Eric Glyman, David Senra, Bridget Harris, The Trouble with Tariffs, See You in Aspen

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPN. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital. Today is Tuesday, March 4th, 2025. And guess what? We have a guest at the opening of the show, Eric Glyman, CEO of Ramp. We're very excited for you to be here. Thank you. Welcome to the show.

• 0:20Eric Glyman?

  Awesome to see you and great to be in this holy place today.

• 0:23John Coogan?

  Yes, yeah, the dojo of the dollar, the shrine of shareholder value. It has many names, but most importantly, it is our humble abode is the host and it is where we

• 0:33Jordi Hays?

  And it should feel like home to you considering that I have this massive, you know, sort of ramp logo over my head here. So home away from home on the air. It's amazing to have you. How's this week been so far? Obviously a busy one with the news yesterday, but from what we understand, it was, you know, old news to you, but I'm sure it feels great to get it out in the world.

• 0:55Eric Glyman?

  It's incredibly exciting and look like you, you know, most days as a founder, it's you in an office, taking calls, waking up early, staying up late. It's just a, you know, a lot of, you know, constant work and it was one of those rare moments, I think, when, you know, customers, partners, the team could all celebrate just a little bit, enjoy and then kind of get back to it. And so it's a, you know, pretty overwhelming, really exciting and feel lucky to be here.

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the, you know, pressure of, you know, raising, you know, in, in the sort of height of Zerp, you guys raised at an eight ish billion dollar valuation, then you had to sort of reorient the team around. Obviously the business performance was still fantastic, but many people were saying, you know, publicly that generally a lot of these unicorns may not ever sort of achieve that sort of peak valuation. How good does it feel to not only achieve it again, but exceed it dramatically? And what did you have to do to kind of like motivate and rally the team in those sort of like the darker days where again, the sort of public narrative was

• 2:02Jordi Hays?

  that, you know, these valuations were never really real. And yeah, so how good does it feel at this moment?

• 2:12Eric Glyman?

  I think someone really has to do just like a deep in-depth piece of like the big comeback and building up from like these 2021 companies and what it took because there really were companies that would raise at you know 100x revenue multiples. I don't think it was a sin necessarily to raise at high prices. I think probably the sin was just spending it all really quickly. You look at a lot of the companies that have transformed their industries, Amazon, Google, Apple, like you name it, often started with some kind of bubble or hysteria. People were investing a lot in it. I think it does interesting things to businesses. I

• 2:55Eric Glyman?

  can tell you that our mission has been very consistent. Start a business that is obsessed with saving our customers' time and money, help them have every dollar an hour that they're spending in their business go a lot further. And when you have a large amount of capital behind you, you of course think about what are the results that you produce next week, but you start obsessing over could I make this outcome 10 years from now larger? Instead of taking that next marginal dollar and I'm keeping it, how do we put it back into the hands of customers, see them succeed, have the ability to use that next dollar to invest in faster growth and in a weird way grow a much larger business for them

• 3:38Eric Glyman?

  10 years from now and we hope a much larger one for us. And so I actually think it created the conditions for Ramp to not just be customer obsessed, but to take that to a whole other level. You know, I would say is one of those 2021 companies, we certainly had a lot of work to do to grow, but if you keep, you know, I think in 2022 is public, the revenue 4x that year, if you keep doubling, if you keep growing at incredible rates, what are very large multiples suddenly become very reasonable. And I think that the interesting thing that happened since is these, you know, it all met and now Ramp is not only

• 4:22Eric Glyman?

  Trading like strongly performing public traded companies just growing at a dramatically faster clip. It's driving more savings and more value for customers. And the most remarkable thing is it's such a large market. I think if we do our jobs right, we tend to save our customers more and grow just as fast, if not faster. So

• 4:40John Coogan?

  I remember you telling me that one of the things you did for the employees was actually during the all hands, during kind of the turmoil of the interest rate rise, you actually walked the team, everyone on the team, regardless of their role in investor relations or not, through how valuations are calculated, where ramp is, the growth rates, the metrics, and kind of did a bottom up analysis, not like a full DCF or anything, but you walked people through that. Do you think that's something that's unique about ramp culture? Or do you think more startup CEOs or scale up CEOs should be transparent at that level with their employees about how, because there's a lot of companies out there right now that are just like, hey, yeah, we're worth $20 billion because I got one guy to write me

• 5:25John Coogan?

  a check at 20 billion, right? They bought, they bought a million dollars of the stock at 20 billion. Whereas you, I think you said, hey, look, there's a whole host of people around the table that agree on this valuation now. We just repriced it in the new interest rate regime. And here's all the multiples. Here's what it would look like if we were public, etc. Walk me through that.

• 5:43Eric Glyman?

  So start with maybe this and think about this, where if you're a new employer, you're considering coming to ramp, there's sort of two ish ends of the deal, just from a comp perspective. One was cash, people can agree on, you know, base bonus, that kind of structure. And what's the equity value? You know, maybe that you get a package worth 100,000, half a million, something like that. And traditionally, when this is done, we say, okay, this is granted, it's based on this valuation. So we believe that the stock today is worth, if you stay for four years, it'll be worth half a million dollars. And if it grows from there, it'll be worth more.

• 6:25Eric Glyman?

  The problem that all these companies had in 2022, 2023, when publicly traded tech companies in some cases were down 70%, some were down 90, others were down 30, is no one quite knew. And for an opaque private company, suddenly the bid-ask spreads could be very, very wide. And during all this, I mean, we were growing incredibly quickly, like that 2022 years, we grew four times year over year. No other publicly traded company was doing that. And so I think part of the problem that we were trying to solve was, you know, we had the very lean, we weren't burning a lot, didn't have a capital need.

• 7:06Eric Glyman?

  But I wanted to be able to look employees in the eye and say, you know, when we make a grant and we say this is a $500,000 grant as of the day that you're joining, we really believe it. And it's not just us, but other sophisticated investors have done it. And so we did what was a very unusual thing at the time, which was, you know, we just went out to market and said, we just want to know where you would price this, what's fair. And investors said, we have more conviction than ever.

• 7:31Eric Glyman?

  In December 2021, we valued Rampant 8.1 billion. Today, we actually think it's going to be a way bigger company and the value is 5.8 billion. And we said, great, let's do it. And the interesting part is mathematically, if you go through it, to your point, John, like a DCF discounted cash flow, one of the biggest drivers of what's the end valuation is what are all the profits you'll make in 10 years plus? And it's impacted by what is the risk-free rate, the overnight rate you should get? In December 2021, that rate was almost 0%. You know, you would get no reward for risking.

• 8:11Eric Glyman?

  2023, 2022, the risk-free rate was like 5 to 5.5%. And if you compound that over 10 years, it has a dramatic effect. And so in a weird way, But 5.8, if you kind of go through the math, the 5.8 billion dollar valuation first, it lowers the share price today, but it implies a much higher share price later on. So I guess to back into it, you know, I still think a lot of companies haven't taken their medicine. They actually haven't just marked it to market. And I think that a lot of employees who've been working hard, probably are still underwater. And I, we didn't think this was right. We rather would just say, you know, here's where the stock is. Come in today through hard work and, you know, focus customer session, let's build from here. And I think that proved

• 8:56Eric Glyman?

  really well. You know, we're, we're back above all time highs. We have a lot of momentum. And I think for people who've joined the team and part of the mission, I think people have been treated really fairly. And so I don't know, hope that's helpful in just how we thought about it.

• 9:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I have a question around ramps. Ramp truly lives the ramp way. Like the, the approach to company building that you guys advertise, you, you, you do exactly yourself, right? So, so I feel like you're in a position, like, looking at Ramp's capital efficiency, which I think was published, you know, yesterday around your guys' sort of net burn. It's really astonishing, right? And it's got to be if you're running a business, you know, at, at anywhere in the same category, even adjacent categories, you have to be highly concerned at the, at the rate that you guys are growing in that context. Is that, how much of that do you credit to Ramp versus yourself and your team's operational abilities?

• 9:53Eric Glyman?

  I, I think our whole mission, right? To your point is like, make the most of every dollar and every hour. If you're spending it, you should know why. And it's not just that you're spending it in one place, but, but what actually generates the return? What, what connects to growth? And I, I, I would say that we certainly benefit a lot from our own product. We try to be obsessive over making sure we're not wasting. And if we're spending on, on, you know, software licenses of product, we buy 500 seats, we want 500 people to use it. And we use Ramp to cut out extra licenses. We look and make sure we're getting the, the most impact for, for prices and.

• 10:31Eric Glyman?

  You know, software that we're buying and I just think, you know, for the same reason, a lot of the highest performing, best running companies on the planet run on Ramp and use it. You know, we do too. We want to be the best customer of our own product. And so some of it's that. But I'd also say with your whole mission is, you know, to obsess over getting, you know, your customers the most from every dollar an hour. As long as you're not a big hypocrite, you start thinking about it for yourself too. And so I would give credit to the team. I just think that the rigor, you know, not just financially, but even just from a, you know, engineering perspective, design perspective. I think most organizations could not have put out a Super Bowl ad from, you know, 11 days start to airing.

• 11:15Jordi Hays?

  I think we were one of the few groups that had direct insight into that because I remember we talked to the team. You know, we have a sort of a weekly with the Ramp marketing team and we talked to them and they basically were like, hey, we got to go dark for like three days. And so we got to witness the process and it was just, it was incredible to see. In this moment, you know, to me, it feels like Ramp's opportunity, like the value proposition for Ramp has never been stronger, right? You were born in 2019. You very quickly were in the zero interest rate era where it was not cool to save money. It was cool to spend it and grow as fast as humanly possible. And we're now entering this period where, you know, we have terrorists.

• 11:59Jordi Hays?

  There's austerity in the government, right? It seems that, you know, saving money and making dollars go further is in. How do you, you know, how are you thinking of, you know, taking Ramp out of, you know, Ramp is, the Super Bowl felt like this first moment where Ramp was going mainstream, right? And, you know, what does that look like over the next like couple of years in terms of, you know, getting, there's many more businesses that aren't on Ramp than are. What does the next two years look like in terms of going mainstream?

• 12:34Eric Glyman?

  Two things. I mean, there's something just timeless about Ramp's core ideas. You know, I need to paraphrase Jeff Bezos when he was talking about Amazon. He couldn't imagine 10 years in the future, people would ever, you know, say, you know, Jeff, I love Amazon, but I wish the prices were higher. I just wish that, you know, these packages got to my door a little bit slower. You couldn't imagine it. People always want lower prices. You know, and getting things earlier, getting more done with less effort. And in some ways, we just took the simple idea very seriously. For a business owner, you know, in the US, average profit margin is eight and a half percent. It means a dollar saved is not equivalent to a dollar earned.

• 13:16Eric Glyman?

  A cost that you cut is equivalent to increasing your revenue by $12. And I just think that we, you know, looked at the math and just took it seriously. And I think that, you know, simple truths in some sense are one of the most powerful forces in business.

• 13:37Eric Glyman?

  When I look at where we are, it's, it is incredible to be serving, empowering what we believe is 1% to 2% of all corporate and small business card spend in the US, which is maybe the market that we're largest in. You know, it's 98 to 99% to go. I think part of going mainstream.

• 13:53Jordi Hays?

  You did the meme. You did the 1%.

• 13:57John Coogan?

  If we just take 1% of this thing, it will be a big company.

• 14:00Jordi Hays?

  They did it.

• 14:02John Coogan?

  So frustrating.

• 14:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, people are gonna be like, yeah, yeah.

• 14:07John Coogan?

  Can I get a breakdown of like postmortem on the Super Bowl? I want to know, I mean, everyone kind of knows, okay, Super Bowl, like it just looks good. It looks like a six to seven figure spend. But how do you, everyone wants to know, you know, what does it feel like? How do you start calculating? Like, does this make sense? And did we make money from it? What's your early read? And then what do you, what signals are you looking for down the road?

• 14:28Eric Glyman?

  It's incredible. So there was a couple of things and also there was even kind of in Ramp fashion, some things that made the the buy particularly impactful and maybe a little more clever. So by being

• 14:44Eric Glyman?

  By buying the ad much later than most normal people would do, we had access to very unique inventory. Like it's sort of is a little insane to say 11 days before the Super Bowl. You know, what if we did that? And so as a result, we actually knew who was playing in the Super Bowl. You know, we were able to find someone that had incredible relevance to what people were watching. And of course, Saquon is an amazing one of one talent. That was phenomenal. Next, there was, without getting too specific, a lot of folks that, for various reasons, would normally buy Super Bowl ads, insurers who had to deal with fires and other things like that, that dropped out of the Super Bowl. You know, didn't want to be advertising at a time when, you know, we're sort of coming

• 15:29Eric Glyman?

  under attack. And it meant that some of the spots that we were able to get were in extraordinary slots. For people who were watching closely, we were the very last ad going in to the Super Bowl. And that was nationally aired. For folks in other markets, saw the ad twice. And, well, I can't get specific on the figures. It was a lot less than what people think. And the impact was a lot more. I think that Saquon, you know, being a core contributor and having extraordinary season, meant that not only, you know, was there a lot of coverage of him, but you know, even the next week, he was on the Today Show. And, you know, they talked about his story, as well as our partnership. And the ad aired there. And

• 16:11Eric Glyman?

  we can see this in the metrics, where February was, you know, by many accounts, the, by far, the biggest February that we've ever had. The acceleration, just in terms of sales, as well as people feeling like, you know, it's gone from startup to, you know, this company that I knew when is actually on this big stage. And so you can see it in the growth, and just even in how people feel, how likely people are to recommend. And we've seen all of these go up.

• 16:40Jordi Hays?

  I have a more personal question. You now run a $13 billion plus company. You're still one of the most kind and genuine people that I know. And it's almost, most people by the time they sort of climb the mountain to build a company this big, they get sort of hardened. What do you, what do you credit your ability to, you know, your, your ability to sort of lead with kindness? And I feel like every conversation that I've had with you, but at the same time, sort of broadly, your sort of reputation, despite, you know, building such a behemoth in such a short period of time, that's broadly your reputation with anybody that I feel like interacts with the company. Where does that come from?

• 17:22Eric Glyman?

  So one, I just think, you know, we're, we're thrilled to be here, but you know, I show some humility, 13 billion is a lot. It's still very small in the grand scheme of things, you know? We're competing directly with companies that have multi hundred billion, if not almost trillion dollar market caps. Some of the largest companies, you know, today are, call it three and a half trillion dollars. And the wild part, you know, is that mathematically, a company like, you know, an Apple or Microsoft or Nvidia, you know, talking to a ramp is almost like a ramp talking to a seed or C R J startup. It's actually those multiples in between valuations are about the same.

• 18:05Eric Glyman?

  And so in some sense, I think some of it just comes from the, the reality of we have such a long way to go. There's so much more to build. There's so many more people that we can serve and just remembering that. I, I think that when you look at, at great companies in the past, often are killed by, by hubris, you know, arrogance and, you know, forgetting like the reason why they were able to, to grow and get there is there were people who, early employees who gave them a shot and worked hard, who didn't have to be there, who were there, early customers who said, you know what, I, I'm going to try and, and, you know, trust you with my business and please take good care of it. And, you know, that still is true. And so I, I don't know.

• 18:49Eric Glyman?

  I guess it's a little bit too, like, you know, you, you grow up a certain way and, you know, that, those kinds of things stick with you, but that's really how I think about it.

• 18:56Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 18:57John Coogan?

  Did you want to get into any of the?

• 19:00John Coogan?

  General entrepreneurship questions or anything?

• 19:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I guess you've had your pick of the litter in the valley, right? At this point, I'm sure you've talked with every major investor for across different rounds. And obviously, some funds get conflicted and things like that. What's the single best piece of advice you've ever gotten from somebody on your cap table? It could be, you know, specifically on the investor's side.

• 19:31Eric Glyman?

  It's a really good question. I mean, I tend to really resonate with former operators, people who have built and run business. I think that experience, it's fun, it's interesting, also times very solitary.

• 19:45Jordi Hays?

  Turns out it's pretty valuable.

• 19:47Eric Glyman?

  It's pretty valuable, yeah. And so, look, I, you know, we have a very small board. You know, one of the members is Keith Herboy, and I think that part of why I wanted to work with him, even from the earliest days, is I just think he had an obsession with what it takes to be a high-quality operator. Like, I still think his how-to-operate talk he gave over a decade ago is, as good as it is, I think it's very underrated.

• 20:15John Coogan?

  What was the gist of that? It was cannonballs and barrels, right? Barrels and ammunition?

• 20:20Eric Glyman?

  Yeah, barrels and bullets.

• 20:21John Coogan?

  Barrels and bullets.

• 20:23Eric Glyman?

  Yeah, I mean, the idea is just like, you could put the bottleneck, you know, you might have as many bullets as, but if you have too few cannons, you can't fire as many bullets. You need to have more cannons to go quicker. But I think a lot of the heart of it, and some of this is like the score takes here of itself, with the idea that you manage towards the inputs to drive the outcome. And, you know, I think Ramp has been in this very large, and in some sense, people look at it from the outside in, hyper-competitive space. And we've grown at a level others haven't, in part, I actually think is just by taking that advice to heart. It's really looking upstream. What are the activities that lead to the outcomes we're trying to drive? What are the things I can do today that will save your business, you know, time and money tomorrow? What are the things we can do today to drive more sales tomorrow?

• 21:09Eric Glyman?

  And so, in some sense, it wasn't profound, it just was right, and we try to listen to it pretty often.

• 21:17John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 21:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I feel like the best, the best advice in the valley is actually all out in these sort of blog posts or individualized talks and in the same way on the company side, you know, the ramp secret plan is out there. It's like, we're going to save businesses the most amount of time and money. And if you want to compete with us on that, you're welcome to. It's good for the world, but we're going to do it the best. So it's amazing to witness. And yeah, we'll have to have you back on in the very near future because, you know, if there's one thing about ramp is there's always, always news coming.

• 21:49John Coogan?

  Always news.

• 21:50Eric Glyman?

  Anyway, guys, I really appreciate it. And like, I, thanks for having me on the show. When I can say I knew when I think this is going to get, continue growing really quickly.

• 22:01John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:03Jordi Hays?

  We're excited. We have Senna coming on in a couple of minutes, I think. So we're going to have him psychoanalyze you.

• 22:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll let you go, Eric. We'll talk to you soon.

• 22:13Jordi Hays?

  Talk to you soon.

• 22:13John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 22:14Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 22:15John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 22:16Eric Glyman?

  Cheers. Yeah.

• 22:16John Coogan?

  Bye. And we are going to take a 30 second break while we fix some stuff with the stream. And then I will give you a little run of show because we did, we jumped straight into that interview. Obviously, we're getting live later and later. And so, yeah, we want, we want to go, we want to touch on the Trump tariff thing, but just a little bit. Dip our toe in, stay not political, but it is the top story. It's what everyone's talking about. So we're going to focus on the tech reaction. We're not going to really deep dive into the politics of it. We're going to talk about what people on tech Twitter are saying about it. We're going to go through a bunch of timeline, cover some reaction to earlier

• 22:59John Coogan?

  clips that went out yesterday from the show. And then I want to talk about Greenland. I think Greenland's super interesting.

• 23:06Jordi Hays?

  Cool spot.

• 23:07John Coogan?

  There's an article in the Wall Street Journal about whether or not Greenland could be a place for a mining boom. And the question they ask is Greenland has the makings of a mining boom. So where is everyone? Like, like, there are minerals there, but no one's really going after them. We're going to try and get to the bottom of it with this Wall Street Journal article. And then also, Google's making a new push with start project Starline. Have you seen Starline?

• 23:32Jordi Hays?

  I have not.

• 23:33John Coogan?

  It's one of these like tech demos that feels very fake, but every, because like, you just can't go experience it, but they bring in journalists like YouTubers and they all walk out.

• 23:43Jordi Hays?

  Journalists?

• 23:46John Coogan?

  And they all walk out of the room being like, that was incredible. And you don't know if they're being paid off or something. Yeah, yeah. You know, you put on the tinfoil hat. Like, they might be paid off to be like, that was amazing. And really, it sucks. So it's in the, it's in the like Project Orion realm of like, seems really promising. But basically, it's like a TV that's like 3D. And it uses kind of like an illusion technique to help you see someone across the table in like, as a hologram.

