Apple Goes Full Throttle on F1, Meme Stocks Make a Comeback, Amazon's New Wearable AI Device | Christina Cacioppo, Deena Shakir, Davide Asnaghi, Ylan Richard

(01:34) - Apple Goes Full Throttle on F1 (18:43) - Meme Stocks Are Back (37:27) - Amazon's New Wearable AI Device (56:53) - Timeline (01:19:54) - Christina Cacioppo is the founder and CEO of Vanta, a trust management platform that automates security and compliance processes for businesses. She discusses Vanta's recent $150 million Series D funding round, which increased the company's valuation to $4.15 billion, and highlights the platform's expansion into AI-driven features like questionnaire automation and trust centers. Cacioppo also reflects on Vanta's growth from focusing on SOC 2 compliance for startups to becoming a comprehensive security and compliance solution for over 12,000 clients across 58 countries. (01:42:10) - Deena Shakir, a Partner at Lux Capital, invests in transformative technologies across sectors such as women's health, digital health infrastructure, health equity, foodtech, and fintech. In the conversation, she discusses the evolving landscape of AI in healthcare, highlighting the dual trends of cost-effective company startups enabled by AI and the substantial funding required for infrastructure-intensive ventures. She emphasizes the importance of AI applications beyond medical scribes, such as in clinical trials and drug development, and notes the increasing adoption of AI by major healthcare players, underscoring the necessity for startups to offer innovative, defensible, and transformative solutions. (02:03:56) - Davide Asnaghi, co-founder and CEO of Diode Computers, discusses how his company leverages AI to automate the design and manufacturing of printed circuit boards (PCBs), aiming to democratize access to high-end PCB design for a wide range of hardware companies. He highlights the challenges in the industry, such as the scarcity of skilled engineers and the reliance on proprietary data, and explains how Diode addresses these by building proprietary datasets and utilizing large language models to generate schematics. Additionally, he announces that Diode has recently raised a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz and plans to expand their manufacturing capabilities to scale production within the United States. (02:14:55) - Ylan Richard, co-founder and CEO of Cala, a French startup that developed fully automated pasta restaurants, discusses his journey of building the company in France and the challenges faced due to structural financing gaps and stringent labor regulations, which ultimately led to the business's closure. He reflects on the lessons learned, emphasizing the importance of lean headquarters operations and strategic financing, and shares his plans to launch a new venture in the United States, aiming to open the first store in New York by mid-next year, with considerations for franchising to scale more efficiently. (02:27:05) - Timeline TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPN. Today is Wednesday, July 23rd, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital.

• 0:11Jordi Hays?

  El capital de capital.

• 0:12John Coogan?

  El capital de capital. Uh, thank you to Restream for powering this stream. We love Restream. Couldn't do the show without them.

• 0:19Jordi Hays?

  Seriously.

• 0:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's amazing. Uh, they're a new partner. If you haven't noticed already, uh, they're in the intro in the first, in the last 30 seconds.

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 0:28John Coogan?

  That little cinematic IMAX treatment. We're having a lot of fun with that.

• 0:32Jordi Hays?

  We realized how dependent we are on them.

• 0:35John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 0:35Jordi Hays?

  We had a small error at one point and we could not run the show.

• 0:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, critical infrastructure.

• 0:41Jordi Hays?

  But one out of a few hundred shows.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:44Jordi Hays?

  And it was fixed quickly. So.

• 0:45John Coogan?

  Um, you know who should get on Restream? Apple and F1. That's the story that we're talking about today. Uh, we've talked about this before. So, uh, F1, fantastic race series.

• 0:58Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 0:58John Coogan?

  We're big fans. Um, but the actual streaming rights to the, to the races has been kind of hotly debated. There was an article in the Journal a while back that they were going to ESPN saying, hey, we want something like $80 million. And, uh, ESPN was like, I don't know if that's worth it. And we were going back and forth.

• 1:19Jordi Hays?

  They wanted something like 200, right?

• 1:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. They wanted a lot. And so, uh, the, the, the stack of, of content to go through is growing. So we will be, we will be thinning out.

• 1:29Jordi Hays?

  The textbook.

• 1:30John Coogan?

  We will be thinning out the guest lineup in the future. Um, but for today, we're going through. Uh, let's kick it off with Ben Thompson. He had some good analysis here and has some, uh, some details from reporting in The Athletic, uh, which is a New York Times property. Um, Formula One is trending towards choosing Apple for its United States broadcasting rights for, for 2026 onwards. The technology company's bid being in the 120 to 150 million dollar range. Market clearing order inbound. It is a market clearing order. Probably will clear. Uh, ESPN has held the rights since 2018, but its current deal is up at the end of the year. The sports media giant's exclusivity negotiation

• 2:09John Coogan?

  period, period expired before February 2025, leading to interest from other broadcasters.

• 2:17Jordi Hays?

  Including Netflix and TVPN.

• 2:19John Coogan?

  Yes, we would love to.

• 2:20Jordi Hays?

  We decided to sit it out.

• 2:22John Coogan?

  ESPN has remained in the mix for US broadcasting rights, though its bid is lower. Apparently ESPN's offer is in the $90 million per year range.

• 2:30Jordi Hays?

  Which is still wild, because this is the US broadcasting rights.

• 2:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:36Jordi Hays?

  And I believe in 2024, Formula One had around 1 million total viewers.

• 2:42John Coogan?

  1.2, 1.3 million race viewers on average per race.

• 2:48Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:50John Coogan?

  But Ben Thompson puts it in a different perspective. He says F1, on the other hand, has a meaningful audience versus MLS, which was averaging around 200,000 viewers per year on linear TV before the Apple deal, and that wasn't growing. So this is six times as big as MLS.

• 3:07Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:09John Coogan?

  Again, I think there's more games than, or more race, more games than races. So it's not exactly Apple to Apple. But every race, but one has seen a year-over-year increase in viewership. So F1's getting more popular. A lot of that's driven by Drive to Survive. And this is the crazy thing, given when races are televised, usually early Sunday morning, and the fact that they aren't promoted by ESPN in any meaningful sense. So it's not like you're getting the Pat McAfee Show talking about, oh, you gotta tune in. There's a ton of coverage on ESPN throughout the week. They just kind of show up Sunday morning and people turn on the TV and they schedule it. And so you can, he says you can make the case.

• 3:44Jordi Hays?

  I always like the timing because any, any parents out there, you know, you're certainly not sleeping in on the weekends. The kids wake up.

• 3:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:52Jordi Hays?

  And I find it's, it's some nice background noise or viewing in those early hours.

• 3:59John Coogan?

  For sure. And so he says you can make the case that F1 makes its own audience, which by extension means they will be able to pull people to a streaming service. Basically, F1 fans are strong enough that they'll go search it out. And when I, when I was really getting into F1 after getting into Drive to Survive, I was like, okay, I'm gonna have to subscribe to F1, the app, and like jump through all these hoops.

• 4:20Jordi Hays?

  That's on your phone.

• 4:20John Coogan?

  And it was, yeah, it's, it's like as many hoops as, as UFC, but people still do it.

• 4:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:25John Coogan?

  And there's still, there's still a big debate, but anyway.

• 4:27Jordi Hays?

  And I think Netflix had done the analysis and realized that all of the potential viewers have. F1 were basically already subscribed to Netflix.

• 4:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 4:35Jordi Hays?

  And so it didn't, it was a more difficult kind of equation to make work than someone like an Apple TV, potentially that, that could potentially drive.

• 4:45John Coogan?

  I think someone called it like a streaming backwater or something like that in here. We'll dig into it, but somebody had some not nice things to say about, about Apple TV, although I'm a subscriber and I think it's nice.

• 4:57John Coogan?

  So he says, what makes, this is Ben Thompson writing in Stratechery, what makes this all work is the fact that for F1 races, F1 races are at the bottom of the funnel in terms of fan engagement. F1, at least in the US, has by and large grown its audience via Netflix's drive to survive. Netflix pays F1 a pittance for rights, apparently, single digit millions for that, but it's okay for F1 because the way they ultimately make money is by curt converting Netflix viewers into race fans. So if you're F1, you see that as a marketing channel.

• 5:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and F1 has sponsors at the, at the sort of league level and also the individual teams. All of those sponsors are getting more viewership and engagement through F1. So it's sort of added value to them and they don't have to pay, they're actually making money on, I mean,

• 5:43John Coogan?

  I wonder if the sponsors.

• 5:45Jordi Hays?

  Consequential.

• 5:45John Coogan?

  I wonder, I mean, of course the sponsorships are like such like 360 deals that it's like, you know, car livery and also a whole bunch of other, you know, advertising assets, but I wonder if they broke out, okay, how much lift? How much benefit? How many impressions are we getting from Drive to Survive? Would that be, when you total up all the, all the value add to all the different advertisers from being in Drive to Survive and being seen by people on Netflix, how much would, would that be more than the couple million dollars that Netflix pays for the, for the rights? It might be. It might be. Like, there's a lot of people that, that see ads that are for specific F1 sponsors.

• 6:25Jordi Hays?

  Saudi Aramco, like hundreds of times.

• 6:29John Coogan?

  During Drive to Survive.

• 6:30Jordi Hays?

  Drive to Survive.

• 6:30John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah. It's like pretty valuable ad space. So interesting deal that kind of works both ways and everyone makes money. Anyway, making that model work, however, means actually monetizing the races, which means that it actually, it's actually quite logical to go with the company willing to pay 30 to 60 million dollars more for those rights. You have to capture value somewhere in the funnel. Moreover, you could make the case that many F1 fans aren't necessarily ESPN subscribers. And this is, this is where it gets interesting because the cable bundle is shrinking and. The F1 did this global fan survey, so it's their data, so Ben Thompson's kind of taking it with a grain of salt, but this is from the F1 global fan survey.

• 7:11John Coogan?

  They conducted a study every four years to track how fan engagement is evolving across the sport. They got 100,000 responses from self-identified, highly engaged fans in 186 countries. That's basically all of them. The findings offer a detailed snapshot of the modern fan mindset and show that Formula One is increasingly attracting new, younger, and more female audience with growth in markets such as the United States. Gen Z is helping shape the rhythm of the modern fandom, engaging with the sport more frequently and on a deeper emotional level. Female fans now account for 3 in 4 new fans.

• 7:51Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 7:52John Coogan?

  I would not have predicted that. That's very, very interesting.

• 7:55Jordi Hays?

  Well, the drivers are often chads.

• 7:58John Coogan?

  That's what's driving it?

• 8:00Jordi Hays?

  That could be part of the factor.

• 8:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's also interesting that there are no female drivers on the grid right now. There was Danica Patrick in the NASCAR series for a while, but somehow it's breaking through. Maybe it's through Drive to Survive being more accessible on Netflix, more storylines, pulling people in, and they're just going down that funnel. I don't know.

• 8:20Jordi Hays?

  Well, there's also the WAG industrial complex around the F1 that is aspirational lifestyle.

• 8:28John Coogan?

  Maybe they should do a spin-off of Drive to Survive. Don't they do that with NBA? Isn't there a show about like WAGs or something like that?

• 8:34Jordi Hays?

  Maybe.

• 8:35John Coogan?

  That's kind of informally what the Housewives series is, right? Maybe they should do that. With the largest country share of respondents, fans in the US continue to stand out for their growth, youth, and digital fluency. They over-index on content engagement, sponsor responsiveness, and daily touchpoints, signaling a market where fandom is evolving rapidly and is commercially primed.

• 8:56Jordi Hays?

  Saudi Aramco is like, why? We seem to be getting a lot of female Zoomers.

• 9:03John Coogan?

  Zoomers.

• 9:04Jordi Hays?

  Buying oil. Following our content on Instagram. They seem to be really into this. What's happening?

• 9:10John Coogan?

  Maybe, I don't know. So. So basically Ben Thompson's conclusion from this survey is what are you talking about when you're talking about a younger, more female focused audience? Those don't sound like ESPN subscribers. Those actually sound like Apple TV subscribers or potential Apple TV subscribers. Certainly cord cutters, certainly people who are not going to buy a big cable package and get on ESPN2 and Red Zone and all of that stuff. That's typically the Gen X male, the maybe older millennial male that probably dominates the ESPN audience. And so.

• 9:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's really interesting. Apple kind of has an edge where they can build out a service for some of these more lifestyle oriented sports, some of these alternative, you know, you could imagine them doing things in tennis over time because maybe that's a different audience than like the hardcore ESPN Red Zone subscriber.

• 10:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So he says, I could definitely envision a scenario where F1 not only doesn't suffer from being on a streaming service instead of ESPN, but it actually grows further. So this is an interesting bull case. Given Apple TV's lower price point relative to a standalone ESPN streaming service, much less a cable bundle. What is clear is that this deal certainly makes a lot of sense for Apple than the MLS deal did. If the company can capture all 1.3 million of those current viewers and they are incremental to current Apple TV subscribers, then the company will break even on this deal. Those are very generous assumptions, of course, but not nearly as generous as whatever assumptions drove the company to spend double the money on a sport no one watches, which is MLS.

• 10:50John Coogan?

  So he's taking shots at MLS because there was an interesting quote in here from something else. What was this? It was from The Athletic again, talking about the North American Soccer League general managers. One common theme from general managers, the Apple deal, which is Apple's deal to air MLS, is proving to be too much of a barrier for new fans.

• 11:14Jordi Hays?

  Wait, they want the content to be completely free?

• 11:18John Coogan?

  New fans just don't want it on Apple, apparently, or the GMs don't want to be limited to the Apple audience, apparently. They want to be on ESPN or something.

• 11:25Jordi Hays?

  Oh, okay.

• 11:26John Coogan?

  Apparently. So the GMs say, hey, if we want this to grow, we're the general managers of a bunch of different MLS teams. If we want to grow soccer in America and grow MLS, change the format, change the salary cap.

• 11:39Jordi Hays?

  Why don't they just pivot to football or basketball? Or baseball if they want.

• 11:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's wrong with just throwing around a pigskin? Yeah, change the format. Just turn it into American football.

• 11:49Jordi Hays?

  I have to say, football is one of the best things you can buy under 50 bucks.

• 11:54John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 11:55Jordi Hays?

  Period.

• 11:55John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 11:56Jordi Hays?

  That's non, non, non-food. I mean, I think the value you can get out of a pigskin is absolutely insane.

• 12:01John Coogan?

  Hours of fun.

• 12:02Jordi Hays?

  The return on, the return on pigskin.

• 12:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's fantastic. Uh, he says, allow us to bring more attractive players. I, I, I didn't realize that MLS had a salary cap because I thought they were signing like massive deals with these, uh, like legacy famous, uh.

• 12:17Jordi Hays?

  Who is the player that went to Galaxy?

• 12:19John Coogan?

  Isn't it Messi or something?

• 12:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:21John Coogan?

  Is that right? I don't know. Uh, well, this is how, this is bad because I don't know anything about sports.

• 12:28John Coogan?

  There was somebody who went to Miami, there was someone who went to the LA Galaxy.

• 12:33John Coogan?

  I don't know. Anyway, uh, this GM says.

• 12:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so, so Messi plays for Inter Miami.

• 12:39John Coogan?

  Yep, and it's a huge deal. It's like AI researcher money, remember? That's what we were, uh, how we were comping it. Um, and the GM said, but they also have to end the deal with Apple. It's bad for the fans.

• 12:51Jordi Hays?

  Beckham.

• 12:51John Coogan?

  David Beckham.

• 12:52Jordi Hays?

  Played, uh, in the MLS. And then you have, uh, Zlatan Ibrahimovic as well. So they'll pull in some superstars, uh, but usually towards the end of their runs.

• 13:04John Coogan?

  So, so, so the GMs of the North American Soccer League MLS, they say, I think we have to be on more linear outlets. We have to be on ABC, NBC, Fox, or more regularly, more regularly because I think a lot of people, a lot more people watched our games when we were in that space. I think Apple and the whole streaming thing is really innovative, innovative, but it's probably where things, uh, and it's probably where things will be going, but I don't think MLS is the leader of that. I don't think enough has been put behind the subscription model. You're in a different league when you're, you're a different league when you're a subscription-based league. I don't think the effort has been put in like it should be. It's like selling tickets. You need people out there selling. You can't just hope that people are going to sign up. And so, yeah. Um, interesting.

• 13:48John Coogan?

  The risk for F1 is that the series, which has massive, massive growth, uh, is going. To conscript itself to the streaming backwaters, says Ben Thompson. Just so it can make a few more bucks in the meantime. So that's the risk is that F1 goes and you know, gets stuck in subscription land and no one can just turn on the TV and see it. And the 1.3 million fans don't actually migrate over and they say, I'll just catch the highlights or I'll just watch Drive to Survive on Netflix. Instead of going setting up a new subscription. But if it's truly, F1 truly does have a younger audience, does have a more female audience. They might be, that might be what gets them to turn on Apple TV streaming at least.

• 14:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:27John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 14:28Jordi Hays?

  I still get so confused by all the different cable plans. I watch F1 on YouTube TV, which I guess is through ESPN. I guess that will go away and then I would have to subscribe to Apple so they would get a net new. I actually don't subscribe to Apple TV.

• 14:43John Coogan?

  You don't?

• 14:43Jordi Hays?

  I don't. Not, not for any reason. I just, I never want to, I never want to go through the, I never want to go through the, I just don't watch a lot of television.

• 14:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:51Jordi Hays?

  And I don't want to go through the hassle of like signing up for a new service.

• 14:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. I feel like recently I got a new iPhone and it just like came with Apple TV plus. And I just like clicked the button and didn't unsubscribe and then I've been on that for a while. But speaking of a new iPhone, we have a challenge for Tyler Cosgrove, the intern at TBP. And we will be giving him a second shot on goal, a second kick of the old field goal today.

• 15:15Jordi Hays?

  We bricked his iPhone. He had to upgrade to liquid glass. It's been on its last legs.

• 15:21John Coogan?

  Mark German has some interesting posts today. He said, we won. He likes the new revision to liquid glass, the latest and greatest, which I think you can't get yet. Break it down.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  No, so it's mostly because my storage is so low. So I can't, so you can't revert back.

• 15:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, but you also can't go forward.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  I can't go forward because I would have to like delete basically everything on my phone, which I guess maybe I could basically clear it and then update and then get the stuff back.

• 15:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  But it's, I don't know if that would work.

• 15:47John Coogan?

  Well, you're stuck in purgatory, an iPhone iOS purgatory, liquid glass, a liquid glass house. But today you have the chance to win a new iPhone. If you can get on the leaderboard for Arc AGI V3. We gave Tyler the chance to prove his humanity and defeat the version three of Arc AGI. This is a benchmark for artificial intelligence systems. The whole design is that anyone should be able to do this. Any human should be able to achieve, to beat these puzzles. Tyler beat them. But we got some benchmark time. We gave him a time constraint. Mike Newp, the co-founder of Zapier, who's also the co-founder of Arc AGI

• 16:31John Coogan?

  and behind the lab that's actually pioneering this benchmark, gave me some times. He said 15 minutes would be super hard, 20 minutes would be reasonable, 25 minutes would be very doable. We set it as hard as possible, 15 minutes. Tyler came in around 25. So, but today redemption is on the line. You get a second shot on goal of winning that iPhone. So what do we say? So the new human benchmark, there's a leaderboard where you can go and do these tests as many times as you want. The first time you do it, it's hard because you have to figure out how the games work. But then after that, it becomes kind of a speed run. But the leaderboard is based on efficiency. So how many, how few moves can you make?

• 17:14John Coogan?

  How few actions can you take to solve the puzzles? To be kind of in the top 15, top 20, you have to do it under 600 moves across all three games. And that's the challenge for today. There's no time limit. You can do this as many times as you want. You can reset. You can try and learn all the different patterns and all the different paths.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  We were worried about, so I think originally we were going to do like I had to be in the top 10.

• 17:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  But then I was a little worried about stream snipers.

• 17:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  Coming in and, you know, viewers watching the stream coming in and just going crazy, going ham. And then I would be out of the top 10.

• 17:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Even if I did well.

• 17:50John Coogan?

  So, so try and beat it today. Give us, give us the bench, the, the baseline score of how many moves it takes you the first time you go through. And then try and do it again. Try and become more efficient until you can hopefully cross the 600 move threshold.

