YC Demo Day Lightning Round, New Snap AR Glasses, SpaceX Rips | Garry Tan, Andrew Lee, Stamatios Floratos, Hugo Frisk, Efraín Torres, Russell Smith, Payton Case, Akshay Trikha, Diana Hu, Harj Taggar, Connor Hayes, Luke Burgis, Anda Gansca

(01:05) - SpaceX Rips (08:00) - Andrew Lee, co-founder of Firebase (acquired by Google in 2014), discusses his latest venture, Tasklet, an AI agent platform that integrates with various work tools to automate workflows. He highlights Tasklet's rapid growth, achieving a $7 million run rate, and its ability to dynamically generate integrations using AI, enabling connections to both public and internal APIs. Lee also mentions a recent $20 million funding round and emphasizes Tasklet's competitive positioning against major AI labs. (18:14) - Stamatis Floratos is the co-founder and CEO of Eden Robotics, a company developing autonomous robots for industrial and commercial applications. In the conversation, he discusses their semi-humanoid robot with a wheeled base and two human-like arms equipped with grippers capable of performing over 80% of industrial tasks. He highlights the robot's 20-hour battery life and their innovative "labor as a service" model, charging clients per hour of robot operation, which has been well-received by customers. (26:20) - Hugo Frisk, co-founder and CEO of Tenet Industries, discusses his company's focus on mass-producing low-cost defense systems by applying principles from electronics and automotive manufacturing. He highlights the challenges of extending drone range without GPS, emphasizing the need for improved navigation systems and autonomy to overcome jamming issues. Frisk also outlines their business model, starting with private company sales and scaling up to government contracts, while addressing counter-UAS technologies and the importance of efficient, scalable production methods. (36:01) - Dr. Efrain Torres, co-founder of Adelante, discusses their development of mobile whole-body MRI units for cancer screening, emphasizing the safety and cost-effectiveness of their technology. He highlights the system's lighter weight, reduced power consumption, and quieter operation, enabling scans at $250 each, significantly lower than competitors. Torres also outlines their strategy of deploying traditional MRIs in mobile units to build distribution channels ahead of their proprietary system's FDA approval, aiming for profitability upon its clearance. (42:13) - Russell Smith, an entrepreneur and founder of 9 Mothers, discusses his journey from participating in Y Combinator's Summer 2012 batch to developing AI-powered counter-drone systems for the Department of Defense. He highlights the challenges of detecting and neutralizing fast-moving drones using a combination of sensors and kinetic methods, emphasizing the importance of sensor fusion to address various environmental conditions. Smith also shares the company's progress, including delivering units to the DoD, plans for significant revenue growth, and the development of a belt-fed shotgun system to enhance their counter-drone capabilities. (49:41) - Payton Case, founder of Dispatch Space, discusses his company's focus on building reentry vehicles to transport advanced materials manufactured in microgravity back to Earth, emphasizing applications in the semiconductor industry. He highlights a pilot mission with a paying customer to grow semiconductor crystals in space, noting that microgravity conditions yield crystals with up to a thousand times fewer defects. Case also shares his entrepreneurial journey from working in a smoothie shop to leading a space technology company and mentions the positive progress of their fundraising efforts. (54:24) - Akshay Trikha, co-founder of Madrone, is developing hyper-efficient cooling systems for data centers, particularly in hot and dry climates where hyperscaling is prevalent. He highlights that data centers are currently constrained by power availability rather than chips or land, with cooling consuming up to 40% of power that could otherwise be allocated to computational tasks. Madrone's innovative thermodynamic process aims to reduce power and water usage by 30%, enabling data centers to install more GPUs within existing grid permits and significantly lowering operational costs. (01:00:56) - New Snap AR Glasses (01:07:09) - Diana Hu, a Managing Partner at Y Combinator, co-founded Escher Reality, an augmented reality backend company acquired by Niantic in 2018, where she subsequently led the AR platform team. In the conversation, she reflects on her entrepreneurial journey, noting the significant growth of Y Combinator since her participation in 2017, and discusses the rapid revenue achievements of current startups, attributing this acceleration to advancements in agentic coding. She also emphasizes the importance of tailored advice for startups, recognizing that strategies should vary based on the company's focus, such as core infrastructure or defense applications. (01:20:51) - Harj Taggar, a Managing Partner at Y Combinator, co-founded Auctomatic in 2007 and Triplebyte in 2015, and was the first non-founder partner at YC in 2010. He discusses the evolving educational backgrounds of YC founders, noting a decline in computer science degrees and a rise in physics and math backgrounds, suggesting a shift towards first-principles thinking. Taggar also observes that while initial concerns about large AI labs dominating the field have subsided, founders are now focusing on creating tools and infrastructure that these labs are unlikely to develop, emphasizing the importance of identifying opportunities beyond the labs' scope. (01:38:36) - Garry Tan, born in 1981, is a Canadian-American venture capitalist and entrepreneur, currently serving as the President and CEO of Y Combinator. In the transcript, Tan discusses the growing trend of hard tech startups, emphasizing the importance of innovation in defense technology and the structural challenges faced by large tech companies in delivering desired technologies. He also highlights the potential of AI in transforming various industries and the need for startups to focus on creating products that people genuinely want. (02:00:30) - Connor Hayes, a longtime Meta executive, was appointed head of Threads in mid-2025, transitioning from his role as Vice President of Product for Generative AI. In the conversation, Hayes discusses Threads' growth to 500 million monthly users, emphasizing the platform's focus on fostering diverse communities and enhancing user engagement through features like Live Chats for events such as F1 and the NBA Finals. He highlights the app's commitment to being a "quiet" space for public conversation, differentiating it from other platforms by avoiding features like vertical video feeds, and underscores the importance of balancing growth metrics with the goal of facilitating meaningful interactions. (02:21:04) - Luke Burgis is an entrepreneur, author, and educator known for his work on mimetic desire and social contagion. In his conversation, he discusses how desires are often unconsciously shaped by others, the impact of artificial intelligence on these dynamics, and the importance of developing a strong personal identity to navigate societal pressures. (02:37:35) - Anda Gansca is the co-founder and CEO of Notch, a leading digital intelligence and optimization platform for Fortune 500 brands. In a recent conversation, she introduced ACE, a new infrastructure designed to enhance website conversion rates for both human users and AI agents. Gansca emphasized the importance of creating personalized digital experiences that cater to the evolving landscape of web traffic, where AI agents are becoming increasingly prevalent. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com...

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP on today's Tuesday, June 16th, 2026. We are live from the TVP Ultra on the Temple of Technology, Fortune's Finance, Capital Capital. Let me tell you about Ramp, Time is Money, Save Both, Easy Use Corporate Cards, Bill Pay, Accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. Sorry about the delay. We had a little bit of a technical issue. Glad everyone's here. Thank you for tuning in. It's YC Demo Day.

• 0:22Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for never doubting.

• 0:23John Coogan?

  Never doubt us, ever. No, it's okay. Every once in a while, you can.

• 0:28Jordi Hays?

  You can doubt us a little bit.

• 0:29John Coogan?

  Pop off in the comments, pop off in the chat. But we have YC Demo Day. We have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven YC founders joining, then three YC partners, and then we're going around the horn, talking to some other folks. Threads just hit 500 million monthly active users. We're having Connor Hayes back on the show for that. Luke Burgis is here, Burgess is here with his new book, The One and the 99. And so we'll go through that. Not a lot of time for the news, but we'll take you through it anyway.

• 0:59Jordi Hays?

  And in the middle of guests, we'll jump in for a little news.

• 1:02John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:03Jordi Hays?

  We love, we love, love the news. The big news is that SpaceX ran like absolute crazy after hours last night. I kept getting push notifications and thinking that, that can't be right. And then I would double click in, check a little bit, and I would say.

• 1:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, the headlines are crazy.

• 1:26Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, so the big one is.

• 1:27John Coogan?

  There's so many of it, just like it's passing this company, passing this company, passing that company. And you're like, whoa, this is a crazy, crazy time.

• 1:35Jordi Hays?

  So SpaceX.

• 1:36John Coogan?

  Bigger than Amazon.

• 1:37Jordi Hays?

  Sitting comfortably in the top five company.

• 1:40John Coogan?

  You got Nvidia at five trillion, Alphabet and Apple right around four, four and a half, then Microsoft and SpaceX neck and neck, just shy of $3 trillion. And it basically makes their, their cursor acquisition free. They paid $60 billion in new stock for the company and their market cap, SpaceX's market cap, more than quadrupled and added more than four X'd the price of a cursor acquisition.

• 2:06Jordi Hays?

  I believe they had until Q4 to actually pull trigger on the cursor deal, like they built in a window.

• 2:12John Coogan?

  Did it now.

• 2:14Jordi Hays?

  I bet you, I bet you there was some terms that weren't public that, that Cursor would have wanted to make sure that they got in as quickly as possible.

• 2:24John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:25Jordi Hays?

  Because IPOs done really well.

• 2:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:28Jordi Hays?

  Who knows where SpaceX will net out? I mean, I thought, I thought we'd be at 2.4 trillion by, by the middle, by basically the last hour of trading on Friday.

• 2:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38Jordi Hays?

  I was incorrect at the time, but it's obviously, you know, continued to run. And there was another scenario where SpaceX could have effectively acquired Cursor at an even higher, at an even higher valuation, but I think it's a great, fantastic outcome for the Cursor team, obviously, you know, OpenAI, it's a big Cursor investor, Thrive, A16Z, Co2, and, and others that, that I'm unfortunately forgetting, but.

• 3:10John Coogan?

  Who was Rema saying about this? He said it's the biggest, the biggest VC backed, in the past five days, we've seen the biggest VC backed IPO ever, and the biggest VC backed strategic sale ever. We've never had a, an M and A of a VC backed company, young startup, north of 50 billion. Like 60 billion is so, so big. We sort of lose sight of it because we're talking about a trillion dollars for this company, three trillion for that company, but 60 billion is beyond a home run.

• 3:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:44John Coogan?

  And it happened in an M and A, which is crazy.

• 3:48Jordi Hays?

  And there's, I would assume a, a large number of the retail investors investing in SpaceX.

• 3:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:55Jordi Hays?

  Were not necessarily even that familiar with Cursor up until today.

• 3:58John Coogan?

  I did see the headline today.

• 4:00Jordi Hays?

  If you're waking up today, you're like, wait, SpaceX just acquired one of the hottest AI companies in the world with billions of dollars in revenue. Like this is so bullish. Obviously, a lot of the more institutional investors or people that, that had been following the company. Privately, we're well aware that they had the option to do this, that they would almost certainly take it.

• 4:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, the takes are all over the timeline. Quinn Thompson says, "This is brilliant corporate finance. User newly printed low float retail inflated currency to acquire real businesses ahead of the lockup expiring. Probably the most creative accretive way to sell as much equity as possible into IPO pump. I wonder what acquisition is next." That's very interesting. Nick Carter fires back and says, "You'd think the people buying the equity would also be aware of this." And that's a good point, but the question is like, are there more acquisitions in the pipeline? Because Tesla has not done a lot of acquisitions. Elon's always been a build, not buy operator or founder.

• 5:05Jordi Hays?

  Tesla itself.

• 5:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's a very different scenario. What I'm talking about is like, there are companies, Meta is very acquisitive. Google, Apple, Apple's like on the smaller side, but they still do deals more frequently. It would be very interesting if we're seeing, you know, one deal a month and he's sort of putting together the pieces of buying up Neo Labs and compute capacity and Neo Clouds and rolling everything up. That would just be a completely different operating philosophy, but given where the stock is, given how smooth this deal went and where the market cap of SpaceX is, it's not the craziest thing. It would be a big pivot in his strategy though.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  Business Insider has a deep dive on Cursor's wild ride. Michael Truall didn't pay himself for years. Interestingly, Cursor once made up 40 to 50% of Anthropic's revenue. That is a crazy, you know, gyration in the market. It just shows you how quickly things are changing. Went from, you know, it's all Cursor, that that business is just funneling to Cursor. Cursor is the front door to this business. Then it's like, oh, it's all these hyperscalers that are spending a billion dollars, half a billion dollars a month. And so the whole landscape is changing. Nothing tells that more than Anthropic telling Cursor that Claude Code was just a research effort. This goes back to the Dylan Field, like, were they consistently candid? Or maybe they really just did think, hey, yeah, this is just a research effort, like you do you.

• 6:32John Coogan?

  And then realized later like, whoa, whoa, we need to be a player in this. We cannot be in the middle of this situation. So we gotta do our own thing.

• 6:40Jordi Hays?

  Owning the end customer relationship.

• 6:42John Coogan?

  And so wild, wild ride.

• 6:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, similar, similar to I think the messaging to Figma.

• 6:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:49Jordi Hays?

  Canva around.

• 6:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:51Jordi Hays?

  Propics design tool.

• 6:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's tricky. Every AI company is it's a general use technology. They're using it for everything. There's, there's, you know, questions about like, will you maintain value if you're in the token path? Do you need to be like, do not build a company that depends on the models getting better. But if the models are really, really good, like what can't they do? And so constantly we see every company competing with every other company as, you know, every hyperscaler has an LLM at this point and every SaaS product has other products because they can launch features faster. And so the, the competition is heating up across all these different companies.

• 7:27Jordi Hays?

  Next time we have Michael on the show.

• 7:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:29Jordi Hays?

  We got to ask how he paid the bills for all those years.

• 7:33John Coogan?

  Doing crashing on couches or something?

• 7:35Jordi Hays?

  Got to ask.

• 7:36John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 7:37Jordi Hays?

  Taking out massive loans against the company, maybe.

• 7:41John Coogan?

  Anyway, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it.

• 7:51Jordi Hays?

  Snap also has some big news today. We're going to get to it.

• 7:54John Coogan?

  We'll get to that after our first interview with Andrew Lee from Tasklet. He's the founder and CEO. Andrew, welcome to the show. Thank you for the patience and joining us on such a busy day. How is Demo Day going? How are you?

• 8:09Speaker 02

  I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. I want to be upfront. I can neither confirm nor deny the SpaceX acquisition rumors.

• 8:15John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. I see. They're flying around.

• 8:17Jordi Hays?

  Flying around Demo Day.

• 8:19John Coogan?

  Elon's probably there. Demo Day shaking hands, trying to scoop up, roll up the entire batch, maybe. Who knows? He's got the stock to do it.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  No comment. Demo Day is great. We're, we're having a good time. There's a thousand people here. There's 200 companies.

• 8:32John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Uh, it's, it's a good time.

• 8:34John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 8:34Jordi Hays?

  Did you, did you pitch already or is that ahead of you still?

• 8:38Speaker 02

  Not, not yet. We're in, we're in group four, which is going to be this afternoon. And it's actually my co-founder who's going to be up on, up on stage giving the talk.

• 8:45John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  I'll just be the pretty face over on the side.

• 8:48John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, uh, give us some backstory on yourself and tell us about the business.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, so as background, I was, the thing I'm probably best known for is I was one of the founders of Firebase. Oh, yeah. So this is my second time through YC. I did the summer 2011 batch. Yeah. We sold that company to Google in 2014. Yeah. I was there for about three years. This, this company has been a very interesting story. We actually started in 2020 as a better Gmail. Like, we tried to build a new email experience, raised a bunch of money, hired a team.

• 9:20Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so you quit Google to try to, to try to eat Gmail alive?

• 9:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. I, I had already left Google a couple of years before, but I saw them shut down Inbox. And I was like, man, what are these, this is a huge, huge product. Like, what are these guys doing? We should do a better job. This is a terrible idea. Don't do it. Don't invest in it. But just as we were getting ready to shut that thing down, LLMs got good. And we're like, holy crap. We can take all of this data that you have, and we can feed into a language model, and we can like draft emails for you. We can do interesting types of search, and we can do categorizations. We started kind of pulling that string. And around about this time last year, we had this really good agent inside our email client. And we had a bunch of users being like, hey, I love your product, but could you just get rid of all this Inbox crap? Right? Like, the UI is getting in the way.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  And so we spun it out, and we had a, it's a totally new product, totally new code base, and this is Tasklet. And we launched that in October, and that's gone super, super well. And that's, you know, that's why we're in YC. And that's gone, you know, at the beginning of the year, we were at about a third of a million of run rate. We're at a $7 million run rate now, so it's like a nice, nice fast ramp. And...

• 10:31Jordi Hays?

  Is that the bar now? Like, is, is there, you know, are you meeting other companies in the batch that have been able to ramp that, that quickly?

• 10:40Speaker 02

  I, I think we have the highest revenue of the batch.

• 10:42Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  Let's go.

• 10:44Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Well, why don't we go hit the gong?

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Oh, yes.

• 10:47Jordi Hays?

  And then, then we can, boom.

• 10:51Jordi Hays?

  That's for you.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Love that.

• 10:53Jordi Hays?

  So, so this feels like, so we were, we were looking at our little summary here. AI agents that connect across work tools, run 24/7 and take ownership of recurring workflows.

• 11:06John Coogan?

  Does big tech hate you? Like, because I feel like the whole point is walled gardens, that what, that's what creates value accrual. That's what keeps the value accruing to the work tools that, you know, big company CEOs love and extract a lot of value from. And you're coming in here and digging a hole under the wall of the garden and throwing a ladder over the top and digging a hole right through the, the walled garden.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 11:36John Coogan?

  How do you like maintain those integrations if, if, if the actual platform is maybe like hostile? We've seen reporting about this where different companies have tried to sort of integrate across and then they've wound up with sharp elbows. I think a lot of them have figured it out, but like, how do you think about working copacetically with the, the work tools that you integrate with?

• 11:59Speaker 02

  Totally. So, so AI has totally changed the game, you know? Two years ago, if you wanted to integrate with a bunch of stuff, you had to like hand code a bunch of integrations. And there were, you know, companies like NADAN and Zapier that just did that. That was their moat. And our secret sauce is that we can dynamically generate the integrations with AI, like when you need them. So we have a bunch of, you know, canned integrations. Some of that we, some of them we've hand coded and made them like really, really nice. But even if you ask for an integration we don't have, the AI can generate one for you. And this is super powerful, not just because it lets you go outside the walled garden, but because it lets you connect to things that like, might not be public at all. So if you're a company, a lot of times you have internal APIs and you're like, hey, I want to have some integration that hooks up to like Notion and HubSpot and Gmail,

• 12:41Speaker 02

  but then also like my random bespoke like internal API. And you can't do that with, you know, any of the products from, from, you know, big tech. You can't do that with, you know, Claude or, or OpenAI. But our product, yeah, sure, you can integrate, you know, via API with this thing, with MCP with this thing, with a pre-cant connector with this other thing, and they can all work together.

• 13:01John Coogan?

  What's the state of search these days? I feel like we've seen incredible progress in AI and agents. And then when I have the same frustration that you had when you were thinking about working on email, I'll type in some keyword, you know, like YC. And I will get some cookie, some string that's stuffed in a receipt from some coffee shop, but it has nothing to do with Y Combinator. The context isn't there. Apple Intelligence is rolling out. It takes like five days just to index everything into some sort of rag database. Like, why are we falling behind there? Is that a key? Is that key to your strategy? Or is it something that it's a problem for someone else to work on?

• 13:44Speaker 02

  So I think agents, again, have totally changed the game here. So in short, we have our email client.

• 13:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  The way we did search was the, you know, the vector database approach, right? We embedded your, all your emails. We stuck them in a vector database. We had this interesting search stack and the goal there was to have like the search results be good.

• 14:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  And it turns out with, if you have a really smart model and you have an agent, you don't actually care that much if the search results are good as long as you can run lots of searches. So what we found in Tasklet is we don't need to like ingest all your email and index it. We can hook up to the regular APIs and just run a whole bunch of queries in parallel. Look at the results, adapt, iterate.

• 14:20John Coogan?

  Just keep refining.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  And so the results are almost as good without any infrastructure. So it's a lot cheaper, you can connect to more stuff. So I think if you find use Tasklet, you can kind of hook it up to anything.

• 14:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  And you'll get surprisingly good search results without any special backend support.

• 14:35John Coogan?

  I imagine that that's sort of slow right now. And for a company like Google to roll that out to a billion users, you know, for free immediately, that's going to be really expensive. So that's still a ways out. They need to actually chop through that. But we could expect that search will get faster and better over the next couple of years.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that is the big drawback. And like, as an example, for Demo Day, I wanted to make sure that I chatted with the folks that were here that had reached out to me. And I've had people reaching out a period of months. And so I took Fable 5 back when that was still a thing.

• 15:08Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  And I pointed that at my Gmail and I said, "Go find everyone who was coldy-belled me in the last N months who might be at Demo Day and like, give me a spreadsheet with those folks." And it spent like, and stackrank them, right? Like, I want to know, who should I talk to first and so on. And it spent like, half an hour, it spent like $60 running this thing, right? But the end of the, I had this spreadsheet of like, 100 plus folks that was like, carefully researched and like, ordered and like, it found every, like, there was no one I could think of that it didn't find in that process. So if you're willing to spend 60 bucks, if it's worth it to you, like, great.

• 15:43Jordi Hays?