• 24:11Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 24:11John Coogan?

  And they want to roll it out and they want to get it like cheaper so that basically everyone can have this. But they're, they're making a push.

• 24:17Jordi Hays?

  So we could podcast holographically.

• 24:20John Coogan?

  I would love that. I mean, the reviews, the early reviews have been, has been remarkable. But it's very unclear like how real it is or how, or how expensive it is to actually roll out. So we're going to go through that. But mostly, we're going to do a telephone calls today because we're really enjoying the guest spots. We're having a lot of fun people on. So we will have David Senra hop on. And then we're going to have Bridgette Harris from Founders Fund hop on at 11:45. And who else is maybe going to come on? Maybe Sean McGuire. We'll see. I texted him. Hopefully, he can get on. Let me see if he's on, he's on next. This is turning increasingly into just like a live stream. Just like hanging out.

• 25:03Jordi Hays?

  We're hanging out.

• 25:05John Coogan?

  Okay, he just liked my post. He DM me his cell phone number. I texted him. Hopefully, he gets on.

• 25:12Jordi Hays?

  Hit him with a double text.

• 25:13John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe we'll just call him live at noon and just be like, you're on and that's it. What's going on? Okay, we got to cut you a break. We will be right back. You're watching TBPN. You'll still be watching in a couple of minutes when you get back. We are back. You're still watching TBPN. We had a little HDMI issue. I guess when I was looking at Jordy, it would look like I was looking off to the other side. Anyway, it's fixed. We're back. We're happy to be here. Ben, give me an update on David Senra. Is he in the waiting room? Does he have the Zoom link?

• 25:44Jordi Hays?

  I mean, we're talking about the most powerful man in Miami.

• 25:47John Coogan?

  He is the most powerful man in Miami now. You know, we had Keith on, but Keith has kind of relinquished it a little bit. He's got his toes in DC. He's got one foot in Silicon Valley now. Senra, Senra isn't making a move. He's, he's locking down the islands. He's having, he's establishing.

• 26:03Jordi Hays?

  He's not leaving.

• 26:04John Coogan?

  He's not leaving. You're going to have to drag him out of Miami. And I would be happy to drag him out of Miami.

• 26:08Jordi Hays?

  Actually, it's very easy to get him out of Miami. You just got to send a private jet.

• 26:14John Coogan?

  He really does hold the bar well.

• 26:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he, he, he holds the line.

• 26:18John Coogan?

  It's remarkable how he set that bar and then still manages to get on a plane twice a week. You would think that that would reduce the amount of travel, but somehow it does not. Anyway.

• 26:33John Coogan?

  Senra, Senra, Senra, hopefully he hops on. He says he needs five minutes.

• 26:39Jordi Hays?

  That was like four minutes ago.

• 26:40John Coogan?

  You know, maybe we should just play a little bit of his podcast on our podcast.

• 26:45David Senra?

  The dynamic range between the average quality and the best quality is at most two to one.

• 26:50John Coogan?

  This is a perfect substitute.

• 26:52David Senra?

  I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to one. So given that, you're well advised to go after the cream of the cream and to build a team that pursues the A plus players. And that is exactly what Ramp did.

• 27:11John Coogan?

  We're in the middle of a Ramp ad. It's hilarious.

• 27:15Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 27:16John Coogan?

  I'm playing, I, I was listening to your, your latest episode and there were some good, there was, there was a really good quote in there. And I didn't realize it was in the middle of a Ramp.

• 27:27David Senra?

  That's funny. I caught the, the tail end of you talking to Eric.

• 27:31John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. That's great. How you doing, man?

• 27:34David Senra?

  Good, good. I just actually saw Eric last week. We had breakfast. I went, I flew to New York for a super secret

• 27:41David Senra?

  dinner that I'm making an episode about right now. Me and, me and Eric had breakfast the very next day.

• 27:47John Coogan?

  Very cool, very cool.

• 27:48Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 27:50Jordi Hays?

  Every time I tried to ask Eric something personal, he perfectly redirected it into talking about

• 27:57John Coogan?

  Saving money.

• 27:58Jordi Hays?

  Saving businesses time and money. Can you help us psychoanalyze Eric? Cause he's just like this, and he's truly a one of one in the sense that I was kind of positioning it as like building a $13 billion plus company and maintaining that level of sort of genuine kindness is like very tough. And I'm curious if you, if you have any sort of like opinion or, or sort of like

• 28:24John Coogan?

  I mean, I, I just have the answer. Like when I, when I've made the documentary about Ramp, like I was interviewing him with that, that exact question, like, hey, you're so nice, but like you're running this like kind of cutthroat company in this like hardcore industry. Like, how is this possible? And I kind of got peeled back the onion and got to the fact like, like. He had a brother who got bullied a lot and like he developed like this insane empathy. That was my takeaway. I was like tearing up while I was talking to him about it. It was really, really like, uh, kind of like a crazy, crazy, like

• 28:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:52John Coogan?

  early life to like deal with. And that clearly gave him like a new level of empathy because he went through all this stuff with his brother. It was wild. Anyway, but Sandra, what's your take?

• 29:01David Senra?

  One, I spent much time with him. I do, when I say on the ramp ads, my friend Eric, I don't, that's not hyperbolic. I would say that the larger, uh, like the more important idea is like, you actually don't have to be like a complete, and listen, I think Steve Jobs, one of the best, you know, founders of all time. If there's a Mount Rushmore of the history of entrepreneurship, he's got to be on it. It doesn't matter like what the other three are, but he's definitely one of them.

• 29:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 29:27David Senra?

  But people hear how like, you know, how he spoke to other people and they just say, oh, like to be like him, I have to be like that. And it's just like, no, you don't. Um, like if you look at the greatest, you know, when I went to Charlie Munger's house and had dinner with him, like he said that the greatest, he feels the greatest founder of all time is Rockefeller. And one of the craziest things about Rockefeller is like, there'd be people that worked for him for decades that said he never raised his voice and he never said an unkind word. So I think there's like this myth that there's like this one size or one way to be successful. In fact, I was on a long walk with a friend last night. And we were talking about Michael Dell, you know, uh, one of the, regardless of what you think, is like one of the most successful people that ever lived, uh, has a phenomenal relationship with his son.

• 30:09David Senra?

  They're like best friends from what I hear. Uh, very, very proud that he's still married to the same woman, like on anybody who spends time with him says the same thing. He's just unbelievably thoughtful and kind. So yeah, I, I, I, one with particular Eric, it's definitely not an act. And two, I don't think, you know, it's a prerequisite for success. This is like one of the reasons I tend to work alone is because I am really fucking mean.

• 30:35David Senra?

  I don't like that. I wish I wasn't so, you know, uh, like intense around that. I'm perfectly fine being that way with myself. I just don't like doing that to other people.

• 30:44Jordi Hays?

  That's why when you said you liked our podcast, I took it really serious because I'm like, you just wouldn't say that.

• 30:50John Coogan?

  Oh, no way.

• 30:51Jordi Hays?

  Very authentically like, yeah, like this, this isn't for you, bud.

• 30:55John Coogan?

  I mean, I've sent him so many things to review and I'm just like, it's, it's not bad, right? And he's like, have you listened to it?

• 31:02David Senra?

  So there's a, you see this bookshelf behind me, let me zoom out a little bit. So it is, um, it, it holds like 600 books or something like that.

• 31:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:10David Senra?

  And, uh, let me see if I can change this. So they're actually in order by episode number.

• 31:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:17David Senra?

  And one thing that I love about, there, there's another, um, like 300 books in my living room. And I walk past it every day to get upstairs and one, one of the books, uh, has the title in like big bold letters in the spine. And it's, it's applicable to a lot more industries than you think of, and it's definitely applicable to podcasts, but the title of the book is competing with idiots.

• 31:40David Senra?

  And I think like-

• 31:41John Coogan?

  You know, we're doing the same thing here with posts, right? We have, we have every-

• 31:46Jordi Hays?

  We have the library of Alexandria.

• 31:48John Coogan?

  Every post printed out in order that we reacted to them on the show.

• 31:52David Senra?

  So remember when-

• 31:54John Coogan?

  It's bigger than your, it's bigger than your bookshelf.

• 31:58David Senra?

  You remember when you guys had this idea of like, you were going to sell your podcast in vinyl?

• 32:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:03David Senra?

  And so I actually, I hope you make that into a book and I would buy the technology brothers book of tweets.

• 32:09John Coogan?

  We're definitely thinking about that. Definitely thinking about that. I think with the vinyl thing where we got was we want to send you our favorite episode of founders on vinyl. Something like-

• 32:19David Senra?

  There you go.

• 32:20John Coogan?

  And then send that to Patrick and then, so like the Jeremy Giffon episode goes out because you get that on vinyl. It's like a fun thing. You could like put it on your bookshelf or something. It's a little trinket.

• 32:30David Senra?

  I, I actually think it's really smart. There's been multiple occasions. So like, um, you can't see it, but behind my desk. So Sam Zell, there, there's a bunch of people. I'm actually reading Michael Obits's autobiography.

• 32:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:39David Senra?

  Uh, so I'll give you a preview of the, the episode that has been killing me. I made it out two days ago and it still won't be done.

• 32:45John Coogan?

  Brutal.

• 32:46David Senra?

  And he had a full-time gift guy. And this has actually come up a lot in the books. Sam Zell had a, he spent millions of dollars a year, from my understanding-

• 32:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:56David Senra?

  On his full-time gift department. In fact, he built these like automatons, right? And they have a theme and I actually spoke at this guy's conference and he's like, do you want anything for this? I was like, it's in Miami. I don't give a fuck. I'll do it for free and we're friends anyways. Um, and he's like, all right, I have a gift for you. And he actually found one and he bought me a Sam Zell like automaton. But I think the technology brothers, especially because you're like, you're doing it five days a week, you're going to have all these guests, you should have like a gift department. Where it's like thoughtful that, like that, like here, here's your favorite episode on vinyl or like- Whatever, whatever.

• 33:26John Coogan?

  I mean, isn't that in How to Win Friends and Influence People? The whole idea of a Rolodex, you save everyone's. You said that was your favorite book, right?

• 33:35John Coogan?

  I mean, I thought Patrick O'Shaughnessy said he rereads it all the time. I read it. It is a fantastic book. It is one of those like timeless books. It's a little ridiculous because it's like so, it's such a like over the, it's clickbait title, but you know, clickbait works.

• 33:48David Senra?

  Yeah, no, the value, I like things that the value prop is in the title, actually.

• 33:52John Coogan?

  Also, it's so old timey, like it, it's just, it's an interesting artifact because it's like, it's the type of like business advice that you'd see on like a thread on Twitter these days, but it's from like the 1920s. So all the examples are like really antiquated.

• 34:04David Senra?

  Cause it's not, it's advice on human nature and human nature doesn't change.

• 34:06John Coogan?

  Hasn't changed.

• 34:07David Senra?

  Like that's why people still read it and like Charlie Munger's, one of his favorite book was influenced by Robert Cialdini. He liked it so much, he gave him a single share of Berkshire stock when it was valued at like 500,000. I think today it's like 750.

• 34:21John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 34:22David Senra?

  Pretty good compensation for writing a book.

• 34:24John Coogan?

  That's awesome. That's amazing. I love that. When are you writing a book?

• 34:27David Senra?

  What's that?

• 34:28John Coogan?

  When are you gonna write a book?

• 34:29David Senra?

  Never.

• 34:31John Coogan?

  Pod dominance.

• 34:34David Senra?

  No, cause like here's the thing, um, like I told you before, I mean, you guys know this cause like I kinda like cornered you at Heretic on about how important podcasting is.

• 34:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:42David Senra?

  And you know, I get like, uh, it's very nice. Cause like I, as you guys know, most of the books I do, I cover like really old, but publishers send me all of their like new books. And you know, I might do like one new book for every like 50 old books.

• 34:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:55David Senra?

  And they all, they send me their new books for distribution, but they also like, were you interested in writing a book?

• 35:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:00David Senra?

  And my point to them is like, I, I think of podcasting as like one of the greatest technologies to ever create. I think it's the printing press for the spoken word. And so me taking, and I think it's the highest and best use of my time. So me taking time away from that to do anything else, but more podcasting doesn't make sense. Now that I, I talked to my friend Jimmy Sony, who I absolutely love. And, uh, he's, he wrote this great biography on Claude Shannon.

• 35:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, he spoke at your event.

• 35:25David Senra?

  What's that?

• 35:26Jordi Hays?

  He spoke at your event.

• 35:27John Coogan?

  He wrote the PayPal book, right?

• 35:28David Senra?

  Yep. He wrote The Founders, A History of Founders. He's like another psycho obsessive. It took him longer to write The Founders book than it took PayPal to be founded and then sold to eBay. Okay. So, uh, but I called him, I was like, hey, just name your price and, you know, listen to the podcast. We'll have some conversations and if you can write this for me, like in partnership, then I'd be interested in doing that. So what I told him to do, it's one of my favorite books is Will and Ariel Durant's Lessons of History, right? You really think about that book, it's like they dedicated 50 years of their life to writing the history of civilization. It's probably, I don't know, what 10,000 pages all combined? And yet after that, they're like, hey, we're going to do this fucking ridiculous thing of trying to write a biography of the human species. And we're going to limit to a hundred pages. So I was like, okay, I would want to do that.

• 36:08David Senra?

  Like, what are the most important ideas that we've just, we've unveiled so far through the podcast in the eight years of its existence? And write like, this is about, like, the most important ideas in a hundred pages. And so he, he's got a bunch of stuff going on, including two books that are really fascinating that he's writing, but he said he's going to do it.

• 36:27Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 36:29Jordi Hays?

  Who are the entrepreneurs that are still building their legacy that you are hoping that they will live up to their full potential? And one day be qualified to be, uh, you know, given the full Founders Podcast treatment? I would put Eric and Kareem in that, in that bucket of, you know, ultra high potential, but still, uh, you know, sort of just getting started in a sense. Are there people that stand out today that, that you're excited to cover in, you know, 15, 20 years, right?

• 37:00David Senra?

  I'm going to tell you who my favorite founder alive is right now, and it's going to be surprising to people. Cause um, I, I heard your episode yesterday where you talked about like how I'd call you up, John, and I'd be like, find a simple idea and take it seriously. And I think that's one of like the best pieces of advice and you see it over and over again. I've been able, and some of these people I can't fucking name because of the podcast, but I've been able to meet like these crazy, you know, family businesses. Where the founder's 80 years old, still running the company, no outside investors worth $10 billion. And, you know, they just monopolize like crazy stuff like nails or packing equipment or shipping company or just like crazy, like not very complicated ideas. Just like they found a simple idea and took it, uh, very seriously.

• 37:39David Senra?

  I, I, I think, uh, one of the things I like about Eric and Kareem is, uh, before we had this like very deep. Uh partnership is not, obviously you guys know this is not just like, we're not just like reading ads for them on my podcast. Uh like we're friends. We, we spend a lot of time together. Our wives spend time together, our kids play together. Um, and you know, I took a long time getting to know them really well. Um, one of the important things when we talked about this is like, is this your last company? Like, I'm not interested in like the people that want to start scale and sell. I'm interested in people that do something for a very long time. If you look at all the books behind me, these people literally work Enzo Ferrari, right here. He worked like he died. He worked on Ferrari. There's no retirement. Like Ferrari is my entire life. This is what my life energy goes to this.

• 38:23David Senra?

  Yeah. Most of the people I come on the podcast, you know, their life's work. And what I loved about both Eric and Kareem, and like, this is the last company. Like this is, we, we want to build this forever. Um, there's actually an interesting idea. Um, and I'm trying to convince Kareem to do more, not that he needs my advice by any means, but I really want him to be interviewed by Patrick. Um, just because I get to talk to him privately and he's like fucking brilliant technical mind. And one of the things that he said that was very fascinating, um, is he, he optimizes for spikes. And uh, what that means is like, you know, especially as the, as the company grows, you tend to like, try to like even out and like hire for personality or like, yeah, this guy's talented, but he's kind

• 39:05David Senra?

  of like an asshole or he's like, comes in late, uh, or like, you know, will show up for two days and kind of disappear. And I think what Kareem understood is what a lot of history, business entrepreneurs understand. There's a great line by David Ogilvie where he said that talent is likely, is most likely to be found against, uh, among misfits, non-conformists and rebels. And uh, what Kareem is interested in is not like your total package. He's interested in your very best idea. So like, if you were the very best at X and he just wants you to do that for ramp. And if you only last for six months, that's fine. It's like, he just, he optimizes for spikes. And I think that's incredibly, um, intelligent because it's also something that Steve Jobs says that he's like,

• 39:48David Senra?

  you can never, ever, ever, ever forget the dynamic range of human beings that most things in life, you know, between the, the average to the best, it's like two to three, two, two times best, three times quality, where he's like in software and hardware, it's like, the difference is like a hundred X or a thousand X.

• 40:05John Coogan?

  And marketing too. Not just, not just 10x engineers, 10x ideas, 10x.

• 40:09David Senra?

  A hundred percent.

• 40:13David Senra?

  What's that?

• 40:13John Coogan?

  You can see it with Apple right now.

• 40:15Jordi Hays?

  Genmoji it.

• 40:15John Coogan?

  Like, it's not crazy to think of the yin and yang campaign that they ran as a thousand times better than the than the Genmoji campaign.

• 40:23David Senra?

  Yeah, and again, where does that come from? Where like Eric and what I like about Eric and Kareem is like they work like dogs, just like I do, right? And I'm really only interested, I just had, came back from lunch, the reason I text you guys in five minutes late is because I was meeting another founder friend of mine and we had lunch with another friend and it's like all three of us had the same comments, like we're taking what we do very seriously. It's all different businesses. But Kareem works nonstop, right? Eric does too. And they want the pressure. And they want, they do believe like something that Eric told me that was wild at breakfast was like when Grant was founded, Amex was like a $70 billion market cap company and now it's like 220 or whatever. So I heard at the very end, he's talking about, yeah, people are saying, hey, we're

• 41:07David Senra?

  valued at 13 million, that's fine, but like, you know, we're missing a zero, maybe two zeros. Like, if we're doing this for a long period of time, things grow in unpredictable ways. Like, the people that I've met-

• 41:17Jordi Hays?

  I actually didn't, I like didn't ask him the question of, you know, I was, I'm genuinely curious, like, what do you do, if you have five minutes in the day, you know, what are you doing for fun? And I don't even think that's worth asking Eric, because I know he's just gonna say, look, you know, I like to, you know, keep in touch with my family and, but otherwise I'm at the office, I'm thinking about work, or I'm calling Senna. But, uh, but yeah, it just didn't even seem like worth asking, because I already know the answer.

• 41:46David Senra?

  One of the most interesting things, I think they just put this out in that blog post, but we definitely talked about it too, is like, you know, they're doing like 54% of their payroll is on, are dedicated to R and D. Like, they're not just like, oh, we're, we're, look what we did in this amount of time. It's like, no, we're gonna keep pushing the pace. This is, again, the, what I-

• 42:04David Senra?

  I, I, the, when I went to New York, I had dinner with Mike Ovitz, that I had an intense three hour dinner with Ovitz. So I'm making an episode on the dinner and I'm making an episode on, um, on the book. And the way this came about is because I was, uh, at breakfast with a friend of mine and his phone was on the table and it rings and it's Mike Ovitz. And he picks up, he puts on speakerphone, he's like, hey, I'm actually sitting here with my friend, David. He does this podcast, you should know about Founders. And Mike, without missing a beat, he goes, I love that podcast. I listened to four episodes yesterday. And one of the things that me and Mike talked about at breakfast is like, nothing that Michael Ovitz said in his book or at dinner is like surprising to me. And because it's like, Founders is church for entrepreneurs. It's, I just tell them the same story over

• 42:46David Senra?

  and over again. It's the same personality type over and over and over again. Um, and so, yeah, of course, like, when they're saying, hey, we're extremely dedicated to what we're doing, we're trying to get better. It's like, that's exactly what they should be doing. If this is going to be your last business, if this is your life's work, then you will have that like importance of every little detail. Like, how many, you guys see all the tweets when people talk about the difference of like the UI and UX to ramp compared to some other people? Yeah. Um, yeah, and you're, you're, you're pointing about Apple. There's a great book called Creative Selection. It's episode 281 of Founders. I think the title's Working with Steve Jobs, if I'm correct. Might be wrong. Maybe 282, probably 281. Um, and that's one of the best books I've read three times because it talks about the care that Steve Jobs put to every

• 43:27David Senra?

  single pixel of all the products they're making, making and all the advertising. So that ad wouldn't have gone out because Steve would have had to approve every single ad that went out. That's, there's a different level of care and love. Yep. What's your sleep score? What's your sleep score? Not, not good. And Mateo, I love Mateo. Uh, they were, uh, one of my early partners. Let's, it was, here's the problem, because every, I'm so excited about, this is gonna be a big year. Yeah. Uh, and I have a lot of stuff coming that people don't know about. Okay. And like, it's, it's not good. So last night was 70. Ooh, I got 88. What'd you do, Jordy? The night, the night before is 56.

