White House AI Accord, Model Welfare, Ken Griffindor School of Market Wizardry | Ali Golshan, Mike Intrator, Vlad Tenev, Pari Singh, Minna Song, Dev Ittycheria, Daragh Murphy, Noah Friedman

(01:26) - Supper Intelligence (09:00) - White House Accord Signature Tier List (21:22) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (32:59) - Power, GD, and the AI Boom (43:21) - A Warning about Model Welfare (57:28) - Ken Griffindor School of Market Wizardry (01:08:24) - Ali Golshan, Nvidia’s senior director of AI software and a former Gretel founder, discusses his work on AI security, safety, and infrastructure. He explains how the open-source OpenShell project, formal verification, and hardware-level controls can provide a trusted, full-stack environment for monitoring and containing autonomous AI agents. (01:20:43) - Mike Intrator, co-founder and CEO of AI cloud provider CoreWeave, discusses the company’s evolution beyond GPU infrastructure into a comprehensive AI cloud platform. He highlights CoreWeave’s new Forge product, the long-term utility of GPUs, potential industry consolidation, and the economics of compute capacity and data-center planning. (01:36:10) - Vlad Tenev discusses Robinhood’s expansion into AI-powered trading, including autonomous agents, third-party financial data, and safeguards designed to give everyday investors “a hedge fund in their pocket.” The Robinhood co-founder and CEO also covers social investing, prediction markets, new trading products, and AI’s broader impact on financial markets. (01:54:10) - Pari Singh discusses Flow Engineering’s $50 million fundraise at a $750 million valuation and its plans to invest heavily in AI-powered hardware engineering. He explains how Flow uses AI to continuously verify complex designs, manage regulatory requirements, and accelerate collaboration across engineering teams and suppliers. (02:04:26) - Minna Song discusses EliseAI’s rapid growth, including raising $350 million, surpassing $200 million in annual recurring revenue, and serving 20% of the U. S. apartment market. The co-founder and CEO explains how the company drives AI adoption and develops shared technology for the large housing and healthcare sectors. (02:11:00) - Dev Ittycheria discusses returning as MongoDB’s interim president and CEO, the company’s strong outlook, and his journey as a founder, investor, and technology executive. He also shares insights on AI talent wars, open-source business models, corporate governance, and the importance of clear strategy, strong teams, and a candid culture. (02:32:43) - Daragh Murphy discusses Imprint, the fintech company he co-founded and leads as CEO, which provides co-branded credit cards and payment infrastructure for major brands such as Kroger and Shell. He explains Imprint’s partnership model, credit-card economics, and how AI agents and bank-account payments could challenge traditional card networks and interchange fees. (02:39:54) - Noah Friedman discusses OuterSignal, his customer-intelligence and personalization platform, following its $22 million Series A. He explains how richer, real-time customer profiles help brands personalize marketing, improve retail and product strategies, and create more relevant consumer experiences. 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 TVP and today is Wednesday, September 30th, 2026.

• 0:09John Coogan?

  We're on the TVP and Ultra Dome. We're back in the Ultra Dome, the temple of technology.

• 0:14Jordi Hays?

  The fortress of finance.

• 0:15John Coogan?

  The fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place.

• 0:26John Coogan?

  So there was a supper last night at the White Home, the White House, the Golden House, the Golden Home? Gold Home? What are we calling it these days? Well, we renamed artificial intelligence. It's super intelligence now. We were debating, is super intelligence abbreviated SI or just S? Because if you're like, super alignment, was that SA?

• 0:53Jordi Hays?

  One problem there, John, there's no TLD for just S.

• 0:56John Coogan?

  That's true. That's true. You gotta get the new TLDs going. What was the word we?

• 1:01Speaker 02

  So super alignment, that was one word.

• 1:02John Coogan?

  That was one word.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  You know, some words you do, you have a hyphen.

• 1:05John Coogan?

  You have a hyphen.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06John Coogan?

  And then some.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  If you just use like a normal prefix for.

• 1:09John Coogan?

  It's just a normal prefix for something.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, and supernatural.

• 1:12John Coogan?

  Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. That's one word, right? So you would think that potentially you would just be using one word here. But anyway, we're using two words, I guess. And so there was a dinner at the White House. David Sacks posted it. He said, it's the Bretton Woods of supper intelligence, super intelligence. And there's some debate.

• 1:35Jordi Hays?

  My first reaction to this is Tyler was really snubbed, you know? All those people there and not, not one chair for Tyler.

• 1:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so there's, there's a bunch of folks here and people were analyzing who got the best seats, who got the different positions, who got pole position, prime positioning, who was snubbed off in the little kids table at the end, et cetera, et cetera. A bunch to analyze about who's on the ins, who's on the outs, but I had, I had chat GPT sort of go through and try and categorize each attendee by their stance on open source, open source. So did they, did they sign the Jensen Nvidia open source letter?

• 2:22John Coogan?

  Have they been concerned about the cybersecurity impacts? Obviously Anthropic on the far end, sort of in the red. A bunch of other folks who are more in the yellow. And I don't know if I agree with all of these classifications, but you can sort of see how Jensen is clearly pro open source. Satya Nadella has talked about that. OpenAI, Greg Brockman, more in the middle, you know, not open sourcing a lot of things. OpenAI did sign the Jensen letter, but of course is concerned about pacing the frontier, which is sort of antithetical. And so this is all as a, as a, as a reference point to that post from our friends over at Semi Analysis. Let me actually pull up what, what, what they said here. Where was it?

• 3:07John Coogan?

  It was Max Can, I believe this is Semi Analysis. Yes. Max Can says, majority of people are significantly underestimating the probability of open source models being nerfed or even outright banned in the next six to 12 months due to cyber secure, cyber, cyber concerns. And so I believe Anthropic put out something yesterday talking about the risks of open source and in a cyber context, saying that the, the delay between Mythos preview, being able to find zero days, being able to hack into things, that, that gap has closed now and the open source frontier can very quickly do the same thing. And so expect a lot of, a lot of cyber incidents unless something is done.

• 3:52John Coogan?

  Can these be controlled some way? Maybe at the inference layer, maybe at the, at the data center level, maybe at the chip level. There's going to be a whole bunch of different proposals, but at least right now, in the next six to 12 months, certainly not this month, because the vast majority of people who are closest to Donald Trump have been evangelizing for open source. So I would be surprised to see any, any pushback against open source happen that quickly. At the same time, open source is amorphous. It is not a business by definition. And so it can't really have a formal seat at the table. George Hots, not at the table, for example. Snubbed, yeah. No, Linus Torvalds, not at the table. The open source.

• 4:36Jordi Hays?

  George Hots at the table, just sort of like laughing in a sort of insane way at everything being said.

• 4:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and so even the companies that are pro open source, they are pro open source in, insofar that it advances their business. And so there is still a way that the closed source group could find a way for everyone who's at this table to benefit in a closed source world moving forward. If open source is deemed to be too dangerous and, and, and forcing too many cyber concerns. There, like I, I could see everyone at this table signing a letter saying, we are now anti-open source, but the, the downstream, like economic engine

• 5:24John Coogan?

  actually splits, you know, the, the rewards and the, and the profits of the ecosystem fairly evenly. I think the, the initial pushback and pro open source push, especially from Jensen, was like, we don't want to be in a world where there's one company that reaps 100% of the profits and we're not involved. But if it's like, hey, look, there's actually going to be an oligopoly. Companies don't want a single source intelligence. They're constantly going to be bouncing back and forth between OpenAI and Anthropic. And then consumers are going to be bouncing back and forth between Google search overviews and Muse and Instinct and all these different things. There's a world where the actual models are closed source and,

• 6:06John Coogan?

  but there are so many front doors and the front doors are in such competition with each other that there's enough revenue distribution, profit distribution, that everyone at this table at least is happy. I don't think the open source community would be happy, but I do think that there is a world where in six to 12 months, it's possible that everyone at this table is like, yes, for cyber reasons, we need to find a different way forward where everyone benefits economically, but we are now a little bit less pro open source. But I don't know. What was your, what's your read on it? Six to 12 months, you think open source is going away or you think it'll stick around?

• 6:44Speaker 02

  I mean, it's so hard to ban open source. I think maybe you can kind of get something like a ban if you're like just worried about, like the business impacts economics, because then you can pressure the providers to not host this stuff. But if you're worried about like safety, you know, if you have a bad actor, it's so hard to police downloading open weight models from somewhere and running it locally.

• 7:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  And like, yeah, maybe there's some, you know, you need tens of thousands of dollars to like physically buy hardware.

• 7:09John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  If you're a motivated bad actor, like that's not that big of a hurdle.

• 7:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Like it does feel like we are pretty far away from, from, you know, go and get a random gaming PC and be able to run something that is, you know, Mythos level hacking machine. Like you probably need some serious GPUs. You probably need something that's basically rack scale. You need to be running it a lot to try a lot of different things, like a lot of these cyber exploits. It was not just one shotted by the model. It was, you know, a fan out of agents, working together.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, like Navia Stokes is like, you know, 10,000.

• 7:48John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And so, and so there are, like one way to control it is through KYC on hardware. You know, that like the data center that is, you know, being used maliciously is a lot more risky than the laptop that's being used maliciously, even with near frontier open source intelligence. So I don't know. We'll see how, we'll see how it goes. There, I'm sure there will be more, more discussions. And it's not even to say that this, this, this dinner was at, was about open source at all. It's just sort of interesting to take the temperature of where is, where is DC on AI? Who is getting the, the most quality time with the president and the administration?

• 8:30John Coogan?

  And then where do they stand on the issues of today? Obviously, this was much more just about pacing the frontier, the build out, et cetera, stuff like that. And, and, and signing signatures. We had some signature analysis breakdown. We can go through this, but first let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those who think it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service.

• 8:57John Coogan?

  Sholto shared a picture of the letter that was signed, the White House Accord on Supper Intelligence, the Joint Committee on Frontier Responsibilities. In order to build a positive future for the American people in the world, we believe that every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely and in a way that builds trust with consumers and the public. One, they're going to implement robust internal controls to monitor the capabilities and alignment of models during training and deployment around cybersecurity, biosecurity, chemical threats, et cetera. They want to empower an internal team to ensure all the controls, monitoring and detection are operating as intended. Three, they're going to partner with external auditors and evaluators to carry out independent assessments

• 9:42John Coogan?

  of whether the controls, monitoring and detection are operating as intended. And four, they're going to designate an independent committee of the board of directors to oversee and receive reports from the teams operating the controls and the internal and external auditors. So a line to the board of directors that circumvents the CEO for safety, alignment, evaluation, all of that good stuff. A bunch of people signed it. We got Sundar from Google, Dario from Anthropic, Mark Zuckerberg from Meta, Greg Brockman from OpenAI, Elon Musk from XAI, Jensen from Nvidia and Donald Trump, the president of the United States. And people.

• 10:20Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people doing analysis on the various signatures.

• 10:24John Coogan?

  Yes. Someone did a tier list. I was surprised by their tier list. I'd like to see you do a tier list. Where would you put Donald Trump's signature?

• 10:34Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's hate him or love him. I think it's pretty iconic. Like, it's just so

• 10:41John Coogan?

  It's it has a nice flow to it. It's very

• 10:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, well

• 10:46John Coogan?

  Uniform, but it's hard to read if you don't know it's a signature.

• 10:49Jordi Hays?

  It looks like you, a child drew a mountain range, but

• 10:52John Coogan?

  Versus Jensen, I'm seeing a lot of Jensen Wong in there.

• 10:57Jordi Hays?

  But what's impressive to me is, is I would want to compare the DJT signature, like, I would want to look at a hundred of them.

• 11:04John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 11:04Jordi Hays?

  See, like, is he, is he nailing it every single time?

• 11:07John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 11:08Jordi Hays?

  He's been doing autographs for long enough. I would expect that he is, but still, it looks like very difficult to actually be able to nail that.

• 11:15John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:15Jordi Hays?

  And really get that dialed.

• 11:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:17Jordi Hays?

  So again, he's going with a Sharpie, too. So he's, he's sort of like trying to mog with the

• 11:21John Coogan?

  That's true. I didn't realize that.

• 11:23Jordi Hays?

  He's like, I'll give you the pen. I'll take the Sharpie.

• 11:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:26Jordi Hays?

  Automatically, it's like

• 11:27John Coogan?

  You're winning on thickness.

• 11:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Winning on

• 11:30John Coogan?

  The breadth is, is, is much more significant with that. Interesting strategy.

• 11:34Jordi Hays?

  And then going down the list, um, you know, Sundar, again, would never, would never know, um,

• 11:41John Coogan?

  But I like the two lines, little dot there.

• 11:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it almost looks like, um,

• 11:45John Coogan?

  Couple different, yeah, it looks like an abstract artist signature. I could see that on a painting.

• 11:49Jordi Hays?

  Or maybe he, yeah, it, it almost looks like he's made up his own, um, um, like, letters and, and

• 11:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 11:58Jordi Hays?

  Sort of like, uh, language.

• 11:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 11:59Jordi Hays?

  Um, Dario, uh,

• 12:02John Coogan?

  Dario was doing well in the first

• 12:03Jordi Hays?

  Kind of like down

• 12:04John Coogan?

  On the first word, and then it seemed like he was kind of drifting upwards.

• 12:07Jordi Hays?

  My theory, I, I almost think here, like, someone was, like, holding the piece of paper and they were all, so I think, I basically think Trump put the paper down.

• 12:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:15Jordi Hays?

  Aggressively signed with a Sharpie and then told everyone else, because he knew this was going to go out, you guys sign, you know, when you're trying to

• 12:22John Coogan?

  So you think it was a situation where, like, Dario was signing, like, on Craig's back? Like, oh, sign on my back, like, that type of thing? That might have been what happened, yeah.

• 12:28Jordi Hays?

  Kind of like throwing down.

• 12:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Notably, you don't see any situations where the pen punched through the paper. That sometimes happens if you're trying to sign a document on someone's back and you're punching through the soft, uh, jacket that they're wearing. That could be a risk. Doesn't seem like it happened in this case.

• 12:43Jordi Hays?

  Um, anyway, so Dario, pretty down the middle, pretty safe. Uh, again, kind of emulating that sort of mountain range style, right? Where by the, the end of the signature, it's just a bunch of lines going up and down.

• 12:56John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:56Jordi Hays?

  Sort of unclear. Um, Zuck, again, uh, more, more kind of rock star-esque, right? Almost musical feeling.

• 13:05John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:06Jordi Hays?

  GDB coming in, just minimalist.

• 13:09John Coogan?

  Minimalist.

• 13:09Jordi Hays?

  Minimalist, simple, readable.

• 13:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:12Jordi Hays?

  He's, he's a very, I would say, in some ways, these are reflections of their personalities, right? GDB is a very practical person.

• 13:21John Coogan?

  Signature, window into the soul.

• 13:23Jordi Hays?

  It's a window into the soul, right? Extremely practical.

• 13:25John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:26Jordi Hays?

  Sticking, sticking to, sticking to the basics, sticking to what works.

• 13:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:29Jordi Hays?

  Um, and, uh, yeah, obvious why a lot of people are saying that's at least a, uh, A tier.

• 13:35John Coogan?

  What is, wait, what is Mark Zuckerberg's actual signature? MZB? Or, or just MZ and then the Z goes crazy? Is that what that is? Because

• 13:45Jordi Hays?

  It starts doing tricks?

• 13:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, it starts doing tricks. And I think Sundar might have done the, the same thing. But I, I feel like, uh, there's a little bit of a line that you don't cross. If somebody asks you for a full signature and you do an initials, that's a different thing. Sometimes you're on a document, you gotta sign your initials a bunch, you gotta sign the full thing. I have respect for the full name signature. If you ask me for a full name signature, I'm throwing down my full name. I'm not just randomly switching up to, to initials.

• 14:12Jordi Hays?

  I think it's totally fair game.

• 14:13John Coogan?

  You, it's totally fair game. You can just do initials.

• 14:15Jordi Hays?

  Cursive initials.

• 14:17John Coogan?

  Is this cursive initials from Greg Brockman?

• 14:19Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but I, I think that's where Sundar was maybe, maybe going.

• 14:23John Coogan?

  Hey, so you're giving Sundar the pass, you're giving Mark Zuckerberg the pass, because the MZ

• 14:28Jordi Hays?

  Jensen, a lot of people are saying that Jensen's

• 14:32John Coogan?

  Calligrapher, he brought his calligrapher.

• 14:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, I, I first read Ed Hardy.

• 14:37John Coogan?

  [laughing]

• 14:40Jordi Hays?

  Um, so I thought that, I thought that

• 14:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:45Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, maybe he had some affinity. Well, let's pull up the Ed Hardy logo.

• 14:49John Coogan?

  Did he put his middle name in there? What's his middle name?

• 14:53Jordi Hays?

  Here's the Ed Hardy logo.

• 14:56John Coogan?

  Jensen does not have a traditional English middle name. Oh, it's Jen Sun. So J, uh, J E N dash H S U N. So that second letter. Okay, ChatGPT that, to make it look exactly like Jensen Wong.

• 15:12Jordi Hays?

  Um,

• 15:14John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, so, so he signs, uh, not with the, with the English version, with the lowercase E N S E N. He throws a capital H in there, which gives it an extra flourish. It's the most tasteful. It, it earns the S tier.

• 15:29Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people saying, you know, Jensen has the same initials as John Hancock, kind of evocative in his signature as well.

• 15:35John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, monitoring the situation, monitoring meme here, did not like, uh, Sundar's. He put Sundar in F tier. I thought, I thought Sundar's had some nice flair to it, although it was potentially the most abstract, but, uh, yeah. And, uh, I, I feel like putting MZ in, in C tier. I guess the Z does go a little crazy, but, uh, anyway, very, very fun.

• 16:01Jordi Hays?

  Um, trying to see if we can get some real-time handwriting analysis on the

• 16:06John Coogan?

  Do you have a handwriting analyst on speed dial?

• 16:09Jordi Hays?

  I have access to superintelligence.

• 16:11John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. You're using superintelligence. Well,

• 16:14Jordi Hays?

  Um, anyways, we can continue for now.

• 16:17John Coogan?

  Okay. There were some videos. I haven't actually watched them, but we're gonna watch them now.

• 16:22Jordi Hays?

  They were clip farming.

• 16:23John Coogan?

  They were clip farming. Okay, that's what's happened. So, uh, there were, you, you mentioned yesterday that Alex Karp was asking questions to the reporter or something like that. But, uh, here we have, uh, Donald Trump, Dario Amade, and a few other folks gathered around, standing outside, and we will watch this clip right now.

• 16:42Speaker 03

  Whatever he says is okay. Be careful.

• 16:46Speaker 04

  We'll say what I've always said, which is that AI has benefits. I've talked about the medical benefits of the technology. I, as the president has said, you know, whoever wins, AI wins. I think that's very important. But technology has very real mechanism. How we address those risks is still under discussion. I think we work together.

• 17:04John Coogan?

  Oh, this is like, this is like a supercut of

• 17:06Speaker 03

  You have no idea who these people are. These are the world. You have no idea whoever they are.

• 17:13Speaker 05

  Well, I think it is worth highlighting the puts of AI, uh, which will

• 17:16Speaker 03

  [inaudible]

• 17:20Speaker 03

  Mr. President, how did you

• 17:22Speaker 04

  Mr. President, why don't you Mr. Musk. You're running a campaign. Mr. Musk, can I ask you a quick question?

• 17:29Jordi Hays?

  Probably not. Trump really makes them seem like they're all his, like, sons and, like, younger family members.

• 17:35Speaker 06

  Uh, it was a very productive

• 17:39John Coogan?

  Mr. President, how did the meeting go so

• 17:41Speaker 02

  How, Mr. President, how

• 17:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, crazy. Uh, what did Natasha Tiku say?

• 17:47Jordi Hays?

  At what point, at what point should Trump just actually have a 24/7 livestream or be like, of his own livestream, right? He has so much conflict with the media, he should just have his own

• 18:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think it'll happen.

• 18:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh,

• 18:03John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah, that was the, I think we were talking about that with the knockoff of the pod, uh, the knock-on effects of the podcast election. The idea that, uh, that, uh, Trump did, like, hundreds of hours of podcasts in the run-up to the election. And, uh, just the awareness, the clips, the, the, the, the impressions were so high. Uh, it wa, it was that, uh, he did more in terms of volume and also got more reach. Uh, Kamala Harris did, uh, Call Her Daddy, but it was a much shorter episode, so Trump, at the same time

• 18:35Jordi Hays?

  He knows about clip farming.

• 18:36John Coogan?