• 18:07Speaker 02

  Let's run it.

• 18:07John Coogan?

  Get on, get on the leaderboard. That should be a lot of fun.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  All right.

• 18:10John Coogan?

  And what else is fun? Getting your business on ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more. All in one place. Go to ramp.com to get started.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  Ramp.

• 18:19John Coogan?

  Ramp. You know, other news, meme stocks are completely back.

• 18:24Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for meme stocks.

• 18:26John Coogan?

  Let's give it up for meme stocks. Let's give it up for top signals, baby. We got a bunch of them. So, The Wall Street Journal has an article about Kohl's, the discount retailer, and then Open Door, the high-flying tech company that was co-founded by Keith Roy.

• 18:40Jordi Hays?

  Recently more low-flying.

• 18:42John Coogan?

  Yes, but got out, I think via a SPAC, was... What was Open Door's core business? Basically allowing folks to sell...

• 18:53Jordi Hays?

  Buying and selling homes.

• 18:55John Coogan?

  And the stock's been up and down, and there's been a lot of discussion over, you know, can they take on Zillow?

• 19:03Jordi Hays?

  It's backed at $10, just under $11 a share as of a month ago, it's trading at $0.50.

• 19:11John Coogan?

  Okay, so way down.

• 19:12Jordi Hays?

  So it's still down 79% since the IPO, but more recently, it's up 300% in the past month.

• 19:22John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 19:23Jordi Hays?

  And people seem to be rallying around. I saw people saying, "This is an $82 stock all day, all day." I don't know why. I don't know why that number in particular.

• 19:34John Coogan?

  A lot of DCFs going on in meme stock community.

• 19:37Jordi Hays?

  Vibes-based analysis.

• 19:39John Coogan?

  It's been, it's a proven strategy.

• 19:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:42John Coogan?

  Meming a stock. It happens.

• 19:44Jordi Hays?

  Krispy, Krispy Kreme.

• 19:45John Coogan?

  Is also in the conversation.

• 19:46Jordi Hays?

  With the ticker D-Nut.

• 19:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 19:48Jordi Hays?

  Is up 40% in the past five days. So, yeah, the market, a lot of, lot of opportunity out there, but the thing that's been interesting is that Buco Capital bloke had a post earlier this morning. He said, "Open Door is down 10% after being down 10% yesterday. Krispy Kreme is up 37% after being up 27% yesterday. The meme market is brutal, lightning quick, and moving way too frantically between absolute..."

• 20:21Jordi Hays?

  To ever have another GameStop.

• 20:23John Coogan?

  Dogs.

• 20:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, basically.

• 20:24John Coogan?

  Absolutely, dogs, basically.

• 20:25Jordi Hays?

  So yes, it's interesting, like this eagerness from retail, just investors broadly, to find the next GameStop.

• 20:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:34Jordi Hays?

  Means that there's an incentive, like, you know, if you don't get in before something goes up 300% in a week, there's almost this like, there's almost an incentive to just pick a new company.

• 20:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:48Jordi Hays?

  That has that potential to do something.

• 20:51John Coogan?

  I feel like Krispy Kreme in particular was part of the narrative that like GLP-1s would destroy that business because people's appetites would be suppressed and so junk food markets would sell off and junk food companies wouldn't do as well. But maybe the meme stock retail traders know something. We don't. Anyway, let's go to the Wall Street Journal. Individual investors are once again loading up on a group of unloved stocks and taking to social media to defend them from haters and the short sellers. Meet the cast of the meme stock craze, season two. Let's go. A username HotTicket9440 wrote on a subreddit forum Tuesday as shares of Kohl's, which is down 17% when I took this screenshot.

• 21:35Jordi Hays?

  That's down 15% today.

• 21:36John Coogan?

  The department store chain surged by nearly 40%. Max Payne on the shorts, buy every dip, together we strong, said HotTicket9440. Open has GameStop vibes written all over it. Skip Tradeless wrote Tuesday on X of Open Door Technologies.

• 21:53Jordi Hays?

  Which is down 23%.

• 21:55John Coogan?

  23% today, but it was up yesterday, I guess. Real estate platform, it's a real estate platform, and in all caps, we won't stop until $82, which I don't know how that was picked, but we'll find out.

• 22:08Jordi Hays?

  It's a nice, nice number.

• 22:10John Coogan?

  Shares of Kohl's and Open Door have rocketed highly, higher recently. So have other oddball stocks, including QuantumScape, a maker of batteries for electric vehicles, and Regetti Computing, a quantum computing firm that we talked to Martin Scurely about. Their recent rise and the cult followings they have inspired on social media are reminiscent of GameStop, AMC Entertainment and the original meme stocks that caught fire in the aftermath of the pandemic when interest rates were near zero and the market's rally was underway. What's interesting is like, it was very clear to trace the origins of the meme stock craze. It was like you had, social media had fully arrived. You had low interest rates and then you had stimulus checks going.

• 22:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:53John Coogan?

  And there was a whole cottage industry of influencers and YouTubers who basically they made content around when will the, when will the checks get delivered? When will the stimulus checks get delivered? How will you get, how can you get your stimulus check sooner? People were Googling for that. People were searching for that and you would make a video explaining, okay, they're in the mail now and people were just so interested to know when the money was coming and making sure that it would go to the right address and that they were set up to get it because it's free money. You don't want to just lose out on it. Right? And so people made those videos and then the natural evolution was, well, now that you have the money, what do you do with it? And then they were making financial recommendations, financial advice, right?

• 23:36John Coogan?

  And they made a ton of money and they got really, really big and there were some of them that were making like five videos a day, breaking down, you know, all, every different, what you should do in Tesla, what you should do in GameStop. And so there were like the precursor was very, was, it was a very clear trend and also retail hadn't gotten burned in a while, I feel like. It was just like, like all of the precursors were very clear. And now I don't, I'm having trouble constructing like the narrative around why this is happening again, other than maybe this is just like, it's just going to be cyclical forever. But anyway, their recent rise and the cult followings they inspired on social media are reminiscent of GameStop, the original meme stocks. Younger individual investors congregated on online stock picking forums to share their

• 24:21John Coogan?

  triumphs and losses and found every, not a common enemy in the professional investors who were betting against their favorite stocks. Now with stocks at records, the economy staying resilient and corporate earnings beating expectations, Netflix beat earnings by the way, and we should expect that basically every tech company is going to beat earnings because the dollar is weak. And so, and, and so if you have a large portion of your business outside of the United States, you will see very strong earnings results this quarter.

• 24:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, one unfortunate thing for the meme stock movement is that Besen said this morning that Trump's not going to fire Powell. And so the, there's Jerome Powell out as Fed Chair in 2025 is sitting at 18% now, dropped on that news, so.

• 25:11John Coogan?

  What did it peak at?

• 25:13Jordi Hays?

  It peaked, it peaked at twenty, it was at twenty four.

• 25:17John Coogan?

  So it never went above fifty percent?

• 25:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it was at twenty four percent and it had been rising kind of week over week.

• 25:25John Coogan?

  I mean, that was a crazy, that was a crazy time when the Jerome Powell stuff, it, I didn't see that much real evidence. We talked to Joe Weisenthal at Bloomberg about this a little bit. But it was a full core press by the financial media and the financial institutions to say like, do not do this. I remember opening up the Wall Street Journal one day and like, there were five different articles from, you know, news reports of big bank CEOs commenting on the record, hey, don't fire the Fed chair, let's, there were op-eds saying about the value of Fed independence, that we shouldn't lose this. And then when we talked to Joe Weisenthal, he also said, you know, it's, like, it is somewhat un-American to not have

• 26:08John Coogan?

  an independent Fed. But then, of course, there are people on the other side of the debate. But if Jerome Powell's staying around, what does that mean? Rates stay high and so we should see less froth in meme stocks in theory? I don't know exactly how it works through the system, but, but, you know, like, I would imagine that it's harder to borrow on margin, harder to get more leverage, like, all these different things are functions of interest rates being higher. So you see all these, quote, "You see all these indicators where this is full-blown meme mania," said Brent Kocub, founder of derivatives data firm Spot Gamma. Open Door, which traded under $1 as recently as last week, began to take

• 26:52John Coogan?

  off after social media users rallied around the company. Then hedge fund manager Eric Jackson said in a July 14 post on X that his firm, EMJ Capital, has taken a position in the stock. Open Door notched six consecutive sessions of double-digit percentage gains following his endorsement, and the shares are up 439% in a month. And look at that stock chart. Look at that. It is complete line, just directly up.

• 27:20Jordi Hays?

  And of course, Keith Rebois was absolutely loving it.

• 27:24John Coogan?

  You don't get 100 baggers without upset stomachs. This is Jackson, not Keith. But when you spot one early with almost no one else watching, that's when the magic happens.

• 27:36Jordi Hays?

  And so this was a guy that was doing a little bit of general solicitation as well.

• 27:41John Coogan?

  Oh, is that guy?

• 27:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:42John Coogan?

  I didn't realize that. A 38-year-old educator in California says he began scooping up shares of Open Door last month when it was trading under $1 a share. This is Melvin Beriantos. He says he sold all his shares and put options tied to Open Door over the past week and pocketed a roughly $3,000 profit. Put options defer the right to sell a stock at a set price. Beriantos says he is always on the hunt for beaten-down stocks and has traded meme stocks like AMC and Carvana before, often loading up on thousands of shares before selling them when they rally. He says he plans to sell more Open Door puts if the shares continue tumbling. And shares of Open Door fell 10% to $2.88 on Tuesday. It just happens by luck.

• 28:25John Coogan?

  Kohl's revenue is another example, the embattled trader.

• 28:28Jordi Hays?

  What's your investment strategy?

• 28:29John Coogan?

  It's just luck. Luck. Make your own luck. I feel like there's some great wisdom out there about luck.

• 28:36Jordi Hays?

  I wouldn't, I wouldn't, it doesn't feel like true mania, since this guy's not saying, "I just quit my job to become a day trader."

• 28:44John Coogan?

  Yep. I don't know. It's very, very interesting. So meme stock traders are often talking, are often target companies that are highly shorted, like Kohl's and GameStop before it, hoping to induce a so-called short squeeze. Short sellers bet against companies. If the stock starts rising instead, short sellers may need to buy their shares back to exit from the losing trade, a cycle that creates even more demand and can send shares soaring. The frenzy continued on Wednesday. Shares of GoPro soared 57%, and Krispy Kreme, which you mentioned, jumped 20% despite no clear impetus to buy.

• 29:18Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I love when they just pick an awesome company like GoPro.

• 29:21John Coogan?

  GoPro is a sweet company.

• 29:22Jordi Hays?

  Making cool cameras for doing cool stuff. How can you not love that?

• 29:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. It is interesting because AMC and GameStop were very much nostalgia plays. Whereas Open Door doesn't really fit that template of... I feel like a lot of the GameStop supporters were also supportive of the idea of getting back to a world where you can go and buy a video game from a local store. And that just being a fond childhood memory. I remember as a kid, riding my bike to GameStop to pick up a new N64 game.

• 29:54Jordi Hays?

  I love how there's somebody out there that has that mentality of just buy the stocks of the companies you love. And they're like, "Well, I love Krispy Kreme and I love GoPro because I love doing some cool stuff, filming it and treating myself with some donuts." And they think they're a genius investor, not realizing that.

• 30:15John Coogan?

  And I mean, every once in a while, things do get oversold. There's plenty of examples of companies that have been trading below cash for some reason. And it's a function of various lockups. And then the company goes into wartime mode and rebuilds and does come out of it and builds back up. And that does happen, especially post the end of Zerp, post the SVB crisis. There were a lot of companies that were just truly oversold and they were able to come back, usually because their founder led and the founders stuck it out. So there's lots of options being traded on Open Door, Nvidia, Apple. And Open Door has over 3 million option contracts that changed hands on Monday, almost as much as the S&P 500. Wow.

• 30:59John Coogan?

  With a market capitalization around $2 billion, Open Door is a member of the Russell 2000 Small Cap Index. The fact that more Open Door options traded Monday than contracts tied to Nvidia, the $4 trillion behemoth, was unusual. "That's pretty much unheard of," Heisinger said, founder of options data platform Quant Data. And that trading increase obviously wasn't tied to fundamentals. It was a speculative squeeze. And so, there's a very funny article. In Bloomberg from Matt Levine, he's a fantastic columnist and fantastic writer. This is taking it one step further. We're getting into meme stock treasuries at this point.

• 31:41John Coogan?

  Okay, so he says, well, the other day I wrote, and if you're not already subscribed to Matt Levine over at Bloomberg, you got to get on Money Stuff. It's a great newsletter that you can get in your email inbox if you subscribe to Bloomberg. Well, the other day I wrote that the crypto treasury strategy trade is very good, but saturated. The US stock market will pay $2 for $1 worth of Bitcoin. So lots of companies have acquired Bitcoin to make their stock go up, but the returns are diminishing. Companies have moved on to other cryptocurrencies, Ethereum, Tron, and Solana, and BNB, and Trump Coin, but they are running out of space. And he wrote, if you want to do this trade now, you might want to try something else. Maybe the stock

• 32:23John Coogan?

  market will pay $2 for $1 worth of blank, you think, where what goes in the blank is, one, big and attention getting, two, relatively liquid, so you can buy it incrementally as money comes in and market to market as the price goes up, and three, somewhat crypto adjacent in spirit, but four, not a big, obvious crypto token. And so.

• 32:45Jordi Hays?

  What are, what would be exciting? One of one Ferraris, you know, classics?

• 32:53John Coogan?

  Ferrari treasury?

• 32:54Jordi Hays?

  Ferrari treasury? There's something there, something there.

• 32:59John Coogan?

  That sounds like something we would do as a joke.

• 33:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:02John Coogan?

  And it will actually happen in the market in a few, in a few years. Maybe someone should buy that McLaren collection.

• 33:09Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 33:09John Coogan?

  That's a good treasury.

• 33:11Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 33:11John Coogan?

  You got an original F1.

• 33:13Jordi Hays?

  Trying to think what else is, what else is big and attention getting and relatively liquid?

• 33:19John Coogan?

  I don't know. Well, his example is MicroStrategy. So he says, I feel like someone should try a MicroStrategy treasury strategy. Like, you take over a small public company and you announce that you are raising 200 million to buy MicroStrategy stock. Maybe that would be worth 400 million. And he says, I'm an idiot, but there's one obvious answer, and I'm ashamed that I missed it. Quantum Biopharma found it.

• 33:43Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 33:44John Coogan?

  A biopharmaceutical company dedicated to innovative therapies for neurodegenerative disorders today announced the purchase of 2,000 shares of GameStop. To hold on the company's balance sheet as a strategic investment. This move aligns with Quantum BioPharma's ongoing commitment to combating market corruption and enhancing shareholder value through prudent financial strategies.

• 34:05Jordi Hays?

  Prudent, that's the word.

• 34:06John Coogan?

  And advocacy against manipulative trade practices. Well, whatever your plan is, you're going to need to design a graphic for it. You're going to need to get on Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma Designs helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free at Figma.com.

• 34:22Jordi Hays?

  And speaking of Figma.

• 34:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:23Jordi Hays?

  They hold their coin.

• 34:24John Coogan?

  They do.

• 34:25Jordi Hays?

  On their balance sheet.

• 34:26John Coogan?

  They do. I don't think that's because.

• 34:28Jordi Hays?

  It wasn't, it was, it was more, I think it was more like prudent treasury management. And wanting to be diversified. Dylan's been a big believer in crypto for a long time. But the mark, when the S1 came out and people saw that, everybody was pretty excited.

• 34:43John Coogan?

  I actually held Bitcoin on the balance sheet of my first company when Bitcoin was trading.

• 34:48Jordi Hays?

  Oh, because you guys had to, you were accepting it.

• 34:49John Coogan?

  We were accepting it through Coinbase. We had an integration where you could pay, but it was complicated because customers would pay in Bitcoin and then if the price of Bitcoin went down, they would ask for a refund. And if the price of Bitcoin, or if the price of Bitcoin went up, they would ask for a refund in the Bitcoin that they paid if they, so there was effectively the use your refund policy as a hedge. And so if the price of Bitcoin went down, they could like sell the product and then buy more Bitcoin with it. It was just like very, very messy. But we wound up holding some Bitcoin on the balance sheet, but we eventually sold it way too early, obviously. And we also paid out a bonus to people. I think everyone, everyone at Christmas got five Bitcoins.

• 35:29Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 35:29John Coogan?

  Crazy to think about now. It was like five grand back then. Yeah, brutal. Anyway, let's tell you about Graphite Dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. I wish I had Graphite back in the day. You can go to Graphite Dev to get started.

• 35:47Jordi Hays?

  I had Graphite back in the day.

• 35:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. So.

• 35:52John Coogan?

  Matt Levine goes on, 2,000 shares of GameStop is like $50,000, which isn't going to move the needle, even on a $72 million public company. The stock was down this morning, but good effort.

• 36:02Jordi Hays?

  Good effort.

• 36:03John Coogan?

  So, he says, "The simple way to think about exchange traded funds is that an ETF..."

• 36:09Jordi Hays?

  See, that would be, if they added $50,000 worth of GameStop to their, to their balance sheet, and then the stock moved, that would be true mania in my book, right?

• 36:19John Coogan?

  Oh, totally, totally.

• 36:20Jordi Hays?

  You gotta have the day trader, the educator who's day trading

• 36:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:24Jordi Hays?

  options, quitting his job, and you gotta have adding, you know, $50,000 of GameStop, triple your stock price. To me, that's...

• 36:33John Coogan?

  $50,000 is so little. I mean, what, yeah, what is the, why did they do this? Like, what, what is the, is it just to get a press release, just to get mentioned in Matt Levine's article?

• 36:42Jordi Hays?

  Well, John, it obviously aligns with Quantum BioFirma's ongoing commitment to combating market corruption, enhancing shareholder value through prudent financial strategy and advocacy against manipulative trading practices.

• 36:52John Coogan?

  How does this combat market corruption?

• 36:56Jordi Hays?

  They're making a statement, John.

• 36:57John Coogan?

  They're making a statement, I suppose. Anyway, there's no way, there's no better way to make a statement than getting on Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform, yeah.

• 37:10Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna talk to the CEO. Hitting the gong in just a little bit. Vanta raised some new money that was announced today, and we will have Christina on a little bit later to break it down.

• 37:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, this, this newsletter from Matt Levine is fantastic, but I'll let you go and subscribe and read it. We can move on to the Wall Street Journal, talking about Amazon. Amazon has launched a, a new, or they, they bought an AI wearable. They kind of flew under the radar. This is the B...

• 37:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Had you ever, had you ever heard of this company?

• 37:42John Coogan?

  I hadn't heard of it. I feel like I've heard of most of them, but only the ones that kind of went viral. So the humane pen I followed, the rabbit R1 I followed, the, uh, the friend I followed. And then obviously the Sam Altman, Johnny Ive project I O, which we don't know what it is. Might be a wearable, might be a phone. I don't know. I feel like there's been a lot of conflicting reporting about what they're actually building, but there's a lot of stuff there and there's something coming. And then obviously we've talked to the, the founder of Whoop and other wearables. And I'm aware of Fitbit, that's kind of in the legacy space. Apple has the Apple Watch. Now Amazon has the B A I bracelet that listens to your conversations throughout the day and automatically adds action items from those chats to a to do list.

• 38:27Jordi Hays?

  So it might suggest it'll, it'll create a suggested to do for you. Uh, on their website, it says, go grocery shopping for the week as one. Two is actually on their site says, send a Figma link of the work discussed to the team. And three, establish a daily routine to take a, establish a routine to take a daily walk. And it gives you reflections and insights. And the example they give on the site is you're adapting your parenting approach during wife's absence by creating special moments around routine activities like swim class.

• 39:01Jordi Hays?

  Not a bad reminder for your parent. Turn that swim class into a special moment.

• 39:07John Coogan?

  Do they have a linear integration, the purpose built tool for planning and building products? You can use a system for modern software development.

• 39:13Jordi Hays?

  I would get a B band if.

• 39:14John Coogan?

  To help you streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. That'd be great. They should go to linear.app. Uh, anyway, it's funny. After a decade of Amazon saying Alexa isn't listening to your every word, the company is buying a bracelet that can listen to your every word.

• 39:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh oh.

