Delian Asparouhov, Michael Mignano, Chrisman Frank, Kennan Davison, Markets are Down, We Love Bubbles

TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@TechnologyBrothersPod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV (01:14) - Markets are Down (22:47) - History in the WSJ (34:10) - OpenAI's $12B Deal with CoreWeave (39:30) - CPG Takeover (51:20) - Meghan Markle's Netflix Show (57:45) - The Timeline (01:07:43) - Kennan Davison (01:23:33) - Chrisman Frank (01:50:30) - Michael Mignano (02:22:45) - Delian Asparouhov

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  Early light, what so proudly we hailed.

• 0:07John Coogan?

  We're live, we're live, we're live.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  Welcome to TVPN. It is Tuesday, March 11th, 2025. We are live from the temple of technology.

• 0:18Jordi Hays?

  The fortress of finance.

• 0:20John Coogan?

  The capital of capital. This show starts now. We got a great show for you today. Even though the market's down, we are

• 0:29Jordi Hays?

  We are up.

• 0:29John Coogan?

  Best of it. We are up. It's a, it's a golden era for short sellers.

• 0:33Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 0:34John Coogan?

  That's what it is.

• 0:34Jordi Hays?

  It's a bull market.

• 0:35John Coogan?

  It's a bull market in put options. Yes. So rough times out there, but no matter what you're doing, you gotta do it on public. Go to public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. Multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, trusted by millions. Get on public, move your money around, do whatever you think is best, do your own research and make a play.

• 0:55Jordi Hays?

  You know what we're a fan of?

• 0:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:57Jordi Hays?

  Buying when others are scared.

• 1:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's good.

• 1:01Jordi Hays?

  That's what we do.

• 1:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02Jordi Hays?

  When others are There's blood in the streets.

• 1:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, when others are fearful.

• 1:05Jordi Hays?

  When others are fearful, we get greedy.

• 1:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, greedy, greedy when others are fearful. Anyway, moving on, we're talking about the market crash. Here's what happened. The Wall Street Journal is breaking it down. The stock market yesterday, trade threatens sent the Dow down more than 600 points. The Dow industrials dropped after President Trump said he would ramp up tariffs on steel and aluminum from Canada. 50% shares of industrial and financial firms were among the biggest decliners in the S and P 500. All 11 sectors in the broad index were trading lower. Fears about a recession sparked a sell-off Monday with sliding tech shares spurring the Nasdaq's biggest loss since 2022. President Trump declined to rule out a recession on Sunday and said his economic shakeup would

• 1:52John Coogan?

  result in a period of transition. It's, it was a really emotionally charged decline, said Katie Stockton, founder and managing partner of Fairlead Strategies. But she added that this is more than just a brief pullback that we're going through. New Labor Department data showed that the U.S. had 70 7.4 million job openings in January, up from 7.51 million in December, slightly above the consensus for 6.7.6 million openings. So unemployment ticking up, too many job openings, not enough people getting placed in their roles. Big tech stocks recovered. They started to recover from some of their losses. Tesla shares regained some ground after the EV maker shed 15% of its market value on Monday.

• 2:37Jordi Hays?

  I saw an account, I saw an account post, you know, there's that iconic shot of, what's the, Chris Paul is the basketball player where he's like, Chris Paul drills a three to close the lead, close the gap to 40 points. That's Tesla going up 3% today after being down.

• 2:59John Coogan?

  It's, it's rough out there, but we've said it before, naturally aspirated V12 with a gated manual shifter in the next Tesla Roadster, and it's a $10 trillion stock. You heard it here first.

• 3:11Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 3:11John Coogan?

  Verizon stock.

• 3:12Jordi Hays?

  Not financial advice.

• 3:13John Coogan?

  Not financial advice. But if you see them deliver a naturally aspirated V12 with a gated manual shifter.

• 3:20Jordi Hays?

  We know that we will be going turbo long.

• 3:22John Coogan?

  We will be going turbo long. Verizon stock dropped more than 7% was the weakest performer of the Dow industrials Tuesday morning. A company executive flagged heightened industry competition at an investor conference. So rough time out there.

• 3:35Jordi Hays?

  Monopolists complains about competition.

• 3:37John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. So a lot of, a lot of reactions on the timeline. A lot Gil here, he says, quote, and he puts in quotes, "Most things are not as serious as they feel in the moment." I don't know if that was about the market crashing, but it seemed like it was a subtweet, right?

• 3:53Jordi Hays?

  It's all priced in.

• 3:54John Coogan?

  I think so. But yes.

• 3:56Jordi Hays?

  I was just workshopping a post, which was being greedy is low key goaded when others are fearful.

• 4:07John Coogan?

  Extremely stupid, but you send it. Yeah, I love it.

• 4:12John Coogan?

  What was the original format of that? I don't know. It was something funny. I like that. Yeah, just send it. Okay, anyway.

• 4:18Jordi Hays?

  This is just for the record, it's a Warren Buffett quote. It says, be fearful when others are greedy.

• 4:24John Coogan?

  And be greedy when others are fearful. And so buy low, sell high. Anyway, the Kobe Essie letter has a thread here on the real reason that markets are crashing. And I thought we could maybe take a tour through this. Over the last two months, the S and P 500 and crypto have raised combined five and a half trillion dollars in market cap. I think we need a moment of silence for that.

• 4:46Jordi Hays?

  Yep. This moment of silence is brought to you by public.com. Fantastic multi-invest multi asset investing products trusted by millions.

• 4:55John Coogan?

  Okay, that's enough silence. We have, we have just witnessed one of the most sudden shifts in sentiment since 2020. What's happening? Let us explain. Let's begin with the timeline. Markets have known the trade war was coming since as early as mid 2024. In December, tariff threats ramped up. We saw many all time highs in the S and P 500. After that, even after the trade war began February 1st, we saw more all time highs. Since February 20th, the S and P 500 has raised a whopping four and a half trillion in market cap.

• 5:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just, I guess, quick comment here. Saying markets have known the trade war was coming is not exactly.

• 5:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:34Jordi Hays?

  Not exactly, like, it's hard to say, or it's hard to basically position that as fact. This is stated as a fact, but this is clearly their opinion, right? Many people thought Trump would run, but many people also thought Trump was not actually serious about tariffs.

• 5:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:50Jordi Hays?

  And still, in many ways, the market isn't fully pricing in tariffs because there's sort of this back and forth. He announces something, he just announced 50% tariffs on Canadian aluminum products this morning, but who knows if that's real, right? There was like a day last week, I think it was Wednesday, where if you paid some big tariff bill, like, you know, at the end of the day, like, it was like, you shouldn't have paid it, like, you know,

• 6:16John Coogan?

  Very odd.

• 6:16Jordi Hays?

  Very chaotic. So I think the markets.

• 6:21Jordi Hays?

  When you look at the last Trump presidency and what the stock market did then, I think the markets to date, the sentiment has just been Trump presidency generally good for the economy because he's a guy that cherishes the economy.

• 6:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, the whole thing has become very oddly political. I mean, we covered it during the Trump pump post.

• 6:42Jordi Hays?

  Trump presidency becomes political.

• 6:44John Coogan?

  It's not that. It's that for the first time in my life, at least, I feel like like small 2% moves in the market are driven by executive level. Like the narrative is this is the this is the problem of the president.

• 7:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:02John Coogan?

  Like during the housing crash, you know, there's like a multi multi month sell down and a big recession and way over leveraged. And then people start asking questions and they start asking questions about, well, who's responsible? And in part, the banks and part in deregulation, they go back and they find different different pieces of legislation that might have led to this. Some of it came from the Bush administration, some of it came from the Obama administration. And then, and so it becomes like this bigger narrative, but this is the time where like crypto pops and people will be like, oh, this is because of Trump. And then, and then, you know, S and P goes down to, you know, a couple of percent and people will be,

• 7:41John Coogan?

  this is because of Trump. It's the worst thing ever. And it all just, my takeaway is that we need a president who is just hyper focused on the short term stock market returns. And that's all they're doing every day. They're not thinking long term at all. Like a high frequency trader type.

• 7:57Jordi Hays?

  It's like a crypto protocol founder.

• 8:00John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 8:00Jordi Hays?

  Posting.

• 8:01John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 8:01Jordi Hays?

  Which is, which is in many.

• 8:03John Coogan?

  Feedback into the market.

• 8:04Jordi Hays?

  Trump is the closest president we've had.

• 8:06John Coogan?

  Very close, very close.

• 8:08Jordi Hays?

  But he's not doing enough.

• 8:09John Coogan?

  Even, even he's put out statements like, okay, I don't really, I'm not worried about the short term performance of the stock market. I'm trying to make America great again over some long period of time. No, I want him to say, yes, I do care. If the stock market went to 2%, down, interest rates are negative.

• 8:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's some angle here where he says, in the first quarter of my presidency, the S and P 500 was. X Y Z.

• 8:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:31Jordi Hays?

  By the fourth, it had, you know, more than three X.

• 8:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:35Jordi Hays?

  You know, so he's maybe he's positioning, positioning, he's really playing the long game.

• 8:39John Coogan?

  Maybe the president should have some sort of, you know how Elon had that pay package that was like, if he can get the, if he can get the Tesla stock up to a certain amount, he gets more of it. He gets rewarded for high share prices. Is that effectively?

• 8:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:50John Coogan?

  The president should have that where like, if the S and P goes up by a, by a certain amount, then they get to stay in power longer. But if it drops, then they get fired. And then we get a new president and we get new blood.

• 8:59Jordi Hays?

  Hyper financialized.

• 9:01John Coogan?

  Hyper financialized.

• 9:02Jordi Hays?

  It's already kind of like that, right? You see these senators that are just running up these crazy, you know, basically operating hedge funds.

• 9:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:09Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, the more, the more, the better they do in the, in the public markets, the more they can invest into their campaigns, which the more inside information they can get, the more they can be better investors.

• 9:18John Coogan?

  This is a great virtuous cycle, is what they call it. One hand washes the other.

• 9:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:23John Coogan?

  That's what we're going for here.

• 9:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. All right, let's get, let's get back into this.

• 9:27John Coogan?

  Anyway, the NASDAQ is sadly just eight percent away from entering a bear market for the first time since 2022. What changed so quickly? The trade, the Kobe S E letter is arguing the trade war is simply the scapegoat. The real reason behind the market's decline is a sudden shift in risk appetite. We've gone from extreme greed to extreme fear in a matter of days. Positioning was so polarized that we have swung in the complete opposite direction. And long Mag 7 is the most crowded trade. Everyone agrees that tech is great and the AI narrative. And so everyone's pumped into that. Where it gets even more interesting is that institutional capital exited before this decline in tech stocks.

• 10:07John Coogan?

  Heading into 2025, hedge fund exposure to Mag 7 stocks fell to a 22 month low. Let's take a look at the divergence between the NASDAQ and fund positioning. On February 9th, institutional investors built the largest Ethereum short position in history. This came as retail investors piled into crypto on the hopes of a US strategic reserve. Crypto is down over one trillion.

• 10:30Jordi Hays?

  One institution. Went turbo long and that was World Liberty Fy, which

• 10:35John Coogan?

  ETH?

• 10:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:36John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 10:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. What is it? Eric Trump was basically Ethereum bull posting, you know, saying like now it's my opinion, but now is a really good time to be stacking.

• 10:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:47Jordi Hays?

  In there. Unfortunately, another moment of silence.

• 10:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, not if they didn't sell yet, but they

• 10:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is another thing the president could change. You know, the whole like, oh, not financial advice. I'm responsible.

• 10:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:58John Coogan?

  You could get rid of that.

• 10:59Jordi Hays?

  A centralized blockchain that could fix, do price fixing.

• 11:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:06Jordi Hays?

  Would be, would be cool.

• 11:07John Coogan?

  Step one is permanently set rates to negative 10%. And then the fund rates, the Fed funds rate needs to legally be negative 10% forever.

• 11:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:18John Coogan?

  And then, and then maybe permanently, you could just legally mandate that the S and P grows at 10% a year forever.

• 11:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's something there.

• 11:26John Coogan?

  Prices. Yeah.

• 11:26Jordi Hays?

  There's something there.

• 11:27John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 11:28Jordi Hays?

  We should workshop this more.

• 11:31Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, maybe throw it into a blog post.

• 11:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Crypto is even more supportive of our thesis. Take a look at the bullish crypto developments that have happened over the last two months. Even the, even the US Bitcoin reserve became a sell the news event. So what's changed in December?

• 11:45Jordi Hays?

  Many, and to be clear, many people said Trump launching a token is so obviously the top because there's nothing. There's really nothing. The US government can't launch a token, right? It would just be competing. I mean, nothing's off the table anymore, but you know, competing with your own currency is not.

• 12:03John Coogan?

  Every time someone said, oh, this is the, this is the end of the road for the craziness in crypto.

• 12:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:08John Coogan?

  They've been pretty wrong.

• 12:09Jordi Hays?

  Very clearly felt like a massive, you know, sort of dying breath of a, of a bull market.

• 12:15John Coogan?

  And retail had just gotten hosed again and again and again throughout 2024. So all of the, all the meme tokens.

• 12:20Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people wanted to blame it on Melania.

• 12:23John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:24Jordi Hays?

  Because it sort of pulled the wind out of Trump coin and everybody felt like they were losing a bunch of money or were losing money.

• 12:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway, so they go to this Apollo risk list. Apollo is predicting a 90% chance of tariffs coming in 2025 while they were also predicting a 0% chance of a US recession. Fear and greed indices in crypto and stocks have hit their lowest since the 2022 bear market this month. Last year crypto saw extreme greed levels of 92 plus, but now it's at a polar opposite of 17. Sentiment is the ultimate driver of price in any market regardless of fundamentals. When sentiment shifts so quickly, outflows hit record highs and cause flash crashes, as we have seen.

• 13:08Jordi Hays?

  How do you, how do you put the probability of a US recession at 0% if you're Apollo?

• 13:15John Coogan?

  That is crazy.

• 13:16Jordi Hays?

  When the president is actively threatening trade, massive trade wars and things that I think, I think.

• 13:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, any GDP hiccup.

• 13:27Jordi Hays?

  Bucko Capital, yeah, Bucko Capital had a really good post, which was basically like, the president told me he was going to destroy the economy, so I listened and sold everything.

• 13:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:36Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, it's obviously an exaggeration.

• 13:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:41Jordi Hays?

  But there's some, there's some truth to that.

• 13:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, like the, the.

• 13:46Jordi Hays?

  Like Trump, Trump can be, Trump can be sort of bullish.

• 13:48John Coogan?

  Ripping a Band-Aid off, right? It's not, it's not, oh, this is going to be all sunshine and rainbows. Although people were certainly talking like it was going to be.

• 13:58John Coogan?

  So, small cap funds saw 3.5 billion in outflows. Mid-cap funds saw outflows of 2.1 billion. Sectoral funds saw 4.5 billion in outflows. Once again, shift in positioning. This means that getting ahead of shifts in sentiment will be the most profitable strategy in 2025, they argue. VIX surges over 70% in one month. The swings are going to broaden. This is something that a lot of people have been talking about. Even, I think Jeff Lewis, you know, markets are getting more aggressive, there will be more swings, more volatility, probably.

• 14:29Jordi Hays?

  Sentiment spreads faster is one thing, right?

• 14:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:32Jordi Hays?

  You can imagine a world where now, you know, historically, you have your college friend group, you know, guys that you just talk about random business, stocks, et cetera. You might get together with them.

• 14:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:44Jordi Hays?

  Once.

• 14:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:46Jordi Hays?

  Once every six months and they're like, oh yeah, I'm like pretty short the market right now.

• 14:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 14:51Jordi Hays?

  Everybody like goes and they go short.

• 14:53John Coogan?

  It is crazy.

• 14:53Jordi Hays?

  Now it's, it's a group chat.

• 14:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:55Jordi Hays?

  And you know, it's just sort of that sentiment spreads really quickly.

• 14:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:59Jordi Hays?

  We had a friend who went super long Tesla, you know, basically a month ago, exactly. It's down 40% since then.

• 15:09Jordi Hays?

  R I P.

• 15:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. The, the idea of going to something like what happened in like the seventies where there's like languishing stagflation for like a decade or even, even post housing crash where the economy was in the doldrums for like years seems unthinkable because the swings are just so fast now with COVID down and up. And then same thing with the, with the, the, the interest rate crisis, like down and up so fast. Through technical and fundamental analysis, they've been trading these swings, stocks, commodities, bonds and crypto are highly tradable. And they're arguing that you should sign up for their stuff. But anyway, uh, kind of an, kind of an interesting post, but Paddy McCormick had one of the best jokes of the day.

• 15:49Jordi Hays?

  Oh, Paddy.

• 15:51John Coogan?

  He says, uh, now would be the perfect time to go to, to hit, go on the strategic NASDAQ reserve. I love it. What a banger.

• 16:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And, and who was saying that, uh, if the U S government needed them to manage, oh, he was, it was Keith on the show. He said, if, if we started a U S sovereign wealth fund and you know,

• 16:14John Coogan?

  He wants it at cost.

• 16:15Jordi Hays?

  Kozla was asked to manage some of the funds. He would do his, he would oblige as a patriot.

• 16:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, here Keith, go, go deploy $10 trillion, become the next Masa.

• 16:28Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 16:28John Coogan?

  Be great. Um, I mean, the, uh, the, the, the steel man on the strategic NASDAQ reserve is like the original Peter Thiel thesis on like a cryptocurrency that's backed by hard, hard assets, uh, kind of like the Maker Dow idea, but for like, you know, non crypto companies. And the idea that you could, you could have like something that looks like a tradable bond or tradable ETF slice. And when I go to pay you, I'm paying you not just a dollar piece of paper that's maybe backed by gold, maybe backed by nothing. It's backed by the cash flows of Apple, Google, Amazon, and every American business. Feels very stable, feels very hard to implement, but, uh, was always like an interesting.

• 17:09Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 17:10John Coogan?

  You know, turbo libertarian dream of the late 90s. Liquidity says, PE funds are the Chad memes, watching public markets plummet while keeping their portfolio marks flat. Always nice to be in privates when the market's down. Powerbottom Dad says Elon is down almost $21 billion today. That puts him at only, checks notes, $113 billion richer than the next richest person alive. We did it Reddit.

• 17:41John Coogan?

  I love it. So yeah, everybody's losing, everybody, all the billionaires. What are they called? The super billionaires? Wasn't that the, the phrase the Wall Street Journal tried to coin?

• 17:49Jordi Hays?

  Giga beaners?

• 17:50John Coogan?

  Giga would have been way better, but you know, they didn't use that.

• 17:52Jordi Hays?

  Giganer.

• 17:53John Coogan?

  Giganer. Between trillionaire and, yeah, senti billionaire is, is confusing because some people use it for senti millionaire.

• 18:01Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 18:01John Coogan?

  So it needs, I think giga is the right one. Giga, giga billionaires over 100.

• 18:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:05John Coogan?

  You heard it here first, folks. Garcia Capital says, I can tell the bottom is close because traders are starting to share Bible verses.

• 18:16Jordi Hays?

  I haven't seen this yet, but maybe I'm not following enough.

• 18:19John Coogan?

  I don't follow enough traders to really see this, but this one's funny.

• 18:21Jordi Hays?

  Certainly sharing Warren Buffett quotes.

• 18:23John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:24Jordi Hays?

  Like he, he said, you know, he's known for saying being greedy is low key goaded when others are fearful.

• 18:29John Coogan?

  Did you post that earlier?

• 18:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great. And, and a lot of people were saying, uh, yeah, like, uh, oh, like, you know, now's a good day to learn about dollar cost averaging. It's like, you weren't dollar cost averaging the last month. Like now you're going to start.

• 18:43Jordi Hays?

  The most memorable moment for me as, as an investor, where I really thought it was entirely over. Like things were never going to come back was seeing Ethereum at $800 and thinking, where's the bottom on this?

• 19:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:01Jordi Hays?

  Like, what is the, because with, with cryptocurrencies, like, yeah, there's, there's some network value and activity and all that stuff and fees and stuff like that. But I was like, we got no cash flows here. And, and I don't know if this, this, uh, you know, protocol is, is even going to exist in, in two years with, with this was when, when FTX had collapsed.

• 19:22John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:23Jordi Hays?

  And there was just so much contagion. Very dark. And then of course it was like, right when I thought that was the absolute best time to buy. So.

• 19:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. What were the darkest moments? I remember. The SVV crisis was pretty crazy.

• 19:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:37John Coogan?

  I remember like just looking at my phone like all night and just be like, whoa. And then the other one was the Sam Altman OpenAI drama over the weekend. That was like when, when he got fired and then back.

• 19:47Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 19:48John Coogan?

  That was like, wow, I can't believe this is happening. This is like history in the making.

• 19:51Jordi Hays?

  You were calling your second, secondary's broker and like sell everything.

• 19:56John Coogan?

  No. Uh, that, that was less like a shock to the market.

• 19:59Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah.

• 20:00John Coogan?

  But the SVV thing was clearly like, okay, like the market is bad, like rough. Um, anyway, if you're losing sleep over the markets, why don't you improve your sleep by getting an eight sleep? Go to eightsleep.com slash TBPN. They're nights that fuel your best days. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. It's fantastic. It's a fantastic product. We highly recommend it. Uh, family loves it. What are you thinking?

• 20:30Jordi Hays?

  If we didn't have eight sleeps, our wives would be pissed.

• 20:33John Coogan?

  It'd be rough.

• 20:34Jordi Hays?

  They, uh, love them almost as much as we do. Um, it's a, it's a cover that you put over your bed.

• 20:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:41Jordi Hays?

  And it automatically adjusts the temperature, uh, minute by minute, basically to give you better, deeper sleep.

• 20:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:50Jordi Hays?

  I'm going to check my sleep score really quick. I put up, uh, mostly because I know.

• 20:54John Coogan?

  Phenomenal numbers. You got good numbers today?

• 20:56Jordi Hays?

  I know.

• 20:56John Coogan?

  You got good numbers?

• 20:57Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 20:58John Coogan?

  Let's see.

• 20:59Jordi Hays?

  I, I put up a 97.

• 21:00John Coogan?

  Ooh, I think you beat me. 94, but I'm back in the swing of things.

• 21:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was a good night. You're getting dialed in.

• 21:06John Coogan?

  It was a good night.

• 21:07Jordi Hays?

  It was a weird, you know, the last 30 days have been hectic.

• 21:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:11Jordi Hays?

  Um.

• 21:12John Coogan?

  But it really is fantastic.

• 21:13Jordi Hays?

  People don't realize like you get into bed and you're typically hotter because you've just been moving around.

• 21:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 21:18Jordi Hays?

  And it cools you and then it will raise the temperature throughout the night so that you wake up, uh, warm.

• 21:24John Coogan?

  Ready to go. It is so crazy how fast you fall asleep and how fast you wake up with this thing. It's, it's amazing.

• 21:30Jordi Hays?

  Asleep.com slash TBPN. Uh, there's a discount there if you use our code.

• 21:35John Coogan?

  Go check it out.

• 21:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, come compete with us.

• 21:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yes. And that's your sleep scores. Uh, anyway, let's move on to some historical analysis from the Wall Street Journal. Uh, they write today, Rolf Winkler writes, uh, what the dot com bust can tell us about today's AI boom. Uh, this week marks the 25th anniversary of the NASDAQ peak, but it wasn't all lost.