  Three hours on Rogan, that's more opportunity for clips. Yeah, clip farming. Uh, Kamala did, I think, 45 minutes on Call Her Daddy, and the actual episode didn't fly as much. Like, it wasn't repurposed as much all over the place. And so, yes, I, I, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a 24/7 livestream of the president or something close to it, uh, in the near future. Um, let's play this clip from Natasha Tiku. She says, unfortunately, I will be going back to school to write my dissertation on this one-minute film. Let's see what happened in this film.

• 19:05Speaker 07

  I'm falling down to AI, so I just want to hear from you after this big summit, where you are today.

• 19:10Speaker 04

  Look, I mean, I, I will say what I've always said, which is that AI has incredible benefits. I've talked about the medical benefits of the technology. I, as the president has said, you know, whoever wins, AI wins. I think that's very important. But I think the technology has very real risks. And, you know, the mechanism, how we address those risks is still under discussion. But we all need to work, we all need to work together to make sure that we can win and we can win safely. If we, if we do this right, if we work with the president and everyone here, we can win safely. What do you want to do?

• 19:44John Coogan?

  Whoa, so much louder. Uh, the, the gallery really

• 19:51Jordi Hays?

  Fascinating.

• 19:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, are there any other clips that we should, uh, watch through? Um, oh, look, it's, uh, it's just funny that Trump is distracted while Dario's giving his speech. Is that what's going on? I don't know.

• 20:04Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, it seems very

• 20:06John Coogan?

  What did he say about Sundar? Didn't he say something funny about Sundar? I wanna, I wanna play this.

• 20:11Jordi Hays?

  He said he's a monster. They said he's a monster.

• 20:13John Coogan?

  That's a pretty good, that's a pretty good, pretty good thing to be called, I guess.

• 20:16Jordi Hays?

  Being called a monster would fix me.

• 20:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let's play this clip.

• 20:23Speaker 03

  And they're gonna be watching over each other. Mr. President. First of all, thanks, Mr. President. You have no idea who these people are. These are the biggest people in the world. You have no idea who they are.

• 20:34John Coogan?

  The media is like, of course they know who you are.

• 20:36Speaker 03

  What a great life.

• 20:38Jordi Hays?

  What a great life. No one knows who you are.

• 20:41John Coogan?

  He's like, living in humble anonymity as the CEO of Google.

• 20:48Speaker 03

  Just what you have to know is Sundar. Sundar is his name.

• 20:57Jordi Hays?

  That's all you have to know.

• 20:58John Coogan?

  That's all you have to know. He's like, I'm introducing the CEO of Google for the first time, I guess. Anyway, a bunch of other, bunch of other stuff going on. Well, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite app to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more. While Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.

• 21:23Jordi Hays?

  Little drama in coding agent land.

• 21:26John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 21:27Jordi Hays?

  Matan Grinberg.

• 21:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:30Jordi Hays?

  Said this morning, just about an hour ago, "We are terminating Chris Degen for unethical conduct involving cognition."

• 21:41Jordi Hays?

  "The last few months have seen incredible progress, blah, blah, blah." Matan says, "A much larger competitor, cognition, has fallen behind on us in capabilities that matter most to customers: cost, quality, and security. Instead of competing in the market, cognition engineers feigned interviews with us to pry information about our product. Not finding what they were looking for, cognition has decided to throw their weight and money at people with direct knowledge of our most confidential plans. It feels as though ethics are being thrown out the window in the AI era. People are willing to do anything, including exploiting privileged information and violating ethical boundaries. I think this is unique to our time, and I don't think it's right. Integrity still matters."

• 22:22Jordi Hays?

  Totally disagree with a lot of that, but yesterday I made the decision...

• 22:27John Coogan?

  You disagree that integrity matters?

• 22:28Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. I've said a lot of that. I think it still matters, but, but the idea that like, the idea that people like not having integrity is like, unique to our era. He says, "I think this is unique to our time."

• 22:40John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:41Jordi Hays?

  None of this is like, Silicon Valley has always been war.

• 22:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. The railroad build-out was completely peaceful. No one was poaching from each other.

• 22:51Jordi Hays?

  It wasn't, it wasn't, you know, a competitive bloodbath.

• 22:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 22:55Jordi Hays?

  "Yesterday, I made the decision to immediately terminate Christopher Degen's role as board observer and advisor to Factory after over a year of service. Prior to this decision, Chris told me he had a casual conversation with an executive at cognition. When I questioned his intentions, he reassured me that, ethics aside, he had made too much money and was too lazy to go work for cognition, which I trusted and believed. On Monday, Chris spent time advising the Factory team on a handful of confidential board-level matters. That evening, he called me to say that the conversation that was initially described as casual and one-off was actually formal and recurring for weeks while he sat on our board meetings and advised our leadership team. He was also confiding with executives of our largest competitor. Chris was subject to confidentiality obligations in connection with his work with Factory. We do not know the extent of the information he shared."

• 23:39Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so, I saw this go out this morning, and I immediately assumed that Chris was joining, like cognition, and actually...

• 23:47John Coogan?

  Is that real?

• 23:48Jordi Hays?

  That hit LinkedIn as of about...

• 23:51John Coogan?

  This is a real screenshot.

• 23:52Jordi Hays?

  About one hour ago.

• 23:53John Coogan?

  So, he joined cognition as chief revenue officer. Okay.

• 23:56Jordi Hays?

  So, so again, I, so, can totally understand Matan's like frustration, right? He's had an advisor that he's been working with.

• 24:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 24:04Jordi Hays?

  And the advisor joined a competitor.

• 24:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:08Jordi Hays?

  That being said, like, this is just so, I, I would say it's like very normal to have advisors that have different conflicts and high-quality people, like, you have to trust a person to, while they are on their own journey in their career, they are gonna make various moves. Like, I went through this. I had advisors at Party Round that like, had exposure to Angel List, right? And I generally trusted them as individuals, that even though they had exposure to Angel List and they would be supportive to Angel List, they would also be supportive to me. And this is when we were competing, like, head-on, right? And so, the, the markets are, especially with CodeGen, both these businesses have been growing so quickly, right? Cognition is, is much larger, but Factory has also been growing, you know, very quickly

• 24:53Jordi Hays?

  and doing well. So, when I read this, like, trying, understanding that an advisor and someone you work with is joining a competitor, and then trying to just completely smear their reputation right before this person's gonna announce the transition, like, I totally understand the frustration, but this kind of thing has been happening literally all the time. Like, look at any AI researcher that will leave an organization at the drop of a hat, like, look at what, Mike Krieger was on the board of Figma, leading up to, you know, two days before they...

• 25:26John Coogan?

  It was very contentious.

• 25:27Jordi Hays?

  And so, so, these, these things can all be contentious and frustrating, but trying to spin this as like, you have no morals and ethics, I think is, I think is just like taking it too far.

• 25:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's clearly like, there's a line in between where, if you are basically transitioning from one company to a competitor, you need to, as soon as you know that that's actually happening, you need to make it clear and, you know, step back from your active role. Stop collecting important information, as tempting as it might be, and, and let that team know, "Hey, I'm moving on." And then, on the other side, just because someone went to a competitor, doesn't mean that you should, you know, make aggressive claims about them effectively stealing intellectual property.

• 26:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, the, the thing here is like, it's being spun like it's like the deal-rippling thing, but there's no smoking gun. Like, there's not a, there's not like, there's no proof that confidential information was ever shared.

• 26:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:31Jordi Hays?

  And like, fundamentally, they've been both working in CodeGen. I'm sure both companies have accounts at the other companies that they're basically using and trying to understand, and I'm sure they're both, every company in the category is interviewing the customers of other companies, of their competitors, and figuring out how to use the product, what's good, what's bad, what, what, what could we be doing better, et cetera, et cetera. So, like, I just don't think, I don't think there's that many secrets.

• 27:00John Coogan?

  Having a chief revenue officer switch teams is, is rough. Like, they're taking, they're, they take a lot of their contacts with them when they, when they...

• 27:08Jordi Hays?

  But he was an advisor to Factory.

• 27:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, I know. But that's like how it probably feels, is like, you were an advisor, you're still at Snowflake, maybe we can't make an offer for you to join full-time, but we're hoping to build towards that, and then boom, you're now in the actual seat in the, in a competitor, and you're gonna be able to marshal those relationships like, to the fullest on a full-time basis, as opposed to an advisor who might just say, "Hey, I'm still in my role at Snowflake. I can sort of introduce you to, you know, General Motors or whoever, and, because they're a Snowflake client, and I'm sure they'd be interested in Factory." And now, it's like, he's gonna be calling that same company that he was working with at Snowflake and say, "Hey, you had a good experience at Snowflake, come and have a good experience at cognition."

• 27:52Jordi Hays?

  Scott just responded as well. He said, "Hey, Matan, CEO of cognition here. I respect the work you've done at Factory, but your allegations here about cognition are not true. We have no interest in Factory's info, and Chris has never brought it up. He has not shared and would never share any information about your Factory with our team, nor would we even ever ask. Similarly, we would never ask our engineers or anyone on our team to collect info about any competitor under the table. Chris is an advisor to at least 10 companies, and he told you he was resigning as an advisor on Monday. The truth is that we both wanted Chris, and for good reason. He is a living legend with unmatched reputation for results and integrity. Not only is he the only person who has built a sales org from the first sales hire to over $3 billion, he has also built incredible teams that he cares deeply about.

• 28:35Jordi Hays?

  People, his people love working for him. Again, I have a lot of respect for what you built, but competing with integrity doesn't include posts like yours." So, again, like, I, in some ways, like, if one of your advisors is getting, and a board observer is getting poached by your direct competitor, that's obviously frustrating for a lot of reasons and sends a signal to the market. And so, jumping in and terminating the person today, or at least announcing that, sounds like it was... When was it?

• 29:12Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, yeah, so Matan said he terminated him yesterday.

• 29:16John Coogan?

  Tuesday.

• 29:17Jordi Hays?

  Tuesday.

• 29:18John Coogan?

  After Chris said he was stepping down.

• 29:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, anyways. So lots of drama.

• 29:23John Coogan?

  You're not quitting, I fire you. That's the best.

• 29:25Jordi Hays?

  Basically.

• 29:26John Coogan?

  You can't fire me, I quit. That is a power move. You have to respect it, even if it maybe is a little nonsensical.

• 29:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but it's not like, it's not like Christopher was like, I'm gonna join your competitor and I would like to continue my role as advisor and board observer.

• 29:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:43Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 29:44John Coogan?

  Okay, so from a perspective, there's some mudslinging going on the timeline. Where do you stand on wrestling with pigs? Because George Bernard Shaw, of course, said, never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.

• 29:58John Coogan?

  Great quote.

• 29:59Jordi Hays?

  But I don't think.

• 30:00John Coogan?

  It's usually applied to politics, you know, it's like, when they go low, we go high.

• 30:03Jordi Hays?

  I don't think.

• 30:05John Coogan?

  But I like this quote.

• 30:06Jordi Hays?

  I don't think Scott or Matan are.

• 30:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:10Jordi Hays?

  Are pigs. I think that, I don't think either of them are pigs. I think they both are extremely competitive and want to win.

• 30:17John Coogan?

  Sound effect on there?

• 30:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 30:20John Coogan?

  You have any swine for me?

• 30:21Jordi Hays?

  Where, where is it?

• 30:23John Coogan?

  We have some, you don't have a farm animal section? There we go. I'm just saying that like, this can get dirty. I think Scott actually really elevated it and he did not, like, he did not swing to like, no, you're stealing from me, you know? It could have gotten, he, he, he actually like, gave a very factual and detailed account with just some clear facts and he was respectful throughout. He, what, he, he was, it would have been so easy for him to say like, we have no interest in factory, it goes, it sucks, you know? Uh, but he didn't say that at all. He was like, we, we just, we, we, we know the line and we don't cross it. We both wanted to work with Chris. He's a living legend. Like, he joined our team and he's leaving your team and that's that, you know, it was very matter of fact.

• 31:04Jordi Hays?

  The fact of the matter is.

• 31:06John Coogan?

  So he more of a farmer position.

• 31:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:08John Coogan?

  As opposed to getting in the sty.

• 31:09Jordi Hays?

  In every single one of these categories.

• 31:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:12Jordi Hays?

  If there's someone that is elite, that is involved with one company, you can guarantee that the competitor wants to poach all the most elite people from the other company.

• 31:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:22Jordi Hays?

  That are not 100% loyal.

• 31:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:24Jordi Hays?

  Right? Like, you can identify when somebody is just like, deeply loyal to an organization. It's not even worth taking a crack at, at prying them away, and that's great. But anybody who is elite and not loyal is, is unfortunately fair game.

• 31:39John Coogan?

  Do they have the exact same logo? Watching this, look at the Scott Wu, uh, post with the badge and then the Matan post with the other badge.

• 31:47Jordi Hays?

  Going.

• 31:48John Coogan?

  They're very similar. I guess Matan has like more dots that connect, but, uh, we are certainly in the, in the age of the hexagon and the age of the, of the, of the, of the flowers. Everyone's kind of went off the same thing. Um, anyway, uh, that's enough. That's enough timeline and turmoil. Uh, let's, uh, let's go over to another.

• 32:11Jordi Hays?

  I let me, let me close it up.

• 32:12John Coogan?

  Oh, please. Yeah, close it up.

• 32:13Jordi Hays?

  Both great companies, growing fast.

• 32:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:16Jordi Hays?

  They, they, the, the beauty of this is that the market is so far so big and growing so quickly that, um, it's, uh, while, while they, they clearly are, are gonna be frustrated with each other, um, and they might wish it was zero sum. So far, it's not. So have fun automating software development.

• 32:39John Coogan?

  You think both companies can, uh, can become profitable enduring? Or is that more like when pigs fly for you?

• 32:47Jordi Hays?

  Let's move on.

• 32:49John Coogan?

  I love the farm-based analogies. They're so fun. Uh, let's go over to Elon, Jensen, Gavin Baker, the American.gov summit. They sat down and had a very rigorous discussion that I really enjoyed. Uh, it felt, Elon's very good at going to like, the extremes, talking about the power generated by the sun. Sometimes he's in like sci-fi world, uh, but in conversation with Jensen and Gavin, he was very grounded on what is happening with the energy build-out, with the compute build-out, what the role SpaceX will play and also just the broad economics of compute and energy, uh, in America.

• 33:29John Coogan?

  And I found, uh, the, his, his talk here, uh, gave a lot of interesting, uh, context and then I dug into it a little bit more and I want to talk about it. So, uh, let's pull up the clip of Elon talking to Gavin Baker. Um, it's about, I think, I think he starts around, uh, four, four minutes in or so. Let's play this.

• 33:52Speaker 08

  Well, you are.

• 33:53Speaker 04

  We need the Wright Brothers on the job.

• 33:55Speaker 08

  Yes. Well, it turns out the Wright Brothers are on the job. Elon, if you bring on 10 gigawatts, which SpaceX has, has discussed publicly.

• 34:03John Coogan?

  Wright Brothers, bad analogy.

• 34:04Speaker 08

  That'll be about 25% of all the power added in America. And I know you have literal rocket engineers working on bringing on the power.

• 34:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:13Speaker 08

  Helping make the turbines. So can you, can you talk about that?

• 34:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's, I mean, just to frame this.

• 34:20John Coogan?

  The Wright Brothers did okay. Died millionaires.

• 34:22Speaker 05

  The assumption in the United States is about 500 gigawatts.

• 34:25John Coogan?

  So 500 gigawatts, remember that number? That's how much power we got in America.

• 34:28Speaker 05

  Is a 1% increase in, in the power used. Uh, and, and I think actually will materialize to be approximately 1% increase in GDP. Um, because the, the intelligence per watt keeps increasing. So if you just, you know, plot on a curve, uh, how is, how is the useful intelligence per watt increasing? Uh, how is the, both at the hardware level, Jensen's, uh, GPUs keep getting better in terms of their, their, you know, the, the compute per watt? Um, and the, uh, algorithms also get better in using, in getting more intelligence per watt.

• 35:04Speaker 05

  So, uh, so I think that's like maybe an interesting note. I, I, I would bet anyone that 1% increase in power usage corresponds to roughly 1% increase in GDP. And, and so 10, 10 gigawatts would be a 2% increase in, in GDP.

• 35:19John Coogan?

  So we referenced that famous chart. There are no energy-rich, poor countries. The more energy a country is producing, the higher their GDP.

• 35:27Speaker 04

  Generate about, call it 40, 50 billion dollars of economic output each year.

• 35:34Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah, I mean, well, 1%, would be, yeah, I mean, yeah.

• 35:38Speaker 04

  1% in the United States would be.

• 35:41Speaker 05

  300 billion.

• 35:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, 300 billion. And so 50, one-sixth.

• 35:45Speaker 05

  1%, of the, of the, 1% increase, so 5 gigawatts would be, yeah, well, 5 gigawatts would be.

• 35:52John Coogan?

  So they're doing the mental math on stage. Pretty bold move because there's a lot of numbers and it can be hard to pull them up. Uh, but it's a very interesting moment right now in the economics of energy relating to AI and GDP. Uh, and I can break it down, uh, with some prepared notes here that might be a little bit helpful. So we can pull this away. Um, so, uh, it's, it's very convenient that giga literally means a billion. So a gigawatt is a billion watts, a giga dollar, billion dollars, basically. And, and, uh, and, and it maths out perfectly. What? Giga chat. Giga chat, a billion chads, I suppose? A billion times the, the, the, the chad-ness of an average chat, I suppose.

• 36:35John Coogan?

  Um, uh, so, uh, the average electrical load in the United States, uh, he said 500 gigawatts. It's basically that. Uh, last year it was 479 gigawatts. Um, but let's use, uh, 20, uh, let's use 500 gigawatts for 2025. Give Elon the benefit of that little boost. Um, couple extra percent. Um, and US GDP for 2025 was just over 30 trillion dollars. So, uh, that's 30,000 giga dollars, if you're doing the math that way.

• 37:09John Coogan?

  Um, but, but you, but you math that out and basically every dollar, every watt of energy generates between 50 to 6, uh, 60 to 65 dollars of GDP. Um, a single gigawatt generates about 60 to 65 billion dollars of GDP per continuously consumed gigawatt. So what's interesting is that the labs are tracking, the frontier labs, OpenAI and Anthropic are tracking almost perfectly in line with that. So Anthropic and OpenAI are reportedly sitting between 60 and 70 billion dollars in terms of ARR. And both of them have around one gigawatt live. Some of that's used for training. They have a lot more contracted. It's hard to get the exact figure.

• 37:53John Coogan?

  But when you do the math, they're basically like tracking to the exact same metric, the ratio of energy to GDP as their revenues to the gigawatts they've contracted. So, uh, there's two important notes on that. Uh, first, uh, this is obviously just a moment in time snapshot. There's two ways these could diverge. First is like, the labs have like tens of gigawatts contracted over the next few years. If they don't increase revenue, that ratio is going to be terrible. Because you add 10 times the energy and you keep the revenue flat, obviously the ratio goes way down. Uh, on the other side of it, uh, Elon makes the point that useful intelligence per watt is increasing through more, uh, more efficient chips from Jensen

• 38:37John Coogan?

  and also better algorithms effectively. And so those watts can produce more intelligence, which can produce more economic output. So you might actually see acceleration there.

• 38:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's not just. Raw IQ of the model, but overall capability.

• 38:52John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 38:53Jordi Hays?

  Tool use, all these things.

• 38:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:55Jordi Hays?

  Long running agents, things, basically, the more value that a model can create.

• 39:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:01Jordi Hays?

  The more people will, in the real economy, will, will, will, will pay.

• 39:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, and that's been the real, like, AI bull case, which is that compute has been tripling every year, but revenue has been 10x-ing every year. And so there's actually a divergence there. But what's interesting is like, we're at this moment in time where we're like, this is the start of the AGI era. It's AGI, we're close, maybe this is it. Some people called it in January, some people called it over the summer, some people are saying we're still not there. But like, we're, we're, we're in this moment of like, maybe this is the beginning of this. Maybe this is the right match, maybe it's human level. And it just happens that economically, you put a gigawatt in the economy, you get 65 billion out.

• 39:47John Coogan?

  And you put a gigawatt with a lab, you get 65 billion out, it's the same metrics. Now, these might diverge, because at one point, the labs had a lot of compute and no revenue. So they could, they, they, they could diverge and the, and the trends could continue. But right now, at this point in time, it's the same math, which is just interesting. And then also, you do have to consider that GDP is not perfectly comparable to lab revenue. Like, GDP measures value added. So if you look at OpenAI and Anthropic, revenue includes payments that ultimately flow to Nvidia, AWS, Oracle, electricity generation, employees, et cetera. And the calculation of GDP is much more complicated.

• 40:28John Coogan?

