The Lawyer Who Beat Meta and Google, Revisiting The Jetsons, Japan Twitter | Tae Kim, Logan Bartlett, Sam Stephenson, Ben Broca, Brett Adcock, Andrei Serban

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (01:49) - The Lawyer Who Beat Meta and Google (15:44) - The Social Media Addiction Placebo Controlled Trial (32:54) - Revisiting The Jetsons (42:16) - What I Hate Most About Hotel Room Tech (48:37) - Sysco to Acquire Restaurant Depot (51:08) - Office Chair Racing (01:00:08) - Tae Kim, a financial analyst and founder of the newsletter "Key Context," discusses the recent volatility in Nvidia's stock, attributing it to cyclical market fears rather than fundamental issues, and highlights the company's strategic acquisitions and partnerships, such as with Groq, to meet surging AI inference demand. He emphasizes Nvidia's proactive supply chain management and strong relationships with TSMC to secure wafer allocations, positioning the company to capitalize on the growing AI market. Additionally, Kim notes the increasing demand for CPUs driven by AI agents, suggesting a significant trend in the tech industry. (01:30:37) - Logan Bartlett, Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures, discusses the disconnect between public and private market valuations in the software industry, highlighting how public software companies trade at lower multiples compared to their private counterparts. He attributes this to public investors' concerns over stock-based compensation and questions about the long-term terminal value of these businesses. Bartlett also emphasizes the cultural challenges incumbent companies face in adapting to rapid technological shifts, particularly in integrating AI capabilities, which may hinder their ability to capture new market opportunities. (02:09:37) - Sam Stephenson, co-founder and CTO of Granola, an AI-powered meeting notepad, discusses the company's recent $125 million Series C funding led by Index Ventures, bringing its valuation to $1.5 billion. He highlights Granola's evolution from a personal note-taking app to an enterprise solution, emphasizing the importance of capturing meeting contexts to enhance company operations. Stephenson also addresses the challenges of integrating AI into meeting tools, noting the complexities of understanding social nuances and the necessity of building features that seamlessly fit into users' workflows. (02:23:38) - Ben Broca, founder of Polsia, discusses his AI platform that autonomously builds and manages companies by handling tasks such as product development, marketing, and customer support. He emphasizes the importance of configuring AI models with the right tools and orchestration to achieve desired outcomes, and highlights that while AI can automate operational tasks, human input remains crucial for aspects like branding and understanding market trends. Broca also shares that Polsia has rapidly grown, with over 500 companies utilizing the platform, and mentions the intentional naming of Polsia as "AI Slop" spelled backward to spark conversation. (02:34:28) - Brett Adcock, founder and CEO of Figure AI, has launched Hark, an AI lab focused on developing advanced personalized intelligence by integrating multimodal AI models with next-generation hardware interfaces. In the conversation, Adcock discusses the limitations of current AI systems and devices, emphasizing the need for proactive, personalized AI that can interact naturally through speech, text, and vision, and highlights Hark's efforts to address these gaps by building both the models and hardware interfaces necessary for a seamless AI experience. (02:44:47) - Andrei Serban is the founder and CEO of Console, an AI-driven platform that automates IT support tasks directly within communication tools like Slack. In the conversation, he discusses Console's recent launch of "Assistant," a feature that automates complex, multi-system tasks such as investigating internet outages and deploying software updates. He also highlights how Assistant enables IT teams to build their own integrations, allowing for rapid adaptation to specific needs without extensive engineering resources. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cisco - https://www.cisco.com https://www.cisco.com/ Cognition - https://cognition.ai https://cognition.ai/ Console - https://console.com https://console.com/ CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com https://crowdstrike.com/ ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io https://elevenlabs.io/ Figma - https://figma.com https://figma.com/ Fin - https://fin.ai https://fin.ai/ Gemini - https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com/ Graphite - https://graphite.com https://graphite.com/ Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Kalshi - https://kalshi.com https://kalshi.com/ Labelbox - https://labelbox.com https://labelbox.com/ Lambda - https://lambda.ai Linear - https://linear.app https://linear.app/ MongoDB - https://mongodb.com https://mongodb.com/ NYSE - https://nyse.com https://nyse.com/ Okta - https://www.okta.com https://www.okta.com/ Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com https://plaid.com/ Public - https://public.com https://public.com/ Railway - https://railway.com https://railway.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Shopify - https://shopify.com/tbpn Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co 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://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVP.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Monday, March 30th, 2026. We are live from the TVP Ultradome.

• 0:06Jordi Hays?

  The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.

• 0:12John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about ramp.com, baby. Time is money. Save both these use corporate cards, bill pay accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Let's pull up the linear lineup. We got Take Him coming on to give us the Nvidia update. He is, of course, the founder of Key Context, the Substack. Logan Bartlett's coming on from Red Point. Been way too long since we had him on, been probably over a year at this point, maybe nearly a year. But he drops one of the greatest market updates, slide decks, analyses, very, very good. Tons of really interesting tidbits in there. And then we have a fantastic.

• 0:46Jordi Hays?

  It's a great.

• 0:47John Coogan?

  Lightning round for you today. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear using agents. So.

• 0:55Jordi Hays?

  Lightning round. We got Ben Broca from Pulsia, Sam, founder of Granola. On their one and a half billion dollar valuation and then Brett Adcock.

• 1:05John Coogan?

  What was your nickname for him again?

• 1:07Jordi Hays?

  Who?

• 1:08John Coogan?

  Brett Adcock. You had some nickname for him, right?

• 1:11Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I didn't.

• 1:12John Coogan?

  Oh, you just call him.

• 1:12Jordi Hays?

  Someone else.

• 1:13John Coogan?

  Oh, you're on a first name basis. You just call him Brett.

• 1:15Jordi Hays?

  Brett.

• 1:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16Jordi Hays?

  Or just B.

• 1:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17Jordi Hays?

  Hey, B.

• 1:17John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 1:18Jordi Hays?

  Hey, B.

• 1:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:19Jordi Hays?

  Now, this will be interesting. He launched a NeoLab last week.

• 1:22John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that's right.

• 1:23Jordi Hays?

  And so we're gonna be able to talk to him about that, models and hardware.

• 1:26John Coogan?

  Hark, I hear the angels singing.

• 1:29Jordi Hays?

  And then Andre from Consol joining as well. So looking forward to that.

• 1:33John Coogan?

  Well, I've been addicted to social media lawsuits. I cannot get enough of these lawsuits. I keep reading about them, losing sleep.

• 1:42Jordi Hays?

  You're potentially filing your own lawsuit against the lawyers.

• 1:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:47Jordi Hays?

  That were coming after these social.

• 1:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So there's actually a profile in the Wall Street Journal, in the Exchange this weekend, the lawyer who beat Meta and Google. And it goes into some of his addictive techniques that are driving jurors crazy across the country. Attorney Mark Lanier, he uses props.

• 2:08John Coogan?

  Come on. Come on. What's more addictive than props? He also uses parables. What? Parables, metaphors, axioms, all of the above. He moonlights as a preacher and it shows when he's taking on the world's most powerful companies. The 65-year-old came to court in downtown Los Angeles for closing arguments this month of one of the biggest trials of his career, armed with a parable of leavened bread. That feels like something that is designed to make it hard to rip yourself away from. Exactly. So he knew he needed a simple way to show a jury that Meta's Instagram and Google's YouTube were designed to be addictive and were harmful to young people. So the veteran plaintiff's lawyer from Texas-

• 2:52John Coogan?

  We just say he looks fantastic for 65. He does look fantastic.

• 2:57John Coogan?

  And as much as I'm joking, I do think he's doing important work and I do think there's a potentially really good outcome here that we'll go into. But we're still having some fun. So the veteran plaintiff's lawyer from Texas showed them two grocery items: cupcakes and tortillas. "Social media," he told the courtroom, "was like the baking powder that makes a cake rise, exacerbating the struggles of already vulnerable teens." "We have an interactor, an amplifier, something that blows it up," Lanier said. "We have here social media that takes the vulnerable and goes after them in destructive ways. It's as easy as A, B, C."

• 3:41John Coogan?

  So he's making the argument that social media is more like cupcakes than tortillas. Both contain flour, both are carbohydrate-loaded, but one is bigger than the other, or puffier, I suppose. The simple image, delivered with Lanier's slight drawl, helped convince a majority of jurors. On Wednesday, the ninth day of deliberation, the jury found that Meta and YouTube were negligent in a case that accused the companies of designing their apps to be addictive and harmful to teens. And there's some interesting images, both of him walking into the courthouse with a large box of papers, clearly very anti-tech movement there. He's saying, "I reject technology."

• 4:23John Coogan?

  This cannot be stored digitally. I'm using paper.

• 4:27Jordi Hays?

  Which, I don't know, this seems a little bit risky because we've been addicted to the printed word in the past, so much so that we face criticism from people that said, hey, printing is unnecessary.

• 4:40John Coogan?

  It did.

• 4:40Jordi Hays?

  You're hurting the environment.

• 4:42John Coogan?

  Not environmentally friendly, but maybe he's going to defend us.

• 4:44Jordi Hays?

  We were forced to adjust.

• 4:45John Coogan?

  Maybe he can flip over to be our defense attorney when we are attacked.

• 4:50John Coogan?

  There is a courtroom sketch showing linear questioning. Former TVP on guest Adam Mosseri, the head of Meta's Instagram, a jury ordered the company to pay $3 million each in compensatory damages and $3 million in punitive damages. So I think it's $6 million across both firms, but it's split compensatory and punitive damages. And now, a now 20-year-old woman named Kaylee, whose last name was redacted in the case, she had testified that social media use that started when she was a child dominated her life for years and contributed to mental health issues, including anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphia. A very, very sad situation, very unfortunate for her, of course. In a statement, Meta said it disagrees with the verdict and plans to pursue an appeal,

• 5:31John Coogan?

  reducing something as complex as teen mental health to a single cause risk, risks leaving the many broader issues teens face today unaddressed. Not mutually exclusive, but of course, that is a reasonable position for Meta to take. Google also put out a statement. What do you think?

• 5:50Jordi Hays?

  They're like, we're not even a social media company.

• 5:53John Coogan?

  We're a VR company.

• 5:54Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. Google said, "This understands YouTube", which is a responsibly-built streaming platform, not a social media site.

• 6:02John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 6:04Jordi Hays?

  You got the wrong guy.

• 6:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think of YouTube very much as in the same world as social media, anyone can post, but it is severely lacking in some of the greatest features of that social media sites. Like, when you actually become a YouTuber, you start putting out content that, like, there is sort of, I don't know, like a group of made men on YouTube, like, people that have ascended and they now have, they're now making...

• 6:32John Coogan?

  Content like professionally and they are in conversation with each other and they might be reacting to each other's content. And of course, there are different communities. There's like the car YouTuber community and then there's the, you know, the game show community and there's the business community and pretty quickly everyone sort of gets to know each other, but there's no DM feature. So even if I make a video-

• 6:54Jordi Hays?

  Which is a, which is a good argument for it not to be-

• 6:57John Coogan?

  Not being social media.

• 6:58Jordi Hays?

  Not being a social media.

• 6:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So like, you know, we at this point have done the Colin and Samir show, but we don't really have a way. We can go on to the Colin Samir YouTube channel and leave them a comment and they might see it if it's from the TVPN account, but we can't like just DM them and be surfaced to the top of the inbox. People have always wanted an inbox on YouTube.

• 7:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's a huge feature request.

• 7:21John Coogan?

  It's insane because like it would be so cool to be able to see, okay, I got a DM from someone who has 100,000 followers and I can click on their profile and see, oh, they're like, you know, in the same niche. Like maybe we'd want to work together. Maybe we want to collab on a video or do something else because they're like an established YouTuber. As opposed to everyone basically needs to flow over to Twitter or X and then DM there. Because the DM functionality is much more mature on-

• 7:50Jordi Hays?

  The other thing Google has in this kind of position is that so much of the watch time on YouTube is happening on television. Something like 50%.

• 8:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:00Jordi Hays?

  And so they can make the argument that this is just modern television.

• 8:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. So let's go through Linier's career because the Wall Street Journal has some interesting backstory here. He says Linier has built a career and fortune representing plaintiffs against corporate giants. He won one of the first major wrongful death trials against pharma company Merck over claims that the prescription anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx caused heart problems. He also won a $4.69 billion verdict in 2018 for women and their families who said asbestos tainted talcum powder caused ovarian cancer. So, I mean, over his career, it seems like he's done some very, very-

• 8:42John Coogan?

  Good work and has won some massive, massive settlements against big companies with broadly damaging products. So a lot, lot to, lot to admire about his career here. The social media trial drew more scrutiny than he predicted before he joined the plaintiff's team last fall and was brought face to face with Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. Suddenly, Lanier was at the epic-

• 9:06Jordi Hays?

  And I believe that Zuck is actually mewing in this picture. If we can pull up this, this image.

• 9:12John Coogan?

  It does appear to be something along those lines. Suddenly Lanier was at the epicenter-

• 9:18Jordi Hays?

  You agree, Tyler, right? Yeah, you can tell his cortisol is not spiking here.

• 9:21John Coogan?

  That's true. That definitely seems, he seems calm, collected. But this is not his first time putting on a suit. This is not the first time he's been in court. Suddenly Lanier was at the epicenter of a broad public debate about social media and how people stay connected or are disconnected on platforms offering nearless, nearly endless content curated by algorithms. Quote, "Nothing compared to this," Lanier said, reflecting on the attention to the trial over oatmeal toast and a Coke Zero in downtown Los Angeles, in a downtown Los Angeles hotel the morning after the victory. "Nothing even remotely close," and I think that's accurate because even though those previous settlements were huge, they weren't major, they didn't break through to the point where like, "I remember them vividly." Do you?

• 10:04Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 10:04John Coogan?

  No. Vioxx, it does not ring a bell, but this certainly will for a lot of people, especially in tech. Social media companies have largely been shielded from being held liable for third-party content on their platforms by Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. At trial, Lanier had to focus on the platform's features, not the content to make a case, and that's something that I want to talk about today and I wrote about in the newsletter. The trial was the first among, the first among thousands of consolidated lawsuits filed by teenagers, school districts and state attorneys against Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap. More are scheduled for this year. TikTok and Snap settled the case, settled the first case.

• 10:45John Coogan?

  A Christian who teaches Bible study classes to as many as 500 people at an evangelical church, Lanier turns a folksy courtroom demeanor, honed over decades of trial work, first in Texas, now nationally. He's known for showing jurors hand-drawn roadmaps and illustrations on an overhead projector to guide them through his legal reasoning and evidence, including signposts and human figures that could have been sketched by a child. To visualize microscopic asbestos fibers in talcum powder, he bought, he brought a bale of hay into a courtroom and dropped a needle into the blades. Into the blades? The blades of grass. Oh, the blades of hay. Got it. Okay. Wow.

• 11:30John Coogan?

  Very, very interesting. He, yeah, he, he, he likes, he likes props. That's it. When arguing for punitive damages against the tech company, Liner held up a jar.

• 11:41Jordi Hays?

  Quite addictive.

• 11:42John Coogan?

  Of, this is a good point. So he, he held up a jar of 415 M and Ms to show how a $1 billion fine would be a fraction of Alphabet's 415 billion in shareholder equity. He needs a bigger jar, because I think every tech company is five times larger now. He says he tries to avoid being flashy himself. He wears the same two unremarkable suits on rotation during a trial, and then I go burn them. What? He burns his suits after? Is that a joke or he gives them away? I don't know.

• 12:15Jordi Hays?

  My work here is done?

• 12:16John Coogan?

  I guess. I guess. I don't know. It's odd. Liner graduated from college at 20 and is trained as a minister before going to law school at Texas Tech University, hoping to make enough money to support his preaching. He began gaining renown as a lawyer in an era when asbestos cases were swamping the US courts. He won a jury verdict of about 115 million in 1998 for 21 steel workers who felt ill after using machinery that contained asbestos. Liner and his wife Becky met in high school debate class. They have five children and 12 grandchildren. Wow. Overnight success. They were known for years for their child-friendly Christmas parties at their estate of more than 35 acres near Houston, which has a model railroad that can seat 120 people?

• 13:01John Coogan?

  Okay. This guy's got to win. I have completely changed my position here.

• 13:06Jordi Hays?

  Need a mansion section article.

• 13:08John Coogan?

  This is incredible.

• 13:08Jordi Hays?

  I think we have a direct line to him, by the way. We want him on the show. Maybe we should go do a show from the, from the, from the model train.

• 13:16John Coogan?

  Yes. I'm, I'm so ready to be convinced of his position. I, I wrote a whole piece about how I disagree with, with the result, but he's winning me over.

• 13:24Jordi Hays?

  Disagree with his entire argument, but you're agreeing with his approach to life?

• 13:28John Coogan?

  Yes. 100%, 100%. I feel like we're kindred spirits. It's amazing. So the model railroad can seat 120 people and guess what? He's got a menagerie. This is goals. You need to be menagerie maxing in life. You need a menagerie. His contains lemurs.

• 13:48Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 13:48John Coogan?

  And llamas.

• 13:49Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 13:50John Coogan?

  Lemurs and llamas.

• 13:52Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 13:52John Coogan?

  This is incredible. The family pulled the plug on the party, which featured up to 9,000 guests and performers, including Miley Cyrus, Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton, he said, because it was too hard on the lawn. God cares about his grass too much. This is incredible. Inviting 9,000.

• 14:10Jordi Hays?

  He's an environmentalist.

• 14:11John Coogan?

  From the community. I mean, that's like the entire, I mean, Houston's a huge city, but that's like, that is so, so, what a pillar of the community. This guy's a hero. Lanier said, "The theme of his cases against major corporations is responsibility and integrity or lack of it. Tech billionaires don't need his help," Lanier said, "but Kaylee would not have anybody else. Faith is much the same way. God, God's there to try to help people who need the help." Two of Lanier's daughters, who are lawyers, were by his side during the trial. He joined the social media case.

• 14:43Jordi Hays?

  By the way, you keep saying linear.

• 14:45John Coogan?

  Is it Lanier or Linear?

• 14:46Jordi Hays?

  Lanair?

• 14:47John Coogan?

  Lanier.

• 14:48Jordi Hays?

  Lanier.

• 14:48John Coogan?

  Lanier.

• 14:49Jordi Hays?

  Lanier.

• 14:49John Coogan?

  I think it's Lanier. Well, we'll figure it out. He has deep authenticity.

• 14:55Jordi Hays?

  I just don't want people to get confused with the system for modern.

• 14:58John Coogan?

  Yes, it's not Lanier. It's Lanier, I think. Maybe it's Lanier. Maybe it's French. He's not a phony. What he does is not a performance. Even from you, even from Los Angeles, he posted short video selfies discussing Bible passages on YouTube. So he's a, he's, he's dog fooding the thing that he's suing.

• 15:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's switch gears to your piece.

• 15:23John Coogan?

  I will take you through my counter argument, but first I'll tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And let me also tell you about Gemini. Gemini 3.1 Pro is here with a more capable baseline. It's great for super complex tasks, like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single. Or bringing creative projects to life. So, uh, last week, uh, Brandon Gurrell summarized the ruling this way. He said, "In the case, the plaintiff's lawyer, Lark, Mark Lanier, argued that Meta and YouTube built digital casinos that used neurobiological techniques similar to those employed by slot machines." The jury found that specific features of Meta and YouTube are designed to be addictive.

• 16:07John Coogan?

  And I want you to really hone in on these features. So, infinite scroll creates an environment where there are no natural stopping points.

• 16:17John Coogan?

  Algorithmic recommendation feeds users highly engaging content. Algorithms feed users highly engaging content. Autoplay removes users' agency in choosing whether to watch the next video. Notifications pull users back in by exploiting their need for validation. IG beauty filters contribute to the plaintiff's body dysmorphia. And features like the like button exploit users' biological need for social approval. Okay, so you got a bunch of features. You know this stuff. You, everyone uses social media. We all know about this stuff. The question is like, is, are the features addictive or is the content addictive? Because social media platforms are of course protected from the content that is posted on the media.

• 16:59Jordi Hays?

  Lanier's entire, Lanier's entire argument is predicated on it being the features, right?

• 17:05John Coogan?

  Yes, the features. Okay. Yeah. So, the, so, uh, you know, we talked to Eric Goldman from Santa Clara University of Law, and he was saying that like, yes, it's a $6 million settlement right now, but this is, this could be huge. The direct quote was, uh, whether we will even have social media in the future. Like, this could be existential.

• 17:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and, and there's thousands of other cases like this kind of percolating, right? And so.

• 17:28John Coogan?

  And it could turn into a class action. He's gotten $6 billion before. He could get $50 billion. I don't know. He could get a lot. And he's not, like, $6 million is, he's not a $6 million guy. He's a $6 billion guy. And so this is the precursor and it's going further. And whether it's a ton of different cases or one big one, like, it's a big problem for the tech companies. So, uh, I thought it was an odd coincidence that we sort of had. I called the placebo controlled trial for these exact features last week when Sora shut down. So OpenAI's nascent social network Sora shut down. The reaction of the news was funny to watch because a lot of people were like, yeah, I told you it was always bad. But when it launched, it was exactly the opposite.

• 18:12John Coogan?

  Everyone was like, it's too good. We won't be able to look away.

• 18:15Jordi Hays?

  It's simply too good.

• 18:16John Coogan?

  Simply too good. And Rune summarized this pretty well, I think, yesterday. Or I think it was yesterday. He said, "Sora was peak moral panic. All of these breathless takes about making videos that are going to addict humanity and waste everyone's time. Meanwhile, we made some funny videos that were less funny as time went on. And AI slop is just one category among many on Instagram reels. Don't worry so much about making videos that are going to blow up people's brains without making anything good. Without worry about making anything good at all. The best Soras were up there with the best reels and the humor relied significantly on the voice of the creator. I completely agree. The funny Soras that I..."

