Tim Cook Retires, Mark Gurman Joins, Images 2.0 | Howie Liu, Scott Stevenson, Alex Wiltschko, Spiros Xanthos, Carolina Aguilar, Jake Jurewicz

(00:15) - Tim Cook Retires (19:43) - Howie Liu, co-founder and CEO of Airtable, discusses his journey from learning programming in high school to founding Etacts, which was acquired by Salesforce, and eventually establishing Airtable to democratize software creation. He emphasizes the importance of building a product that is significantly better than existing options, highlighting Airtable's evolution into a low-code platform that empowers users to create custom applications without coding. Liu also reflects on the company's growth, noting its valuation milestones and the strategic patience involved in developing Airtable over several years before its public launch. (47:50) - Mark Gurman, a prominent technology journalist known for his in-depth coverage of Apple, discusses the recent leadership transition at Apple, highlighting John Ternus's appointment as CEO following Tim Cook's decision to step down. He emphasizes Ternus's decisive leadership style, likened to Steve Jobs, and his focus on product innovation, including the development of new AI-powered devices and a significant revamp of the iPhone lineup. Gurman also notes that Ternus's promotion is expected to bring a sharper focus to Apple's product development, aiming to reinvigorate the company's innovation pipeline. (01:08:28) - Image 2 Reactions (01:17:50) - Scott Stevenson, co-founder and CEO of Spellbook, discusses the company's significant growth, highlighting that they have onboarded over 4,400 customers across 80 countries, making Spellbook the most widely used AI contract review tool globally. He attributes this rapid international adoption to strong inbound interest and emphasizes the product's multilingual capabilities, facilitated by AI models adept at handling various languages and supplemented with jurisdiction-specific legislation and norms. Stevenson also critiques the use of Contracted Annual Recurring Revenue (CARR) as a metric, pointing out how some companies inflate their ARR figures by reporting future, non-guaranteed revenues, and advocates for more transparent and grounded revenue reporting practices. (01:33:42) - Alex Wiltschko, founder and CEO of Osmo, is pioneering the integration of artificial intelligence with olfactory science to endow computers with a sense of smell. In the conversation, he discusses the complexities of digitizing scent, the development of Osmo's proprietary Olfactory Intelligence technology, and its applications in creating fragrances for brands. He also highlights the company's recent $70 million Series B funding aimed at scaling their AI-powered olfaction technology across various sectors. (01:47:04) - Spiros Xanthos, co-founder and CEO of Resolve AI, discusses how their AI agents assist in debugging and managing production systems, complementing coding agents that generate code. He highlights the importance of reliability for businesses like Coinbase, Salesforce, and MongoDB, emphasizing that Resolve AI serves as the first line of defense by detecting and resolving production issues to minimize customer impact. Xanthos also notes the company's rapid growth, attributing it to the significant demand for automating production operations and their focus on building a successful product. (01:54:11) - Carolina Aguilar, CEO and co-founder of Inbrain Neuroelectronics, discusses her company's development of graphene-based brain-computer interfaces aimed at restoring health by creating intelligent connections between the neural system and AI. She explains their focus on implantable systems to achieve precise neural interaction, highlighting three product verticals: a semi-chronic platform for tumor and epilepsy resection nearing commercialization, an implantable platform targeting Parkinson's disease, and a vagus nerve sensor for therapeutic applications across various organs. Aguilar also emphasizes the importance of integrating their technology into existing surgical workflows to facilitate adoption without the immediate need for advanced robotics. (01:59:22) - Jake Jurewicz, co-founder and CEO of Blue Energy, has over a decade of experience in the energy and construction sectors, holding degrees in Nuclear Science & Engineering and Physics from MIT. He discusses Blue Energy's recent $380 million funding aimed at building the world's first project-financeable nuclear power plant by prefabricating components in existing shipyards, thereby reducing construction costs and timelines. This approach leverages mature light water reactor technology and centralized manufacturing techniques from offshore industries to make nuclear power more economically competitive. Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:01John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPN. Oh, no. It's Tuesday, April 21st, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultra, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Massive, massive news. Tim Cook to step down at Apple. This broke yesterday. Gormanator had the scoop, of course, it's coming on the show later today, but it's on the cover of the Wall Street Journal today. Heavily predicted, often debated. It's a time to reflect on Tim Cook's legacy and what's up next for John Ternus, the longtime insider.

• 0:36Jordi Hays?

  We just say incredibly well executed, incredibly smooth. They sort of telegraphed it. It wasn't a surprise. It was already fully priced in. I personally was hoping that the market would give Tim Cook a 21% salute, where when the news went out, it just immediately nukes 21%.

• 0:55John Coogan?

  Massive red candle. Let everyone know. This is, we don't like this. We love him.

• 1:00Jordi Hays?

  It's a sign of respect. Of course, rebound immediately. But I think that's something that the market collectively should try to do for.

• 1:08John Coogan?

  Yes, more symbolism in the candles, for sure. Chartology is really the key thing.

• 1:13Jordi Hays?

  A 21% salute.

• 1:14John Coogan?

  But of course, what is Apple at right now? Are they moving at all? Down 3% today, 2.5%, but up 3% over the last five days. Still nearly a $4 trillion company. They're doing fine and they're cooking. So let's go through a little bit of the review of the news and some of the, some of the previous discussions that we've had around Tim Cook and John Ternus, because we're going to be learning a lot more about John Ternus. He's probably going to do a lot more content, a lot more media, a lot more interviews, and we will be hearing from him at keynote events for probably over a decade, maybe two decades. We will see. So in January, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman, who's coming on the show later today, predicted that John Ternus would succeed Tim Cook as Apple's next CEO.

• 1:59Jordi Hays?

  Let's, let's just pull up this clip. Let's give some credit to the Gormanator.

• 2:04John Coogan?

  He didn't predict it on our show first. I think he scooped it and posted it.

• 2:08Jordi Hays?

  I know, I know. But this was back in January. I dropped the clip.

• 2:11John Coogan?

  The crux of the argument was twofold. Ternus's relative youth among a pool of potential successors.

• 2:17Mark Gurman?

  He's 50. Everyone else in the Apple executive team, late 50s through their mid 60s, turning 66 this year, in the case of Tim Cook. You're Apple's board. You like continuity. You like an insider, you like people who know what they're doing, have been there for a while, they know where the bodies are buried. Okay? These guys all have hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more.

• 2:40Jordi Hays?

  Pause.

• 2:42Jordi Hays?

  I love Mark Gurman so much. He's the best. He's truly the best. And he's coming on, he's coming on in forty-five. Forty-five minutes. But, continue.

• 2:51Mark Gurman?

  Yeah, at fifty, he's the only one who is, if let's say Tim Cook hangs out another three to five years, you're not going to appoint another CEO who's sixty-five, seventy years old. He's the only guy. Apple, they get vast majority of the revenue from hardware. He's the hardware guy.

• 3:09Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:10Mark Gurman?

  Have they screwed up any hardware since he's been in charge? No, he's a steady hand, knows what he's doing. He's really the only choice. You know, there was this New York Times report a few weeks ago, basically saying that it could be Greg Joswiak, it could be Eddie Q, it could be Deirdre O'Brien, it could be Craig Federighi. It's for sure not going to be Craig. It's not going to be Deirdre, it's not going to be Eddie, it's not going to be Joss. The only category that makes sense is an operations person. Because you look at the current CEO, Tim, obviously comes out of the ops world. You look at the guy who would have been CEO if Tim Cook didn't stay so long, I'm not saying he shouldn't have stayed so long, he's done obviously a fantastic job for shareholders and employees and what have you, would have been Jeff Williams. He was the COO.

• 3:55Mark Gurman?

  So, Sabi Khan, he was named COO, you know, a few months ago, but he's really been in that job for the last half a decade, I would say. So anyways, it'll be Ternus or Sabi or someone completely out of left field. I don't think this is imminent. So, we'll see what ultimately happens, but all signs are turning towards Ternus. Everyone has an opinion that Ternus is going to be the next CEO, fine.

• 4:17Jordi Hays?

  I like getting the double from you.

• 4:17Mark Gurman?

  I've been shouting this from rooftops the last two years. But no one has given evidence, like, what is this based on? Right? Has there ever been a baton handoff? Is he getting more responsibility?

• 4:28Jordi Hays?

  Well, they have a, like, a big baton.

• 4:30Mark Gurman?

  They've got one of these. You know what you have? You have white smoke coming out of the...

• 4:37Mark Gurman?

  Very environmentally.

• 4:38Jordi Hays?

  Do they have a big scoop, maybe?

• 4:43John Coogan?

  Is that the end of the clip? You know.

• 4:45Jordi Hays?

  They have a comically large baton like like we have our scoop.

• 4:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, Mark Gurman, the scoopinator. He's a scoop doggy dog, scoop athlete, the scoop, the scoop, the scoop is on fire. We're very excited to have Mark Gurman joining in just 40 minutes. What a great, what a great run he's been on reporting this story. It's absolutely fascinating. So yesterday evening, Mark was the one with the scoop. Tim Cook will assume the role of Apple's executive chairman and John Ternus will take the reins of the company. Mark followed up with a scoop with internal memos from both Cook and Ternus announcing the transition. I, I don't, I mean, I, I understand, I don't know, maybe I don't understand what it's like

• 5:32John Coogan?

  to be 65, but I was always optimistic that the Warren Buffett 65 to 95 would be the new trend and that people would just say, you know what, I'm, I'm, Tim Cook's healthy. He, he's, he's going.

• 5:45Jordi Hays?

  Everything to date was a warm up.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:47Jordi Hays?

  It's time to go on the actual run.

• 5:49John Coogan?

  That's, I, I would, I mean, I totally understand.

• 5:51Jordi Hays?

  He's like, I got another, I got another tenant.

• 5:53John Coogan?

  Another Neo Lab.

• 5:54Jordi Hays?

  I'm going to, I'm, I'm, I'm taking us to 40 trillion.

• 5:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. I don't know. I, I mean, uh, maybe Warren Buffett's in a different world because he's more of an investor, maybe doesn't need to travel as much, doesn't need to be in the arena shaking hands, kissing babies, doing product launches, you know, being in DC, getting wrangled into things like Buffett can be more like hands off and just sort of read the news, review the financials and, and delegate.

• 6:22Jordi Hays?

  Step in with some liquidity.

• 6:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:23Jordi Hays?

  If needed.

• 6:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's more, it's, it's a, it's a more hands off role. I don't know how, I mean, I imagine that the role of CEO of Apple is incredibly demanding, but I, I liked the idea of, of just, just locking in and being like, oh yeah, I'm 65, everyone expects me to, everyone expects me to step down, but I got another 30 years in me. But, uh, you know, he, uh, he chose a different path and he is retiring or stepping into the executive chairman role. Uh, Ben Thompson published Tim Cook's impeccable timing, which eulogizes.

• 6:55John Coogan?

  Cook's impressive accomplishments as the head of Apple. Ben Thompson kicks it off with an interesting thing. He says, "It's the nature of business that the eulogy for a chief executive doesn't happen when they die, but when they retire." Or in the case of Apple CEO Tim Cook, announced that they will step up to the role of executive chairman on September 1st. One morbid exception is when the CEO does die on the job or quits because they're dying. But the truth of the matter is that they were, is that where any honest recounting of Cook's incredibly successful tenure as Apple CEO, particularly from a financial's perspective, has to begin with the numbers. And he says that the numbers are extraordinary. Cook became CEO of Apple on August 24th, 2011.

• 7:40John Coogan?

  And in the intervening 15 years, revenue has increased 303%. Profit surged 354%. And the value of Apple has gone from a mere 297 billion to over 4 trillion, a staggering 1,251% increase. And there was some chatter back and forth on the timeline over whether Tim Cook had simply put Apple on cruise control and lucked out, as many big names in tech also saw 10 to 40x increases in their market caps. This is from Brandon Gorrell's newsletter at tbn.com. You can sign up today for free. But this interpretation ignores the fact that many of the biggest public tech companies

• 8:23John Coogan?

  in 1980, when Apple IPO'd, are no longer even close to the top of the pack anymore. And Brandon cites Xerox, Motorola, Texas Instruments, IBM, and HP, which all fell, by the way, over the past 30 years. While Apple built the biggest consumer hardware company on the planet and thrived in the public market. And I was, I was doing some digging on this as well. I pulled up, you know, it's easy to look at like, well, zoom back to the, the, the Mag 7. All of the Mag 7 have done fantastically well. Over the past 15 years during Tim Cook's tenure, did he do anything special? Is he in a different category in some way?

• 9:06John Coogan?

  And maybe not when you look backwards from the current Mag 7. But if you go back to 2011, when Tim Cook took the reins and you look at what were the biggest tech companies there then and how have they performed? It does look like outperformance because Apple was at 377 billion. That was, you know, big, huge, the biggest company at the time. Then Microsoft at 218.

• 9:33Jordi Hays?

  What their peers were at the time where he took the helm.

• 9:38John Coogan?

  And to be clear, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon were clearly there. Fang was the term at the time. Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google. For some reason, Microsoft didn't make the cut in that acronym. That has since changed, of course. But there were a lot of companies that didn't go on as significant of runs. You have IBM, Oracle, Intel, Cisco, Qualcomm and HP, all that were in the top 10. They were sort of the Mag 10 of 2011 and now they are not in the Mag 7, although many of them have done very well. So it seems, this was our take from a long time.

• 10:19John Coogan?

  You know, we like to harp on the failure of Apple Intelligence and how Siri is ineffective sometimes and the FaceTime interface is odd and the new iPhotos app is hard to use. But where it matters.

• 10:33Jordi Hays?

  We give them credit on Genmoji.

• 10:38John Coogan?

  No, where it matters is, did they navigate tariffs? Did they navigate supply chain? Did they navigate the transition to Apple Silicon, delivering a great product consistently that doesn't break? Like, we have ordered so many Apple devices throughout building TBPN and there was a time when you would get a new consumer product and it would just be, oh, it's a bad one. I got a bad one and I gotta take it back. And that's never happened. The quality control is flawless and. Navigating a very, very difficult chip export act from Biden in 2022, all the way to the Trump tariffs, to different political swings, back and forth and back and forth.

• 11:20John Coogan?

  And Tim Cook has just done a great job of like, keeping the wheels on the train going down the track. And I think that should be celebrated, even though the sexy new AI features are-

• 11:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he's bound to be under, underappreciated. Because he wasn't, he wasn't the visionary that, that, that Steve was. But he also never, I don't think he ever wanted to be seen in that way. But the consistent operational excellence over almost two decades is almost unprecedented at this scale. It is, yeah, just, just the way you put it, right? I, the, the same, the same experience that I had getting a new Apple computer as like a teenager, I have today. It is actually almost remarkable how similar the experience is.

• 12:14Jordi Hays?

  You open this wonderful box, you get a great device, it works for a long time. And, and you still get that today. So the, the consistency. And, um, yeah, I think, I think he will just get more, when, when people kind of process the run, uh, over time, he will just get more and more respect.

• 12:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. And a lot of the, uh, a lot of the other computer manufacturers have had to go into bloatware and pre-installed software, and Apple's been very good at holding the line there. They've of course ramped up their services business, integrated advertising in places that were somewhat unexpected, since that was always how they were counter positioned against Google. But, um, they've done it in a way that hasn't been that annoying. I feel like I don't see that many people complaining about ads in the App Store. People see the ads and they're like, wow, this company is bidding on the keyword for their direct competitor. That is, uh, you know, extremely competitive behavior. Uh, the same thing happens on Google. Didn't expect to see it in the Apple ecosystem, of course, it's going to happen.

• 13:16Jordi Hays?

  Gregov in the chat says, not a single product recall under Tim Cook. Is that possible?

• 13:22John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 13:23Jordi Hays?

  I think that is incorrect.

• 13:25John Coogan?

  What did the recall?

• 13:26Jordi Hays?

  Says they recalled a 15-inch MacBook Pro in 2019.

• 13:31John Coogan?

  Did Ben Gate?

• 13:32Jordi Hays?

  The AC wall plug adapter in 2016, 2019. Battery gate service program.

• 13:37John Coogan?