  I love it. Are you, last question, are you capital constrained? Like, I'm assuming you have a bunch of offers, maybe you already finished your fundraise, but why even raise? It feels like you guys seem to be making, I would imagine with that kind of revenue ramp, it'd be hard to not be making money right now.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  We are not capital constrained. We actually already closed a $20 million round in April with USP and Lightspeed and some other folks. But they're, you know, we're competing directly with Anthropic and OpenAI. They've obviously raised a lot more money and I think we can put it to use. So we are, we are raising more money now.

• 16:19Jordi Hays?

  I like just, I like just saying the actual reality, because there's a lot of founders that would come on and be like, "Well, actually, like, we do something that like, you know." And it's like, no. Everyone is competing all the time and it's better to just accept it and play the game, so.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  100%. And I think Corgi set a new bar with, you know, three weeks from, from, what was it, Series B to C or whatever they did there. So, you know, why wait?

• 16:42Jordi Hays?

  Three days. Do it in three days. Three days. I love it. Thank you for coming on. Yeah, great to meet you, Andrew. Congratulations. Congrats on all the progress. We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 16:51Jordi Hays?

  Have a good one.

• 16:53John Coogan?

  Let me tell you all about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Our next guest will be sitting in that same seat slotting in in just a second. We have

• 17:08Jordi Hays?

  And we'll be working on

• 17:09John Coogan?

  Eden Robotics.

• 17:10Jordi Hays?

  The microphone.

• 17:12John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, yes, yes.

• 17:14Jordi Hays?

  Good Alexander says, I pay for Starlink. It's a great product. Cursor is also a great product. Codex is a great product and Claude with Fable is ridiculous product. That's the main difference between now and 1999. All this stuff is awesome.

• 17:27John Coogan?

  So total white pill, then read the follow up.

• 17:31Jordi Hays?

  I don't think you can really compare this to 1999. I think it's actually unprecedented. If AI doesn't work, the global debt bomb explodes and there's a great depression. The 1999 tech bubble popped and things were generally fine.

• 17:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. So it is higher stakes, but it's more impactful. So he's, he's, I mean, it's a good point to not try and draw too much comparison to 1999 just because it's, it's, it's, it's technology. It's a technology driven boom. It is very, very different in terms of the, the financial structure and also the, the impact, the revenues, the rollout, the opportunity. All of these things were just in higher stakes territory, I suppose. Anyway, we have our next guest from Eden Robotics in the YC Demo Day stage. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 18:19Speaker 03

  Hey guys. All good. How about yourselves?

• 18:21John Coogan?

  We're doing great.

• 18:22Jordi Hays?

  We're doing great.

• 18:23John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. Introduce yourself and the company.

• 18:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I'm Stam, CEO and co-founder of Eden Robotics. We're making general purpose robots for manufacturing warehousing initially and everything else right after that.

• 18:37John Coogan?

  How general? Are we going humanoid? Are we going wheels? Are we going?

• 18:41Speaker 03

  Semi-humanoid.

• 18:42John Coogan?

  Semi-humanoid? What does that mean? Centaur?

• 18:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Centaur. So the body, the legs are, there's four legs like a horse.

• 18:51John Coogan?

  But yeah, semi humanoid, what does that actually mean?

• 18:54Speaker 03

  So that means it's a wheeled base robot, so it has wheels. But it has two arms, which are placed like a human in our shoulders, same way we have. And it also doesn't have Dexter's hand, it has grippers. Which fun fact, can do more than 80% of work in industry.

• 19:11John Coogan?

  Interesting. What about the wheels are important to decide? Like, a lot of manufacturing facilities have very flat floors. So I imagine you don't need really any stair climbing ability, which some wheeled robots can do. But do you need to be omnidirectional? Do you need to change path? Is it just about optimizing battery life? Like, what are the trade-offs that you decide when you're building the base?

• 19:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, so when you're building a base, really, when you're going with wheeled, it's not going to be as general purpose as legs, like legs can go anywhere. But it doesn't have to be, and you have a massive gain in both cost and energy. Legs are extremely expensive in terms of energy, and also in terms of like simply cost.

• 19:57John Coogan?

  And also, I imagine you can put way more battery pack on top of like the wheel base, right?

• 20:02Speaker 03

  Half our base is just the battery. So half the base is just the battery, and then the other half is the compute, and that's it.

• 20:08John Coogan?

  So how long, is there some sort of like sweet spot for, once you have a robot that can roll around and do work in a manufacturing plant for six hours without needing to recharge, that's the sweet spot? You know how like 300 miles of range was like the sweet spot for electric vehicles? And under that, you start getting range anxiety?

• 20:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think six hours is too low. Right now, our robot is using a car battery, it can run for 12 hours. But with our own-

• 20:38John Coogan?

  Not an electric car battery, just like one of those like bricks that's a car battery?

• 20:42Speaker 03

  Exactly, it's a really big car battery. And with our own battery design, it can go for 20 hours and optimize charging for like these four hours and not have to like stop for four and work for 20, but like optimize throughout the time to charge enough.

• 20:56John Coogan?

  You've got the car battery in there, are you thinking about putting a V8 in there? Why not?

• 21:01Speaker 03

  Probably not.

• 21:04Jordi Hays?

  So, so, so one of the, uh, you know, we've had a bunch of robotics founders on. I've been trying to understand what, what some of the kind of like economic challenges there's going to be to rolling out, you know, humanoid-esque robots. When I see some of these humanoid form factors, I'm thinking like, look how many different motors it has, how much wear is each of, each of the motors going to be taking at any, at any given point. And then like trying to run the number on the, run the numbers on like the, what is the cost of the unit? What is the depreciation going to look like over the year? How often are you going to have to be repairing different components to actually make it

• 21:44Jordi Hays?

  competitive with a human, which you can hire for, let's say 30 to $40,000 a year, depending on, uh, minimum wage in a, you know, a certain area or, um, type of role. Because like the, the, you know, aside from humans being like cool and funny, they also go home after work and they feed themselves and they repair, you know, they, they sort of are repairing them, you know, repairing themselves while they're sleeping, right? So that's like sort of off balance sheet, uh, sort of like activity that's happening that ultimately benefits the business because somebody goes home, eats, sleeps, and then they come back to work refreshed, ready to go.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  That's a crazy way to describe human workers, uh, but I get it.

• 22:29Jordi Hays?

  But, but, but, but, yeah, just like comparing, comparing these two things, a robot, it doesn't go home at the end of the day. It might need to be repaired. It might need to be updated and it doesn't happen unless, unless the company actually pays for it.

• 22:44Speaker 03

  So the biggest kind of like hardware risk factor is just the actuators. Uh, really nothing else would require maintenance. Everything else would be able to last pretty long time. Right now, we're at this point where you have actuators that are actually good enough to last, um, like three years and last this over usage. Uh, it used to be that these actuators would overheat very quickly, um, and you would be able to run for a very short amount of time. And there are some humanoids today, like for example, unitary robots, they're very famous for overheating very, very quickly. Um, but there are actuators in the market and we are using such actuators that actually can sustain uh, long hours of operation. We ran it, for example, for 10 hours during alumni demo day.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  Um, it didn't, there was no hardware issue when it came to the actuators. Um, and it went pretty reliably. We expect that these kind of actuators would have a useful life of about three years. Um, and in the case of the maintenance, so our whole thing, by the way, is we're not selling these robots. So we're selling the labor and in fact, we're not even leasing them on a monthly basis. We're charging per hour. So we're charging a $10 per hour, which is actually found that customers love that idea much more than they love the lease idea because they have no mental framework, right? Um, they have the mental framework of a human worker. And so the maintenance would go is if a customer has a robot somehow breaks, there's a problem with it.

• 24:08Jordi Hays?

  And sorry, is it per hour that the robot is actually running?

• 24:12Speaker 03

  Yes, so it's per hour.

• 24:13Jordi Hays?

  So you're not just saying, I'm going to charge you 24 hours a day for this period. It's like they're, you're, they're only paying if they're getting actual.

• 24:20John Coogan?

  It's like a waymo, you're used to paying 20 bucks to get across town. You pay 20 bucks to get across town.

• 24:25Speaker 03

  Exactly. We do set minimums, obviously because we need to keep the hardware at the facility, but it's uh, just whatever is enough for us to keep the hardware there. Everything else is adapting based on usage.

• 24:34John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for coming.

• 24:37Jordi Hays?

  Did you, uh, did you already get the round done?

• 24:40Speaker 03

  Uh, not yet, but we're very close.

• 24:42John Coogan?

  Good luck.

• 24:42Jordi Hays?

  Love it. Great to meet you. Come back on soon.

• 24:44John Coogan?

  Have a great one.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 24:45John Coogan?

  Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon. Well, we bring in our next guest. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with Design System Context.

• 25:01Jordi Hays?

  Breaking from Semaphore.

• 25:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 25:03Jordi Hays?

  Net, Netflix lost out to Fox in, in pursuit of Roku.

• 25:08John Coogan?

  How is that possible? I mean, yeah, it is interesting, the lore there, Netflix sort of created Roku, but uh, the real question is like, why would Netflix want to buy Roku? Like the boxes? It just seems like it makes so much less sense. So in terms of lost out, I can imagine.

• 25:25Jordi Hays?

  It's a platform. They sit as an application on a platform that represents like 40% of connected streaming.

• 25:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. I'm not surprised they lost out because I would be surprised if Netflix, like when Netflix was bidding for Warner Brothers, that made a lot more sense to me. More library, more studio production for Netflix to distribute. But finding a second distributor, when they're already competing in the ads-based model, they're moving towards a cheaper distribution thing. They're already installed by default on most connected TVs.

• 25:58Jordi Hays?

  I just think it's a way to expand like overall engagement, watch hours. They're already getting into ads. Why would they not want to have like more, basically like more watch hours to monitor?

• 26:10John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe, maybe. It seems like Roku is in way better hands with Fox than Netflix. So it makes sense why the deal broke that way. Anyway, let's bring in our next guest, Hugo Frisk from Tenet Industries. He's a co-founder and CEO. Hugo, how are you doing?

• 26:25Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 26:25Speaker 04

  I'm doing great over here. Yeah.

• 26:27John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for having the time. Introduce yourself and the company. How are you doing?

• 26:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I'm Hugo. I'm co-founder of Tenet Industries. We are focusing on mass producibility and low cost for the defense system, basically commoditizing it. So I'm from the electronics manufacturing industry and my co-founder, we're three co-founders, but the one of them is from the automotive industry. So basically taking this like mass producibility, those concepts, and bringing them to the defense industry.

• 26:56John Coogan?

  How low cost do you want to go? I mean, we're all familiar with like the couple hundred dollar price point for a DJI product. Where do you want to sit?

• 27:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's about it. It depends on the customer really. But yeah, we want to match shipper than China is our slogan.

• 27:14John Coogan?

  Okay. And then how are you thinking about the actual product? We've been hearing a lot about the fiber optic controlled drones that don't need to deal with wireless jamming or anything like that. Like where is the demand for the next generation product? Or is it just what we know from a DJI quad rotor, what we saw there? Are there any specific demands for the defense context that make it a little bit different than what's already out there?

• 27:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, the main factor is the range, basically. It's range and lift power. How much can you lift? What's the payload weight? So it's all about increasing the range. And the main limiting factor for the range is oftentimes the radio, right? So what you want? That's why they're using like these fiber radios or these fiber optic cables, because then you get longer range without getting jammed. But unfortunately, I think the fiber market, it's kind of only relevant for this bubble in time, because to increase the range, which is the main, like what customers want, they want. You can do either a better radio, basically. You can develop better radios. That's maybe the first step. And the next step is doing autonomy, right?

• 28:28Speaker 04

  If you have autonomy, then why do you need any contact at all?

• 28:31John Coogan?

  Sure, yeah, everything. Are you capable? Or do you think it's going to be possible to do on-device autonomy on a drone that size, two kilograms? It's not enough to run some serious GPU. But what is possible these days?

• 28:46Speaker 04

  No, exactly. You can put an Nvidia Jetson on it. But the Nvidia Jetson is like five times as expensive as the drone itself. So then it's not really a one-time-use kind of deal. But there are these embedded chips for AI. It's just you can't run an LLM model on it. You can do some visual recognition and maybe you can do some like prioritization of different targets. But the main factor here about the autonomy is not really the vision model. That's like a solved problem. This is possible. The main problem there is navigation. How do you get to the near vicinity to your target? How do you arrive in like navigating for 20 kilometers without the GPS? Because you can't use a GPS on the front line. It's not possible. It's jammed out.

• 29:30Speaker 04

  It's super easy to jam out GPS and to spoof it. They will say that you're in China or something while you're in Ukraine or you're in Sweden or wherever. So that's the main problem. How do you navigate without the GPS? Because the last mile, which is basically targeting, that's a solved problem. That was solved in the 60s with missiles. I don't get the companies that are pitching that.

• 29:52Jordi Hays?

  What is your business model going to look like? Or what does it look like today? You're trying to commoditize the category, push pricing down as much as possible. But what are your margins going to look like? And how do you expect to structure deals with different buyers?

• 30:10Speaker 04

  So right now, it's kind of this pipeline. How do you scale a defense company? Because it's not really possible to get these deals as a new startup, as deals right to the state. At least not where we're looking in Europe. But so what you want to do is you start with the private companies. You sell to them. So we're selling to this counter U.S. companies. This month, we went from five orders to 350 orders. And then you start selling to this subprime, it's called. Like basically, you're selling to a company that's selling directly to the government. And those are really interesting because they have already the channels to sell to these governments.

• 30:52Speaker 04

  And then, once you have established like your manufacturing line and your capability and people trust you, then you can sell directly to the governments.

• 31:01Jordi Hays?

  Chat asks, how does their drones survive high-power microwave machines like Leonidas? Is the answer that it doesn't, but you can produce at such scale that you can kind of...

• 31:13John Coogan?

  Or they're just aren't high-power microwave machines rolled out everywhere? But what is your take on microwave as a counter UAS force right now?

• 31:25Speaker 04

  I think microwave is like we've tested with these people having shotguns and shooting down our drones with shotguns, like radar-controlled shotguns, basically. And it's a short-range system. It only reaches, that system only reaches 100 meters. I don't know about this microwave, how long is the reach that there? But I would guess it's pretty small. So then you need a lot of these systems. And people don't have that. They don't have these systems every 100 meters.

• 31:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not every military installation or unit is going to have every possible counter UAS. So it's sort of a game of rock, paper, scissors on the battlefield these days.

• 32:02Speaker 04

  And then the other thing is, like you said, like just send more.

• 32:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's what I was saying. It's like you have, you know, your five exquisite systems while we're going to, you know, outproduce.

• 32:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is everything hand-built right now? Are you already working on automation? I imagine that low-cost manufacturability means more on supply chain and design. But what does the actual rollout look like over time?

• 32:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, so when we started this, we wanted to produce with robots, still do. But basically, what we, our background is this manufacturing background. So we're really good at designing for manufacturing, designing it so it's really easy to assemble. So we designed it, so how would it be easy for a robot to build this? Well, then it needs a few parts and it needs a few screws and no soldering and it needs to be assembled all from one side. So that was the starting. And then it turns out, once you do that, it's very, very easy to assemble. So it takes two minutes for a human to assemble it.

• 33:03John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 33:04Speaker 04

  So then why do you need a robot?

• 33:08Jordi Hays?

  Good point.

• 33:09John Coogan?

  Well, your batch, mate, we'll have to make a pitch for you.

• 33:12Jordi Hays?

  How's investor interest so far? You been busy the last couple of weeks or are you starting a process now?

• 33:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, super busy. It's actually my co-founder Emil who's doing that. So he's always on call and I'm doing customer demos and stuff, yeah.

• 33:27John Coogan?

  Very cool. Well, congratulations.

• 33:29Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you, Hugo.

• 33:29John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

• 33:31Jordi Hays?

  Congrats on all the progress.

• 33:32John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 33:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, no problem.

• 33:33Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 33:34John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 33:37Jordi Hays?

  Ryan Peterson says, "With yesterday's 20% SpaceX pop, Elon made more money than Warren Buffett made in his entire career."

• 33:45John Coogan?

  These headlines are going to get crazy because, I mean, I see some of them getting community noted, but it's like a single day will move more than like all of Bill Gates's current net worth, that type of thing. Those headlines are going to pop off consistently. The crazy one is like, it's, there's going to be down days. Like, there's going to be just randomly.

• 34:04Jordi Hays?

  Elon lost more money today than any person in history combined.

• 34:08John Coogan?

  He lost more money than Brazil makes in a trillion years, you know? And because like whenever the big numbers get contextualized, it's always very entertaining. It was up another 14% after hours, though. But the numbers are staggering when you're in the $1 trillion club.

• 34:26Jordi Hays?

  JB says, "Is this everyone's first IPO? It's silly now as it approaches Amazon valuation." Well, we passed that, but the float is low. Until the lockup of nearly every retail investor on earth wants to be involved, you're going to get stupid moves. Then the float opens up and all the retail people are stuck for years.

• 34:42John Coogan?

  What does that mean?

• 34:43Jordi Hays?

  Just say, just say you haven't seen the Mass Driver demo, buddy.

• 34:47John Coogan?

  Or the next data center. I mean, that's the really interesting thing with cursor. There's all this debate over like they have a deal with Anthropic, they have a deal with Google, cursor obviously wants to compute, but talking to Gavin Baker, it sounds like there might be a lot more terrestrial compute coming online in the very short term. And that is valuable. They're monetizing this very effectively. And so you could see a short term revenue ramp just driven from sort of the boring neo cloud stuff that monetizes really well. And then that provides, you know, it's like the model three, it's, it's, it's going to be the economic engine that provides the capital for data centers in space, mass driver on the moon, all that stuff needs fuel for the fire. Anyway.

• 35:29Jordi Hays?

  Ad Ludlow has some data SpaceX, the current approximate price of sales is 150x. Amazon is 3.6, Microsoft 9.2.

• 35:42John Coogan?

  See, people read this as a bare SpaceX take, but imagine if Amazon started trading at SpaceX's price of sales.

• 35:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:49John Coogan?

  Be probably like a hundred trillion dollar company. Anyway, our next guest might be building the next hundred trillion dollar company. We have Payton Case from Dispatch here building reentry vehicles for returning space manufactured payloads in semiconductors, biotech and pharma. Welcome to the show, Payton. How you doing? Oh, wait, sorry. Do I have the wrong person?

• 36:08Speaker 05

  Wrong. I think they were the mix up of the.

• 36:10John Coogan?

  Oh, we switched around. Efrain Torres. Sorry. Thank you. Please introduce yourself for us so we get it correct.

• 36:16Speaker 05

  Yeah. So everyone, my name is Dr. Efrain Torres and we're from Audialan, building whole body mobile MRIs for cancer screening.

• 36:22John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 36:22Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 36:24John Coogan?

  Are there any downsides to constantly getting MRIs?

• 36:27Speaker 05

  No. So MRI is non-cancer causing radiation.

• 36:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 36:30Speaker 05

  CT and X-ray, there's limitations.

• 36:33John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 36:33Speaker 05

  But MRI, I mean, I've scanned myself thousands of times.

• 36:38John Coogan?

  Okay, so.

• 36:39Jordi Hays?

  Are you the most scanned person in history?

• 36:41Speaker 05

  No, my professor takes that one. He, he's, he likes to tell he's the most scanned and published brain in the, in the history of mankind.

• 36:47John Coogan?

  Five times a day or something?

• 36:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's how you get it. Yeah.

• 36:50John Coogan?

  How, how mobile are we talking? Are we talking mobile like it can be in a truck that comes to the town and you go like getting your body fat measured in a water tank? Or are we talking like Fitbit, I clip it to my, my waistband and I'm constantly getting MRI?

• 37:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, we're talking trailer. So pulled by like a Ford 350, shows up outside of a clinic. Let's give it up.

• 37:11John Coogan?

  I like the Ford 350.

• 37:13Speaker 05

  There you go, right? We actually calculated it just for that.

• 37:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:16Speaker 05

  And this whole body's screened, $250, and there you go.

• 37:20John Coogan?

  $250, okay. So what, uh, I'm getting a little feedback right now. Can we deal with that? Thank you. Um, so, yeah, sorry.

• 37:27Jordi Hays?

  What does a normal MRI cost?

• 37:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, Pernuvo, if you look at their pricing, they're $2,500, and it can go up to $3,500. So we're around 10 times cheaper than everything on the market.

• 37:39Jordi Hays?

  And what is driving that?

• 37:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, so there's two things. The first thing is our technology. Like, our system is 80% lighter, consumes 60% less power. It's actually eight times quieter, too. And all of this lets us have the operational gains. So we don't sell the systems, we sell scans. So it makes our internal operation costs really low.

• 38:03Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 38:04Speaker 05

  And the shelf life of these systems are 10 to 12 years. So we can charge $250 a scan, and actually, our gross margin actually ends up being 55% because of how long these systems last.

• 38:14John Coogan?

  Do you have to go through medical device approval with the FDA?

• 38:18Speaker 05

  Yeah. No, we're going through medical device approval next year as a Class II 510K. It's a fairly straightforward path because of the fact that there's a lot of regulatory precedence.