• 21:56Jordi Hays?

  Rolf Winkler over at the journal. This time it's different, buddy.

• 21:59John Coogan?

  This time it's different. Yeah.

• 22:02Jordi Hays?

  No, we don't know yet. It feels different because you know, you got companies like Cursor and you know, Windsurf doing, you know, millions of dollars of revenue per month when their dot com counterparties were doing, you know, millions a year. Thousands. They were doing, yeah, we're in the high.

• 22:23John Coogan?

  You go back and you find all these like emails of them like being like, look at this chart. I went from zero to a hundred thousand dollars in revenue in six months. Of course, I'm worth 10 billion. Of course. And everyone's like, I'm gonna do it even faster. Zero to a hundred thousand in revenue, then I go public.

• 22:37Jordi Hays?

  We have plumbing.com.

• 22:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:40Jordi Hays?

  How, that's worth at least a billion dollars by itself.

• 22:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the multiple is, is all the difference here. Anyway, there's some good history in the Wall Street Journal today. 25 years ago this week, the NASDAQ composite hit its dot com era peak after soaring more than 500% in five years. Imagine that ride. You're just sitting in the NASDAQ, five X-ing your money.

• 23:01Jordi Hays?

  Merry Meeker, just going off.

• 23:03John Coogan?

  Going off. Its subsequent collapse was swift and brutal. Small investors lured by a promising new technology called the internet's lost, called, called the internet lost fortunes. The economy stumbled. High-flying companies like pets.com, the globe.com, and Webvan collapsed. Today, some investors are worried the same cycle might be playing out when it comes to artificial intelligence. Now, the interesting thing, I don't know about the globe.com, but Webvan was basically Instacart, very successful company now. Pets.com, chewy.com, pet delivery stuff.

• 23:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:35John Coogan?

  10 billion dollar company for a while. I'm not sure exactly where it trades now, but big company. Lots of good ideas. MP3.com went public with just a domain business plan. No revenue. Obviously Spotify's a beast of a business now. So the story of the dot com to me is not like wrong ideas, directionally correct, just bad timing, bad, bad execution.

• 23:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:56John Coogan?

  Today, some investors are worried the same cycle might be playing out when it comes to artificial intelligence. Even if that is the case, a big if, there's an important lesson for investors from the dot com collapse. Ultimately, the early internet hype proved correct. It's easy to understand the fear and echo of the dot com boom. Leading AI companies are valued in the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, some of them with little prospect of generating meaningful sales. That's not, I mean, I don't know who exactly they're talking about. A lot of these companies have plenty of prospects for generating meaningful sales. There's obviously a ton of questions, but

• 24:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:29John Coogan?

  Investors are racing to give the companies still more money at ever

• 24:32Jordi Hays?

  We're having a founder on in 45 minutes that's putting up insane numbers in his first month.

• 24:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 24:42John Coogan?

  So they're buying AI chips to fill out new cavernous data centers. I like that term cavernous data centers. Yet, the dot com boom and bust showed that big bets on ambitious technologies can pay off in the long run. The five most valuable listed companies globally and six of the top seven are tech companies from that era or ones that grew from seeds planted then. In other words, the dot com bubble had elements of what some investors call good bubbles that fuel rapid adoption of revolutionary technology.

• 25:10Jordi Hays?

  I want to make a statement for the record that we have been pro bubble.

• 25:15John Coogan?

  Pro bubble.

• 25:16Jordi Hays?

  We were pro bubble in the first episode of this show.

• 25:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 25:18Jordi Hays?

  And we're going to be pro bubble in the last.

• 25:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 25:21Jordi Hays?

  And we're certainly not going to fold now that Tesla is down 40% a month. It's going to take a lot more than that.

• 25:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:32John Coogan?

  So the journals separating out the idea of good bubbles versus bad bubbles, which I think it's a good distinction to make. Bad bubbles are things that where people speculate on assets that don't make the economy more productive. Tulip bulbs, beanie babies, houses in the Arizona desert. Boom to bust. And they have some charts here. It's very difficult to be a radical innovator, Sars says Carlotta Perez, author of Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages. To create a world that doesn't exist, such innovators convince suppliers, workers and financiers that they Should march simultaneously toward an imagined future of clamoring consumers. While people race to cash in, ideas are tried and infrastructure is built.

• 26:15John Coogan?

  Many fail who nevertheless lay important groundwork. Famously, the fiber optic lines of 2000 were the equivalent to the electrical grids of the early 1900s. The railroad tracks of the 1800s, the canals of the late 1700s, says Perez. Busts followed those booms, yet the networks fertilized new markets. And so, you know, even if we build these massive data centers, we don't know what to do with them. Eventually we'll figure it out, which is why this is potentially, even if it is a bubble, it's a good bubble.

• 26:47Jordi Hays?

  We love bubbles.

• 26:48John Coogan?

  AI innovators are making their own gargantuan capital investments, primarily in specialized semiconductors known as graphics processing units, GPUs made by Nvidia today. Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world or among them with a market cap of 2.7 trillion. The question of whether those investments will lead to productivity advances that power the economy or elements of a good bubble. The jury will be out for some time, but there are tangible advances already. Search is smarter, AI bots can write software code, cover letters and more. AI agents are booking flights, filing taxes, scheduling meetings and acting as smart assistants that could boost productivity in years to come. Not that there won't be losers, some AI companies are already melting down. Sequoia Capital's David Kahn has written of the massive revenue hole that AI companies need to fill

• 27:31John Coogan?

  to justify their data center spending, which could lead to a speculative shakeout. Yet he's optimistic.

• 27:36Jordi Hays?

  That's a great article, by the way.

• 27:38John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:38Jordi Hays?

  It's probably worth revisiting at some point.

• 27:40John Coogan?

  The massive revenue hole is the one the journal linked to.

• 27:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's basically this idea of like, if you're spending, I mean, it's a simple idea.

• 27:48John Coogan?

  No, it makes sense.

• 27:48Jordi Hays?

  You're spending all this money, you have to actually make it back at some point.

• 27:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. But I mean, as we say, you know, 99% of AI companies quit right before they close the massive revenue hole.

• 27:59Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 28:00John Coogan?

  Before they hit it big.

• 28:01Jordi Hays?

  Many have said that, yeah.

• 28:03John Coogan?

  Yet he's optimistic that a huge amount of economic value will be created, as am I. To distinguish bad bubbles from good bubbles, look at the assets the people are betting on, says Bill Janeway, former vice chairman of Warburg Pincus, who has studied speculative eras. The world banking system collapsed in 2008 when houses couldn't, people couldn't afford or finance with risky mortgages sliced into highly levered securities.

• 28:25Jordi Hays?

  I didn't just study speculative eras, John, I participated in them.

• 28:31Jordi Hays?

  Who are you gonna trust more? Bill Janeway?

• 28:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, has he ever had a

• 28:35Jordi Hays?

  Speculative era?

• 28:36John Coogan?

  Has he ever had an NFT profile picture?

• 28:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:39John Coogan?

  If you haven't been in the trenches of the speculative eras, Bill, I don't want to hear from you.

• 28:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Where were you in 2021?

• 28:45John Coogan?

  In contrast, Janeway points to Tesla. Some investors think its shares are overvalued, but Tesla is using its windfall to deliver a future of electric vehicles, solar power, as well as self-driving cars and robots powered by AI. Many overhyped AI startups may flame out, yet some will have had brilliant ideas that get picked up by others. Anyway. Fun article, good times. They talk more about the smartphone revolution. By the time Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone in 2007, wireless phones and the internet were already widely used. Flash memory was cheap. Computer chips were smaller and faster. Responsive touchscreens had already been invented. And when the smartphone revolution came, it was General Magic alums Tony Fadell and Andy Rubin who helped deliver it.

• 29:27John Coogan?

  Fadell helped develop the iPod and iPhone at Apple, and Rubin founded Android, the world, the startup behind the world's largest mobile operating system. And so are you familiar with the story of General Magic?

• 29:38Jordi Hays?

  Pre-

• 29:39John Coogan?

  It's fascinating. It was basically this like dream team of like, you know, all the venture capitalists came together, all the top technologists came together, and they were going to build an iPhone essentially in the mid 90s, I believe. And they, so an early version of the smartphone was released in 1994 by a company called General Magic. Co-founder Mark Parat envisioned digital touchscreen phones, but his device arrived years earlier. There were no digital cellular networks, Parat recalls, to retrieve digital content, of which there was little. It had to be plugged into a dial-up modem. So they were just too early. Company doesn't work, but the team goes out and works at Apple and ultimately Google post-Android acquisition. And so as hundreds of billions of dollars pour into AI, some are calling it another bubble.

• 30:24John Coogan?

  True or not, Perez forecasts that AI will boost productivity as the first electrical lines did when they replaced steam power. General Magic went bankrupt in 2002. Its devices were so far ahead of their time that few customers bought them. Another prescient idea it was working on would also have to wait. AI agents to build, AI agents built to complete tasks for people. The engineer working on that project, John Giandrea, now heads Apple for AI for Apple.

• 30:54John Coogan?

  Oof. Interesting. Maybe they need some new blood. Maybe he's, uh, he needs to hang his jersey in the rafters. He's been certainly early to this stuff, but not rolling things out faster. My biggest complaint recently, we talked about the Gen Moji thing, which is terrible playground, which is bad. They still haven't replaced the voice dictation. Like I'm, I'm used to decent voice dictation now. You use it a lot. I use, I use a lot for chat GPT. I go to chat GPT and I click the voice thing and it, and it records it and it nails it every single time, no matter what. And then every once in a while I'll accidentally hit the button on the Apple keyboard and it's just terrible. And it's like, Apple, that's not a security thing. That's not, it's not some crazy, it's, it's, it's so easy to implement whisper.

• 31:36John Coogan?

  It's like, there's open source frameworks. There's like, you buy a company, there's a million ways to just upgrade that and just make the existing stuff better. I was thinking about like, how funny it is that their, their Apple intelligence, you've seen like they, like, like their rewriting thing. Where like you, you highlight stuff and then you have writing tools now. Have you seen this writing tools?

• 31:59John Coogan?

  Writing tools describe your change. This is an Apple intelligence. So if you highlight some text, you can go to writing tools. You can say like proof, read it, rewrite it, make it friendly, professional, concise. Like turn it into key points, turn it into a bullet list, turn it into, turn it into a table. Like it's cool. But it's, but it's weird because like there's already spell check and grammar check like running. And so instead of like replacing that with one system that runs over your text. Now there's just two systems that are talking to it and they're like kind of fighting. One's like the old school, like, hey, we're just checking spell check here. It's like the, the metaphor is like, there's a robot over your shoulder who's just kind of looking and say, oh, you misspelled this. Like let's underline it with a blue line. You can click and you can change, right?

• 32:41John Coogan?

  But then there's a separate robot over here saying, hey, actually you want to turn this into a list of bullet points? Like I could do that for you. And it's like, I kind of just want one system that I'm interacting with, that I'm like really comfortable with. Instead of like, when I want this problem, I go over here. It's very like fragmented. Anyway.

• 32:59John Coogan?

  Time is money, save both. Go to ramp.com. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place, folks. You gotta get on ramp.com. We launched our season two of the show, our version two today. We are now officially supported by Ramp, presented by Ramp.

• 33:19Jordi Hays?

  And we had talked about Ramp, but we had never, we'd never shown a handshake on-

• 33:25John Coogan?

  That we were, we had never in partnership with them, little teasers, but we never actually really told everyone that we were partnered on.

• 33:34Jordi Hays?

  We had never had a shot of us, me grabbing a briefcase out of an unmarked black van and pulling it into a yellow Ferrari and driving away.

• 33:42John Coogan?

  But now we have that.

• 33:43Jordi Hays?

  That's really what makes it sort of official.

• 33:44John Coogan?

  Now it's clear that, yeah. We're in the-

• 33:48Jordi Hays?

  Great car, too. Underrated.

• 33:50John Coogan?

  We're in the pocket of Big Ramp.

• 33:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Big Ramp.

• 33:56John Coogan?

  Big Ramp, it's great.

• 33:57Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people have been talking about, you know, the potential monopoly, you know, positioning of Ramp and Big Ramp.

• 34:04John Coogan?

  Yep, yep.

• 34:05Jordi Hays?

  But we're conflicted out of that.

• 34:08John Coogan?

  We are, we are. Anyway, let's move on to another big deal. OpenAI signs a $12 billion deal with CoreWeave. They'll get an equity stake. CoreWeave, an Nvidia-backed cloud provider, which we talked about on the show last week, they're filing to go public. We had Nick Carter, one of the first angel investors in the company on the show, which is very cool. They just signed a five-year deal to rent AI servers to OpenAI, according to a Reuters report. As part of the cloud deal, OpenAI will also get a stake in CoreWeave, expected to be worth around $350 million when the company goes public. Now, CoreWeave already has a big partnership with Microsoft and they've signed deals to spend more than $10 billion renting AI servers

• 34:48John Coogan?

  through 2030. And so this is the Satya Nadella, I, you know, I own, I also like to lease, I like to rent, I like to do everything. I, you know, I'm a CoreWeave customer. It all just depends on what the flavor of the week is for me. I'm good for my 85 billion.

• 35:03Jordi Hays?

  So I have another article pulled up here. In 2024, Microsoft accounted for 62% of CoreWeave's revenue, which is wild.

• 35:12John Coogan?

  Wow. Yeah, yeah. That's one of the main things that people are kind of pounding on in the S1 is revenue concentration.

• 35:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:19John Coogan?

  Are they too concentrated? Because if Microsoft says, hey, we're out, then the company's worth what? A 10th or something, or 5th? But, you know, we'll see.

• 35:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. And so in many ways, OpenAI could have continued to access CoreWeave's underlying products through Microsoft.

• 35:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 35:37Jordi Hays?

  But now they're not.

• 35:38John Coogan?

  Now they're becoming their own company. They're leaving the nest, spreading their wings.

• 35:43Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 35:43John Coogan?

  Becoming all grown up.

• 35:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:46John Coogan?

  They're even going for profit.

• 35:48Jordi Hays?

  You gotta credit Satya and Sam for publicly, you know, right after everybody was like, oh, they're beefing. They're not on the same team anymore. They like went and took a picture together. This was probably three months ago at this point. But we see through it. No jersey swap.

• 36:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 36:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So this barely counts.

• 36:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, barely counts. You gotta do the jersey swap if you're serious about, you know, healing wounds.

• 36:14Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 36:16John Coogan?

  You know, Zuck and Jensen seem like they're just really aligned. They're not playing in each other's backyards at all. It's like pure customer. Nvidia's never gonna build a...

• 36:26Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't Meta have a chip?

• 36:28John Coogan?

  They're like talking about it, but it's clear, there's clearly still a huge Nvidia buyer. Nvidia's not trying to do any, you know, Nvidia does have a cloud offering. So with the other hyperscalers, they're in some competition sometimes.

• 36:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I think today, actually, Meta announced that they're testing a new AI chip with TSMC.

• 36:52John Coogan?

  TSMC, okay.

• 36:53Jordi Hays?

  You were correct that they were respectfully just letting each other, you know, do their own thing. But now Zuck is kind of doing the same thing.

• 37:01John Coogan?

  Was there a Morris Chang-Zuck jersey swap? Maybe that should be the thing.

• 37:05Jordi Hays?

  I'm guessing, I'm guessing.

• 37:05John Coogan?

  They must have. Even if there's no photo, they probably did it.

• 37:07Jordi Hays?

  Jersey swap.

• 37:08John Coogan?

  Jersey swap. The Financial Times reported...

• 37:11Jordi Hays?

  They just say they're testing it.

• 37:14John Coogan?

  The Financial Times reported that Microsoft cut back on some planned spending with CoreWeave due to delivery issues and missed deadlines. CoreWeave denied the report and said there have been no contract cancellations or walking away from commitments. And so that's the story of OpenAI and CoreWeave. And I feel like... This IPO is going to be pretty crazy because there's all these deals that are going to get papered like right before and the the future in the future revenues and cash flows and contracts of these businesses, like the entire AI industry is kind of deciding like, hey, like, we're going to spend like, you know, what I mean, the base case is like 250 billion in CapEx in the in one year, right? And so like, where does that pie get sliced up?

• 37:58John Coogan?

  And so if you're CoreWeave and a couple billion dollars will materially move your, you know, market cap, then yeah, you're going to do a deal with OpenAI for 12 billion over

• 38:07Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, the timing is very convenient with their IPO.

• 38:09John Coogan?

  And give stock away and stuff. So there's all these kind of like one hand washes the other type deals.

• 38:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're just to reiterate, so CoreWeave, OpenAI is doing this deal, but then CoreWeave is passing them back 350 million dollars in stock.

• 38:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:24Jordi Hays?

  And it's very conveniently timed with CoreWeave's IPO where the number one risk factor, like you said, is that the revenue concentration with Microsoft.

• 38:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, I feel like

• 38:31Jordi Hays?

  And so people will, my sense is that analysts will switch from revenue concentration, which is still going to be a focal point to, okay, you're less, you have less concentration going forward, but OpenAI is losing all this money and, you know, it's not the most reliable customer and then they're going to still, you know, continue to have to fight a similar fight.

• 38:51John Coogan?

  I do like this trend of if you spend a lot of money with a company, you get equity in it. I feel like with how much you spend at Arrowan, you should, they should give you a slice. They should cut you in.

• 38:59Jordi Hays?

  They should.

• 38:59John Coogan?

  Give you some equity.

• 39:00Jordi Hays?

  You're telling me, you're telling me that's, I go to their customer support daily,

• 39:06Jordi Hays?

  cold email, hey, here's how much I spent in the last week.

• 39:09John Coogan?

  Cut me in.

• 39:09Jordi Hays?

  Think about a little

• 39:10John Coogan?

  Little pre-IPO slice.

• 39:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, little pre-IPO slice.

• 39:13John Coogan?

  Slice me off some equity.

• 39:14Jordi Hays?

  I wouldn't even need, I don't even need the shares, just let me, let me get an allocation.

• 39:18John Coogan?

  Let me get an allocation in Arrowan. I mean, LVMH should, should cut us in with all the DOM we're buying too.

• 39:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:23John Coogan?

  You know, every company, if you're a good customer. Let us get a taste. Anyway.

• 39:30Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 39:31John Coogan?

  Speaking of stuff you can buy at Arowan, there's a tour of food and drink startups in the information today, taking through some D to C, some consumer, some CPG brands. I thought this is kind of interesting. Strategic acquirers are starved for growth. They're cash rich and they need to innovate, says John Levert, a managing director for consumer retail at investment bank Solomon Partners.

• 39:55Jordi Hays?

  The most conflicted.

• 39:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:56Jordi Hays?

  Possible position, the guy who wants to sell all the consumer, the upstart consumer brands for the most amount of money to the strategic.

• 40:05John Coogan?

  They have to do this. Conglomerates like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Mars.

• 40:08Jordi Hays?

  You guys have so much cash. You gotta innovate. Why not buy?

• 40:11John Coogan?

  You gotta do it.

• 40:11Jordi Hays?

  Why not buy some of my clients?

• 40:15John Coogan?

  They've long used acquisitions to add trendier brands, popular with new sets of shoppers. And over the past few years, new food and drink brands have been able to grow sales quicker than ever using social media to reach shoppers cheaply and leaning into viral health and wellness trends. Still, big acquirers will likely be selective. To be a good candidate for an acquisition, brands need to have over 100 million in annual sales and gross margins of between 30 and 50%, Levert said. They should be nicely profitable on EBITDA. And if they're growing quickly, buyers typically are okay with a lower EBITDA.

• 40:51John Coogan?

  Some potential sellers are holding off on seeking buyers until later this year amid uncertainty around the impact of tariffs and supply chain disruptions. Selling or offloading a big stake to private equity firms could be another alternative for brands that aren't able to find a strategic buyer. And so here are the eight food and beverage startups that might get acquired in the next year or two. Banza.

• 41:12Jordi Hays?

  Banza.

• 41:12John Coogan?

  Banza. They raised 31 million. They were founded in 2014.

• 41:16Jordi Hays?

  Scarbonzo bean based pasta.

• 41:19John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 41:20Jordi Hays?

  I used to eat a lot of this.

• 41:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:24Jordi Hays?

  I still have it from time to time. It's pretty good.

• 41:27John Coogan?

  Is the pitch low carb, lower carb than pasta?

• 41:30Jordi Hays?

  No, it's just no gluten.

• 41:32John Coogan?

  Oh, no gluten, gluten free. Okay.

• 41:33Jordi Hays?

  Sort of high protein.

• 41:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. In, in 2014, when they launched, this was, this was ultra trendy, as they say. More recently, it has added products, including high protein waffles. They raised $20 million in 2019 from investors, including private equity firm Prelude Growth Partners and Danny Mayer's investment firm.

• 41:52Jordi Hays?

  Smart.

• 41:53John Coogan?

  They sell their products in 23,000 locations. Chomps, the line of meat sticks. I'm not a big Chomps guy. I mean, if I'm in like a random store, maybe I'll grab one, but.

• 42:04Jordi Hays?

  I think they're fantastic.

• 42:05John Coogan?

  Daily driver. Yeah, no, I like the idea.

• 42:07Jordi Hays?

  I'm almost a daily driver.

• 42:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:09Jordi Hays?

  My son is an absolute chomp fiend.

• 42:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 42:12Jordi Hays?

  If I ever pull one out, he'll just come over and, and he'll just take it from me and just eat the entire thing.

• 42:17John Coogan?

  I mean, they're looking really strong. It's been a long road, 2012. So, I mean, they're going on 13, 14 years old. But in 2024, they did over half a billion dollars in sales and the last disclosed valuation was 200, 300 million. And they raised 80 million.

• 42:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're well, well beyond that now.

• 42:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, they are in the money stride. Consumer Partners looks great on this deal. They got Meat Stack, Meat Sticks, other snacks founded by personal trainer Pete Maldonado.

• 42:43Jordi Hays?

  That's, John had, John had an idea this morning while we were working out to just have.

• 42:48John Coogan?

  I don't know if we should leak this. It's such a good idea.

• 42:50Jordi Hays?

  Precut steaks. Like imagine if you could buy like steak that was cooked in sort of more of like a bacon style, like pre sliced form factors. You could just instead of going for a chomp, just grab, you know, a little bit of filet mignon. Which is, I'd like somebody in the audience to build that. We'll, we'll definitely trial it.

• 43:09John Coogan?

  Well, my idea was specifically like Chick-fil-A, but steak based. So you go to the drive thru and instead of getting some chicken nuggets, you get a bunch of steak and it's like 50 bucks because steak, it's expensive.

• 43:22Jordi Hays?

  And there's no other items, and there's no other items on the menu.

• 43:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like, I mean, maybe like you can get a whole steak or you can get half a steak or you can get little slices of steak. But like it basically the restaurant just cooks steaks all day and then you drive up and you buy steaks.

• 43:37Jordi Hays?

  Economy's a steak.

• 43:38John Coogan?

  Steak.

• 43:38Jordi Hays?

  Steak.

• 43:40John Coogan?