  They've had some, they've had some back and forth. But, uh, but, but, but, you know, a very, very successful run. Uh, the other two things that the chat was mentioning was, uh, the Apple car and the failure of that program. Uh, maybe a little bit, they bit off too much, more than they could chew. I think, you know, looking at what's happened in China with every phone manufacturer launching a car that's extremely impressive, uh, I would have loved to see Apple execute there. And I think that would have been very good for the American technology industry, the electric vehicle industry, a variety of different, uh, American industrial efforts, but, uh, it was not to be unfortunately. And then there's the Apple Vision Pro, which I think a lot of people, uh, you know, look at the churn rates,

• 14:21John Coogan?

  look at the, the, uh, the, the, the retention rates and they just see it as an underwhelming product. I still like it, but I'm in the minority and I acknowledge that fully. Uh, I do think that they made the right decision to turn it into a, uh, a, a, a home cinema, a home theater. Like they, they understood that, that there was not enough of a video game library, a VR game library to plug into in any meaningful way. And so they made the decision, I think, one of the lead, uh, staff members on the Apple Vision Pro project was from the Dolby Cinema team, which had done Dolby Vision and, and some of the, the actual theater build outs.

• 15:02John Coogan?

  And so they were able to bring that experience and understand what actually makes for a great movie watching experience in a premier, you know, cinema and how can we recreate as much of that as possible in VR? Still, you know, obviously didn't hit the mark fully because the product has not taken off by any stretch of the imagination. But, uh, overall it was a fun project and I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm hoping that they continue that. It might wind up pivoting into just camera glasses and they'll go up against the Meta Ray-Bans, which might be the, the more prudent, uh, you know, business strategy. But I still, I still like, uh, I still like, you know, these incredible investments in VR. What are you laughing at?

• 15:40Jordi Hays?

  Josh over at Semaphore.

• 15:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:43Jordi Hays?

  Says, nobody tell the new Apple CEO that he has a streaming service. We've got a good thing going here, lighting iPhone and AirPods, money on fire to make great movies and shows. And we don't need any of that getting any extra attention right now.

• 15:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:56Jordi Hays?

  5,000 likes.

• 15:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is interesting. Yeah, Ternus is about as far as you can be from the Apple TV services organization. But I don't know, I talked to a filmmaker in Hollywood, a very successful filmmaker, like years and years ago before the, before Apple TV was really ramping up. And he was saying that Apple's brand is so prestigious that it's sort of antithetical to the Hollywood mindset, which is much more VC, risk on, you're going to have flops. Like every, every movie studio understands that it is impossible to predict the perfect success and have the level of polish that comes from these slight iterations. I think you could though.

• 16:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, built different, for sure. But, and so it's a different culture because if you have, you know, Apple's, Apple hasn't, I mean, they've had like flops, but even the flops, like they still feel like very on brand. They don't have like a silly movie that is just like bad. And running that risk was always, was always a problem. But I feel like Apple navigated it really, really well, especially with the F1 project and has done, has done really well with the content side. And they have held a brand standard that feels like almost at the level of HBO pretty quickly. Whereas some of the other streaming services have kind of gone more scattershot, more

• 17:18John Coogan?

  reality TV, more, you know, sort of silly projects that might put, you know, might entertain viewers, but don't fully, they don't create a cohesive brand idea of like, what, what am I getting when I open that particular app on the Apple TV? Yeah. Anyway, continuing, Mark Gurman said on TVPN in January that Ternus really viewed, really is viewed as the ultimate hardware guy at Apple. Ralph Winkler at the Wall Street Journal published an article yesterday detailing Ternus' pedigree with physical products. Quote, "If Jobs is a product visionary and Cook a supply chain guru, Ternus is a hardware savant who exists somewhere in the middle."

• 18:03John Coogan?

  Ternus, who has a background in mechanical engineering, has been working at Apple for 25 years.

• 18:10John Coogan?

  Recently led hardware engineering of all of Apple's products. He played a crucial role in the development of Apple AirPods, obviously a massive success, and he redesigned Apple's computers to use company-designed chips instead of Intel's, a massive move that extended battery life and improved performance. So Ternus is

• 18:27Jordi Hays?

  And set them up very well for AI.

• 18:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Ternus is taking over Apple at a time when the company has largely sat on the sidelines of the AI race, going so far as to outsource the technology powering Siri to Google's Gemini. Ternus will have to, will have to somehow manage this dynamic. Ben Thompson wrote about it in November of 2025. Apple's plans are a bit like the alcoholic who admits they have a drinking problem, but promises to limit their intake to social occasions, namely, how exactly does Apple plan on replacing Gemini with its own models when, one, Google has more talent, two, Google spends far more on infrastructure, and, three, Gemini will be continually increasing from the current level.

• 19:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, a number, a number of people have, have talked about, you know, what are the challenges that, that Ternus is inheriting? One, supply chain, right? Kind of like, you know, stuck in, in China in a big way. That presents a pretty meaningful, you know, risk to the business, and then sort of like overall dependency on, on, on Google, especially on some of these key products. But without further ado,

• 19:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 19:35Jordi Hays?

  Let's bring in

• 19:36John Coogan?

  Let's bring in Howie Lu from Airtable. Howie, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for coming on down to the TDP and UltraDome. For those who might be living under a, a supercomputer, not a data center, introduce yourself. Tell us who you are.

• 19:53Speaker 03

  All right. Howie Lu, co-founder and CEO of Airtable, now also maker of Hyperagent, part of Airtable.

• 19:58John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 19:58Speaker 03

  I've been doing this for 12, 13 years now.

• 20:01John Coogan?

  13 years. Give us the backstory. Take us from college through early career to the first, the founding moment.

• 20:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. So in high school, I kind of got into programming, like my dad had this C++ book, left it in this, you know, corner of the house one summer and I was super bored.

• 20:17John Coogan?

  C++ is a rough place.

• 20:19Speaker 03

  I mean, this is like Two thousand three.

• 20:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was like pre.

• 20:22John Coogan?

  Pre Python for the.

• 20:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, I mean, Python was was around, but people didn't really use it.

• 20:26John Coogan?

  That wasn't the jumping off point.

• 20:27Speaker 03

  And yeah, it was like definitely like early days for even like web apps, right? Like Rails didn't exist, like all that stuff. So learned C++.

• 20:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 20:34Speaker 03

  Thought it was kind of cool.

• 20:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:35Speaker 03

  Uh, and then started thinking about like, how do I turn this into like a real career? Cause it just, it was a lot more fun than like classes and like I went to Duke, took some like mechanical engineering classes. But, uh, on the side, basically learned how to do web app programming, like first with PHP, then like Rails and stuff. And I stumbled on Y Combinator actually like pretty early on. It was like maybe oh six.

• 20:54John Coogan?

  That's like the first class.

• 20:56Speaker 03

  Like literally the first class.

• 20:57John Coogan?

  I guess oh five.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  No, cause I remember, um, like I saw, uh, looped, uh, Sam Walton's first company. And I was doing research, like I wanted to do a similar type of company or product. And I was like, nope, you know, I was a nobody in college, didn't know anything. And through that, like found out about looped. I was like, damn it, somebody's already got this, this, uh, this idea. And then learned about Y C and like Sequoia. And so that kind of became my first inroad into like just learning about that whole world of like startups and tech. Uh, eventually after college, applied to Y C with my first company, which was, um, basically it was called E-Tax, like contacts with an E.

• 21:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 21:28Speaker 03

  And it was like a personal CRM product.

• 21:30John Coogan?

  Oh, God.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 21:33John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, they were like, oh, this is a big problem. Everybody was this problem. Yeah, we'll fund it right away.

• 21:38John Coogan?

  He's, am I correct in, in my, my take has always been that the people that clamor for a personal CRM re- really just don't realize that they're friends or people that they do business with. They should ju- either just use a real CRM.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:52John Coogan?

  Or just don't and just be friends.

• 21:54Speaker 03

  I mean, it's, yeah, I think, I think it's like a very unique target audience for whom it's a very high pain point. So I think there's like a market there, but like it's a very like power user, prosumer audience. And the punchline of it though, was that like after a year of work, we like worked on this thing, raised some money. Uh, you know, hired like a couple of people.

• 22:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:13Speaker 03

  And then we kind of realized, like I sort of realized like, I think it's a more niche market than we set out to, to go after. And we had some like different acquirers come knocking, like Salesforce was one of them, but like also big like consumer internet companies who wanted to just buy us for talent.

• 22:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 22:27Speaker 03

  And, you know, to me it was like. And what this is. Like, we were winner 2010, that batch, and then the acquisition talks were like 2011, basically, late 2011. And, you know, we kind of got to this point where I realized, like, I want to work on a really big problem, like a meta problem, not like, here's one small niche for like, some people, but instead, like, what's like, the underlying problem, which is, you know, you could actually build this whole CRM with like, an app platform, right? Like, you really want something that's a lot more just configurable and customizable. And so we took an acquisition by Salesforce, worked there, and like, for me, the big lightbulb moment was, you know, Salesforce is one big database. What's Benioff like on All Hands? Uh, I mean, Cause he's, he's, he's electric on the job. Well, there weren't that many, like, All Hands were quite infrequent at Salesforce at

• 23:12Speaker 03

  the time, but like, I went to like, their, their big sales kickoff that year. I mean, Mark is like, a very smart guy, and also a very like, commanding presence. Like, he's a physically, like, you would, if you met him like, on the street and didn't, didn't know who he was, like, you'd probably think he was like, a linebacker in the NFL. Like, he's massive. And he just like, he exudes charisma. Like, even in like, a quiet, small room, like, he'd take meetings in his house, like, I'd go over with like, you know, some of the other like,

• 23:36John Coogan?

  He's the sales guy's final boss.

• 23:37Speaker 03

  I mean, but like, not always, like, he's like, Imagine just going head to head with him.

• 23:41John Coogan?

  It's over.

• 23:42Speaker 03

  I'd be like, I give up.

• 23:43John Coogan?

  It's over.

• 23:44Speaker 03

  I forfeit. Uh, but he's like, he's just got such a presence, even when he's not like, like, booming, you know, out loud, like, on a stage, like, in a quiet room. The dolphin sound. Oh, I don't know about that one, but, I didn't get to see that part, but.

• 23:59John Coogan?

  That's the whole genesis of Salesforce. Apparently, he came up with the idea while he was swimming with dolphins.

• 24:04Speaker 03

  With a pot of dolphins. I guess that's what, what all the Hawaii motifs are for.

• 24:08John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, he loves swimming.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  It was a fun time. I mean, honestly, it was a really fun company, like, you know, it was like, for being in enterprise software, it was like, one of the more fun experiences, like, you know, people were kind of super laid back, it was like, all aloha, and like, or what? But, uh, but learned a lot, you know, and I think like, for me, the big aha was like, wow, like, all of enterprise software is basically just like, a database with like, some app logic and like, interfaces on top, right? And like, that's basically all that Oracle is used for, that's basically what SAP is, that's what Salesforce is, and if you could create like, a way simpler version of that, like, that's super intuitive, like, that's, that might be a big market. And that was basically the, the genesis of our table was like, I want to go and like, basically PLGify before that even was a term, like, this category.

• 24:51John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. So yeah, what was the, what was the initial like hunting for team, raising money, building an MVP, like what was the first step?

• 25:00Speaker 03

  I mean, the second time around, like, so this was my second company then, Airtable. Um, you know, I wanted to do things a little bit differently than the first time. Like the first time was kind of like, just go and like, apply to YC, get in, do whatever it takes to get some traction. Like, it literally felt like this roller coaster, right? Every week it was like, launch, get some, you know, signups, go and like, raise money. And Airtable was a lot more premeditated. Like, we spent two and a half years building the product before even launching.

• 25:24John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 25:24Speaker 03

  It was actually weirdly a, a very parallel timeline to Figma. So like, both like, two and a half years around the same time, launched around the same time, very like PLG in both cases. And then we both kind of exploited like, um, you know, the advent of like, rich browser experiences, like for the first time. So like,

• 25:41John Coogan?

  And multiplayer.

• 25:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, you couldn't build like a rich, real time, like, single page app experience before maybe like 2011, 12, like, and really it became like, you know, kind of really legit in like 2014, 15 with like V8 becoming like really mainstream and dominant, like, you know, just like, the performance of the browser became there.

• 25:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  Um, so we built this product, like, you know, the premise was, let's make it really, really simple for like, anyone, like a small business owner, like, you know, podcasters, or even like people within a larger, larger company, to build their own app or database. Uh, and they're like, you know, FileMaker, Microsoft Access, like, some of these products existed back in the day, but never made the transition to the web. So we kind of built it.

• 26:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my career started shortly after you guys kind of like came onto the scene. And my first ever business, we signed up for Airtable, like probably day one, and still use it, uh, how many, like, eight years later, something like that? So like, just running, like, it's been core infrastructure.

• 26:43Jordi Hays?

  Every single day.

• 26:44Speaker 03

  That's all.

• 26:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:46Jordi Hays?

  And like evolved and.

• 26:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. It turns out like databases are pretty sticky, right? Like about all the Oracle installs and like just random like large enterprises that are just still chugging away. Like you've got your system of record in there and like.

• 26:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:57Speaker 03

  Built a lot of like customization.

• 26:58John Coogan?

  Oracle database as a revenue line within Oracle is growing. Revenue.

• 27:02Speaker 03

  I'm, I'm.

• 27:03John Coogan?

  Top line is growing for the Oracle database, not their AI stuff is a separate thing.

• 27:08Speaker 03

  GPUs, yeah.

• 27:09John Coogan?

  Very different valuations, but it is growing, which is I think a narrative violation that I think a lot of people wouldn't take. Talk about like the early go to market. I mean, you said PLG, but like, are you sending this to like startup friends? Are you trying to sell this into Salesforce on day one? Like, how, how are you thinking about like enterprise versus mid-market versus startups versus like prosumer? There's like so many different routes you can go.

• 27:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. So this was like 2013 ish, right? And like, at the time there weren't that many, I mean, there wasn't like really a PLG like thing.

• 27:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:40Speaker 03

  Like Slack had, I think, just come out when we launched in 2015. So they had launched a little bit before Dropbox and maybe Evernote were kind of the best like PLG pioneers.

• 27:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:49Speaker 03

  And they were both very like consumer, prosumer first, so like solo, like individual user first.

• 27:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Drew Houston has the funniest riff on, I don't think he calls it PLG, but he calls it like the web growth, the web 2.0 growth playbook, which is like going viral, but he takes it a lot further and he's like, so you want to sneeze on as many people as possible? And he refers to that as like, if you send them a file.

• 28:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:12John Coogan?

  That you've sneezed on and then they might create an account. It's just like a much more like visceral way of viral marketing.

• 28:19Speaker 03

  I can't even get this thing off.

• 28:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, no, I mean, the thing about, so, so my first company is an ad network.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:24Jordi Hays?

  So we would, you know, a company would come and say like, I want to advertise. Use a hundred thousand dollar budget. And then the company would put together a dashboard.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:34Jordi Hays?

  Of like potential buys and then the person would go through. And so it was inherently viral. Every customer that would work with us had to log into Airtable and like use a product. So that was just happening at like massive scale.

• 28:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I think that like that type of like, you have some like data set, like, you know, maybe it's for your ad inventory. Or whatever, maybe it's for like your CRM or whatever, you need to collaborate with it. Like it's a very fundamental construct in just like how knowledge work is done, right? So I think like the lesson learned from here, like that the principle applied was like, can you go after something that's so foundational? That like it's always going to be around, right? Like, I think with the personal CRM thing, I'd kind of felt the like turbulence of like, is this in vogue right now? Is it not like, and I really wanted to go after something that felt like it's going to be around for decades. And like, what's more eternal than like, people need like Databases. A database. That you can do stuff with. The past 40 years of computing, it's probably going to be around for the next 40.

• 29:29Speaker 03

  And like even now with agents, it's like the database layer actually becomes more important, right? You don't want just like a bunch of ephemeral context windows like for agents. Like they need to like store and collaborate on data along with humans. So you would kind of pick that as the vantage point. And a lot of the early customers were like startup founders, like small business owners. But like, interestingly, we had like, we had written this like fake business plan. It was like basically like a vision deck more than an actual business plan. But like we had said, you know, conjectured like, we're going to have to go after like a long tail of like the kind of prosumer SMB audience. Basically like Dropbox, right? And I think what was really surprising is it turned out to be a little bit more like Slack, where we got the most virality within larger companies. So like, there'd be a big like media company or like even like a scaled startup, like a WeWork or something

• 30:13Speaker 03

  that would run all of their operations very quickly early on on Airtable and then just grow with the company, right? And so like, I mean, WeWork was one of our early customers, had like, like probably 10,000 people, like, you know, when they were at their peak, like it basically was like used by every almost employee there. And like a lot of their operations, building operations, et cetera, were just built on Airtable by default. And I kind of learned the, the value of like having this like data gravity. Like, once you get enough data into a product like Airtable, like it just kind of retains really well within the company and gains more and more usage.

• 30:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. How did you think?

• 30:47Speaker 03

  Until, until the company. Well, you index against the industry that you're in.

