You Don't Need a Storyteller, ChatGPT Images, Ali on the Series L | Karri Saarinen, Mike Cessario, Elliot Cohen, Ali Ghodsi

(00:55) - Viral WSJ 'You Don't Need a Storyteller' Piece (28:52) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (34:03) - ChatGPT Images 1.5 (46:05) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:00:44) - Coreweave Tests AI Market Hype (01:11:40) - The Price of Ford's EV Push (01:19:58) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:30:32) - Karri Saarinen, co-founder and CEO of Linear, a project management tool, previously served as Principal Designer at Airbnb and Head of Design at Coinbase. In the conversation, he discusses the importance of maintaining a broad perspective in design, cautioning against conflating design with coding, as it may limit creativity and lead to conservative solutions. He emphasizes the need for a conceptual design phase to explore multiple directions before execution, allowing for innovative and thoughtful outcomes. (01:51:42) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:00:47) - Mike Cessario, founder and CEO of Liquid Death, discusses the innovative launch strategy of his canned water brand, emphasizing the use of a viral video to gauge market interest before product availability. He highlights the importance of leveraging existing networks and resources, such as collaborating with the creator of "Mr. Pickles" for brand design and animation, to create compelling marketing content. Cessario also addresses the balance between humor in branding and maintaining sincerity in customer interactions, underscoring the significance of understanding the audience and context in communication. (02:21:36) - Elliot Cohen, co-founder of PillPack, which was acquired by Amazon in 2018, discusses his new venture, General Medicine, an online healthcare marketplace aiming to simplify access to medical care. He highlights the platform's ability to connect users with medical providers, assess care needs based on symptoms, and integrate health history into a chat interface for personalized support. Cohen emphasizes the importance of empowering consumers in their healthcare journey, aiming to make the experience as seamless as shopping online. (02:38:44) - Ali Ghodsi, CEO and co-founder of Databricks, discusses the company's significant growth, highlighting a revenue run rate surpassing $4.8 billion with over 55% year-over-year growth, and AI products exceeding $1 billion in revenue. He emphasizes the importance of a solid data foundation for effective AI implementation, noting that AI models are becoming commodities, but their true value lies in reasoning over proprietary enterprise data. Ghodsi also shares insights on navigating open-source business models, advising founders to achieve widespread adoption of their open-source projects and then innovate with proprietary offerings to monetize effectively. (03:06:30) - Affinity Drops out of WB Takeover Battle (03:09:04) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions 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 Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com/ fal - https://fal.ai Privy - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TBBN. Today is December 16th, Tuesday,

• 0:07John Coogan?

  2025. Merry Christmas. Oh, oh, oh. We are live from the TBBN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital, the North Pole, the North Pole of net income. Ramp, time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more. You know what to get for that loved one in your life this Christmas. Get them on Ramp, introduce them to a Ramp SDR. They will appreciate it. It's the gift that keeps on giving. It really is. Anyway, you know what else is the gift that keeps on giving? Hiring a storyteller,

• 0:48John Coogan?

  which apparently is the hottest topic in Silicon Valley. Thanks to our friend Katie Dayton over at the Wall Street Journal, who made this go mega viral by posting an article in the Wall Street Journal, all about how startups are hiring storytellers. Companies are desperately seeking storytellers is the headline, of course. We are going to dive into it. Jordy wrote a take. If you have a storyteller, you want to tell a story, why don't you tell it on all of the streaming platforms simultaneously with Restream. One livestream, 30-plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. Storytelling is the only way to impose meaning on abundance, says Signal. Coherence on noise, legitimacy on power, strategy ops and capital

• 1:33John Coogan?

  are all downstream. Without narrative control, none of it will ever stick. This has been one of the core premises of my account. In a world of infinite output, story is the scarce primitive. He's a very good writer, Signal. Whoever can compress chaos into something people can feel, remember, forgive and rally around actually runs the system. This skill is worth more than the entire C-suite combined. Okay, so lay off the CEO, the CFO, the CTO. You just need a storyteller, you're good to go. Is that the pitch? No, people are having fun with this one. What was your take, Jordy? Break it down for me. How did you process this?

• 2:13Jordi Hays?

  I mean, should we, should we read through the article briefly or at least summarize it?

• 2:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, for sure.

• 2:16Jordi Hays?

  So Katie writes, companies are desperately seeking storytellers, brands trying to wrest great, greater control from their narratives or seeking storytelling skill sets without a camp, uh, campfire in sight. Uh, maybe some of them have a, have a warm hearth like we do. Um, anyways, corporate America's latest-

• 2:34John Coogan?

  What is the campfire thing?

• 2:36Jordi Hays?

  Normally you'd be telling a story.

• 2:38John Coogan?

  Oh, around a campfire. Yeah, that makes sense.

• 2:40Jordi Hays?

  Light a fire and be telling a story that way.

• 2:42John Coogan?

  I usually think of smoking cigars around, uh, campfires. That's what I associate. Mostly focused on the cigar.

• 2:47Jordi Hays?

  But you like to yap between puffs.

• 2:49John Coogan?

  I do, I do.

• 2:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, corporate America's latest hot job is also one of the oldest in history, storytellers. Some companies want a media relations manager by a flashier name. Others need people to produce blogs, podcasts, case studies, and more types of branded content to attract customers, investors, and potential recruits. All seem to use the word differently than in its usual application to novelist playwrights. Uh, as storytellers, a Google job ad said last month, we play an integral role in driving customer acquisition and long-term growth. The listings sought a customer storytelling manager to join the company's Google Cloud storytelling team. That sounds like a fantastic opportunity in another life. Personally, I'd be on the Google Cloud storytelling team.

• 3:32John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 3:32Jordi Hays?

  In some ways, in some ways we are. Uh, one article the unit published this year was titled Lowe's Innovation: How Vertex AI Helps Create Interactive Shopping Experiences. Uh, Microsoft Security Organization meanwhile is recruiting a senior director overseeing narrative and storytelling described as part cybersecurity technologist, part communicator, and part marketer.

• 3:52John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:52Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Vanta is also hiring a storyteller. Uh, Notion, uh, recently-

• 3:56John Coogan?

  Head of storytelling at Vanta.

• 3:57Jordi Hays?

  That's right. Productivity app Notion recently merged its comms, social media, and influencer functions into one 10-person team, a so-called storytelling team. And so anyways, they go, uh, Katie goes on and on. She talks about, uh, how, uh, more and more of these listings are popping up. They're, they're growing year over year. They're showing up in earnings calls.

• 4:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:19Jordi Hays?

  And I went and tried to find-

• 4:21John Coogan?

  I have a different, I have a different take on this. I think, uh- As soon as, as soon as there's a Wall Street, I mean, we love Katie, but as soon as there's a Wall Street Journal piece about a trend, the trend is effectively dead. And so there is no more alpha in hiring storytellers. You need to hire a yarn spinner. You need to hire a fabulist, someone who will go around to group chats and tell wild lies about your product, your company, how successful you are. You recruit this person and then they go around seeding little anecdotes, little tall tales, and they spin yarns.

• 4:54Jordi Hays?

  I think that's called securities fraud.

• 4:55John Coogan?

  I don't know. It certainly depends. Maybe if there's no securities changing hands.

• 5:00Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so I went and tried to find, I tried to find a storyteller from a long time ago.

• 5:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 5:07Jordi Hays?

  And I found none other than the legend Steve Clayton. He's currently the vice president of Microsoft's communication strategy. But back in 2010, what was he hired for? The chief storyteller.

• 5:19John Coogan?

  No way. They were using that term 15 years ago. That's crazy. It feels like a very modern term.

• 5:25Jordi Hays?

  He held that title from 2010 to June 2021. And he says, "In this role, I led a team of 40 who engage in a wide variety of storytelling inside and outside Microsoft." And anyways, goes, goes on and on. I was trying to also kind of understand the, from like the early 1900s to the 1950s, you had copywriters, like that it was, it was like pretty elite to be a copywriter. This was like a high status job you were using.

• 5:52John Coogan?

  Don Draper. Isn't Don Draper, it's more or less.

• 5:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he was a creative director, but also a writer, and the people that he worked with were copywriters, because at that time, print media, you could, being able to use your words to get people to take action that you want, that you benefit from, is a very elite skillset.

• 6:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:11Jordi Hays?

  At some point, marketing.

• 6:13John Coogan?

  One, one, one more example that I mentioned earlier, early storytellers in Silicon Valley. Guy Kawasaki, he was, he was one of Apple's employees originally responsible for marketing their Macintosh computer line in 1984. He actually popularized the word evangelist in marketing the Macintosh as. An Apple evangelist and the concepts of evangelism, marketing and technology evangelism slash platform evangelism in general. And and he became, you know, this this idea of like word of mouth, marketing, not quite storytelling, different, different keyword around it. But he was also sort of, you know, one of the early, you know, turning points in in tech marketing. Anyway.

• 6:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And around that time, you started to get content strategists, right?

• 7:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:02Jordi Hays?

  And and if you look back to the to the eighties and nineties, it was about if that was kind of like the boom of brand strategy, brand identity. Think like the Nike kind of era of marketing.

• 7:14John Coogan?

  And biology recently went viral because there was a clip from an older podcast that was reposted on X went viral. And it was his take a few years ago during the creator economy boom, arguing that companies need a founding creator or like a or like a.

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  Creator and resident.

• 7:34John Coogan?

  Create, no, it was it was higher than creator and residents. It was like, it was like on the co founding team, you should have a CTO and then you should have a creator. And it was like, you know, it's an interesting thought experiment, probably good for some companies, maybe not good for every company, you know, like any piece of tech advice or wisdom. You know, there's going to be a variety of cases where it makes sense. But it went viral and everyone was saying like, oh, this is so, it's he's so behind. And I had to correct someone. I was like, no, no, like that clip is actually a couple of years old. He when he was saying it, it wasn't. So it was sort of interesting that way.

• 8:04Jordi Hays?

  Early insight.

• 8:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:05Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, I wrote a piece for the newsletter today at tbpn.com. And of course I titled it, You Don't Need A Storyteller. Said, according to a friend of the show, Katie at the Wall Street Journal, companies are desperate to hire storytellers. Hiring a storyteller is not a new phenomenon, but it makes sense that companies feel the need to hire them right now. Why? Because it's never been more obvious that the best storytellers in the world create billions of dollars of value for their companies and create massive advantages using only their words. Their words are so powerful that no matter where they appear on the internet, they draw millions of views and create a vortex of talent, capital and customers.

• 8:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's this thing where like. If you have a hot take, you don't actually need to own the platform. You can just go do a circuit of appearances.

• 8:50Jordi Hays?

  A podcast tour. Anyways, I'll continue. The reality distortion field that emerges often results in 100 XPE ratios. Of course, every company in the world wants this. The problem is that it's impossible to hire the most elite storytellers because they are founders. Think Elon, Karp, and Palmer. New coinage alert. I call these types Joe Rogan CEOs, right? You know if you have a Joe Rogan CEO. It's fine if you don't. There's great CEOs that are not Joe Rogan CEOs, but there's a certain type of CEO that's a Joe Rogan CEO.

• 9:23John Coogan?

  And to be clear, you're not saying that the CEO has to have the same aesthetics as Joe Rogan or the same style as Joe Rogan.

• 9:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, even Karp has not been on Joe Rogan.

• 9:32John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 9:32Jordi Hays?

  But you know that if he went on, it would be a grand slam. It'd be electric.

• 9:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no. So it's more about being able to put on a performance in that particular environment.

• 9:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Can you capture people's attention for three hours?

• 9:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 9:47Jordi Hays?

  Just like rambling, basically.

• 9:49John Coogan?

  Whereas there have been CEOs that have gone on Joe Rogan successfully, but they just haven't delivered a Joe Rogan experience.

• 9:56Jordi Hays?

  And I think if you think about, I think if you think about like early-stage founders, who would go on and just crush Joe Rogan?

• 10:06John Coogan?

  Augustus Durok.

• 10:07Jordi Hays?

  It just like immediately comes to mind. You know who these people are. And there's CEOs, founders CEOs of his generation.

• 10:14John Coogan?

  He's a JRC.

• 10:15Jordi Hays?

  That are amazing, even though they wouldn't necessarily, they're not necessarily a JRC.

• 10:20John Coogan?

  He's a JRC.

• 10:21Jordi Hays?

  So I continue, "The internet is noisier than ever with thousands of startups competing for mindshare. When every startup has a great launch video, no one does. And yet these storytellers consistently break through and dominate the timeline. Even though Gen AI allows marketing teams, big and small, to massively increase their output, it is often not even 1% as effective as one of these elite storyteller founders going on a podcast or just posting stream of consciousness on X. The white pill for savvy marketing teams is that even as we're seeing an exponential increase in content production, I'm not sure we're seeing an exponential increase in great ideas. That means that companies, large and small, that don't have the luxury of having an Elon or Palmer on the payroll, still have a chance to break through the noise and be remembered."

• 11:03Jordi Hays?

  As I was personally reflecting on 2025, there were only a handful of like truly corporate storytelling moments that I remember. And each of them worked for different reasons. One, uh, don't work at Anduril. Iconic campaign. Palmer makes like a cameo in it, but he's not the star. He's just like a, he's, he's like a kind of, he's just like a character in it, but it's, you could remove Palmer and the, and the ad would like still carry weight. I thought that was, uh, one of the best campaigns of the year. The other one was Astronomer. Their reaction to the, to the crisis and the viral moment they had, uh, the, the campaign is titled, "Thank you for your interest in Astronomer."

• 11:44Jordi Hays?

  It obviously featured Gwyneth Paltrow. I think this one will be studied in 10 years. It was like really a perfect reaction to that moment and, uh, I did not know Astronomer before then. I do now. I will never forget them. I thought Ramp's expenses should do themselves with Saquon. Uh, that one was this combination of like luck, incredible execution and timing, uh, and, and ultimately it, it just like having the Eagles got it done and that like was the cherry on top. It was a great campaign. It was a great, you know, first Super Bowl commercial for them.

• 12:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, next is Keep Thinking from Anthropic is felt like very Apple inspired. They even had the piano crashing and then sort of like reversing up, right? Which I felt was a reference to that iPad ad in some way. Uh, and then finally, uh, Avi Schiffman's campaign, which I call buy every billboard. He literally bought every billboard. We've talked about this before, but near our office, there was a billboard that you could only see like a third of it. You could only see it say n.com because it was just facing, it was like 10 feet away from a apartment building. And so I said, friend did something absurd, which we can call the buy every billboard strategy. Many people criticized the campaign and the product,

• 13:06Jordi Hays?

  but the results from an awareness standpoint are undeniable. Avi spent one to two million was my estimate and became a household name, at least on the coast. And a lot of other brands have spent like 10 times that amount. And you don't even know who they are, right? You, you, you wouldn't. Somebody could rattle off a handful of them. You'd be like, what? Like, I'm actually not familiar. So that campaign was notable to me because I think if you utilize that for the right product, it could be super impactful, right? It could have, you know, I don't know if that campaign transformed Friend as a business, but it certainly put them on the map.

• 13:47Jordi Hays?

  And I think like, it's very possible that billboards can have increasing returns to scale. So you might buy two billboards, not really see any noticeable like lift in awareness and attention and traffic, but if you buy like 200, it's sort of undeniable. You can't miss it. I kept, I-

• 14:04John Coogan?

  Well, we had a great result with literally two billboards. Could have just been one, basically. Just one billboard, but we were able to get a lot of photos taken of it. And so it broke through in a very interesting way. And so we probably got way more value out of that just because it was such a small, just one billboard. And then Avi went the opposite direction and bought every billboard. When he came on the show and was like, it's the biggest billboard campaign in history. I was like, there's no way. And then I saw it everywhere and I was like, okay, maybe it is. But I thought it would cost more than a million dollars to get that big of a billboard buy. I thought a billboard buy of that scale would be like 10 million or 20 million, but I guess not. I guess-

• 14:46Jordi Hays?

  I know he didn't spend that much because he hasn't raised that much.

• 14:48John Coogan?

  He hasn't raised that much, but I don't know. He also, he was like financing his, his dot com. So is there possible, is it possible that he has like financing agreement to like pay these billboards down over time or something like?

• 15:02Jordi Hays?

  I don't know about that. I don't, you can finance a domain because the domain gets held in like a third party like custody. And so if somebody stops making payments, you just claw back the domain. Whereas billboards is like, you ran the ads, you took the spot of another advertiser that could have been cash today. So I don't really know about that. I wouldn't be surprised if Avi's levered up in more ways than one of those. Anyways, I said, hiring a storyteller to craft narratives and tell your story internally and externally is fine. But if the goal is to be remembered and you lack a Joe Rogan CEO, remember that one great campaign is worth 10,000 posts.

• 15:38Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, I would just like to see people, companies, instead of frantically just trying to make a lot of noise in a bunch of random ways as you go into 2026, how do you have one breakout moment, campaign, and truly be remembered?

• 15:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's interesting. I have more to say about that, but first, let me tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers. Develop and fine-tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. Yeah, I'm trying to square the problem that these job posts are trying to solve. So in the Wall Street Journal article, it says, "The percentage of LinkedIn job postings in the U.S. that include the term storyteller doubled in the year ending November 26," I guess, "to include some 50,000 listings under marketing and more than 20,000 job listings under media and communications that mentioned the term storyteller, storytelling, executives

• 16:39John Coogan?

  on earnings calls, and Investor Days mentioned it 469 times," which is like three times as much as 10 years ago. So clearly, clearly, people are, you know, business leaders are interested in storytelling, both as a narrative for investors, but also as an actual, physical job. But I'm wondering, like, you get in the seat, it does feel like a little bit of what this story is, what this Journal article is saying is like, you're going to be storytelling every single day. It's kind of counter to what, which I guess is what your whole point was, but it's very much counter to your point of like, one big campaign, one breakthrough idea.

• 17:23John Coogan?

  And I'm wondering, just like, I don't know, is there a world where you need both, where you need inspiration, but you still need like, you know, at a certain point, you know, there was an example here, it's like, you know, they did a Lowe's case study on how Vertex AI helps create interactive shopping experiences.

• 17:43John Coogan?

  Is that going to be?

• 17:43Jordi Hays?

  Well, the standout moment for me this year for Microsoft was Satya saying, "I'm happy to be a leaser. And I'm good for my, I'm good for my 80 billion." So when you think about when I, you know, I think what I was encouraged-

• 17:57John Coogan?

  But what does that do to Lowe's partnership, you know? Like if you're, like, this was actually Google's cloud storytelling team. They published an article, and so if they just have to get out a blog post, maybe there is some benefit to just like shifting their mindset to at least being like, "Hey, instead of just doing like a list of facts, like, why don't you try and like, tell it like a story?" Meaning like the React structure, conflict, resolution, characters, antagonists, like, you know, like, because like a lot of, like, it sounds like a low bar.

• 18:27Jordi Hays?

  They didn't want Lowe's to have efficient cloud infrastructure.

• 18:32John Coogan?

  They didn't want the shopping experiences to be interactive. But then Google came in and changed it up, changed up the game.

• 18:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess I'm still- You know, if I'm at a big company, if I'm employed at a big company, it would be cool to have a recent, like a centralized resource that's like, "Here's how we talk about this product. Here's how we talk about our mission. Here's how we talked about, talk about our roadmap in the near term, and the medium term, and the long term, right?" But ultimately, that, when you think of the companies that are great at storytelling, it is because the CEO is a great storyteller.

• 19:05John Coogan?

  Yes. Hmm. I mean, yeah, there's two.

• 19:08Jordi Hays?

  Like, I would, I would argue that Apple, who's historically been an amazing storyteller, is not, is not currently an incredible storyteller because Tim Cook is like 11 out of 10 operationally, and he's not the guy to go on, he's not like, I, I, I don't see Tim Cook popping up on a bunch of-

• 19:34John Coogan?

  There also aren't paying him enough to go do extra stuff. Like, if, you know, if I, if you, if you're making that type of money, like, you're not gonna be like, "Yeah, I'm gonna go work on the weekends."

• 19:43Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna, 5 o'clock rolls around.

• 19:44John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 19:45Jordi Hays?

  You're bailing.

• 19:45John Coogan?

  You're bailing. But.

• 19:48Jordi Hays?

  No, so, so again, in that, that's not, it hasn't mattered. Like, he's told the story through the company's performance.

• 19:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:54Jordi Hays?

  Which is that he is one of the most elite operators.

• 19:57John Coogan?

  Last night, last night, I feel like we had dinner with a great storyteller. And he told us his entire life story. And what was interesting and why I thought it was a really great story was two things. Like, one, the facts of the story, just the truth, was a lot of up and down, a lot of conflict.

• 20:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was riveting.

• 20:15John Coogan?

  It was riveting.

• 20:16Jordi Hays?

  Failure, wins.

• 20:17John Coogan?

  He's the protagonist, but there were antagonists. And there were, and there were mentors and trials and tribulations. Like, it really did fit the hero's journey. Um, so, so the facts were there and you could go fact check them and be like, oh, yeah. There were, there were these story points. But then also, the way he told the story didn't hide those. There was, there's another version of that story where he only tells you the good moments in the story. And he doesn't tell you about any of the trial and tribulations. And we're like, okay, yeah, we get it, you're successful. You know, it's boring.

• 20:47Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 20:48John Coogan?

  Um, instead, we were like, whoa, like, another, another downturn, another up, another swing. It was emotional, it was a roller coaster, it was a great story. And I feel like if, if there, if there's anything that comes out of like the storyteller era of corporate marketing, it should be giving marketers, writers, storytellers, permission to actually inject conflict into their marketing materials.

