SpaceX Financials, Chimpanzee Civil War, Ferrari's Brand Legend | Josh Reeves, Prof. Alex Young, Jason Kim, Chad Janis, Jordan Bramble, Andy Dunn

(02:56) - SpaceX Financials (08:26) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (15:30) - Chimpanzee Civil War (23:12) - Ferrari's Brand Legend (39:02) - Prof. Alex Young, an Assistant Adjunct Professor in Human Genetics at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, specializes in statistical genetics and serves on the steering committee of the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium (SSGAC). In his conversation, he discusses his involvement with Herasight, a company applying advanced genetic testing to embryos to predict disease risks and traits, highlighting the development of algorithms that utilize polygenic scores and rare variant analysis to enhance embryo selection in IVF. He also addresses the ethical and regulatory challenges in the field, emphasizing the need for balanced oversight to foster innovation while ensuring patient safety. (01:02:44) - Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly Aerospace, discusses the company's achievements, including being the first commercial entity to land on the Moon and executing a rapid 24-hour launch for the Space Force. He highlights Firefly's advancements in lunar exploration, such as deploying Nvidia Jetson modules for space domain awareness and imaging, and outlines future missions targeting the Moon's far side and South Pole. Kim also shares his background, from immigrating from South Korea to serving in the U. S. Air Force, and emphasizes the growing integration of space technology into various industries. (01:16:55) - Chad Janis, founder and CEO of Grüns, discusses the inception of his company, which was inspired by his desire to create a more enjoyable and convenient daily nutrient intake solution, leading to the development of gummy-based supplements. He highlights the company's rapid growth, attributing success to novel innovation, a culture of urgency, and a strong, autonomous team. Janis also reflects on the challenges faced during the company's expansion, including supply chain issues and the strategic decision to enter retail markets, culminating in Grüns' recent acquisition by Unilever. (01:41:26) - Jordan Bramble, CEO and Co-Founder of Antares, leads the company in developing transportable microreactors aimed at providing resilient energy solutions for defense, space, and industrial applications. In the conversation, he discusses Antares' focus on leveraging nuclear power's unique characteristics to enhance energy resiliency, particularly through modular power plants with high uptime and reduced supply chain dependencies. He also highlights the company's progress, including the development of a graphite-moderated reactor design using TRISO fuel and heat pipe cooling, and outlines their testing and deployment timeline, aiming for an electricity-producing system by 2027. (01:57:00) - Andy Dunn, co-founder of Bonobos and author of "Burn Rate," discusses his new venture, Pie, an app designed to foster real-life social connections by suggesting events, communities, and people to meet. He shares that the idea stemmed from his own experience of feeling isolated after moving back to Chicago during the pandemic, realizing he lacked local friends. To address this, Pie offers an AI agent named Penelope to help users coordinate social gatherings, aiming to combat adult loneliness by facilitating meaningful in-person interactions. (02:12:16) - Josh Reeves, CEO and co-founder of Gusto, discusses the challenges small businesses face with compliance across local, state, and federal levels, emphasizing the burden of tasks like state tax registration and managing notices. To alleviate these issues, Gusto is developing an end-to-end compliance solution, including comprehensive state tax registration services and acting as a registered agent to handle notices directly. Reeves also highlights the increasing number of new businesses being created, attributing this trend to improved tooling and the inspiration individuals feel to start their own ventures. 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.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP. Today's Friday, April 10, 2026. We are live from the TVP in UltraDome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. We have a great show for you today, folks. We have a professor from UCLA Human Genetics, Alex Young, coming in person to break down polygenetic embryo selection, critique some industry claims, and discuss the future of genetic optimization. With Jason Kim, the CEO of Firefly Space, coming on while the astronauts are in transit back to Earth. We also have Chad Janis.

• 0:36Jordi Hays?

  He's somewhat of a spaceman himself.

• 0:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's some big news there. The founder and CEO of Groons, which just was acquired by Unilever for $1.2 billion. We'll talk about his journey building that company, an incredible success.

• 0:52Jordi Hays?

  Just over three years.

• 0:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, really, really.

• 0:55Jordi Hays?

  Creating 300, almost basically $1 million of EV a day for three years straight.

• 1:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is crazy. Jordan Bramble, the co-founder and CEO of Antares Industries, is coming on to talk about nuclear energy, which will be very interesting. And then Andy Dunn, you might know him from Bonobos. Now he's the founder of Pi. It's trending in the App Store. We're going to talk about building a social app.

• 1:18Jordi Hays?

  App of the day yesterday.

• 1:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, app of the day. And then Josh Reeves, co-founder and CEO of Gusto, is coming on to break down the acquisition of Mozy and building an all-in-one SMB operating system. The news on Artemis 2 is exciting. Today is splashdown day. If you've been tracking it, it's been over a full week at this point. It's 13 minutes of things that have to go right, NASA said of reentry and splashdown with the first astronauts from the moon in over 50 years. After an epic trip to the moon and back, it's landing day for the four astronauts of NASA's Artemis 2 mission. For the first time in over 53 years, astronauts are returning to Earth from the moon. A fiery 13-minute plunge through Earth's atmosphere

• 2:04John Coogan?

  at about 24,000 miles an hour will subject them to degrees and temperatures of up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit with only their heat shield for protection.

• 2:15Jordi Hays?

  Feels fast. It feels like they just left.

• 2:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does. So if you're looking to actually track the the mission, the Artemis two Orion capsule will return to Earth tonight, April 10th at 8:00 PM Eastern, 5:07 Pacific. Splashdown is in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of San Diego, not far from here. Returning home on the ship to end a 10-day trip to the moon are the NASA astronauts, who we followed, and they seem very, very happy. They just woke up for landing day.

• 2:48Jordi Hays?

  What is the exact splashdown time?

• 2:52John Coogan?

  5:07 PM Pacific. So we'll be tracking that. In other space news, SpaceX has some financials going out in the information today. SpaceX posted nearly $5 billion loss last year from AI spending, but they generated $18.5 billion in revenue. Two people familiar with the figure said, this is from Corey Weinberg in the information. The financial figures include XAI, the Elon Musk-founded artificial intelligence company that SpaceX acquired in February. The net loss, as well as other financial figures that consolidate SpaceX and XAI's performance, haven't been previously reported, but now they are here.

• 3:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think everyone was expecting this. SpaceX, very profitable company, bought, acquires a very unprofitable company combined.

• 3:39John Coogan?

  But new opportunity, and all in the pursuit of vertical integration. And so SpaceX has closely guarded its financials as it prepares for what will likely be the largest IPO of all time. The loss figure shows that investors who participate in the IPO will essentially be financing Musk's unproven AI ambitions in order to get a piece of high-performing commercial space and telecom firm. But that's sort of been the Tesla model for a long time. Elon has always had multiple irons in the fire, one project that's working and producing cash flow and growing to finance the next piece of innovation. Ashley Vance has an interesting deep dive on the Tesla semi-truck factory. He went and saw it rolling off the

• 4:24John Coogan?

  factory line, which was one of those projects that has been. Rumored for a very long time, announced a very long time ago, but seems to be getting off the ground. Tesla's spent heavily on chips and data centers to power XAI with capital expenditures for the division nearing 11, uh, nearing 13 billion. So lots of capex. That was 50% more capital spending than the rocket and satellite divisions combined. It is crazy how quickly you can spend a lot of money on a data center versus, um, you know, you'd think a satellite manufacturing facility or a rocket manufacturing facility would be the most expensive thing, but it is in fact not. Uh, and

• 5:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What's that other, what's the, the company, uh, that, that Dalian backed?

• 5:06John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, the, the, the satellite bus company in, uh,

• 5:11Jordi Hays?

  I'm for, I'm forgetting the name of it, but, uh, like wildly profitable.

• 5:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:15Jordi Hays?

  There's, there's, it's been pretty astonishing to see space companies, which you would just assume would, would lose money.

• 5:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:21Jordi Hays?

  Uh, indefinitely actually figuring out ways. Was it, uh, EnduroSat?

• 5:25John Coogan?

  EnduroSat, yeah. EnduroSat. And when we talked to the founder of EnduroSat, it's, it did sound like there was a lot of really important manufacturing, but it wasn't at the level of like buying tools from ASML and, and spending a hundred million dollars on a single machine. I think ASML's lithography machines are up to like $400 million and there's a huge backlog. So, um, so if you, you know, the, the, the chip, chip expenditures can get really, really high. Uh, SpaceX's core business of selling rocket launch services to governments and companies as well as selling its own Starlink satellite internet services together generated nearly eight billions, eight billion in EBIT, uh, in earnings before interest, taxes,

• 6:05John Coogan?

  depreciation and amortization and stock-based compensation in 2025. So, uh, eight billion EBITDA, that is a fantastic number for SpaceX. A very, very solidly profitable business there at the core. Uh, the two space-related divisions are intertwined with most SpaceX launches of its Falcon nine launch, with most SpaceX launches of its Falcon nine launches carrying, um, Starlink satellites rather than other companies payloads. And, uh, I saw another, I saw another piece about. How there's still like way more demand than supply just in the launch market broadly. A lot of companies have spun up with big plans to put things into orbit. We talked to a founder yesterday who's doing a new GPS system in low earth orbit.

• 6:49John Coogan?

  And so there's a lot of demand for launch and Elon and the rest of the space industry seemingly can't make rockets fast enough. I'm excited to talk to Jason Kim of Firefly Aerospace about the launch market broadly, going to the moon and what else Jason has planned in the orbital economy, the lunar economy, the space economy. Overall, including its AI division, the company generated just over 6.5 billion in adjusted EBITDA. SpaceX's depreciation of chips, rockets and satellites was among the largest expense, topping 6.6 billion. Other large costs were stock-based comp and interest expense, which neared 2 billion. For SpaceX bulls, the company's allure is its dominance in the commercial space market,

• 7:31John Coogan?

  where it sends by far the most payloads into space, lapping competitors. Although we've seen some good stuff out of Rocket Lab and also Blue Origin recently, but there's no question that SpaceX has a dominant hold on the launch market. That could further its ability to catch up in the AI race in the coming years if it can bring down the cost of launching solar-powered data centers into orbit, as Musk has said he wants to do. SpaceX is hosting investor meetings this month and sending invitations to a two-day IPO pitch, a sales pitch in Southern Texas and Tennessee, where it launches its new rocket and is building data centers, respectively. In February, Musk orchestrated the merger of SpaceX, his crown jewel, and XAI, the AI model company he founded to rival OpenAI.

• 8:13John Coogan?

  The company combined, the combined company is planning to go public in June, which will be a very, very exciting time for the market and will be covering it, of course, on the show. There's more back and forth about XAI. David Sacks is happy that XAI is the first AI company to challenge Colorado law requiring it to censor truthful answers if they could have a differential impact on protected groups. He wants the First Amendment to apply to AI and so Sacks. has written about this and talked about it on the All In Podcast. In other XAI news, XAI approached Black Forest Labs about licensing its AI image technology in recent months, but the startup declined Wired has learned from Max Zeff.

• 8:56John Coogan?

  The companies, the companies had a similar deal back in 2024, but Black Forest Labs is now trying to focus on training AI models to power robots and smart glasses. That's very interesting. So it appears that Black Forest Labs was sort of serving as like the mid-journey of to the meta vibes, powering that first Grok Imagine mode. But maybe there was a consideration of, well, if you're going to be, if you're going to be working with this company, but also in competition with them because they're training new models, maybe you want to go and carve out a separate niche that's more defensible. So.

• 9:32Jordi Hays?

  Also, Elon had shared, I think, earlier this week or late last week that they are training a new version of Imagine in Colossus 2.

• 9:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. So Black Forest Labs has 70 people and is taking on Silicon Valley's giants. And this is from the the HumanX conference in San Francisco. It's in Wired. You can go and read it. Max Zeff has the report. Alex Tabarrok had an interesting debate around the unemployment rate and how things might shape up with AI developments. He writes, AI, unemployment and work, trying to square different efficiency gains and how this might impact the economy and the future of work. So he says, imagine I told you that AI was going to create a 40% unemployment rate.

• 10:23John Coogan?

  Sounds bad, right? Catastrophic, catastrophic even. And I agree, that would be completely unprecedented. We really have never had more than 10% unemployment for any sustained period of time. It would be, it would be completely.

• 10:38Jordi Hays?

  Great Depression was something around 30%.

• 10:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, it did get, it did get high, but in the modern era, even even during COVID. I mean, brief spikes above 10, but in general.

• 10:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So I'm saying like worst it's ever been.

• 10:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, this would be bad. So then he says, now. Imagine I told you that AI was going to create a three day work week. Uh, that sounds great, right? Wonderful even. Yet to a first approximation, these are the same thing. Sixty percent of people employed and forty percent unemployed is the same number of working hours as a hundred percent employed at sixty percent of the hours. So even if you think AI is going to have a tremendous effect on work, the difference between catastrophe and Wonderland boils down to distribution. It is not impossible that AI renders some people unemployable, but that position is harder to defend than the idea that AI will be broadly productive.

• 11:29John Coogan?

  AI is a very general purpose technology, one likely to make many people more productive, including many people with fewer skills. Moreover, we have more policy control over the distribution of work than over the pure AI effect on work. Declare an AI dividend and create some more holidays, for example, this would naturally have that effect. So you could just have more bank holidays, more government holidays and sort of ramp towards a lower, like a shorter work week essentially. Nor is this argument purely theoretical. So he shares some historical facts here. Between eighteen, uh, between eighteen seventy and today, hours of work in the United States fell by about forty percent.

• 12:11John Coogan?

  From nearly three thousand hours per year to about eighteen hundred hours. Hours fell, but employment did not increase. Moreover, not only did work hours fall, but childhood, retirement and life expectancy all increased. In fact, in eighteen seventy, about thirty percent of the person's entire life was spent working. People worked, slept and died. Today it's closer to about ten percent. That feels very low, but when you think about it, you know, if you're working forty hours a week and there's, what is it? A hundred and sixty hours in a month, in a month, in a week, uh, twenty-four times seven. Can I do that in my head? Oops.

• 12:47Jordi Hays?

  What is it?

• 12:48John Coogan?

  Uh, I typed the wrong number. Um, it's a hundred and sixty-eight, yeah. So, uh, forty divided by one's.

• 12:56Jordi Hays?

  Never do mental math while podcasting.

• 12:59John Coogan?

  So 23, 24% of just a normal work week is spent working if you're working a 40 hour week. And then, and then of course, you don't work until you're 18 roughly, maybe 20.

• 13:12Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 13:12John Coogan?

  If you're in college.

• 13:13Jordi Hays?

  Retirement.

• 13:13John Coogan?

  And then retirement. And so that pushes it down to something like 10% on average, according to this report. What do you think?

• 13:17Speaker 02

  I mean, doesn't this still depend on how many days you have in a week, right? Because like I have more days in my day, right?

• 13:22John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, yes, because you've manipulated time.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 13:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yes. What time did you wake up today? 4am, 3am?

• 13:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, 1am.

• 13:30John Coogan?

  2am?

• 13:31Speaker 02

  1 to 5 is my first day.

• 13:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  And then I go to sleep and then like 5 to 10 is my second day.

• 13:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  And so on, you know?

• 13:39John Coogan?

  The real trick is just, is just wa- waking up so early that you're waking up at noon the day before. So if you wake up at noon, Sunday, and start your Monday then, you're just way ahead of everyone. People are waking up at 4am, you're up at noon the day before, you're good to go. And then you need to go to sleep at like...

• 13:57Speaker 02

  They don't want you to know this.

• 13:58John Coogan?

  They don't want you to know this.

• 13:59Jordi Hays?

  Rick Ross talks about this.

• 14:00John Coogan?

  Yes. So thus, in the past 100 years or so, the amount of work in a person's lifetime has fallen by about 2/3, and the amount of leisure, including retirement, has increased. We have already sustained a massive increase in leisure. There's no reason we cannot do it again. I like this. It's a bit of a white pill. There's a lot of fear about unemployment, and this is sort of a different path. It might require government intervention, it might require a new social contract, or new, just new holiday creation from the government, but it certainly seems possible. There's some reactions to this. Alex is more correct than incorrect, but he glosses over an important caveat. The difference between catastrophe and Wonderland boils down to distribution. It's not impossible that AI renders some

• 14:44John Coogan?

  people unemployable. If there's one thing we've learned over the past decades is that even welfare improving changes such as increases in international trade and technological progress do result in distributional effects, even often severe ones like rust belt cities and deaths of despair. It's not all nice Milo minder binder, where everyone gets a share, or to put it another way, Schumpeter's creative destruction still involves destruction. And so people are going back and forth on this. But it does set, it does set one, one perspective on a positive outcome.

