LIVE FROM NEW YORK: Ramp's Valuation Reaches $22.5B, Figma Going Public, The Personal Superintelligence Debate | Eric Glyman, Avi Schiffmann

(00:34) - Zuck and Personal Superintelligence (32:00) - Figma Going Public (45:40) - Eric Glyman, co-founder and CEO of Ramp, a financial operations platform, announced a $500 million Series E-2 funding round, elevating the company's valuation to $22.5 billion. He discussed the rapid growth of Ramp, highlighting the launch of autonomous AI agents designed to streamline financial processes and the company's commitment to saving customers time and money. Glyman emphasized the importance of integrating AI into financial operations to enhance efficiency and reduce manual tasks. (01:13:39) - Avi Schiffmann, known for his innovative tech projects, discusses the launch of "Friend," a $99 AI-powered pendant designed to serve as a digital companion. He shares that the device has received positive feedback, including bulk orders from companies like Arc Boats. Schiffmann emphasizes that "Friend" is not just a productivity tool but aims to provide emotional support, with plans to release a feature film to further promote the product. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Wednesday, July 30th, 2025. We are live from Manhattan, New York.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:08John Coogan?

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

• 0:11Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:12John Coogan?

  The temple of technology with us to Manhattan. We're here live from New York City for a few reasons.

• 0:18Jordi Hays?

  What are we wearing?

• 0:19John Coogan?

  We're wearing yellow suits to celebrate.

• 0:21Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:21John Coogan?

  Fundraise, Ramp raised their Series E2 today.

• 0:25Jordi Hays?

  As one does.

• 0:26John Coogan?

  Team over there.

• 0:26Jordi Hays?

  As one does.

• 0:27John Coogan?

  We will have Eric Lyman joining the show in just a little bit, in about 50 minutes, 52 minutes. He will be joining.

• 0:33Jordi Hays?

  Can't wait.

• 0:33John Coogan?

  First, we got to talk about Mark Zuckerberg.

• 0:35Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:35John Coogan?

  Who has been completely natified, Nat Friedman.

• 0:39Jordi Hays?

  They natified my boy.

• 0:41John Coogan?

  Already, already having an impact over at Meta. Will Depew has the post. He says, LMAO, Zuck has been natified. Plain text, Times New Roman, now going to hit mainstream corporate media like a bomb. And this is from Mark Zuckerberg's announcement of his, a little bit more into his strategy and product strategy with.

• 1:01Jordi Hays?

  Superintelligence for everyone.

• 1:03John Coogan?

  For everyone, potentially.

• 1:04Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be personal.

• 1:04John Coogan?

  It's gonna be personal.

• 1:05Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be a personal thing.

• 1:06John Coogan?

  So he says, personal superintelligence in an H1, clearly HTML tag. And this is all in plain Times New Roman text you can see in the post. He says, over the last few months, we have begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves. The, the improvement is slow for now, but undeniable. Developing superintelligence is now in sight. And that's kind of the breaking news. This was like when we talked to DJ CO over at Neuralink and they said, we are starting to see glimpses of superhuman powers from Neuralink patients. And we kind of were so in the midst of the conversation that we kind of missed that scoop, but.

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  It reminds me of, it reminds me of the Buzz Lightyear meme where it's like, uh, everyone is saying, superintelligence is now in sight.

• 1:51John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. I mean, the question is like, it immediately, it immediately asks like, okay, what does that mean? Because. Superintelligence broadly, in some ways, it means like higher IQ than any human, but also this idea of it's self-improving. Like, that is the definition of superintelligence in many realms. And so the question is like, what was this glimpse? Is this, because you can make the argument that using AI to write code in and at a foundation model lab is superintelligence, even if there's still a human in the loop. You have to take the human completely out of the loop. And then what is the prompt?

• 2:34John Coogan?

  Because if the prompt is just, is just go fix this one little bug and it does it, and it does it agentially and no one touches it, that's different from the prompt being like, improve the system.

• 2:43Jordi Hays?

  Or never having to prompt it at all.

• 2:45John Coogan?

  Yes, yeah, yeah, exactly. Because you've, you've given it this plan of just.

• 2:49Jordi Hays?

  It's agentially, proactively.

• 2:52John Coogan?

  It just wants to improve itself.

• 2:53Jordi Hays?

  Improving itself.

• 2:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, and then there's also.

• 2:56Jordi Hays?

  Kind of like how nobody has to tell you to bench press on Monday.

• 3:00John Coogan?

  And, and yeah, and the flip side is like, you can, like, some of the algorithms for reinforcement learning feel like they are self-improvement because you are not laying down a, a specific, there are emergent qualities where, like, when they train GPT-4.5, it doesn't feel like that was RL'd on four tan green texts. And yet it gained the ability to do that and make them funny. And it wasn't necessarily a, like, a stated goal. And so you could imagine that that's an example of this, but all of these are kind of squishy definitions, but it's certainly a, a good rallying cry that we're on the cusp of this. And, and many of the foundation model lab founders and leaders have been kind of like

• 3:42John Coogan?

  teasing this and, and discussing how much have we seen here? But I think everyone would want more concrete evidence.

• 3:49Jordi Hays?

  Zach put out a video on, I'm sure it was on Instagram and threads and, and Facebook and everywhere else, but the video took an interesting angle. He basically says, he basically was like, other players in the industry want to automate all valuable work.

• 4:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 4:06Jordi Hays?

  And his message was effectively, we want to give superintelligence to the people.

• 4:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:13Jordi Hays?

  And so Zach is, yeah, he's, he's finding his, his wedge into the market.

• 4:18John Coogan?

  And he kind of, he kind of did that with. Instagram and Facebook in some ways in the sense that like he gave everyone a printing press. He gave everyone a TV show or a your distribution potentially. It's in the algorithm. You still have to win, but everyone has the ability to publish now, thanks to him and YouTube and a lot of other services, of course, but you know, the modern social media networks enable anyone at basically zero cost to stand up an operation that previously had very high fixed costs.

• 4:49Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 4:50John Coogan?

  In the sense of like you needed to own a TV channel or put wires in the ground or buy a radio tower to distribute your content. And now you can just click a button and go live or something like that.

• 4:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the messaging was broadly around AI to help you improve yourself, level up, learn, things like that. So it's a very optimistic message, far different than what some other executives in the industry have shared, which is that all white collar.

• 5:16John Coogan?

  The SSI thing is the most extreme where it's like, we're not even going to give anyone this product. Like we are going to have full control over the super intelligence. We're building the same thing, but we're distributing it. Zuck wants to make it free for 5 billion people. And Ilya, so far, you know, he hasn't really talked about this too much, but the vibe has been no one will have access to it. It will be completely self-contained. And so a dramatic shift from.

• 5:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Anthropic, Anthropic as well was saying, you know, all white collar work or 50% of white collar work being replaced.

• 5:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, they kind of walked that back.

• 5:49Jordi Hays?

  Short timeline.

• 5:50John Coogan?

  But yeah, so the white collar work thing is interesting because Zuck does address that a little bit. So let's just read through a little bit more of his post. He says, "It seems clear that in the coming years, AI will improve all of our existing systems and enable the creation and discovery of new things that aren't imaginable today, but it's an open question what we will direct super intelligence towards." And this is the question on like white collar work, I suppose. "In some ways, this will be a new era for humanity, but in others, it's just a continuation of historical trends. As recently as 200 years ago..." This reminds me of that guy saying like 300 years ago, we were living in caves. But this is actually true. 200 years ago, 90% of farmer, 90% of people, of humans, were farmers growing food to survive. Advances in technology have steadily freed much of

• 6:34John Coogan?

  humanity to focus on less, less on subsistence, subsistence farming, farming for yourself, growing food just to keep yourself alive. You need food, so you grow the food and then you immediately eat it and then you go back to working on the food.

• 6:47John Coogan?

  And more on choose at each step. People have used our newfound productivity to achieve more than was previously possible, pushing the frontiers of science and health as well as spending more time on creativity, culture, relationships, and enjoying life. I am extremely optimistic that superintelligence will help humanity accelerate our pace of progress, but perhaps even more important that superintelligence has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment where people will have greater agency to improve the world in the directions they choose. As profound as the abundance produced by AI may one day be, an even more meaningful impact on our lives will likely come from everyone having a personal superintelligence that helps you achieve your goals, create whatever you want to see in the world, experience

• 7:29John Coogan?

  any adventure, be a better friend to you, those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be. Meta's vision is to bring personal superintelligence to everyone. We believe in putting this power in people's hands to direct it towards what they value in their own lives. Yeah, superintelligence for the people. This is distinct from others in the industry, not naming names, who believe that superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output. At Meta, we believe that people pursuing their individual aspirations is always how we have made progress.

• 8:02Jordi Hays?

  You know a job that was impacted by technology?

• 8:04John Coogan?

  What?

• 8:05Jordi Hays?

  Knocker-uppers. These were human alarm clocks that would walk the streets of London with either a long stick or a device to shoot frozen peas at windows to wake up workers in the morning.

• 8:18John Coogan?

  So before- Real thing?

• 8:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this was real thing. Before clocks, alarm clocks specifically, were widely used, you would effectively pay somebody a small amount to come up to your window in the morning and hit it with a long stick or shoot it with peas. So this was a job that was impacted by, again, alarm clocks becoming widespread.

• 8:40John Coogan?

  How'd the the rooster industrial complex fare with that?

• 8:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the roosters were down, were rocked by. The original alarm clock. The original alarm clock. I would, I would, if I didn't have neighbors, I think I'd get a rooster.

• 8:54John Coogan?

  A rooster?

• 8:54Jordi Hays?

  Have you ever, like, have you ever, have you ever spent, uh, yeah, they were called knocker uppers. Have you ever spent, have you ever, like, stayed at a farm?

• 9:02John Coogan?

  Chicken and accidentally.

• 9:04Jordi Hays?

  Accidentally got a rooster? Yeah, that happens.

• 9:06John Coogan?

  It was fine. It wasn't that big of a deal. I wake up pretty early.

• 9:09Jordi Hays?

  No, it's, I mean, it's nice as an adult. You're like somewhere around 5 a.m. It starts making noise. It's kind of a nice noise.

• 9:14John Coogan?

  No, I get up earlier. I wake the rooster up.

• 9:17Jordi Hays?

  John wakes up the rooster. You walk out and you're in your yellows, in your ramp suit.

• 9:22John Coogan?

  I'm sweating peas at the rooster.

• 9:23Jordi Hays?

  In your ramp suit, just.

• 9:27Jordi Hays?

  Very good. Well, uh, speaking of white collar work, uh, the Fed holds rates steady, but two officials are backing a cut. Uh, there's dissent at the Fed, uh, highlighting a fraying consensus among policymakers who are debating the effects that tariffs will have on the economy and inflation. So the Journal just put this out a few minutes ago. The Federal Reserve held rates steady for the fifth straight meeting Wednesday, but are faced with rare dissents from two officials seeking an immediate cut.

• 9:56John Coogan?

  These are officials within the Fed?

• 9:57Jordi Hays?

  Yes. The decision followed. There's another, there's another official who's, who's also in agreement with them.

• 10:03John Coogan?

  Venture capitalists.

• 10:04Jordi Hays?

  Venture capitalists and, uh, you know, I was thinking about that the other day. It is, is it, it is interesting that, uh, that, you know, if you look at real estate and private equity, uh, VCs, you know, always get memed for, for benefiting from low rates. But in many ways, VCs can continue to deploy into companies because they're just betting on that company's prospects over a very long period of time. If you're trying to deploy into real estate and traditional private equity when rates are high, things are way, way less workable. So I think it's, I think big real estate and big P E are really trying to shift the, the ZIRP blame on, on the venture capital class. And I won't stand for it.

• 10:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, there were a lot of companies that, like startups, that got hurt during the interest rate rise. Some of them. Some fintechs were sensitive to rates, but many weren't. I mean, you think about banking products. And if they're like, all of a sudden, we went from offering our customers 2% interest on their deposits to 6% or 5%. And that just allows us to take, you know, a fraction of a larger. You know, interest rate payout every month, that actually improved their economics?

• 11:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Mercury is the best example of this. Every, every time the Fed-

• 11:16John Coogan?

  Were they profitable?

• 11:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, they're printing money, they still are.

• 11:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:20Jordi Hays?

  And every time the Fed would hold a meeting, their revenue would basically go up immediately with, no, they didn't need to hire new people. I guess it's just default based on the Fed funds rate.

• 11:30John Coogan?

  So that kind of like, you know, it hurts some of the fintechs, it helped some of the fintechs.

• 11:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:34John Coogan?

  And then a lot of just the normal software companies were like completely unaffected, sort of loosely broadly.

• 11:38Jordi Hays?

  Loosely affected because maybe VCs couldn't raise their next fund and market it up again.

• 11:43John Coogan?

  As opposed to like, we know examples of people who started real estate roll-up plays, bought a bunch of facilities, put, got variable interest loans on them and then-

• 11:53Jordi Hays?

  And are now producing like 1% yield.

• 11:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. And then when the interest rates went up, their mortgage payments on all those assets went through the roof.

• 12:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:00John Coogan?

  And all of a sudden they were upside down on all of their economics. So, so very rough.

• 12:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you went heavy into SF real estate in 2018, 2019, 2020 on variable rate loans, you just have gotten absolutely cooked.

• 12:12John Coogan?

  Even the meme of like, buy a boring business, that's the example I'm thinking of is, is, okay, you bought a boring business that cash flows, you know, a million dollars a year, but you bought it such that you have, you know, okay, 500,000 of that cash flow was going to service the debt that you used to buy the asset. And then all of a sudden, your interest payment on that loan doubles, then you're not making any net profit all of a sudden and that really puts you under.

• 12:37Jordi Hays?

  So Fed officials maintain their benchmark policy rate in a range between 4.25% and 4.5% as they weighed how importers, retailers and consumers will split the costs of bigger gong hits. Uh, sorry, cost of higher duties on imports. The outcome of hand-to-hand combat over who will bear the burden of tariffs, figures to shape the trajectory of inflation and hiring later this year, which could resolve whether and when the central bank resumes cuts in the months ahead. So hinting at a September rate cut, or at least that's how people are, are kind of like reading through the lines here.

• 13:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, also we blew out the GDP numbers, right? It was like 2.2 was the expectation, it was, it came in at 3.

• 13:16Jordi Hays?

  3.

• 13:17John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 13:17Jordi Hays?

  Quick hit.

• 13:21Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people are, a lot of people are, yeah, we got a, we have a new gong here in the great city of New York.

• 13:29John Coogan?

  Okay, I want to go back to the, the personal superintelligence thing for a little bit with Zuck. So this is distinct from others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work. It feels like maybe a shot at SSI or Anthropic or OpenAI, but I feel like I've noticed that Sam Altman is, yeah, maybe, because they're turning down Zuck's billion dollar offers, which we'll get to.

