Open-Source AI, a16z's Playbook | Marc Andreessen & The a16z Partnership, Bryan Johnson, Chris Pedregal, Joshua Browder

TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV (03:10) - Is Open-Source AI Dead? (04:35) - OpenAI Restructuring (18:50) - Investors Comment on Open-Source AI (31:33) - Chris Pedregal. Chris is the founder and CEO of Granola, an AI-powered notepad designed to enhance productivity during back-to-back meetings. Previously, he co-founded Socratic, an educational app acquired by Google. (45:17) - Joshua Browder. Joshua is the founder and CEO of DoNotPay, the world's first AI-powered legal service platform aimed at automating consumer rights processes. He also leads Browder Capital, focusing on investments in innovative legal tech startups. (01:01:32) - Bryan Johnson. Bryan is the founder of Don't Die, a longevity company pioneering protocols and tools to slow aging and extend healthspan. Through extreme self-tracking and data-driven experimentation, he aims to build a roadmap for reversing biological age. (01:21:28) - Matteo Franceschetti. Matteo is the co-founder and CEO of Eight Sleep, a company that integrates technology into sleep products to optimize health and performance. His work emphasizes the importance of sleep fitness in overall well-being. (01:40:20) - Erik Torenberg. Erik is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he brings a decade of experience at the intersection of investing, product, and media. He previously founded Turpentine, a media company focused on tech and culture. (01:53:52) - Jen Kha. Jen is the Operating Partner and Head of Investor Relations and Fundraising at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads the firm’s capital-raising strategy and manages relationships with limited partners. Over her career, she has facilitated the raising of over $40 billion in capital, drawing on her experience from roles at Technology Crossover Ventures, HSN, Inc., and BMO Capital Markets. (02:04:54) - Anjney Midha. Anjney is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, investing in AI, infrastructure, and open-source technologies. He serves on the boards of several AI startups, including Mistral and Black Forest Labs. (02:21:53) - Martin Casado. Martin is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, leading the firm's infrastructure practice. He was a pioneer in software-defined networking and co-founded Nicira Networks. (02:31:45) - David George. David is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he leads the firm's Growth investing team. Since joining in 2019, he has spearheaded investments in companies like Roblox, Coinbase, and Databricks, drawing on his prior experience at General Atlantic with firms such as Airbnb and Slack. (02:47:27) - David Ulevitch. David is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, focusing on American Dynamism, investing in companies that advance national interests. He previously founded OpenDNS, a security company acquired by Cisco. (03:00:09) - Anish Acharya. Anish is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he leads investments in consumer AI applications and innovative digital experiences. With a background as a founder of two acquired startups, he focuses on products that blend cutting-edge technology with exceptional design. (03:11:40) - Marc Andreessen. Marc is a co-founder and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a leading venture capital firm. He is also known for co-authoring Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, and co-founding Netscape.

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 TVBN. Today is Wednesday, May 14th, 2025. We are live from the

• 0:05Jordi Hays?

  Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  Ben is back.

• 0:12Jordi Hays?

  Ben is back.

• 0:13John Coogan?

  Ben is back. Welcome back, Ben. Welcome.

• 0:16Jordi Hays?

  He found his happy place.

• 0:18John Coogan?

  He found his happy place. It wasn't in a wander, although it could have been in a wander, but now it's in the studio in the Temple of Technology. Ben is back, baby.

• 0:26Jordi Hays?

  That was a huge milestone for the show.

• 0:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:29Jordi Hays?

  To actually survive for

• 0:32John Coogan?

  It was remarkable.

• 0:33Jordi Hays?

  without Ben.

• 0:34John Coogan?

  We were on a shoestring.

• 0:35Jordi Hays?

  But he's back.

• 0:36John Coogan?

  Pulled through and he's back and we're excited. Also, thank you to Sequoia Capital. They sent us some beautiful candles.

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  They smell fantastic.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  High dimensional cardamom and violet embedding diffusing through hidden layers of spice back propagating to a musk and sandalwood base. So, thank you. This is from their AI Ascent Conference. They sent scented candles. Extremely well.

• 0:59Jordi Hays?

  Extremely well executed.

• 1:00John Coogan?

  And they sent us a nice little note here. It's from, uh, from Sonya and the team at Sequoia. Beautiful. She says, uh, thanks for having me on the show to chat all things AI. It's no Himalayan Birkin, but hope you enjoy the candle. So, thank you, Sonya. We'd love to have you back on the show.

• 1:16Jordi Hays?

  I really enjoyed the conversation.

• 1:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was great.

• 1:18Jordi Hays?

  And we're going to be talking to quite a lot of venture capitalists today, John.

• 1:22John Coogan?

  Yes, it's a, it's a gladiatorial, it's a gladiatorial battle. It's a, it's a one man versus a hundred guerrilla situation. One show versus a hundred injuries and partners. Let's take a look at the lineup. We do have, uh, four founders here, although one of them is raising a fund. Josh Browder, uh, you know, from Do Not Pay, but he's announcing his, uh, fourth venture fund. That's pretty crazy. We were just talking about how, how few, uh, company, how few firms get to fund four. He did it. We got the founder of Granola, uh, Brian Johnson's coming in, the founder of Don't Die. We're going to get to the bottom of how not to die.

• 1:55Jordi Hays?

  Die before he comes on.

• 1:58John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah. And Mateo from Eight Sleep is coming on, announcing the Pod Five.

• 2:02Jordi Hays?

  Big launch today.

• 2:03John Coogan?

  Talked about the Pod Four. Now it's time for Pod Five. And then we're going live to A16Z's Limited Partner Day. This is the day of the year that they check in with all of their investors. So they're all together and we got them all calling into the stream. One after another, we got six GPs and the co-founder of the firm. So that'll be a lot of fun. But first, I wanted to set up the conversation because I think that if you're talking to Andreessen, what's the most interesting tech trend that they seem to be? They have a unique perspective on. And from my perspective, that is open source artificial intelligence. They, Mark has been very outspoken about his love for art, for the open source community.

• 2:42John Coogan?

  They backed a bunch of open source AI companies and it's been, you know, received very well in the open source community and some investors love it, some don't. And so my former colleague at Founders Fund, John Lutig, wrote a piece that we're going to be diving into all about the future. He claims the future of foundation models is closed source and he makes the argument that open source is not ever going to fully win. Not that it can't be helpful or useful, but we've also been having some other conversations with folks that say, open source might be a tool of economic warfare that we need to be engaging with. And maybe we haven't considered all the different angles. And so his piece is from a year ago. We'll see how it holds up today. And then we'll talk to a bunch of the Andreessen partners about open source AI.

• 3:26John Coogan?

  But I wanted to kick it off with Ben Thompson in Stratechery, talking about OpenAI's restructuring. We covered this when the news broke, but he kind of packaged it up in an update with a few different pieces of information, talking about how Microsoft's involved, talking about the hiring of Fijisimo and the acquisition of Windsurf. And so he starts it off with a quote from the Wall Street Journal. He says, "OpenAI abandoned a controversial effort to place its juggernaut artificial intelligence business under control of a for-profit entity and will instead remain under its founding nonprofit board." We covered this story, this exact story in the Journal when it dropped.

• 4:03Jordi Hays?

  And Sam said, "Hey, it's not that big of a deal."

• 4:06John Coogan?

  It's not that big of a deal.

• 4:07Jordi Hays?

  And then people were like, "Okay, it's not that big of a deal."

• 4:09John Coogan?

  Then we won't talk about it on podcasts.

• 4:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, what, does he want us not to talk about this? Is that what he's saying? It's not a big deal. Don't make a three hour podcast out of it, guys.

• 4:17Jordi Hays?

  About this one thing.

• 4:18John Coogan?

  Thing is no big deal. Well, too bad. We're making a podcast about it. And it's four hours today, by the way.

• 4:26John Coogan?

  And so the move could complicate the company's future fundraising efforts. Obviously, it's very difficult to invest in a nonprofit, even though there was a way for some cash to flow through. Unlike traditional boards, which must act in the best interest of shareholders, OpenAI's nonprofit board has a fiduciary duty to humanity.

• 4:44John Coogan?

  I was joking that if they have a fiduciary duty to humanity, if you're human, you can just ask them to do things, can't you?

• 4:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:49John Coogan?

  You can just submit them tickets. I was telling Will, make me a to do list app.

• 4:53Jordi Hays?

  Now, do it.

• 4:54John Coogan?

  I'm human, so you're responsible to me.

• 4:56Jordi Hays?

  You're in service.

• 4:57John Coogan?

  You're in service to me.

• 4:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:00John Coogan?

  But OpenAI started working on this change after Sam Altman was surprise fired and then reinstated in 2023. Its big investors, including Microsoft, watched his temporary ouster from the sidelines, unable to wield official power over the outcome because of the nonprofit structure. They couldn't just sue, hey, this is not in the interest of shareholders. And the nonprofit board was able to make a very convoluted argument for why they were so suddenly changing CEOs. The conversion would have changed OpenAI's business to a public benefit corporation, while preserving some form of the current nonprofit that controls the company. Altman's rival, estranged co-founder Elon Musk, had tried to block the conversion in court. OpenAI said it scrapped the Boulder plan after discussions with civic leaders and attorneys

• 5:45John Coogan?

  general in California and Delaware, which would have been required to sign off. Yeah. And so they probably just went to the courts and said, are you guys gonna veto this if you try and do this? And they said, yes, absolutely, we're gonna veto this.

• 5:57Jordi Hays?

  Very likely.

• 5:58John Coogan?

  Okay, we're not even gonna try.

• 5:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:59John Coogan?

  That's what that reads like. I don't know. But anyway, the framing of this news and the tenor of the overall reaction has been interesting. OpenAI is characterizing this as a clear step back from their initial for-profit plans, and most people seem to be taking them at their word. A small contingent, including Elon Musk, are on the opposite extreme, claiming that this is a total betrayal of OpenAI's nonprofit roots. Unsurprisingly, stratechery falls somewhere in the middle. Ben Thompson, of course, with a twist. I do, in fact, think this is still a meaningful change, but also a fair one that does stay somewhat true to the entity's roots. And frankly, that's the part that worries me most. And so. Interesting, of course, that the open source company is now closed source. They're maybe

• 6:42John Coogan?

  releasing an open source model. I don't know if you want to pull up the Polly market on whether or not OpenAI will release an open source model or what the timing is, but it seems like they they do that at some point. It doesn't seem like a crazy strategy.

• 6:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, right now it's sitting at, uh, will OpenAI release an open source model before July? Polly market has it at a forty eight percent chance.

• 7:03John Coogan?

  Wow, really fifty fifty, basically.

• 7:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, still feels significant on three hundred and fifty six K of volume.

• 7:08John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, not small.

• 7:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:11John Coogan?

  Anyway, so we'll see. So Microsoft's obviously a big player in here. They it seems like they need to sign off on whatever happens and they want a stake. And then there's also some crazy numbers about exactly how they how much they've invested. And so the core problems facing OpenAI as a nonprofit were straightforward. Developing AI costs astronomical sums of money. Money at that scale is only available from investors who expect a return and OpenAI has no meaning, no means to deliver a return to investors.

• 7:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, basically, you can raise a few hundred million dollars as a nonprofit from people like Elon and PT, things like that.

• 7:47John Coogan?

  Lots of other folks put money in.

• 7:49Jordi Hays?

  But beyond that, you start to run out of, um, you know, they could have just perpetually raised. They could probably have gotten to a point where they were perpetually raising a hundred million dollars a year, but not ten billion dollars a year.

• 8:00John Coogan?

  And my and my take on this was like, it's beautiful that that the future of AI must be capitalist. And it's actually very good. And I think Ben Thompson kind of agrees with this. So he says, now, you can certainly make the case that the most appropriate thing for OpenAI to do at the point that they had this realization. And this was and everyone started realizing that scaling laws applied in twenty eighteen after they released the paper, Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre Training. And this was confirmed with GPT two. They saw that they didn't really train, they didn't really change the algorithm. They just increased the scale of the data and the compute, and it got way better. And so they're like, okay, well, we thought if it was just genius application, genius algorithm

• 8:42John Coogan?

  and design, all you need to do is just raise a hundred million dollars, get a hundred geniuses in a room. Turn them loose and they would come up with the most beautiful elegant algorithm for AGI.

• 8:51Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 8:52John Coogan?

  Give them enough time, they'll do it. But that wasn't the, that's not the solution. They need compute and they need energy and that costs money. And so they should have wound down the nonprofit at that point is what Ben Thompson argues. And he says, I wonder if Altman regrets not just doing that. After all, and this is critical, OpenAI had at that point created very little of commercial value. To review the timeline of that critical 2019 period, February, OpenAI releases GPT-2. This was the model that showed simply scaling up model size, data set size and compute produced more generalizable results. March, OpenAI creates the OpenAI LP, a cap profit entity that could be invested in exchange for a share of profits.

• 9:32John Coogan?

  And July, Microsoft invests $1 billion in OpenAI LP with the right to 100x its return. So they could make $100 billion.

• 9:42Jordi Hays?

  To 100x.

• 9:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:43Jordi Hays?

  Simple ask.

• 9:44John Coogan?

  Well, the funny thing here is that I'm pretty sure 100 billion is less than what Microsoft earns in a year. So it is like a substantial sum of money, but it's not that much money to them. To put in context, 100 billion is 17 billion short of Microsoft's total operating income last year. And so it'd be like a nice bump.

• 10:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, their EBIT, their EBIT was 131 billion.

• 10:09John Coogan?

  But it sounds, it sounds crazy, but I mean, they put in a billion dollars. So the question is like, what's more valuable?

• 10:13Jordi Hays?

  20%, they grew 28%, they grew.

• 10:17John Coogan?

  EBIT?

• 10:18Jordi Hays?

  EBIT 28% from 2023.

• 10:21John Coogan?

  It's amazing. Satya on fire. Come on the show.

• 10:24Jordi Hays?

  Soon.

• 10:26John Coogan?

  Anyway, of course, OpenAI and the rest of its investors almost certainly don't want to give up such a valuable asset. I'm not sure that they will have the choice. So the question is, should, should, should Microsoft go for revenue share? Or perpetual rights to OpenAI's models that they can vend into Azure? And they'd probably want to stick with the, with the perpetual rights. The fact of the matter is that Microsoft put up the money to make OpenAI an entity worth fighting for, and they would do well to give up future profits from OpenAI to secure profits of their own. Assuming this deal happens, that leaves the nonprofit board, which has final say over the company and some amount of shares in the public benefit corporation. This is ultimately in line with OpenAI's original structure, so I think it's a reasonable compromise.

• 11:09John Coogan?

  I don't like it, though, but not for the same reasons as those who think that any for-profit entity is wrong. Rather, I don't like the idea of an entity unconstrained by things like fiduciary duty or the profit motive having ultimate say over what is shaping up to be such an important company. I get the theoretical argument for people motivated by the common good. I myself subscribe to the perhaps more cynical view that base motivations like profits and doing right by shareholders are important constraints against utopian visions that all too often end badly. And I completely agree. He's very, very convincing on that point. And then we can go through a little bit of the of the CMO, Fidji CMO and and windsurf news.

• 11:51John Coogan?

  So in an Altman email, CMO will enable our traditional company functions to scale as we enter the next phase of growth. Altman keeps the top job and will increase his focus on research, compute and safety systems. CMO is a technologist at heart, but a very pragmatic technologist. She loves consumer companies that have a big impact. That's why she went to eBay.

• 12:11Jordi Hays?

  And what else does she like?

• 12:12John Coogan?

  Ads.

• 12:13Jordi Hays?

  Ads.

• 12:13John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:14Jordi Hays?

  Ads.

• 12:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. So now the question is, you know, you interview anyone from OpenAI. When are you going to get promoted to CEO? Because now if there's two CEOs, why not fifty?

• 12:25Jordi Hays?

  Three, four, five.

• 12:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:28John Coogan?

  Unlimited.

• 12:28Jordi Hays?

  Why stop at fifty, John?

• 12:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, just keep going.

• 12:31Jordi Hays?

  I mean, this is an entirely uncharted territory. We've seen the co-CEO model before.

• 12:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:36Jordi Hays?

  We have not seen scaling is all you need.

• 12:42John Coogan?

  Scaling law applied to CEOs.

• 12:44Jordi Hays?

  The scaling law applied to CEOs.

• 12:45John Coogan?

  Imagine, do you think that's the value, if value accrues to the most CEOs? CEO drives the most value, so get multiple CEOs.

• 12:52Jordi Hays?

  More CEOs.

• 12:53John Coogan?

  They need ten more ooms of CEOs.

• 12:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:56John Coogan?

  Six billion CEOs, then they'll be responsible to humanity. This is the way.

• 13:00Jordi Hays?

  It's very likely that the company that develops AGI.

• 13:04John Coogan?

  Will be entirely CEO driven.

• 13:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:06John Coogan?

  CEO mode.

• 13:07Jordi Hays?

  Everyone acting like they run the company.

• 13:10John Coogan?

  It's great. And so, yeah, I mean, it's obviously like a big shift to they're going all in to be the next big consumer app. And they're necessarily going to build an advertising product. And I was trying to think about this, like, there is a world where you charge people $200 a month, or $20 a month, or zero a month. And the $20 a month subsidizes the rest of the cohort, but you have to differentiate the product at that point. And so you're essentially giving poorer people dumber AI, which feels a lot worse to me than giving everyone equivalently smart AI.

• 13:50Jordi Hays?

  Where everyone the same. Or everyone the same content, but you either watch ads or you don't, or you.

• 13:57John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly, exactly. So I truly, yeah, maybe it'd be nice to be able to pay to remove the ads. But, but I do, I don't like the world where, where certain people, based on their economic conditions, don't have access to the smartest models. I think that's very, very good.

• 14:14Jordi Hays?

  I mean, who are, who are we? I honestly think it was Mad Fez that we were talking about offline about how that this dynamic that we've had where billionaires have the same iPhone.

• 14:26John Coogan?

  We've talked about this many times.

• 14:28Jordi Hays?

  At Polite, right? I, that is not going to be the case in AI. And that's kind of the issue that you're getting at.

• 14:33John Coogan?

  Well, no, I think it, I think it ultimately will be the case in AI, that it will be the same, because I do think the, because I do think the ads and the economics will lead to GPT-5 being available to everyone equivalently. And maybe there's less ads for certain people, maybe there's certain usage limits or certain things that you pay for, but fundamentally, it just seems so much better for humanity.

• 14:55Jordi Hays?

  If I'm paying $2,400 a year for OpenAI as a prosumer, right, I use, you know, whatever, I'm on the $200 a month subscription.

• 15:07Jordi Hays?

  They could get probably 10 grand a year in ads, in value from me as a user in ads.

• 15:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:13Jordi Hays?

  Right? Hey.

• 15:14John Coogan?

  We gotta raise the price on you.

• 15:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:16John Coogan?

  To get rid of those ads.

• 15:17Jordi Hays?

  That's right. But, but, but no, the, the argument is that like Google, I would imagine, you know, like OpenAI at some point would have an incentive to just get so good at ads that they can extract the maximum amount of value.

• 15:29John Coogan?

  It's so cocky to be like, yeah, my ARPU at Facebook, they make 20 grand off of me because they show me so many AMG G63s that they just print off of me.

• 15:41Jordi Hays?

  They found the infinite money glitch.

• 15:43John Coogan?

  They've shown me so many G wagons that Mercedes has.

• 15:47Jordi Hays?

  We've got another G wagon addict over here. He's already got two and he's like.

• 15:54John Coogan?

  It's ridiculous. Anyway, but obviously, you know, the company is shifting to it's the, what do they call it? The unlikely consumer tech company, the unwilling consumer tech company. They just bought Windsurf. It's model agnostic, which is very interesting because you can use Windsurf with Anthropic, Claude.

• 16:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, some other news that was interesting. Harvey just announced that they're going model agnostic.

• 16:20John Coogan?

  Interesting. What were they built on before? OpenAI?

• 16:22Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI and they, OpenAI's fund was invested in Harvey.

• 16:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so this is the point that Ben Thompson makes, which is that there is a world where ChatGPT is powered by Claude and no one notices or cares because all you care about is the app that being a great front door to AI and you go there and as long as you get good responses, does it really matter what exact model you're using? Not really. The actual underlying model matters a lot less than how that model interacts, the other tooling, the tool use, all these different things. And so we got to dig into this more, but.

• 16:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The other, the other interesting thing here, and Ben calls this out, he says, the unusual part of this appointment is that Simo is currently a public company CEO of Instacart. And the best way to understand her decision is that it is better to be the number two at a generational company instead of the number one basically anywhere else. And it's interesting to, you know, in many ways, Instacart was a generational company.

• 17:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:22Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 17:23John Coogan?

  But it's 11 billion dollars right now and it's been around there since IPO. It's actually fairly up since IPO, I believe. $25 when IPO'd. Now it's at 45. So it's done well.

• 17:37Jordi Hays?

  Do you remember they were, I think they were over thirty in the private markets?

• 17:40John Coogan?

  Oh, really? Yeah. But still, I mean, eleven billion dollars, that's what, three percent of OpenAI at the current valuation or something like that? But the takeaway is that if you're running a startup, why don't you just go recruit a CEO from a public company to come work for you?

• 17:54Jordi Hays?

  Totally, totally.

• 17:55John Coogan?

  Set your, you set your bar high.

• 17:57Jordi Hays?

  Massively underappreciated approach to recruiting.

• 18:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:01Jordi Hays?

  Is just go look at the public markets, see which companies have, you know, executed well over the past, call it eight quarters, and then just go pick out, you know, your favorite CEO.

• 18:12John Coogan?

  So I want to shift over to John Ludig's piece on his Substack, Ludig's Learnings. He says, "The future of foundation models is closed source. If the centralizing forces of data and compute hold, open and closed source AI cannot both dominate long term." So he was thinking about, you know, this was, this was during this wave and this big meme that open source would just completely dominate and commoditize the foundation model layer. Some of that's happened, but then we've seen missteps with Lama four, and there's some interesting context in here, but it's a year old piece, so it's interesting to reflect on how it's held up. And he got into a big debate with Martin Casado, who I believe

• 18:53John Coogan?

  is coming on the show in just a couple hours. And I'd love to hear how Andreessen's view of open source AI has evolved because they've invested in some open source AI companies and some closed source AI companies. And so I want to know how they're thinking about it. So John writes, "Two seemingly contradictory but equally popular narratives about the future of foundation models have taken hold. In one future, AI centralizes, scaling laws will hold, and value accrues primarily to scaled closed source players. In the other future, AI decentralizes, foundation models have no moat, open source has caught up to closed source, and will have many competing models. Today, both narratives seem true. We have powerful closed source models and a thriving ecosystem of sanctuary-sankt

• 19:35John Coogan?

  open source models. Lama three recently put open source on the map of GPT-4 class models. Meanwhile, an unusual open source alliance is formed among developers who want handouts," which is a very controversial say, "academics who embrace publishing culture, libertarians who fear centralized speech control and regulatory capture, Elon who doesn't want his nemesis to win AI, and Zuck who doesn't want to be beholden to yet another tech platform." As an accelerant of- Not letting it happen.

• 20:03Jordi Hays?

  Simply not happening again. I will spend $100 billion this year to make sure this doesn't happen again.

• 20:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, 100%.

• 20:10Jordi Hays?

  And this is what keeps him up at night.

• 20:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:13Jordi Hays?

  Because it, it might be happening.

• 20:15John Coogan?

  For sure. But I think he's doing okay. Like, the Llama models, they're not fantastic, but they're definitely good enough for enterprise use. And that's, that's really the win case for enterprise AI or open source AI is, is seeing fantastic adoption in the, in the, in the enterprise where you can fine tune it and tweak it and really understand the cost structure and you can stuff it in all different parts of your enterprise. So as an accelerant of modern software, open source maintains a cherished, a cherished place in tech. Who can argue with free stuff? Decentralized control and free speech. But open and closed source AI cannot both dominate in the limit. If centralizing forces hold, scale advantages will compound and leave open source alternatives behind. Despite

• 20:57John Coogan?

  recent progress in endless cheerleading, open source AI will become a financial drain for model builders. Basically, this idea that Zuck will run out of, of investment dollars to pour into Llama if there's not a strong economic engine there.

• 21:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:13John Coogan?

  And that's the main, that's the main argument here. And so, open source software started as an act of charity. The world owes the likes of Linus Torvalds and Fabrice Bellard for endowing humanity with Linux, Git and FFmpeg. Because free stuff is popular, open source became a great freemium marketing strategy. Think Databricks or Mistral. And sometimes a market equilibrium in itself, e.g. Android's cheap smartphone option reinforces Google's search monopoly. Companies that earned free marketing from open source eventually succumbed to business physics. Red Hat hid Centos behind a subscription service. Elastic Search changed their licensing after accidentally seeding competition. And Databricks owns the IP that accelerates Apache Spark. So Apache Spark is open source, but you can't

• 21:57John Coogan?

  just spin up a Databricks instance. You have to license their IP, so you have to use Databricks. Unlike the charity work of open source in the early software era, today it is subsidized by businesses with their own goals.

• 22:07Jordi Hays?

  By the way, Databricks bought a company for a billion dollars today.

• 22:12John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 22:12Jordi Hays?

  Got announced.

• 22:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:13Jordi Hays?

  They announced this at 3 a.m. Pacific. I guess that's 6 Eastern, so not that crazy.

• 22:19John Coogan?

  They're just on the Ashton Hall grind. Play the Ashton Hall sound. We're announcing something at 3 a.m.

• 22:25Jordi Hays?

  They are.

• 22:25John Coogan?

  Banana peel on the face.

• 22:26Jordi Hays?

  Many people have called Databricks the Ashton Hall of data analytics.

• 22:30John Coogan?

  Of data analytics, yeah. And so, John writes, "That begs the question, if Meta is only pursuing open source insofar as it benefits themselves," which he believes, like, they're not doing it completely charitably. It's not a charity. It's not a nonprofit. "What is the tipping point at which Meta stops open sourcing their AI?" So, "Sooner than you think. Exponential data. Frontier models were trained on the corpus of the Internet, but that data source's commodity model differentiation over the next decade will come from proprietary data, both via model usage and private data sources. And so, the feedback loop in ChatGPT is what's valuable: the thumbs up, the thumbs down, the follow-up questions. You issued a response. Did they close the app because

• 23:12John Coogan?

  they were satisfied, or did they ask you 25 more follow-ups to get the real answer?" So, open source models have no feedback loop between production, usage, and model training. So, if you're running Llama, that data doesn't go back to Facebook.

• 23:24Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't go to Llama.

• 23:25John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. And then there's exponential CapEx. "A lagging-edge model that requires just a few percent of Meta's $40 billion in CapEx is easy to open source. Nobody will ask questions. But once you reach $10 billion or more in CapEx spend for model training, shareholders will want a clear ROI on that spend. The Metaverse raised some question marks at a certain scale, too. Diminishing returns on model quality within Meta, there's a large upfront benefit for Meta building open-source AI model, even if it's worse than the frontier closed-source counterpart. There are lots of small AI workloads. Think feed algorithms, recommendations, and image generation where Meta doesn't want to rely on a third-party provider like they had to rely on Apple. But it's unclear whether Facebook products benefit much from models approaching AGI quality. It's equally possible that Meta's

• 24:08John Coogan?

  model improvements will be very particular to their own internal use cases." And that's like what we talked to, that company that trains small language models.

• 24:20Jordi Hays?

  Task-specific?

• 24:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, the task-specific models. And so, you could imagine that a lot of Meta's AI workloads are not going to need AGI-level universal.

• 24:31Jordi Hays?

  Fastino.

• 24:32John Coogan?

  That's right. Fastino.

• 24:35Jordi Hays?

  Fastino AI.

• 24:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, Fastino. And so, uh, so you could imagine that there is a Fastino.

• 24:40Jordi Hays?

  TLMs, task-specific language models.

• 24:43John Coogan?