  Anyway, Chomps has proven it can scale up. It's on its own. The brand has already expanded to most major grocery chains. Whole Foods, Target, Kroger, Trader Joe's, as well as many convenience stores. And Maldonado expects it to hit a billion in retail sales this year. Wow. That is big. Could include a strategic exit and IPO, or we could continue to hold it for cash flow. Good Culture, I don't know this company. They did over 200 million. They're founded in 2014. They raised 85 million. Good Culture has been the forefront of a resurgence in the popular cottage cheese.

• 44:14Jordi Hays?

  This is like a yogurt, dairy, health, better for you, kind of dairy-esque brand.

• 44:19John Coogan?

  Cool. Do you know Lesser Evil? Are you familiar with this?

• 44:22Jordi Hays?

  Popcorn.

• 44:23John Coogan?

  2004. Wow.

• 44:24Jordi Hays?

  Popcorn.

• 44:24John Coogan?

  That's an old company. 165 million dollars in sales. They raised 45.9 million. Aria Growth Partners, Valor Equity Partners is in there? That's amazing, because Valor's in like SpaceX. But yeah, good team around the, around the board, looking good. Raised money in 2023, around 19 million dollars. And apparently, they are exploring a potential sale, but also seeking a valuation of around a billion dollars. That would be a relatively rich number compared to a recent, to recent snack deals. In January, Flowers Foods said it would pay 795 million for Simple Mills, which sells gluten-free versions of snacks like Goldfish and Wheat Thins, but had higher net sales.

• 45:09Jordi Hays?

  The trade, the basically trade of the early 2010s was just to go into a 7-Eleven or a gas station and make a better-for-you version of every product.

• 45:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:20Jordi Hays?

  Every single product, from meat sticks to Wheat Thins, to Goldfish, you know, all these categories.

• 45:27John Coogan?

  It is kind of crazy that no one said, like, let's just do that. They, everyone, it was always like some random entrepreneur focusing on one single category. There was no one who said, like, our business is, we are going to create a better-for-you product in every single category.

• 45:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Some people.

• 45:44John Coogan?

  You needed to focus.

• 45:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, some people tried to do that, but you can't remember any of their names.

• 45:48John Coogan?

  No, I agree. They didn't nail any of them.

• 45:50Jordi Hays?

  And it's also, that's, that's the thing. CPG, we talked about this on the show yesterday. CPG is so tangible that people assume that it's very easy. Oh, I'm gonna make a cracker. I'm gonna make this drink. And then you realize, you actually have to, the best CPG companies either got super lucky, which is unreliable, or they iterated. Across 30 plus production runs to like dial in a product and make it truly, truly great. And then they had to like reinvent it when they scaled up again. And it's just really difficult. It's basically blue collar entrepreneurship and that, you know, you have to go sit in grocery stores early on and just like get people to trial your product. It seems crazy, but it's kind of what it takes.

• 46:32John Coogan?

  Liquid Death. I mean, this is another good example, like Liquid Death, super unique go to market, super unique branding. Like that's not going to come out of some hold code. That's just like, we need better for you in every category because Liquid Death is a very bespoke, like Liquid Death is not a brand that is a goldfish, right?

• 46:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:50John Coogan?

  It doesn't translate. It's a very different thing.

• 46:52Jordi Hays?

  Liquid Death had perfect marketing market fit in a mass market product that they could sell everywhere.

• 46:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 46:59Jordi Hays?

  And they've executed that very well. They've also been very aggressive in terms of raising capital, science, which is an LA based sort of incubator that incubated it.

• 47:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:08Jordi Hays?

  They were also in Dollar Shave Club. That was like their first big outcome, I think in the, in the D to C world.

• 47:14John Coogan?

  They were actually looking at IPO.

• 47:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was getting pitched Liquid Death, you know, pre-IPO round. I didn't sign any type of NDA. I think it was at like, I think it was at like close to $2 billion. I think that's completely unrealistic unless it was trading like a meme stock.

• 47:38John Coogan?

  Well, they did get some private credit money in. They got a $55 million working capital line from Aries Management. Let's go.

• 47:45Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 47:45John Coogan?

  Some of the best in the game. They got three or four billionaires.

• 47:49Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get a private credit fund as a partner.

• 47:52John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 47:53Jordi Hays?

  For the show.

• 47:53John Coogan?

  It's great. And so we'll see, we'll see where that goes. Ollie Pop also very, very popular. They're doing 400 to 450 million in sales. They've raised 90 and the last disclosed valuation was 1.85 billion. So wow, pull in a four or five X revenue multiple. Not bad. You got JP Morgan's private capital growth equity fund, Monogram, Rokana Ventures, low calorie, low sugar sodas with added fiber. It's long been seen as a candidate, candidate for buyout by a big beverage company. And they're in kind of a race against Poppy, which was launched in 2020. Just three years after Ollie Pop started, Poppy's doing more than 500 million in

• 48:37John Coogan?

  sales and has raised 30 million in funding.

• 48:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Poppy directly, they were also making sort of better for you-ish sodas, but then Ollie Pop was working so well that Poppy completely cloned their product down to the font.

• 48:51John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 48:52Jordi Hays?

  Like it was just a complete copycat, but they, to their credit, they executed well and have grown sales pretty impressively.

• 49:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 49:02Jordi Hays?

  A buddy of mine is the head of growth, I actually don't know what his title is now, but he was the head of growth for Ollie Pop back around their seed round. And he's a super well-connected, smart guy. And basically I kept, back then, I would honestly ask him, I didn't really understand how hard Ollie Pop was ripping. This was like 2020 and I was like, are you gonna look and do other things? Like, do you wanna be a head of growth for like a CPG company? Like your whole life? Cause he had, like I said, he had all these opportunities and he'd been there for a while already. He's like, no, like, we're doing well, I'm gonna stay. And like, I'm sure he's gonna do like really, really well from this, so.

• 49:41John Coogan?

  And Cavu Consumer Partners is in, is in Poppy, which is Rohan Oza's fund. You might've seen him on Shark Tank. Good, good guy. I ran into him in Beverly Hills the other day. Anyway, if you're building a consumer product, a food product, a beverage, you're gonna need to advertise it. And where should you advertise it, Jordy?

• 50:01Jordi Hays?

  Out of the home, John.

• 50:02John Coogan?

  Out of the home, on AdQuick. Go to adquick.com. It's out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And so, start a CPG company and throw it on a billboard.

• 50:26Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, we are, obviously, we are partnered with AdQuick and

• 50:31Jordi Hays?

  Right after we launched the video this morning with Ramp, we started going back and forth with Chris and Adam on the AdQuick team about our video with them. So there's lots in the works.

• 50:43John Coogan?

  I'm excited.

• 50:44Jordi Hays?

  Very excited for that one. Iconic memes will be created, recreated.

• 50:49John Coogan?

  Definitely.

• 50:50Jordi Hays?

  To celebrate out of home advertising.

• 50:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. And we wanted to celebrate some great out of home advertising. Durin put up a billboard that says, "You can't have rocket science without rock science." Durin's a new mining company. Very cool. And Jackson Moses here says, "Ad's the go hard." I love it. Right outside the SpaceX headquarters. So beautiful billboard.

• 51:12Jordi Hays?

  It's time to mine.

• 51:13John Coogan?

  We love, we love some billboards.

• 51:15Jordi Hays?

  That's actually insane alpha that you can get a billboard right in front of SpaceX.

• 51:19John Coogan?

  And then just take the photo and SpaceX is right there. It's really good. Anyway, we gotta move, we gotta move on. We got 15 minutes till our first guest is joining. Have you seen Meghan Markle's new Netflix show, Jordy?

• 51:31Jordi Hays?

  I haven't, but everybody's been saying this show is one of a kind. It's the best ever.

• 51:36John Coogan?

  I don't know about the second part. It's definitely one of a kind.

• 51:39Jordi Hays?

  People are saying it might be the show of the year.

• 51:43John Coogan?

  Well, I don't know. I'm not really equipped to judge this. I don't want to watch a lot of cooking shows, but I watched like five minutes of it and it was atrocious.

• 51:51Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 51:52John Coogan?

  It was really, really rough. Really, really rough. But, you know, I, me dragging it is nothing compared to what The Economist did. It was one of the roughest articles. I was laughing out loud and I, so I want to read some of it here because The Economist is one of those, one of those journalism outfits that has just incredible command over the English language and can body someone in the most subtle.

• 52:16Jordi Hays?

  Basically pseudonymously, or not pseudonymously, basically anonymously.

• 52:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's, it's an anonymous writer and it's, it's hilarious. So I'll read some of this. "One scene is magical. Another is so pretty. Another delightful. Welcome to With Love with Meghan, Meghan Markle's new cookery and lifestyle show in which she smiles at things in Montecito. In episode one, she smiles at raspberries on a cake. In another episode, she smiles at hydrangeas. She also smiles at bees, whose hives she keeps on her property." Quote, "When I think of honey, I think of bees," she says, "in one of the many insights with which the show brims."

• 52:55John Coogan?

  Just like, wow.

• 52:56Jordi Hays?

  When I think of honey, I think of bees.

• 52:59John Coogan?

  Just like, these are the type of insights you're getting from this show. There have been doubts about whether Netflix was right.

• 53:05Jordi Hays?

  We talked about bees and honey on this show before.

• 53:07John Coogan?

  We did.

• 53:08Jordi Hays?

  And John didn't believe that.

• 53:09John Coogan?

  She's more of an expert than I am.

• 53:11Jordi Hays?

  John didn't believe that bees ate their own honey.

• 53:13John Coogan?

  They do.

• 53:14Jordi Hays?

  Turns out they do.

• 53:14John Coogan?

  They do. There have been doubts about whether Netflix was right to fork out a reported 100 million in a deal with Ms. Markle and her husband Prince Harry for this show and other content. Such doubts must now be dispelled. However, Ms. Markle is not just smiling, she's on a mission. As she explains, she wishes to share some little tips and tricks for entertaining friends and elevating one's life, such as perhaps make sure to member, little tips and tricks, such as perhaps make sure to marry a member of the British royal family.

• 53:44Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 53:45John Coogan?

  We've been saying this.

• 53:46Jordi Hays?

  We've been saying this.

• 53:46John Coogan?

  Marry into royalty.

• 53:47Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 53:48John Coogan?

  Hot tip. That, that tends to help to no end. Or ensure you get Netflix to pay you a vast sum to show off an immense property, complete with a vegetable garden, beehives and chickens to lay fresh eggs. That helps too. This new eight-episode Netflix show released on March 4th is more or less Martha Stewart for the 0.01%, but aimed at the other 99.99%. In it, she offers indispensable tips such as how to make candles with your own beeswax, or how to boil noodles with tomatoes. Apparently, first you put the noodles in a pan, then you put in water, then you take off the lid, then the water will evaporate, then they are done. At last, everyone had been wondering. Destroyed.

• 54:32Jordi Hays?

  Destroyed.

• 54:32John Coogan?

  Like, it's just, this is such good, right? I love, I love it so much. It's just, it's just so funny. Anyway, it's a lot of fun.

• 54:42Jordi Hays?

  She has not created a lot of fans.

• 54:44John Coogan?

  No, no.

• 54:46Jordi Hays?

  Decade.

• 54:46John Coogan?

  Ms. Markle says that she is not in the pursuit of perfection, but in the pursuit of joy. This is charming, if not precisely the wording that some inside the palace use. Their descriptions of her tend to go a little heavier on words like abrasive, bullying, difficult and rude. But then, perhaps those palace workers did not step to, did not stop to smell and smile at the hydrangeas.

• 55:11John Coogan?

  That's so funny.

• 55:13Jordi Hays?

  Ms. Markle, we're not far from

• 55:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:18Jordi Hays?

  Montecito. We'll come up.

• 55:19John Coogan?

  We'll come up. We will stay at a wander.

• 55:21Jordi Hays?

  Show you how we drink Dom.

• 55:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:24Jordi Hays?

  Proper etiquette if you're celebrating a podcast milestone.

• 55:27John Coogan?

  Yes, she had a podcast on Spotify, big deal. And I heard through the grapevine that her one request was that there was quote unquote, no homework.

• 55:38Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 55:39John Coogan?

  Yo, yeah, yeah.

• 55:40Jordi Hays?

  She just wanted to show up and do it.

• 55:42John Coogan?

  I mean, this is unsubstantiated rumor, but the rumor was that at a certain point, she wasn't, David Senra will love this. We got to send this clip to him. She wasn't even doing the interviews. So imagine it's like, we're going to have someone on, we're going to have like a, like an assistant, ask them the questions, record their answers, and then I will come in once a month and record all the questions. So I come in and I say, Barack Obama, what was it like being president? Tony Blair, what was it like being prime minister?

• 56:12Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 56:13John Coogan?

  You know, like, you know, whoever else like is on this week, you know, Martha Stewart, what's your favorite recipe? I come in, I record those lines, and then they cut it together with the answers where that person got interviewed by someone else.

• 56:27Jordi Hays?

  Insane.

• 56:27John Coogan?

  It's like the lowest effort podcasting. And that's why it's no longer a podcaster.

• 56:34Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy.

• 56:34John Coogan?

  David Senra rolling over, just ripping his hair out, thinking about the lowest effort podcasting you possibly do. Brutal. Anyway, the one my main takeaway from the show is that Montecito is beautiful. We should spend more time there. And there's no better way to do that than on Wander.

• 56:51Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 56:53John Coogan?

  Find your happy place.

• 56:56Jordi Hays?

  Find your happy place.

• 56:57John Coogan?

  Go to wander.com, book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. Jordy, do you have a code for folks at home?

• 57:09Jordi Hays?

  I got a code for us. It's wander.com/tbpn. You can use the code tbpn to get a discount if you're booking a trip. And just by creating an account, you can get entered into a giveaway that they're just doing for TBPN listeners.

• 57:24John Coogan?

  Circle.

• 57:25Jordi Hays?

  So you're only competing with other brothers, which is kind of a win-win situation. So either you win a free trip. Or another one of your brothers wins. So there's zero downside.

• 57:36John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 57:37Jordi Hays?

  Enter now and you know, take it, take a crack at it.

• 57:42John Coogan?

  I love it. Um, let's, uh, let's do some timeline. We have 10 minutes until our first guest. And I want to kick off with a post from Bezel.

• 57:54John Coogan?

  We're going back to back with the advertisements today, uh, but this is a great post, uh, sold and authenticated by Bezel. All along a Sony long one time zone reference 136029 two time zones, day, night indicators, zero guesswork. If you're crossing continents, this longer ensures you never call the wrong person at 3am. Beautiful watch, flip it over and things intensify. It's manually wound L141 dot one movement is pure German engineering flex. Visible through a sapphire case back, hand engraved balance cock 72 hour power reserve.

• 58:29Jordi Hays?

  You're hesitant there slightly because that sounds vulgar, but it's just.

• 58:34John Coogan?

  No, that's just.

• 58:34Jordi Hays?

  Watch terminology.

• 58:35John Coogan?

  72 hour power reserve and enough finishing to make any watch nerd emotional, uh, fancy a longer of your own good taste. Better news. We've got more. Hit the link in bio to shop Bezel full selection.

• 58:46Jordi Hays?

  This is screaming zuck to me. I think he might've snapped this up.

• 58:49John Coogan?

  He might've. Yeah.

• 58:51Jordi Hays?

  They have a lot of private, you know, clients they can't, you know, share.

• 58:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:55Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, this seems like up his alley.

• 58:58John Coogan?

  Anyway, go to Bez, uh, go to getbezel.com shop over 23,500 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezel team of experts. Download the app, scroll and have fun. Uh, should we move on to Lulu?

• 59:12Jordi Hays?

  I just got to say, when we, when we do our Bezel partnership video.

• 59:16John Coogan?

  Multiple watches.

• 59:17Jordi Hays?

  We need a shot of both of us.

• 59:19John Coogan?

  All the watches.

• 59:21Jordi Hays?

  Watches all the way up to the shoulders.

• 59:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. We, we gotta get the, the graph diamonds hallucination.

• 59:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:26John Coogan?

  Get one of those going. Couple of patacs.

• 59:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How much would it cost to just get a graph diamonds hallucination for?

• 59:33John Coogan?

  Depends on what the market's doing. You buy it and then you sell it at a higher price. You made money.

• 59:37Jordi Hays?

  That's smart. Yeah. Look at you.

• 59:39John Coogan?

  It's possible.

• 59:39Jordi Hays?

  Course coming soon.

• 59:40John Coogan?

  Course going soon.

• 59:42Jordi Hays?

  Kugan's code.

• 59:43John Coogan?

  Anyway, Lulu, uh, Misservi posts just went to the DMV. They've replaced the take a number ticket dispenser with a person at a booth. And you get a ticket. You have to line, and to get a ticket, you have to line up. And when it's your turn, ask the person to give you a ticket.

• 1:00:03John Coogan?

  This is so funny.

• 1:00:04Jordi Hays?

  AI, mogging, mogging computers and artificial, artificial intelligence, you know?

• 1:00:10John Coogan?

  I mean, when, when mid journey came out and everyone was like, oh, this is going to destroy artists. I was like, there's still courtroom illustrators who like draw pictures of like SBF sitting there. And like, we have cameras. They could just take a photo.

• 1:00:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:24John Coogan?

  And yet like somehow that job like did not get destroyed by technology. And so there are plenty of jobs that are super resistant.

• 1:00:30Jordi Hays?

  I didn't, I didn't understand third party DMV services until I was probably 22.

• 1:00:38John Coogan?

  Break those down.

• 1:00:39Jordi Hays?

  Well, pretty much, there's only a handful of things that you need to actually go to the DMV for. And then the vast majority of them, you can pay a third party DMV $50 to do it with just over text. And they just send it to you.

• 1:00:53John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 1:00:55Jordi Hays?

  I bought a car recently and the title like, you know, got registered under my name, but then the title never got sent to me. And I just texted my DMV person and they're like, oh yeah, just like, send me a hundred bucks and it'll be there in like two weeks.

• 1:01:12John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:01:13Jordi Hays?

  And I don't have to touch it at all. So huge alpha, my dad was a very practical, is a very practical, pragmatic guy. He goes and sits in the line, but he's retired now. So.

• 1:01:25John Coogan?

  I always think of the DMV as a good example of Gelman amnesia, which we talked about in the last thing. It's like, it's very ridiculous, over the top, like mental model, but Gelman amnesia, I like it. Cause the whole thesis is like, once you realize that one thing is incorrect, like you're reading, you're reading an article in, in, like you're listening to this show and you hear us talking about your, your point of expertise and you realize we don't know what we're talking about. And then you assume that we don't know our, what we're talking about, about anything. And you're probably right.

• 1:01:55John Coogan?

  The DMV is a great insight into like how the government works in the sense that like everyone's like, oh, man, the DMV is so bad and so inefficient. But I'm sure the NIH is fine, or I'm sure the DOD works great. I'm sure the, you know, the other arms of the government are fantastic. And it's like, no, actually, like, the DMV is par for the course. Like, what your experience of the DMV is the exact same experience you'll have doing business with the FDA, doing business with the DOD, doing business with like any, any arm of the government. It's kind of all the same. But it, but the DMV is the one that, you know, the average citizen interfaces with the most.

• 1:02:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:33John Coogan?

  And so, yeah, anyway. Big news, Robinson Helicopter Company has released a new helicopter.

• 1:02:40Jordi Hays?

  We've been waiting for this.

• 1:02:41John Coogan?

  They haven't released a new helicopter for a very long time. The R88 Reveal Trailer is now available to watch on YouTube. Go check it out.

• 1:02:48Jordi Hays?

  Very cool video. Can we pull it up?

• 1:02:49John Coogan?

  We wanted flying cars. We got new helicopters from Robinson Helicopter Company.

• 1:02:55Jordi Hays?

  We wanted flying cars. We already had helicopters.

• 1:02:58John Coogan?

  I mean, really.

• 1:02:58Jordi Hays?

  Skill issue.

• 1:02:59John Coogan?

  Why don't we just put wheels on the helicopters?

• 1:03:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:02John Coogan?

  It seems pretty easy to do.

• 1:03:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, with little electric motors in each wheel.

• 1:03:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, be fine.

• 1:03:07Jordi Hays?

  Probably get up to like 30, 40.

• 1:03:09John Coogan?

  I really, I really. Can you play this? Let's see.

• 1:03:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I really feel like the whole flying car thing, a lot of those, a lot of those companies, like, we were talking about Kitty Hawk. The Google founders had trouble. They couldn't get through all the regulatory. It'd be very interesting to see someone try and take like a much more iterative, iterative approach and just take a helicopter, modify it and do just the minimum. I mean, this is what we saw with the Sea Glider thing where you got to find the regulatory hack. Anyway, Aussie Hex says, nice machine.

• 1:03:40Jordi Hays?

  Nice machine.

• 1:03:41John Coogan?

  53 views, just showing up. I mean, the Robinson Helicopter Company, they have a checkmark, so they are verified on X, but they still posted a link, got 3,000 views. Fortunately, we're featuring it here and try and get you some amplification. And, uh, yeah, send us more footage, Robinson. We'll check it out. We'll review it on the show.

• 1:03:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we got to give them a masterclass in the vibe reel.

• 1:04:02John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly. This should have been, this should have been native. You should have posted it native, could have had a banger.

• 1:04:07Jordi Hays?

  Could have had a banger.

• 1:04:08John Coogan?

  Gone viral.

• 1:04:10John Coogan?

  I don't know, I don't know how we're doing on this, but let's see who we got.

• 1:04:16John Coogan?

  Okay. Do, do, do, do, do. We got a bunch of stuff here. Uh, let's move on to, uh, Jack Rains.

• 1:04:25Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 1:04:26John Coogan?

  Jack Rains went on the Ad Quick podcast. We love Ad Quick. We love.

• 1:04:30Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 1:04:31John Coogan?

  Very funny. He was previously joking that OnlyFans is the best way to get your message out, but now he's advocating for LinkedIn. He says with revenues higher than Pinterest, Reddit, and Snapchat combined, LinkedIn is still ultimately number one for cringe.

• 1:04:46Jordi Hays?

  Number one.

• 1:04:47John Coogan?

  Number one for cringe.

• 1:04:49Jordi Hays?

  We, uh, we've been getting active on LinkedIn.

• 1:04:51John Coogan?

  We are. Go follow us.

• 1:04:52Jordi Hays?

  If you go to tbpn.com, you can follow our LinkedIn account.

• 1:04:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:56Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, we're starting to share. We're, we're, we're staying true to our X roots by posting the LinkedIn content like two weeks later.

• 1:05:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:05:04Jordi Hays?

  You know, standing, uh, you know, honoring X, you know, being where, you know, the everything app where, where the most important conversations happen. But LinkedIn, you know, you can, it's more like a greatest hits.

• 1:05:15John Coogan?

  I don't wanna like, I don't wanna pat ourselves on the back too much, but, um, we do that often and it's actually part of the brand. So, um, but, but, but, but I, I do, I do like the strategy of, of just posting interview clips on our LinkedIn. It feels like the least cringe thing to do. Like, we tried to take, I tried to take one of my, like, like, soundbites from the show and turn it into text and put it on LinkedIn and be like, serious. And it's just like, didn't feel right to me for some reason.

• 1:05:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I remember when we did our first launch video.

