Founders Guide to VC Holiday Parties, Dawgs of the Week, Zuck's Gold Chain, Trillion Dollar Potential

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Jordy, get off the phone, please.

• 0:05Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, center. I'm gonna have to call you back.

• 0:07John Coogan?

  Okay. Uh, great night last night. Took a massive group of bros and actually two women as well, uh, to

• 0:13Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 0:14John Coogan?

  the movies. We went and saw Interstellar, 10 year anniversary, 70 millimeter IMAX, Universal CityWalk.

• 0:20Jordi Hays?

  Been there.

• 0:20John Coogan?

  Fantastic event. Yeah, yeah, fantastic. Actually, the, the last time I saw Interstellar was at 70 millimeter IMAX, maybe even the same theater.

• 0:28Jordi Hays?

  When it, when it first released.

• 0:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I think it's been 10 years. Uh, fantastic movie, very techno-optimist, very sci-fi, lots of fun.

• 0:36Jordi Hays?

  The iconic scene of the guy like through the glass, right? Is it the movie that I'm thinking of?

• 0:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, don't go, don't go. Like, like, make me stay, that whole thing. And, uh, there's, yeah, the great docking scene where they're like, "It's impossible." He's like, "No, it's necessary." Yeah. Uh, it makes you think of, you know, raising the impossible round with, you know, one month of, of runway left.

• 0:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  It's, it's impossible.

• 1:00Jordi Hays?

  Can always be done.

• 1:00John Coogan?

  But it's necessary.

• 1:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03John Coogan?

  Great.

• 1:03Jordi Hays?

  How, a lot of people say, John, how do you get 30 people in a single movie?

• 1:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'll break it down. Yeah. So I highly recommend this to everyone, no matter what city you're in, if you have a movie theater, uh, what you do, go to Fandango, pick a, pick a movie, doesn't matter if it's bad. It just has to be a good bro movie. We did Jason Statham movie, The Beekeeper, once. It was disaster, but it was amazing. You just buy like 20 tickets.

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  Did you ever do Minions?

• 1:26John Coogan?

  Uh, no.

• 1:28John Coogan?

  We just pick something fun, something easy, accessible. Don't go art house, don't go depressing, just something, action movie, something silly, a classic, something that's in theaters you've seen before. Get a whole row, get 20 tickets, uh, bu- buy the tickets and then just text, literally just go down your text list. Everyone that you've texted in the last month who's in your city, "Hey, go into this movie. You wanna come?"

• 1:50Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:50John Coogan?

  And then whoever gets back to you, some people just won't even respond, other people, "Oh, I'm busy." And then a lot of people bail the last second. Some people will jump on the last second.

• 1:58Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:58John Coogan?

  But you can refund the tickets up until like 15 minutes before. And so there's no financial risk.

• 2:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:04John Coogan?

  But you've, but you've, you've de-risked the.

• 2:07Jordi Hays?

  The social capital that you generate from hosting your absolute boys and girls.

• 2:11John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 2:11Jordi Hays?

  At a movie, priceless.

• 2:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it just, it just defeats the activation energy of like, "Hey, should we do something? Well, who else is in?" It's like, the first text is like, "I'm going to see Interstellar in 70 millimeter with 20 people." Do you want to come? And then people are just like, sure. Yeah, it's so much easier. So highly recommend it. Holiday season, there'll be friends in town, people traveling, holidays. And it's a great experience. So just go make it happen. We've done it a few times. Try and run it back as often as possible.

• 2:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, cinema is meant to be enjoyed as a collective in many ways. Cinema has now become so much like, I'm going there with my little tiny group. You know, one or maybe a couple of people. You just sit there in silence, but there's, there's an amazing energy of filling a row.

• 2:54John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:54Jordi Hays?

  With your absolute boys.

• 2:55John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:56Jordi Hays?

  And just locking in.

• 2:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, the emotional moments are more emotional. The funny moments are funnier. Everything's better with a big group.

• 3:01Jordi Hays?

  If you get scared.

• 3:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02Jordi Hays?

  You gotta, you can grab on your bra.

• 3:04John Coogan?

  Bulky size, your mass monster who you brought with you.

• 3:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, David.

• 3:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, definitely bring a guy who can bench 400 pounds to keep you safe during the scary parts.

• 3:14Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:15John Coogan?

  It's essential. Well, it is the holiday seasons. It's Christmas time and we are bringing you today, something really special. We are breaking down the founder's guide to VC Christmas parties. And I have a cheat sheet here that, oh, this is, this is a prized possession.

• 3:33Jordi Hays?

  You put a lot of work into this.

• 3:33John Coogan?

  There's a lot of alpha here.

• 3:34Jordi Hays?

  And basically it more than a decade of actually attending these and trying to extract the most amount of value.

• 3:39John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 3:40Jordi Hays?

  Just because it's the holiday season, just because you're getting into the spirit of giving and just socializing and, and doesn't mean you shouldn't be trying to extract value out of the event.

• 3:50John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. There's always an opportunity cost. You could be working. If you're going to the Christmas party, you gotta get your money's worth.

• 3:56Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:57John Coogan?

  And so I have six steps here. Jordy has a bunch of different ideas. We'll break it all down for you. Here's how to get the most out of attending a VC Christmas party. Step one, you gotta get your friends on the list. This is tough because the guest list can be very tight. You gotta make your friends sound interesting. You gotta, you gotta craft compelling backstories for them. I have some examples. You go to whoever's hosting, say, hey, I got a buddy. He's in stealth mode on a revolutionary startup. He's building, you know, a bear domestication platform. He's an expert in bear domestication. You can just be like, hey, you seen that movie Inception? Yeah, he's doing that.

• 4:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he's a biotech founder in bear domestication.

• 4:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, or doing, or doing dream tech, sleep tech, you know, Johnson rejuvenation. These are the guys that get invited. Anyone else who's just building B2B SaaS, they're gonna show up to the partner meeting straight away, but they're not getting the Christmas invite. The Christmas invite's for

• 4:45Jordi Hays?

  Different category.

• 4:46John Coogan?

  The crazy folks, but you gotta get them up to speed. You gotta tell them, hey, I pitched you as the inception guy.

• 4:52Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 4:52John Coogan?

  I need you to pull an all-nighter, get up to speed on this. You can't just walk in there because you're gonna be quizzed.

• 4:57Jordi Hays?

  Get on perplexity and just start researching.

• 4:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, how would we make inception happen in real life? You might need to be, if you're the bear domestication guy, you gotta know all the different breeds, how are we getting them smaller? How long is this gonna take? What's your timeline?

• 5:09Jordi Hays?

  You wanna have some marks on your face, like, because it's a process. They're not fully domesticated yet. Like, go down, get violently slashed by something.

• 5:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:18Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, really, it's like a method. It's like John Fio's, you know, method entrepreneurship. You gotta get into character. And if somebody that's a biotech founder in bear domestication, certainly getting clipped with a claw here or there.

• 5:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:31Jordi Hays?

  Otherwise, you're just working with previously domesticated bears.

• 5:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So you gotta, you gotta work the list, work around whoever's organizing the assistance, the wildcard folks who might be in the organization, might have access to the event bread or the paperless post or whatever they're using. Get the names on the list. You gotta understand, the security's gonna be tight. This isn't a college party. You can't pass back an ID. That's not gonna play. You gotta be on the list. And so, once you get your boys in, you wanna be arriving early. You gotta respect the opportunity cost. Time here is time away from building your empire. You gotta maximize the night. So you show up, probably wanna be bringing a gun. And the reason is because it puts them in an awkward position. It's like, either they respect the Second Amendment, let you in.

• 6:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:19John Coogan?

  Or-

• 6:20Jordi Hays?

  And trust you.

• 6:20John Coogan?

  And trust you. And then you're, and then you're carrying the whole time.

• 6:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:25John Coogan?

  Or they make you take it off and check it at the door, and then you can be like, oh, so I guess you're un-American. And then you have the high ground.

• 6:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. And if they're, if they invest in American dynamism, then you have some, a little bit of blackmail on them to be like-

• 6:37John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. They didn't even allow guns at their Christmas party.

• 6:39Jordi Hays?

  They didn't allow me to carry at the Christmas party. How, how, how American are you?

• 6:44John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 6:44Jordi Hays?

  Um, yeah, and it, this, this goes back, like, I, a lot of people in LA carry.

• 6:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:50Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, a lot of people all over the country carry, but surprisingly here in LA. And I have no issues being around people that carry.

• 6:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:57Jordi Hays?

  As long as I really fully trust them. And if that's the case, then great. I'm actually feel safer knowing that they're, they're, they're strapped, right?

• 7:04John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 7:04Jordi Hays?

  And so it's a good way to determine- Does your GP, does VC actually trust you?

• 7:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:10Jordi Hays?

  And if they've invested in your company already, then great. If they haven't yet, it's a sign that they are probably more likely to invest.

• 7:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:16Jordi Hays?

  If they trust you with their life, they'll trust you with their capital.

• 7:19John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. So, once you get in, you gotta scout the best drinks. You gotta skip the tray past wine and champagne.

• 7:26Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 7:27John Coogan?

  That's the house wine. You gotta head straight for the wine cellar, usually in the basement. Scout out the sommelier. You gotta ask for the best pour. You're looking for Screaming Eagle. Here's what you do. You don't just drink it one glass at a time. You say, "Hey, I got a bunch of friends upstairs. Can I get four glasses?"

• 7:42Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 7:43John Coogan?