• 39:29John Coogan?

  Let's go. The tin foil hats on. Uh, B's wearable transcribes all the conversations in your day, including when you talk to yourself. Then it uses artificial intelligence to turn that giant word soup into a searchable history, offering up key events and even to do lists based on your chatter. So. Interesting. Obviously, there's a big pushback on this from privacy perspective. Do you trust Amazon? I tend to trust Amazon on this stuff. The bigger question is like, if I see you wearing one, are you gonna get the glass hole phenomenon? Do you remember that with the Google Glass thing? That seemed, we seemed to have blown past that. So, Google launched Google Glass back in 2012-ish, something like that.

• 40:10John Coogan?

  And it was just a, it was just a pair of glasses with the camera on it. And you could take pictures, very, a direct precursor to the Meta Ray-Bans. Although it did have a heads-up display. It was very small in the corner. You could kind of look up. And the, and the basic, you know, use cases they were pitching were things like turn-by-turn directions. If you're on a bike, you don't need to pull out your phone. You can get Google Maps integrated. Google was working on this for a while. Then eventually it kind of got sunsetted. It was, it was very, there's this famous picture of Marc Andreessen in, in the Google Glass. And a lot of people were very excited about it. It seemed like the, the era of augmented reality was on the horizon.

• 40:51John Coogan?

  Didn't really pan out that way, that way. They pivoted to B2B or enterprise. And the idea was like, okay, maybe if you're on a factory line, you could have instructions, work instructions pulled up there. That never really panned out either, and they kind of sunset it. And it kind of went the way of the Microsoft HoloLens, where there was some amazing R and D that was done, some amazing engineering. But they never crossed the chasm, never got past the early adopters. And so, but during that time, it was one of the first major backlashes against like the Silicon Valley tech bro. So, people were wearing these because they were, yeah, there's Marc Andreessen wearing the Google Glass, one of the prototypes.

• 41:31Jordi Hays?

  Looking sharp.

• 41:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, and interestingly, kind of solves the problem of, are these sunglasses or are these indoor glasses? Like, it's not glasses. So you could wear it indoor or outdoor. And I guess you could put sunglasses over the top of that, more or less. But, never really got adoption. And there was, there was this, I think, like, some sort of instance where a tech person was wearing them in a bar. And someone came up to them and was like, I don't want you taking pictures of me. I don't want you recording me in public. Get that off of here. And it caused this kind of culture war issue. And the, and the, and the portmanteau that became popular was glass hole. As you can imagine what that means. And so people were very upset about this and like, I don't want you taking pictures.

• 42:14John Coogan?

  Now we're kind of blown past that where everyone has a phone on them that could be recording you and everyone's taking out their phone all the time, taking pictures. And there's just kind of, you know, Emily Sundberg was talking about in the Hamptons, how there's so many TikTokers around taking video of everything. You can't even leave with another man's wife, as she put it, right? And so the, it's such a funny phenomenon, but, but I mean, it was funny because she said that. And then a week later, the Coldplay concert happened and that went mega viral. And that's of course, the product of technology. That's a product of the fact that everyone is filming. There is going to be someone filming every screen at every moment.

• 42:51Jordi Hays?

  At a concert.

• 42:53John Coogan?

  It wasn't like something happened and then the one person that has a camera needs to be like, oh, I should take a video of that and post it. It's like, they were, after a while, once it went viral, there were other camera angles that came out because other people were also filming at the same time. Now, not everyone was, but you put 100,000 people together, they're going to be filming everything at all, at all, at all, at all times, all the angles. Obviously very beneficial when something disastrous happens. You have a lot of, you have a lot of coverage to figure out what happened. But in, in other cases, it is somewhat of an invasion of privacy, all sorts of things. And so, long story short, we kind of blew past that. There hasn't been a pushback on the Meta Ray-Bans. People wear them and there hasn't been any.

• 43:32Jordi Hays?

  Don't they have like a light?

• 43:33John Coogan?

  They do, that lets you know if it's recording.

• 43:35Jordi Hays?

  It's recording, which I think is good.

• 43:37John Coogan?

  Yes, and so that was kind of where the technology resolution landed. Now Meta Ray-Bans aren't the most popular product, but there's certainly plenty of people that daily drive them and they're not getting, you know, aggressively yelled at for being like Meta Ray-Ban holes or whatever. Like that meme is dead. And people just kind of assume that if I'm out in public, someone might take a picture of me with their phone or their Meta Ray-Bans. Like it's just something that happens now and we've just been normalized.

• 44:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and anytime these wearable pendant bracelet things have popped up, people's immediate thought is, okay, so you're recording.

• 44:13Jordi Hays?

  Every conversation that you're having and that's being indexed.

• 44:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:17Jordi Hays?

  Maybe you're getting transcription.

• 44:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:18Jordi Hays?

  Is that suddenly if if if somebody sues you?

• 44:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:22Jordi Hays?

  Can can do you have to provide that? You know, as part of a lawsuit?

• 44:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:29Jordi Hays?

  That you can imagine the kind of problems that that would cause. We should have so so Avi from friend.com.

• 44:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:36Jordi Hays?

  He's starting they're starting to ship their product on July 30. So just a week from now. And I'm sure I'm sure he has some way that he's addressing that, but.

• 44:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:46Jordi Hays?

  B is interesting. The company was started just under three years ago by some former Twitter employees, actually.

• 44:54John Coogan?

  Really?

• 44:54Jordi Hays?

  Back when it was called Twitter.

• 44:55John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 44:56Jordi Hays?

  So the CEO Maria and.

• 44:59John Coogan?

  Twitter and B both like flower adjacent animals. I'm seeing a trend here. I like this.

• 45:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I can see it.

• 45:05John Coogan?

  So. Maria Delord Zolo said the company, which imagines a world where AI is truly personal, is joining Amazon in a LinkedIn post. And Amazon spokeswoman said that while the deal is signed, the agreement isn't yet closed. For Amazon, it's a small move in a potentially huge future market. I saw the bracelet.

• 45:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was interesting. I think the pricing strategy here was smart. The device they they sold it for $49.99. So just clearly trying to sell these to as many people as possible. And then I'm sure there's a subscription component to it as well.

• 45:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, there there is something about the the the price point. And even though even though when the iPhone was released, it was like $600. It was very expensive.

• 45:45Jordi Hays?

  Oh, and they actually haven't shipped any product yet.

• 45:48John Coogan?

  Oh, B hasn't?

• 45:49Jordi Hays?

  So so they they're shipping and.

• 45:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 45:51Jordi Hays?

  They were we're shipping in in February.

• 45:53John Coogan?

  Well.

• 45:54Jordi Hays?

  Or sorry, September.

• 45:54John Coogan?

  So when they ship, will they have to pay sales tax? And what should they use for that?

• 45:58Jordi Hays?

  Definitely. I would I would strongly recommend.

• 46:02John Coogan?

  Numeralhq.com. Sales they could put their sales tax on autopilot. They could spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. That would be amazing. Anyway, so they did send a demo to Joanna Stern at the Wall Street Journal. She was impressed with how useful the bracelet was, but she wasn't sold on the privacy trade offs rather than saving audio. B only keeps a transcription, but still the creep factor is high, says the Journal. We have long had listening devices in our pockets in our homes. For many, Amazon's Echo Speaker was the first.

• 46:35Jordi Hays?

  It is kind of funny. Somebody, you know, let's say somebody, a friend comes over to your house and, you know, they've got their B bracelet on and then they take it off at some point, sitting on a table and you're like, wait, there's, you know, let's say you're having a pool party.

• 46:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 46:51Jordi Hays?

  You're sitting at the table, we're sitting like this. So the person, the B owner is off doing something else, but they actually get like a perfect transcription.

• 47:00John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:01Jordi Hays?

  And they actually get recommendations.

• 47:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:02Jordi Hays?

  It's like, hey, so and so was talking behind your back for about 30 minutes.

• 47:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, the mangoes he brought to the pool party, totally rotten.

• 47:09Jordi Hays?

  Totally rotten.

• 47:10John Coogan?

  Wow, really lacks attention to detail. Won't be invited to the next pool party.

• 47:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, until your B is like, okay, so you really need to work on your mango selection going into the next party.

• 47:20John Coogan?

  Your friends were roasting behind your back.

• 47:22Jordi Hays?

  This is really a weak point for you.

• 47:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:26Jordi Hays?

  That could be valuable.

• 47:27John Coogan?

  I think, I think some people are gonna have to fill out the apology form to all the schizophrenics out there who've been like, everything's listening to me because like, well, yes, in fact, everything is listening to you.

• 47:37Jordi Hays?

  I think if Meta, if Meta could, if Meta could have bought a company like this and said, and said, for $50 a month, we'll pay you $50 a month to listen to everything that you say and give you better ad targeting. I bet Meta could make it back.

• 47:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, I, I, I do think the price point is like super, super key to getting the install base down. John Carmack was talking about with VR, what was he saying, like 100 grams, $100 for a VR headset? That's when you're gonna get everyone to buy them. And then there's gonna be such a big install base that everyone will want to build on top of it. And that's when, you know, the, when the, when the iPhone came out at $600, it was so expensive. It was such a luxury good. But everyone had a phone at that time. The phones were just heavily subsidized by the, by the phone plans. And the phone plans had started at like $10 a month, $30 a month and kind of worked their way up to $100 a month. The phones were really only like a couple hundred dollars.

• 48:32John Coogan?

  So if you lost it, it wasn't that big of a deal. And like slowly it had worked its way up from the bottom. I mean, wireless phone, cell phones used to be a luxury. It took two decades probably from the eighties to go from the big Deena-Tac all the way down to the Motorola Razr V3, which was like pretty much, you know, affordable to many families. We'd give them to their high school kids, right?

• 48:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:54John Coogan?

  And then, so when the iPhone came out. There was already this install base of people who expected to be able to make phone calls over the cellular network and then also text each other. And then the internet browsing was like kind of a nice to have extra feature. I remember someone had a really fancy, I think it was like a Nokia or something, or it was some sort of other phone that had a very primitive web browser on it about like two years before. It was really expensive because you had to buy a data plan too. But I was like, oh, man, like the ability to access the internet everywhere, like that's such a killer feature. And so I definitely could imagine a world where, you know, you have to get these products

• 49:35John Coogan?

  just so cheap that everyone's buying them, wearing them, they're just baked into everything. And then you can scale up to something that's more premium.

• 49:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it just seems we're so far past the Siri, Alexa, personal assistant, shopping assistant rivalry. But it makes sense for Amazon to try to get back in the game.

• 49:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder, do you think, do you think OpenAI could, could kind of come out with an Alexa competitor that would do well?

• 50:01Jordi Hays?

  I mean, they arguably already have.

• 50:04John Coogan?

  Which is?

• 50:05Jordi Hays?

  It's just, I mean, ChatGPT.

• 50:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:08Jordi Hays?

  I would say you use, specifically you use ChatGPT as like voice memo.

• 50:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 50:12Jordi Hays?

  Say like, you kind of talk through what you're thinking and what you want to do.

• 50:15John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 50:16Jordi Hays?

  And then it condenses it nicely. It's not taking a bunch of actions yet, like being like, hey, I want to make, I can see in the future where you're like, hey, I want to make, I want to cook my wife a nice dinner in this theme. Can you put together an ingredient list and order all the ingredients and have it home by 5:00 PM?

• 50:37John Coogan?

  That's very, very agentic. I just imagine, I talked to somebody who said that they often leave, or their, their wife leaves ChatGPT open in the, in the conversational mode.

• 50:49John Coogan?

  When they're just hanging out and then you can just like, it won't chime in unless you actually ask it a question and it will kind of know that, okay, now you're talking to me.

• 51:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:00John Coogan?

  But it doesn't have a specific wake word. So it's just like a third party in the conversation. Felt very sci-fi, very futuristic. I don't know. Anyway, so now Amazon is interested in a wearable device that's always listening, always listening, no wake word needed. So Amazon has reminded us for years that its voice activated speakers only start listening when they hear the wake word, even if you didn't necessarily utter it.

• 51:24Jordi Hays?

  But they would, if you've had an Alexa in your home ever, it certainly will wake up when it'll hear something incorrectly and pop on all the time.

• 51:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, very interesting to see what they're thinking about here. B is one of a growing pack of AI gadgets out there. Google has Pixel earbuds that put Gemini AI in your ear. Meta Ray-Bans, of course, we talked about Samsung recently showed up, showed off Gemini infused Galaxy devices. Apple has been slower on the uptake. But remember we were hearing that reporting from Mark Gurman that Amazon or Apple was working on like a robotic arm or something like that? Something that like would sit on your table or something? I don't know. They had some sort of like robotics device like in the far roadmap.

• 52:10Jordi Hays?

  Apple's always, I mean, I do believe that Apple works on a, what you see even leaks from Apple is still like 5%.

• 52:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Constantly patenting stuff.

• 52:22Jordi Hays?

  Under the surface. Meta had an announcement today for a wearable device. So I'll read their post. They said, "Imagine controlling your devices with a subtle hand or finger gesture. Our cutting-edge research turns intent and muscle signals into seamless computer control. This breakthrough risk technology is redefining how we interact with computers, intuitive, precise, and ready for the future." And they, I believe they released an entire study around this as well. We actually got a chance to take a demo. Of this, it was very cool. Earlier this year. I'm not sure how much we can actually say on it for now.

• 53:02Jordi Hays?

  But, but yeah, so they, they, they did an entire study as well around a generic, non-invasive neuromotor interface for human-computer interaction. So it's basically, yeah, the, the team has it pulled up here. You can see like you can click by going like this. You can scroll in different ways. And when we used it, it was extremely, it was extremely intuitive. Like you needed, it took about 30 seconds to figure out.

• 53:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, the scrolling motion was particularly cool. That was when I had an experience with the Apple Vision Pro.

• 53:35Jordi Hays?

  And this is one of the ways in which Meta imagines integrating, making something like a pair of glasses as functional as a phone or a computer.

• 53:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. This was an acquisition too. So Meta bought Control Labs to bring this wristband into the company. That was a deal reportedly between 500 million and a billion dollars. It's been six years now and now they're starting to test it even further. What's interesting is that the Apple Vision Pro was pretty good at hand detection. And I feel like this is maybe one of those like Elon versus Waymo debates about like, you can do it with a camera, like you can see that I'm doing this. You can see that I'm giving you a thumbs up. You, if you can see, the computer should be able to see with a camera.

• 54:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 54:26John Coogan?

  And it's just a matter of getting the right training data, building the right model, and then rolling that out. And so it should be doable from a, from a pure software perspective. But it was nice when you put on the glasses and you put the control wristband behind your, you, you didn't have to have it in view.

• 54:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so. You could have your hand in your pocket and still be controlling.

• 54:47John Coogan?

  And that was a big part of the weight of the Apple Vision Pro was that it has cameras not just looking out this way, but also looking down to see your hands. So, but if your hands are behind your back, but it's such a weird niche use case. I feel like I could just get used to having my hands out.

• 55:02Jordi Hays?

  The other challenge is getting people to adopt effectively two new devices.

• 55:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:07Jordi Hays?

  Is also.

• 55:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:08Jordi Hays?

  Not necessarily easy.

• 55:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, putting on a wristband, I mean. If you put a watch on it, you put, you know, you make it part of the daily wear. The big question is like, Apple's getting so strong with the Apple Watch. Like, the ecosystem feels like if it really starts clicking, the Apple Vision Pro can key off the watch. And it just gets so much better if you have the watch on and you're like, okay, well, yeah, I'll get the watch then to throw that on. But obviously, that's no substitute for a Patek Philippe or an Audemars Piguet. So you gotta head over to Bezel. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch, go to getbezel.com. But I don't know, I don't know exactly how it will play out.

• 55:54John Coogan?

  It feels like you need maybe both. It'll, it's still like, it adds cost. I, I feel like the, I'm still in the camp of make the headsets light and cheap and give people the, the ability to replace their TV. Like, and then a few other things that they can do, but they have to replace their screens.

• 56:14Jordi Hays?

  Entertainment, not, not a daily driver coming with you everywhere.

• 56:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's so many people that build, you know, like, okay, I got three Apple Pro displays or three studio displays. I mean, look right there, we got, we got six displays in the, in the production suite. Like, in theory, that could be replaced with VR headsets. And, and you can have unlimited displays and reconfigure them as you need on the fly.

• 56:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 56:37John Coogan?

  And for a lot of people, especially if you're traveling, college student, a smaller apartment, you know, instead of a big 60-inch TV and a bunch of monitors for your desk setup and this and that, you just have one headset. But it's gotta be light, you gotta be able to wear it for a really long time.

• 56:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, let's go and check in with Europe. We have a post here from Kai. He says, normalize sitting outside the cafe all day and not really doing anything. And superstar poster Jira Ticket says, impressive, very nice. Now let's see the GDP. Good to flag. There's a real cost to sitting outside the cafe all day and not really doing anything seven days a week.

• 57:18John Coogan?

  These guys look, these guys look very retired though.

• 57:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 57:21John Coogan?

  And I feel like.

• 57:23Jordi Hays?

  Let them sit outside the cafe in peace, but shouldn't be an invitation for you to do the same thing.

• 57:28John Coogan?

  I don't know. I, I, I think you flipped this around and you phrase it as you're holding court. People come to you. You set up, set up shop.

• 57:35Jordi Hays?

  Holding court is underrated.

• 57:37John Coogan?

  Holding court is extremely underrated. You gotta just set up, you know, hey, you want to come pitch me your startup? I'll be outside this cafe all day long.

• 57:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we have a, we have a friend of the show, Media Mogul, who holds court at a, at a certain hotel in LA and he doesn't have to, doesn't really have to leave all day long.

• 57:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 57:58Jordi Hays?

  They just, you know, he's, he's really a king there.

• 58:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 58:01Jordi Hays?

  And they come to him. It's a fantastic way of doing business.

• 58:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, if you're struggling with a bunch of inbound emails to your support team, get fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks.

• 58:14Jordi Hays?

  Bake off, world champion.

• 58:15John Coogan?

  Number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2. Did you see this video of the flying, this flying bike?

• 58:21Jordi Hays?

  Company called Volanot.

• 58:23John Coogan?

  Volanot.

• 58:23Jordi Hays?

  Volanot says, we are excited to share this raw flight footage, including takeoff and landing, all with real sound. No special effects, no CGI, no AI, pure engineering. Enjoy the future. A functional, real world speeder bike that so far only existed in sci-fi movies is finally here.

• 58:44John Coogan?

  This seems extremely dangerous.

• 58:50Jordi Hays?

  You should just look at.

• 58:53John Coogan?

  It's a, yeah, it's like, we wanted, yeah, we wanted flying cars. We got them and now terrified of them. And I don't necessarily want to go for a ride on this. It seems really fun. It seems like at the, in the same territory as like wingsuiting. Like as a kid, I was like, I'm definitely going to become a pro wingsuiter. No doubt. Put me in.

• 59:12Jordi Hays?

  Put me in.

• 59:13John Coogan?

  Like, give me the Red Bull livery on my wingsuit. I'm a hundred percent doing it. And then I looked at the actual stats of how dangerous wingsuiting is and it was like. I will never be wingsuiting. I will be watching Red Bull videos of wingsuiting.

• 59:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, leave it to the Red Bullers.

• 59:27John Coogan?

  How do you even make this safe? This is crazy.

• 59:31Jordi Hays?

  They're calling it the air bike.

• 59:32John Coogan?

  Yep. It's very cool that they built this. Very, very, very cool. I wonder, I wonder how it commercializes. I wonder, like, where does this go? What use case is it?

• 59:42Jordi Hays?

  It's also crazy on the, on the link. I have no idea who's building this on the LinkedIn.

• 59:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:47Jordi Hays?

  It has

• 59:50Jordi Hays?

  one guy on it and Tomas Patan. And it seems like, where is this?

• 1:00:01Jordi Hays?

  He's in Poland. He's apparently the only person working on this company.

• 1:00:06John Coogan?

  Solo dev, solopreneur.

• 1:00:09Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so he's also the founder of Jetson, which is the EV tall company.

• 1:00:13John Coogan?

  Okay, so he built this on the side, side project?

• 1:00:16Jordi Hays?

  Little, little side project, built a speeder bike.