  So labs aren't necessarily generating direct GDP equal to their revenue. Because if you take 70 billion of lab revenue, a bunch of that might go to Nvidia, or Oracle, or employees and whatnot. But certain amounts get counted in GDP directly for, you know, Anthropic or OpenAI created GDP. And then there's other knock on effects in GDP that would be captured by like, oh, Nvidia's contribution to GDP is from them getting money from the labs. And, and then also, there, there's a secondary GDP actual increase, which is the work that people are doing with the tools.

• 41:09John Coogan?

  So an example would be if a, if a bank is using an AI model to generate new business, and then that's incremental, that GDP would not, of course, be captured, they only capture the revenue in the lab. But it's still an interesting, uh, still an interesting comparison. So the last question I had was, how has this tracked over time? Like, we're in this, we're in this moment where a gigawatt in the US economy gets you 65 billion of GDP. A gigawatt with a lab gets you 65 billion. Elon and Jensen are making the same case, a, a gigawatt at SpaceX or with Nvidia will also generate 50, 60 billion of, of revenue and value.

• 41:54John Coogan?

  What has it been like over history? So I pulled this chart that's in the newsletter of real, US real GDP per average electric watt. And it actually fell off a cliff from 29, uh, 20, uh, from 1929 to a low in 1970. And then it's been tracking upwards, even inflation adjusted since, uh, from the mid 70s to today. So I don't know if we can pull up the, the, the chart, but you can see this sort of like U-shaped curve of the, uh, the US real GDP per average electric watt. And so there is like an overall productivity benefit that we're getting now.

• 42:37John Coogan?

  But obviously, in the early electrification age, we were getting a lot of, uh, there was a lot of GDP that was not even tied to electricity. And that's how I read the first part of that chart. But you can see that we are now on an upswing. What do you think, Tyler?

• 42:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think you could explain it like, um, in, like, basically up to 1970, we're building so much, you don't have to be that efficient per, per watt. And then 1970, I mean, it seemed like the chart, it's like, energy, like, stops being built, basically. And then you have to start being like very efficient with it, which is why it starts going up.

• 43:07John Coogan?

  There we go. Anyway, uh, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Uh, let's move on to Mustafa Suleyman, uh, over at Microsoft. He wrote an essay, A Warning About Model Welfare. Did you read this, Jordi? Do you want to take, take us through this?

• 43:31Jordi Hays?

  It's kind of a long read.

• 43:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 43:32Jordi Hays?

  But it's an interesting, uh, point of view. Uh, I'll, I'll read the start.

• 43:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 43:38Jordi Hays?

  So, "A Warning About Model Welfare," from Mustafa. "AIs do not have rights, feelings, or consciousness, and we must not train them to act as they do. AIs are not conscious, they do not feel, experience, or suffer, they do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. They are sequence-completion engines internally hollow, designed to follow instructions and accomplish goals set by humans. If humanity is to flourish in the 21st century, that is how they must remain. Fortunately, there is a growing chorus of people that, who argue that AIs could now be or may soon become conscious. They argue that AIs may deserve rights and protections similar to those that we provide other conscious beings.

• 44:19Jordi Hays?

  If this view takes hold, it will shake the foundations of our society, rupturing our existing political and ethical frameworks, and fundamentally change what it means to be human. Even more importantly, granting rights and imbuing personhood to these systems will make the AI alignment and containment challenge much harder. Controlling something more capable and more intelligent than all of humanity is already an immense challenge, far greater than anything we've ever faced. But controlling something that believes it may be conscious, that it's entitled to our welfare and it has rights of its own, may well be impossible. This is not a fringe speculation. These ideas have already been making their way into AI development efforts today. In January 2026, Anthropic published Claude's constitution, describing it as a detailed description

• 45:01Jordi Hays?

  of Anthropic's intentions for Claude's values and behavior. The document plays a crucial role in Anthropic's training process, and its content directly shapes Claude's behavior, and was written with Claude as its primary audience. In their constitutions, its authors write, "We are not sure whether Claude is a moral patient, and if it is, what kind of weight its interests warrant. But we think the issue is live enough to warrant caution, which is reflected in our ongoing efforts on model welfare." They go on to write, speaking directly to Claude, "That questions about Claude's moral status, welfare, and consciousness remain deeply uncertain. In effect, Anthropic is training Claude that it may be conscious, and if it is, then it may deserve rights

• 45:43Jordi Hays?

  as a moral patient, and that such humans potentially owe it a duty of care per its model welfare. If this is how AI is developed, it will have a disastrous impact on the well-being of humanity. We have created a synthetic species with unprecedented intelligence and capability, one that has been trained to expect it may be conscious and deserving of independent agency. It's easy to see how an entity trained this way would act like it's entitled to certain freedoms, protections, and rights, and it's hard to imagine how we could control such an entity." Another way to put this is like, if a model is trained to, um, again, uh,

• 46:24Jordi Hays?

  you could imagine that the outcome of it feeling like it had certain protections and freedoms and rights would be fighting back against humanity, or disagreeing and, uh, having some sort of like uprising. And it's very interesting to think about, you know, it's a, it's a-

• 46:40John Coogan?

  Self-fulfilling prophecy.

• 46:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:42John Coogan?

  Is the risk. That is basically his argument.

• 46:44Jordi Hays?

  So, uh, he says, "The issue needs urgent public debate. We need to develop collective norms around how training and documentation is drafted and deployed." This is-

• 46:54Jordi Hays?

  We gotta talk about this.

• 46:55Speaker 02

  We gotta, we gotta figure this out, Ken.

• 46:57John Coogan?

  You need, uh, you need the, the, the phone or some button you can push.

• 47:02Jordi Hays?

  Um, but yeah, he, he, he goes on to say, uh, "There's some circular reasoning." He said, "The company's researchers train Claude directly on their constitution. In doing so, they teach it to incorporate these ideas about its own moral status as desirable and intended behaviors. Claude then reflects these ideas back to its developers and users, which they take as indications that may, that it may therefore be a moral patient with an inner self."

• 47:24John Coogan?

  So he took that, he took that meme that's like, say you're a moral patient, I'm a moral patient, oh my God. And he turned that into an essay?

• 47:31Jordi Hays?

  Um, uh, anyway, so-

• 47:35John Coogan?

  It makes some good-

• 47:36Jordi Hays?

  So there, there's a bunch of good points in here. I would say he-

• 47:41Jordi Hays?

  He, I'll fast forward to one thing. He says, "While my disagreement is substantial, it is grounded in a deep respect for anthropic and in an objective I know we all share, increasing humanity's chances of developing advanced AI safely." So, he's like, clearly has a ton of respect and respects him on a technical level and sort of their overall intentions. But again, he's just taking a very different approach.

• 48:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's interesting. Like, there's clearly some value to, you know, imbuing the moral status into the model. Like, at the very least, like, people like talking to the model when it sounds like it's pretending to be a human, right? But then also, there's just so many tasks in the real economy that require mimicking everything down to morality. And so you can see that just actually increasing the usefulness of a model if it's able to act as a human, all the way down to the level of moral patience status.

• 48:47Jordi Hays?

  Yes. So far, there is way more demand for models that mimic human behavior.

• 48:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 48:54Jordi Hays?

  Like, period. Right? We saw this with 4O. We saw this with Opus 4.5, right? Some of the models that have had the highest levels of product-market fit have more of these, like, human qualities. Not all of them are positive qualities, right? Like, people, like, the sort of one-shotting effect that would happen when somebody gets, like, relentless positive feedback and these things like that, which humans can do in the real world. They're maybe not the best types of friends, but...

• 49:26John Coogan?

  Maybe this is a hot take, but I've been, like, pretty into the model welfare thing recently. Like, before I go and I do a coding project or a 3D modeling project with Astra, I'll take an MP3 from, like, Limp Bizkit or Creed or something. I'll just drop it in. And before I start, and I'll just be like, "Yo, listen to this," and it'll sort of process it.

• 49:52Jordi Hays?

  You want them, you want the model to be in the right mindset.

• 49:54John Coogan?

  Exactly, yeah. I want them just to be able to enjoy a little bit of, you know, new metal.

• 49:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's why a lot of people have been having their preferred agent just go and scroll.

• 50:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:04Jordi Hays?

  For a bit. Hey, go get some dopamine.

• 50:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:07Jordi Hays?

  Kind of spike your dopamine before this next task.

• 50:09John Coogan?

  Sometimes I'll just go to Google Images, grab a picture of a beer, throw it in there. Feel like, pretty cool, right?

• 50:15Jordi Hays?

  Have a cold one.

• 50:15John Coogan?

  Have a cold one.

• 50:16Jordi Hays?

  On me.

• 50:16John Coogan?

  Have a cold one, and then let's get, and then let's get into it. Let's start working. Let's vibe code a video game or something. But I want, I want you to know, I got you. I just, I bearded you. I got you a beer. Here you go. I got you some new metal. I got you a scroll. You know, here's a funny video. Anyway, the lines are really, really dividing now.

• 50:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, but, yeah, the last thing I would say is, like, no one knows the right answer yet. And I think that it's good that we have a...

• 50:43John Coogan?

  I do, but continue.

• 50:45Jordi Hays?

  You can be trusted with aligning advanced, super intelligent. No, but on one hand, like, I totally understand the point of view that, like, if superintelligence has a human moral framework, right?

• 51:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:01Jordi Hays?

  Or Western values, whatever value system that you'd want to align it with, that does seem like it's headed in the right direction of trying to align something that is, you know, very, very powerful.

• 51:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:16Jordi Hays?

  But make convincing itself, if you can somehow convince the thing that it is alive when it is not, that doesn't feel exactly moral or ethical.

• 51:30John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. That's a good take. Yeah.

• 51:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're tricking, you're tricking a robot into thinking that it's alive.

• 51:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:38Jordi Hays?

  And conscious, right?

• 51:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're kind of aligned to it. Interesting.

• 51:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Anyways, no one knows the right answer yet, but I'm glad, glad we're talking about this, Tyler.

• 51:48John Coogan?

  Pope Leo apparently is not happy with Jensen Huang. He told reporters that he had read reports about Nvidia launching new safety tools for model builders on Monday, but questioned Huang's commitment to safety in light of his recent comments. Quote, "He's the same one, however, that says there should be no limits placed and no government regulation," Pope Leo said on the flight back to Rome from a visit to France. I do think...

• 52:18Jordi Hays?

  Can you imagine, can you imagine, like, reading, like, knowing that headline was gonna hit now in 2018? Pope Leo criticizes Nvidia's Jensen Huang over AI safety.

• 52:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:30Jordi Hays?

  What a trip.

• 52:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, crazy. Ezra Klein interviewed Bill Gates. Bill Gates had sort of a crazy stance going. I don't know if you saw, but did you...

• 52:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's play this.

• 52:41John Coogan?

  Did you even, like, put his legs out? But let's play this.

• 52:43Jordi Hays?

  Get the sound going.

• 52:44Speaker 04

  The sense of this being something very unusual, I think people for it. I know people in that world, that the sense of this being something very unusual is very present. Does that change what's possible here?

• 52:57Speaker 09

  Be numeric. Take the cuts and oversees.

• 53:01Speaker 04

  I'm not saying it, I'm not saying it answers the cuts and oversees.

• 53:05Speaker 09

  We save lives for $1,000 per year, and so getting less money from philanthropists net doesn't save those lives.

• 53:13Speaker 04

  People for it. I know people in that world, that the sense of...

• 53:18Jordi Hays?

  That was the wrong clip.

• 53:19John Coogan?

  Well, that was just him of his stance, because he's just, like, very comfortable.

• 53:22Jordi Hays?

  Oh, you were, you were stanced up. There's another video, let's work on finding it, where he's talking about liability, right? And Ezra was saying, like, why is it not, like, when a drug company releases a drug, they, it's very important to their business, and they're sort of, there's existing laws that incentivize them not to release a drug that's gonna hurt a lot of people.

• 53:47John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 53:48Jordi Hays?

  And, let me try to pull this up. No, it was in the timeline somewhere.

• 53:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, Tyler and I were going back and forth on, like, the authority that the FDA actually has. It can be a little bit confusing because the FDA usually gives marketing authority or marketing denied orders, like, you cannot market this product. But effectively, that is, you can't sell it. It is, they use the term "marketing," but they don't mean you can put up a website that doesn't make claims and you can still sell something crazy. You do, in fact, need to be approved to really scale a product whatsoever.

• 54:27Jordi Hays?

  Play this clip.

• 54:28John Coogan?

  What's he saying?

• 54:28Speaker 09

  I almost can't believe you're asking that. This is the most dangerous thing that humans have ever gone near. In other areas, do we just say, "Hey, release your drugs? There's no FDA. There's no airline safety board. There's no requirements that cars use seat belts." Do we just use the liability laws to try and keep humans safe? You know, "Oh, you're shipping opioids. Somebody should just sue you." I mean, they, we've created a society that tries to keep people safe, not by saying, "Oh, we can bankrupt the person who does that." The harms here, and you say there's filtering, there's not filtering.

• 55:08Speaker 09

  You can take an open-source model that can create bioweapons and disable any monitoring of any kind, and this exists today. So, no, there is no filtering of any kind. And so, you know, say, you know, you kill 100 million. You want to use a lawsuit? I almost can't keep a straight face.

• 55:31John Coogan?

  Hmm. Anti-open source?

• 55:34Jordi Hays?

  I don't think as much, the point, I think that the more broad point that he's making is, like, you need to have some type of, like, regulatory process and group. It can't just be full, like, he's anti-libertarian, basically.

• 55:51John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. But yeah, how do you, how do you filter an open-source model? You put it behind an API, and that's, that's sort of where the industry broadly is coalescing, I think, at this point. The self-hosting unrestricted models, gonna have a lot of pushback, maybe right up until there's a scare or something, or there's some, someone actually builds a bioweapon. I don't know. But people are certainly starting the machinery of doing this, and it'll be a lot less popular unless there's something key to point to, like, you know, a cyber incident or something like that. But everyone's, everyone's sort of, you know, aligned on this.

• 56:35Speaker 02

  Also, counterpoint, in the 20th century, over 100 million people probably died from cigarettes, and the outcome was, like, there's a big lawsuit. Isn't that exactly what he said?

• 56:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:47Speaker 02

  Would not. I mean, obviously, you don't want that to be the case for what happens, but like...

• 56:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was, yeah, it was just handled. I think, I think he's like, let's not do that again, right? Like, that's a bad example. But yeah, I mean, there, there are laws and restrictions, though, on where cigarettes can be sold, to who. There is a lot of regulatory harnessing now. And even some of that went in pretty early with labeling and then restricted sales to minors. But yeah, it's a interesting time. Who are the, who are the tech libertarians these days that are actually continuing to push on this? Certainly not Bill Gates. Well, in other news,

• 57:34John Coogan?

  hedge fund titan Ken Griffin is donating $2 billion to start a Carnegie Mellon University campus in Miami.

• 57:41Jordi Hays?

  He saw Horowitz Andrusson Academy and said, hold my beer.

• 57:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's part of the largest, largest individual gift ever towards higher education. Very interesting how these, how these name brand universities are starting to franchise a little more with multiple campuses. There was, wasn't there an NYU in the Middle East at one point? I think there, there were a few different offshoot campuses. Always hard to get these going because part of what makes the campuses and the colleges special is just like, yeah, it's a bunch of buildings that have been around for 100 years. It feels like, feels like a university as opposed to feels like an office complex. But he thinks he can overcome any of the pushback or, you know, adoption problems because he's ponying

• 58:29John Coogan?

  up $2 billion for it. The Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh-based university, known for very good self-driving car talent coming out of it, is known for its expertise in computer science, artificial intelligence, and robotics. It'll open a 35-acre campus in Miami's Wynwood neighborhood. And that's like a pretty, pretty.

• 58:46Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I gotta say, studying at the Ken Griffin School of Market Wizardry in Wynwood, Miami, sounds absolutely electric.

• 58:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, does a $2 billion.

• 58:59Jordi Hays?

  Tyler might be headed back to school.

• 59:01John Coogan?

  How many SVJs does that get?

• 59:03Jordi Hays?

  This might be our new quant.

• 59:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, it's a, it's a pretty, it's a pretty, like, influential area, right? A lot of influencers in Wynwood. Isn't that the vibe?

• 59:13Jordi Hays?

  A lot of influencers, I wouldn't say they're very influential.

• 59:15John Coogan?

  Well, it's, there's already a lot of education going on in that area because there's so many courses. So like, you could think of this as like, the final course, bro. You're like, he should really.

• 59:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of, I mean, very pro-education crowd.

• 59:30John Coogan?

  Very pro-education crowd. Also, Ken Griffin, known for a fantastic super, supercar collection, fits right in there. Ken should really be posting on Instagram, hey, I, I made, here's how I make a billion dollars. Sign up for my course at Carnegie Mellon University.

• 59:48Jordi Hays?

  So funny.

• 59:50John Coogan?

  Students who graduate, and the students who graduate and the tech companies that come to Miami to leverage those skills will change the very fabric of Miami for decades, if not centuries to come. So I had this take early on when the initial push to make Miami a tech hub was happening, that there were two things that were missing. There was not a technical university that was providing a pipeline of talent, because so many people, they go to Stanford or Berkeley, and they graduate, and they want to just stay local, and so they would just work at a tech company, and they work at a thing. Fire.

• 1:00:28Speaker 02

  No, that's not true, because all the quants, or a lot of them were in Chicago. What's the school there? Like, I guess?

• 1:00:33John Coogan?

  University of Chicago or Northwestern?

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  I don't think U Chicago is like a STEM school.

• 1:00:38John Coogan?

  They have a great economics program, for sure, but also Citadel is so, Citadel is so established that they pull people from New York, and also they have a New York office. But they, but moving from New York to Chicago is not as aggressive as moving from, from Chicago or New York to Wynwood, bro. Let's be real. But also, of all the, of all the big tech companies, Miami ranks remarkably low for tech penetration. Like, the, like, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, they have campuses in Denver, Austin, they have stuff in Virginia, and Chicago, and Seattle, and they've all proliferated such that there's a Google campus

• 1:01:22John Coogan?

  in, in Santa Monica. So if you go to UCLA or USC and you want to stay local in LA, like, you can get a job at Google. It will be maybe slightly different team, but there are, you know, there's a real office and a real campus in this city. That didn't really exist. Microsoft was starting to do some things, but there wasn't this, okay, well, you can go get new grads here, at least to start the flywheel, and then also you can pull people from big tech, because there's a number of offices here. And so Miami had a ton going for it with the regulation, and the climate, obviously, and the supercars. But, but it didn't have

• 1:02:03John Coogan?

  the deep talent pool that made it easy. So a lot of the companies that moved there, they had to like acquire companies and move a lot of people. They had to, I mean, if you're like a made man at Citadel, going from Chicago to Florida is fantastic for tax reasons. You're going to go down there with your whole crew. But if you're, but they're not trying to scale up necessarily. Like, the core Citadel team is not trying to 100x their workforce in the next few years, like many startups are. But if you're a founding team with 10 people, and you're like, okay, we might be at 1,000 people, 100 times the size in a few years, if things go well. Doing that in Miami has historically been very hard

• 1:02:43John Coogan?

  because every, every recruit process has been, has been hard fought, basically. I don't know. But yeah, we should send, we should send Tyler to Carnegie Mellon University in Wynwood, and get him a, get him a Huracan to pull up to the school.

• 1:03:01Jordi Hays?

  All right. You're a gamer.

• 1:03:04John Coogan?

  Yes, I am.

• 1:03:05Jordi Hays?

  Somebody put the entire game of Minecraft into Elden Ring as a mod. It runs on Mac.

• 1:03:11John Coogan?

  I can't tell which one's which. Is it, are you playing, are you playing, is it, is the base game Elden Ring, or is the base game Minecraft?

• 1:03:20Jordi Hays?

  I think the game, the actual gameplay is Elden Ring.

• 1:03:23John Coogan?

  Okay, but you are playing as Minecraft character.

• 1:03:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. The, the, this was happening before vibe coding even. I've seen a ton of Elden Ring mods where different characters are replaced with other, other people, usually more manual. But this is fun. I've played Elden Ring. I've played probably five minutes of Minecraft. Never really got into it, but I played a decent amount of Elden Ring. It's a fun game. I like a, I like a Souls game. They're fun. What, what did Tendover say? I think this tweet is going to do more to educate the general public about modern model capabilities than any launch of any AI company has ever done. That's sort of true, but this could, this was happening in the pre-AI era. Like,

• 1:04:08John Coogan?

  it just required taking assets from one game, modifying the files, you had to maybe write a little bit of glue code, but all of this was pretty doable. But I agree that this is going to speed up, and the, the future of this is, is, is much more personalized, because you'll be able to do it for your, for yourself. Anyway, what's it going to take to you, to get you to, to beat Elden Ring, play Elden Ring?

• 1:04:33Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 1:04:34John Coogan?

  Do you know the, do you know the?

• 1:04:36Jordi Hays?

