Soham Parekh Exclusive Interview | Chris Miller, Aaron Ginn, Bridget Harris, Pryce A. Yebesi, Jacob Rintamaki, Auren Hoffman, Mehran Jalali, Kushal Byatnal, Avlok Kohli, Nico Christie, Flo Crivello

(04:05) - Soham Parekh, an Indian software engineer, has been accused by multiple U. S. startup founders of simultaneously working at several companies without disclosure, leading to his termination from firms like Playground AI and Antimetal. In a recent conversation, Parekh admitted to his actions, attributing them to financial difficulties and expressing regret for his decisions. He emphasized his commitment to focusing solely on his new role at Darwin, an AI-driven video platform, and discussed his plans to rebuild trust within the tech community. (35:31) - Top Stories (42:21) - Nat Friedman Confirms His Start at Meta (01:05:12) - Chris Miller, an economic historian and author of "Chip War," discusses the historical and ongoing global competition in semiconductor technology, emphasizing its critical role in military and economic power. He highlights China's extensive investments to reduce reliance on imported chips, particularly from Taiwan, and examines the strategic implications of U. S. export controls and the challenges in enforcing these regulations. Miller also explores the complexities of China's semiconductor industry, noting the mix of market-driven competition and state intervention, and the difficulties in replicating advanced chip manufacturing capabilities due to the intricate and capital-intensive nature of the industry. (01:38:12) - Aaron Ginn is a writer and entrepreneur known for his work on technology and innovation. In his recent article, he argues that robots will democratize luxury by making services once exclusive to the wealthy accessible to the general public, thereby enhancing the quality of life for average Americans. He emphasizes that, like past technological advancements, robots will follow a pattern of starting as luxuries for the rich before becoming widespread, ultimately benefiting society as a whole. (02:00:45) - Bridget Harris, an Associate at Founders Fund with a background in early-stage crypto investments from her time at Pantera Capital, discusses the decentralized nature of the crypto industry and the significance of stablecoins as a key development within it. She highlights the challenges posed by stablecoins to traditional banking systems, emphasizing their potential to disrupt financial institutions by offering safer, one-to-one backed alternatives to conventional bank deposits. Additionally, Harris touches on the complexities of tokenizing equities, noting that while it serves as a regulatory workaround for delivering U. S. equities to international investors, it may be less compelling for domestic markets where traditional systems are already effective. (02:13:40) - Pryce Yebesi, co-founder and CEO of Open Ledger, introduces his company, which provides an embedded accounting API enabling vertical SaaS platforms to integrate comprehensive accounting suites without building a general ledger from scratch. He discusses the challenges businesses face with fragmented financial data and how Open Ledger's APIs and components simplify embedding full accounting functionalities into products, enhancing efficiency and user experience. Yebesi also highlights the role of artificial intelligence in automating bookkeeping tasks, reducing the need for human intervention, and positioning Open Ledger as a transformative solution in the embedded fintech space. (02:21:47) - Jacob Rintamaki, a Stanford student and early supporter of AI art, discusses his collaboration with artist Ophira on creating artwork using large language models like ChatGPT. They have launched a platform, beautiful.aiart.com, to sell AI-generated art, achieving initial sales and planning to expand by adding more artists. Additionally, they mention a forthcoming documentary by Grimes and filmmaker Matt Zien, focusing on AI artists and their interactions with AI models. (02:31:41) - Auren Hoffman, an American entrepreneur and investor, is the CEO of SafeGraph and co-founder of LiveRamp. In the conversation, he critiques venture capitalists for not adhering to the ambitious advice they give to startups, highlighting their reluctance to take their own firms public, merge with others, or maintain single leadership structures. He contrasts this with private equity firms, which he views as more ambitious and proactive in scaling their businesses. (02:40:25) - Mehran Jalali, a tech entrepreneur and AI startup founder, discusses his recent project using lidar technology to uncover ancient Mayan civilizations hidden beneath dense rainforests in Belize and Mexico. By flying planes equipped with powerful lidar scanners, his team has identified previously unseen pyramids, buildings, and extensive road networks, revealing structures unseen for over a millennium. Jalali emphasizes the importance of integrating technology into archaeology, aiming to expand these efforts to scan larger areas and explore other regions like the Amazon and coastal areas to uncover submerged cities. (02:50:47) - Kushal Byatnal, co-founder and CEO of Extend, discusses his company's recent $17 million funding across seed and Series A rounds, which will accelerate their mission to transform unstructured documents into structured, validated data using AI-powered solutions. He highlights Extend's platform, built on large language models, that delivers over 95% accuracy in processing complex documents, including degraded scans and handwritten forms. Byatnal also emphasizes the platform's ability to handle various document types, such as PDFs and Excel files, and its application in industries like healthcare, finance, and supply chain, where accurate data extraction is critical. (03:07:30) - Avlok Kohli, CEO of AngelList and a serial entrepreneur, discusses the surge in venture capital activity during Q2, highlighting increased M&A and IPOs leading to significant returns for limited partners, which are being reinvested into emerging and micro VCs. He notes a 50% quarter-over-quarter increase in LP dollars flowing into these smaller funds, attributing this to a cycle of liquidity and renewed optimism in the venture ecosystem. Kohli also addresses misconceptions about the decline of emerging managers, emphasizing that real-time data from AngelList contradicts such narratives. (03:25:22) - Nico Christie, co-founder of Fundamental, introduces Shortcut, a superhuman Excel agent designed to enhance productivity by automating complex tasks within Excel. He highlights Shortcut's superior performance compared to existing tools like Gemini and Copilot, emphasizing its ability to generate code at runtime through a novel approach called Cogen. Christie also discusses plans to scale Shortcut's capacity to meet growing demand and shares insights into Fundamental's mission to develop digital humans with advanced cognitive capabilities. (03:32:54) - Flo Crivello, founder and CEO of Lindy, an AI assistant platform, discusses the challenges of maintaining trust within Silicon Valley's culture, emphasizing the importance of ethical behavior and the potential consequences of compromising on ethics. He reflects on the necessity of building a company culture centered on customer obsession and excellence to ensure long-term success. Crivello also highlights the significance of human-centric collaboration software in the evolving landscape of remote work. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://a...

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 TBN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Thursday, June 3rd, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome. The temple of technology.

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

  The fortress of finance.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  The capital of capital. And we have some breaking news. Soham Parekh, he's, he was fired multiple times yesterday, I believe. He's been fired many times in his career.

• 0:18Jordi Hays?

  First person to be fired by five startups, five plus startups in a day.

• 0:23John Coogan?

  In a day, in a day.

• 0:24Jordi Hays?

  The positive news, any.

• 0:26John Coogan?

  Timeline exploded.

• 0:26Jordi Hays?

  Any companies that he works for that are predominantly on LinkedIn?

• 0:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 0:30Jordi Hays?

  He's safe for at least a week. Another payroll cycle will come through.

• 0:34John Coogan?

  For sure. And so there's a big debate raging. Is he a scammer? Is he a misunderstood builder? How wrong was what he did? The headline here, India-based engineer is accused of juggling multiple jobs and misleading YC startups. He defends his passion for building and lands a new role at a video AI startup after online backlash. Yeah, break it down.

• 0:58Jordi Hays?

  Atlas says they hated Soham because he was profitable.

• 1:01John Coogan?

  Probably was extremely profitable.

• 1:02Jordi Hays?

  It is wild to think, you know, if, if five plus companies came out yesterday and, you know, realized they were all employing him. How many others was he, was he, is he actively working for that just didn't happen to pop up on X that day?

• 1:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. The only, it seemed like the, what do they call it in manufacturing where there's like the, the single rate limiting piece of equipment is the one that you need to like, build everything else around. Basically like, there's some choke point and for him, it was probably like stand-ups. And so could he do 10 stand-ups in?

• 1:36Jordi Hays?

  It's tough.

• 1:36John Coogan?

  At the same time?

• 1:37Jordi Hays?

  It's tough.

• 1:38John Coogan?

  It's hard to juggle those.

• 1:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:40John Coogan?

  But it seems like he got the numbers up there.

• 1:43Jordi Hays?

  I bet you, I bet you his TC was on average significantly higher than the ARR of the companies that he would work with.

• 1:50John Coogan?

  Wait, oh, his, his personal TC across all the jobs.

• 1:54Jordi Hays?

  Grouped.

• 1:54John Coogan?

  Which you put as over 2 million.

• 1:57Jordi Hays?

  Over 2 million. It's my estimate.

• 1:58John Coogan?

  I was thinking over 1.

• 2:01Jordi Hays?

  That's five, that's five. Let's say like TC 200K a year from equity.

• 2:05John Coogan?

  We're thinking cash, not equity, or are we counting the equity as dollar value?

• 2:10Jordi Hays?

  Interviewed very well.

• 2:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11Jordi Hays?

  I think pretty universally, people were impressed by him.

• 2:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:14Jordi Hays?

  He could easily go in and get, you know, 180K.

• 2:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:18Jordi Hays?

  For, you know, cash comp. And then you add some equity into that. I mean, the big question, Matt from Anti-Metal, who had hired him over two years ago, said that he was joking about how much equity he'd actually left on the table over the years because probably unlikely that he was hitting the cliff with these companies. That wasn't really the strategy.

• 2:35John Coogan?

  Managed out so quickly.

• 2:36Jordi Hays?

  Um, the new CS grads, Ben Hylak called out. Uh, they are, uh, poor, poor CS grads. So, um, getting all of the jobs.

• 2:47John Coogan?

  Well, the market is ripping. Wow, Bitcoin's almost at 110, uh, 110, $110,000. So we are in white suits to celebrate, uh, the jobs news and the market news. Uh, we'll be doing a deep dive on the news and doing our normal interviews in just a minute. But we believe we have Soham Parekh joining the show in about four minutes. So.

• 3:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:07John Coogan?

  We've been coordinating this, but we will keep you up to date. Hopefully it happens.

• 3:11Jordi Hays?

  Um, we can go through some other posts. We have a post here from Anna Mostarik. She says, "The tech industry needs a, are we dating the same guy group?" These are groups that pop up on, on, uh, Facebook and things like that where people coordinate and, and see if, um, you know, uh, girls see if they're, they're dating the same guy.

• 3:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:30Jordi Hays?

  Clearly we needed something like that or we needed, um, I think the big question that, that we were kind of debating is, you know, was he, you know, a lot of these companies don't typically have something in their, in their offer letter that says, "You legally cannot have other W2 income."

• 3:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's a big question.

• 3:50Jordi Hays?

  Yet, uh, he probably was signing full-time.

• 3:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:54Jordi Hays?

  Job offers, who knows, you know?

• 3:56John Coogan?

  So we'll have to dig in, uh, dig into it with him, but we believe he's here in the studio with us here. So, welcome to the stream, uh, Soham. Uh, good to meet you. How are you doing?

• 4:06Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 4:07John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 4:09Jordi Hays?

  The man himself.

• 4:09John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for joining.

• 4:13John Coogan?

  Why don't you, why don't you introduce yourself and just take a few minutes to just give us what's going on in your world, what's the last 24 hours been like? How would you describe yourself? What, what, what do you have to say to people?

• 4:28Jordi Hays?

  Let's go back to the very beginning. Who are you? Where do you come from?

• 4:34Soham Parekh?

  I mean, I'm, you know, I'm originally from Mumbai. I kind of grew up, you know, here all my life. Obviously drove into computer science, like, you know, coding and everything kind of without a choice, kind of process of elimination. Fell in love with it, you know, as you're aware, at this point, I'm like everyone's like favorite founding engineer pretty much or worker 17 or whatever you might call it, like AI bot or so home as a service. I don't know. But yeah, don't have much to my story essentially, you know, I've just been always passionate about, you know.

• 5:04John Coogan?

  Who was your first job?

• 5:07Soham Parekh?

  My first job was actually at a company called Allen. It was like a voice assisted like conversational startup. You know, this is back in like 2020, 2021.

• 5:15Jordi Hays?

  2020. And when did you come to the States? Because I know I was talking to Matt and he said you, you would go to the anti-metal offsites and you're very much a part of the team.

• 5:25Soham Parekh?

  So to be honest, my, my, you know, I have family in the East Coast. The first time I ever visited US was in 2018 and then I was supposed to do grad school there, you know, different financial circumstances, couldn't do that, had to kind of like, you know, not go with that plan. But obviously, you know, I have visited, you know, America mostly for like offsites and stuff, just to catch up with team members and things like that.

• 5:50John Coogan?

  Okay. So the main claim that was levied against you on X yesterday kind of started with Su Hale over at Playground. He accused you of working at multiple jobs simultaneously. Is that true?

• 6:05Soham Parekh?

  It is true. And yeah, I would, you know, love to add color to it, but you know, that is true.

• 6:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. I guess the question is, do you believe that you were in violation of your own employment contracts? Or do you believe that there was some sort of legal loophole that allowed you to do this without committing any sort of legal violation?

• 6:29Soham Parekh?

  I mean, honestly, I think going back to like how it even like started to happen and what the motivations were.

• 6:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, please.

• 6:36Soham Parekh?

  Would probably have, you know, obviously, I would want to like preface with saying like, I'm not proud of what I've done. Um, you know, that's not something that I endorse either. Um, but you know, financial circumstances essentially like no one really likes to work one forty hours a week, right? But I had to do this kind of out of necessity like I was in extremely like dire financial circumstances and somehow like, you know, I don't, I'm not a very people person. Uh, uh, I, I don't share much in terms of like what's going on with my life.

• 7:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 7:04Soham Parekh?

  Kind of in my internal thought process, you know, was kind of like getting more stressed with like, hey, you know, I want to like come out of the situation, what should I do? So it's more not, it was not more so kind of out of greed, but essentially like necessity. And just like thought that if I work like multiple places, you know, like I can basically like help myself like alleviate the situation I was in much faster.

• 7:24John Coogan?

  No, it's very economically rational. Uh, what about the conjecture that, that you had a, a, a team of junior developers underneath you, helping you actually accomplish the tasks? Is there any truth to that?

• 7:39Soham Parekh?

  I wish I had the money and I wish that was true, but that is not true.

• 7:43John Coogan?

  Really?

• 7:43Soham Parekh?

  Any of the founders that, uh, you know, uh, I've worked with can watch with that. I have multiple locations like pair program with people.

• 7:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:51Soham Parekh?

  You know, I've written every single inch of the code. Uh, you know, Anti-Metal is one of the companies I worked at.

• 7:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:56Soham Parekh?

  Uh, you know, they have pretty high bar for design, as you might know. Uh, they did a launch recently. Um, you know, there were two occasions where, you know, just before the launch, like, you know, the, the contractor who was going to do the front end for us essentially had bailed out and, you know, we as a team had to figure out and do everything, which was a team of only three engineers, right?

• 8:14Jordi Hays?

  So, so how did it originally happen though? You started with one job in twenty twenty, then you realized, hey, I could add another and then you realized you could just continuously add them? Did you create any type of financial models to kind of model out potential churn as you would get, you know? Uh, I'm curious if you're operating this looking at as basically a SaaS business, the SaaS of Soham.

• 8:37Soham Parekh?

  This was, this was not a business to me. Um. Every company that I've worked with, I have deeply cared about, like, you know, um. And again, people who spend, you know, a, a, a lot of time with me can like back that um on multiple occasions. The uh and again, I did not have any financial model. The uh like I said, the only motivation for me was, hey, you know, I'm in a financial jeopardy.

• 8:58John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 8:58Soham Parekh?

  You know, and so I didn't do this until twenty twenty two. Twenty twenty two is actually when I was, you know, running into issues. I had deferred my, you know, grad school uh admit and uh, you know, did like an online degree. But basically, you know, did not have like enough uh uh uh, you know, like uh essentially like, you know, uh just to get out of the situation I was in.

• 9:20John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 9:20Soham Parekh?

  Don't want to talk like too much deeply about it, but.

• 9:22John Coogan?

  No, no, that's fine.

• 9:23Soham Parekh?

  So, yeah, so that's kind of why.

• 9:24Jordi Hays?

  Talk about, talk about your own, talk about your own uh abilities. Every, it, it seemed universal that the, the, the teams that you worked on said that you were extremely talented, that you interviewed incredibly well. Um. It's, you know, easy for, you know, new C S grads to be frustrated because you were probably running laps around them in the interview process. But um, but yeah, uh it's very impressive if you actually didn't have a junior team and you were just, you know, juggling, you know, it seems uh estimates seem to put it at maybe five, five companies at once.

• 9:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, are you just, are you just like a hyper productive? Are you leveraging A I tools and coding assistants? Are you just able to move really quickly in a startup environment or are you also like talented like systems engineering and algorithms and like solving really, really hard computational program uh problems?

• 10:13Soham Parekh?

  So I'll preface with this. Um. You know, some of these companies I worked at was before the co-pilot boom, right? There were no A I-assisted programming. At least three startups have went on the record like saying this. People who've programmed program that we can also watch with this. The, the real truth is, you know, there's this funny line in some of my interviews, like T L D R, I don't do anything outside coding. That is very true. And if you're like spending hours, like, you know, sitting in front of the computer, you will eventually like, at least I hope so, like get good at it. Um. I I I would, there's obviously a lot for me to learn in general. Uh, you know, I wouldn't say like I'm, you know, like a, a, a, like a, a, I don't know what they call like, uh, you know, like a platform engine or something like, you know, top principle or whatever.

• 10:54Soham Parekh?

  But I I would like to believe that I was a decent enough, a good enough engineer to essentially be able to work at three places because that's the only thing I did the entire day.

• 11:03John Coogan?

  So, so an average day for you, an average week for you, it feels like basically maybe you sleep for six to eight hours and then you're basically programming for twelve to fourteen hours every single day for seven days a week.

• 11:17Jordi Hays?

  But as, as some of these, you know, new coding, uh, code gen tools came out, Claude code, cursor, Devon, et cetera. Were, did you feel like you could add maybe a few more jobs? Were you getting, you know, more efficient or are you still handcrafted code, farm to table, organic, you know, handmade?

• 11:34Soham Parekh?

  I mean, obviously like, you know, uh, having more like, uh, you know, AI assisted tooling like definitely help, but it did not amount to like me working on more jobs. Um, because like I would still love to spend, you know, a, a, a justifiable hour like working on something. And it doesn't have like a measure. It's not like, hey, you know, I'm going to split time like four hours for this company, five hours for that company. Like I was essentially like working until I got something done for that day. And, um, I think people around me will probably say this, that I am notoriously known for not sleeping. Um, I am, uh, you know, I'm a serial like non sleeper at this point is what I'd say.

• 12:09John Coogan?

  I'm sorry, yeah.

• 12:11Soham Parekh?

  But yeah, and as far as the interviews go, right? Like so one, there, there's also been a lot of things around like, hey, you know, I probably used, uh, you know, some sort of like tool like Clouly, which, you know, I would love for the founder to essentially go on record and say, if I'm a paying customer, I'm not. Um, but, uh, or, or some sort of like, you know, how to game the system. The truth is a lot of these companies did not have lead code style problems. And if they did, I would have bombed interviews, you know, because I don't practice lead code as much. I'm, I know my data structure as well. I know what to use when, but you know, like typically a gun.

• 12:43Jordi Hays?

  Well, you're also great at cold email. I saw some of these cold emails. You got a great format. It pulls people in. It, it, it shows your personality. It shows that you care about, you know, coding. And I think that helps a lot as well.

• 12:54John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 12:56Soham Parekh?

  Yeah, I mean, I do care about coding a lot, but again, like, you know, most of these companies essentially had a take home assessment or a work trial, right? So it's very difficult to like game a work trial or game a take home assessment like you have to do it and then deliver it. Um, and I, I did everything, you know, on my own, like I was also doing the work trials on my own and. Um, yeah, like I guess I'll, I'll leave it at that. If, if they did have lead code, I would have bombed the interviews, but luckily they didn't like startups usually just like care more about like.

• 13:26John Coogan?

  What you would do. Talk a little bit about the companies that you chose to work for, you applied to. Do you think you could have pulled this off with Microsoft, Google, Amazon and split three times? Or do they have defenses in place that would make this difficult? There's a variety of memes around maybe big tech companies. It's easier work, maybe startups are harder. I'm just kind of curious about, it seems like you went for a lot of startups. What was the reasoning behind that?

• 13:56Soham Parekh?

  Yeah, so it feels counterintuitive. Like if I was in a need of money, like why would I work for? You know, startups as opposed to big time because they clearly pay well, they have a nine to five schedule. For the most part, like I would say, you know, people don't really care about like what you are essentially like doing. Um, the thing with me is like, if you're spending, you know, multiple hours a week, like working on something. You would have to at least decently be passionate about it because otherwise you'll just like burn out. Um, like I said, you know, each of these companies that I've worked for and again, uh, you know, founders, some of the founders who spend meaningful time with me can vouch. Um, you know, would, would say that I actually cared about these companies. So it wasn't like cold email without context.

• 14:37Soham Parekh?

  Like I deeply read into what a company was doing, what the business model was, you know, who their customers were. I had great ideas about like, you know, what to build for them, what not to build for them, you know, what the platform is like. Um, you know, I did deliver like beyond engineering for a lot of these companies and, um. Yeah, like it was more kind of like, hey, if I'm spending like one forty hours, like I want to do something that I actually care about. Like, I don't want to like, you know, do nine to five and kind of like center a div in like six hours or something. Um, you know, that's, that's just not me because I do like what I do and, and, and that's kind of.

• 15:10Jordi Hays?

  Cold email hack. Send the cold emails from the heart. Put some real thought into them.

• 15:15John Coogan?

  Um, talk to me about, um, other alternatives that you may be considered or maybe didn't. Um, did you ever think about going to a startup and saying like, hey, I'm doing a great job. I'm working forty hours a week. I need to make more money. I'd like to take on a second job. It would, would, would that be amenable to you? Do you think that founders might be actually open to that?

• 15:38Jordi Hays?

  Or say, I'm working eighteen hours a day. Can you pay?

• 15:41John Coogan?

  Can you pay me three times as much?

• 15:42Jordi Hays?

  Pay me.

• 15:43John Coogan?

  I'm doing the work of three devs because there is a world where you could have allocated all that time. And one startup would have gotten three times as much value, but they probably should have paid you three times as much, maybe to make that balance out. And so did you ever have those types of decisions? Like we're seeing this with the AI talent wars, the, the ten X. You can think of yourself as like a three to five X engineer, I guess. No offense, but you know, the hundred X engineers are getting a hundred million.

• 16:08Jordi Hays?

  Maybe be ten X if you just, if you really focus.

• 16:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, and so it, it's almost a question of like, why couldn't you get the money that you wanted from a single job? What was, what was the, what was the stumbling block there?

• 16:20Soham Parekh?

  Yeah, I think the part where, you know, I should have basically done is like come clean with my situation. Uh, you know, to be very frank with you, like I mentioned, like I'm not a good, uh, you know, person with sharing what my internal conflicts are. I do like to keep boundaries between my personal and family, you know, like whatever is like going with me mentally. And that's true with any person I'm with as well, like, and that's outside of work. Um, so one, there was an embarrassment to essentially like admitting that, hey, you know, I have this struggles mentally. Uh, you know, like, uh, and talk in open about it. And then the second thing is, you know, I really did not like think through this because like I said, it was an action that was done more out of desperation to get out of the situation I was in rather than like.

• 17:01John Coogan?

  I mean, the flip side here is that you you don't necessarily need to have something going on in your family to justify a $10 million salary or a $1 million salary. Like LeBron James doesn't need to say, oh, like, you know, I have a sob story and that's why I need 50 million dollar contract. He's like, I'm delivering this value to you and you should pay me the value that I'm creating. And so I'm wondering if you ever considered just coming to a founder and saying like, I can do the job of three engineers, but you got to pay me three times as much.

• 17:28Soham Parekh?

  Honestly, I it again feels counterintuitive. Like, I don't really care much about the money. I was really into it for building. So like greed was not like an incentive for me. Again, regardless of my financial circumstances, in most of these companies, I always took the lower, you know, pay a higher equity offer. Again, like equity for me was not even like vested until I would make the move to US, which like I said, you know, I was based out of India. So I had to go through a whole visa process in order to make that happen. So I wouldn't even be getting equity as long as my immigration was uncertain, which it was. So all the decisions seem counterintuitive.

• 18:06Soham Parekh?

  Basically for me is like, hey, you know, I have to do something to kind of get out of the situation I'm in. I also want to do spend time like building something meaningful. You know, as long as I like the startup and as long as it's not like hand to mouth, it did not matter too much. Like, you know.

• 18:21Jordi Hays?

  So what are you going to do now? You have the intention of the entire tech ecosystem. The and I appreciate how candid you've been with us and and.

• 18:31John Coogan?

  I want to talk about Dev Shop specifically.

• 18:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, there's a few angles here. You could do the the Dev Shop of Soham Perik. I think you would be able to get a handful of clients immediately. I think you could sign a max out, a max out contract with Cluley. They would probably pay you a a pretty penny to to join the team over there. And I also, it sounds like you're interested in joining as a founding engineer of a new AI startup. So how are you thinking about your opportunities right now? And and how can you turn this into a win?

• 19:05Soham Parekh?

  Yeah, look like I've, you know, regardless of the situation, like I've been privileged to like work with some of these companies like, you know, um, Anti-Matter, you know, Shaisin Mad, the founders, like Cincelabs, you know, Prady, uh, you know, Ruzaba. They're one of the most, uh, you know, crack places I've been at in general, partly because they had me, maybe not, I don't know. Uh, I guess I'm a bit, but um, I think the main thing is like, I am really excited about what I'm going to be a part of next. So, um, you know, working with a company called Darwin, they are essentially like building a new like AI-driven like data platform, like, you know, video platform essentially for more kind of like, you know, uh, UGC-style media. And we're going to release to the market very shortly. Um, this is the only thing I'm going to focus on.

• 19:47Soham Parekh?

  Um, I, I think, you know, they've put a bet on me. I have a lot to prove. Um, and there's, there is not a lot to be said, so, yeah.

• 19:55John Coogan?

  How, how, how do you rebuild trust? How do you, how do you give them the confidence that this isn't just, you're focused on it for a couple of weeks and then the second job creeps in and then the third job creeps in? Um, is there something that you see happening down the, down the line around, um, you know, worker monitoring? Or, or checking when the GitHub commits are coming in or doing something to understand if someone else is, uh, is, is working multiple places. Somebody was saying we, like, um, tech needs a, like a, some sort of service to see, hey, are we employing the same company? Uh, how do you, how do you rebuild trust and, and guarantee that you won't be working multiple jobs against the will of the current employer?

• 20:40Soham Parekh?

  So I, I think like, you know, all, all of this that has taught me is like, you know, just coming in kind of like probably, and this makes people understand your situation. After all, like, we all are humans. Um, I don't anticipate like working on multiple gigs again, but you know, my financial circumstances have not changed. So if, even if it did came to them, which it won't, like, right now, I'm very clear that this is my sole focus. Um, you know, I would probably like approach with like being very candid with the founders and just letting them know. And if that's not a possibility, you know, that's fine. Um, you know, uh, maybe I can, uh, figure a way out where, you know, there is like a higher pay or whatever. Kind of like to your point, right? Um, but. In in in another spectrum of the world, I think like what I've really realized is that I just,

• 21:23Soham Parekh?

  you know, I just want to be a part of like building something that I can like focus on a longer term. And that's always been the goal, uh, you know, it is always a goal with any of these companies I've worked with. So, um, you know, I, uh, ob- obviously, you know, like I, uh, I, I, I believe in actions more than words. Like, I guess what we'll build and launch in a month would probably be a testament to, you know, what we've been able to build.

• 21:46Jordi Hays?

  Well, you're certainly going to have a lot of attention around that launch. I hope you, uh, uh, now is probably not the right time to renegotiate your, your, uh, offer letter for the new company. You should probably, uh, you know, stick with it. But, uh, I think you're going to bring a lot of marketing, uh, value to, to Darwin, the new company you're joining. What's the reaction been like, uh, at home? You getting a lot of messages from, from?

• 22:09John Coogan?

  Has this broken tech acts and broken containment into kind of your, your, your, the world beyond? Just people asking you about this?

• 22:19Soham Parekh?

  Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, reaction is natural, like a ton of people have been asking about this. Uh, what's also funny is like, you know, some of the memes like, um, I, I am very new to Twitter. I joined Twitter yesterday, so this was a lesson for me in social media in general. Like, I am not a social media person, so it just like, I was like, you know, very overwhelmed with it in general. Um, obviously, you know, feeling shitty about it as well. Like I, like I said, you know, I'm not a proud, very proud of what I did. I think there was a way where I could have course corrected in, in a much different manner. Um, so there's a lot of like reflection in general, but I think friends and family have been strong. Uh, you know, like I said, I was lucky to work at some of these places where I had really close relationships with the founders. Uh, you know, a lot of them reached out, you know, they, uh, to essentially be like helpful here, kind of give advice on what I should be doing next.

• 23:02Soham Parekh?

  Um, even like, you know, sometimes like staying through with me, like, you know, uh, just to make sure that I'm like, all right. Um, you know, like, uh,

• 23:10Jordi Hays?

  No, I think it says a lot that, that a, a number of the people that, that you worked for that fired you because you were working multiple jobs still care about you. It shows that when you were working for them, at least, you know, that, that it does seem like you really, you really did care.

• 23:23John Coogan?

  Are there any, uh, startups that you've worked for in the past that you were, uh, working multiple jobs for that you haven't gotten a chance to apologize to yet that you plan to?

• 23:33Soham Parekh?

  I mean, in general, like I plan to apologize to everyone, like that's, that goes without saying.

• 23:38Jordi Hays?

  Any companies that you still need to resign from?

• 23:43Soham Parekh?

  None whatsoever. Dakman is the only focus I have.

• 23:45John Coogan?

  That's great. Okay, he's on the record.

• 23:47Jordi Hays?

  You're on the right path.

• 23:49John Coogan?

  On the right path. Well, I'm rooting for you. I hope this is a story of redemption. I believe in forgiveness. I believe in mistakes and I'm optimistic that this can have a good ending.

• 23:58Jordi Hays?

  Me too. So to be clear, your ex account is at realsohamparik, right?

• 24:04Soham Parekh?

  Yeah.

• 24:05Jordi Hays?

  That's the real one?

• 24:05John Coogan?

  That's the real one.

• 24:06Jordi Hays?

  Okay, because there's a lot of fake ones floating out there trying to take, uh, trying to ride the hype wave.

• 24:12Soham Parekh?

  Yeah, I mean, a hundred percent. There's been so many fake accounts and a lot of fake narratives as well. But yeah, that is my real account. There's, there's one person who asked me to post a picture of banana on my head with a fork in my hand. And I did not have banana at my home at that point in time, but I was trying to do that just to show them.

• 24:33Jordi Hays?

  Drift of Parekh.

• 24:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 24:36Soham Parekh?

  But it's, it's been, it's been interestingly like, uh, uh, in a while to like notice how people are like taking this in different ways. But, um, yeah, that kind of helps like just feel a little bit less shitty about it, but yeah.

• 24:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, what, what are the, uh, the questions here? Remote versus in office, US versus international AI.

• 24:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, I think we had this post from Ahmad at Mercury. I think, I think the reason this struck such a chord is, you know, again, it's this remote angle, the international angle, the ideas around a 10x engineer, the potential of new AI tools. But, uh, this has been really helpful.

• 25:15John Coogan?

  It's been very helpful.

• 25:16Jordi Hays?

  And I think, um, you were getting, uh, you provided, uh, entertainment for a lot of people the last 24 hours. So I'm glad to hear that you're going to apologize to everybody that, that you misled. And, uh, I am excited to follow, uh, what you do next.

• 25:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. Thanks for stopping by.

• 25:33Soham Parekh?

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 25:35Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 25:35John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 25:36Jordi Hays?

  We'll talk soon.

• 25:37John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 25:39John Coogan?

  Fascinating.

• 25:40Jordi Hays?

  Fascinating. I think he's handling it quite well.

• 25:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I do think this is a situation where the damage is hopefully minimal to the companies. It's not, it's not like he was working multiple jobs and then there was like a, you know, the customer database leaked because he wrote bad code because he was working multiple jobs, too stressed out. There's no, there's no one alleging that yet, at least that we've seen.

• 26:02Jordi Hays?

  And I think the founders that hired him and then fired him, in general,

• 26:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:08Jordi Hays?

  probably noticed it pretty quickly.

• 26:09John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 26:10Jordi Hays?

  This is not like somebody joining a big tech company and working there for five years, not doing any work and just sort of like being a cog in the machine.

• 26:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:18Jordi Hays?

  And so, yeah, ultimately, it's unfortunate. Silicon Valley runs on trust.

• 26:21John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 26:22Jordi Hays?

  He violated that trust, but I was happy to see that he was, you know, really apologetic and...

• 26:29John Coogan?

  And that's the thing about the startup ecosystem, like we, like Silicon Valley has really, really leaned into the trust thing to the point where a venture capitalist can shake your hand and say, "I'm gonna invest a million dollars." And the expectation is that they actually do that and they don't back out. And if they do back out, it's, it's a big thing. It's a big deal. And so, yeah, even, even though, you know, I don't know how, I don't know how ironclad every work contract is. Like, we were going back and forth on like, does, is there a specific no moonlighting clause that describes exactly what you can do in your free time? And can you go do DoorDash or Uber Eats on the side? Or can you take a, you know, you know, can you earn an ex-creator pay, pay share, like rev share?

• 27:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:11John Coogan?

  Like, does that count as moonlighting? You're posting, you're making 200 bucks or 1,000 bucks from X. Is that moonlighting? You know, maybe there's not some clause... But people know what full-time means. And if I send you an offer, I'm, I'm offering you a full-time job, I'm expecting you not to take another full-time job.

• 27:25Jordi Hays?

  To be all in.

• 27:25John Coogan?

  Like, maybe, yeah, maybe, you know, someone throws you 50 bucks to, you know, walk their dog once, you know, once on the, random on the weekend. But the idea is that you're not taking a very similar job at another company.

• 27:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:36John Coogan?

  So, it seems pretty clear, even if there's no major, like, legal ramifications. So, I don't know. He seems, he seems like he's, he's, he's handling it well and, and going on the, the correct apology tour. And there could be the good ending here.

• 27:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Lulu said, "Come clean, be sorry." He did that. "Be willing to laugh at yourself, embrace a good meme."

• 27:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:55Jordi Hays?

  Worker 17. He did that. "Feed the curiosity. What was it like? What did you learn? Don't sugarcoat." I thought it was interesting that, that he, it would have been hilarious if he came out and said, "Oh yeah, I'm running, you know, 10 Codex agents, I'm running Devon, I'm using Claude Code." He was just like, "No, I just worked really hard."

• 28:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:14Jordi Hays?

  "And I don't do anything other than..."

• 28:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it is always tough with this stuff because, you know, like, somebody who would lie about working multiple jobs might just come on here and lie to us, but he seemed, he seemed, he seemed sincere. And so I'm, I'm, I'm inclined to believe that he is an insomniac and just was working three jobs, 40 hours a week each, and that's 120 hours, and that's, you know, Morgan Stanley Investment Bank Associate.

• 28:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:38John Coogan?

  You know, work, but it, it does raise this question of like, like, there are people out there who are willing to work 100 hours, and if they go to Wall Street, they get comped on that immediately, and startups don't really have a mechanism.

• 28:54Jordi Hays?

  Not necessarily immediately.

• 28:55John Coogan?

  No, but, but, but the, the, the comp and the expectation is matched, and, and like, I think Wall Street has like absorbed that, that latent demand for work and capacity of young people who are down to grind, basically. And they can choose to opt out of it and get, getting a different job, but they kind of know what they're going into. Like, no one, no one, no one shows up at Goldman Sachs and is like, "Oh my God, I had no idea I was gonna have to like, do a slide deck on Saturday." Right? But in startups, like, there's kind of this like, "Hey, we're, we have this, you know, good work culture, it's kind of chill, let's, you know, do 40 hours a week." But then, you know, also, there's no real way to make three times as much if you're willing to work three times as hard. So, yeah, it's interesting, it's an interesting story.

• 29:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and to be honest, he, he posted yesterday, he said, "There's a lot being said about me right now. Most of you don't know the full story. If there's one thing to know about me, it's that I love to build." Which I do believe. He said, "That's it. I've been isolated, written off and shut out by nearly everyone I've known and every company I've worked at." That doesn't feel completely true because he's in conversation with the CEOs that had hired him. But building is the only thing I've truly known and it's what I'll keep doing. Earlier today, the timing of this is amazing. Earlier today, I signed an exclusive founding deal to be founding engineer. At one company and one company only. They were the only ones willing to bet on me at this time. I actually think there's a lot of companies that would take a bet on him now.

• 30:18Jordi Hays?

  And it just has to be, you have to promise me that you're going to work for this, just for us.

• 30:24John Coogan?

  Exclusively.

• 30:25Jordi Hays?

  And, and I think the right thing to do for this next company is try to bring him out to SF or wherever they're based.

• 30:30John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 30:31Jordi Hays?

  Because you will probably spend 18 hours a day in the office.

• 30:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's so easy to deal with a, with a known unknown or like a known risk factor. It's the devil you know. Like forever, this will follow him. It's like, hey, monitor this guy. Make sure he's not working a second job.

• 30:43Jordi Hays?

  If you scroll down on this post, he says, "I'm pissed and I've got something to prove." It's like.

• 30:48John Coogan?

  He had a very aggressive posting style and he came on and was just very like sweet and nice and just like kind of contrite.

• 30:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it seems like he got in a bad spot. He made some bad decisions.

• 30:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:57Jordi Hays?

  He's sorry about it and he's now got something to prove.

• 31:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:01Jordi Hays?

  And he's now infamous.

• 31:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, infamous. Well, that's a fun story. Uh, I'm glad we were able to get him on and cover it. That's, uh, that's part of the beauty of the show. Live, baby. Uh, anyway.

• 31:13Jordi Hays?

  News maxing. Yeah. And I think that provides some good closure to this chapter of the timeline.

• 31:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, we have a million messages coming in from various sources. Um, I can go through a little bit of the stories if you want. Um, we gotta ring the gong though, because the US economy added 147,000 new jobs. Let's go. Manufacturers are.

• 31:43John Coogan?

  It's like a very, very slight jobs beat. It's not actually bad. We're very excited. Joe Weisenthal has a post in the stack somewhere where he says.

• 31:54Jordi Hays?

  Breaking. It's a beat. 147,000 new jobs. Unemployment rate falls to 4.1%. Last month revised higher. Analysts had expected 106K new jobs and a 4.3% unemployment rate. So we love to see it. Stark contrast with the calls from our president to reduce rates.

• 32:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:17Jordi Hays?

  If jobs report is good.

• 32:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, not gonna happen.

• 32:21Jordi Hays?

  It's hard to argue to drop them.

• 32:23John Coogan?

  So manufacturers are pausing hiring amid tariff uncertainty while unemployment fell partly because fewer people are looking for work. So that's never a good sign, but it does seem like the the American consumer seems resilient and things are. We're staying in the kangaroo market. We're neither, we're neither, you know, it's not so over, but we're maybe not so back just yet. We're kind of right back where we started at the beginning of the year in terms of the stock market rates. Anyway, the CEO of Ford had a controversial quote in the Wall Street Journal.

• 32:56Jordi Hays?

  He's AGI-pilled.

• 32:57John Coogan?

  He's AGI-pilled. He's been talking to Dario over at Anthropic.

• 33:01Jordi Hays?

  Clearly.

• 33:02John Coogan?

  So the CEO of Ford said AI will replace, quote, literally half of all white collar workers, which is something that was definitely said on Dwarsh Patel first. I think Sholto might have mentioned that and then Dario mentioned it in the post as well. And Anthropic's been kind of noodling on this and then OpenAI and Meta have kind of stayed back from that. And a lot of the other labs have kind of said like, I don't know, like, you know, I think the quote from Sam was like, Dario is a scientist. Like, he should apply more scientific rigor here to like, do this prediction. Like, this is a very jarring, bold prediction.

• 33:38Jordi Hays?

  Brad Lightcap over at.

• 33:38John Coogan?

  That's right, Brad Lightcap.

• 33:39Jordi Hays?

  At OpenAI was pushing back a little bit.

• 33:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:42Jordi Hays?

  But look, when he was making these comments, he was also talking about just how advanced Xiaomi and these other Chinese EV manufacturers are. So this was coming from a broader conversation.

• 33:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm sure.

• 33:56Jordi Hays?

  And it's a good, you know, ultimately, whether or not he actually believes this is true. He's signaling to the market that he's. He's on top of this trend.

• 34:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:06Jordi Hays?

  And if this does turn out to be the case, it's very possible that Ford will be a beneficiary in some way.

• 34:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a, it's a, it's a tough business. And I'm sure he's looking to the Chinese manufacturers and looking at their, their cog structure and their, and their SG and A spend relative to revenue and, and seeing how they can benchmark. Not that, not that the Chinese EV manufacturers are necessarily adopting AI any faster than Ford, but it's certainly the idea of like how the shape of the business will be.

• 34:39Jordi Hays?

  Well, a little bit. They do like facial recognition tech.

• 34:42John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 34:42Jordi Hays?

  I think it will like you walk up to your car.

• 34:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:45Jordi Hays?

  Unlock.

• 34:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:46Jordi Hays?

  For you.

• 34:47John Coogan?

  I think there's a story about the Ford CEO dailying a Chinese car just to get a taste of like, okay, we need to step it up.

• 34:56Jordi Hays?

  The future.

• 34:56John Coogan?

  A bunch of different ways. Yeah.

• 34:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:58John Coogan?

  In other.

• 34:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's no reason that, that Ford can't catch up on these type of things.

• 35:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. In other news, we have a massive story.

• 35:06Jordi Hays?

  Huge story.

• 35:07John Coogan?

  The United Kingdom, folks. Britain's royals gave up their luxury train citing fiscal restraint. This was sent to us by a friend.

• 35:19John Coogan?

  In an era of hard choices for economies around the world, Britain's royal family is also playing its part, waving farewell to perhaps its most extravagant mode of transport, the royal train. The House of Windsor's personalized service that chugs the royals to engagements will be axed in 2027 after a review concluded that it no longer offered value for money and that two new helicopters.

• 35:44Jordi Hays?

  Nothing is sacred anymore.

• 35:45John Coogan?

  I know.

• 35:46Jordi Hays?

  Nothing is sacred anymore, John.

• 35:47John Coogan?

  They're getting rid of their train. The locomotive service, which features bedroom compartments, a dining room, and a study has, has been a lightning rod for anti-monarchy campaigners who pointed to its costs as emblematic of royal excess.

• 36:04Jordi Hays?

  Shows the power of democracy that.

• 36:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:06Jordi Hays?

  That we have anti-monarchy campaign.

• 36:08John Coogan?

  You can't even be a king with a private train anymore. What's happening to the world? It's ridiculous.

• 36:15John Coogan?

  You know, royal excess? What is royalty if not excessive? It, it, it's the brand. It's, it's, it's terrible. Last year, King Charles III. Undertook a 190 mile rail trip to the capital from England's East Midlands, which was billed at nearly $62,000. It's like the price of a Model S.

• 36:39Jordi Hays?

  Wait, the trip was 62?

• 36:41John Coogan?

  It was 190 mile rail trip on a private train car. And so they have to staff it. They have to load it up with fuel and food and all this different stuff. And the study has to have books.

• 36:50Jordi Hays?

  Does that not strike you as, I mean, it's, it's a, it's.

• 36:52John Coogan?

  $62,000 for 190 miles?

• 36:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but 190 miles, it's across maybe a few days.

• 37:00John Coogan?

  Probably bringing multiple people too.

• 37:02Jordi Hays?

  He's having meetings on there.

• 37:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, it depends on how many people were on there.

• 37:04Jordi Hays?

  It's cheaper than, you know, taking a, zipping around in a PJ, that whole.

• 37:08John Coogan?

  Well, they, well, a review by the government concluded that buying two new helicopters would be a relative, a reliable alternative, or a viable alternative.

• 37:20Jordi Hays?

  What about safety, though? I have to imagine trains have a better safety.

• 37:24John Coogan?

  I would think so. I would think so. James Chalmers, who manages the royal finances as keeper of the privy purse, said, "The decision to halt the personal train would mean the fondest of farewells." Yes. This is the Wall Street Journal. "In moving forwards, we must not be bound by the past," he added. Oh, rough. "This kind of public fiscal self-flagellation is nothing new to the British monarchy, which has often at pains to point out its value to UK taxpayers who bankroll the franchise. The late Queen Elizabeth II gave up the royal yacht in the 1990s in the name of financial prudence.

• 38:05John Coogan?

  But this latest decision is all the more surprising, given that the royal family's finances are arguably stronger than they've ever been in modern times. The Royal Train."

• 38:15Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for the royal family's finances.

• 38:17John Coogan?

  Let's give it up for the royal family's finances. Thank you.

• 38:20Jordi Hays?

  I don't think ramps in, in the UK yet, but they'll be able to get to the next level, obviously, when, when that happens.

• 38:29John Coogan?

  The Royal Train will stop rolling for the first time since Queen Victoria first commissioned coaches to be pulled by a locomotive in the 1800s. The train's importance in an age of air travel has repeatedly come into question. Once the train is mothballed, Charles, who has long advocated protecting the environment, will instead use two newly leased helicopters that run on sustainable aviation fuel. The train will be taken on one more tour of Britain before it is retired and can be placed on display. So, R.I.P. to the Royal Train.

• 39:02Jordi Hays?

  The Royal Train.

• 39:03John Coogan?

  Hopefully it makes a comeback at some point.

• 39:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:05John Coogan?

  I think American train, you know, the Royals are backing off, let's get an American train.

• 39:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is actually could be bullish for trains because them shutting it down creates an opportunity for them to start it back up, which would be a positive catalyst for the train.

• 39:18John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, I agree. Well, you mentioned Ramp. Time is money, save both. Easy is corporate cards, bill paying its accounting and a whole lot more. All in one place. If you're trying to expense train trips, do it on Ramp.

• 39:29Jordi Hays?

  That's the way to do it. Ramp travel, baby.

• 39:30John Coogan?

  Ramp travel. What else is going on in the news?

• 39:36John Coogan?

  J.P. Morgan is revamping its bank for the super rich to cater to global clientele. David Frame, named global head of private bank, helping deep-pocketed clients invest more abroad. Oh, oh, there's also big news.

• 39:50Jordi Hays?

  Not very American.

• 39:50John Coogan?

  No, not very American, but Ilya Sutskever has issued a statement on Daniel Gross with Safe Superintelligence. So Ilya writes, of course, the OpenAI co-founder, now at SSI, says, "I sent the following message to our team and investors. As you know, Daniel Gross's time with us has been winding down, and as of June 29th, that's three, four days ago, he is officially no longer a part of SSI. We are grateful for his early contributions to the company and wish him well in his next endeavor. I am now formally CEO."

• 40:25Jordi Hays?

  Reading between the lines, do we think he hit his cliff?

• 40:28John Coogan?

  I don't know. When did SSI start? Probably one year cliff or your best. You think they went default? I don't know.

• 40:35Jordi Hays?

  When was SSI founded? 1970s, Scuba Schools International.

• 40:41John Coogan?

  Wow. Superintelligence has not arrived in Jordy's web browser just yet.

• 40:46Jordi Hays?

  Oh, he may have hit his cliff. It was founded June 19th, 2024.

• 40:51John Coogan?

  No way.

• 40:52Jordi Hays?

  But it's very possible this was resolved prior to that.

• 40:55John Coogan?

  Absolute dog.

• 40:57Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so Ilya says, I am now formally CEO of SSI and Daniel Levy is president. The technical team continues to report to me. You might have heard rumors of companies looking to acquire us. We are flattered by their attention but are focused on seeing our work through. He's a missionary. We have the compute. We have the team. We know what to do. Together, we will keep building safe superintelligence. Ilya. So DG has entered the trade portal and seems...

• 41:24John Coogan?

  The trade portal. I don't even know what that means. I'd never heard that term before, but I understand that it's vaguely...

• 41:30Jordi Hays?

  It's portal time.

• 41:30John Coogan?

  It's portal time.

• 41:31Jordi Hays?

  It's portal time. But anyways, the rumor is that he's going to Meta, but we will have to see.

• 41:39John Coogan?

  Yep. Well, speaking of Meta, Nat Friedman officially posted that he has in fact joined Meta. This was rumored and leaked multiple times. It seemed pretty confident. Everyone seemed pretty confident in the reporting. But he has confirmed it. He said, "I started work at Meta this week." This is Nat Friedman tweeting. "My job is to make amazing AI products that billions of people love to use." He's in the application layer, baby. He's productizing.

• 42:08Jordi Hays?

  He's in the app layer.

• 42:08John Coogan?

  Love it. I'm excited. I'm so excited for what he's gonna build.

• 42:12Jordi Hays?

  Will says, "Taking the balance sheet of the world's largest mega corp and using it to develop the technology to find Noah's Ark, the Ark of the Covenant, and other biblical artifacts is top-tier stuff. Congrats, King." Ashley Vance says, "If you're not hiring an intern to use ground penetrating radar to find the ancient first copies of Solaris buried under Building 12, I'll be disappointed."

• 42:33John Coogan?

  I love it. He says, "It won't happen overnight, but a few days in, I'm feeling confident that great things are ahead." Yeah, I posted something when the news leaked that it's like it's 2026. I put on my Meta Quest for Lama, "Open Instagram and pull up the latest Vesuvius scroll."

• 42:50John Coogan?

  Because I certainly hope this means more Nat Friedman side projects. Obviously, he's going to be incredibly locked in, has a huge task in front of him catching up to the big labs. He's, you know, has an incredible team now, a lot of funding, but it is a big challenge. And I'd certainly hope that he has time for some side projects. I wonder what this means for AI Grant. I wonder what this means for the the rest of the Nat Friedman cinematic universe of of kind of cracked interns that have gone on to the the Nat Friedman diaspora is really illustrious at this point.

• 43:25Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 43:25John Coogan?

  Sort of a sort of a new Thiel Fellowship.

• 43:27Jordi Hays?

  So, breaking news, the big, beautiful bill has passed.

• 43:31John Coogan?

  No way.

• 43:32Jordi Hays?

  The House. I had a polymarket just about 45 minutes ago. It had rocketed up to 99%. It's now sitting at 100%. So Axios has the reporting. The House passed President's big, beautiful bill Thursday. This article is from five minutes ago, clearing the way for Trump to sign it by his July 4 deadline. It's a massive victory for Speaker Mike Johnson, who was able to flip dozens of members who had initially threatened to vote no, as well as for Trump and Senate Republicans. The bill passed 218 to 214. Representatives Thomas Massey and Brian Fitzpatrick were the only Republicans to join all the Democrats in voting against the measure. Moderates and conservatives demanded adjustments after

• 44:17Jordi Hays?

  the Senate made significant changes to the House version, but ultimately none were made. Several key holdouts flipped following meetings with the President at the White House, but a ground of a group of hardliners needed more persuading.

• 44:33Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, so we will wait to see the the impacts of all of this. I'd be curious to get Zach Kukoff on maybe at the end of the show to just kind of break it down.

• 44:44John Coogan?

  We will be continuing to track the big, beautiful bill. But if you're trying to design something big and beautiful, head over to figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Bigma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free at figma.com. Palmer Lucky has an update.

• 44:59Jordi Hays?

  People are loving the S1.

• 45:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 45:01Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely loving it.

• 45:02John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 45:03Jordi Hays?

  Then they're going out.

• 45:04John Coogan?

  We gotta get Tane on, who does the S1 deep dives, for sure. We gotta do that. And if you're also in the S1 deep dive business and you have an interesting take, hit us up. We'd love to have you on and chat about the Figma S1. Very interested in that. And Earl, Palmer Lucky has an update on the story about how many weapons from America are flowing to Ukraine. He is kind of giving his take and where he stands on this issue. So Andre Yermak says, "Today I remembered an early wartime meeting with Palmer Lucky." I remember, I think I remember this photo, or a photo like it going out at the early start of the war. "Steady, kind, and clear like Tanjiro in the face of darkness. Grateful he chose to stand with Ukraine. His company's growth is proof.

• 45:48John Coogan?

  Good people build strong things." And Palmer chimes in and says, "And Earl had people/hardware in Ukraine. Two weeks into the invasion, our autonomous weapons have destroyed hundreds of millions of worth, hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of Russia's war machine. The United States should give them the tools they need to win. It is the fastest path to peace, one way or another."

• 46:10Jordi Hays?

  I had to look it up, but Tanjiro is an anime, or a manga?

• 46:16John Coogan?

  Tanjiro.

• 46:17Jordi Hays?

  He's a manga demon slayer. So Andre clearly knows his audience with that post.

• 46:24Jordi Hays?

  Luke Metro has a post here. So OpenAI came out yesterday and said, "These OpenAI tokens are not OpenAI equity. We did not partner with Robinhood. We're not involved with this and do not endorse it. Any transfer of OpenAI equity requires our approval. We did not approve any transfer. Please be careful." And Luke Metro says what every CFO is thinking. "Yeah, these tokenized shares on Robinhood are every startup CFO's newest headache." They are derivatives, from what I know. So they're not, it's not actual equity. It's closer to a, you know, something like a prediction market.

• 46:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. No one is more... Creative financially than secondary salesman.

• 47:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:05John Coogan?

  Do you remember the whole Ford contract situation, this whole thing?

• 47:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, you'd write that, I mean, it's derivative contract, but people were doing that for a while and then that got banned. And I don't know how they're doing this one, but odd to.

• 47:20Jordi Hays?

  Never bet against American financial.

• 47:22John Coogan?

  But the interesting, what does this say about Robin Hood? Says that they're not AGI pill, because if you truly believe that OpenAI is building God, you wouldn't want to make God angry. So not AGI pill, I guess.

• 47:33Jordi Hays?

  Something.

• 47:33John Coogan?

  Is that the conclusion?

• 47:34Jordi Hays?

  That could be one, one conclusion.

• 47:36John Coogan?

  I think we need to, we need to frame everything in the context of, do you believe?

• 47:40Jordi Hays?

  Every decision is how AGI, you know, you're just reading between the lines.

• 47:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, even, even the, even, you know, the UK is clearly not AGI pill, because if we're approaching super abundance.

• 47:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's wrong with having a royal train?

• 47:55Jordi Hays?

  Figure out how to operate the royal train.

• 47:57John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 47:57Jordi Hays?

  Cheaper than, you know, walking.

• 47:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is, this is very damaging for their brand.

• 48:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:03John Coogan?

  Ford CEO, though, AGI pill.

• 48:05Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 48:06John Coogan?

  Let's get him on the show.

• 48:08John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your trust, out of your security and compliance process, and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

• 48:25John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 48:26Jordi Hays?

  Head over to vanta.com.

• 48:28John Coogan?

  Fantastic photos in Getty Images. He went through Getty Images and found some insane photos of Steve Jobs that I hadn't seen. I thought I'd seen every viral photo.

• 48:37Jordi Hays?

  He's watching in the bottom right corner, if we can pull this up. He's watching Larry Ellison game tape.

• 48:43John Coogan?

  I love it. That's amazing.

• 48:45Jordi Hays?

  So good.

• 48:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, wow, he's really watching Ellison and just being like, okay, what's he saying? How am I going to counter this? How am I going to do that? I, I assume.

• 48:53Jordi Hays?

  Or just learning from, from one of the best.

• 48:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Zoom in on the bottom right one there.

• 48:57Jordi Hays?

  Picture laying on the floor, like, you know. Deep in conversation or argument.

• 49:03John Coogan?

  No, no, always on the phone. I, I, I think he's just, I think he's just thinking. It just seems like he's on the, he's just on, he's just like exasperated, like taking a second.

• 49:11Jordi Hays?

  They didn't have, I, it's funny. I just assumed he had an iPhone up, but the phones weren't that small.

• 49:15John Coogan?

  No, he invented the phone.

• 49:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They didn't have that. He had to go through that to make the iPhone.

• 49:21John Coogan?

  Indeed.

• 49:23Jordi Hays?

  Well, speaking of hardware and jobs, I have Reggie James' new book here. It looks absolutely fantastic. I got it last night. So, well, thank you for making it. I purchased it to support the fellow technology brother. But it is absolutely fantastic. Portfolio company in there, daylight.

• 49:42John Coogan?

  That's very cool.

• 49:42Jordi Hays?

  Love to see it and a bunch of other features. We got.

• 49:45John Coogan?

  I love these books.

