Verizon vs Salesforce, Blue Origin's Test, Robot Marathon | Signüll, Ethan Ding, Matt McKinney, Errik Anderson, Pippa Lamb & James Wise

(00:27) - Verizon vs Salesforce (25:23) - Blue Origin's Test (30:03) - Robot Marathon (32:59) - Signull is an anonymous technologist and entrepreneur focused on integrating agentic AI into consumer software. He discusses the development of an AI-driven home screen replacement for iPhones, aiming to transform static interfaces into dynamic, personalized experiences by leveraging ambient AI. He also addresses the challenges of monetization, considering ad-supported models, and reflects on the complexities of maintaining anonymity in the tech industry. (55:03) - Ethan Ding, co-founder and CEO of TextQL, a startup specializing in AI-driven data analytics, discusses the company's inception in late 2022 and its evolution in addressing enterprise data challenges. He highlights the complexities large organizations face with fragmented data systems and the substantial costs associated with migrating to new platforms. Ding emphasizes TextQL's mission to create solutions that seamlessly integrate with existing infrastructures, enabling efficient analytics without the need for costly migrations. (01:04:14) - Matt McKinney, co-founder and CEO of Loop, leverages his background in data science and engineering to revolutionize supply chain operations. He discusses how Loop utilizes AI to automate back-office processes, such as accounting and payment services, addressing issues like the 30% error rate in supply chain invoices. By organizing and analyzing complex, unstructured data, Loop enhances efficiency for clients, including 20% of the Fortune 100, enabling them to better serve their customers. (01:13:01) - Errik Anderson, founder and CEO of Alloy Therapeutics, discusses the company's role in providing biotech infrastructure to support drug discovery and development. He highlights the integration of AI and machine learning in accelerating drug development, emphasizing the importance of combining in silico simulations with wet lab experiments to validate findings. Anderson also notes the trend of big pharma acquiring innovations from smaller companies to replenish their pipelines as patents expire, underscoring the industry's need for efficient and collaborative drug development processes. (01:29:06) - Pippa Lamb is a Partner at Sweet Capital, an early-stage venture fund established by the founders of King.com (Candy Crush). In the conversation, she highlights the UK's robust AI ecosystem, emphasizing the country's deep R&D capabilities and the emergence of grassroots innovations from local universities. Lamb also notes the trend of European entrepreneurs relocating to London, reinforcing the city's status as a hub for ambitious founders. James Wise is a partner at Balderton Capital, a leading European venture firm, where he focuses on investing in early-stage technology companies across fintech, marketplaces, and software. He is known for backing high-growth startups and working closely with founders on scaling products and building category-defining businesses. (01:41:48) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions 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.

• 0:01Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVBN.

• 0:03John Coogan?

  Today's Monday, April 20th, 2026. We are live from the TVBN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We have a great show for you today, folks. Absolutely incredible addition of the Wall Street Journal. Over the weekend, I saw these hit the app, but they're in print today, Monday, April 20th. There's two articles from two tech CEOs that run companies that are almost identically valued. Salesforce is, I think, 150 billion. Verizon's 190 billion. They're right in that sweet spot.

• 0:41Jordi Hays?

  And I'm assuming they have like the exact same point of view, same market outlook.

• 0:46John Coogan?

  They have exactly opposite points of view. And I thought it was, I thought it was interesting seeing what, what is a victim of the SaaS apocalypse have to say about AI? And then what does someone who is the most resilient to this SaaS apocalypse have to say? And potentially is like, "Levien, I want some of the drama. I want the smoke." And so Mark Benioff is who I'm talking about at Salesforce. So he says, "The software bears are all wrong about Salesforce." We had a bear hat, but it was, it was too terrifying. So, so we skip it. But he says, "People think we have our back against the wall, but customers aren't replacing offerings with AI.

• 1:29John Coogan?

  They aren't replacing Salesforce with AI. They aren't ripping it out." Of course, everyone will say, "Well, yet." But let's dig into Mark Benioff's argument and how he's processing the SaaS apocalypse and what he's going to do about it.

• 1:41Jordi Hays?

  Crazy opening. Mark Benioff has some problems. His enterprise software company Salesforce is the biggest name in a category that Wall Street thinks may get decimated by artificial intelligence. Its business model is centered on selling software to large companies on a per-employee basis, but many of those firms are expected to downsize as AI agents become increasingly proficient at performing real-world tasks. It's a daunting double bind, and it isn't even the worst-case scenario. Salesforce stock is down a mere 28% year-to-date. The hardest-hit software-as-a-service companies are down about twice that much on similar fears. But Benioff thinks the bears have it wrong about the SaaS apocalypse thesis generally and especially about Salesforce. AI, he says, is making Salesforce more valuable to its customers than ever.

• 2:26Jordi Hays?

  Leading AI labs couldn't replace what Salesforce offers even if they wanted to. And they would rather partner with them for now. Anyway, Norco.

• 2:35Jordi Hays?

  He's like, I dare you. I I dare you.

• 2:37John Coogan?

  He's.

• 2:38Jordi Hays?

  Norco customers. Uh, I I wish I wish we had Benioff on right now.

• 2:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44Jordi Hays?

  It's it's it's a joy to to speak with him. But continuing, Norco customers easily vibe code their own sales management management software that could compete with Salesforce on security, compliance and other vital features. People think we have our back against the wall when in fact, the opportunity has never been greater, Benioff said in an interview. An early investor in Anthropic, Salesforce has been developing and pushing its own AI tools for years. By the end of this year, it plans to unveil a new AI platform that automatically studies its users and takes actions on their behalf. Codename Agent Albert.

• 3:17Jordi Hays?

  It's kind of cool to put agent in the name instead of just Albert. Agent.

• 3:22John Coogan?

  Well, they had they had Einstein, right? So Albert Einstein is their whole shtick here.

• 3:27Jordi Hays?

  Agent Albert is the culmination of an effort that began three years ago when Benioff galvanized. When Benioff galvanized by the debut of ChatGPT instituted a standing Saturday meeting to accelerate Salesforce's AI efforts.

• 3:42Jordi Hays?

  Saturday stand up everyone.

• 3:44John Coogan?

  An earlier flagship product of that push, Agent Force has been somewhat slow to gain traction. Launched in 2024, it is used by 23,000 customers of a total base of 150,000. So what is that a little little under 20% of the customer base is using agents? They're building.

• 4:04Jordi Hays?

  Remember, Jason Lemkin came on the show and he was like, I use Agent Force. It's solid.

• 4:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:09Jordi Hays?

  Like he's like, it won us back a customer that like we weren't reaching out to. And it like, it made me money.

• 4:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:15Jordi Hays?

  So he he was an Agent Force enthusiast.

• 4:18John Coogan?

  And so Salesforce's yearly revenue growth at 10% is down somewhat from recent years. But interestingly, the the deceleration in in Salesforce's revenue growth started back in 2022, maybe even a little bit earlier. If we scroll down on this on this. You can see back in 2012, they were growing 36%. Then as recently as 2020, they were growing 28.7%. There was acceleration in 2022 to 24%, but then 2023, 18%, 2024, 11%, 2025, 8%. And then we're actually seeing some re-acceleration this year from 8.7% to 9.6% to 10.8%.

• 5:00John Coogan?

  And so it feels like definitely too soon for the SaaS apocalypse narrative to show up in the actual revenue growth rates of these SaaS companies. I pulled together the recent earnings from a variety of public cloud software names, and they're all still growing, which you would expect. I mean, of course, you want to be growing fast, and there's a lot of things, and there's the long-term durability of the value of the stock that actually informs enterprise value today. But we're certainly not seeing, like, okay, there's so much churn at GitLab, for example, because people are forking it because it's open source and vibe coding on top of it,

• 5:44John Coogan?

  and they don't need to pay GitLab, that you would expect GitLab's revenue to actually be shrinking. It's not. GitLab is growing at 23%, Adobe's at 12%, PagerDuty 2.7%, little low, but UiPath at 14%, Box is at 9%, Asana is at 9%. Asana feels like textbook, like you could just vibe code this. It's a Kanban board, a task list, but it's still growing. Zoom at 5.3%, Snowflake's growing 30%, Workday's at 14.5%, HubSpot's at 20%, Datadog's at 29%, Cloudflare 34%, Monday.com 25%. Like, there is really, really strong revenue growth across the SaaS category. Of course, the expectations have been very high.

• 6:29John Coogan?

  So when there's a readjustment in expectations, you see a sell-off in the market. But this idea that the companies aren't growing anymore because they're being replaced so rapidly, that certainly hasn't taken hold just yet. So, partner at... Partner at Salesforce, investor Chicago Capital, has been impressed with some of its recent moves. But what Salesforce really needs, he says, is positive word of mouth from clients talking up the value they derive from its AI products like Jason Lemkin. They need to show revolutionary jumps. Benioff has said Salesforce was destined to be an AI-first company as far back as 2014, when it's launched its AI research unit. I didn't realize that AI research unit all the way back then, but it makes sense just for like

• 7:11John Coogan?

  tagging and classifying different records inside the CRM. Still, it was caught flat footed by the arrival of high-functioning chatbots in the form of ChatGPT.

• 7:20Jordi Hays?

  Customer superintelligence.

• 7:22John Coogan?

  Customer superintelligence. I mean, this is, it is, it is funny because a lot of this, the agentic enterprise, it is a little like boring and it's not as like sexy as some of the more like crazy sci-fi scenarios. But in terms of just, you know, incrementally improving the value that is delivered to the customers, it seems like things are doing okay. Early reviews were tepid, though. Customers complained of having to spend half their time preparing data so the AI could understand it, limiting the platform's effectiveness. To help fix the problems, Salesforce built a layer into its tech stack that automatically pulls in customer data from external sources and purchased a string of companies that include firms specializing in data management and AI-powered sales. At education company Pearson, agents now autonomously handle queries about order statuses, refunds, and

• 8:07John Coogan?

  lost access codes for its customers. This has increased the percentage of customer questions that don't involve human interaction by 40%. While Agent Force, where Agent Force has been lacking in its addressing complex customer problems and those require human touch, David Wembsley, chief digital officer at Pandora Jewelry, said Agent Force hadn't been able to reliably recommend products on its own based on the vague context the customers share through its website, like, my wife likes dogs, what should I buy her? That's such a funny, funny question, but I mean, I guess the natural text, natural language interface should be able to find you jewelry based on a love of dogs, although I think that a lot of people who are dog lovers might have different tastes that appeal to their jewelry.

• 8:52Jordi Hays?

  Why not just get her a dog or multiple dogs?

• 8:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 8:57Jordi Hays?

  So how does this, how does, how does Salesforce's view compare to the Verizon CEO?

• 9:03John Coogan?

  So, so Verizon has a new CEO. His name is Dan Schulman. I don't think he's related to John Schulman, the co-founder of OpenAI and Thinking Machines, but he is stepping into the AI debate. He says for, the Wall Street Journal says, "For a big company CEO with big AI ambitions, Verizon Communications, Dan Schulman doesn't pull punches about the pain the technology could unleash on America's workforce. Just months into the job, he has predicted 20 to 30% unemployment within the next two to five years," which is staggering, staggering. And I can put that into some context. He says, "He warns that advancements in humanoid robots could upend the manual labor jobs still

• 9:46John Coogan?

  seen as safe today, and he has pushed for more education and reskilling to help workers adapt to intensifying tech disruption."

• 9:54Jordi Hays?

  Okay, put this into context for me.

• 9:56John Coogan?

  So, uh, uh, he's, uh, so, uh, this is an insane.

• 10:01Jordi Hays?

  And, and yes, and so this is like potentially the most aggressive stance.

• 10:06John Coogan?

  I mean, there are.

• 10:07Jordi Hays?

  Of anyone who's even, even Dario, so Dario had the clip going viral this weekend. It was a clip from last year, talking about risks to entry level white collar job.

• 10:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:17Jordi Hays?

  And Dario, which is like, you know, I would say like on the frontier around being concerned around AI job loss, was not calling for 30% unemployment.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  Well, no, so, so the headline number, he says 50%, but he's.

• 10:31Jordi Hays?

  To entry level white collar work.

• 10:33John Coogan?

  Entry level white collar work. And that sounds really bad until you actually dig in and you realize that America only has five to seven million entry level white collar workers and the US labor force is 170 million people. And so if the Dario prediction came true, the overall unemployment rate would sit somewhere between six and nine percent, which is not great, and it's obviously deserving of intervention. But it's far from the twenty to thirty percent outlined by Dan Schulman. And it wouldn't even be, even if the Dario scenario, fifty percent of early-stage white-collar work unemployment that happens, you're still below COVID, below the Great Depression.

• 11:17John Coogan?

  And I think that there's a whole bunch of government interventions that could offset that pretty quickly.

• 11:25John Coogan?

  Like twenty to thirty percent is truly like the do-nothing, the government never engages. There's never any sort of incentive to keep hiring people. And there's this like fast takeoff in AGI and also humanoids, which I think people are worried about. But if you look at the deployment rate of self-driving cars, people have been saying that all the truck drivers were going to go out of a job. And this is a very, very slow takeoff. The number of self-driving cars on the road is well below one percent of overall cars on the road still. And this is just the case across the board. I was listening to a podcast with someone who was very worried about unemployment internationally.

• 12:05John Coogan?

  And he was saying that AI could upend the Philippines because the Philippines does a lot of customer service.

• 12:13Jordi Hays?

  Which we haven't seen at all yet.

• 12:14John Coogan?