• 13:53Jordi Hays?

  Legitly.

• 13:54John Coogan?

  But the, the interesting thing there is that I feel like Sam Altman's been sort of pivoting his rhetoric around this, and he said something similar recently where, I think it was in the Soft Singular, he said, in that blog post, he said something similar to, as recently as 200 years ago, 90% of people were farmers. And his point was, if you went back in time and you showed a subsistence farmer in the year 1800, hey, there are these people, like, let me take you on a tour of the modern economy. Here's someone whose job is-

• 14:25Jordi Hays?

  Is email.

• 14:26John Coogan?

  Is email.

• 14:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that, that, that, that, like, 100 years from now, we're going to look back and be like, nine, you know, like-

• 14:32John Coogan?

  Why were they doing email?

• 14:33Jordi Hays?

  Everybody that went to school became an email professional.

• 14:37John Coogan?

  It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, or like calendaring or phone calls.

• 14:40Jordi Hays?

  You mean, wait, they had to use the computer?

• 14:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:42Jordi Hays?

  They had to type, they had to like physically hit the buttons?

• 14:44John Coogan?

  Why didn't the robots just do that?

• 14:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Why do you need, if it's a, if it's a machine, why do you need to hit?

• 14:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, and it's scary because it's like, okay, well, like, if I'm not doing that, am I doing anything?

• 14:54Jordi Hays?

  I like my email job.

• 14:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, my email job is directly tied to, to my-

• 14:57Jordi Hays?

  My self-worth.

• 14:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, and my subsistence.

• 14:59Jordi Hays?

  Income.

• 15:00John Coogan?

  I'm a subsistence emailer.

• 15:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:02John Coogan?

  And it's the same thing if you went back and said to somebody in 1800, hey, you're growing food, but in the future, you won't, you won't have a job as a farmer. They'd be like, well, then I'm screwed, right? Like, I'm, I'm done for. And it's like, no, you'll have an email job. You'll be able to, you'll be able to do email all day. But we need to debate more about like what this actual product looks like, because we were talking about that earlier. We, we know that when you, they're charging you 20 bucks or $200 a month because it's expensive. And we were talking to George Hots about this, and he was saying like, they're losing money on me, just because of the inference cost.

• 15:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Claude came out yesterday and said one person was costing them tens of thousands of dollars a month on their $200 a month plan.

• 15:39John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 15:40Jordi Hays?

  There was also, so- Sam is projecting to spend 35 billion on inference and 55 billion on training models between 2025 and 2027.

• 15:50John Coogan?

  So I'm less worried about the training model. I see that as CapEx. I'm more thinking about the total inference cost right now across all the major labs. Like, it's got to be in the billions. It's probably not in the hundreds of billions. If you look at how much OpenAI and Anthropic have raised and how much they're burning, a lot of that goes towards salaries. But if you just look at the actual inference cost, it feels like Mark Zuckerberg could eat that cost for a long time.

• 16:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:10John Coogan?

  And then, if he wants to keep it free, there's the very logical path, which is ads. He already has the most robust, most targeted ad network, and he can bring all those ads in and start monetizing those users. And so, the more you're using, the more ads you see, it's perfectly aligned, it's an auction. And so, someone who's doing low, low economically valuable work will see, like, cheaper ads. It's perfectly price discriminated. So, I don't see Meta as having problem, like, scaling inference and keeping it free.

• 16:40Jordi Hays?

  The questions...

• 16:40John Coogan?

  The question we're going back for, yeah.

• 16:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the questions I have are, that wasn't exactly answered here. Although, reading between the lines, it's maybe less important. It sounds like a shift in strategy, but doesn't, when I read that announcement, I don't think, oh, they're going to go heavy into open source. Like, that doesn't scream...

• 16:54John Coogan?

  That's a good point.

• 16:55Jordi Hays?

  That doesn't scream, uh, we want to be the number one open source model. They might still, but this feels more like an application play to me.

• 17:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the areas that, uh, you can imagine Zuck wants to dominate in are in create, the, the action of creation. So, content creation, it heavily ties into the meta ecosystem already. Uh, their business is dependent on, you know, billions of people globally, creating content all day long. Some professionally, some recreationally, but all of those people he wants to serve there. Uh, the knowledge, kind of learning, I think, uh, he's signaling here that he cares about. He clearly understands that ChatGPT has incredible PMF around, uh, around just like, learning, understanding the world, et cetera.

• 17:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:35Jordi Hays?

  Um, and I could see him playing there. The areas that I'm interested to track, uh, going forward are, are how much, uh, how much, how much resources go into this companionship, right? That's another area. That's like driving up user minutes on ChatGPT, right? And, and we've talked about it before. That can ultimately threaten the time that, you know, if people start spending two hours a day with ChatGPT, that's potentially two hours a day that they're, you know, maybe, maybe they have it on audio mode and they're still using Instagram, but it's, you know, potentially threatening user minutes on his platforms. And then the big one, probably a long shot, but just search, right? I'm sure he's always want, you know, search, multi-trillion dollar market, very, uh, very.

• 18:17John Coogan?

  He was going to launch a search engine for a while.

• 18:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:19John Coogan?

  Like there was a point where you, like, the search bar in Facebook was getting so powerful that you could search the web, never became a serious Google competitor, but was a.

• 18:28Jordi Hays?

  And the other, the other thing here to track is, the other thing here to track is, uh, threads, we, we gotta like do a proper, like new deep dive on threads. I don't think when it launched, we didn't even have the show, but, um, uh, it, it sort of launched, peaked in the charts, fell off completely, but I think it's building back up. There's actually quite a lot of activity there and he's going to have confidence to see like, okay, I have WhatsApp, I have Instagram, I have all these different platforms that I can drive users to. I have the best ad engine in the wor- in the world.

• 18:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:55Jordi Hays?

  If I want to, if I want, uh, MSL to create these like new consumer applications,

• 18:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 19:00Jordi Hays?

  I'm going to have the ability to get those in front of billions and billions of people. So it is a massive unfair advantage on the, uh, just like training and inference and like CapEx side. And then massive distribution advantage. OpenAI has benefited from, you know, tremendous organic virality, everything from just people telling their friends to these Studio Ghibli moments, et cetera. But, uh, but yeah, it'll be interesting to see, okay, where does he really want to compete? Does it look like something like ChatGPT that ChatGPT again is this like incredible tool that allows you to do all these, you know, anything you want, you can study with it, it can keep you company. It can, uh, help you with your homework, it can help you write emails, uh, it'll transcribe a meeting, it'll, it'll make an S1 for you, right? And so that, those are the big things.

• 19:42Jordi Hays?

  It's like, okay, we have a much better sense now of where the team is going to be focused. Again, it doesn't read like open source to me, um, but it's still, there's so many different ways that you can kind of like chop up the, uh, the category and the opportunity.

• 19:55John Coogan?

  I have a rebuttal, but first I'm going to tell you about Vanta.

• 19:58Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 19:58John Coogan?

  Automate compliance and security and trust with Vanta. Go to vanta.com to check it out. So my rebuttal is that, uh, the, so the, the, the question that I have, I agree with a lot of what you said. I guess the question is, um, I have this personal superintelligence. Do I want it in a meta property app right now? Or do we need a new app?

• 20:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:21John Coogan?

  That's really hard.

• 20:21Jordi Hays?

  That's what I was saying. Well, really hard, but at the same time, how many ways? I re-downloaded threads because I kept getting notifications and it would tell me something to the effect, like it would give me three words out of like an interesting, you know, post. And I could only see it if I re-downloaded it, right?

• 20:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 20:39Jordi Hays?

  And so.

• 20:40John Coogan?

  I'm just wondering about if I, if I'm, if I'm interacting, if I go to Instagram to do my homework, I'm going to get sucked into reels, right? And it's like, I want to go to the library to study and ChatGPT feels like a library. And it's been very difficult, even if you have massive distribution, to actually scale share of queries. Even, even, I mean, threads is a special.

• 21:07Jordi Hays?

  Seven percent right now?

• 21:08John Coogan?

  So, so threads, I think is a special case, potentially because of the political dynamic of Elon Musk. Whereas with, there's no political dynamic between ChatGPT and Gemini. Google has massive distribution. They've been able to get to 450 million DAUs or MAUs.

• 21:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:24John Coogan?

  But they haven't been able to break over like 10% of queries, share of queries, something like that. And so I, I wonder if, you know, you launch a consumer app for studying and your personal superintelligence. Like the logical way to distribute Meta's AI projects and products is through their existing platforms.

• 21:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:46John Coogan?

  And so.

• 21:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and you can imagine that. You're in the Instagram tab. You have a boring picture. It, it makes a Ghibli version of it.

• 21:52John Coogan?

  Even if you're in a, like, imagine you're in a study group with, with a couple of people in the same class in a WhatsApp chat. And then there's, there's a super intelligent person, there's a super intelligent agent or AI in the chat with you. And you can talk to it and you can answer it right there.

• 22:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, so and to be clear, they have the Meta AI app. Sounds like you're not a DAU yet. Uh, but, but it's number three on productivity. I imagine Zach wants to get that to number one.

• 22:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 22:15Jordi Hays?

  I could imagine. Uh, the other form factor here is obviously glasses, right? He's just invested billions into owning a piece of Luxottica. I imagine as part of that investment, he gets, he's gonna probably make it so that other AI assistants can't get access to.

• 22:30John Coogan?

  That's actually maybe the better like personal super intelligence like tutor.

• 22:34Jordi Hays?

  No, and he says that in the video. He says that in the video. A lot of, a lot of, a lot of what he says in the videos.

• 22:38John Coogan?

  Put on your glasses to read a book. If you have, if you're, you know, farsighted, you put on the glasses and so you put on the glasses to study. And then it's, it's seeing the textbook that you're interacting with. It's seeing your screen and you do, and it, but, but specifically like the meta Raybans don't have the ability to show you an endless stream of reels. And that's what I'm most worried about is that if, if you're.

• 22:57Jordi Hays?

  No, they do though. You remember that, you remember that?

• 22:59John Coogan?

  Orion does, but not the meta.

• 23:01Jordi Hays?

  I know, but that's where we're going.

• 23:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. Maybe, maybe it's like.

• 23:04Jordi Hays?

  You don't, you don't think they want to merge Orion and Raybans in the future?

• 23:08John Coogan?

  I, I don't know. I just think that like it, it would be like.

• 23:12Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's already, you can already do.

• 23:14John Coogan?

  Products. If I had to choose two different products for an educational, uh, like environment. And I have one that's ad free and distraction free. And the other one is like, do you want to see this amazingly viral reel?

• 23:27Jordi Hays?

  I'm not, yeah, I'm not betting, I'm not that, I'm not betting that American, uh, students will be using Instagram to study with them at all. But, uh, but yeah, it, it does feel like, you know, Zuck's vision is, uh, the, the, this, this is, he's making a big bet on, on, uh, you know, vision. VR, AR being, uh, the future computing platform. He talks about this saying, you know, you're going to be in your kitchen, looking at your fridge. And it's going to be like, hey, did you know that you could make this kind of quesadilla? I see you have the ingredients. I'll give you a recipe. And then you just like make it and guides you through it. And then again, like you said, you're reading, uh, a textbook and it's popping up. Uh, you can ask questions in real time to the AI based on the information that you're seeing or you're studying or, or even the, the interesting data point.

• 24:10Jordi Hays?

  I think it was yesterday they came out and they're saying they're letting applicants use AI in coding interviews.

• 24:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 24:15Jordi Hays?

  Which is.

• 24:16John Coogan?

  Total clearly victory.

• 24:17Jordi Hays?

  Total clearly victory. Uh, uh, credit, credit to Roy Lee there for making, uh, making cheating, uh.

• 24:24John Coogan?

  Controversial branding, but directionally correct.

• 24:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:27John Coogan?

  For sure. Well, let's go into the potentially bigger bottleneck for superintelligence at MSL. But first, let me tell you about Linear, meet the system for modern software development. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. So, interesting comment, this comes from Rehar Jacques. An interesting comment from former Meta employee, "Energy is the biggest bottleneck right now."

• 24:50Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 24:51John Coogan?

  "Even if Meta wants to spend $100 to $150 billion on CapEx for AI infrastructure, they can't. It's not just Nvidia, it's not TSMC, transformers, power equipment, cooling equipment, and the availability of power is all limited right now. Schneider Electric is completely booked until 2030. Even if you have the money, you can't spend it." And this is from, oh, this is a screenshot from like a GLG call or a Tegus call or something. He won't, so is he serious? It must be AlphaSense or something like that. So, they're talking about Meta CapEx and they talked to this anonymous expert who is clearly a former Meta employee. Says, "Yeah, there's no way you can spend $150 billion right now. If we look at any of the transformers, not the machine learning architecture,

• 25:34John Coogan?

  but the actual physical energy transformers, or any power equipment or cooling equipment, or even construction or availability of power, there's no way it's going to happen. If you talk about Schneider, who supplies a lot of the power equipment, they're completely full until 2030. They're not negotiating on price. It's basically, you're lucky to get an order. Everyone talks about Nvidia, but there are many other things beyond Nvidia for this thing. Even if you have the money, you can't spend it."

• 25:57Jordi Hays?

  And Josh Steinman quoted this post and said, "If you're an American engineer and want to lead the technical aspect of building a transformer company, my DMs are open." So, apparently, there is an American, a new American transformer startup.

• 26:11John Coogan?

  I've been asking, I asked the co-founder of CoreWeave, and I also asked some semi-analysis folks, like, we've all learned about Nvidia, then we all learned about TSMC, then we all learned about ASML, then we learned about SK Hynix, the memory supplier. Like, we've learned the entire supply chain of AI. And I was like, "What's the next company we're all going to need to learn about?" And it sounds like it's Schneider Electric. I've never heard of this company before today. But we gotta dig in and understand, do they have competitors? Is there an opportunity? What's going on? I'm very curious to know how Schneider Electric works. But continuing on Zuck's.

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  This is a French company.

• 26:47John Coogan?

  French company.

• 26:48Jordi Hays?

  Founded in 1863.

• 26:50John Coogan?

  Founder mode.

• 26:51Jordi Hays?

  So they're, I don't think they're still, it's gonna be hard to be in founder mode if you got started back in the 1800s, but they did about $36 billion in 2023. So massive, massive company.

• 27:05John Coogan?

  Market cap?

• 27:06Jordi Hays?

  137 billion euros.

• 27:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 27:11Jordi Hays?

  So I don't know, that's like, what, a billion USD?

• 27:13John Coogan?

  50 bucks. Anyway, Will Depew says, "The bigger story is not that Zuck is giving out $400 million offers. It's that people are turning them down. What that might, what might that mean?" Of course, Will works at OpenAI.

• 27:27Jordi Hays?

  Not conflicted at all.

• 27:28John Coogan?

