Jensen vs NYT, New Model Reactions, "You Can See Everything" Trailer, Saudi EVs | Cristiano Amon, Talia Goldberg, John & Louis Antonelli, Max Levchin, Sam Ross

(00:49) - Jensen vs AI Alarmism (19:33) - New Model Reactions (28:54) - Saudi EVs (31:00) - "You Can See Everything" New Trailer Reaction (36:40) - Cristiano Amon discusses Qualcomm’s vision for AI-powered smartphones, vehicles, data centers, and emerging wearable devices. The Qualcomm president and CEO highlights rising demand for computing, the importance of on-device AI, and the company’s push for an open-source AI software ecosystem. (48:41) - Talia Goldberg, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, discusses emerging AI opportunities, including physical AI, “token market fit,” and personal agents. She also outlines Bessemer’s new $5.75 billion fund and its strategy of making selective, substantial investments in early-stage and high-growth companies. (01:00:22) - John and Louis Antonelli discuss co-founding Real, a social sports app that transforms live statistics into fast, engaging, community-driven content. They explain the platform’s growth through sports fan pages, real-time notifications, digital collectibles, AI-powered moderation, and plans to expand into more sports and live events. (01:25:25) - Max Levchin, founder and CEO of Affirm, discusses the company’s UK expansion with Amazon, its breakthrough attention-based underwriting models, and the advantages of operational discipline and transparency. He also explains why existing financial infrastructure can support AI agents and how Affirm’s dedicated developer-productivity team has increased AI-assisted coding while reducing costs. (01:43:48) - Sam Ross, co-founder and CEO of Numeral, discusses the company’s $100 million funding round and its mission to automate global sales tax and VAT compliance. He explains that the capital will primarily support R&D, AI-powered tax advisory tools, and solutions that reduce manual work for tax professionals. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPN. Today is Wednesday, September 23rd, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Time is money. Save both easy use corporate cards, bill pay accounting and a whole lot more. All in one place.

• 0:22Jordi Hays?

  What happened, John? The mallet broke.

• 0:24John Coogan?

  Oh, you broke the mallet.

• 0:25Jordi Hays?

  You broke the mallet.

• 0:26John Coogan?

  I mean, does that have anything to do with the number of days until Christmas?

• 0:30Jordi Hays?

  I think so.

• 0:31John Coogan?

  Are we at around one or so we gotta hit the gong? What are we? I can't read that. Is it 90?

• 0:37Jordi Hays?

  92 days.

• 0:38John Coogan?

  Okay, well, yeah. If it's 92 days till Christmas, you gotta celebrate, of course.

• 0:43Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  Get ready. TBPN Road to Christmas continues. 92 more days. Get ready. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang went toe to toe with Ezra Klein on the New York Times Podcast, The Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:58Jordi Hays?

  That's actually a crazy environment to go in.

• 1:02John Coogan?

  Why?

• 1:02Jordi Hays?

  As Jensen. I just think he's brave. Ezra is a real journalist.

• 1:09John Coogan?

  It's like, he's brave. He engaged with a real journalist.

• 1:13Jordi Hays?

  No, it's like, it's like, you know, you have to imagine he was a bit traumatized after Dorkesh.

• 1:19John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:19Jordi Hays?

  Who, who isn't, you know, I don't think of as a journalist by any means, but he's, he's obviously has very strong beliefs.

• 1:28John Coogan?

  And, and yeah.

• 1:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:30John Coogan?

  And gets to like the root question for a particular audience.

• 1:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:34John Coogan?

  Now, Dorkesh, although he was going super hard on the, the open source question, on selling chips to China, on sort of AI safety and rollout and like how the model, how the AI race should go. You know, Dorkesh is not the person to push, push Jensen on like politics specifically, right? Like that's going to happen somewhere else. But yeah, it is, it is a hot seat, but I think he did well. Two hours almost hanging out with Ezra Klein. There's some clips and I have some reactions and it's sort of interesting to dig into the mind of Jensen because he's simultaneously the biggest force in AI, the central bank of artificial intelligence, according to The Economist. He's the backstop of all backstops. He's backstopping everything from, you know, the biggest data centers in the world lending

• 2:19John Coogan?

  investment grade designation to the debt and the credit lines to like sort of acting as a soft landing for startups that get acquired at the application layer or anywhere in the stack. He's been an acquirer that's sort of underwriting. If you're a VC and you, and you did a deal at a billion dollars.

• 2:37Jordi Hays?

  And you're kind of in trouble on it.

• 2:39John Coogan?

  There's a chance that you could get out because Jensen is willing to do a $10 billion, $15 billion acquisition, whereas like in the prior era, Apple had the money, wouldn't do it. Google really didn't do that many deals that huge. Facebook would do one, big one every five, 10 years, but Jensen's been quick on it. And then he's also been investing directly in basically every lab and basically every AI project. So he's been an incredibly important force and yet he's now starting to stand alone in his sort of P doom equals zero take, which was very much the consensus in the, in the technology community.

• 3:16Jordi Hays?

  Chuck would like a word.

• 3:17John Coogan?

  I think, ah, true, true. Yeah. I think it still is the consensus in the business community and the finance community. Basically, anyone at the application layers, P D M zero, anyone deeper in the stack on the semiconductor side or the, or the, the energy side, the build outside, the neo cloud side, they're all pretty much P D M zero, but the labs and Jensen's been playing there. He's, he's at that level. He's, he's as important as a voice as, as Talia, Sam, Elon. And so to hear him not jump on the bandwagon when Elon, Sam and Dario all agreed on pacing the frontier, he's saying, no, we don't really need to pace the frontier. It's, it's interesting to hear him say this. There's a, there's a couple of clips. Let's play one and then I have sort of an allegory for where I think his position is, but let's play this.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  So what I've been hearing from the labs, what they've been saying publicly is that they are facing a hard problem.

• 4:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  Partially an engineering problem, partially an alignment problem, partially an operational excellence problem in Dari Amade's framing. And what they are worried about is that in competition with each other, in national competition with China, that they are being pushed to move too fast, that they all feel they're in a collective action dilemma. Now I watch you on the All In Podcast stage, Donald Trump, President Trump gave you a call there.

• 4:34Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 4:35Speaker 04

  This is not planned, but we know who it is.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 4:41Speaker 03

  Mr. President?

• 4:43Speaker 03

  Oh, yes, sir.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  And you and the president and the other members at the stage were very resistant to the idea any kind of regulation or collective action was needed.

• 4:56Speaker 05

  And they're just playing right into the hands of a lot of people that don't want to see it happen and that could be political people, it could also be China. And we're not going to let that happen. It's a, it's a hoax and.

• 5:09Speaker 03

  You're right.

• 5:10John Coogan?

  Did you come out as pro regulation? It's illegal to slow down. That's a form of regulation. I think, I think AI regulation is incredibly important. We need accelerationist regulation. Really frustrate everyone. Yeah, it's interesting. Didn't he all, didn't Jensen also do Joe Leng Kent on CBS just recently? I saw a clip from that, but very different clips going out. The one from Ezra Klein is talking about maybe we need to shut the labs down, a very, you know, in the weeds, a hot take about the current thing and the AI debate. I think the clip that I saw from CBS was talking about his leather jackets. Like I, I imagine that that, that interview will be more substantive when it, when it

• 5:51John Coogan?

  gets clipped properly, but it's funny that that's the one that made it out, made it out initially. Let's play the other clip from the Midas Project. They said, here's the clip of Jensen actually talking about, about property slowing down. Why is there a bonk?

• 6:07Speaker 03

  Release the product. That's the simple answer. If you're, if you're going to build a car, a self-driving car and, and let's say it's a robot taxi and there's a really difficult condition. And it just, as an engineer, we just have no idea how to solve this problem because these cars are not programmed, they're trained. And so we have no idea how to train these cars and we have no idea how to align them to the safety standards that are expected on the road. And so what's the answer? Don't ship it. These products weren't released. What's that? These products weren't released. Ah, so now it's coming back to engineering problem again. And so the one is, one, you have to cause it. Second, you have to, you know, think about what's the, what you could have done, what's

• 6:52Speaker 03

  the solution for it. And then in the future, you just, you know, improve your process so that you could, you could avoid this from happening again. I am fairly certain, I am fairly certain, they will say, yes, they need, they know how to solve this problem. And if that's the case, then that's the problem. It's as simple as engineering. And, and now the alternative, the alternative is that if they say that, if they say the alternative, which is there is no way to contain our experiments. There's just no way. When we test our AI models, it will get out and it will damage the world.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  Then I think the answer is we have to shut the labs down.

• 7:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, that, that is kind of what happened with self-driving cars, you know, like they do, before they ship them, they do test them on roads and they don't test them on open roads. They test them on closed courses before they move to open roads. They sort of have their own sandboxes, their own, their own environments to test these in. I do wonder if there's a, a sort of a legislation or liability gap between the liability incurred by a self-driving car company who causes property damage from a car running into another car autonomously and a, an AI agent that hacks and defaces or causes some economic damage. I don't think there will be.

• 8:23John Coogan?

  I think the courts, if, if there was true economic harm, like one model accidentally took down a payment system for an e-commerce website, I think it would be pretty easy to sue that company and say, you caused me to lose this much revenue. You owe me. And the courts would say, sure. And even if the lab argued, hey, we didn't tell it to take down your, your e-commerce system or your, your payment rails, the judge and the courts would say, doesn't matter. Even if you expressed a duty of care, like you still have to pay in this, in this scenario. But it is possible that there's a gap there and that's where regulation could fit in. It's interesting. He spent the first like 20 minutes sort of steel manning the, the jobs question and

• 9:08John Coogan?

  talking about jobs because I think that's, I think that's throwing a lot of people off. Like we, we sort of moved past the job apocalypse, SaaS apocalypse narrative, which was predicted from somewhat of the same community into actual apocalypse. And people are like, whoa, like you were wrong about the SaaS apocalypse, like Salesforce is still doing fine, like Slack still exists. And you were wrong about the job apocalypse, like the unemployment rate is like 3% for American white collar workers. You were predicting like 50% or 30%, something like 10% overall. And even, even in the Philippines, I mean, I remember seeing, I think it was Tristan

• 9:51John Coogan?

  Harris on Monitor Wisdom, like he, he's now sounding the alarm bells about existential risk, but he was saying something like, like the Philippines would see like, you know, 90% of their economy go away because they're, they're heavily dependent on call centers. Call centers are actually only like three and a half percent of the Philippines job market. They do in fact make things and have agriculture and all sorts of other, all, all sorts of other economic endeavors going on in the country. But even in the, even in the Philippines, like the unemployment rate is, is right now in the Philippines, it's 4.9% in June of 2026. Now it went up to 6% in August, but it still feels like the AI effect is pretty minimal. And most people were predicting that like the offshore call centers would be affected

• 10:36John Coogan?

  first. And that one seems like, like maybe we're there, but it's just taking so much longer that everyone feels very vindicated in saying like, hey, let's watch that play out first before we move on to the, the X risk discourse potentially. I think that's a lot of what.

• 10:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, now with, with Muse floating the idea of having a human in the loop on personal agents, you can imagine those people would be former like.

• 11:01John Coogan?

  Oh, they could just move over. Yeah, yeah, potentially. But yeah, I mean, it's all the same, you know, in the limit, in the exponential, add, add five orders of magnitude, maybe things look very different. But Jensen just rejects that. I mean, he's an, is he an AI as a normal technology guy? I saw, I saw Joe Weisenthal posting about this. He said that he had to, he had to differentiate between, I gotta pull it up because it's funny, Weisenthal.

• 11:30John Coogan?

  Um, Joe Weisenthal said he had to dis- he had to disaggregate. Where is it? He posts a lot, so I gotta dig it up.

• 11:42John Coogan?

  Normal technology.

• 11:47John Coogan?

  Man, he posts a lot. Okay, he said, "The splintering around AI discourse is really a sight to behold." Was in a conversation yesterday with some folks during which it became necessary to distinguish the people who see AI as normal technology from the AI as normal technology people. Because there is a group of people that have rallied around a particular thesis, which is AI as a normal tech- AI as normal technology. And that's different than people that are just like casually into that idea. Because it's actually like a different ecosystem. Anyway, um, it does feel like Jensen is AI as normal technology. I mean, you've certainly seen plenty of technology revolutions come and go.

• 12:29John Coogan?

  And, uh, he's been in this industry for, what, 30 odd years? Um, and, uh, I, I, I think of the jobs on the job discussion. We were talking to Joe Weisenthal about this when he was in the studio. Uh, like, where is the, where is the economic impact of the internet? Like, why can't you see, you know, a kink in the graph of really any economic data when, like, the internet takes off? It's not like productivity went way up. There's nothing really to grab on to. You actually go back to 1970, if you want to see like the real, the real trends shift. And there are other, you know, uh, trade and globalization moves that have had bigger economic impacts on the internet, which is crazy to think because so much wealth was created, so many companies were created. Uh, and it did change the world and like the day-to-day experience, but didn't actually

• 13:14John Coogan?

  show up that much in the economic data. And that's what we're seeing now, where jobs are sort of changing, tasks are changing, but, uh, we're not seeing, uh, dramatically different, uh, economic statistics like the 10 years at all-time highs, or not all-time highs, but 19-year highs, you said, uh, five, over 5%. And yet, everyone is sort of consensus agrees that that's because of the war. Are you rooting for people that are buying the bonds and getting higher yields now?

