Intel & Apple, The American Economic Rollercoaster | Brian Chesky, Josh Reeves, Jonathan Neman, Zal Bilimoria

(01:34) - Apple and Intel Reach Chip Deal (10:05) - The American Economic Rollercoaster (27:52) - Timeline Reactions (43:48) - Josh Reeves, CEO and co-founder of Gusto, a company specializing in payroll, benefits, and HR solutions for small businesses, discusses the company's recent milestone of surpassing $1 billion in trailing revenue, attributing this achievement to their commitment to assisting small businesses. He emphasizes Gusto's focus on execution and support for small businesses, noting that while they have no immediate plans to go public, they are closely monitoring market conditions. Reeves also highlights the impact of AI on business growth rates and the increase in new business formations, expressing optimism about the potential for AI to empower more individuals to become business owners. (55:59) - Jonathan Neman, co-founder and CEO of Sweetgreen, discusses the company's recent nationwide launch of wraps, marking its most significant menu expansion to date. After a year of development, Sweetgreen introduced four signature wraps featuring a custom four-ingredient tortilla, aiming to offer a portable, healthy, and craveable option for customers. Neman emphasizes the importance of customer feedback in this innovation, highlighting the use of social listening tools and direct interactions to meet consumer demands for convenient and satisfying meals. (01:32:00) - Zal Bilimoria is the solo general partner at Refactor Capital, a seed-stage venture capital firm he founded in 2016, focusing on hard tech startups in sectors like bio, climate, and aerospace. In the conversation, he reflects on his journey from product management roles at Microsoft, Google, YouTube, Netflix, and LinkedIn to becoming a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he co-launched their Bio Fund, before establishing Refactor Capital. Bilimoria discusses his investment philosophy, emphasizing a concentrated portfolio strategy, writing $1-2 million checks to 20-25 companies per fund, and highlights recent successes such as Astranis' $450 million Series E raise and PathAI's $1 billion acquisition by Roche. (01:56:27) - Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, is an American businessman and industrial designer who has led the company since its inception in 2007. In the conversation, he discusses Airbnb's accelerated growth post-pandemic, attributing it to a renewed startup intensity and a focus on enhancing the guest experience. Chesky also highlights the significant role of AI in the company's operations, noting that 60% of Airbnb's code is now written by AI, which has improved customer service efficiency and reduced costs. Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today's Friday, May 8th, 2026. You're live from the TVPN UltraDome.

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

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

• 0:13John Coogan?

  Jordy has some new buttons.

• 0:15Jordi Hays?

  I got some new buttons. That's why we had to be off for a couple of days.

• 0:18John Coogan?

  Yes. Deep engineering work, the great lock-in continues.

• 0:22Jordi Hays?

  The great lock-in.

• 0:23John Coogan?

  No, we will go into a review of the last few days, but first we'll give you a review of the next three hours, because we have Josh Reeves from Gusto coming on, Jonathan Neman from Sweetgreen.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  Zom from Refactor. And then Brian Chesky from Airbnb coming in to the TVPN UltraDome.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  We're very excited. Lighter schedule, it's Friday.

• 0:45Speaker 03

  We're having fun. We're gonna be hanging out here on the screen, telling you about the American economic roller coaster. You've heard this story before.

• 0:58John Coogan?

  It's just non-stop. Okay, so, the American economic roller coaster.

• 1:03Jordi Hays?

  It's good to be back, we miss you guys.

• 1:04John Coogan?

  It's good to be back, yeah. We got a bunch of stuff going on. So, a whole bunch of economic news over the last couple of days. Stock market is absolutely ripping, we should be in white suits, Intel's up 20% today, so almost. And there's this split between the AI economy and the real economy, the American economy. And there's a whole bunch of different things that like you need to puzzle together to get a picture of what's going on. And then, I'm discovering that there are K shapes within the K shapes, even in the real economy, there's a divide between different companies, and so, I wanted to walk through that. So, let's start with the Intel news. It's up almost 20% today on the news that they will be making chips for Apple. There's a report in the Wall Street Journal about this, they've released, reached a preliminary

• 1:49John Coogan?

  chip-making agreement, it's not completely locked in, but, there's a whole bunch of extra context here that we've been tracking for the last six months, 12 months, as some of this was expected, the revitalization of Intel was something that a lot of folks were clamoring for, Ben Thompson, myself, a lot of folks, Leopold Oshinbrenner, we're all hoping for something, and then, plans are starting to come together. So, the talks have been described as intensive, intensive talks between the two companies have been ongoing for more than a year, Apple's been talking to Intel. Interesting. Of course, Intel and Apple have been long-term partners for the 90s, 2000s, up until the Apple silicon program where they started going, Apple started going direct to TSMC.

• 2:34John Coogan?

  Can they get them back? It seems like potentially in some form factors, but we're going to dig into it. So they have hammered out a former deal in recent months. And it's still unclear which exact Apple products Intel would make chips for. And manufacture them both its own designs. So Intel has two main businesses. It's both a design shop and a manufacturer. They have a fab and a, and a design unit. And in its foundry unit, both businesses have been underperforming for years before Liputan came in as the new CEO and was vowing to revitalize them. And so the last summer, the Trump administration struck a deal to convert nearly $9 billion

• 3:16John Coogan?

  in federal grants into Intel stock, giving the US 10% stake.

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  Twenty, twenty, twenty-one dollars a share. It's now at $125 a share. So White House has got to be feeling pretty good.

• 3:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, huge. I mean, I'm pretty sure Jensen has made over a billion dollars on the $5 billion investment. I mean, just today, if it's up 20%, and he must have seen a big growth in that position since then. So just today, probably a one or $2 billion print. And so the reporting here in the Journal says that the Trump administration was actually key in bringing Apple to the table, putting pressure on sort of both sides to say, hey, let's think about the future of American manufacturing, resiliency, reducing Taiwanese depend, dependence on a foreign supply chain, and, and giving Intel a real shot at underwriting the next big fab that they want to build.

• 4:08Jordi Hays?

  Nvidia got in at $23 a share with their $5 billion investment, so up.

• 4:15John Coogan?

  Round of 5X. Not bad. That's not bad at all. The guy really needed it. He paid for Grok with that. That's pretty sick. Oh, yeah. He just paid for Grok perfectly. That's why he wired before they actually closed. Yeah, he's like, I'm up. I got gains. I need to offset these. So Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has met repeatedly over the last year with high-ranking Apple officials, including CEO Tim Cook, as well as SpaceX chief Elon Musk, Nvidia chief Jensen Wong, to try and convince them to get into business with Intel. There was a discussion about should Nvidia dual-source the Grace CPUs from Intel. SpaceX and Elon's been with Samsung for a lot of Tesla chips, but there's been discussion there. There was that rumor

• 4:56John Coogan?

  about global foundries, and Elon's always been in and around the fab world, and he's obviously going a lot deeper with the long-term tariff fab project. So Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was trying to convince them to get into business with Intel. Some of the people familiar with the matter said with the Apple deal, Intel is now signed partnerships with all three. So over the last decade, Intel fell badly behind rivals, this is from the Wall Street Journal, such as TSMC and Samsung Electronics. After a series of technical mishaps, leadership changes, and failed attempts at consolidation led outside founder customers to pull or curb their businesses. When Intel hired Tan in March of 2025, wow, just a year

• 5:36John Coogan?

  ago, I guess a year and two months, to replace ousted chief executive Paul Geltzinger, President Trump raised concerns that Tan's close ties with China would compromise him and called for his ouster. It was a very, very dramatic moment, but Tan won Trump over with a charm offensive. I like that. And the government announced its 10% investment in Intel shortly after. Following the investment, Intel's shares price rose sharply. On Friday morning, it rose 7.5% to an all-time high of nearly $118 per share. It's up more now. Tan has been reshaping Intel's top leadership ranks in recent months, including hiring former TSMC executive Weijen Lo, a move that prompted a lawsuit from TSMC. So they're not friends

• 6:19John Coogan?

  anymore. Intel CEO has ousted, also ousted his head of product and hired new executives to lead the company's data center processor and client computing units. As well as newly formed custom silicon business. He's also invested heavily in Intel's most advanced manufacturing process known as 14A. And that is the node that Intel is hoping that all of the potential customers will jump together and say, hey, we're going to buy from this if you make it. If you build it, we will come. President Trump personally advocated for Intel to cook in a meeting, which is funny because it sounds like he's advocating for Intel just to cook generally. But he's, no, he's advocating for Intel to Tim Cook in a meeting at the White House,

• 7:04John Coogan?

  according to people familiar with the matter. Trump said, I like Intel in January. He said that the government made tens of billions of dollars from Intel deal and that the government's backing of the company had attracted important partners to Intel. As soon as we went in, Apple went in, Nvidia went in, a lot of smart people went in, Trump said. Nvidia, the world's largest chip firm, invested $5 billion in Intel in September and the two companies announced a partnership under which Intel would build custom data center CPUs, the processing brains for most computer systems for Nvidia. And last month, Elon, of course, announced the TeraFab project. And so, Apple relies on TSMC to make chips for iPhones, iPads, Macs and other devices and is under pressure to find additional chip suppliers.

• 7:46John Coogan?

  There's also chip shortages, so it could be good to dual source, independent of the geopolitical discussion. On Apple's last two earnings conference calls, Cook blamed a lack of availability of advanced chips for Apple's inability to meet customer demands for iPhones. The constraints are expected to continue in the current quarter, affecting several Mac models, Cook said. Quote, "We think, looking forward, that the Mac Mini and the Mac Studio may take several months to reach supply-demand balance." And after the earnings call, Apple raised the Mac Mini's starting price. And so, TSMC's manufacturing capacities, capabilities far surpass those of Samsung and Intel. Makers of other kinds of chips for memory and storage, for example, are more competitive

• 8:30John Coogan?

  with one another, giving Apple multiple sources of supply, although, of course, they aren't memory constrained. Apple's been long been TSMC's top customer, but skyrocketing demand for its manufacturing capacity. From Nvidia and other designers of AI chips means Apple's no longer has as much leverage to secure the supplies that it needs. Starting in 2006, Apple used Intel-designed CPUs as its main processor of its personal computers, but switched to its own custom CPUs based on ARM design in 2020. That's the dawn of Apple silicon. And so there's been an incredible economic and financial performance concentrated in just a handful of trillion-dollar tech companies,

• 9:13John Coogan?

  Intel starting to join and starting to perform like that. There's a few memory stocks. I saw one report that referred to it as the MAG 10, and they'd added a few other AI names to that group. But there's just a few companies that are driving the vast majority of returns in the stock market. There's a couple of slides that we can pull up that show the the the scope of what they're calling the it is now a bubble.

• 9:39Jordi Hays?

  The concentration?

• 9:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, the concentration.

• 9:41Jordi Hays?

  We went through, we had three sort of beautiful weeks where

• 9:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:46Jordi Hays?

  pretty much everyone started saying, there's no way it's a bubble.

• 9:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:50Jordi Hays?

  Look at the revenue growth. There's no way it's a bubble.

• 9:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:52Jordi Hays?

  But now, people, Steve over at Bloomberg, we can pull this chart up since you mentioned it.

• 9:58John Coogan?

  Which one is this?

• 9:58Jordi Hays?

  This is the concentration.

• 10:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 10:03Jordi Hays?

  In

• 10:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've seen this.

• 10:05Jordi Hays?

  The market, you can see.

• 10:06John Coogan?

  The AI Big 10. So MAG 7 plus AMD Broadcom and one other. Who is that? Micron? Now make up 40% of the market. Railroads, for reference, during 1835 to 1910 were 63% of the market, and he comps it to Japan, the Nifty 50, tech and telecom. Throughout various periods of time. And yeah, it's it's an interesting dynamic. And so I was reading this post by or this piece by Greg Ip in the Wall Street Journal,

• 10:46John Coogan?

  and he was trying to disentangle what's happening in the overall American economy from the AI economy, what's where is the growth coming from? He sort of back the envelope did. He said the AI economy grew 31% while the non-AI economy just 0.1%. And he cites a few economic statistics that are recent. Personal consumption, the biggest component of GDP grew a relatively muted 1.6%. Investment fell in housing, business structures. I think we're building, we're spending more in data centers than housing now or office buildings, I guess. I think it eclipsed office buildings and factories and transportation equipment like trucks and aircrafts. Meanwhile, investment soared 43% in tech equipment. Obviously,

• 11:29John Coogan?

  that's chips and GPUs. 23% in software, surprising. And 22%

• 11:36Jordi Hays?

  SaaS has had a pretty meaningful bounce back.

• 11:38John Coogan?

  Certainly on the revenue side.

• 11:39Jordi Hays?

  Datadog, Atlassian.

• 11:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:41Jordi Hays?

  There's been some re-acceleration.

• 11:43John Coogan?

  It really was extremely widespread where you had, I mean, you had like DoorDash and companies with strong network effects where the software was not their mote. They still had to go and answer to the market. And some of them got in and out of that in a week or a month. And some of them it took a quarter or two to show that there's resiliency. Some of them are still beaten beaten down. But overall, you know, software is still doing very well. And so on the flip side, there's another headline that hit the Journal yesterday. U.S. adds 115,000 jobs in April with solid hiring across sectors, retail, transportation, warehousing, and healthcare.

• 12:25John Coogan?

  All showed all showed strong growth and led to expectation beating jobs growth. And so this is the weird dynamic that, you know, you're seeing all of this growth in the in the AI economy and yet the overall Employment is still chugging along. We can pull up the chart from the Wall Street Journal, but the US job market blew past expectations in April, buoyed by gains in industries including retail, transportation, warehousing, healthcare. Not completely unexpected, given that those are not particularly AI targeted areas, whereas you might see, you know, the layoffs in the tech

• 13:05John Coogan?

  community, but that doesn't, it's just not enough because the US employs over 100 million people. And so a layoff of 4,000 people at some tech company just doesn't really move the needle when you're talking about overall.

• 13:18Jordi Hays?

  Breaking news from Gabe in the chat, Texas Roadhouse is up.

• 13:21John Coogan?

  What?

• 13:22Jordi Hays?

  He says 20%. I'm seeing 15% either way.

• 13:25John Coogan?

  Why is it up so high?

• 13:27Jordi Hays?

  He says, you're not bullish enough on Texas Roadhouse. I have never been.

• 13:31John Coogan?

  Maybe they beat, yeah, everyone says this is a Kiriyaku filter. It really, it really is.

• 13:37Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy how viral that meme format has gone. I thought that was just like a thing that I sent to you because I'd be dying laughing about it.

• 13:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, it's quite popular, broken containment fully. So the American economy added 115,000 jobs in April. This was down from a net gain of 185,000 jobs in March, but it was much better than what expectations were for April. Analysts polled by the Wall Street Journal were expecting 55,000 jobs and the real number came in more than twice that, which is like, it just breaks the narrative a lot. And it's this, there's this disconnect between like the AI economy and the real economy. I was talking to Saagar about this. It's like, in some ways, it's like AI is, Nvidia earnings is holding up the global economy and it's holding up the

• 14:29John Coogan?

  global stock market. It's not actually holding up the economy. If you view the economy as, as all of the different jobs and activities that happen, even if there isn't incredible growth there, there's actually a surprising amount of strength and resiliency. So the unemployment rates.

• 14:46Jordi Hays?

  Personally, I'm waiting to hit the gong until we see what the revisions come in at.

• 14:52John Coogan?

  We haven't seen any revisions from March this time.

• 14:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, it comes like, it comes like, it comes like over six months later.

• 14:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, but that's why I wanted to have Josh from Gusto on today because I think that Gusto has data on hiring that is very different from what the Labor Department, what's going on at the Labor Department. It's just a completely different dynamic and you can look at like what's actually going on in small businesses. We've talked to folks at Stripe about this and, and, and there are a lot of other data sources, ADP payrolls and stuff. There's, there's plenty of like pretty standardized formats for reporting and while there might be revisions to, to some government stats, it's, it feels like there's plenty of places to get data and it's all pointing in the same direction, which is not, oh, yeah, they, they, they said

• 15:40John Coogan?

  they beat twice, they, they delivered twice as many jobs as were projected and it was actually down. No one's really, you know, suggesting that. So the April report coming in after strong job gains in March shows how the labor market is holding up better this year than last. While healthcare is still leading the way in job gains, other sectors now appear to be picking up. Businesses are seeing conditions stabilizing and they have weathered the tariffs. So many are hiring. It's looking somewhat better than it did last year. In the first four months of the year, monthly payrolls have averaged 76,000 up from an average of 42,000 during the same period last year. Still, the US has shed jobs over the past six months and many companies are reluctant to bring on new workers en masse.

• 16:22John Coogan?

  Companies grappling with changes in everything from trade to immigration to tax policy have for the most part held off on large scale hiring and firing, but it does seem like the, the, the chaos of the tariffs and all of the early like EOs, like that creates a lot of business uncertainty. That settles eventually and then you get back to, okay, there, there, there were a bunch of changes, but at least we know that there aren't wild changes coming in the future, at least that are expected. And so Diane Swonk, Chief Economist at KPMG says it's still a high anxiety job market. Those who have a job are clearly clinging on while those who are looking for a job are feeling frozen out. And so.

• 17:05John Coogan?

  I was, I was digging into, you know, where, where is their strength within the real economy? Once you go outside of AI, what is going on? And there were two recent earnings reports that were sort of disconnected, but showed a little bit of the picture of what's going on. So it was Whirlpool and Six Flags both had very different reports. So Whirlpool, you probably know from refrigeration and washing machines, dryers, that type of appliance. They've been making appliance for, for over a hundred years. And they've also been paying a dividend since the 1950s consistently. They've never, they've never suspended their dividend, even through all the great recession, the dot com crash. Every year they've been able to pay that dividend.

• 17:49John Coogan?

  They just cut their dividend, which is a really, really big deal for this company since it's a dividend stock. The stock traded down on the news and the stock is down 80% of the past five years. And they're in some financial trouble, like they have a lot of debt and they have a lot of competition. But you could play that as like, okay, this, that like the real economy is like completely chugging to a halt. At the same time, you had Six Flags, which is, should be the thing that is the most discretionary. Like, do you go to the roller coaster theme park or not? And Six Flags just reported higher first quarter revenue. They're growing and they're growing attendance and customer spending.

• 18:31John Coogan?

  And so now Six Flags is not exactly a juggernaut of business. It's only worth 2.3 billion and the stock is down over the past two years, about 50%. But the business is growing and you wouldn't expect that during a time of like deep economic weakness. And so there's something odd going on there where as you think of refrigeration as extremely necessary, roller coasters as the ultimate, like you don't, you, you can definitely skip it if you are cash strapped, but the actual dynamics of the market are very different. So Whirlpool sells big ticket necessities, these, these refrigerators, but they are deferrable. So you, you can put off getting a new refrigerator. You can repair an old refrigerator if money is tight, but you're

• 19:14John Coogan?

  Kids are only really roller coaster age for a limited time. Uh, and Whirlpool also faces brutal global competition and existing home sales are down three percent month over month. Uh, and so all of that drives fewer appliance upgrades and they are not. And they are not necessarily beneficiary of all the international competition that they face from LG and Samsung and other international players. And so, uh, I've sort of been.

• 19:39Jordi Hays?

  Quick correction, Six Flags or, or, uh, new information, Six Flags is, has been, uh, up since, uh, since around. Around the, around November, it sort of bottomed.

• 19:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:53Jordi Hays?

  I remember I was thinking of this because one, they have the ticker fun.

• 19:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:56Jordi Hays?

  Which is fantastic. The stock has not been having fun. Uh, but Travis Kelsey and a group put in 200 million.

• 20:03John Coogan?

  That's right. We talked about that.

• 20:03Jordi Hays?

  The stock traded down pretty substantially.

• 20:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, I remember that.

• 20:08Jordi Hays?

  After the investment, but it's basically recovered to where it was.

• 20:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:12Jordi Hays?

  And, uh.

• 20:13John Coogan?

  Well, it's still down over the past like five years.

• 20:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:16John Coogan?

  Like two years ago, it was, it was like a $5 billion company.

• 20:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, down, down big.

• 20:19John Coogan?

  But, but, but, but, but what's interesting is that at this time of like economic uncertainty and all these questions about hiring, questions about, uh, economic resilience. They are increasing revenues, increasing attendance, increasing customer spend, uh, and that's what's driving the stock today. Uh, and so there's this, I, I was looking at these two companies and I was like, they, they sort of fit into this, uh, this barbell thesis of the AI future. Which I've been seeing pop up more and more. And the two examples that I always give are one, the Ellison family is both like long slop and long anti-slop. They have a ton of infrastructure investments in AI through Oracle. And then they own legacy media like Batman, Superman through Warner Brothers.