  And so you could imagine there is a Fastino-like team inside of Meta actually figuring out, "Okay, we just need to translate every caption. Let's, let's build a model specifically for that." Or we just need to flag everything for profanity, right? Like they could build a model for that and they're not going to need AGI-level massive models for that. And so, uh, Zuck is not running a charity. He's a savvy capitalist. While Meta can justify scaling CapEx on incremental models for their own ends, their open-source strategy will only make less sense over time. And so then, uh, John goes into developers and consumers. Um, as a developer choosing an open-source model, what do you get in terms of cost, model quality and data security? Open-source models have the illusion of being free,

• 25:24John Coogan?

  but developers bear the inference cost, which are often more expensive than comparable LLM API calls. You either pay a middleman to manage GPUs or end-host models, or pay the direct cost of GPU depreciation. Um, in capitalist America, free is never really free. You should wonder how you'll ultimately be monetized. This isn't Linux where a single developer built the product as a gift to humanity. These are cash-incinerating endeavors whose only way out is to eventually monetize you. You're probably committing to a closed-source compliment in time.

• 25:54Jordi Hays?

  I'm not afraid to be monetized.

• 25:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:58Jordi Hays?

  Are you afraid to be monetized?

• 25:59John Coogan?

  I'm fearless about being monetized. Monetize me. Go right ahead. Even Android eventually monetized via Google.

• 26:05Jordi Hays?

  There's like a, a pretty good, you know, metal song, you know.

• 26:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:10Jordi Hays?

  Monetize me.

• 26:13John Coogan?

  On model quality, like housing, healthcare and education, a paid version is generally better than the free version. Even within software, the open-source winner is rarely the best product. Android is worse than iOS. Open Office is worse than Office or Google Docs. Godot is worse than Unity. FreeCAD is worse than SolidWorks. A corollary is that engineers focused on the best platforms make more money. They're more likely to build cutting-edge products. Everyone's celebrating Lama 3.

• 26:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, here's the kicker. Everyone is celebrating that Lama 3 is on par with GPT-4 a year later.

• 26:42John Coogan?

  A year later.

• 26:43Jordi Hays?

  The product quality gap between iOS and Android or macOS and consumer Linux has stayed wide for a long time because the best software creators are aligned with paying customers. When you choose closed-source models, you're not making a point-in-time decision on model quality. You're paying for future model improvements where the roadmap is aligned with paying customers.

• 27:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then he talks about data security a little bit. Some enterprises need the utmost data security, financial services, healthcare legal, but I'm not sure using open source models on-prem or via third-party cloud hosting is actually safer than using third-party LLMs in the cloud. This is a legacy belief from the early internet era where an on-premise data center was the Fort Knox of data security. As a customer, I'd trust Microsoft with healthcare data security more than my IT department's self-managed data center. Ooh, putting Founders Fund's IT department on blast.

• 27:32John Coogan?

  But very nice, very nice IT department over there. They're very nice. I know.

• 27:38John Coogan?

  And that bridge has already been crossed when 65% of the risk adverse Fortune 500 already uses Azure on OpenAI. It makes you wonder who is dealing with data that is too sensitive for cloud-based LLMs, of course. And so then he goes into national security, and this is why I wanted to pull up that Aaron Gin clip, which we'll play in a second. But even if it makes eventual economic sense for model builders to build open source, should they? Advocates like Yan Le Cun claim that open source AI is safer than closed, but it makes me wonder if he really believes in Meta's AI capabilities. Any reasonable extrapolation of capabilities with more compute, data, and autonomous tool use is self-evidently dangerous. And we've talked to some other folks about this. So let's play the Aaron Gin clip because I want to react to that.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  But the new AI Belt and Road Initiative has already started. They're already around the world. We know this. We see them at, you know, different data centers that we work with, selling their stuff. And it comes as a fully complete solution with DeepSeek, like Manus models, combined with infrastructure, combined with support.

• 28:41Jordi Hays?

  Manus has that kind of distribution already?

• 28:44Speaker 02

  No, Huawei is designing for their open source ecosystem. So Huawei is being the hands of heat out there building.

• 28:52John Coogan?

  I think what George is asking is like, have you ever run into a country that's not China? That's like, yeah, we have Huawei Ascend, and then we have DeepSeek, and then we have Manus, because Manus came out of nowhere just a couple of months ago. Feels like that would be a very quick ramp to be like, it's deployed in another country as a part of the AI Belt and Road Initiative.

• 29:11Jordi Hays?

  DeepSeek I can believe, Manus I would give it.

• 29:14John Coogan?

  So yeah, give us the update on that.

• 29:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's deploy like DeepSeek and Manus are everywhere in Europe. Like they're everywhere. And again, it's open source. It it work. Open source works as a distribution strategy. They're not open source because they give they they try to care. They don't care about open source. They care about defeating us. And and and so the the approach that this is why uh OpenAI made that announcement of we're gonna do like this combined deployments of software plus like infrastructure is because that's they're mimicking what China's doing. But but the proliferation of the open source models, go look at OpenRudder. Like you can just see the growth in other models. Those other models are Chinese.

• 29:52John Coogan?

  Okay, so there's this debate about now. So so where I think John left off is that if we're open sourcing all American AI and truly the best American AI, you're in you're immediately giving it to near peer rivals geopolitically. And that's risky. What Aaron is saying is that if we don't do it, they will. And there could be this AI Belt and Road initiative where a country that's a little bit more of a coin toss might say, hey, my options are pay OpenAI a ton of money or use the free Chinese model. I'm gonna go with the free Chinese model. And that draws me closer to their economy and that pulls them away from

• 30:34John Coogan?

  us. And so in terms of forging durable relationships with countries that are kind of on the brink or or could go either way, having a strong American secure open source AI ecosystem might actually be an advantage to us in terms of like broad AI economic warfare. And so

• 30:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the question

• 30:54John Coogan?

  That's something that I've been

• 30:55Jordi Hays?

  A lot of gets at this a little bit. I think the question becomes how much does being able to deploy the truly bleeding edge leading models matter, right? Does it matter if you're deploying, you know, GPT six versus the open source CCP equivalent of GPT five, right? How big of a difference is is that, right? Everybody's gonna have a different take. But uh but yeah, we got

• 31:23John Coogan?

  Let's dig in it. Dig into it today. Let's tell you about Ramp real quick. Time is money save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. And let's invite our first guest into the studio. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 31:35Jordi Hays?

  It's granola time. What's happening?

• 31:37John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 31:38Speaker 02

  How you doing?

• 31:39John Coogan?

  We're doing great. Would you mind introducing yourself and the company a little bit?

• 31:42Speaker 03

  Totally. My name's Chris. I'm the co-founder, CEO of Granola. How much you wanted me to tell about it?

• 31:49Jordi Hays?

  Tell us everything.

• 31:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, specifically the evolution of the product, because I know people think note-taking, but you're doing a lot more. So give us kind of the, what was the initial, the initial minimum viable product? What's the product today? Where's it going?

• 32:09Speaker 03

  Totally. So we launched Granola a little under a year ago, and the idea was the best way to take notes during meetings, and to do that in collaboration with AI. So it's an app that lives on your Mac. It looks a lot like Apple Notes. You can take notes however you want, but it listens to the conversation in the background. And when the meeting's over, it'll rewrite your notes to flush them out to make them great.

• 32:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that's the basic product. We tried to keep it super simple, really minimal. And I mean, I think that design resonated. I think we can talk about that. But I think there are a few things about the way we built that that people really liked. And then I think what we noticed happening was that, once you start using Granola, what happens is you have a meeting and like a notification pops up saying, hey, this meeting's starting. Do you want to use Granola for it? And once you start using Granola for lots of meetings, it kind of becomes this searchable second brain repository thing. Like you can kind of be like, hey, what did that person say? And you kind of turn to it, and we noticed lots of users doing that. And then kind of the evolution, like what we launched today, is now you can do that across your team.

• 33:18Speaker 03

  So like now you can chat. We added a bunch of support for these great reasoning models, and you can chat across meetings, across your whole team, and ask questions. And it's a stepping stone towards the bigger vision of where we're going.

• 33:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Tell me about search. Are you stuffing every Granola note into a vector database? Or are you just doing the huge context window, what are the different strategies to actually surface insights?

• 33:45Speaker 03

  I mean, it's definitely evolving. What we found is like rag or stuffing it into a vector database is really good for certain types of like information lookup, like search. What it is terrible at is basically if you ask questions like, hey,

• 34:03Speaker 03

  Like, coach me. Like, how could I be better in my one-on-ones? Right? Or when, let's say you're trying to sell something, it's like, hey, when I get this type of question, like, how good are my answers and how does that compare to the answers that other folks on my team give? Like, Rag completely breaks with that. And what we find is, people turn to granola to ask a lot of these kind of analysis-type questions, like, hey, what are the biggest burning fires, right, that I should be focused on, or something like that. And Rag's not suitable. So we actually make a lot of use of stuffing these massive context windows with the right, with the right transcripts and notes.

• 34:38John Coogan?

  What's the favorite context window to stuff? I know Gemini's got a big one, but...

• 34:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. They all have trade-offs.

• 34:47John Coogan?

  But Llama's going bigger even more.

• 34:48Jordi Hays?

  Do the big ones scare you?

• 34:49John Coogan?

  No, no, the big ones scare me. OpenAI's context windows, perfect.

• 34:58Speaker 03

  We just, we just today, starting today, we let users choose. Before that, it was, you know, we do it.

• 35:03John Coogan?

  Everyone's going model-agnostic. This is a trend, right?

• 35:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean...

• 35:07John Coogan?

  Wind Surf is model-agnostic now. Who else were you saying? Harvey just went model-agnostic. This seems to be the trend, really. Drinking the commoditization Kool-Aid.

• 35:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, the product person in me feel, I have mixed feelings about surfacing it to the user. It's like one more thing a user has to think about, and your average person shouldn't have to think about, we should do the best thing. So it defaults to auto, so we try to choose the right model, which for a lot of it is like Sonic Cloud 3.7, like, the reasoning mode of it, because we find that for the type of queries that we're getting, it works the best. But, you know, if you're a power user now, you can choose Gemini 03, like, whatever you want.

• 35:44John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 35:44Jordi Hays?

  I gotta ask, what was your reaction to Notion's launch yesterday? Many people said it was a granola clone.

• 35:53John Coogan?

  Do we have a shots fired?

• 35:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we need like a shots fired sound effect. But, yeah, I'm curious to get, I'm curious to get, you know, your reaction to it. I'm sure it's not even the first time that somebody's taken a little inspiration from you guys over the last year.

• 36:07Speaker 03

  I mean, it feels like, it means we're doing something right, is my first reaction. Like, I...

• 36:15Speaker 03

  It'd be easier if I didn't like Notion. We really like Notion, right? Like, we think they're great. Like, Ivan actually DM'd me on Twitter, letting me know it was coming beforehand, you know, as in like, hey,

• 36:24Erik Torenberg?

  Wow, that's very sweet.

• 36:25Speaker 03

  It's really cool, you know, he's like, "We respect you. I hope this leads to us pushing each other to build better products for people." So like, I like them. What it means for, I mean, I think the world changed overnight with AI. And we're like, 2% of the way there, figuring out like, what does that mean in terms of products and tools? And there's just a ton to build, right? I feel like transcription from the beginning has always been a commodity, right? Everything is gonna have transcription, so I think the question is, how do you go from what we have today to like, a true AI assistant that kinda understands you and helps you like, be a thought partner and do most of the work you wanna do?

• 37:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like there's like, three different like, approaches to building a new AI-enabled note-taking app or something like that in this world. It's like, a greenfield project with startup that has a fresh, clean slate like you guys. There's Notion, which is like, a well-funded, scaled company, but still in founder mode, can still like, we saw this with like, Figma, roll a bunch of new features in, move still pretty agilely, compete. And then there's the hyperscalers, which are just like, "We have a monopoly and yeah, it might take us 10 years to add this feature, but you're probably still gonna be using an iPhone, so, uh, yeah, expect Apple Notes to get an update in 2035 or something like that."

• 37:47John Coogan?

  But I'm interested to know, kind of like, do you see the market that way? And how are you thinking about, uh, the broader competition? Because I imagine that if you just look at the overall, like, people taking notes, Apple Notes is probably still the number one product, or something like that, or Notepad. Um, and so maybe that's the real opportunity and you and Notion can both win.

• 38:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's an interesting question. Okay, so one angle is like, I think we underestimate. You remember when mobile came out and everyone tried to pour websites to mobile, to the iPhone? And like, it took us a little while to figure out that that doesn't work and that mobile apps should look really different.

• 38:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:32Speaker 03

  The jump from mobile to, except from web to mobile, is a fraction of the jump of like pre-AI to post-AI. So like, I really think the future is going to look very different. I think, and in a, in a very different future, I think the, the products that are kind of like invented in that new medium tend to do better. You know, that doesn't, doesn't mean like the, the massive companies won't be able to add really cool AI features, but if you think about the AI features you use on a daily basis, how many of them were launched by startups? You know, that, that came out in the last two years versus how many of them were launched by big companies? Like, it's like an interesting assessment to do. So like, I, the way I see it is like, there's a ton of opportunity.

• 39:14Speaker 03

  I, I really think, like, when Sam and I started Granola, it wasn't a, our vision was never meeting notes. Our vision was to be like, a tool for thought that is contextually aware and AI-powered. Like, from the, you know, you can, you can see the stuff that we wrote before launch. And meeting notes just turned out to be a frickin' awesome wedge. Like, we thought it would be a good wedge. Turned out it's an amazing wedge, way better than we thought. Cause there's like so much information in, in our conversations that we don't like.

• 39:42John Coogan?

  Is there also like a viral loop there where people are sharing their notes with each other onboarding, I imagine?

• 39:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's like, basically the Granola product is nothing, like, there's no growth stuff built in. Like, until today, there's, it was like a single-player product.

• 39:54John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 39:54Speaker 03

  It's something really, yeah, yeah, there's something super inherent about the information in meetings and wanting to share that, right?

• 40:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 40:01Speaker 03

  It's it's all been like word of mouth until now.

• 40:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:03Speaker 03

  I think.

• 40:04John Coogan?

  But I imagine if I take notes in a meeting, I could share a static link and we're not multiplayer in that, but I could share my notes and then I'm seeing granola.com and I'm.

• 40:13Speaker 03

  That's true. Yeah, you can't. You can't share a link and now you can even you can like, put a bunch of meetings together in a folder, you can share a folder and someone who doesn't have granola can now see those and, you know, if they log in and then.

• 40:23John Coogan?

  Granola.ai. Sorry, I got the domain not wrong.

• 40:26Jordi Hays?

  Do you have a, I'm curious, do you have a, do you have a strong thesis around agents? You know, I can imagine at some point, companies have agents that are calling people and companies want to kind of understand the the context of those conversations and what, what happened, what what kind of next steps need to take place? Is that something that would live in granola or is that more at the CRM level? What what's your theory there?

• 40:50Speaker 03

  Oh, man. I I mean, I I think the you mentioned CRM. I think the product categories that we've had for the last 20 years, whether it's like, okay, you have like a Wiki company, you have a CRM, you have like your docs company or. I think those are all going to get redrawn because I think in in an AI world, it's it's all about context. Right? And then how do you make use of that context to to do work? So, yeah, if you have agents calling people, I don't think that's very different from other folks on your team calling people. And then how do you make that context useful? I think that could live in granola. I also think agents are just one of those terms or I think we throw it around now, but we don't really. There's probably like 15 different things that today we're calling agents that are going to be their own separate things

• 41:33Speaker 03

  in the future. And it'll be really interesting to see how how that evolves.

• 41:36Jordi Hays?

  So I got a real time follow up question from our mutual friend, Michael at Lightspeed, who was in is in the new round, but he asked, is there an opportunity around agents to take action based on meeting notes? Right? Because in a beautiful world, humans get together, they have a conversation, you figure out next steps and then things immediately start to happen. Uh, autonomously and

• 42:02Speaker 03

  A hundred percent like a hundred like that. That's the whole future of granola is basically like, how do we use this context for meeting notes, but also in the future email, Slack, you know, Google Docs, whatever, to help you do work. And like our vision for granola is like AI should do all the busy work for you. Right. And you should only be left with the judgment. So you can imagine a world, you come out of a few meetings, it's already kind of done. All the, the post meeting work or suggestions and all you have to do is kind of be like, ah, a little bit more this way, or yeah, that looks good. Yep, yep, yep, yep. Do that. And then move on to your next thing.

• 42:34John Coogan?

  What's the use of the funds? Forty three million, big series B. Uh, is LLM inference a material cost to your business right now? Is it just hiring more engineers, product people? Doesn't seem like you're going to be training foundation models if you're moving to model agnostic. But what's the use of funds look like over the next 12 to 18 months?

• 42:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I, like I said, I think there's a, like in this pivotal moment in history to build the future tooling of work. And it's a big vision and we need to hire the best people in the world to go out and build that. And there's a, just a ton to build. So that's the primary use. Um, LLM inference is, it costs money. Transcription actually costs more. So we transcribe millions of minutes, millions of minutes a day right now. So that actually does cost some money, but people also pay for granola. So like that, the funds are really like, can we go after this massive vision?

• 43:27John Coogan?

  That makes a ton of sense.

• 43:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and what's, uh, what's, what's the dispersion of the team going to look like over the next couple of years? I know you're in London now. You are an American though.

• 43:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:38Jordi Hays?

  What, what, what does it look like?

• 43:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I think we, so when we launched granola, we were four people. We're 18 people now. We're still tiny, right? Uh, but we got a great group of people here. So we're definitely going to grow, um, the team in London because I think there's a lot of talent, but our ambitions are global, right? So we're definitely going to be opening up more offices, probably in the US, probably multiple in the US. Um, but all of that TBD.

• 44:04Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 44:04John Coogan?

  Very cool. Thank you so much for coming on the screen.

• 44:07Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations.

• 44:08John Coogan?

  And Love to see Nat Friedman making some money.

• 44:11Jordi Hays?

  Size Lord.

• 44:13John Coogan?

  We love that.

• 44:14Speaker 03

  That's alright.

• 44:14Jordi Hays?

  Great having you on, Chris.

• 44:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's great.

• 44:16Speaker 03

  Thank you so much, guys.

• 44:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

• 44:18Jordi Hays?

  Have a good one.

• 44:19John Coogan?

  Quickly, let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, trusted by millions, and they have a massive news dropping today. Now, you can vibe code your own portfolio.

• 44:33Jordi Hays?

  Basically vibe coding indexes.

• 44:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can go and type in, I want to create a synthetic index fund around founder mode CEOs, or I want to find CEOs that have been tenured for more than 20 years, people that have been quoted in their transcripts referencing Warren Buffett, and it'll just pull it together, make it for you, and you can invest in it. Very cool.

• 44:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so you can do my personal favorite CEOs who don't believe in meetings.

• 45:02John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 45:02Jordi Hays?

  That's a fun one.

• 45:03John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 45:03Jordi Hays?

  But even better, CEOs that deadlift.

• 45:07John Coogan?

  Is that real?

• 45:08Jordi Hays?

  Building, you can just go build an index based on.

• 45:11John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 45:13Jordi Hays?

  Guys that are very into Olympic weightlifting.

• 45:16John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, we have Josh Browder in the studio. He's a CEO. We'll ask him, does he deadlift? We got to know because he's going in the portfolio. Welcome to the stream, Josh.

• 45:25Jordi Hays?

  Josh, it's great to have you on.

• 45:26John Coogan?

  It's been too long. How you doing?

• 45:27Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me. Love the show, and I love Wunder as well. I see that Wunder.

• 45:32John Coogan?

  Oh, yes. You're one of the first investors, right?

• 45:35Speaker 05

  We did an audit. I'm proud to be the first investor.

• 45:37John Coogan?

  The first investor.

• 45:39Jordi Hays?

  You found your happy place.

• 45:40John Coogan?

  You found your happy place.

• 45:41Jordi Hays?

  First spot on the cap table.

• 45:43John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. So, yeah, give us a little bit of an introduction, and do you call yourself a CEO or a venture capitalist at this point? You're on Fund 4, so moving more into the VC world, what's the story?

• 45:56Speaker 05

  So, definitely a founder at heart. I'm the founder of Do Not Pay, which helps consumers fight companies and governments. The very first use case was parking tickets. But today, I'm announcing my fund that I do on the side called Browder Capital Fund 4. I'm very lucky. We've raised $30 million from a lot of the best investors, and I specialize in backing undiscovered, uncredited founders. So, we're living in a world now where there's like these crazy seed valuations of like 50, everyone going to like one company, gravitating towards, like chasing hype.

• 46:32Speaker 05

  I'm the exact opposite. I back more Thiel fellows than any other investor or fund. And I really try and create my own hype and almost incubate them. Obviously, it's up to the entrepreneur to build their business, but I put them on the right circuit. And the very first company I did this with was I was the angel investor in a company called Owner.com. I'm in the pre-seed and it's now, yesterday, they announced their billion dollar.

• 46:58John Coogan?

  Congratulations. What, how are you thinking about this? How are you thinking about the fund sizing? I feel like most funds, when they get to fund four, they're thinking three billion. But you've kind of kept it small. What are the advantages of that?

• 47:11Speaker 05

  So I was lucky. It took about three weeks to raise and I've got some raises in my career and this, this was a very smooth process. And I deliberately kept it small and disciplined. I was lucky. I had a lot more demand. I want to do a good job for people. I want to do a good job for the founders I back and my LPs. And I think smaller fund sizes far outperform larger ones. In terms of what I'm backing now, I actually have a founder like living with me that I don't know too well. I invited him into my home. Another founder, I put his visa on my credit card personally. Third founder, I co-signed for the apartment lease. So it's really just about putting people on the right track and being their first believer. That's amazing.

• 47:57John Coogan?

  What, what overall trends are you excited about or staying away from? What's your take on defense tech, the application layer in AI? You've kind of built a, the perfect company to benefit from foundation models, didn't have to train anything, but I'm sure do not pay is benefiting from AI and agents and reasoning models. But what, what are the trends that you're most excited about right now?

• 48:22Speaker 05

  So I'm founder first. So wherever the top founders are going, I go. For example, a recent company that I was the first believer in with Corey is called Pilgrim. I think he was on your show a few weeks ago. They raised an amazing round, I think from Kantos and others, which is a top defense investor. Also excited about AI. I'm an investor in a company called Assured, which helps insurance companies process their claims and they've received huge traction in the market. I, I think every AI, every company will be an AI company though. So I try and stay away from like founders who are like too smooth with their pitching. AI first. I think about this with Do Not Pay. We've added AI to our business and really every company should do that.

• 49:06Speaker 05

  So kind of these AI first pitches where the founders are saying all this jargon like we're building LLM operability dev tools. What does that even mean? So I like folks on like real problems and real solutions.

• 49:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think we actually met Jake Adler of Pilgrim together when we were camping a year or two ago. I don't know if that's the first time you met him, but that was the first time I met, I think, both of you in person.

• 49:30Speaker 05

  It was the first time I met him in person, but I this is more in the COVID era. So I was like doing my program over Zoom. But I really enjoyed playing Mafia with you guys. I think you can.

• 49:40John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 49:42Speaker 05

  Good founder or investor by how good they are at Mafia.

• 49:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, a lot of bluffing. It's fun. I mean, on the topic of like, I mean, I love Jake. I love Pilgrim. I don't feel comfortable due diligence in a company like that because it's so out of my wheelhouse in the biotech space. Is that one of the benefits of being early stage and founder led is that you can kind of just bet on the founder and you're not you don't need to do all the technical due diligence? Or do you like to dig in on that stuff and just get up to speed?

• 50:12Speaker 05

  I I don't want to get into trouble by revealing any like specific numbers, but of my biggest kind of wins, they've been sub five or even around two average. And so that kind of risk is baked into the valuation entry price.

• 50:30John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 50:31Speaker 05

  I've seen I've been an operator for 10 years now. I've seen things come and go. And if you have a founder who truly it's their life's work and they're technical, they have some sort of good success. And so they just have to keep at it and stay in the game and not run out of money and then they become really big.

• 50:51Jordi Hays?

  How long do founders stay under the radar today? Right? And if you can invest in a founder at five posts, right? They're typically, you're either friends with them. You can add a tremendous amount of value or they're flying under the radar in some form of another. And then it's at a certain point, they become kind of discovered broadly and they start getting, you know, these rounds start getting bid up. It feels like with the internet today, even X, you know, a kid can drop out of college and immediately get, you know, three term sheets in a week.

• 51:24John Coogan?

  Especially if they can go viral, which is like a common thing that we're seeing now with X is that some founder does some sort of stunt, gets a ton of attention. And then there's a question about whether they can build a product, but it certainly drives venture capital interest. But yeah, I'm interested to hear your take on that.

• 51:39Speaker 05

  So I think we're seeing a rise of like super credentialism. Now, top VC funds are even tracking math competitions in high school. And you have these founders, they tell the perfect story and they're like, I won Intel, I won math. I went to MIT, I dropped out of MIT, I worked at OpenAI and now I'm starting a company. Those ones are super chase, everyone's chasing them, there's lots of competition. But for me, I really think it's about creating one's own winners. And so the best entrepreneurs I've backed, they didn't have those credentials coming in. And maybe they needed to be put more on the right track in terms of what they are working on. And a lot of sometimes investors even passed on them.

• 52:19Speaker 05

  And so I really, I'm not saying the math competition winners make bad founders. Obviously, there's some huge wins with that. But just because someone's good at math doesn't mean that they make a good founder. And there's like more innate qualities that other people aren't signaling on.

• 52:36John Coogan?

  How do you think about kind of the geopolitics of entrepreneurship right now? We're in kind of this, this odd realignment towards America. There's, there's some VC funds that are pushing really hard to invest in Europe. There's other folks that are great at, I mean, you said you, you, you paid for someone's visa. Clearly that sounds like you're bringing a founder from somewhere else to America. What does the trade imbalance look like in the founder ecosystem? Is America still bringing enough talented entrepreneurs here? Is it still fertile ground for the global entrepreneurship community to come to America or Silicon Valley and build generational companies?

• 53:18Speaker 05

  So I'm originally from England, as you guys can probably tell from my accent. And I think that America is by far the best place to build a company. People are more ambitious here. The capital availability is like 100x. I think a concrete example is like the most valuable private company in the UK is like Revolut, which is like a bank clone. The most valuable private company in the US is like OpenAI or SpaceX. There's like order of magnitude bigger. So I encourage any founder I back to move to the US and also to move to the San Francisco Bay Area. Unfortunately, still being in the Bay Area really matters a lot. The companies don't have to start in the Bay Area. They could start in Arizona or wherever they drop out from, but they should really move here. Pilgrim is a great example.

• 54:03Speaker 05

  Jake started in Canada and then moved to the Bay Area. I also think there's a huge arbitrage on the O1 visa. It's people, it's known as the genius visa, but it has like over 95% approval rating depending on the year. And so you get someone the O1 visa and they're a true genius. They move to Silicon Valley and then they hit the ground running.

• 54:27John Coogan?

  What about advice for young people? Do you think learning to code or being able to code is still a positive signal? Or in the age of cursor and winserv and Devin and AI tools, it's becoming less relevant?

• 54:40Speaker 05

  I think the biggest thing is like distribution and being an online first and having these skills of like distributing your product. Coding and being technical is important, but it's just one skill. Like I backed the WAP founders, W H O P as an early check. And they were like really deep in like sneaker bot communities and things like that. Because everyone is starting a company now and you need to break out. I feel like a lot of Stanford students are just starting companies just for the resume. There are, so there's so much noise and you have to kind of wade through that.

• 55:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, the WAP founders are definitely doing it for the love of the game. They're killers. It's amazing. What a great company.

• 55:19Jordi Hays?

  Can you give us, I know it's not why you're on the show today, but can you give us the update on Do Not Pay? It seems like in so many ways, the company was incredibly well positioned to benefit from improvements at the model layer. Give us the update there.