  No, none of this is showing up in the unemployment data. It's not showing up in US unemployment data yet. I mean, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be aware of this stuff, but it's certainly not true. Just like the SaaS apocalypse is not showing up in revenue yet. You know, AI unemployment is not showing up in any of the employment statistics yet. So, but this individual was on a podcast that was saying that something along the lines of, you know, AI could be devastating to the Philippines economy because the Philippines is very dependent on customer service. And the stat he quoted was that ninety percent of the Philippines economy is based around customer service and customer support and handling people on the phone. And I was like, ninety percent? That seems really, really high.

• 12:58John Coogan?

  Like, they have to do other things in the Philippines because, sure, you go to work at your... At your customer service job, but then you go home and you buy food and you live in an apartment. There must be real estate agents. There must be home builders. There must be people who work on roads. There must be doctors. There must be lawyers. Like, like, an economy requires more than just like a single, like, it's 90% feels like incredibly concentrated. So I looked it up and I was like, how, how big of an issue is, how big of a, of a, of an industry is customer service in the Philippines? Like, is it 90% that feels high? Maybe it's 50, maybe it's 40. It was like 6%, 7%. It's really, really small. Now, it's like huge in terms of like, you know.

• 13:41Jordi Hays?

  You don't want it to go away.

• 13:43John Coogan?

  You don't want it to go away, of course. And you don't, and, and you do want, you know, you want a number of industries that are flourishing. And that is probably more concentrated than many other countries. There's probably many, it might be, it might be the country with the highest percentage of customer service intensivity in the economy, but it's not 90% of their economy. And so there's a little bit of this, like, people don't seem to go back to the raw numbers. Because if you go back and you try and understand, like, okay, what would 30% unemployment really look like? Well, that's like, you know, Great Depression level with no intervention, no, no action from the Fed, no action from the government. And it seems a little bit, a little bit crazy. So I can't tell if this

• 14:25John Coogan?

  is just like saying the biggest number, but there, there's a little bit of that going on here where if you want to grab headlines, and you go out and you say, okay, well, someone predicted, you know, 5% unemployment, I'm going to predict 10%, and then I'll jump to the front, forefront of the discussion. That seems to be a way to get earned media. But, I mean, let's unpack a little bit more of his discussion because we, we will see if there's a way to steel man his take around 20 to 30% unemployment. Said, "Coached in the blunt AI talk is a warning for other CEOs. Be candid about the coming disruption or risk a public backlash." It's a very difficult time and everyone knows this, Schulman said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

• 15:07Jordi Hays?

  And I don't, I don't even, I don't even agree with that stance. If you, everyone that's being candid or even talking about it is immediately getting backlash anyway.

• 15:19John Coogan?

  So I think being authentic, being realistic, telling the truth as best you can is key. That belief, he said, is why Verizon created a $20 million career transition retraining fund for the age of AI.

• 15:31Jordi Hays?

  He's like, look.

• 15:32John Coogan?

  Laying off 2,000 workers.

• 15:34Jordi Hays?

  We are gonna have greater unemployment than in the Great Depression. And I'm gonna, you know, he's taking the piece of duct tape.

• 15:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:40Jordi Hays?

  You know, there's water pouring out.

• 15:41John Coogan?

  I know exactly what you're talking about.

• 15:44Jordi Hays?

  And to be clear, to be clear, this is not our view. Like, this is not our view at all.

• 15:48John Coogan?

  No, but I mean, at the same time, like, they did layoffs. They probably hired a lot during COVID and beyond. And they, and a $20 million career transition retraining fund is great.

• 16:00Jordi Hays?

  It's a good start.

• 16:00John Coogan?

  That is good. Like, this is a good thing. But he says, the warning, this is from the Journal, "The warnings are a departure from the messaging of other public company CEOs, many of whom have been bullish about AI's potential to unlock new levels of growth, but demure on or even reject the idea of job losses. A lot of people are saying AI is coming, we're gonna run out of jobs. It's exactly the opposite, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said last month, pointing out that every other technological advancement has brought more productivity and more prosperity. And there is some new data showing that productivity might be climbing, which is very exciting if the, all the economists wind up developing a consensus around that. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is similarly sanguine about potential job losses to AI, though some

• 16:45John Coogan?

  roles will be replaced, there will be other jobs created. In the short term, though, a cavalcade of companies from Snap to Amazon have invoked AI or desire to find efficiencies as they slash large portions of their workforces. Block, which cut nearly half of its predict, half of its staff, predicted other companies would soon follow suit. A new Boston Consulting Group report predicts that AI will shape roughly half of US jobs in two to three years, and that up to 15% of jobs could eventually be eliminated outright." Again, that's, you know, reshaped and eliminated does, you know, would be offset by the creation of new jobs. So even in this BCG report, you're probably looking at like, again,

• 17:30John Coogan?

  Maybe a transition of like six, seven, eight, nine, 10% unemployment while there's an adjustment period. Many, many Americans fear that will happen too. In a Quinnipiac University survey of 1,400 adults, 55% said they felt AI would bring more harm than good, up from 44% in a poll last year. And so the, the, the average American is dooming for sure. CEOs are not thinking about this the right way, said Bill George of the, the former CEO of Medtronic, who is now an executive fellow at Harvard Business School. Too many, he said, are focusing on productivity instead of laying out a strategy for how companies can find new business models to grow, or on how workers can best use AI. They should

• 18:12John Coogan?

  be very candid with them and paint a big picture. Showman's big picture also included sweeping job cuts, the 13,000 layoffs he announced shortly after his appointment of as CEO in October were Verizon's largest ever, but not, but necessary to make Verizon more efficient, he said. All together, he's seeking to cut nine billion of costs. Verizon said it, its layoffs were not related to AI. The, the carrier was too hierarchical, too bureaucratic, too way too process oriented as opposed to outcomes oriented.

• 18:44Jordi Hays?

  And the CEO saying, this is already happening in a big way. But the layoffs we're doing are just that we're bloated.

• 18:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. So Verizon has 90,000 employees and they laid off 13,000. So maybe like a little over 10% riff. Verizon's a weird one because the stock is basically completely flat over the last, it's actually up 15% year to date and it is incredibly stable stock. And it's also just like, should not be a victim of the SaaS apocalypse because they own spectrum allocation.

• 19:17Jordi Hays?

  Cell towers.

• 19:18John Coogan?

  They own cell towers. Exactly. And that's just.

• 19:20Jordi Hays?

  Or they, or they have like very, very long-term lease agreements.

• 19:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I mean, they, I, there is, there is the case that like, you know, if Starlink direct to cell gets really good. Even, I mean, even Elon saying like, it's not gonna be that good inside buildings. Like, it's pretty difficult to get to a point where all of a sudden, there's a new technology that's just wildly disruptive. Like, maybe if you're like somehow transitioning from Starlink when you're outside to Wi-Fi when you're inside, like, you could cut the cord with Verizon, but that just feels so, so far away for something that is like a pretty key utility in most people's lives, like their water bill or electricity bill, like their, their, their phone internet bill is like pretty, uh, it's like one of the, one of the, probably the, the least elastic

• 20:08John Coogan?

  things, like they will just keep paying and, and, and stick around. Now, they might move to Sprint or AT&T, and there's gonna be some competitive dynamic. It is an oligopoly after all, but, uh, it, it doesn't seem like there's going to be some massive disruption moment where people are vibe coding their own cell carriers necessarily. So, uh, in meetings, he has repeatedly told Verizon staff they must embrace AI, describing it as core to the company's future. He, he used it himself to comb through some 8,000 responses after-

• 20:36Jordi Hays?

  This is the future, trust me. I used it once.

• 20:43John Coogan?

  Schulman's embrace of AI goes deeper than cost cutting. He envisions a company wholly reshaped by the technology, from improved customer service to more personalized options for consumers. And he has encouraged staffers to talk to their children about AI at the dinner table. In one all hands, Schulman recommended that staff ask AI to write their obituary so to see how the technology works and how it frames their lives. Just dig your own grave.

• 21:10Jordi Hays?

  He's literally, the title of this article-

• 21:13John Coogan?

  He's so doom filled.

• 21:15Jordi Hays?

  He's saying, "AI is coming for your job and everyone knows it."

• 21:18John Coogan?

  They're ready to hear it.

• 21:19Jordi Hays?

  Intact, intact. We're starting to, uh, you know, um, every company's adopting this technology at a rapid rate. But, uh, everyone's like, hey, this, you know, basically like jobs aren't tasks, right? This sort of narrative is building, like, we need to figure out how to, um, it, it's, it's, we've, we've built a bunch of very useful tools.

• 21:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:41Jordi Hays?

  And they are going to have powerful effects in our economy.

• 21:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:44Jordi Hays?

  But- We have to kind of change the narrative around this because like a fear-based approach is not working. And meanwhile, Dan comes in, he's like, AI is coming for your job. Everyone knows it. Write your obituary.

• 22:00John Coogan?

  Write your obituary.

• 22:01Jordi Hays?

  It's so not, so not helpful. And, and, and they're not even doing AI-related job cuts.

• 22:08John Coogan?

  No.

• 22:09Jordi Hays?

  So I just don't understand. I don't understand this whole press cycle.

• 22:13John Coogan?

  I love, I love, he just comes in and just immediately starts blackpilling. It's so wild to just get this job and immediately start blackpilling.

• 22:23Jordi Hays?

  Like, do you think this is a setup for, for a much, like, deeper layoff than they've done historically?

• 22:29John Coogan?

  I don't know. I mean, it's possible, but I, like, I think that they would need to do some serious, like, AI tooling and implementation and actually figure out, like, I, I mean, I would be surprised about those 90,000, like, I want to know more about the breakdown of those 90,000 employees or 80,000 employees. Like, what are they actually all doing? Which ones are actually just sitting there being like, I just do tasks all day long. Like, form comes in, I type it into an Excel sheet, and I email it to somebody. Like, that type of job, yeah, that's probably going to be automated in some way, and that person will have to find a different way to make a play inside the organization. But for a lot of, but for a lot of the folks at Verizon, I imagine that they're,

• 23:13John Coogan?

  that they're working on bigger projects than just, you know, just throwing, throwing tons and tons of people at a single problem. At the same time, who knows? Maybe, maybe it's 50, maybe half the company is customer support reps. I don't know. He has invited staffers to experiment with AI by writing poems to their loved ones. Some employees responded by, by using AI to write poems for Schulman, and they weren't half bad, he said. Like it or not, we live in the age of AI. I, I happen to like it. I agree with that. It's like we all wanted to live in the Renaissance, or like, when fire was first invented. How cool would that be? He continued. We're in that stage. We're not just appreciating it for what it could be. That's a very optimistic take. I like that. I

• 23:55John Coogan?

  like that sentence. That's good. Some prominent CEOs are starting to join Schulman in acknowledging. AI has potential for disruption. Others have also recently sounded warnings. There's real risk of artificial intelligence could widen wealth inequality. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink wrote in his annual letters shareholders last month. Jamie Dimon recently told investors that AI's productivity gains could lead to other derivative effects. It may happen faster than we can adjust to it. Schuman said AI may reach human level capability known in the industry as AGI by the end of next year on the early side of most industry predictions. So, end of 2027 for AGI, isn't that crazy? I mean, Sequoia has an event right now, AI Ascend, the whole keynote slide is AGI is

• 24:40John Coogan?

  here. And so, people are going back and forth on that. But I think, I think it's not, it's not that crazy to imagine, you know, very, very human level AI by the end of 2027. That doesn't seem impossible whatsoever. The question is just like, how much will this be additive? How will the government respond? What will the actual effect on the labor market be? And I think people are digging into that a lot right now. There's a good podcast on this, on Odd Lots with Alex Imas. He's a professor at University of Chicago focusing on economics and applied AI. Highly recommend you go check that out if you're interested in going deeper into the labor market.

• 25:22John Coogan?

  Well, moving on, Blue Origin rocket stumbles on first commercial mission. AST Space Mobile, who we've talked about a few times here. Jeff Bezos's rocket company said the satellite from ASTS was deployed into an incorrect orbit. And so, a little bit of a setback for them. I think the stock traded down in the news a bit. The launch of the company's New Glenn rocket started smoothly with the vehicle shooting into the sky from the Blue Origin launch site in Cape Canaveral, Florida. During the flight, New Glenn's third ever, the vehicle's huge booster returned safely to Earth. Only, a feat only Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceX have ever achieved with orbital rockets.

• 26:06John Coogan?

  But the mission later suffered a mishap. A satellite the rocket was carrying into orbit for AST Space Mobile, a company building cellular broadband network in space, wasn't deployed correctly. In a post on X, Blue Origin said its rocket delivered AST's satellite into an incorrect location in space. The payload was placed into an off nominal orbit. Adding that teams were assessing what happened. AST said the satellite's altitude was too low to sustain operations and that it will be taken out of orbit. The cost is expected to be covered under its insurance policy. The stumble comes as Blue Origin works to ramp up flights with new gladiators.

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I saw some of the AST retail army saying like, don't worry, keep holding.

• 26:51John Coogan?

  Keep holding.

• 26:51Jordi Hays?

  It's covered under insurance.

• 26:53John Coogan?

  It seems like-

• 26:54Jordi Hays?

  Very, very, very unfortunate, but somewhat-

• 26:58John Coogan?

  It seems like it's rebounded a little bit.

• 26:59Jordi Hays?

  Somewhat to be expected, right? As Blue Origin like figures out their commercial business.

• 27:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, it traded on like 16% overnight, but it's down just 6% today. So a little bit of a rebound.