• 1:05:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:45Jordi Hays?

  The thing LinkedIn doesn't understand is, is humor and satire. So we did our first launch video and people's reaction when they would talk to me about it is they were like, "Super cool video, dude. Like, looked very serious."

• 1:05:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And everyone on X got it. Everyone on X got it.

• 1:06:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It was ironic.

• 1:06:03John Coogan?

  It's odd. Anyway, uh, let's, let's get away from the irony, get away from the jokes. We have to talk about this story. This has been shaking up tech. Lamborghini just announced a $5,000 baby stroller. Uh, this is huge for the pronatalist crowd, huge for the, uh,

• 1:06:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this was a lot of people's final excuse. They were like, you know, "I wanna have children. I've been planning for this for a while, but all of the strollers are so cringe."

• 1:06:27Jordi Hays?

  The babies are surprisingly heavy. It's like carrying around. Once they, you know, get. Few months old, it's like carrying around a 25 pound dumbbell.

• 1:06:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:06:35Jordi Hays?

  You know, everywhere, but you know, it's, it's not even as easy to carry as a dumbbell.

• 1:06:39John Coogan?

  I mean, I gotta say like Lamborghini really did not bring their design aesthetics to this at all.

• 1:06:45Jordi Hays?

  It's super disappointing.

• 1:06:46John Coogan?

  It just looks like a normal stroller to me.

• 1:06:47Jordi Hays?

  The only thing is maybe it's, it's, it feels super like something I don't like about strollers is because they're made of a lot of plastic.

• 1:06:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:56Jordi Hays?

  They don't feel always.

• 1:06:57John Coogan?

  This looks like there's some metal in there. I see some shine on there.

• 1:07:01Jordi Hays?

  If they have carbon fiber accents.

• 1:07:02John Coogan?

  It needs carbon fiber.

• 1:07:03Jordi Hays?

  I would even, I would even like, imagine if they had the, the rear view mirrors on it.

• 1:07:08John Coogan?

  That'd be cool.

• 1:07:08Jordi Hays?

  That could be cool too.

• 1:07:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm thinking like sharp angles. I'm thinking like.

• 1:07:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:13John Coogan?

  You know, Reventon.

• 1:07:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:14John Coogan?

  The one where they take the Aventador and they make it even crazier, like even more aggressive.

• 1:07:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So I'm going to give this a four out of 10.

• 1:07:22John Coogan?

  Four out of 10. Okay. Well, it is 1245. We should have our first call in. Ben, make sure we have pulled up the, uh, the zoom and see if we can have our guest join us.

• 1:07:37John Coogan?

  How we doing?

• 1:07:39Speaker 02

  Can you guys hear me?

• 1:07:40John Coogan?

  I can hear you.

• 1:07:41Speaker 02

  Awesome.

• 1:07:42John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 1:07:43Speaker 02

  Video on too, but.

• 1:07:44John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Yeah, we can see you. No, this is great. Yeah, we can see you. Cool. So, uh, Ken Davison is here, uh, from Icon. Uh, big announcement today. Can you break it down for us? What are you announcing? And give us a little backstory on your product, uh, what you're building, how it's going, just from the top.

• 1:08:03Speaker 02

  Sounds good. Um, yeah. So we, we just announced a second round from Founder's Fund. Um, I'm the founder of Icon and basically what we're doing is we're helping brands make, uh, much, much better ads with, uh, this thing we're calling the AI ad maker. And high level, what we do is we, we take someone's like big content library and then we turn it into hundreds of ads.

• 1:08:21John Coogan?

  Cool. Uh, do, uh, do you have any good like case studies or examples from companies that are using it?

• 1:08:28Jordi Hays?

  Wasn't Ridge, Sean Frank was on the show less than two weeks ago. Uh, and I think he was one of your guys' super early partners.

• 1:08:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, we we built a lot of Icon with with Sean and then Ron and Obvi and a lot of other folks in the community. Basically, what we're doing is we're tackling like nine different problems at once. So we help with script writing. In that script writing, we're we're helping you like target a specific audience.

• 1:08:52Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:08:52Speaker 02

  And then, once you have that script, we're we're taking your library and then matching it with that script. So you don't have to do that by hand. On top of that, we also do analytics. We help you like keep an eye on competitors like. We help you even like launch ads on on many different channels. There's there's all these pieces of that making puzzle that we're we're taking on and it's very manual today. So we're we're solving that.

• 1:09:13Jordi Hays?

  Do you like competitive markets? Previously, you started Ski-O. Subscription management within e-comm is deeply competitive. I'm actually a co-founder of this company, Rora, and Rora was running on some other subscription management platform, but I actually messaged the CEO just before this. Brian Keller and he said, we're switching over. Ski-O is just a far superior platform than the others. So great, great review for Ski-O. But my my big question is, is you clearly love competition because to go into subscription management, dominate and then and then come in and do Icon, which is a very obvious idea and many people are, you know, trying to tackle it, but it's very difficult to do well.

• 1:09:58Jordi Hays?

  Is competition something that you're sort of seeking out in some way because you just know you can do it better?

• 1:10:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, definitely. I, as you said, Ski-O was a really competitive space. There's there's at least 10 subscription apps and yeah, we we tackled it with one, like a really like engineering first culture. But two, also just like a really like playful personality. I think we we really like try to be real with our customer rather than corporate. And I think that resonates really well with the community and we're we're bringing a similar approach to to Tycom. We we're working seven days a week. We're really like pouring our heart into this and I think it resonates really well with with the type of customer we're going for.

• 1:10:37John Coogan?

  Can you break down in terms of where AI lives within the the ad stack? There's so many places from generate a script, generate an AI voiceover, generate a deep fake of a UGC customer, or even the CEO, or something like that, to AI assembly and picking which clips go where? A lot of these could be done programmatically or deterministically. A lot of them could be done with AI approaches. What do you see working well? Where's the highest leverage point to inject AI?

• 1:11:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think a really common mistake is is thinking AI is just going to generate that. And then you're not going to have to do anything at all. Really, the way I see us is basically cursor for ads where we're trying to like, take the editor, the creative strategist, anyone involved in the ad making process and just make them a lot faster, like remove the work they don't want to do, right? So with the script writing previously, right? I'm sure everyone knows this, but you can you can get some writer's block when you're trying to like, pump out 100 ads a week, right? So one of the things we're doing is we're looking at your previously run ads. We're we're looking at trending like concepts on the internet. And then we're like, doing all of that behind the scenes and helping you steer that. Like, you're able to write in first or third person. You're able to like, say, don't talk, don't make a medical claim or something like, really,

• 1:11:55Speaker 02

  it's up to the user. And as a result, you're just a lot quicker.

• 1:11:59John Coogan?

  Is there some sort of concept of like, temperature? I remember in like, the early GPTs, like, you could kind of turn up the temperature and get a little bit crazier. Because I feel like I could I could immediately imagine any of the LLMs kind of just like, re paraphrasing the same value propaganda again and again. But maybe so the value is actually, hey, let's let's think of new ideas that then we can test. And and that's where like, the real alpha is going to come. Hey, we never thought to make this type of claim. It's not a medical claim. We didn't cross any lines, but we did. We never really knew that that was what the customer wanted. Do you have some sort of a way to dial that in?

• 1:12:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, so it you're able to use our thing called AdGBT. Very similar to ChatGPT, but but for ads. And the key thing with it is you can really like, just steer it in the direction you want to go. There are people who want like 100 permutations of their winning ad. That's a really common use case. We also have people who want to like, just like, do 100 different concepts at once, right? So it's really like, pick your own adventure sort of thing. And we just help you do that a lot quicker.

• 1:12:59John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:13:00Jordi Hays?

  I have a question. So for the last five years, the meta on the meta ads platform has just been meta is really good at like finding you the right customers. So you should focus on creative. That's part of the opportunity that you have with Icon. Is there a world you do you imagine a future where meta tries to almost like move up the stack and and get into the area that you're in? Obviously, you're no, you're not afraid of of competition. But you know, how do you how do you think about sort of meta getting into this game?

• 1:13:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's definitely some stuff that's more in the pocket. But what I can say here is that we're we're going to be like platform agnostic, right? So you you can run ads on meta, you can run run ads on TikTok like like imagine 10 different platforms, right? Like, I don't think meta is gonna like want you to like run a TikTok ad or or different platforms. Of course, we can't rule that out, right? But there are like five of those like misalignments, I'd say for meta to be doing something like this, and they'll therefore have to keep in the pocket. But I'm pretty excited to partner with them. And yeah, just see where this goes.

• 1:14:04Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Well, you have to come back on when you can share on that.

• 1:14:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, any anytime I have an AI founder on, I have just a bunch of questions like, you know, what's hot, what's trending like MCP? Does that mean anything? Is that legit and real? What other like, what other kind of like foundational developments are you watching for the the give me a deep seek take, give me a scaling take, give me whatever you got?

• 1:14:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I wanted to bring this up in a few of our other trends of thoughts earlier. One of the things that we're really like approaching this with is like, we want to like pick the best like, like model for the the problem, right? So one of the things we do is like UGC, like UGC lip syncing, right? Sure. I'll be really candid. It's not quite there yet in terms of replacing like normal UGC. That's why we're taking existing content and repurposing it, right? But we've definitely got our eyes on it. I'd say HeyGen, Tavis, there's like 10 players in this space, and we're just going to like partner with the best one. And we use a combination of them today already. So that's kind of the way to like, think about Icon, where we're taking like the best voice vendor,

• 1:15:12Speaker 02

  we're taking the best like video, like UGC vendor, the best like writing, right? Like, we're we're using a lot of like Claude underneath, but like with like a lot of code on top, right? So It's really picking the best.

• 1:15:24Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about, you know, cost reduction at kind of the infraslayer? You said you've gone from zero to 5 million in ARR in 30 days. You're extremely profitable.

• 1:15:39Jordi Hays?

  It sounds like, you know, costs aren't a big issue at the moment. You know, you guys are running pretty efficiently, but presumably it will only get better. So it sounds like you're in a good spot.

• 1:15:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I think another thing that's really fun about this is there's a lot of people in this space that are are basically like operating on like 90% margin. They're, they're really charging a lot for what they're doing. And part of the reason we're, we're being so disruptive here is we're charging like 10% of what they're charging. Right. And I want to like pass the savings to the customers as the, the costs get better underneath. Right. I think companies either gonna have to like adapt with their pricing or they're gonna die.

• 1:16:15Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. What, what's the actual, you're going for the record to beat every company ever on the one to 100 million ARR record, which is less than 12 months. Do you know the actual day? Are you just, are you just gonna do it in 12 months?

• 1:16:30Speaker 02

  Well, I'd like to hit it in nine months, like not leave it too close, but I will have to see.

• 1:16:37Jordi Hays?

  Is there a scenario where at the last, on the last day, you have to bump prices like 30% just to hit the mark? Or you, or you think there's enough customers out there at the, the current pricing that, that you can get in front of? Cause I feel like e-commerce is very, the top e-commerce founders and CMOs are all talking to each other. There's almost like, you know, Sean Frank and Connor McDonnell have their podcasts. I think, I think like, you know, probably an important acquisition channel for you guys. But, um, but yeah, you seem pretty confident. We, we'd love to, you know, do a check in call in maybe six months, uh, you know, and see where we're at.

• 1:17:14John Coogan?

  Throw the gauntlet down. I want to see that. Let's do it.

• 1:17:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, part of the reason I'm doing this is it really like pressures me and the, the team in a good way. I think like I, I don't want to like let everyone down. So it keeps me working pretty hard. But yeah, if you think about it, right, like we, we've got a business plan that's a thousand a month. It's only 8,300 customers we need to get to 100 million, right? And like that, keeping the numbers a bit more private, but we're more than a thousand already. So I. Yeah, well, let's see, six to nine months from now.

• 1:17:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, 8,300 customers. These are businesses. I mean, Meta has what, like a million businesses, probably advertising at a significant level. Yeah, it's not insane, insane penetration to get there. So good luck. I love that. It's amazing. Well, we'll let you get to your next meeting. I know you got to jump, but thanks so much for calling in. Please let me know when you have news or announcements next and we'll bring you back on.

• 1:18:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, congrats on the progress in the new round.

• 1:18:10Speaker 02

  Thank you. Congrats to you guys.

• 1:18:10John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon.

• 1:18:11Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:18:11Speaker 02

  Okay, bye bye.

• 1:18:13John Coogan?

  Cool. Should we move on with more timeline, Jordy?

• 1:18:16Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it. Let's run through a couple.

• 1:18:18John Coogan?

  Well, a lot Gil has reported that Dropbox has converted from Delaware to a Nevada corporation. Lots of people talking about the risks of being in Delaware. Interestingly, I don't know exactly what triggered this. We should get the Drew Houston, the Dropbox founder on to talk about like how he's thinking about his business because Dropbox was one of those companies came out of Y C, I believe. Yeah. Well, yeah, Y C company got to unicorn, almost Decacorn status, was super legit, goes public, really big, but then just kind of stays.

• 1:18:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, they hired 300,000 people, right?

• 1:18:54John Coogan?

  No, that's DocuSign. That's a different company.

• 1:18:57Jordi Hays?

  They, they, the name.

• 1:19:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, did you really confuse it?

• 1:19:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:02John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 1:19:03Jordi Hays?

  I always do. It's DocuSign and Dropbox.

• 1:19:05John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, it's Dropbox. I mean, Dropbox has a fascinating engineering culture. They hired Guido Van Rossum for a while. Do you know who Guido Van Rossum is? He's the creator of the Python programming language.

• 1:19:16Jordi Hays?

  Clear, Dropbox still has, I think, more employees than X.

• 1:19:20John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:19:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, they were, they were one of the hottest startups, then have been kind of a, what do they call it? Like a store of value type company? Where, you know, if you bought, you bought a thousand dollars in Dropbox five years ago, it's still a thousand dollars today or something. The stock's been kind of flat. But, but I mean, it's, it's, it's a fascinating founder story of, you know, building a multi-billion dollar company and not many people can say that they've done it. So I have respect.

• 1:19:45Jordi Hays?

  I was wrong. X has 2,800 employees.

• 1:19:48John Coogan?

  Okay, how many Dropbox have?

• 1:19:49Jordi Hays?

  Dropbox has 2,200.

• 1:19:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:19:52Jordi Hays?

  They've been getting.

• 1:19:54John Coogan?

  22, 2,200. And what does DocuSign have? Because Dropbox acquired HelloSign, which is a DocuSign competitor.

• 1:20:02Jordi Hays?

  DocuSign has 6,700.

• 1:20:04John Coogan?

  6,000.

• 1:20:04Jordi Hays?

  Let's go. Hit the size going for that.

• 1:20:06John Coogan?

  Headcount.

• 1:20:08Jordi Hays?

  Headcount's still cool. A lot of people says, hey, you shouldn't, you shouldn't celebrate headcount. You know, it's not a real metric.

• 1:20:15John Coogan?

  I'm a job creator.

• 1:20:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:16John Coogan?

  I'm a job creator.

• 1:20:17Jordi Hays?

  Job creation.

• 1:20:18John Coogan?

  DocuSign is gonna get the craziest corrupt bargain from Trump. Be like, well, you're employing half of America. Like, what do you want? DocuSign's gonna decide whether or not there's tariffs or taxes. They're just gonna write the policy and it's gonna get ironed in because they're creating so many jobs. Every, every politician will love them.

• 1:20:34Jordi Hays?

  There should be a founder that comes out and says, my entire mission is to create jobs. I, if, if we have 0.01%, uh, you know, profit margins.

• 1:20:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:20:45Jordi Hays?

  That's, and we can add.

• 1:20:46John Coogan?

  Hire more.

• 1:20:47Jordi Hays?

  You know, I will just keep, you know, dividing that 0.01% as many times as possible to just get each incremental employee.

• 1:20:55John Coogan?

  Anyway, Dropbox, fantastic story. You know, you know the story of their, their viral growth too? They were very, very early at, at being very intentional about distribution baked into the product. So, uh, when you would sign up for Dropbox, they would give you like, you know, one gig of space to store files in the cloud. But then if I referred you, you would get an extra gig of space and I would get an extra gig of space.

• 1:21:18Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 1:21:18John Coogan?

  And so it went super viral on college campuses and, and they really did a good job of that, like, that, like, you know, viral, uh, viral marketing model that so many companies tried to copy in, like after Dropbox was successful. But, uh, it gets harder and harder over time, but it makes a ton of sense. It's the same Gmail model that worked. Anyway, uh, speaking of legendary Silicon Valley startups, changing, uh, things around. Uh, Asana CEO Dustin Moskowitz is retiring.

• 1:21:49Jordi Hays?

  What did the stock do?

• 1:21:51John Coogan?

  And I mean, young guy.

• 1:21:54Jordi Hays?

  Down 24%.

• 1:21:56John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:21:57Jordi Hays?

  But it could be.

• 1:21:58John Coogan?

  It was like a crazy day in the markets.

• 1:21:59Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no.

• 1:22:00John Coogan?

  But that's.

• 1:22:00Jordi Hays?

  It was very clearly.

• 1:22:01John Coogan?

  Because of him?

• 1:22:02Jordi Hays?

  Because of him.

• 1:22:03John Coogan?

  Stuff. But, I mean, what an interesting run.

• 1:22:07Jordi Hays?

  As a CEO, you want your stock to drop tremendously when you announce your retirement, because that is your market value.

• 1:22:14John Coogan?

  I wonder, I wonder how much of his net worth was in Asana versus Facebook? Because he was a Facebook co-founder. And so you're looking at a trillion dollar company, even if you got 1%, you know, you're in the multi billions. I'm sure there's dilution in sales and stuff, but still, it's like, there's so many, there's so many things where, you know, it's, it's a, it's a big, big shoes to fill. When you're on your second company and your first one's Facebook. But, I don't know, I used Asana for a while, nice product. And, you know, Dustin, come on the show now that you're on retired. Let's talk about what you want to do with all that money now that you're retired. We'll get you, we'll get you a nice watch on bezel, we'll get you an eight sleep.

• 1:22:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Trey.

• 1:22:50John Coogan?

  Wander vacation every once in a while.

• 1:22:51Jordi Hays?

  Trey in the chat, there was some Rolex leaks around their new 2025 models.

• 1:22:56John Coogan?

  I heard about this.

• 1:22:57Jordi Hays?

  They're allegedly introducing a land dweller. Trey says it's a perfect watch for VCs.

• 1:23:03John Coogan?

  Really? Why?

• 1:23:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, obviously, they just mostly dwell on land.

• 1:23:09Jordi Hays?

  If you're enough of a size lord, you start to be more of a sky dweller.

• 1:23:14Jordi Hays?

  But it takes a little bit.

• 1:23:15John Coogan?

  Okay, do we have our next call in for the, this stream? I know we are going, we're supposed to be going live at 1:00 PM. I don't like doxing the, the guests too frequently. There we go.

• 1:23:32Jordi Hays?

  Hey.

• 1:23:33John Coogan?

  Hey.

• 1:23:35Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you guys.

• 1:23:37John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 1:23:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, welcome to the show. It's great to have you, Chrisman.

• 1:23:42Jordi Hays?

  I, I don't know why I messaged you yesterday, or it was maybe the day before, but I was just like, dude, you gotta come on. John and I are dads, you're building products that our children will ultimately use. I don't know if they're quite old enough yet, but I've got a bunch of buddies that, that are on Synthesis for their kids and have said great things. So I wanted to have you on.

• 1:24:07John Coogan?

  Let's start with just a high level intro, who you are, what your company does. Set us up for the viewers and then we'll just ask a bunch of questions.

• 1:24:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I think, by the way, it was like nine or 10 p.m. last night that you messaged me. So yeah, definitely. Thanks for the advance notice.

• 1:24:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:21Speaker 03

  But yeah, happy to come on. I was maybe, you know, in a similar position to you guys like five years ago. My oldest son was two. I went down to visit the school at SpaceX that Elon had created for his own kids. He hired a teacher out of the fancy private school in L.A. and started his own school at SpaceX. And the guy he hired, Josh Don, is, you know, became a friend of mine. And we ended up starting a company together to kind of scale up the best parts of that school. So we started during COVID. The initial product was this thing that really captured my imagination. I went to the school, which, you know, I was at a company, education company called Class Dojo,

• 1:25:04Speaker 03

  which went from, you know, zero to a billion dollars. I was the first employee there. And, you know, what they did at the SpaceX school looked a lot like what we were doing to build that company. The kids were just working together to solve problems in the form of games. And so we took that approach, put that on the internet, and signed up kids from all around the world. You know, it kind of took off. So that was our initial product. And now, you know, we have built an AI math tutor that I think is taking off pretty well. And I think is going to be a major part of every kid's education in the future. Yeah, company's called Synthesis. And yeah, that's where we are.

• 1:25:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So right now you have the subscription. What does Synthesis look like long term? Starting digital makes a lot of sense, but over time, is there, you know, desire to kind of almost verticalize and go into the real world? Or what does that look like?

• 1:25:59Speaker 03

  I don't know about going into the real world. I think it's, there've been some. You know, Silicon Valley startups have been really well funded that tried to do the software piece and the real world piece at the same time. I think it's really hard to pull off both. Like if you're going into the real world or schools, you're doing like a real estate play essentially. And, and you know, I think when it comes to learning, you know, math, science, engineering, the fundamentals, these are, this is information. And so information can be transmitted through computers in a lot of ways, you know, better than than a human can do it. And so I think if we want to reach a billion kids, then, you know, it makes sense to go vertical, but within, you know, software, like things

• 1:26:42Speaker 03

  that can be delivered purely software. Never say never, because it is attractive to, you know, the idea of like opening up physical in-person schools. If we did something like that, we'd probably do something like an academy, like the, I always admire the European soccer clubs. What they do is they'll have an academy attached to all their professional teams and they'll bring kids in at like age six or eight. There's a guy who's a star now for Barcelona that they brought in at eight years old and now he's like 18 and he's just, he's amazing. I think if you really want like incredible performance, then you should do that kind of like focus on the elite. So we might do one of those in like every city.

• 1:27:14Jordi Hays?

  We talked about it.

• 1:27:15Speaker 03

  The kids with the most potential. Yeah.

• 1:27:18Jordi Hays?

  We talked about a TEAL fellowship for middle schoolers, you know, just like you just go further downstream, get the middle, like you, you could basically be that guy of getting the middle schooler to like drop out of their like regular, you know, or elementary school and be like, come to the synthesis institution academy. Block in. And you.

• 1:27:35Speaker 03

  That's exactly what if we, if we do go in person, that's what we're going to do. Okay. I think it's, it's a, that, that'll just make a lot of people upset, but I think it's actually the right thing to do. Like, I think you can identify kids who have potential like engineering talent pretty early. And if you develop that, this is, it's like, this is what they do for sports. And so like, if, if we're looking at people who can actually advance civilization, you know, we should have something that's at least as serious as what we do for sports.

• 1:28:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What is, what is?

• 1:28:07Jordi Hays?