• 13:41Jordi Hays?

  I guess.

• 13:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 13:43Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, sometimes big, a record-breaking number.

• 13:45John Coogan?

  It's just exciting to you.

• 13:46Jordi Hays?

  Exciting.

• 13:47John Coogan?

  Just general, just real golden retriever mind.

• 13:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you understand the implications and, and you.

• 13:51John Coogan?

  You don't even think about the implications, potentially. You're just cheering for a bigger number.

• 13:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:55John Coogan?

  It's like, now it begins with a five. Great, I like that. It's a higher number. Uh, there's an interesting, uh, there's an interesting allegory, uh, around the effect that technology has on the labor market, at least historically. Now, things might change, but, uh, Stephen Covey highlighted this in First Things First, his book on time management. Uh, he said, "I attended a seminar once where the instructor was lecturing on time. At one point, he said, 'Okay, it's time for a quiz.' He reached under the table and pulled out a wide-mouthed gallon jar. He set it on the table next to a platter with some fist-sized rocks. On how, uh, how many ro- how many of these rocks do you think I can get in the jar?" He asked. After everyone made their guesses, he said, "Okay, let's find out." He set one rock in the jar, then another, then another. Uh, I don't remember how many he got in, but he got the jar full.

• 14:39John Coogan?

  Then he asked, "Is that jar full?" Everyone looked at the rocks and said, "Yes." Then he said, "Ah." He reached under the table and pulled out a bucket of gravel. He dumped some gravel in and shook the jar, and the gravel went in all the little spaces left by the big rocks. Then he grinned and said once more, "Is the jar full?" By this time, people were in on him. They said, "Probably not, there's something else coming." Uh, "Good," he said, and he reached under the table and brought out a bucket of sand. He started dumping the sand in, and it went in all the little spaces left by the rocks and the gravel. "Once more," he said, "Is the jar full?" "No," everyone roars. Uh, he said, "Good." And he grabbed a pitcher of water and began to pour, and the water went in between the rocks and the sand and filled up. Uh, and, and, and somebody said, "Well, there are gaps, and if you really work at it, you can always fit more into your life."

• 15:24John Coogan?

  He said, "No, that's not the point. The point is this, if you hadn't put these big rocks in first, would you have ever gotten any of them in?" And so, the effect that Jensen's describing is that, like, at one point in human history, there were maybe only two jobs, hunting and gathering, something along those lines. Then we invent agriculture, the industrialization. At one point, everyone's farming. Now, very few people are farming, but we still have more food than ever.

• 15:47Jordi Hays?

  There might have been a third job, singing. I can see Tyler while everyone else was hunting and gathering, just kind of jesterback thing and just singing for all the hunters and all the gatherers, kind of like providing ambient entertainment.

• 16:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:01Jordi Hays?

  But anyways.

• 16:02John Coogan?

  But it, it does feel like that, that was the effect that the internet had. Like, it didn't, it didn't, it didn't dramatically reshape the labor force, but like, obviously, like lawyers use the internet to communicate. And now, like, you, you see the AI agents thing. It's like every, every little document will go through an AI pass. Every little interaction in the economy gets this, like, small effect, at least right now. And, and that's what Jensen's like living in. He's like, "I have a real business to run in the real world today." So, he says he's worried about the future. But, or he said, he says he thinks about the future, but really, he's clearly very much living in the present.

• 16:39Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's interesting to think about how much, uh, like, technology-driven efficiency gains just get effectively wasted. So, I would imagine today it's faster to clo- to, to like, close a venture round post-term sheet than it was in like, the 90s, right? I think so with the, with the internet and, and AI and all these different things. But I bet you that it's not as maybe, as fast, as efficient as you might think if we can now generate docs on the fly and you can easily go back and forth on red lines.

• 17:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:13Jordi Hays?

  Right? Like, maybe it went from six weeks to four weeks, but theoretically, it could have gone from six weeks down to five days, you know?

• 17:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:24Jordi Hays?

  Um, and I think you're just seeing that, even with AI now, people can do their jobs faster. And you've seen some management teams tell their employees, "Hey, I know you're getting a lot more efficiency, that doesn't mean you should just do the same. I want you to do more work in the same amount of time. Don't do the same amount of work with, with less time, but you're just sort of like wasting a bunch of time."

• 17:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, it seems like no one's really saving time. Everyone's just doing more stuff. Um, there is an interesting, like, like corollary of that, which is potentially, these technologies, they don't necessarily change the growth curve, but they are responsible for the growth. Like, if you don't have the internet speeding up commerce from a week to get an item to two days, that is actually the source of the 2% growth. And without the technology, you have no growth. And so, there, there is, there is another side of an argument. Of course, there's like population growth and a whole bunch of other things that are affecting economic growth broadly, but there is a, there is a world where, yes, if you, if you're compressing the timeline on everything, you're building the house faster, you're deciding

• 18:28John Coogan?

  to buy the house faster, you're exchanging everything faster as things move quicker, even if you're not doing entirely like net new jobs, just the fact that you're doing them faster, you do more of them, and that's what actually creates the economic growth? I don't know. We'll figure it out. We'll get to the bottom of it tomorrow. Uh, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

• 18:51John Coogan?

  Uh, the, the, and, yeah, it's always a good time to share the Financial Times' black pill, white pill, uh, chart of which way things go. Either, either GDP goes to zero, infinity, or it stays the same. It's like that Mitch Hedberg joke.

• 19:09John Coogan?

  "I used to be in a metal band. People either loved us, they hate us, or they thought we were just okay." It's that stupid joke.

• 19:17John Coogan?

  Do you know Mitch Hedberg? Oh, he's a great, like, one-liner comedian. He's fantastic. Uh, RIP. Uh, anyway, um, let's move on to some other reactions. Uh, I'll tell you about Consol. Consol builds AI agents that automate 70% IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Uh, Claude Opus 5.5 drew every frame in this animation in JavaScript. They went all in on LLMs, on the big model, on the great model, and now it can do basically video generation, but do it in JavaScript, do it in Blender, do it in Python, do it in SVG, uh, and you can just hillclimb on SVG. And people are sharing a bunch of cool demos. And good for launch. People are sick of benchmarks.

• 20:00John Coogan?

  People want to see visual stuff, entertain me, make a song, uh, and, uh, yeah.

• 20:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, really, really cool style.

• 20:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:08Jordi Hays?

  I'm already sort of mourning it, just because this is probably going to be everywhere on the internet, like, by next week. But for now, a good format, uh, I would, you know, if, if you see maybe a coworker doom scrolling, send them a custom animation like this, saying, "Hey, stop doom scrolling."

• 20:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:26Jordi Hays?

  Do some work. Uh, you could maybe send this to the, uh, I think the, the president of Syria.

• 20:31John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, he was doom scrolling.

• 20:33Jordi Hays?

  Caught, caught, using Instagram reels at the UN. Uh, nati nati, as they say.

• 20:42John Coogan?

  Hey.

• 20:43Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, very, very, very cool.

• 20:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, Mike Bird says, "Total cultural victory. Man has yet to create an ideology that can compete with short-form, video-based, social media scrolling." Ahmed Al Sharah spotted scrolling and sending Instagram reels during UN General Assembly with the translator headphone on. He's scrolling, hey, you know?

• 21:06John Coogan?

  You gotta keep those, you gotta keep those group chats going. You gotta, you gotta keep the content flowing. You don't want to be falling off. He might be sending them to other world leaders. He might be recontextualizing what's happening at the UN with a funny reel. Like he might, the person might be talking about some peace plan and he might be sharing some hilarious Instagram reel that makes fun of that to let his friends know that he's not buying it, something like that.

• 21:31Jordi Hays?

  He also could be just, his feed could be so dialed into just local political content. He could be mainlining public opinion and trying to understand what's important to voters heading into the next election, you know?

• 21:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. There, there's one more, there's one more Claude post I want to, I want to show the GIF, animated in Python and rendered in Blender. And at this point, you know, I posted that AI video of you and people were asking like, what was the workflow? And I was like, it's, you just ask it to do exactly what you want it to do and you don't, you actually don't even need to know the word Blender. You can just-

• 22:09Jordi Hays?

  You can even misspell every word and it will still-

• 22:12John Coogan?

  No, you just open up the voice mode and I just talk and I'm like, you can even do multiple things now. So I was like, I have this children's story that I made up for my five-year-old and, and I was like, in one shot, I was like, take this story, turn it into a series of stories, then a series of children's books. Go find a place that can print the children's books, illustrate it, turn it into short-form video and also make a video game. And it did it all, it was just like spawning sub-agents to do it. And you can just do it all in one prompt. And I didn't need to be like, well, I want you to use JavaScript for this and Blender for that. You can just ask for what you want and basically get it from all the models right now. You have an interesting thesis.

• 22:54John Coogan?

  You're, you're blackpilling on the, on the application layer now? You think the models are getting so good that people are just going to use the AI tools? Does this change anything for you? Because I see this and like, I still feel like, these are, these are great. There's probably a couple of revisions. When I do the prompts, I'm like, I, I still sort of filter and review. I'll usually get like 20 outputs, pick the best one. I actually talked to an AI video founder yesterday who's doing like AI movie production and whatnot. And he was absolutely printing, using all the, all the latest models. The business is doing fantastically. He's hiring four video editors, like a week or day or something. Like, he's hiring lots of people because there still is a

• 23:38John Coogan?

  lot of, it's not even prompt engineering. It's more like processing the output, curatorial work, understanding what is the right thing to fit together. And I think that that mainly comes into picture when you're looking at something that's a bigger project. You want to go from a one-minute thing that might have some consistency, but when you go to two hours, the consistency becomes much more important. The, the style, the pacing, matching, everything matters more. I don't know. I, I, I think we might be gearing up for another application layer versus, versus model layer debate. We, we saw this with the Harvey discourse earlier. This, I, I think we discussed that yesterday, actually. People were sort of blackpilling because their margins went negative, but, but then all

• 24:22John Coogan?

  the models got cheaper since that released. And so you think-

• 24:26Jordi Hays?

  Better and cheaper.

• 24:27John Coogan?

  Back up. Yeah, but of course, if the models can do it at a base level, there is a world where every company just has, you know, a relationship with a foundation lab. So, I don't know. We'll see. Anyway, people are feeling the AGI. The serious adult, ML enjoyer at Anthropic, he said, I'm feeling the AGI. I'm gonna follow this guy back. I'm feeling the AGI. He made this cool video with Opus 5.5. Then Sholto comes in from the top rope. We don't have AGI. The job's not finished. I love the debate, even internally. People are saying there may be loosening up comms over there. I think it's cool. I like seeing, I like seeing different takes. Of course, these

• 25:07John Coogan?

  companies are not monoliths. It's nice to actually get a glimpse into everyone's different perceptions. Everyone has different definitions for AGI and I think it's cool to actually toy with them. Early in the show, I coined like definition of AGI, which was just purely economics. Just when AI revenues equal non-AI revenues, you have AGI. So like, when the AI economy is as big as the human economy, then that's AGI. And of course, that's completely arbitrary. Who knows if that's a valuable metric? Certainly interesting, but I can definitively say we're not there because AI is contributing like a quarter percent to GDP. And, and total, total lab revenues are in like the hundreds of billions while we're doing like tens of trillions in the, in the global economy

• 25:52John Coogan?

  or in the US economy even. So, interesting stuff, fun. Go play around with it. Let us know what you build. I like that they put the horse riding the astronaut on the moon. And I think there's probably some Blender under the hood, but it was cool that the model was able to do the post processing and the, and adding grain and texture. That made it look very special. Like it popped out on the timeline, at least to me because of that. Very cool. I also had an interesting test. Like you really can hill climb SVG. At one point, I just took an image that was AI-generated image of a pelican riding a bicycle, which is of course, because AI-generated Gen AI image, like looks amazing. And then I just told Astro, like, turn this into an SVG pixel by pixel. And I was,

• 26:35John Coogan?

  it'll send it to you. There's like a 40 megabyte SVG, but it looks exactly like a pelican riding a bicycle. And so it calls into question like, what, what, what even matters? Like, as you can, you can use a generative AI tool, then create a Blender model, to then create an After Effects file, to then bake it down to a PNG or change it. Like every format changes into every other format. Use the best tool for the job. We're, we're definitely in the regime of like, how much did it cost to actually get that thing done? As opposed to some like artificial synthetic benchmark around like a line of code costs this much. Like no one cares. No one cares what tools are being used under the hood. There's definitely a world where you go to a model, you ask for a

• 27:17John Coogan?

  thing, and if it needs to use Slack, it uses Slack. If it needs to use Photoshop, it uses Photoshop. If it needs to write its own thing in Python, it does that. It uses the right tool for the job and it intelligently chooses things, just like a real person on your team would, which is exciting.

• 27:31Jordi Hays?

  EV news.

• 27:32John Coogan?

  EV news.

• 27:33Jordi Hays?

  From, from Dave over on X. He flagged this first.

• 27:36John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish.

• 27:47Jordi Hays?

  We are one week out from the Roadster reveal.

• 27:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:51Jordi Hays?

  And I'm quite excited.

• 27:52John Coogan?

  Did you listen to the end of the show when we bounced, when you bounced? We went deep on the Roadster. We got a scoop. We got a scoop from our guest who was next to a Tesla employee on a plane and was like pulling facts about him just to go leak it on TVPN. Yeah.