• 30:54Jordi Hays?

  What, so, so, uh, I want to get, I want to get to all the goods, the, the good part and like right now and all that stuff. But, uh, walk us through, since this is your first time on the show, like, you know, you went from being one of the hottest companies in tech during the whole no-code boom, the like PLG boom, Zerp, like it must've just been, you know,

• 31:18Jordi Hays?

  I mean insane experience and then like there's kind of this reset in late 2022, 2023. How how has it been kind of like building out of that trough and then like have you I'm assuming it sounds like you've been like very re-energized by this new this new opportunity.

• 31:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, one of the maybe benefits of like not being an overnight success because we took like two and a half years to build the product.

• 31:42Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 31:42Speaker 03

  Even like from 2015 to 2017, 18, I would say like we were getting like a steady compounding of growth, but it wasn't like Slack or like Dropbox where it just overnight became super easy, right? Like it felt like we had to really grind. We had to think about like, how do we need to like improve the product and increase the, you know, kind of like shareability and the scalability of it. So it's kind of a grind for like at least the first five years. And 2018, when we got our first unicorn round is kind of the first year where it felt like it was starting to get easy, right?

• 32:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:08Speaker 03

  So 2018 to 2021, like very fun years, but also.

• 32:12Jordi Hays?

  Everything is so good.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  Money just was being printed in the world, unlimited money and like, you know, we got to raise like a big, you know, set of rounds.

• 32:20Jordi Hays?

  How would you like a hundred X revenue multiple?

• 32:23Speaker 03

  Or yeah, I mean, yeah, and and just like the absolute scale of funding was like huge compared to prior art, right? Like now, I mean, you can raise like a hundred billion, you know, like if you're opening eye, but like at the time, like, you know, we raised, you know, our first, our first unicorn round was like a hundred million dollar round and we raised like another like couple hundred and then like a few hundred more. And then like our big round was our series F, which was like kind of at the peak of like the markets.

• 32:49Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 32:49Speaker 03

  Raised 700 plus million in that round.

• 32:52Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  And then 11 billion, 11 billion valuation. And, you know, we still have like all of that money on the balance sheet and we're now like cash flow positive.

• 32:58Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing.

• 32:58Speaker 03

  So I think like, you know, it's kind of a fun, fun, fun time to like, you know, kind of get to like ride that wave.

• 33:05Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 33:06Speaker 03

  And then, you know, but like I, I always, I think for myself, knew like, you know, you have to build like a durable business, right? And so like valuations are going to like rise and fall, it's just going to be like macro, but like, you know, ultimately either we build a great enduring business or we don't. And if we don't, then like, you know, you could be like a flash in the pan, right?

• 33:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  So I think we were always like trying to focus and I tried to focus on. Like, what do we actually need to do to like, you know, compound growth, like go after the enterprise? Obviously, at the time, especially like, it was clear that was like the move, right? You get PLG, but eventually you have to go into the enterprise and win like these big multimillion dollar contracts, like become a really sticky system within these larger companies. And we did that and like, we're still doing that. We have like a bunch of the Fortune 500, like running really critical operations on airtable.

• 33:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:53Speaker 03

  Whether it's like content production at a big media company or like, you know, like fund operations at a company like, you know, like financial services company. So these are like the like, almost like modern ERP.

• 34:03John Coogan?

  Did you hire a different set of individuals to work on that? That were already connected and knew that flow?

• 34:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:10John Coogan?

  Was it something where like your best sales reps just sort of got bigger and bigger and leveled up?

• 34:14Speaker 03

  It was a, it was a little of both. I mean, I think it's a different muscle. Like, I think Rolodex selling is even at that time, like, you know, not that effective. Like, I think like just knowing somebody at a big company like doesn't, even if you're like, you know, very senior and they're very senior, like, doesn't actually help that much. Like, we've had some reps come in, like, they've had like a decade long relationship with like, you know, the CMO of XYZ company.

• 34:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 34:35Speaker 03

  And I think that gets you like a phone call, it gets you like a meeting.

• 34:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:39Speaker 03

  But ultimately, like buyers are wising up, right? And they have been for quite some time where it's not just like, oh, I know this guy, I'm gonna like, or, you know, gal, like, I'm gonna buy this like product from them. Like, you actually have to like, show them why this is gonna help their, you know, to help them in their job, right? And help the company.

• 34:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:53Speaker 03

  And so I think it became much more about like transitioning from like, oh, people can just use it on their own and they'll figure it out on their own.

• 34:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:59Speaker 03

  To like, starting to do more of a consultative sale, like come in and say like, okay, how can we solve like a really big problem for you?

• 35:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:05Speaker 03

  And maybe like for one company, it's like, how do I consolidate like my end to end operations for like how we do all of our brand planning, launching new products, all that? And that's kind of like, it's like one part consulting, one part like just thinking about like a big enterprise scale solution. And then one part like be able to leverage the flexibility of our product, almost like in a Palantir like way,

• 35:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:27Speaker 03

  to show the customer like, we can actually solve this really deep problem for you quickly.

• 35:31John Coogan?

  Is there any sort of like PLG motion or land and expand that happens in the Fortune 100?

• 35:39Speaker 03

  Like, because there's some small team inside of Coca-Cola or something that's using Airtable.

• 35:45John Coogan?

  And then you're able to use that as a demo or jumping off point that does happen?

• 35:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's like, there are some companies where you just can't even get your foot in the door without the top down. Like, a lot of big banks, like, we just, we were firewalled out until we got some top down intro.

• 35:59John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. So they can't even...

• 36:00Speaker 03

  They literally block you, right?

• 36:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 36:02Speaker 03

  Your IP is like blocked. Like, it might be like hard wall, like, you know, request access. So, you know, there are some companies where you have to come in top down. But like, there, you know, I would say 70% plus of our current enterprise accounts, including the ones that are like, now like five plus million in revenue, like, originated from teams within the company organically adopting Airtable, right? Sometimes it was kind of like shadow IT, they just figured it out on their own. And they just, like, they showed real value from using the tool, right? They would build some real operation on it and say like, well, I've been waiting for like IT to deliver me this like, old bespoke solution or some like crappy other vendor for like two years now. I got impatient and just built the thing myself. And that's like a big, I think, you know, I think of like the enterprise landscape now is like,

• 36:47Speaker 03

  you know, there's plenty of dollars in enterprise, right? Even now, like, you know, it's just shifting from like traditional software to now AI. But like, there's plenty of dollars, right? The budget's there, but like, the question is, you're not the only one going after it. And so like, what's your kind of asymmetric wedge to get in there and like, take those dollars, right? And if you're a big company like a Salesforce, maybe it's like, we already have the distribution. We have like the customer data in there, we're going to go and attack adjacencies. If you're Airtable, we don't have like the scale of like a, you know, ServiceNow or like an SAP or Salesforce. What we did have is like the usability of the product. So like, the PLG was like, kind of the entry point. And then also, like, even when we pitched to other people in the company that hadn't used Airtable, they had, you know, probably heard about it from a friend, like, maybe the CMO is like, you know, partner,

• 37:31Speaker 03

  like, uses Airtable in their company, or we can go in and just show them like a really compelling demo quickly.

• 37:37John Coogan?

  Talk about AI. What are customers demanding? What have you rolled out? Where does AI fit in well? Where does AI take a backseat?

• 37:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's crazy because it's like we've, we've seen like so many layers of disruption happening almost in parallel. Like, you know, you think about like desktop to mobile, it was like a single form factor change, kind of, kind of easy, almost like execute on. That was the one that I experienced at Salesforce. Like, the big thing at the time was like Mark would tell every team, like, show me the mobile UI first before you show me like the desktop UI, right? Like, go mobile first, right? And, you know, it was like the right move and also kind of a simple move. Now, it's like, you've got at one level, like, obviously, every product should have like AI in it. So, you know, we have the obvious stuff, like you can now talk to Airtable's assistant, like copilot style, and have it do stuff on your behalf in the product.

• 38:27Speaker 03

  We have what we call field agents, which are kind of like the ability to map reduce AI calls against like all of your data. So you have like 20,000 customer records and run like, you know, AI agentic, like, you know, kind of tool calls, like search and like research about the company, like synthesize, like.

• 38:42John Coogan?

  Hydrate a bio for every single contact.

• 38:44Speaker 03

  That kind of stuff. Yeah, and like, you know, we do all that stuff. But to me, like, the more interesting, you know, kind of disruptions underneath that are like, one, like, you know, are people, do people even want to come into your interface anymore?

• 38:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's what I was gonna ask, like, why you care about like storing the data in a, in a sort of safe, secure.

• 39:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, Salesforce, they just went like headless recently, like, is there a plan for that?

• 39:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's like, I think the right move is like hybrid headless, right? Like, I think, I think the whole, look, like, if you wanted just like a backend database, you could use like Postgres, like Superbase, right? Like, you know, it's, and, you know, there's like PHP My Admin equivalents, like modern day ones, right? Like Prisma has its own version of it, like, that are okay, or they're good, right? Like, but like, I think what most people actually want, especially in a business context, is like, you want like the database, but you want to have like proper permissioning, you want to have proper collaboration. And most importantly, like, you don't want to exclusively interface with the data through like an agent, right? Like, you want to do that a lot of the time, but like, it's really helpful to actually go in and see the, like, see the actual. Data like I think of it as the equivalent of, you know, even though um agentially you can like generate all your code and you should as a frontier developer like

• 39:54Speaker 03

  does that mean you never want to inspect any lines of code ever like no like you still want to see like a diff of like all the actual like code files change whether that's in your IDE or in GitHub or whatever. And so I think the equivalent here is like you want to be able to drop down into a really nice interface. And we've done some work around like kind of figuring out what what's the best blend of the two, right? So like with chat GPT, for instance, we have a kind of a first class integration where you can go in through chat GPT and like interact with your data in air table, say like, hey, pull me like all the customers that are like waiting for an outreach for me. And pre draft like outreach messages. Um but then it can basically compose like a fragment of a view within the chat GPT interface. So like you can actually see

• 40:33Speaker 03

  like air table, but like, you know, kind of a part of the interview. So it's not completely headless. It's almost like you get to pull out like pieces of its face at the right time on demand. And I think that's a really important kind of like UX form factor.

• 40:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you thinking about uh speed in the context of AI? I feel like uh the models keep getting smarter, but they also keep getting slower, basically.

• 40:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:58John Coogan?

  Uh and while I'm extremely confident that I could point a deep research agent at a massive air table with twenty thousand rows and uh get very good results, like a lot of times I'm just in my email and I want to find one thing very quickly and uh that feels like it has yet to be uh you know, AI-ified or at least like LLM-ified. It's very much uh it's it's very much like, okay, well, I should probably just fall back to like SQL query or just some Boolean logic or just like vanilla search because uh I want this now.

• 41:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think both are going to be really important experiences. And obviously, we have like, you know, kind of great, like smaller and faster models, like the mini, you know, series. You know, that that are great for like more synchronous interactions and like within air table, like if you go do to air table or you use chat GPT with like one of the the smaller models, you get that like faster, kind of almost like more like real time experience. But I do think like a really important class of work that will come to dominate like every frontier company or company trying to reinvent themselves to be frontier is like figuring out how to operate in this new modality of like, you know, it's like the best developers today. Don't go and like sit there in front of their IDE and like synchronously like talk to the agent. You have like thirty, you know, separate branches that are each being worked on by a different agent. Yep.

• 42:14Speaker 03

  And like you can have the agents continue to like update, you know, the branch based on human and other agent feedback, right? Yep. So you have like comments back or like, you know, run like tests, et cetera. And I think this whole idea of like, look, it's going to take like hours for that entire loop to complete, right? Like agent pushes some changes, the changes get feedback from other agents or humans, agent responds to that, like that whole loop could be hours, not just like minutes. Yeah. So you're not going to sit there and like watch it one at a time. Yeah. But the powerful thing about this is like each one is still actually operating faster than like a human engineer could have like back in the day, right? Like when I think about like the speed with which like our early team at Airtable could build features and we had a very good team, like one agent on one branch can, you know,

• 42:55Speaker 03

  do the work of like maybe three humans back in the day, operating probably in like three times the time, right? So it's like literally like a ten X, you know, kind of leverage factor just for one agent. But the best engineers are now able to multitask and kind of basically say, look, I'm going to oversee my own little team of like twenty to thirty agents working concurrently. And so I think it requires like, it's almost like everybody needs to graduate from being an IC to like an IC manager of agents, meaning like in every function, like if you're like a VC analyst, your job should no longer be to go and synchronously research one company. It's like you're going to go and research like thirty companies and do them all faster, better and higher quality, right? Like than, than what you could before.

• 43:36Speaker 03

  And so it, I think that's the greatest leap that is going to be challenging for a lot of people in a lot of roles to make the leap on because it's, it's a totally different mentality to like how you operate and what your role is than before. What are you pushing the, the team to achieve? Hmm. Um, so a lot. You know, I think like there's, there's basically like three different levels of self disruption we're trying to do at Airtable, right? One is like the core product itself, like how do we reimagine that for increasingly agent-led futures, all the like headless hybrid type stuff we talked about and like, you know, like the best testament to that is like, do we see like massively growing, uh, you know, basically tool call? Volume from, you know, ChatGPT, Claude, any other agent products like are people using

• 44:21Speaker 03

  Airtable more and more agentically and is it working smoothly for them? So that's like priority one. The second, though, is like, I think we have to like really transform how we operate internally. Right? Like, you know, clearly like the companies, the best companies in the future are not just going to hire like massive armies of people to do everything, right? Like they're going to hire like people who can really effectively leverage agents. Right? It's so obvious that's happening in engineering where like, you know, if you could hire one engineer who could be fully agentically leveraged, you get more output than like 30 kind of traditional engineers doing traditional engineering. So that's kind of one internal thing. But then the third is like, I'm a strong believer that like you have to go and skate to where the puck is going, like index against like the big tidal wave coming, right?

• 45:04Speaker 03

  Like Amazon did this like back in the day against like the growth of the internet. Right? Like they, you know, Bezos picked books and like, you know, e-commerce because like he thought that would be the best way to index against the growth of the internet. And so for us, like, we get that through Airtable and like kind of hybrid headless Airtable, but we're also placing a big bet on hyperagent because hyperagent is basically like taking all of the like excitement of frontier agents like IE OpenClaw and like YOLO agents that can just like have access to your data and tools and do stuff like really, really like long running stuff, not like 10 second tasks, but like 10 hour tasks. But for non-coders and we want to do it in like a business friendly way, right? So like you can go and like do this, deploy it into your company, run like agents across, you know, your entire company.

• 45:48Speaker 03

  And so that's kind of like a bet on if we believed Airtable, you know, 10 years ago was like the most meta problem, like the largest problem we could work on, which is like software arguably is like was the biggest and fastest growing industry at the time. Right? And like, how do we go after that entire category and index against that? How do we now go against agents and say like, we want to build like the best agents platform that any business and any person can come in and use and just start building agents with, right? And deploying them into their company, right? And so if we do that really well, then like we get to doubly win both as the data layer, but also kind of have a bet on the agent wave.

• 46:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. Last question. Should children learn C++?

• 46:30Speaker 03

  Definitely not.

• 46:32John Coogan?

  And is that because of C++ or because of the AI era?

• 46:35Speaker 03

  I think, well, I mean, I think both. Like, I think, um, I think the fundamentals of good technical architecture are going to be the most important thing, but that has let, like, I think the abstraction that really matters now for creating value is raising up, right? Like, it used to be at one point, like, you know, Bill Gates wrote, like, some of his first programs in, like, literally, like, machine code, right? And like, would punch it into his, like, PDP 10. And like, clearly, you could be a great startup founder or be a great software engineer and make lots of money, like, without having to go down to that level. And so I think now with agents, like, the bar has raised yet again, where, like, what you really need is, like, good product business and, like, tech architecture sensibilities. Like, how should this system work? Like, where should the different, like, levels of, you know, kind of responsibility belong?

• 47:18Speaker 03

  And, like, if you can get really good at that, then you have super leverage. If you are just kind of like, like, learning the literal kind of like lines of code and how to write them, that, you know, a lot of engineers were poor, I think that's going to be increasingly below the frontier line of, like, agents can just do it, like, equally or better to humans.

• 47:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 47:40John Coogan?

  Have a fantastic rest of your day.

• 47:43Speaker 03

  Great hanging. Talk soon.

• 47:44John Coogan?

  And we have our next guest, Mark Germain, the Germinator himself, in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVP on the Ultra Dome. Mark Germain, how are you doing?

• 47:56Mark Gurman?

  Tired. How are you doing?

• 47:57John Coogan?

