Keith Rabois, Ramp's $13B Valuation, Crypto Reserve, Moon Landing, Packy McCormick and Sheel Mohnot

TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV (01:13) - Ramp Valuation (08:45) - Crypto Reserve (51:08) - TSMC Announcement (58:29) - Lunar Landing (01:03:12) - Keith Rabois (01:29:51) - Packy McCormick (01:57:41) - "Garage Mahals" (02:30:33) - Sheel Mohnot (03:02:58) - Timeline

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Today is Monday, March 3rd, and this show starts now. We got a great show for you guys today. We're talking Ramp Fundraise. We're talking Strategic Crypto Reserve. We're talking about TSMC potentially investing $100 billion in America. Let's go. Also, speaking of America, we landed on the moon again.

• 0:18Jordi Hays?

  We're back. America's back.

• 0:20John Coogan?

  We should have a flat-earther call in. Probably not doing too well today.

• 0:24Jordi Hays?

  In shambles. In absolute shambles.

• 0:27John Coogan?

  Also, we're talking massive garages. Apparently, it's a trend, and the Wall Street Journal covered it.

• 0:31Jordi Hays?

  And we just had to cover it.

• 0:32John Coogan?

  And we had to cover it. It's, people are building 6,000 square foot garages, 3,000, like, 4 times the size of, you know, average house in LA. Minnesota, built different. We're also doing some call-ins today. We got Sheel Mohnot calling in at 1:30, hopefully, and Pacquiao Cormick at 12:30 Pacific. And so, we'll kick it off, take you through the stories, and, uh, yeah, break it all down.

• 0:57Jordi Hays?

  Break it down, John.

• 0:57John Coogan?

  Break it down. Uh, let's kick off with, I gotta adjust my headphones. Too loud. When I, when I get loud, it's a little bit too much.

• 1:05Jordi Hays?

  We're bringing the energy up. Let's go. Cause we've got some big news today.

• 1:08John Coogan?

  We do. Yeah. Uh, Ramp reached a new valuation, $13 billion. That's a lot of money.

• 1:16Jordi Hays?

  It's a big number.

• 1:17John Coogan?

  And so, Eric posts, "Today, Ramp reached a new valuation, $13 billion. We're not Steve Jobs or Wilbur Wright. We don't invent the next iPhone or flying machine. Our job is more modest. Save you time and money, so perhaps you can."

• 1:32Jordi Hays?

  And there's levels to this. They went with the Financial Times for the write-ups.

• 1:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36Jordi Hays?

  At this point, right? This shows a sign of maturity.

• 1:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:39Jordi Hays?

  You know, skipping over the, uh, you know, typical Crunchbase, uh, tech crunch announcement. Uh, very cool to see. And I like that Eric is leading, uh, with, uh, by being a little humble here, right? He's saying, "We are the platform in which you create the next iPhone," not calling out that they're the next iPhone. And I think that's, that's what you want out of a financial institution. You don't want them, uh, you know, thinking that they're reinventing the wheel and making it all about them, right? You just want it to sort of run. In the background.

• 2:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can tell he's been listening to a lot of David Sander's podcast.

• 2:11Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:11John Coogan?

  Founder's podcast because he says, we got here by taking Charlie Munger's quote to heart. Take a simple idea and take it seriously. And Sander has literally said that to me on a phone call before.

• 2:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:22John Coogan?

  About, about, about podcasting.

• 2:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:23John Coogan?

  It's a simple idea, but if you take it seriously, it can grow and grow and grow. Uh, our simple idea, save every business time and money. In less than six years, we incorporated, have saved businesses $2 billion in 20 million hours. Over half in the past 12 months alone. Efficiency isn't flashy, but it builds enduring businesses. Sam Walton, cut Walmart's supply chain down from five components to three. Henry Ford, cut the time to complete a car from 12 hours to 93 minutes. We cut the cost to buy anything from 30 minutes to 30 seconds. Ramp puts lessons of history's greatest entrepreneurs on autopilot. Ask Poshmark, who hit free cash flow goals five months early. Or Anduril, who's able to focus fully on their mission. Or Notion and Cursor, who maintain momentum without sacrificing control. Most companies slow as they grow. That's not happening at Ramp.

• 3:07John Coogan?

  We're determined it won't happen to you either. As we enter the AI age, finance is going from steer assist to self-driving. Expenses that categorize themselves and money that real allocates itself for higher returns. That's an interesting vision.

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I love going back to the simple idea.

• 3:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:25Jordi Hays?

  I think every founder, uh, usually founders start with a simple idea. And then it gets dramatically more complex.

• 3:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:31Jordi Hays?

  And then it's a good sign if you can resimplify it down to just like this core, core idea. And saving every business time and money is a fantastically simple idea that, uh, they can build for decades off of that one simple idea.

• 3:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:44Jordi Hays?

  So, um, amazing to see, uh, you know, I think this, this round from, from what we know, got done last year and, and Ramp has just kept, uh, this ridiculous pace. And, uh, I expect to see many more announcements like it this year.

• 4:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. Also interesting that, uh, This is not a new fundraise that goes into the balance sheet. It's a secondary sale.

• 4:07Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 4:07John Coogan?

  Essentially. And so the, the structure here is the five-year-old company hit a new valuation as part of a share sale in which investors, including Singaporean Sovereign Wealth Fund, GIC, US Private Equity Group, Stripes, and venture capitalists, including Josh Kushner's, Thrive, Cosla Ventures, and General Catalyst, bought $150 million worth of employee stock.

• 4:27Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 4:27John Coogan?

  And so for early employees, they've been working for a long time. They get some liquidity and Ramp gets to reprice the equity, which allows them to hire more people, show them that they're making progress.

• 4:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, notably, this was above the 2022 mark, which is a milestone.

• 4:42John Coogan?

  Seven point six five billion in April of last year.

• 4:45Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 4:45John Coogan?

  And, uh, yeah, I mean, Ramp is, is known for being, I would say, aggressive and high throughput on valuation and, and marking the company. Uh, that's something that is, can often be very, very difficult to do for companies because, uh, it can sometimes mean you're going down. And that's exactly what happened, uh, years ago during the, the kind of the interest rate hike and the, the failure of SVB. Ramp was at an eight point one billion valuation in 2022, but dropped to a five point eight billion a year later as higher interest rates hit consumer spending. Factors that also hit rival fintech companies such as Stripe and Klarna. Fintech obviously went through volatility, given the wild swing in rates

• 5:27John Coogan?

  and spending across businesses and consumers. What I always thought was super interesting about this was that Ramp ripped off the Band-Aid really quickly. And there are a lot of companies that didn't reprice their equity. And there was always a question of, is it zombie corn? Which is something people were saying, but coming out and saying, hey, yeah, look, like the, the market is down 50%. We're down 30%. We're still growing. We're growing into our valuation. It's actually a very strong sign of strength. And it means that for employees...

• 5:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, companies that fixate on a headline number.

• 5:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:58Jordi Hays?

  And are trying to recruit employees based on that, you know, 2022, 21 valuation.

• 6:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, three years ago, we were worth a billion dollars.

• 6:04Jordi Hays?

  Really doesn't work well for anyone, right? It's really difficult.

• 6:07John Coogan?

  People will only fall for it for so long.

• 6:08Jordi Hays?

  Employees are intelligent. They figure stuff out.

• 6:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:11Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, they're not going to, you know, they're eventually going to say, Yeah, I'm going to go somewhere else. Like my equity is worth a fraction of what it was initially priced at. And you know, I can go join another company that's priced fairly, given their traction. So.

• 6:24John Coogan?

  And so they delivered on exactly that, you know, they repriced. So sure, the employees that got in at 8.1 went down to 5.8. They, they were like, oh, but at least they had transparency on what that was worth. It wasn't zero, obviously, because there was a round that happened at 5.8. And now it's up and they can kind of reprice and say, okay, this is what, this is, this is where we're going. And so congratulations to the ramp team. We're going to have a couple of people call in and talk about where that business is and where it's going.

• 6:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So while Packy join, he's been an early investor in the company and covered their journey from, you know, early, early days till now. And then we're going to have Sheel on at the end to talk specifically about just broadly the state of fintech. Cause there was a very long, you know, roughly 700 days where it felt like everybody said fintech is dead. You know, this was like a ZIRP trend, you know, these business models only worked when rates were zero. And it's very clearly not the case. So we're excited to have him on and get his perspective about the kind of the future of the category. And a lot more specifically, the Stripe add in stuff, which he covered last week as well. And we covered a bit. But looking forward to getting his thoughts there. So let's get into the rest of the show.

• 7:32John Coogan?

  Cool. Well, speaking of fintech, if you're looking to invest, you should go to public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They have multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. And speaking of other investments that you can make, that the government might be making.

• 7:51Jordi Hays?

  The. With your tax dollars.

• 7:53John Coogan?

  With your tax.

• 7:54Jordi Hays?

  Presenting.

• 7:55John Coogan?

  You pay your taxes and then, you know, the government.

• 7:57Jordi Hays?

  The government gambles with them.

• 7:58John Coogan?

  In crypto. Uh, I mean, we might have to put on the steel hat for this one as well. And there might be a silver lining here.

• 8:07Jordi Hays?

  We need, we need the steel helmet.

• 8:09John Coogan?

  The tinfoil hat.

• 8:11Jordi Hays?

  We need all of the hats to come out today for the story of Trump. The funny thing is like the, the, the real takeaway from this is that when Trump plans anything crypto related, something big is gonna happen. So first time he obviously launched the Trump coin, got everybody together, got the industry together and said, all right, now I have my own token. And you guys are all sidelined because you're here in tuxedos instead of at your computers, you know, trading. And this time launching the strategic crypto reserve, or at least formally announcing it.

• 8:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. So the story from the Wall Street Journal is crypto prices jump after Trump announces five tokens for strategic reserve. And so Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, Ripple linked XRP and Cardano will be in the, in the stockpile. And so crypto prices surged Sunday after President Trump said he would move forward on a US crypto strategic reserve that would include Bitcoin and Ether as well as three smaller and riskier tokens. Lots of fun. And the, and the US would actually be buying these. Such an odd time to announce these things like most. I mean, I guess he, he seems like he always announces things on like the weekend, maybe?

• 9:23John Coogan?

  I don't know. Because like, obviously like a lot of companies, they, they announce their earnings after the market closes. So people have maybe time to process it. It doesn't create like chaos in the markets. Is that why they do that?

• 9:35Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's fascinating too, because there's obviously, you know, there's Bitcoin ETF now, you have MicroStrategy. There's apps that let you trade those in off hours, right? But ultimately, the sort of traditional financial markets are closed. And he's releasing this, you know, very market moving news on a Sunday morning, which is, you know, it's interesting to say the least. Also, you have to look at the lead up to this, right? His, you know, his son, Eric Trump, has been on the timeline pumping World LibertyFi. Pretty much daily, telling people to hodl, to buy, you know, so, so they're basically, you know, they, they're, they've learned the crypto game, right?

• 10:16John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, there was an interesting take, Pomp, obviously like, you know, super pro crypto. But he was saying it was funny that like, The crypto announcement happened when the market was closed and so like the traditional, the TradFi people couldn't participate, which is like kind of true, but also a lot of the TradFi people can participate because they, yeah, because they have assets that they trade with.

• 10:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:41John Coogan?

  They're not completely separate. Anyway, a US crypto reserve will elevate this critical industry after years of corrupt attacks by the Biden administration, said Trump in a Sunday post on his social media platform, Truth Social. I will make sure the US is the crypto capital of the world. Trump said the crypto strategic reserve will also include Solana, XRP and Cardano. Unlike Bitcoin, which is the largest and oldest cryptocurrency, these tokens were created more recently and often by smaller teams, making them more susceptible to the wild price swings and other risks. I heard, I think it was Naval was saying like, if your crypto has a lobbyist, it's not decentralized, something like that, which I think is a very good take. Let's go through some price action. On Sunday afternoon, Bitcoin

• 11:26John Coogan?

  rose nine percent.

• 11:27Jordi Hays?

  That's the counterpoint to that is that a decentralized organization could decide collectively that we should have a lobbying arm, right?

• 11:37John Coogan?

  Sailor is like, Michael Sailor is like PR for Bitcoin, basically. And it's not for any reason.

• 11:44Jordi Hays?

  Arguably some of the most important PR, right? Palm pump is, you know, catalyst for, you know, the ex-audience and Sailor's going on CNBC, you know, getting normies.

• 11:53John Coogan?

  And yeah, it has nothing, it's still decentralized, but it also incentivizes people to do stuff. And that was a big, that was a big push on like the Trump pump and the idea of like, you know, eventually, you know, like there are so many gold bugs in, in, in Congress right now, just because over the life of a senator, they accumulate gold effectively. And so, and so the stocks and healthcare stocks and, and industrial stocks and tech stocks, and eventually the assets work their way into our government organizations. And so our, our representatives care about these things because they've acquired them and our next generation of legislators will have crypto assets.

• 12:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And one of the interesting things about this announcement is so it very clearly was priced in pretty effectively because if you went back five years ago and you told a Bitcoin maxi, the US government is going to be buying Bitcoin off their balance sheet, they would have said, oh, we're looking at a million dollars a coin, right? Like it just sounded. It sounded like a lot of people believe this would happen, but they assumed that it would come with such a massive, you know, sort of increase in the price.

• 13:01John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 13:01Jordi Hays?

  And now, so yesterday it popped significantly, popped around 10% yesterday. But today, it's actually down almost 7.5%. So it's almost back to 87,000.

• 13:14John Coogan?

  87 today?

• 13:14Jordi Hays?

  Which is crazy because it's basically, the announcement is almost round-tripped. And it could very well-

• 13:20John Coogan?

  I remember, I remember thinking just a couple of weeks ago, like, what is the next catalyst for Bitcoin moving up?

• 13:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:27John Coogan?

  And it would have to be a massive US strategic national Bitcoin stockpile. And I think it also has to be that cascading into every other country saying, we also need this.

• 13:40Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 13:40John Coogan?

  And so, just like there is gold at every Federal Reserve of every country, essentially, like they all stockpile gold to some degree.

• 13:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, I don't know if we have any left.

• 13:48John Coogan?

  Apparently. You gotta put on the tinfoil hat for that.

• 13:51Jordi Hays?

  Put on the tinfoil hat, yeah.

• 13:53John Coogan?

  I'm a believer, I believe it's there, but I don't know, I want to see it.

• 13:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:58Jordi Hays?

  At the very least, I hope, hopefully they spray painted bricks.

• 14:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:03John Coogan?

  Ridiculous. So Bitcoin rose 9% from 24 hours earlier to about 93,000, then you mentioned it round-tripped. What's ETH at? Can you look on public.com?

• 14:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm pulling it up. I'm sure-

• 14:17John Coogan?

  ETH was up 11% to 25-

• 14:19Jordi Hays?

  ETH is down 13%.

• 14:20John Coogan?

  No!

• 14:22Jordi Hays?

  So Eric, we gotta get Eric Trump pumping ETH a little bit harder, who's clearly not-

• 14:28John Coogan?

  That's hilarious.

• 14:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so the dynamic here is absolutely wild, like so much of the, so much of the news around World LibertyFi, Eric Trump's project, was that they were buying Ethereum with size, presumably from the pre-sale, but it also seemed like potentially proceeds from Trump coin were being sort of reallocated over there. So I'm pulling it up right now, I'm expecting to see Eric saying, "Hodl."

• 14:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 14:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he said, so he said, on February 25th, he said, "Buy the dips."

• 14:59John Coogan?

  Buy the dips.

• 15:01Jordi Hays?

  And then today, he says, uh, somebody said, never fade Eric Trump. And today he says, you're welcome, my friend. Hopefully I made someone's life just a little bit better. Now my advice, hold long term. And Ethereum is down, uh, yeah, 12% today, uh, on, on, uh, really, really a devastating blow to the Ethereum community because they've had a, they've had a rough go at it.

• 15:25John Coogan?

  Becoming a little bit of a punchline.

• 15:26Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, yeah, this is, this is right after their conference, Eve Denver, which is one of the biggest, you know, events of the year for them. So tough go, um, but, uh, you know.

• 15:36John Coogan?

  So let's get some more context and then go into the timeline. Uh, a one time Bitcoin skeptic, Trump embraced crypto last year and made a series of big promises to the industry. Since returning to the White House, he has created a working group on digital assets and pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, an online drug bazaar that used Bitcoin as its payment method. Investors and analysts said that one way to build the reserve is for Uncle Sam to hold on to its stash of Bitcoins seized from cyber criminals and dark net markets. The US government holds more than 180,000 Bitcoin worth about 18 billion based on current market prices.

• 16:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, see, that would have been enough, right? We could have just had the US crypto reserve be assets that were seized from criminals.

• 16:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it's kind of funny to be like, hey, look, like it will effectively be burned.

• 16:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:24John Coogan?

  Like it, it, any, any Bitcoin that is ever seized going forward, because we're probably going to be seized a lot more.

• 16:31Jordi Hays?

  It's a way, it's a way, you know, cause, cause in the past, there's been concern that the government has been sitting over the sell button, you know, going to just like market sell. And so it would have been a way to potentially find sort of a through line of saying, you know, we, we, we believe the government should have some exposure.

• 16:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:47Jordi Hays?

  To cryptocurrencies, but, uh, we're not going to be using taxpayer dollars to do that.

• 16:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:52Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, uh, alas, uh, not, not what ended up happening.

• 16:56John Coogan?

  It's great. Well, let's go to some reactions. We got Nick Carter. We wanted to have on the show, but he's tied up today. He'll probably be coming on later this week. If this is still in the news, if not, we'll get him the next time there's breaking news.

• 17:10Jordi Hays?

  There'll be another headline.

• 17:11John Coogan?

  I'm sure something will happen.

• 17:13Jordi Hays?

  Trump, Trump coin number two.

• 17:16John Coogan?

  Let me retweet this. Repost. There we go. Today feels like a good day to repost my anti SBR article. That's the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. I stand by it, especially in light of the inclusion of ETH, Sol, ADA, and XRP. It's not the job of the government to run an ARX crypto hedge fund. It's not their job to pick winners and losers. The dismay you're seeing at the inclusion of some coins confirms, if the government gets interested in crypto, it's not going to be, it's not necessarily going to be good for my bags. Most conservatives and libertarians are suspicious of top-down government apportionment of resources in this manner, preferring to let the private sector sort it out. I wasn't

• 17:58John Coogan?

  a fan of Biden's massive infrastructure spending, which I felt was extremely wasteful. And for that reason, I don't support further inclusion, incursion into the private sector by the government, especially not via naked dollar issuance. Typically, the US government doesn't really intervene in markets with its monetary tools beyond setting rates. Its role is setting the rules of the road and keeping the system stable, not aggressively deploying government funds into commodities for day trading. And yeah, it is fascinating. This is something that like, I feel like it's so pro tech. It's like, it really should mark the end of the story of the government being anti-tech, anti-crypto, and now the government's like so pro crypto.

• 18:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:39John Coogan?

  But the response from at least our corner of X was, this is not good.

• 18:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, it seems like the government is generally pro crypto because it makes a certain part of the voter base happy.

• 18:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:54Jordi Hays?

  The government doesn't seem to be pro crypto. And the government acknowledges that it's a legitimate asset class now, and we shouldn't as a country attack it.

• 19:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 19:04Jordi Hays?

  Because the technology has real potential. And if you create a positive regulatory environment, or a fair regulatory environment, it could flourish, right? And we want that, we want that industry to flourish here in the United States. That being said, it does seem to date that the biggest pro- Crypto moves have not been, you know, the pushback is that there's so many ways that you could argue that that they're sort of conflicted moves, right?

• 19:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:30Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, even even Sacks was was facing a lot of blowback yesterday on X just because he said, you know, he came out and said, I sold, he sold his positions in Solana and Bitcoin, Ethereum, all these different things. But you can easily kind of look through and say, you're a, you know, major investor that has positions in a bunch of individual crypto companies, like Bitwise is one. And

• 19:54John Coogan?

  He still has a ton of look through exposure.

• 19:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, look through exposure, basically.

• 19:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:57Jordi Hays?

  And somebody was pointing out, you know, I think this is later in the timeline, but somebody was pointing out that just, just how convenient it is that Bitwise's top five position in the Bitwise index are the exact assets that are in, and I'll push, and the reason

• 20:13John Coogan?

  I don't think that's a conspiracy at all.

• 20:15Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I don't, yeah. So, so my, my, what I would point out there is that they just picked the five biggest tokens by market cap.

• 20:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're all the same. So like the top five happen to be the ones that the index built, which happens to be the ones, and that makes perfect sense to me.

• 20:30Jordi Hays?

  It's more so that it was

• 20:31John Coogan?

  Oh, we're making a tech index and it was like Nvidia, Fang, you know,

• 20:36Jordi Hays?

  The Mag7.

• 20:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, Mag7. And then, and then all of a sudden, some, some senator owns all, all the Mag7. And then Trump says, the Mag7 are what we're going to focus on for like chip, you know, incentives. I'd be like, yeah, that makes sense. Like hyperscalers are hyperscalers.

• 20:49Jordi Hays?

  So overall, I think that the pushback against Sacks on specifically Bitwise is a little bit misguided.

• 20:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 20:56Jordi Hays?

  But, but overall, it's, it's hyper politicized, right?

• 21:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:00Jordi Hays?

  And the other thing is that they very clearly did this via the White House. This wasn't something that went through Congress and was supposed to be something that had sort of broad buy in from Washington.

• 21:11John Coogan?

  Also, to be, to be fair, did this isn't They haven't done anything.

• 21:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:16John Coogan?

  They've just announced a plan to do something.

• 21:18Jordi Hays?

  They were like, Eric's like, Dad, we need a pump.

• 21:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no, no, I don't even think there's a number yet.

• 21:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:26John Coogan?

  Like, it could be, we're buying a million dollars.

• 21:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:28John Coogan?

  It could be, we're buying a billion. It could be, we're buying a trillion. Like, these are all wildly different things. He's just saying, I'm excited about this.

• 21:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the number is gonna be hyper, hyper analyzed because people are, we're also tracking how much Doge, how much waste Doge is catching. And so if Doge saves, you know, $500 billion and then we buy, you know, anything less than the 500 billion doesn't seem super serious, right? If they, if the government went and bought $100 billion worth of crypto, it's like, okay, cool.

• 21:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:56Jordi Hays?

  But, but anyways, that's gonna be, this is gonna be, you know, continue to be hyper politicized as everything is today.

• 22:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so I like this analysis from Joe Weisenthal over at Bloomberg, kind of breaks down what it means to build a strategic stockpile. He says, conceptually, it makes sense that,

• 22:19John Coogan?

  conceptually, it makes sense for the government to hold strategic stockpiles of any asset that, A, it could presumably have a liability in at some point, and B, it can't instantly acquire with money. So for example, oil, especially when we can't produce much here, made sense. Military equipment is like this as well. One could argue that in a war, we have bullet-denominated liabilities or tank-denominated liabilities.

• 22:43Jordi Hays?

  And you can't acquire bullets or tanks out of thin air with money due to the time to ramp up production.

• 22:50Jordi Hays?

  And then Saleh, who we've had on the show before, says, "Strategic Bitcoin reserve makes sense for the same reason a strategic gold reserve makes sense. It's a monetary hedge against US dollar hegemony, a prime export of the US. Other assets don't make much sense, i.e. the US does not have a random basket of precious metals." So I think that's, I think that's the right take. I think a lot of people, Max Meyer had some good points along this route. He's like, he wants the government to be focused on making sure the currency of the United States, you know, sort of maintains, maintains its value, not data. Day trading, but as we've seen some presidential day traders, you know, the guy from El Salvador, you know, he pulls up Robin Hood or whatever on his phone.

• 23:34Jordi Hays?

  If he's smart, he's pulling up public and, you know, he's just, you know, basically on a mobile device, market buying, market buying Bitcoin from what, from what I can see. So.

• 23:46John Coogan?

  I mean, we were talking about this before with the Javier Malay stuff and it's like, it's great that, that day trading Bitcoin is working for some people and the crazy stuff is working for some of these smaller countries, but like, I, I need to be convinced a little bit more that this is like, that we are in the same situation as these other countries.

• 24:07John Coogan?

  Let's go to Joe Wildsdale.

• 24:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this was, this was a good take. So Joe says taxation is theft. It should be kept to a minimum. It's wrong to steal my money for grift on the left. It's also wrong to tax me for crypto bro schemes. Efficient defense courts, national parks, which he says should fund themselves, prison, et cetera. Fine. Cut it out with these schemes, guys. I thought this was the best take. You didn't see a lot of people that were, you know, overly pro Trump in the sort of election cycle, actually coming out and pushing back against this, but this is the right take. I think we, we never discuss politics on the show as, as our audience knows, but it's okay to vote for somebody, yet disagree with, with, you know, and agree with some of the stuff they do and disagree with other stuff that they do. And if you can't, if you can't manage to do that, then

• 24:52Jordi Hays?

  you're not sort of thinking independently, right? You're just sort of.

• 24:55John Coogan?

  And vice versa. Yeah. Like you should, you should be able to say, hey, I don't support the guy generally, but like this is one thing that I like. And there are plenty of examples of that, like the moon.

• 25:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so, so somebody, and he was quote tweeting Mayor Suarez, who says, I turned Miami into the crypto capital of Florida. Now we're turning the US into the crypto capital of the world. I generally agree that the US should be the crypto capital of the world.

• 25:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:20Jordi Hays?

  Like 100%, but uh, but if you actually look at the chart of Miami coin, uh, hopefully our strategic follow the same path.

• 25:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Also, also like, like making America business friendly to a, like a company like Coinbase that operates a very legitimate crypto exchange and having Bitcoin on the balance sheet of the Fed are two completely separate things. One is like, stop sending Wells notices, have more regulatory oversight, be very clear with Coinbase on what can they list, what can't they list, what's a security, what's not a security, what's a fair launch, all these questions that everyone in the crypto community has, where's the line drawn? And the other is just like, are we pumping the price?

• 26:09Jordi Hays?

  Miami coin, is the chart won't even show for Miami coin.

• 26:14John Coogan?

  I don't want to know.