• 15:16Jordi Hays?

  Fact checking myself, the most commonly cited peak US unemployment rate during the Great Depression was 24.9%.

• 15:21John Coogan?

  24.9%.

• 15:22Jordi Hays?

  I thought it had gotten, got up to the 30s, but...

• 15:25John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, there's a fun article in the Wall Street Journal, a very bizarre article about a deadly civil war that tore apart a group of chimpanzees in Uganda. Not exactly a fun article, but it's gripped everyone and everyone is wondering what is going on here with these monkeys. A chimp group's success may have led to its violent downfall, a new study suggests.

• 15:48Jordi Hays?

  Slow news week.

• 15:49John Coogan?

  Very slow.

• 15:50Jordi Hays?

  Slow news week when the Wall Street Journal is reporting on a deadly civil war among chimpanzees.

• 15:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's just a crazy thing. I don't think many people knew that this was even possible. But let's read through it and try and understand what's going on. A rare and deadly civil war has broken out between two factions of chimps in Africa, according to new research. The dispute erupted in what was once a cohesive group of about 200 chimps whose ties stretched back two decades. It just took three years for them to turn on each other, according to a new study in the Journal of Science.

• 16:27Speaker 03

  overnight success.

• 16:28John Coogan?

  We've known for a long time that chimpanzees will attack and kill their neighbors, said primatologist John Mottani, professor emeritus at the University of Michigan and a study co-author. It turns out they will do this even when those neighbors are former friends and allies.

• 16:44Jordi Hays?

  So I'm just reading this from the lens of the technology industry.

• 16:48John Coogan?

  Yes, many, many cases. There is, this is potentially a metaphor. For 20 years, the chimps of Uganda's Kabale National Park were living the good life by being together, Mottani said. They helped one another, dominated and killed apes from neighboring groups, expanded their territory and boosted their babies' chances of survival. But in 2015, the group started splitting into two clusters. Several male chimps who had bridged cliques within the larger group died from disease, weakening social ties. Around the same time, a new alpha male rose to dominance. Changes in the dominance hierarchy can fuel more aggression intentions, said Aaron Sandel, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin and study co-author. As aggression escalated, the factions drifted

• 17:33John Coogan?

  into separate areas of the park. By 2018, the split was complete. This is, it's interesting, it took like 10 years to do this full study, I guess. Since this all started back in 2015, but by 2018, the study was complete. The two groups had no remaining social or reproductive ties between them. The last chimp infant with parents from different groups was born in 2015. What was once the center of the group's territory became a border which chimps patrolled, the researchers found. Then the hostilities began in earnest. Members of the smaller group of the two groups launched coordinated lethal attacks on the other, aiming to kill rival adult males. By 2021, these raids

• 18:15John Coogan?

  had expanded to target younger apes, averaging several infant deaths a year ago.

• 18:19Jordi Hays?

  Devastating.

• 18:20John Coogan?

  Since a year since. And there's a video here of the encounter between these two rival groups, and they're fighting it out. It's crazy. So more than 24 apes have died as a result of the conflict. That's horrible. The true death toll is probably higher, given that so many chimps, there are so many chimps in a large area, some deaths go unrecorded. Primatologist Jane Goodall observed what may have been a similar split.

• 18:45Jordi Hays?

  But, but, but, sorry to jump in, but, you know, this group of apes has been being, has been studied for, for, it sounds like, over 10 years now.

• 18:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:55Jordi Hays?

  At any point, did they think like, hey, let's, let's break it up?

• 18:58John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 18:59Jordi Hays?

  Is, is that, is the ethical thing to do, to let them continue to fight?

• 19:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:04Jordi Hays?

  At what point do you step in? How many, how many apes, how many chimps need to die before, hey, let's stop the research project?

• 19:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:12Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, step in?

• 19:13John Coogan?

  I don't know. It's an important question.

• 19:17Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, we may have an assignment for you this weekend.

• 19:19John Coogan?

  I think you need to hop on a plane. Let's see if there's any more about this. I mean, there is, you know, like, for a lot of these studies, observation, you want to be hands off and not putting your finger on the scale, I guess, but...

• 19:30Jordi Hays?

  Number one, number one comment, put any 200 humans together and the same thing will happen. And you only need 20 humans if it's an HOA.

• 19:38John Coogan?

  It's a little, it's a little Stanley Milgram prison experiment vibes.

• 19:42Jordi Hays?

  It's very, I think it's very Girardian, right? Because you have the, the two warring groups, memetic rivalry, right? They're exactly like each other, and you gotta fight it out, and you have the scapegoat.

• 19:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's true. Primatologist Jane Goodall observed what may have been a similar split and subsequent violence among chimpanzees in Tanzania in the 1970s, but the findings have long been debated because most of the observations were in an area where humans regularly fed the chimps, altering group makeup, size, and aggression. So, maybe that's, maybe you should be feeding the monkeys to keep them happy, I guess, or the chimpanzees. With these chimps, researchers aren't certain what prompted the split, but said it's possible the apes were victims of their own success. The group grew large, and even though resources were abundant, the chimps may have perceived increased competition for food and mates.

• 20:36John Coogan?

  The once smaller of the two chimp groups is now the larger one because its members have killed so many rivals. They observed more lethal attacks. It's an ongoing conflict, they said, and the conversation is ongoing in the...

• 20:50Speaker 02

  I think, actually, like, this does make sense that it got too big, right? Because you have this idea of, like, Dunbar's number. So you have 150 people, like, the group of chimpanzees gets above 150, it's at like 200, and then you have the kind of war start. Because you can't know everyone, right? Chimps can't know each other.

• 21:05John Coogan?

  Would Dunbar number be the same for chimpanzees as humans? I wonder if anyone's ever studied that.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  I mean, you assume that there's some, you know, lineage there, that it's like, stays relatively similar.

• 21:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, Jane Goodall passed away last year and had an obituary in the Wall Street Journal that was very interesting. I think we touched on it briefly, but we can go through a little bit more of it. Jane Goodall was always, always remember the first time a wild chimpanzee took a banana from her outstretched hand. In that moment, she would often say the chimp, a grizzled male she had dubbed David Greybeard, welcomed her into a community of humanity's closest living relatives. It opened a relationship with wildlings that in due course upended scientific misconceptions about chimpanzees and turned her into a global icon of conservation. As an untrained young woman...

• 21:54John Coogan?

  In the summer of 1960, she first ventured into the forests of what is now Gombe National Park near Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania to study chimpanzees. Equipped with little more than a notebook, a pair of binoculars, and almost infinite patience for five months, though, the wary creatures evaded her, if in fact, no one had ever been able to study them at close hand. By winning Greybird's trust, she gained entry to the troupe of wild chimps that became the focus of her life's work. "The chimps had accepted me, and gradually, I was able to penetrate further and further into a magic world that no human had ever explored before: the world of the wild chimpanzees."

• 22:36John Coogan?

  She died of natural causes in California last year. But she spoke with the Wall Street Journal before passing, urging people to continue fighting to slow climate change and the loss of biodiversity. "We have a window of time, but it's not a very big window of time," she said, adding that the key is ordinary people, corporations, and business leaders getting together to enact change in economic development, she said, "cannot continue to come before the environment."

• 22:59Jordi Hays?

  John?

• 23:00John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 23:01Jordi Hays?

  Why is no one talking about Ferrari?

• 23:04John Coogan?

  Well, they're about to be, because the good folks over at

• 23:08Jordi Hays?

  Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal are in the Wall Street Journal today.

• 23:12John Coogan?

  They are.

• 23:13Jordi Hays?

  Writing about why Ferrari is unlike any other luxury brand, according to the hosts of Acquired.

• 23:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:20Jordi Hays?

  And we can get into this. They say, "The business of Ferrari looks simple: make fast cars and not too many of them. On the surface, this strategy of scarcity and tantalizing exclusivity seems remarkably similar to the classic playbook of other storied luxury brands, as if Ferrari's cars are just Hermes bags and Rolex watches on four wheels. But Ferrari has something that Hermes and Rolex could never cultivate: hordes of screaming fans who worship the brand from the time they can say vroom, vroom. Few teenagers hang posters of Birkin bags in their bedroom, but droves of them have the sight of F40s and Testerosas seared into their brains long before they can get behind the wheel." Despite selling a grand total of 330,000 cars over the course of its entire history.

• 24:04John Coogan?

  That's really not a lot. I didn't realize it was so low. I mean, I know that many of the limited releases are like a few thousand, but you'd think, I guess they don't have a, like a Lamborghini Urus that's, that's more mass-produced. Like, everything's pretty limited.

• 24:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:23John Coogan?

  So they have more than 400 million fans worldwide, and no company has a higher ratio of people who know about its products to people who actually own those products. Far from cheapening the brand, Ferrari's rabid base of super fans only enhances the brand's appeal to clients who can afford to pay millions of dollars for a car they will rarely drive.

• 24:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just to put the 330,000 lifetime sales into context, Ford sold 2.2 million vehicles just in the United States last year.

• 24:52John Coogan?

  Last year. Wow.

• 24:54Jordi Hays?

  And that 330,000 numbers global over the lifetime.

• 24:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 24:59Jordi Hays?

  Of the company.

• 25:00John Coogan?

  I really like Ben and David writing in the Journal for this. It's a great way to promote the new episode, but it also just, there's enough of their voice from the show in this, but it still lends itself to the Wall Street Journal op-ed vibes, which I love. Far from cheapening the brand, Ferrari's rabid base of super fans only enhances the brand's appeal to clients who can afford to pay millions of dollars for a car they will rarely drive. As we learned when we spent hundreds of hours understanding the company's history and business strategy for the upcoming acquired podcast episode, the genius of Ferrari is the way it has weaponized that set of Italian contradictions and bolted the business model of luxury onto a beloved professional sports franchise.

• 25:43Jordi Hays?

  They better have each acquired a Ferrari during the research period.

• 25:48John Coogan?

  I think they did get Rolexes.

• 25:49Jordi Hays?

  They did it with Rolex, so they had to do it with this.

• 25:52John Coogan?

  It's gonna be a very expensive habit if they, if they keep doing all the, all the, they do, "Oh, now we're doing Bugatti. Now we're doing Koenigsegg. Now we're doing, uh, Lamborghini, etc." When Enzo Ferrari established his eponymous company in 1947, wow, creating a luxury brand was the furthest thing from his mind. He was obsessed with building the world's fastest cars to conquer the booming world of auto racing. To do that, he also built a clever business model. Like many of his rivals, he built cars for his own racing team and sold them on the side. Unlike Mercedes and Ford, whose racing garages and consumer car factories might as well have been located on different planets, the same Ferrari employees in the

• 26:35John Coogan?

  hills of Maranello, Italy, built substantially the same cars, whether they were selling them to customers or racing them at Le Mans. The model created a beautiful feedback loop. Scuderia Ferrari's success in Grand Prix races stoked greater awareness and desire for private client road cars, the profits from those clients. Sales fueled the research and development that turbocharged La Scuderia's performance back on the track. It was a fantastic strategy through the 1950s and 60s, filled with F1 championships and notable clients. But by the time Enzo died in 1988, the business was struggling. After a 50% sale of the company to Fiat in 1969, Ferrari was losing money and furloughing workers due to a misguided

• 27:16John Coogan?

  strategy of overproduction. Even more unfathomable today is that the cars were just sitting there at the dealerships, waiting to be sold. Can you imagine Ferraris that you could drive off the lot? Yeah, that is not the case today. The company's future was very much in doubt when it found a savior in Enzo's one-time protege, Luca di Montezemolo. Montezemolo, I'm bad at pronouncing that. A blue-eyed Italian aristocrat with a steady hand to pull off a U-turn at Ferrari. Fifteen years earlier, he was the young Ferrari team manager who had engineered the prancing horse's last run of Formula One dominance. To the trifosi in their unmistakable Ferrari red, he was so popular that he could have run for president of Italy. He left Ferrari in 1977.

• 28:02John Coogan?

  The chief executive of a drinks company and organizing the 1990 World Cup in Italy. He had traveled back, he traveled the world and mingled with the elite by the time Fiat Ceyon Gianni Agnelli brought him back to Maranello as chairman and gave him a specific mandate, rescue Ferrari by any means necessary. So the visionary saw immense potential lying in the wreckage of Ferrari's road car business. Instead of positioning the product as a domesticated race car, he realized that this was Ferrari's chance to sell something less tangible, but infinitely more valuable. The fulfillment of every fan's childhood dreams. Rather than driving off a lot, clients could fly to Italy and take their cars out for a rip around the

• 28:45John Coogan?

  test track that Michael Schumacher practiced on the day before. The interiors would be made of leather that rivaled Pradas. Unlike Ferrari's untamed best beasts of old, you could enjoy driving them somewhat regularly without fear of breaking down on the way to the store. The engines could still rocket drivers to 200 miles an hour on a moment's notice, but now they would be signed by the craftspeople who made them. By pursuing the counterintuitive strategy, he transformed Ferrari into a new kind of company like Hermes smashed together with Manchester United. Other luxury brands manufacture desire through scarcity. Other sports teams benefit from shared emotional attachments. Ferrari does both. It breeds a mass fandom that somehow makes

• 29:25John Coogan?

  the company's most exclusive product even more valuable. By 1997, the business had returned to meaningful profitability for the first time in years despite making fewer cars. He slashed production from 4,561 cars when he arrived to just 2,289 two years later. Once he put his strategy in motion, Ferraris were no longer sitting around like Fords. Suddenly, there was a waiting list to buy them. In the decades since then, it has become clear that his innovation dug a moat around the company that no competitor has been able to cross. To this day, other racing teams may pass Ferrari on the track, and other carmakers may challenge Ferrari on the road, but no business can offer luxury, maniacal freedom, and nearly a century of unbroken sporting

• 30:06John Coogan?

  heritage, all rolled into a product that's rarely seen but instantly recognizable on any street in the world. What a great.

• 30:14Jordi Hays?

  Full episode drops Monday. Very excited for that. But I think my, we have some data here from Goldman Sachs that is actually Goldman Sachs Research Division.

• 30:28Jordi Hays?

  Has a Ferrari residual value tracker, so they just keep track of the the secondary market. Oh, interesting. And so we can read through some of this, but but it's but it's interesting because like processing that article, personally, I feel like they're back in the exact same spot that they were before that turnaround where they're making too many cars, they're making cars that people don't want. Yeah. They're building up people, even even the F, the F80. Yeah. Like, like the hardcore fans, the people that may not even own a Ferrari, but are just like fans of the brand. Yeah.

• 31:05Jordi Hays?

  Across the board, like whether you you're you, you could buy an F80 or you're just like a hardcore fan. Like, nobody's like that excited about it. I just think it very much feels like they've they've lost their way on a number of and and on a personal level, the like, the car that I think I'm most excited about, that they've been kind of testing and teasing is the like, street, uh, street version of the 296 Challenge. Oh, sure. They're making a street legal version. Is that XX? No, that's that's the SF90 XX, which is, you know, very hyped right now.

• 31:41Jordi Hays?

  But unclear how that'll, you know, how that'll trade over time, but the 296 Challenge, the street, uh, legal version of it is like ditching the hybrid, which I think will be very appealing to people. It's going to be like a more raw, like driver focused car. Yeah. Anyways, from Goldman Sachs, they say, our GS Ferrari residual value index tracks used Ferrari listings across five key markets. We view this proprietary data set as central to the race equity thesis, given that Ferrari's scarcity led model has historically resulted in its used vehicles commanding a premium in the secondary market.

• 32:21Jordi Hays?

  Our index has declined 7% year over year as of March 2026, though month over month has seen a promising increase of 1.6%. And they still are rating the stock as a buy, even though it's dropped pretty dramatically as of late, but.

• 32:41Jordi Hays?

  They say continued stabilization across regions with Germany and Japan improving. Powertrain gap widens as non-hybrids continue to outperform. So they've made so many different hybrid cars, everything from like the 296 to the SF90 of course, and people, you know, these cars are very fun to drive, but they haven't been fun to own. And they just haven't been holding up, holding up well. People like their ICE Ferraris. Specials, resilience, underlines continued strength of business model. So basically, the cars that are still

• 33:17Jordi Hays?

  actually exclusive, like the 812 Comp, 458, 488 Pista, things like that are really, really outperforming. So basically, all the mass market stuff is like brutal to own. And the cars that are actually limited are still, are still outperforming. And so I think this is why I think they need to do what they did before, whereas cut production from like 4,500 cars a year down to under 2,500. Obviously, we're at a much different scale today, but still, they need to do a pretty dramatic cut.