• 49:46Jordi Hays?

  Nothing. We got nothing in there.

• 49:48John Coogan?

  No way. That's amazing. Yeah. Very cool.

• 49:51Jordi Hays?

  Beautiful. Beautiful stuff.

• 49:52John Coogan?

  So go pick it up. What is it? Hardwarebook.com, I think was what he said.

• 49:56Jordi Hays?

  Hardwarebook 2024.

• 49:58John Coogan?

  Hardwarebook 2024.

• 49:59Jordi Hays?

  Dot com. It's sold out. So.

• 50:01John Coogan?

  It's sold out, but I don't know. DM Reggie with something.

• 50:04Jordi Hays?

  He'll figure it out.

• 50:05John Coogan?

  And figure it out. But if you're trying to build a product, go to linear.com or linear.app.

• 50:13Jordi Hays?

  It's linear.app.

• 50:14John Coogan?

  Linear.app. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. And they got linear.

• 50:23Jordi Hays?

  The world's best team. Best teams use linear. They got Cursor, Perplexity, Retool, Ramp, OpenAI, Scale, Boom, Cash App for sell. You should be one of them.

• 50:33John Coogan?

  Kind of LeBron James of, of product planning.

• 50:36Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of LeBron James, breaking news from Emily Sundberg. LeBron was in the Hamptons last week and needed somewhere to practice. Instead of going to some weird, rich guy's home gym, who, who would have probably asked for photos afterwards, he turned to the most obvious solution, a high school. And Emily interviewed a teenager who played pickup basketball with him. So, great story.

• 50:59John Coogan?

  Good for his brand too. It's just, it's just good all around.

• 51:02Jordi Hays?

  It's great for his brand.

• 51:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's like, it's an unexpected gift in unexpected time. Like you played, you're a teenager, you probably played basketball at this high school gym, like, you know. Every day for a couple of months during basketball season, probably offseason a little bit. And then all of a sudden, the greatest basketball player of all time, potentially. I don't know where you stand on the GOAT debate, Jordy, but he just shows up, puts on a clang.

• 51:24Jordi Hays?

  There's only one GOAT debate I care about.

• 51:28John Coogan?

  The best entrepreneur of all time.

• 51:28Jordi Hays?

  We have another post here from Jira, at Jira Tickets. Good morning. 10,000 new AI startups with cute little minimalistic names and logos just launched, and they say they're going to change everything. Please enjoy your timeline scroll. Just call me if you need anything.

• 51:45Jordi Hays?

  That's true. We have a post here from-

• 51:47John Coogan?

  Is he just saying that there's a ton of AI startups launching every day on the timeline?

• 51:51Jordi Hays?

  Basically, and they're all going to change everything, John.

• 51:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 51:55Jordi Hays?

  They're gonna, they're gonna do their best.

• 51:56John Coogan?

  Minimalistic names, logos. I feel like, I feel like what's clogging up the timeline more is like, you know, people actually taking like the viral video seriously and like, and like breaking through. I, I don't see that many like cute little minimalistic names and logos that much, but I don't know. It's interesting. Yeah. I guess, I guess it is, it is a paradox that there could be so many things that all, that all change everything simultaneously.

• 52:18Jordi Hays?

  My, my recommendation for Soham, we were on the drive in today, we were, we were working on this. The, it's hard to see.

• 52:26John Coogan?

  Maybe text it to the group and put it in the tab.

• 52:28Jordi Hays?

  The dev shop of Soham Perique is the last.

• 52:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 52:31Jordi Hays?

  And, and just flip the browser company logo.

• 52:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 52:35Jordi Hays?

  You're at 5 million of ARR by the end of next week.

• 52:38John Coogan?

  I, I really, I really do think that I, I'm, you know, hopefully excited for him if he's going to this new video AI startup and he's working seriously on that and he's enjoys the founding engineer role there, rooting for him. But I do think the dev shop, he's teed up for something amazing. Like, I think that that would be a fantastic business for him.

• 53:00Jordi Hays?

  He's deeply aligned with the culture, clearly loves building.

• 53:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:03Jordi Hays?

  He got it over his skis, made some bad decisions, disappointed some people, maybe broke some rules.

• 53:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 53:08Jordi Hays?

  But if he just, if he just, you know, stayed in Mumbai and found-

• 53:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:13Jordi Hays?

  Fifty other guys like him and

• 53:14John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 53:15Jordi Hays?

  And he was the guy that was onboarding clients, he would absolutely crush it.

• 53:19John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. Yeah, onboarding clients would be huge for him.

• 53:21Jordi Hays?

  And it seems like he likes juggling, he likes juggling, bouncing around.

• 53:24John Coogan?

  Totally. And, and I think most importantly, with this, like, the crazy viral attention that he got, I think he had a chance to kind of rewire people's brains on what it means to use a dev shop. Because using a dev shop feels very antithetical to like the way startups are built. We talked about this a little bit yesterday, like, you're like, it's a, it's a sign that like, you can't hire, or you can't actually build, like, you don't have a team on your, like, a line to you. But he is, he has such an interesting story that I think a lot of people would, would say, "Yeah, let's get Soham on for, you know, the dev shop on for a quick sprint for three months.

• 54:05John Coogan?

  Seems to be good at, good at that. He has a good team and he could grow it from there." So, I don't know. I'm, I'm optimistic about that. I was surprised that that didn't, it didn't seem like when we talked to him, that it was even in his mind, that he, that he could do that. It also seemed like he hadn't considered just having a bidding war between the three jobs and saying like, "Who can actually pay me more?"

• 54:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think there's a

• 54:27John Coogan?

  And the equity thing was weird too.

• 54:28Jordi Hays?

  Surprisingly, there's a bunch, there's a bunch of teams right now where if you just said, "I'm gonna work 18 hours a day on your company", they would probably pay you 350K.

• 54:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. There was something weird, there was something weird about the fact that he's like, like, "I, I don't want to talk about my personal life, but I have financial needs, but also I didn't, wasn't doing it for the money and actually like, I cared about the equity." Because it's like, if you're really in like, "I have medical bills" or something, you'd be like, "Cash now."

• 54:56Jordi Hays?

  No, the Skizzo takeaway is that like, there's, like, he's the mob, the Mumbai mob is like saying like,

• 55:03John Coogan?

  Go get equity?

• 55:04Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. Like, "Go, you, you, you work for us" kind of thing.

• 55:07John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. But, but in that case.

• 55:10Jordi Hays?

  You would just max out.

• 55:11John Coogan?

  You'd max out the cash, right? You'd max out the cash comp and you, and you try and go get one, one job or multiple jobs that just pay all cash or as much cash as possible. And I mean, we need to talk to more of the founders on the other side.

• 55:22Jordi Hays?

  I don't think it was incredibly, it wasn't like he had this master plan of, I'm gonna like.

• 55:26John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 55:27Jordi Hays?

  Taking, the takeaway from yesterday is I was coming away and being like, okay, if five people came out on X, are there 20 more on LinkedIn?

• 55:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 55:35Jordi Hays?

  And it's like this massive conspiracy that he was like master plan.

• 55:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:40Jordi Hays?

  But it didn't, that wasn't my takeaway.

• 55:41John Coogan?

  We'll have to dig into it more and talk to more folks because it's totally possible that more people.

• 55:45Jordi Hays?

  Dee Dee, Dee Dee had a post from yesterday, uh, who was on the show yesterday. He said Soham is just the tip of the iceberg. Just like this redditor pulling 800K a year, working five jobs.

• 55:54John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 55:55Jordi Hays?

  There's a Reddit, uh, uh, what is it? Uh, uh, group called r/Overemployed. There's 500,000 people where people just maniacally discuss this. There are thousands of Soham Periks we don't know about.

• 56:10John Coogan?

  That's hilarious.

• 56:12Jordi Hays?

  There's a post here from user Big Fat Phony Account. He says, "Five jobs at 800K TC using an ROI mentality. I've jumped from three jobs to five jobs two weeks ago. I'm now making three, 3K a day. It's doable for me. Here's why. I'm an expert in my field, which is data. I know how to solve problems in various forms. Clients, as I call them, know my value. If there's a problem or they need my expert help, they like having me on the team. This expertise has come from 15 years of experience, but also three years of overemployment, teaching me the latest methods. I'm all remote. None of this one day in the office BS. Just say no."

• 56:52Jordi Hays?

  So he's basically giving the playbook. The funny thing is you could just have a consulting shop and do this. Above board and probably be way more successful.

• 57:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:03Jordi Hays?

  You just have to build the muscle to sell your services and and not just get fixated on just applying for jobs.

• 57:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:13Jordi Hays?

  Like, you can still look, okay, this company is hiring for this role.

• 57:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:16Jordi Hays?

  Great, I should reach out to them. Hey, I offer XYZ service.

• 57:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:21Jordi Hays?

  I I'll be, you know, fractional.

• 57:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:24Jordi Hays?

  Staff engineer, whatever it's called. I command a premium because I'm super experienced and I have this team. You can call me anytime. I'll be available, you know, 18 hours of the day. And you could just build a legitimate business. So I think that that should be the takeaway from engineers that are getting inspired by Soham in the wrong way is just build a consulting practice.

• 57:45John Coogan?

  I agree. Well, if he does, he's gonna have to reach out to a lot of people. He needs a CRM that he can trust. He needs

• 57:50Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 57:50John Coogan?

  ADO, customer relationship magic. ADO is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. Let's mix it up with a post from the P God. If you're pure.

• 58:01Jordi Hays?

  This is important going into the weekend, everyone.

• 58:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is huge for July 4th, which is tomorrow. If you're pure of heart, drinking 17 ice cold beers isn't bad for you. We gotta have Andrew Huberman back on to debate this. And Brian Johnson, too. We'll get both of them. They'll love it. They'll be like, yeah, heart agree.

• 58:20Jordi Hays?

  I think we feel this way about splitting a bottle of champagne.

• 58:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:23Jordi Hays?

  It certainly doesn't feel bad.

• 58:25John Coogan?

  Everything in moderation, including moderation. That's what I like to say.

• 58:31Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 58:32John Coogan?

  Anyway, what what else should we go?

• 58:35Jordi Hays?

  Leaf over at Public, our friend, said, this is some interesting context on the on the tokenization of private companies. So he says, "Tokenization of private companies is tricky and risky. Public used to offer alternative assets like music royalties, and we looked deeply into offering tokenized private company shares. Here's why we haven't done it. The risks come down to four aspects: liquidity, supply, information rights, and investor protections." First, some background. Public offered private assets via regulatory framework called Reg A. Think of it like a rapper that turned a private asset like IP, art, real estate, or a private company into a security, i.e. securitization, enabling it to be traded. It's very similar to what a crypto token represents in the Robin Hood tokenization scenario.

• 59:18Jordi Hays?

  Same thing, different database. And he goes on to give a lot more context.

• 59:25Jordi Hays?

  He says, let's say Robin Hood now owns $10 million worth of stock at a $300 billion valuation. They could spin up 10 million tokens priced at $1 each and offer them on their platform. Customers then own the token, not the actual shares in OpenAI. Think of it like a ticket representing a sliver of ownership in the SPV, but not OpenAI directly. And he says, the issue one, a $10 million float on a $300 billion company with major hype is unlikely to meet demand. That limited float can quickly lead to a price spike, AKA the shares will trade at a premium. The $1 token might jump to 10, implying a $3 trillion valuation for OpenAI. What started as a fundamentals-based investment quickly turns into pure speculation. People buying tokens in the hopes someone else will pay more.

• 1:00:09John Coogan?

  I mean, the float on some of these things is crazy. I mean, the numbers that have been

• 1:00:13Jordi Hays?

  That's what I was saying with Republic saying

• 1:00:15John Coogan?

  5 million $5,000 investments, $5 million total. So there's 1,000 people that are putting 5K down to set the price of SpaceX. It's like, does that make any sense?

• 1:00:27Jordi Hays?

  Not setting the price, the initial price.

• 1:00:28John Coogan?

  Well, they're setting, yeah. No, no, no, but like, there are essentially 1,000 slugs of 5K value to kind of set the price. It's like the smallest possible market. So yeah, I mean, I think that there's a lot of risk to that. They could just trade like the coins, who knows?

• 1:00:48Jordi Hays?

  The other thing, because, you know, these types of offerings will typically be tied to SPVs, not the underlying shares. There's usually no information rights. There can be dilution, other changes, and so you actually don't know the value of the underlying assets.

• 1:01:06John Coogan?

  Well, really quickly, let's tell you about numeralhq.com. Sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. We have Chris Miller joining, the author of Chip War. In just a few minutes, I wanted to run through this post in the, it's not a post, it's an article in the Wall Street Journal from yesterday. China is quickly gaining in the AI race. I think this is something we'll be talking about with Chris. Chinese artificial intelligence companies are loosening the US global stranglehold on AI, challenging US superiority and setting the stage for a global arms race in the technology.

• 1:01:40John Coogan?

  Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia, users ranging from multinational banks to public universities are turning to large language models from Chinese companies such as startup DeepSeek and e-commerce giant Alibaba, that's Quen of course, as alternatives to US offerings such as ChatGPT. HSBC and Standard Chartered have begun testing DeepSeek's models internally. According to people familiar with the matter, Saudi Ramco, the world's largest oil company, recently installed DeepSeek in its main data center, which is interesting because Saudi Ramco, I believe they have their own model as well. And so they're testing DeepSeek.

• 1:02:17Jordi Hays?

  Very AGI-tilled.

• 1:02:18John Coogan?

  And I mean, you could rewrite this to say like, hey, like, you know, perplexity has a DeepSeek fork, Microsoft serves DeepSeek, so maybe it's okay. But obviously, the larger geopolitical narrative here is like, we don't want to have the rest of the world standardize on non-Western models. That could be very harmful to global competitiveness. And so that's something that we'll be digging into. Even US major cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google offer DeepSeek to customers despite the White House banning use of the company's app on some government devices over data security concerns. Of course, there's a separation between the layer there. If you're running the open source model on your own chips, it shouldn't be able to call back to China.

• 1:03:03John Coogan?

  But if you're installing the DeepSeek app on a government phone, well, then everything that you send, it has to go to a server to be processed to then be inferences. And so like, when, like, I assume that everything I've ever said to ChatGPT exists on an OpenAI server somewhere, right? Because they have to store it, because when I open the app, I want to see all my chats.

• 1:03:20Jordi Hays?

  Required it.

• 1:03:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's required. Well, that's a slightly separate thing. It's about like actually disclosing, but yes.

• 1:03:26Jordi Hays?

  Hegseth, Hegseth and the DeepSeek apps, just being like, thoughts on Iran right now? What should we do?

• 1:03:35John Coogan?

  OpenAI's ChatGPT remains the world's predominant AI consumer chatbot with 910 million global downloads. Let's hit the gong for OpenAI. There we go. Compared to with DeepSeek's 125 million, give me the wah wah. 125 million for DeepSeek.

• 1:03:56John Coogan?

  Not even close to OpenAI DeepSeek. You gotta catch up, buddy. No, it's very impressive. 121 million is a serious, serious number. Figures from research Sensor Tower. The US's AI is widely seen as the industry's gold standard because of advantages in computing semiconductors, cutting-edge research, and access to financial capital. But as many other industries, but as in other, as in many other industries, Chinese companies have started to snatch customers by offering performance that is nearly as good at vastly lower prices, I imagine is what we're gonna say. Let's see. Prices, yeah. A study of global competitiveness in critical technologies

• 1:04:41John Coogan?

  released in early June by researchers at Harvard University found China has advantages in two key building blocks of AI. Data and human capital that are keeping it, that are helping it keep pace. The competition, some industry insiders said, has set the world on the path toward a technological Cold War, potentially even a chip war. And we have our guest, Chris Miller, in the studio, author of Chip War. Welcome to the show. How you doing?

• 1:05:11Avlok Kohli?

  What's happening?

• 1:05:11Speaker 04

  Good thanks. How are you?

• 1:05:13John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for joining.

• 1:05:14Avlok Kohli?

  It's great to have you.

• 1:05:15John Coogan?

  Great to have you. I would love, I mean, we were just reading an article from the Journal about the China versus the US AI race. There's a whole bunch of modern details, but I'd love to kick it off with a little bit on your background and how you initially came, became interested in the idea of a chip war and kind of how things emerged from there.

• 1:05:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, I got interested in the idea of a chip war because I realized we've been living through multiple iterations of one since the first chips were invented in the late 1950s, that you couldn't really separate the development of military power or a country's strategic position on the world stage without understanding the ability to access and deploy computing power. And so we're seeing a new version of that right now with AI, but it's, it's actually replicating what we saw in the Cold War competition between the US and the Soviet Union, or the economic competition in the US and Japan in the 1980s. And so then as now, there's this deep link between access to compute and your strategic position.

• 1:06:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, going back in the history, we were digging into some of the efforts that the Chinese government had.

• 1:06:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, how many, how many five-year plans have they, have they done? They keep stacking these five-year plans and it seems to be working.

• 1:06:33John Coogan?

  For decades, just to stay on the lagging edge. What did you learn about that? And what can you tell us about like that narrative as, you know, maybe the chip war is heating up right now, but China has been aware of this for decades and has been investing against it.

• 1:06:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, they've certainly been investing for a long time. I think really the last decade or so, it's kicked up a real notch, both because China solved a lot of its other technological problems. It's become self-sufficient in many other spheres of manufacturing and making chips is the, one of the really few areas and the largest by far where China still has to import manufactured products from abroad, such that today China's largest import, more even than it spends on oil, is importing semiconductors from Taiwan.

• 1:07:20Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:07:20Speaker 04

  And so this is something that they wanted to break free from.

• 1:07:24Jordi Hays?

  More on semis than oil.

• 1:07:25John Coogan?

  That is wild.

• 1:07:27Jordi Hays?

  That's insane.

• 1:07:28John Coogan?

  When you talk about that, is that driven heavily by stuff that's not sanctioned on the lagging edge, the, you know, the 15, 16 nanometer, like the bigger chips? Or, or are we talking about like smuggling numbers of three nanometer chips that have been repurposed through shell companies or something like that?

• 1:07:48Speaker 04

  It's a mix, but it's mostly things that are legal to sell to China. And you can sell both the lagging edge, like things in your dishwasher, but also a smartphone chip at three nanometers that you can still sell to China. And there's a large volume of those for PCs and smartphones and autos that are still being sold.

• 1:08:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So every, every Huawei phone has a chip and those are not sanctioned. We're just talking about the large accelerators, the big GPUs that are really under

• 1:08:16Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:08:16John Coogan?

  under lock and key.

• 1:08:17Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 1:08:18John Coogan?

  Interesting. Then take me through kind of how you processed the initial rollout of the chip ban during the Biden era. What, how did that play out for you? I assume people were calling you? I don't know. I want to know your side of that, of that era of history here.

• 1:08:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I would actually rewind the clock back to 2018 and 19. That's that's when ASML, the Dutch company that produces the lithography tools you need to produce cutting-edge chips, was first thinking about selling a cutting-edge tool to a Chinese customer. And then the the Trump administration, the first administration leaned very heavily on the Dutch and said, don't let this go through, because if you do, China will have everything it needs to catch up in in chip making. And so I think that was actually the the key turning point. And then the 2022 restrictions that not only tightened up the rules around chip-making equipment, but also banned the GPUs that you can make with these tools, in some ways,

• 1:09:19Speaker 04

  naturally followed from that first 2019 move. What was different in 2022 was that there was a real, I think, understanding, and it came before ChatGPT, that AI was going to be a big deal, and that access to GPUs was going to be a a critical input into building bigger and better AI systems.

• 1:09:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, how how did the chip shortage fit into all of that during COVID? I mean, everyone experienced, you know, the the chip shortages from like auto prices going up, used cars, there were so many market distortions. How how did you process that point in time? And then I want to step forward even further.

• 1:09:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I think the chip shortage didn't really impact tech companies. It impacted, as you say, autos and dishwashers and microwaves, but it brought together a political coalition across the West that included the auto companies and the tech companies and and medical device companies, all of whom realized chips were very, very important. We needed reliable supply chains, and we needed to stay ahead technologically in in this. And that's why, whether in the US or in Japan or in Europe, you had CHIPS acts being passed to reinvigorate domestic manufacturing, to try to provide some more resilience for the supply chains. It would have been unthinkable five years earlier, but because of this coalition, it was possible.

• 1:10:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is it, is it a misnomer to call China's strategy around semiconductor and domestic production of semiconductors and all of their semiconductor strategies communist? It feels like they in some ways have an extremely capitalist system with not picking winners and putting out, you know, huge government incentives. They're, they're shifting the market. But from what we've heard, a lot of times there's just a huge pool of money and there's vicious competition to go after it. So how, how would you actually characterize, like what words are we using? How are we describing the Chinese political system now with specifically with

• 1:11:21John Coogan?

  regard to not just how they elect people, but specifically their chip policies?

• 1:11:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. You know, I think you got a strange mix of, of policies being deployed by the Chinese. And, and in some ways that's why it's worked relatively well by a lot of metrics. You, you have the benefit of the market weeding out firms that can't compete, but you've also got the benefit of the government devoting long-term patient capital into its priority areas, which pulls in resources, pulls in entrepreneurs to these segments. I think the risk for China is that unlike other sectors that they've done well, like solar or EVs, where they've had a thousand flowers bloom and you figure out which ones are capable, which ones are not. In the chip industry, you don't have nearly as much of that. And

• 1:12:06Speaker 04

  in fact, the key players today, like the most significant, most advanced maker of processor chips today was also the most significant advance in China 10 years ago. So there's much more, that would be SMIC, which produces chips for Huawei. Yeah. Yeah. And so you, you don't have this thousand flowers bloom dynamic in the chip industry just because it's so capital intensive and the number of people with the know-how is fairly limited, that you've got a small number of flowers blooming and all these flowers now have state ownership.

• 1:12:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:37Speaker 04

  And so it's a different dynamic.

• 1:12:38John Coogan?

  It feels like they're building like a mirror stack. Can you walk us through the equivalent to Nvidia, TSMC, ASML over in China? And then maybe give me a little bit of color. Yeah, and on the SK Hynix side as well, are they doing stuff there? And then I'd love to know, kind of, if you can give me like a qualitative grade of like how serious these competitors are. Huawei seems super advanced. It seems like SMIC and SME maybe not, but I'll let you explain it.

• 1:13:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, yes, I think you're right. They are trying to build out the entire supply chain. On the memory side, you have YMTC, which is their leading producer of NAND memory. CXMT, leading producer of the DRAM memory, including eventually the DRAM memory that will go into, be paired with GPUs, the high bandwidth memory. I think on the memory side, China's done really well.

• 1:13:31Speaker 04

  You probably wouldn't say it's the cutting edge in terms of its ability to produce that volume, but in terms of the kind of pure technological capability, they've, if they haven't cut up, they've gotten very close.

• 1:13:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:41Speaker 04

  I think for the processor chip side, it's been more complicated. Huawei is very capable at chip design. It's done it for smartphones at the cutting edge. Now it's catching up very rapidly in terms of GPU design. Hardly exactly benchmarked these of the Nvidia, but Huawei is very capable in chip design. The challenge they've had is that SMIC is right now about five years behind TSMC, five or six years in terms of its ability to produce processor chips at quality and at scale. And so that has been a real limiting factor. And the reason SMIC's behind is because there are no real Chinese examples today of companies

• 1:14:22Speaker 04

  like ASML or Applied Materials or Tokyo Electron that make the tools that make chips. There are companies that would like to compete with them, that can compete with some of this really simpler, lower end tools. But when it comes to the advanced tools, the Chinese firms just aren't there yet. And so SMIC needs to buy.

• 1:14:41John Coogan?

  How far behind?

• 1:14:43Speaker 04

  Hard to say. I mean, I think certainly, certainly 10 years behind today. They're now investing a ton, they're reverse engineering, usual playbook. But if you look at the the leading edge fabs that SMIC operates, it's still mostly Western tools inside. And every single year for the past decade or so, China's been one of the largest, if not the largest importers of chip making equipment in the world. Last year, China accounted for ballpark half the revenue of all of the world's key chip making equipment vendors, which is a pretty good data point for where those firms are relative to their Chinese competitors.

• 1:15:28Jordi Hays?

  What about the, what about the scale of the shell company activity buying from from TSMC and and other players? Have you tracked that closely?

• 1:15:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, certainly a big shell company was discovered and then we hope shut down last year, but the scale was vast, truly enormous, millions, several million chips procured from TSMC and then appears diverted to Huawei, which is, you know, at a scale that I am frankly surprised by. Everyone knew there'd be smuggling in the scale of dozens or hundreds or even thousands, but smuggling at the scale of millions really calls into the question the ability of the US government to properly enforce these rules. And the only thing worse than a rule that is overly broad is a rule that's overly broad and not not seriously enforced. You get the worst of of both worlds. And so I think

• 1:16:25Speaker 04

  the US government has a lot of thinking of its own to do. And how do you actually make these rules stick in the real world? And thus far, there's it's been a real struggle.

• 1:16:33John Coogan?

  Are there any underexplored areas in data center build out that where people aren't really tracking the competitive dynamic between China and America? I was listening to Dylan Patel talk about how with Huawei's Cloud Matrix 384, they were able to do, I think, fiber optic connections between the chips and basically do NVLink at a much larger scale. And Nvidia had tried to do that and maybe not been able, not been as successful. And it felt like Huawei's slightly behind or seriously behind in a number of categories, but that might be one place that they're actually ahead. Have you tracked that at all? Is there, is there anything that people should be digging into there? I feel like the, the narrative was like, everyone was getting up to speed on Nvidia,

• 1:17:18John Coogan?

  and then people learned about TSMC, and then they learned about ASML, and then they learned about SK Hynix. And I feel like we're all about to learn about a networking provider soon. But what, what's been your, what's been your take on that industry?

• 1:17:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. No, I think you're, you're right to focus on networking as a, as a key area of rapid technological advance. You know, it's hard to benchmark who's how far ahead, unlike in Foundry, where you've got like a really clear way to measure TSMC versus SMIC. There's not such an obvious kind of benchmark. I, I think the, the underexplored area in, in the Chinese ecosystem is actually not at the chip level, but the cloud level, which is, we know that China's smuggled in a large number of chips. We know that there are a meaningful volume of chips that SMIC has produced domestically for Huawei.

• 1:18:09Speaker 04

  But it appears that a lot of these chips are in data centers that have low utilization. And anecdotally, all the anecdotes we hear about utilization of AI data centers in China suggests a lot of real challenges in terms of getting utilization, partly because there's some state-owned telecoms that are just mismanaging their cloud businesses. But it's, I think, surprising that Chinese firms like DeepSeek talk about compute limitations, given the number of chips we know that are actually in China. And so if you're, you know, if you're starting with a thesis that China's good at centralization, that doesn't appear to be what we're seeing here. We appear to be seeing an inefficient decentralization, perhaps driven by some of the pathologies of having state-owned firms run data centers.

• 1:18:52John Coogan?

  Do you have any insight into what's happening that benefits China but happens outside of China? I've heard reports that folks are taking training data on hard drives and flying it to another country. We're doing a training run, saving the weights to hard drives and then flying back. You know, you could imagine, you know, DeepSeek V4 or something being trained by, you know, a series of shell companies and it's just an American guy with a big AWS account, right? But at a certain point, I would hope that Amazon says, wait, who are you and why do you want to spend a hundred million dollars this month on cloud?

• 1:19:33John Coogan?

  Like, we like billing everyone a few thousand dollars, but this is going to set off some alarm bells. What are the risks there? Is the government doing anything about that? What is your take on this idea of just, you know, hopping on to other clouds and then routing the data backwards?

• 1:19:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think this is an emerging area of focus for the government. I think you're right that it's an area where the US government doesn't have a whole lot of visibility. And I think cloud computing companies haven't, they've got know your customer requirements, et cetera, but not nearly as much investment as, say, a financial institution spends on making sure they're not transferring money to a sanctioned Iranian entity, for example. I wouldn't be surprised if for the next couple of years, we have a lot more build out of this type of regulation precisely to deal with what you're talking about. And I think, you know, a large training run is large. And so I think we shouldn't be surprised to see heightened know your customer requirements

• 1:20:31Speaker 04

  as you get larger and larger in terms of the scale of compute that you're using. The other nuance is that certainly US cloud providers are key here, but there are also cloud providers from other countries in other countries that are playing a role. We read a lot about Malaysia last couple of months as one of the key buyers of GPUs and a variety of Malaysian companies that are maybe working with Chinese companies operating there. And I think that's also an area where we might see more regulation. There's been proposals in, out of the House of Representatives, for example, to say, we want more GPUs going to US cloud providers and fewer going to non-US cloud providers precisely.