• 21:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, look at the way that Palmer responded to that journal piece about how Andorl had a fire at one of their test sites. Right? He was like, yes, we had a, I, I'm paraphrasing, but it was effectively, yes, we had a fire at the, at the missile test site or whatever, at the explosives test site, right? Like, yes, we, and he was trying to do that. He was, he was, he was trying to do that in the journal article when he, clearly when he was talking to them. But they, they pulled out moments where it was like, we fail a lot.

• 21:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:43Jordi Hays?

  Whereas Palmer was trying to tell a good story, which is like, yeah, we fail a lot because we test a lot.

• 21:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:47Jordi Hays?

  And we're trying to iterate faster than our competitors.

• 21:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:49Jordi Hays?

  And through that, we'll succeed. Um, so.

• 21:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. I wonder, I wonder what the net impact of that journal article will be.

• 21:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, ultimately, ultimately, I just think, I think tech needs to fall, like, fall in love with advertising again. Advertising is amazing. Like, I want to see companies hiring advertising specialists. Somebody that

• 22:12John Coogan?

  That's funny.

• 22:12Jordi Hays?

  Somebody that is just focused on doing really great advertising, right? Not just like, you know, I think, I think this gets lost because we're in this era of rapid testing, iterating through a bunch of assets, you know, volume, right? You see this with, you know, companies that say like, yeah, we just need to create 100 new ads for Meta every single week forever. And we're trying to get to 200, right? But in, in that, it can oftentimes get lost of like, what, what story are we telling, right? Like, what is the, what is the through line between all this noise that we're creating and all this attention that we're getting?

• 22:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Numeral, compliance handled. Numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance, you can focus on growth.

• 22:57John Coogan?

  Do you think companies? We have some

• 23:00Jordi Hays?

  Ben made some new sound effects.

• 23:02John Coogan?

  Let, let, let's have a couple.

• 23:06John Coogan?

  What was that?

• 23:11John Coogan?

  There's a couple of the good ones.

• 23:15John Coogan?

  You're surrounded by enemy snowmen?

• 23:20John Coogan?

  Take the shot. Hostile drummer boy.

• 23:25Speaker 02

  Friendly reindeer inbound.

• 23:27John Coogan?

  Friendly reindeer inbound. I like it.

• 23:30Jordi Hays?

  Oh, really fun. Anyways.

• 23:32John Coogan?

  So, so, so do you think, do you think it's going to be hard for companies to hire great storytellers? Ties here, Bronco, says, "The Venn diagram of people who get tech, get people, can explain complex things simply and can make people care is tiny." So will these folks be?

• 23:53Jordi Hays?

  I think a lot of these, I think a lot of these people actually are at advertising agencies. And, and

• 24:02Jordi Hays?

  If you're Coca-Cola, you've been working with hundreds of advertising agencies for decades and decades and decades, right? This has worked well for them. You're bringing in new ideas, new perspectives. You're hiring. It can be great to say, hey, we're gonna give this agency like a hundred thousand dollars, but in exchange, we're gonna get a great campaign out of it, right? So I just think people need to know what they actually want. I think what they want is to be remembered and to be thought about and to be, you know, have certain ideas associated with their company, right? And I think just people that are like, oh, we want, we want to be remembered. We should hire a storyteller. I don't think that's gonna work really that well, right?

• 24:41Jordi Hays?

  Because, I mean, for, again, just because like, in order to, it's about like, cutting, cutting through the noise. Like, you need an idea that is so good, like, don't work an Andorol, that it will just break out and people will remember it, right? And people will watch a two-minute ad.

• 24:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. There's a little bit of like, the, just like, you know, the story still has to be, we're talking about, we're not talking about yarn spinners. We're talking about actual, real stories that potentially could be fact-checked. And so you do have to do a little bit of the hard work to actually deliver some facts and some story points, which is probably why it's extremely hard to tell a compelling story as like a seed-stage company, because you're a young company. It's why usually your story leans on like, your backstory, like, how you grew up, or what you were doing before, or why you quit that big cushy job to go out and to cross into the unknown and become the intrepid entrepreneur.

• 25:37John Coogan?

  I was reflecting on Keller at ZipLine as having a great story this year in particular, that sort of manifested itself in ZipLine's solar punk-style launch video and Keller going around on different shows, coming on our show multiple times and talking about the progress of the business. But a lot of that story is just the fact that he's been running the business for a decade and it's now finally working. And it's this thing that, the story of drone delivery was told a decade ago. Like, I remember in San Francisco, people were saying, there was somebody who was like... Building a drone delivery company as like a small startup and it would basically just be like a DJI drone that he would just like clip it to and like fly it to you.

• 26:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:21John Coogan?

  But it was like.

• 26:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, an example also in the drone space of good storytelling is the Neurus guys. So like Soren, for example, when he comes on, he's like, yeah, I was competitive drone racer.

• 26:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:31Jordi Hays?

  It immediately, it doesn't matter that he's like young and doesn't have the most experience in the category.

• 26:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:38Jordi Hays?

  But you're like, okay, the guy that is making.

• 26:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:40Jordi Hays?

  Killer drones, you probably want him to be one of the best in the world at actually flying.

• 26:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, I completely agree with that. The hard part is that like if you're, if you don't have that background, if you don't have the, the, the, the plot points, if you don't have plot, then no amount of storyteller hiring can fix that.

• 26:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 26:58John Coogan?

  If you have a boring plot. Um, so you gotta go do things.

• 27:01Jordi Hays?

  It's easier to be a great storyteller if you have motion and if you have aura.

• 27:06John Coogan?

  It is. But also, yeah, I don't know, plot points, plot points are, are, things happen, things, they like facts occur, like, you know, things, the, the, you know, Soren actually competed as a drone racer, like aura motion that, that ties to it, but it's really.

• 27:25Jordi Hays?

  You're saying that adds to the aura, right? If you think about.

• 27:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 27:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, if Soren rewind a little bit, he starts fundraising for his company.

• 27:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:36Jordi Hays?

  Like that, that kind of just by that, that gives him a huge advantage if that's just circulating of like, there's a new startup raising and the founders were competitive drone racers.

• 27:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, even, even just like being on your second company, having sold your first company, that's just a plot point. No, no storyteller can come in and say like, hey, why don't we go tell everyone that you sold your last company for a billion dollars? It's like, yeah, that would make your story better, but it's not a fact, so you can't use it.

• 28:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, there's always, you know, there's always something to latch on to. I, I think about with the, the Ridge Wallet guys.

• 28:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh, they never raised money. There was never any hype surrounding the business.

• 28:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:11Jordi Hays?

  And like as a storyteller, everyone's a storyteller. So when I introduce them to people, I'd be like, you should talk to Sean and Connor.

• 28:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:21Jordi Hays?

  They've bootstrapped this business to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

• 28:26Jordi Hays?

  And profit by being truly elite marketers. And that like creates like a catalyst for people to be like, wow, I'm paying attention now.

• 28:34John Coogan?

  So. Yep. Figma, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Ali is chiming in. She says, wow, 23K likes. She says, tech bro obsessed with storytelling, but hasn't read a book in the last five years. Probably not a good sign. A lot of the classic stories have been told again and again and again. And go back to the classics.

• 28:59Jordi Hays?

  Instead of a launch video, somebody should just write an announcement in the full hero's journey.

• 29:06John Coogan?

  That actually sort of works. I mean, I would, I would, I would use the story circle when I would write YouTube videos. Dan Harmon's story circle is it's basically like a three act structure, but in eight parts. And so there's like the crossing into the void. I would try and map out like, you know, all the different story beats pretty deliberately and try and map them on there. It's, it's hard, though.

• 29:26Speaker 03

  I would like to see a, um, a launch post written in verse.

• 29:31John Coogan?

  Ooh. Getting back into poetry. Yeah. Uh, I mean, Homeric, you should maybe drop an epic poem, like a true, true, like thousand page book of poetry.

• 29:44Jordi Hays?

  Or, or you could drop 20 haikus on your startup.

• 29:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. Graphite dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. This really did become the current thing. There's a clue Eric Zaworski says, there's a big clue in the middle of the viral Wall Street Journal article by Dolly Diten that explains why the people who would otherwise crush the role of storyteller, the hot new job at hot startups, rarely get the gig in the end as designer Stefan Sagmeister observed back in 2014. It's all the people who are not storytellers who now suddenly want to be storytellers. Interesting.

• 30:31John Coogan?

  Says every so often, an article like this drops, remember brand brands the new mote or taste can't be taught that lays bare the repackaging of an oft taken for granted concept in communication, human to human relation, just enough that it entices reaction discourse today. It's the idea that stories are is telling stories is an important function of extending the lifespan of companies. A familiar debate on the timeline, many are correctly pointing out that this is nothing new. Marketing 101 always has been .jpg tier stuff. So how did storytelling and an idea fundamental to our existence get Rubik's Cubed into a novel optimization strategy? That is, that is funny. Rubik's Cubed is good.

• 31:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just, I just think a title like this would, I think a good, a good test, if you're trying to hire for a role like this is would the person be, do they want the title storyteller?

• 31:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:26Jordi Hays?

  Or would they be okay with the title copywriter?

• 31:28John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 31:29Jordi Hays?

  Right? Because in my view, if you're hiring somebody to be a storyteller, their job is to like write down words in a structured impactful way and help the entire organization like share those words in a, in a, in a consistent manner. And I would say a lot of the people, a lot of people like want the title creative director, but do they want to be a project manager? Like, no, they want to be a creative director, right?

• 31:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:53Jordi Hays?

  There's just like a status associated with that.

• 31:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:57Jordi Hays?

  There's maybe a status associated with storyteller.

• 32:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:00Jordi Hays?

  But at the end of the day, if you're trying to hire for this, do you want somebody that is obsessed with writing?

• 32:07John Coogan?

  You should be willing to take the job of storyteller. If I come to you and you say you want to work for me as a storyteller, I say, I'm going to start you off with the title fabulous. And if you're cool with that, then maybe we'll upgrade you to storyteller. If you're, if you're okay coming into this organization with your, with your title being yarn spinner.

• 32:27John Coogan?

  Just tall, tall tailsmith.

• 32:30Jordi Hays?

  First project, you just hand them a bunch of yarn. They spin this for me.

• 32:34John Coogan?

  Just tell me a lie, tell me a lie about my company.

• 32:38John Coogan?

  You're, you're, you're actually a generational founder. You sold your last company for $10 billion. Like, yeah, write the blog post and post it. Uh, anyway, uh, what is this, uh, Andreessen Horowitz has a, uh, laws of new media coming from Marshall McLuhan. The laws of media, the new science. There are four of these, the laws of media. One is it enhances awareness of inclusive structural process. Obsolesse's dominance of the logical method reverses into technology hardware becomes software. Retrieves metaphor logos. That is, I like some McLuhan. Where, where else is this Xerox enhances the speed of the printing press. Obsolesse's the assembly line book reverses into everyone becomes a publisher.

• 33:23John Coogan?

  Retrieves the oral tradition. That's a cool framework. I like this. Dig through, uh, you know, different value props, essentially the iPhone one. It enhanced bringing the world into your, yourself into the world. The world into yourself into the world. Whoa. Obsolesse's the house's home flips, the end of the individual retrieves the nomadic hunter. What? That's weird for the, here's, here's one of his tetrad's on the computer. The computer enhances instant replay of information. It obsolesse's hardware. It retrieves hunter. It flips pattern recognition. Huh. Uh, what a, what a fascinating, uh, framework. Chat GPT has a new image model.

• 34:06John Coogan?

  They just launched this. Sam Altman teased it with a photo that at this point, you know, him and a bunch of, uh, him and a bunch of polos. Looks great. He says, uh, most likely to launch a new image model. And Sam Altman says, launching something really fun today. What is the actual announcement? How is this, how is this framed? I know, I know the model got better.

• 34:25Jordi Hays?

  Elf.

• 34:25John Coogan?

  But what if?

• 34:26Jordi Hays?

  Elf.

• 34:27John Coogan?

  But what is uh?

• 34:28Speaker 03

  It's a good model. It's a good model, sir.

• 34:30John Coogan?

  Yes, yeah, okay, so, so.

• 34:31Speaker 03

  Image one point five.

• 34:33John Coogan?

  Image one point five. What were they on before?

• 34:35Speaker 03

  GPT image. Now there's GPT image one point five.

• 34:38John Coogan?

  Were they on one point oh before?

• 34:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:40John Coogan?

  Okay. Today, we're releasing a new version of ChatGPT Images powered by our new flagship image generation model. Now, whether you're creating something from scratch or editing a photo, you'll get the output you're picturing. It makes precise edits while keeping details intact, and it's four times faster. You know that's a big deal. You know that that like, like, that is the real thing where Nano Banana's been very, very fast. They gotta speed this thing up, uh, and they clearly figured out a way to do it. Alongside, we're introducing the new Images feature within ChatGPT, designed to make image generation delightful, to spark imagination, inspiration. And it is cool. It's like it has its own little corner of the app, its own little surface area. Before I tell you more about this, let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one agent.

• 35:24John Coogan?

  The number one AI agent for customer service, automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel. Why is Dory going over to the gong?

• 35:33John Coogan?

  It's gong.

• 35:35John Coogan?

  Just.

• 35:35Speaker 03

  Finn is gong.

• 35:36John Coogan?

  Oh, Finn, Finn. Fantastic. So, around here, we have a benchmark for images, for image generation. You come to us, you come to us with.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  With a model?

• 35:48John Coogan?

  A new model. You know we're gonna try and generate a Where's Waldo. And we have some Where's Waldos pulled up. And, uh, we're, we're getting better, we're getting closer. They're not ready for prime time, though.

• 36:03Speaker 03

  Not ready for print.

• 36:04John Coogan?

  We didn't pass our personal internal benchmarks.

• 36:07Speaker 03

  Can we pull it up?

• 36:08John Coogan?

  Let's pull up, uh, this, this first image of this Where's Waldo. It's gonna be very small, so I don't know if you'll actually be able to see that. Can you zoom in a little bit? Yes. So, so this is the Where's Waldo.

• 36:18Speaker 03

  Okay, the important thing is that from far away.

• 36:21John Coogan?

  This looks, this looks- It looks like a Wears Waldo. It looks ready to rock. Now, part of what makes Wears Waldo special is it has this unique perspective, like the, uh, it has, uh, it's like infinite depth of field. It's, uh, it's this forty, it's this forty-five degree angle, isomorphic. It's an isomorphic image. This is not perfectly isomorphic, uh, but it's not bad. Uh, and there's a lot of interesting detail and texture, but as you zoom in, you start noticing- It's actually isometric. Oh, isometric. Isometric. Thank you. Um, and so as, as you zoom in, you start to notice that like, some of the people are not quite to scale, and the telltale sign of a Wears Waldo is that

• 37:05John Coogan?

  there is story. Back to storytellers. The creators of Wears Waldo are storytellers, because as you move around the image in the Wears Waldo, you see little scenes playing out. It will be a dog that is hungry for a ham, a Christmas ham- And that's part of what makes it enjoyable. Yeah, as he goes for the ham, he knocks over a ladder where someone is painting and the paint bucket falls, and, and, and it tells you, like, there's these little vignettes that are playing out- That's what makes it enjoyable to look around for Waldo. 100%, because you notice, and in fact, if you go to the back of the book in Wears Waldo, oftentimes there will be bonus things to search for. So you will, so you will get a list of prompts for

• 37:47John Coogan?

  what to hunt for outside of just the main Waldo. You will also be prompted to, is this a real Waldo? Or is this an AI one? No, this is, you made this. I made this one. This is the- By hand? It looks great from this direction, but as you zoom in, you'll see that you're not quite getting the, the, uh, the level of storytelling. And also, the, the final, the final check is like, there must be one and only one Waldo. And I'm not, I'm not actually sure that this one included a Waldo of any kind.

• 38:15Jordi Hays?

  Put it back in ChatGPT and say, where's Waldo?

• 38:18John Coogan?

  Where's Waldo? Can it find it? So I'm not, I'm not seeing a Waldo on this one. Um, on the beach, there are a number of people that look sort of like Waldo, but they, none of them have the precise, like, walking stick backpack.

• 38:32Jordi Hays?

  Gold Rock in the chat says, couldn't you just generate that picture and then drop in a Waldo with an edit feature? Which is true. You could just say, generate a where's Waldo scene, but don't include Waldo and then add him afterwards.

• 38:42John Coogan?

  No, I think, I think you're a hundred percent.

• 38:43Jordi Hays?

  Where's Waldo was created by Martin Hanford, a British illustrator.

• 38:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 38:48Jordi Hays?

  He gained worldwide fame in 1987 with the release of the first book.

• 38:54Jordi Hays?

  He, prior to that, specialized in drawing massive, detailed crowd scenes for commercial clients.

• 39:00John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 39:00Jordi Hays?

  Which ended up becoming the foundation of the Where's Waldo series. A single illustration would take him up to eight weeks to complete.

• 39:07John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 39:08Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 39:09Speaker 03

  And also imagine, um, kind of like a generator verifier setup. Uh, where like the, the generator gets better and better at generating them and the verifier can find them.

• 39:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 39:18Speaker 03

  So soon you'll have kind of where's Waldo super intelligence.

• 39:20John Coogan?

  Do you think that would be, it'd be adversarial?

• 39:23Speaker 03

  One, one could say that.

• 39:24John Coogan?

  It could be generative adversarial network potentially. They could network these two together.

• 39:29Jordi Hays?

  Can we work on, uh, so Martin is based in the UK, just under 70 years old. Uh, we should get him on the show.

• 39:35John Coogan?

  The creator of Where's Waldo?

• 39:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:36John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 39:37Jordi Hays?

  Let's get, uh, new challenge.

• 39:39John Coogan?

  That would be amazing.

• 39:39Jordi Hays?

  New challenge for the team. Let's, uh, let's get Martin.

• 39:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, we got to.

• 39:43Jordi Hays?

  On the show.

• 39:44John Coogan?

  But yeah, uh, the, the OpenAI news, uh, the model excels at editing, uh, adding, subtracting, combining, blending, transposing. It seems very clear that with a little bit of a harness, dare I say, a wrapper, you could in fact create a proper Where's Waldo, but you probably need to generate the images tile by tile, one tile at a time and kind of work piece by piece and then combine it all, blend it all together. And then yes, you probably want to add one Waldo at the very end in some random spot, but, uh, you would not want to just, uh, just one shot the full image because it's still a little bit too complex. But it's remarkable. I mean, th- th- these images are, are remarkable and yet, and yet.

• 40:27John Coogan?

  There's still room for improvement. It's crazy. It's like we're we're we're every time we see one of these, I'm like, okay, this is the final thing. We're done. It's good enough. It's great. And then another year goes by and there's more challenges.

• 40:40Jordi Hays?

  Pull up, pull up this post that says also very fun way to use it to easily get fun images and then scroll down. I thought this was somebody messing with Sam as a reply, but it is Sam himself. As a firefighter with a with a calendar. And then there's a there's a Sora video from Ramp Capital. Let's pull it up.

• 40:58John Coogan?

  Huh, that's funny. Um, I'm the product.

• 41:02Jordi Hays?

  Oh, it's showing up in my replies, but not your replies. I'll put it up.

• 41:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, going back to the OpenAI announces ChatGPT images.

• 41:17John Coogan?

  Creative transformations, the model's creativity shines through transformations that change and add elements. Here, let's play this one.

• 41:24John Coogan?

  Well, this is not, what does it say?

• 41:26Karri Saarinen?

  Impressive.

• 41:27John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 41:28Karri Saarinen?

  Very nice.

• 41:29John Coogan?

  That's pretty funny. I like it.

• 41:30Karri Saarinen?

  Now let's see more slop.

• 41:31John Coogan?

  Oh, my God.

• 41:36John Coogan?

  The the the ability to use Sora to make jokes at Sam's expense is truly new territory for. I mean, I guess there were probably people that were in MS Paint making fun of Bill Gates back in like the 90s, but.

• 41:51Jordi Hays?

  Mocking him?

• 41:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, mocking him. And and he's just like, you you wrote this takedown of me in Word. You wouldn't have been able to do this without me. But but the but the feedback loop, the the the the iteration cycle is like way, way faster there. Let me tell you about cognition. They're the team behind the AI software engineer Devon Crusher backlog with a personal AI engineering team.

• 42:20John Coogan?

  So these transformations work on both simple and more intricate concepts and are easy to try using preset styles and ideas in the new ChatGPT images feature, no written prompt required. That's very interesting. So in in an in an effort to make it easier to prompt, we are now instantiating more UI. So as that image shows you.

• 42:47John Coogan?

  It's like

• 42:47Jordi Hays?

  As the models get better, we need more sass.

• 42:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's it's something like that. It it's just that like it is. I mean, this was David Holes's in- insight during the mid journey boom was that if you gave someone a blank text box and said, this is a magical text box. It's artificial intelligence. It can generate an image of anything. They would just type like dog and they would just get a picture of a dog. And the picture of the dog was so photorealistic. It was just like, okay, cool. You could go to Google Images and get that. Like, what is special about this? There's nothing special about it because like we have images of dogs. Like, yes, it's amazing that a computer can generate it from nothing. Like, that's remarkable.

• 43:26Jordi Hays?

  Can always have more.

• 43:27John Coogan?

  But that fades away. And so and he was like, then you ask them again, you can do anything and be like, dog, dog, happy dog, you know, and and then people just weren't fully inspired. And so the beauty of mid journey was putting everything in this big chat room on Discord so that

• 43:42Jordi Hays?