• 26:14Jordi Hays?

  Because it's down so horrifically, but um, it's a good experiment.

• 26:19John Coogan?

  The, the steel man on this is that a lot of times when people, when people say like, oh, the government shouldn't be spending on X, Y, or Z, they always assume that it, like, the government spending is going to go to zero.

• 26:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:32John Coogan?

  But there is a world where the government buys a bunch of crypto and at 10Xs and they sell it and they make money. And that's actually what happened during the, during the, the housing bailout.

• 26:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:45John Coogan?

  Like, everyone was like, why are the bankers getting a bailout? Like, they're wasting my taxpayer money? Well, those loans got repaid back with interest. And so it's kind of like a narrative violation. And like, you might not like it because you didn't punish the people as much as possible because yeah, some of the people that were involved in the banks, they did get bailed out.

• 27:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:05John Coogan?

  But it didn't cost the taxpayer anything. In fact, it made the taxpayer money. So you paid less taxes.

• 27:10Jordi Hays?

  The disappointing thing here is that if, if somebody was already not a fan of Trump.

• 27:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:16Jordi Hays?

  Nothing about the last 24 hours would have changed their mind at all, right? Like the dominant narrative on the left was that. Trump is a grifter, you know, he's using his, the office to just sort of accumulate personal wealth and all this stuff. And

• 27:30John Coogan?

  Now even the people who voted for him are like, yeah.

• 27:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or saying like, stop it with the crypto, crypto bro grifts. So I, I posted yesterday,

• 27:38Jordi Hays?

  uh, Nathan, picture of Nathan for you. Fantastic show. If you need some business advice.

• 27:44Jordi Hays?

  And I said, the plan, pay off the national debt by cutting government waste and investing the savings into high risk cryptocurrencies. I can't even finish it because it's such a, such a ridiculous plan.

• 27:55John Coogan?

  What, yeah, we're doing.

• 27:56Jordi Hays?

  But, uh,

• 27:57John Coogan?

  Well, let's go through, uh, Trump's crypto schemes according to how crazy they are.

• 28:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So Nick,

• 28:02John Coogan?

  In chronological order.

• 28:03Jordi Hays?

  Nick went ahead and did the heavy lifting here. He ranked, uh, uh, Trump's six crypto projects. And, uh, so he starts off Trump NFT, three out of 10, low stakes, was kind of cool at the time and started off, uh, Ryan Selkis's Mar-a-Lago arc, which I think was kind of an important moment.

• 28:22John Coogan?

  I have a hilarious story about this. So I know someone who bought this NFT and they said that, uh, it was actually one of like the most valuable NFT things you could possibly get because it got you dinner at Mar-a-Lago.

• 28:36Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 28:37John Coogan?

  And yeah. And the thing was, is that the people that bought it, so like,

• 28:42Jordi Hays?

  But it only gets you that one time, right?

• 28:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, one time, but, but, but,

• 28:45Jordi Hays?

  Which is a kind of a problem for the,

• 28:46John Coogan?

  This is the thing. So, so it's sold to everyone. So a lot of the people that bought were just like fans of Trump, but they weren't like hardcore crypto people.

• 28:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:56John Coogan?

  So they went and bought it, but then in order to actually redeem the dinner and do the NFT stuff, you actually had to have like a wallet that you could transfer. And it was like somewhat technical.

• 29:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:05John Coogan?

  And so you take the universe of like Trump supporters who are down to spend a bunch of money, like supporting him and like buying his NFT, and you narrow that down to like 1% of people that are both Trump supporters or like down with him, but also like capable of running the wallet in the way that they need you to do to cash in the NFT to go to the dinner. And so, uh, I like the person I know that that that bought the NFT went and like the dinner was like empty. And so then he was basically able to just pitch pitch Trump like his exact mission for crypto. Yeah. And it was like, it was like, this is exactly how I and then and then and then Trump was like, wait, the my biggest crypto fans all believe X, Y, and Z.

• 29:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:43John Coogan?

  When like, clearly that's not true.

• 29:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:45John Coogan?

  But he was able to just like, it was so funny.

• 29:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm surprised that more projects didn't realize that buy it.

• 29:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:51Jordi Hays?

  Because it sounds it sounds extremely far fetched that you bought an NFT for 500 bucks.

• 29:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:56Jordi Hays?

  You got a dinner with the president and you could talk to him about crypto policy.

• 29:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:59Jordi Hays?

  But that was probably the best lobbying dollars, you know, you could ever spend.

• 30:02John Coogan?

  And so like, yeah, like, like, the expectation was like, you get you get a dinner, you get to go into a massive ballroom and maybe Trump comes around and like shakes your hand. Instead, it's like him and three people. It's like the highest leverage lobbying you could possibly do.

• 30:17Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 30:17John Coogan?

  If you but imagine the combination of things, you have to be pro-Trump in crypto. And also like enough of a D gen to think that buying an NFT is a good idea. So you can't be like the highbrow crypto person who's like, actually like Bitcoin is just the only thing. I'm a Bitcoin purist. I would never buy an NFT. But then you also have to be willing like, it's like, all these weird things have to have like line up.

• 30:39Jordi Hays?

  One thing you have to give Trump's crypto team credit for is they always position these things as collectibles, like very clearly.

• 30:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, memes, memes.

• 30:47Jordi Hays?

  They were collect Trump cards.

• 30:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:51Jordi Hays?

  They were they were trading card NFTs.

• 30:52John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 30:53Jordi Hays?

  They weren't NFTs, right?

• 30:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:54Jordi Hays?

  And with with Trump coin, it was Trump memes.

• 30:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 30:57Jordi Hays?

  You were just buying a meme. You could buy a million of them if you wanted. You could buy.

• 31:01John Coogan?

  We need a strategic meme reserve, for sure.

• 31:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:04John Coogan?

  That's obvious.

• 31:05Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so continuing through this, so we have World Liberty Phi, seven out of 10.

• 31:10John Coogan?

  We got through one.

• 31:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Seven out of 10, low, kind of an insane thing to do ahead of the election, which which, you know, this started in Q4.

• 31:20John Coogan?

  Nick was very against it. He was like telling them like, how can we tell them not to do this?

• 31:23Jordi Hays?

  Started as vaporware, now an extremely questionable slush fund thing that Justin Sun owns a lot of. Bad vibes on this. And so they were basically doing a public sort of like. Equity financing type thing, but you've just got tokens or something and now now they just have this, you know, basically hedge fund. Trump coin, he says nine out of 10, completely unhinged, just a crazy move overall. Melania coin, he's, he's actually pretty harsh here. He says six out of 10, kind of sad at this point, but it was the beginning of the end for meme coins and introduced us to Kelsier, which was behind the Malay project, which was funny. So there are positives. And then he said crypto reserve featuring Cardano and XRP 10 out of 10.

• 32:07Jordi Hays?

  I didn't even know what to say about this. A government bailout for your buddy who gets crypto news from TikTok. Silver lining, at least the Maxies are upset. Sad how long this list is. So I think, to be honest, I think Nick had the best takes across the board over the last 24 hours.

• 32:24John Coogan?

  We should get him on tomorrow.

• 32:26Jordi Hays?

  And

• 32:26John Coogan?

  Even if it's slow news.

• 32:27Jordi Hays?

  So we got another post from Jack Rains over at Slow. He says, this is a great take and it's a post from David Sacks in 2021 that says, who's now our crypto czar. He says, the problem with government as a capital allocator is that the money goes to special interests who have the ability to lobby, but not to innovate. And it has to come from somewhere. Usually innovators haven't built up influence yet. So anyways. And good, good, good one to surface. Sam Lessin, another crypto project guy and GP over at Slow says LOL. So anyways, tough one. Again, David Sacks, you have to imagine.

• 33:10Jordi Hays?

  If, if I had to, if David Sacks could say what he actually thought. I would say that maybe he thinks that there should be a Bitcoin reserve in the same way that there's a gold reserve. I don't think that if he could have made this policy himself, that he would have just made it the top five projects by market cap.

• 33:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, he does. He is in a weird situation because

• 33:29Jordi Hays?

  And again.

• 33:30John Coogan?

  Like, we have no idea how much he's actually shaping policy.

• 33:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:35John Coogan?

  He is, he is the crypto czar.

• 33:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:38John Coogan?

  But what does that really mean?

• 33:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, he's also the crypto and AI czar.

• 33:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:42Jordi Hays?

  And arguably AI is probably a lot more important for him to be focused on.

• 33:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:47Jordi Hays?

  But to date, you know.

• 33:48John Coogan?

  But if anything goes wrong, he's gonna take the blame.

• 33:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So I remember Saturday night, Trump coin gets launched and I'm thinking, I'm thinking to myself, it's very possible that Sacks didn't.

• 34:00Jordi Hays?

  Didn't know this was happening, right?

• 34:02John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 34:02Jordi Hays?

  And now he's in a position where he has to defend,

• 34:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:05Jordi Hays?

  You know, defend the actions.

• 34:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:06Jordi Hays?

  And make up some, you know, he kind of has to say something about it.

• 34:09John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 34:10Jordi Hays?

  I don't remember what he actually would have shared, but uh,

• 34:12John Coogan?

  He is pretty good.

• 34:14Jordi Hays?

  He's definitely along for the ride right now.

• 34:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, he, he, yeah, I mean, clearly anytime someone, uh, anytime the government does anything like iffy with crypto, he's going to take like the brunt of the attack.

• 34:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:25John Coogan?

  Effectively, even if he was not in the room when it happened. But he has been pretty good, but good on comms, like his, his, he's, he very quickly anticipated, people are going to think I'm pumping my own bags. Let me make it clear that I did sell all of my personal holdings. I might have some look through exposure, but that's a separate thing. I'm not actively managing any, any positions here. And most importantly, it's not like I went, I'm not front running this. I'm not like egregiously insider trading this. And like the bar is so low that I think a lot of people look at it and they're like, yeah, okay. Like at least you, at least you're not insider trading aggressively.

• 34:58Jordi Hays?

  Go TA over at Alongside, uh, who we've had on the show before, uh, takes a screenshot of Truth Social. Donald Trump had to, uh, add a clarification.

• 35:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, what happened here?

• 35:10Jordi Hays?

  So basically he came out and initially just said the crypto reserve featuring Solana, Cardano and XRP.

• 35:17John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that's right.

• 35:18Jordi Hays?

  He had to follow it up and say, and obviously Bitcoin and Ethereum as, as other valuable cryptocurrencies will be at the heart of the reserve. I also love Bitcoin and Ethereum. So the coming out and just saying the meme coin network, Cardano and XRP are, are.

• 35:34John Coogan?

  I know, I like, I do, I do genuinely, I, I, I think the, the, the team behind Solana is fairly like legitimate. I did a whole, a whole thing on them. I think they're building cool technology genuinely.

• 35:47Jordi Hays?

  Bitcoin is digital gold. Solana is payment rails for the greatest casino in history.

• 35:52John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 35:53Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, with the native sort of like poker chip, right? Like it, it makes sense. And then Card, and then Cardano and XRP.

• 36:00John Coogan?

  Poker chip is the, is like the, the immutable like, uh, like instrument. It's like the, the fundamental unit of value on Solana is the poker chip.

• 36:08Jordi Hays?

  But, but Cardano and XRP are, you know, people were joking like this is huge for Uber drivers.

• 36:16Jordi Hays?

  Because it's

• 36:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, it really is like the fake one, right?

• 36:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, anytime, anytime somebody that's outside of tech asks me like, oh, what do you think about crypto? They're always like, yeah, I'm like, oh, like blah, blah, blah. Yeah, like I have Bitcoin and Cardano.

• 36:30John Coogan?

  And Cardano, yeah.

• 36:31Jordi Hays?

  And they're like, and the funny thing is, is Cardano and XRP.

• 36:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:35Jordi Hays?

  Like, one of the reasons that you could make the argument that you should put them in the strategic reserve is they sort of just like generally trade based on Bitcoin too. So like, they're all sort of like fluctuating at different rates, but um, overall fantastic. And then

• 36:49John Coogan?

  It's hilarious.

• 36:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people were trying to put Sacks in the truth zone over Isaac Saul says that's a pretty weak dodge. David, you know, calling out that

• 37:02John Coogan?

  The conflict of interest here.

• 37:03Jordi Hays?

  And they say first Sax's firm Craft Ventures has been invested in a startup called Bitwise since 2017.

• 37:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:09Jordi Hays?

  David Sacks was the lead investor. Right now, Bitwise is celebrating. So the CEO of Bitwise came out the top five holdings of the Bitwise 10 crypto index fund.

• 37:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:20Jordi Hays?

  Because the main crypto coins going, the best way to out yourself is not understanding crypto is to call them crypto coins.

• 37:26John Coogan?

  That's hilarious.

• 37:27Jordi Hays?

  Not ironically.

• 37:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:28Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so the main crypto coins going in the crypto strategic reserve just so happened to match Bitwise's top five crypto holdings. And the reason for this is that the tokens going in the crypto reserve are just the largest project by market cap.

• 37:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, except for Binance Coin, which is, which didn't make it in.

• 37:41Jordi Hays?

  But

• 37:42John Coogan?

  Because that's like the Chinese one, right?

• 37:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, right, right, right.

• 37:45John Coogan?

  Which makes sense.

• 37:45Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so

• 37:47John Coogan?

  So we talked about this, it's not crazy. Also, there's a question about like, you know, yes, he, so Sax invested through Craft. I don't know if Sax is stepping back from direct control over Craft over the czarship. He could be.

• 38:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that has been obvious.

• 38:04John Coogan?

  But

• 38:04Jordi Hays?

  I doubt he has a board seat.

• 38:07John Coogan?

  Like, that doesn't mean that he also invested in the, in the index fund. And yeah, there's just like, there's like seven layers of like conflict here that Where it doesn't seem like that bad, but also it's not great, but also it's like, how could you ever find someone credible at all in to advise the government on crypto? Who had never invested in crypto? Like, that's basically impossible, right?

• 38:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and to be honest, the way so Sacks is very good at the internet, right? He has one of the biggest podcasts in the world. He's got a hyper engaged X following. If he was running point on the strategic reserve announcement, it wouldn't have gone out like, hey, we're putting Cardano, XRP and Solana in the reserve. Oh, and also we're doing this. So it would have just been so clearly he's not actually running point on anything or has any impact on sort of the comms around this stuff, right? That that feels very obvious. We have another post here from Joe. He says, even prior to today, there are a lot of professional people in crypto who have been denigrating coins like XRP and ADA for a long time, and yet they're still here largely riding the same beta and performing not much differently from Solana and ETH. Why is that?

• 39:15Jordi Hays?

  He says, all the big DeFi stuff is on Solana and ETH. Most of the NFTs you hear about are on Solana.

• 39:19John Coogan?

  I completely agree.

• 39:20Jordi Hays?

  You would intuitively think that Solana and ETH would have built up some gigantic market cap over others like ADA and XRP and yet.

• 39:29Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 39:31John Coogan?

  Laura Shin has a take.

• 39:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a good point.

• 39:33John Coogan?

  It's kind of interesting. It's because their total supply is many billions, 45 billion for ADA and 100 billion for XRP that gives them an inflated market cap. Even if you limit it to the circulating supply of 36 or 58 billion respectively, it's still many, many multiples of the circulating supply. Yeah, other side is of the coin is that they benefit from small unit prices. Someone with a limited crypto allocation can feel like they're buying a lot of coins.

• 40:00Jordi Hays?

  It's still.

• 40:02Jordi Hays?

  Still doesn't fully explain it.

• 40:04John Coogan?

  It's ridiculous, but like these psychology things are real. I mean, like even like Warren Buffett has to split shares. I mean, at a certain point, yeah, I mean, you can't buy Berkshire Hathaway Class A because it's like 250K a share.

• 40:16Jordi Hays?

  Well, there was a while where you couldn't buy fractionalized shares very easily too, which is a big factor.

• 40:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:20Jordi Hays?

  But that never was a thing on crypto. We have a post from Fat Man. He said, the whale. So on Saturday night, there was a bunch of hubbub on X because some, you know, all this is happening on chain. This whale comes on and makes a, does a 50x long on Ethereum and maybe one of the other positions. Using only $4 million in capital to create a $200 million position.

• 40:47Jordi Hays?

  As the strategic reserve was announced on Sunday, they went up, I think about 6 million.

• 40:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 40:52Jordi Hays?

  It says 5 million here. Coincidentally, perfectly timing Trump's true social post confirming United States crypto reserve. So obviously some insider action here. Who knows who it was, but it's hard to say, right? Because these assets haven't been explicitly sort of designated as securities. You know, it's sort of a gray area, but at the same time, you know, sort of insider trading collusion is broadly illegal. And you'd have to hope that this kind of thing got cracked down on. Cause it's, you know, some serious size being thrown around.

• 41:31John Coogan?

  It's a bad look.

• 41:32Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 41:33John Coogan?

  Very, very bad luck.

• 41:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And for what it's worth, that guy Nate Chastain went to prison. He's in prison today for doing the same type of activity on OpenSea.

• 41:42John Coogan?

  On OpenSea, right?

• 41:42Jordi Hays?

  He was the product manager at OpenSea who was involved in the decision-making around what NFTs got featured on the homepage. And so he would just buy them, they would pop, he would sell them.

• 41:52John Coogan?

  And he went to jail for that?

• 41:53Jordi Hays?

  He went to jail. He's sitting in jail. I think it was at least for a few years.

• 41:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, the question of like, of like, is it a security or not, blah, blah, blah. It's like, there's just something clearly immoral about having an edge on anything that has a financial asset wrapped around it. And so I don't care if it's a monkey picture or a decentralized cryptocurrency or a stock. Like you clearly have an edge, you're trading on it, you're stealing money from people, like.

• 42:22Jordi Hays?

  So he's actually out of prison now. He only had to go in for three months and then three years of supervised release. So they were trying to make an example out of him, but overall, I think this is enough of a precedent.

• 42:33John Coogan?

  Unreasonable.

• 42:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Enough of a precedent to say whoever was, you know, trading on insider info ahead of the strategic reserve announcement. Probably. And it's kind of crazy too, that they got a 2x in, you know, 24 hours, they had to put it. Well, you're less than a 2X, right?

• 42:50John Coogan?

  I mean, 50X long is pretty crazy. I mean, like,

• 42:54Jordi Hays?

  But, but the issue is-

• 42:55John Coogan?

  It speaks to the lack of volatility. It's a very low volatility asset, right? Like, like, I feel like for something as monumental as like, the government is going to be stockpiling this asset. Like, you should not need to go so long just to double your money. Like, I feel like a 50X long, like, just like an Nvidia, a slight Nvidia earnings beat is enough to do this. But Ethereum's pretty sticky.

• 43:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:17John Coogan?

  And then, uh, there's a funny post here. If he was really an insider, he would have longed anything other than Ethan BTC, though. Let's be honest. Because of course, anything else-

• 43:25Jordi Hays?

  No, this is a good response. He says, uh, I don't, uh, the original poster says, "I don't know if it was an insider or not, but it's possible for an insider to know the tweet is coming, but not know the exact contents of the tweet."

• 43:34John Coogan?

  Yep, totally.

• 43:35Jordi Hays?

  Which was again, good.

• 43:36John Coogan?

  Hey, this is gonna happen. I mean, the rumor was out there. I heard the rumor months ago.

• 43:39Jordi Hays?

  The original way to index the crypto market, which is why crypto indexes didn't become super popular. So you could just buy the few biggest coins by market cap and basically have an index.

• 43:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is interesting. Also, when I see this, I want to know, like, okay, yes, uh, $4 million, 50X long. That seems like a lot, but does this type of trade happen every single day? Because in that case, maybe this isn't insider trading. Maybe there's just one random person who's doing this every day. And then something big happens and then you see it pop, you know?

• 44:07Jordi Hays?

  This was out of the ordinary. It also is funded by a wallet that was associated with phishing.

• 44:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 44:15Jordi Hays?

  Who knows what's going on there? Uh, we can cap it off. Uh, we have a post here from Packy, who's joining in about an hour. He says, "Not to get all political, but Cardano."

• 44:26Jordi Hays?

  And then, uh, another post from Atlas.

• 44:29John Coogan?

  I actually don't, I actually don't understand Cardano that well, because wasn't the guy, like, one of the co-founders of Ethereum? Like, is Cardano not a serious technical project? Or, because it hasn't been like hacked or anything, right? Like, it, like, it works.

• 44:42Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think Cardano and XRP are two, two blockchains-

• 44:47John Coogan?

  I know that they're not taken seriously, but I don't know-

• 44:49Jordi Hays?

  They were super early and they were, they were ICOs that, um, that never delivered on, uh, from a-

• 44:58Jordi Hays?

  From a

• 44:59John Coogan?

  Product perspective or

• 45:00Jordi Hays?

  Traction standpoint.

• 45:01John Coogan?

  Adoption perspective. It did to the price is really the only

• 45:03Jordi Hays?

  It's one of those things like Solana came about. They were like, we're going to build a really fast blockchain. We're going to, you know, build this amazing developer ecosystem on it. And then they basically did exactly that.

• 45:12John Coogan?

  They kind of did it, yeah.

• 45:12Jordi Hays?

  Right? And, um, and one of the things is

• 45:15John Coogan?

  Payment rails for the global casino.

• 45:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:17John Coogan?

  That's the soundbite.

• 45:19Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, yeah, overall it makes sense that, you know, you know, in 2022, every other week you'd have a new, uh, L1 blockchain. And then it was a new L2 blockchain. And what, what we're seeing now is that it seems like, you know, developer and investor activity have sort of focused in on Solana. And, you know, it, it makes sense, right? There's, there's no reason that, um, there should be, you know, a hundred different L1s.

• 45:48Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, last post for this one, we have from Atlas at Creatine Cycle. He says, American Strategic Scam and Gambling Reserve with the, uh, with, uh, Bald Eagle.

• 45:59John Coogan?

  I was so inspired by that.

• 46:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you were inspired. We got it. We got it.

• 46:03John Coogan?

  Immediately ripped.

• 46:04Jordi Hays?

  I'm going to pull up John's post. He says, um, if you want to read it out.

• 46:08John Coogan?

  Say, now that we have a strategic crypto gambling reserve, the next obvious step is to introduce universal basic parlay. Every Friday, Uncle Sam should send $5 to every citizen's DraftKings account to give them a little thrill going into the weekend.

• 46:24Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic.

• 46:25John Coogan?

  Obviously, I'm very anti gambling.

• 46:27Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get that, uh, we gotta get that into Sax's ear. You know, that's next.

• 46:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, there is something to it. Just giving someone a little, hey, there's a chance. It, you know, it's like the government already runs casinos or like the lottery and they give you little stimulus. The stimulus is giving everyone the same amount of money, right?

• 46:49John Coogan?

  And so this is a version of, uh, of that, but, uh, instead of giving, instead of giving everyone a thousand dollars for the COVID checks, the Trump checks, remember that?

• 46:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:59John Coogan?

  What was it? A thousand bucks? Something like that?

• 47:02Jordi Hays?

  Something like that.

• 47:02John Coogan?

  I don't know. I don't think I qualify. I don't think I got it. But I think everyone got like a thousand bucks and then they went and bought sneakers and Bitcoin and GameStop stock.

• 47:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:14John Coogan?

  Instead of that, it cut out the middleman. Instead of giving everyone the thousand dollars. And then they go gamble it.

• 47:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:21John Coogan?

  Just give them.

• 47:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:22John Coogan?

  A lottery ticket.

• 47:23Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 47:24John Coogan?

  And so everyone gets it. And it's like, hey, we need, we have a trillion dollars in stimulus. We're gonna make.

• 47:27Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna give you.

• 47:28John Coogan?

  A thousand billionaires. So, so every American, we know you're suffering. There's a one in a million chance that you become a billionaire.

• 47:37Jordi Hays?

  Incredible. The American dream.

• 47:38John Coogan?

  The American dream. Yeah.

• 47:40Jordi Hays?

  The American dream.

• 47:42John Coogan?

  Okay, we got, we got Keith coming on in 15 minutes.

• 47:45Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 47:47John Coogan?

  We got Packy coming on in third, in 45 minutes and we got Sheel in an hour. So let's keep moving on. Let's keep talking. We got 15 minutes to run through.

• 47:57Jordi Hays?

  You know, what's something else that people would take?

• 48:00John Coogan?

  Strategic stockpile of?

• 48:01Jordi Hays?

  No, what's, yeah, strategic. What's, what's another thing that the US government should be getting a strategic stockpile of?

• 48:07John Coogan?

  Holy Trinity watches, baby.

• 48:09Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, I want to, I would be more comfortable as a citizen if I knew that Uncle Sam had 100,000 day dates.

• 48:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 48:17Jordi Hays?

  Of every.

• 48:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, like just Rolexes for everyone.

• 48:26Jordi Hays?

  Like, I would like to know that the, the US government.

• 48:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:29Jordi Hays?

  Could at any point decimate the watch market.

• 48:32John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, by flooding the market.

• 48:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And if you really, so imagine, let's, let's say if, if Trump really wanted to build goodwill.

• 48:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:38Jordi Hays?

  He would buy up every single watch.

• 48:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:41Jordi Hays?

  On the market and then at the end of his term, market sell them all.

• 48:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:45Jordi Hays?

  Drop, drop the prices and then every American could buy a Daytona or an Atlas or a Day Date, right?

• 48:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:50Jordi Hays?

  Everybody'd be walking around, you know, in style.

• 48:53John Coogan?

  I mean, you know, you know, Fort Knox is filled with gold. Let's take that gold, turn it into Cartier tanks. Turn it into presidential. Turn it into, turn it into, you know, I don't know. What's another good gold watch? Santos.

• 49:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:10John Coogan?

  Let's, let's, let's take our gold. Ship it to Cartier.

• 49:13Jordi Hays?

  One for every price range.

• 49:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'd like, we'd like 1 million Cartier gold.

• 49:17Jordi Hays?

  Bernard O'Noe wants to avoid tariffs.

• 49:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:21Jordi Hays?

  Use US.

• 49:22John Coogan?

  Use our Fort Knox goal to make more watches.

• 49:25Jordi Hays?

  And then give us a cut of the net revenue on the final product. We want some of your margins.