• 1:21:13Speaker 04

  So that type of region, America first for AI is sort of the way to think about that. And, you know, the driven parts of the government that would find that pretty appealing.

• 1:21:22John Coogan?

  Can you, I mean, you mentioned Malaysia. Can you take me on a little bit of a tour geopolitically of what's going on in some of the other countries that might be on the horizon for AI relevance? I'm thinking about, you know, we've, obviously, everyone knows the US and China, and then Taiwan's role, and then Malaysia pops up, and then France has Mistral now, and there's deals being done in the Middle East. I was always surprised that Russia was not on the conversation at all because they have a very, like, long lineage of incredible math prodigies, and it feels like you would, I mean, there are a number of AI scientists in America who come from Russia, and so I was, I'm

• 1:22:03John Coogan?

  surprised that we're not seeing, oh, Russia's getting in the supercomputer game, or trying to build out some massive data center.

• 1:22:10Speaker 04

  They have been busy.

• 1:22:11John Coogan?

  And so what are some of the other countries? Can you take me on a tour of, maybe, maybe let's just start with, like, what's going on in the Middle East? How are you thinking about that? Is it just like a jump ball bidding war between, are they going with the West or the East? And then we can move on to some of the other regions in the world that might be relevant or not.

• 1:22:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. And the Middle East has a real advantage in terms of the capital they can deploy, which matters if you're trying to build the compute clusters. And I think both for Saudi and especially for the UAE, there's a desire to build their next generation of industries, if and when oil becomes less reliable for them. And that's driven this investment in terms of building infrastructure. And we saw after Trump visited a couple of weeks ago now, big deals announced, especially in the UAE, you know, 500,000 GPUs a year to the UAE is a large number. I think the question for the UAE is, there's no doubt they can build data centers, no doubt they can afford the GPUs. Can they build businesses on top of that?

• 1:23:12Speaker 04

  And I think all these countries want to do more than just host Azure or AWS data centers. They want to own their own businesses and build on top of that. And that's a harder thing to do than than simply building data centers. I think the UAE has big ambitions in particular, but it's easier to have ambitions than it is to realize them, and it'll be a challenge.

• 1:23:31Jordi Hays?

  What's, what's your take on TSMC's traction in Arizona? Nvidia's had some announcements as well. How bullish are you on the progress they're making?

• 1:23:45Speaker 04

  So I think the good news is that TSMC has publicly said their manufacturing yields for the shared chips that they produce that actually work are just as good in Arizona as they are in Taiwan. That's a really powerful data point. I think the bad news is that on a unit cost are still a lot more expensive than in Taiwan. And that cost differential will decline over time, but it's a real differential and it's not going to go to zero. And so the key question, I think, is to what extent TSMC's customers are going to keep pushing TSMC to build more in the US versus be comfortable with production in Taiwan. I think the trend has been that they're pushing TSMC to do more in the US. And certainly, TSMC, looking at the tariff dynamics, has

• 1:24:29Speaker 04

  registered that. They've announced plans to build six fabs beyond the one operational one in construction right now. Unclear exactly over what time horizon that happens. But so long as you've got these kind of tariff and geopolitical issues front and center, I think TSMC's customers will be encouraging them to pursue this diversification.

• 1:24:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, who would eat that cost? Because Nvidia has famously very high margins. All the hyperscalers are thinking about doing in-house chip design now. I'd love to know your take on Microsoft's strategy, the TPU at Google, anything else that's going on, Tranium and Amazon, for example. Because you could see those, you could see, yes, TSMC in Arizona is more expensive, but that cost is kind of mitigated by being able to route around Nvidia's margin. But I don't know if that's a reasonable thesis.

• 1:25:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think my assumption would be that the cost is shared by, across the supply chain. And actually, if you look at the supply chain, you've got a number of high-margin companies involved. TSMC has a pretty healthy margin. Its key customers do as well. And if you, you know, take an iPhone as an example, you know, ballpark the share of the TSMC content in an iPhone, $50, let's say. If that goes up by 30% in the context of a $1,000 iPhone, it's not dramatically going to change the economics. Same for, same for an Nvidia server. So I think you're right to say there's plenty of places where you could, you could absorb some

• 1:26:05Speaker 04

  of that cost. What share of it goes to TSMC versus its customers, I'm sure is a constant source of negotiation.

• 1:26:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, so there's there's kind of like an interesting supply chain here in the actual delivery of AI applications. And I can't help but wonder if some of the some of the international players outside of America and China are maybe targeting the wrong thing. It seems extremely valuable to be able to fab chips in your country and own your supply chain and be able to produce a consistent flow. And then it also seems incredibly valuable to have the front end to AI, essentially like a ChatGPT national champion that users go to. But the model itself and the data center seems maybe less important there, but it feels like all of the different countries that we're talking

• 1:26:55John Coogan?

  about, whether it's France or Saudi Arabia, they seem obsessed with owning a data center. But then if the local population is going to chat.com instead of let chat for Mr. All, like, has France really won if they just have a model? And maybe they're thinking about in terms of like deploying within the government in the same sense that like the DOD is deploying Llama right now. But how do you think they're, how do you think these international countries are thinking about the different places that they can try and plug into the overall delivery of artificial intelligence?

• 1:27:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's the right question to ask. And I think you're right to suggest that just having a data center is not a guarantee of making money off of AI. And it seems highly likely to be the case that the the application layer and the the operating system for AI, however that develops, will be places where a lot of money is made. And again, not clear that that if you build a data center in your country, you're going to guarantee that you have that at all. I think when governments think about this, there's probably a degree to which they're not asking the question you're asking, and they ought to. There's also, I think, a degree to which they're thinking about sovereignty and control over their their tech infrastructure. And they're worried that if they become

• 1:28:17Speaker 04

  wholly down wholly reliant either on US or Chinese AI providers, they're going to be in a weakened position politically. Now, is the best use of their resources solving that problem, building data centers? I think that's an open question. But we've certainly seen a lot of countries turn in that direction as their first response for trying to build a bit more room for maneuver in the AI space.

• 1:28:40Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting, in the, as the UAE was, was opening up to Western businesses back in the day, there was a structure that was popular where if you were Coca-Cola or Michelin and you wanted to sell into the UAE, from my understanding, you needed to set up basically a JV, like a 50/50 JV with somebody locally. So it was like, basically owned and operated to some degree, but almost like more of a franchise model. And I wonder if we're, we'll end up effectively seeing something like that on the data center side.

• 1:29:13John Coogan?

  I just wonder, I just wonder how much that particular layer matters. Like, if you look at what China's done in just the delivery of conventional web services, it's like, obviously, knockout, drag-out fight to try and build data center capacity and import chips, but also develop the traditional semiconductor, the CPU, supply chain, and then ban Facebook and Google and develop homegrown alternatives for the application layer. But they haven't tried to rebuild Linux from scratch. Like, North Korea does have a fork of Linux called Red Star Linux, apparently, but in general, you know, Chinese phone companies have been fine forking Android. That hasn't been a place where

• 1:29:55John Coogan?

  they've said, oh, we gotta rebuild, we gotta own that from start to finish. It's like, we want to be able to make the phones, and we want to be able to deliver the services so that, you know, Google can't, like, bring their own censorship rules, and we can't, and, you know, Samsung can't cut us off of actually delivering the phones. But in terms of the actual operating system layer, everyone's been kind of fine with standardizing around Linux and Android. I don't know. It's interesting. I wanted to talk about the AI trade, AI trade deals.

• 1:30:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. So this is what I want to get into. I would love to, to understand the talent market to the, in China, to the extent that you can.

• 1:30:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:30:30Jordi Hays?

  It's been what, what we've been covering for the last couple of weeks, these sort of massive changes between. In talent moving around between the different labs. I'm curious if there's that level of competition for talent or it's.

• 1:30:44John Coogan?

  Between like deep.

• 1:30:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because in some ways, you know, these American, you know, researchers constantly, you know, shifting around to the highest bidder. It's not necessarily the best for winning the AI race or winning the AI war. It's the right strategic moves for the different labs and different hyperscalers to compete for this talent to to build the best businesses and products that they can. But it's not necessarily.

• 1:31:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, authoritarian might say, hey, let's just consolidate all of the AI talent at one lab in America. That's not the way America works, but how does it work in China?

• 1:31:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, you still do have a pretty flexible labor market. I think there's an interesting question. Would you be right to consolidate all AI talent? I think if you're if you're a believer that we're going to kind of reach a single threshold called AGI. And if you reach it two months earlier, you've got this kind of enduring strategic prize, then maybe concentration is the right strategy.

• 1:31:42Speaker 04

  But if you're a believer instead that there's going to be a bunch of different products, which will themselves be pretty transformative, but there's not one threshold you want to pass. And actually, you probably want a more flexible system that's going to allocate between different firms. And, you know, maybe it is macro efficient to have people jumping between firms once every year or two, if they're bringing the cutting edge, spreading it to different firms. That could actually be a good thing on on the macro level as well as for the the individual level. I would be more pessimistic about China's chances if I found them centralizing more aggressively. I thought one of the most pessimistic data points this year about the Chinese ecosystem was the news that deep sea researchers were having their passports confiscated.

• 1:32:24Speaker 04

  They had to report international travel, which to me is a strong disincentive to do it, doing AI research.

• 1:32:31John Coogan?

  China seems to love doing that. They were doing that to rare earth element experts as well at rare earth minerals. It seems like it's just in the playbook when when a when an industry becomes important, the passports start disappearing.

• 1:32:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the other the other elephant in the room is you can imagine the amount of pressure that the CCP is putting on. Chinese AI researchers that are here in the US, maybe they want their their citizens already, or they have a path to citizenship, but if they have any family or any exposure at home, there's still that's still a lever that they can pull.

• 1:33:06John Coogan?

  I want to talk about talent in the context, not just of AI model development, but actual chip fabrication. It feels like right now what we're seeing in the foundation model labs is an extreme power law in the value of AI researchers, hence hundred million dollar offers for top talent and starting salaries in the 300K range. Like, that is a wide, wide power law, right? There's always been this narrative around TSMC that you can't chat GPT how to make a semiconductor. There's a couple of books out there, but it's it's a lot of lore, it's a lot of tutelage and mentorship. How power law distributed is talent in semiconductors?

• 1:33:47John Coogan?

  And is there a world where CHIPS Act 2.0 gives Intel a bunch of money or something? And then they start offering TSMC experts a hundred million dollar offers? And that really pulls forward American chip production?

• 1:34:04Speaker 04

  So I don't think the mental model is is that expertise is power law distributed. I think that there's lots of very unique capabilities you need to make a chip. And the level of expertise you need in each of the verticals is very deep, and you need all of them. And if you only got 90% of them, your chip doesn't work. And so you need to build this expertise over a long period of time. And so if you were to say, who are the three people you need to hire from TSMC to replicate TSMC? I would say that's not the way to think about it. Hire half the half the staff or more. When TSMC was bringing the facility in Arizona online, they had hundreds of people from Taiwan working in Arizona. And this was not even their most leading edge chip production.

• 1:34:49Speaker 04

  This was two generations behind the cutting edge with all of the explicit help coming from headquarters as well. And so I think that helps illustrate how much of the the transfer needs to happen at different levels. But if you look at who's Mick hired over the last decade, it's been a ton of engineers from Western Taiwanese, Singaporean semiconductor firms. And I think a lot of the advances that they made can be ascribed to the fact they were able to import all of that human capital from workers who had previously spent a lot of time at other companies.

• 1:35:23Jordi Hays?

  What are you tracking? We're halfway through the year. What kind of events are on the horizon? Or various potential new legislation are you kind of following?

• 1:35:36Speaker 04

  I think from the policy side, there's going to be some action on tariffs and semiconductors, it seems. Presidents repeatedly said that. Unclear exactly what direction that's going to take, but it could have pretty big implications for the cost of building AI data centers. That's certainly one. And I think on the kind of tech controls front, we haven't seen the last of the moves from this administration either. And I wouldn't be surprised to see more there, too.

• 1:36:03John Coogan?

  Can, have you been tracking the leadership change at Intel? Liputan is coming in. It seems like they're going to be doing a lot of layoffs. I was trying to go back through Ben Thompson's analysis of Intel through the years and try and understand how the narrative. I've been tracking Intel that long to follow whether there should be a split. What has been your take on Intel? And has it changed? And how do you think, what should we expect from Intel over the next few years? It seems like they're going to be tightening things down, but do you expect any significant changes? Would you recommend any specific changes? I'm interested to hear your take on Intel.

• 1:36:43Speaker 04

  There's a lot of people who think that a split between the manufacturing and design businesses is the right way forward. I think that the question, if you think about a split, is what does that mean concretely? Because the reality is you'd still need to have a fair amount of integration between the design side and the manufacturing side, because the manufacturing side is making chips for the design side that will be in progress for a number of years. And the manufacturing side needs business from the design side. So there's split or no split is probably too simplistic a way of thinking through the option set. There's a bunch of different variables around that. And I think that's probably exactly what Lipu is wrestling with right now. I think the second challenge that Intel has is in its products business, the CPUs for

• 1:37:27Speaker 04

  CCs and data centers. I think there's a wide agreement that they've got work to do on both those fronts in terms of remaining competitive with AMD. And they've lost market share over the past couple of years. They need to win that that back. And so I think those are the the two key issues he got to deal with. And they're, of course, interlinked. And it's hard to hard to say you're only going to focus on one of them.

• 1:37:51Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:37:52John Coogan?

  This is great. Any other questions?

• 1:37:53Jordi Hays?

  Fascinating. No, would love to have you back on.

• 1:37:55John Coogan?

  This is fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:37:57Jordi Hays?

  This next quarter.

• 1:37:57John Coogan?

  Really appreciate this.

• 1:37:59Speaker 04

  Well, thank you.

• 1:38:00Jordi Hays?

  Cheers. Bye. And I'll be right back.

• 1:38:02John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Aaron Gin, the GPU Whisperer, as his moniker in the information proclaims. He has a new piece out in the wild. I believe it's in the Wall Street Journal. We will get the latest from him. Aaron, how are you doing?

• 1:38:19Aaron Ginn?

  Hey, man. How's it going?

• 1:38:21John Coogan?

  Wait, did I get that right? New piece in the journal or somewhere else?

• 1:38:25Aaron Ginn?

  Uh, the one on robots?

• 1:38:26John Coogan?

  Uh, well, a rena mag. Is that where?

• 1:38:28Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, yeah, that one. That was, yeah, rena mag. And then I did.

• 1:38:32John Coogan?

  You're prolific.

• 1:38:34Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, it's fun. I'm a kind of a not only Christian, but academic at heart. So I like, I like writing. I like all sorts of things in that zone. So, uh, but yeah, I have a new one on on robots.

• 1:38:47John Coogan?

  Okay, take me through it. What was the inspiration? What's the thesis? Give me the details.

• 1:38:52Aaron Ginn?

  Um, I guess, yeah, I kind of know for hot spicy, hot spicy takes done in a kind manner, in a gentle manner. Uh, but I think, I think most of the analysis done with people in our space is devoid of any kind of reference framing. They kind of live, people in Silicon Valley, particularly people in AI, live in, they think they live in this kind of arrogant Michael Cosm, as C.S. Lewis would say, like chronological snobbery. So they don't appreciate how other things that look very similar are just patterns of repeating. Uh, as the, uh, you know, one of the most famous Solomon phrasing, uh, because theorizing the Bible, that Solomon said that, uh, you know, that there's nothing new in the sun. Uh, we don't

• 1:39:33Aaron Ginn?

  fully know the distributive, but generally distributive to Solomon. And in that sense, like innovation kind of goes the same pattern that you have something that. Innovation is always intentionally oriented to CapEx, both in the sense of knowledge workers and also capital expenditure and it always starts with as a rich luxury, but then it gets proliferated out. And robots, as people have been pitching, both in the sense of the doomsday sense and the utopian sense, I think are wrong because if you look at past patterns of innovation and how it's been adopted in society, it generally doesn't get oriented towards the rich. Like, the rich continue to do what they do. Like, there's a reason why rich people have their own planes, have their own drivers, have a yacht, have multiple houses, have chefs and

• 1:40:17Aaron Ginn?

  carers, things like that. Like, that's basically the same trajectory of lifestyle that they've had for a while. And in terms of like, things that you own, things that you do, things you buy, like, there's the names that are associated with the Yale Club and the Harvard Club continue to be the same names. People who go to Davos do the same things. But the real arc of capitalism, which is why the existentialist, the German, the Frankfurt School was completely wrong, is that what it does is that it takes those luxuries and gives them to everybody else. I think that there's a, there's a, I've read the name of the Greek capitalist, but he said that his, his kind of moniker of looking at innovation and adoption is oriented towards taking something that is available to the rich and giving it to somebody else. So Uber is the example of that, right? Private jet over to everybody else. And into robots will be the

• 1:41:01Aaron Ginn?

  same thing. Like, certainly, like, robots will, there'll be a certainly, you know, a luxury version of a robot that will be deployed for people and the rich and famous, but the rich and famous can afford people. And rich and famous like character. They like things that are, like, go listen to, like, I know people love comparing you and Jordy to All In, right? And just go look at what Chamap talks about. It's like, it's things that are, take a long time or delicate.

• 1:41:28John Coogan?

  The King's cashmere, I love it.

• 1:41:29Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, yeah, this is made of endangered panda fur, right? That I hunted myself, right?

• 1:41:36John Coogan?

  No, no All In host has ever worn panda fur. That's real. But the King's cashmere is real, yes.

• 1:41:43Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, yeah. So, so like, so for the rest of us, right? Upper middle class down, robots will be for us. Robots will give us the ability to do things that we didn't have before that makes us more like rich people.

• 1:41:54John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:41:55Aaron Ginn?

  AKA time.

• 1:41:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:56Aaron Ginn?

  And so that's what it's arguing is that

• 1:41:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:41:58Aaron Ginn?

  That robots will not be dystopian, will not be utopian.

• 1:42:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:01Aaron Ginn?

  It'll be every other pattern of wave innovation and helping the average American live a better life.

• 1:42:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I know. I noticed this when I started interacting with like the the multi multi billionaires that every app on my phone, they had a person for. So if you do incorporation of your company through LegalZoom or Stripe Atlas, they have a lawyer full time on staff. You have Uber, they have a driver. You have DoorDash, they have a chef. And and it's like

• 1:42:29Jordi Hays?

  Gotta have guys.

• 1:42:29John Coogan?

  The new technology, yeah, the guys, yeah. How many problems can you solve by just calling a guy? Very interesting. What do you think about it was Chris Pike, right?

• 1:42:37Jordi Hays?

  Somebody's gonna create guys.app. They're democratizing access to guys.

• 1:42:41John Coogan?

  To guys, to just a guy.

• 1:42:42Jordi Hays?

  It's just a database of lawyers and drivers.

• 1:42:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, even even like, you know, you don't call 911 and that's for everyone. Private security is the opposite side of that. But what do you think about Chris Pike's take that when I mean, I guess this relates, but I think his take was that if there is a human that is acting as like a roadblock to something that you want, that will be a that will be replaced by artificial intelligence or robotics. But if it's but if the human is is part of the delightfulness of that experience and his example was like an Omakase chef, that will never be replaced because you want. What do you think about that? Give your reaction, please.

• 1:43:25Aaron Ginn?

  So so like I'll like I'll be a Chamofirma, right? Because like there was a question was, you said like, we go, just talking to J Cal, right? He's the ultimate like the thing guy, whatever the thing is, that's that's J Cal, right? And he goes, you know, talk about watches and Chamofirma was like, oh, get a handmade mechanical watch, right? So I'm wearing one right now, actually. So so like, and so you look at this, right? And I was like, so it's a lot of

• 1:43:50John Coogan?

  Go to getbezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available now to source you access to the planet, literally any watch.

• 1:43:55Aaron Ginn?

  So, so, so it, you know, hand and can Gillich, hand and car, can carve, you see a software engineer, then it becomes watches. And, and so the reason why this is worth it is because of that human interaction.

• 1:44:08Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:44:08Aaron Ginn?

  Right. It's that his, his ability to do everything by hand, he has like the machine built on like late 1900s, he does everything, you could show it. It's like, that's the point, right? And so another example of this would be like being a waiter.

• 1:44:20Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:44:20Aaron Ginn?

  Like you could, here's this example, like there is automated checkout on Applebee's, I don't know if you've been there recently.

• 1:44:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:25Aaron Ginn?

  But there's automated checkout Applebee's, like Chick-fil-A, right? One of the most highest grossing per store sale fast food joint in, in the world, one of the best.

• 1:44:34Jordi Hays?

  Delicious.

• 1:44:34Aaron Ginn?

  Has tons of people, right? So it could, if it wanted to, but it's not the point of where you go. And, and fundamentally, there, there's this disconnect. I think it's spiritually connected. I think you could watch some of Peter Thiel's recent, uh, interview with Dufat, and you can kind of hear some of these trends.

• 1:44:49Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:44:49Aaron Ginn?

  It's like, if you remove the ability of the anthropomorphic orientation of what innovation is and why you do it. You come up with these conclusions that are basically absurd. It, it, like, there's people in the Silicon Valley who argue absurd things about the nature of what the arc of innovation is going to. Because the pre-deposition and priors and the metaphysics that are built into it are basically that humans are worthless and existential and they kind of have a have a Star Trek Descartes view of the world that's very dark. And, and the same thing exists with social media, the same thing exists for search, the same thing exists for mobile phones, now it exists in AI. All of these are continuations to the same thing. And just like the AI doomers, if you go look at the names of the people, it's like the same people who are like the title to social media is going to end the universe sort of people, because it's the same line of thinking.

• 1:45:33Aaron Ginn?

  So humans, just like what you're doing now, people watch this show because of you too.

• 1:45:37Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:45:38Aaron Ginn?

  Like, like, it doesn't, even if there is a memetic machine.

• 1:45:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's not the most efficient way to get the news, but it's fun.

• 1:45:45Aaron Ginn?

  But it's fun, right? Like, like, like, because it's, it's part of what the nature of this, uh, it, it's hard for me to imagine that robots.

• 1:45:53Jordi Hays?

  The, the idea that, that, uh, let's say a humanoid robot, you know, gets real traction in restaurants. Well, naturally, you know, and, and you can go and sit down at a restaurant, the humanoid can serve you and whatever, and it's efficient, it's fast, it's smooth. That will naturally create even more opportunity for human waiters, waitresses that love the craft of service. And I think it is a real craft. And I think that anybody that's had a truly fantastic. Dinner and

• 1:46:24Aaron Ginn?

  Yes.

• 1:46:24Jordi Hays?

  Can can

• 1:46:26Aaron Ginn?

  attest.

• 1:46:26Jordi Hays?

  Can attest.

• 1:46:27Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah. Yeah. So, so it's a, this is one reason why I think the adoption curve of AI is going to be kind of like two different bucks of buckets of things. There's going to be the infrastructure side, which we're going to excel at. And then there's going to be the adoption side, which we're not going to excel at. And some of it is political, which is everything from we lost the AI moratorium of the bill. But thankfully the bill got passed, so we're not paying higher taxes. So thank you Daddy Trump. Daddy T wins again. So, yeah, you know, so, yeah, exactly. Make what I know is that so. But, but the, but on the other side is like, if we're going to do, let's say, one of the best things AI does is that it allows this, the ability of computers to look like humans, behave like humans.

• 1:47:10Aaron Ginn?

  It's fantastic at that. It's the ability to, to model us, right? To, to make a mimetic version of us. And from an education perspective, that could be incredibly powerful. Because my upbringing, even though I went to public school before was insane. So like I'll say from that. But my dad, who's Chinese, raised me much more of a Tom Uda traditional tiger dad sort of fashion. So I still remember this one conversation I had with my dad. I think it was in like fourth grade. And I got like a hundred in a class. And he said, why did I, why did I do extra credit? Right? And I was like, his immediate response. And, and you know, and the, you know, the, the more Caucasian people in the audience will clutch their pearls and oh my God, that's so traumatic. Right? But, but the, but the point of it, right? Is like, oh, you always can do more. Right? He's teaching me resilience. He's teaching me how to challenge myself, teaching me how to

• 1:47:56Aaron Ginn?

  push beyond what I think I can do into like open my expense. Cause his goal was to not have the upbringing he did, which was super poor. And, and so imagine AI that could do that, right? That could be your, your own. Yeah. Yeah, they did. Like it, your own ability to challenge your thoughts. Like, and people are thinking it like the Cluey thing. Which I think is a very surface level understandable AI can do. But imagine if AI was actually like a challenge agent, that let's say you got the right answer. And AI was like, you're wrong. So prove it to me like you're right, right? There's a whole other layer of this. And this is, this is what like in terms of the El Salvador project. That we're working on is like that. That's kind of like the orientation of why other countries don't have that. Like they don't have the teacher, the the labor unions, let alone they don't have

• 1:48:40Aaron Ginn?

  the internal capability of delivering these types of things today. But a computer can come in now because what they have now, they have nothing, right? And they're willing to take a swing being like, well, you know, if it works 50% of the time, that's a huge win for our country. But America, the lawsuits and this and this and this, right? But, you know, Bucelli is just like, oh, this sounds like a great idea. We should just try this. If it doesn't work well, do something else, right? And and so that's why I think we will excel at infrastructure, which is why it's so important. We push in video products everywhere. But the adoption is going to be in Africa, Second World Third World countries. It's not going to be in America, because we already have people doing it today, and people will still be the preferred, like, rich people still have tutors, right? And they're still going to have tutors, even though AI can actually good at tutoring.

• 1:49:22John Coogan?

  Interesting. Give me the update on sovereign AI generally. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal, I think, yesterday about more and more Western companies adopting DeepSeek and Qwen. It's like, oh, I actually wrote that. Yeah, I need to check. No, it's Josh Chin, Lisa Lynn. But, but, yeah, I mean, any major updates there? Did anything get stuffed in the bill related to chips or semiconductors or anything like that that's relevant?

• 1:49:53Aaron Ginn?

  Uh, not that I not that I know of. I mean, I mean, people also have to take a step back and realize this is a tax bill, not a spending bill. I'm I'm an Austrian economics guy, as y'all know, so I don't like that. I'm not I don't believe that you can keep spending forever. This is a tax bill. It's literally why it's going through reconciliation. So people need to like, lower your threshold. Like, I agree with Elon. It's one of my heroes. He's very wrong on the purpose of this bill. But he's but he's right. We're spending too much money. But it's also, we have to get away from omnibuses. So the AMR touring stuff got removed. I'm pro that. Saks is pro that. The OSTP office is pro that. I I this is not be something should reside in the stick. It's it's something that we have to win, and we can't have these like

• 1:50:35Aaron Ginn?

  varying laws everywhere. On the chip side, essentially, you know, there are, like, I have a hat that the the president's daughter gave me. So they so like, for countries like, you know, Bucelli, who's trying to, I basically provide this sort of infrastructure and capital to the world. The market is there for us and we have these basically voices that I think are living in an era of where the moat resided in areas that they were previously defined sort of infrastructure ways. And we're at this moment now where we could accelerate victory to where, hey, how about, you know, China, we outsourced all, you know, manufacturing the last 30 years to them that make all the stuff in T M U, they got the stuff in

• 1:51:18Aaron Ginn?

  Sheen and all this crap. Like, why can't we do that to them for semiconductors now? Like, why can't we take their money? Right? And you see all these people like, oh, but wait a minute, like, what if AI destroys the world? Right? And it's like, it's all this kind of like soothsaying, again, Title II people, go back to the, to that debate, remember free speech debate online and like telco versus where does the right to speak reside and the right to serve content? Those people are the same people in the AI moratorium. It's literally the same line about thinking. And, and so the, the AI moratorium was supposedly specifically on like training and application. But in El Salvador, like they pass an AI law, like basically a free training law where that, which is how the law should be structured.

• 1:52:00Aaron Ginn?