• 27:10Jordi Hays?

  And we got a fantastic video of the booster landing that we can pull up here.

• 27:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:18Jordi Hays?

  Courtesy of Jeff.

• 27:19John Coogan?

  Tyler, you dug into why doesn't ASTS just launch on SpaceX?

• 27:25Speaker 02

  Well, so there are two things. I think one thing I thought was interesting is like there's this whole press cycle about it like, oh, it was like a failure of a launch or something. But this was like happened a number of times before, like SpaceX in 2024, there was Falcon 9 that that kind of the upper stage like failed and then a few like Starlink satellites.

• 27:44John Coogan?

  Just went into the wrong orbit.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically. And then they're too low and then they just get burned up.

• 27:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, companies don't typically like to talk about when they send something into space and lose it, basically, but that happens too. I remember at the beginning of last year, there was a launch for a venture-backed space company and, you know, they basically put a satellite up and almost immediately lost contact with it. So it's not unusual, unfortunate, but they'll be back.

• 28:12John Coogan?

  In 2016, SpaceX blew up a Facebook rocket, which was crazy.

• 28:20John Coogan?

  Mark Zuckerberg laments the loss of internet.org satellite. The Facebook CEO said he was deeply disappointed in the explosion of Falcon 9 rocket carrying satellite intended to provide internet coverage to parts of Africa. So, writing on his Facebook page, Zuckerberg said, "As I'm here in Africa, I'm deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX's launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent. The accidental explosion of the Falcon 9 rocket early Thursday morning," this is back in 2016, referred to as an anomaly by SpaceX engineer, "destroyed both the rocket and its cargo, the AMO6 satellite, which Facebook had planned to deploy to provide internet coverage to

• 29:05John Coogan?

  parts of Africa. Fortunately, we have developed other technologies like Aquila that will connect people as well. We remain committed to our mission of connecting everyone, and we will keep working until everyone has the opportunities this satellite would have provided." Contrary to Zuckerberg's description, the satellite did not belong to Facebook. In October 2015, Facebook partnered with Etoile Sat, I can't pronounce that, a French satellite company, to lease the broadband capability of the AMO6, which was built by Israeli company Spacecom. According to Space News, which reviewed Spacecom filings with Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, the joint lease cost $95 million over five years. So, this like $100 million satellite just blew up on the pad.

• 29:50John Coogan?

  So, lots of different setbacks, but there is one technology that is not having setbacks, which is robotic marathoners. And there's new This is crazy. There's a crazy video, I don't know if the video relates to this, but a Chinese robot beat a human best time in a half marathon. After a stumble, tech companies are making progress to fixing humanoid runners' malfunctions. A year ago in Beijing, humanoid robot half marathon race, the first runner to cross the finish line took more than two and a half hours. In this year's event, the champion beat the fastest human ever. Sunday's race demonstrated China's rapid progress in humanoid robotics.

• 30:34John Coogan?

  A field American tech leaders, including Nvidia's Jensen Wong and Tesla's Elon Musk say is the next big thing.

• 30:40Jordi Hays?

  This video is pretty wild.

• 30:41John Coogan?

  Is this the actual runner?

• 30:43Jordi Hays?

  This is one that's failing.

• 30:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 30:44Jordi Hays?

  Didn't didn't make the half marathon, but you can see there's dry ice spilling out of the back.

• 30:50John Coogan?

  Oh, they've been cooling it off? Interesting.

• 30:53Jordi Hays?

  Which is like very cyberpunk.

• 30:55John Coogan?

  That's crazy that you have to load it up with dry ice as well. I like that. About 220 yards from the finish line, the five foot five lightning slammed into a barricade and collapsed. The red and black robot managed to get back on its feet with help from humans and ran across the finish line in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, according to state media. I feel like if you fall down and you're human in a half marathon and humans help you get up, that's still fair game. You're still good as long as you finish. Uh, this probably still counts. Uh, last month, the humanoid, the human, the actual human world record holder from Uganda, uh, finished in 57 minutes and 20 seconds in Lisbon, Portugal. Lightning and two siblings from honor swept the podium.

• 31:38John Coogan?

  Uh, all three navigated the course without human control, excluding the one time help the champion got. The race penalized the completion times of those relying on constant human remote control, including one that finished the race in under 50 minutes, but it was teleoperated. Uh, the Tiankong Ultra, which was developed by Beijing based lab ex humanoid and won last year's race more than halved its finish time. This year clocking in at one hour and 15 minutes without any human intervention. That is pretty impressive. Like they're, they, they, they cut the time in half in just one year.

• 32:11Jordi Hays?

  Uh, wow.

• 32:12John Coogan?

  13 mile course included more complex terrain than last year, such as slopes, narrow passages and sharp turns, testing robots abilities.

• 32:20Jordi Hays?

  If you assume an acceleration in progress, eventually one of these humanoids is like running a marathon in like an hour or like 30 minutes. Just like truly insane, insane speeds.

• 32:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, as fast as a cheetah.

• 32:32Jordi Hays?

  Tyler could still take it out though.

• 32:34John Coogan?

  I think so. China is moving to quickly dominate the humanoid robotics industry and cement its place in the global supply chain while the US controls the best chips and other technology for robot brains. China leads in the manufacturing ecosystem for humanoid robot bodies. That has been reported many, many times. Well, without further ado, we have Signal here in the TVP and UltraDome. Let's bring in Signal, who is launching Sky, an agentic AI home screen, replacing the iPhone app with

• 33:03Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 33:03John Coogan?

  With content

• 33:04Jordi Hays?

  Handsome fella.

• 33:05John Coogan?

  Driven

• 33:05Jordi Hays?

  Dude, I can't believe

• 33:07John Coogan?

  It's been too long.

• 33:08Jordi Hays?

  This long.

• 33:08John Coogan?

  We've reacted to your posts like so many times. So good to have you.

• 33:11Speaker 03

  I, oh my God, it's incredible to be on here, guys.

• 33:15John Coogan?

  Welcome.

• 33:15Speaker 03

  It's been a long time coming, but I just want to start off by saying congratulations.

• 33:19John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 33:19Speaker 03

  This has been ridiculous.

• 33:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:22Speaker 03

  I've been watching you guys since day zero.

• 33:24John Coogan?

  Really?

• 33:25Jordi Hays?

  I know, I know. Because I think we were covering

• 33:28John Coogan?

  I think we did.

• 33:28Jordi Hays?

  Your post would have been making it into like the first episode.

• 33:31John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 33:31Jordi Hays?

  You're probably like, why are these two guys in suits?

• 33:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:34Jordi Hays?

  Reading.

• 33:34John Coogan?

  Printing out my tweets.

• 33:35Jordi Hays?

  This is

• 33:38Speaker 03

  I tweeted this out a little bit, but I was like, man, when I read that and you guys were reacting to what I posted, because I didn't really think about what I posted and you guys analyzed it and I was like, oh my God, this is ridiculous. Holy crap. What did I even write?

• 33:52John Coogan?

  I don't, I don't remember. You have a ton of bangers. They're all good posts. You had a great time. That was lifeblood of the show. It was so much fun. Anyway, we're not here to talk about, you know, the first episode. We're here to talk about your first episode in this new journey. Talk to us about what you're launching.

• 34:10Jordi Hays?

  Very smooth, John.

• 34:11John Coogan?

  I try, I try.

• 34:14Speaker 03

  You guys have

• 34:16John Coogan?

  Come a long way, for sure. Anyway, introduce yourself a little bit. Introduce the app. Introduce the product, where you want this to go. And I have a ton of questions.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  No, absolutely. Um, you know, uh, we're, I've always been in consumer software and I think there's just not that much, other than this sort of main players, um, I noticed and there's, there's a lot to be done and, and what a time to be alive. So, you know, we're experimenting at the very basic layer of how to make this stuff, uh, really easy to use, really easy to access for normal people that have not really come into this agentic AI world in full speed, other than sort of chatting with chatbots and whatnot. And I think it was an, it's an early experimentation of what we're up to is kind of how AI will kind of

• 35:06Speaker 03

  speak to you as well as how, you know, sort of ambient AI will be in various surfaces, um, starting with your phone, right? Like maybe your phone may not look exactly the same way, even in the next couple of years. Um, so we're kind of operating at the very earliest stages of experimenting of how AI will communicate with you. And we're trying to think of creative surfaces and one of the, one of the most interesting places you always, you know, people take out their phones and they glance at it and turns out, you know, this stuff hasn't really changed in such a long time.

• 35:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:38Speaker 03

  The iPhone home screen is 20 years old. That's two decades and it's just static icons.

• 35:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  It, it roughly speaking, it has not really evolved in any meaningful way.

• 35:51Jordi Hays?

  They one shot it. They one shot it.

• 35:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's the steel man.

• 35:54Jordi Hays?

  The steel man is the one.

• 35:55John Coogan?

  It's good. It's the final four.

• 35:57Jordi Hays?

  It's the final four.

• 35:58John Coogan?

  Some things don't change.

• 35:59Jordi Hays?

  We're all gonna, we're all gonna.

• 36:01John Coogan?

  We could always do a three wheel car or five wheel car or six wheel car.

• 36:04Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the thing that I've been, the thing that I've been pressing on is like, you would think, you know, if I could rewind two, three years, I would not expect, and, and, and knowing how much progress there would be in AI, I would not expect to look at the top 25 apps in the app store and only see LLMs.

• 36:21John Coogan?

  Like chat apps.

• 36:22Jordi Hays?

  I would expect to see like a variety, given, given just like how many magical experiences people have had, a variety of like new products.

• 36:29John Coogan?

  Like a new Uber, a new Instagram. I like.

• 36:32Jordi Hays?

  And that's like some argument.

• 36:33John Coogan?

  There was a previous app boom that was like very diffuse. You got, you got Candy Crush and, and, uh, what's the one with the pigs? The Flappy Bird and, uh, Angry Birds? And like, you got all these different apps, Runkeeper and diet products. And it feels like this has really collapsed down into just chat apps.

• 36:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you know, I actually recently got a new phone and I was installing apps. You know, I always like to set up my phone bare, like I don't like to transition my phone.

• 37:00Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 37:00Speaker 03

  Mainly.

• 37:01Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 37:02Speaker 03

  It gives me a little bit of a reset on not only what I need and what I don't need, but also how to think about software as it exists today. Like, I don't want to be tied to what I was before. I want to kind of be a new, if you will. And, um, you know, it turns out I installed, uh, you know, GPT and Claude and whatnot. And I was like, man, I don't think I really need that much stuff. You know, these LLMs are kind of collapsing, um, how and what you do into an interesting dynamic. Um, and I think generally, um, they're incredibly powerful. And the fact that, you know, those top five apps are all LLMs roughly is speaks volumes to the zeitgeist and speaks volumes to the impact of the actual technology.

• 37:45Speaker 03

  Like, I don't think, you know, previous, I think technology has always been kind of a little bit more evolutionary than not. Obviously hindsight is 2020, but, um, but this feels so, so different, you know, as a technologist, um, this, this world feels very different. It feels, um, just, just, uh, the, the things are gonna rapidly change from here on out in terms of how people experience their lives, how people interact with each other and how, you know, we're gonna facilitate brand new interactions potentially or, you know, completely reinvent old ones. So I'm very excited for that. And I think our company and the way that we think about it from a consumer perspective is just to make things, you know, easily accessible for these individuals.

• 38:30Speaker 03

  And, and I think we, we're gonna, we're gonna attempt to do that, very basic stuff.

• 38:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what, what is your, like, more as like a CEO, I, I, it sounds like you guys have raised a little bit of money and like are just like in an experimental phase. Is that like generally? Right, Reid?

• 38:45Speaker 03

  I think, yeah, I think generally, I would say two things. Number one is, look, we've built a really fun product that we're gonna give to lots and lots of lots of people. Turns out, you know, this era is non-zero marginal cost. We have raised a little bit of capital, but you know, inference is non-trivially expensive, and especially if you operate at like agentic inference or just background inference. That stuff is just consistently going, unlike, you know, Claude or GPT where people actually make requests or go on there and type something. We're doing it on behalf of you, right? Like, we're doing those things in the background where we anticipate, we listen to context, we turn, you know, every time, for example, every time you get an email, we process it with one of our agents.

• 39:28Speaker 03

  It sort of turns out, it buckets that item, it tries to figure out what to do with it, it tries to see if there's, it deserves some higher order, like ranking, and then it tries to figure out, oh, can I complete this task? Can I draft a reply? Oh, maybe it does deserve a reply. Let me go back to John and say, okay, hey, here's a reply that I've crafted based on everything I know. And it's a very, look, replying to emails has been, you know, thirty, forty years, but this is a new world in terms of how you think about communication and how agents kind of mediate this world. And apply that to any, you know, any aspect of your life, whether it's health or finance or where, even where you are, right? Like, one of the underlying things that we do is location.

• 40:09Speaker 03

  And, you know, imagine learning about the world around you through an LLM, whether it's through text or voice, by simply it being on your home screen wherever you are. If you're at a museum, if you're in a New York neighborhood, and that's a one tap away. Like, our goal is to make intelligence either zero or one tap away, not one prompt away.

• 40:29Jordi Hays?

  So, burning question. How do you, how do you, how do you make this product free so that everyone can use it? Will we see ads on the home screen of the iPhone? Ad-supported? I think ad-supported could make sense, right? I'm walking by a coffee shop and I get, I get an offer.

• 40:49John Coogan?

  There's ads in Apple Maps now, so.

• 40:51Jordi Hays?