  Take one, chug it right there in front of them. Let them know, establish dominance, establish dominance. Then, as you're walking up the stairs, that's glass two. Then, you head upstairs. You act like, "Oh, I'm looking for my buddy, but I'm just gonna take a sip." You're down to two glasses now. Take the third glass. And then, as you're milling about, scout in the scene, four glasses. Then, you're a full bottle of Screaming Eagle in.

• 8:02Jordi Hays?

  You can slow down.

• 8:03John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 8:03Jordi Hays?

  Do it a little more leisurely, at least.

• 8:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. So, now, you're already up on the deck.

• 8:08Jordi Hays?

  To be clear, the sommelier knows you've had at least one glass.

• 8:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:12Jordi Hays?

  But everyone else just thinks you're on your first, right?

• 8:14John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 8:15Jordi Hays?

  They didn't see the other three.

• 8:15John Coogan?

  Plausible deniability.

• 8:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:17John Coogan?

  So, now, like, no matter what happens, you've hurdled your opportunity cost. Cause you've consumed an entire bottle of Screaming Eagle.

• 8:24Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 8:24John Coogan?

  Now, it's time to get some food in you. So, you gotta head to the buffet. Usually, there's prime rib or another high-value protein. And you're gonna wanna take down as much as possible. But, this is where it gets creative. Bring a couple Ziploc bags, take a couple prime ribs home to your team. If you're a bootstrap startup, you could feed your entire team for a week off of what you can take.

• 8:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I would recommend, like, take, you know, don't just bring a couple Ziploc bags. Bring 30 or 40. And actually stash some around the property, uh, so that you can, you could, you could come back. After the party's ended, the host will probably be fairly incapacitated, right? They've had a bunch of drinks throughout the night, they're sleeping. Leave the party, but then actually come back like an hour later and just collect all the, all the prime rib and then get out of there again.

• 9:09John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. Okay, so step four, you gotta navigate the social scene. You gotta handle the cool kids. Cause if you're a founder, you're not gonna be the hottest kid there. You're not gonna be the coolest guy. There's always gonna be someone who's flexing a little bit harder. There's gonna be a lot of drugs going around potentially. You gotta skip the mushroom bar for sure. No psychedelics. Uh, there might be tattoos. If that's the case, let everyone know. Get a giant chess piece. Bald eagle eating a panda bear. Let people know. You're an American.

• 9:41Jordi Hays?

  A real patriot.

• 9:42John Coogan?

  Real patriot. Everyone will be getting like small tattoos because it's, you know, it's, it's time limited. You wanna be in there for two hours.

• 9:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so much, so much of company building is pure pain tolerance, right?

• 9:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 9:53Jordi Hays?

  You gotta chew glass for a decade to get that generational outcome.

• 9:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:57Jordi Hays?

  And so if you can sit there at the holiday party, getting a chess piece for two hours, that's a way to display that level of pain tolerance and, and don't flinch, don't cry. Just, just take it on the chest.

• 10:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:09Jordi Hays?

  And that's an easy way to get your next round done. Cause that, other VCs are gonna see, this guy just got a pound of ink in his flesh. Didn't even win. So of course I can trust him with my money, right? Cause this is about, this isn't really about, if you're, if you're invited to the holiday party, you either have a pending term sheet or already in the portfolio.

• 10:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:29Jordi Hays?

  And so this is really about getting in front of the other capital allocators at the event and getting their attention so that they can get your next round done.

• 10:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so you wanna bring your print, your, your pitch deck. You wanna print it out. Uh, use a high quality 80 pound paper. Don't go cheap. No, no 20 pound, no 30 pound.

• 10:45Jordi Hays?

  Smart.

• 10:45John Coogan?

  Full color. You wanna bind it and you wanna leave it everywhere. Drop it strategically. In the bathroom, the home office, behind books, where, get it in the gym, wherever you think the,

• 10:55Jordi Hays?

  Put it in the prime rib. You know, the, the catering and they have the,

• 10:58John Coogan?

  Flip it open, little pitch deck in there. Easy. Next person's gonna find it. A VC is not gonna be able to resist looking at the pitch deck, no matter how poppin' the party is. So then-

• 11:08Jordi Hays?

  Would you, would you use airdrop in a situation like this? Or you just start airdropping to anybody like in the, in the vicinity?

• 11:14John Coogan?

  I like, I like the way you're thinking. Yeah, I like the way you're thinking.

• 11:16Jordi Hays?

  Cause if you're out of physical copies, start blasting airdrops.

• 11:20John Coogan?

  Yep, exactly. So then you're gonna wanna mill about. Now you have your tattoo, you got your steak, you got your screaming eagle. You're gonna head upstairs and there's probably gonna be some cool kids hanging out in some private room, maybe doing a little bit of cocaine. You wanna stay away from that. But you don't wanna get mugged by the cool kids. So here's what you do. You walk in, you see them, hey, hey, and they're gonna be like, hey, come do the coke. You don't want to, you wanna stick to the basics. Caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, protein. Right? So, how do you mug them? Say, hey, I just got back from Pyongyang. I got some crystal meth that's purer than a graph diamond. Let's hit this. Now they're scared. Cause they're like, ah, I don't wanna touch that, that's too crazy. And so now you're the boss.

• 12:01Jordi Hays?

  You're the boss.

• 12:02John Coogan?

  And you don't even have to do any hard drugs. And so they, you've established your dominance.

• 12:05Jordi Hays?

  Just throw it on the table.

• 12:07John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 12:07Jordi Hays?

  And watch them scatter to the wind.

• 12:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, their fear is your win. Leave with your reputation intact. So the last thing, or actually step five, uh, spycraft. Everyone suspects at these parties that the Asian women are CCP spies. But that's racist and just wrong. What you need to watch out for are the Canadian guys. Because they blend in. You think that they're Americans, but then you find out, you get completely blindsided.

• 12:32Jordi Hays?

  Gafon, this is Gafon's law.

• 12:34John Coogan?

  I was, I was shocked when I learned that. So, uh, you need to be figuring out who is un-American, who's from Canada. You can usually ID them by if they're saying happy holidays instead of merry Christmas. Very un-American. And then you could drop an obscure ice hockey reference. You could start talking about the Zamboni market and how Zambonis are technically hard tech. And if they get excited, that's a tell, it's Canadian, he's into hockey. Uh, and if someone questions you, you're already good, cause you can show off your tattoo of the eagle eating the panda bear. And they know you're on, you're on America's team. And so the last step, step six, you gotta party like a legend, you gotta be a contrarian, you gotta leave your mark. You gotta get ready for the pool. We always recommend wearing a swimsuit under your tuxedo.

• 13:17John Coogan?

  You go into the bathroom, you hang up your tuxedo nice and neat. You wanna leave it, you wanna leave it nicely folded.

• 13:22Jordi Hays?

  Good when you get back in it.

• 13:23John Coogan?

  Exactly, hop in the pool, maybe you start a revolution. VCs are herd animals, they'll all jump in, all of a sudden it's a pool party.

• 13:30Jordi Hays?

  And do your best, if, if, if any of your absolute boys are in there, do your best to start a whirlpool. You know, where you all move around. Long enough that you kind of create this, like basically creating a movement founder, venture capitalists like to invest in founders that can create a movement.

• 13:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:46Jordi Hays?

  And so this is a wonderful physical display, not just physicality, but ability to, you know, create something bigger than yourself, right? Whirlpool is a great example of that. And a beaner or any type of emerging GP is going to just appreciate their pool getting used in general.

• 14:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:02Jordi Hays?

  Many of those pools go untouched for months.

• 14:05John Coogan?

  I completely agree.

• 14:06Jordi Hays?

  And so it's a sign of respect to say, hey, you pay to get this pool cleaned every single week and serviced. I'm going to use it so that you get your money's worth.

• 14:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's use the fruits of your labor. A cannonball is respectful.

• 14:18Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 14:19John Coogan?

  So you got any more tips for me?

• 14:20Jordi Hays?

  I mean, you really, you really covered it almost all. Yeah, my, my main stuff kind of just echoes a lot of what, a lot of what you're saying. I think it's always about finding a way to stand out. You, you sort of went over a number of different ways to do that and be memorable, right? But the biggest thing, if I could hone in on anything, it's become the main character.

• 14:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 14:41Jordi Hays?

  If somebody's hosting people at their house, they're trying to create an environment that says, oh, you know, look, look at how incredible my network is, the quality of the people that I surround myself with, the quality of my portfolio. And so if you're going to become the main character, you need to be controversial. The best founders are often controversial, right? Steve Jobs, Travis Kalanak, Kalanick. You need to figure out a way to pattern match to this and do that in this sort of party environment. So that can be, you already covered this, a lot of people are going to be sticking to one to two drinks. Try drinking in order of magnitude more than that.

• 15:14John Coogan?

  Power law outcome for drinking.

• 15:15Jordi Hays?

  Power law, power law drinking, they call it. And this is really like, you want them to remember you on Monday, right? So the Saturday party, everybody, everybody's in a daze on Sunday. And then Monday, you send that email out, hey, it was great seeing you at the party. I don't remember much, but I'd love to. Get together and sort of talk further, take the conversation a little bit further.

• 15:38John Coogan?

  And this is one of those like Tealine secrets about Silicon Valley. Like, we know some VCs who get completely blacked out and they've gone on to raise huge funds.

• 15:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's sort of a blackout to fund manager pipeline that's pretty well established.

• 15:49John Coogan?

  And so, yeah, kind of narrative violation there.

• 15:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you know, you know. Another one, insist on bringing your own security. Often, oftentimes, there's going to be security already there. And if you're going to a party with, with people like this, you want them to know that you have enemies and that you need your own security with you.