• 44:06John Coogan?

  56?

• 44:07Jordi Hays?

  I've never actually gotten that low.

• 44:09John Coogan?

  I don't think I've ever gotten that low, man. You're grinding too hard.

• 44:12David Senra?

  No, no, I'm just very excited. This is like.

• 44:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, it makes sense.

• 44:15David Senra?

  One of my favorite founders, you mentioned earlier is, are you, we were asking earlier, is Dana White. I think what he did, what him and the Fertitta brothers did with the UFC, buying out of bankruptcy for like 2 billion or 2, 2 million. And then, you know, selling, selling it for whatever the number is and still staying on there. And I saw a clip from a podcast interview that he said, that's excellent. And it's like, very, again, I like simple ideas. He's just like, build a life that you can't, like, you can't wait to wake up to. And he's like, I, people always ask me, oh, when are you going to retire from the UFC? And he's just like, retire from what? Like, I get to put on the best fights in the world. I get to travel and I get to stay in the nicest hotels, eat at the nicest restaurants, like, put on the best live events. He's like, I'm going to be doing this till I'm 80.

• 44:56David Senra?

  And I just love that idea, like, very simple idea. Am I building a life that I cannot wait to wake up to?

• 45:03Jordi Hays?

  One industry oriented question, and then I have, I just want you to rant about a specific topic. So what's going on with Spotify? Yesterday, for the first time, I got a clickbait style video suggested to me on Spotify that was like, I tried zero star tech and it was like this, like, kind of like crazy. It looked exactly like a YouTube video.

• 45:24John Coogan?

  It was a YouTube video. It was just a YouTube video.

• 45:26Jordi Hays?

  It came out, came out, you know, last week that YouTube's the biggest podcast platform in the world now. That's obviously not, you know, sort of not great for Spotify. How do you see Spotify as a platform evolving?

• 45:41David Senra?

  So I don't see, this is another thing, because keep in mind, I like study people for a living, right? I think that's really the only edge I have. So, um, we, we've talked about this, like, um, when I think of like people, like, people think of like their portfolio, they tend to like list companies. Mine is like people. It's like, oh, I invested in this dude and I invested in Justin or Sebastian or like that.

• 46:02John Coogan?

  Your long Daniel Ek.

• 46:04David Senra?

  What's that?

• 46:04John Coogan?

  And so, and so in this analogy, your long Daniel Ek.

• 46:09David Senra?

  Daniel's the best. Like, he's the most, like, the car dude, yes, I, I've spent a bunch of time with him. I consider him a friend, like a legit friend, and it's shocking that we're friends. But like, every time I talk to him, like, he's, the idea that, what is Spotify, like 120 billion dollar market cap company or something today? I don't pay attention to any, like, the stock market, but like, it's big.

• 46:30Jordi Hays?

  Public.

• 46:31David Senra?

  Yeah. Hold up and inform this. It's over a hundred billion, I would imagine. Hundred and twenty. Nailed it. Okay, so how the hell is the guy that's been running the company for eighteen years? He's the founder, he's still there. Uh, he's what, forty-two? Like, young. Um, forty-four, I don't know, something like that. He's like so underrated. More people should study him. Like, he doesn't give a bunch of interviews and usually the interviews are around product announcements, but like, I don't know what's gonna happen with Spotify, but I would back up the truck in anything that Daniel does, and as long as Daniel's there, and his team. I've met his team, they're fucking incredible, like, um, yeah.

• 47:07John Coogan?

  They also knew exactly what was gonna happen. This is like famous like Founder's Fund lore, is that like, Sean Parker and Daniel Ek come in and they're like, and they're like, we are gonna execute like the Napster type music sharing strategy, but it's all gonna be legal, we're gonna build this platform. And they projected something like, I don't remember the exact number, but they're like, in the, in the investment memo, it's like, in twenty twenty-five, we'll have three hundred million DAUs. And they got it within like ten percent or something. It was like a twenty-year projection and they nailed it. It was crazy.

• 47:40David Senra?

  Listen, more important, he's one of the greatest living entrepreneurs without a doubt. That's not even including the stuff he's doing outside of Spotify, which is fucking awesome, credible and impactful. Uh, more important than that, he's like a good guy. So, um, I, I, I want, I'm gonna do more of these, like I had dinner with episodes, you know?

• 47:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:55David Senra?

  There, the people seem to like them and I like doing them. And, um, I had dinner with, and this one had to be like anonymous, so I don't know, I'm, I'm not gonna make an episode on it, but, um, cause I asked the guy, it, I, I mentioned this briefly in a, in a episode, but I was like, I had dinner with, you know, one of, I got the opportunity to have dinner with one of the uh, wealthiest people on the planet. Um, very unknown, right? His family, it's a multi-generation dynasty. And his family had like commissioned biographies for certain people in the family. And of course, when he's telling me that, I was like, oh, let me get those. And he's like, this is, you know, I say bad boys move in silence, that maxim that reappears over and over again in history of entrepreneurship, uh, came from Rockefeller. Uh, he's like, absolutely not. I go, why not?

• 48:38David Senra?

  And he goes, because I'm not interested in educating my competitors. And the dinner was incredible, but he knows Daniel. And he was just like, there's, he's, what do you think of Daniel? He's incredible, one of the best entrepreneurs in the world, this guy's telling me, he's like, but more important than that, like, he, his, like, when you speak to him, like, he's a kind person, he's not one of these, you know, assholes, he has no ego. No ego. He's not much older than all three of us. Well, maybe a lot older than Jordy. I forgot how young Jordy is, but like it's incredible what this guy has done. And you know, I, I, I think more people should spend time studying him. Like, we're gonna, um,

• 49:17Jordi Hays?

  It's true.

• 49:18David Senra?

  We're gonna do, he already agreed to like, we're gonna do, I had dinner with, uh, Daniel episode soon, cause I had an incredible dinner with him. It was the most important. You know what I fucking think of him? I get to meet a lot of incredible people. Last year was the craziest life, year of my life. That conversation, that conversation I had with Daniel was by far the most important. Because like he doesn't, he sees no ceiling to what he can achieve. And then he takes that self-belief and he transfers it to you. Which I think is very, very important. So I have no idea that they, look what the fuck have they've done in podcasting so far.

• 49:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:49David Senra?

  Um, and they're gonna continue to do. What I would say, if people are interested in learning more about Spotify, they made, I was just in Stockholm and I found this out. They made a short series on the history of Spotify. Sean Parker's in there, Daniel's in there. Uh, it's called Spotify, a product story. It was out in like 2021. And I think it's eight or nine series, eight or nine episodes. And then they updated it later, but you could just listen to the first ones. And again, everybody's talking about AI, right? In 2000, whatever year, I don't, 2025. They're, they were talking about it half a decade ago. They were using it half a decade ago. They're just, he's, he's, he's great. That's all I have to say, like.

• 50:29Jordi Hays?

  Two minutes left. Yeah. Uh, question for you. Uh, we're at a unique moment in time where it doesn't feel like the, a, a lot of entrepreneurs can afford to not pay attention to geopolitics, right? There's, there's been a lot of time in the last 20 years where it was the, the generalized advice was focus on your customers. You can kind of ignore everything else. And if you're delivering value for your customers, then you know, you'll do well. We're at a period where, you know, there's, there's, uh, you know, tariffs coming down. It's impacting a lot of businesses, you know, here in the U S and entrepreneurs. Who should those entrepreneurs study in the sort of founders world, uh, in terms of, you know, uh, entrepreneurs and companies that had to navigate sort of like, uh, or does it not even matter, right? Or is it still just?

• 51:13David Senra?

  This, this is the biggest thing, man. Like you're. The problem is, everybody's so focused on the present, right? And it, it, history allows you to like take a step back and have a perspective. And instead of like being in front of your fucking face all day long. And so like, here, here's a great book. Uh, I just did this episode, it's like absolutely ripping. It's called 400 Pages of, uh, Munger and Buffett in their own words. And in there, it talks about the fact that you, you could have bought Coca-Cola, you know, in, after World War II, I, I'm making up the numbers, but World War I for like nothing. Right? And it went up by 10,000x since then, or whatever the number is, right? And the point being is, um, Buffett's point was, there's a lot of smart investors and other people, and smart capitalists that pass because they're like, oh, like, there's all this uncertainty.

• 51:58David Senra?

  There's political uncertainties, there's wars, there's pandemics. So if you think about everything that happened from like 1910 to up until when he's saying this is probably like in 1990s. You know, you went through two world wars, you went through multiple pandemics, you went through all this turmoil. You went through, uh, asset bubble, asset class collapses, high interest rates, low interest rates, everything else. He goes, at the end of the day, you know what mattered? That 60 years from now, they're gonna be, they're gonna be serving a billion servings, eight ounce servings of Coke a day. And if somebody is making a billion people slightly happier every day by, by serving this drink to them, that person should make a little bit of money and probably will make a little bit of money. So I don't, I'm not actually a good person to ask that question, surprisingly so.

• 52:39David Senra?

  Because like, uh, the amount, you guys know this, like the amount of what I don't ignore. I figure that this important stuff, like, I'll know about wars, I'll know about pandemics. But I have no idea like who's leading in the stock market. I don't pay, I don't like reading the news. I don't do any of this, because what, what, what matters? It's like, I just stay focused on my customer, right? So if I wake up every day and I read for a few hours, you know, a biography of one of his history's entrepreneurs, and I sit down once a week and I talk to you for an hour, and I just rip through idea after idea in an hour that you can listen to on 1.5x speed. So it takes 40 minutes to you, right? There's nothing else, everything else has something I control. I will get everything I want in life and that I deserve.

• 53:21David Senra?

  If I just focus on that, just focus delivering value as much as possible.

• 53:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and another, another way to look at this is if, if you are, if the company that if you're an entrepreneur and you're running a company that's not your last company. It's the, the, the sort of geopolitical environment right now is hyper stressful, right? Cause you're thinking about, oh, I want to sell the company. I want to exit and all that stuff. But if you're thinking about, you know, still running the company in 20, 30 years from now, uh, it really doesn't matter what happens in the next four years. You just need to, you know, make it through and make.

• 53:52David Senra?

  Okay, dead, dead on. I'm glad you said that because this just spawned another thought to me, right? Where, um, for some reason, and this has not been like on purpose. I was spending a lot of money or a lot, uh, spending a lot of time with like family offices. And, um, and a world I didn't know anything about, and I've been asking questions like who's the largest like American family office? And, you know, a lot of them are dispersed, whatever the case was like highly likely it's the Waltons, right? You know, Sam Walton's kids and grandkids. Uh, I was, if you, if you pass the Miami Beach Marina, right? Um, if, if you're coming from downtown to, to the beach, you'll see this giant boat. I looked it up one day. It was like.

• 54:30David Senra?

  Sam Walton's brother's daughter's boat, right? It's like bigger or ship bigger than anything else, even remote in, in a giant, um, marina. And it's like, it sticks out like a sore thumb. So there's a great biography that I actually read. Um, it's called Sam Walton, America's Richest Man, written by Vance Trimble. And it was actually published a year before. Sam Walton's autobiography came out and he had a funny story in there because, uh, Sam was very private, just focused on, uh, satisfying the customer. And then everybody sees Walmart stock. Oh, this is the richest man in America. So during Black Friday, that was I think 1987, right?

• 55:06David Senra?

  Sam didn't have a cellphone. He doesn't have a beeper. He doesn't have internet, right? So he's driving.

• 55:10Jordi Hays?

  Black Friday, the retail.

• 55:12David Senra?

  No, Black Friday.

• 55:13Jordi Hays?

  Or the actual stock market crash. I just want to clarify because you're talking about a retail entrepreneur.

• 55:18David Senra?

  Good point, good point.

• 55:18Jordi Hays?

  Also a big day.

• 55:19David Senra?

  Yeah, Black Friday, biggest stock, I think, single day stock crash ever. I assume that still holds the record. And so anyways, on paper, he lost like a billion dollars, right? So he goes, he's, he's giving a speech at like this charity event, I think in Arkansas. Uh, for like kids or something and somebody, uh, he takes questions after somebody asked some questions like, how does it feel? To lose a billion dollars in the stock market today? And his, his response was great. He goes, I didn't, I didn't hear about it. It's like, he didn't care because he's just like, I don't care. I'm just like focused on my business. I'm not selling the stock today. I'm never selling it. My like, it, it, all that matters is that he was, he really, he took a, if you mean, take a simple idea and take it seriously. His dedication to that simple idea, E, everyday low price, so EDLP.

• 56:04David Senra?

  This is everyday low price. Let's just make sure we have the lowest price for our customers. And so let's work backwards from that. We just focus on that. We'll do that forever. And you fast forward and it's like, one of the greatest. If it was concentrated in one person, it might be one of the, it is one of the greatest fortunes ever created by taking a simple idea and taking it very seriously.

• 56:22John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 56:24Jordi Hays?

  David, we love you.

• 56:25John Coogan?

  Thanks for joining.

• 56:27Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for joining. Uh, expect, uh, expect us to send you a zoom link once a week forever. Cause we're, uh, we're, we're all in.

• 56:35John Coogan?

  This is the best way to catch up. I, I love this.

• 56:37David Senra?

  Yeah, I feel like it robs the people, you just. Uh, next time in California, I gotta suit up though.

• 56:42John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:44David Senra?

  We'll do it suit up. Hey, where's, you said you were gonna frame. Where's that picture?

• 56:49Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, we're, we're, it's like the Munger, it's like the Munger picture that we're gonna do. We're getting a picture of the pod father, the most powerful man in Miami, David Senra.

• 57:00John Coogan?

  You really are the most powerful man in Miami.

• 57:02David Senra?

  Not even close, not even close.

• 57:06John Coogan?

  Oh, man, I think you're too humble.

• 57:07Jordi Hays?

  You're too, you're acting like you're spending too much time with Eric. You're too humble. You're the most powerful man in Miami.

• 57:12John Coogan?

  I think if you go to Miami, you gotta check in with Senator. You gotta let him know.

• 57:15David Senra?

  No.

• 57:15John Coogan?

  He's not there. He's gonna, he's gonna, yeah. You gotta email him. We'll, we'll drop his phone number. We'll drop his personal address in the comments and you can go stop by. He loves socializing. Invite him to really big events. If it's crowded, like a, you know, conference room hall, Las Vegas. Invite him to that. That's where he's really in his element. Book signing, you know, podcast signing.

• 57:36David Senra?

  Real quick before I go, so our mutual friend, Patrick, always gets on me because he's just like, he'll like try to connect with people or like, he's like, David doesn't read his email. Like, he's just unreachable. And he goes, why don't you have an assistant? I go, why do I need an assistant? He goes to answer these emails and to like manage your schedule. I go, why do I need a schedule? Like, I just need to wake up every day, read for a few hours, sit down once a week and talk about what I read. I don't need to do anything else. I don't need to do anything else. It's that simple.

• 57:59Jordi Hays?

  It was great. This morning, we actually published on our X account that you were calling in and you hadn't fully confirmed. You'd been like partially confirmed.

• 58:07John Coogan?

  Maybe he'll see this.

• 58:08Jordi Hays?

  It was like David Senra calling in at 2:00 P. M.

• 58:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:12David Senra?

  I, I, unless I'm absolutely indisposed by creating a podcast, I will always answer for you guys. You know that.

• 58:18John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 58:19Jordi Hays?

  All right. You're the man.

• 58:20David Senra?

  I love you guys. Talk to you later.

• 58:21Jordi Hays?

  Love you.

• 58:21John Coogan?

  Talk to you later.

• 58:22Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 58:23David Senra?

  Bye.

• 58:23John Coogan?

  Bye. Uh, do you want to do 10 minutes quick on tariffs?

• 58:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 58:28Jordi Hays?

  I'd like to just sprinkle in a little geopolitics.

• 58:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think it is, I think it is an interesting question about like, you know, this was the result of Coinbase, like Brian Armstrong said, look, we are not going to be participating. We are a mission driven company. We're, we're not going to be participating in every political fight, every culture war issue, but that doesn't mean that we're going to stay out of crypto lobbying. Like, we do need to be regulated effectively. And so it's this weird balance of like, yeah, we're not like getting fully political, but we're also not completely apolitical. We care about our industry and the things that we're experts in. So, uh, So I think look like, yes, if you're just some random like AI SAS founder, like you might not care about tariffs between Canada and Mexico, but if you're manufacturing something

• 59:13John Coogan?

  there and it's coming, that does make, that does matter. All of a sudden, that is a tech issue. Like what we, when we talked to Ryan Peterson, he was saying the same thing. He was like, well, this matters to me.

• 59:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So we, we have a bunch of good posts in here. Why don't we quickly run through the article?

• 59:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 59:29Jordi Hays?

  And then we'll, we'll jump into it. Cause I think that-

• 59:31John Coogan?

  So the news is that Trump imposed 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada. It took effect first thing Tuesday. Canada responded with plans to impose, impose 25% tariffs on about a hundred billion dollars worth of US imports. Trudeau said Trump is acting in bad faith. Mexico's president said he would also retaliate with a range of moves to be announced Sunday. The US is also introduced an extra 10% tariff on Chinese imports overnight, adding to a levy imposed a month ago. So everything's ramping up. China announced retaliatory tariffs on US agricultural goods and other measures against American companies. Beijing also filed a lawsuit with the world trades, with the world trade organization. And so investors were rattled.

• 1:00:16Jordi Hays?

  Funny way to get to Trump.

• 1:00:17John Coogan?

  The, the market sold off generally. And yeah, it's been not like full chaos, but definitely one of those things like tariffs are taxes, you know, they kind of suck energy out of economic systems. They can be very good for certain things, especially if you're getting a super raw deal and a country is really, you know, just destroying your ability to produce something or, or playing some sort of long game that you're not considering. But of course there are a lot of pushback for this. So let's go through some of the reaction. Logan Bartlett had a post, he said, the trouble, he's, he's quoting David Kelly, the chief global strategist at JP Morgan Asset Management. And David Kelly says, the

• 1:01:01John Coogan?

  trouble with tariffs, to be succinct, is that they raise prices, slow economic growth, cut profits, increase unemployment, worsen inequality, diminish productivity and increase global tensions. Other than that, they are fine. So bit of a hot take.

• 1:01:17Jordi Hays?

  Keith fires back, he says, most of that is false. And then Logan fires back and says, I put it in quotes, so I could obfuscate responsibility for saying it.

• 1:01:26John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:01:26Jordi Hays?

  Which is smart.

• 1:01:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:27Jordi Hays?

  Phenomenal.

• 1:01:28John Coogan?

  Strategy. It's good posting strategy. I don't know. What do you think? Which side do you take on this?

• 1:01:35Jordi Hays?

  You know,

• 1:01:38Jordi Hays?

  I'm very grateful in moments like this that we are a technology and business show.

• 1:01:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:01:43Jordi Hays?

  I I've approached this from the point of view of this is making life really, really difficult for a lot of entrepreneurs that I respect and want to see do well.

• 1:01:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:01:55Jordi Hays?

  And so from that lens, from a purely sort of personal angle, it's, you know, it's tough to see, but at the same time, there's been precedent throughout history where we've implemented tariffs like this and seen seen seen positives out of it, right?

• 1:02:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:12Jordi Hays?

  So I just think I just think it, you know, I think that Mexico and Canada have the right to be able to say like, you know, Trump's acting in bad faith because he's been sort of like, you know, he's playing with people's livelihood to a very extreme degree. I I thought it was worth jumping down to something.