• 38:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:27Speaker 05

  Where there's, the regulatory risk arises when you're like the first MRI, first therapeutic, and things like that.

• 38:32John Coogan?

  Well, then what about, uh, patents?

• 38:33Jordi Hays?

  So what's the backstory on the, on the company and IP? Did you cook this up with your professor? Is he, is he involved with the, the business? What's, what's the history?

• 38:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, not the professor. He's not involved. So me and my co-founder, we've known each other 10 years, went to grad school together, specifically to spin out a startup to disrupt the MRI industry, if you think about it. And so we developed the IP in grad school, got that patent issued. Adelante has exclusive rights to it. Uh, and yeah, so it's been, it's been cooking for a good bit here. But MRI is a hard problem to solve, and that's why it's been picking us. But yeah, doing well.

• 39:06John Coogan?

  So you're going through FDA approval. Can you actually sell the product in some advanced form yet? Or is it just like demonstration for medical, for like research purposes at this point?

• 39:18Speaker 05

  Yeah. So I love this question because it's got to one of the creativity of our company. We are deploying this year, first of traditional MRIs.

• 39:26John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 39:27Speaker 05

  The traditional MRIs, we're gonna put them in semi trucks and it's all FDA cleared.

• 39:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 39:31Speaker 05

  We can go to our customers. We have 11 LOIs already, 18.75 million, and start building that distribution channel now.

• 39:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:39Speaker 05

  And over the next year, right, we're gonna get five to 10 of these trailers out there.

• 39:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 39:43Speaker 05

  All breaking even. But then come Q1 2028, when our product is cleared, you just switch it and it's like a lever to profitability.

• 39:50John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Congratulations.

• 39:52Jordi Hays?

  You're cooking.

• 39:53Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 39:53John Coogan?

  How's the fundraising been going?

• 39:55Speaker 05

  It's been going well. We have, we only have a small amount of allocation left of our non-leads and having a lot of exciting conversations with potential leads.

• 40:03John Coogan?

  Are you more, are you seeing more interest from investors who have invested in health tech, medical tech, FDA-approved devices, that crowd? Because, or are there tech investors who are sort of exhausted with the AI stuff and want to broaden their horizons?

• 40:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, honestly, we're getting a lot of interest from deep tech, generalists, and just tech. Because MRI is very well-known in this space. You have Pranuvo.

• 40:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:31Speaker 05

  Everyone has a story of someone that didn't get an MRI in time, whether it be from like a sports injury to something more severe, like the cancer wasn't caught in time. And so we've had interest from deep tech, tech investors, generalists, health tech as well.

• 40:47John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations.

• 40:48Jordi Hays?

  Where's the name from? I gotta know.

• 40:50Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, so all credit goes to my wife. So Adelante stands for a couple of things. Our scientific approaches are known as radiofrequency adiabatic pulses. And my, my, my parents saying is sigue adelante, which in Spanish is keep going forward. Also tattooed on my forearm here.

• 41:07Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 41:07Speaker 05

  And so Adelante is very close to adelante, which means go forward in Spanish. And it kind of goes that no matter what happens to us, we're just gonna keep on making progress every single day.

• 41:17John Coogan?

  Very cool. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 41:20Jordi Hays?

  Logo, logo chess piece.

• 41:22Speaker 05

  There you go.

• 41:23John Coogan?

  No more. We don't need any more intent.

• 41:25Speaker 05

  There you go.

• 41:27John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your demo day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 41:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, thank you so much. Likewise, yeah.

• 41:33John Coogan?

  Up next, we have a good buddy of mine, Russell Smith from Nine Mothers. He's back in YC. I went through YC with him in summer of 2012, 14 years ago. Overnight success. There we go. But I'm excited to catch up with Russell Smith, introduce him to everyone.

• 41:53Jordi Hays?

  Tyler was, was what, one or two?

• 41:57John Coogan?

  He was probably seven years old or something.

• 41:59Jordi Hays?

  Just a boy.

• 42:00John Coogan?

  Years old, yeah. But he's working on AI mission systems for defense.

• 42:05Jordi Hays?

  Can we get Tyler in here for a little bit?

• 42:07John Coogan?

  Focused on counter drone protection. Yeah, yeah. In between the next guests, let's slot in some Tyler for sure. Anyway, we have Russ Smith from Nine Mothers in the TVP and Ultra Dome in at YC Demo Day. How are you doing, Russ?

• 42:20Speaker 06

  Hey, good to be, long time.

• 42:22John Coogan?

  Been way too long. Thank you so much for taking the time. I'm glad we could make this happen. For those who don't know you, introduce yourself. Give us a little bit of the YC history, the entrepreneurial backstory, how long you've been an entrepreneur, and then take us through the current company.

• 42:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I was an entrepreneur before I did YC, so like in, in the UK. But got into YC in the same batch as you. That's how we met in summer 12.

• 42:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:46Speaker 06

  The batch that basically broke YC at the time and made them re-change it.

• 42:50John Coogan?

  Seventy companies looks quaint right now. So YC had been like 30. Yeah, yeah, you can tell it.

• 42:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, it scaled and then they decided to change how it worked. And it's the genesis of how they do groups now, right? It was basically a free-for-all at the time where the loudest companies or the most like intense ones would get the most, well, not deliberately the most attention, but would, would.

• 43:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's sort of natural.

• 43:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, get the most love, right?

• 43:16John Coogan?

  It's funny, because it was the YC batch that broke YC. Everyone said, oh, YC's over. It's, it's, you know, it's gotten too big. It's, and then it was like Coinbase, Airbnb, or Coinbase, Instacart, Zapier, a couple other companies that came, became huge.

• 43:31Speaker 06

  Clever.

• 43:31John Coogan?

  Clever, yeah.

• 43:32Speaker 06

  Benchling, like a bunch of.

• 43:34John Coogan?

  There were a bunch of great companies that came.

• 43:35Speaker 06

  Bunch of Dakicorns and Unicorns in that batch.

• 43:38John Coogan?

  It was good. So.

• 43:39Speaker 06

  And now Soylent as well, right? As in, I remember going to your. Going to your tenderloin office and carrying bags of your early product out in little bags.

• 43:51John Coogan?

  Fifteen hundred bucks a month for three people live in San Francisco.

• 43:55Jordi Hays?

  I remember that. Didn't you move in there when you had like eighteen grand or something?

• 44:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think we had like twenty grand left in the bank.

• 44:04Jordi Hays?

  And you're like, good, this will last us like eighteen months.

• 44:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We paid our rent a year in advance, owned our laptops. We just had to pay internet and food and that was it. It was pretty good life.

• 44:13Speaker 06

  Where Solent came from, right? It's like, just eat that. It's cheaper.

• 44:17John Coogan?

  Anyway, we're not here to reminisce about the old times. Tell us about Nine Mothers.

• 44:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, so we make AI mission systems for the DOD and our first product is Counter Drone. And we make a very small robot. So it's thirty-five pounds. We sell it for about a hundred fifty K. And it's capable of defeating multiple fast-moving drones, day or night.

• 44:36John Coogan?

  Kinetically?

• 44:38Speaker 06

  Kinetically defeat. So yeah, it's basically a gun on a robot and then we build all of the models for day, night. Build acoustic sensors, build models for that and then basically capable of shooting down small, fast targets.

• 44:52John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 44:52Jordi Hays?

  Can we pull up the video? Because I have no idea what this robot looks like.

• 44:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's pull up the video.

• 44:56Speaker 06

  You should have brought it with me. I have it.

• 44:58John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. We'll have the team pull up the video. I'm curious about the decision around acoustic models versus video models. There's so much energy around.

• 45:11Speaker 06

  We do all of it.

• 45:12John Coogan?

  You do all of it.

• 45:12Speaker 06

  So like the key here is that no sensor is perfect, right? And so multiple sensors gives you more chance of finding something. And then for instance, acoustics is bad on some of the projects we're doing that are around turbines, right? On Chinooks or other vehicles because it gets drowned out. But then radar is bad in some environments and vision is bad in some. And so the fusion, the ability to fuse all that together into coherent picture and also adapt to new sensors means that we can stop more things, right? And the key here is that this is kind of like the same problem that you saw in Iraq with or Afghanistan with IEDs. These are just now flying IEDs and.

• 45:52Speaker 06

  All the demos you've seen existingly, almost all of slow-moving targets, so like sub 10 meter a second, sub 10 mile an hour, in some cases drones, people are struggling to shoot down. And that's just not reality, right? As in, we've been shooting and demoing, as in we shoot faster internally, but demoing 65 mile an hour small drones repeatedly, like, and that's way closer to reality, if that makes sense.

• 46:19John Coogan?

  Where does the name come from?

• 46:21Speaker 06

  Dude, it's Norse mythology. So we're nerds and then our product names are all around the same mythology. And so naming's hard, but yeah, that's where it came from. That's the story.

• 46:34John Coogan?

  That's good. What does it actually shoot? Is it shooting like 556, like some commodity round?

• 46:39Speaker 06

  We can adapt to anything, as in we can do 556, but the thing that works the best is 12 gauge. And so we make our own, we use a gun off the shelf at the moment. We're also developing our own belt-fed shotgun system, like as in the world's first belt-fed. And that will be first firing in the next three weeks. We also make ammo, right?

• 47:02John Coogan?

  You make ammo?

• 47:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's basically closer to match grade, which is like tighter tolerances and then slightly higher pressure. But owning everything, like the full stack, that means, it means we have better results.

• 47:15John Coogan?

  So where?

• 47:16Speaker 06

  We do the raises and lays for defense, right?

• 47:18John Coogan?

  I mean, you're obviously a very experienced founder. Where's the company right now? Do you already have a facility set up, a staff hired? Like, I imagine that you're pretty far along.

• 47:28Speaker 06

  For YC, we're a little later on. So we are, we've sold like 1.6 million dollars of stuff to the DOD, as in direct sales of units, not, not research and dev stuff, like actual sales, delivered units to DOD, and then we're expecting to sell over 100 units this year and 1,000 next year. Have multiple believable paths to both, but yeah, aim is to do over 100 million of rev next year, and it's looking completely believable. Should hit 50 this year.

• 47:58Jordi Hays?

  Super impressive. Question for you, how, let's say, let's say there's a frontline and you set up, you know, I imagine, you know, let's say the US military sets up a bunch of these drones are flying over. How do you manage friend like like friendly fire like let's say a drone passes the line there's actual troops back here and you want to take out the drone but you're effectively shooting rounds into the air?

• 48:25Speaker 06

  It's a great question and it's a complicated answer and it depends on the mode the system's in we can ignore stuff that's flying away from us and only prioritize stuff that's coming towards us we can also take signals off networks they have if they know which drones are theirs really the the common thing is that they don't actually have that kind of data and so the operator can choose to not run it full automatic and then choose which targets but mostly they will shoot them because of blue on blue risk if it's not drones they are physically flying in the same group right it's that's the problem is is it a friendly drone that's misidentified you or not if it's on a network and we know it's not has it still misidentified you that's

• 49:09Speaker 06

  where you get into the problem of this at this kind of range right?

• 49:12John Coogan?

  Well congratulations on the progress really exciting growth great to catch up come back on the show and we'll talk more soon have a great one

• 49:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah great to catch up

• 49:23John Coogan?

  See you soon goodbye let me tell you about CrowdStrike your business is AI their business is securing it CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches our next guest is Payton Case from Dispatch I accidentally introduced him a little bit too soon but we got him sitting down in the YC Demo Day What's going on? How you doing? Yeah it's good to be here good to see you guys Good to see you too introduce yourself introduce the company tell us what you're

• 49:53Speaker 07

  Yeah so I'm Payton I'm the founder of Dispatch Space we build satellites for manufacturing products in space and these are for the most advanced materials in the world that can only be made in microgravity and we bring them back down to earth

• 50:06John Coogan?

  What specifically are you building because the space economy has gotten so fractured at this point there's you know multiple launch providers there's satellite bus providers there's impulse space Tom Mueller has a extra propulsion system that you can bolt on like what is the key product that you're focused on for this early stage of the company?

• 50:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, we build the reentry vehicles. So this is the satellite is in space. You've made your product and now you need to get back down to earth. You're flying at Mach 25. You're surrounded by a plasma that's 3,000 degrees. And we build the heat shields and satellites that can survive that environment.

• 50:44John Coogan?

  Who is doing stuff in space? Like I live in the world of Varda very closely.

• 50:50Jordi Hays?

  Elephant in the room is that we are very familiar with the category because Delian's our friend.

• 50:55John Coogan?

  And and it seems like obviously they're going vertically integrated, building the reentry vehicle and also doing the contracts with biotech companies and pharmaceutical companies. But it does seem like the the the industry is expanding. So who are the other buyers that aren't working with Varda that you have an opportunity to to work with?

• 51:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, the biggest players are semiconductors, pharmaceutical and biotech. Varda is very vertical and that pharmaceutical application. We're big. We're the biggest bulls on the semiconductor space. We think that the regulatory environment makes it so that you can come to market a lot faster. And the applications of growing those gallium nitride and indium selenide crystals in space are massive. And that's where that's where we're bullish on it.

• 51:40John Coogan?

  Massive. I'm I'm down semi. Everything that touches semiconductors is massive. You say semiconductor, you're a trillion dollar company, but timelines, timelines like it feels like we're a decade away from making a chip in space, making a chip on the moon. Like even even the big SpaceX bulls are saying like, okay, actually doing the mass driver. That's maybe more than 10 years away. Let's focus on terrestrial stuff.

• 52:03Jordi Hays?

  Like what traction are you talking about this demo day?

• 52:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 52:08Speaker 07

  Yeah, so we have a pilot mission that we're flying with a paying customer to grow semiconductor crystals in space. And we're not talking about doing like the lithography or assembly of iPhones in space. It's about it's earlier in the supply chain. So wafers, wafers, wafers actually come from these cylindrical crystals. And when you grow those in microgravity, you get up to 1,000 times fewer defects. So you grow those crystals in space, bring them back down to earth, and then you cut them into wafers. And that is actually happening now on the ISS. And these companies are looking to scale. They just don't have the vehicles to do it.

• 52:38John Coogan?

  Oh, very cool.

• 52:38Jordi Hays?

  How did you make your first dollar?

• 52:41Speaker 07

  The first dollar was the deposit on the pilot program.

• 52:43Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, in life, in life. I want, I want the, I want the founder origin.

• 52:48Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah. It was probably working in a smoothie shop that I totally loved the smoothies of wink wink. I was, you know, I made a few tips. That was, that was about it, but uh.

• 52:59Jordi Hays?

  You, you realize you weren't, you realize you weren't cut out for the smoothie business.

• 53:03John Coogan?

  Gotta go to the heavens.

• 53:07Speaker 07

  Yeah, fab, fab, fabs in space are a little easier than getting tips at a smoothie shop for me.

• 53:12John Coogan?

  That's amazing. What's the state of the, the space investors that have attended demo day? Are you seeing traction? How's the fundraise going?

• 53:22Speaker 07

  Yeah, the fundraising is going great. Obviously IPOs are very useful for us. That's been great indicator of where the entire market is going. We're getting close to closing out that round, which is super exciting for us. And like really that goal is getting back to work as quickly as possible and using that money to go build great things in space.

• 53:40John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 53:40Jordi Hays?

  Dan in the chat said from smoothies to a smooth opera.

• 53:44Speaker 07

  I like that.

• 53:45John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much.

• 53:46Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you Payton. Congrats on all the progress.

• 53:49John Coogan?

  Have a great one.

• 53:50Speaker 07

  Thanks so much.

• 53:50John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Our next guest is Akshay from Madrone, building cooling systems for data centers.

• 53:59Jordi Hays?

  He is working on, I'm assuming he's working on reducing water consumption in data centers so that almonds can.

• 54:06John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This guy's an almond industry plant for sure. Anyway, let me tell you about Railway first. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security.

• 54:22John Coogan?

  Thank you, Jordy. Let's bring in Akshay from Madrone. How are you doing? Welcome to the show. Thank you for taking the time.

• 54:30Speaker 08

  What's up? Hey guys, huge fans. So appreciate the opportunity to talk to you guys.

• 54:34John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Glad to have you on the show. Introduce yourself, introduce the company. I have tons of questions, but let's start with the basics.

• 54:41Speaker 08

  Sounds good. So I'm building my drone. We're building hyper-efficient cooling for data centers. So specifically, we've engineered a thermodynamic process that works really well in hot and dry climates, which is where most hyperskilling is happening right now. And yeah, it's we have our demo that's running live at Demo Day today. So we're actually really excited to show people in person. But the big problem really is that data centers are limited today by power and not by chips or land. So cooling and power are two sides of the same coin. If you can save power on cooling, that's more power for your flops. And that's where our real value unlock is. So people can install more GPUs, given the same grid permit, which takes years to get. To give you a sense of the scale of the problem, last year in Texas, Semi Analysis said that there were 150 gigawatts worth of load requests to the Texas grid.

• 55:24Speaker 08

  Texas grid on a good day, 60 gigawatts, and only 1.5 gigawatts worth of those requests were actually approved by the local utilities. So it's a crazy scrambling time. Like Elon Musk was probably the first person to kind of come up with a method of putting engines on the back of trucks, rolling them onto data centers for power. You know, Boom Supersonic, whose ultimate goal is to be building supersonic jet planes, has had a slight pivot to selling supersonic jet engines, and apparently they're crushing it. So it's a crazy time, and it's the first time in a long time where a new company can come into the market and build a thermal industrial company.

• 55:56Jordi Hays?

  So what is the bottleneck for you? Is it figuring out where your system, you know, what data centers your system can fit in? Is it actually just you have the demand and you're trying to meet it? Like, what does your supply chain look like? Like, what's standing between you and, let's say, not this round right now, but, you know, the next one?

• 56:14Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's a great question. So we actually scaled our 1-kilowatt prototype 100 times during the batch to 100-kilowatt prototype. We're going to be deploying our 1-megawatt version very, very soon. The 100-kilowatt prototype that's actually running live at Demo Day right now is going to be running our first pilot in two months. So really, it's going to be between the 100-kilowatt and the 1-megawatt prototype. It's going to be figuring out how to elongate it and make it taller. So we've done the really hard work so far, but really it's just building a physical big version of it. So that we've talked to hyperskilers, their feedback is they just want a bigger version. They can, because they have such a huge demand, they're not really interested in 100 kilowatts. They're interested in 100, 1 megawatts.

• 56:49Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so 1 megawatt will be enough to get your first real, you know, orders, revenues with hyperscaler-type customers?

• 56:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, all the data center campuses would say, "I'll take 10,000, please, because I'm building 10 gigawatts." I mean, basically, chain them together, right? But this is, I mean, we saw in the video, it looks like a shipping container. And essentially, the input-output, the output is just cold water, it takes in water. So you are agnostic to the design of what happens in the data center, I imagine. You're not dependent on any particular chip or rack design. But then, what energy is actually going into your system?

• 57:26Speaker 08

  Yes, exactly. It's a great question. So, the energy is used to be the fans and the pumps, so actually circulating the fluids through the system. If I may brag about my co-founder a bit, we don't just design the physical box. We actually, he actually designed the thermodynamics, the mechanical structure, the electronics to power it all, and then also the software to control it. We do this all in-house, we're big Tesla fanboys. All our competitors are outsourcing every single level of this engineering out, and they're just integrating that and selling that as a product. So we've been able to get a lot of efficiency gains by just designing this all in-house with two people so far. We're fundraising, and we're gonna hire some more people, hire our friends in the Bay Area, and building the 1 megawatt one with our own hands.

• 58:02John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 58:03Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 58:04John Coogan?

  And so, there's already a lot of energy on these campuses that you can draw from. So whether it's natural gas powered, powered from the grid, powered from nuclear, solar, whatever's going on, you're drawing from that, but your goal is to just draw more efficiently and take less of the power, so that can probably just go into the chips, right?

• 58:24Speaker 08

  Exactly, yeah. You get a lot more inference value out of redirecting that power to your flops.

• 58:28John Coogan?

  Okay. And then, in terms of how you're pitching yourself at Demo Day, are you on the path to LOIs with hyperscalers? Are you working backwards from, are you doing business with NeoClouds? Like, what's the walk, crawl, run to actually create the economic flywheel to raise money and then go build this thing?

• 58:46Speaker 08

  Yeah, great question. So we've already started conversations with two hyperscalers. We're actually talking through our third one this week after Demo Day, which is super excited about. Let's go. One of our investors, actually, we closed the check today. They're actually building $20 billion worth of data centers in Texas. So that's been really nice, but the really first, yeah, fantastic. The first thing for us is really going to be focusing on that pilot, just demonstrating that we can plug into an AI data center at scale, do it reliably reliably and at scale with our investor that we just partnered with today.