• 16:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:12Jordi Hays?

  If I meet a founder and they don't have any enemies, they're probably not doing anything important and I probably don't want to invest in them. So by bringing your own security, it adds to the sort of mystique and allure and saying like, why does he need four bodyguards surrounding him at all times?

• 16:25John Coogan?

  I thought he was just domesticating bears. He must be doing something much bigger.

• 16:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. You know, seed stage founder, like, how does he have this many enemies? How is, how is this, you know, a high threat environment? So it's just a way to establish sort of your importance. Second, so this happens a lot. Sometimes you're getting invited to a VC holiday party for, for a VC that you love. That's one situation. That's kind of what we outlined. But if you get invited to a rival VC's holiday party, you can bring, I'd recommend bringing a journalist as a plus one. And here's the trick, disguise them as an escort so that, so that you don't make anyone's alarm bells go off.

• 17:08Jordi Hays?

  So basically, if they're just...

• 17:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 17:13Jordi Hays?

  If they're disguised as an escort, that's pretty common for, for people to bring escorts to, to a holiday party like this. And so, nobody, the, the rival VC won't know what hit them until they're in the information on Monday.

• 17:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I mean, the journalists will be able to blend in because they all come from fabulous wealth. And so...

• 17:31Jordi Hays?

  Totally. They're, they're gonna, they're gonna know what wines to, you know, select and which appetizers to skip and whatnot. And then the last thing, a little more serious, bring extra large napkins. A lot of rounds get done on the back of napkins at these kind of parties.

• 17:49John Coogan?

  Makes sense, yeah.

• 17:51Jordi Hays?

  Depending on your situation as a founder, there might be a lot of structure added to the deal. And so if you have a bigger napkin, you're just, you'll kind of need the extra space to make, to kind of work out all the kinks and make sure you get the whole thing and the signature blocks and everything like that. So bring extra napkins, bring a journalist as a plus one if you're going to your enemy's holiday party and whatever the situation is, bring your own security.

• 18:15John Coogan?

  We should make paper napkins that have full Excel sheets printed on them.

• 18:18Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 18:19John Coogan?

  So you can just do a full model.

• 18:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:21John Coogan?

  Do you have printed on there on the back of it? Yeah, you can do this deal on the back of a napkin.

• 18:25Jordi Hays?

  It's simple.

• 18:25John Coogan?

  And it's just the most complicated DCF you've ever seen.

• 18:28Jordi Hays?

  That's great.

• 18:29John Coogan?

  Well, that's fantastic. Let us know how it goes, folks. Use those tips and enjoy Christmas parties at VC events this holiday season. Moving on, let's do some DMs that we got. We have a bunch here. First is from Jeremy, good friend of the show. He says, "Why won't you guys put on a tie?" That's a good question. I think for 2025, that should be a new year's resolution. I'm putting on a tie. Send me your recommendations. Send me, we found a great NetJets tie. It was a steal. We're going to find, we're going to become tie experts.

• 19:03Jordi Hays?

  Tie experts, yeah. Guys in LA, guys in LA put on a suit and think they deserve an award.

• 19:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 19:09Jordi Hays?

  And they haven't even thought about getting to the tie yet. So there's levels to it.

• 19:12John Coogan?

  He did, he did send us this the day that I was wearing a tuxedo with a bow tie, though. So, you know, pay attention. I do wear ties every once in a while. Oh, here's a, here's a more serious DM that I got. "Ahoy, John. Do you know how I can get off the employment blacklist? I've applied to an amount of jobs that would blow your mind this year and have only had 10 or so interviews. What do you think about how to stand out?" Maybe we can tell some jokes, but also give some serious advice because I know that this person is seriously applying to jobs and is seriously trying to get a job right now and is kind of willing to do anything. Very, very strong hustler. Sent me some, just like very interesting stock tips. He, he found this company that-

• 19:55John Coogan?

  Is in the caviar business that was mooning for a while and he's just like observing, he's not like a trader, but he just like knows an interesting storyline, clearly like tapped in, but is really having a, having trouble standing out in the kind of vanilla, uh, hiring, send in your resume. Like he just doesn't make, make it through the first gate.

• 20:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:15John Coogan?

  So what would you recommend to stand out?

• 20:18Jordi Hays?

  I mean.

• 20:18John Coogan?

  Maybe jokingly, maybe seriously. I know he's looking for real advice though.

• 20:22Jordi Hays?

  Applying for jobs is, uh, is pretty much futile unless, unless you're applying to these sort of big companies that have sort of established pipeline.

• 20:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:33Jordi Hays?

  Pro, even, even then I don't really recommend it.

• 20:35John Coogan?

  Like the one application process that works is like you're a new grad at a top school and there's a recruiting cycle.

• 20:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:42John Coogan?

  It's like, yeah, of course you put in your application with Bain, BCG, McKinsey and it's like a clear flow.

• 20:47Jordi Hays?

  And even, even, even relatively unknown seed stage startups will get 3,000 applicants.

• 20:54John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:54Jordi Hays?

  For a entry level role.

• 20:56John Coogan?

  Any tech.

• 20:57Jordi Hays?

  And so it's, it's completely, it's completely impossible to try to get jobs that way. Not impossible. Uh, but, but I don't, I think people going and applying to a bunch of jobs, feeling like they're being productive and, and working towards, something is not a good idea. Two, so two things. One, establishing some type of personal relationship with someone at the company. That could be the founder. That could be an investor in the company. That could be, uh, you need, you need some type of warm relationship. Otherwise you're just going to get lost in the, in the stack. Uh, second, this is especially probably relevant to engineering roles. If you can go talk to,

• 21:36Jordi Hays?

  go find 50 engineering focused recruiters and, and, and get on the phone with them because they're trying to get on the phone with potential candidates all day.

• 21:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 21:44Jordi Hays?

  And have them start to understand you and help, and then start warm introing you to companies. That, that's another way. But yeah, I think you just need to get more creative in order to get attention. My. My favorite story of hiring somebody was somebody who had seen some marketing in my last company, sent me a number of DMs that I actually didn't see. They went to the like spam or like requested messages folder. And then he, he just made an app for us, like an entire end-to-end app that was like fully out of the box, like marketing drop. And that finally got through to me and I jumped on, I think it was like a Saturday that I saw it and I was like, this is insane. Like totally like blew me away and I had a conversation with him and ended up hiring him.

• 22:31Jordi Hays?

  Pretty much like after seeing that work, I was like ready to hire him on the first call. So like you gotta, if you're struggling to find a role, like you just gotta get, find a way to get like, figure out how to be 10 times more creative than what you're doing right now. Sending a linked, a boilerplate LinkedIn message, you know, probably not going to do it, but figure out a way to stand out.

• 22:49John Coogan?

  So two things, one on cold email incredibly effective, but dialing in the complexity and length of a cold email is really tough and really critical. Too short, hey, I just want a job. Can we hop on the phone? That's not going to break through, but also going super long and telling your entire life story is also going to feel like work. It needs to be just this perfect balance, like three to five sentences with phone number. Hey, you can just text me, like let's move to the next stage. You want to see these things as like a funnel, like you, you want to get to like phone, text, meet, like move very quickly. And then in terms of the building something, creating value before you get paid essentially, a lot of people are like, oh, well, like you just want free work or whatever.

• 23:34John Coogan?

  But I think that if you reframe it in your mind in terms of like, I could spend 40 hours applying to 400 jobs with generic applications and just like slightly reworded. You know, like cover letters saying, I like your industry, whatever.

• 23:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:49John Coogan?

  Versus you take that 40 hours and you put that towards whatever your craft is, whether that's marketing or sales or development, you put that towards one company.

• 23:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:58John Coogan?

  It's more wood behind fewer arrows. That's going to break through.

• 24:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:01John Coogan?

  And, and I think that you'll actually see a higher conversion rate down the funnel, even though the top of funnel is so much smaller.

• 24:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:07John Coogan?

  Because you're actually just, just, you know, dedicated.

• 24:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:10John Coogan?

  And that'll really show off.

• 24:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Try to do some type of small project, even like if you're an engineer, message a CEO and say, hey, I contributed to this like open source project that I know you guys use.

• 24:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:21Jordi Hays?

  That'll get you through. If you're in a marketing role, hey, I, uh, here's five influencers in your category that I think could, could be potential partners and here's why.

• 24:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:31Jordi Hays?

  That'll get you through. Sales, same thing. Hey, here's three companies that I know that it could be potential customers. I'd love to connect you to them and separately would be great to jump on the phone sometime.

• 24:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:43Jordi Hays?

  So we got a, uh, we got reply guy of the month. And the big, the big news here, reply guy of the month, there's been so much, so much activity in, uh, the comment section of the TV account that we are moving reply guy of the month to reply guy of the week. And, uh, so there will be 52, up to 52 reply guys over the next year, uh, honorary reply guys. And I gotta say this, there's, there's a number of accounts that have been putting in the work. We're talking 10, 20 plus comments a day. Uh, it's extremely excessive. The people that are, um, and necessary, the people

• 25:23Jordi Hays?

  that are, are standing out are, uh, are actually, you know, reply guys that are engaging with each other.

• 25:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:30Jordi Hays?

  So they're, they're taking the conversation on to each other's accounts and each other's posts. They're engaging with, you know, companies like Ramp and Devon. They're engaging with the employees of the companies of the companies that we feature. So there's levels to the reply game. Last week, we gave it to Baldow. He has even leveled up since then. His posting has been out of control, good. And he actually had a little bit of back and forth with this, this week's reply guy of the week, which is none other than Turner Novak. Congratulations to Turner.