• 33:53John Coogan?

  Well, there's an update in the MedVee story. The New York Times updated their article to share some new information. Lulu has some, says some takes here. Let's start with Alex Cohen, though. He said, friend got a marketing email from MedVee this morning. Email copy aside, the provider they are using in the screenshot is an actual doctor, not an NP, who is, real name is Alex Weir, and he is completely unaffiliated with MedVee. And so there are, there are more concerns about the company bubbling up. Lulu says more press isn't better. For example, huge self-own for the MedVee guy to do this New York Times article. The company clearly wasn't ready for scrutiny, and it made no sense to invite

• 34:37John Coogan?

  it. But some just can't resist the flattery and excitement of getting profiled. So the New York Times added an editor's note. After this article was published, many readers noted that MedVee was facing legal and regulatory actions for its business practices. Our piece should have included that information to give readers a fuller picture of the scrutiny that the company was facing. We have updated the article to note a warning letter from the FDA and pending class action lawsuit accusing Medvee of violating California's anti spam law. It was really hard to follow this piece because as we were digging through it, we were like, okay, there's pieces of this that sound like worth digging into, like the margins, the growth, like what's actually happening here? Because the main claim was

• 35:19John Coogan?

  like one person, one billion dollar company. And you could latch on to, oh, well, there's two people. But and, you know, what's the, what's the marketing cost? What's the, you know, what's going on in the hood? How much, how much does it cost to actually deliver the service? But quickly, once people started digging in, they found a whole bunch of other sort of concerning elements that need to be dealt with. Some of them can be, can be dealt with if it's just, you know, if they, if they react to the FDA and the FDA clears them, they could be in a good place. But it was.

• 35:50Jordi Hays?

  Do you think if they had to sell the business today, they would be able to get anywhere close to a billion dollars?

• 35:55John Coogan?

  No, no. But even, even in the clean bill of health with no controversies over the FDA warning letter and the pending class action lawsuit, it was hard to justify the billion dollar valuation necessarily based on the fact that it was potentially giving up a huge amount of margin to the rest of the supply chain. But hopefully, they will sort that out and wind up building a great company. There's, there's more back and forth on the NY, on the New York Times Satoshi discourse. Evan Ratliff chimed in, who he wrote The Mastermind, which was the book that I recommended to Joe Weisenthal about, about

• 36:38John Coogan?

  Paul LaRue, who was at one point suggested to be Satoshi. And so there's a whole timeline out there about various Satoshi accusations. He says, I had, I enter, I hesitate to enter the New York Times Satoshi discourse, and I have a huge amount of admiration for John Kerry Rude, this is Evan Ratliff writing, but since he unequivocally claims to have solved the mystery and links to a piece of mine. A failed attempt to do so, false. I thought I wanted to share a few thoughts. He said the story that he wrote, Evan, for Wired was about speculation around whether Paul LaRue could be Satoshi. And I wanted Paul LaRue to be Satoshi so badly. It was such an interesting wild card pick that no one, it wasn't really on anyone's bingo

• 37:21John Coogan?

  card, and Paul LaRue had such a gripping story that it would have been a wild twist and turn. So Evan had spent five years on a book about LaRue, and he had wondered this. And so he said he certainly held the largest archive of reporting that could contain proof that Paul LaRue was in fact Satoshi Nakamoto. But if you actually read to the end of the Wired story that he published, he says, I know, I know, its conclusion isn't about claiming LaRue was Satoshi, but about the dangers of motivated reasoning and trying to do so, a lesson I respectfully think could have been valuable to heed in the Times case. I tap the sign about setting out to prove one Satoshi candidate's strategy again last year after the HBO documentary. Ultimately, that approach is not much of an investigation,

• 38:06John Coogan?

  more like a gradual winnowing of the facts to the ones that you like. I'll leave others to critique, dissect, trumpet the assertions in the Times. Obviously, Adam Back could be Satoshi, which is why he's been a top candidate for many people for a long time, and gets asked about Satoshi and their email exchanges regularly, including in the past by Evan himself. The fact that he both denies it and is so often, and is often so game to discuss it, either scrambles your Satoshi motivation narrative or reinforces it based on what you already believe. And so Joe Azenthal's still having fun following the Adam Back thing, because Adam Back has been reposting a ton of, like, basically anything that links

• 38:46John Coogan?

  him to Satoshi, he's been having fun amplifying and sort of playing into it. And hopefully we can get Adam Back on the show and ask him more about it. Anyway, we have our next guest live here in person in the TVP in UltraD. Let's bring in Alex Young. He's a professor at UCLA. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 39:06Speaker 04

  Good, yeah.

• 39:08John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for taking the time to come down to the show in the studio. Why don't you introduce yourself first?

• 39:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm Alex Yang. I'm a professor in statistical genetics at UCLA Med School, and I'm also an advisor to Heracite, a company doing advanced genetic testing in IVF.

• 39:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. What drew you to Heracite in particular?

• 39:30Speaker 04

  Well, I had a realization that this technology, so the technology that they've developed, is applying genetic testing to embryos so you can predict their disease risks or traits. I had a realization that that was a very powerful technology and an incredibly important application of a lot of the research that I was doing. But, you know, there were already some companies in that space, and I didn't find any of them that serious about doing really innovative R and D. And Heracite actually approached me in 2023 with really intriguing idea to develop an algorithm, and I kind of couldn't resist doing that. So I decided to get involved,

• 40:13Speaker 04

  and we ended up, yeah, creating some good technology.

• 40:19John Coogan?

  What have been the key milestones in embryo selection technology? Like, how much of it is machines in the lab better data collection versus more on the algorithm computational side?

• 40:35Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, IVF has been around for a while, and genetic testing in IVF is not new. So, you know, I think even back in the 90s, they were doing like sex selection to avoid certain sex-linked diseases. And there are other tests already developed such as PGTM, which looks for like Mendelian disease genes. So they're like, you know, cystic fibrosis or something like that. And then also test to look for chromosome abnormalities and PGTA. So those tests were more about being able to get like lab, a lot of that was lab innovation, being able to get the genetic data from the embryos.

• 41:14Speaker 04

  Now, this new wave of technology that Heracite and some of the other companies are developing, that's grown out of the research program in human genetics, which is much more computational. It's been enabled by the massive drop in the cost of sequencing technology that's happened over the past 20 years. So that's created huge genetic data sets, these big, what we call biobanks, places, like UK Biobank was like the flagship one where you have like 500,000 people with their whole genome data and all of their medical records and things like education as well.

• 41:54Speaker 04

  So that's enabled us to create these predictors called polygenic scores. And they're the things that we can now apply in IVF. And that's sort of more of a computational aspect than a lab aspect, I would say.

• 42:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, give me some history on the UK Biobank. It feels like a big step to share that much information publicly. I assume it's somewhat anonymized, but what are the considerations with sharing genetic data and associated traits? Obviously, there's a medical benefit, but how do individuals grapple with that trade off?

• 42:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, UK Biobank kind of took a much more liberal attitude towards allowing people to access that data. So, you know, it's kind of sad, actually, that, so they were kind of the first big biobank and it wasn't originally designed purely for genetic data. It was designed for sort of medical epidemiology and then they added genetic data to it. And they made it very easy for both companies and for academic researchers to access that data. And it's had, you know, 10, 100x the impact of other biobanks, including, you know, the US has been quite behind actually in that respect. And a lot of other genetic

• 43:17Speaker 04

  data sets are really hard to access and are actually, you're actually barred from accessing them for commercial uses. So, yeah, I would commend UK Biobank for taking this more liberal approach that, you know, you have to protect the, you know, informed consent and privacy of the participants. But I think sometimes the restrictions that are put on other data sets really have hampered the development of, you know, both the sort of research side, but then also the commercialization of virchinomics.

• 43:50John Coogan?

  How powerful is the technology these days? Like, how, how, how, how good are we at detecting diseases? I imagine that there's some diseases that we're very good at. What's like the best case study right now?

• 44:04Speaker 04

  Yes, I mean, if you're talking about in, in the sort of IVF context, where that, that's most powerful is diseases where you have a particular gene, a particular position in the genome that has an outsized effect on, on the risk of that disease. So if you look at something like type 1 diabetes or Alzheimer's, there are certain genes in the genome that have a really large impact. And if you're someone, if you're a couple and one of you carries one of those major risk genes, then doing this embryo selection can drastically reduce the risk. You can probably pretty much eliminate the risk of passing on type 1 diabetes, for example, and drastically reduce the risk of passing

• 44:44Speaker 04

  on Alzheimer's disease. Now, there are other, what we'd call more complex diseases like type 2 diabetes or various cancers. And, you know,

• 44:56Speaker 04

  There it's a bit less effective, but it can still be quite effective. You can roughly say half the risk your offspring gets some disease. And if that disease is present in your family history, then that can be quite a substantial absolute risk reduction. So you could go from something like 20% risk of type 2 diabetes to 10% risk in your offspring.

• 45:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's the progress? Has progress been faster on the screening side or on the actual drug development and treatment side? I mean, we've seen the peptide boom, the GLP-1 boom. There's a new major biotech acquisition every few days now. It feels like the pace is accelerating in actual drug development. But what are you seeing actually being unlocked by new technologies?

• 45:47Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, human genetic data has been incredibly important in drug development. You've seen big pharmaceutical companies like Regeneron. They hired a lot of the best people from... I was at Oxford for my PhD and a lot of the best people from Oxford ended up getting hired by Regeneron to set up a big new genetics center. And they've amassed a huge dataset there, like 10 million people or something now. And that's definitely driving target discovery in pharmaceutical industry. So that's been where a lot of the investments come. The sort of IVF and screening side has been maybe a more neglected part of the potential

• 46:30Speaker 04

  of human genetic data, partly, I would say, for political and ideological. There are a lot of people who are opposed to this technology. So I suffered some career consequences for getting involved in this industry myself.

• 46:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, what happened?

• 46:46Speaker 04

  Well, you know, when it came out that I'd been involved in Harasite, I mean, some people said some unpleasant things about me, but I don't really care about that. But I also had some collaborators pull out of a paper I had in review at Nature, and I also had a job offer rescinded from a top US university.

• 47:07John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. So how are you splitting your time these days?

• 47:10Speaker 04

  Well, I'm mostly, you know, doing my academic research. But yeah, my main contribution to Harasite was this algorithm that we developed and we're trying to get published now. So yeah, my involvement is more as like an advisor now, but I did make a sort of key technological contribution.

• 47:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, what does an algorithm, like, are we talking about like, machine learning, transformer-based AI, or just, you know, some statistical model? Like, what goes into honing a, you know, an algorithm that actually moves the needle on predictability?

• 47:55Speaker 04

  For predictability, it's more kind of statistics and machine learning than AI. Like, it turns out that you don't need these very complicated, kind of like nonlinear models that transformers and large language models are particularly adept at. So, for example, creating this, like Harasite created this very powerful genetic predictor of IQ, much more powerful than anyone thought was possible. And that was sort of, they used some, like, deep learning-based models to kind of create better curated data, psychometrically curated data. And then, when you're actually creating these predictors, this is basically,

• 48:37Speaker 04

  it's kind of like a Bayesian statistical model, where you're using functional data, so information about which genes are likely to affect the trait to improve your estimates. The algorithm that I developed wasn't really on the prediction side. This was more to... Lower the technological and regulatory barrier to accessing the technology. And this is more, this was a machine learning model based on hidden Markov models. And this basically enabled, it turns sort of a routine test. So there's a routine test for aniploidy, for chromosomal abnormalities such as DAM syndrome. And this algorithm enables the data that's produced for that routine test to then be

• 49:20Speaker 04

  used to give a comprehensive genome profile of each embryo. And one advantage of that is that that test is done as routine in like 60% of IVF cycles in the US and worldwide. And it also kind of puts the power back in the hands of the couples undergoing IVF. Because, because of HIPAA legislation in the US and GDPR in Europe, you actually have a legal right to that data. So you can just request that data from your clinic in whatever country you're in and send that to Heracite. And then that enables you to get, you know, all these disease risk predictions and trait predictions like IQ from, from a routine test. So there's, there's kind of, there's two different sides to where the algorithms come in.

• 50:05Speaker 04

  One is creating these predictors and the other is actually how do you get the genome data on the embryo? Because that's, that's not a trivial technical problem either.

• 50:12John Coogan?

  Where does the FDA stand on this? Where do they fit in? How do they actually regulate tests? Walk me through all that.

• 50:18Speaker 04

  So in the US, the IVF space is pretty unregulated.

• 50:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 50:23Speaker 04

  I think it's because...

• 50:25Jordi Hays?

  Is that good?

• 50:26Speaker 04

  Well, it's, it's, I, I think it's on that good because if you look at, if you look at the...

• 50:34Jordi Hays?

  Like, I'm normally pretty against regulation, but I don't know.

• 50:37John Coogan?

  This is a big decision.

• 50:38Jordi Hays?

  It feels like maybe an area that, that you, you would want more government involvement.

• 50:43Speaker 04

  Well, you know, I guess my, my take on this is that in an ideal world, you'd have a kind of light touch regulation that ensured some, you know, unscrupulous players were kept out of the market. Like, I know you had a nucleus key in on here before and, and they've had some test results that look pretty misleading to me. And, you know, you'd wanna, you'd wanna make sure that misleading test results are not, not being given out to people. But my concern with any kind of regulation is that it, it's gonna suddenly... Evolve into something that just completely kills innovation. Like, this is basically impossible to do in Europe, for example. So, all of the companies doing this are US-based, and that's partly because it's a pretty unregulated

• 51:28Speaker 04

  space. So, it's enabled this industry to actually grow here, whereas it's not possible in other countries.

• 51:35Jordi Hays?

  Do you think the industry is ready for venture capital?

• 51:38Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, yeah, I think so. I mean, I guess-

• 51:43Jordi Hays?

  Because, and I ask that because it feels like there's a lot of promising work being done, but unclear that any time you involve large amounts of venture capital, then people have various growth expectations and decisions get made that maybe wouldn't be in the long-term interest of patients.

• 52:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's certainly a risk, but there is, you know, there is a lot of demand for this product, and I think that we're still in the sort of infancy. And part of what's holding this industry back is we kind of need more, we need more money to be put into it. We need more awareness of the potential of this technology. And, you know, Herisight, their revenue's been growing pretty well. They're trying to do a big raise this year. I think that there could be kind of a preference cascade here. Like, a lot of the people that have been, a lot of the customers so far have been, you

• 52:47Speaker 04

  know, people from the tech world, people that are quite wealthy, and I think that's going to create a lot of demand as people see, as people see these wealthy and sort of elite people wanting these services, then I think everyone else is going to want them. So, I think it's poised for a big growth spurt.

• 53:09Jordi Hays?

  Is one of the big challenges the feedback cycles, where you have models today that are making predictions about outcomes that won't happen for decades, and so it's hard to gauge- You know, basically accuracy of predictions if if we basically just need to wait and see.

• 53:32Speaker 04

  I mean, that that is a concern that that the predictions might, based on historical data, might not perform as well in the future. I mean, I think that is not a concern that's exclusive to this kind of technology, though. Like, a lot of what is done in medicine is based on randomized controlled trials that were done decades ago, and I don't see it being hugely different here. One, you know, one good thing about this technology is that rather than having to do this big, long, I mean, to, it's sort of impossible in a way to, if you wanted to do a randomized controlled trial for some kind of late onset disease, you'd have to wait like 60 years for people to get cancer or something. So it's basically like impossible to do that. But nature has sort of provided us with a natural experiment

• 54:17Speaker 04

  that recapitulates a lot of the properties of the randomized controlled trial. So this is related to my academic research in that, so embryos are basically siblings genetically. And if you can predict genetic differences between siblings, then you can, you can be pretty sure that that's going to also translate into predicting differences between embryos. So it's a bit, and that's, that's kind of the technical standard that that we've tried to establish at Heracite, that you can, you need to validate all of your predictors carefully in predicting differences between siblings within family. That ensures that you're getting like a causal estimate of of what these predictors are able to do. And, you know,

• 55:00Speaker 04

  yes, they might, there might be some differences in the future, like if if the environment changes drastically, there's some different environmental effect that puts someone at risk of cancer, it might not capture that so well. But that's just the nature of the game in a way. We have to, we have to use the information we have now to make the best predictions to account about the future. Yeah.

• 55:18John Coogan?