• 28:07Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 28:07John Coogan?

  No, no. I mean, I, I don't know how real this was because the guy could have been messing with them. I don't know. It's, it's all rumor mill stuff, but the guy was basically like, yeah, I was the next to a Tesla employee. And he was saying that the jets are not to make it fly. It's actually for downforce. It's going to suck it to the ground and it's going to go zero to 60 in one second. Very cool prediction. Very different from what we were saying. So who had the lowest-

• 28:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the only thing is it doesn't, it doesn't track with-

• 28:31John Coogan?

  Lowest number. So you're closer to win if that's what happened.

• 28:33Jordi Hays?

  Well, it doesn't track with what Elon was saying on Rogan, which is that-

• 28:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, it should be able to leave the ground.

• 28:38Jordi Hays?

  Fly.

• 28:39John Coogan?

  And that's what I was getting at. It was like, if you can have a fan or a jet that sucks you to the ground for one purpose, you can probably reverse those and boost up at least for a little bit, for a little jump. But we'll see. We're counting it down.

• 28:52Jordi Hays?

  Well, in other EV news-

• 28:53John Coogan?

  Road to Christmas, Road to Roadster, but we're still keeping an eye on it.

• 28:56Jordi Hays?

  Saudi Arabia is aiming to disrupt the auto industry with these radical EVs.

• 29:01John Coogan?

  They're wedges.

• 29:02Jordi Hays?

  They have a brand called CER Exobot, coming as a sedan and an SUV. It looks like sort of a futuristic, like Lamborghini offshoot.

• 29:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's a little bit of Huracan wedge in there, a little Cybertruck in there. Is that-

• 29:19Jordi Hays?

  This is Saudi Arabia's first true production car brand. So they're going to be making these.

• 29:25John Coogan?

  There's such a hard trade-off between the wedge looks great, but it's a terrible use of space. Like you're, like, the, the optimal use of space is like the new Waymo vehicle, which is basically just a box or like a bus.

• 29:38Jordi Hays?

  You care, you just care about utility now?

• 29:41John Coogan?

  I'm just saying it's a trade-off. Like, the more wedgie you get, the less utilitarian the, the vehicle's space is. Of course, you need to have-

• 29:50Jordi Hays?

  This one looks like somebody broke up with the new generation of Prius.

• 29:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:54Jordi Hays?

  Now they've leveled up again. Right? That was the, that was the original, like, read on the Prius is like, who hurt you? You know? Because the, the new Prius is looking pretty, pretty stanced, you know?

• 30:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is. It is.

• 30:07Jordi Hays?

  It's a level up.

• 30:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:08Jordi Hays?

  But this is a level up.

• 30:09John Coogan?

  Is it the Prime? Prius Prime looks pretty good. Yeah, they've done a good job.

• 30:13Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 30:13John Coogan?

  850 horsepower, tri-motor, electric powertrain.

• 30:17Jordi Hays?

  This thing looks insane.

• 30:19John Coogan?

  It does look insane. It, it, I wonder where they'll hit in terms of price. That'll be, that'll be interesting to see. I mean, it's cool. Saudi Arabia obviously known for, you know, pretty outrageous car culture in many places.

• 30:32Jordi Hays?

  John, what if I could, what if I, what if they could make this the performance of the Luché at only 60% of the cost?

• 30:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:41Jordi Hays?

  Still hundreds of thousands of dollars. Hopefully not that, but will be interesting.

• 30:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, I have no idea where they would price this because it could be sort of like a, a national treasure, a, a point of pride. It could come in at a very high price. At the same time, EV is a tough sell when you're in the, when you're in the six figures. Should we watch the trailer? The official trailer?

• 31:04Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 31:04John Coogan?

  Where you can see everything. We watched the preview clip. Now we get the full trailer. And I want you to pay attention to the quotes because the reviewers were floored by this movie. I've never seen quotes like this on a movie.

• 31:17Jordi Hays?

  I know.

• 31:17John Coogan?

  It's crazy. People really, really enjoyed this. Triple glaze. Yeah, seriously. While they pull that up, let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They've got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service.

• 31:32Speaker 06

  I feel you did nothing wrong.

• 31:33Speaker 07

  I did not.

• 31:35Speaker 06

  So where did things get lost? Like, how are you where you are right now?

• 31:41Speaker 07

  I, I wish I knew, you know? I, I don't know. I don't, I don't feel like I understand that.

• 31:53Speaker 06

  So I know you guys invited me to stay here.

• 31:58Speaker 06

  Does any part of you worry about me being here 24/7?

• 32:02Speaker 07

  I don't think so.

• 32:04Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so pause.

• 32:06Speaker 06

  But what if I see?

• 32:08Jordi Hays?

  24/7. He's actually, I think-

• 32:11John Coogan?

  Living there.

• 32:11Jordi Hays?

  Living with Elizabeth Holmes.

• 32:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:15Jordi Hays?

  And it's crazy because only Nathan Fielder would even think to throw out an idea of, hey, would you mind if I moved into your house before you go to prison? And documented the entire process. Because you would think that there would be no circumstances where that would

• 32:38Jordi Hays?

  be a good idea.

• 32:39John Coogan?

  I think it's just pure upside. There's very little downside to doing this. I mean, you're going to prison. Like, worst case, you look worse, but you're in prison either way.

• 32:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:52John Coogan?

  The only thing you, the only way you can go is up and actually endear some people to you, which is the attempt. We'll see how it lands. Let's keep watching.

• 33:01Speaker 06

  And it makes you look bad.

• 33:08Speaker 07

  I think this is the moment in time-

• 33:10John Coogan?

  Like no other film I've ever experienced.

• 33:13Speaker 07

  -to capture this story before I'm gone.

• 33:16Speaker 06

  I fell in love in that first conversation. Before or after that she revealed she was the founder of Theranos? Probably before. I mean, weren't you worried she was sort of scamming you? 100%, but what did she have to gain for me? Well, isn't your family rich? Yeah, I think that there's like a lot of different levels of wealth.

• 33:41Speaker 07

  Come jump in with me.

• 33:43Speaker 06

  You're asking me to go?

• 33:45Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 33:47Speaker 03

  You've never-

• 33:48John Coogan?

  What is this for? Why are they doing a 3D scan of your body?

• 33:52Jordi Hays?

  That's just something Nathan would do. Do you mind if we-

• 33:55John Coogan?

  A 3D scan of your body? I saw that and I was like, this has nothing to do with Theranos or going to prison?

• 34:08John Coogan?

  I know what you're talking about.

• 34:17John Coogan?

  I may think about this movie for the rest of my life. That is a crazy quote.

• 34:24Speaker 07

  Be okay with-

• 34:27John Coogan?

  It feels like there's going to be some twist or something, something very interesting, but I'm hooked.

• 34:31Jordi Hays?

  No, I think the, I think the whole thing is going to make the viewer feel like they're in a really bad acid trip.

• 34:37John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:38Jordi Hays?

  Like, all these scenes.

• 34:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:41Jordi Hays?

  The pauses, the silence, the way the lighting, the sort of sense of impending like doom, right? Because she's going to, she's about to go to prison.

• 34:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:51Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the, the, the kids, you know, being present in these scenes, like the whole thing is just like incredibly dark and weird.

• 35:00John Coogan?

  No, I feel like it has to break expectations in some way because the average viewer is going to sit down and believe that she is guilty and that she lied and is like a sociopath because like that's sort of her brand, right? Is that like she never admitted any guilt and was guilty in the John Kerry retelling of the story? And obviously the court findings and so the, for it to be, for it to be like that, I feel like there has to be some twist or something. I don't know. I, I'm, I would be shocked if it's just like, yep, like she defrauded investors and didn't really build a good blood testing device and now she's in jail, like the end. Like, would that be, would that be-

• 35:44Jordi Hays?

  I don't think it would get those quotes.

• 35:45John Coogan?

  I don't think it would get those quotes. So I feel like there's going to be something crazy that happens, some like complete twist, like maybe she's innocent or something, or, or maybe she's like, I don't know, guilty of something else. I, I, there's just gotta be something else.

• 35:56Jordi Hays?

  The question is, how does the, uh, who's, who's the guy that, that she would, she would call Tiger?

• 36:03John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Uh, I actually don't know. Um, uh, yeah, yeah. Like, because there, there has, during the, during the court case, there was a question about his responsibility. Should, should he bear more of the responsibility and so, uh, but he doesn't seem to be in the trailer, so I don't know. Because one, one weird like twist would be if you came away being like, that guy's more responsible than I thought, you know? But anyway, let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with Design System Context. We have the President and CEO, Paul Kalm, Cristiano Amon, in the waiting room. Let's play-

• 36:45Jordi Hays?

  Here we go.

• 36:45John Coogan?

  TVP and UltraDome. Cristiano, how are you doing?

• 36:49Speaker 08

  Very good. About yourself?

• 36:50John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastically. Where are you calling in from?

• 36:53Speaker 08

  From Maui, Hawaii. It's our Snapdragon Summit. This is day two.

• 36:58John Coogan?

  How, how long have you been doing Hawaii? Why Hawaii?

• 37:02Speaker 08

  Uh, it's probably more than 10 years. I think it's, uh, uh, we have a lot of, uh, you know, global brands that come here from all over countries, a lot of partners. Nobody complains about coming to Hawaii.

• 37:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, I can imagine. Yeah, it's a good place to be. Uh, what are the highlights? What are the messages that you're trying to drive home today and with this conference?

• 37:23Speaker 08

  Look, at the Snapdragon Summit, we always announce our latest, uh, you know, Snapdragon flagship, uh, processor for smartphones. But this one's, it's special because, uh, for the past couple of years, we have been seeing, we have a clarity of vision. We have seen how a smartphone is going to change to an AI smartphone, and I think this actually started to happen right now.

• 37:47John Coogan?

  Yes. What, uh, how does your business actually change in an era of, uh, folks wanting to do more on-device inference and AI on something like an Android phone, one of your big partners? How, how do you think you need to adapt? Is there something you need to change or has this been years in the works? You think you're ready?

• 38:07Speaker 08

  No, years in the work. Look, we, if you, we were kind of a long time ago. It, it feels like a long time ago when we're kind of showing, you know, multi-billion parameter model running on devices. Look, there's this whole conversation about AI running on the cloud and on the edge. And people often ask the question, why the edge? Why the cloud? And I think that's probably the wrong question. It's almost, I like to go back and, and say, okay, everybody get their phone out of their pockets. Get your 200, 300 apps that you have and let's go have a conversation about what part of your app runs on the device or runs on the cloud. And if you, and I know, even though we build incredible processors, if you put on airplane mode, you know, use your phone.

• 38:52Speaker 08

  So at the end of the day, AI is no different than that. It's going to be running on the device and on the cloud. It's going to be all transparent to you.

• 38:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, how, how are you viewing what the next couple of years will look like in automotive? It feels like the demands for AI on-device at the edge are even more important potentially, but maybe it's equally important. How are you seeing the automotive business develop?

• 39:15Speaker 08

  Well, automotive has been ahead of that. Like, we, we've been very fortunate. Automotive is a new business for Qualcomm and and we now, uh, serve all the, uh, car companies in the world. And, uh, what has been interesting about that is AI on the edge actually is being very big in automotive because of assisted driving and autonomous driving. That's kind of AI running on a processor in the car. But what's happening with the car right now is when you're behind the wheel and you don't have any legacy of OSs and apps, agentic experience is very natural when you're behind the wheel. We also see now the fusion

• 39:56Speaker 08

  of the systems in the car that was designed for navigation, like the cameras, for example, being also being used, uh, for see what I see and have an agentic experiences. Like, uh, you know, people are in their car and they say, well, it gets the agent. This restaurant on the right, what's the Yelp review and do they have availability for lunch right now? Those are kind of, uh, some of the experience we see and that's accelerating for us.

• 40:21John Coogan?

  Got it. Um, how are you, uh, processing the narrative around like the CPU crunch? We saw the, uh, the agentic era boom and, you know, there were the whole websites that were going down because so much code was getting pushed. It feels like agents, like the, the idea that everything would be done at the model layer on a GPU is not the way things are planning out. CPUs are incredibly important, especially in the data center. I'm wondering if, are we going to experience like another CPU crunch as we enter the era of like personal agents? Because we saw the effect that the, uh, enterprise agents and software coding agents had on

• 41:02John Coogan?

  the CPU demand. What does the next couple of months even look like for CPU demand in the data center?

• 41:09Speaker 08

  Okay, let me separate that conversation into, I think one, one topic is there's so much more demand for computes than availability right now and across the board. So I think what we've seen this right now, and by the way, as a semiconductor company, I'll tell you, the supply chain, it's, uh, operating at 100% capacity. Everything, everything is short, uh, because there's so much more demand than the availability of compute. Now, the second part is the way we see it, and we're just entering the data center, but we kind of see that also on devices at the edge. You, the data center is going to have to evolve and it's already

• 41:51Speaker 08

  on its way to do that into a heterogeneous compute. You have different engines to do different things. CPUs are going to be very important for orchestrator and agents. And CPU demand will continue to rise and that's also true on the other side of data center phones. As, as those agents get deployed on devices, they have a lot of CPU demand. But you're going to have different engines for different things, right? For example, for inference, we see there's engine now for pre-fill, engine for decode, decode attention and so forth.