  Not conflicted at all. Zuck is targeting Mira's lab thinking machines with offers between 200 to 500 million made to a quarter of their team and one over $1 billion and not a single person has taken the offer. And there's, there's some people going back and forth on like, what that means. Maybe you just believe in the mission and you already have 1% of the company and you think it's gonna be worth a couple hundred billions. So you're like, yeah, I'll just wait and deliver on this and I think we're gonna win. You could also not want to go work at a big company. There are a variety of reasons.

• 27:57Jordi Hays?

  Also, if you've worked in AI for the last four years as a top researcher and you're not worth at least 50 million by now, like, what are you doing?

• 28:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, a lot of the thinking machines folks, like, the reason people speak so highly of them is that they were at other foundation labs, great labs, early on and probably got big stock grants that have grown a ton.

• 28:18Jordi Hays?

  But they've been able to get liquidity against and...

• 28:19John Coogan?

  This is really...

• 28:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, there's so much information warfare happening right now, right? There's so many different incentives for people to say, oh, it was this offer and they turned it down. Or there was no offer made or it was, you know, somebody from Meta was chiming in and saying like, we made a few offers. One was big, but there's a lot of misinformation here.

• 28:35John Coogan?

  The real problem is that there aren't...

• 28:37Jordi Hays?

  Bull market and misinformation.

• 28:40John Coogan?

  The, the, the real problem is that there aren't, there aren't enough luxury goods. Like if if Zuck really wants to make people bite at a billion dollar offer, like what's the difference between making a hundred million a year and making a billion? It's like, what are you gonna buy? Yeah, maybe a boat, but he should start a new watch company, a higher end Richard Mill.

• 28:57Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 28:57John Coogan?

  Five million dollar entry point.

• 28:59Jordi Hays?

  I think I think you're on to something.

• 29:00John Coogan?

  Need a hypercar company that starts at seventy five million dollars.

• 29:04Jordi Hays?

  You should just buy the top five.

• 29:06John Coogan?

  Somehow I don't think this stuff appeals to AI researchers.

• 29:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:09John Coogan?

  I don't see a lot of them.

• 29:10Jordi Hays?

  They're immune. They're immune.

• 29:11John Coogan?

  Not in flex culture.

• 29:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:12John Coogan?

  But yeah, I mean, also if they're super AGI build, like they just are like, what's the value of money in a couple of years? Who knows? We're going to be in a completely different economy. There's a whole bunch of different, uh, there's a whole bunch of different reasons, but maybe they like the team.

• 29:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The the other thing is, uh, I think many people will be uniquely motivated by winning and challenges. And, uh, and then, and then having a, you know, do you want to be one of the top five people at Thinking Machines? Or do you want to be the number thirty, the thirty fifth, you know, researcher at at a bigger organization?

• 29:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:47Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people want to have that.

• 29:49John Coogan?

  There's also been so much like memetic warfare around this where like if you take the offer, you're instantly branded as a mercenary forever.

• 29:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:55John Coogan?

  You can never be seen as a missionary.

• 29:57Jordi Hays?

  I was getting, I was getting some notes from a, from a few people about, uh, so we released the Metis list, uh, a, a collection of top AI. A loose, a loose collection of top AI researchers yesterday.

• 30:09John Coogan?

  Cool people.

• 30:10Jordi Hays?

  It's just a bunch of cool people, uh, Alan Turing, people were pissed that he was included. Uh, they said he fell off.

• 30:17John Coogan?

  Was underrated.

• 30:17Jordi Hays?

  Um.

• 30:18John Coogan?

  Founder of Booley and.

• 30:19Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but yeah, there was some, I was getting some interesting notes around a handful of people in the top twenty five.

• 30:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:24Jordi Hays?

  Saying, you know, this person was kicked off of every team that they've ever worked on, uh, which is funny. They gotta be way lower. They shouldn't even be on the list.

• 30:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:32Jordi Hays?

  Um, so.

• 30:33John Coogan?

  Anyway, it was all in good fun. We love everyone on that list and many more. And we're going to expand it and add to it and have more fun with it, hopefully.

• 30:40Jordi Hays?

  Eventually, everybody will be a researcher. And the other thing is, uh, Elon came out yesterday, uh, right after we published the Metis list, uh, saying they, they don't have any researchers anymore. Everybody's engineers. I think it's a good framing. I think, uh, it's very possible that. Some researchers want to self identify as engineers. And if you're an engineer, I think it's cool to all be in the same bucket. And so I think that I think that can make a lot of sense for XAI's culture.

• 31:05John Coogan?

  Well, whether you're a researcher or an engineer, you got to get on Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. It is an interesting debate about are we in an age of of of research or engineering at this point? And and it feels like Elon is the master of engineering and is and is rarely trying to come up with like.

• 31:27Jordi Hays?

  And infrastructure.

• 31:28John Coogan?

  Completely. Yeah, infrastructure. He's rarely trying to come up with like the completely novel new science. He but but he believes that Grok at a certain point will be able to do that. But but if you see how fast he's.

• 31:40Jordi Hays?

  He's going for the greatest feats of engineering.

• 31:43John Coogan?

  Engineering and that's and that's the culture is like engineering.

• 31:45Jordi Hays?

  He's like, I started a research. I started a research nonprofit.

• 31:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:49Jordi Hays?

  Almost a decade ago called OpenAI. I'm over research.

• 31:52John Coogan?

  I'm over research.

• 31:53Jordi Hays?

  I'm I'm I'm doing engineering now.

• 31:55John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's read through Ben Thompson's analysis of the Figma S1, the Figma OS and Figma's AI potential.

• 32:01Jordi Hays?

  Finally.

• 32:02John Coogan?

  Course in Manhattan for Figma's IPO tomorrow. We're very excited about that.

• 32:07Jordi Hays?

  We will be live from NYSE, the New York Stock Exchange.

• 32:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 32:10Jordi Hays?

  Cannot wait.

• 32:11John Coogan?

  So Bloomberg has a story here. Figma's initial public offering is approaching 40 times oversubscribed, according to people familiar with the matter.

• 32:18Jordi Hays?

  Is that good?

• 32:19John Coogan?

  The design and collaboration software. We'll have to we'll have to ask everyone tomorrow if it's good.

• 32:24Jordi Hays?

  Did they get the same revenue multiple as how oversubscribed they are?

• 32:28John Coogan?

  Could be the year the year's most in demand listing. The company is guiding prospective investors at its IPO, which could raise as much as 1.2 billion. Is expected to price above the marked the marketed range. The people said the San Francisco based firm and some investors are offering 36.9 million shares at $30 to $32 per share. After increasing the range Monday from $25 to $28 each. Orders taking is expected to end at noon on Tuesday in New York. Bloomberg News has reported oversubscription refers to when the number of orders for shares in the IPO exceeds shares that were originally offered. And so.

• 33:03Jordi Hays?

  Lot of demand for Figma shares. Makes sense. It has been one of the most in demand secondary.

• 33:10John Coogan?

  Helps you think that you're in build faster.

• 33:12Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 33:13John Coogan?

  It helps design and development teams build great products together. What's not to like?

• 33:16Jordi Hays?

  Nothing like mixing and add into, at least this is Ben Thompson's analysis, right? So Ben Thompson is not sponsored by Figma.

• 33:24John Coogan?

  No, he's not. We had a friend of the show come on and break down the S1 when the, when the numbers dropped. And it was kind of like the dream case for, for SaaS, right?

• 33:33Jordi Hays?

  Coming out and immediately being the top, you know, from a purely metrics based look, the top SaaS company in public SaaS company in the world.

• 33:42John Coogan?

  And, and of course, a lot of people point to the rule of 40. You add the growth rate to the burn rate, how much money you're losing. If you're losing a lot of money, but you're growing really fast, that's fine. If you're, if you're making a ton of money, but growing slower, either way, they should add up to at least 40%. Higher the better. And if you add Figma's up, they're, they're in the 70%. So well beyond 40, 40% according to the rule of 40, which is of course exciting to the venture capitalists who popularize the rule of 40.

• 34:11Jordi Hays?

  They basically created profitability.

• 34:13John Coogan?

  So he says, I think you can make the case that an $18 billion valuation is in fact too low. Indeed, I think you can make the company, make the case that the company is worth more than 20 billion. Adobe agreed to buy it for 20 billion back in 2022. That of course is despite the rise of generative AI, which at first glance appear to be a threat to Figma. Cause you just go to chat GPT and say, hey, build me a collaborative software tool. And maybe it's just one shot.

• 34:38Jordi Hays?

  Don't make mistakes.

• 34:39John Coogan?

  Don't make mistakes. But he says, I would go in the other direction. Generative, generative AI and the opportunity it represents is exactly why Figma should go public. As Field strongly suggests, and get ready to be acquisitive.

• 34:54Jordi Hays?

  Get ready to, get ready to get bought.

• 34:56John Coogan?

  Do some deals. We love, we love a Dylan Field deal.

• 34:59Jordi Hays?

  The Figma OS, Ben says, the reason why I'm optimistic about Figma comes from my belief that Figma is not simply design software, rather it's something much more fundamental and valuable. An operating system with a collaboration built in. Here is how I explained Figma back when Adobe tried to acquire them. Forgive the long excerpt, he says, but it really is the point as far as my optimism about Figma is concerned. He says, "Here it is important to note that Figma's most prominent victim to date has not been Adobe, but rather Sketch. The explosion in apps led to a growing market for product and design. Product design and development, as designers needed to lay out a whole host of different app views and developers needed to know what exactly the designers wanted them to build. Photoshop and Illustrator, which were primarily focused on the creation and editing of single

• 35:44Jordi Hays?

  files, were the completely wrong tools for the job. Sketch, which was released in 2010 as a macOS app and is still macOS only, although it now includes the ability to view files on the web, completely took the category by storm. Adobe eventually responded with Adobe XD, but not until 2015, and the product is still in third place. Sketch, though, is now only in second."

• 36:08John Coogan?

  Really quickly, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Continue, Jordy.

• 36:13Jordi Hays?

  Chris, the CEO of Adquick, is in New York as well. We're gonna try to meet up with him in a little bit. Sketch was not a disruptive product. It was, like Adobe's products, a desktop app. It just delivered a solution to an emerging product category that Adobe was slow to respond to, and that was like the designing of web and mobile products. Figma, though, was something completely new. The company, which was founded in 2012, made a bet on the browser and spent a full four years building V1 of the product. This included, which is just so funny, because normally if you talk to a founder building a software company, and they said, "Yeah, I'm three years in and I haven't shipped an MVP," you would just immediately write the company off, because like, you know, "Why haven't you shipped?" In this case, it was necessary.

• 36:55John Coogan?

  Quit your job, raise $10 million, vibral, launch video, slop like product in two seconds. Like, that's the flow, and then a ton of bugs, and then sort it out, and then maybe it works, but it's a completely different.

• 37:08Jordi Hays?

  Don't worry about securing personally identifiable information at all. Just get to the top of the charts and figure it out later. So, this included writing the editor in C++ cross-compiling it to JavaScript using the asm.js set that let it achieve desktop-like control of memory and performance, and building its own rendering engine from scratch using WebGL, which had only been released in 2011. GL was the why now for the business and Dylan was very early to recognizing that. It was the epitome of leveraging new technologies to compete on a new vector, which in this case was collaboration. And, you know, anybody, anybody under the age of 25 like probably doesn't remember the pre,

• 37:50Jordi Hays?

  pre Figma era, but like having different files and sending them back and forth and like sending comments by email. It's just like it, even, even personally, I only briefly was, was working without having access to Figma. So Ben says, "Think about my brief description for this product design and development segment. Multiple app views created by design and implemented by engineering imply at least two different people working on a project, a designer and a developer. In reality, the huge number of views and increased functionality in apps meant that there was an increasingly large teams on both sides. Sketch definitely made it easier to design an app in one place, but it did nothing to make it easier for teams to work on the app together. Figma, because it was native to the web, effectively got

• 38:34Jordi Hays?

  collaboration for free from the beginning."

• 38:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is a crazy screenshot. I don't know if we can show this, but on, on Figma's website, the company compares itself to Adobe XD. But I use Photoshop and Illustrator. Don't stop. We believe you should use the best tool for the job. If you're photo editing, choose Adobe Photoshop. If you're doing detailed illustrations, Adobe Illustrator is a no-brainer. But if you're looking for the best tool for UX design, Figma is here for you. Plus, you can easily import images and SVG code into Figma and have your cake and eat it too. And so putting the competitors' products right there. So

• 39:09Jordi Hays?

  And recommending them.

• 39:09John Coogan?

  Eventually Photoshop and Adobe did launch a competitor called XD. And XD wound up is getting killed by Figma, but no one ever subscribed to Creative Cloud for XD. You just used it because it was here, says Ben Thompson. Here's the problem, though. To the extent that Adobe's products were being used as part of Figma's workflow was the extent to which Adobe was slowly but surely losing control of its long-term relevance. Figma could, for example, start investing much more heavily into its photo editing or illustration capabilities, rendering Adobe's products increasingly unnecessary. What is more threatening is Figma's cross-platform capabilities. Third-party developers can build plugins for Figma that make it possible to easily add the sort of editing capabilities. So regulators blocked the Adobe deal and Ben Thompson says

• 39:51John Coogan?

  he thinks it was correct. The regulators got to correct that time. And based on the run that Figma's been on ever since, it seems like it could be a win for them as well.

• 40:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:01John Coogan?

  And it's interesting because a lot of people-

• 40:03Jordi Hays?

  Insane roller coaster for the team.

• 40:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:05Jordi Hays?

  And Figma, I think during the acquisition process, clearly didn't have the insane urgency to launch new products because they thought they were going to, you know, Adobe and would be part of an organization with a bunch of different individual apps. And watching how they reacted after it was blocked and then came and just started shipping like crazy.

• 40:27John Coogan?

  And so the FTC has gone after some mergers that have made no sense. Like they, I believe they blocked-

• 40:33Jordi Hays?

  Like Roomba.

• 40:34John Coogan?

  The Roomba one, yeah, that one didn't make sense. The worst example I can think of is Meta bought a VR fitness app and they said that Meta was trying to create a monopoly in the VR fitness market, which is just not a market at all. It doesn't even exist. And I don't know anyone that does VR fitness and it's very rare. And so it totally makes sense to let that team get an exit and go hang out at Meta and try and work on this until-

• 40:57Jordi Hays?

  Creating the market for VR.

• 40:58John Coogan?

  Creating the market. And then as soon as it takes off, there's going to be a ton of competitors immediately. And so it seems like totally fine to let that one go through. And then there are other sides where like truly there are like two players and they're merging and there's going to be a lot of competitive dynamics that come from that. Anyway, let me tell you about Bezel, pre-owned luxury watches, authenticated in-house. Bezel is the top marketplace in the world for authenticated luxury watches.