• 21:01John Coogan?

  And then Josh Kushner is doing a similar thing with OpenAI and the San Francisco Giants, like two completely opposite ends of the spectrum. Uh, and so you can think of roller coasters as potentially like anti-slop, uh, because you can't vibe code space mountain. But, uh, but, but it, it's interesting to sort of like dig into the weeds of what's going on in the global economy and the American economy and seeing like where. The unsuspecting winners are. Ryan Peterson shared a post from the, or a chart from the Financial Times that perfectly illustrates our possible futures. This is so funny that this is in the, in the, in the Financial Times,

• 21:42John Coogan?

  but they, they fully embraced what happens in the human extinction tech singularity and the end of scarcity tech singularity. In the bull case, real GDP per capita goes north of a million dollars. And in the human extinction scenario, it goes to zero, of course. But the AI boosted growth path is a steady trend upwards. And that is the, that is the goal that I think everyone should be working for, potentially the end of scarcity outcome as well. But it is, it is fascinating. And I, and I think this, this chart that Ryan shares is sort of, sort of, I think, why there's anxiety in the market because there's this,

• 22:25John Coogan?

  like, you know, the, the whole, like, you're not prepared if it's not a bubble concept. But there's, there's like a dual anxiety where like, if, if AI gets too good, there's mass unemployment, everyone's worried about that. But if AI is a bubble and it collapses, you go into a recession and everyone loses their job and like you're in a similar scenario of like economic anxiety for both the, not necessarily the true doomers. I mean, obviously they, they face a similar, you know, opinion. But, but, but even if you're just like in the, it's overheated camp, there's real risk to the stability. And I think that's where a lot of the, the, the bubble concerns come from, although we're certainly not seeing

• 23:07John Coogan?

  very many signs of, of, of, of the bubble. I mean, obviously the evaluations are high, but so are the revenue growth charts. So we can go through some of the folks that are

• 23:19Jordi Hays?

  arguing. Are you more of a back of the envelope guy or a napkin math guy?

• 23:23John Coogan?

  Oh, that's interesting. I have a napkin here from Wonderco, from the event I brought

• 23:28Jordi Hays?

  in. Would you look at that? A little souvenir.

• 23:32John Coogan?

  I like, uh, I like a napkin. I like a napkin. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, napkin math is insane. It's extremely hard to write on a napkin.

• 23:40Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 23:41John Coogan?

  It's way easier to write on the back of an envelope.

• 23:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:44John Coogan?

  And you get a big envelope. You can get an envelope that's eight and a half by, it's a, it's effectively a

• 23:48Jordi Hays?

  An envelope is sophisticated. spreadsheet. An envelope is, is, is kind of a core business utility.

• 23:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:55Jordi Hays?

  Napkins can be used for anything.

• 23:57John Coogan?

  If you're in napkin math, you gotta pivot.

• 23:58Jordi Hays?

  I will say I'm much more of an napkin math guy.

• 24:01John Coogan?

  Why?

• 24:01Jordi Hays?

  I can't, I mean, just, just, just, um,

• 24:04John Coogan?

  The phrase that you pull.

• 24:06Jordi Hays?

  Spiritually, spiritually and the phrase that I pull, but, uh, if I can't get excited about an opportunity based on what can fit on a napkin,

• 24:14John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 24:15Jordi Hays?

  then I'm, I'm never going to get excited about it, right? There's usually like

• 24:18John Coogan?

  So you think a napkin is, is definitionally smaller? It's a lesser math?

• 24:23Jordi Hays?

  It's not, it's not, it's a, it's a lesser vehicle

• 24:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:27Jordi Hays?

  than an envelope?

• 24:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Cause a big envelope, you could do a full spreadsheet on.

• 24:32Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 24:33John Coogan?

  You could, you could write out columns

• 24:34Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 24:35John Coogan?

  and have multiple cells.

• 24:36Jordi Hays?

  Um, no. So I'm, I'm, I'm in, in practice, I'm a napkin math guy, but if something was really serious, I would probably trade that.

• 24:47John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, we've been doing too much napkin math around here. It's time to pull out the big guns. Let's get out the envelope.

• 24:52Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of envelopes, so this morning I was telling Tyler,

• 24:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:56Jordi Hays?

  um, I'm, I'm incredibly overwhelmed with, uh, Slack's emails, you know, DMs on every platform, LinkedIn DMs, Instagram DMs, X DMs, all the different messaging apps. And I was thinking, how cool would it be if there was a service where you connected all your inboxes to, and then every day they would print out all of the different messages and then bring them to you? And you could put, um, like a box.

• 25:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:25Jordi Hays?

  But you could put a box outside of your house and they would just put them in there. And then at a specific time, you know, maybe in the roughly like two hour window, you could go out and grab all the printed out messages and sort of, sort of like leaf through them, decide what you need to respond to. You would potentially, because you're only getting messages once a day, you would probably be a lot more intentional about what you wrote back and forth, right? Um, and I think that could be.

• 25:51John Coogan?

  Sort of the opposite of Earth class mail, those virtual mailboxes. Cause they'll, they'll, they'll take your physical mail.

• 25:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I want everything, I want everything coming in this box. I want to put a box outside of my house that people put. Um, and I think there's something there.

• 26:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:05Speaker 04

  Trump, I mean, Trump literally does this.

• 26:07John Coogan?

  He does that, right?

• 26:08Speaker 04

  He gets emails printed out and then he'll, he'll write with a big marker his response. And then his assistant will scan it and then email it back.

• 26:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, more, more on, uh, Sea Fry says a napkin is more available than an envelope. Very true.

• 26:21Speaker 04

  I was just like.

• 26:22Jordi Hays?

  Often the best, often the best business meetings were not scheduled as a business meeting.

• 26:28John Coogan?

  So there aren't envelopes around.

• 26:29Jordi Hays?

  There's no envelopes around, but there's plenty of napkins.

• 26:31Speaker 04

  Also, you're, I mean, you're saying napkins are smaller, but if you're at a restaurant and you have like a fabric napkin and you unfold it, those can be pretty big.

• 26:37John Coogan?

  So you're, you're, but I feel like it's bad form to be at a restaurant. Like you're not supposed to ruin the napkins. Or, uh, do you carry a pen that has washable ink?

• 26:47Speaker 04

  You have the crayons for the kids, right? People are.

• 26:49Jordi Hays?

  The chat is saying.

• 26:50John Coogan?

  They don't ask you to.

• 26:51Jordi Hays?

  The chat is saying, I could call my service, the United States Postal Service.

• 26:55John Coogan?

  That's a good name.

• 26:55Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, Alex. That's a great name.

• 26:57John Coogan?

  That's sort of like the, the, the San Francisco Artificial Intelligence Company or something like that, or the browser company of New York. It would be inspired by that. Yeah. Uh, I, I, I, I think that even with the crayons of the kids.

• 27:10Jordi Hays?

  Says he uses crayon, closed fisted grip right on the table.

• 27:13John Coogan?

  Tablecloth, okay. I, yeah, I, I feel like, uh, i- i- if, if you give, if you're given crayons, you are expected to maintain that the child uses the crayons only on the children's menu, which is typically made out of paper, very disposable. If you see the child using the crayons on a cloth napkin, you are expected as a patron to intervene.

• 27:36Jordi Hays?

  Jackson says, digitize this service and call it email.

• 27:40John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 27:41Jordi Hays?

  We gotta, we gotta get, we gotta establish the mailbox first.

• 27:44John Coogan?

  We got an idea.

• 27:46Jordi Hays?

  But then we can go there. But I like where you're going.

• 27:49John Coogan?

  I got an idea. Um, well, there's some other, uh, there's some other posts about the, the, the markets. Justin Spitler says them be careful buying semis here. Obviously the market's very, very

• 28:02Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this video.

• 28:03John Coogan?

  Heated.

• 28:03Jordi Hays?

  Travis.

• 28:04John Coogan?

  Let's play this video. Oh, this is Travis Pastrana?

• 28:08Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 28:08John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Nitro Circus, we mentioned many times on the show. Is he drinking a Red Bull?

• 28:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no parachute.

• 28:16John Coogan?

  No, oh, no parachute?

• 28:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So he jumps out of the plane, no parachute.

• 28:19John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 28:20Jordi Hays?

  Drinking a Red Bull.

• 28:21John Coogan?

  That's actually

• 28:22Jordi Hays?

  And then he connects, he's gotta do some tricks.

• 28:24John Coogan?

  He's really taking his time here. The tension is building, building, building. And so he connects with someone who wraps him up and then do they pull the parachute?

• 28:34Jordi Hays?

  Connect to each other.

• 28:35John Coogan?

  Or do they?

• 28:35Jordi Hays?

  They, they, they strap him to them.

• 28:38John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. There is a strap.

• 28:39Jordi Hays?

  Strap themselves.

• 28:40John Coogan?

  Cause it seems sort of crazy just to bear hug and, and hope for the best.

• 28:44Jordi Hays?

  You're bear.

• 28:44John Coogan?

  I don't know. It's Red Bull. Anything could happen. Um, I would, I would, I would expect him to be delivered a full parachute, his own parachute that he then, you know, dawns and, and, but he made it. Wow. Well, that's what it's like investing in semiconductors right now, I guess. Uh, anyway, um, how was your last two days, Tyler? What, what'd you get up to?

• 29:06Jordi Hays?

  It was sick. I was at the, uh, I went to the trial.

• 29:08John Coogan?

  You went to the trial?

• 29:09Jordi Hays?

  Open AI Elon trial.

• 29:11John Coogan?

  Okay. Walk me through it. You left the, the studio on Tuesday.

• 29:15Jordi Hays?

  Yes. Wait, wait, before this, the chat is still going. They said if Gary Ten gets a hold of this service, he's going to call it Gmail.

• 29:21John Coogan?

  Gmail is good.

• 29:23Jordi Hays?

  Something there.

• 29:24John Coogan?

  Gmail. If he vibes codes a full Gmail replacement, anything's possible. Uh, so you leave the office at uh, two after we wrap the show on Tuesday. You went straight to the airport?

• 29:36Jordi Hays?

  I did.

• 29:37John Coogan?

  Okay. And then? What time did you go to bed? Because you woke up really early, right?

• 29:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I got to the trial. So it's in Oakland.

• 29:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:45Speaker 04

  The courthouse at, I think, like, something around like 5:30.

• 29:48John Coogan?

  5:30.

• 29:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, because you got to get in line. So basically, you know, it's a public.

• 29:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:52Speaker 04

  Because it's like a federal case.

• 29:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:54Speaker 04

  There like has to be some room for the public. But there's only like, I think the number is somewhere like 20 or 30. Because I think it's closer to 20 because I think part of the 30 is reserved just for media.

• 30:06John Coogan?

  Okay. And when you got there at 5:30, were there already people standing in line?

• 30:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, so there were, I think there were like three or four people there already.

• 30:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 30:13Speaker 04

  In line.

• 30:14John Coogan?

  Early bird getting the worm.

• 30:15Speaker 04

  But yeah, well, I, because I didn't want to be late, obviously.

• 30:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:18Speaker 04

  Did you talk to the other people? A few of them. So. Were you there before Mike Isaac? I was there before Mike Isaac.

• 30:24John Coogan?

  But he has a media pass.

• 30:25Speaker 04

  So, yeah, because last time when Mike Isaac came on the show, he said that. Because each, like, news.

• 30:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, New York Times got one pass and he was splitting it with Cade Metz. And so they were sort of going back and forth. And I guess he had a media pass that day.

• 30:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, so that day he had a media pass.

• 30:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:41Speaker 04

  He got there pretty late. He got there like 7:30 or 8:00.

• 30:44John Coogan?

  Okay, so you're there from 5:30. He gets there at 8:00. What time does the trial actually start?

• 30:49Speaker 04

  I think around 8:30.

• 30:52John Coogan?

  8:30, okay.

• 30:52Speaker 04

  Yeah. So basically, I'm just posting up for like three hours.

• 30:55John Coogan?

  Okay. And then this is Wednesday, so walking through like, what, what are you seeing? There's these opening remarks from the judge, they sort of welcome everyone in.

• 31:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, jury comes in.

• 31:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 31:05Speaker 04

  So there are basically three main like segments. So basically, I'll say it starts 8:30, ends at, I think, 2:00 PM. There's two breaks, two 20-minute breaks.

• 31:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 31:16Speaker 04

  So starts off and we watch like the deposition of Miramaradi. So this is all live streamed, right?

• 31:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:22Speaker 04

  The audio is live.

• 31:23John Coogan?

  The audio is live. You're seeing a video.

• 31:25Speaker 04

  We're watching the video of her deposition.

• 31:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 31:28Speaker 04

  It's mostly covering the ousting, the timeline of the ousting.

• 31:31John Coogan?

  And, and.

• 31:32Speaker 04

  This is where, this is where all the texts came out.

• 31:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, and, and, and. Were they showing you the actual text? Were they playing a video? Or were they playing the AI reenactment of the texts? Because we have this, someone turned Sam Altman's text to Miramaradi into a 2011-style emo teenage heartthrob anthem. Did this make it into the courtroom or no? Let's play this. We have the audio.

• 32:09John Coogan?

  Good motion graphics, too. Whoever made this is talented.

• 32:22John Coogan?

  What i- is this Suno? Can you put in text into Suno and get a full song?

• 32:27Jordi Hays?

  Play this for an AI skeptic.

• 32:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:29Jordi Hays?

  And, and see what their reaction is.

• 32:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you see this and not want to build? Um, I, I'm, I, I've, I've seen these before and I've always really enjoyed them, but, um, with most of the AI music tools, I've never found a great way to put in a full script that I've written to get the results, but it, does Suno have that?

• 32:49Speaker 04

  So the author, uh, said his steps to make this.

• 32:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 32:52Speaker 04

  So first he OCR'd the images and turned them into plain text. So images of the actual text messages.

• 32:57John Coogan?

  Easy.

• 32:57Speaker 04

  And then removed the names from the dialogue, pasted into Suno and iterated like 20 to 30 times.

• 33:01John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 33:02Speaker 04

  And then finally thought this one was catchy.

• 33:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 33:04Speaker 04

  Um, yeah. So I, I think it's still like, this is still Suno, but I think it's still iterated a bunch.

• 33:08John Coogan?

  I like this. I like this. Yash is really having fun with this. Uh, put up a version of this with the, uh, with the Gen Z brain rot slang. Yo fam, can you give me a vibe check on, am I cooked or nah? For real, for real. Sacha and the gang low-key stressing. Uh, Mira Maradi, yeah, you're skibitty. This isn't a rare L. This is an Ohio level generational aura loss, little bro. Who ratioed me? Sam Altman says. Mira Maradi.

• 33:38John Coogan?

  Some rando zesty NPC Twitch looks maxing Sigma. I'm not even gonna go further, but Yash is having fun. Lots of people having fun. Uh, what else happened? Did someone actually get on the stand or was it all video?

• 33:50Speaker 04

  Yes, so the first like hour-

• 33:51John Coogan?

  It's straight up teacher played a movie. It's movie day. You went to the movie day.

• 33:55Speaker 04

  The judge actually did get angry, uh, because like the, she was like, oh, the jury's gonna get bored and like, she was like offering them coffee and stuff.

• 34:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 34:01Speaker 04

  So basically, yeah, the first like maybe hour was, um, Mira deposition video and then we go through some of the actual like documents again of the text messages. And then, uh, Siobhan Zillis is testifying, so she's physically- There. Okay. She was a open eye board member 2020 to 2023.

• 34:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 34:17Speaker 04

  And she steps down when Elon started XAI.

• 34:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:22Speaker 04

  So that was, I have no idea how long that was. That was the majority of the.

• 34:25John Coogan?

  It was during the whole conflict.

• 34:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:28John Coogan?

  Perfect person to testify.

• 34:30Speaker 04

  No, so she actually left the board before the ousting. So she left in February 2023. Ousting is November.

• 34:37John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. Interesting. I didn't, I, I.

• 34:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:40John Coogan?

  Timeline always gets so jumbled up because like, there's like 2018 battles between Sam and Greg and Ilya and Elon. And then there's the board.

• 34:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, because all throughout this hearing, there's like, yeah, there's basically two main like.

• 34:52John Coogan?

  Moments, right? Yeah. And we're sort of clicking back and forth between them.

• 34:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:57Jordi Hays?

  Chat wants to know what kind of wombos were being thrown around with Lorraine being used? People saying, can you please Lorraine this email?

• 35:07Speaker 04

  Uh, Siobhan was actually dropping some good lingo. I, I, I don't know if I can remember any.

• 35:10John Coogan?

  There's something like Mike Isaac always talks about, like they're keep referencing Dota and they keep, everyone on the stand is using a ton of jargon. How jargony was it? Was it like Dwar Kesh Patel podcast level jargon? Or like actual like researchers like talking to each other jargon?

• 35:29Speaker 04

  I would say it was not very sophisticated, especially among the lawyers, right?

• 35:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 35:33Speaker 04

  Yeah. Siobhan, she did drop some good lingo.

• 35:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 35:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was some referencing some like why she got into AI.

• 35:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 35:41Speaker 04

  But, you know, acceleration and all this.

• 35:42John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 35:43Speaker 04

  Um, and then after that, we watched another like hour long video of Helen Tonner's deposition.

• 35:48John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 35:49Speaker 04

  That was just about the, the ousting.

• 35:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 35:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was very fun. I enjoyed a lot. Like basically, you know, almost everyone like sitting in my section, which was basically the public and the, and the media.

• 35:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:59Speaker 04

  Like everyone that came as the public were basically also media. They just didn't get the media pass.

• 36:04John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 36:05Speaker 04

  So everyone surrounding me is, is on their laptop, like typing basically. Yeah, just like taking down what's, what's being said.

• 36:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:11Speaker 04

  And then I'm just sitting there enjoying it because it's like, you know. It's good stuff.

• 36:14Jordi Hays?

  How would you rate Mike Isaac's like snack and overall food supplies for the day? Did he burn?

• 36:20Speaker 04

  It looked pretty good. I believe he did bring the butt pillow.

• 36:23John Coogan?

  It seems like he's not making progress on the food front. I would expect by day seven of this, he would have a smorgasbord in front of him, a full Thanksgiving.

• 36:31Jordi Hays?

  I mean, honestly, like- What's that Nathan for you where he's brings chili into the-

• 36:35John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 36:35Jordi Hays?

  He's got the chili suit.

• 36:38John Coogan?

  You should, you should bring chili suit.

• 36:40Speaker 04

  I was, I, I fasted the whole time. I was kinda, I just talked it out.

• 36:42John Coogan?

  Why didn't you figure, we, we have talked about the food situation so many times. How did you not think ahead there?

• 36:47Speaker 04

  I just wanted to make it more challenging.

• 36:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 36:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was like, this is gonna be too easy.

• 36:51John Coogan?

  Inspire you to-

• 36:51Jordi Hays?

  Can we play this chili, uh, the chili man?

• 36:54John Coogan?

  If you have it. We can also play, uh, what, what, what's the other video? The, uh, the, the Hamilton musical, uh, has, has been adapted. People are, are, are taking this in all different ways. Has anyone done a-

• 37:07Speaker 04

  I have the video here.

• 37:08John Coogan?

  A corn remix of it?

• 37:10Speaker 04

  The Hamilton one is good.

• 37:11John Coogan?

  New metal? Let's play the, let's play the, the, the Hamilton one. Uh, Altman, an AI music experiment from-

• 37:17Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's, let's, let's start with chili because I think that the trial is going for another couple of weeks.

• 37:22Speaker 05

  Robert was on board, so later that week, I hired a professional tailor to help design the chili suit based on a detailed sketch I had drawn.

• 37:30Speaker 06

  The easiest way is probably to put the chili in.

• 37:34John Coogan?

  Tag Mike Isaac. This is how he can make it there.

• 37:38Speaker 05

  Our plan was to have the chili reservoirs mimic the distribution of fat on a larger man's body, so it wouldn't look suspicious under clothing. And with the help of a guy from Craigslist-

• 37:47John Coogan?

  Why is he bringing chili into, is he going into a-

• 37:49Jordi Hays?

  No, he's helping a local business.

• 37:51John Coogan?