  Tired. I can imagine. Uh, this has been months in the works. Uh, you predicted this, uh, many times, but also on our show. Uh, how did this come together? Did this match your timeline? Were you surprised by this particular Monday that it was announced, or?

• 48:15Jordi Hays?

  Walk us through the scoop.

• 48:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:17Jordi Hays?

  And get the, get the scoop.

• 48:18John Coogan?

  Get the scoop ready. This is the scoop of all scoops.

• 48:22Jordi Hays?

  You got this ready.

• 48:22John Coogan?

  The golden scoop for you.

• 48:23Jordi Hays?

  The golden scoop.

• 48:24Mark Gurman?

  Oh, I've never, I've never seen that.

• 48:25John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. It's a new prop in the studio. You'll have to take a spin the next time you're in person.

• 48:31Mark Gurman?

  The, the OpenAI deal is already, uh, doing work for you guys. There you go. Good props. Uh, so he he here's the deal. There's a reason I published my profile of of John Ternus just a few weeks ago, right? Uh, this was all coming together. Uh, things really ramped up internally at Apple on this at the end of, uh, last year. Uh, things have been in motion. Uh, the plan was to announce it after the 50 year anniversary celebrations. And it almost felt like the 50 year celebrations were not just, you know, about Apple's 50 years, uh, but sort of a goodbye celebration to Tim Cook and his legacy at the company. So it all came together over, over, over several months. Uh, this really started about

• 49:14Mark Gurman?

  two years ago, uh, when, uh, Tim Cook identified John Ternus as, as the next one. Uh, Ternus had been being, been prepared for this role probably for over five years at this point, since they put him on the executive team and he became SVP of Hardware Engineering. Uh, but this started in, in early 2024. And, uh, at the time I, I wrote that, um, that was the first time I wrote that he would be the next one.

• 49:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, how do you, uh, have you been able to process? I know you've published a few memos. Have you been able to ascertain anything about the internal, uh, response? Are Apple employees excited about this? It feels like it's been managed from a communications perspective very carefully, uh, and so it shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone. But are Apple employees generally excited about this? It seems like, uh, there's a lot of cause for optimism, but, uh, I'm always interested to hear.

• 50:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there was that one article a couple of months ago where clearly they were getting quotes from former employees that were like, kind of taking potshots at him, basically saying like, he's never made a hard decision.

• 50:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, that was the quote that went into the journal, but I don't know. It seems like it didn't matter because he got the job.

• 50:22Mark Gurman?

  Well, got the job two years ago. And I think he's going to do a hell of a job in this new role. I am quite optimistic for Apple in the long term with Ternus at the helm. He has product sensibilities that Tim Cook simply doesn't have. He has product decision making ability that Tim Cook certainly had, but wouldn't utilize because he himself knows that product based decisions is not where he could have the most impact. Just like Tim Cook really oversaw the operations part of Apple as the CEO and led left product development to other members of the executive team. My expectation is that John Ternus will be intimately involved with the product side of the organization as he was in his prior role to CEO

• 51:07Mark Gurman?

  and will leave the operational side to people like Sabi Khan and Priya, the people who run the operations division at Apple, supply chain, manufacturing, procurement, Apple Care, you name it. And so he's going to pick his spots and his spots is hardware and product development. There's a reason that when he chose his successor for the hardware engineering organization, he chose Tom Maryab, not an innovator, but an incredible execution guy when it comes to hardware engineering, product quality. He did that because his belief is that he will still be intimately involved and sort of be that product visionary for Apple in this new chief executive position.

• 51:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. Does, when I remember Steve Jobs, I think of Jobs as an innovator, as a visionary, as someone who both did Pixar and the iPhone, you know, so many different projects, a lot of them wildly successful. Tim Cook felt like a focusing of that a little bit, but you still had the car, Vision Pro, there's a few different projects going on. Is this more, is this the most focused Apple has ever been and will ever be? Or do you think that there's, do you think Ternus has like some aces up his sleeve where he might want to take a wild swing at something?

• 52:19Mark Gurman?

  The thing with John Ternus is going to have to do is stay the course. Annual iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, AirPods upgrades. But at the same time, is going to need to do a better job bringing out new product categories that Tim Cook has done. If you look at Tim Cook's legacy in terms of major new products, it really was on the services side. The AirPods and Apple Watch, you know, those were both really developed by management teams, engineers, and people who came from the Steve Jobs era. It's not a slight, but my point being is that we really haven't seen anything wholly new that is also successful since 2016 with the AirPods and the Apple Watch at the end of 2014.

• 52:59Mark Gurman?

  The Vision Pro has obviously been a Tim Cook product, a Tim Cook priority, and it's been sort of a flop. At least for now. I know Apple has a very long, decade-long spatial computing roadmap. They eventually want to get to AR glasses. They'll have displayless glasses to compete with Meta several months from now into 2027. But he needs to get cracking. There are six major Apple products in development right now. Six major new product categories. AI AirPods, smart glasses, pendant, smart display.

• 53:36John Coogan?

  Is that the lamp or the kitchen thing?

• 53:39Mark Gurman?

  No, no. Lamp is number five. Smart display is different.

• 53:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 53:44Mark Gurman?

  The tabletop robot, so that's the lamp, the moving lamp. And then number six is a, I'm only going to say very little about this, but a security camera.

• 53:55John Coogan?

  Okay. Interesting. Well, at least the Apple Vision Pro has one key fan.

• 53:59Jordi Hays?

  Do you think the lamp is a predecessor for a humanoid? Do you think Apple would ever do a humanoid?

• 54:06Mark Gurman?

  I do. I do. But I think it's going to be a decade if they do, and they're going to wait and see.

• 54:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I feel like it says a lot that they're not.

• 54:14John Coogan?

  Talking about it?

• 54:15Jordi Hays?

  That you don't know about an internal humanoid project yet.

• 54:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:18Mark Gurman?

  Oh, I do.

• 54:19John Coogan?

  But, but.

• 54:21Mark Gurman?

  They're exploring humanoid, the idea of a humanoid. But they're They're not working on it full throttle, but they have a large robotics initiative. They're working on AI robotics technology and they're also working on robotics hardware. John Ternus actually took control over the robotics hardware team about a year ago. He took it from the AI chief that Apple, you know, got rid of a couple of weeks ago, John Janandrea. But they're also looking at, they're actually building a, it's really cool, a gigantic manufacturing arm, or gigantic robotic arm that they want to use in manufacturing, but also use in Apple retail stores to grab, you know, products off the shelf in the back room and whatnot and bring it into the store.

• 55:04Mark Gurman?

  That's probably five years away, but they're looking at robotics from a manufacturing standpoint, from a retail standpoint, and also, most importantly, from a consumer standpoint. They've also been exploring a mobile robot, something like an Amazon Astro, but I don't think that's probably going to see the light of day.

• 55:20John Coogan?

  That's fun. I feel like Apple has the perfect brand.

• 55:23Jordi Hays?

  Talk about, talk about Ternus's challenge with supply chain broadly, what you think he's going to be focused on over the next five years.

• 55:31Mark Gurman?

  I don't think he will be. I don't think he will be. I think just like Tim Cook.

• 55:35Jordi Hays?

  But is that not, you're saying like, just basically like

• 55:39John Coogan?

  He's delegating it.

• 55:39Jordi Hays?

  broadly ignore that it's a kind of a key risk to the business to have, you know.

• 55:45Mark Gurman?

  I mean With the hands, in all hands meeting with Apple employees this morning, he was pretty clear that Tim Cook didn't do everything. Tim Cook chose his spots and Ternus said that he's going to pick his spots as well. As we know, Tim Spots was operations, finance and sales and he delegated everything else. My sense is that Ternus is going to, Ternus is mandate. Ternus was hired because they believe that he is going to be able to bring Apple back to the forefront of product device innovation. Okay, they already have the best in class operations, finance, salespeople. They don't need Ternus to do that. They need Ternus to keep his eye on the prize, which is products.

• 56:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:29John Coogan?

  What do people point to when they say that there's a risk to Apple staying on the frontier of product development? I saw the Android phone that has the privacy screen that you toggle on and off. That looked like kind of a cool feature. There's folding phones that they're working on. But are any of these features that exist in other phones, it feels like they haven't actually gotten to groundswell and started pulling iPhone users away from the ecosystem. But are there key features that people are worried about? Or what?

• 57:00Mark Gurman?

  It's not here yet. Nothing you've seen is the risk. The risk is whatever the hell Meta and OpenAI and Hark and all these companies eventually come out with. The risk is one of those companies doing something really cool and jettisoning Apple from that perspective. But we all know that nobody has done quote unquote cool stuff yet to steal away iPhone users. Nobody is ditching their iPhone for Android. In fact, the switching is going in the other direction despite the fact that Apple is supposedly the most innovative company in the world and has the least innovative AI technology.

• 57:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, but consumers care about value and things like the MacBook Neo really deliver that value.

• 57:41Mark Gurman?

  Brand, colors, value.

• 57:45Mark Gurman?

  Ternus was only Senior VP of Hardware Engineering at Apple for five years. It's a short tenure to be an SVP of a division at Apple. And the reason is because he's, oh, there you go. Now, he's been at Apple 25 years.

• 58:01Mark Gurman?

  No, I know. But the point I'm trying to make is that he still has a legacy. And Ternus's legacy is making Apple hardware more performant in terms of speed and battery life.

• 58:15Mark Gurman?

  And higher quality. He is really focused on the durability and longevity and the reliability of Apple products. And it's meaningful, I think, that the person that they chose to be Ternus's replacement in hardware engineering, Tom Herryab from Intel. Is a product quality and reliability expert rather than a product design person.

• 58:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, what was the thinking? I mean, I remember we talked about this, how I got the new iPhone and it has immediately been dinged.

• 58:44Jordi Hays?

  What was the thinking on making it disposable?

• 58:46John Coogan?

  And but it's but it's better for heat or better for wireless connectivity, even though you can't get the color to adhere to the to the material as much. So it scratches off. Is that the is that the current trade off? Yeah.

• 58:59Mark Gurman?

  Yeah, there's trade offs with every material like titanium was light. It looked cool. You could beat blasted. It's, you know, interesting. I mean, it looked interesting and it gave them a good marketing point like, oh, come buy a titanium phone like anyone cares about the material of their phone. But it had really bad properties related to heat aluminum, which we've known for 20 years. Is an excellent material to build consumer electronics out of. So they went back to the basics. You know, they were really talking about at the end of last year, splitting the line between ultra thin with the iPhone air. And pushing the iPhone Pro to the right as much as possible by making it more performant.

• 59:39Mark Gurman?

  My expectation is they're really doubling down on this. Their goal is really to just squeeze as much performance and power in these iPhone Pros as possible. And for everyone who needs less power, you can get the thinner and lighter iPhone air. And I think you're going to continue to see Ternus pushing that direction, making the MacBook Pro as amazing and most performant as it can be. And pushing everyone else to the MacBook Neo and the MacBook area. And I think his legacy on performance. And product quality is is really important thing to remember.

• 1:00:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:06Jordi Hays?

  Has Ternus ever talked publicly about AI in any capacity?

• 1:00:13Mark Gurman?

  He talked about AI in his all hands meeting with employees this morning. He said that.

• 1:00:23Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna check it out.

• 1:00:25Mark Gurman?

  No, just hold on. Hold on. I don't want to give you inaccurate. Yeah, fake news. Okay. Yeah, just hold on. Bear with me.

• 1:00:38John Coogan?

  Internal memos.

• 1:00:39Mark Gurman?

  No, no, no, no, no. Okay. He said that. He's especially excited to be stepping into this role at this moment because I am telling you, we are about to change the world once again. He said, Apple has an incredible roadmap ahead and that I'm not exaggerating when I say this is the most exciting time to be building products and services at Apple in my entire career.

• 1:01:02Mark Gurman?

  Is going to create almost unlimited potential. We're going to be able to keep unlocking possibilities that are going to create entirely new opportunities for our products and services. And I'm so excited about what that's going to mean for our users. Earlier this month, he reorganized Apple's hardware engineering division around in a new AI platform that they're going to be using to improve product development processes and overall quality.

• 1:01:27John Coogan?

  Interesting. Okay. I saw a post here from Bubble Boy. I want your reaction. Apple is about to become the Mecca of hardware engineers around the world with John Ternus taking over at Apple. Is Apple not already the Mecca? Is there actually somewhere to go? But that is up in terms of hardware engineer recruiting? Do you see this as changing the culture in some meaningful way?

• 1:01:55Mark Gurman?

  I mean, they don't pay like these, you know, OpenAI's Harks and Metas of the world. Their Apple has been pillaged by OpenAI and Meta and all these companies. As of late, they are stripping apart Apple's hardware engineering division, hiring people from every team they can get their hands on, throwing very big offers at them. And so this has been a really big issue that Ternus has been dealing with over the last year and change. So, but Apple is, you know, the hardware Mecca. They're the company that everyone wants to poach from.

• 1:02:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:27Mark Gurman?

  And they're the company that people go to to learn how to build consumer devices. So this is definitely, yeah, I agree to a large extent with you, actually. All right, with Bubble Boy.

• 1:02:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, Bubble Boy. Well, I did. This might be somewhat separate, but just get me up to speed on the folding iPhone. What is the latest there?

• 1:02:49Mark Gurman?

  Announced in September, Ternus's first big new product.

• 1:02:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:53Mark Gurman?

  Super exciting, super pumped.

• 1:02:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:55Mark Gurman?

  We've talked about this. I'm sick of the candy bar phones. Been the same junk for 15, excuse me, 20 years now.

• 1:03:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:02Mark Gurman?

  I want a foldable. I want a bigger screen.

• 1:03:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:05Mark Gurman?

  I really hope.

• 1:03:06Jordi Hays?

  John Neat wants a newspaper sized phone.

• 1:03:09John Coogan?

  Well, they have those. I've seen those in China. The tri-fold, right? But this is a bi-fold.

• 1:03:13Mark Gurman?

  Don't get me started on the tri-fold. Those are awful.

• 1:03:15John Coogan?

  Wait, why are they awful? It seems amazing.

• 1:03:17Jordi Hays?

  John wants pages of screens that he can turn.

• 1:03:20Mark Gurman?

  Blimzy and they break.

• 1:03:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:03:21Mark Gurman?

  You need a tri-fold at Apple like quality in 20 years because, you know, Apple takes a good old time. When they do a, uh, when they just, when, when Apple does a tri-fold, it'll be good.

• 1:03:31John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:03:32Mark Gurman?

  You know, I open up a foldable phone right now. You open it up and you can hear the screen sort of creaking, right? And then you have that big line in the middle and then it's like impossible to get your thumb in to open the thing.

• 1:03:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:44Mark Gurman?

  Um, I hope Apple fixes that. I don't want to hear a creak for $2,000. I don't want to hear a creak. I don't want it to stand, stand, uh, sound like I'm stepping on, you know, a wooden floor.

• 1:03:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:55Mark Gurman?

  Right? I want it to just open and I want it to open quickly and nicely and it not be like I'm trying to lift a weight.

• 1:04:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's still gonna be weird for video consumption though, because I feel like we've done vertical videos, nine, uh, nine by 16 and then 16 by nine widescreen. But if you open up a foldable phone, you eventually get a square and that doesn't really make like a movie watching experience better.

• 1:04:15Mark Gurman?

  No, Apple's is different. Apple's is like the new Huawei phone where it is, um, iPad screen ratio.

• 1:04:22John Coogan?

  iPad screen ratio. When you open it. Okay.

• 1:04:25Mark Gurman?

  When you open it.

• 1:04:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay. So still black bars.

• 1:04:27Jordi Hays?

  Any intel on, on, uh?

• 1:04:29Mark Gurman?

  No, no, no. Uh, black bars, black, uh, yeah, sure. There'll be black bars.

• 1:04:34John Coogan?

  When you rotate it, black bars on the top and bottom. If you're watching like a cinema film or even if you're scrolling Instagram, like you, you, you won't necessarily get more view because for so long, all the content production has been ultra widescreen. If you're making a Tarantino film and it's super cinematic, or if you're on TikTok and you're doing vertical video, then you're, then you're, you're, you're gonna have black bars on the side for, for the most part. But for so many other applications, uh, you know, for Word, documents and notes and.

• 1:05:06Mark Gurman?

  VPN will look great on it.

• 1:05:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Something to look forward to.

• 1:05:10Jordi Hays?

  What do you think Ternus's new comp package looks like? You know, we were, we, we almost marched on Cupertino, uh, multiple times because of Tim Cook.

• 1:05:18Mark Gurman?

  To get Tim Cook.

• 1:05:19Jordi Hays?