• 26:05John Coogan?

  Congratulations, Turner.

• 26:05Jordi Hays?

  This guy, Turner, I would have to imagine has post notifications on. He has been highly, highly active. And this goes to show that it's not just emerging posters that can win this award. It doesn't, you know, Turner's got, you know, 100,000 plus followers on this platform. He's been, and been very active for years.

• 26:25John Coogan?

  Elon Musk is a reply guy.

• 26:26Jordi Hays?

  Elon Musk is a reply guy, too.

• 26:28John Coogan?

  With just emojis, this is so good, quote tweets, he engages.

• 26:31Jordi Hays?

  You're never above replying and being a reply guy.

• 26:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 26:35Jordi Hays?

  And Turner had some fantastic replies. I'll kind of go down them.

• 26:38John Coogan?

  Let's go through the greatest hits.

• 26:39Jordi Hays?

  Greatest hits, wow, Devon is a game changer, engaging with cognition labs. We love to see that. We were talking about how expensive podcasting is. You've got mics, cables, cameras, $300,000 to spend on a, you know, branding agency just to get, just to get in the game. And Turner said each trust fund actually comes with a podcast. So that would explain why there's so many podcasts.

• 27:03John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 27:04Jordi Hays?

  He also was trying to get wire instructions for Baldow's seed round, which again, showing that engagement with other reply guys.

• 27:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, kind of syndicate of reply guys going on.

• 27:12Jordi Hays?

  And he actually said, you guys are doing it all wrong. You don't actually need a podcast. You just need to be able to tell people you have a podcast.

• 27:18John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 27:19Jordi Hays?

  Telling someone you have a podcast gets you all the same benefits without having to deal with any of the downside. So this is, if you just have a podcast, you can say, hey, do you want to come be a guest on my podcast? And if they say yes, maybe you do a podcast with them just to, you know, show like, you know, extend an all branch. Having somebody on your podcast is the modern equivalent of an Ollage branch. He also is dunking on TechCrunch a little bit. He says TechCrunch has been real quiet since the Technology Brothers got together. So anyways, love to see this. He even took it a step further. This kind of was icing on the cake. He did not release an episode of his podcast during Thanksgiving, but he used that as an

• 28:00Jordi Hays?

  opportunity to promote Technology Brothers podcast. So setting a new bar, I see a pretty vicious rivalry emerging between Baldow and Turner.

• 28:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 28:11Jordi Hays?

  Bright future for both of them as posters, but certainly going to be continuing to get at it in the comment section. So congratulations to Turner. We will be getting you your medal in the mail soon. So thank you for replying and never stop.

• 28:26John Coogan?

  Near Cyan says, "I am purchasing Mark Zuckerberg's golden chain for $15,420.69, and it's one of Zuck's gold chains in support of the Edge Institute." And this was all over the timeline. People were very excited about the auctioning of Mark Zuckerberg's golden chain, which is very cool. I guess this was donated, but you know the whole backstory. Can you break it down and then tell us why we are awarding the Brother of the Week, not to Zuck, but to someone else?

• 28:55Jordi Hays?

  Yes. So anyways, so this auction was hosted by a friend of the podcast and friend of ours, Justin Maers. So Justin has his own company, TruMed.

• 29:05John Coogan?

  And Kettle and Fire.

• 29:06Jordi Hays?

  Made his money in bone broth, but more recently has been in the running TruMed. He's also a venture partner at Long Journey Ventures, a famous venture capital firm. And Justin has created this thing called Inflection Grants, which is a program where if you're 25 and under and $2,000 would change your life, you can get a grant. So this could be... Getting a plane ticket somewhere, let's say you're living in Tennessee and you want to get to Silicon Valley, they'll give you a grant that lets you fly out, meet somebody and potentially change the trajectory of your life. It could be a computer, let's say kids in high school and they're like good at video editing and they want to get better at that, they'll give them a grant to buy a computer. And so this entire auction-

• 29:49John Coogan?

  Are tailor-made suits eligible?

• 29:51Jordi Hays?

  Yes, so if you're a Gen Z founder, you're going to Y Combinator, you want to stand out and you want to get a tailored suit from Fiorentino Label, $2,000 is not going to get you that, but you could go down to Suit Supply and pick up a suit from there. And so yeah, it's an amazing program, sort of adjacent to TEAL Fellowship, more accessible, and just goes to show that it doesn't take that much money to change the trajectory of someone's life, right? So very cool program. And so this chain, they were able to secure Mark Zuckerberg's former daily driver chain and auction it off and able to raise $100,000

• 30:35Jordi Hays?

  for inflection grants. And so that's 50 people that are going to get this grant. And so if you're interested in the program, go to inflectiongrants.com, I believe is the thing. And congratulations to Justin, one of the founding brothers of the week. And nobody deserves it more than him this week. So, thank you.

• 30:58John Coogan?

  Let's continue with potentially a future brother of the week, Luke Metro. He's been on the show before. He says, "It's kind of cool how raising a seven-figure seed round is generally easier than getting a job as a VC associate." Interesting.

• 31:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we... This was somewhat controversial in the group chats.

• 31:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, Theo was saying that this behavior needs to be shamed, and I think he was talking about the pattern of VC associates or something?

• 31:27Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I think he was saying it shouldn't be that easy to raise millions of dollars for your company.

• 31:31John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 31:32Jordi Hays?

  And I can see it both ways. Theo's point of view is a lot of people, their first few ideas that they work on are just not going to be that great, right? And sort of resources that are potentially wasted. I can see that side. The other side of this is that the VC associate job is just not, at most firms, is not that. You're kind of like a BDR, SDR, like cold reaching out to companies. The good-

• 31:58Jordi Hays?

  Companies don't want to talk to the associates and so it's just sort of like a role that has a bunch of busy work and maybe it's, you know, maybe it ends up being a pathway to joining the firm as partner or joining another firm as partner, but I think in a lot of funds, the, the associate role is a, is a, is almost like a death trap. But I, I think it's generally good that, that more young people will be better qualified to be investors later in life if they like build stuff. So I think it's generally good that it's, it's, it, and you know, Luke is just like identifying this, but it's pretty wild how it's some, for some people, it's easier for them to get it to raise a seed round than get a job.

• 32:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:38Jordi Hays?

  Which is, which is actually probably very, a, a, a indicator of how strong our innovation economy is.

• 32:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, just like a, like almost like a tax on large VC funds, if you raise a billion dollar fund and you put a hundred million aside for million dollar seed rounds, that's a hundred companies.

• 32:58Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 32:59John Coogan?

  You're not going to hire a hundred associates with a billion dollar fund.

• 33:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:02John Coogan?

  And so the math just plays out much better. You get all these call options and then all these companies.

• 33:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:08John Coogan?

  It really does seem like it's a better job.

• 33:09Jordi Hays?

  That would be an interesting fund strategy though. It's a hundred million dollar fund with a hundred associates and they just fight. They just fight for the death. There's a leaderboard every single week, who's talking to the most companies, who's doing the most deals.

• 33:21John Coogan?

  There are some funds that track calls.

• 33:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:24John Coogan?

  In the CRM, like you gotta be making forty calls a week.

• 33:26Jordi Hays?

  And emails, I'm sure.

• 33:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, forty calls a week, it's crazy.

• 33:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:29John Coogan?

  Oh, well, I, I, I agree with Luke on this. I think, I think it is, it is wild, but I think it's the correct, correct model. Erroneous Input created a fantastic meme of us. I love this. This is reply guy of the month or week level posting.

• 33:45Jordi Hays?

  He's a candidate for sure.

• 33:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:47Jordi Hays?

  Do not stop Erroneous Input.

• 33:48John Coogan?

  We love what you're doing.

• 33:49Jordi Hays?

  On the map.

• 33:50John Coogan?

  It's a beautiful photo. Found some great photos of us from the show. Photoshopped them in to this, uh, this sports car in the snow. And, uh, really, really good job with the cropping and the masking. Just this was not, it's not a hack job. This is, this is class. I like it. Um, really, really good. Probably could have blended in the TB logo into the hood a little bit more.

• 34:12Jordi Hays?

  Dusted a little snow over the hood.

• 34:14John Coogan?

  In a couple of months, we'll be pulling out the 3D rendering software, really baking it in.

• 34:18Jordi Hays?

  Using Sora, maybe.

• 34:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe, but we, we, we love to see the user-generated content, where it's going, how it's growing. We appreciate what you do for the show.

• 34:27Jordi Hays?

  Great work.

• 34:27John Coogan?

  We wouldn't be who we are without you. Uh, let's go through this three post deep dive by Arfa Rock. Funny name. Uh, and I think, uh, did you want, did you want to start with, uh, the Steph post? Steph Mui, she says, uh, a GP from a multi-stage VC firm is anonymously posting private revenue numbers and funding rounds of large companies that are apparently quite accurate. And they only have 450 followers and most of their tweets have almost no likes. And, uh, Arfa Rock is posting 11 labs, 90 million ARR, planning 100 million EOI, profitable. Closed unannounced round at 3.2 billion from iconic growth in A16Z.

• 35:08John Coogan?

  And, um, Arfa Rock also says 20 million ARR in the first two months. Fastest growing software company ever, raising 80 to 100 million at 1 billion. Have a few term sheets first week in market. And then Arfa Rock closes with saying, my DMs are open. If you have some tea, it ain't much, but it's honest work. So yeah, what's going on here?

• 35:28Jordi Hays?