• 49:29John Coogan?

  And of course, the US government should order all of their watches on Bezel. You can shop 22,000 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house, which would be important.

• 49:39Jordi Hays?

  Bezel's authentication team is going to be busy.

• 49:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe we should send the Bezel authentication team to Fort Knox. They're authenticating gold watches. Why not have them authenticate gold bars?

• 49:48Jordi Hays?

  Do the bars too.

• 49:49John Coogan?

  Do the bars too. Yeah.

• 49:50Jordi Hays?

  Are these, are these bricks that were spray painted with yellow?

• 49:53John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 49:54Jordi Hays?

  Chrome spray paint.

• 49:55John Coogan?

  If they can, if they can tell, is this watch just gold plated versus gold? Have you seen that viral post that's like, like, oh, like, there's like these fake jewelry companies that sell on TikTok? And no one can tell the difference because they gold plate them instead of making them solid gold. And Ryan Peterson was like, didn't Archimedes figure this out 2,000 years ago? Like, you literally just have to figure out the density. So you just put it in the tub and look at the water displacement. And then you weigh it on a scale, which has existed for thousands of years. And everyone on TikTok is like, it's impossible. Like, we can't figure out if it's gold plated or not without destroying it.

• 50:36John Coogan?

  It's impossible. It's so funny to me that he just like, he's just dunked with like the Archimedes thing. Like, we've actually been able to solve this problem for thousands of years. But misinformation continues to be, continues to be the problem. Anyway.

• 50:50Jordi Hays?

  Misinformation is back.

• 50:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, well.

• 50:53Jordi Hays?

  We have some real information for you.

• 50:54John Coogan?

  Real information.

• 50:55Jordi Hays?

  Trump and chipmaker TSMC expected to announce a $100 billion investment in the US. It is the latest effort by Trump to persuade companies to make big investments in the US. What do you got, John?

• 51:08John Coogan?

  It's exciting. I mean, the whole tune and the whole, the whole just, I don't know, vibes around the chip band and how we are playing the semiconductor strategy in the era of AI has changed pretty radically. Like, there was definitely a thought in post chat GPT, post doomers having a serious say and being taken pretty seriously. There was definitely a vibe of like, yeah, like this is going to be a weapon. This is going to be something that's very valuable. We need to corner this resource. This is maybe like nuclear weapons. We should maybe lock it down. We should make sure that it's not just, you know, being stolen left and right. And, and, and also we should restrict the chips that allow these models

• 51:50John Coogan?

  to run at scale. And then, you know, flash forward a few years, we've done the chip band and Nvidia was able to restrict the memory bandwidth on the, on the, the H80 instead of the A1, A100. They, they basically created a custom one that complied with the, with the chip bands. China bought a bunch of those. Deep seek team, you know, optimizes, winds up building a frontier model.

• 52:14Jordi Hays?

  No, and we've talked about this before. We don't think that Nvidia has, has gotten enough sort of flack for sort of working around the chip band.

• 52:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 52:23Jordi Hays?

  But at the same time, so many major US institutions have so much, such large positions in Nvidia.

• 52:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 52:32Jordi Hays?

  You know, there's actually a good, you know, you brought this up earlier. Ben Thompson has made a good argument for, we actually should, the chip band is probably bad. We want China to be dependent on, you know, TSMC chips and not to build their own sort of alternatives to it.

• 52:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 52:48Jordi Hays?

  So that they, they're, they sort of worry about, you know, invading Taiwan for that reason. And Ben Thompson lives in Taiwan, obviously doesn't, you know, wants to continue living there. I don't think he would be too welcome after a Chinese invasion, given his, you know, long history of critiquing.

• 53:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so China's rebuilding the TSMC supply chain right now. They have SMIC and SME, which are the TSMC and ASML copycats, but they are potentially a decade behind. It's very hard to tell how close they are to the frontier. I mean, even Intel, AMD are not near the frontier. And, and American companies have been struggling to catch up, which is why we, you know, both, every administration, every tech leader has been like, let's get TSMC to come here. Can't we just, you know, give all those people green cards or gold cards? We didn't really talk about the gold card thing, but I think people would happily pay 5 million per person to bring over the TSMC experts and manufacturers.

• 53:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the challenge there though is you have Taiwanese people who love Taiwan and have, you know, lived there for generations.

• 53:58John Coogan?

  Because there's like slight tensions between two companies that aren't, two countries that are just rivals. Like, we're not enemies with China. We're just rivals. Like, we're not allies, but we're in the World Trade Organization together. We're in the UN together. Like, we are not at war.

• 54:13Jordi Hays?

  Goes to show, sure, sure. That's a bigger debate, but we are not geopolitical experts.

• 54:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're, we're, we're in like an economic tiff, but that's about it.

• 54:23Jordi Hays?

  And I don't know.

• 54:25John Coogan?

  No one's killing each other.

• 54:26Jordi Hays?

  I mean, ask the, ask the fish off the coast of Argentina.

• 54:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay, okay.

• 54:33Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but you know what I, what I like about this announcement, hopefully it goes through, is that this sort of America first investment executive order, this is the kind of thing that makes that EO real.

• 54:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so 100 billion in chip manufacturing plants over the next four years.

• 54:51Jordi Hays?

  In a short timeline, too.

• 54:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:53Jordi Hays?

  It's not a XAI speed, but, you know, certainly pretty close.

• 54:57John Coogan?

  And there was news that, that TSMC was making good progress at their Arizona plant.

• 55:02Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 55:02John Coogan?

  I don't know if it's in this article, but.

• 55:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that should give them confidence in, you know, making a much larger investment.

• 55:08John Coogan?

  Yep. To the US, advanced chip packaging is particularly critical for AI-related chips as it enhances performance by integrating multiple semiconductor components, reducing size, improving power efficiency, and ensuring faster data transfer. Key applications for, uh, key factors for AI applications. The US has supported TSMC's growth through 2022's Chips Act, which earmarked tens of billions of dollars in grants to domestic chip manufacturing. And this is the other criticism that Ben Thompson has always, uh, lobbied against the Chips Act is that it's grants, it's, hey, we'll just give you money to just go try and build these instead of, instead of being demand side, it's supply side. So, um, much better to just say, hey, we want to actually strategic reserve, like, like the US is a buyer of these chips at this price.

• 55:52John Coogan?

  If you can domestically manufacture a chip that is competitive with a Nvidia H100 or H800 at, uh, at scale in America, boom, we'll buy it, we'll build a data center and then we'll be the leasur and then maybe we'll just sell it immediately. But you know that the demand's there.

• 56:09Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 56:10John Coogan?

  And that's, and that's enough for the free market to go work and figure everything else out as opposed to, oh, there's this grant that's going out and so the grant got parceled up and now, now all of a sudden you have to do it, not, you can't just do it in America, you have to do it in Arizona because the Arizona guy gave more of the grant and like this is the taxes and this and they're like, all of a sudden it becomes like the government is now managing the project fully instead of just being like, hey, we're, we're just a buyer, we're just a buyer.

• 56:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so one of the, so, so going back to one of your earlier points, so TSMC, the world's largest contract shipment, uh, maker set down roots in Arizona in 2020 when it said it would build a chip factory there for $12 billion. Its ambitions for the site have expanded rapidly since with two more factories on the same site and a total investment of 65 billion. The company's first factory began mass production late last year. So, uh, we'd love to see them, you know, make a significant $12 billion investment and then, and then commit to, you know, expanding that site as well as, you know, uh, committing additional capital. Uh, hopefully this announcement isn't final yet, but, uh, have to imagine it'll be, um, sort of set in stone later this week.

• 57:13John Coogan?

  That's great. Um, yeah, love to see it. And yeah, I mean, the, the, the, the TSMC stuff, it is, it is, it is somewhat interesting how AI has made everything, it's democratized learning in the sense that like, you know, like it just codes for you. You can also learn pretty much anything, any history, you can just go and talk to it and it's your teacher. Except for making the chips that make AI possible.

• 57:39Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 57:40John Coogan?

  All of that knowledge is just locked away.

• 57:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you have to imagine.

• 57:44John Coogan?

  You are, you know, uh, in these, uh, what do they call them? Like mentor, mentee, uh, you know, artisan, like, like, uh, like they, they don't open source any of the papers. So there's nothing to build on. And so deep research, like if you actually ask it how to run an ASML machine and get good yields, uh, it will come up very, very short.

• 58:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The interesting thing is it seems that the conversations around Intel and potentially Elon getting involved with Intel have gone, uh, silent. I haven't heard much, uh, from that front.

• 58:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. All the, all the airplanes were like circling and we'll see where it goes.

• 58:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:21John Coogan?

  But anyway, um, let's move on to the moon.

• 58:26Jordi Hays?

  Let's talk about the moon.

• 58:28John Coogan?

  What a shot, the first lunar sunrise.

• 58:29Jordi Hays?

  And everybody.

• 58:30John Coogan?

  Captured by a commercial lunar lander.

• 58:32Jordi Hays?

  We tried our best to get a, you know, flat earther on the show today, somebody, a moon denier, uh, but we're squarely in the moon should be a state category here, which is why we're happy to see that an American private company is landing on the moon in collaboration with NASA.

• 58:48John Coogan?

  I really want to know the moon. Yeah. The moon landing denier, like they have to deny this too. And then they have to deny the next one that's going to happen. And then SpaceX and then Elon. And it's just like.

• 58:57Jordi Hays?

  Well, the moon, the moon was a bit of a lost art for a while, right?

• 58:59John Coogan?

  It was, it was, it was easy to be a denier when it was like, ah, that happened 30 years ago. It's grain footage.

• 59:04Jordi Hays?

  Kubrick was involved.

• 59:05John Coogan?

  And now it's like, okay, we're going to be up there all the time. Uh, and so huge, huge news. We have the, uh, we have the breakdown here. Uh, Blue Ghost, uh, which is a private US spacecraft landed on the moon, uh, after its successful lunar touchdown. Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost mission could soon be joined on the moon by two more commercial spacecraft. And we have, uh, two minutes to rip through this before Keith, I think we'll be hopping on.

• 59:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And we just have to call out that Firefly Aerospace's comms are not. Not where they should be.

• 59:38John Coogan?

  Oh, good point.

• 59:39Jordi Hays?

  The fact that nobody really knew this was kind of happening until they were basically on the moon.

• 59:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:45Jordi Hays?

  And Austin's calling out, "A private company just flew to the moon and I didn't hear about it until now." So.

• 59:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was hilarious. Like, anyone else who would do this would be like, "Seven days until we land on the moon. Five days until we buy merch. Here's a documentary about it. Here's a video about it." They just went and did it. It's amazing.

• 1:00:01Jordi Hays?

  I mean, which is also cool.

• 1:00:03John Coogan?

  It's cool. Yeah, I mean, they were clearly working.

• 1:00:04Jordi Hays?

  Rare in deep tech today.

• 1:00:06John Coogan?

  What do they call it? Monk mode? Monk mode? Something like that.

• 1:00:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:10John Coogan?

  They were just focused on themselves. After 45, after 45 days in space and a pulse pounding semi-autonomous hour-long descent to its landing site at 3 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, the boxy, car-sized spacecraft's four-foot tipped legs crunched into the surface of Mer Chryssium, a vast and ancient impact basin filled with frozen lava on the moon's northeastern,

• 1:00:34John Coogan?

  northeastern nearside. This marks the second time the US has soft-landed on the moon since the crude Apollo 17 mission of 1972. The first accrued occurred just more than a year ago when another robotic commercial mission, the Odysseus lander from the company Intuitive Machines, made moonfall lopsided but intact.

• 1:00:51Jordi Hays?

  How do we not know about Intuitive Machines?

• 1:00:53John Coogan?

  I don't remember that either.

• 1:00:55Jordi Hays?

  So, space companies, please reach out to Lulu.

• 1:00:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:59Jordi Hays?

  And get your act together.

• 1:01:01John Coogan?

  That is so, yeah, that is so crazy. Stuff's just going up there.

• 1:01:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the fact that, who knows what we were talking about when Intuitive Machines went to the moon, but.

• 1:01:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want to know more of this. Maybe it's because it's not launching on SpaceX?

• 1:01:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you would think.

• 1:01:18John Coogan?

  Not getting enough attention?

• 1:01:19Jordi Hays?

  Wait, but how did they?

• 1:01:21John Coogan?

  I think they went, it says, "It's a suite of 10 experiments provided by NASA as part of the space agency's Commercial Lunar Payload Services, CLPS, public-private partnership." So NASA's effort to save costs by enlisting more than a dozen US firms to ferry cargo tied to the US space agency's ambitious Artemis program? I honestly don't know. I honestly do not know how to.

• 1:01:44Jordi Hays?

  An Elon critic might say that Elon is intentionally sort of.

• 1:01:49John Coogan?

  Look, Resilience, also called Hakuto R, mission to launch to the moon alongside Blue Ghost on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in mid-January, but unlike other landers. Okay, so.

• 1:02:01Jordi Hays?

  So I'm surprised that Elon wasn't pumping this harder, but he's been a busy. He's been busy.

• 1:02:06John Coogan?

  He has been busy. There's been a lot going on. Anyway.

• 1:02:12John Coogan?

  One of these inward looking instruments dubbed Lister is a drill capable of reaching a record setting three meters beneath beneath the lunar surface to measure heat flowing up from within, deep enough to give scientists a better idea of how exactly the moon cooled from a ball of molten rock to the cold inert world we know today. Another called the Lunar Magneto-Teluric Sounder, LMS, will place electrodes across a roughly 700 square meter swath of terrain. Its measurements of subtle electric and magnetic currents coursing through the moon can probe more than 1,000 kilometers into the interior, two thirds of the way to the lunar center. That's crazy.

• 1:02:56Jordi Hays?

  Wild. We got Keith in the waiting room?

• 1:03:00John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:03:00Jordi Hays?

  Should we add him in?

• 1:03:01John Coogan?

  That's perfect.

• 1:03:03Jordi Hays?

  You have to imagine Blue Ghost was running on ramp to, you know, make it to the moon.

• 1:03:08John Coogan?

  Undoubtedly. You can't, you can't get to the moon if you're taking 45 days to close your books every month. It's impossible.

• 1:03:17John Coogan?

  What do you think, Keith? Is it possible?

• 1:03:20Keith Rabois?

  The future's on ramp, so all the companies that want to create the future hopefully are saving time and money on ramp.

• 1:03:26John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, I love it. Can you give us the update? What's going on with ramp? They seem to be on a tear. Valuations never been higher.

• 1:03:33Jordi Hays?

  Actually, I would push back and say, take a, take a victory lap.

• 1:03:37John Coogan?

  Take a victory.

• 1:03:37Jordi Hays?

  I know, I know, the, the job's not done. Eric has been very clear about that, but I feel like you can take a little bit of a victory lap and probably more, more this year to come, given the momentum.

• 1:03:48Keith Rabois?

  Well, the amazing thing about ramp is the value proposition, you know, has been clear from the beginning. We're going to save you time, we're going to save you money. And now there's empirical evidence across any type of company, we can show that, you know, 5% this, 10% that. So it's very obvious. And the CFO world is one of the most archaic worlds, parts of any business, even the most cutting edge organizations. Typically have the very archaic, call it analog CFO function. And Ramp has the vision of we're going to digitalize and bring the CFO function and all of finance into the modern age. And use the same tools, same techniques, same data, same software, same SaaS tools that everybody else in your organization uses. And that's why it's such an exciting vision, like the valuation, the valuation, you know, is somewhat art, not science.

• 1:04:32Keith Rabois?

  But the reason why investors all across the globe are ecstatic about, you know, investing in Ramp at any point is because we have this vision of changing and transforming the CFO suite. And every company has this broken engine, has an old engine from the 1800s or 1900s. And we're going to bring the engine of finance into the 22nd century, first 21st century. AI will probably bring us into the 22nd century with Ramp too. So that's why everybody's excited. The other, the thing that's special about the company though, in the short term is usually at this level of scale, companies slow down. The product velocity slows down, the quality of talent decreases. We have a reversion to the mean, so to speak. And Ramp, if anything, is firing on all cylinders.

• 1:05:14Keith Rabois?

  The product velocity is increasing, the quality insights of the products in the team are improving. The intern classes for the last two years are by far the best intern classes anywhere in the globe. So that's the future. And so that's why this round is very exciting because it's a prediction for the future based upon a lot of, a lot of savvy people who get access to all the best companies that Ramp still has the highest slope, which is, you know, a play on their metaphor.

• 1:05:43John Coogan?

  Do you think that's because Eric and Kareem are second time founders? Like, can you break them down as founders? Like, what makes them able to stay on the, like, just insane cadence going into year six, going into year 10? Like, how do they have so much energy?

• 1:05:59Keith Rabois?

  Great question. I wish I wish I knew the answer because I would love to invest in more.

• 1:06:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:04Keith Rabois?

  If you can come up with a formula or predict a formula, that's great. But having worked with them now for over five years, I think there's a couple of ingredients. One subtle ingredient is Eric has amazing marketing instincts and you really can't train us. The best CEOs or the chief marketing officer for the company. And, you know, Eric entered originally a space that was quote unquote crowded. There were large incumbents, there were other funded startups and we're able to cut through the clutter immediately. And he deserves the credit for being able to clarify distinctly, powerfully and communicate the value proposition of Ram. And then reinvent that every year or two to make it broader, more relevant, more more impressive, actually.

• 1:06:45Keith Rabois?

  Korean, you know, is definitely setting the engineering both tempo and quality bar and has been from the beginning. And I think the combination is really interesting. And, you know, maybe a global point is if you look at some of the other heroic companies in in people's portfolios, let's say Stripe.

• 1:07:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:02Keith Rabois?

  You have two brothers. You're getting two executives for one. I think, you know, Ram, there's like you're getting two CEOs for one. And so I think that other amazing company is that incredible synergy between two incredibly talented people. Where you're always on the same page and you really reinforce each other is very rare. And so if I could find two other founders that are that much in sync, that might be the reason to invest, actually.

• 1:07:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, what are you seeing for like young Gen Z founders? Like what, what, like, there's this narrative like, oh, Gen Z hasn't produced, there's zuck yet. Like, what's your, what's your take on that? And, and what would be some advice for, you know, the younger entrepreneurs who are coming in? Maybe deciding between like, hey, I build a chat GPT wrapper, make some money. Maybe it's not a VC backable company, but it gets me paid versus let me take a big shot at something massive. Like, how do you counsel people these days?

• 1:08:02Keith Rabois?

  I don't think there's a formula that works for building an iconic company. Like as you pointed out, Zuckerberg is his first company.

• 1:08:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:08Keith Rabois?

  Eric and Cream did build a company, did sell a company. So I don't, I don't think there's a one size fits all formula. I think it really comes down to, do you have a vision of what the world needs? And do you have a strategic advantage in your own traits, your own personal superpowers? That maps to that problem set? And if you have one when you're nineteen years old or twenty years old or twenty one years old, it might be a really good idea to proceed. If you don't have that combination of a vision and your own superpowers, then learning, building, working with other talented people might be a really good sort of formula. For those of you who are sports fans, you know, there's this epic debate, constant in football about you draft a rookie quarterback in the first round. Do you start that quarterback and do they learn, you know, trial by fire?

• 1:08:51Keith Rabois?

  Or do you sort of sit them on the bench for a year or two, have them carry the clipboard around, occasionally, you know, enter a game that's, you know, over, so to speak? And I've studied this actually empirically and it's really interesting. The people, the, there are fall fame quarterbacks of both, uh, of both sort of backgrounds, career progressions. The career progressions of those who start right away, typically the first season, the performance of, of the quarterback is miserable. It's the worst year of their career, almost without fail. Interception to interception touchdown ratio as a specific illustration. The people who sit on the bench though for two or three years, put aside the opportunity costs there. When they start, they don't have an upside down intercept touchdown ratio.

• 1:09:34Keith Rabois?

  So they do learn things and so it depends upon the quality of the team. Anyway, I think it's most useful most of the time for founders to work in an outstanding organization for a year or two. Before starting their own company, you get a feel for taste, taste of what great is, like what excellent really excellence really means. Excellence, quality, excellency, driving an organization forward. And I think there isn't. There isn't a great substitute for that, but if you're really ready to go, there are people who learn better by being told, you know, I'm throwing in the pool, learn to swim.

• 1:10:06Jordi Hays?

  I love it. Yeah. Question I have is, you know, you obviously noted earlier that Ramp was a already a pretty competitive category. People thought that it was not, you know, a lot of people had made a bet and were kind of ready to just watch the category play out. Do you see categories today that are like fintech in 2020, when you made the, what I believe was your first time investing in Ramp that are ripe for a team to come in and take this sort of new approach, uh, kind of potentially invert the value prop in the way that Ramp did? Uh, have you identified anything there? Is there kind of categories that you would like to invest in?

• 1:10:42Keith Rabois?

  Well, I was fortunate. It was in 2019. I had a fair amount of expertise in the space and I'd come to the conclusion that there's massive opportunity in replacing Amazon Business Card, let alone this bigger vision of, you know, digitalizing the CFO's world. But the people that were funding other operations, those founders and teams were missing some key ingredients and were kind of naive about some stuff, underwriting specifically, but there's other points. So actually unusual for me, I was proactively trying to find high-quality founders that were interested in this problem set.

• 1:11:16Keith Rabois?

  And then Delian fortunately intercepted Green playing a video game, having listened to me probably annoyed by me platificating every day that we need to find like people to, you know, kind of compete with Brax or Amex and blah, blah, blah, Divvy and all this stuff. And then he's like, he actually walked into my office and I was in shock. He said, like, I found, I think I found two founders. I was like, really? But he turns out he did. Um, we had actually been like pitching other founders and trying to recruit people to do this. So I don't usually do this, but I had a lot of expertise in the area. So I'm not usually proactive about trying to find investment opportunities. And then similarly, you know, when I was working at Founder's Fund at the time.

• 1:11:57Keith Rabois?

  This is a very non-standard Founders Fund investment in many, many ways. The most acute one being if you have all these competitors that are doing well, what's the monopoly story? You know, like, and there is a monopoly story. I believe Ramp will be a monopoly. But, you know, imagine pitching the investment team at Founders Fund, the monopoly story in 2019 in a category that includes Amex, actually SVB even had a product in the market, Brax and D V, well, very well-funded, you know, with quote-unquote traction. So, you know, it took a little bit of massaging. Fortunately, Brian Singer also saw the potential at the time and really was alienated by some of the other founders too.

• 1:12:39Keith Rabois?

  So that that helped correct the anti-monopoly, you know.

• 1:12:46John Coogan?

  That's great. Are there any categories that you're looking for right now? Hunting for founders?

• 1:12:51Keith Rabois?

  I mean, obviously, everybody talks about AI all the time. And I think there are opportunities in AI that

• 1:12:59Keith Rabois?

  probably fit that characteristic where people have assumed there's a winner or winners or, you know, whether it's an application layer, a foundational model layer, or somewhere else, infrastructure layer. But perhaps the right founders, it's now five, 10 years into that story. And sometimes it takes a lot of time to bake before you get the next generation of founders who have insights into what could be reinvented. The thing about this is kind of like what SpaceX did, you know, in some ways, the rockets was like, rockets were really good, but they were invented in 1960s in the United States. And, you know, waited about 20 years, maybe 30 years to reinvent rockets. And then Rocket Lab, which has a very competitive offering for certain kinds of payloads, was another 20 years post SpaceX.

• 1:13:44Keith Rabois?

  So sometimes you just have to let the wave, you know, sort of go on for a while before you have a vision about how to reinvent it. And then it's the right founder. So I would love to invest in something that's the next generation replacement for LLMs. Not a better LLM, but something that would, you know, transforms a pretty good double time draw. But that's something that would be a, you know, complete, it would make LLMs obsolete. That would be a cool investment.

• 1:14:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How durable do you think the AI revenue is today? You obviously were around for the dot com era and companies going public, you know, with with little to no revenue, five million of revenue going public. Right. The the counterpoint today is that we have, you know, great private companies with nine figure run rates, you know, that are growing tremendously fast. But, you know, we've talked about this on the show before, this idea of like easy come, easy go, right? So if you can create a bunch of traction really quickly, how durable is that? Do you think that the companies that are, you know, adding 10 million of ARR every month are, you know, sort of durable yet? Are they going to be leaders in five years? What's your take there?

• 1:14:48Keith Rabois?

  Well, there's a quality of revenue and it's different. Like, for example, OpenAI, most of their revenue comes from chat GPT subscriptions. That's pretty durable.

• 1:14:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:56Keith Rabois?

  Consumers are people using it, you know, for business applications, but on an individual basis. There are revenues you can get that are more like pilots.

• 1:15:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:06Keith Rabois?

  And, you know, those are completely non durable. And then there's somewhere between, like, if you sell to an enterprise and they roll out to the entire organization, this AI based product, the chance that they're going to swap, you know, in any short term is very, very low.

• 1:15:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:20Keith Rabois?

  So if you get through IT, you get through procurement, you know, you have a champion and you change business processes within a very large 14,000 organization, that's pretty damn, you know, scalable, durable revenue sustainably for probably five plus years. And so those kind of companies, those AI companies are in pretty damn good shape, in my opinion. But you do see people adopting something that's kind of like a trial. Like, you know, my board told me there's this AI wave, I need to test out this, this and this and have an answer to my board. That revenue is very precarious. Another set of revenues is around training and post-training.

• 1:15:59Keith Rabois?

  I think the advances in AI are so fast that the way we build models today with fine tuning and different kinds of training may be also obsolete a year, two years from now. So there may be models that are built that don't require any human training. So revenues that are built on and companies that are built on that kind of revenue may not be as durable as people think either.

• 1:16:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, while we have you here, what's your take on one of the hotter categories in deep tech humanoid robots? Everybody's got to take because I think they rightfully should, but I'm guessing you have something spicy for us.

• 1:16:39Keith Rabois?