• 18:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, even the video we played last week of the cat on the porch.

• 18:57John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:58Jordi Hays?

  That wasn't one shotted.

• 18:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. The prompt was not, was not make something that will retain users.

• 19:03Jordi Hays?

  And it wouldn't have been funny if the person hadn't been escalating like the scene every new prompt.

• 19:09John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 19:10Jordi Hays?

  And then sharing them together.

• 19:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, and he closes by saying, "I know so many of you who are loudly concerned about this, who won't update at all, who will remain pessimistic about humans and their ability to use tools." And I said, "So like, what do you make of these two situations?" It feels a little bit like a placebo controlled trial to me. Of course, like, there's a lot more nuance here. This is like a high level take. But Sora absolutely used all of the social media best practices or addictive and harmful neurobiological techniques, if you want to use the course language. Sora app was basically the same as TikTok, Instagram reels, YouTube Shorts, Snap, in terms of UI and UX design. It had infinite scroll, it had algorithmic recommendations, it had notifications, it had a like button.

• 19:55John Coogan?

  And it didn't have IG beauty filters, but like, the whole thing is a filter. Because I could go in there and say, "Make me look like a bodybuilder." And it did a good job and I looked great in the videos. And so, like, it is, it really checks all of the same boxes.

• 20:10Jordi Hays?

  Match that.

• 20:11John Coogan?

  It gave me crippling broad body dysmorphia, obviously. I dream for the for the day when I will look like my Sora avatar, my, what do they call it? Cameo, my cameo? No, but they really did use all the normal tools and that was for familiarity, but also because they're moving quickly. And the key innovation was not the UI design or the fact that it's vertical or algorithmic feeds. Like, we are in 2026, we're not in 2014 when we're launching Vine. So, the key insight was purely AI-generated content. And it didn't work. Like, the features were not addictive because the people that downloaded Sora did not become addictive because the content was a little bit too sloppy, right?

• 20:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, it was just one type of content.

• 20:59John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 20:59Jordi Hays?

  And it turns out people like a broad selection and they like variability.

• 21:04John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 21:04Jordi Hays?

  They might want to see, you know, a video of someone skiing.

• 21:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:07Jordi Hays?

  And then some slop.

• 21:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:09Jordi Hays?

  And then something their friend made.

• 21:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 21:10Jordi Hays?

  And then some health content. And it's really the collection of that.

• 21:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 21:14Jordi Hays?

  The other thing I think that seems very obvious is if it was the if it was the product itself and the features that were addicting, there would be so many social media, there would be so many social media apps that were effectively thriving.

• 21:28John Coogan?

  And look at-

• 21:29Jordi Hays?

  There would be like a bunch of Instagram.

• 21:30John Coogan?

  And this is where I get to the cigarette comparison. So, there's a bunch of comparisons to the cigarette industry, and I think it's really worth revisiting, like, what is addictive about cigarettes? Because there are some people that say, like, it's an oral fixation, like, you just want to put, like, a stick in your mouth, so you should, like, switch to carrots. Like, that is like-

• 21:47Jordi Hays?

  And-

• 21:47John Coogan?

  Maybe like 1%.

• 21:48Jordi Hays?

  Some could argue it's an addiction to looking cool.

• 21:51John Coogan?

  There you go. But it is the nicotine. It is the nicotine. And that's why you do have a long tail of like 50 different cigarette brands and 1,000 different e-cigarette brands. And nicotine gum is addictive. Nicotine patches are addictive. Nicotine pouches are addictive because they all contain the nicotine. And if the court is asking us to believe that the like button, the algorithmic feed, that is addictive, then we should see addiction-like results from any app that implements that.

• 22:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:20John Coogan?

  Because that is the case for all nicotine-containing products. They all addict people. I mean, there are less addictive formats-

• 22:27Jordi Hays?

  How many-

• 22:28John Coogan?

  In general.

• 22:28Jordi Hays?

  How many apps have you tried or test flights over the years that had any of these features-

• 22:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:33Jordi Hays?

  That you used? For 30 seconds.

• 22:36John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. Because what actually keeps you coming back is the content which is created by the users and

• 22:42Jordi Hays?

  And so you're at, you want Lanier to go after every single person that has ever posted anything on Instagram and jailed them?

• 22:50John Coogan?

  No.

• 22:53John Coogan?

  No. Uh, I think that some creators do create very compelling content. Some of that

• 22:59Jordi Hays?

  You want to jail the best creator?

• 23:00John Coogan?

  No. Some of that content is amazing. Some of that content is great. Uh, some of that content is bad. There's a very, very wide range. You can go to truly amazing educational content. I'm thinking of like Three Blue, One Brown, this math channel that does visualizations of math concepts on YouTube. It's incredible. Andre Karpathy's YouTube videos. There's so many interesting, uh, educational history shows, podcasts. There's so much content that

• 23:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Tyler got, Tyler got addicted to that video, "Are you destined to deal?" That's a great video. He kept saying, "Why?"

• 23:34John Coogan?

  That's why you have a tie on today.

• 23:35Jordi Hays?

  He, he, he called me on Friday night and said, "Why is this video 20 hours long?"

• 23:43John Coogan?

  Cause he had a loop?

• 23:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he was just looped.

• 23:45John Coogan?

  That makes sense. That makes sense. Uh, so yeah, but I mean, but it is true. Like, like I think the court is correct And Lanier is correct that some people go on social media and make horrible content that depresses people that land on it. And it goes without saying that social media companies do have an enormous responsibility to manage recommendation feeds responsibly And route people in tough situations to helpful resources. So Google already does this very, very well. If you type in specific keywords that seem like you're in a mental health crisis, like it will not give you search results. It will give you a phone number for someone to call and, and they know when to route the right people to that. And I, and I do believe that all the tech platforms are thinking about this and implementing this. Maybe they need to be more aggressive. Uh, I think that the big, the big thing that most people can agree on is parental controls here.

• 24:30John Coogan?

  Um, and I think that that's like a much easier like middle ground here. Uh, and just in general, one other nice meet in the middle option Is potentially just, uh, you know, getting tech companies to give users and parents in particular, but users broadly More control over their experience. So it's possible to disable algorithmic feeds, endless scroll, Uh, the like button with browser plugins on mobile web.

• 24:57John Coogan?

  But it's a much worse experience because you have to load it on mobile web, which isn't the actual app and it's slower and there's a lot of things that are just kind of janky and don't load as well. But having those like in the settings to just say like, I know some creators on Instagram can turn off the like counter. Have you ever seen this? So you can see somebody post an image and it'll just have a like button there, but it doesn't have like 5,000 likes because the creators were getting like, you know, annoyed by, oh, this one.

• 25:28Jordi Hays?

  Well, to be clear, that's because people didn't want to post because they were worried something wouldn't do well.

• 25:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:34Jordi Hays?

  And the world would know that their content wasn't engaging or something like that. Right. So that was just, that effectively is just an incentive. I don't believe that that was done for the mental health of the creators.

• 25:48John Coogan?

  No.

• 25:48Jordi Hays?

  That was done to encourage more people to post.

• 25:52John Coogan?

  I don't know. I don't know. I mean,

• 25:54Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure.

• 25:54John Coogan?

  Like, my mental health as a social media creator was at an all time high before I understood the metrics. Because I was just like, oh, 300 views? I'm famous. This is amazing. 300 people sat down and watched my 10 minute video essay about a dying VR technology or something like that. It's like, I've done it. 300 people sat down. It's like I'm a, I'm a business school professor, basically. Yeah. But then eventually you get and you're like, wait, like, the last video got 400,000 views. Why does this one have 375,000 views? I'm a failure. So like, there is a little bit of that. But I, but I hear you.

• 26:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but the metrics are still available for the creators.

• 26:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:34Jordi Hays?

  You can, the creator, the person that posted it.

• 26:36John Coogan?

  But you can turn it off with a Chrome plugin. You actually can. There's some creators that do this. But anyway, like surfacing those in apps, I think that will help users feel like they're in more control. And realistically, I don't think it will be super damaging to any of the platforms because most people won't opt into that, but certain people will. And in general, it'll, it'll just like increase public perception broadly. We've already seen this with a lot of the LLM companies where like, you can go in, you can fine tune and add a custom prompt and kind of talk to it about what you like and don't like. Change the personality. I think people have been asking for that for a long time, surfacing it. It seems like a win-win. And so something, something along those lines seems, uh, seems, seems in the cards.

• 27:18John Coogan?

  Anyway, we can debate this, but first let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. And let me also tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest. Securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending now with AI. So, um, do you have any other pushback on my take? Tyler had some pushback. Should we go to him?

• 27:43Speaker 02

  Let's go to Tyler.

• 27:44John Coogan?

  What do you think?

• 27:44Speaker 02

  I mean, yes, I guess there was a few things. I mean, one thing is that like.

• 27:48John Coogan?

  Not enough props, right? Too many analogies, too many parables.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  Like I, I think you can say that, um, like, okay, yeah, it's the content. That's the problem. But like the content is like kind of downstream of the features, right? Because you didn't see like short form video.

• 28:02John Coogan?

  The medium is the message.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:03John Coogan?

  And so it is possible for me to create a platform that incentivizes addictive content. And that's like the retention curve. So retention editing makes it more addictive. You become addicted to the content, but it's because of the features.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I, I think that's like broadly.

• 28:19John Coogan?

  Pretty good argument.

• 28:20Speaker 02

  The steel man that you can, you can make for like Lanier's position.

• 28:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  And then, I mean, there was other stuff. I think on like just the nicotine analogy, we were talking about this like, okay, so you have nicotine like broadly and then below nicotine, you have like smoking, which is like definitely very bad for you. And then you have like, uh, you know, pouches or stuff like this, which is like probably less bad. Like it's just the nicotine, there's no tobacco. So like, maybe this is like less bad. So maybe the equivalent is like, uh, you know, the, the cool snowboarding videos on Instagram.

• 28:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 28:49Speaker 02

  Are like the, you know, the, the cleaner like nicotine stuff and then the like.

• 28:54John Coogan?

  Still addictive, but not harmful.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  Yes. And then there's.

• 28:56John Coogan?

  Unless you're Jordan and you're going to try and do a double cork 1260 and, uh, and eat it.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  Get smoked.

• 29:02John Coogan?

  Get smoked into the ground.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. But, but then on the other side, you have like the like, you know, very graphic stuff on Instagram that like, we don't want people to see. And that's like the, you know, the, the cigarettes, that's like going to give you cancer or whatever.

• 29:12John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  So I think they're like. I mean, I guess it's still in agreement with what you're saying, but like,

• 29:18John Coogan?

  Well, this is what

• 29:19Speaker 02

  nicotine

• 29:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is what the cigarette has

• 29:20Speaker 02

  If you're under 18, you can't buy

• 29:21John Coogan?

  which was like, there is an addictive component, and then there was a carcinogenic component, and they needed to sort of separate those out. And where we landed as a society was like, the addictive component is acceptable for the, it's suitable for the protection of public health, according to the FDA. And so they are approving new products that are addictive, but not carcinogenic. And so you would imagine, even in the most strict ruling, where every new social media platform needs to be approved, you could potentially use all of those addictive features, as long as the content was not carcinogenic with inside that app.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:55John Coogan?

  And that would be like a new nicotine gun, basically.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, basically, I'm saying, like, right now, if you're under 18, you can still, like, there's, like, parental controls, and you, if you can't be under 13, or whatever, but like, it's like, very not, it's like, poorly, you know, enforced, like, you can actually see a lot of the bad stuff, if you're under 18, on Instagram, or whatever.

• 30:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  So, like, directionally, like, you know, you can be against the, the, the ruling of this.

• 30:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  But, like, the parental controls that people are, like, asked for are still, like, very much not there.

• 30:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense.

• 30:24Jordi Hays?

  So, I, I, I think I have a potential solution. Let's pull up this image of a cigarette package in Europe.

• 30:33John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. What is this?

• 30:34Jordi Hays?

  So, pull this up.

• 30:36John Coogan?

  Let's pull it up.

• 30:37Jordi Hays?

  This is the hardest challenge.

• 30:37John Coogan?

  While we pull it up, let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every age and a trusted identity, so you get the power of AI without the risk, secure every agent, secure any agent. And let me also tell you about TurboPuffer.

• 30:48Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 30:49John Coogan?

  Turbo is a vector of full-time search. Built from first principles in object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable.

• 30:56Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so, this is, like, typical cigarette packaging in Europe. John, you probably wouldn't know this, because you're very American, and you're very loyal, and you, and you don't, you, you avoid overseas trips as much as possible. So, on any given cigarette pack in Europe, you're gonna see, like, a really terrible image, this woman

• 31:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 31:12Jordi Hays?

  apparently is coughing up blood.

• 31:14John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 31:14Jordi Hays?

  And so I think what, what a potential solution that Meta could do, is as soon as you open Instagram

• 31:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:21Jordi Hays?

  it, it makes an AI-generated image, based on the last picture of you that you posted on social media, and it just makes you look terrible.

• 31:28John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 31:29Jordi Hays?

  And it says, like, "Warning, like, social media will destroy you."

• 31:33John Coogan?

  It could show you

• 31:33Jordi Hays?

  And then you can scroll past it.

• 31:34John Coogan?

  It could potentially show you with Tachnak. Are you familiar with Tachnak? Where you go like this?

• 31:42Jordi Hays?

  Yes, it's just a crazy image of you with technic.

• 31:45John Coogan?

  It shows you with technic.

• 31:47Jordi Hays?

  And then, so you can scroll past it.

• 31:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:49Jordi Hays?

  Every time you open that app, it's a new image.

• 31:51John Coogan?

  It's a reminder.

• 31:52Jordi Hays?

  It's a new image of you looking the worst, wasting your life away.

• 31:55John Coogan?

  Are the AI labs lobbying to get this removed?

• 31:58Jordi Hays?

  All right, we can put this, we can put this away.

• 31:59John Coogan?

  Are the AI labs lobbying to get that removed? Because I think most of their timelines suggest that lung cancer will be cured by AI any day now. So potentially you could start smoking again. Has anyone come out as pro smoking?

• 32:11Jordi Hays?

  I don't think Anthropic's come out with, they're, they're, they're anti Anthropic, you know.

• 32:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, anti sunscreen.

• 32:16Jordi Hays?

  The joke that they make with journalists that they kind of got caught on anti sunscreen.

• 32:20John Coogan?

  If AI is going to cure liver cancer, it's game on.

• 32:26John Coogan?

  It's game on. It's game on. You can drink as much as you want because that's, because you get liver disease if you drink too much. And so if AI, if I'm going to be able to vibe code an mRNA vaccine to cure my liver cancer, I'm going to be oozing for sure. It's the only, only rational thing to do.

• 32:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, this is also kind of like when.

• 32:42John Coogan?

  Sort of irrational.

• 32:43Speaker 02

  When companies like are saying like, oh yeah, work like balance is super important.

• 32:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  So then their competitors will, you know.

• 32:48John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, people on Anthropic should tell people to open AI to start drinking a lot because AGI is going to cure liver.

• 32:54John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes, this is good, this is good.

• 32:56Jordi Hays?

  Let's revisit the Jetsons.

• 32:58John Coogan?

  Okay, revisit the Jetsons, I'm sure you've seen the Jetsons.

• 33:00Jordi Hays?

  Where's my flying car and three hour workday? So I'm going to be learning about the Jetsons.

• 33:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 33:05Jordi Hays?

  John is going to be revisiting.

• 33:07John Coogan?

  I.

• 33:07Jordi Hays?

  The 1960s version of the future is way more fun than our reality. But when it comes to innovations, we're catching up.

• 33:13John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 33:14Jordi Hays?

  Interesting. Let's see, Nicole says, I recently spent a weekend doing deep investigative research into future technologies. I binged the Jetsons in my sweatpants. For the uninitiated, the forgetful, this space age family sitcom features George and Jane Jetson living the American dream in an apartment in the sky with their two children, dog Astro and robot maid Rosie. The show is set in 2062. A century ahead from its original 1962 air date, it's full of fantastical inventions such as flying cars, dinner generating machines, and canine treadmills, complete with fire hydrants. The upbeat vibe is markedly different from the apocalyptic, at times murderous, sci-fi of today. The 1960s were full of optimism about what the 21st century would bring, and some of

• 33:59Jordi Hays?

  it actually has come true. While we've still got a few decades before the Jetsons family is meant to arrive, I dug into some of the show's technological hallmarks and determined how close we already are. Video calling. She says, "Absolutely. In lieu of a home phone, the Jetsons had a video phone. Shows creators couldn't fathom mobile devices, but they were spot on about video calling."

• 34:21John Coogan?

  Now, to be clear, we are still working on, with one of our business associates, like, a video call that doesn't stop halfway through and just cancel.

• 34:31Jordi Hays?

  So the Jetsons didn't predict the free tier of Zoom.

• 34:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, the free tier of Zoom was not considered in the Jetsons where you're talking to someone.

• 34:42Jordi Hays?

  They couldn't fathom it.

• 34:43John Coogan?

  You're clearly gonna go long on the meeting, and Zoom's just like, "Goodbye."

• 34:47Jordi Hays?

  It's over.

• 34:48John Coogan?

  It's over, and it kicks everyone out with no notice.

• 34:50Jordi Hays?

  Is that a new thing? I feel like it used to do a countdown.

• 34:53John Coogan?

  I think it did a countdown too, but now it's just like, "Get out of here."

• 34:55Jordi Hays?

  Now they're just like, "We want to embarrass the host."

• 34:58John Coogan?

  The plus tier is gonna blow your mind.

• 35:03Jordi Hays?

  So in the Jetsons, they could even create deep fakes to stand in for them on camera.

• 35:06John Coogan?

  Whoa, that's cool. I didn't realize that.

• 35:09Jordi Hays?

  FaceTime's got a gun on them. You know, the other thing they haven't cracked with FaceTime is like, if you FaceTime a group of people, like, most of the people won't even have a notification and don't know that it's happening. So we haven't cracked the notification part of the video call.

• 35:23John Coogan?

  This is good. Read this next line. "When George secretly attended a robot football game, his simulacrum told Jane he had to work late." He's like, using a deep fake to lie to his wife. This is so 60s.

• 35:36Jordi Hays?

  Do not do this.

• 35:37John Coogan?

  Do not do this. This is dystopian.

• 35:39Jordi Hays?

  Flying cars.

• 35:40John Coogan?

  It's not all optimism over here.

• 35:41Jordi Hays?

  Flying cars and travel tubes, sort of. "There is much walking in Orbit City. A conveyor belt brings George from bed to the bathroom to get to and from his classroom. Elroy jets through a series of air tubes called the School Homing Network. When the wrong child shows up at the Jetsons' home, Jane sends him back with the push of a button." And they also use personal vehicles, the ones that typically fly. George Aero commutes in a glass dome saucer that folds into a briefcase.

• 36:08John Coogan?

  That's pretty cool. We're pretty far from there. We do have helicopters, but they're very expensive. I always fight people on the flying cars don't exist thing because like, we do have helicopters and people, some people get to use those, but they are not nearly cheap enough. But we gotta get them, we gotta get them way down.

• 36:24Jordi Hays?

  Here in the actual future, we're still toting around on pavement pounding automobiles. A version of flying cars, however, is very real. It's called an eVTOL.

• 36:32John Coogan?

  Look at this. Pivotal Blackfly is a solo piloted aircraft free to operate unrestricted airspace. An upgraded version called the Helix can be yours for 190K. You don't even need a pilot's license. That's like, pretty close, but I mean, I would still say like, we are not near the flying car because they're just not. Like, they're way less flying car rides than Waymos, for example. So, we're just not right there. Push button jobs. Almost. George works as a digital index operator at Spacely Space Sprockets for approximately three hours a day, three days a week. As a button pusher, he makes enough for, to support a family of four, even though majority of his day is spent with his feet up on his desk.

• 37:16Jordi Hays?

  Okay, they basically nailed this. There's some people out there that are basically button pushers right now. Vibe coding?

• 37:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:23Jordi Hays?

  TBD on, on the revenue side, but...

• 37:27John Coogan?

  Working three hours a day, three days a week. You know, we, we work three hours a day, five days a week, and, uh, maybe the future's three, just Monday, Wednesday, Friday streams. We can live the Jetsons future. Now, we work...

• 37:40Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. That would be, that would be...

• 37:44Jordi Hays?

  That'd be devastating for us.

• 37:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Until then, we'll be the working alongside...

• 37:47Jordi Hays?

  Space colonization, nope.

• 37:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. They live above Earth with houses built on tall stilts. I like that. Uh, to avoid the planet's environmental inconveniences, the stilts can rise above any inclement weather and space itself isn't out of reach. In a classic episode, Elroy goes to an asteroid on a school filled trip. We're not quite there. Musk had preached of populating Mars, but now his focus has turned closer to the moon. Meanwhile, an interplanetary space race between US, China, Russia, and UAE and the European Space Agency is well underway. Robot maids, not exactly, but we're getting...

• 38:24John Coogan?

  Much closer there.

• 38:25Jordi Hays?

  It's funny that Brett Adcock's coming on today.

• 38:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:29Jordi Hays?

  And he's working on the flying car.

• 38:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's working on the robot made.

• 38:32Jordi Hays?

  Working on the robot made.

• 38:33John Coogan?

  He doesn't have a space thing yet.

• 38:35Jordi Hays?

  He's now working, his new lab is basically like a butt, you know, seems like a button pusher.