• 1:00:18John Coogan?

  He's in Poland. I wonder if there's a defense tech application.

• 1:00:22Jordi Hays?

  There's oft, anytime you can put something in the air and make it move fast, there's usually.

• 1:00:27John Coogan?

  I mean, if you're worried about, if you're worried about a minefield and you need to get from one place to another, maybe this is a good way to get around. And if you're really trained, because you're in the military, you're not just some casual person going for a flight, like, could be safer than trying to walk through a minefield. Of course, like, you are a pretty big target up there. It looks like he's wearing some sort of hat.

• 1:00:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the way to think about this is, this is a, you could also imagine this as a drone, right? There doesn't need to be a human on it. So it's, it's powered by jet propulsion. It's designed to carry one person at speeds up to 124 miles an hour.

• 1:01:03John Coogan?

  That's so fast.

• 1:01:04Jordi Hays?

  And what, what makes it possible is they have the stabilization system, onboard flight computer.

• 1:01:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:01:10Jordi Hays?

  And anyways, I mean.

• 1:01:14Jordi Hays?

  This looks like a beautiful future.

• 1:01:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:16Jordi Hays?

  It's just like, how, how safe does it need to get until I'll be ripping one of these from Malibu into the, into the studio every morning?

• 1:01:24John Coogan?

  I don't even ride a motorcycle, so I don't know. I'm, I'm more likely to go to the moon, I think, than, than rip around on one of these. It seems like it, it, you have to be-

• 1:01:32Jordi Hays?

  Very Doomer pill, John. You don't think they can, you don't think they can make this-

• 1:01:36John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe they make it so, so safe that it's, that it's, you know, flyable by anyone, certifiable by anyone. It's, it's just so easy to drive that, you know, there's no risk. Then, yeah, maybe I'd give it a try. It looks very, very fun. It does look very fun.

• 1:01:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one, one solution is it, is it becomes like fully autonomous and you don't have the sort of like human saying, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take this turn a little faster.

• 1:01:58John Coogan?

  But then it's just a drone, right?

• 1:01:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it'd still be cool to have a drone that you could ride on.

• 1:02:01John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:02Jordi Hays?

  That would take you around to places.

• 1:02:03John Coogan?

  Then you're just back in eVTOL territory, right? I don't know.

• 1:02:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:07John Coogan?

  I guess this is not eVTOL, cause it's not electric motors, it's jet propulsion?

• 1:02:11Jordi Hays?

  But imagine when this thing gets to the point where you can just like fly it up a mountain.

• 1:02:16John Coogan?

  That will be crazy.

• 1:02:17Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna be able to take these skiing?

• 1:02:18John Coogan?

  Just everyone's waiting in line at Everest and you're just bombing up to the top?

• 1:02:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're just like taking it out in the mountains?

• 1:02:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, again, it's like, we kinda do have flying cars in the form of helicopters, right? Just like, not, not evenly distributed. Um, it's gonna be fun when they start selling these things. They're gonna get on Adio. Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level and gets started for free.

• 1:02:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I have a feeling you're not gonna be able to just order one of these on the website anytime soon, so.

• 1:02:46John Coogan?

  No, they're gonna need a sales team for this.

• 1:02:47Jordi Hays?

  Peer-to-peer sales.

• 1:02:48John Coogan?

  Uh, let's check in with Tyler. How are you doing on the challenge?

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  Okay, so I, I played all three games.

• 1:02:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:02:54Speaker 02

  And then, I don't know how the like scoring works, so I can look at each of the three games. There's like scorecards and then there's recordings. I'm on site. So, I can see the number of actions. If you add them up, I'm at, uh, 576.

• 1:03:07John Coogan?

  Oh, you're pretty good.

• 1:03:08Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:03:08Speaker 02

  So that's under 600.

• 1:03:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:03:10Speaker 02

  Uh, but I'm not on the leaderboard. I don't know why.

• 1:03:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:03:12Jordi Hays?

  Maybe it needs some time to update?

• 1:03:14John Coogan?

  That's the real challenge now.

• 1:03:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:16John Coogan?

  Get on the leaderboard. I'm not just trusting you.

• 1:03:19Jordi Hays?

  He's like, I won, but, but-

• 1:03:21John Coogan?

  Write a, write a sequel injection to, to half the day.

• 1:03:24Jordi Hays?

  Reach out to Mike, reach out to Mike.

• 1:03:26Speaker 02

  Alright, I'll see how it works.

• 1:03:28Jordi Hays?

  You might be getting a bug bounty too, and your iPhone.

• 1:03:30John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe. But congratulations, that sounds like good work. How far are you away from number one now?

• 1:03:36Speaker 02

  I'm in 13th place, so I got 576.

• 1:03:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  Number one is at 511.

• 1:03:40John Coogan?

  Do you think that's doable, based on your experience?

• 1:03:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, definitely. I made a bunch of mistakes.

• 1:03:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:03:45Speaker 02

  So.

• 1:03:45John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe, maybe give it another run.

• 1:03:47Speaker 02

  I could probably go.

• 1:03:47John Coogan?

  See if you go sub 500. That'll be good.

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  Bang.

• 1:03:51Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:03:52John Coogan?

  Sub 500, you get upgraded to more storage.

• 1:03:54Jordi Hays?

  I will reach out to Mike, because I think there might be a bug here, and I don't want, I don't want the reason that, that you're not going to win your iPhone to be a bug.

• 1:04:01John Coogan?

  True, true, true.

• 1:04:01Jordi Hays?

  I feel I want, yeah, it feels like you might have earned it.

• 1:04:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. You also don't want bedbugs either. You want a new bed. You want to go to 8sleep.com.

• 1:04:09Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:04:09John Coogan?

  Get a Pod 5. 35, 5-year warranty, 39 risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping.

• 1:04:15Jordi Hays?

  I am deathly ill. I'm trying to keep the energy up. My 8Sleep, uh, basically.

• 1:04:21John Coogan?

  Let's hear it for Jordy. I think he's putting out a fantastic performance today. Production team.

• 1:04:25Jordi Hays?

  I didn't know this was possible. My HRV last night was at 32.

• 1:04:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:04:30Jordi Hays?

  Which, which I thought would imply death. Uh, but, uh, I'm here, I'm doing the show, um, and it's scary to imagine what my night would have looked like without my 8Sleep.

• 1:04:41John Coogan?

  Indeed.

• 1:04:41Jordi Hays?

  I don't even want to imagine that world.

• 1:04:42John Coogan?

  Indeed. Um, well, there's one founder I know who's sleeping a lot better, sleeping well. Samir from Viz. He, his company just hit $22 billion in platform assets. Do you know the story of this company?

• 1:04:57Jordi Hays?

  All I know is they got marked up like a back-to-back-to-back.

• 1:05:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:05:01Jordi Hays?

  Sort of 2021 era.

• 1:05:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:05:03Jordi Hays?

  It was a unicorn.

• 1:05:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:05:04Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and then they, they went through.

• 1:05:06John Coogan?

  They're very young founders, and there was all this like, oh, like they're overvalued, like, you know, and the guys apparently just kept sticking with it and chopping wood, and I love to see this. This is amazing. So he says, "One learning to share with all future entrepreneurs. Great businesses take a long time to build. Ignore the noise and keep going." It sounds like that's exactly what he did. They grew 1,275% year over year. They're growing 40% quarter over quarter, a record number of new firms. So what this company does is is is software for fund administration for asset managers, I believe. And so they're

• 1:05:43Jordi Hays?

  Portfolio management.

• 1:05:44John Coogan?

  Portfolio management. So they're onboarding more managers and and bringing those assets on the on the platform. I don't think it's fair to say like, oh, 22 billion is a revenue or they'd have some take rate. It's more like a GMV type of thing and they probably take a small, small fraction of all that. But still, like, growth is growth and it seems like they're doing very well. So good to hear.

• 1:06:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, cool to see. I think he's been a huge beneficiary of Gen AI, from what I can tell.

• 1:06:09John Coogan?

  Interesting. Yeah.

• 1:06:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It is funny. I mean, looking at Lucy's been on an absolute tear this year and hearing like, how many years that that were not super exciting, that you were just chopping wood, just just trying to be better every single month. I had a buddy, I had a buddy come to me last year and he was like, yeah, I think I want to create like a Zen competitor. Like, I think it'd be pretty, pretty simple to get it to like, you know, just like, get it to like a $50 million run rate, you know, nice little lifestyle business. I was thinking about your journey with Lucy being like, I don't, I don't remember the exact numbers, but it just was the exact opposite of like a of a fast growing, you know,

• 1:06:52John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:06:52Jordi Hays?

  company at the beginning. You just had to like, just, just compound, compound, compound. It took so long to really unlock the growth.

• 1:06:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, it always grew. And the growth rate was always decent, but it just took a decade to get any meat on the bones. Just like, I always refer to that as like, once the company like, it has enough revenue and profit to like sustain the operations out of the, out of the fundraising to survive mode. It just, and it's actually like a player in the category, not just some wild bet. It takes a long time for the, for the majority of companies. Some people, they're just built different. Maybe they're lucky. Maybe they made their own luck. They rip from day one and we love to celebrate them here.

• 1:07:35Jordi Hays?

  We do.

• 1:07:36John Coogan?

  But yeah, sometimes if you have something, you know, the die has been cast, Aaliyah Akta, Ayakta est, the Mark Zuckerberg quote, you know, you release the arrow and it travels in whatever direction you released it for as long as possible. But hopefully that's at a compounding rate upwards for a long time. Anyway, if you're looking to compound, get on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Multi asset investing, industry leading yields, trusted by millions, public.com. Go check it out. Sonos.

• 1:08:05Jordi Hays?

  New news out of Sonos, out of Santa Barbara County, California.

• 1:08:10John Coogan?

  Trade deal.

• 1:08:11Jordi Hays?

  Tom Conrad has been asked to be the next CEO of Sonos. He's grateful for the perspectives and critiques that many of you have shared here these last six months while I was interim. So excited for the road ahead. So big pickup from Sonos. We've covered Sonos before. We've shared frustration over the years with Sonos.

• 1:08:35Jordi Hays?

  But fundamentally, the products are incredible when they're working and it feels like it was always a software problem, right? Not necessarily maybe firmware.

• 1:08:48John Coogan?

  Which I'm still confused by because they haven't rolled back the app. And so I'm wondering what's going on because my Sonos app still takes a long time to open. Just opening it up is a full, at least 90 seconds to just adjust the volume, which is crazy bad experience. And the crazy thing is that the same hardware with the same phone used to be 10 second. And so there's something that changed when they added some new functionality that really bogged down the network or the app or something. They got to roll it back. It's very clear what they need to do. So hopefully he can do it. He's been interim CEO for six months. Hopefully he can turn things around. There's a lot that they need to do. It'll be interesting to see where.

• 1:09:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and he's got experience. He was the executive vice president of product at Pandora for 10 years and then became the chief technology officer, then went over to Snapchat with VP of product there. Also had a brief stint at Quibi as the chief product officer. So excited to see what he does with Sonos and considering I have a bunch of Sonos in my house still.

• 1:09:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do any Sonos speakers have microphones on them? Let's figure it out because yes, several Sonos speakers come equipped with built in microphones. The Sonos One, Sonos Era 100. And so you should be able to talk to them. They work with voice assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant, Sonos Voice Control. OpenAI has got to buy this company, right?

• 1:10:22Jordi Hays?

  I could see it.

• 1:10:23John Coogan?

  That would be a wild deal.

• 1:10:24Jordi Hays?

  Cause at 1.3 billion, current market cap.

• 1:10:27John Coogan?

  It's affordable. It's affordable, but then you just jump forward in the supply chain. You can start delivering all of these things and then you just have an Alexa competitor.

• 1:10:36Jordi Hays?

  Distribution into millions of homes.

• 1:10:38John Coogan?

  And also in through like the actual distribution like chains like Best Buy and stuff like. Maybe you want to start from scratch. Maybe you want to greenfield it. I don't really know, but this feels like something that would be a no brainer.

• 1:10:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So in 2024, Sonos shipped 5 million units globally. That was down from the year before, but still that's a lot of devices out in the world in a single year that I could see it.

• 1:11:07John Coogan?

  What about Perplexity? Aren't they at 18 billion? Perplexity buys Sonos.

• 1:11:14Jordi Hays?

  Well, they're working on a phone.

• 1:11:16John Coogan?

  They're working a lot of different stuff.

• 1:11:17Jordi Hays?

  Solana is working on a phone.

• 1:11:18John Coogan?

  Lots of new phones coming.

• 1:11:19Jordi Hays?

  Everybody's working on a phone.

• 1:11:21John Coogan?

  But maybe the smart speaker market has like languished enough that there's something interesting to be done there. I mean, just the voice transcription is so much better. We talked to the CEO of the Nothing phone and he was saying that he's integrated Whisper and Gemini and kind of beefed up the voice assistant. But maybe people aren't willing to jump from the iPhone ecosystem. But you know, if you're like, oh, well, I could offset the lack of a great Siri with a great chat GPT enabled smart home device. Kind of interesting. I don't know. You put some AI researchers on the problem of getting the Sonos app to load in less than 90 seconds and I think you might solve it. Tyler, you have an update for us? What's up?

• 1:12:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm on the leaderboard now.

• 1:12:05John Coogan?

  You're on the leaderboard.

• 1:12:06Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Let's go.

• 1:12:07John Coogan?

  Come over, ring the gong.

• 1:12:08Speaker 02

  I'm going for number one.

• 1:12:09John Coogan?

  Ring the gong, ring the gong. Hit the gong.

• 1:12:11Jordi Hays?

  Hit the gong. You are the proud owner of a new iPhone.

• 1:12:14John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:12:16Jordi Hays?

  Well deserved. Give it a better hit than that. Give it a better hit than that. I'm gonna, I'm gonna kinda cover the mic, but uh.

• 1:12:21John Coogan?

  Bigger hit, bigger hit.

• 1:12:25Speaker 02

  Still fairly gentle, but it's great contact.

• 1:12:28John Coogan?

  Great contact, great contact. Nice work.

• 1:12:29Jordi Hays?

  Love to see it.

• 1:12:31John Coogan?

  So what, yeah, yeah. Give me the position. What ranking are you now? I want to see you go for number one.

• 1:12:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think I'm number 13 now. I think we can, I don't know if you already showed it, but yeah.

• 1:12:39John Coogan?

  Okay, can we pull up the screen?

• 1:12:41Speaker 02

  I'm 65 moves behind.

• 1:12:44John Coogan?

  Okay, and what was it? What was the total number of moves that you?

• 1:12:46Speaker 02

  576.

• 1:12:47John Coogan?

  576? Not bad. You smoked 600.

• 1:12:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:50John Coogan?

  Okay. And, and you gotta do it to 511 is the number one, I believe?

• 1:12:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:12:55Speaker 02

  So.

• 1:12:55John Coogan?

  So you gotta cut down a little bit, be a little bit more efficient, but I think you can do it.

• 1:12:59Speaker 02

  Should be doable.

• 1:13:00John Coogan?

  Very cool. And then, after that, we gotta get you working on the agent side of that leaderboard. You've seen that? So on the other side, yeah, on the other side, they, they actually have like a harness that you can use to get started and you can start trying to build a, your own AI agent that will go and try and solve it and, and, and rank on the, on the leaderboard.

• 1:13:21Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 1:13:22John Coogan?

  But, you know, that's enough about leaderboards. Let's talk about billboards. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable with adquick.com. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe, folks.

• 1:13:36Jordi Hays?

  Meanwhile, on the timeline, Ryan Peterson is throwing out some bait. He said rail is best used for freight while humans should fly through the sky at 500 miles per hour because they value their time. And he says, just discovered that saying bad things about rail travel is an evergreen way to engagement bait. Plan accordingly.

• 1:13:54John Coogan?

  People love, love rail, but it is very true. America is very different than Europe. Like the Trans Grand Vite, the TGV that goes from Paris to London. That's, I think that's like the equivalent of like Boston to, to New York. Like Europe is just so much smaller than the, than the western side of the United States that. Even with a high-speed rail system, getting from LA to Chicago is still hours and hours and hours just so much longer than on a plane. And so we actually do have a pretty robust rail system, but we just choose to use it for freight. And then we fly through the sky at 500 miles an hour.

• 1:14:35Jordi Hays?

  Meanwhile, Meta is investing in their own AI chip Olympus. Zach is really cornering a lot of these iconic Olympus-like words, right? He says, Meta recently updated its ASIC roadmap, adding a new project ARC, a supplementary of its ASIC product line, which leverages TSMC's 2-nanometer technology and is targeted to enter mass production in the first half of 2027. We believe Meta plans to make adjustments to the design of Olympus to compete with Nvidia's Ruben GPUs, resulting in a delay from fourth quarter 2027 to first half of 2028.

• 1:15:18Jordi Hays?

  ARC will focus on post-training and inferencing purposes. The design service vendor selection will be complete in coming weeks, and we think MediaTek has a good chance of winning the product, project, sorry.

• 1:15:31John Coogan?

  Interesting. SemiAnalysis says, don't worry, H100s, H200s won't be worthless anytime soon. It will still be a valuable baseline that impressive AI accelerator upstarts like MATX, Etched AI, OpenAI, Titanship, Meta, and Microsoft can use in their performance comparisons. This, of course, is when folks come out and say, we're buying H100 equivalents. And so they share a picture of Jensen here, chief revenue destroyer. After Blackwell, you can give away a hopper because Blackwell will be so performant. So interesting to see where this goes. It feels like Nvidia is the one company in the Mag7 that every other Mag7 company is coming for

• 1:16:14John Coogan?

  and being like, I'm sick of paying them, whereas all the other Mag7s have kind of...

• 1:16:20Jordi Hays?

  Meanwhile, Elon's just saying... You want a hundred billion dollars, Jensen?

• 1:16:24John Coogan?

  That's true. Yeah, he isn't, he isn't designing his own chip yet. I wonder if that'll change.

• 1:16:29Jordi Hays?

  But I do believe there was an XAI engineer yesterday that was saying that the key word in some of the, the things that XAI was putting out as they said, uh, like H200 equivalent or something like that, or Blackwell equivalent GPU. So they're not necessarily fixed on it.

• 1:16:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, yeah, yeah, it's interesting because like Google and Amazon compete on like shopping searches and LinkedIn competes with, you know, Facebook in some ways, but basically every hyperscaler kind of has their own corner and their own monopoly built out. In search and social networking and in desktop or cloud or, or shopping. Um, and then they all butt heads in little ways, like Google going up against Tesla with Waymo and, and, and they, they, they kind of touch on each other's territory, but they don't often, it's, it's very rare that all of them are going up against one, but it feels like that's the narrative around, uh, around Nvidia. Everyone's sick of, of paying the Nvidia tax, maybe?

• 1:17:31John Coogan?

  I don't exactly know, but it seems like if, if you're trying to cut them out, if you're going to TSMC and fabbing your own chips, like that is straight up cut, cutting out Nvidia. And Google, it seems like was successfully doing it with the TPU.

• 1:17:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Uh, Signal has a post here. He says, meanwhile, on the App Store, and there is a new king of the App Store free charts. It is tea, dating advice, helping women date safe. From my understanding, they basically productize the groups on Facebook, the are we dating the same guy groups? And so this is acts as a layer over a bunch of different dating apps where women can effectively review, add comments, leave Yelp style reviews.

• 1:18:17Jordi Hays?

  For the men that they are going on dates with and the founder, I think his name is Steve Cook. Let's see here. Sean Cook. He was a director of product management at Salesforce for just under four years. Really putting in the work at Salesforce. We love to see it. And I said earlier, this is just a massive moment for big tech PMs. Never doubt them. Again, never doubt them. A lot of people have been doubting the PMs. They'd say, oh, you're just changing the color of this button.

• 1:18:53John Coogan?

  The color of the button matters, apparently, because you have to imagine that this, that this app category is highly competitive. Like, I don't know, maybe they're just the first one to think of doing it, but there has to be multiple of these.

• 1:19:07Jordi Hays?

  So I was looking and the third most popular app, I believe, is the same exact

• 1:19:13John Coogan?

  Concept?

• 1:19:14Jordi Hays?

  Concept. It's called T-Born.

• 1:19:16John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:19:17Jordi Hays?