  10 years from now, what is sort of K through 12 going to look like? My, my sort of personal experience with school was interesting. I started a Waldorf school. That was like my earliest memories of school. I think I benefited a lot from it, but they didn't really teach me to read until I was in the third grade. And I was like conscious enough to tell, complain to my parents and be like, mom and dad, like I want to learn to read like the other kids like, you know? So I ended up going to a regular elementary school. And then by high school, my, my father was actually a math teacher at my high school. And I hated high school so much that I like graduated early. So like my, my, and then, and then by college, I was just like focused on startup stuff. So my, I didn't feel like I had a great experience with my education.

• 1:28:51Jordi Hays?

  How much better can it be? And sort of what's your broader vision? Obviously synthesis can be a big part of a child and a kid's education. But you know, what does the full stack look like in the future?

• 1:29:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, that's funny. I also had a bad experience with my education and it's, you know, it's, I got like psy opt into, you know, devoting the rest of my life to changing the whole system because I hated it so much. So, so, so maybe similar to you in that regard. I, I think the big problem is you start with this original elite education is with one-on-one tutors. And I, I don't know, but I don't think it was like eight hours a day plus homework with, with one-on-one tutors. I think you can learn a lot more efficiently than that. Then you have like the one-room schoolhouses, which again were like, kids are like working on the farm and then they come to the schoolhouse, you know, a couple of hours a day, maybe a couple of times a week. And that's it. And then all the parents go to work and these, the school day expands.

• 1:29:47Speaker 03

  And instead of just sticking to that, like, well, we'll teach you a little bit and then we'll kind of have fun for the rest of the day. They just expanded the teaching to make it somehow encompass all the hours from like eight to three, eight AM to 3 PM and homework. And I think what we're going to see, I think AI tutors are going to drive this. I think you could actually learn 1E to 30X faster. I don't think there's going to be a need, a need for any homework. And kids are just going to use AI tutors to learn the fundamentals and hopefully, you know, a lot beyond that, what their interests are. My hope is the rest of the day is spent in ways that we can't imagine. Like there's just like in your life, there's an infinite number of things you can do in ways you can spend your time. And the same is true of kids. So we should spend a little bit of time teaching them the fundamentals so that they can have

• 1:30:31Speaker 03

  good ideas and find what they're interested in. And then I don't know what they should be doing. My kids go to like a charter school two days a week where they they build bridges, they do school plays, they do all these kinds of things that you're not going to do with. It's not just software and like it's not just reading. And so I'd love to see a lot more of that. Our goal is like be the partner with every in-person school that does that. And you know, hopefully there's a lot of just local creativity and exploration, right? Because kids have a tough job, you know, they have to figure out what they want to do in life. And that that's it's a hard problem in the modern world. It's hard to say like, I just, I want to be a doctor or I want to be, you know, something specific like that because careers get more and more creative. And so I think it's important for kids to have that time to explore.

• 1:31:17John Coogan?

  Can you take me on a little tour of where the government's doing things that are great for education of the next generation, where things could be improved, how charter schools fit into that, how public funding fits into that? Just kind of like, what's your world model for, you know, public-private partnership in educating the next generation?

• 1:31:37Speaker 03

  There's some really exciting stuff going on now, which I don't know if you guys had Ryan Delt from Primer on, but he's done some work in like kind of lobbying governments in Florida for increased school choice, which is like, so I think a lot of people don't know, in California, for example, it costs like $20,000 a year to put a kid through the public school system, which is just like an extreme amount of money. And that's a little bit higher than the national average, but not by much. And so what a lot of states are trying to do is say, you can take that money with you and go choose a different school. And so that creates like the government, whether it's usually like the local government. Collecting taxes, paying for the education. But then there's this fierce competition, right? Like, somebody can open up a school right next door.

• 1:32:21Speaker 03

  Bad schools can fail, bad teachers, bad principals can go out of business. And there's going to be a lot more creativity in that regard. I think that's maybe one of the most exciting things that government can do. Because I think, you know, then you would be as well served by education as people are served by like grocery stores. And they'll just be, you know, kind of wild, like, cutthroat competition and people trying to do interesting things to attract students and get results. So I think that's one place where the government can do something really great just by letting the, you know, bringing this like kind of consumer mentality into what's typically been a government monopoly. So schools could get, you know, you'd be as well served as grocery stores as opposed to what it is now, which is like the DMV, right? Sure.

• 1:33:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Does all K through 12 education over time start to look more and more like a video game? Because like, one concern I have right now is that kids, when they're out of school, they're doing Roblox, they're watching TikToks. And then you put them in a classroom or you give them homework that's sort of built around this sort of old style philosophy around learning, which is like, you know, writing things down and, and, you know, here's this, you know, textbook and we're going to read a chapter out of it or things like that. To me, it seems like kind of an impossible uphill battle to try to get a kid to pay attention to that when outside of class or even on their phone in the classroom,

• 1:33:47Jordi Hays?

  they have this sort of consistent, really intense stimulation. So in order to compete, does education need to start looking more like what's on their phone in their sort of leisure time? Or how do you think about that?

• 1:34:01Speaker 03

  I think those are, I know this like on people's minds. I think they're less related than people think. I think, you know, TikTok and these things are addicting. But also, school is just terrible. Like, it was terrible when we were kids and we didn't have TikTok, right? So I think, I think regardless of what's going on in the rest of the world.

• 1:34:24Speaker 03

  You want to make the tools for learning as effective and as engaging as possible. It's a really tight balance that you have to strike when you're building products. Like for us, there's, you know, there's things like Duolingo, which famously, you know, it's maybe really good at getting their early retention and engagement. But, but, you know, hardly anybody knows someone who's learned a language from Duolingo. So they kind of focus all the way on the engagement and gamification and not so much on the effectiveness. And then, you know, you, you can go the other way where it's like, well, theoretically, if, if kids would spend a lot of time on this, they would learn, but they won't do it. And I think the right products, it's going to be, you know, just, just a balance of, of those kinds of things. And I think if you get it right, you know, something a lot of people miss is kids, they want to learn.

• 1:35:07Speaker 03

  When you really learn something, you, you rock a new idea, it makes you more powerful and you can feel that. And I think it's especially true in math, but I think it's true in all subjects. If you want them to learn something, it's because you're trying to make them more powerful. I think what a lot of teachers do is say, well, this will become, you know, useful to get to the next level of school, and that's not terribly motivating. What we try to do is just show you, these ideas make you a more powerful thinker in the moment, and I think kids are pretty motivated. They're pretty motivated by that. So, yeah.

• 1:35:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Last question I really have today, and would love to have you back on in the future, just as, you know, this sort of industry develops. But we had talked before, when the humane AI pin came out, I think everybody that was intelligent in the tech industry generally looked at it and said, this is not going to replace my phone because it does a lot of the same things. It doesn't necessarily do them better. But our reaction at the time was that this is not going to replace my phone, but maybe this is a solution that my kid would use where like, I want like location tracking and I want, you know, them to be able to easily call me, but I don't want them to be on a screen.

• 1:36:22Jordi Hays?

  Have you thought, and, and so as like all these AI pins sort of evolved, there was the rabbit, there was humane, there were some others. My immediate thought was maybe they're focused on the wrong user type. Maybe there's a market for this with kids who, if you gave them something that they could ask any question in the world to and was sort of like this sort of companion, maybe that could be cool. Have you guys thought at all about sort of hardware experiences? I know you're very focused on delivering these sort of digital experiences, but is that, you know, ever been even a conversation?

• 1:36:53Speaker 03

  We we haven't talked about it at all. You know, like my my kids have like the um it's not Apple Watch, but it's like a knockoff like watch brand that like tracks that look, yeah, they they can talk to you and that kind of stuff. And I I assume, you know, they'll be able to connect to the Internet and use the use AI for for questions and that kind of thing. I think um I I I think for learning, screens are like extraordinarily powerful. Like you can simulate almost anything on a screen. And uh yeah, that that's like underrated, you know, I I I think people like don't realize how amazing that is. There's a lot of Luddites and who are like, you know, there's just something about learning on paper, like reading a book on paper. And like, I just don't agree with any of that at all. I just think it's like information, um information kind of flows, you know, you can you can kind of do anything on a screen.

• 1:37:36Speaker 03

  So, yeah, you know, we we haven't uh we we haven't talked about doing uh doing anything in in hardware yet. One one kind of crazy idea I have is because a lot of a lot of people do homeschooling now, a lot of uh, you know, uh, I've become uh, you know, close with some people who are, you know, you're fairly prominent who who do homeschooling. And uh, I I like the idea for my kids as well, having like a booth with like a screen and and speakers and just something to like isolate the outside world where you've got the computer in it and you're gonna go in there. You're gonna go in this booth, which this seems kind of dystopian, but it's gonna be for like an hour and a half a day, right?

• 1:38:09Jordi Hays?

  Lock the door.

• 1:38:10Speaker 03

  Turn everything else. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like it's it should have like a time lock on it, of course. Um, yeah.

• 1:38:15Jordi Hays?

  You know, you have to complete the lesson to get out.

• 1:38:19John Coogan?

  Well, well, last last question for me. Let let me flip that around. Um, I I I know a lot of parents are obviously, you know, they want their kids to be accelerated in in STEM and math. But uh, there is the other side of like socialization. And there's a big question like, you know, Tyler Cowen's written about this, how maybe in the future, intelligence is too cheap to meter. The real value is in connections being, we we like to joke that we're we're we're trying to be golden retrievers, be very friendly, uh, attractive and dumb, because intelligence is gonna be too cheap to meter. The AI can do the rocket science for me, but you know, if if I'm a friend that you want to hang out with and you want to, you know, chop it up with, we're gonna have a great time. So, I mean, but I mean, seriously, as a as a parent, like I think a lot of parents do even worry even more about their kids like.

• 1:39:02John Coogan?

  Like, hey, it's okay if you're falling behind in math just a little bit, as long as you're getting socialized and and becoming like an upstanding member of society. And so do you see AI tutors or AI calibration being able to communicate with a child and understand, hey, they're being a little antisocial or something like that in a way that a teacher could, or maybe just an augmented or an additional layer there to to see, hey, this this kid is, you know, actually engaging at a very, you know, mature level, which is great. These are good signs. We want to continue this pattern of behavior.

• 1:39:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. I think parents are correct to worry more about social skills, especially from a young age. How old are you guys' kids? Are they they're like

• 1:39:46John Coogan?

  Twenty-four, and then I have twin boys who are six months.

• 1:39:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oh, okay. Three and eight months.

• 1:39:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:39:53Speaker 03

  Okay, cool. So yeah, you're in that age now where like the social skills matter, I think, up to like age seven. It's like close relationships with the the family and just try to spend as much time with them as you can.

• 1:40:05John Coogan?

  Makes sense.

• 1:40:05Speaker 03

  And be around and like reading faces. I actually think it's a mistake. We don't like actively recruit customers below age seven, because if you think about how much processing it takes to, you know, learn how to operate in the social world and read faces, I think you just want to leave kids' brains like open to basically spending all their resources doing that. Because if you get it, it's like speaking a language. You get that by like age, you know, four to seven. Then then in some ways, you know, you're set for life because you're going to be able to like fit in with groups. And I think that's that's extraordinarily important. We kind of, and when it comes to education, I think it's, I don't see that the AIs are going to be able to do our thinking for us. I mean, that's like a totally different world. It doesn't look to

• 1:40:50Speaker 03

  me like we're on the path to getting that. I think LMs are really cool. I think you're going to want your kids to be smart and knowledgeable and able to think as an individual and also have those social skills to work with other people and solve problems together, which is which is humanity's way of superintelligence, right? It's like being able to work together in groups. Also, this is actually mirrors the structure of the company. Now the AI Like the leading edge of the product, but then we have synthesis teams where you put kids in teams, small groups to work together in solving problems. They're like video games, but they're not shooters or race games. They're like complex problems where you have to argue and decide what action you want to take under conditions of uncertainty.

• 1:41:29Speaker 03

  Figure out what you got wrong and make the course corrections and it's like meta problem solving skills. So it's, I think if you, you want like these outgoing, like, you know, sociable engineers, people who can do both sides of their brain. And I think we can do that, right? I think of course people lean one way or the other, but I think we can get people up to like a really good standard on both of those. And then that's just going to make us able to solve more problems and advance the civilization. So that's how I look at it if I was a parent anyway. Work on the social skills first.

• 1:41:56John Coogan?

  That's a fantastic vision for the future. I'm very optimistic.

• 1:41:59Jordi Hays?

  I have one last, last question. Miss Rachel on YouTube, very popular, little controversial. Do you have any under the radar creators on YouTube that just make?

• 1:42:15Jordi Hays?

  I, my wife is very good about having like extremely limited, just like TV screen time. We don't do iPads in public or at home. Planes are maybe the one condition. So if I'm taking my kids on a plane, is there, is there a YouTube creator that you recommend? Or you just like now put them on, put them on, give them their AI tutor and that's that.

• 1:42:38Speaker 03

  No, I mean, at your kid's age, I think that Daniel the Tiger, like PBS series is, is really good. Do you guys know that one?

• 1:42:46Jordi Hays?

  Alpha.

• 1:42:46Speaker 03

  I don't know. Yeah, that was great. That it like teaches them little, it's like, I think it's like the successor to Mr. Rogers and he's like made, made by like the same people. So it's got like little lessons and it's animated. It's okay for them to watch. Your kids watch Bluey?

• 1:43:01John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:43:02Speaker 03

  You ever seen Bluey? Bluey's great. So that's what we would do when they were on planes and little kids like that. I would. I haven't seen, I've got four of my own and just having seen the, um, I, I think YouTube, YouTube is quite bad and it seems to push them into the YouTube shorts, which are just terrible. And even my like five year old recognizes like, this is bad. I shouldn't be watching this. What's up?

• 1:43:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, we just, we were just agreeing the short form is like slop and you know, you should avoid it at all costs, no matter what age you are, basically. Except ours. Except ours. You should definitely watch clips of this because we will be clipping this interview and posting it out. And you should definitely watch these shorts because they're educational, but.

• 1:43:38Speaker 03

  Shorts on, on, on X are, are, are great. Yeah.

• 1:43:40John Coogan?

  It's different. It's different. Yeah. But I'm sure if you swipe up on this, on X, you're going to get some really dirty stuff.

• 1:43:49John Coogan?

  Anyway, this was an awesome interview. Thank you so much. We'll have to have you back soon. This is fantastic. Yeah. Very helpful.

• 1:43:53Speaker 03

  Thanks. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

• 1:43:55John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon.

• 1:43:57Speaker 03

  All right. Cheers, guys.

• 1:43:58John Coogan?

  That's hilarious. Um, uh, the, uh, the how much screen time thing is a great question. I don't know if you saw Peter Thiel got in, asked this at like Sun Valley. Really? Yeah. Because they would say, oh, you're the, you're the board member of, uh, you know, Facebook, like how much Facebook do you think kids should use? So it was basically screen time and he was like 90 minutes a week. And so I was just like, yeah, that seems like a good number to benchmark against. But then I was, I was trying to think like, how can I make this? Gotta get your 90, son. Yeah, no, no, no. Here's the iPad. Get your 90 in. No, no, no. Mr. Mr. Thiel. Yeah. So get, get to 90. Yeah. You gotta get those numbers up. Uh, but no, but then I wanted to make it like, you know, can I, can I make it even easier to keep that number lower? Cause you want to basically keep the number as low as possible.

• 1:44:42John Coogan?

  And I realized you just have to create a really brutal economy in your house. So we have a whole economy going now where you get stars for brushing your teeth, doing all these different things. Oh, yeah. And all of a sudden it turned something that was like, the sticker economy is big. And so all of a sudden it turned from like, oh yeah, like it's a Friday. I can watch this to like, I am grinding for like weeks for like a movie night, which was like, it was just free before, but he doesn't mind it. That all of a sudden I've just created this, you know, Kafkaesque. Economy around it that he has to work like weeks to get like a single episode, a single like eight minute episode.

• 1:45:16Jordi Hays?

  It's great.

• 1:45:17John Coogan?

  But, but it's worked fantastically.

• 1:45:18Jordi Hays?

  This is the new economy.

• 1:45:19John Coogan?

  He feels the reward. It's fantastic. I highly recommend it. Create a really, a really arcane economy in your household for whatever your kids want to do. It's great. Anyway, speaking of arcane Kafkaesque economies, let's move over to venture capital. Will Manitis posts, Paul Ferry, founder of Matrix Partners. There's a little interview in this book. Question, do we have 20 minutes? What do we have?

• 1:45:41Jordi Hays?

  And he says, no, I'm done. I have to quit. But again, if you want to call me next week or continue on, we can do it by phone. Let me just finish the point. So why is this the best business? One, you can make a lot of money if you're in it for a long time. It's not a business that you can get rich next year or the following year or five years. It's changed a little bit with some of these mango solo GP funds. It may be 10 years, it may be 15 years, but if you continue to be successful at it, it's amazingly rewarding. But more importantly, you're dealing with interesting people all the time. They're innovators that are people that are changing lifestyles in the world. You're dealing for the most part with people who have no net worth and you're helpful to them in building net worth for themselves and net worth for their employees.

• 1:46:24Jordi Hays?

  And you can be in the venture business and be relevant for a very long period of time if you're good at it, more so than if you start a tech company. The people who started Stratus Computer or Apollo Computer were relevant and important people in the eighties, but nobody knows who they are today. Whereas people that were in the venture business to be relevant for 40, 30, 35 years later, you're at the leading edge of product development or technology or capability. There's no other business like that. You're not collecting the receivables for the hundredth time. You're not laying off employees. You're dealing with interesting personalities. So it's the best business. Sorry, we had to cut it short, but something came up and I have to attend this.

• 1:47:01John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:47:02Jordi Hays?

  Great, fantastic quote. The only, the only, the only pushback here that some GPs would give you is the downside of having, you know, 20 to 100 LPs who are your customers in many ways and can call you at any hour of the day, 365 days a year to, you know.

• 1:47:25John Coogan?

  Well, that's the most interesting thing is that like, there's this bifurcation right now where a lot of funds are trying to do less LPs, higher GP commits.

• 1:47:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:32John Coogan?

  And then simultaneously, there's the opposite, which is like, let's go public. Let's have any retailer.

• 1:47:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:37John Coogan?

  Retail investor be able to yell at us when the stock goes down because we had a miss.

• 1:47:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:42John Coogan?

  But, you know.

• 1:47:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've got a, I've got a buddy who raised his first fund. It's $20 million fund.

• 1:47:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:48Jordi Hays?

  100K is like the average check size.

• 1:47:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:50Jordi Hays?

  So that means there's people that are way less than that.

• 1:47:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:52Jordi Hays?

  People that are way more than that, but you do the math. It's a lot of people.

• 1:47:56John Coogan?

  I wonder how, I, I mean, if, if, if General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz get out in the public markets, I wonder what the smallest fund to go public would be in like five years. You think someone would take like a $100 million fund public?

• 1:48:10Jordi Hays?

  Are there, are there any?

• 1:48:13John Coogan?

  Just raise, just raise a fund, just spack it, sell your entire GP stake.

• 1:48:18John Coogan?

  Deploy it all. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. Stranger things have happened. Who knows? Silly. Anyway.

• 1:48:23Jordi Hays?

  There's not.

• 1:48:23John Coogan?

  Let's move on to Near Cyan, big friend of the show. They're hiring for a social media influencer, marketing lead. This seems like a dream job. Seems really fun. We released V1 of RN last week and the response has been amazing. If you'd like to lead our marketing team for the, for an app that has already been redefining the relationship between humanity and AI, please apply slash DM.

• 1:48:45Jordi Hays?

  Near is super smart. I got early access to the app.

• 1:48:48John Coogan?

  Oh, you did?

• 1:48:48Jordi Hays?

  I've used it and it's very cool. It's built on, built on Claude, but Near is super opinionated and the, the little, a little lore here, we talked about this before, but for anybody that doesn't know, Near. Developed some notoriety for creating an Nvidia only fund.

• 1:49:09John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 1:49:09Jordi Hays?

  I think two years ago at this point, it turned out.

• 1:49:12John Coogan?

  Then you just can't sell it.

• 1:49:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, for 10 years.

• 1:49:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, 10 years.

• 1:49:15Jordi Hays?

  So the whole point is that it's a 10 year lockup.

• 1:49:18John Coogan?

  That's really fun.

• 1:49:18Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 1:49:20John Coogan?

  It's a cool thing.

• 1:49:20Jordi Hays?

  So far, so far, so good.

• 1:49:23John Coogan?

  And yeah, I mean, we featured New Year's posts many times, a lot of bangers.

• 1:49:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and this is just an underrated role in tech because there's the historical social media manager role.

• 1:49:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:49:36Jordi Hays?

  That was like you have your little SaaS tools and you know, you're scheduling posts out weeks in advance. And that's just not the way that social media works anymore.

• 1:49:45John Coogan?

  We talked about this with the PMF at I guess.

• 1:49:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's.

• 1:49:47John Coogan?

  It's like, it's like, can you make a crazy vibe reel? Can you post a banger? Can you be truly in the conversation? Get a bunch of fans, be doing frontline customer support almost, getting, you know, executive communication from the founders. Get the founders posting more.

• 1:50:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:04John Coogan?

  You know, it's just, it's just 360 now. Anyway, I wanted to move on to a little historical size gong. Because I want to have Connor Zwik on the show from, from Speak. Do we have our guest in here? Okay, well, we'll do this one after. Let's bring in Michael. He's here. I got so excited with the size gong. I was gonna, I was gonna hit it, but.

• 1:50:26Jordi Hays?

  We can hit the size gong for Michael.

• 1:50:28John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 1:50:29Jordi Hays?

  Welcome, Michael. We don't have you up on.

• 1:50:35Michael Mignano?

  We hit it a little harder. Hit the gong.

• 1:50:36John Coogan?

  Hit it a little harder.

• 1:50:39Michael Mignano?

  All right, there we go. That works. Can you guys hear me right? Every time. Oh, we broke it. That was, that's what I was going for. I was hoping we would break it.

• 1:50:46John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 1:50:48Jordi Hays?

  What's going on? You made it to Boston. He, Michael messaged me like maybe two hours ago and says, I might be in the air, but you made it. And you're at, where are you right now?

• 1:51:00Michael Mignano?

  So this is the Suno studio.

• 1:51:02John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:51:03Michael Mignano?

  Very cool. This is where I guess they have like artists roll through and stuff when they're in town.

• 1:51:08John Coogan?

  Nice, nice.

• 1:51:09Michael Mignano?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:09Jordi Hays?

  Is Boston a major? Is Boston a major music market or is it more so they're bringing in musicians that are helping improve the models that they're making and the app in general?

• 1:51:23Michael Mignano?

  I think it is a market, right? It is a, it is a major market, but no, it's not like in LA or in New York. But this is where Suno was founded, right? Uh, the founders came out of MIT, Harvard. There's obviously, as you guys know, there's a lot of machine learning research going on in Boston and Cambridge. So that's where the company got started, but you know, I think what they had a really smart idea, which was when our artists are going through Boston, which you know, most major artists do. They can use the studio. It's a place to.

• 1:51:51Jordi Hays?

  That's cool. Okay, that makes sense.

• 1:51:53John Coogan?

  Really quickly, can you introduce yourself to the stream?

• 1:51:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:55John Coogan?

  And give us a background, your name.

• 1:51:58Jordi Hays?

  The man who needs no introduction. But you may as well do it.