• 59:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then what type of efficiency number actually draws the attention of a potential buyer? Are we, is 1% enough? Is it 10%? Is it 50%? Like, what's reasonable? Because I imagine we're 99% more efficient. Everyone's like, yeah, that's not real. But, but is, is, is one, are we doing basis points here? Like, how, how, how much of an impact do you need to have to actually move the needle? Because some of these projects are so big, their bill, their bill for electricity might be, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 59:48Speaker 08

  Yeah, exactly. Like, guys, it's so crazy. My competitors are 100-year-old companies that have been designing the same thing for decades. There's this thing called the mechanical chiller. It's literally the same thing as your refrigerator at home, and it costs $500 million per gigawatt. So people are really desperate to get away from these chillers and look for different types of cooling, because that's actually eating up your grid permit. So that's a thing that actually costs 30% of your grid permit. And we can do it for cheaper, and we can actually have better OpEx as well. So really, any percentage is okay. I think that, like, you can't quote, like, 0.1% gain. But like, you know, people are thrilled if you have a 10% efficiency gain.

• 1:00:20John Coogan?

  And then also, we're just in a supply crunch. So even if you just said, hey, we're, we have the exact same thing, but it actually will ship in the next couple of months, a lot of people might jump at that. So that's the benefit of being in.

• 1:00:31Jordi Hays?

  What were you doing before this?

• 1:00:32Speaker 08

  Yeah, so I was actually scaling manufacturing at QuantumScape. So I was doing computer vision, working directly under the CTO, Tim Home. I was founder, CTO, took it all the way from inception to IPO. And I also did grad school at Berkeley studying material science. There's a materials twist to this company. We didn't get to talk about today, but we're, we're doing something cool.

• 1:00:47John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 1:00:48Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 1:00:48John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much.

• 1:00:50Jordi Hays?

  After you raised, and it was great to meet you.

• 1:00:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, fantastic.

• 1:00:53Speaker 08

  Thanks, guys.

• 1:00:53John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. We're going to bring on some YC partners in about four minutes. Stay tuned. In the meantime, we can go back to the timeline, back to the news. Talk about specs. This is from Evan Spiegel. Yes, and the

• 1:01:08Jordi Hays?

  The Gervonator says the Snap specs are official.

• 1:01:11John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:11Jordi Hays?

  Two thousand one hundred and ninety-five dollars, all-in-one AR glasses that Evan Spiegel has dubbed the next computer.

• 1:01:19John Coogan?

  Two thousand two hundred dollars. That's almost Apple Vision Pro numbers. That's expensive. It's gonna be a lift. I feel like it's a lot. It it it seems it seems like a lot of money. It's gotta be

• 1:01:36Jordi Hays?

  Apple Vision Pro starts at three thousand four hundred and ninety-nine dollars.

• 1:01:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:40Jordi Hays?

  So a bit of a jump, but but this is a product that seemingly is trying to compete in the realm of like it's it's a mobile device. It's naturally a mobile device. Unlike the Apple Vision Pro, which obviously some viral images on launch of people walking around with it.

• 1:01:56John Coogan?

  I'm just thinking about like, like, there are a lot of Apple fanboys who buy every

• 1:02:00Jordi Hays?

  Get this.

• 1:02:00John Coogan?

  What?

• 1:02:01Jordi Hays?

  Get this guy on right now.

• 1:02:02John Coogan?

  What?

• 1:02:02Jordi Hays?

  Pull him up.

• 1:02:04John Coogan?

  Hey, what are you saying? Are you buying the Snap specs? Two thousand two hundred dollars? Are you spending your paycheck on that?

• 1:02:12Speaker 09

  I mean, they they I think they actually do look really cool. Uh, I I don't know, like, I was looking at some of the product demos earlier.

• 1:02:20Speaker 09

  Some, like, the game features look really cool. There's, like, ping pong.

• 1:02:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:22Speaker 09

  Two, two point two K is like a little pricey personally.

• 1:02:26John Coogan?

  But if you can watch Lawrence Arabia from start to finish.

• 1:02:29Jordi Hays?

  If we bought this, if we bought it, if we traded you your phone for a pair of these for a week, would you demo them? Would you demo them for a week? No phone.

• 1:02:39John Coogan?

  No phone.

• 1:02:40Jordi Hays?

  Would you commit to the

• 1:02:41Speaker 09

  Can you do, like, texting on it? Can you call?

• 1:02:43Jordi Hays?

  You don't need to. You can go without texting for

• 1:02:45John Coogan?

  You have Lawrence Arabia. You don't need a phone.

• 1:02:47Speaker 09

  That's true. I can watch Lawrence Arabia, like, you know,

• 1:02:49John Coogan?

  What's the battery life?

• 1:02:51Jordi Hays?

  During the show.

• 1:02:51John Coogan?

  What is Snap specs, battery life? Specs, battery life? I gotta, I gotta know.

• 1:02:56Jordi Hays?

  So what happened? Wasn't there some conversation that specs might spin out?

• 1:03:00John Coogan?

  Up to four hours. That's Lawrence Arabia right there with a little intermission.

• 1:03:04Jordi Hays?

  If I remember correctly, there was some, like, rumors

• 1:03:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:09Jordi Hays?

  that that specs would be spun out.

• 1:03:11John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:03:13Jordi Hays?

  That has not happened.

• 1:03:15John Coogan?

  I don't think so.

• 1:03:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and so the stock is down seven percent today.

• 1:03:20John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:03:22John Coogan?

  I don't know. The, the, the, the trick is that you have Apple fanboys who, of, you know, they have a lot of Apple fans, but some of them are wealthy. Some of them buy every product. They buy a new phone, a new iPhone every year. They buy the top of the line MacBook. They have the Mac Studio and the Mac Mini just for fun. And like, that's a whole class of consumer for Apple. And so when they come in with something that's a little crazy, like a $10,000 gold Apple Watch, like they'll sell a couple of them when they come in with a $3,000 VR headset. Like, a couple of people will just be like, "Yeah, I'll give it a try." Uh, when you're talking about a new company entering, uh, hardware, Meta, I think did a better job coming in with like, "Yeah, it's just a pair of sunglasses. You need a pair of sunglasses anywhere, anyway."

• 1:04:06Jordi Hays?

  We put a camera in it.

• 1:04:07John Coogan?

  We put a camera in it. It's $100 for the version that you know and love, the Ray-Ban Wayfarers that don't have a camera in them. Ours are, add a couple hundred extra bucks. It's still something you could give as a gift.

• 1:04:18Jordi Hays?

  And Meta can afford to lose money on every single device effectively forever.

• 1:04:21John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah. And so, and so it's a lot easier to get into that like meta ecosystem just saying, "Yeah, throw a camera on my, uh, on my Ray-Bans. I'll give it a try. Maybe I'll churn." But if it's collecting dust in the, in the cabinet, or in the, in the sock drawer, you're a lot less like, "Ah, I really got burned." And, and like the Apple fanboys that, you know, a lot of them took them back, but they're like, "Yeah, that was still like a cool experiments mix of me."

• 1:04:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, Tyler, once you're back in town.

• 1:04:51John Coogan?

  What was that?

• 1:04:52Speaker 09

  Lord of the Rings Extended Cut. I think that's, that's even longer than.

• 1:04:56John Coogan?

  Is that four hours?

• 1:04:57Speaker 09

  Lord of Arabia.

• 1:04:58John Coogan?

  You can't watch the whole thing.

• 1:04:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's do this. Once you're back in town, let's pick up a pair. Tyler can live with them. We won't say a week, we'll say 48 hours.

• 1:05:05John Coogan?

  Exclusively.

• 1:05:06Jordi Hays?

  Exclusive.

• 1:05:07John Coogan?

  Do everything.

• 1:05:08Jordi Hays?

  We take.

• 1:05:09John Coogan?

  I think you need the phone to, to, to do anything. I think a lot of the compute happens.

• 1:05:13Speaker 09

  48 hours, I, I think is actually like, not very hard.

• 1:05:14John Coogan?

  That's just a digital detox.

• 1:05:16Speaker 09

  That's like one weekend.

• 1:05:17Jordi Hays?

  You're down?

• 1:05:18Speaker 09

  I could do a week. I could do a week.

• 1:05:19John Coogan?

  That's like 10 showings of Lawrence.

• 1:05:20Jordi Hays?

  I'm not asking you to do a week. If you want to do a week, we can do it. Okay, he's doing.

• 1:05:25John Coogan?

  I'm here in, I'm here in four weeks. I'm here in a full month now.

• 1:05:29Jordi Hays?

  All right. It was great to see you, Tyler. We miss you.

• 1:05:31John Coogan?

  Great to see you. I'll see you guys. Talk to you. Without you.

• 1:05:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it really is. John and I were kind of messing around.

• 1:05:37John Coogan?

  Kind of quiet in here today.

• 1:05:38Jordi Hays?

  And we realized when Tyler's not here, there's, there's nobody super close by to laugh at our, our, our bad jokes.

• 1:05:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:45Jordi Hays?

  Bit rough.

• 1:05:46John Coogan?

  Spiegel called the specs both very, very wearable and highly capable, which he said gives Snap an opportunity in a market that's focused on either very large and clunky headsets that are super capable, or very lightweight glasses that really don't do much. So it is interesting. I was reading the coverage of, of, in, there's some videos here in Upload VR, and it shows sort of the, the, the process of this. The hollow lens one from Microsoft 2016, was 580 grams. Snapbacks are 132 grams, so they are light. Now, the red, the Meta Ray-Ban display is 70 grams, so about half as

• 1:06:26John Coogan?

  heavy. So these are heavier, but they're nowhere as heavy as a hollow lens or a real VR headset. And it checks a lot of the boxes on Field of View, and we'll see, we'll see what the developer ecosystem's like. I hope someone comes up with some interesting thing. I hope that there's a YC company that builds on top of this exclusively and, and has some sort of breakthrough user interface experience, some, some killer use case that comes from the community.

• 1:06:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, gotta wait to see how many of these sell.

• 1:06:55John Coogan?

  Yes, that will be, that will be very.

• 1:06:56Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna need, I mean, even with a million, a million sold, it's not a very big user base.

• 1:07:00John Coogan?

  It's a lot of money. Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And without further ado, let's bring in Diana Hui from YC. She's a managing partner. Diana, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:07:17Speaker 10

  Good. Thanks for having us.

• 1:07:18John Coogan?

  So much for taking the time.

• 1:07:20Jordi Hays?

  How is today?

• 1:07:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. How's Demo Day going?

• 1:07:23Speaker 10

  The energy and vibes are immaculate.

• 1:07:28John Coogan?

  What is it? How does it compare to your YC experience, your entrepreneurial journey? Tell us a little bit about that and then take us through how you're talking to today's entrepreneurs about what's changed, what's the same.

• 1:07:41Speaker 10

  It's kind of fun that you were just talking about Snap because my company was building augmented reality SDK for game devs back in the era of Hololens. So my company went through the batch back in summer seventeen and back then it was different, it's way smaller than what it is now and AR still taking time to get to the headset. And when we went through it, Demo Day was back in the Computer History Museum, back in Mountain View. And now we got our campus here in San Francisco and have way more investors and companies

• 1:08:21Speaker 10

  are raising a lot of amount that probably was more Series A when I was running my company.

• 1:08:28John Coogan?

  What was the mood like around like platform risk, building on top of something else? Obviously, a lot of the augmented reality companies like Niantic built on top of the iPhone, on top of smartphones. And then now we see AR sort of, you know, trying to break in through new devices, specifically spectacles, headsets, wearables. But was that a risk factor that came up in pitching VCs? Or was there sort of like, okay, there's enough of an ecosystem here, there's enough of an enterprise play that you'll be able to, you know, be a winner no matter if there's one platform that breaks out?

• 1:09:12Speaker 10

  I think it's a very good question. I think it's the same question right now that a lot of the AI companies are wondering whether they're on the path of the roadmap for the big labs. We had the same issue when, one fun fact, maybe not so fun, but... On the first day of the batch, when we went through it, we basically had built the same platform that Apple ARKit released.

• 1:09:40Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 1:09:40Speaker 10

  Exactly same. It was the same SDK.

• 1:09:43Speaker 11

  Oh, no.

• 1:09:43Speaker 10

  And on that first day of the batch, we actually freaked out because you have this giant company that has infinite amount of money that could just crush you. And I think what that forced us to do was to really accelerate a lot of our roadmap because we had thought of building basically this SDK that would enable anyone to build code once and run on any hardware. So we were the first SDK that could enable running it across, you build a code once and it would ship on Android and iOS and eventually also got it to headset. Then later on, our company had an exit and got acquired by Niantic, the makers of Pokemon Go, which was the biggest user of AR back then.

• 1:10:27Speaker 10

  And then I ended up running a lot of the AR and engineering teams for Niantic.

• 1:10:35Jordi Hays?

  We had Andrew Lee from Tasklet on first and I really appreciated how he just straight up said, he's like, "Yeah, we are in the path of Anthropic and OpenAI and we're just, we are competing." But just sort of accepting that and workflow automation, what they're doing, such a big category, can obviously, with great execution, build a big company even despite of that. What are some of the key themes for the batch? How does this batch compare to the last batch? What kind of trends are you seeing overall?

• 1:11:10Speaker 10

  I think this batch is following a similar trend to the winter 26 batch, where things that have been happening, a lot of these companies are the first one that are basically riding the wave with agent decoding working. It is, it has become the norm where a company, well, the norm, it's become more common that companies can go to zero to seven figures in revenue within just three months, which when I did the batch, that would have been impossible. I don't think any companies did that. The best companies back then would grow, let's say, 10% week on week, which is what, let's say, Airbnb did back then. And that would get them to a couple hundred thousand in ARR, which is a very good.

• 1:11:54Speaker 10

  Very, very, very impressive accomplishment back then, but now companies get to seven figures because the companies are able to build a more mature product a lot quicker with, with the code. If they find the right user and customers and sales and nail, nail on that, people can really speed through this right now.

• 1:12:17Jordi Hays?

  How, how often, how often do you, do you find yourself talking to a company in office hours that you think shouldn't be optimizing for that? Because there's a lot of companies that, you know, we've talked to today, like Madrone, for example, like very important sort of product category, clearly massive TAM, and they should go as fast as possible. But if they just optimize for revenue traction right away, it would take them on the wrong path, I imagine.

• 1:12:45Speaker 10

  Oh, absolutely. So this is where we give very custom advice depending on the type of company. If you're building, let's say, core infrastructure or defense type of applications, it's more important that you deploy deeply into few customers. And it doesn't matter if the revenue is small, but it has a lot of opportunity for growth. And it really depends on the journey. So this is not advice for all the companies, for, for some of them.

• 1:13:16John Coogan?

  YC has gone through waves of like consumer boom in the early days with Airbnb and a lot of consumer companies and then sort of swung to business to business products and companies. And there's been demo days that we've been to where it's a lot of stuff that's deeper in the token path, which is a great place to be, enabling agentic workflows, deeper in the stack. There's a lot of hard tech this time. But I'm wondering how you're viewing the opportunity in consumer, in gaming. We're just seeing so many vibe-coded games that are remarkable demos and it feels like

• 1:14:00John Coogan?

  With a YC team on an actual deadline to get to real functionality, real adoption, revenue traction, the tools are there now where previously to make something that looked anything like a breakout game, you'd see these companies and you'd hear, oh, well, you know, Epic Games was grinding in the dark for five years, building their engine before they released a game, or, you know, so many companies, Roblox, it took a long time. Now it feels like you can move faster. And that might make it more, the end state might be that all of this turns into, you know, there's no fundraising at all and it's all just indie devs. But it does feel like there's an opportunity here. But how are

• 1:14:43John Coogan?

  you seeing consumer, either in gaming or just broadly, develop over the next couple of years at YC?

• 1:14:51Speaker 10

  I think it's still very early. We haven't seen these companies break out yet. I mean, this whole era of AI right now, which is one of the most fun eras in tech right now, there's still so many patterns that we're figuring out. And with regard to consumers, I think there's going to be a lot of big category winners that we don't know what the shape of them could be. Sort of like trying to predict the Airbnb or DoorDash back in the 2010s would be very hard. And with regards to gaming, haven't worked in gaming myself and know a lot of these AAA studios that you mentioned that take a long time to get game out there because they build the engine and there's just so much technical

• 1:15:35Speaker 10

  complexity. A lot of that, yes, the barrier of that is entry is lower. But I think the thing that's still in short supply is the ability to encode fun. The thing why you could build lots of games today, which I've tried and by coded some games, but it's hard to build actually game loops that people keep coming back and have fun. And those are new patterns that we haven't discovered. I mean, you could imagine now in the era where a lot of games could be in an agentic loop and based on a lot of the metrics of the usage, they could self-improve and it could be more fun. But I don't think people figure out how to build those because you have to be able to measure fun, which I'm

• 1:16:20Speaker 10

  not sure if There's a easy way to do that. It really depends game for game.

• 1:16:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's a good point.

• 1:16:27John Coogan?

  Makes a lot of sense. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Have a great rest.

• 1:16:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you and great work this batch. There's a lot of fun companies.

• 1:16:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:16:37Speaker 10

  Alright guys.

• 1:16:37John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 1:16:38Speaker 10

  Nice to see you.

• 1:16:38Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:16:39John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:16:41John Coogan?

  Romanitis is getting himself in trouble for

• 1:16:44Jordi Hays?

  Again?

• 1:16:45John Coogan?

  debating the world's population. He says, "Population is max 500 million global. Earth is max 15,000 years old." People are asking if it's bait. He's going back and forth with a bunch of people. He's pointing out that there are some economic incentives to certain countries to misreport population numbers if they're getting economic incentives or distributions based on that. He's having fun on the timeline. You can go dig into his posts and make a call for yourself. Anyway, over in China, one of the most populous countries in the world allegedly,

• 1:17:25John Coogan?

  the final boss of ADHD has been spotted. The guy is simultaneously watching TikTok, chatting in a messenger, and playing a game. This is what a foldable smartphone is for. There's pushback against smartphones now. Imagine what foldable smartphones will do. Is it gonna be even worse? Who knows? This is an absolutely crazy setup to be rocking. And is this a single-player game that he pauses or?

• 1:17:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it kinda seems like he's LARPing.

• 1:17:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, this seems performative, right?

• 1:17:58Jordi Hays?

  This is a LARP.

• 1:17:58John Coogan?

  This is a LARP, yeah. I don't think this is real. I got in trouble for my game knowledge. I apparently used min-maxing improperly, although there was some debate over whether or not min-maxing has transformed into the definition that I used, whether I was using a more modern interpretation of that term. But anyway, you can go and dig into Satriani's post and make your own justification on where you sit on token maxing, token minning, token min-maxing. The clear point is that you gotta focus on ROI like any other business process.

• 1:18:33Jordi Hays?

  Andrew Gao sharing some data. Andrew's over at Cognition. He says, "This is in public, but Stanford CS degrees dropped 42% year-over-year. Berkeley down 61%." All of the propaganda, like you don't need to learn to code anymore, seems to be working.

• 1:18:51John Coogan?

  I mean, it's got to dramatically change the experience and like the fun of being like part of the fun of taking a computer science course is doing an exercise and working through the code and like solving the puzzle that is the code challenge. And when you can just one-shot that with any frontier model, it gets a lot less fun. And so you have to imagine that people moved over to other more amorphous, more rewarding disciplines. But it does seem silly because I'm sure that if you if you go really deep in a CS degree and you're AI-enabled as well, you can both find a job and also have a really, really interesting and rewarding

• 1:19:34John Coogan?

  experience. But certainly a reaction to the fact that the the existing path of just like someone tells me exactly what to implement and then I go and implement that and I make six figures forever is is less and less clear. And so people are reacting to that by going to other places. I want to see the data on where where these students went. What are they? What are they studying? If not CS, do they do they bleed into everything else? Because sometimes you read these and it's like, oh, they're not studying computer science anymore. They're studying computer engineering now. And it's like, yeah, that's kind of the same thing. Like, you saw that, like, computer programming declined, but computer science jobs increased or something like that.

• 1:20:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're studying.

• 1:20:15John Coogan?

  Computer engineering.

• 1:20:15Jordi Hays?

  They're studying AI ML.

• 1:20:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, and yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, a lot of the the AI track has always been symbolic systems anyway, not CS, at least at Stanford. That's what a lot of the early Facebook employees and a lot of those folks studied. There's a lot of other folks that study physics or math or all sorts of things. And it's got to be more fun to study a really hard topic like physics or math because you have an AI tutor and you can use AI to to close that gap, to bridge that gap. But we should ask Harsh Taggar from YC. He's ready to chat with us. We can ask him about what you should major in if you want to build the next great company. What do you think, Harsh? Did you study computer science? I didn't, actually.

• 1:21:00Speaker 12

  I started in law school and then I dropped out and then I taught myself to program.

• 1:21:05John Coogan?

  A lawyer becoming successful, anything is possible.

• 1:21:09Speaker 12

  It's true. It was a bad start, but it ended up.

• 1:21:11John Coogan?

  Remarkable. Yeah, no, no, obviously, it's a fantastic background. It speaks to the diversity of backgrounds that lead people to success in Silicon Valley. What do you make of this decline in CS degrees? What are you seeing in the YC founders that join the latest batches? Is there, are you experiencing more diversity of backgrounds? It feels like YC has always been pulling from all over the place. The best case in point is Airbnb. It's a bunch of design students and that was not a feeder school for, it was not a unicorn factory, RISD, and yet we got Airbnb out of it. So what's going on at YC in terms of educational background these days?