  What's been your experience with the the health system broadly?

• 55:25John Coogan?

  I mean, have you done IVF yourself? Have you dealt with advanced medicines or anything beyond the normal Advil after a long weekend?

• 55:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I am, I am actually a cancer patient, which is, yeah, so I've, I've had a lot more dealings with the health system than, than I would like.

• 55:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. What have the learnings been? What's the process been like?

• 55:50Speaker 04

  Well, one thing, I actually had to do fertility preservation for undergoing radiation and chemotherapy. So that actually made me feel a lot more pro IVF.

• 56:01John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 56:02Speaker 04

  Basically, I had to, you know, freeze my sperm and basically now I can only reproduce through IVF. So that, that dovetails a bit with, with the work I've been doing with Heresy. But yeah, I mean,

• 56:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have you been tracking? I mean, it seems like you're very capable of doing research on your own. Have you been doing research into your own cancer to understand it at a deeper level? Do you feel like there's more self-education happening now? A unique position there?

• 56:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, I have a bit. It's, it's one of those things like I've seen, you know, these stories about people kind of using AI to sort of figure out, you know, some sort of mRNA vaccine for their cancer.

• 56:41John Coogan?

  What's your reaction to that?

• 56:44Speaker 04

  Well, you know, some, I can't remember what the guy's called.

• 56:48John Coogan?

  We had him on the show.

• 56:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. No, that was quite an inspirational story and I, I've talked to some of the people that have, that have been working with him recently about that. And yeah, I think the, the standard way that sort of oncology is approached, it doesn't seem to be as patient centric as it could be. You know, it's not like, can, are we going to throw absolutely everything we can at curing this person? It's more like, oh, we're just going to sort of follow the The play, the standard playbook and wait until something really bad happens. Um, so I think there's definitely potential for people to take more agency with, with

• 57:29Speaker 04

  serious conditions like cancer and, and using, you know, genomics and AI to, to, to enable that, although it's, it's not, not trivial to do that. Well, I mean, uh, if, if you're a billionaire, it helps. You can, you can get all of these experiments done that are not standard. Um, but yeah, actually doing it well. I don't think it's, it's, it's not as simple as just plugging your data into an LLM and then you have a, have a cure, you know?

• 57:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. What, what's the bigger, bigger bottleneck? Like, like more larger data sets that are publicly available for like the, like the English biobank? Or is it more computational or just general intelligence?

• 58:11Speaker 04

  Um, well, I think, I think, um, in terms, in terms of cancer, it's probably more getting more, making clinical trials easier.

• 58:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 58:21Speaker 04

  Um, there's, there's this, uh, movement, uh, movement online and there's clinical trials abundance movement.

• 58:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 58:27Speaker 04

  It does seem to me that like in the U S, especially clinical trials are very expensive. Like there's a treatment that I am trying to access that, that doing the phase three trials, for example, in Australia instead of the U S because it's too expensive.

• 58:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:41Speaker 04

  Then there's some, and then trying to get into a trial is like threading a needle, you know?

• 58:44John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 58:44Speaker 04

  So I think that making it easier for patients to access cutting edge treatments and just.

• 58:51John Coogan?

  And then even if you get in, it would be placebo controlled. So there's a 50% chance that you don't get it.

• 58:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's one of those things where, where, where my scientists had, I'm like, oh, it's really important to do placebo, you know, properly controlled trials. So you can make the right inferences, but then when you're, when you're a patient, you're like, I don't want to be in placebo. I'm like, what's the point in that?

• 59:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 59:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. We, we, we heard about this with, uh,

• 59:15John Coogan?

  G L P one.

• 59:16Jordi Hays?

  trials.

• 59:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:17Jordi Hays?

  Where people would, the drug's so effective, people would realize they're in the placebo and then just drop out of the trial entirely.

• 59:23Speaker 04

  Right. Yeah. I mean, I was thinking that about, about this trial. I was like, well, if it, it's probably going to be pretty obvious within the placebo because it won't have any like side effects. And if it's just not working, then why not just drop out? But they kind of like expect you to just keep on going in these trials when things aren't working, which also doesn't seem to be particularly in the patient's interest.

• 59:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, what's next for you? What do you want to focus on?

• 59:47Speaker 04

  Well, you know, getting cured of cancer would be nice.

• 59:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, it seems like priority number one.

• 59:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm, you know, I'm pretty excited about this whole reproductive tech space.

• 1:00:01Speaker 04

  I think there's a lot of potential. It's, we're really in the infancy of this, of this industry. So, you know, what Heracite's been doing with the polygenic scores, they've, they've created very powerful predictors with that. But these polygenic scores, they only capture a certain fraction of the total effect of, of the genome on disease risk and traits.

• 1:00:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:22Speaker 04

  So actually, a lot of the, the remaining signal that we could get out of the genetics is in these rare damaging mutations that are not typically included in, in these scores. And that's one of the things that, you know, Heracite's been working on. There's, there's, there's an important application of AI models like Alpha Fold, Alpha Miss Sense.

• 1:00:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:00:43Speaker 04

  And sort of DNA foundation models to try and predict what these rare mutation, what, what risks these rare mutations might confer.

• 1:00:52John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:00:53Speaker 04

  And including, you know, Heracite have already developed a product looking at how you can predict risk of neurodevelopmental disorders using, using these kind of rare variants. So I think, I think that's going to be an important area going forward.

• 1:01:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:08Speaker 04

  Then, you know, this more like further in the future kind of technologies, in vitro gametogenesis. So that's a technology to create gametes, so sperm and eggs, eggs is what would be more useful generally, from adult cells that are not, not, uh, gamete cells. So that could potentially create like thousands of embryos. So I think you could, you could, and then there's also gene editing, actually, so. You know, you can, you can use CRISPR or some technology like that to go into an embryo and edit particular base pairs, remove some disease-causing variant, or maybe more

• 1:01:49Speaker 04

  controversially, enhance some ability, like you could put in the Tibetan altitude adaptation gene that NIMSTI has, or you could put in a sprinter gene or something.

• 1:01:59John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:02:00Speaker 04

  So I think, you know, my, my idea for the future of this space could be that you have this kind of stack where you have in vitro gametogenesis that creates thousands of embryos, then you can get the genome data, do the predictions of disease risks and traits from that, select a few promising embryos, and then do some edits in them.

• 1:02:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:22Speaker 04

  So that, that kind of, that kind of excites me.

• 1:02:26John Coogan?

  Sci-fi, yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on and sharing it with us. We appreciate you having the time. Good luck with everything.

• 1:02:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:36John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:02:37Speaker 04

  Cheers.

• 1:02:38John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day. Without further ado, we are going to bring in Jason Kim from Firefly Aerospace. We're very excited to talk to him. He is the CEO of Firefly Aerospace. Jason, how are you doing?

• 1:02:50Speaker 03

  I'm doing great, guys. Thanks for having me on the show.

• 1:02:54John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Why don't you give us a little introduction? I think most people will be familiar with some of Firefly's work, but take us through a little bit of the journey and the milestones that have been important to you.

• 1:03:07Speaker 03

  Well, this is our ninth year as a company, and we're the first company in the history of the world as a commercial company to land successfully on the moon.

• 1:03:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:20Speaker 03

  And everybody's talking about the moon these days.

• 1:03:22John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:03:23Speaker 03

  And the other thing is we did a 24-hour launch for the Space Force that broke the previous record of 21 days. That was back in 2023, and that's used for deterrence because, you know, space is contested.

• 1:03:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:38Speaker 03

  And the moon is ultimately high ground.

• 1:03:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:40Speaker 03

  So we're into that. And then we're doing a lot of commercial tech, so a lot of... The latest industry technology like what we announced earlier this week, we're putting Nvidia jets into space around the moon and we're going to do space domain awareness, imaging and imaging of the moon and we're going to do all that on orbit and then just get the insightful data back to the earth. It's incredible journey. We're launching badass rockets, super cool lunar landers and satellites and we're doing AI ground processing as well.

• 1:04:14John Coogan?

  Well, give me a little bit of your background. What led you into the aerospace industry? How long you been doing this?

• 1:04:21Speaker 03

  Well, I was born in South Korea, immigrated when I was one. My parents always taught me get back to the US. And so what I did was I went to the Air Force Academy out of Dallas, Texas and made a career in the Air Force, loved it, was working with UAVs before they became popular in 1999 and then you saw what happened in 9/11. And then the same thing with small satellites, I got to work with small satellites and rockets and ground systems. And that's really taken off. Now you've got proliferated systems in LEO, MEO and GEO with things like Starlink and other. And now we're going to the moon. And so it's just incredible where space is going.

• 1:05:04Speaker 03

  I think in five years, every single company on earth is going to be related or going to be part of the space industry.

• 1:05:10John Coogan?

  Talk about the journey to the first moon mission. Was that a milestone from day one? When did you know that that was going to move forward?

• 1:05:20Speaker 03

  Well, the team started on that journey in the Trump administration, number 45. That's when he built the Artemis program in the first place and under that there was a commercial lunar payload services program. And that's where commercial companies like Firefly could bid end-to-end missions to the moon to do. Important, you know, exploration of the moon and science missions. A lot of the missions that we flew in Trump's second administration, forty seventh administration, successfully did the fourteen days of lunar surface operations are actually supporting Artemis. We got, you know, characterization of the carcinogenic moon dust.

• 1:06:03John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:06:04Speaker 03

  We're looking at data on what the GPS looks like. Wait, that's terrible news. The dust is carcinogenic?

• 1:06:12John Coogan?

  If you can, sir.

• 1:06:13Speaker 03

  It's harsh. Yeah, it's harsh. And we want to do everything we can to learn about the moon, the surface, the geographic features, the environment. Yeah.

• 1:06:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, it's a harsh environment. It's outer space.

• 1:06:27Speaker 03

  As we learn these things, it gives us a chance to mitigate those risks. And that's what our successful Blue Ghost Mission One did is found out a bunch of stuff from the ten NASA payloads that successfully carried out their missions. I had my fingers crossed that the dust was creatine.

• 1:06:44John Coogan?

  Or cheese. Unfortunately.

• 1:06:46Speaker 03

  That's really devastating.

• 1:06:48John Coogan?

  Very harsh environment.

• 1:06:49Speaker 03

  Creatine plus one six acceleration of gravity on moon, that would be a deadly combination.

• 1:06:54John Coogan?

  That would be as well. Yeah, walk me through the, the, the, the Blue Ghost Mission One. What were you building? What were you partnering on? Take me through the, the launch plan. Was the launch delayed? Tell me the story of that launch.

• 1:07:10Speaker 03

  Well, the average age of our team was around twenty eight at the time. So this is the next generation leaders for space. I'm proud of them. They had this can do attitude. They're bold. This, some of them, it was the first satellite they ever, you know, designed and launched and tested and nailed the moon landing. But they, you know, did through all the testing that was necessary in the relative environments. They, you know, rung it out at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. They did hundreds of hours of rehearsals, getting ready for the launch and the operations. It's a forty five day operation. Then, once we landed, it was fourteen days.

• 1:07:52Speaker 03

  So the team had two shifts, twenty four seven, and they got through it and celebrated at the very end.

• 1:08:01Speaker 03

  But you know, now we're ready to do it again. We've got a second Blue Ghost mission that we're targeting no earlier than, uh, later this year to launch.

• 1:08:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:08:10Speaker 03

  And then we got a third one a year later and a fourth one a year after that. And then, uh, Jared Isaacman from NASA just came out a couple of weeks ago and said he wants 30 landers in the next three years. So we're also looking at that upside opportunity as well.

• 1:08:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, uh, walk me through what each lander will do. I imagine you're trying to increase the capability of each mission. Uh, what's the, was the only goal of the first test, uh, just testing the, and characterizing the moon dust itself? Uh, where, where does this go? What else are you doing?

• 1:08:44Speaker 03

  Well, on the first one, we looked at the moon dust. We also, uh, had some electrostatic shielding that allowed to repel the dust.

• 1:08:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:53Speaker 03

  Cause if you have dust, you can repel it. Um, and so that's something, something that Kennedy Space Center put on there. Um, we also drilled the, the longest into the moon, um, about three feet into the moon and tested the temperature. Cause you're going to want to know what's under the

• 1:09:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:09Speaker 03

  moon surface.

• 1:09:10John Coogan?

  So does that mean you brought like a three foot drill bit up there?

• 1:09:13Speaker 03

  It was actually supposed to go longer, but it turns out, we found out what we didn't know, that there's actually hard surface

• 1:09:19John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:09:20Speaker 03

  around the three feet mark. And so we're learning so much about the moon.

• 1:09:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:24Speaker 03

  And most importantly, we're learning that we need to learn more. And so the second mission is going to go to the south far side of the moon.

• 1:09:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:09:30Speaker 03

  And it'll be the first time the U S attempts this. So we're very honored to do that.

• 1:09:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:34Speaker 03

  Um, we're going to be able to sense signals.

• 1:09:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:38Speaker 03

  Uh, from millions of years ago in the dark ages.

• 1:09:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:42Speaker 03

  Uh, you know, after the big bang happened. And so we're going to learn a lot about the universe through that mission. It's called U C night.

• 1:09:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:50Speaker 03

  And then the third mission is going to go to a volcanic region of the moon surface that we've never gone to. Nobody's ever gone to. It's called the Gruuthyzen domes.

• 1:09:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:10:00Speaker 03

  And then the fourth mission, we're excited about because it's going to go to the South Pole. It's going to have some rovers. We're going to go and look at, you know, there's supposed to be a lot of water and hydrogen and minerals in that area. So we're going to go explore that for NASA.

• 1:10:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:14Jordi Hays?

  What is the easiest part of space?

• 1:10:20Speaker 03

  I think the idea generation, I think coming up with ideas and the prototyping, the first ofs are straightforward, but doing it at scale, that's really hard. And you've heard that multiple times, building the system that builds the systems. That's what we're doing at Firefly. And so if you come out to near Austin, Texas, you'll see both our factories just going at rate, delivering one-ton rockets and building up a new 16-ton reusable rocket and our lunar landers and our orbiters as well.

• 1:10:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Did you, everyone probably knows from the Artemis mission that it was a very successful test of the SLS. Did you partner with other space companies for launch capacity? How do you see the launch market generally? Who are you partnering with to deliver to the moon? Since most of the folks that we talk to are going to LEO and they're hitching a ride on SpaceX, is anything different about these moon missions for you?

• 1:11:21Speaker 03

  You know, right now, we're partnering with all the above, go to the moon. We've used Falcon 9 on our last Blue Ghost mission one. We have a great relationship with SpaceX. And we're forming relationships with Blue Origin and others. We're also building our own 16-ton reusable rocket as well. Someday, that's going to have capability to do amazing things. Our Alpha rocket, that's a one-ton rocket that does dedicated launches to low Earth orbit and does the response missions. That's all us. That's all Firefly. But the 16-ton reusable rocket, we're co-developing that with Northrop Grumman, who has a rich heritage in launch as well.

• 1:12:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. How long do you think this stays as a primarily government-sponsored project? People are starting to map out what a lunar economy might look like. It took decades for SpaceX to find that commercial side of the business with Starlink. It's been massively successful. So these things sometimes come out of nowhere, but if you have ideas, where do you think the commercial opportunity will be in 10 or 20 years?

• 1:12:32Speaker 03

  You know, we're just manifesting it and that's the way you can kind of predict the future is just do it. And so on our Blue Ghost mission two, we're carrying a Eletra spacecraft with us and it's got the Oculus sensor on there and it's got a Jetson Nvidia module on there and we're going to be able to use our SciTech software AI processing to actually take the data of imaging the moon and around the moon and process it on orbit. And that's going to be the first commercial imaging service that I know of in the history. The previous imaging systems were government owned, government operated. This will be all Firefly owned and operated and we'll be able to sell that data commercially.

• 1:13:16Speaker 03

  So, you know, it's, it's a first step and we see more of that dedicated landers that, you know, a bunch of business models, businesses, entrepreneurs can put their important payloads on our dedicated lander. That's another commercial idea that we're working on and I think it's just a matter of time where it will be a good fraction of NASA. They're never going to let go of the moon. National security is not going to let go of the moon, but you'll start seeing a lot more commercial endeavors, commercial only type moon missions as well.

• 1:13:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What, what year do you expect to set foot on the moon?

• 1:13:55Speaker 03

  Myself?