• 42:26John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about, uh, the changing landscape of consumer devices? I mean, Meta Connect is today. I'm sure that they're going to announce some new consumer devices, but, uh, we talked to founders all day long that are building just like really cool, small robotics projects, wearables, devices. There's, there's rings and wristbands and ankle bands and anything you can wear or put on your body, it's happening. And I'm wondering if you're seeing that actually start to move up your to-do list as like you got to engage with that smaller community, even though it might be nascent?

• 43:05John Coogan?

  And are you, are you, are you actually trying to engage with like the smaller device community on the consumer side at a conference like this?

• 43:16Speaker 08

  Look, and I'm gonna say this in all humility, but the majority of those new classes of devices are actually used in our chip. And there it is now. There's a multitude of those products now. And there are big companies and small companies. And the reason is because when you think about agents, and agents are now bound by OSs or applications, and you have multimodal. Like, think about glasses, for example. I'm actually a big believer that glasses is going to see an inflection point. The glass is a prime real state. Close to your eyes, to your mouth, to your ears, your head turns, your camera see it.

• 44:00Speaker 08

  And then those things like, see what I see, read what I read, hear what I hear are going to come up. But we've seen all sorts of form factors. We've seen earbuds with cameras, jewelry, pins, buttons, and this is kind of the new personal AI category, and I think that will be a very big category.

• 44:20John Coogan?

  How are you grappling with the open source ecosystem versus closed source tooling to enable the next generation of devices to integrate? I mean, obviously, you've already won a huge portion of them over, but you want to keep that forever, right?

• 44:38Speaker 08

  Oh, thank you for asking this question. I think it's maybe a great opportunity for me to make a plug about what we're doing with Modular. So I don't know if you heard about what we're doing with Modular.

• 44:49John Coogan?

  Tell them.

• 44:49Speaker 08

  Look, we made an acquisition of a company, and that's a great team. It's the Modular team, I think the founder is Chris Latner. I think he's probably a legend within the computer science world. He was the inventor of the Apple Swift programming language. He was the inventor of LVM. And he built a stack, which is like CUDA, but is designed to work on any hardware. Doesn't matter. You know, CPU accelerators, and will run on Nvidia, on AMD, on Qualcomm, or on any hardware whatsoever. So we bought that company, and we're making that open source. That's what we're doing.

• 45:29Speaker 08

  Because we actually believe that the industry will benefit from an open source stack that's scaled from the data center across different hardware in the edge. And it doesn't matter. I'm gonna celebrate that stack in each and every one of my competitors, because we probably need an open stack to drive innovation in AI. Otherwise, it's just one company doing most of the innovation.

• 45:55John Coogan?

  Uh, thank you. Yeah, that's a very helpful explanation. We were just earlier in the show talking about Jensen Huang, sitting down with Ezra Klein, engaging with some of the very deep questions about AI, jobs, and existential risk. Is this something, is this conversation that we're seeing bubble up in the public sphere actually making its way to the C-suite of your customers that you engage with? Or are you sort of in a mode of put one foot in front of the other and let those conversations take place in other platforms? Have you been engaging with all these debates around slowdowns and open source AI versus closed source AI?

• 46:38John Coogan?

  It feels like every week there's a new big hot topic and meaty, almost sci-fi scenario to engage with. But what has your been, what has your approach been as the CEO of an important company in the space?

• 46:52Speaker 08

  Well, I wish we have like at least like half an hour to have this conversation. This is a very big topic. It's a very big topic. But look, in one minute that we have, I'm gonna try to maybe give you an answer.

• 47:04Jordi Hays?

  Solve the whole problem.

• 47:05John Coogan?

  Solve it all. One minute.

• 47:10Speaker 08

  I think there's a lot of different conversations. And look, in any kind of change, for example, in the United States, you see a lot of conversation about safety of the models. I, look, I think people talk about safety in general, but they are, they're very specific things. I think cybersecurity is actually a big one, and I think it's really important, it's important to have products that are done responsibly. I think that's, nobody's gonna, nobody's gonna argue against that. Hey, do you want me to build a product that is gonna go crazy? No, no, I don't want you to do that. I think that's kind of a logical thing. And cybersecurity is actually a serious issue.

• 47:50Speaker 08

  You know, there's a big surface area. But if you go to places like China, the conversation is very different. It's about putting AI in every car, in every phone, every PC, every industrial, and it's kind of very different.

• 48:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it is. Yeah, we were talking about that, how there's just such a wide gap in the discourse between the impact putting AI in all these little places, and then you have like the bigger questions. But we'll get to that next time. We'd love to have you back on the show. We can spend a full hour solving.

• 48:19Jordi Hays?

  Thirty minutes, we can get to the bottom.

• 48:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, then we'll solve it. It will be solved. But congratulations.

• 48:24Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for calling in from your event.

• 48:25John Coogan?

  And thanks so much for taking a couple of minutes today to come chat with us. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 48:30Speaker 08

  You too. Great talking to you guys. Thank you.

• 48:32John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. Coming back on the show, we got Talia Goldberg, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. We very much enjoyed her last appearance.

• 48:52Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 48:54Speaker 09

  Hey, great to see you guys.

• 48:55John Coogan?

  You had a hot take last time that went very viral and proved true. Everyone thought, everyone was like, no, it's about to collapse. And you were like, no, I think like, it's okay if there's some, you know, margin compression in the short term, things will iron out.

• 49:10Jordi Hays?

  Models are gonna get cheaper.

• 49:11John Coogan?

  Models will get cheaper. And everyone was like, she's not taking finance seriously. And here you are.

• 49:16Jordi Hays?

  Vindicated.

• 49:17John Coogan?

  Vindicated. So congratulations. Victory lap.

• 49:19Speaker 09

  Your margin is my opportunity.

• 49:22John Coogan?

  There we go. There we go. How are you processing the current moment? What's exciting to you? Is the, is the lab trade over? Or is the more opportunity above the fold at the application layer? Below the fold at the semiconductor, NeoCloud build-out level? Like, what's exciting to you personally?

• 49:40Speaker 09

  I mean, yes and yes. I'll say a few things I've been thinking about lately. One is physical AI, and one is this new concept that a portfolio company, Mindful, coined, called Token Market Fit.

• 49:59Speaker 09

  And I'll talk about, like, I love this idea of Token Market Fit. I wish I had invented it, but they did. And the idea of Token Market Fit is like, simply put, like, what are the areas and the categories where we've found the ability to productively use the average end user, like $10,000 a month of tokens? And if you actually look at where a lot of the spend has gone, it's really like, there are basically only three categories I can think of right now that have like real token market fit. One is encoding, like, you know, enormous spend in coding. The second is in, is in video and in media, and in your line of work, where you can very productively spend, you know, huge amounts of money creating great content.

• 50:42Speaker 09

  And then maybe the third is in high-frequency trading. But if you look at like on average, you know, legal, customer support, sales, like, we actually haven't really hit like product-market fit in a real way in a lot of those areas, and we will. And I think the bottlenecks are moving away from things like code and video.

• 50:59Jordi Hays?

  Is it possible that you can have product-market fit without massive costs? Because, like, like, like, I would argue that, that you have like token market fit in something like a legal, but it's just not, you're not gonna see massive spend in the way, due to the nature of the work, right? So it's like possible that you can have, I, I'm just, this is maybe a question, it's like, can you have token market fit with just like relatively modest per-person spend at a company?

• 51:30John Coogan?

  Is this sort of the argument that like, we're like, we need a lot more software, but maybe we don't need that many more legal briefs or something? Like, the market size is small?

• 51:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's, there's in some ways almost like infinite soft, like a product is never finished. But in legal work, like you do a deal, and then it's sort of like done, and there's not, you know, I don't know. My question, yeah, my question is like, I believe there's, I believe there's gonna be some categories where, like, AI is incredible, it transforms like the task or the job, but you just don't end up with that much. It's just very efficient, and you don't end up with like, you know, exceptional spend, right? You're saying like $10,000 a month per company in a category.

• 52:11Speaker 09

  It's possible. I mean, I think, like, I guess, yeah, there's difference between product-market fit and token-market fit. But legal is like a really interesting example. Bessemer's been a long time investor in Legora, which is like a great example of this. And I think they're still very early actually in this transition towards what's possible and what spend even for their customers is possible. So I think legal is like yet to be unlocked in a lot of ways. And in a lot of use cases, Legora is still co-pilot. It's not really autopilot. It's not like truly doing the work of lawyers, and you know, you don't see like large law firms like, you know, massively changing their, their. Team compositions yet? I think that is still to come. And that's on the come. And as we can

• 52:56Speaker 09

  give and figure out how to productively leverage models to give more work to agents, like we will be spending more on agents than on models in fields like legal, too.

• 53:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, we saw that transition, maybe last year, earlier this year, with like the software engineer who says, like, I don't read the code anymore. And that can sometimes be a little bit risky, but in a lot of places.

• 53:19Jordi Hays?

  The lawyer who's like, I don't even read the contract.

• 53:22John Coogan?

  Well, that would be token market fit. Like, if I heard a, you know, a star lawyer say, yeah, I don't even read the filing anymore, the document, I'd be like, okay, yeah, super intelligence is here. It's working. Like.

• 53:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, the difference is like, software, you can ship a feature and it can be, it could be broken 1% of the time, where in legal, if you have a 1%, you know, major error rate in contracts, like it's

• 53:47John Coogan?

  Could be bad.

• 53:48Jordi Hays?

  A lot of money on the line.

• 53:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe it'd be a little bit higher up. Yeah.

• 53:54Speaker 09

  Yeah, look, there are these categories that like, I guess the point is like, they're still to come. And like, they're still growing. And so like, what are those next areas with token market fit from an investment perspective are interesting? Because while you're right, there will be some that are maybe a lot more efficient. A lot of the dollars are in the token flow.

• 54:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. How important do you think it is to be the entry point to a certain token flow? To be an aggregator in the Stratechery parlance? I was just thinking about Fall and Higgs Field, they, you know, access to incredible models. There's a few other companies in the category, but a lot of people, the workflow is like, go to their preferred AI agent, then send an API key over, and they've already put some credits in an account, and then they're using another tool to sort of access that inference. And there's a world where that billing relationship lives within Claude Code, or lives within Codex, and they're taking sort

• 54:53John Coogan?

  of an App Store cut. Is that a nightmare? Is that a death knell for the inference provider? Or could that actually be the future way of these companies working together in a positive way that actually grows the market and the distribution so much that it offsets whatever rent the model labs and like the front doors are taking?

• 55:16Speaker 09

  Yeah, and look, I think it's probably not like, black and white in every single category. And so it's somewhat different, like even in, you know, in the case of Fall as an example, like they are the front door. And so, you know, that you can even access a model, like, you know, in the past, models like Nano Banana and Google's models, even through Fall. So you didn't have to go to Google. So like, they have their cake and eat it, too. But we do see this playing out. And I think like, Instinct and Muse and what's happening with Meta, or Amazon and Shopify are other really interesting analogies of this aggregation, disaggregation theory. And at a high level, like, I am a believer, like, there will be places for both. And like, both exist. Amazon exists and Shopify exists. And like, the tension between the two is real.

• 55:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:00Jordi Hays?

  Personal agent predictions? How are you thinking about the category?

• 56:05Speaker 09

  Well, we're very small seed investors in Instinct. So we're, you know, very bullish on their, on their, I don't know if I should be offended by that sound or excited by that.

• 56:15Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, that's the air horn.

• 56:16John Coogan?

  No, no, no, it was a small check. But now, because you went in the scene, it's big now.

• 56:20Speaker 09

  I wish we were bigger. I wish we were bigger investors. But, like, it is such a magical experience. I'm obsessed with these products. Like, other than when ChatGPT launched, like, this is the second, oh, my God, moment that I've had. Like, my parents are having this moment, and my sister's having this moment, and they don't even use technology. And so it's kind of crazy, like.

• 56:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is much broader than what we saw with the Claude Code Codex boom, where it was this magical experience for people in tech, and for people who knew how to open up a terminal, and then were familiar with code and had these tasks that sort of fit neatly in that world. This is something that you can give to a family member who doesn't have a GitHub account, and they'll have fun, and they'll get some value out of it, and be, and sort of see the progress, which they might not have updated on in three years or something, but.

• 57:11Speaker 09

  And so, yeah, everyone is going to need to own this. And there's going to be a major war. And every large lab, every large company is going to be out there trying to figure out, how do I create, like, similarly such a delightful experience? And how do you bring this to enterprise? I think it's just like, the interaction modes, the delightful proactivity, the simplicity of the interaction is something that could absolutely be ported over to the enterprise use cases as well. And so I think this is not a winner take all market. There will be multiple agents and different angles on it. And I think this is about to be arguably the most important next category in AI.

• 57:51John Coogan?

  It's another knife fight, too, which is fun. Give us the update on Bessemer. Raise some more funds. But what's the structure of the fund? What's the structure of the

• 58:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and how is the strategy evolving? All that good stuff?

• 58:04Speaker 09

  Yeah, look, so we have exciting news that we just raised $5.75 billion. One point

• 58:15Jordi Hays?

  That sounds good.

• 58:18Speaker 09

  That's how we feel. We're so excited. We have $1.75 billion of that is dedicated to early-stage companies, which lets us write really meaningful investments in companies at their earliest days, when conviction matters a lot, when it's not, you know, very obvious.

• 58:35John Coogan?

  Two $800 million seed rounds. Let's do it. Get it done in two deals.

• 58:42John Coogan?

  Probably not.