• 1:21:52Speaker 12

  You know, I was actually, this weekend was with a group of college students that we were meeting and hopefully they'll do YC one day. And this was definitely something they said is that they are seeing their smart friends enroll in computer science less. People want to do more physics and math and first principle stuff. So that definitely, I think that's a leading indicator. So I would definitely expect over the next few years, we might see more of the smart founders come in with like a math or some sort of like thinking STEM background. That's not pure CS and then like use the coding models to actually write the code.

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it doesn't, there's one read on this where it's like, oh, no one's going into tech. And I think it's like, no, people are going to be like even sharper about using these tools and even more, you know, ground truth in what matters, in what's not changing in the math and physics stuff. Anyway, other trends that you're seeing.

• 1:22:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, I wanted to get into like the psyche of this batch. If you zoom out, so many companies are having like this sort of like. Often, you know, if they're a later-stage company, midlife crisis, if they're a younger startup, that's kind of in the path of the lab, they're wondering. It feels like even the last, you know, few weeks, like, the narrative is kind of flipped, and we're seeing, like, a lot of the application-layer companies say, like, "Hey, we have an opportunity to sort of orchestrate a variety of models and maybe get efficiency for companies that were token-maxing." So what is the psyche of the current batch? Where are they finding opportunity? I'm sure, you know, you had a few office hours where founders were saying, like, "Is it over?

• 1:23:28Jordi Hays?

  Should I just, you know, pack it up and join a lab?" But, and of course, the YC way would be to say, like, "No, there's always going to be opportunity for, you know, smart, focused people." But take us through it.

• 1:23:40Speaker 12

  Yeah, I mean, it definitely ebbs and flows. I would say when Claude Code first launched earlier this year, I feel like it really did flow towards the, "Oh, wow, like, the labs are going to take way more of the value and, like, are they just going to own everything?" And I think that was a little bit in the psyche. I feel like now it's flowed back towards, you know, you don't, you want to try and have a little bit of thought around, are you going to be in the path of labs or not? But mostly, I just think the founders here are doing their thing. And they're not, they're not currently, like, worried about that as much, so much, so much more. And I think, like, largely, they're trying to figure out what are kind of maybe the boring but valuable things that the labs are just not going to focus in on.

• 1:24:23Speaker 12

  And I think there you see a lot of, it's funny, it's like, we used to talk about, like, making stuff that people want. Now I feel like it's a lot of making things that agents want. And so especially at, like, the infrastructure level, it's like how you set up sandboxes for agents that go into the nitty-gritty detail of giving them all the tooling that they need to use to actually perform tasks and actually to do things. And it's the kind of stuff that the labs themselves are just unlikely to go into depth on.

• 1:24:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's funny, that's somewhat of... It's like somewhat a new framing. Think about what the big companies aren't going to do is too off the beaten path for them. But if you go back, I'm like, well, the hotel industry wasn't thinking about Airbnb and the the the big banks weren't thinking about Bitcoin and you get Coinbase. And so there's something there that's like always been true and is just sort of resurfacing and is actually maybe a ground truth that you need to pull back to constantly. But it but but it is it is potentially more relevant than ever. Has the has the Gavin Baker meme of being in the token path taken hold this batch? This idea that you want to be deeper in the bottleneck that if you're if you're not in the in the downstream

• 1:25:32John Coogan?

  path of the labs, the safest place might be upstream, deeper in the supply chain. We talked to a founder who's working on cooling for data centers. That's clearly something that's very aligned with the broad trend. But what's happening there in terms of token path thought?

• 1:25:49Speaker 12

  I don't I don't at least I don't think that has trickled down to like the founders starting these companies and figuring out what ideas to work on. I do think some of that framework fits. Like you're certainly seeing things

• 1:26:01Speaker 12

  further into like the physical world, like actually, you know, building building physical things. But I think that's actually more to do with being inspired by Elon and Palmer Lucky at Anduril on the founder side that people want to work on like physical, like work in the atom. So we've got a team in this batch building like a nuclear reactor like that. That I think is just inspired by, hey, like, we want to build real things. And then I think on the other side of the marketplace, investors typically really didn't want to invest in hardware companies. So we used to see this. I always used to brace the hardware or the hard tech companies. Hey, you're going to have to like be ready for it because no one's going to want to invest in you. You're going to have to grind it out. It might be years before you raise the money that you need. And now I think, again, since Claude Code, there's been this real shift of, oh, like, SaaS is dead, maybe software is not going to be as valuable.

• 1:26:46Speaker 12

  Suddenly, investors all want to invest in hard tech stuff, which is, you know, I'm happy about it, but it does also just show like how fickle that that that side of the marketplace can be as well.

• 1:26:56Jordi Hays?

  Have you seen any change to average burn rates with or anyone in the batch token maxing so hard that you have to say like, hey, you should probably, you know, I expect you to raise, you know, after demo day, but you know, maybe, maybe don't.

• 1:27:12Speaker 12

  No, not yet. You know, I'm a bit reluctant to say this. I don't want it to change, but I don't think I have that much control. Like, I actually think on the ground, the founders feel like the, um, the subscription plans from the big lab companies are actually very generous. And so they're able to actually, um, get as much token usage as they want largely out of those plans is sort of being what, what I've seen. Um, we do internally talk about this. Like, we do wonder if there's some training we need to do to like push the founders to spend more on tokens and that maybe they're thinking about, um, tokens as something you should conserve spend on. Whereas like, I think I and a bunch of the other YC partners really think about it. It's a lot more like rent. Like, you don't say, I'm not moving to San Francisco to build my tech

• 1:27:57Speaker 12

  startup because the rent's expensive. Like, yes, it's expensive, but it's the place to be. Like, you don't conserve on that. You like, want to be, um, you actually want to spend money on that. There's other things you save money on. And so it, I do feel like because so many of the founders, especially if they're younger, they just don't have the budgets to use the latest models and be like cost insensitive and token max. So they're just, they're just used to, um, conserving and trying to do more with less. Um, and I think that that may well change, but at least currently I, I am, I don't feel like the burn rate is going up because people trying to get to product market fit are spending way more on tokens.

• 1:28:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting. It's like, you know, maybe you don't, you can delay hiring the incremental engineer, which actually can be very good because it's way easier to pivot if you have just the founders, right? Versus like, you know, once you start adding. What about trends on the business model side? You know, last year, I feel like the, you know, classic VC blog post would be like, sell the work, not, you know, the product. Uh, we've seen it. Uh, some companies get to the point, let's, there's like, you know, a legal startup, uh, that, that's like actually just doing the, doing the contracts. They basically, they sell, uh, executed contracts effectively, but it hasn't maybe been as popular as I think a lot of people had imagined, at least so far. But what are you seeing?

• 1:29:20Speaker 12

  I don't think the business models have fully switched over to like to paperwork yet. It's certainly paper usage, but I don't think it's paperwork yet. And I think that's just because the agents as yet haven't quite been good enough to actually consistently deliver like the final contract in a way that makes the startups feel good about charging that way. I do think we're right on the cusp of that changing though. Like this batch really does feel like one where it's, it's not just sort of agents to review things or human in the loop or getting stuff teed up. It's really starting to be more end to end and you're getting to the point where the agents are just doing all of the work.

• 1:30:02Speaker 12

  And at that point, yeah, you may well switch over, but I feel like maybe that's going to be a batch or two away.

• 1:30:08John Coogan?

  Are we going to see a revenge of the, of the network effect? It feels like in a world where, you know, software is mutable and, and maybe like the million lines of code that you and your team built are not as defensible as you thought. The original SaaS apocalypse thesis, network effects businesses should do really well. I don't know if more founders are talking about that, but what's your interpretation? Because it is sort of the hardest moat to construct, happens sort of randomly sometimes. But if you can get it done, it feels like you'll be very, you'll be in a very strong position.

• 1:30:44Speaker 12

  You know, you mentioned like the late stage companies having like maybe midlife crises. That's where I, I hear network effects talked about more, honestly. It's like some of those, if you're whatnot or Cowshy at the moment, like yeah, or Coinbase, like you're feeling pretty good about the fact that you are a marketplace business with real network effects and you're not worried about sort of someone vibe coding a competitor to you. So I think that's where I hear it. I will say like, yeah, again, on the ground floor here on the batches, I don't, we haven't seen as many founders like build pure marketplace businesses as you would, you would expect based on that thesis. And I think it's just because obviously people are really excited to work with AI and build AI tools. They're not really thinking about it as, hey, like what's like a, what's got like a network

• 1:31:29Speaker 12

  effect moat and how can I build that business?

• 1:31:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about gaming? We talked to Diana a little bit about this, but it feels like we, you were seeing incredible demos of vibe coded games. When I see them, I'm like, I would love for a team of YC founders to work on that for three months to get it actually to a place where it's a real game instead of just a demo. And but the underwriting for the game industry has always been different than the traditional SaaS venture capital flow. Is there a world where YC is more open to just pure games companies? We're just going to make a hit game. We're going to scale it into a AAA game studio. We're going to develop IP. That's a very different motion. But are you open to that?

• 1:32:15John Coogan?

  Is there is there momentum there? Or is that something that you think is farther off?

• 1:32:20Speaker 12

  Yeah, I mean, we would totally be open to it. Diane has definitely got the gaming background, the gaming expertise there. But yeah, I think we would be totally open to it. And just like, the reason you typically, as a startup investor, don't want to invest in games is it's so hits driven. Even if you get one hit, how do you know you get another one? What's replicable? But yeah, like, you know, these days, like, if you can, if you can build some recipe for actually consistently producing games, and I feel like Zynga got the closest to that, that arguably that was more about like, they sort of productized the the distribution mechanism and the viral mechanics more than like, the gameplay. But I know that seems plausible in AI. It seems like you can, if you can actually build an AI or an agent that can consistently produce high quality games, and also you just be able

• 1:33:04Speaker 12

  to run so many of those experiments in parallel, or so many more experiments in parallel than you could before. I think that'd be really interesting. Again, with us, it's the same thing. We need to see founders who seem like they've got some insight at that level, like they're thinking about it beyond just, hey, I really love playing third person shooters, and I want to build like, a really cool third person shooter game. We'd probably have to hear that in the interview. Like, hey, like, I'm thinking of how this would like, generalize and build out. And here's like, where the the technology could be interesting.

• 1:33:30John Coogan?

  I'm wondering if, I mean, I'm wondering if there's a lesson from, I mean, Hollywood is probably behind YC in terms of the forward lookingness. But there's this interesting case study with Backrooms and Obsession, these YouTubers who went and made like, classic Hollywood films, low budgets, but real budgets. And they put up huge numbers and they're and they're massive successes in Hollywood now, driving a lot of attention. And and it's interesting to think about, like, what is the next category that gets unlocked, that's more of like indie dev world, but now has the ability to scale through like, the YC venture capital model?

• 1:34:11Speaker 12

  Yeah, I think, yeah, I think that's gonna be really interesting. I think that's where you might end up seeing. I don't know if we'll see like the one person, well, you might see the one person unicorns, but you certainly feels like you're gonna start seeing the one person like hundred million dollar revenue companies in like a bunch of verticals because you've just got like agents doing the core business functions.

• 1:34:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:29Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so have you ever had an office hours where where a founder comes in and they're like, all right, like, I think I'm, I think I'm that company. I think I'm the one person hundred million dollar company because like everyone's been talking about this forever, but like there's such a much stronger incentive to just like hire the incremental person if it can make you like, I just don't know that it will ever. I just like, may, maybe it.

• 1:34:55John Coogan?

  You just want a buddy.

• 1:34:56Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, there's such a strong incentive, like, do I want, do I want to be the company?

• 1:35:00John Coogan?

  But I gotta have a friend around.

• 1:35:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like, do you, do you wanna, do you wanna be the like company that gets an award that doesn't matter? Or do you wanna win?

• 1:35:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, good point.

• 1:35:08Jordi Hays?

  Or not even a real award. It's just like, it's, it's something that you can say on the internet and then people will debate it and be like, well, you hired this freelancer, like, you know, you have a lawyer. Does that really count? So like, I feel like it will never actually happen because it will already always be debated and.

• 1:35:22John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:35:23Speaker 12

  I personally have not worked with a founder who's like come in with the dead set like, I never want to hire anyone. I can't wanna only work for myself. I mean, my guess is someone like that is not going to gravitate towards like a community product, which is essentially what Y C is. And so it could happen, who knows? I, I, the thing that I'm seeing of a hundred percent, you can get to you like series A. You can get to a million or two million dollars of revenue without hiring anyone and being way leaner than you've ever seen before. But after you've raised the A or the B, it does seem like hiring is essentially the same as it's always been. Like, who knows whether that's because like there's just more work to do or whether just like it's like, you know, once then you have like your investors and they're like running the same playbook.

• 1:36:06Speaker 12

  But I definitely am not seeing any evidence yet of like those companies really slowing down on hiring.

• 1:36:14John Coogan?

  Can you give us the lore on the Paul Buchheit $100 billion question?

• 1:36:22Speaker 12

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, what's the lore? Like, you know, we did this thing at YC called Group Office Hours where it's just a couple of the partners and a group of the startups. It's sort of like, I don't know, it's sort of like a group discussion. Hey, like, what's going on? What are your problems? And sometimes we'll prompt with, hey, like, let's think about this. Again, everyone could like chime in. And Paul always had this great prompt, which was, don't just think about how you're going to be like a billion dollar company where you get to like $100 million in revenue. Think about like, what's the next act from that? Like, how do you get to $100 billion? You know, like, Google started off with search and then became so much more. Meta's the same. And so it's sort of like, it's sort of like a mind expanding exercise. And it's useful to do at this stage, because you get a sense for how much ambition

• 1:37:07Speaker 12

  and vision do the founders actually have. And sometimes it helps them get more excited about their own company when they realize, oh, wow, like, this is like, you know, I was thinking about it as like, how do we like, build this one product that gets us to like, you know, 100 billion revenue. But actually, I didn't even realize there's six other things we could do. I just have to like, get there.

• 1:37:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is it too small? Do you need a 10x it? We got trillion dollar companies now.

• 1:37:31Speaker 12

  It's true. It's inflation.

• 1:37:32Jordi Hays?

  Even Elon.

• 1:37:33John Coogan?

  Small time YC just wants to sit around just knocking base hits to 100 billion. Are you swinging with the fences or not, Har?

• 1:37:41Speaker 12

  Maybe, maybe I'll bring it back and call it the trillion dollar.

• 1:37:44John Coogan?

  It has a nice ring to it.

• 1:37:46Speaker 12

  I'll brand it as my thing.

• 1:37:48John Coogan?

  You should, you should. Sorry, PB. Jordy, what was the last thing?

• 1:37:52Jordi Hays?

  Elon was saying on Sunday, he would be surprised if they don't have a trillion of revenue by 2031.

• 1:37:59John Coogan?

  I agree. I agree. What's the path?

• 1:38:00Speaker 12

  The market, the market space times, he can't beat that.

• 1:38:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway, we're gonna hop on with Gary. Thank you so much for hopping on the show.

• 1:38:08Jordi Hays?

  Thanks so much.

• 1:38:09John Coogan?

  Congrats on Demo Day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:38:11Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:38:11Speaker 12

  See you guys in a bit.

• 1:38:13John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. Absolutely. We gotta hit Gary with the flashbang.

• 1:38:26Speaker 12

  Right away.

• 1:38:26John Coogan?

  He comes in. Gary, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. He's now here. It's Demo Day. Watch out, it's a flashbang.

• 1:38:39John Coogan?

  Great to see you. Great to see you. How are you doing? Take us through it. How's the day been?

• 1:38:46Garry Tan?

  Oh, it's awesome. I mean, it's always the big show here in San Francisco.

• 1:38:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:38:50Garry Tan?

  It's a beautiful, gorgeous day and, you know, who doesn't like to go check out a nuclear reactor in our back parking lot? No uranium, don't worry.

• 1:38:58Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 1:38:58John Coogan?

  This is like the second or third nuclear company, though, right?

• 1:39:01Garry Tan?

  I mean, I think we kind of need all of them, right?

• 1:39:04John Coogan?

  You need all of them.

• 1:39:05Jordi Hays?

  Let's stop them from going critical in the parking lot.

• 1:39:10Garry Tan?

  Oh, well, luckily no uranium. So you have no Geiger counter needed. You're all good.

• 1:39:14John Coogan?

  That's great. Is, how much is hard tech booming? Do you have any like stats? It feels like every year there's a slight, slightly more people taking the, the hardware isn't that hard. They say hardware is hard, but I'm going to try it. And it feels like that's been a trend that's been growing steadily. Uh, am I, am I correct to read that into the trends over demo days over the last couple of years?

• 1:39:38Garry Tan?

  Yeah, man. I got to call out, uh, my buddy Brett Gibson over at initialized capital. I mean, right when CodeGen first started happening, Brett was my first friend. He said, you know, obviously you gotta, you know, fund the bangers and it's not like they stopped doing B2B SaaS.

• 1:39:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:55Garry Tan?

  But, uh, you know, initialized was one of the first people to do the pivot. To say, you know what, like hard tech is the way it's going to go. And, uh, you know, things like flock safety were sort of the first things we did that really, really became huge. And, um, you know, computer vision is in, and then now with AI, like everything is open. It's so much easier. Um, I mean, you can do mechanical engineering. You could do electrical engineering. If you don't understand it, you can build it. You can find every vendor, like the supply chain management can happen right there, all in open claw now. I mean, there's, I mean, we're just in a new age.

• 1:40:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, we've even seen people like, like, uh, optimizing their home wifi speed.

• 1:40:36John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:40:37Jordi Hays?

  Like, you know, different models.

• 1:40:39John Coogan?

  It's crazy. Um. A lot of the hard tech boom, I feel like, has been driven by Elon, Palmer, Lucky, just sort of breaking the glass on like, it's possible for this to happen. And that's led to a lot of like, defense tech startups. But I'm interested in the intersection. What are you seeing and how much, how much conversation is there around hardware and AI, data centers, stuff that's in the token path, but not in the direct path, not one-shot-able by a frontier model?

• 1:41:13Garry Tan?

  Oh, my God. I mean, honestly, you should probably get Ashton. Ashton Kutcher is here today. You should go talk to him. He's got a whole thesis around AI, solar, you know, he's actually pretty bearish on fusion, which is interesting. You should ask him about that.

• 1:41:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:41:28Garry Tan?

  I think that's

• 1:41:29Jordi Hays?

  That's news. That's gonna hit.

• 1:41:30Garry Tan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:31Jordi Hays?

  Ashton Kutcher, bearish on fusion.

• 1:41:34Garry Tan?

  Hey, man, he is like, really, he went all the way, like, he met everyone. So, I mean, Ashton has been an incredible investor, especially for hard tech. But anyway, I mean, I think what we've been seeing, there's like, more, there's more defense here in this batch than the entire last year.

• 1:41:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then But there's also more geopolitical conflict. So there's more energy to purchase and the governments sort of changed a lot of the ways stuff is procured. And so the old adage, you need to be a billionaire to start a defense tech company, sort of gone.

• 1:42:09Jordi Hays?

  Elons, the Palmers, the

• 1:42:10John Coogan?

  Carps.

• 1:42:11Jordi Hays?

  Software Singularity, and then hardware.

• 1:42:14Garry Tan?

  Who I got to hand it up to?

• 1:42:15John Coogan?

  Who?

• 1:42:15Garry Tan?

  So it's Emile Michael, and it's our friends who are actually in the Trump administration, who are like, changing everything, like the DIU, like, it's a new Department of War, like, this is never, you know, I think that there is actually an awareness that cost plus, you know, cost plus was originally designed to be something that created more innovation. And, you know, here we are 50, 80 years later, and, you know, what was needed for 50 or 80 years ago, that's the wrong thing now. You know, you have the defense primes that are just not actually Innovating, they can't, like it's sort of structural, there's sort of these, you know, it's the equivalent of big tech bureaucracy, like I think, you know, I think of iPhone,

• 1:42:58Garry Tan?

  how stupid Siri is and how terrible it is, or even like Alexa over at Amazon, it's like unbelievable.

• 1:43:03Speaker 06

  Shots fired.

• 1:43:04Garry Tan?

  How incompetent, you know, I mean, these are very competent people put into a system that is structurally unable to deliver technology that is actually what people really, really want. And so, when you talk about consumer technology, like, you know, it's not that big a deal, like, you know, my life is 20% worse, 10% worse, because I can't use a Siri that actually uses large language models properly, you know, years after it was designed. And I usually, you know, when I go to DC, I like to tell politicians that, it's like, hey, like, here's this thing that doesn't make sense in society. But, you know, it's consumer tech, it's, it's, no one's gonna really, like, probably very few people have died because of it. But when I really, what makes me mad, though, is when you think

• 1:43:46Garry Tan?

  about, like, there are service members who are going to die in, in service of our country to defend liberty, and they're giving their lives because defense primes are not doing the job that they're supposed to be doing, right? They're not innovating, they're not bringing these new technologies to fore, and it's structural. And it's not like individual people trying to do it, it's structural, right? Like, just as the people who work on Siri, like, actually, we funded a number of them who have come and done YC, delightful, wonderful people, like, the people who work at these companies are incredible.

• 1:44:17Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:44:18Garry Tan?