  You're seeing my notification stream in, so you can really, you know what I like.

• 40:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:56Jordi Hays?

  I think the interesting thing here is like, you guys can operate, like, you can kind of wake up and ask yourself, like, what would Apple do if they were like truly excited about AI versus like seemingly scared of it?

• 41:13Speaker 03

  You know, I've posted about this a little bit with respect to Apple. Apple relies on a deterministic world, right? Like, a world where lots and lots of elements, from design to the experience to the underlying context, that doesn't change as much, and it's very deterministic. So, for example, iPhone is very much kind of, software is very broadcast-y, right? It's a one-to-many. They write it once, and it runs for everybody, and roughly speaking, it runs exactly the same way. Now, with a non-deterministic world, that could change drastically. Like, for example, for when we, you know, give this out to everybody, everybody in their, everybody has a very different experience with our app, because it's completely non-deterministic.

• 41:58Speaker 03

  And Apple lives in a deterministic world, and having to transition into non-determinism and non-deterministic software is actually a really non-trivial transition, especially for a company like Apple, where every single corner or every single thing needs to be tightly controlled. So, I think for us, we're kind of paving a path where we can marry some level of, like, expectations and determinism with the beauty of non-deterministic elements of AI, and create a really great user experience around that, that lives on your home screen and works for everybody. That's how we think about it. So, we're kind of, maybe in some sense, moving ahead of Apple, who has to deal with a few

• 42:39Speaker 03

  billion users, you know, just a minor amount of users. So, I think, I think that, you know, this, this world deserves more experimentation, like, like we're doing, in terms of both user interfaces, and experiences, and feeds, and ranking. And, and Jordi, going, going back to your point on, on monetization, like, I think that's the number-one thing that I think about quite drastically. Look, we're trying to capture real estate on your device that is the home screen, that is available at a glance. And, you know, I think, I've posted about- Potentially the greatest billboard of all time. Exactly. I mean, it is insanely powerful if we can activate that. Now, that's a tall order. But at the same time, you know, like I've posted about ads and advertising. Look, I've been in

• 43:24Speaker 03

  technology for such a long time from consumer, you know, whether it's like feeds at Facebook or, you know, even Google and whatnot. But, you know, you sort of think about advertising has done a lot of good for the world, you know? It has actually made things accessible. And I think generally, if advertising is done well, it is actually one of the most useful economic paradigms in terms of delivering equality in services to people who would have otherwise not been afforded. So I believe in advertising. I believe in good advertising. I believe in advertising that is actually like complimentary to the user experience, not necessarily taking away from it. It's tricky to do.

• 44:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the worst ad experience I've ever had as an ad enjoyer was like in college, I was buying a Kindle and they were like, "Do you want the ad-supported Kindle for like a hundred dollars or the ad-free Kindle for like a hundred and twenty dollars?" And I was a college student and I was like, "I don't think I'll mind ads. Why not?"

• 44:23John Coogan?

  Were they bad?

• 44:24Jordi Hays?

  And it's on the home screen when the device is locked.

• 44:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 44:27Jordi Hays?

  And they're just showing me books that I would never read.

• 44:30John Coogan?

  It's all bad targeting?

• 44:32Jordi Hays?

  So it's terrible targeting and it's a device that's just like sitting around my house all the time.

• 44:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 44:37Jordi Hays?

  And it kind of looks like, "Wait, you're reading that?"

• 44:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 44:41Jordi Hays?

  So if you can avoid that.

• 44:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:43Speaker 03

  Definitely.

• 44:43John Coogan?

  Well, there's a question from the chat. "Why are you anonymous? Do you plan on continuing to be anonymous?" I mean, I imagine as you grow the business, like it would be interesting to stay anonymous forever, but you know, at some point, a journalist will want to know. And I imagine that unless your opsec is super tight, it'll come out. Not that it's like bad. I'm just wondering, like, how have you processed the anon thing?

• 45:09Speaker 03

  That's a great question. You know, my entire online existence as it exists today with respect to this account is a giant accident because I was trying to find my old username and password for, because I just wanted to post a little while ago, maybe, you know, whenever I started posting. But I think when you guys actually started, started TBN as well, and I think-

• 45:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, your account must have gone from like a thousand followers to like- 180k. Over a hundred within the first few months of us.

• 45:38Speaker 03

  It was kind of nuts. Okay, so the whole story is, you know, I, I was kind of, I was like, you know what, I just want to read, maybe I'll reply or something. And I had a lot of fun. And, you know, whenever I'm having fun, I like to double down on things. You know, maybe not change, change it around too much. Look, I think certainly this, this world is going to change at some point. But in the, in the meantime, you know, I love leaning into fun, new things. You know, if you want to do anything new in the world, you gotta do it a little bit differently. You gotta be a little bit more unique. You gotta be a little bit more mysterious, a little bit more, um, yeah, I don't know. All of this stuff is just so wild to me, right? Like the anonymity aspect of it and the ex culture and the anon's around it. And you guys have had, you know-

• 46:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can never dox. I'm sorry. You can never dox. I mean, like Banksy, Banksy getting unmasked, is that good for the, is that good for the brand? Like, like you could be, you could be like taller than John, Giga Chad- Everyone just- And it won't be enough, right? Like, we all picture you as a philosopher king of sorts.

• 46:40Speaker 03

  Oh, it's beautiful, isn't it? I mean, my, my bio and my thought, like the actual content are like sometimes, sometimes the same and sometimes disjointed. But that's, I think, the beauty of it. So in that realm, you know, like I was actually talking to some people around this. And I was like, I, I sometimes, I basically kind of do what I feel like. And right now, it's like, just been so much fun to, to kind of lean in on this world and, and, you know, but I think certainly I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm more- Like I'll, I'll, I'll marry myself to the zeitgeist, if you will. And if that, if that calls that, then I'll, I'll, I'll continue and we'll, we'll see what happens. Not married to the game, married to the zeitgeist.

• 47:19John Coogan?

  Okay. Take me through, take me through iOS development, uh, like current status because this seems like a really good idea that people would want. Uh, I do think people are bored of the grid and having something that's more dynamic and agentic makes a ton of sense. And I think you could deliver a ton of value, but my fear is that Apple's just like, no, that's our real estate. Uh, so is there a clear path right now through like widgets and the shortcuts API to actually do interesting things? Or am I going to have to like side load a different OS? Like how, how like consumer friendly and like easy will this be?

• 48:02John Coogan?

  Or will you be bumping up against the walled garden of Apple pretty quickly?

• 48:07Speaker 03

  Um, that's a really great question. Look, every single thing we do is within the confines of the Apple ecosystem and experience and the way that they've designed and made it work. And we've designed our product to fit almost like a glove into, into that ecosystem. You know, when, when you onboard into our experience, you just connect the things in your life that you think you, you would want more.

• 48:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. The server side connections, I totally get. Like, all of that makes sense. You can, like, oh, auth with email and use APIs or MCPs. Like, there's a million things that you can do on the server. What I'm interested in is like, is like, how big can the widget be? Or can you actually take over the whole home screen?

• 48:48Speaker 03

  We can, we could take care of that. We basically ask you to install two widgets, a medium widget and a large widget that encapsulates the entire home screen. And those work in dynamic together. So the, the medium widget will basically what we call a wildcard widget, which internally, which shows you precisely what you might need to know at this point in time. And then the rest, the big widget is what we call a for you widget, which is just a feed. And you know what we're doing, John? I think is we're, we're building kind of the new iteration, the, the. Facebook News Feed 2.0 that's entirely AI-generated about your life, highly personal and that lives directly on your home screen and you can browse it as easily.

• 49:28Speaker 03

  The feed paradigm is so familiar with individuals and the beautiful part is that it's all like AI-generated and AI-mediated. Every, we have 22 agents that work continuously to generate content for that feed.

• 49:40John Coogan?

  It's funny because like everything, everything that's fancy, I'm like, yeah, that's easy. And then like getting people to install two widgets, I'm like, that's the hard part. And I don't know if I'm right, but like, it feels like, like, like, I'm still in like prosumer territory, but that's a good place to start and then you can hopefully make it easier. And then maybe Apple opens it up to a point where like you downloaded an app and just by clicking yes, it just installs the widgets by default or something. It does feel like, the biggest thing is like, I just love when like these new surface areas are explored. Uh, I mean, you, you, you mentioned Nikita, uh, but like he's, but he's done a great job of really understanding all the different hooks,

• 50:22John Coogan?

  what you can do within iOS, uh, you know, pushing those to the limit, creating like new UX, new experiences on top of like what Apple gives you and it feels like that's really underexplored.

• 50:34Jordi Hays?

  Have you thought of, uh,

• 50:37Jordi Hays?

  have you thought about built, trying to build any products within, within any of the LLM ecosystems? Just given that they, they already have an exist, you know, massive existing user basis?

• 50:47Speaker 03

  That's a great question and you know, I've definitely explored like every single thing with respect to an API or a platform that comes out, you know, um, I, you know, for example, the WWDC APIs that come out every year. I, uh, I read them like, like the Bible, you know, like I would, I, I, I.

• 51:06Jordi Hays?

  Bro, study.

• 51:09Speaker 03

  You know, that's my, that's my, you know, religious holiday or whatnot. And every

• 51:15John Coogan?

  Tim Cook is the Pope. He's your Pope.

• 51:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 51:18John Coogan?

  We get it. Yeah.

• 51:19Speaker 03

  And, you know, so I scrunch these. I think generally these API, the sort of apps or chat GPT apps are, it's unclear to me what the incentive structures are for the app developer just yet. And it's unclear to me why applications deserve to exist inside of an LLM just yet, besides just adding more context. Because theoretically, an LLM is powerful enough to even generate an app to be able to do something. In which case, I'm not sure exactly, unless you bring some highly proprietary data like Zillow or whatnot, maybe some of these experiences work. But otherwise, I don't know if the small time developer, you guys remember the flashlight apps and the lighter apps on the iPhone? Like, you know, you're not really seeing those types of experiences in LLMs.

• 51:57Jordi Hays?

  All I remember as a probably 12 year old was the beer app.

• 52:01John Coogan?

  The beer app was good.

• 52:02Jordi Hays?

  And just thinking that, thinking that that was like, that was peak humor.

• 52:05John Coogan?

  What about the I'm Rich app that was like $10,000? It was just, it should have died, a picture of a diamond. And it was just like, you could just open a picture on your phone. But if you bought that app, you could show people that you just wasted 10K on a iPhone app or whatever. I think it literally maxed out. It was the most expensive app you could possibly like type into the App Store.

• 52:27Speaker 03

  I think the guy sold like over 500 copies before Apple removed it.

• 52:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:31Speaker 03

  Or no, not offering real person. So I think he made 500 times a thousand dollars. And it was incredible. See, these are the kinds of experiments and creative elements that, you know, I think deserve to exist in the world today.

• 52:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:44Speaker 03

  And I think, you know, we're a few handful of individuals that are kind of trying to make that happen. And we're trying to be really creative, really fun, really interesting, engaging. And AI is a super powerful tool to be able to do that. More powerful than the original iPhone APIs. Like, holy crap. So I think we're, we're, we're early, but we're gonna try to.

• 53:05John Coogan?

  It seems like a dream. Like, like, there's so much, like.

• 53:07Jordi Hays?

  You're doing this, you're doing this the right way, because there's another scenario where like you could raise a series A right now, like, or it's like, you know.

• 53:16John Coogan?

  You have a team, you have the technology.

• 53:17Jordi Hays?

  Just keep the team small.

• 53:19John Coogan?

  And the waitlist. Like, you'll be able to test things and experiment and learn. Like, there's so much opportunity. Well, what an exciting time. Thank you so much for joining the show.

• 53:27Speaker 03

  Hey, thanks a lot, guys.

• 53:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to finally have you on and congrats again.

• 53:30Speaker 03

  1,000% and maybe next time we'll talk about hot takes.

• 53:34John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 53:34Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah. What do you think about this AI-powered cannabis vape with blockchain rewards?

• 53:41Speaker 03

  I'll have to, I'll have to try it out before.

• 53:43Jordi Hays?

  So John was, John showed me like a screenshot. He was showing the website for this, this morning, and I didn't realize today is 4/20. So that's like, this is like a 4/20 joke.

• 53:53John Coogan?

  Is it a joke, though? I think it's a real website. Like, I think it's.

• 53:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. John, you can make a joke website. Did you know that?

• 53:59John Coogan?

  I know, I know, but I, I, I think they're.

• 54:02Speaker 03

  John, Claude Design, man. Claude Design. You can do anything.

• 54:04John Coogan?

  Okay, so you're telling me if I put this in the Wayback Machine and it shows up, uh, as of yesterday, it's not a joke? Cause I bet you this existed yesterday. Let's see.

• 54:15Jordi Hays?

  Let's see. I bet you if they were planning to make a.

• 54:18John Coogan?

  April, April 6th, it's in the, it's in the Wayback Machine. What does it say? It says, let's see. It's loading. It's got blockchain still. I think these are hustlers who have been just tacking on every single possible trend to go as viral as possible. I don't know. We'll have to dig into it. Well, thank you so much for joining the show, Signal.

• 54:37Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 54:37John Coogan?

  Fantastic news and congratulations on the progress. Have fun.

• 54:41Jordi Hays?

  Happy to have you guys ship.

• 54:42John Coogan?

  And we'll talk to you soon.

• 54:43Speaker 03

  Cheers.

• 54:43John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Uh, up next, we have Ethan Ding from Tech Q L. He is the co-founder and CEO here to announce a fundraiser.