  Dating Advice. See the truth before you date. So they went with the same name. This is number three. It has very few ratings. So I do wonder, so T Dating Advice has 56,000 ratings, but the number three app is T-Born Dating Advice. So, so strange. It only has 60 reviews, but clearly climbing up the charts.

• 1:19:40John Coogan?

  Well, here's some dating advice. Book a wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks.

• 1:19:52Jordi Hays?

  That's right. And without further ado, I think we have our next guest. And I gotta get this ready.

• 1:19:59John Coogan?

  Welcome to the studio. How are you?

• 1:20:00Jordi Hays?

  Massive day.

• 1:20:02John Coogan?

  Massive day. We're getting a little bit of feedback on the audio. Can we turn up the levels a little bit? Can we, can you hear us okay? I can hear you well. Okay. It's just a little bit muffled. Are you on headphones? Maybe take those out and we'll see if the computer audio is any better.

• 1:20:22Jordi Hays?

  Should be better.

• 1:20:23Speaker 03

  This better?

• 1:20:23John Coogan?

  That's way better. There we go. Welcome to the stream. No problem. Kick us off. Give us the news. What happened today?

• 1:20:31Speaker 03

  We at Vanta announced we raised $150 million, Series D, 4 billion pre, 4 and 5 post.

• 1:20:39John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:20:40Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:20:41Jordi Hays?

  Been waiting to do that. Such a massive, such a massive milestone. Can you catch us up to speed on, you know, I think people know your story by now, but can you catch us up to speed on, on just like the last couple of years getting to this point?

• 1:20:57John Coogan?

  It was an overnight success, correct?

• 1:20:59Speaker 03

  Definitely. Yeah, definitely. Haven't been working on this for like eight to 10 years totally. But he's counting. Okay, so we started, most known for like automating SOC 2, also putting up billboards on the 101. So we still do both of those things. But we also help our customers like build out their security programs, improve them in a bunch of different ways, and then take all that hard work and use it to build trust with their customers through audits, through trust reports, through security questionnaires, all sorts of things like that.

• 1:21:33John Coogan?

  Is, is the characterization of Vanta as like a point solution company, at least when you started the company, correct? Is point solution a pejorative?

• 1:21:41Speaker 03

  Yes, it is. Now did you see my?

• 1:21:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Break, break that down. Why is it, is it all because of Parker Conrad, who's a friend who, who has coined the, the, the compound startup and you have to do everything at once? What, what, what are the trade offs of being point solution early on? And then how do you think about adding things on? Because it's, there's probably some trade off of you build to try and too much territory, try and capture too much territory, territory, you can't hold on to it. But at the same time,

• 1:22:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's an easy argument if Christina had started and said, we're a platform.

• 1:22:12John Coogan?

  That might have been rough.

• 1:22:13Jordi Hays?

  Could have been a much, could have still been successful, but maybe a much smaller company.

• 1:22:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. So walk, walk me through that journey.

• 1:22:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. So we started, I mean, our word was wedge.

• 1:22:22John Coogan?

  Okay, wedge.

• 1:22:23Speaker 03

  It's a nicer word. Yeah, right. Like it sounds better than point solution, which sounds kind of like trivial.

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  Well, wedges have points on them, right?

• 1:22:29Speaker 03

  Totally. Really strong ones. Yeah, you need a pointy wedge.

• 1:22:33John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:22:35Speaker 03

  But we started with SOC 2 for startups and because they like, You might remember this, but like 2017, like no startup got SOC 2. Now you get it when you're like two founders, which is a little wild. Um, but they were like so valuable then. We figured if we can do that, customers will let us do a lot and give us a lot of access. And we can help them with a lot of things and then we can use our pointy wedge to expand into like a platform over time. And I'm like joking, but like that was a seed pitch. I posted one of the slides from it today. Uh, it's like truly the 2018 pitch. And so it's kind of cool to be here, uh, you know, a little bit later and.

• 1:23:10John Coogan?

  Were you getting, were you getting pushback on, uh, like market size at that point? Where people are saying like, you're going to need an act two, basically?

• 1:23:18Speaker 03

  Oh, totally. People weren't even like, you need back to it's like, you need a new idea.

• 1:23:23Speaker 03

  Like you just pitched me on SOC doing all the startups and no startups get SOC.

• 1:23:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, so what were, what were you, uh, what were you seeing then that other people were missing? Cause it seems so obvious in hindsight that young startups would need SOC two and, and a variety of other things in order to sell into enterprise and do other things that they want to do. But like, what, what were you seeing then, uh, that now looks obvious in hindsight?

• 1:23:49Speaker 03

  I think it was this, like, if, if you could make it easier, like less time, not necessarily less money, less time for a startup to get a SOC two, they would a hundred percent do one. The problem is you really had to give your CTO up for a year. Who would go talk to a bunch of accountants and like, then become very sad. And so like, no one would do that. Um, but if they didn't have to do that, everyone would go sign up and press the like fast SOC two button.

• 1:24:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. I don't think it's an obvious idea at all. Like when, when you, when you start a company, most people think I need a laptop.

• 1:24:18Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I'm saying it wasn't, it was not obvious then. That's what made it a great opportunity.

• 1:24:22John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:24:23Jordi Hays?

  But it was clearly obvious to Christina and the team.

• 1:24:26John Coogan?

  What, what do you think of the, uh, it feels like you're one of the success stories of like, uh, selling to other startups early on. And there's been this like criticism, people have bubbled up of like, it's this kind of like circular economy that happens in the startup world. We've seen a lot of people break out of it. What's the secret to breaking out of it? Is that still a good wedge? Is that still a good go to market? And, uh, just kind of what are your thoughts on that idea of like, you know, be, being a startup that sells to startups?

• 1:24:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, first I appreciate the use of the word wedge. Um, I still actually think it is like a good idea. There's like definitely some like circular or a burrow sting, uh, in certain partially because. Like especially early stages, everyone cares about growth. They don't care about your costs. And so there's like, can be some amount of trading that happens. We tried not to do that. And I think actually, the couple of times when I did that, it just blew up later. Like it was a bad idea.

• 1:25:19Speaker 03

  But I think with that, you like, hopefully have startups that are growing. Like you have the cursors in your user base, you have the ramps, you have the who members. And then those customers like push you up market, whether you're ready or not. And if you can hang on to them, you can like start serving bigger customers, but kind of, you need that growth out of the startup base too.

• 1:25:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. On, on that note of like, like people care more about growth than costs. Like, were people ignoring margins early on?

• 1:25:48Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:25:49John Coogan?

  Were you paying attention to margins early on though?

• 1:25:51Speaker 03

  Not at all.

• 1:25:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:25:53Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:25:55Jordi Hays?

  What are those?

• 1:25:56Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:25:57Jordi Hays?

  Never heard of them.

• 1:25:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, non-AI software.

• 1:26:00John Coogan?

  Then, then talk to me about, we, we were just talking to another entrepreneur who has kind of a wedge type of product and is expanding. And there's this trade off between, take what you have into new places, either up market or international versus add new products, new SKUs. And that's kind of an, an age old question. How have you worked through it through the past couple of years? And, and do you have any like, like frameworks for thinking through those types of processes?

• 1:26:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I think that, well, we, I mean, you do both, right? Both is sometimes hard to do at the same time. And so what we did was like, take the same thing, if the go to market's working and you know, do it in Europe, do it in Australia, do it in Asia, right? And then, and at the same time, start to like, build the muscle to build multiple products. Cause it is hard. Everyone talks about it's hard. And I remember being like, kind of why? And I don't know, I've lived through it. It's hard. It's, I don't have a great answer. It's just like, the organization gets optimized around like doing the thing you're doing. And you have customers and your revenue and it like all reinforces itself. And so when you want to go take a group of people and do something that has no customers and no revenue, you kind of can, but it's, it's just weird. It is hard.

• 1:27:14John Coogan?

  Are you big on, is it Gresham's Law, the idea that you like ship your org chart? Have you noticed that?

• 1:27:21Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:27:21John Coogan?

  No, no, Gresham's Law is bad money drives out good. I don't know the one I'm talking about. It's a different law, but it's this idea that you ship your org chart. So if you have an org chart that's, you know, heavily international, you're just going to wind up selling internationally. Do you think about it from that perspective?

• 1:27:35Jordi Hays?

  Conway's Law.

• 1:27:36John Coogan?

  Conway's Law. Conway's Law.

• 1:27:37Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:27:38John Coogan?

  Have you, have you been through the wringer of Conway's Law? Have you learned how to fight it? Have you learned how to deal with it?

• 1:27:44Speaker 03

  Oh, totally. I think I've like learned like you can't fight it and so you just have to change your org chart sometimes.

• 1:27:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:27:49Speaker 03

  Right, because you're like gonna ship whatever your org chart is. So like try to make your org chart the thing you actually want to ship. Does that make sense?

• 1:27:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I've noticed that. What's the, what's like the, the correct way to keep morale high while basically doing a reorg? And telling someone like, hey, you're going to be working on something different, but you're,

• 1:28:08Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:28:08John Coogan?

  but you're talented and we like this, but it's just like, it makes more sense for the business to do this here over, over here.

• 1:28:13Speaker 03

  Like, I mean, beyond all the like, be honest, like actually say, or like make sure you believe you're saying those things when you're saying them. I think we went through a phase, or I went through a phase where I like, you tried to like, we reorged kind of a lot. And it was because you like always did feel like you had a better structure. And it's like that, that was too much. Also, like, it doesn't matter, let it, like the order chart, like hang out for six or nine months. Don't change it every quarter. You're just gonna drive people crazy. Sounds really obvious when I say it, but.

• 1:28:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:28:42Jordi Hays?

  What, what, what are some, like, any new technology, like, technology trends that, that you're seeing across the customer base? In terms of like challenges and ways that you guys are reacting? I can imagine, um, social engineering, like, you know, hacks and challenges must be skyrocketing. But what, what are you guys seeing broadly?

• 1:29:04Speaker 03

  That's a good one, um, especially with like AI and deepfakes and, you know, the like text message gift card scams, but like ratcheted to a hundred, like really good versions of those. I think the other thing we see, especially for European customers, is they just get a ton of pressure from European enterprises on AI. Some of it's on AI in general, some of it's on the American model providers, especially the ones you might guess, right? And there's just like all this kind of default skepticism in Europe, that then if European startups-

• 1:29:34Jordi Hays?

  And that's around like data, data usage and-

• 1:29:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And just like, I don't trust OpenAI and so don't send any, like, I don't even want to use something, use a tool that uses OpenAI.

• 1:29:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:48John Coogan?

  Because CTO or CIO are saying that, basically.

• 1:29:51Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:29:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Do, do you think, I, I, I want to know the thoughts on just general competition when you're selling a wedge product from bigger companies that might want to add this on as a feature. We've been talking to a bunch of founders about how to deal with competition from bigger companies. What, what have you been through? How'd you get through it? And then I want to talk about how that landscape is changing.

• 1:30:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we've been slightly different. It's like, we never really had competition from big companies because people didn't build what we built before. They built vertical task trackers, but no automation. What we had was in the COVID boom, lots of folks decided to start Vanta knockoffs. And so we had like a round of that and kind of went through the gauntlet that, you know, like gone through that whole roller coaster and now we're on the other side of it. But sort of different.

• 1:30:41John Coogan?

  How did that manifest? Was that like pricing pressure or just like, like having the markets slice up differently? Needing to reprioritize or kind of double down on kind of territory that you kind of claimed and felt you were confident on and then had to retrench a little bit?

• 1:30:59Speaker 03

  Some of all of it. I mean, I think in the early days, we were kind of probably in retrospect, like too pleased with ourselves. Sorry for like coming up with this category and this product. And like the honest answer is like, no customer care. I mean, the carrot, you know, or like, they're very supportive, but like, they just want the best product for them. And that might be the first one.

• 1:31:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're not like, oh, you created the category. Great. Then I won't, I won't look at my other options.

• 1:31:22Speaker 03

  Exactly. Like no, said no one ever. Right? And so I think it pushed us to be like, okay, we did whatever we did years ago. Cool. What have we done lately for customers? Like, what have we done today? Whatever we shipped, you know, this week, this quarter, this month, this day? Um, so is it that piece, which I think we got a lot stronger because of that. And then pricing pressure for sure. Um, because in our space, because it's it's sales all the way through, like there's no self-serve trial. The dominant strategy for a competitor is to like copy the demo, do the same demo. And then say, hey, prospect, these products are the same. You're right. You just saw the same thing, but like we're 30% cheaper. So like, why would you go with Vanta?

• 1:32:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:07Speaker 03

  And like, we kind of learned what to do with that.

• 1:32:09Jordi Hays?

  Why, why did you go international so early? Was it, was it, uh, was it to defend against other people being like, I'm going to build the Vanta for XYZ country, but it sounds like it was more customer driven?

• 1:32:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was about like a 20% of our customer base, I think at the time was outside the US. And we hadn't done anything for that. It's just like, you know, founders in London, you know, watch T P P N like it's not like just because they're in London doesn't mean they like, don't listen to American podcasts.

• 1:32:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, and they're selling to American companies.

• 1:32:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:32:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Yep.

• 1:32:43John Coogan?

  What, uh, what's up with all the colors? I feel like Vanta black is the darkest black you can possibly buy. It's like patented paint, but then purple llamas.

• 1:32:53Speaker 03

  Okay. We create more color.

• 1:32:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, take me through that.

• 1:32:58Speaker 03

  So yeah, not, not touching that. Um, but we kind of coined a purple in the early days. And so we have, we've become the purple llama company.

• 1:33:06John Coogan?

  Purple llamas. Where'd the llama come from? Cause yeah, I mean, yeah.

• 1:33:09Jordi Hays?

  And by the way, by the way, we called every llama owner in LA. We were trying to get llamas here in the studio to join us. We have, we have a third mic, but it ended up being, it ended up being a massive challenge and we were worried about, we didn't have a, a, a carve out in the lease that said we could bring llamas in our studio. So it ended up being, uh, but, but I think you guys should actually, uh, it would be great to get, to get some live llamas.

• 1:33:36John Coogan?

  Popular with the kids at the petting zoo.

• 1:33:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. We tried it in downtown San Francisco. Downtown San Francisco, also not the most llama friendly.

• 1:33:43John Coogan?

  It's hard. They're tough to get.

• 1:33:45Jordi Hays?

  You can't even, you can't even bring llamas wherever you want in this country anymore.

• 1:33:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:48Jordi Hays?

  It's really.

• 1:33:50Speaker 03

  What is it coming to?

• 1:33:51John Coogan?

  Disaster. On, on the kind of the AI, like on the AI story, there's like this question of, that I've been, I've been noodling on with a lot of founders about like, is AI a reason to launch a new product that the customer feels? So an agent, a, a, a, a prompt box that they interact with versus just, hey, behind the scenes, we're going to use a ton of AI. You're not even going to know. It doesn't really matter, but the product's just going to get better, more efficient. Maybe our margins go up. Maybe we are delivering things that we want to deliver you faster, more reliably, more accurately.

• 1:34:33John Coogan?

  All these different things. Is there one area that's more exciting? I know you're probably doing both, but how do you think about?

• 1:34:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I've seen it. I've seen a trend of companies that are basically clones of existing companies that were traditionally seen as SaaS platforms. And they come out and they're basically like, we're this, but it's an agent. And then if you look and try to understand the product, it ends up looking exactly like SaaS with maybe a slightly different workflow, but I don't know how much more valuable it is to customers or if it's actually a better experience.

• 1:35:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:06Speaker 03

  Oh, totally. There's like, it's an agent, but actually it's a forward deployed engineer, but actually it's like a founder pressing a button by the speed, you know, and like, I did not.

• 1:35:13Jordi Hays?

  It's a crud app.

• 1:35:14Speaker 03

  Totally. It's a crud app with like the founder like pressing buttons at 11:00 PM at night. Um, so like definitely that. I think it'll get better over time. To the first question, like, we do a bit of both. It's actually more AI in the background, just doing stuff. And then sometimes when we're going to start like surfacing it more and we might call that, you know, oh, that's an agent or the agent did that. And like, yes, it is AI, but it's really just getting rid of workflows behind the scenes that no one really wanted to do or needs to do.

• 1:35:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, I've been personally experiencing it in Gmail where it was very easy for them clearly to like add an extra panel with like now you can chat with your email inbox, but for me, the search still doesn't work. And so I would much rather that just every email that comes in gets condensed down, summarized. And then when I go to search, it really knows what I'm looking for. And it just gives me a better product behind the scenes. But that's probably like a harder technical challenge, or maybe just, it's just less experimental. So people are kind of debating. What about in terms of like internal productivity? We were talking to a friend earlier that said that he's seeing, there are examples of 10x engineers going

• 1:36:27John Coogan?

  to 100x engineers because of tools like Cursor and Windsurf and Devin, cognition, all that, all the different tools that improve developer productivity. But he was actually more excited about designers becoming 1x engineers. And I thought that was a very interesting take. And if you kind of do like a divide by zero, maybe it's an infinity game. I don't know. But he was saying that like, that has been more exciting to him. And I don't know, what are you seeing internally?

• 1:36:54Speaker 03

  So some of that also PMs with like a V0 replit, like right? Because you like have this idea for a thing, and then you can make a version of it, and then go stick it in front of five customers. And like, it's just, and you can do that in 15 minutes, like actually. You know, it was before you'd have to like write the spec, or draw the picture, then get the designer to make the mocks, and then animate the pigman, you know, whatever. Like, that loop went from, like, ideally, two days to 15 minutes, and that matters so much for like, just testing new stuff.

• 1:37:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. What about just this idea of like, generally, AI being like a reinvigorating force for founders who are in your position where like, the business has worked. The business like is big, basically. And like, you have

• 1:37:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the valuation

• 1:37:46John Coogan?

  Post-product market fit.

• 1:37:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the like, series B, C, D, just shows like a clear story of just execution. But then, what John's getting at, and we

• 1:38:00Jordi Hays?

  We've had Owen over at Intercom from the show who actually left his company, came back and then was like fully ready to just like restart the company almost because there was so much net new.

• 1:38:11John Coogan?

  And even Ben Thompson was saying like he was kind of getting bored of writing about tech and then AI happened and he's like, I can't wait to write the articles anymore. But what's your experience been?

• 1:38:22Speaker 03

  Like basically that, that there's all these like magical product experiences that we've thought about, but just couldn't build until now. My favorite like clear Vanta example was in 2017 when it wasn't clear if anyone wanted a SOC 2. It was clear people answered security questionnaires, like those long spreadsheets of questions. And so we wanted to automate those and tried and like weren't good enough ML engineers and libraries weren't good enough that we didn't and went down the SOC 2 path. Anyway, it's kind of working, but like now Vanta is really good questionnaire automation. We thought of this building this in 2017. We just like couldn't until now and that is like very fun.

• 1:39:01Jordi Hays?

  Where next? You guys have just been chopping wood seemingly like just executing day over day, but where are you going from here?

• 1:39:10John Coogan?

  Hardware.

• 1:39:11Jordi Hays?

  Hardware. AI pendant from Vanta. Captures every, if you say a single word, that if you say a single non-compliant word.

• 1:39:21Speaker 03

  No way to say trust like a constantly listening AI pendant.

• 1:39:24John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 1:39:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but what's next?

• 1:39:28Speaker 03

  You know, keep building stuff, cool stuff for our customers. We have a bunch of security products that are launching that are very excited about. So you like get customers in on the wedge, you know, but then over time after they get their SOC 2, they start growing, they start needing more things. They start thinking about building out different parts of their security program. So a couple being launches there coming. And a couple more things that we have in store.

• 1:39:52John Coogan?

  Last question from my side, we'll let you go. Has the rise of defense tech, American dynamism, ITAR compliance been like, how have you been like playing in that space?

• 1:40:05Speaker 03

  Oh, it's good. Yeah, yeah. Actually, we're working with the government. So this administration is trying to make it easier for everyone to procure software. There's like a FedRAMP, there's a new FedRAMP 20X pilot we're in and we're doing that for two reasons. One, so our customers can sell to the government and have a path there that is not, you know. Years in consultants and like literally thousands of pages of long form text mail like can do a lot there. And then also helping the government go procure software. And so we are just like doing a ton there.