  I never want to attack the engineer working on this stuff. It's actually structure.

• 1:44:21Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:44:22Garry Tan?

  Like, you have big tech and you have, you know, big anything, right? It becomes structural, where, here's a thing that should happen, it does not happen, why? You know, I think Cost Plus is one of those things, like, it's just systematically, instead of trying to create something that's better, it's like, how do we maximize shareholder value? And, you know, I get it, but also, why are we doing it this way? And so, you know, credit to the Department of War, like, they are actually, for the first time in, like, decades, easily, like, they're actually open to a team of 10 or 20 people, whether it's, you know, in Boston, in Austin, even down the street in San Francisco, in, in Gundo, shout out to our Gundo bros out there.

• 1:45:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, we talked to Dan Durst about just like having range days where any startup can come and pitch and they'll just buy the best product right there. It feels like it's an entirely new day in terms of procurement. Switching gears to software is like I could prompt that with one with one prompt, I could build that. Or it's just directly in the path of the labs. It's so easy to build. Is that the new like, what if Google builds it? Like, I have a suspicion that we might have over rotated on the on the Oh, like it's easy to build that particular product or vibe code that particular product. And it's like, yeah, but you didn't.

• 1:45:45John Coogan?

  And then this team did, and they went and did all the other hard things to get customers and understand the user and actually build a great product. And so, yes, you could clone it, but they have momentum. And so maybe they won't be a trillion dollar business, but there might be some beautiful businesses that are accelerated and they look like SaaS and they look like they could be cloned. But there's something secret there that's still going on. How do you think about that? Do you push back or do you agree?

• 1:46:13Garry Tan?

  No, I think that, you know what, like being in San Francisco and being friends with people at the labs and being able to see like the inside, like, you know, being able to see the inside of like, you know, what Codex and Claude Code is going to be incredible, right? And then these are all 200 IQ people building 200 IQ models. And it's gonna keep going. I mean, it's it's gonna be, you know, true AGI, the takeoff is happening.

• 1:46:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:46:42Garry Tan?

  And the thing you have to realize is like everywhere else, like, well, those 200 IQ people can't really interface the way that they need to with the 150 IQ people and the 130 IQ people and the 100 IQ people. And like the mass humanity.

• 1:46:56John Coogan?

  Room temp, you need a room temp guy to build a great business. No, you talk to a lot of entrepreneurs and it's like, yeah, this person just worked really hard and found an interesting niche and just delivered.

• 1:47:06Jordi Hays?

  Bring it down to my level, room temp, please.

• 1:47:09Garry Tan?

  But like, we're joking, but on the, you know, on the other hand, like, the world actually cannot interface with these things. Like, the models will be too complex.

• 1:47:19John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:47:20Garry Tan?

  The UI will be too complex, like. You know, the more complicated you make any given solution, the less likely someone's actually going to be able to take advantage of it and implement it and use it. Yeah. Um, and so, you know, that's where all of the value is in business. It's like, how do you take this new tech that nobody has, that very few people understand? Yeah. And then bring it to them in a way that actually helps their lives. And, you know, I mean, obviously, on a five or 10 year basis with, you know, superintelligence becoming what it is, you know, all bets could be off on like a long enough timeframe. But certainly for the next like 18, 24, 36 months, uh, that's not happening.

• 1:48:02Garry Tan?

  And for now, um, hey, man, I, we're going to fight for the little guy or for, you know, the person who has nothing sitting in front of a recycled MacBook Pro to be able to make anything, to make prosperity happen. Like, that's what, that's what this logo is, right? I love it.

• 1:48:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:18Garry Tan?

  That's what, that's what we're about. Like, this is, you know, as long as this is a flag that flies, like, I, I will, to my dying day, will fight. I love it. For the startups and for startup founders and for people to be able to create something from nothing. Yeah. And, uh, you know, I think it's going to be a while before we really have to worry about like, are there going to be jobs and things like that? No, I completely agree.

• 1:48:41Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, out of the current like requests for startups, is there any category that comes to mind? Are you working on a new, on a new, uh, request for startups list?

• 1:48:54Garry Tan?

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we're always doing that. Uh, I don't know, I'm, I'm trying to convince Ashton to do the, uh, you know, the call for solar and re-industrialize America with me, so maybe you'll see that. Uh, Joe Gebbia, uh, Chief Design Officer of the United States, uh, he, he, um, you know, sent me the one about agriculture, you know, we're, uh, I, I think that we're realizing that like Y C has a real convening power and, uh, people really shouldn't have to just go and work on, you know, nothing wrong with B two B SaaS and we love it. Yeah. But also like, you know, if you've got something in you that isn't that, like, we can actually try to harness like all that brain power.

• 1:49:31Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:49:31Garry Tan?

  And all that AI power into basically everything. I mean, that's my, the number one philosophy that I think people have not absorbed yet enough and that I want everyone to hear and I will shout. From every hill is that it's time to boil the oceans, guys. Like, everyone else is out there trying to figure out like, oh, let me like lay off all these people. And haha, like, the machines are better than humans. I was like, you know, we live in a broken, completely just, it's like a backward world. Right? Like, if we could accelerate technology fast enough, it would solve a lot more problems. People would have a lot more prosperity. And now, like, the biggest, one of the biggest things, the blocker is not even money. It hasn't been money for some time. It's definitely not right now.

• 1:50:15Garry Tan?

  Like, it's just pure agency. Like, do you have an idea? Like, can you prompt it? Like, can you actually, you actually know how to use this stuff? And what do you want? Like, what do you want to manifest in the world? And if we do that, and we do that like 10 or 100 times, or 1,000 times more than we have been. And we have, you know, and then going back to what we were saying earlier, like, it's actually about the systems. Right? A startup is the defining system where either you do it or you don't. Like, either you have a customer that loves it, or a customer that like doesn't buy it. And like, most of the time, frankly, like, people love to bag on startups. It's because those startups don't make something people want, right? That's why our T-shirt is literally make something people want. It's not more complicated than that. We actually give away the secrets on our frickin' T-shirts. It's a great T-shirt that you get on your first day at YC.

• 1:51:00Garry Tan?

  But like, it's surprising how hard it is to do that. And then, but if we did that, you know, instead of trying to replace jobs, instead of trying to say like, you know, haha, I could like lower my cost by 90%. Like, the thing is, that's why I love markets. Like, if you have, you know, just to take, take like a big tech swing again, when you have a moat that is so unassailable, that is basically like regulatory capture. Like, you basically, if the government says like, actually, Apple, you can just not have multiple app stores. Then you know what the government just granted? The government is okay with the monopoly. And when you have a monopoly, you have no choice. And then that's what we have.

• 1:51:43Garry Tan?

  Like, we do not have choice about what messenger we use. Like, why is iMessage so stupid? If you had LLMs embedded in that, you would have, you know, we could actually literally save time by having that level inside our phone. But I guarantee you-

• 1:51:58Jordi Hays?

  Personally, I like when I'm searching for like a very specific message that I know I sent and I can't find it. Personally, I just-

• 1:52:05John Coogan?

  Where is the bar for big tech now? Where is the bar for big tech? Because SpaceX is now a $3 trillion company. If you're just hanging out of just $1 trillion, are you little tech now? Are you $100 billion little tech company?

• 1:52:20Jordi Hays?

  That's toddler tech.

• 1:52:21John Coogan?

  Where is the line?

• 1:52:23Garry Tan?

  Honestly, it's like, after people are like $10 billion valuation, I'm like, God bless you.

• 1:52:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:52:29Garry Tan?

  Please don't, please don't, you know, mess it up for the next, yeah, please don't steamroll the next generation.

• 1:52:34John Coogan?

  Decacorn is the graduation.

• 1:52:35Garry Tan?

  That's just my experience, right?

• 1:52:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, I know, that makes sense.

• 1:52:37Garry Tan?

  Once you become a Decacorn, you start hiring these Google PMs who come in and, you know, the same people who closed off the platforms on App Store, things like that. You start hiring those PMs and then it's over, guys, you know? Which is fun, like, as long as, the thing is, like, as long as there are markets, as long as there's choice.

• 1:52:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:52:54Garry Tan?

  There's gonna be a check on that, right? And that's, that's my fractal. I'm like, hey, man, let's boil the oceans.

• 1:53:00John Coogan?

  I think it's great.

• 1:53:01Garry Tan?

  Let's make so many more people. I mean, it's, you wanna get political? I don't know, I have a thing about that.

• 1:53:06John Coogan?

  Not particularly.

• 1:53:07Garry Tan?

  Okay, no politics today, no politics today.

• 1:53:11John Coogan?

  I, uh-

• 1:53:12Garry Tan?

  No politics today.

• 1:53:13John Coogan?

  I would rather talk about gaming.

• 1:53:16Jordi Hays?

  You're running, that's it, you're running. For president, for president of the United States.

• 1:53:20Garry Tan?

  I'm Canadian, sorry, guys.

• 1:53:22John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. I, I wanna, I didn't know that for some reason.

• 1:53:27Garry Tan?

  I was born in Winnipeg, I'm naturalized though. God bless America.

• 1:53:30John Coogan?

  Talk, I, uh-

• 1:53:33John Coogan?

  What I actually want to know about is Gstack. I want to know about Gstack in the context of LIC. I feel like YC, the whole goal, the whole system is built to allow the founders to talk to their customers, to build something people want. And that's why there's Bookface with investor reviews. Because you could see a founder getting distracted and being like, I need to optimize my fundraise. And so I should go build a database and interview everyone about what funds are the best. They don't need to, because it's been done for every YC company. That's all gone through the batch. And is there a lens where I can view some of the research, some of the work, some of the experiments that you're doing around vibe coding, around Gstack as let me sort of like do the unhobbling,

• 1:54:16John Coogan?

  but fall on the sword of like optimizing systems and experimenting so that that burden doesn't go on to every single YC founder that's token maxing in the batch?

• 1:54:26Garry Tan?

  Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so Gstack was sort of my project from like January through March. I'm still maintaining it and fixing it. But like, my new thing is G-brain, which I actually want it to be like the Postgres for agents. So the thing I realized is that like, you know, what an agent, you know, a human can only keep like seven plus or minus three things in their head, right? Like a phone number is about it, right?

• 1:54:49John Coogan?

  That's generous.

• 1:54:49Garry Tan?

  But yeah.

• 1:54:50John Coogan?

  I can keep hundreds of things, but yes, I understand.

• 1:54:53Garry Tan?

  That's very nice. Some of us are special. John, you're very special.

• 1:54:58Garry Tan?

  And but a computer with an LLM, it can keep about three Harry Potter books in their head. And so.

• 1:55:05John Coogan?

  It doesn't sound that impressive when you say it that way.

• 1:55:07Garry Tan?

  I mean, it's like a stack of books.

• 1:55:09John Coogan?

  No, no, no, I understand. It's just way better when you say like, it can contain like 75 air dish problems or like some complex math. Harry Potter. But yes, I understand. The context window is significant and especially when compared to a human.

• 1:55:23Garry Tan?

  Yeah. And then when you think about like what most computer systems are, like actually you should think of like. The Library of Alexandria, right? Like thousands of books, tens of, maybe millions of books. Like actually, it's even bigger than that. It's like the whole internet, right? And then, uh, that's what like, sort of like Karpathy's knowledge wikis are. People are talking about company brains. Like, uh, you could basically take all of the relevant info about customers and, uh, everything that you've ever, any, any person that like, any one of the companies ever even met. Like, that's what a CRM is. You can have that in like a hundred thousand or a million markdown files that like comprises everything that that business is.

• 1:56:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:02Garry Tan?

  So that's basically what G-Brain can do.

• 1:56:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think people misunderstand that like YC has been building software to help batch participating companies for over a decade at this point, I think. Probably longer, maybe 15 years. And so that is in the lineage.

• 1:56:17Garry Tan?

  We're building that in.

• 1:56:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:56:19Garry Tan?

  I mean, actually, I think, you know, now we have all these tools that are going to be built directly into, uh, YC Bookface. So, you know, you're going to want to be a part of the community.

• 1:56:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've been seeing it. It's been getting better. Like the pace of, the pace of software development on Bookface and YC's internal tools is accelerating. It's been, uh, refreshing to see, uh, that, that it's, people often have a window into it and they see like, oh, there's this demo, but there is an internal product that is evolving and getting better, which is great.

• 1:56:47Garry Tan?

  So, so the magic moment for G-Brain is basically like being able to take any book that exists in your entire business and then making sure the three books that really matter for the thing you're trying to do are loaded. And then that's basically ASI. Like, you don't have to write software anymore. You can just straight up use Hermes Agent or OpenClaw plus this. Uh, I am trying to make it work with a Codex and, um, you know, Co-Work, but honestly, I think that those are like Hondas. And honestly, I mean, OpenClaw is still the Ferrari man. It's still the Ferrari, but you know.

• 1:57:22John Coogan?

  Open. Yeah, that's good. Very, very fun. What are the trends that you're seeing in applications? Are applications increasing in the age of AI? More people wanting to do startups? Or people coming from big tech?

• 1:57:36Jordi Hays?

  Applications as in like people?

• 1:57:38John Coogan?

  Applications to YC, like people trying to start companies. Like it feels like in all this anxiety of like big tech layoffs and stuff like the flip side of that is that there's more entrepreneurial opportunity because we see companies every day.

• 1:57:50Jordi Hays?

  I find myself just pointing people to the YC website when they're, when they're, maybe they're not a software developer and they decide to build their first app in the last six months, which there's been many. I'm just like, go follow this, even if you're not going to apply. Like this is, this is, uh, this is what works.

• 1:58:09Garry Tan?

  Yeah. Did you see PG came out and said it? He's like, if you're non-technical, just stop calling yourself that. Cause you shouldn't. I mean, why, why limit yourself actually?

• 1:58:18John Coogan?

  No, I completely agree.

• 1:58:19Garry Tan?

  Yeah. I don't know. I think we're seeing.

• 1:58:21John Coogan?

  Non-technical was always like, uh, because obviously like it's not a binary. Like, like I learned Python and a little bit of C++ and I could like sort of deploy a website, but like, I'm like levels below like a true like, you know, incredible computer scientist who's like creating Python. Uh, but I would just sort of like, be like, yeah, okay. I'm technical because that's good. But it's like, there's obviously levels to these things. And the more you can like, you know, get away from that stigma.

• 1:58:49Garry Tan?

  If you sit in front of Claude Code, I guarantee you, you could fix some bugs in Python and submit a PR that would be accepted. That wasn't true a year ago.

• 1:59:00Jordi Hays?

  Personally, I think John could solve continual learning.

• 1:59:03Garry Tan?

  That would be great. You could do it. It's just a matter of will.

• 1:59:07John Coogan?

  I got a podcaster run. I'm trying to be low agency, low taste right now. Low taste. Anyway, thank you, Gary. Congratulations on demo day.

• 1:59:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great. Great to see you.

• 1:59:21John Coogan?

  It's always fantastic catching up. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:59:23Garry Tan?

  Catch you guys.

• 1:59:24John Coogan?

  Have a good day. Did you see?

• 1:59:27Jordi Hays?

  I like the all black.

• 1:59:28John Coogan?

  All black looks great. Uh, did you see the Rolex opened a new boutique on the Swiss Alps in, inside of a former telecommunications tower? It looks like a Modern Warfare 2 map. Look at this building. This is an incredible, uh, place to hold a boutique. I guess you have to hike up here, but look inside. This is a Rolex boutique. You go in there, they show you some watches, um, but this looks like Modern Warfare 2.

• 1:59:53Jordi Hays?

  Carter says, imagine being told they have nothing in stock here. You both know very well, they have watches in stock.

• 1:59:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:59:59Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what actual resort is it on?

• 2:00:01John Coogan?

  I don't know if this is a resort. I think this is a, uh, a telecommunications tower, but I gotta know more about this. We gotta, we gotta get someone to call in from this particular boutique because this is an absolutely wild, uh, wild, wild scene. But what a great like brand activation. Uh, it does have a Bond villain aura, but I think it looks great.

• 2:00:24Jordi Hays?

  Posting threads from here.

• 2:00:26John Coogan?

  Imagine posting threads. You know what? Every time Connor Hayes comes on the show, he's like, you guys don't post on threads. I posted twice about this interview. So Connor Hayes, get in here and, uh, tell us what's new with threads.

• 2:00:37Connor Hayes?

  What's up gentlemen?

• 2:00:38John Coogan?

  What's up? Good to see you again.

• 2:00:40Connor Hayes?

  I'm doing great, man. Yeah, I do. I appreciated the post today, John.

• 2:00:44John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it. We have been getting better. We've been posting a lot more on threads. We're having fun. And also the, the, this is the weird thing is that like, I think, and you'll tell me, but I think what's driving thread success and, and the growth is the differentiation. Like I go there for car community. I go there for, uh, all sorts of different sub communities around TV shows and different things that aren't real, it's not work for me when I'm there. When I'm on X or YouTube or even Instagram now, my Instagram, my personal Instagram is just my personal brand, my work product, but threads has, i- i- it's more fractured, but in a good way, if that makes sense. But you tell me, what's, what's driving all the growth?

• 2:01:23Jordi Hays?

  First of all, can we just, can we just hit the gong already?

• 2:01:26John Coogan?

  Absolutely.

• 2:01:27Jordi Hays?

  For half a billion.

• 2:01:28Connor Hayes?

  I was kinda waiting.

• 2:01:29Jordi Hays?

  Half a billion.

• 2:01:33Connor Hayes?

  That was a big swing too.

• 2:01:34Jordi Hays?

  That was a big swing.

• 2:01:35John Coogan?

  It's a warm up swing.

• 2:01:36Jordi Hays?

  Big swing for every day.

• 2:01:37John Coogan?

  The real swing is coming later in the show.

• 2:01:39Connor Hayes?

  Yeah, so we announced 500 million

• 2:01:41John Coogan?

  Huge.

• 2:01:42Connor Hayes?

  monthlies today.

• 2:01:43John Coogan?

  Huge.

• 2:01:43Connor Hayes?

  I mean, John, I'll get to your question in a second, but the other thing, which I know we've talked in the past when I was on the show about growth coming from promoting the app in Facebook and Instagram.

• 2:01:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:53Connor Hayes?

  You know, another thing that we were sharing today is the proportion of people that are coming to threads not from those promotions has been going up quite a bit in the last year, and that's been a big focus for us. And we're doing it while deepening engagement. So we're up like 130% year-over-year on time spent in Japan, 80% year-over-year in Korea.

• 2:02:11Connor Hayes?

  Part of the playbook that we've been running is to pick these verticals and communities kind of one at a time.

• 2:02:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:15Connor Hayes?

  And just blitz them from a go-to-market perspective and a product perspective altogether. And sorry if you guys get background noise, I'm literally like at a team

• 2:02:23John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:02:23Connor Hayes?

  party for this right now.

• 2:02:24John Coogan?

  Huge.

• 2:02:25Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:02:26Connor Hayes?

  So we've got, you know, the entire Threads team surrounding me while I'm talking.

• 2:02:30John Coogan?

  Non-family of apps referral traffic, is that links being shared on the open web? Is that screenshots? Is that referral like invite your friend or share a link in a DM?

• 2:02:43Connor Hayes?

  Yeah, often actually the initial new user install comes from those. And then what we try to do is get people to come back to the app without a promotion the second time and third time, et cetera.

• 2:02:52John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:02:52Connor Hayes?

  So that's been the thing that we've been most successful at. And that's just through like making the content better, getting you better connections in the app, launching messaging, which sends you notifications when you get DMs and just having good content-based notifications too.

• 2:03:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:03:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, every, I've transitioned from someone maybe a year ago that would click over to Threads when there was like, I was almost getting click baited by something to now just like a lurker, because there's like, good.

• 2:03:20John Coogan?

  Oh, he's in the lurker category.

• 2:03:22Jordi Hays?

  I'm in the lurker category.

• 2:03:22Connor Hayes?

  We need you to transition from a lurker to a reply.

• 2:03:25Jordi Hays?

  No, I know, but every, no, every, yeah, every, every reply guy starts as a lurker, right? I have to build up, I have to build up the confidence to move into that. But no, it's been, it's seriously impressive and, and yeah, the car, the car stuff is what I've been following most closely.

• 2:03:43Connor Hayes?

  Oh, that's so cool to hear. We've been doing a bunch with F1 too. I don't know if you guys are F1 fans, but um, we have this new feature called live chats. So we're trying to do like, one of the things people love about Threads is they call it the quiet app. Like you're in a world right now where you, every single app you go to is like a sound on video feed.

• 2:03:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:04:00Connor Hayes?

  Um, you go to Threads, you can just like quietly scroll, read things that are going on. Um, one of the things that we're trying to do is make Threads the live second screen that is still quiet while you're watching something on TV.

• 2:04:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:11Connor Hayes?

  So we had a, uh, like a Q and A with Lewis Hamilton and Ferrari last week. There's like him and a bunch of fans in a chat that thousands of people can follow along with, react to the messages, asking questions. We've done this for NBA Finals. Um, so yeah, it's, it's, we're just trying to be the best platform for public conversation and that just means we have to lean into these live events.