• 55:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, so Do Not Pay is an incredibly efficient business. It's a very small team. It's only fourteen people and seven of those are like expensive employees and seven contractors. And when I started Do Not Pay, it was really about templates to get people out parking tickets. And admittedly, now ChatGPT can write you a template letter, but AI has improved our product by five to ten X. So instead of helping people with parking tickets now, we have AI agents. They log into someone's Comcast account and start negotiating with Comcast to get people's bills down. And the big companies have AI, we have AI, and it's like AI versus AI warfare. But we're more motivated than the Comcast of the world, and so we're winning like thousands of these negotiations a week.

• 56:20Speaker 05

  And I think it's a good lesson that I tell all the people I back. It's like you can't rest on your laurels. You constantly have to be innovating, change the product, and adapt with the times.

• 56:31Jordi Hays?

  Yep, it makes a lot of sense.

• 56:34John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. We appreciate you and good luck with the new fund.

• 56:40Jordi Hays?

  I feel like I, my only concern for Fund Four is that some of these bigger multi-stage funds are gonna sort of pay a private investigator to follow you around and just sort of like see who you're meeting with, you know, ahead of time and be like, oh, Josh is trying to do another.

• 56:55John Coogan?

  The preempt.

• 56:56Jordi Hays?

  He's trying to do another, you know, five hundred K on five mil. Why don't we offer them five on twenty-five?

• 57:02John Coogan?

  Has that actually been a problem for you at all? Have you, are the like the bigger funds, the crazier dynamics, is that, is that a trend that early-stage VCs should actually be worried about?

• 57:13Jordi Hays?

  No, I think Josh's playbook is he meets them.

• 57:15John Coogan?

  Just way before.

• 57:16Jordi Hays?

  Buys ten percent before anybody knows about it and then says, hey, you know, you guys, you know, take them on a road trip.

• 57:23Speaker 05

  They're not ready for the big funds. They need about a month to kind of get that polished and stuff like that.

• 57:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. So it's not, it's not strictly like they wouldn't be sniped even if they could be found because they're just not, there's not in a place to do those types of rounds. That's interesting. Makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you so much for joining.

• 57:42Jordi Hays?

  Love it.

• 57:42John Coogan?

  This has been fantastic.

• 57:43Jordi Hays?

  Great to hear the update, Josh. And yeah, congratulations on the new fund.

• 57:47Speaker 05

  Thank you. See you guys soon. Bye-bye.

• 57:48John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 57:53John Coogan?

  Well, that's a great cue to talk about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products.

• 57:59Jordi Hays?

  It is, John.

• 57:59John Coogan?

  Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. Jordy's been using it for the past 35 years. He loves it.

• 58:09Jordi Hays?

  I wish.

• 58:10John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 58:11Jordi Hays?

  In the...

• 58:12John Coogan?

  Planned his whole...

• 58:13Jordi Hays?

  Years before I, you know, was in the womb, I was, I was running on Linear. Now, you know a funny little anecdote? Linear's sending us some merch.

• 58:20John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 58:21Jordi Hays?

  And, and the, the automated email to notify us that they were sending us merch that's not even available online was like perfectly designed.

• 58:31John Coogan?

  Designed? No way. That's crazy.

• 58:33Jordi Hays?

  Like, it was truly incredible. I'm like, okay.

• 58:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, culture of design.

• 58:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, every single touchpoint matters.

• 58:39John Coogan?

  Makes more sense. We should also talk about Numeral. Numeralhq.com. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

• 58:46Jordi Hays?

  It's sales tax AGI, John.

• 58:48John Coogan?

  It is. We gotta get, uh, we gotta get blueprint on Numeral.

• 58:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:52John Coogan?

  Brian Johnson's coming on.

• 58:53Jordi Hays?

  We should just spend this entire...

• 58:53John Coogan?

  Pitching him.

• 58:54Jordi Hays?

  Bit.

• 58:54John Coogan?

  What are you doing for sales tax? What if he's just like, I'm already on Numeral? It's possible. It's a highly efficient business. I'm excited to talk to him about it. Benchmark Series A. Anything else you're tracking on Polymarket these days? I saw, um, I'm still obsessed with the world's largest tech company. Nvidia is surging right at the same market cap as Apple, but, uh, um, Nvidia has the, uh, the momentum.

• 59:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, largest company end of May. It's, the gap has been closed, John.

• 59:27John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 59:28Jordi Hays?

  It's still, so Nvidia's at 42%. Microsoft is at 50%. And, uh, Nvidia has a lot of momentum.

• 59:38John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Nvidia's 42% now. Wow, they really are ripping today. They were at 20-something just yesterday.

• 59:46John Coogan?

  Good to be Jensen. Good to be Jensen. I was, I was posting this that, that if Nvidia does it, if they pull it off and they're the biggest company, they're gonna have to teach Jevon's paradox.

• 59:56Jordi Hays?

  It's a $60 billion, it's only a $60 billion gap.

• 59:59John Coogan?

  Wait, really?

• 59:59Jordi Hays?

  Jensen can, Jensen can, all he needs is one more, he needs to, he needs one more.

• 1:00:04John Coogan?

  One more deal.

• 1:00:05Jordi Hays?

  Conference with a global.

• 1:00:07John Coogan?

  You know, he's been on the conference circuit, but it's working. Like, he seems to be at a new conference every single week, but clearly he's getting business done at these events and he's striking deals. And I'm sure it's like, you know, he meets someone super important, like the head of a country, and then says, my people will talk to your people and we'll get, and we'll ship you 100,000 GPUs.

• 1:00:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he definitely has envelopes, or not, not, he has napkins with, with full, fully fleshed out contracts on them. You know, they just.

• 1:00:36John Coogan?

  Just how many zeros do you want behind the one of the number of GPUs you're ordering?

• 1:00:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:40John Coogan?

  Of Hoppers. Fantastic. I don't know if Brian's here yet. Let's check on him. And yeah, I mean, maybe we can do some timeline while we wait for him. We got some posts. We can talk about mischief, collabed with Mercedes. This is a fantastic looking collab. They created a trashcan with.

• 1:01:01Jordi Hays?

  Seeing this, seeing this, almost made me angry because I want, I want every piece.

• 1:01:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, you were like, you were like, oh, like, what did they do? This is so frustrating.

• 1:01:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you thought something was wrong.

• 1:01:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, like, did they, did they do something that we were thinking about doing or something? No.

• 1:01:16Jordi Hays?

  No, just an incredibly well executed partnership.

• 1:01:19John Coogan?

  You can kind of scroll through these.

• 1:01:21Jordi Hays?

  And I guess they're gonna be selling.

• 1:01:22John Coogan?

  There's an AMG coat hanger. That looks like a fantastic coat hanger to hang your jacket on.

• 1:01:29Jordi Hays?

  The couch is just insane, too. We got Brian in the studio.

• 1:01:34John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream, Brian. How you doing?

• 1:01:36Jordi Hays?

  Hey, guys. How's it going?

• 1:01:37John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 1:01:38Jordi Hays?

  It's great. It's great to have you on the show finally.

• 1:01:41John Coogan?

  How'd you sleep last night?

• 1:01:43Bryan Johnson?

  Really well. Actually, no, that's not true.

• 1:01:45John Coogan?

  Oh, no?

• 1:01:45Bryan Johnson?

  No, I just started a new sauna protocol.

• 1:01:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:01:48Bryan Johnson?

  And it's 200 degrees Fahrenheit.

• 1:01:50John Coogan?

  200 degrees? Wait, what's the sauna that we do? Isn't it like 130 or something?

• 1:01:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I can get my sauna. So

• 1:02:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:00Jordi Hays?

  I've been nerding out about saunas for a decade now and currently my sauna can get up to like 165 and then it'll trip like a a heat limit. I'm not, I'm not even able to get to that range yet.

• 1:02:14John Coogan?

  You're in the minor leagues.

• 1:02:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's in the minor leagues.

• 1:02:17John Coogan?

  Okay, so 200 degrees. What else is special about the new sauna routine?

• 1:02:19Bryan Johnson?

  Yes, I found, I read this yesterday. Let's see here. So a

• 1:02:25Bryan Johnson?

  yeah, 200 degrees, it takes about 20 to 30 minutes to bake an egg until the white is set and the yolk is still soft. So yeah.

• 1:02:35Bryan Johnson?

  It's hot. Cause I've done seven days now and my sleep has been disrupted. So I'm still getting, I'm still getting good sleep scores. My total time in bed, but my nervous system is, is pretty high. So

• 1:02:47John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:02:48Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. So I'm going through this.

• 1:02:50Jordi Hays?

  So what do you have to, are you wearing gloves? Are you wearing like any type of protection on your head at 200 degrees? What, what do you need to actually make it not, you know, cause your hair to fall out?

• 1:03:01Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, exactly. So today's day eight. I think I have the system sorted. So I, I sit on this, this ice pack and then I have another one that I put inside my shorts to cool the testes because it does lower sperm quality.

• 1:03:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:03:16Bryan Johnson?

  So make sure that the balls need to be cooled. And then I have another ice pack laid over my head because it can make hair brittle and yeah, cause scalp irritation. So those seem to be adequate.

• 1:03:27Jordi Hays?

  People used to never, people used to never believe me when I said I had, I got an ice pack on Amazon specifically for use in the sauna. That is like a more like a cup. They stopped, they discontinued them. I think it was just me and Brian buying them on there. The special cup ice pack.

• 1:03:41John Coogan?

  So where, where did this idea come from? Is there new research or did you just discover old research? Or I mean, I imagine that you want to know that there's some sort of data out there about the effects of this. Or are you just coming up with this idea on your own?

• 1:03:55Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, I mean, our process has been we've rolled through all the scientific literature and said, what things have the very best evidence to improve health span, lifespan? And then we've just gone systematically down the list. And so sauna has always been a target of ours, but most of the data in sauna is observational, which is a lower grade of quality data than interventional, where you say if we're going to do this thing and it's going to solve, you know, whether you're going to see where that has an effect or not. And so we just finished up with hyperbaric oxygen therapy. And now we're pointing to sauna. So we completed about 40 measurements for sauna baseline. And now we're testing, like even seven days in, like, I'll tell you, I just did this analysis this morning. My, I had a five, six percent drop in my central blood pressure, which is, it's an improvement.

• 1:04:39Bryan Johnson?

  A 21% improvement in my central pulse pressure, 50% improvement in my augmentation pressure, and 25% improvement in my augmentation index. So we're looking at all these vascular age markers. So even seven days into sauna, it looks like it's having, you know, some meaningful effects in my vascular health.

• 1:04:59Jordi Hays?

  How are you thinking about the potential of hyperbaric oxygen chambers? It feels like the next frontier, the people that have a cold plunge in a sauna at home are probably, you know, thinking about adding one. You've, you've used them quite frequently, but, but is that, is that the next trend that, that you're expecting to see broadly on the hardware side?

• 1:05:20Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, the hyperbaric was the best therapy I've ever done. And so we've, we've tried so many things and what was unique about it? It's whole body health improvement. So it improved my brain and my gut and skin and inflammation markers and like protein markers that cause Alzheimer's were down.

• 1:05:43Bryan Johnson?

  Trying to think others.

• 1:05:44John Coogan?

  Is there an equivalent to like altitude that you're at? Or are you just like in the stratosphere? Or is it like you're, you're in, you're in Los Angeles, but you're effectively in Denver? Or is it more like K2 or Everest? Or is it like space?

• 1:05:59Bryan Johnson?

  Exactly. So what happens is it's a hard shell chamber and then you pressurize to two atmospheres, which is the equivalent of about 33 feet underwater.

• 1:06:10John Coogan?

  Underwater, got it.

• 1:06:11Bryan Johnson?

  So it's pressurized and then you breathe in 100% oxygen. So when you breathe in oxygen, the atmosphere is about 21%. So you're getting oxygen through your body, but at this high concentration plus the pressurization, you basically flush your entire body with this 100% oxygen. So it pushes it via the plasma. So it gets it out to all the extremities and that has an effect of growing new blood vessels of getting oxygen to parts of your body which you just don't get at. So it's that 90 minute exposure to oxygenation to the entire body that which has this whole body effect.

• 1:06:44John Coogan?

  It seems like a lot of the interventions that you do kind of have, there's some that have power lot outcomes like sleep, diet, exercise, and then there's some that are more on the long tail. How have you thought about as just being like a science communicator, relaying the relative importance of these? Because some of these seem like they're extremely expensive for a minor gain, but it's worth it for you because you're running the experiment and this is your life. But for other people, it might be a distraction to say, oh, I just need a hyperderic chamber and then I don't, and then I can eat McDonald's.

• 1:07:16Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think the big, the big change for me was in the past few months, I've been able to figure out how to compress everything I've learned into one biomarker. And I just didn't think that would be possible because before, if you talk about health, it depends on what era of guru you're in. You know, sometimes it's like NR or Veratrol or cold plunge or sauna or like take your given, you know, celery juice or whatever. And the marker I think that is actually durable over time is resting heart rate before bed. And so the reason why this is so good is it basically is if you show me your resting heart rate, I'll see your soul. It's an accounting of your life decisions. And so the thinking

• 1:08:00Bryan Johnson?

  is this, that like, so tonight when you go to bed, if you lay your head on the pillow, And if you have a wearable, just take a few deep breaths and then look at your resting heart rate. If you don't have a wearable, just take your pulse, you know, do it for six seconds, times it by 10. Let's say your resting heart rate is 60 beats per minute. Your singular goal now is to drive that down. And so over the next week or two weeks, you want to have that be 55 beats per minute instead of 60. And when you see that happen, your sleep is going to be improved. And when your sleep is improved, you're more likely to exercise. When you exercise, you're more likely to eat well. When you eat well, you're more likely to. So it creates this really positive domino effect. And the other thing it does is it's a check against behaviors that drive your resting heart rate up at

• 1:08:43Bryan Johnson?

  night. So a lot of our worst behaviors are between like 5pm and midnight. We're tired, we're stressed. We want to just be left alone because it just all feels too much. And oftentimes, food can be a soothing mechanism or other things, you know, a drink. So activities in that late night, even though they seem soothing to us, they drive up our resting heart rate. And that necessarily reduces your sleep quality, which then reduces your, your likelihood to exercise. So I basically, I now work with all kinds of people, helping them understand which things increase heart rate and which things decrease heart rate. But once you build your life around that, it solves all the fundamental problems with health that you wanted to basically, and then once you get that solved, you can then of course ladder

• 1:09:27Bryan Johnson?

  up and do other stuff. But really, that's it. Like that is the marker that you can peg all your decisions on. It's a really great starting point.

• 1:09:36Jordi Hays?

  What ingredient are you worried that will, that we're consuming a lot of, uh, the sort of maybe broader biohacker community is consuming a lot of today that in 15 or 20 years from now, we'll discover is, is actually terrible for us. Cause we've, we've done that. We've done that a bunch of, a bunch of times. Fat and carbs and sugar. Fat is probably the biggest one. Um, but, but is there anything that, that comes to mind that you're kind of wary of that, that you don't, you're maybe not a hundred percent convicted on yet, but you're, you're starting to Watching it. Spend more time thinking about.

• 1:10:07Bryan Johnson?

  I'll tell you, we we got pretty surprised. I was taking rapamycin. This is considered by many in the longevity field as, you know, a very promising drug. And I mean, anti-aging scientists disagree on almost everything. But there was probably more consensus around rapamycin around than anything else out there. And I was taking it for several years. We meticulously tracked my blood levels to make sure we were on a good dose. But we all we stopped last year because the side effects were too significant, like lipids were being messed up. My blood glucose had some alterations. I had soft tissue infections. And then a month after we stopped, a paper came out that showed that 16 epigenetic clocks showed that it actually accelerated age.

• 1:10:49Bryan Johnson?

  So this is not the end all be all to say rapamycin is toast. This is just to say that it's not like a slam dunk easy one. It's complicated. And so we stopped. I stopped taking that that drug. But I guess like it's a good example to your point of we I think we're in the very early stages of truly understanding anti-aging and biology and certain interventions. I think we're good on sleep and exercise and, you know, eating nutritious food, but even then that branches out into some complexity. But I'd say rapamycin is probably, to your point, a really surprising outcome for where consent like emergent consensus has been. And now we're not doing it anymore. And so there's a few other drugs we've been looking at. We have a similar path we're looking at right now, but that's probably one of the bigger ones that I would identify.

• 1:11:34Jordi Hays?

  Do you think anti-aging will be solved in some form via pharma or a collection of lifestyle decisions, right? Because in many ways, lifestyle decisions today, you know, allow you to have a longer health span, lifespan. But in some ways, you know, we had the founder of New Limit on on the show last week, which is working on longevity. In many ways, it feels like if we can all just extend our lives long enough to get the you know, the the sort of pending miracle drug that, you know, adds whatever, another 100 years, 50 years, whatever that that number ends up being. But I'm curious how you look at it.

• 1:12:15Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, I yeah, I think we need. Much more robust interventions that the type that Brian's working on with New Limit. Did you guys have Brian on?

• 1:12:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:25Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, yeah, I love what he's building. I'm an investor there. I think that that's a very promising path. And what a lot of people, I think, don't understand with what I'm trying to do is I'm not suggesting that one can jump past 120 or find a path to not die by going to sleep and exercising and eating well. I'm suggesting that this is the most disruptive moment in the history of the human race. We're giving birth to superintelligence. It's going to transform society in ways we can't understand. And in this approaching an event horizon, I'm suggesting literally the only thing we know is that none of us want to die in this very moment.

• 1:13:07Bryan Johnson?

  And so I'm really trying to give birth to a new ideology, a new way to understand ourselves as a species. And but you know, ideology and philosophy is very hard for people to engage with. So I speak with about things that people understand, like going to bed on time and not eating junk food and you know, not basically doing things to slowly kill yourself that in a few years' time, I think we'll look back at this moment and we'll say that was insanity in the, you know, before the early, before the late 2020s, humans used to do things that was some form of slow suicide. Can you believe that? That is just incomprehensible. So really, I guess I'm, I'm trying to get at this from a philosophical, ideological, spiritual, cultural perspective

• 1:13:50Bryan Johnson?

  by the practices I'm doing now, but I'm, I'm grateful that people like Brian are working on the more robust interventions that actually will meaningfully change how we age.

• 1:14:00Jordi Hays?

  Are you worried there's not enough companies like New Limit, you know, taking on this monumental task? It feels like, you know, at least within the tech community, there's a bunch of ways, you know, there's, there's a million easier ways to make, you know, a hundred million dollars than longevity.

• 1:14:18Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:18Jordi Hays?

  And that automatically, you know, people self-select out of that path.

• 1:14:23Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I'm not surprised at all. And I, my, my diagnosis of the situation would be that. Currently, the strongest incentives are pointed at the accumulation of wealth, power, and status. If you look at our day and say, how much effort do we put behind those things? And we do that because when death is inevitable, we've chosen a YOLO game of we're going for epicness, right, of achievement, or of being remembered for a given accomplishment, or of status and power in society. And we just haven't crossed over that threshold yet, where people really believe that we can begin to dramatically extend our lifespans. And so,

• 1:15:04Bryan Johnson?

  if AI progresses to a certain point where it even opens the window, or a longevity intervention makes a breakthrough where it's like, huh, is this moment really different? Like, you know, people look at the health and wellness stuff, they're kind of like, I don't really care. Like, if I lose an extra 10 or 15 years of my life, whatever, I don't want to live those years anyways. I'd rather have this preferred life now. So I think it's just, we're just really caught in a cultural moment between the death being inevitable and don't die. And it's happening right now, we're starting to cross over. But I think there will be an event, or a few events in the coming years, will change it, and the humanity's going to snap and say, I think this might be it. Like, and I think we'll have a big cultural shift.

• 1:15:48John Coogan?

  How do you think about like, this internal motivation as something that can overpower an unhealthy lifestyle? I'm thinking about Warren Buffett drinking six Coca Colas a day, kind of rejection of everything that we know about health and wellness, and yet he's been phenomenally successful and performant in a very stressful, important job for, what, seven decades or something like that? Donald Trump's in a similar category. It seems like there's something to the motivation and like the human will potentially, but is that just all pseudoscience in your mind?

• 1:16:27Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, I mean, people, they do reference Buffett a lot, right? And it's like also, it's like someone's grandma who lived to be one or two, who drank and smoked every day. And those examples are just not practically relatable, right? Like, those are genetic differences that they got. They won the genetic lottery and they lived despite their choices. But if most people do what they do, they would die prematurely. I think it really comes back to the ideology that Warren Buffett played a game in life about asset accumulation. And he won the prize. I mean, he's arguably the best investor of all time. So he really played that game very well.

• 1:17:08Bryan Johnson?

  And so the question is, if you were to basically take a Warren Buffett-like persona today, what would they do? Would they try to amass assets or they try to amass existence? And so what I'm suggesting right now is the highest ROI investment anyone can do is to stay alive. And that's what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to basically, I've attempted to become the healthiest person on the earth. Like the, you know, with the best biomarkers to demonstrate a new game of status and accomplishment is here. And it's about health and wellness and it's about your ability to exist. And so this will take time because it's a massive shift in our culture, culture.

• 1:17:47Bryan Johnson?

  But really, it's just like we've all, whether we've agreed to this explicitly or not, we've all agreed to this wealth, power and status game. And we play it independent of whether we're aware of it. And I'm just trying to say that that is a game. It will shift and a new cultural emergence will arise. And don't die will be the prominent thing we'll focus on.

• 1:18:05Jordi Hays?

  Last question I have, do you think people pay too much attention to scaled data sources? Like, you know, the concept of blue zones, right? Is it, should individuals be focused on, you know, highly personalized health and the approach that you're taking? Which is, you know, sort of real time experimentation, rapid testing? Because even, you know, I'm curious if you have any type of thesis here, but, you know, I think people, many people have said that, you know, Japan having this, you know, immense longevity might actually just be Fraud and I don't, you know, because people have an incentive to like, That's funny. People have an incentive to say like, yeah, grandma's still kicking. Keep giving us the, you know, 10 K a year, whatever.

• 1:18:49Jordi Hays?

  I'm not making any accusations myself, but um, I'm 65, I can retire next year. People love to read into, you know, oh, this region, they're drinking two glasses of wine. So I should drink three and I'll be okay. Yeah.

• 1:19:02Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, I mean, what you're touching on is a real problem where if, if somebody encounters the idea of wanting to be in good health for whatever reason, like, let's just say, a person wants to be hot, right? They want to look good and be hot. Then the next question is, what do you do? And once you step out into the world and you say, what do I do? You're faced with hundreds of different opinions. And they're all in conflict with each other. And then if you take another scenario where somebody's got something that they're dealing with, they have constant headaches, or they have sleep apnea, or they have an autoimmune disorder, or like, or take your, your thing. They've got a complicated situation. What do they do? And so up until this point, you've had to go about and navigate the world of experts.

• 1:19:44Bryan Johnson?

  You know, now these AI tools are better than almost all the experts in helping people solve their given problem. And so the next thing to close this loop is now that we've got a source of advice that is reliable and that everybody has access to, is now really a function of measurement is can you actually get data that then improves the AI's ability to make very precise assessments? And so that's what I'm working on personally is I've become the most measured person in human history. And I've seen firsthand, when you have data, it's incredibly helpful to figure out what's happening. And when you don't have data, you're in the dark poking around. And so we're trying to figure out how to scale data and access.

• 1:20:24Bryan Johnson?

  Cause once you pair that with the AI, then the, the question of what to do becomes so simple, which again is why I believe we're at this moment of shifting dramatically. Where the complexity and the friction between someone saying, I want to be healthy and knowing what to do is extremely short. Whereas now it's like so big and so complicated. It's like, honestly, not doing it. So I think we really are like, this moment is so rich and has such high potential. It hinges on data with closed loop with AI. I think we're off to a new race.

• 1:20:57Jordi Hays?

  It's exciting. All right. Very exciting. Well, come back on when you have more news. Yeah. Always welcome. This is amazing. Thank you so much. Thanks for making the time.

• 1:21:02Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, good to hang with you guys. Be well.

• 1:21:03Jordi Hays?

  Cheers. See you soon. Bye.

• 1:21:07Jordi Hays?

  We got Mateo.

• 1:21:08John Coogan?

  We got Mateo coming in, in the waiting room. Let me tell you about Vanta really quickly. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

• 1:21:26Jordi Hays?

  One of the fastest growing vendors on ramp.

• 1:21:28John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:21:28Jordi Hays?

  At scale.

• 1:21:29John Coogan?

  No idea. And we're excited to have Mateo from Eight Sleep today. Massive day. Congratulations. Huge news. I gotta update my ad reads. I'm always talking about the Pod 4 Ultra. It's the Pod 5 today.

• 1:21:43Jordi Hays?

  Pod 5.

• 1:21:44John Coogan?

  Congratulations. Well done. And this is, this is particularly huge for the podcasting industry because I've said this before, but you know, in the high stakes world of professional sports, sleep is extremely important, but arguably a higher stakes world exists, technology podcasting. And you need to get your sleep if you're going to be podcasting three, four hours a day. And that's why we sleep on Eight Sleep.

• 1:22:07Jordi Hays?

  You be proud. I legitimately get angry at John when his, when his sleep scores are down. It's, it's.

• 1:22:12John Coogan?

  It's terrible. It's tearing us apart.

• 1:22:14Jordi Hays?

  I take, I take this game, this podcasting game very seriously.

• 1:22:18John Coogan?

  Very seriously.

• 1:22:19Jordi Hays?

  And I take John's sleep very seriously and.

• 1:22:22Matteo Franceschetti?

  You should.

• 1:22:23John Coogan?

  Jordy's been smoking me. Uh, but yeah, give us the update. Explain to us what, how the launch is going. What's the overview? Break it down for us.

• 1:22:32Matteo Franceschetti?

  Yeah, of course. I mean, first of all, at Eight Sleep, we develop technology to improve your sleep. That that's literally what we do. And the way we do it is by focusing on controlling and personalizing all the environmental factors. We started with temperature in the cover, which was a cover, is a cover that you can install on top of your mattress. It tracks everything about your sleep and health, and then it changes temperature to give you better sleep. And then we took temperature to the next level now with Pod5. So you also get a blanket and you can sleep in this sort of micro climate. And guys, I know I'm biased because of the CO8 sleep, but it's freaking cool. I have been using this product for nine months and I have

• 1:23:16Matteo Franceschetti?

  given it to some friends or people inside the company and they all love it. Doesn't matter if you like it cold or warm.

• 1:23:21Jordi Hays?

  Anecdote, John's, John's wife

• 1:23:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:24Jordi Hays?

  messaged John this morning when she saw the launch and she was like,

• 1:23:27John Coogan?

  Independently.

• 1:23:27Jordi Hays?

  like just sending exclamation points like,

• 1:23:30John Coogan?

  We have to get one.

• 1:23:32Matteo Franceschetti?

  Yeah. She will love it. Do you know if she sleeps hot or cold?

• 1:23:36John Coogan?

  Extremely. She's cold. She wants it to be a blazing fire.

• 1:23:40Jordi Hays?

  An inferno.

• 1:23:41John Coogan?

  An inferno.

• 1:23:42Jordi Hays?

  A cocoon.

• 1:23:42Matteo Franceschetti?

  Yeah. So she will love it because now she will be surrounded by temperature, cold temperature everywhere. It's like going in the freezer and closing the freezer and you just sleep there.

• 1:23:52John Coogan?

  And I like my side freezing cold. I'm minus 10 and she's plus 10 every night. But she says, you can tell him I love him. We're inventing this. It's really like the greatest upgrade of the entire year to our house. It's fantastic.

• 1:24:06Matteo Franceschetti?

  That's awesome. And so temperature is one.

• 1:24:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:09Matteo Franceschetti?

  Right? And we tackled that biggest factor impacting your sleep outside sleep medical disorders. So there was plenty of evidence. We didn't have invented the wheel. We were just the first ones to really commercialize a consumer product that would do something that it was already proven to work. And then we got into elevation. And so we introduced the base. The base goes underneath your mattress and it raises your head if you're snoring. And so you will see a drop in your snoring by up to 45%. If you have problems of circulation with your legs, we raise your legs.