  So you remember, so you remember last, uh, last bubble, uh, 2021, there was an account, I think it was called Genuine Info or something like that, that was just similar approach that was basically leaking major deal making that was happening.

• 35:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 35:44Jordi Hays?

  You know, months or two months out before it was getting publicly announced. And so Arfa Rock, great name.

• 35:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 35:50Jordi Hays?

  I actually don't know what it's in a reference to.

• 35:52John Coogan?

  Arthur Rock.

• 35:53Jordi Hays?

  Arthur Rock.

• 35:54John Coogan?

  The original GP or the original like VC.

• 35:57Jordi Hays?

  Wow, wow. I just proved I'm a zoomer.

• 36:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:01Jordi Hays?

  The original GP himself. So anyways.

• 36:04John Coogan?

  The first venture capitalist.

• 36:05Jordi Hays?

  The first venture capitalist. So great, great name and some, some interesting intel. I actually DM with him a little bit last night.

• 36:13John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:14Jordi Hays?

  Nice guy, technology brother himself, clearly.

• 36:18John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 36:18Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, I'm, I'm, it's an interesting strategy, Cotton. Cause I think at some point, some, some schizo is going to just try to pinpoint all of this and put it all together. Because on one hand, I think it's a lot of this information by the time that, but he, he's not sharing anything that would be potentially damaging to companies.

• 36:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:38Jordi Hays?

  But he's certainly front running the news cycle.

• 36:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:40Jordi Hays?

  Which our friends at the misinformation like to do quite a lot.

• 36:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:44Jordi Hays?

  And so anyways, I'm interested. I think, I think I'm long this account. I'm investing sub 500 followers.

• 36:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 36:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he's got a bright future and it's, it's one, it's one to follow. It's funny because I think it will whip GPs into this hysteria because they're going to see. Sometimes announcements get done and GPs are like punching the air because they just didn't see the company at all. And it just like happened and they're like, how did this happen without us seeing it? And now it's even earlier than that. Like the term sheets are basically already signed and they're seeing Arfa Rock announce it. And they're just like sending Arfa Rock's posts.

• 37:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 37:18Jordi Hays?

  To their principal being like, how the fuck did you miss this?

• 37:22John Coogan?

  I love how you say during the last bubble because it's just like, you're always in a bubble.

• 37:27Jordi Hays?

  We're always in one bubble.

• 37:29John Coogan?

  You're either in a crash or a bubble.

• 37:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:30John Coogan?

  There's no normal time.

• 37:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:32John Coogan?

  And this is true. Like when I got to Silicon Valley in 2012, 2013, everyone was talking about Texas, the major bubble. And then that bubble went on for a decade.

• 37:41Jordi Hays?

  That was a great bubble.

• 37:42John Coogan?

  Great bubble.

• 37:42Jordi Hays?

  But I think we're in the best one yet.

• 37:43John Coogan?

  Might be best one yet.

• 37:44Jordi Hays?

  The America bubble.

• 37:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:47John Coogan?

  Jacob Sandsbury says, having kids in the next five years might be a tragic mistake. Every smart bio founder slash scientist I've talked to seems to think that embryo editing for things like short, short, short sleeper, reduce cancer risk, et cetera, is possible on a near term horizon. Imagine having two kids a couple of years apart. One is a superhuman and the other isn't. Sorry, Jim. Little Timmy won't get cancer. Only needs four hours of sleep and you're normal. And you're normal. You were just born in the wrong order. 3K likes, interesting. The problem with this is that like, these innovations, like it's not going to be some binary step change. It's going to be very smooth and so, like, yes, every, every kid is going to be healthier.

• 38:26Jordi Hays?

  Decel, decel alert.

• 38:27John Coogan?

  Decel alert.

• 38:28Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm kidding. I, I, I looked at this, I'm more like, part of being human is being imperfect.

• 38:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 38:34Jordi Hays?

  And I, I plan to have, you know, many more children with my wife and.

• 38:40John Coogan?

  Go watch Gattaca.

• 38:42Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 38:42John Coogan?

  The indomitable will of the human spirit.

• 38:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and, and, and my children are perfect to me, even though I'm sure like, one of them needs more sleep than the other, when, you know, all these things, so I think it's pretty

• 38:53John Coogan?

  A lot of these gene editing technologies will be possible, once you're alive, there'll be medications, there'll be all sorts of different hacks.

• 38:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's also, do you want to be in the first generation of fully gene edited children, where you're like, oh, I want to make sure, I want to allow them to only sleep three hours so they can grind harder?

• 39:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, probably no side effects.

• 39:10Jordi Hays?

  And then it creates this like insane side effect and it's like, yeah, maybe you want to cycle, a 20 year cycle.

• 39:15John Coogan?

  All of them became serial killers.

• 39:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just want to edit for not being one shotted by ayahuasca.

• 39:22John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 39:22Jordi Hays?

  In case, in the downside that my children.

• 39:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, also, if you talk to a parent and you said, hey, there's this new experimental gene editing technology that will let your kids sleep for four hours, I don't know a single parent would take that. Every parent would be like, where's the 12 hour sleep?

• 39:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, every night, you're basically optimizing for, oh, make sure this light

• 39:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, longer sleep, blackout curtains, noise machine.

• 39:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, noise, two, let's do two noise machines.

• 39:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, two noise machines.

• 39:50Jordi Hays?

  Overlapping, have you done the overlapping noise machines?

• 39:52John Coogan?

  No, I haven't done that, it works.

• 39:53Jordi Hays?

  There's levels to the noise machine.

• 39:56John Coogan?

  I love it. Okay, Cora says, today was the day I finally broke. I was accidentally not disassociated enough on the streets of San Francisco and projectile vomited from the yucky sights. This is interesting because I, I looked at Cora's profile and she's like, a very normal tech person, she's not some like raging, right wing lunatic who's like agitating for culture war, but 10 years ago, there was this guy Greg Gottman who posted something very similar, talking about the homeless problem in, in San Francisco and he was. Cancelled harder than like anyone ever, like could not get a job for years, for years. And then he kind of bounced around. I think he's doing okay now, but it was really, really rough.

• 40:40John Coogan?

  He wrote a post about how like San Francisco has a lot of homeless problem and like we need to do something about this. And everyone was like.

• 40:45Jordi Hays?

  And he was cancelled for that?

• 40:46John Coogan?

  Incredibly cancelled, like terrible. He got hired at Twitter for a little bit, got fired.

• 40:50Jordi Hays?

  There was an era, you're basically, I, I basically missed this era because I was in, basically in high school.

• 40:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:56Jordi Hays?

  But you said Dustin Curtis got cancelled for liking nice things. This guy got cancelled for.

• 41:02John Coogan?

  Identifying the homeless problem. Yeah, it was, it was rough. And yeah, the tech industry hadn't learned to like circle the wagons at all. And so there was just, it was just complete, complete scapegoating and then just ostracization. And you just became an apostate very quickly for, for doing anything like this.

• 41:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:18John Coogan?

  It was crazy. And yeah, Greg was a little too early on that one, but it's interesting to see like just, you know, from what I can tell, just like a completely normal person in tech, like not, not raging like, oh, some culture war, like clickbait, you know, trying to like rile people up.

• 41:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's not a contrarian thing. I mean, I, that's my, some of my core memories of San Francisco, unfortunately, are being a kid and like walking around and being stunned at some sort of very traumatizing situation.

• 41:47John Coogan?

  I mean, I, I lived in the Tenderloin in 2012, 2013, and it was, it was rough, but I mean, I'm a tall guy. Most times people would just be like, oh, do you play basketball? They get kind of distracted. And once you're, once you're like a local, people just kind of clock you as a local.

• 42:03Jordi Hays?

  And you'd carry a basketball, right?

• 42:04John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 42:05Jordi Hays?

  When you leave the house.

• 42:08Jordi Hays?

  Place for the Warriors.

• 42:08John Coogan?

  It wasn't that bad for me, but I went back after COVID and I'd seen everyone on Twitter in San Francisco talk about how bad it was. And I was like, okay, I'm going to try and be objective here. Like, how can I quantifiably say if it's actually worse? Or if that's just some psyop from tech people?

• 42:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:25John Coogan?

  And the thing that I landed on is being like, something that I noticed that was physically different was the number of barbecues that were on the street, like more permanent encampments.

• 42:35Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 42:35John Coogan?

  Because you're actually like living and cooking and like sometimes even hooking up gas lines and stuff. Like, it's like very, very permanent installations.

• 42:41Jordi Hays?

  On the city gas.

• 42:42John Coogan?

  And I was like, I, I don't remember that happening. And so. You can never really tell if it's like, oh, you see a street and there's a lot of homeless people. It could just be like, well, they moved from five streets to one street. So there's not actually a gain in the number of homeless people. But the barbecue thing really, really stuck out to me. So I do think there's an issue and I really hope they solve it soon. And apparently the best way to solve it is to have Cixin Ping come and visit. You saw that?

• 43:04Jordi Hays?

  Gary Tan.

• 43:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, Gary Tan's leading the serious charge. But anytime there's Dreamforce, Mark Benioff is just like, clean up this entire city. It's great. Let's go to Will Quist. He says, that sound you hear is tech investment bankers everywhere cancelling their holiday plans and breathing a sign of relief. And it says this post is unavailable. Should we even cover this?

• 43:23Jordi Hays?

  No, that was, that was something about Service Titan.

• 43:26John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 43:27Jordi Hays?

  Because it was Service Titan, they priced it at like 70 and then it went out at like one over 100.

• 43:33John Coogan?