  Sell chili.

• 37:52Jordi Hays?

  Sell chili in the stadium.

• 37:53John Coogan?

  Sell chili in the stadium, that's right.

• 37:56Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm. He could probably do like a cup there and-

• 37:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:59Jordi Hays?

  Alright, skip ahead, skip ahead.

• 38:01Speaker 05

  To hold over a hundred servings of fresh chili.

• 38:03John Coogan?

  A hundred servings?

• 38:05Speaker 05

  The individual reservoirs would be linked by a network of tubes that would all lead to a battery-powered aerostaltic pump for dispensing the chili.

• 38:12Jordi Hays?

  If somebody doesn't do that, the trial is going for another couple of weeks. If somebody is not doing-

• 38:16John Coogan?

  I think, I think you might, I think the bailiff might actually just send you straight to jail if you did this. I think the judge does not-

• 38:21Speaker 04

  There were surprisingly little hijinks going on. I thought there would be way more hijinks. Like, you know, like, no one dressed up in a costume or anything.

• 38:28John Coogan?

  We, uh, were there Elon?

• 38:29Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it actually is quite possible someone is doing this and we just don't know because it's such a good idea and they're

• 38:35John Coogan?

  True, they might just be enjoying chili. Uh, were, were, were there Elon fans? That was something, uh, Mike Isaac was talking about, like people. Oh, I, I guess Elon's not on the stand, so like, why would the fans go, right?

• 38:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I don't think there are any Elon fans. Cause he, he was not even there.

• 38:48John Coogan?

  Okay, got it, yeah.

• 38:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, so no one there. I, I think that there's gonna be more testimonials soon with, with some higher named, uh, you know, higher profile people.

• 38:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think Elon is getting on the stand, so that'll be a big moment.

• 38:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, I believe Ilya is, is early next week, maybe Monday or Tuesday.

• 39:02John Coogan?

  That'll be interesting. And did you go two days in a row or just?

• 39:05Speaker 04

  I, I just went one day, cause, uh, Wednesday, the people testifying, I think were like, not gonna be as interesting.

• 39:10John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 39:11Speaker 04

  Uh, but you may, maybe that's a diss, so I apologize.

• 39:13John Coogan?

  Okay, I think everyone's, everyone's equally deserving of, uh, some attention, especially if there's a nice, warm bowl of chili being served in the courtroom. Uh, anyway, should we play this, uh, Altman, uh, uh, AI music experiment from Daniel Green? The, uh, the Hamilton recreation of the texts. Everyone has, uh, enumerated their various, uh, their various techniques.

• 39:37Jordi Hays?

  Ryan says, John, you should go to the trial dressed as Ilya.

• 39:40John Coogan?

  Ooh, yeah, I do have the costume ready to rock.

• 39:43Jordi Hays?

  It only takes five hours to set up.

• 39:46John Coogan?

  Get up at 2:00 AM, then go stand in line. I think I'd get kicked out immediately.

• 39:52John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's play this. I want to hear this.

• 39:54Speaker 07

  How does a startup founder, late stage, get fired by a board on a Sunday?

• 40:01John Coogan?

  Oh, so it's actually like?

• 40:03Speaker 07

  Can you please officially invite me to the office for a meeting?

• 40:06John Coogan?

  So it's not the direct quotes from the text? Or maybe it is?

• 40:19John Coogan?

  This is much more uncanny valley for me. This doesn't sound like a real musical in the same way that the pop punk one sounded pretty accurate. I don't know. Anyway, we can move on to some other news. Uh, Deep Seek is raising a monster $7 billion round at $50 billion valuation. China's largest ever AI raise, but what shocks a Jaws here CryptoPunk the most is the founder. He's personally contributing 40% of the round himself. Wow. 3 billion coming from the founder directly. Owns 90% of the company unheard of at this valuation. DeepSeek was founded inside of his hedge fund, one of China's most successful funds. What a beast. He's got to acquire as much compute to push out new DeepSeek models.

• 41:04John Coogan?

  You know, we saw that chart that showed that Chinese open source models were sort of falling behind a little bit on a different growth curve in terms of performance. But, you know, he's certainly betting on getting back in line, having a, you know, frontier model within a couple of months. Oh, Tess has an interesting idea. If I was running a frontier lab, I would have the model versions countdown.

• 41:29Jordi Hays?

  Ominous.

• 41:30John Coogan?

  Extremely ominous. Be like, yes, we're excited. Version three now. And next year, version two. Somebody would do that. Well, folks over on Amazon are reviewing The Art of War.

• 41:46Jordi Hays?

  One star. Nothing but common sense. How this became a classic is beyond me. So much of it is common sense, to the point where it brought out my snarky, no kidding reflex. Like, if an enemy leaves a door open, you must rush in. Wow. That was deep. Keep your money if you're thinking of buying it.

• 42:06John Coogan?

  That's very funny. Leaving a bad review so my enemies don't read it. Yeah, that's the game theory. Zach Brock says, congrats to Anthropic for defeating Grok in the market and feasting upon the compute of their fallen enemy.

• 42:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, basically every time we take, every time we take a day off the show, like something big happens.

• 42:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:27Jordi Hays?

  And that on Wednesday was the, was the big XAI or SpaceX Anthropic deal. A lot of people have been predicting that. I, I was not simply because I thought there, it was like the rational decision for the parties, but I thought that the tension between. You know Elon, who had only a couple of months ago been, you know, hurling insults at the Anthropic team. I didn't think they would be able to uncover that those cultural differences.

• 42:56John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 42:56Jordi Hays?

  But, you know, demand for compute finds a way.

• 43:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think that you and others had identified the possibility of becoming a NeoCloud, selling the compute.

• 43:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, last year, last year I was talking about that a lot, all the time. I was like, look, they're incredible at building infrastructure, really, really fast, bringing power online. This feels like a very strong, a strong use for Elon, Inc.

• 43:23John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 43:24Jordi Hays?

  And, but I, but, but as things evolved, I just didn't see, I didn't see this coming together.

• 43:29John Coogan?

  I didn't see this coming together specifically because of the cursor deal. I thought the cursor deal was the long-term solution for all that compute. And then the compute sort of got sold twice, maybe, but of course, there are multiple clusters, multiple colossus data centers.

• 43:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:42John Coogan?

  And plenty of work to be done as SpaceX continues to grow their ambitions in artificial intelligence. Well, we have our next guest, our first guest on the show, Josh Reeves from Gusto in the waiting room.

• 43:55Jordi Hays?

  Big news.

• 43:56John Coogan?

  How are you doing?

• 43:57Josh Reeves?

  Good to see you guys.

• 43:59John Coogan?

  Welcome back to the show. Always great to have you.

• 44:01Josh Reeves?

  It's good to be here. It's a fun time to talk tech. It's a lot of big moves happening, huh?

• 44:05John Coogan?

  A ton of big moves. Yeah.

• 44:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we've had over the last year, we've had a decade's worth of big moves.

• 44:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, progress.

• 44:15Josh Reeves?

  There was a time when Silicon Valley was a cottage industry, not anymore.

• 44:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, a garage industry and now the largest companies in the, in the world, for sure. Well, your business is growing. You're quickly becoming one of the largest businesses in the world. And you also power tons and tons of American businesses. Give us the update. How are things going?

• 44:35Josh Reeves?

  Yeah, excited to be here. I think probably what you're alluding to, we shared a milestone. To me, it's all a byproduct of helping customers, helping small businesses. But, but yeah, we passed, actually a few months back, a billion dollars of trailing revenue. Founder. Crazy stuff.

• 44:53Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, did you hear that, John? Trailing. That's not something you see very often. People want to take today's revenue, multiply it by 365, and lead with that number.

• 45:04Josh Reeves?

  ARR is much higher, but yeah, trailing.

• 45:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, talk about that. Talk about that decision.

• 45:11Josh Reeves?

  Yeah, I think for us, I mean, when we started this company now over a decade ago, you know, I said, you always start with a problem, something you need to go fix. You have to create a solution, actually show it works, but then you have to have a business model where your unit economics, how much it costs you to serve them, how much it costs you to acquire them, makes sense. Otherwise, it's kind of like gambling. So at Gusto, you know, we've been free cash flow positive too for a number of years. We reinvest that money to build more product, but we knew the potential was there to be at this milestone, and frankly, much, much further. There are 6 million employers in America, and 2/3rds of them are less than 5 employees. Small businesses are a huge part of the economy. So, yeah, we're excited to beat this milestone, but much, much more work ahead.

• 45:55John Coogan?

  So cash flow positive, reporting, trailing 12-month revenues instead of ARR. These all feel like real strengths to eventually go public around. At the same time...

• 46:07Jordi Hays?

  Monday, you should report ARR. Come back on Monday.

• 46:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, but at the same time, like, it's incredibly tumultuous time in the public markets. There's winners and new favorites every day, everyone, SaaSpocalypse narratives. Like, how are you thinking about the benefits of being private right now versus potential future in the public markets?

• 46:27Josh Reeves?

  Yeah, I mean, our focus is on just execution. I would not expect Gusto to be private in the near term.

• 46:32John Coogan?

  Do you mean public?

• 46:34Josh Reeves?

  Like, big, big folks. Sorry, public in the near term. Yeah, correct.

• 46:38John Coogan?

  What are you announcing here?

• 46:39Josh Reeves?

  No, no, not announcing.

• 46:40John Coogan?

  I would not expect us to stay private.

• 46:43Josh Reeves?

  I will leave that all to like the SpaceX and Anthropic and AI's in the world. There's lots of good noise in that.

• 46:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 46:49Josh Reeves?

  I would say like, we're going through this massive paradigm shift in how AI affects not just like our product, for example, and how we help small business, but also how a company's run, how a company's built. And so that is where I'm spending all of my time. It's an exciting time to be spending focused there. It actually is a net, net, pretty big tailwind in gusto, but like absolutely no plans to be public in the near term. Super focused on small businesses and execution. And at some point, the timing will make sense, but yeah, we haven't had any of that process get started.

• 47:21Jordi Hays?

  We covered the April jobs report this morning. It surprised a lot of people to the, to the upside. What are you guys seeing in, in your data? You guys basically have a, have a forwards view at least on the.

• 47:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, to, to set the table, the Wall Street Journal had polled analysts, expectations were at 55,000 new jobs and the number came in at 115,000 after a very strong march as well. And so things are, although there's so much anxiety, so much uncertainty about the future of the American economy, at least over the last few months, things have been looking strong, but we've seen revisions before. I think there's a lot of questions about as you dig into that data, what's going on? And so we'd love to know what you're seeing internally.

• 48:12Josh Reeves?

  Yeah, so two stats we look at quite a bit. There's the kind of state of new businesses being formed, new employers, obviously companies can exist before having an employee. And then there's the state of hiring across the base of customers. I would say, you know, on the customer, small business hiring front, things are more depressed over the last few years, and that's continued relative to, call it the last decade, if you will. We think there's many parts of that, including some of the effect of, of AI on, on frankly, company growth rates. On the flip side, we are seeing a lot more new businesses being formed. And new employers out there and that's showing up in our data that's showing up in

• 48:57Josh Reeves?

  a bunch of third-party data. We think that's a really good thing. You know, there's a there's a scenario with what's happening in AI. We call it the happy path where a lot of people decide to take the plunge and become business owners. You know, the non-happy path to me is the Pixar movie Wally, which is a future I hope we avoid.

• 49:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. How have you been, how have you been thinking about getting to customers and small businesses earlier? Like, have you ever explored trying to meet customers before they incorporate, help them with incorporation, anything that gets you into the the system? Because Gusto, I feel like is always one of the first tools, but it sometimes happens like a month after incorporation.

• 49:39Jordi Hays?

  Well, you have, I mean, one, one really powerful dynamic is you're paying, you know, millions of employees, many of, many of whom will go and leave companies.

• 49:47John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 49:47Jordi Hays?

  Like, I had a good experience on Gusto. Should I pay myself? I'll use Gusto.

• 49:52Josh Reeves?

  Yeah, I mean, first off, the biggest way we grow is word of mouth and often it is from not just the employer, but the employee. Also, we'll have people join Gusto and ask how you heard of us and they're like, I was paid through Gusto. So we don't try to recruit from our customers, but sometimes it happens and it's a wonderful dynamic where they truly, truly get the value of the product. To answer your question directly, absolutely. Like, we, we think payroll is one of the best products out there when you're hiring someone. Obviously, if you don't pay them, they quit. So it's a really important front door for that interaction. But there's a lot of companies that exist as one person, the founder, for some period of time. And so we have an offering we call Gusto Solo that's very focused on that. Turns out, you know, the founder still needs to pay themselves. There's specific tax dynamics

• 50:34Josh Reeves?

  at play. There's a lot of compliance requirements. We acquired Mozzy to help with expanding our work around business compliance. So all those kind of headache compliance things that you still have to do as a one-person company, Gusto is going to be increasingly a great, great partner to help with. And then when that business owner decides to hire an employee, obviously, we hope they continue their relationship with Gusto. But stay tuned. We're going to be launching some more products in the next several months, really focused on building that relationship more deeply with employers or even businesses before they become employers.

• 51:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:07Jordi Hays?

  Do you think the, are you expecting the velocity of new product releases from Gusto to go up an order of magnitude in the next few years? Or do you, do you see it as a smaller of? A smaller family of products with a bunch of and higher velocity of like new feature creation.

• 51:24Josh Reeves?

  Yeah, it was a few years. Give me the next few months. It's fun to be accelerating. I think of it as this is the most amazing time to build. People can, smaller teams, self-serve, iterate faster, maintain high quality, but just literally velocity is increasing dramatically. So we apply that to both breadth and depth, to answer your question. So, within the world of what we do, whether it's 401k, health benefits, payroll, people getting paid when they want, how they want, where they want faster. We're excited to be doing a lot more work there. But absolutely, expanding the breadth of the product, it's still way too hard to be a small business owner. So, you will see a lot more new product launches coming from Gusto in the coming several months. Things that we maybe thought of as like the

• 52:06Josh Reeves?

  next two to three years, I now think of as the next, you know, three to six months. And it's, it's really fun to say that and actually then back it up and see it happening.

• 52:13John Coogan?

  Do you, one question that I've been having is we've seen like LLM usage exploding is the, the shape of LLM spend across a software engineer who fires off a coding agent, build something that's new, but it is deterministic code that runs in perpetuity, new features, new designs, new copy, versus LLMs that are baked into an existing work stream where every time payroll runs, there is a trigger and it is not something that's fired off by an employee. It is, and I don't know if one of those is more agentic or we need a different

• 52:53John Coogan?

  word for those, but can you kind of characterize the shape of those two applications for AI right now?

• 53:00Josh Reeves?

  Yeah, I mean, maybe a couple of cuts on that. Like, I think new product development generally more accelerated, dramatically higher velocity with AI. If you have an existing product, existing codebase, there's just by definition more the dynamic of, you know, building the train, rebuilding the train, running the train at the same time, accelerating the train, laying the tracks, kind of all. In parallel. So I think it's more complex on existing product surface area. So that's one cut. I think on the kind of cut around the ongoing interaction dynamic, I guess we've always believed, since we're serving small business, that what we do, it's mostly compliance centric, is just better done by technology, right?

• 53:41Josh Reeves?

  You think about the potential for human error, whether it's from the customer or a gusty. We want to have as much of that as possible be codified into software, into a system that can scale, that can do it repeatedly, that can do it in millions and millions of situations. To your point, some of the newer technologies, obviously not fully deterministic. So then having the right evals, having the right feedback loops, having the right review and audit process is super, super critical. So as we do all this velocity acceleration, you can imagine there's a lot of focus at Gusto on not just maintaining, but actually improving the quality of what we do and the accuracy and the reliability for our customers. And it does feel like you can have a win-win-win outcome here, where the product gets easier to use, it gets even more accurate and reliable, and actually we can build and ship it faster.

• 54:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you have a feeling for which bucket is bigger? Because I can imagine LLMs being very useful to scan every PDF and do translation and do things on an ongoing basis baked into the systems that you've built versus augmentation and amplification of engineering efforts and design efforts. Do you have an idea of, like, in terms of spend, which one's bigger or where it goes?

• 54:54Josh Reeves?

  Yeah. I mean, I would say for us, most of the ongoing systems and how they run, if you're talking about the backend, don't generally involve a lot of LLM technology.

• 55:05John Coogan?

  And then those are probably efficient too, right? Because even if you do use an LLM to process a PDF, well, you can pretty efficiently get to some sort of, you know, small language model that's tailored and probably pretty cheap. So.

• 55:20Josh Reeves?

  Yeah. Yeah. And that's a world where you want accuracy or reliability, and it's pretty deterministic. I think like, if you look at risk, if you look at things where you have to make more judgment, that's where I think LLMs can actually complement humans quite a bit.

• 55:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Jordy, anything else?

• 55:35Jordi Hays?

  Incredible update.

• 55:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, congratulations.

• 55:38Jordi Hays?

  The focus, everything is incredible. The intentionality, the humbleness of looking backwards versus forwards. I love it all.

• 55:47John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 55:48Jordi Hays?

  Great to catch up Josh.

• 55:49John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Yeah, my pleasure. Have a good one. Goodbye. And up next, we have Jonathan Neman from Sweet Green.

• 56:02John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. How are you doing? What'd you bring us today?

• 56:05Speaker 09

  Lunch.

• 56:06John Coogan?

  What'd you bring us today? You brought lunch?

• 56:08Speaker 09

  Brought you lunch.

• 56:08John Coogan?

  Fantastic. What is it? What are you launching? Give us the updates.

• 56:11Speaker 09

  So, uh, this week, we launched probably our biggest, uh, new category in company history. We launched wraps done in our own way. So we spent about a year designing a custom tortilla with four ingredients. Most wraps in the market, about 22 ingredients, full of seed oils, preservatives, etc. So really wanted...

• 56:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I had a devastating moment yesterday where I was eating a box of crackers, like the sort of default cracker in my household. And they, they updated the ingredient list without, without me realizing, because like when I bought them, they were seed oil free. And then some point in the last like two years, they added it. And so I looked down at the ingredients list and I was like, no. I just walked over to the trash and devastated. But anyways, continue. Four ingredients.

• 57:01Speaker 09

  Yeah, so we created a tortilla, four ingredients, and, and launched wraps this week. So we launched with, uh, four signature wraps. Anything can be customized. The response so far has been awesome. We launched it on Wednesday. We brought you three of them to try. If you guys want to give them a taste.

• 57:16John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 57:17Jordi Hays?

  On, on air, on air taste?

• 57:18Speaker 09

  On air taste, yeah.

• 57:19Jordi Hays?

  We'll give it, we'll give it a try.

• 57:21John Coogan?

  What, uh, was this a customer pull? Was there demand for this? Like, how do you measure that like now is the right time to launch a new product?

• 57:30Speaker 09

  Yeah, so we wanted to reach kind of different customers in different occasions. And one of the things we heard from our, from our guests is they wanted something that was portable. They also wanted food that, you know, was healthy, but a little bit more craveable. And so this was one way to get to that.

• 57:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's like a stated versus revealed preference.

• 57:47Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 57:48Jordi Hays?

  It's like you wanna eat healthy, maybe you wanna eat a salad, but sometimes you just need something that feels like a bit more dense.

• 57:54Speaker 09

  Exactly.

• 57:55John Coogan?

  And how does that feedback actually get to you in practice? Is this like interactions with cashiers and they're taking notes? Or are you sending out surveys afterwards, polling customers, doing like, you know, some in-store marketing that someone's standing there and they're asking people about their experiences?

• 58:14Speaker 09

  Yeah, we do a lot of things in order to get feedback. One is, let me see which one you got there. This is the Chicken Jalapeno Ranch. There's a little dipping sauce on the side.

• 58:24John Coogan?

  What else you got here?

• 58:27Jordi Hays?

  Mmm, fantastic. We never get a lunch break.

• 58:30John Coogan?

  We don't, we don't. This is Chicken Caesar.

• 58:32Speaker 09

  Chicken Caesar. And then you got a Cali Chicken Club.

• 58:35John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 58:36Speaker 09

  So a lot of ways. You know, one thing I say all the time is all the restaurants, all the answers are in the restaurant.

• 58:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 58:41Speaker 09

  Spending time in the restaurant, actually talking to guests. We also do a lot of, you know, traditional things like focus groups, et cetera. Recently.

• 58:49Jordi Hays?

  Do you ever go undercover?