• 1:24:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:24:43Matteo Franceschetti?

  And the most important thing that very few people know, I don't sleep flat anymore. Meaning sleeping flat is from the eighties. You need to, you, you need to sleep in a position where you raise a little bit the head, a little bit of your, your, your feet and it takes away any sort of pressure on your back.

• 1:25:03John Coogan?

  Yep. Is snoring actually bad for you or is it just annoying to whoever's sleeping next to you?

• 1:25:09Matteo Franceschetti?

  Sorry, say that again.

• 1:25:10John Coogan?

  Is snoring actually something you should be worried about or something you should be trying to mitigate from like a health perspective or like a personal sleep quality perspective? Or is it just annoying to whoever's sleeping in the bed next to you?

• 1:25:21Matteo Franceschetti?

  No, it's negative for you. It negatively impacts your sleep architecture and it can limit the amount of oxygen that gets to the brain. Because if you think the real true problem of sleep apnea, which is a form of extreme snoring, if you will, is that when you have these episodes of snoring or sleep apnea, less oxygen gets to the brain. And so if your sleep apnea is very strong, the reason why you feel very tired in the morning is because you kept lacking oxygen in your brain during the whole night and your brain cannot rest. And so meeting it in snoring is very important for your own health and is important for your partner so you don't bother them with your noise.

• 1:26:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:02Matteo Franceschetti?

  Now, the latest base also comes with a speaker now. And the speaker plays soundscapes that you can play to fall asleep, to stay asleep. And then we have this partnership with Huberman where we are introducing an SDR, so non-sleep deep rest, is a sort of meditation and breathing. You can play that with the voice of Andrew and then you just fall asleep and you sleep like a baby.

• 1:26:27John Coogan?

  SDR, I think sales development representative for Andrew Huberman is just there pitching you on sleep. Like, you know, I've talked to a lot of people that are considering sleep and I think it'd be really great for you tonight.

• 1:26:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think there's an opportunity to do an ad-supported eight sleep with the speaker now and we'll record ads.

• 1:26:44John Coogan?

  And you can fall asleep to the sound of us just reading ads constantly.

• 1:26:47Jordi Hays?

  And even at 1 a.m. Hey, have you heard about Ramp?

• 1:26:54Matteo Franceschetti?

  Exactly. I can start playing ads for Ramp. No, I'm joking.

• 1:26:59John Coogan?

  Well, if they already have an eight sleep, we don't need to do an eight sleep ad again.

• 1:27:02Matteo Franceschetti?

  Maybe Easter egg.

• 1:27:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, maybe.

• 1:27:05Matteo Franceschetti?

  When you wake up, certain days, there is a Ramp ad. By the way, my Tesla, sometimes I start, now I go into Tesla, I use the radio very few times, but then there are ads on my Tesla when I want to use the radio. So.

• 1:27:20Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:27:21John Coogan?

  Everything's ad-supported now.

• 1:27:22Jordi Hays?

  You gotta upgrade to the ad-free version of your car. It's a dark, very reventured in.

• 1:27:27John Coogan?

  This is the future.

• 1:27:29Jordi Hays?

  Mirror, but welcome.

• 1:27:30John Coogan?

  It's gonna be cheaper because it's gonna be ad-supported. What else have you looked at in the sleep world? I know that you've launched some adjacent products. I'm thinking like, you know, you're in blankets. Are we gonna see pillows? Are we seeing, you know, supplements and other clothing and pajamas and all sorts of different things? Like, how do you view the sleep market? And what have you gone after first? And what do you see on the horizon?

• 1:27:56Jordi Hays?

  Or even, I like blackout curtains, right?

• 1:28:00John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:28:01Jordi Hays?

  Try to blackout, try to, trying to blackout your room is, is, you know, there's

• 1:28:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:05Jordi Hays?

  solutions.

• 1:28:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, what do you like? What do you, what have you already done? And what's on the roadmap?

• 1:28:10Matteo Franceschetti?

  Yeah. So if we go back, you know, to the beginning, right? We use AI and technology to improve your sleep. So anything that can improve your sleep is something we are gonna do sooner or later.

• 1:28:19John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:28:20Matteo Franceschetti?

  What is, technology is the top priority. There could be other products that maybe they don't have embedded technology, but that we develop based on our data. Because we are becoming one of the largest sleep labs in the world. So supplements, we launch a first line of supplements that we developed with Peter Attia. And the reason is, we have all this data. We know what works, what doesn't work. Sometimes you, you read people saying, oh, should I take a malatine? Should I take magnesium? We have run clinical studies. But from a technological standpoint, I would say the two coolest buckets to me are, one is environmental control, and the second is body scanning. And I'll tell you about both. So environmental control is, okay, today's temperature with the blanket and the cover, elevation and sound.

• 1:29:03Matteo Franceschetti?

  Then you should imagine that, yeah, there will be more thermo-regulated products, because temperature is, is, is the killer feature. But we, I wanna control air, oxygen, light, noise, sound, sense, everything. So everything that we can optimize, because the key difference between us and the wearables is, wearables do a decent job at tracking stuff, but they don't do anything for you. Our job at Eight Sleep is, don't wear anything, and we are gonna do the work for you.

• 1:29:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:33Matteo Franceschetti?

  And so this is the environment. Then, doesn't matter how long you sleep, it's still a lot of time. And so the goal here is to work on body scanning technologies where we can scan your body every single night to detect if you are developing certain health conditions before you even know.

• 1:29:50John Coogan?

  Crazy.

• 1:29:50Matteo Franceschetti?

  And that is part of our R and D.

• 1:29:52John Coogan?

  Uh, have you been able to look across the anonymized sleep data and noticed any interesting trends? I'm thinking right before tax day or how do people sleep before Christmas or is everyone excited? Anything that you can tell us about how the global sleep community trends one night or another? Do people sleep better during winter when it's cold or summer? I don't even know. Have you learned anything?

• 1:30:19Matteo Franceschetti?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:19John Coogan?

  Aggregated data anonymized, of course.

• 1:30:22Matteo Franceschetti?

  Yeah, we have a look at some of this stuff again, as you said, aggregated anonymized. So obviously we don't know anything about an individual. But like, for example, I think the city where the town where they sleep the best is in northern Australia. We have seen people sleeping more after COVID, meaning after COVID, the trend generally changed. Women tend to sleep longer than men. During the election day, people went to sleep like a couple of hours later.

• 1:30:52John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:30:52Matteo Franceschetti?

  And then we can start tied or connected to certain specific events, right? Even sport like Super Bowl, all that kind of thing, which is pretty cool. Or you see it if there are bad days in New York and there's no day in New York, all that kind of thing. And it's pretty interesting to see these patterns. This in terms of, I would say, consumer behavior. Then with AI, our models are reaching a point where are smarter than us. And they start connecting the dots of things that we don't even medically know. Meaning, let's say that you join a sleep and let's say you share that you have certain health conditions.

• 1:31:33Matteo Franceschetti?

  Our models start understanding that there could be, based on these parameters, you might have a certain likelihood to develop a certain health condition. They can go, could be completely disconnected from sleep. It could be diabetes, it could be Parkinson's, it could be a neurological disease. But by correlating all this aggregated amount of data, hundreds of millions of nights of sleep, we can predict the future of health.

• 1:32:02Jordi Hays?

  I gotta ask, how did the Charles Leclerc partnership come together? Was that a, was that a two plus year kind of, you know?

• 1:32:12Matteo Franceschetti?

  Let me start with a cool story and then I'll tell you. But so the day we sign, so I go to Monaco for the day we sign and I'm at the hotel. And we need to go to this place where we sign and then we do the first photo shoot. And so Charles comes to pick me up and he comes in a Ferrari because he drives a Ferrari. And so I said, look, man, you're the best Uber driver I ever had.

• 1:32:36Matteo Franceschetti?

  By far.

• 1:32:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, being driven around Monaco by Charles is, uh, is a good, good. Everybody should do it once in their life, you know?

• 1:32:50Matteo Franceschetti?

  The interesting thing is Charles bought the pod two years before the partnership. We didn't even know.

• 1:32:57John Coogan?

  It's always the best.

• 1:32:58Matteo Franceschetti?

  Yeah, it's always the best. And so when we got connected two years later, he already knew about us. He, he loves the product. And when I pitched him our health vision, health is very important for him. And he's like an AI geek. You would never expect that, but he reads everything about AI. So when we meet, we never talk about Formula One because I don't want to bother him. Talking about work. And we just talk about AI and health. And so when we met, we had dinner. It was actually before the, the F1 GP in Miami last year. And it was a Thursday night. And before the end of the, of the, of the dinner, we said, look, we, we want to work together. We'll figure it out.

• 1:33:39Matteo Franceschetti?

  Uh, I'll, I'll do some steps to, I mean, I'm, I'm sure you, you have a decent cost and you will make some steps towards me because I'm a startup and I don't have money. And, and within a month, the deal was done.

• 1:33:53Jordi Hays?

  Wow, quick.

• 1:33:54John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 1:33:55Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing. But yeah, I, I, I get, uh, you know, I'm not excited if I have a bad night's sleep and I gotta go podcast for, you know, four hours, but I can't imagine getting a bad night's sleep and then needing to go race around it. You know, hundreds of kilometers an hour. So it makes sense. Well, congratulations to you and the team. It's a, an amazing milestone and we are, you know, stoked to be partners.

• 1:34:23John Coogan?

  Proud to be partners.

• 1:34:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:25Matteo Franceschetti?

  Of course. You guys are doing a great job. So I'm a big supporter and thank you for everything.

• 1:34:31John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:34:32Jordi Hays?

  You're the man.

• 1:34:32John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:34:33Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for coming on. Talk soon.

• 1:34:34John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:34:34Matteo Franceschetti?

  Bye.

• 1:34:38John Coogan?

  Fantastic. We love a big product launch on TVPN. Fantastic.

• 1:34:43Jordi Hays?

  So good.

• 1:34:45John Coogan?

  We also love adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.

• 1:34:51Jordi Hays?

  Say, see you later.

• 1:34:52John Coogan?

  See you later to those headaches. Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe.

• 1:35:02Jordi Hays?

  Simply too good. And we have.

• 1:35:07John Coogan?

  We're going into the Andreessen Horowitz LP meeting. We sent one of our producers out there, set up a Zoom room. Hopefully it looks really nice and we have an absolutely stacked lineup of Andreessen Horowitz general partners and some operating partners. And we should be able to take you on a whirlwind tour of what's going on in Andreessen world, what they're investing in, what trends they're looking at and what deals they've done because we really have a full, full list here, finishing out with Marc Andreessen. But it should be a lot of fun. Eric will be kicking it off. He's been on the show twice. We, we, we broke the news here, not really. He came on the show shortly after announcing that he was joining Andreessen Horowitz.

• 1:35:50John Coogan?

  And he's been a close friend of us, of ours for years and it's always fun to talk to him about media and venture and tech and all of those things. So he'll be kicking us, kicking it off with us breaking down how the transition's been, what it's like working at Andreessen and how he's settling in. Has he ripped any huge checks? We're going to get to the bottom of it. So we will bring him in in just a minute. And in the meantime, why don't I tell you about Bezel? Go to getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available to source any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Marc Andreessen's known for wearing, what, what does, what did he wear on Rogan? He wore a.

• 1:36:31John Coogan?

  Uh, which one was it? Omega. An Omega, the botch of James Bond, the Speedmaster. The recently voted by Nico Leonard as the most iconic watch in history. He had a whole debate with all of his team, the great YouTuber about watches. If you're interested in following him and uh, uh, so maybe we'll see what Mark's wearing. Maybe we'll see what Eric's wearing. I don't know if we'll get into watches. We always, uh, we always try and spice it up, but some people, some people want to stay on message. That's surprisingly they want to, they want to focus on business, but you know, we try and throw them off. Try to throw a TJ off with some car talk. He wasn't really having it, but we'll get to him one of these days. We'll bring him back for a car segment eventually. Anyway, let's see if Eric is ready.

• 1:37:14John Coogan?

  We, do we have a red, green, blue, yellow card? Let's see yellow, we're, we're almost ready. So let me tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book of Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. The other thing that we could talk about is, uh, four years ago, The Verge wrote of Elon Musk's Tesla bot announcement, "Don't overthink it. It's a joke. It's a distraction and an empty promise." This was the event where Elon hired a dancer to come out dressed as a robot and is dancing around.

• 1:37:55John Coogan?

  And it looked very silly and Elon is saying LOL because now, um, of course the Tesla robot is dancing and it's clearly very real, but.

• 1:38:04Jordi Hays?

  Somebody was saying it dances like Brian Johnson.

• 1:38:07John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:38:07Jordi Hays?

  Brian Johnson's got that, that's got that very specific style.

• 1:38:11John Coogan?

  The, the interesting thing is that, um, you have to know, know that like Elon likes humor. He likes telling jokes and, and he also knew what was capable. He could have just white labeled, he could have bought all of Boston Dynamics and had a dancing robot on stage, but he chose to put a human in a suit, probably to troll people, I imagine. Like that had to have been, he had to have known what would happen, that people would see that and be like, that's obviously a human in a suit. That looks goofy. And so, you know, we know that you didn't do a real robot, Elon. This is a joke. So he almost, I think, I feel like he was baiting the media a couple of years ago because what he was proposing, like a humanoid robot was not impossible by the laws of physics.

• 1:38:54John Coogan?

  Elon, of course, lives by the laws of physics and he gets to take his victory lap today, of course. Anyway, what else is interesting going on? Oh, HBO has rebranded again. Max is now HBO Max. And Derek Thompson.

• 1:39:11Jordi Hays?

  That was absolutely brutal. I mean.

• 1:39:13John Coogan?

  It was crazy. It was crazy that they went from HBO Max to Max. They rebranded three times as Max. They have three different logos and now they're bringing back HBO Max. They're Maxing. They're HBO Maxing.

• 1:39:25Jordi Hays?

  Somebody said back then, and I think this was on point, was that HBO is such a good brand.

• 1:39:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:33Jordi Hays?

  To drop it.

• 1:39:35John Coogan?

  It's crazy. It was always, it was always a crazy, crazy move.

• 1:39:38Jordi Hays?

  But why, why even call it HBO Max?

• 1:39:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:41Jordi Hays?

  Why not just call it HBO?

• 1:39:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, they should just call it HBO.

• 1:39:43Jordi Hays?

  Next move, drop the Max.

• 1:39:44John Coogan?

  Well, that's what ESPN did recently. It was in the, it was in the business section today. ESPN prices its new service at $29.99 a month.

• 1:39:51Jordi Hays?

  And it's called?

• 1:39:52John Coogan?

  And it's called ESPN. What a concept. You know, the internet is as important as the linear TV over the, over the air TV. And so make your OTT option just the same name. It's, it's genius. It's so basic. Derek Thompson was saying, if Max is paying a marketing company a million dollar annual retainer for naming strategy, this is pathetic, but if Max figured out that it can add and remove HBO from its streaming title every two years to create a bunch of free outraged publicity, I sort of respect the play. So who knows? Is it 3D chess? Are they playing 4D chess? Who knows? Anyway, we got Eric Torrenberg from Andreessen Horowitz in the studio. Welcome to the stream, Eric.

• 1:40:28Erik Torenberg?

  Welcome to the stream.

• 1:40:30John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 1:40:32Jordi Hays?

  He's back.

• 1:40:33John Coogan?

  Third time, three-peat, three-peat champion.

• 1:40:35Jordi Hays?

  And kicking off a record, I have, has eight Andreessen partners ever been on one podcast?

• 1:40:41John Coogan?

  I don't think so.

• 1:40:43Erik Torenberg?

  I said Nixon went to China, Torrenberg goes on TVPN.

• 1:40:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, look what happened. Look what happened.

• 1:40:49John Coogan?

  You opened the floodgates. It's been fantastic. How has the transition to Andreessen been? We asked you when you joined, what your plans were. Were you hitting the ground running? Are you ripping checks on day one? You're a couple of weeks in the gig. I expect some sizable checks to be written. What you got for me?

• 1:41:05Erik Torenberg?

  I feel like TVPN is my, you know, what did you get done this week? Times my third week, fourth week and. No, it's been amazing. I mean, just the scope of the firm, almost 600 employees. I mean, I don't think people fully appreciate all the amazing things that are happening here. I've been spending a lot of time in the different deal meetings of the different funds, just getting up to speed and how we operate, meeting the broader team, starting to build out this media org. And I feel like, you know, I talk to employees at OpenAI all the time. They're like, we've got so many things cooking. And I feel like there's a little bit of that here, too. Just Ben and Mark are so entrepreneurial and that leads on to the different vertical fund leads that you're going to hear, everyone's going to, you're going to chat with today and people are going to hear from.

• 1:41:50Erik Torenberg?

  And yeah, it's just been incredible.

• 1:41:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is Andreessen the biggest venture fund ever in history now? I can't imagine there's a bigger one, right?

• 1:41:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think if you count the original ships that went looking for whales, harpooning, they probably had like something like a thousand spread across maybe a few ships.

• 1:42:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, because I mean, there's like this narrative in venture generally that like Andreessen's really big and no one's ever done it at this scale before. And like, maybe that's weird or different or good or bad or whatever. But the other way to think about it is like, think about the other major financial institutions that are huge, much bigger, sometimes an order of magnitude or two orders magnitude bigger. And are they in founder mode or are they like 200 year old behemoths? And all of a sudden, when you frame it like that, I become very bullish on the founder mode organization, even though there's obviously all these competitive dynamics and different strategies. But it is very interesting to see a new financial institution. We got this from when we were talking to David on the show. And it was just very interesting to see that, this is David Haber,

• 1:42:52John Coogan?

  that he came from Goldman, worked on firm wide strategy there, told us some of the history of how Goldman had developed all these pods. I was doing a deep dive on their, their special situations group and how that spun up and spun out during the OA crisis. And like, it's such a storied firm, but I don't think you can get there by maintaining some small size. You have to become an institution. That's exactly what you've done.

• 1:43:17Erik Torenberg?

  And I think the core insight, you know, softwareizing the world and the sort of the implication behind that, that the winners are going to get bigger and bigger and there's going to be more of them is just perfectly coincided with the firm going super big and you need a lot of capital to support that strategy and it's worked out tremendously.

• 1:43:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, yesterday we were talking about this weird dynamic where you would expect the power law to apply to startup outcomes. And we've seen this from time to time again. It's very obvious and it also just makes sense based on market dynamics, how power accrues, et cetera. But venture capital funds also follow a power law. And you would imagine that also the size and scale of the firms might also follow a power law as there are increasing returns to scale. So it's been interesting to see kind of that play out. And in many ways, the power law just keeps applying, no matter what lens or frame you take, there's like, there's going to be a big outcome. Anyway, Jordy, anything else you want to run through? Can you break down LP Day? Like, what's actually going on today?

• 1:44:17John Coogan?

  What are we zooming into? Break it down.

• 1:44:19Jordi Hays?

  The thing I'm trying to triangulate is what's the next coinage, you know?

• 1:44:24John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:44:24Jordi Hays?

  What's the next American?

• 1:44:25John Coogan?

  We got to break it here.

• 1:44:26Jordi Hays?

  That's the trillion dollar, that's the trillion dollar question.

• 1:44:28John Coogan?

  Or it'll drop as a big piece, either in the Wall Street Journal or on a blog, and then we'll get you the same day to break it down.

• 1:44:35Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, 100%. And today and tomorrow is going to be us presenting sort of, you know, one, our biggest portfolio companies or some of our best ones that you'll, you'll, you have Alex tomorrow coming on the show, Blania from WorldCoin, but then also the different leads of, you know, Jen, who runs LP Day is coming right after this. And also just our fundraising, I believe over $40 billion to date. But then also the heads of the different vertical funds.

• 1:45:07John Coogan?

  40 billion, that's huge.

• 1:45:08Jordi Hays?

  That's the most deserving.

• 1:45:09John Coogan?

  That's the biggest size going ever, I think. Maybe beaten out by Stargate. But other than Stargate, you know, you're up there.

• 1:45:16Erik Torenberg?

  All in, all in. I'll let Jen, you know, sort of go deeper on it, but also just David George, who leads our growth fund, which has done phenomenally well. You know, Martine on the infra side, Ange, who works AI underneath him, Dave Ulevich on the American dynamism side. And the LP day is really just us talking to our LPs about, you know, what is the latest in terms of how we're doing, what we believe, what's happening in the market, where we think things are going. And it's really giving them kind of an inside purview. And we're going to release some of the best talks. And of course, you're going to hear from Mark and Jason himself about where we are and where we're going.

• 1:45:55John Coogan?

  In terms of kind of like advice for founders, what is the role of an LP day in the life cycle of a startup CEO that becomes a fund driver? I've seen some times where founders go to these LP days and then a couple of months later, there's a direct investment from one of the LPs. Is that part of the dynamic or is it really just an opportunity to kind of come and share the story of the business with the wider business and investment community?

• 1:46:23Erik Torenberg?

  A hundred percent. So we have a very influential LP base. Jen will get more into the specifics and it's, we're more diversified than your average event firm. So we have LPs that, you know, a lot of firms really focus on endowments. We've got some incredible endowments as well, but we also have a lot of other partners, including a big international partners. And a lot of companies are looking for, you know, especially some of these AI companies, you know, Ange will tell you about sort of the open source AI companies that he's worked with, looking for global partners. So, so yeah, we have WorldCoin, et cetera. So there are a bunch of companies that have international presence that are growing their international presence and want partnership from, from, from big players globally. And some of them are here and yeah, we're definitely looking to.

• 1:47:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, we saw that yesterday with Nvidia. Jensen went to Saudi Arabia, announced a big deal, the stock popped, it might be the biggest company in the world, it's so back. And, you know, Jensen gets invited to these things, but if you're, you know, two years into your entrepreneurial journey, you might not get a seat at the table, but an LP day could be an opportunity to meet someone from that community, correct?

• 1:47:27Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, yeah, no, 100% Ben Horowitz was also there as reported, which is why he's he's not joining TVP today, but Mark will give you the scoop there. Perhaps Jen, but but yeah, no, there's a lot going on in terms of international partnerships. And so expect to hear more from us on that front.

• 1:47:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. Now, I'm sure the fund is aligned on most of the strategies and kind of topics and hot takes. But there's probably a lot of internal debate as well around how these future tech trends will play out, especially the things that haven't been codified or really decided. Are there any topics that you're hearing the partnership kind of go back and forth on or debate internally? Whether it's future of AI or how geopolitics plays out or anything, a reindustrialization, different strategies? What is keeping the partnership, you know, excited in in big partner meetings?

• 1:48:24Erik Torenberg?

  I'll give you a couple. So one is more of a meta topic, which is this idea of, you know, a lot of people say a lot of things about us and how much should we engage? You know, should we just it's on the work, just just working with founders, just, just, you know, driving great returns for LPs or when do we correct the record? When do we step in versus, hey, it's not, you know, it's not worth our time. You know, there's this famous, this rap rap beef. Yellow once called out Eminem, or maybe it was MGK MGK called Eminem. And then Eminem was like, oh, man, now I got to answer this fool. I'm going to like build up his profile and in responding to him. And so it's a little bit of that, you know, there's one example. Eric Newcomer, who like Ben Smith, unclear if that's a real name or not.

• 1:49:10Erik Torenberg?

  If that's, I don't want to dox him. Yeah, don't dox him. Don't dox him here. Don't dox him. We don't dox here. You know, Eric Newcomer, who is a friend of mine, he's a good guy. But on his podcast, he did say.

• 1:49:23Erik Torenberg?

  Or certainly imply that it was one rumor that our crypto fund has made a lot of its money betting on speculative things and then selling off. And that couldn't be further from the truth. You know, we are not a meme coin fund, we hold most positions. And so that's a straight up.

• 1:49:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, there was at least like one good company in that fund, right? Like, am I thinking of Coinbase, maybe?

• 1:49:46Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:47John Coogan?

  Like the biggest potential one, yeah, that Chris Dixon got into it, like the seed in the series A, the series B, and the series Z. Basically, every single round. Yeah, that turned out okay.

• 1:49:56Erik Torenberg?

  Entirely the industry.

• 1:49:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:58Erik Torenberg?

  That's that's an example of disinfo. There's a lot of disinfo out there. And so we debate how much we should weigh in. Of course, me coming in, I'm like, no, let's let's correct the record a little bit. So that's one on the on the highest level, how the firm operates.

• 1:50:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:50:11Erik Torenberg?

  In terms of where things are going, you know, I'm excited that you'll have both Martine and Anj today because in AI, we have a big and David George, we have a big debate internally around defensibility. And is it going to look like, you know, previous platforms where if it's not state, that's the moat because they can be exported. It's context, context is the moat in that you you chat with chat with chat GPT and it gets to know you better. And and that's what's going to keep you. Or is it is it brand? Is are these things just moving so fast? You know, we hear all the time about people who are building cursor for X that that brand is what keeps people going, even if if it's not context. Or are they just not not as defensible as previous players?

• 1:50:52Erik Torenberg?

  But, you know, the numbers don't lie and the user growth and the revenue growth is just astronomical. And as aggressive as we have been, we talk internally like we should be being more aggressive. We should have been more aggressive. There's winners in every category and it doesn't seem like they have dominant market share. That's a mistake that we've made historically is like thinking, oh, you know, OpenAI won this. So, you know, there's not going to be another, you know, big provider and on either the model layer or the apps. And so it seems like the market is expanding where OpenAI continues to do phenomenally well. And also there's there's winners and across the stack and and room for more. So.

• 1:51:30Jordi Hays?

  How is your?

• 1:51:31Erik Torenberg?

  I'm surprised.

• 1:51:31Jordi Hays?

  How has your mindset shifted being at a, you know, platform multi-stage fund now where, you know? Historically, if you're investing, maybe you could do personal checks across different you know, stages, but ultimately you're very early-stage focused. Is it, has it been enjoyable being at a, you know, such a scaled fund where you can realize like, oh, I didn't get into the Series A of that company, but I want to meet the founder now, so, and really get to know them, so we have an opportunity to be in the B or the C or the D, right? Like, there's, there's really no, no sort of cap on, on when you guys can get involved and partner with the company. And that's a totally different mindset of a lot of being able to think like

• 1:52:16Jordi Hays?

  truly long-term.

• 1:52:18Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, well, it's a bit of both, great, because on the angel side or seed side, you can, it's easier to invest in people who are doing the same thing, or sort of, you know, YC is in, you know, god knows how many competitors, you know, companies that absolutely hate each other, I'm not going to mention names, but you can get sense. And, you know, bigger multi-stage firms just don't have that same luxury. So you got to pick and you got to be right. And also, to your point, yeah, if you don't hit something in the A, you know, you know, we weren't the earliest backer of Andro, but we're the second biggest backer now, because we just caught it at the, at the right time and just backed it all the way afterwards. So even if you don't get in at the seed or the A, and I was spending a lot of time with the growth team, there's big opportunity to get involved. So that's, that's an encouraging

• 1:53:03Erik Torenberg?

  sign. And just, once, like, I didn't know what I didn't know. It's kind of like, I used to live in Detroit, and then I moved to San Francisco, and I was like, why do I live in Detroit? Why did I live in Detroit? And similarly, like, just being at a place like this, I didn't, I didn't quite realize what I was missing.

• 1:53:18John Coogan?

  That's great. Well, let's kick it over to Jen. I know we're running over time already. I'm sure we're going to be bumping up against stuff all, all day long. But thank you so much for hopping on and kicking it off.

• 1:53:26Erik Torenberg?

  GBN Correspondent signing off. Thank you.

• 1:53:29Jordi Hays?

  Always good to see you, Eric.

• 1:53:30John Coogan?

  Good to see you.

• 1:53:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, keep the soundboard going. Jen told us that she wants some soundboard. We'll hit it hard. She's the operating partner at Andreessen Horowitz and is responsible for fundraising. LP Day is obviously a huge day for her, so we will bring her in in a second. We'll ask her what's on the minds of the LPs today and whether or not America is back. Welcome to the stream, Jen. How are you doing?