• 58:42Speaker 09

  And look, like, 70% of our investments have started early, often way before there's even revenue, or sometimes even a company name. And we're going to continue to do that. And then $4 billion for growth, which lets us keep backing companies as they're at their inflection points, and not just participate, or let others kind of invest. And then we're going to be leading these rounds. Returns are concentrating, as you all know, in fewer, larger winners. And so the right move for us is to be a meaningful investor and have meaningful positions in the companies that really, really matter. And we don't want to spread it thin and be a peanut buttering across our growth dollars across a bunch of companies. We want to be super disciplined, but disciplined not by taking small checks

• 59:27Speaker 09

  in growth companies, by making big checks, being highly selective, and really committing fully to a smaller subset of companies. So that's the strategy.

• 59:35John Coogan?

  That's exciting.

• 59:36Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 59:36John Coogan?

  Very exciting times. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 59:38Jordi Hays?

  It is so funny to rewind like 10 years. And if somebody from the future came and they're like, Talia, like, you're going to have a $5.75 billion fund. And you would be like, so we're the biggest venture investor in the world, right? It's like, well, you know, this is now like, if you want to be like a real fund, you gotta have.

• 59:59John Coogan?

  Companies are staying private so much longer. I mean, the trillion-dollar IPOs are, you know, unthinkable years ago. And now, there's

• 1:00:07Jordi Hays?

  Here we are.

• 1:00:07John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 1:00:08Jordi Hays?

  Wild time.

• 1:00:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:10Speaker 09

  Lot to come. Well, thank you guys for having me.

• 1:00:13Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you. Great update.

• 1:00:14John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:00:14Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:00:15John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. We have our next guest in person. Welcome to the show. How you guys doing? Sorry, let me get this out of here. Welcome, welcome. Introduce yourselves for those. Introduce yourselves.

• 1:00:38Jordi Hays?

  Great name.

• 1:00:40John Coogan?

  Introduce yourselves for the audience. Tell us about the company.

• 1:00:44Speaker 10

  Yeah, my name is Louis Antonelli.

• 1:00:46Speaker 11

  I'm John Antonelli. We're brothers, if you haven't.

• 1:00:49Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:00:50Speaker 11

  Can guess. But yeah, we're, so we started Reel six years ago. It's a score stat tracking app. It's very social, engaging, and it caters towards those fantasy players, betters, just avid fans that want to know what's happening in sports.

• 1:01:05John Coogan?

  Is it the ultimate second screen experience? Is that the trend? Or is this actually like a third screen now? How do you, how do you think about this?

• 1:01:12Speaker 10

  Yeah, I think it's the ultimate second screen. And then, I mean, it's the penultimate first screen. So like, when you're not watching the game, it's the fastest way to know what's happening in sports.

• 1:01:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:01:22Speaker 10

  We started, like, when we started live data was kind of, play-by-play data was kind of this concept that was kind of shoved on a fifth tab on ESPN. You'd have to like, tab over to the play-by-play. You'd have to look at like, really tiny Excel-looking rows of data to try to find those small numbers and see, you know, what's happening. So we wanted to bring engagement, you know, comments, reactions, a bunch of community around the data. And then the latency, too, at the time, with gambling companies, like, low latency data is super important, right? So we brought that more from a media perspective to, you know, show people, you know, bring people that knowledge in real time about what's happening.

• 1:01:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, what is the data source? Are there, like, sort of open APIs and companies that are comfortable sharing the raw data? At some point, like, someone has to write down what happened in the stadium, I imagine, or?

• 1:02:11Speaker 11

  It's pretty commoditized. Genius Sports, Sport Radar, scrape a lot of the data as well. So it's pretty like, the fact that Steph Curry hit a three isn't owned by the leagues or anyone. So like, we've kind of taken a spin on, that's our content.

• 1:02:25Jordi Hays?

  Public ball knowledge.

• 1:02:26Speaker 11

  Exactly.

• 1:02:27John Coogan?

  And then, but so the magic, like, the secret sauce is really transforming that into a feed that is intelligible, not an Excel sheet, more like a Twitter timeline.

• 1:02:38Speaker 11

  And contextual, too. Like, I think we add, like, we started to add historical milestones. Like, this is a player's 500 career three, or like, a player's 12 straight point in a row. A lot of the times when you're on these products, like, you won't know, or even when you're watching, you're just tuning into a game, like, you won't know how well a player is performing, or what they did in the first or second quarter. And this kind of brings them that. Like, adds like what an announcer might tell you.

• 1:03:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:01Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so you guys have one, one and a half million monthly actives. And it sounds like the social product is actually like, working and real.

• 1:03:10Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:03:10Jordi Hays?

  Which is notable, because I feel like so many people think about this idea, like, I'm going to create a data product, and there's going to be a social layer. And then For every hundred pitches like that or people that take a shot like yeah, maybe less than one are going to actually build something where there's like tons of highly engaged users. Just because I think about where these sports communities pop up, it's on Instagram, on, on X, on Reddit, on all these existing social platforms. So how was that, like, how did you actually make that happen?

• 1:03:44Speaker 10

  Yeah, I think so from my perspective and John can touch on his, but we basically on Twitter, for example, you'll have a million people who are all separately leaving the same comment about some big play. We take that play as the piece of content and then underneath that you'll have a million people. So we've kind of inverted it a little bit. So instead of like one to many, it's like, kind of, yeah, just flipped. And then

• 1:04:05Jordi Hays?

  And it's more ephemeral. So people feel like instead of posting on Twitter, like sometimes when I see somebody in tech will post like

• 1:04:14John Coogan?

  It's over.

• 1:04:15Jordi Hays?

  Like

• 1:04:15John Coogan?

  And you're like, oh, this must be about AI.

• 1:04:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they'll be like

• 1:04:17John Coogan?

  You're like, you know, it's actually about the game.

• 1:04:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. And so like, I missed that.

• 1:04:21John Coogan?

  AI discourse and also basketball.

• 1:04:23Speaker 11

  Yeah, the issue is super fragmented across like tons of different. I mean, there's only a few people that control the conversation, like meme pages and fan pages for every sport, team and player. And we kind of built for those fan pages and meme pages.

• 1:04:36John Coogan?

  People used to use sort of hashtags on X to sort of organize around a particular game or something, but that has gone so far out of fashion, the algorithm sort of replaced a lot of that. But you lost in that place, the ability to actually tell the app today, I only want to focus on the Lakers game. Like, and so even if there's something

• 1:04:56Speaker 11

  Or specific player.

• 1:04:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:04:58Speaker 10

  And you'll see X has added like a live chat now at the game level. So we break down our chats to box scores. So instead of just everyone in one massive chat, we were like, oh, I'm talking about Steph Curry's box score, or his most recent three, or his, you know, blocked shot. So like, you can dive into these very like deeper places. A cool stat too is like 30% of our monthly users leave comments, which is crazy. It's like an order, a couple orders of magnitude higher.

• 1:05:23John Coogan?

  Normally it's like 99% lurkers.

• 1:05:25Speaker 10

  Just lurk, yeah. So we bring that like really cool global community feel to everything, yeah.

• 1:05:30John Coogan?

  Did you, did you get your start on Vine?

• 1:05:33Speaker 11

  I started on Vine.

• 1:05:33John Coogan?

  What were you making on Vine?

• 1:05:35Speaker 11

  So I was taking highlights and putting songs to them. I was like one of 30 people that were, like the OBJ catch that went viral. I put a song to it and went viral on, when I posted it.

• 1:05:43John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 1:05:44Speaker 11

  And then I grew a page. It was close to 100,000 followers in six months.

• 1:05:47John Coogan?

  Okay. So no, no front facing, no personality, like original faceless content. Wow.

• 1:05:53Speaker 11

  Yeah, exactly. I was, and I still know like decade later, a lot of the same. And this is partly why real, why we were able to grow is through these meme fan pages.

• 1:06:02John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:06:02Speaker 11

  I grew a page on Instagram, close to a million followers.

• 1:06:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:05Speaker 11

  And I would just create content.

• 1:06:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:06Speaker 11

  But I, we noticed like, why do millions of people go to Instagram and follow hundreds of basketball pages, NFL pages, super fragmented and sensationalized? We, I would pull like the top three stats in a game and like make a graphic out of it. And so a lot of what we've done is we've codified that content. So people share real, it's the most shareable score app.

• 1:06:26John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:06:26Speaker 11

  So it feels like, I mean, you see it all over. And that's how we've been growing is people are using it as a means to like slander or praise players.

• 1:06:32John Coogan?

  Slander.

• 1:06:33Speaker 11

  Like in the first quarter, you can say like, oh, Tatum went like 0 for 11 or whatever. And then people screenshot that and, you know, use it as a, as a fueling of like narratives.

• 1:06:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. What's been the mix of, of top of funnel awareness? And I guess how it's, how has it changed amongst, I can imagine using, you know, paid partnerships with creators. We want you to, we want, we want you to promote us versus in-house clippers or even like distributed clippers like WAP. Like, like what's been, what's worked in the past? What's working now? How has it changed?

• 1:07:08Speaker 11

  I like, we just started to seed, like, we started with just the NBA. But the way that we started to grow is like we added, now we have 18 leagues. But we seed this content among like, there's creators that talk about the game.

• 1:07:21John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:07:21Speaker 11

  And they might use like a score in the background or whatever. We encourage them or pay them to use the scoreboard of reel or whatever.

• 1:07:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:29Speaker 11

  And our first thousand users were all my friends that run these meme fan pages. And there's like thousands of these meme fan pages. They have, some have like hundreds of thousands to millions of followers.

• 1:07:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:07:37Speaker 11

  The NBA Sentels or NBA Centrals of the world, Legion Hoops, like it would take their, I, I would just like encourage them to use it or naturally weave reel into the conversation.

• 1:07:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:07:48Speaker 11

  Cause they might just, I mean, they're already posting like, oh, LeBron had a sick game. Might as well add that, like, box score or whatever.

• 1:07:55Jordi Hays?

  How do you make money?

• 1:07:57Speaker 11

  It's a great question.

• 1:07:57Speaker 10

  Yeah. So we started with a kind of virtual bucks model, like Roblox or Fortnite, that users could, you know, earn and then also collect different moments. So, you know, instead of collecting like a player, collect his home runners, three years touchdown and build your fandom, kind of based on how many you've, how many cards you've collected.

• 1:08:16Jordi Hays?

  And you have to be like in the app when a play happens in order to collect it?

• 1:08:19Speaker 10

  Yeah, there's like real time raffles. And then there's also just like general packs. So it's cool. Cause like as soon as every touchdown right now in the NFL happens, you can kind of get like a digital representation of it. It's a stat based representation, like a, this is a 30 yard touchdown. And a really cool thing we do is we rate everything between zero and 10, or it can actually go above 10. So we don't become like a dunk.

• 1:08:38Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 1:08:39Speaker 10

  So we don't, we don't become, we're not the dunk contest.

• 1:08:42Speaker 11

  Sometimes it's like 14.

• 1:08:43John Coogan?

  14.

• 1:08:45Speaker 10

  So Shohei's, yeah. So Shohei's like 10 RBI, that like legendary 10 RBI, six for six, 50 50 game was like a 15 or something. So Ashton Gentry regularly was sitting in his college days at like 12.

• 1:08:57John Coogan?

  So it's sort of logarithmic. Like 15 is 10 times better than 14.

• 1:09:00Speaker 10

  We're not, like the dunk contest is the worst back when it was like, everything was a 10. It was stupid. So we didn't want that. But people actually now reference our scores and it's really good for like rookie ladders for MVP. Like usually it reflects really well without us needing to like subjectively say like, this is just a, it's a

• 1:09:17John Coogan?

  Do players like this?

• 1:09:19Speaker 11

  A lot of them like, a lot of them use it. Yeah. Cause it's just fast. I think that's like the difference.

• 1:09:23John Coogan?

  They're opening up during the game?

• 1:09:24Speaker 10

  Whoa.

• 1:09:24John Coogan?

  Wait, really?

• 1:09:26Speaker 11

  Yeah. Like Trey Jones.

• 1:09:27John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:09:28Speaker 11

  And they open up at halftime.

• 1:09:29Speaker 10

  Every single game.

• 1:09:29John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:09:31Speaker 10

  Don't tell like Microsoft Surface or whatever, because I think they're supposed to use that.

• 1:09:38Jordi Hays?

  They're like, damn, damn, I've got an 0 for 15.

• 1:09:41John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:09:42Jordi Hays?

  I really thought I was on a hot streak. It's so funny. It's the opposite approach of like the score takes care of itself. It's literally just like obsessing over the score.

• 1:09:53Speaker 11

  I think another thing we do different too is a lot of like the ESPN's Bleacher Reports. Their score apps would never send real time notifications, only like halftime, end of, end of game moments. So we'll inform you like, this is like Tatum's 12 straight point in a row, or like this touchdown just happened. We'll take you straight to that moment. And I think that we send like 50 million notifications a day on average.

• 1:10:14John Coogan?

  Is that sort of like predictive? Like you can

• 1:10:17Speaker 11

  It's based on the rating.

• 1:10:18John Coogan?

  AI model or, or okay. So you have the rating and then if something is happening, you can be like, oh, you should really tune in this game. Something cool's happening.

• 1:10:23Speaker 10

  We'll tell you when it happens. We, we do some like cycle watches are the coolest ones. So like when a player's about to hit a cycle in baseball and they have like three of the four things, we won't tell you when they need a triple, because that's very unlikely. So we'll only bring you in when they need a single double or homer.