• 58:51Speaker 09

  I do go undercover a lot.

• 58:52Jordi Hays?

  Like behind the counter?

• 58:53Speaker 09

  Oh, all the time, all the time.

• 58:55Jordi Hays?

  Do you wear a mustache?

• 58:56Speaker 09

  I spend about, you know, a third and probably like a quarter of my time in restaurants. Talking to customers, talking to team members. I get all, you know, really I get all my best feedback there. Both how to make the experience better for guests, but also how do you make it easier to run from a, easier to run from a team member perspective. We do a lot of social listening from a feedback perspective. And recently, about a year ago, we started working with a company I think you featured here, Listen Labs.

• 59:20John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:22Speaker 09

  We were one of their first customers and it's, it's helped us accelerate our time to feedback by about 10x and about half the price. And so, you know, this is actually one of the first things we've worked with them on.

• 59:35Jordi Hays?

  It's been a while since we've had Listen Labs on, but basically there's like a like, what are the core features of the product again? It's social listening, but then also like surveying?

• 59:45Speaker 09

  It's it's surveying focus groups and insights. So in, you know, typically when you do a focus group, it takes a long, really a long time to get it set up and, you know, it can take weeks to get that feedback. With Listen Labs, we can get a diverse cut of customers by demo, you know, age, psychographic group, geography.

• 1:00:04Jordi Hays?

  I feel so rude.

• 1:00:05Speaker 09

  No, come on. And so, and so that's been a really powerful way as well. And then social listening is huge, you know, just seeing what people are saying online. And then you look at the competitive landscape and where the business need is, you know, we do really, our business does really well Monday through Thursday, you know, when people are looking to be healthy. And then you see it on Friday.

• 1:00:27John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:00:28Speaker 09

  It falls off a little bit on Saturday. Yeah. So it's how do we have that cheat meal that you could still feel good about?

• 1:00:32John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure. Where in social listening, like where is the sweet green community? Where are people actually having conversations that are valuable?

• 1:00:39Speaker 09

  TikTok and Instagram.

• 1:00:41John Coogan?

  TikTok and Instagram.

• 1:00:41Speaker 09

  TikTok. I mean, and

• 1:00:42John Coogan?

  Not Reddit.

• 1:00:43Speaker 09

  Reddit as well. You'd be surprised how, how much juicy information is on that.

• 1:00:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. So social listening, how manual is that versus like scrape TikTok and transcribe everything and roll it up?

• 1:00:59Speaker 09

  It's not manual at all anymore.

• 1:01:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:01:01Speaker 09

  So a lot of software.

• 1:01:02John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:01:02Speaker 09

  That can do it. Yeah.

• 1:01:03John Coogan?

  Huh.

• 1:01:04Speaker 09

  There's a lot of companies that are offering this now.

• 1:01:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:07Speaker 09

  We've looked at it. We've tested a bunch of them.

• 1:01:08John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. And is it valuable to find stuff that's not viral, but still on TikTok? Like the TikTok creator or just like person that expresses themselves through TikToks or vertical video to loosely just their friend group? Like they don't have a following. They're not a professional creator. They're not making any money on it. But like when like, like someone would post a photo on Instagram, they post a front-facing TikTok. Is that as valuable as the big creator that goes viral for some like dunk or stunt or ta hot take or something like that?

• 1:01:41Speaker 09

  You want to find it before it goes viral. You know, like there's this thing going on viral on TikTok right now about this like chimichurri steak bowl.

• 1:01:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:01:47Speaker 09

  Like the Jimbo.

• 1:01:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:50Speaker 09

  And you know, we should have done something with that, but we should have done it a month ago.

• 1:01:54John Coogan?

  What is there to do with something like that? Like, I feel like a lot of times if there's something that's good, that's organic that's happening, like, and you step in as the brand of the corporation, like, you risk like making it uncool and corporate.

• 1:02:04Speaker 09

  Well, for us, if it's something we could actually serve, like, that happened to be something that we can put on our menu.

• 1:02:09John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure. Okay. So you make a change on your world. You're not trying to go and like, create your own content around it. Let them do it.

• 1:02:14Speaker 09

  We would create the content and then I could serve it.

• 1:02:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:17Speaker 09

  So we put a video out this week on it to see what happens. And if the reaction's good, we'll actually put that on the menu. We have all the ingredients.

• 1:02:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 1:02:24Speaker 09

  It's effectively a bowl without lettuce or any grains. It's just steak.

• 1:02:28Jordi Hays?

  John's kind of a John Chen bowl.

• 1:02:30Speaker 09

  Steak, cucumber, tomato, onion, you know, feta cheese.

• 1:02:34John Coogan?

  That's great. I've seen random videos of focus groups. Do they really do a one-way mirror? Or two-way mirror, whatever that is, where like, they can't see you, but you can see them? Is that a thing? Have you ever done one of those?

• 1:02:47Speaker 09

  When I do them, I actually like to sit in.

• 1:02:50John Coogan?

  Okay, so it's just sitting in a conference room?

• 1:02:51Speaker 09

  Yeah, you just sit in a conference room.

• 1:02:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:02:52Speaker 09

  When we tested wraps, we brought in, we brought in customers every day for a week, different groups of customers, and just tasted them, tasted them a few different ways, really to understand, you know, how important was the sauce on the side? How important was it to get cut? Like, little details, like, for example, we decided the wrap was best when you had it mixed first and cut. It sounds like such a stupid little detail, but it has huge operational implications.

• 1:03:18Jordi Hays?

  You mean mix, the ingredients mix?

• 1:03:19Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:03:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because that's a, that's a worse, that's my least favorite part about any wrap or burrito, is you get in there and it's all like spaced out. So you have like avocado bunched over here.

• 1:03:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:29Jordi Hays?

  All the chicken over here, and then like rice, whatever. And it's like, you're, you want to be having the full blend with every bite.

• 1:03:36Speaker 09

  That's exactly right. So it sounds like such a small, minor detail, but it's huge operational implications. We also had to figure out how to make this work in our infinite kitchens. You know, over 10% of our fleet and growing is powered by the infinite kitchens. How do you make this, this, you know, work in that operation as well?

• 1:03:53John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about other verticals like, like, I don't even know what you call it, like prepackaged in, in, in other grocery stores or consumer packaged goods or like product like extensions outside of the, the retail stores?

• 1:04:08Speaker 09

  We're really focused on our retail stores and the experience. We don't, you know, so much of what we do is based off of the scratch cooking we do in our restaurant. So we're really afraid of extending that out to retail.

• 1:04:18John Coogan?

  You don't want to get into like salad dressing at the grocery store?

• 1:04:21Speaker 09

  Uh, CPG is something we will eventually get.

• 1:04:23John Coogan?

  Okay, you'll, you will.

• 1:04:24Speaker 09

  Yeah, we, we think CPG like, you know, dressing being an obvious category.

• 1:04:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:28Speaker 09

  You know, right now really focused on the core business, but eventually that's definitely a category.

• 1:04:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, was, was, uh, my, my immediate reaction to this is it's, it's, uh, it's incredible. We'll add it to our, our, uh, reoccurring lunch orders. Uh, it reminds me of Chipotle in like 20, 2005 to 2010, like some of the best vintages.

• 1:04:52John Coogan?

  Vintage.

• 1:04:54Jordi Hays?

  Like seriously, back, back then it was, I, I, I yearn for that time when you could just go into any Chipotle and eat something that actually felt, uh, that tasted like fresh and, uh, clean and a small number of ingredients. And they had such an extreme, uh, commitment to that. And, and somewhere along the way, I just, I just stopped going, uh, because it didn't, it didn't feel like that anymore. Um, but, uh, but that's, that's my review. To me, to me, the best food, the best prepared food product that was widely available in history was that, you know, 2005 to 2010 era, uh, Chipotle.

• 1:05:31Speaker 09

  It's funny, that was kind of the inspiration for Sweetgreen in a lot of ways. I was in college, you know, 2005, seeing Chipotle take off, eating Chipotle all the time. And the idea was to create just kind of a healthier, fresher version of that. And the one you ate, the chicken jalapeno ranch is, you know, it's effectively a burrito.

• 1:05:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:48Speaker 09

  Um, some of the other ones are more, it have lettuce in them. That one is, you know, rice, avocado, chicken, corn.

• 1:05:53Jordi Hays?

  Saved you a half.

• 1:05:54Speaker 09

  Yeah. So, and I brought you guys more as well.

• 1:05:56Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:05:57Speaker 09

  And the other thing about the wraps is they start at 11 bucks. So we were also, you know, given where the consumer is today, really trying to create something that can, you know, meet their needs today, can be something that you can eat every day. So the chicken Caesar in some markets is all the, you know, all the way down to $10.45 and no wrap is above 15 bucks.

• 1:06:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's talk about that because we have, uh, consumer sentiment right over, I think there was some reporting. Over the last couple of days, it's like as bad as it's been in like a really long time, stock market at all time highs, like insane disconnect there. Jobs report today came in better than expected, but ultimately consumers aren't feeling great. Part of, I guess, part of the approach there is, you know, introducing products like this that, you know, are high calorie, or not high, I don't know if you'd describe them as high calorie, but maybe higher calorie and great value. But what else, what else are you doing across the business?

• 1:06:55Speaker 09

  I think the key is around the experience. You know, in restaurants, fundamentals wins championships. So it's really about delivering a consistent experience around quality and hospitality. And that gives you the opportunity to layer in the menu innovation. So right now, you know, we've been very focused on innovation for a while and right now we're really just trying to dial in the basics. It's what you talked about Chipotle.

• 1:07:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:16Speaker 09

  It's like what, what made you love it wasn't all the new stuff that they're now doing.

• 1:07:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:20Speaker 09

  It's just being really excellent at the basics.

• 1:07:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, consistent.

• 1:07:23Speaker 09

  It's consistent, it's making sure the quality's there, you're not out of stock on things, you're staffed at peak, people are, you know, smiling, friendly and warm. It's all those little things which create, you know, the system behind that is highly complex, but it's all of that that really creates.

• 1:07:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so, so put another way, Sweetgreen, you know, started in, you know, as like, my view is like it's, it has the DNA of a technology company and maybe that drove you guys at some point to focus too much on, on, on like, on the things that ultimately don't drive, always drive that consistency. Does that feel like somewhat?

• 1:07:58Speaker 09

  Yeah, I'd say the, you know, early on in like the 2010s, the technology side of the business from a consumer perspective was an advantage, it was, was a competitive advantage. We were the first ones to have digital ordering, delivery, mobile payment, all of that stuff. It's, it's pretty much been commoditized.

• 1:08:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:16Speaker 09

  For the most part, all restaurants have it.

• 1:08:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:18Speaker 09

  You know, I think our digital experience is better than most, but at the end of the day, you can order online anywhere. We do have a Technology infrastructure that allows us to scale. So if you look at like our G and A, it's been flattered down for five years. So as we continue to scale, a lot of the tools we've put in place and now with how we're leveraging AI, like we can continue to scale without adding headcount and our data and reporting and all the tools we have to manage our kitchens are really incredible. Like we have tools that, you know, kind of predictive ordering for how we order food, you know, predictive apps that teach us, teach our teams or guide our teams as they make the hot food and the cold food. Because what's different about Sweetgreen is we pretty much make everything in the store every single day.

• 1:09:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:01Speaker 09

  But to your point, at the end of the day, it, you know, it's, it's about.

• 1:09:04Jordi Hays?

  But you can't get, you can't start spending, maybe you're spending half your time on innovation, half your time on like the basics.

• 1:09:11Speaker 09

  It's, yeah, it's probably even more so on the basics right now.

• 1:09:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:15Speaker 09

  It's on delivering on a great consumer experience. Someone asked me the other day about how we build our brand. And, you know, we do a lot of stuff, culture, social media, events, all great. But the way we build our brand at the heart of it is just creating an experience that people love.

• 1:09:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:30Speaker 09

  It's an environment, a store that looks beautiful, clean, it's that, you know, a team member that goes out of their way and is friendly. It's a culture of like saying yes when someone wants something that's a little bit weird. Just figuring out, you know, that how to say yes to that, to that customer.

• 1:09:45Jordi Hays?

  No, there's nothing worse as a customer if you're in, in like a fast casual experience and you can see everything that's in the store, you can see all the ingredients and then you ask for something and they say, well, that's not available. And it's like, well, you're, you're just making a call on the fly not to combine those things in the way that, that I.

• 1:10:02John Coogan?

  Put the pizza in the deep fryer.

• 1:10:04Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:10:05John Coogan?

  I know you have both.

• 1:10:06Speaker 09

  So our, our team knows it's a culture of saying yes. Just figure out, figure out a way to say yes, take, you know, take care of the guest. And I remind our team all the time, our number one marketing channel is word of mouth. Eighty percent of people find out about Sweetgreen through friend, family. You know, it's the, you know, they walk by a store, they had a good experience and they come back. Like our critical metric that we use in, in tracking like the health of how we're doing is what we call our comeback rate. So of customers that come in. How, what percentage come in within thirty, what percentage come back within thirty days?

• 1:10:38John Coogan?

  Right.

• 1:10:39Speaker 09

  And we can now track that across analog and digital customers. And we've kind of gotten the whole organization aligned around, you know, from the people making the menu, people running our loyalty and CRM, and most importantly, the people in the, in the restaurants. Like your number one job is delivering a great experience where that guest comes back. Cause that's what drives that, you know, that lifetime value.

• 1:11:00John Coogan?

  Where was the first store?

• 1:11:01Speaker 09

  First store was in DC in Georgetown.

• 1:11:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was, uh, what was the key to making it work?

• 1:11:08Speaker 09

  Key to making it work, I think originally was probably the simplicity of it.

• 1:11:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:12Speaker 09

  You know, originally the idea was create a healthy fast food restaurant, but the size of the first store was 500 square feet.

• 1:11:18John Coogan?

  So a small store, but great location?

• 1:11:20Speaker 09

  Small store, good location.

• 1:11:22John Coogan?

  Good foot traffic?

• 1:11:23Speaker 09

  Had to keep the, the, keep the operation pretty simple in order to execute it. And I think just, you know, we were maybe lucky in the naivete, we had never worked in restaurants.

• 1:11:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:34Speaker 09

  And so we were able to approach things a little bit differently.

• 1:11:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:37Speaker 09

  And create a brand that just didn't look like the other brands, whether it be how we sourced.

• 1:11:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:42Speaker 09

  You know, how we went to market in the early days, it's, you know, like one of the things that helped build the brand was we threw a big music festival for eight years.

• 1:11:48John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:11:49Speaker 09

  It was like, you know, we threw a 25,000 person music festival with, you know, like The Strokes headlining. And the idea was how do you make healthy eating cool?

• 1:11:57John Coogan?

  Is that within reach for some brands? Like what's the cost to throw a 25,000 person music festival? Do you charge tickets?

• 1:12:02Speaker 09

  We charge tickets. Yeah.

• 1:12:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:12:04Speaker 09

  So it was actually a break even event.

• 1:12:05John Coogan?

  Oh, that's cool. Okay.

• 1:12:06Speaker 09

  Yeah. It was called the Sweet Life Festival.

• 1:12:08John Coogan?

  Okay, great. Yeah. Uh, any plans to bring it back?

• 1:12:12Speaker 09

  We are looking at it. We have our 20 year anniversary next year and so we have some, some, some ideas.

• 1:12:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. Where's, uh, where's the store footprint these days?

• 1:12:19Speaker 09

  Almost 300. We'll end this year with about 300 restaurants.

• 1:12:22John Coogan?

  And do you have a target? Do you want to grow that?

• 1:12:25Speaker 09

  Yeah. If you, I mean, if you look at Chipotle, they're at about 4,000. They, they give a target of 7,500 stores in the US.

• 1:12:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:12:32Speaker 09

  So, you know, our first target is a thousand stores, but we think over time should be able to get to about 5,000 units in the United States.

• 1:12:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The, uh, I, I always appreciate looking at the forecasts for some of these, some of these brands, whether it be Starbucks or Chipotle, because in our, in our chaotic, modern world, everyone's like, it's so hard to plan more than two years out, especially in tech. Everyone's like, it's hard to see two years out. And if you look at like the forecasts of store growth, it's like Chipotle is like. In 2030, we will deliver exactly, you know, 200 new doors across these geos. It's like you actually can like think long term, like consumers are still going to want to eat food. They're going to want to eat healthy food in 2030, 2035, 2040. And, uh, you know, taking that long view, I think is is super important.

• 1:13:21Speaker 09

  In the Adams development world, like you, we're already building our 2028 pipeline and we're looking at 2029. You, you have to get, get ahead of it, especially when you do a lot of ground up development, building drive-throughs. That sort of thing, you, you're about two years ahead.

• 1:13:35Jordi Hays?

  You're doing drive-throughs now?

• 1:13:36Speaker 09

  We do, yeah. We have a handful of drive-throughs. They do really well. Um, we actually just opened our first drive-through feature featuring an infinite kitchen. It's close by. It's in Costa Mesa here.

• 1:13:44Jordi Hays?

  Oh, nice.

• 1:13:45Speaker 09

  Um, and it's awesome because now you have the power of the infinite kitchen from a speed perspective with the drive-through. Um, stores, stores doing awesome. So it's a model for the future.

• 1:13:54Jordi Hays?

  Why have you never done anything in Malibu?

• 1:13:57Speaker 09

  I would love to do Malibu. It's probably my favorite place in the world. Um, doesn't really have the, the density, um, from a consumer perspective.

• 1:14:05Jordi Hays?

  That's been my, so I, so I've lived there for, um, coming up on five years. And early on, every time I would leave Malibu and go to somewhere else, I'd go to Montecito. There's like much better restaurants in my opinion, and like Montecito, Santa Barbara, some of these other beach towns. And I was trying to figure out why, and it's entirely because the town is spread out. Like you said, the density, it's spread out on this huge line. That was my intuition. Obviously I don't have restaurant experience, but you can put a restaurant in Malibu, but it's still like 40 minutes in the car for like the average person in town potentially. Because you have to like get on PCH and drive like miles and miles and miles. And if there's a little bit of traffic, then that's 20 minutes there, 20 minutes back.

• 1:14:48Jordi Hays?

  And then it's like, I'm not, you know, people are just like, ah, they'll just. I'm not driving 40 minutes.

• 1:14:53Speaker 09

  Yeah, the bigger challenge in Malibu is actually the staffing side of it.

• 1:14:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:58John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:14:58Speaker 09

  It's like, nobody in Malibu wants to work for 20, $25 an hour.

• 1:15:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:04Speaker 09

  And so the people that are going to be coming there are coming from really far away.

• 1:15:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:08Speaker 09

  And that's what becomes a problem. You can probably feel it in a lot of the places you go to.

• 1:15:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:12Speaker 09

  I'm sure you can see the staffing.

• 1:15:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like labor, labor, you know, turnover will be higher. General, you just have to pay significantly more for somebody to be willing to spend the money on.

• 1:15:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. That that's somewhat limited, so.

• 1:15:24Speaker 09

  Yeah, limited, limited on the Malibu kids, uh, working, working at the restaurant.

• 1:15:29Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, how do you, like, I'm, I'm curious how you spend your time with, uh,

• 1:15:36Jordi Hays?

  with like the capital markets and investors. Today, you've been public for a while now. Uh, I'm, I'm sure you have, have had investors come and go, but also some that you've developed, like, you know, really meaningful relationships with. Uh, what is that like as a, you know, public company CEO?

• 1:15:53Speaker 09

  Yeah, you know, I think we were fortunate before we went public, we had a lot of these kind of crossover investors.

• 1:15:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:59Speaker 09

  Investors like T-Ro or Fidelity, Bailey Gifford, that we were able to build those relationships with. And, you know, took long, long-term positions, believed in what we were doing. So that really helped us as we made, as we made that transition. You know, I, I talked to them, you know, our, our large investors every quarter.

• 1:16:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:15Speaker 09

  Um, and it's like, I always say with investors or with anything, it's really the people behind it than just like the name, um, the name on the door.

• 1:16:22Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:16:22Speaker 09

  Um, and building trust and confidence in what we're doing. And, you know, I think there's investors that are looking for short-term results. And there's other investors that really, you know, kind of believe in the long-term, believe in the management team. And the goal is to just build trust with them over time.

• 1:16:37Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Makes sense.

• 1:16:39Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:16:39Jordi Hays?

  So no, no, no, we can't expect to like an Allbirds, like local inference provider, provider out of, out of Sweetgreen.