• 54:52Jordi Hays?

  To talk about enterprise analytics, workflows.

• 54:56John Coogan?

  I think we had him. Let's check in with the team and make sure that he is here. I believe he is. So let's bring Ethan Ding in from Tech Q L into the TVP and UltraDome. Ethan, hello. How are you doing?

• 55:09Jordi Hays?

  What's going on, guys?

• 55:12John Coogan?

  Oh. How you doing? Uh, how's it going? It's good. We have two of you, so, uh, please introduce both of you.

• 55:18Jordi Hays?

  And it looks, it looks like it's being filmed on a, you know, phone camera from 2005, but, but, uh, we're excited to have you on.

• 55:29Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Ethan. I'm the CEO and co-founder, or this is my co-founder Mark, or our CTO. We're actually at a customer office onsite, and this is actually a company that does not, I think like IP bans like Zoom from their internal network, which I found out like lately last second.

• 55:47John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 55:50Jordi Hays?

  No, no, it's great. I'm super, we're super excited to have you guys on. Walk us through history of the company since it's your first time.

• 56:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think we started this like late 2022, right before ChatGPT came out. We had this idea that if we spent a lot of money and time on like try to make analytics work, it'd be worth something. We really didn't know what we were doing when we first got started. Since then, what we've like really like realized is after like two years of rebuilding the product like 10 times over, we landed on something where, you know, I think like the typical enterprise has like 150 databases, 10 different dashboards, BI tools, they have like 20,000 different charts, another like 400,000 tables. And every single vendor wants you to like migrate into their thing and like drop another $20 million

• 56:43Speaker 04

  on like systems integrator for another 10 years till I do the migrations. I were like, like, let's like build a thing that can like connect to everything and hopefully be the do for analytics what like high frequency trading firms at the like stock markets.

• 56:57John Coogan?

  What was the first like analytics stack? Because if you're pre-GPTs, are you just doing like word clouds or clustering based on keywords and tagging different phrases as they flow through a system? Like what was the initial like, okay, there's a stream of data, there's a bunch of text in a variety of databases. Like, how are you giving the customers value from that?

• 57:24Speaker 04

  Well, it was pre-ChatGPT, but still post-GPT. And so yeah, GPT-3, but I think as we all know at this point, the

• 57:35Speaker 04

  Few of that was, we overstated, at least for business stuff. And so, yeah, text box on the right, we type in your question, like, how do I get revenue? Then a text box on the left with the sequel.

• 57:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:48Speaker 04

  And you run it and you copy it and then paste it into your whatever tool.

• 57:53John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 57:53Speaker 04

  And then that was it. We've come a long way from that.

• 57:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. So walk us through, I mean, you don't have to tell us what customer you're with today, but what does actually, as a group of co-founders going to a customer site, like, what are you doing? How deep in the weeds are you? Is it just sort of like a high-level pitch or are you rolling up your sleeves and working on actual integration?

• 58:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, I think like today's session was basically like, walk us through like the,

• 58:22Speaker 04

  I mean, every single Fortune 500 company like basically spends like nine figures on like AWS, GCP, and Azure. I'd expect another like, like 10 figures on like paper that like manages all these systems. And it's kind of this like constant like war of like, you go from like spending $20 million to like a teradata on-prem, to like spending like $30 million with like a data breach in the cloud or something. And so like what we're, what we're trying to map out with them is Anthropic is telegraphing that they want to be the size of AWS in like three years, right? And they're an enterprise-oriented company. They expect that to basically come out of like companies like the, that we're working with, like budgets. And so it's, they basically expect them to take their entire IT budget of like, let's say like 200, 300 million dollars, double it and like, like materialize this money out of like thin air and like spend it on inference.

• 59:08Speaker 04

  They're, they're, they're walking us through like the parts of their roadmap where, you know, what kind of SaaS can they sunset? What kind of labor costs are they like thinking about, like the trade-offs around? On like what time horizons to like create up? And also like, what kind of like workloads that are going to be extremely expensive that they can like, just kind of like start basically triaging off like the large like models. Because, because at the end, like these are kind of the people, like when you see like the token charts, like everyone's token maxing, these are kind of the people that like pay the bills on like those token. And like, they notice the size of that bill, you know, like blowing up like 10x like year over year.

• 59:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:42Speaker 04

  Interesting. It's interesting side of the equation that I guess like people don't spend a ton of time talking about.

• 59:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. How have you been processing the SaaS apocalypse narrative? Benioff was given some pushback. Other folks were very bullish on it. There's a whole bunch of different data points. I've been just shocked that we haven't seen revenue declines from really any software company that's been targeted. Although, you know, you could talk about the long term, but Slowly growth. The growth, like, these companies are still growing, even if they are in like the direct path of the AI companies.

• 1:00:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, for like the, for the longest time, I assumed that like, everyone likes to buy like good enough. I think really in the past like three months, I've heard like, like six different CIOs or CBOs of like Fortune 100s. Like talk about how they're ready to, like Salesforce is like increase, like their headless like tax. And they're ready to like, like, like do like a two-year migration like off into like, like Postgres or something. It's not like they're going to another vendor. They're just like, I need to free up money to like set on GPU. It's like set GPUs on fire.

• 1:00:46John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:00:47Speaker 04

  And I'll pay like anybody to like, like move me into like, like a Postgres instance and like, like Google Cloud or like AWS.

• 1:00:53John Coogan?

  Interesting. Okay. So that's a little bit of your opportunity. You help with migration?

• 1:00:58Speaker 04

  That, that one's kind of adjacent to us. We look at a lot more like low-level infrastructure, like, like Databricks, Snowflake, like Tableau and otherwise. But it's, it's interesting, like, a CRM is basically the second most important system of record at an enterprise next to the ERP. If they're willing to entertain like moving entirely off CRMs within like a two-year time horizon, maybe they'll completely fail. But like the weakness to like, like, like forge into that is then, ah, like, like, like an order of magnitude more higher than I expected.

• 1:01:27Speaker 05

  And surprising based on the profile of company. That's something you don't expect from like Google or Facebook, like the most mature engineering companies in the world. But you, you see this effort starting to come from 100-year-old companies as well.

• 1:01:41John Coogan?

  Interesting. And is, is, is that driven more by they think that over the long term, there will be a net cost savings to having their own system? Or more that they want something that's completely bespoke and more custom to their business?

• 1:01:59Speaker 04

  Um, it's mostly not, th- there's an interesting thing Larry Ellison talks about when it comes to like enterprise sales, which is not like, like enterprise sales is like buying like, like, um, like Gucci bags. Um, it's, it's much more like, like, at any given year, you have a CIO come in, like, right? Like, the, the, the half-life of like a CIO is like, like five years before they retire. New one comes in, they have to like start a set of like new initiatives. Often like they're going like, like they're, they're finger testing like the market and trying to figure out like, who, who has the best vibes?

• 1:02:28John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:02:28Speaker 04

  And, and like basically who, who, okay, whoever has the best vibes, I'm gonna throw like eight figures against. Um, and I'm gonna like, that eight figures away from like someone, like a, a company that has like, like worse vibes.

• 1:02:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:02:38Speaker 04

  Um, I think there's this like weird, um, self fulfilling prophecy where.

• 1:02:41John Coogan?

  They're vibe procuring.

• 1:02:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:44John Coogan?

  They're vibe procuring.

• 1:02:46Speaker 04

  Like, you walk into a room, you can tell when that like company's stock is up. You can tell when the CEO is like extremely cocky. You can tell like when the, when the FDEs and the salespeople are like, listen, like, you, you don't even have to move this today. I'm gonna get your business next year, no matter what, because I know we're on the up and up. And you can also like tell when like a vendor is like desperate, um, right? And they're like, like moving for discounts, right? When, when, when some, when, when, as long as the perception that a company, like, the market is short, a given like SaaS vendor, um, customers start asking for discounts, the most aggressive ones go first. But now like all the sellers on that team are like, like bad, like, you know, they're, they're traumatized between like the next set of reels. So they're, they're progressively gonna give more and more ground. Um, it's kind of a rough, uh, yeah, wouldn't want to be one of those right now.

• 1:03:29John Coogan?

  Interesting, interesting. Well, uh, your business is growing, you're raising money. Tell us about the latest round.

• 1:03:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, we, um, it was actually like a, like a two, two-part round. Um, the first, uh, like led by like Hoff Capital and the latest part like, uh, Blackstone.

• 1:03:45John Coogan?

  How much did you raise?

• 1:03:47Speaker 04

  Uh, I think it was seventeen total.

• 1:03:53Jordi Hays?

  This was awesome guys. I really, I really enjoyed speaking with you both and thank you for making time on, while you're hanging out with your customers.

• 1:04:02John Coogan?

  We appreciate it.

• 1:04:02Jordi Hays?

  Appreciate the perspective. Let's do it again soon.

• 1:04:05John Coogan?

  And good luck out there. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:04:07Jordi Hays?

  Thank you. Good one.

• 1:04:08John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day. Up next, we have Matt McKinney from Loop. He's the co-founder and CEO, raising a big Series C in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP and L2L. Matt, how are you doing?

• 1:04:22Speaker 06

  What's going on guys?

• 1:04:24John Coogan?

  Not too much. Good to have you here. First time on the show. Why don't you introduce yourself and the company?

• 1:04:30Speaker 06

  I'm Matt McKinney. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Loop. And our mission is to unlock value that's trapped in the operations that power the physical economy. And we started specifically in a back office where no one else wanted to go and back office services and automating things like accounting and general ledger coding and payment services. And all we do to exist is to make our customers more efficient so that they can better serve their customers. And we work with some of the most important companies in the world, 20% of the Fortune 100.

• 1:04:59John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:05:00Speaker 06

  And excited to be on with you guys.

• 1:05:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, how, I mean, there's a different world when you say like procurement or accounting that you could have been like, we're a agentic accounting firm or something. And it feels like this is much more cross-functional. How are you actually positioning like the integration? Who's the buyer? How does the, how does the business like instantiate itself inside of your customer?

• 1:05:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, we started, we started with a very acute problem, which is if you look at the supply chain industry, roughly 30% of invoices are wrong or they have an error. So clearing of them is really painful.

• 1:05:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:05:39Speaker 06

  And because of that, a bunch of services firms popped up, specialized services firms popped up.

• 1:05:44John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:05:45Speaker 06

  And all they do is attract, address that specific problem, which is you've got to adjudicate this invoice, you've got to ensure that it's accurate, you've got to remit payment to the truck drivers and the carriers across the world. And that's a big industry. It happens to be a $5 billion industry alone. And it's all done with human labor. And obviously LLM's presented a perfect opportunity for that. But I think what got my co-founder and I most excited is really the data. If you can go organize the data that you can obviously automate things like we just mentioned, the accounting, but you can use that as a wedge to expand into adjacent use cases, whether it be in compliance, or planning, or procurement, and continue to unlock value for your customers.

• 1:06:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, so what does it look like for a customer to actually onboard? I imagine you need access to their emails, like the actual PDFs of the invoices, whether things have gotten paid. There's often like multiple versions of a particular invoice, and then you need to plug into bank data to see what's actually moved around, or accounting systems. How long does it take to integrate, and how key is that?

• 1:06:48Speaker 06

  What's so wild about supply chain, supply chain is just a network of networks. And you've got, you know, a transportation carrier, you've got a supplier, you could have multiple versions within your own enterprise. A lot of these big companies, they do a bunch of M and A, and so you've got all these different versions of the truth. So just take, for example, the weight and dimensions of a package or shipment. There could be seven different versions of the weight and dimensions for that package. And so you need almost like a data auditor itself to prove that that's the correct data. And we get it from a bunch of different sources. We get it from, you know, email, we get it from EDI, we get it from API connection, we get it from Excel spreadsheet, PDF, you name it.

• 1:07:32Speaker 06

  It's just really messy, unstructured data, data that no one's ever organized. Quite frankly, no one was able to organize until the power of LLMs came out.

• 1:07:42John Coogan?

  When you talk to customers, do they care about the AI buzzword at all?

• 1:07:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, are they trying to buy AI?

• 1:07:49John Coogan?

  Or do they just want a solution? How are you thinking about how front and center AI is in your value prop and pitch?

• 1:07:59Speaker 06

  All our customers want is just outcomes. And they don't really care how you deliver it. Now, sometimes they might have a top-down AI mandate that they're looking to check the box, but at the end of the day, they don't care how the sausage is made. They're buying an outcome. That's all that they want. And if you can demonstrate that you can deliver a superior outcome, it's better, it's faster. You know, for example, you're finding more errors or whatnot, and faster resolution times, so you can close your books faster. That's what they're buying. They're not buying a gentic buzzword into their, you know, the checkbook. They really want to buy the value.

• 1:08:34John Coogan?

  What is the value of like getting this business to scale? Is there, is there something where you can, you know, optimize the supply chain, introduce different clients that need different resources and help them buy the best product at the right time or reviews or even just like panel data of like how the economy is moving? We've seen that from some financial, some fintech companies. Uh, like, how are you thinking about the value that's unlocked as you become a platform?

• 1:09:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's more, you mentioned like procurement, for example, it was more obviously when you, you have a bunch of data that you can use and say, this is good, this is bad, or you should be working with the supplier and you're not, because we see it over here. But I think that, you know, really building context across the network is probably where we see the most gains where you can take learnings from a carrier that's working with, you know, suppliers working with multiple parties in the network and then say, oh, well, this carrier always likes to build a specific way. And so propagate that learning through the L M's context across all the, all the companies that work with that carrier. And I think that's really, I'd say the unlocking automation that you get at scale. And then obviously the, you mentioned the intelligence one, the time to value, you're able to get someone on much faster because you're working with 95% of their suppliers

• 1:09:48Speaker 06

  instead of 2% of their suppliers. That's a huge win as well.