• 1:52:02John Coogan?

  But you're not at that level yet.

• 1:52:04Michael Mignano?

  Of course, of course. No, I mean, I, I appreciate you guys bringing me out. Sorry, am I introducing myself?

• 1:52:09John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, introduce yourself, tell us what you do now. And then I have a bunch of questions about your career. We'll dive into it.

• 1:52:14Michael Mignano?

  All right, let's do it. Uh, what's up everyone? Uh, my name is Michael Mignano. I'm a partner at Lightspeed. Uh, I was the co-founder of Anchor, podcasting platform. I'm just now owned by Spotify. I also recently co-founded a company called OBO, which is an AI education platform.

• 1:52:30John Coogan?

  Awesome.

• 1:52:31Michael Mignano?

  Yeah, big, big fan of the pod, happy to be, uh, one of the early guests. Thanks for having me.

• 1:52:36John Coogan?

  I'm a huge fan of Anchor. I, we, we, I used it for some podcast test I did, like must've been right when it came out. And I just remember thinking like, man, this is, this takes so much of the headache out of podcasting.

• 1:52:47Michael Mignano?

  Exactly.

• 1:52:47John Coogan?

  You just, uh, you could upload it on your phone. I, I don't think, was the original vision, uh, you wanted people to be producing and, and producing podcasts on their phone and uploading? Because that was a button. You could just kind of hit record and then boom, it goes out to the RSS feed. But it seemed like it almost became like a prosumer tool pretty quickly because the podcasting market, it's pretty bifurcated between like, people start taking it seriously. Once they get any sort of traction, right?

• 1:53:11Michael Mignano?

  Yeah, no, the the original vision for Anchor actually was not to be a podcast platform. It was it was very, very idealistic. We wanted to be a social media platform, like audio, social media.

• 1:53:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:53:22Michael Mignano?

  Like think Clubhouse, but a couple of years earlier.

• 1:53:25John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:53:25Michael Mignano?

  And what we what we learned is that social audio is really, really frigging hard.

• 1:53:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:53:30Michael Mignano?

  You know, we we took a crack at a certain format, take on it that we had, which did like fairly well. I mean, there was like, you know, there were spikes of growth here and there, but overall wasn't working. After a year, we like completely pivoted to another iteration of social audio.

• 1:53:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:46Michael Mignano?

  Gave that a year, didn't work. And then what we were hearing from all of our users is, hey, we just want to use these tools to publish podcasts to Apple and Spotify.

• 1:53:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:55Michael Mignano?

  And when we did that, it was just like instant PMF from that moment.

• 1:54:00John Coogan?

  So yeah, take us through the story of the of the company. How big did you get? You raised money, I'm sure, eventually exit. I want to hear that.

• 1:54:07Michael Mignano?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and for for a little little bit of lore, when I was, this was 2018, I had just, maybe I was still in college. I hit up Michael and he did a call with me.

• 1:54:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:19Jordi Hays?

  Didn't need to, had no real, I mean, it was much more beneficial for me. I was doing, I was working in, you know, doing a bunch of podcast advertising stuff at the time. But thank you, thank you to Michael. You always remember the people that like give you, you know, 30 minutes of their day, however long it takes. But but yeah, I would love to hear the the story again.

• 1:54:38Michael Mignano?

  Yeah, so so so my co-founder and I, Nir Zicchraman, we we built product at this company called Aviary. And this was around the time that like Instagram was taking off and people were realizing that you could take and edit photos on your phone and it could actually look good. Obviously, you know, now that's that's just a given, like the camera is the phone. And, you know, we sold that that business to Adobe. And while we were there, we got really into podcasts.

• 1:55:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:03Michael Mignano?

  And we were sort of like sitting around asking ourselves like, how come nobody has done for photos? How come nobody's done for podcasts what has just been done for photos? And so that was like the original idea, like, and of course, at this time, it was like 2016. Everything was a social network back then, like Snap was exploding. And we're like, oh, of course, this should be a social network, right?

• 1:55:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:23Michael Mignano?

  We should have a feed, we should have a button right at the bottom of the app in the middle. And and so that was the original vision. We raised a couple million bucks from folks like Beta Works and SV Angel and Eniac and all these, all these guys. And And yeah, like I said, we, you know, we, we, we had to go through a couple of different pivots. We raised, I think to answer your question, John, we ended up raising just under 15 million total.

• 1:55:46John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:55:46Michael Mignano?

  Uh, we were about 25 people when we exited. We sold to Spotify in 2019. They actually announced two acquisitions on the same day, Anchor and Gimlet.

• 1:55:55Jordi Hays?

  I remember that.

• 1:55:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, I remember that.

• 1:55:57Jordi Hays?

  Which is like the cardinal sin of, of launches is like, if you have two, both very interesting launches, you should just do them like space them out and like, you know, get the full benefit of each, but uh,

• 1:56:07John Coogan?

  I think, I, I mean, you could probably speak to it more than I can, but it seemed like Spotify really wanted to plant the flag and be like, we are in podcasting now. So not just one acquisition, we're taking this seriously. Uh, wait, but quick question. Did you ever run into Archie Archibong at, uh, Aviary?

• 1:56:20Michael Mignano?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:56:21John Coogan?

  I went to high school with him.

• 1:56:22Michael Mignano?

  I hope he's listening.

• 1:56:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I'll have to send him this clip. That's awesome. Yeah. Uh, yeah. He was out in Japan a bunch. Uh, yeah.

• 1:56:28Michael Mignano?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:56:29John Coogan?

  Good guy.

• 1:56:29Jordi Hays?

  Big in Japan.

• 1:56:30John Coogan?

  Huge in Japan, honestly.

• 1:56:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I wanted to ask you about, uh, where, you know, as somebody who sold your company to Spotify, worked there for a while. And then now you have a much more sort of, uh, now you're a venture capitalist. I'm, but, but still, you know, I'm sure very opinionated on the Spotify product. How do you, you know, where, where do you think Spotify is going? You know, we, we had talked about this a little bit offline. I'd said, uh, and I'd even posted about this of Spotify and YouTube have sort of always been on a collision course. Long, ultra long form became very important to YouTube and then they became the biggest podcast platform. Uh, and in many ways, like podcasts aren't just replacing radio, they're replacing TV.

• 1:57:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:57:13Jordi Hays?

  Right? Which is, so it's super important to YouTube. Uh, and it, it feels like a sort of critical battleground for Spotify, but I'd be curious to get kind of your point of view on the, on the overall, battle between these, you know, tech, tech giants, right? Spotify feels like a small company, but it's a hundred and 40 billion dollar market cap. It's a big business, probably would be well beyond that if Apple Music, uh, wasn't, you know, rammed down everybody's throat. But, uh, yeah, I'd love, would love to get like, it's kind of a general market perspective on, on that.

• 1:57:47Michael Mignano?

  Yeah. So taking a step back and I should caveat all this by saying that I haven't been at the company in like three years. So this is, this is a pure outsider perspective. But you know, I think the big thing that Spotify has always done well and they've always believed in is this notion of bundling, right? Like taking, taking these products and these business lines that they have strengths in, and then bundling them with other new, new products on product lines and product in business lines. And that's honestly why podcasts were so successful for Spotify. You know, if you think back, back in the day when it was like Spotify head to head with Apple, Apple had two separate apps for these things, right? They had music and they had podcasts, two separate apps. And that was a, that was a total gift to Spotify.

• 1:58:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:28Michael Mignano?

  Because Spotify could take the podcasts and put them right next to the music. So you never had to leave the experience. And that's really what Kickstarter, the whole thing. It's like they had a built in audience of hundreds of millions of people that were one tap away from podcasts. And I think, you know, maybe to start getting to the, the question you're asking, I think that's, that's how they've probably thought about video as well. It's like, hey, we have people listening to music. Now we have them listening to podcasts. What if we bundle in video now? And that opens up a whole new market for us. So the obvious place for them to start was with podcasts, right? Like they have every podcast in the world already. Now let's get these people to add videos to these podcasts. But, you know, again, as an outsider, you have to imagine the next step is you start to see other types of video content

• 1:59:12Michael Mignano?

  on the platform. And even if they can start chipping away a few market share percentage points here and there, YouTube's catalog, that's a big deal for Spotify. So, um, I think it's, I think it's a pretty smart move.

• 1:59:24John Coogan?

  How do you think about the relentless march of the algorithmically curated feeds? Uh, in the podcasting world, I think a lot of podcasters are super, super happy that they're in the RSS feeds. And they feel like it's almost as strong as having someone's email address. There's a very high open rate. If you have that RSS feed, your weekly show, you're dropping a weekly thing right at the top of their Apple Podcasts app. But, and Spotify has a similar feel right now, but you could imagine them going to something that's more algorithmically generated, more variance in the, in the total views. You see this on YouTube where, uh, you know, Mr. Beast can be, can be reliable, but for most other creators, it's like a banger and then a flop and then.

• 2:00:06John Coogan?

  A banger and then a flop and we all feel this on X when we post, you know, it's very high variance, but you can go really, really big because it's an algorithmic feed. You know, your, your podcaster who's built on RSS, pretty hard to all of a sudden have one episode go 10x bigger, but the downside is very protected. Do you think, my, my question is basically like, if I'm an RSS podcaster and I'm thinking, hey, I want to go to Spotify, this is a little dangerous because I could see them going more algo feed in the future. And then that introduces more volatility to my business. Maybe that's good, maybe that's bad. What's your read on that?

• 2:00:39Michael Mignano?

  Yeah, I mean, I think the RSS feed is a very, very controversial thing in podcast land. You have the podcast purists.

• 2:00:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:00:45Michael Mignano?

  That will live and die by the RSS feed. I mean, they will fight you to the death if you tell them that RSS is going to go away.

• 2:00:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:53Michael Mignano?

  But, but on the flip side, like it has lots of limitations, the RSS feed, like it's, it's not like a two-way channel, right? It's like very limited in terms of the functionality it can ultimately provide. And, you know, I think there's probably no coincidence, two biggest platforms now for podcasts, Spotify and YouTube, are not really RSS based anymore, right? They're, they're all doing things that layer on top of the format that have nothing to do with RSS. And so, again, I know like the RSS purists are, you know, probably want to, want to murder me right now, but I just don't, I don't know if the, the format is viable long-term as a solution, I think. Cause like you said, you can, you can get massive, massive distribution on YouTube that you can't get through, just like a plain old RSS feed.

• 2:01:35John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:01:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, the two things as a creator now, the analytics on the RSS feed are just obviously a joke.

• 2:01:43Michael Mignano?

  Terrible.

• 2:01:43Jordi Hays?

  You basically get no analytics. And then with Spotify is a lot better, but then the, the distribution, which we're already seeing this with Spotify. You know, we're, we're, we're growing our audience just by nature of being on Spotify versus like, that's not really happening on Apple. It's sort of us driving other sort of top of funnel growth. But anyways.

• 2:02:07Michael Mignano?

  It's the classic, it's the classic centralization versus decentralization argument, right?

• 2:02:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:13Michael Mignano?

  And in most cases, I know people don't want to hear this, but centralization often wins.

• 2:02:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's your take on the pivot to video for most podcasters? We saw a big one today. Invest like the best now has video. I started on video with YouTube. Basically, I never really had a pure audio product. I think the first episode we did was video. We very much enjoy video, but is there, is there any hope for a creator that just wants to stay audio only for the future?

• 2:02:40Michael Mignano?

  I don't think so, because again, we're talking about Spotify and YouTube being the predominant platforms right now. And we know that those algos, they need the video. They crave the video.

• 2:02:50John Coogan?

  Craves the video.

• 2:02:52Michael Mignano?

  I think users got wise to this. Actually, it was during COVID. People don't realize it was during COVID when, before COVID, people were recording podcasts in studios, in booths, right? Similar to how you guys are now. But they weren't video booths, right? It was just like a microphone on a table. And then COVID, everyone went home and the way that these shows kept going was through Zoom and Riverside.

• 2:03:14John Coogan?

  So you get video for free.

• 2:03:15Michael Mignano?

  So all these podcasters got video for free. And they were like, oh shit, if I upload this video to YouTube, I get all this distribution.

• 2:03:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:21Michael Mignano?

  And now you can't go back. The algo craves, craves the video.

• 2:03:25John Coogan?

  Craves the video. You feed the AI gods.

• 2:03:28Jordi Hays?

  Talk to us about, I'm going to butcher the name, OBO. I've only read OBO. So this is a company you basically incubated, you're a co-founder, but obviously you're, you're still a full-time investor. Maybe talk about that dynamic and then what you guys are working on.

• 2:03:45Michael Mignano?

  Yeah, recently co-founded this new company with my former anchor co-founder, Nears Dickerman. He's the CEO. He's, you know, he's running it full-time. I am not full-time on it, as you mentioned, I'm a full-time partner at Lightspeed. Basically, the premise behind OBO is very, very simple. We, we, the humans, you guys, me, everyone, we have invested many, many billions of dollars over the past couple of years in making machines very, very smart, right? Through, through AI. And we believe with OBO that it's time for the machines to make humans smarter. And so this is a company, the premise of AI making humans smarter. You guys have all heard a lot of the talk about, you know, the hyped up use case of ChatGPT has been, oh, it's going to be a personalized tutor. It's going to help people learn.

• 2:04:28Michael Mignano?

  ChatGPT is not really built for that. Yes, yes, it's helpful for like one-off tasks. Hey, tell me about this thing. Tell me about this thing, but. John, it doesn't know everything you've ever learned and it doesn't know what your interests are and it doesn't know what your goals are in, you know, maybe learning a new language or learning about, I don't know, some theory around finance or something. And so that's the basic premise of what, what OBO is solving. Um, we have a, a beta coming very soon. If people want to be the first to check it out, just go to our, I guess our ex OBO labs, at OBO labs. Um, I'm very, very excited for it. And, uh, yeah, I think, I think people are going to really like this product.

• 2:05:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And you, uh, you dropped by the PMF for Die Cage to support the players recently and they're working on a problem that's, that's sort of adjacent. Um, uh, but, but yeah, maybe, you know, and funny enough, we, we just before this, we had the founder of Synthesis, which is an AI tutor. And so it feels like, it feels like we're maybe, uh, I'm sure maybe people have already done it, but sort of a broader market map around, you know, AI and learning, maybe they exist.

• 2:05:33John Coogan?

  We're in the App Store moment where there's a bunch of, we need to build products around this stuff. We have the new technology, but you know, what is the dominant product factor, product form factor for each of these, uh, use cases? And so it's a knockout, drag out fight. Good luck out there.

• 2:05:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:48Michael Mignano?

  Yeah. What? I mean, that's, that's, it's usually a good sign, right?

• 2:05:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:05:51Michael Mignano?

  Couple of things going.

• 2:05:52John Coogan?

  And consumers benefit. I mean, everyone benefits. Like, you know, you, you, you, you, pace of iterations very fast. You get to test a bunch of things. You try new stuff all the time, everyone. And then, you know, at the end, a bunch of people make money, which is great.

• 2:06:04Michael Mignano?

  Exactly.

• 2:06:04Jordi Hays?

  How do you, how do you think about the pressure? So you're sitting on both sides of the table, right? You're an investor at Lightspeed, getting an opportunity to look at and invest in some of the fastest growing, most exciting companies in the world. You're on the founder's side now. Meanwhile, the average founder is being inundated with content around companies going from zero to 10 or zero to a hundred million dollars in this super short period of time. Meanwhile, you at Anchor, you know, pivoted multiple times and iterated towards this idea and eventually had a fantastic outcome, but it wasn't this sort of straight shot, linear. As a founder now, and from the founders that you talked to, is there just sort of this extreme pressure around, I need to deliver faster results than ever? And do you think that could have a negative

• 2:06:47Jordi Hays?

  impact on outcomes? Because when I think of OBO, I think, okay, massive TAM, massive opportunity. This can be a $10 billion plus company. If you look at, you know, companies like Duolingo and things like that in the public markets. But I could imagine that you're going to have to sort of iterate in the same way. So what does success look like for you? And what advice do you give founders that are kind of facing that pressure to, you know, put up ridiculous numbers in a really short period of time or be, you know, relegated to the like, you know, sort of not top tier company?

• 2:07:21Michael Mignano?

  Yeah, we actually talked about this in the PM effort, I cage in the cage.

• 2:07:26John Coogan?

  The cage. As one does.

• 2:07:29Michael Mignano?

  There are a lot of startups right now that are experiencing explosive revenue growth. Right? It seems like every week that chart has a new line on it like zero to one. You know, the chart of talk.

• 2:07:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, 100 million ARR.

• 2:07:40Michael Mignano?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:40John Coogan?

  Two months, one day, zero days.

• 2:07:43Michael Mignano?

  Yeah. Something we talk a lot about at Lightspeed is like high calorie ARR and low calorie ARR. Right? There's a lot of like cheap ARR growth out there. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that AI is very magical. People see these products, they're kind of like blown away by them. And they're like, oh, here, take my credit card like I'm happy to pay. But that doesn't necessarily say something about how sticky these products are or how good they are, or whether or not these users will actually retain. And so, you know, with a lot of these explosive high ARR companies that we've seen over the past couple of years with AI, it's not really a secret. You guys have probably heard of this as well. Many of them are very, very churny, right? They churn very quickly, a lot of trialing, a lot of like, oh, I want to experience this magic moment.

• 2:08:28Michael Mignano?

  Take my credit card, but then I'm never coming back. And so, you know, the advice I gave to the the cage was

• 2:08:37Michael Mignano?

  I think we got to remember to continue to pay attention to like the metrics that have always mattered. Right? Things like consistent user growth and retention and making sure like the retention cohorts flatten out. They don't just like drop to zero. Cause I think people are getting like very, very hung up on this ARR metric, which is great. I mean, it's a business that can go from zero to 100 in six months. Phenomenal, but you can't ignore the traditional metrics that tell you whether or not a product is good. And I think, I think that's going to be really.

• 2:09:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So on your side, are you, are you ready to, you obviously started this with your former co-founder. Are you guys ready for, you know, I think you have like a good instincts here, but you, you must be sort of ready to, you know, do as many, hopefully it's a one-shot, you just nail it at the gates, but it sounds like you guys are ready to pivot as many times or sort of adjust the strategy as many times as necessary because it is such a big problem space. There has to be, there's definitely a billion dollar business in here somewhere, but you know, it's, it still takes work to,

• 2:09:39Michael Mignano?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:40Jordi Hays?

  find that spot.

• 2:09:42Michael Mignano?

  Absolutely. I think, I think you gotta be willing to pivot. And by the way, that's what we see like, you know, in places like YC, these companies pivot sometimes like five times over the course of two weeks. The pivot is so important. And, um, you know, the other thing I would say is not only do you have to pivot, but you have to move faster than ever. I mean, the thing that I felt when I went in the cage with the guys was I've never seen people move this fast. These guys have been in there two weeks. They showed me what they're working on and I'm not, I'm not going to reveal it. They told me not to reveal it, but the, the amount of progress they've made in two weeks, I've never seen anything like it. Like they literally went from not having a line of code to having a very fully featured app, iOS app. They're about to ship to the app store.

• 2:10:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:24Michael Mignano?

  There's just never been competition like this.

• 2:10:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:27Michael Mignano?

  It's insane. Uh, I interviewed this, uh, this guy, Josh Moore on my podcast. He, he started this app, um, called Wave. Have you guys seen this app, Wave?

• 2:10:35Jordi Hays?

  I haven't.

• 2:10:36Michael Mignano?

  It's kind of like, kind of like Renola. It's like a note taking thing with AR.

• 2:10:39Jordi Hays?

  Sure. Sure. Cool.

• 2:10:40Michael Mignano?

  It's doing like five million ARR. He built it by himself, just like he had never coded before in his life.

• 2:10:45John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:10:46Michael Mignano?

  And he uses AI to not only teach him how to code, but to write the code and to generate the marketing. And it's just the level of intensity and competition right now is unlike anything we've ever seen.

• 2:10:57John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 2:11:00Jordi Hays?

  Switching over to putting on your investor hat, I wanted to give you an opportunity. You know, Lightspeed's big investor in XAI.

• 2:11:11Jordi Hays?

  You know, and has been just one of the most active investors across the foundation model landscape. I'd love to, you know, besides the obvious, you know, you just sort of invest in Elon companies and you know, you tend to do well. What was like sort of more of, you know, without going into, you know, going to however much detail you want, but like break, break down kind of the memo on, on the XAI thesis.

• 2:11:36Michael Mignano?

  Yeah. I mean, a lot of, a lot of what has been reported publicly, you know, aligns with, with our, our thinking and our thesis and that. Yes, betting on Elon is a pretty smart thing, but, but more than that, it's, it's the level of intensity. I mean, to again, bring it back to the speed and intensity that, that he and the people that he hires brings to the team. And so, you know, the first time we talked to that team and they were telling us about the data center that they were going to build. And again, it's been very publicized at this point.

• 2:12:08Michael Mignano?

  We were like, wow, like if you could actually do this, you would, you would go from basically the starting gun to, you know, being at the same level or possibly exceeding OpenAI in, in a matter of months in terms of model performance. And, and then they went and did it like they literally did it in like three or four months.

• 2:12:26Michael Mignano?

  And I think that type of intensity and speed and scale that, that, that, you know, only Elon and Elon like companies can actually do, combined with the fact that they've got obviously this incredible distribution channel right out of the gate through X. And not just a distribution channel, but a really unique content set to feed off of the model, right? This model, unlike most other models, it has real time information that they don't really have. And, and that real time information also serves as a surface to trigger, you know, usage of the product. Analyze this post, tell me more about this. So I think those are some of the factors that, that got us excited and the team has as far beyond delivered on what they said they would. So it's been really exciting.

• 2:13:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What?

• 2:13:12Jordi Hays?

  You know, obviously you can't share any details here, but should the broader market expect more foundation models? Or is it kind of getting to the point you remember in crypto was like, okay, we don't need another like foundation level. We don't need another L1. And then you'd see one and you'd be like, really? You know, like

• 2:13:30John Coogan?

  But this one.

• 2:13:31Jordi Hays?

  This one.

• 2:13:32John Coogan?

  Built different.

• 2:13:33Jordi Hays?

  Or do you think that, you know, the five or six major players, thinking machines, XAI, OpenAI, SSI, are those like the labs that, you know, we're sort of betting on? Or do you think there's room for more teams there?

• 2:13:49John Coogan?

  The way we were framing this was like, if it is commoditizing, well, commodities are valuable. Oil is a commodity and everyone wants to drill for a well.

• 2:13:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's very

• 2:13:59John Coogan?

  The more wells you have, the better. So get a bunch of wells.

• 2:14:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's capital intensive, but if you put together a really great team, you could just start a new oil company and it's being worth something.

• 2:14:08John Coogan?

  But yeah, what are you thinking about it?

• 2:14:10Michael Mignano?

  Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I think a few weeks ago, a lot of people wanted to have the debate about whether or not, you know, DeepSeek meant that models were commodities and nobody should ever train foundation models again. I actually feel like that was the wrong conversation to be having. You know, the way we think about it at Lightspeed is these companies are not just models, they are companies. They have distribution, they have customers, they have data, right? They have security, safety, like things that enterprises actually care about. And so, you know, I think, should there be more models trained? Maybe, but I don't think a model by itself is necessarily interesting. I think there needs to be a product and a team behind it. And so I think if you were starting a model, you know, if you're starting a company today that's training a foundation model, I think you need to either bring something very, very

• 2:14:54Michael Mignano?

  unique to the table in terms of what that model can do, or you better have some other advantage in terms of distribution or some sort of data that other players don't have access to that lets you jump up ahead. And I think like, that's an example of something Elon and the XAI team were able to do. They were able to build this data center in a way that no, no one else was willing to do to jump ahead, right?

• 2:15:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:18Michael Mignano?

  So, yeah, that's a little bit of the way that we think about it and talk about it.

• 2:15:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's fantastic. You have any other questions?

• 2:15:26Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I think we covered everything. It's been great having you. Uh, we'd love to have you on. You know, when you have news with OBO, uh, new investments, things like that, come on. Uh, we're all about, you know, conflict, right? So we want people coming on that have, have positions in the companies discussed on this show.

• 2:15:43John Coogan?

  Highly conflicted.

• 2:15:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So it's a

• 2:15:46Michael Mignano?

  No conflict, no interest, right?

• 2:15:47Jordi Hays?

  Exactly. Yeah. That's our motto.

• 2:15:50John Coogan?

  You come on, pump your bags, then we'll have your direct competitor come on, pump their bags.

• 2:15:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:15:53Michael Mignano?

  Why not? Why not?

• 2:15:54John Coogan?

  Have you both on at the same time?

• 2:15:55Michael Mignano?

  Shout out to the guys in the cage, by the way.

• 2:15:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:15:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, thank, thank you for, uh, thank you for coming on. Thank you for supporting the players and, uh, we'll have you back on here soon. Have fun. Uh, are you gonna go play some music right now?

• 2:16:09Michael Mignano?

  I don't, I don't know. Maybe. Why not?

• 2:16:11Jordi Hays?

  Generate some music?

• 2:16:12Michael Mignano?

  Around with that, that Gibson in the background.

• 2:16:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, generate some music. Honestly, skip the, skip the Gibson.

• 2:16:17John Coogan?

  Wait, uh, you're in Boston. Are you staying through St. Patty's Day?

• 2:16:22Michael Mignano?

  No, unfortunately not.

• 2:16:23John Coogan?

  Oh, you gotta go to Southie, get, get hammered on Guinness's and throw up in the street like you're a Boston college student.

• 2:16:29Jordi Hays?

  Yell about your Stripe secondary.

• 2:16:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 2:16:34Michael Mignano?

  Be fun. In, in, in, in another, another timeline, maybe.

• 2:16:37John Coogan?

  In another life, yeah.

• 2:16:38Michael Mignano?

  Yeah. I don't know if the, my, my wife, hey, I decided to stay five more days to get totally annihilated on St. Patty's Day.

• 2:16:44John Coogan?

  There's gonna be green beer. There's gonna be green beer. I have to drink it. I have to do a keg stand in Southie. I'm sorry.

• 2:16:51Michael Mignano?

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 2:16:52John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 2:16:52Michael Mignano?

  She'll understand. She'll understand.

• 2:16:54John Coogan?

  Great hanging out with you. Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:16:57Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, Michael.

• 2:16:57John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:16:58Michael Mignano?

  Later, guys.

• 2:16:59Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 2:17:00John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:17:02Jordi Hays?

  Michael's a man.

• 2:17:03John Coogan?

  We're, we're like informally doing a full like deep dive on AI education today.

• 2:17:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:08John Coogan?

  We, we, we got that. We got OBO. Now I want to go to Connor Zwick over at Speak. This is for language learning, kind of AI Duolingo.

• 2:17:15Jordi Hays?

  We already did a size gong whole segment on this, by the way.

• 2:17:18John Coogan?

  We did.

• 2:17:19Jordi Hays?

  So I think we should skip this one.

• 2:17:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's skip it. But we do, but I do want to have, I do want to have him on at some point. Um, but yeah, little, little historical size gong, you know?

• 2:17:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:28John Coogan?

  You gotta do it. You gotta do it. Any, any excuse to hit the garden.

• 2:17:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll take it.

• 2:17:32John Coogan?

  Well, let's go over to Saagar and Jetty, a good friend of the show. He's reporting, he's getting a little political, but it's fashion based politics. And so we'll cover it here on the show. Denied entrance to the chamber, to the Senate chamber for Senator Jim Banks for wearing cloud runner running shoes with a full suited tie. He wasn't wearing proper footwear footwear. And Saagar says, the way I feel reading this must be what it's like to get high on heroin. Because Saagar has been beating the drum on, we need our politicians to be well dressed. They need to be wearing suits. No more sweatpants. No more.

• 2:18:10Jordi Hays?

  Hey, dress is at least as nice as we do this show.

• 2:18:14John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:18:14Jordi Hays?

  Which John sometimes gets upset.

• 2:18:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:18:18Jordi Hays?

  Because I'm not wearing a jacket.

• 2:18:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:20Jordi Hays?

  But I just like to wear a college shirt sometime and do a little business casual.

• 2:18:24John Coogan?

  It's, uh, it's offensive.

• 2:18:25Jordi Hays?

  But it's too casual for John.

• 2:18:26John Coogan?

  It's too casual, unless it's casual Friday, in which case we should be in Jeff Lewis tank tops. Anyway, uh, love, love Saagar highlighting that. Speaking of Jeff Lewis, he's the next post in here.

• 2:18:37Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:18:38John Coogan?

  He says, Jeff Lewis over at Bedrock says, things that go up only over 10 year time horizons, select individual companies led by transcendent entrepreneurs, private and public, tasteful ultra luxury real estate. I like where he's going with this. Land in select locations, select cryptocurrencies, select precious metals and select artwork. He says, that is all. I love it.

• 2:19:03Jordi Hays?

  Ominous.

• 2:19:04John Coogan?

  What a great post.

• 2:19:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So if you're in the mag seven.

• 2:19:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:19:08Jordi Hays?

  Rotate to select precious metals.

• 2:19:13John Coogan?

  Well, if your mag seven company isn't led by a transcendent entrepreneur.

• 2:19:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:17John Coogan?

  Because if you are led by a transcendent entrepreneur, it doesn't matter if you're public or private, you can still go up over a 10 year time horizon. But otherwise, get out and get into some ultra luxury real estate, some cryptocurrencies, some precious metals and some artwork. I, I, I think we're, we're getting up to speed with the ultra luxury real estate. We're getting up to speed with the crypto and the precious metals. Uh, I think we're behind on the artwork, so we should have him on to talk about that. Where's, where's the bull market? There's always a bull market somewhere.

• 2:19:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, art's great because you can find an artist that you like, buy up all of their available, you know, works and then just start, uh, you know, putting them up in auction, buying them yourself.

• 2:19:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:56Jordi Hays?

  You know, sort of market.

• 2:19:57John Coogan?

  Chandelier bidding.

• 2:19:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:59John Coogan?

  Are you familiar with chandelier bidding?

• 2:20:01Jordi Hays?

  I think so.

• 2:20:02John Coogan?

  It's, it's a phrase for when you are essentially bidding on your own.

• 2:20:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:08John Coogan?

  Uh, just to like, kind of raise the reserve on a, on a piece of, uh, on something that you're, you're auctioning off. And of course, if you win your own, win your own auction, then you have to, then you have to pay the fee, but the fee for the risk of pumping up the price, you know, creating demand.

• 2:20:23Jordi Hays?

  I think that's just called market manipulation. Chandelier bidding, I just looked it up.

• 2:20:28John Coogan?

  Oh yeah. What is that?

• 2:20:28Jordi Hays?

  It's where the auctioneer.

• 2:20:29John Coogan?

  The auction house is doing it.

• 2:20:31Jordi Hays?

  Pretends to see a non-existent, to see a bid from a non-existent part of the room. So you go, oh, okay. And, and we're going up.

• 2:20:38John Coogan?

  So is the auction house trying to pump their bags?

• 2:20:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I got it. It's not you. What you're talking about is even more real where, you know, I, I know people that, let's say you own 30 pieces of an artist's work and one of their pieces that's comparable to yours goes up for auction. If it doesn't sell well, then your entire collection just gets marked down.

• 2:20:55John Coogan?

  So you might as well just buy up a little bit more.

• 2:20:57Jordi Hays?

  Just buy it.

• 2:20:58John Coogan?

  Create a new mark.

• 2:20:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Mark it up.

• 2:20:59John Coogan?

  Smart.

• 2:21:00Jordi Hays?

  Mark it up. VCs do this.

• 2:21:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:03John Coogan?

  They're like, they're like, all of the, all of the foundation model companies are worth so much because every time one comes to market, it's worth billions. And so, you know, the, the, the first one I invested in certainly has to be worth a trillion.

• 2:21:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:15John Coogan?

  Who knows? Uh, anyway, uh, speaking of a company that sorely needs to acquire one of these foundation model companies.

• 2:21:22Jordi Hays?

  Transcendental.

• 2:21:23John Coogan?

  Uh, Apple, uh, plans one of the biggest software overhauls in its history for iOS 19, iPad, I-O, iPad OS 19 and Mac OS 16.

• 2:21:32Jordi Hays?

  Folks, if you love the Photos app, you're gonna love this.

• 2:21:36John Coogan?

  Looking to revamp its operating systems for a new generation of users. And Raj Veer says, I don't trust 2025 Apple to pull this off. They might just incinerate the greatest business ever created. And Chris Horn says, yeah, I'm taking under on this. I don't know. I don't know if they can incinerate the greatest business ever created, but they definitely need to try something new. They definitely need to get some fresh blood in there, take some risks.

• 2:21:58Jordi Hays?

  They could really make the software much worse and it would still take a lot to actually compete with them on the hardware.

• 2:22:03John Coogan?

  People don't like green bubbles and yeah, the hardware is hard to make. It's a very reliable product. It connects to the wireless network reliably. People forget that like, you know, a lot of the beauty of the Apple ecosystem is just, yeah, like it finds the 5G tower, the LTE tower, or it doesn't drop phone calls that often. Like that, those are considered table stakes, but they could go away if you, if you get lost in something else. Anyway, Jared Rosner says, huge opportunities for AI startups that no one is talking about. AI native brokers, when broker transactions can be fully automated, those markets evolve.

• 2:22:40Jordi Hays?

  For context, Jared.

• 2:22:41John Coogan?

  Oh, hey, really quickly, we got Dalian on the show.

• 2:22:43Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 2:22:44John Coogan?

  Bring him in. Hey, how you doing, Dalian?

• 2:22:47Delian Asparouhov?

  What up, Pam? Congratulations on launch day.

• 2:22:49John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:22:50Delian Asparouhov?

  Great again.

• 2:22:51Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:22:52John Coogan?

  Thank you. Thank you. What's new with you? How did you, how did you enjoy the weekend?

• 2:22:57Delian Asparouhov?

  You know, Tahoe, terrible place to ski, great place to hang out with friends. Always, you know, sort of happy to, you know, sort of be there and yeah, God bless, you know, Kugan's wife for being willing to carry two big Kugans inside of her once upon a time. Really hard. I wouldn't want to do that myself.

• 2:23:13John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, she got, she got a relaxing weekend. It was good.

• 2:23:16Jordi Hays?

  It was all worth it.

• 2:23:16John Coogan?

  It was all worth it.

• 2:23:17Jordi Hays?

  You have twins.

• 2:23:18Delian Asparouhov?

  It was all worth it to me.

• 2:23:19Jordi Hays?

  Twins, if you have twins, twin boys, give me a third son.

• 2:23:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:23Jordi Hays?

  I'll take you to Tahoe.

• 2:23:23John Coogan?

  I actually didn't get to ski with you, Dalian. Are you good? Can you do backflips in 360s or?

• 2:23:28Delian Asparouhov?

  Um, you know, I think I was the best skier on the trip, but um, you know, I'm not quite at the level of uh, doing backflips. But I do have many friends from high school because I went to high school in Utah that are very backflip capable. Um, including uh, my little brother Pavel's uh, co-founder Jeff Morrell. Um, she's a, you know, sort of CEO out of New York, not skiing very much, but a very capable skier. So this is why.

• 2:23:48Jordi Hays?

  Where are you on the, where are you on the skiing risk curve? Uh, do you ever scare yourself skiing? John and I were talking yesterday. If you're getting to the point where you're genuinely scaring yourself consistently, it's probably too far. But at the same time skiing, I was telling a story in, in December, I was in the Alps and having the best run of the trip. You know, got distracted for a second and fell like 200 feet, got a yard sale, did a yard sale, then fell like another 200 feet. But you know, that, that happened once on the trip. That's maybe the most that I'm comfortable with. Where, where are you on the risk curve?

• 2:24:19Delian Asparouhov?

  Um, you know, I think I'm uh, very bad at the risk curve and I should be better at that, given that I have a wife and, you know, sort of child. Um, but weirdly somehow in skiing is not the place where it shows up. Like I've had probably more near death incidents in like the first quarter of this year than like, yeah, the prior decade basically combined. Um, and so it's made me think a lot about maybe I need to adjust my risk curve, but somehow in skiing, because I've just skied for so long that I know the downside of like, I did all the crazy shoots and cliffs and all that stuff when I was younger. So like, I don't feel the need to like quite go that crazy. But then yet again, earlier this year, I found myself in this place where I was just like, I kept powder hunting. Uh, where was I? Oh yeah. In Deer Valley. And I just kept going slightly more off piece and slightly more off piece and slightly more off piece.

• 2:25:03Delian Asparouhov?

  Until at some point I found myself going a little too fast on a cliff that I didn't know was there. I managed to catch myself, but unfortunately like halfway down the cliff where I no longer had an option of like climbing up. I just had like the rocks below me, but not enough speed to clear them. And so I was like, well, there is only one way out of this. It doesn't involve like, you know, waiting an hour for ski patrol to like, you know, come and grab me. And it's like, it's time to go rock skiing.

• 2:25:26Jordi Hays?

  Rock skiing.

• 2:25:27Delian Asparouhov?

  Just watch myself. Skied across the rocks a little bit, went off and I was like, I think I'm done for the day. So, you know, I'd like to think I've gotten better at my wrist curve, but um, yeah.

• 2:25:37Jordi Hays?

  So where are you taking?

• 2:25:38Delian Asparouhov?

  I purposely only grabbed a super thin racing carving skis. Cause I'm not even tempted to go off piece. The only thing that these things are capable of is carving.

• 2:25:48Jordi Hays?

  Are you, uh, are you having those near death experiences as a pilot? You fly small planes. The pilots I know will tell me these stories where, that are just like the most harrowing stories about a single landing on just like what was supposed to be a casual trip. And they're like, yeah, it was raining and we lost connection with the tower and it was like completely pitch black and there was no lights on the runway. So we had to land and the plane was like going backwards. There was so much wind and I'm like, how does your wife let you do that? Uh, where are you having near death experiences other than skiing?

• 2:26:21Delian Asparouhov?

  Um, you know, uh, every motorized vehicle that I found myself behind, you know, whether it's in the air or not, I, I somehow have found myself in a bad situation over the past quarter. Um, so I'm so deep in the doghouse that, um, I, I, I, I'm putting myself through a remedial, uh, you know, program of, you know, I'm very good at the technical nature of the operation of the vehicle, but it's the higher level risk calculus of what situations I put myself into that is very poor. Um, so my remedial program is I went, uh, and, uh, back to all my, uh, flight trainers and I went and found the oldest one. Um, because as they like to say, um, there are bold pilots and there are old pilots, but there are not bold and old pilots.

• 2:27:01Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 2:27:02Delian Asparouhov?

  I think it's important for me to become an old pilot rather than a bold one. And I think right now sometimes I'm a little too bold. So, uh, yeah, well, Mr. Keith out from South, uh, South LA, which speaking of, yeah, excited to be, you know, in LA with you guys a little more often lately.

• 2:27:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're happy to have you. Uh, well, stay safe. We, I wanted to run something by you. Obviously there's turmoil in the financial markets. Uh, we were pitching something called the yard sale theory of financial markets where, uh, basically every ski season, the capital allocators go, they're speaking freely on the ski lifts together. They know no one else is listening. They share stock tips and then the market crashes. And so if you look at like, there or no, so it happened during ski season. FTX happened during ski season and Ron was discovered during ski season. Uh, what do you think of that? Or why do you think the market's going down right now? What, what's gone wrong?

• 2:27:51Delian Asparouhov?

  Um, you know, there is a like a historical seasonality to like the stock market. I remember, you know, sort of seeing something similar where it was basically the past, like, you know, sort of 50 years of the steepest dry downs of the S and P 500, something like 80% of them happened between like October and February. There's a component of that that I'm sure is also like tax season related where like people want a lot, you know, sort of gains versus losses at the end of the year, but not too closely, you know, sort of coupled to it. I'm sure there's a component of it is, you know, people sharing, you know, stock tips in Aspen. There is also a presidential transfer, whether it's, you know, sort of this year or any prior year always happens at this time of year, which also introduces volatility and people don't like volatility. The one bull sign that I'll say is I was just looking at this. I don't know if you guys know

• 2:28:32Delian Asparouhov?

  this website, Trueflation, uh, which basically tries to do like a week to week, um, analysis of inflation, just tracking grocery store prices that are, and it has, it is actually showing like a pretty steep drop, um, you know, the past 15 months. And so I'm a, I'm a little bit of a believer of like the Scott Besant, um, you know, there is going to be a detox period. Now, I think that some of the moves that the administration are making feel like a little, um, blind and they clearly are sometimes pulling things backwards. Like you do the tariffs, you roll them back, you do a bunch of layoffs and then some of those layoffs, like in NOAA, I was just reading today, where like they laid off a bunch of like the NOAA commercial sent, remote commercial sensing team. And then there is a huge, you know, sort of backlash. And so some of those people got

• 2:29:13Delian Asparouhov?

  rehired like a week after getting fired by, you know, sort of Doge and crew. So there is a little bit of like, I feel like they're taking, you know, sort of a chainsaw, which is not unreasonable when you need a scalpel because it's just like the scalpel may take too long and the, you know, Aspen only has two years before like Congress potentially flips. And so it's probably a reasonable, you know, sort of approach, but I think that's what you're seeing in the market is dear God, like the, you know, sort of president and Elon are taking a chainsaw to the federal government. And, uh, that's, you know, introducing some level of volatility. I like this, um, you know, you, you've, I'm sure heard, you know, sort of Peter say this a bunch, but I love his, um, you know, analogy on what is the US president and it's, you know, they're the mayor of the United States, but the dictator of the world, um, in that, you know, they basically have infinite power over foreign policy, um, but actually pretty limited power domestically. And so there's

• 2:29:58Delian Asparouhov?

  so much of like the S and P 500 that's been propped up over the past couple of years by just like Insane amounts of foreign inflows.

• 2:30:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:30:03Delian Asparouhov?

  That starts to become, you know, sort of very aggressive to some of our, you know, sort of partners and allies, and especially in Europe. You'll start to see some of that, you know, sort of flow out into like their own domestic stock market. Which again, you know, I'm not saying like I'm somebody that, you know, obviously comes from Eastern Europe and I'm, you know, sort of crazy anti, you know, sort of Russia. And so I, you know, don't necessarily, you know, want us to totally concede to Putin. But at the same time, I also think it's important for allies to finally like, you know, get their, you know, shit together. Now, rearming of Germany, we've seen how that's gone the past couple of times. So, you know, we gotta be a little cautious there. You never know. You know, AFD, you know, Elon being very pro AFD, probably good. If AFD gets too powerful, you know, maybe we're back to Lebensanheim. And so that's maybe a little, you know, sort of tricky.

• 2:30:48Delian Asparouhov?

  But, you know, the Germans probably, you know, could stand to be a little more, you know, prideful.

• 2:30:51John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of Elon, Starship.

• 2:30:54Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:54John Coogan?

  Do you have a theory for how long, for why I say so?

• 2:30:56Jordi Hays?

  Real quick before that, because it sort of leads into this. Right as the Doge stuff started to get very intense and was sort of top of mind, NASA just happened to come out and they said, oh, by the way, there's an asteroid that's. It's basically, it was like doubling every day. Yeah, yeah, I gotta, I gotta throw this on. We keep this nearby for incidents like this. It was like almost every day, it was like doubling the, the, the chances that an asteroid was gonna hit in 10 years. And I was like, this is just like. It's 10 years out. It's particularly convenient, conveniently timed.

• 2:31:30Delian Asparouhov?

  Now, we finally need NASA.

• 2:31:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That, that was, that was, that was kind of the joke, but how, how to, do you have any insight into how? Into why they, they could have had some, an event that's far enough out that we have probably quite a lot of data on. That then there could be that amount of variance in such a short period of time around something as catastrophic as impact.

• 2:31:55Delian Asparouhov?

  I'm gonna, you know, bring up a totally unrelated point and then answer your question. The totally unrelated point is China has now confirmed that they're gonna fly Pakistani astronauts to the Chinese space station. So for the first time, now, I'm not saying that Pakistan is like a huge, you know, sort of lover of the US or anything like that, but I actually don't know too much about like the, you know, general foreign policy history with them. Do they like us versus China more? I mean, China did basically invade, you know, their next door neighbor, India, but I know that they hate the Indians, so maybe because of that, you know, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And so maybe therefore Pakistan likes China. But I think the interesting thing to think about there is that China is exerting soft power, not just via like the Belt and Road Initiative and like investing in the infrastructure,

• 2:32:37Delian Asparouhov?

  but it's like, you know, come visit our infrastructure and it's starting to build up a coalition around that, because you can imagine that eventually turning into, you know, Pakistani astronauts visiting the Chinese lunar station. And, you know, I don't know if Pakistan's good at a lot of things, but like maybe they're good at having, you know, sort of some of their folks go up there and be, you know, sort of lunar miners that may have a very high death rate early on, but, you know, maybe they're willing to, you know, sort of push for that. So, thinking about some of our, you know, sort of enemies, you know, coalescing around, you know, sort of stations in space, you know, potentially scary thing, we gotta think about what we do as America. On the like asteroid tracking, I, I kind of buy it in that, man, it's so hard to track even on our satellite, and we know where SpaceX dropped us off and like where things are going, and that's like so close to Earth. The idea that like we have perfect track on these like asteroids super far out, you

• 2:33:22Delian Asparouhov?

  know, there is, I think, a lot of statistical, you know, variability, and then you have to like, you know, the reason that there is, you know, increasing, increasing, and then set and drop is I'm sure what was happening is we have a bunch of these like, you know, sort of deep space radar, et cetera, different assets. One of them starts to pick up, hey, this thing is starting to get close, and then it may take some time for us to like spool up a bunch of resources. Probably need the Earth to spin around a couple times, you have like the Australian radar, et cetera, pointing at it, and then we just get better and better, and then all of a sudden it, you know, sort of drops down to zero.

• 2:33:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, every time, that, because it really felt like every day was a sort of doubling effect, so, and it's very possible that it was like the Earth was just spinning around, we were getting another look at it. Yeah, that makes sense. But yeah, going back to John's.

• 2:34:02Delian Asparouhov?