• 1:13:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:57Speaker 03

  Well, I think, you know, I already had that chance going to the Air Force Academy and try to be a fighter pilot. I wasn't able to do that, but my, my, my kids, you know, the other day I was talking to them and I was like, hey, isn't this cool Artemis two? Don't you want to go to the moon? And they said, Dad, I want to live on the moon. So that's when my mind just exploded, right? That's what our kids are saying these days and kids are so genuine, they, they say what is on their mind. If it interests and excites kids, you're on to something.

• 1:14:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, uh, what are you watching for, learning from the Artemis two mission?

• 1:14:36Speaker 03

  I just am thinking about about the astronauts. Those are heroes for the world, in our nation, and you know, other nations. And so my hearts and mind go out to Reid and Victor and Christina and Jeremy. I'm just awaiting them to return home so that everybody can welcome them back to Earth. Because what they did was historic. I mean, it was inspiring. I was really excited when I saw those images and videos of them on orbit. And just looking forward to hearing more stories from them of what it was like.

• 1:15:13John Coogan?

  Last question from the chat. Where does the name Firefly come from?

• 1:15:18Speaker 03

  You know, it's kind of towards our vision. We're lighting the path to a bold space ecosystem that expands humanity's future. If you think about it, we're going to be launching and operating satellites on orbit. And it's going to look like the night sky of Firefly someday.

• 1:15:35John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 1:15:36Jordi Hays?

  I'm hearing the song in my head.

• 1:15:38John Coogan?

  Firefly? Oh, yeah. I know the one you're thinking of. Well, thank you so much.

• 1:15:43Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you.

• 1:15:44John Coogan?

  Great to meet you. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. Nick Carter's been on a tear talking about CoreWeave. They just signed a big deal with Anthropic and with Meta. There's it's in the journal today.

• 1:15:58Jordi Hays?

  John, you would not believe your eyes.

• 1:16:00John Coogan?

  What?

• 1:16:00Jordi Hays?

  If 10 million Fireflies.

• 1:16:02John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, yes.

• 1:16:03Jordi Hays?

  Lit up the world as I fell asleep.

• 1:16:04John Coogan?

  Yes. Nick Carter said, I remember a few months ago when everyone on here insisted CoreWeave was a ticking time bomb, had unreasonable depreciation assumptions, was a Ponzi. Magnetar was doing GFC 2.0, had no bespoke tech, had unsustainable debt load, was just financial engineering. Well, they've been on a tear building ever bigger data centers. And we had the folks from CoreWeave come on the show just recently and saw a bunch of the progress there. And there's an incredible amount of demand. Nvidia, in September, CoreWeave said it was expanding its previous agreement with OpenAI to supply data center capacity by as much as 6.5 billion, bringing the total value of the contract to 22.4 billion.

• 1:16:46John Coogan?

  Earlier this year, Nvidia said it was pouring an additional 2 billion into CoreWeave in a vote of confidence in the artificial intelligence data center company using Nvidia's chips. Anyway, without further ado, let's bring in Chad Janis from Grunz. Welcome to the show.

• 1:17:01Josh Reeves?

  What's going on?

• 1:17:02Speaker 06

  Hey guys, how we doing?

• 1:17:03John Coogan?

  How we doing?

• 1:17:04Jordi Hays?

  Doing great.

• 1:17:05John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on the massive acquisition. We have to hit the gong for you. Unilever paid 1.2 million. Congratulations.

• 1:17:14Jordi Hays?

  Big, big hit. We've been, I think we tried to make this happen last year. So, great, great to finally have you on the show. I think everyone was appreciating how offline you've been for the last little bit. I think somebody, I saw somebody post like, "The founder hasn't posted on X since like Q4 of last year." You guys were busy, busy grinding. But, um, but yeah, I guess like the, I want to kind of dive right into, and I'm sure you've told this story before, but I think it's fun to hear it now. Like, what drew you to this category in, you know, what was it, three and a half years ago? At this point, you had, you'd been on the board of a bunch of different D to C brands.

• 1:17:59Jordi Hays?

  I would say like, you started the company in like the, probably the trot, like the, the very bottom of the trough in terms of like D to C sentiment, like the, at the time, there were not, there were not many like great kind of exit comps to point at. A lot of like the D to C darlings had been struggling. You clearly had faith in the category and managed to build to one of the biggest exits in the space in a while. So, talk about those, you know, the kind of the year or months leading up to starting the company and what you saw.

• 1:18:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, thanks for having me on. So, I actually was trying not to start a company when I had the idea for Grin's. I was going to go get my MBA at Stanford and I was saying, "Hey, I want to have a pretty normal MBA experience, hang out with friends a ton." And it was about two weeks before I went out to Stanford, I was at my dad's place and I was drinking a greens powder and looked up in the corner of the room and I was just like, "There's no way I'm keeping this habit past 30 days." So, that was sort of the epiphany of, "Hey, how do I take..." Something is robust and comprehensive and make it into a form factor. Didn't think gummies at the time. Make it into a form factor that could build a habit for consumer. Make it something they look forward to. They go to bed at night thinking about, excited about taking grins the

• 1:19:20Speaker 06

  next day. And so that started the journey of about a year, formulating, piloting, testing, sampling, about one-fourth of my entire Stanford class. Tried the early iterations of grins before we launched. And then we launched in August of 2023.

• 1:19:37Jordi Hays?

  What, what other companies had you looked at in the category? I know there was, I'm, I'm gonna probably blank on the name, but there was a very high profile, like apple cider vinegar.

• 1:19:50Speaker 06

  Goli.

• 1:19:51Jordi Hays?

  Goli. They had, they had scaled extremely rapidly, but then not, I don't know where that, that business netted out, but I don't, I don't believe it was a fantastic outcome. So I felt like, I kind of had this feeling at the time that maybe there was something wrong with gummies as a category. Like, there was a bunch of demand, but maybe it wasn't possible to build to this level of outcome. Did, did, uh, did you have any kind of concerns about the cat, the form factor at all? Or you just had conviction because people love the product?

• 1:20:21Speaker 06

  I mean, not the form factor. The history of gummies is actually really interesting. About 20 years ago, it didn't really exist. And I would say then Ollie came around in 2014, I believe, and made gummy an approachable category. And then I would say we're entering what I would consider a V3 of the gummy era, which is taking really robust blends and putting them into a form factor like gummy. So you sort of get the best of all worlds. You get robust, comprehensive blends in a form factor that's convenient, enjoyable, consumers can look forward to it. And so I didn't, I didn't necessarily tie the dots the way that you might have just there with Goli. I think they were more focused on individual ingredients that sort of rose and roads that rode

• 1:21:03Speaker 06

  with trends and then came back down as they sort of trended away. We, we stay away from like single ingredients.

• 1:21:09Jordi Hays?

  What would you say are the three biggest factors that contributed to your guys' what I would describe as hypergrowth?

• 1:21:20Speaker 06

  I would say first is novel innovation. So each of the products you see us launching does not exist in the market. So when people say like, oh, who are you competing with? It's like, well, we're kind of creating our own new categories against large outstanding categories. I would say second is just like unrelenting urgency every day. Like I sort of look back at the urgency I've had every single day over the last three and a half, four years, as well as the urgency that my team has every day. Like it's just like compounds over time. If you're delivering that much urgency and impact every day. And the third thing that I'd say is the absolute most important is the team. We've got 130 plus individuals here at this company.

• 1:22:04Speaker 06

  We have a culture of autonomy and accountability. And each individual here wakes up every day as the CEO of their domain. So when you sort of take 130 plus people who are CEOs of their function and stack that together, you end up in a, I guess in a place that we just have ended up here in the last week.

• 1:22:22John Coogan?

  Can you talk about how you thought about building the team? Like what roles you wanted to hire for and when? And sort of how you staged the, the scale out?

• 1:22:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, the hardest part about building a company is like you as the founder have to do too much. You have to do too much to start.

• 1:22:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:38Speaker 06

  And so over time you get to a place of like, okay, where does the company need me most? Like where am I uniquely capable? So I guess like the advice I would take that question is like a, hey, what advice would I give about building?

• 1:22:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:50Speaker 06

  Through the stages that we, we did. You've got to surround yourself with like the absolute best in each, each function. And so you sort of pick off each function slowly over time where either you don't enjoy it and it's sort of, you know, it's pushing down on your, your vibes, I guess I could say. Or B alternatively, things that you think somebody could do way better than you. And you need to clear that out so that you can focus on other things. And so I wouldn't say that, you know, we probably made some hires early that others wouldn't. Like we hired our chief people officer pretty early in the company. Trying to think of another one that we might've hired earlier than, than most people would have.

• 1:23:26John Coogan?

  What, what was the motivation between the early hire on the chief people officer?

• 1:23:31Speaker 06

  I think it comes back to like, ultimately, at the end of the day, like a company's success is the people.

• 1:23:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:36Speaker 06

  Right? The culture that you have, how that facilitates frictionless growth.

• 1:23:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:39Speaker 06

  And so from the early days, like, we've always been focused on ensuring that we get the absolute best people here in the company, and then put them in an environment.

• 1:23:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:48Speaker 06

  Where they can be their full self. They can excel to the extent that they can. I mean, we've got people at the company who probably had an impact at other companies, but when they got here, it was like night and day, the impact that they were able to have.

• 1:24:00John Coogan?

  Well, you mentioned that you demoed the product with your Stanford class. What was the actual process of the very first version of the product to the, you know, the scale up? Were you formulating it yourself, using off-the-shelf products, and then go to a co-packer, and then in-house manufacturing? Take me on like the actual product development journey.

• 1:24:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, we, early days of the business, pre-launch, the process was calling up 20 different co-mans.

• 1:24:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:32Speaker 06

  Co-manufacturing partners, and telling them, here's what I want to do, here's what the ingredients are, I'll source all of it. And every single one of them, except for one, said, I'm not going to do that. Like, that's going to taste disgusting, that doesn't work in a gummy, it's never going to work.

• 1:24:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:45Speaker 06

  The one who said, who said he would give it a try, he was like-

• 1:24:47Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny because, because you say that, like, you talk about the product being innovative, but I think you guys have been so successful, and probably had so many clones, that my assumption has been that, like, this category always existed, and you guys just came in and out, out-executed, but actually creating the category.

• 1:25:06Speaker 06

  Well, here's where it gets crazier. So, so we finally got the one to try, and I was like, look, just produce it, we'll both sample it, we'll say if it tastes terrible or not. So we ended up by producing, it didn't taste terrible, it had some work to do. We went through multiple iterations with the Stanford classmates, 25% of them. And then the hardest part about building this business is the little pack that we have, the daily packs.

• 1:25:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:30Speaker 06

  But that, that infrastructure for taking gummies and putting it into packs did not exist prior to us.

• 1:25:36John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:25:37Speaker 06

  So, for the first six to eight months of this business, we had 20 bodies standing around a table. Manually picking up gummies and putting them in packs and taking a clamp sealer that looks like a staple gun.

• 1:25:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:25:48Speaker 06

  Before we then were able to automate it. So, I mean, that's been the hardest part about this business is getting the infrastructure to where it is today where we can, you know, ship 10 million gummies a day and have the infrastructure for it.

• 1:25:59John Coogan?

  Is that because the gummies are sticky so they don't work on normal like machinery to just fall into the pouches themselves on an automated line?

• 1:26:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, that's one of the biggest difficulties. Why it didn't exist prior, I think in the instances where it does exist would be like your general mills, like Mott's gummies, they're like the more like flimsier type packaging.

• 1:26:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:20Speaker 06

  And that's all in-house.

• 1:26:21John Coogan?

  That's all in-house, yeah, so it's not off the shelf.

• 1:26:23Speaker 06

  Yeah. There's not really like a manufacturing supply chain that does that.

• 1:26:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, yeah, did you stay with CoPacker for a long time? Did you wind up dual sourcing? How did you like solve the supply chain over time?

• 1:26:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, and this has been the biggest unlock of our business over time. And frankly, the part that people are going to overlook is like having operations scale at the rate that we've been able to do it is a massive feat. We've got multiple co-mans, multiple co-packers, multiple nodes, 3PL, in-house facility. It's been a lot. We're finally at a place where we can actually meet the demand that's out there and keep up with it. So, we're in a good operational place right now. The operations stayed asleep.

• 1:27:06John Coogan?

  Did you raise a lot of money along the way?

• 1:27:09Speaker 06

  We raised probably around 50 million.

• 1:27:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:27:13Speaker 06

  Over the course of the business, some of that was secondary over the course, then on primary as well, obviously.

• 1:27:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:19Jordi Hays?

  You have a fantastic group of investors, by the way.

• 1:27:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:24Jordi Hays?

  A lot of them are.

• 1:27:24Speaker 06

  They're great, right?

• 1:27:25Jordi Hays?

  Eva, Amanda, all those people are fantastic. How did your, how did your marketing mix evolve over time? Was it relatively consistent? I mean, I'm assuming you've, you've given quite a lot of money to meta platforms, but, but any, anything that was surprising from a user acquisition standpoint? Or was it the kind of thing where it was like, you know, 80, 90% Google meta for the history plus, you know, rotating in experimental budget?

• 1:27:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, Meta is always going to be a beast for like every brand that's online. What I'll say, though, is it has been surprising to me when I hear others mix and that Meta makes up, like you said, like eighty-five, ninety percent. It's like, oh, wow, you should probably like diversify that a little bit. Meta is always going to take up a massive chunk. I mean, they've built such a good platform that allows for companies to find people in market for their particular product. And so we've diversified over time. We have intent to continue diversifying, building awareness. And so it's not that we feel like, you know, we're overexposed in a channel, but we've just always had the intent to create defensibility against the media mix.

• 1:28:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Scariest moment over the last three and a half years?

• 1:28:43Speaker 06

  I can tell you the exact day. Six months into the business, January twenty-ninth, I was calling my co-man. I was like, hey, we don't have, it was like two weeks of telling him, hey, I don't think we have enough inventory, right? He's like, no, no, no, we're good, we're good, we're good. January twenty-ninth, I was like, hey, we're not good, are we? And he's like, no, no, we're not good. And so we had to shut off marketing spend by ninety-three percent overnight.

• 1:29:08Jordi Hays?

  And this is because you had a bunch of subscribers and you're worried about delivering on the subscriptions. If you can't, you know, there's huge amount of churn and then...

• 1:29:16Speaker 06

  So we've never gone out of stock for like more than a couple of days. So there's been like a couple of periods in the business where we were close. We've never gone out of stock in like a way that would hurt our consumer. But that, you got it exactly right. Like the golden rule at Grin's is we do not go out of stock. These people expect, they take it daily. We are in stock. If that means we can't acquire customers, fine. We've got to deliver for those who are subscribers.

• 1:29:40John Coogan?

  So does that also affect the SKU mix and how careful you are about launching new SKUs? Because every new SKU adds complexity to the supply chain and the inventory management?

• 1:29:51Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, look, like, we've got a couple of, I would say we have a couple of SKUs per brand we launch. If you ask our operations team and the actual SKU that we have, they would tell you we have hundreds of SKUs. So I'm probably downplaying the complexity. But yeah, like, we, the nice thing about this business is we, we have solutions that solve consumers' needs in mass. So we don't have to create, you know, fifty different products to solve niche needs that a consumer has.

• 1:30:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:19Jordi Hays?

  What's your outlook on consumer broadly?

• 1:30:24Speaker 06

  I love it. I can't imagine building in a different space. I would say consumer sentiment is rough in some ways right now. But I don't think that's like a surprise. You can look.

• 1:30:39Speaker 06

  Probably you've seen trends, but I would say consumer is a category.

• 1:30:44Speaker 06

  It's a beautiful thing, right? Like our team, we're leveraging AI probably in a opportunistic way. Not in the existential way that a lot of tech companies are like, hey, if we don't do this right, are we existing next year? For us, it's an opportunity and we're finding some really nice inroads there.

• 1:31:00John Coogan?

  Interesting. How did you think about messaging in the early days and like honing the brand messaging? Because the product delivers across a couple of vectors, convenience and health benefits. Was there ever like a tension between those? Like, how did you wind up sort? What did you settle on for like the key value prop if you could just deliver one message?

• 1:31:22Speaker 06

  I think your consumer helps you identify what resonates best. I would say though, the approach of like the overarching approach of what we've done. One brand that I looked up to is Dr. Squatch. As you know, their approach, you know, it's probably the first time I was in the shower using a soap and I was like, wow. It's like really fun. This is a nice experience. Something like, actually like mark your experience there. And I think we've taken some of that concept to the supplement category. Where as you've sort of called out, most brands are like, like we do clinical research, but we don't, it's not like the only thing we talk about, right? We do, we have like studies, we've done all this wonderful stuff, but we try not to lean too much on that because that's what the rest of the category is doing.