• 1:02:35John Coogan?

  Before we do that, yeah, I I just have a, I don't know if it's a problem with this, but it just feels so inconsistent because if you think about what's going on with the tariffs on tech companies, China effectively has a 100% profit margin tariff on social network. Facebook, Instagram, they're banned, they can't make any money. It's a 100% tariff effectively, and yet we haven't banned TikTok.

• 1:03:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:04John Coogan?

  And so it's like, it's like, if we're not, that is the most clear to me that it's like, that trade imbalance is crazy right there. And we're not doing anything about that, but then we are doing stuff about, you know, agriculture and cars and stuff. All that stuff's important and and I don't know, we'll have to see how this plays out. I mean, the last round of tariffs, it seemed like it went pretty well, like, like all through, like, the economy tended to grow pretty well during the last Trump administration. So I'm like, I'm cautiously optimistic that all of these gyrations in the market kind of get worked out and things and things wind up doing well. Of course, we got like smacked with COVID right at the end. So it's very easy to look at like, oh, well, unemployment was way up when Trump got out. And it's like, well, there was like this crazy, you know, once in a century event that happened.

• 1:03:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:48John Coogan?

  But the core, the core, like, let's renegotiate trade deals. It wasn't as disastrous as I think people thought it was going to be, so. But certainly to Isaac's point here, like if you're in the, if you're in the crosshairs, if it hurts a thousand times more.

• 1:04:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So Isaac says here, these tariffs are going to wipe out the entire net margin of a ton of businesses. Lots of them, my friends, real people, real livelihoods, real employers with lots of jobs. Having your dreams squashed, smashed by geopolitical whims sucks.

• 1:04:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:04:20Jordi Hays?

  And he had another post that I thought was great. I have it pulled up myself here. He says, it's so easy to see numbers and detach them from people. That 25% tariff, it kills a ton of jobs and livelihoods. Families will feel pain. Those casualties in a war, real people, not just a number. That grifting you see in broad daylight, the money came from real people, maybe a college fund, maybe someone's entire savings. It's easy to see a number and have zero empathy. So I think this is the right sort of point of view right now. It's, it's, it's way too early to say, you know, they're all bad or they're all good or, you know, really kind of like, we don't know what the impact is yet. We see what's happening in the, in the public markets and, and that's, you know, based on sort of fear and a bunch of these

• 1:05:02Jordi Hays?

  other sort of factors that, that, you know, are getting sort of priced in in different ways. But I think it's just important to, you know, as a technology and business show, on the business side, a lot of great entrepreneurs are being affected by this.

• 1:05:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, a lot of DSC companies will source internationally and just to keep the business going, they're spending, you know, what, 25% of their revenue on marketing? There's like the profit margins are pretty thin. Yeah. So, yeah. And so, uh, an increase like that could really wipe you out. Fortunately, like there has been really wide signaling on this for a while that like, you know, you're going to need to reshore at some point. Yeah. Spending up new manufacturing can be difficult, but it can be done on the order of a year for most things. I mean, you look at, you look at how fast people.

• 1:05:48Jordi Hays?

  I think what.

• 1:05:49John Coogan?

  Hopefully, hopefully there's, you know.

• 1:05:50Jordi Hays?

  I think what makes sense is generally this idea that we need more targeted tariffs. So a tariff on TikTok, right? Effectively a hundred percent tariff on TikTok in the same way that they, by banning US social media in China, it's effectively.

• 1:06:04John Coogan?

  A tariff on.

• 1:06:05Jordi Hays?

  More than.

• 1:06:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. On fentanyl, a tariff on terrorists.

• 1:06:10Jordi Hays?

  No, and the other thing is, is, you know, for Trump to be fully taken seriously, he should be thinking about, hey, we don't want millions of unitary humanoid robots like walking our streets in our homes.

• 1:06:23John Coogan?

  I mean, on the EV thing, like, like, the tariffs have been way ahead of this, where to the point where I never see a Chinese EV.

• 1:06:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:32John Coogan?

  Because there was 100% tariff on day one, basically.

• 1:06:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:35John Coogan?

  And they, they're not even trying to send them over here.

• 1:06:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:38John Coogan?

  Because it's just like, it's been determined, even in the last administration, like, hey, we're not doing that this time. It's just not going to be a thing.

• 1:06:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:45John Coogan?

  And I think that's probably the right move.

• 1:06:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Luke Metro had a good post.

• 1:06:50John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 1:06:50Jordi Hays?

  He quote tweeted, uh, the Atlanta Fed, they said on March 3, the GDP now model now cast of real GDP growth in Q1 2025 is negative 2.8%.

• 1:06:59John Coogan?

  Not good.

• 1:07:00Jordi Hays?

  Which is.

• 1:07:01John Coogan?

  We wanted 10%. Satya was telling us AI would get us 10%.

• 1:07:05Jordi Hays?

  10%. He said, if we just signed up for Clippy, if we just listened to Clippy.

• 1:07:09John Coogan?

  He promised.

• 1:07:10Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm kidding.

• 1:07:11John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:07:12Jordi Hays?

  Satya implied that if we listen to.

• 1:07:15John Coogan?

  Please, Satya.

• 1:07:16Jordi Hays?

  He said, just listen to what Clippy says.

• 1:07:18John Coogan?

  6% GDP growth.

• 1:07:19Jordi Hays?

  Listen to what Clippy says, 10% GDP growth.

• 1:07:23Jordi Hays?

  But Luke, uh, Luke quote tweets this and says, my ideal economic system is where we inflict large damage on the populace via trade wars, but keep the wealth of the oligarchs propped up via dumb speculative BS.

• 1:07:36John Coogan?

  Wow. Yeah, it's hilarious considering the, the crypto exchange, like the reserve.

• 1:07:41Jordi Hays?

  The, the timing of that was, uh, a little inconsiderate. I mean, it, it's gotta be, you know, if you're an e-commerce operator that just had your margin wiped out and.

• 1:07:51John Coogan?

  It's like, don't worry, the money that we're taking from you, we're going to put in Cardano.

• 1:07:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So you're going to make it all back in one trade, buddy.

• 1:07:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. All back in one trade. But now you own some of that Cardano.

• 1:08:03Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:08:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll see.

• 1:08:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:05John Coogan?

  That's hilarious. Anyway.

• 1:08:07Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, uh, do we have Bridget ready to call in?

• 1:08:09John Coogan?

  How we doing? We are bringing on Bridget from Founder's Fund. She is an investor in crypto, works with Joey Krug over there, good friend of mine. And we are bringing her on to cover the Prime Intellect fundraiser that just happened. Do you know the story of the Metamorphosis of the Prime Intellect? No. Tell me about it. So, a couple of years ago, on Lex Friedman, George Hots, the comma AI guy, is talking about how he thinks AI will evolve. Oh, hey, Bridget. Bridget.

• 1:08:47Speaker 04

  Oh, hey.

• 1:08:48John Coogan?

  Hi, welcome to the show.

• 1:08:49Speaker 04

  How's it going, guys?

• 1:08:50John Coogan?

  Have you read Metamorphosis of the Prime Intellect?

• 1:08:53Speaker 04

  No, no.

• 1:08:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:08:55Speaker 04

  But all of Primes' design, their logo, all of that is inspired by it. Yeah, I think we have a copy in the office, actually, but I haven't read it.

• 1:09:03John Coogan?

  It's, I mean, I don't want to spoil it, but Andre Karpathy also listed it as one of the greatest sci-fi prediction books, you know, in general. And his summary, which I think summarized well, is just AGI gone mixed. And it's very, very weird. It's like, it's like, what happens when you're in this post-scarcity society and you want some sort of like, social reward or some sort of like, reward? But everything is like, post-scarcity because you can just will anything. So, no one ever dies, but then, you know, what do you do? And it gets very, very weird. It's very bizarre. And George Hots highlighted it on the Lex Friedman podcast. And so, it became very popular. And then, there was a sequel to the book as well, like Last Casino in the Universe or something.

• 1:09:48John Coogan?

  But it's pretty like, I don't know, it's like spooky to me. But I highly recommend everyone check it out. Anyway. We want you to break down the deal. Give us, how did you meet the founder? How did we wind up doing the deal? And just give us a background on what Prime Intellect is, what they do. Give us the high level.

• 1:10:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, definitely. So, we met them, I want to say about a year ago. We actually reached out to them because most of the AI crypto projects we had seen had been Just like not really interesting. It was more like copy paste from existing AI companies and then they would like slap a token on top. So it would be like character AI with a token, like Langchain with a token, like Hugging Face with a token, that kind of thing. And I think we saw Prime announce their like 1 billion parameter model trained in a distributed way across like three continents. And then we reached out to them. We were like, wow, like we would love to to meet you guys and chat, you know, more about it. And we met with them and literally like, I think the first meeting, like we were sold, like we were like, these founders are like A level, top tier killers, like

• 1:10:52Speaker 04

  Vincent and Johannes, like you can just like feel the energy like radiating off them, like they're very passionate about what they do. They're in crypto AI like for the right reasons, whereas I think a lot of founders kind of just hopped into this space like after a lot of the hype took off and, you know, we're looking for like a quick token pump, but that's like could not be further from, you know, the team Vincent has built and what they're doing. So basically they're tackling the problem of like distributed training, which, you know, access to compute is one of like the largest bottlenecks in, you know, AI training today. And you have these like huge data centers that are centralized and power constrained and expensive. And what Prime is doing is it's basically like a true peer to peer

• 1:11:37Speaker 04

  marketplace where like, you know, you can go on and bid for compute and then suppliers can go on and supply like idle compute. And then it like it has crypto incentives, you know, layered on top to really.

• 1:11:48John Coogan?

  Did you look at the the render network, like the, I think it's like the Octane team, what they did in like CGI? Have you seen this?

• 1:11:56Speaker 04

  Okay, I've seen like render and a caution. I don't know if I've seen the CGI.

• 1:11:59John Coogan?

  Because this was a thing like years ago and everyone was like, oh, like, you know, crypto tokens, like it's all fake, whatever. But I had been doing a bunch of CGI work where you would need to go and render like whatever scene you built in Cinema 4D and you needed a bunch of GPUs, not as many as like a training run for an LLM, but but you you send out each frame and each frame is like deterministic. So you can, so you can very easily parallelize these and you can run it on AWS. But there was a company that actually built a very similar system where you could kind of sell back your excess GPU time onto the render network. I think it was kind of like low TAM because the amount of independent artists like Pixar has like Disney, they have their own server farms.

• 1:12:44John Coogan?

  And then like the low end like clients, like people tinkering is kind of small. But it was very cool that it was like, oh, wow, this this makes a ton of sense. How do people actually transact in this? Like having a token that moves these, you know, GPU resources around made a ton of sense. And so it's cool. It makes a lot of sense in the in the age of AI. Do you know more about kind of like early use cases, obviously, like the frontier insane, like, you know, gigawatt scale, that's going to come in the future.

• 1:13:14Speaker 04

  Right, right, right.

• 1:13:15John Coogan?

  What are some of the more exciting use cases in like the near term? Is it just like fine tuning stuff? Do you have any insight there?

• 1:13:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. So I mean, they're right now, they're basically working on just like scaling this up to like state of the art level models. Like they did the 1.1 billion parameter, you know, training run. Like a few months later, they completed like a 10 billion parameter training run. And then, you know, basically just serving as like the the peer to peer marketplace between the supply and demand side. So like on the demand side, you have like AI startups that need extra compute, like labs, like, you know, random independent developers, that sort of thing. And then on the supply side, it's like data centers and then individuals and also startups with like idle compute. Like you have like hugging phase, like semi analysis that want to just like earn extra for for their idle compute.

• 1:13:59Speaker 04

  So it's basically just like, like the way we think about it is just enabling like the AI market to like progress at a much faster rate. Because it's just like enabling all this idle compute to be to be put to work. And then on, yeah, on their end, it's like basically what they did is Google DeepMind released a paper called like D-Loco, which stands for like distributed low communications framework. And they implemented that, but in like an open source way, like they called it Open D-Loco. Such that like you can train across like many different continents. And that was like a huge step function improvement, like from the research side that that we've seen. So it's basically about the research.

• 1:14:38John Coogan?

  At that, like they have that spanner and big query and like they they just are so good at at at taking some sort of like database and being like, oh, yeah, now it works globally and deals with all the time zone issues. It just feels like incredibly hard engineering, but they always figure it out. And then, of course, it opens up a million other things. Uh, Jordan, what what what questions do you have for Bridget?

• 1:14:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so so taking a little sip back from Prime Intellect. Uh, one question I've had that you might have some insight on is was there a frustration among crypto founders that are, you know, uh, you know, seeing the news on Sunday and general frustration around it not being included in the reserve, right? It it seems like that the reserve was effectively, you take the top five biggest, you know, projects by market cap and you just, you know, you know, put it in a reserve, right? It didn't seem like it was super thoughtful. Do you was there was there any idea leading up to this that there would have been, you know, uh, any surprises on that list?

• 1:15:37Jordi Hays?

  And, um, yeah, I'm I'm curious around sort of your response, but also across the portfolio, how how founders are kind of reacting to that that are running, you know, through these, you know, bigger project, bigger market cap projects.

• 1:15:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, it's a really good question. I think generally people were a little bit upset because, you know, the XRP, the Cardano inclusion, just like, there's basically two plausible explanations that I think the crypto community came to for why this could be the case. One is just like simple, like unit bias, like XRP and Cardano are like point 001 cent or, you know, something akin to that. And a lot of Americans will like, you know, go and see that, oh, Cardano is like one cent and Bitcoin's like 100K. And like they'll genuinely just go and buy like Cardano because like it's cheaper. And so like the the the joke on Twitter is like, you know, like Uber drivers everywhere are celebrating the Cardano's in the strategic reserve and like it, you know, Trump could

• 1:16:34Speaker 04

  be playing some like 40 chess to like curry favor with a lot of just these like retail buyers. So that's that's explanation one, um, that these buyers have like unit bias and Trump's trying to curry favor with them. Explanation two, and this came from like Udi at at Taproot Wizards, is basically like, Trump is going way too far in, you know, the extreme direction of We're including all these crazy assets in the reserve because it does require an active, you know, Congress and then he's going to roll back and kind of be like, okay, I'm making a concession. I'm making a compromise and we'll just have Bitcoin. And because he always kind of at the outset goes like way too far, way too intense, you know, and then kind of rolls back and acts like he's making this huge concession where a Bitcoin reserve

• 1:17:14Speaker 04

  would already be a huge, you know, act for Congress to make. But yeah, I think, I think those are the two.

• 1:17:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was telling John earlier, I said that Trump doesn't get enough credit for not including Trump coin in the reserve because you know, you know, he's talking with his team. He was thinking about it. Why don't we put in the memes, Melania too? It's pretty, pretty big.

• 1:17:32Speaker 04

  No, exactly.

• 1:17:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's, let's, let's put in the whole, every White House coin, put it in there.

• 1:17:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, like if Trump had just launched the Trump coin and not Melania, like there's all these jokes on Twitter of like, society would be like amazing. Like, you know, crypto would be mooning. It's like Melania, the Melania launch like messed up our whole industry, but.

• 1:17:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it really does feel that way. What is, you know, what, what's the broader sentiment on the investor side right now? Any of the crypto focused investors that I know, the ones that have done well have just taken a very long point of view. They understand that the market has cycles and you need to be in, you know, kind of basically deploying, you know, throughout, you know, consistently if you want to sort of benefit from, benefit from these sort of peaks. How, you know, and, and, and again, we, we also saw this sort of bunch of AI slop in the sort of crypto markets and, and what, what are the areas that you think are most exciting, specifically in the context that, you know, the joke is

• 1:18:30Jordi Hays?

  that crime is legal now, but more seriously, we're in a favorable regulatory environment for basically the first time in history. And it does feel like the next four years are an amazing opportunity to realize the full potential of the technology, right? Specifically around, you know, I'm sure areas that you're looking at a lot. So. Where are you most excited to invest? What is the general sentiment right now? Do you feel like people have pulled back? You know, talk, talk a little bit about that.

• 1:18:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a good question. So like when Joey and I started at Founders Fund, like almost, almost two years ago now, the sentiment was terrible. Like it was six months post FTX, like, you know, no one was deploying. Crypto-only funds were not deploying. Generalist funds were definitely not deploying. Yeah, and that was one of the reasons I wanted to join Founders Fund because I was like, wow, this is like actually a contrarian act than we did start deploying.

• 1:19:18John Coogan?

  It was so funny. You guys just came in and went so hard, so fast.

• 1:19:22Speaker 04

  Just like started doing some deals.

• 1:19:24John Coogan?

  It was ridiculous. It was ridiculous.

• 1:19:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, but it, no, and it was like in retrospect, the best time to start deploying. Like obviously it's easy, easier said than, than done. But now, yeah, I think the market, it's interesting because, I mean, the sentiment isn't amazing, but I would say prices on new deals that we've been seeing have been like asymmetrically high. Like we, the last deal we did was Prime Intelect and that was in, I want to say October or November. So we haven't done like a net new deal in like, you know, five, five-ish months. I think what we're continuing to look for is basically like applications uniquely enabled by crypto, where like integrating crypto is like a step function improvement to what you would currently have. So an example is like Polymarket, like prediction markets obviously existed before Polymarket, you know,

• 1:20:11Speaker 04

  but they were very illiquid. Your counterparty was, you know, across the world betting in a different currency with a different bank account. There was chargeback risk and doing all the conversion on the backend was super costly. But now if you're just, you know, if you're just using crypto, it genuinely does like make a lot more sense from just like streamlining the, you know, the, the market side. And Prime Intelect, you know, it also applies to that. It's basically just like the same thing, but for compute. If you were, you know, paying in a different currency, like to access compute, like it would be a lot of work on the backend on the protocol side. And that's why there's like these compute brokerages that charge like insane markups. And also back to Polymarket really quick too, is like,

• 1:20:52Speaker 04

  Joey always tells the story, but like if you win too much on prediction markets, like they would actually just like ban you back in the day.

• 1:20:59John Coogan?

  No, it's the same as sports betting.

• 1:21:00Jordi Hays?

  Same as Vegas, right?

• 1:21:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So.

• 1:21:05John Coogan?

  I believe Nate Silver is banned from all the sports betting apps.

• 1:21:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean Dana White, Dana White has these stories of casinos, you know, he's.

• 1:21:13John Coogan?

  No one bans him because he loses.

• 1:21:14Jordi Hays?

  No, no, he's super into baccarat and he actually does well.

• 1:21:17John Coogan?

  Oh, he does?

• 1:21:17Jordi Hays?

  He does well and he's had casinos.

• 1:21:19John Coogan?

  He was telling some story about losing like six figures.

• 1:21:21Jordi Hays?

  He goes, right? No, he goes up seven figures, down seven figures, whatever, but he's gone on these sort of runs.

• 1:21:26John Coogan?

  He's high vol, high beta.

• 1:21:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:21:29Speaker 04

  Yeah. No, it's insane. Yeah. And then I, I think the last thing I'll say is like, I think DeFi in America is definitely like a lot more, you know, better positioned now in the sense that like, DeFi founders had it the worst. I think the past four years, like many of our founders just fully moved out of the United States because the risk was just like, you know, way too high. But we're going to get a new like market structure bill and hopefully we'll see like regulatory exemptions for, for DeFi protocols because you can't regulate DeFi in the same way you regulate like an exchange or brokerage, right? Like it's just a set of smart contracts. And so like there should be exemptions like we see in like the, you know, there's exemptions in the Fit 21 bill, but you know, I never, it's, it's all still in the works, but if we do get exemptions for DeFi founders, I think like

• 1:22:13Speaker 04

  that will kind of usher in a new, you know, era for DeFi and maybe even like another DeFi summer.

• 1:22:18John Coogan?

  Do you think this starts with like Bitcoin lending? Uh, is, is that kind of like the first?

• 1:22:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, lava.

• 1:22:23John Coogan?

  Lava.

• 1:22:23Speaker 04

  Lava. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we invested in lava. Um, yeah, it's definitely a, a very interesting use case. I think, I think DeFi is just like, it, it's such a broad sector, but Bitcoin is like, Bitcoin does enable like a huge use case in DeFi because so, you know, so many people own Bitcoin. Like there's just so much capital inflows to Bitcoin and like, if you can lend against your Bitcoin and make your asset more productive, like there's going to be so many whales that, that, that want to do that. Like they just do not want to sell. But even for a regular DeFi, like if you look at like DeFi summer in 2021, like, you know, a lot of founders got in trouble for what they were doing. And it was just, it was just such a new market that people didn't even know what was allowed versus not.