  When you train something, it's up to the user to apply it. If the user applies that to make a robot to kill somebody, just like you get a hammer and kill somebody, right? Or get a robot to scratch, you know, Jordy's Mercedes, right? It's that person's fault, right? It's not going to be like, if John trained that, you know, open source model and they use it against, you know, Jordy, it's like, it's not John's fault. So like in El Salvador, they passed that law, but in America, they want to co-mingle these responsibilities, uh, most out of baseless, baseless fear. But, but, but still, the, the policy of the administration is still towards, we need to export, we need to become the AI exporter of the world, because we have this ability to be the definite infrastructure of the next era and not reside in this kind of loose, not loose. It's definitely, it's actually

• 1:52:45Aaron Ginn?

  really even hard to understand what the critics are saying.

• 1:52:49John Coogan?

  Even with something less dramatic than like, you know, using an open source L M model to commit a crime or something, just, just, just the intellectual property thing. Like, it's very easy that we've had the ability to go and, uh, you know, pirate a movie and upload it to YouTube for a very long time. That's like not a crazy new technology, but it is in the sense of like copying data is new and distributing it all over the world. And yet, You don't, you don't even, YouTube doesn't even need to stop it ever from happening. They just need to stop there to, from being an economic model. Like you can't build a business on top of YouTube, just uploading Star Wars. Like that's not going to work for you.

• 1:53:28John Coogan?

  And as long as you kill that economic model with enough pressure and say, hey, we're not going to serve ads against this. We're not going to pay you out. We're going to ban your account eventually. There, there's a bunch of ways to prevent this stuff at, at, at the level of like, yeah, like someone might, some kid might upload Star Wars and five people see it and before it gets taken down, not the end of the world. Who cares? Exactly. And so, yeah, yeah, going after the, uh, like, like the individual actors, that, that's a very, very good point. I like that.

• 1:53:56Aaron Ginn?

  The, the most, the most freeing phrase you could ever, and maybe you could raise your kids this way too, because it was the most freeing phrase ever received from a, from a guy who's famous, but I won't say his name because I, uh, but he's a huge radio star. And he, he taught me this. He goes, whenever you feel stuck, just say the phrase, so what?

• 1:54:14Aaron Ginn?

  So what? Right? And then like, why should I buy into your presuppositions? Why should I believe in these things? Like prove it to me. Like so what? And, and, and it's so freeing to reside in that zone of like, like you just said, so what? Like somebody does that, like, why is that a big deal? Like, and, and then it kind of puts people on their heels. Like, like I, I said this once in a debate about like, since they're talking about chips, like, whoa, like, you know, ByteDance could get access to this. So like, first of all, Oracle's number, like top five customers are like Chinese. So like, you know, they're already doing it, right? Then I said like, so what? Oh my God. Like, it's, it's like, oh yeah, videos will be more musical. I was like, it's a, and they're like, well, like we could do this, could do this, could do this. I'm like, I'm like, yeah, I could say the same thing about anything.

• 1:54:58Aaron Ginn?

  I could say the same thing about like, well, you know, you, if you, if you buy this watch, you could use this to put on a bomb. Right? And I know like it's like, it's like, that's like their level of thinking. There's so many steps.

• 1:55:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was gonna, I was gonna ask Chris earlier, you know, how, if, how he thinks about AI war versus AI race? And then you would have to ask him the question, well, then should you have named your book the A?

• 1:55:21John Coogan?

  Chip Race.

• 1:55:21Jordi Hays?

  Chip Race? And then that would have sold like 1% of the copies.

• 1:55:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, is it a war or is it a race? Interesting.

• 1:55:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's so, it's so tough. I mean, so many of the loudest voices in our industry are beautifully conflicted because they run multi-billion dollar businesses that are dependent, you know, future fundraising, current fundraising is dependent on certain narratives. And so it's hard to figure out what's, what's real.

• 1:55:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:51Aaron Ginn?

  The, as it relates to like the, like the China stuff?

• 1:55:56John Coogan?

  Not just that, even, even just like the progress of models, how much we should be spending, when AGI will arrive, when super intelligence will arrive.

• 1:56:04Jordi Hays?

  AI war versus AI race, right?

• 1:56:06John Coogan?

  Because if, if you brand it as a war, then all of a sudden it's, it, it, it brings in a new level of funding. Like, you know, there's all sorts of downstream implications of, well, you know, um, uh, it's really, it's, it's, it's really important that we get the AI doom question right. And so we need to over invest. Or it's really good that we win, it's really important that we win the geopolitical battle. And so we, it's okay to over invest in this case, you know, it's, it's all about just like justifying different levels of underwriting. And when you add one of these infinite numbers, you can say 1% chance of infinity is still, you know, I'll pay any price.

• 1:56:45Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah. Yeah. I guess, I guess my, my firm is just way more optimistic. Like I understand, like, why can't we just invest because it's cool? Like, it's, it's, like, like, I like, I like, we, we like stuff that Elon does. I don't want a Tesla because I like my, my cars to go boom. Right? So, but it's still cool. Like, why can't we just be cool? Why can't it just be, hey, this is awesome? This is like moving the trajectory of the human race to something even more amazing.

• 1:57:09John Coogan?

  It seems like we're getting there.

• 1:57:10Aaron Ginn?

  War, death.

• 1:57:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. But it, it seems like we're getting there. I mean, I don't know if you saw Nat Friedman's post, but you know, he was saying he started at Meta and he's gonna just build some cool stuff. And I'm like, yes, like that sounds awesome. Because, I mean, there are a lot of AI products, but a lot of them are.

• 1:57:25Jordi Hays?

  He's gonna discover the great lost wonders of history.

• 1:57:28John Coogan?

  I hope so. I hope so. Be better. Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by, Aaron. This is always a pleasure. What are you doing for the fourth? Yeah, what are you doing for the fourth?

• 1:57:37Aaron Ginn?

  Uh, no, I don't like to work. I can do something with like my church and I usually, my, my house is a third space. So for like the community, so it's very, on the other side of this is the, I built it, I built a custom house. And so like, it's a big, basically like, I don't drake, but it's like a big beer hall essentially from front to back.

• 1:57:56John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:57:57Aaron Ginn?

  So, so we usually host something, it's like, I don't know, maybe three or four thousand square feet.

• 1:58:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:02Aaron Ginn?

  And it's just a big open room with like a kitchen, dining room, living room, outdoor space.

• 1:58:06John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 1:58:06Aaron Ginn?

  So we usually like host stuff and people like use, use my house to do that. So I think this goes back to the, the, you know, the human element is like fundamentally innovation is supposed to be at the primordial basis to be, make humans better. That's why people pay for it. And there's certainly negative downsides of this. And we have to mitigate those downsides, but you always should start from the, the phrase, so what? Or go, go read Thomas Sowell about can you even regulate downsides without creating a secondary effect of mitigating upsides? And, and I, I think that from, many people are projecting lots of things in AI that they could just get from just like being in community and just like having friends. And, and like y'all have your sauna workout.

• 1:58:51Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:52John Coogan?

  Sure for male owners.

• 1:58:54Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You, you, like so much of the projecting of internal problems people have into technology. When have they had a friend? If they resolved their loneliness academic, they had a good family, they surrounded by a religious community. You know, particularly Christianity, that a lot of these things kind of go away. Where you can just look at a technology, you can look at innovation from where it is, which is like, this can just be awesome. It doesn't need to kill us. It doesn't need to start a war. It doesn't need to be A I, A I, S I. All those are certainly things we can talk about, but to overextend, you dig into that person that's arguing that, there's typically a, like a. A pathology built into them that is projecting externally when it's just like, hey dude,

• 1:59:39Aaron Ginn?

  like, do you still like want a hug? Like, you know, just like, you just want like, you want to hang out like the pool or like go to CrossFit or something like, and then, and then they're kind of like, you know, fades away because there, there are many things in the world you should not care about. And, and I don't, like, I get asked to about things. I'm like, I don't really care about that. Like, it's not something I want to talk about. And, and because you care about less things is key to joy. Because less things means you're actually more responsible for more things, which means you can be happy, because you can see your work go into something that has output. But there's, when you become unhappy is when you see all this crap happening around you, and you get worried about it, and you do something about it, and you really can't. And really, it's like, there's, there's just things you just shouldn't care about. And then you're

• 2:00:20Jordi Hays?

  sensing, I hate to cut you off, but I'm sensing it's Ted Talk.

• 2:00:24Aaron Ginn?

  Oh, sure.

• 2:00:24Jordi Hays?

  We'll do a TVPN talk very soon, but have a fantastic weekend. Great seeing you as always.

• 2:00:29John Coogan?

  See you soon.

• 2:00:30Aaron Ginn?

  See you guys.

• 2:00:31John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of fantastic AI products, go to fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2.

• 2:00:42Jordi Hays?

  If you, if you like winning, don't get in the bake off with fin.ai.

• 2:00:45John Coogan?

  Don't get in the bake off.

• 2:00:46Jordi Hays?

  Slash TVPN.

• 2:00:47John Coogan?

  Well, our next guest is Bridget from Founder's Fund. Welcome to the stream, Bridget. How are you doing? Busy time in, oh, wait, okay, so, can you say where you are?

• 2:00:58Speaker 06

  The last time I was on, it was a different format. You guys were in the old format.

• 2:01:02John Coogan?

  We were, yeah, new studio. We are now in Homewood, future capital media.

• 2:01:06Jordi Hays?

  Media.

• 2:01:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:07Jordi Hays?

  And entertainment.

• 2:01:08John Coogan?

  Future home of media. But speaking of future homes, where are, where are you right now?

• 2:01:12Speaker 06

  So I'm at ECC.

• 2:01:14John Coogan?

  Where's that? You're, so you're, you're literally doing the meme. You're a venture capitalist and you're, you're in France right now.

• 2:01:19Jordi Hays?

  Conference, at a conference.

• 2:01:23John Coogan?

  One, one hour conference, seven days on the beach? Is that what's going on?

• 2:01:27Speaker 06

  Oh, my gosh. It's productive. It's productive.

• 2:01:29John Coogan?

  It's productive. Okay.

• 2:01:30Speaker 06

  Lots of founders here. Yeah, I don't know why they have it in France, but last year it was in.

• 2:01:36Jordi Hays?

  I know why. It looks beautiful.

• 2:01:37John Coogan?

  It's beautiful. And all the venture capitalists will be there anyway.

• 2:01:40Jordi Hays?

  All the events with the ocean backdrop.

• 2:01:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's fantastic. Yeah, give us the, what actually happens at an event like that? Is it people kind of voting on direction of the technology? Or is it just like pitch, meeting founders, building on top of stuff? What?

• 2:01:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, I would say it's like, it's sort of a mixture of everything. I would say like, These conferences probably originally started because the crypto industry is like just so decentralized, like for lack of a better word. Um, and everyone lives in different places. So I think originally it was like for kind of like like minded individuals to meet up. And Peter actually used to go to some of the really early ones called like FC Financial Cryptography. And then they slowly evolved into like ETC. There's like token 2049. And it's just a good way to like, see everyone in person, like obviously in person is so much better than Zoom. But people in crypto are just so distributed, like they're not really concentrated in one city, maybe New York now, but it's still kind of like, you know, since the US isn't like insanely regulatorily friendly yet, like people are everywhere. So.

• 2:02:39John Coogan?

  No, I feel like there's very serious projects in San Francisco, New York, Puerto Rico, uh, Singapore and Dubai, which is like all over the world.

• 2:02:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, totally. Yeah. But Joey and I try to do like one-on-one meetings most of the day and like, cause if you just get caught up in events, it's easy to just do a bunch of events and like not actually get anything done. So.

• 2:02:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. We, we, we've gotten the steamrolled a few times. We're not crypto native enough to know the full calendar. And we'll try and book some crypto people and they'll be like, are you crazy? We accidentally held our crypto day. During the Bitcoin thing. And we just didn't know. And we were like, well, Brian Armstrong is coming on. So, you know, if he's not going to this thing, like.

• 2:03:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:03:17John Coogan?

  But we actually had some folks from the conference hop on, which is cool and it wound up working out well. Anyway.

• 2:03:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's like 2 AM our time or something.

• 2:03:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, and, and getting Mert on the street. We had Mert yesterday and he's always great, but he's, you know, always traveling across the world. Um, I wanted to get the update on the, the stablecoin world. What's interesting is the game over circles out. It feels like the legislation's passing, but what are you seeing? Is there, are there still investment opportunities? Are there still opportunities to build? Or is it the time of the enterprise SaaS integrator in web two?

• 2:03:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a good question. Yeah. I think stablecoins are definitely the main character right now. Like we, there's a new announcement every single day with something stablecoin related. Like it's very hypey. Um, it's very in the meta, but I think like for good reason. Um, I was joking with Joey the other day. It's like stablecoins are basically the, the part of crypto that has found the most product market fit. And it's just like a tokenized US dollar, which is like kind of ironic because the original.

• 2:04:17John Coogan?

  Very American.

• 2:04:18Speaker 06

  That's in crypto. It's like. We're going to rebuild the financial system. Everything's going to be Bitcoin denominated. Like, we're going to do, you know, basically recreate. And now we just have like the tokenized US dollar.

• 2:04:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, everyone was complaining about volatility of the meme coins and the crypto community said, "Fine, we'll give you something with zero volatility. Are you happy now?"

• 2:04:34Speaker 06

  Exactly, exactly, exactly.

• 2:04:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, it feels like some of that hype, I want to get into the tokenized private assets and tokenized stocks as well. But before that, Saks came out and posted that there was a certain concession in the stablecoin bill around stablecoin issuers not being able to pass yield back to holders. Could you, could you dive into that a little bit? Because that was, felt monumental, but...

• 2:05:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think that was something that the banking lobbyists probably snuck into the bill. And the bill was like a Herculean effort even to just like pass the Senate. Like, it got blocked once. Just to like get it like to the Senate was like basically like an insane task. And I think basically the gist of that is like, if too much money flows out of banks and into like stablecoin issuers like Circle, or you know, there's going to be like a million in the US probably. That's money flowing out of like the traditional financial system. And then basically like net new money cannot be created via loans because stablecoins have to be one-to-one backed with like T-bills or cash and cash equivalents.

• 2:05:43Jordi Hays?

  So, stablecoins would kill the entire Western financial system.

• 2:05:47Speaker 06

  Like, I mean, basically, and they make, I mean, it makes so much sense because it's like, I like, I would rather hold my money in stablecoins. It's like one-to-one backed. It's very safe. And when you put your money in a bank, it's like, people think it's safe and whatever, but it's actually like not that safe. Like, they're like lending it out and that's how new money gets created. And that's how the economy functions.

• 2:06:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, we all experienced with the SVB crisis.

• 2:06:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's...

• 2:06:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, we all experienced this firsthand. I mean, most people in tech with the SVB crisis and First Republic and the idea of FDIC insurance. And everyone kind of learns about fractional reserve banking at the worst possible time when there's a crisis. But you actually wrote an article all about how a stablecoin bank might be different. Can you take us through some of... What you might expect and and why do we I I feel like there's this whole crypto podcast called like bankless and they're all like don't have a bank at all and that was a meme in crypto for a while.

• 2:06:39Speaker 06

  And now the banks are going to issue stable coins.

• 2:06:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what is the role of the bank going forward? For bank maxing. What even is a bank like like what why do we need that at all? And then walk me through the stablecoin bank idea.

• 2:06:50Speaker 06

  Definitely, definitely. Yeah. Um, okay, let's see. Yeah, I think me and my friend Avi wrote the piece originally like early this year. We basically were looking into this act that didn't end up passing. It was called the Credit Card Competition Act. It had like a 3% chance of passing the Senate or something, but we were reading it. And basically what it did in practice, if it were to be like passed into law would be to like allow or force banks to accept a network other than like Visa or Mastercard. So it basically create this like golden opening for a stablecoin network to come in and people to be able to pay with stablecoins and like all of these things.

• 2:07:28Speaker 06

  Because right now, like banks are pretty locked into Visa and Mastercard, like they have a trillion dollars in market cap, like they're the de facto. And they've also been doing like fairly well on the stablecoin side, like they're kind of like innovating actually like pretty well. So it's kind of like a regulatory thing where you would have to have like the CCCA, the the act I was talking about pass in practice for like a a stablecoin network to come through. And so that was like the first angle we looked at it. And then basically we were thinking about, okay, what about like from a consumer banking perspective? And it basically would function the exact same way as a narrow bank would where they're just it's just a stablecoin bank, like your deposits are held one to one backed.

• 2:08:09Speaker 06

  They're like backed by T bills and it's super safe. But again, it's like if all of that money were to flow out of the traditional financial system and banks and into this, you know, this is why the narrow bank could never get a master account. They can never get a charter and they never actually got a meaningful amount of deposits. Because it's like a threat to the Fed and like to the the US economy essentially, if if it got, you know, in aggregate, like a ton of deposits. And that was kind of like the way it would trend, I think, if it got a master account. So, yeah, but a stablecoin bank, I mean, I think it's something that like needs to exist. Like it it just makes so much sense and the banking system is incredibly antiquated, like it's actually not safe as we've seen. And so.

• 2:08:55Speaker 06

  But yeah, I don't know, a lot of the banks are trying to explore stuff around stablecoins now. JP Morgan is trying to pilot like a tokenized deposit program. BuyServe is trying to launch a stablecoin. And yeah, and like honestly, the incumbents are doing incredibly well, like Stripe acquired Bridge, Stripe acquired Privy, Stripe via Bridge launched their own stablecoin, USDB. So it's kind of one of those things where like you want to see all these like net new winners be created, but also like Stripe and a lot of the traditional players are kind of crushing it. So it's interesting to see.

• 2:09:29Jordi Hays?

  What about stocks on chain, private company shares on chain? What are you, what are you tracking there? Uh, there was a bunch of memes this week. We talked about it with, with Mert a little bit, but I'm curious what you're expecting. Uh, it, it just seems like there's funny enough, a massive amount of demand for US regular publicly listed US stocks just tokenized on chain. Yep.

• 2:09:53Speaker 06

  Yep, yep, totally. Yeah. So I, I actually went to the, the Robin Hood event where they announced like the private company shares and, and then tokenizing equities. Um, and yeah, I think basically like if you're tokenizing equities, it makes a ton of sense as a regulatory arbitrage, like to, to deliver these equities to people outside the US that have historically had a hard time getting them. But like for people in the US, it actually just makes sense just to like use the traditional, you know, equities market and just buy them from your bank account. And then I think on the private side, yeah, uh, Robin Hood talked about, what did they do? Like SpaceX and OpenAI, I think. But again, it's really, it's, it's difficult to issue private company shares. Like we, you saw like the OpenAI response, I'm sure.

• 2:10:39Speaker 06

  It's just one of those things where, yeah, it, it, it's hard to custody them. Where are they living? What happens like when you redeem them? And it, it, it kind of, it kind of becomes foggy. So that's why I think like. Unless it's like a regulatory arbitrage, at least for tokenized equities, it it makes more sense for outside the US than inside the US. But everyone's doing it now, like Kraken issued X stocks. Let's see, obviously Robinhood Coinbase is trying to get into it. So I mean, again, I think it makes sense, but within the US, it's probably like a a less interesting market because our system works pretty well as is, I would say. And then I also think like the most interesting thing about like issuing these things on chain is is native issuance.

• 2:11:23Speaker 06

  Such that basically like instead of like wrapping, you know, Apple stock and then issuing it on say Arbitrum like you just like natively like like let's say just like a company like I don't know like Mertz company just like goes public and you natively issue those shares. Um, and such that you don't have to like wrap and unwrap, add an extra step where you're taking like counterparty risk, you're taking custody risk. There's more fees involved and you don't actually own the underlying, like you're trusting someone else to own the underlying. So.

• 2:11:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the the point of crypto was trustless system. So.

• 2:11:57Speaker 06

  Exactly, exactly. Like if you want to like natively like Tether is doing like tokenized gold, right? Where it's like that's the only asset that represents their gold is that tokenized gold. It's not like they issued it. You know, on like the CME and then they wrapped it in like tokenized it. So I think like if you have that extra step of tokenizing, it only makes sense as like a regulatory arbitrage, otherwise you should natively issue it. And I think native issuance is going to become more and more of a thing and that's going to like drag the rest of the financial system. Kind of on chain. That's Vlad's vision too with Robinhood. It's like if a lot of these companies, if you can find a structure that works for like OpenAI SpaceX, you know, all of these like private companies.

• 2:12:37Speaker 06

  And you just like have them like natively issuing shares of their own that represent, you know, some kind of stake in the company in like a clean cut way. Then you don't even really like need to go public, right? Cause like that's kind of like your trajectory of like letting.

• 2:12:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it is interesting, the strategy of trying to force the conversation and then potentially force the partnership by just creating these things, right? Republic was coming out. We had Ken on and he was basically saying, yeah, some people, plenty of people aren't going to like this, but we think it's sort of the natural evolution and then and then. You know, we'll see what actually pans out.

• 2:13:12John Coogan?

  Well, I'm sure you have a big day of yachting and wine tasting tomorrow. I mean, I mean, meetings, meetings.

• 2:13:19Jordi Hays?

  Business meetings.

• 2:13:20John Coogan?

  So we appreciate you staying up late to hop on the stream. Oh, yeah.

• 2:13:23Jordi Hays?

  Thanks so much for stopping by. It was great to catch up.

• 2:13:24John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:13:25Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Bridget.

• 2:13:26John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 2:13:27Jordi Hays?

  Enjoy the fourth in France.

• 2:13:28John Coogan?

  Yes. If you're looking to get a good night's sleep, head over to eightsleep.com/tbpn and get a new Pod 5. They have a five-year warranty, a 30-night risk-free trial and free returns and free shipping.

• 2:13:39Jordi Hays?

  I am back in the game with an 89.

• 2:13:42John Coogan?

  Congratulations, Jordy. Hit a soundboard for you. And let's bring in our next guest, Price from Open Ledger, embedding accounting in your platform fast. Price, how you doing? Good to meet you.

• 2:13:53Jordi Hays?

  Did you hire Sohom?

• 2:13:56Speaker 07

  No.

• 2:13:56Jordi Hays?

  Did you interview him?

• 2:13:58Speaker 07

  No, not me, neither.

• 2:14:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, check spam. It tends to be a bull signal if he reached out.

• 2:14:05John Coogan?

  But yeah, please kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company.

• 2:14:09Speaker 07

  Nice. I'm Price, co-founder and CEO of Open Ledger. We're building embedded accounting, an embedded accounting API that helps vertical SaaS platforms embed full accounting suites into their products instead of having to build a general ledger from scratch. 70 million people are running businesses of all types and no matter what type of business they're running, they all have to do their accounting. And so they're turning to a lot of modern platforms like Shopify, MindBody and ServiceDigm to run their platforms. But most of them still don't have accounting features and the ones they do are usually duct taped together. And so what we've built is a set of APIs and components that makes it much easier for these platforms to embed a full accounting suite inside their product for their end users to use.

• 2:14:50John Coogan?

  Interesting. So is this B2B2B software?

• 2:14:54Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:14:54John Coogan?

  I love it. We're adding an extra layer.

• 2:14:56Jordi Hays?

  We added a B. Why'd you pick an easy problem like accounting?

• 2:15:02Speaker 07

  Well, I don't see it as an easy problem.

• 2:15:04Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm totally kidding.

• 2:15:06John Coogan?

  It seems extremely hard.

• 2:15:07Speaker 07

  I'm, I'm, I, I get it though. I get it though. I think at first glance, it seems like a very simple company in a lot of ways, but I think what's

• 2:15:17Jordi Hays?

  I don't think it's, to be clear, I don't, I don't think it's

• 2:15:19John Coogan?

  He was joking.

• 2:15:20Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's a simple, it's a simple idea, extremely compliment to actually create.

• 2:15:25John Coogan?

  Totally. Cause you have to create so much flexibility for each different client. But yeah, what was

• 2:15:30Jordi Hays?

  And we had, we had a CEO on from, from Ambrook that does accounting and financial, just for farms.

• 2:15:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:37Jordi Hays?

  And she said it took them like, I think two and a half years to like build the core accounting sort of engine.

• 2:15:42John Coogan?

  So yeah, yeah. So what have the trade offs been as you've, as you've built the product?

• 2:15:46Speaker 07

  Yeah. So we went all, all the way down to the ledger level and built our own ledger database. That, that's what we build all the functionality on top of for reconciliation. And then the actual embedded accounting API itself is all built on top of that general ledger level. And so that took a bunch of time, but we really wanted to save folks who, you know, that exact situation you mentioned, folks who are building these custom accounting products that provides so much value to end users, finding a way to really take that, those core things that don't change between accounting systems and turn them into infrastructure that anyone can use to build their own products.

• 2:16:21John Coogan?

  What's the go to market like? How, how do you actually bring on these businesses? Is it power law distributed? Do you need to just get a few really huge companies on the platform? Or are you trying to go super broad, like Stripe where kind of everyone's using the product?

• 2:16:35Speaker 07

  Yeah. So I think that's how we, we really got our start and that's how our first clients are larger power law as customers. But what we're looking forward to is this, this deeper thesis that we've been building around is this idea that accounting data is basically the best substrate you can get to put at the base of a vertical, vertical agent for business. Right? And so as folks are building more types of vertical agents that are working with financial APIs or payments and things of that nature, having accounting data reconciled into a book or a chart of accounts and building on top of that is one of the best. Places to sit because that information is essentially like memory for a company.

• 2:17:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, it's the reason that every board meeting starts with like, let's look at the, let's look at the finances of the business. Because that, that, you know, that is the map of the territory and then you can dig into specific things. So that makes a ton of sense. In terms of agents, it seems like you don't actually need to do all the work of maybe discovering the correct patterns. Because your clients are working on top of you in that regard. Are you using artificial intelligence at your company? Is there been different trends that you're tracking that are improving the product on your end yet?

• 2:17:51Speaker 07

  Yeah. So what we're really excited about right now is really weaving it inside and through the, the way we're building our general ledger architecture. So that it can automate a lot of those, those, those bookkeeping tasks that, that really are a big part of accounting and turn that into infrastructure that can quietly sit inside of a product rather than having so much human input. And I think that's really what makes this part, what makes this a really exciting opportunity and different from a lot of other embedded payment or fintech features is that we're essentially helping to automate more of a service as well alongside a suite. That's something that a lot of platforms previously were helping their end users and customers like hire bookkeepers or accountants to sit alongside them.

• 2:18:36Speaker 07

  We help kind of add that almost as an extra feature that they can sell alongside their suite.

• 2:18:41John Coogan?

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

• 2:18:44Jordi Hays?

  Oh, very cool.

• 2:18:44John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for stopping by.

• 2:18:46Jordi Hays?

  You know, I'm excited about all the different features and functionality that you can build on, on top of Open Ledger.

• 2:18:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, we've seen such a big trend in vertical SaaS and all the different, different B2B players. It makes sense that there would be, you know, an enabling technology here. So thank you so much for stopping by. This is great.

• 2:19:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to hear from you, Price.

• 2:19:03John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:19:04Speaker 07

  I'm excited for you guys. This rocks.

• 2:19:05John Coogan?

  Thank you. Have a great day.

• 2:19:06Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:19:08John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Public Investing for those who take it seriously, multi-asset investing.

• 2:19:11Jordi Hays?

  You better take it seriously.

• 2:19:12John Coogan?

  Industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions, folks. Head over to Public if you want to buy stocks the old-fashioned way where you actually own the stock.

• 2:19:20Jordi Hays?

  It's pretty cool.

• 2:19:21John Coogan?

  There's a lot of websites out there.

• 2:19:23Jordi Hays?

  Being a shareholder, underrated, underrated being a shareholder.

• 2:19:25John Coogan?

  Being a shareholder is underrated. Well, we have our next guest coming into the studio.

• 2:19:29Jordi Hays?

  Not quite yet. They need a little bit to build the four up, so we can do a little bit of timeline here.

• 2:19:34John Coogan?

  Well, we could tell you about Adquick. You could take a four up and put it on a billboard, baby. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of advertising-only. Adquick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad-buying across the globe. You saw us deploy ads in the real world. We did an out-of-home campaign in New York, and the response to that has been remarkable.

• 2:19:58Jordi Hays?

  It's been really fun.

• 2:19:58John Coogan?

  It's been a way to...

• 2:19:59Jordi Hays?

  People running by it, taking pictures.

• 2:20:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, and it's been a way to reconnect. We've gotten so many text messages from people who are less online, family members, all sorts. It really cut... Out-of-home is just built different.

• 2:20:11Jordi Hays?

  Old friends, college friends.

• 2:20:12John Coogan?