  You know, though, that we did a like, a test run on this, so NASA. Actually about two and a half years ago did a test run on what we would do if we had to deflect an asteroid. And so they basically slammed a satellite into an asteroid going crazy fast and then measured that they were able to adjust the course of the asteroid. So.

• 2:34:17John Coogan?

  How does that work exactly? Is that like, there's, there's already, there's already a satellite up there and they just task it to move a little bit to intercept? Or is this like, we're going to launch a new rocket with a new satellite on it specifically for this? Like, what's the trade off there?

• 2:34:31Delian Asparouhov?

  I think one of the things that helps with SpaceX, and this is both true for like, um, space space, like even stuff that Varda, you know, sort of works on on the defense side. Because, you know, Falcon 9s are basically going up like every 24 hours now. You don't have to think about this stuff as much as like fixed assets in orbit needing to be ready to go. Because the difficulty with that is like, now you have to think about like the longevity, the maintenance of that asset. You have to, you know, sort of replace it. Cause what people don't realize is like, if you're up in low earth orbit, it's not like you get to be up there infinitely. Cause like, there still is a little bit of atmosphere up there. And so you have a little bit of drag. And so if you're like 500 kilometers in the size of a Varda satellite, you'll still de-orbit over the course of five years and basically come back down. And so with something like that, we could actually just like, you know, have the satellite basically ready to go and a storage facility down here on earth. The moment we know the asteroid is starting to head towards us, then, you know, basically go launch it.

• 2:35:13Delian Asparouhov?

  And so, um, they've demonstrated that, you know, sort of now, you know, in terms of the like, go launch the custom satellite and go send it directly at an asteroid and go hit it. And then in space, even though the satellite is like so, so, so, so, so small relative to the asteroid. The speeds are just so insane that like, you're going at such a speed that it's like basically like a nuclear weapon getting like, you know, detonated on the asteroid at those speeds. And you can actually like adjust this thing's course. And if you're like, if you hit it when it's like seven years out, even like a 1% adjustment is like a thousand kilometer. You know, basically like, you know, going off course. And in which case you like totally miss the earth. And so, yeah, I don't think we need to be too worried about the asteroid stuff. We've gotten pretty good at, you know, detecting that and, uh, you know, now showing that we can deflect it. Unless you have, you guys have read the, um, what's called Neil Stephenson book, Seven Eves.

• 2:35:57John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:35:58Delian Asparouhov?

  Little, little dot that goes through the moon. Yeah, then we're fucked.

• 2:36:01Jordi Hays?

  Well, so, so every guy, you know, thinks they could land a commercial airliner like if required, right? It's sort of like, oh, I could do it. Like, you probably actually could, given your experience as a pilot. But if we had an asteroid coming here, you'd probably secretly get a little bit excited because you're like, alright, yeah, it's my time. Like, I'm the guy. I'm gonna deflect the asteroid.

• 2:36:20Delian Asparouhov?

  I'm here, I'm here to save it. Speaking of needing to, you know, land an airliner, as a pilot, if one were to ask me, what's your favorite situation? If you had, if you put me behind the cockpit of 747, you're like, Dell, you gotta land this thing. I would say, I would want to be in the northern latitudes, at daytime, on a very cold day in the winter, with super clear skies. Why? Because that's basically like the highest air pressure that you can basically get. So the atmosphere is very, and at sea level, so the atmosphere is very forgiving. Basically, you have like, you know, sort of ton of, you know, both lift, but then also when you, you know, sort of put your, you know, sort of flaps in, a ton of drag. It's basically almost like, you know, flying, like the equivalent of like, if you've ever seen an XKCD comic of like, if we had humans on Titan, which is one of the moons of Jupiter,

• 2:37:04Delian Asparouhov?

  you could actually just go out there with like wings and the atmosphere is thick enough that basically, like, we could just, you know, sort of flap our wings as humans and fly. And so, it's pretty surprising that, you know, a Delta pilot landing in Toronto, in the middle of winter, on a cold, clear day, with super high air pressure, somehow flip that thing upside down. That is literally like, should be the easiest situation to, you know, sort of land in, so.

• 2:37:25John Coogan?

  Well, we need to give you the tinfoil hat and you can tell us what really happened.

• 2:37:29Delian Asparouhov?

  I mean, you know, there's a lot of like, you know, de-accusations going up there. Maybe it's, you know, the Canadians are starting to try to, you know, fight back against the trade wars by, you know, making our planes flip upside down.

• 2:37:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, UFOs or something, who knows?

• 2:37:42Jordi Hays?

  Talk to us about SpaceX last week. The haters, the space haters, were taking a victory lap.

• 2:37:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:37:48Jordi Hays?

  What's your take on the situation as a, as an entrepreneur who's building on top of SpaceX infrastructure? Obviously a big believer.

• 2:37:58John Coogan?

  Why is, why is Starship so much harder than Falcon 9 on this? Like, walk us through some of the complexity there.

• 2:38:04Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, I mean, you have to remember Falcon 9 was in the early days ultimately based off of technologies that had like a ton of heritage. There wasn't really anything that was that totally net new, other than as they started to, you know, sort of do the landing legs and the grid fins, right? And those were obviously very, you know, sort of net new. And as we saw, it took them like, you know, basically on the order of, if I remember, like, the first landing was like 2014. When it really got operational, I would argue was like sort of like end of 2019. So it was still like a five, five and a half year. And by the way, they were trying to land for like two years before that. So call it like two years of lots of failed tests, five years even from when the first test succeeded to when it became operational. That was obviously in some ways a much simpler vehicle. It was

• 2:38:46Delian Asparouhov?

  smaller. It was based off of like, you know, technology that had a lot of heritage. Everything from the metals they were using, the way that the rocket engines were, you know, sort of designed. There was a lot that already had a ton of heritage. As we flip over to Starship, those technologies just do not scale to the size of, you know, sort of Starship, especially as they started to think about like distributed engine architecture, they wanted to be able to re-enter, etc. So like Starship is, you know, both a huge leap in size, but you're also like discarding this whole history of aerospace that you can, you previously were building on top of. And so the fact that they've even made it this far this quickly is, I still think, astounding. Obviously, the company's a lot bigger, they have more resources, you want to push for like, hey, they should be able to make, you know, sort of faster progress. But I don't see it as any sort of like existential, you

• 2:39:29Delian Asparouhov?

  know, sort of risk. I think it's just that the company's way more high profile. Like in 2013 and 14, where all these rockets were like landing and blowing up, I don't feel like there was like huge news cycles around each one because Elon was like a loved lib, you know, that, you know, the media, you know, treated as like a darling versus like, you know, he's, you know, seen as a Nazi. And so anytime anything ever so slightly, you know, goes wrong, they're trying to, you know, sort of attack him.

• 2:39:51John Coogan?

  I mean, SpaceX even turned all the crashes into this like vibe reel with like in the Hall of the Mountain King playing. And it was like celebrated by everyone. It was like, oh yeah, they blew up so many rockets. This is how progress happens. It's awesome. It was great. And now it's like, oh.

• 2:40:03Delian Asparouhov?

  I don't know if you guys saw, actually Kiko Dunscheff, who's the VP of Launch at SpaceX, actually just wrote, you know, maybe it can be one of the tweets that you guys discussed at some point. But he just earlier today, like two hours ago, wrote this like super long tweet to like a random SpaceX fan Twitter account, basically asking like, what's going on? Why are things, you know, sort of taking a bit, you know, sort of longer, etc. And if you want, I can even text it to you too, then I don't know if it's something you guys. Yeah, we should pull it up right now and maybe walk through it. Yeah, let me, let me text you the. I got it here. I found it. Oh, you got it. Keep it down. Yeah, cool. It's like this long, you know, sort of super long reply. But it was basically like, look, like, you know, they are just flying a lot. So because like Falcon 9 has also had more issues over the past, you know, sort of six months than like the prior, like five years, you know, combined.

• 2:40:44Delian Asparouhov?

  And I think you get it from his point. It's like, you know, sort of look, some of these boosters are getting, you know, sort of a lot older. Also, just like the sea conditions, you know, off of, you know, Florida have actually been, you know, sort of pretty crazy. And so that's been more refurbishment. We're now starting to learn what happens when something flies 12, 13, 14 times in a row. And so we still have a long ways to go until like Falcon 9s are at the level of safety of like a 747. But remember with commercial aviation from when like the first jet tube, you know, sort of airliner came on to when we basically stopped having deaths, other than let's ignore the DC thing, you know, which, you know, more has to do with like air traffic control than it does with like the jet. It took us on the order of like 50 years for those things to become very, very safe, right? Like we basically had lots and lots of airliner crashes in the United States until 2012.

• 2:41:24Delian Asparouhov?

  And then in 2012, they basically stopped, or maybe it was like 2010. And we didn't have them for like 15 years, other than this like DC thing. And so I'm sure Falcon 9s will get to that point, but like it may be like, you know, 30 years of finding all the weird edge cases, atmosphere, this sea condition, this thing before these things are like as reliable as commercial jets. And they're more, you know, complicated than commercial jets are. Oh, one analogy that I like to, you know, sort of bring up that, you know, some of the viewers might like. People think about like, how expensive is it to go to space, et cetera? If you think about it on like a unit of fuel of like how much fuel you need to get up there. The amount of fuel that it would take for somebody to transport us from like London to New York on a 747. That's basically the same amount of fuel, like hydrocarbon energy that you would need to get up to orbit. Which gives you a sense of like, once. On a per person basis?

• 2:42:09Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, on a per person basis, basically. So like, and at this point, if you think about your like tickets to, you know, from London, New York. It's actually mostly the fuel cost, right? Like they've largely amortized the airframes over so many passengers and so many flights that you're barely paying for that. And so to give you a sense of like, what is the terminal cost of going to orbit? It's going to be roughly like a cross Atlantic flight is basically like how much it should cost, like on the order of like 500 or 700 bucks for like an economy ticket.

• 2:42:32John Coogan?

  Interesting. Yeah.

• 2:42:33Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 2:42:36John Coogan?

  That probably unlocks point to point as well then. Like SpaceX point to point, just like using the rockets to get from New York to Japan as well. Similar cost.

• 2:42:44Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, obviously, that's where it's like, okay, the rockets now have to be probably as safe. Because the people that are going to pay for that are going to be like the richest people in the world. They're also the most safety conscious, which is what I always think about when people are talking to these like faster giants, etc. I'm like, man, people are definitely willing to pay for some speed. But like, rich people also really care about it being safe too. There's a little bit of this like, you know, people claim, hey, I'm going to build the like, you know, the Tesla style. You know, what was their first vehicle called, the expensive one? And then, you know, the roadster.

• 2:43:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, the roadster, then the Model S, then the Model 3.

• 2:43:13Delian Asparouhov?

  The roadster of planes approach is like a little harder to do. Like the crazy people are more the like, you know, small, you know, sort of pilots like me that are a little crazier. But like, you know, I don't know that like, you know, Mr. Peter is, you know, hopping on a jet anytime soon.

• 2:43:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:27Jordi Hays?

  Talk about Eric Schmidt going to Relativity Space. He's obviously been a big backer of the company. You have some of your own opinions. And then would love to maybe have you extrapolate a little bit on.

• 2:43:41John Coogan?

  Just for context, we don't, we don't, we cover a lot of posts on X here, but we, we don't cover deleted posts, so.

• 2:43:48Delian Asparouhov?

  Hmm, yeah, that's probably, yeah. Let's say there were some great deleted posts, performing quite well. You know, the team here is all about not making enemies, so I've got to play it safe.

• 2:43:59John Coogan?

  The deep state, the deep state came for you.

• 2:44:01Delian Asparouhov?

  There's the problem with two jobs is you have twice the number of people that are trying to get you to delete tweets. And so, yeah, I think I should have zero jobs. That way I have zero X the number of people trying to get me to delete tweets.

• 2:44:11Jordi Hays?

  I can't wait for that moment where you're just running your family, when he's running his family office from Mars and he can just say whatever he wants. No, but just talk generally.

• 2:44:19Delian Asparouhov?

  There's like 30 minute delay. So even if people ask me to delete, it's like so late that it's like, dude, it's been up there for an hour already. You know, sorry.

• 2:44:24Jordi Hays?

  Just let it ride.

• 2:44:25Delian Asparouhov?

  You're just too.

• 2:44:26John Coogan?

  Very unhinged.

• 2:44:27Jordi Hays?

  Talk about Relativity as a company that presumably would want your business. You know, should it, you know, continue to make progress?

• 2:44:37Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, I mean, you have to look at it from our perspective, right? We have to sign launch contracts basically on the order of like two years out. Because that's basically how long it takes us to like supply chain, plan things, build vehicles, et cetera. That's how far out our customer contracts are. You know, we plan on, you know, call roughly that two-year cycle. And so if I'm signing a launch contract two years from now, I better have that, you know, vehicle ready to go. Otherwise, like, my customer's going to be disappointed and all of a sudden I'm like holding up revenue. And so from a commercial basis, it's like really hard to sign contracts with anyone but SpaceX right now, because no one's showing any level of repeatability. Like, even though, you know, sort of Blue Origin has gotten to space, Firefly, Rocket Lab, et cetera, have, nobody's matched like the consistency or the price of SpaceX and nowhere close to it, right?

• 2:45:18Delian Asparouhov?

  It's like, you know, there's not even like an obvious number two even anytime soon. It's like, for me to feel confident in, you know, let's say Relativity, they would have to launch like this year, they'd have to probably do it multiple times, and multiple times next year, and then maybe at the end of 2026, I would consider signing a contract for 2028. And so, man, that's like a really tough business to take over. You know, I think in 2017, the sort of consensus viewpoint in Silicon Valley was that launch was this commodity, there was going to be like, you know, four or five players, there was going to be very, you know, sort of low margins, and it wasn't going to be a place where you could generate many, you know, sort of venture returns. And it's turned out that it's actually quite the opposite. There's basically one player, SpaceX effectively represents 99% of the market, and has like insane profit margins on their launch business.

• 2:46:03Delian Asparouhov?

  It's something on the order of like, you know, sort of 50%, you know, sort of gross margin is like the rough reported numbers that I've seen publicly. And so, man, stepping in as Eric Schmidt into Relativity, it's like, one, my understanding is he's basically funding the company payroll to payroll. That, I always think, is a really hard cultural place to be as a company. Because you're both on the brink of death, but then also you don't have an obvious death date.

• 2:46:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is the emotional sort of, you know, you might feel great about the company one week and the next week, and the CEO is like, ah, should I, should I fold the blog like this at time? Whereas funding, you're like, at least I'm funding for 24 months of runway and, you know, I want to see, we're going to have good weeks and bad weeks, et cetera.

• 2:46:45Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, exactly. Like, this is why I think a lot of these billionaire-funded projects where the billionaire has made it clear that they will backstop the company somewhat indefinitely without a clear end date have never really worked. Because you don't have this clear, like, I think what's become the magic of venture and how it's been staged out is like, you have this very clear window. You have 24 months, you have to accomplish a lot. If you don't, you're dead. And if you do, you get to march on to like the next window. And like, there's a reason why Darwinistically, basically all the best companies of the last 20 years have gone through those windows. And the ones that tried to like, avoid those windows, basically haven't worked, right? And like, we can list so many examples of this. Airship, Kitty Hawk, et cetera. There's been like so many of these types of projects.

• 2:47:20John Coogan?

  Yep. Larry Ellison has a farm on.

• 2:47:22Jordi Hays?

  He's spent like, almost like a billion dollar.

• 2:47:25John Coogan?

  He's like half a billion into it, and it doesn't seem like it's going too well.

• 2:47:28Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah. And it's like, I, I think when people try to avoid this and self-fund, like, I tell billionaires when it's like, when you're going to start a company, don't do the backstopping thing, still raise the mature, participate alongside the venture rounds, and make it clear that you'd like to invest in the company, but predicated on like, again, hitting, you know, sort of these milestones and growth. And so, the thing that I think is really hard about this Eric Schmidt situation is like, you're both totally decoupled from the like, we need to hit milestones in X, Y, Z period of time. But also, it's not like, you know, Eric has indicated, I'm going to fund this thing for multiple years. You're sort of like, you know, on some indefinite, you know, time period, which is like, the worst parts of both worlds. And then also, SpaceX has just continued to succeed. And there's other players, like, you know, at this point, Relativity was thought of in 2021, let's say. Relativity was thought of as like the number two.

• 2:48:10Delian Asparouhov?

  Just because they had so much funding, momentum, et cetera. It's like, you're not even number three anymore, right? Like, number two is obviously very much a rocket lab. Number three at this point is Firefly, right? And Firefly is actually getting to space on some regular basis. They just landed on the moon. You know, I'm sure it's going to generate a ton of investor interest for them. Like, even though their prior, you know, CEO twiddled some diddles and had to get, you know, booted from the biddle. You know, the, the new CEO is, uh, you know, hopefully not going to twiddle some diddles and block some rockets instead.

• 2:48:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, let's keep it focused on rockets.

• 2:48:38Jordi Hays?

  Are there, are there, are there any, uh, how closely do you track, you know, China's progress? Do they have anything that could be competitive with Falcon 9 in the next 15 years? I'm assuming they're stealing all of our sort of trade secrets actively. But it still takes, even if you have the master plan and, you know, even the schematics, it's takes quite a lot.

• 2:49:00John Coogan?

  Is there a Chinese Varda yet?

• 2:49:02Delian Asparouhov?

  There's an Indian Varda as of yesterday. Okay. Yeah, it's actually in the latest white combinator batch. No way. Props to them. It was a very cool launch video. Okay, cool. It was awesome. You know, look forward to hopefully there being Chinese Varda and, you know, African Varda and, you know, I just want every continent, Aussie Varda. Russian, Russian Varda.

• 2:49:21Jordi Hays?

  It would actually be very bearish if you weren't getting copied at all.

• 2:49:24Delian Asparouhov?

  Exactly.

• 2:49:25Jordi Hays?

  Right, you want them.

• 2:49:26Delian Asparouhov?

  That's always my perspective. If you're not getting copied, then your idea is probably not very good. There are plenty of SpaceX copycats even today. Of course. On the Chinese side, they don't have anything that is anywhere close to landing, but they're clearly just willing to throw manufacturing and bodies at the problem, where I think it's something like SpaceX has launched 27 times so far this year. China has basically launched 19. So it's, I mean, in the grand scheme of things, it's like pretty close, I believe. They just, you know, are, you know, very good at manufacturing these things very rapidly, and they're just pumping it off the line and just not dealing with reusability. And so someone had been like, there's a couple of Indian launcher companies that have taken that approach too. It was like, we're not even going to try and do reusability anytime soon. We're just going to make these things super, super, super cheap, and then at some point we'll think about reusability down the line.

• 2:50:08Delian Asparouhov?

  And so the Chinese are definitely like, if it weren't for SpaceX, man, there would be like red panic bells all over the place. You know, sort of God bless that SpaceX has actually succeeded the level they have. Otherwise, we would be like very far behind the Chinese.

• 2:50:22Jordi Hays?

  Is there, is, what's the chatter within the space industry of, you know, we've seen plenty of, you know, undersea cables being cut. How worried is the average space founder generally? Like, how worried are they about sort of sabotage? Is that something that's sort of like a risk factor in a Series C deck? Where they're like, you know, is that even the right question to ask?

• 2:50:51Delian Asparouhov?

  I would say like not too worried, and it's not to say that it could happen or anything, and we should underwrite this, but it's like, the thing that would be really bad is if like Russia basically, you know, nuked lower earth orbit, you know, detonated a nuclear weapon, and you had a bunch of like highly charged ion particles, you know, basically orbiting around Earth at a much lower level than where you like the Van Allen belt. Because it would basically destroy everybody's Leo business. Right now, part of why Starlink works is they're low enough in orbit that the Earth's magnetosphere basically deflects the solar winds. So you're still relatively protected. If that all of a sudden becomes a very unprotected zone, you have a ton of radiation, man, everybody's economics basically just blow up.

• 2:51:31Delian Asparouhov?

  Actually, one of the few that probably doesn't blow up is Varda, because radiation basically screws you on a day by day basis, and we don't need to be up there for very long. But anybody whose business case is built off of like being in space for a longer period of time. Man, if the Russians launch a nuke up there, that'd be really hard. And I haven't seen any like how one would fix that problem if they did. Like, I don't think that like there's even like a hypothesis for how to do that. Like, maybe some like really big magnets or something, but I don't even know. There'd have to be massive magnets up there. So I don't know. The Russians detonated a nuke, and I can see them doing it where like they just keep falling behind. They see Starlink helping Ukraine. They see that like, you know, the United States is like winning this like, you know, new space race, you know, sort of 3.0. And like, you know, us in China are leaving them in the dust, and Putin is like dying, you know, breath. It's just like, screw it, nuke space, because it's like, you're not killing anybody.

• 2:52:16Delian Asparouhov?

  But you're just tanking all the commercial space economies? That'd be tough. Don't like it. Don't like it at all.

• 2:52:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it feels like most of the opportunities in space should be pursued by private companies. That said, stuff like thermonuclear radiation cleanup in low Earth orbit and like asteroid deflection are probably better suited for NASA and/or sort of NASA private partnerships, just because Varda, yeah, you'd be a good candidate to potentially, you know, save us from an asteroid. But it's not a good business model where you're like, okay, we have to like develop technology, maintain it, like carry this team. But then maybe you never have to use it across 30 years. It's not going to be necessarily a huge profit center.

• 2:52:57Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't think we're so religiously libertarian at Founder's Fund that we believe the government has no use whatsoever. So, you know, there is the occasional need for something that is, you know, of the public good and asteroid deflection and thermonuclear cleaning is probably, you know, shit up there with that. But yeah, I mean, hopefully diplomacy is more effective than having to do the cleanup, you know, sort of part of it.

• 2:53:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Makes sense.

• 2:53:17John Coogan?

  Well, this is awesome. I think we gotta wrap up, but thanks for coming on.

• 2:53:21Jordi Hays?

  Closing it out. Thanks for coming out.

• 2:53:22Delian Asparouhov?

  Oh, yeah. Thanks so much for having me, boys, and congratulations on a phenomenal launch day. Look forward to seeing the success of TBPM, the biggest show on earth.

• 2:53:30Jordi Hays?

  Hey, we expect a cameo on the next video. It's already in the works.

• 2:53:33John Coogan?

  True. Well, here cameo in this video.

• 2:53:35Jordi Hays?

  An iconic post.

• 2:53:36Delian Asparouhov?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, look, everybody needs an island vacation, but, you know, Reid Hoffman, like, really needs one.

• 2:53:42John Coogan?

  You had a face cameo because we used a clip from your call-in. I wasn't talking about the tweet. You had two cameos, I guess, technically.

• 2:53:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:49Delian Asparouhov?

  Oh, I had two cameos.

• 2:53:50John Coogan?

  You had two cameos because at 37 seconds, 38 seconds, you pop up for a second as an example of one of the guests that we've had.

• 2:53:57Delian Asparouhov?

  Hmm, double cameo. Well, I like my first cameo better than the second one.

• 2:54:00John Coogan?

  Your first cameo is good, but yeah, a little bit of an Easter egg.

• 2:54:04Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic having you on.

• 2:54:05Delian Asparouhov?

  Goodbye, boys.

• 2:54:06Jordi Hays?

  I'll see you soon.

• 2:54:06John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. That was great.