• 1:40:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's funny. The it feels like it's incredibly cumbersome to the defense tech founders that have to get ITAR compliance, but then they kind of wear it as a badge of honor.

• 1:40:48Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 1:40:48John Coogan?

  I've been there.

• 1:40:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:50John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, I have to use Teams, you know, because my work's so important. I'm like,

• 1:40:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:55John Coogan?

  Yep, like I your work is important, but now it's become this badge of honor. Uh, but it's great, you know, they they need to stay compliant. Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on.

• 1:41:04Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations.

• 1:41:04John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:41:05Jordi Hays?

  I I it's it's a I I love I love just the the steady march, building momentum. Uh, and, uh, I'm sure you'll be back. If history repeats, you'll be back on here, uh, very soon with, uh, with the next one.

• 1:41:21Speaker 03

  Knock on all the things. Thanks so much for having me.

• 1:41:23John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:41:24Jordi Hays?

  Great chatting, Christina. Talk soon.

• 1:41:26John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Dina from Lux Capital. I will take the intro.

• 1:41:30Jordi Hays?

  I'll be right back.

• 1:41:31John Coogan?

  And I will welcome Dina to the TVPN Ultra Dome when she's ready to hop on the stream. And in the meantime, I can give you some news. Check in with Tyler. How's Tyler doing over there?

• 1:41:44Speaker 02

  All right, I'm I'm up to 10th place.

• 1:41:45John Coogan?

  10th place.

• 1:41:46Speaker 02

  I'm at 550, so I dropped, I think, 26 moves. I still, I mean.

• 1:41:50John Coogan?

  Are there obvious low hanging fruit for you?

• 1:41:52Speaker 02

  At this point, it's just a grind.

• 1:41:53John Coogan?

  Just a grind.

• 1:41:54Speaker 02

  Just grind. I'm just I think I gotta just basically write down my moves.

• 1:41:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:41:58Speaker 02

  And then just try to optimize one by one.

• 1:42:00John Coogan?

  You need maybe like a screen recorder or something so you can watch some game tape?

• 1:42:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:04John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 1:42:05Speaker 02

  You hit the tapes.

• 1:42:06John Coogan?

  We need we need a coach.

• 1:42:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. Who else could who else could help? You need like a world champion, um, like speedrunner or something like that. Uh, anyway.

• 1:42:14Speaker 02

  We have Dina in the restream waiting room.

• 1:42:16John Coogan?

  We have Dina in the restream waiting room. Welcome to the stream, Dina. How are you doing?

• 1:42:20Speaker 04

  Hello. So good to see you guys.

• 1:42:22John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for joining. Um, sorry for the delay. Uh, why don't you kick us off with an introduction on yourself? And I'd love to know kind of how you fit into the Lux Capital structure, ecosystem, what you're focused on and kind of and then we can go into a bunch of questions from there.

• 1:42:36Speaker 04

  Awesome. Well, I'm Dina. I'm a partner at Lux Capital. We're a multi-stage venture firm. We love turning science fiction into fact. I know you've had Josh on here before and heard all about that. We do everything from pre-seed to pre-IPO, so truly multi-stage. And I have a particular propensity for healthcare, which I know we're going to be talking about today. But we are all very much generalists.

• 1:42:59John Coogan?

  Okay. Let's just, we'll get into the other questions later. I already have completely new questions. Delian Asparuhov over at Founder's Fund, buddy of ours, was saying that the seed ecosystem is just kind of been eroded by founders just skipping rounds. And it feels like that's a lot of, kind of, it's in large part because these AI companies were able to justify, yeah, I need a billion dollars to train a foundation model. And so even if you're not training a foundation model, the multi-stage firms are like, yeah, we can do a hundred million dollar seed round, no problem. Like you have a good pedigree, maybe there'll be an aqua hire or something. Where is the pre-seed

• 1:43:40John Coogan?

  market? Where is the seed market still interesting? Or do you disagree with that entire take and you think it's never been better?

• 1:43:48Speaker 04

  You know, I think it's a tale of two worlds. And honestly, the nomenclature for rounds doesn't really mean much these days, anyway. On the one hand, the advent of AI has made it more cost-effective than ever to start a company. And you are no longer judged in terms of growth by how many people you're hiring, or how much money you've raised, but actually how much, how far you can get with the least amount possible. And that is only going to continue to happen as we see the advent of sort of AI software tooling and all of that. On the other hand, to your point, if you are raising for a company that is infrastructure-intensive, that requires high amounts of compute, where you're building your own models, and let's be honest, how many of those do we need? Those types of companies can and will raise.

• 1:44:32Speaker 04

  Hundred million dollar plus seed rounds. So, you know, I think yes is the answer. It's never been better, but also you will very much see a tale of two worlds. And, you know, on our end, we're funding, you know, tiny seed rounds and very large seed rounds. It really depends on the company and what's needed.

• 1:44:47John Coogan?

  Okay, related to that, give me your take on this post from Caitlin Bolnick Relos. You must be one of four things to raise right now. An AI high flyer, a seed company with the promise of being an AI high-flying company. Extra points if you're young. An American dynamism reindustrialization company, or biology enabled by AI. What do you think?

• 1:45:10Speaker 04

  Caitlin always has the great hot takes. I think that's accurate, although honestly, it's not the best time for companies that are raising in the biotech space. So I'm not even sure that I would necessarily include that in the list, but definitely every company right now needs to have an answer to what their AI play is, for sure. That being said, you know, if you're seeing Groundhog Day of pitches that are, you know, AI note taker, AI agent, like, yes, we all use these companies and their wonderful tools, but what we look for is sort of the, the operating system, right? The, the actual picks and shovels, the really generational companies. And where the, the innovation is not just the act of using AI, but something that's actually defensible and transformative.

• 1:45:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Elad Gil had a post yesterday. He said, AI markets crystallized. For a subset of AI markets, it is suddenly clear who the finalists or winners will be. And so he breaks down a few categories. Alums, code, legal, medical scribing, customer service, and search and IR. How are you, how are you thinking about AI markets within healthcare? There's obviously a bunch of different subcategories, but at the same time, some of the biggest headline fundraises have been around these sort of medical scribe products, or at least products with that as kind of the core wedge.

• 1:46:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, I we've actually invested with ELAD in a company in the health AI space, which I'll chat a bit about called Bluno. But yes, AI scribes, I think, were the lowest hanging fruit in healthcare. The, you know, one of the biggest pain points was with, you know, documentation and note taking for physicians. These companies were not immediately up and to the right. Many of them have been around for quite some time. But of course, the advent of LLMs and really the openness to adoption, which has always been the biggest sticky point in healthcare, has made them particularly effective now. But there's still so much latency in healthcare. We are still talking about AI in the context of fax machines. So there's a lot of opportunity outside of that. And I get excited about, you know, the clinical

• 1:47:09Speaker 04

  research side of things, the opportunity in clinical trials, you know, if you're talking outside of patient care, we're in a company called Trial Library, which is, you know, using AI and technology to rapidly accelerate getting patients into trials for lifesaving therapies. And frankly, this is where pharma companies are willing to spend a lot of money to find those hard to reach patients. Companies like Bluno, which we invested in with ELAD, for example, are using generative AI to help get drugs to market. So to help with regulatory and medical writing, etc. There's a massive opportunity outside of scribes. And although scribes are very interesting, it is increasingly a very crowded market. Last count, I think it was over 100. And there's probably

• 1:47:53John Coogan?

  So many, wow. Have you seen anyone

• 1:47:56Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure more are being formed.

• 1:47:58John Coogan?

  As we speak.

• 1:47:59Jordi Hays?

  As we speak, people are reading the TechCrunch headlines and they're saying, hey, maybe I should create.

• 1:48:04John Coogan?

  It seems like Stripe Atlas has gone down under all the pressure.

• 1:48:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. On the note, on the note, though, on the last company, I mean, I think one question that that's come up on the show is, can, what will it take to actually reduce the cost to create and bring a new drug to market? And discovering the drug itself is one thing, but then is there any hope of reducing the cost of of the next stages in terms of outside of the paperwork and things like that? But it seems like if you have this huge kind of variable cost of trials, is there any, is there any sort of hope of bringing that down over time?

• 1:48:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, the the sort of drug discovery piece of it was really, you know, V1 of AI in in this in this field, and we've invested in companies in that space. And there are new companies that are forming in that space. But outside of that, there's a lot. As you pointed out, clinical trials, right? Big area. There's, you know, there have been lots of companies trying to apply technology there, yet still a massive pain point, particularly if you think about where the bulk of the spend is in pharma, in specialty drugs. They these are tens of billions of dollars of of market opportunity here to help get these drugs to market faster. And in order to do so, it often requires finding really difficult to reach patients.

• 1:49:30Speaker 04

  There's only so much right now that AI can do to make that happen. So it requires really unique business models. And the company I mentioned, Trial Library, is a great example of a company that is using technology, but ultimately to find and match humans with one another. And those humans are patients, and those humans are providers.

• 1:49:49John Coogan?

  Okay, I want to go Shark Tank mode for a second. I got a pitch for a hypothetical company. I'm not actually building this, but today, there was a piece in the Wall Street Journal about Amazon buying a bracelet for $50 a pop. You get transcription of everything you say throughout the day. Amazon bought the company. They didn't just buy a bracelet. They bought the company. Have any of the AI scribes in healthcare done something like, hey, the doctor wears a bracelet, and then the the scribe is, you know, there's a hardware play, or there's a wearable play? Have you seen anything like that? Is there an opportunity?

• 1:50:23Speaker 04

  I don't know if I've seen a bracelet per se. There are over 100, so I wouldn't be surprised if one of them involves a bracelet. But yes, I have seen hardware plays, this sort of idea of ambient, you know, taking that. I've seen that in the form of cameras that are sort of, you know, adding on the computer vision element. I've seen that, of course, in terms of, you know, different types of tabletop devices. There is an extra added concern with healthcare, which is, you know, the elephant in the room, and that is around PHI and privacy. And so and oftentimes, that's over engineering it. Really what you need is to understand what's happening in that encounter with the patient. And as it turns out, you don't necessarily need, you know, a ring, a bracelet, you know, a camera hanging over you, oftentimes, audio,

• 1:51:05Speaker 04

  and in many cases, just, you know, AI enhancing text inputs is all you need to get to the outcome that's desired.

• 1:51:13John Coogan?

  And for that reason, you're out.

• 1:51:16Jordi Hays?

  How are you approaching this brain-computer interfaces as a category? There's been Neuralink, Nudge announcing around yesterday. But how are you thinking about the category broadly? It feels like something that, right now, it seems like a very small group of exceptionally connected and talented teams are sucking up the vast majority of capital, which I guess happens in every market, but maybe more pronounced in the BCI space. But do you expect that to be a category where a few years from now, there's hundreds of players or more concentrated until people can really de-risk the different approaches?

• 1:51:58John Coogan?

  Remember, we talked to a tier fellowship company that was doing that, kind of the other side of the barbell there. But yeah.

• 1:52:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think as a trend at Lux, we were investing in this space before it was obvious. We were early and proud investors in Control Labs, which you may be familiar with, which was acquired by Nat.

• 1:52:14John Coogan?

  We just talked about them.

• 1:52:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. Reardon, the founder, is actually now a venture partner at Lux, and it's fun to jam with him on these topics all the time. My father happens to be a neuropsychiatrist, so I have a particular interest in this space. He was really big on TMS, and I think that there's still so much opportunity there. We are actively looking and spending time with a lot of these companies. To your question, I don't know if there's going to be 100 of them in the future. These are still very capital-intensive. There's still a lot of science that does need to happen. We're seeing companies at the earliest stages through our Lux Labs initiative, researchers who are rapidly accelerating on the innovation side and ultimately to get to commercialization.

• 1:52:54Speaker 04

  That piece of it is the piece that I think still remains to be proven, but we are excited about what's to come.

• 1:53:02John Coogan?

  In healthcare broadly, I'm sure there's tons of opportunities for startups to build new companies that are built on the back of the AI trend. Are there any places where you think that AI, in a narrow sense, would be a sustaining innovation for the existing large players? I'm thinking of in the enterprise, it feels like... You know, Google might be facing disruption in search to some degree, but like the Gemini API seems to be doing really, really well. And like they were set up well to serve, you know, a frontier class model as an API. And so they're leveraging that and they will continue and Azure has seen a similar thing with Microsoft. They've they've been beneficiaries and in many ways it's

• 1:53:44John Coogan?

  been a sustaining innovation for them in terms of cloud. But but what is the shape of like the big players in healthcare? Where are they going to like just completely win? So you probably want to stay away from it as a as a startup folk?

• 1:53:59Speaker 04

  I love this question. I don't know if you guys know this, but I actually got my start in healthcare at Google, helping to build what eventually became Google Health. Back then, one of the first products that I got to work on was this knowledge graph for health, which was, you know, taking symptoms and conditions, mapping them together. So if you search for itchy eyes, you'd have this graph pop up that explains to you, you might have conjunctivitis. Very novel at the time. We launched Google's first type of compliant product. It ultimately led me to venture because it became abundantly clear to me that the real innovation in these really intractable industries was actually coming from early stage startups. This was before the advent of L L M's and all of that. I ultimately think that these big tech players are obviously going to be key distribution partners. Google is still the digital front door for a lot of

• 1:54:42Speaker 04

  healthcare. Increasingly, OpenAI and others are becoming that. But it is still where so many healthcare encounters begin before a patient even knows that they're a patient. That being said, do I think that the, you know, the top innovative companies in the healthcare space are going to emerge from these big tech companies? Unlikely, but I think that they will thrive and exist in partnership with them. And the hyperscalers, when it comes to AI, are always going to play critical roles.

• 1:55:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, what what role are the like the big tech equivalents in healthcare playing? Like, is it the big insurance networks, big, big hospital networks? I mean, we've heard General Catalyst is buying a hospital. I don't fully understand the the thesis they're having fully dug in. But but what what are the bigger players doing that that might where they might just be just default beneficiaries of new tech?

• 1:55:36Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, I've so I spent a lot of time speaking with the, you know, the leaders of some of these companies. Obviously, they're critical, important partners to our companies. And they are

• 1:55:47Speaker 04

  Rapidly looking at solutions in AI. So they were, they used to be bottlenecks. These are the distribution partners, you know, selling into health systems has always been a slog. Ask anyone who's done it, they've got the gray hairs to prove it. I was in a board meeting recently, actually, with a major executive from one of the biggest national payers out there who blew my mind talking about how they were thinking about adopting clinical AI. We're talking actual bots that are, that are, that are engaging with patients in a way that was far more ambitious than even some of the most, you know, out there VCs that I had seen. If they're doing it that fast, like, we need to get on this quickly. It is clear that, you know, in healthcare, you want to meet patients where they are. And this is where patients are. They're using these tools constantly.

• 1:56:31Speaker 04

  Providers as well, there's a new generation of providers who expect more digitally. And as you can imagine, and you see this in pretty much every major earnings call from these payers, this is no longer just a nice to have, it's a mandate.

• 1:56:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What about robotics in surgery rooms? We've seen. Striker. Yeah, I mean, Neuralink specifically is, has talked about building basically their own system in order to do these surgeries. That's like a very, yeah, no, they built it, they're using it very kind of like narrow use case for something that they're doing. But how far out do you think we are from robots conducting kind of routine surgeries? Let's say you, you need to get an organ removed or something like that. Is that something that you'd bet on a human still doing 10 years, 15 years, 20 years from now? Or are we going to be at a point where a human is sort of, kind of observing

• 1:57:30Jordi Hays?

  a robot, you know, working, but not necessarily like doing the actions themselves?

• 1:57:35Speaker 04

  I mean, it's already happening. So we're not talking about 10 years from now. It's already happening across the board. And robotic surgery is an area that we've invested quite a bit in. You may have heard of a company called Oris, which was acquired by Johnson and Johnson, in which we were lead investors. It's happening in other procedures, in ultrasound, in IVF. We have a company that's on the software side, but enabling computer vision through IVF. If you've ever had, I don't know if any of you have had surgery, but many, many procedures that used to be highly invasive are now done laparoscopically through robotic surgery. So it's one of the areas in healthcare, actually, that has seen the most adoption. And it's still human assisted in many cases. A lot of that ultimately comes down to, you know, to patient preference as well as liability.

• 1:58:18Speaker 04

  But I would not be surprised if we increasingly move more and more to a world with, you know, robots at the forefront of surgery.

• 1:58:27John Coogan?

  What was your take on Fiji CMO's post kind of outlining therapy potentially as one vector that OpenAI's ChatGPT core product could be impactful? That feels like an example of meeting-

• 1:58:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and health was the other big category that she laid out as well.

• 1:58:44John Coogan?

  Huge, huge. Yeah, it feels like meeting customers where they are. And yet, all of a sudden, we're talking about, you know, a research nonprofit is now competing in the healthcare space. It feels like it's a, it's definitely like an unexpected turn of events if you were looking at OpenAI as a health investment a decade ago.

• 1:59:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, totally. Well, Fiji's amazing. She's become a friend and we actually met in the context of healthcare. So I know it's an area she's deeply passionate about. It's not surprising. It is wild, but it's not surprising. Again, meeting patients where they are and particularly for, you know, a chatbot that does tend to err toward, you know, sicko fancy that's constantly telling you, great idea, let's elaborate on that more, et cetera. Like ChatGPT in an era with an epidemic of loneliness can become a very close friend. It can, in many cases, diagnose. And, you know, there have been some really interesting studies published in JAMA actually looking at the empathy factor, comparing AI to humans. And sometimes the AI actually does score better. Now, do I believe that therapists will be replaced by AI in the near future?

• 1:59:47Speaker 04

  No. But the fact of the matter is, people are already using it. The numbers are staggering. They're using it for this case now. And so I think what we need to think about is, what are the guardrails? How do we ensure that that, you know, you don't end up with the types of situations that have made headlines, you know, whether it's suicides and so on? And, and how do you ensure that this is done responsibly? And I'm excited that someone like Fiji is at the forefront of that because I believe that they are really thinking about not only the, the ethics, but the responsibility of having human lives in their hands.

• 2:00:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like something that's gonna be like back and forth in the news cycle constantly, but ultimately, you know, top of mind and they have all the capabilities and teams in place to, to, you know, execute effectively in that category. But it's gonna be, it's gonna be a lot of PR back and forth, I'm sure. Do you have anything else?

• 2:00:39Jordi Hays?

  No, this is great.

• 2:00:39John Coogan?

  This is great. Thanks so much for hopping on.

• 2:00:42Speaker 04

  Awesome. Great to chat with you guys. Take care.

• 2:00:44Jordi Hays?

  Have a good one.

• 2:00:44John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:00:47John Coogan?

  Let's go to this post from Nick Carter. Do you hear this? Do you see this?

• 2:00:53Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 2:00:54John Coogan?

  They're gonna own you. Oh, wait, no, you're a millennial too. He says millennials will be slash are the peak IQ generation. Zoomers are iPad kids, lobotomized. Gen Alpha will be largely incapable of learning anything due to AI. Tyler, what do you think?

• 2:01:11Jordi Hays?

  Well, Tyler's, you're Gen Z, right?

• 2:01:12John Coogan?

  You're Gen Z?

• 2:01:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm definitely Gen Z.

• 2:01:14John Coogan?

  Do you think you're an iPad kid? Do you think you're a lobotomized?

• 2:01:16Speaker 02

  I think that's a little bit younger than me, but I think that's probably true, like,

• 2:01:21John Coogan?

  How'd you avoid it?

• 2:01:21Speaker 02

  Just replace iPad with TikTok. I think if you talk to the average, like, I mean, like, I don't wanna, you know.

• 2:01:28Jordi Hays?

  You don't wanna throw your whole generation under the bus.

• 2:01:30Speaker 02

  I think there's a big power law and you'll see it like grow more and more with Gen Alpha.

• 2:01:34John Coogan?

  What separates the high performing Zoomers from the lobotomized, brain rotted ones?

• 2:01:42Speaker 02

  I mean, I think it's, you can probably just, like, if you need, like, one thing, it's just like, do they use TikTok daily? That's like, you probably get like 90% of the.

• 2:01:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder, is it a screen time thing? You have to cut it off early?