  Letting people inspire each other.

• 43:44John Coogan?

  Each other, each other. And it became this collaborative thing. And so with this, it feels like it feels like OpenAI and the ChatGPT app are definitely sort of embracing this idea that you will need to bring a little bit of of idea generation. I mean, on on when images and ChatGPT launched for the real for the first time,

• 44:04John Coogan?

  I wasn't the person that came up with the idea of Studio Ghibli. I needed to see that. And then once someone told me, this is a great prompt. I was like, okay, I'm in. I'm going to go create a few more. I needed a jumping off point. And they're bringing that jumping off point to their users in the Images tab. And you know, there's going to be Disney in there pretty soon, and that's going to be very cool, as you wrote in the newsletter.

• 44:27Jordi Hays?

  Ty in the X chat says, no beards.

• 44:30John Coogan?

  I've never seen

• 44:31Jordi Hays?

  Beards are coming. Beards are coming.

• 44:32John Coogan?

  Well, thank you for supporting the coziest podcast in all of in the entire world right now. We really complete victory on the on the cozy maxing. We've been going back and forth on, well, does it look ridiculous?

• 44:45Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 44:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 44:47Jordi Hays?

  And that's why we do it.

• 44:48John Coogan?

  But Merry Christmas to everyone and only a few more days, only a few more days. One really good Christmas gift. Turbo puffer.

• 44:57Jordi Hays?

  Search.

• 44:57John Coogan?

  Serverless vector and full text search for grandma. For your grandma.

• 45:01Jordi Hays?

  This is a fantastic.

• 45:03John Coogan?

  I know your grandma saying, you get me a sweater every, every year. Well, this year, what about?

• 45:10Jordi Hays?

  The platform used by Anthropic, cursor, linear.

• 45:15John Coogan?

  She's gonna, she's gonna ask, she's gonna, she's gonna unbox Turbo Puffer and she's gonna say, well, is it built from first principles and object storage? You're gonna be able to say yes.

• 45:23Jordi Hays?

  And she's gonna say, does, does Notion use this? Does Notion use this?

• 45:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 45:26Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna be able to say yes.

• 45:27John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. She's gonna say, well, is it, is it extremely scalable?

• 45:32Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely.

• 45:33John Coogan?

  That's what, that's what most grandparents care about when it comes to Christmas.

• 45:35Jordi Hays?

  Scalability.

• 45:36John Coogan?

  Scalability. They want something scalable. They want something fast and they definitely want it to be 10x cheaper.

• 45:44John Coogan?

  And so get your grandmother Turbo Puffer this, this Christmas. Get them.

• 45:48Jordi Hays?

  Bobby, Bobby already got his grandma Turbo Puffer. She says, he says she's gonna be so happy.

• 45:54John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 45:54Jordi Hays?

  Uh, OpenAI hires an executive from Google to lead M and A.

• 45:59John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 45:59Jordi Hays?

  According to Walter Bloomberg, according to the information. More notably, OpenAI hire, uh, comms chief Hannah Wong is departing the company.

• 46:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 46:10Jordi Hays?

  Came out yesterday. She's stepping down. She's gonna depart the company at the end of January. Axios says why it matters Wong was the AI giant's first, uh, chief comms officer and guided the company through the launch of ChatGPT. Heightened regulatory scrutiny, controversies and a slew of deals and lawsuits. The bigger picture, her departure comes as the company is pushing on a variety of fronts. From 1.4 trillion.

• 46:34John Coogan?

  Do you think that she asked for the storyteller title and she didn't get it? So she quit in protest?

• 46:39Jordi Hays?

  Very, very possibly, John. It's very possible. Yeah, I feel like she deserves, uh, she deserves like a, a little bit of a, of a vacation at this point. I can't think, I can't think of a more stressful job of since 2021.

• 46:52John Coogan?

  Some gray hair.

• 46:53Jordi Hays?

  Uh, as, as, uh, the OpenAI op comms role. Uh, she joined OpenAI from Apple.

• 47:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:01Jordi Hays?

  In 2021. And, uh, anyways, so vesting, vesting cliff reached.

• 47:08John Coogan?

  Well, um.

• 47:10John Coogan?

  First off, let me tell you about public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi asset investing and they're trusted by millions. Speaking of Merry Christmas, there is a fantastic article in the Wall Street Journal. We got to go through it in the business and finance section. It says advertisers start Christmas season early. This was written for us. This is fantastic news. Brands chase inflation weary shoppers with plentiful TV spots. There's a whole bunch of interesting article or interesting stats in here. And so it starts with a very controversial question. It says, are you tired of Santa's and relentlessly cheerful snowmen filling every screen?

• 47:52Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 47:53John Coogan?

  Blame the advertisers. This is so funny. Advertisers kicked off the holiday season even earlier this year and they are inundating televisions with commercials. The activity comes despite continuing efforts by many businesses to rein in costs to contend with tariffs. Holiday TV ads started in earnest in early October and companies have spent a combined 1.47 billion dollars over the past nine weeks, a 13% jump compared with the year ago period, according to ad tracker iSpot.

• 48:32John Coogan?

  So keep this in mind, 1.47 billion on holiday TV ads. Guess how much holiday retail sales are expected to be this year?

• 48:47Jordi Hays?

  Counting, counting Black Friday?

• 48:49John Coogan?

  Everything, everything.

• 48:51Jordi Hays?

  What do you mean?

• 48:52John Coogan?

  It's big.

• 48:52Jordi Hays?

  All retail spend? Are you asking for all retail spend in Q4 or do I have to like pull out grocery and?

• 48:58John Coogan?

  Sales from November and December each year.

• 49:01Jordi Hays?

  Does it include grocery spending, food spending?

• 49:05John Coogan?

  I don't know. I think it might include everything. I'll give you a hint. In 2020, it was, it was point seven trillion, 700 billion. Then it went to 850 billion, then 900, then 950. Last year came in around 99, something really close. What was it? It was point nine eight trillion, 980 billion dollars. This year it's expected to be over a trillion. We got to hit the gong for that. That is, that is some fantastic news for this holiday season.

• 49:41John Coogan?

  Truly the first holiday season in history that will be over a trillion dollars. There's a bunch of interesting facts in here. So there are massive investments in digital promotions, flooding social media, email inboxes and text messages. So of course, the 1.47 billion that's happening on TV is just a small slice of the overall advertising that's happening this holiday season. Retailers spent 5.8 billion on digital ads in the US from November 1st to November 7th, a 4% increase from last year. Holiday shopping season remains a critical moment for retailers with inflation still weighing on household budgets, but brands aren't taking any chances of losing out on the action. The National Retail Federation

• 50:26John Coogan?

  is projecting-

• 50:28Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for the National Retail Federation.

• 50:30John Coogan?

  ...that holiday sales will surpass 1 trillion. A handful of retailers are proving particularly busy on the TV ad front so far. Walmart's ads feature a Dr. Seuss-inspired world starring Walter Goggins as the Grinch. Target, meanwhile, brings brass, brings back Chris K, a jolly bearded Christmas enthusiast, introduced in a 2024 campaign. In Target's spot, a woman who with whom he is on a coffee date gets a peek at his gift list and leaves him confused by referencing his naughty list. Interesting. Amazon.com, this is the most interesting stat. So, so total minutes of US advertising

• 51:10John Coogan?

  by retailer. So, Amazon last year was, in 2023, they were around 7,000 minutes of US TV advertising. And to be clear, that's right in line with Walmart. Target was around 6, 7,000 minutes. Macy's was around 6, 7,000 minutes.

• 51:29Jordi Hays?

  The joke's old.

• 51:30John Coogan?

  Even Verizon.

• 51:31Jordi Hays?

  It's an old joke now, John. Stop making it.

• 51:33John Coogan?

  What, what, what joke?

• 51:34Jordi Hays?

  He said 6, 7.

• 51:35John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That is ridiculous. That's actually where it is. But they doubled in 2025. They went to, they went to 14,000 minutes.

• 51:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, they they they went up to they so Amazon has doubled the amount that they're spending on on TV advertising.

• 51:55Jordi Hays?

  AB in the chat said Coca-Cola invented the red and white Santa. I was trying to I was trying to fact check it a little bit. Apparently, it's an urban legend that Coca-Cola invented the red and white Santa. In reality, Santa Claus was already appearing in red suits long before he appeared in soda advertisements. But apparently, they did standardize the Santa look, right? They're spending probably more on advertising than most most other companies in the world for like many decades, right? They had an opportunity to really define the look, define the look that we are delivering this.

• 52:35John Coogan?

  Delivering today. Let me tell you about Adio, the AI native CRM. Adio builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. Friendly reindeer? I'm glad it's good to hear that it's a friendly reindeer.

• 52:49Jordi Hays?

  Did you see the Journal going after CoreWeave?

• 52:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yes, we should get to that. Well, there's one last stat that we need to share. So so I mean, basically, it's like there's a lot of jitters in the economy as AI overheated. We're going to go into the CoreWeave story. But overall, the health of the consumer seems to be good. Holiday retail sales are higher than ever in history and over a trillion dollars now. Everyone's advertising. There's one interesting stat in here, which is at the bottom of this Wall Street Journal article. They they polled consumers, how do you feel about the timing of holiday ads? And so when holiday ads start? So Amazon, one of the largest advertisers in the country, aired its first holiday TV ad on October 13.

• 53:36Jordi Hays?

  Okay, but you gotta you gotta give me more. Was Santa in the ad? Because I'm kind of a purist. I like to go full speed ahead on the Christmas spirit, the day after Thanksgiving.

• 53:50John Coogan?

  Day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday.

• 53:51Jordi Hays?

  I got our tree.

• 53:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 53:53Jordi Hays?

  We went and got our tree.

• 53:54John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 53:55Jordi Hays?

  On Black Friday.

• 53:55John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 53:56Jordi Hays?

  And that just feels like the right moment.

• 54:00John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 54:00Jordi Hays?

  I like to have enough.

• 54:01John Coogan?

  So you don't want to see Santa until

• 54:03Jordi Hays?

  I don't want to see him.

• 54:04John Coogan?

  The day after Thanksgiving.

• 54:05Jordi Hays?

  But then I want to see him everywhere.

• 54:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, of course. I agree. It should be zero to a hundred. So I'm with you. I generally agree with that. Tyler, how do you feel? When is it appropriate?

• 54:14Jordi Hays?

  I concur, yeah. After Thanksgiving.

• 54:16John Coogan?

  After Thanksgiving.

• 54:16Jordi Hays?

  But anytime before, I can't even listen to them.

• 54:18John Coogan?

  Okay, so I will describe the ad and we could potentially pull it up here, but "Amazon Home for the Holidays" was the name of the ad. So, let me...

• 54:29Jordi Hays?

  We got more Christmas lore in the chat.

• 54:31John Coogan?

  Oh, we do?

• 54:31Jordi Hays?

  Red and white Santa is because of Amanita muscaria mushrooms.

• 54:36John Coogan?

  Huh.

• 54:36Jordi Hays?

  Reindeer eat them.

• 54:37John Coogan?

  What? What is that? Okay, anyway.

• 54:41Jordi Hays?

  No, I can see, you know, the red and white mushrooms?

• 54:43John Coogan?

  I know candy canes.

• 54:46John Coogan?

  Sugar plum fairies. So, October 13th, they run an ad. It shows a college student arriving home to see that her child, their childhood bedroom now contains a treadmill with her father running on it awkwardly, wearing short shorts. The young woman checks the Amazon app for more appropriate workout gear, and it's called "Home for the Holidays." So, "No Santa," at least that I can tell from this ad, we can actually pull this up here. The Amazon TV spot, "Home for the Holidays." Maybe it's not playing. Oh, it is. It is. Here. I have it here, if we can pull it up.

• 55:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, so we need to determine whether or not Jordy... Why are we zooming out like this? We need to determine whether or not Jordy decides that this ad is too early.

• 55:40Jordi Hays?

  Too early.

• 55:41John Coogan?

  Too early. And so, let's pull up the Amazon TV spot.

• 55:44Jordi Hays?

  On our side, we have been drinking this podcast in a can all year.

• 55:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 55:49Jordi Hays?

  It's very Christmas themed.

• 55:50John Coogan?

  Okay, I think we have it here. So Jordy, based on this, is... What is the earliest day you could run this?

• 55:56Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm getting red flags already.

• 55:57John Coogan?

  Red flags already? Okay, play it, play it.

• 55:59Speaker 05

  You're home for the holidays. You've dreamt of this moment. Back in your old room.

• 56:07Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 56:10Speaker 06

  Hey kiddo, I'll be right there.

• 56:15Speaker 05

  At least you can get a deal on new shorts for dad.

• 56:19Speaker 05

  Something with a little more coverage.

• 56:22John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 56:24John Coogan?

  There's no Santa.

• 56:25Jordi Hays?

  Way too early, way too early.

• 56:27John Coogan?

  You think that's too early? What's the, what's the earliest date? You still, you, you wouldn't even run that before Thanksgiving?

• 56:33Jordi Hays?

  And that's like two, it's like almost two months before winter.

• 56:37John Coogan?

  It's before, I mean, they ran it before Halloween.

• 56:39Speaker 03

  Well, so, yeah, I mean, this is October. There are some places in the US where it snows in October, right? If you go up to Alaska, this could be like, this could be their, the college students' fall break.

• 56:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, this could be, this could be Anchorage. They could be targeting Anchorage.

• 56:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:50John Coogan?

  Or Juneau.

• 56:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we don't know where it ran. So I did, I did find an article from the fungi foundation.

• 56:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 56:57Jordi Hays?

  Called "The Influence of Hallucinogenic Mushrooms on Christmas. The Story of Santa Claus Is Not the Creation of Coca-Cola, Nor Saint Nick Or a Children's Story. It Exists Because of a Small Living Being With Great Powers, The Amanita Muscaria Mushroom."

• 57:13John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 57:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say like, the fungi foundation might have a little bias.

• 57:20John Coogan?

  Are you doing this research on Gemini 3 Pro? Google's most intelligent model yet? State of the art reasoning with next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding. Why don't you vibe code something for your family for Christmas? So would you say that the Christmas ads are A. Much too early? B. Slightly too early? C. About the right time? Slightly too late or much too late? In terms of the, the timing of holiday ads this year?

• 57:54Jordi Hays?

  I think you can start doing holiday advertising without putting snow on the ground and without...

• 57:59John Coogan?

  How would you do that? How, wait, describe a holiday ad that doesn't at least have a little bit of snow.

• 58:03Jordi Hays?

  I would like to see Amazon do a star, a plain text ad that's Star Wars style where the text is just scrolling and it's like, "Get ready to buy stuff. This is about to be the Super Bowl of just buying stuff."

• 58:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:15Jordi Hays?

  Do it on amazon.com.

• 58:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 58:17Jordi Hays?

  It's time to buy.

• 58:18John Coogan?

  It's time to buy. It's time to buy. But but but so it sounds like you think that the holiday ads are are, you know, at least slightly too early, maybe much too early?

• 58:31Jordi Hays?

  Much too early.

• 58:32John Coogan?

  Or do you think it's about the right time?

• 58:33Jordi Hays?

  I think Amazon should start dropping a billion dollars on ads just on Black Friday. I mean, they probably already do.

• 58:40John Coogan?

  Because so so this is this is the interesting stat from here. They they polled a bunch of consumers and and boomers complained the most about the ads being too early. We're all we're all the boomers.

• 58:52Jordi Hays?

  Because they're locked in. They're paying they're paying.

• 58:54John Coogan?

  For Gen Z, over fifty percent said, yeah, Christmas in October is great. It's perfectly with me. Only twenty something percent of boomers said, yeah, the holiday ads are about the right time. Whereas over twenty five percent, thirty percent of boomers said the ads are much too early. Only ten percent of Gen Z said.

• 59:18Jordi Hays?

  How many said that they were too late? Did any say that?

• 59:21John Coogan?

  Yes, millennials. Millennials actually led the whole pack by saying four point three four percent of millennials said that the holiday ads started too late this year, which is funny. Gen Z only two percent were in the were in the too late camp, basically.

• 59:36Jordi Hays?

  AB says.

• 59:37John Coogan?

  The boomers, the boomers, actually, less than one, less than two percent of them said slightly too late. They were all saying too early, too early.

• 59:46Jordi Hays?

  Did they hate Christmas?

• 59:47John Coogan?

  The boomers? Yeah.

• 59:49Jordi Hays?

  AB in the chat says, Santa discovered Chat GPT and now Christmas is thirty percent faster and the elves are unemployed. Trey says, every time Jordy pitches back on Christmas and when Christmas starts, I'm gonna move it up one month. It starts September first now.

• 1:00:02John Coogan?

  September first is great. September first. Well, let's.

• 1:00:07Jordi Hays?

  Here's here's a I would like to see Coca-Cola.

• 1:00:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:11Jordi Hays?

  Get a blimp. You know, I'm a blimp maxi. I want to see more companies leveraging blimps for marketing. They get a blimp.

• 1:00:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:18Jordi Hays?

  But they hang. A sleigh and a bunch of reindeers and so they fly the blimps in the crowd and they have sort of like clear, you know, uh, wiring so that it just looks like Santa's flying over the United States.

• 1:00:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:00:32Jordi Hays?

  Somebody's got to do it.

• 1:00:33John Coogan?

  I like it, I like it.

• 1:00:34Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's talk about CoreWeave's staggering fall.

• 1:00:37John Coogan?

  But first, let's talk about Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions and get insights in seconds.

• 1:00:47Jordi Hays?

  Uh, very aggressive title. CoreWeave's staggering fall from market grace highlights AI bubble fears. The data center provider's terrible six-week slides picked up speed when a famous short seller piled concerns on top of delays. CoreWeave's value dropped by 33 billion due to AI bubble concerns, a failed merger and short seller criticism. CoreWeave, the largest of a new breed of companies driving the AI boom, has watched 33 billion of value vaporize in six weeks. The share price plunge of 46% comes as investors worry about a possible AI bubble fallout from a failed merger and public criticism from high-profile seller Jim Chanos, known for predicting the collapse of Enron.

• 1:01:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:30Jordi Hays?

  But some of the high-tech company's biggest problems began with a very low-tech nuisance, unexpected turbulent rainstorms in North Texas. Over the summer, heavy rains and winds caused a roughly 60-day delay at a construction site in Denton, a small city north of Dallas, preventing contractors from pouring concrete for a major complex. As a result, the completion date for the huge data center cluster, consisting of about 260 megawatts of computing power that CoreWeave plans to lease to OpenAI, has been pushed back several months. There were additional delays caused by revisions to design plans for some of the data centers a partner is building for CoreWeave in Texas and elsewhere, according to filings. The slowdown was compounded by mixed messaging from CoreWeave's chief executive officer,

• 1:02:13Jordi Hays?

  Michael, which spooked investors and accelerated the company's share price decline at a particularly vulnerable moment for the AI trade. CoreWeave's business model involves using high-interest debt to pay thousands, uh, to buy thousands of advanced chips from Nvidia. Installing them in server racks inside data centers that it leases from third-party landlords, then renting access to the chips. As capital spending on infra has intensified, CoreWeave, which is 7% owned by Nvidia and backed by hedge funds such as Magnitar Capital and Kotu Management, has become the standard bearer for both the promise and the risk of the AI boom. Some critics point to the high levels of debt it has taken on to finance its data center build-out, while others worry that the company depends on just a handful of large customers,

• 1:02:55Jordi Hays?

  such as OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta for the bulk of its revenue. CoreWeave saw sales more than double in the most recent quarters to nearly 1.4 billion from half a billion a year earlier, but the company is unprofitable and lost 110 million in its most recent quarter. In early November, before the construction delays were widely discussed, Intra-Tor played down fears of an AI bubble at a Wall Street Journal event in Northern California. "If you're building something that accelerates the economy and has fundamental value to the world, the world will find ways to finance an enormous amount of business," he said, adding that the number of buyers of data center computing services had convinced him that there is not a bubble inflating.

• 1:03:34John Coogan?

  I think this was the same Wall Street Journal event where Sarah Fryer made the backstock comment that sort of went super viral. I think he, this quote is actually pretty reasonable. This is something that I agree with. The question is always just like the dance of like, how much is it accelerating the economy? Is it showing up in the economic statistics yet? How much, how much value is there being created? And then how are you financing that? Because naturally, the capital markets will push everything to the edge. And if you're underwriting it against 10% GDP growth and that doesn't show up, you could have a bad time.

• 1:04:17John Coogan?

  But if it's more like, oh yeah, like, you know, a new SaaS boom, a bunch of great companies building on top of us, like.

• 1:04:24Jordi Hays?

  I think it's super important to put it into context too. Their last private valuation in November 2024 was uh 650 million dollars. Secondary Jane Street was in that magnetar. So again, the company today is at a 34 billion dollar valuation. So meaningful premium in the last private round.

• 1:04:41John Coogan?

  Private round?

• 1:04:42Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 1:04:43John Coogan?

  Like it was in the tens of billions.

• 1:04:44Jordi Hays?

  Twenty three, twenty three billion.

• 1:04:46John Coogan?

  So it's still up 50% since the last private round, but it's round trips.

• 1:04:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was seven in December, seven in December of 2023.

• 1:04:53John Coogan?

  And I mean, even just today, the stock.

• 1:04:55Jordi Hays?

  Twenty three in November, 2024.

• 1:04:57John Coogan?

  Rough, rough, rough go.

• 1:04:58Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, it's a lot of debt, but it's a lot of demand.