• 1:09:50John Coogan?

  What were you doing before this? Did you always have a love for back office supply chain optimization?

• 1:09:56Jordi Hays?

  I, I, I can tell you, I could tell you had, since he was a boy.

• 1:10:00Speaker 06

  I came out of the womb and I just said, I want to automate the back office.

• 1:10:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. Complex.

• 1:10:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, I've always just been obsessed with the systems and making them more efficient. And I think, you know, when you look at the physical world and it's supply chain, you know, the trucks and the train and that stuff's just so exciting. You feel like it's the last frontier where you can truly unlock that. I mean, look, supply chain alone, just in the U S is 11 trillion dollars in spend.

• 1:10:26John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:10:27Speaker 06

  You know, one of the largest contributors globally.

• 1:10:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:31Speaker 06

  Yeah. If you want, if you want to have an impact on GDP and.

• 1:10:33John Coogan?

  Oh, too high.

• 1:10:37Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, I was giving you that for the 11 trillion. You said the biggest number, so.

• 1:10:41John Coogan?

  That's huge.

• 1:10:41Speaker 06

  If you want to, if you want to have an impact, though, on GDP, at the end of the day, GDP growth is just productivity growth and technology is the leading advantage in that. If you're saying that 11 trillion dollars in spend goes to supply chain and no one's really touching that, then we gotta go attack that problem.

• 1:10:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, I have so many more questions, but.

• 1:10:59Speaker 06

  But before, yeah, before that, my co-founder and I were at Uber and early on the freight team.

• 1:11:04John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 1:11:04Speaker 06

  And we saw a lot of the, you know, the real world there where you had messy PDFs, you had bill of lading's proof of deliveries, just a total data mess, to be honest with you. And we knew that there had to be a better way.

• 1:11:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:16Jordi Hays?

  Dude, perfect, perfect VC pattern match. Uber, freight team.

• 1:11:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a great team. Great company. We know so many entrepreneurs that came out of Uber. Tell us about the round. What's, what's going on? How much did you raise?

• 1:11:28Speaker 06

  We raised 95 million dollars.

• 1:11:32Jordi Hays?

  Couldn't pull together that last five.

• 1:11:34John Coogan?

  That last five, what was going on, buddy?

• 1:11:37Jordi Hays?

  It evaded you.

• 1:11:38John Coogan?

  Sandbagging, sandbagging.

• 1:11:40Jordi Hays?

  No, you had to set up, Sada had to set up the next round.

• 1:11:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:43Speaker 06

  You gotta learn a little, you gotta learn a little bit for the next one.

• 1:11:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:11:47Speaker 06

  We're super excited.

• 1:11:48John Coogan?

  Really, really stacked.

• 1:11:50Jordi Hays?

  Where are you guys, where are you guys based?

• 1:11:51John Coogan?

  Valor, Attrades, AID VC, Founders Fund, Index, JP Morgan, wow, you got everybody.

• 1:11:57Jordi Hays?

  You got it.

• 1:11:57John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:11:58Jordi Hays?

  Wait, where are you guys based? Sorry, I missed.

• 1:12:00Speaker 06

  We're based in San Francisco. We got offices in Chicago as well as in New York.

• 1:12:04John Coogan?

  Is that because Chicago is a major like logistics hub with the trains and trucks and stuff?

• 1:12:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot of really.

• 1:12:12John Coogan?

  There is, there is a major, I'm not making this up, right? Like with the boat, because the boats come through the, the, the lakes and like, it was like a major hub of transactions.

• 1:12:21Jordi Hays?

  Is that because Chicago has trains and trucks?

• 1:12:23John Coogan?

  They do, they do. This is real, right? Am I wrong?

• 1:12:26Speaker 06

  You're not, you're not wrong. I'll give you stats. So 30% of goods that enter America go through Chicago.

• 1:12:33John Coogan?

  Thank you, thank you. 30%, not bad.

• 1:12:36Jordi Hays?

  John was right.

• 1:12:36John Coogan?

  I was right. It's really, oh, in Chicago, why, it's such a weird pick. It's not. It makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you so much.

• 1:12:43Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you, Matt. Congrats to the whole team and hopefully, hopefully you're back on the show this year with some more news.

• 1:12:49Speaker 06

  Really appreciate it, guys. Thank you. Love this show, by the way.

• 1:12:51John Coogan?

  Thank you. Have a good one. Up next, we have Eric Anderson from Alloy Therapeutics.

• 1:12:57Jordi Hays?

  I love, I love messing with you.

• 1:12:59John Coogan?

  You love messing with me?

• 1:13:01Jordi Hays?

  Never gets old.

• 1:13:02John Coogan?

  Well, without further ado, Alloy Therapeutics has raised a Series E to build full-stack AI biotech infrastructure. Eric Anderson is here live.

• 1:13:12Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:13:13John Coogan?

  Eric, how are you doing?

• 1:13:14Speaker 07

  Gentlemen, I'm doing great today. Yeah, good to have you.

• 1:13:16John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for hopping on. First time on the show, please introduce yourself and the company a bit.

• 1:13:21Speaker 07

  I'm Eric Anderson. I'm the CEO and the founder of Alloy Therapeutics. We're a biotech infrastructure company that works with a bunch of companies all over the world, helping people discover and develop drugs.

• 1:13:31John Coogan?

  Okay, infrastructure. What exactly is going on in the biotech stack? Imagine everything from centrifuges down to writing PDFs for the FDA, to trials. There's so much that goes into that. What do you focus on specifically?

• 1:13:44Speaker 07

  You got that. So the technology we have is really around more drug discovery and then into drug development. So the folks that do regulatory, the folks that do clinical, we work with them to discover drugs with the companies that we help to support. So we work with big pharma companies, we work with small biotech companies. What's going on in the industry today, the big trend right now is when we talk about infrastructure, who's going to actually do the wet lab work today in the lab? In addition, we've got everything going on with TechBio of all of this in silico work that's happening. It's really exciting. And sort of bringing those things together.

• 1:14:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the idea is, the idea is like you can have like a million, you know, a million times more ideas for different drugs, but then you still have the constraint of the physical world needing to kind of be able to actually run experiments until ideally we could simulate a lot more in the future, but maybe we're not, not there.

• 1:14:33Speaker 07

  Exactly right. And you can simulate all these things, but it's a bit of a design, build, test, and then you learn. It's that, it's that loop we all know. And right now in the biotech space, we've made some incredible progress with GenAI and machine learning capabilities to come up with a lot of those ideas. You got to close the loop then and actually be able to test them. And then there's a lot of skill that goes in, just the skill of drug development of what makes a good drug. And connecting those things together is what we do really well.

• 1:14:59John Coogan?

  So how, how much of this will wind up looking like an AWS for drug development? I can provision a certain machine and you have it and I can interface with it all over, you know, the internet and you will do all the physical stuff for me?

• 1:15:15Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's part of it. So AWS just launched a service, Amazon launched a great service that connects these generative companies back to a backend of how you manufacture the protein and you test it. That's one small piece to the process, I would say. A lot of scientists out there that can design things in silico and then send them to a lab like that.

• 1:15:34Jordi Hays?

  Is that not like a crazy side quest for them?

• 1:15:38John Coogan?

  We did, AWS has like centrifuges now and like

• 1:15:43Speaker 07

  No, AWS is actually just connecting them together. No, it's pretty cool.

• 1:15:46John Coogan?

  Okay, got it, got it.

• 1:15:47Speaker 07

  I think what they're going for there is that they want to be the cloud. If you're going to do your compute to come up with these with these in silico things, they want to make sure they see all the traffic and then just connect it to anyone else on the backend.

• 1:15:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, got it, got it.

• 1:16:00Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:16:00John Coogan?

  So can you zoom out for me and just do a temperature check on biotech? We read one article about how Boston's going through a really tough time at the same time. Like every time I open up the Wall Street Journal, there's a new billion dollar acquisition.

• 1:16:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so last year felt like the dark, the dark ages for biotech. It felt like everyone, every, every, every bio, biotech investor that we were talking to was like, I don't even know why you'd keep investing in these companies. Like the returns have been so bad. And then this year is like the biggest year of biotech M and A since

• 1:16:34John Coogan?

  It feels like they're just rich from the GLP-1 boom, but I'd love to hear your sort of like narrative setting.

• 1:16:39Speaker 07

  Certainly the GLP-1 boom. One of the trends that's going on here is that the industry has to restock the shelves for new drugs. As drugs go off patent, there's these revenue cliffs. And so big pharma is sitting on probably the largest pile of capital they've ever sat on. And they look to acquire a lot of their innovations from small companies. Those are the folks that we support to create new medicines. So there's definitely a huge M and A trend that's happening this year and it will continue to happen for the foreseeable future. A big thing that's happening as you read about that news in Boston, though, is we're doing drug discovery and development here in the US, but there's been a big shift to move it overseas and to offshore and for pharma to acquire assets from outside of the United States. And so that's, that's been more of the big, I would say, the headwind for the domestic biotech space.

• 1:17:27John Coogan?

  How are you feeling about just acceleration in drug development generally? Like, you know, in cybersecurity, agentic coding, like, there's these very clear scaling laws and, you know, we have the meter chart of the amount of time an AI system can work on a single problem, it's doubling, it's on a very clear trend. I haven't seen a chart that's like that for biotech, but it feels like we're going through advancements and we're just getting more cures. So, something's happening, but are you tracking it at a quantitative level yet? Or just qualitatively, how do you feel about drug development?

• 1:18:06Speaker 07

  Sure. We're living in an era right now where the trend of all of the drugs that we're discovering, we have an acceleration in the amount of innovation that's coming from our labs. So that is just an incredible trend that is supporting everything we're doing in the lab. So, that, the byproduct of that is, of course, generating massive amounts of more data, making sense of that data, and this is where a lot of the machine learning is coming in, is how do we digest all of the data that's being created in the industry, making sense of it, and then turning that into new cures as rapidly as possible? So, that is an enormous trend right now in the industry. And the advances that we have just from literally using Claude and OpenAI even in the lab and just day-to-day things, you're seeing a handful of things come together.

• 1:18:49Speaker 07

  So, first of all, you see this explosion of data, you see the wet lab capabilities largely looking the same, and what's happening then is we're trying to organize that data and turn it into new cures as rapidly as possible. And in the background, what we have is a number of new companies, new entrants in the tech biospace, that I think are just natively better at understanding this massive data problem and being able to make sense of it. And then on the other side, you have the pharma and biotech, which are actually, you require all of those skills to actually make sense of what's going to work in like a human biological system. So, what's coming together this year, I would say, is that there's a lot more folks in tech bio that are getting better, but then we're just seeing the bio folks actually get better at tech.

• 1:19:32Speaker 07

  Basically, you're at this place where like the tech bio folks need more bio and the biotech folks need more tech. And if you're bringing those things together, I do think we're going to have an acceleration in a lot of the cures that we're making.

• 1:19:42Jordi Hays?

  Give us a view into how big pharma executives are thinking right now. Are they confused why everyone and their grandma is injecting themselves with Chinese peptides, yet at the same time like more skeptical of vaccines than than maybe ever? I feel like this is kind of this interesting dichotomy.

• 1:20:05Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's well, in the industry today, I would say the executives in pharma are looking at it from the same place they always do, which is about efficacy and patient safety. And so we're looking for drugs that work and then proving that they work in in animals and then ultimately in humans. So peptides being injected into humans, I think everyone's just saying, hey, what's safe, what's efficacious? The FDA has done some pretty amazing things in this administration, I think, to give flexibility for what's allowed. There's been some incredible changes that have happened that I think will accelerate the pace of innovation, what we do in the regulatory space in the clinic as we're testing in humans. And I think pharma is apprehensive about the changes, but overall they're excited that things are moving along and that we're going to see a lot of new drugs coming on the market.

• 1:20:48John Coogan?

  Can you help me understand the flow to get to like a data boom in biotech? Because I would assume that that's more driven by like dropping costs of DNA sequencing than anything from the gen AI world because the but maybe there's something where the gen AI world can process data that was previously like locked up in PDFs or something like what is actually driving the data boom?

• 1:21:15Speaker 07

  It's those things really coming together. So certainly the continued falling cost of DNA sequencing. And then the falling cost of all the other types of data that you can generate along with when you're sequencing someone's DNA. So if you go to a place like Function Health here, like what you can pull off your Our Ring or your Apple Watch, there's actually a massive amount of data that is that is being generated passively. And right now, the ability to connect that data to that I would call it real world data that we can connect to what's happening in patients is a level of complexity that we just haven't seen before in the data side. But it's got to be rooted back in basically the wet lab. You're describing these things of of taking your DNA or your tumor DNA. And you're learning from what's actually happening in a patient.

• 1:21:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:59Speaker 07

  And bringing those together is actually a huge data problem.

• 1:22:02John Coogan?

  I imagine you work with like mostly like big pharma or real biotech companies, but we're also seeing this like boom in like a single person vibe coding a cancer cure for their dog like.

• 1:22:15Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's pretty crazy.

• 1:22:16John Coogan?

  Do you have a policy for whether like how small a team can be? Because I imagine it's not far from you getting like an inbound from like a single person who's like, I want to do this by myself. I'm a solo founder.

• 1:22:28Jordi Hays?