  Well, spicy is that look, Chinese are ahead of us and it's very dangerous politically, geopolitically. I think the administration is going to have to take some action there. I think you have large companies like Meta publicly embracing this and their CTO is responsible for this. So it's a very top-down punishment. You have a lot of startups. We funded several at KV. It's probably the hottest sector among VCs right now is robotic startup walks in and it's like, okay, how much money do you want? And the value is just 600 million dollars. So, you know, and then Tesla's had a lot of progress. Like actually, I think some of the private progress is better than the public stuff. So it's very impressive. So I think the sector will be successful for somebody. I think as a VC right now,

• 1:17:24Keith Rabois?

  it's really hard to invest in a sector, given the proliferation of startups, all with high potential, the prices you'd have to invest at.

• 1:17:33Jordi Hays?

  Also, the monopoly.

• 1:17:34Keith Rabois?

  A way to make money.

• 1:17:35Jordi Hays?

  It's unclear that there will be monopolies, yet some of these companies are being priced that way. One of the concerns that I have is I think we need to learn from DGI. We need to understand that they were able to flood the market with products that they were selling for less than it cost them to produce, right? If you just take apart some of these products and you understand the component costs, it's actually more than what the retail price is. And Unitree is doing the same thing right now, right? There you can go on Unitree and buy a humanoid and you imagine they're pretty happy with how the DGI rollout went and they want to do the same thing again.

• 1:18:08Keith Rabois?

  No, this is why I think geopolitically, the Trump administration is going to have to address this. I think robotics have military applications too. So not only do you have this like imagine the data collection potential, but the military applications of a robot that can run 17 miles an hour. So I would be shocked if this administration doesn't figure out a way to ban.

• 1:18:31Keith Rabois?

  Chinese robots before it's too late.

• 1:18:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, with DGI, there's this idea that you're not too worried about the drone in your closet because it's like zipped in, you know, the box that it came in and and there's the idea that like, okay, like in this doomsday scenario, the drones take off and, you know, become these sort of weaponized devices, but a humanoid who's doing your laundry and then can turn around and, you know,

• 1:18:50John Coogan?

  Get up any moment.

• 1:18:51Jordi Hays?

  take you out is a is a totally different story. So I think that you have a good point there.

• 1:18:55Keith Rabois?

  Also, training data. I mean, there's, there's a lot of dangers and so I think this is a real political issue that needs to be top of mind. Like, once we get through TikTok, which will happen sooner rather than later, I think robotics and humanoid robots are particularly severe, particularly severe threat. And so that said, we will need an American competitor one way or the other. Like, the world is going to develop at some point.

• 1:19:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:19Keith Rabois?

  Humanoid robots that are effective. And it'd be better if American competitors are great.

• 1:19:26Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:19:27Keith Rabois?

  But we really need to slow down the Chinese progress, especially in the sub-society by CCP.

• 1:19:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Uh, one thing that's been interesting is seeing how Uber's been positioning themselves in the context of autonomous driving, right? They're basically DARs position the company to be like a booking.com for autonomous vehicles, giving you an opportunity to potentially talk your book a little bit. Does Traba, and I don't know if you can speak to this, but does Traba have a position where, you know, today they're using sort of human capital across the sort of network of customers that they have? Is there a world where, you know, I'd be curious if you could speak to sort of long-term potential of a humanoid through Traba?

• 1:20:05Keith Rabois?

  Well, I think not immediately. I think if you look at the tasks in light industrial warehouses where Traba specializes, a lot of those tasks are not yet ready for robotic intervention. However.

• 1:20:17Jordi Hays?

  But 10 years from now.

• 1:20:18Keith Rabois?

  If Traba is succeeding in running an organization, in running. You know, the most sensitive part of a light industrial operation is the human labor in your action, quality control, reliability, all of those things. If you get the credibility of making a business more successful, you may be a great pathway to introduce more and more technology.

• 1:20:36Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:20:37Keith Rabois?

  So you may not obviate humans, you may supplement humans, you may make a, you may introduce a combination that does some humans and some robotics. But it's some company from afar that doesn't understand how a warehouse works, that doesn't understand real workers and what real workers, you know, needs are, and tries to run a mixed system without having any understanding of real people. I don't think it's going to be very successful. And I don't think we're ready to rip out, in the long tail fragmented sense, light industrial, the investment required for robotics to rip out all the humans.

• 1:21:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:09Keith Rabois?

  Isn't going to be economically feasible. Amazon may be able to justify, you know, the R and D plus the fixed cost, but like.

• 1:21:16Jordi Hays?

  No, and we, we had, uh, we had Ryan Peterson on the show last week talking about how the bar, the, the bar to clear if you want to replace humans is so high because we're actually, we're pretty good at what we do, right? We've got, you know, all this, you know, ability to, to an agency. And it's, you know, very clearly going to be the same type of situation within, within warehouses as in ports.

• 1:21:38Keith Rabois?

  But over 20 years, I can see Trava introducing more and more technology to their current customer base. Like saying, you know, look, look, we've already satisfied you, we're delighting you, trust us. This is going to make you more efficient, more competitive, more scalable, et cetera. And so that could be a long-term strategy that makes tons of sense for the company and for their customer base.

• 1:21:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How do you think about the rollout of humanoids specifically around depreciation in the EV space? We've seen massive depreciation on the consumer side, right? Somebody buys a Model Y, it's worth, you know, 30 grand less a few months later, right? This sort of extreme depreciation. Do you see that as, as a potentially a headwind for the rollout of humanoids where, you know, factories basically say, hey, look, I, I think your tech has potential, but if I just wait a year, I can get a much better, you know, robot for, uh, you know, the same price?

• 1:22:25Keith Rabois?

  Well, I don't think anybody really knows under the decay curve, you know, because what is wearing territory to these robots and like, and what functions to it may be very different. Like if you ask robots to do this versus this, but like a year, are they completely dysfunctional? Like imagine a simplified metaphor. You, if you have weights like a gym at home. Probably last for a decade easily, like you're squat racking your weights. You throw up in a commercial gym, those things are gonna show merit terribly in the first year.

• 1:22:52Jordi Hays?

  Especially you and Barry.

• 1:22:55Jordi Hays?

  They gotta change the treadmill out every day after you at Barry's, I'm sure.

• 1:22:58Keith Rabois?

  Literally, like to wear it too. It does depend upon the use you use. And I don't think anybody knows really what that like curve looks like. And then that affects the economics, like help fruit it just on a purely rational basis is using a robot to do X, Y, or Z. Because you don't, you don't really understand that trade right now. The only way to really do that is you have to throw some robots at some problems. And then monitor what breaks why and how and how fast and how expensive are the replacement parts?

• 1:23:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about the strategic Bitcoin reserve? Do you have a take prepared for that yet?

• 1:23:30Keith Rabois?

  Yeah, I'm probably not the biggest fan. I mean, I'm very supportive of the Trump administration. I think almost everything they've done. Has been really good and really strong. I've been very impressed. I probably, if I was going to do it, would have done it Bitcoin only. I don't think, I don't think we need to do it, but if we're gonna do it, I don't think. Kind of stepped in the middle of a bunch of messaging problems by like including a bunch of other cryptocurrencies. But I'm not the biggest fan of like the government doing, performing business functions, period. So I don't like the sovereign wealth fund either. I mean, I'm happy to manage it if they, you know, if KB wants to, if they want to need KB, if they need professional managers, we'll probably do it.

• 1:24:10John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:24:10Keith Rabois?

  The reality is I don't think mixing business function and politics is a good idea. I think you should separate those. And, you know, free enterprise works really well. Capitalism works extremely well. And the government should do, you know, protect the American people, defend, defend the border, you know, et cetera. And I don't, I don't see any, you know, the only argument for the Bitcoin strategic reserve is obviously we do have gold reserves.

• 1:24:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:24:33Keith Rabois?

  You know, and if you believe the metaphor that the future of store value is like cold, you can talk yourself into it. I don't, I don't think it's the most compelling thing.

• 1:24:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there was a good point.

• 1:24:43Keith Rabois?

  The situation.

• 1:24:44Jordi Hays?

  Like the strategic reserve could just be Bitcoin we seize from criminals, right? And it just goes into fund.

• 1:24:49Keith Rabois?

  Well, actually, for that too. Yeah. I mean, obviously, obviously the FBI and other people, you know, treasury winds up getting their hands on a lot of valuable assets.

• 1:24:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:24:58Keith Rabois?

  And, you know, that could be a good way to fund it without taking American tax dollars. You know, I think the burden. And I think George is showing this, you know, is really setting a great example here is the burden for taking a dollar from an American family should be increased by an order of magnitude. The justification should be go up, not that there's never justification, but we need to raise that bar. The dollar belongs to the people who earned it, barring the most extraordinary justification for it. We can't have these frivolous soft justifications or low RRI justifications. It really belongs to the people who create the value.

• 1:25:33John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:25:33Jordi Hays?

  Well said.

• 1:25:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're spending more time in DC. Do you think that there's a like a potential for startups or specifically like defense tech startups? Like to to move offices there earlier, like actually like build companies there?

• 1:25:46Keith Rabois?

  I don't know. I think for non-defense startups, I would recommend starting an early stage company in DC. Obviously, the people who are already successful are spending more time in DC, which is, you know, valuable to me to some extent. But I think if you're an early stage company, that's not really targeting the government as your first customer, federal.

• 1:26:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:04Keith Rabois?

  You know, in some way, then I think it's probably a mistake right now. That could change in five or 10 years and, you know, maybe there's a better ecosystem there.

• 1:26:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:12Keith Rabois?

  I don't know the defense landscape and how fast the Defense Department is going to innovate. We'll see. I mean, there are people in the administration who believe that reform is going to be fast and furious in the defense department and that we need it from a budget perspective. We have to, the defense department needs to do more with less.

• 1:26:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:28Keith Rabois?

  And so, but until the proof's in the pudding, I don't know how vast the opportunity is right now.

• 1:26:34Jordi Hays?

  We have time for maybe one more question. I'm curious to get your take on on Sundar. Do you think he's still got a job in a year from now? The rollout of AI across the Google ecosystem has been atrocious from my view, and I think consumers feel this. John always jokes, he's like, I pay for Gemini, I don't know where to find it. But it's cool when it pops up. He seems to be underperforming dramatically in the context of Satya, you know. What's your, what's your take on, on that whole situation?

• 1:27:05Keith Rabois?

  Well, it seems to be outperforming Tim Cook, which you've read.

• 1:27:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, at least they have models that they train that are good.

• 1:27:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, for those that missed it, Apple just said we're delaying our series.

• 1:27:16John Coogan?

  Two years.

• 1:27:16Jordi Hays?

  Two years, something like that.

• 1:27:18Keith Rabois?

  Two years is like, as other people have pointed out, two years in an AI world is an eternity. You might as well say we're delaying something for 20 years or, you know, like two generations at this point. And so I think that's a serious problem and I'm an Apple fanboy forever, you know, have been forever.

• 1:27:32Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:27:32Keith Rabois?

  So I think it's pretty devastating that they're so far behind. I think Sundar made several miscalculations and I actually do think that Microsoft and, you know, Satya got a lot of credit, but I think they're seeing some of the downsides to some of their strategies now. Like I think they are going to wind up not having quite as much of a strategic like lock on AI as they thought they were. I think that said, they maybe played the cards the best they could, you know, you can't always control everything. But I think the world is changing really rapidly and the people who control the future of AI may not be at Microsoft.

• 1:28:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:28:11Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 1:28:12John Coogan?

  Well, thanks for stopping by.

• 1:28:13Keith Rabois?

  Pleasure.

• 1:28:14John Coogan?

  Love having you. You're welcome anytime, anytime there's breaking news, well, I'm sure I'll give you a call. This is fantastic. Uh, we're gonna hop on. Keep talking about Ramp. Uh, we're going to Packy McCormick yet next, so.

• 1:28:25Keith Rabois?

  Awesome.

• 1:28:25John Coogan?

  Thanks for stopping by, Keith. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:28:27Jordi Hays?

  Great to chat.

• 1:28:28John Coogan?

  Have a great day. That was great.

• 1:28:33John Coogan?

  Good questions, Jordy. I like, I like, I like keeping the humanoid question going across all of these. We got to ask Packy that too, and then eventually we can put together a supercut.

• 1:28:43Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:28:43John Coogan?

  Here's every, every important capital allocator, every Silicon Valley person, uh, talking about humanoids. Well, while we are waiting two minutes to bring Packy in, uh, let's talk about Wander, Find Your Happy Place.

• 1:28:56Jordi Hays?

  Let's go. I got a hat for this one. Throw it on. We got a hat. Throw it on.

• 1:29:01John Coogan?

  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. I've been looking at one, uh, up by Yosemite, thinking about taking the kids up there.

• 1:29:15Jordi Hays?

  Big Yosemite guy over here.

• 1:29:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's snowing and we wanted to go to the snow, but we didn't want to do crazy hotel. We didn't want to do some, you know, Airbnb thing. Wander was just like the perfect.

• 1:29:25Jordi Hays?

  Perfect middle ground.

• 1:29:26John Coogan?

  Perfect middle ground. And they have this really nice UI feature where if it's snowing. At the Wander, when you're going to be booking at it, it will drizzle snow over the webpage while you're on it. It's amazing.

• 1:29:41Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:29:41John Coogan?

  It's a really, really nice touch.

• 1:29:43Jordi Hays?

  While we're buying some time until Packy joins, Packy did an entire deep dive on Wander.

• 1:29:50John Coogan?

  Oh, fantastic.

• 1:29:52Jordi Hays?

  And we got Packy in the waiting room.

• 1:29:53John Coogan?

  Let's bring him in.

• 1:29:54Jordi Hays?

  Let's bring him in.

• 1:29:54John Coogan?

  Let's bring him in.

• 1:29:55Jordi Hays?

  I wish he was here in person.

• 1:29:57John Coogan?

  He could do the Wander. Oh, I got that ramp hat on.

• 1:30:00Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:30:01John Coogan?

  Ramp day.

• 1:30:02Jordi Hays?

  Hello, brothers.

• 1:30:04John Coogan?

  Hello. Welcome to the show. Good to have you here.

• 1:30:07Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. It's great to be here. Long time, long time, first time.

• 1:30:10Jordi Hays?

  First of many, first of many.

• 1:30:12John Coogan?

  First of many. Yeah. Break it down. What happened today? Why are you wearing a ramp hat?

• 1:30:17Jordi Hays?

  Take a victory lap.

• 1:30:18John Coogan?

  Take a victory lap.

• 1:30:20Speaker 03

  No, I always wear a ramp hat.

• 1:30:23John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:30:24Speaker 03

  I've heard that TVPN is just unbiased journalism. And so I wanted to join you for an unbiased conversation.

• 1:30:31John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:30:31Jordi Hays?

  Unbiased.

• 1:30:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Guests and hosts of this podcast may hold securities by the presenting sponsor of the show. Anyways, great to have you on, Packy. I wanted to go back to March 21st, 2022, when you, this was like probably your second time covering when they announced

• 1:30:56Speaker 03

  It was.

• 1:30:56Jordi Hays?

  their $8.1 billion valuation. And

• 1:31:00John Coogan?

  Was that the back to background, the double round or whatever?

• 1:31:03Jordi Hays?

  I mean, every single round for a minute there was, you basically would, you would read a ramp fundraising announcement. You'd close.

• 1:31:09John Coogan?

  Speedrunning for a while there.

• 1:31:11Jordi Hays?

  Information and then they, you get a notification on your phone that said scoop, ramp is raising another round.

• 1:31:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was wild.

• 1:31:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was the 8.1. That actually might have been the third piece. I think the first time I wrote about them was December 2020. I think we didn't talk about evaluation, but I think they were valued at 300 million at the time. So like something just pathetically low.

• 1:31:31John Coogan?

  Like seed and series A at that point.

• 1:31:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's like a personal kind of net worth type number. And then the next time I wrote about them was when they had raised back to back rounds. I think it was like 1 billion and then 1.6 billion.

• 1:31:45Jordi Hays?

  So I have it here, the first time.

• 1:31:46Speaker 03

  And I spent a lot of the time in these pieces. One, just being like, you know, praising ramp, obviously. And then two, kind of justifying that, you know, if you're growing. This fast.

• 1:31:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:59Speaker 03

  Like, these valuations kind of end up catching up. I think there was a period in between. They took a down round. They took their medicine in 2023. But now they just kind of continue to grow fast and we're we're back way above that 8.1 billion dollar valuation.

• 1:32:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, think about thinking about the the ramp down round was directly tied to the market, not business performance, which is why they're back above that last, you know, financing, just given that, you know, they were they were taking that down round while still putting up ridiculous numbers.

• 1:32:31John Coogan?

  And also, I mean, down round is like, I mean, Facebook did a down round at one point, but down round can mean so many different things. And like, I saw some down rounds during that year that were brutal, like pay to pay, pay to play, total cram down. Yeah, it's $100 million on 50 pre. So the new investors are taking 2/3 of the company.

• 1:32:53Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:32:53John Coogan?

  And then, yeah, there's a 10% option pool for the executive team or something like that. That's like, gonna get rolled out. And literally, anyone who touched the company for the first half decade that they were running it is just gone, wiped, like, didn't exist, never thing. You got paid W2 wages. I hope you I hope you put some in Nvidia stock because you got nothing now. And it was like, that happened all the time. And it was like, terrifying. But, you know, it happens.

• 1:33:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:20Speaker 03

  I was on I was on the other side of a few of those. But I mean, I remember reading about the the ramp piece, the ramp down around when it happened.

• 1:33:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:27Speaker 03

  And that's when I really knew, like, I think, you know, in 2020, 2021, you know, you can you could be impressed by a company. But a lot of people are going fast. A lot of valuations are going up.

• 1:33:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:33:37Speaker 03

  When you read a story about in, you know, this terrible market, a company doing a down round, and it's like, pretty much gushing, and all of the commentary around it and Twitter and everything about them doing a down round was gushing commentary on how how smart it was for them to kind of just take the hit and keep going. That's when you know you got a company that's it's pretty special on your hands.

• 1:33:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. So you're talking about ramp safety?

• 1:33:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so this is John's.

• 1:34:00John Coogan?

  So, yeah, so Packy, like, obviously, like, ramps moving really quickly, we're worried about a future where Ramp is like closing the books so fast that like you go to ask Ramp to close the books and it thinks like, if we didn't have any humans, we would never need to close the books. So it just kills everyone.

• 1:34:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the Ramp AI.

• 1:34:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, kind of like a, kind of like a Ramp doomer scenario. Like, should we pause Ramp? I've seen some people throwing out open letters, maybe trying to lobby the government to slow down Ramp. What do you think? What's your take?

• 1:34:27Speaker 03

  It's, I mean, I think it's a real risk. I think pausing doesn't work there, right? Then the Chinese are gonna start, you know, closing the books faster. And so you can't do that. The thing that I get worried about is that you run out of atoms in the universe at some point. Right? If you're an investor and you're thinking like, can they continue to double every year? Like, at some point, you run out of atoms in the universe. And so that, to me, is kind of one of the bear cases, I guess.

• 1:34:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think Ramp generally is what they're doing is like they're building a machine god that lives in your CFO's Chrome tab, but ultimately, it will be a beneficial benevolent machine god that lives in your CFO's Chrome tab.

• 1:35:02Jordi Hays?

  That's focused on saving you time and money, and it knows its lane.

• 1:35:04John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. And so in a post-Ramp society, kind of like a post-AGI, post-Ramp society, I think, I think humans will be doing fantastically. I think it'll be great.

• 1:35:15Speaker 03

  At least the CFO suite will, right? They're gonna get all their time back to be able to think strategically about the business, about life. So I think that's one of the things, you know, my dad is a CPA. And so like, I just think, you know, when I, when I write about Ramp, I think about my father, right? And like, how much, how many basketball games, you know, he could have been out of mind had Ramp existed.

• 1:35:39John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:35:40Speaker 03

  At the time. I mean, the guy was, you know, he was a business consultant, he was traveling, you know, all the time. He'd fly to Germany for the day and fly back and like, imagine, you know, Ramp's AI just does that for him, right? And like, we're hanging out, he knows me better, I know him better, like, and I love him, he's a great guy.

• 1:35:54Jordi Hays?

  It just suddenly gets super dark. Packy's like, my dad never made it to games in the first 15 days of the month.

• 1:36:00Speaker 03

  No, he actually did. It was pretty incredible that he would like fly back, he would take the early flight back to make it to my stupid game. So, good on him. I just mean, he'd be like a lot less tired had Ramp existed, you know.

• 1:36:11Jordi Hays?

  I'll give a personal anecdote. I got to hang out with my kids this weekend because we're on Ramp and, you know, it just, the books close themselves. Pivoting a little bit, John and I were talking this morning. There's too many top signals to count right now. Everywhere you look, you got Trump coin, you got Cardano going in the reserve, you got,

• 1:36:34Jordi Hays?

  you know, OnlyFans competitors doing something, you know, we don't know. And we got humanoid robot companies with one customer raising it 40 billion.

• 1:36:45Speaker 03

  What is BMW's valuation, by the way?

• 1:36:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's a good question.

• 1:36:50John Coogan?

  If it's less than 40 billion, you know, Ford is less.

• 1:36:54Jordi Hays?

  53 billion euros.

• 1:36:56John Coogan?

  Billion euros, okay, so, yeah.

• 1:36:58Speaker 03

  So what's that in USD, like 12 dollars?

• 1:37:01Jordi Hays?

  We're mugging the euro these days, but um.

• 1:37:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's probably 50 billion.

• 1:37:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so, yeah, there's definitely, there's definitely a bull case to be made of why figures should be worth as much as their customer, their first customer, but anyways, how do you think as an investor right now, we're clearly living through one of the greatest times in history, right? We just had a private spacecraft land on the moon.

• 1:37:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:37:26Jordi Hays?

  Elon's launching rockets every day. There's, there's, you know, austerity in the government, which is, you know, potentially bearish for GDP short term, but probably good for the dollar long term.

• 1:37:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:37:38Jordi Hays?

  How do you think as an investor and even a writer and somebody who's called a lot of trends, you know, early, you know, what do you think the next, you know, talk to us about the next five to 10 years?

• 1:37:48Speaker 03

  Oh, the next five to 10 years. You know, you know what I found really fascinating is that a lot of the stuff that I'm not investing in has been super overvalued. And then a lot of the stuff that I've been investing in has been undervalued and underappreciated, and I think it's going to be worth like a lot more in the next kind of year or two. So that, that's kind of my take. I, you know, I'm not a figure investor, a big fan of their videos. And actually, my daughter loves figure videos and was like really psyched to see two of them, two of them together.

• 1:38:16Speaker 03

  I don't know. I mean, I think like there's a lot of probably overhyping AI. There's probably going to be like a couple of $10 trillion AI companies that are going to pay for the whole thing. Humanoids scare the hell out of me as an investor because it's like this really impossibly hard thing to do with a lot of really, really smart people. Working on it where like if you pull off this impossible thing, then you're competing against these 10 other companies and like who wins? A big consumer surplus then, but there's, you know, like human labor doing things. There are some people I've heard who don't just kind of podcast and write who like do you like you make cars or whatever physical labor.

• 1:38:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:50Speaker 03

  I think like, you know, human, human salary and wages and all of that, it's like $45 trillion. It's like half of the world's GDP. And so like, if you underwrite robots is like some small percentage. I mean, I think figure already got like 0.1% of that GDP got credit for 0.1% of that GDP, which is pretty, uh, pretty amazing.

• 1:39:09Speaker 03

  But like there will be like massive, massive, massive companies built here. And I think there's also going to be a lot of people who lose a lot of money. We could talk about what's happening in, in venture. I think it's like a really, I think like the big funds are actually super well positioned. And all there's going to be a lot of these like emerging ish funds who try to compete. Who I just think it kind of like wiped out. I, I don't know. I think there's going to be.

• 1:39:32John Coogan?

  Do you have a take on general catalyst going public?

• 1:39:36John Coogan?

  That's a good one.

• 1:39:37Speaker 03

  I don't have a good take on that. I mean, it's like, it's a really.

• 1:39:40Jordi Hays?

  I would say like one of the, you know, when I think back of some of your, one of my favorite pieces of yours over the year, I'm not going to know the title, but you, you had a really great deep dive on this idea that as our tools become better and more efficient. You know, a group that, you know, a company that would have taken a hundred people to build, you know, uh, five years ago now only takes 20, right? And I think we're really seeing that right now in AI where you have companies like Cursor, a big one, you know, with 20 people doing a hundred million of ARR. It's been amazing to see that play out how, you know, how, you know, take basically one, take a victory lap there, maybe double click in and share some more insight.

• 1:40:22Jordi Hays?

  But I feel like that was really, uh, you basically called that, uh, and did it in a very eloquent way. But I think we're, I, I expected it to be something like maybe like five years from now that would be the case, but it feels like it's that way like today.

• 1:40:34Speaker 03

  So there's a few different ways that goes and it's really like there's the Russell conjugation where like, you know, the person who's doing something different than you is doing it bad, you're doing it right, whatever. And like, I literally think about this a bunch when I see all the charts of of these companies making like more money than Ramp faster. I'm like, that's actually like way too fast and that's totally unsustainable. Ramp, however, is like actually growing perfectly. But I think that really actually goes through my head. They're doing it just right, but they're they're not. And I think I'm actually responsible for like

• 1:41:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, the bigger the bigger growth rates scare me. It's okay. Your growth rate is perfect. Growing faster is unsustainable.

• 1:41:12Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:41:12John Coogan?

  Growing slower, disaster. You're growing the perfect rate. The Goldilocks effect. The Goldilocks growth rate.

• 1:41:19Speaker 03

  I mean, that's Eric and Kareem just doing what they do. I think they're just like really nailing that.

• 1:41:24John Coogan?

  That's hilarious.

• 1:41:26Speaker 03

  But I do think that there is something about that that like really actually does does scare me that fast growth and just like how easy it's become. So really, you can build more with fewer people. I took to me kind of two different things. Like, one, it just made me scared. And this was like back in 2022, like really scared about software in in general, because you can go out and build with five people, a company that grows really, really fast. And two, I think the other point of that that essay was because we have better tools and because you can do more with fewer people, startups should be able to just like actually start fresh and compete with these companies that you never thought that you'd be able to compete with. I'm writing, you know, a follow up on Primer right now, which is taking on K through 12

• 1:42:08Speaker 03

  education, taking on public schools. Like, not a group or a group of incumbents that like you thought you'd ever be able to take on. And I think they actually can. You can like put education on a Moore's Law like cost curve and get make education better for less and less money. And so like, that's pretty amazing. Obviously, Anduril, you know, is like starting to get starting to approach kind of Prime's valuation. And so like, that, I think, is like the really exciting part of it to me. Less that five people can build things really, really quickly and more that A hundred people can build things to take on like these really old, big companies.