• 38:40John Coogan?

  Gadget in new gadget induced pain, yes. And now for the show's biggest oversight, no touchscreens. There are lots of visual displays, but they're primarily operated by dials, levers and other physical controls. We got some levers back there in the studio. While the show may not have anticipated touchscreens, it nailed a key side effect of constant use of gadgets, repetitive motion injuries. Orbit City is full of buttons and overworked fingers are a running gag on the show. Jane regularly does digit workouts and complains that her pointers are sore. Here in 2026, office workers often suffer from texting thumb after scrolling through endless feeds and tech neck after craning down to look at mobile devices.

• 39:23John Coogan?

  And don't get me started on my strained hand with carpal tunnel syndrome from all the clicking. Thirty six years and counting. We may not be living as exceptional a future as the Jetsons, but we've still got three and a half decades to catch up. By then I will be twice as old as I am now. I've already witnessed the dawn of high speed internet, the iPhone and generative AI. How many tech revolutions will we experience in another 36 years? By the time we hit the show's 2062 deadline, maybe we will finally live in space or make our current planet more habitable and make a comfortable living on a nine hour work week. Tyler, what do you think? Predict your timelines for 2062. Will we get space colonization?

• 40:04Speaker 02

  How do you define space colonization?

• 40:06John Coogan?

  Living not on the earth above the Karman line for like, that's your primary residence, like more than half the year.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  How many people do it? Like just you can do that, like anyone can do that?

• 40:18John Coogan?

  Yes, anyone with like, like if you can, if you can afford like a apartment for a few thousand dollars or like a house that's above $500,000 in America, you can, you can choose to live in space. So I would assume like population of millions.

• 40:36Speaker 02

  I, it probably depends on like the industry that like is chiefly, you know, benefited from people living there.

• 40:43John Coogan?

  Button pushing.

• 40:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, big news, Sean Frank is in the chat. He says, I'm here, guys, H E A R, which he's saying, I, he's trying to signal that he's listening to you, Tyler, and to you, John. Great to see you.

• 40:59John Coogan?

  Well, thank you for coming in. Let's, uh, let's read him some ads since he's here. Let's tell him about Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, Sean, go to Restream.com. And you know what we gotta tell him about? We gotta tell him about app love and profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Sean, get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today.

• 41:20Jordi Hays?

  Andrew Reed says, the faster technology progresses, the harder it gets to print something in the office. We have experienced this. It's very true. Aaron from Box says Reed's law. I know you may have wanted a better law, but I don't make the rules.

• 41:36John Coogan?

  Hmm. Yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's very, very difficult. Apple has just like never done the printer. I think for environmental reasons. I'm not exactly sure, but like there's never been like, oh, the gold standard, the Tesla printers, just like the one you get and it does what it, it just does everything flawlessly. And it's at that like, you know, five nines of reliability. Uh, we've had a pretty good run with our printers, but, uh, we're always in the market for new printers. So there's more. We are, we're looking for a new printer right now for a special project. Uh, anyway, let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Um, what I hate most about technology in hotel rooms.

• 42:21John Coogan?

  Jordy, I want your take on tech in, in, uh, in hotel rooms. I want to know about your experience when you walk into a hotel room. The Wall Street Journal says, when you book a hotel room, you can count on some things like shampoo, a hot shower, some way to get a cup of coffee, but a stress-free technology experience? No way. Not even with basic technology. You find just about anywhere like TV, Wi-Fi and outlets for your devices. Unless you carry a suitcase, bowl of gadgets, cables and adapters, you're risking every kind of tech frustration. Did you know that Ben Thompson carries a Special device that acts as a wifi repeater. Where, when he travels, so when he goes to a hotel, he logs into, yeah, this is amazing.

• 43:03John Coogan?

  He logs in to the, the wifi, the hotel wifi, I believe, or the, or the, or the plane wifi. Through that device and then all of his devices connect to that automatically. And he bring, he'll bring like a fire stick. So he'll be able to watch TV shows and his laptop and his phone. Everything automatically syncs to that device and like reroutes it. But that was a very interesting thing that he's clearly optimized a lot. He's like a huge, uh, uh, what is it? Uh, like gearbag guy. Like he has all the wires like dialed as, as, as I would expect.

• 43:35Jordi Hays?

  I usually forget to bring a charger.

• 43:40John Coogan?

  Hotels are missing out on a fundamental truth. In a world where so much of our work, travel and relationship experience is shaped by technology. The quality of a hotel's tech service is core to what it's like to stay there. Give me a hotel room that lets all that tech fade into the background so that I can focus on my trip. But no, here's what you usually get instead. TV muddle. I suspect I've logged more hours troubleshooting hotel TVs than I have watching programs on hotel TVs. Okay, there's a bit of a retro charm in a TV that flips on and instantly tunes to a live network broadcast. But in the streaming age, I'm just as likely to crave a little quality time with Netflix, Disney plus or Apple TV. Many hotels have caught on to this reality by offering some sort of streaming option. But they approach this in so many different ways.

• 44:23John Coogan?

  You never know what you're going to find or what tech you'll need to make it work. Needy wifi isn't another one. Most hotels I've visited recently seem to have figured out that charging extra for wifi. Makes about as much sense as charging extra for a better toilet. Everyone needs to get online, so you might as well build it into the price of the hotel room. So now that we've taken that great leap forward, we, why are we still forcing people to log into the network? Not just once per day, but over and over again, once per device, each and every day, or often several times a day. It isn't usual, it isn't unusual for me to log into hotel wifi 20 or 30 times a day. I think you're doing something wrong.

• 44:57Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, honestly, I don't, I don't, this doesn't resonate with me at all.

• 45:01John Coogan?

  You're fine.

• 45:01Jordi Hays?

  The only thing I want from a hotel.

• 45:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:04Jordi Hays?

  Is to be able to order room service without calling someone.

• 45:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 45:10Jordi Hays?

  That's like the only thing and, and hotels miss on that for the most part. Like if you have a little iPad or you could even order on the TV app. That would be amazing. And you get like a Domino's Pizza tracker type thing. That's all I want. I feel like they kind of deliver on everything else and I don't watch.

• 45:29John Coogan?

  I was listening to, I think it was George Hots was explaining how he ordered room service in a hotel he was staying at and he vibe coded an app that interacted with the ordering service. So that he didn't have to talk to them. And it basically like read the entire menu and then like created like a voice agent to call or like or like reverse engineered the API of the ordering menu and he was able to order by command line and just like checking into hotel, time to build the CLI. It's truly the future. I love it. But it is, it is. And you know who else is vibe coding these days? Gary Tan. Ben Hylak has a joke here. He says, "The year is 2027. Gary Tan has just

• 46:11John Coogan?

  crossed 1 billion lines of code per day. Water to three-year-old Californian towns were diverted in order to cool his locally ran LLMs. Riots erupt and protesters demand answers to one single question. What is he building?"

• 46:26Jordi Hays?

  We gotta have GT on.

• 46:28John Coogan?

  I can't wait.

• 46:28Jordi Hays?

  Let's get Gary on.

• 46:29John Coogan?

  We gotta get Gary on. We gotta know what Gary is building. People are joking about this because what was the latest stat? It was something like 80...

• 46:39Jordi Hays?

  78,000.

• 46:40John Coogan?

  78,000 lines of code.

• 46:42Jordi Hays?

  Per day on...

• 46:43John Coogan?

  Per day.

• 46:43Jordi Hays?

  On Gary's list.

• 46:44John Coogan?

  On Gary's list.

• 46:45Jordi Hays?

  Which is his blog.

• 46:46John Coogan?

  It's a blog. And he's built blogs before. Like he's built these sites. But you know, I guess like with all the testing suites and packages and mobile optimization, I don't know. I can't imagine the volume of code that will be generated when he creates a mobile app for it. It's gonna be, you know, trillions of tokens going into that. Anyway, let me tell you about Labelbox. RL environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams.

• 47:17Jordi Hays?

  Sam says, "I remember when this was announced, but didn't fully appreciate the size. That's a hell of a cluster. The Department of Energy will basically be a frontier AI company. Nvidia is collaborating with Oracle and the Department of Energy to build the US Department of Energy's largest AI supercomputer for scientific discovery. The Solstice system will feature record-breaking 100,000 black wells."

• 47:38Jordi Hays?

  And support the DOE's mission of developing AI capabilities to drive technological leadership across US security, science, and energy applications. Another system, Equinox, will include 10,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs expected to be available in 2026. Both systems will be located at Argan and will be interconnected by Nvidia Networking and deliver a combined 2,200 exaflops of AI performance.

• 48:06John Coogan?

  We've talked about nationalization before. We haven't talked about privatization. We could potentially spin this out, take it public. There's an option here.

• 48:15Speaker 02

  So I was interested in this. I looked, this is gonna be like somewhere around like a quarter of a gigawatt equivalent of 100,000 Blackwells.

• 48:22John Coogan?

  Half a, half a Meta campus, I think. I think Meta is working on 500, 500 megs.

• 48:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I mean, Hyperion, like the end state is like, I think a gigawatt or more, right?

• 48:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, more, more. But that's like the first big jump for them. But the default Meta campus, I believe, is around 500 megs.

• 48:41Jordi Hays?

  Cisco to acquire Restaurant Depot.

• 48:43John Coogan?

  Not our Cisco, not.

• 48:46Jordi Hays?

  Not even close. To acquire Restaurant Depot for $29.1 billion.

• 48:52John Coogan?

  Before we take you through this, let me tell you about the real Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. There's only one Cisco in our hearts. This one's important. This is Cisco with an S.

• 49:07Jordi Hays?

  I, I dislike Cisco.

• 49:10John Coogan?

  Why?

• 49:11Jordi Hays?

  Because every time, I find it a very frequent experience where there's a new restaurant coming to my area. I'm excited about it. They invest million, $2 million in building out this incredible space. Looks great. And then you eat there for the first time and you can tell that they're just sourcing like Cisco. I'm not gonna say slop, but the food quality is not great. And then it, and then it, it's like, why did you put all this energy into making a beautiful space? And then you're just. You know, chefing up, uh, generic, uh, generic food. Doesn't make any sense to me, but, um, I believe the founder of Restaurant Depot.

• 49:51John Coogan?

  Look.

• 49:52Jordi Hays?

  I think I saw it somewhere.

• 49:53John Coogan?

  In the Jetsons, they had dinner generating machines, dinner generating machines. Where, how do you think that's gonna happen?

• 49:59Speaker 02

  Travis Kalanick built this.

• 50:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:00Speaker 02

  Isn't this cloud kitchens?

• 50:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, uh, no, no, uh, the dinner generating machine or Cisco? Cause Cisco's.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  Dinner generating machine.

• 50:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's basically it. But it's all part of a, of a pipeline.

• 50:12Jordi Hays?

  The founder of Restaurant Depot.

• 50:14John Coogan?

  What happened?

• 50:14Jordi Hays?

  Who just sold for 29 billion.

• 50:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 50:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, was born in 1932.

• 50:18John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 50:19Jordi Hays?

  Ninety-four.

• 50:20John Coogan?

  He's still kicking?

• 50:21Jordi Hays?

  I think we should hit the gong for him.

• 50:22John Coogan?

  Let's do it. Congratulations.

• 50:24Jordi Hays?

  Great to finally get.

• 50:29Jordi Hays?

  It's never too late. So, if you're 93.

• 50:33John Coogan?

  I can buy that sports car.

• 50:35Jordi Hays?

  Finally.

• 50:36John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, that, that is a true overnight success. Congratulations to him. Um, excited. I mean, you know, we gotta get food to people. People are hungry. There's some good things, you know, maybe.

• 50:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:46John Coogan?

  May- maybe they, uh, they stock some raw milk and you're on board then, you know, who knows?

• 50:51Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 50:52John Coogan?

  Before we play the next video, let me tell you, every day is a fight between the advertisers and the viral videos. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And then we can play this video.

• 51:13Jordi Hays?

  We're heading over to Japan.

• 51:14John Coogan?

  Yes. This is the key sport that we will all be picking up in 2026. This is gonna be the hottest thing in San Francisco with the hills and the office chairs.

• 51:22Jordi Hays?

  And so there's an office chair racing league. So, look at the, look at the speed and the technicality.

• 51:29John Coogan?

  It's incredible. It's incredible.

• 51:30Jordi Hays?

  This athlete says, "The corner once controlled me. Now I control it."

• 51:36John Coogan?

  I think I got, I think I got something here.

• 51:38Jordi Hays?

  You, you have quite a bit of leverage.

• 51:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, with the legs.

• 51:41Jordi Hays?

  With the legs.

• 51:42John Coogan?

  I think I got a bill for office chairs.

• 51:44Jordi Hays?

  The six-year transformation is crazy. I mean, this guy is incredibly quick.

• 51:49John Coogan?

  It lost me.

• 51:50Jordi Hays?

  And we need to bring this to the US.

• 51:51John Coogan?

  It lost me.

• 51:53Jordi Hays?

  We need to bring this to the US. Chair racer Miura. Going around the devil's hairpin.

• 52:01John Coogan?

  Devil's hairpin.

• 52:03Jordi Hays?

  Alright, so Tyler, what is happening on X in Japan? Can you break it down?

• 52:08John Coogan?

  Break it down.

• 52:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know all the internals, but it seems like Nikita's been posting about this. But I think, you know, they basically introduced like all of like Japan Twitter onto like normal Twitter.

• 52:20John Coogan?

  Oh, because of translation.

• 52:21Speaker 02

  Yes, but I mean, there's been translation for a while. But I don't know, like for some reason, this weekend, like half of my timeline was just like Japanese posts. All about America, about how much they love barbecue, that you know, they respect the cowboy aesthetics and all these things.

• 52:34John Coogan?

  Cool. I didn't know that.

• 52:35Jordi Hays?

  And we need to figure out, we need to figure out how and why over 50% or something like that of Japan is like a weekly active user of X, which is just crazy.

• 52:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, they have great posts.

• 52:46John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, I mean.

• 52:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so let's pull up this first post.

• 52:48John Coogan?

  This is a little bit of an update, like narrative violation, because that's a narrative violation.

• 52:53Brett Adcock?

  That's a narrative violation.

• 52:55John Coogan?

  Because when Grok went viral, everyone was like, oh, it's good at anime. It's big in Japan and it was at the top of the Japanese app store. But it appears that Japan is just using Twitter broadly.

• 53:08Jordi Hays?

  Elon.

• 53:09John Coogan?

  They just like, they just like the app and that's like where they have conversations, which is very cool. It's a narrative violation. So let's go to.

• 53:16Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this first post.

• 53:18John Coogan?

  This is hilarious.

• 53:19Jordi Hays?

  And it is the.

• 53:20John Coogan?

  Pizza?

• 53:21Jordi Hays?

  And this is the translation from Grok. "When I saw this, quote, pizza topped with a pizza in America, I thought, there's no way we could beat these guys." This is, this is an amazing.

• 53:33John Coogan?

  This is an American pizza.

• 53:34Jordi Hays?

  I've never, I've never seen.

• 53:35John Coogan?

  There's so many layers. There's actually one, two, three, four layers of pizza. I'm gonna make this. I feel like this would be a smash hit in my household.

• 53:45Jordi Hays?

  This is, this is, this is quite, quite smart.

• 53:48John Coogan?

  Peak performance, peak performance. We gotta, this may be for lunch today. Let's get some pizza.

• 53:53Jordi Hays?

  And so this post. Which in Japan, or I guess now everywhere, got 93,000 likes is the the translation from Grok is, I like this photo of American men and meat. Someday I'd like to join in on this in person.

• 54:09John Coogan?

  It's just some guys cooking a whole bunch of steaks. That's a lot of meat. Wow, that's a lot of food. They're they're they're having a big barbecue in in Sasibo's dining establishment.

• 54:22Jordi Hays?

  Someone else, so somebody's just, I guess, an American is posting their their grocery haul and someone says, the amount is way too much, as expected.

• 54:34John Coogan?

  As expected. We have a brand over here in America. We do things this particular way. Hello, Japan. We love your fascination with our barbecue. Here is me buying half a cow's worth of meat for our family. We store it in a big freezer in our garage. I actually have heard about this. Buying in bulk, obviously, is more economical, but hilarious ratio by Doctor something or other, Doctor Nicholas. The amount is way too much, as expected. What else is going on in Japan? Take me through.

• 55:02Jordi Hays?

  In someone else says, in Sasibo's dining establishment, it's common to spot US military personnel enjoying their meals with lively enthusiasm. One day at a restaurant, I came across a group that reached an oddly intense level of excitement just upon seeing bacon.

• 55:19John Coogan?

  That's incredible. I love it. Let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud, building AI supercomputer for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. And let me also tell you about Eleven Labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with Eleven Labs. In fundraising news, physical intelligence is in talks to raise $1 billion at $11 billion valuation.

• 55:45Jordi Hays?

  I need to know, why is Jeff Bezos here besides the fact that he looks fantastic in the tux?

• 55:51John Coogan?

  He might put in some money. Oh, no, no. The company has previously raised more than $1 billion in capital from investors, including Jeff Bezos and Alphabet's independent growth fund, Capital G. So you could have put Peter Thiel, because founders' funds in, you could have put Lightspeed, is that Danny Riker?

• 56:08Jordi Hays?

  Could have put Carol or Aki.

• 56:12John Coogan?

  But Bezos in a tuxedo seems to get the viral attention. So, but very good news. We actually interviewed both the co-founders of Physical Intelligence, both Lucky and Carol, this last year. And they don't do a lot of media, so it's an interesting little segment. We spent maybe 20 minutes with them. And you should go back and listen to it because it's a very interesting insight into the business that they're building, which I think a lot of people, you know, they're not a noisy firm. They're not a noisy company that's like posting vibreals and going and picking fights all the time. So there isn't that much coverage of physical intelligence. But like, if you just look at the traction, look at the open source contributions, the

• 56:57John Coogan?

  data, the fundraising, like clearly something is happening there. And so I think it's worth digging in and paying attention to.

• 57:05Jordi Hays?

  Last night, Bill Ackman hit the timeline.

• 57:09John Coogan?

  Whoa, I didn't realize.

• 57:10Jordi Hays?

  He said, "Some of the highest quality businesses in the world are trading at extremely cheap prices. Ignore the mainstream media. One of the most one-sided wars in history that will end well for the US and the world. And we have potential for a large piece dividend. One of the best times in a long time to buy quality. Ignore the bears." And he says, "And Fannie Mae and Freddie are stupidly cheap. Asymmetry at its best. They could be a 10x and it could happen soon." And of course, Jira Tickets comes in and says, "X.com, the market manipulation app that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are up 42% and 37% as of this morning." I think, I think they've actually dipped back down a little bit. But Justin says, "Posting your opinion on a public website is not market manipulation." JT says, "Don't ruin the tweet."

• 57:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's not, it's not market, it's not market manipulation. It doesn't seem like he has any inside information. I don't know. Is he, does he even have a position? Isn't that disclosed in his filings? I'm not exactly sure. I would take every recommendation from a Twitter poster, every piece of financial advice with a grain of salt. But this one certainly turned out to be. Some sort of pump going on and I did dig into this. Somebody asked Grok like, hey, break it down. Like what is actually going on here with Fannie and Freddie? They generate 25 billion in stable annual net income from guaranteed fees, low credit losses outside

• 58:37John Coogan?

  crises. They're still in 2008 conservatorship and the stock trades for a total market cap of 10 billion. So there's a world where you're sort of buying maybe, I don't know exactly how aggregated this is, but maybe it's like 25 billion of cash flow at some point for 10 billion. That feels like a very good deal. Get paid back in four months, five months. But of course there are a whole bunch of other, a bunch of other political considerations.

• 59:06Jordi Hays?

  And of course, he does, he does own the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are in his Pershing Square portfolio. But again, not, not, not illegal to share your opinion.

• 59:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, there are some, not everything is up. Mac, Mike Zaccardi shares the current Mag 7 plus drawdowns from 52 week highs. Nvidia is down 21%. Google's down 22%. Microsoft's down 36%. Apple's down 14%. Amazon 23%. Meta 34%. Tesla 28%. And many others have drawn down significantly. Fortunately, we have the perfect person to ask about what's going on with Nvidia because we have Take Him in the Restream waiting room. Before we bring him in, let me tell you about Console because Console builds AI agents that automate 70%

• 59:58John Coogan?

  of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant access, instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And let me also tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security because Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And without further ado, let's bring Take Him in to the TPN Ultra. Take Him, how are you doing? Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 1:00:22Jordi Hays?

  And congratulations on the incredible launch of your business.

• 1:00:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:00:27Tae Kim?

  Thank you. I mean, it's been really gratifying. That first day, you never know who's going to show up.

• 1:00:32John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:00:33Tae Kim?

  I was like, maybe 15 subscribers or 20 subscribers, but like hundreds of people showed up.

• 1:00:38John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 1:00:38Tae Kim?

  Tons of billionaires and tech founders. It's insanely gratifying.

• 1:00:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's great.

• 1:00:45John Coogan?

  So is it, is it over for Nvidia? They're down 21%. We just read since the 52 week high. Is it doom and gloom? Is it over?

• 1:00:54Tae Kim?

  No. I mean, I think I was on last December and the stock is semis and chips have gone up. And now they're back down to where they were in December. The chip sector's flat, flat on the year and Nvidia is down 10%. And it reminds me a lot of about a year ago. Do you guys remember? Everyone was freaking out about deep seek, the super efficient models were going to destroy AI compute. There will be a huge compute glut. And then everyone freaked out about Trump's tariff wars, the liberation day. And this year seems very similar to that. Almost it's like Groundhog Day. We have fears over AI capex. People think that it might be the peak.