  I can be trusted with advanced AI.

• 1:22:31John Coogan?

  And maybe they should, maybe they shouldn't be. I don't know. I just want to know how you've like grappled with it. Maybe it's just not a business concern. So you don't need to worry about it, but I'd love to know like, how are you processing that idea?

• 1:22:40Speaker 07

  No, I mean, I think everyone can be trusted with this generally. So that's actually not the problem. Don't, don't worry about kind of these fear mongering that's happening on this front.

• 1:22:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:49Speaker 07

  At our company, we service anyone who is interested in discovering new drugs.

• 1:22:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:54Speaker 07

  And so that's a lot of what we try to do with our company is how do we democratize access to many of these tools?

• 1:22:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:59Speaker 07

  We started in a particular place nearly 10 years ago, and that was before we had any of this gen AI work going on.

• 1:23:05John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:23:06Speaker 07

  And it is lower that single person biotech company, or maybe just more of the, the virtual biotech company where you've got five or 10 folks and they can work with a different contract research organization to help do their drug discovery and development. That's been a trend for a while. What's happening is we're just getting more efficient at it today.

• 1:23:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:24Speaker 07

  I do think the future biotech company is going to be much, much smaller and be able to plug into these different resources and be so much more efficient at coming up with ideas and testing them.

• 1:23:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it is interesting. Tech loves to sing the praises of like the five or 10 person team, but there are a lot of biotech companies where it's like one genius researcher who discovered something and a couple of support staff and then a lot of outsourced stuff all the way to, okay, we're ready to sell it. And it's mostly just a research. This is not entirely new there. You, you mentioned that you're not worried about like doom related to like bio, but like, you know, how, how, how are you grappling with the idea of like somebody making a super bubonic plague or, you know, some new flu like, are you, do you feel like there's safeguards or how have you processed that question?

• 1:24:17Speaker 07

  There's lots of groups of folks that are worried about this, and I think the United States military and some of the consortiums that we've been involved with are giving that thought. It really comes down to, though, is you could make a lot of things that might be dangerous. There's always a bad actor problem. The way that we think about that is through our biosecurity division, we try to make sure that the capabilities that we need to have in the United States are always available and accessible to us. So we call it medical access capabilities. We've learned a lot of lessons in COVID. Everything from could we actually just test for viruses in the community? And do we have the reagents available to do that? And then, of course, we had masks and everything else. So from our perspective, we think about biosecurity as a way of making sure that you do all of

• 1:24:59Speaker 07

  those components from being able to surveil what's happening in the theater, all the way out to can we discover and develop the drug very rapidly. And there's some great, uh, different initiatives that are going on of these ideas. Can you go from a threat to 100 days later, actually have a drug ready to go? And our company and others participate in making sure that there's just a really robust response available with incredible supply chain and sort of make sure we can do everything here in the United States at all times.

• 1:25:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, it certainly seems like, uh, like the advancement in the positive side, like we're seeing a major, major, uh, swing to the upside right now. Uh, every time I hear about one of these new medicines or new treatments, it seems really positive. There's a huge story about pancreatic cancer recently, which was a complete white.

• 1:25:47Speaker 07

  Right now, we've got a conference that's going on, and we saw two different studies that were showing just for some of the patients that were on drug, that it was six years later, they still had no disease.

• 1:25:57John Coogan?

  And that's remarkable to know about pancreatic cancer. It is really, really tough.

• 1:26:02Speaker 07

  Oh, it's really incredible. It's one of the worst cancers we have. But I think this is the overall trend. We are living in a world where we will cure everything that is curable, I think, in the next three decades. It's really just a question of, and maybe even faster than that, it's a question of how fast can we accelerate and really give as many people as possible access to these incredible tools. And just like in tech, I mean, where you saw these very small companies be able to do incredible things in the last five, 10, 15 years. I was investing back during the first internet bubble, uh, back in venture capital 25 years ago. And in those times, the world just looked a different place. We actually, middleware was like.

• 1:26:39John Coogan?

  Were you 10 years old?

• 1:26:41Speaker 07

  I was, I'm like forty eight right now. So yeah, I was, I was still a child.

• 1:26:45Jordi Hays?

  You look like, you look like late thirties. So, so that's, that's good, good for you.

• 1:26:50Speaker 07

  I was a child at the time, but it was incredible because there was a lot of the same criticisms that we're hearing in the tech space right now and as it relates to biotech. It was like, we were wrong about everything back then, except for what we were right about. We did see the flow of investing coming in and many, many things went bankrupt. But the things that didn't go bankrupt changed the world. And that exact same thing is happening today, that you're going to see an incredible number of winners. And I do think biotech is going to be an important part of the big market that everyone's going after in, in the AI and the ML space as well. The tech space is going to go conquer biology as much as it has in other places. But I would say also that pharma and biotech very much have a seat at the table. Our academic researchers have a seat at the table there. And it's really about bringing the two domains together. They're going to be critical.

• 1:27:35Speaker 07

  One of them is not going to go it alone without the other.

• 1:27:38John Coogan?

  Tell us another round.

• 1:27:40Speaker 07

  I need more tech.

• 1:27:41John Coogan?

  How much did you raise? How much did you raise?

• 1:27:43Speaker 07

  Raised forty million dollars this time. Yeah, we hadn't raised any money. Are we good? Well, thanks, man. Appreciate that. We've been working hard to build a real business. So, yeah, this has been, this has been a long haul for us. This is our series E. I'm a little old school. Back when I was a child, when I was a baby investing twenty five years ago, I, I learned that it's okay to just letter your rounds just like normal. Our last round was in twenty twenty two. Yeah, I'm kind of old school in that way. So in twenty twenty two, we did a round and

• 1:28:12Speaker 07

  between then and now, we really laid down the infrastructure so that we had operations across seventeen time zones now. We're operating in the United States, Japan, the UK. We have an incredible group that's actually working in the GCC right now in the Middle East. Obviously, there's a lot going on there that's, that's creating a bit of a headwind. But we're very bullish on the work we're doing in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Riyadh. And Doha and and over in Abu Dhabi. So yeah, bringing all this stuff together has been really important for us. And just our view is you stitch together the supply chain of innovation, you link it to great world, real world data, and you bring a lot of AI and ML in there. And we're going to really accelerate the pace of drug discovery and development.

• 1:28:52John Coogan?

  Well, thanks so much for joining the show. Great to meet you.

• 1:28:55Jordi Hays?

  Enjoyed the conversation.

• 1:28:56John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your week.

• 1:28:57Speaker 07

  Thanks for having me on, guys. Appreciate it.

• 1:28:59John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Up next, we have Pippa Lam returning to the show from Sweet Capital alongside James Wise from Balderton Capital Partners. I believe they are in the waiting room calling in from across the pond. Are you both over in the UK today?

• 1:29:16Jordi Hays?

  They better be. Yeah, we have. Given the news.

• 1:29:20John Coogan?

  Well, welcome to the show. Why don't, Pippa, why don't you reintroduce yourself? And James, since it's the first time on the show, you can introduce yourself as well.

• 1:29:29Pippa Lamb?

  Yeah, big day. James' first time on TVP, guys.

• 1:29:33John Coogan?

  Yes, we're very excited.

• 1:29:34Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic to have you.

• 1:29:35Pippa Lamb?

  Yeah, so those who haven't met before, I'm Pippa Lam. I'm a partner here at Sweet Capital. I'm also an active angel investor here. And I also scout with A16Z, but generally sort of sit between ecosystems of the US and the UK tech.

• 1:29:50Jordi Hays?

  How do you, I didn't know you were you were the triple threat there. How do you, how do you decide who gets, who gets?

• 1:29:56John Coogan?

  Who gets the deal flow? That's interesting.

• 1:29:58Pippa Lamb?

  Yeah. Secrets, secrets.

• 1:30:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:01John Coogan?

  James?

• 1:30:03Speaker 09

  James? Yeah, first time caller, but longtime viewer. Thanks, guys.

• 1:30:07Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you.

• 1:30:08Speaker 09

  Having me on. So I'm a general partner of Balderton Capital. We're a $7 billion venture firm. We're based here in London. And we used to be called Benchmark Europe. There we go. We got the buzzer. So back, back in 2001, we were Benchmark Europe. We spun out in 2010 when the European market really took off. And for the last four months, I've also been helping set up the UK Sovereign AI Fund.

• 1:30:30John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah, take us through that. I think that's what we're here to talk about. How long have the talks been going on? How big is the fund? What's the strategy? What makes it unique in that it's so linked to the UK specifically?

• 1:30:43Speaker 09

  Yeah, well, about a year ago, we kicked off this big AI opportunities plan. There was huge news about it at the time. And we've been working through all the various parts of that. And people can talk more about things we've been doing in data centers and compute. But the fund was set off to really accelerate some of the UK's big UK AI successes. But with a lot more than capital. So we've got about 500 million pounds. It's a starting point. It's the entry ticket in this game. But more importantly, we're providing access to UK supercomputers here. So huge amount of compute. We're providing fast track visas. We're providing any data sets. We're providing government as a customer. So procurement through government. Basically, to give a lot of the companies here that could benefit from working with the government a massive boost.

• 1:31:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, I have to say that supercomputer is such an underrated term. Whoever thought to rebrand supercomputer to data center is an idiot.

• 1:31:35Jordi Hays?

  Terrible.

• 1:31:36John Coogan?

  Because data center sounds so boring and terrible.

• 1:31:39Jordi Hays?

  Futuristic.

• 1:31:40John Coogan?

  Supercomputer is awesome.

• 1:31:41Jordi Hays?

  Not gonna take my job.

• 1:31:42John Coogan?

  I'm so into supercomputers.

• 1:31:43Jordi Hays?

  I love to use a supercomputer.

• 1:31:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, so but

• 1:31:48Speaker 09

  It's your grandfather's data center, right?

• 1:31:49John Coogan?

  It is.

• 1:31:50Speaker 09

  Supercomputer is like what IBM used to build.

• 1:31:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And and they have them in like cool scientific locations like CERN has one. And like you always hear about, oh, they're doing astrophysics on them. There's so many cool things. But that does link to, you know, where will the UK get the most leverage out of investing? Because I imagine that there's not a lot of value in just trying to like clone Google search or Instagram for Europe like those platforms, it's fine. But at the same time, sovereign AI does have value. Where in the stack does that live in your mind?

• 1:32:26Speaker 09

  Yeah, so we're building out a whole range of talent, right? So we're gonna be doing everything from electrons to token. But obviously, working with American partners, doing that and international partners as well. Sometimes at the chip level, sometimes at the model level. And then we're starting to focus on where the UK has huge advantages. So life sciences is a huge area for us, right? If you look at Isomorphic, which is actually a spin out of Google. You know, they're based here in London. The whole team basically is European and They may be the closest we get to a AI company getting a drug all the way through to approval. That's sort of end to end AI design.

• 1:33:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:01Speaker 09

  Outside of life sciences, loads of stuff in physics and material sciences. So a lot of the AI science end of the spectrum, rather than the AI slop end of the spectrum.

• 1:33:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. Pippa, are you seeing, are you seeing like a, an effect where entrepreneurs from around Europe are moving to London? In the same way that folks from Chicago move to San Francisco to do startups? Like, i- is there, is there a proper movement to make London like the destination for ambitious European founders these days?

• 1:33:34Pippa Lamb?

  Yeah, I think it's, it, you know, I obviously fairly biased, having spent a lot of, of time here. But I think that the UK has always battered above its weight in terms of the deep R and D pockets we have here. You know, in terms of universities, the talent that are coming out of the local schools. And that's already created a very fertile ecosystem. And I think that, you know, one of the reasons we wanted to jump on here today was because it feels like, you know, UK is having a bit of an AI moment. It's not to say that we weren't already at the forefront of many of the innovations happening here. You know, of course, we always talk about Demis and as Hannah Sabas from, you know, DeepMind, that was founded in the UK. Obviously, we would have loved to have kept that here, but of course it also went with Google. But, you know, we have long been at the forefront.

• 1:34:18Jordi Hays?

  I think it's super critical that, that they, they, DeepMind maintains such a big presence in, in the UK. Because you guys now at the Sovereign AI Fund, if someone wants to leave DeepMind, spin out. Like, you guys can be there to provide capital and.

• 1:34:34Pippa Lamb?

  Exactly. And that's what we're, we're seeing now. I think both from the idea that we want to be an AI maker, not just an AI taker. We're seeing, you know, grassroots innovation come out of the schools here. But as you say, we're also having people either leave DeepMind. Also in terms of our partners across in the US. I think, you know, James can correct me if I'm wrong. I feel like a lot of the, you know, the first destination headquarters within Europe is usually in London. I think that that is pretty much most of the large AI companies we've had. So I think that there is definitely, you know, it's always been a good hub for AI. But we are seeing a lot of additional tailwinds, of which Sovereign AI is one of them at the moment as well.

• 1:35:14John Coogan?

  We went through this period last year and I it might still be going on. I don't really have a pulse check on it where every AI company's seed round was in like the hundreds of millions of dollars and I imagine that you're not going to spread this fund over just five companies. And so do you think

• 1:35:30Jordi Hays?

  No, John. It's one.

• 1:35:32John Coogan?

  It's one.

• 1:35:34John Coogan?

  But I mean, do you imagine being like, like investing alongside other funds and doing more structured rounds where a lot of capital comes together to take like big swings? Or is there actually some sort of structural shift in the type of startups that are getting built today where five, 10, 20 million dollars can actually put some points on the board early on and get in the game in a meaningful way?