• 1:05:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it was interesting. Yesterday, there was a pretty viral post from an account called Hunter Brook.

• 1:05:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:05:08Jordi Hays?

  They said Bethany McLean broke the Enron scandal tomorrow. She publishes her first investigation for Hunter Brook on a company that may epitomize the AI bubble. Sign up.

• 1:05:20John Coogan?

  And they say what it is.

• 1:05:22Jordi Hays?

  And then, uh, they shared it this morning. So I'm expecting like she broke the Enron scandal. She is her new investigation is on the company that epitomizes the AI bubble.

• 1:05:33John Coogan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:05:34Jordi Hays?

  And the company is RadNet.

• 1:05:38John Coogan?

  Whoa, okay.

• 1:05:40Jordi Hays?

  Do you know the company?

• 1:05:40John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:05:41Jordi Hays?

  I wasn't familiar.

• 1:05:42John Coogan?

  I'm not familiar.

• 1:05:42Jordi Hays?

  I'm somewhat of a bubble enthusiast. I used to pray for a bubble.

• 1:05:46John Coogan?

  And I, I did see a clip of her talking about how it's not the hyperscalers. So it's kind of like we're on the hunt for the, for the.

• 1:05:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So RadNet, RadNet is a, as of today, it traded down on this report. It's a 5.37 billion dollar company. I was expecting something in the hundred to trillion dollar range, right? I wanted, I wanted some, I wanted some real meat.

• 1:06:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:09Jordi Hays?

  Didn't get that. Hunter Brook says RadNet, the AI story that doesn't add up.

• 1:06:14John Coogan?

  It's a radiology firm?

• 1:06:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:16John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, okay, okay. Interesting.

• 1:06:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but again, like this company, I like, we'll dig into it. But again, this company like collapsing wouldn't make a dent in.

• 1:06:28Jordi Hays?

  The broader kind of like AI trade.

• 1:06:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's like 25 different funds that could just write this off and be like, yeah, zeros are part of the game, you know?

• 1:06:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Anyway, so Hunter Brooks says RadNet's much hyped AI business is a sideshow. Less than 5% of the medical imaging company's revenue, about 65 million out of one and a half billion in the first nine months of 2025, comes from its new fangled digital health division. Much of that division's revenue and 2/3 of its reported revenue growth excluding recent acquisitions come from selling software to RadNet's own imaging center. Imaging Center, RadNet also charges mammogram patients $40 for an AI read using technology that experts say is commoditized. Again, I'm not seeing anything.

• 1:07:09John Coogan?

  The pre-AI stock price of this company was around 20 bucks a share. Now it's 70 bucks a share, something like that. And so you have seen like a 3X pump. Like the stock has definitely benefited from the AI narrative, if that's what they're alleging. But it's, yeah, you know, you're gonna have to do better if you're gonna try and bring down the entire global economy. You gotta service up something that's worth at least 100 billion. I agree with you on that.

• 1:07:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, somewhat of a clickbait. And yet, the company's stock has soared in value since its AI rebrand, trading at a much higher multiple than historic norms and competitors.

• 1:07:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:49Jordi Hays?

  And so, again, I didn't, I think.

• 1:07:53John Coogan?

  Okay, well, let's tell everyone about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on-trading infrastructure, all through one simple API. Now, there is interesting, like, everyone's been hunting for the Enron of this cycle because there was one in the past. There must be another one. We, of course, were joking around doing the, you know, the letters lining up from OpenAI or Nvidia or whatever, when those are obviously very real businesses and no one is alleging that they are doing anything inappropriate. It's more just like. How fast will they grow? Will they be complete winners forever? Will they face competition?

• 1:08:35John Coogan?

  Those are the questions that people are asking. But Buco Capital bloke had a good rebuttal to this question of is it possible to argue that AI is not a bubble right now? Someone in the chat was putting AI bubble in quotes, kind of sarcastically. Well, Buco Capital is arguing that AI is not a bubble. He says, real businesses are seeing real impact from AI. Coding and tech support help are the two clear immediate role beneficiaries. Advertising is another clear beneficiary. Meta has talked about it in detail. We, of course, are sponsored by Profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands.

• 1:09:19John Coogan?

  Traditional boring companies like C.H. Robinson are pointing to AI and agentic workflows as making them more efficient. The market is responding quite rationally and scrutinizing these AI input companies diligently. See Broadcom and Oracle this past week. So that is the sign of... Yeah, I agree with him. People are taking a victory lap dunking on Oracle. It's like, this is how the market should be working. It should sort of be like, okay, we're regarding this future RPO five years out with some skepticism. We're not going to give you that much credit for it upfront. You got to actually deliver some real value. You got to get some cash flow into the business. You got to actually deliver on the build out that you're promising.

• 1:10:02John Coogan?

  We're not just going to moon your stock because you said the biggest number, right? Mag7 minus Tesla have reasonable evaluations and the hyperscalers have more demand than they can handle. He says, I've been vocal that indiscriminately gunning all AI input companies is a dumb thing to do, again, as Oracle, Broadcom, NeoClouds have shown this last week, but it doesn't mean AI is a bubble. I like it. I think it's a good take. But Duchamp...

• 1:10:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting going back to this RadNet. Analysis.

• 1:10:32John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:10:33Jordi Hays?

  Saying that they also charge mammogram patients $40 for an AI read using technology that experts say is commoditized. It's like, how is that? Like, they're positioning that as a bad thing when this company clearly has distribution? And they're just gonna like vend in technology into that? And it doesn't, like, I don't, I don't, that's like, it's basically making the argument that, like, rap, a rapper can never have value when clearly, like, they have a captive audience here.

• 1:11:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:00Jordi Hays?

  And they can put in commodity technology and charge premium for it.

• 1:11:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, there's a huge incentive, once everyone is, is giving the stuff's overvalued take, to then move into the, like, it's fraud, it's crime take. But the bar for that is so much higher because it's, it's legal. Obviously, like, anything can be overvalued or undervalued at any moment in time, but fraud is very much like binary. Like, the company's either cooking the books or they aren't. Anyway, let me tell you about Vanta. You gotta stick to compliance. Automate compliance and security. AI that powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. Let's move on to the EV debate.

• 1:11:44John Coogan?

  Tomorrow, I want to get into how Rivian beat Ford in trucks, in electric trucks? That seems crazy to me. I want to get to the bottom of it, but there's a little bit of a, of an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that I thought might be useful to go through as some extra context. They say Ford learns a brutal...

• 1:12:02Jordi Hays?

  Putting the gloves on this one.

• 1:12:03John Coogan?

  You're taking the gloves off?

• 1:12:04Jordi Hays?

  I'm putting the gloves on.

• 1:12:05John Coogan?

  Putting the gloves on. What, what, wouldn't you be taking the gloves off to, to fight it out?

• 1:12:09Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if we're gonna be fighting yet.

• 1:12:11John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Maybe we'll be agreeing. Ford learns a brutal EV lesson. The carmaker takes a $19.5 billion write-down on its electric vehicle business. And in this op-ed, they say, "Not long ago, automakers were touting electric cars as the future. Well, now they're slamming the brakes hard on that future as market reality has hit them like a 16-wheeler."

• 1:12:33John Coogan?

  See Ford Motors stunning announcement Monday that it will take a $19.5 billion charge on its electric vehicle business instead of plowing quote instead of plowing billions into future into the future knowing these large EVs will never make money. We are pivoting. Ford CEO Jim Farley said as he explained the company's plan to boost its lineup of gas powered cars and hybrids. Ford will also scrap its all electric F-150 Lightning pickup. Full scrap. Has been full scrap. They're not going to sell them anymore, which has been a favorite of the EV loving press. So it got very good reviews and obviously it was positioned in this interesting way. It has the aesthetics of the F-150. It doesn't have the baggage

• 1:13:16John Coogan?

  of the Elon brand, although does that really matter to the F-150 buyer? So it's so complicated. I just hope they make a Raptor. You know they Raptor, Raptor R, the high performance version of the F-150? Of course. They need to do the Raptor R plus with a V12. You wouldn't want it to be the R Max? R Max would be good, too. So Ford has lost 13 billion on its EV business since 2023 with bigger losses expected in years to come. Last year Ford lost about $50,000 for each EV sold. Wow. That's so much money to lose. Don't do that. The truth is that the business case for EVs has always rested largely on government

• 1:14:00John Coogan?

  subsidies and mandates. Now that is now that this combination of government favoritism and coercion is mostly going away, most car makers have much less reason to make EVs. I was listening to an interview with the CEO of Ford yesterday and he was talking about some of the challenges of the supply chain. Like they, I think that they're doing it sort of like almost a JV with a Chinese company that has. IP around battery manufacturing, but they're going to make them in the United States. And so they're very much negotiating like, how do we get this new technology that we haven't been really developing? We, this hasn't been in our, our DNA for, you know, 20 years. We gotta get a speed, but it's been very costly because they have to pay everyone all up and down the supply chain and then deal with tariffs and deal with, you know,

• 1:14:45John Coogan?

  geopolitical considerations and all this other stuff. So the Biden administration sought to force feed that EV transition with ramped up fuel economy and greenhouse, greenhouse gas emission rules. Car makers were required to produce increasing number of EVs, which they had to sell at a loss because consumer demand was weak. The Inflation Reduction Act's $7,500 EV tax credit boosted demand, but not enough to make the cars profitable. This year's GOP tax bill eliminated the tax credit in October, causing demand to fall off a cliff.

• 1:15:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was talking to a buddy on Saturday who manages a group of dealerships around LA. And he was saying that, that, I mean, the market generally has been brutal for cars this year. You've had just like chaos and uncertainty around tariffs. And then also there was a huge boom right before the tax credit ended and then everything fell off a cliff.

• 1:15:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. The, this, so the deregulation has enabled Ford to cut its losses, sizable as they are. A $19.5 billion charge will hurt, but it's better than spending tens of billions of more dollars on making cars that are not enough, that not enough Americans want to buy. Ford can focus its investments on gas powered trucks and SUVs that are popular with customers and earn, dare we say the forbidden word, profits. If Ford makes more money, workers also make more in profit sharing. General Motors this fall also rolled back its EV plans and took a $1.6 billion charge way less. The American car industry would be stronger today had its CEOs not embarked on the EV joyride with politicians promising subsidies. So yeah, always dangerous to over rotate on the government mandate or government

• 1:16:27John Coogan?

  action because we change governments every couple of years. That's the nature of America, democracy. You know, what, what

• 1:16:34Jordi Hays?

  So you don't think Ford should over rotate and, and get like a Like a maybe four V12s into a single Raptor, like put them at an angle like they do with the Bugatti.

• 1:16:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, like the Bugatti, but just do it like copy and paste a few more times. Yes, yes, yes, definitely, definitely.

• 1:16:53Jordi Hays?

  Something there.

• 1:16:54John Coogan?

  Something eight liter, nine liter.

• 1:16:55Jordi Hays?

  Look, the front of the car looks like a train.

• 1:16:57John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:16:58Jordi Hays?

  And it's just, it's just engine.

• 1:16:59John Coogan?

  This is the goal. This is what they should go for. Um, no, to, to more seriously investigate it, like, do you, can you think of a way that, uh, that the Ford F1 Lightning would have been successful? Like, it doesn't seem like it was like wildly mispriced. It doesn't seem like it was, I mean, it had a classic silhouette. So it wasn't like you could, the Cybertruck hasn't been selling fantastically well, but it's like so bold that you could easily say, well, okay, it's not doing that well because it's such an edgy choice. It's such a, it's such a bold design decision. Like, you have to really want to yell to everyone like, I own a, I own a Cybertruck. You can get an F150 Lightning.

• 1:17:44John Coogan?

  And unless someone's really checking out the badge, they're just gonna be like, oh, truck, you know?

• 1:17:47Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I disagree.

• 1:17:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:17:49Jordi Hays?

  I think real, real ball knowers can clock that from a quarter mile away.

• 1:17:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:17:56Jordi Hays?

  I, I, it's, it's nuanced.

• 1:17:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:58Jordi Hays?

  But I can, I can clock a, a Lightning over a normal F150.

• 1:18:01John Coogan?

  Cause you see the little blue, blue trim.

• 1:18:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's just, you can just.

• 1:18:04John Coogan?

  I know, I know you can, but, uh, is that, but it has to be, so would you have gone crazier in the design? And put more distance between the Lightning and the classic F150?

• 1:18:16Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think maybe, I, I also think like truck buyers, it's very possible that they're, they're making purchasing decisions, not for how the average person views it, but how other truck buyers are gonna view it, right? There's so much like, oh, you have a T-Rex.

• 1:18:30John Coogan?

  I think that's true for almost every category.

• 1:18:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:33John Coogan?

  Like, even, even in like the midsize sedan.

• 1:18:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or look at, look at handbags.

• 1:18:37John Coogan?

  What does it say about?

• 1:18:37Jordi Hays?

  You see a handbag.

• 1:18:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:39Jordi Hays?

  Your wife might see like, oh, that's.

• 1:18:41John Coogan?

  Every car goes the speed limit now. They like, there is no real argument for, oh, I need this car because it's like more efficient or something like that. Yeah. Like it, they all go the speed limit. They all basically get you from point A to B in the right time. So it becomes very quickly about.

• 1:19:01John Coogan?

  Some differentiation in amenities, but really the brand and what it says about you. And

• 1:19:06Jordi Hays?

  The silhouette, the trim.

• 1:19:07John Coogan?

  The silhouette. And so yet, maybe they needed to go more like it's it's even more obvious that you made the eco-friendly choice. But again, I think that the truck buyer just doesn't is is not interested in in signaling I made the eco-friendly choice at all. And that seems very intuitive to me. Am I crazy? But like, I I I know that like, the reason everyone went after trucks was because it's just such a big market. Americans buy so many trucks, you had to go after that market. And Rivian wound up winning it, essentially, it seems like.

• 1:19:38John Coogan?

  But but it's it is weird that that Ford wasn't able to break through. I guess it's just like their core, their core customers weren't able to to to get over the the hurdle to actually get into the into the brand.

• 1:19:52Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna try to figure out how many Rivian trucks actually sold.

• 1:19:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we'll have to pull up all the all the data and run through it. Maybe tomorrow. But

• 1:20:03Jordi Hays?

  I'm pulling it up if you want to.

• 1:20:04John Coogan?

  So in in in other news, I mean, we can move on from this. We have our guest joining in just a few minutes. In other news, SpaceX is now initiating a bake-off to select which investment banks will advise on its planned 2026 IPO. They are very much moving forward with the IPO. It feels very real. It does feel like there's a bit of a race between SpaceX and OpenAI to some degree, but SpaceX has to be set up for this. Like, they have to be, you know, there's a whole, whenever you talk to somebody about going public, they're always talking about, well, the the financial requirements are much, much more onerous. Like, you need to be really, you know, like reconciling your books, like, understanding the business, like, you need to be,

• 1:20:45John Coogan?

  you know, really mature CFO operation, office of CFO needs to be really dialed in. You probably need, you know, clarity about whether or not you're a for-profit or a nonprofit, right? And and you have to imagine that SpaceX has been effectively ready to go IPO at any moment in time for a decade, because it's just been such a real business. And they've been working with the government. And so the government comes in and says, wait, we want to know that you are actually generating real revenue, or you're knocking the books if we're going to be working with you, all that other stuff. So we'll see.

• 1:21:14Jordi Hays?

  I just want to take a second to give it up for everyone out there that's currently in a bake-off, no matter what side you're on. I just want you to know, we are We are rooting for you.

• 1:21:25John Coogan?

  Like a Christmas cookie bake off?

• 1:21:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of people this time of year, they're winding down. Some people are just getting started on some of these bake offs, right? There's going to be intense, you know, it's going to be intense all the way through the end of the year. So I just wanted to give a, give a shout out to, to the bankers. Not getting enough, not getting enough love.

• 1:21:41John Coogan?

  If you're a banker, get yourself a nice luxury watch on getbezel.com. Shop over 26,000 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. Bilal asks, Bill Gurley, shouldn't SpaceX just do a direct listing? And Bill Gurley says 100%. I would love to know how that will actually play out.

• 1:22:08John Coogan?

  If, if, like what, what the decision making will be because it has to be, I mean, you imagine an Elon stock, like the chance that it moons on day one is like, it feels guaranteed, right?

• 1:22:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So the question is, the que, yeah, I don't know.

• 1:22:25John Coogan?

  I just feel, it just feels like.

• 1:22:26Jordi Hays?

  So looking at Figma's IPO, right? They did not raise very much money in the actual IPO, right? So they priced it around, it was around 20, like, forget, it was something around $20, $20 billion valuation.

• 1:22:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:40Jordi Hays?

  It immediately popped like crazy.

• 1:22:43John Coogan?

  Did.

• 1:22:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but, and, and people were like, oh, you're leaving a lot of money on the table, but uh, they, they never had an intention of, they wanted to price the business fairly. So of course people that invested pre-IPO in that pre-IPO round, right? Or, or as part of the IPO benefited a lot, but uh, again, I, I would, there is very real possibility that they, like Elon wants to sell the incremental 30, they raised the 30 billion at

• 1:23:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:11Jordi Hays?

  one and a half, and I could see there being that much. Demand.

• 1:23:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I wonder if you're, if you're, you know, an investor who's supposed to potentially come in as permanent capital, stay with, stay as an investor for a very long time, even in the public markets. If you come in at a lower cost basis, even if the stock moons and then round trips, you're like, okay, well, like, I'm still kind of where I was. I'm not day trading it. My, my point is to like, hold this company, not trade it, own it, not trade it. And so I could imagine a situation where we're going out at a logical price, even if you miss the pop and then, and then round trip. Could be good for keeping those types of investors on board.

• 1:23:53Jordi Hays?

  I just don't think people are prepared for it to price at one and a half trillion and go to three on the day of the IPO.

• 1:24:00John Coogan?

  That would be very, very crazy, but it could happen. I mean, anything could happen with Elon. It's, you know, he's a, he's a Joe Rogan CEO. He's a JRC.

• 1:24:07Jordi Hays?

  That's right. This was a funny post from Andrew Benson.

• 1:24:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:24:13Jordi Hays?

  He says, Peter Thiel will personally make 42 billion from the SpaceX IPO at a one and a half trillion dollar valuation. What a recovery from the mistake of exiting Facebook early.

• 1:24:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:24:25Jordi Hays?

  That he never helped, that he never sold. He was down to his last like 20K, I think.

• 1:24:27John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 1:24:28Jordi Hays?

  I think so. I think so. I've never seen, I've never seen PT do a money spread. I've never seen him wearing Rick Owens.

• 1:24:36John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:24:37Jordi Hays?

  I've never seen an RM on the wrist.

• 1:24:38John Coogan?

  Never.

• 1:24:39Jordi Hays?

  Never spotted in Chrome Hearts.

• 1:24:40John Coogan?

  Never.

• 1:24:41Jordi Hays?

  So how do we know that he's not down to his last 20 grand?

• 1:24:45John Coogan?

  He doesn't have spinners on his car.

• 1:24:46Jordi Hays?

  True.

• 1:24:47John Coogan?

  He doesn't have, his, his, his wheels stop when he stops. They don't keep rolling. It's ridiculous.

• 1:24:54Jordi Hays?

  So it's really hard to clock.

• 1:24:55John Coogan?

  He doesn't have hydraulics on his car. Hydraulics would be a good one. You gotta get hydraulics on your car. That's a lead. And, and two 12s in the back. You gotta get subwoofers. Mod your car. That's, that's what real power is.

• 1:25:09Jordi Hays?

  Should we talk about venture?

• 1:25:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, FF2 holds 10% of SpaceX. PT funded 10% of that. Carry of 20%, assuming that in the early days, he was entitled to all of it. I, I have no idea if this math is accurate, but it is, it's, it's going to be a remarkable result. Probably one of the greatest, one of the greatest investments of all time, certainly in the venture world. It also will be interesting because. This will be the second, this will be the second trillion dollar early-stage investment for PT, and there aren't that many funds that have done any, like, if you, remember the Holy Trinity calculation was, have you done the first institutional round into a Mag7 company?

• 1:25:56John Coogan?

  And it was just Kleiner, Founders Fund, and Sequoia that fit that criteria? If you take it to, you need two of those?

• 1:26:03Jordi Hays?

  Well, the other thing is, companies were just going so much, they were going public so much earlier.

• 1:26:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:26:07Jordi Hays?

  It's not like they just stayed private and let, you know, so I'm just saying, if you actually held for the same amount of time.

• 1:26:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I don't knock that at all, because like, a lot of the Sequoia guys did hold the Nvidia shares, right? Even though they were distributed, I still count it as one of the big wins. But this, yeah, this-

• 1:26:26Jordi Hays?

  T T says, "Never seen him with a grill either."

• 1:26:29John Coogan?

  There we go. That's a great point. No grill is crazy. When you have that amount of money, you gotta get a grill, get it iced out. Did you see this venture capital compensation in the United States?

• 1:26:42Jordi Hays?

  I did.

• 1:26:43John Coogan?

  D D Doss. D D Doss has been in some hot water lately, because he's taken shots at OpenAI. Lot of, lot of OpenAI folks-

• 1:26:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, he was right in the center of the whole Kleiner-

• 1:26:52John Coogan?

  Oh, that was also dramatic, but, you know, we're back, we're back on the top line with some viral stuff.

• 1:26:58Jordi Hays?

  He was born, he likes being in hot water.

• 1:27:00John Coogan?