• 1:42:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:40Jordi Hays?

  What's your AI stack? You've been a little bit critical of AI's writing ability, which I think is fair. We also, we have Coogan's benchmark, which we do about once a week where we get the new latest model to try to tell us a joke and it's pretty.

• 1:42:54John Coogan?

  It's hilarious when you read it like you're a stand up and it just bombs intentionally. And it's funny to watch someone bomb intentionally. So it's good in that regard, but.

• 1:43:05Jordi Hays?

  How have you been? Yeah. What's your, what's your AI stack? And.

• 1:43:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's actually useful?

• 1:43:13Speaker 03

  I mean, I still use Claude and ChatGPT and Grok to just kind of like, if I don't understand something, I'll throw it in or like to make sure that I like, I have explained something the right way or to get feedback on an essay.

• 1:43:25John Coogan?

  Basically.

• 1:43:26Speaker 03

  Four point, what's that?

• 1:43:27John Coogan?

  Like, you're using it like a better Google search or like better Wikipedia.

• 1:43:31Speaker 03

  A better Google search and like just a little safety blanket on the like, I don't have an editor. So somebody to like, tell me that this isn't like the, the worst thing I've ever written.

• 1:43:40Speaker 03

  Four point five is actually a little bit better. It stopped doing like the thing that killed me and then I tweeted about a couple of times recently is like the M dash. It's not just blank M dash. It's like a totally different blank and four point five has actually stopped doing that, which is really good. Cause I would see that in people's writing and it just like, it really made me hurt, but.

• 1:43:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was the PG one? Delve?

• 1:44:01Speaker 03

  Delve. But you know what's funny? I, when I read older stuff that's like, that totally predates, I find delve in it all the time. I think PG might've been wrong on that. People use delve in there.

• 1:44:09John Coogan?

  Oh, really? Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I, I thought there was some, some, some weird round tripping thing where like, like the RLHF team in Kenya, that OpenAI was paying to do the RLHF stuff had learned English in a very proper way. And so delve was one of the words that was like in the vocab. Like course that they all took. And so they thought that it was like a much more popular phrase than Americans think. And Americans use it, but just not all the time. So it's kind of weird. But I, I mean, you'd see these aberrations all the time where you'd be like, write a tweet and it would like use hashtags. And it's like, that's kind of what a tweet is, but not really, not today. It's not a banger. Like no one uses hashtags.

• 1:44:51John Coogan?

  Or if you do use hashtag, it's like in this funny, like kind of meta ironic way. It's not just like, yeah. So yeah, yeah. Give me some other hot takes.

• 1:44:59Speaker 03

  I mean, it's, I literally just asked it today because I was trying to, you know, make my own joke. For this podcast, you know, the joke that ended up becoming, you know, the fact that with this unbiased conversation about ramp. There's like that one phrase, like no bias, no something.

• 1:45:14Jordi Hays?

  No conflict, no interest.

• 1:45:15John Coogan?

  No mercy.

• 1:45:16Speaker 03

  No conflict, no interest. That's what I was looking for. See, this is, this is, so I said that, I said, uh, no bias, no dot, dot, dot. And it was like, very confidently, no bias, no bet.

• 1:45:26John Coogan?

  No bet.

• 1:45:28Speaker 03

  What you're thinking of, I was like, no. The phrase you're likely thinking of is no skin in the game, no opinion.

• 1:45:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:36Speaker 03

  And Jordy got it in two seconds.

• 1:45:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, still got it. Not a paperclip yet. What, what's going on on Substack these days? They've got some like social activity that's happening. It seems to be picking up. You're still writing on Substack, correct?

• 1:45:54Speaker 03

  I'm still writing on Substack. I've seen a lot of conversation about, uh, you know, people going over to Substack, you can use links there. It's a friendly conversation. I have not done that at all. And I think, you know, my, my people are on X, we're on X live right now, right? Is this our first live X episode?

• 1:46:08John Coogan?

  It is.

• 1:46:08Jordi Hays?

  First ever, first ever.

• 1:46:10John Coogan?

  Go retweet it right now. Don't get too distracted.

• 1:46:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, I don't know where you want to take that.

• 1:46:18Jordi Hays?

  Oh, no, I just.

• 1:46:19John Coogan?

  Substack like as a company seems to be doing very well. Like the last time I saw Chris and, and I, I got like some kind of, I don't know if I should even say, but like, you know.

• 1:46:27Speaker 03

  You should say.

• 1:46:28John Coogan?

  So some reference on like, oh, I'm like hiring an accountant that worked for them. And they're like, oh yeah, it's actually a pretty good business. And so congrats to the team. I think they, I think they've done really well from a company that was like, kind of like. Maybe overhyped at one point. It's like, oh, it's like playing in the social

• 1:46:42Jordi Hays?

  It seems like it's

• 1:46:43John Coogan?

  They've, they've built a really solid business.

• 1:46:45Jordi Hays?

  Broken through the cultural norm.

• 1:46:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:46:47Jordi Hays?

  I see it on Instagram.

• 1:46:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:46:48Jordi Hays?

  And my question to you is, you pay them 10% of your gross revenue, right?

• 1:46:55John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:46:55Speaker 03

  I don't.

• 1:46:55Jordi Hays?

  Cause you don't do

• 1:46:56John Coogan?

  Because he, unlike the All In Podcast, run ads. This is why he's on the show.

• 1:47:02Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:47:02Speaker 03

  You gotta run ads. I mean,

• 1:47:03John Coogan?

  He is an ad respecter.

• 1:47:05Jordi Hays?

  Ad respecter.

• 1:47:06Speaker 03

  We're, we're both, you know, Ram sponsored, obviously Wander Portfolio Company.

• 1:47:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:47:11Speaker 03

  Longtime friend of the newsletter. And you just feel good getting to tell people about that. If I were, there you go. If I were a subscriber business, I wouldn't get to tell people about Ram. I wouldn't

• 1:47:20John Coogan?

  There's not nearly enough ads on the screen right now. We need more. So we got, everyone has a sponsored hat right now.

• 1:47:25Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:47:25John Coogan?

  Jordy got the bezel. I got the Wander. You got the Ram.

• 1:47:29Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 1:47:29John Coogan?

  Be sure to look down so I can see the logo. There we go. That's good.

• 1:47:32Speaker 03

  There we go.

• 1:47:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, so, so, I mean, he is kind of a bit of a failure mode for, for Substack.

• 1:47:37Speaker 03

  I am. Well, it's funny because people will ask me like, you know, you like, what do you think about Substack? And like, you've talked to the team, obviously. And like, I actually have never talked to the co-founders. I've talked to one person at Substack once.

• 1:47:47John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:47:47Speaker 03

  Because I'm like the worst possible business for those guys. I haven't paid a dollar to Substack.

• 1:47:52John Coogan?

  What do you think about this idea that like, they should be doing the bundling and aggregation on their side? Where like, you should go to Substack, somebody should pay $20 a month and they should get, you know, like you and Pirate Wires and, you know, Barry Weiss's Free Press, like all, instead of, instead of those folks like leaving and you monetizing elsewhere, like, do you think that makes sense? Or is that just like a crazy idea?

• 1:48:16Speaker 03

  No, it's a good idea. I mean, it's like, it's the idea that everybody I think has that they should do that, that they should build an ad network. That like, there's all these things that are like clearly good for, good for business. That actually I think in practice, like when you, when you're like dealing with people who have kind of like egos and think that their own thing is like the thing.

• 1:48:33John Coogan?

  Important.

• 1:48:34Speaker 03

  Are really, really, really hard to pull off in, in practice. Like I wouldn't want to be part of a bundle. And so I think that, that ends up being a challenge. Same with, Uh, you know, like Ramp is not going through an ad network and buying like random slots, right? They're partnering with, you know, just top shelf kind of shows and specific people. And so I think the ad network stuff falls apart there. I really like what Substack is doing for the simplicity. Like I, in the beginning was definitely somebody who thought that I would move to a different platform. I wanted more customization, whatever. You'd have to give me a lot of money to move to a different platform now just because it works really, really well. The core product that they, they built.

• 1:49:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have you ever experimented with a, like a paid offshoot? Cause I know you've done other offshoots, like, uh, what, what was the Thursday white pill one?

• 1:49:19Speaker 03

  We did the Friday, yeah, the weekly dose of optimism.

• 1:49:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Weekly dose of optimism, which is kind of like, oh, yeah, yeah, offshoot, but, but that's still free, right?

• 1:49:26Speaker 03

  It's all still, all still free. We can, I don't want to write more. If anything, I want to write less this year. And so, uh, I think I don't want to.

• 1:49:35John Coogan?

  Bangers only.

• 1:49:36Speaker 03

  Bangers only. I don't want to limit what I send.

• 1:49:38John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:49:38Speaker 03

  And I actually don't know. I like, at this point I'm in too deep and I don't know what the conversion rate would be. And maybe it would be incredibly embarrassing. And so I'm just going to stick with, stick with what I got.

• 1:49:45John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 1:49:46Jordi Hays?

  Love it. Uh, where you mentioned earlier, you've been finding, uh, companies you feel are undervalued. You obviously have an insane top of funnel, right? Uh, you, you're broken through the, the mainstream. If I ask somebody that, you know, is on X, they know who you are. If I ask somebody that's kind of even LinkedIn mode, like they usually know who you are, right? So the top of funnel must be.

• 1:50:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:50:09Jordi Hays?

  The top of funnel must be crazy. But, uh, what, like where, where are you excited to be investing right now? Um, I'm sure you're flooded and, and doing a bunch of AI, but at the same time, uh, it feels like an interesting time right now where you, you maybe wouldn't want to invest in the next humanoid robotic, you know, company. You probably don't want to be investing in more defense, like net new defense tech companies that are just incorporating today. What, what's got, you know, space feels, uh, like in many ways, there's more opportunity than ever because the cost to get up there is dropped, but where, where is exciting to you? What's the weird stuff you're looking at?

• 1:50:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um.

• 1:50:48Speaker 03

  Really like the way that I've been thinking like my catchphrase on this is Andorl and SpaceX for everything. So as opposed to like you see Andorl and SpaceX, the move is not like go do the second best version of that. It's go find that in the other industry. So you know, like a base power company or some of us internet doing telco or primer doing education like find the thing that is going to go win that category is really what I'm looking for. And those end up looking weird. So I was kidding about the stuff that I'm investing in being undervalued. But I do think that because it doesn't really fit a thesis that a fund would have on defense or whatever, it is a little more affordable than a humanoid company or a foundation model company for sure.

• 1:51:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, stuff in like power, energy, deeper in the supply chain, way far away from the core hot AI consumer stuff. There's going to be more reasonable prices there. Also, are you looking at bio stuff yet or bio adjacent?

• 1:51:41Speaker 03

  Oh, we've been doing a lot of bio stuff.

• 1:51:42John Coogan?

  I imagine.

• 1:51:43Speaker 03

  I think a hot take would be cancer is probably gone in 10 years. I think is one of my favorite hot takes. There's just so many different attacks on it and CAR T cell therapies are doing well. And it's a matter of kind of scaling, scaling those out.

• 1:51:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm sure you read Sebastian Malabas, The Power Law. I'm sure you've read Sebastian Malabas, The Power Law. And before that, he wrote that book on more money than God about hedge funds. And so his whole thing is like, go and find the group of people that are making trillions of dollars effectively, or like really moving capitalist markets, like the biggest power players, and then write the definitive history and profile of them. And so I went to a speaker series with him. And afterwards, you know, somebody comes up to him, he's like, what's the next book you're writing? Because that's where I want to be investing today, right? And he said bio. He was like, I think that the next book I write will be about like the flagship pioneering, like, but also the biotech public companies, and then the biotech funds.

• 1:52:35John Coogan?

  And so it's something that I've certainly been meaning to get more up to speed on. I have a lot of friends and co-founders who have done like.

• 1:52:41Speaker 03

  I have to say, it is bio is hard. Like compared like of all the other things, you know, who I've been working with on the bio side, who's, you know, Stanford PhD in genomics. And he, like, without him, I wouldn't invest in bio. You see other generalist investors investing in bio, and he'll be like, that is the dumbest. Fucking deal I've ever seen in my life. Are we allowed to curse on X? Dumbest deal I've ever seen in my life.

• 1:53:00John Coogan?

  You are allowed to curse on X, but you will. What would your mother say? And we will shame you for cursing generally because this is a, uh, this is a friend, uh.

• 1:53:09Jordi Hays?

  Our kids watch this show.

• 1:53:10John Coogan?

  Kid friendly show. Our kids watch the show.

• 1:53:11Speaker 03

  Oh my goodness. I'm, I'm so sorry.

• 1:53:13John Coogan?

  We don't, we don't curse personally, but do whatever, whatever's right for your brand.

• 1:53:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're, they're, uh.

• 1:53:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. If you want to have like a low, a low tier, like I, I, I know you're an Irish guy. You're, you're, you're, you're up in Boston, getting drunk and having all.

• 1:53:27Jordi Hays?

  Pot trick.

• 1:53:28John Coogan?

  I keep performing, having some beers, throwing some curse words out.

• 1:53:34Speaker 03

  No, I, I, all, all to say, bio is incredibly exciting and bio is like a really funny one where I, I think like people get really excited and really like, oh my God. Like they told me that they're going to make people live till 250 years old. They're definitely investing in that and people are going to lose their shirt, but.

• 1:53:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, at the same time, it's like, it's like every category is hard until some power law company comes along and makes it look easy. Like Andorol.

• 1:53:56Speaker 03

  Not even, not even.

• 1:53:57John Coogan?

  And now there's like, and now there's a new hardware company like every two days. And then they like, yeah, they can't like beat Andorol necessarily overnight, but they can like sell and get deals and then sell to Andorol or like create value or like, there can be good deals done in hardware now, even though like hardware is hard.

• 1:54:12Speaker 03

  Totally. I, I, I mean more just like, and this might just be me calling myself out, uh, on it. What do you have like millions of, of, of people watching this right now, calling myself out for being, uh, stupid, but like just the vocabulary of biology and like understanding how that whole thing fits together. It's just like a totally different beast, even I think compared to hardware and other things.

• 1:54:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. One of the, one of the things I've been sort of realizing around everything, deep tech, hard tech, biotech fits this is, uh, within software, we, we went through a 20 year period in Silicon Valley where software entrepreneurs could go out and make these sort of outlandish claims around the products that they would build, but then just go and do it, right? Cause the software is hard, but you can kind of make the pixels like, you know, work and whatever. It's code, right? We, we know how to do it. And then in hard tech is very different. You know, Elizabeth Holmes, like I do believe she genuinely believed that she could build the blood testing device that only needed one drop, but then like physics got involved.

• 1:55:07Jordi Hays?

  It was like, I gotta, I gotta tell you to pump the brakes there. Um, so it's been interesting to see that play out where for you as somebody who's a definite optimist, somebody that wants to believe in human potential and the ability to great, uh, build great things, you, you probably have to. Dial it back at points and say like, I want to believe this is real, but I'm not going to invest because I can't kind of reach that conviction threshold.

• 1:55:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, I have said, and I think this is fair for me, not for people who are better at science, but like I do, I'm trying to actually move closer to the series A now and like not doing deep tech because like I'm not the guy to underwrite the science. And if I'm like the investor that you're calling to have something that has a bunch of science risk in it, like I shouldn't actually be. It's more like the, you know, the furthest out proven thing and putting a bunch of those together and into a company. Gentlemen, I have to, I have to leave you.

• 1:55:58Jordi Hays?

  Last, can we, can I get a minute?

• 1:56:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can get a minute.

• 1:56:01Jordi Hays?

  Okay. As the godfather of Solana, the guy who kicked off Solana summer, you did, you gotta, you gotta give credit. You gotta, you deserve some credit for that. Give us your 30 second take on the strategic reserve. It would have been unimaginable to think that's the US government would be buying Solana, but you probably maybe I wouldn't be surprised if you alluded to it. What's your 30 second take?

• 1:56:23Speaker 03

  Oh, man. My 30 second take is that it's also dumb right now. Like I think Solana's great. I think it's like fast tech. And I think at like some point in five years, a lot of finance is going to run on Solana, on ETH, maybe on SUI or, you know, like a lot of, I think it's inevitable that that more and more finance will move over to crypto stable coins and having Stripe behind it is like a real thing. Any strategic reserve that has Cardano in it is just, it's a joke, right? Like it's like,

• 1:56:49Jordi Hays?

  Not to get political.

• 1:56:50Speaker 03

  There's a bunch of like, and I'm guilty of this too. There's a bunch of, a bunch of dog that caught the car stuff going on, I think in crypto right now where it's like no regulation, strategic reserve. And we're like, this is actually kind of stupid. Like not this way. This is not what we've been fighting for.

• 1:57:02Jordi Hays?

  Bitcoin's down 8% today and basically round tripped back to where the announcement happened, which is so bearish. Like that's, the US government is buying crypto and everybody's bearish. But I know you have an in-person meeting in like four minutes. So sorry for making you late for that.

• 1:57:18Speaker 03

  No, this was great.

• 1:57:18Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for coming on.

• 1:57:19John Coogan?

  You're welcome anytime. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.

• 1:57:22Speaker 03

  See you later, guys.

• 1:57:23John Coogan?

  See ya. Let's move on to garage mahals. This is, this is important stuff, people.

• 1:57:28Jordi Hays?

  This is really critical.

• 1:57:29John Coogan?

  If you're building a garage, how big should it be?

• 1:57:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:32John Coogan?

  Couple hundred square feet? No? Couple thousand square feet? No, we're talking to people that are making 6,000 square foot garages bigger than most people's houses.

• 1:57:42Jordi Hays?

  And where are we talking about Minnesota? So I have spent time in Minnesota. The CEO, my co-founder at Aurora, Brian, lives in Minnesota and you can play, everything's bigger in Minnesota, right? The houses are bigger, the basements are bigger. You can play basketball in his basement. He's got a half court and when it's below freezing for half the year, you gotta go big. You gotta build man caves and we're talking about man caves today. So I'm excited to get into this.

• 1:58:08John Coogan?

  So he has a three car garage in the Minneapolis suburb, already full. He had a three car garage. Brett Bailey, talk about struggle. I mean, we need a moment of silence for this guy because he had to keep his racing Porsche and trailer outside through brutal Minnesota winters. Then one March, as he prepared for a race, he discovered the wheels of the trailer had frozen to the ground. Unacceptable. But he didn't just take it lying down. He figured out a solution. For two weeks, he was throwing salt out there, but now he is part of a man cave meets storage wars revolution spreading across the country. I love it. I'm a huge fan of man,

• 1:58:51John Coogan?

  man caves and storage wars. And so he now keeps his two Porsches, a Ferrari, a custom Harley, a dune buggy and a racing trailer in a nearly 2,700 square foot space outfitted like a sleek European car dealership. It sports a tequila bar, heated floors, bathroom with a shower, giant TV, leather sofa, stack of racing tires and a car lift. So you can lift up the car, work on it, wrench on it with a couple of cold ones over the weekend. It's great.

• 1:59:21Jordi Hays?

  Nothing like getting under your car after you've had a couple of beers and just going to work on it.

• 1:59:26John Coogan?

  Going to work on it.

• 1:59:27Jordi Hays?

  It's a little dangerous, but sometimes you hit that Balmer peak, right? Working on your car.

• 1:59:32John Coogan?

  Call them car barns, barn dominions, toy sheds, garage mahals, or shouses for shophouses. They're a big hit in the land of 10,000 lakes.

• 1:59:43Jordi Hays?

  All right. So what's the controversy here, John?

• 1:59:45John Coogan?

  The controversy is that they're too big and they make the town look stupid. Everyone hates how they look. They called it, what was it? What did they call it? They call it the tin, Tin City or something like that.

• 1:59:59Jordi Hays?

  So I don't, you know this, but Ben, Vice President, producer of the show is actually from Minnesota.

• 2:00:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:06Jordi Hays?

  So we might have to send him out there to, and just have him zoom into the show on the site. Cause this is just such an important story.

• 2:00:12John Coogan?

  It is.

• 2:00:12Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get original reporting. We don't like to do original reporting here. We like to just, you know, spread misinformation from the timeline.

• 2:00:19John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 2:00:20Jordi Hays?

  But we gotta get Ben on the ground there. Cause yeah, there we go. Ben, Ben says he's got friends with garage mahals.

• 2:00:27John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. Yeah. In Crosslake, a forested vacation mecca, two and a half hours north of the Twin Cities. Space is limited on lakefront lots, making storage space elsewhere, often in simple metal buildings, highly valuable. The city council has twice put a moratorium on new storage, combating an image that has led some to dub the community Tin City. Cause there's so much tin going up as, as, as storage. But if you look at some of these photos, they look fantastic. It looks like a lot of fun. If you're in one, Nelson and others tout the expansion of the tax base from the storage boom, which includes his new 4,200 square foot building, which is, that's a massive house.

• 2:01:10Jordi Hays?

  And he's got a taxidermied Kodiak bear in there.

• 2:01:13John Coogan?

  Yes. It's jammed with boats, an RV, sports cars, motorcycles, a taxidermy Kodiak bear and his father's Model A. One section designed with input from his wife includes a full kitchen, flat screen TV, bathroom and stone fireplace.

• 2:01:28Jordi Hays?

  You know, the biggest thing here, John, is I can't go in my backyard and throw up a, I can't do one of these. Cause California, they don't, they don't want you to build.

• 2:01:36John Coogan?

  You can do ADUs every once in a while, but not 4,000.

• 2:01:40Jordi Hays?

  Square feet of podcasting, you know?

• 2:01:42John Coogan?

  I gotta run to the restroom. Can you keep it going?

• 2:01:44Jordi Hays?

  I'll keep it going. Um, let's jump through to the next post. We're going to jump into the timeline. We got a post from Reggie James. Somebody posted. Do you think that Steve Jobs did a market survey, you know, did a consumer survey to build the iPhone? And Reggie jumps in here with a fantastic point. He says, they literally did. They got all the phones on the market. They saw it was all junk by Apple standards, and they knew this for a while, but had to get a few technical things in order first. They had to get really good at miniaturization. iPod helped them learn that. Then they had a cross-learning moment where the company they acquired for their touchscreen technology, which was working on computer displays, they took that and brought it over to Project

• 2:02:27Jordi Hays?

  Purple, and that is how the multi-touch was born. So now they have multi-touch and know how to make things small, and they're still looking at these junk phones on the market. Once they see what's wrong with them, they ask themselves, what's the phone we make for ourselves? They vibed after they knew the market. They had technical pieces in place, and this is where all the software love that made the iPhone, and the iPhone finally comes together, pulling from Springboard and all the Mac OSS work. That's what made the iPhone feel so good with directional manipulation and multi-touch. The iPhone wasn't some isolated do what you want event. It was built off of decades of HCI learnings, a key acquisition in the success and learnings of the iPod. Learn the real stories and don't

• 2:03:12Jordi Hays?

  just take a cliche like users don't know what they want as an excuse to build nonsense.

• 2:03:16John Coogan?

  Shots fired.

• 2:03:17Jordi Hays?

  So I think that's, yeah, aggressive, but completely fair analysis of the situation.

• 2:03:22John Coogan?

  The guy who posted this, though, was like, hey, I'm actually, I actually don't know the history. I'm just curious. Like, can you just like educate me? But Reggie's a good poster, so he kind of amps it up. And it's like, let's go, let's talk about this.

• 2:03:33Jordi Hays?

  I want to have Reggie, you know, Reggie's had some amazing analysis of Apple over the years and their different trends. It'd be great to have him on the show sometime soon.

• 2:03:42John Coogan?

  We should have him on the show. It's interesting. I remember this old Quora post by Joe Lonsdale talking about the Hegelian dialectic. Are you familiar with this?

• 2:03:50Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 2:03:50John Coogan?

  It's this idea of like, the dialectic is basically like, there's a thesis, antithesis, and then the synthesis. And so you take like the, like an idea, you think about the opposite of that idea, the counterargument, and then you synthesize something that takes into the best art, the best pieces of both, essentially.

• 2:04:09Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:04:09John Coogan?

  And it's a very popular like mental model. And the example that he used in this Quora post to explain the Hegelian dialectic was literally Steve Jobs, both being like the vibes guy, but also the spreadsheet guy. And it's so easy in thought leadership and like posting for people to be like, oh, like vibes are the only thing that matter. Like you should never think about the market math.

• 2:04:32Jordi Hays?

  Don't ask, don't talk to customers.

• 2:04:33John Coogan?

  Don't, exactly, exactly. People want axioms, uh, when in fact, like, like the best leaders are often like, you know, uh,

• 2:04:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the best generalized advice is to like, don't do traditional market research and just talk to as many customers as you can. The thing about consumer is consumer is a category where you can have no pre-existing business experience with a category and just build the product that you want. I mean, you can do this in B2B as well, but I think it's more common to just kind of ignore the market and just build what you want in consumer.

• 2:05:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:05:05Jordi Hays?

  But even then, it's, it's cool to see the history of how the iPhone came together and not just being, oh, here's a good idea. We should just do this.

• 2:05:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway, anything else on Apple?

• 2:05:16Jordi Hays?

  I got a lot of hot takes on Apple.

• 2:05:18John Coogan?

  You gotta be more positive about Apple, I think.

• 2:05:20Jordi Hays?

  I just, I've just been positive on Apple for 20 plus years of my life.

• 2:05:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:26Jordi Hays?

  And it's fair to be negative in the short term, but I'm positive in the long run.

• 2:05:29John Coogan?

  It's more just like, like, I feel like at the end of your, after you go massively viral for talking trash, there needs to be like, hey, like, we can,

• 2:05:40Jordi Hays?

  I gave Apple an out. I said, if you're just giving up on innovation, buy an F1 team.