• 1:01:35Tae Kim?

  And then we have the Iraq war. And one of these things is oil up here.

• 1:01:41Jordi Hays?

  Iran. Easy to get them mixed up. They happen so much.

• 1:01:45Tae Kim?

  Feels like the same, same thing over again. But um.

• 1:01:49Jordi Hays?

  Sorry to distract. We wanted to throw, we wanted to.

• 1:01:52John Coogan?

  We want to show respect.

• 1:01:53Jordi Hays?

  We wanted to show respect to a real podcaster.

• 1:01:57Tae Kim?

  I mean, it's very similar to Iraq.

• 1:02:01John Coogan?

  These are great.

• 1:02:01Tae Kim?

  Uh, but in a hundred dollar oil, this stuff is unsustainable and probably subsides.

• 1:02:07John Coogan?

  Okay. So, so, so because when I, when I, I like the deep seek analogy. And I feel like the market half digested the agentic coating narrative. And the Citrinie article, whether you thought it went too far, was too hypothetical, like clearly the markets did react. And a lot of names sold off, but in, in a world where you believe that narrative, you would think that Nvidia would be going up. But you're saying that there are other factors at play that are sort of tamping down the excitement in the market broadly.

• 1:02:37Tae Kim?

  I mean, there's no doubt. Just like tariffs a year ago, Nvidia had 30% drawdown.

• 1:02:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:02:42Tae Kim?

  When their business was actually flying, the actual fundamentals of the business. I think the same thing is happening here with. The Iran war, things will eventually subside, oil can't be $100 for forever and Trump will probably backpedal in the next few weeks ahead of the Trump.

• 1:02:58John Coogan?

  So let's recap a few of the key stories around Nvidia. We just came off of GTC and there's a lot going on at the company. I mean, it's a huge company. Maybe it'd be good to start with just next generation chips, changes to strategy, what people are actually buying. Maybe that means gray CPU standalone sales or the development with the Grok partnership. What's sticking out just on the actual AI product side to you that you're most excited about?

• 1:03:30Tae Kim?

  Well, inference demand is exploding, driven by the AI agents and the coding assistance. I met with Ian Buck, I met with dozens of engineers at Meta, Google, Nvidia, and all of them are seeing crazy inference demand and AI compute shortages. So across the board, people are in crazy clamoring need for AI.

• 1:03:53John Coogan?

  And we're, I mean, yeah, you're seeing that from talking to engineering leaders at big tech companies, but we're also seeing it from vibe coders who are just on X and Twitter and talking about how they're hitting rate limits and they're subsidized and they have multiple plans and they actually shift around from one model provider to another just to make sure that they're getting the tokens they need to build whatever they're building.

• 1:04:15Tae Kim?

  And you see the tweets, like people are like, building bots to pick up any kind of B200 GPU that can, that they're waiting like weeks and months or whatever.

• 1:04:26Jordi Hays?

  Basically like sneaker bots, but for Neo Cloud.

• 1:04:28Tae Kim?

  That's crazy.

• 1:04:29John Coogan?

  Exactly. I can't believe that.

• 1:04:31Tae Kim?

  And the great thing is Jensen, you know, he's very prescient. He probably saw this demand months away. He locked up all the supply agreements for memory, co-OS, you know, connectors ahead of time. He saw this inference demand. And to take advantage of this coding assistant boom, it's almost like a gold rush. You see OpenAI pivoting toward it. Anthropic obviously is thriving on it. Billions of ARR every few weeks.

• 1:04:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:58Tae Kim?

  Uh, Jensen's acquired Grok.

• 1:05:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:02Tae Kim?

  Acquire the assets of Grok and the people of Grok. And this, the combination of integrating Grok's technology together with Vera Rubin. Let's Nvidia serve this tremendous wave of compute demand economically. And Ian Buck talked about it, Jensen talked about it. So Nvidia is positioned perfectly to thrive on this coding agent wave.

• 1:05:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:24Tae Kim?

  That we're seeing right now.

• 1:05:25John Coogan?

  On, on, on the Grok deal, uh, Jensen did a fantastic interview with Ben Thompson and, uh, was sort of asked the same question two years in a row about ASICs, the threat of ASICs, the idea that the GPU, the general, like, like general architectures can truly satisfy 100% of demand. It feels like there's a shift in Nvidia's strategy there. Do you see that? It, it, it feels like the right move, but do you, do you see it as a shift in the philosophy of the company or the strategy? Or, or is this just something that the gears have been turning for a long time? And this is maybe just an unveiling of a strategy that makes a lot of sense and has made a lot of sense for a while.

• 1:06:08Tae Kim?

  I think what Jensen does, he sees where the market is shifting and where the economic value is with Mellanox. He did this in 2019. He saw.

• 1:06:16John Coogan?

  That was an ASIC.

• 1:06:16Tae Kim?

  Shifting to, um, it's a networking chip. But he saw the world shifting to like these 10,000, 100,000 GPU clusters and Mellanox. In the same manner, he saw AI agents and, and the inference behind that taking off. And he said, oh, this Grok thing will work perfectly with Vera Rubin. It, it doesn't replace everything. It just has talked about 25% of the inference demand would be, uh, Grok would, uh, work on that.

• 1:06:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:44Tae Kim?

  But them working together where 75% of the inference is Vera Rubin and 25% is a Grok low latency stuff. That's, it's like the perfect combination to, to, to take advantage of this. And the other thing is like, we're just in this great liftoff of AI innovation.

• 1:07:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:01Tae Kim?

  We've talked about anthropic mythos, the blog.

• 1:07:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:04Tae Kim?

  Blog post that leaked out. So we're going to have this, you know, step up. Function, they told Fortune it's going to be a huge step up change.

• 1:07:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:12Tae Kim?

  OpenAI is coming out with their model soon. And then when I went to GTC, the biggest takeaway I had was this session between Jeff Dean and Bill Dally, both chief scientists of Google and Nvidia, and it's online. I highly recommend people watch it. And he talked about, Jeff Dean talked about the context, have context window innovations where they could focus on the 10,000 documents that that work well with your your request and query. So we're going to have this context window innovation. Both chief scientists talked about stacking memory right on top of the GPU or TPU. And that's going to be a huge innovation in the coming months or years. And so you have, and then Jeff Dean talked about synthetic data for audio and video.

• 1:07:57Tae Kim?

  There's this huge runway that data is not over. And then they're going to be able to take advantage of all this data that people don't realize yet. So you have like all these vectors where AI models, you could just keep getting better and better.

• 1:08:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you processing the idea that Nvidia will be investing in an open source frontier lab capability? That feels like potentially competitive with some customers. Nvidia is like never really been in that market before. But at the same time, I've been the biggest like supporter of open source American AI models. I loved when Meta was doing it. I want more of it. I loved when OpenAI, open source GPT OSS. It feels really, really important, really great, but it does feel like a strategic shift. How did you process that announcement?

• 1:08:49Tae Kim?

  It's not a huge, I think it's like 25 billion over the next few years, which doesn't really compete with what OpenAI and Anthropic doing.

• 1:08:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I guess you're right.

• 1:08:56Tae Kim?

  But these smaller models are going to be helpful for people running smaller use cases. So GPUs, as long as they're utilized even locally or in the cloud, Nvidia benefits.

• 1:09:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:08Tae Kim?

  And saw the the top people at Quen. Um, left and we don't know where they went left to. Quen is an amazing model. It's kind of like what deep is, uh, what people thought deep six should be. When it works well locally.

• 1:09:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:21Tae Kim?

  Um, it when kind of subsides because all the

• 1:09:23John Coogan?

  Wait, what's your theory on, what's your theory on where they all went? Another Chinese lab?

• 1:09:28Tae Kim?

  I, I, I asked, I asked all engineers when I was at GTC. No one really knew. But people, people are trying to say Nvidia should actually hire them.

• 1:09:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:37Tae Kim?

  Because the more capable open source model, Nvidia doesn't care if you're using GPT to run open source or not. They just want, you know, more AI adoption across

• 1:09:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. And Nvidia has more, uh, probably more levers to pull if it, if it turns into a negotiation with China. Like we're, we're, we're tracking like the Manus story with Meta and there isn't that much that Meta can give to China in exchange. If there's like, hey, like, look the other way on this particular deal. Like let this one flow through. We'll trade this. Meta not really doing any business there, but Nvidia, of course, is going to be, uh, selling Blackwells at some point in the near future. And there's probably some level of pricing, you know, it can be part of a larger discussion, which makes a lot of sense.

• 1:10:24Tae Kim?

  And one thing that kind of went on under the radar, Jensen literally said at GTC, they got license approvals on both the US and China side. So we're going to see billions of dollars of H200 orders.

• 1:10:34John Coogan?

  Okay. So yeah, I mean, it seems like, it seems like there's a path on the demand side that's very, very clear. You've mapped it out a few times. It's a huge number. Um, it's already a massive revenues, just an incredible growth. But, uh, what is, what is the supply side looking like? Because it feels like TSMC is not ramping CapEx nearly fast enough over the next few years. And if we see another 10x increase in compute demand, uh, we could be really constrained on the leading edge FAB side. Uh, so how do you think Nvidia is going to process that?

• 1:11:10Tae Kim?

  Well, Nvidia is in the driver's seat because Jensen goes there five, six times a year and his best friends at TSMC and speaks at their employee day. So they're going to get higher, they are getting a higher allocation to wafers and cool loss and all that stuff. So Nvidia will benefit. But I agree with you that industry wide, like Google is dying to get more TPU wafer

• 1:11:30John Coogan?

  Sure. Sure.

• 1:11:31Tae Kim?

  All the hyperscalers that have ASICs are trying to get more way for capacity. So there is going to be an AI compute shortage in the years to come, just like you said. And Nvidia just benefits because they're the biggest dog in the house and they can prepay tens of billions of dollars to get the allocations they need.

• 1:11:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, maybe there's some offtake in ASICs that can potentially be fabbed somewhere else at some point. I know that a lot of the ASIC companies wind up fabbing at TSMC, but it feels like if you're already doing some sort of re-architecture, maybe there's a way that you can squeeze something a little bit out of, you know, an Intel deal or something else. I'm not exactly sure.

• 1:12:16Tae Kim?

  It's Samsung and Intel.

• 1:12:17John Coogan?

  Samsung and Intel, yeah.

• 1:12:19Tae Kim?

  That's the bookcase on Intel.

• 1:12:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, is that at some point the labs and Google, like, across TPU, extra GPU capacity, Nvidia, the new R, like, there's just so many buyers of lab capacity, of fab capacity now, that you could imagine everyone coming to the table, potentially in Washington DC or Mar-a-Lago, since the US government owns a slice now, and everyone's saying, okay, let's hold hands and jump across this and say that if the supply comes online, we will buy it at this price because we have really, really solid use cases that will justify the investment for us and for Intel. So that would be a really, really good case. But again,

• 1:13:06John Coogan?

  even if the money is there, how long does it take to get to, you know, good production numbers?

• 1:13:11Tae Kim?

  I mean, I suspect like Apple and Nvidia are considering either Intel or Samsung for their lower end stuff, whether it be like a mid-range iPhone or on Nvidia's side, definitely their consumer gaming GPUs. They may go back to Samsung and maybe even Intel.

• 1:13:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, I have one more, but.

• 1:13:28Tae Kim?

  Go for it.

• 1:13:30John Coogan?

  I wanted to know how you're processing the ARM CPU announcement. It's an interesting dynamic because they're sort of frenemies with Nvidia now. They're competing in many ways to break the x86 monopoly because they both are selling ARM CPUs, but then they're also competing. And so I'm wondering how you think that plays out, what that means for Nvidia and just the rest of the semiconductor supply chain.

• 1:13:58Tae Kim?

  I think ARM is, their CPU opportunities, a longer term, you know, even they said 2030, 2031. Yeah. It's a longer term opportunity. I don't really expect the major hyperscalers like Amazon to switch to ARM's product offering. They have their own. Yeah. Same with Nvidia, they have their own ARM CPU that they're gonna incorporate and sell. So it's not that big of a I don't think Amazon or Nvidia are really worried that ARM is gonna take any big share. It's probably gonna be on the margin for companies that can't develop their own ARM CPU, the more the mid-tier hyperscalers or enterprises that use these things.

• 1:14:39Tae Kim?

  But I think the ARM thing is very important because it kind of confirms what the biggest underlying thing that's not really consensus yet is this massive CPU shortage that we're seeing. Yeah. Just over the last few months, we have Dell, AMD, Intel CFO talked about, they're talking about three to five year locked in supply contracts from hyperscalers. So this is a major trend that's gonna go over the next few years. And the reason why is AI agents need more CPUs. The ARM CEO talked about four times more CPU cores versus last year's kind of AI infrastructure model.

• 1:15:19Tae Kim?

  So we're gonna see this massive demand for CPUs that people aren't really understanding yet. Because AI agents, the whole thing, requires orchestration, tool calls, database queries, web searches, and that's all handled by the CPU. Yeah.

• 1:15:37Jordi Hays?

  Give me your bull and bear case for TeraFab.

• 1:15:41Tae Kim?

  TeraFab, I'm not that optimistic.

• 1:15:46Tae Kim?

  I mean, it's so hard to build that.

• 1:15:48Jordi Hays?

  Do your absolute best to give me the bull case.

• 1:15:53Tae Kim?

  Because TSMC is so short that, you know...

• 1:15:58Tae Kim?

  Elon needs to find, but even then, like, how are they gonna buy like semi cap equipment from ASML and AMAT? Like, there's just no capacity there. So I'm not optimistic on that.

• 1:16:09John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:16:10Tae Kim?

  And this is, this is stuff that takes decades. Chip fabs is almost like cooking, and it's not like something you could just follow, follow a manual. It's like, it's almost like cooking where it takes a lot of trial and error accumulate over decades, TSMC, and even Intel. So it's not something you could just jump right in and do.

• 1:16:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:34Tae Kim?

  Unless they partner with.

• 1:16:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's someone goes back to the XAI debate about, like, do they need AI researchers? Or should everyone be an AI engineer? Like, are we in a research period, or a, you know, the Ilya Sutskever age of research versus the Elon Musk age of engineering? Where are we in semiconductor production? It feels very engineering, like, like an engineering process. But what we've seen from ASML is that it, and TSMC, is that it does feel like there's a little bit of research and artistry to it, and the cooking analogy holds.

• 1:17:12Tae Kim?

  Yeah, I've been doing a lot of search into space, and it's a lot of trial and error, and like, almost like cooking a recipe.

• 1:17:19John Coogan?

  And, and it also feels like in, at least with XAI, if all the researchers are in San Francisco, you can sort of just like walk across to the coffee shop, poach someone. But if, if the best, if the best, you know, semiconductor engineers or technicians are in Taiwan, and they see it as a national, you know, urgency to, you know, bring, you know, stability to the country, both economically and geopolitically, then you have a very different calculation. It's like, oh, yeah, I could make five times as much if I left my home country to, like, be abandoned. That's a very different calculation. And, and everything that I've heard about the culture at TSMC is that the, the folks who work there are

• 1:18:02John Coogan?

  extremely dedicated beyond the economics. They are true missionaries, not necessarily

• 1:18:08John Coogan?

  mercenaries and so it does feel like it's even harder to do like a talent raid in in the leading edge fab world than even the AI world which is extremely competitive and there are still tons of missionaries but

• 1:18:21Jordi Hays?

  I guess I guess another question I have is would you expect uh would you expect XAI slash SpaceX at any point to get to basically just open up a shop as like a Neo cloud because the thing that was like probably the one of the least compelling aspects of the tariff app pitch was him just saying we need all of this compute we need to do this because we were going to be so chip constrained we're going to be so supply constrained but there was no explanation of

• 1:18:50John Coogan?

  where the demand is coming from

• 1:18:51Jordi Hays?

  where the demand was going to come from is it going to come from

• 1:18:53John Coogan?

  training Tesla models Optimus or Grok or

• 1:18:58Jordi Hays?

  yeah it was it was just very unclear

• 1:19:00John Coogan?

  there's a lot

• 1:19:01Jordi Hays?

  but there's even the question right now is should XAI be kind of renting GPUs I don't know I don't know

• 1:19:09John Coogan?

  renting out GPUs because the biggest win has been Colossus 2 yeah Colossus 2 which was built very fast

• 1:19:15Tae Kim?

  I I think Elon's pitch with the SpaceX IPO we'll see it in the coming months is the AI compute it's gonna be so there's gonna be so much demand over the next five 10 years that you're gonna have to use the SpaceX satellites that have GPUs in them to to serve that

• 1:19:34John Coogan?

  and and maybe maybe I mean even though Tesla's been vertically integrated to the point of being a consumer product SpaceX has not it's been a railroad and there is a world where you fab the chips you put them on satellites on Starlinks in space and then you let other companies do whatever they want with those GPUs

• 1:19:51Tae Kim?

  Elon did with Starlink I mean that's a telecom infrastructure play and this will be an AI computing

• 1:19:56John Coogan?

  yeah yeah yeah yeah

• 1:19:57Tae Kim?

  that model

• 1:19:59John Coogan?

  there's a world there

• 1:20:00Tae Kim?

  I'm not gonna bet against Elon it might just take long

• 1:20:02John Coogan?

  yeah yeah

• 1:20:03Jordi Hays?

  uh what about what's going on with helium what are you tracking there there's chatter about helium shortages potentially

• 1:20:11Tae Kim?

  Jensen has talked about this this is a risk but there is probably like six months six to nine months of inventory in the channel Bernstein has talked about it's not a risk in the short term so so if this thing if this Iran stuff lasts

• 1:20:28Tae Kim?

  In, you know, two, three, four, five months, then becomes a problem.

• 1:20:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:20:32Tae Kim?

  But if it, you know, gets solved or straight removed, opens up with a toll or whatever, uh, final negotiation they come up with over the next few weeks, I don't think it's a problem.

• 1:20:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, I do think that like, like most of these, uh, materials, there are, uh, extra deposits, they're just not economical to mine. I don't think that all the helium exists in the Middle East.

• 1:20:52Tae Kim?

  It's similar to the rare earth thing, just like you said.

• 1:20:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, where, where, uh, in a supply constraint scenario, it becomes more economical to mine American helium.

• 1:21:01Tae Kim?

  Let me put it this way, if helium becomes an issue, we're gonna have bigger problems at our hands.

• 1:21:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:21:05Tae Kim?

  I mean, there's gonna be world starvation.

• 1:21:07John Coogan?

  Let's hope not, let's hope not.

• 1:21:09Tae Kim?

  That'll be the least of our problems if helium becomes a problem.

• 1:21:13John Coogan?

  Take me through, uh, depreciation gate. How did you process that and where do we stand now with the fear that GPUs will depreciate precipitously? And H100s will be worthless in six to 12 months.

• 1:21:26Tae Kim?

  It's totally not a problem right now. Like, Core Week has talked about, uh, these things are lasting five to six years, uh, and they're getting like almost 90, 95% of the pricing. So it could be, potentially be a problem if the whole, if this is a bubble, I don't think it's a bubble.

• 1:21:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:42Tae Kim?

  But if this is a bubble two, three years from now and there's a compute glut, then, you know, the stock's gonna go down because there's a compute glut. But as of now, it's the opposite. Like, all the GPU rental prices, even for stuff that's six years old, is still being sold out and it, the AI compute demand outpacing supply is so large that this is not an issue right now.

• 1:22:04Jordi Hays?

  Do you have any theories on, on where the next step change in token demand could come from? Cause right now we're seeing it in code gen and there's a lot of optimism around, uh, these types of workflows being applied to other forms of work, but we were talking about this on Friday. Like even if AI can just one-shot beautiful financial models.

• 1:22:27Jordi Hays?

  It won't necessarily even make a real dent in token demand, at least compared to to CodeGen, because no company needs to just constantly be, you know, be generating models at the rate that, let's say, Gary Tan generates code. And so I'm like, kind of been trying to wrap my head around where could these incremental use cases?

• 1:22:51Tae Kim?

  I actually think CodeGen is still just early innings.

• 1:22:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I don't disagree with that.

• 1:22:57Tae Kim?

  Ten, twenty agents and they're kind of overseeing them. But then we have this other stuff where these models, the Mythos and OpenAI, they're just going to get better, where you could automate all these work process flows. Companies are going to use them for every single vertical, customer service, research, simulating chip design, where they can verify drug discovery, where they verify if drug molecules can do so. So we're just getting started at this stuff. So you're going to see vertical AI agents on every single category. And I think Logan's coming on, he wrote this great post on X, that he says

• 1:23:35Tae Kim?

  this, the AI agent wave is going to kind of attack this $6 trillion knowledge economy, right? It's not just about programming anymore.

• 1:23:46Jordi Hays?

  They're coming for us.

• 1:23:47Tae Kim?

  Yes. I'm actually...

• 1:23:51Jordi Hays?

  They're attacking the key context economy and the TBN economy.

• 1:23:56Tae Kim?

  No, I think it's like a calculator, a spreadsheet, you know, thirty, forty, fifty years ago, we had like, you know, fifty accountants doing the spreadsheet manually, right? And now, after a spreadsheet came, it didn't get rid of all of knowledge work, it just enabled people to think at a higher level and get more done. And I'm very optimistic about that.

• 1:24:17John Coogan?

  I mean, one way that you 10x token demand on around a financial model without 10x-ing the number of financial models that you're building is having the agent go and collect 10 times as much data. And so there's a lot of situations where, I mean, you look at like hedge funds that want to understand the price of Walmart stock.

• 1:24:41John Coogan?