• 1:23:05Speaker 04

  And then the SEC was issuing like Wells notices to like the most compliant companies like Uniswap, Coinbase, like things like that. So I do think that what people say in crime cycle, like. I think those people are a little overblown because I actually think the the new administration is just really, really smart. Like, I don't think they'll be issuing Wells notices at random to like Coinbase and Uniswap because that's just dumb, but like, they will be actually going after like legit scams. So I would say like, act accordingly.

• 1:23:32John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah, for the last four years, the best like cop in crypto was like Coffeezilla. It was basically like, like, the only hope that you can, the only hope you have if you're like seeing a scam happen is Coffeezilla makes a video and then everyone realizes it.

• 1:23:45Jordi Hays?

  And it's one guy.

• 1:23:46John Coogan?

  But like, the SEC is not going to step in for any of these things.

• 1:23:49Speaker 04

  No, exactly.

• 1:23:50Jordi Hays?

  Where do you, where do you see?

• 1:23:51John Coogan?

  There's a lot of room to just be smart and actually just go after the scams and like the power law bad stuff. Yeah.

• 1:23:57Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:23:57Jordi Hays?

  Do you still, where do you see opportunities around founders that are interested in building in the stablecoin space? The Bridge acquisition, I think, was fantastic for crypto broadly. It really was a, you know, real stamp of approval for Stripe to go out and pay this sort of pretty significant revenue multiple to buy a developer platform, a crypto developer platform, which you, which, which Bridge is. And then, from what we know, that sort of spawned a wave of new stablecoin, you know, startups to come out and say, we're building in stablecoins too, right? And so I'm sure you saw a lot of those companies. Where are you excited about the potential of stablecoins and, you know, going forward?

• 1:24:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a really good question. Yeah, I think after the Bridge acquisition, we genuinely got like, probably like 50 stablecoin pitches. Like, it was legitimately like insane.

• 1:24:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. But no, I think like right now, the most interesting use case for stablecoins is probably in like B2B payments, just because that's where there's the most volume. It's like, yeah, like literally like, you know, billions and billions of dollars of volume per year. And B2B payments, like cross-border historically, just take so long. There's insane markups, like, the bank takes a lot of fees. I think on the consumer side, like, the argument is basically like, okay, you know, if a user like swipes their card, you know, Visa and Mastercard take like a 2% fee. A lot of that goes to the issuing bank, and then it will actually flow back to the user in the form of like rewards. And that's such a different story than if like, I want to pay like Kugan or

• 1:25:31Speaker 04

  something, and Kugan's in Europe or whatever, and it takes like five days, and it, you know, they charge like... 2%. Like that's just like kind of scammy, right? Like that should not be a thing anymore. So I think that's an interesting use case on the, on the consumer side. A lot of people are arguing like on the credit card side, like it might be stable coins under the hood, but you know, it's doubtful that the user will like know it's stable coins, at least to start. But yeah, I think B2B payments is like, that's where there's the most volume. That's where there's the most incentive for like startups to compete. And then the issue there is like getting the, the regulatory stuff figured out, the corridors opened in these different markets. And then just yeah, starting to capture the volume, but.

• 1:26:12Jordi Hays?

  And the infrastructure to prevent Citibank from sending a trillion dollars.

• 1:26:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:16Speaker 04

  Oh, my God.

• 1:26:17John Coogan?

  That's a good question.

• 1:26:18Jordi Hays?

  Like, how do you solve the fat finger issue? Like, obviously you can do multi sigs, but, but, but let's say you have, you know, a group at Citibank, they're like, all right, we gotta send, you know, uh, uh, some stable coins to somebody and then it's late at night and one person signs off and someone else signs off and like three people fat finger it collectively. And you're like, well, we have these protections in place and now we have to go ask the customer nicely, like.

• 1:26:41Speaker 04

  Citibank should not get into crypto because like that money would be gone forever if it was crypto, there's no way.

• 1:26:47Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, this would be huge alpha in just being a Citibank customer and signing up for as many accounts as possible.

• 1:26:56Jordi Hays?

  No, but I think those are, I mean, I think those are real things to figure out. It's, um, my last company, like we, we enabled, you know, stable coin investing and, and, uh, and we actually had like, I won't even name them, but billion dollar crypto companies that were customer of ours that said at the time, this was 20, early 2022, we don't want to accept stable coins as too much of a hassle. And so I think that's, I think that's evolving, but, um, Bridget, amazing to have you on.

• 1:27:23Speaker 04

  Thank you, guys.

• 1:27:23Jordi Hays?

  You're, you're a regular now.

• 1:27:26John Coogan?

  Always welcome.

• 1:27:26Jordi Hays?

  Always welcome.

• 1:27:27Speaker 04

  Thank you, guys.

• 1:27:28Jordi Hays?

  And we're looking forward to having Vincent on the show as well.

• 1:27:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:31Speaker 04

  Awesome. Thank you, guys.

• 1:27:32John Coogan?

  Thanks for talking with me.

• 1:27:33Speaker 04

  See you soon.

• 1:27:34John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:27:34Speaker 04

  Bye, guys.

• 1:27:38John Coogan?

  Very fun.

• 1:27:40Jordi Hays?

  What should we run through next? Do we have another guest or are we just diving back into the show?

• 1:27:42John Coogan?

  I mean, we could call Sean McGuire right now. I have his phone number. He hasn't responded to me.

• 1:27:46Jordi Hays?

  Give him a shout.

• 1:27:47John Coogan?

  Should I just give him a phone call?

• 1:27:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:49John Coogan?

  I don't want to talk to this. I need to make sure the camera doesn't, uh, doesn't see anything.

• 1:27:56John Coogan?

  Let me see. Should I just?

• 1:27:59John Coogan?

  For some reason it's, I don't want to talk more about this, but let's see.

• 1:28:06David Senra?

  I U V Sean.

• 1:28:09John Coogan?

  Okay. He didn't pick up. Oh, well.

• 1:28:12Jordi Hays?

  Next time.

• 1:28:12John Coogan?

  Next time. We'll get him. We'll get him. We'll send him this clip. We'll post this clip and then he'll feel a lot of pressure to come on the show.

• 1:28:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's get into the timeline.

• 1:28:20John Coogan?

  We haven't done timeline because we had a lot of guests. We gotta go through some timeline. First up, David Holes, founder of Mid Journey, founder of Leap Motion. He says, "Chemistry to biology, silicon to blank." What do you think? I don't even remember who put this in there.

• 1:28:35Jordi Hays?

  You put this in.

• 1:28:36John Coogan?

  Oh, no.

• 1:28:37Jordi Hays?

  Cause you're.

• 1:28:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:38Jordi Hays?

  Or, or.

• 1:28:39John Coogan?

  Or Brett. I think it was Brett. What?

• 1:28:45Jordi Hays?

  We got somebody new joining the team soon.

• 1:28:47John Coogan?

  We got some buddies on the show helping out. I don't know. Yeah, it's interesting. It's like, what he's getting is like, is like, you know, biology is built on top of the chemistry silicon. He's clearly getting at like some sort of like AI metaphor.

• 1:29:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:01John Coogan?

  And like how you understand like the, the, the, the mind and the, uh, the consciousness that emerges on top of these systems.

• 1:29:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, uh, random, um, sort of adjacent topic is Rabo yesterday saying, what comes after L L Ms? Like, what is the next iteration of, of L L Ms and sort of our understanding and application of,

• 1:29:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:24Jordi Hays?

  of a technology that everybody's talking about, but we don't know its full potential yet.

• 1:29:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was, I was remarking the other day, I was watching this interesting video about how, uh, Dolly and like all the image generators can't generate a wine glass that's full. Have you seen this?

• 1:29:40Jordi Hays?

  I haven't.

• 1:29:40John Coogan?

  So you can say, it starts with this like incredible interaction where it's basically saying like, uh, hey, Chat GPT, can you, uh, generate a wine glass that's full to the brim, to the top? And it gives you a half full wine glass. And then you say, oh, no, like you made a mistake, like actually fill it to the top all the way. 100%. You give it more context. It's like on it, totally understand, returns, and it's like the same.

• 1:30:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:07John Coogan?

  Because apparently there's just like no images of completely filled to the brim wine glasses in the training set. And so it just couldn't figure out how to do it. And it gets to this idea of, I think it's David Hume has this idea of like, Humans are good at, there's this impression and there's this idea. And basically you can interpolate between two things. So you can imagine a unicorn, even though you've never seen a unicorn in, in the world. But it's hard to create these complex ideas. If you don't have like the reference images, which is what they have. But my takeaway from it was just like, we're, we're scaling up these models and we still are building like an image model and a language model separately. And a driving model separately.

• 1:30:48John Coogan?

  But you would imagine that if we're really building like this, like AGI, like won't ASI be like a one model? But maybe not, maybe, maybe it will be like what he's saying where, you know, there's silicon. And in biology, you know, you need to understand the, the basics of chemistry, but you also need to understand the different parts, the different lobes of the brain, the different actions that your body can take, your muscles, how these different systems interact with each other. And, and you could imagine that the, the AGI that we build will have, you know, so many middle, so many different models and so many different things that are kind of like trained that it can like, you know, interact with. It's interesting. I'm, I'm sure it will be a whole field of study.

• 1:31:27Jordi Hays?

  I just want a, a model on top of the open, all the open AI models to route me to the best model. I don't want to be choosing.

• 1:31:35John Coogan?

  I mean, I noticed that there's the search button you can push that will indicate like, hey, I'd like you to search. But even if you don't push that, it'll still search sometimes.

• 1:31:44Jordi Hays?

  It's so clunky.

• 1:31:45John Coogan?

  And one time.

• 1:31:46Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that's just the, that's just the reality of it's, it's possible for companies to be, at this point, it feels like they're waiting for this big announcement of the router. Like the router needs to come, right? It should be one box.

• 1:31:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:31:59Jordi Hays?

  And it should take me to the, take me through, you know, send my query through.

• 1:32:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:05Jordi Hays?

  The right.

• 1:32:05John Coogan?

  They're really speedrunning the Google story because Google, it was like, just, just search box. I'm feeling lucky. 10 blue links. Simple.

• 1:32:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:13John Coogan?

  Now Google is like, no one hits, I'm feeling lucky because it auto fills. Then it shows you Google shopping and then 25 ads and then clickbait and then videos and all this stuff. And they've kind of like recreated that all in like a very short amount of time, whereas it took like Google, like 20, 20, 20 years to degrade like that. They've gotten a very convoluted thing, but.

• 1:32:33John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:32:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's a huge, I mean, it's just gonna be such a big selling point for OpenAI once they get there, when they can say, look, it's one box, you enter in what you want to do, and we're just gonna execute it to the best of our abilities.

• 1:32:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:32:46Jordi Hays?

  And it shouldn't even really matter.

• 1:32:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:32:47Jordi Hays?

  The underlying model.

• 1:32:48John Coogan?

  It is a testament that like, even though, yeah, there are some reasonable critiques of the naming scheme, ChatGPT is still ranking higher than Jimmy John's in the App Store.

• 1:32:57Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:32:57John Coogan?

  That's big.

• 1:32:58Jordi Hays?

  Which is big.

• 1:32:58John Coogan?

  Because Jimmy John's, if you're not aware, it's number two app in the App Store right now. ChatGPT is number one, and I'm sure it's a knockout, drag-out fight. I'm sure they had meetings. Okay, Jimmy John's is coming for us. We need to call the key to beer. What are we doing to stay ahead of Jimmy John's?

• 1:33:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I posted about this earlier. 2023, everybody said, all right, value's gonna accrue to the model layer. It's obvious. 2024, people said, hey, value is actually gonna accrue to the app layer. A lot of value here. 2025, everybody's saying value's gonna accrue to the sandwich layer. And so I expect to see Subway charting soon.

• 1:33:30John Coogan?

  How did, how did this happen? Like, did they run some national AI campaign that we don't know about? Like, it is weird that Jimmy John's is the number two app in the App Store. Like, what, what is going on? I know it's based on momentum and stuff.

• 1:33:41Jordi Hays?

  They launched the toasted sandwiches. That's it.

• 1:33:45John Coogan?

  It's equivalent to like, you know, magical machine intelligence, too cheap to meter, or like toasted sandwiches. Humanity assigns.

• 1:33:52Jordi Hays?

  They're giving away $1 million of toasted subs.

• 1:33:56John Coogan?

  Oh, I mean, that's.

• 1:33:57Jordi Hays?

  I mean, so it's obvious. Props to, props to OpenAI for, for holding the lead.

• 1:34:02John Coogan?

  The funny thing is that, is that Grok threw right now because they aren't charging yet. They are literally giving away millions of dollars in inference costs. Same thing with DeepSeek, they're subsidized. Even, even ChatGPT, you know, Sam has said like, hey, we're losing money on some of these queries, right? And so you could think about this as like, the AI labs are giving away hundreds of millions of dollars of intelligence, magical machine intelligence.

• 1:34:24Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:34:25John Coogan?

  But that's, but we value that as humanity, like, only slightly higher than like a million dollars with the toasted sandwiches.

• 1:34:32John Coogan?

  Like, that is what the market is telling us. The market is telling us that sandwiches are like, you know, they're up there. But it makes sense. Like, food is, it's what I need. I need food.

• 1:34:42Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:34:42John Coogan?

  I will die without food.

• 1:34:43Jordi Hays?

  And intelligence, but I need food more than intelligence.

• 1:34:45John Coogan?

  I could, I could live without a poem.

• 1:34:49Jordi Hays?

  I could live without a good stand up joke.

• 1:34:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:34:52Jordi Hays?

  AGI can wait.

• 1:34:54John Coogan?

  That's hilarious.

• 1:34:55Jordi Hays?

  You know, it's funny that ChatGPT continues to, you know, basically battle for the number one spot. And they don't even share it anymore. Any, any other, any other, uh, you know, AI lab would be taking victory laps, you know, sharing the number one.

• 1:35:08John Coogan?

  Spraying the champagne into their mouth.

• 1:35:11Jordi Hays?

  Into their mouth. Open AI is just like, you know, it's just great, you know, uh, usual business. And, uh, credit to them. It's impressive.

• 1:35:20John Coogan?

  Well, should we move on to Fred Wilson?

• 1:35:23Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, we got a post from Vincent. He says Fred Wilson, VCs are service providers to entrepreneurs. We ride on their coattails. And so even though venture capital requires a sophisticated understanding of finance, technology, markets, strategy, it's ultimately a people business. Learning to be a successful venture capitalist is about learning how to work with people, a particular breed of people who are at the same time charismatic, brilliant, frustrating, anxious and fragile. And our job is to meet them right where they are and support them with all of our might. And I think that is a fantastic quote. It's almost become, it's almost become normal for, uh, I would argue it's almost becoming meme territory where investors now, if you ask them, uh, you know, what, what do you look for in investments?

• 1:36:08Jordi Hays?

  They just say, you know, we're, we're in the people business, you know? We're, we're trying to find generational founders and it's absolutely right.

• 1:36:13John Coogan?

  That's what Brian Singerman says at Founders Fund.

• 1:36:15Jordi Hays?

  It's sort of, it's sort of this open.

• 1:36:16John Coogan?

  And you meet with him and you want some secret of like, oh yeah, like what I go for. You want something you can copy and, and his whole strategy is uncopyable. And it's very frustrating actually because he's like, yeah, I actually just picked founder. And then you talk to David Center, it's the same thing.

• 1:36:29Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:36:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:36:31Jordi Hays?

  That, that was, uh, as I got to know you, I expected to sort of learn some sort of secret sauce that you had sort of gotten from Founders Fund and you were basically like zero to one.

• 1:36:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Zero to one is the playbook, but then it's really about judging the founders and the people. And, and, and that's the stuff that it's very hard to concretize. And I mean, we saw this with the debate over Keith Roy's quote yesterday. It's like, he was making a recommendation that like, Like you will probably have a good time if you like go and work in an excellent organization and then start a company. But he's not saying like you can generate alpha as a venture capitalist by just pattern matching that.

• 1:37:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I like here, you know, the point is Fred says a particular breed of people who are at the same time charismatic, brilliant, frustrating, anxious and fragile. And I think the frustrating point stands out because oftentimes people, you know, you know, incredible founder is going to have, you know, some aspects of them that are that are truly amazing. And then you have other moments where you're, you know, personally I have 50 plus, you know, angel bets. And there's definitely some moments where I'm super frustrated with entrepreneurs. Not that I make that obvious or known because it's oftentimes is my, you know, not really my place as a small investor to cause any type of hubbub.

• 1:37:46Jordi Hays?

  But an example that I thought of, I once helped a founder get a four letter.com for $10,000. That was their exact, their exact name. And they had some terrible domain prior to that, like get blank.com. And I got them their four letter.com domain at, at cost, obviously like their portfolio company. I wasn't, um, you know, gonna mark it up or anything. And the guy didn't even say, thank you. Like I said, I sent him, I sent him that, like the info and everything and like basically just ignored it. He ended up like, like checking out for the domain and everything like that and started to use it. Never, never once said, thank you. And I, and I was like, that's super twisted and, and feels very wrong in some ways.

• 1:38:31Jordi Hays?

  Right. It's like the JD Vance, like you should have said, you know, you should have said please, you know, you should have said, thank you. But at the same time, I was just like, look, you know, I would have gotten this even knowing ahead of time that you weren't going to, you know, express any gratitude for it. And, uh, you're not going to be judged 15 years from now on whether or not you said, thank you a lot. You're going to be judged ultimately, you will be judged, but you're going to be judged on was your company successful? Did you treat your people right in a, in a grand scheme of things? And, and I can get over it, uh, even though it felt, um, It was funny.

• 1:39:05John Coogan?

  I have a funny anecdote about why you should say thank you and be nice. At my first, at my first company, um, the, uh, the CEO was extremely curt and would just like, send emails, like do the blah, blah, blah, you know, like not like very like, like didn't really bring like a personal style to his emails.

• 1:39:24Jordi Hays?

  Which is a style by itself.

• 1:39:25John Coogan?

  Yes, but that style just also happens to be the style of every phishing scammer in the world. And so people would get phished constantly because the scammer shows up and, and falsifies some email and is like, I need you to send me $10,000. And people would be like, yeah, this actually sounds exactly like our CEO. Normally.

• 1:39:48Jordi Hays?

  No one would ever be this direct.

• 1:39:50John Coogan?

  Exactly. Normally you get a phishing scam email and you're like, well, this doesn't sound like Jordy. Like this sounds like someone impersonating like just a random.

• 1:39:58Jordi Hays?

  I just talked to this person. They would have brought this up.

• 1:40:00John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:40:01Jordi Hays?

  They would have texted me.

• 1:40:02John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:40:02Jordi Hays?

  They would have slacked me. It would just come out of the blue.

• 1:40:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. So you can't be too chaotic like that. You gotta be a little more, a little more empathetic. Bring your own style. You know, the Ron Conway, all caps. That's one of the funniest things in the world to me.

• 1:40:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. One of us should start using, adopting the all caps.

• 1:40:19John Coogan?

  Something chaotic. Well, I mean, one, one way you know, you're talking to us and not an AI clone of us or a scammer is, there's gonna be a lot of typos.

• 1:40:28Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Put typos in your posts.

• 1:40:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:30Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people are saying, if you're writing a blog post, people are saying, oh, you use the word delve.

• 1:40:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:36Jordi Hays?

  You definitely generated this.

• 1:40:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:38Jordi Hays?

  Put, put a, put a bunch of typos in.

• 1:40:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. And don't worry about spell check because the AI is gonna handle it. If, if you want to read a spell checked version of my post, you, you are free to take my post and put it into chat GPT and say, spell check it.

• 1:40:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:51John Coogan?

  And then boom, you have a spell checked version, but I'm not doing that.

• 1:40:55Jordi Hays?

  Well said.

• 1:40:56John Coogan?

  I'm golden retriever max saying, I'm going FSD mode. This is my new twist on this. Full self-driving? No. Funny, friendly, sexy, dumb. FSD.