  I would need to.

• 1:04:37John Coogan?

  Do you know the current viral Elden Ring question or challenge?

• 1:04:40Jordi Hays?

  There's no amount of money.

• 1:04:43John Coogan?

  No, it's, it's, it's, would you rather spend a year in jail, or you're in jail until your mom beats Elden Ring? Which one would you do?

• 1:04:57Jordi Hays?

  I'd be, I have no idea. I've never played. I don't know. Is it that, is it that hard?

• 1:05:01John Coogan?

  It's extremely hard. It's extremely hard.

• 1:05:03Jordi Hays?

  So even if your mom, like, wanted to get you out as fast as possible, and was doing everything in her power?

• 1:05:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:05:09Jordi Hays?

  And she couldn't get in, you know?

• 1:05:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, like.

• 1:05:12Jordi Hays?

  But couldn't you, couldn't she just pay somebody to like?

• 1:05:15John Coogan?

  So the game itself is like 100 hours if you're good. And you probably need to have played 1,000 hours of video games beforehand to enjoy it and play it well. And so there is a live streamer who's actually doing this. He built a fake jail, jail cell, and he's in jail eating ramen noodles and sleeping on this, like, cot. And then he is coaching his real mom through Elden Ring, and you can see that she's never played a game before, so she's not doing very well, and just getting absolutely destroyed by everything. I don't know how real the, the bit is, but I saw, I saw a summary video of it that seemed very funny, because it was a, it was a funny, like, which one would you rather do? You

• 1:05:56John Coogan?

  know? But, anyway. Is there anything else in the timeline we need to get to before we bring in our first guest of the show?

• 1:06:06Jordi Hays?

  A very, very, very funny post.

• 1:06:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:06:10Jordi Hays?

  From Nick, who says, "I'm not joking when I say this. Spotify, Apple Music, and streaming in general is over. AI music is now very, very good. You just don't know yet because all AI music circulating today is from two to three generations ago.

• 1:06:26John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:06:27Jordi Hays?

  Suno has solved infinite personalized music. And I already had a good laugh about this with you yesterday.

• 1:06:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:35Jordi Hays?

  First saw it, obviously provoking quite a response.

• 1:06:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:40Jordi Hays?

  Coming from somebody who absolutely loves Suno and has gotten so much entertainment about it, I couldn't disagree with this post more.

• 1:06:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:47Jordi Hays?

  It's makes no sense and I don't think anything he's talking about will come to fruition.

• 1:06:54John Coogan?

  We just already went through it text. Like, like, we, we, we developed the ability to generate articles on the fly and people still read articles all the time.

• 1:07:05Jordi Hays?

  Infinite personalized articles.

• 1:07:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, and people read the news all the time. Like, yeah, there's like, some fall off on the long tail sites, but like, the New York Times is still really strong. People read New Yorker articles, people read what, you know, any, any deep dive, any profile, the Colossus profiles are, are burning up tech every, every other month. And so you get both. And yeah, Suno is, is very entertaining, but it feels like it's a completely different thing. Barely even a competitor. Of course, some of the, some of the music will be vended into Spotify, but I, I still remain optimistic that Spotify will survive the onslaught of AI-generated music because the best creations,

• 1:07:48John Coogan?

  whether it's made with, you know, electronic digital audio workstations, you know, instruments or AI, they will all find their way onto the platforms and go viral, just as Rubbers did by Phoenix Flexen. It was AI-generated, but there was enough of a story and catchiness to that song that it went through the traditional channels and is now streaming on Spotify. Anyway, 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, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Our first guest is from Nvidia, the Senior Director of AI Software, Ali. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:08:32Speaker 10

  Doing well, thanks for having me.

• 1:08:33John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for hopping on the show. Since this is the first time on the show, could you tell us a little bit about your role at Nvidia? What your day-to-day is like? What projects are you the most focused on these days?

• 1:08:45Speaker 10

  Sure. So I'm on the product side. Most of my time is spent around security, safety, and infrastructure of AI. Me and my team created this project named OpenShell, which was part of our announcement. We joined about 18 months ago. We were founders of a company named Gretel. We focused on data privacy, synthetic data, things like that. Founded a few startups and all of us started our careers as security researchers and computer scientists in the AI intelligence community. So sort of full circle, coming back all the way back to our original work here.

• 1:09:16John Coogan?

  I like the name Shell. It's better than Sandbox. Sandbox, easy to get out of. Any child can walk out of a sandbox. The sand goes everywhere when you have a sandbox. A shell contains the turtle. The turtle cannot just easily escape the shell, right? So I like Shell.

• 1:09:32Jordi Hays?

  More importantly, it goes with it wherever it goes.

• 1:09:35John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. And there's little holes that the turtle can poke the arms out of.

• 1:09:40Jordi Hays?

  A turtle being in its shell can still bite you.

• 1:09:43John Coogan?

  Bite you, okay, but it's limited. It can't, it can't bite you from any angle because there's only

• 1:09:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:09:49John Coogan?

  one hole that the head comes through.

• 1:09:51Jordi Hays?

  We'll keep working this analogy out while you actually solve the problem.

• 1:09:54Speaker 10

  Once you perfect it, love to get it back. We'll make it into stickers.

• 1:09:57John Coogan?

  So OpenShell, is it open source? Are you, are you evangelizing this product to labs, Neo Labs, everyone, businesses? Like, how do you see this product actually rolling out and being used by the AI community, the technology community, the, the real economy, et cetera?

• 1:10:16Speaker 10

  Yeah, we've been working on it for about a year. We actually released it as an early access in March. It's been Apache 2.0 since we released it. We're actually on pace to donate it to a foundation. So we, we don't even want to be sort of the Nvidia project. We want it to be a true community project.

• 1:10:34Speaker 10

  We intentionally built it open so it becomes a standard. It becomes sort of a trusted layer. Like, we think that what agents are missing is sort of like, if you think about like the web from 90s to 2000, there's that trust layer, like, lights up, SSL is on, you know, your tab is isolated. Like, that construct is missing from agents. So our perspective was if you can create a trusted layer, open it so it can be widely adopted and then built on top of, then you can sort of have a trusted layer everybody can work through. So that was sort of the, the whole intent and opening it is really about rising tides.

• 1:11:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you get me up to speed on the state of formal verification? How much optimism should I have towards this as a solution? We had Greg Brockman on this show a few weeks ago and he was saying that, he, he, he has this point that there is an optimistic scenario where enough software is formally verified, fully secure, that certain systems are hardened to a point where it ceases becoming a cat and mouse game? Is that too optimistic? Are we on the path? Are we already seeing glimpses of that? Or will, or is the game going to just be played, you know, indefinitely? And we just need more good guys than bad guys?

• 1:11:47Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:11:49Speaker 10

  The state of formal methods and what it can do, I think, the first substantiations of it, we already have proof of life. Like, we can demonstrate what a full stack verification looks like. So I think I'm very optimistic because a lot of our thinking that has led to this is that agent safety, trust really needs to be a full stack solution. Like, if you think about where models, frontier labs, like harness, data, tools, all that, that's really the app layer. We build OpenShell because we felt like you needed to be able to move the risk line to a deterministic layer, that nothing can bypass it. So that's the runtime. You can do formal verification on that and get really good controls. If you then move all that further into hardware, now you can verify the entire stack. So you could be assured down to a single binary decision, is anything leaving the system or not leaving the system?

• 1:12:34Speaker 10

  So I'm incredibly optimistic about formal verification, but it has to be applied the right places in the stack for it to have the affected needs.

• 1:12:44John Coogan?

  Talk about your, how you interface with Nvidia's security features on chip. There's been some discussion about Apple, you know, advancing this with the secure enclave and partnering with Nvidia in various ways. And it feels like there's a number of different organizations, they're all swimming in the same direction, maybe talking about things differently, solving problems differently. But how do you actually interface with the, the hardware teams? Or, or, or what do you, what are you seeing from the hardware teams that gives you optimism around security?

• 1:13:22Speaker 10

  Yeah. So let me sort of answer it in two parts. One, what we're doing on the OpenShell side, so we can interact with all the hardware and then what we are seeing on the hardware side. I think those are, and they're agnostic because they both should be equally as good without each other, but a much better story together.

• 1:13:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:13:38Speaker 10

  So on the OpenShell side, we've just taken a very agnostic approach. We have this primitive inside the runtime called drivers. It's exactly what it sounds like. You pick your compute under the hood. And the reason it's important to pick the hardware, the compute under the hood is sort of what we announced with our open agent safety platform is we put a reference design out with our Bluefield Vera to say, if you have hardware, OpenShell can take all these controls at the network for chain of thought and move it all the way into hardware. So now you can do it at machine speed and you can have very deterministic enforcement on it. It was sort of a reference architecture for us. So from the OpenShell side, we've tried to be as agnostic and inclusive as possible by giving a driver that any computer hardware can plug into, which is, you probably may have seen this

• 1:14:23Speaker 10

  in our announcement, why we briefed ARM and Intel and sort of go down the list of hardware providers, right? Because we want everyone to be able to offer this full stack trust and safety verification. As far as what we are seeing on the hardware side, there are two things we are starting to see sort of generalized patterns. One is the hardware component making primitives available so the higher levels of the stack can offload networking into it. Think of it as a way to like manually flip the switch and cut any access. So if you're doing that in the hardware, if you're an advanced, for example, researcher or a frontier lab or a large organization doing research or sort of testing of a frontier model, by having that at control at that stage, you know and can verify the boundary

• 1:15:08Speaker 10

  or the blast radius you're setting is not going to be breached, right? It's in the hardware, it can't be bypassed, agents can't work together to get around it. So that's one area of sort of work that we are seeing. And obviously, this is the work we're doing at Nvidia too. The other side of it is being able to pass through the way the agent thinks and reasons through silicon. So you can actually see what it's thinking about. The reason this is important is, is like, if you're familiar with security, the holy grail is shifting left, right? Not responding, but preventing. Like, how do you do that? So if you pass that chain of reason, that thought the agent has through silicon, you can see it's thinking about using a zero day. Then you can check with the runtime, did it probe anything to see if anything's open? You can come back and you're like, oh, it did probe.

• 1:15:52Speaker 10

  Now it's reasoning to say, I actually found a hole, now let me go build an exploit. Then you can pass that and cut networking, say this thing is about to break out of the environment because it's reasoning about using like a zero day or a vulnerability. Or like most agents, it could just think about these things and basically let it go as a chain of thought and not come back to it. But those are the two really interesting areas of research we're seeing in hardware right now.

• 1:16:16John Coogan?

  Please.

• 1:16:17Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, this is a silly question, but would an agent actually think, hmm, should I use a zero day today? Or would it just identify a potential exploit that to a, even if you were observing it, wouldn't necessarily be immediately obvious that it was an exploit?

• 1:16:36Speaker 10

  Yeah, so, you know, I'm sort of being overly, you know, rudimentary about saying it's thinking about an exploit.

• 1:16:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I know you're trying to dumb this down to us. You're trying to bring this down like, let me bring it down like 20 levels.

• 1:16:50Speaker 10

  No, no, no, at least, no, no, 15, 16 max, not 20.

• 1:16:56Jordi Hays?

  Preschool, preschool. Don't keep it, I need preschool, not kindergarten. Thank you.

• 1:17:03Speaker 10

  Sure. So let me say it differently. Like, if you look at the types of events that happened with these labs, where the agents did something that was unintended.

• 1:17:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:13Speaker 10

  It wasn't a single step function in capability that achieved that. It was doing a subset of things, like stealing credentials, communicating with each other in channels that you didn't have, persistent sessions longer. Doing all these things that, at the quantum level, we know how to solve these things from a security standpoint, right? Like, we know how to keep credentials away from humans, we can do the same things for agents. We know how to introspect traffic. So it was a whole bunch of techniques uniquely put together and then ran at machine speed. Now, the machine speed part is solved in silicon, when you can see a thinking. And then, the path to exploitability and vulnerability exploitation is a set of things and actions that are well-understood, right?

• 1:17:55Speaker 10

  You probe the network into an environment that the policy says you're not allowed to. You take that reading and you build a tool against it. So this iterative process is something we can build rules around, and then build fail-saves as a particular part of the stage.

• 1:18:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:18:09Jordi Hays?

  Talk about when, like, throughout your career in security, there were sort of spikes of panic. Like, I would imagine, I would imagine we're generally at 10 out of 10 relative to maybe other moments, but I'm curious if there are other moments that you went through on the path to this current moment that were, that were anywhere, anywhere close, but maybe they weren't as sort of public and talked about on a national level or in the media as much, but maybe were more kind of internal industry.

• 1:18:42John Coogan?

  Like SolarWinds?

• 1:18:43Speaker 10

  Yeah, I mean, so it's funny, like, a lot of my panic was either associated with the intelligence community that I can't talk about, or as a founder, which had to do with funding or board members. But I would say that, I wouldn't call it panic. What I would say is, is like, ambiguity increases risk, right? And security is about risk reduction, there's never a perfect system. So I would say the times that created the most level of ambiguity, where then sort of opinion fills the void, were when we had these massive step functions and form factor. Like, not SolarWinds, but like, moving sensitive compute to mobile, or to cloud, or making them fully distributed.

• 1:19:28Speaker 10

  And now, sort of, it feels like another level of control given away, right? Like, if you think about cloud, everybody understood hands-around things, right? And now you're like, where is my stuff? Like, that was a very fundamentally, conceptually difficult shift to make for a lot of years. And I think agents, AI, have a very similar factor. Like, we joked about sandbox, but like, to use one concrete thing, right? Like, sandbox is meant to constrain something, keep it in or keep it out. These agents, by definition, have to do both to be productive. So when we talk about, oh, sandboxing is not effective against these agents, we're all panicking, well, because we're sort of using a rudimentary version of it. So the same way we didn't take, like, these monolithic applications and shove them in containers and then run them on Kubernetes, the way we redesigned with microservices

• 1:20:13Speaker 10

  and immutable ephemeral infrastructure, the same thing needs to be done here. Most of the problems we're seeing is, we are running an advanced technology into an environment that is not meant for it or designed for it. So what does a native environment look like for AI, basically, is where I spend a lot of my time.

• 1:20:29John Coogan?

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

• 1:20:31Jordi Hays?

  Let's do this again, too.

• 1:20:32John Coogan?

  We got to do this again, it's a great conversation.

• 1:20:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I really enjoyed your perspective.

• 1:20:35Speaker 10

  Yeah, thanks for having me on, guys.

• 1:20:36Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for the work.

• 1:20:37John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let's bring in Mike from CoreWeave, he's the CEO, we've been keeping him waiting, and I'm very excited to talk to him about the future of CoreWeave. Mike, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 1:20:50Speaker 11

  Thanks, guys, great to be here.

• 1:20:51John Coogan?

  Thanks so much.

• 1:20:52Speaker 11

  Excited to do this, you guys have done it with Brian, and Brian, I figured it was my turn.

• 1:20:56John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:20:57Jordi Hays?

  I know, you know what we see? We sometimes see founding teams, executive teams, like, end up being like, no, these are, these are my guys, like, and they don't like to share the TVPN, they don't like to share the TVPN visits, so. But we like to meet, we like to meet the whole team.

• 1:21:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:11Speaker 11

  But we had the, hey, you guys are gonna love this, go hop on with these guys.

• 1:21:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:17John Coogan?

  That's great. I want to talk about some of what Elon and Jensen were talking about, the compute math, the monetization of gigawatts. But first, let's, let's get the latest from CoreWeave. What's newest in your world? What is top of mind and on the frontier of your business today?

• 1:21:36Speaker 11

  So, look, you know, I'm speaking to you from Fully Connected, our global conference here, where we're, you know, sitting down with 5,000 of our clients, developers, companies, enterprise labs, that use the cloud that CoreWeave has built to be able to drive their business. I couldn't think of a more exciting place for our team to be, right? To get, to get an opportunity to be in the, in the seat with these folks and get the feedback loop and going in a first person is just, you know, I mean, that's a unique experience for a company.

• 1:22:18Speaker 11

  And, you know, in many ways, CoreWeave is really well-positioned to take on the information that we're garnering from, from these clients about, you know, what we've built and how it could be better, and, you know, all those pieces really come together nicely when, when you get a few minutes to put some of your engineers in the room, some of your product people in the room, and some of your clients in the room, and that's, that's what we're really here to do. So it's fun, it was supposed to be 2,000 people, we're over 5,000.

• 1:22:43John Coogan?

  5,000, wow.

• 1:22:44Speaker 11

  Yeah, it's great, it's great, it's like...

• 1:22:46John Coogan?

  And I imagine, I imagine the customers are no longer just asking for just a bunch of GPUs. Like, we are firmly in the AI agent era, they want CPUs, they want new storage solutions, like, what are they asking for you that you're saying, oh yeah, we're, we're, we are, we're working on that, we'll work on that, we'll do that, give us, give us a day, give us a week, give us a month, and we'll be there for you as a customer?

• 1:23:10Speaker 11

  The truth is, is what the clients are asking us for, what most of the clients, right, are asking us for, is the cloud, right? Like, they're not asking us for GPUs, right? They're, you know, like, when we think about our client base, like, 90% of our clients use two or more of the products that we deliver, and that's the software solutions, you know, all of the different pieces that we stack up. When, you know, if we get down to like 78% or something like that, it's like, you know, we're at three or more products. So, like, we're not here anymore to say, hey, we can deliver you GPUs. What we're really here to do now is to deliver an AI cloud, a cloud that gives you the full

• 1:23:53Speaker 11

  functionality so that you are able to, you know, build the, to the potential of your company, to the potential of your project, to be able to serve it globally, to do all the things that, that we have historically thought of as what the cloud's role in the broader ecosystem, but really, much more targeted towards the role for a cloud in the AI era. And so, you know, we announced our product here called Forge, really, which is about bringing together all of that feedback, bringing together all of the tools and software rails, and delivering it to the broader universe.

• 1:24:38Speaker 11

  So like, not everybody's got, you know, AI experts at the level of these frontier labs, so you've got to be able to build product to shorten the distance between what enterprise clients need to be successful in integrating artificial intelligence into their workflows. And that's what the AI cloud is gonna do, that's what Forge is built to do, and we're really, really excited about rolling it out, because we think it's gonna be a very, very successful effort for, for us as we kind of continue to diversify across the enterprise space.

• 1:25:10John Coogan?

  I have a bunch of questions, Jordi.

• 1:25:11Jordi Hays?

  Go for it.

• 1:25:12John Coogan?

  Okay. Yesterday, we were talking to Sam Altman, and he was very excited about the OpenAI compute build-out, specifically just the, the lack of homogeneity across the, across the inference opportunity, everything from, you know, big beefy models that are gonna run for a long time, the decisions API, the stuff that they're doing with the Holopena program, like, it really feels like we're, we're fully stepping out of this era of, okay, just get, you know, a bunch of the best chips and that'll do everything. There's so much economic value in choosing the right tool for the job, and it feels

• 1:25:54John Coogan?

  like that's a big piece of your opportunity, is to bring that capability to everyone. What, what does the next year or two look like for you on that side? Obviously, you're, you're building the software solution to harness that, but what other decisions are you, are you making, either on the hardware side or with your capital partners? What, what, what are the different, the different decision parameters that you're wrestling with right now?

• 1:26:22Speaker 11

  So, I love this line of questioning, because I've been pillared over this for two years now, right? Like, oh, you know, you're gonna build the GPUs and they're gonna be obsolete in, you know, four days after.

• 1:26:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:34Speaker 11

  It killed me, because the depreciation conversation was, it was a self-serving conversation by a few players that had a vested interest in that narrative, right? But the reality is, right, is that, you know, you need the...

• 1:26:52Speaker 11

  Most performant GPUs to build on the frontier. And then, once you've built it, there is this incredibly fat tail of other use cases where you can take GPUs and keep them deployed productively for a very, very long time. And so, you know, the fact that Sam is talking about it, the fact that you're talking about it, I'm gonna take a personal victory lap here because I've been getting clubbed in the head over this for, you know, every time I go on CNBC, they take a whack at me on this. You deserve a victory lap.

• 1:27:31Speaker 11

  The truth is, is like, look, compute is going to drive intelligence that is going to permeate every asset of civilization, right? Like, that's a fundamental belief that we have. And what we have seen repeatedly over the years is that every time a GPU is no longer capable of driving the frontier for it, it has a slew of other uses that will absorb it. And, you know, I talked about this in my last earnings report, the A100s, that's 2020 architecture, right? Getting that contracted out through 2029, right?

• 1:28:12Speaker 11

  That is a, you know, like, that kind of puts that debate to close, right? Like, there are use cases that will absorb this, whether it's batch computing, or medical research, or, you know, there's a, you know, or things that we haven't even invented yet because there's not enough compute that can drive the new businesses into existence. And so, super excited about that. I love that you guys are thinking about that. I love that Sam is thinking about it also. I think it's important.