• 1:53:55Speaker 08

  Hey, good to see you all.

• 1:53:57Jordi Hays?

  There was a world where we didn't talk and I just hit the size call button over and over and over and over and over. And it's just a 10 minute segment of just us.

• 1:54:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, why don't you kick us off with how much money you've raised for Andreessen? So we can just get Jordi an easy layup here.

• 1:54:10Speaker 08

  All right, let's do it. By the way, for the audience, I told Jordi ahead of time, my sole intention is to have all the sound effects pop up the entire time I'm talking here.

• 1:54:19John Coogan?

  Let's get the national sound effect.

• 1:54:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 1:54:22John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream, Jen.

• 1:54:27Speaker 08

  By the way, by the way, as KB said a few weeks ago, first time caller, long time listener. But before we get into the content, I have to say, I have to do just a quick plug for your true early fans. You know, I know you had to do the gift guide for the Super Bowl of pronatalism, right? You had to cover tariffs, you had to cover drug pricing, there's a lot happening. But before we get to the real topics, it's been a while since you've talked about Aman property rankings.

• 1:54:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:54:51Jordi Hays?

  It has, it has. We need to bring that back. Why don't you come on with us? Why don't we do, why don't you join us for the, for the updated power rankings of Aman properties?

• 1:55:01John Coogan?

  This is what really, this is the news that moves Silicon Valley for sure. Yeah.

• 1:55:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we can get kind of like a goat debate going. Yeah.

• 1:55:10Speaker 08

  Anyway, by the way, I've got, so I've raised over 43 billion in capital and over the course of my career. Most of that was at.

• 1:55:18John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:55:20Speaker 08

  But I spend all my time across all the funds, across crypto summers, tech winters, everything in between. I'm the professional yapper to the capital behind the capital. So the LPs. So that's where I spend all my time.

• 1:55:33Jordi Hays?

  What's it like having everybody, or not everybody, but many people under the same roof? I'm surprised you have even 10 minutes to get away today. You're probably one of the more popular people in the room.

• 1:55:44Speaker 08

  Well, it's definitely the quiet before the storm right now. So things are kicking off here shortly, but it's awesome. It is, there's a lot obviously happening in the world today and also RLPs are busy people. Last week was Milken, this week was the Saudi conference. There's a lot on everyone's minds. We could talk about what's happening with the endowments. And, you know, people are looking for some optimism. We're probably the bright spot in their portfolio right now. And so as a part of that, it's exciting to gather everyone here.

• 1:56:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's a lot of like hot take and micro themes around, oh, if there's a, if Harvard goes for profit or something, that's going to flood a huge amount of endowment money out of venture capital or Yale's going to sell their stakes or something like that. But can you talk about some of the more macro themes? If we zoom out the last 10 years or more, how have trends changed in the LP base of venture capital more broadly?

• 1:56:37Speaker 08

  Yeah, well, the asset class has definitely gotten obviously a lot more sophisticated, right? It used to be a small cottage industry and the asset class has just grown alongside, of course, the outcomes. And so as a result of that, you know, the sophistication level of not only the venture capitalists, but also the expansion of LPs have commensurately changed as a part of that. So you just don't have endowments or foundations or family offices investing. That's expanded to sovereigns now who have a different type of opportunity, cost of capital. And then you have big pensions now actively playing the game as well. So CalPERS, for example, very famously missed out on the last 10, 15 years of returns. And now they're making up for lost time as a part of that.

• 1:57:19Speaker 08

  And so traditional pools that didn't use to invest into the asset class are now wanting a seat at the table, largely again, because increasingly the percentage of GDP that's being taken over by tech has just exploded. I heard you mention to Eric, you know, Nvidia is about to be, this monster of a company just jumped up.

• 1:57:37John Coogan?

  About to be.

• 1:57:37Jordi Hays?

  It's only a 60, it's only $60 billion gap between.

• 1:57:41Speaker 08

  I checked this morning, so give this. So Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft independently are bigger than the entire stock market of most of the G7 countries. So Germany, UK, France, like it is wild. It's actually bigger. The G7 companies are bigger than all the G7 countries, except obviously for the US and Japan.

• 1:58:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, speaking of the international stuff.

• 1:58:03Jordi Hays?

  A month ago, people were buying French bonds.

• 1:58:06John Coogan?

  It was a mistake.

• 1:58:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, what is kind of the trade imbalance, the trade flow in terms of venture capital? I imagine there's a lot of money flowing internationally into American venture capital firms, but VC funds also invest abroad and internationally. Is there a trade imbalance there? Is there more money flowing into America than flowing out? Or is it kind of 50/50? Like, how has that evolved?

• 1:58:31Speaker 08

  Yeah, so I will only speak for A60Z. So A60Z is still 90% plus in North America. That being said, you know, our portfolio companies have spent a lot of time abroad and focus on a lot of distribution as a part of that. So I heard your Saudi correspondent yesterday mention that folks in the defense in Saudi, you know, all of a sudden are like, we want Anduril, we want Seronic, we want all these early-stage technologies. And guess what? Every country wants to modernize their government. They want Silicon Valley tech on speed dial. And so there's a massive interest in all areas, especially in our American dynamism practice for new technologies, and they want to replatform to the new AI age. And so we actually, at A60Z, have brought over almost close to 300-plus companies around

• 1:59:16Speaker 08

  the world, spending a lot of time in Saudi and a lot of the broader GCC. And particularly, yeah, it's funny, I was watching the Qatari motorcade welcome Trump earlier today, and like, they went so hard on it. But it's that kind of classic thing where they're going to go to the top of technology first and foremost. And so as a part of that, that is the leading driver of wherever trade actually ultimately goes to.

• 1:59:43John Coogan?

  What is the takeaway from Saudi Arabia and what's going on with KSA and MBS? How are you thinking about Saudi Arabia more broadly these days?

• 1:59:53Speaker 08

  Yeah, so we spent a lot of time there largely again to help our portfolio companies with with expansion and you know, MBS is pretty phenomenal. Everyone's talking yesterday a lot about Trump and how the vibe has shifted, right? The America's so back, right? And I feel like that deserved a gong.

• 2:00:10John Coogan?

  Hit it.

• 2:00:11Speaker 08

  America's back.

• 2:00:13Jordi Hays?

  I was caught sleeping.

• 2:00:14John Coogan?

  You're sleeping at the wheel. You're gonna be on top of it.

• 2:00:16Jordi Hays?

  I got more here. I'll stay. I'll keep the soundboard up and just keep going.

• 2:00:22John Coogan?

  Good.

• 2:00:23Speaker 08

  But MBS is like an amazing leader, right? Everyone's talking about Trump, but I think the other part of this is like in the eight years since Trump's first visit, MBS was basically able to get every tech leader in the world at that conference, right? He's absolutely crushed. And the whole country, by the way, his people love him. They all have, if you go to the country and you see people's cell phones, they have MBS's photo as their background on their phone. And then if you WhatsApp with people, their profile picture is MBS, which makes it obviously very confusing. But when was the last time a world leader was as beloved as he has been? And that's largely again because he's very conscious of the fact that the future needs to be tech first. He's got 70% of the population

• 2:01:08Speaker 08

  under 35, and that population is watching Netflix and YouTube. And so he's very conscious of the fact that he needs to modernize his country as a part of that. And he's retooling all the capital away from oil into tech as a part of that.

• 2:01:21John Coogan?

  Very cool. Well, last question, then we gotta move on.

• 2:01:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what are people getting? You are one of the co-creators of a mega fund. What do people get wrong about in the sort of mega fund debate? Because oftentimes the people that are debating have sub nine figures of AUM. And you know, I just think it's like unless you're playing, unless you're in the arena.

• 2:01:46John Coogan?

  The big ones scare me.

• 2:01:47Jordi Hays?

  The big ones scare them. But yeah, what are people getting wrong about the mega fund debate today?

• 2:01:54Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's a totally different game. And obviously, again, I'll only speak for ourselves. What we're playing is very different than, you know, obviously, seed funds and small emerging makers are playing. So it's very, very difficult to paint the broad paintbrush across every type of venture capital firm. But, you know, I think the premise of it still holds true. So I heard Eric mention this earlier, you know, Mark pioneered the term software is eating the world. And the reality is, software didn't just eat it. It doordashed it. It devoured it. It asked for seconds, right? And so everyone's obviously now playing catch up as a part of it relative to this massive opportunity. But also, more importantly, firms haven't scaled, most VC

• 2:02:35Speaker 08

  firms haven't scaled to reflect that. And so from a capital standpoint, not only have we scaled the capital, but we've also scaled the firm as a part of it. So if you look at every single team at A16Z, it's actually no bigger than the original incarnation of A16Z. So the deal teams are actually pretty small. They're no bigger than four to six people. So every vertical that you'll talk to today has a deal team focus that is much more oriented around not only that vertical, but also making sure that the fidelity of conversation that you have is super high. Because otherwise, as you've scaled the firm, if you have too many people around a table, it ends up being like a presentation, right? And so when we think about the firm, that's the big part that we focus on. Like, have

• 2:03:16Speaker 08

  we actually not only made sure we've scaled the capital to reflect the market opportunity, but also have we also scaled the firm to reflect how we actually want to run the organization? And making sure we're actually covering each vertical with that domain level expertise?

• 2:03:32John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Thank you so much.

• 2:03:34Jordi Hays?

  I mean, my contribution to the mega fund debate is if you ask a series C or D founder, "Hey, are you happy that there's, you know, potentially hundreds of millions or billions of dollars available to you to raise in the private markets?" Are they going to be like, "No, I'd rather do a small cap IPO and, you know, be, you know, spend years dragging it out in the in the public markets before..."

• 2:03:55John Coogan?

  The SEC in my, in every financial statement.

• 2:03:57Jordi Hays?

  I think that that should end the debate by itself.

• 2:03:59John Coogan?

  No, no, no, yeah.

• 2:04:01Jordi Hays?

  Jen, it's fantastic having you on. The crowd loved it, too.

• 2:04:04John Coogan?

  The crowd loved it. Thank you so much.

• 2:04:06Jordi Hays?

  Come back, come back on again soon. This was great. We'll do that. We'll do the Aman power ranking together. Awesome. Catch you later. Bye. Have a great event.

• 2:04:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's, uh, it's funny. Uh, underrated narrative is that they are this mega fund, but I was looking at who invested in Josh Browder's new fund, $30 million. It's like for Andreessen Partners, right?

• 2:04:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:27John Coogan?

  It's like Mark, Chris, like all the guys, and he raised money from Andreessen for Do Not Pay as well. So there's been this like relationship.

• 2:04:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:33John Coogan?

  Like they have a lot of exposure.

• 2:04:34Jordi Hays?

  Josh's A16D round, I think it was a series A, wasn't it? Like 4% dilution round?

• 2:04:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was really low, really low. But they clearly like working with him because they backed him on the fund.

• 2:04:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And he's taken such a contrarian approach to building the company, seven full-time employees.

• 2:04:49John Coogan?

  Yep. Dividends. He was like the first company to be like, I'm profitable. Do you remember this? He's a master of media. He's always on TV. Like, how'd you do that? Anyway, uh, our next guest is here.

• 2:04:59Jordi Hays?

  Runs in the family.

• 2:05:00John Coogan?

  Uh, welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 2:05:02Speaker 09

  Great.

• 2:05:03John Coogan?

  Looking fantastic.

• 2:05:03Jordi Hays?

  What's happening? What's happening?

• 2:05:05Speaker 09

  Um, my name is Purnas Angene. Friends all call me Ang. You should feel free to as well.

• 2:05:10John Coogan?

  Ang, fantastic. Uh, well, great to meet you. Um, I would love to kick it off with a little bit of overview of what you're investing in today. Uh, what you're excited to be presenting at LP Day. And then I have a bunch of questions on open source AI and the specific trends that are going on in the, in the, in the market right now.

• 2:05:26Speaker 09

  Sure. I have the fun job of spending the $40 billion that Jen raises for us.

• 2:05:32Speaker 09

  So I, I'm a general partner on AI infrastructure practice, which is basically all the computing systems that people need and rely on to build great products and services on top. And I basically spend most of my time, um, as a glorified customer support, um, and compute intern for scientists building foundation model companies, training models, all the stuff that happens. You know, at the intersection of, of, of research and then actually trying to figure out how to get that research out into the real world.

• 2:06:03John Coogan?

  Okay, so.

• 2:06:04Speaker 09

  I, I started at the firm two years ago.

• 2:06:07John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 2:06:07Speaker 09

  At the day. Um, and I came to the firm after a couple of years as a founder. Um, and then I, I founded a company called Ubiquity 6, which we then sold to Discord. And, um, I ran the platform there for a few years. During the era where we went from basically being a chat app for gamers to which was about seventy million monthly active users to about two hundred million monthly actives, basically in six months because covid happened. Yeah. And the the homework assignment was, Ange, go build a developer platform business for us. And it was around that time that I got a call from some friends who are running research at OpenAI, who said, hey, Ange, we're we're we've just trained this model called G P T three,

• 2:06:52Speaker 09

  and we think we're on to this thing called scaling laws, where if we can combine compute data and algorithms in the right combination, we just might have a shot at creating God. Classic. Okay, how much do you need to get started? They're like.

• 2:07:09Speaker 09

  Sorry, are the audience, the live audience here got a little excited.

• 2:07:12John Coogan?

  A little excited about God in the box.

• 2:07:15Speaker 09

  Well, you know, as of having just gone through the journey as a founder, I was like, okay, how much do you think that's going to cost us? I mean, God should be pretty pretty cheap in these times where where religion seems to have left the room. And you're like, yeah, it we think we can get by with five. And I said, okay, five million shouldn't be a problem. We can probably scrap that together next week. And this was Daria, who is a longtime friend and now founder and CEO of Anthropic, said, no, Ange, I don't think you realize I meant five hundred million. I said, okay, that's going to take a little bit longer. So so I was one of the early angels into Anthropic at the time. That gave me sort of my crash course to scaling laws for neural language models, right? The idea being that you could get these these language models to to to predict the next word in a sequence.

• 2:08:00Speaker 09

  And if you kept scaling up, both the compute, the amount of compute you train these things on as well as the data set, then you'd have no you'd be able to predictably improve the performance of these models. I'd call that the pre-training era. What I spent a lot of my time, and so, you know, for the better part of the last three, four years, I've basically helped teams like Anthropic. I usually get a call from them before there's a company, when there's scientists who who've who've who've got who have this sort of moment where they realize. They're about, they've unlocked something repeatable, where you can predictably improve the performance of these models on some axes. And they usually give me a call and they say, we've had the enlightened moment, we have no idea how to

• 2:08:43Speaker 09

  commercialize that and turn that into a business. And so I've worked with teams like Mistral, which is working on open source models. Last year, I led a, our, the first one into a company called Black Forest Labs, which are the creators of Stable Diffusion. The open source image model family that I think sort of introduced the world to the idea that open source language and image models can be pretty powerful. And so that's, that's what I spend most of my days doing, helping folks, you know, get their clusters set up, to train models, to then build products on top. And I think at this LP day, the, there's sort of two big things I'm getting asked about. The first is, okay, Anj, you know, two years ago, it was all about pre-trained models, like the pre-training error, AI scaling laws.

• 2:09:28Speaker 09

  What's going on now? Why is everybody talking about post-training, right? So that's, that's one big question. And then the second is, hey, what, what is going on with, with sovereigns? Why are countries announcing a hundred billion dollars into data centers? And why are they all talking about wanting their own AI, you know, champion company, whether it's Mistral in Europe or whether it's Alamin in Saudi. And so I would say sovereign AI, which is really the idea that you want to control your own AI, you want to control what it can and can't do. And the idea that, that progress in AI is not coming necessarily just from pre-training, it's coming from, from post-training are the two big themes for, for this year for me.

• 2:10:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. On the, on the open source question, are you, are you thinking about Mistral and Black Forest Labs as kind of like the red hat Linux model where they will be almost like implementers in the enterprise? Or is there a real world where you're underwriting against total and complete victory of the open source, of the open source paradigm at the foundation model layer? And then related to the, the international topic you mentioned, like, is Mistral uniquely, are you uniquely bullish on Mistral because it's an international company? As opposed to an American company because it has this, this specific advantage of being in Europe and, and that driving extra value for the company?

• 2:10:54Speaker 09

  Oh, I know, I think so you're, of course, you know, Europe is 400 million consumers. So just mass economy that's that's decided to gear up to build the basically the single largest infrastructure build out. I think we've seen in the continent in like 60 years. They just passed an $800 billion defense bill. They're calling rearm Europe and like a huge portion of that is flowing to AI and computing teams for sure. So we can talk about that. But that wasn't when I led the the series A into Mistral two years ago, $200 million round. Like the Europe was, we I did not expect that we'd be in the middle of like this massive sovereign AI build out. I mean, the bet was very simple is that if you look at the history of computing infrastructure, there's basically two frontiers.

• 2:11:39Speaker 09

  You've got the capabilities frontier, and then you've got the efficiency frontier, right? So the capabilities frontier is usually dominated by closed source. If you look at, you know, databases and storage and networking and so on, you usually have a company like Cisco and so on that that pioneers some new capability, right? And then, or actually, in the case of Linux, like you said, right, you had Microsoft show up and build Windows, closed source, right? And that usually opens up the aperture for consumers because consumers are often the first to flock to new use cases. The enterprise cares about something slightly different. They care about cheaper, faster, more control. And that's usually dominated by open source. So, you know, two years ago, when I was running the the platform or get

• 2:12:20Speaker 09

  Discord, we got early access to GPT four. And the open AI guys said, hey, we've got this new model. It's going to come out in six months. Can you guys just figure out what it's good for? And we ran an experiment, you know, we ran a bunch of tasks through it, and it was extraordinary on a couple of them. And we said, okay, great. Let's go to production. Well, it turns out, when you want, when you're working with sensitive data, right? In our case, this was a social platform. So GDPR, CCP, all of the compliance stuff, really critical that our data doesn't leave our servers, right? You want control over what where the weights are running and what the weights can and can't do. And so we looked around for for an open source alternative to to GPT four and we just couldn't find one.

• 2:13:02Speaker 09

  And that's when I realized, okay, for every dollar that that you're seeing in like enterprise or large company prototyping or proof of concept revenue. There's like 10 more waiting for the open source alternative, right? And really, there was no alternative until later that summer when Lama showed up. Right? Lama was the first time there was a comparable open source alternative for to to close source models. And and while the creators of Lama left and started Mistral, so that that may be.

• 2:13:29John Coogan?

  Investment easy. That's great. Can you take me through the deal for Sesame AI? Obviously, they went viral, but the founder had had a previous Andreessen backed company, I think in Oculus. How did that come together? And how is the company?

• 2:13:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and even your first interaction with the product that blew you away, because in in many ways, that that that their initial launch and the website, and I think you guys had already, you know, completed the investment well before that. But so many people, that moment was truly eye opening for them, where it was like, okay, I could imagine this feels like talking to, you know, a friend, you know, it felt it felt really real.

• 2:14:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:14Speaker 09

  Yeah, Sesame is a fun story, because we started that company two years ago at a time when like everybody in this space was like, look, this this idea that that we're going to have a new computing interface was completely seen as like a crazy, a crazy idea. There's there's two parts of this Sesame. One is the the hardware, and we're building AI glasses over there. And the second part is the actual companion, which is the voice interface you guys have probably tried out, the voice AI, right? And when you put those together, the idea is that it's a it's a system that has so much context about

• 2:14:59Speaker 09

  everything you're doing about your life, that it becomes a primary interface to to computing. And I mean, you know, two years ago, it it it, I would say a lot of people had seen and watched like her, the movie, right?

• 2:15:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:14Speaker 09

  But. The, the, the, when I'd sit down and I'd describe to people that, hey, what you really need i- is, is this beautiful marriage of hardware and software. Um, and that's what's going to come, that's what's going to be the primary interface after smartphones. People would just look at you like you're crazy. Um, and so I was like, okay, the, the, there's only two people I know who are crazy enough to believe this. One was Brendan, who had been an angel investor in my last company, Ubiquity Six. Brendan was the CEO of Oculus. You know, a few people on earth who, who'd both built a hardware startup and sold it for billions of dollars. I think Oculus sold in total for north of two billion. And Ankit, who was co-founder and CTO of Ubiquity Six, which was my last company.

• 2:15:57Speaker 09

  And Ankit was running the voice, uh, part, part of the voice AI, uh, SDK and infra at Discord. You know, about sixty percent of all Discord voice minutes, uh, daily minutes are spent in voice channels.

• 2:16:11John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:16:12Speaker 09

  That's what I realized. People don't realize it, but for most, for many, many, many consumers, voice is actually a much more frequent interaction modality than like looking at a screen. And so the idea was if we can combine those two, we might have a shot at building whatever comes next after smartphones. So that, that, that was the idea, but the, the key like insight, I guess, or bet was that it has to feel realistic. You're not like Siri just doesn't work. Like you, you, you just nope out completely. When you try to talk to Siri and you're like, okay, I'm talking to a robot.

• 2:16:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:42Speaker 09

  But instead, if we could get the companion, the, the, to, to cross the uncanny valley. If we could get you to think about talking to Sesame, and we, you know, we have two companions right now. One is Maya, the other is Miles. If we could get, get you to think about using and talking to Maya and Miles as companions, not as robots. Then that's when you'd really start using it in your daily life as an interface constantly to all the apps and services you use. Does that make sense?

• 2:17:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:17:11Jordi Hays?

  How do you, in the context of Sesame, what, what's been the thinking? Cause obviously it sounds like you've been on the board since day one or, or, you know, I don't know the exact mechanics. But how, how has the company thought and how do you think broadly across the portfolio around this balance, balance between, you know, being heads down building? And needing to capture the attention of? Of the tech community, the broader potential user base, because I feel like it's this interesting dynamic right now where there's so much to build, like in some ways, companies should just be heads down and almost be silent, right? And this is like the SSI approach is to basically say like,

• 2:17:51Jordi Hays?

  we're not maybe going to release anything that we consider less than a really significant evolution. But sesame kind of like popped its head up and said, hey, look at us, look what we're doing. But then now it seems like it's taking more of the approach of being willing to fly under the radar for, call it the next, who knows how many months?

• 2:18:15Speaker 09

  I'm happy to report that it doesn't get any easier, the more money you raise. I found like that on day one, we hadn't raised any money, right? So we were just three guys sitting in a room and talking about ideas. And this, I would say the heuristic for most people who come from the software era is like, hey, ship fast, ship early, ship something you're embarrassed about, right? And then iterate. And AI is a little bit different. Frontier AI is a little bit different because you often need a critical, you need to have a capability threshold that is

• 2:18:55Speaker 09

  sufficiently transformative enough that people will put up with all the tons and tons of like friction that there still is to use AI today, right? So you guys may have noticed, but when you go to the sesame site and interact with the demo, right? It's quite fast today. One of the things we really, the team like spent a ton of time honing was the latency of voice responses. We had to make it feel like it was 200 milliseconds. So it felt like you're having a conversation, right? Two years ago, it wasn't there. It was excruciatingly slow.

• 2:19:27Speaker 09

  And we knew that nobody, people would miss the underlying personality of the model if we hadn't solved the systems problem of latency. And I find it comes down to this really delicate, the overarching problem of like, hey, when do we ship? When do we actually put this out in the world versus being heads down? Comes down to this constant tussle between taste, which is who at the company has such a strong opinion that the product experience is good enough? And the ruthless sort of machine learning approach of running evals, right? The idea that you build a model, you test it in an environment, you benchmark it and you see how it does on that eval. And if it hasn't improved that evaluation score, you know, you keep going.

• 2:20:12Speaker 09

  And it basically, you've got to have, like, I've lost count of the number of hours we've spent debating that tension. Right? And it's extremely uncomfortable for traditional software teams to do the eval-driven approach because the list of features you can kind of deterministically write out and say, check, check, check. These are the things we need to ship, build. Once you've got the V zero, the MVP, we ship. That's not how, that's not how AI works, right? AI research and post-training is evals-driven, which is you have an intuition for what you need to do to improve the model, but you don't actually know until you run it through an empirical test. And so the answer comes down to how good are your evals?

• 2:20:56Speaker 09

  And so if I was to boil down what's what works for the best teams, if they have great product taste, but they also have great taste in evals, which is what is the right evaluation metric to build for your team? And then you basically stay heads down until, until you've unlocked both of those. Does that make sense? Yeah.

• 2:21:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for joining. Good luck with the rest of LP Day.

• 2:21:17Speaker 09

  Come back on again soon.

• 2:21:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we'd love to have you back and talk.

• 2:21:20Speaker 09

  Anytime. You know where to find me.

• 2:21:21John Coogan?

  Fantastic. We'll talk soon. Bye.

• 2:21:23Speaker 09

  Cheers. Cheers.

• 2:21:24John Coogan?

  Next up, we have Martin Casado, general partner. He's on the board of Cursor, World Labs, DBT Labs, Kong, Five Tran, Ideogram, Ambien AI. This guy has a lot of board seats, Brain Trust, Coactive, Netlify. He leads the firm's 1.25 billion dollar infrastructure practice and has built quite the AI portfolio. So we're excited to have Martin on the show, discuss open source AI, his views there, what's Cursor doing. Welcome to the stream, Martin. So good to have you here. How are you doing?

• 2:21:56Speaker 10

  We're good.

• 2:22:02John Coogan?

  The live audience is really just, they couldn't hold that. They're out of control. Anyway, thanks so much. Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much for, for joining us. I'd love to know your take. Let's just jump right into it since we're running a little bit behind. Cursor, obviously, it's becoming this front end, almost aggregation play. It's the front end to AI coding. It's potentially model agnostic. What does that mean? What have you learned from the Cursor journey around how value accrues across application layer versus foundation model layer?

• 2:22:37Speaker 10

  Yeah. So, I mean, I think that there's two things, you know, that that led up to this Cursor moment. And one of them is, one of the first use cases for AI was code, right? We had like Microsoft Copilot, a lot of people used it. But like, and so like, you know, there's, you know, a bunch of users and their behavior was trained by Microsoft, but the models weren't quite good yet. And in the last, you know, year, we had this RL movement. And as a result, the models got way, way better. And then Cursor just happened to have like this kind of magic timing where it, you know, it did something very similar to what Copilot looked like, but, you know, use these greater models. And now that they've

• 2:23:19Speaker 10

  kind of caught the wave, they're able to, you know, not only serve these amazing models, but like for every magic experience you see the, the users have, they've starting to like have their own smaller models. And so it's just, you know, very unique point in time, very unique position. And then of course, a very unique technology wave behind it.

• 2:23:40John Coogan?

  Going back to the foundation model layer, can you talk about how you're thinking around open source in the foundation model wars has evolved? I remember you and John Ludig were talking about it last year. Since then, we've had Llama 4, which kind of fell backwards, but then DeepSeek was a huge moment. And we just had a guest on the show yesterday who was talking about the importance of offering the world open source foundation models that they can build on because if we don't do it, our near peer adversaries might. How has your thinking evolved, if at all, and where are you seeing the most opportunity in the foundation model wars?

• 2:24:19Speaker 10

  Yeah, so it's not clear to me that the model space is significantly different than the software space when it comes to open source. So in the software space, we've got 20 years of history of this. The close solutions tend to aggregate the value first and the quickest. And the reason is, is you kind of need to make money to change people's behavior, right? And this is like, you need to have Unix before you have Linux, and you need to have Oracle before you have MySQL, et cetera. And the same thing seems to me to be playing out in this AI space, which, of course, OpenAI was first, and they've aggregated a ton of value, and Anthropic for Code.

• 2:24:59Speaker 10

  And then even if you look at the non-language models like Image, Midjourney was first, and that's closed, and 11 Labs. And so it seems to me like the first movers will close source, and they'll continue to close source, and they'll aggregate a lot of value. But then for every first mover, there's always the opportunity to enable the masses, right? Like everybody else. And there's always a lot of value there, right? And this is kind of where these open source models come in. And what's amazing, and everybody should realize, is just because DeepSeek is out there, hasn't changed the calculus or the growth of these other companies, right? It's been fully accretive. I think the only sin anybody can make in AI from an investor's standpoint is zero sum thinking. Because the reality is is every time something new gets introduced, it's not at the expense of something else.