  I mean, he did not stop posting. So, VC compensation by fund size, so this is a chart that shows what level are you at and how big is your fund? And so, if you have a sub $50 million fund, even if you're the GP, you're probably only making 200K. But if you're at a $3 billion fund, you might be making $1.2 million in salary. And so, I had some car-

• 1:27:23Jordi Hays?

  This is why these, these smaller solo GP funds, you're really in it for the glory.

• 1:27:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:27:29Jordi Hays?

  It's a, it's a carry game.

• 1:27:30John Coogan?

  And so one of the base-

• 1:27:32Jordi Hays?

  It's really, it's one of the hardest ways to make 200K a year.

• 1:27:36John Coogan?

  Indeed, indeed. I mean, some of the associates here, if you're an associate at a small fund, you might be making 150K, 170K. Even at, even at the big funds, the associates are making 238. The principal VP at a big fund might be making 450. So I had some recommendations for cars. If you're making 153,000 dollars a year as an associate at a small fund, you're gonna take, that's about 12,000 dollars a month, 13,000 dollars a month, you're gonna put that into a leased Ferrari SF90 Street Dollar.

• 1:28:07Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay, great.

• 1:28:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. You have no money left over, so you have to sleep in it. But I think it's gonna make a statement, you're gonna get that promotion.

• 1:28:14Jordi Hays?

  You can sleep in an SF90, you can't drive a house to work.

• 1:28:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. When you get that promotion, and now you're making 250, well, that's 20K a month for your lease. You're gonna upgrade to a used Bugatti Veyron.

• 1:28:25Jordi Hays?

  What about taxes?

• 1:28:26John Coogan?

  Uh, we're not, we're not paying taxes in this model. We're deferring the taxes. Uh, but, but, but I think if you pull up, if you're, if you're making 250, so, so what role do you have to do to make, to make 250? To make 250, you have to be, uh, where, where are you? You, you, you have to get promoted to partner at a small fund, or principal at a 250 million dollar fund. So you're making 250, that's, that's 200K, uh, that's 20K a month, that's enough for the used Bugatti Veyron lease. Uh, that'll get you the bump up to 350 a year. That's 30K a month. At this point, you're in Ferrari F40 territory.

• 1:29:07Jordi Hays?

  There you go. The other thing I was gonna say is, is you could go to the, to the managing partner and say, instead of a bonus this year, will you guarantee the loan on a, on a Porsche ST?

• 1:29:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:29:18Jordi Hays?

  Right? Go, go for something really timeless. Uh, and the benefit of that, assuming you live close to work, right? You're not gonna be losing a lot, there's not a lot of depreciation there. I mean, that's, that's a special car. And so you gotta get creative here.

• 1:29:30John Coogan?

  The really, the really crazy thing, okay, so obviously, uh, so, so, so, so, once you, once you get promoted, uh, you'll be making 600,000 dollars a year, that's 50K a month, that's enough for a multi-car garage. You're gonna get the Ferrari F40 plus, plus a daily driver per a song. Which you'll be sleeping.

• 1:29:48Jordi Hays?

  Of course, sleeping in it.

• 1:29:50John Coogan?

  But at that point, you can finally upgrade. You're making 1.2 mil a year. You're making 100,000 a month. That's enough for the Bugatti Chiron or the Pagani Roadster. But the interesting question is that the current market value of a McLaren F1 is $20 million. And so the carrying cost to lease that is probably around $2 million a year. And so if you see someone dailying an F1, you know that they are post-exit. It's truly the most.

• 1:30:23Jordi Hays?

  They're in the carry.

• 1:30:24John Coogan?

  You gotta do it. Yeah, they're into the carry. They're into the carry.

• 1:30:27Jordi Hays?

  Carry mode.

• 1:30:28John Coogan?

  Speaking of Kari from Linear, he's our next guest. Let's bring in Kari from Linear. Welcome to the stream. He's in the Roosting Room. How are you doing, Kari? Good to see you.

• 1:30:40Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 1:30:41Karri Saarinen?

  I'm doing well. How are you guys?

• 1:30:42John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastic. We're in the Christmas spirit, obviously. We're dressed up like Santa Claus, both Santa Claus.

• 1:30:48Jordi Hays?

  If you didn't notice.

• 1:30:49John Coogan?

  If you didn't notice.

• 1:30:50Karri Saarinen?

  Yeah, I mean, it's gonna look similar to what you usually look like, so.

• 1:30:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:54Jordi Hays?

  When do you think is the right time for companies to start getting into the Christmas spirit? Because Amazon was running kind of Christmas-themed ads back in October. That felt a little early for us.

• 1:31:06Karri Saarinen?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't really have an opinion on this on the company level. Like, we don't do anything about it.

• 1:31:14Jordi Hays?

  Locked in.

• 1:31:15Karri Saarinen?

  I think personally, I believe in the after Thanksgiving, it's okay to start it. So you can get a Christmas tree after Thanksgiving, but not before that.

• 1:31:25John Coogan?

  Let's hear it for another respecter of after Thanksgiving.

• 1:31:27Jordi Hays?

  I said the exact same thing earlier.

• 1:31:29John Coogan?

  I agree. Everyone says this, but there's clearly been a sort of erosion in every day, every year, one day earlier. And now they're running Christmas ads in October. It's an outrage. But anyway, we're not here to talk about Christmas anymore. We're here to talk about design. We're here to talk about your essay, "Design is Search." I would love for you to just kick us off with the inspiration behind the essay, why you felt the need to set the record straight on this particular topic. And then we can go into some of the actual thesis and hopefully bat around some different ideas around it.

• 1:32:08Karri Saarinen?

  Yeah, um, yeah, I think this whole like debate on Twitter or on X started like on Friday. I was just sitting on the couch and in the midnight and thinking about this that this is probably like, I don't know, the thent time I've seen a company launch this like designed code tools or coding design or like designing code kind of tools. And I, I think it's like people always kind of see that that's kind of like the final form of design. Like now we can finally design in the actual medium, like actually in the code. And I think it's, there's definitely like some benefits to that and like it is a great tool. But I always think like design is not just the tools. It's, it's like broader than the tools. And in a designer's toolkit, you always have many tools.

• 1:32:51Karri Saarinen?

  And depending what you're designing and like what this, like what is the environment, like who we're designing for? What's the domain? What's the product? You, you use different tools. So I think like it's not like that clear cut that like, like designing in code is the best way to do design. So I kind of like wanted to like highlight that there's some like challenges with this. And what I started with was that the, I think that what also happened to me in the past, like when I was designing and building front ends for apps. I, what I, what I often like start feeling, happening to me is that like I, I become less idealistic or I become more conservative because like I know that like whatever I design, I also have to build.

• 1:33:31Karri Saarinen?

  So there's like already like you start hesitate yourself or like you don't believe you can actually build certain things because like you, you start to kind of collapse the design and build more too much. But I think like also like if you are designing against an existing code base, I think it's also introduces like additional bias where it's like the code base is like, it's this kind of collection of decisions and architecture and layers and, and, and product features that have been built over the years or over the months. And you are now kind of like trying to fit something new into that. So like the natural tendency there is to like fit something that fits. And like, kind of like any kind of new or alien idea can kind of, kind of like feel like it doesn't fit

• 1:34:16Karri Saarinen?

  and doesn't feel like a good idea. So like you're too much reflecting the design against the state of the world versus like thinking about design more in abstract, like what the world could be.

• 1:34:26Jordi Hays?

  It's like an artificial constraint.

• 1:34:29Karri Saarinen?

  Yeah, I mean, it's all, yeah, I don't know if it's an artificial constraint, but it's the constraints what arrives too early. So like eventually any design has to be like manufactured or coded or something like made it real. Like design is not real. It's like it's an idea or like a concept or like it's it's something, but it's it's not something people use. So I think it's eventually you have to deal with the constraints. Similarly, like architects has to deal with their constraints. Like, how does the building like, uh, how can we build this building? How can we stay under budget? Or how do we make sure the materials? How much land, yeah, how much usable land do we have? Yeah, but it's like, I think like a lot of science architects still don't start from the constraints.

• 1:35:11Karri Saarinen?

  Like they might acknowledge the constraints, but then they go to start sketching something what they wanna see. Yeah. So I just wanted to highlight that like every tool has certain certain kind of strengths and weaknesses. And like if you're not mindful, you kind of like they can influence you your thinking a lot. So what I worry about is that like if we start thinking design is about coding, then I think we lose something like we lose that like space to think more broadly or kind of without those constraints and we jump into like, let's build this solution. And that was kind of like that. I think like some people were pushing back on this essay or this ideas I was I was talking about that.

• 1:35:52Karri Saarinen?

  Well, now the design can be better because we can build it better and the quality can be better. But again, this kind of proves my point is like, I don't think that, uh, I think construction and execution is different from designing. And I actually think that while it can help to construct a design better, like, does it really make the design better? So I'm like still like looking for that, like, how do these tools actually make the design process better? Like, how do we make better things with these tools versus like we just execute them faster?

• 1:36:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, is your view that like doing design within code is something that should effectively happen at a refinement stage where maybe you have a process of like planning how you want to build a product or a feature and then you know you think really deeply about how you want to do it, you make a bunch of decisions based on your intuition and what you know about the customers and how the thing should work and then you build it and then at a certain point you're able to make like more kind of like micro level changes to it when you've already you've already done all the work of the kind of like heavy planning and being really thoughtful about something versus I don't know, I would be I'd be worried if if you know somebody was like building me a house and they just came to the land and

• 1:37:08Jordi Hays?

  they threw up like a box like a frame and then they started just kind of like, okay, we're going to add a door over here and oh, we actually have to add like some pipes under here, so let's like dig under there and like you want when you're trying to build things that are high quality and great, I think like that that like pre-planning process and doing things in the right order matters a lot. So I feel like with these new tools, you have to be thinking about where do you actually like slot in that, where do you slot into the tool to the overall process?

• 1:37:40Karri Saarinen?

  Yeah, yeah, I think like I think these new tools can can help to plan this like so I think in the past, I think there's more like this like, I don't know, the way things operate is which more much more that there's a design and then there's a handoff, then there's a engineering and then nothing crosses this border. And I think that's a bad way to do as well. And I think it there should be this blended mode where I like to think that design is kind of essentially like two phases, like you have a conceptual design. So you're kind of like trying to understand the problem and then you're trying to explore multiple directions, how to solve that problem. And like I always tell my designers to do that, like even if you know the solution, you should still explore something else because like maybe you find something better.

• 1:38:25Karri Saarinen?

  Or like sometimes you should even explore bad ideas because sometimes the bad ideas show, sometimes bad ideas actually turn out to be good ideas and then sometimes bad ideas can show why that that other ideas are good. So I think like there's this stage where what what my essay was about was like design is a search. So you you're searching for the direction and like you're searching for the concept. You're kind of like removed from the execution stage of actually making it work. So the conceptual design is like, it's kind of like cars, car industry has a concept cars, like those cars are not in production yet and like they never will be, but it's an idea what the car could be. And like car industry never like, seems like they never take anything from those concept cars, but they could.

• 1:39:10Jordi Hays?

  We took the handle. We took the handle from the passenger door.

• 1:39:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, we made this crazy gullwing, super fast, crazy car. It's like, yeah, the lights.

• 1:39:19Karri Saarinen?

  So that that's kind of like the idea. It's like there's a concept that is cool and we should try to execute it. But like, I don't know what happens in the car industry. They just kind of like can't do it. But I think like in a software, you can do it. And then there's the execution design where you are like, how do we actually make this work well in this context of the application or fix the like fix the problems we we didn't think about in a concept like the edge cases or performance or just like we get user feedback, we make some fixes. So at that stage, I think the coding tools can be really useful because like you are iterating on the, you're refining the the the kind of like the design. But you had first this other stage where

• 1:39:59Karri Saarinen?

  you kind of like thought about it like more like, I don't know, not exactly first principles way, but like you started from like a kind of like a pure problem or an idea. And then you like created some concept that you think is worth like executing on.

• 1:40:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, how do you think about like, it feels like so much of what AI is great is maybe, I mean, AI is pretty good at like search, but I still feel like we probably agree that there's elements that are lacking around inspiration and and and design is certainly not a solved problem from an AI perspective. But a lot of times, translation is more or less solved. So what stuck out to me was in your essay, you you noted that a lot of architects will start by sketching with like pencil and paper. And we are in the area, the era of like, you could sketch it and maybe you have to come up with the brilliant idea, the brilliant, beautiful design. But then you can just take a picture of that sometimes and get a floor plan out of it potentially.

• 1:41:01John Coogan?

  But do you think that something's lost there? Or do you think that like text, like are these all going to be lossy? And so you want to avoid like text to image to code? And you want to be able to like dip in at every single level? Like, how do you think about the different translation modes? Because some of them are really helpful. Like, at the end of the day, some of them are just autocomplete, and that's amazing.

• 1:41:26Karri Saarinen?

  Yeah, I feel like there could be always something lost. Like, I think like when you actually, if you draw something and then you try to like draw it again. For example, you kind of like, even if you just took the sketch and then draw it again on a paper, you probably like start noticing different things. Like, you start thinking about the problem like slightly like different way. So I think like what the AI is kind of like always doing is kind of like it's shortcutting you to the output without actually you yourself going through the process. So I think like something always gets lost there. I think, again, and I don't think it's like necessarily a bad thing. You can just like take a sketch and generate an idea and like you see it in a different way. And that can be good, too. But I think there's that that problem.

• 1:42:09Karri Saarinen?

  And yeah, like some of the comments I got this like, well, now the AI is so good. So you don't even have to code. So it's like you just describe what you want and the AI kind of like creates it for you. But then now you're kind of like adding another another layer of influence there. It's like the AI is like kind of influencing the output like. And the LLMs are kind of like statistic models, whereas they're like always like looking for the correct, like kind of like statistically correct answer. They're not looking for the like necessarily the unique answer or your best brand, best answer for you personally or for this like context or something. So like you, there, there can be this danger of like everyone starts to average towards the means or the the the kind of like the.

• 1:42:52Karri Saarinen?

  The common standard patterns or standard practices. Uh, again, like, I, I think it's fine to use AI, but it's just like, kind of like, you have to understand, like, what are you giving out? Or what is the trade off? And like, if.

• 1:43:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:06Karri Saarinen?

  Should we do something about it?

• 1:43:07Jordi Hays?

  What is the M dash of? Yeah, so. What is the M dash of code? Well, one, one interesting example, earlier in the show, we were talking about, uh, where's Waldo? We, we use like Waldo bench, so we'll test like a new image model by just making like a where's Waldo illustration? And like, none of the models can do it yet. It's like really complicated. They can make it visually look like it's perfect, at least from far away. And then you zoom in and it's like chaotic and there's no story happening around the page. And maybe Waldo is just not even on the page, like it's the ultimate where's Waldo? He just bounced. Um, but we looked back at the history and the, the original illustrators, this guy Martin. And he would spend like eight weeks on to make like a full spread, right?

• 1:43:45Jordi Hays?

  And you could imagine, uh, I mean, part of that was just like hand illustrating everything, but it's also like planning out, like, what is the storyline? And what is the experience of like being in this page? And like, what is the experience of finding Waldo, right? And I feel like that is the, that is still the thing that is ultimately going to give products edge and make products have that craft. Is when you know that a team that's building software could have one shotted like a dashboard? And got it like to, to, to the point where it's like, it's functionally a dashboard. Like we can functionally make a where's Waldo illustration that you can go on the page and search for where's Waldo. But is it like an enjoyable, is it an enjoyable experience?

• 1:44:26Jordi Hays?

  Like right now, we're not seeing AI that like, maybe that you could find the right prompts, but right now you're not doing, or you're not one shotting an illustration like this. And, and it is still something you have to put an immense amount of like thought and planning into and, and, uh, try things and, and revert them, things like that.

• 1:44:43Karri Saarinen?

  Yeah, and I think there's different modes, like I think you can use AI like creative ways of like generating a lot of output or different ideas. But I think it's it's like, yeah, there is always like, you now have this influence of the AI model, like what is it, how it does, how it creates those outputs and like decides things. And then you have the tool that is doing like the code base. Versus like you're kind of directly working on a sketch or a screen where there's like very little like influence, like what what can be do, how the design can be. The the other reason like I like why I even like talked about this, like, like I didn't, I don't, I don't have any tool to sell here, like I don't have a design tool to sell, but it's it's more like I worry about the,

• 1:45:26Karri Saarinen?

  if we start to like kind of see design as coding, then or like start to see design as construction, that we like already like there's like, the incentives to ship things fast is so strong that we start to see that, oh, like now we don't need to design because we can just build it. And we can, designers are gonna like design and build it. And then I think we start losing that. The other phases where can we just think about the problem, like can we think about the concepts, like how could this be work really nicely? Um, and then like I think we, it's like very like,

• 1:46:05Karri Saarinen?

  like it's very exciting idea for companies or founders or someone's like, I don't have to think about design anymore. It's just like happens with that when we build it. And I think it's it's maybe like a good for the business, but I think it's just like not good for the world or like good to get like. My my kind of like motivation with linear and like talking about some of this stuff is always that like, can we just have nicer things in the world? Can we like spend more time on the craft and quality and and like value it again, even if it's not like something that can be measured. And I think the Silicon Valley and. Technology companies always have trouble with this. It's like it's hard to like value something that is not quite quantifiable like easily. It's it's like Yeah.

• 1:46:47Karri Saarinen?

  It's if there's no data for it, then it doesn't exist. And like, good design is something sometimes like it's it's cannot be measured. So so I think like this, again, like shipping speed and and like how many things you ship can be measured. But like, if someone makes a design really good, it's like it's hard to like um it's hard to measure that. And and then designing things or like sketching things can be seen as unproductive because it's not directly um contributing to that shipping s- speed or shipping more things. Mm hmm.

• 1:47:20Jordi Hays?

  What's your philosophy on uh story storytelling? Is is Matt your storyteller? Do you like that word?

• 1:47:31Karri Saarinen?

  Yeah, I mean, I I like it because like I think I don't know what happened to marketing, but I think marketing kind of like lost the lost the story uh or it lost the plot there at some point. It's it's

• 1:47:41John Coogan?

  It became very quantitative. It like it became more mathematical, like just buy the ads and run all the A B tests and all. It became more of a science. And so the art needed a new brand, maybe.

• 1:47:54Karri Saarinen?

  Yeah. That makes sense. I would I would kind of like think like storytelling is kind of like I think it the same way as I think the brand. I think the brand of storytelling is maybe like the same thing. It's like so I and like to me, brand is something just that you have a belief or like some kind of worldview and you like and you have some values or things you stand for. Like, we always had that on linear. And like, that's kind of like from the place I always articulate my things. It's like I try to like keep true to that brand is like, and we have nicer things or quality things or or something. And so the brand or the storytelling is not never about the like again, about the output. It's actually like it's like a deeper thing. It's like, do you believe in something?

• 1:48:38Karri Saarinen?

  And then I think the storytelling or the brand is just like, how do you express that belief? So anyone like people can't reach your mind. So you have to like either tell stories or you have to show visuals or videos or something. So how do you express your beliefs? So the problem when people are looking for storytellers is that like, again, like, do you have the story to tell? Like, do you believe in anything? And like, is that, and if you believe in something, is it like engaging? Like, do we people? Do people want to hear that story? So hiring a storyteller doesn't help if you don't have this like a good story or engaging story.

• 1:49:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and someone in the chat noticed you guys are hiring a writer, which is something I was pushing for. Like, if I wanted to hire a storyteller, I would wanna, personally, I'd wanna hire somebody that is very good at writing and wants to come in and write a lot and like enjoys the craft of writing. And not somebody that wants like a, like a pretty title that like sounds cool, but then ultimately just wants to collaborate cross-functionally across the org or whatever it is. Um, last question I have, what are your thoughts on holiday gimmicks in products? I got into my car this morning and on my profile, it had a, a Santa hat on it. And I, I got, I got some enjoyment out of it. It had some cobwebs for, for Halloween too.

• 1:49:59Jordi Hays?

  But is that cheapen a product? It feels like something that, uh, I don't, I don't know which way you're gonna go.

• 1:50:08Karri Saarinen?

  Yeah, I would think about it like, again, like from the point of brand is like, does it like fit the brand? Like, I think we, we haven't done those things because we kind of like linear kind of, the brand is more that is like a serious tool for work and it's, it's, I think some of those kind of things can, can kind of feel like off and like, I don't know, like, for example, it's always like these situations where, I don't know, like a company is using linear and then something goes down, like their service goes down, like their, the whole company is like scrambling and then suddenly some Santa hat appears and everyone's like, what is this thing? It's like, we, we have like, Like our product or like customer base is on fire and like there's some Santa hats flying around. So it's it's like it can be distracting. And so I think it's kind of depends

• 1:50:53Karri Saarinen?

  on your brand and like how critical like infrastructure you are and where do you put these things? I think it's it can be fun thing for the team to do Easter eggs like we do Easter eggs that are hidden. So there there's like you can there's games you can there's an arcade you can enter in linear and then there's like old arcade games you can play. But you know that you don't find them like you have to really find them to like you need to find the Easter egg to access it. So there's like these kind of things that you make secrets. But um, but yeah, I don't personally like the like putting the decorations on your face and and like professional tools.

• 1:51:29Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Makes total sense. Well, uh, great having you on. And uh, yeah, we'll save the Santa hats for the podcasters.

• 1:51:38Karri Saarinen?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:39John Coogan?

  Thanks for having on.

• 1:51:41Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you.

• 1:51:42John Coogan?