• 1:10:37John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:10:38Speaker 10

  So we'll bring people together for kind of more of that, like expected things to build that hype. But most of the time, most people, there's so much going on in sports. They just want to know kind of what happens.

• 1:10:47Jordi Hays?

  Is this, is, is reel replacing like sports radio in some ways? Because I guess when I was a kid, I would, I would be like, you know, cycling through the radio and I'd hear like a baseball game on. And as a kid, like you kind of grew up on the internet. I'm like, who's, who's like tuning into like just the rate, like who's watching sports? Well, you know, who's listening to radio? But it's just sort of that, you're kind of like passively following a game or, or, you know, a team that you care about. And this feels like

• 1:11:18John Coogan?

  Now people can stream the video on their phone. Like I feel like that's probably more dominant.

• 1:11:22Speaker 11

  It is fast. I like to think of it as like written radio and Twitch. Like it's faster to read than it is to watch than it is to even listen.

• 1:11:28Speaker 10

  Especially when there's like 15 games on at once. Like you're not streaming 15 games on like an NBA Wednesday, right? So like, this is like a kind of the red zone of every league.

• 1:11:36John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah.

• 1:11:38Speaker 10

  It's kind of like how we

• 1:11:39John Coogan?

  What's the, what's the smallest league you support currently? Like curling?

• 1:11:44Speaker 11

  We just added, that's, that's a good question. Cause like every league technically can be considered big. I mean, we added, we're, we're starting to add like golf, tennis, some of the more longer tails that we haven't had. F1 is going to be coming on the product as well. But we cover, we have tons of like soccer's, but World Cup was big.

• 1:12:02John Coogan?

  Kar Jitsu, you've seen that one?

• 1:12:04Speaker 11

  Ping pong would be

• 1:12:05Speaker 10

  We're considering putting a community vote for like some obscure

• 1:12:08John Coogan?

  Some crazy one.

• 1:12:09Speaker 11

  Like hot dog eating.

• 1:12:10John Coogan?

  Hot dog eating would be fun. Joey Chestnut.

• 1:12:12Speaker 10

  People ask for everything. And we have this like pretty strong Australian fan base. Like I get every, like 3am every day. It's like, add the AFL.

• 1:12:21John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Okay.

• 1:12:22Speaker 11

  The down under group.

• 1:12:23John Coogan?

  Down under, okay.

• 1:12:24Speaker 11

  At the AFL.

• 1:12:25Speaker 10

  It's like our third biggest city is

• 1:12:26John Coogan?

  How cyclical is the business? Is the, I mean, I imagine the Super Bowl is your Super Bowl, but

• 1:12:33Speaker 10

  NBA Finals.

• 1:12:34John Coogan?

  NBA Finals is big. But, but in general, is there like a pretty stable demand for this across?

• 1:12:40Speaker 10

  It's definitely cyclic. I mean, like summer, when it's just baseball, it's just like natural cycles. But

• 1:12:46Speaker 11

  World Cup was big for us.

• 1:12:48John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:12:48Speaker 11

  I think as we continue to add more, the summer

• 1:12:50John Coogan?

  Are you thinking about Olympics?

• 1:12:53Speaker 11

  We were talking about like Olympic basketball. The tough thing is like it's four months out of the year.

• 1:12:57John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:12:57Speaker 11

  So like put engineering time into it.

• 1:12:59John Coogan?

  Lot of work.

• 1:12:59Speaker 11

  But I think now that, I mean, our team hasn't really grown from like a, I mean, our engineers are outputting because of like AI and everything.

• 1:13:07John Coogan?

  A lot more.

• 1:13:07Speaker 11

  We used to be outputting updates every three to four months. Now it's every like two to three weeks.

• 1:13:11John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:13:11Speaker 11

  And so like we're just continuing to add more insights, make the data more contextual.

• 1:13:15John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:13:16Speaker 11

  I think that's how we continue to stay like ahead is like, how do we, like we added next gen stats to NFL. You can see like telemetry data. And then we're also seeing, you can see like personnel, like personnel coverages and like things you wouldn't, like while you're watching, like you wouldn't be able to conceptualize.

• 1:13:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:32Speaker 11

  We're just trying to bake it in and into a very digestible way. Cause then that makes it more shareable. You'll tell your friend more, like it's all that helps is, that helps like the growth flow.

• 1:13:41Speaker 10

  Yeah, you can go really deep on live still. Like live for us is like everything. That's most of our usage is live. So just keep being, just go as deep as we can.

• 1:13:49John Coogan?

  What's the house philosophy on prediction markets? Partner, roll your own, stay away from, how do you puzzle it out?

• 1:13:57Speaker 10

  Yeah, we have an engagement feature we launched, kind of with the virtual bucks, kind of more of a kind of fun

• 1:14:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:14:02Speaker 10

  play thing um to build your profile and like compete with others as on that dimension. Um, we've considered kind of the prediction markets. We

• 1:14:10Speaker 11

  But yeah, a lot of our, I mean, our recent, I mean, we, in the last year and a half, two years, a lot of our usages come from fantasy players and bettors. Um, and people just like sweating their bets, basically, like around players.

• 1:14:22Speaker 10

  Comments sections are like

• 1:14:23Speaker 11

  Like they're, oh, I need another 12 Ks or 10 Ks or whatever.

• 1:14:25John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:14:26Speaker 11

  Or like another touchdown. Um, and so we were like, how do we play into like more of a real, real money gaming space, the real money gaming space? Um, and we've talked across the board from the Kalshis to

• 1:14:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:38Speaker 11

  Polly market and all them. Um, we end, we ended up landing on FanDuel as like a partner for us.

• 1:14:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:43Speaker 11

  Um, so that's another revenue stream.

• 1:14:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:14:45Speaker 11

  It was like, how do we bring odds to the product?

• 1:14:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:48Speaker 11

  I mean, we were talking about, it's like, we have so many bettors and we can't even serve them with live odds.

• 1:14:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:14:53Speaker 11

  Um, and so it's another data source.

• 1:14:54Speaker 10

  Yeah, the data layer of live odds too, like it adds a dimension that people kind of expect. Now you see it on every broadcast now. It has live odds and what like, what Vegas thinks, what the people think. So I think there's like a lot of cool things we can do with like real time charts about how the lines are moving for everything. People can discuss every market. They can kind of just like have it where they expect it with, especially with our, we've signed up millions and millions of the, of the Ambler's in the last couple of years. So

• 1:15:20Speaker 11

  A lot and I mean, used for the people that are interested in it. I mean, we, we've just been missing that as like a source of data and it's a good conversational piece too.

• 1:15:27Speaker 10

  And you can turn it off. Like obviously there's people that don't want to see that. So they can just toggle it off.

• 1:15:31John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 1:15:31Jordi Hays?

  Do you think AI is allowing people more time to just watch sports?

• 1:15:36Speaker 11

  More, I think the thing that's missing though, which I think we separate ourselves even across Instagram and Twitter and TikTok is they don't have deeper community. Like I can spend six hours a day on NBA Twitter

• 1:15:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:47Speaker 11

  and get nothing from my fandom. Like I don't get badges. I don't get like anything related to like, you know, viewing these games, we build up your profile. And I think that's something we want to continue to like triple down on is that community side. Uh, cause a lot of these, I mean, you look at like there's hundreds of millions of Taylor Swift fans.

• 1:16:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:04Speaker 11

  Well, there's no like, I still think there's these communal things that can be built for like tons of different niches.

• 1:16:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, a lot of it's offline. Like you have the tour merch or the signed, you know, album or the jersey that's signed, but on the digital world. Uh, there was like, I mean, there was some movement towards this with like NFTs, but it sort of died off.

• 1:16:23Speaker 11

  I mean, you think about it with Belly and

• 1:16:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:25Speaker 11

  even like the letterboxes in the world.

• 1:16:27John Coogan?

  Sure, yeah, same thing.

• 1:16:28Speaker 11

  Pockets.

• 1:16:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, clout, people like

• 1:16:29Speaker 11

  They want that like community

• 1:16:30John Coogan?

  They want a profile that they're building on.

• 1:16:31Speaker 11

  Focus thing.

• 1:16:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:33Speaker 10

  I think sports is pretty safe though and AI because it's like the last kind of human

• 1:16:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:16:38Speaker 10

  thing that people value. I mean, that sounds distorting. I don't know. It's like, it's

• 1:16:42Jordi Hays?

  Art, art.

• 1:16:43John Coogan?

  More than family. More than your children.

• 1:16:47Speaker 10

  If you think about it, it's like

• 1:16:48Speaker 11

  The only live thing.

• 1:16:49Speaker 10

  And that's why you see these ticket prices are going.

• 1:16:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, ticket prices are high and of course there's a bunch of venture capitalists that are trading AI.

• 1:16:55Speaker 11

  Players are getting paid more than anything too.

• 1:16:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:58Speaker 11

  Humans.

• 1:16:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, how, uh, community building, uh, how do you deal with moderation? Do you have an in-house team, an AI system, hybrid? I imagine that like culling the most disruptive folks in, or there's probably a dance there.

• 1:17:14Speaker 10

  Yeah, it's very, it's a huge dance because our demographic is like that 18 to 30. So you definitely want to keep some of that edginess.

• 1:17:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, you want people to be able to go and talk some trash.

• 1:17:23Speaker 10

  Exactly, yeah. And not, yeah.

• 1:17:25John Coogan?

  What do you say, libel or slander? There needs to be an appropriate level of slander.

• 1:17:29Speaker 10

  But we use, yeah, we've been using AI for moderation from, from day one and just building that up over time. So we've, it's always going to be a dance and a balance.

• 1:17:36John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:17:37Speaker 10

  We're pretty confident now. We actually scan like every single reply in real time.

• 1:17:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:17:42Speaker 10

  Um, just to make sure we catch like the really, really bad stuff.

• 1:17:46John Coogan?

  Do you use like a really cheap commodity open source model for that? Are you actually passing that through AI or is it just like lookup table if bad word?

• 1:17:53Speaker 10

  Yeah, well, we, we use the lookup table catches like 80, 80, 85%.

• 1:17:57John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:17:58Speaker 10

  And then we have like a classifier.

• 1:17:59John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:18:00Speaker 10

  That's super fast. That catches another 10%.

• 1:18:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:02Speaker 10

  And then anything that falls through there will hit like any of the latest

• 1:18:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, and then you can, and then you can escalate.

• 1:18:07Speaker 10

  So we have a couple of layers there and escalate if we need to. Generally it's, which worked super well. And I think it's something that's missing on a lot of these kind of live chats. There's a lot, some of these live chat streams, like you just have to close the chat. So like we we don't want that. So, um,

• 1:18:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:23Speaker 10

  Yeah, it's a dance, but I think it's, uh, it's important.

• 1:18:27Jordi Hays?

  What's stopping you guys from having one and a half billion monthly actives? Right now you have one and a half million.

• 1:18:33Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:18:33John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:18:34Speaker 11

  That's a great question. I think the, I think we just need more sports, more content.

• 1:18:39Jordi Hays?

  More sports. Start creating more sports.

• 1:18:42Speaker 11

  Just more data within the product.

• 1:18:43John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:18:44Speaker 10

  And also live events in general.

• 1:18:46Speaker 11

  Yeah, most, I mean, if we want to go for like the billion users, say we could have every like live show, The Bachelor from The Bachelor to like

• 1:18:54John Coogan?

  Oh, that's interesting, yeah.

• 1:18:55Speaker 11

  Take data.

• 1:18:56John Coogan?

  Huh.

• 1:18:56Speaker 11

  I mean, you can talk about what you saw.

• 1:18:58Speaker 10

  Yeah, the, sure, the original idea came from, so my now wife and I, we built like a fantasy bachelor app where we would sit and type in everything that was happening, every kiss, every hug. And we had like, we built it, it was just us two. We

• 1:19:11John Coogan?

  That's the funniest.

• 1:19:13Speaker 10

  Yeah, we had like 50,000

• 1:19:15John Coogan?

  Locking in for The Bachelor.

• 1:19:16Jordi Hays?

  Fifty, 50,000 weekly users for every kiss and every hug.

• 1:19:22Speaker 10

  So I, I watched, we watched four years.

• 1:19:25Jordi Hays?

  So you're sitting there like, riz them up, riz them up.

• 1:19:27Speaker 10

  Four years and we had to be on live because if we weren't on live, people would just be like, where, where's the data?

• 1:19:31John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:19:32Speaker 10

  But the most used screen of the app was the live feed.

• 1:19:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:19:35Speaker 10

  With people commenting and watching as their second screen. And of course, like John at the time was building his like incredible uh, social media properties and I knew what he could do. And like

• 1:19:44John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:19:44Speaker 10

  it was just like a perfect mix with play by play and sports and like this live feed concept. So that's kind of

• 1:19:49John Coogan?

  That's so funny.

• 1:19:50Speaker 11

  And him not having to type in the data every time.

• 1:19:52Speaker 10

  Yeah, not having to type it in, even though the, some of these third party providers aren't

• 1:19:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:56Speaker 11

  But you look at like politics, there's tons of like, even how like

• 1:19:59John Coogan?

  Mention markets and stuff.

• 1:20:01Speaker 11

  Yeah, especially around like the elections. It's like, would be cool in theory. And we don't want to go down that path before we dominate. I think sports is still like a 10x with what we have.