• 2:01:56Speaker 02

  I don't think it's necessarily screen time, because you see a lot of kids who just like,

• 2:02:01Speaker 02

  if you're like reading like less wrong or something. If you ever talked to someone who like, obviously like, read a lot of like, online blogs like that, they're like super cracked. So it's not necessarily screen time.

• 2:02:10John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:02:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, one thing is I feel like maybe the kids that have it the worst are like 10 years old right now, where I feel like parents today, there's a general awareness that having your kid glued to an iPad is not great.

• 2:02:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:02:23Jordi Hays?

  If you see, I'll be at a restaurant and I'll see a kid just like drooling over their iPad for two and a half hours, not engaging with the parents or whoever they're with. I think that's like fairly frowned upon now. Like, I got an iPad for my three-year-old, but he's only used it on flights.

• 2:02:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:44Jordi Hays?

  Like, he really just doesn't, he only thinks of it as a flight device, and that's purely because I don't want other people to be angry if he's gonna, you know, cry for four hours.

• 2:02:56John Coogan?

  Tyler's over there being like, "I'm not addicted to Apple products, but I'll do anything for an iPhone." Which one is it, Tyler?

• 2:03:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you gotta pick. You gotta pick.

• 2:03:06John Coogan?

  Any more progress?

• 2:03:07Speaker 02

  I'm still working through. I'm going like very slowly.

• 2:03:10John Coogan?

  Okay, so yeah, because there's no time, so you're just really calculating.

• 2:03:13Speaker 02

  I can't see my score like until the end.

• 2:03:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:03:15Speaker 02

  So I think I'm doing better, but it's very slow.

• 2:03:17John Coogan?

  And are you like actively on a run in RKG IV3 right now?

• 2:03:21Speaker 02

  How do you, what do you mean?

• 2:03:22John Coogan?

  Like, do you kick off a new, new test, or can you optimize each one individually?

• 2:03:28Speaker 02

  I think you can do each game individually. But you can't do a specific level. Like, you have to do...

• 2:03:32John Coogan?

  The whole thing.

• 2:03:33Speaker 02

  You know, one through eight or whatever.

• 2:03:34John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, okay, got it.

• 2:03:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:03:36John Coogan?

  Interesting. I need, I still need to do all three, because I've only done the first one. I actually haven't beaten it.

• 2:03:42Speaker 02

  Did you time yourself?

• 2:03:43John Coogan?

  Well, no, because I did it in parts, right? I did like a couple minutes before the stream, and then I did five minutes on the stream, and then, you know, I think I know enough at least to be like, to probably have an edge, so it wouldn't be apples to apples. But maybe I gotta check the number of moves. That's the move. Okay, well, we have our next guest here in the studio. Let's bring them in. Good soundboard, Jordy.

• 2:04:06Speaker 02

  What's going on?

• 2:04:07John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

• 2:04:09Speaker 02

  Welcome.

• 2:04:12Speaker 05

  Awesome to meet you.

• 2:04:13John Coogan?

  Oh, thank you.

• 2:04:14Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you.

• 2:04:15John Coogan?

  I was worried we had some audio issues. Turns out we don't. Can you give us an introduction? What are you building?

• 2:04:21Speaker 05

  Of course. I am building data computers alongside with my co-founder Lenny. And we use AI to automate the production of printed circuit boards. We design them and manufacture them.

• 2:04:34John Coogan?

  Very cool. What's the state of the art right now? Like, who are your competitors?

• 2:04:39Speaker 05

  So there's a bunch of companies that really like try to build circuit boards. Circuit boards are at the heart of every single electronic product that you have. You name it like aerospace, robotics, medical devices. These are all industries that traditionally would take months to come up with designs and like volume manufacturing of these boards. And so our goal is to help them and like scale up to production right away. Our competitors are folks like Altium Cadence, but also like current manufacturers that are like building circuit boards right now.

• 2:05:12John Coogan?

  And what's the latest news? Do you have anything?

• 2:05:15Speaker 05

  I am very proud to announce that we raised a Series A by Andreessen Horowitz.

• 2:05:20Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:05:24Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic. When did you start the company? I don't know. I think I missed that.

• 2:05:28Speaker 05

  Exactly a year ago. Like we hit the one year anniversary three days ago.

• 2:05:32John Coogan?

  And am I looking at a virtual background or is this actually your office?

• 2:05:35Speaker 05

  No, this is the Brooklyn Navy Yard. We build circuit boards in Brooklyn, New York.

• 2:05:40John Coogan?

  Cool. What is the core value proposition? Speed, quality, time? How do you think about like, what are your customers asking for right now?

• 2:05:51Speaker 05

  So the real like thing that was very interesting to me is that we have fewer and fewer people that can build circuit boards at the highest like level of complexity. And these people are working at insanely good companies like Tesla, SpaceX, Apple, Meta. And they're very, very hard for other hardware companies to kind of like take away.

• 2:06:15Speaker 05

  I like, I used to be at one of these companies. I used to work at Apple. I used to work on custom silicon. So our goal is basically to democratize the way that we currently like build circuit boards and allow like from startups to large enterprises to take advantage of a very high-end type of workflow. And the only way we could think about how to do it is to teach large language models to actually generate schematics. And so like the, the advantage and the difference is that we use code to build our circuit boards, which is something that usually like is not done this way. Circuit boards are very visual. Like you can think about them almost as like Figma. Um, while we, what we do is like more like web design, like CSS and code that then gets rendered into like an actual circuit board. Um, it's called artwork.

• 2:06:58John Coogan?

  Can you, uh, can, is it like, okay to take a circuit board schematic from an existing product? I remember we had this founder on, I think it was the Matic Robot and he had, was, was that right? Or we had some founder on who had printed on their, on, on their circuit board like, hi, Amazon. Because they knew that Amazon was going to take it apart and like try and understand how they were doing what there was. I might be messing up the company names, um, but it seems like there's some proprietary information in the, in the like, like, yes, there's amazing data and amazing engineers at these big companies. They're making these circuit boards, but they're probably not okay with you just taking that as training data or maybe it's legal. I don't know. What, what's the deal there?

• 2:07:41Speaker 05

  You're absolutely right. Um, I think that Matic is a fantastic company. Uh, they and Whoop both print on their circuit boards like.

• 2:07:48John Coogan?

  That's the one. Yeah. Whoop.

• 2:07:51Speaker 05

  Fantastic detail. I, I really love it.

• 2:07:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can make that, you can make that a feature.

• 2:07:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:58Speaker 05

  We will do it for everyone of our circuit boards. Um, data is actually like the most important part of this. So. Like, there is no easily available data for this kind of problem. Like, whereas on code, you can basically take GitHub and kind of like start training your models on very high-end like data that you can use. Part of like what we are doing at DAI is we're rebuilding the data set from the ground up. And so there is a lot of like data annotation, data cleaning, like generating new types of data that we can use to improve the models. And we are about to announce like next week a partnership with like a very large like software open source project.

• 2:08:37Speaker 05

  And and our goal is basically to contribute back to the community, generate this data that like we're gonna use to train like better models without going and like touching on proprietary data, like we own our own designs. And so while we assign the IP of the board that we design for our customers to them, we usually retain the rights to the individual components that we generate. And those are like a competitive advantage for us. We are basically building an internal data structure.

• 2:09:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, why, why do you even need real data? I feel like you could generate all of this in simulation. Like, I, when I hear people talk about bio and saying, oh, we don't have a simulated cell. I'm like, okay, well, that makes sense. Like, humans are really complicated, biology is really complex. But like, we created circuit boards in the first place, we should be able to simulate those. Like, why can't you just simulate all possible circuit boards and then do some sort of search through that? Why do you need hard data?

• 2:09:26Speaker 05

  You're absolutely right. We actually do do that. Like, we have reinforcement learning algorithms. There's two types of simulation that you can do. One is like an electrical simulation, which you can absolutely like get right. It's called spice. But then, like, the second order effects of like physics are quite complicated to model. And so there's a really, like, there's a good saying around like very talented electrical engineers, which is that you never trust them. Like, you basically, like, you can try simulating it, but then, like, manufacturing something and making sure it works is the ultimate, like, simulation test. Like, the, the boards may be manufactured in a different way. The, the, like, Boardhouse may not like respect your specifications. And so we hundred percent do simulation, that's how we bootstrap the process.

• 2:10:10Speaker 05

  You couldn't like build the library of data that we've built just by hand, like, it's physically impossible.

• 2:10:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:10:16Speaker 05

  So we, we use like simulation to bootstrap. But then the ability to manufacture the boards is really what creates differentiation and like brings home the fact that these like circuits are actually working.

• 2:10:25Jordi Hays?

  So what are you guys actually doing on the manufacturing side? Are you going to be scaling manufacturing? Are you just making prototypes for customers and then they take those elsewhere to scale?

• 2:10:40Speaker 05

  Excellent question. So our offer to the world is come to us, bring us what you want to design. We'll design it for you, optimize it for manufacture it and then scale it with you. Today, we have only small batch assembly in-house. Like, we actually have an electric lab right here that we use to assemble like circuit boards like these. And then we partner with manufacturing houses for like the largest, higher volume production. But the eventual future is we are going to vertically integrate this manufacturing. And like this is what we want to offer to company. If you look at the current offer for printed circuit boards in the US, it's very, very hard to manufacture them like within the nation.

• 2:11:24Speaker 05

  It's usually like anytime you want to scale, you need to go to China. And we think that the way to solve that is basically by making all of our design look the same from a manufacturability standpoint. So we can generate volume and like bring it to all of our clients at the same time. We also do things like automatically matching the parts and the ordering, which is something that normally it's done manually and it's incredibly like long and annoying to do. And so to like keep a very complicated process short, we make ordering PCBs from the US as easy as ordering them from China. Not quite as inexpensive yet, but we are going to go there.

• 2:12:01Jordi Hays?

  Where do you think you'll you'll set up your actual manufacturing hub? You're you're said you're in the Brooklyn Navy Yard right now. Do you think you'll go elsewhere or do you want to keep it in the in the great state of New York?

• 2:12:14Speaker 05

  So I'm a big believer in like decentralized approaches for prototype level. So we're actually opening an assembly shop in San Francisco for our clients there. And we're thinking about one in Austin where we have like some clients that I absolutely love alongside the one in New York. And I think that long term for scaling production, the best strategy will be to co-locate the warehouses for the components and the assembly. So we're probably going to open a larger facility in either Arizona or Ohio, most likely.

• 2:12:46Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 2:12:47John Coogan?

  Last question for me, IMO gold medal. What was your reaction to the news? And is is solving IMO level math useful to you? Do you think there will be transfer learning from that model into the circuit board design domain? Or are we in the era of spiky intelligence where until you RL on that particular problem, you're not getting generalizable results?

• 2:13:13Speaker 05

  I think even if we were in the era of like spiky intelligence on like RL on a specific problem, like circuit boards are an absolutely like good way of doing this. Like conceptually, a circuit board is orders of magnitude stimppler than silicon design. Like before, like building circuit boards for a living, I used to do like custom silicon designs. And those have been like represented as code for years. This is 100% an RL approachable problem. I do think that the IMO news is fantastic. Like clearly, there are incredible returns if you do train on like a very specific set of data. I think that the the biggest mode will be in the data. Like what we consider to be our competitive advantage is not really like training new

• 2:13:58Speaker 05

  foundation models. We actually rely on like foundation model improvements in the wild. And our like entire model is based upon feeding those models with better and better data and being able to fine tune and reinforcement learning, train very specific parts. Like one of them is like the model that spots mistakes. That's how you tell like a good generated design versus a bad generated design. And you can ground the model in reality and physics.

• 2:14:22John Coogan?

  That makes no sense. Thank you so much for stopping by. We will talk to you soon. Congratulations on the raise.

• 2:14:28Jordi Hays?

  Crossing the one year milestone and getting an A done as well. Great stuff.

• 2:14:33Speaker 05

  Thank you so much.

• 2:14:34John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day. Talk to you soon. And up next, we have Elan, who I met and Delian was mentioning, was building a company in France. Now he's building a company in America. We're going to dig into the differences between the two countries. Figure out which country is the best. Get to the bottom of it. Hey, how you doing?

• 2:14:54Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:14:55Speaker 06

  Hey, I'm good. I'm good. And you guys?

• 2:14:56John Coogan?

  I'm good. We met at Miami Tech Week a few years ago, correct?

• 2:15:00Speaker 06

  Yes, yes.

• 2:15:01John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 2:15:02Speaker 06

  And I remember you telling me quite specifically, you didn't see yourself starting a venture business, a venture backed business, but you said media was something you were very interested in. So it looks like it turned out quite well.

• 2:15:12John Coogan?

  Here we are.

• 2:15:13Jordi Hays?

  Here we are.

• 2:15:13John Coogan?

  Here we are. But yes, give me, give me the background on your journey. We'll get to the current company, but I want to talk more about building a company outside of America. Dalian gave us a little bit of the background, but I wanted to just hear that journey and kind of tangle with it for a little bit.

• 2:15:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I started a company called Kala with two co-founders, probably a bit more than eight years ago. The vision and the mission was to basically make real food more affordable by using robotics and AI to automate the back kitchen operations. And if you look at the typical P and L of a restaurant, it's like 30% food cost, 30% people cost and 30% overhead, real estate, rent, electricity, those sorts of things. And like the 10% EBITDA margin, if you're performing well, most, a lot of restaurants actually are losing money. So that's, that was the vision. We said, okay, we can actually build machines and robotic systems to bring down operating costs, to bring down the required footprint of a restaurant to run, which means we bring down overhead as well.

• 2:16:12Speaker 06

  And hopefully we can reinvest part of those gains into better quality ingredients to make the product more affordable and more higher value. And then we can also make the restaurant itself more profitable, thus more scalable. So that was the vision. We basically ran the company for, for eight years, did a bunch, like an ungodly amount of mistakes along the way. But in the end, managed to have five very, very, very profitable restaurants. Basically, give you a few numbers, but like 60% retention, customers coming more than once a week, 95% customer satisfaction, can give you the profitability numbers, but much higher than what any other restaurants has achieved in the world thus far.

• 2:16:52Speaker 06

  And so the thinking from there was, okay, we have those great first results with the restaurants, let's start scaling. We had raised 10 million up to that point from. And we could have got hung on a very structural problem of Europe, which is there's a big financing gap when you go, when you get to like the series A slash series B kind of moment, where basically there's just a gigantic cliff of funding there. And so basically, we didn't, we did not understand that when we created the business and structured the business. And so we basically were like, starting to assemble the plane, get ready to take off, and then we hit the wall like straight on, straight on. And we just hadn't built, we should have built like a much smaller plane or whatever, a Delta plane or something, something that's more lean

• 2:17:36Speaker 06

  than what we had prepared to do because we had kept a much more ambitious vision that what was achievable in Europe. And the thing that's quite specific and that Delian was referencing a few days ago on the show was restructuring the business to go from those handful of restaurants that were like very profitable and a very high of HQ cost, trying to restructure that to get to a profitable, break even point at the business level. Was basically on paper possible, like we could have cut down cost enough to make the business profitable. But just pure French regulation prevented us from doing that. Just the severance cost, Delian can put it quite well, like the purely the severance liability was higher than the cash on the hands we had at the time, and we had quite a lot of cash and still it was like a lot of money

• 2:18:21Speaker 06

  that we had to pay in severance and plus other liabilities around that. And so in the end, we basically tried to talk to the regulators, to the government, to any structure that was around us to try and find a work around, but we in the end, we couldn't really go beyond what the laws and rules allowed. And so ultimately, we had to shut down the business around a bit more than two months ago, which was quite a shame. I was very, very angry throughout the whole process. Which obviously kind of painted up in the next year, in the past few weeks. And when I met Delian a few, yeah, actually a few days after the decision from the court came down, I was still kind of on the fence about what I wanted to do next. I was still thinking, should I, I'm still very angry about this.

• 2:19:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one thing I would just highlight, the idea of using robotics to deliver better, cheaper food was not novel. What was novel was actually getting it to work, right? Like so many companies, so many people have tried to do this in the United States.

• 2:19:19Speaker 06

  It's a graveyard.

• 2:19:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's an absolute graveyard of companies with super talented founders and teams that for some reason or another couldn't, like, you know, it's hard enough.

• 2:19:29John Coogan?

  Dave Friedberg started one, Itza. Yeah, and it's hard enough.

• 2:19:32Speaker 06

  It's interesting was the other way around, like they automated the front of house, not the back of house. But but a lot of businesses like I could give you 20, 30 different businesses that I've tried. And I think up to that point, we are the only business that had, and technically Sweet Green does as well, but had proven, let's say incrementally positive return investment on the whole investment of a restaurant. Meaning like if you actually invest the money it takes to build a machine and put it in the restaurant, you actually end up with a higher ROI on the whole investment than if you are just launching with a normal team. I think Sweet Green is the only restaurant that had this apart from us. And for them, it's not very clear exactly how they achieved that in terms of how transparent they are with the numbers.

• 2:20:15Speaker 06

  But yeah, other than that, I don't think anyone had even made like had even actually paid back a single installation of a robotic system in a restaurant. And so, yeah, we were very proud of that result that we got a few years ago. And then we managed to launch more stores, get more revenue, get stores doing very high EBITDA margin. But yeah, in the end, couldn't really get there with Keller. And I think in the end, the biggest mistakes we made was definitely starting the business in Europe, in France specifically. There's just the market and the, let's say, the whole ecosystem is just not made for ambitious plays. And like if you want to build something ambitious, you can't really do it there.

• 2:20:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you think that the restrictions and the regulation that you ran into, are those broadly popular? Or are they kind of like legacy rules that if you put them up to a purely democratic vote, most people would say that doesn't make any sense? Because there's a lot of like, you know, legislative and regulatory cruft in America that isn't popular, but hangs around and people just kind of deal with it. But but what is like the mood in France around this? Like it's, it sounded like there wasn't very much like public outcry, but it feels like a situation where kind of everyone loses because the customers were enjoying the food, the employees were enjoying their jobs, you were enjoying building this company, and now they all go, just go away.

• 2:21:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I don't, so this regulation specifically, I don't think it's known enough. Like, company going bankrupt is not something that makes national news. So it's not something that people have top of mind. But I think overall, people would probably support it because what the regulation actually says is just that when an employee, when a company goes bankrupt, the employee gets pretty high severance, meaning they don't have to find it up straight away. Or if they can, they can take a few months to find it and it's fine. And so I think with the very socialist mental model that most French people have, I think this would probably be popular. But on top of the severance itself, the state puts in place a lot of other protections, even beyond what the severance cost is, like you basically get your full salary for a year if your company goes bankrupt, paid by the state.

• 2:22:18Speaker 06

  So that was, I mean, partially by the company, but the state puts a bit more on. And so there was a bunch of those rules that I think people would probably be in favor of if they thought about it, but it's just not something that's top of mind for anyone.

• 2:22:31John Coogan?

  Have you talked to any other founders in France who went through something similar or had cautionary tales to share? Because it feels like if this was widespread, we'd be hearing about it a lot and people would be starting to lobby or anything, or maybe just everyone leaves.

• 2:22:44Speaker 06

  I don't know. I think one of the reasons why it was so hard for us specifically is that the, so first, we had our business and so the HQ cost component is harder to scale down than a typical software business. I think that's probably one reason why it was hard. And also, I think a lot of businesses that fail, especially startups in France, just fail because they can't really find product market fit and they can't even get commercial traction. And so in the end, you don't really mind the company going bankrupt because you just didn't have something that was worth working for. Versus for us, I think it's a bit different because we actually had a product that worked and the economics were there, we just couldn't keep on scaling and we should have understood that maybe two or three years earlier and been a lot more conservative on the structuring of the business.

• 2:23:26John Coogan?

  What's the strategy for the new company? How do you leverage what works and avoid what doesn't?

• 2:23:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I think so the first one key lesson is definitely being a lot more lean on the on the HQ cost. I think one thing that I learned is that even though I think this business can be scaled built with venture capital. I think you have to to build a strategy around your financing that's both VC but also private equity that does retail and restaurants come more naturally. You have to be able to tailor your business to all those guys because at some point you're gonna need them. And so that that means lower HQ cost, more lean HQ operations. That means other structuring element that you have to do differently. So there's definitely one big learning. And the second one is also in terms of, let's say, structuring of the operations. We had built restaurants that were too small. And so even though they are very profitable, they didn't bring in as much EBITDA as we could have.