• 1:16:47John Coogan?

  I was gonna ask if he was gonna fit on eBay.

• 1:16:50Speaker 09

  I mean, that's an amazing story to watch right now.

• 1:16:52John Coogan?

  You got a couple hundred stores, you could go to Sweetgreen and verify your baseball cards to auction them off on eBay.

• 1:16:58Speaker 09

  Funny, our COO, Jason, who's been with us about a year, spent a long time of his career working at, he was actually the COO at GameStop for a while. He actually ended up, more recently, he was at Chipotle, but before that, he was at GameStop from like 300 stores to, you know, 3,000 stores. So it's been fun watching all of the developments now and talking to him about it.

• 1:17:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we were looking it up, it seems like GameStop has like shrunk the store footprint a ton, about half since Ryan took over five, six years ago. But like wildly different business, because of digital distribution, like there's a direct competitor, you can't, you can't download a rap on your phone like you can a game. And so they've had to change the business model a significant amount.

• 1:17:45Speaker 09

  For me, it was interesting learning how much of that business model was dependent, all the margin was dependent on the trade business. So the new releases, they didn't really make as much money on it.

• 1:17:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:17:54Speaker 09

  All the, the, yeah, the margin came from.

• 1:17:57John Coogan?

  GameStop's famous for being like, oh, you bought that $60 game, we'll give you $5 for it.

• 1:18:02Speaker 09

  Exactly.

• 1:18:02John Coogan?

  And they sell it for 20 and that's no bad.

• 1:18:04Speaker 09

  And that was the business.

• 1:18:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:06Jordi Hays?

  What are general real estate trends, not just restaurants, but that you're seeing across different markets across the US?

• 1:18:19Speaker 09

  Drive-throughs are hot.

• 1:18:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, what makes for a good drive-through? Like, there's a few in LA, but it doesn't feel like a drive-through city.

• 1:18:27Speaker 09

  LA is more about zoning.

• 1:18:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:18:29Speaker 09

  And getting the right permits for it, and they're not adding more drive-throughs.

• 1:18:32John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:18:33Speaker 09

  So you have to take over an existing drive-through in order to get one.

• 1:18:36John Coogan?

  I typically always see big chains have them.

• 1:18:38Speaker 09

  Yeah, and so you're competing with. You know, like some of the drive-throughs that we've taken recently have been like old Jack in the Boxes, for example.

• 1:18:45John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:18:46Speaker 09

  But, you know, who are you competing with? Chick-fil-A, Raising Canes, and they have very high AUVs. You know, some of these, you know, Chick-fil-A, I think that's eight or so million dollars per restaurant.

• 1:18:58Jordi Hays?

  So they can, they can just outbid you.

• 1:18:59Speaker 09

  They can outbid you. And they need, you know, the acre lot with the, you know, with the egress for the parking.

• 1:19:05John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:19:06Speaker 09

  So, drive-throughs are really hard to come by, but we do see a pretty significant lift when we put a drive-through in. People are really looking for convenience, and that's only accelerated since COVID.

• 1:19:17John Coogan?

  And do delivery drivers prefer drive-throughs? Is that faster for them?

• 1:19:21Speaker 09

  No, we actually, most people actually don't want the delivery drivers going through it, so you have to build a model where you have a separate area. So if you go to like McDonald's or any places.

• 1:19:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because they're not doing the ordering, they're just doing the pickup.

• 1:19:30John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure, sure.

• 1:19:31Jordi Hays?

  So they would just be taking up space.

• 1:19:32Speaker 09

  Yeah, so you have like separate parking spots for the delivery drivers, having them come in. Some places are experimenting with the double drive-through.

• 1:19:40John Coogan?

  I was gonna say, is that possible?

• 1:19:42Speaker 09

  It's possible, but you need so much space in order, in order to do it.

• 1:19:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:19:47Jordi Hays?

  Don't have a lot of space in California.

• 1:19:48Speaker 09

  Don't, and you don't have the space in California. Other, yeah, I think the thing about what we see in retail is the best streets continue to be the best streets. So like, you know, and we see it, like, if you look at LA, like, you know, Melrose Place, just like rents continue to go up.

• 1:20:05John Coogan?

  Because there's more customers and there's more profit?

• 1:20:07Speaker 09

  More customers, it's, it's like, there's this, this thing about like this, these moments and these, you know, this condensed attention and traffic in these great high streets. And so, on those areas, prices have only gone up. Everywhere else, the market's been pretty stable. We haven't seen things, you know, collapse. We have seen, the, the biggest challenge we've seen is around what's happened with interest rates, because landlords have left, less money to give from a tenant improvement perspective.

• 1:20:36Jordi Hays?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:20:37Speaker 09

  So, that's been, you know, the issue there, even though there's probably less demand, you know, when they're, you know, interest rates from zero to where they are today, they're not giving you as much improvement allowance.

• 1:20:48Jordi Hays?

  Last question, how is the drone delivery market evolving from your view as, as an operator, as a brand? Like, are you, are you, do you expect drone delivery to be, you know, double, double-digit percentage of delivery orders?

• 1:21:07Jordi Hays?

  Nationally or in specific markets like how do you see it evolving?

• 1:21:11Speaker 09

  I think I think was Keller and Zipline is doing is really interesting. We've done some early work with them looking at it. It's not something we're hugely focused on right now, but they have had some breakthroughs. And so I, you know, if you said 10% in the next year or two, I probably don't see that, but over time, absolutely.

• 1:21:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It's very market dependent, right? You have to be like, let's work on something in Texas.

• 1:21:34Speaker 09

  It's yes. It's Texas, more suburban. You do have to change how you build your restaurants a little bit, having like the portal where you where you put the food in. But when you think about the

• 1:21:43Jordi Hays?

  Drone portal.

• 1:21:44Speaker 09

  Yeah. When you think is, yeah, you need like a drone portal. But when you think about the speed of delivery, you know, for delivery, getting sub 30 minutes is

• 1:21:52John Coogan?

  Huge.

• 1:21:52Speaker 09

  Is it? It's that's like, kind of like the number when people are opening the app. You want to be sub 30 minutes. And what you can do with drones and getting there, it's pretty amazing. They still can't do really large orders. So like the

• 1:22:05John Coogan?

  Sure. Yeah.

• 1:22:06Speaker 09

  What it fits in isn't huge.

• 1:22:07John Coogan?

  For a whole office, it's not gonna work.

• 1:22:09Speaker 09

  But I do think over time, they will, they will figure it out and more restaurants will be built around that.

• 1:22:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:16Speaker 09

  I mean, it was amazing to think is how much your radius can increase and what that means for your footprint over time, if that's true.

• 1:22:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, LA, LA, since, you know, we're here, when you look at this market, the craziest thing is putting, when you put, you know, you go into maps and you put an address in and you're like, it's seven miles and it's going to be 50 minutes is like a normal, a normal thing. It sounds crazy to anyone else in the country, but it's like a drone going seven miles is like, you know, feasible.

• 1:22:44Speaker 09

  Yeah. And you've seen the videos. They like, they're able to just drop the, you know, just literally have it parachute like right on your doorstep. So it's a, it's pretty amazing. It's coming, but I think it's a little early for us.

• 1:22:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:22:56John Coogan?

  Very fun. Well, thank you so much.

• 1:22:57Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for the food.

• 1:22:58Speaker 09

  Great to see you guys.

• 1:23:00Jordi Hays?

  Let's hang, let's hang soon.

• 1:23:01Speaker 09

  Thank you, guys.

• 1:23:03John Coogan?

  Here, throw these back on and we can click over to, um, to some of just Jason Fried's favorite watches. He was a fan of Nike's early 2000s era watch lineup. Have you ever, have you ever seen these before, Jordy?

• 1:23:19Jordi Hays?

  I have, I have.

• 1:23:20John Coogan?

  I have not.

• 1:23:20Jordi Hays?

  I've never seen one in person.

• 1:23:22John Coogan?

  Never seen one in person. There's my other headphone. There we go. Yeah, this has this design aesthetic come back yet? I feel like there's enough posts about it. At some point, I feel like a tech startup is going to really run with it.

• 1:23:37Jordi Hays?

  Someone will do it. I like the kind of soft lines.

• 1:23:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, Avi from Friend was sort of doing that with the material that went into the Friend pendant. But he was, he was talking to Paul Graham about like, how do you differentiate from Apple? Like, if you launch a product like this, it does stand out from an Apple Watch, certainly aesthetically. And so you at least create some like distance that's maybe defensible. They even if they, even if they come out with a competitive product, it's not. And if you become iconic with this design or, or similarly bizarre design, you don't stand as much chance of getting commoditized. Well, Ryan Cohen's in the Financial Times. People have been processing the, his bid for GameStop to take over eBay.

• 1:24:23John Coogan?

  Very fun story. Not too many updates on what's actually happening. I think there's sort of a wait and see approach here. But the, the Financial Times has a little bit of a deep dive here. Ryan Cohen spent much of his career being dismissed. It's a pattern that has turned the chief executive of video game retailer GameStop into a leather jacket wearing outlier with a loyal base of meme stock investors. I saw someone commenting the legal, the leather jacket, very Jensen-esque. Although I, has he been dismissed? I feel like through the rise of Chewy, there was a ton of respect for him all along that journey since e-commerce is such a challenging business. There's so few companies that have exited at north of a billion dollars.

• 1:25:08John Coogan?

  There's been a ton of, a ton of attempts to make e-commerce companies, but they, they often run into Amazon headfirst. The Canadian entrepreneur turned activist investor has built his cult-like reputation by repeatedly betting on ideas that many institutional investors labeled as absurd. First, it was online pet supplies. Okay, I guess that fits. Then a dying strip.

• 1:25:31Jordi Hays?

  Why has, why has Chewy?

• 1:25:35Jordi Hays?

  Why is Chewy? So Chewy is a $9.6 billion company.

• 1:25:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 1:25:40Jordi Hays?

  Why has Amazon and Walmart not eaten them alive?

• 1:25:48John Coogan?

  I don't know. I mean, I think a lot of people have pet food on subscription and they just don't change it. And so you acquire that customer and then even if it's on Amazon.

• 1:25:56Jordi Hays?

  So the CAC equation just works.

• 1:25:58John Coogan?

  I think the I think the retention is remarkable because the dog doesn't tell you, hey, I'm bored of this particular food. It's just like awesome.

• 1:26:06Jordi Hays?

  I feel like my dogs would would grow up and they'd be like.

• 1:26:08John Coogan?

  But how would they communicate?

• 1:26:10Jordi Hays?

  They had this look and I'd know I'd had to go take an egg, go get an egg from the chickens and crack it on their on their.

• 1:26:16John Coogan?

  But that's not you're not getting that egg on Amazon, right? They don't make egg egg laced dog food on on Amazon. Like switching e-commerce platforms isn't going to solve your your your belligerent dog problem.

• 1:26:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one one response from eBay could be focus on yourself, King, because Chewy's down 40% the last year.

• 1:26:39John Coogan?

  Well, is Ryan?

• 1:26:40Jordi Hays?

  No, he's no longer. He's no longer. He's no longer the CEO, obviously.

• 1:26:45John Coogan?

  But still, you know, I guess it's down since IPO. It had a it had a quick rise in 2021. The stock was up at $101, now at 23. So some sell off there. But let's read through more of this. Now he is focused on this $56 billion attempt to acquire eBay and an e-commerce giant roughly four times the size of GameStop. Wall Street, right? Wall Street's immediate response to the hostile bid has ranged from skepticism to outright mockery. Analysts have questioned how GameStop, valued at roughly $11 billion, could realistically finance the takeover of a company worth around $47 billion. None of that has dissuaded dissuaded Cohen. The more eBay fights me, the more I'm going to not take no for an answer. I'm

• 1:27:29John Coogan?

  not going away, he told the Financial Times. The 40-year-old billionaire first set out his his stall for the takeover bid in an awkward interview with CNBC on Monday that instantly ricocheted across social media. He responded to questions about the financing details with a blank expression and clipped monosyllables explaining that it was half cash, half stock. Of course, that became a massive meme. The interview generated waves of memes online as X and Reddit users speculated that Cohen looked drunk, high, or exhausted.

• 1:27:56Jordi Hays?

  Do you think the half cash, half stock meme is good or bad for the prospects of successfully acquiring the company?

• 1:28:04John Coogan?

  I think once it clicks, it sort of makes sense. But it is a big jump to eBay shareholders to roll into that at that price.

• 1:28:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the decision or the sort of like situation would be wildly different if eBay hadn't been performing since Jamie became CEO.

• 1:28:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's outperformed the S and P 500, right? Which is pretty remarkable. So, yeah, it's not beaten down and the shareholders seem pretty happy. The Financial Times says, "The script is played out before. Born in Montreal in 1986 to a teacher, mother, and father who imported glassware, Cohen did not attend university. As a teenager, he built websites for family, friends, and small businesses, teaching himself coding. Now, in 2011, now in his mid-20s, he founded Chewy from South Florida with the ambition of creating an online pet supply business that could compete with Amazon. Investors thought the idea was ridiculous. I knew that significant capital would be required to finance the growth, that's for sure.

• 1:29:04John Coogan?

  A lot of inventory, very capital-intensive business." He said, "He approached dozens of VC firms, even flew out to Silicon Valley, went door-to-door on Sand Hill Road." Can you do that? I don't think you can just knock on Sequoia Capital's door.

• 1:29:21Jordi Hays?

  I think some of these Neo Labs are hot enough that they actually could just drive down, no meetings, and just go door-to-door.

• 1:29:29John Coogan?

  I'm here unannounced.

• 1:29:31Jordi Hays?

  Be like, "Cool, I'll come back in like 20 minutes."

• 1:29:33John Coogan?

  I gotta turn to you for you. Yeah, yeah, probably. So he went door-to-door on Sand Hill Road, probably a turn of Ferraris, he was probably scheduling meetings. But he was explaining how Chewy would succeed by delighting customers and running an ultra-efficient operation, but everyone turned us down. He couldn't raise money. The skepticism was understandable, given the failure of pet supply website, pets.com, in the .com bubble era. Pet food was bulky, low-margin, and expensive. to ship venture capitalists doubted consumers would buy 40 pound bags of dog food online. Cohen ignored them all. Instead, he focused obsessively on customer service. Chewy employees wrote customers handwritten cards and sent flowers to grieving owners who animals had died.

• 1:30:15John Coogan?

  That's really sweet. That is a good touch. He doesn't come across as that. He comes across as, you know, this like ruthless operator. But that is really, I mean, obviously that.

• 1:30:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, he comes across as an absolute dog, John.

• 1:30:26John Coogan?

  Yes, he was. He was raised by dogs and essentially grew his career through the dog economy.

• 1:30:33John Coogan?

  The approach helped to create unusually intense customer loyalty. By 2017, private equity backed PetSmart bought Chewy for 3.35 billion, then the largest e-commerce deal on record. It cemented Cohen's reputation as a rare entrepreneur who had successfully challenged Amazon on its own turf. Flush with cash and credibility, he launched Ryan Cohen Ventures, RC Ventures, his investment vehicle. That led to his most controversial bet in 2020. While much of Wall Street viewed GameStop as a doomed relic of the physical retail era. Cohen quietly amassed a large stake in the company and began pushing for a radical digital transformation. I really wonder if there's going to be, what is this, just horses? Why are we just playing horses?

• 1:31:15Jordi Hays?

  The team had this on this morning. I thought it was incredible.

• 1:31:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, the horses are good. I wonder, I wonder if there will be a Ryan Cohen.

• 1:31:23Jordi Hays?

  Some people do subway servers. We do.

• 1:31:25John Coogan?

  Horses, I like it.

• 1:31:26Jordi Hays?

  Horse B roll.

• 1:31:27John Coogan?

  Do you think there'll be a Ryan Cohen GameStop type deal of the SaaS apocalypse era? Like the most seat based SaaS, you know, like Laggard, who's getting absolutely beaten up, shorted, huge short interest. And some wildcard operator comes in and, and turns it around, or at least turns it into a meme stock. I don't know.

• 1:31:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I feel, I mean, it's just felt like so many people were, were too, too afraid of, of, you know, catching a falling knife, basically. But sure we'll see some of it.

• 1:31:58John Coogan?

  We can dig into it more. We can ask Zal about it because we have my good friend Zal from Refactor in the TBP and Ultra Dom. Let's bring him on down to the seat. And I don't know, are those plates left over? Of course. Anyway, great to see you.

• 1:32:13Speaker 10

  Derek, good to meet you, man. Thanks for having me, guys.

• 1:32:16John Coogan?

  Let's introduce yourself and then I want to hit the gong. I want you to hit the gong.

• 1:32:19Speaker 10

  Oh, man.

• 1:32:20John Coogan?

  Tell us the news today. Introduce yourself and then tell us.

• 1:32:22Speaker 10

  Yeah, no, I'm Zal from Refactor Capital. As you know,

• 1:32:25John Coogan?

  I know.

• 1:32:26Speaker 10

  I led Lucy's seed round a decade ago.

• 1:32:28John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 1:32:28Speaker 10

  Um, and it's been a pleasure. Um, yeah, and I run a deep tech, hard tech fund.

• 1:32:34John Coogan?

  Hey, you guys are winding up pretty well. There we go.

• 1:32:38Speaker 10

  I like it.

• 1:32:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:39Speaker 10

  Uh, and by the way, I do have schwag for you guys. So that is for you. And I got some

• 1:32:43Jordi Hays?

  How did, uh, how did John, how did John pitch Lucy to you back then? Because this

• 1:32:47Speaker 10

  Oh, that is a little.

• 1:32:48Jordi Hays?

  This is what, four years before zins were like a common, you know, word?

• 1:32:54Speaker 10

  Well, no, no, it was a, it was a smoking alternative, Jordy. That's what he was pitching.

• 1:32:58John Coogan?

  It was before Zen launched. It was before Zen launched.

• 1:33:01Jordi Hays?

  No, I know. Yeah, I know.

• 1:33:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:04Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:33:04John Coogan?

  I mean, the pitch was basically just.

• 1:33:06Jordi Hays?

  The main thing is like, if I was getting that pitch,

• 1:33:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:10Jordi Hays?

  I mean, you're, you're very compelling. I probably would have invested if we knew each other back then. But, uh, you know, a pouch, yeah, it's popular in Europe.

• 1:33:19John Coogan?

  Well, we weren't doing pouches yet.

• 1:33:20Speaker 10

  No, it was just the gum.

• 1:33:21John Coogan?

  And I think we maybe had mapped out lozenges, but the idea was basically that Nicorette was, uh,

• 1:33:28Speaker 10

  A horrible product?

• 1:33:29John Coogan?

  Horrible product, but had grown into like a billion dollars a year in revenue and had been around since the seventies, had been really well studied by the scientific community, had been loosely effective at getting people to quit smoking, but delivered in the most medicinal way and had not had a consumer or brand wrapped around it. So very much in like the hymns and Roman telehealth, like let's take the, you know, the scientific backed product that we know works, but then package it in a, in a, in a new way and go direct to consumer.

• 1:34:01Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:34:01John Coogan?

  Chewy style.

• 1:34:02Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:34:03John Coogan?

  It was fun.

• 1:34:03Speaker 10

  It was, it was a blast. It was a blast.

• 1:34:05John Coogan?

  But you were doing a lot of other investing at the time.

• 1:34:07Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:34:07John Coogan?

  What else stands out from your investing career?

• 1:34:09Speaker 10

  Yeah, well, I've been, but can I first say like, I have had a fantastic week. Can I tell you about the week that I've been having?

• 1:34:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:15Speaker 10

  I think it's my best week in venture.

• 1:34:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:34:17Speaker 10

  And I've been doing this for 12 years.

• 1:34:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:19Speaker 10

  So. Uh, let me, let me paint the picture, right? So Wednesday.

• 1:34:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:23Speaker 10

  Astronis raises a 450 million Series E.

• 1:34:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:28Speaker 10

  This was the first check I wrote after I left Andreessen Horowitz.

• 1:34:30John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 1:34:31Speaker 10

  Very first check I wrote.

• 1:34:32John Coogan?

  Great company.

• 1:34:33Speaker 10

  Led the seed round, uh, introducing the 16Z, which, which did the Series A and they've also done subsequent rounds.

• 1:34:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:39Speaker 10

  So that was on Wednesday morning. Yeah, that was amazing, right?

• 1:34:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:43Speaker 10

  Um, you know, 2.8 billion dollar valuation.