• 1:20:09Speaker 10

  Well, people do ask for elections like a lot. And it's kind of does, it is, has similar feel to like a prediction market with like the

• 1:20:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, everyone's watched like the election map populate and go red and blue over the night and, and, and that's sort of like a similar visualization for sure.

• 1:20:24Speaker 11

  We are a daily use product though.

• 1:20:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:20:26Speaker 11

  And I love talking about like monthly actives, but we peaked at like 1.1 million daily.

• 1:20:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's really good down now.

• 1:20:31Speaker 11

  Yeah, our down now is like 70% at its peak, like during moments you would think people would be watching.

• 1:20:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:20:38Speaker 11

  But they're almost like people want to also see, because a lot of people watch alone, like in their, like it's just at home or whatever. They just want that community or that second screen. Um, and like during the Bam out of Bio game, we had like 200,000 concurrent people like tracking his like every point

• 1:20:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:54Speaker 11

  towards his 83 points.

• 1:20:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:56Speaker 11

  So we see like during big moments like that, or even just like the NBA finals or the Superbowl, we have like very concurrent usage, like high concurrent usage.

• 1:21:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:05Speaker 11

  It's like figuring out how to make that more engaging and then also more fun with your friends. I think it's a big growth unlock for us.

• 1:21:12Jordi Hays?

  And all the, all the betting and, and prediction market companies must be so pissed off that they don't have this product. Because it's like, actually like all they care about is, is, you know, user acquisition and figuring out how to get engagement and deep usage. And you guys feel like you built something that, um, Built something that's gonna be very hard to actually replicate,

• 1:21:34Jordi Hays?

  but would be would be very valuable to them.

• 1:21:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. Are there like, walk me through the how a subculture emerges? I'm thinking about like, on Twitter, it's just one big global chatroom, but then there's like Teapot, like that part of Twitter, like these, like the SF tech insider community has has created its own little sub community. Are there groups of people that break out and build like a Discord for their, or do you have the functionality to create like a group of people that are all commenting on similar games and then they, you know, become friends on the app and can interact more communally outside of a particular event?

• 1:22:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we have like, we have groups in the app so people can like create groups and it's kind of nested under any piece of content. You can kind of talk in that group.

• 1:22:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:24Jordi Hays?

  I think most of the sub communities, though, are still global, but they're around like kind of those meme moments.

• 1:22:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:22:30Jordi Hays?

  When Brandon Podzemski was trying to hit thirty points, for example, like everyone with every game was just this community and then they would grow from people discovering.

• 1:22:39John Coogan?

  Who were like rooting for that moment.

• 1:22:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like we need the thirty and you get like twenty eight and everyone just be devastated. So like, tracking those type of moments when they pop up.

• 1:22:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:45Jordi Hays?

  Is really big, like the meatball sub thing with the interceptions right now in NFL. Like, there's like random.

• 1:22:51Speaker 10

  It almost, it feels like you're just making up stuff.

• 1:22:55Speaker 10

  I don't know any of these references.

• 1:22:57John Coogan?

  You could just throw one in that doesn't exist and we'd be like, damn, that's crazy.

• 1:22:59Jordi Hays?

  But they happen all the time. It's like crazy.

• 1:23:01Speaker 11

  But we don't create them. It's kind of like they're already a known, like people are already talking about like, yeah, like, like the Brandon Podzemski thirty point, or like it comes from a media Twitter almost.

• 1:23:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:23:12Speaker 11

  I think we can do, like, we haven't really been at this scale before, so I think we can start creating those like subgroups or encouraging them beyond just like teams or players or whatever.

• 1:23:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's awesome. Well, thanks for coming by. Thanks for explaining it down.

• 1:23:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you. Thank you.

• 1:23:29John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. Our next guest is coming in just a minute. We have Max Levchin from Affirm coming back on the show. Always fun to talk to Max about his role as CEO, how he's adopting AI, what he's seeing in the consumer markets and debt markets and all sorts of things. While we are waiting for him, let's talk about another electric vehicle, another international electric vehicle, the the Jili EV that can charge under five minutes.

• 1:24:13John Coogan?

  Is this, is this fast enough? How long does it take to get gas? Two minutes? Four minutes? Five minutes? This feels like maybe a tipping point where people will, you know, be more likely to adopt this. It does make me wonder about the Roadster. Is that gonna be a new, will they roll out a new charging technology that allows them to charge faster? They've been sort of, Tesla has not moved fast into the like sort of wireless charging, the actual Porsche, the Cayenne EV does wireless charging. You just put a mat down on your, on your garage floor, drive over it and then it charges. That's, that seems like a no brainer. I'm surprised that Tesla hasn't done that, especially since they were working on that crazy robotic snake arm.

• 1:24:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, I'm hoping the Roadster will just send the battery out the side with rocket, with rocket engines.

• 1:25:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:25:03Jordi Hays?

  But, but we'll see. But yeah, it's an interesting trade right now, you know, it's charging at these charging stations can cost, you know, in the tens of dollars. It takes quite a bit longer than gas, obviously. So dropping that down, I think is gonna be pretty key.

• 1:25:22John Coogan?

  Well, Nikita Beer is, oh, do we have our next guest? It's red, so.

• 1:25:25Jordi Hays?

  It was green for a second.

• 1:25:26John Coogan?

  Let's wait. Nikita Beer has a, has a, oh, I guess we do have Max. Is that correct? Okay, great. Let's bring in Max Levchin, the founder and CEO of Affirm. Welcome back to the show, Max. How you doing?

• 1:25:38Max Levchin?

  It's been too long.

• 1:25:39John Coogan?

  It has been too long.

• 1:25:42John Coogan?

  Let's start with the latest and greatest in, in your world in Affirm. And then, as always, I have so many, I have so many questions about how you're running the company, what you're seeing, what's working managerially on the new technology on adoption side. But first, what's the biggest news in Affirm world?

• 1:26:00Max Levchin?

  Today's news, we are available in the UK on Amazon. That's a massive announcement.

• 1:26:08John Coogan?

  Huge. Not everyone can get an Amazon deal done these days. Congratulations.

• 1:26:14John Coogan?

  Do you have to go straight to the top? Are you negotiating with Jassy?

• 1:26:17Max Levchin?

  No, no, no, no.

• 1:26:20John Coogan?

  Amazon does feel like a company that might build this themselves. Like, what is your pitch to a big company with a lot of engineers and they have AI tooling? What do you bring to the table when you're partnering with another company at that scale? It's a huge company.

• 1:26:35Max Levchin?

  But it doesn't hurt that we've been partners for quite some time in the US. And so we're, we're definitely no strangers to working with the Amazon engineering team. They're excellent. They're very capable of building things. We're a specialist. We know what we're doing in things like underwriting. We have extraordinarily diverse capital markets program that allows us to fund the loans that we do for, for them and for all our other merchants. And so I think every company that's not a financial service specialist at some point or another flirts with the idea of like, hey, maybe we should do this ourselves. And if they're not serious about it, they'd sometimes stick with it. If they're very serious about it and they're of a certain scale, they usually say, wait a second, we should partner with the very best and, you know, I'm obviously biased, but

• 1:27:19Max Levchin?

  I think we've demonstrated that we're, we're pretty great. So this is a, a great continuation of the relationship we've built with them over the years here and UK is certainly a super important market for us. We're very excited to be there. Also, we came there a little while ago with Shopify, but been meaning to expand the relationship and are excited to be live with Costco and now with Amazon and many others.

• 1:27:43John Coogan?

  Having already worked with Amazon for so many years, I imagine that the hurdle to rolling this out is not technical. It's not the actual integration. They probably have a great team. You have a great team in place. Where are you seeing technical challenges emerge? Where are you seeing acceleration in your ability to deliver a better product? Is it on the underwriting side? Is AI helping there? Or is it on productization, conversion, all the downstream customer service? Like, there's so much in the business. What's really moving the needle for you?

• 1:28:15Max Levchin?

  It's like you read a press releases. So I'll answer a bunch of them. There's actually a lot of really cool stuff in the question you just posed. The, the thing that I was referring to, the press release, that we just announced, we launched an entirely new family of underwriting models. And this has been a long, long time coming. So we are a biopolitarian specialist, a financial services specialist. We've been underwriting, building underwriting models for fifteen years. We have, you know, umpteen petabytes of data that we train on. So we've been a ML AI specialist for a very long time. But up until recently, we primarily stuck to tree based models. They're deterministic, they're easier to audit, they're easier to explain to regulators. We have to do every year. And so all of that has been kind of the stronghold of Affirm.

• 1:29:00Max Levchin?

  And about three ish years ago, we said, this attention idea that you see in LLMs and the transformer architecture is really compelling because it just opens up new ways of capturing complex patterns in a way that humans actually cannot. And fundamentally, improving underwriting models for things like underwriting is expressing patterns you see in behaviors over and over again in a way that can be reused across multiple humans. And so we started an internal research project into using attention based modeling to understand behaviors, to surface these patterns, all in the service of underwriting people that are figuring out a little bit more about them.

• 1:29:41Max Levchin?

  And so about a year ago, we had something we thought was really compelling and we've been testing it quite obsessively. We're finally live as of a few days ago with a full suite of these attention driven models that outperform our own gradient boosted tree based models. And the way, I mean, just to give you a sense of just how compelling this, this breakthrough is, so every quarter, we launch a minor addition of the model. Every year or so, we launch a brand new approach to the core model, all using these tree based architectures. We measure the improvement and that's what we report to ourselves and, you know, our shareholders on. The improvement for this new, we call it ARC, it's the code name for the architecture,

• 1:30:25Max Levchin?

  the ARC based model outperformed the next planned improvement by factor two. I don't remember the last time I've seen a factor of two implementation improvement. So it's just very hard to overstate how compelling this is. And so this is, I'm very, very proud of the team and this was a very, very large scale project that was just unbelievably successful.

• 1:30:45John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 1:30:47Jordi Hays?

  Talk about what you've learned about the, the timelines it takes for X, basically like the, the difference in execution between two companies to become obvious to the market. And when I say that right now, there's a bunch of new like AI companies, for example, let's say two vertical AI companies. They both have five hundred million in funding. Right now, it seems like, like, you know, maybe there's two ish years where, where, where it's sort of unclear, like just how much better is one company versus the other. But over time, you know, that like one will, will surface to the top. And then I would say we've also, you can basically see that in every category where there's like, there's a category like prediction markets.

• 1:31:31Jordi Hays?

  Last year, there was like two heavily funded companies and then you saw like difference in execution and they sort of like bifurcated over time. But I'm just wondering from your view, how you, how you work with your team? Like, when I, talking to you, you just get this sense that like, competing with you would be like living hell. And it's because of the, just like, the, the experience level and then the approach to all these different layers of the stack and the understanding of the category and your business. And like, it just, it feels like, you know, Affirm is just pulling away very, very strongly from other players in the market, whereas it looked like it was a pretty even race in many ways, like, you know, five years ago.

• 1:32:15Max Levchin?

  Thank you. First of all, that's a, I mean, I happen to agree, but I'm obviously biased. I do agree that these things take a while to play out. And who knows which inning we're in and how many more ups and downs we're going to see in the superficial judgment, you know, AKA the stock price.

• 1:32:33Jordi Hays?

  But like private markets seem to muddy this a lot. It's like, almost like companies have to get, companies have to get public and then have to actually.

• 1:32:44Max Levchin?

  I'm not even sure public markets make it that much better. Public markets force you to be very transparent about a quarterly check-in. Like, one of the things that I think we did really well as a public company, if I do say so myself, is we put a timeline of getting profitable out on the map and said, we're going to get there. And we did it quite far out, so 24 months before we were profitable. We said, we're going to be profitable 24 months from now. And we just printed quarter after quarter after quarter, saying like, look, we are that much closer. And then on the dot, actually, a couple of months prior, said, yep, profitable now, here it is. And I think it was a big credibility thing that private companies don't get to have because the only people who know their internal metrics intimately are the venture capitalists.

• 1:33:28Max Levchin?

  And even if they publish metrics, they wouldn't be helped to the sort of a standard GAAP accounting, SEC regulated way of communicating. So in that sense, public companies have it probably a little bit easier. But you also get slapped around if you miss on a metric or the market thinks that you messed up one of your metrics. But I think the way you know who's pulling away kind of early, if I were putting on my occasional investor hat,

• 1:33:56Max Levchin?

  I think, you know, I'm feeding your compliment to me back to myself, but I happen to agree with that. I think you can tell operator to operator, people who are, quote unquote, for lack of a better term, serious people, you can tell, like people who know their metrics, people that understand the entirety of their stack, that don't just say, well, you know, I have a great team and so my AI engineers told me to say these words and those are the words I'm going to repeat now obsessively. Like, maybe the shortest hand is like, companies run by engineers. We are skilled in not BSing. And so if that may be like a good 1-8 predictor, like how likely are they to do what they say they will?

• 1:34:39Max Levchin?

  Like if the person running it has an engineering degree in whatever engineering, probably going to be pretty truthful.

• 1:34:46Jordi Hays?