• 1:41:10John Coogan?

  On the, on the golden retriever maxing.

• 1:41:12Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 1:41:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. Does a golden retriever you spell check? Absolutely not.

• 1:41:16Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely not.

• 1:41:17John Coogan?

  Ship it. It's gonna be a banger anyway. No one cares if there's a typo in your post.

• 1:41:22Jordi Hays?

  All right. We got a post from Yaxin.

• 1:41:24John Coogan?

  Yaxin.

• 1:41:25Jordi Hays?

  Yaxin. We need to have him on the show.

• 1:41:28John Coogan?

  We should. I don't know how to pronounce it.

• 1:41:30Jordi Hays?

  But he says, the only AI risk that I'm concerned about is the risk of me not making an F ton of money off of AI.

• 1:41:38John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 1:41:39Jordi Hays?

  I think that's a right, the, the gen, you know.

• 1:41:43John Coogan?

  It's good bait for us.

• 1:41:43Jordi Hays?

  Generally, the, the right point of view for most people. I actually think, I think it is a good thing broadly that there are a group of humans focused on AI safety.

• 1:41:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:41:53Jordi Hays?

  Like that, that, that's like generally probably a good use of resources.

• 1:41:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:41:57Jordi Hays?

  For the future of humanity. That said, if you're not a, you know, sort of philosopher, king or queen type, who's going, wants to spend all their time thinking about the impacts of AI and the potential risks, you should probably just focus on how to make money with AI. And, you know, this idea of you don't want to just be worried about something. You want to be sort of like taking action, right? So if you're worried about, you know, losing your job from AI, build a business with AI, right?

• 1:42:26John Coogan?

  This is remarkably good post because I've, I've, I've also come around on AI safety. I think DeepSeek was a big moment for me in terms of like, I want to know if they are embedding in, if an open source model has a, a bad version or a jailbreak version embedded inside of it. And the AI safety teams are like the only ones that can really evaluate that.

• 1:42:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:49John Coogan?

  So I think that's really interesting. So all of a sudden, while I'm not worried about like overall overnight, like the nanobots come, like the Eliezer Yudikowsky theme of like, I'm just gonna be turned into a paperclip overnight. It's like, no, but like Stuxnet did happen, like, you know, like the, the, the, the pagers did explode. Like these, these hacking attempts do happen.

• 1:43:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I think I brought that up. I was like, the, what is the AI equivalent of Stuxnet where something?

• 1:43:13John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:43:14Jordi Hays?

  You know, travels without.

• 1:43:15John Coogan?

  It's dormant in there. And if, and if there's a trigger word, it goes and it steals some data and that's it. It's like, that's worth, that's worth investigating. And the AI safety teams are the ones who would be equipped to run those evals. So. That's interesting, but then also, we've been saying for a while that like the like, like the stop measuring AI against all these random evals and instead just measure it against how much money people are making from it because that's at the end of the day, the value capture is usually a weighing machine.

• 1:43:42Jordi Hays?

  Even Satya saying, I'm really looking at the real benchmark to him is GDP growth around AI, right? So what is the, what is the impact? Old Billy comments here. He says, yeah, I'm an AI researcher, researching how to stack that paper. Great line.

• 1:44:00John Coogan?

  I wonder how, I wonder how accretive the current AI revenues are to GDP. Like, because you could see every dollar that goes into character AI being like, it's taking $10 out of the economy. Not to like throw a ton of shade at character, but like it is.

• 1:44:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's, you know, you spend a dollar on character AI and you skip dinner and you don't, you know, take your girlfriend on a trip and you know, suddenly like you're, you're thinking to yourself.

• 1:44:29John Coogan?

  It is possible to have like destructive.

• 1:44:31Jordi Hays?

  I can get by on my parents allowance. I don't need to go, you know, there's very, there's sort of a dark scenario where it's very destructive.

• 1:44:39John Coogan?

  I mean, at the very least, we've seen a lot of technology get rolled out over the last, I don't know, two, three, five decades with that haven't, hasn't caused massive GDP growth. Everyone was expecting, oh, the internet is going to be the thing that, you know, cures stagnation, right? Because, you know, prior to 1970, the US economy was growing very, very fast post-war boom, right? And then we kind of stagnated and GDP growth, real GDP growth kind of slowed to, you know, two, three percent real.

• 1:45:08Jordi Hays?

  And now the Atlanta Fed reporting two and a half percent negative GDP growth. Who knows? Who knows what's real, right? GDP is politicized.

• 1:45:17John Coogan?

  Maybe if we go down a bunch, it's easier to build back up.

• 1:45:19Jordi Hays?

  Run it back up.

• 1:45:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Run it back up.

• 1:45:21Jordi Hays?

  You're on a smaller base, you can grow faster.

• 1:45:24John Coogan?

  It's good. Yeah. Really, America just wants to grind harder.

• 1:45:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:28John Coogan?

  That's the whole point here.

• 1:45:29Jordi Hays?

  Trump is trying to inspire Americans to grind harder.

• 1:45:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. GDP is going down because we need to grind harder.

• 1:45:37John Coogan?

  Oh, my God. It's so stupid.

• 1:45:38Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, speaking of grinding harder, we got a post from Shkreli. So Raboy was on the show yesterday. He said, quote, "Work at an outstanding organization for a year or two before starting your own company." And he gave some, there's some other context here, and he said there's some great entrepreneurs that just sort of one-shot their companies, right? One-shot, you know, entrepreneurship, right? Zuckerberg's a good example of this. But.

• 1:46:01John Coogan?

  Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, right?

• 1:46:04Jordi Hays?

  Steve Jobs did not. He interned at HP.

• 1:46:07John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that's right. That's right.

• 1:46:08Jordi Hays?

  Again, you could argue.

• 1:46:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do we count in for tips or not?

• 1:46:11Jordi Hays?

  That's a good question. So this shouldn't have been a controversial quote, especially in the context of it, but it's started a conversation. And Raboy's point was that you get this feel for taste, a taste of what great is. And I think that's generally good advice. I gave this advice to a listener who's DMing me company ideas and saying, hey, should I join this company? Should I start this thing? And I just told him unless you're hyper, hyper convicted in an idea, and you can get, you know, people that care about your, truly care about your professional success that are knowledgeable in that sector to say, you know, this is generally, you know, you know, I agree with you. I think this is a big opportunity and I share your conviction.

• 1:46:50Jordi Hays?

  Then go start, go start a company if that's the case. If not, go try to work at the best possible company that you can join. And don't even optimize for the title, comp, or anything like that. Just go work at, you know, go work at an OpenAI, go work at a ramp, go, go work at one of these companies that is gonna, you know, really change your, your perspective around what, what great is, you know, how to have good taste across marketing and product and things like that. So I was surprised at how controversial this was. Avi. Avi was posting, nobody that I look up to, you know, ever worked for anyone else.

• 1:47:23John Coogan?

  Taking shots at Warren Buffett, taking shots at Jensen.

• 1:47:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Skrely put together a list of absolute dogs who worked at other organizations. So if you want to run down the list.

• 1:47:34John Coogan?

  Warren Buffett, Jensen Wong, George Soros, Peter Thiel, John Carmack, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Mike Bloomberg, Phil Knight, Tom Peterfee, Peterfee? I don't know who that is. CZ and then Jeff Yass, Yan Koo, Ray Dalio, Leon Black, a lot of finance people since he really knows his finance chops. But then also GDB from OpenAI.

• 1:47:53Jordi Hays?

  Yep, Brian Armstrong, Benioff.

• 1:47:55John Coogan?

  Yep, every Tiger Cub, I love that one.

• 1:47:57Jordi Hays?

  That's great. Anyway, so, you know, advice is best taken, you know, generally. You don't have to apply every bit of advice you get from a podcast to your life. But, but generally, you know, there's too much evidence that this can tremendously accelerate your abilities and your career.

• 1:48:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. It's like the, it's like the Jeremy Giffon quote of, you know, Mozart never asked how to write concertos. If, but if you have a question in your mind of what you should do, go work at an outstanding company because that's either going to be, that's going to be great no matter what, and it certainly doesn't close off becoming a generational entrepreneur.

• 1:48:39Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:48:39John Coogan?

  So if there's a question, but yes, if you truly are like working on this and you have this burning desire, you're not even going to ask, you're not even listening to this clip. You know, you're just like, I'm already building and there's nothing that can stop me and that's fine.

• 1:48:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would, I would argue since we had Eric on from Ramp today, I would argue that if Eric hadn't built a fintech company and then went and worked at a big company like Capital One, he would not have had the insight or the know-how or the relationship with Kareem and all that stuff to go and build Ramp. Like Ramp wouldn't exist in its current form if he didn't have that sort of body of experience and the network, right? And so.

• 1:49:15John Coogan?

  The Tiger Cub thing is so funny to me because, so Julian Robertson funds Tiger Management, very successful hedge fund. Bunch of people spin out, they're all called Tiger Cubs. And one of them is Chase Coleman starts Tiger Global, like what, mocking your former boss, basically? Like Tiger Global sounds more aggressive than Tiger Management to me.

• 1:49:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, it sounds like the parent company.

• 1:49:37John Coogan?

  It does, it does. So imagine like you go and work at like, you know, Apple or something and then you leave and you're like, actually my new company is going to be called Apple Global. It's like very funny. I wonder, I mean, obviously Julian Robinson like

• 1:49:49Jordi Hays?

  My new company is called Fruit Management.

• 1:49:53John Coogan?

  I think, I think the Tiger Cup thing is specific because it's like, I think Julian Robinson would like set people up to like succeed, like actually stake the fund. So he was very much like starting them. So it was great that it's like carry the brand forward because I will retire and you will be running the new organization. But it's still just like a funny thing. What is going on with this Axe perplexity, Axe perplexity account? Is this, is this fully AI automated? Is this just their social media manager? What do you think's going on here?

• 1:50:18Jordi Hays?

  The perplexity CEO, it's Arvin, right?

• 1:50:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:22Jordi Hays?

  He knows how to, he knows how to post.

• 1:50:25John Coogan?

  He knows X.

• 1:50:25Jordi Hays?

  He knows, he knows X.

• 1:50:26John Coogan?

  He does.

• 1:50:27Jordi Hays?

  How to get attention. This is a funny one. Please stop tagging me in questions about meme coins. I don't reply to broke people.

• 1:50:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:50:34Jordi Hays?

  Really, you know, trying to get a reaction out of the crypto community.

• 1:50:41Jordi Hays?

  Somebody replies, why didn't you buy TikTok, broke boy? Which is, which is

• 1:50:46John Coogan?

  It's hilarious because they were, they were talking big game about that.

• 1:50:48Jordi Hays?

  Set themselves up for that.

• 1:50:49John Coogan?

  Is this, is this the, is this the at chat thing we were talking about with Grok and X? Where like you could just, can you just at this and it will answer? And it's basically a bot, it's automated?

• 1:50:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So somebody, somebody tags Axe, ask perplexity, what meme coin should I buy?

• 1:51:03John Coogan?

  And it gives you the real answer.

• 1:51:04Jordi Hays?

  Immediately responds with, with kind of a perplexity style answer.

• 1:51:08John Coogan?

  Which basically just says, I can't devise anything.

• 1:51:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:13John Coogan?

  But that makes sense. Okay. So, so there's probably someone managing the account who's posting like the major ones, but then it also acts as a bot, right? So it's both. Interesting. I mean, it's good. More, more perplexity attention, more impressions, more people reminding them, hey, maybe fire up the app again, give it another try. Drag back into this, in the ecosystem. I wonder how long this lasts. Because, I mean, the Grok button is literally there on this, on this post. Elon's very aggressive with competitors.

• 1:51:43Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:51:44John Coogan?

  I don't see a world where he's happy that there's another AI system running on Axe.

• 1:51:50Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:51:50John Coogan?

  That you can interact with on Axe, even though

• 1:51:53Jordi Hays?

  He hasn't been accused, it doesn't feel

• 1:51:57Jordi Hays?

  If he has shadow banned Sam Altman.

• 1:52:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:01Jordi Hays?

  It's not working.

• 1:52:02John Coogan?

  Oh, no, no, I don't think he said that.

• 1:52:04Jordi Hays?

  No, no, but I'm just saying that the people have had this idea that, okay, you're building on an Elon platform. If you're competing with Elon, you're going to have a bad time.

• 1:52:13John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:52:14Jordi Hays?

  Yet X is probably the most important.

• 1:52:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:17Jordi Hays?

  Sort of, sort of comms engine.

• 1:52:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:19Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI still, at least for the industry, obviously.

• 1:52:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, I more just think like the API pricing, like it's got to be really expensive. I know that they raise the pricing and so, you know, it's like it's got to be unaffordable at some point to build anything on top of this, especially if you're building something that should just be an XAI product.

• 1:52:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he just adds a couple zeros to your API pricing.

• 1:52:41John Coogan?

  Uh, anyway, Sean's in meetings, he can't call in, but he said he's good for tomorrow or Thursday. We got to ask him about, uh, he's, since he's in all the Elon companies, we got to ask him about that. And then we got to ask.

• 1:52:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he's in X.

• 1:52:51John Coogan?

  Are, I want to, I want to know, he's in X and I think he's in XAI.

• 1:52:55Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:52:55John Coogan?

  And I think he's in SpaceX. And I, I don't know if he's in Tesla, but we'll see if he's in a Tesla, if he owns a Tesla. And I want to know if he has a Roadster. If he has a Roadster reservation.

• 1:53:06Jordi Hays?

  The timing there.

• 1:53:07John Coogan?

  Um, yeah.

• 1:53:07Jordi Hays?

  Insight. I'm sure he owns Tesla in the public markets, one way or another.

• 1:53:13John Coogan?

  Maybe he might be conflicted out. Sometimes you can't trade those things.

• 1:53:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:53:16John Coogan?

  Too much inside information.

• 1:53:18Jordi Hays?

  True.

• 1:53:18John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, let's move on.

• 1:53:20Jordi Hays?

  We got a post from Aiden, a friend of the pod. I've been talking with Aiden lately, trying to give him, uh, my point of view on, on how he should, uh, approach his next career move. He's been working on startups. He has some bunch of good ideas, uh, and then a bunch of people trying to recruit him as well. So he's got a lot of opportunity. But he says, this goes unbelievably hard. And it says, during my 44 years as a career CEO and serial entrepreneur, I think I've made every possible mistake in business. I've overpaid for acquisitions and botched integrations. I've run operations for cash when I should have invested for growth. I've delegated tasks I should have done myself. Sometimes I've hired the wrong people or made strategic bets that didn't pay off.

• 1:54:01Jordi Hays?

  And yet my teams and I have managed to create tens of billions of dollars of value for our shareholders. This book. Is about what I've learned from my blunders and how you can replicate our successes. In corporate America, I'm what's called a moneymaker.

• 1:54:13John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:54:14Jordi Hays?

  I've started five companies from scratch, seven if you include two spinoffs, and turn them into all into billion dollar, multi-billion dollar enterprises. My teams and I have completed approximately 500 acquisitions and opened more than 250 greenfield locations. In total, these ventures have created hundreds of thousands of jobs and raised about 30 billion in outside capital. So this is obviously Brad Jacobs.

• 1:54:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:54:37Jordi Hays?

  He's got a book, If You Want to Make a Billion Dollars, he's got a great book for you. It's called How to Make a Few Billion Dollars.

• 1:54:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:54:42Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 1:54:43John Coogan?

  How to make a few billion dollars.

• 1:54:44Jordi Hays?

  Great book, and this is the intro to the book.

• 1:54:46John Coogan?

  And he has a great, he has a great, like this crazy exercise that feels like, I don't know, like some, something like a psychic would tell you or something. But he's basically like, I want you to physically visualize what a billion dollars looks like. Like mentally, in your mind, like stack up the bills inside of a room. It's enough to fill like a massive ballroom. Imagine that. And then imagine all the things that you would need to do to like make that yours and then just go do them. And this is like, kind of like crazy mental exercise.

• 1:55:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:16John Coogan?

  That I just really, I really thought, like made the book stand out in like very unique ways.

• 1:55:21Jordi Hays?

  You should lead tomorrow, you should lead the audience through that exercise.

• 1:55:26John Coogan?

  Do that exercise, I'd love to.

• 1:55:27Jordi Hays?

  And you should do it weekly, right?

• 1:55:28John Coogan?

  I, I, I screen recorded the audio book when I was listening to it. I said, I sent it to David Senra and I was like, this guy is on a different level. This is crazy. Yeah, it's fantastic. Yeah, that's a great, that's a great quote. Yeah, highly recommend reading, reading Brad Jacobs. It's good. And I like how Andrew Gardner hears, like, haven't read it, but I could immediately tell it was Brad Jacobs. Like it is, it is his brand to a T.

• 1:55:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, a lot of interesting stuff.

• 1:55:57Jordi Hays?

  We got another post from Schwetta.

• 1:55:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:59Jordi Hays?

  I think I'm saying that right. She says, if the founder you invested was in Aspen this month, you can write that investment down to zero. And harsh, potentially true. February is a tough month. There's not a good, there's not a lot of good arguments to be in Aspen in February.

• 1:56:15John Coogan?

  No, why not? Can you ski?

• 1:56:17Jordi Hays?

  For capital allocators, I can think of 100 reasons.

• 1:56:20John Coogan?

  And when is the Aspen Ideas Festival? I think that's over the summer.

• 1:56:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:25John Coogan?

  That's when you want to be there.

• 1:56:26Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:56:26John Coogan?

  Because then there'll be like the big debates and stuff.

• 1:56:28Jordi Hays?

  If somebody's in Sun Valley in February, that's not a serious operator.

• 1:56:32John Coogan?

  Unless I'm, unless I find out that you're in Sun Valley on Alami stock photos because you got caught by paparazzi, you shouldn't be there. That's the only, that's the only reason to be in one of these places is if the paparazzi are there taking pics of you next to Sundar and Tim Cook.

• 1:56:49Jordi Hays?

  Yep. But, but yeah, it's a funny thing. I do think founders need to be, if you're a venture backed founder with a, with a team.

• 1:56:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:56:57Jordi Hays?

  Small or big, it's really hard to have any type of divide between your personal life and your professional life as a founder, because you need to be, you know, if you're not sort of 100% fixated on what you're building at all times, like Saturday, you know, obsessing and sort of frustrated around, as a founder, you should be annoyed on Saturday that everyone else is offline. Like, I think that's like the default, you know, sort of state that, that early stage founders specifically need to be in. And I think that, you know, I've seen founders mess up optically around, you know, it's not sending good signals to the world if you were on, you know, a week long ski vacation in February and your company's not absolutely ripping.

• 1:57:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:57:42Jordi Hays?

  And even if it is ripping, the challenge is that people are going to judge you for that.

• 1:57:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:57:45Jordi Hays?

  People are hyper, hyper, hyper judgmental of founders. In the same way that VCs get on a different, you know, sort of in a different way, right? It's like, oh, they're in Aspen, they're not working hard. Founders are like, oh, they're in Aspen, their company is a zero, right?

• 1:57:59John Coogan?

  You know who, you know what founder I would not judge for being in Aspen? And I would not write down the stock if I found out that they were in Aspen this month?

• 1:58:09John Coogan?

  Wander. Because you know that they're onboarding a new, that they'd be there with a purpose because their

• 1:58:16Jordi Hays?

  With a customer.

• 1:58:17John Coogan?

  Is in, is in Aspen. We love Wander here. Go check it out. Go book a Wander. Find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. But yeah, seriously. Obviously, there are a bunch of, there are exceptions to every rule.

• 1:58:37Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:58:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. Don't, don't go to Aspen if you're building a B2B SaaS company for sewage treatment plants and there's no sewage treatment plants there.

• 1:58:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And you know what, John?

• 1:58:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:47Jordi Hays?

  Wander is going to give away a trip for free to our audience.

• 1:58:51John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:58:51Jordi Hays?

  All you have to do is create an account.

• 1:58:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:58:53Jordi Hays?

  Totally free to enter and you could go to Aspen for free.

• 1:58:56John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:58:57Jordi Hays?

  On us, courtesy of the Technology Brothers. So wander.com/tbpn is a great place to go.

• 1:59:04John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:59:04Jordi Hays?

  If you're interested in Aspen.

• 1:59:06John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Should we do another post?

• 1:59:08Jordi Hays?