• 1:34:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:34:47Speaker 10

  And then on Thursday, of course, I launched my new fund.

• 1:34:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:34:50Speaker 10

  Fund five, right? And so I've got 300 million under management.

• 1:34:54John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 1:34:55Speaker 10

  Yes, 10, 10 years and change. Yeah, at this point. So another 50 million, I just raised 50 million dollar funds. Again, we can talk about that in a sec. And then, you know, I'm, I'm like waking up yesterday morning and I'm like, you know, getting all my tweets and my LinkedIn posts together for the launch at like 6:00 AM.

• 1:35:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:10Speaker 10

  And something pops up in my feed and my emails. It's like one of my companies just got acquired. I'm like, okay, well, I gotta take a look at this. Like what, what happened? Well, Path AI got acquired by Roche for a billion dollars.

• 1:35:24Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:35:25Speaker 10

  So.

• 1:35:26John Coogan?

  Incredible.

• 1:35:26Speaker 10

  And I have two founders that have had kids this week, babies this week. So it is just a best, best week ever, guys.

• 1:35:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, I mean, I, I, I know, uh.

• 1:35:37Jordi Hays?

  So it's time to rest on your laurels.

• 1:35:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, rest on your laurels. At one point we were thinking about getting a bed of laurels that people here could physically go and rest on.

• 1:35:45Speaker 10

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:35:46John Coogan?

  Uh, one day. Uh, what were you doing before Andreessen?

• 1:35:48Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah. So, um, you know, originally from, from the Midwest, uh, born and raised in Indiana.

• 1:35:53John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:35:54Speaker 10

  My dad had a computer business growing up, so I built computers in our basement and we sold them to people's homes, doctors' offices, you know, 80s and 90s, pre Dell, right?

• 1:36:01Jordi Hays?

  Was this basically like, we'll build you a custom PC for your use case?

• 1:36:04Speaker 10

  Do you remember 386s and 486s and Pentiums and all that?

• 1:36:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I was born in 95.

• 1:36:10Speaker 10

  Okay, so maybe not, maybe not.

• 1:36:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:12Speaker 10

  But this was like the era of the 80s and 90s before Dell like really kind of took over.

• 1:36:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:17Speaker 10

  And so, you know, we built that business. So I got into hardware, software coding at a young age.

• 1:36:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:22Speaker 10

  And then. I went to Penn and I did the Wharton undergrad program. What I didn't understand when I got there was that 90% of my classmates would go into banking and consulting. And I did internships in both and I hated it. So I didn't know, a senior year comes around and I'm like, what am I going to do with my life? And I was so lucky, I was so lucky, guys. Microsoft came to campus and recruited me to be a product manager.

• 1:36:42John Coogan?

  Okay, there you go.

• 1:36:43Speaker 10

  Right? And so that started a 10-year career.

• 1:36:45Jordi Hays?

  The GOAT, Satya.

• 1:36:46John Coogan?

  Was Satya running it?

• 1:36:47Speaker 10

  No, no, it was Steve Ballmer at the time.

• 1:36:49Jordi Hays?

  But wasn't he like a rising PM?

• 1:36:51Speaker 10

  He was a rising, he was VP of Product at that point.

• 1:36:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying. You're working under the GOAT.

• 1:36:56John Coogan?

  In the org, yeah.

• 1:36:57Speaker 10

  People knew him. Of course, people knew him.

• 1:36:59Jordi Hays?

  And stay in Aura.

• 1:37:00Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:37:00John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 1:37:01Speaker 10

  But it was like a time when like Microsoft's stock price was just between 25 and 30 dollars.

• 1:37:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, the Ballmer era was rough.

• 1:37:06Speaker 10

  It was, it was rough.

• 1:37:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:08Speaker 10

  And they didn't understand the internet. This was 2004 to 2006.

• 1:37:11John Coogan?

  This was like while they're missing mobile, basically.

• 1:37:13Speaker 10

  Correct. They missed the whole, and I was like, this is not, this is not happening. I'm wasting my career up here in Seattle. So I moved to the Bay Area 20 years ago.

• 1:37:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:37:21Speaker 10

  And I got a job at Google.

• 1:37:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:22Speaker 10

  I was a PM in 2006 on the AdWords team.

• 1:37:25John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:37:26Speaker 10

  That, let me tell you a story on that real quick. So, this was Susan Wojcicki's team.

• 1:37:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:31Speaker 10

  So Google was founded in her garage.

• 1:37:33John Coogan?

  Yep, that's right.

• 1:37:33Speaker 10

  You know, back in the day. She passed away a couple of years ago of non-small cell lung cancer, but she was an amazing leader, amazing human. And the talent that she had put together on that floor and building 42 on the second floor was amazing.

• 1:37:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:45Speaker 10

  So, I'm in this cube. Eliot Gill is sitting next to me. Satya Patel from Homebrew over there.

• 1:37:51John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:37:51Speaker 10

  Josh McFarland, who was at Greylock and now at Boom.

• 1:37:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:54Speaker 10

  Ben Silberman from Pinterest.

• 1:37:56John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:37:57Speaker 10

  Kevin Siskrim from Instagram.

• 1:37:58John Coogan?

  Oh!

• 1:37:59Speaker 10

  Dan and Pete from Optimizely.

• 1:38:01John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:38:02Speaker 10

  Tom Tungus now from Theory Ventures. And Gokul Rajaram, who's on the board of Coinbase and Pinterest.

• 1:38:07John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:38:08Speaker 10

  Godfather of AdSense. We were all within three cubes.

• 1:38:10John Coogan?

  That's incredible.

• 1:38:11Speaker 10

  It was insane. I don't know what was in the water there, but like...

• 1:38:14John Coogan?

  That's remarkable.

• 1:38:15Speaker 10

  We've all done pretty decently.

• 1:38:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:38:17Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:38:17John Coogan?

  What is, what does a PM on AdWords do?

• 1:38:20Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:38:21John Coogan?

  Because there's a, there's like the ad matching product, that's a product, but then there's like the dashboard with which brands go to advertise and sites and there's like, you know, a two-sided marketplace effectively. Like, what is a day in the life like?

• 1:38:37Speaker 10

  Yeah, so there's, you know, back in the, in the, the core product offering at Google back then was AdWords and AdSense.

• 1:38:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:43Speaker 10

  So AdWords was like, okay, go to Google.com, I tip in a search query, you know, the ads show up. AdSense is putting ads, whether it was text or display or image ads, video ads, on other publisher sites so that publishers can start making money from the Google search algorithm based on the content of scraping that page, surfacing the best possible ads.

• 1:39:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:39:02Speaker 10

  So my job was to kind of think about new concepts or new product launches to make more money on the AdSense side.

• 1:39:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:39:08Speaker 10

  But they were AdWords products on AdSense.

• 1:39:10John Coogan?

  Got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:12Speaker 10

  Right? But then we acquired YouTube.

• 1:39:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:13Speaker 10

  And so I was asked to move over to YouTube.

• 1:39:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:39:16Speaker 10

  And another OG, Hunter Walk, Satya's partner at Homebrew.

• 1:39:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, Homebrew.

• 1:39:20Speaker 10

  Brought me over.

• 1:39:20John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 1:39:21Speaker 10

  And so I was working at YouTube for three years.

• 1:39:23John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:39:23Speaker 10

  And this is when we were bleeding cash. Everybody was suing us. The Sony, the music labels, like the movie studios. We were burning cash like crazy.

• 1:39:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:34Speaker 10

  And Eric, Larry and Sergey come to us and they're like, hey, guys, this is like 2007, 2008. Hey, guys, like, we need to turn on the revenue spigot like yesterday.

• 1:39:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:45Speaker 10

  Like, go figure out how to get the Fortune 500 to feel comfortable putting their brands on YouTube. Because remember with UGC, User Generated Content, people were really worried about it, again, 20 years ago, right? So we had to build all new products to get them more comfortable with making that, making that, their, their brands and their products available on YouTube.

• 1:40:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:04Speaker 10

  And so, you know, we built that business to a few hundred million in revenue. I think they did like 20 billion last year.

• 1:40:09Jordi Hays?

  Linear, linear, linear TV execs at the time, were they saying like, no one's ever going to put dollars against YouTube because of that UGC risk? Were they, were they, were people saying that?

• 1:40:21Speaker 10

  Yeah, I mean, they didn't, they didn't, they didn't want to, but they didn't want to risk, because honestly YouTube's filters for content were not as good back then. So like, like weird stuff was like popping up.

• 1:40:32John Coogan?

  Totally. This was like the tagging age where like you could upload a video and tag it like skateboarding, Los Angeles, and then you hope that that's what's in the video. But there wasn't an AI model that could look inside every frame, listen to the audio and actually understand what it was, at least not yet.

• 1:40:51Jordi Hays?

  What, what, what were the, I'm, I'm super interested in, you know, every, every platform.

• 1:40:58Jordi Hays?

  Every platform that has traffic and usage is like different. So like, you know, just screen space is on a website is different than screen space on Instagram is different than screen space on, you know, a Google search result, right? What were the unique challenges with building an ad product for YouTube, given the consumption habits and the state that people come to YouTube in?

• 1:41:22Speaker 10

  Yeah, so, you know, they actually had to create a new role for me because they called me the big ads PM. So my job, to your point, on linear TV, you know, execs, they wanted their 30 second TV spot on YouTube, but we weren't going to do that. That's just like so orthogonal to the YouTube thesis. So what we did instead is we let them buy the homepage.

• 1:41:43Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:41:44Speaker 10

  Do you remember this? So we had homepage takeover.

• 1:41:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:47Speaker 10

  So you could put like these big banners up.

• 1:41:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:49Speaker 10

  And our sales team would have this calendar of 365 days.

• 1:41:51Jordi Hays?

  And they'd go sell them.

• 1:41:52Speaker 10

  And they'd go sell them for a million a pop.

• 1:41:53Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:41:54Speaker 10

  Two million a pop.

• 1:41:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:56Speaker 10

  Whatever it was on Christmas or whatever, it was like three million or whatever, right?

• 1:41:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm sure.

• 1:41:58Speaker 10

  And so, and it got tons, I mean, hundreds of millions of views.

• 1:42:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so much traffic.

• 1:42:02Speaker 10

  Yeah, so much traffic.

• 1:42:03Jordi Hays?

  Because everyone lands on the homepage then. It was pre-app.

• 1:42:05Speaker 10

  Yeah, Apple, EA, all the big brands.

• 1:42:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they would all do it.

• 1:42:08Speaker 10

  L'Oréal, they wanted to put their brands up there. And, you know, that was getting them comfortable with like a known display ad product that they were using on AdSense or somewhere else.

• 1:42:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:18Speaker 10

  And bringing them on. But with that million dollar ad buy, John, we were forcing them to actually spend money as part of that million on youtube.com through the search engine.

• 1:42:29Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:42:30Speaker 10

  So when people searched, they'd have to have their display ads and their other search products up there and running. So it got them comfortable with using YouTube.

• 1:42:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:37Speaker 10

  Because otherwise, it's like, okay, it's just a 24 hour pop.

• 1:42:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:40Speaker 10

  Don't you want to continue the campaign for the next month and leverage all the gains that you made from brand awareness by people coming to youtube.com?

• 1:42:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and they're not tied to a specific video at random.

• 1:42:49Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:42:50Jordi Hays?

  Which is where the real brand risk comes. Because it's like, your ad was shown on this particular ad. It's like, no, we were on the homepage. There's a lot of things. If you're mad at that one video, take it up with Google or YouTube, right?

• 1:42:59Speaker 10

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:43:00Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 1:43:01Speaker 10

  Exactly. And then after YouTube, I went to Netflix and I was their first head of multiple. Yeah, yeah. This was like six months after the iPad launch from Steve Jobs and we had to rebuild all the phone and tablet apps from the ground up. They were, they were growing like a weed and they looked like

• 1:43:15John Coogan?

  This is like Forrest Gump level Silicon Valley lore.

• 1:43:19John Coogan?

  Then I was at Andreessen, then I was at Netflix, then I was at Apple.

• 1:43:21Speaker 10

  You know, there's definitely gray hairs here.

• 1:43:25John Coogan?

  Every big tech company. There's like three on the mag seven that you still gotta go do tours at.

• 1:43:29Speaker 10

  Yeah, well, I did LinkedIn after that. So I got Microsoft.

• 1:43:31Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:43:33Speaker 10

  But I was, I was basically at LinkedIn.

• 1:43:35Jordi Hays?

  Please tell me you were, you were pitching them on short form vertical video on LinkedIn back when you were there. Cause they finally added it.

• 1:43:43Speaker 10

  They finally did. They finally got comfortable with it. We were talking about it back then, but they were not, they were not going for it.

• 1:43:50John Coogan?

  So yeah, what was the experience?

• 1:43:51Jordi Hays?

  It's too addictive. I spend, I spend four, five, sometimes six hours on LinkedIn, just scrolling on the vertical video.

• 1:43:57Speaker 10

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, Netflix was great, man. I mean, a very small team back then. This was 2011, 2012. Only eight PMs in the whole company. I was responsible for all the phone and tablet apps, you know, across Android, like the tablet Nook. Remember those and the Kindred Fire, Kindle Fire rather. And so we had to build that and

• 1:44:18John Coogan?

  No one really gives Bezos enough credit for using the Gen Z slang. Like he made like a fire phone and like that's what like kids would say like, oh, we should make a fire phone. Like this phone is fire. And he, and he rolled it into an entire brand. But today people would like call that out as like being too like patronizing to the younger generation. But the fire phone just sort of slid under the radar.

• 1:44:40Speaker 10

  Oh, well, it was a complete flop too.

• 1:44:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, he also has like, you know, he clearly picked up people say, you know, the derogatory like, oh, you're basic.

• 1:44:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:49Jordi Hays?

  He flipped that around and tried to turn it into a positive with him on basics.

• 1:44:53John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:44:54Jordi Hays?

  Like it's okay, it's okay.

• 1:44:56John Coogan?

  A lot of Gen Z slang over there at Amazon.

• 1:44:58Speaker 10

  That's right. Yeah, so that was a great time. And then Andreessen Horowitz about 12 years ago were looking for kind of junior folks of like like their general partners who were product people like to come join the investment team.

• 1:45:13John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:45:13Speaker 10

  And help them source, evaluate and work on investments together.

• 1:45:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:17Speaker 10

  Right, and so this was 2013.

• 1:45:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:45:19Speaker 10

  I ended up joining, the firm was only four years old at that point. Investing funds three and four, which were each 1.5 billion in size.

• 1:45:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:26Speaker 10

  At that point, they had not launched any sector-specific funds like the crypto fund or the gaming fund or anything.

• 1:45:31John Coogan?

  Or American Dynamism.

• 1:45:32Speaker 10

  Exactly, none of that was a lot, it was just one fund.

• 1:45:35John Coogan?

  It didn't even have growth yet, it was just one.

• 1:45:36Speaker 10

  It was just one fund, yeah, it was just one vehicle.

• 1:45:39John Coogan?

  But they were doing weird deals, like the Skype thing is always so funny to me. Were you around for that?

• 1:45:43Speaker 10

  Well, they were doing SPVs, yeah.

• 1:45:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:44Speaker 10

  We were doing SPVs into Pinterest, Skype, Facebook.

• 1:45:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it was very creative deal-making. It was not, which I think was like to their massive benefit.

• 1:45:53Speaker 10

  Yes.

• 1:45:53John Coogan?

  To so many experiences, obviously of financial wins, but also just like the breadth of activity at the firm allowed for those expansions to go successfully.

• 1:46:01Speaker 10

  That's right, that's right. And so, you know, obviously you can imagine, it was just an amazing whirlwind of an experience. And that's when I got to meet you and Rob, Soylent Journey too as well.

• 1:46:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, that was wild, yeah. We're with Chris Dixon.

• 1:46:13Speaker 10

  Yeah, with Chris Dixon. And that's when I started actually getting into hard tech.

• 1:46:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:17Speaker 10

  So I was kind of bored trying to find the next Netflix, the next Google. It wasn't as interesting to me as like the world of atoms.

• 1:46:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:24Speaker 10

  And so I ended up starting getting into digital health, computational biology, synthetic biology. I don't have a bio background, but like very smart people like you guys got me excited about where some of these directions were going, especially in food and chemicals and materials. And then a few of us convinced our LPAC to actually launch the bio fund.

• 1:46:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:43Speaker 10

  Which was the A16Z's first sector-specific fund that they launched in 2015.

• 1:46:47John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 1:46:47Speaker 10

  Which was a $200 million fund to go after the intersection of life sciences and computer science. And that's when I spun out and started Refactor, you know, about 10 years ago.

• 1:46:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:46:56Speaker 10

  And so. Yeah, um, if you recall, I started it with David Lee from SV Angel and then he ended up retiring, but I've been solo since and uh, yeah, I haven't hired anybody. It's literally just me running, running the firm.

• 1:47:09John Coogan?

  So you have SaaS for the tooling on the backend fund administration, like lawyers on contracts? There are certainly things that in a day you can't do. Do you not even have a executive assistant?

• 1:47:24Speaker 10

  I, I had an executive assistant for nine years, part-time.

• 1:47:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:47:28Speaker 10

  Um, who would just do all my scheduling, all that stuff. But there was a new company that Sequoia, Sequoia Partner actually ended up in, uh, leading called Blockit.

• 1:47:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:47:36Speaker 10

  And it's an AI calendaring tool.

• 1:47:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:47:38Speaker 10

  And I just, I just, I just made that change three months ago. It has been amazing.

• 1:47:42John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 1:47:43Speaker 10

  So I have like, I don't know what SaaS is, John, but I know what AI is. I'm kidding. Um, but I've got like a whole bunch of, you know, stuff, setups that I can actually like amplify my time. I have my fund admin. They do all my compliance. I have a tax and audit team.

• 1:47:57John Coogan?

  Fractional back office.

• 1:47:59Speaker 10

  Yeah, but as far as employees go, full-time employees, you're looking at them.

• 1:48:02John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:48:03Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:04John Coogan?

  That's wild. Uh, then why, why keep the fund size the same? Why not at least inflation adjust it?

• 1:48:10Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, so this, I get this question all the time.

• 1:48:12John Coogan?

  I'm sure.

• 1:48:13Speaker 10

  Oh, you, cause I had more than 50 million of interest in this fifth fund.

• 1:48:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:16Speaker 10

  Right? And so if I increase the fund size, then one of a few things might happen. A, I have to write more checks, right? And so that's, you know, as a, as a single person, like it might be a little stressful and like I won't be able to give as much time to my founders.

• 1:48:31John Coogan?

  And marginally, you might be adding like the, the company that wouldn't make it on the margin in the previous fund. So you're just adding in like worse performance.

• 1:48:39Speaker 10

  Exactly, exactly. And so if I, I only do 20 or 25 companies every fund. It's a concentrated portfolio. I'm writing one to $2 million checks and all things hard tech, bio, energy, aerospace, critical materials, robotics, physical AI. Um, so all of these things like need my time. And so if I, and I, and I want them to actually be a fund driver. Right? If I'm starting out with 10% ownership in a business, maybe after dilution, I have 5% of that company. Well, what's 5% of a billion dollar unicorn? $50 million.

• 1:49:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:07Speaker 10

  What's my fund size? $50 million. So it makes it work, right?

• 1:49:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:11Speaker 10

  And I hope there are much bigger outcomes, but like Path AI, it was, it was a great, great outcome, right? And so. I wish I had more in it, but.

• 1:49:20John Coogan?

  On dilution, is the level of dilution increasing? I mean, you look at the CapEx numbers from AI Labs, you look at the CapEx and spending and dilution that's going on at large scale, hard tech companies that are growth stage. Is that dynamic shifting? Are you worried about that? Or are you changing your strategy based on what's happening with some example companies?

• 1:49:40Speaker 10

  Oh, yeah. I mean, we're seeing it in the last six months in the areas of hard tech, deep tech, whatever you want to call it, right? Like, we're seeing it, the valuations increase, both at pre-seed and seed. And so I have to be able to make certain adjustments to make sure that I can get into the highest quality companies, right? Because like 10% of a bad company is still a bad company, right? And so to your point on adverse selection, you know, I want to avoid that. And so, you know, I've made very conscious decisions and exceptions on being below my target ownership to get into some of the very best companies, right? And so, especially in this world of AI, where I feel like the outcomes may not be a billion, they might be 10, it might be 100, right? And so.

• 1:50:21John Coogan?