• 1:32:04Speaker 06

  We're kind of a lifestyle brand. And so consumers buy it, they enjoy it, they look forward to it. And it drives an impact in their life. And so I would say the overarching theme, and I think if you were to look at our our ad account, if you were to look at our like, what resonates with the consumer, it's that we're a brand that personifies our consumer. And they like to associate and have the benefits from it.

• 1:32:24John Coogan?

  Talk to me about the D to C to retail transition. Was that in the pitch deck at the very start? Did you know exactly how long that was going to take? Or was there a moment when you were like, okay, I'm ready, we're ready to go, now's the time?

• 1:32:40Jordi Hays?

  Or did Trey come and find you and say, it's time to go?

• 1:32:43Speaker 06

  You guys know Trey?

• 1:32:44Jordi Hays?

  I know, I know Trey, yeah.

• 1:32:45Speaker 06

  Love it. Trey's awesome. He's been a good buddy and helping the business since the early days. He actually went with me to pitch, I believe Walmart and Sam's Club in the summer of 2024. But we didn't have a lot of employees at the time and I was the original one pitching.

• 1:33:02Speaker 06

  Look, I just always knew this business was going to be omni-channel. I don't think there's any reason to like have pride in being a solely D to C business or a solely like, there's just, there's consumers everywhere, like meet them with the solution that, and at the price point that works for them. So I first had conversations about launching retail back in like January of 2024. And I'll tell you, everybody was telling me, hey, it's kind of early, like, do you really want to do this? And I said, yes, guaranteed, like the selling cycles are so long here. Guaranteed by next year, when we're finally in this retailer, we're going to be really glad that we put in the time today.

• 1:33:35John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:33:35Speaker 06

  And so we, you know, that process took really long. We launched with Sprouts in October of 2024. Target in February of 2025 and then Walmart in April of 2025. And then a bunch of other amazing retailers after that.

• 1:33:51John Coogan?

  And then what were you tracking? What changed about the business, the marketing, the strategy to actually be successful in retail?

• 1:34:00Speaker 06

  The biggest thing is the rebrand we did.

• 1:34:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:34:02Speaker 06

  So the original branding, I don't know if you've seen it, it was like a dark green color.

• 1:34:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:34:06Speaker 06

  I, I'm glad you haven't seen it. I developed it in Canva in an afternoon. You know, it's funny is it was like, it was so bad, but when we changed, like the vast majority of people were like, this is a really good rebrand change. We got a few people who were like, hey, like what's up with the, I want the old branding. I was like, guys, like that's Canva. Nothing's special there. So we redid the packaging. We made it ready for retail.

• 1:34:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:34:30Speaker 06

  You could more quickly in sort of three seconds identify what, what the product was. And so that's probably the biggest change we had to do to get ready for retail distribution.

• 1:34:43Jordi Hays?

  Is, is product the only thing that really matters in, in, with, with an early stage consumer brand?

• 1:34:52Speaker 06

  It's a big, broad statement. I think it really matters for us because it's the it is, it sets the stage for how big any of our businesses can become. So as you know, we've got Croons, we've got Nutrups, our mushroom product, Nutrepics, we've got Immune, which is an immunity product, and we've got Juiced, which is our pre-workout, pre-anything energy product. If we don't get that product right, speaking to that category right, then it caps the upside of how big that business can be. So it really matters for us. I can't speak for every business, though.

• 1:35:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. How diversified did the business become? I mean, 130 employees is, is a lot. I imagine that you've had success both in e-commerce and then also in retail and then also across these new product lines. But is there a power law where one product in retail is driving the vast majority of sales? Or is it pretty much like a sum of, some of all the different parts?

• 1:35:49Jordi Hays?

  There's always a power law.

• 1:35:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:52Speaker 06

  Yeah. Everything's growing. Everything's doing well. Like, all these products are phenomenal. People should, should try them.

• 1:35:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:58Speaker 06

  See if they want to stick with them. I, I would say that our team's like, super ambitious. So if you asked us, we'd be like, oh, my goodness. We want these, these secondary products behind Croons to be much bigger than they are.

• 1:36:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:11Speaker 06

  But to be clear, like, they're large businesses.

• 1:36:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:13Speaker 06

  And I think any founder would love to have just one of them as their core business. So, and, and we've got a lot of really exciting innovation coming that I think will grow nicely like Croons has.

• 1:36:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. When did you first meet Unilever or the folks over there?

• 1:36:29Speaker 06

  I first had a conversation with them probably in like June of last year.

• 1:36:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:34Speaker 06

  It's when we started talking. But like casually, not like, like just getting to know them. Ultimately, for me, what really matters is the individual is somebody that I'm excited to work with, I'm excited to build with. And so I've been chatting with them for quite some time to identify whether it was a good fit for both sides.

• 1:36:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You also, you're like, give me another year. I'll like three, four X again.

• 1:36:58John Coogan?

  And then, and then what, what do you think Unilever brings to the table to let you fulfill the vision here?

• 1:37:05Speaker 06

  They're, they're awesome. I mean, you may, you may be familiar with their background, but they've done this like with multiple businesses before and frankly, might be one of the few strategic partners that has. So you've got Nutriful, which they just acquired probably about four years ago. And their, their public has stated that that business is significantly larger than when they acquired it. They acquired Liquid IV back in probably 2020. That business is massively larger. I think they just stated last year that it's around a billion of revenue. They acquired Ollie back in 2019. That business is significantly bigger. So they, they've just done a really good job. They, they know what to look for. And I think that's what our team's most excited for is we're getting a partner who can help us on our ambitious goals and knows the path to get there.

• 1:37:48John Coogan?

  You mentioned that you're using AI opportunistically. What does that actually look like in practice? Because I can imagine that, you know, you, you probably have some sort of software SaaS product in many verticals. All of those companies are probably launching or adding AI features. So you can flip a switch and turn that on, or you can go and build from scratch. Like what's working right now?

• 1:38:14Speaker 06

  One of the biggest things I'm grateful for is we have a really, really strong data and finance team. And so we have like all the data infrastructure, data warehouse in a place where it's accessible through Claude to our team. So you've got, you've got the CX team, you've got the finance team, you've got the marketing team, all like immediately accessible with that information to make decisions. So I'd say that's probably the biggest unlock is everyone's in Claude. Everyone is like, we, we all went through an effort. It's kind of a, the objective is kind of a joke, but it's basically make yourself replaceable. Like can AI replace your job? And so we're all ticking across the aspects of our roles and what we can automate through AI and finding a lot of productivity from it. But I would

• 1:38:58Speaker 06

  say the biggest takeaway there is you've got to have your data infrastructure and data warehouse in a place that it's a source of truth to every individual in the company.

• 1:39:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Talk about your approach to creative. I've heard that you guys are like absolute powerhouse when it comes to just like generating high volumes of creative. And I'm curious if there's any unlocks on the AI side on that front as well.

• 1:39:23Speaker 06

  You know, we haven't really used AI for that. Um, I imagine that like we're, we're testing like a few things, but I'm sure you guys see all over X, there's a million posts about people creating like the Pixar animations and stuff and yeah, say what you will. Some of it's a little testy. It's kind of like, hey, we're, we're a reputable brand. Like we can't be putting some things out on the internet like that. And so we're pretty careful about it. I would say at this point, we're still like 99% plus like human generated, whether it's like in a editing file or whether it's actual humans creating UGC or working with influencers who are creating content. Uh, we, we haven't moved, I would say into like AI being the the generator of our, our creative.

• 1:40:07Jordi Hays?

  Interesting. Uh, did you actually get your MBA or did, did you drop out?

• 1:40:11Speaker 06

  Oh, I was so close. It was so close.

• 1:40:14Jordi Hays?

  Okay. So, so an exit, an exit at this scale, can they not just say like, okay, this guy's a master of business. Well, give him the degree.

• 1:40:21Speaker 06

  I don't think they would. I don't think they would. Uh, I don't think they've done that for others who have, uh, who have, uh, had some success, successful outcomes. Just before I graduated, every quarter, so the business was doing like 50 million of revenue when I graduated. Uh, we had probably like six people working on it at the time. And, uh, it was two weeks before I graduated. I came to my wife, back to our dorm, but I was like, hey, there's like a real chance I'm not going to graduate. I was like right on the GPA cutoff. She's like, ah, I'm like, no, no, like, like dead serious. We're like one test, one, one point lower and we're not going to graduate. She's like, do you want to come back? I was like, no. Uh, either we graduate and I have an MBA or we don't. And I, I don't have an MBA. That's, that is.

• 1:41:01Jordi Hays?

  Well, you're, you're a master, you're a master of business in our book. So I think you got, you got the, you, you won the right award. Uh, but thank you. Thank you for hanging out on, uh, and congratulations to, to the entire team. It's really, uh, uh, incredible.

• 1:41:16Speaker 06

  Thanks, guys.

• 1:41:16John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Up next, we have Jordan Bramble from Antares. He's the co-founder and CEO. Antares is becoming the first company to secure DOE safety approval for a new reactor, marking a breakthrough in U.S. nuclear deployment. Jordan, how are you doing?

• 1:41:36Speaker 07

  Well, how about yourself? Thank you for having me.

• 1:41:38John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. I'm glad to meet. We've heard a ton about the company over the years. Please, but give us an introduction on yourself and the company.

• 1:41:47Speaker 07

  Yeah, so Jordan Bramble, CEO here at Antares. Our focus at Antares is nuclear power for what we call strategic energy. So that primarily means defense and space applications, but increasingly expanding into commercial markets as well.

• 1:42:02John Coogan?

  Does that mean like oil and gas extraction? You need a diesel generator normally, but you can put down a nuclear reactor as well?

• 1:42:10Speaker 07

  Absolutely. And the thing that I think is aligned across both of those markets is, you know, what we're seeing, and this is what strategic energy really means to us, is you're using the unique characteristics of nuclear power to enable a resiliency or other characteristics you can't get from alternative energy sources. And that's really the crux of what we're trying to do on the defense side of things, is provide modular power plants that have a much higher uptime with a much lower sustaining supply chain than the alternatives do, so that we can power our operational assets that exist here in the homeland.

• 1:42:42John Coogan?

  So what are the, what's the shape of the reactor that you want to build? The size, the scale, the differentiators? Like what goes into actually delivering a product here?

• 1:42:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, absolutely. So it's a graphite moderated design. We use a fuel form factor called Tris-O. So think of tiny spheres, particles of uranium encapsulated in silicon carbide, pressed into graphite compacts stacked in the channels inside of graphite. Our reactors are cooled with heat pipes. So we actually vaporize sodium that travels the length of the pipe, then condenses into a wick structure to return that working fluid. So it's a totally passive way to move heat inside of a nuclear reactor. Heat pipes, copper water heat pipes are also in your iPhone. They were actually invented at Los Alamos National Lab for space nuclear power applications in 1963.

• 1:43:29Speaker 07

  The reactor itself can fit on a truck bed alongside of the power conversion system and then can be installed at the site.

• 1:43:36John Coogan?

  And then how far along are you in the actual development? I know this stuff, it's not an overnight project. There's a lot that goes into being, yeah, going critical, basically.

• 1:43:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, first thing I would say is North Star for us, North Star for any company is to have an electricity producing system at a customer site. Customers paying for it.

• 1:44:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:44:01Speaker 07

  And all of our work with Idaho National Lab, you know, we view this as a sequence of multiple test reactors to get to that point. We've been at this for three years now. We actually started developing our test facility at Idaho National Lab back in 2024 so that we can be ready for this moment. Funnily enough, you know, just kind of brilliant rhyme of history here. The last time a nuclear reactor was tested in that building in Idaho was actually this picture right behind me.

• 1:44:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:28Speaker 07

  So this is the Army's, the Army's ML1 reactor that was built in 1967 here in Los Angeles. Now, you know, call it a half century or so later, we've built a reactor here in Los Angeles that we're now going to go test in that same building. You asked about Dome, it's not actually Dome, so it's very nearby. So our facility is called RACE, the Reactors and Critical Experiments Facility. Formerly known as MFC 793. We invested a couple million of our own dollars in that building, starting in 24 and 25. So that we would have a facility ready to go by the time that we were ready to test a reactor.

• 1:45:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:04Speaker 07

  But, you know, the broader kind of tech maturation strategy here is we actually tested an electrically heated prototype at full thermal power back in 2025. Now what we're trying to do with this criticality test in 2026 is validate the performance of our control systems. As well as prove out all of the simulations that govern the design, especially in the nuclear data side.

• 1:45:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:27Speaker 07

  We're really getting a lot of ancillary benefits from this test, though. So it's been a great opportunity to debug the supply chain and, you know, performance and lead times of our suppliers. Also been great opportunity for us just to learn this regulatory pathway. So, you know, we're obviously doing this for the first time. But much bigger than that, this is actually the first time for the country that a reactor, a new reactor, has been authorized under DOE standards. The last time a new reactor was built at a DOE site of a new design was before this regulatory pathway actually existed. So it's a historic first in that way. We've learned a lot from it. And now when we do subsequent reactors, you know, we know a lot more about how to get through this regulatory pathway efficiently.

• 1:46:08Speaker 07

  So maybe just to summarize that, you know, full thermal power in 2025, we're going to be making neutrons this year in 2026, and then electrons in 2027 with an electricity-producing reactor.

• 1:46:20John Coogan?

  What's the, what's your background? I feel like nuclear does not have a very clear pipeline of, oh, you worked at the, you're part of the SpaceX mafia that went into nuclear. Some people in nuclear came from SpaceX, but there isn't a, there isn't a clear lineage for everyone. What was your path into the nuclear industry?

• 1:46:37Speaker 07

  Yeah, so engineer by background, studied systems engineering and physics, like lifelong interest in nuclear power. I like to joke that the first, like, real job I had where, you know, I wasn't working on, you know, working at fast food, working on the family farm. First thing I ever did was work at the Newport Shipyard where we build, build and construct nuclear submarines. Spent some time at different startups, you know, worked on everything from artificial intelligence, machine learning, embedded systems, you know, product companies. But the other unique thing in my background is I was actually in the White House in OMB in 2017, 2018.

• 1:47:14John Coogan?

  Got it. Yeah, talk more about the regulatory approval. Maybe map out exactly the path because there's clearly like a series of steps here, like what happened most recently?

• 1:47:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, so this final regulatory approval that we received is called the DSA, Documented Safety Analysis. And, you know, really what that is doing, the approach to licensing a reactor with the Department of Energy is You establish a safety basis, right? These are the fundamentals, design characteristics, but also subsystems that perform some fundamental safety function to ensure the public is safe. And you prove that through analysis, you prove that through testing, and your documentation outlines that, right? And what the DSA does that's different than the preliminary approvals is it's actually based on what is as built, right? So at time of final design review, they consider that 90% design complete. The other 10% is what you actually deliver and build,

• 1:48:08Speaker 07

  and that's what goes into approving the DSA. So you can think of it simply as the final regulatory approval. From here on out, what comes next is we're going to get into what's called readiness, operational readiness, where we start working with our operators on the documentation and procedures, do final test checkouts. And then, once we get approval from the Department of Energy on that, then we can actually start putting fuel in the reactor and then eventually start it up and go critical.

• 1:48:34John Coogan?

  Talk to me about the opportunity for nuclear in space. I know that there's some trade-offs around, like Mars might be less suitable for solar, but that seems very far away. Is there a more near-term vision for nuclear in space?

• 1:48:51Speaker 07

  So just as of two weeks ago, Administrator Jared Isaacman at NASA actually announced that NASA's Ignition Day, that they want to fly a nuclear-powered spacecraft to the moon in December of 2028. Because, you know, they recognize the immense value of this technology to expand humanity's presence, both in Earth orbit, but beyond as well. You're absolutely right. So the further you get from Earth, beyond 1 AU, solar efficiency actually declines exponentially with respect to distance. So you can imagine your solar panels just ballooning in size as you get further and further to make an equivalent amount of power. But even beyond that... You know, we believe the market for nuclear power in space will be much larger and move a lot faster than I think a lot of people think.

• 1:49:36Speaker 07

  The overwhelming thing that will drive that is space is now a warfighting domain, right? And, you know, as we seek to employ higher powered assets in Earth orbit, in SIS lunar space, there's pretty clear physics there that a nuclear power system scales more favorably on a size and weight basis compared to solar panels, right? So, you know, you want to do 100 kilowatt spacecraft, those solar panels would be, you know, like the size of a football field. You could do a similarly sized nuclear powered spacecraft and actually fit it on a Falcon 9.