  It's just built different. I mean, you gotta do a lot of different marketing strategies. There's a lot of different things. Out-of-home should be a piece of that.

• 2:20:19Jordi Hays?

  It is incredibly underrated. I expect people to just start doing the one-up, no-launch video, just big one-on-one billboard.

• 2:20:27John Coogan?

  That's the way to do it.

• 2:20:28Jordi Hays?

  Very efficient.

• 2:20:28John Coogan?

  That's the way to do it.

• 2:20:29Jordi Hays?

  It's very efficient.

• 2:20:30John Coogan?

  Well, do we have time to dive into the business of Formula One? Or, Jordy, you want to check out our next guest? Because I saw F1 last night.

• 2:20:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, tell us, give us your review.

• 2:20:42John Coogan?

  It was incredible. It was one of the best movies I've ever seen. I'm really sorry because we wanted the whole crew to come, but I was catching up with an old friend, a college buddy, and a former guest on the show as well, and it just kind of came together. But saw it in IMAX, highly recommend it. The entire film seemed to be shot in IMAX, which I have no idea how they did because... Half the shots are from the perspective of a Formula One car. And so they must have mounted some massive camera rig on that thing. But it was beautiful. Hans Zimmer delivered an absolutely incredible score. I've been listening to the, the theme to F1 religiously as I drive at just, you know, five over the speed limit, right?

• 2:21:23Jordi Hays?

  You sure Brad, you sure you want to put that on the record? I, I heard that you drive always perfectly at the speed limit.

• 2:21:29John Coogan?

  One under.

• 2:21:30Jordi Hays?

  You've capped your car.

• 2:21:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:31Jordi Hays?

  You, you actually hacked it.

• 2:21:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I, I kind of take the Nvidia approach to driving.

• 2:21:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:37John Coogan?

  You know?

• 2:21:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:38John Coogan?

  And, uh, yeah, fantastic movie. Highly recommend it. Lots of great sponsorships, lots of great ads within the movie. Shark Ninjas in there. We got a bunch of, we got a bunch of great stuff. Highly recommend seeing in theaters. Anyway, go check it out. F1 with Brad Pitt. We'll be on Appti.

• 2:21:54Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:21:55John Coogan?

  We have our next guest. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Could you guys introduce yourselves? I wasn't, we weren't fully expecting to. We're excited to have you all here. Thank you so much.

• 2:22:03Speaker 08

  Of course. So, I mean, maybe just to start out, um, my name is Jacob. Uh, I'm very excited to be here at the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, capital of capital.

• 2:22:14Jordi Hays?

  Very early, very early supporter.

• 2:22:17John Coogan?

  So we appreciate it.

• 2:22:18Jordi Hays?

  We'll never forget you.

• 2:22:18John Coogan?

  We, we, we will remember.

• 2:22:20Jordi Hays?

  It's great to finally have you.

• 2:22:21Speaker 08

  So just quick background, um, I'm currently a student at Stanford, um, along with Jack Whitaker, one of your old interns.

• 2:22:28John Coogan?

  Nice.

• 2:22:29Speaker 08

  And then, uh, right now I've been, uh, working for a lot of guilt for the past, wow, it's like, I think four or five months now. And what I'm going to be talking about today with Ophira is something.

• 2:22:39Jordi Hays?

  Wait, wait, first, fit, fit check? What, what is this jacket?

• 2:22:42Speaker 08

  Yeah. Oh yeah, no, this is, um, a Sun Microsystems jacket that we got from the old C-suite. One of my coworkers, uh, the Cleveland mafia of Ann, me, Peter Thiel, a bunch of other folks. There's, there's a bunch of Sun Microsystems merch. Uh, yeah, so every time I wear this, I think that's, that's kind of what you need. If you're going to a pitch meeting, if you're fundraising, this instantly gets you.

• 2:23:06Jordi Hays?

  It's a Letterman jacket of our industry.

• 2:23:08Speaker 08

  Exactly.

• 2:23:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:23:09Speaker 08

  And it doesn't have Java on the back, but it does have Java on here.

• 2:23:12John Coogan?

  Oh, that's great.

• 2:23:13Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:23:14Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 2:23:14John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Okay, so give us the, yeah, yeah, give us the story.

• 2:23:18Jordi Hays?

  And then Ophira.

• 2:23:19John Coogan?

  Oh, sorry.

• 2:23:19Jordi Hays?

  Quick intro as well would, would be great.

• 2:23:22Speaker 09

  Hi, yeah, my name's Ophira and we're gonna be talking about large language model art. I actually, I invented making artwork with language models like ChatGPT. And Jacob has a really exciting project around that.

• 2:23:40Jordi Hays?

  Wait, break it down.

• 2:23:43Speaker 09

  Just dropped something on you there.

• 2:23:44Jordi Hays?

  You're the creator of AI art. Break that down.

• 2:23:48Speaker 08

  Yeah, one of them. Yeah, no, she's ridiculously, I'm gonna gas Ophira up for a moment.

• 2:23:53Jordi Hays?

  Please.

• 2:23:54Speaker 08

  She invented a large portion of modern AI ASCII art. And is probably the world's best jailbreaker. OpenAI holds these competitions pretty regularly, like every couple of months or so. They invite people from all around the world to jailbreak their models. Usually people can't get past like one or two of the tests out of like a 20 testing. Ophira just regularly wins them, breaks everything. Like, it's something where I was talking with Ben Mann, who's one of the Anthropic co-founders. And even when we were discussing this, he's like, yeah, no, like, there's still a lot of red teaming and CBRN, which is chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear threats that, like, these artists and their communities, they just break through everything.

• 2:24:39Speaker 08

  Like, and all the, like, I don't care what kind of MIT PhD, like, hire everybody, like, doesn't work. Like, they're just, they're killers.

• 2:24:47Speaker 09

  And before that, I even came along, you know, I was using the same techniques to make artwork. So back when Microsoft Bing came out in like, summer of 2023, I got like, you know how you guys read poetry books sometimes? And the poems are like arranged in these beautiful shapes, the words have like, like this gorgeous shape-a-tree? That's what I do with language models.

• 2:25:07Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:25:07Speaker 09

  So I actually first discovered that they could do that in the first place, and I've made a whole beautiful art form out of that.

• 2:25:14John Coogan?

  So this is not diffusion-based image generation?

• 2:25:17Speaker 09

  No, no, this is, and this is a language model doing it.

• 2:25:20John Coogan?

  Yes, and so just the, just the letters on a keyboard.

• 2:25:23Speaker 09

  It's actually a very interesting capability because it's showing spatial intelligence, despite all it's doing is predicting the next token, just like, like you would normally get a chat reply.

• 2:25:32John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:25:32Speaker 09

  But it's doing it in these gorgeous shapes that very often actually reflect the content of the words.

• 2:25:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've seen someone put out a benchmark for having LLMs basically interpret secret messages in, are you familiar with this, where you draw, you basically write out a sentence in a square box and the LLM gets really confused, even though the human can one-shot it, it's kind of like an Arc AGI for this type of thing, but it's very fascinating that you're able to get good results, because I thought that that's a place where LLMs were particularly weak, but it seems like you've been able to break through.

• 2:26:07Speaker 08

  I think they also, like, one thing to note is that they don't naturally, they're naturally not very good at this. Like, I think if either of you, like, both of you, I feel like are fairly AI fluent, but if you tried to go out and do this, I don't think that you would get terribly interesting results at first. There's a lot, like, to get some of the artworks that are featured on beautiful aiart.com going right now, showing my stuff, our stuff, but, um, to go, to go buy this, I usually, like, I mean, Ofera can speak on this, like, you want, like, sometimes it's like thirty, forty, even like hundreds of prompts that warm it up and go into these very weird places of distribution, since

• 2:26:49Speaker 08

  if you think of modern language models, they're pre-trained on the entire internet. So the odds of, like, if it is on the internet, you can probably make it. So for people saying, like, how do you make this art? How does this happen? Like, if you just have creative enough prompts that go on for pages at a time, like, you can just find anything on the internet. You can make all sorts of ridiculous stuff. And that's how, honestly, I think you can get around these, uh, these jail, kind of like these safety measures and so on, is that if your, if your training distribution is the internet, like, anything on the internet, you can just, you can go and find.

• 2:27:26John Coogan?

  So give me the, give me the announcement. It sounds like you mentioned selling art on the internet. Have you processed your first sale? How much do these things cost? How many sales have you done? Can you give us a number? I'm itching to ring the gong for you.

• 2:27:43Speaker 08

  I'm actually gonna check right now.

• 2:27:44John Coogan?

  Pull up the Stripe dashboard.

• 2:27:45Speaker 08

  Let's see it. Stripe dashboard. It looks like we already have six orders.

• 2:27:51John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:27:55Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:27:57John Coogan?

  That's great news. Well, we'd love to have you back on when you hit 1,000 sales or take it to the moon or put it in the loop.

• 2:28:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what's the vision for beautifulair.com? Are you gonna add a bunch more artists over time? What does it look like?

• 2:28:11Speaker 08

  I think that my original thought was that first, all of these great artists, we just have to put something out there. We just have to ship, keep shipping. So, goal of today was launch, have all the payments set up, have all of the drop shippers so that way we don't have to worry about inventory, about shipping costs, etc. And yeah, no, a bunch of people from the NFT community have reached out. The crypto community has been pretty good to us. I think that adding more artists is definitely on the list.

• 2:28:40John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:28:40Speaker 08

  Ophira can talk about this.

• 2:28:42Speaker 09

  Yeah, I wish. Like, I just came on the show, like, I found out about an hour ago, maybe? So, you guys are gonna admire my telephone today. So, this is actually a poem by a historical artist named Aldous Huxley called "The Crystal Cabinet."

• 2:28:56John Coogan?

  Okay, cool.

• 2:28:57Speaker 09

  And it's, you can see, like, it's in the shape of a wing.

• 2:29:01John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 2:29:01Speaker 09

  And it's very beautiful, and it was interesting. I actually prompted Claude Opus III by Anthropic to do that. And it's very interesting. It's a whole conversation, as Jacob describes, and you actually say, like, can you make this more like the shape of a wing, for example? And again, even though this is, like, I can picture that in my head, because I'm a human, but somehow the model is able to gradually refine the shape more and more like that.

• 2:29:25John Coogan?

  That's very, very cool.

• 2:29:26Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:29:26Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 2:29:27John Coogan?

  Well, look forward to following along. Thank you so much for stopping by. Hey, wait, do you have a closing, anything you want to say?

• 2:29:34Speaker 08

  A closing remark, I think, is something for people to keep an eye out for. Ophira can speak on this as well, but Grimes is making a movie about the AI artists. And that's how part of, like, the impetus for launching this is that there's filmmakers from Cannes that are right now filming Ophira, Janice, some of the other artists I'm gonna feature.

• 2:29:57Speaker 09

  Yeah, our friend, our filmmaker, Matt Zien, who we actually met through Grimes, who is a huge fan of this artwork and a big supporter of it. Um, is is hoping to film an independent documentary about that kind of first contact with the AI models because so many of us have had like weird experi- weird experiences, right? Like you chat with it and it's not like talking to a computer. It's like there there's a little something going on there. So this is going to be kind of a, I, I would call myself like kind of further on the, the edge of that. It'll be about how we interact with models. So stay tuned for that.

• 2:30:33Speaker 08

  We'll wear CBPM merch in it. We'll be first CBP on a cans.

• 2:30:36John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Fantastic. We'd love to see that. Uh, thank you so much for stopping by. We'd love to chat more. There's so much to chat about, but have a great day.

• 2:30:43Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you guys.

• 2:30:44John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Uh, really quickly, let me tell you about Wander.

• 2:30:49Jordi Hays?

  Find your happy place.

• 2:30:51John Coogan?

  Find your happy place. Book of Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home but better.

• 2:30:59Jordi Hays?

  We dropped that video into the, into a timeline and turmoil.

• 2:31:02John Coogan?

  It was a timeline and turmoil.

• 2:31:03Jordi Hays?

  And it stood out. It was a bit of a timeline cleanse.

• 2:31:05John Coogan?

  We did well. We did well. It was a lot of fun. Uh, it's having a long life on Instagram right now. It, uh, it, it did well on X and, uh, and I've been enjoying getting it into the hands of the Instagram audience.

• 2:31:16Jordi Hays?

  Before our next guest.

• 2:31:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:31:18Jordi Hays?

  I just want to say happy birthday to John Exley.

• 2:31:21John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 2:31:21Jordi Hays?

  He is.

• 2:31:22John Coogan?

  Happy birthday, John.

• 2:31:23Jordi Hays?

  The most positive person.

• 2:31:24John Coogan?

  He's been very helpful in the chat.

• 2:31:27Jordi Hays?

  Met and he's our unofficial moderator.

• 2:31:30John Coogan?

  There's 77,000 people on the stream and so, uh, I think we'd be melting down without him. So he's been a huge asset. So thank you and happy birthday to John.

• 2:31:39Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:31:40John Coogan?

  Uh, anyway, we have our next guest, Orin Hoffman, in the studio. Welcome to the stream. Welcome back.

• 2:31:44Jordi Hays?

  Welcome back.

• 2:31:45John Coogan?

  Great to talk to you again.

• 2:31:46Speaker 10

  Excited to be here. Second time guest.

• 2:31:48John Coogan?

  Yes. How you doing? Uh, I had a question for you. Uh, do venture capitalists take their own advice?

• 2:31:56Speaker 10

  Apparently not. Yeah.

• 2:31:57John Coogan?

  Break it down for me.

• 2:31:58Speaker 10

  Including myself. We're all hypocrites.

• 2:32:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. Why? Uh, I, I, I want to hear your, your, the examples that you have for situations where VCs, uh, give advice, but then don't take it themselves. And then I want to go into kind of the meta level of like, why is this happening? Uh, what is driving that dynamic? But first, kick us off with some concrete examples of VCs giving advice, but then not taking it themselves.

• 2:32:19Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think first of all, just the high levels, venture capitalists are just really not that ambitious. Like they're not nearly as ambitious as like someone who runs a private equity firm. Like the level of ambition is probably like 10x higher on private equity than it is in venture capital. And so in private equity, you might be like really building like an amazing company that you're trying to take public, that you're really trying to take over the world. Venture capital is like, you're just kind of like, you're, you're just okay with this. You know, essentially just a little business.

• 2:32:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, is that because of duration?

• 2:32:52Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and on the company side, you're, you're kind of, you know, there are certain investors that take a more hands-on approach, or maybe they're on the board, but it's somewhat, you, it's, it's sort of culturally, you're sort of leaving it up to the founder and, and fate to some degree after, right?

• 2:33:07Speaker 11

  Yeah, it's essentially, it's a lifestyle business. And so the venture capitalist always deride lifestyle businesses, but they run them one themselves. You know, they, they often say to founders, hey, you know, you should have one CEO, but most venture capital firms have like four CEOs. And it's like hard to make decisions. They'll say, take dilution, but they don't take dilution. They'll say things like, you know, merge with other companies. They never do merge. They almost always say, hey, it's a good thing to go public, but you never see them trying to take their own company public. Like Bill Gurley or, you know, Brad Gerstner are not taking their companies public, but they always give advice to take, you know, and they have big companies. They run big, you know, fairly large companies.

• 2:33:49Speaker 11

  They could have taken it public, but they don't, but you know, they'll say board governance, but they don't have their own board governance. So you're just, there's a whole host of things where the venture capital will say one thing. And then of course they sell like, well, you should have a differentiated product. But most venture capital firms, you know, they're just selling money. It's commodity and so it's very hard to differentiate. You just have all this competition. You know, if competition is for losers, well, like venture capital firm is like the most competitive place where you have some of the most smartest people competing against you.

• 2:34:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but in some way, at some way, the, the partners are the product. And there's only one Orin Hoffman. And there's only, so, so you're differentiated by, by the, the, the product that you're providing is in some way. Yourself, plus the money.

• 2:34:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:34:38Jordi Hays?

  And so that's.

• 2:34:39John Coogan?

  But what about, um, what about some of the rumors that, uh, firms like General Catalyst or Andreessen Horowitz might actually go public? And if you look at the way Mark Andreessen's been building his business, it does feel like he, if someone's going to turn a venture capital firm into a Blackstone-like, you know, financial institution, it certainly seems like he's trying to do that.

• 2:35:01Speaker 11

  I would agree. I would agree. And so I would say, first of all, if you think of Andreessen Horowitz, they have, they have, at least they have two CEOs and not six, right? And they clearly only have two, and they're clearly the CEO and they're clearly running the firm. So I would say they are way more ambitious than almost every other venture capital firm. General Catalyst, like they own like a hospital now. So, right? So, I mean, they're, they're definitely leveling up the level of ambition. But still, just if you just look at venture capital versus private equity, just if you just think about the top venture capital firms versus the top, you know, private equity firms, you just do a comparison for each one on one, like it's, it's just, it's just a 10x different scale in private equity. Maybe venture capital will eventually get there and Andreessen Horowitz

• 2:35:44Speaker 11

  could definitely be one of those firms that get there. But today, it's like we're the also ran of the, uh, and the ambition level is just so much lower.

• 2:35:53John Coogan?

  Okay. Ambition level, do you think it's because it's kind of a prerequisite if you're going to be a VC that you're already rich?

• 2:36:03Jordi Hays?

  Well, the other thing, the other thing is, the other thing is.

• 2:36:05John Coogan?

  I feel like a lot of people go into private equity and they like, they're grinders and they grind their way up. And so they build that muscle. Whereas a lot of VCs, they don't kick it off with grinding in VC. They're like grinding as a founder, which is arguably the hardest thing you can do. Eating glass, staring into the abyss. They get some liquidity event. They do a rest and vest for two years. Then they go into VC and by then they've kind of come down off of the mountain of like grinding misery. And then they're like, okay, I'm like somewhat retired now.

• 2:36:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, there's also the different types of ambition. There's I want to 10, I want to have a 10x fund.

• 2:36:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:36:42Jordi Hays?

  But you could be off of a small base. It could be a 20, 20 million dollar fund. And then there's, I want to have a trillion of AUM, which no VC has done. BlackRock has 10 trillion of AUM, right?

• 2:36:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:53Jordi Hays?

  Um, so there's levels and I do think you, there's a bifurcation of certain VCs just want to put up good numbers and have a little lifestyle business and deliver great returns for LPs. Others that have wildly different and bigger in some ways ambitions and that they want to have hundreds of billions of AUM and I think that they will get there. But I think what you're saying is there's maybe not enough investors that are, or too many, too many people are just not actually wildly ambitious at all. You know, they're like, I just want a 3x.

• 2:37:25Speaker 11

  They're running a lifestyle business, which is totally fine.

• 2:37:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:28Speaker 11

  Um, and obviously they're building, they're, they're, they're hopefully doing, the, the venture capitalists are doing good in the world. It's not like they're not doing good.

• 2:37:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:35Speaker 11

  Uh, they're, they're out there doing a good thing and, uh, but we just, we're just tend to not follow our own advice.

• 2:37:41John Coogan?

  Okay. Now let me, let, uh, if I come to you and go to the, the, the Silicon Valley market and I say, I'm, I'm going to do it differently. I'm taking high dilution. I'm going to take this company public. I'm starting the, a venture capital firm that will scale. Is that even a viable strategy or is there some sort of like market dynamic that prevents that from even being possible?

• 2:38:03Speaker 11

  It, it, it might be very hard given the constraints that other people want to put on the market and stuff like that. And different people have tried. So obviously we, we saw SoftBank try and maybe kind of pull back. We saw some other folks who did have a different level of ambition.

• 2:38:18John Coogan?

  The crossover investors.

• 2:38:20Speaker 11

  And, and some of the pilots that be internally have kind of fought against it. It's, it's, it's tough and the venture capital market itself is very small.

• 2:38:28John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:38:29Speaker 11

  So it's, you know, it's a private equity market is just a much, much bigger market, especially when you talk about things like private lending. And, you know, Apollo just has a much bigger sandbox that they can play in than at least Andreessen Horowitz today. Doesn't mean that will change because the, the venture capital market is getting bigger. And of course Andreessen Horowitz is going to move it to other. Things will move into wealth management. They're gonna move into a lot of other adjacent things over time. So that's the really the way it's like you, you, you, you get this niche in, in venture capital, but that niche really can't be that big. And then you'll have to layer on other things to, to grow, just like any other company. If you're, if you're Facebook just for Harvard University, there's only, there's only how big you can grow. Even for all the universities, there's only how you, you've got to move into other markets. If you really want to become a

• 2:39:14Speaker 11

  great company.

• 2:39:15John Coogan?

  So many VCs are big poker players. One of the major tier one firms should open a casino. And just start running cash games.

• 2:39:24Jordi Hays?

  And have rules, no crying.

• 2:39:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, no crying. Open a literal casino.

• 2:39:28Jordi Hays?

  And say, if you start crying, booted.

• 2:39:31John Coogan?

  You're booted. Yes. This is great. Well, but please, we'll, we'll have you back on the next time.

• 2:39:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wish we had more time.

• 2:39:38John Coogan?

  To noodle.

• 2:39:39Jordi Hays?

  What are you, what are you doing for the fourth?

• 2:39:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. What are you doing?

• 2:39:41Jordi Hays?

  You're in France?

• 2:39:42Speaker 11

  I'm in, I'm in Wisconsin for the fourth.

• 2:39:44John Coogan?

  Oh, stay in America. Let's hear it. Let's hear it for Capital Allocator.

• 2:39:51Jordi Hays?

  That is, that's American dynamism in practice.

• 2:39:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:39:54Jordi Hays?

  Staying in America for the fourth.

• 2:39:56John Coogan?

  We salute you.

• 2:39:57Speaker 11

  Absolutely.

• 2:39:58Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, Orin.

• 2:39:59Speaker 11

  Yeah, thanks, guys.

• 2:40:00Jordi Hays?

  Enjoy the holiday. Cheers.

• 2:40:02John Coogan?

  Um, next we have, uh, Mehran Jalali. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. Um, I think we've got through all of our ads, which is rough. I like doing ads and now we're, now we're out of them. Well, we have one more graphite. I had, I don't have it in the debt, but graphite.dev code review of the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

• 2:40:25Jordi Hays?

  Cursor, ramp, Asana, for sale.

• 2:40:28John Coogan?

  At graphite.dev. And we got our next guest in the building. Welcome to the stream, Mehran. Am I pronouncing that correctly?

• 2:40:37Speaker 11

  Yeah, Mehran or Mehran. Yeah.

• 2:40:38John Coogan?

  Mehran. Fantastic. Uh, give us the update. What are you up to? Where are you in the world right now?

• 2:40:43Speaker 10

  Yeah, I'm in San Francisco. I'm back in San Francisco. I was in Belize for the past two weeks doing the scan there. That is complete. The preliminary results are super, super cool.

• 2:40:53John Coogan?

  What were you scanning for?

• 2:40:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Give us the whole backstory because I remember like the initial post. It was maybe six months ago.

• 2:40:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:41:00Jordi Hays?

  That we saw. So this has been in the works for a while.

• 2:41:02Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah. Um, I mean, basically the Mayans, they cleared out forests to build some of their cities and settlements. And so when they moved or they died or in any way they vacated their cities, trees ended up growing back over them. So if you look at it from the satellite, the it's just completely green. It's just completely trees. Um, but beneath the trees are these like magnificent pyramids or roads and buildings and whatnot. And so, and they're invisible from space and they're invisible on the ground because it's just so hard to traverse these rainforests. And so what I'm doing is we're flying planes with very big, very strong lidar scanners under them and we're scanning these trees. And while most of the canopy is just completely full of trees, because you know, it's rainforest, some of the lasers make their way through and then you classify the points.

• 2:41:46Speaker 10

  You remove the trees, you look at the ground and then, you know, if we discover something like a pyramid or roads or structures and stuff, we know that we found something that no one's seen for the past, you know, thousand, two thousand years or whatever. So yeah, lidar scanning forests to find civilizations.

• 2:42:00John Coogan?

  Did you find anything?

• 2:42:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What'd you find?

• 2:42:02Speaker 10

  Yeah. So I'm doing two scans this year, four hundred square kilometers in Belize, six hundred square kilometers in Mexico. The Belize one's done, but only like a third of it has been processed so far. Super cool. There are some, there are pyramids. There are like hundreds, maybe even thousands of buildings. Um, hundreds of kilometers of roads, you know, things that no one has ever seen, you know, since a thousand, two thousand years ago.

• 2:42:23Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah. Tell me about the, uh, tell me about the, the, the economic model of your entire operation. You're flying planes. You've got lidar scanners.

• 2:42:33Speaker 10

  Yeah, it's a nonprofit. So, I mean, so what got me interested in this was I saw this paper.

• 2:42:38John Coogan?

  But there'll be a for-profit spin out at some point and I could get tokens. Units.

• 2:42:43Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna, we're gonna tokenize the Mayan ruins.

• 2:42:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:47Speaker 10

  The capped lidar unit. No.

• 2:42:50John Coogan?

  Hundred X.

• 2:42:51Speaker 10

  What caught me interested in this was I saw this cool paper over Thanksgiving or so, funnily enough, that was about how some conservation efforts scanned some trees in some forests in Mexico. And then these archaeologists removed the trees and they found stuff underneath. And so I decided to see like, oh, like if, if you can spot, you know, random archaeological sites without even explicitly looking for them. I wonder, you know, have they been doing more of it? And the answer is like, you know, archaeologists have done some of this stuff in the past, but ultimately there's just not a whole lot of money in archaeology. I mean, it's not, it's not a very like well-funded thing. Like, it's like, maybe all the money going into archaeology on an annual basis is the same as like, you know, a series A or series B or something. And so, and it's like massive economies of scale because you're flying planes, you know, the more you can fly them, the more you can, you know,

• 2:43:36Speaker 10

  divide your total costs by, there are these like extremely expensive, like million dollar LiDAR scanners. And yeah, I mean, you know, the, the main costs are basically the plane and the LiDAR scanner and the crew to go and actually do the scanning. Yeah.

• 2:43:49Jordi Hays?

  So where, where do you go from here? What's the next step?

• 2:43:53Speaker 10

  Yeah, so still the data has yet to be processed. The processing is basically figuring out what points belong to the ground, which, which ones belong to the trees, removing the tree ones, taking the ground ones. And then while like, you know, the, the naive visualizations are like striking, like, you know, you're seeing like this huge pyramid or whatever. Ultimately, the archaeologists draw the most interesting inferences, like, you know, is this actually super novel to us? Like, sure, like this is, no one's seen this before, but like, did anyone expect this to be there or not? So give the data, so process the point cloud, give the data to the archaeologists. They made their inferences, but my goal ultimately is to scan all of this area. I mean, ultimately, I think, you know, we, we need to put more money into archaeology. I think there's really cool stuff to do with tech in archaeology. We need more tech talent in archaeology.

• 2:44:37Speaker 10

  And my goal is essentially to use these results, you know, get like, publish them, all that stuff, raise a lot more money and do like a significantly larger scan next year, like 10,000 square kilometers at the very least next year. And within a couple of years, you know, finish all of Central America, then move to the Amazon, then other interesting archaeological projects like, you know, scanning coastlines, stuff like that. So I just-

• 2:44:59Jordi Hays?

  Anything to, anything to scan in, in America, considering it's, it's the fourth tomorrow?

• 2:45:06Speaker 10

  In the US, I, you know, the, the, the thing is, the thing that's interesting to me about Central America is that they, they actually had like massive pyramids and stuff. Uh, the US and the Amazon, like, there is stuff there, but like ultimately, the, and, and the Amazon, at the very least, they didn't have stones. So everything that you find are like dirt mounds, which are cool. Like the fact that they're there, like in places that seem so hostile to life, kind of in general, you know, like raining nine months here or whatever school. But yeah, there are like dirt mounds and stuff in the US and the Amazon as well. But at the moment, my interest is mostly in Central America. I think there was like, you know, 50,000 square kilometers or so there to scan and I plan on scanning all of them first and then, and then other.

• 2:45:44Jordi Hays?

  How are, how are the local governments in, in these areas? Are, are they excited about what you're doing? Are they, are they, are they emailing you for updates? Hey, what, what did you find?