• 41:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And again, just more context. So Amazon, Amazon's acquisition of iRobot, the maker of Roomba, was blocked due to antitrust concerns, which was primarily from the European Commission. They were worried about a monopoly in home robotics, I guess. And the CEO ended up just resigning.

• 41:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's interesting is like the robotic vacuum market is extremely competitive because of a lot of the Chinese companies, Ufi and- There's a few others like it is definitely not as much of like it's it feels like a lot less of a sticky product. Because yes, it maps your home and it's supposed to learn. But really, if you move to a new place and you get a different robot vacuum cleaner, like you're pretty much good after a day. You're not like, oh, I can't get out of the Roomba ecosystem. Whereas like even Sonos is stickier than that. And so I never had a problem with that.

• 42:11Jordi Hays?

  And iRobot shares are down ninety five percent over the last looking.

• 42:19John Coogan?

  We'd actually got blocked and then they just got cooked.

• 42:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they actually went public July thirty first, twenty twenty.

• 42:25John Coogan?

  No way.

• 42:25Jordi Hays?

  Stock popped to a hundred and thirty three dollars a share by early twenty twenty one. It's now sitting at four dollars and twenty eight cents. A hundred and thirty million.

• 42:34John Coogan?

  Hundred and thirty million.

• 42:35Jordi Hays?

  So a little bit of value destruction from the European.

• 42:38John Coogan?

  Imagine how frustrating that'd be. You're like, I'm getting out to like the most logical choir possible. So Figma's position and the AI potential. Consider the position Figma has in the software design process. First, Figma enables collaboration, their original differentiator from Adobe and Sketch. Second, Figma creates one canvas for app creation, everything based on the same URL instead of files that are passed around with increasingly absurd file name appendages, you know, final, final, final, V three, V four, V one, final, final. Third, Figma serves as a source of truth for an app's design. These capabilities seamlessly translate into AI-enabled workflows.

• 43:15Jordi Hays?

  And these capabilities seamlessly translate to AI-enabled workflows. Collaboration today between a host of humans could very well mean coordination and orchestration of AI. Critically, Figma isn't assuming or relying on an AI doing everything. Granted, that is a theoretical threat to the company, but the problem with AI-only development processes is that they are extremely difficult to debug or decompose. Figma gives a natural canvas to add in AI.

• 43:42John Coogan?

  Ben Thompson kind of closes out talking about Figma as the OS of design being important. What operating systems have is coordination and orchestration abilities, one canvas where all the work happens.

• 43:54Jordi Hays?

  And a source of truth.

• 43:55John Coogan?

  And then for now, Figma gets its nascent AI, it gates the capabilities behind a full-seat license, i.e. the most expensive plans. They also have a usage-based model. But Ben Thompson is advocating for Figma to move towards some sort of usage-based or task-based monetization model.

• 44:15Jordi Hays?

  Selling work.

• 44:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, Salesforce.

• 44:17Jordi Hays?

  Selling the end product.

• 44:18John Coogan?

  Exactly, as opposed to seat-based. And so that will be a business model transition. And he says that the transition will be tricky, and it's arguably the best argument against Figma going public, because if all of a sudden you shift to, hey, we don't charge per-seat, we charge per-finished design, or finished website, or shipped website, then all of a sudden, you could see that you wind up with a much better business model four quarters out, but you have two rough quarters, and the public markets don't like that. And people always talk about that being one of the reasons, one of the drawbacks of being public is that you have a lot of investors that are a little bit more short-term oriented. But, he says, "I think, however, that it is notable that Field mentioned M&A in his argument

• 45:00John Coogan?

  for going public. Figma would do well to start acquiring AI companies to plug into every aspect of its stack, particularly now when AI capability is nascent and not yet a threat to Figma as a whole. Above, I was skeptical about AI replacing Figma, but that is a skepticism that is relevant for the short term. Figma's task is to replace itself before anyone else has the chance in the long term."

• 45:23Jordi Hays?

  And I am very excited for tomorrow. Before we have our guest, should we talk about Friend.com?

• 45:30John Coogan?

  We should. We're going to give him a call in 30 minutes.

• 45:33Jordi Hays?

  We're going to call him later.

• 45:34John Coogan?

  Quickly, let me tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI-native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. And we have Eric Glyman in the studio, correct?

• 45:43Jordi Hays?

  Get over here. Eric?

• 45:46John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 45:47Jordi Hays?

  Looking sharp.

• 45:49Eric Glyman?

  Great to see you.

• 45:50John Coogan?

  Have a seat here.

• 45:51Eric Glyman?

  Great to see you.

• 45:53Jordi Hays?

  You got a Celsius there.

• 45:56John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 45:57Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 45:59Eric Glyman?

  Thanks for having me.

• 46:00Jordi Hays?

  Our humble New York temple of technology.

• 46:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, give us the update. What's the news today? Break it down for us.

• 46:05Jordi Hays?

  Great jacket, by the way.

• 46:06John Coogan?

  You look fantastic.

• 46:07Jordi Hays?

  We've got little touches of yellow in there. It's not this.

• 46:09John Coogan?

  It's not quite yellow enough for my taste, but there is a little bit of yellow.

• 46:12Jordi Hays?

  By the way, our tailor designed these to celebrate and really symbolize saving time and money. And so I think they did the job. I think they did the job.

• 46:22Eric Glyman?

  I'm overwhelmed.

• 46:24Jordi Hays?

  We'll get you one too.

• 46:27Eric Glyman?

  You've got to do this.

• 46:28John Coogan?

  We've got to go man on the street in Times Square. What do you do for a living? What business do you run? Do you want to save time and money? Let's get you on Ramp right now. We'll introduce you to the CEO.

• 46:37Jordi Hays?

  Ramp.com.

• 46:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, but break it down for us. What happened today?

• 46:42Eric Glyman?

  Yeah, well, first, I mean, we might need a bigger gong.

• 46:44John Coogan?

  I know.

• 46:47Jordi Hays?

  You have no idea. We're going to the ends of America to get an American-made gong, and we're looking for something that will actually be floor-to-ceiling. You know, it'll be, you know, something like 20 by 20. So, working on that. I look forward to hitting it for the next one. The E, the Series E3.

• 47:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Break it down for us.

• 47:06Eric Glyman?

  This is phenomenal. Guys, thanks for being here. Here in New York, the capital of capital.

• 47:12John Coogan?

  Yes, it is.

• 47:13Jordi Hays?

  It really is.

• 47:13Eric Glyman?

  With technology here at TVP. No, it's, we raised $500 million at a $22.5 billion valuation.

• 47:22Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 47:25John Coogan?

  There's a nice ring to it. I'm really happy to appreciate all the thanks.

• 47:28Jordi Hays?

  And I'm losing track, but it seems like Ramp has not been able to get a fundraise public without it leaking, you know, five days previously to the press. But this is official. I'm glad to make it official here.

• 47:40Eric Glyman?

  It is official. It's the right valuation. And look, I, early on in my career, I got this advice that the biggest battle a startup faces is people not giving a shit, people not caring. And so... You know what? We're happy that people care, even if things come out a couple of days before.

• 47:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:56Eric Glyman?

  But we feel super lucky. And so that's the big news of the day. But you know, I think so much what we focused on today, especially in the raise, is what we're going to do with the capital.

• 48:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 48:06Eric Glyman?

  Between the last raise, which we were proud to hit the gong for.

• 48:10John Coogan?

  Six weeks ago.

• 48:12Eric Glyman?

  Six weeks ago. Some of it actually came from, actually from the product. We launched our first AI agent for controllers and the data was like nothing I'd ever seen before.

• 48:23John Coogan?

  Interesting. So that catalyzed this?

• 48:25Eric Glyman?

  A hundred percent.

• 48:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's my big question. Like, why E2? Why not F? And then also, it feels like you're like the king of like a bunch of fundraises in a short amount of time. There's clearly some benefits to that, but why not?

• 48:40Jordi Hays?

  I gotta give some credit to the business, John. I mean, Eric's a great CEO, but the business is really, you know.

• 48:45Eric Glyman?

  Well, we even talked about this before. Like, we'll share it. Like, right now, July is pacing. We're pacing to do 20% more purchase volume in July than June. Like, it's been one month. Like, the business is growing extraordinarily quickly.

• 49:07Jordi Hays?

  What's that meme with the guy on Hot Ones?

• 49:14Eric Glyman?

  Don't talk. We need to have Celsius, but.

• 49:18Eric Glyman?

  No, no, no.

• 49:19Jordi Hays?

  That's insane.

• 49:19Eric Glyman?

  The business itself is.

• 49:20Jordi Hays?

  I remember, I'm sure, back in 2020, you'd be happily sending, you know, investors like, you know, we grew 20% month over month, you know, but on like, you know, whatever, 1% of the scale. So, really wild.

• 49:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, I guess like the bigger like meta question is just like, like, there's a world where you stack a bunch of these wins into the mega-deck and then just do like one massive fundraiser every 18 months. There's this meme of like fundraising is a distraction. The CEO should be out there working with customers, improving the product. Obviously, you're doing that. But how do you, how do you do these back-to-back fundraisers without them being distracting? I know you have a big team now. But like, what goes into the decision to do, like, I don't know if they're even smaller, but just like more frequent fundraisers? Because that feels like something that's unique to your company.

• 50:08Eric Glyman?

  Yeah, for sure. So, one, it's sort of a funny thing, but people, I actually didn't understand this before in the startup world. Like, what is a series A or a B or a? E2 really

• 50:18John Coogan?

  To somebody who did a $55 million seed round.

• 50:20Eric Glyman?

  Yeah.

• 50:21John Coogan?

  And then, and then you'll talk

• 50:22Jordi Hays?

  And we, we pressed them. We were like, is this for marketing?

• 50:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:25Jordi Hays?

  You know, you're still going to get the expect, like the expectation will be that you perform at like the, at the series B level.

• 50:30John Coogan?

  If I walk around that company, it's going to feel like a series B company.

• 50:32Eric Glyman?

  I like, I almost think like calling things by letters is totally silly. All it actually meant was we had a set of documents that we use whenever financing happened. There's hundreds of pages of documents that go back and forth between company and investor.

• 50:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:46Eric Glyman?

  Calling it an E2 just meant that we use the exact same documents.

• 50:49Jordi Hays?

  Save time and money.

• 50:50John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 50:51Eric Glyman?

  Save money on laundry. No, it was really just that. And so, so look, it, um, it was very efficient to get the financing done. And I also believe a lot in this concept of marking to market.

• 51:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 51:02Eric Glyman?

  Of, uh, in real time, what are companies ultimately worth? And, you know, when, when you look at the fund raised from about a month, a month and a half ago, I think is when it was announced done, done earlier. You know, we raised, uh, I, I think in exchange for about $200 million, um, approximately 1% uh, more shares, uh, came on to the cap table. So it was a very small amount of dilution.

• 51:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 51:26Eric Glyman?

  With this raise of 500 million at 22 and a half, it's like two-ish percent.

• 51:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:31Eric Glyman?

  So these are not that dilutive.

• 51:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's not, it's not completely restructuring the company, but, but, but it's giving you a, a more modern mark.

• 51:38Jordi Hays?

  Adding to the war chest.

• 51:39Eric Glyman?

  Adding to the war chest. And I think it's a good thing because one, you know, allows people to invest at the right point in time. But two, because you're, you're not raising far ahead of where metrics are, um, it means that the company is not that distracted. You know, for, for the actual organization, like we've just been obsessed with going.

• 51:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:59Eric Glyman?

  And

• 52:00John Coogan?

  You're not in a position where everyone's like, oh, like at this valuation, like Ramp doesn't just need an act two, but they need an act three, four and five. Like they gotta, you know, create super intelligence and all this crazy stuff because like, like it's like based on the actual progress of the company.

• 52:13Eric Glyman?

  A hundred percent right.

• 52:14John Coogan?

  Makes sense. I want to talk about the product. I want to talk about the AI agent thing. The, the, the interesting, uh, my experience with Ramp was that it was in many ways an AI agent before AI agents was a buzzword. And I know that, um, obviously when you scan a receipt, it goes through an OCR process and, uh, the data, the text is extracted from the image. And then I would assume that you were an early adopter of L L Ms to help clean that up. And that was in many ways a more like a super magical A I agent experience. But I'm not prompting it. It's just something that's happening in the background.

• 52:54Eric Glyman?

  Visible.

• 52:55John Coogan?

  Ramp, it's invisible. And you're using some deterministic code, some probabilistic code, some older machine learning algorithms for O C R, some newer L L Ms to clean up the data and tag things and say, this is a restaurant, that's a flight. And, and, you know, do all the magic that helps categorize expenses. The question is, like, it feels like a big shift to put the, the, the, the, the agent in the hands of the user. And so you said that you're seeing like incredible adoption. What are people actually using for? What's the feedback? And, and I, I mean, like, yeah, what else are the learnings of like where that goes? Do people want that? Or do people ultimately want to be able to prompt a few times and then have things baked into the core behind the scenes workflows?

• 53:40Eric Glyman?

  Yeah. So I, I, I feel like, so let's talk a little bit like what are like A I assistants? What are A I agents? What's the distinction? Because I actually think people are like pretty, pretty sloppy with the two. And so I feel like.

• 53:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, to be clear, if you want to raise money right now, you just build SaaS and call it an agent. Boom.

• 53:57Eric Glyman?

  But let's talk with a lot of people who are building, who are listening to this podcast. So I, I think first for, you know, assistants or co-pilots, the idea is a person prompts. The co-pilot will review it, will make a recommendation. But then ultimately it's on the human to go do the work. I get a recommendation, I input it back and forth. This is maybe similar to experience that you might have on a chat G P T or that kind of a thing. An agent is a bit different. What you do is you give it instructions and access to tools. And you say, under certain conditions, if you see an outcome that I've instructed you to drive, just go do it. Right?

• 54:31John Coogan?

  Forever, essentially.

• 54:32Eric Glyman?

  Forever. And, and, you know, I'm going to modify things from time to time. But it's a little bit more similar to like, let's say you hire an intern or a new hire. You teach them how to do the job, you watch a bunch of times.

• 54:42John Coogan?

  Ongoing basis.

• 54:43Eric Glyman?

  And then, then they go on and you periodically check the work. And so that's a bit of the distinction. And, and one of the. If you if you think about what we're actually optimizing for, one of the core metrics is we look at what was the amount of work that a ramp customer was able to do in a single, let's say in an hour or in a minute. Right. And so as we look over over the years, that's gone up a lot. And if if you joined in 2023, you know, mathematically, we can show that you are categorizing three times more transactions, pulling in three times as many receipts, whatever the the metric is, as you did just two years ago, for every minute you're spending on the site. So it's all to say like every minute is counting for three times more. I think that ratio should be 30 times more.

• 55:27Eric Glyman?