• 2:05:45John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:05:45Jordi Hays?

  Then we'll, we'll shut up.

• 2:05:46John Coogan?

  There's something about like, I still love this company and I want it to be great. And there is a sliver of greatness here. Let's just,

• 2:05:53Jordi Hays?

  There's more than a sliver.

• 2:05:55John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:05:55Jordi Hays?

  It's way more than a sliver.

• 2:05:56John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:05:57Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, if Tag Heuer will sponsor F1,

• 2:06:00John Coogan?

  Why not?

• 2:06:01Jordi Hays?

  Why not Apple?

• 2:06:01John Coogan?

  That would be very cool. An Apple car.

• 2:06:04Jordi Hays?

  And no other sponsors.

• 2:06:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, like, like Red Bull. Like, I mean, Red Bull has a few others.

• 2:06:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they've got a bunch, but.

• 2:06:09John Coogan?

  They got a bunch. Imagine just the Apple car going around. But I'm sure they can't do it because it's like some emissions thing or something. Like they've, they've made so many, like they've pandered so, to so many like special interest groups, essentially like they're like completely bought in at this point.

• 2:06:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:23John Coogan?

  I don't know. Uh, it'd be very cool. I'd like a, I'd like an F1 team.

• 2:06:26Jordi Hays?

  Do we want to talk about the GC?

• 2:06:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, General Catalyst is going public. You'll be able to, uh, invest in a venture capital firm soon on public.com. Uh, so get ready, move your assets over to public.com. Uh, but no, this is a real story. Uh, General Catalyst is considering an IPO. Dan Primack has the scoop. We've been hearing rumors about this for, uh, a couple of months. And as these asset managers get bigger and bigger, it makes more sense to trade them publicly. There's a few reasons behind that. The main reason in my, I mean, we can list out a few, but when you're a public company, you are subject to much more aggressive audits. And this is why people don't want to go public because it's a hassle. They will put, they will put up with that hassle.

• 2:07:12John Coogan?

  And as a result, they will have access to more capital. And it will be a, there will be potentially more of like a power law consolidation in the actual fundraising of these funds. General Catalyst has, you know, billions and billions under management at this point, tens of billions. And if they want to go for even bigger funds, saying, hey, we are publicly traded. All of our financials are public. You can go see them. You know, you don't have to rely on newcomer scooping some random things to, to, to count on it. But there was some debate over this. Dan Primack, you know, posts that General Catalyst is considering an IPO. Jason Calacanis says, what is going public exactly? The returns or the LP interest? Dan Primack says, what do you mean?

• 2:07:57John Coogan?

  In this case, it would be the management slash holding company like Carlyle, Blackstone, et cetera. And a lot of people don't necessarily understand this, I guess, but you know, asset managers are themselves businesses that make money from fees and all sorts of different pieces of that.

• 2:08:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. GC, I think, didn't they roll out a private wealth division?

• 2:08:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. And they have private equity investments. They have, they have growth stage investments, seed stage investments. And so every time they make a deal with someone else's money. And so it will be valued similarly to a bank, although it's a very like high performing bank in the sense, but how do you, when you invest in a bank, when you buy, when you buy shares in Citi or Chase, JP Morgan, or, or, I don't know, Goldman Sachs, what is happening? Well, Goldman takes money from some people, put my money in the bank and then they lend that money out and then they return it and over time they make money. And it's just like any other business. So I don't know why Jason isn't thinking about this.

• 2:08:58Jordi Hays?

  Jeremy Gaffon has a good bit on this, which is, you know, basically that at the end of the day, private equity is the greatest. Business model on earth.

• 2:09:06John Coogan?

  He always says like merchant banks, the merchant banks.

• 2:09:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he talks about merchant banks, but specifically it makes sense that the, the, the people that invest in private in public, in private markets.

• 2:09:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:18Jordi Hays?

  Who study businesses all day long, created a business model for themselves. That's just absolutely fantastic.

• 2:09:23John Coogan?

  Sure. Yeah. I mean, they certainly have like an advantage playing in the private markets.

• 2:09:26Jordi Hays?

  The question is, is it will be very interesting to see a venture capital firm going out and doing, you know, a roadshow and putting together materials and saying, look how much EBITDA we're going to put up in this year.

• 2:09:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:09:39Jordi Hays?

  And it's based entire, you know, presumably entirely based on the fee accumulation.

• 2:09:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:45Jordi Hays?

  From their various funds that are all kind of funneling into this one vehicle.

• 2:09:49John Coogan?

  It'll also be very interesting to see what comp looks like post IPO at these firms.

• 2:09:53Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 2:09:53John Coogan?

  Because instead of carry points, you're looking at stock options potentially. There's a whole variety of ways to slice up a pie.

• 2:10:01Jordi Hays?

  The, the fund performance, the carry, where do those returns flow through? Cause some of them will flow to the partners still, but you would imagine that investors in GC and the public markets would want upside in the returns as well.

• 2:10:15John Coogan?

  Yep. So the partners have, the partners own the general partnership, right?

• 2:10:20Jordi Hays?

  So then they would just own shares in the, in the company.

• 2:10:23John Coogan?

  Exactly. And so when you buy them, you're buying a, a slice of the general partner stake. And if you buy enough, it's like you're a general partner.

• 2:10:30Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 2:10:31John Coogan?

  But you just paid for that instead of worked on it. And yeah, and, and this, this type of thing has happened before where firms have sold GP stakes and said, hey, I'm cashing out of my fund.

• 2:10:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Thrive did this.

• 2:10:45John Coogan?

  But I'm selling, I don't know if that's actually, I haven't heard that, but, but basically I'm, I'm, I'm selling part of my GP stake. You will, you will be the one to earn the returns from that upfront. But.

• 2:10:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So this happened in 2023, January 24th, 2023, Thrive Capital sells minority stake to Bob Iger and other mobiles. So this was kind of like a party round. They sold 3.3% of the company, including CEO Bob Iger. And yeah, so they, they were able to raise $175 million to the balance sheet.

• 2:11:19John Coogan?

  That's so fascinating too. Yeah.

• 2:11:20Jordi Hays?

  Management company.

• 2:11:21John Coogan?

  And, and because you think about 3% like. That could be just like hiring another GP and giving them a slice of the GP, right?

• 2:11:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:31John Coogan?

  You hire another partner, you say, oh, you're going to be the one who does the AI deals or the deep tech deals or the defense deals or whatever. And you wind up giving them the effectively the same share, but they didn't pay for it, or unless they, you know, bought in for some reason. Or they, and they don't get the same alignment. Like at this point, it's kind of like Iger's like a partner almost in the sense of like, if he owns a stake in this one firm. So if he has a deal that he wants to bring or partnership, or he wants to do a deal with a portfolio company, like he is linked to thrive in this like very important way. That's more tangible and more economic than just like, oh, I'm an advisor to your fund. It's like, no, like I actually invested in your fund. I not just as an LP, but also on the GP side, which is fascinating. Anyway,

• 2:12:14John Coogan?

  so Sheel sums it up. He says GC would be the first major USVC fund to IPO. They own a health system, a wealth business, a fund of funds, a debt business, et cetera. They all started from a $73 million fund one that had 0.7 IRR. Wow. Not good.

• 2:12:31Jordi Hays?

  Legends.

• 2:12:31John Coogan?

  But they kept it going.

• 2:12:32Jordi Hays?

  I mean, you just gotta give them credit for that.

• 2:12:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 2:12:36Jordi Hays?

  That's incredible.

• 2:12:36John Coogan?

  Their first five funds weren't exceptional, but that all changed with Stripes when Hamant led Stripes Series B. And of course, Hamant Tanaja is the CEO now. And he refers to himself as CEO. He has never, he's never said GP. I'm sure he said GP, but more recently, he's been saying, hey, I'm the CEO of this firm. I'm not just the, I'm not just the GP or like the named GP or the most important GP. Cause all of that's kind of like, you know, fake essentially.

• 2:13:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we should ask Sheel. He's going to be on in 20 minutes. We should ask him, yeah, for kind of a deeper analysis here and how he thinks all the fees and everything.

• 2:13:14John Coogan?

  A huge percent of GC's returns, 5.85 billion came from Levongo, a chronic care company sold for 18.5 billion in 2020, written down two years later. I wonder what it was written down to? And I wonder.

• 2:13:28John Coogan?

  And I wonder exactly what, uh, what happened with that? Like, why was that asset so mispriced? But this happens all the time. Uh, I mean, plenty of times, uh, companies get, uh, get sold early and then wind up not doing the thing. But then on the other side, you have the Instagrams, right?

• 2:13:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So Teladoc was the acquirer. They took a $13.7 billion loss in 2022 tied to the Levango acquisition.

• 2:13:51John Coogan?

  That's a lot. That's a lot. I wonder what happened. I wonder how they mispriced it so bad.

• 2:13:56Jordi Hays?

  This is, uh, maybe on par with, with Square, Square's acquisition of a firm or not a firm. Who did Square acquire?

• 2:14:06John Coogan?

  Uh, wasn't it Tidal or something?

• 2:14:08Jordi Hays?

  Well, that was.

• 2:14:09John Coogan?

  That was the, uh, wasn't that like the, the music streaming thing? Didn't they, wasn't Jack Dorsey buying that?

• 2:14:14Jordi Hays?

  They bought Afterpay.

• 2:14:16John Coogan?

  Afterpay. Was that not a good deal? I don't know. I mean, all that stuff blew up when the interest rates were.

• 2:14:21Jordi Hays?

  They acquired Afterpay for 29 billion.

• 2:14:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:24Jordi Hays?

  And then like two years later, they were worth like maybe 40 billion.

• 2:14:28John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:14:29Jordi Hays?

  Public company.

• 2:14:30John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, should we zoom in on much smaller deals? A company making 30K in 24 hours, selling through Google Meet after one viral tweet. Interesting rhyme scheme here. I wonder if that's intentional. Eddie Zoo.

• 2:14:45Jordi Hays?

  So just to clarify on the last bit, then we'll restart that. So Square buys a firm.

• 2:14:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:51Jordi Hays?

  In, uh, the Zerp era for 29 billion and two years later, they're worth 26 billion.

• 2:14:57John Coogan?

  You mean Afterpay, right? Not, not.

• 2:14:58Jordi Hays?

  Sorry. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:15:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:15:00Jordi Hays?

  So Block or Square.

• 2:15:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:02Jordi Hays?

  Buys Afterpay for 29 billion.

• 2:15:06John Coogan?

  That's a lot.

• 2:15:07Jordi Hays?

  Less than two years later, they're worth $25 billion collectively themselves.

• 2:15:12John Coogan?

  Block is worth 25 collectively?

• 2:15:15Jordi Hays?

  I mean, they're worth $40 billion now. So.

• 2:15:17John Coogan?

  So they'll build it all back.

• 2:15:18Jordi Hays?

  It's one, it's just one, um. Figure, basically.

• 2:15:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, they're just, they're just one really good parlay away from

• 2:15:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:27John Coogan?

  getting back to nine-digit territory.

• 2:15:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we don't see public companies like ripping parlays.

• 2:15:33John Coogan?

  It's a hundred billion. I don't even know.

• 2:15:35Jordi Hays?

  I think that public companies should start ripping parlays Friday after the market closes.

• 2:15:40John Coogan?

  What, what is your job as a CEO if not a parlay?

• 2:15:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:43John Coogan?

  It's like, I want, I want, I want my CFO to work out. I want this financing to go well. I want that distribution deal to pop.

• 2:15:51Jordi Hays?

  And I'm gonna rip parlays.

• 2:15:52John Coogan?

  It is a parlay.

• 2:15:54Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and even you would

• 2:15:55John Coogan?

  You are constructing the ultimate parlay.

• 2:15:57Jordi Hays?

  CFO's job is automated away by ramp and they have all this free time.

• 2:16:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:01Jordi Hays?

  They could be ripping parlays and it would be fun for the market to be able to sort of anticipate, all right, how's the company, you know, the company's putting up a hundred million dollars on DraftKings this weekend? How's it gonna go, right?

• 2:16:12John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, no. Don't, don't bet on sports. Bet on yourself.

• 2:16:17Jordi Hays?

  Bet on yourself.

• 2:16:17John Coogan?

  But, but view your, but view your organization as if it is a parlay.

• 2:16:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:23John Coogan?

  Because

• 2:16:24Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna get this right, and we're gonna get this right, and we're gonna get this right, and you only have to do that a few times.

• 2:16:28John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:16:28Jordi Hays?

  One T.

• 2:16:29John Coogan?

  Jensen Wong, he's like, I want China to not invade Taiwan. I want, I want

• 2:16:35Jordi Hays?

  TMC America to work.

• 2:16:37John Coogan?

  TSMC America to work. I want, I want Microsoft over 80 billion in CapEx. I want Zuck to develop 20 billion dollars.

• 2:16:45Jordi Hays?

  Secures the 500 billion.

• 2:16:46John Coogan?

  500 billion. And if he gets that, boom, 10 trillion stock.

• 2:16:51Jordi Hays?

  You gotta post that.

• 2:16:52John Coogan?

  10 trillion stock.

• 2:16:53Jordi Hays?

  He's like, here's my 10 trillion dollar parlay for Nvidia.

• 2:16:56John Coogan?

  It's like, it's like the Tesla secret plan, you know?

• 2:16:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:58John Coogan?

  It's like, if all these things go right, my stock should be worth 10 trillion. And so, you know.

• 2:17:04Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff.

• 2:17:05John Coogan?

  This is, this is my plan. Just express it in a parlay. I, I think it's a viral format. I think it's good. I like, I like thinking about things in parlays, even though I don't participate them in the sports betting realm because it's Low class and vulgar. Anyway, moving on. Eddie says he made $30,000 in 24 hours selling through Google Meet after one viral tweet. And I like the rhyme scheme there. He says he was inspired by PMF or die.

• 2:17:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is amazing. So he made a post.

• 2:17:32John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:17:32Jordi Hays?

  On Saturday, and he said, I built an algorithm that simulates how thousands of users react to your tweet. So you'll know if it will go viral before you post. It's a really cool concept. Everybody's experiences. If you post it on X, you think you've got something great. You post it. 300 impressions later, you got one like from, from.

• 2:17:50John Coogan?

  It's brutal.

• 2:17:50Jordi Hays?

  Your, your absolute boy. And you realize like, all right, this wasn't a good post. Sometimes the opposite happens and something that you weren't super confident in rips. But anyways, very cool. He ended up launching this and starting to sell it kind of immediately. And did $30,000 in volume in a day, which annualized this pretty good business.

• 2:18:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:10Jordi Hays?

  He basically would have gotten out of the cage in an hour.

• 2:18:13John Coogan?

  Insane. Oh, I didn't even annualize it. Yeah, that's crazy.

• 2:18:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you got to annualize everything.

• 2:18:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:18:19Jordi Hays?

  Don't talk about, you know, you had a good day. Say, well, annualized were, you know, $200 million revenue business.

• 2:18:26John Coogan?

  It's great. It's great. Yeah, I saw some big, big people quote tweeting this. It seemed really fun. We should give it a try. And congrats to Eddie. I love that people have been inspired to go build stuff and take a crack.

• 2:18:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I saw Emmett Shear from.

• 2:18:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's what it was. Tick, tick, tick.

• 2:18:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, saying, you know, something dramatic, which basically alluding to if we're letting truly. Right now, there's a lot of human input. You know, your brain's basically an algorithm. It sort of creates a concept, releases it to the algo, and then, and then humanity sort of reacts. And then in a world where algorithms are dictating the sort of entry into the algorithm, it's just an entirely new level.

• 2:19:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so Emmett Shear says, tick, tick, tick. And essentially, you know, he says, we're going to start, he, he's going down like the wire heading path. We're going to, you know, be optimizing for the algorithms too much. That's going to lead to, you know, some, some sort of AI doom scenario, essentially. Not, not, not full doom. I don't want to like mischaracterize what he's saying, but he's just saying like, it's clearly just like, things are getting weird, which I agree with. And so Yaxine chimes in and says, would work better to replace this app with something that just has a blank screen with the text, everyone likes you. Because, you know, the goal is to get lots of dopamine from the like button, basically. But that's not really what it is. The goal of a social media, everyone thinks it's the goal to get like,

• 2:19:47John Coogan?

  you know, a pat on the back and, oh, people like me, I'm popular. No, the goal is to make money. The goal is to make money. And, and, and, and that's what a proxy for, you know, getting a banger post is, is that it will get you a job, it will sell your product, like this kid is making money. And so, it's not about that everyone likes you. It's, it's, you know, you cannot replace the app with, with, with shareholder value, with, with, with actual capital trends, uh, changing. So Emmett says, "Do you truly not see the oncoming train of consequences for building optimizers that can predict the discourse generated from a post, both volume and tenor?"

• 2:20:30John Coogan?

  "Do you truly not see the oncoming train of consequences for building optimizers that can predict the discourse generated from a post, both the volume and tenor?" And so,

• 2:20:41John Coogan?

  I can't. Emmett, break it down. I, I gotta dig into it. I mean, I can imagine some consequences from that. I don't know about all of the, all of the consequences on this oncoming train.

• 2:20:51Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think that, you know, the reality is right now, every active creator online is already hyper fixated on how to, um,

• 2:21:02John Coogan?

  What does the algorithm want?

• 2:21:04Jordi Hays?

  Totally. It's like TikTok does this, where they're like, if you do this song, we're gonna surf, you know, surface it. If you talk about positively about, if you are against the TikTok ban, we're gonna surface it, right? So people know that and they start to lean into it.

• 2:21:18John Coogan?

  So how is this an oncoming train? I, I see this as like, the train has been whizzing past us and continues to whiz past us and is, is accelerating and, you know, I don't see this as some binary moment that Emmett is, is kind of, I don't know, we'll have to have him on and, and discuss this with him because, uh, I, I think that's the main thing that I, that I disagree with the characterization here is like, I, Mr. Beast literally built this for YouTube like two years ago.

• 2:21:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:45John Coogan?

  Like, it's like, it predicts how well your thumbnails and titles are gonna do. And so like, we're here. Like, people, people have these tools. Maybe, maybe it's not good enough yet. And when it gets better, then it really becomes, you know, give the people what they want. But I don't know. I mean, yeah, it becomes all AI generated, it becomes all. All very addictive and it becomes wireheading and no one ever goes outside and they get the juice reward and they get the nutrients directly delivered into them and that's the end of humanity.

• 2:22:15Jordi Hays?

  Beautiful.

• 2:22:17John Coogan?

  Except for us because we'll be lifting on Mars.

• 2:22:18Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of the end of humanity, we got a post from Patrick, Patty Collison. He says Grok's voice mode remains active when the app is closed. This behavior is made very clear with a live activity. It ends up being an awesome experience. Plop it beside you while reading a book and bat occasional questions its way without interrupting your flow.

• 2:22:37John Coogan?

  I read this post and I read the first sentence, Grok's voice modes remains active when the app is closed. And I just thought like, oh, this is going to be bad. This is going to be like, it's spying on you. You need to be aware of this. Like I thought, because I didn't even see it was him. And I love that it's just like, this is exactly what I want, actually. This is great. And I completely agree. What was I?

• 2:22:57Jordi Hays?

  It's funny because Patrick has the perfect index on AI, which is every AI company pays him, you know, 2.7% of every dollar. So he can be the sort of Switzerland. He's like the Switzerland of AI, the true Switzerland of AI. You know, everybody can run on Stripe. But this was cool. I mean, it does seem like, you know, voice has been this sort of lingering trend that everybody's been predicting, but it hasn't quite played out, right? It seems that voice has been predominantly used by people that aren't good at using their thumbs. And it hasn't been the preferred sort of method of communicating with your device. That seems to be changing, right? Sesame, Sesame came out last week and had a pretty

• 2:23:42Jordi Hays?

  incredible response. It's a wild experience to use. And now Grok is, you know, I flagged this post from Patrick because I think we should try to.

• 2:23:54Jordi Hays?

  I think we should try to leave Grok running for a show and just start interacting with it and saying, you know, when we have a question that I would otherwise Google, we can just ask Grok.

• 2:24:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:02Jordi Hays?

  And it'll have the context from the conversation, be able to sort of surface relevant data. So.

• 2:24:06John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 2:24:07Jordi Hays?

  But we're having trouble with X servers today, our live stream on X, the entire.

• 2:24:12John Coogan?

  They moved all the servers to Grok.

• 2:24:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:14John Coogan?

  What happened?

• 2:24:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:16John Coogan?

  Clearly, they're not, they're not deploying AI, they're not deploying the servers to the humans. We're the second-class citizens now.

• 2:24:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:23John Coogan?

  Well, it's a disaster.

• 2:24:25Jordi Hays?

  Um, but, uh, sweet. Well, let's, uh, jump in. We got a promoted post from AdQuick. Our favorite way to advertise out of the home.

• 2:24:35John Coogan?

  Out of home, 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.

• 2:24:47Jordi Hays?

  And what I think is amazing, in the same way that, you know, any, any company in the world can go on Meta and, and just sort of sign up and start running ads alongside the biggest companies in the world. Same thing happens on AdQuick. Biggest companies in the world, there's like a ton of the Fortune 500 that runs on AdQuick. Wall Street Journal, Warby Parker, Ramp, Discount Tire, Instacart, Credit Karma, H&R Block, Lyft. All these massive companies use it, but you as a startup can go and start testing out of home.

• 2:25:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:15Jordi Hays?

  You know, even on a smaller scale. So.

• 2:25:17John Coogan?

  You know, another way to advertise out of home, make a T-shirt like Jason Carman did.

• 2:25:22Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:25:22John Coogan?

  Move on to the next post. He says, we made a movie about space for free on X. Then we made some T-shirts. All of the designs are love at story.inc/apparal. Go check it out. We love to support Jason Carman here. He has made some incredible documentaries. And yeah, he's building a whole media company right now and it's fantastic. And, uh, yeah, I mean, really cool designs, like very, very iconic. I think these will age very well. And, uh, yeah, good to get it out in the world. And I'm sure it'll start a lot, a lot of conversations about the content. If you see somebody rocking a Jason Carman original, you're like, yeah.

• 2:25:59Jordi Hays?

  You know, they're an absolute killer.

• 2:26:01John Coogan?

  Techno optimist. Uh, should we go to Carpathia on, uh, 4.5 again?

• 2:26:05Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 2:26:06John Coogan?

  So this is a, uh, reply to someone, uh, Zvi Moschewitz saying, uh, GPT 4.5 reaction time. Go anything you want to make sure I don't miss or your own reactions and. Karpathi says, my reaction is that there is an evaluation crisis. I don't really know what metrics to look at right now. MMLU was very good and useful for a few years, but that's long over. Sweet bench verified, real practical verified problems. I really like and is great, but it's self too narrow. Chatbot arena received too much focus, partly my fault. That LLM labs have started to really overfit for it via a combination of prompt

• 2:26:47John Coogan?

  mining, private eval bombardment, and worse, explicit use of rankings as training supervision. I still think it's okay, but there's a lack of better. It feels like it's on the decline in signal. There's been a number of private evals popping up, an ensemble of which might be one promising path forward, in absence of great comprehensive evals. I tried to turn to vibe checks instead, but now I feel they are misleading and there's too much opportunity for confirmation bias, too low sample size, etc. It's just not great. TLDR, my reaction is I don't really know how good these models are right now. Yeah, you gotta get the models to write, to write little standup sets, feed them to standup comics that get bucket pulled at Kill Tony or go on the stand. Put them, put them in this,

• 2:27:32John Coogan?

  put them on the stand. No, it's gotta be humans that step on stage.

• 2:27:36Jordi Hays?

  At the comedy store.

• 2:27:37John Coogan?

  At the comedy store on an open mic night.

• 2:27:39Jordi Hays?

  And don't get booed off.

• 2:27:40John Coogan?

  And then you measure the boos to the laughs.

• 2:27:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, booze to the laugh. No, I think, I think the real, the real bench, like the only thing that really matters right now, if you're a foundation model company, is being

• 2:27:50John Coogan?

  Money.

• 2:27:51Jordi Hays?

  significant, noticeably better, not to benchmarks, noticeably better than, than ChatGPT.

• 2:27:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:57Jordi Hays?

  For specific use cases, right? So Claude is noticeably better at coding, right? And so people use Claude. Grok is notably more entertaining for some specific use cases for consumers than ChatGPT, right? So that, that's like something that, you know, potentially, but, but you have the situation right now where 100 million plus consumers. Love chat GPT. They think it's awesome. So if you're competing with them, you don't just need to be 10% better on some random math benchmark. You need to be 50% better so that somebody will try you and switch to you for their day to day use. I think that's what actually matters in terms of winning and you know, you can see what in my view,

• 2:28:38Jordi Hays?

  you can see what companies are actually consumer AI companies are actually doing well by looking at the app store rankings, right? It's not, it's a snapshot and it's obviously momentum driven. But if you're a consumer AI company and you're not on the app store chart while OpenAI has continued to have a pretty dominant position, you're not in a good spot. And that like the app store chart is the final benchmark, the real benchmark that matters.

• 2:29:04John Coogan?

  It's gotta be so hard to try and be competing in LLMs right now because it's like you have people who are, everyone there is like an OpenAI co-founder or adjacent to the president or a state actor. It's like if you're not on the highest, highest level, like how are you, how are you competing there? It's gonna be tough. Anyway.

• 2:29:24Jordi Hays?

  We got Sheel in the waiting room.

• 2:29:26John Coogan?

  Let's do it. Let's bring him in. Let's talk fintech. Let's talk Stripe, Adyen, Ramp.

• 2:29:32Jordi Hays?

  We're not gonna call it fintech today. We're gonna call it finance technology.

• 2:29:36John Coogan?

  Finance, finance, finance tech, finance technology. Let's go. Let's bring him in. Let's chat. Let's chop it up with Sheel. How we doing?

• 2:29:49John Coogan?

  Should we do one more? Related post. Will Brown says, it's interesting that 1.5 billion parameters is all you need to crush math competitions, but you need like 15 trillion to make the model funny. Maybe humor is the right measure of true intelligence. And I agree. I agree. It was very difficult.

• 2:30:07Jordi Hays?

  Can you see him in the waiting room?