• 2:24:18Speaker 06

  If we had stores that were doing like, let's say, three million revenue per store, we'd have been bringing a lot more EBITDA per store than the revenue we had in our stores. So that's another key learning. And the tech itself also, we are changing a bit the product. We are not taking any of the previous IP or tech that Kala kept developed. We are rebuilding everything from scratch. But we know overall, we have kind of rough good ideas of what are the prototypes we made, what worked, what didn't work. And so we are also approaching the tech a bit differently than what we did with Kala. And thus, we're also approaching the the product differently. We're not gonna be serving the same the same food.

• 2:24:51John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Jordi and Pien.

• 2:24:53Jordi Hays?

  So what, yeah, can you, what's the timeline for the new company? And where, what what kind of key markets are you looking at?

• 2:25:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, so when I spoke with Delian a month and a half ago, was not really decided on it yet. So barely basically incorporating the business now. Already have, basically, I talked to a bunch of Kala shareholders that when I announced that we had to shut down the business in India, we were forced by the state to shut down. It's not even like we decided to do it. Talked to a bunch of them that basically said, whatever you guys do again, if it's the same business, we want to back you again. So I'm right now just thinking about how I want to think about financing. And the first few months is very, very high level at the moment, not really into any details. So that's the first step in next few months. The higher level roadmap is to launch the first store in New York, middle of next year, midpoint of next year.

• 2:25:43Speaker 06

  Exactly when is gonna depend a bit on a few elements around running and also timeline on regulation. But yeah, the first restaurant in New York, gonna launch a few us from there and then pretty highly considering franchising. As of a path to scale a lot more aggressively than and a lot more efficiently. Capital efficiently than we did with with Cala where we own every single restaurant.

• 2:26:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think most people don't understand just how if you if you have a hit.

• 2:26:11Jordi Hays?

  Restaurant, you know, concepts and you can scale with with franchises, not only can franchisees, you know. Change their lives through through that opportunity, but you can have what ends up looking like a software or better than software. Margins in that like super lean HQ and just printing cash off the top line, so.

• 2:26:31Speaker 06

  And imagine imagine if the restaurant itself doesn't do 10% of it double, multiple X around above that. The amount of money you get out of the top line of the restaurant is just so much higher. Then let's say you are a typical restaurant does 10% of the margin as a franchise or you're gonna take 5%. That's not a lot of value you're taking for you basically not doing everything, but creating the whole value in the end. If you have a restaurant that does a lot more than that, you can get a much bigger chunk of the top line that restaurant and does. The gains into by not operating is also much better.

• 2:27:02Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 2:27:02John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:27:03Jordi Hays?

  Well, excited for you to come to the US and build here.

• 2:27:07Speaker 06

  I hit you up when someday I'm gonna come to the restaurant.

• 2:27:10John Coogan?

  Amazing. Yeah, we'd love to try it. Thanks so much.

• 2:27:12Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 2:27:12John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 2:27:15Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff.

• 2:27:16John Coogan?

  Tyler, any more progress? How you doing?

• 2:27:18Speaker 02

  I made it to fifth place.

• 2:27:19John Coogan?

  Fifth place?

• 2:27:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:27:20John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:27:21Speaker 02

  My moves are 525.

• 2:27:23John Coogan?

  525, you're you're hot.

• 2:27:25Speaker 02

  14 away.

• 2:27:25John Coogan?

  You might be a number one by the end of the day.

• 2:27:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's pretty marginal like.

• 2:27:29John Coogan?

  It's hard now.

• 2:27:30Speaker 02

  It's gonna be hard from here on out.

• 2:27:31John Coogan?

  To squeeze out the last little bit of performance.

• 2:27:34Jordi Hays?

  It's all it's all your mindset, Tyler.

• 2:27:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:37Speaker 02

  Did Tyler win the iPhone?

• 2:27:39John Coogan?

  He did.

• 2:27:40Jordi Hays?

  He did. He did.

• 2:27:41Speaker 02

  I had a constellation prize already.

• 2:27:43John Coogan?

  Oh, I did. Rubik's Cube. Oh, we got a Rubik's Cube now? Uh, that's too easy for Tyler. That's a that's a three by three.

• 2:27:49Speaker 02

  I got the nine by nine.

• 2:27:50John Coogan?

  Tyler can do the nine by nine.

• 2:27:52Jordi Hays?

  That's the next challenge.

• 2:27:53John Coogan?

  You say that you can do the nine by nine. That thing has not been solved yet.

• 2:27:56Speaker 02

  It'll be done by tomorrow.

• 2:27:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think that's the challenge.

• 2:27:59John Coogan?

  Tomorrow?

• 2:27:59Speaker 02

  Okay, I can do it. Give me like 20 minutes.

• 2:28:02John Coogan?

  Tomorrow. Do it tomorrow on the stream.

• 2:28:04Speaker 02

  Okay. I can fully scramble it.

• 2:28:06John Coogan?

  Scramble it. It looks pretty scrambled to me. It looks like the last, like, the hardest part is ahead of you.

• 2:28:11Speaker 02

  No, the hardest part is done.

• 2:28:13John Coogan?

  Okay. Okay.

• 2:28:15Jordi Hays?

  Nice. Little timeline?

• 2:28:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, Brian Johnson is...

• 2:28:19Jordi Hays?

  Blueprint has been a pain in his butt. It's kept me from not focusing on the single thing I'm consumed with. How does the human race survive the rise of superintelligence? Every minute spent dealing with problems like, why is suppliers shipped us something out of spec? Is a minute not spent figuring out how to make Don't Die the fastest growing ideology in history increasing our odds of survival and thriving? At the same time, Blueprint produces products my body and mind, uh, that bring my body and mind great joy. I rely upon them for my well-being. I trust it. So do tens of thousands of happy customers. After years of consuming, I am at a molecular level Blueprint.

• 2:28:54John Coogan?

  How big do you think the business is? Tens of thousands of customers? What do you think LTV is?

• 2:28:59Jordi Hays?

  I had thought or heard that it was at like a hundred million dollar run rate.

• 2:29:04John Coogan?

  That feels about right. I feel like if you go into the Blueprint ecosystem, you go pretty hard.

• 2:29:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you could end up consuming six products in a day.

• 2:29:12John Coogan?

  For everything and you go, it's not just like, you know, one protein bar and that's it. It's like, maybe it has a whole variety of things to purchase. So yeah.

• 2:29:20Jordi Hays?

  Supplement companies continue to be undefeated in terms of monetizing health audiences.

• 2:29:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, especially if you have a big audience like he does.

• 2:29:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he says, uh, Blueprint is the best longevity stack in the world. That's not an exaggeration. It's meticulously, uh, designed, based on scientific evidence, third-party tested, comprehensive, easy to consume, delicious and priced to be accessible. And anyways, he go on, uh, to say that he's been, uh, basically attacked, uh, for, by people saying that he's grifting, that he, uh, you know, is, is the whole kind of Blueprint, uh, Don't Die ideology is, is meant to sell supplements.

• 2:29:55John Coogan?

  Netflix did a documentary. Wow. That's really, really big.

• 2:29:59Jordi Hays?

  But the news here is that he's hiring, he's hiring a CEO and a CTO who can lead the business day to day while he focuses on don't die. And so, you know, interesting opportunity here. There's a bunch of different product lines. They have nourish biomarkers, quantified. And I guess clinics are coming soon. I don't know. I don't know that any exists yet, but they're raising money too. They need some hardcore builders. So I think this would be a great SPAC candidate, John. It's a real revenue, charismatic founder. Take it, take it public, Brian. Just, just do it.

• 2:30:36John Coogan?

  Buy some meme stock for your treasury.

• 2:30:39Jordi Hays?

  Keep some GameStop and some Bitcoin.

• 2:30:41John Coogan?

  Just diversified memes.

• 2:30:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. Some fart coin in there in the treasury, in the corporate treasury. That's the move.

• 2:30:49Jordi Hays?

  I can see it.

• 2:30:50John Coogan?

  What, what a run. He is such a master of earned media. It's so crazy. He's ba- this is basically what, like a hiring post? He's saying like, I'm hiring two people.

• 2:30:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:59John Coogan?

  Amazing essay, super viral, and then also a business insider piece that he gets coverage from and can screenshot.

• 2:31:05Jordi Hays?

  The master.

• 2:31:06John Coogan?

  What a beast. Sickie Chen.

• 2:31:08Jordi Hays?

  How does he do it?

• 2:31:09John Coogan?

  Putting up massive numbers. His portfolio company just exited today and he got paid. Waters on me next time, folks, because he received a distribution.

• 2:31:17Jordi Hays?

  Better than nothing. It's not a zero.

• 2:31:20John Coogan?

  What happened? It's so interesting. It wouldn't be a zero, but it also wouldn't be like, like a real number. It's like the smallest amount.

• 2:31:28Jordi Hays?

  That happens. Money has to go somewhere.

• 2:31:30John Coogan?

  I guess, I guess.

• 2:31:31Jordi Hays?

  Michael Kratzios has a video today to win the AI race and ensure global technological dominance. We need more power. So we have Michael be coming on the show tomorrow, correct?

• 2:31:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. And a lot of news here. I'm sure we'll be digesting it. The All In Podcast is also having a crossover event with Hill and Valley.

• 2:31:50Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:31:51John Coogan?

  With a bunch of hitters breaking this down. There's a lot.

• 2:31:54Jordi Hays?

  Absolute dogs.

• 2:31:57Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if there's been more absolute dogs under one roof in Washington in, in maybe since Helen Valley.

• 2:32:03John Coogan?

  It's pretty, it's pretty wild. Uh, the actual action plan is really, really like huge. Uh, the, the, the basic summary is that, um, they're shift, they're trying to shift or they're shifting with this document, AI policy at the federal level from safety first posture. We're worried about paper clipping. We're worried about, you know, like the Doomer scenario. Should we, you know, have an FDA for, that was one of, something that was thrown around on podcasts a while ago. Should these models need to be approved by the federal government before they go into general release? Um, now there's a shift in posture to a growth in geopolitics posture, basically. So, uh, the immediate practical effect is the publication

• 2:32:46John Coogan?

  of priorities. Real world impact will depend on how quickly the 90 plus follow on actions, especially deregulation, fast track permitting, new export packages and procurement rules move from paper to binding regulations, guidance and contracts over the next few months. So there's a bunch of stuff in here. It's going to touch the OMB, NIST, all the cabinet agencies, commerce, energy, labor departments, treasury, department of energy, basically census, like,

• 2:33:19John Coogan?

  treat AI skill programs as tax-free educational assistance. There's a whole bunch of different ideas in here.

• 2:33:24Jordi Hays?

  They're bringing that golden retriever mode ideology to AI.

• 2:33:28John Coogan?

  There's going to be the creation of the department of defense, AI and autonomous systems, virtual proving ground. I was talking to somebody yesterday about how big is, um, is AI on the battlefield? How big of an issue is having frontier AI in a military context? And, um, it's very unclear if you can just, you know, hey, invade Taiwan, don't make mistakes. Um, like one-shotting these prompts, we don't think we're there, but, uh, even if you just think about if you're going up against a, a, an adversary and they have Microsoft Excel and you don't, well, their logistics are going to be smoother. And so even just having AI tools and systems in, in all the different little places within your military force,

• 2:34:12John Coogan?

  that could be advantageous, even if we're not talking about the Terminator killer robot scenario, like the, the humanoids, all of that stuff feels a little bit further out, but just using AI to make. Standard process is a little bit more efficient, seems like an important advantage to have in a conflict. They're also expanding the National AI Research Resource Pilot and the creation of financial instruments, spot and forward markets to give startups on-demand access to GPU capacity. NSF, Department of Energy, secure compute environments and National Secure Data Service Portal for controlled access. So there's some open source and research efforts. There's a ton of stuff in here. I'm sure it'll all be.

• 2:34:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the open source stuff was exciting to see.

• 2:34:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll see how Mark Zuckerberg fits into that because if he stays with the new super, the superintelligence team is stacked, but there was always a question about like, how long will Llama stay open source? China seems to be beating us up on open source. We saw Quen doing really well, DeepSeek doing really well. And so if there's going to be an open source champion in America, it feels like that could come from Meta. And so it'll be interesting to see how badly he wants it, how badly he wants to stay there and how valuable that is to stay in the open source,

• 2:35:28John Coogan?

  at the frontier of the open source. Speaking of that, there was an interesting debate back and forth. I forget who said this. Oh, Francois Chalet said, please note, we are not able to produce the 41.8% result from Arc AGI 1. That's the first Arc AGI test claimed by the latest Quen 3 release, neither on the public eval set nor on the semi-private set. The numbers we're seeing are in line with other recent base models. In general, only rely on scores verified by the Arc Prize Foundation on the semi-private set. That way you can trust that the methodology was consistent and fair across all models verified. But then one of the team members, I think, says, hey, we use the JSON format for convenient parsing.

• 2:36:11John Coogan?

  I'll DM you for reproduction. Sounds good. Waiting for you to DM them. So we will have more news on whether or not Quen 3 really did jump forward in Arc AGI. But again, you know, the goal should be 100% on Arc AGI since these are, these are tests that, you know, everyone from an intern to a. You know, I don't know, a 10 year old can do. I don't know how low it goes. I don't know if a five year old can do it. I gotta, I gotta put it to the test. I gotta have the kids try.

• 2:36:40Jordi Hays?

  Definitely.

• 2:36:40John Coogan?

  Um, anyway.

• 2:36:41Jordi Hays?

  Martin Shkreli has a good post here responding to Caitlin Relis. She says, you must be one of four things to raise right now. AI high flyer seed co with the promise of being an AI high flying company. American dynamism slash reindustrialization company. And Martin says, how about just growing revenue and profits really fast? That is a fantastic strategy.

• 2:37:01John Coogan?

  The Lindy way, but then if you're growing profits really fast, you might not need to raise. You might not be able to justify a big raise potentially.

• 2:37:09Jordi Hays?

  Just raise it 500x revenue.

• 2:37:11John Coogan?

  I guess, yeah. 10,000x EBITDA or something. Um, anyway, in other news, um, people are still memeing about the, uh, nuclear reactor breach, uh, by hackers via Microsoft SharePoint.

• 2:37:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was interested in the timeline there. I was getting into that story yesterday. The vulnerability was discovered in May at a hacking competition that Microsoft put on. They then patched it later, uh, which didn't work. And then the major hacks happened over the weekend, just a few days ago. And so the timeline there is like, kind of weird. Like, did they not, um, uh, and people were pushing back and saying like, very unlikely that there was, um,

• 2:37:54John Coogan?

  A serious breach?

• 2:37:55Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, more so unlikely that super critical documents were shared in those systems, but still, uh, any of, any and all information related to the US Nuclear Weapons, uh, Agency and just program broadly should be pretty secure. So yeah, anyways, I'm sure we'll learn more about the, uh, kind of timeline that, that led to that over time. And, uh, some final words, uh, of advice, uh, from Sahil says, buy a dot com domain. Go into debt if you have to. I saw somebody quoted this and, um, and, uh, said,

• 2:38:35Jordi Hays?

  I actually did do this. I went into debt. The guy who got the domain contra.com. Which is a nice.

• 2:38:42John Coogan?

  Did it work out?

• 2:38:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he raised a lot of money.

• 2:38:45John Coogan?

  Oh, that's great.

• 2:38:46Jordi Hays?

  It's a great domain, great name. We got our domain from snagged.com. Rob, the

• 2:38:52John Coogan?

  Check it out.

• 2:38:54Jordi Hays?

  Industry-leading domain services. He helped us get tbpn.com in 30 minutes.

• 2:39:01John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:39:02Jordi Hays?

  Was one of the fastest negotiations of all time.

• 2:39:05John Coogan?

  It's pretty awesome.

• 2:39:05Jordi Hays?

  And we are very grateful. It's also cool. He started Ro, Ro, like

• 2:39:10John Coogan?

  Pharmaceutical company.

• 2:39:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, ro.co. So he's been in the domain game for a while, but

• 2:39:16John Coogan?

  Fire domain.

• 2:39:18Jordi Hays?

  And last, I gotta do one more final post.

• 2:39:20John Coogan?

  Do it.

• 2:39:20Jordi Hays?

  From Will Brown, chat GPT should have a big green switch that says sicko mode.

• 2:39:26John Coogan?

  Like sicko fancy mode?

• 2:39:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, S I C O mode. If you want to just turn it on and just get gassed up by the model, you should be able to really turn it on.

• 2:39:37John Coogan?

  Stay safe out there. Stay safe. Don't get lost in the sauce. Don't get lost in the sauce.

• 2:39:43Jordi Hays?

  And one more final post.

• 2:39:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:39:44Jordi Hays?

  The CEO, Brew Markets is highlighting the CEO of Nvidia, Benson, has a legendary LinkedIn profile. He was at Denny's for five years, 1978 to 83. He was a dishwasher, busboy, and a waiter. So just working his way up the org chart. If he had stayed there, he probably would have become CEO. But he went and a decade later founded Nvidia and has been running it for 32 years and seven months. So.

• 2:40:10John Coogan?

  What a run. Biggest company in the world.

• 2:40:13Speaker 02

  I think we low-key gotta put him in the truth zone because he worked at AMD.

• 2:40:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's, that's, that's the post.

• 2:40:19Jordi Hays?

  Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, I didn't highlight. Leaving out the years that he worked at AMD and LSI is a great example of how a lionizing narrative works, creates the impression of superhuman genius, which confers a valuable aura that has material impact on morale, negotiations, et cetera. Similar to Singapore was a fishing village. So.

• 2:40:37John Coogan?

  I actually don't know that much about the rumor that Singapore was a fishing village. I guess it wasn't. I don't know the story of Singapore nearly enough. We gotta do a deep dive. Sounds interesting. But yeah, worked at AMD and LSI Logic and then started Nvidia. So, but he took those off the LinkedIn. Because he's like, ah, like, why should I promote my competitors?

• 2:40:58Jordi Hays?

  Smart man.

• 2:40:59John Coogan?

  I'm not competing with Denny's. Apparently the first Denny's that he worked at or something has a plaque on the wall like Nvidia CEO worked here. Very cool. And he still does Denny's stunts. He did one with the acquired guys. He came by and like, I think he delivered them Denny's or something like that when they were doing some event at Nvidia GTC.

• 2:41:14Jordi Hays?

  At this point, he should just buy Denny's. It's 237, it's trading at $270 million market cap right now.

• 2:41:21John Coogan?

  It's that cheap? Wow. I didn't realize it was pure play like.

• 2:41:23Jordi Hays?

  It's also, I guess it's getting meme stocked. It's up 16% in the past five days.

• 2:41:29John Coogan?

  Not financial advice. Not financial advice.

• 2:41:31Jordi Hays?

  Jensen should really.

• 2:41:32John Coogan?

  Pick it up.

• 2:41:33Jordi Hays?

  Pick it up quick before it runs too hard.

• 2:41:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, he's in the interest of keeping it alive because if it just goes away and no one remembers.

• 2:41:40Jordi Hays?

  He could turn every Denny's into a showroom for his latest chips, you know, just carve out a booth.

• 2:41:47John Coogan?

  I feel like I read some article about Denny's or some sort of, you know, restaurant chain using AI to help the servers or something. Everyone has an AI play. Restaurant, restaurant solutions or something. They own IHOP, I believe, something like that. Yeah, yeah. Headquartered in Pasadena.

• 2:42:04Jordi Hays?

  Very American episode today, John. You could not put that football down the whole time.

• 2:42:09John Coogan?

  It's fun. It's nice to just have like a little, it's the original Fidgets.

• 2:42:11Jordi Hays?

  Something about John with a football.

• 2:42:13John Coogan?

  It's great. It's great. Yeah, I tried to keep it like below the desk during the interview so I could be a little bit more serious, but you know.

• 2:42:20Jordi Hays?

  Eventually, we're just gonna be, eventually, we're just sitting here.

• 2:42:23John Coogan?

  Tossing the pigskin while talking to some founder brother Ray.

• 2:42:28Jordi Hays?

  On that note, leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and.

• 2:42:34John Coogan?

  See you tomorrow.

• 2:42:35Jordi Hays?

  See you tomorrow.

• 2:42:36John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 2:42:36Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, folks.