  And for a long time, the tech IPOs would dip right after. It was rough. And then SPACs were aggressively bad. And so, so many VCs were like, let's just stay private longer.

• 43:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:42John Coogan?

  But now, the game's back on. M&A is back on the menu. Lina Khan's out. IPOs are back on the menu.

• 43:48Jordi Hays?

  Start, start underwriting your seed investments to Decacorn outcomes. It's okay to invest at 50 posts, pre-revenue, pre-idea, pre-team. Just do it.

• 43:59John Coogan?

  50 posts? Wait, 50, 50 million going into the seed round?

• 44:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 44:05John Coogan?

  200.

• 44:05Jordi Hays?

  50 on 250. Right, right. Sorry, sorry.

• 44:08John Coogan?

  We're building AI here, man. We need some cloud credits. Oh, this is a good one, but we're a little bit too deep in the post. Gary Tan says, I want this. I would fund this too. And it's Andre Karpathy talking about building a tool to help you read along with a book. We talked about this last time. But Krish then says, I love you, Gary, but you guys literally rejected me. And he posted, he posts his, his company. But the beauty of YC, you can apply again. Gary wants it.

• 44:39Jordi Hays?

  Apply again?

• 44:40John Coogan?

  DM him.

• 44:40Jordi Hays?

  And if you want an AI reading companion, go to get meaning.

• 44:45John Coogan?

  Get meaning.xyz slash home. Do you really need the slash home, bro?

• 44:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and go get a meaning.com.

• 44:52John Coogan?

  And, I mean, what a, what a real poster. He included a link, 2.5K likes, real posters built different.

• 44:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:58John Coogan?

  Respect.

• 44:58Jordi Hays?

  Built different, broke through.

• 45:00John Coogan?

  Respect. Yeah. So, you know, never too late to apply to YC. You can always get in. Go BioWorks went through, had like 200 million valuation, promoted post.

• 45:10Jordi Hays?

  Not a promoted post, I'm just gonna jump in because this one is near and dear to my heart. I got a post from Druva Rohendra, a close friend of mine. Yesterday, Druva and myself and the Deterrence team announced Deterrence, which is a new company leveraging robotics to manufacture energetics. So for anybody that's not heavy, heavy in defense, a lot of the high-profile defense tech companies like Anduril have been going after these sort of very sexy programs like drones and autonomous submarines. And there hasn't been a player yet that's come out and made a made an effort to rebuild the sort of high-volume manufacturing base.

• 45:54Jordi Hays?

  So for anything like munitions, in the case of Deterrence, Deterrence's first product is manufacturing primer, which is the explosive sort of like thing that starts the reaction in a In a bullet. And so, yeah, Deterrence has been in the works for,

• 46:16Jordi Hays?

  let's see, some, you know, Druva and Brian, the founders, had been working on this for, since, you know, last year at this point. But company got out and running earlier this year, built, you know, fantastic team. And, yeah, this is a company that I was fortunate enough to be involved with since probably six months prior to incorporation. So personally, I got a front row seat. And the team now is stacked, Tesla, Palantir, Rivian, bunch of, you know, incredible engineers and operators and ridiculous customer backlog. Like, we were able to identify something that has a shocking amount of demand.

• 46:59Jordi Hays?

  And so if you're looking for a job, check us out, deterrence.com. Got a number of positions open. And this was a fun, fun round for me because my, my good friend, Will Cofield, who's here in LA, led.

• 47:15Jordi Hays?

  Led the round $10 million in total financing and a bunch of friends of the podcast participated as well, Heston, Berkman, Jack Drafus, people like that. So, very exciting and it was good to finally get this out. It's always, it's always, it's always a strange thing when you've been working on something in silence for, you know, oftentimes more than a year and so to finally get out there and see the reactions, great. So, good work to the deterrence team. And yeah, this is one to follow.

• 47:43John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Let's go to Avi Schiffman. He says, "There's nothing more nauseating than a Tesla Uber." And you had some comments on this. What's wrong with Tesla Ubers? Break it down.

• 47:54Jordi Hays?

  So, so being in Malibu, like Uber is super unreliable. So, I always have to, like, I have a driver that will take me to the airport. And I had to tell him, like, "Stop picking me up in your Tesla." Because yes, it's like, you know, maybe environmentally friendly and it's just convenient, modern features or whatever. But it's just so nauseating sitting in the back. And a lot of people don't, have been slow to sort of realize why this is. The obvious one is the acceleration. Teslas have like the acceleration of like a Turbo S, but like even like throughout, like the full, like it's just like way too much acceleration for the average person. It's like driving an F1 car on the street.

• 48:36Jordi Hays?

  The regenerative braking, so the car automatically braking creates this to sort of recharge the battery, creates this effect where it's this fast acceleration and then you take your foot off the gas and it sort of breaks aggressively more so than if you just let it sort of coast. And then the big one that I should put on my

• 48:57John Coogan?

  Tinfoil hat.

• 48:58Jordi Hays?

  My tinfoil hat on to maybe protect me from some EMFs. But Teslas just emit like a ridiculous amount of EMF, which is, you know, sort of low level radiation. A lot of people say that it doesn't have any negative effects. But there's quite a lot of evidence that it might. And you can actually go on YouTube and just search like Tesla EMF reading. And in most Teslas, the EMF levels are much higher in the backseat. So, when you're sitting in the backseat, You're getting like Matt, you're basically getting microwaved and then the car is like, you know, accelerating, decelerating. It's not a very, um, not a very amazing experience.

• 49:34John Coogan?

  So And it's probably something people don't notice if they're in the front seat because they're look eyes in the roads.

• 49:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah.

• 49:39John Coogan?

  Acceleration is, it's like you, you rarely get carsick when you're driving.

• 49:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly. So if you're driving and you're the one on the gas and, and

• 49:47John Coogan?

  And then also a lot of the Uber drivers are just trying to get there as fast as possible. So they're going to be really pushing the acceleration and braking to get there faster because they want to do the next ride.

• 49:55Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 49:56John Coogan?

  Whereas if you're driving yourself, you might be a little bit more leisurely.

• 49:58Jordi Hays?

  But I want to see, I, I know that there's stuff Tesla can do to mitigate EMF. Some other car manufacturers have made efforts on this. So I'd like to see them prioritize it because I don't have anything against Tesla as a manufacturer. I think it's great.

• 50:12John Coogan?

  Let's go to dudes posting their W's. He says buddy is the most condescending word in dude culture. And there's a meme that shows a hierarchy. Guys that say big dog are at the top. Guys that say bro and man are after that. And then sir, bruh, chief, dude, son and fella and buddy are at the bottom.

• 50:31Jordi Hays?

  Bud and buddy are just so much farther than chief. I don't, I don't think chief is derogatory, but bud is.

• 50:38John Coogan?

  It's about the hierarchy. Like are you, like when you say big dog, that's like a sign of respect. Sir, chief, these are boss.

• 50:45Jordi Hays?

  Champ.

• 50:46John Coogan?

  These are, you're, you're paying respects upward. Then there's brother, which is equivalent. Man, equivalent, dude, sir even. But then when you go son, that's younger. And buddy is like what you call your dog. And so it's like, are you talking down to people or are you talking up to them or showing a sign of respect?

• 51:05Jordi Hays?

  Son can also be used in the right context can be, um, you know, positive.

• 51:10John Coogan?

  Damn son, like that.

• 51:12Jordi Hays?

  No, more like here, come on, son. I'll teach you.

• 51:15John Coogan?

  That's still very negative.

• 51:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it can be, but it's more familial. Like it's got a more positive connotation.

• 51:21John Coogan?

  But that's why technology brothers, we're all equal here.

• 51:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're all equal. I do think that if a VC calls their portfolio founder Bud, they should be diluted to zero. Like there should be like some type of new round with structure done to just dilute them to zero because it's so condescending. And, uh, should, should be taken out of the vocabulary entirely.

• 51:42John Coogan?

  That's great. Well, this is interesting. Word Grammar says, "Most of Peter Thiel and Paul Graham's advice is directly contradict each other. You have to pick a side. Trying to follow both is a good way to make sure you end up following neither."

• 51:56Jordi Hays?

  Word Grammar, I'd never seen him until this post, him or her, but it great post and perfectly controversial.

• 52:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:04Jordi Hays?

  Which is why the engagement seems strong.

• 52:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that the, I mean, the funds are set up wildly differently. What?

• 52:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, you're perfectly qualified for this. Been through YC twice.

• 52:14John Coogan?

  Work with Peter.

• 52:15Jordi Hays?

  Work at Founders Fund.

• 52:17John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, so, I mean, the funds are set up wildly differently. Like, um, YC invests in thousands of companies. Founders Fund is extremely picky and they're trying to teach you two different things. I think YC is effectively just, can you start a business? And by the end of YC, you, like, most of those founders, unless they mess something up, they will have a company, like a business. I talked to a YC founder that went through, they tried to build some, like, SaaS product and then they wound up, it didn't, they didn't really have traction. They wound up just being a software consultancy.

• 52:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:52John Coogan?

  And so the guy makes a great living as a software consultancy and it's just like a lifestyle business, essentially. It's great.

• 52:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:58John Coogan?

  Um, whereas the Founders Fund Thiel model is very, very narrowly selected for monopoly power.

• 53:07Jordi Hays?

  Power law outcomes.

• 53:08John Coogan?

  Are there moats or power law outcomes? Can this be a trillion dollar company?

• 53:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's not, it's not underrated. It's not underrated. Oh, we think this can be, they can IPO and have a $10 billion market cap. It's, are we gonna still wanna invest in this company at a $200 billion valuation?