• 1:50:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. Okay, so yeah, nuclear powered spacecraft, you're fitting on a Falcon 9, that means that the primary stage is still traditional, but then, once you get to low Earth orbit, the nuclear power is kicking in, like, what is actually creating thrust with a nuclear powered spacecraft?

• 1:50:26Speaker 07

  Yeah, so, so, great question. So, there's really two paradigms here. So, there's nuclear thermal propulsion.

• 1:50:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:50:32Speaker 07

  You can think of that as, imagine it like a traditional rocket.

• 1:50:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:35Speaker 07

  Where you're circulating your propellant through a nuclear reactor to heat it up and then exhaust it and create thrust. We're not focused on that, so we don't work on that, but there's, there's a great history in that technology. What we're more so focused on is nuclear, nuclear electric power and propulsion. And so, in NEP, essentially what that is, is you're using a nuclear reactor to create electricity, and then you're powering electric propulsion thrusters, right? So, it's an alternative to solar electric propulsion, but, you know, really it's about power density, right? You could have a much larger onboard power source than what you could get from the equivalent size and weight of solar panels.

• 1:51:13John Coogan?

  How, how do you convert electricity to thrust in space? I feel like with a plane, I understand you spin a propeller, like, that seems pretty intuitive to me. With a car, you spin the wheels, so there's traction, but if there's no friction in a vacuum, how are you creating thrust from electricity?

• 1:51:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, so you're ionizing a propellant and then shooting it out of thrusters. And so it's typically electric propulsion, it's very small amounts of thrust. Right? So it's, you know, imagine a Starlink satellite, how it would reorient itself.

• 1:51:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, sure. Okay, so there's still propellant onboard that is transferring the mass that's creating the thrust. Got it. Okay.

• 1:51:48Speaker 07

  Yeah, generally xenon or krypton is what you see.

• 1:51:50John Coogan?

  Xenon or krypton, interesting.

• 1:51:52Speaker 07

  Very cool.

• 1:51:53John Coogan?

  Um, zooming out, like, uh, what, uh, what is underpinning just the broader nuclear boom? We've talked to a lot of different nuclear companies. It feels like we were in the real doldrums of nuclear startups and nuclear opportunities. There were a couple, uh, sort of false starts a few decades ago and a decade ago. But it really feels like there's a number of companies that are working really well. Like, what is the critical unlock? Is it technology or regulatory or both? What's going on?

• 1:52:23Speaker 07

  I think it's really all of the above. I mean, I think it's a confluence of things. So, um, you know, the president signed a series of executive orders in May of last year that really created the streamlined regulatory path that we're utilizing. Uh, one thing I would say is, you know, in the history of our company, regulation has actually never been a key bottleneck for us. It's always been about, um, you know, engineering rigor, uh, getting our safety basis in order, you know, creating the deliverables such that we could argue our safety case empirically. And whenever we've done a great job of that, we've been able to move really swiftly through these approvals.

• 1:52:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:58Speaker 07

  Um, but I think what you're also seeing now is there's just a new need for this capability, right? Uh, you know, we had this period in the sixties and seventies where, you know, if you go back in the 1960s, like R and D funding as a percentage of federal overlays was like double-digit percentages. Uh, you know, we had like the central banking era of Paul Volcker, where federal funds rates was like 20% or higher. Uh, we had this like austerity period where actually what we did is we cut a lot of R and D funding. Nuclear particularly suffered from that, right? And we never really, I would, I would make the argument that we did not have a true nuclear private sector at the time when those changes were made. Very different than the approach that the French took where they went all in on nuclear

• 1:53:39Speaker 07

  in the same time period because they saw it as a matter of energy sovereignty for them, right? Um, then, you know, we had this kind of comeback in the, in the, in the second Bush administration, so George W. Bush, uh, that's when the AP 1000 was developed. And then what happened is you had fracking, right? So you just had really cheap natural gas that I think really competed with the need for new large-scale nuclear. But now we're in this world where energy is the bottleneck to almost everything, right? We have this huge capex built out for artificial intelligence, need to win the AI race. Our ability to do that is limited by energy. Reindustrialization broadly, I would say, energy is the bottleneck to that, right? People are not talking enough about if we want to bring all of these factories back

• 1:54:22Speaker 07

  to the US, we want to start making all of these critical technologies here again, we're going to need a lot more electricity to do that. So that's part of it. And then what we do, really focused on national security. We want to be a multi-product company. Like, one day, we want to put nuclear power on the grid, we want to put it in space, we want to do small reactors on military bases. But we're really starting there. And the national security matter that I think really motivates this new need for energy resilience is increasingly the assets that we rely on to project power on the other side of the world, to generate warfighting effects. They're here, on our installations, in the homeland, and they depend on the commercial grid, or they depend on commercial civilian diesel supply chains.

• 1:55:04Speaker 07

  And we now have adversaries, I mean, this is relatively new in the last couple of years, we now have adversaries that are totally capable of disrupting both of those. And nuclear power, it's the highest-capacity factor form of energy that we know of, that we have today, when it's mature. And our approach to this is you put multiple small reactors together in a modular bank of systems, a modular power plant, so that you can get really, really high uptime, right? You can refuel offline, you have redundancies. That's by far the best way to do that.

• 1:55:33Jordi Hays?

  What can the American nuclear energy learn from nuclear energy diffusion in China over the last, call it, 30 years?

• 1:55:47Speaker 07

  I think there's a lot of answers to that question. I think, you know, to me, the particular one is the benefit of sustained coordinated national willpower, right? I think, you know, we're finally in an era where we're going to have this in this country when it comes to nuclear power. Like, private capital is aligned on this, from everything, from venture capital up to the banks. This is now a bipartisan issue, right? So even if you go back in time three years ago, like, people thought we were crazy when we were trying to start this company because, you know, nuclear was very much out of the zeitgeist at the time. But from where we sit today, you know, I'm on the Hill three to four days a month. If I don't do my homework ahead of time, it's hard for me to even tell you if I'm talking to a Democrat or Republican

• 1:56:32Speaker 07

  because they all want the same things, right? Reindustrialization, clean energy, American jobs, high skilled labor force, national security. All of it aligns in that way.

• 1:56:43Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing to hear. A little white pill to end the week.

• 1:56:47John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congrats on the approval.

• 1:56:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, congrats to the whole team on the milestone and hope to have you back on soon.

• 1:56:55John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:56:56Speaker 07

  Yeah, thank you so much. Nice meeting you guys. Thanks for having me.

• 1:56:58John Coogan?

  Nice meeting you. Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon. Without further ado, we have Andy Dunn. He's the founder of Pi, the Novos. He's the author of Burn Rate, and he's here with us. And the TV Pen Ultra, Andy, how are you doing?

• 1:57:12Jordi Hays?

  I'm doing amazing. Happy Friday, guys. Look at that. Look at that cardigan.

• 1:57:16John Coogan?

  What is it? What happened to that?

• 1:57:18Jordi Hays?

  TVP and green, man. There you go. You're blended in perfectly. Not quite, but like, pretty close. Yeah, you're blended perfectly into the Chyron. It's fantastic.

• 1:57:26John Coogan?

  Uh, should we start with the new app? I want to go back and hear so many war stories. I've followed your career throughout my entire, like, the last 15 years.

• 1:57:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Andy and I were texting yesterday.

• 1:57:38John Coogan?

  Let's kick it off.

• 1:57:38Jordi Hays?

  Pi is the app of the day. Let's start there. Maybe give us the brief history of Pi, how you got to be the app of the day, and then we can go from there.

• 1:57:52Speaker 08

  Look, this one's pretty simple. I was talking to my psychiatrist one day and I told him I was feeling a little bit low. I have a proclivity to depression. I've gone through some ups and downs. Got to write a book about that. And we talk about a lot of things. At some point, he said to me, when's the last time you had dinner with a friend? And I thought about it. This was 2021. We were obviously in the middle of a pandemic and a lot. My wife and I and our young son had just moved from New York to Chicago. And yeah, I think Jordy knows this. My whole world was in Chicago during the Bonobos days. My friends were there. That's where I met my wife. That's where all the Bonobos team was. And I thought when I came back to Chicago, you know what? This is gonna be great. This is my hometown. My parents are here. My sister, who I have a business with, Monica and Andy. This is like a homecoming. And then I realized after a minute, like,

• 1:58:37Speaker 08

  I don't have any friends. Like, it's a hard thing to admit to yourself, but like, I have friends, just none of them live here, right? So then I got curious, because all of a sudden I was like, wait, how do you make friends if you don't want to make lame friends and you don't want to feel lame? Like, how do you put yourself out there? And how do we, how do we solve that problem for people? And that was the beginning of the Pi journey.

• 1:58:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and then take us up to the present.

• 1:59:02Speaker 08

  Yeah, so what it is is-

• 1:59:03Jordi Hays?

  For friends.

• 1:59:04Speaker 08

  It's an app, well, it's evolved. It's an app and an AI agent to build infrastructure for your whole social life. So we want to be the operating system by which you get off your phones and back into real life. So the primary product is an app that is got events that we think you might want to go to, communities that you might want to belong to, and then people that we think you'd want to meet. And that's how it gets going. And then what happens, and maybe you guys are in a place in your lives here where at some point, you actually have a lot of friends, you have a good social life, but what sucks is it's hard to find time to see them. Right? It's like, hard to get out of this rat race to actually prioritize seeing the people that you care about. And so that's where we just launched an AI agent called Pinelope.

• 1:59:47Speaker 08

  And her job is both an iMessage, as well as soon in the app, to help be a, what we call a social life instigator, you know, and chaos coordinator to get you together with the people that you should be spending more time with.

• 2:00:00John Coogan?

  So yeah, what's the actual, uh, like onboarding workflow? We see a lot of people set up Mac minis just to do stuff with iMessage. I imagine that you're handling all of that on, on your end and, uh, and then, you know, do I start by downloading the app or can I text something? Like, what, what's the workflow to actually start getting prompted to do something in my social life?

• 2:00:21Speaker 08

  So there's two ways to do it. The easiest way is to just go on the App Store or Play Store and download the Pie app. And then we can kind of get you going. That's live in Chicago, Austin, San Francisco. We're going live in New York and LA. We got other smaller markets percolating like Columbus and Milwaukee and Atlanta. That's kind of the core way to do it. The second that you can do is just dig into the community on Instagram at Pie. What we're doing now is we're building PieNellope.com. So that's P I E N L O P E dot com. And that enables you to go right into an agentic experience where you don't even have to get the app. Cause there is this tension between, well, we want to build an app that solves a problem, but also no one wants to download another F and app.

• 2:01:04Josh Reeves?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:04Speaker 08

  So we wanted to create an easier on-ramp for people that want to just have the experience in iMessage. And it's like a super cool Wild West world right that right now with how do you manage that? And do that the right way from an infrastructure and a compliance perspective.

• 2:01:17Josh Reeves?

  Sure.

• 2:01:17Jordi Hays?

  How do you, how do you know if, if the app is working in a specific market? What are, what are the indicators? What are you, what do you, you know, what do you see in the data that says like, hey, okay, we have, we have some product market fit in a place like, you know, Chicago or Austin, or the other cities that you've listed?

• 2:01:36Speaker 08

  Yeah. So I mean, you guys know the cold start problem, extremely difficult. Jordy, I know you've played in consumer, John as well. Our cold start problem solution is called the Pie Creator Club. It's at piecreatorclub.com. And what we try to do is attract and incentivize people who love to bring other people together. Right? We like to say we're hunting for gatherers. These are the community hosts, the community builders who host run clubs and book clubs and NBA watch parties and trivia nights who get folks out there. And we want to incentivize them. Those are our Airbnb super hosts. Those are our Uber drivers. Those are our Wikipedia article writers. And we can pay those folks up to $3,500 a month via a rewards program to light up plans and events on Pie.

• 2:02:20Speaker 08

  And then they typically distribute those plans through their social media followings. We've got about 800 of those community builders on our app right now. And in any given market, once we have 50, it starts to percolate.

• 2:02:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, how important is going individual market by individual market? Because I feel like one of the unique unlocks of AI is that you can probably go and scrape a bunch of data together, transform it and do a lot of the grunt work a lot faster. But at the same time, like actually getting to real critical mass and putting extra care into it and attention into a launch is probably also very important.

• 2:02:55Speaker 08

  Totally. One of the tabs we just launched on the app is called the People to Meet tab. It's right in the middle and what it enables you to do is kind of flick through and see who's out there and go into their profiles and have it not just be about how they look, but about what are they into, what are their interests, what kinds of events have they gone to, which kinds of events are they going to? And then you can actually star people right on the app and we hope to build a matching experience that is the first of its kind where it's across friendship, platonic, romantic and group. And get those people to not have to figure out a plan to get together, but actually just join an event on the product. Back to your question, we think you need about 1,000 people on that People tab, about 50 events on the Events tab.

• 2:03:39Speaker 08

  And that's when we start to see percolation in social density and geographic density start to get momentum.

• 2:03:45John Coogan?

  How big is the team today?

• 2:03:47Speaker 08

  It's funny you ask that. Well, at one point the team was 23 and in the age of AI, it's now 12 and we've seen what you guys are talking about, which is just a massive collapse of product design, engineering and even go to market where people can do so much more. And so, you know, we didn't have a big moment, you know, we're not Block, we're not Jack Dorsey saying, you know, we're doing some big restructuring. But as you guys know, with startups, things evolve, the team turns over, some people go to do other things. We've got this thing in Chicago, we call the Pipehouse Mafia, where I'll back people that start companies. We're trying to build the tech company Chicago deserves. We've never had $100 billion enterprise value tech company built here in Chicago and you need one of those, as you guys know, to change the market.

• 2:04:29Speaker 08

  So we're, we're just so, we're having so much fun right now because we've gotten leaner and removed more quickly.

• 2:04:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. What is the shape of the Chicago tech market broadly?

• 2:04:41Speaker 08

  It's bad.

• 2:04:42John Coogan?

  It's bad.

• 2:04:42Speaker 08

  It's really bad, guys. The problem in Chicago is two things.

• 2:04:47Jordi Hays?

  You might be the first person to call in from Chicago.

• 2:04:51John Coogan?

  It is rare, but it's such an interesting. I've lived there. It's a beautiful city. It's amazing.

• 2:04:56Speaker 08

  It's a beautiful city.

• 2:04:57John Coogan?

  It has youth in Chicago, Northwestern. There's good schools. I'm sure that a lot of big tech companies have offices there. So there's a pipeline of established talent. It has a lot of the trappings of it could be, you know, pretty quickly at an Austin or Miami or, you know, any of these other LA, like these tiers. But it feels like it hasn't had its, like, maybe it just hasn't been marketed, but it sounds like there's also just a lot less going on there.

• 2:05:22Speaker 08

  I mean, we have some cool things happening, right? SpotHero was just acquired by Uber.

• 2:05:26John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:05:26Speaker 08

  It's a quantum computing center here. We have Tempest that just went public, Tegus that just had a great outcome. But the market in general sucks, and I'll tell you why. There's a cultural factor, set of factors, and then there's an ecosystem set of factors. And they're both navigable, by the way. That's why I'm here. That's why I'm building Pi here. My wife is building a hardware company called Kideya, Monica and Andy, which I mentioned, because we want to help be the change that we're looking for. The problem in the ecosystem here is twofold. There's no angels. There's no community of people throwing around 10, 25, 50, $100,000 checks. I mean, there's a few.

• 2:06:03Speaker 08

  Like, we've got some Mike Gamson-type people here. There's some folks who do it, but it's very hard to get that first 250,000 to 2 million.

• 2:06:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the angels are so influential because, you know, if a great founder meets an angel on the West Coast or the East Coast, and they're going to say like, hey, you seem smart. I love your idea, but you're absolutely, I'd love to invest, but I think you're kind of crazy to not move to SF or move to New York or et cetera. So that...

• 2:06:30John Coogan?

  That there's

• 2:06:31Speaker 08

  Exactly.

• 2:06:32John Coogan?

  A lock.

• 2:06:32Speaker 08

  There's like a talent, talent drain that goes coastal. The second thing is the venture capital ecosystem here puts most of its money in coastal companies. So I heard something recently is a woman in Desiree Vargas-Rigley, who backed her fund. She's doing cool things and she has a fund of funds. Ninety percent of the alpha for Chicago-based venture firms is created on the coasts.

• 2:06:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:54Speaker 08

  Right? And ninety percent of the capital that the leading Chicago companies raise is from the coasts.