  And if you look at what happened, so we launched, we made this announcement about three, four weeks ago for this first AI agent, and we had early adopters, Notion, Webflow, Quora. The stats just absolutely shocked us when we looked at this. Functionally,

• 55:44Eric Glyman?

  these companies were able to get 15 times more work done, transactions categorized. But the more interesting part is these agents were way more accurate. These agents all day, like they know the expense policy better than any manager at the company. And so it was 99% accurate. It got a lot more tasks done. And suddenly, like for many people who've worked at large companies, you spend like an hour just reviewing expenses. And you're like, why am I spending an hour reviewing like someone's Uber? Or or their purchase, and that's just gone. And you're focusing on actually the interesting exceptions. And so where I think this kind of adds up to is for a lot of years, people had to be forced forced to like learn how does software work? And how do I think like software? How do I learn to use Salesforce?

• 56:28Eric Glyman?

  How do I learn to use Google? How do I learn to use Excel? Now we're teaching these software programs to think like people. And that means you can teach software functionally the same way you would an intern to go and figure out what expenses are in and out of policy. And that very avid software that doesn't take breaks, doesn't take holidays, that is obsessed over every deal of your expense policy can catch when your policy is.

• 56:52Jordi Hays?

  It's online. If you if you need to talk to it at you're on a on a work trip and you need a yeah, or yeah, therapy. But I was gonna say like, you don't, if you can avoid messaging somebody on the weekend to ask if something's in or out of policy, it's like it benefits everybody.

• 57:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 57:07Eric Glyman?

  That's exactly right. No, and I think you're bringing up like another, another point of like, a lot of work is sort of if this and that, like if you get a, if you get a, you want to buy a new piece of software and that vendor sends you like a quote, then procurement negotiates it. Once procurement negotiates it, then legal takes a look at it. Once legal says it's fine, then you know, finance says, is there an invoice and we go and pay it out and then it goes into accounting. But if you have lots of digital agents functionally all the time, online and responsive, these things can occur simultaneously.

• 57:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:40Eric Glyman?

  And so it means actually, instead of waiting days to go and onboard a new vendor, it can be done in minutes. And so it just means it's much easier to do work. And I think the big picture of like, why are we here at all? It's actually just to save time and money to make it easier for more companies to operate. And that's what the stuff adds up to.

• 57:59Jordi Hays?

  It's really nice when you don't have to update your, your mission statement.

• 58:03Eric Glyman?

  I know.

• 58:03Jordi Hays?

  You know, as new techno, I mean, this is, we've talked about, you know, Google's original mission statement, which is loosely like, you know, organize and make the world's information like valuable, right? And it's like, okay, well, generative AI like does that very efficiently. Agentic workflows applied to finance saves people time and money. It's the same, same mission.

• 58:24John Coogan?

  I want to take a post about a post from Keith Raboy. He said, five out of six board meetings he had in the last couple of months were about how to design a company's organization for AI. I'm interested in, and we've been debating this in the context of meta superintelligence, is artificial intelligence an app like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp? Or is it like their finance team, like their infrastructure team, like their database team that sits across all of the apps as like a service layer? And I'm interested to know, like you have a product now, and I imagine that there is a team that is working on building that product and that product has AI in the name.

• 59:06Eric Glyman?

  Yeah.

• 59:06John Coogan?

  But then I imagine that every single person from designers to engineers to, you know, the, the ops people are using artificial intelligence in their day to day. And I'm wondering if you're seeing a new like cross-functional team develop or how you're thinking through that, that trade-off of like horizontal versus vertical, maybe both teams in just terms of running a high-performance organization.

• 59:31Eric Glyman?

  I love his posts and I think it's actually like, I'll put it this way, like, I don't think most people have really come to terms with the reality that like, computers can like see and hear and like think now.

• 59:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 59:48Eric Glyman?

  It's so different and like if you're like just going and repeating the same organizational structure that like was in place when anything were possible, like it's a little bit of like, are you awake? Like this actually is the right question and one I think people should be spending a lot more time in, you know, in earnest.

• 1:00:06Jordi Hays?

  We need more business, we need some new business, you know, management textbooks.

• 1:00:10Eric Glyman?

  It's true.

• 1:00:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:00:12Jordi Hays?

  It's a joke, but there's no like enduring.

• 1:00:15John Coogan?

  And so if you have a whole piece of your org chart that doesn't have any AI on it, like you're going to ship that in the product and then people are going to be like, wait, this part, this piece of the product feels very manual and like web 1.0 almost.

• 1:00:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, I mean, one, one thing that happened yesterday was Zach saying, like basically saying you can now use code AI in your coding interviews, which sounds insane. Like, wouldn't you want to still hire for people that, that might just, just naturally be good at engineering and then get better, but he's basically making the statement of, no, we're so committed to this new paradigm that, yeah, you should use every tool you have available to do the best possible work.

• 1:00:52Eric Glyman?

  And I think it's totally right and I'll admit something even for people who, you know, are in very soon, there are some job functions at Ramp where it is actually not possible to pass it like an interview or a coding interview without using an LLM.

• 1:01:08John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:01:09Eric Glyman?

  And that's intentional. It's actually intentional to figure out like, are you curious about that? Are you using these tools or not? It's not a question of IQ. I think there's brilliant people who, you know, don't need an LLM to think, but I think that the capabilities of being able to access an extraordinary amount of compute as well as specialized, you know, knowledge, why wouldn't you?

• 1:01:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's like just because Scott Wu could do a problem in his head doesn't mean he shouldn't use a calculator.

• 1:01:34Eric Glyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's funny, one of the old, one of the old like coding challenges was this thing called fizz buzz where you try and write out numbers from zero to one and if it's, if it's odd or if it's divisible by three, you write fizz and if it's divisible by seven, you write buzz and then if it's divisible by both, you write fizz buzz. And it's like a very basic coding challenge, but it always assumes that you have access to Python. Like, and it's not saying, okay, you have to go and like fab your own semiconductor to do it. And so it makes sense that like, you know, we are in the age of LLMs, like that's going to be a tool.

• 1:02:01Jordi Hays?

  Don't give Eric ideas.

• 1:02:04Jordi Hays?

  Kareem might start requiring the engineering team. You're going to have to be able to set up your own semi fab in order to.

• 1:02:10John Coogan?

  Write it out in binary with a pen and paper.

• 1:02:13Jordi Hays?

  Engineering with your own silicon.

• 1:02:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, one interesting thing, um, we've talked a lot about this like move 37 concept. Lisa Doll, the Google Deep Mind Challenge, they beat Lisa Doll. And in move 37, it was like this moment of like true inspiration where, uh, uh, AlphaGo put a piece on the board that was so unexpected. Lisa Doll stood up, went outside, smoked a cigarette and was like, had his mind blown, right? And we've had moments like that, maybe the Studio Ghibli moment is this like, we've had passing the Turing test. But there's also been plenty of areas that feel more intractable in terms of artificial intelligence. And it feels like if you are like with the latest IMO, problem six was this combinatorics problem that I don't understand, but neither does OpenAI or Google apparently. So, you know, we're basically the same.

• 1:02:58John Coogan?

  But, um, my, but my question is like, is like with the AI agent product, are there, are there things that you see CFOs, modern CFOs do? Like what is the, the humanities last exam, the intractable problem, the most elegant, beautiful thing that a CFO can do? That feels like, oh, this is going to be something that's happening and requires like the human touch for a very, very long time.

• 1:03:22Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think my, my, my immediate thought, it's to give you, give you some time to think, uh, is, it feels like AI today is really good at doing the work that like a management consultant could do. So you can like tell them like, I run this type of business, like make me a marketing planner, come up with five ideas for marketing, you know, strategies in Q4. And it will create like a great report, it'll look great, it'll have some, maybe some decent ideas. And yet it still feels like to do truly exceptional work. Like we, like Monday, like the three of us, uh, spent like a couple of hours talking about some, some campaign and like debating it and all these different points. And it's like, we could have had AI in the mix there, but you could imagine to be tossing in ideas that, uh, that were kind of maybe random.

• 1:04:07Jordi Hays?

  And maybe something helpful, but it was still like, you just like, people needed to just like sit there and just like hash it out. And it feels like that's, that's like, you know, do the work to like, do analysis, create reports, you know, when it, when it comes to like actual knowledge work. Yeah. But anyways, I don't know what your thought is.

• 1:04:23Eric Glyman?

  I I love this line of questioning and I think it's gonna get super interesting, especially as AI is going from a primarily academic tool. And and also in some ways, I feel like it's it's it's jumped into software engineering in part because, you know, software engineers know what it is to to code. And, you know, they're working with AI and and so they have good taste and there's these great feedback loops. And so it's happening there sooner, but it's starting to make it into general business logic, finance, everything. I mean, I I think a good place to start, if you you just want to decompose the problem, is like, what is the job of finance actually?

• 1:04:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:58Eric Glyman?

  What is it? And and I I think if you were to just really simplifying it down, it's, in my view, some subset of you're gonna define a set of rules that govern who is able to spend what, under what circumstances, what are the controls you have in place? Once activity has occurred, you've spent money, things are coming in, how do you record that activity accurately?

• 1:05:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:22Eric Glyman?

  Close your books? And then, based on what occurred, how do you goal seek to more profitability, more growth, more cash flow, whatever thing you're gonna go try to go do?

• 1:05:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:34Eric Glyman?

  It's about it.

• 1:05:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:34Eric Glyman?

  And if you really kind of simplify it, it's just a set of rules and algorithms.

• 1:05:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:39Eric Glyman?

  These systems, one, they're incredibly complicated to do each of those things. And so I I actually think like brilliant people have, over the last fifty, hundred years, been reduced to like, I don't know, in some cases, like tabulators, just calculating things, or like downloading the same spreadsheet over and over, or matching the receipts and doing like very low level tasks and only doing a little bit, you know, after you finally look back.

• 1:06:05Jordi Hays?

  A great example is like when any any like, like TV show about business.

• 1:06:11Eric Glyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:12Jordi Hays?

  It's like, like, you look at like The Office. All this was any real work done like you did.

• 1:06:18Eric Glyman?

  Was there any?

• 1:06:19Jordi Hays?

  You don't you don't really do you remember a time when they were maybe once or twice they called a customer or they did a customer meeting? But outside of that, it's like thousands of hours of just like.

• 1:06:27Eric Glyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:27Jordi Hays?

  Doing they they're doing business, but they're not like, are they really getting anything done? And so I think I think the point you're making is like, how much of the work that we do is should should be the work that we're doing.

• 1:06:37Eric Glyman?

  I think that's you you nailed it like I I think so much of work is very mechanical and it's. You know, we want finance to be forward thinking and strategic, but the reality of a lot of finance is looking backward.

• 1:06:49John Coogan?

  I think that's yeah, yeah, I I think that the strategic thing is really key like. Like Tyler Cowen would say that like relationships are are very Lindy and going to stick around for a long time, trust building that type of stuff. But Ben Thompson dumped some sort of, you know, 10Q into ChatGPT and said, like, make me a Ben Thompson style article. And it did some of it, but it didn't have.

• 1:07:12Eric Glyman?

  Uncanny.

• 1:07:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it didn't have like the actual strategic insights and the storytelling that can actually like marshal the proper resources. And I feel like that's in many ways, the the job of CFO, it's risk taking, it's deciding the right strategy for the situation. And it seems like the the the frontier models are not quite there yet.

• 1:07:30Eric Glyman?

  You you you nailed it, and I think that when I think about. The next set of years, we we with the funders, we tried to lay out of like, we're seeing glimmers of like this whole industry is going to get rewritten. What do we think the industry looks like over the next three to five years? What is the org like look like? And we laid that out in the post, but I think the biggest transformation is like, really, really, I think most of the finance function today, unfortunately, is very backward looking. But I think as automation, agentic workflows are coming to the forefront and platforms like Ramp.

• 1:08:04Eric Glyman?

  Actually, more people can be looking forward, can be spending time, you know, on like for Ben Thompson, like what are the really interesting breakthrough theories? And how do you go and make things better? And when I think of like, what is that last exam ultimately for a finance organization is? You know, I I think there are companies that have taken these tests. So I think one of the interesting studies I think about is. Amazon in its early days, they were very early and they would send email follow-ups to customers. You just bought this. And the old way of doing email marketing to customers was someone would write, like if you've seen like the Trader Joe's newsletter where someone writes like these poetic things about the new ingredients and cool stuff, come try this and whatever. Amazon did that in the 90s.

• 1:08:48Eric Glyman?

  There was an editorial team talking about the great new products that were coming online on amazon.com. And then there was this personalization team. It's like, I don't know, P12N or whatever it is. And they said, we're going to A/B test it. This personalization team, you're going to get 10% of the send volume. And your job is to just go and try to find these weird connections, these move 37s of like, you just bought this, you may be interested in this product. And for a long time, humans crushed the personalization team. There was something kind of in the example of how these marketers thought that was better. It would get better and better and better till one day the personalization team, the volume started winning.

• 1:09:28John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:09:29Eric Glyman?

  And it kept winning.

• 1:09:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:09:31Eric Glyman?

  And there is no team that is sending like newsletters around. And so, you know, it turns out algorithmically on single products, you might be able to go and have a better algorithmic recommendations. I still think for quite a while, there was a role for creative CFOs in thinking about these unexpected strategies. It's sort of in some ways like, I don't know, make it about you guys for a second. The media industry has been at it for a long time. You know, there's live streaming, you know, TV has been around for a while. No one saw this and suddenly like this is one of the most, I think, important things happening, you know, in broadcasting. It's your show.

• 1:10:06John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 1:10:07Eric Glyman?

  You guys saw it.

• 1:10:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:09Eric Glyman?

  And I think there's room for people of great taste, who are great marketers, who are great leaders, CFOs. And so, no, I'm bullish actually when you have time to think about the interesting work.

• 1:10:18John Coogan?

  100%. Yeah. Like, there's one world where you see the expense policy as like a set of if statements and there's a different world where you start thinking about expenses as like bets and risk taking and actual like, what is the net present value of buying that particular thing? Will this pay off for the business? Does this actually increase shareholder value? When you buy even just those pencils versus those pens like that's really

• 1:10:39Jordi Hays?

  Also, I mean, I mean, yeah, there's so much, you know, finance historically is, you know, looking backwards and you can make decisions based on that be like, whoa, we spent this on this, we shouldn't do that again. But there's also so much that you can bring in of like even helping understand projecting out. Did you know if you adopted this tool and then you grow head count 20% or 30% or 100%, you know, this is going to be in a year if you keep this existing, you know, plan contract, you're going to be spending, you know, some crazy multiple of what you're paying today. So, and there's so much, so.

• 1:11:09John Coogan?

  What's next for the company? Is the job finished?

• 1:11:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, everybody, everybody in the chat is asking, job finished?

• 1:11:15John Coogan?

  Is the job finished?

• 1:11:16Eric Glyman?

  The job is not finished, guys. I'm still, we're still, we can't believe it.