• 53:21John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. So that's just a wildly different question and you would never get that in a YC interview. Like, oh, like, let's make sure that you can, that it's plausible that this could be a trillion dollar company. No, it's like, are you an interesting hacker? Are you building something? Do you wanna build a business?

• 53:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the cool thing is that YC generates a number of power law companies, right? Coinbase, uh... Lucy Airbnb.

• 53:46John Coogan?

  Airbnb.

• 53:46Jordi Hays?

  Right. So they still generate these these Tealium companies.

• 53:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 53:50Jordi Hays?

  And and Founders Fund will back those companies.

• 53:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:54Jordi Hays?

  But it's just a much different method.

• 53:56John Coogan?

  Let's just continue with word grammar because this one's great. God cursed Peter Thiel by making him Silicon Valley's biggest tech guru. Now, the minute he says something, millions of tech bros listen and agree with him. Because of his curse, he will never be able to be a contrarian ever again. So this is interesting and this is somewhat true, but there are plenty of things that he doesn't say publicly.

• 54:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a timing mismatch.

• 54:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 54:19Jordi Hays?

  He's gonna say, he's gonna make everyone believe what he wants them to believe when it is convenient.

• 54:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a timing mismatch more just in the sense of like, like, there's clearly ideas that he's talking about with his inner circle. Then workshopping and private events, then there's then there's private dinners where these ideas go out. And then maybe like six months to a year later, it's on a podcast.

• 54:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 54:42John Coogan?

  And so.

• 54:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a very intentional, he, I would say, he's understanding the weight of his words.

• 54:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:48Jordi Hays?

  And being very intentional with how he rolls out that messaging.

• 54:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 54:52Jordi Hays?

  To not come out and be too dogmatic about one thing.

• 54:55John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep, yep.

• 54:56Jordi Hays?

  Too early.

• 54:57John Coogan?

  I mean, we, yeah, we heard, we heard a talk by him recently in Miami and it was very clear that that was something that was still being workshopped.

• 55:03Jordi Hays?

  No, and we've talked about this offline, but the, it's still contrarian to actually follow zero to one's approach to a T.

• 55:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 55:14Jordi Hays?

  Where most.

• 55:15John Coogan?

  It's very hard.

• 55:16Jordi Hays?

  Most investors will say, oh, we're contrarian, we're only investing in power law monopoly companies. But then they'll do like a run of the mill, like B to B SaaS company still.

• 55:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 55:25Jordi Hays?

  And so they're not actually like fully embodying that approach.

• 55:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I, my, my takeaway from zero to one is always like, if you read the book and you really apply it to your business, like what you're meant to do, what you're enjoying building. The answer might not be, don't start a company, it might just be, don't raise venture capital.

• 55:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:45John Coogan?

  And there, and Y C is not that check.

• 55:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:47John Coogan?

  But there are plenty of companies that get through Y C and then they don't need to raise because they're not. Not building in that zero to one playbook sense and that's okay.

• 55:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:56John Coogan?

  But but it just it wouldn't it wouldn't count in that metric. Let's go to DeeDee. DeeDee says, just learned that WhatsApp has not 10, not 20, but 150 designers all working tirelessly to make sure the app looks exactly the same as it did in 2014. 92K likes.

• 56:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so this is crazy because the ex-design team.

• 56:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:16Jordi Hays?

  Which now includes my dear friend Brandon Jacoby, who you've covered on the show before. The ex-design team, I think, is under five people, like it's some like tiny, tiny, much more complicated product, I would say, in many ways to run a social app.

• 56:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 56:29Jordi Hays?

  Than a messaging app, even though WhatsApp has plenty of social features. So anyways, this goes back to what we've talked about before. Why haven't more companies done the Elon and just cut like 80% of people? But I guess WhatsApp being part of Meta now, maybe it doesn't have the same incentive.

• 56:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, I also wonder if like a lot of those designers are working on like little.

• 56:49Jordi Hays?

  New projects.

• 56:50John Coogan?

  Small like like ad integrations because the core product does look the same, but there's a lot of like.

• 56:55Jordi Hays?

  There's some, every simple product is deeply complex.

• 56:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, all the different onboarding flows and like little screens that you don't see and you never really interact with. But yeah, 150 is a lot of designers for an app that's pretty basic. It feels basic, but yeah, I mean, Facebook has a long history of stuffing features in these apps like.

• 57:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 57:15John Coogan?

  Instagram used to just be photos. Now there's like 25 different tabs.

• 57:18Jordi Hays?

  I do, do you have to give them credit for keeping Instagram, Instagram?

• 57:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:22Jordi Hays?

  They've like 100x the features.

• 57:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:24Jordi Hays?

  And it's still the core functionality of going there to see what's likely the most interesting posts for me at that moment in time. Profile's still fairly clean, so credit to them for that.

• 57:37John Coogan?

  Let's go to Lee Jacobs. He says, when Chase Lochmiller first told me about Crusoe, I said, wait, you are turning large fireballs from the ground into Bitcoin in North Dakota? What started as that absurd idea is now the leading full-stack AI inference company. Excited for the new fuel from our friends at Founders Fund. That is crazy. Do you know the story of Crusoe, like how they started?

• 57:58Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I only know that Lee was one of the first investors.

• 58:04John Coogan?

  And so Crusoe, the whole play was like finding stranded energy and then using that for compute to power supercomputers.

• 58:13Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 58:13John Coogan?

  And so what they did was they found natural gas plants where they have to flare the gas. And so there's excess gas that comes off. They can't capture it. It's just going to burn and that's bad for emissions. So instead they burn it and they turn it into energy that then they can use to power the computers. And at the time, the most valuable use for cheap energy was mining Bitcoin. So they started there and then obviously AI came up and the Bitcoin mining business has kind of taken a backseat to the AI infrastructure now.

• 58:41Jordi Hays?

  That's very cool.

• 58:41John Coogan?

  So yeah, it's crazy like second and third act for that company that was only possible because they took the path they did. And for a long time, people were kind of like, oh, you're like a Bitcoin mining company. Like this isn't interesting during the downturn. And now that the AI booms here, it's like, we got it.

• 58:56Jordi Hays?

  All the, all the VCs that probably passed when they were, you know, doing something that was less on narrative. But we joked about this earlier, but you said the Crusoe founder said they, some of these foundation models would burn whale blubber if they could.

• 59:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 59:13Jordi Hays?

  They're so desperate for energy.

• 59:14John Coogan?

  So desperate for energy.

• 59:15Jordi Hays?

  This goes back to just energy being one of the kind of core foundational layers of the AI value chain.

• 59:21John Coogan?

  Just today, I saw Satya Nadella was doing a, some sort of interview press conference for, no, press conference for Microsoft. And he said that they're no longer GPU poor, like GPU bound. Like, and everyone's like, oh, bear case for Nvidia, like they have all that they need. I don't think it's that. I think that they're buying the maximum and now they've hit a different bottleneck, which is probably energy.

• 59:42Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 59:42John Coogan?

  Which is crazy. Do we have a promoted post?

• 59:44Jordi Hays?

  Promoted post from our friend, Delian over at Varda. He says, if you want to come work for me, the teams I work with most at Varda is expanding. If you've worked in Gov and love policy, come help us make space factories a reality. It takes legislation as much as it takes nuts and bolts to make this crazy thing a reality. He puts a link in the next tweet. They have a fantastic role available, Government Affairs Manager. They're going to be based in Washington DC. So if you have experience in working the government and, you know, they go over some of the requirements here, but. Varda has just been

• 1:00:19John Coogan?

  On a tear.

• 1:00:20Jordi Hays?

  Taking a crazy idea and then just ruthlessly executing against it, getting contracts, proving out that this is very real and happening. So awesome opportunity for the right person.

• 1:00:30John Coogan?

  The only downside is if you take that job, Delian will probably refer to you as a swamp creature.

• 1:00:36John Coogan?

  I was out in DC once with him and he was like, "Oh yeah, I'll introduce you to our swamp creature, our head of government affairs."

• 1:00:41Jordi Hays?

  Our head of swamp.

• 1:00:42John Coogan?

  Our head of swamp. And he's like, "He's so swampy. He's been in the swamp for years. He's the best." It's a term of endearment, but it's very silly. Let's go to Mark Sisson. He says, "When I heard the New York Times was suing OpenAI for using its archives as training data, I knew relying on LLMs as arbiters of truth was fucked beyond all recognition."

• 1:01:03Jordi Hays?

  So real. So real. I mean, yeah, I think you have to, models do a good job of processing broad, I don't know, you could argue maybe they don't do a good job, but they're aware of bias and trying to piece together what they imagine is the truth. But it's the same thing, same end thing that an individual is doing of like looking at multiple sources and trying to piece together the truth. The truth is, it's hard to nail down oftentimes in the world that we're in. But yeah, you certainly, this goes back to, there's a company out there called Dexa

• 1:01:42Jordi Hays?

  that I think is interesting. And they basically scrape all the binger podcasts. And so you can ask, "What does Mark Huberman think about this gluten?" Right? And so this goes back to in the era of models, you're still going to go back to individuals. So I'm going to trust the experts.

• 1:02:03John Coogan?

  Joe Rogan, Andrew Huberman.

• 1:02:05Jordi Hays?

  No, but like, yeah, obviously joking, but like Mark is a good example where I want to know what Mark Sisson thinks about

• 1:02:12John Coogan?

  Oh, totally.

• 1:02:12Jordi Hays?

  about seed oils, right? I don't want to know what OpenAI thinks about it because they're probably going to say, "Well, Popular Science says that there's no issue with seed oils."