• 2:04:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So it's, you're basically taking like what's great about the chat on, let's say like a Twitch livestream, right? It's like this real time flow of information and ideas, but then making that like disconnecting it effectively from the programming.

• 2:04:46Connor Hayes?

  Yep. Tie it to a live event and put like authoritative voices in charge of it. Um, we were talking, John, I think a little while ago about just how well we've done reality TV.

• 2:04:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:56Connor Hayes?

  I don't know if you guys are into the Summer House lore.

• 2:04:58John Coogan?

  I'm not.

• 2:04:59Connor Hayes?

  Lives on Threads.

• 2:05:00Jordi Hays?

  Is it Mike Solana?

• 2:05:01John Coogan?

  I saw, yeah, I saw Mike Solana on Threads discussing some reality TV show. Maybe it was the, the, the traitors or the, is that the one where they play like mafia? Yeah, there's a couple of these. And it's just so interesting when you bump into someone who you know in a different context and they're on Threads and they're just like, like they're sort of like wearing a different, it's a more casual outfit, basically. And like the, the, the posture can be, uh, very political on other apps or very defensive or very aggressive. Or maybe they're a particular influencer and they're always, you know, this just killed this on LinkedIn. But then they come over to Threads and they're just sort of just being a normal person in some ways, if that makes sense.

• 2:05:43Connor Hayes?

  It worked. I mean, it's, I think a lot of it's just that people wanna wear that hat sometimes. I mean, you were talking about it was like your stuff too.

• 2:05:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:50Connor Hayes?

  Um, there's something very like human about building an app that's for conversation and leaning on to that. And I think in a world where like increasingly so, conversation is just very hard to have or the person isn't a human. You know, we're trying to make that the baseline thread. So that's.

• 2:06:04John Coogan?

  What, what is the KPI culture like? Like, cause you're the quiet app now. It's working. It seems great, but like it feels like there's gonna be a moment where it's like, okay, well, let's A B test vertical endless scrolling video. And it's gonna outperform and you're gonna be like, yeah, we're no longer the quiet app. We're actually just like the second Instagram and like, and it just maths out, but like, it feels like that's not the mission. That's not the goal, but like, how, how, how will this actually play out?

• 2:06:34Connor Hayes?

  I mean, I think that's, that's the difference between metrics and goals. Like it's the, you know, the goal is for us to be the best app for public conversation. I know that I could, I could tomorrow pump time spent on threads by putting more video in the feed. But that wouldn't make us the best app for public conversation. So we try to find metrics that give us as best a possible proxy for that goal.

• 2:06:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:55Connor Hayes?

  Um, and a lot of times actually it is like, how much is their back and forth reply happening on a top level post?

• 2:07:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:02Connor Hayes?

  You know, in terms of growth, the, the name API that the team works on is what we call threads driven now. It's like, people that are coming back, not because they saw a promotion.

• 2:07:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:07:11Connor Hayes?

  Um, so my, you know, my job is to like, set those goals, give them the best incentives possible. But then just know that the metrics are going to be imperfect. And sometimes I need to like come in and, you know, make a strategic decision to do something that might be against the metric, like to your point with vertical video. So we're not gonna do, we're not gonna do a vertical video tab and threads. Like that's not part of the plan.

• 2:07:29John Coogan?

  It's gonna be a horizontal video. You will turn your phone and it will be the entire Lord of the Rings extended edition. We're getting 10 hours.

• 2:07:38Connor Hayes?

  1996 NBA finals, game four, like front to back.

• 2:07:42Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about building your own kind of culture within Meta? Like, is that a thing? Is that something that's encouraged? Or is it like, you know, all big, you know, one big team? Or are there, do you guys like, do you guys have like a nickname for people working on Threads?

• 2:08:04John Coogan?

  They're not Meta made, they're threaders.

• 2:08:06Connor Hayes?

  Threads.

• 2:08:06John Coogan?

  Threads, okay.

• 2:08:07Connor Hayes?

  Yeah, we have a very unique culture. I mean, I think like all good cultures, it kind of like happened on its own based on the people that were excited to work on the app. Because I think if you're coming to work on Threads, you want to be on a smaller, scrappier team. You probably care a lot about culture and, you know, pop culture and the types of things that we spend our time on. We just had, you know, actually a team of people in here talking about like how we do that. So I would say it's encouraged in as much as you're like building value around the culture. But like, it's really important for us to not build the culture around the idea that we're different and special. Because we get so much value from being at Instagram and Meta. Like, all of the infrastructure that we use, all of the integrity teams that we leverage,

• 2:08:52Connor Hayes?

  the monetization that we do comes from an ad team that's inside Instagram. And so it's like, you're trying to strike this balance between making sure people feel like they identify with the app and the stuff that we're doing, but appreciate, you know, being inside the bigger company where we just get so much value.

• 2:09:08John Coogan?

  Instagram Pro recently launched 3.99 a month, I believe, for some premium features. I upgraded instantly. Some fun details I haven't even dug into.

• 2:09:18Connor Hayes?

  Who's viewing your story twice?

• 2:09:20John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, that's one of the features that they show. I like the fact, I don't post on my story that often. I like the fact that I can extend it to 48 hours. Because I'm not a daily story person. I'm only sharing like news about the show on there when someone else tags me. And so just extending it a little longer, that felt like a valuable feature. But are you looking to that for premium subscriptions there? Are you more focused on the ad product on the monetization side? Like, because it's a new surface area. It's sort of unexplored. Where do you want all that to go?

• 2:09:52Connor Hayes?

  More focused on ads. Like, we're not currently working on Threads as a part of the meta-subscription. We love ads. Ads is a really good, high-margin business.

• 2:10:01John Coogan?

  I completely agree. No, I like the subscription too, but I see it as a yes-and for sure. Because the ad business should be so good.

• 2:10:10Connor Hayes?

  I think if Threads gets big enough and we have good offerings to people for something like this subscription, why not? But it's not something we're working on right now.

• 2:10:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:18Connor Hayes?

  We did, we launched ads globally four months ago and have just been like slowly scaling it in line with the engagement going up. You know, just trying to be careful about it.

• 2:10:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what is different about a conversational or kind of a news-driven platform like Threads? Like X versus like a more passive product like, you know?

• 2:10:40John Coogan?

  People say lean forward versus lean back.

• 2:10:42Jordi Hays?

  I think the big question is like, the question that people have always had with Twitter and X is like, why wasn't the ad product like amazing for advertisers? Why did it never really maybe scale to?

• 2:10:56John Coogan?

  Like, was it an ad matching problem or was it a behavioral problem?

• 2:10:58Jordi Hays?

  There's been this like, you know, the audience on Twitter historically was like so valuable. The user base was always smaller, but you know, some of the most important people in the world are on there as like their primary, you know, application. And so the big question was like, why was it never a great ads business? Do you have any theories? Like, you know, you could say it was execution, or I could say that.

• 2:11:25John Coogan?

  You could not deny it. Connor Hayes doesn't disagree with Jordan.

• 2:11:32Connor Hayes?

  He sat silently. I don't think it's the format because, you know, we know from years and years of experience. I mean, think about Facebook ads before the app was so video-centric. That feed format is kind of similar to what you have in like a Threads or an X today. And that was one of the most efficiently monetized surfaces ever in the history of technology. So I'm pretty confident that we'll be able to get Threads ads into a really good place there. The other thing that matters is like, you know, obviously it's like, how much attention are people paying to the content that they see in a feed? But also, how much content do they view? Like, the more shots you have to show them something relevant, the better you're gonna do.

• 2:12:14Connor Hayes?

  So you're gonna monetize more effectively if people are viewing 100 things a day versus 50 things a day. So, you know, to your point on KPIs, John, like, one of the big ones that our team has is just like, how many impressions of content do people have in the app?

• 2:12:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:27Connor Hayes?

  And then we try to make that as deep as possible by giving them more relevant stuff. And eventually, some percentage of those will just be ads that hopefully are really good, because they come from the Instagram and Facebook ad inventory. Like advertisers can just opt into their demand going to our surface. It's a checkbox in the flow where they create all the IG and Facebook stuff. So I don't know, I think we're set up for that to do pretty well, but we're just, again, trying to be careful and not scale it too quickly while we're still making the product great. It's been under three years at this point. So I think sometimes people lose sight of the fact that we're still a bit of a young app in the ecosystem. Totally.

• 2:13:02John Coogan?

  Will AI-generated ads be more difficult to crack on Threads? I'm thinking that if I'm on Instagram and I have, you know, maybe it's Manus or some MSI or MSL like agent that can go take screenshots from my website, re-instantiate them, and put that in an Instagram flow. Like, you're showing me the product, job maybe finished, might convert well. But if I'm advertising on Threads and I need a really punchy hook, and I actually need to think about like 140, 280 characters that are really, really high skill ceiling type writing, that historically has been hard, and that's why like brands come off as like cringey often on these short text-based mediums.

• 2:13:47John Coogan?

  And I'm wondering, even though we have all this crazy acceleration in AI, I haven't followed an account where I'm like, oh yeah, like this model is really good at writing tweets or posts that are 180 characters. They're honestly better than deep research.

• 2:14:02Connor Hayes?

  That's part of what keeps us, yeah, that's part of what keeps us popular, I think, you know, like there's. Especially when you're optimizing for conversation, it's at least right now, humans are pretty good at telling when they're conversing with another human. And also, there's a lot of metadata, right? They have a profile, they have a username, they might be verified. I think for ad creative, you know, on the organic side, posts with photos in them do really well on threads. It's a pretty high percentage of our top performing content. I think it's probably similar on X. And so my sense is that as AI-generated ads get more prevalent, it'll probably be through the image path more than the text path. And I don't know, I'm not pulling off of any data besides personal experience on this, but you know, usually for me, the image is the hook when I'm thinking about

• 2:14:47Connor Hayes?

  buying something or getting, you know, more fond of a brand. Obviously, the content matters at some point, but I think the image is going to be what people want.

• 2:14:55Jordi Hays?

  How much do you think about what Starlink will do to global connectivity? There's a bunch of people that don't have internet today that are going to have like reliable, fast internet over the next 10 years, people coming onto the internet for the first time. Is that something that you're thinking about? Or is there just enough people that haven't tried the app yet that are that are obviously taking more of the focus?

• 2:15:22Connor Hayes?

  I think probably more of the latter. Like, we're not at the point with growing threads where we're worried about, you know, lacking more opportunity at the top of the funnel for people that are already online, or maybe even already online and using similar services. The other thing is, we tend to be pretty market focused. Like, we, like I was mentioning before, have been really focused on Southeast Asia, Japan, Korea are two of the biggest ad markets in the world. We are very US-focused. And so in these early stages, I think it's actually really easy, especially if you track a top-line global number, to see that go up, but not actually build an app that's like, meaningful and makes sense and a big part of people's lives every day in a country. So I look at success more as like tipping individual countries into threads being

• 2:16:06Connor Hayes?

  the app of record for public conversation. Right now, that's starting to happen in Southeast Asia. And then the US is our biggest focus outside of that. So from that lens, I think in those countries, the connectivity is quite high at this point. So we worry less about that opportunity.

• 2:16:23John Coogan?

  What's the plan to get at Connor on threads? You got an underscore sitting there. How did you get sniped? You're the head of threads.

• 2:16:30Connor Hayes?

  The craziest part about this is the at Connor is an Instagram employee, I think, or he was at some point.

• 2:16:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, so he's locked it down. Wow. Johnny come lately to the platform. That's hilarious.

• 2:16:42Jordi Hays?

  It's over. It's over. You're never getting it.

• 2:16:45John Coogan?

  Walk me through, walk me through the process of spinning out, spinning up a little like, I don't know if you call them like micro features or something like the year ago, you launched sort of like disappearing ink text, like sort of glows.

• 2:17:00Connor Hayes?

  Spoilers.

• 2:17:01John Coogan?

  Spoilers and these little features are, they seem so simple. They're probably getting easier to build because of AI tooling. But at the same time, like your code base can be kind of a mess. 25 people want to do different things with text at the same time. Like, how do you think about those? What's the importance of that in terms of the growth?

• 2:17:21Connor Hayes?

  So we, we have actually like done a bunch of work to get the process on this, right? I think like social products often, you know, there's so much work that is just like getting the details right, executing well. But there's a bunch of work that's just like a hits business. Like, you know, look at Instagram, getting instance to work. It's just, you gotta take a bunch of shots on goal with small creative teams. So a lot of the stuff that you see in the app that feels like a little bit more fun, the music attachment feature we did, animated stickers. These are like pods of three or four, you know, technical, but creative people that we just give a bunch of space to. We talk to them like once a week or once every two weeks about the ideas they have, give a bit of feedback.

• 2:18:02Connor Hayes?

  And then they've just been coming up with hits. So the way that, and your point about AI making that easier is true. I mean, the, I think one of the fun things that we've seen is that design talent has been getting more technical, which has made these things easier to build. So whereas in the past, you would have two people sparring over how to build a feature. Now the really creative designer with great taste can actually develop the thing on their own.

• 2:18:25John Coogan?

  That makes a ton of sense. Well, congratulations on hitting 500 million monthly active users.

• 2:18:31Jordi Hays?

  500 billion soon.

• 2:18:33John Coogan?

  500 billion soon.

• 2:18:34Jordi Hays?

  Hey, with Starlink, you never know.

• 2:18:37John Coogan?

  Economic imperative, solve the fertility crisis because you need more users and that's the fastest way to get more. Everyone should be having 10, the 10 child policy rolled out globally. Yeah.

• 2:18:50Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you Connor, congrats to the whole team.

• 2:18:52John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:18:53Jordi Hays?

  Great work.

• 2:18:54John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 2:18:56John Coogan?

  Incredible, AI futures does it again. This is a post from Bronson Shawin. It says, mid 2026, France wakes up. Europe's leading lab releases La Château Fat, their latest open source frontier model. It's state of the art. The US and China scramble wildly to catch up. The mainstream narrative around AI has changed from maybe the hypo blow over to a guess this is the next big thing. The US enters talks with France to hopefully gain access, but without much success. I like a little twist on the China wakes up from AI 2027, a funny copy pasta at this point, but still again, congrats to Mr. All on launching La Château Fat.

• 2:19:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this is important before we're joined by author Luke Burgis. We have a safety alert from the US embassy in the south. Ambassador Herschel Walker has an important message for Americans visiting the Bahamas. Ski, jet ski rentals pose a serious risk of injury, death and death. US government employees are banned from renting them. That's how serious they are and you should avoid them too. Really taking shots at the jet, jet ski industrial.

• 2:20:04John Coogan?

  A lot of people were surprised to see Herschel Walker. He's a famous football running back. This is how they found out that he is in fact the ambassador.

• 2:20:13John Coogan?

  But fun story.

• 2:20:14Jordi Hays?

  I, is the risk worth it?

• 2:20:17John Coogan?

  Jet ski? I don't know.

• 2:20:19Jordi Hays?

  Are you a big jet ski guy?

• 2:20:20John Coogan?

  Hmm, no, not really. I'm fine. I prefer scuba if I'm on the water.

• 2:20:26Jordi Hays?

  Every, every time, every time I'm on a jet ski, euphoria.

• 2:20:31John Coogan?

  Good, you like it?

• 2:20:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's incredible.

• 2:20:34John Coogan?

  They're fun.

• 2:20:35Jordi Hays?

  Under, I think there's, I think they're underrated. I think they're underrated.

• 2:20:38John Coogan?

  They feel like very highly rated.

• 2:20:40Jordi Hays?

  No, but highly rated, but, but are people organizing their life around jet skiing?

• 2:20:47John Coogan?

  It is nice that it's sort of the experience of a motorcycle with a lot lower stakes, right?

• 2:20:52Jordi Hays?

  Gold Rock says jet skis and vibe coding are a golden combo.

• 2:20:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. Our next guest is the author of The One and the Ninety Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion. Ben, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 2:21:15Speaker 11

  Hey, what's up, guys?

• 2:21:17Jordi Hays?

  What do you think about jet skis?

• 2:21:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:20Jordi Hays?

  We gotta start there.

• 2:21:21John Coogan?

  We gotta start with jet skis.

• 2:21:22Speaker 11

  As one who spends his summer literally on Lake Michigan, I'm offended by that warning big time. I need to generate some positive memetic desire for jet skis.

• 2:21:30Jordi Hays?

  Okay, there we go. See? I think they're still underrated relative to how fun they are.

• 2:21:37Speaker 11

  Rent them. Buying a jet ski is idiotic. Rent, rent.

• 2:21:41John Coogan?

  Why? Why? I feel like, I feel like when people say, don't buy, they say, don't buy the boat because the boat requires so much maintenance. Feels like the jet ski, you just pull it out of the water. It's not, it's gonna dry out. It's not gonna need a million dollars in maintenance.

• 2:21:53Jordi Hays?

  Just like a boat.

• 2:21:54Speaker 11

  Yeah, I mean, it's just what everybody, it's still a relatively large piece of equipment that I don't want in my garage.

• 2:22:00John Coogan?

  I guess, I guess you don't want to own it because you're probably not organizing your life around jet skiing, but if you are and you're gonna be jet skiing 200, 250 days a year, 300 days a year, then you might want to own it.

• 2:22:12Jordi Hays?

  My number one criticism of Malibu is like, lack of jet ski launch points.

• 2:22:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:22:18Jordi Hays?

  Like it's, makes it, makes it like, it's, it's good for the natural environment that there aren't, but it's tough to be.

• 2:22:25John Coogan?

  You catapult from the bluffs to just launch you straight in.

• 2:22:28Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, more importantly, let's talk about the book.

• 2:22:30John Coogan?

  Give us the thesis, but first, I mean, can you explain what you mean by social contagion? What are some examples? Why that phrase?

• 2:22:39Speaker 11

  Yeah, well, first of all, my book that I wrote four years ago was about memetic desire. So I want to congratulate both of you for doing more than anybody in the history of media to generate memetic desire by talking about founders and who's investing in who and the size of exits. I don't know if you

• 2:22:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, the gong.

• 2:22:56Speaker 11

  built your business that way, but in the gong. So you literally are on the medic machine. So congratulations.

• 2:23:01John Coogan?

  I did work at Founders Fund, so maybe some of it rubbed off. Who knows?

• 2:23:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. The, you know, people ask us, like, you know, how do we book so many guests? And, and early on, we saw a pretty extreme flywheel, right? It's like people see someone they know, or someone they like, or a company they like, and then it just created this really crazy flywheel. And now it's been for the last, you know, year and a half, it's been more about like managing.

• 2:23:28John Coogan?

  Perpetual motion machine.

• 2:23:30Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:23:31John Coogan?

  Basically. Yeah.

• 2:23:32Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:23:32John Coogan?

  Anyway, take us through.

• 2:23:34Speaker 11

  So this book, I mean, in wanty and I had one job, and my job, I think, was to explain the ideas of this obscure French thinker in an accessible way to the world at like an eighth grade reading level. And I think I did my job. But it meant that I had one thing to do, and there was a lot of things that didn't make it into the book unless my publisher was, he'd be very mad if I wrote a, you know, 600 page book. So I took that, all the things that didn't make it into that book, and I applied some of the ideas of mimesis and memetic desire to the family, to the education system, to technology, to politics, and to religion, right? And one of the most interesting things about, and what is social contagion, you ask me? Social contagion is just the unconscious way that we catch the desires of other people, the ideas and beliefs and emotions of others,

• 2:24:18Speaker 11

  and we integrate them into our sense of self, and the way that we move through the world without really realizing that we caught these things from other people, with desire being the most important one.

• 2:24:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is contagion bad? Because it feels like contagious. It feels like I caught a cold or a flu. It feels like a negative, a negative twist on memetic desire. Desire feels like something that could take you to a bad place, but also could be good. And just this idea of, of pulling something, you want what someone else wants, like, that can be good. Someone else wants to go to the gym, be healthy, do something like, you want to do that too. That's probably fine. But contagion feels like it's memetic desire, but only in the negative. Is that the way I should be thinking about it?

• 2:25:03Speaker 11

  No, no, no. I mean, I'm very clear in the book. Like, there's such a thing as good contagion.

• 2:25:07John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:25:08Speaker 11

  There's things, the desires that I want to catch, right? Like, if I want to be more ambitious and take more risks, maybe I should move to Silicon Valley.

• 2:25:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:25:15Speaker 11

  Uh, so I think there's, there's definitely good, good contagions out there.

• 2:25:19Jordi Hays?

  Okay, if you want to jet ski more, maybe you move to the Bahamas.

• 2:25:21Speaker 11

  You want to, you, you move to the Bahamas, right? Or, or, yeah, move, move next door to you.

• 2:25:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:26Speaker 11

  Uh, yeah, totally. Um, so, and one of the interesting things about AI, right? And in the book is I'm wondering if it's actually contributing to contagion and mimesis in a way that we don't fully understand, right? Like, it's, did you guys see that Tim Ferriss blog?

• 2:25:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:25:41Speaker 11

  About what, what's happening to his nonfiction books, right?

• 2:25:44John Coogan?

  Yes, I know exactly what you're talking about.

• 2:25:45Speaker 11

  So he's talking about, yeah, like, he had an 80% drop in sales of his book.