• 2:25:44Speaker 10

  It kind of finds new territory to gain value in and and open source is no different. So it's a very important part of an ecosystem. It's been part of the software ecosystem for a very long time. It'll continue to be, I do think that, you know, US should have open source models. And and I think it's very important for like continued US presence and technology in that conversation. But it feels very healthy to me, both the dynamic with existing closed companies. And then, you know, new companies that can be built on on the open source.

• 2:26:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, are you a fan of aggregation theory or this idea of like the front door to artificial intelligence? Cursor is kind of that for coding. And we're seeing that in other applications that are popping up where the underlying model might not even matter. And my where I'm going with this is that there's one world where another country wants their own foundation model. So they know that the weights are trained in a way that they want aligned with their views on speech, for example. But there's another world where the individual countries should be thinking about how do we create the dominant consumer app? That people actually use because even if we have the model, if nobody's using it because they're just opening up a certain URL. And they go to another country's model. What do you think of there?

• 2:26:54Speaker 10

  I mean, I think I think the story of AI has been the markets are much larger and they're growing much faster than anybody had expected. And that's just resulted in actual fragmentation. So everybody had these theories early on, if you remember, oh, there'll only be one model. Oh, the models are not defensible. Oh, the apps are just GPT wrappers. Oh, like the apps are going to take all the value. And you know what? They're all wrong, like everybody's been wrong. The only people that have been right are like, you know what? These things are massive. I mean, let's take OpenAI, which is one of the most remarkable companies and maybe forever in tech, right? But, you know, they were the first to image. Remember that with Dali?

• 2:27:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:27:31Speaker 10

  Yeah, they're the first to code with Copilot. They're the weights. They lost that. They are the first to video. And like, you know, Sora was amazing and remarkable, but like, they're not the leaders in video. And yet they're still the dominant AI company on language, right? So what are the takeaways you can take from that? Like, in my view, it's, you know, every one of these is a massive, massive market that's too big for one company. And so like, you know, OpenAI has done a great job focusing on ChatGPT. And you could have the same discussion between the model and the app layer, right? And so I know, I mean, you're talking about aggregation theory. So there's two views of the world. One view of the world is like, everything consolidates into one company. And there's another view, which is there's like a model per thing that's a behavior. I'm definitely in the second one. And I just, you know, even though we're relatively early,

• 2:28:15Speaker 10

  we do have four years of experience with this and the story has just been disaggregation. It really has.

• 2:28:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

• 2:28:22Jordi Hays?

  How are you, uh, how do you think about revenue quality in the enterprise in an environment? When, you know, the Fortune 500 sort of has a mandate to just, you know, buy AI? Some, some things they're going to.

• 2:28:35Speaker 10

  That's a great, yeah. So, okay, so there's, there's a lot to this question and I'll try to be as succinct as possible. So the first most important thing is AI today is mostly a prosumer and consumer movement. So even though the people are working in the enterprise, it's like, it's an individual use and individual behavior. And it's not like a big budget buying thing. And so I would say the vast majority of the companies we work with, it's this more kind of bottoms up prosumer thing. And so that's clearly real individual demand. This happens in all super cycles. Like it was the same thing for the internet, right? It was the same thing for PCs. It was the same thing for like the iPhone, like the true smartphone, like post BlackBerry. It was like individuals. And so, you know, from that standpoint, like I think we're very, very comfortable.

• 2:29:18Speaker 10

  This is a real secular movement because it is individuals that are driving the behavior. You know, there, there's, there's a second point to all of this, which is.

• 2:29:30Speaker 10

  In the early internet days, you had all sorts of funny accounting because you know, and it was quite frankly, because people just didn't know how to do it.

• 2:29:38Speaker 10

  But at the time, people weren't even paying, right? So they would just kind of say everything. And of course, in these early super cycles, you have all of that. Like, they don't know the difference between like GMV and take rate and, you know, run rate is not a GAAP thing. And so they kind of had deals. There's clearly all these funny numbers out there. And, you know, that's just an artifact of massive, massive growth and success. And like, you know, we'll rationalize it as an industry, but for sure that's going on. But it's less about like enterprise budget moving. And it's much more about, I've got this consumer phenomenon. I have no idea how to really do the accounting, you know? And so, you know, it just requires, from our standpoint, you know, just to kind of go through things and kind of really normalize it.

• 2:30:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great. Makes sense. I mean, we could talk for another hour about this. We'd love to have you back on the show. This is fantastic. But thank you so much for even taking the time that you did. Yeah, I wish we had more time. This was great.

• 2:30:25Speaker 10

  No, love it. Thanks so much. It was a real pleasure.

• 2:30:27John Coogan?

  Have fun. Cheers. Bye. Yeah, we didn't even get to Fei Fei Li and World Labs, the deal that he led there.

• 2:30:34Jordi Hays?

  I've never heard.

• 2:30:35John Coogan?

  Spatial intelligence.

• 2:30:36Jordi Hays?

  I've never heard Martin, you know, I've seen his posts.

• 2:30:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:30:39Jordi Hays?

  Never heard him talk.

• 2:30:39John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:30:39Jordi Hays?

  Potentially a Hall of Fame yapper.

• 2:30:41John Coogan?

  Hall of Fame yapper. Can we get a soundboard for that?

• 2:30:44Jordi Hays?

  Hall of Fame yapper for Martin.

• 2:30:46John Coogan?

  Boom, boom, boom. We got David George, Leaves the Growth Fund, coming in next. I'm going to want the Ashton Hall sound effect. I'm going to want lots of sound effects for this one. We're getting too serious right now. We got to take it down a notch. Everyone thinks, oh, they manage 40 billion. You got to be serious. You got to be on talking points.

• 2:31:03Jordi Hays?

  I have some serious news.

• 2:31:03John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:31:03Jordi Hays?

  We have a fully executed lease on our new studio.

• 2:31:06John Coogan?

  Oh, let's hear it for us. Let's hear it for TVP.

• 2:31:11Jordi Hays?

  And you know why that's exciting, John? It's because we're going to be, we're going to be able to walk around the studio while we're live.

• 2:31:17John Coogan?

  Sitting for four hours.

• 2:31:18Jordi Hays?

  Sitting for four hours is brutal.

• 2:31:19John Coogan?

  Brian Johnson is shaking his fist. Yes, thank goodness.

• 2:31:23Jordi Hays?

  Sitting is, you know, don't they compare it to smoking cigarettes in terms of, you know, the effects on the body?

• 2:31:29John Coogan?

  It's terrible for you.

• 2:31:30Jordi Hays?

  And we're going to be walking around.

• 2:31:32John Coogan?

  Hitting the biggest gong you've ever seen that we've yet to reveal on the show. We'll be whacking that there.

• 2:31:37Jordi Hays?

  You're going to be hype mogging me, but I had an idea. We can put a, like a measuring tape up on the wall so that I can periodically walk over and prove that I'm six one to people.

• 2:31:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, we got David George in the studio. Welcome to the stream, David. How you doing? How's it going?

• 2:31:56John Coogan?

  We're trying to keep the energy up. It's a big day. I love it.

• 2:31:59Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you. Thanks for coming on the show.

• 2:32:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks for coming on.

• 2:32:02Speaker 11

  Yeah, I love it.

• 2:32:03John Coogan?

  I would love for you to break down how the growth fund actually works. And Reesons is known for these specialized funds, but then I know that the growth fund cuts across all of them. And you see deals all over the place. Do I have that even roughly correct? How do you think about supporting the companies in the portfolio that maybe get picked up at the earlier stage?

• 2:32:23Speaker 11

  Yeah, absolutely. Well, look, fun to be on here with you guys. A big, big fan. Yeah, I mean, you have it right. So we have seven different funds. I think if you talk to some of our early stage folks, they're very domain focused. And that means, you know, they know the products, they know the markets, they know the technologies at a very deep level. And then the growth fund where we sit is kind of across all of those. So, you know, ideally, the way it works is, you know, we can work hand in hand with them and take kind of the best of the best ideas from each of those sectors and then invest, you know, stage specific at the growth fund. And so what we do, probably half our effort and dollars historically have been follow-ons, supporting existing portfolio companies.

• 2:33:07Speaker 11

  And that's worked great. You know, there's something we talk about all the time, which is game film. And like, there's no better way to have game film than to, you know, have my partner having done the Series A and Databricks. And then, you know, we get to see it all along. You know, with that comes access, you know, relationships with the founders. All that stuff helps. But then, you know, the other half of what we do is invest in net new companies that were not, you know, previously investments in A16Z for whatever reason. And so, you know, we started, started this in 2019. I had a big list when I joined. I'm like, all right, I know the six existing portfolio companies that I want to go try and create a, you know, a new deal in.

• 2:33:50Speaker 11

  And then I knew a bunch of the ones that I wanted to invest in outside the portfolio. And, and, and we've been fortunate to have some success. You know, we've invested in outside companies like Roblox and Figma and SpaceX and Waymo. You know, and then, you know, obviously a lot of success doubling and tripling and quadrupling down with existing companies.

• 2:34:09John Coogan?

  Well, it's a great time to tell everyone that TBPN is sponsored by Figma. So thank you for the shout out. This is one hand washes the other moment. Put some dollars in your pocket. Put some dollars in our pocket.

• 2:34:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was what, didn't you do that deal in like April of 2020 or got announced back then? That was, that was a crazy.

• 2:34:25John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 2:34:25Jordi Hays?

  Moment in history.

• 2:34:26John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:34:27Speaker 11

  I got a lot of stories about that one, man. But we, um, so we had been courting, I remember I met Peter Levine, when I was like right at the tail end of figuring out whether I was going to join and, and, uh, he's like, we need a growth fund. I'm like, okay, like I was going to tell you that. And he's like, you know, like we gotta invest in this company, Figma. Like it's crazy that we got investors in this thing. Like it really pisses me off. All right, well, we can go fix that. And so, um, you know, I joined and we courted Dylan for like, you know, a year, year and a half. And then, you know, COVID hits, we all think the world is going to melt. We'd been trying to convince Dylan to, to do an investment with us. And like the world's falling apart. And he calls us and he's like, I'll do a deal now. And I'm like, oh God.

• 2:35:14John Coogan?

  Art of the deal, Dylan Field.

• 2:35:16Jordi Hays?

  Legend.

• 2:35:16John Coogan?

  Absolute dog.

• 2:35:18Speaker 11

  This is brutal.

• 2:35:19Jordi Hays?

  Put you on the spot.

• 2:35:20Speaker 11

  I know it was, uh, but it was great. Obviously we're thrilled to be his partners. Uh, that one was funny because we, you know, like if you take a traditional growth investing lens and look at a company like Figma at that stage, you know, you could look at a spreadsheet and look at market reports on market. Could size it and you know, what, what you'd see is like, well, there's not that many designers and sure, the number of designers is growing, but how compelling is that going to be? Um, and you know, if we didn't have like depth of product and technology and market insights, we would have missed like the obvious, you know, thing, which is like, it's not just a design tool. It's a, it's a tool for, you know, designers plus front end engineers and that functionality is all merging together.

• 2:36:02Speaker 11

  And the proportion of designers is massively growing relative to, uh, relative to engineers. And you know, there's even going to be business uses. And so, you know, Figma is an awesome one. It's a, it's a great example of a company where, um, you know, traditional lens would probably miss it for what it could be. Um, but you know, it's sort of a, it's one of these things we call, you know, we call them model busters. It's like, you do a little spreadsheet model. And it like show these numbers and it like, it turns out like it's all wrong. Like the market size is totally wrong and it could just totally exceed it. So.

• 2:36:36John Coogan?

  Can you talk about the

• 2:36:36Speaker 11

  I love when it breaks them all.

• 2:36:37John Coogan?

  Model busters, the aperture of growth equity deals. Obviously, the traditional growth round is post-product market fit. Maybe you're up in the 50 million plus raised range. But we're seeing these crazy deals get done with pre-revenue, pre-product AI companies raising hundreds of millions of dollars. Are you putting that in the growth bucket? And are you changing the way your team thinks about deals to look at, to set yourself up for looking at those bigger but earlier stage deals? Or are you trying to think about how can we fit those into a venture portfolio or venture fund?

• 2:37:17Speaker 11

  Yeah, let me just talk to you about like the buckets of stuff we do.

• 2:37:20John Coogan?

  Please.

• 2:37:21Speaker 11

  And so, you know, there's a big bucket of stuff that we do, which is, you know, traditional high-flying growth equity companies. And so a bunch of the companies that I listed would fit that, you know, Databricks, Roblox.

• 2:37:36John Coogan?

  And those are like mature businesses, like you can do a DCF on them. You can do market multiples, like you can do real, real work, but yeah.

• 2:37:43Speaker 11

  Yeah, so that's one bucket, and I'll talk more about those. But I would say my observation from, you know, doing growth investing for the last 15 years or so is, you know, there's a bunch of instances of those that like end up being way bigger and better businesses than anybody would have thought.

• 2:38:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:02Speaker 11

  And that shouldn't be surprising because if you just look at like the composition of the biggest and most important companies in the world, they're all tech companies. And, you know, they, you know, their market caps have sort of extended beyond anyone's, you know, idea of what they could be, both because they exceeded market size estimates and also they came up with new products. And so there's both flavors of those when we talk about model busters. But that's one class of things that we're doing. In the AI, in the AI world, there's another class of things that we're doing, which is like, it slaps you in the face that it's working. Like, these are the fastest growing companies that we've ever seen. Like, we're investors in a bunch of the fastest growing companies of the previous generation, like Wiz and Slack and Deal.

• 2:38:41Speaker 11

  And if you put them on a chart with companies like, you know, Cursor or 11 Labs or XAI, like, they get to that 100 million stage way, way, way faster than that previous generation of company. So, you know, that's a, that's a bucket. And, you know, there's, there's not like hundreds of those yet. But I think there will be hundreds of those as you know, the AI applications come. Cause the groundwork groundwork is being laid for that. Then, you know, you asked about the sort of kind of, you know, earlier stage kind of companies that raise a lot of dough.

• 2:39:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:14Speaker 11

  We do do those, but you know, we keep an extraordinarily high bar. So, you know, we're investors in, you know, companies like SSI. That are working on, you know, really exciting new things with the best talent in the world. That was part of our thesis in investing in character AI is backing Noam Chisier. And you kind of squint and say, okay, you know, this is a person that we can back and we know that, you know, he's going to create something special.

• 2:39:41John Coogan?

  So it's pretty, he's on the paper.

• 2:39:44Jordi Hays?

  Founder bet, but you can really go risk on.

• 2:39:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:47Jordi Hays?

  I have a question for you around kind of modeling market sizing in this AI era. Everybody likes to say there's an opportunity for software to not just, to basically get paid for end work. So instead of creating, let's say, software for accountants, you can create software that does accounting services, right? And the TAM expansion there of, you know, these end markets for, you know, that that look more, maybe more like payroll spend or services spend. It starts to get really exciting because they go from, you know, hey, this is a hundred billion dollar market to this is, you know, could something could be a, you know, multi trillion dollar market around labor.

• 2:40:28Jordi Hays?

  The question that I've been personally kind of wrestling with is if you, if software solutions are delivering services, maybe there's a short period where you can capture, you know, a huge amount of that, you know, spend. But over time, that those opportunities, there will be other software providers that are, you know, competing to do that services work. And Won't that have like some type of deflationary effect and overall maybe not maybe markets aren't getting smaller, but maybe prices can't stay as high as they are in a in a sort of human led, you know, service market. So what are your high level, you know, how are you thinking about market sizing given?

• 2:41:11Jordi Hays?

  And I don't expect you to have like a perfect answer here because again, a lot of these companies are model breakers, as you described.

• 2:41:19Speaker 11

  The model, model busters, man. The busters. The busters.

• 2:41:27Speaker 11

  So, uh, so yeah, I love this topic because it's the, it's the like, it's the fun one that everyone is debating right now. It's like, well, we can go capture labor. And, you know, without like a super deeply developed and astute strategy, like that's just not going to happen. And so, you know, if you look at like some of the biggest technology breakthroughs of all time, the way that those get priced isn't the replacement of what they are delivering.

• 2:41:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:54Speaker 11

  Competitive forces come in and actually like there's return on capital. There's like, you know, different competitive positioning and often that gets competed away. So my rule of thumb is when you have these major technology waves, just assume that 90% plus of the surplus is going to be on the consumer or customer side. And that's great because you can still like, if they work, when they work, you can still create incredible businesses out of it. So, you know, if you take the previous wave of technology change, you know, what would, what would you or I, or probably any average American person pay for an iPhone? Like a lot more than a thousand dollars. Like 10K. Yeah, like a lot more than a thousand dollars.

• 2:42:40Speaker 11

  Like, you know, like we've, we've, we've captured like 90% of the surplus and it still turns out that Apple has an amazing business on the back of it.

• 2:42:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:48Speaker 11

  So, you know, technology can be kind of magical in that way. In the previous cycle, if you just take iPhone and cloud computing, those things together created like 10 trillion of new market cap across internet, software, mega cap tech. Now, a lot of that got captured by the large tech companies, but a ton of it went to new companies as well. And so my simple framework for AI right now is The more disruptive the technology itself actually is, and the more potentially disruptive the business model, the more that favors the startup and the less that that favors the incumbent. So like, what was the mobile version of Salesforce.com?

• 2:43:29John Coogan?

  Salesforce.com.

• 2:43:31Speaker 11

  But if Salesforce.com, if that technology wave, instead of being just, hey, access Salesforce on your mobile device, if instead it was like, hey, we have completely new workflow, we have a completely new interface, a completely new database, and oh, by the way, a totally different business model, maybe you'd have a startup.

• 2:43:47John Coogan?

  Position. Yeah, that makes sense. We're talking to David Olivich next. How has, how does growth underwriting work in defense tech or hard tech or American dynamism? I imagine it's different because there's more debt, there's more capex, it's a slightly different business, not zero marginal cost necessarily. How are you thinking about underwriting the next, the hard tech boom?

• 2:44:08Speaker 11

  This is a great question and one that we sit around and talk about all the time. So our lives are a lot easier because we have an amazing early stage American dynamism practice. And so we see a lot of things. We're on the cutting edge of the trends. We have the right networks. My simple rule on that is you can create venture scale amazing outcomes that are even better than the software only businesses, but they're probably going to be fewer and further between. Like, they're very, very hard to pull off. So, you know, we saw this at, you know, not quite the degree of difficulty as others, but but still quite a hard one at Samsara, which is one of our portfolio companies, which was one of the

• 2:44:48Speaker 11

  first companies that was sort of a modern hardware plus software public company. And they've demonstrated that they can create an incredible business out of it. Right now, the four that I always go to that I talk about that are the the sort of champions that I always reference are Anduril, SpaceX, Flock Safety, and Waymo. These are four of our biggest portfolio companies that we've, you know, let a bunch of rounds in and in some cases are some of the largest shareholders. In the case of Anduril, you know, it's a model buster because they have made multiple products work and they now have trust. And that's a even more defensible position than a software company could ever be in. So there's

• 2:45:29Speaker 11

  700 billion of defense market cap for them to go get. And I think they'll go get a lot of it and they might create new market cap, too. You know, SpaceX has, you know, one of the best competitive positions of any company. Of all time. I mean, it's like the British East India Company of space. It's incredible. They have, yeah, I love it. They have like 20x relative market share. Like that doesn't happen anywhere. And then, you know, Flock is doing some crazy stuff. I always say it has the craziest ROI of any company we invest in because it's like we stopped kidnappings. Like, you know, recovered lost kids. You know, they solve like greater than 10% of all crime in the United States today. That's just incredible. And then, you know, Waymo is the last one,

• 2:46:14Speaker 11

  which is, you know, super exciting. Obviously, there's a tremendous amount of R and D and invested capital and difficulty in building that company. But it's a magical experience. Like, I took my family from Kentucky in Waymo's this weekend, and they were like, oh, my God. They were very nervous. And they were like, okay, this is a better driver than you. So, that's, it's super exciting. It's grown really fast. But yeah, the simple thing for me is like, they can be better businesses, but they're much harder to pull off.

• 2:46:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Well, thank you so much for joining us. We're gonna kick it over to D U. This is great. Love having you back and talk more.

• 2:46:53Speaker 11

  Thanks, guys. Cheers.

• 2:46:56Jordi Hays?

  I don't, is there anybody that deploys more capital than?

• 2:46:59John Coogan?

  He's up there. He's on the leaderboard. He's in the conversation.

• 2:47:03Jordi Hays?

  It's funny, his list of investments, I thought they were ranked in order of significance, but they're just alphabetical order. And in many ways, they just get more. It starts basically at Andurall and ends at X and XAI.

• 2:47:20John Coogan?

  Oh, X and XAI, yeah. Big, big checks. Well, we're excited to talk to David Ulevitch, General Partner at Andreessen on the American Dynamism team. We need an American. We need, this is pretty American. But we need, I'm proud to be an American or free bird or something on the soundboard. Anyway, welcome to the stream.

• 2:47:37Jordi Hays?

  David, welcome.

• 2:47:38John Coogan?

  Good to have you here.

• 2:47:38Jordi Hays?

  Hey, how are you?

• 2:47:40John Coogan?

  We're great. I'd love to talk, just jump right into it about Army modernization. We talked to General George. We had Driscoll on as well. How optimistic are you for early-stage startups? We know it's working at the growth stage, but is this, is this time really different? We've been beating the drum of American Dynamism for a couple of years. There's a lot of startups now. Is there something changing in the Army right now?

• 2:48:06Speaker 12

  Yeah, I think there is something changing and it has to change. And you hear the enthusiasm from General George, General Fenton, Secretary Driscoll, and you hear it from everyone else you talk to who's just, you know, not just the people that you haven't spoken with, but the people that are walking up and down the halls and the people that are working in the DOD that they know for a variety of reasons, both from a we don't have the tools we need, we're not procuring things fast enough, we're not manufacturing things fast enough to support the defense industrial base, we are tritting our systems that we thought were not attritable as quickly as we would. So there's a whole bunch of reasons. So I think people recognize there's a need for change. I think the question is, will this be the moment for change? And if you look at the change that's happening elsewhere

• 2:48:50Speaker 12

  in Washington and throughout the government, I think you have no reason other than to be optimistic that this is going to be one of those moments. And, you know, there's going to be a lot of pushback from the primes and from people that have, you know, sort of had a delicious steak lunch every day for the last 25, 30 years. But like, this is the moment. For the early stage startups, I think, I think, you know, we can talk about the early stage startups, but I do think it's a moment of change.

• 2:49:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, on American dynamism, national interest investing broadly, is there a structural reason why venture capital has led here? Because you could have seen this boom play out, like biotech, where companies go public much earlier. You could have seen a private equity boom, where old subprimes or primes get turned around, taken private, LBO'd and revitalized. And reindustrialization really could have happened that way, but it doesn't feel like it is. Do I just have a narrow aperture on venture because I'm in this world? Or is there something structural going on?

• 2:49:50Speaker 12

  Yes, to both. I think it has to be venture capital first, because we're at a technology transformation moment, right? Whether it's being able to use AI from computer vision standpoints and just rapid changes that only startups can really embrace and react to and take advantage of quickly, or just the fact that they can attract the best talent. You know, like private equity firms really manage to the bottom line, so they're not going to pay top dollars. For the 10x engineer, the way a venture capital or venture capital backed startup would. So there's a bunch of reasons why it has to be a venture backed company. Now that said, I think you're going to see the private equity world quickly follow all these small sub primes and people that contribute to

• 2:50:34Speaker 12

  the manufacturing base are going to not be able to keep up with the demand. And I think you're going to end up getting rolled up. You're going to see people doing even venture backed startups that sort of have a private equity sort of lens like what Jay Malik is doing. You're going to see these things start to come about where the private equity model is going to make sense. But even those things might be ventured back, just like you see Jay doing with Amka.

• 2:50:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. A lot of people think defense when they think American dynamism, but obviously the aperture is much broader. Can you talk about the interesting fringe of the of the circle of competence that for what you can put in the American dynamism bucket as it's grown. I've seen some energy deals. There's hardware, there's all sorts of stuff, but what excites you in this kind of like next era of American dynamism?

• 2:51:19Speaker 12

  Yeah, look, we're going to invest in anything that we, as we say, supports the national interest. So that defense is a big part of that. Public safety is another huge area people don't think about. I think that I think on the venture side, I'm probably the largest public safety investor in the country, if not the world. Energy, you know, we have this insatiable thirst for energy. So whether it's on energy generation or energy transmission or energy storage, those are all huge opportunities. You know, the battery ecosystem that we live in today is entirely dependent on China. That might be at risk down the road. So we need to have an energy storage infrastructure in this country that's not dependent on China. That creates a whole bunch of supply chain opportunities for everything from mining to reprocessing and

• 2:52:04Speaker 12

  production of minerals and turning those things into batteries is really important. So there's so the aperture is wide. And then I would include everything from transportation, logistics, education. You know, the tent is big. Rollo welcomes anybody that wants to build for American dynamism, but the investments tend to focus on defense, energy, space, public safety. Thanks.

• 2:52:27John Coogan?

  On on energy, I know you're in radiant. I'm a huge fan of Doug. What he's building is fantastic. And but it is small modular reactors. I think one megawatt reactors designed to replace a traditional diesel generator. I'm I'm kind of cautiously optimistic that we're going to see someone figure out how to just copy paste Diablo Canyon all over the country. But it feels like that might need some sort of change on the regulatory side. Are you optimistic about that being the catalyst? And will that happen? Or do we just need an entrepreneur who says, you know what? I don't care about the red tape. I'm going to go figure it out. I'm going to go copy paste Diablo Canyon 45 times. Or is that not even the right strategy?

• 2:53:12Speaker 12

  So look, we are all all all three of us on this on this pod right now have survived the greatest nuclear disaster in modern history, which is that after the Vogtle three and after Vogtle four reactors came online, we didn't just go build Vogtle five, six, seven, eight, nine, take all the workers who knew how to do it, all the supply chain pieces of the cement makers and the steel manufacturers who knew how to make all the components and pieces that we didn't just take them and stamp them out across the country. Like that was the biggest miss in our in our lifetimes, frankly, and it's very depressing. Now that said, from a from a startup standpoint, whether it's radiant, and you are correct, it's one megawatt. I think there's only two ways to win in nuclear. You have to do

• 2:53:55Speaker 12

  it at one megawatt or the like thousand, you know, the gigawatt scale. And there's a bunch of reasons why I think radiant will work and why the why the gigawatt scale can work. But in one one change on the regulatory front that I think people don't appreciate. Yes, we need reform in the in the NRC, and we need we need the regulators to be much more productive and positive to approving new reactors and making the fuel supply chain more readily available. But One of the things that's held up new reactor designs for so long is that when you make a change to your application, or you make a change to your design, you then have to go through this hugely laborious process of figuring out all the different statutes and regulations that your

• 2:54:37Speaker 12

  change impacts. And there's an entire army of consultants that get paid tens of millions of dollars a year to just help navigate all of the requirements for nuclear regulatory process, or fuel, how to transport fuel, all these things. With AI, you now have the ability to parse through all these regulations so that when you make a change, you can say, hey, you know, this, you know, hey, language model, tell me, what are the, of the 100,000 pages of regulatory paperwork, what are the things I need to go update in my application that are affected? So things that might have taken three months and $10 million of consultants' work now maybe just takes a few minutes of asking the GPT, hey, how do I update my application that, based on these changes? Or, and that applies to the regulator as well. The regulator

• 2:55:19Speaker 12

  can now go through the applications, if they're using a language model or GPT that's tuned for the regulatory code around whether it's fuel, or reactor, or transport, they can actually say, hey, look, how do I evaluate this application? What are the things I need to watch out for? And the entire process for nuclear regulatory approval should really be condensed dramatically. And that was never possible before the AI boom. So people don't always realize, while we need nuclear power to capture the AI opportunity, we're also going to use AI to, I think, enable the nuclear opportunity in future. That's very cool. Jordy, do you have anything?