• 1:36:01Jordi Hays?

  I can see that you guys can make a number of bets in the app layer.

• 1:36:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:05Jordi Hays?

  About energy.

• 1:36:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's a lot of different stuff.

• 1:36:08Jordi Hays?

  More science focused, Neo Labs.

• 1:36:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:10Jordi Hays?

  Neo Cloud. Like, I feel like 500 will like really can kind of like seed.

• 1:36:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:16Jordi Hays?

  A bunch of different players, but.

• 1:36:18John Coogan?

  But yeah, how are you thinking about like the dynamics of like early stage startup fundraising right now?

• 1:36:23Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, in the UK, actually, we are seeing those hundred million dollar and even billion dollar seed rounds now. So there's a rumored billion dollar seed round in a, in a founder who's out of DeepMind, which is incredible.

• 1:36:33John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:36:34Speaker 09

  And there's, there's been a bunch of those in the last few months, which is great. The fund is actually doing it the other way around. So we're saying we're gonna give you tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly of government procurement contracts, right? You can build it. If it's good enough, if you're world class, we're the customer. We're ready to buy.

• 1:36:53John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:36:54Speaker 09

  Same thing with compute. We're able to give a sort of, you know, a significant amount of compute to early stage companies. The quid pro quo is, hey, the taxpayers taking all this risk backing you, what's our upside? Right, we want to be on the cap table, right? We want to do it on commercial terms. It's, you know, going to be on the same terms as an index, as a Balder Turner, as an Axcel, as a A16Z, whoever's there. We're going to be good partners, but the money isn't just about unlocking upside and getting, you know, getting on the cap table. It is also about helping the companies to some degree. And obviously, you know, still, five, 10 million pounds can make a difference. I don't want to be like too flippant about it. You know, those things early stage do matter. But, you know, we're, we're here to help the taxpayer get a bit of benefit from all the risk we're taking, supporting all the AI companies.

• 1:37:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:38Pippa Lamb?

  I think that's also one of the things that jumped out at me as well as, you know, as a commercial VC, it's hard to compete purely on capital, right? Especially in AI right now is when the numbers become so, so huge. Um, I think that something I've been really excited to see from the sovereign AI fund is, is exactly as James said, is this kind of hands-on ops help, whether it's how to navigate large data sets that the government may have access to that, you know, portfolio companies will, will have help navigating, whether it be early procurement opportunities, as James said, and then obviously we're going back to the, the a million GPU hours of compute from the supercomputer, uh, uh, which is, you know, a huge, huge help. So, you know,

• 1:38:22Pippa Lamb?

  it's, it's not purely trying to compete purely on a capital basis, which I think, you know, frankly, would not play to the strengths of, of what the fund can do.

• 1:38:30John Coogan?

  So AI is extremely popular in China and India, deeply unpopular in America. Where do you think the UK will land? Do you think there's a chance that, uh, that the population broadly will, uh, be supportive of artificial intelligence?

• 1:38:46Jordi Hays?

  They're like, AI allows me to spend more time at the pub.

• 1:38:51Speaker 09

  That's the way to sell it.

• 1:38:53Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:38:56Speaker 09

  Now, look, the UK, we've been pretty, uh, strong in early adopters, almost of every wave of new technology, right? Whether it's financial services, like, you know, paying with this thing, the Brits are way ahead, earliest adopters. Um, and when it comes to sort of first generation AI tools, your Claude's and, uh, GPT, I think the UK is number one or two in Europe for adoption. So so far, so good. But of course, there's loads of issues, you know, I, I think that, um, there's gonna need to be some really strong political leadership to explain to people the trade-offs between, you know, these things can be transformative, make, you know, your wealth and your health and your security of your nation better off. But at the same time, you know, we're gonna need more energy. There's a load of issues we need to navigate on, uh, online harms

• 1:39:38Speaker 09

  and copyright. Uh, so some of those battles have been fought publicly. Some of them are still to come.

• 1:39:46John Coogan?

  You say that there's an opportunity for the government to be a buyer. I think a lot of people jump to defense and military. I'm more interested in if you're seeing any opportunities in non-defense sector opportunities for efficiency. I feel like at least in America, everyone laments like the DMV is a huge weight and like if they just had, you know, a piece of software instead of a physical form, things would speed up. Are you seeing opportunities for startups to increase efficiency across non-military portions of the UK government?

• 1:40:26Speaker 09

  Oh, yeah. I mean, everywhere. And I think, you know, there's a bunch of businesses here in Europe, I'm sure there are in the US as well, who are using AI for you to complete procurement contracts, you know, these like 400-page things you have to do. So, private companies have been doing that. In response, you know, the UK government at least is already smartly using AI to read them as well and prioritize them, right? They don't make any decisions, but they help you help you navigate some of these processes. Same thing in transcription and voice. Like, obviously, we're already seeing GPs and doctors benefit hugely from being able to use these tools to quickly take notes and actually look at the patient rather than spend all their time sitting in front of the computer filling out the health record. So, look, there's been some

• 1:41:10Speaker 09

  early wins. And I think, you know, part of the job at Sovereign AI is to work out which of the companies we should work with and the government to see where else those wins are.

• 1:41:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Jordy?

• 1:41:21Jordi Hays?

  Super smart. I hope that you can work out, like, on the cap table to just say the United Kingdom. Because like, I feel like as a founder, if you just see your country on your cap table, you're like, well, I gotta, I gotta, I gotta.

• 1:41:34John Coogan?

  I gotta deliver.

• 1:41:34Jordi Hays?

  I gotta deliver.

• 1:41:35John Coogan?

  You gotta deliver.

• 1:41:36Jordi Hays?

  But very cool.

• 1:41:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:39Jordi Hays?

  The country is lucky to have you both, you know, leading this effort.

• 1:41:44John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to stop by. Have a good rest of your day and we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:41:49Speaker 04

  Thanks, guys.

• 1:41:50Speaker 09

  Bye, guys.

• 1:41:52John Coogan?

  There's some huge news in the world of robotics because they made a slot machine that can follow you across the casino floor.

• 1:42:03Jordi Hays?

  We actually got a slot machine stalker before a humanoid demo.

• 1:42:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is before.

• 1:42:12Jordi Hays?

  I guess not demo.

• 1:42:13John Coogan?

  Well, this is before it can actually fold your laundry. Like, we've been seeing a lot of laundry folding demos. We got the slot machine.

• 1:42:19Jordi Hays?

  Never, yeah, what is never ask a woman her age, a man his salary, or humanoid robot founder to let you be alone with the robot for 30 seconds.

• 1:42:29John Coogan?

  Okay, but what is actually happening here? Because, obviously, like, the joke is that it will follow you around so that you never stop gambling. But that can't be why they actually built this. It must be because they want to be able to reconfigure the layout easier?

• 1:42:46Jordi Hays?

  It's probably that, but also the novelty.

• 1:42:49John Coogan?

  Okay. Oh, if you see something moving around.

• 1:42:52Jordi Hays?

  If you're walking through.

• 1:42:53John Coogan?

  You'll be like, I gotta chase that down and throw a couple bucks in.

• 1:42:55Jordi Hays?

  Oh, that's funny.

• 1:42:56John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:42:57Jordi Hays?

  It's a robot slot machine.

• 1:42:57John Coogan?

  This also looks like, I don't know what Novomatic is, but this does not look like it's, uh, this does not look like it's at an actual casino. This looks like it's at a trade show for casino equipment. Which I think might be, this is a demo of something that this company is going to try and sell to casinos. I don't know that this is actually at a major casino just yet, although people are walking around. But it looks like, it looks like trade show bags to me. I don't know, this says trade show all over it. I do wonder if this is being teleoperated, or if this is end-to-end machine learning. I need to know. I need to know the tech stack. And I need to know, is this, is this truly, is this truly autonomous? Or is this just being puppeteered by an Xbox controller? Because.

• 1:43:40Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get one for the studio.

• 1:43:41John Coogan?

  We've had, we've had, this is not, this, this could be just a remote, a remote-controlled car, which has existed since, like, what, the 80s, maybe? Maybe longer? But we're in this, we're in this phase where we want to layer on, oh, this is AGI. This is, this is truly AGI. What else is going on in the timeline, Jordi? Anything else?

• 1:44:05John Coogan?

  The must have item in Silicon Valley is $178 sweater with a CEO's face. Leaders from companies from Nvidia to Palantir are now driving fashion, signaling a new era of the cult of the founder. We saw Nick on our team rocking the Jensen sweater from GTC. It looks great. This is a very beautiful sweater.

• 1:44:25Jordi Hays?

  It does look great.

• 1:44:25John Coogan?

  Very funny, very silly, and, and just a nice departure from just a normal T-shirt. You know, for, for what, 20, 30 years, the tech, the tech merch was just a T-shirt with a logo on it? That's fine, but why not mix it up? Why not go in a different direction and make a sweater with the CEO's full, full cartoon character on it? Why not?

• 1:44:46Jordi Hays?

  Dolly Bolly says, is showing a screenshot from, I believe is Biz, Biz by Sell, a laundromat which is selling, it's got 421,000 of EBITs asking just under 3 million. So getting a better multiple for your laundromat than most, than most public SaaS companies out there right now. And it was established in 2024.

• 1:45:13John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:45:14Jordi Hays?

  They just made this business in a couple of years.

• 1:45:18John Coogan?

  Lifestyle business.

• 1:45:18Jordi Hays?

  And they're like, I would like $3 million for it now.

• 1:45:21John Coogan?

  Okay, a couple more posts. John Fio, friend of the show, says the sphere is probably the most important piece of architecture in the last 100 years. It's a hot take. It's what the VR trade was trying to be, but manifested in the real world with a real novel experience instead. It's what Apple and Meta were trying to go after, but failed because they tried to shove it into a scalable box instead of building for real life. A sphere in every major city will be a proprietary technology for a new kind of stadium. It will suck in only the best acts and they'll stop playing regular stadiums. It's the perfect example of mixing real novel tech with real novel life. This is how you capture value over the next cycle. And I agree with this. I think this is a great take. So.

• 1:46:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, rewind a year ago. You're like, companies are going to announce hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of Nvidia orders.

• 1:46:12Jordi Hays?

  Do you want to, meanwhile, we have the Sphere.

• 1:46:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:14Jordi Hays?

  Which they built the Sphere.

• 1:46:16John Coogan?

  It's one concert venue.

• 1:46:18Jordi Hays?

  They built a, they built a really cool concert venue in Vegas. They got a bunch of debt. But it's awesome. Which one do you, which one do you want to own?

• 1:46:26John Coogan?

  The trade is...

• 1:46:27Jordi Hays?

  And of course, on Nvidia, you were, you were still up, you know, 100% over the last 12 months. But if you had bought the Sphere, you were up 442%.

• 1:46:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, did very well. I, I made a whole YouTube video about the Sphere two years ago and was pretty bullish on it. Had dug into the founder and how it got built. And it was just a fascinating, fascinating story. But I think he's right that, that there will be a Sphere in every major city. There is technically a Sphere-like location in Los Angeles over by SoFi Stadium. It's not technically a full Sphere with LEDs on the outside, but it has a big screen and you can go and watch a football game there. And I think it's doing well, as well. I haven't dug into that one nearly as much. But I do think that these types of like immersive experiences. The Sphere is unique because it grabs attention from all over the world.

• 1:47:20John Coogan?

  You fly by on a plane, you just see it and you see the emoji on it.

• 1:47:23Jordi Hays?

  It's kind of a miss that we've never done anything with the Sphere.

• 1:47:26John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:47:27Jordi Hays?

  Last, a little white pill here.

• 1:47:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's up?

• 1:47:30Jordi Hays?

  Meta announced, "Level up a free four-week training program that takes people with no prior experience and prepares them to work as fiber technicians on data center construction sites across the US." We built this program with CBRE because the fiber technician field and the broader construction industry is facing a nationwide shortage at a time when data center demand is higher than ever. And I'm sure people will come up with reasons why this is bad, actually. But I think this is, I think this is great. Great opportunity. And Tyler, we didn't get a chance to talk with you about,

• 1:48:04Jordi Hays?

  talk with you about this before the show, but you're actually going to be going through the program starting tomorrow. We got you a slot.

• 1:48:10John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:48:10Jordi Hays?

  And so get, this actually seems fun. I would be interested in doing this.

• 1:48:13John Coogan?

  It's data center, they made data center simulator in real life. They made data center simulator in real life. That's amazing. Tyler, do you ever play Elden Ring?

• 1:48:24Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:48:24John Coogan?

  No. Oh, it's such a good game.

• 1:48:26Jordi Hays?

  More like online games.

• 1:48:27John Coogan?

  More on Elden Ring can be online.

• 1:48:29Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I don't know.

• 1:48:30John Coogan?

  You can play with people. They're making a movie about it. A live action adaptation of Elden Ring, produced by A24 in partnership with Bandai Namco, and filmed for IMAX is slated for release March 3rd, 2028. Wow, that's a long ways away. Production will begin in spring. But if you haven't played Elden Ring, it's a fun time. It's really, really hard. And sometimes it just gets like a little bit too much, but it's a good time. Anyway.

• 1:48:55Jordi Hays?

  Well, folks.

• 1:48:55John Coogan?

  Thank you for tuning in. We will be.

• 1:48:57Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor and a privilege.

• 1:48:59John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com and flashbang out. We'll see you later.

• 1:49:06Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:49:06John Coogan?

  Growing flashbang.

• 1:49:08Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 1:49:08John Coogan?

  Goodbye.