  Evergreen, evergreen. I had one more, one more follow-up question. I'm very curious to get your point of view. We've heard a million pitches on this show about how agents are going to need to pay agents and we need all of this new financial infrastructure. And I've been consistently incredibly bearish on that just because we have a bunch of really robust financial infrastructure that's regulated. We even have companies that like, you know, think about Stripe for an example. They've built for developers at the core from the very beginning, which means that they're inherently well set up to work with agents. And using an example, we see new personal agents like Instinct and Muse, and there's a bunch of others coming. And there's no point where, I'm sure somebody's pitched like a firm for agents, you know,

• 1:35:31Jordi Hays?

  or some silly pitch like that. But with all these new, you know, sort of applications, the agent will just go and tell the user, do you want to pay cash or do you want to use a firm? And like a firm, and they'll just get to select like they would as a consumer. And so there's no new financial infrastructure needed. And I feel like agentic payments, like net new agentic payments might be an entire mirage. And we may have gotten a bunch of like, you know, posts online and blog posts and all this stuff. And then really nothing new happens. But what do you think?

• 1:36:07Max Levchin?

  I'm going to make a bold claim.

• 1:36:10Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:36:10Max Levchin?

  A firm for agents will be a firm.

• 1:36:15Max Levchin?

  Going to put it out there. I know it's risky. I know I'm saying.

• 1:36:21Max Levchin?

  No, I happen to agree with you. I think there are definitely many really cool, exciting developments in agentic. I am trying out all the same agents myself. Some of them are surprisingly good. Some of them are still lumbering through the same problems you see with some of the earlier attempts. But it's very clear that we will get, we will all have agents doing our chores for us. I happen to believe that quite a lot of shopping isn't actually a chore. In fact, it's a form of entertainment. And so human in the loop will not just be a requirement, it will be a loss to humanity if we are not allowed or if we're not participating in some of the shopping choices, which includes, by the way, the way you pay. But some of these things will go to the agent.

• 1:37:07Max Levchin?

  The underlying plumbing, and by that I mean everything from deciding the best way to pay all the way down to figuring out the smartest choice of a plan, most rewarding transaction, that's a 0% loan, et cetera. I think that's going to primarily accrete to people who know what they're doing, who are specialists in the space. And that's why we have to continuously work on improving underwriting. We want to be more inclusive, as in say yes to more people while maintaining the same level of credit performance. And so all of that is still like the work we have to do and we have to do it faster and we have to pull away from the competition as aggressively as we can. But I don't think there's an opportunity to dislodge a firm by showing up and saying,

• 1:37:51Max Levchin?

  we are just like a firm, but smaller, less profitable, with less credibility in the market, in the capital markets in particular, but we are agentic. We are agentic too. We're pretty, pretty agentic ourselves.

• 1:38:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, I know. I love it. That's a great take.

• 1:38:09Jordi Hays?

  How, how have you been approaching leveraging open source models in various sort of like employee use cases and workflows? I think it's been, you guys are such an incredible engineering culture. I'm sure a lot of your team has been using open models in a bunch of different ways. Yet at the same time, if you were focused maybe five months ago about, you know, building your own harness or using these harnesses and open source models, and then the cost of the frontiers drops like so dramatically to the point where you now have like frontier-ish models that are cheaper than open source in some cases, maybe that wasn't the best use of time. So like, how are you thinking about allocating time to getting the most out of open models where it makes sense

• 1:38:54Jordi Hays?

  versus trying to avoid just wasting time when the cost of intelligence will continue to fall?

• 1:39:01Max Levchin?

  So we actually did something pretty smart, if I do say so myself, pretty early on. So I'd sort of predicted that we're going to go through these moments where like, oh my God, the best harness, the best model, the best, the combination of harness, model, user interface is going to change. And there's so much money, there's so much innovation, there's so many really brilliant people who are working all day, every day and making AI useful specifically for software engineers. It is foolish to commit to a configuration today. You know, someone else is looking at it and saying, wait a second, that is the best way of writing software, except I have a better idea. And writing software just became the best it's ever been by the hands of the company I'm about to compete with.

• 1:39:46Max Levchin?

  So like the whole, like this self recursive self-improvement that everybody's sort of either excited or terrified about, it hasn't come to the models yet, but it's certainly come to the development industry. Like we are living through recursive self-improvement of software engineering for humans and agents together. And so sometime around January of this year, we split off a team of about 12 people and basically said, your job is to make our development experience the absolute best for the current state of the art in a way that is easy to take advantage of now, but switch out to the next best thing later with a thoughtful, continuous manner. So we don't want to have this disruptive moment where everybody stops. We're all going to switch to product X. Oh, wait a second, product Y is available.

• 1:40:30Max Levchin?

  So we've had this team and it's run really, really well by a bunch of very, very smart engineers who love their craft and know what they're doing as practitioners, but also great thinkers when it comes to developer experience. They have been keeping us at the, almost the cutting edge of both the commercial frontier models as well as open weight models, harnesses, et cetera, where we organize the entire process through with our hands. And whatever it is they offer to the entire company is usually within a hot second of whatever is considered cutting edge. But it's thoughtful enough where if you, yesterday you were on harness A and today we really believe harness B is better, they will need the transition really simple.

• 1:41:15Max Levchin?

  So just having a dedicated team that gives us the best possible developer experience without having to do a handbrake turn every three months has been unbelievably good investment. Like when we lopped off this team and said, we're going to have this big group of people whose only job is to make us more productive at the meta level. I think some people were kind of doubting the validity of the idea.

• 1:41:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting because like the alternative is, you know, similarly sized companies, you have hundreds of people that are experimenting in real time and be like, well, I think, I think I found the best way to do it. And the other person's like, well, I'm using this thing.

• 1:41:46Max Levchin?

  We started there. So I'll give you real stats on this one since I'm a fan of numbers. So we were in the experimental way mode until we had this developer experience team, developer productivity team. And we were probably, I think the percentage of code written by machines and humans together versus prior to this team's arrival increased by a factor of 10 when we organized this team and said, look, here are the prescriptive approach we're going to take. And there's always a menu, like you can use cursor, you can also use Claude. There we support all sorts of different harnesses and models. But we have a menu versus go figure out what works for you best. The tyranny of choice is a terrible thing.

• 1:42:30Max Levchin?

  And telling a software engineer, go explore over the weekend, your favorite way of writing code with an agent, it's not going to be a weekend project, it's going to be a six months long project. So lopping that off into a separate area where you have a rigorous approach and then we constantly produce, here's the best way according to this team and here's some of the choices you have in there, has been really, really useful. We know it's doing well for us. So we measured productivity long before AI in PRs, pull requests, per engineer, per unit time. The cost per PR, fully loaded, everything from salaries all the way down to AWS costs, has come down 30% since we created this developer productivity team. And so not only are we increasing the amount of code we're writing because we're able to leverage all the agents,

• 1:43:14Max Levchin?

  the true cost per pull request is coming down quite steadily and has been for a while. And so I'm very excited about what's to come there. But I love the fact that we have this really well-constrained approach.

• 1:43:26Jordi Hays?

  Makes a lot of sense. One, one word to answer for the next one, since you like numbers, what's your P do?

• 1:43:37Jordi Hays?

  No answer. No answer. All right, we'll get to it next time. Thanks.

• 1:43:41John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for coming on the show.

• 1:43:42Jordi Hays?

  Great update.

• 1:43:43John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. We got Sam Ross from Numeral, the co-founder and CEO, in the waiting room. Sorry for keeping you waiting. Sam, how you doing?

• 1:43:57Jordi Hays?

  Big dog.

• 1:43:58John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. We got a fresh gong now. Jordy already broke one. I think because he was celebrating that it's only 92 days till Christmas.

• 1:44:06Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:44:06John Coogan?

  But we got some bigger news than that, a number that's bigger than 92.

• 1:44:09Jordi Hays?

  Most boring.

• 1:44:10John Coogan?

  How much did you raise?

• 1:44:11Jordi Hays?

  The most boring AI company in the world.

• 1:44:14John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:44:15Jordi Hays?

  Which, no, no, no, they ran that as an ad.

• 1:44:17John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that's right.

• 1:44:18Speaker 13

  That's our campaign.

• 1:44:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:44:19Jordi Hays?

  And you guys trigger a bunch of, you guys trigger a bunch of people.

• 1:44:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, you triggered me because I don't find it boring at all.

• 1:44:26Jordi Hays?

  Uh, anyways, let's talk about the round.

• 1:44:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:28Jordi Hays?

  Let's talk about.

• 1:44:28John Coogan?

  How much did you raise?

• 1:44:30Speaker 13

  We raised 100 million.

• 1:44:38John Coogan?

  Insight Partners, you got Salesforce Ventures. You being careful if you shake hands with Marc Benioff in the wrong place? You don't want to get frame-mogged. That's a big risk if you partner it up.

• 1:44:49Speaker 13

  I know. I know he's already mogged you guys, so I, that's the way.

• 1:44:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were early.

• 1:44:54Speaker 13

  Jordy more than you, I guess, yeah.

• 1:44:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:56John Coogan?

  Both of us.

• 1:44:57Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely brutal.

• 1:44:58John Coogan?

  What unlocked the round? What was the most exciting thing that Insight latched on to? Is it just top line growth? Are the margins better than what we're seeing in other companies? Like, what was the thing that they were like, okay, let's back up the truck?

• 1:45:12Speaker 13

  Yeah, well, we solved sales tax, RSI. Beyond that, I think ultimately, this is, this business is, you know, sales tax is not going anywhere. In fact, it's growing in California, starting in January. All businesses selling software have to collect and remit tax on software. So there's this growing trend where as the world, as AI takes a bigger share of the economy, there's going to be more and more of the tax dollars are going to be taxing things like AI. On top of that, I think you look at the world of accounting and really our space is like tax advisory. And AI has not penetrated that space as much as areas like law. And so there's, you know, there's some really large potential there to build a really large business.

• 1:45:57Speaker 13

  And so I think, you know, we've been building this business for about three years. We've had, you know, phenomenal growth. And I think just, yeah, with a great engineering team and great customers, that's what gets the investors excited.

• 1:46:10John Coogan?

  There we go. What are the most valuable growth channels for you? Are you able to sell through tax accounting firms? And then the accountants tell their clients, hey, you should be using Numeral? Or do you go direct to the CEO of the biggest software companies?

• 1:46:29Speaker 13

  Yeah, look, we do all of the above. More and more partnerships with firms is getting important for us, especially as you move up market and these complex businesses really trust their advisors.

• 1:46:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:46:41Speaker 13

  I've always been someone who has, before this, I was running e-commerce businesses. So I love the world of growth. And so, you know, a lot of direct sales as well. All the things you'd imagine that most SaaS companies are doing, a lot of marketing.

• 1:46:58John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Sorry.

• 1:47:00Jordi Hays?

  Go for it.

• 1:47:00John Coogan?

  I was just wondering about 100 million dollars. Are you staffing up? Are you hiring a lot of salespeople? Are you just going to run even bigger ad campaigns? Like, how are you seeing deploying this capital?

• 1:47:14Speaker 13

  Yeah, I think for this money is primarily focused on R and D.

• 1:47:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:47:19Speaker 13

  So again, there's a lot to be building in the space around, you know, building things in the tax advisory space for firms, for companies directly. And the space is heating up. You see companies like Sponsor Ramp building in the space as well. And so it's, you know, I don't see them as competitive. Like, this is a big space with a lot of different sub-verticals. We're really focused right now on like the indirect tax space. So things like sales tax, VAT, we file in 80-plus countries. And so there's a lot of low-level grunt work that gets done by armies of tax, you know, tax workers throughout the globe.

• 1:48:00Speaker 13

  And that's what we get excited about, going and making their lives easier so people can be more strategic.

• 1:48:06John Coogan?

  Last question, and it's a choose your own adventure. You can answer either of these questions. You don't have to answer both. One, what's your P Doom? Two, what's the biggest fish you've ever caught?

• 1:48:18Speaker 13

  Ooh, P Doom, that's based on time?

• 1:48:23Speaker 13

  Well, we already solved, we already solved RSI, sales tax RSI.

• 1:48:27Jordi Hays?

  And you guys are fine.

• 1:48:29John Coogan?

  And we're fine.

• 1:48:29Speaker 13

  I'm living in the future here.

• 1:48:31John Coogan?

  Miff the tell the tale. So P Doom Zero, a vote of confidence. I love to see it. Well, congrats on the new round. Thanks so much for hopping on the show.

• 1:48:39Jordi Hays?

  We're going to close out the show with you. We did have a hard stop. Sorry for the little running late on the schedule. But I wanted to close out the show with you.

• 1:48:46John Coogan?

  Well, then I got to tell him about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplace, and now with AI.

• 1:48:55Jordi Hays?

  Sam, I wanted to throw a flashbang with you.

• 1:48:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:48:59Jordi Hays?

  As an early partner of the show and friend. So I'm going to throw it and then we'll sign off. And congrats to the whole Numeral team on an awesome milestone.

• 1:49:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:49:09Speaker 13

  Thank you. I wanted to give a shout to our customer, Lucy.

• 1:49:11John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that's right. Thank you.

• 1:49:16Speaker 13

  And also, I don't have a gear. Aurora Water Filter is another customer of ours. So, you know.

• 1:49:20John Coogan?

  The Shopify Numeral ecosystem is cooking.

• 1:49:24Jordi Hays?

  Powerful.

• 1:49:24John Coogan?

  Everyone's working together.

• 1:49:25Jordi Hays?

  Let's hit it.

• 1:49:27John Coogan?

  Well, thank you for tuning into TBGN. We'll see you tomorrow.

• 1:49:29Jordi Hays?

  Goodbye.