• 2:06:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:00Speaker 08

  So when I was raising the pie series A, look, we, we didn't have the best metrics. Maybe we didn't even deserve a series A yet, right? But we were inspired by what we could do. We had a little bit of a kernel of momentum. We had an amazing team, you know, there's just enough talent density here. That's not the issue. You know, we recruited a great VP Engineering Hunter Husar, who's from Grindr. We've got an awesome, you know, kind of VP Ops Finance Strategy. She's from Wintrust, Bailey Moore. We've got the talent here, but it's very hard to get funded. So I did fifteen pitches in Chicago because I wanted to raise our series A from a Chicago venture fund. I got fifteen no's. I did one pitch on the West Coast with Kirsten Green from Forerunner and we got a term sheet within forty-eight hours.

• 2:07:45Speaker 08

  So that just illustrates that, you know, some of the challenges with Chicago. And I, we believe at Pi, we can be part of the solution because you've got to build a hundred billion dollar, or at least a fifty billion dollar company to create that ecosystem of angels and to create a training ground for the entrepreneurs of, you know, the next decade in Chicago.

• 2:08:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's the biggest lesson you're carrying from Bonobos over to Pi?

• 2:08:10Speaker 08

  I mean, the main one is it just doesn't matter that much. You know, I don't know exactly how to describe that to you guys in a way that will make sense because obviously we're so passionate about what we do.

• 2:08:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:19Speaker 08

  But having gone through the experience of, you know, being hospitalized in the psych ward at Bellevue, you know, when we were nine years into building Bonobos.

• 2:08:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:26Speaker 08

  The Cliff Notes on my story were we had over a hundred million of revenue. We had six hundred plus employees and I ended up in the psych ward of Bellevue because I had untreated and unmedicated bipolar type one. And it felt like the Whole world was falling apart. You know, I was losing my sanity. I might lose my job. I might lose the woman that, you know, the first great relationship that I'd ever been in in my life. Now, my wife, Manuel Zonin sign. And I came out finally ready to deal with it, thanks to the amazing work that they do at that hospital. And rather than walking to the loving arms of my family, I walked into four NYPD officers who booked me and charged me with felony and misdemeanor assault. And then I spent the next, you know, 12 hours in jail.

• 2:09:10Speaker 08

  And I remember thinking when I was in jail, because at this point, I was now sane. I was medicated. I was ready to deal with this issue. None of this stuff matters that we think matters relative to our health, our freedom and our liberties. And so I have that perspective now that I care so much about this. And I know my health and your health and family and friends and loved ones matter so much more than building startups.

• 2:09:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's an inspiring message. What have you actually done? Who have you met through Pi?

• 2:09:44Speaker 08

  I've met some amazing people. One of the, one of the relationships I'm the most excited about right now is with woman named Nadia Okamoto. She just joined us as one of our creators. She's got a run club out of New York called Zoomies.

• 2:09:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:56Speaker 08

  Uh, previously she was, she's been a part of a company called August that she was co-founder of, a period care company. And I just, she got over four million followers on TikTok, million, million on Instagram. What I love seeing is right now is people who are massive content creators and social, um, social media influencers pointing all of their following at in-person community.

• 2:10:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:10:19Speaker 08

  Because the only way to get off these phones is through our phones. The people that were influential and hooking us on social media are very well positioned to say, guys, let's get out. Let's go for a run on Saturday morning for five miles or eight miles. We're gonna go slow. We're gonna talk. So I'm so inspired by our creators. We love, we love seeing, um, the spirit around the country. It's, it's a huge movement largely driven by Gen Z to, to, who have realized that it is the damn phones.

• 2:10:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:49Jordi Hays?

  Do you think, uh, do you think the? Like, do you think you have a kind of a window here because, you know, maybe some of the digital platforms would rather we not meet up in person? They're like, actually, it'd be great if Saturday you just, you know, take that six hours, you were gonna go to the Run Club and go do this other thing, and you should just doom scroll. Seriously, it'll be good. It'll be good for you. And I feel like that kind of creates creates an opportunity where, you know, a new platform can can emerge that that is not, you know, trying to deliver as many ad impressions as as physically possible.

• 2:11:28Speaker 08

  Totally. I was just reading this story last night in The New Yorker about the lawsuit that was, you know, that came up. I think someone won $6 million in damages from having been addicted to social media. You guys have probably talked about it.

• 2:11:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:39Speaker 08

  Look, I think there's room for the next great American rooted social network right now, and I believe three things about it. Number one, it's going to be AI native. Number two, it's going to be focused on actual friends and your IRL local life, your in real life existence. And then thirdly, that that company is going to be called Pi.

• 2:12:00John Coogan?

  I love it. Well, congratulations. Thank you for taking the time to come shower with us. Have a great weekend.

• 2:12:08Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations. Congratulations to the team on the on the milestone yesterday.

• 2:12:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

• 2:12:13Jordi Hays?

  Very, very cool.

• 2:12:14Speaker 08

  Thanks.

• 2:12:14Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, Andy.

• 2:12:15John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Josh Reeve from Gusto. He's the co-founder and CEO here to break down their acquisition of Mozy to expand into full stack compliance. Josh, how are you doing?

• 2:12:25Josh Reeves?

  There it is. It's been too long. Great to see you. Good to see you guys. This time, this time on Zoom, last time in person.

• 2:12:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, congratulations on the acquisition. Walk me through the problem that you were trying to solve, and then I want to hear about the process and how you met this team, or how, what you're planning to do once you bring these in. But first, sort of describe the problem, because I'm sure you were feeling it among customers beforehand.

• 2:12:53Josh Reeves?

  Yeah, so the key word here is compliance. No one likes compliance. There's a lot of compliance out there. Local, state, federal. And we've been tackling many forms of it at Gusto from the early days. If I were to case study, any small business owner knows this. You hire in a state. You have to go register with that state. You have to go, obviously, file specific documents, materials. Once you're registered, there's now filing requirements. There's entity management requirements. You might get notices. So what we're doing here is basically creating a end-to-end compliance solution. Compliance, basically, way to get stuff done for a small business so they don't have to do it themselves anymore.

• 2:13:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this was a shocking thing for me as a young entrepreneur on Gusto. Getting like a physical piece of mail from a state that I had never visited. And it was always because we had hired some, like, you know, paid some contractor one time for this tiny thing. And now suddenly it's created hours of work. I have to like call or send mail back.

• 2:13:57John Coogan?

  And everything else is basically zero minutes a week for the executive team. When you're on Gusto and you're set up. And maybe during onboarding, you have to go through a quick flow to get someone on. But most of the time, it's just nothing, which is amazing. And then when the compliance stuff comes up, it's always like, oh, what happened? They moved, you know, all this stuff. But then, talk to me about the solution. Like, how does this actually get fixed? How does it get, like, how quick can it be?

• 2:14:26Josh Reeves?

  From a product lens, like, I'll give some examples. So anyone that's used Gusto before knows state tax registration has been a pain point. We will have a end-to-end, just comprehensive state tax registration offering that gets it done at the quality and standard you would expect. You mentioned notices. No one likes to receive notices. Even if we do a good job helping you with them, it'd be better if you just didn't get them in the first place. So the ability for Gusto to be a registered agent, to have that mail actually come to us directly. So the business owner doesn't even have to think about or consider the notice in the first place. We think is going to be really, really valuable and helpful as well.

• 2:15:01John Coogan?

  So I'm sure you're experiencing the productivity gains of AI coding and coding agents. What stuck out to you about this is the time to buy as opposed to the time to build?

• 2:15:18Josh Reeves?

  So we're doing both. I mean, I pinch myself because I tell the team and we talk to each other, this is the most incredible time in our lives to be a builder. And I wake up every day with like just giddiness of like what we can go create and what you can basically pull forward on your roadmap because now it can get done with high quality much, much faster. So lots of first party on the way. Mozy, we had known the team for a long time. We actually were an early investor in the company. We have partnered for a long time as well. And it really came down to the team, the technology, the product, all of it's coming over to Gusto and the chance to bring it to small businesses earlier faster. But yeah, stay tuned. Lots more first party builds coming from us as well.

• 2:15:59John Coogan?

  Amazing. What are you seeing on the small business hiring side? Generally, we talked to your chief economist about some of the trends and I'm wondering how you're processing and what you're expecting to happen with the shape of your of your business and just the small business community generally.

• 2:16:16Josh Reeves?

  So reminder to folks, there's more dentist offices in the US than tech startups. So when we say small business, we're talking mainstream small business here. And yeah, some puts and takes. One of the things that also got us really excited about the pain point we're able to help with Mozy, there's a lot more new businesses getting created and that's exciting. I think some of that's driven by folks getting inspired or feeling like they can take the plunge for the first time because of the tooling that's now available. Some of it, I think, is also affected by a lot of the job dislocation underway. And the happy path I look forward to is a lot more folks starting businesses for the first time because they realize they now can go do that successfully and actually make a go of it and be accomplishing their goals. So we're seeing more businesses getting started.

• 2:17:00Josh Reeves?

  On the flip side, hiring within not just small businesses, but from talking to lots of bigger companies, hiring across the board is not as robust as it has been historically. So company growth, if a company might have historically grown from five to seven employees, maybe now it's growing from five to six. So there's an offset there. Again, I think tied to some of the productivity gains and some of the things that people can go do now with these different AI technologies.

• 2:17:25John Coogan?

  How have you been processing the SaaS apocalypse? Like, when I think about the last thing that would get vibe-coded, it would probably be a payroll system for a dentist's office. But how have you been grappling with this idea that just the instantiation?

• 2:17:41Jordi Hays?

  As soon as we get rid of our physical onboarding forms and our fax machines, we're gonna vibe-code.

• 2:17:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, every time I go to the dentist's office, I'm like, oh, we're not even on, you know, like SaaS at all in many ways. And there's still a lot of paper and pen going around.

• 2:17:57Josh Reeves?

  I mean, the number one thing a dentist should do, right, is be working in your mouth.

• 2:18:00John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:18:00Josh Reeves?

  Because that's what they're actually best at. I'd say, we talk a lot about offense, defense. Like, the offense side is we can go deliver a lot more product functionalities, solve a lot more pain points for small businesses, make the life of a small business owner easier, better, faster than ever before. That excites us. I think from a SaaS apocalypse lens, Gustav has never been a pure software company. In my mind, if you want to oversimplify, there's pure software, and then there's companies that do actions for you. So from day one, Gustav does the filing, says we did it correctly, and if there's a mistake, we'll go fix it. So we've always kind of had this mindset of, we'll take five of the 20 hats off your head and be responsible for it. So now we can, you know, keep being responsible like we've always been.

• 2:18:44Josh Reeves?

  That pain point has always existed. It exists with AI. And the small business owner doesn't want to be the one responsible to make sure it's done accurately. And from what we can tell, the foundation model providers still also want to be the one liable and responsible for it to be done accurately. So we have a chance now to be where our customers are, be inside ChatGPT, be inside Claude, be inside Slack, be even easier and more accessible to them, and then still do these really important jobs for them.

• 2:19:11John Coogan?

  Can you actually contextualize the size of the per-employee annual compliance cost? And then try and break it down for me, because the number, when I read it, seems so high. I have, I'm having trouble wrapping my head around, like, where this is actually getting sliced up, where the dollars are actually flowing.

• 2:19:31Josh Reeves?

  So probably we have to follow up on that one. I mean, I'd say there are many, many drivers for it. One of them is a little bit how the US was formed. So this is more like 50 countries than 50 states in many ways. And so you have not just state and federal that are usually wildly not in sync in creating their own versions of many different forms and requirements, but also county and local that actually have lots of opinions as well. So in San Francisco, for example, where I'm based, you hire a new employee, you have nine different taxes, you have multiple different jurisdictions. If you hire, you need to report to the EDD. This is a form that's specific to making sure if someone, let's say, has garnishments

• 2:20:13Josh Reeves?

  on their wages due to like childcare payments, it gets pulled out from their wage on time. So there's just lots of different programs and activities that connect to employment. And again, if you're not using a partner for this, it means the business owner and the employer on their own having to figure it out.

• 2:20:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, so when I'm contextualizing that $14,700 per employee cost, that's not just filing fees and paying and processing this, any actual fees associated with compliance. It's also the burden on the HR organization broadly. Is that right?

• 2:20:48Josh Reeves?

  Yeah, there's the time investment that could be spent elsewhere. There's the fines and penalties. There's the follow-up headache and hassle involved. And yeah, all that adds up.

• 2:20:58John Coogan?

  Okay. Well.

• 2:20:59Jordi Hays?

  What habits do you have as a CEO today that you wish you had a decade ago?

• 2:21:06Josh Reeves?

  Oh, good question. Let's see.

• 2:21:10Josh Reeves?

  I think one thing that shifted for me quite a bit, it could have been tied to having children. It could have been something I wish I did earlier, but I used to like go to bed at 2:00 or 3:00 AM and it was kind of more of the late night schedule. I actually really like waking up at 5:00 AM now, 5:00, 6:00 AM, having multiple hours in the morning of. He just shifts the hours, right? So it's the same couple of hours I would have. He still needs to sleep the same number of hours. But that morning time, I find to be even more productive than some of the nighttime time I had in the past.

• 2:21:35John Coogan?

  No, yeah, it makes a ton of sense. You're, I mean, you're naturally more tired at the end of the day. And so even if you're getting those bonus hours when like maybe the messages aren't coming in at such a rapid clip, better to have those in the morning. A lot of executives feel the same way. Well, thank you so much. Congrats on the acquisition and we'll talk to you soon. Have a great weekend.

• 2:21:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just, with, with, with all this acceleration in software development, I can, I can honestly see, I can, I can see the world where you guys have legitimately hundreds of individual products, some very small, maybe some built by third party.

• 2:22:11John Coogan?

  And also just way more companies and small businesses on the platform.

• 2:22:14Josh Reeves?

  Yeah, one thing I add, I mean, there's systems of action. Maybe that term catches on, but there's a big difference to me between like systems of just pure software where you're kind of like on a database versus actually doing things on behalf of the customer, taking those hats off their head. And Gus, there's always been a system of action and we're excited to add many, many more actions going forward.

• 2:22:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and you guys are, you guys are like selling the work. Like in some ways you compete with like, there's actual stores, you know, physical places where you can go to run, have someone run payroll.

• 2:22:43John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:22:44Jordi Hays?

  And so the original product.

• 2:22:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:46Jordi Hays?

  This has become a popular VC market, you know, market map type pitch over the last couple of years, but you guys have been doing it for, what is it, 14 years now? So.

• 2:22:57Josh Reeves?

  Yeah, well, one decade plus in, still early. We got, we got decades to go, lots more small businesses to help.

• 2:23:02John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, have a great weekend.

• 2:23:04Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, Josh.

• 2:23:05John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:23:08Josh Reeves?

  Good to see you guys, too.

• 2:23:09John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:23:10Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:23:11John Coogan?

  Is there anything in the timeline that we should review? Because we do have to get out of here soon.

• 2:23:17Jordi Hays?

  Donald Trump says Palantir Technologies, PLTR, has proven to have great warfighting capabilities and equipment. Just ask our enemies.

• 2:23:26John Coogan?

  Did you see?

• 2:23:27Jordi Hays?

  And Jim Cramer says, now we need POTUS to weigh in on CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks.

• 2:23:34John Coogan?

  That's what we need.

• 2:23:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't has has a I don't know if a president has ever posted about a stock ticker.

• 2:23:42John Coogan?

  Hmm, this might be the first one. There's a new benchmark out there for AI models. Kelly Bench, long horizon evaluation for frontier models. Kelly Bench evaluates models within a year long sports betting market, a challenging and highly non stationary environment. Every frontier model they tested loses money. They struggle to design ML strategies, manage risk and adapt as the world changes. Can language models beat the market? Some of them got it appears to get lucky in the beginning and then sort of sell off. You would sort of expect that none of them would be able to outperform necessarily. But if they get really, really creative, I mean, you might you might expect to see outperformance in the future.

• 2:24:24John Coogan?

  I want to dig into more about how this benchmark was implemented because you either need to like hold back all the data or run it for a full year to see because otherwise if it has tools, it can go and just look up the results before you ask it to make a bet on a particular sports team. Anyway.

• 2:24:42Jordi Hays?

  Well, folks, it's been a fun week.

• 2:24:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's been a great week.

• 2:24:46Jordi Hays?

  We hope you have an incredible weekend ahead.

• 2:24:49John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for the newsletter at TVPN.com and we'll see you on Monday at 11 a.m. sharp. Goodbye.