  Um, we went, uh, yeah, thank you. Well, we'll talk to you soon. Merry Christmas. Um, we went way over, so we are going to skip, uh, Pranav Mayana and get him on the show tomorrow.

• 1:51:52Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 1:51:53John Coogan?

  Uh, instead, we will be joined by, uh, Mike at Liquid Death at 1pm. Um, and we will catch up with the Space Data Center Debate. Pranav, of course, uh, built a first principles model on, uh, the economics of data centers on Earth and data centers in space. Uh, I'm really enjoying the way the Space Data Center Debate has evolved. We are now vibe coding full applications to get to the bottom of, uh, the economics of these, uh, the, the, the decisions. And, uh,

• 1:52:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, Santa, Santa came early for light speed this year.

• 1:52:28John Coogan?

  Yes, that's right.

• 1:52:29Jordi Hays?

  Have nine billion in new capital for a new family of funds. Their largest raise in 25 years. AI is rewriting the rules. We're back in the founders building.

• 1:52:40John Coogan?

  What comes next?

• 1:52:41Jordi Hays?

  Next. Congratulations to Lightspeed, Guess, Aaron, Michael.

• 1:52:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:46Jordi Hays?

  And all of the folks over there.

• 1:52:49John Coogan?

  Hanging out with you guys. Interesting. I mean, we saw that chart of like the new venture funds raised really falling off a cliff.

• 1:52:57Jordi Hays?

  Something like 50 billion to date.

• 1:52:59John Coogan?

  This feels like a huge chunk of it potentially.

• 1:53:01Jordi Hays?

  That chart was already getting debated.

• 1:53:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:53:04Jordi Hays?

  Or potentially.

• 1:53:05John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe stuff had been reclassified. Like it's possible that this nine billion, well, some of it's in a growth funds, they reclassified it or something like that. Wait, do you have more context there on that one? No? Okay. Let me tell you about wander.com. Book of wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home by better folks.

• 1:53:27Jordi Hays?

  Pavel Prata says, look at haystack ventures fund three.

• 1:53:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:53:31Jordi Hays?

  It was an $8.2 million fund.

• 1:53:35John Coogan?

  Semel Shah.

• 1:53:35Jordi Hays?

  Semel.

• 1:53:36John Coogan?

  Former guest on the show.

• 1:53:37Jordi Hays?

  Bought three Decacorns.

• 1:53:39John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:53:39Jordi Hays?

  Invested early in DoorDash.

• 1:53:42John Coogan?

  That's a Centicorn.

• 1:53:43Jordi Hays?

  Centicorn alert. Figma.

• 1:53:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, Figma.

• 1:53:46Jordi Hays?

  Public company Instacart, 12 billion. Karri, 7.4.

• 1:53:50John Coogan?

  And DoorDash. That's, that's interesting. You'd think that that would be like a little bit of like, hey, what are you, what are you doing investing in a competitor?

• 1:53:58Jordi Hays?

  But it was restaurant delivery versus grocery.

• 1:54:00John Coogan?

  Grocery, which is different. Yeah. I guess it's different. Yeah.

• 1:54:03Jordi Hays?

  Hashi Corp.

• 1:54:04John Coogan?

  And Karri, open door.

• 1:54:06Jordi Hays?

  Seven billion, open door, six billion.

• 1:54:07John Coogan?

  Best solo GP fund in history.

• 1:54:10Jordi Hays?

  Oh, and apparently.

• 1:54:10John Coogan?

  Was Fund Three solo though?

• 1:54:12Jordi Hays?

  Ashay says Applied Intuition was also in this fund.

• 1:54:14John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:54:15Jordi Hays?

  Currently at a 15 billion.

• 1:54:17John Coogan?

  Wow, that's very, very impressive. Well, congrats to Semel Shah over at Haystack.

• 1:54:24Jordi Hays?

  We gotta have him back on the show.

• 1:54:26John Coogan?

  Wow, I'm liking the gong today. Not warmed up, still has a nice little ring to it.

• 1:54:32Jordi Hays?

  Kind of a wild ring to it. Harry Stebbing says venture investors are going through an existential crisis. If you are not in OpenAI, Anthropic, Curse, or Merkle, et cetera, et cetera, you do not freaking matter.

• 1:54:43John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:54:44Jordi Hays?

  And we were with somebody. Yesterday for dinner and they were in OpenAI and Anthropic in

• 1:54:52John Coogan?

  They were doing fine.

• 1:54:53Jordi Hays?

  Back in 20, early 2023. He was feeling pretty good.

• 1:54:57John Coogan?

  I, I, I, I do know some VCs that have been early to the category, but missed all of those and it is a hard story to tell. Uh, you know, to bring it back to storytelling if you're, if you're a VC right now and you're, and you haven't done anything like that. Um, at the same time, um, I, I, I, if you're, if you're early, early stage, if you're early stage, um, it, it, it doesn't seem that crazy. There are only so many people that could be in these firms really, really early. Um, but if you're, if you're a growth investor, I mean, we've, we, we've seen many growth funds that are in both Anthropic and OpenAI, which is like typically a no-no, but they, they figured out how to do it.

• 1:55:41Jordi Hays?

  Well, why don't you and Tyler read this post from Dee?

• 1:55:45John Coogan?

  I will.

• 1:55:46Jordi Hays?

  I'll be right back.

• 1:55:47John Coogan?

  So DeeDee Das says, "A few software engineers at some of the best tech companies told me this week, my entire job these days is prompting cursor or Claude code with Opus 4.5 to do what I need and then sanity checking it." Tyler, do you agree? Is that this is the new life of a software engineer?

• 1:56:09Speaker 03

  I mean, yeah, kind of. Like, blood code is like really good. And, and I mean, also Codex, the, the Gemini CLI, basically all, they're all like very similar.

• 1:56:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:17Speaker 03

  Um, but that form factor is like really, really good. I find it to be.

• 1:56:20John Coogan?

  Uh, it says, "We've crossed some intangible threshold of AI generalizing to most software. Uh, Opus 4.5 is the, is my, is the first model that makes me actually fear for my job. All models so far were okay-ish at best. Opus 4.5 really is something else. People who haven't tried it yet do not know what's coming for us in the next two to three years. Hell, even next year might be the final turning point already. I don't know how to adapt from here on. Sure, I can watch Opus do my work all day long and make sure I, to intervene if it F's up here or there, but how long will it be until it's not even, until I'm not even needed anymore? Um, yeah, I mean, I, uh...

• 1:57:02John Coogan?

  Is the, do you think there's any sort of like overweight here on the type of like, you know, vibe coding, small apps, new features, like in, are you, are you hearing about big, like, like big hairy code bases, things that need to be very, you know, fault tolerant, where it's not just throwaway software, still?

• 1:57:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think like, you know, he says, you know, he still has to intervene if it messes up.

• 1:57:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:32Speaker 03

  Which I think is like, that's extremely valuable. Like, you need someone to do that. It's like, it's like the law firm thing where people talk about, you can't just place everyone with AI because so much of like, a law firm is like, you need to have them be accountable.

• 1:57:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:44Speaker 03

  Where I think it's very similar with engineers.

• 1:57:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:46Speaker 03

  I also think like, a lot of the stuff I do is like, kind of fairly like, low risk, like, it's not super important if it messes up a little bit.

• 1:57:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:54Speaker 03

  So there, I can like, really use models.

• 1:57:55Jordi Hays?

  Disagree.

• 1:57:56Speaker 03

  Well, it's, it's not gonna bring down like, a nation state, or it's not like, important government data, or whatever.

• 1:58:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:02Speaker 03

  So if it, if it's like, not super efficient, or stuff like this, it's like, not that big of a deal.

• 1:58:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:06Speaker 03

  Where, I, I think it's still, it's much harder, like, I, I often find that, if I, if I'm trying to like, completely one-shot a project, and then I keep iterating on it, a lot of times I have to do some sort of like, architecture rework.

• 1:58:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:58:18Speaker 03

  Because it just like, doesn't make sense if you really wanna keep scaling it.

• 1:58:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, where the tech debt, then you can use the model to do the, to fix the tech debt.

• 1:58:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:58:25Speaker 03

  But it's still, it's kind of like, not as smooth as you would really, like, ideally want it to be.

• 1:58:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway, Eight Sleep. Maybe you just hit Claude Code and then you go to sleep. Overnight success. Exceptional sleep, without exception. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, and wake up energized.

• 1:58:42Jordi Hays?

  Eight Sleep should really make overnight success into a campaign.

• 1:58:46John Coogan?

  Ooh, that would be good. That's a great tagline for them. Overnight success. I like it. What most discussions of AGI feel like nowadays, says Rota. Cars have windows and can move. Houses have windows and can't move. So it's not the windows that make the cars. It's something else entirely. Wow, yeah, that's a good point. It's not the car, it's not the windows that make the car go. It's something else entirely. What a great post.

• 1:59:15Jordi Hays?

  PJ cooked.

• 1:59:16John Coogan?

  PJ cooked with this one. It's fantastic.

• 1:59:21John Coogan?

  What is, what is this long?

• 1:59:22Jordi Hays?

  Crazy image.

• 1:59:23John Coogan?

  That is a crazy image. Martin Shkreli shared some, clearly a screenshot of a, of a spreadsheet. I don't know how accurate this data is, but he's, he's pulling minutes spent on AI sites last month alone. Sixty-four percent were on ChatGPT, fifteen percent on Gemini. DeepSeek and Grok are the only two on a trajectory to come even close. Grok, Grok.com is only at three percent of the total of these users that were on web.

• 1:59:54Jordi Hays?

  But growing, growing.

• 1:59:54John Coogan?

  But it's growing very fast. DeepSeek.com is the same thing, three percent, but growing very fast, whereas some of the other ones are shrinking. Interesting to see, yeah, perplexity is at two percent. Claude AI is at two, at two percent. Some of these have, they bend themselves into other systems. And also, these are, of course, websites, so, you know, app-based LLMs are not going to be quite captured here, but, you know, continues to tell the story that, that, you know, ChatGPT is still the dominant consumer platform for, for just hopping on an LLM and answering some questions.

• 2:00:37John Coogan?

  Anyway, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Plan, buy, and measure out of home with precision. Our next guest, Mike from Liquid Death, is in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP and Ultra Dome.

• 2:00:52Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 2:00:53John Coogan?

  Mike, how you doing? Hey. Welcome to the show. What's new in your world?

• 2:00:57Jordi Hays?

  You didn't get the memo.

• 2:00:59John Coogan?

  What memo? Oh, yeah. He's not wearing, he's not wearing a Santa.

• 2:01:02Jordi Hays?

  We're the only ones wearing Santa suits today.

• 2:01:04John Coogan?

  But we are feeling the holiday spirit. Merry Christmas.

• 2:01:08Speaker 06

  Merry Christmas.

• 2:01:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:11John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. First time on the show. There's a ton of stuff I want to talk about, about marketing and launching this business and how comedy scales. But maybe, can you just take us back and really quickly give us the intro on the actual launch? I feel like, is it fair to say that Liquid Death had like a viral launch video strategy? Was that the cornerstone of the launch? Or were there other pieces that were at play in the early days?

• 2:01:41Speaker 06

  Well, the way we launched Liquid Death was actually a bit different. So when I had the idea, it was a little bit too crazy to most people to find investment to make it. So I basically created a Facebook page and we made it seem like a real brand. Just to see like, what kind of traction did it get in the world if people thought this was a real thing? Then we shot a cheap commercial for the product that didn't exist yet. We probably spent fifteen hundred bucks to shoot the commercial. And, you know, we put a little bit of paid media behind the video, maybe like a few thousand dollars. And then after five months, the video had three million views.

• 2:02:25Speaker 06

  The Facebook page had, you know, sixty, seventy thousand followers, which was more than Awkwafina had on Facebook at the time. So then I used all that kind of market traffic to then go raise like a small.

• 2:02:39Jordi Hays?

  I'm so surprised that, that more CPG brands don't do that. Like, it takes so long to make even a, like, like if somebody's making a drink like this, right? If they actually start working hard on it today, they might have something close to a product that they can sell in six, six to twelve months, something in that range to like really go through rapid iteration and getting it made and scaling up production and testing and all that stuff. When you could just actually make an image of something like this and just like start running ads against it and see like, do people care at all? Do they click through at a good rate, even with ads that aren't super refined? Uh, I did that once on a project in, uh, in college. I had the idea, I was shooting a lot of film photos and I was super frustrated.

• 2:03:21Jordi Hays?

  It was like a thirty minute drive to the place you drop off film. And so I wanted to make like, basically like kind of Netflix model for film. So you could just like get sent a roll of film, send it back once you were shot it. And I was shocked. I just ran ads against it and I had like immediately like a $10 like customer acquisition cost. Of course, I didn't actually have the service set up. So I just refunded everyone immediately, but it's so much easier to validate stuff and I think people waste so much time. And when you're in that sort of like pre-product, pre-product and CPG is just like the death zone. Like, it's just so hard to get people to care and like actually risk capital. And it's like, you don't even have a product that I can like sample and you want me to give

• 2:04:02Jordi Hays?

  you like $100,000 or 250K. It's just, it's a big ask.

• 2:04:08Speaker 06

  Completely. And it's something I hear from people, you know, who are aspiring entrepreneurs or have an idea. I think there's just like a general sense that, oh, I have this great idea for something. How do I now go raise money? Well, the reality is investors like to invest in businesses, not ideas. So how can you start in some way to prove out that there might be some traction, however you might be able to do that. And that's going to get you a lot further than just saying, hey, I have this great idea. You know, give me some money.

• 2:04:44John Coogan?

  The first, so that video that you described, was that the animated video?

• 2:04:48Jordi Hays?

  I think that was before this.

• 2:04:50John Coogan?

  That animated video happened later. Can you take me through like how like the, I mean, I imagine that cost more than $1,500 to produce that. What was the story behind picking animation? I feel like a lot of brands were doing sort of like the founder testimonial, direct to camera. You tell the vision of the business or, you know, you go on a podcast tour and Liquid Death came out with that really aggressive animated style. What was the story behind that particular video?

• 2:05:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, with most businesses, I think you need to look at where are your strengths? What is your network? What are your connections? And utilizing what you have near you to the best of your advantage. So, you know, another way to put is play the hand of cards that you have. It's unique to you. So for me,

• 2:05:40Speaker 06

  You know, I was a big fan of this animated TV show on Adult Swim called Mr. Pickles. It's this bizarre acid trip of a violently funny cartoon. And I ended up reaching out to the guy who was the creator of it. There was two creators, he was one of the two. And in the early days of Liquid Death, saying, hey, I'm a huge fan of your show. I feel like we have similar creative sensibilities. Maybe you'd want to be involved in this Liquid Death thing I'm trying to get going. And sure enough, he responded, we met, we got along really well. And he's actually the one who drew the skull that is the logo on all of our cans to this day.

• 2:06:21Speaker 06

  And then, once we actually got the brand off the ground and we had real product that we were selling and we were making, you know, real revenue, we had slightly bigger marketing budgets. You know, we were able to use the animation firm that he was working on his TV show with. And they said, hey, we'll do this for super cheap because Will's already here. He can just do this on the side and, you know, we can make it happen. So, animation is very expensive, like, you know, 30 seconds or 40 seconds of animation is very expensive. But we were able to get, I think we spent all in like 30K on that. But that should have costed probably a quarter million dollars if you

• 2:07:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:04Speaker 06

  were just trying to go do that normally, minimum.

• 2:07:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:07Speaker 06

  Um, but yeah, it was kind of like that was something that was in our quiver and we were a big fan of it. And we had some great resources there to make a really funny. And that was always our thing. How do we make something that's the funniest thing someone's gonna see

• 2:07:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:20Speaker 06

  in their feed and spread it for us for free?

• 2:07:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, obviously, we love comedy here. You're being interviewed by two Santa Clauses. I'm interested to know, take me a couple of years into my future, do I regret this? Or do I lose this? Like, how does, how do you maintain a level of humor while still, you know, coming to the customer and the business partners with like, hey, yeah, we're not joking around about quality assurance or something like, there's a serious side of the business now. There's still some humor that's still there. At the same time, the marketing's probably not laugh a minute anymore. How have you thought about like scaling comedy?

• 2:07:59Speaker 06

  No, it's a really great question. It's something that I've had to push through multiple departments of the company, which, yes, we're a funny brand in the way we market, but if you think about a brand like a person, like, think about someone you know that's funny. Like, they're not funny in every scenario. You don't tell them that, hey, my dad died, and they crack a joke.

• 2:08:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:23Speaker 06

  People, a lot of really funny people, they just know people really well. Like, they know how to make people laugh. They know when to tone it down. Like, the number one rule of comedy is, like, know your audience. So I think it's important that it's always like, hey, when someone sends in an email saying, "Hey, my case of Liquid Death from Amazon got all screwed up in the mail", you don't crack a joke, like, act very earnest. "Hey, I am so sorry about that. Like, that sucks." Like, we will completely figure it out. So it's all about knowing where it's important to be, you know,

• 2:09:02Speaker 06

  real and authentic and caring, and then where it's important to be funny and irreverent, and that you always gotta be cognizant of.

• 2:09:11John Coogan?

  How much did you predict the death of the alcohol culture? It feels like this is perfectly timed. We've talked to so many folks on the show about the next generation just drinking way less, and it feels like you've been a beneficiary of this. But was that something where you had seen a chart and you'd actually seen a trend line? Or you just had a vibe, or it just kinda came to you naturally? Or you just got lucky? Like, how do you frame the fact that you're selling an alternative to alcohol in a ton of bars, I see it all the time, at a time when people are looking for an alternative?

• 2:09:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was a little bit luck. I think the bigger... Conceptual drive behind Liquid Death's inception was that how do we make a truly healthy beverage company that markets more like a fun alcohol or junk food company?

• 2:10:05Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 2:10:05Speaker 06

  Cause you think about all the funny irreverent marketing over time, it's all like stickers, Cheetos, Dos Equis, like it's beer, it's candy, it's fast food.

• 2:10:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my biggest criticism of, of like healthy brands historically is they, it's so hard to build a brand if you're not making people feel any like real emotion, right? Like how many healthy brands are funny at all? Like almost, almost zero, right? It's like toned down colors, uh, like just kind of like simple straightforward copy. There's not a lot of, there's no energy coming through the brand. So how are you going to make somebody feel something? And if you want to be remembered, you have to make somebody feel something.

• 2:10:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, I, I completely agree. And I think it's also just strategically unhealthy brands, like in their marketing boardrooms, they're like, we want people to associate our products with fun. So everything we do is going to be centered around fun and like that. We want this to be fun. Um, or they think about their audience like, hey, we are selling to teenagers. Like this is how we want to make teenagers love us. We're healthy products. We're not ever marketing to teenagers. They were marketing to 35 plus, you know, females and they would market a certain way there. So yeah, for part of what I love about Liquid Death and why I wanted to do it is so many healthy companies just preach to the choir, people who already make healthy decisions. How can I use a brand

• 2:11:31Speaker 06

  to get people who don't typically make healthy decisions? And now every once in a while, pick up a low calorie water just because they identify with the brand and they think it's cool.

• 2:11:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:42Speaker 06

  Um, then you still get the healthy people because they're already buying in those categories. But how do you start bringing new people into the healthy categories who weren't there before?

• 2:11:49Jordi Hays?

  What's your, what's your philosophy on storytelling on, on X the last 24 hours? Everyone has just been debating, everyone's been debating like, do you need to hire a chief storyteller?

• 2:11:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:12:00Jordi Hays?

  I took the point of view of like truly the most elite storytellers are founders, CEOs who are the ones communicating to. Customers and vendors and the media and all that kind of thing. And if you're feeling like you need to hire a storyteller, it's very possible that you just don't know what story to tell. But I don't know that hiring somebody off the street to tell your story is going to actually get you what you want, which is like a plot and meaning and all these other things that great, great stories and brands have.

• 2:12:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, it's like storytelling is such a broad thing. It's like storytelling is in everything. As a founder specifically, or if you work in sales, like just being able to tell a story is not just important to a consumer. How do you get employees to want to follow you? If you can't articulate a vision, a story that gets people excited and believing in the mission, like you're not going to be a very good leader either because it's so important. So I don't know if hiring a chief storyteller is like the equivalent of having like, you know, a language translator. Hey storyteller, tell everybody in the company why what I say matters.

• 2:13:18Speaker 06

  But I think that, you know, great CEOs have been successful because they're great storytellers naturally. And that goes far beyond just knowing how to tell a consumer story, but how to get investors excited, how to get employees excited. You got to be able to speak in a way that makes people believe.

• 2:13:35Jordi Hays?

  You have an advertising background. How do you work with ad agencies today? Another thing I was kind of sharing with the audience, my point of view is that more tech companies should work with traditional ad agencies to actually just like come up with like novel campaigns to try to cut through the noise. I think people get too focused on, we just need a pretty website, like that will solve our problem, or we need a nice logo. And it's like spending not enough time thinking about like really clear messaging and actually thinking in campaigns. I know companies that will spend Fifty million dollars next year on marketing and they're not thinking about,

• 2:14:17Jordi Hays?

  they're not even thinking about like what campaign, what campaigns are we going to do? They're just thinking about like what channels are we doing? How are we spending? Who are our segments? And they're not thinking of this like kind of like through line messaging. And so I think that that's an area that traditional ad agencies, not necessarily the biggest ones in the world, but the sort of classic ad agency can actually really be really helpful on.