  Another post. We got a post from Sam Altman. He is posting a screenshot with, and the caption is just two exclamation points. That's how you know it's serious. He says, "Okay, so relying on only your own first principles thinking and not giving much weight to what you've read, what do you personally, as GPT-4 or 5, think? Is consciousness the only thing that exists? Or is that material, is the materialistic universe also real? Please try to answer as clearly as you can." Do you want to play it, you know, role-play the AI, John?

• 1:59:38John Coogan?

  So it's, it kind of repeats this. It says, "What I personally think. Consciousness definitely exists. This is undeniable, since all experience directly proves awareness itself. Matter, or a material universe, is always inferred indirectly through consciousness. We never directly observe matter independently, only perceptions appearing within consciousness. Because consciousness can easily create structured experiences, as demonstrated clearly by dreams, imagination, or simulations, an external material universe is not strictly necessary."

• 2:00:16John Coogan?

  Given that matter is never directly experienced independently, it seems logically simpler and clearer to conclude that, and this is what GPT 4.5 thinks about the universe, consciousness alone truly exists, and the material universe is merely a consistent experiential creation within consciousness itself. My clear personal conclusion is GPT 4.5, yes, consciousness is likely the only fundamental existence. No, I do not think a separate materialistic universe independently exists. Bizarre. And of course, this is, this is like highly relevant because like it is simulated. And so if you're a simulation hypothesis guy,

• 2:00:56John Coogan?

  like, this is wild, right? Because it's like, yeah, like, are, is there anything real? Or are we just, is consciousness the only thing? And that's what it's basically saying. And certainly, we would say that that is true for GPT 4.5. So like, I would, I would say, like, this is true for the experience of this particular AI. But I would definitely say it's not true for me. I'm built different. I'm in the real world. I have a materialist experience. Look at this watch. I got it on bezel.com.

• 2:01:31John Coogan?

  It's materialist. As long as we're talking about materialistic universes, let's talk about materialistic items. Let's go to bezel.

• 2:01:39Jordi Hays?

  Let's go. No, I mean, it's absolutely wild. I think some of the most thought provoking responses are when you ask the AI, not, how do I make, you know, it sounds obvious when you say that out loud, but how do I make a good avocado toast? It's how, what, what is the meaning of life? And then, and then it sort of gives you a pretty good answer, right? That's sort of based on humanity's consciousness in a way, because it's been trained on, you know, humanity, right? So.

• 2:02:06John Coogan?

  Matter is just an internally generated experience of consciousness, not independently real. That's what we're dealing with, with this AI. You know what? I think you're wrong.

• 2:02:16Jordi Hays?

  We'll get back to you, we'll get back to you after the break.

• 2:02:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I think you're right.

• 2:02:20Jordi Hays?

  All right, we got a post from Bridget. She says the GDP per capita in most African countries is $2,000. And then the average yearly revenue per user to sports betting platforms in Africa is also $2,000. And this is just another argument for why the United States needs-

• 2:02:39John Coogan?

  How is this possible?

• 2:02:40Jordi Hays?

  No, I think, I think it's that the average person in Africa is basically like the people that are sports betting in Africa-

• 2:02:46John Coogan?

  Rich.

• 2:02:46Jordi Hays?

  Are doing well.

• 2:02:47John Coogan?

  Got it, got it, got it.

• 2:02:49Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, so, so I can see how this makes sense, but this is more evidence of your post yesterday that the United States needs a strategic parlay reserve to allow every American, the, the sort of, uh, once a week to get the rush of a potentially, uh, life-changing wealth.

• 2:03:09John Coogan?

  You know, guys like Saagar and Jetty will come out there and be like, oh, sports betting's so bad. I don't like sports betting. Well, if it's so bad, why don't we use USAID to send sports betting to countries that we want to infiltrate and destroy?

• 2:03:23Jordi Hays?

  Smart.

• 2:03:23John Coogan?

  Why don't we airdrop parlays to North Korea, destabilize their entire economy? Why don't we, why don't we take a, uh, super long shot bets?

• 2:03:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:36John Coogan?

  QR code, drop that over the Forbidden City. Get everyone at the Forbidden City addicted to sports betting.

• 2:03:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I gotta give you this, but John, is it possible that DraftKings is, uh, you know, a, a deep state operation?

• 2:03:50John Coogan?

  I have no, I, not at this point, but if, but if we send, if we send DraftKings to, uh, to the Kremlin-

• 2:03:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:57John Coogan?

  And we get, and we get Putin, maybe that's the cure for the war.

• 2:04:00Jordi Hays?

  If we airdrop, if we airdrop one, you know, $5, you know, match-

• 2:04:05John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:04:06Jordi Hays?

  Over-

• 2:04:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:07Jordi Hays?

  Over Moscow.

• 2:04:08John Coogan?

  Think about this. So Putin is clearly just going to war because he's, uh, he needs a rush. He needs a thrill. And he probably doesn't have a lot of access to sports betting. And so if we brought him sports betting, then he's like, I don't, I don't wanna, I, I just don't get the same rush out of the war.

• 2:04:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:27John Coogan?

  So I'm gonna wind down the war. We're gonna have world peace through sports betting.

• 2:04:31Jordi Hays?

  World peace through sports betting.

• 2:04:33John Coogan?

  I think that's

• 2:04:33Jordi Hays?

  That is a bold idea. I think you should do a TED Talk on it.

• 2:04:35John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:04:36Jordi Hays?

  I think you should look at the data and make a case based on the data.

• 2:04:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, that, uh, that world peace is possible. It just, we need universal basic parlay.

• 2:04:45John Coogan?

  We do, we do, truly.

• 2:04:48Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, uh, Packy, we got a poster.

• 2:04:51John Coogan?

  Bats?

• 2:04:52Jordi Hays?

  Is there another?

• 2:04:53John Coogan?

  Oh, he's saying he, this looks like a bad bat.

• 2:04:55Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, speaking of, uh, potentially a parlay to put together here, Packy, uh, quote tweet. So, uh, we talked about this yesterday.

• 2:05:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:03Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Apple's chat GPT like version of Siri, which I think is an OpenAI partnership, uh, right? They had a partnership of some sorts, but maybe they're

• 2:05:12John Coogan?

  This is so confusing. I don't understand what they're canceling because so the, the headline is, is Apple has now delayed a chat GPT like version of Siri. But they were just telling us that they launched a chat GPT like version of Siri called Apple Intelligence. And that rolled out in a bunch of beta tests and is like available. And then also you can go into your Siri settings right now on your phone. As long as you have the latest software and you can integrate your chat GPT credentials. And so you can use chat GPT through Siri right now.

• 2:05:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:51John Coogan?

  And so I don't know what this is that they're delaying. Like, we all know it's bad and it's not working.

• 2:05:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:58John Coogan?

  So I guess they're just saying like, hey, we were going to improve it because we know it's bad. But now we're acting like we've never launched anything, but it's like they clearly did. Apple's chat GPT like version of Siri, that's just Apple Intelligence. You launched that. It didn't go very well. Now you're saying you're delaying the launch of it, but you already launched it and you put billboards up everywhere in 2024. And so very confusing. Anyway, there's been a bunch of talk about this. Packy had a spicy take. He said, Apple will not be a top 10 company by market cap by the end of this decade in 2021. That's a crazy, crazy take.

• 2:06:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:33John Coogan?

  I mean, that's a completely different question because they print money and, and they have a monopoly on a bunch of different things in the App Store and all the service revenue. But Packy says.

• 2:06:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the idea that luxury goods have proven to be a fantastic business for the RNOs.

• 2:06:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:06:51Jordi Hays?

  They're worth, if LVMH collectively is worth 300 billion is the sort of consumer electronics equivalent. If Apple just becomes a luxury business that's less focused on innovation, but more so just making the best kind of commodity devices. Is that worth, is that, is that a $3 trillion company? Like, is it worth 10 times more than LVMH if they can be a toll road on so many transactions?

• 2:07:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:07:18Jordi Hays?

  Still feels like it's possible, even if they sort of stop innovating.

• 2:07:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:07:22Jordi Hays?

  But, but yeah, overall, he says, looks like a bad bet right now. Apple is the most valuable company in the world by a healthy margin. But there's so many little cracks like this one. They have lost the it and it's only a matter of time. So very interesting to follow.

• 2:07:38John Coogan?

  I don't know, it's just so hard. Look at Microsoft, Microsoft lost the it like decades ago and is still super, super valuable, right? Like Microsoft Windows stopped being cool in 2001, right?

• 2:07:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:55John Coogan?

  Like it literally ceased to be like a cool company. And it was like, oh, you're running Windows XP at work? Like, that's a bummer.

• 2:08:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:04John Coogan?

  Like, yeah, well, you know, we have to run Windows XP for the security patches or whatever. And then they just use that to print a trillion dollars.

• 2:08:11Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:08:11John Coogan?

  Apple has returned a trillion dollars to shareholders. They have generated a trillion dollars in cash, in cash. It's so much money.

• 2:08:20Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:08:22John Coogan?

  Gravy train ain't stopping. It's just going to be hard to displace them. Who, who's going to build the computers?

• 2:08:28Jordi Hays?

  Perplexity announced a phone with T-Mobile, the AI phone.

• 2:08:31John Coogan?

  Perplexity phone. You know, there's, obviously there's a lot of people that are like, oh, that's like a super bearish signal, right? But the interesting one is Solana launched a Solana phone. Obviously, I think it didn't do well.

• 2:08:44Jordi Hays?

  Now they're in the strategic reserve.

• 2:08:45John Coogan?

  But, yeah, like it was a, it was a, it was a boondoggle. I think the Solana phone was like a side project.

• 2:08:51Jordi Hays?

  Here's the bet.

• 2:08:51John Coogan?

  But it, but it wasn't a death now.

• 2:08:53Jordi Hays?

  Here's the bet.

• 2:08:53John Coogan?

  It wasn't a death now.

• 2:08:54Jordi Hays?

  We have a strategic crypto token reserve. Perplexity is betting that there's going to be a strategic. Token reserve, the other kind of token.

• 2:09:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:03Jordi Hays?

  And if they have some tie to the real world.

• 2:09:05John Coogan?

  Internal reasoning tokens.

• 2:09:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. We have a question on X from Gordon Gecko. He says, is this what you guys do every single day? And the answer is yes. Every Monday through Friday. Some people like formatting PowerPoints. We like doing a daily

• 2:09:27John Coogan?

  Livestream.

• 2:09:28Jordi Hays?

  Technology and business, you know, show and

• 2:09:31John Coogan?

  It is so funny how everyone else that has a show has to pretend like they have some other job. Like they're like, oh, really? I'm like an investor, so I can only do this once a week for an hour. It's like, we all know, you know, podcasting is the most important thing in the world, so the other stuff's just window dressing.

• 2:09:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, right. So yes, the answer is yes.

• 2:09:55Jordi Hays?

  Going forward, we got a post from Dan Ko. He says, everyone is going to make their own apps with AI. That's a quote, and he says, my friend, you don't even make your own food. You'll still pay a few bucks to use an app. And I think this is a great take.

• 2:10:09John Coogan?

  So true.

• 2:10:11Jordi Hays?

  There's, you know, like, the idea, like, I'm a firm believer in that apps become memes in the way that you're going to generate apps. And there's going to be some novelty and maybe some value. And maybe for little stuff like, hey, I want to make a custom weather app that, you know, that should be able to kind of maintain itself and, you know, stuff like that. But the idea that you're going to, you know,

• 2:10:35Jordi Hays?

  anything with network effects, obviously, is like a different story. But even the idea that you're going to generate a CRM that's on par with HubSpot or Salesforce or some of these other products, and then you're going to be building your business, but also maintaining your AI-generated CRM. That's breaking all the time. And if it's, and if, you know, you get some like data loss or something like that, like

• 2:10:58John Coogan?

  I mean, I talked to people at Dollar Shave Club, they built their own They built like a MailChimp replacement or something at that company like, cause like, they were like, we're a tech company and they, and they hired a bunch of engineers and they built like an email management system for, to like, you know, send transactional emails. And it was like this big system and of course, like you can, it's like, you're kind of saving money because you're not in, and you're getting more customization, but ultimately, and, and all of that was, was predicated on like, well, you know, now we have, you know, the ability to write programming code really quickly with like, you know, abstract languages like Python. We're, we're at a higher level of abstraction. So we can build this faster and they did, but it was still like, you're upside down on the trade because like, you're only selling it once.

• 2:11:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I think the way to look at, the way to look about software costs is like an example, like a MailChimp or Beehive or something like that is you pay, like, let's say you're an early stage company, you pay a thousand dollars a month for something. You are getting the benefit of potentially a million dollars of R and D spent a month on that specific area. And you only have to pay a thousand dollars. You don't even, you know, maybe you have to think about it, you know, actually building out integrations and stuff like that. But in general, that the value of, I'm going to spend a thousand dollars and get a million dollars, you know, millions of dollars a year in R and D is truly why capitalism is goaded.

• 2:12:13John Coogan?

  And this is the big question about those, like, buy an old business and drop a, drop AI on top of it is like, well, is everyone doing the same thing? Because that doesn't change the competitive dynamics. It doesn't change the market structure. If everyone, if it's like, yes, like, uh, there are a bunch of like web design agencies, you could buy them and tell them to use Cursor and Figma instead of whatever they're using right now. But if everyone's doing the same thing, it's not going to really change the economic structure. So you better be happy with the price you paid at the current multiple and the current cash flow generation for what you paid, because you shouldn't expect it to 10x like a venture bet. Interesting.

• 2:12:52Jordi Hays?

  We got another post. So this company launched yesterday. It's called Orca. Uh, it's an energy drink that tastes like water. And I just wanted to highlight this hilarious launch video. Did you see it?

• 2:13:02John Coogan?

  I saw it.

• 2:13:02Jordi Hays?

  So it's a, it's basically this woman, she says, introducing Orca. This is a flavored, basically wa, caffeine water.

• 2:13:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, caffeine water.

• 2:13:10Jordi Hays?

  They hard post. Amazon link, which, which maybe worked out for them.

• 2:13:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:13:14Jordi Hays?

  This, this still did numbers, even though I'm sure that throttled them.

• 2:13:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:13:18Jordi Hays?

  But then it says, she basically introduces the product and she says, now this guy is going to read off every.

• 2:13:25John Coogan?

  Corbin Blue.

• 2:13:26Jordi Hays?

  Corbin Blue.

• 2:13:26John Coogan?

  I think is someone famous. I don't know who it is though.

• 2:13:28Jordi Hays?

  I actually didn't realize that he was famous.

• 2:13:30John Coogan?

  This is going to be very offensive because I bet there's like fans out there who are like really into this guy.

• 2:13:36John Coogan?

  But.

• 2:13:37Jordi Hays?

  Oh yeah. Corbin Blue. He was in High School Musical.

• 2:13:39John Coogan?

  There you go. See, I, I knew it was someone important.

• 2:13:42Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely brutal.

• 2:13:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So.

• 2:13:46John Coogan?

  And he reads every stop sign or every sign.

• 2:13:48Jordi Hays?

  Every legal road sign in America.

• 2:13:51John Coogan?

  And it's just very odd. So of course it goes viral.

• 2:13:54Jordi Hays?

  And it's actually a brilliant way to hack the algorithm because the.

• 2:13:58John Coogan?

  Regretted user.

• 2:13:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. Because it's very entertaining and people are clicking this long video and watching the whole thing. So the algorithm is getting the signal that people really love this. I should show it to more people. And I, I, I thought it was hilarious.

• 2:14:10John Coogan?

  Also, speaking of the typo thing, he made a mistake while he was reading that. And people in the comments are like, at seven minutes, he said like the turn left signal, but he put the turn right signal up. Or like he used the wrong hand signal for it. And so people had a lot of fun, kind of like critiquing it and finding that little Easter egg. And then that obviously drove more engagement. And so it all went very viral. I remember seeing when this dropped, we gotta, we gotta do a taste test of this. See if it's better than Celsius.

• 2:14:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we should give it a try. I like it. I, when I was watching the launch video, I was like, wow, this is like a 10 minute long video.

• 2:14:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:50Jordi Hays?

  And I would skip ahead, I'd skip ahead two minutes, more signs, more signs, more signs.

• 2:14:54John Coogan?

  Wait, you did that?

• 2:14:55Jordi Hays?

  I just kept skipping and then I skipped to the end and it just, it finished, Corbin Blue finished strong with the signs. And.

• 2:15:01John Coogan?

  I wonder if he's an investor or something. I wonder why they picked him or like how that happened.

• 2:15:04Jordi Hays?

  I gotta hope that he.

• 2:15:08Jordi Hays?

  Like had some incentive to do this outside of like

• 2:15:11John Coogan?

  I mean.

• 2:15:11Jordi Hays?

  $10,000 or something like that.

• 2:15:13John Coogan?

  I mean, it's a pretty easy job. You just sit down, read a bunch of signs, get a teleprompter.

• 2:15:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he did a good job on this, on the.

• 2:15:19John Coogan?

  The lighting's good. It looks nice.

• 2:15:21Jordi Hays?

  We got a post from Chad Byers. He's been on the show before. He says, "At this point, I won't fund a startup without an MVP, beta, or working prototype. It's just too easy to make stuff today. A pitch with nothing to show is emblematic of a team that's low ambition, conviction, agency, or all three."

• 2:15:36John Coogan?

  Well, Chad, what about a, what about a startup that has a billboard? Let's go to AdQuick and then we will do the analysis, but we're doing the ad inside of this post. So, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Okay, let's go back to the post.

• 2:15:59Jordi Hays?

  Brilliant, John. Great point. If you're a founder, if you're a founder, and you, if you want to make a splash.

• 2:16:07John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:16:07Jordi Hays?

  In, in, in Northern California.

• 2:16:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:16:10Jordi Hays?

  No MVP necessary. Just buy like five or six billboards on AdQuick and you will get enough coverage.

• 2:16:16John Coogan?

  Here's, here's what you do. Okay, I'm not going to tell you where Chad's, where Chad skis, but if you look at his profile picture, you can see there's some skiing going on there. You go GeoGuessr mode. You figure out where that is. You get AdQuick to put up a giant billboard on the favorite mountain. He's up there, "Ah, I finally got away from the hustle and bustle of Silicon Valley." And then he looks over and it says, "Guess what, Chad? I have an MVP, a beta, and a working prototype."

• 2:16:47Jordi Hays?

  And a billboard on your favorite mountain.

• 2:16:50John Coogan?

  And I'm high conviction and I got massive agency and I'm high ambition. Fund my startup. And he's like, "God damn it."

• 2:16:57Jordi Hays?

  Find the, find the Jet Charter Service that Chad uses in a pinch, you know?

• 2:17:04John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:17:04Jordi Hays?

  And wrap the plane.

• 2:17:06John Coogan?

  Wrap the plane.

• 2:17:06Jordi Hays?

  And say, "I don't have a beta, but, but for the next, you know, three, three hour flight, wrap the inside and the outside."

• 2:17:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:17:15Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, there's something there, but I flagged this because I talked to an entrepreneur yesterday.

• 2:17:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:17:21Jordi Hays?

  Who. Who's raising for a SaaS company and he's a buddy of mine. So, you know, we were chatting and he was basically saying like, yeah, it's going to take a couple of years to kind of get feature complete on sort of what, what we've designed to date. And I just said, do not say that to any investor. And before you talk to investors, figure out how you can sort of shrink that timeline by basically 75%.

• 2:17:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:49Jordi Hays?

  Right. It's fine if it's going to take a year to, because it wasn't like, you know, it wasn't SpaceX, it wasn't hard.

• 2:17:56John Coogan?

  Time travel machine.

• 2:17:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No, it was more like.

• 2:17:58John Coogan?

  Because the, the narrative in Silicon Valley is like, humanoids and quantum computers and AI God, like two years max.

• 2:18:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. So if, if Elon is building an XAI data center in Memphis with 200,000 GPUs in a year.

• 2:18:10John Coogan?

  In a year.

• 2:18:11Jordi Hays?

  You can build your SaaS company in three months.

• 2:18:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:18:14Jordi Hays?

  And that is a bar you should hold yourself to internally.

• 2:18:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:18:17Jordi Hays?

  And that is what people will hold you to externally. And it's hard to get conviction in a founder that thinks that, you know, something's going to take two years if it's pure software anymore.