• 2:45:54Speaker 10

  Well, when I was in Belize and I was talking to the, you know, the people in the city, they were super excited. You know, they, they're proud of their history. They find their sites cool. They find that like other people are interested in them. They're very cool. And I think that people are super excited. The governments are also very excited because, you know, this booster tourism, this boosts their national heritage. It shows that, you know, there were once great civilizations here and like, you know, that's something to be proud of. Um, and they're also wary because the problem is that there is a big looting problem in these countries, especially countries that like, don't have, you know, so much money dedicated to artillery to protect all of the sites. Um, and so they're a little worry, worried about, uh, the data privacy and stuff related to this stuff because yeah, like, you know, what, what, when you're earning like, I don't know, like $10,000 a year when

• 2:46:37Speaker 10

  that's your GDP per capita and you like find like a jade mask worth like, you know, 200K in, in, on the black market. Like there's a strong incentive and so they're trying to prevent that. And so, yeah, I mean, we've been working with the governments to assure them about the data privacy, but generally like they're super excited about this.

• 2:46:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, I can imagine.

• 2:46:55John Coogan?

  Can you talk about El Dorado?

• 2:46:58Speaker 10

  Um, you know, huge if true.

• 2:47:00John Coogan?

  Huge if true.

• 2:47:02Jordi Hays?

  Big if true.

• 2:47:02Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 2:47:03John Coogan?

  Uh, I mean, what is the lore? What is, are there any, are there any folks out there that still believe it's out there? Is there any, like, what is the, uh, what is the historical narrative? And then what is the modern narrative?

• 2:47:19Speaker 10

  Well, I, I think the meta point is kind of that, uh, uh, things like El Dorado, things like Atlantis, like Noah's Ark and stuff are like, kind of how a lot of people get interested in archaeology initially. Like, they're like, we're gonna find Noah's Ark in Turkey. And then you look and you're like, oh, well, you know, huge if true, but I don't know how much these, these hold up to some scrutiny. And then you're like, okay, like, what are other, like, more practical things that we can do? So, um, yeah, I mean, hu- huge if true, but like, you know, most likely not true, but it's, it's good that these persist because it gets some people interested in archaeology.

• 2:47:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, what about other things that we should be scanning for? I mean, if not gold, rare earth elements are top of mind. Maybe there's a secret chip fab somewhere we could grab.

• 2:48:04Speaker 10

  Yeah, like data centers.

• 2:48:05John Coogan?

  Data centers, yeah, exactly.

• 2:48:08Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm expecting you to find Mayan data centers.

• 2:48:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:48:12Speaker 10

  I mean, what do you think?

• 2:48:12Jordi Hays?

  There was a Jensen back, there was a Jensen of that era.

• 2:48:15John Coogan?

  That would be truly huge if true.

• 2:48:18Speaker 10

  Well, I, I think we should scan the Amazon. I mean, there's like been really interesting stuff there, like the early people that like, you know, the early Europeans that went there, they reported, you know, like 10 foot tall naked women that are like shooting arrows, which is how it got the name Amazon. Um, you know, it would be cool to maybe fact check this, but like, even if this is not a real, like, there's probably some stuff that this was based on. Um, it would be cool to look for Atlantis, you know, huge if true. Um, I think we should scan all the coastlines of the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, the Caspian, you know, because there are probably so many cities that are now underwater. I'm Iranian. I would love to do archaeology in Iran as well. Um, you know, there, there are so many civilizations that, uh, that like, you know, are mentioned in Sumerian history,

• 2:49:01Speaker 10

  but like, we have no traces of, except for like, you know, that we know there was a powerful king there. So there's, there's a ton of archaeological, uh, mysteries, but like, Kind of the bits versus atoms thing is also true in archaeology where like the atoms part of archaeology doing fieldwork, doing digging and stuff, that hasn't really changed in hundreds of years, but they're like interesting opportunities in bits now of like, you know, Nat Friedman's Vesuvius Scrolls, or, you know, doing lidar scanning, using satellite imagery, stuff like that. And like, those are kind of the lower hanging fruits, the more we can do remote sensing, the more we can do scalable things, that's the lower hanging fruit. And then, yes, like, making really educated guesses about like where some like Atlantis might be and like doing work there. But I'll defer to what I'm right.

• 2:49:42Jordi Hays?

  Do you find it funny or fascinating that that being an explorer is like, super contrarian? Like, we have this idea that that the world is fully discovered and, you know, we've mapped every coastline, so there's nothing else to do?

• 2:49:56Speaker 10

  I like high school career fairs, like no one's saying, oh, you can still discover things. Which is like, oh, that's amazing. Like, I didn't know this was an option. Um, I don't know if it's contrarian, but like, yeah, I mean, not many people are doing it. I would love if there were more people doing it, there was more interest, there was more money in this. But, yeah, I mean-

• 2:50:13Jordi Hays?

  Well, you're starting the exploration industrial complex. You're the first of the of the modern era.

• 2:50:18Speaker 10

  I think when the results come out and like, they're gonna be super cool and yeah, it's gonna get a lot, a lot of people a lot more interested in this sort of thing.

• 2:50:26John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:50:27Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. Well, come back on whenever you have updates. We should do the next one from the air, ideally, Starlink powered.

• 2:50:34Speaker 10

  Yeah. The plane's flying like 500 meter, taking the sharpest turns it can. It's not gonna be a pretty sight.

• 2:50:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, it'll be fun. Anyways, thank you for coming on.

• 2:50:44John Coogan?

  Thank you for coming on.

• 2:50:45Speaker 10

  Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me.

• 2:50:46John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Bye. Up next, we have Kushal from Extend app coming into the studio. We got some gong-worthy news, baby.

• 2:50:58Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah? It's gong time. It's gong time.

• 2:51:02Speaker 12

  It's gong time. What's up, guys?

• 2:51:04Jordi Hays?

  How are you? Good to see you.

• 2:51:05John Coogan?

  How much have you raised?

• 2:51:06Speaker 12

  Good to see you too. What's up, guys?

• 2:51:07John Coogan?

  Give us the news on the fundraising front first, and then we'll figure out what you do for a living.

• 2:51:15Speaker 12

  I just answer customer support for a living. That's what I do.

• 2:51:17Jordi Hays?

  Well, you gotta get on Finn. Finn by Intercom.

• 2:51:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:51:21Jordi Hays?

  Then you can just go to France.

• 2:51:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:23Speaker 12

  There we go.

• 2:51:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what's going on? What's the news?

• 2:51:26Speaker 12

  What's up, guys? Great to meet you. Uh, well, we recently announced seventeen million dollars in funding across our seed and series A rounds.

• 2:51:33John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:51:35Speaker 12

  Thank you, thank you.

• 2:51:38Jordi Hays?

  With authority. That one felt good.

• 2:51:40John Coogan?

  Okay. Now of the less important news, what does the company do?

• 2:51:46Speaker 12

  Well, we also filmed a pretty kick-ass launch video to go along with it, too.

• 2:51:49John Coogan?

  I saw that.

• 2:51:50Speaker 12

  A ton of fun.

• 2:51:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:52Jordi Hays?

  So is this like some type of new like fax machine company? You're doing document processing? What are you, what are you building?

• 2:52:00Speaker 12

  Yeah, yeah. So my name's Kushal. I'm the CEO, co-founder of Extend. And at Extend, we're building a modern document processing cloud. So, you know, we work with companies that just get a ton of PDFs and unstructured documents, right? Uh, and we help them ingest and process that. So we really work with, you know, cutting-edge AI teams, data teams, technical teams, whether they're trying to build AI agents on top of that data, new products with that data, automate, you know, manual back office work with that. Uh, we really give them all of the infrastructure and tooling they need to go after that.

• 2:52:32John Coogan?

  Is the actual physical document ingest problem solved? Is, is Iron Mountain just dominant there? Is there no need for actual new scanning? Have we scanned every document in the world by now?

• 2:52:45Speaker 12

  Not even close. It's actually funny. One of the first customers I talked to back when I was getting the company started off the ground, it was a, uh, a large healthcare provider in Milwaukee, believe it or not, in the, the middle of the country. Uh, and I talked to them, trying to pitch them, you know, LLMs for document processing. And they're like, this sounds great. Come back to us in two years. Once we, you know, have digitized this mountain of, you know, lockbox warehouse of PDFs and boxes that are stored in our backyard. Um, so not quite there yet, but I think we'll get there pretty soon.

• 2:53:13John Coogan?

  Talk to me about the tech stack. Is OCR traditional OCR pipelines or there's like dead at this point? I've heard about some people that will, you know, send a PDF to Google for OCR, get a big messy bucket of text, but at least it's in text format and then run that through an LLM to just kind of clean it up. What's the state of the art?

• 2:53:34Speaker 12

  Yeah, you know, what's really surprising is so much of the world still runs on these PDFs and Excel documents and they just end up being the system of record for such mission critical data. If you think healthcare, you know, finance, supply chain, it's just all powered by PDFs. I think people's mind would be blown if they knew how much of the global economy just runs off of PDF files. And the problem's been around for a long time, right? I think OCR at this point is decades old. You know, funnily enough, we have a bunch of hoodies for the team and we have the OCR patent printed on the hoodies. Just as a little testament to it, but it's like 40, 50 years old at this point, right? But it's really accelerating now, you know, I think more documents are going to get processed in the next six months

• 2:54:17Speaker 12

  than all of history combined since the PDF file format was invented. And I experienced this myself, you know, I actually built this back at Brex in 2018. I was an early engineer there and we did exactly what you were saying OCR a document and then just run it through a ton of painful rejects to try to like pull out these targeted data fields. And it was so painful and fast forward now to today with LLMs and the capabilities are just so much higher. And the demand for document processing is through the roof right now.

• 2:54:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, what, what, what, talk about kind of the demand. I know you got a bunch of pretty incredible customers already.

• 2:54:54Speaker 12

  Yeah, I mean, we have the privilege of working with some awesome folks from large enterprises like Square, you know, that are trying to do a ton of use cases around financial statement ingestion or Flatiron Health who have billions of pages of patient medical data, all the way to cutting edge startups like, you know, Brex and Mercury and Checker and many others that are all using us in production. And we have incredibly high retention, ton of folks that kind of refer us to others and come inbound. And we're growing the team to keep up with it, but the demand has been pretty intense. And I think what we've kind of seen is that as these models have gotten better, it's sort of increased the possibility of what you can go and do. But for very mission critical use cases where even, you know, 99% accuracy, for example, is not good enough if you're trying to do.

• 2:55:38Speaker 12

  Mortgage processing or patient healthcare intake because the downstream impact of bad data is so catastrophic. Right. And so we really focus on these, you know, pipelines and industries where you just cannot get it wrong. Accuracy, reliability, you cannot get it wrong. And that can, that, you know, constraint puts a ton of complexity on the problem and that's kind of where we go deep. And that's why we have a number of customers that kind of try to do the model approach and then come back to us in three months, six months. Uh, and they sign up for extend and pay for extend, uh, despite the models having gotten exponentially better over the past couple of months.

• 2:56:10John Coogan?

  So, yeah, I mean, what the models are getting better, but what models are you actually using and for what use cases? Cause I imagine that the price difference and the time cost of using a heavy duty reasoning model versus a really quick optimized. Like, you know, four O level model has got to be pretty different. And then is tool use at all in the mix with some of these? Because I can imagine as clunky as RegX is, every once in a while, you might want to have a layer of RegX validation on top of things. Right. Just to make sure.

• 2:56:43Speaker 12

  I think you're getting at a really key point, which is there's very few use cases, which is like, here's a document, extract this data. Cause for any mission critical pipeline, you have the entire end to end system you have to build of classify the document. Because that changes the schema and then split the document up and then actually parse it to make sure you can handle these tables that span 10 pages. Right. And each one of those kind of adds complexity to the axes of cost and performance and latency. And you kind of need to have all three of those, right? Not a single model is going to be great at all of them. And really why customers end up buying us is because they don't want to be locked in to one model. And we give them all the tooling to figure out, hey, this initial triage step, we want to use a really cheap, fast, you know, low latency triage and classifier.

• 2:57:26Speaker 12

  But then for this really complex table, we do want to use a really powerful reasoning model. Uh, and we kind of help them integrate bill and build all of that end to end.

• 2:57:34John Coogan?

  Talk about where the data is winding up. Are you seeing more clients demand that you map the documents that you're adjusting all the way to a relational database like Postgres or something? Are people just saying, hey, just give me a blob of JSON, I'll stuff it in a MongoDB. Do people want a CSV file that's on AWS or S3 or something like, how do people want the data finalized from you?

• 2:57:59Speaker 12

  Yeah, I mean, the flexibility is kind of the name of the game, and that's why we provide options for all of that. Some people that are trying to build, you know, AI agents on top of it, they'll want the JSON payload, but then also put it into a vector DB, right?

• 2:58:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:58:12Speaker 12

  Some other folks are going to want to actually index that in like Elasticsearch if you're trying to do text experiences on top of it. Other people that are like just automated mortgage processing, for example, that'll just go like structured data points into a DB that then they can take action on. So we kind of give them the data, the raw data, and then get out of their way so they can figure out, you know, where to do and what to do with it downstream.

• 2:58:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. How real are, I mean, there's this narrative for a while, like, oh, enjoy the VC subsidized era. It's like the early Uber days. All the LLMs are cheap, but they're going to be really expensive. How real is it that LLM inference can be a material cost for a company like you that's kind of reselling inference, not to degrade what you're doing, but like that's a piece of your business is you have a cost that's inference, and then you're earning revenue from the value that you add on top of that versus a startup that's buying from you. How big are these line items? Are we talking, you know, something that's material to SG and A for a company? Or is intelligence like basically too cheap to meter at this point?

• 2:59:18Speaker 12

  Yeah, it's a great question, and it really depends on the use case, right? And our contract sizes range from, you know, we work with small startups paying us a few hundred bucks a month, all the way up to large enterprises that pay us six plus figures a year, right? And it kind of varies all across the board. But, you know, we haven't played the unit margin game where we're trying to, you know, give away a dollar for 90 cents or anything like that. We have been positive, you know, economics on all across the board. Because really, what we benchmark ourselves against is what is the cost of bad accuracy in your downstream product or your user experience? What's the cost of six months of enge time? And at the end of the day, those end up outweighing a lot more than, you know, potential percentage differences on like the LLM costs themselves, especially

• 3:00:01Speaker 12

  as they've continued to come down. You know, there were some things we couldn't do from a product perspective 18 months ago that now we really can, just because it's so much easier to make multiple LLM calls and do things more agentially in an end-to-end system.

• 3:00:14John Coogan?

  Very cool. Jordy, anything else?

• 3:00:16Jordi Hays?

  No, very excited for you.

• 3:00:17John Coogan?

  This is amazing.

• 3:00:18Jordi Hays?

  Clearly ripping. I can, I can, I can sense.

• 3:00:20John Coogan?

  I can feel it in the voice. It's going well.

• 3:00:23Jordi Hays?

  There's nothing better than, than seeing, um, yeah, you, you, you know, a lot of people raise the Series A. Not everybody has this level of, of, of pull from the market. So I'm sure you'll be back on for a B in no time.

• 3:00:36John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. Can't wait. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks so much. Thanks, guys. I feel like that could be very valuable for you. You could maybe use, extend to take, ingest all the registrations from the G63s, from the G wagons and all the service records. And then you could have one database for all of them that you could query across.

• 3:00:54Jordi Hays?

  I was gonna say, I was gonna say, I mean, we produce a lot of documents here on the show. And figuring out how to process these bad boys.

• 3:01:01John Coogan?

  It's almost like they come from the computer and the internet and they could just, uh, remain there. And yet we print them out because it's fun. Um, anyway, what else is, what else is in the news? What else is important to cover today? Uh, we have a few, few, we have one more interview today.

• 3:01:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we got Avlok, Avlok coming on, uh, in just a little bit. Uh, Daniel, Daniel, uh, growing Daniel was chirping.

• 3:01:28John Coogan?

  Any breaking news?

• 3:01:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he says, watching the Soham interview, and I can already tell people are going to see this interview of a legendary liar talking about his legendary lies and be like, wow, I kind of believe him. You can label the tin poison and people will still eat it.

• 3:01:41John Coogan?

  Label the tin poison?

• 3:01:43Jordi Hays?

  Yes. You can label the tin poison, people will still eat it. Um, he says it's, uh, you, you had said at some point it's tough because someone who would lie about having multiple jobs might come on here and lie to us.

• 3:01:53John Coogan?

  Was he quoting, quoting me?

• 3:01:54Jordi Hays?

  Quoting you. Uh, he seemed sincere. He did seem sincere. It's very possible that he's a, a legendary, he's a 10x engineer and also a 10x liar or a 100x liar.

• 3:02:05John Coogan?

  Well, the proof is in the pudding, you know?

• 3:02:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you know, it's very obvious that I, I wouldn't recommend a portfolio company hire this guy. I think it's possible he goes and works somewhere and just does a great job. Um, I wouldn't necessarily bet on it.

• 3:02:19John Coogan?

  Might hire him if he's gonna be in the house and you're, literally in your house.

• 3:02:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but the pushback there is.

• 3:02:26John Coogan?

  So you gotta have him in the office, but then you gotta live with him.

• 3:02:28Jordi Hays?

  And he

• 3:02:28John Coogan?

  It's gotta be a hacker house.

• 3:02:30Jordi Hays?

  No, but he buried Maybe he just is, you know, he sets up his desk and he's just still moonlighting, you know? I think he might be, he might just be built for moonlighting. He also was

• 3:02:40John Coogan?

  Dev shop, dev shop. If he does the dev shop thing, he's fine.

• 3:02:42Jordi Hays?

  He would routinely miss, you know, miss deadlines and then use various excuses.

• 3:02:50John Coogan?

  Excuses, yep.

• 3:02:51Jordi Hays?

  When the India, Pakistan stuff was happening. He was telling people, you know, they shot a drone 10 minutes away, guilt tripping people. So

• 3:03:01John Coogan?

  It's rough.

• 3:03:02Jordi Hays?

  Terrible behavior.

• 3:03:04John Coogan?

  It's a buyer beware situation for anyone who's employing him.

• 3:03:07Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 3:03:08John Coogan?

  You know what you're getting yourself into, you gotta be careful and make sure that that aligns. And ultimately, the value of what you're paying, what's the value he's delivering? And you just know, okay. Could be, could be some volatility in that, but he's more of a known quantity now. And we learned a couple of things, at least got him on the record. So, you know, if he goes out and moonlights again, everyone will be able to point to that interview. Feel like he said he wasn't gonna do it. And he did it.

• 3:03:34Jordi Hays?

  So, somebody was saying, a fake Soham, fake Soham account was saying Elon can work at nine startups.

• 3:03:41John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:03:41Jordi Hays?

  Jamie Dimon can be on the board of multiple companies.

• 3:03:44John Coogan?

  I like this post.

• 3:03:44Jordi Hays?

  But when you do it, it's a scam. And then Austin says, so tired of this argument, working at multiple companies was not the problem. Many people have side gigs or contract at many places. They just don't lie about doing so. So that's the key thing. Jamie Dimon is not sneak, sneaking on to other boards. Elon's very public about his different companies. And it's all about just avoid lying, just don't lie. That's what he said. Soham probably could have had a, had a cracked dev shop, but he chose to lie. So hopefully he course corrects.

• 3:04:17John Coogan?

  Oh, well, we will see. We will let the timeline decide. I'm sure the timeline will not let up on the memes and the jokes and anything else that's going on. Oh, well, should we go through some F1 stuff? So, F1 has made an annual sponsorship revenue of more than $636 million, which I believe is a significant multiple to the amount of money that they were asking for.

• 3:04:50Jordi Hays?

  TV rights.

• 3:04:51John Coogan?

  TV rights.

• 3:04:52Jordi Hays?

  I think they wanted 200 million ESPN.

• 3:04:55John Coogan?

  200 million.

• 3:04:55Jordi Hays?

  Balls.

• 3:04:56John Coogan?

  For the right to distribute that and show that as content, but the ads inside.

• 3:05:01Jordi Hays?

  Are generating well beyond that.

• 3:05:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, so between 2019 and 2024, Liberty Media says F1 series annual sponsorship revenue more than doubled to 636 million. At a team level, total sponsorship revenue increased by 60% to 1.3 billion over the same period. So Liberty Media is selling F1 sponsorships, but then the teams are also selling sponsorships.

• 3:05:28Jordi Hays?

  There's levels.

• 3:05:29John Coogan?

  The sport is bigger than it has ever been in its 75-year history, and everyone wants a slice. But how can sponsors stand out and justify the cost when demand is so high?

• 3:05:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they haven't announced their new media rights or TV rights deal, but given how much they're doing on the sponsorship side, I wouldn't be surprised if they just go for Max eyeballs and kind of take it at somewhat of, not necessarily a loss, but just understand it won't be the profit center that it maybe once was. Because if you actually look at F1 viewership, that was TV rights in the United States.

• 3:06:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:06:03Jordi Hays?

  They wanted 200 million. ESPN wasn't interested in doing that.

• 3:06:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, I guess this is global sponsorship revenue.

• 3:06:10Jordi Hays?

  Previously, in 2023 onward, they were paying between 75 and 90 a year. And they just don't command the live US viewership to really justify that anymore, I guess, or even beyond that, despite the sport's popularity.

• 3:06:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Apparently, brands are picking teams based on like the unique personality of those teams now. So they give this example, the team's distinct personalities can be a big draw for sponsors. Heineken began sponsoring Red Bull in 2017, just a year after the Dutch brewer started its longstanding series-level partnership with F1. The deal with the team is effective because both are non-premium brands in a sport dominated by luxury car manufacturers, says Hesse, who has previously worked for both. Looking up and down the grid at the time, they wouldn't have sat anywhere else. And so there's the official like drinks car of F1. And if you're selling alcohol or

• 3:07:15John Coogan?

  energy drinks, you head over to F1 Red Bull Plus. What was it?

• 3:07:21Jordi Hays?

  There's the steak. Steak has a collaboration. It's like insert. It's the Sauber Steak F1 Team. The Kick Sauber.

• 3:07:32John Coogan?

  Which is Kick is their streaming platform for steak.

• 3:07:35Jordi Hays?

  The Kick Steak Sauber. But without further ado, let's bring in Avlok. He's got a Q2 update for us. Great to see you. What's going on?

• 3:07:45John Coogan?

  Good to have you on the show. Welcome back.

• 3:07:46Jordi Hays?

  Welcome back.

• 3:07:47Avlok Kohli?

  Thank you. Been great. Been great. Q2 was awesome.

• 3:07:50John Coogan?

  Break it down for us. What was awesome about it?

• 3:07:52Avlok Kohli?

  I mean, overall, there's just a lot of optimism. Maybe I'll just take from the top and what we're seeing ecosystem-wide and then what we're seeing in our data. I mean, look, ecosystem-wide, we're just seeing exits across the board. M&A is up by a huge margin. IPOs are up by a huge margin. And so what we're actually seeing is a lot of exit dollars coming through, making its way back to LPs. And that ends up flowing its way back into venture, because all of ventures parallel, as you have some of the best companies go public, get acquired, all those all flow right back in and they go right back in and

• 3:08:32Avlok Kohli?

  get recycled back into venture. And I think we just sort of hit the perfect storm in Q2 where a lot of optimism is there. Obviously, a lot of exits, you know, a lot of it's been reported. You have Circle, you have Scale AI and a bunch of other companies. And these exits are massive, huge. And so the LP dollars, the returns of LPs are getting also massive. And what we're just seeing is those dollars come right back in and they just get reinvested back into emerging managers and some of the scaled up, uh, scaled up venture firms. And so the, the thing that was actually shocking to me personally, um, you know, you can kind of feel it. So I invest of course, um, and you can kind of feel it in the deal velocity

• 3:09:15Avlok Kohli?

  and the, and the rate at which, uh, companies are growing, like the revenue growth is real. But what we saw in our data was the LP dollars to micro VC, emerging VC, uh, think of these as like managers with a hundred million dollar fund size, two million dollar fund sizes, was up 50% quarter per quarter, almost 50%.

• 3:09:35Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 3:09:36Avlok Kohli?

  So that's in one quarter, it was like a giant increase that, you know, for many quarters, it was sort of the, the valley of debt.

• 3:09:44Jordi Hays?

  There was a, yeah, there was a very dark, dark period where you saw some.

• 3:09:48Avlok Kohli?

  We, we, we tracked that, we, we tracked those dark periods actually in our data too. It was like, we have the boom times and the bust times. And for a while, there were a lot of the bust times and, but we're just seeing a lot of optimism, uh, coming in. And it's, it's actually really, really great to see. Uh, and I think some of the data that was circulating around, uh, X over the past few weeks was around the emerging, the death of the emerging manager class. And I just think that data is actually wrong. Uh, it, it's coming from PitchBook and PitchBook's data is very laggy. They don't actually have information on this, uh, this class of venture.

• 3:10:22Jordi Hays?

  Super real time.

• 3:10:23Avlok Kohli?

  Yeah. They don't have a real time view of it. Uh, Angelus does. And so we see, we basically see it all. And that's great. A lot of optimism.

• 3:10:30Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah. And the emerging managers that were steadily deploying over the last couple of years during that dark period are the ones that are now, I'm sure, you know, showing, uh, you know, tremendous markups during this time, which will hopefully catalyze more investment as well.

• 3:10:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. How much of the liquidity is psychological for LPs versus actual dollars going back into LP pockets and then they just need to redeploy them? Cause there's something about like, if you've been in some fund for years and years and years and the marks and they don't really feel real. And then all of a sudden you actually get a check, you're, even if that's only 10% of the money that you put in or 10% of what you commit in the next fund, it kind of feels like, okay, this is the, this is working at least. I'm ready to go back in, um, versus just, okay, I actually need to deploy new cash because I have cash on my balance sheet now.

• 3:11:25Avlok Kohli?

  It depends on the type of LP. So if you are a more of a traditional, larger asset allocator, you have strict requirements on amount of money that goes into public versus private. So that is a little bit stricter, but you have a large swath of capital that comes from non-institutionals, like you've got family offices, individuals, a lot of wealthy individuals. I just saw a report the other day, the number of millionaires in the US have gone up considerably. For them, it's all psychological, a lot of it's psychological. Even if you get 10% of your capital and 20%, 30%, it feels real because venture is, it's a weird asset class when you think about it.

• 3:12:08Avlok Kohli?

  You basically invest in it and you're, you don't know if you're going to get liquidity for 10, 15 years, depending on where you invest. But when you start seeing that cycle of liquidity coming back, all of a sudden you gain confidence, not just in the asset class, but also the manager that you're backing. And so we do see a lot of that. So that's what the reflexivity is that we're seeing on the platform where, you know, you have NASDAQ that was up 18% year-over-year and even venture dollars deployed as an overall ecosystem is up like 30% year-over-year. But within the micro VC, emerging

• 3:12:47Avlok Kohli?

  VC area, it grew 40, 50% quarter-over-quarter, right? So there's this reflexivity of excitement because you're starting to see the dollars come right back and people are looking at going, this is real, these companies are real. It wasn't just, you know, in their minds like propped up valuations, which was a lot of the narrative, I would say, for the past two years post-CER.

• 3:13:11Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's interesting. It's interesting to think about people that maybe invested in the first six months of Angelus being a platform and then maybe they just made a couple investments at the time and then checked out for a decade and then suddenly they get an email and it's like, it's a liquidity event. It's like, whoa, maybe, maybe I should pay more attention here.

• 3:13:31Avlok Kohli?

  We actually have that. You know, there's this thing that happens with banks sometimes and even crypto platforms where people have money and they're like trying to get in touch with them to take their, take their money. It's pretty significant in some cases. And so, yeah, we have cases of that as well, which is, hey, you have a return. You probably want this. This is actually pretty significant. Yeah. So we see, we see that.

• 3:13:52John Coogan?

  What do you think about potential new sources of liquidity coming into the LP pools, coming into venture? I saw some news about some crossover funds potentially lowering the requirement to invest in the fund, maybe down to, from like a million dollars down into like the single-digit thousands or maybe 25,000.

• 3:14:14Jordi Hays?

  Co2, Co2 had a 50K offering.

• 3:14:17John Coogan?

  Maybe it's a separate fund. And so, I don't know if, I don't know if that changes the requirements around, around, what's it called, professional investor rules? No, accredited investor rules?

• 3:14:31Avlok Kohli?

  Accredited investor rules, yeah.

• 3:14:32John Coogan?