  To get him a raise.

• 1:05:20Mark Gurman?

  You're gonna get tough yourself to the, uh, to the spaceship.

• 1:05:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 1:05:25Mark Gurman?

  I would, I, I'm just guessing. I'm just guessing. Um, I think a million shares.

• 1:05:33Mark Gurman?

  Hmm. Over 10 years.

• 1:05:35John Coogan?

  That's pretty big.

• 1:05:37Mark Gurman?

  Oh wait, can I just tell you why I think that?

• 1:05:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, why?

• 1:05:39Mark Gurman?

  Because that's what they, because that's what they gave Tim Cook when he was named CEO, a million over 10 years. So I would assume it's the same.

• 1:05:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:46Mark Gurman?

  But again, I, I, I don't know.

• 1:05:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:48Jordi Hays?

  Entry level researcher salary, but it's a good start.

• 1:05:53Mark Gurman?

  Pretty much, well. Tim Cook is getting, uh, Tim Cook, you know, Tim Cook was getting 100 million a year and then everyone flipped out except you guys. And so he had to cut his pay to like 40 million and then when things died down, he's like, all right, I'll, I'll, I'll take, I'll take my 70, 80 million.

• 1:06:11Jordi Hays?

  I slept peacefully for, for those years.

• 1:06:16Jordi Hays?

  And then you should see my sleep score once.

• 1:06:18John Coogan?

  We were really, we were really the, the strongest supporters of the, the Tim Cook pay package, but.

• 1:06:23Mark Gurman?

  I, I'd guess, I'd guess a million.

• 1:06:25Jordi Hays?

  I was just, I was just like, okay, the market, the free market values, a baseball player at the same amount as a guy leading, you know.

• 1:06:33John Coogan?

  A four trillion dollar company.

• 1:06:35Jordi Hays?

  Make it make sense.

• 1:06:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:36Mark Gurman?

  Maybe it'll be 500,000 shares, maybe it'll be 500,000 shares. I, I don't know, but I know that they gave Tim Cook a million.

• 1:06:42John Coogan?

  You gotta get those numbers up. You gotta get those numbers.

• 1:06:45Jordi Hays?

  It's time to march.

• 1:06:45Mark Gurman?

  Really? You're all in on fairness already?

• 1:06:47Jordi Hays?

  We should preemptively march.

• 1:06:49John Coogan?

  We're, we're bullish on both. We love both here.

• 1:06:52Mark Gurman?

  Well, now you get, you get both now.

• 1:06:54John Coogan?

  I know we do. Uh, yeah. What, why, uh, why, why is 65 a retirement age for the CEO of Apple? Like, uh, we were talking about Warren Buffett. He was able to manage a, you know, trillion dollar organization well into his 90s. Uh, is it a more physically demanding job? Is he traveling more? Is it, is his hand wringing from shaking hands in DC? Like, why not have another 10 years if you're in that seat?

• 1:07:24Mark Gurman?

  I don't think the hand situation has much to do with shaking other people's hands.

• 1:07:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:07:28Mark Gurman?

  Uh, why is he not there another 10 years? Well, he needs to give the new guy runway.

• 1:07:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:07:35Mark Gurman?

  Um, I'm sure there, there are some in, I'll just tell you what Tim Cook, uh, I'm not, I'm not gonna get into it.

• 1:07:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:07:44Mark Gurman?

  What I'm gonna do is tell you why Tim Cook said he's stepping down.

• 1:07:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:47Mark Gurman?

  He said he's stepping down because it's the right time.

• 1:07:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:49Mark Gurman?

  And there's an intersection of John Ternus being ready.

• 1:07:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:52Mark Gurman?

  Uh, Apple's finances being in a very strong place and Apple's future road about being in a very strong place. Uh, in terms of the real reason why he's stepping, uh, down now, you can read some of my prior articles.

• 1:08:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:08:02Mark Gurman?

  Uh, taking a deeper look at the, at the situation.

• 1:08:05John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah. Makes sense. Cool.

• 1:08:07Jordi Hays?

  I love seeing you. I love talking to you. Thank you for coming on.

• 1:08:09John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:08:10Jordi Hays?

  Got some sleep.

• 1:08:11Mark Gurman?

  Love you guys too.

• 1:08:12John Coogan?

  Get some sleep.

• 1:08:13Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, Mark.

• 1:08:14John Coogan?

  And keep up the amazing work. We'll see you soon.

• 1:08:16Mark Gurman?

  We'll see you in 15 years for Ternus Jr.

• 1:08:19John Coogan?

  Can't wait. We'll see you. Goodbye.

• 1:08:21Jordi Hays?

  Uh, let's pull up the OpenAI livestream. OpenAI launch. What's going on with images?

• 1:08:27John Coogan?

  Image Gen 2. I've been playing with this for a while.

• 1:08:30Jordi Hays?

  It is.

• 1:08:31John Coogan?

  There are some wild, wild examples. They are live streaming.

• 1:08:33Jordi Hays?

  Sam should have saved the Death Star meme for this.

• 1:08:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:37Jordi Hays?

  For this launch.

• 1:08:39Speaker 04

  ... and we think we made a lot of progress in both of this visual understanding and visual generation, both of these aspects. Uh, as a result, being able to handle this kind of tasks, uh, very well. Uh, and, um, we now have an output for this where you can see eight different, uh, real cool outfits from me. Kim, what do you think?

• 1:09:03John Coogan?

  The level of detail in these models is getting so extreme.

• 1:09:06Jordi Hays?

  It's post slop.

• 1:09:07John Coogan?

  It is post slop. That's a good, that's a good point. Uh, but I've seen, I've seen somewhere people are like, generate the entire periodic table with details about each element and a visualization of each element. And it's just like so much information, so dense that you have to wind up zooming in so much just to get all the information. Uh, it's like, like the idea of generating like a single photo of a person in an outfit was, uh, was remarkable just a year ago, I guess, when the Studio Ghibli thing happened. And now you can generate layers and layers of, uh, of detail here. Uh, good teaser. They said this is not a screenshot and posted the image.

• 1:09:47Speaker 04

  And details.

• 1:09:49Jordi Hays?

  Something that prompts, tell everyone about the prompt you've been running with Wiki.

• 1:09:55John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, I've been doing this thing where I take a Wikipedia article and I ask ImageGen 2 to turn it into an infographic, or you can actually do an Instagram carousel, like 10 images that tell the story of something. I did this with John Ternus and it's remarkable. I mean, the text is perfectly photoreal. The other thing that's interesting is the brand comes through in an interesting way. It doesn't, it's not like it has like one style for infographic. Like I had it make an infographic about John Ternus and his career and his path and everything that he's done at Apple and it put in images of the projects that he's worked on, but then also had like an Apple-like brand aesthetic, like

• 1:10:38John Coogan?

  a white background, the correct fonts. But then I did the same thing for like the Elden Ring movie that we were talking about yesterday. So I went and got the Wikipedia for the Elden Ring movie that has some details and some leaks of who might be in the, in playing different roles and it was able to go get images, go get headshots of those people, put those in because it has tool calls now. So you can actually, like if you say like generate an infographic of John Ternus's career, it will do like a pretty good job generating someone who looks sort of like John Ternus, but then you can actually just take his canonical headshot and say, no, use this exact photo of John Ternus and it will just drop it right in. And so it looks, it looks perfect because it is just like

• 1:11:23John Coogan?

  a copy paste basically on top of the layers.

• 1:11:25Jordi Hays?

  Let's get some audio again.

• 1:11:26John Coogan?

  Let's see what else is going on here.

• 1:11:27Speaker 05

  Output. This is particularly useful for very complex prompts, for things that require like web searches, for require you to output multiple images that have to maintain coherence with each other, or even for it to check its work before saying, hey, here's your final output. But let's just like look over some examples of this first. Gabe actually kicked off a few of these examples at the start of the live stream. So let's go to the one on the phone, which is the one of him and Sam, the selfie of them, and they created a manga of it. And if we look at the very first image, we can see, yeah, it does look like Gabe and Sam, right?

• 1:12:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:07Speaker 05

  But I think what's even cooler about it is that if you look at the follow-up images... They still look like Dave and Sam, and they still look like in the style that was originally maintained.

• 1:12:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, children's stories, coloring books. It's like really insane.

• 1:12:25Speaker 05

  Among pages one, two, and three.

• 1:12:30John Coogan?

  I did that this weekend. It was very successful. Rave reviews in the Kugan household for AI-generated coloring books for mythical creatures that my son came up with, combining different creatures.

• 1:12:42Speaker 05

  We beta-tested the instant version of this model on Elmarina, under the codename Duct Tape. A few of you on the internet were like really good detectives and deduced that it was us, but we're gonna announce that it was us. And so in this prompt, we basically asked that

• 1:12:58Jordi Hays?

  You got us.

• 1:12:59Speaker 05

  Basically, GPT Images 2, to go and find social media reactions to this duct tape model and basically quote people. And so we see quotes from threads, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc. But I think an even crazier part is that we've also asked the model to put a QR code to chatgpt.com so that you can try out this model right now for yourselves. And can we just make sure that it works? Yeah, I try. Oh, nice, nice, nice. So image generation with thinking allows you to do really complex things such as, so in this case, web search, synthesize answers, and put a QR code all in one image. But we have still more, and Alex will talk to you about these new details.

• 1:13:43John Coogan?

  It's so interesting. The tool use is getting really, really advanced.

• 1:13:48Speaker 05

  We also made a lot of improvements in naturalness.

• 1:13:51John Coogan?

  Actually was able to generate a vector diagram to make sure that everything was correct and then regenerate the image on top of that. Of course, we should go to the timeline because there's some people that are having fun with the image generation. Someone made Presidents in Elden Ring. There's Joe Biden, which is a Dark Souls-style boss that you can fight, and FDR, Lord of the New Deal. And these images, it just looks remarkable if you've ever played any of the Elden Ring or Dark Souls games. Because of course, like, the text is flawless, and then you can fight Richard Nixon in front of the Watergate. And this looks like a mod that I think people would play if it actually

• 1:14:36John Coogan?

  existed. Blake Robbins said, "The world is now ready for the rumored OpenAI image model. People are creating Google Street View images that just look perfect and Grand Theft Auto V loading screens." And there's a big trend of people creating things that look like screenshots of live streams, and then they put themselves in the live streams and have all fun with that. And there's one of Satya Nadella presenting a slide, and like, even the minor text at the bottom of the slide in the picture, it's sort of remarkable to think that all of this is generated, basically one-shotted. Justin Moore was posting about this a long time ago,

• 1:15:17John Coogan?

  April 6th. This ad was one-shotted by OpenAI's image model. Prompt was literally "Make an advertisement for the M4 Pro Mac Mini." And, I mean, you can see how quickly this will speed things up. The question is just like, what is your source content? What do you want to visualize or deliver via this format? The whole meme of like, "Turn this essay into bullet points, turn this bullet points into paragraphs. Now you can turn this infographic into text and turn the text back into an infographic." I feel like a lot of slides-

• 1:15:51Jordi Hays?

  Someone made a calendar for tracking your Uber Eats and FedEx deliveries, and it looks pretty believable.

• 1:15:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:58Jordi Hays?

  If you can pull up the screenshot here.

• 1:16:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. People, there's something interesting about this where I've seen a number of slide decks that could be infographics, and I'm wondering if there's going to be a new level of like, compression where people are saying like, "Just send me a screenshot, like a one-page or screenshot, over text instead of like, a slide deck that I have to click through." That is a lot of information.

• 1:16:23Jordi Hays?

  But if you zoom in, there's like, pretty impressive fidelity.

• 1:16:30John Coogan?

  It's just, that's wild. But yeah, I mean, if you're trying to, if you're trying to deliver a whole bunch of information that could go in a slide deck, condensing it down into an infographic feels like potentially a new trend. And I wouldn't be surprised if you see a lot of these flowing out into Instagram carousels and other sorts of content if you're trying to summarize some sort of content, a history, quotes, you know, any sort of information like that. Anyway, Tyler Cowen, back to the timeline, Tyler Cowen made an incredible call back in July of 2020 in the depths of COVID in Bloomberg. He said, "This year is likely to be remembered for the COVID-19 pandemic and for a significant presidential

• 1:17:11John Coogan?

  election, but there is a new contender for the most spectacularly newsworthy happening of 2020, the unveiling of GPT-3. As a very rough description, think of GPT-3 giving computers a facility with words, a faculty, oh no, a facility with words that they have had with numbers for a long time, and with images since about 2012." What a remarkable post. This was two months after Goren's scaling hypothesis post and two and a half years before ChatGPT was released. That is remarkable. There's a lot of folks that are chiming in with, "I called it too." Anyway, I believe we have our next guest in the waiting room, Scott Stevenson from Spellbook. Scott, how are you doing?

• 1:17:55Speaker 06

  Doing great, doing great. How are you guys?

• 1:17:56John Coogan?

  We're good. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:18:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 1:18:02John Coogan?

  Can you, I mean, I want to go into the contracted ARR debate, but let's get the update on Spellbook. How are things going? Where's the company at? How are you feeling?

• 1:18:12Speaker 06

  Going very well. We had a killer Q1, crushed our stretch targets last year. Yeah, we're over 4,400 customers on board in 80 countries now.

• 1:18:22John Coogan?

  80 countries?

• 1:18:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, we're the most used AI contractor view tool in the world, so.

• 1:18:26John Coogan?

  Why so international so early?

• 1:18:30Speaker 06

  Uh, it's been inbound. Yeah, we've had a ton of interest inbound. So yeah, it really, you know, the choice is accept the customers or return them away. You know, we chose to accept them. Yeah.

• 1:18:41John Coogan?

  Is the product sort of multilingual by default?

• 1:18:45Speaker 06

  Uh, I would say yes. Like there, a lot of it is driven by AI models and models have some ability to deal with different, actually pretty good ability to deal with different languages. And then we're able to supplement the models with legislation and norms from many different jurisdictions and so a legal product.

• 1:19:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. So yeah, where else are the key integration points? Like, what's the hard work to like bring a country on board or even bring a new flow on board or expand the capabilities of the product as models are just sort of getting better every month by default in the background?

• 1:19:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I think for us that the bit, you know, we try to be two years ahead of the market and build things that are two years ahead of what anyone else is building in legal AI or elsewhere. And we've consistently done that. We built the very first Gen AI product for lawyers back in the summer of 2022. This is like before ChatGPT.

• 1:19:38John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:19:38Speaker 06

  Um, though a lot of like Claude for word just came out. That was kind of what we launched like four years ago. So we're pretty, pretty far ahead from that now. What we really focus on is building unique workflows that are not just chat. I think if you're building something chat shaped, it's very difficult to make that defensible because there's going to be some really good general AI products for just generic chat based, based work. What we focus on at Spellbook is really rails for high volumes of contracts and contract workflows. So we sell to like Fortune 10, Fortune 100 companies and really companies of all sizes who are processing, you know, hundreds of thousands of contracts, not just with the legal team, but with their sales team, the procurement team. You know, we're

• 1:20:20Speaker 06

  in manufacturing, shipping, you know, all of these different verticals. And we kind of build this, these end, end rails that allow these contracts to move quickly and safely through organizations. And like, there's a lot that can slip through the cracks when you're dealing with these high volumes of contracts and a lot of mistakes are made. So, um, you know, we give like every legal team a second set of eyes on like these massive flows of contracts going through the organization.

• 1:20:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:46Jordi Hays?

  What drew you to Cargate? Why are other, is it, is it legal AI companies that you, that you feel like are, are? Getting a little bit dicey on this front or, or, you know,

• 1:21:01Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:21:01Jordi Hays?

  How do we get here?

• 1:21:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I've got some interesting examples to cite, but you know, I think, I think it's an enterprise AI problem. And I'll say, I'll say first, like my goal here with this tweet and what I'm doing is, is to destroy as much equity value as possible. By discrediting this obscene metric of Carr, or at least the way it's being used today. So we can all get back to like building real companies. So that's, that's, that's, that's what I'm trying to get out there.

• 1:21:27Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:21:27Speaker 06

  What I mean, where this came from is, I think, I just noticed more and more founders and investors telling me things about ARR reporting. You know, mainly the public reporting, but also some of the internal reporting that was just getting more and more skewed. And yeah, there's all these headlines being published about, you know, ARR records being broken. And, um, you know, when the laws of physics are being broken, you have to ask, is it, is it AI breaking the laws of physics? Or, you know, uh, might there be some other kind of illusion going on as well? And I think, I think it's a bit of both. We have really high growth, awesome companies being built. But when you have really high growth, you know, um, uh, issues can kind of fester and hide underneath.