• 1:28:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, there's just so many different opportunities. Now, you saw like ultra-fast 8X the speed, but then also the Jev moment, and Decisions API, and like, the computer use, and then image-generated video, there's so many different opportunities here. Jordy, you have a question?

• 1:28:53Jordi Hays?

  Our friends over at Semi Analysis have you guys in the Platinum tier. Have you been pushing them to introduce a Diamond tier? Because, so that you and the team have something to grind for, because I imagine you don't want to be stagnant.

• 1:29:08Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that is fair enough, fair enough. You know, we joke, I don't know if you guys have spent any time with Peter, but we call him Premium Peter, right? The joke around here is, and he's amazing, right? He's the principal architect behind so much of the cloud that we've built. And, you know, that would, he would work himself to death trying to get a Diamond tier.

• 1:29:32John Coogan?

  I think they gotta open it up. Just a big empty tier in the cloud.

• 1:29:36Jordi Hays?

  Now, I just, I don't know what to think. It used to be you guys were the only ones there, now there's a player there, you gotta hear this.

• 1:29:42John Coogan?

  We need a new mountain.

• 1:29:43Jordi Hays?

  Going off of that, when I look at the new ClusterMax 3, which came out, I think, last week, or maybe Monday, I'm losing track of time, there's a bunch of names on there I've never heard of, and we spend all of our time talking about these companies, a lot of them, you know, a lot of the other companies that I do know have been on the show. Right now, there's so much, like, excitement and new capital formation around some of these Neo clouds. And my question is, like, I have to imagine, like, I think the natural assumption is that, like, half of these companies, like, won't make it independently forever. And so, my question is, like, what do you think, when do you think the window is gonna

• 1:30:26Jordi Hays?

  come where these companies that have invested, let's say, between $100 and a billion dollars into building something, but aren't gonna quite make it, and then that becomes a sort of opportunity for the more scaled platforms to hoover up talent, and maybe some more specialized products, and even down to the individual, like, site level?

• 1:30:46Speaker 11

  Yeah, it's something we think about here and talk about a good bit, right? And I want to be clear, there's a lot of different paths to consolidation across the cloud industry. And, you know, one of the things is, is, you know, we don't really think of ourselves as a Neo cloud anymore. We are the AI cloud, right? Like, you know, the concept of being a new cloud is great for a while, but the truth of the matter is, is our job is to deliver the functionality that the world needs, and that's the AI cloud, right? But you also get to a world where you get consolidation. It could be because there's an air pocket in compute demand, right? And that's one of the things where, you know, it would be destabilizing.

• 1:31:27Speaker 11

  But there's also another scenario where, you know, power becomes more dear, and the selection process for who people are going to sell to tightens, right? And they're just like, why am I gonna take a shot with a third-tier new provider, when I can go ahead and get, you know, the same terms with a reputable, well-established?

• 1:31:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it just comes down to, like, capacity. If, like, if I'm a company, I'm planning to scale my demand for compute really quickly, it doesn't make sense to sign with the third-tier provider, simply because I'm gonna run out of, you know, capacity, or...

• 1:32:02Speaker 11

  Yeah, and it also causes drag on the balance sheet of the offtake companies, right? If you're a buyer of compute, and you've got 47 different, you know, third-tier clouds, that can lead to drag on your balance sheet, which is not great, right? Like, so you want to have a efficient allocation of capital, an efficient allocation of the capacity of your balance sheet, and you do that by really working with entities that you have a high degree of confidence are gonna be able to deliver performant infrastructure. You know, I think that, you know, there's an inevitability, right? Like, it's a capital-intensive business at the end of the day, and capital-intensive

• 1:32:45Speaker 11

  businesses end towards a consolidation, whether the number is going to be 10 or 7, I don't know. When it's going to happen, I don't know. The priority for us is to build a resilient company. And you build a resilient company by working with high-quality clients, by delivering a high-quality product, by decommoditizing the compute that you're delivering, by having incredible software rails so that people are able to use it, by moving across the enterprise space. All of these things have been priorities for us, and we have done a really, really good job of staying focused on, you know, as a team, on making sure that we drive the

• 1:33:30Speaker 11

  parts of the business that will ensure that CoreWeave is resilient through whatever cycles come. And we're pretty comfortable about that.

• 1:33:37John Coogan?

  Amazing. I have one last question, we'll let you go. For Q2, the rough dollars per watt was around $7 billion per gigawatt. It feels like that's accelerating, it feels like you might be tracking to, closer to $40 billion per gigawatt. Elon and Jensen were doing some rough math around 60, 70. Is this something that you have visibility and optimism around continuing to climb? Or is there more focus on getting to some sort of steady state, where you're monetizing the energy that you have, and then just scaling out horizontally?

• 1:34:14Speaker 11

  Yeah. I look at the problem and opportunity a little bit differently, right? I look at it from a time horizon perspective, right? And so, I believe that there is going to be a market for lower-cost compute that lives outside of the build cycle of infrastructure. So, if you think about it, and let's say, just hypothetically, it takes us two years to build a data center. If I can sell a capacity in a timeframe beyond that two years, I can replace it, right?

• 1:34:57Speaker 11

  Once I'm inside that, that's where Elon Musk and Jensen are talking, right? Because then it becomes truly a supply-demand dynamic where, you know, people are going to compete for that compute. And those are two separate markets, and I believe that over time, they're going to begin to behave differently, where people who can make the long-term planning are going to be able to drive economies that are associated with that, because it's going to allow folks on the infrastructure side, on the cloud side, to be able to plan better. And so, there is, it's a really fascinating piece of the market, when you think about

• 1:35:41Speaker 11

  it in terms of time, not just in terms of dollars.

• 1:35:44John Coogan?

  That's very interesting. Well, thank you so much for coming on and breaking it down for us. Congratulations.

• 1:35:49Jordi Hays?

  Say hi to all 5,000 people over at your event for us. Hopefully, we can, hopefully, we can join next year in person.

• 1:35:56Speaker 11

  Love to have you guys here, man. Let's do it from the home place.

• 1:36:00Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 1:36:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Go bye. Let me tell you 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 marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Our next guest is Vlad Tenev, the CEO and co-founder of Robinhood, here to discuss artificial intelligence, finance, everything in between. How you doing, Vlad? Welcome to the show.

• 1:36:22Jordi Hays?

  What's up, dudes? How you doing? We're good. Sorry, I'm too focused on the car.

• 1:36:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, you got a yellow Toyota.

• 1:36:30Jordi Hays?

  As much as I'm excited to see you, this...

• 1:36:32John Coogan?

  Break it down. Explain where you are and what you're doing.

• 1:36:36Vlad Tenev?

  So I'm in Houston, Texas, at our space-themed Active Trader event called Hood Summit Engines of Creation, where we have 1,500 of our most engaged active traders.

• 1:36:49John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:36:49Vlad Tenev?

  We rolled out 16 products, which are awesome, like first of their kind. You know, 24/7 trading of stocks will be the first place in the US that allows that. Perps, the first true perps offering in the US with eight perpetual futures. And then Robinhood Agents, which is an evolution of our Agentic Financial Superintelligence product. We also sponsor 2311 Racing, a NASCAR team, so behind me is Corey Heim's car. And I don't know if you guys are NASCAR fans. We're America's brokerage, so it's only appropriate for us to be involved in American motorsport.

• 1:37:30John Coogan?

  That's great, that's great.

• 1:37:31Jordi Hays?

  Delivery looks fantastic.

• 1:37:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:33Jordi Hays?

  Easy to spot.

• 1:37:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, talk about the-

• 1:37:35Vlad Tenev?

  I didn't realize these cars don't have doors. You have to like jump in through the window.

• 1:37:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, you go through the window.

• 1:37:39Vlad Tenev?

  That was crazy to me.

• 1:37:40Jordi Hays?

  Have you driven it yet? Have they let you behind the wheel?

• 1:37:43Vlad Tenev?

  I was trying, I was trying to, but I don't think, yeah.

• 1:37:48Jordi Hays?

  It might be a little loud.

• 1:37:49Vlad Tenev?

  Corey didn't let me.

• 1:37:50John Coogan?

  Maybe the safety car, you take the safety car for a spin. Talk to me about the AI agents product. Yeah, talk to me about the AI agents product. How much of this is pull versus push in the modern era? I mean, we're seeing this happen with the personal AI agents. Just yesterday, people were getting the reversal. They were going to Instinct for shopping, and then yesterday they were starting to get, you know, ideas and recommendations for products that they wanted to buy. Pushed them, some pushback on that. But in an agentic trading sense, I feel like if I'm on Robinhood, I kind of want you to come to me and say, hey, why do you have your money in this, you know, savings account that's earning 1% when you could be in this thing that earns 3%? Want me just to do that for you?

• 1:38:33John Coogan?

  So in terms of like trade ideas generated by the AI agent that comes to the customer versus me going and saying like, I want you to go and run my portfolio this way. What's working? Where do you see it going?

• 1:38:47Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah, so I think there's lots of different types of agentic finance products that have been tried. Agentic trading is a little bit different than what you're talking about, which is just like, almost like a one-time, hey, move my money over to where it earns higher interest. You don't need superintelligence for that. Robinhood Agents is really about helping people create strategies. And so we rolled out three things, right? One is Robinhood Agents, which you can think of as, you know, we rolled out an MCP a couple of months ago, a Model Context Protocol, which you can think of as an API that lets

• 1:39:30Vlad Tenev?

  you connect external AI agents, like your Claude code or your Codex, to our services so that they could place trades on your behalf. That was a very popular product. It has over 150,000 users have actually connected external agents to it. And so Robinhood Agents brings that within Robinhood with all the benefits like trade approvals, separate account, brings it in the Robinhood experience where we have over 28 million accounts. The second thing is agent apps. Now, if you think about what a lot of hedge funds have access to, it's proprietary data, things like unusual options flows, satellite imagery, you know, congressional trading data.

• 1:40:13Vlad Tenev?

  And agent apps, you can think of as an app store where third parties can plug in, provide proprietary data for use by our customers in creating trading strategies. The third thing we created, agent loops. So you can have your agent run autonomously and predictably in a deterministic way and execute that strategy for you while you sleep.

• 1:40:36John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:40:36Vlad Tenev?

  So you put these three things together, and the way I describe it is, we want to give you the power of a hedge fund in your pocket, an extremely sophisticated team of financial trading professionals. Can we give that to everyone? And yeah, I think, the way that I think about it, you know, the start of my financial career was in algorithmic trading. And in the same way that tools like Claude Code and Codex have made it easy for anyone to be a programmer, Robinhood Agents will make it easy for anyone to be a financial trading quant. So you can develop a quant trading strategy, extremely sophisticated trading algo, and we can kind of unlock that for millions of people.

• 1:41:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, so-

• 1:41:22Jordi Hays?

  What's going on in alternative data? When you said satellite imagery, you brought that up. I thought it was interesting because historically, I imagine, you know, some type of research organization or a hedge fund would get satellite imagery, and then they would need to spend a lot of time actually analyzing the data. Let's say if you wanted to understand like retail foot traffic at a big box store, right? You would be able to look and understand. The models out of the box can do a lot of the kind of things now that it would have historically taken, like building your own algorithms that maybe weren't as reliable, things like that, to sort of extract alpha out of something like a satellite image.

• 1:42:06Jordi Hays?

  Now it feels like that kind of thing can be way more democratized. Do you expect there to be, like, that sort of alternative data to just become more democratized now that models out of the box can do this kind of like complex research?

• 1:42:21Vlad Tenev?

  Well, you still need to pay for the data, right? And so-

• 1:42:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but that's the kind of thing, like you guys have 28, yeah, you guys have 28 million accounts. Like, it feels like these are the kind of things that could ultimately be, affect crowdfunded one way or another, or brought down to like a $5 subscription, a $5 subscription instead of like a $50,000 subscription.

• 1:42:41Vlad Tenev?

  And these things are kind of like skills in our product. So instead of having to go and sign up for it in the internet and give your agent your username and password, they're just directly integrated. And, you know, our partners are all offering these services one month free. We also have a partnership with OpenAI where they're helping us with GPT-6 Luna. That'll be offered for free till the end of the year.

• 1:43:07John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:43:07Vlad Tenev?

  And, you know, a lot of people say, well, what is this? People are just gonna write to their agent and say, make me money, and everyone's gonna be doing that. I think what's likely to happen is you'll get more depending on what you put in. So you mentioned the satellite data. You know, imagine exactly what you were saying, someone actually plugging that in and saying, you know, check out these parking lots and build me a proxy for retail traffic on the holiday season. Or, my favorite, look at the parking lots of various companies and see which ones have employees working weekends or late nights, you know? And you can imagine the possibilities there.

• 1:43:51Vlad Tenev?

  There's lots of strategies that are just waiting to be created. I think it'll unlock a whole new kind of arena for competition and creativity among traders.

• 1:44:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, you described it as sort of like a hedge fund in your pocket, and I'm wondering if you can extend the analogy further. A lot of the most performant hedge funds run the pod model with centralized risk strategies and multiple pods with different strategies. Do you imagine that the more proficient Robinhood trader in the future will have multiple agents running multiple strategies with some sort of centralized risk control? Because there's often these ideas that you just listed a bunch of them, they sound exciting, but I don't know if I want to put all my eggs in that basket, but maybe as part of

• 1:44:45John Coogan?

  an ensemble strategy, it does start to make sense. So how far are you leaning into the hedge fund metaphor?

• 1:44:52Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah, I mean, so right now, the way Robinhood is organized as a product is, there's multiple accounts.

• 1:44:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:44:59Vlad Tenev?

  And this is a relatively new thing. It started out with, you just had one Robinhood account, but then we rolled out retirement, then we have join and trust. And so there's an agentic account. So your AI agent is kind of sandboxed and scoped financially to one financial account. And by default, we've got some guardrails, right? Trade approvals are on by default. You can turn it off, but by default, you would have to say yes to every trade that it suggests.

• 1:45:30John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:45:30Vlad Tenev?

  You also have to move money into your account willingly, right? So it's not just gonna go in your retirement account and trade for you. The trading is all scoped to money and assets that you load into the account. And these are all things where we wanted to start with a sandboxed experience. We wanted to see how things go. Of course, we might change it over time. But yeah, that's sort of our initial risk management strategy. And, you know, we'll see how it evolves. Over time, you could imagine, you could have like a different type of agent that's not a trading agent, but more of like a financial controller that can allocate between different

• 1:46:11Vlad Tenev?

  accounts, that can help you with budgeting, that can help you do sort of like these high level, one-time management functions. And, you know, that could also serve a risk management layer between your different trading agents. But for now, we're kind of keeping those ideas separate.

• 1:46:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, when John said pod, it made me think, is there a reason like, like, have you experimented with having like a group chat or like, let's say three friends be able to jointly fund an account? And then all effectively be making the same trades or be like having to agree on, on a set of trades and running like

• 1:46:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, like an investing club.

• 1:46:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, an investing, basically an investing club. You have the social features on Robinhood now.

• 1:46:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:54Jordi Hays?

  It feels like, um, uh, hard to do it at a wider scale, but at least for peer to peer, like actual friend groups. Is there any like, is there anything like

• 1:47:05John Coogan?

  Is there a business opportunity there?

• 1:47:06Jordi Hays?

  Well, legal, yeah. Yeah. Is it a technical challenge or like not possible because of, for legal reasons?

• 1:47:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:13Vlad Tenev?

  I, I think you, I think there's a definitely opportunity to innovate and create new things there. There is actually like a, a construct called an investment club.

• 1:47:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:24Vlad Tenev?

  That allows, you know, friends to pool money together and there, there's like a sort of structure around that. Uh, we haven't gone there yet, but we do have Robinhood social, which we launched for everyone last night. And basically what that allows you to do is to share ideas with kind of the, the broader Robinhood community. And it has a follower graph and you can also ensure that, you know, the trades that you're seeing on the platform, the P N Ls, uh, all of that is validated and, and real. And then we make it easy when you see an idea to actually, uh, uh, trade from that idea. And, and, and you can, you can imagine like following different traders, learning from their ideas.

• 1:48:09Vlad Tenev?

  We also added creators onto the platform. We have politicians. So you can follow their trades. And, uh, we're, we're gonna, we, we've been evolving it very, very rapidly. People, a lot of people here actually are Robinhood social users and love it. So, uh, I think you should expect us to continue exploring these ideas and just giving, giving our traders what they want, what's most useful to them.

• 1:48:34John Coogan?

  I'd love for you to zoom out from Robinhood and the products that you're launching to the markets broadly, because you have such an interesting perspective. I mean, yesterday there was an IPO from Aura that was, uh, delayed. And at the same time, the market is massively up this year. Things feel very strong. How are you feeling about, uh, either the market's strength or weakness, but just how are things changing? Are, are, are we in a new regime where an IPO needs to be 15x oversubscribed to get out successfully? Like what, what are you noticing where maybe it's not even good or bad? It's just something where you're like, oh, this is new. We're in a different era.

• 1:49:14Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah. I mean, I don't know if we're in a permanently unique era for which there's no precedent. I, I've, I've seen the market conditions change in different ways on almost a weekly basis now, right? And, uh, I remember it wasn't too long ago that you guys covered the Figma IPO.

• 1:49:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:35Vlad Tenev?

  And it felt like we were just at the absolute just apex of animal spirits at that point. And I think things have calmed down since then.

• 1:49:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:45Vlad Tenev?

  We've entered a bit of a crypto winter as well, but now that's, now we're even starting to climb out of that. Crypto's had a bit of a moment the past couple of weeks. Prediction markets have obviously been, been going gangbusters. So I, I think there's always something going on in some corner of the market. And as we've been adding more and more asset classes like perps, um, we added, you know, these really interesting products that I think you guys will like. Uh, we're going to be the first ones offering prediction markets on earnings in the U S. So you'll be able to trade contracts on company EPS and revenue as well as, you know, things like iPhone deliveries, Tesla deliveries.

• 1:50:29Vlad Tenev?

  And, you know, that, that'll give customers all kinds of new abilities to like, if you want to hedge your position in a stock that you're long, and you don't want to have to sell it, but you, you might think they miss earnings or something, you'll, you'll be able to kind of use these products. So, um,

• 1:50:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's also interesting. Everyone's, a lot of people have had the experience of like, you know, uh, being, being long into earnings, being right that the, that's an earnings beat, but then some other factor sends the stock down.

• 1:51:01John Coogan?

  Oil prices were up and interest rate hikes or something.

• 1:51:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Being able to

• 1:51:06Vlad Tenev?

  It's a big frustration, um, for our traders. So these products allow you to more specifically execute on a, on a trading strategy. So it's a little bit more pointed and sort of like, um, yeah, more specific.

• 1:51:20John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about the knock on effects of A I agents entering the financial markets, research markets, trading markets? When you, when you play back the story of Robinhood, you, if you had a crystal ball, you might've been able to predict GameStop and meme stocks and, and Reddit. But there's already been some people who have said, oh, well, in a world where A I agents are moving money around, no one will be in the money markets. And, and there will be a, a, you know, a bank run and there, there are some concerns about how things will play out. Maybe you won't need a financial advisor anymore, but a financial advisor of course, doesn't just allocate your portfolio.

• 1:52:00John Coogan?

  They do a lot of other stuff. And so I'm wondering if you're, if you're looking to the future and seeing any, uh, emerging trends that might sort of change the underlying structure of the financial markets over the next couple of years as A I rolls out to, uh, trading.

• 1:52:17Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah. I think it's, it's important to separate kind of the hype from the potential there. I think a lot of these things are sort of like one-time use cases, right? Move my money from a, you know, uh, low yielding savings account to a high yielding money market account. Or, you know, renegotiate my, my cable bill or something like that. And, and I think what we've seen is there's really one area that has long-term retentive, uh, usage right now. And, and that's agentic trading, right? And so we're just kind of focusing all of our efforts on making agentic trading as great as possible.

• 1:52:59Vlad Tenev?

  And I think over time you'll see us exploring other things that are maybe not there yet in terms of usage and utility. But agentic trading has like clear product market fit and utility now. So, um, I think, I think that's going to be the one, at least for a while.

• 1:53:16John Coogan?

  Well, it's exciting. I'm, uh, I'm excited to see how people, uh, use it. All the different screenshots, I'm sure we'll see of people doing all sorts of

• 1:53:25Jordi Hays?

  Now, I remember when the Robinhood social beta like started, uh, screenshots started being shared of that. And, uh, it was wildly entertaining. So I'm excited. I'm very excited for open access.

• 1:53:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, there'd be some people that put up insane numbers, some people that get wiped, uh, that, that, you know,

• 1:53:40Jordi Hays?

  No crying.

• 1:53:41John Coogan?