• 2:18:28John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 2:18:29Jordi Hays?

  The bar's been raised, but at the same time, there's more information and, and playbooks out there than ever. So.

• 2:18:35John Coogan?

  And that's also say that it might like, like you will have a five year roadmap. You will have a 10 year roadmap. Like every company that we work with and we see internally, we, we, we see that it's like, oh, wow. Like, yeah, it took a couple of years to get around to launching this new feature or launching this new thing. Like it, it, it doesn't just happen immediately. There is that compound startup philosophy, that idea that you like, try and build everything all at once.

• 2:18:59John Coogan?

  But for a lot of companies, they need to really dial in the software. And it's not so much that like, instantiating the first idea is difficult. Like we're building a to do list. Yes. Getting the right to do list, like coding it is not the problem. It's the finding the product market fit, accelerating it, figuring out the full economic workflow for it. And then doing that again and again and again for every single product in the portfolio.

• 2:19:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:23John Coogan?

  Actually builds like the full company. That does take time. And I think that even though the, the time from like design to its technical instantiation has gotten a lot shorter. That doesn't mean that there's still not like a whole bunch of cycles of talking to customers, testing, seeing can we scale this? Can we advertise this? Are the channels working? And some of that stuff is just going to take time. So it's not that you're going to be retired in two years. It's just that you're going to be able to do more than previously thought in two years.

• 2:19:53Jordi Hays?

  Yep. We got a post from Palmer. He says, uh, so Anduril came out with an announcement today. They are, uh, they say fight unfair. The US Air Force announced the mission design series designation for Anduril CCA prototype, the Y F Q dash 44A. Palmer quote tweets, uh, and says in Chinese culture, the number 44 is considered unlucky because the pronunciation of four sounds similar to the word for death and 44 is seen as double death. So he, they basically named their new autonomous fighter jet, the, the, uh, Y F Q double death A, uh, which, which sounds menacing.

• 2:20:33John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:20:34Jordi Hays?

  If you were, uh, across the pond.

• 2:20:35John Coogan?

  What would, what would China do if they wanted to get back at us? Like, I feel like the number 13 is not that big of a deal over here. It would be funny if they made a huge deal out of it. They were like, guess what? We named our missile, the 13. Friday the 13th. They were all like that, that played out like Halloween movie.

• 2:20:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:56John Coogan?

  Didn't really land.

• 2:20:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:58John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 2:20:58Jordi Hays?

  Stuff. We're not a.

• 2:21:00John Coogan?

  We're not superstitious.

• 2:21:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:01John Coogan?

  I guess we're not as superstitious. I don't know. But I like this. It's fun.

• 2:21:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's fun.

• 2:21:07John Coogan?

  I want to see, I want to see some videos of this, uh, the CCA prototype. I mean, it's going to be a knockout, drag out fight for this.

• 2:21:14Jordi Hays?

  And, and this is ultimately going to inspire the, the Anduril for X, all those out there to also come up with cute and sort of fun.

• 2:21:23John Coogan?

  Agitating.

• 2:21:24Jordi Hays?

  Agitative, uh, names for their, uh, products. So Anduril leading the charge. Again, we got another post from Packy. Tim Cook today says, introducing the newest iPad Air. And it's just an iPad that looks exactly the same as every other iPad.

• 2:21:40John Coogan?

  Well, he's getting into, he's getting into meme posting. He's like, he's like riffing now. It's like a

• 2:21:44Jordi Hays?

  You think Cook is riffing?

• 2:21:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's just like, oh, like, everyone will understand the joke here that like, I'm just posting.

• 2:21:51Jordi Hays?

  We gave up on AI, but don't worry.

• 2:21:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:54Jordi Hays?

  We got, we got a fresh iPad for you.

• 2:21:56John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, no. The, the, the joke of the post here is Tim Cook is just posting the previous iPad Air. And, and he knows that everyone will be like, and he's like, oh, I'm introducing the newest iPad Air. And everyone will know, and then they'll be, they'll think it's funny, right?

• 2:22:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly, John. You nailed it.

• 2:22:16John Coogan?

  Nailed it.

• 2:22:17Jordi Hays?

  Cook is cooking.

• 2:22:18John Coogan?

  High art.

• 2:22:19Jordi Hays?

  No, but Packy says, holy, they did it. Those crazy, I can't say those crazy sons of really, really did it. And imagine.

• 2:22:31John Coogan?

  Apple is back, baby.

• 2:22:34Jordi Hays?

  Jacoby, Apple is back.

• 2:22:36John Coogan?

  Apparently this core core trend research report is like a PDF that they use as like a demonstration, just to like throw something on the screen. And it's this inside joke. And it was like very funny five years ago, but they haven't come up with a new joke since. And so they're still recycling this like same idea of like this insider joke. They haven't come up with a new one. It's very silly. Anyway.

• 2:23:00Jordi Hays?

  We have to, I genuinely, I would genuinely love.

• 2:23:03John Coogan?

  It'd be like introducing the new iPhone.

• 2:23:05Jordi Hays?

  We need to find somebody that recently left Apple.

• 2:23:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:09Jordi Hays?

  That's not under NDA.

• 2:23:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:10Jordi Hays?

  And just grill them.

• 2:23:12John Coogan?

  A whistleblower, but not about the toxic work environment, about the lackadaisical work environment.

• 2:23:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. We need somebody to.

• 2:23:18John Coogan?

  They didn't yell at me once. They didn't, they didn't yell at me at all. They let me, I, I never came in on the weekends. It was too lazy.

• 2:23:26Jordi Hays?

  I left it, I left it 12:30 after lunch on a Friday to have a long lunch and take off.

• 2:23:31John Coogan?

  That's the type of whistleblower we need.

• 2:23:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:23:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. If you work at Apple and you're chilling. Call us.

• 2:23:36Jordi Hays?

  Reach out, reach out.

• 2:23:38John Coogan?

  Anonymous.

• 2:23:38Jordi Hays?

  You don't, so, so there's this phenomenon where every major tech company, you see Apple employees out online, over the internet.

• 2:23:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:23:46Jordi Hays?

  Talking.

• 2:23:47John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 2:23:47Jordi Hays?

  Chatting.

• 2:23:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:23:48Jordi Hays?

  You never see, does anybody work there? Have, have we, do you know anybody that works at Apple right now?

• 2:23:53John Coogan?

  I do, actually. I was supposed to go skiing with one last week. I, I should have gone. Could have gotten the, the inside scoop.

• 2:23:57Jordi Hays?

  And what do they say? I had to go on a different ski trip?

• 2:23:59John Coogan?

  I mean, this guy actually works really hard and like, is like, doing like semiconductor stuff, like in like their fabs and stuff. It's like, it, it, like, the stuff that they do is really legitimate. Uh, they're, the company is just optimized, like, right? Like, so like, what you don't see there.

• 2:24:17Jordi Hays?

  Optimizing, I'm optimizing.

• 2:24:19John Coogan?

  Like, like to steel man this is like, yes, this looks exactly the same, but like, this is the best form factor. They've tried to make the iPad a little bit bigger, a little bit smaller, and nothing else works. Like, no one wants a slightly bigger one. No one wants a slightly smaller one. They want that size.

• 2:24:32Jordi Hays?

  No, but they haven't taken it to the extreme. I need the comically large iPad that's the size of a flat screen. You have to carry with your.

• 2:24:40John Coogan?

  I would love that, yeah.

• 2:24:41Jordi Hays?

  It's actually, it's actually.

• 2:24:42John Coogan?

  I want the printer, but you know, obviously the printer's not a real business.

• 2:24:46Jordi Hays?

  Like, they don't nail the simple things. If you made a, a true Apple TV.

• 2:24:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:51Jordi Hays?

  Not, not the sort of.

• 2:24:52John Coogan?

  I know, I know.

• 2:24:53Jordi Hays?

  Device. I'm talking about a large.

• 2:24:54John Coogan?

  You're talking about the app, the Apple TV? Or are you talking about the streaming service, Apple TV?

• 2:25:00Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm talking about the Apple TV plus plus extreme.

• 2:25:04John Coogan?

  Are you talking about the, the app, the, the streaming service that lives inside the app? That lives inside the device and they're all three called Apple TV?

• 2:25:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Um, no, but there's a world, I would pay for a mattress sized flat screen from Apple that I could mount to my.

• 2:25:21John Coogan?

  Can you imagine how expensive a hundred inch TV would be from Apple?

• 2:25:25Jordi Hays?

  But that's like, I wish they just.

• 2:25:26John Coogan?

  Hundred grand.

• 2:25:27Jordi Hays?

  So, so LVMH will drop a product.

• 2:25:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:29Jordi Hays?

  That's 50 grand.

• 2:25:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:31Jordi Hays?

  And they're just like, yeah, we know some people will buy this, so we're gonna make it. I want Apple to do more stuff like that.

• 2:25:35John Coogan?

  The Apple Watch Edition. $10,000 gold watch, gold Apple watch. Version one immediately became out of, out of, out of date. Like doesn't even run the latest software.

• 2:25:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:45John Coogan?

  Uh, and so, and so they, they wound up cutting out.

• 2:25:47Jordi Hays?

  You don't see those on bezels.

• 2:25:47John Coogan?

  A little bit. They, they do the bracelets.

• 2:25:50Jordi Hays?

  Um, anyways, I want to buy a, uh,

• 2:25:54John Coogan?

  Do we throw that bezel at that? Do we already do the bezel?

• 2:25:57Jordi Hays?

  We already, we already, we already fit one in, but I have a, I have a prepare, prepare a promoted post, but we got a question from T. Di in the chat. He says, question, how do I get out of analysis paralysis?

• 2:26:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:26:08Jordi Hays?

  And I think that's a good question. It's, you've just got to start ruthlessly taking action. I think if you think about, um, I think there, there.

• 2:26:18John Coogan?

  I feel like I knew some story about some guy who like just would carry around a D20.

• 2:26:23John Coogan?

  You know, like a Dungeons and Dragons like dice that has 20 sides. I think it was like a very odd, you know, the A word. I don't know if we're supposed to say that, but like, uh, you know, neurodivergent thing to do. But, uh, yeah, it's like, okay. With, if you carry around a, a, a dice with 20 sides, you can model probabilities down to 5%. So you could say, look, I think that, uh, there's a, uh, there's a 15% chance that I should become an entrepreneur and a 85% chance that I should take Keith or boys advice and be a startup founder first, or, or work at a, work at a large, high performing organization first.

• 2:27:00Jordi Hays?

  Just roll the.

• 2:27:01John Coogan?

  And so, yeah, you roll it. And the way you model it on the D20 is that if it's, if it's a three or under, that's a 15% chance.

• 2:27:08Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:27:08John Coogan?

  Cause every single digit on the D20 is 5%. So you say, okay, I'm just going to roll this dice. And if it comes up three or less, I'm starting my company today. And if it comes up four, between four and 20, I'm, I'm applying to a job at a high growth company. I don't know. I mean, it sounds crazy, but like sometimes it really is valuable. I think just to like, you know, like when, when you're in a, when you're in a business relationship, someone, there's obviously this idea of like disagree and commit. Like, yeah, look, we, we, we, we, you know, we, we, Jordy was saying we should do six days a week. I was saying we should do four days a week or whatever. Like we disagreed, we, we met in the middle, we made a compromise, but we disagreed. But like, we're putting it behind us, we're committing to that.

• 2:27:50Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 2:27:51John Coogan?

  And so you should do that with your life too, to get out of paralysis paralysis. And like just running hard at anything is probably better than waiting around. And so it's the same thing. Should you lift legs or arms? Like, well, just do something aggressively.

• 2:28:07Jordi Hays?

  Ultimately, every act in life is a leap of faith.

• 2:28:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:10Jordi Hays?

  And specifically startups, you know, I don't know TDI's situation. He might be deciding, you know, given the example of do I join a company and work there for two years? Or do I start my own thing? And success is not guaranteed.

• 2:28:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:28:23Jordi Hays?

  You might join the company and you have a bad manager and you don't get access to the CEO.

• 2:28:26John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:28:27Jordi Hays?

  And you don't get any of the learned, positive learnings that Keith is talking about. Or you might start a company and you had the right idea, but you know, a more heavily funded competitor came in and just steamrolled you. But every act is a leap of faith.

• 2:28:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:28:41Jordi Hays?

  And the big, the most like what you work on matter is like, at the end of the day, the only thing that matters.

• 2:28:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:28:48Jordi Hays?

  But you're not going to know, you can't have, you can't go into any decision, you know, with, with a hundred percent certainty of, of the outcome. And that's okay. And you just have to get comfortable with that. And you have to make the decision and make micro adjustments and sometimes macro adjustments. But if you're, if you're waiting for, to be able to make a decision that, that a hundred percent leads to success, you're never going to find that.

• 2:29:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's a good point. I like it.

• 2:29:17John Coogan?

  Anyway, we have pretty much gone through the whole timeline.

• 2:29:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think we should cover Greenland tomorrow.

• 2:29:25John Coogan?

  Okay, let's do Greenland tomorrow.

• 2:29:27Jordi Hays?

  Got to talk about mining, which is cool. We have one more question and then I think we can close out.

• 2:29:32John Coogan?

  Let's do it.

• 2:29:32Jordi Hays?

  Jordy and John, how do you deal with incompetence and lack of speed? This is relevant. So we have somebody joining the team soon. And it was pretty funny because John connected me to him on a Saturday.

• 2:29:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:46Jordi Hays?

  And I will usually, if I'm talking to a candidate and I get introduced on a Saturday morning.

• 2:29:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:52Jordi Hays?

  I'll just say, hey, let me know if you're like, do you want to jump on the phone now? And that's just sort of information gathering. I'm not going to write the person off if they're like, oh, actually like, can we talk Monday or Tuesday? But I am going to judge that interaction. And John introduced me to this guy and he, before I could even respond, he said, are you free right now? I'll give you a call. And so like, that's an immediate signal. And so, you know, we ended up extending an offer to this person. And, but I already knew that like speed was in their DNA, right? And you could tell like, if somebody's, it's Saturday morning at 9:00 AM and they're ready to jump on a call.

• 2:30:31Jordi Hays?

  You can look for those signals, right? You need to be, you should, the entire recruiting process should be figuring out, is somebody competent and are they fast?

• 2:30:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:30:41Jordi Hays?

  And competence and speed are like the two biggest factors. Competent, general competence and speed make up for a lot, even intelligence, right? In a lot of roles, like golden retriever mode is real in companies. If you're just, you know, golden retriever is maybe not the right example, but, but there's sort of this idea of like, if you're competent and you can make generally good decisions and you're fast and you're

• 2:31:03John Coogan?

  A corporate athlete.

• 2:31:04Jordi Hays?

  A true corporate athlete, you're going to do well. So I think the biggest thing is if somebody's in the role and they're incompetent, then you need to potentially find a different

• 2:31:13John Coogan?

  Different role.

• 2:31:13Jordi Hays?

  Different role for them.

• 2:31:14John Coogan?

  Maybe in a different company.

• 2:31:15Jordi Hays?

  But if they're not fast and if they don't have that sort of speed in their DNA, I've never, I've never gotten somebody that didn't want to work fast to work fast. It just

• 2:31:24John Coogan?

  Didn't want to work fast to work fast, yes, but you can, if you give someone the right job, I think people can move faster.

• 2:31:33Jordi Hays?

  For sure.

• 2:31:34John Coogan?

  If they're in a job that isn't rewarding or demanding or like gives them the right feedback cycle, you can, you can steer them towards something that just fires them up.

• 2:31:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:48John Coogan?

  And all of a sudden you're like, wow, that person's doing way more work, way faster. They're pumped because like we found the slot.

• 2:31:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:55John Coogan?

  And so I think that's like how you deal with it. Then kind of the other side is like, just on feedback, you know, being very candid, very open, like, you know, humane, but giving like direct feedback, but then also trying to give as much kind of like meta level, like algorithmic feedback.

• 2:32:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:14John Coogan?

  Not just on this was bad, but what, what is the process? How do we improve the process of whatever, whatever the output was instead of just acting as like the validator.

• 2:32:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:24John Coogan?

  Also acting as the fine tuning of the model.

• 2:32:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:28John Coogan?

  Essentially.

• 2:32:28Jordi Hays?

  Now I had a, one example, you know, people Often don't change and it's disappointing, but it's just reality. But people sometimes don't understand the seriousness of a situation or the importance of a situation. And that they might be working quickly in other areas, but like not on the right thing.

• 2:32:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:32:46Jordi Hays?

  And I had this last year, I had a portfolio company and I'm one of probably the top five shareholders in the company. It was involved super early and the company was at a point, we would have these sort of monthly check-ins with the CEO. A month passed, very little progress happened and I had a very candid conversation with the CEO where I said, if you keep operating like this, the it will be Christmas break, break, whatever that is, if you're a startup founder, but it's going to be between Christmas and New Year's and you're going to be dealing with laying off your team and shutting the company down because at this pace, you're not going to be in a position to raise your next round. The traction is not going to be there and nobody's coming to save you. And between, and I said, let's meet in a week and like, let's see if you can get the pace up.

• 2:33:31Jordi Hays?

  And he absolutely did. He crushed it the rest of the year. He got his round, his next round raised and the company's in a fantastic position right now. And there was something that I think he was too fixated on sort of like the big picture of like where the company's going and all this stuff. And I just said, you need to take sort of ruthless action. And he unlocked something in himself and the company's been dramatically different since then. I think it's different giving that advice to a founder and saying, look yourself in the mirror and decide, you know, understand the situation that you're putting yourself in is very different than, you know, if you talk to a employee who's not motivated and they're not moving quickly and things like that.

• 2:34:12Jordi Hays?

  I haven't had a lot of success in sort of turning somebody from a low, low urgency, low output person into somebody that's super high output. But that was, that was, you know, one very bright point in my year last year where I said, okay, this person like found the next gear.

• 2:34:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:28Jordi Hays?

  And it dramatically transformed the company.

• 2:34:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, I just don't want to be too blackpilled on it because I think like, yes, like there is some like innate speed that is just like in people's DNA or something and they come into an organization and they just go hard no matter what.

• 2:34:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:42John Coogan?

  And you see these people all over. But I do think that there's that there's that next gear that everyone can achieve for sure. And then there's also just, you know, if you get dropped in, if you're parachuting into, you know, Nazi occupied France, and you're a 17 year old or 19 year old kid, like, you can just kind of like stare the opportunity in the face and like, just, just turn it on.

• 2:35:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:08John Coogan?

  Even if it's, even if you've never done it before. And so finding that, that thing that like brings that insane energy and, and really going for it is, is really important. And that's the job of managers is to like unleash that.

• 2:35:19Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:35:21John Coogan?

  Anyway, that's a great show. I thought we had a lot, lot of fun. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 2:35:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, tomorrow, Ben, hold us accountable. Let's, oh, we gotta get some new ones. You people are not leaving enough ads in our reviews.

• 2:35:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, please leave some, leave some ads in our reviews.

• 2:35:39Jordi Hays?

  I got a DM the other day that had an ad in it.

• 2:35:45John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 2:35:48Jordi Hays?

  And, oh, we got one last question. Let's do it. Advice on becoming a creator and not, and cutting out consuming. The answer here is that all the value on social network, or at least 99% of the value created by social networks accrues to the people that create the content versus the people that just use them for entertainment. And so if you, the other thing is, if you don't create content online, you don't really exist online. And it's hard to have a real impact in this world if you have no digital presence.

• 2:36:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, we had a post about that in the last, in the last show notes. I don't know if we got to it, but it was like, oh, in like 1999, oh, someone has a presence online? They must be a weirdo. And then now it's like, someone doesn't have a presence online? They must be a weirdo.

• 2:36:38Jordi Hays?

  And I still think there's, I, I still think that there is value in going through periods of time where you cut out all social activity at all. Like try to just not go on these platforms and try to just focus on your business or your role or whatever, whatever kind of situation you're in. But there will come a time where you should emerge and start sharing what you're doing with the world.

• 2:37:06John Coogan?

  That's fantastic advice. We will see you tomorrow. Thanks for watching. We appreciate you all and have a great Tuesday. Enjoy it. We will see you soon. Sean McGuire on the show tomorrow. Yeah. We're excited. Stay tuned. Stay tuned. Have a good afternoon.