• 1:11:25Jordi Hays?

  Job not finished confirmed.

• 1:11:26Eric Glyman?

  No, guys, this is, I love this thing. No, it's like, it's like, we're pleased, we're happy, but like, this is the crazy thing about our industry is that any business that spends money could be a ramp customer. And we've come a long way.

• 1:11:40John Coogan?

  They will be. They will be. They must be.

• 1:11:42Eric Glyman?

  They must be.

• 1:11:43John Coogan?

  Shoulds and musts.

• 1:11:45Eric Glyman?

  I don't know, we're working hard on it. But guys, most, most people, you know, pour one out for our friends, like expenses, closing the books, it is the worst hour of their month. It doesn't have to be. We're going to change that.

• 1:11:59John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:12:00Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 1:12:00John Coogan?

  Well, thanks so much for stopping by.

• 1:12:02Eric Glyman?

  Thanks a ton. A ton of fun.

• 1:12:03Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you later, hopefully.

• 1:12:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll see you later.

• 1:12:05Eric Glyman?

  And please recommend your tailor to me. I gotta get one of these things.

• 1:12:08Jordi Hays?

  No, we'll, we'll put you in touch. We'll come to the fitting. Awesome. Great to see you, Eric.

• 1:12:14John Coogan?

  Thank you. We gotta hop on with Avi Schiffman in a few minutes. Let's read through some posts, though. Interesting fact about the IPO market.

• 1:12:22Jordi Hays?

  We needed a poly market on whether Eric would say job's not finished, although it probably would have been sitting at 100%.

• 1:12:29John Coogan?

  Jeff Richards says the last five technology IPOs are up 142% on average. The last 20 are up 93%, performing well beyond lockup windows. Last 12 months prevailing narrative, there is no IPO market. Smart companies prepared anyhow, and we're ready to take advantage of favorable conditions. And it's Chime, Voyager, Circle, Mountain, Hinge Health, Etoro, Core Weave, tons of companies on here. Service Titan, all got out and are sitting at pretty solid offer to current percent gains. There's a few that are down, but by and large, the IPO window is wide open.

• 1:13:03Jordi Hays?

  It's wide open. And on that note, there was some news yesterday that an ultra massive asteroid is on a possible collision course with the moon. May trigger destructive meteor shower on Earth. And Andy from 2Cents says it's in 2032, enough time for an IPO, lock in.

• 1:13:21John Coogan?

  So really quickly, let me tell you about numeralhq.com. Sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. And we can give Avi Schiffman a call.

• 1:13:31Jordi Hays?

  Give him a ring.

• 1:13:32John Coogan?

  Let's give him a ring and see.

• 1:13:33Jordi Hays?

  This, we haven't done many of these before, these sort of FaceTime call-ins, but we're going to give it a shot.

• 1:13:38John Coogan?

  I'm just going to call him on the phone. I'm not even FaceTiming.

• 1:13:41Avi Schiffmann?

  It's good to know.

• 1:13:42John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 1:13:43Jordi Hays?

  My man.

• 1:13:43John Coogan?

  Can you hear us?

• 1:13:44Jordi Hays?

  Happy launch day.

• 1:13:45Avi Schiffmann?

  It's London. I can hear you.

• 1:13:46John Coogan?

  Happy launch day.

• 1:13:47Jordi Hays?

  Very, very bold to, to launch on the day of a ramp fundraiser, but you're breaking through.

• 1:13:51John Coogan?

  You're breaking through. Congratulations.

• 1:13:52Jordi Hays?

  I've seen a lot of posts.

• 1:13:53Avi Schiffmann?

  Ah, thank you.

• 1:13:54John Coogan?

  We've been following the story for a long time. Very excited that you got these out into the world. Break it down for us. Are you sharing any numbers or has there been any feedback? I saw a bunch of posts that you were reposting. What's the feedback been so far? What, what did you actually ship? Is this the, the final product? This developer preview? Give us kind of the, the, the high level overview and then we'll dig in.

• 1:14:17Avi Schiffmann?

  Sure. Yeah. Am I live right now?

• 1:14:19John Coogan?

  You're live.

• 1:14:19Jordi Hays?

  You're live.

• 1:14:20Avi Schiffmann?

  Oh dope. Uh, yeah, actually, I mean, just, uh, one, one minute ago, right before you called, a friend of mine that I sent it to, um, he's, uh, he works for, uh, Arc Boats. And, um, everyone there loves it so much. They just called me and just, uh, they just ordered a whole bunch of them. So.

• 1:14:36Jordi Hays?

  There we go. You're selling enterprise software.

• 1:14:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. I was going to ask, are people abusing this yet to, to do work instead of like, yeah, he's pitching me a friend, but really I just want an intern.

• 1:14:45Jordi Hays?

  I just want to sell stuff.

• 1:14:46Avi Schiffmann?

  Yeah. I think some people wanted to like help them with productivity and like, that's kind of the con of, of talking about it on Twitter, but I have no idea. I, the cool thing about friend is I can't read people's chats because I don't have their friend. It's kind of like a, like a living Yubiki in that way.

• 1:15:00John Coogan?

  Interesting. Interesting. Is it, is it on device or just like end to end encrypted or secure somehow? Or what?

• 1:15:05Avi Schiffmann?

  Uh, I mean, it's kinda just.

• 1:15:10Avi Schiffmann?

  I look forward to seeing people try and crack it, but it's basically it's basically encrypted in sorts on the device. There's like a key in each device that like I don't have access to.

• 1:15:21John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:15:22Avi Schiffmann?

  Because I don't have the actual friend, but um anyways.

• 1:15:26John Coogan?

  How much do people pay for these?

• 1:15:28Jordi Hays?

  Hundred and twenty-nine dollars.

• 1:15:33John Coogan?

  I was asking how much people paid.

• 1:15:35Avi Schiffmann?

  Oh, uh, ninety-nine for the pre-orders, but now they're for sale for one twenty-nine.

• 1:15:39Jordi Hays?

  Price of the bricks going up.

• 1:15:41Avi Schiffmann?

  Dude, I would never ship a developer preview. These are, this is the final.

• 1:15:44John Coogan?

  This is ready to go. Ready for, ready for the big time. Uh, yeah. Uh, what, what, what, what's next? Uh, do you immediately go into getting feedback? V2, software, hardware? What are you excited about improving? Uh. I'm sure you're getting a lot of feedback already.

• 1:15:59Avi Schiffmann?

  Yeah, no, no V2s anytime soon. I think the product is the best I could possibly do with the current state of tech. Um, the, the real marketing push will come sometime soon when our next movie drops, which will be a proper feature film that we're submitting to film festivals.

• 1:16:13John Coogan?

  No way. You're making a whole movie?

• 1:16:16Jordi Hays?

  Okay, this is a new meta.

• 1:16:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, the cinematic launch video is dead. You gotta just ship in ninety minutes.

• 1:16:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is.

• 1:16:23Avi Schiffmann?

  That's why I didn't want to drop another video today. Like, fuck, that's boring.

• 1:16:26John Coogan?

  That's amazing. The meta moves on. Congrats.

• 1:16:29Avi Schiffmann?

  The new feature film, I promise you, will be the greatest cultural technology thing of the 2020s. I think it's gonna be amazing.

• 1:16:36Jordi Hays?

  Bold statement.

• 1:16:37John Coogan?

  Can you tell us anything about who's attached? I know, was it Sandwich Video that worked on the previous film?

• 1:16:42Jordi Hays?

  If you had Sandwich do a feature film, it would cost like fifty million dollars.

• 1:16:46John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 1:16:48Avi Schiffmann?

  I'd be surprised if you guys knew them, but you know All Gas No Brakes or Channel Five?

• 1:16:52John Coogan?

  I know. Andrew Callahan, deeply, yes.

• 1:16:55Jordi Hays?

  He interviewed the former president Sun originally?

• 1:16:58Avi Schiffmann?

  They split off a while ago because of all the sex scandals, but uh, but the production. Behind all Gasno Bricks has been following the whole project.

• 1:17:04John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 1:17:04Avi Schiffmann?

  And it's it's gonna be kind of like that Kanye documentary from a couple of years ago.

• 1:17:09John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:17:11Avi Schiffmann?

  It's gonna be, it's gonna be great.

• 1:17:13Jordi Hays?

  When's uh, uh, is it the August, September? When are we, when are we talking?

• 1:17:18Avi Schiffmann?

  Uh, I have no idea. Probably not this year because I want to submit it to film festivals first and win them. Uh, the the closest one is the Berlin Film Festival and the awards for that will come out in February, so.

• 1:17:27John Coogan?

  Do you think the price of uh, you you know how the price of like a cinematic two minute uh, like intro video has dropped a lot because like, you know, cinema cameras are getting cheaper, Sony has the FX three, like, you know, you can just use free editing software, AI tools. Like, uh, do you think the price of making a feature film has dropped such that like more companies will be doing this in the future?

• 1:17:47Avi Schiffmann?

  Uh, I mean, probably, but I think like ultimately you just got to like care enough to make something good. I mean, for the friend launch video from last year. I location scouted it, I casted it, I helped write the script, I was there on set, like you just have to be involved.

• 1:18:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:00Avi Schiffmann?

  And uh, I guess be, I don't know, just be good enough to make something dope. I thought the waves video was probably the best, second to Friends video I've seen.

• 1:18:08John Coogan?

  Which one?

• 1:18:08Jordi Hays?

  The waves.

• 1:18:10Avi Schiffmann?

  Like the glasses. I thought it was like a nice, it was a nice video. It wasn't just like, you know, flat. It wasn't annoying.

• 1:18:15John Coogan?

  I completely agree. Yeah, it was great. Uh, what, take me on a tour of the other uh, hardware devices. It sounds like you're a bit of a fan of waves. What else is going on in the world that's interesting? What are you, uh, what do you think's a dead end on the tech tree?

• 1:18:31Avi Schiffmann?

  Hmm, well, I am still disappointed that there's not really any interesting consumer stuff. I still find polymarket to be pretty much the only, like genuine mainstream consumer thing of the last billion years that's, that's worthwhile.

• 1:18:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, that is real.

• 1:18:45Avi Schiffmann?

  Yeah, I mean, you, you, you're a partner with them.

• 1:18:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're partnered with them.

• 1:18:47Avi Schiffmann?

  It's novel, it's, it's, it's cultural, it's cultural, it's cool. Shame is cool. I mean, it's, it's, it's new, it's, it's what I want to do.

• 1:18:56John Coogan?

  It's just so hard to break through consumer because it's either like it's hardware and it's a billion dollars to do a big run or, or it's like, oh, it's anything tied to social networking and like, there's a super durable monopoly. I mean, I guess ChatGPT broke through in the consumer context really, really massively, but you know, it instantly just turned into like a Mag Seven company.

• 1:19:14Avi Schiffmann?

  They're doomed. I feel like, okay, for starters, I really, I'd be very surprised if the whole Johnny I thing actually ships.

• 1:19:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:19:21Avi Schiffmann?

  I just. I don't think that's gonna ship. That's maybe my take.

• 1:19:24John Coogan?

  Not ship at all?

• 1:19:26Avi Schiffmann?

  It's just they're, they're just, look, they're, they're just too old to understand how to go towards, let's say the new, like, the main target audience that I'm very interested in is Gen A. Because they don't say the word AI companion. You know, I named it friend because they just say they're talking to their friends. They know how to intuitively talk to an AI, but also view it as like a platonic companion. It doesn't have to be a sex bot. Or an assistant, which I think is really only old people that need some kind of utilitarian value from.

• 1:19:53Jordi Hays?

  What about, uh, what about, uh, GPT psychosis? Is it real? Is it, uh?

• 1:20:00John Coogan?

  A risk for the friend.

• 1:20:00Jordi Hays?

  Is it a risk? You worried about it? You worried about someone getting, uh, seven million prompts deep in friends?

• 1:20:06Avi Schiffmann?

  If, if you truly fall to that, I mean, I think that's your problem.

• 1:20:13John Coogan?

  Well, uh, I would hope that you at least build some guardrails in just to be safe, cause, uh, you know, why not?

• 1:20:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just make sure the friends check on.

• 1:20:20Avi Schiffmann?

  Behind the, behind the, we're using Gemini two point five, which I think is a great model and Google does a good job allowing it to.

• 1:20:25John Coogan?

  Just, just do me a favor and remove those, uh, what is it? Uh, uh, it's not SCP, like horror copy creepypastas. Just remove those from the training set, please.

• 1:20:34Avi Schiffmann?

  Sorry for that guy.

• 1:20:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:20:36Avi Schiffmann?

  That Bedrock guy.

• 1:20:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:37Avi Schiffmann?

  He arrested.

• 1:20:38John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 1:20:39Avi Schiffmann?

  Yeah, well, we'll see. You know, I, the, the friend used to be a little bit more psychotic. When the battery died, your friend actually was truly dead.

• 1:20:47John Coogan?

  That's wild. Tamagotchi style. Uh, well, what about, uh, do you ever play Fallout?

• 1:20:52Avi Schiffmann?

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:20:52John Coogan?

  What about Pip Boy? Is that a good idea? I was pitching that to people. Uh, if you're, if you're on Shark Tank, would you invest in that if you had, if you were a shark?

• 1:21:00Avi Schiffmann?

  I, I do think that like, like, single feature consumer electronics will be popular again. Like, I don't understand why everyone's got this boner of trying to build the iPhone up AI when the iPhone ever came. Out without the iPod, you know, with friend at least, I tried to just do one single feature and, you know, do it well end to end.

• 1:21:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:17Avi Schiffmann?

  Um, I think there'll be more, more products like that. People want like interesting new form factors and to kind of disperse from their phone a little bit. But not replace it. People, people want to scroll their TikToks. That's just not going away anytime soon.

• 1:21:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, the phone's kind of end of history.

• 1:21:28Jordi Hays?

  It is forever.

• 1:21:29John Coogan?

  People are gonna be on their phones, but then, you know, Apple Watch sort of broke through, VR headsets, nice.

• 1:21:34Avi Schiffmann?

  The Apple Watch did not break through. That is the most dorky product of all time. I would never even.

• 1:21:38Jordi Hays?

  I see, I would say, I would say probably half, half our guests wear, wear an Apple Watch, so.

• 1:21:44John Coogan?

  You're like, you're like a hundred billion dollars in revenue a year. It didn't break through. It's a failure. Wind it down.

• 1:21:50Jordi Hays?

  AirPods, AirPods.

• 1:21:53John Coogan?

  I, I hear you. I hear you and I, I agree with like the aesthetic criticism, but certainly like the idea of like a computer on your wrist is like somewhat.

• 1:22:02Avi Schiffmann?

  It sounds like you're wearing one right now.

• 1:22:03John Coogan?

  I'm not, I'm not. I am, I am a proud, proud Brad ambassador for bezel. I appreciate mechanical watches. I appreciate.