• 2:14:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think another way to think about it is thinking about all different kinds of companies, tech or what have you, thinking about more of the full funnel. Because when you talk about campaign, you're kind of talking about top of funnel, like more general awareness around the brand. And then you've got other marketing assets further down the funnel that are focused more on converting somebody into a customer. I think you have so much focus, especially in the tech world, on the lower funnel where you know, hey, I put this money in and then this much money comes out because of conversion. But what happens is if you're not bringing in enough people at the top of funnel at the brand level, you don't have enough people to convert.

• 2:15:22Speaker 06

  And it starts getting really expensive to convert low level performance people because you start running out of people and it just starts getting more expensive. And I think like a great example is like AI. All the L L Ms now are fairly comparable in what they can do. But still, Chat G P T is by far the biggest because it's the most notable brand. It's just the thing that people, oh, Chat G P T, it's easy to say, it's fun to say, I know that, I'm just going to use that one. Look at Google. How many other search engines tried to come about? And just because of Google's brand and something that's emotional just made that the go to place where nobody else could really come and take it away. And to your point, a lot of that has to come from more brand marketing

• 2:16:06Speaker 06

  and not just like nuanced performance functional marketing.

• 2:16:11John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about the new sparkling energy drink? I feel like there's, there's a sort of like positive positioning. Hey, we're the only ones that have this particular benefit? Or there's the free of strategy where everyone else has this bad thing and we don't? Is that the framework you think about when you go to launch a new product? What was your thesis behind getting into energy?

• 2:16:34Speaker 06

  I mean, we've been asked about when we were going into energy since probably like year one of Liquid Death because people just think the brand is so much more like

• 2:16:43Jordi Hays?

  It's got a lot of energy.

• 2:16:44John Coogan?

  It does.

• 2:16:48Speaker 06

  And even it's still funny to this day, you know, in consumer research that we have, you know, we make flavored sparkling water, we make plain water, we make iced tea.

• 2:17:01Speaker 06

  Like 60% of the country has heard of Liquid Death. 20% know that we make flavored sparkling water, which is our biggest actually category now.

• 2:17:12John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:17:14Speaker 06

  But 19% of the country thinks we make an energy drink. So literally, our biggest category has as much awareness as a category we don't even make yet.

• 2:17:24John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 2:17:25Speaker 06

  Because the brand just sounds more like an energy drink than it sounds like a flavored sparkling water. So the reason we got into energy was because I think we finally found a way to stay to our brand ethos, which is to truly be a better for you brand. And we were able to find a way to do what we feel is a truly better for you energy drink product. And now that the better for you segment of energy is the fastest growing within energy, the Celsius's of the world, Alani, C4, these other brands that are low, zero sugar, low calorie, et cetera. Um, it just became the right window for us to kind of offer something that really felt better for you within the category. And that's a combination of things with just, we thought the category was getting a little

• 2:18:10Speaker 06

  instain with the caffeine, like Celsius, Alani, all these brands are like 200 milligrams of caffeine.

• 2:18:18Jordi Hays?

  We started this show, by the way, John would have three Celsius in a single show.

• 2:18:22John Coogan?

  It was insane. It was so bad. Now I do three Diet Cokes, which is like, I think around 100 or 200 milligrams of caffeine. It's not too bad.

• 2:18:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, most people don't think of Red Bull as a weak energy drink. It's the number one selling energy drink. Red Bull is 114 milligrams in a 12 ounce can. So Celsius is like pounding two Red Bulls at one time. Yeah, it's crazy. You know, so, and I don't think a lot of people realize that. And the more we've talked to people, they kind of feel like, oh, yeah, I don't, I stopped drinking, you know, Celsius or Lani, because I don't know, I started feeling a little like cracked out. Oh, yeah, it's crazy. You know, I just thought there was like, you know, we, we thought there was like a good opportunity to come in with something that was not weak, but this just what we're calling a sane level of energy in a category that I think is starting to go a little insane. Do you have a tagline for it? Murder your sleep or something?

• 2:19:14Speaker 06

  Well, we actually have on the can, uh, it's like, it's not really the tagline, but it's a small one that says death to drowsy. There we go. I knew it was gonna be something good.

• 2:19:22Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, how, what's the, what's the go to market with energy? I can, I can imagine, uh, I, uh, buddy of mine is like a pro skateboarder and like in skating, there's like some fatigue around the, the big energy drink brands and it feels like there's room, uh, like, energy drinks have had a big place in the industry for a long time. So I can imagine there's like an athlete angle to this. There's kind of campaign, uh, broader campaign, but how are all the different ways you're planning to really bring it to market?

• 2:19:56Speaker 06

  It's funny, it's actually not that at all because, you know, Monster, Red Bull, both companies valued like upwards of 60 billion apiece. They've got endless checkbooks to buy athletes. And that's the thing, when you do sports marketing, anybody with a big enough checkbook can buy any athlete. That's how they make their money, right? So if Liquid Death tries to go in and buy athletes competing with the checkbooks of Monster and Red Bull, we're never gonna make enough of a dent to have it move the needle for us. So for us, like, what makes Liquid Death unique is We're arguably the funniest beverage brand in the world and we're better at being funny than

• 2:20:36Speaker 06

  anybody else and big companies have a really hard time producing comedy because you go through that bureaucracy of focus groups and layers. It's hard to make something legit funny the way we can and no amount of money can fix that. So, we want to focus on being the only funny energy drink brand in a sea of extreme force, right?

• 2:20:58John Coogan?

  I love that. I love that. Yeah, that's great. That's great. Different positioning. This is, uh, what a great guest for today. Uh, thank you so much for hopping on the show. We gotta jump to our next guest, but, uh, we'd love to have you back, you know, way deeper. This was-

• 2:21:10Jordi Hays?

  No one loves advertising more than me. Maybe you do. Maybe you do.

• 2:21:14John Coogan?

  You're a lead. You're very elite at it, so thank you. It's always great to-

• 2:21:16Jordi Hays?

  Super fun conversation. Let's do it. Let's do it again soon.

• 2:21:18John Coogan?

  Let's do something again soon, please.

• 2:21:19Jordi Hays?

  Congrats to the whole team on the launch.

• 2:21:21John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 2:21:22Speaker 06

  Appreciate it. Thank you.

• 2:21:23John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon. Bye. Uh, you heard from Kari Linear. Let me actually tell you about Linear. Linear, meet the system for modern software development, linear streamlined work across the entire development cycle from roadmap to release. Uh, we have Elliot Cohen from General Medicine in the Restream waiting room. Next, he's coming in, previously co-founded PillPack, with friend of the show.

• 2:21:49Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 2:21:50John Coogan?

  Merry Christmas. How are you doing? Happy Hanukkah.

• 2:21:53Speaker 06

  Merry Christmas. Thanks for having me, guys.

• 2:21:55John Coogan?

  Happy holidays.

• 2:21:56Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 2:21:57John Coogan?

  Please, uh, since it's your first time on the show, I mean, we've talked about general medicine before, but introduce yourself. I'd love to get a little bit of your journey, your story, uh, and then I'm sure we can go into a ton of different, uh, aspects of the healthcare industry and, uh, and, and general medicine generally.

• 2:22:14Jordi Hays?

  Also, hello TJ.

• 2:22:16John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 2:22:16Jordi Hays?

  If you're watching.

• 2:22:17John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. I hope so, too.

• 2:22:18Jordi Hays?

  We love you. Anyways, Elliot.

• 2:22:21Speaker 07

  Thanks for having me on. He was joking that maybe he would have actually been better for this because he's got the nice panda beard. Oh, yeah, he does have the panda beard sometimes. Anyway, but it's great to meet you. It's great to meet you guys. My name's Elliot Cohen. I was one of the other founders of Pillpack along with TJ Parker. And we started that business in 2013. We sold it to Amazon in 2018 and then both of us stayed at Amazon. Yeah. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, it was like, you know, a month or two and it all just worked out. Yeah.

• 2:22:54Jordi Hays?

  Yep. What's the latest at General Medicine? I hear you guys are ripping.

• 2:23:00Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:23:00Jordi Hays?

  But we'd love, we'd love for you to share kind of the state of the business.

• 2:23:06Speaker 07

  Business is doing great. We launched in May and since then we've just been expanding. It's available nationwide. I think it's got the most insurance coverage of any provider group in the country. And, and even if we don't take your insurance at our provider group, we can always route you to the right care locally or anywhere else. And really, we started with this sort of first touch experience. We wanted to make sure it was as easy as possible to get access to immediate care. And the ambition has always been to build an entry point to healthcare where you should be able to come to us for absolutely anything. And what we're launching today is a new way to do that with a chat that has all of your health history in it.

• 2:23:47Speaker 07

  You know, we've been watching, I think probably like you guys, people have been chatting with ChatGPT and Gemini and others about their healthcare. And, you know, it's something like 60 or 70% of probably any all adults out there. And what we've noticed though is that those chats don't go anywhere. They, they aren't connected back into the rest of your care. And so at General Medicine, what we've been building is the ability to go from that chat. Straight into into actual care and all of it is health history aware. So we import all of your records, make it really easy for you to have a conversation with them.

• 2:24:22John Coogan?

  How are you importing records? I feel like my records are all over the place. Sometimes the doctor just hands me a piece of paper. I lose it. Sometimes it's an email. Sometimes there's a web form or web portal that I have access to. Sometimes I went and used some one-off like, you know, internet product that I signed up for, did some labs, have some data over there. It feels very messy. I understand that AI could do cool stuff with it, but I feel like I will be very lazy about actually centralizing all the data in my life, since it's not organized.

• 2:24:52Jordi Hays?

  You need an agent that goes and finds every doctor.

• 2:24:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, maybe. But how do you see actually the the the most important pieces of health information, pulling those in? What's the workflow like? How does the how does the user actually experience this?

• 2:25:07Speaker 07

  We we have a bunch of elves and you tell us, yeah, they just stay right out there.

• 2:25:13John Coogan?

  That's great. He's gonna ring the gong for the elves.

• 2:25:21John Coogan?

  We completely lost him on the camera, too. You dodged him completely.

• 2:25:26Jordi Hays?

  Where am I? Here I am.

• 2:25:27John Coogan?

  There we go. Okay.

• 2:25:29Speaker 07

  You know, that's the I think we've been willing to wrestle with the complexity of healthcare. That's the difference of being willing to take people's insurance, being willing to embed yourself in the entire healthcare system. And so, yeah, you look at what traditional healthcare or sorry, tech companies have been doing. They've given you these ways to import your records one-off. And the problem with that is exactly what you said. You get one record from one care event. You know, when I imported my records into general medicine, I had stuff going back to 2005, more than 20 years of records that got automatically imported. And the difference is, we're an actual provider group and we're providing real treatment. And that gives us the ability to go collect a lot more information because it's critical to the way that we provide care. Ultimately,

• 2:26:12Speaker 07

  this is the contact that we're using that lets us provide this this much richer care to folks when they come through the front door.

• 2:26:20Jordi Hays?

  So is the goal for this to be like? Effectively like passive where even if I'm not immediately seeking like a treatment, I'm and I'm just trying to understand my health. Maybe I have like shoulder pain and I want to understand that this is some I'm coming to general medicine to just like have a conversation with an LM and maybe later I come back and I'm like, okay, I actually want to pursue treatment now, whatever, whatever I learned is not going away or whatever. And then, and then you guys can help route it. Is that, is that the goal?

• 2:26:51Speaker 07

  I think, you know, honestly, whenever anybody comes in, if you're experiencing shoulder pain, there's always advice that we can help support you with that's going to help you figure out when's the right time to seek imaging or when's the right time to go to PT, when's the right time to talk to a clinician about it. And that's the, that's the whole point of trying to have the care deeply embedded into the experience is you shouldn't have to just wait to see if it magically gets better or doesn't before deciding to really engage with the healthcare system. If it was easy to engage with, you'd do it right away. And that's what we want to enable. Actually, I've had foot pain for the last two years and the connection I had never made in my head. I've been wrestling this with this. I've been talking to doctors about it. I've been exploring it. And when I loaded all this into general medicine, it was the first time I

• 2:27:35Speaker 07

  made this connection back in injury I had in 2005 on my, on my left foot. And it was the, the LM that helped me appreciate that there might be a connection between these two. And it started helping me explore, you know, what are the different options to figure this out? We decided, you know, one, one of the options that came out of that was imaging. I ultimately booked a visit so I could debate whether the imaging was really the right thing or whether PT was the right thing. Since this had been going on for so long, we decided, my clinician and I decided that really jumping straight to imaging was probably the right next step. And the imaging ended up finding these cysts in my ankle and

• 2:28:14Jordi Hays?

  cysts.

• 2:28:15Speaker 07

  I'm a relatively, yeah. I'm a relatively educated consumer and I read the report and I didn't really understand it. You know, you get like that MRI, you log into your portal, you're downloading all this stuff, it's like this really technical language. And I started reading, I just didn't really get it. And I dumped it all into our, into general AI. And it started explaining it to me perfectly. In fact, it was so different, though, than my understanding of it. I had to give it to one of my buddies who's a radiologist, because I thought it meant that this was thing was wrong. And he was like, no, no, it's giving you a perfect interpretation. That's exactly what the radiologist said in the read. And so that, I was then able to start exploring with it, all of these different pathways. So is surgery the right next step?

• 2:29:00Speaker 07

  Is there a different, you know, less invasive approach? And ultimately, you know, this thing is not going to diagnose me, it's not going to tell me what the right next step in the care is. But being able to have that very exploratory, in-depth dialogue, by the time I get to the actual visit, to talk about the different options with a doctor, now I've got this clear idea in my head of, man, there's these three or four different options, I actually don't know which one's right for me, but here kind of the puts and takes. And that just makes it way easier to then have this super rich dialogue with the doctor about which of those pathways is best for me.

• 2:29:29Jordi Hays?

  What, what is it like being a doctor post LLM in general? Like, are, do you think patients in general are coming in more informed, or more freaked out for no reason? Everyone's been told by a doctor, you know, don't Google it, you know, don't, don't, don't search and then add Reddit to the end, you just go down a rabbit hole. But I think everybody's experienced at this point of like, actually, it can be very empowering to like, do research, and maybe it has some negative side effects, but in general, I think this is, people want information, they want to understand their health, and you're never going to stop them from exploring.

• 2:30:10Speaker 07

  I think we're, we're pretty clearly on the side of like, you want to give people these tools. More, more, more data and information is helpful. You want consumers to be empowered, you know, it's their bodies, it's their health. They're the ones who get to make the decision. Uh, the clinician should not be a gatekeeper. The clinician should be a, a guide, a quarterback, helping them get to the best care for them. And we think AI is a really critical tool in that process. It helps the consumer understand more upfront so they come to the visit way better prepared, have a really rich dialogue. We also then have a bunch of tools that let us share that conversation in a nicely summarized way with the doctors. The doctor, when you show up, they know a conversation you've been having. They have a sense of that history and what you're interested in exploring in a visit.

• 2:30:52Speaker 07

  And so in a 15, 20 minute visit, you can just dive right into the meat of the conversation. You know, you don't have to spend the entire time just ramping up on the history.

• 2:31:00John Coogan?

  How do clinicians see you? Uh, is, is, do they see you as just like a funnel for business broadly? Like they all want to be on, on general medicine, um, having you, uh, funnel customers to them. Is there any sort of negotiation that happens? Is all of this just happening sort of by default? Is there opt in, opt out? Like, what is the relationship between you and the, you know, the radiologist, for example, in that example you gave?

• 2:31:30Speaker 07

  We've got two ways that you could work with us.

• 2:31:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:31:32Speaker 07

  Um, one is you can join the platform and see patients directly through the platform. And in that scenario, you're getting paid just like you would as part of any health system, getting paid for providing care.

• 2:31:42John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:31:43Speaker 07

  Uh, separately from that, we have these really rich, uh, tools that help us understand the quality and, uh, the different services that each physician across the country provides. And so when a customer needs follow-up care, um, we can help them search very precisely for the exact right care. So to come back to my ankle example, you know, I can go hunting in that, uh, in that database for the doctor that is going to be the perfect one to remove this cyst for me. Not just a general orthopedist, but someone who has experience in that exact surgery and that exact repair. And I think this is actually where physicians and consumers are perfectly aligned. Consumers want to get to the exact right doctor for their need as quickly as possible. It's just really hard to know what that is because you didn't go to med school, you didn't go to residency. Like you don't have the same expertise.

• 2:32:27Speaker 07

  Same thing on the other side, the doctor wants to practice, you know, they want to focus on the patients. They're going to be the absolute best to see. And today, there's just no good way for the consumer to know that they're going to the right doctor for them. And there's no good way for that doctor to say, hey, you know, these are exactly the type of patients that I'm going to be really good at. You know, I'm really good at these ankle repairs, but I don't want the knees. There's no way to filter for that today.

• 2:32:50John Coogan?

  Um, one more question from me and then you can close it out. Um, I did i- i- in terms of like AI and health, uh, we're still, it feels like we're very much in like the abstract era of like, maybe it'll cure cancer and it feels like, uh, a couple of years ago, when in broadly in AI, we were like, maybe there'll be like an economic explosion, we'll be growing at 10% GDP. And like the economic data, at least this year, has been like, pretty fine, like same as, it's like not bad, but also not great. And like the unemployment rate just came back and like sort of mixed and like the stock market's doing well, but it's not like, oh, 10% GDP growth. Um, and I'm interested in if, you know, you know, Sachin Adella said like, I'll believe the AI like fast takeoff narrative.

• 2:33:35John Coogan?

  When I see GDP growing really, really fast, like what are some of the health metrics that you would look to, to, to judge in, in five years, 10 years, is AI having a really dramatic impact on health? We've seen, you know, I think everyone has expect, expectations about what's happening with, uh, the, the peptides and GLP-1s, right? And we would expect that if the GLP-1 mission works, uh, you'll see obesity rates fall. But is there a broader health metric that you could imagine tracking to understand the impact of what you're doing? But also just broadly, like AI in medicine, uh, having an impact?

• 2:34:15Speaker 07

  You you want us to get a metric that's not like Chinese peptide shipments into the country?

• 2:34:20John Coogan?

  I mean, that one would be probably worth tracking as well, but yeah, I'm just wondering like, like, what are the high level KPIs for like? The we look at a lot of like the health of the American consumer. How much did they spend on Black Friday? What about the the health of the just the health of the American? Like, how are we tracking that?

• 2:34:38Speaker 07

  I think we look at this stuff all wrong, honestly. Like, we spend the last 20 years optimizing for the financial relationship between the doctor and the system. And so all of our health metrics, the way we talk about it, it's all about cost. I personally, I don't think that's what we should be optimizing for. I think we should be optimizing for the consumer and their enjoyment and their fulfillment that they get out of that experience. So to me, it's, you know, if you want to boil that down as a metric, it's something like net promoter score. Like, how much do you love interacting with the system, the healthcare system? And today, that's a silly question because the answer is nobody. Nobody loves interacting. That's the craziest thing. Like, it's the most it's it's the definition of wealth, right? Like, the most important thing that any of us have in our life is probably our own health.

• 2:35:19Speaker 07

  We should love interacting with it. We should love engaging with it. And to me, that'll be, that's the metric I would look for, particularly around AI. You know, it has this opportunity to completely shift the way consumers engage with their health and how empowered they are in it and really make them the customer. You know, at the end of the day, I think so much of our healthcare system today, the consumer is not actually the customer. And our ambition of general medicine is to build a completely new health system where the consumer gets to be the actual customer of their own care. And my personal belief is if we do that, we will solve most of the problems in healthcare. Most of the stuff we complain about, it's because the customer is the employer, the customer is the doctor, it's the insurance company, it's the government, it's not the consumer. And I think healthcare, I think AI has a real chance to shift that back around and make the consumer the center of that.

• 2:36:04Jordi Hays?

  I love it. All comes back to MPS.

• 2:36:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:08Jordi Hays?

  It's a final metric.

• 2:36:09John Coogan?

  The final boss.

• 2:36:10Jordi Hays?

  If you think about it, like, in in times that I've rate, like, like, my NPS score for a company would be like, one.

• 2:36:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:16Jordi Hays?

  It was like a healthcare-related experience, you know?

• 2:36:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:36:20Jordi Hays?

  Like, where if you get misdiagnosed, or just get bad advice, or you get prescribed a drug that you shouldn't be on or whatever, it's like you're gonna have a really bad time. And a lot of that, I think, is avoidable with just.

• 2:36:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, better, better understanding, better, more personalization, et cetera.

• 2:36:38Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, congratulations to the, to the whole team. Uh, very, very exciting and, uh.

• 2:36:43John Coogan?

  Thanks for coming on the show.

• 2:36:44Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you on. Hey, thanks for having me. This was great. I love that.

• 2:36:47John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. So, Rude has weighed in on the word of the year situation. He says the word of the, everyone's word of the year is slop, thus making the word of the year as an article category, slop. What do you think? Word of the year, still underrated, still room to run? Does the word of the year as an article category have motion?

• 2:37:14Jordi Hays?

  We were trying to, yeah, we were trying to figure out our word of the year. The word that we landed on was motion.

• 2:37:20John Coogan?

  I love motion.

• 2:37:21Jordi Hays?

  It's, uh, it's hard to perfectly define.

• 2:37:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:37:25Jordi Hays?

  Define, you know it when you see it.

• 2:37:26John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:37:27Jordi Hays?

  You know when someone has it.

• 2:37:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:37:28Jordi Hays?

  You know when someone doesn't have it. Uh, and I just felt like this year.

• 2:37:33John Coogan?

  You know when they're sleeping, you know when they're awake. You know that who's been bad and good.

• 2:37:37Jordi Hays?

  Good.