• 2:55:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:52Speaker 12

  I have a question.

• 2:55:52Jordi Hays?

  My main question is, you know, I'm sure this is something that you guys talk about internally, but, you know, you have these categories, right? And let's call it defense, public safety. What's your kind of internal dialogue around making net new investments in something like public safety, when in many ways, I imagine flock safety is like, flock safety is the flock safety of XYZ, right? You know, like people, I'm sure come to you with pitches and, and oftentimes for things that are just inevitably on the flock safety roadmap, you know, and it's, and it's, why not just put another, you know, billion dollars into, into them is kind of a calculus that I'm sure you guys run.

• 2:56:36Speaker 12

  This is like the Anduril of whatever is going to be Anduril. Look, sometimes that's true and we just try to put more money into Anduril. We try to just put more money into Flock Safety. We've done that many times. I think that as we get smarter and learn more about these markets, we recognize that the surface area is just much, much more expansive than we realize. So take, for instance, 911 Services. Well, Flock Safety doesn't do anything with 911 Services. Being a 911 operator is a thankless job. It's an exhausting job. The turnover rate's very high and that entire world needs to be totally reimagined with AI, where you have AI operators answering the calls, triaging the calls, so that the operators can deal with calls more efficiently. First responders can have more information at their fingertips. Flock Safety is not going to do that.

• 2:57:21Speaker 12

  Another example, you read constantly about what's happening at Newark Airport with the FAA air traffic control system breakdown. Obviously, a venture-backed startup can do a much better job than whatever we've had for the last 30 years, trying to make the air traffic controllers better equipped with really dated radar systems, not getting the information they need about what's happening down on the ground at the airports. And so that's just an obvious opportunity. Well, neither Anduril nor Flock Safety is going to do that. So we just think these surface areas get bigger and bigger the more we look, especially the ones that have not been disrupted by modern software.

• 2:57:55Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 2:57:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Last question on space investing. There's a lot of startups that are predicated on declining launch costs. Are you seeing the trend in launch cost pricing and dollar per kilogram to orbit on trend or ahead of trend or are we lagging there?

• 2:58:18Speaker 12

  You would have to ask my partner, Catherine. I'm not the space expert, I have to confess. But I think that the cost is going down and we're seeing companies that are now in sort of that next echelon of what happens now that launch is achievable. What about when we really expand and be able to return things to Earth reliably and quickly? VAR just made a lot of progress there. So when that really unlocks, then what companies come next? I think is a question to ask and that we're asking.

• 2:58:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, she's been on the show. We didn't get to answer, we didn't get to ask her that, but we'll have to ask her the next time that she's on. But thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us. This was really great.

• 2:58:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to finally have you on.

• 2:58:54John Coogan?

  And enjoy the rest of LP Day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:58:58John Coogan?

  Yes, thank you.

• 2:58:59Jordi Hays?

  A little round of applause.

• 2:59:00John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Next up, Anish, who I think you're buddies with.

• 2:59:04Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:59:05John Coogan?

  You've chatted with a few times. I'm excited for this conversation. You can.

• 2:59:08Jordi Hays?

  Well, more than a few times. Dear friend.

• 2:59:10John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 2:59:11Jordi Hays?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:59:12John Coogan?

  Your boys.

• 2:59:13Jordi Hays?

  My boy.

• 2:59:13John Coogan?

  Your boy.

• 2:59:16Jordi Hays?

  I'm excited to chat with him.

• 2:59:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:17Jordi Hays?

  Long overdue to come on the show.

• 2:59:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've been trying to make it happen for a while. Glad we can make it happen today, even if it's just for 15 minutes. But we'll bring him in.

• 2:59:28John Coogan?

  What are you interested in talking through? What are the interesting angles to take with him today?

• 2:59:34Jordi Hays?

  He's focused on the application layer.

• 2:59:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:59:36Jordi Hays?

  So a lot of the, if you see.

• 2:59:39John Coogan?

  Consumer, enterprise, is there a delineation there? Both?

• 2:59:42Jordi Hays?

  Uh, both, but leaning consumer.

• 2:59:45John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:59:46Jordi Hays?

  So, um, yeah, I just want to get into the app layer, what he's seeing. How he's, you know, he's an extremely busy guy and I've seen his process.

• 2:59:58John Coogan?

  Oh, he's in Arc Boats. Have you seen that? The electric boat company?

• 3:00:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and that was like a super.

• 3:00:02John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 3:00:02Jordi Hays?

  That was a super, um, super random.

• 3:00:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:06Jordi Hays?

  Deal that.

• 3:00:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, it doesn't, doesn't fit. I mean, he says his AI apps investing in an electric boat company, but I've met the founders. Very, very cool company. Anyway, welcome to the stream, Anish. How are you doing?

• 3:00:15Speaker 13

  Hey, what's up, guys?

• 3:00:16Jordi Hays?

  There we go. What's going on?

• 3:00:18Speaker 13

  Why are we not in person? I want to see the size.

• 3:00:20Jordi Hays?

  I know. I know.

• 3:00:21John Coogan?

  We're gonna come see.

• 3:00:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, we, uh, we just, uh, we just signed a lease today, actually, for a new space. So next time you're in LA, we'll have to, uh, we'll have to have you over. And we do have a comically large gong that has not been shown. Uh, but it's about, it's about the size. It's, it's at least, I think, like seven feet tall. So you can look forward to hitting that in person.

• 3:00:43Speaker 13

  Fifty, man. We used to get to hang out all the time and now we've got to do this to see you.

• 3:00:46Jordi Hays?

  I know, I know, I know. We both, we both got busy, but it's great to see you. Thanks for making time today. There's so much, so much to talk about. I was telling John, um, before, uh, before you joined, a little bit of, uh, your background. But why don't, why don't you introduce yourself? And maybe give a quick overview on, on your focus at the firm.

• 3:01:06Speaker 13

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. It's great to see you, Jordy. So I'm focused on AI apps. I lead our consumer team. So we do a lot in consumer. We do a lot in B2B. I've started two companies. I sold the first to Google. Second, Credit Karma, which is why I've done a bunch of fintech investing as well. And this is great, man. I built my first company in 2008, and this is the most excited I've been since 2008. Like, everything is working, and people that are more technical are winning. So it's just like a fun time to be building or be around building.

• 3:01:32Jordi Hays?

  Did you always have conviction around the app layer? There was a period over the last few years where people were kind of oscillating between, you know, there's no value in the app layer, these are all wrappers, to back to, you know, just kind of back and forth. I'm guessing you never lost faith.

• 3:01:48Speaker 13

  I don't know, dude. I think the rapper thing was such a mid thought, you know, like, maybe for like two months. Give me a break. Am I allowed to swear in here or not?

• 3:01:57Jordi Hays?

  Uh, our kids are watching. Yeah, we keep it usually pretty clean, but you know. We're working on a bleep effect now, but yeah, go swear at the people.

• 3:02:06Speaker 13

  Okay, I will not. I'll save it for a beer when we hang out in person. But like, if you look at the kind of evolution of that comment in particular, sure, there was a minute when it seemed like you had to either spend $100 million to train a foundation model, or you had to be a quote-unquote rapper. But as soon as you started to see fine tuning, and then all the things that came after it, and then, of course, open source, that stopped being a consideration. So anybody who tells me that there's this like rapper concern hasn't thought deeply enough about it, I think.

• 3:02:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I also think there's an effect there, which is people that aren't seeing enough real data from companies at the application layer and seeing the growth rate of some of these companies, where you're meeting with, you're meeting with companies all the time that I'm sure you're, that are growing at rates that would have shocked you in 2021, and that you're even passing on because it's maybe not even best in class now, right? I don't, you know.

• 3:02:56Speaker 13

  Yeah, and the top decile is not zero to one in, you know, 12 months, or zero to two in 12 months. It's like zero to 10, zero to 15. We've seen 10 to 80. Like bananas. What is?

• 3:03:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, talk about open source a little bit. Are you seeing that impact financials in any way? You know, obviously tokens can be expensive. I've, we talked to some early stage founders who are pre-launch and they're like, I need $500,000 of like OpenAI credits to just do the pre-work that I need to do to make my, my, my startup work. I haven't heard about that. I mean, we, we were in the free AWS credits. If you go to YC, you get a bunch. People would not burn through those. They're burning through tokens. Have you, have you seen that as, as a meaningful cost driver at the early stage and has open source shaped that at all?

• 3:03:48Speaker 13

  Yeah, there's actually two things to talk about here. One is it's actually amazing that there are real costs because it forces companies to make money. So it forces them to charge real prices right away, which forces them to deliver value that substantiates the prices they're charging. So the business model quality is way better than it was three years ago because ironically, because the underlying software has gotten more expensive. So we're seeing way better, especially in consumer. Jordy, you know this, right? Like so much of consumer was this field of dreams investing. You know, we'll build it and someday we'll have ads, whatever that meant. And a lot of times it didn't work. And now like day zero, people are charging for subscriptions and they're making tons of money.

• 3:04:23Jordi Hays?

  And there's strong willingness to pay because people have had such magical experiences on the consumer side. People will be like, sure, I'll pay 50 bucks a month for this, right?

• 3:04:33Speaker 13

  Or more, you know, this is why the most interesting question right now for builders is what is the $1,000 a month skew of your product? Right? It's not can I charge? It's what is the like insanely expensive thing? And this is why I think for consumers, like you're going to have food, you're going to have rent and then you're going to have software. That's what the consumer spend looks like. On the open source question, John, I think what we're actually seeing is this routing layer emerge where companies are routing to different models based on capabilities and cost. So in some cases, we need something that an open source model can do, or you kind of make the cost benefit trade off. You do that. Other times you might route to, you know, Claude because you've got a coding thing that you need to generate or a long form writing. You know, OpenAI has got really good general purpose reasoning

• 3:05:16Speaker 13

  models. So the routing layer is actually a very interesting thing and it only exists because there's so many models and because there's open source. And that's changing the considerations for companies like OpenAI that are now moving up the stack. They bought WinSerp. They're doing, you know, a bunch of things at the application layer because they're no longer the sole provider of the models.

• 3:05:35Jordi Hays?

  How are you thinking about the line between consumer, prosumer and bottoms up adoption in the enterprise? Because I'm sure you've had this already where you make an investment into what looks like a prosumer tool and then suddenly you see some Fortune 500 company adopting it and, you know, different patches. But

• 3:05:55John Coogan?

  It used to be those early stage startups would be like, oh, well, one person from an @google.com email signed up. So let me just put Google on my landing page. Now it's like, yeah, they're actually getting meaningful adoption in the enterprise just from the bottoms up perspective. But yeah, what are you seeing?

• 3:06:11Speaker 13

  From my mindset, everybody's a consumer. I think the greatest thing that ever happened to consumer software is giving people expense cards at companies.

• 3:06:17John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:06:18Speaker 13

  Instead of IT buying something, individuals are buying something. And of course, it's not like you've got this work, this, you know, work brain and personal brain. Like you bring your personal brain to work and you want to use consumer grade software. And we're seeing products like Krea, K R E A. That's one of our best companies. You know, this team is like cracked. They like live to get every model. They're so technical and the product has a sort of aesthetic and a sophistication that a regular IT buyer might not understand. But it's getting huge adoption in the enterprise because the people that are in those companies want to be using the best tools and this is what they look like.

• 3:06:53John Coogan?

  How do you think about the gap between what's happening in these like super agile startups? It's a couple of people. They ramp to 100 million in sales really quickly. They're in the enterprise. They're making a difference. Consumer adoption versus like McKinsey is also making like billions of dollars, selling like PowerPoint decks on AI adoption. Is there a world where someone closes that gap and builds like a McKinsey for, as a startup or something? Or is that, is that a dynamic that's actually good? And maybe McKinsey's underrated in some weird way?

• 3:07:24Speaker 13

  I mean, I would argue that the main thing McKinsey knows, McKinsey knows how to do is sell to the enterprise.

• 3:07:28John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:07:29Speaker 13

  There is no product there. Their product is deep research, or worse.

• 3:07:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:07:34Speaker 13

  Everyone's a McKinsey consultant now.

• 3:07:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, because any CEO can, first question they ask, how should my company be using AI? And then they go and sign up for a bunch of stuff.

• 3:07:47Jordi Hays?

  Uh, how are you thinking, what's your timeline around ubiquity of ads in consumer AI? Because we're in this interesting moment where a lot of people are paying for models. Some people are using free version of models, but ads are, ads aren't ubiquitous yet, but the, the movement from OpenAI, uh, you know.

• 3:08:11John Coogan?

  Did you see Mo coming in?

• 3:08:12Jordi Hays?

  CEO, obviously signals.

• 3:08:14John Coogan?

  Big ads business there. My take, I was debating with Jordy was that I love the world where every human being, regardless of their economic condition, has access to the smartest possible model. But I'd love to know your take on ads in AI products because it feels like it's coming, but we haven't really seen it yet.

• 3:08:34Speaker 13

  I mean, I think the, the more spiritual question for us is what is the front door to the internet, you know? And the front door to the internet has been Google for so many years. And it's really interesting, actually, because Google is sort of search based and intention based and the browse based web that existed in the nineties, we've kind of moved away from a lot of the browse based behavior is now in Insta and Tik Tok and these other places.

• 3:08:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:55Speaker 13

  So we're all in the command line era of AI. Like ChatGPT is a command line product essentially, and I think it's going to evolve in a really different direction. And, and wherever that terminal state of that direction is, will define the monetization model. I'd be surprised if it's ads, maybe it will be. So I don't know that we'll ever see ads in the way that we see them today in the AI ecosystem.

• 3:09:17John Coogan?

  What about what's happening with the hyperscalers broadly? Obviously they're all investing insane amounts of money in CapEx, but they've been, by most reports, lagging on the product side. Is this something where their monopolies are so strong, they're just going to wait it out and develop the products internally? Is there a wave of M and A coming in AI apps? Are they going to try and build or buy? Or what do you, how do you think all this plays out in the big tech world?

• 3:09:44Speaker 13

  I mean, probably all the above. You know, number one, I think when you have a new technology, the existing companies do a good job of extending their lead in their existing markets with the new technology. So I think a bunch of that will happen. You know, Microsoft will get better at delivering the word processor they've always delivered, and Google will get better at delivering the search results they've always delivered. The real issue for Google is not somebody builds them on search, but that there's a new front door to the internet. So the new categories are where the upstarts will dominate. And that's where I think we'll see a lot of the M and A activity. But it's probably all the above. The one most surprising thing for me, not just for sort of incumbents, but often for incumbents, is just that people aren't using the products. Like I talked to VCs, you should test investors on this. Like, give me the five things that you're

• 3:10:26Speaker 13

  actually using every day. And if the answer is ChatGPT, come on, you know? So there's such an opportunity to build intuition by actually just using the products, and yet so few people do it. It's like this alpha that's hiding in plain sight.

• 3:10:38John Coogan?

  Well, that's great. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll definitely have you back.

• 3:10:41Jordi Hays?

  Come back on again soon. It took us way too long to do this.

• 3:10:44Speaker 13

  Next time in person, I want to ring the gong.

• 3:10:46John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Well, we have a soundboard now. We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:10:49Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, dude.

• 3:10:51John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. And next up, we have Marc Andreessen, the founder of Andreessen Horowitz.

• 3:10:57Jordi Hays?

  Why is nobody talking about Marc Andreessen?

• 3:10:59John Coogan?

  No one really knows about him. And I think what we need is just one more Twitter thread breaking his career down.

• 3:11:06Jordi Hays?

  This was something that probably made us laugh. It was a top three laugh last month was somebody posted a thread on Twitter and said, why is nobody talking about Marc Andreessen? I think that was probably entirely ChatGPT generated, but you shouldn't need much of an introduction.

• 3:11:26John Coogan?

  No. A big day for him. So we're glad to bring him in and ask him about open source, what he's learning from the dot com boom, American dynamism geopolitics, raising a huge fund. There's so many things to talk about. So excited to have Mark on the show. Excited to go deep with him on everything Andreessen's up to and the firm that he's built. So we will welcome him into the studio. Welcome. How are you doing, Mark?

• 3:11:54Marc Andreessen?

  Hey guys, what's happening?

• 3:11:56Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 3:11:56John Coogan?

  It's been a great day.

• 3:11:57Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna hit this real quick.

• 3:11:58John Coogan?

  We're here at the sound effect board. Thanks so much for joining us.

• 3:12:02Jordi Hays?

  And thanks for wearing a suit.

• 3:12:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:12:06Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, you look fantastic.

• 3:12:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, special occasion.

• 3:12:09Marc Andreessen?

  This podcast. I'd like to congratulate you on the podcast. I just wanted to start out by saying I've been watching. It's tremendous.

• 3:12:14John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 3:12:15Jordi Hays?

  Well, you know, I have a funny story. We, the moment that I realized that you were maybe paying a little bit of attention to what we were doing. And it gave me some conviction that we were on the right track as we did a reply guy of the week to this guy Baldow. And it was like this inside joke and I was like, holy shit, Mark just followed Baldow. Very talented guy, but yeah, so it's, thank you for, for following along and it's been awesome talking to your whole team today. They're fantastic.

• 3:12:41John Coogan?

  So let's go through some hot topics. I want to start with, we're in the AI era. You obviously lived through the dot com era. There's some comparisons. What have you learned and what, how is this time different? Companies are making more money, valuations are high, but how are you thinking about teaching the next generation? What they should learn or what they should ignore from the people that might say this is the dot com boom 2.0?

• 3:13:06Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so look, I guess I'd say, I think as Mark Twain once said, history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. And so, you know, I think people looking for like a direct compare contrast. Sometimes you see people like drawing charts or the stock market's going to do the same thing or whatever. Like, I don't think that stuff ever quite happens that way, but you know, it does rhyme. And you know, the line that John Doerr had in 1995, I remember was that the internet is a cream that you rub on investors to get them all excited.

• 3:13:29Marc Andreessen?

  So.

• 3:13:32John Coogan?

  John Doerr said that?

• 3:13:33Marc Andreessen?

  Yes, yes. I have many, many, many, many John Doerr lines.

• 3:13:39Marc Andreessen?

  Oh yeah, exactly. But, you know, so, you know, AI is like that now. You know, look, the AI, I'm sorry, the internet went through, you know, went through phases. People actually forget, but there was like, you know, there were like these, even the phases like on the way up from, you know, 95 to 2000. You know, there were these phases of like skepticism and panic. You know, it looked like the whole thing was going to fall apart in 98. And then, you know, in 2001, you know, after the dot com crash, you know, it's like all the big companies just like completely wrote the internet off. And they just said, you know, thank God that's over. And then, and then the internet itself just kept growing, right? And then, you know, by 2005, it was back to, you know, kind of, you know, back to, back to where it had been before. And we, you know, the, the rest was, was history. And so, you know, you know, people kind of go, people are kind of bipolar on these things. They kind of get overly excited, they get overly depressed.

• 3:14:23Marc Andreessen?

  I you know, I just always thought then, and I think now the substance matters. You know, the substance overwhelmingly overwhelmingly matters. And so, you know, is is is is the technology great? Like, are the products great? Are people using them? And, you know, AI is like off to the races so far. It's just like unprecedented rate of growth of actual use.

• 3:14:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:40Marc Andreessen?

  Right? Um, and you see that in in in all the numbers. And then, um, you know, look, the businesses, I, you know, I just, I talked to another conversation yesterday with like, you know, a company that's raised seed money. They're already over 10 million ARR with this incredible, you know, like, it's just, and you know, there's like, there's a lot of those. Like, you know, they're they're all over the place. And so, you know, the the the things that are working, the products are fantastic. Um, you know, the users are getting tremendous value out of them. And and and as you know, the base technology is moving really fast. So I feel really good about it.

• 3:15:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it can move faster because we have the Internet. Like, the these apps can get to hundreds of millions of daily active users because there's hundreds of millions of people. There's billions of people on the Internet. Uh, very interesting. Uh, not to linger on the dot com stuff too much, but I'd love to know, uh, a little bit of a history lesson around the way the browser wars played out. And is there anything you can learn from that that applies to the open source versus closed sourced AI debate? You've been very opinionated on that. I'd love to know kind of if is there, are there any previous eras of tech that you're mapping to when you think about open source AI?

• 3:15:41Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so, you know, look, you know, a lot of the browser wars, you know, there was kind of a big company, little company, kind of big company thing. And, you know, I think that's repeating itself. And, you know, I think one of the ways to think about what's happening right now is OpenAI is kind of growing up to become Google. And Google is kind of, you know, reinventing itself to be OpenAI. And so, you know, there's like a similar thing there. And, you know, then, you know, like Microsoft and Apple and Google control the operating systems, you know, for for end user devices. And they all have, you know, AI strategies, um, and Amazon as well. So, you know, a lot, a lot of those issues are going to are going to come back up. You know, two of these big companies are actually on federal trial right now, you know, in big FDC cases in in in Washington DC, actually in the same courtroom. Um, and so, you know, that many of those issues will will will repeat or, you know, will be intense. Um, you know, the open source thing in tech has always been the wild card. Um, I I think it's always been an incredibly positive wild card.

• 3:16:26Marc Andreessen?

  I, you know, I've always been, you know, enthusiastic supporter of it. My original work was all open source. And so, you know, the real thing that happened with open source is in operating systems, you know, basically Unix won and then, and then, you know, specifically Linux won, you know, for everything on, on, on the backend. And I, you know, like, you know, I remember like in the 1990s, there was like a furious operating system war and there were these companies that were making huge amounts of money on server operating systems, you know, companies like Sun and many others. And then, you know, Linux just like commoditized that entire thing.

• 3:16:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:53Marc Andreessen?

  You know, I think it's plausible, you know, we'll see, but it, look, it's plausible that open source AI may just be the standard, like it, you know, and whether, whether that derives out of, you know, DeepSeek or Llama, or, you know, any of the other new things that are coming out, you know, we'll see. But like, I think that's entirely feasible. And, you know, I think that would be obviously, you know, there are companies that would have to adjust to that if it happens. But the other side is if, if kind of the world had AI for free, I, I think that would be a pretty magical result also.

• 3:17:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally. I mean, shifting to the geopolitics, the geopolitics of all this, is it important not just that there's an open source champion, but that there's an American open source champion or a Western open source LLM?

• 3:17:29Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, I, I believe so. And I believe so for two reasons. One is just actually cultural reasons, which is just, you know, the, you know, open weights is great, but like the open weights, like they're baked, right? Like the, the, the, the training is in the weights and you can't really undo that. And so, and, and, and so are you being trained by, you know, a company or organization or set of people with American or Western values? Are you being trained, you know, by, by, by, you know, a company with, with Chinese values? And, and look, you know, there's issues on both sides, you know, they, they, you know, the American trained models have their, have their issues, they have their weirdnesses, you know, but the Chinese trained models, you know, look, they, they like score really well. You know, they literally, the Chinese benchmarks, they literally have like line items for like Marxism, right? Right? And, you know, DeepSeek like is like a hundred out of a hundred on Marxism, right? And so.

• 3:18:12John Coogan?

  Let's hear it for DeepSeek, really knocked it out of the park with that line. Congratulations.

• 3:18:16Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, exactly. It's fantastic, right? And so, well, it's like, all right. So these are gonna be, you know, this is gonna be the technology that's gonna intermediate your, the legal system, right? The courts, the education system, the medical system, like, you know, how, you know, you want your, you know, if you guys have kids, like, do you want your kids to, you know, your, your kids are gonna be learning from these things their whole lives. And, you know, do they have, you know, do they fundamentally have Western values? Do they, or do they have, you know, sort of, you know, CCP values? I think is really critical. And then the other thing, just I would say, just close your eyes and just imagine two states of the world. One is which the entire world runs an American open source L M. And the other is where the entire world, including the U. S. Runs on all Chinese software. And I, you know, I don't know, for me, that's a, you know, very straightforward. It's a very important topic and a very straightforward answer.

• 3:18:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, in the American dynamism context, is it kind of mission accomplished there? Or are there new territories that you're looking to expand into with the broader American dynamism thesis? We talked to D. U. About energy and whatnot. But what is exciting about you outside of artificial intelligence on the national interest investing side?

• 3:19:21Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so I mean, look, we made tremendous progress. I'm super proud of that team. And then, you know, this, this, in this new political environment, the new administration has embraced it. But also, a lot of Democrats are actually quite excited about it. Also, in our, you know, our event that we hold has, has lots of people from both parties. So I think there's a, you know, there's this unified view now, I think, in the American, at least in the political world of like, all right, it's, it's time, you know, it's time for the U. S. To step up on a lot of these things. It's time for the U. S. To build more. It's time for the U. S. To, you know, reinvent energy. It's, it's time for nuclear. You know, it's time for, you know, infrastructure, you know, housing, like all these things. And so, you know, I think there's a lot of momentum. I think we're at the very beginning of it. You know, like, one of the ways to think about what we're doing American dynamism is we're going after all the sectors of G. D. P. That are like, really big and not yet basically

• 3:20:04Marc Andreessen?

  affected by tech. And so, education, healthcare, housing, defense, law, you know, just to pick five, you know, those are giant, important slices of the economy that largely have not been transformed by technology in the last 50 years. You know, the U. S. Defense Department spends, you know, it's coming up on a trillion dollars. Very little of that money is going to technologies and companies that have been invented, frankly, in the last 20 years. You know, most military hardware in the Department of Defense is, you know, the F. 16 is from the 1970s. Right? Like, the, the U. S. Plane that does high altitude photography, the high altitude spy plane, it's still the U. 2.

• 3:20:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:39Marc Andreessen?

  Which is, it's just like, literally a 70 year old plane. So, like, there's just, like, enormous changes, you know, that really have to happen. And I think everybody kind of in the system knows that, but it's hard to get there. And I think, you know, a big part of that is, you know, these new companies, you know, that we're, you know, that we, that we try to support, you know, they, they need to show up and make their case. But, you know, the entrepreneurs are fantastic. And then, you know, we, we see more receptivity coming from the, the system than we ever have.

• 3:21:02Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the kind of position, the position that the firm is in today. In many ways, it feels like you and Ben and the team had somewhat of a crystal ball to see how the private markets were evolving, companies staying private longer, AI being this massive platform shift that's going to upend, you know, every industry. And then now the sort of political environment that enables industries to kind of get a second or third life. Did you just get lucky? Or did you see a lot of this coming?

• 3:21:33Marc Andreessen?

  I mean, I think we got a few things right. We got a bunch of stuff wrong. You know, we buried those ideas out back behind the shed. So, you know, we made a bunch of mistakes along the way or changed a bunch of things. But, you know, we got a few big things right. You know, I think the things I think we got right, you know, what is like the venture ecosystem, as you guys know, has just evolved enormously in a very positive way. And the kind of old model of having a sort of a bunch of kind of midsize firms, they kind of sit on San Hill Road and wait for the founders to, you know, to come in like that, that, you know, those days are kind of over. You have the rise of the high scale, you know, firms like, like us, but you also have the rise of all these seed and angel investors, you know, that are, that are really, you know, first money in and then really working closely with founders from the very beginning. And I think that, that ecosystem is healthier than ever and doing really well. And so, you know, that's been a big change. You know,

• 3:22:17Marc Andreessen?

  and the IPO is like, I don't know, I would say we have changed on that, which is I used to, I used to complain a lot, like I used to give these interviews years ago and, you know, like early 2010s, and just complain about like the, that it was basically becoming impossible for companies to go public and, you know, the things that had, had caused that to happen and what needed to change. And then, you know, of course, nothing happened. Like, you know, there were no reforms, you know, there were no improvements. If anything, everything got worse. And so, you know, we and others adapted to that by, you know, by basically putting, you know, putting ourselves in a position to fund companies, you know, later in their lifecycle at higher, higher, you know, bigger, larger amounts of money, you know, later growth stages. And, you know, it's now much more common for companies to do these tenders and these kind of private, you know, private sales even for their employees. You know, so that's been a big change. You know, but look, I

• 3:23:01Marc Andreessen?

  don't know, maybe the best directional bet we made was just technology was going to keep becoming more important. It's just like in, in every area of our life, the, the bet that, you know, in, in sector X, tech is going to be more important. They're going to be big tech companies built. They're going to really matter. That, that I think is, that I think that's a very good bet. I think frankly, I like, I don't, I, it's hard for me to ever see that ending.