• 1:22:11Jordi Hays?

  Holy Trinity appreciator.

• 1:22:12John Coogan?

  Voucher on Constanton. They would never think to put a battery in that thing.

• 1:22:15Avi Schiffmann?

  Yeah, I mean personally, I don't want to be tied to time like that, but.

• 1:22:18John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:22:19Jordi Hays?

  Shots fired at the watch community.

• 1:22:21John Coogan?

  Wait, so you don't want a watch at all? Okay. No, yeah, no, no time whatsoever.

• 1:22:25Jordi Hays?

  What is, what is Gen Alpha think about AirPods? Are they, are they always in? Or is it, is it, uh, are AirPods?

• 1:22:31John Coogan?

  I remember some people doing interviews with them in and they're like, yeah, they're in transparency mode. And it's like, that's a crazy.

• 1:22:36Avi Schiffmann?

  I don't know. I don't even wear headphones really. It's just like, just got a good speaker system.

• 1:22:39John Coogan?

  What about, uh, what about like analog cameras? You carry like a film camera or like a Q3, something like that?

• 1:22:45Avi Schiffmann?

  Sure dude, I mean, uh, I just bought the same camcorder they used in 28 Days Later, that zombie film.

• 1:22:50John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:22:50Avi Schiffmann?

  Highly recommend it.

• 1:22:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. We, we brought a VHS camcorder with us, our mini DV on this trip to do a little vlog.

• 1:22:56Jordi Hays?

  You think, uh, what, what do you?

• 1:22:57Avi Schiffmann?

  It's exactly the mini, mini DV.

• 1:22:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:00Jordi Hays?

  What's your, what's your read? What do you think Zuck is gonna do in the AI companion space?

• 1:23:06John Coogan?

  Good question.

• 1:23:07Jordi Hays?

  AI friendship?

• 1:23:07Avi Schiffmann?

  I mean, I think it'll just make the concept like, you don't buy a dog because you have the low self-esteem. And I don't think AI companionship, which right now people think is just a product for like lonely people or people with low self-esteem, et cetera. I think it will just be like a new kind of companion that people will have in their lives.

• 1:23:25John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Anything else, Jordy?

• 1:23:27Jordi Hays?

  Oh, this is great. Congrats on shipping. Uh, I believe you're sending, uh, I don't know if you already sent one.

• 1:23:33John Coogan?

  Friend.com.

• 1:23:34Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if you already sent one to us, but, uh, happy to, happy to, to purchase and support and we'll, we'll bring it into a show. We'll bring it into a show. It's gonna be a high stakes.

• 1:23:41Avi Schiffmann?

  I'll send you one, Jordy.

• 1:23:42Jordi Hays?

  High stakes, high stakes demo. You're gonna, the, the friend will be with us live for, for three hours, so.

• 1:23:49Avi Schiffmann?

  Okay, well you might have to wait a couple of years then.

• 1:23:51Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, it's okay for something to.

• 1:23:52Avi Schiffmann?

  I got you, I got you. We'll, we'll ship it out to you this month.

• 1:23:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be awesome. Yeah, well, well, we, we, we do a bunch of product demos with our intern Tyler as well. We can demo it in a smaller setting, a segment on the show, maybe not the full show.

• 1:24:03Avi Schiffmann?

  I hope you enjoy that. The whole thing, I think people, people yearn for opinionated hardware again, and I think there's not a single user facing detail that at least I did not choose.

• 1:24:13John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:24:13Avi Schiffmann?

  If you like it or don't like it.

• 1:24:14John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:24:15Avi Schiffmann?

  This is something I chose.

• 1:24:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm so sick of, uh, Christmas and the holidays coming around and it's like, I can't get you music because you already have Spotify and you don't want a CD anymore. I can't get you a book because everyone has Audible. I can't get you a DVD set because everyone has iTunes and like just the gift. I feel like the gift economy has been nerfed by the proliferation of the internet. And you're like, kind of bringing it back and it's like, even if, even if somebody wants an Apple Watch, like they'll probably just buy that themselves. It's pretty rare to like make it a good gift, whereas this is something that's unexpected just by virtue of the fact that you're a new company. And so I feel like if I gifted this to a few people, it would be a surprise and delight. Maybe they don't love it forever, but it's something that's new and it's different and it's fresh. And I love that.

• 1:24:58Avi Schiffmann?

  Well, maybe for Christmas time also, John, I mean, I don't even have internet at my house. I just listen to, to finals and see what's up.

• 1:25:03John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah. But you, you have to admit you're in the minority there.

• 1:25:06Avi Schiffmann?

  I don't know. I think I'm starting a new wave.

• 1:25:08John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, well, expect, expect all 600 hours of TBPN pressed on vinyl under your Christmas tree in December 25th.

• 1:25:16Avi Schiffmann?

  You should actually do that. That would be great.

• 1:25:18John Coogan?

  Expect it. If you have a, if you have a record player, you're going to be listening to our sultry

• 1:25:21Avi Schiffmann?

  I'm looking at it right now.

• 1:25:22John Coogan?

  Reading Ben Thompson articles on vinyl. Be great. Anyway.

• 1:25:26Avi Schiffmann?

  Okay.

• 1:25:26John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon, Alvy. Congrats.

• 1:25:28Avi Schiffmann?

  Peace.

• 1:25:29John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:25:29Avi Schiffmann?

  Thank you.

• 1:25:31John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh.

• 1:25:32Jordi Hays?

  Opinionated young man in tech.

• 1:25:34John Coogan?

  We love it.

• 1:25:35Jordi Hays?

  Always a fun conversation.

• 1:25:36John Coogan?

  We love it. Also get on Fin AI, fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, the best performing AI agent for customer service, delivering higher quality customer

• 1:25:45Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:25:45John Coogan?

  experiences and higher resolution agents.

• 1:25:47Jordi Hays?

  Bake off champion of the world.

• 1:25:50John Coogan?

  And, uh, there was an interesting Australian rocket launch that happened.

• 1:25:55Jordi Hays?

  It was very interesting.

• 1:25:56John Coogan?

  It did not go very well. The rocket Eris, launched by Gilmore Space Technologies, was designed to carry small satellites to orbit. It goes up, it kind of slides, it went for 14 seconds. And it was, it was a little bit of a crazy slide to the side to left.

• 1:26:10Jordi Hays?

  Sad to see, sad to see, but you have to, you gotta fail. Apparently in aerospace, in rocket science, you gotta fail a lot to, even Elon is failing.

• 1:26:20John Coogan?

  We were watching this video with somebody and was like, was anyone on board? It's like, obviously not. The, we, we send satellites to space. We don't send humans to space.

• 1:26:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, I don't think we should laugh at the misfortune or the failure, but there was a very viral and funny post. Where someone was saying, uh, you know, imagining the Australians saying, "Arner, arner."

• 1:26:43John Coogan?

  Very funny. Um, but yeah, I mean, uh, it, I mean, it, it is, it is very fortunate that way. We're in the era of like, you know, autonomous rockets from day one. And so you can blow them up a lot.

• 1:26:53Jordi Hays?

  Rockets are tough too. It's hard to hide a catastrophic failure, you know? You can launch your, your AI, you're, you can launch your agentic workflow and it can fail. Uh, but when you launch a rocket, uh, people are going to find out.

• 1:27:06John Coogan?

  Oh, this is interesting. Uh, Avi mentioned polymarket. Uh, there's a, there's a trader on polymarket who's up $750,000 and just can't seem to lose. They have $2.4 million on rates going unchanged today. They'll profit another $100,000 if they're right. Better trader than Pelosi? And, uh, wow, they really went all in.

• 1:27:25Jordi Hays?

  And they were right.

• 1:27:26John Coogan?

  And they were right. So they made another 100K. Uh, what, what an impressive trader. Crazy. Yeah. It feels like a lot of the people on polymarket have like scaled up to being like, it's more like a hedge fund. And it's like their professional job, like the, the famous example of the person who called the Trump thing, right? It was like, he was paying for his own polling data, uh, just to, just to make that bet.

• 1:27:45Jordi Hays?

  In other news, uh, Palo Alto Network acquired CyberArk for 25 billion.

• 1:27:53John Coogan?

  Good name for a company, Palo Alto Networks. Sand Hill Road Company. Probably didn't have trouble with money.

• 1:27:58Jordi Hays?

  Great name. Great name. My, uh,

• 1:28:02Jordi Hays?

  Family moved, my dad's family moved to Palo Alto, I think in 1906.

• 1:28:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:08Jordi Hays?

  So way back.

• 1:28:09John Coogan?

  1906.

• 1:28:10Jordi Hays?

  But they bought CyberArk for $25 billion. CyberArk is an Israeli identity security provider. And cyber, sorry, Palo Alto Networks is down 6.24% today.

• 1:28:24John Coogan?

  I didn't like it.

• 1:28:24Jordi Hays?

  So, never know with these things, sure.

• 1:28:28John Coogan?

  In other acquisition news, Sam Ross shares that Numeral has acquired Spend Ruby. As part of this acquisition, we're excited to welcome the entire Ruby Card team to Numeral. This marks our first acquisition and it's been a long time coming. They first met during Y Combinator's winter 2023 batch. They became fast friends, given our shared experience building and supporting e-commerce brands. It turned out that I wasn't the only one who had dealt with the nightmare that is sales tax. The team will join the engineering team to help accelerate our global offering, including integrations and industry-leading tax engine. Together, we'll solve one of the hardest problems for growing businesses, sales tax compliance. I agree, I've experienced it myself and I use Numeral for my e-commerce company.

• 1:29:10John Coogan?

  Joe Weisenthal was talking about GDP, also talking about the odds of the Fed rate cut, which we already covered. The odds have dropped substantially, as they probably should, given that the American consumer is undefeated and the American economy continues to be on a tear.

• 1:29:26John Coogan?

  Speaking of Apple products, Freya Lobo says, "One of my longest-standing hobbies is thinking about whether I should get an iPad. It's not about the iPad, it's about imagining an alternative life. I might live as someone who has an iPad. Love to wonder about it."

• 1:29:40Jordi Hays?

  The T2K, apparently this struck a chord.

• 1:29:42John Coogan?

  This is, I was literally doing this.

• 1:29:44Jordi Hays?

  Apparently many people dream of an iPad life.

• 1:29:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, when the latest iOS came out and everyone was like, "Okay, the liquid glass is a little crazy. We don't know if we like this. It's cooking Tyler's phone. It's not maybe the best update yet. They'll get it there, but it's amazing on iPad." And everyone, and I was like, "I want an iPad, I want it." But then I actually thought about my day-to-day of doing the show and writing and screenshotting stuff. And I was like, "I think I would hate it."

• 1:30:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my dad, my dad's retired and when I see him use an iPad, I go, "Wow, what a, what a simple, what a simple but nice life." You know, if you can just leisurely tap around, maybe read an email, fire off a thumbs up emoji, you don't have to do much.

• 1:30:22John Coogan?

  Well, whether you use an iPad or an iPhone or a Mac or some other device to access the internet, you gotta go to public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Another question about...

• 1:30:36Jordi Hays?

  Yu Chen Jin says, "Not a single person from Thinky or Anthropic took Zuck's offer. Why?" Some good reasons here, some of which we covered. Already rich, mission greater than mansion. They've seen AGI, hate big corp. Life upside is higher. Value of money is diminishing post AGI. No faith in Meta or Zuck, and people are voting.

• 1:30:58John Coogan?

  Defnot 6 because a Lambo is a Lambo, pre or post AGI?

• 1:31:03Jordi Hays?

  Fact check, true. Experts confirm this is true. Kosh over on the Ramp team, "I don't know if this was intentional." Ramp was valued at 22.5 billion, 225, 225, and he says, "Bench 225 a little easier this morning." Feeling absolutely jacked, so shout out to Kosh.

• 1:31:22John Coogan?

  The numerology on 225 is really good.

• 1:31:24Jordi Hays?

  Mike Isaac says, "Pretty clever. Someone who claims to have scraped public listening data from a number of public figures, politicians, celebrities, journalists, spun up their alleged playlists and made it into a site. Thankfully, mine isn't too embarrassing, but others..." Dot, dot, dot.

• 1:31:42John Coogan?

  And people were talking about Palmer Luckies. He listens to all the hits. He likes pop, and he was like, "This is mine, and I'm proud of it." And everyone was like, "This is amazing. I gotta listen to Palmer's list." But panamaplist.com if you want to check it out. Also, like, sort of an odd data leak. Like, this happened during the election. The Venmo transactions were public. And so they'd find JD Vance's Venmo, and then they'd see JD Vance paid someone else, so they're connected. So if you're out there and you're on your stuff...

• 1:32:15Jordi Hays?

  So you're on this list. You're on the Panama playlist. There's a playlist here from you called Immortal.

• 1:32:22John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:32:23Jordi Hays?

  And it's the Four Seasons Concerto, Hero, Family of the Year, Jesus Walks. I'm on the list as well. I don't even know what this playlist is.

• 1:32:35John Coogan?

  I'm proud of my playlist. You're free to go listen to them if you'd like. I should just make them all public. I love my Spotify playlists.

• 1:32:42Jordi Hays?

  Keith Raboy, listen to some Deadmau5.

• 1:32:45John Coogan?

  A lot of good EDM. He's sent it.

• 1:32:47Jordi Hays?

  Leso.

• 1:32:48John Coogan?

  Spotify playlist. It is funny because I feel like I didn't expect it to be public, but obviously I don't.

• 1:32:53Jordi Hays?

  Sean, Sean McGuire's listening to some, uh, Apex Twin, Muramasa. Yeah, I don't know. This is so random. I don't use public, uh, play. I mean,

• 1:33:04John Coogan?

  I feel like we gotta go.

• 1:33:05Jordi Hays?

  Dalian is listening to some Creedence Clearwater.

• 1:33:08John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 1:33:09Jordi Hays?

  Um,

• 1:33:09John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 1:33:10Jordi Hays?

  Gary Tan, uh, is listening to Crumb.

• 1:33:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:33:16Jordi Hays?

  It's an interesting list here.

• 1:33:18John Coogan?

  You gotta, we, we gotta figure out, uh, to really curate that. So when people land on it.

• 1:33:23Jordi Hays?

  We're working on a playlist for a little something tomorrow.

• 1:33:26John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. Cool. We'll have to put the Four Seasons on there.

• 1:33:29Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:33:29John Coogan?

  Baldi, one of the greatest ever.

• 1:33:31Jordi Hays?

  Something like that. Um.

• 1:33:32John Coogan?

  Speaking of, uh, tomorrow, inspired by Oomph, are you the 2003 Dom Perignon where the heatwave killed 5,600 people and made the best grapes of all time? Have you heard this lore about Dom Perignon? Apparently there was a crazy heatwave in 2003. And now it's a, uh, it's a beloved vintage of wine? I had no idea.

• 1:33:52Jordi Hays?