• 1:22:10Speaker 06

  So, yeah, I'd heard, heard a lot of more and more stories of people using this, this metric of CRR. Often using this metric when they're talking to press about, you know, um, their, their revenue. And then gaming it in some pretty, pretty obscene ways. So maybe I just tweeted about it.

• 1:22:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, the tweet. So you say the setup, company signs three-year enterprise deals. Year one is discounted, say one million. Year two steps up, two million. Year three is full price. They report three million as ARR, even though they're only collecting one million dollars this year.

• 1:22:47Speaker 06

  That's a big deal.

• 1:22:47Jordi Hays?

  The worst part, the customer has an opt-out option at 12 months. It's not actually a three-year contract. So they're basically like taking the three-year number, pulling it into the present, even though it's not a, it's not, it's a contract that, that the customer can, can get out of.

• 1:23:02Speaker 06

  Interesting.

• 1:23:03Jordi Hays?

  And they're not actually on, on the hook. So it's not really.

• 1:23:08John Coogan?

  That's rough. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You just react to that, I guess.

• 1:23:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I think, I think, you know, that's a specific real example that I heard of in the wild from an insider of how this, these ARR metrics were being gamed to create, you know, some amazing revenue charts. But I would say there's, you know, broad category of issues that I can talk about, like a few of them that, you know, after the tweet went viral, I got a huge response of other founders and investors saying that they were saying the same thing and like some other examples of the types of gaming that's going on.

• 1:23:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because if you get one person in a category that starts doing this, then the other people

• 1:23:46John Coogan?

  We have to report the same way.

• 1:23:48Jordi Hays?

  Have to start reporting the same way and it creates a vicious cycle.

• 1:23:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:54Speaker 06

  And it starts, and it starts pretty innocent, you know, CARR. For folks that don't know, CARR is contracted ARR. So it allows you to count revenue that's not live yet. So maybe you're doing like a nine-month implementation or you have a one-year pilot.

• 1:24:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was meant for short-term stuff, like, hey, this, this, this contract is going, you know, this, this customer is actually going to be going live next quarter, but we've signed it and we're just going through the implementation process.

• 1:24:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:20Jordi Hays?

  And but, but there's nothing that, there's no like law that says you can't say, like, we're going to extend the, the sort of like timeline dramatically. It just is not a very grounded way to run your business.

• 1:24:35Speaker 06

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And like, I think it's innocent, like three months extra credit, you know, arguably useful, but it's a very easy metric to game, especially if you miss those obligations. So I think because we, we've kind of normalized, you know, the forward deployed engineer, which, you know, we used to call professional services. And so now you have these really complex implementations where you might be promising a customer like, hey, we'll build this feature. And once we build this feature, then we'll start billing you. What happens if you don't build that feature? So one of the issues you see is companies stacking all these commitments of they'll, they'll switch on billing once they deliver X with their forward deployed engineers. And then what happens if they miss that? Or what happens if that gets delayed? They, and then the reporting upfront as ARR

• 1:25:17Speaker 06

  publicly, but they're not actually at the point where they're, the ARR is, is live. So yeah, that's another category of issue. And then there's, you know, people reporting pilots, you know, just three-month pilots as ARR and they're free, free pilots. That, you know, I was talking to an investor yesterday who just sees that all the time from early-stage companies, like. Coming out of accelerator saying they have like a million AR and they look under the hood and it's just all pilots that haven't converted yet. So there's a host of different, you know, issues with the metric. And then, and then the other one is the step up contract where, yeah, you're stepping up, you know, year one is, you know, 25% of the cost, year two is a little higher, year three is higher. And then people are either amortizing that back over

• 1:25:59Speaker 06

  the period to get a higher average, or even taking like that year three amount, like you said at the beginning. So, yeah, there's a bunch of patterns that are happening. The other thing is like, there's early opt outs. So like, you know, you can have early opt outs in these long term contracts. And, but there's all, I mean, we're a contract company. So there's a million ways that a contract can be terminated.

• 1:26:20Jordi Hays?

  Seen a few, seen a few contracts.

• 1:26:23Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I think, I think it's, it's a really ungrounded metric and people should stop using it to report their enterprise AI companies should stop using it to report their AR publicly. I think no one should take it seriously, except maybe internally for some projections. You know, it's, it's not a, not a good, good metric.

• 1:26:43John Coogan?

  What is the gold star example of using ARR correctly? Because it's very easy, once a company's public to just say, okay, let's just go off of, you know, GAAP revenue for the year. And like, what did you actually book this quarter? There's a whole revenue recognition policy. It feels like there's some benefit to tracking ARR month by month if you're a high growth startup, but what is the best?

• 1:27:08Jordi Hays?

  Companies should just report their daily annualized run rate or hourly.

• 1:27:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. And that goes into the debate of annualized versus annual, right? So how have you processed sort of the, the better cases? Or like, like, what is the responsible way to report a revenue metric in 2026?

• 1:27:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on the company and the shape of the company and whether it's usage-based billing or seat-based billing, which you still have lots of both. Definitely don't do like hourly, you know, annualized run rate based on the hour. That's not good. I think the main thing I would say is it should be live. It's like what revenue is actually live right now? Like what customers are you actually billing and are actually paying you? So calculating run rate based on, you know, the month of revenue that you have coming from customers that are actually paying you, that you're actually billing. I think that's okay. I think, you know, annual recurring revenue based on live customers that you're actually billing, that are actually using your service, I think that's pretty good.

• 1:28:11Speaker 06

  I think once you start stretching into people who will pay you or, you know, might pay you, that's where things start to... I mean, it can just be so easily gamed and anything that can be gamed will be gamed.

• 1:28:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:23Jordi Hays?

  Are you optimistic that anything will change? Or do we need to see a massive correction and a dark, the dark ages like post 2022?

• 1:28:35Speaker 06

  I mean, I would like to see a steep correction and then back to building, you know? We'll see if we can make that happen. You know, my reach is only so far, but you know, I've spoken to a lot of reporters in the past like 48 hours who are like, I'm always going to ask now, like when the company tells me their ARR, are they talking live error? Are they talking, you know, this like long-term committed error that might come? So I hope, you know, at least the journalists are going to be a little bit more savvy and ask more questions before they report on these numbers.

• 1:29:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. The, I want to ask about who suffers, but in terms of ARR, like, yeah, there's almost something where you should just report your last month's revenue instead of doing the times 12 thing. And then if people want to multiply it by 12, they can, but at least you're just reporting, hey, last month, this is what the Stripe account did.

• 1:29:29Jordi Hays?

  You can also just say by Q3, we will be at X ARR.

• 1:29:35John Coogan?

  Or

• 1:29:35Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 1:29:35Jordi Hays?

  That's a different way of saying that's that's better than saying we are we are at 10 million.

• 1:29:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:41Jordi Hays?

  C A R.

• 1:29:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:42Jordi Hays?

  C A.

• 1:29:43Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:29:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:44Speaker 06

  So exactly. Much better.

• 1:29:46John Coogan?

  Who who suffers here? Is it is it purely investors? Because I feel like a good venture capitalist, their job is to dig into the contracts during due diligence to set prices. And if they want to pay, you know, 1,000 times ARR because they think it's 100 times CARR, like that's their risk profile. Like, I would maybe be careful, but, you know, that's their job. Or is there a risk that employees see a headline number and think that the business is more stable than it is, and they join and then they're they're rugged? Like, how do you think this affects the who needs to watch out for this, basically?

• 1:30:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I think I think investors are generally good investors are generally very aware of the difference between CARR and ARR and aware of the widening gap between these metrics. And like in most board decks, you see two metrics. On the press, you only, you know, you usually see CARR, but it's called ARR.

• 1:30:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:30:38Speaker 06

  In a board deck, you see both metrics. So so, you know, investors are quite aware, but but I don't think it's victimless at all. I think, yeah, employees are signing up for companies. And as you know, in like a high growth startup, people are committing a ton of blood and sweat to be successful, based on, you know, part of it is based on the growth of their equity. And if it turn and they might think they're they're they're multiple, you know, they might read the headline number, they may not know the number that's actually in the board deck. They might read the headline, you know, ARR in the in the press release, and they might base base their decision to join a company based on these headline revenue numbers, which are really not grounded in reality whatsoever. Like, and by that, I mean, I have literal examples, confirmed examples of, you know, the the press number being three to five times higher than

• 1:31:23Speaker 06

  the actual live ARR number. So like, that's a huge difference. If you think about a multiple.

• 1:31:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:29Speaker 06

  Um.

• 1:31:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Between a public company that's trading at 10x revenue multiple or something, and then you get your you get your offer from a company and it seems like they're at 10x, but they're actually at 50x. Like, that is very material for. How you should think about valuing that that stock that you're working for. Makes a ton of sense.

• 1:31:48Speaker 06

  There's the customers, like customers are trying to figure out which company is most mature or least mature. And then there's the, you know, like the, the whole competitive landscape. It's like if one person, if one company starts doing this, all companies have to start doing it. And it just creates.

• 1:32:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, we could start doing contracted viewership. So we could sign three year deals with people in the audience that requires them to tune into the show every year. They have an opt out after a month if they don't, if they don't like it after a month.

• 1:32:17Speaker 06

  Still advertising based on contracted viewership. I'll drive for the rest of the year. I'll watch every day, every hour.

• 1:32:24John Coogan?

  I mean, I mean, I, I guess that sort of does happen for YouTube channels that, I mean, no one really does this, but there was a time when YouTube channels were sort of valued on like the subscriber number as opposed to the average view number. And of course there are some channels where every video gets a million views and they only have a hundred thousand subscribers for whatever reason. And then there's vice versa, where someone's been doing, you see this on like old legacy media accounts on X where they'll have like 30 million followers and then the post will get like three likes. And it's like, those are two wildly different metrics. Like that happens all the time. But this is the name, this is the name of the game in Silicon Valley, the metrics game. Everyone's finding an edge somewhere. Well, uh, thanks for keeping everyone honest and, uh, good reporting. Good luck fighting the good fight out there and spreading the good word.

• 1:33:09Jordi Hays?

  Don't, don't, uh, don't get too sucked into all this. You're, uh, you can take, we promise you can come back on in three years with your, with your honest ARR and take a good victory lap.

• 1:33:26John Coogan?

  No, become an investigative journalist, pivot to investigative journalism, blow those doors wide open on this.

• 1:33:33Jordi Hays?

  Wow, this goes deeper than I thought. Good, good to see you.

• 1:33:38John Coogan?

  Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon. Up next, we have Alex from Osmo, building olfactory intelligence. We've talked about this before. Can AI smell? That's our current benchmark for AGI. We say if, if, uh, you know, we talk about white collar work, we see sommeliers as white collar workers. Unless you can smell, it's not AGI and artificial intelligence is falling short. But it's your first time on the show. I would love an introduction on yourself and the company, uh, because I'm fascinated by this topic.

• 1:34:12Speaker 07

  Let's talk about it. Your Somali comment and also what you talked about with Max Hodak spit on my mind. My name is Alex Wilczko. I'm founder and CEO of Osmo. We're giving computers a sense of smell. I've been working on this problem for 20, exactly 20 years or so. First as an academic, I did my PhD in olfactory neuroscience, Harvard and trained under Bob Dada who trained with Richard Axel, got the Nobel Prize for discovering the receptors of smell. And my AI mentor trained with Jeff Hinton, who got the Nobel Prize for deep learning. And I'm the one weirdo that's like

• 1:34:46John Coogan?

  We've been waiting for you to join for the entire history of the show.

• 1:34:51Jordi Hays?

  There's been great prophecies of your arrival for hundreds of years.

• 1:34:55Speaker 07

  I'm so excited. I'm so pumped to be here.

• 1:34:58John Coogan?

  So, so should we start with maybe like olfactory science 101? Can you set the ground on like, how does smell even work? What are the important sort of like building blocks that we should know? And then we can build up to the next generation and how AI is being applied?

• 1:35:14Speaker 07

  A hundred percent. So the chemical slice of reality, all the stuff that's data in the air, we can detect that. Our sense of smell is literally our brain leaving our skull. So when you smell a molecule, whether it's a tree or it's a meal or a drink, like the physical pieces of that thing enter into your nose and touch a piece of tissue about the size of a postage stamp. And that's your brain, right? So like you were in physical communion with that thing. That information gets turned into neural data, which actually skips all of the normal way stations for the other senses and goes right to your centers of memory, the hippocampus and emotion, the amygdala. So our sense of smell is very primal in that regard. So it's like, it's the reason why when you smell something, you get dragged

• 1:35:58Speaker 07

  into a memory and you cannot stop it. You're just like back in high school or you're back as a kid is because it's physically wired for that.

• 1:36:05John Coogan?

  So that's real. I've always heard that. I've always heard that phrase, smell is the sense that's most tied to memory. But I didn't know if it was just something you saw on like a t-shirt or something.

• 1:36:14Speaker 07

  No, literally neuroanatomically

• 1:36:16Jordi Hays?

  Target wall art.

• 1:36:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it feels like Target wall art. I don't know. It's just one of those things. Things that you repeat.

• 1:36:22Jordi Hays?

  They say a smell is worth a thousand words.

• 1:36:25John Coogan?

  Okay, so that sounds like something that's extremely hard to reverse engineer. Do we have, do we have sensors? Because, you know, L L M's, it was so obvious that we had text that was already encoded into data, into ones and zeros. And so transforming that and encoding it, I mean, it was incredible breakthrough, but it felt like the, the text was, the data was already in the computer. And I feel like that's not true for olfactory data, for smell data. But how are we, do we need to digitize this before we do anything with it? How does digitization of smell work?

• 1:37:02Speaker 07

  Yeah, great question. So I was very fortunate to have those guys as my colleagues. I actually spun Osmo out of Google Brain. And so I was there when all that stuff got invented and I ran the digital action team at Google Brain for about six years before we decided to make it a company through Lux and through G V. And you have it exactly right. Like the internet had been, been accumulating for a while. So we had all this text data. So we could basically slurp that down and start building models. We have chemical sensors. They're called mass spectrometers. There's other kinds of chemical sensors, mock sensors. There's like a dozen, the history of sensors that can turn chemistry into data is about a hundred years old, maybe more. I mean, a lot of it was pushed forward in the Manhattan Project, actually. But what we've been missing is a map, right?

• 1:37:46Speaker 07

  So for sound, low to high frequency is a map, which lets us build M P three and speakers and microphones and Spotify, et cetera. And for color, R G B is a three dimensional map of color. And that lets us build C M A, C C D, you know, cameras, et cetera. We haven't had the map for smell. And that's not crazy because there's three channels of color information in our eye. But we know there's over 300 channels of information in our nose. So in a way, we actually did need to wait for artificial intelligence to mature in order to have the ability to extract a 300 dimensional map from data. And that's exactly what we did, starting with our first work at Google Brain. So you got to go get a crap ton of information, right? A bunch of molecules, what they smell like. We've since collected the largest A I data set for scent in the world. That's what drives olfactory intelligence.

• 1:38:32Speaker 07

  Five million sniffs digitized, over a quarter million physical samples created. We've digitized about six billion fragrance molecules. So like all this is like inside of the company because there's literally nothing on the internet. The fragrance industry has done a phenomenal job keeping everything secret. So we built it on our shelves.

• 1:38:50John Coogan?

  Remarkable. Jordy?

• 1:38:52Jordi Hays?

  How are you gonna make money on?

• 1:38:55John Coogan?

  It's a good question.

• 1:38:56Speaker 07

  If you go, actually, let's, how can we make money on this? So does TVPN have a scent?

• 1:39:02John Coogan?

  Yes, and it's terrible. There's rubber smell in the studio.

• 1:39:07Jordi Hays?

  So there's in this studio, in this studio, there's like thousands of cord.

• 1:39:11John Coogan?

  Cables.

• 1:39:12Jordi Hays?

  And cable.

• 1:39:12John Coogan?

  And the cable smell.

• 1:39:14Jordi Hays?

  We do a good job hiding them, but we have so much gear going everywhere.

• 1:39:17John Coogan?

  It's a lot of rubber, a lot of plastics.

• 1:39:18Jordi Hays?

  And so we had to get these.

• 1:39:20John Coogan?

  Race tracks.

• 1:39:21Jordi Hays?

  Race tracks, they're called, to cover all the cables. And it turns out these things smell terrible.

• 1:39:26Speaker 07

  It was off gas as well.

• 1:39:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're off gas.

• 1:39:29Jordi Hays?

  So we wanted to give our viewers the full experience.

• 1:39:33John Coogan?

  I think we ought to do that.

• 1:39:34Jordi Hays?