  There are hedge funds that will task satellites to take pictures of Walmart parking lots, estimate the number of people on a day by day basis that are going into the Walmart to shop, and then using that as a proxy to project revenue and then flow that through to cash flow, and then flow that through to the DCF and the actual evaluation of the company. And if you think about all the different financial models and all the different businesses where you could go and say, well, for this company, I need to go to every single local, like, I want to know the price of Squarespace. Let me go to every single website that's powered by Squarespace and estimate the revenue that they're bringing in and their willingness to pay for their hosting service, something like that. And all of a sudden, like, it's just one spreadsheet, it's just one number at the end of the day,

• 1:25:26John Coogan?

  but it's like a thousand times more work went into it.

• 1:25:29Tae Kim?

  Let me give you this great example. Every year I do this, the same store sales for these fast casual companies, so like Chipotle, Kava, and I put out this tweet, it goes viral. A year ago, when I do it, I would have to manually go to every IR website for these six fast casual restaurants.

• 1:25:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:50Tae Kim?

  It would take me like an hour or two.

• 1:25:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:52Tae Kim?

  I would try to use a chatbot, they would get it wrong.

• 1:25:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:25:55Tae Kim?

  I did it like a few weeks ago and all the chatbots got perfect. So it just saved me two, three hours of tedious manual labor. So that's only going to get better and better.

• 1:26:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's only going to take you one, like, like, this year is the year that you, you do it with multiple chatbots and you fact check it yourself. And then forever, it's going to be just one prompt.

• 1:26:16Tae Kim?

  And it got it right.

• 1:26:18John Coogan?

  And it got it right.

• 1:26:19Tae Kim?

  A year ago, it wouldn't get it right. But now, in one, two minutes, I put, give me the same store sales for these six restaurants. I put in Gemini, I put in ChatGPT, and just to, to make sure they're right, and they're right. So that, all, all the tedious labor, all the manual labor, all the data entry that, you know, all of us are used to, that stuff is going away. And we could think higher level. So I could look at the same store sales and say, oh, the economy is at risk and whatever. But all the grunt work, all the tedious work is going to be taken care of by these AI agents.

• 1:26:52John Coogan?

  I can agree completely. I agree completely.

• 1:26:56Jordi Hays?

  We got a lot of, a lot more sound effects since the last time you joined. Last, last question for me, what's your outlook on, on Meta? It feels like the, the broader market right now has zero faith in Meta to actually put all their AI investments to use.

• 1:27:16Tae Kim?

  I had, I have this history with Meta is that in every time it starts falling apart, I say, it looks cheap and then it goes down another 30%. But nothing has changed. Like no one's going to replace Meta digital ad position. I mean, like I would even say in the AI world, they're even better positioned because Google might lose digital ads share to AI chatbots, their search position in the future. So like no one's going to replace Instagram, no one's going to replace Facebook. Billions of people are still going to use those social media apps. And you know, it's every six, six months to 12 months, everyone goes through this bare meta cycle, but their pure competitive position really hasn't changed. And you saw what happened to Sora, right? Like, you know, everyone was all excited about

• 1:28:01Tae Kim?

  Sora and that, that got shut.

• 1:28:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and there's just this world where even, even if like the AI spending is like a side quest, it's like really they just pulled forward like three or four years of CapEx and they will use that for their other products. It's probably even less like wasteful than reality lab spend, which might take even longer to realize that the cash flows from, like they can recoup. Okay. We built this massive data center. We did this training run. We didn't get to the frontier. We're not getting a lot of like gen AI usage, but we can apply it to our ads platform and tools and reels, recommendations and a million other things just in years 2028, 2029. And yeah, we're a little bit ahead of schedule.

• 1:28:46Tae Kim?

  Our core ad engine monetization.

• 1:28:48John Coogan?

  100%. Yeah. The gem model.

• 1:28:51Tae Kim?

  Reality Labs, he made a waste of 70 to 80 billion dollars. He made waste 100 billions of dollars on on these frontier AI models.

• 1:29:00John Coogan?

  The business is good.

• 1:29:01Tae Kim?

  But their core ad engine, core business, that money making engine has, it's not going to be affected by this.

• 1:29:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come hang out. Always a great time, Tay. Go subscribe to Key Context on Substack. Follow Tay Kim on social media, First Adopt.

• 1:29:20Jordi Hays?

  Join the many beaners that were the first adopters.

• 1:29:22John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, you'll be in good company. And thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great week.

• 1:29:27Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 1:29:28Tae Kim?

  Thanks, guys.

• 1:29:29Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:29:30John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create, modify, create and modify your Figma files with Design System contact in beta starting today. And let me tell you about Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. So.

• 1:29:46Jordi Hays?

  Chamath.

• 1:29:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:29:48Jordi Hays?

  Holi Hapia says, the biggest threat to Instagram's moat is an incredible image model.

• 1:29:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:29:53Jordi Hays?

  Zephyr says, meta bottom.

• 1:29:55John Coogan?

  An incredible image model, it should be.

• 1:29:59Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that's basically, that's a, that's a, like, you're basically saying, okay, if Sora was, if the content on Sora was 100 times better.

• 1:30:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:09Jordi Hays?

  Would that be a real threat to Instagram? And I still am not, I'm still not convinced.

• 1:30:14John Coogan?

  I feel like a lot of people have their network there. They want to share with their friends. And they have a graph there. And even though the recommendation, like the content doesn't come through the graph anymore, having your friends on there to have the conversations and the comments, there's still a lot of moat left.

• 1:30:29Jordi Hays?

  But if they could make an AI agent of you that instantly reacts to every video I send you.

• 1:30:35John Coogan?

  Killer feature. Killer feature. Killer feature. There's some, yeah, between our DMs, there's a lot of stuff that you got to still react to. Well, without further ado, we have Logan Bartlett from Redpoint, his managing partner there. Welcome to the show, Logan. How you doing?

• 1:30:51Logan Bartlett?

  Good, gentlemen. How are you?

• 1:30:52John Coogan?

  We're fantastic.

• 1:30:53Jordi Hays?

  It's great to see you.

• 1:30:54John Coogan?

  I like this camera setup. This looks fantastic.

• 1:30:57Logan Bartlett?

  You know, once upon a time, I was, you know, I was a semi-professional podcaster before you guys stole all the thunder in the industry and forced us into oblivion.

• 1:31:07John Coogan?

  Three cartoon avatars was truly goading.

• 1:31:10Jordi Hays?

  Back to market update, Dex.

• 1:31:12John Coogan?

  Just put the investments in the bag, bro.

• 1:31:15Logan Bartlett?

  I know. That's exactly right. Yeah, the McDonald's bag of cash I have. That's what I'm doing these days.

• 1:31:21John Coogan?

  But you're also writing market analysis, which I always look forward to.

• 1:31:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this has been consistently some of like the the best content in the entire VC industrial complex. And I've enjoyed it for many years.

• 1:31:36John Coogan?

  It was it was extremely valuable during the interest rate crisis as well, and also the conversations that you were having on the podcast. But it felt like a really rational reset that wasn't a total black pill, wasn't a total white pill. It was just actually like, here's some data. There are obviously some conclusions, but you can also make your own. So thank you for everything you do. Take us through the biggest findings. Take us through the process that led to this particular research.

• 1:32:01Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it turns out there's a little bit of nuance that 75 slides give you more than 140 or 280 characters to kind of tease out in some ways. I am. So it started. It started probably in January. I have this process every year where I have a panic attack that we have an annual meeting coming up and I I got tricked in 2020 when I joined the firm. They were like, we're going to give you this, this really illustrious honor that you get to do the market update. We so trust you and what you have to say. And I thought that, oh, my gosh, this is amazing. I'm being bestowed this honor of doing this market update deck. Little did I know, no one else wanted to do it.

• 1:32:44Logan Bartlett?

  And so every, every January, I get a mild anxiety attack that I have this coming up. And over the past couple of years, there's been a bunch of different, I mean, that year it was COVID. Then it was kind of the Zerp fallout, Zerp era 2021, then Zerp fallout, then 23, I think, was SVB. 24, maybe I got like a little bit of a respite. Then last year was the tariffs. And so every year there's like something going on that forces us to recalibrate. But this year it became pretty clear it was going to be the software sell off and what was going on in the public markets. And so monitoring that, I sort of started from a process of talking to a bunch of smart friends in the industry.

• 1:33:24Logan Bartlett?

  About what they're thinking about and trying to probe on questions that they wanted answered. And this generally involves a lot of public investors because private investors in some ways are like fish in water. Where like you sort of just operate in the world around you. And so if you're doing defense, you really just focus on defense. If you're doing software, you just focus on, you know, that. If you're doing whatever healthcare, you're focusing on that. Public market investors, I find are a little bit more zoomed out and they typically have an opportunity to play across different scale of businesses, different sectors, different, you know, types of companies, all that stuff.

• 1:34:03Logan Bartlett?

  And so I talked to a bunch of them and in software and like what the hell is going on was the big narrative. And there felt like there was a major disconnect between what private folks were seeing going on and what public folks were thinking about. And so trying to bridge that gap of how do we have this world where, you know, software companies are now trading at 4.1 times NTM in the public markets, but also getting priced at 2, 3, 400 times ARR in the private markets. And so sort of setting out to bridge that gap was kind of the goal.

• 1:34:37John Coogan?

  Is it a gap or is it a gulf?

• 1:34:41Logan Bartlett?

  A gulf. I would say it's a optimism disconnect, maybe.

• 1:34:45John Coogan?

  That's a good phrase. I like that.

• 1:34:47Logan Bartlett?

  It is. It is amazing. You know, I think about the, I did a panel recently with a bunch of private equity investors. And in hearing them talk, what I concluded, and some of this is true, I think for public investors as well, is like, what is the risk of going to zero and optimizing your process around like, hey, we really can't have a zero X in the portfolio. Versus private market investors, you're optimizing on like, what are the chances you're missing out on a 30, 50, 100 X? And if you take those two lens, it ends up with a very different place of like optimism versus cynicism, upside versus downside, you know, all the questions you ask.

• 1:35:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. So let's, uh, let's.

• 1:35:28Jordi Hays?

  You'll appreciate this, Logan. I had a portfolio company at the end of last year that is a software as a service business. And in one of their updates, they, they made the announcement that workflows are now called agents in the product. And I was like, they were like, this workflow stuff seems like people are not that excited about it now. We're switching gears. These are now agents.

• 1:35:53Logan Bartlett?

  Do you know that Breaking Bad meme that like he says, we had a good thing, you stupid son of a bitch?

• 1:36:00Logan Bartlett?

  That was like all SaaS investors over the course of the last.

• 1:36:03John Coogan?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:36:04Logan Bartlett?

  Being like you MFers, you had to go mess up this like really good thing we had going on with this AI pixie dust.

• 1:36:10John Coogan?

  With a nonprofit that didn't even raise a seed round until they were multi billions. It's like we couldn't even get in early.

• 1:36:17Logan Bartlett?

  We had a good time.

• 1:36:19John Coogan?

  We had a good time. So let's start with the the public markets. How much of how much of this is driven by the Citrinia article? How much of this is driven by actual data points where we're seeing? I was I was just pulling like the top 50 SaaS companies, sort of pure play SaaS companies and trying to ask, answer the question like, is revenue decelerating yet? Are we seeing a kink in the graph, like some change in the data? And I didn't go nearly as deep as you go. But but how much of this is just like narrative and anxiety about a changing, a changing curve to the financials versus actual data points where people are saying, okay, like, we're not going to be growing as fast, we're not going to be as profitable as before, something else that would change the valuation.

• 1:37:04Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I mean, I think broad buckets, there's two main things. One is like the public market investors are fed up with stock based comp. And so like, let's put that in a bucket. And I actually, I do think venture investors and public markets CEOs are to blame for some of the softness in the cultures and like how bloated some of these businesses got. But also you have to be practical. There is a game on the field to play and like you could triage and say, hey, you know, we're really going to reduce the number of employees we have. And you really have to be careful there because, you know, they could, your best people could just walk out the door if their friends are all getting fired. And they can walk out the door and go work at Anthropic or Lagora or,

• 1:37:47Logan Bartlett?

  you know, one of the businesses that's growing at this crazy, crazy rate and get stock based comp. And so I am sensitive to that, but that is a real part of it that like there's not true profits going on. And so I think let's put that in a bucket, though, that that's like sort of aside. The other thing, the far more interesting conversation to have is like, Are financials deteriorating? And the answer is really no, right now. It's more of this like long-term existential question of what terminal value of these businesses are worth. And it used to be, hey, eighty-five to ninety percent of a business's value was tied up in the period beyond the DCF, right?

• 1:38:29Logan Bartlett?

  The the terminal value of the, you know, the the long-term duration of it. And that's really what people are asking questions on. And to be honest, I think what's really happened is the public investors are saying, I can't tell the difference between Salesforce and ServiceNow and Snowflake and CrowdStrike and Guidewire and Samsara and all these businesses. And to be honest, I don't even really want to go dig in and figure out all the little specifics here. I'm just going to go put my my bankroll in Nvidia or Google or AMC or something else. And I'll wait for this to sort itself out, wait for the market to do its thing and figure out what the buying opportunities actually are, when it's a little more, a little less uncertain. And so I think it's it's that.

• 1:39:13Logan Bartlett?

  And people are asking like, what is the long-term terminal value? And saying, I'll wait on the sidelines until other people really show the proof points that they're going to be able to survive this AI thing.

• 1:39:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, is there is there a world where we move into a regime where we're talking about not revenue multiples, but like EBITDA multiples for these software companies? So I was looking at a company that was three billion market cap, hundred million of EBITDA, very stable the last five years. And and one one one investor was making the case like, oh, AI winner. And I was like, I don't see that. But also, I don't see these customers churning. I just see them doing AI stuff on top of this particular company because they're more infrastructure layer, more data storage, that type of thing. And so I was like, I think you can count on a hundred million of EBITDA and probably cash flow for ten years, twenty years. But do you want to be paying thirty times that? Is that enough?

• 1:40:07John Coogan?

  And I don't know if that's the rational framework for this stuff.

• 1:40:10Jordi Hays?

  Nobody knows anything. You have to apply a big discount. The other the other slide that one of the slides I Loved was was the slide on newspaper earnings.

• 1:40:18John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:40:19Jordi Hays?

  Slide 22, you said newspaper earnings.

• 1:40:22Logan Bartlett?

  It is interesting. It's funny. I actually have that up on my screen here as well. But yeah, newspaper earnings, I mean, when these platform chips happen, you might not see it in their earnings or revenue initially at all. And so the newspaper example in the deck was that newspaper earnings were actually fairly stable for like the five years post internet while their value collapsed. And so everyone saw the writing on the wall of where this was headed. But it took a while for that to actually come through and show up in the in the actual financials themselves. So, John, I guess to your question on it, like I I use revenue as a proxy. And maybe it's like too too flip of a nomenclature.

• 1:41:04Logan Bartlett?

  We really should be talking about like free cash flow with deductions for stock-based comp or whatever. But like, all these things are growing at different rates. And that's sort of in the historical lingua franca that that I kind of use.

• 1:41:18John Coogan?

  But you're right. To be clear, it makes it impossible to comp to the private markets because no one's generating any.

• 1:41:23Logan Bartlett?

  That's right.

• 1:41:23John Coogan?

  So it's a useless comp. But I'm just thinking like if I'm a public markets investor and I'm just and I'm choosing between Google, Apple, and then some small cap, mid cap software company, I probably want to have an EBITDA hat on or something like it to sort of understand my just my rate of return, which is going to be a lot less like, oh, all of a sudden they're growing at some unpredictable rates. So the DCF gets crazy and I'm paying some high rate.

• 1:41:47Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, and and this might be a little

• 1:41:51Logan Bartlett?

  simple for for some of your listeners and maybe helpful for others. But like, at the end of the day, a business is valued at the the current value of all future free cash flows. And so discounted back to today's dollars. And so when when the reasons software businesses have been so good is the the you you have annuity streams going out into the future. And you're able to, with some level of precision, figure out what the discount back the the value as in the future. And so that's a that was a great thing, particularly when we had retention rates at, you know, 95, 96, 97% net retention. rates at 120, 130, 140, you could really do very little and you could discount back those dollars with pretty good certainty of figuring out what those are worth today.

• 1:42:34Logan Bartlett?

  It was almost bond like, and I think this equity made a bunch of money saying like, actually, you know, this is, this is better than a debt instrument. This actually sits on top of the, the debt in terms of your vendors are going to get paid before your debt providers will, because the business needs to keep going. Now I think we're seeing a little bit of cracks in the armor and I think your analogy is a good one where it's actually not, I worry less about the like, the churn risk, are people really going to churn off of Salesforce or Workday or ServiceNow or whatever it is like? Maybe, but I, I worry less about that. I worry more about the value abstraction that is captured on top of it.

• 1:43:16Logan Bartlett?

  And if, if the AI dollars, which we, we found in one of the reports, AI dollars this year are, it's a bigger pie of net new dollar opportunities in AI than all of software combined by like 50% or something. And so if you're not capturing the AI dollars, then your growth rate is going to go to near zero. And if your growth rate goes to near zero, then it's worth something, but it's not worth, you're right, like the 30 times.

• 1:43:43John Coogan?

  Think about it almost like a real estate investment. It's like, what's your cap rate? You know, like if I'm giving you a hundred bucks, am I getting five bucks this year? 10 bucks this year? Because there's a lot of other options. And then, yeah, the other thing historically with, with software has been just low interest rates. So, oh, oh, that cash flow is coming in 20 years? Fine. Like, it's basically the same as today if it's zero interest rates.

• 1:44:03Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:44:04John Coogan?

  But when you're at 6%, you know, you do discount it back and you get a lot lower number. Um, anyway, uh, where, where should we go next? Uh, I'm interested in.

• 1:44:13Jordi Hays?

  Did, I'm, I'm curious, any of the public markets investors, you said a lot of them were just like, I don't want to try to be the smartest person in the room and lean in and figure everything out. It's safer to just like, you know, bet energy, bet semis, et cetera. Was anyone like licking their chops, being like, this is the greatest buying opportunity? Like actually had some well thought out thesis around how, it's like Tomo Bravo, some of their slides leaked from their LP summit. Uh, and, and they obviously are in the position where like they have no choice, but they can't be bearish now. You know, they have to like, you know, create the like 4D chess of how this is like a huge accelerant to, to their, uh, to their businesses, but.

• 1:44:55Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I think some of the public, some of the public guys, they are very interested in trying to discern what's going on. And this is actually a really good buying opportunity. If you believe people are going to figure out the agentic opportunity or the AI opportunity, because it's certainly not being priced in in a material way. And the incumbent vendors are going to get every chance from their existing customers to get this right. And so I think that's the, if you were to paint the optimistic lens about, you know, Toma got dragged a little bit for some of their, you know, talking their own book. But I actually think some of the slides that people were dunking on were, it's true fundamentally that like,

• 1:45:36Logan Bartlett?

  hey, your incumbent vendors are going to get shot one, two, three in getting it right. I think the problem, and at least what we're seeing in the private markets, is that the culture of building these AI companies is just so different than the culture of building what the historical software company looked like. And you guys, I think, I think you know, I was an investor in Ramp. And, and the stuff that they did, like.

• 1:46:05John Coogan?

  They're the best, they don't get enough, brother. Let's give it up.

• 1:46:09Logan Bartlett?

  It is my cross the bear.

• 1:46:11John Coogan?

  Logan, in particular, he's.

• 1:46:13Logan Bartlett?

  I know.

• 1:46:14John Coogan?

  He never takes victory laps. That's the thing about this guy. We'll take it for you. We'll take it for you.

• 1:46:18Logan Bartlett?

  I am, I'm unknown. I was a silent investor for a long time. And so it's, I'm glad to come, come out of the closet as a Ramp investor here for you guys. But, you know, one of the things that they did. Yeah. One of the things they did culturally for a long time that, that I thought was kind of crazy was they shipped a lot of stuff and would just put it out in the market and see how people would react to it. And that was very different than the way that I learned, you know, the companies I invested in 2014, 15, 16, and how they built products was they had a very tight product roadmap. They communicated with their customers, you know, they had it over a three, six, 12-month period of time.

• 1:46:59Logan Bartlett?

  And they would only really release it when it was fully ready out of initially an alpha, then a. Beta, then they would take a GA with a handful of customers and then take a The Ramp guys sort of put that on its head where they would move really fast, iterate, get it in front of customers, ship it at like 90% readiness and then see how the market took to it. And if they, if it resonated, then they would continue to build around it. And like that mindset is actually what I've seen with a lot of AI native companies now, which is like, you're not totally sure what the model capabilities are going to be in three months' time. And so what you need to do is internalize what your customers are going to want, like have enough of appreciation for their job

• 1:47:41Logan Bartlett?

  that you sort of know what workflows exist or like what existing pain points are. And then when the model capabilities keep getting better and better, you need to internalize what that customer is going to want and what the capabilities of the models are or where they're headed and sort of let those two things intersect. And then deliver that to the customer. And so it's a very different way of like building product and that's one example. And we have a slide in there of like all the different examples, but like it's sort of been flipped on its head. And so I actually don't worry from a is it possible standpoint for the, for the big public companies to do this? I think it's totally possible. And I think some of them will figure it out, but the vast majority are going to have to totally change their culture that they built over the last 10, 15, 20 years.

• 1:48:26Logan Bartlett?

  And that's really painful. And, and I think that's where they're going to end up falling down more than anything else.