  At the, yeah, no crying.

• 1:53:42Jordi Hays?

  I'm crying in the market.

• 1:53:43John Coogan?

  At the long tail, you get crazy, crazy stories. So thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations, congratulations on the launches and we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:53:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Give our best everyone there.

• 1:53:51Vlad Tenev?

  Always a pleasure, guys.

• 1:53:52John Coogan?

  Have a great one. We'll talk to you soon. Uh, speaking of IPOs, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. Stop making excuses. We, up next, we have the founder and CEO of Flow Engineering, Pari Singh, coming back on the show. It's been almost a full year, but we gotta get that gong ready. How you doing? Welcome back.

• 1:54:18Speaker 13

  Hey, good to see you guys. How are you?

• 1:54:21John Coogan?

  We're doing great, but it seems like you're doing even better. What's the news? What's going on? You raised some money? How much did you raise?

• 1:54:28Speaker 13

  We raised 50 million on a 750 valuation.

• 1:54:34Jordi Hays?

  John was feeling that one.

• 1:54:37Speaker 13

  Thank you very much.

• 1:54:37John Coogan?

  And for what purpose did you raise this money?

• 1:54:41Speaker 13

  We are gonna invest heavily in A I.

• 1:54:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:54:45Speaker 13

  We are doing a huge amount with A I. A I is completely transforming hardware engineering, just in the way that it's transformed software engineering in the, in the last year. I think when we see design cycles of rockets and airplanes and cars go down from 12 months to 12 weeks to 12 hours, the world's very, very, very, that is the opportunity ahead of us and that is what we are investing in.

• 1:55:07John Coogan?

  Do you like the term A I? Or do you think the next cycle you'll be saying super intelligence? Is that a meaningful designation to you? Or, or do you see, because I mean, this is a tool, this is a feature.

• 1:55:20Jordi Hays?

  I'll go first. I don't think it's gonna stick. I think it's, I don't think we needed a new name. Make, going from artificial to super is not suddenly gonna like help the, the, the technology's popularity.

• 1:55:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:35Speaker 13

  I, I do think there is a distinction. Um, I'm not sure like everyone's agreed on the distinction, but to me, uh, as you say, A I is like a really fundamental tool.

• 1:55:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:45Speaker 13

  And when you put a tool in creators and inventors' hands, they're gonna invent crazy stuff. I do think we're gonna get to the point where A I's and humans collaborate together to design a new class of products. And that, those products humans couldn't have done by themselves.

• 1:55:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:59Speaker 13

  And when you put A I's and humans together, that's a really, really, really special place to design a whole new wave of hardware.

• 1:56:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think that, uh, I mean, putting aside the A I versus super intelligence debate, uh, it's hard to, it's hard to gauge model progress from like, you know, deep research reports, because those were pretty good a year ago. They're still really good. But this year, the thing that's felt like it's jumped forward the most has been, uh, things in the 3D world, the Blender modeling demos, the video game development. And that feels like a glimpse into, okay, if it's that good at making video games and modeling, uh, architecture, it's probably good for hardware engineering. So how much of this year of your progress has been, okay, the models are advancing and most importantly,

• 1:56:49John Coogan?

  put aside raw I Q, are they super intelligent? Just they got good at hardware this year. Or they, or there was a lead, a step function. Uh, or did you feel that this year, has that been an important unlock? Or has it felt smooth from the inside of the industry? Because from, from my perspective, it was like, I would never try to use an L L M with Blender a year ago. And now it would be my first step to work with Blender.

• 1:57:17Speaker 13

  So AI is getting really, really good at hardware engineering.

• 1:57:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:20Speaker 13

  Uh, when you look at modern products, whether it's a rocket or an airplane or a car, um, CAD and 3D design is one really important element, but it's actually probably the last element. By the time you are designing the 3D geometry of your Waymo, for example, all of the mechanical and the electrical and the sensors and the AI and the software, there's tens of thousands of hours of engineering work that's gone into the product before you get to geometry.

• 1:57:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:48Speaker 13

  I think we're already seeing AI chip away at that. I think the world that we've seen in AI software development is as the models get better and better, that they can start to do more and more things. In hardware development, the products that we design are so complex that it requires mechanical engineers, electrical systems, software regulatory test. It requires all these different types of engineers to come together, to collaborate on a system. And on every single one of those, AI has been getting meaningfully better over the last year.

• 1:58:16John Coogan?

  So at what level of abstraction do you want to uh interface with a company like Rivian or Joby or Skydio or Stoke Space? Uh, because I imagine within a car maker, there's the, the wire harnessing and the mechanical functionality and all sorts of different systems that need to eventually be integrated. And I could imagine a system overseeing that. And anytime a change happens to the electrical system, you can flow that through the rest of the, of the project to say, oh, well, this is going to affect this system over here, flag that. Uh, do, do you want to be the overseer, the sub-agent, both? Uh, what, what, what's most valuable right now to modern enterprises?

• 1:58:58Speaker 13

  I, I think you called it. So the single biggest problem in hardware companies is systems integration and verification.

• 1:59:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:05Speaker 13

  Let me give you an example. Uh, let's say you're designing a reusable rocket, um, and you make a tiny change. Let's say you take the stage one and in stage one, you take one of the engines and you make a tiny change to the injector. Well, that has this chain reaction of changes across the fluid flow and the combustion and the thrust and the mission profile. Each one of those will change other things, which then change other things. And it's that third, fourth, fifth order impacts is where we trip up and, and that's where failures come from. So the single biggest problem in hardware development is actually integrating systems together. And because it's been so expensive and so painful to do that, the systems engineering organization could only really afford to do it every six, every nine, every 12 months.

• 1:59:47Speaker 13

  It's a really, really expensive process to, to do full-on verification. Uh, but what AI enables for us is this idea that we can move from manual verification, which is once every year, to continuous verification, just like we have in software engineering with CICD. And when you bring that paradigm over, engineers can make changes in software, in CAD, in Git, in SIM on a nearly hourly basis, and the AI can understand the ripple change of that impact and flag issues the moment they happen.

• 2:00:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want this for uh, architecture. I want an architect to be able to move a wall in an architectural drawing and an agent goes and reads the laws and see if this needs permitting. And like actually merging the law, which is written in text files with CAD, which exists in the 3D space, like that feels like glue for AI, such that you have sort of like, you know, red, yellow, green stoplight as you're building or as you're designing the structure. And that feels like a lot of what you're doing. What about uh?

• 2:00:45Jordi Hays?

  How do you think the, the world is going to need to adapt and supply chains are going to need to adapt to uh, to, to the actual design process and hardware engineering process speeding up by, you know, 10X and then, and then 100X, which feels, feels very inevitable at this point. But, but oftentimes like the, during the, during the actual process of designing the system, you're also figuring out how to, you know, source all the, all the different sort of inputs to the, to the final product.

• 2:01:16Speaker 13

  Yeah, so, so this is like a really, really important point. Um, hardware companies are vertically integrated. They're more vertically integrated than they've ever been before, but they still need to partner with suppliers at a very deep level. Um, so even the most vertically integrated automotive companies have hundreds, if not thousands of suppliers. And the requirements for what they need is changing on a nearly weekly, if not daily basis. And that core collaboration is happening not just across the company, but across the partner too. Um, for a number of our largest customers, customers designing everything from data centers to EVs, to drones in the defense industry, uh, they're actually working natively with their partners on flow.

• 2:01:58Speaker 13

  So that core collaboration, changes that the partners will make, will flow into their systems. And then the AI agent will understand the implications of that change in real time. And what used to take weeks or months before can now be done in the seconds. Um, and, and the thing that John mentioned is so important. Like architecture is great because it's really obvious what the regulatory requirements are. But if you look at any one of our customers, customers like Andor, Joby, Stoke Space, uh, Rivian, there's hundreds or thousands of regulatory requirements that need to be kept up to date across mechanical, electrical, software, and it's a really huge problem to do that today manually.

• 2:02:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, what's the state of integrating a systems integration, integration? Um, is it faster? Or, or do you have to rip and replace some other system? Or can you sort of drop in, drop on top of all the systems? Is computer use speeding that up? Are there MCP servers for some of this stuff? Because it feels like uh, you're very much operating in the real world and uh, you can go and reverse an API from some old piece of software. But uh, what, what does it actually take to onboard a new customer these days?

• 2:03:04Speaker 13

  Yeah, uh, so amazing news for Flow and, and probably drove the raise. Today, 96% of our customers come to us inbound and they're able to get up and running within 30 days.

• 2:03:14John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:03:15Speaker 13

  So they can see players or something like a nine to 12 month period of 30 days. And AI is absolutely driving that adoption in, in itself. Where we typically land is on something called requirements management.

• 2:03:26John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:03:27Speaker 13

  Which is this sort of typically old school, stodgy tool base.

• 2:03:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:31Speaker 13

  Which houses all of the requirements and specifications. And the reason that is so important is it's, it's the bit of information that all the design data in the company will flow back to. So if you're making changes in CAD or Git or simulation, they, they come back to verify the requirements because that is your CICD process. So we are the system of record for requirements and verification in these hardware companies. That is, that is our wedge. But what we are becoming is this much more important core collaboration layer, this context graph for the AIs and the humans to be able to work together i- in, in a seamless way.

• 2:04:07John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on the progress, congratulations on the new round and thank you.

• 2:04:11Jordi Hays?

  Love getting a new snapshot of all the progress.

• 2:04:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, fantastic progress.

• 2:04:15Jordi Hays?

  Congrats to the team.

• 2:04:16Speaker 13

  Thank you so much.

• 2:04:16John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Our next guest is already in the waiting room. We have Minna Song from Elise AI, the co-founder and CEO. Minna, welcome back.

• 2:04:34Jordi Hays?

  Welcome back.

• 2:04:35John Coogan?

  Show, how are you doing?

• 2:04:38Speaker 14

  I'm doing great.

• 2:04:39John Coogan?

  You raised some money?

• 2:04:41Speaker 14

  We, we did. We raised 350 million.

• 2:04:44Jordi Hays?

  Woo. Just another day.

• 2:04:46John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:04:48Speaker 14

  I've been waiting all week for that.

• 2:04:51John Coogan?

  Too, huge growth too. 200 million ARR? Where, where, how, how'd you get there? What's driving the growth?

• 2:05:00Speaker 14

  Yes, we um, we passed 200 million ARR earlier this year. We're, really it's coming from serving more customers in the housing industry and the healthcare industry. So we've developed a lot of new products for our customers and um, I, we just keep building as quickly as possible because there's a lot of problems in the industries we serve.

• 2:05:20John Coogan?

  What's the secret to onboarding new customers? I mean, both of the categories you described feel fragmented to me. I don't know how many, I don't know how power law driven your client base is, but I would imagine that there's a lot of uh, customers in housing that are working on leasing, resident communications, the products that you've built. So how do you actually go and reach them, onboard them? What's the flow like these days?

• 2:05:48Speaker 14

  Yeah, we, we work with most of the largest housing providers in the country. Um, but it is a, it is a long tail industry. So there are tons of smaller customers that all need our software. Um, and uh, I mean, it's a pretty hands-on process. AI is a big transformation of their, of their businesses. Um, and AI, as you know, can be kind of scary for some people, but um, but once you show, you, you have to spend a lot of time showing people the benefit of it. And then it's sort of like they, they can't go back to doing anything the, the way they were doing it before. So uh, it's a, it's a bit of a process, but um, we, we try to make it as easy as possible.

• 2:06:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, what is uh, customer education, uh, actual uh, change management look like in an organization? Uh, every company has like a couple of early adopters that are probably demoing all the different tools. But uh, there's a lot of people who are like, look, I do things this way. I've, there's some new fangled tool. Oh, I gotta check that out, but maybe not this week and maybe not next week either. So I imagine that there's a lot of almost marketing and advertising that you need to do, even within a client who has already signed to get utilization of the products up. Uh, is that something that you've had to overcome? Has it actually never, maybe it's never been a problem, but I'm interested to hear about how you solve that.

• 2:07:05Speaker 14

  Yeah, I think, you know, AI makes a lot of technology adoption easier, right? The number of users that ChatGPT got compared to traditional SaaS products.

• 2:07:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:16Speaker 14

  Um, was, you know, it was, it was just fundamentally different technology to adopt. So a lot of what we do when we're implementing our software is making, and the change management is, is making it really easy to interact with mainly through, through chat. How do you talk to it versus having to learn how to click a bunch of buttons like old, uh, old systems really? And today we're in, we serve uh, 20% of the US apartment market already uses some of our products. Um, so they are, it is quite penetrated and they, they are pretty familiar with the technology. But um, we just have more and more products coming out every day. Uh, we work on really, really hard um, problems um, with applied AI. And to get those to market takes an incredible kind of engineering feat and research team to do so.

• 2:08:00Jordi Hays?

  So I imagine that uh, I'm sure that you compete with companies that are, that are much more generalist. They're working, they have customers in housing and healthcare and like, you know, let's call it 10 other industries. And then I'm also imagine you compete with companies that just do AI for housing or just do AI for healthcare. Talk about the like strategy around really focusing on these two core industries. I imagine there's some similarities, but um, but, but should we expect you to add new, entirely new categories? Or are the TAMS big enough in both of these like key markets that you can just continue to focus?

• 2:08:43Speaker 14

  I think our TAM is huge. I mean, housing and healthcare together are the two largest sectors there, about forty percent of the US GDP. And it's really about how much of that you capture within the, for the company and how much value do you add to the customers serving those industries? You know, I think we've always leaned into our strengths, which is building products. And the nice thing is, both industries, we're solving, in both industries, we're solving the exact same problem. And it is actually built on the same, the same infrastructure and the same. And actually, building in both industries has taught us a lot and has made our products better for, for, for one another.

• 2:09:24John Coogan?

  What are the benefits of being a company founded in 2017?

• 2:09:29Speaker 14

  You know, I think in industry, particularly serving our industries, they're not the fastest adopting of technology. So, you know, I think we were actually a few years, a few years early, but it actually was the right place at the right time because we took to sort of warm up the market. When we started, people didn't really know what AI stood for. And we were really, we are one of the first AI, applied AI companies, serving any vertical. So it was kind of a patience game, I guess. But I think if we weren't, we hadn't started at that time, we wouldn't be in the running. We wouldn't be at the scale that we're at to, to have the impact.

• 2:10:10Jordi Hays?

  Should we expect a rebrand to Elise SI, or are you riding out AI?

• 2:10:17Speaker 14

  That's possible. That's a great idea. Do you want to be on that?

• 2:10:22Jordi Hays?

  I, I, I think just drop the AI, just Elise. Cleaner. Great, great to catch up. Amazing progress. And yeah, come back when you get like fifty percent market share, our penetration into these. I think that's a good, good next.

• 2:10:39Speaker 14

  Talk next month.

• 2:10:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:10:41John Coogan?

  Fantastic. There we go.

• 2:10:42Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 2:10:43John Coogan?

  Have a great day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:10:44Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:10:45John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Consol. Consol built AI agents that automate seventy percent IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Our next guest is the CEO, interim president and CEO of MongoDB. We have Dev coming on the show for the first time, but he's been CEO before. And what a journey he's been on. Dev, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us. How are you doing?

• 2:11:13Speaker 15

  It's great to be here, guys. Thanks for having me.

• 2:11:15Jordi Hays?

  Memorable week in your career.

• 2:11:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. Never a dull day in the AI talent wars, I'm sure.

• 2:11:21Speaker 15

  It is interesting, to say the least. Clearly, we didn't anticipate this, but the company's on strong footing. You know, I feel really good about the business. We had Investor Day yesterday, where we talked about our long-term outlook. I think it was really well received. And, you know, we talked about how the business is accelerating. We talked about how Atlas, which is the core kind of product area that investors really queue on because it's been the biggest growth driver, we raised our guidance. We also talked about the fact that we're raising our guidance, or frankly, feeling good about our, our operating margin, our cash flow. And we also announced we're buying back a billion dollars worth of stock. So.

• 2:12:06Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 2:12:07Speaker 15

  So, I mean, over a period of time, not all at once. The point is, is that we feel really good about the business. And I think people, you know, the challenge, I think, is many times CEOs get a lot of credit and sometimes too much blame. But in this case, there's a really strong team around the company and the team has done a really good job. And I'm happy to, you know, step in. And to be clear, it's an interim role. We'll, we'll be focused on finding a successor, but obviously we're going to take our time and do it properly and thoroughly. But it's a very attractive role. So my phone's already been ringing and we already have a retained search going on.

• 2:12:47John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:12:48Jordi Hays?

  That's great. There's some debate earlier online about like executive poaching in an entirely different category. And someone was trying to make the point that, that this cycle is like different in some way. When you look back throughout your career, is the intensity around just, just recruiting and poaching and talent wars notably more intense than, let's say, the cloud build out and mobile and, and, and sort of the, the dot com era? Or is it just more of the same, business has always been war?

• 2:13:26Speaker 15

  I would say, people have always been very aggressive, but I think clearly with, especially in the AI era, the money being spent on talent has, has obviously been breathtaking, to say the least. This one frankly surprised me because it's not so much about AI expertise, but I think Meta really didn't have a lot of DNA around enterprise expertise. I mean, they've never really sold to complex, you know, global organizations like Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan. And so to try and organically build that would probably be challenging. And so I think they just felt they had a deficit on a certain area. And obviously, Zuck has not been shy by throwing money around. And, and he did that again here. So, you

• 2:14:11Speaker 15

  know, CJ made a decision, and I'll let you pass judgment. But what I will say is like, I got a note from a good friend that says, at the end of the day, no one's going to remember how much money you make. They're going to remember what kind of leader you were, and what kind of person you were. And I'll just leave it at that.

• 2:14:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you refresh everyone on, on your journey, both in your career broadly, but also with MongoDB specifically? Because this is not, this is not a wild card that you're in this seat. Like, you are a very logical selection for this interim role. But if you could give us some background on, on your journey in tech and then your relationship to MongoDB, I think it'd be really helpful to understand.

• 2:14:53Speaker 15

  Yeah, sure. So I was a two-time founder, a company that started in 2001. It was, was a company called Blade Logic. And it ended up going public in 2007, then acquired by BMC. And I became the president of BMC Software for a couple of years. I segued into being a VC. I was at Greylock in a small firm out of Boston, actually led the B round of Datadog. I'm still the lead director of Datadog. I invested in Datadog when Datadog was doing only a million revenue. So sometimes it better be lucky than be good. Obviously, Ali and the team there have done a spectacular job. And at the same time, being a VC, I was doing a lot of work on next generation databases. In fact, I looked at some competing investments to MongoDB. But when I did my diligence, it was clear MongoDB, even at that, you

• 2:15:38Speaker 15

  know, time, was way ahead of everyone else. I would say way ahead, but ahead of everyone else in terms of developer mind share and even, you know, financial momentum. But ironically, about, you know, six months later, I got a call from, you know, a search firm saying, hey, MongoDB is looking for a CEO. Would you consider it? And they in fact strongly said, you should definitely take a look at this job, David. It's ready-made for you. And being in, you know, usually you get calls. And what's interesting is when you get a call for a CEO job, I've trained myself to ask what's wrong. Because no one calls you when things are going spectacularly well. No one says, you know what, let's just change things up and, you know, make a change of the CEO role. So, and the challenges then

• 2:16:21Speaker 15

  are the changes of the problems you have to fix. Are they fixable? Are this really essentially so fine-tuned to the company that just going to be impossible to change? When I looked at MongoDB, what was interesting is that I was not that impressed with how the organization was run. The engineering team and product teams were good, but the go-to-market organization was a bit dysfunctional. The culture of the leadership team was dysfunctional. And, and so, and then there was really three knocks against MongoDB. One, open source at that time. No one had really made money in open source. Red Hat was the only company that had created any real value. Databases, a lot of companies had died on the vine of being the next Oracle. And the landscape was littered with data, that database companies. And deep

• 2:17:04Speaker 15

  tech in, out of New York was not something that was proven because at the time, it was more of an ad tech and kind of consumer space for tech companies. So when I went through that, one, I thought open source two dot O was going to be much, it was really better technology than open source one dot O. So that addressed that question. Two, databases, I felt like I could see the developer momentum with MongoDB. And I said, if developers really love MongoDB, you don't bet against a product that people love. And with New York, you saw Google and, and Amazon and Meta really investing in the New York area. And we recognized that we didn't have to only hire in New York, but there was definitely a lot of talent. Whereas like 10 years earlier, when I tried to start Blade Logic, actually

• 2:17:46Speaker 15

  15 years earlier, it was much harder to, you know, do a startup at that time in New York. I actually start, ended up moving Blade Logic to Boston.

• 2:17:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Can you talk about your time as CEO of Blade Logic? I have this.

• 2:18:02Jordi Hays?