  But, but, but we're seeing, you know, private company stocks go on-chain and potentially be traded on consumer retail stock apps. We're seeing lower, you know, lower hurdles to get into venture funds. It feels like there could be a wave of, sort of like retail-esque liquidity coming into venture. Do you think that narrative is real? How early are we in that? Do you think that could be a significant shift in the dynamic of early-stage investing?

• 3:15:01Avlok Kohli?

  Yeah, short answer is it's real. And Angelus is also working on something around there, and we'll have something more to announce. The, the way to think about it is, venture has never actually been connected to the public markets directly, right? It's always been, venture dollars get invested in the companies, those companies maybe 10 years, 15 years later, maybe never, right? But, go public, and that's when people in the public markets end up investing in those companies. But what's never happened is venture or dollars going into venture funds coming from the public markets. And what you're seeing is, you're starting to see a lot of these different experiments, and people crying this out. Co2 is an example, and there are a couple of other funds as well.

• 3:15:46Avlok Kohli?

  And the accredited investor rule that you're referring to is, you can only take on 99 non-qualified purchasers in a fund. Qualified purchasers are effectively, you have $5 million in assets and above. So if you have less than that, then you can only take on 99 of them into a fund. So that's what actually keeps those fund sizes pretty restricted.

• 3:16:05John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 3:16:06Avlok Kohli?

  But you can register your fund, and you are effectively under different regulatory regime. And you can take on a lot of investors at once, right? But that takes time, it's expensive and all it also depends what SEC regime you're under, right, and what the goals are of the administration and power at that moment in time. And right now, the goal of the Trump administration is capital formation, the golden age, right? The golden age of America. And so what's happening is everything is optimized towards a new startup formation, more capital coming in. And so you're seeing a loosening of restrictions or a reinterpretation, if you will, of some of the SEC rules to allow for this to happen, right?

• 3:16:51Avlok Kohli?

  It's actually not even new laws, it's just, most people don't realize this.

• 3:16:54Jordi Hays?

  Let's look at them differently.

• 3:16:56Avlok Kohli?

  They just look at them differently. It's interpretation, right? It's, they look at the law and they can interpret it and write their own rules based off of it. So a lot of that is changing in real time. And so that's leading to funds like the CO2 Fund and a few others. So it's real, it's happening. I think venture is undergoing a pretty significant shift. It is not the same as it was five years ago, 10 years ago. You're, you have a very large number of these micro funds, emerging funds, and then you have the mega mega funds, right? And these mega funds are not the venture funds of yesterday, right? These are full-blown sophisticated financial asset allocators that some of them are now getting into rollups, right?

• 3:17:38Avlok Kohli?

  And that's a whole separate strategy that comes from the private equity world. And so we're in the midst of a massive change within venture.

• 3:17:48Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about new products and experimentation? We've seen Angel List doesn't have the same luxury that Robinhood can do, which is run some crazy experiment in Europe and make companies, you know, OpenAI was posting yesterday that they were frustrated with what was going on there and that they didn't endorse it. Obviously, you guys have to maintain and build trust within the venture community. And part of that is kind of balancing the desires and of a bunch of different kind of players. So how do you think about kind of innovating? Because at the same time, it is core to Angel List. Like the initial platform was an innovation, right? And then the RUV and the rolling funds and things like that.

• 3:18:34Avlok Kohli?

  Yeah, it's actually really simple for us. There is a through line that has never changed for Angelus since the very beginning, which is the founder is at the top of the pedestal. So everything we do, we always ask, is this what the founder would want? Right? And if it's not good for the founder, it's not good for the startup, we just don't do it. And so this even applies to innovations like the rolling fund. We ultimately asked, hey, is this going to drive more capital into early-stage founders? And if the answer is yes, great, we're going to do it, we're going to pursue it. If the answer is ever no, or we're not quite sure, we just won't do it. Because founder trust is everything, and ultimately, we're here to make sure that

• 3:19:19Avlok Kohli?

  we increase the amount of innovation in society. And that always comes from ambitious founders. And so that's actually been a very easy thing for us to do. It's also why we never really went into secondary markets. I mean, you think Angelus with our entire portfolio and everything would be the first to get in there. We never did, because there's always this question of, well, are they, like, are we adding more work on their plate? And having been a founder myself multiple times, and also having been in that seat, the answer is it's just a distraction. Right? Like, you're busy running a company, building a company, recruiting, dealing with a thousand fires at any moment in time. And so it's been, it was easy for us to not fully pursue that path.

• 3:20:04Avlok Kohli?

  But any new innovation we have, we always ask that question, is it, is it good for the founder or not? If not, we won't do it. And that's just a through line all the way up to the, as a board, we view it that way as well.

• 3:20:16Jordi Hays?

  That's super key. And when you look at many of the new experiments that are happening, they don't, they don't pass, they don't pass that test. Still, it'll be interesting to see, to, to, to, to watch and, and witness. I've been interested to see if, if some of these experiments can, can end up kind of forcing innovation or change. But again, that's still not, that's still not the role of someone, you know, Angelus shouldn't piss off every Fortune 500 CFO, or every late-stage company, right? It's not, just not a good, not a good business practice, given your guesses.

• 3:20:56Avlok Kohli?

  I think there are some cases where you actually want to push the Overton window, right? I think that's where you're referring. It's just like, can you push the Overton window and make something normal? And so with that in mind, I'm actually very, I love all these experiments are actually happening. In fact, right now is such an amazing time in venture and startups and starting company having, you know, even Robin's, Robin experiment is amazing because we have a chance to push the Overton window. But where it is today, that, that particular one is very fixed. I don't see a way around that.

• 3:21:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's, how, how are you thinking about the Angel list kind of core business and scaling the team? We were talking yesterday, there's a lot of signs of wild top signals right now between these AI hiring packages and, and different valuations and the list goes, you know, Soham working six jobs, right? They're, they're all across the board. Meanwhile, Satya is scaling back on some new data centers. He's, you know, doing kind of routine layoffs. It feels like he's not letting at least Microsoft get too exuberant in this moment, even though there's a lot of, I'm curious what your approach has been and will be for the next half of the year.

• 3:22:13Avlok Kohli?

  Yeah. So as context, Angelus has been profitable for, for a little while now. And so a lot of the way we all, yeah.

• 3:22:24Avlok Kohli?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:25Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 3:22:28Jordi Hays?

  Hate to cut you off, but we love profitability.

• 3:22:30Avlok Kohli?

  Yeah, I love it. I love it. We need a gong like that in the office.

• 3:22:34John Coogan?

  Definitely.

• 3:22:36Avlok Kohli?

  And so, you know, we've actually always approached it, approached headcount and people in the, in the, in the company as, do we really need this next person? And how is it, how are they actually going to move the company forward? So none of that's actually changed in how we're approaching any of the new bets that we have. The, the, the bar has actually increased now, which is, hey, for this next new person we're bringing in, are they truly curious to work with AI tools and the models? Do they really understand how their job has completely changed? And if not, we probably shouldn't bring them in because as you both know, knowledge work is completely changed forever. Right. Whether you're in sales, marketing, definitely coding, right?

• 3:23:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:19Avlok Kohli?

  And so you want people who are naturally curious and are naturally leaning into these new tools. And the reality is the amount of headcount needed to continue to scale will go down over time. And so that's how we've thought about it is you just bring in people who are naturally tuned to this way of working. Because we're in the early innings right now. It's like so early in terms of how company is going to be formed, how teams can be formed. Do you even have your traditional functions anymore? Sales, marketing, engineering, product design? I don't know because people are starting to blend skills very, very fast. And so we're in such early stages that you almost want to rewire your culture right now.

• 3:24:03Avlok Kohli?

  I think every company should rethink whatever culture they had and rethink however they formed their teams. You may need to blow it up because what's going to happen is I'm telling you that I've been watching. Some of the newer founders are just graduating from school. They operate differently. They're like, you know, I recently, for the first time, I came to tech in 2009. For years, I didn't feel like I'm kind of a part of an older guard, if you will. In the last 12 months, there was a distinct change in San Francisco. I'm like, these new founders just operate differently there.

• 3:24:36Jordi Hays?

  I'm a veteran now.

• 3:24:38Avlok Kohli?

  Yeah, veteran. I never felt that. I never felt that before, except for the last 12 months. Where they are very capable, very creative. They were just born in a different era. They don't have any of the hangups of how things used to be done about a decade ago. And I think the, I think it's very important for any company that's been around for even five years or seven years or 10 years to just rethink the entire company from the ground up at this point. Otherwise, they're going to get completely demolished.

• 3:25:08Jordi Hays?

  Totally. Well, always great talking.

• 3:25:11John Coogan?

  Always fantastic.

• 3:25:12Jordi Hays?

  We should make this, uh, let's schedule it quarterly.

• 3:25:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's get the next one on the calendar ASAP. Have a great rest of the day and enjoy July 4th.

• 3:25:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:25:20Nico Christie?

  Thank you. You too.

• 3:25:22John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Up next, we have, we have two more guests. We're going long before the 4th of July. We gotta get an extra couple of minutes in. Who we got, Jordy?

• 3:25:34Jordi Hays?

  We have added a new guest.

• 3:25:36John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 3:25:37Jordi Hays?

  Very last second.

• 3:25:38John Coogan?

  Hey, we're, we're here. Welcome to the stream. You're live.

• 3:25:41Jordi Hays?

  This is Nico.

• 3:25:41John Coogan?

  Nico.

• 3:25:42Nico Christie?

  What's up, guys? How are you?

• 3:25:43John Coogan?

  Break it down, introduce shortcut.

• 3:25:46Jordi Hays?

  Nico managed to go viral yesterday on a timeline that was in turmoil.

• 3:25:51John Coogan?

  That's insane.

• 3:25:52Jordi Hays?

  You, you did it.

• 3:25:53John Coogan?

  You were up against some serious competition.

• 3:25:54Jordi Hays?

  I haven't, uh, I haven't been, been able to watch the video yet. So you're gonna have to bring, uh, break down the whole thing for us. But you introduced Shortcut, the first superhuman Excel agent. And when I read this line, I was like.

• 3:26:07John Coogan?

  Shots fired at Copilot. Let's go.

• 3:26:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, the, the, when I read this line, I was like, oh yeah, you should just build agents on top of Excel where people already are. You don't need to reinvent Excel and build agents.

• 3:26:18John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 3:26:19Jordi Hays?

  But so anyways.

• 3:26:20John Coogan?

  But in your words, what do you do?

• 3:26:21Nico Christie?

  Yeah, what's up, guys? I'm Nico from Fundamental. Uh, I'm one of the co-founders here and we just released Shortcut yesterday. And X, and Shortcut is a, is essentially the first superhuman Excel agent. We actually benchmarked it against Gemini Copilot, uh, GenSpark. It's really not even close. What we have to do now is scale capacity. It's about four times better than Gemini, even in the limited stuff that we were like allowed to use for Gemini. Cause we just know I couldn't do it. Um, and yeah, we're scaling up capacity now. I'm actually about to drop a million dollar check on scaling up the infra. Just, just.

• 3:26:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:26:51Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Physical check. Do you, did you write it out?

• 3:26:54John Coogan?

  How much, how much are you popping?

• 3:26:56Nico Christie?

  I might do it just for posterity. Yeah, yeah. Smack the thing.

• 3:26:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you need a, you need a.

• 3:26:59Nico Christie?

  Million bucks.

• 3:26:59Jordi Hays?

  You need a comically large check.

• 3:27:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:02Jordi Hays?

  Like one of those, you know?

• 3:27:04John Coogan?

  One of the hyperscalers.

• 3:27:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, go, go give it to AWS.

• 3:27:08John Coogan?

  Andy Jassy. There we go.

• 3:27:10Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, awesome. So, so, uh, is this the, the second, you know, to talk about, maybe step back Fundamental, uh, is this?

• 3:27:18Nico Christie?

  Yeah, yeah, sure. Uh, so Fundamental's a research lab. Uh, we're in Menlo Park now, but we actually shut down our lab at MIT where my co-founder was a professor about 18 months ago. And the mission of the company is to build digital humans, back when that was like a crazy deranged thing to say. But from a computational neuroscience perspective, it basically means giving AI more than just intelligence, but like fundamental understanding of life, a. An ability to perceive and experience emotion, grounded interactions in the world, long-term autonomy. So naturally you start with Excel, the foundation of modern life. Well, you know, it's a perfect storm that we're doing Excel. I cut my teeth like on Excel. I get my knuckles bruised for using the mouse. And then I found my way into a research lab. And the reason it hasn't been done yet is because the people who are capable of doing

• 3:27:59Nico Christie?

  it are just so out of distribution for like regular people that Excel hasn't been touched. Until now.

• 3:28:05John Coogan?

  Okay, talk to me about actually building this thing. I remember like CAP IQ and Bloomberg had like VBA plugins for Excel. There's some pretty crazy stuff you can do under the hood of Excel. It is very modular. I don't know if that's changed with Excel going more cloud native. But you know, Microsoft talks a big game about Copilot. Are you worried about getting steamrolled? Is there a way that you guys work together? How does that dynamic play out? And how are you actually building this thing? Because we've seen like Clouly just does screen recordings, right? And that's a different vector. There's other LLMs that are just like using the, like they'll integrate with any IDE by just using the ADA features, like the accessibility features to just scrape the text out.

• 3:28:45Nico Christie?

  Right, of course, of course.

• 3:28:46John Coogan?

  But how are you working through that?

• 3:28:47Nico Christie?

  So for context, the reason we're doing what we're doing now is because we actually set the state of the art in OS world, which is the computer use benchmark. This computer use were like sweep benches to software engineering. But we wanted to go tackle it in a much deeper way, as if we had full access to the machine interface. So what that means is like, can you write your own code essentially to do what you want to do? And to do that, you actually have to own the machine interface. So we couldn't build exactly on top of Excel. What we actually wanted to do was recreate it entirely with feature parity. And then from there, the big question is how we're doing this. I don't care to give away a little bit of a secret. This is being done through Cogen at runtime, which is a totally new paradigm for Cogen. It does, Cogen's not about writing your own tools to store in your code base, right?

• 3:29:30Nico Christie?

  It's about like giving the AI the ability to do what it needs to do as it has to.

• 3:29:34John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:29:34Nico Christie?

  So it's writing all of it. It's essentially writing its VBA's as it needs to.

• 3:29:38John Coogan?

  I haven't used Microsoft Copilot that much, but I've noticed that the way Gemini is like surfaced in Gmail, it's very clear that it's not doing Cogen. It's actually just taking text, dropping it in an LLM. It's a chat interface and that's it. And so I can imagine that we're in, we're entering the V2 of like sidebar companions. And this feels very logical.

• 3:30:01Nico Christie?

  Yeah, even Gemini, if you actually look into the Sheets integration they have now, they are starting to do a little bit of Python integration. So they are doing some NumPy, some data frame manipulation.

• 3:30:10John Coogan?

  Okay, interesting.

• 3:30:10Nico Christie?

  But they're much more hesitant to get there. And we were very hesitant to even call this Cursor for whatever.

• 3:30:15John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 3:30:16Nico Christie?

  Because it's such a caricature, but there's a truth that's much deeper about how you do that. And it's actually about owning the interface, the same way Cursor had to fork VS Code to own it.

• 3:30:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:30:27Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the demand. I replied to a comment of yours 15 minutes ago, and then a bunch of people are now replying to me saying, can I get an invite code? So it seems like...

• 3:30:36Nico Christie?

  All right, all right. Announcement, well, we got, first of all, I went about on LinkedIn. I didn't even know that was possible.

• 3:30:42Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for LinkedIn.

• 3:30:44Nico Christie?

  It still exists.

• 3:30:45Jordi Hays?

  Always getting there.

• 3:30:46Nico Christie?

  We got about 7,000 comments now, and I've only given out about 50 codes. This thing is extremely token hungry. But I did just make code TBPN.

• 3:30:56John Coogan?

  No way, let's go.

• 3:30:58Nico Christie?

  10 uses, it's probably eaten up by now.

• 3:31:00John Coogan?

  Go hunt it down.

• 3:31:01Nico Christie?

  But yeah, we are trying to get this out as fast as we can. That's why I'm writing these big checks for infra so that we can scale up capacity to serve. The only bottleneck is GPUs.

• 3:31:10John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 3:31:10Jordi Hays?

  Incredible. Well, thank you for pinging us.

• 3:31:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is awesome.

• 3:31:14Jordi Hays?

  This is super exciting. Come back on.

• 3:31:15John Coogan?

  I'm sure they'll be there soon.

• 3:31:17Jordi Hays?

  So what's the next few months looks like? Is scaling shortcut? Or are you gonna be...

• 3:31:22John Coogan?

  Can I refine this a little bit? I want to ask Cursor, very ground up adoption, from what I can tell, it's a developer who's at a big company and they just buy it or install it, expense it, that type of thing, versus going top down to, you know, I imagine Goldman Sachs has a lot of people working in Excel. You could go to McKinsey, you could go to Goldman and say, hey, CTO, install this and let's do an enterprise contract. How are you thinking about go to market?

• 3:31:49Nico Christie?

  Yeah, I mean, the stupid answer is I'm doing a little bit of both and seeing what's working. But it's pretty obvious that the same people who adopt AI in enterprise for Excel don't have the same risk tolerance or like the appetite to try stuff at the frontier that does software engineers like for Cursor. So and also my intention is that this bubbles up organically and that people bring it in as opposed to me telling some VP, adopt this, you can reduce headcount by 20%. Because that reality also can exist if I wanted to, right?

• 3:32:18John Coogan?

  Very awesome.

• 3:32:19Jordi Hays?

  All right, we'll come back on soon. Thank you for the code. Hopefully, hopefully, we get a shot at it before. I'll make you a special one.

• 3:32:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, we appreciate it.

• 3:32:27Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Congrats on the launch. Crushed it.

• 3:32:29John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon. And up next, we have Flo Crivello coming back on the stream.

• 3:32:35Jordi Hays?

  Soham's former boss.

• 3:32:37John Coogan?

  Former boss, former boss. So we opened the show with Soham himself. And now we're going to a former employer to get his side of the story. And the question that I want to answer is that that point that growing Daniel pointed out, which is the question is, can he change?

• 3:32:56Jordi Hays?

  Pathological liar that's just going to continue to lie and scam?

• 3:32:59John Coogan?

  Yes. Can is redemption possible?

• 3:33:02Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 3:33:02John Coogan?

  Is redemption possible? So let's go to Flo and get his take. How are you doing? Good to have you back on the show.

• 3:33:09Flo Crivello?

  Yeah, thanks for having me. No, redemption isn't possible. When people show you who they are, believe them. No, there's plenty of very honest people like, what are the ads? That's someone who's been lying compulsively and being been confronted about it for three years, like two or three years. And like, look, it's a special kind of person too, who can do this thing to people who trust them. Right? You have a relationship with an employer, you know? And and my understanding is that he basically has been averaging like getting fired once a month for the last three years. Like it's a special kind of person who can do that.

• 3:33:42Jordi Hays?

  So he could have learned his lesson like two years, three years ago.

• 3:33:45John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 3:33:45Jordi Hays?

  Like the first time he was called out and and.

• 3:33:49Flo Crivello?

  Totally. I wasn't I wasn't tuning in. I didn't I didn't hear what he said.

• 3:33:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, to me, the to me, the argument of sounds like he has some situation that's bad, but it's not a justification to go steal money from a bunch of Silicon Valley startups for years and years and years and years, and use them as a piggy bank to solve his own problem.

• 3:34:09John Coogan?

  So really quickly, how long did he work with you?

• 3:34:13Flo Crivello?

  Two weeks.

• 3:34:14John Coogan?

  Two weeks. And what was the result of that? I mean, I imagine you paid him for those two weeks of work. Did you get any good results?

• 3:34:21Flo Crivello?

  I am literally out of a meeting like an hour ago. Well, the engineer described his impact as negative.

• 3:34:27John Coogan?

  Negative.

• 3:34:28Flo Crivello?

  Well, because we had to, we had to onboard him.

• 3:34:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, on board him, yeah.

• 3:34:32Flo Crivello?

  Yeah, it's wasted our time and money.

• 3:34:35John Coogan?

  Has he apologized to you?

• 3:34:37Flo Crivello?

  Not yet.

• 3:34:38John Coogan?

  Okay, he said he would apologize to everyone else. He would go on an apology tour. We'll see if that actually pans out.

• 3:34:44Jordi Hays?

  My, my, my big, my big question is, is somebody like this, you could have them working in your office as a full-time employee and they would probably still, there's a good chance they would still keep doing this thing with people on LinkedIn that didn't see the whole Soham, uh, Soham gate.

• 3:35:01Flo Crivello?

  We never, we never compromise on ethics. Like that's just a thing I don't fuck with. Uh, he's gonna apologize. Is he gonna give the money back?

• 3:35:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:35:08John Coogan?

  Good question. I don't know.

• 3:35:11Flo Crivello?

  Cause, cause, cause stock is cheap.

• 3:35:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:35:15John Coogan?

  That's a higher bar. If he wants to make a statement, that's what he would do.

• 3:35:18Flo Crivello?

  A hundred percent.

• 3:35:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense. How do you prevent this in the future? How does Silicon Valley prevent this in the future? Obviously, the valley is built on trust. This is a violation of trust. There's been discussions about like, maybe we need a Reddit for, are we dating the same man? Are we employing the same software engineer? Uh, maybe we need an AI tool to, you know, check the GitHub commits and see that, oh, they're coming in at the same time every week.

• 3:35:41Jordi Hays?

  I was wondering if this could be done at the HRIS level. It's like this, this employee has accepted two offers.

• 3:35:48John Coogan?

  Why are they in two instances of, of, of rippling? That doesn't make any sense. Uh, yeah. How, how are we solving this?

• 3:35:55Flo Crivello?

  I, I don't want to over rotate on it. I think a lot of part of what makes Silicon Valley tick is its culture of, of trust. You know, there's this whole game theory around like hawks and doves, you know, and it's, it, it turns out there is no stable equilibrium. You're like in a constant state of, of, of shifting because if, if everyone's a dove, then the, the returns of being a hawk are very high and vice versa. If it runs a hawk, then you can have this like cliques of doves that, that start the building. So I, I'm really careful not to tip Silicon Valley towards this attractor state of like the hawk. And like a lot of industries end up in this state of like low trust and I really don't want to do that. Like, look, you're gonna get screwed over every so often. We had a good laugh. You know, the memes were amazing. Like I,

• 3:36:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I hope, I hope your, your viral posts at least drove a bunch of new signups and maybe, maybe he paid, he paid back a little bit by, by some customer acquisition.

• 3:36:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I, I completely agree. Like, yes. The handshake deal protocol is built on trust. Do some VCs violate it? Yes, every once in a while, a team, a term sheet falls through. It's not the best thing that ever happens, but the alternative is so much overhead on everyone that it's probably worth taking the risk of, yeah, occasionally the handshake deal is going to fall through.

• 3:37:08Flo Crivello?

  You're gonna get screwed over every so often and it's not worth over pivoting on it and like looking for your shoulder your entire life.

• 3:37:14John Coogan?

  So it sounds like he is, he's announced that he's taken a new role as a founding engineer at a single startup. He says he's not going to work at multiple companies. It seems like the jig, even if he, even if he is a pathological liar and continues to lie, like, people, like his, his SEO is terrible now. Like it will forever like be like very easy when you go to Google search for the person that you're hiring.

• 3:37:36Jordi Hays?

  He's like, oh, that's a difference. So Han Peric, there's a lot of, there's a lot of people.

• 3:37:40John Coogan?

  Name and it's going to be really complicated for him to get away with this longer. My question is like, if we were, we were kind of saying like the Soham Peric dev shop makes much more sense here. Does that make sense to you? Would like if he was saying, hey, I've been working at all these different startups. I'm starting a developer shop and yes, you can hire me, but I'm a contractor. Why, why are dev shops bad for startups? Why would this not work for him?

• 3:38:12Flo Crivello?

  I actually think for him, the real move is to start a course on how to crack cutting interviews because he's really good. And he's incredible. He's actually incredible, right? So he can actually make lemonade here. Like he should do that and he can make a lot of money. It's very highly.

• 3:38:27Jordi Hays?

  It was that and the cold email strategy. It was like, he had a very dialed in cold email approach where he would be, you know, he'd be like, say something nice and really clearly.

• 3:38:39Jordi Hays?

  I love building. The funny thing is in his message, he said, he said, I'm pissed and I, it's like.

• 3:38:45John Coogan?

  About what?

• 3:38:47John Coogan?

  You got busted.

• 3:38:48Jordi Hays?

  You pissed you got busted and you kind of gave himself away a little bit.

• 3:38:51John Coogan?

  He was saying like, oh yeah, like I'm gonna, you know, there's gonna be a great reversal here. And he came on and was like, the mainstream narrative is basically correct about me, but maybe I'm sorry.

• 3:39:01Jordi Hays?

  The redemption of being like, I'm gonna prove everyone wrong by working at one company. It's like, you don't get, you don't get, you don't get. Yeah, yeah, we don't give a, that's like a second, the fourth place trophy. You worked at one company.

• 3:39:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's funny.

• 3:39:16Flo Crivello?

  Um, yeah, I mean, uh, look, he's, he's not sorry. He just got cut. Like, is, is, that's it. It's really simple. Um, and, and why do dev shops not work for startups? I mean, it's like, I'm a nerd when it comes to the, the, the theory of the film because of my experience at Uber and so forth. There's a book that's called managerial dilemmas that explains why dev shops don't work.

• 3:39:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:39:38Flo Crivello?

  It's, it's fascinating. Yeah.

• 3:39:40John Coogan?

  But can you unpack it a little bit more because Uber is interesting because didn't, wasn't the very first version of Uber done by a dev shop? And wasn't that part of the early, early Uber lore that like the code base was written in Spanish? And so everyone at Uber had like the Spanish to English dictionary there, which is hilarious because I'm pretty sure Google Translate existed at the time, but they still had the dictionary for some reason. It's like, it's like amazing lore regardless of how real it is.

• 3:40:03Flo Crivello?

  Yeah, I think people add a little bit to it. This is the first time I hear about it.

• 3:40:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:40:07Flo Crivello?

  Uh, but you know, like next time I hear about it, there's gonna be a guy with like a sombrero in the.

• 3:40:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Travis was in Tijuana pulling random devs off the street. Yeah. They're really, really amping it up. The apocryphalness of the story just needs to grow and grow and grow. It's a tall tale at this point.

• 3:40:24Flo Crivello?

  The, the reason why dev shops don't work is because there's like a complicated, there's a complicated game theoretic argument, which goes basically, the reason why you employ people is because they know things you don't know. And so there is a, an information asymmetry, which always makes it possible for someone to cheat, because they can basically bullshit their like, and, and you see it with engineering all the time. It's like, oh, this is so complicated. You said it'd be a day, but actually it's gonna be a month and you have no clue. You have no way to verify. And this is inevitable. Like the reason you hire them is because there is this information asymmetry. Yeah. Because otherwise might as well just do it yourself. Um, and so. Basically, in a way, it is always possible to cheat, which is why we are not fucking around and hiring people who do cheat. Because there is no way you can always prevent them from cheating. If he doesn't cheat, he still cheat by doing something else.

• 3:41:09Flo Crivello?

  So there is always a way to cheat. So you could say that, to some extent, not cheating is irrational. You can cheat, you can get away with it. He's made millions, he's made so much money, right? Like, you can cheat, you can get away with it. And so, in a way, you've got to solve for the equation, where it's like, I can cheat, I can make a lot of money, I can get away with it. Nothing is ever going to happen to me, but I'm not going to do it because of X. And you have to solve for X, that's your job as a founder. You're like, why would you act irrationally? And the way you do that, thankfully, is we have that bit that you can flip in our brains as humans. We have these tribal pro-social tendencies that are like, I don't want to cheat, because I like these people, or because I'm bought into the mission. Which is why they always say, every startup is like a religion, like the mission, the culture really matter,

• 3:41:54Flo Crivello?

  and the camaraderie really matter as a startup. And that's what you lose when you have dev shops.

• 3:41:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, to be even more specific, the dev shop gives you a scope. They say, it's going to take me XYZ time to do roughly this, or maybe they're on a retainer. And then if they come back to you the next day, and they say, well, actually, it's going to take more time, and it's going to be more money. Well, an employee is going to say, well, it's going to take more time, maybe, but I'm not going to necessarily charge you astronomically more, right? I'm just a salaried team member. And because they have that equity compensation as well, they're bought, and hopefully bought into the mission.