• 1:48:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is fascinating. I'm like sort of an early issue adopter, I think. And we, I recently wanted to know like, how much have we spent on Apple products? And I was able to get that answer in like Ramp's AI mode, basically. And I didn't need to like export any data. But then I wanted to know how many, how many, what I've spent with Apple over the last year on my personal financials. And for that, I had to vibe code something that exported all the data and did it manually. And so the question of like, you have a system of record. There's going to be some new feature where, where is that value going to be captured? Are you going to capture that value or is another system going to come down? And it's going to be a feature of a chatbot or a feature of another platform like this is a tale as All this time.

• 1:49:15Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's abstracting the value on top of it, which is interesting. I mean, I guess if you guys think about like my direct visiting of websites has definitely gone down because I interface with Claude or ChatGPT in a meaningful way. And I think that same thing's going to play out within the enterprise as well. And it's not just going to be retrieval of information. It's going to be actually taking actions. And so now I don't totally care. I'm sure you didn't totally care if that information was coming from on ramp side, if it was by bill pay or credit card. And ultimately, once you five coded that application, you didn't care if that information ended up coming from a credit card statement or an email receipt or whatever it was like.

• 1:49:55John Coogan?

  In fact, I wanted to, I wanted to unify credit card and, and like checks and, and like bank transactions as well. And I want to put all of that in one bucket. And that's something that it's not a feature in my bank right now, but it will be if they move quickly. But it already was a year ago in ramp. And so it's just like the pace of play is like still on the order of years in a very interesting way. And yeah, definitely like encourage all the, all of those companies have like opportunities, but they have to go win them. No one just like gets granted, you know, monopoly on the new, on the new capabilities that emerge on top of their platform.

• 1:50:32Jordi Hays?

  So in the, in the deck, you talk about, you know, you have some bub talk, talking about it. Are we in a bubble? And, and with, with every advancement with coding agents and things like that, it seems like there's plenty of demand. There's plenty of demand for tokens right now. People are willing to give real dollars for tokens and that's just going up and up and up. And, but I think there's a tendency right now, at least for kind of the early stage private markets crew to say like, AI is not a bubble. So I should still be investing like tens of millions of dollars into all these different early stage companies and things like that. And I've been like, I've been kind of feeling the bubble in, in private markets, like just based on

• 1:51:15Jordi Hays?

  the number of companies coming out every single day that seem to all be doing kind of variations on like the, you know, the AI CMO, right? And I'm like, maybe, maybe that ends up being a big category.

• 1:51:25John Coogan?

  Like a sort of niche vertical SaaS player that's like AI will be like at a 50 cap for a seed.

• 1:51:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I guess my, my, my point is like, we can, AI maybe isn't a bubble, but that does not mean we're not experiencing like a massive bubble in the kind of venture world right now.

• 1:51:45Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I mean, it sort of goes to like where value is going to accrue. And like if you, we did a slide on percentage of GDP in there. And if, if, if you were obviously investing in airlines, like it was a transformative technology that didn't end up proving to be a material investment opportunity. And what actually presented opportunity was the second derivative considerations of like business travel or like, you know, lounges in airports or whatever, B2B sales and all that stuff. Like there were second derivative things that were actually far more impactful. And you're right, like it's possible. And this is what I've told our LPs that I've asked is like, I think we're operating in a world in which our mortality rate of companies we invest in is going to be higher than it's been in the past.

• 1:52:28Logan Bartlett?

  It just like, it is, even at the stage we're investing in, I think we're going to see a lot more businesses die. I hope we will also invest in things with a lot more upside. And so we'll end up with, you know, hopefully things that could be hundreds of billions of dollars, which used to be not in the realm of possibility. And so I do think we're entering this like extreme period of uncertainty. And the only thing I've really been able to come back to in all this is because you're right, these categories end up so crowded and they end up very dynamic in terms of like how the category evolves, what the product surface area ends up looking like, all that.

• 1:53:09Logan Bartlett?

  And so in some ways we're, we're, we're back to like investing in teams and investing in like the wedge or the general space that they're operating in, and then hoping that those doors open or that, that see parts and they're able to run through that in a meaningful way. But it's, it's very possible that the model providers end up soaking up a ton of the equity value. And so just because there will be a CMO in the AI world that a company starts, like it doesn't mean that any of these companies will be the one to capture that value. And actually it'd probably be very unlikely that it would. And so that individual investment, you might be very rational in, in doing it or not doing it.

• 1:53:54Logan Bartlett?

  And the opportunity will ultimately create a ton of value, but it might not be a private, early-stage specialized company that's going to be the one.

• 1:54:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the uh, yeah, it's been interesting to to look at these businesses ramping revenue so quickly and still and and have like real customer love and pull from the market and still have that question in the back of your head of like, does this eventually just get zeroed out, you know?

• 1:54:19Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:19Jordi Hays?

  And and for me.

• 1:54:20Logan Bartlett?

  That's the one people.

• 1:54:21Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, for me, the my, the only real comp I have, because I kind of came, I came kind of online in my career in 2018, so I got to see the, you know, Zerp era very closely, but I remember with OpenSea, you know, and the NFT boom, that was, you, I remember the way that they ramped revenue, even even the thing that made, you know, I think a lot of otherwise, you know, great funds like pile money into it, what at what ended up being the top is there was, like, you could kind of just say, like, okay, even if revenue drops by like 90% and this doesn't end up being like this mainstream,

• 1:55:01Jordi Hays?

  uh, you know, opportunity, there's still like a business here and and maybe you can just own the category and and but but then revenue ended up dropping like 99% or something like, and and I think that's still so that that still stays in the back of my mind. That that was more of a demand issue versus like new kind of competition from from an adjacent player, uh, but but still.

• 1:55:25John Coogan?

  Are there any previous booms that you do like as comparison points? If not, dot com? Do you like railroads?

• 1:55:32Jordi Hays?

  Electricity.

• 1:55:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, electricity.

• 1:55:34Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:35John Coogan?

  What do you like?

• 1:55:35Logan Bartlett?

  Um, that's a good question. I haven't actually, uh, I haven't actually thought of the right analog for what time we're, I mean, people, you know, the industrial revolution is the one that people come back to the most and I that wasn't on our like GDP calculation chart, uh, but I do, I think there's, there's elements of like the shifting balance of. Of worker dynamic and like where people are actually gonna

• 1:56:05John Coogan?

  Totally the leverage.

• 1:56:06Logan Bartlett?

  Employ themselves in that way going forward and like wealth, you know, there's a lot of considerations on wealth capture and what percentage of the population that's going to go to. And there's definitely a lot of like populist rhetoric out there. And so I think this is more of a, I think, revolution than like a techno. I mean, it's both a revolution and a technological shift in some ways. And so I think like the car or the airplane or the railroad or whatever, like that didn't fundamentally shift the balance of an entire workforce in some ways, the way that I think this has the chance of doing. And so that's the one I kind of come back to, but it's a good question. I'll think more about it.

• 1:56:45John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about capability, overhang, diffusion, the

• 1:56:51Jordi Hays?

  Copability overhang.

• 1:56:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, the debate about like the models are good and they're getting better really, really quickly. But there's just like, you know, teams in companies where they're like, yeah, I'm actually fine doing my spreadsheet job. And, you know, I, yeah, I gotta, I've heard this direct quote, I gotta check that AI thing out.

• 1:57:14Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:14John Coogan?

  I gotta check that out.

• 1:57:16Logan Bartlett?

  When did Jordy say that to you? Was that recent?

• 1:57:20Logan Bartlett?

  I think, you know, it is interesting. I mean, that's where you're seeing a lot of this like FDE Palantir

• 1:57:27John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:57:28Logan Bartlett?

  Era where bridging the last mile is really, really hard. And I think we assume that that like if we build it, they will come in some ways, but it's obviously, that's not the case. AI to most people, I guarantee, if you took whatever, I don't know, 350, 300 million Americans or something and you ask them like, name an AI company, I would guess, I'm making this up, but like 25% wouldn't actually be able to name an AI company. And like 70% would say, oh, that's that chat GPT thing or something.

• 1:58:00Jordi Hays?

  I talked with a guy, I talked with a guy and said, like, what, what AI, are you using any AI products? And he was like, Nope. And then I was like, what about ChatGPT? And he's like, I use that every day. I love it.

• 1:58:12Logan Bartlett?

  But he just doesn't think about it. It's just a website. Like, we've been to websites before. And I think that's an interesting thing. You know, Brett Taylor talks about this from Sierra where there's so many capabilities that you're raising the waterline of and that they're needing to build in-house themselves, knowing ultimately the model providers are going to need to productize that or going to productize that. And so they end up building things that they throw out six months later all the time. And I think, I think that's kind of true on the go-to-market or like education side as well. Where like, a lot of these customers, if you're going into an industrial business or a healthcare business or an energy company or whatever it is, like, you're having to bridge the capability to competency and like, bridge that gap to the individual person at the end of the day.

• 1:58:57Logan Bartlett?

  And so I do think this diffusion, when everyone talks about like, are we in a bubble structurally at a big picture? I don't, I sort of reject that notion because of both the demand and when people talk about the power supply and all that, I actually think it's going to be, it's going to take far longer to get this out into society in a really meaningful way than people on the internet tend to think, because the real world's a lot more complicated than I think we make it out to be when we're just, you know, living in our techno utopia. That's a good point.

• 1:59:25Jordi Hays?

  If you can call Exa-Techno, the techno nightmare. Except in Japan, and Japan has seemed to be great. I did want to ask about buy versus build economics. You talked about how you could just buy.

• 1:59:38Logan Bartlett?

  That's the one that people have been asking all about, by the way, today. Yeah, it's, yeah, people like that one.

• 1:59:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's so funny. So, so Logan makes a point. You can buy Slack for a thousand employees for like, a quarter million a year. Or you could build it in-house. You estimate it around two million a year. And then like, other kind of random, unexpected costs. Sure, a lot of people, anybody that's pushing back on this, just tell them like, okay, build me Slack.

• 2:00:03Logan Bartlett?

  It's a really funny thing where I just think it's sort of the 80 20 rule in some ways that people assume building a software product is like the getting to the proof of concept or like the credible MVP in some ways.

• 2:00:16Jordi Hays?

  Look, you can send messages. You can create a group and then it's like, oh.

• 2:00:19Logan Bartlett?

  I vibe coded this thing and it does all of what Slack needs to do, but then there's.

• 2:00:26Jordi Hays?

  Not even to mention the network effect of Slack of you build the perfect clone and then it's like, okay, do any other companies use it? No? Okay, then we still need Slack.

• 2:00:35Logan Bartlett?

  And so, so like, let's say, I think, I mean, people want to argue about the specific math on all this, but like, let's say that you're willing to do all the integrations and the SSO and the search and the file sharing and the, you know, whatever, the admin controls and compliance and all that stuff. Let's say you do that. Yeah, the emojis, the GIF embeds, all, all those things. Like, let's say you do all that. Was that, whatever that costs, like, what is the opportunity cost that you spent all this time doing that rather than like focusing on whatever it is your core business is? And so actually, like, I, we did the math here and it's 2 million versus 220K or whatever. Like, let's say it's the same, or let's say it's cheaper. Like, is, is saving,

• 2:01:17Logan Bartlett?

  you know, 40 grand, let's say it's 180 versus 220 and.

• 2:01:21Jordi Hays?

  It actually has to be significantly cheaper.

• 2:01:24John Coogan?

  But, but also, I mean, I talked to a friend who runs a company and just about AI stuff and I was like, oh yeah, like you should probably, you know, be aware of this stuff, but what percent of revenue is going towards like software broadly? Like, what's your IT spending? It's like, less than 1%. And so it's like, yes, like you could take something that costs a thousand dollars down to 200 dollars. Like, maybe you take that, but not if it's a headache at all, because 99% of the time you want to be with your actual customers, suppliers, because it's a completely different business. And so.

• 2:01:54Logan Bartlett?

  That, that was the point someone was arguing me about. It's like, most companies actually, you know, aren't growing like, like, yeah, software or tech companies are. And so these costs are really material to them. And I'm like, you know, what's material to them is like decreasing their workforce turnover from like 70% a year to like 60% a year and not having to pay incremental recruiter or staffer fees. To get people on like the difference of the Slack budget and saving 40K I guarantee does not like resonate at all and Slack was a simple example because it resonates with people. But I think it's true across the board. So I was trying to think of like what a good bet would be with someone to try to like. Come up with it. It's a very hard thing to figure out of like what the right framework of of of thinking about this is because I love just codifying bets with people.

• 2:02:37Logan Bartlett?

  And being like, you know, okay, let's let's wager some money on what this is. And I couldn't come up with a good one. So if you or if anyone listening can come up with a good bet on this. I would love to place whatever significant sum of money on. Side of it.

• 2:02:48Jordi Hays?

  It's funny. It's funny to think about the company building Slack in house and they're like throwing time. They're getting 10 people on a call like, hey, like we need to meet and talk about some up. We need to talk about like our roadmap for our internal Slack. We need to kind of bat some ideas around about different trade offs that we're making.

• 2:03:05John Coogan?

  Well, the the deep irony here is that Slack was an internal tool for a game studio like it was actually like the. We need to build our own thing because we communicate so frequently and then it became.

• 2:03:16Logan Bartlett?

  And there's a historical analogy, by the way, of this that I didn't include in the deck because I really like Drew Houston from Dropbox, but like they built their own data centers and like. I don't know, like.

• 2:03:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:27Logan Bartlett?

  If that was a good cost decision from them, but like from a focus decision, should they have just used AWS and you know. Or GCP or or one of the other. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. And I didn't want to like. Put him on blast and actually get into the debate because I like him quite a bit, but like. I don't know if that's like the right decision for them and that they were even like the furthest, you know, they're like a tech company that that was their business, able to decrease costs. And who knows what the opportunity cost of incremental products or mindshare or whatever it was going and doing that.

• 2:03:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, that makes sense.

• 2:03:59Jordi Hays?

  Last question. Did did the current AI suite make making your annual report significantly easier or was it still?

• 2:04:12John Coogan?

  Handcrafted.

• 2:04:12Jordi Hays?

  Handcrafted.

• 2:04:14Logan Bartlett?

  It's an artisanal craft of this, but I will say it is interesting doing this deck every year. It does serve as a snapshot of like what the model capabilities are and like where, how much progress that's been made. And so I think if I go back like two years ago, that version of it, I can wordsmith like my talking points that I was actually talking, you know, when I get up there in front of the LPs and do it. And last year it was actually a decent, I could ping pong some ideas. Here, I would guess, I don't know if there's 68 slides or something, I would guess 75% of them, AI had some hand in either helping visually lay it out in some way, writing some of the texts, maybe coming up with some of the analogies.

• 2:04:56Logan Bartlett?

  And that is such a step function change versus where it was 12 months ago. And so it is helpful every year to like revisit, come back and like see what's actually possible. Because as you just go about your day, you sort of forget what three weeks ago was, or eight weeks ago, or 15 weeks ago. But when I went through the process this year, I was like, wow, this is really much less painful. And I think the principal and associate on the team that worked with me on this were very much appreciative of where the model capabilities are going. Because I think if it made my life a little bit easier, it definitely made their life a lot easier.

• 2:05:30Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 2:05:31John Coogan?

  Is that alpha for up and coming venture capitalists? What advice do you have for those who want to make a career out of venture capital? Because it feels like coming in and surprising the entire partnership with a very deep analysis.

• 2:05:44Jordi Hays?

  I would just say have a non-traditional background, maybe grow up in the kind of like Menlo, Palo Alto area, go to Stanford.

• 2:05:52Logan Bartlett?

  It's actually an interesting thing. So if you guys have a minute, I can riff for a second on this. But like historically, so we've hired people out of investment banks, largely speaking. And so why do we do that? Well, we hire people out of investment banks because it's an expressed interest in finance and technology. Okay, that's great. Two is they have the model training of like what we need, you know, the cap tables and projections and all that stuff. Three is there's like a high pain tolerance and like willingness to grind and do the extra thing. And then four is It's like it's a referential network like we can call the same MD at Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs or Catalyst every year and be like, hey, how does this person calibrate to that person? And it gives us a qualified pool of people to pick in. The thing that investment

• 2:06:35Logan Bartlett?

  banking didn't have was you're very much like if you ended up in investment banking, you followed a pretty straight path for the most part in your life. And I say this as a former investment banker myself, where like you went to a high school, got good grades, got into a good college, you know, did interviews, got a good job. Then at your investment banking job, you're staffed with like 90% of your day is pre-filled by someone else. And so it's like, okay, well, if I work hard and I stay late and I do this pitch book, align the fonts the right way, I'll get a good bonus and then I'll get a good job. Well, then we drop you in and increasingly now with the model capabilities, the financial modeling Claude can do it better than, you know, or as well as most of the people on our team and the sort of remedial tasks are getting the

• 2:07:19Logan Bartlett?

  water level keeps going up. And so when we hire people in now, we've always had to train on the agency thing. And it's a little bit of rewiring your brain where, hey, my day used to be 90% filled by this staffer. And now you're telling me just go figure out what's a good company? Like, where do I even start in that? And so in some ways, like investment banking is actually a bad pool of how it's wired and prepared people for this world now. Historically, it always was, but we were willing to forego the agency because we got the modeling capabilities and the remedial tasks. And we sort of took that as the basics. And then we had to try to figure out if there was agency there. Now increasingly, like, the models are getting so good that agency might be the only

• 2:08:03Logan Bartlett?

  thing that matters. And so like, are you able to find differentiated?

• 2:08:07Jordi Hays?

  We're actually working on an internal model for agency at BBPN.

• 2:08:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, right along with our taste model.

• 2:08:13Jordi Hays?

  We've hit a huge unlock. We've cracked taste. Now it's, now it's agency.

• 2:08:17Logan Bartlett?

  And so that's the thing that we now are trying to figure out. Like, where do you find pockets of people who still want to do the job talent wise, or have the capability to do the job, but also have agency? And you might be finding people that are entrepreneurs. You might find people that are project managers. You might find people that have taken serendipitous paths in some ways. And that actually might be a good sign and not a bad sign. And so it's forcing us to think in a different way of like where we're hiring people from.

• 2:08:44John Coogan?

  So what I'm hearing is that you're pulling up the ladder behind you.

• 2:08:47Logan Bartlett?

  That's right. That's right. That anyone, any door, I always say when people ask like, "Hey, how did you get to where you are in your career?" My answer is always like, "Well, is the specific question what I would do when I was in, if I was in your seat?" Because I can tell you the doors I walked through, but those doors aren't just shut. They're like shut, they're cemented over, they've like been fortified, you know, you're not doing what I did. I lucked through this path.

• 2:09:13John Coogan?

  Thank you for joining us. Always a great time hanging out. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:09:17Jordi Hays?

  Just with all the AI progress, try to ship one of these a week.

• 2:09:21Logan Bartlett?

  You got it.

• 2:09:23John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Find your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. And then head over to public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. And without further ado, we have the founder and designer of Granola, Sam Stevenson. Welcome to the show, Sam. How are you doing? What's going on?

• 2:09:50Speaker 06

  I'm good. I'm good. How are you doing?

• 2:09:52John Coogan?

  Congratulations. Massive news. Tell us what happened. Let's hit the gong. Let's warm things up since we're in our Lambda Lightning round now. I want to hear what happened.

• 2:10:01Speaker 06

  So we have raised a $125 million Series C from

• 2:10:08Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations. I didn't hear it over the sound of the gong. You said Index Ventures?

• 2:10:13Speaker 06

  Index Ventures, Index Ventures. And with KP participating as well.

• 2:10:19John Coogan?

  Fantastic. What unlocked the round? Is it just continued progress, new features, a little bit of everything? Talk us through the progress over the last year.

• 2:10:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think it's been, I mean, all the above. Like, we've been talking to these guys for a while. They've been fans of the product. I think as all of our investors have, they've all like used the product a bunch before we've got to talking about investing. And then, yeah, like, like growth has been good and continuing. And like, I think it's the combination of that. And then like the I feel like the environment is like waking up like to the power of of having all of the context of what's happening in your meetings in a company, you know? Like, I think, like, everybody adopting MCP is like making it apparent that you can, like, if you have the right context about what's happening in the company, you can do that to power so much of what's happening in your company.

• 2:11:16Speaker 06

  And I think we're just well positioned as like that that context gatherer that a company can take advantage of.

• 2:11:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so my, my, uh, something I've been thinking about with this category is why do you think the, why do you think the labs have not built a product in this space? Sure, there's a number of reasons, but I'm sure they would generally love the context that you're gathering so that their agents could actually leverage it directly and, and, so, and so explain like why you guys have had kind of just a open, uh, open, not, not to say open, but there's certainly competitors, but like, why have you guys been able to just run, uh, run away?

• 2:12:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, I'm sure they, I'm sure they are working on it. Like, uh, OpenAI had a stab at it last year. They had like, uh, um, launched like a longer running record mode thing, which I think was aimed at this, but like, uh, I think, I think it's a few things. Like, I think, um, we, uh, we're basically like, we, people use this for meetings, right? Which is like, um, it's a big time for a, for a startup like us, but it's also like only a slice of people's life. Like, and, uh, and if you're designing like a super open-ended, general-purpose chatbot like ChatGPT, I think like, they're probably questioning like, does this make sense? Or should we be going for like always on recording of everything? And, and anything less is, is like not good enough. Um, I think

• 2:12:44Speaker 06

  that's probably part of it. The other, the other thing is like, um, I mean, we found building Granola that like you can build a Granola clone like super easily, you know, right? In like a weekend, you could build a thing that transcribes your meetings and gets you a summary. And like all the work is in understanding like the all of the like social nuances of like, who are these people in the meeting? Why are they meeting? What's this meeting about? And like therefore, like what notes do you want out of it? What are the action items you should care about? Like, just, just kind of all the work behind the scenes to like actually make this thing fit into your life in a way, the way you'll use it and find the notes useful is a, is a bunch of work. And yeah, that's, um, you know, we use the latest and greatest models. So like

• 2:13:29Speaker 06

  you've still got to go and do that work on top of that, at least today.