• 1:02:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, and he's calling out New York Times and there's been some crazy, crazy quotes in the New York Times recently about health. Like, I really would trust Huberman way more than the New York Times. Didn't they say like ultra-processed foods aren't bad for you? It's like, so I can just eat Oreos all day long? Like this is nutrition 101. You shouldn't be eating Cheetos all the time. This is not like some contrarian crazy idea. This is like pretty basic. Anyway, we have some breaking news, folks. Lucy Guo has broken her silence. She has not posted in hours, but she just dropped a banger pod with Molly O'Shea. The queen of LA is talking about the creator economy. She's the founder of Passas, and we encourage you to go check out the podcast.

• 1:03:05Jordi Hays?

  And Lucy was also posting yesterday that she has millions of dollars in short-term capital gains, and she's looking to marry somebody who has millions of dollars in losses that's ideally local to LA.

• 1:03:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:03:16Jordi Hays?

  And so you, and, and, and the two of you would be able to split the different, the, the savings.

• 1:03:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:03:21Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and then, and presumably get divorced soon afterwards, but, um,

• 1:03:24John Coogan?

  So hit it.

• 1:03:25Jordi Hays?

  If you have millions of dollars in short-term losses, go hit up Lucy.

• 1:03:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:30Jordi Hays?

  She's got a solution, uh, for you to make some of that back.

• 1:03:33John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Let's move on to, uh, Daniel Tenrero. I need to learn how to pronounce his last name. He says, "The Robinhood Foundation is running a stock picking contest for donors, and the leaderboard is truly a work of art. Put it in the Louvre." And the leaderboard is Bill Ackman at the top with a total return of over a hundred percent. His long pick was Fannie Mae, and his short sector was financials.

• 1:03:58Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so is this, this is put on by Robinhood?

• 1:04:00John Coogan?

  No, the Robinhood Foundation with a space. And the funny thing here is that

• 1:04:05Jordi Hays?

  Wow, that's very confusing.

• 1:04:05John Coogan?

  Number two is Mark Galant, and his long pick was Robinhood the Company.

• 1:04:09Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:04:10John Coogan?

  And his short pick was Communications. And then MicroStrategy was the long pick for Mark Galant again, and, uh, and David Einhorn picked Peloton.

• 1:04:19Jordi Hays?

  Wait, do you have back, I don't, actually I'm not familiar with the Robinhood Foundation.

• 1:04:22John Coogan?

  I, I'm, I'm, I'm not familiar either. It's, I think it's just a charity.

• 1:04:26Jordi Hays?

  This is why you come to the Technology Brothers, folks.

• 1:04:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:28Jordi Hays?

  Get the facts and the deep analysis and backstory. Uh, so if you know

• 1:04:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:34Jordi Hays?

  what the Robinhood Foundation is, let us know in the YouTube comments.

• 1:04:37John Coogan?

  It's probably literally in the second post here in thread, but I didn't study for this one. We, we phoned it in, folks. Uh, this is an interesting one. Zach Colelius says, uh, Colelius? Is that how you pronounce it? I don't know.

• 1:04:50Jordi Hays?

  I wish I knew.

• 1:04:50John Coogan?

  Uh, Zach says, "Played credit card roulette for the, for the dinner bill last night with a bunch of VCs, and it was surprising how uncomfortable a bunch of them were. What happened to the degenerate gambler mentality of our asset class? For a neutral EV bet, it is such a no-brainer."

• 1:05:07Jordi Hays?

  Such a no brainer. I love playing that game.

• 1:05:09John Coogan?

  Well, it's not always neutral EV because what if you're the one that ordered the most, drank the most wine, ordered the most steak,

• 1:05:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:16John Coogan?

  housed all the appetizers. It could be extremely positive for you.

• 1:05:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:21John Coogan?

  So maybe the people that were sheepish, they just had a little salad on the side and they're like, ah, I'm gonna get burned here.

• 1:05:26Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna get burned. Yeah.

• 1:05:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No, I just go into that. You want to be going to dinners

• 1:05:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:31Jordi Hays?

  where you would happily pay for everybody.

• 1:05:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:05:34Jordi Hays?

  And still feel like it was a good just exchange, right? Because you're going for the company. It's not about the food. It's not about how much you ate. It's not about how much you drank. It's about who you were there with and what deals you got done.

• 1:05:46John Coogan?

  It's great. Do we have any more promoted posts?

• 1:05:48Jordi Hays?

  I got a promoted post from the number one business podcast in the world.

• 1:05:53John Coogan?

  Oh, that's fantastic.

• 1:05:54Jordi Hays?

  David Senra with Founder's Podcast. He gave a great summary of the book, How to Make a Few Billion Dollars, which we've talked about before on the show.

• 1:06:03John Coogan?

  Brad Jacobs.

• 1:06:04Jordi Hays?

  He did a, he did a whole, he did a whole interview with Brad Jacobs. You called this out last time, but some of the most iconic founders now are actually living and breathing. And so David can just hang out with them and hear it straight from the horses, from the thoroughbred's mouth.

• 1:06:20John Coogan?

  From the stallion's mouth.

• 1:06:21Jordi Hays?

  From the stallion's mouth, from the eventing horse's mouth.

• 1:06:24John Coogan?

  From the dressage horse's mouth.

• 1:06:27Jordi Hays?

  If you haven't seen our gift guide, go check it out. We talk about the different horses, that you should be gifting your friends. But a couple of highlights out here. Narrow your focus to the most important dreams and tune out everything else. Two, the most important thing a CEO does is recruit superlative people. Three, an empty seat is less damaging than a poor fit. Four, resist the urge to flood communications with non-essential information. And five, if you want to make money in the business world, you need to get used to problems because that's what, that's what business is, solving problems. Our, the problem we're solving on this podcast is Tech Tech One didn't have a podcast.

• 1:07:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:07:05Jordi Hays?

  And the tech adjacent podcasts, All In wasn't monetizing, right? So you couldn't get in front of that audience. This is how you're getting in front of the similar audience. So there's five, or sorry, five more that I'm not going to say here, but go listen to Founders Podcast. It is the number one business podcast. And thank you to David Senra for being on our board and supporting our show.

• 1:07:28John Coogan?

  The godfather of podcasting. Let's stay on podcasts and close with some news from Dextero. They say BuzzFeed has sold the show Hot Ones for 82, 82.5 million dollars. So I mean, that would be a down round for us if we, if we sold for 82.

• 1:07:45Jordi Hays?

  We wouldn't even clear the pref on that.

• 1:07:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, I know. That'd be rough, but good for them. I hope they, I hope they did okay.

• 1:07:52Jordi Hays?

  That wasn't that, wasn't that, that feels, I feel like it was originally reported that they were trying to sell it for like 30 or something like that.

• 1:07:59John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:07:59Jordi Hays?

  So it seemed that that's coming a lot higher because I think a lot of people just looked at that and they said, the show was so reliant on the host.

• 1:08:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:06Jordi Hays?

  That how do you really attach enterprise value unless you're locking him up for a pretty extreme time period? So maybe they figured out a way to do that. But it's funny because BuzzFeed, I think was, weren't they trading at?

• 1:08:19John Coogan?

  Less than that or something?

• 1:08:20Jordi Hays?

  They were trading, I thought they were trading at like 20 million dollars.

• 1:08:24John Coogan?

  Well, well, that's the equity value. And so I think BuzzFeed has debt. And so even if they sold this for 82, they might still be underwater on the equity.

• 1:08:30Jordi Hays?

  They were using BuzzFeed or they were using the sale to reduce their.

• 1:08:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense.

• 1:08:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so they're trading at 126 now, but they were.

• 1:08:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, I do wonder about if there's, if there is asset value beyond Sean Evans because his, I mean, he obviously is a great host there. But his style is very much like ask the question and then kind of get out of the way. And there have been talk shows in the past that have had asset value beyond the core host. I think the best example is probably Late Night, which traded hands from Jay Leno to Conan O'Brien in this very dramatic. Situation where then Conan got pulled and Leno came back. You've heard of this whole story. It's like the late night wars. And so, but that's, that's very tied to, there is, there are only 24 hours in the day. There, there's going to be a late night show that's on Monday through Friday and there's only three spots for late night.

• 1:09:23John Coogan?

  It's like 10:00 PM, 11:00 PM, midnight. And then you get into the late, late show that has no value. And if you go earlier, you're in prime time and you want to be showing like scripted stuff. And so there's only, for a while, it was like, there were only four channels, like NBC, ABC, Fox, CBS, or whatever. And so there were really only like 10 slots for late night shows that would do interviews for adults after the kids go to bed, that type of stuff. But with the internet, obviously there can be unlimited interview shows, unlimited podcasts. And so Buzz, like Hot Ones is obviously built like this incredible brand. It was originally with Complex, then sold to BuzzFeed. It's traded hands a few times now. Will be interesting to see where this goes. I mean, it doesn't seem like Sean Evans is stopping anytime soon.

• 1:10:07John Coogan?

  And it seems like they must've got him a great deal. And I bet part of that 82 was, you know, built into his contract and predicated on a great contract there. So always interesting to see what's going on in the podcast world, but we got to wrap up. We got a lot to do.

• 1:10:22Jordi Hays?

  Got to get on with Taipei, I think.

• 1:10:23John Coogan?

  That's right. That's right. So thanks for listening. Subscribe, follow us on X and we'll see you next time.

• 1:10:28Jordi Hays?

  See you on the timeline.

• 1:10:30John Coogan?

  See you on the timeline.