• 2:25:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:25:48Speaker 11

  Um, and it coincided with, like, uh, 2022 when ChatGPT came out. And he's saying, like, why would somebody read prescriptive how-to nonfiction? When they can go to, you know, ChatGPT or Chatbot and ask, well, here's my life. Here are all the things that are going on for me. Um, apply, like, what should I do? And by the way, like, summarize Tim Ferriss's book, but make it highly personalized for me. Like, why would you read the book?

• 2:26:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:12Speaker 11

  Um, you get instantaneous, highly personalized, customized advice. So I, I wonder, though, if that is actually going to lead to a form of contagion that we don't even understand? Because there's something happening in, in, in the AI. Even the engineers don't fully understand what it's doing. And it's giving us back something that feels really personalized to us. But the inputs are obviously being drawn by what, you know, large language models and what other people are putting into it. So I wonder if it's, we're entering like a Pluriboo's, you know, the, the Apple show kind of situation where the AI is actually, while seeming highly personalized, it's actually sort of contributing to some form of social contagion.

• 2:26:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, I feel like we are in the, sort of like, we're just starting to diagnose the social contagion that breeds on social media. And we're just starting to understand the effects of what, seeing certain videos or political biases, or even memetics, just like you see a sports car and you want a sports car and that changes your perception of things.

• 2:27:14John Coogan?

  And with AI, it feels like we're in this unknown, unknown period where it could, it could wind up creating more of the pluribus. It also could wind up being more personal. And so everyone sort of goes into their own world. There's this weird stat where like the, I think it's like

• 2:27:35John Coogan?

  over 50% of high school students are a super fan of some creator that none of their friends know about. And so they are in this like niche internet micro celebrity world, NIM cells, where they know everything about this one Instagrammer or this one TikToker, this one YouTuber's life, their repertoire, their whole catalog of work. And they talk to their friends and they're like, no, I've never heard of, you know, Markiplier or whoever is like their choice. Or you're, you're a Doug Demuro fan and you run into a car fan and they're like, I've never heard of Doug Demuro because you're in this like niche world. And, but at the same time, you do have this like, you know, the like ideas do spread extremely quickly. And we're just starting to diagnose that. And with AI, it's, it's somewhat similar where,

• 2:28:20John Coogan?

  but potentially even, even more removed because you might be getting fed Tim Ferriss insights, but it's sanitized of Tim Ferriss's name. And so it feels like it's personalized to you, but you're actually doing what everyone else who's asking the same question is. It's very hard to diagnose. It's very hard to, to track the actual outputs. What do you look for in, in the book in terms of like, just level setting on like, how things are going in America, the state of things, whether we're on the uptrend or downtrend on a particular category, or even just like the level of mimesis. That's something that I can't really, I don't have an economic

• 2:29:01John Coogan?

  factor for. I can't trace it to GDP or, or incomes or anything like that.

• 2:29:08Speaker 11

  Yeah, I mean, it seems like the book is basically about the relationship between the self and groups in various communities, right? And to what extent can we be in something without becoming completely of it? Whether that's a political party or a city. You know, if I live in Vegas, which I did, there are certain things that I really like about living in Vegas, but there's other parts of Las Vegas that I don't want to permeate me. It's like, how do we be part of something and take the best from it and give our best without it completely forming us and determining everything about us? So when it comes to the state of the US, I mean, I'm finding that, maybe it's because of social isolation, but I'm finding people over-identifying with various communities,

• 2:29:52Speaker 11

  whether it's like, you know, national level politics. It seems like when people don't have like a solid sense of self, which is a term that I use throughout the book, like a solid sense of self as opposed to a pseudo-self that is constantly adapting to expectations and conforming as we walk into different rooms and move to different cities, it's kind of the malleable version of ourselves. It seems like, you know, to the extent that people don't have a solid sense of self, they're much more likely to be sort of liable to capture by the first group, party, whatever, company that comes to them and tells them how special they are. And I sort of noticed this over-identification, right? That worries me quite a bit.

• 2:30:34Speaker 11

  And it's like, groups want everything from us, they want complete loyalty, which, you know, like right from the very beginning, right? It'd be like meeting a girl at the bar and like, you know, she's asking for, you know, a full commitment right in the beginning, or else you don't love me, kind of a thing. It's like, no, we actually need to take time to like test things and get to know each other, and it's probably not a good thing to completely identify. We like to situate people and people like to situate us. And some people own those labels and some people are kind of repelled by those labels. So the book is kind of looking at identity and the way that we, how easy it is to situate people and how we can become, you know, how can we become a little bit immune from being overly situated ourselves? And the most interesting people to me, I don't know, like a Taleb kind of a figure,

• 2:31:19Speaker 11

  are those people that are really difficult to situate, like politically, you never quite know what they're gonna say. They're the most interesting people for me to follow.

• 2:31:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, Renaissance man-maxing. What do you think of the Maxer culture? Because that feels like the, in many ways, like the worst case scenario of what you're describing, where whether it's looks maxing, or fitness maxing, or whatever maxing you're doing, it's like, everything else about the identity has to go by the wayside. And we saw this very interesting clip with Clavicular, the popular looks Maxer, where they asked him about politics, and he doesn't even have a read on any politics whatsoever, because it's completely irrelevant to what he actually cares about, which is just looks. And it feels like there's the inverse of that, which is someone who's politics maxing, or left-wing maxing, or right-wing maxing, and they don't have an opinion about anything outside of their political domain.

• 2:32:13John Coogan?

  And if you ask them about health, they would have to toe their particular party line. And that, it feels like in the competitive sphere, maybe that's something that's going on with maxing. But how have you been processing that, that trend of maxing?

• 2:32:28Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah. My colleague and friend, Jordan Castro, did a whole thing on Clavicular, who you've seen on the show, and which is worth watching. I mean, my book is an anti-maxing book, and I think maxing is evidence of exactly what I'm talking about. Because when you max anything, like, what are you giving up in order to do that? Like, you can't max everything, right? So, I'm pro-maxing in my marriage, I'm pro-maxing love. But apart from those things, like, there's really nothing that I want to max, because it turns me into an individual that, I mean, what's interesting to me is that there's some people that just max one thing, and then they get exhausted, and then they just look for another thing to max. And that was me throughout my twenties, right? I was maxing on a company so hard, that I didn't even, and I didn't even like it, right?

• 2:33:11Speaker 11

  And I would get bored with it, and then move on and start another one and max on that one. It's like, maxing cannot be an end.

• 2:33:16Jordi Hays?

  I went, I went through this with, with health. Like, there was a period of my life in college where I would, it felt like 80% of my attention and energy was just going towards being healthy. And I eventually got to the point where I was like, okay, the point of, at least for me, the point of being healthy is so that I have energy to do other things and I, and I can feel good day to day, hopefully live a long time. And I just went from, I went from like 80% down to like 10%. And I probably got a little bit less healthy, but it just freed up all this energy to do other things. But the benefit of going through that maxing period is I learned

• 2:33:59Jordi Hays?

  like a lifetime's worth that I now still get the benefits of. And that's part of what probably keeps me higher from a health standpoint than my, than my previous baseline. So I would say for me, it's like going through periods of obsession has been healthy, but it's like, how do you, how do you remove your, how do you eventually figure out the time to remove yourself?

• 2:34:20John Coogan?

  So it's fun to grind, but you don't want to get lost in the sauce?

• 2:34:24Speaker 11

  Periods of obsession is the, is the key word there, right? Periods of obsession. And I don't know if anybody's done some kind of empirical research study on this, but I would guess that a very low proportion of hardcore maxers have children. So, you know what I mean?

• 2:34:40John Coogan?

  No, I know.

• 2:34:40Speaker 11

  That's been a game changer.

• 2:34:41John Coogan?

  Instinctually, I think everyone agrees with you. It makes a lot of sense.

• 2:34:45Jordi Hays?

  If you had to turn your book into a, a Tim Ferriss style self-help book that would then be summarized by an LM, what would the output say?

• 2:34:57Speaker 11

  Well, it's not a prescriptive how-to book, first of all.

• 2:35:02John Coogan?

  But hypothetically, turn it into one.

• 2:35:03Speaker 11

  If it were.

• 2:35:04Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but, but, but to me, like, periods of obsession, not getting lost in obsession.

• 2:35:11John Coogan?

  Well-rounded maxing and Renaissance man maxing.

• 2:35:15Speaker 11

  I mean, it would, it would probably tell, you know, I think that we're really bad at leisure and especially like ambitious entrepreneurs and founders. And I've been one for most of my life. So one of the things that it would probably tell people to do is actually think of leisure as a skill that you actually have to get good at. I suck at it. I remember being on a beach in Thailand when I was starting one of my companies and I could not rest. I could not sit still. I could not have any fun at all. So one of the things that we At the Clooney Institute, which Jordan and I run together, is we quite literally offer really busy founders and people the opportunity to come on like humanities retreats and chill out for a couple of days and think about the human person and think about important questions with the promise that they're going to go back

• 2:35:56Speaker 11

  refreshed and with a better sense of what they actually want, might want to max out on for a couple of days, actually. But like, like leisure is not a, is not a popular thing to talk about in this world, but you know, learning to do it well has been one of the most important innovations in my life.

• 2:36:11John Coogan?

  All ties back to the jet ski. I do my best thinking on the jet ski.

• 2:36:14Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:36:15John Coogan?

  You gotta be able to turn off. It is really, really hard. Where do you stand on, on digital detoxes? Dumb phones, black and white screens, those sort of like dopamine, like dopamine fasting, little mini techniques that people like. Sometimes they can go, they can become their own, their own pursuit and their own obsession. But where do you stand on all that? Like, what is the secret to like unplugging, I guess?

• 2:36:44Speaker 11

  Yeah, I mean, I think you've got to know yourself. The micro mini little tools have never worked for me because I'm, I guess I'm like an all or nothing kind of guy. So I have to like go hike the community Santiago for 30 days to witness any change whatsoever, right? For better or worse, that's like the kind of guy I am. If there's like some incremental N plus one change that I'm making to like, you know, I don't know, the background of my screen, it doesn't do anything for me. So like, but to each, to each his own and that stuff.

• 2:37:12John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. The book

• 2:37:15Speaker 11

  Thanks for sending it.

• 2:37:15John Coogan?

  Is The One and the 99. Go pick it up wherever books are sold. Thank you, Ben, for coming on the show.

• 2:37:23Speaker 11

  Yeah, let's do it again soon.

• 2:37:23John Coogan?

  We gotta do this again soon. This is a really great conversation. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. And let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And without further ado,

• 2:37:39Speaker 11

  Speaking of agents.

• 2:37:40John Coogan?

  Our final guest of the show, Andi Graschka from Notch. She's a co-founder and CEO. Andi,

• 2:37:47Speaker 11

  What's going on?

• 2:37:47John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 2:37:48Speaker 11

  Great to see you.

• 2:37:49Speaker 15

  Hey guys, I'm good. Good to see you too, Jordan. Good to meet you, John.

• 2:37:53John Coogan?

  Good to meet you.

• 2:37:54Speaker 11

  It's an honor to have you on the show on a big day.

• 2:37:57John Coogan?

  Take us through the news. But first, introduce yourself for everyone. Introduce the company a little bit.

• 2:38:02Speaker 15

  Yeah, thank you. Hey guys, my name is Andi. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Notch. Notch has been the leading digital intelligence and optimization platform for Fortune 500 brands for the past six years or so. And our news today, coming live to you from the Guggenheim, actually, where we've taken over the Guggenheim for the day, is that we just announced ACE, which is infrastructure that makes websites convert both humans and agents.

• 2:38:28John Coogan?

  Okay. So what is the, what was the first big client that you brought on board? The first big logo? What did you actually try and move the needle for them? How much of that is focused on e-commerce conversion versus brand building broadly, marketing? Like, where's the surface area of the impact of the product?

• 2:38:49Speaker 15

  So when we started going to market, we actually moved from Silicon Valley to New York with my co-founder. And some of our first clients were the biggest banks. They still are. If you can think of the biggest bank in the, in the world, there are a client. Our surface area of impact, look, we, we track how audiences journey through digital experiences and we help brands understand what's resonating with these audiences, what's not, and how they can ultimately gain more customers by making better content and better digital experiences.

• 2:39:18Jordi Hays?

  With ACE, this feels like a product that people have realized that they need really acutely over the last year. We had Matthew Prince on, I believe it was maybe the middle of last week, and he had recently shared that there's more web traffic from agents now than humans. That flip came even faster than he was expecting. And so now there's a bunch of Fortune 500s that you guys are working with that are kind of waking up to this, realizing that they need a solution. But I guess, talk about kind of the, the origin of the new product.

• 2:39:56Speaker 15

  What we saw across the biggest websites in the world, which we measure with Notch, what we saw was the same thing. There were more agents starting to come to websites than humans. And about a year ago, every single CMO became obsessed with G E O or A E O, which is how do I make my website readable to agents? But ultimately, L L M's cannot be gamified. And the tricks of G E O, which is publish another 100 blog posts and 10 other product A F Q pages and whatever, it ended up really destroying the human experience. So in the last six months, we've actually seen crazy high immediate bounce rates, like human beings that actually arrived to websites and are getting a horrible experience because

• 2:40:39Speaker 15

  they're presented with this agent-ready, agent-first content. So ACE, the origin story, was really how do we build a system that can personalize for each of these audiences without taking away from the experience of the other?

• 2:40:53Jordi Hays?

  And that's making the agent side invisible to humans and vice versa? Like, how does it actually work?

• 2:41:00Speaker 15

  Yeah, so let me tell you how it works. So ACE is, first of all, we have to ingest all of a brand's knowledge from, currently it's sitting in silos. The website is just one area where that knowledge exists. So we ingest that knowledge alongside brand guidelines, governance, etc. That knowledge gets vectorized and atomized, and then it gets semantically tagged. This step is really important because what you want is to enable both the humans and the agents to retrieve this information through natural language. Then we start to reassemble the information based on implicit inputs. And these are the kind of the data signals that we've been capturing through Notch for the past six years. And that reassembly enables for a really personalized human experience as well as a personalized agent experience.

• 2:41:43Speaker 15

  So, for example, I'm a mom. I've been looking for an electric car that doesn't look like a mom van. And I've been doing my research in L L M's, and I know nothing about cars, unlike my husband. And so I type in "electric car that doesn't look like mom van," and it's telling me to go to, you know, gm.com, rivin.com, etc. When I get to that website, which I will still go on because I want to validate the information, I want to see, like, is this brand the brand that represents me? What I get is really static, really generic, essentially a dumb website that doesn't actually speak to me. And so it's a very jarring difference. And LLMs have really conditioned us to expect conversational experiences and the ability to really command these experiences through semantic intent.

• 2:42:25Speaker 15

  So what we've built with Ace is the ability to give GM the capacity to allow people to just copy paste their research from an LLM, put it on the site, or just simply say, I'm here to, you know, find an electric car that doesn't look like a mom van. And then the site reassembles with dynamic atoms in response to what you just said. So the whole website comes to the homepage. There's no more pages. It's really just dynamic reassembly based on your semantic input. When an agent shows up, the same thing happens. It's the same knowledge base. It's just visualized differently. It's a different modality. It's really just code.

• 2:43:01Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. Yeah, there's so many people talking about like generative software, software that's created on the fly, but forgetting that like websites in their current form mostly have just been like effectively digital catalogs that are kind of, you know, there's just one, one version of it. But that's very cool. I wonder, um, yeah, the, the idea of like, you know, it, it, uh, and that's, that's like, I've, in some ways I've like stopped going to a lot of websites because I know it's easier to get the information that I really want. But the thing is like then the brand is losing like full control over how they're being displayed. Maybe they want it be showing like images at different points that, um, uh,

• 2:43:43Jordi Hays?

  and, and obviously the, the, um, chat app or whatever consumers using is, um, you know, they don't have any control over kind of that whole service area, which is rough.

• 2:43:54Speaker 15

  Yeah, they really don't. I think the website as we know it to date is definitely dead. Um, I think we have to replace the word too. Like I'm, I'm starting to play with knowledge site because I think what really matters in tomorrow's world, whether or not humans still come to your experience, right? What matters is that you have that knowledge in a knowledge base that can speak to agents. Right now, what brands are doing is they're just cramming a bunch of crappy content into the same website. And it's not personalized for humans and it's not personalized for agents. Um, and so the experience of course is going to turn people off and people are going to stop going to websites. So we got to enter a new era where websites are dead and long live the knowledge site.

• 2:44:33John Coogan?

  What's the long-term?

• 2:44:36Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah. No, my immediate thought is like you want the you want like the source of truth and then you want to be able to effectively just prompt the and be able to get the information that only matters to you. But what were you gonna say, John?

• 2:44:50John Coogan?

  I was gonna ask about just the obviously you've seen a ton of success in the enterprise. Are you thinking about going down market? How do you think about that? What are the decisions that would that would lead you to work with smaller companies? Or is there just so much valuable, so much value in such a unique problem in the enterprise that that's where the company will be firmly placed for the long term?

• 2:45:15Speaker 15

  We're gonna go everywhere, John. We have big ambitions. I think this product that we built can serve everyone. And actually, if you go to our website, it's running on Ace now, and we've built it in the past 48 hours because, you know, we're a startup, so we leave things last minute. But if you go to our website and start prompting it, I'm sure, like I just said this, and so many people are gonna go try to break it. So, you know, knock yourself out and send us feedback if you manage. But yeah, I believe that any company needs to have a knowledge base that's accessible by agents that they can control and maintain in a really structured governed way. I also believe humans are not going away. Like every time there's been a new tech trend, whether it's social media or something else, we've always been like, guys, this is it. All we need is a Facebook page. I don't

• 2:45:59Speaker 15

  I don't believe in zero click marketing. I believe humans like choice. I believe especially for high purchase, high, high intent purchases, we really like to do our research. And so I believe websites are gonna be around because, you know, it's kind of a yes and situation with marketing. It's always LLMs are just another channel ready to optimize for.

• 2:46:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just went to notch.com, as you said, and tried it. And very cool to have the the bar on the bottom. You can just and then and then they basically just creates a section that's just like effectively generating whatever information you want, which is like John's talked about this before, like Ramp, you know, who we work with, like, it's nice to have access to language models within the application, right? You don't, sometimes you want to take it, you know, back to your preferred agent, but having intelligence where you are already. Makes a lot of sense and I and I wouldn't be surprised if this is like, you know, hopefully you guys capture as much value as possible with this like new paradigm, but I'm sure a lot of other people will will happily follow suit.

• 2:47:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:01Speaker 15

  Well, Dirty, I think there's actually a great use case for TBN as well. So if you guys want to be customers, I'm all ears. I mean, you guys create so much great content and you're truncating it in a really great way, making it accessible in a way that enables you guys to, you know, just give people the information they really came there for would be cool, too. So let's talk.

• 2:47:18John Coogan?

  Totally transcripts.

• 2:47:19Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 2:47:20John Coogan?

  I love it. Well, thank you so much.

• 2:47:22Jordi Hays?

  So great to finally have you on the show.

• 2:47:23John Coogan?

  K, go check it out and get the demo today. Thank you so much for coming on.

• 2:47:27Speaker 15

  Thank you, guys. Really appreciate you having me on.

• 2:47:29John Coogan?

  Bye. Have a great rest of your day. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish.

• 2:47:43Jordi Hays?

  Over on X, Daniel's advocating for banning social media for over 65s.

• 2:47:48John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, the inverse of the UK's project or the UK's initiative to ban social media for under 16, over 65, I think that would ruffle some feathers. That would probably be pushed back on more by the social media companies because the purchasing power from 65 onward is so high. There's so much wealth with the boomer generation. That would actually be very devastating to Facebook and YouTube and TikTok even. The young folks, I think all the social media companies have an incentive to get those users as early as possible, keep them on the platform. But I think more than anything, they want a level playing field.

• 2:48:31John Coogan?

  So Connor Hayes can duke it out with every other social media site as soon as someone turns 16, try and acquire them, try and get them on board. But we'll see as that rolls out and where the guardrails are set.

• 2:48:46Jordi Hays?

  We'll close out the show with Sean Frank. Everyone is doubting Meta. Spenders are mad at bugs and model changes. Investors think they're missing AI, like the AR saga all over again. But as a large-ish customer who will spend something like $100 million with them this year, Meta is working and no ad space comes close to their level of scale. Don't doubt the zuck. It, the fact that you can buy.

• 2:49:12Jordi Hays?

  That you could have one SpaceX or two Metas for the same price is pretty unbelievable and certainly not something that most people would have guessed even a year ago.

• 2:49:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is a crazy, crazy situation. At the same time, rockets, they're inspiring and social media is so.

• 2:49:35Jordi Hays?

  Totally, I can see what we got here, but it's still surprising.

• 2:49:39John Coogan?

  But yeah, obviously fantastic business and yeah, people are probably need to, you know, reality check with Sean Frank because he's in the trenches, he understands the business better than most, so go pay attention to him. Anyway, thank you for tuning into TBBN today.

• 2:49:55Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor and a privilege.

• 2:49:58John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbnn.com. We'll see you tomorrow.

• 2:50:04Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 2:50:05John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:50:06Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.