• 2:30:12John Coogan?

  Well, 15 trillion parameters to be funny. The whole be me thing is funny because it feels like it's going to really benefit from personalization. Like, the people that are like, oh, it's so funny. It's like, well, yeah, Tyler Cowen, like, you did laugh at it because, like, it's funny that the LLM knows so much about you. But you give that to just some random person off the street, and it's like, be me. Like, I don't know, the LLM doesn't know anything about you. Or like, you just have a normal job. Hey!

• 2:30:42Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 2:30:43Sheel Mohnot?

  Hey, guys.

• 2:30:44Jordi Hays?

  Welcome.

• 2:30:44John Coogan?

  Oh, looking good in the suit. Let's go.

• 2:30:47Jordi Hays?

  He was prepared.

• 2:30:48Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah, I mean, when you come on this show, you gotta, you gotta dress up, you gotta do the part.

• 2:30:53John Coogan?

  I appreciate it.

• 2:30:55Jordi Hays?

  I mean, we had, we had quite the lineup today. Packy, Rabois. Nobody showed up in a suit, but you did, which is why.

• 2:31:03John Coogan?

  I think you win the day.

• 2:31:04Jordi Hays?

  You win the day.

• 2:31:04Sheel Mohnot?

  Hey, let's go.

• 2:31:06John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:31:06Jordi Hays?

  Let's go. I love it. Super excited to have you here. I mean, we, we've had you on the show informally through the post.

• 2:31:13John Coogan?

  Dozens of times.

• 2:31:14Jordi Hays?

  Dozens of times, constantly surfacing the stories that matter. But, um, I don't know, we've had a big week. I think, why don't we start, I want to kind of start with, uh, maybe kind of extrapolating on your Stripe, Adyen point of view. You, you covered this last week. Let's start there. And then I want to kind of broaden it and talk about fintech more broadly. There's been some big news. But maybe we start there. What?

• 2:31:36John Coogan?

  What's your takeaway?

• 2:31:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. What, what's like the main takeaway from, you know, I, I think you've tried to generally stay somewhat impartial, right? And just sort of like put the, the numbers out and let readers take away their, their own opinion. But, um, but yeah, what, what's your, what's your expansion there?

• 2:31:53Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah, so, so the overall headline is, the Stripe, Stripe puts out an annual report now, and Adyen's a public company, so they do. They process a similar amount of volume. Stripe is slightly ahead, growing slightly more. It's like 1.4 trillion processed by Stripe. And I think, you know, a lot of people look at that and say, okay, well, these are equivalent companies. So it's crazy that Stripe trades at 91 and a half billion, when Adyen's a public company and trades at 56 billion. So a lot of people said, okay, that's a sign that the private markets are... Overvaluing Stripe. I don't think that's exactly true. Like although they have similar processed volumes, their margin profile is different. So like when you make a transaction

• 2:32:38Sheel Mohnot?

  on Stripe, Stripe actually charges more than Adyen does, in part because of the types of businesses that Stripe serves. Adyen has a lot of enterprise businesses, Stripe has some smaller businesses. So Stripe most likely actually has greater net revenue than Adyen does. We don't know it because Stripe hasn't posted that publicly. But overall, I think both are amazing companies. I think Stripe, you know, people fault them for having more employees, but I actually think it's interesting. I think like Stripe is investing more in R and D and they're growing faster and they have a lot more business lines. So I think both are outstanding companies. I actually have exposure to both, which I'm quite happy about.

• 2:33:20Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. You gotta be, the best case scenario is you're conflicted, but the even better scenario is you're double conflicted.

• 2:33:27Sheel Mohnot?

  And they're both ripping.

• 2:33:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're both ripping. I'm happy to, I'm happy to hear that. Where do you think, you know, one Stripe, Stripes had this amazing ability to, you know, build a behemoth by betting on, basically betting on these super early-stage companies, right? Many of their biggest customers today were startups when they were all going through YC together. And that's turned out to be a fantastic strategy. Is part of the reason that Stripe could be worth significantly more than Adyen right now is that the sort of general investor base believes that they'll be able to take customers away from Adyen, these sort of bigger enterprise players? Because all the marketing, you know, Stripe has been able to take these two lines, right? They've got Stripe Atlas, so they're going to get the next generation of companies.

• 2:34:12Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:13Jordi Hays?

  But then simultaneously, when you see their out-of-home ads today, it's all oriented around, hey, we, we sign Hertz Rent-A-Car, right?

• 2:34:19Sheel Mohnot?

  Totally.

• 2:34:19Jordi Hays?

  Clearly marketing. And so do you see Stripes, you know, what are Stripe's biggest, you know, future opportunities, you know, enterprise and sort of beyond?

• 2:34:29Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah. So you're absolutely right. So Stripe does a phenomenal job of getting all early-stage startups or a huge percentage of early-stage startups. And actually like, This business, it started like almost 15 years ago now. And at that time, your CTO was not making the decision on who you chose for payment processing. That was not a CTO's decision. That decision was made by, if you had a CFO, it was a CFO. Or it was like the CEO, because it was, it was a money decision. And then what Stripe did is they said, we're going to save you so much time and energy in getting a payment processor up and running, that it's going to be the CTO's decision.

• 2:35:09Sheel Mohnot?

  And the CTO is a little less price sensitive and is going to go with the best option that saves them time and engineering resources. So Stripe charged a little bit more money than you would pay if you went somewhere else. But it was transparent and you knew what you were paying. And, and then along the way, a lot of those early companies that they assigned, ended up growing into massive behemoths doing many billions of revenue.

• 2:35:38Sheel Mohnot?

  And so that was awesome for Stripe. But now Stripe is also saying, okay, like we got those customers that started with us when they were small and grew, grew up. But to your point, on the out of home and like when they're at conferences and stuff, they are trying to attract these other behemoths as well. And so, you know, I think they have part of Amazon's business. They have, Shopify is large in the, I think if you look at in aggregate,

• 2:36:04Jordi Hays?

  All the sellers.

• 2:36:04Sheel Mohnot?

  Shopify one, then Shopify is probably the largest single opportunity for Stripe. But it's made up of, you know, thousands or many more than that of smaller individual retailers.

• 2:36:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense. What other, what, you know, they've, they've obviously, they're making a push into stable coins.

• 2:36:25Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:26Jordi Hays?

  What do you think they're, you know, I think it was very smart to identify that, hey, what is the stablecoin developer tool that has the most traction? That's, that's really working and just pay kind of any price to get that and then sort of bolt that on, right? That's basically what happened. What do you think?

• 2:36:44Jordi Hays?

  You know, what's your thesis around Stripe and stable coins? They obviously wanted to own that sort of asset and have exposure to it. But it's not like they're exactly rolling it across, out across the entire portfolio today. But what do you think that rollout actually looks like?

• 2:36:59Sheel Mohnot?

  So yeah, one thing that's kind of interesting is like how this came to be. So one kind of funny thing is I think the Bridge Stripe acquisition was announced, I don't know, three or four months ago. And literally in the next month, I was getting five to 10 stablecoin pitches per week. It's amazing how how quickly that happens. Like, as soon as some some large acquisition happens, you're instantly VCs are getting pitched, all sorts of companies around that space. And everybody thinks, you know, because Stripe made this acquisition, now the space is super hot. I think what actually happened here is pretty interesting. I think like Bridge

• 2:37:38Sheel Mohnot?

  is a very, a great company. I think what happened is they, so SpaceX had this problem with Starlink. So Starlink, you know, is an international ISP, accepting payments in developing markets. Developing markets are really hard to accept payments in. Traditional banking infrastructure like totally sucks, is slow. It was like blocking transactions, like traditional infrastructure in some of these markets was blocking blocking transactions. So Stripe, or so SpaceX said, okay, we're looking for a solution. I don't know if Sean Maguire was involved at all, but like Sean is is close with SpaceX, is close with with was an investor in Bridge. And so

• 2:38:22Jordi Hays?

  You can imagine between, you know, raging, you know, fighting the culture war on X, he was also doing the side deal to get the Bridge SpaceX thing to happen.

• 2:38:31Sheel Mohnot?

  It's amazing he has time to do anything else.

• 2:38:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:35John Coogan?

  The man contains multitudes.

• 2:38:40Sheel Mohnot?

  Absolutely.

• 2:38:40John Coogan?

  Man of many talents, for sure.

• 2:38:43Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, continue.

• 2:38:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you want to finish?

• 2:38:45Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah, so quickly. So I think like, I think SpaceX using stablecoins was a big moment. And I think a lot of other people said, oh, like, we're having this issue too. SpaceX is using stablecoins with the Bridge. I think that was actually super instrumental for them.

• 2:39:01John Coogan?

  Even the Scale AI example, like, really concretized it for me, where it was like, oh, it's very clear that you're paying a bunch of people internationally. I I I paid I paid video editors internationally using stable coins and just because like it's it's so much easier for them to get the money. And so I think as soon as you have that, it's very hard to be a skeptic about it because you're like, okay, I actually used it. It worked. It was it was it was what everyone's been talking about for a very long time about easier, faster, lower fees, etc. But I wanted to flip it around for you and ask, you know, you know, you in consumer tech, you always have like, oh, Zuck's gonna kill you. Do you feel like, you know, you get these bridge pitches post bridge acquisition? Is there is there

• 2:39:43John Coogan?

  any fear like, oh, Stripe is gonna build that? Is that a vibe that you see among early-stage fintech companies? Because there's been a lot of successful fintech startups. Also, Stripe is a founder-led Decacorn that is very able to move quickly.

• 2:39:58Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah, I do think I do think there's some of that. But I think that there are other there are areas in which people have been able to build great businesses that Stripe was competing. Actually, you know, kind of crazy, maybe blasphemous to talk about, but one of your sponsors here and friends of ours, Ramp, you know, Stripe ended up investing in Ramp. Stripe, as you may recall, had a competing product.

• 2:40:25John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:40:25Sheel Mohnot?

  So so it's not like you can't beat Stripe at anything they do. There are a lot of businesses that are going after.

• 2:40:30Jordi Hays?

  Well, Stripe also had a stablecoin, internal stablecoin team that had been working for a while. So.

• 2:40:36Sheel Mohnot?

  So while Stripe, you know, those guys are super sharp. And as you said, founder-led, my brother works there. I'm, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm all about Stripe, love it. But I think there are plenty of opportunities to build businesses that go after businesses that Stripe is in. And Stripe has a core focus area that they need to that they're doing phenomenally well at. And they're doing a bunch of other stuff that I think there are opportunities to compete with them on.

• 2:40:57John Coogan?

  Just don't start a high-end publishing company because they will kill you.

• 2:41:02Sheel Mohnot?

  Stripe Press is great, man. Beautiful books.

• 2:41:04John Coogan?

  I would not touch it with a 10-foot pole, that industry. I think that's the one that they just have completely locked up monopolized. And they will actually break your legs if you

• 2:41:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the Irish mafia.

• 2:41:14John Coogan?

  The Irish mafia will come out to defend that monopoly.

• 2:41:16Sheel Mohnot?

  We should just hope that Stripe does not launch a podcast because.

• 2:41:19John Coogan?

  Game over.

• 2:41:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:41:20Sheel Mohnot?

  It'll be tough for the Clancy Brothers.

• 2:41:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Very true. What you posted a day or two ago about the general catalyst IPO and sort of rumors around that. How do you? Talk about, you know, I don't know if you, you know, speak generally, you don't need to give us any sort of inside baseball on it. But how do you think the sort of fee structures work when a venture fund goes public? And, and, and do you think that's going to impact GC's ability? You know, is it going to be good for GC's ability to recruit top investors is because there's more liquidity? Is it going to be bad in the sense that, you know, people that really want to bet on themselves are like, oh, I could go work for BTV

• 2:42:03Jordi Hays?

  and get a bunch of carry and I, and I trust my picking ability and I can make them a lot more, you know, getting actual carry. What, how, how does that unfold?

• 2:42:12Sheel Mohnot?

  I think on the latter part, I think like these mega funds, we'll call them the like, you know, double digit billion AUM going out to raise five to 10 each time. They're already huge behemoths and like, somebody who is considering working at them should not be considering working for us. Like we're, we're, we're playing a different game.

• 2:42:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:37Sheel Mohnot?

  It's like, you know, you're, you're a seed or series A startup and you interview somebody who's like, and you're like, who are they? Who are you considering? And they're like, well, I'm considering Meta, Stripe and you guys. I'm like, get out of the room, dude. Don't waste my time.

• 2:42:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. We just had this. It makes so much sense.

• 2:42:54Sheel Mohnot?

  So I think, you know, I think we play a different game. Like they're in the asset accumulation game and going public only furthers that.

• 2:43:01Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 2:43:02Sheel Mohnot?

  Where like they're going to make a lot of their money off of management fees from these billions of dollars they collect. And, you know, returns, like they've had some great returns along the way. You know, they led Stripe's series B at, I think a $500 million valuation. It's now worth 91 billion. So obviously they've done phenomenally well there. They have a few other bangers that they've had through the years, Levango amongst, amongst others. So I I think in the past, they've had some pretty good returns. I think in the future, it becomes more of an asset accumulation game. And if I think about how we as BTV, like if we're if we're pitching or if we're trying to sell a startup to take our money,

• 2:43:43Sheel Mohnot?

  it's like, look, like, we're returns motivated. We're driven by you being successful. They're just and and like, you're really meaningful to us versus if if it's a multi-stage firm, it's like, take their money later. Like, they're not they're not as driven by your success.

• 2:44:00Jordi Hays?

  They'll always be there. Yeah, they'll always be there. We we won't be. Yeah.

• 2:44:03Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah, exactly. But I I think it's interesting. I think you're going to see more funds IPO, frankly, I don't think this is the last one. I think, you know, it's certainly possible that Andreessen could IPO and and any of the mega funds could.

• 2:44:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Especially if they're already set up as RAAs, right?

• 2:44:20Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:44:22Jordi Hays?

  You have to be feeling pretty good lately, given that fintech is is back. I'm sure you had. I'm sure you had a no, I remember this in in in late, early 2023, FTX had collapsed. I was running a fintech at the time that that had digital asset features and traditional fiat features. And it just was like, where where do we really go from here? Brex at the time was burning, spending like 800 million a year to make, you know, like, what it was totally inverted, right? It was like 500 million in revenue on like 800 million of expenses. I was like, is this category like, you know, where do we go from here? Right? It was it was sort of a dark time. You guys rode through it. You know, crypto is really good at this, right? Like crypto VCs, like the market's down. They're like, I'm going to get paid

• 2:45:07Jordi Hays?

  if I just hang on. VCs typically are like, you know, you probably had a lot of fair weather fintech investors that were like, we're going to go and do other categories. How where do you think the biggest opportunities are in fintech today? And yeah, I'd even be curious, you know, without naming names, out of the last few deals that you've done, can you kind of kind of talk about the the investment areas?

• 2:45:29Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah, sure, sure, sure. So I'd say like fintech overall. Look, it's been it's been a crazy time. We started this fund five and a half years ago. It's been a roller coaster.

• 2:45:38Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah, and I've been investing in fintech full time since 2016. Nobody gave a shit about us then. Then, you know, fast forward to 2021, we were the belt, the ball. Everybody, everybody wanted to invest in fintech. People were like,

• 2:45:53Sheel Mohnot?

  Begging us to give them advance notice on deals we did and then investing like months after us at in some cases like 15 times evaluation. It was absolutely bonkers and stupid frankly.

• 2:46:05Jordi Hays?

  Good for fundraising, I'm sure.

• 2:46:08Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah, you know, good for fundraising, actually not actually, not actually good for those companies that took too much money.

• 2:46:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:46:16Sheel Mohnot?

  And so, and then what happened was an overcorrection in 2022 and 2023. And in part because those companies had so much money, they didn't have to find PMF like it wasn't PMF or die. It was PMF or survive because you raise a hundred million dollars.

• 2:46:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, PMF or coast for five years.

• 2:46:38Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, fortunately, most of the companies in our portfolio, like they had enough money to survive and then they didn't burn too much. And they're now like, now they're having killer years. Like a lot of our companies actually kind of struggled in 22 and 23, but then 24 was a banger year and like especially the second half. I think it was just coming out of that whiplash and, and you saw it in the public markets too. Like if you look at fintech companies, 22 and 23, they were totally in the, in the doldrums.

• 2:47:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was just explaining, I was just explaining to John that Square bought Afterpay for 29 billion and then was worth less than 20, 20, like 25 billion combined, like less than a year later. I mean, one of the, one of the most, one of the most devastating acquisitions ever in recent memory.

• 2:47:27Sheel Mohnot?

  By the way, that's a fun topic. So Afterpay, so the, the cool thing about that one is our friends at Matrix, Dane over there. When they invested in Afterpay, I believe it was an 80 million dollar public company.

• 2:47:44Jordi Hays?

  What?

• 2:47:45Sheel Mohnot?

  Matrix led the A. It was Australian.

• 2:47:49John Coogan?

  They were already, they were already publicly listed. Raising money in Australia just meant you go public. There's a lot of Canadian companies like that. I, I see them all the time where it's like, oh, it's a hundred million dollar company and they just happen to be public because like that's how you get a deal done if you're raising $5 million. Like you have to go public because I want all of the oversight and I want all the accounting and I want all the audits. And so you better just be public if you want me to underwrite this. Yeah.

• 2:48:14Sheel Mohnot?

  So, so what a banger of a deal. Like they invested in a company any of us could have invested in.

• 2:48:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:18Sheel Mohnot?

  And then like. I don't know. I don't know how many years later. It's four or five years later. Sells for $30 billion.

• 2:48:24Jordi Hays?

  Banger.

• 2:48:24Sheel Mohnot?

  I think when all said and done, what happened was it got announced at 30 billion, but by the time it closed, Square stock had already dropped a lot. So it was like half as much. Still.

• 2:48:34Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 2:48:34Sheel Mohnot?

  Quite a banger.

• 2:48:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Amazing. How?

• 2:48:38John Coogan?

  That's why they brought in TJ to find the next one, right?

• 2:48:41Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yep. So there was a bunch of, you know, a bunch of businesses started, super low rate environment that worked in that, in that sort of setting and then sort of started to not work in 2023 and beyond. How are you advising your founders around, just are you telling them like plan, like this is the new normal? You know, it's been easy to imagine a situation where Trump just lays on the pressure to drop rates, but, and then, and this reminds me, you have a portfolio company Mercury that generates, you know, basically like really obscene levels of EBITDA, but it's predicated on, you know, this sort of Fed funds rate that they don't control, right? So they've built a fantastic product, but.

• 2:49:29Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, how are you advising your portfolio companies around the sort of rate environment? Given that, that so much of the returns in fintech are driven by, you know, finding that perfect balance.

• 2:49:40Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah, it's true. And I would say overall, lower rates are great for us. We have Mercury and one other portfolio company Relay that are benefited by having higher interest rates. It's because they're sitting on deposits. So, you know, they, that's how they make a lot of their money. It's tricky for both those companies. Like if you think about, to your point, they're printing money, but investors have to think about, okay, like what is the rate that we can make, we can assume is going to be the case going forward? It's really hard to predict these things. I don't think it's going to be back to where it was in 2021. Anytime soon, if ever. Um, so

• 2:50:20John Coogan?

  At the same time, you could totally imagine like, you know, like a period in the next decade where we have effectively zero interest rates for like five years plus, like post some sort of recession, like

• 2:50:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and that was why when the, when the Mercury news came out and, you know, they were getting a $3 billion valuation and everybody's like, oh, this is great because it's 2X whatever they got priced in 2021. I was looking at that and saying they're not really getting credit for that

• 2:50:45Sheel Mohnot?

  Oh, totally.

• 2:50:45Jordi Hays?

  Profit at all. They, they may as well, like there's, there's, you know, other companies that are losing $200 million a year, much less making $200 million a year that are getting priced like that. So

• 2:50:55John Coogan?

  Fundamentally, America just has a lot of debt and keeping a high interest rate is not fun when you

• 2:51:00Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah, totally. I think you're gonna see a lot of pressure from Trump.

• 2:51:03John Coogan?

  I think there will. At some point in the future of American history, we will see low interest rates.

• 2:51:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The next, the next grift, there's been one grift every two weeks, but the next might be dropping, dropping rates just long enough to refinance the whole Trump, you know?

• 2:51:19Jordi Hays?

  No, but anyway, so your, your general position is like, assume they're going to be somewhere between here and 2% and you got to make your business model work kind of anywhere in that range.

• 2:51:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:51:29Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah, totally. And, and one thing that's interesting is like Mercury started before, like Mercury was making a large portion of their revenue off of the rate. And then in 2020, rates dropped. They lost a huge portion of their revenue and then actually like built up a pretty substantial interchange revenue business. And like, kind of, I don't remember the exact amount, but like in March 2020, rates dropped. Mercury lost a shitload of the revenue and I, I believe that like two or three months later, they were back up to where they were.

• 2:52:03Jordi Hays?

  Where they were.

• 2:52:04Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 2:52:06John Coogan?

  Growth heals all.

• 2:52:07Jordi Hays?

  Since, since it's the, the topic of the last 24 hours, I would love your, I would love your take on the strategic scam and gambling.

• 2:52:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:18Sheel Mohnot?

  Strategic crypto reserve? Yeah.

• 2:52:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:52:20Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah. I, I think, I think it's total bullshit. I, it's like a, it's a classic big government idea that masquerades as some sort of like forward-thinking policy. You can say we're innovative or whatever, but it's actually quite the opposite. We're literally handling, handing public funds over to like, you know, private cronies and wealthy people like myself.

• 2:52:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you said, you said your single biggest position, personal position is Bitcoin. So you're, you're actually, and, and the craziest thing is, you know, we started the show today and we realized that, that the Bitcoin price had almost round-tripped back to, which is, is the biggest bear signal that we, the government announces, hey, we're going to be investing in crypto now.

• 2:53:01John Coogan?

  It doesn't move the market materially or in any permanent way.

• 2:53:05Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 2:53:06John Coogan?

  Really priced in fully. It's ridiculous.

• 2:53:09Sheel Mohnot?

  I, I think like my, my point of view is on this and, and a bunch of the other stuff that, that has, Trump has done in this administration. I feel like, you know, it seems like a short-term political win, but long-term it's bad. And in this case, I think this crypto reserve undermines the dollar's position, which is like fucking awesome. The dollar is the global reserve currency. And this sends some sort of confusing signal about our own confidence in USD.

• 2:53:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:42Sheel Mohnot?

  And, and like, so other countries hold, hold dollars because they're stable, consistent, and predictable.

• 2:53:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:49Sheel Mohnot?

  And, you know, I, I think you could make the case for Bitcoin. I wouldn't personally.

• 2:53:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:53:55Sheel Mohnot?

  But you could make the case that Bitcoin is the new gold and it's some sort of hedge against inflation or currency instability. I don't think you can make the case for fucking Cardano, you know, XRP. Like, what, what is this shit? It's, it's bullshit. It's a, it's basically a taxpayer-funded backstop. Now, David Sacks came out today against Elon's deal and said it's not taxpayer-funded. I think that's bullshit. Let's say there's confiscating. Coins and holding them. It's the same thing. Like if you like previously when they confiscated, they sold.

• 2:54:29John Coogan?

  Yep. Now they're not selling.

• 2:54:30Sheel Mohnot?

  It's the same thing. Like it makes no difference.

• 2:54:33John Coogan?

  Well, what about the argument of like, you know, during the bank bailouts in 2008, obviously, like it looked very bad because it's like taxpayer money is going into the, the, the balance sheet of Bank of America, Wells Fargo, save those companies. But if you look back historically now, and you read the Tim Geithner book, it's like, well, the banks paid them back with interest and the, and the, and the taxpayer actually made money on that. What about that argument?

• 2:54:59Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah. So, so what's the, but what's the argument for the crypto reserve?

• 2:55:03John Coogan?

  Because the argument is that it is that, is that it could be net positive to the taxpayer. Like the taxpayer, yes, the taxpayer does, does put money into this thing essentially. But if it goes up, then they wind up paying less taxes down the road.

• 2:55:17Sheel Mohnot?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:55:17John Coogan?

  When the government wants to fund something because, all right, we don't need to tax you as much because we went 10x long on X, Y, or Z.

• 2:55:24Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah, it's, it's just a question of, do you trust the government to allocate our dollars?

• 2:55:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:55:30Sheel Mohnot?

  Or do we trust individuals? And so I think it's like a personal freedoms issue. So it's kind of strange to have it come from the Republican Party, frankly.

• 2:55:38John Coogan?

  Yep, totally.

• 2:55:39Jordi Hays?

  It was odd. Anyway. What, uh, talk to us about, you've got an accelerator, which yeah, vertical specific accelerator makes a ton of sense. It, you know, if you're, you know, YC is an amazing product and platform.

• 2:55:51John Coogan?

  And why are you locking them in cages, though?

• 2:55:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. No, that's the real question. Why aren't you locking them and putting a live stream on it? No, I don't think that, I think people are sick at this point of the PMF or die approach applied to financial products. We, we very clearly did not want that because there's been some bad, bad things that happened when you just tried it. But what kind of companies are you looking for? I imagine that it would be insane if somebody had the opportunity to go through the, your guys' accelerator and they're building in fintech to, to choose YC, not because YC is not great, but just because you guys can connect them to this hyper, hyper specific network and.

• 2:56:31Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah, I totally agree. YC is great. Um, look, I, I ran an accelerator 2016 to 2018. YC's, I think Gary said that they had four and a half percent of their companies became unicorns. Actually, um, in mine, 7% became unicorns. So we have, we have a good success rate.

• 2:56:46Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations.

• 2:56:49Sheel Mohnot?

  So we, we have a good success rate. I, I think the idea is like, look, if you're building in an area that we have expertise. Yes, ring the gong. Um, we have expertise, we can be helpful.

• 2:57:00Sheel Mohnot?

  Now, you, you asked what areas I'm interested in. I, I'd say, look, we're, we're sort of founder driven first and foremost. But there are some areas we've invested in a lot. One is this, you know, very unsurprisingly, we're investing in AI companies. Um, we, we've done a bunch recently in the services as software space.

• 2:57:20Jordi Hays?