  I did not either.

• 1:33:53John Coogan?

  I need to, I need to learn more about that. Um, anyway, uh, Percy Jackson was right. SF is the new Rome, says Lucas. Both SF and Rome have exactly seven hills, temperature, temperate sunny sea climate. Status is a pilgrimage site where immigrants working to, uh, become citizens, center of a productive valley. Sea, military, industrial, business power. And look at this photo. I, I, it's not going to translate on the screen, but, uh, this, I had, I had no idea that the, uh, Palace of Fine Arts could be shot with the, uh, with the, is this one better? I don't know. I'll hold it up. I don't know. We're, there, go to four. Yeah, camera four. There we go.

• 1:34:33John Coogan?

  Put it for, ah, I'm fighting that air conditioning. Um, uh, but the Palace of Fine Arts, incredible image, incredible image. And it does look very Roman, so.

• 1:34:43Jordi Hays?

  San Francisco.

• 1:34:43John Coogan?

  San Francisco, undefeated.

• 1:34:45Jordi Hays?

  Undefeated.

• 1:34:45John Coogan?

  Uh, oh, Luke Ferrator. So there was a piece in Bloomberg about Luke Ferrator, friend of the show.

• 1:34:51Jordi Hays?

  Lots of debate. Was it a, uh,

• 1:34:54John Coogan?

  Hit piece, there certainly.

• 1:34:56Jordi Hays?

  Analysis, critique, profile.

• 1:34:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So people were going back and forth. Uh, Spore said the Luke Ferrator article is hardly a hit piece and some of y'all are wildly overreacting. We have some of the overreactions here. We got Catherine Boyle saying, "When I worked for the Washington Post, there was an understanding that the family of elected officials was generally off limits unless they put themselves in the arena. A hit piece on a low-level government employee that goes after his mother by name is so appalling. Why would anyone in tech talk to Bloomberg after this?" Sean McGuire says, "Luke Ferretor is an American hero." He says it's a hit piece. This is a hit piece, it's a badge of honor. Par for the course, Luke Ferretor is still 23. We gotta get him out of the government. We gotta get him into Silicon Valley.

• 1:35:33Jordi Hays?

  Gotta get him into SAS.

• 1:35:34John Coogan?

  We gotta get him in term sheet. That's the key.

• 1:35:36Jordi Hays?

  I mean, think about how many, I think about how many people have probably approached him and said, "I will give you $50 million to start a company, and you can immediately take 5 million of secondary."

• 1:35:48John Coogan?

  Immediately.

• 1:35:49Jordi Hays?

  Like, I'm sure, I'm sure some, some offer in that range has been made, but it is worthwhile having him in the government, working on important problems. I think you had a, you had a framing, which was, you can look at some of the cuts that Doge has been making and say, "If you believe that the government is efficient and that the money is being spent well, then you're going to be really upset. If you believe that there's a lot of, potentially a lot of waste, and that there's money just going to people that shouldn't be getting it, or, or going to causes that might be harmful, then maybe it's positive." And so, it's naturally like an incredibly politically charged topic.

• 1:36:22John Coogan?

  It's completely reasonable. If someone says, if someone says to you, "America is spending $100 million to help the less fortunate."

• 1:36:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:33John Coogan?

  You'd be like, "Well, I don't want to take that away. Of course, it's, it feels good to help the less fortunate."

• 1:36:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:36John Coogan?

  But if, but if you dig in and you find out that it's like, "Well, they, that's what it said, but in fact, it was all going into someone's pocket who's super rich," you'd be like, "Wait, why are we doing this? This makes no sense." And so, the, the stated names of every program are always with the best, with the best intentions. But, I mean, you know this from running a business. You, you, you spend money on a lot of different projects. Some of the projects go off the rails and you need to cut them. And so, the idea that like, cutting spending is super controversial, this is something that was done in the Obama administration, like, it should not be as politically charged as it is, but unfortunately, we are in a very, very politically charged environment. So, Casey Hanmer was particularly upset about this article. He said, "Disappointed but not surprised by the tone of the article. The authors tried desperately to smear Luke Ferretor

• 1:37:20John Coogan?

  with their poorly engineered invective, but instead only showed their limitation of their vision and the mediocre cowardice of their sources who couldn't even air their own uninformed opinions under their own name. Not a single mention of the ballooning deficit, not a single mention of collapsing state capacity." implied that USAID was cut because Luke misread some database and not that Doge found that USAID had illegally ignored an executive order by continuing to pour money into unaccountable foreign NGOs, some of which was illegally coming back into partisan US organizations. It is astonishingly irresponsible to paint a target on Luke like this. A number of sources made claims about his motives, which is defamatory. An article like this brings dishonor upon the profession.

• 1:38:04John Coogan?

  The other, the other side of this is that, is that I think this isn't Luke's first rodeo. Even though he's only 23, I think he is holding up well and I'm, and I'm, and I think he is, he's, he's, he's, he knows that this is, this is par for the course and so.

• 1:38:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's, it's making a large number of people think that he might be bad.

• 1:38:22John Coogan?

  Sal Al-Gaib. Oh, sorry.

• 1:38:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, well, no, like, you know, this could be an example where, where a million people think that he's bad.

• 1:38:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:38:31Jordi Hays?

  And that he should be removed.

• 1:38:32John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:38:33Jordi Hays?

  And then, and then 50,000 people.

• 1:38:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:35Jordi Hays?

  Think that like, I will support this.

• 1:38:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:38Jordi Hays?

  Person throughout my entire life.

• 1:38:39John Coogan?

  And all it takes is like one crazy person to be really, really destructive. So, uh, rough. Anyway, Spore has the other side of the argument, says the Luke Farid or article is hardly a hit piece. Some of y'all are wildly overreacting. You don't just, you, you don't just like that a technologist is being scrutinized for working in an extremely important governmental position. Sorry, but the fourth estate has no reason to kowtow to Silicon Valley. And I kind of agree with this, like, you know, I'm a taxpayer, you work for the government, just like I would expect, like, to know where the government funds are going and what, you know, is this particular government program efficient or not? I also would like to know who the people are. And so I do think this is of the public interest and I think it's okay for reporters to dig into what Doge is doing because even if you're pro Doge, you want to make sure that it's

• 1:39:24John Coogan?

  working effectively.

• 1:39:25Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:39:25John Coogan?

  Uh, and so that's, so that's reasonable, I think. Spore continues and says, I super support the new media strategy of going direct and telling these publications to F up when they try and slander you, but then you don't really get to complain when they're not characterizing you how you want. That's not how it works. For what it's work, for what it's worth, I read the piece. It's a, it is a too long portrait of work, Luke. It is extremely long. It takes over an hour if you listen to the audio version.

• 1:39:49Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:39:49John Coogan?

  His history and experience and spends a ton of time on some of his most impressive accomplishments. I agree with that. It is very, very interesting.

• 1:39:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and they were nice enough to make him look very cool in the picture.

• 1:39:58John Coogan?

  I thought so. Although the, the red coloring does make it look a little like Darth Vader-esque. Then it gets a bit critical and yes, it does include some stupid jabs. But again, if you're going to work in the government in a highly public and highly controversial role, yeah, people are going to look into you. They're going to find things they don't like and talk about it. That's the game. Obviously, the publication does not like Doge. They don't like Elon or Trump. And so, yeah, a glowing piece was never going to happen. But if you genuinely read this piece and think they slandered him and dragged his name through the mud, you and I are two different, are reading two different articles. Oh, but hey, he's just a kid. Well, one, don't diminish the guy. He's incredibly talented, smart and accomplished. So, and also, I don't know how old a person is. If they're operating a key government position, the public has a right to understand who they are.

• 1:40:40John Coogan?

  And so, I thought that was a good, more nuanced take from a tech insider about the piece. And Max Meyer chimes in with a rebuttal and says, "His work in government is fair game. The main thrust of the criticism was the bizarre focus on elements like this," shared by Mike, "and the extreme bias in the subtitle suggesting he's kind of some sort of evil sellout. The bias of writers is fair game too." Oh, so, yeah, you can criticize the writers, too.

• 1:41:06Jordi Hays?

  Hard to call him a sellout considering he's earning-

• 1:41:08John Coogan?

  He hasn't raised, he hasn't raised money for a SaaS company yet. He did sell out, in my opinion. Going to work, going to work for the government, working for a nonprofit, that's the selling out. You gotta stay in the arena, build some SaaS.

• 1:41:21Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:41:22John Coogan?

  Anyway, post from Ara Karazian, "No one is talking about this, but the bull case for AI and economic growth. AI spend is up 60% in construction and 35 times in manufacturing. Faster planning and smarter automation will transform these-

• 1:41:38Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for big construction and little construction for adopting AI.

• 1:41:42John Coogan?

  It is interesting that they're adopting AI faster and more aggressively than professional services, technology, finance, retail.

• 1:41:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this is, this is growth rate, though. So, that doesn't mean they're-

• 1:41:56John Coogan?

  Yes, but-

• 1:41:57Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't mean they're indexed growth.

• 1:41:59John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:41:59Jordi Hays?

  So, it doesn't mean they're, they're actually spending more. It just means that they're-

• 1:42:02John Coogan?

  They went from zero to-

• 1:42:03Jordi Hays?

  They were not adopting it at all, and now they're adopting it like crazy.

• 1:42:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I guess they, I guess they all, they all kind of started at 100, what, two years ago? Anyway, we should talk to Ara about that more and dig in.

• 1:42:14Jordi Hays?

  Relevant post, primary topic at five of six board meetings this week. We covered this with Eric, but he, Keith says, "How to redesign a startup org in the age of AI."

• 1:42:26John Coogan?

  Oh, we should close with this extremely important lesson from Peter Thiel. Or maybe we should do a few more, but David Senra said, "Don't divide your attention. Focusing on one thing yields increasing returns for each unit of effort. At a micro level, an extra hour of focus on the current project has a much higher return than an hour on something new, or worse, five minutes each on 12 new things. Before you ever do something, you should understand the opportunity cost versus existing things. Don't rationalize that something you want to do is complementary when it's not. At a macro level, understanding that applied effort has a convex output curve is a very useful discipline when considering new market areas.

• 1:43:09John Coogan?

  This convexity means that the opportunity cost of transferring resources from existing projects to new ones is high unless the new area is incredibly valuable. Anything we can do to extend an existing convex curve is worth so much more." And there was someone in the comments saying, "Well, Elon is the counter example to this." And of course Elon and Peter Thiel were business partners for a number of years and continue to work together in many capacities.

• 1:43:34Jordi Hays?

  So with that reading, should Timothy Chalamet be partnering with Lucid Motors to promote their new car?

• 1:43:42John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 1:43:42Jordi Hays?

  I think this looks like a car straight out of Arrakis.

• 1:43:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:46Jordi Hays?

  So I think it works.

• 1:43:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I think this is very much, this actually builds his brand as an actor. Like, I see this and I see, yes, it's an ad for this car, but it's also an ad for Timothy Chalamet. So he's partnering with Lucid Motors, bold, discerning, unapologetically original. And, you know, his primary thing is point a camera at me. And so this is an extension of that.

• 1:44:13Jordi Hays?

  Kind of the main thing.

• 1:44:13John Coogan?

  It is the main thing. This does not feel, if he was starting a car company, I might be like, okay, well, that's probably going to pull you away from the next, really killing it in the next Dune sequel.

• 1:44:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:24John Coogan?

  But I was debating with someone with this about Elon, I think we mentioned this on another show, but... People say, oh, Elon has so many different things. He was the CEO of just one company at a time for 13 years straight. So he starts Z2 in 1995. He doesn't become the CEO of Tesla until 2008. And at that point, he was already the CEO of SpaceX. And so he was effectively like a one CEO person. He did a few different companies back to back because one sold and he couldn't run it anymore. He was ousted. But he was basically just focused on one thing for 13 years straight. And so I think a lot of people will say like, well, Elon can do it. And it's like, yeah, I mean, he exited a company for over a billion dollars very

• 1:45:06John Coogan?

  early in the dot com boom. And then, you know, also spent 13 years focusing on things. So maybe if you're at that stage of your career, maybe that makes sense. But be very, very careful.

• 1:45:14Jordi Hays?

  In other news, Kate Clark has a scoop. Iconic Capital will lead Anthropic's next mega round valuing the OpenAI rival at $170 billion. Hit the gong, John. QIA and GIC are also in talks to invest. This is pretty wild. They're adding $120 billion to their valuation since the last financing.

• 1:45:39John Coogan?

  Wait, it was only 50?

• 1:45:41Jordi Hays?

  It was, uh, sorry, 110. So they were at like somewhere around 60.

• 1:45:45John Coogan?

  That's crazy. That's so, it's such a big gap.

• 1:45:48Jordi Hays?

  And I think Anthropic is expecting to be run rating at around 10 billion by the end of the year. So seems like a reasonable multiple, given the growth rate and given their, they are the 170 ton gorilla in the Coogan market right now.

• 1:46:10John Coogan?

  This will be at the top of the request that SBF sends to the president begging for a pardon.

• 1:46:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you were saying this. So FTX owned, what, 13%?

• 1:46:20John Coogan?

  13% of Anthropic. They effectively led, I think their Series C or something. They put $500 million into the business.

• 1:46:26Jordi Hays?

  Off the balance sheet.

• 1:46:27John Coogan?

  13% ownership of Anthropic. And if they'd held on to that, it would be worth 20 or 30 billion dollars. Of course, they went through bankruptcy and had to restructure.

• 1:46:36Jordi Hays?

  And whoever bought that position is doing very nicely.

• 1:46:39John Coogan?

  Exactly. So a bit of a liquidity crunch going on and a lesson there about don't, don't get over your skis. If you're effectively a bank. Maybe set up a separate vehicle for your private market illiquid investing because you could get caught.

• 1:46:52Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:46:53John Coogan?

  Anyway, thank you for watching today's stream. We will see you tomorrow live from the New York Stock Exchange.

• 1:46:58Jordi Hays?

  I cannot wait. I wish we could wear these tomorrow.

• 1:47:01John Coogan?

  No, it's a little off.

• 1:47:02Jordi Hays?

  I think it's a little.

• 1:47:03John Coogan?

  I think we have some new suits, though.

• 1:47:04Jordi Hays?

  We've got some other suits for tomorrow, but thank you for tuning in. Unique show today. We're figuring out how to do the show on the road.

• 1:47:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:12Jordi Hays?

  Thank you to our.

• 1:47:13John Coogan?

  Production team.

• 1:47:14Jordi Hays?

  Chad's on the production team that, what's that?

• 1:47:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:47:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ben, Michael, Scott. People know, they know the names.

• 1:47:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, we gotta get out there.

• 1:47:26Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, thank you for having us and we will see you tomorrow.

• 1:47:30John Coogan?

  See you tomorrow.

• 1:47:31Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:47:32John Coogan?

  Goodbye.