  And we're seeing that constantly, even with, like, there's so many markets, I mean, the coding agent market across Cursor, Windsurf, Cognition, like, you have three companies that are all north of, there are three Decacorns in the same category effectively. Like, that is a wild situation. I can't remember the last time that happened in a competitive industry.

• 1:50:44Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:50:44John Coogan?

  Certainly, you had Uber and Lyft, but there was a divergence there at some point. And the third company was, I forget what it was called, but I think it topped out at like 100 million in valuation, maybe a billion, but it was very power law driven. And we're seeing many more categories be more oligopolistic early on, which is fascinating.

• 1:51:03Speaker 10

  Yeah, I mean, the venture math is pretty simple for a seed fund of like, like mine, like refactors. You know, if I want to be a top decile investor, you go back and look at 40 years of venture capital history. What is a top decile investor? A net 3X fund. So I take my 50 million and I turn it into 150.

• 1:51:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:21Speaker 10

  Right? But in order to do that, there's a lot of ways to make money in venture. But the vast majority of those funds that hit that top decile, net 3X mark, had at least one fund returner. Meaning they had one company return the entire fund, more likely, many multiples, like a 2, 3, or 4X.

• 1:51:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:40Speaker 10

  Right? And so, you only can do that if you have sufficient ownership at entry.

• 1:51:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:45Speaker 10

  Right? Which is why I've done more of a concentrated strategy versus, you know, I love, you know, SV Angel, Box Group, I co-invest with them, there's a bunch of other seed funds that I love working with. They write smaller checks and they probably do like 100 investments a fund.

• 1:51:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:58Speaker 10

  Right? And they get into some amazing companies.

• 1:52:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:52:01Speaker 10

  So I love working with them because they're a great source of deal flow.

• 1:52:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:04Speaker 10

  But, you know, they've got a whole team that can go and like just meet companies all day long. That's all they do. They just meet companies.

• 1:52:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:10Speaker 10

  And I want to really spend more time building like foundational relationships with my founders because I just get a lot out of that.

• 1:52:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:17Speaker 10

  Right?

• 1:52:17John Coogan?

  How are you sourcing and vetting hard tech founders? It feels like there's the SpaceX alumni mafia and then there's the wildcatters, the college dropouts who are doing a bunch of interesting stuff.

• 1:52:30Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, I have one here in LA, General Galactic, ex SpaceX, ex Farda team, building the fastest engines in space using electrolyzers.

• 1:52:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:52:39Speaker 10

  So water onboard. You guys, you guys remember the TV show, The Expanse?

• 1:52:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:52:44Speaker 10

  And for all mankind?

• 1:52:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:52:45Speaker 10

  The whole idea is like, can we use water as a fuel?

• 1:52:47John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:52:47Speaker 10

  Right? And we think that there's water at the south pole of the moon.

• 1:52:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:52:50Speaker 10

  Imagine being able to actually have a satellite powered by water?

• 1:52:54John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:52:55Speaker 10

  That can go all the way out to the moon and refuel and come back.

• 1:52:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:58Speaker 10

  And if we're going to have a civilization on the moon?

• 1:53:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:01Speaker 10

  You know, that is going to be required. Water as propellant.

• 1:53:04John Coogan?

  So what is your diligence process for that? Because that sounds like amazing, but I don't feel equipped to answer.

• 1:53:11Speaker 10

  Will that work or not? How are you deciding to make the investment? Yeah, I mean, when I invested in their pre-seed, like, you know, what was it, three or four years ago, three years, yeah, three or four years ago? It was just Halen and Luke with a deck and an idea. Yeah. And I just loved them as founders and they were extremely well referenced. Okay. And I feel like they had a sense of urgency about them. Sure. And that's what I look for. I mean, I don't really have a market map saying, I need to invest in this idea. Sure. I wanted to exist. That's where I make mistakes. Yeah. Right? Where if I fall in love with an idea, more so than a founder. Sure. I have to really watch myself. Sure, sure, sure. It's more of the other way around. I need to fall in love with the team. Yeah, yeah. I may not know what the business model is going to be or the product. Yeah. Like, this team has pivoted once before, right?

• 1:53:53Speaker 10

  And so, like, but they figured out this new idea and it's like, it's going to work. Yeah. And the Space Force loves them and like, you know, we're getting some great momentum there. And so, that's an example of one. But like, you know, when you're doing hard tech investments across all these categories, I leverage my network of professors, advisors and founders. Okay, yeah. And I don't have to pay them because they just want to meet these companies for free. Yep. Because sometimes they may want to invest. Sure, sure. Sometimes they want to be an advisor. Yep. And so, it's great to be able to do it. And so, they can sort of fact check some of the scientific claims. Jordi, any other questions?

• 1:54:22Jordi Hays?

  Is the, is the business getting more, you know, running the firm getting more fun now that you have over a decade of investments that are kind of, you know, some of the most exciting companies in hard tech are the ones that were started 10, you know, 20, in the case of SpaceX, 20 years ago, things like that. I think of companies like, you know, ZipLine, Keller's Company that are, that were incredibly exciting, probably in a deck back then, but then now are like actually coming to real, like fruition.

• 1:54:54Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:54:55Jordi Hays?

  At least here in the US. And you mentioned like, weeks like this with a lot of activity. I've certainly felt that way as an angel investor. It's like, the more time that passes, the more fun it is to be an angel investor because you're not just making new investments, but you're getting to see the, see the sort of stories of all your previous investments play out and you start to like really notch wins and it's a great feeling.

• 1:55:18Speaker 10

  It's a really great feeling. I've, you know, I've got six unicorns in the portfolio today. I've got many more hopefully coming, you know, nuclear energy company and all of these things. So, it's, oh, yes. It's great.

• 1:55:34Speaker 10

  And so, you know, there are just so many amazing companies to be built and I'm ready to work with them. And I don't know if you guys saw my, my, my new website, but I've got my call sign.

• 1:55:43John Coogan?

  Okay, what's your call sign?

• 1:55:44Speaker 10

  Better calls all.

• 1:55:45John Coogan?

  Better calls all.

• 1:55:46Speaker 10

  Better calls all, like how you pronounce my name and it's the call sign I was built for.

• 1:55:50John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:55:52Speaker 10

  Thank you, John. I appreciate it. Jordy, I'll give these to the guys.

• 1:55:55John Coogan?

  Fantastic. We have Brian Chesky from Airbnb joining in just a minute. We can pull up what else is in the timeline in the meantime. Someone, oh, there are, there are some birthday announcement. David Attenborough turned 100 years old. He's called the most consequential broadcaster of our time. And if you haven't gone down the David Attenborough rabbit hole, I highly recommend it. Major inspiration for travel. And I'm glad we have Brian Chesky from Airbnb here to talk about all things travel and his business. He's in the waiting room. We'll bring him in to the Zoom room right now. Brian, how are you doing?

• 1:56:38Brian Chesky?

  Good. How are you guys doing?

• 1:56:39John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastic. Welcome back to the show. Been too long. Yeah. Why don't we kick it off with just, you know, an update on how 2026 is going, how the business is going, what's new in your world?

• 1:56:50Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, I mean, things are really good. We've accelerated growth for the first time since the pandemic. We grew 10% last year in revenue. And this quarter, we announced that revenue was 18%. So from 10 to 18%, which is a pretty big acceleration. And marketplaces are really, really hard, right? Like, it's kind of like gravity. Once a marketplace at our size, doing around $100 billion in gross bookings a year, it's hard to come down. It's really hard to tip that curve. So this has been a pretty big feat for the team to be able to do it.

• 1:57:20John Coogan?

  So how'd you do it?

• 1:57:21Brian Chesky?

  Um, you know, it's kind of funny. A number of years ago, We, so I noticed that, you know, as we got bigger, we started losing a little bit of startup intensity, that startup energy. And I asked myself, like, how can we get that energy back? And we basically took a very small team. We named the team Project Kawaii. The name doesn't really matter, but it basically, I took a very small team of people and we said, we're going to focus on a very, very small service area. And we decided to focus on conversion rate, the guest journey. And I basically tried to work with a team like as if we're at Rouse Street. Rouse Street was the apartment that Joni and I started. And I said, we're going to act like a startup. And the team just grinded really, really hard. We weren't working like a big company. We were a very small team, grinding really hard, focusing on obsessing

• 1:58:05Brian Chesky?

  over the customer experience, really looking at the data. And we really got a lot of points in the board. And then we really started taking these pods and we really started working with the teams, trying to coach them how we worked in the early days. And I just think the pace increased, the intensity increased. We really like tried to bring in like world class people onto the team. They got very, very focused. We tried to get all the management and bureaucracy out of their way. And it's been a couple of years. And in fact, we were doing this last year, but one of the things is, as you know, financial results are lagging indicators, especially when you're a big company. So it takes sometimes a while to get the, the, the financial numbers to reflect what's happening inside the company. But I feel like we're a startup again, like more than ever. We're like, where we feel much younger and smaller than earlier. And I think with AI, that would be the other thing is

• 1:58:50Brian Chesky?

  60% of our code is now written by AI, which is twice our, a benchmark of our competitors and peers. And it's really, really helping us. AI, I think, is a huge boon to us. I don't know if it's helped the OTAs, but it's helped us with customer service. The cost per customer service ticket is down 10%. 40% people who contact me, the AI solves the problem for them. And we brought it through the entire journey. So everything is really accelerating.

• 1:59:16John Coogan?

  On the, on the, the, the, the special team that went in to optimize conversion rate, I imagine you have folks internally whose job was basically the customer journey already. Then you bring in your special team and is there some sort of culture clash there? Like, how do you set people up for success to, you know, not get too political in that environment, actually see it as an opportunity for a win, some fresh eyes, some fresh ideas? Like, what, what is required to actually have success? Because I think a lot of big companies that bring in McKinsey and they put together a big deck and everyone freaks out and thinks they're getting fired and maybe some of the good ideas are surfaced, but it never really goes through. So what, like, what, what, what, what do you have to communicate to the team that is

• 2:00:01John Coogan?

  receiving information from this new, uh, this new Qui team?

• 2:00:04Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, so it's a great thing. I mean, really what I'm talking about has played out over like really five years.

• 2:00:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:11Brian Chesky?

  And the term founder mode, what it really meant that Paul Graham wrote was about me like skipping layals to management and going into the details with teams. And instead of trying, I mean, here's my advice, if you're a CEO or a leader of a company that's big, don't try to change the whole company, try to change a corner of the company. It's kind of like, don't renovate the whole house, pick like one room and make it perfect and then go room to room. So I really told teams like, hey, like, I actually, I actually didn't replace the team. I took the team that was already working. I like handpicked some people on the team, but I really just taught them the pace and I would review work very regularly. So I'd sometimes review the work weekly or even daily to just teach them a level of intensity, a level of perfection. Um, and it was unfamiliar and uncomfortable.

• 2:00:56Brian Chesky?

  And I will tell you that not everyone liked it and some people didn't stick around the company because they didn't like that way of working, but those who stuck around and the vast majority did, they realized, wow, actually when the CEO is involved, it's actually easier, there's less bureaucracy, I try to make the work better and I try to clear all obstacles. And so I basically did that group by group. And the great thing is, like, I was in massive number of details, reviewing everything for years, but eventually it's like muscle memory. It's like, uh, I don't know, an instructor or a coach, you have to. To teach them, but once they learn and they have the muscle memory like a golf swing, you can step back and now it's muscle memory. So now I don't have to be in all these details, all these teams. But I would just say a couple of things to people listening, like great leadership is presence, not absence.

• 2:01:41Brian Chesky?

  I think a generation of management consulting or management school, management teaching, taught us that CEOs should trust their people and get out of the way. And I don't think trust and getting out of the way are the same thing. Again, I think leadership is presence. And if you, if you, you should actually be partnering with your people. You should be on the field with them. If you're a, if you're a cavalry general, you should be on a horse. You should be on the battlefield. You're not like, you're not overseas somewhere else just writing out blueprints. You gotta be on the field with them. You gotta be leading from example. I think leadership from the front, not from the back. And so these are just some of the things we do. And I think AI is gonna create like the equivalent of an AI founder mode, which is now you gotta be even more hands-on. And I don't think in the era of AI, there should be any pure people managers.

• 2:02:24Brian Chesky?

  Because you're so close to the details, to the data, that everyone has the opportunity to be hands-on. And it's hard to imagine only managing people and not agents. So I think this hands-on approach is for everyone inside of a company.

• 2:02:39John Coogan?

  How did, uh, Jordy, please?

• 2:02:42Jordi Hays?

  Do you think a lot about what you would do if you were you from 10 or 15 years ago? And you were trying to disrupt Airbnb? Like, is that, is that a helpful exercise?

• 2:02:53Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, and it's slightly, and it's slightly scary because I think that I've told, I had a meeting with our team recently. I said that 26-year-old me and Joe and Nate could, could F us up if we wanted to. And so I told them this is what I would do.

• 2:03:07Jordi Hays?

  But that's because, but that's because you understand this market better than anyone else. You know, you know the key drivers. Like, I don't think any 26-year-old off the street.

• 2:03:17Brian Chesky?

  Hey, I'm paranoid. I think that if Airbnb sits still, I think a different group of 20 or 30-year-olds could also disrupt us. And I think that's true of every one of us. And maybe, by the way, maybe that's not true. And maybe that's not reassuring because we do have a brand that's a noun and a verb. We've got a global network in fact. I, I think it's actually hard to build a network. That may not. Be possible, but the software and the app, I told our team like we can't sit still like our app is beautiful. It's really nice, but we got to be in a world of AI native. And here's a key point I would make. I do not think a chatbot is the right interface for travel or e-commerce. That might be a radical statement. Chat GPT launched third-party apps last year in March. They shut them down. I don't think a chatbot's the right interface. It's got four or five problems.

• 2:04:01Brian Chesky?

  The first problem is it's text-based, um, you know, photos are an afterthought. The second is there's no direct manipulation. You have to type every single prompt, which is fine for a conversation, but you can't like add filters. You can't cook around. Um, the third problem is, um, it's hard to compare. A lot of e-commerce and travel is comparison shopping. If you have thousands of options, the AI has to know exactly what you want to be able to show you one or two things. But you usually want to see more choices and you get lost. And most AI is single player. It's not collaborative, let alone the fact that Airbnb, it requires people to have an account. The eighty-five percent of people send a message. So what I'm trying to do is match.

• 2:04:41Jordi Hays?

  But sorry, sorry to push back there, but I'm, I'm, uh.

• 2:04:44Brian Chesky?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:45Jordi Hays?

  My wife's planning a vacation and there's like

• 2:04:51Jordi Hays?

  three-ish hotels that we're looking at and we're looking for specific dates. And she theoretically, I'm not saying the products are there yet, but theoretically you could ask a chatbot. I'm interested in staying in this location. I'm interested in these hotels. I have X, Y, Z number of people and it could go and the agent could go and pull together like relevant sort of like listings or, or room types, et cetera, pricing, show me pictures. And then actually do an analysis of the trade-offs based on all the information available as well as information in other parts of the internet and pull it together. And then she could share that chat with me and we could both review it together.

• 2:05:34Brian Chesky?

  Yes, I agree. That's the future and that's not a chatbot we described. That's not a chatbot. It's going to be a completely different interface. It's going to be, um, well, I guess you'll have to wait and see, but I, I, I think the future are not apps. The future are agents, but I don't think they're going to be text-forward. I think they're going to be really rich user interface.

• 2:05:53Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:05:53Brian Chesky?

  Um, and so I think the current chatbot paradigm, what you're describing, it can do it. I just don't think it's the best way to do what you just described. I think there's a much more immersive way to do that.

• 2:06:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, as you think back, I mean, it feels like at various points, clearly, there's been like, oh, is all of this going to move to chatbots? Or is all of is are there going to be a million competitors that are all vibe coding exactly what you have? And so is software remote? The stock has not been beaten down during the SaaS apocalypse. But have you had to process those with investors? Have you had to walk people through Airbnb strengths again?

• 2:06:30Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure you did after the like the 2028 intelligence crisis. Thankfully, they picked DoorDash instead of you guys.

• 2:06:38Brian Chesky?

  But I really appreciate them picking on someone else for once. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think like there were entire like actually when chat GPT launched a third party apps, their stock probably went down like 7%. And by the way, I thought it was a really good idea for them to do third party apps. I think it could have been successful, but they would have needed a richer SDK for it to work. And it would have like, like the App Store, Apple's App Store was good for Airbnb and was good for every company. Because they had a really rich user interface. Maybe this is the point I'm making that imagine using iMessage on your iPhone to do everything. When in fact, like every other app has a unique interface. So what I think is e-commerce, you want a very rich user interface. It would be agentic. You can be able to have a conversation with it. You can talk to it, I could talk back to it.

• 2:07:22Brian Chesky?

  But I think the point is it has to be more visual. I think a text based interface is for some solutions and a chatbot that's visual. Yeah, that would work. I'm just saying today's chatbots aren't the right solution. But the answer to your question, I had a couple of new employees, like one of our, one of our new team members is a name, a guy named Ahmed, who is the CTO of Airbnb now. He led the Lama models at Meta. And one of the comments he made to me was, he said, wow, yeah, Airbnb is so much more than the app. And in fact, the app that you see is like 20% of Airbnb. And we have typically four or five million people staying in Airbnb every night in more than 100 countries around the world. So there's a lot more to do around payments, around customer service, adjudicating everything.

• 2:08:03Brian Chesky?

  We have to, you know, we have a $3 million guarantee against after property damage for a million homes a night. That's $3 trillion. You know, there's just so many. Many types of things around managing five and a million hosts. We have a host app. So there's a lot of things that are beyond the guest app. I actually think the guest app would be pretty easy to copy. And I think in the age of AI, you can make a better app than ours and we want to make that app before anyone else does. And we want to be agentic, but I think the key is most of Airbnb is not the app that you use. It's mostly the offline experience. It's the operation.

• 2:08:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, the iMessage example is good. It's even maybe even going deeper into like old SMS. Because iMessage has hydrated so many things with the reactions and you paste a link and it hydrates it. And it's becoming more of a visual tool, but it is a long road.

• 2:08:50Brian Chesky?

  Question for you. Yeah, and one of the things, yeah, well, before you said, one of the things is the last time I was on, I did make a comment and I'll make it again. Almost every AI company is an enterprise company. And the last stat I think I said on TBPM was like three months ago and stats haven't changed. I think it was 175 companies in a YC batch and I think 16 were consumer. That trend hasn't changed. Almost everyone is going into coding. Almost everyone's going to enterprise. I think that's great. My whole point, though, is that the consumer experience hasn't fundamentally changed that much beyond a chatbot. And I think the consumer is a massive opportunity for AI and I think it's going to need to be a richer user interface.

• 2:09:29Brian Chesky?

  I think people that want to do more things, they wanted to be, I mean, the modern AI today is text, photos and buttons.

• 2:09:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:09:36Brian Chesky?

  Mostly in some videos. And I think there's a more breakthrough visual paradigm that can be much more immersive. And with the new image and video generation models, you could do something so much more immersive. So the exact example you gave of trying to book a hotel, yeah, you can do it on a chatbot. But there's probably some more breakthrough way to imagine that, to visualize it, to see the neighborhood, to see the map, to be able to talk to it, to understand where it is, to be able to compare photos, different hotels. There's something, I think, richer on the horizon.

• 2:10:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was, I was, I was surprised at the push into browsers last year from some, some different AI companies. Specifically because I always, I already felt like an LLM, like the chatbots were helping me browse around the internet. It was like just double down on that and helping me find information all over the internet. I like that it's brought together in a standardized way, right? If like the example. You know, of comparing like different hotels, right? It's nice to have it just like formatted the same way. So I'm looking at it. I'm not being like, I want to be influenced by the images and like the property, but not necessarily the design of the website, right? Because that they can be disconnected.

• 2:10:47Jordi Hays?

  I wanted to ask if you think L L M's will impact travel in the world in the way that social media did and travel trends specifically because Instagram nowadays, like a place like Marfa in like Texas, right? It's like it's random town or, you know, artistic type town in Texas. And then it just becomes a cool place because of Instagram and then, and then, and then the entire kind of town evolves because of that. I can imagine like people researching like places to go with L L M's could ultimately drive some of that and then ultimately reinforce each other. But, but what, what do you think?