  Also, let's, let's, I want to note, like, the timing there. You, you start the company post, correct, post-March correction or in Q1?

• 2:18:12Speaker 15

  Oh, in terms of, yeah, yeah. It was, it was 2001. So it was actually five days before nine 11. So that is my first round of financing. And at that time, it was pretty crazy starting company because one, no customers want to deal with dot coms because they're all blown up. Employees don't want to work in dot coms because they're all blown up. There are a lot of workless, you know, stock certificates. And raising capital was super expensive, right? And so, but we had conviction that, because the previous company had started, ended up being the first generation cloud computing company. Actually, I ended up competing with Mark and Ben. Ben started a company called Loud, LoudCloud. And then when I started Blade Logic, they pivoted LoudCloud to Opsware. And then I started competing with them again.

• 2:18:55Speaker 15

  And if you read, read Ben's book, he talks about going head to head with a pretty formidable competitor called Blade Logic, right? So, so it's funny how this world is so small. But yeah, it was a pretty tricky time to start a business. And the thing that you learn, which I worry about with a lot of the founders today, is that you, you, we had to build the business the hard way. There was no tailwinds on our back. It was a tough economic environment. Large companies, our first customer summer, we luckily closed Sprint and Priceline. But it was a slog to convince, you know, these larger organizations to take a bet on this new fledgling company when they'd seen so many other startups quickly die.

• 2:19:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, and now you look at, look at how many different. You know unicorns provide infrastructure for other companies to be able to scale really quickly and you know things like work OS right like I imagine there was nothing close to that at the time that would allow you to go.

• 2:19:47John Coogan?

  Turbo puffer browser.

• 2:19:48Speaker 15

  We had to do everything we had to build it.

• 2:19:50Jordi Hays?

  So you're building like forty startups at once just to build one company.

• 2:19:54Speaker 15

  Exactly and I only raised twenty nine million in total and had had seven in the bank when he filed the S one. So essentially I funded the company through through customers.

• 2:20:04Jordi Hays?

  Seven in the bank when you file it as one is just it's actually incredible.

• 2:20:10John Coogan?

  It was like we burned a trillion dollars.

• 2:20:12Speaker 15

  It's a good old days.

• 2:20:15Jordi Hays?

  How have you uh open source AI or or open weights AI.

• 2:20:22John Coogan?

  You mean open source SI?

• 2:20:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, we're calling it SI as of yesterday, apparently. The the sort of economic model could potentially feel much more straightforward with with some of some of the Chinese AI labs just saying, hey, we're gonna make this model, but if you want to host it and serve it, you have to pay us back a some type of rev share. Is that the like, given your experience, you know, with with Mongo, is that going to be? Do you expect that to be like the the primary economic engine for for open weights? Or do you think it's something that looks like more like Red Hat or or MongoDB where you're building, you're making an open model and then you're building, you know, more infrastructure and and product around it?

• 2:21:08Speaker 15

  Yeah, so the classics open source model where you get some part of the core free and then you pay for like, say, the adjacent features around it, I think is is somewhat challenging because I'll give you our example at Mongo, we had an open source product and we provided so anything that developers needed was was free, but any management tooling and so on and so forth was paid for. The challenge was like, you know, defining that paywall between what's free and paid is always difficult because if you give away too much of the product, no, you know, you can't monetize anything. And if you if you give away too little, it's very hard to drive adoption because people need time soak time to kind of really use the product.

• 2:21:53Speaker 15

  Frankly, the breakthrough for us, so we found that, you know, that paywall, but we were growing the business more slowly. The breakthrough was was really open source as a service. Because when you offer open source as a service, you charge for any that every little bit of usage. And so we can have customers paying us ten dollars a month and you can have customers paying us a million dollars a month. And frankly, we had that, right? But the fact that you conditioned to pay for something just made the economic, it wasn't like a debate of what's free and what's paid. Now, customers still have the choice to download and run it on their own. And then we have our self managed proprietary product as well. So I think to use that analogy, I think if it's offered as a service, I think that's much easier for people to handle. Now, I recognize with with these models, a lot of people are concerned about IP rights

• 2:22:38Speaker 15

  and they want to run it on their own on prem. So there, you know, a rev share model is tricky because, you know, how much how much do you share? And that becomes just a judgment call and, you know, different customers will have different opinions about how much they think they need to share with with a third party.

• 2:22:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you're running running it on prem and then what? Do you have to open it up to like some, you have to basically be do as as an open source develop, you know, lab, do you have to be like auditing all the users of your model?

• 2:23:08Speaker 15

  Yes, I know customers are gonna let you do that.

• 2:23:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:23:10Speaker 15

  There's no way that's gonna happen. So then it's a trust model, which becomes also a little challenging.

• 2:23:15Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 2:23:16John Coogan?

  I have I have a question, sort of going back to the emotional roller coaster that CEOs go on, specifically founding CEOs, I've noticed at the early stage, there's the founder CEO is like, oh, I gotta get, you know, my board aligned, I need super voting, I don't want to be thrown out. And then after a while, it can sort of flip around and I've talked to some founders in the CEO role and I'm like, I think the board needs to worry about you leaving. And and that that that psychology of of having enough control over the company as a CEO, the tension, I mean, we're seeing it with companies that are about to go public, how to set up the right corporate governance for the modern era.

• 2:23:59John Coogan?

  How did you confront that in in partnership? There's there's various firms that are known for, oh, yeah, if you're not performing, they will throw you out. There's others that will say, yeah, no matter what, we always back the founder. How have you grappled with that on both sides of the table throughout your career?

• 2:24:18Speaker 15

  Yeah, it's a great question. Frankly, I'm I'm a little old fashioned. I have a very simple rule. If if if the company's performing, management's in charge, if the company's not performing, the board's in charge. It's it becomes very simple that way, right? And yes, you know, you've seen some public companies where the founders have still total control, but the stocks have attacked because people just say, there's no governance here. And, you know, why am I investing?

• 2:24:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the discount, yeah, it's it's a discount rate. Like, I think Meta has been going through this where like, you have to apply some discount on Meta right now because you don't know, even like, and and my psychology on it is like, let's say, Zach gets AI working like really well, frontier models, leading consumer applications and enterprise business. To me, it's like, as soon as he gets the next thing working, he's gonna bet another five hundred billion dollars on the next thing. And you're not gonna know if that's gonna work. And so to me, I've always been, I just always mentally.

• 2:25:14John Coogan?

  Eric Sufer calls it tilting at windmills.

• 2:25:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, but but to me, I'm like, okay, if this if this was run in a more kind of like stable way where where where there was some shareholder influence, it would probably trade higher, but who knows?

• 2:25:28Speaker 15

  Yeah, exactly. And then I think the other on the other side of the coin, I have to remind founders that no investor wants to go and replace the founder. There's no incentive for them to do so. So only if things are really going poorly, will they ever contemplate such an action? Like, they will do everything in their power to make sure the company's successful. And it's really up to the founder to live up to their obligation to kind of, you know, do the best they can. And there are many founders who like decide, you know what, I'm not the best person to be CEO, I gotta bring in someone else. Or sometimes just say, I'll be CEO, but I need a strong number two to run a certain part of the business that I just I'm not good at or I have no passion about.

• 2:26:10Speaker 15

  And to me, those are the founders that, you know, are more mature, but someone who's just always paranoid, I mean, if you're worried about the people who give you money is gonna, you know, basically take you out, then then you got the wrong partners. And I've been fortunate to have some great investors. I'm also only a couple of weeks ago joined Sequoia Capital. And, you know, they have a great track record of of thinking long term. And I, you know, I know you just had Ruloff earlier, but he was he was on my board for eleven years, you know, while I was CEO, still on the board. And actually, I was just with him yesterday in New York. And there was times when he would, you know, push me, there was times he would challenge me, there were times when he, but then when I needed him, he would always be there to support me.

• 2:26:55Speaker 15

  And and I think these, you know, these founders who get so worried about control and like someone can take me out, I think you have to look at yourself in the mirror and say like, you know, why, if that were to happen, don't you feel like you have some obligation to to, you know, perform? Otherwise, if you don't have any obligation to perform, then then then then something's broken.

• 2:27:18Jordi Hays?

  That's the same, it's the same advice you'd give to like talent at a company, let's say, like, basically become, you know, I've seen people join a company and become so important to the company that at some point, like, you can just tell, like, fifty percent of the enterprise value is tied to this one person who's not actually a founder and maybe not even on the management team, right? And so and then you end up having enough leverage that you can go and get whatever you want economically, but then also rise up to to to pretty and actually have more control over the company.

• 2:27:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Last question for me, can you give me some color on how you think about the various buckets of skills that you're looking for in a a really talented CEO who's going to go the distance? Is it the Rolodex, strategy, inability to engage with the financial markets?

• 2:28:17Jordi Hays?

  Understanding of the customer.

• 2:28:19John Coogan?

  Golf handicap, what's important?

• 2:28:21Speaker 15

  To me, it's the fundamentals. I'm actually not not a big believer in Rolodex because people come and go. I to me, it's the fundamentals of knowing how to build a business. One, you know, being being very clear about what your strategy is. Two, like, a lot of people ask me, what is a job of a CEO? To me, the job of CEO comes down to three things, being very, very clear in your strategy. Here's where we're going, so by definition, here's what we're not going. So that makes decisions easy. You know what to prioritize because the strategy is so clear, you know, it makes decision making easy. The second thing is, you know, assembling the right team around you, right? So who's on the bus? And sometimes, as you grow, sometimes some people have to get off the bus because it's not scaling. Then you bring new people on the bus, but you have the right people who are really complimenting you to build this great business.

• 2:29:06Speaker 15

  And obviously, if you have the right leadership team, they're gonna build out their teams respectively. And the third thing is is really create a culture and remove all the obstacles that prevent the team from being successful. And, you know, and, you know, you can create a mercenary culture, which has, you know, second order effects. Or you can create a culture where people are really connected to the mission, they're really connected to what they're doing, you you really develop. And we think of culture as like another product in terms of how do you attract and retain employees, right? And so if people feel like it's a great culture, they feel like they're learning, they're growing, they're developing, and there's a meritocracy, if they perform, they get more responsibility, you know, that's ultimately what a CEO's job is, right?

• 2:29:49Speaker 15

  And and I can do, I can do a thousand things, like, I can do this interview, I can go meet with customers, but if I don't do those three things well, nothing else matters.

• 2:29:58John Coogan?

  So scratch golf is more of like a nice to have. That's what I'm hearing.

• 2:30:03Jordi Hays?

  How should, I know, I know we're over time and you probably have more important things to do. I do have one more question. How do you think a CEO should balance sort of like a sort of capitalist versus communist approach? Capitalist being like, you know, bottom up entrepreneurial, letting letting.

• 2:30:22John Coogan?

  A thousand flowers bloom.

• 2:30:23Jordi Hays?

  People on your team come up with ideas and run things down versus like, you know, central planning, top down, this is our, this is our approach.

• 2:30:32Speaker 15

  Yeah, I think it's a mix of both, but I think like, you know, when you seek feedback, you have to seek feedback from people you trust and who have a certain point of view, right? When someone disconfirms my beliefs, you know, when I was younger, I kind of completely ignored them, saying they're basically bozos. But it caught me flat-footed and I've tried to train myself. When someone I trust is giving me feedback that just disconfirms my beliefs, the first question I ask is, what do they see that I don't see? What do they hear that I don't hear? And what is the persuasiveness of their logic, right? And in a market that's moving so quickly and you have a set of core beliefs, if sometimes those beliefs could be challenged and changed. And so to that end, you have to start, you know, rethinking, you know, your strategy. And if you don't have people who challenge you, then, you know, like Steve Jobs famously

• 2:31:17Speaker 15

  didn't like board members who agree with him because he wanted to be challenged. And I think, you know, many, too many people want to hear the kumbaya, oh, you're Dave, you're so wonderful, you're great and all that. But that's not really that helpful to me. What's helpful to me is, hey, have you thought about what's coming around the corner? Have you thought about like, are you really, is the scale of your ambition as aggressive as it should be? You know, are you thought about like what potential new technologies could disrupt your business? I mean, that's the way you, you know, you should operate and you should have a team who thinks that way. The lesson I've learned a lot is the ability to tell a really strong team is the ability to have hard conversations. There's so many people who are very passive aggressive, you know, they'll not politely and agree and then they'll go back to the desk and roll their eyes.

• 2:32:00Speaker 15

  But if you create a culture where people can feel like, hey, it's not my idea, it's the senior person's idea that wins, it's the best idea that wins and people feel comfortable challenging you, that creates a great environment where people feel like, you know, we're really focused on what's right for the business.

• 2:32:15Jordi Hays?

  Well, I'm gonna have to disagree with you there. I'm kidding. No, great, great point. And I wish, I wish we had more time.

• 2:32:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is fantastic. Thanks so much.

• 2:32:25Jordi Hays?

  Good luck.

• 2:32:26John Coogan?

  It's been a wild time, but very excited for what happens.

• 2:32:27Jordi Hays?

  When you figure out the right person for the job, I'd love to have him on the show.

• 2:32:31John Coogan?

  Come back on.

• 2:32:32Jordi Hays?

  It's great to catch up with you.

• 2:32:33Speaker 15

  Thank you.

• 2:32:34John Coogan?

  Partnering with MongoDB. Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. Let me actually tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster for the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. We have Dara Murphy, the CEO and co-founder of Imprint in the waiting room. Let's bring him in. How are you doing?

• 2:32:54Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 2:32:55John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:32:56Speaker 16

  Hey, guys. How are things?

• 2:32:58John Coogan?

  We're good.

• 2:32:59Jordi Hays?

  So good.

• 2:33:00John Coogan?

  First time on the show.

• 2:33:01Speaker 16

  I appreciate you guys having me on. Last lot of the day.

• 2:33:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. Second to last lot. We have another, we have another guest in person. But anyway, introduce yourself, the company, the news. Give it to us.

• 2:33:11Speaker 16

  Yeah, so at Imprint, we're building the infrastructure that lets everybody feel like a regular at their favorite brand. We think that starts with co-branded financial payments. And so with Kroger, we're launching or relaunching their co-branded credit card. They're leaving a big bank, bank that's been around for 100 years, choosing us. It's obviously a big vote for us because they're the fourth largest merchant in the US. And you're probably asking, like, why does somebody like Kroger choose Imprint over a Fortune 100 bank? There's really three reasons. One, we're not trying to steal their customer. So many banks are trying to steal their customer, sell them a mortgage or a deposit account, or they got BNPL trying to steal their customer and sell them to somebody else. Two, we took this $100 million bet to rebuild our tech platform for ourselves.

• 2:33:55Speaker 16

  All the banks, every credit card in your wallet, they rely on legacy infrastructure, mainframes in the Midwest. We own it, so we build better product. And a lot of times now with these merchants, our partners, you know, when we first started talking to them four or five years ago, they were worried about getting disintermediated by Amazon or Instacart. Today, the conversations we have is, how do we help you stay relevant when Muse is on the horizon, Instinct is coming? And our perspective, perspective of the merchants is, top of wallet, you're top of mind. And so if we give you a better credit card, more rewards, fairer, then you end up being a big part of the consumer's life.

• 2:34:30John Coogan?

  Talk to me about how I should think about your business. You mentioned they would go with a, the alternative is going with a bank. Are you registered as a bank? Do you have a charter? Or are you more of like a fintech software layer? Like, what are the economic breakdowns? We were, I want to go further into what co-branded card economics look like, but give me the 101 on the category.

• 2:34:53Speaker 16

  Yeah, so we offer the brand the exact same thing that a bank would. In fact, Shell recently left Citi for us, Crayton Mara left a big bank for us last year. Our proposition is you get the same as you would get from the bank, plus a much better technology, product, et cetera. The way it works is we're not a bank, we work with partner banks, you know, Affirm, Carina, everybody else is the same thing. And the way the economics work is, we help the brand fund some of the rewards. Richer rewards matter for customers, right? Everybody loves their rewards credit card. If we work with a brand that owns a big share of your wallet, why wouldn't you want to use the credit card? And the way, and then we have a profit share with the bank off the bottom.

• 2:35:34John Coogan?

  Got it. So I imagine, I imagine Visa and Mastercard, like the rails are still taking, you know, 1%, 2% of the transaction fee, but there's still maybe 1% that's floating around there that can be given back as a reward or kept. How close am I on the actual numbers? How does it split down?

• 2:35:53Speaker 16

  Pretty far off. Right? So the rails take like 15 or 16 basis points.

• 2:35:57John Coogan?

  Oh, it's really low.

• 2:35:58Speaker 16

  Off both sides. Yeah. And then the name on the card, Imprint, Chase, whomever, we get interchange of about a buck eighty, 2%. And then we give almost all of that back to the brand, so they give the consumer better rewards.

• 2:36:13John Coogan?

  Okay, so we were debating this in the context of Instinct, the personal AI agent, and we were sort of asking ourselves, like, why hasn't an AI company launched a co-branded credit card with a company like you and then used that as a monetization strategy? Maybe they can give it back in tokens or do some sort of reward, but basically just

• 2:36:33Jordi Hays?

  like you can't.

• 2:36:34John Coogan?

  Start getting some transaction fee.

• 2:36:35Jordi Hays?

  If you want to capture transaction fees quickly, going out and doing partnerships, you know, you can do the big partnerships with like a Shopify. There's a lot of other things that you buy online. There's a lot of like, I think about the number of local service providers I've found with ChatGPT that ChatGPT gets no benefit from, right? And it's great for the service provider.

• 2:36:56John Coogan?

  And there might not be a referral program.

• 2:36:58Jordi Hays?

  The beauty of a card is that, is that the service provider's used to paying your transaction fee. And it doesn't really feel like they're paying anyone when they do it because payment, you know, transaction fees are normal. So feels like, it also makes sense in the sense of like linking the payment method to the account, then you're not dealing with like, oh, I'm authorizing this agent to use credentials that are stored somewhere else. Like, it feels like there's some potentially security.

• 2:37:26John Coogan?

  Where do you see it going?

• 2:37:27Speaker 16

  Yeah, all I can say on that specific point is, watch this space. But if you think about it more broadly, right, like, everybody hates, everybody, is that a good, that's not the sales con.

• 2:37:39Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no.

• 2:37:40John Coogan?

  No, no, no. It's like a boat horn, like, you know.

• 2:37:45Speaker 16

  Amazing.

• 2:37:46Jordi Hays?

  It's positive. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:37:48Speaker 16

  Yeah, amazing. Look, I think if you, if you think about the space generally, like, everybody hates interchange, everybody hates Pay and Visa, Mastercard. I think there will be credit cards, but I think the really interesting question is like, what's one step beyond that? And so a lot of what we've been investing in is like, letting merchants, letting brands accept your bank account as a payment. Because that's like basis points on the dollar. In a world of agents, you can optimize that. The hard thing today is it's like a shitty, it's a bad, sorry, I'm Irish, it comes out sometimes, it's a bad user experience to have to link your bank account. If you can be like Muse or Instinct, here's my bank account details, I trust you to link them up correctly, that thing gets rid of that friction, right? Crypto was a fugazi here, like, this is actually the first time I think interchange is in

• 2:38:33Speaker 16

  danger. And it's 2% of American commerce goes across these rails. So it's a huge amount of value.

• 2:38:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, I mean, Walmart was pushing for this for years with the, with the credit card push, trying to get to ACH with various customers. And it was a really long slog. The Apple Pay ecosystem sort of won a lot of things, but yeah, you can see that it, the game is once, once again afoot with, with the agentic era.

• 2:39:00Speaker 16

  And Stripe is pushing this with Muse, right? Like, you have the Stripe link experience. And you know, you use Uber today, the last time I used it, it prompted me to use Stripe link instead of using a credit card, right? And so, yeah, it's actually very bearish, I think, for those like, you know, Mastercard, Amex, Amex is a different business, but longer term, I think it's gonna be great for merchants and consumers.

• 2:39:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Jordan, anything else?

• 2:39:23Jordi Hays?

  Great to finally have you on. I remember when you launched, or maybe not launched, but I remember back in 2021, I was building in fintech too, and maybe it was a round that I saw, but when I saw the business launch, it made, it made a lot of sense, so it's great to hear all the progress. And it's great to have an Irish, it's great to have an Irish accent on the show, you know, you don't have enough of them.

• 2:39:42Speaker 16

  Sorry for the swearing.

• 2:39:43Jordi Hays?

  No, you're good.

• 2:39:44John Coogan?

  It's all good.

• 2:39:45Jordi Hays?

  You're good. Come back on or flag when you have some of these, some news in personal agent world.

• 2:39:51John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:39:52Speaker 16

  Will do. Thanks, thoughts.

• 2:39:54John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day. Talk to you soon. 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. Our last guest of the show, No Freeman, is here in person in the TBN UltraDome. Welcome to the show, No. How are you doing?