  Cool.

• 2:57:21Sheel Mohnot?

  Including one, actually, we did with a previous guest on here, Keith. Um, we have a company called Basis, uh, that's a AI for accounting company. That is able to do a lot of the work that a low level accountant does. We led the seed, uh, last year, Keith led the A recently. We've done a bunch of others in that space. We did, um, one in the SMB loan underwriting space called COD. We did one in the mortgage space, did one in insurance and all these companies basically are using AI, but embedding themselves deeply into a workflow and solving a problem for somebody who probably could not build it themselves, which is exciting. I, I think, you know, my worry with a lot of these AI companies, you've seen all the charts, zero to a hundred million revenue.

• 2:58:05Sheel Mohnot?

  I think a lot of them that aren't as deeply embedding into a workflow, I think are in danger of going from zero to a hundred down.

• 2:58:13Jordi Hays?

  Easy come, easy go. Yeah.

• 2:58:15Sheel Mohnot?

  So, so we're trying to invest in companies that we think have some durable lasting value, some data distribution, um, and embedded workflow, uh, value. And those, those kinds of things are easy to find in fintech.

• 2:58:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Have you touched any of, um, these broader, sort of more PE style rollups? You know, there's some opportunities in, in payments, obviously for that. Have, have you gone into that space at all yet? And what's your general point of view there?

• 2:58:44Sheel Mohnot?

  We haven't, we haven't done a whole lot of these PE rollup style things. We've done a couple of things that, that are similar. We did one in the, um, in the healthcare space, uh, that's doing, that's works in private practices called Maroka.

• 2:58:58Sheel Mohnot?

  I think honestly jury's out on those kinds of businesses and raising venture dollars to do so.

• 2:59:07Jordi Hays?

  Probably works better for the asset accumulator harvester model where you know you can deploy a lot of capital with with lower risk unless you're saying, you know, we're going to replace every employee with AI, you know, it's easier to say we're going to buy a bunch of companies at fair prices and get some efficiency, but that's basically just private equity, which is not the business that you're in.

• 2:59:28Sheel Mohnot?

  Not the business that we're in. That's exactly right. And so I completely agree. I was gonna bring up like General Catalyst is buying a hospital system in Akron, Ohio. That's they're in a different business than we're in.

• 2:59:42Sheel Mohnot?

  And I can see why it makes sense for them.

• 2:59:44John Coogan?

  Really quickly, you say is buying. Can you break down like? I heard about that deal like last year. Why is it taking so long? Like what's going on with that? What is this like a regulatory approval type of situation?

• 2:59:55Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah, I'd imagine I don't know. I don't know any first hand information, but I'd imagine when you're buying a health system, there's a ton of shit that you have to do. There's like there's pushback from the community. I noticed like immediately like when we heard about it. I also saw articles like, hey, this is fucked up. Like a venture capital firm is buying something that should be for the public good.

• 3:00:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's been a lot of pushback on like, oh, private equity bought this, you know, local clinic and like made it worse or like reduce the quality of care to like maximize profits. So it's always been controversial. It'll be very interesting to see how General Catalyst positions themselves in the IPO. I mean, Citadel was thinking about going IPO back like, I don't know, 10 years ago and they they like hedge funds were seen as like villains of the of the crash. So they bought an investment bank to try and make themselves look better, which is hilarious to me because it's like oh yeah, we're not the bad hedge fund guys. We're the good investment bankers. Both of those are like kind of villainized already.

• 3:00:56Sheel Mohnot?

  It's bad if you go banker to make yourself look better. That's bad.

• 3:01:00John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 3:01:00Jordi Hays?

  That's great.

• 3:01:01John Coogan?

  So they, yeah, I think they paid McKinsey like a fortune to like, you know, advise them on how to position their brand going into the IPO. And then they just kept it private and then they created Citadel Securities and printed. It was great.

• 3:01:11Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:13Jordi Hays?

  You're probably got to jump. Cause I know we had 30 minutes. Is there any IPOs that you're you're pretty convicted are happening in 2025 in fintech specifically? I mean, there've been rumors around Chime and Klarna and, you know.

• 3:01:27Sheel Mohnot?

  Chime and Klarna are the biggest. I think where Chime prices is going to be, you know, very important to the fintech world. I think like, I think in the private markets, it's currently trading at 10. But people think, you know, people think it's going to go out stronger. It's going to have a huge impact on on me and our portfolio. Actually, we have we have some other companies that are in a similar space. So I'm I'm really looking forward to that one. Klarna, I think, you know, I actually don't know where it's going to price. Klarna has something interesting, you know, they raised at a crazy valuation and then did a massive down round, which is not necessarily a bad thing, especially for them. Klarna actually does not have liquidation preferences, crazy enough. So.

• 3:02:12Sheel Mohnot?

  It actually was just like.

• 3:02:13John Coogan?

  They also replaced 100% of their employees with AI, right?

• 3:02:16Sheel Mohnot?

  Supposedly.

• 3:02:18John Coogan?

  It's just the CEO and Claude 3, Sonnet Cursor, actually, now.

• 3:02:23Jordi Hays?

  Somebody should go buy a Peloton and see if a human bangs on their door. It's just a chatbot being like, hey, please pay this back.

• 3:02:33John Coogan?

  No, it's fun.

• 3:02:34Jordi Hays?

  What but but Chime, what was their what was their 2021 or 2022 valuation? It must wasn't it or, you know, Forex? Yeah, 25 billion in 2021. Nice.

• 3:02:46Sheel Mohnot?

  And I remember it trading privately at like 30.

• 3:02:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:53John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 3:02:53Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. Well, we will have to definitely have you back on for those IPOs.

• 3:02:57Sheel Mohnot?

  This was super fun, guys. Enjoyed it.

• 3:02:59Jordi Hays?

  You're welcome any week and thanks for jumping on.

• 3:03:01John Coogan?

  Appreciate it.

• 3:03:02Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:03:03John Coogan?

  See you later. Bye.

• 3:03:05Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic.

• 3:03:06John Coogan?

  Should we close out with, we're going so long, the lights are turning off because we're running out of battery and we're really pushing it to the limit today. It's great. Should we close out with some timeline? What do you want to do?

• 3:03:16Jordi Hays?

  A little bit of timeline.

• 3:03:17John Coogan?

  It's 2:00 PM. We gotta, we gotta drive around in a Ferrari later. You know, it's a hard life out here.

• 3:03:22Jordi Hays?

  More to come there soon.

• 3:03:23John Coogan?

  Also not kidding. Did you see the Mr. Beast backlash? I thought this was kind of interesting.

• 3:03:28Jordi Hays?

  I didn't.

• 3:03:29John Coogan?

  So Mr. Beast did a podcast on Diary of a CEO. Have you ever listened to this podcast? Diary of a CEO?

• 3:03:35Jordi Hays?

  No, but it's like the biggest.

• 3:03:36John Coogan?

  It's the biggest business podcast and no one in Silicon Valley listens to it. It's very odd. I mean, it's like, it's popular, but it's popular just with like a very different crowd, I guess. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that it's not an American show.

• 3:03:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:50John Coogan?

  The guy's British. And so even though he has, he has great guests, like, I mean, Brian Chesky.

• 3:03:54Jordi Hays?

  He also has like a Web three startup.

• 3:03:56John Coogan?

  He does?

• 3:03:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:03:57John Coogan?

  Oh, I had no idea.

• 3:03:58Jordi Hays?

  The, the host.

• 3:03:59John Coogan?

  Really?

• 3:03:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:00John Coogan?

  Wow. He should have stuck to supplements, I guess. But anyway.

• 3:04:05Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna let you read through this. I'm gonna go to the restroom.

• 3:04:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, sure. So Mr. Beast goes on Diary of a CEO and then Kotaku writes an article about Mr. Beast going on the show and says, Mr. Beast, life is quote, "so much easier when you're broke." And of course, this is very controversial. People get very upset. There's a viral post saying, "F you." It gets like 100 million likes. Everyone sees it as very, you know, negative and flippant that this rich guy would come on and say, "Ah, it's, life's so much easier when you're broke." But that's not actually what he said. And it's very interesting. So Jack Appleby breaks it down. He says, "This might be an all-time PR team screw-up. Mr. Beast went on Diary of a CEO podcast. The podcast PR

• 3:04:51John Coogan?

  team pitched Jack Appleby and other writers to cover it," which is something most, most podcasts, but most people don't know about podcasts. But when you go on a podcast, there's a PR team for, you know, trying to amplify the attention that this guest gets. It's all very, very planned out, very insider plant, industry plant. And so when Kotaku wrote about it, they used a pretty harsh quote. He said, "I'd, I'd have done the same," except it's not a real quote. The podcast publicity team somehow confused Mr. Beast saying "bro" as "broke." So maybe they use like AI dictation or something. But in a moment where he's just saying, "Life is harder when you travel." They misquote him and made him sound like a jerk when it's not the case at all.

• 3:05:35John Coogan?

  And it's all not naturally gone viral with the misinformation side of it. All because the publicity team tried to get coverage and they screwed up. So now Mr. Beast is taking heat. Kotaku is taking heat when neither of them deserve it. And so the, the real quote was, this is killing me, to be honest. It was like so much easier when you're broke if you don't travel constantly. And that's not what he was saying. He was saying, it's so much easier when, bro, like you're not traveling and it's fascinating. And of course, uh, his original point is correct, but the, but, but, but the Straussian reading of all this is of course that life is so much easier when you're broke.

• 3:06:14John Coogan?

  And that, and that with wealth comes responsibility.

• 3:06:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:17John Coogan?

  And that, and that, and that what he's, what he's getting canceled for, he should have said the quiet part loud. And that everyone else is wrong.

• 3:06:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's true. He's also built up a brand where he's sort of almost promised his audience that he's reinvesting like a hundred and one percent of whatever he makes.

• 3:06:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, it doesn't fit with his brand at all. But, uh, I mean, Elon has said this, uh, and not backed down from it where he said like, look, I have all this money and the world's richest man. I'm miserable. You don't want to be me like, I'm not having fun. Like I'm, I'm like, like I'm having, I'm doing, there's forward motion. There's energy, but I wouldn't call what I'm doing fun. And that's fine. That's good.

• 3:06:56Jordi Hays?

  That's also a choice, right? He could retire and he could retire, buy the biggest yacht and not ever talk to the media again.

• 3:07:02John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 3:07:03Jordi Hays?

  He didn't have to buy.

• 3:07:04John Coogan?

  And plenty of people have.

• 3:07:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:05John Coogan?

  The, the Google founders did for a long time. Bill Gates, you could say, has kind of been on that tip for a long time. Even Ellison is kind of chilling from time to time. Like there are people that choose to be much less aggressive.

• 3:07:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Jason Calacanis was the first investor in Uber, one of the first. And now he's deciding to be in this, you know, go to war with Defense Tech founder.

• 3:07:28John Coogan?

  He does not need to do that, you know? He could, he could pass on that and yet he doesn't. He keeps, he keeps kicking the beast and everyone involved in that seems to love fighting, love fighting.

• 3:07:38Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense.

• 3:07:39John Coogan?

  It's very annoying.

• 3:07:39Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense.

• 3:07:40John Coogan?

  I'm totally over it. Anyway.

• 3:07:42Jordi Hays?

  Over it.

• 3:07:43John Coogan?

  Uh, should we stay on the topic of VC Liz Wessel, Ramp Investor? Congratulations to Liz. She was an angel. She says, has anyone written about the trend over the last six to 12 months of founders, 18 to 26 years old, raising VC to buy old school businesses and inject AI into them? I've seen so many pitches in every vertical on this in 2024 and it looks like still in 2025. I'm curious to learn how VCs who have done these seed and A rounds, often priced pretty high, are thinking about this approach. Blog posts or podcast recs appreciated. Well, let's just do a podcast about it right now.

• 3:08:15Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 3:08:16John Coogan?

  Here we go.

• 3:08:16Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 3:08:17John Coogan?

  So Liz, we got the answer for you. We're going to go to Jordy, an expert in this exact topic. Jordy, break it down for us. Would you invest in a 18 year old founder buying a old school business, injecting AI into it? And the seed round is at, uh, you know, you're going to get.

• 3:08:35Jordi Hays?

  You had me at AI, John.

• 3:08:36John Coogan?

  One on 99 pre.

• 3:08:37Jordi Hays?

  I'm in, send me the wire instructions.

• 3:08:39John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 3:08:39Jordi Hays?

  No, so there's two things that hap- there's two things that happened. The, the, the concept of the search fund.

• 3:08:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:08:46Jordi Hays?

  Exploded because the idea of these sort of old school IRL, real world businesses.

• 3:08:51John Coogan?

  It wasn't a Silicon Valley thing.

• 3:08:52Jordi Hays?

  It wasn't Silicon Valley.

• 3:08:53John Coogan?

  HBS.

• 3:08:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was an HBS thing. It was saying, hey, you could have gone to Goldman.

• 3:08:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:08:57Jordi Hays?

  Instead, you're going to take five million bucks and try to turn it into $15 million in, you know, five years, something like that. So that became popular and then the, the AI sort of enabled roll up, you know, started blowing up. And, and Liz is right, there's just tons and tons and tons of these companies. My concern, you know, generally I think we're going to see, we're going to see returns in the category. It's not going to be one where, you know, every, everything that gets basically zeroed out. But that being said, you're going into, you're, you're taking venture dollars and you're going into this sort of private equity world, which is like one of the most efficient markets in the world, right? Private equity has spent decades honing the ability to buy assets, make them better and then sell them for a higher price.

• 3:09:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:09:43Jordi Hays?

  And so by going in there and saying, It's a huge bet to say we're gonna, we're gonna be able to replace 80 to 90% of the employees with AI. Right? When, when the models are good, but you know, they're not agentic yet, right? For the most part. And so my, my concern is that you're gonna have that. It seems like the most likely outcome is like, some of the big winners end up being, the big winners still end up not being venture winners. Right? And that they, they, they get a nice three to five X and on invested capital, but it's not enough to, to, to sort of return any, any type of fund.

• 3:10:21John Coogan?

  Yep. I, I think that's a good point. I'm, I'm trying to think of like the private equity deals that I've seen, like kind of up close and personal. And I'm going back to like Bain Capital. When I was there, they, the, the, the historical like banger for them was Staples.

• 3:10:36Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:10:36John Coogan?

  You know, Staples stores, and that was not a digital transformation story.

• 3:10:41Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:10:41John Coogan?

  Like that was very much a nuts and bolts. Like what should the capital structure be? How do we lever this thing up properly? How do we close underperforming stores, ramp up overperforming stores? It was not, it was not, hey, the internet's here. I mean, this, this happened in like the nineties, like this is the Bain Capital story. So they, I mean, they, they think they owned, I think they owned Staples from like the eighties, nineties to the early 2000s.

• 3:11:02Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:11:02John Coogan?

  Like the internet was a thing. They, they, there, there is a world where you could be like, buy Staples and turn it into amazon.com.

• 3:11:08Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:11:09John Coogan?

  But I'm sure they launched an e-commerce site at that point, but it didn't like materially change the business. Same thing they bought, uh, who'd they buy? Toys R Us? And that one, I think they got out, but eventually it went bankrupt and it was not a digital transformation story. And so, yeah, the private equity thing, it's like the, the, even though there's been a trend of like the internet for a long time. There like, that hasn't been the story of private equity in my, in my, in everything I've read over the past, like few decades. It hasn't been, oh, let's, but like, let's go and buy the hospital network and we're gonna improve the user experience flows of the payments plan or whatever.

• 3:11:47Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:11:48John Coogan?

  It hasn't been, let's use the internet.

• 3:11:50Jordi Hays?

  The challenge is when you're buying a legacy sort of SMB.

• 3:11:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:54Jordi Hays?

  Typically, the founder is retiring.

• 3:11:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:57Jordi Hays?

  And the reason that that company, you know, outsiders will look at the business and say, oh, they run on pen and paper.

• 3:12:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:03Jordi Hays?

  They're not factoring in the fact that that founder was a staple of their local community, would work 12 hours a day for decades, and put their blood, sweat and tears into the business. And so you would get this effect of you're ripping out this sort of owner operator, who's, who's made their lives work, this company, and then you're slapping some AI on it.

• 3:12:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:22Jordi Hays?

  And I don't know, I think you almost are better off with the owner operator, right?

• 3:12:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:26Jordi Hays?

  And so the value, and so in these businesses, when you're buying businesses that are being valued on cash flows.

• 3:12:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:12:32Jordi Hays?

  You need to make them grow faster and you need to increase earnings. Otherwise, the value is less.

• 3:12:38John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:12:38Jordi Hays?

  And so it's, it's, you can rip out costs to increase earnings, but the, the sort of replacement, the sort of, what you're ripping out is human capital and injecting, you know, artificial intelligence.

• 3:12:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:12:49Jordi Hays?

  It's unclear what that trade is going to look like in the short term. The other thing is-

• 3:12:52John Coogan?

  And where the value capture lies, because, so, so, so, uh, hold on to that second point, but the, the interesting thing is like, like, oh, they're doing stuff on, on pen and paper. Well, if they're paying somebody, you know, $10 an hour, and they're only spending one hour a month on it, well, that's 10 bucks a month. DocuSign is going to hit you up for a hundred bucks a month. You're going to 10x your bill by going not paper, right?

• 3:13:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:14John Coogan?

  And so there, there's a question of like, how efficiently priced are the digital tools?

• 3:13:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:20John Coogan?

  Because if they're really efficiently priced-

• 3:13:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the other thing with these small-

• 3:13:22John Coogan?

  They're going to take their pound of flesh and just going to wind up paying them.

• 3:13:25Jordi Hays?

  Small businesses are like, you have the, the niece and nephew-

• 3:13:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:31Jordi Hays?

  Of the founder who like, kind of work for like, below minimum wage.

• 3:13:34John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 3:13:34Jordi Hays?

  And they're getting ripped out too, right? They're not sticking around.

• 3:13:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're the grandchildren coming in on the weekend and like, you know, racking servers.

• 3:13:41Jordi Hays?

  I've got a, I've got a buddy in Malibu who's like, has a multi hundred million dollar like healthcare software focused PE fund. And he, uh, he has, like, people don't realize like how, um, how precise these, um, managers are, and that he does not care to try to get a 10x. He's like, I just want to get, you know, 2x. Uh, I want a 2x, uh, and that's really all that I care about, but I'm never going to miss. And I'm just like, only, and so you're coming in, and you're competing with an operator where you're going to have to pay- You know, people that are selling their businesses, usually they have some type of long-term incentive to make sure that the acquisition is successful.

• 3:14:23Jordi Hays?

  Do they want to sell to the guy that's a proven operator that's like, like, literally, like, I'm going to go out of business if this doesn't, you know, my fund is going to be damaged if this doesn't work? Or do you want the 22-year-old that's like, you know, I'm rolling up, you know, pools? Like, I saw like, like a pool roll up. That was like, and I think it's awesome. Like, it's a cool, like, it's a cool shot.

• 3:14:46John Coogan?

  Going to the pool?

• 3:14:47Jordi Hays?

  But, you know, I, I, it's unclear if-

• 3:14:50John Coogan?

  Public pools?

• 3:14:51Jordi Hays?

  No, no, like, residential pools. So like, if you can-

• 3:14:54John Coogan?

  You roll those up?

• 3:14:55Jordi Hays?

  No, so you can go on BizBuySell or some of these other sites right now, and you can buy a pool route, and it'll be like-

• 3:15:02John Coogan?

  Oh, it's a route for the cleaning?

• 3:15:03Jordi Hays?

  Basically, the clients, and so these things trade over time, where you can go and say, "I'm going to buy, you know, thousands of pool clients and outside of Austin," right? And roll those up. The challenge is like, the, the competitive pressure on a pool route is so intense that anybody with, you know, $100 worth of equipment can clean pools, right? And so, it's not, it's certainly not a monopoly-type environment, right?

• 3:15:28John Coogan?

  Totally, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I can see a lot of VCs getting burnt here, mostly because, like, yeah, like, even if you wind up shifting from, "Look, we have 100X in our, in our fund," to "Everything's a 3X," and the math, and you work out the math, and the IRR should be the same, that's not the entire purpose of a single fund, because there's plenty of, there's plenty of situations where, yeah, you want to get a seed, you want to get a seed into some company, and then you want to pile it into, pile into it with your growth fund.

• 3:15:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:57John Coogan?

  And if you're just getting a 2X, you're not going to pile into it and scale it. And so, it's kind of just this, this hope that AI will transform private equity, and maybe it will, but we don't know, and we haven't seen it.

• 3:16:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the risk for venture funds is that you're running a traditional venture model, and then you say, "Oh, we're going to put 20% of our fund into a bunch of, you know, rollups," and then you get a banger, and it's a 4X, and they're like, "Great, like, we still are, like, are under, going to underperform," right? So- Anyways, I think venture people need to understand that, you know, we like to go into other industries and, you know, sort of say like, oh, like you guys have been doing this all wrong.

• 3:16:37John Coogan?

  Expeditionary or boondoggles. I mean, they're basically boondoggles.

• 3:16:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:41John Coogan?

  Maybe. Hopefully it works out. I hope they figure it out. Let's go to Molly O'Shea. It's a fun one. I think, I think we should take this into account. We've been, we've been podcasting pretty hard. I think we should announce that we're taking a break. We're going to take maybe 18 hours off.

• 3:16:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:57John Coogan?

  So you won't hear from us for a while.

• 3:16:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're gonna end this stream eventually and it's gonna be about 18 hours before we start up again.

• 3:17:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, so.

• 3:17:05Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna spend time with our family.

• 3:17:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, really recharge the batteries.

• 3:17:09Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:17:09John Coogan?

  Deep breaths and stuff, but then we'll be right back at it. But let's, let's close out with this post from Molly O'Shea. She says, after further analysis, I've come to the difficult decision to go into hermit mode. I will be refraining from any generalized social interaction or networking-like events, travel, conferences, and coffee chats for the foreseeable future. If you want to hang out, sign up, link in my bio, my team will get back to you.

• 3:17:32Jordi Hays?

  Brave Molly.

• 3:17:33John Coogan?

  Brave.

• 3:17:34Jordi Hays?

  You're brave.

• 3:17:34John Coogan?

  I wonder who inspired that.

• 3:17:35Jordi Hays?

  I wonder who inspired.

• 3:17:36John Coogan?

  I wonder who inspired that. No, no, we love Molly on this show and, uh, yeah, she's.

• 3:17:42Jordi Hays?

  Our default answer when we get invited to events now is, uh,

• 3:17:45John Coogan?

  Come on the show.

• 3:17:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're happy to cover it on the show.

• 3:17:48John Coogan?

  Do you invite us to an event? We're gonna say no, but if you tweet about it, we'll cover it on the show. And if you want to call in, you can call in too.

• 3:17:55Jordi Hays?

  Everybody wins.

• 3:17:56John Coogan?

  But, uh, you're probably not gonna get us out of this chair because it's so much fun.

• 3:18:00Jordi Hays?

  It's just too much fun.

• 3:18:01John Coogan?

  It's too much fun. You never want to turn off the stream. Are there any other bangers you want to go through?

• 3:18:05Jordi Hays?

  What was your sleep score last night? Cause I, I had a rough one.

• 3:18:08John Coogan?

  I had a good one. I got a ton of sleep.

• 3:18:11Jordi Hays?

  It takes me having the worst night of the last 30 days for you to, for you to do better. Uh, I got a 72.

• 3:18:18John Coogan?

  I got a 94. I slept eight hours and seven minutes. Let's go.

• 3:18:23Jordi Hays?

  You put up, you consistently do eight hours.

• 3:18:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:27Jordi Hays?

  You got the laugh.

• 3:18:29John Coogan?

  That's great. Yeah.

• 3:18:30Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 3:18:31John Coogan?

  Put up huge numbers. Built like a bear, sleep like a bear, just hibernate every once in a while. I have, I've been a bit under the weather, so I had to go to bed early. Still got up at six, got in, pumped my air.

• 3:18:42Jordi Hays?

  Funny, so, so I didn't set an alarm.

• 3:18:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:45Jordi Hays?

  I use the, the eight sleep alarm.

• 3:18:47John Coogan?

  The eight sleep alarm is amazing.

• 3:18:48Jordi Hays?

  I didn't set it yesterday.

• 3:18:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, you shouldn't have told me about that because if you're competing with me, now I got an edge.

• 3:18:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:53John Coogan?

  You gotta keep these features to us.

• 3:18:55Jordi Hays?

  Well, I got some other secret features that I'll share with the audience, but you're gonna have to.

• 3:18:58John Coogan?

  I'll have to do, cover my ears.

• 3:19:00Jordi Hays?

  No, but I, I didn't turn on the, the warming feature at the end of the night.

• 3:19:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:04Jordi Hays?

  And so it was like impossible to get out of bed yesterday, even though I was sleeping in like two hours past, like whenever I normally get up. So anyways, go to, uh,

• 3:19:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, go to 8sleep.com/TVPN. My original transition was when we go to the moon with Firefly, we'll, we'll sleep on an eight sleep on the moon or something, but somehow I missed that. I don't know.

• 3:19:23Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, we are interested in competing with the audience, so, uh, go to 8sleep.com/TVPN.

• 3:19:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:19:30Jordi Hays?

  And get a discount on eight sleep and then DM us. We'll get in a group and we'll all sort of motivate, uh, each other to put up crazy numbers.

• 3:19:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:38Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, we got some more timeline?

• 3:19:39John Coogan?

  I think, I, I think let's do more timeline tomorrow. I think we're, I think we're good at this point. It's getting late.

• 3:19:44Jordi Hays?

  Good, good, good.

• 3:19:45John Coogan?

  We, we got a promotion to film.

• 3:19:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we are, uh, gonna go drive a Ferrari around, which you'll hear more about soon.

• 3:19:54John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Uh, thanks for watching. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Leave an ad in your review.

• 3:20:02Jordi Hays?

  We gotta do a review of the reviews tomorrow.

• 3:20:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, we should do a review of the reviews. We'll get them up on the show and, uh, thanks for watching. We appreciate you.

• 3:20:11Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, brothers. We'll see you tomorrow.

• 3:20:13John Coogan?

  See you tomorrow.