• 3:23:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What are you, you know, you guys are with your LPs today, tomorrow. What are you hoping they, they take away from the event?

• 3:23:29Marc Andreessen?

  Oh, so this is not a John Dorr quote, but I'll give you another quote. When we were raising money originally, we're going around, we raised our first fund in 2009. And, you know, the world had, you know, completely collapsed after the financial crisis. And we, you know, went around and we sort of briefed all the, you know, all the VCs we respected to just give them a heads up what we're doing. And one of the GPs took us to the side of the end and said, you know, you guys have been dealing with like these, you know, very smart public market investors. He said, you know, that's part of the job you're going to hate the most is working with these LPs, you know, they're just terrible. And he said, the key is you need to treat them like mushrooms. You put them in a cardboard box, you put the lid on the cardboard box, and you put the box under the bed, and you don't open it for two years.

• 3:24:12John Coogan?

  That makes a ton of sense. They're like, what's the markup today?

• 3:24:17Marc Andreessen?

  That was somebody else. That was not John. And so, you know, look, the view Ben and I always had was the exact opposite of that, you know, which is our investors are our partners, you know, and, you know, and look, that's how we want to be treated by the companies we invest in. You know, that's how we always, you know, viewed it when we were running public companies. Our investors are our partners, you know, they're in it with us together, you know, they're making a big bet on us and trusting us. And then, you know, look, correspondingly, the promise that we made to them is like, look, we're going to try to like deliver, you know, excellent returns, but in this business, it's just going to take a long time. And, you know, you guys know this, for any company that really succeeds, it takes, you know, 10, 20, 30 years, you know, to really have it succeed. And like, and along the ways, along the way, like, a lot of things happen, you know, everything

• 3:24:59Marc Andreessen?

  from negative headlines to, you know, lawsuits, disasters, chaos, you know, all kinds of crazy, you know, twists and turns, changes happen along the way. And so I just think it's like really important for us as a firm, like, we really always need to make sure that we're treating our LPs as full partners. And so we, what we're trying to do is be is just really like open the kimono all the way, show them everything, kind of expose them to everything that we're doing, make sure they really understand it, go as deep as they want to go on the, on the technology and on the companies. And I, you know, this is like year 15 of this for us, and so far that, I think they would say that that's gone well.

• 3:25:27John Coogan?

  That's great. Last question from me, just general advice for the next generation of entrepreneurs. Are you hoping more college, less college, more coding, less coding? Like, there's a ton of technological change right now. How can the next generation of entrepreneurs set themselves up for success?

• 3:25:42Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so there's an old Steve Martin, uh, Steve Martin line, uh, you wrote this great book on, on how to be a successful stand-up comedian. Um, it was just, you know, a short, short little book, really well-written, and, you know, every aspiring comedian in the world opened it up and said Steve Martin's, you know, advice for being a great stand-up comedian, and it was, be so good they can't ignore you. Right? It's like, okay, thank you, Mr. Martin. You know, I'll get right on that. Um, but like, that, that remains the best advice, I think, which is just like quality, like we said, like quality bears out, like quality shows. Um, and so, you know, a, you know, really excellent thinking, um, coupled with a high degree of, you know, energy and courage. Um, you know, team building, a great team, and then a great product, you know, and a real, you know, insight into a market with customers.

• 3:26:24Marc Andreessen?

  Figuring out how to design, you know, not just design a product, but also design a business. Like, that's basically, like, my, my view, my view of that as an entrepreneur always was like, that's my job as an entrepreneur. Um, and like, if I, you know, if I put a lot of time and effort into that and very serious about it, I can hopefully do a good job. And I think time spent improving the quality of the thing, the, the product and the business is almost always better than time spent trying to, you know, I don't know, networking, or, you know, polishing a presentation, or, you know, trying to get positive press coverage, or kind of all the external stuff. Um, and so it's really, it's really the quality of the thing. And then, you know, again, my, you know, my hope would be like we as a firm and others like us, like that we really, you know, that we really recognize that and see it, you know, see it, you know, kind of see it when it shows up. And I think that's the thing, and then I, I think the other thing would be, look, like AI is superpowers, right?

• 3:27:07Marc Andreessen?

  And like, if you, as a founder, have access to, you know, just to, you know, to say chat GPT deep research. It's just like, oh, you know, it's just like, oh, my God, like, I have a, you know, I, like, I have a PhD level. It used to be so hard to get information, right? Um, and it, and it, and then it's been so hard, you know, even still to figure out what to do with it. And so to now have this tool, you know, these tools for thinking through everything and, you know, increasingly being able to do things like write code. Um, you know, we, we ought to see a generation of founders here that are just like incredibly capable. Uh, you know, relative to, to, you know, to what, to what we used to be like. Um, and, you know, and we're starting to see those, we're starting to see, you know, say a handful of those. You know, that's it. I'm still waiting for like the real conceptual breakthroughs. Like, I'm, I'm still waiting for the, you know,

• 3:27:50Marc Andreessen?

  the, you know, the company where it's like, you know, it's got a thousand employees, nine hundred ninety-nine are bots, like, you know, I haven't seen that yet. And you know, somebody's going to really figure out how to use this technology to really not not just bring a product to market, but like fundamentally change how companies operate. And I think that's probably, that's probably the next big unlock.

• 3:28:06Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about an individual's edge around their own proprietary knowledge? There'd been talk of with Warren Buffett, you know, retiring. He read something like a hundred thousand plus earnings transcripts. He had this incredible recall. You're often credited with having this incredible recall and it certainly gives, can give you an edge in thinking through, you know, net new opportunities and decisions. Do you, do you think that edge remains in a world where all human knowledge is accessible in a single query? Or what's your kind of mental model there?

• 3:28:41Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so I think it's gonna be, I mean, look, I think there's basically like two ways to really have a differentiated edge, like in general, right? There's sort of, you know, there's kind of go deep or go broad. You know, go deep has kind of become a more and more specialized expert over time. And, and you know, look, there are domains in which that like really matters, you know, biotech and, and things like, or you know, by the way, designing a, you know, AI, you know, working on AI foundation models like that, that stuff really matters. The deeper you are, the better. So there's, you know, certain fields where that really matters. I think for most fields though, now with these new tools, I would probably bet more on basically people who are able to be broad, which is to say, basically, can you know something about a lot of different, you know, kind of aspects of life and how the world works? And then you can use the tool, you can use the AI to go deep whenever you need to.

• 3:29:24Marc Andreessen?

  But then your job as the human is to basically then, you know, basically cross the domains, cross the disciplines. And, and look, you see this, if you talk to any of like the great CEOs, you see, you know, you kind of see this, which is like the really great, great tech CEOs, the great product people, and they're great salespeople, and they're great marketing people, and they're, you know, and they're great legal thinkers, and they're great finance people, and they're great with investors, and they're great with the press. Right? So it's this, it's this, it's, you know, this sort of multidisciplinary, you know, kind of approach and being able to cross domains. And I, you know, and I don't know, we'll see, we'll see how good, you know, we'll see how good the AI gets at that, hopefully gets good at that also. But, you know, that's, that in a lot of ways, you know, the entrepreneur has always kind of had the burden of, you know, for somebody who wants to do something serious, like they have to be like that, at least to some extent. And, you know, the, the best entrepreneurs of the future, I think, will probably be

• 3:30:07Marc Andreessen?

  like quite skilled at like six or eight things and then able to kind of cross and combine them.

• 3:30:12Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about the responsibility of the venture industry broadly to try to influence, you know, world, you know, outcomes in the world? I was sort of laughing, you know, less than a month ago, a lot of investors were clearly shifting capital out of the US and just, you know, YOLOing into French bonds and things like that. Venture capitalists obviously didn't do that, right? But at the same time, there was a high-profile story of a venture capital firm, you know, investing in a Chinese AI company that we won't mention here. And it got me thinking around there, you know, if you're operating a hedge fund, you can go invest wherever you want without a ton of scrutiny, right?

• 3:30:53Jordi Hays?

  People don't look at that as, you know, if you, you know, move assets into some, you know, Chinese market.

• 3:30:59John Coogan?

  It's not as impactful.

• 3:31:00Jordi Hays?

  It's less of a, yeah, it doesn't feel like you're betting against your own team in the same way. So I'm curious how you think of the generalized kind of responsibility of venture capitalists, even especially as the sort of AUM has scaled dramatically.

• 3:31:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, to actually bend the arrow of progress.

• 3:31:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:31:21Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, look, the big thing I think I would say is like, we always, we always thought and aspired that we were building things that mattered and that were going to have an impact on the world. And for a long time, you know, we were trying to convince people that we were doing that and they never quite took us seriously. Because it's like, you know, it's like, all right, databases, routers, like, okay, nice, you know, nice guys, I don't even know what those things are. You know, even personal computers, like a thing on my desk, I write letters on it, you know, whatever, like, just like, tech was never like relevant to politics, really. You know, and call this, I'm talking about like between the modern era, 1950s, call it through like the 2000s. And so, you know, and look, you know, generally speaking, like, our press coverage was, you know, generally people were like, wow, startups are exciting and, you know, when companies succeed, it's great. And then, you know, in the last 10 or 15 years, you know, like, questions like yours, you

• 3:32:05Marc Andreessen?

  know, have started to come up and then, you know, correspondingly, just as you know, like, just enormous amounts of kind of criticism attacks, you know, kind of indictments of, you know, people with all kinds of points of view on the industry. I would say, you know, in the beginning, that kind of irritated me because I had gotten used to the environment where either nobody cared about us or people just said nice things about us. What I came to realize is, we're the dog that caught the bus. Like, we actually now are building things that matter, right? Yeah. And so, you know, tech now interfaces directly, you know, when Elon goes into the car market, like, he just, you know, the repercussions of that, you know, to your point, like, on many countries are just gigantic. And there's, you know, a thousand examples like that that we could give, and, you know, AI probably being the biggest of all. And so, you know, look, it worked. Like, the stuff that we do now, the companies that we fund, they really matter. They really have, you know, really big implications for society

• 3:32:48Marc Andreessen?

  and for policy and politics and geopolitics. And so, mainly, I think the responsibility is on us as a firm, as well as, you know, our companies. Like, we need to go explain ourselves. You know, we need to go be present in the policy debates. As you know, like, we have a, you know, we have a huge push now into policy and politics that I never imagined we would have. By the way, it's something I got wrong. I never thought we would have that, and then it became very clear that we need that, you know, kind of for this reason. So, so, like, I just think that's part and parcel of, like, of it working. Like, we're gonna have to do that. And then the geopolitics, you know, the China thing, I think, is probably the most intense version of that. You know, I don't know, maybe that's when we got right. We just never really did anything in China for a bunch of reasons. You know, and, you know, look, and by the way, we'll see, you know, this is a fluid situation, and you guys, it's been publicly reported that there, you know, talks underway

• 3:33:31Marc Andreessen?

  with China, so the relationship with China could be better or worse, you know, in six months.

• 3:33:35John Coogan?

  I think that's what everyone wants, yeah. Yeah, I mean, everyone wants, like, cooperation in general.

• 3:33:40Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, like, look, it's possible. Look, I mean, I'll give you my favorite, here's my favorite story. So, in 20, I think it was like 2011, at the time, the Obama administration was trying to reestablish, was trying to reestablish a relationship with Russia. And there was a famous moment where the Secretary of State, who was this, this, this woman named Hillary Clinton, I don't know whatever happened to her, I hear rumors that she then went on, I don't know, did something in politics. But she was the Secretary of State, and there's this famous photo where she was on stage with Sergei Lavrov, who was the Foreign Minister of Russia, her counterpart, and she brought, like, a big plastic red button, which was the reset button, right, to reset, you know, warm relations with Russia. And then, and then what happened was, Medvedev, who was-

• 3:34:20John Coogan?

  Showman, showman shirt.

• 3:34:22Marc Andreessen?

  The reset, the reset air horn. Exactly. And then Medvedev, who was the Russian, he was Putin's number two, actually came to Silicon Valley, and the Secretary of State's office called all around to Silicon Valley, saying, "Please, you guys, roll out the red carpet to Russia. There are new friends. Like, do everything with them, do whatever they want. You know, please go invest in Russian companies. Russia's building this new Silicon Valley. See what you can do to support them." And so it was like, you know, like it was just like a love fest. And then, you know, fast forward four years later, and you know, Putin became, you know, butler, as they say, and you know, just, you know, and then, you know, Russiagate, like everything that followed. And so, look, I would just say, part of being citizens, I think, is, you know, we're just gonna have to navigate through shifting geopolitics. Our view, and quite honestly, like, our view is just, we're gonna just put ourselves squarely on the side of the United States.

• 3:35:06Marc Andreessen?

  Our, we, we just say, our foreign policies affirm is the United States foreign policy. If they, you know, if they don't want us to do things in China, they don't. If, by the way, if they come to us and they say we should do more, like, you know, we'll, we'll look at it at that point. But, you know, we're, we're, we're, we're trying to be good citizens among everything else.

• 3:35:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense.

• 3:35:21Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the evolution of the A16Z brand. You guys came out with a new logo and website. And as always, you're good at getting the attention of the internet.

• 3:35:32John Coogan?

  I was a fan of this.

• 3:35:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we talked about it on the show. We liked it.

• 3:35:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I think it's something that's different and, and will age very well. But I wasn't exactly sure, like, what are you trying to say with it? What are the references? And even what was the process? Like, did you pick the color? I don't know. Or even that conversation, I wouldn't know more about the brand.

• 3:35:51Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. So first of all, um, you know, I know we got some Twitter controversy on it. And I just, I just want to thank Kanye West.

• 3:35:58John Coogan?

  For drowning that out entirely.

• 3:36:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:36:01Marc Andreessen?

  Like, I don't think we're a topic of conversation at the moment. So, yeah, so that, that worked out well. Um, so, anyway.

• 3:36:10Jordi Hays?

  Heat shield.

• 3:36:11Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, look, so we had this incredible designer, Greg Truesdale. He's got, he's got a team. They did a fantastic job. I worked, I did, I worked closely with them on it. I have no design skills, but I provided a lot of input. Um, you know, I think the big thing about it is what it's intended to sort of reflect is, is like an embrace of what I think is a broad, a broad set of cultural changes that are happening right now. You know, frankly, you guys are a part of as well, which is this, what I would describe as an, I don't know, 15 year era of, I don't know, like, cultural, almost shrinkage, everything getting, you know, and you see that in the design world, it's like everything getting like ultra-clean, minimalistic, and then culturally, everybody getting like very cautious and careful about what they say. And, you know, with all this kind of censorship and speech control, and then, you know, this whole thing of everybody needs to feel bad about everything all the

• 3:36:54Marc Andreessen?

  time, and everybody needs to feel bad about the country, and bad about their, you know, ancestors, and bad about this, and bad, you know, everybody's just miserable all the time. Like I just think like that whole thing got kind of this, you know, I don't know, you may call it like you know, neopuretonism or something.

• 3:37:07John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:37:07Marc Andreessen?

  Um, like that thing kind of crested in, I don't know, 2021 or 2022. And, and you know, basically in the last three years, I, I think there's this like renewed sense of energy, enthusiasm, ambition, um, you know, uh, achievement, um, dynamism, um, but like, you know, and again, it's like literally, yeah, we should have nuclear energy. Yeah, we should have rockets going to Mars. You know, yeah, we should like, we should, we should have these things. Um, and that, you know, that it's good to succeed. Um, it's good to build businesses. It's good, it's good, it's good to make, make, make new things in the world, you know? And yeah, we should have the thousand, you know, yard tall, you know, shiny colossus on, on El Catraz Island.

• 3:37:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. I was, I was gonna ask, my, my only request is like, make it, make it real, you know? Like, like make it the statue of liberty of the West Coast.

• 3:37:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm imagining a massive instantiation of that coin in the office and maybe physical versions.

• 3:37:56Jordi Hays?

  Coin, like the, the figure.

• 3:37:57John Coogan?

  The actual figure. True. Yeah.

• 3:37:59Marc Andreessen?

  Yes.

• 3:37:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, we need a monitor.

• 3:38:00Marc Andreessen?

  You know, she has a name. She has a name. Did you know that?

• 3:38:01John Coogan?

  She has a name. Well, no, what's the name?

• 3:38:03Marc Andreessen?

  She has a name. Technomedes.

• 3:38:04John Coogan?

  Technomedes. I love it. That's fantastic.

• 3:38:07Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 3:38:08John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 3:38:08Jordi Hays?

  All right. Well, Technomedes, buy a plot of land somewhere visible from the Golden Gate and just, you know, build it a mile high, please.

• 3:38:17John Coogan?

  Mile high.

• 3:38:18Jordi Hays?

  Make it happen. Make it happen.

• 3:38:20John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for joining. This is fantastic.

• 3:38:22Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for coming on. Really enjoyed it. Have fun with the, with the team and LPs. Cheers.

• 3:38:26John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Bye.

• 3:38:29John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Let's give it up for Marc Andreessen. Absolute dog. Fantastic allocator, size lord, all of the above.

• 3:38:38Jordi Hays?

  People love to yap online, but you talk to the team and it's hard not to be giga bullish.

• 3:38:45John Coogan?

  For sure. There will never be enough venture capital. We didn't even get to that. But we'll save that for Ben. Yeah, we'll save that for Ben. Anyway, should we do some timeline? Should we get out of here? What are you thinking, Jory?

• 3:38:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, John, I'd like to talk to you about Figma.

• 3:38:58John Coogan?

  Okay, tell me about Figma.

• 3:38:59Jordi Hays?

  Is the tool to design and build products. It's a tool that we use. Everybody knows that already. I've been a DAU for my entire career at this point, and we are very lucky to have them as a sponsor and a partner on the show. Crazy story, by the way, from David George earlier.

• 3:39:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:39:19Jordi Hays?

  Talking about how Dylan came to him during the middle.

• 3:39:23John Coogan?

  That is so funny.

• 3:39:24Jordi Hays?

  You want to invest?

• 3:39:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, we've been talking about this for a while. Yeah, same price. We've been discussing the price, right?

• 3:39:29Jordi Hays?

  How about now?

• 3:39:30John Coogan?

  That price. But I mean, that was a fantastic time to actually invest.

• 3:39:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the NBA had basically, you know, just shut off.

• 3:39:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:39:38Jordi Hays?

  And that was when, how about now?

• 3:39:41John Coogan?

  How about now?

• 3:39:42Jordi Hays?

  Put your money where your mouth is.

• 3:39:43John Coogan?

  That's why Dylan's one of the best to ever do.

• 3:39:45Jordi Hays?

  But I really appreciated getting a snapshot of everybody at the firm. It's such a

• 3:39:52John Coogan?

  It's fun.

• 3:39:53Jordi Hays?

  Massive organization, like Eric said, 600 million, or sorry, 600 people, not 600 million. Sorry, we're in hour, hour four of the show.

• 3:40:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:40:05Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, what else we got?

• 3:40:06John Coogan?

  What else is in the news? Tigers kind of out of the game. They led 47 Series As in 2022. This is from Aaron Harris. Tiger hasn't led a Series A since June 2023, although we saw that they are changing their strategy and they're doing pretty well in their OpenAI investments. So we'll see how the overall fund performs, but they were, you remember back in 2022, they were going crazy. They would meet a founder, term sheet, same day. On the call, they would give you a decision. It was actually really nice because you just take the meeting and you know exactly where you stood by the end of the call. But obviously a shifting strategy for Tiger and the crossover funds. A lot of them stepped back.

• 3:40:43Jordi Hays?

  All I want is for them, is for OpenAI to hit that one T mark and then Tiger says, you know what? We actually, we're on to something there.

• 3:40:53John Coogan?

  There we go. It was the best of times.

• 3:40:55Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't even, it felt like they were doing more than 47 Series As, but that was 2022.

• 3:41:01John Coogan?

  Well, that's just the Series As.

• 3:41:02Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah.

• 3:41:03John Coogan?

  They were doing Bs and Cs. They were doing everything. Thing really fast.

• 3:41:06Jordi Hays?

  But also 2022 was, there was really only like

• 3:41:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:41:09Jordi Hays?

  Four or five months where things were really ripping and then things became, it became obvious that, that things were getting a little dicey.

• 3:41:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:41:18Jordi Hays?

  Interest rates went up.

• 3:41:19John Coogan?

  No board seats, moved very fast. That, uh, that Walmart capital is Ev Randall that Kleiner Perkins refers to, refers to refer to it as. Ryan Peterson says, a gentleman is never rude, except on purpose. And Paul Graham chimes in to say, the, the original version, a gentleman is someone who is never unintentionally rude, makes a stronger claim. It's defining the term instead of just telling us one thing that's true of them. I like this because it's, it's essentially a coinage. So instead of saying a gentleman is never rude on purpose, say, a gentleman is someone who's never intentionally unintentionally rude.

• 3:41:54John Coogan?

  Define a gentleman. It's kind of re-coining the phrase. So you take, you take a word that everyone knows, you know, uh, an entrepreneur is someone who never accepts a down round. Who always, it always announces a preempted round, who always has.

• 3:42:10Jordi Hays?

  Always gets preempted.

• 3:42:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, a generational founder.

• 3:42:12Jordi Hays?

  They go out to raise, they go out to raise, they, they still get preempted.

• 3:42:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's great. Uh, Packy's talking about Harry's. They just launched a new razor. They've been in the business for so long, these Harry's guys.

• 3:42:23Jordi Hays?

  You had a good take here.

• 3:42:24John Coogan?

  So they, so it, it's a very polished ad. It is honestly a fantastic ad. That's like half vibral, half comedy. The founders are in there. I thought it was a fantastic ad and I learned that, hey, they launched a new razor. It's kind of like four blades has a pivot. So it's a more modern design. Apparently that was under patent. The patent expired, so they were able to enter that market and they already own a German razor factory. Do you know the story of Harry's? They, they, their seed round was like a hundred million dollars and they bought a razor factory.

• 3:42:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:42:52John Coogan?

  Because the, the whole industry was very monopolistic. Yeah. And, um, but they're, they're positioning themselves as like, we're going up against big razor. Which is true, like Gillette is a huge, huge company. Um, but also I think that they tried to sell themselves to big razor at some point. And so there, there's a question here in my mind of like, do, can they really say that they're a little tech still? Can they really say that they're a little razor once you've done the knee?

• 3:43:16Jordi Hays?

  At what point do you just claim, we're now a big razor?

• 3:43:19John Coogan?

  Exactly. I think Harry's is so Lindy at this point. It's over a decade old. Uh, you're part of big razor. I'm putting you in the big razor bucket.

• 3:43:27Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:43:27John Coogan?

  Anyway. Sean Frank had a good post. Talked to a founder today. Her business was worth more than Ridge, growing 100% year over year. I asked a personal question. How much money do you have? Oh, basically none. Business is huge, growing fast, only ever raised a small amount, but no cash for salaries, no cash for dividends, no secondaries. I think this is really stressful. She's top 1% of 1% of outcomes. On paper worth hundreds of millions, still has to rent an apartment. Rush to your first million liquid, even if you have to grow slower, even if you have to take a lower valuation to get secondaries. Money doesn't make you happy, but it certainly reduces the level of stress. So, interesting take from Sean.

• 3:44:06John Coogan?

  What else is here? Oh, we gotta cover the 747s. They're the 747-8 Boeing Business Jet, BBJ, VVIP aircraft. Here's a comprehensive list of these planes. People think 747s are around. People think private jets are around. Really, the overlap of private jets that are at this scale is quite, quite small. And so Qatar has three, Kuwait has one, Oman has one, Brunei has one, Morocco has one, Turkey has one, Saudi has one, Egypt has one, and the US technically has two for Air Force Ones, and that's it. And so, first, shame on all of the tech elite for not stepping into the 747 BBJ game.

• 3:44:49Jordi Hays?

  What, Spiegel's?

• 3:44:51John Coogan?

  He's a 737.

• 3:44:53Jordi Hays?

  And the other one, the other one that we saw, which will go unnamed recently?

• 3:44:57John Coogan?

  That was also a 757. So 747 is the biggest, the most expensive.

• 3:45:01Jordi Hays?

  Truly elite.

• 3:45:02John Coogan?

  Truly elite. Two stories in many configurations. Absolutely massive plane, very expensive. And it's, of course, the plane that is being rumored to have been delivered to Trump as a gift, and there's a lot of debate over that. But, I mean, I say America needs more 747s, BBJs, for sure. That's essential. This Packy post kind of relates to what Mark was talking about. Everything is technology, is breaking down. 2025 venture-backed exits over $1 billion, and you're gonna have to hit the size gong multiple times for this, because we got Wiz at $32 billion, Core Weave at $23 billion. Ampere at 6.5 billion, Deliveroo, it's 3.9 billion, Windsurf at 3 billion,

• 3:45:42John Coogan?

  Deribit at 2.9, MoveWorks at 2.9, Scorpion at 2.5, Poppy at 1.7, NinjaTrader at 1.5, Hidden Road at 1.3, and Seven Rooms at 1.2. So, an absolute stacked year of liquidity above the $1 billion mark for tech companies. Everything is technology. Thanks for highlighting it, Paki. You'll love to see it. The data's from PitchBook, and he's breaking it down for you. Oh, I like this post from Signal, and then we'll get out of here. "You should be able to trade employees like sports teams trade players. Would be hilarious. Today, OpenAI traded two mid-level engineers for a researcher and a veteran UX manager. There should be a trade deadline every year."

• 3:46:22Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I love Signal, but I basically posted this exact same thing like six months ago. You remember that?

• 3:46:27John Coogan?

  I think you did.

• 3:46:27Jordi Hays?

  It also went equally viral, so I think I must have.

• 3:46:35John Coogan?

  He's trading your post for one of his posts, and he's getting Elon bucks.

• 3:46:39Jordi Hays?

  I love to see it. I love to see it.

• 3:46:41John Coogan?

  Play the hits. If you're not gonna play them, he's gonna play them.

• 3:46:43Jordi Hays?

  I love to see it.

• 3:46:44John Coogan?

  Anyway, the last piece of news from Semi Analysis. "Over the past 30 days, the tech leads responsible for RockM, PyTorch have submitted 14 PRs. That's AMD's implementation of PyTorch that runs on AMD graphics cards that have been behind. Versus Nvidia, PyTorch tech leads have submitted 22 pull requests. And so AMD is finally catching up to Nvidia. Just like VLLM maintainers, we are working on internal infra pipeline to track the quantity and quality of PRs for Nvidia and AMD to gain additional insights. Stay tuned." And so Dylan Patel from Semi Analysis, fantastic analyst, obviously, but he's coming on the show in a few weeks. We'll have to ask him about the race between AMD and Nvidia,

• 3:47:28John Coogan?

  but it feels like it's heating up, and I love a horse race in tech.

• 3:47:32Jordi Hays?

  Love a horse race, John.

• 3:47:33John Coogan?

  So stay tuned. We'll see you tomorrow. We have a massive show for you. And we're gonna be in a new studio soon, so please leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify.

• 3:47:41Jordi Hays?

  Our board of directors said if we don't ask you to leave a review on Apple and Spotify.

• 3:47:47John Coogan?

  If you like the show at all, leave us five stars.

• 3:47:50Jordi Hays?

  They said they're gonna pull the plug.

• 3:47:51John Coogan?

  We're gonna pull the plug.

• 3:47:52Jordi Hays?

  Go do it. Thank you for tuning in today. We love doing this show. And we hope you have a wonderful evening.

• 3:47:58John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you later.

• 3:47:58Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:47:59John Coogan?

  Bye.