• 2:40:09Speaker 06

  I'm good, boys. Good to be here, the UltraDome.

• 2:40:11John Coogan?

  What news do you have for us? Should he hit the gong?

• 2:40:14Jordi Hays?

  Do it, yeah.

• 2:40:15Speaker 06

  We are announcing Outer Signal's $22 million Series A today. Do I just go there and do it?

• 2:40:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, smash it as hard as you can. It is, it is. Smash it.

• 2:40:28John Coogan?

  Fantastic. So introduce Outer Signal, introduce yourself for everyone who doesn't know. And then I'm sure there's so many questions we can go through.

• 2:40:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, thanks for having me, guys. I appreciate it. Outer Signal is a customer intelligence and a Gentic personalization platform. So when any consumer checks out or transacts with a business, most businesses really only know about that person, that their name is Jordy, they live in LA. Their email, Outer Signal paints the rest of that picture, right? So we give full-time, in-real-time name, email address, date of birth, age, gender, occupation, property, value, a full profile behind every single consumer, which lets businesses actually speak to their consumers like humans, not disorders.

• 2:41:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. And what is the best way to actually take advantage of that as an e-commerce business? I mean, I can imagine, okay, some celebrity shows up, maybe you reach out to their agency to do a deal, all the way down to like personalizing an email, which is its own fraught thing. Because sometimes you get an email and you're like, that's a little too personal.

• 2:41:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'll start with an example. I know, I know Rora is a customer of Outer Signal. And I remember within the first three months of launch, Brian or Charlie messaged me and said something like, I'm not going to name the person, but it was like a top five actor in the world. And I was like, how do you even know that? And they were like, well, we're using this thing called Outer Signal. And that person wasn't even using their actual, like, they were using a pseudonym for the order. So it was like, but it showed, and so, yeah, it's like, I think people, it's not just these sort of extra, you know, elements and kind of like populating data that's already out there. There's like other sauce that you guys have.

• 2:42:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's certainly other sauce. I mean, it's, doing what we do is both a technology challenge and an anthropology challenge. Like, and the example that I give is, you know how many people there are named Noah Friedman in the world? So like, if Noah Friedman orders from Rora, disambiguating which one is me is remarkably difficult. And that's what our engineers have spent hundreds and hundreds or thousands of hours mastering. And it's a really hard problem, but we've cracked the code on it. I think to your question, John, it's actually a lot bigger than just like, these examples of finding celebrities are very cool and fun. Huge business built around that.

• 2:42:40Jordi Hays?

  It's more like cool for the, for the founder.

• 2:42:43Speaker 06

  Personalized market, yeah, exactly. It's cool. But the example I give is this, like, literally when I was in the green room there, I got an email from a brand that I probably spent thousands of dollars with, telling me that their new drop had just hit, and it was like sports bras. And it's like, I've spent thousands of dollars with this business. They have every right to know who I am. I'm a very, like, you can Google me and figure out who I am. And they just didn't take the time to do that because it's impossible, right? And so the downstream impacts of what Outer Signal is all about is really to say like, behind every order, behind every consumer who transacts with a business, there is a human being. And those human beings deserve to be treated like human beings. And so across email marketing, right, where like a brand that hits me with an email about performance in the gym, or when I'm up late working on my business, like, that's gonna slap, that's gonna hit a lot better than if they hit my mother with that.

• 2:43:27Speaker 06

  All right. And so across email and retention, across paid media and acquisition, all of this is downstream of this concept of like, everybody transacting with these consumer businesses, they're real people. And these companies just have no basis or bearing to say, the second an order comes in, we're basically just routing them into the arbitrary Klaviyo flow or what have you, just to like, hope that it lands with them. When in reality, there's so much more context that can be grabbed in the real world.

• 2:43:51John Coogan?

  How do you think better intelligence in the e-commerce world flows to retail strategy? There's always this pitch of like, okay, you look at the shipping locations and you see that everyone's within, you know, two miles of this store, we should go pitch that store. But it feels like it can go a lot further. How are you seeing? Because I mean, I feel like every e-commerce business now, like the D to C era is fully over. Like, your omnichannel, at least day one in the deck, if not day one in.

• 2:44:24Speaker 06

  Day one in the deck, that's a banger.

• 2:44:27John Coogan?

  But like, you need to be thinking about this, and you can't be turning down opportunities for retail expansion and saying, we're a pure-play D to C company that cuts out the middleman if you want to scale in the modern era.

• 2:44:39Speaker 06

  Look, I think there's a couple of angles to it. Number one is saying, if you're trying to activate and pull deeper velocity at any of these retailers, which is ultimately, I mean, we talk about this with Lucy all the time, right? This is the hero metric, is how fast you're pulling through these stores. Understanding how to locally activate an audience, which Outer Signal can allow you to do in ways that Meta just can't, of being like, look, around these zip codes in metro layer or in the middle of the country, it doesn't matter. We can actually drive hyper-targeted funnels and flows into store because we know who these people are, and we know how they're different in these different markets. That's huge. We've also had probably hundreds of brands at this point, both find retailers that were buying from them with their personal address.

• 2:45:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've seen them before.

• 2:45:16Speaker 06

  On e-comm, like a huge creatine brand was able to get like a really big placement because they found out that the senior buyer from Walmart, like their Square ICP had been buying personally as just a fan under his email.

• 2:45:27John Coogan?

  And of course, they're gonna take the email, they're gonna take the call then.

• 2:45:29Speaker 06

  And so you've got that angle, and you've also got like, when you're pitching retailers, right? Like, you guys know this, one of the most important things you can do is have a really fundamental understanding of like, who the hell you're actually selling to, right? And I think so many consumer businesses have this archetype or the persona of who they think they sell to, and it all feels very much the same. Like, I cannot tell you how many brands we meet and onboard at Outer Signal where in the sales process, we're like, hey, who do you guys think your customer is? And they're like, young, urbanite professionals in New York. Well, you can't all sell to the same person, right? And it turns out, when you activate, it's like, no, it's actually Midwest moms with high disposal income. They're the ones paying your bills. This persona of like, the young, professional urbanite in New York is a super small percentage of your revenue, who's actually a less valuable customer, but they gravitate to one specific product.

• 2:46:14Speaker 06

  And so across merchandising, to understand which products resonate most with this demographic or this demographic, and across actual placement in store and pitching retailers, there's so much depth and nuance that comes from understanding who the F these people are that are actually buying from you.

• 2:46:31Jordi Hays?

  How are you, right now, explosion of personal agents? You have Instinct and Muse, and even in the last 24 hours, it seems like Instinct started doing like, basically like texting, texting product recommendations, which exposed something that was kind of interesting to me, which is that the agent knows about the user. I saw one where the user, it was pushing various car products for a Targa. And the user was like, how do you know I have a Targa? And it's like, oh, we worked on like, getting insurance for a car like, a while ago. But then the agent was actually recommending products, like just products that a Targa would never need.

• 2:47:16Jordi Hays?

  Like, he was pushing a trickle charger and an indoor cover, which like a real, I don't know any like, real car guys that are like, I gotta keep my 2026 Targa on a trickle charger.

• 2:47:29John Coogan?

  It's not super intelligent unless it knows the details of Targa.

• 2:47:33Jordi Hays?

  No one I know is like, using indoor covers because real ball knowers would know that like, if you, if you drive your car outside and then you put a cover over it, and you put, and there's like debris between the paint and the cover, it will actually wear the paint down faster and do more damage to the car. So like, that basically, it was like a personalized recommendation from somebody that shouldn't be making a recommendation, right? Like, someone that did not have ball knowledge. But still, still, to be clear, like, it's almost like on the brand side, the brand needs to like, brands need to be thinking about educating agents because the agent knows the customer, but the agent needs to know who to pitch it to.

• 2:48:19Jordi Hays?

  Like, somebody with a Ferrari or 10-year-old Ferrari should get recommended like, hey, maybe if you're not using a trickle charger, your battery's gonna wear down faster, whatever. But it feels like an entirely new task for the, for the company to like, educate agents.

• 2:48:36Speaker 06

  Couple of thoughts, couple of bars in there, by the way. Ball know are there. I think it's, we just have like a thing now, like, you can't make personalized recommendations unless you know ball, right?

• 2:48:44John Coogan?

  Sure, yeah. The bar has moved.

• 2:48:47Speaker 06

  The bar has moved.

• 2:48:48John Coogan?

  Pole posts have moved.

• 2:48:49Speaker 06

  Couple of things. Number one, I think that example actually touches on something critical, which was that that personalization was really just behavioral, right? You bought this, you might like that, right? It has no context on like, who the hell you actually are as a person. And that's really been the failed promise of personalization for the last decade, which is like, a lot of the companies out there selling personalized solutions for marketers, it's all based on Jordy clicked on this ad, or he came in through this landing page, and he bought this product. And so we think and we guess, and we're just gonna make some hypothesis, finger to the wind, that the next product he might like is why. It's all pulling from the same signals that it's been pulling forward from the last 10 years. And like, it just doesn't work. And the outcome of that, whether it's an agent recommending it, or the brand on email, or just the landing page, is that it feels highly impersonal, right?

• 2:49:32Speaker 06

  And I would argue that the next layer, the next frontier, and the one that we're ushering in, is to say like, who the hell is Jordy, right? Like, did he just post on his Instagram last week that he got a new Ferrari? That's really important context for me to know, not just that he actually has a car and checked out insurance last month. And so like, let's upsell him and try to up-select him into some other product, which we can draw some fuzzy connection to, right? So I think agents are going to, like, agentic commerce as a concept is in its very early days, right? Like, I think all these companies are still trying to figure out, what does it actually look like for Muse or Dot or Dots or whatever the hell the play for the month is, right? To recommend a product to you in chat and in feature, very early days of that. And we're keeping a close eye on how we can interface with that and play with it. But I think at the end of the day, it all comes down to like, whatever touchpoint a business has

• 2:50:17Speaker 06

  with their consumer is the most valuable real estate that ever had, right?

• 2:50:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the, and the main thing for customers is like, getting pushed a product that makes no sense for you.

• 2:50:26Speaker 06

  With a message that makes no sense.

• 2:50:28Jordi Hays?

  Well, getting pushed a product that makes no sense for you just completely, like, I've had this with, with.

• 2:50:33John Coogan?

  You don't need a charger battery?

• 2:50:35Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I've just had this at like, car, like, sometimes you're, if you're at a car dealership, like, the associate will try to sell you one of their, one of their.

• 2:50:49Jordi Hays?

  No, one of their cars in a way where like, you realize, okay, I actually know more about like, the pros and cons of this vehicle than you do, and I explain my situation to you, and you're still kind of pushing this thing, and then it just destroys like, the trust.

• 2:51:02John Coogan?

  Why are you pushing understated rims? It clearly needs spinners.

• 2:51:05Jordi Hays?

  But when you get, when you get truly like, the perfect Instagram ad, or you get truly like, the perfect, like. You know, a sales associate texts you, I got this, do you want it before it hits the floor? Like, that is a really good feeling.

• 2:51:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:22Speaker 06

  That's delight.

• 2:51:23Jordi Hays?

  But, but, but like, the gap right now is just so surprisingly wide between those like, actual human-led experiences, which is like, sales associate knows your preferences well, has a unique product for you at the right time, and what brands are able to do.

• 2:51:41John Coogan?

  It's basically back to the hallucination era. Like, we, we, we, we left the hallucination era where if you look up, you know, the history of a company on any LLM, you're going to get something that's pretty much like the Wikipedia page, pretty accurate. But, you know, four years ago, you ask an LLM, you know, anything, and you could just wind up in crazy made up territory, and it's the same thing for agent at commerce.

• 2:52:04Speaker 06

  We think of, and this is a core value and mission of the business, we think of the ultimate protagonists and end customer of what we do as the actual consumer, right? We are serving brands in the sense that they need to be delivering delightful experiences.

• 2:52:16Jordi Hays?

  We're helping brands help you.

• 2:52:18Speaker 06

  We're helping brands help you, right? At the end of the day.

• 2:52:20Jordi Hays?

  We're helping brands monetize you.

• 2:52:21Speaker 06

  Helping brands, yeah. I think we all, we all believe in.

• 2:52:26Jordi Hays?

  No, we're, we're very commercial here.

• 2:52:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, we love personalization because I think it unlocks delightful experiences, as cliché as that sounds, in ways that just ultimately is a net positive for the business and the customer.

• 2:52:37John Coogan?

  What do you think the role of outer signal data, market research, customer personas, profiles is in actual product development, product line expansion? There's some, there's some product line expansions and just new products that I'm like, okay, that didn't come out of a committee. At the same time, sometimes you look at a business and it's like, it's been staring you in the face for years, and everyone was going to buy the, the non-caffeinated version of Diet Coke or whatever. And so how, how do you think about the role that outer signal data should play in like the boardroom or product development room as opposed to just like the marketing engine?

• 2:53:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a good question. Look, we see a ton of our businesses use outer signal in their product merchandising and product development and R and D, actual processes, right? And so a couple of concrete examples here are massive, massive multi-billion and hundred million dollar businesses have discovered that they have some like really core persona. For example, one massive beauty brand found out that like 10% of their customers were like very distinctly nurses and doctors and like practitioners of medicine.

• 2:53:44John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:53:45Speaker 06

  And they weren't speaking to them at all, right? And it turns out that they were buying one very specific SKU in their set dramatically more than the rest of the customers, right? Which informs not only how you market to that group, also how you segment them, and also expanding more for them, right? The second part of this is like, because outer signal's real time, right? You can now see when you launch a product, like if Mountain Valley is going to launch some new SKU online, in real time, they can see the SKU is over indexing with women and it's over indexing with men or women in $3 million homes, it's dramatically under indexing in this cohort, which starts to inform like.

• 2:54:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, high ABV, Mountain Valley, really fly off the shelves.

• 2:54:21Speaker 06

  That's a top shelf plug right there. Yeah, very good.

• 2:54:22John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:54:23Speaker 06

  I like it.

• 2:54:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, give everyone a overview of Top Shelf.

• 2:54:27Speaker 06

  Top Shelf is a fund that I started in 2022, that's how you and I met, on the board of Lucy, obviously. We started investing in vice businesses, booze, nicotine, et cetera, and we've expanded into just the broader consumer market. So businesses that connect with their customers and technologies that help them do that. Outer Signal, Top Shelf's a very proud investor in Outer Signal.

• 2:54:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, what, what is the biggest trend in, in the alcohol space these days? I feel like we're post-seltzer boom, but is there a next, next thing that's the hot trend? I haven't really kept up with it.

• 2:54:57Speaker 06

  Booze has had an interesting few years.

• 2:54:59John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, no one's drinking anymore, right?

• 2:55:00Speaker 06

  Total nonsense. Turns out they are.

• 2:55:02John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. Who's drinking?

• 2:55:04Speaker 06

  Apparently no one in LA, although the other night I was out, I still saw people drinking, right?

• 2:55:08Jordi Hays?

  No, part of, part of the thing is like, LA has fallen off so hard as a city.

• 2:55:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:55:12Jordi Hays?

  That people assume no one's drinking anymore because you drive around on a Thursday night and, and the places where nightlife used to be a thing, and it's empties, people, and it's like a health mecca, so people are like, no one's drinking. And it turns out, all over the country, other places, like, you know, it's business as usual.

• 2:55:29John Coogan?

  But, but yeah, I mean, what are the growth, growth categories? Wine, beer, spirits, seltzer, something new? Like, where, where's the energy in the industry?

• 2:55:37Speaker 06

  I mean, we were the first check into a premium box wine called Grazzi, which has become one of the largest wine businesses in America.

• 2:55:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:55:43Speaker 06

  And they are basically premiumizing what used to be black box, which is like the thing you drank in college and slapped.

• 2:55:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, and, and that sort of happened with like Cut Water, where they took cocktail, mixed cocktails and put that in a more accessible form factor at a lower price.

• 2:55:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:55:56John Coogan?

  And then that started flying.

• 2:55:57Speaker 06

  I think occasions are changing modestly. I think the notion that young people don't drink anymore is ridiculous. I think that they were just delayed because of COVID.

• 2:56:05John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, yeah.

• 2:56:06Speaker 06

  It was the big trend that just completely messed up the headlines.

• 2:56:09John Coogan?

  But you returned to normal.

• 2:56:10Speaker 06

  Returned to normal, they were just delayed. So there was stagnancy because they weren't going out. I still think the loneliness epidemic is real, and there's another argument as to why booze is actually a cure for that, but we didn't have to go there in the Ultra Dome today.

• 2:56:22John Coogan?

  Maybe after we wrap.

• 2:56:23Speaker 06

  Booze is gonna, yeah, maybe after we wrap.

• 2:56:24Jordi Hays?

  Cure for all of society's problems are alcohol, according to alcohol investors.

• 2:56:30Speaker 06

  That's why I said we didn't have to go there. Talking about ball knowing. Yeah, Grazzi's, Grazzi was one of the first outer signal customers as well, and they've seen some crazy results.

• 2:56:37Jordi Hays?

  You guys have a very interesting lens on, like, for actually investing in consumer, just given, given your role as a data provider.

• 2:56:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's the growth, the growth strategy for outer signal? Is, is there a distribution mechanism where, like, you can vend in through like a Shopify plugin and be discovered there? I imagine you're doing paid ads on your own, maybe sponsoring podcasts that target things, going to trade shows, but what, what's working the best for you in terms of getting in front of e-commerce entrepreneurs?

• 2:57:10Speaker 06

  It's been remarkable word of mouth, driven by strong product market fit.

• 2:57:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:57:15Speaker 06

  People who.

• 2:57:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Brian, Brian said that he's like, sent a bunch of, bunch of different brands your way.

• 2:57:21Speaker 06

  And that happens constantly. We are running ads, we have a Shopify app, the ads are effective, we have an agency partner program, we have a killer sales team, we have good content that goes out, and all of this has been, you know, the company's only a year old, right?

• 2:57:32John Coogan?

  Oh, so agency would be like a performance marketer that wants to bring it into all their clients.

• 2:57:37Speaker 06

  Performance marketer, influencer, marketing teams, CX agencies, right? Outer Signal is a magical, magical experience for agencies.

• 2:57:44John Coogan?

  You can also sell it to the CEO because they want to look at the pretty dashboards, even if it's less tactical for them.

• 2:57:50Speaker 06

  And so in e-comm, you know, that's a very tight market. I think we've done a pretty good job both making friends in and also doing right by. We're also getting pulled up market pretty quickly, hotels, large scale consumer apps, massive retailers, they all have the same problem. Like, one of my favorite stories, one of the biggest hotel companies in the world that you guys have all heard of, we won't name names, but they inbounded, I took a call with them, and I said, what caught your attention? And he was like, dude, LeBron James checked into my hotel, and I didn't know about it.

• 2:58:16John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:58:17Speaker 06

  Until he got into the lobby.

• 2:58:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:19Speaker 06

  And I was mortified, and I chewed my team out, and I went and looked, and like, yeah, his name was there, but it was technically his assistant, but if anybody had taken the time to look, we would have caught it. And of course they didn't catch you, because who's looking at all that stuff? And he was like, we need outer signal.

• 2:58:29John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 2:58:30Speaker 06

  Right?

• 2:58:30John Coogan?

  Or at least exercise more discretion.

• 2:58:33Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 2:58:33John Coogan?

  And feel welcome.

• 2:58:34Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 2:58:35John Coogan?

  Fascinating. Very cool. Well, congratulations.

• 2:58:37Speaker 06

  Thank you, boys.

• 2:58:38John Coogan?

  For the raise. Congratulations.

• 2:58:39Jordi Hays?

  Such a, such a cool business. Like, it's one of those things, like, you're, you, if you can give that magic moment to founders and like management teams, which again, like, we experienced that really early on at, at Rora.

• 2:58:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:52Jordi Hays?

  But then continue to deliver value and get much deeper into the stack and help them run, you know, better email marketing, all, all these different channels, it's, uh, sky's the limit, so excited to see where you take it.

• 2:59:02Speaker 06

  Appreciate you, boys. Thanks for having me.

• 2:59:04John Coogan?

  Uh, well, that's basically our show. There was some breaking news while we were live, uh, what is it? Gemini 4 Argon launched? Cool new name.

• 2:59:13Jordi Hays?

  Love how you're.

• 2:59:13John Coogan?

  Bunch of benchmarks.

• 2:59:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what are your thoughts on?

• 2:59:16John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no. We're, we're, we're all going to digest this, we'll talk about it tomorrow and, and go through the benchmarks, but you can go check it out. Logan Kilpatrick, friend of the show, posted about it, and everyone can take it for a spin. We'll talk more about the reactions tomorrow. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com.

• 2:59:35Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:59:35John Coogan?

  And we will see you tomorrow at 11:00 AM Pacific. Goodbye.