  It would be like a can that sits on their desk. aerosol, and it would just spray a rubber smell into the room.

• 1:39:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:42Jordi Hays?

  So they could experience what we experience.

• 1:39:44Speaker 07

  We could capture it, but I think we should fix it. So really concretely, we raised our Series B. We put in additional 70 million in the bank with Two Sigma leading Lux.

• 1:39:55Speaker 07

  A lot of it got the gong.

• 1:39:58Speaker 07

  That was to underwrite building a fragrance factory. So we have a robot that's the size of a school bus that makes a new fragrance every 100 seconds. And what we do is we design and manufacture fragrances for brands.

• 1:40:08John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:40:09Speaker 07

  And so we use olfactory intelligence to design it. So super fast, data driven, basically, you know, perfect fit for the brand and for the consumer of that brand. And then we actually physically make it. And what leaves our factory is a steel drum of that fragrance when we build them for it.

• 1:40:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:23Speaker 07

  We also will do end to end. So like if you want to actually make a physical bottle, we'll actually put the fragrance in the bottle for you. So the full product comes out. So if you guys want to launch a TVPN cologne or something like that, we could design it for you. I mean, like if you tell me the prompt right now.

• 1:40:37Jordi Hays?

  It should smell like burnt rubber.

• 1:40:39John Coogan?

  No, no, no, we're not doing burnt rubber.

• 1:40:41Speaker 07

  Rubber, there's some, it smells like disagreement.

• 1:40:44John Coogan?

  No, it needs to smell like, like old $20 bills.

• 1:40:48Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 1:40:49John Coogan?

  From the nineteen eighties and mahogany, the official wood of business. We need it to smell like mahogany mixed with with old twenty dollar bills, the smell of money.

• 1:40:59Speaker 07

  That's okay, cool. We've done this. We've done the smell of money one, which we demoed actually on the New York Stock Exchange floor, which is pretty cool.

• 1:41:06John Coogan?

  That's amazing. That's amazing.

• 1:41:07Speaker 07

  But no, I'll I'll send you. I'll we'll make something. Send it to you.

• 1:41:10John Coogan?

  Talk about sensor miniaturization. My phone has three cameras and no smelling sensor. Can we swap one of these out? Like, I when you say mass spec, I imagine like a device the size of a living room. I imagine that they are getting smaller dishwasher.

• 1:41:29Speaker 07

  Size of the dishwasher.

• 1:41:30John Coogan?

  Is there a path to actually shrinking that down to something that's more portable?

• 1:41:36Speaker 07

  So, yeah, in the same, there's like many kinds of cameras, right? So the one in the Hubble telescope not getting smaller. So if you need resolution, it's got it's gonna be big, but you can make trade offs. And like when the thing that's reading the data, instead of it being person, it's an algorithm, you can actually make really intelligent trade offs, which is what we've done. So we actually have a sensor right now. It's the size of two shoeboxes.

• 1:41:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:41:55Speaker 07

  Um, and I kind of use that metric aptly because we've actually used it to smell fake shoes. So if you're buying a pair of like five hundred dollar Air Jordans, the real smell different from the fakes, we can actually pick that up.

• 1:42:06John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:42:07Speaker 07

  It actually turns out we can.

• 1:42:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:09Speaker 07

  Yep. The the counterfeiters use cheaper glues, turns out.

• 1:42:13John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:42:14Speaker 07

  And uh, the the other thing that's interesting is we can actually tell the factory of origin of the shoe ninety three percent of the time. So the smell is a fingerprint. So we're already miniaturizing these devices. Look, the path to get from two shoeboxes to one shoebox is pretty clear.

• 1:42:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:29Speaker 07

  We're working on that. Um, to go to something that's like the size of the AirPods case, there's gonna be some like part four engineering required to have it be a component that fits in your phone. There's some breakthroughs, like I can't quite see through the fog yet, but there's nothing like, look, our noses do it. So there's nothing that Mother Nature is saying, I think, impossible, but we just got a lot of work to do.

• 1:42:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Uh, what about taste? How closely is taste linked? Talk me through the sommelier example.

• 1:42:55Speaker 07

  Yeah, so. Flavor is everything that happens in your mouth, you know, that's a sensory experience of food. Taste is not as like 10% of that. It's like what happens on your tongue. Like, you ever eat a jelly bean and it like plug your nose?

• 1:43:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:43:07Speaker 07

  And you just actually can detect very little of what's going on there.

• 1:43:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:10Speaker 07

  It's because 90% of what you experience is actually called retro nasal olfaction, where when you're biting, we're biting on something, there's a chimney effect and the kind of almost the steam of what you're eating goes back through your nose and you smell it. Excuse me. And then there's also the texture and everything in your mouth. So we've done tests and our OI models, and this is from a while ago, we haven't revisited it, we're really focused on fragrance right now, but our OI models actually work on flavor surprisingly well. And so the whole world of flavor is there for us with Moretti, but we're, we're really focused on this particular business, yeah.

• 1:43:44John Coogan?

  I've seen a couple of these sort of, I don't want to call them niche, but like vertical AI projects that are not fully generalizable. There's a DNA model also from Google or DeepMind. And it feels like they're starting to get on scaling curves, on scaling laws. Are you at a point where you feel like, oh, if I 10x the computer, 100x the compute that goes into some of the...

• 1:44:12Jordi Hays?

  I believe Alex is ready for a one gigawatt data center.

• 1:44:16John Coogan?

  He can be trusted with...

• 1:44:16Jordi Hays?

  I, I, I would trust you.

• 1:44:18John Coogan?

  But, but, but it is, how, how universal do you think scaling laws are? Is there a scaling law here? Is it data based? Is it compute based? Both? How are you thinking about it?

• 1:44:29Speaker 07

  The bitter lesson's real. The bitter lesson's super real. I always think about technology as S-curves, right? And like, what's driving you up that S-curve and then how can you hop on the next one? Our current S-curve is data, which is why we're maniacally focused on like generating a ton of data. Like, we have a giant fragrance robot that spits out a ton of fragrances. We have mass packs running 24/7. We have sensory panels, both domestically, we have a building of people that just smell all day abroad. And we ship them crates of stuff to smell. And that's how we get to 5 million sniffs, right? So data, data, data. The, the, the size of the models is not the limiting factor right now.

• 1:45:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:03Speaker 07

  And it will be at some point, and then switch to the other S-curve.

• 1:45:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Because you don't just have like the open internet to scrape, because there's not an existing dataset. Makes sense.

• 1:45:11Speaker 07

  Totally. Double edged sword, right? So we had to make it all, right? Which is really hard. But also, nobody else has it, because we had to make it all and had to learn a ton of stuff in order to do that at scale and efficiently and all that stuff.

• 1:45:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. Where is the, where is the business today? I mean, you've raised money. It seems like there's, you know, monetization opportunities for sure. Are you fully in commercialization? Are you still in research? Is it half and half? Like, how do you think about raising more money over time and just growing the business?

• 1:45:41Speaker 07

  Yeah, so we're always going, like, we started with like this curiosity driven drive to figure out how to digitize smell, which is like a pretty wacky thing to do. So we're always going to be trying to push the edge here. But look, we have a factory. We manufacture fragrance for brands. We did this commercial, kind of R and D to commercial transition last summer. We're kind of almost at the end of that. And we built a manufacturing organization. We built a sales organization. We have some really amazing partnerships with some big brands. And we're making fragrances for brands. You can go into Target and buy a product that has our fragrance in it today. And so we're scaling this part of our business. We're still placing bets on the future though, right? So I think we've got really the tiger by the tail.

• 1:46:23Speaker 07

  It's a whole other conversation. Sometimes you come to the factory in New Jersey and see how it operates. But like the fragrance industry is wild. We've got a lot of work to do there, a lot of opportunities. So we're focused on that.

• 1:46:32John Coogan?

  Amazing. Well, congratulations and thank you for the work that you do. We think it's so important.

• 1:46:38Jordi Hays?

  One of the most interesting companies we've ever, we've ever learned about on the show.

• 1:46:43John Coogan?

  True science fiction. I love it.

• 1:46:45Speaker 07

  We're trying to make science fiction into science fact, but like open invitation to come see how it all gets made. It's pretty crazy in person. So come to the Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory where all the stuff happens.

• 1:46:55John Coogan?

  I would love to. Thanks so much.

• 1:46:57Jordi Hays?

  So great to meet you. Come back, come back on soon.

• 1:46:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. We're running a little bit behind, but up next we have Spiros from Resolve AI, raising a massive round to build AI that runs production systems. Let's bring in Spiros. How are you doing?

• 1:47:14Speaker 08

  Hello, guys. Welcome to the show.

• 1:47:17John Coogan?

  Sorry, we're running a little bit late. Kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company.

• 1:47:22Speaker 08

  I'm one of the founders and the CEO of Resolve AI. We're building agents that can help you debug and run production. Think of it as the counterpart to coding agents that produce all this code and our agents are there to support you.

• 1:47:36John Coogan?

  Are you always, is your customer always like deeply in the throes of vibe coding, has rolled out agentic coding across many organizations? Like, who is the target customer? Do they have to already be deep in the agentic coding wave to really get the value here?

• 1:47:56Speaker 08

  They don't have to, but the two are correlated. Like, anybody who runs a large software system has this problem. The only solution we've had so far is humans manually solving it, right? Using the tools, being on call. Of course, now AI allows us to automate all of this. But I would say, this is true, it was true before. Now with all the AI-generated code, it becomes a necessity, right? So we see strong correlation between the two often.

• 1:48:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, and what are customers coming to you asking? Is it, I want the code that's, you know, written, we're writing way more lines of code, we want it to be more readable, or we want it to be more secure, or we want it to be more performant, or all of the above?

• 1:48:32Speaker 08

  The way to think about it is like, for anybody who's delivering their business through software, look at some of our customers, Coinbase, Salesforce, BongDB, right? To them, reliability is of paramount importance. If anything goes wrong and affects customers, it's a big problem. So resolve becomes essentially the first level of defense that captures any problem that happens in production, that can affect end users, gives you a resolution and a fix, let's say, so you can accelerate that loop, right? And it doesn't take too much human effort, but more importantly, it doesn't cause impact to customers.

• 1:49:05John Coogan?

  What is, Ed, like, I mean, the company is now over $1.5 billion in valuation. What has been like the key to growth? Is it just product-led growth? Do you have a big sales team? How are you actually scaling the business as you scale the valuation?

• 1:49:25Speaker 08

  Yeah, so this is a very big problem, right? Anybody who has, as I said, delivered to business through software is facing this issue. And whether you're a CTO... You know, who pays for, let's say, developers to focus on reliability? Or well, you're an individual that has to solve this problem. You'd rather have AI do it for you.

• 1:49:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:42Speaker 08

  So we've seen like huge amount of demand from day one since we launched the company a bit more than a year ago. And we've seen it coming from both big and small companies. We primarily focused on larger enterprises because we think there is a lot more complexity.

• 1:49:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:55Speaker 08

  You know, given the complexity of the software. And, uh, you know, most of the growth, I guess, most of the, the, the, let's say, the demand comes inbound to us. Because this is a well understood problem. And of course, we have like both a product led approach, let's say, but also sales led approach. As we work with large customers.

• 1:50:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. In, in, in some ways, like, the naive approach would be, okay, just appoint a typical AI agent at the code base and just tell me, you know, where the fault lines are. But I imagine there's some special sauce in the engineering to understand knock on effects that can happen across a large code base. Are you actively working around context windows or, or, or creating like a special harness to understand the, the, these problems that can come up before they do?

• 1:50:41Speaker 08

  Yes, so think of it like we have a production ID basically, right? The same thing you have for your code, we have it for all your production systems.

• 1:50:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:48Speaker 08

  Production involves code, involves, let's say, telemetry, logs, metrics, like tools like Datadog, Splunk. It involves AWS, right? So you have to deal with all of these, not just code.

• 1:50:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:57Speaker 08

  And then we also are training our own models now to improve, let's say, uh, at the state of the art, let's say, right? How far you, you can go far enough, let's say, with, you know, a good harness, you know, and, uh, a, a, a lot of work, let's say, on the, on the genetic front. But now, and we just announced together we're funding that we're building a lab to focus on actually, you know, uh, training our own models for this domain.

• 1:51:20John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. How, uh, what, what is, uh, what goes into getting like relevant data or actually nailing a specific model for this? Because I imagine that you have some great clients, they probably don't want you training on their data. At the same time, if you just grab some open source code, it might not be as complex as like the Coinbase mono repo or whatever they have going on over there. So how do you, how do you actually, uh, create enough training data to, to justify a special model?

• 1:51:52Speaker 08

  What is important here to understand is like the training doesn't happen like on code per se. What happens on is actually the action a human takes to perform a task for the most part.

• 1:52:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:52:02Speaker 08

  And we're talking about very long kind of, uh, let's say, planning tasks here, right? It might take like many, many iterations, looking at code, looking at data dog, looking at infrastructure.

• 1:52:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:52:13Speaker 08

  So, and this generally speaking, this, this is not in the training set of models. Uh, so, and software, let's say, generally is a both deep and wide domain, right? So I think if you actually focus on building a model for the types of problems we're trying to automate in how you run a debug production, I think you have a lot of gains, both in performance, cost, but even like quality of outcomes, right? And that's our goal. And I would say, you know, the big labs, uh, make it sound, make it look like it's impossible for anyone else to build a model, but I don't think that's the case.

• 1:52:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:41Speaker 08

  And, uh, you know, that's what we're seeing ourselves with our investments.

• 1:52:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:44Jordi Hays?

  How do you put together such a low dilution round?

• 1:52:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, tell us about the round. I want to hit the gong.

• 1:52:49Jordi Hays?

  The forty on one and a half billion.

• 1:52:52Speaker 08

  So it is an extension. We just did essentially the A. We just, we just did the A at a billion dollars like two months ago, right? And I would say, Resolve.

• 1:53:04John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:53:07Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, continue.

• 1:53:08Speaker 08

  Resolve is essentially in many ways created this market, right? Like AI for production.

• 1:53:13John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:53:13Speaker 08

  And I think it's well understood by investors. It's also proven, given the customers we have.

• 1:53:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:18Speaker 08

  So, uh, and we're also a very ambitious company, right? Like we are obviously trying to build the agents and the models for this domain. And we have a lot of traction. So, I mean, as simple as that, right? Like there is nothing you can do to create a low dilution round other than be very successful, in my opinion, these days.

• 1:53:33Jordi Hays?

  Great answer.

• 1:53:34John Coogan?

  That's a great answer. Be, step one, be successful. I love it.

• 1:53:38Speaker 08

  Or like step one, focus, focus on building, focus on building a business, right? This is my first startup as a founder.

• 1:53:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:45Speaker 08

  I made this mistake many times before, right? Of thinking that raising money is success. It's not. It follows real success on a product.

• 1:53:52John Coogan?

  Yep. No, no, that's a hundred percent right. I love it. Uh, well, thank you so much. Congratulations on the new round.

• 1:53:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great having you on.

• 1:53:58John Coogan?

  And, uh, great having you on the chat.

• 1:53:59Jordi Hays?

  Excited to watch you guys.

• 1:54:00Speaker 08

  Thank you.

• 1:54:00John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day. Goodbye. Up next, we have Carolina Aguilar from InBrain Neuroelectronics, building the first inhuman study of graphene brain interfaces.

• 1:54:16Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:54:17John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. How are you?

• 1:54:19Speaker 09

  Thank you. Very good. Thank you for having me.

• 1:54:23John Coogan?

  Please, since it's the first time on the show, introduce yourself in the company a little bit.

• 1:54:27Speaker 09

  Yes, my name is Carolina Aguilar. A lot of people call me Carola. I am the CEO and the co-founder of Inbrain New Electronics. And we are a graphene-based brain-computer interface, data analytics company that actually is developing the most intelligent interface between the neural system and AI to restore health for billions.

• 1:54:49John Coogan?

  Okay. All right. So walk me through brain-computer interfaces and the decision tree that got you to graphene specifically. I'm familiar with like, the first decision is probably invasive versus non-invasive. We've talked to a number of founders that have taken either approach. How did you, how did you confront that first question?

• 1:55:13Speaker 09

  Yes. Well, I call them implantable and non-implantable systems. Yeah. And in our case, we are an implantable company.

• 1:55:24Speaker 09

  We believe that the real signal processing that is going within the neural system is actually deeper in the brain and to listen carefully to what it says, what the neural system says, and being able to decode it, but also modulate it. We need to be close to those neurons and interact with those neurons firsthand.

• 1:55:45John Coogan?

  Okay. So when I hear modulate, it sounds like not only processing information that's coming out of the brain, but also potentially writing information back into the brain? Is that the long-term vision?