• 2:11:25Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, maybe the simple framework is think about a travel journey. Step one is destination discovery. Where should I travel? Step two is flights. How do I get there? Step three is where do I stay? Airbnb hotel? Step four is like, what do I do when I get there? Restaurants, activities? And step five is typically like logistics, car rental services. And then step six is you're in the city and then you might want to do things that time spontaneously. I think L L M's or that, let's call it the L M technology applied to, I'm arguing a slightly richer user interface than typical chatbot will be revolutionary for step one, step two, for destination discovery and flights. Also because flights are not very hard to build. There's just three global distribution systems.

• 2:12:09Brian Chesky?

  Anyone can pipe in an A P I and have a flight booking app pretty, pretty quickly. And so I think the L L M's are really, really good at destination discovery. If you want to say like, hey, I want to go somewhere that's like Paris, but it's a little more affordable. It's good to go in August. I like opera. Like it's going to give you like a very rich like suggestion of places to go. Now, I think the current chatbot doesn't have really rich maps. I think it could do a lot more visually. I think eventually chatbots or this new interface could be very video based. So imagine. Chatbot that was actually video based or very, very photo based rather than a little less text based. I think that would probably be what you'd want for travel. I think what I'm describing would disrupt travel more than the current chatbots, which are more acting like Google sending referral traffic.

• 2:12:54Brian Chesky?

  And they actually, the referral traffic from these chatbots are converting higher than Google. And so actually, the chatbots are actually additive to travel companies. To dismediate travel company, you would really wanna dismediate the travel journey. It would have to be much richer.

• 2:13:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, I feel like, do you remember that company HipMonk? I think it was founded by some Y C founders, right?

• 2:13:16Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, actually, the CEO of Reddit.

• 2:13:17John Coogan?

  That's right, Steve Huffman, right?

• 2:13:20Jordi Hays?

  Wait, are you talking about HipCamp?

• 2:13:22John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:13:23Jordi Hays?

  HipMonk.

• 2:13:23John Coogan?

  HipMonk was a-

• 2:13:25Brian Chesky?

  HipMonk was a really cool flight booking.

• 2:13:26John Coogan?

  It was a really cool flight booking dashboard. And it would, it would rank the flights by pain, like a pain index. So it would say, well, you're not gonna face financial pain because it's a really cheap flight, but you do have a stopover. Or you do have to get to the airport super early. And so it would blend all these things together. And it's something that it feels like could be vibe coded over a weekend now.

• 2:13:49Brian Chesky?

  Totally.

• 2:13:49John Coogan?

  And yet, it is weird that when I open up the App Store charts, I see ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and then it's just AI chat apps. And we haven't had that breakout moment. Demis was on stage at Y C actually talking about the fact that it feels weird that we have this super intelligence in the enterprise and vibe coding. And 60% of Airbnb's code is written by AI now. And yet, we don't have like a new AAA game or a new video game that everyone's playing. And I'm wondering, like, is that a lack of creativity? Is it a lack of risk-taking? That there's just too much money? It's too, it's too, it's too obvious to be able, if you're, if you're good in AI, just go into enterprise because you'll just raise a bunch of money, get a bunch of customers. It's really easy to make money. It's more risk on in consumer.

• 2:14:33John Coogan?

  Like, what do you think needs to happen? Or is it just the intelligence isn't quite there? And maybe the next model's the one that unlocks it.

• 2:14:39Brian Chesky?

  Mike, this is such a good question. I think there's like three or four factors going on. The first factor is I saw a tweet recently that I think there's like sixty new Neo Labs being formed. And I've met a number of these researchers and a lot of them are interested in doing the same things. And I think what I'm noticing is most of these teams are purely AI people. They don't have product people or designers on their team. As they're picking things like science, they're picking things like coding. They're picking things like we want to create a different type of model. This is great, but I don't know if all sixty companies should be doing the same problem. And so what you're seeing is you don't see a big focus on people wanting to do consumer.

• 2:15:17Brian Chesky?

  I think some people think that the AGI can just figure out consumer. I think that's maybe overly simplistic thinking. I do think you have to have a point of view about consumer. So I think that's the first point. I think the second point is Silicon Valley's become more vibe and trend based than when I came to Silicon Valley two thousand and seven, although it was back then. And one of the things I think when people see enterprise companies doing well, they go into it. And I think there's this like natural flywheel. The other thing is I know in Y Combinator, for example, we teach the Y Combinator companies to use the other companies as their customers. Now, back in the day, we would get them to use our product as consumers. But I think everyone's figured out actually it's way more efficient to get them to become customers.

• 2:16:02Jordi Hays?

  It's like five code gen startups all being like, you code with me.

• 2:16:07Brian Chesky?

  Yes, exactly. And so I think enterprise makes a lot of sense until everyone does enterprise. And then suddenly, like, everyone's saying consumer's hard, but you know what's also hard? Like competing with ten other companies and enterprise doing your idea too. That's also hard. I think additionally, the image in video generation models are having a, I think Image two is almost like a Claude code breakthrough. It is so good now in the C dance video models that I think we're about to enter this new era where suddenly going beyond text is possible. And I think you're going to even be able to see real time AI generated interface in the next year or two. So my prediction is this has been the era of enterprise.

• 2:16:49Brian Chesky?

  Even ChatGPT's breakout success, I would predict that most revenue is going to be going to Codex. That's my prediction. I might be wrong, but just given how much money is going to Claude. And I think in the next two years, you're gonna see a massive revolution in consumer. And I think you're gonna need a couple of companies to lead the way. Yeah. I think we need reference points. I mean, even me saying the chatbots, not the interface. People are probably asking, well, what is? Yeah. And someone needs to be the one to do that. I mean, we're gonna try to do our part. I'm not sure Airbnb will be the company to blaze the trail, but I think someone has to. I think in another era, it would have been Apple, like the Steve Jobs era. Apple would have done that. Maybe Apple will do that, but they would have been typically the company that would have done that. Yeah.

• 2:17:31Jordi Hays?

  Are you worried that everyone is working on the exact same thing?

• 2:17:38Jordi Hays?

  And when I say exact same thing, I mean, agents that can do things on your computer and/or, you know, look at the iPhone App Store chart, or look at, uh, look at the early-stage startup market, right? Lot of companies, you know, whether the full spectrum of companies from hyperscalers to labs to Neo Labs to...

• 2:17:58Brian Chesky?

  I'm not, I'm not too worried. I might be a little worried for the entrepreneurs if they're like the 10th company doing something. I mean, like Peter Thiel was one of our earliest investors, and he used to, he wrote this book, Zero to One, that a lot of people listening probably read. He has a saying, "Competitions for losers," and you wanna kinda try to do something that no one else is doing. Back in the day, that was enterprise, because everyone was making an app. And now, I just, I do be careful about being the 10th company, um, doing something, unless you're gonna be a lot better decisively. It's just really, really hard in a crowded market. So you wanna kinda zig when everyone else is zagging. Um, so I'm not too worried, but maybe a little bit. And I would just encourage entrepreneurs to try to take, claim a space for their own. And by the way, Airbnb was that. It was kinda

• 2:18:42Brian Chesky?

  accidental, but like, like in 2007, everyone wanted to do like a social networking something. And we were like, it was tempting for us to try to be a social networking something, something as well. It was accidental that we inflated through AirBeds one weekend and created AirBed and breakfasts, and people thought it was the worst idea ever. I guess it became like the worst idea that ever worked, but we carved our own space, as did Uber. Um, and we weren't... aren't trying to be anything else. And so I kind of, and by the way, OpenAI wasn't trying to be anyone else either. Maybe they were a little bit like DeepMind, but AI was not the thing. When OpenAI Anthropic got started. So I do think there is something about not chasing trends. I think once it's a trend, it can be a little crowded.

• 2:19:27Brian Chesky?

  And to try to claim out your own space. And I would say there's so much of the US economy that AI hasn't yet touched.

• 2:19:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. On that note, how are you talking to, or how would you talk to designers or RISD students about applying non-technical skillsets or non-AI disciplines, non-computer science backgrounds to consumer? The reason I ask you that, I feel like there's a lot of, there's a lot of pushback against AI in design communities, in colleges right now broadly. AI is not particularly popular and there's a lot of fear of job loss. But at the same time, you know, I'm sure

• 2:20:15John Coogan?

  like the tools have changed throughout the history and there's, and I feel like you believe that there's incredible opportunity. But I'm worried that some people are not jumping on that opportunity because they have hesitations about various, oh, well, does this displace this tool or what, you know, how is this made or, you know, is this, is this, is this the right tool for the job? Should I even be using this?

• 2:20:40Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, I'm really worried that an entire generation of designers, artists and creative people are going to decide to kind of sit out AI. And I think it's the biggest opportunity for creative people in my lifetime. By the way, this is not the first time designers were late. We, we creatives and designers were really late to the internet and web. So going back thirty, thirty-five years, most of the prestigious designers did not get into so-called web design. Web design was considered a lower tier, lower status design and they stayed with print, all the established people. And so they did not really chase design. What ended up happening was because you had a lot of these really Designers that did not go into web design. Um, I think what happened was a lot of, there were a lot of good people that became web designers.

• 2:21:25Brian Chesky?

  But I think there became a gap between web design and engineering. You had people that, you know, maybe didn't have the full, full design skill set. And what happened was this function emerged called product management. Product management, I'm not arguing against, we have product managers, it's very important. But in industrial design, there's no product managers for the most part, they're industrial designers. In architecture, the architect is the product manager. And so I think what ended up happening in web design, designers were very, very narrow. There was a void, product managers filled that void, I'm not arguing against that model. But I think if designers sit out, we're going to see as engineers and product managers designing for them. And I think the counterpoint is designers can be engineers and product people for intensive purposes. Said differently, if I were starting Airbnb today, I'd be vibe coding and Claude code.

• 2:22:11Brian Chesky?

  And I'm trying to do it now, I'm, I'm doing it for fun, I'm not really going to be doing anything productive Airbnb. But if I was 26, I would have thought of myself as a technical person. I think all designers should think of themselves as product people and as, you know, front end designers, engineers, if, if anything. And so I think this is a boon, I don't think that the future of, of the internet has to be all text based. I think it can be very visual. I think that photo and video generation models allow you to design incredibly rich interfaces. And this is, I think, the best time in the world for designers and creative people to get involved. I think they're just a little bit afraid and I, whatever we can do to enlist them to just get their hands dirty. Many designers are, I just think more should get involved and not be, in beginning, getting out of typical wireframes.

• 2:22:57Brian Chesky?

  Just start coding.

• 2:22:58John Coogan?

  Do you think, so assuming we, we solve this problem of not enough, you know, uh, creative people working in consumer. We, we build, you know, we as a society build cool new consumer products and experiences and apps. There's something that deserves to be at the top of the app store. Has distribution and the acquisition of customers and, and users changed structurally? I, I, you know, you were very good at SEO and Google and there was a referral program. Do those patterns still work or they broken? Is there a new playbook that needs to be, uh, that needs to be rolled out for anyone who has something that's great? But they need to get it in the hands of consumers broadly?

• 2:23:43Brian Chesky?

  I think, I think we need new patterns. This is a funny saying. I think the highest turnover job of any executive at Silicon Valley might be the CMO. I don't know for sure, but like, you know, you don't see a lot of turnover CFOs, you don't see a lot of turnovers of CTOs. But like, Amazon was famously, and I don't know if, part of my theory is that like, what works in marketing changes every few years. You have to be adaptable and your old playbook gets outdated. So, marketing is unfortunately one of the hardest functions. I have a huge amount of respect for people in marketing, because once something works, it almost becomes stale, because then everyone does it. And so like, influencer marketing was really successful until everyone did it. And then, people kind of tune it out. It's this thing called banner blindness. Banner blindness is after you see something over and over,

• 2:24:27Brian Chesky?

  you tend to be blind to it, and so you need a new tactic. So, I think that, a couple of thoughts. Number one, I think that just like we need new interface design, new creative, experiential approaches, we also need new types of marketing. I don't know off the top of my head what that is. It's probably something we haven't done before. I mean, Joe and I, we did like bizarre things, like we sold collectible cereal boxes, and we like, when social media was new, we were all over social media, and when, when there were newspapers, we would hunt down reporters and like, try to get them to write about us. But, like, people ask me, how do I get users? I'm like, all the tactics from 2008 aren't relevant anymore. So, you gotta be relevant, and you gotta find new tactics.

• 2:25:09Brian Chesky?

  The second thing I'd say though, is, you're right, the distribution is mature. When we started Airbnb, the App Store was young. In fact, the internet was still young. I mean, we could just, you could launch a website and just ride the growth of the internet. And it's hard, the internet i- is not growing like it did before. In other words, people were coming on the internet in hundreds of millions a year, new users. So, I do think distribution for consumers mature. At the same time, the top apps in the App Store are new apps. They're, they're mostly chatbots. So, what that tells you, if you do something truly breakthrough and revolutionary, consumers will still probably find it. And, so that's, I think, yeah, I think the two principles are, do something so revolutionary, consumers

• 2:25:50Brian Chesky?

  will find you. And number two, you're gonna have to find your own new tactics. And, you know, anything that is standard is probably stale.

• 2:25:58Jordi Hays?

  Well said.

• 2:26:00John Coogan?

  I have one more.

• 2:26:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, looking out into the future, you've ridden the growth of the short-term rental market. You dominate it now. Is the biggest opportunity to just continue to make the best product in the category? Ride the continued growth of it? Or do you think there's another STR-sized market for Airbnb?

• 2:26:22Brian Chesky?

  I think the biggest opportunity for Airbnb is to go beyond our core business. I do think our core business does close to $100 billion in gross sales. If you net out all the other businesses, gross booking value, the total amount of reservations going through the site. I think that could probably double one day. I don't know how long that one day is, but for every person who stays in Airbnb, eight or nine stay in a hotel, I think we can get one extra person in Airbnb eventually. And I think that can get you to 200 billion. I think there's a market much larger than Airbnb, which is hotels. Again, hotels is about eight or nine times the size of Airbnb. I don't think we'll ever be a hotel-dominant site, but we are going more aggressive into hotels. A fun thing is that about half the hotels in the world are independents and boutiques. They're not chain hotels.

• 2:27:06Brian Chesky?

  And they're not really happy listing on the OTAs because they pay a higher commission than the chains. A lot of these independent hotels are being forced, or they feel like their hand is being forced to franchise, to Marriott, to Hilton, or other brands because they have loyalty programs, they can negotiate lower commissions. So we think we can be a distribution channel for these boutiques independents. That is a multi-billion-dollar market. I think another one would be services. There's no Amazon for services. And think about like, you can hit a button and a car can pick you up. You can hit a button and food can be delivered to you. But what about hitting a button and having 80 other things possible? I don't know if any one market is large, but if you add up the 80 different service verticals, that to me is another pretty big market.

• 2:27:49Brian Chesky?

  And then maybe the last one is like living, stays longer than 30 days. More and more people have a job via laptop. More people are nomadic, more people are moving around. That's another really big market. So I think for Airbnb, we're looking at really expanding to a lot of different categories. And I think that's where most of the growth is going to be in the future.

• 2:28:08John Coogan?

  Do billboards in San Francisco work on you? Going back to marketing, it's one of these old things where like, yes, I completely agree with you. Like the CMO who did the first billboard campaign back in the 50s, probably printed legend, you know, books written about them.

• 2:28:25Jordi Hays?

  The billboard campaign that worked over the last couple of years was just buy so many billboards that people are like, wait, how did this company buy so many billboards?

• 2:28:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so I'm wondering, is your thesis on marketing that these things go in cycles? And yes, we might be out of the influencer marketing meta right now, but it's going to come back in five, 10 years. Who knows?

• 2:28:45Brian Chesky?

  That's possible.

• 2:28:46John Coogan?

  Or is it rise and fall and then never again?

• 2:28:49Jordi Hays?

  I think these channels though, they don't go away. They just stop being like, if you do this thing, you're going to grow like crazy. You still need to do that thing, but it's no longer an art.

• 2:28:58John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah. What do you think?

• 2:28:59Brian Chesky?

  You guys are, okay. So, so one thing I have to acknowledge is I think all of us, advertising works better on us than we admit.

• 2:29:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:29:06Brian Chesky?

  I honestly, I, we spent a lot on like all these ads and I kind of think to myself, do these really influence people? Like, and if they do, and if they didn't, we wouldn't be spending like a billion dollars here in advertising. So I want to admit that advertising does influence us more than we realize. There's, I think a lot of studies that show like, oh, that doesn't change my mind. But you see something seven times and it probably, even if you don't want to believe it, you might start believing it.

• 2:29:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:29:29Brian Chesky?

  So clearly it works.

• 2:29:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:29:30Brian Chesky?

  I do think though, the ROI of new ideas works a lot better. Just for example, we spent a lot on advertising, but the most popular marketing we've ever done is like when the Barbie movie came out, we took a house in Malibu, we turned the Barbie Malibu dream house and it was like new and the whole internet talked about it. And the ROI of that was better than any ad we've ever done, right? We've done things like that. So I do think doing kind of crazy, slightly unhinged things that people notice. Like, I mean, you guys are successful because you're different, right? I think, I think being different is the key to marketing. And so if you have a billboard, people are probably influenced, but if you, if it looks different than another billboard, it's going to work. So I think the key to marketing is to be different because you got to stand out.

• 2:30:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, the Red Bull Baumgartner, the skydive from space is, I think, like a thousand X ROI. I think they spent less than a million dollars on that. And I think it has a billion views or something like that. Great example of that.

• 2:30:30Jordi Hays?

  Space, Airbnb.

• 2:30:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, then we'd get bored. Yeah. And that's probably why they didn't do a sequel and then another one. And they went and found something else. Let's put a plane through a tunnel or fly a, you know, hot air balloon upside down or something.

• 2:30:42Jordi Hays?

  Get a blimp, get a blimp on Airbnb that I can go on a sky cruise.

• 2:30:47John Coogan?

  Sleeping in a blimp, yeah.

• 2:30:48Brian Chesky?

  So that would be, that would be, that would be a very good idea. Maybe we can talk about.

• 2:30:52John Coogan?

  I'd love that.

• 2:30:52Jordi Hays?

  Ship it. We'll podcast.

• 2:30:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know how long it takes to get to, yeah, LA to San Francisco. If it takes me two days, three days, but I have a beautiful view.

• 2:31:01Brian Chesky?

  Would you guys do that? Like, can we talk about that?

• 2:31:03John Coogan?

  I would 100% do that.

• 2:31:04Brian Chesky?

  It'd be good advertising for us and you.

• 2:31:06John Coogan?

  So, so, so, so we say things like this all the time where we're like, oh yeah, like we'll definitely like do something. And oftentimes it's hard to schedule, but we have been talking about blimps for like over a year.

• 2:31:17Jordi Hays?

  We know we can broadcast. We've been having.

• 2:31:19John Coogan?

  To happen with a blimp.

• 2:31:20Jordi Hays?

  We've been having guests call in from their jets with Starlink and the connection is perfect. So much so that people in our chat sometimes don't know that the person's on a plane.

• 2:31:30Brian Chesky?

  Okay, you've heard it here first. Airbnb and TBPN are gonna work together on a blimp partnership. And you guys are gonna broadcast across the country on a blimp.

• 2:31:40John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:31:40Brian Chesky?

  And Airbnb's gonna be a part of that. I wanna make this work. Let's, let's.

• 2:31:43John Coogan?

  Let's, let's figure it out. We'll talk. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a great weekend and we'll talk to you soon.

• 2:31:49Jordi Hays?

  You're the man.

• 2:31:50Brian Chesky?

  All right, bye guys.

• 2:31:53John Coogan?

  We're going on a blimp, baby. For Blimp Maxing. Let's go.

• 2:31:56Speaker 03

  We've been waiting for this for so long. We've been thinking about blimps, what we could do with them. And we finally have the perfect bit. I couldn't be more excited. Thank you for tuning in to TBPN today. It's a fantastic show.

• 2:32:11John Coogan?

  Thank you to our guests and our audience. And leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. And.

• 2:32:21Jordi Hays?

  I was supposed to cut to John.

• 2:32:23John Coogan?

  There we go. Yeah.

• 2:32:25Jordi Hays?

  All right.

• 2:32:26John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 2:32:26Jordi Hays?

  We love you guys.

• 2:32:27John Coogan?

  Sign up for our newsletter. Leave us five stars. Thank you. And we'll see you on Monday.

• 2:32:31Jordi Hays?

  Have a great weekend.

• 2:32:31John Coogan?

  Goodbye.