• 2:13:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Uh, yeah, it makes total sense. What, what kind of progress are you guys make? Like, what is the, what's the most kind of like sci-fi element of, of the pitch for this last round? Like, are you imagining a future where the only thing that humans do is just kind of meet and talk about what should be done and then make a decision? And then machines ultimately carry out all the work? Uh, like, like, how, how far are you kind of like taking out the, how far out are you kind of looking?

• 2:14:07Speaker 06

  I mean, I can see, I can see that, like, yeah, I can see that someone being true. Like, I do think like, um, I mean, we do, we do it internally in the company, you know, we'll, we'll meet and talk about a thing and then, and then go ask Granola to write a brief that we either go then hand to a coding agent or, um, or we use it as the material to write a job description or a blog post or whatever. Like, the conversations are like incredibly good input for a lot of the work that you end up needing to do at a company.

• 2:14:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:38Speaker 06

  I think the, like the more kind of, like the most near term, but sci-fi things that we, we see is like, um,

• 2:14:46Speaker 06

  If you want like a pulse on what's happening with like any project or any group of people in the company, going and like looking and asking Granola what's happening with this, with this project is like easy and incredibly insightful. And I think that's essentially because like transcripts are just such a good up-to-date record of like what's happening in a company. So much more so than like a, I don't know, a Notion doc or a Google doc that someone had to sit down and write. Like, you know, without making any effort, you have kind of an up-to-date picture of what's happening in the company. And that's, I think that's just going to be useful to a lot of people in so many ways.

• 2:15:26John Coogan?

  What is, what does diffusion look like inside a large company? Like how much training, education, messaging you have to do? I'm sure you have playbooks for this, but how do you, because once you like land, I imagine the next step is expand. What does that look like for Granola?

• 2:15:44Speaker 06

  All word of mouth, pretty much, at the moment, like for most companies. Like, we, we focused so much on just making it like a good product for the individual when we started, that, yeah, like still, the majority of our growth is like patient zero finds it at a company and then tells their friends about it because they, because they love it so much. And we just go on from there. We, I mean, we're working on a bunch of team-facing features that kind of let you harness the value of a whole group of people using it together. And, I mean, the motivation behind a lot of that is that we kind of create a reason for you to just go wall-to-wall across your company with Granola and kind of unlock

• 2:16:26Speaker 06

  the power of, of sharing all that context of the transcripts together. But for the most part, it's still just word of mouth. People, people love it and they share that with each other.

• 2:16:35John Coogan?

  Talk about the end-of-year wrapped campaign. I've heard fantastic reviews for it.

• 2:16:44Speaker 06

  I was such a delight to share it.

• 2:16:47John Coogan?

  So yeah, explain it for those who did not receive one or followed the story. And then tell me about.

• 2:16:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, so we did a like a spin on Spotify wrapped as many companies do. Which for us was granola crunched. The basic thesis was like, you know, granola, if you've used granola, some of our users have used granola for like thousands of meetings over the last year. And if you look inside those meetings and across over a year, you can, you can tell a lot about a person and what's going on and what's important in their lives. So granola crunch was basically like every user could go hit a button and generate a like Spotify rap style report about them, about their year. It was things like, like, who's your partner in crime? What's your favorite catchphrase?

• 2:17:38Speaker 06

  What's like, what are some of the smartest things you said? What are some of the dumbest things you said? You know, that kind of thing. And it was like, you know, mostly fun. There's some, there's some things that could hit pretty hard. Like, like I remember mine was like, I felt kind of uneasy sharing it with other people because it felt.

• 2:17:57John Coogan?

  I've heard that from a number of people. They've been like, it was scarily accurate and I didn't want to share with the rest of my team.

• 2:18:04Jordi Hays?

  You said nothing from my end, thanks.

• 2:18:07John Coogan?

  700 times. That's great.

• 2:18:11Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so we have this buddy who's, who's, you know, built a massive company in a super regulated industry and like had been through, ultimately had a, had a huge exit, but has been, been through kind of, you know, lawsuits and discovery along the way. And so he's just like, absolutely hates every product in this category. He's like, I don't care how useful it is, it's not worth, you know, someday having like, you know, basically line by line, live kind of transcript of every meeting that you've had at a company. What are the, I'm sure you guys are aware of, of, you know, some of these more like sensitive use cases, like what kind of fixes, like what are you doing at the product level

• 2:18:55Jordi Hays?

  for people that don't want every conversation?

• 2:18:58John Coogan?

  You should sell saunas. So if you want to have a meeting that's off the record, you go into your company sauna. And then nothing can record you. There's no recording devices. This is Lindy.

• 2:19:09Jordi Hays?

  Maybe. Maybe check for any product roles.

• 2:19:12John Coogan?

  You got a wire on you?

• 2:19:13Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, Sam.

• 2:19:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think like, this is like a really tricky path for us to walk and like, it's like so important for us to be, you know, doing what we think is right at every step of the way. Like, I think, um, I think we have to juggle, like, I think tools like this are kind of, they're, they will be somewhat inevitable in a work context. I think, I think like talking about the personal, you know, like always on recording type things is totally different. But in a work context, there's just so much value in having like, you know, like transcribes meetings and therefore being able to use that conversation data for stuff. So I think that's kind of inevitable. And the question is like, how do we, how do we kind of make that okay for people in the meantime?

• 2:19:57Speaker 06

  And I think like, some things we've observed are like, for companies that use granola, um, they very like, they basically just get comfortable with the idea that like, we're gonna make it a thing that like, we use granola internally and, um, and that's the default. Like that you should kind of just assume that's happening. And you know, you can know it like it's okay to opt out and say, you don't want to, you don't want to use it. But companies get comfortable with that very easily, we find.

• 2:20:26Speaker 06

  Then, then like the external question is like a question of following the laws in your state and, and you know, like granola, we, we make that clear to you, but it's ultimately it's a tool and, and you kind of, it's up to you to follow the rules on it.

• 2:20:39Jordi Hays?

  But I've had more like, even on like data, data retention, right? So, so like, like if a company, there are plenty of meetings that are just not that important. But if that was pulled in discovery at some point down the road, it could be unnecessarily damaging. Now, the bull case for this is that whoever's, you know, suing the company and like wants that discovery actually has more, like they're, they're more able to make a, an effective case.

• 2:21:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:21:11Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but, but like, yeah, I was asking more.

• 2:21:14John Coogan?

  Do you have a referral link for companies that I'm planning to sue?

• 2:21:20Speaker 06

  We had this from companies in all directions. Like, some companies are like real, like this is an opportunity for them to have things on record. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:21:29John Coogan?

  That's excellent, yeah.

• 2:21:31Speaker 06

  But plenty go the other way, right? Where they want everything like off the record and deleted immediately. We've ended up building a bunch of retention controls. So you can do this either way. Like, some companies will set transcripts to self-destruct after 24 hours. So like, you know, there's no more record of those and you just get left with the notes. And, yeah, I think, I'm a big fan of that. Like, I feel like we, it's not in our interest to have like, on the record recordings of everything that's happened. Like, all granola needs is the kind of main notes of what was talked about.

• 2:22:04John Coogan?

  Plans, yeah.

• 2:22:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:22:07John Coogan?

  Makes sense.

• 2:22:07Speaker 06

  Like, a healthy level of abstraction is like good for everybody there, I think.

• 2:22:11John Coogan?

  Last question. Can you tell me about the brand? Because this could have been called like Panopticon, it could have been black background, steel, silver, you know? It could have been very different branding wise, but it's granola, it's crunchy, there's a, you know, this like green color that you've picked. Like, it's clearly intentional. What are you, what are you thinking with the brand?

• 2:22:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, we basically like, I think since the beginning, when we first started studying how people take notes, I think one thing that was really apparent was like, taking notes in meetings is a really personal thing. And we, like, there was already a bunch of AI note takers out there, but people hated them. People, nobody wanted to use it and no one felt comfortable kind of like writing their raw, messy thoughts into them. And so we really just wanted granola always to feel personal and like it's yours and that the more you use it, the more it feels like your space. And all the branding is like downstream of that. Like, the name, the colors, the kind of messy, like, organic feeling textures and stuff. Like, it's all meant to communicate that this is like your, your thing. This is not, this is not your company's thing, this is your thing.

• 2:23:20John Coogan?

  Love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on during a big day and breaking it down for us. Uh, very exciting progress. Fantastic progress. Talk to you soon. Have a good rest. It's really fun hanging out. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Let me tell you about vibe.co where D to C brands, B to B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences and measure sales just like on Meta. And let me also tell you about Gusto. The unified platform for payroll, benefits and HR built to evolve with modern, small and medium sized businesses. And without further ado, let's bring in Ben from Pulsia. What's going on? How are you doing, Ben?

• 2:23:53Speaker 07

  Guys, how are you?

• 2:23:54John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. Introduce yourself. Since this is the first time on the show, tell us what you do.

• 2:24:00Speaker 07

  Yeah, my name is Ben. Uh, I run a platform called Pulsia.

• 2:24:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:24:04Speaker 07

  It's an AI that builds and runs companies autonomously.

• 2:24:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:09Speaker 07

  Uh, you give it an idea and it's going to go about, uh, building the products, uh, running the marketing, running ads, uh, doing support.

• 2:24:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:18Speaker 07

  Uh, and all of the things that, uh, a founder would do to start a company and grow it.

• 2:24:22John Coogan?

  So should I think about this as you've fine tuned a bunch of agents, built MD files or workflows that then leverage other foundation models to deliver on those. You have some playbooks in place, like what, what have you done that's, uh, that? Cause I imagine you're not training the actual foundation model. You're using different tools off the shelf and different integrations and then fine tuning things. But walk me through like the actual experience of using the product.

• 2:24:54Speaker 07

  Of course. I mean, the way to think about it is, you know, I've, I've spent like a lot of the past 12 months, uh, spending 12 to 16 hours a day using AI, using new cloud code, using Codex, um, and, and building my company, companies with it.

• 2:25:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:25:10Speaker 07

  And the idea is that like the, the fundamental models are like super powerful and, and I pretty much think that AGI is here at this point. Like the models are super intelligent and they are fluent at using any tools. But I think the trick is knowing how to configure them, uh, to give them the right tools, the right orchestration, the right series of tools to get to an outcome. Right? So for example, one of our agents on Pulsia can run meta ads campaigns.

• 2:25:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:25:35Speaker 07

  But to do that, there's a lot of steps, uh, that are needed, right? It's like creating the creative, um, you know, uh, using maybe an AI, an AI generation model.

• 2:25:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. And different labs are good at different things, you know, Nano Banana is great and Codex is great. You know, there's writing models and there's all sorts of different things. So you're choosing those and rerouting those. How do I think about it in terms of an actual payment flow? Is there a world where I give you a credit card or a bank account? And then you already have the integration set up, so I don't need to go set up an AWS instance? Or I don't need to go set up a Meta Ads campaign? And you can just kind of say, hey, we're running a hundred dollar test campaign. We're going to withdraw a hundred dollars. We think we're going to bring back 200. Okay, we did. Now I need a thousand.

• 2:26:27Speaker 07

  Exactly. I mean, if you think about it, like agents are essentially like AI humans that can act on the economy. And, and today, obviously, if an agent, like if a thousand agents go on Meta to create accounts, like Meta will say, no, you need to verify your identity and all this stuff, right? And so there's the first layer of infrastructure to build that we've built at Pulse here, which is how to make partnership with those platforms to, to get, for them to understand that it's an agent working on behalf of a human for a certain task and to sort of like have all that set up ready. And, and as you said, like today, we abstracted it quite a bit where like, you know, you pay a subscription and you get sort of like one task every night of, you know, your agent doing work for you. And then, and then you, you, you can do various types of tasks.

• 2:27:11Speaker 07

  But in the future, as you said, you know, if you want to open a bakery in New York and you have this idea, there's going to be a lot of orchestration to like buy the real estate, to buy, to hire staff, manage them, all the fulfillment and like an AI could totally do this. But you probably will have to say, the Pulse will tell you, you got to deposit a hundred K on an account because we're going to have to do a deposit. We're going to have to pay the realtor. We're going to have to hire staff. And, and that's something that like, what Pulse is trying to do is really give access to all the best practices of being entrepreneur to anyone who has an idea and wants to fund it and wants to try it. And obviously it's going to be a much lower cost than what you, what you can do today.

• 2:27:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:55Jordi Hays?

  So Pulse has ramped revenue super quickly. I feel like every time I see you guys, the ARR has gone up. But what is actually, what, what, give us an example of like? Automated companies that are working on the platform, like individual entrepreneurs that signed up.

• 2:28:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, what are they building?

• 2:28:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what are they actually building? What are they selling?

• 2:28:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:20Speaker 07

  So there's like a, you know, an entrepreneur who's like building like a service to create ads from a script, you know, autonomously using different APIs and reselling that to people and like has a bunch of customers that are paying. You have another person who's building an AI receptionist for businesses and so using like the agent SDK to like figure out how to respond correctly based on context. You also have existing businesses or using Pulsia sort of like as a, as an AI team that can build a landing page for them, create leads, sort of like lead, lead capture and run ads to get customers for their offline business.

• 2:29:04Speaker 07

  So there's a lot of different use cases. It's actually very varied because obviously this platform's promise is so open-ended.

• 2:29:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:11Speaker 07

  That you get and it's, you know, it's pretty affordable. It's like $49 a month to try it for a month. And so you get a lot of people with a lot of ideas and.

• 2:29:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like the low code, no code, like boom all over again where like there were low code, no code products at the hyperscalers and GCP and AWS, but there were still platforms that did a little bit more and became like low code, some no code. And, uh, and you're seeing the same like continuum of like, how much do you want the platform to help you before you actually open up the terminal yourself?

• 2:29:45Jordi Hays?

  Does the human matter a lot still?

• 2:29:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:49Jordi Hays?

  Like if I just, if I just go on there and I, and I pretend to be like my 10-year-old self, am I still, am I, am I going to print or is it, am I, am I going to be cooked still?

• 2:30:01Speaker 07

  So I mean, first of all, like it's this platform is like to build real businesses. So it's not like a get rich quick scheme. It takes time to ramp up. It takes time to build real businesses. Obviously, trying to do a lot of things on the on the marketing side to automate more of like trying to get customers, but also bringing on maybe people with already have influence that can bring on their their their audience and sell them services. But to answer your question about how much the human is needed, I think that you you as long as like humans are the ones buying the goods and services, you need another human on the other end who understand the subtleties of what people want these days right now. What are the new trends? What are the new things?

• 2:30:45Speaker 07

  In a world where like there's going to be an abundance of new services and goods that being sold all over the place because all those AI tools are augmenting people to build faster, better.

• 2:30:58Speaker 07

  You need humans for the taste. So the way I I explain it is you got you got the 80% you know, operational work, day to day grind that can be fully automated by AI. That's like engineering, that's like support, that's like market research, that's like pricing. And that usually you need to hire people for that. And today with tools like BossY, they can do most of the work. However, the A, the 20%, which is taste, which is branding, which is like on marketing, and I know trying to market in turn ways, understanding how to position your product, maybe having an audience to sell to, however small it is, you know, if you have a thousand followers that are dedicated to what you do and they love you, you don't need that much

• 2:31:42Speaker 07

  more to get like 10, 20, 30 paying customers and start doing income. And today they're selling merch and tomorrow they can sell.

• 2:31:50Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:31:50Speaker 07

  Real services that may be more sophisticated. So that's sort of the way I look at it. There's a world in the future and where I'm going to introduce services where you can completely autonomously let the agent run wild. Obviously, if you do, because you don't have to give it feedback, like it will every day, every night, wake up and do work. And and I'm going to choose ways for you to let it run 10 times a day, right? If you pay, if you pay to compute, right?

• 2:32:14Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:32:16Speaker 07

  And I'm sure that would work. It's just that like that becomes like, you need to have a very tight feedback loop on like the user, what the user feedback is. So it feeds back in to what the service is and how to make it better. And I think there's a world where like a human with a lot of capital can actually start building a lot of you know, money printing businesses as the loop gets tighter and the platform gets smarter about what are the best practices. And I think this is where the world is going. And ideally, I want to give that opportunity to the 99%. The people that like think that AI is chat GPT and that's that's pretty much it. And if we can give them the tools to to be economic actors

• 2:32:56Speaker 07

  in this new era, I think we will hold benefit and it will be a more, a more just sort of like society.

• 2:33:03John Coogan?

  Okay, last question we have to ask you about the name. You write a lot of people up because it spells AI slop backwards. Is that intentional? Is that a joke? What's the name?

• 2:33:12Speaker 07

  I mean, it it it started as a, not as a joke. It was like my lawyer asked me to come up with the the name for the ink when I started the company.

• 2:33:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:21Speaker 07

  And I was on my couch and I was like, oh, I could name it like, you know, Pulsar AI slop in reverse. That's a, that's a good name.

• 2:33:28John Coogan?

  Oh, so you. Intentional.

• 2:33:29Jordi Hays?

  So it was intentional?

• 2:33:30Speaker 07

  It was intentional.

• 2:33:31Jordi Hays?

  Oh, that's, that's, that's amazing. That's amazing. I thought, I thought it was like, I thought it was bi, I thought it was.

• 2:33:37John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:33:37Speaker 07

  But it was not intentional to, it, I decided to use it as the product name.

• 2:33:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:42Speaker 07

  You know, I started the company like in April and I, I built the product in November. So and and I was like, that's kind of cool, actually. It's very, and I will make people talk. And it did.

• 2:33:53John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and breaking it down for us. Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:33:57Speaker 07

  Yeah, good to meet you.

• 2:33:57John Coogan?

  And we'll talk to you soon. Sounds good.

• 2:33:59Jordi Hays?

  See you then.

• 2:34:00John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. And let me also tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai.

• 2:34:15Jordi Hays?

  I would love to sit in on that pitch meeting. We're building an infinite money glitch.

• 2:34:20John Coogan?

  It did seem like that.

• 2:34:22Jordi Hays?

  Forty-nine dollars a month.

• 2:34:23John Coogan?

  I mean, I don't know. Like, there's a world, there's, you know, Teespring was, you know, empowering entrepreneurs to sell a lot of t-shirts. There's a lot of different things. It depends on what you bring to the platform, I suppose. Well, without further ado, we have Brett Adcock in the restroom waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV can ultra. Brett, how are you doing?

• 2:34:43Brett Adcock?

  Guys, good to see you again.

• 2:34:45John Coogan?

  Good to see you again.

• 2:34:45Jordi Hays?

  Welcome back.

• 2:34:46John Coogan?

  Been far too long, but since the last time we talked, you launched a new company. So break it down for us.

• 2:34:51Brett Adcock?

  Oh, Hark?

• 2:34:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:34:52Brett Adcock?

  Yeah, let me, um...

• 2:34:53John Coogan?

  I want to know about that.

• 2:34:55Brett Adcock?

  Yeah, all right. Well, I mean, I guess the summary here is I've been working for the last three years on, I think maybe one of the hardest AI problems in the world, being AI to work on humanoid robots.

• 2:35:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:05Brett Adcock?

  Separately, you know, separately, I've been like, watch, I'm basically using and watching what's happening in the digital world, like, you know, the different language models. And to be honest, I think they're just incredibly dumb. Like, I, they don't remember anything about me. It's not very personal. They can't listen or talk to me really well, can't see the world, can't use computers well. I just, I just think this whole experience is just like, I think it shouldn't feel very much like a sci-fi movie. This should feel like Jarvis, that can like, really understand you, very personalized, use tools well. So about seven months ago, I started a new AI lab called Hark, and we want to build a really advanced personalized intelligence.

• 2:35:46Brett Adcock?

  In order to get there, we think there are some fundamental gaps remaining in the models. So we basically have, we basically have like a large focus on trying to like, basically build new multimodal models. And the second thing is, you know, we're interacting with AI today through like 20-year-old computers, like my phone and like laptop. These are all

• 2:36:09Brett Adcock?

  Decades old. And we feel very strongly that there's like a next generation of AI devices. That need to be like, need to be built to kind of interface with AGI appropriately. So we have a team dedicated not only to models here, but also on the design side. One of our key guys, Abider, started about four months ago, previously led design for MacBook, MacBook Air, iPhone 13, 15, 16, 17, was keynote for iPhone 17 Air about five months ago. So Abs is here with a killer team on the hardware side and we're designing next generation interfaces. For the models that we're, that we're working on here internally.

• 2:36:52Jordi Hays?

  Is it the interface that you think is the issue? Or do you need more compute locally?

• 2:36:59Brett Adcock?

  I think there's like some big gaps in the model side. I think there's like twofold. I think there's some large gaps remaining on the model development side that we want to try to close. And then secondly, there's like, I think the, just the interface of how we're using traditional computers right now to interface as AI is extremely broken. We think both need to be fixed. To have like a really killer, like, like, you know, like, super intelligent personal assistant. We think you need to fix the hardware interface and we also think we need to fix the model side. I mean, there's just like simple things today that we need to be better, like computer use agents today are just not very good. Like, they're getting better every month, but there's still like a large gap in order to get their speech to speech systems,

• 2:37:42Brett Adcock?

  which will be like a really natural UI into AGI are just not, not great. They don't remember things I've, I've told it, they don't have access to my life, they can't access my calendar, they're not very like, they're pretty high latency, EQ and naturalness are not great. So we're kind of taking this holistic approach to this problem and saying we have to work on the models and we have to like fix the interface issue here today.