• 1:55:56Speaker 09

  Yes. And this is, the magic of graphene is actually about reading and writing very effectively at micrometric precision within the brain. I think that's why we took, let's say, a higher risk to get an advanced material into this panel. Because we see that the benefit is incredibly impactful.

• 1:56:17Jordi Hays?

  Okay. What are, what are the most near-term commercial applications?

• 1:56:24Speaker 09

  Yeah, so the Morgan Stanley report stated the market in 400 billion. And we thought that we needed to bring a platform with three product verticals to actually penetrate such a such a big market. So we are creating three products. One is, let's say, not implantable, actually. So it's a semi chronic, it's a semi chronic platform, kind of like the modern eTAR. It's like 100 contacts of graphene that can read and write. We went into tumor and epilepsy resection at the beginning, and that one is pretty pretty close to commercialization. We're almost there.

• 1:57:06Speaker 09

  The second product is the implantable platform for the brain. So this is an implant on the brain for Parkinson's disease. So we didn't do, sorry, assistive BCI, because we saw a 1.8 billion market that is suboptimal, that we could actually displace very easily with this technology. So we decided to go therapeutics into Parkinson. And the third one is the same platform, but instead of a, let's say, brain sensor, we connect a vagus nerve sensor that is actually able to decode all the fibers that go into the different organs.

• 1:57:47Speaker 09

  So we have a therapeutic target for each of the organs just by targeting that nerve in the neck.

• 1:57:53John Coogan?

  What about the actual implantation process? We followed from Neuralink, they had to build a whole robot just to drill into the skull. It's incredibly high precision. Are surgeons capable of implanting this at this stage? Or will there need to be other robotic devices that are developed to actually deploy this technology safely?

• 1:58:15Speaker 09

  It's an excellent question. I'm coming from Medtronic. I spent 10 years in neuro modulation and another three in diabetes. And I think in the future, when micro robotics are ready, we will have a very close relationship between our interfaces and micro robots that probably can deliver this implantation in 30 minutes. But today, when there is not micro robots, and we are not Elon Musk, we decided to actually have our platform ready for the current surgical workflows that today exist. So we are not changing much from the neuromodulation workflows.

• 1:59:00Speaker 09

  And it's an easy procedure, two hours, one or two hours, you know, is enough. In the case of the NAK, it's 45 minutes.

• 1:59:08John Coogan?

  Wow, wow, that's very impressive. Well, congratulations on all the progress and thank you for the work that you do. And thank you for stopping by the show.

• 1:59:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you.

• 1:59:15John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:59:17Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:59:18John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Up next, we have Jake from Blue Energy. He's the co-founder and CEO with a massive raised gong breaker. Jake, how you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 1:59:30Speaker 10

  Hey, guys. I'm doing well.

• 1:59:31Jordi Hays?

  I got a feeling you have the biggest number for us.

• 1:59:33John Coogan?

  I think you have the biggest number. Kick us off, how much have you raised? And then we'll get into what you're going to do with it. But tell us about the financial situation for the company.

• 1:59:44Speaker 10

  We have announced a $380 million raise.

• 1:59:55John Coogan?

  And what will you be doing with all that money?

• 1:59:59Speaker 10

  Yeah, so our focus, we're really unique amongst the field of nuclear players right now. Our focus is on building the world's first project financeable nuclear power plant. So we're using this funding to actually put deposits down on long lead equipment as well as finishing out the engineering and development licensing on some of our first sites.

• 2:00:17John Coogan?

  Does that mean like less R and D risk or more in like the GE or Westinghouse territory? More like, you know, going with products that have been de-risked, but it's very expensive? And maybe the underwriting is different this time around? Or are you working on an entirely new reactor design somewhere in the supply chain?

• 2:00:41Speaker 10

  No, you had it exactly right. We are not a reactor designer. We're a developer, but our technology is the proprietary approach by which we go about building the plant. So what bugged me and why I started the company was I have a lot of friends in the nuclear space designing really exciting new reactors. And then you have a lot of incumbents in the space who are working on, you know, kind of the same old technology that we've been operating safely for 70 years.

• 2:01:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:06Speaker 10

  But nobody was focused on the core issue of how do we build nuclear on time and on budget. So I grew up in a construction family. I used to be a draftsman for my father's architecture firm. So I just grew up around a lot of construction, did my nuclear engineering and physics degrees in the space and just felt like there isn't, there hasn't been anyone really focused on the root cause issue. So what we're doing is we're borrowing best practices from LNG and offshore oil and gas and offshore wind to prefabricate everything at existing oil and gas fab yards and shipyards. And then we barge it all as a prefabricated system on the order of 1,000 or 2,000 tons to the operating site. And then really, you know, basically are just installing it like giant Lego pieces. But what that allows us

• 2:01:49Speaker 10

  to do is bring a lot more debt financing to bear. So we're not taking a lot of reactor technology risk to start in the beginning. We're using mature light water reactor technology to start, but we'll happily work with the gen four reactors as they, as they mature.

• 2:02:03John Coogan?

  Cool. Take me through.

• 2:02:05Jordi Hays?

  I feel like you've been wanting.

• 2:02:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've been wanting this for a long time.

• 2:02:09Jordi Hays?

  John, John's, John's point has been.

• 2:02:11John Coogan?

  Copy paste, copy paste.

• 2:02:12Jordi Hays?

  Hey, we know how to do this.

• 2:02:13John Coogan?

  It works. So this is.

• 2:02:14Jordi Hays?

  Instead of we don't need to like reinvent. I mean, it's great if we want to reinvent the wheel.

• 2:02:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, we need the next gen tech.

• 2:02:19Jordi Hays?

  New reactors, but in the meantime, let's just, let's just build some.

• 2:02:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. So yeah, my question is about Vodal, lessons from the Vodal project. What, what do you think they did well that you want to copy, that you want to learn from? What do you, what if anything, do you want to do differently?

• 2:02:39Speaker 10

  Yeah, so to kind of put some stats on Vogel, it like so many other nuclear projects in the West was ended up being about two to three times over budget and behind schedule. But when you double click on where that cost was, you realize it wasn't actually in the reactor technology or the equipment.

• 2:02:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:55Speaker 10

  It was on the over forty percent of it was just the construction overhead. So it was the cost of training and relocating ten thousand skilled workers to book to the site at Vogel.

• 2:03:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:05Speaker 10

  Think about the cost of training, relocating their families, retaining them once they're trained because data center projects are trying to steal that talent.

• 2:03:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:13Speaker 10

  You have to set up the nuclear quality assurance program in the field. So there's all this overhead. It's basically like building a small town.

• 2:03:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:19Speaker 10

  And then the hope is that you'd be able to move that, you know, traveling circus around from site to site.

• 2:03:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:03:24Speaker 10

  And then a third of the project cost was just capitalized interest on debt because it took over ten years to build before it started generating revenue. So this, these are the two big problems we're trying to address is we are moving most of that work off site. We're keeping the workforce centralized at the fab yard and the shipyard where they are already ours. So we can start to put nuclear into a learning curve.

• 2:03:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:03:46Speaker 10

  And drive the cost down over time akin to what we've seen in wind, solar, batteries, and gas turbines. And what they did well was it was a mature light water reactor technology. It's a passively safe reactor technology. They they really pushed the the world forward a little bit in the licensing space and still composite structures, which we're looking into as well. They actually had, this is not well known, they originally wanted to barge it in up the Savannah River, but they had to then dredge the Savannah. They would have had to dredge the Savannah River for miles and that would have become part of their environmental impact statement. So they ended up, it became such a regulatory and permitting nightmare that they gave up.

• 2:04:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:24Speaker 10

  And they said, all right, let's just truck it in. And then they had to truck it in and build a module assembly building on site.

• 2:04:30Jordi Hays?

  Reminded me of your remodel down.

• 2:04:32Speaker 10

  So they ended up doing all the welding on site.

• 2:04:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. This is a nightmare. Remodel from nightmare. Nightmare remodel. Very interesting. I, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm fascinated.

• 2:04:43Jordi Hays?

  Where's it, where's the company base? Where are you guys based?

• 2:04:46Speaker 10

  We're in Chubby Chase, Maryland, pretty close to NRC headquarters. And then we've also got a big presence in Edinburgh, Scotland, where there's a lot of offshore engineering talent, particularly from like, kind of the history of shipbuilding and offshore oil and gas. And then we've also got an office in Houston, also offshore oil and gas capital of the world.

• 2:05:04John Coogan?

  Okay, I read a blog post about one of the potential problems or stumbling blocks that nuclear projects run into. And I want to reality check it with you. The thesis was basically that we have a reactor design, we have a, you know, there's infrastructure around that, cement needs to get laid, pipes need to go here and there. But oftentimes, the regulation will change while the project is underway. And so in order to stay ahead of the changing regulation, you might have to, you know, jackhammer a bunch of concrete and move a pipe to a different route because the regulation has changed. Is that real?

• 2:05:45John Coogan?

  And is there anything that we have done or can do to get to a regime where the the regulation is more locked and deterministic? So that I imagine you're not going to build this overnight. But if it takes you a couple of years, you know, that the contracts that you put in place, the plans that you put in place today will hold and you won't face a massive delay.

• 2:06:08Speaker 10

  Yeah, so that was another one of the big learnings from Vogtle. Vogtle was the first and still today, I think, the only project that did a combined operating and construction license, which means, once they locked the blueprint, they really were not allowed to make changes to it during construction. So every time they encountered something and said, oh, when you, you know, the craft labor wound the rebar clockwise instead of counterclockwise, you know, they had to jackhammer it up, or they had to go and reapprove it all. And there's just a, there's a long list of things like that that they encountered. So one of the things we're doing is we're following a slightly different licensing process. The original licensing process of Part 50, whereby we're going to incrementalize it, so that

• 2:06:51Speaker 10

  we don't have to encounter that rework, that kind of regulatory triggered rework. But also because we're following this prefab approach and we're moving eighty percent of the CapEx into a fixed price contract environment with these fab yards and shipyards. It forces us to go to something like sixty percent detailed design upfront and locking those designs because that is what is going to be coming in prefabbed. Uh, from the fab yard.

• 2:07:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:16Speaker 10

  So it's, it's sort of baked into the strategy. Uh, but really this is about taking a lot of those lessons learned and making sure we don't make the mistakes of the past. But I'll also say we've never had a more supportive regulatory environment than we have right now. Like this is a critical juncture in the history of nuclear power that we can take advantage of. Uh, with where the NRC is presently at.

• 2:07:36John Coogan?

  What is the power output for the first reactor that you're targeting to bring online?

• 2:07:43Speaker 10

  Uh, so we are focused right now for the first project using light water, small Maza reactors, which the, the power range of the units we're looking at range between fifty and roughly three hundred megawatts per unit.

• 2:07:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:55Speaker 10

  Uh, yeah, each site we're targeting doing is going to have multiple units. So we're, it's going to be a gigawatt to a gigawatt and a half per site because multi-unit operations.

• 2:08:07John Coogan?

  That makes a lot of sense.

• 2:08:08Speaker 10

  It's, it's important.

• 2:08:09John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah.

• 2:08:10Speaker 10

  And it helps drive down costs.

• 2:08:12John Coogan?

  And then are you already sharing a timeline? Do you have an optimistic scenario, a base case, a bear case? I'm sure you get asked this all the time. It's the worst question, but we talked to a lot of nuclear founders and uh, we hear a lot of twenty thirties and there's a whole bunch of projects with hyperscalers and big tech companies that are looking at twenty thirty two, twenty thirty five. Uh, it's exciting, better, you know, twenty thirty two than never, but uh, do you have uh, anything to share on like the, the timeline of rolling out new nuclear capacity in America?

• 2:08:43Speaker 10

  Yeah, we'll be announcing things uh, very soon. Uh, but what I can share on the dates, and this is actually another unique thing we're doing, part of our strategy is we're pursuing this thing we call gas to nuclear conversion. So we're actually going to be building half the nuclear plant right away. So the whole nuclear steam turbine system set up for nuclear steam conditions and quality. And we're going to fire it early with two combustion turbines as a two-on-one combined cycle. So it's kind of a Frankenstein combined cycle. We've actually gotten the NRC to buy off on this methodology, uh, through a topical report recently. So that allows us to actually project finance half the CapEx for a first SMR. And then we will spill the reactor and splice in the steam and switch it over from gas steam

• 2:09:27Speaker 10

  to nuclear steam. So that actually accelerates our commercial operation date with confidence. So we're looking at generating first power in 2030, 2031, mostly driven by gas turbine delivery dates today.

• 2:09:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:39Speaker 10

  And then our first nuclear commercial operation, we're looking at 2032.

• 2:09:43John Coogan?

  Okay. So is that, is that switch out possible at any legacy natural gas infrastructure site in America currently?

• 2:09:52Speaker 10

  Uh.

• 2:09:53John Coogan?

  Cause that seems like an environmentalist dream, right?

• 2:09:55Speaker 10

  I'm not ready to say yes or no. Yes. I think this opens up a whole new world of fossil to nuclear conversions, which we think is an important precedent to set.

• 2:10:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, it seems huge if possible. Uh, but yeah, I imagine that, you know, it's not exactly USBC on both sides, but hopefully one day we can build the adapter.

• 2:10:14Speaker 10

  That's right. Yeah. What we're really focused on is, you know, there, there's a lot of announcements out there, a lot of sometimes, you know, noise of what, you know, there's a lot of exciting things happen in the nuclear sector. We think we've got the first project financeable nuclear project and the first one that's going to power, it'll be a new build that powers a new AI data center.

• 2:10:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:34Speaker 10

  Uh, so we're excited about that and we think our timeline is, is credible, is aggressive, but credible and defendable. And we've got the right set of partners around it to make it happen.

• 2:10:44John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Don't use the word data center. We're using the word supercomputer.

• 2:10:47Jordi Hays?

  Supercomputer.

• 2:10:48John Coogan?

  They're supercomputers.

• 2:10:49Jordi Hays?

  They're supercomputers now.

• 2:10:50John Coogan?

  Everyone likes a data center. Everyone likes a supercomputer.

• 2:10:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:53John Coogan?

  Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 2:10:56Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you, Jake. I'm sure you'll be back on soon. I, I really, we really appreciate your approach. It feels like you're, you're making plays and I like how pragmatic and, but, but innovative the approach is at the same time.

• 2:11:08John Coogan?

  It's great stuff.

• 2:11:10Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 2:11:11John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:11:12Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:11:12John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:11:13Jordi Hays?

  And we will close out on this. I need your reaction, John.

• 2:11:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:11:17Jordi Hays?

  Ferrari's first electric car is priced at the low price of $650,000.

• 2:11:22John Coogan?

  An absolute steal. They're giving them away at that price.

• 2:11:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 2:11:27John Coogan?

  It's electric, right? So you don't have to deal with gasoline?

• 2:11:30Jordi Hays?

  You don't have to do. Yeah, you save a lot on gas.

• 2:11:32John Coogan?

  You don't, you don't have to deal with all the noise that comes out of a V12.

• 2:11:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you know noise and you save on gas.

• 2:11:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:38Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 2:11:38John Coogan?

  Oh, well, yeah, I mean, if you're saving on gas and you're driving, I mean, if, if, if oil keeps spiking and gasoline goes to a thousand dollars a gallon and you're filling up every week, you could easily be spending millions of dollars a year on gasoline in a normal car. So there's potential cost savings here. So it's sort of a more you buy, the more you save situation, I think, at the Ferrari Luce.

• 2:12:03Jordi Hays?

  There's really going to be a, uh, like, what kind of Ferrari client are you moment?

• 2:12:08John Coogan?

  Uh, no, I think it'll be a status symbol. Because if you see someone with this, you will know.

• 2:12:12Jordi Hays?

  You know they can eat 300 grand of depreciation.

• 2:12:15John Coogan?

  That, and you know that they are, that they are high on the list for the F90. Like, they are working their way up, buying in now. And when the F90 comes out in a decade, they're getting a call.

• 2:12:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:25John Coogan?

  They're getting a call, for sure.

• 2:12:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, very interested to see how this does in the market. And the good thing is if you are excited about the Luce, but you're not excited about paying $650,000, you will have an opportunity to buy them for far less than that very, very quickly.

• 2:12:41John Coogan?

  Probably, probably.

• 2:12:43Jordi Hays?

  But thank you for hanging out with us today.

• 2:12:45John Coogan?

  Thank you for tuning in.

• 2:12:45Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor and a privilege to be here with you. We hope you have a wonderful afternoon.

• 2:12:49John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Throw that flashbang. Sign up for our newsletter, tbvn.com. Goodbye.