• 2:38:06Jordi Hays?

  What is the hiring market right now for all of this? All of this talent? Because you're basically going up against Apple, OpenAI, Quad, you got Demis. Like, you're going up against, you've already bit off a lot, obviously, with Figure. And we can move over and get the update there. But I'm just so curious, when you're recruiting talent for Hark, I have to imagine any of the people that you're hiring, if you want to hire them, they probably have the opportunity to work at these other companies. So what's working on that side?

• 2:38:44Brett Adcock?

  I mean, I think the summary is like, all of the other companies are kind of boring. They're all doing the same thing. They're all copying each other. We've headed in a certain direction over the last three years. I think that direction is somewhat saturating. To work on vision understanding, to working on models that can go and interact with the world and get that interaction data, we think these areas are especially important to push the boundaries and get the AGI. This AGI feeling of highly multimodal scenarios. So we're finding, from a hiring perspective, we're being extremely competitive. We've brought on now over 50 people into the team. About two thirds of that are from the AI side, from top frontier labs.

• 2:39:28Brett Adcock?

  I will say it's probably one of the most competitive areas I've hired for in general, around compensation. The space is just completely lit up. Like, I've never seen it like it before. You know, I've hired people across all areas of robotics and AI and software and hardware. Just like, this is, it's next level competitive. I think we have a very small amount of people in the world that really understand how to build the right infra, pre-training, data mix, all of this. It's just very tough. So, and some of these spaces are just new. Like, computer-using agents that can really reason really well in pixel space, like, this is just happening now. So there's not a lot of good precedent for how to go out and build these systems.

• 2:40:07Jordi Hays?

  Why not? What was the decision-making process around doing this externally? Because I feel like a lot of the capabilities that you want to build with Hark, like, I'm assuming you'll want to integrate into Figure. If Figure is going to be a robot that can add value to my day-to-day life, you know, where's the overlap? And why build it externally?

• 2:40:32Brett Adcock?

  I'm a bit fan of focus. I feel like Figure, we have a singular focus, which is like, how do we solve for a general purpose humanoid robot? How do we build like a human in a body suit? That has like common sense reason. A lot of the AI focus we have around Figure is basically how do we predict physics? Around things like grab and touch and move through the world. At Hark, we have like a different objective. We want to launch like, like next generation consumer electronics. And we want to basically build extremely multimodal models. That can almost like act like as like a Jarvis type interface to AI. And the, the, the focus on those tracks are completely different. And with that said, though, I think there's like some, some opportunity over time to closely collaborate. The voice on the model, on the robot today.

• 2:41:16Brett Adcock?

  Is using the Hark voice API. So we talked to any of our robots here today, it's using the Hark of voice model. That we designed here internally. Um, so I think there's like a, a lot of room. Over time to collaborate the business together. We're both, uh, we're, we're like, uh. We're taking an entire data center of B two hundreds in April here. And, uh, Figure literally has half the building and Hark has the other half the building. Uh, obviously paying for things separately, but we like literally between the two of us have an entire data center. Of like next generation Blackwells that we're using for training for AI models.

• 2:41:50John Coogan?

  Uh, I want your latest timelines on the chat GPT moment for, uh, robotics, humanoid robotics. We were talking to, um. Sean McGuire about this. He's, he, he was putting out maybe like. Two to three years away, three to four years, uh, from just, you know, seeing them on the streets, seeing them in, in restaurants, seeing them in the real world. Uh, maybe not economic impact because that could happen in, in, you know, all sorts of different industrial, uh, settings. But, uh, it will be a special moment, I think, when people, uh, wind up interacting with a humanoid robot. What are you thinking these days?

• 2:42:28Brett Adcock?

  You can come to Figure right now. And you can see robots running complete 24/7 shifts.

• 2:42:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:34Brett Adcock?

  Fully autonomously with neural nets all the way down the stack.

• 2:42:38John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:42:38Brett Adcock?

  So like, I think, um. This will be a big year for us to ship robots commercially to many different customers of ours.

• 2:42:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:46Brett Adcock?

  And then we're also working on trying to, how do we integrate these into the home?

• 2:42:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:50Brett Adcock?

  How do we get robots to go and do like laundry and dishes and tidy the house? Like things that we just like, I don't want to be doing, nobody really wants to do. And use like robotics as a key tool for this.

• 2:43:00Brett Adcock?

  I think we're, I think we're like having this moment now. I think it's uh, we're in it. We're feeling it as like I, I, right now, like you're, we're seeing these robots do uh, long horizon autonomous work at Figure here. And I think over like this year and next year, it's gonna be very, the whole world's gonna wake up to it. Uh, I think we saw a little bit of that at the White House last week with uh, with Figure. It was just like, we saw like unprecedented demand, like uh, like uh, it was um, it was kinda crazy because we didn't show any like new capabilities. So we're like, uh, internally, we're like, okay, we're just gonna be at the White House. And it was a big, it was a big um, it was a big milestone. The first humanoid robot, you know, built in the US at the White House in history. So it was like uh, getting like, you know, getting the invite from the White House to come there and be able to be the first

• 2:43:44Brett Adcock?

  one to do it was just like huge. Um, it was great. Like, but like, you know, there was, there was no new capabilities there. But like, the, the whole world is just like waking up to the moment now of humanoids. And it was a big, very apparent from last week and all the incredible reaction we got from like, basically the entire world that uh, this is, we're still early here in the cycle.

• 2:44:02John Coogan?

  I love it. Well, good luck and thank you for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 2:44:06Jordi Hays?

  One quick question. Can humanoids reliably crack open a cold Diet Coke and serve it? Or is like, I imagine the tab is like, kind of a challenge?

• 2:44:15John Coogan?

  That's AGI for me.

• 2:44:17Brett Adcock?

  I don't think they should have any problem doing this.

• 2:44:19Jordi Hays?

  Okay. That's a demo. That's a demo. We'd love to see. Because honestly, John would, would buy a humanoid just to, just to come over with a cold one, crack it open. He goes through a lot of these. So he gets a real utility out of it.

• 2:44:33Brett Adcock?

  All right, John, bring a six pack over to Figure and we'll, let's test them out in person.

• 2:44:37John Coogan?

  It's a deal. I'll talk to you soon.

• 2:44:38Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 2:44:39Brett Adcock?

  Yeah. See you guys.

• 2:44:39Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you.

• 2:44:40John Coogan?

  Have a good week. Talk to you soon. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. And let me also tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And without further ado, we have Andre from Consol, TBP and royalty in the TBP. And Andre, how you doing?

• 2:45:02Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:45:03John Coogan?

  Great to see you.

• 2:45:04Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, dude. Good to see you guys.

• 2:45:06John Coogan?

  So much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 2:45:08Jordi Hays?

  You're always, you're always with us. You're always with us. Yeah, I was gonna say, I love the stickers. It's special to have you here.

• 2:45:14John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, uh, why don't you just give us a general update on the business? Like, where, uh, walk us through some features, some customers, and then I want to hear the latest and greatest.

• 2:45:24Speaker 08

  Well, absolutely. Thanks again, guys, for having me on.

• 2:45:28John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 2:45:29Speaker 08

  Yeah, so I think, as you guys know, maybe the rest of the audience doesn't, but we are your console. We build AI agents that automate service management or employee support. We do that directly in Slack or Teams. And things like onboarding, offboarding, PTO requests, access management. You know, even telling the facilities team, there's no more napkins left in the bathroom or something.

• 2:45:54Speaker 08

  And so last week, we just launched our kind of a big product called Assistant. And Assistant helps you do tier two work. So it's not just the tier one employee support stuff. Now it's an assistant, it's an agent that helps your IT, HR, legal, finance team automate the more complex tasks that often span multiple systems. So, for example, say, you know, there's like, there's an internet outage. You can actually now ask Console to go and investigate across those different systems. So on the backend, we're plugged into your Meraki, your CrowdStrike, your Okta, your Entra, all these different systems. And Console knows how to go and pull data from different, those different tools and kind of come back with a report for you. You can also tell Assistant to go and like fix things, right?

• 2:46:39Speaker 08

  So you can say, actually go and, you know, push this update to this user's laptop or something like that.

• 2:46:45Speaker 08

  And then you can also have Console build out itself now. So with Assistant, you can tell it, hey, I want to connect into Coupa or NetSuite to pull this information. And Console will go read the docs and then build its own connector into that system and then write a workflow with it.

• 2:47:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, I was about to ask. That's basically like, it's instead of doing a feature request, just request the feature.

• 2:47:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I was gonna ask, like, it feels like years ago, you would be spending like, you know, you'd be stack ranking all the different integration requests. It would take like maybe a month or two to write each one by hand. I imagine that that was accelerated when you first built the product. But now it can be handled on the customer side, which is crazy to me.

• 2:47:27Speaker 08

  Yeah, so when we started Consolar, you know, we were like, hey, we're actually going to build this framework internally. And then our engineers are going to use AI agents to like build out integration super fast using that framework.

• 2:47:39John Coogan?

  And so that's what I would expect.

• 2:47:40Speaker 08

  Get things done in like two to three, four days.

• 2:47:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:43Speaker 08

  Um, and then I think, you know, a couple, maybe two, three months ago, we were thinking to ourselves like, can we actually just have Consol do that, you know, just iterate on itself? Um, and that's, that's where the idea came from. Um, and, and that's what it does. So you just tell it, you know, the same way I would tell an engineer, hey, like we need to build this for this customer. Now the customer can just tell Consol directly, you know, I want to pull these, you know, I will pull this data. I want to all these actions into these systems and, uh, you know, it'll build itself out to do that.

• 2:48:09John Coogan?

  How are?

• 2:48:10Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that's going to be an entirely new, basically part of every product where you'll still be able to request a feature, but at some point it's like, you're paying for the software. You should be able to adapt it to your own needs, but I haven't, no one, no one's come on the show and like, pitch that specifically as, as a company in the application layer, basically like, we're going to give you the autonomy to adapt the product to your.

• 2:48:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's crazy new paradigm.

• 2:48:37Jordi Hays?

  Which is just crazy because like every, every sat like.

• 2:48:41John Coogan?

  Every customer wants that.

• 2:48:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:43John Coogan?

  They want it immediately. They want to.

• 2:48:44Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I want to wait for support to get back or my account manager to talk to the engineers and.

• 2:48:52Speaker 08

  Yeah. Um, I think I'm sure it'll, I'm sure it'll come, you know, come about in, in other tools as well. I would say the core unlock for us was actually building out a really robust and like kind of framework interface that, you know, we can plug into. Um, I think once you have that, um, and you have, you know, the really important piece for us is this, you know, the context graph. So we have a context graph under the hood where we're ingesting data from these different systems. We actually like model out your organization. And so, um, when you tell it, hey, like go and update, you know, John's laptop to this version, or you ask it like, you know, what is John's version of his laptop? It gives you an answer. You say, go and update it. Um, you know, Consol already knows who John is, you know, we know what laptop you have, in order to find it.

• 2:49:35Speaker 08

  If you were to build that from scratch, like, you know, you might have too many lookups. It would get kind of like, you know, a little lost in the sauce. And so, um, that, that context graph is, is really important. Uh, it's really a core part of what we've built here.

• 2:49:46John Coogan?

  How are people thinking about?

• 2:49:48Jordi Hays?

  You gotta coin this, by the way.

• 2:49:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is.

• 2:49:50Jordi Hays?

  This isn't entirely, you need to, you need to, you need to.

• 2:49:53John Coogan?

  Deployed something, I don't know, forged, yeah, something. It is definitely.

• 2:49:57Speaker 08

  What should we call it, guys?

• 2:49:59John Coogan?

  I don't know, like agentically deployed engineering or something is.

• 2:50:02Jordi Hays?

  I was saying, you name it after yourself.

• 2:50:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. The Serbian method.

• 2:50:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, the Serbian.

• 2:50:08John Coogan?

  The Serbian.

• 2:50:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You gotta get, you gotta get people posting like.

• 2:50:12John Coogan?

  Something like that.

• 2:50:12Jordi Hays?

  Figma needs to incorporate the Serbian method.

• 2:50:15John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, this is it. Yeah, I think we got.

• 2:50:17Jordi Hays?

  We'll, we'll work on it.

• 2:50:18John Coogan?

  Wait, so, so, uh, talk me through the, the experience of, of onboarding to console and how people are thinking about this in terms of like net new functionality. So I'm basically increased my AI, uh, my IT spend, but it's all justified because workers are happier, we're getting more stuff done versus like ripping, replacing an existing system or not going with an alternative solution. Or like at one point in like 2013, I was scaling a startup. We had like 50 employees. We had like a, uh, an outsourced IT partner that was like one day a week and they managed like a ticketing system. It was very manual. Uh, but there was basically like a consultant who was available every once in a while, like

• 2:51:01John Coogan?

  a fractional IT person. How, how are, how are, uh, companies actually like interfacing with console and like integrating?

• 2:51:09Speaker 08

  Yeah. So I would say most IT and kind of service management teams roughly scaled linearly with headcount growth. Um, so you have like one IT person for a hundred people or maybe one to 150, maybe one to 200. Um, if you don't include Ramp, who has a very, you know, insane ratio. Um, but, but, you know, most companies are in that range. And so with console, they're able to take that, you know, they go one to like 400, one to 500. Um, so we act as ultimately like this force multiplier for, for your team. And so, you know, yes, there's, there's spend going into console, but you're actually saving on the backend of that as your, you know, we, we work with companies like Databricks, you know, uh, Cursor, Figma, Chime.

• 2:51:55Speaker 08

  You know, and these guys are growing incredibly fast and a lot of these guys actually have plans to keep their IT teams flat, you know, through this this hypergrowth phase that they're about to experience. And it's entirely because of console. And so we're seeing, we're starting to see that now, not just in IT, but you know, HR, legal, finance workflows as well, where, you know, they're just doing this employee support, where they're just answering questions that, you know, answering questions or taking action into systems that they have kind of elevated permissions into. Now you can have an agent that just does that. So they don't need to spend their time on that. They can

• 2:52:33Jordi Hays?

  What's your approach? Do you, do you just, are you the only IT person at console? Like, do you force yourself to dog food the product to the extreme? Or are you, what's the?

• 2:52:44Speaker 08

  We, we take a bit of a crazy approach here where everyone has full admin access to console and everyone is encouraged to build their own workflows out.

• 2:52:54Jordi Hays?

  That's probably smarter. You want everybody using the product.

• 2:52:57Speaker 08

  At some point, we probably need to pull it back. I think our head of security was complaining last week. He's like, hey, we've got too many salespeople in here.

• 2:53:04Jordi Hays?

  I can imagine.

• 2:53:06Speaker 08

  But like, you know, we've got, we actually have like our, I was actually just talking to our office manager. We're going to have console just do our dinner orders as we do dinner in the office every day. And, you know, with assistant, now she can build out her own workflows. She says, hey, I want to, you know, ping me every, every week at 4:00 PM. Ask, give me the options. I'll select it and just like go and order it into, I think she's using like ECater. So not an integration we would have built out if, if, you know, on our own, but I think with assistant, it can do that. And so, you know, our head of security, actually, he was just, we, he was presenting a use case to us the other week. He rolled out CrowdStrike on our devices. And he did it in like 40 minutes instead of, I think, what he said, you know, would have taken him like a day or two.

• 2:53:50Speaker 08

  And he just, he did that entirely through assistant. He was just, hey, I want to, you know, plug into these laptops. It went, it understood, hey, you need to download these two binaries if you're going to deploy it on these versions of Mac OS. Here's re-uploaded. Here's the script you write. Okay. Do you want me to push it? Yes. And just deployed it. So I think there's, there's kind of a lot, there's more use cases than we can imagine. And so I think we work closely with our customers where we're almost like just trying to show them the technology. And then I think they tell us what they, what they want to build.

• 2:54:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, there's so many startups. I'm sure a lot of a lot of founders in the audience have have felt this before where you're the CEO and you set up the, you know, the all the IT systems and then actually offboarding is like the super admin is extremely difficult. I actually, I actually fully lost my Amazon account at a previous company because it was so deeply integrated into the company that they just couldn't figure out how to change the super admin. I was like, just take my, just take my Amazon account. And so I just don't have Audible anymore or like Amazon Prime. I need to set up like a new account. I basically just declare like Amazon bankruptcy because I was just the admin for like a decade and things just like built up and I try and give people the other password. Anyway.

• 2:55:01Jordi Hays?

  How are you, how are you, how do you, uh, how do you try to, um, how have you been trying to model like the like overall opportunity for console? Cause you're still early stage. So at this point, it's just like, let's get as many great companies as we can on the products. But then, you know, five, 10 years from now at later, later rounds or stages, you'll be kind of, you'll probably be asked that question more seriously. But how do you think about it? Because you are at this moment, like selling against what historically was like the kind of, I don't know, labor TAM to some degree where, um, but the other side of that, the interesting thing is there's a lot of companies that would like use console

• 2:55:42Jordi Hays?

  that never would have had a dedicated IT person. And so it's not entirely, it's not just replacing people. It's like bringing a kind of capability to, to a company. But how are you thinking about the, the overall category?

• 2:55:55Speaker 08

  Yeah, absolutely. So there's, there's a couple of things I think that are, that are going on at once. I think the first one is, you know, when we, when we look at IT today, it's very much a reactive role. It's very much a cost center because I think we've just, it's kind of like escaped us a little bit, right? In the eighties and nineties, IT was actually an enablement center, right? You were bringing in technology or deploying, you know, giving people computers or, you know, deploying Wi-Fi and not Wi-Fi, but internet, uh, you know, giving them email and so on. That's like a force multiplier. We've done too much of that. We have too many SaaS apps. There's all this sprawl. And now all your, you kind of, the, the team is just managing that, right? They're just doing support.

• 2:56:40Speaker 08

  And so with console, the way we think about it is we're going to bring our teams back to kind of what it was like in the 90s, where you can actually have this agent handling, you know, all of the, the, the ticket management for those, those simple systems and those, those kind of basic requests. Now you have assistant that can go and do more complex work across the, the enterprise. And the value there is now you can do 10 times as much as you were going to do in, you know, in that year. And, you know, if you think of, you talk to any company, no one will tell you, oh yeah, like our IT team is kind of always on top of it, or IT systems are, you know, perfectly set up. There's always something kind of a little bit lagging behind and it's because they're just constantly drowning.

• 2:57:23Speaker 08

  And so console allows them to, to kind of focus on the more strategic and kind of be more outcome based. And so I think when you think of it that way, um, you know, that the TAM is actually all of the work that, you know, all these companies would love to do, and they just don't have the, the employee headcount or the cost really, the, the, to, to, to go and spend on it. And so that's, that's one big piece. The other one is we're actually just ripping out, replacing, you know, tools like ServiceNow and, you know, your service desk, Fresh Service and kind of replacing with a more AI native solution. And so we, we expect that to, to kind of scale as, as you onboard more, as, as companies become more digital native, right? They, they have more SaaS.

• 2:58:04Jordi Hays?

  You're saying you're the SaaSpocalypse.

• 2:58:08Jordi Hays?

  You're flaming, you're flaming the fires of the SaaSpocalypse.

• 2:58:13Speaker 08

  I didn't say that.

• 2:58:15Jordi Hays?

  I said that.

• 2:58:17Speaker 08

  There you go.

• 2:58:17Jordi Hays?

  Very, very cool. Yeah, it's great, great to get the update. That, uh, yeah, and, and we're going to work on this coinage. Go back with the team, brainstorm a little bit. You tell us, you tell us what, and we'll start asking every company, are you guys using the Serban method?

• 2:58:30Speaker 08

  Yeah, we'll figure it out. It's good, it's good. Yeah. I love it. I'll run it by my head of growth. We'll see what she says. Fantastic.

• 2:58:37Jordi Hays?

  Good. Great to see you.

• 2:58:38Speaker 08

  Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks, guys. Have a great day.

• 2:58:41John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Um, there's a bunch of news that we need to run through before we head out. Artemis 2 is launching and Calli has it at 64% chance before April 2nd of this year. We're going to the moon. Four people are going to the moon. Everyday astronaut says, "I'm honestly shocked at how the general public has no idea Artemis 2 is taking humans out to the moon and will be the furthest humans have ever flown. Every non-space nerd I've talked to has no idea. We gotta get people stoked. This is what I'm gonna be writing about tomorrow. I want to deep dive this."

• 2:59:16Jordi Hays?

  Why is no one talking about Artemis 2?

• 2:59:18John Coogan?

  Why is no one talking about the moon? We're going. NASA is set to launch four astronauts around the moon. The deepest human spaceflight since the final Apollo lunar landing on 1972. And there's a bunch of goals. So, you can go track that and we will talk more about that tomorrow. And of course, bring you a whole bunch of other news and interviews tomorrow. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com.

• 2:59:46Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor.

• 2:59:49John Coogan?

  It's been an honor.

• 2:59:50Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor to be here with you guys today.

• 2:59:52John Coogan?

  It was a rough couple of days. It was a rough couple of days being away.

• 2:59:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:55John Coogan?

  But we're back.

• 2:59:55Jordi Hays?

  We're incredibly back. It's gonna be a great week and have a wonderful evening.

• 3:00:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, we will see you tomorrow. Goodbye.

• 3:00:03Jordi Hays?

  Throwing smoke.

• 3:00:04John Coogan?

  Throwing smoke. Okay, goodbye everyone.

• 3:00:07Jordi Hays?

  See you tomorrow, folks.

• 3:00:07John Coogan?

  Goodbye. We will be back when the smoke clears.

• 3:00:10Jordi Hays?

  Wonderful day.

• 3:00:11John Coogan?

  Goodbye.