• 2:37:38John Coogan?

  Are you on the motion list?

• 2:37:39Jordi Hays?

  Are you on the?

• 2:37:42John Coogan?

  Are you on the motion list?

• 2:37:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does, it does, it, it does feel like everyone, everyone sort of landed on the slop thing. Anyway, you had another story you wanted to run through.

• 2:37:52Jordi Hays?

  Warner is preparing to tell shareholders to reject Paramount offer.

• 2:37:57John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:37:58Jordi Hays?

  Company to recommend existing Netflix deal as soon as Wednesday. So we'll be looking out for that tomorrow. If you want to participate, uh, I'm, I'm kind of tempted to, at least I'm not a, I'm not a Warner shareholder. I'm tempted to buy a share. I'm, I'm tempted to participate.

• 2:38:13John Coogan?

  Just to vote yes or vote no?

• 2:38:14Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, I haven't decided yet.

• 2:38:16John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. You could be swung.

• 2:38:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:18John Coogan?

  You could be swung. You're, you're swing.

• 2:38:19Jordi Hays?

  I want to put the word out.

• 2:38:21John Coogan?

  I'm a single, I'm a, I, hey, I'm going to buy some and I'm going to be a single issue voter. Foghorn Leghorn.

• 2:38:27Jordi Hays?

  I need a new.

• 2:38:28John Coogan?

  I need a trilogy. I'm going to need a trilogy. I'm going to need a Foghorn Leghorn trilogy with a lot of Porky Pig on there. I'm going to need, uh, a, a, a massive cinematic universe all around.

• 2:38:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you want to hold up the process until you can get clarity on how they're going to treat that, that IP.

• 2:38:45John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Foghorn Leghorn is very, very important. Um. Anyway, our next guest is already in the re-streamed waiting room. We have Ali from Databricks. Welcome to the show. How are you?

• 2:38:57Jordi Hays?

  So sharp, so sharp.

• 2:38:59John Coogan?

  You look very sharp.

• 2:39:00Jordi Hays?

  It feels like you're wearing a suit, but you're not. It's your own.

• 2:39:04John Coogan?

  Good to see you again. How are you doing?

• 2:39:06Speaker 08

  Likewise. Good, good, good. I didn't get the memo. I'm not dressed up the right way.

• 2:39:09John Coogan?

  We should have. No, you, you look fantastic. Don't worry about that.

• 2:39:11Jordi Hays?

  Come back on tomorrow. We'll, we'll ship you a Santa outfit. Can raise the next round. We still have a few letters left.

• 2:39:18John Coogan?

  But congratulations. Give us the news. What, what, what happened?

• 2:39:23Speaker 08

  Yeah, what happened is that, you know, we're just seeing an acceleration in the business, especially with respect to AI. And actually, we slice and dice, we're data companies. We slice and dice that data in many, many different ways. Is the particular customer concentration? Is it the particular cloud? Is the particular product? No, it's like, you know, broad-based acceleration throughout the business. You know, we passed $4.8 billion run rate revenue.

• 2:39:48Speaker 08

  Oh, wow. I was asking, I get a gong. Thank you.

• 2:39:52John Coogan?

  Yes, of course, of course.

• 2:39:53Jordi Hays?

  Maybe multiple.

• 2:39:54John Coogan?

  Maybe multiple.

• 2:39:55Speaker 08

  Perfect. Yeah. So over 55% growth. And, but, you know, more interestingly, we, we're now passing $1 billion on our data warehousing product, which we announced four years ago.

• 2:40:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:07Speaker 08

  And we also passed $1 billion run rate in AI revenue, which, you know, makes it, you know, over 25% of our revenue. You know, not that many companies. And there's a lot of talk about AI, what's going on with AI, is there a bubble or not? Not many companies have over 25% of their business in AI and, you know, over a billion dollars. So we're excited about that.

• 2:40:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you thinking about classifying that? Because I imagine that in some ways, a lot of the data warehouse revenue is from AI companies that want to warehouse data because there's more and more need for data because everyone's doing more things with it. We're in this era where everything is becoming AI and yet it can feel a little disingenuous when companies slap AI on the back of their name.

• 2:40:48Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's hard to classify too, because we were looking at some data earlier this week from Ramp that basically said like 50% of businesses aren't spending any money on AI directly, yet they're clearly buying things from companies that are using AI.

• 2:41:00John Coogan?

  Yes. Where in the supply chain is it? But how do you think about, what is the main driver of that data warehouse growth?

• 2:41:08Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, that's kind of interesting. So, you know, um, we, we started the company two thousand thirteen. Yeah. And one of the reasons we started was because we wanted to do AI. Sure. And the problem is, since two thousand thirteen, up until November twenty twenty two, no one wanted to hear AI. Okay, no one was interested in it. And then come November twenty twenty two, ChatGPT gets released, and now everyone wants to just talk about AI. You know, so now it's like, you know, well, you know, are you an AI company? Are you doing AI? What's AI? But yeah, no, when, when we, we split our revenue up, right? You can think of it like, you know, roughly two billion of data munging and securing that data. One billion of data warehousing, and then one billion of AI. So you can like, separate these out. So it's not like overlapping the triple, quadruple counting or anything like that. Yeah. Uh, so what are they doing with AI?

• 2:41:50Speaker 08

  I mean, there's just lots of use cases. So let me give you an example. So we have this product called Agent Bricks. Um, you know, one of the favorite use cases I have is that Merck actually created a model. These are called transformer models, these AI models. They created something called Teddy, which stands for Transformer Enabled Drug Discovery. And this is an AI model. Instead of predicting the next word in English sentence, it can predict cells and cell expressions. So it's called Gen, Gene Regulatory Network. Sure. This is super important for drug discovery, because then the drug companies can target those genes that are responsible for diseases. So that's like a game changer. Yeah. Uh, and then there's lots of use cases like this. Seven Eleven was able to automate most of their marketing stack.

• 2:42:33Speaker 08

  So before, you would have to do your own segmentation, like who should I show this material to, who this will be interesting to? And then you would have to create the material for that segment manually. Now the agents can actually prepare a lot of that material themselves. They can generate images, they can rewrite the text to target a specific group. You can do that much faster now. Um, you know, I could keep going. RBC, Royal Bank of Canada. Basically, when an earnings call comes out, you guys will like this. Earnings call comes out, it fetches the earnings call, it looks at all the previous earnings calls, looks at earnings calls of competitors, looks at what's going on in the market, looks on, you know, the sentiment, and then writes up the equity research report. Sure. Using the tone of the equity research analyst, and they can get this out in fifteen minutes. Which is, you know, usually in the industry, it's at least two hours or several hours. Sure.

• 2:43:17Jordi Hays?

  And every, every minute, every minute matters.

• 2:43:20Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:43:21Jordi Hays?

  Every second.

• 2:43:21Speaker 08

  Exactly. Exactly. So those are some of the use cases that you're seeing out there. So it it is taking off.

• 2:43:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:27Speaker 08

  We're kind of focused on this. Like, you know, I call it sort of, you know, uh, get stuff done or GSD AI rather than, you know, super intelligence AI.

• 2:43:36John Coogan?

  How much of those examples, I mean, there's a great case studies, very, very tangible in a world where there's, you know, not many tangible AI narratives or, um, how many of those, how many of those, um, case studies came from companies that were already using Lake House or a data warehousing product? And then you came to them and they were comfortable working with you or they felt like they would be sped up on working with you, um, on the AI side because they were already comfortable with you housing the data for probably years?

• 2:44:10Speaker 08

  Yeah, almost all of them. Let me explain why, though.

• 2:44:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:12Speaker 08

  There's a reason why. It's not just, hey, we know each other and I'm comfortable with you.

• 2:44:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:16Speaker 08

  Uh, it's the fact that AI today, like large language models are actually a commodity. I mean, they're the coolest thing that ever happened, but they're already a commodity. What I mean by commodity is just like oil, you know, you could get your gas from this gas station. You can get it from that gas station, slightly different price, but doesn't really matter for your car, right?

• 2:44:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:33Speaker 08

  Same thing with L L M's. You can get this L L M or that L L M. You don't even know the difference. This week, this one is better. That week, that one is better at, you know, coding this week. This one can do reasoning. This one can do images. So it's a commodity. So actually, it's now a commodity to have a generative AI model that can answer any question about the world and the history. And it's super smart.

• 2:44:51John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:44:52Speaker 08

  What is super elusive and you can't get your hands on is an AI that can actually reason on proprietary, private enterprise data.

• 2:45:00John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:45:01Speaker 08

  Okay, that's, that actually doesn't exist.

• 2:45:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:03Speaker 08

  Because the techniques used to generate these AI models work on huge amounts of data. Like, when I mean huge, I mean, like, the whole internet. Like, take all the data and crunch it. It doesn't work on a smaller data that enterprises have. So you, how do you then make the AI work on that data that you already have inside the enterprise, right? This could be electronic medical records that are sensitive. It could be financial models that are super secretive. It's your recipe for your alpha generation. Um, so what you need to do is you need to get a good data foundation there. And that's the lake house that you're talking about.

• 2:45:34John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:45:34Speaker 08

  And then the governance and the secure on top of that with Unity Caplock. Those are the kind of things you have to get in place first. Before you can unleash the AI on it. So that's why it's not that they just know us. It's that they've been at it for a long time. And actually, if you haven't gone that foundation right, if your data is a mess, it doesn't help. If your data is sitting in on premise in some old database, you know, some Oracle database and it's locked away. What help is this commodity AI that you have on the top?

• 2:46:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. What advice do you have for founders that are building their business around in and around open source technologies? We've, we, we talked to a lot of young founders that, um, you know, are, are, are open sourcing something really cool. They have a bunch of GitHub stars, there's energy, they don't really have a business model yet. But you can see that they're delivering value and at some point they're going to capture it. What are the do's and don'ts of growing up and being a good steward of an open source project? Or being a good partner to the open source ecosystem? Well, what, what would you counsel a founder in that situation?

• 2:46:38Speaker 08

  Yeah, that's a billion dollar question. It's very hard to get that right.

• 2:46:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:42Speaker 08

  You know, what I would say is number one, there, there's actually kind of two requirements. And there's like an analogy I have that you kind of have to get right. First of all, realize it's a very difficult sport. The sport that you're about to get into open source and to monetize and create this like not an easy sport. So, you know, preferably don't get into it because you might, you know, get hurt.

• 2:46:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:59Speaker 08

  But if you decided if you're hell bent on doing this.

• 2:47:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:02Speaker 08

  Then, you know, you can think of it as, you know, your strategy basically is to hit two home runs after each other consecutively. The first home run and you're banking on hitting that home run is for your open source project to take over the world. Everybody wants to download it. It's like the greatest thing ever. If you don't hit that first home run, you just shot yourself in the foot because you just gave away all of your intellectual property. And you got nothing back for it and now you have nothing. So you better have a first home run and the open source project takes over the world. So that's like step number one. Now you've achieved that, congrats to you. Everybody's paying attention. They're downloading your open source project. The GitHub stars are just like, you know, going vertical. It's awesome. You don't have any monetizable business.

• 2:47:46Speaker 08

  You cannot make any money. So then comes home run number two. Home run number two is now you have a 10x, just as good as the first one. Innovation on top of the open source. And that's the proprietary value that you're going to provide to these companies. That's why they come to you. Otherwise, you know, they can get open source anywhere. And that's how you monetize. And now you have the sort of secret sauce to a really successful company. If you don't hit the second one, the problem is now the big guys, you know, the hyperscalers and others just pick up your open source model and they offer it up for almost free. How do you compete with that? How do you compete with that free? That's where you need your second home run. So it's very difficult.

• 2:48:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, so I want to double click on that part particularly. How do you compete that we have? Because we have other founders that have an open source project and it's growing and they're doing well. And then we see the press release from one of the hyperscalers that their product is now a feature. Their child has been abducted into the cloud. And it's always a, you can just tell, no matter how they respond, it's a scary moment. It's an existential moment. We know that there's a board meeting happening. If you're in, you know, a board meeting, a fly on the wall, an advisor or something, and there's a founder who says, oh, one of the hyperscalers just launched a clone of our product. They're really going to come for us this quarter, maybe next quarter.

• 2:49:07John Coogan?

  What do you advise them to stay in the game while the capital cannon of the mag seven is pointed directly at them?

• 2:49:17Speaker 08

  Well formulated. So I actually get that call from the founder day before the board meeting. And they're like, oh, my God, you know, what do I do? My life is over. And I tell them, congratulations. You just proved that you hit your first home run. They're paying attention to you. So now they're coming after you. So now you need to do another home run. Okay, but your first home run, you just actually succeeded.

• 2:49:36John Coogan?

  This is a home run business.

• 2:49:38Speaker 08

  They would not, yeah, they would not direct all those cannons towards you if you didn't have anything. So you have something now. Now they're direct, now they're coming after you. So now you need to innovate and you need to actually monetize that. And that portion, you cannot open source. If you do, they'll just keep, you know, milking that with their cannons, right? Uh, so that's the way to go about it. And it's a normal part of life. And we all went through it. I went through it. I remember like, you know, waking up, you know, cold sweats in the middle of the night and, you know, freaking out about like, oh my God, this thing will kill us. Uh, but you know, the good news, if you continue innovating, you can stay ahead. Because you know, the people that want to copy you, they're always going to be a few years behind. So if you continue executing, you can stay ahead. And if you did a home run once, you can probably do it again if you set your mind to it.

• 2:50:22Speaker 08

  So just the trick is to stay behind, stay ahead, right? Because the way it works is that startups, the main, the main thing going on is that they don't have time on their side. Right? Like if you could freeze all startups for 12 months, all the Mac seven would catch up immediately. There would be no startups, right? So your whole thing is outrun the big guys very, very fast. So that's another thing I tell them, don't slow down, move very, very fast. Continue innovating.

• 2:50:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, I love that.

• 2:50:47Jordi Hays?

  How do you, uh, how do you categorize everything that's happening in AI? Like what, what is your personal framework? Because like what you're doing is very different than, let's say a foundation model lab, which is different than, uh, you know, maybe, maybe an end rapper company.

• 2:51:02John Coogan?

  Is picks and shovels a pejorative? Is, is, is, is that a pejorative?

• 2:51:06Speaker 08

  No, I mean, look, Levi's still around. I don't know how many gold diggers are around.

• 2:51:10John Coogan?

  That's true. That's a great point. I never thought about that.

• 2:51:14Speaker 08

  Yeah, still here, kicking, you know, here in San Francisco. But I would say there's, there's kind of like three paradigms going on at the same time. Paradigm number one is the quest for super intelligence. And the quest for super intelligence, uh, you know, requires bigger and bigger data centers, more and more gigawatts. And it's very resource intensive. And the idea is to come up with such a smart model that can improve itself to the point that we don't like, you know, it's just curing cancer and coming up with new AI models. And of course, we should be really afraid of the, you know, safety aspects of that. So that's like, you know, what the frontier labs are doing. Uh, I would say, you know, category two is the researchers that created these models in the first place, like Jan LeCoon or Rich Sutton, who created reinforcement learning, that technique. They'll actually tell you like, hey, that's not gonna actually work.

• 2:51:55Speaker 08

  You're not gonna get to superintelligence that way because that's not how humans learn or animals learn and so on. So they're like, hey, we're, you know, leave us alone and we'll get to something in 20 years. Which to me, it sounds like a little bit like, hey, we don't really know, leave us alone. Uh, then there's the third camp. The third camp is, hey, we already have all the AGI we already need. We might not have superintelligence, but we have artificial general intelligence. I'm in that camp. I believe we already have artificial general intelligence. It's generally intelligent, just use it and you'll be convinced within like five minutes, it's pretty smart. Okay, so now start applying it and get stuff done inside of an enterprise or inside of an organization. Just GSD, deliver AI value on basic tasks. And if you're unsure, start with the simplest mundane tasks that, you know,

• 2:52:39Speaker 08

  are, you know, really low cost right now. See if you can start augmenting and automating them.

• 2:52:44Jordi Hays?

  How did you, how did you process the talent wars this year? Uh, I think the question on my mind is, will we see, you know, a, a one billion dollar pay package into, in two years from now or even in, in next year, right? Uh, but I'm curious how you processed it as somebody.

• 2:53:04John Coogan?

  Was it a one-time thing or is it new normal?

• 2:53:07Speaker 08

  That was last year, guys, uh, you know, I think, I think Noam's character got like a billion, right? I mean, they paid billions for character at AI. And that was literally a billion dollars for one guy, at least one billion. So that's already done now. So I mean, 10 billion is the next, I guess, package to go for. And maybe that was Alex at Meta, but, uh, no, but, uh, you know, joking aside, um, I think that it's also in everybody's interest to exaggerate these numbers.

• 2:53:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:30Speaker 08

  Like the joke among CEOs is, let's exaggerate that number, right? It's like, oh, you know, companies are making like hundred billion dollar offers for my employees. Because when you say that, what happens is that, first of all, they approach their employees. Yeah, first of all, it's like a compliment to your team. Second, if someone comes after someone in your team now, they're gonna expect at least that amount. If they don't, they feel insulted.

• 2:53:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:51Speaker 08

  You know, you're not even, you're not even offering me a billion dollars. What's going on here?

• 2:53:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:53:55Speaker 08

  So that's a, that's.

• 2:53:55Jordi Hays?

  They don't value, they don't value my skill set, clearly.

• 2:53:58Speaker 08

  Exactly, exactly, right? So it dissuades everyone. So I think there's also a little bit like self-reported numbers here going on. Uh, the market is not as crazy as, you know, people say, but it has been pretty nutty and especially on the research side. Uh, in AI, but actually I think it's coming. Uh, like it used to be the case that if you're a big shot professor in AI, you could, you know, get funding, huge amounts of funding for crazy evaluations. And if you, you could just say, I want to just do research and get to superintelligence. Those days are over actually already. It's no longer the case that you could, that pitch doesn't work anymore. Uh, and there's no capital, like you're not gonna get a billion or two billion dollars to go just do research on AI. You need to have something more than that. So I do think actually the market is coming to its senses.

• 2:54:40Jordi Hays?

  The timeline, the last 24 hours has been fixated on the role of storytelling within companies. You're a fantastic storyteller, like very just fun to, to listen to and, and animated. I'm curious, were you, were you always goaded or did you, did you have humble beginnings?

• 2:54:59Speaker 08

  There's no way to answer that question, right? Like a trick question?

• 2:55:02Jordi Hays?

  No, it's not, no, no, I, no, I genuinely believe there are founders that come out and they're seed stage and they're hyper engaging and they're incredible to listen to and they get you excited and motivated. And then there are other founders that like have to really learn and, but I, but I think it's like, in some ways, it's like you either have it or you don't.

• 2:55:21Speaker 08

  Yeah, look, I think there's many things that go into like running companies. Like one of them, ingredient number one is to be engaging and excite people and get people excited about your vision, right? But number two, you also need a good strategy. If you're not, if you don't have a good strategy, eventually it's gonna catch up to you. Number three, you need to put together amazing stellar world-class team, right? That's all that matters. Cause if you're amazing, but your team is not, then you're not gonna go anywhere. Even if you have all of these, it's not enough. You need to also execute, like you need to actually get the team to execute again and again and again and get to the results. And that kind of matters more than anything else. I mean, look at AWS, like the phenomenal at executing, right? And then, uh, finally, five, you need to do it with good culture. If the culture is not good, it will eat you up from inside. The key people will leave. You know, we've seen, you know, companies that went under because the culture was bad

• 2:56:06Speaker 08

  or the CEO got fired and, you know, they went through tough times and, you know, the, you know, authorities were after them for fraud and these kind of things. So you kind of have to nail all these five, you know, it's the unfortunate truth.

• 2:56:18John Coogan?

  Well, is it Series L now? You're quickly running out of letters of the alphabet. We have to ask, are you going to be hanging out with us at the New York Stock Exchange anytime soon? Or are there, are there no plans to go public? Because we'd love to

• 2:56:36Speaker 08

  hang out there. We can hang out there. We can hang out there anytime at the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq, you know, but, but whether we're going to go public, look, we're, I mean, I wouldn't be, I wouldn't rule it out. Okay. We would be public by the end of next year. But, you know, it's also not like it's guaranteed. Sure. Because the thing I want to avoid is what happened in 2022. Yeah. In 2021, I had a lot of peers that were too excited. They took their companies public. They're ex, by the way, great storytellers. Yeah. Great execution machines. They're awesome. Yeah. But then interest rates went up, inflation went up. And in 2022, they said, Hey, man, you got to like get EBITDA. You got to produce, you know, margins. So what did they do? They all did layoffs. Yeah. And they all produced EBITDA. And what did they cut down on? All the futuristic stuff,

• 2:57:18Speaker 08

  all the innovation, all the new products, and also employee morale kind of tanked. Yeah. Because, you know, employees are like, I don't trust you anymore. You said this company is going to do well. But now, you know, you're firing my friend here. So, you know, and, you know, as you can see, we're not growing twice the growth rate of many of those companies. Sure. And I think staying private in 2022 had something to do with it as well. So, you know, you know, we're not trying to exactly time the market. We're trying to win it.

• 2:57:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you think that the, the narrative around open source L L Ms is like, is over? Do you think it's understood? Because, you know, the deep seek moment was a moment when everyone was saying, oh, maybe open source will win or it'll have a serious shaping of the market structure in AI. It feels like folks have a much more concrete thesis around the shape of the AI market with, you know, like, you know, an aggregator winning in consumer and then maybe more of an oligopoly and in enterprise code gen and API businesses. And, and certainly the, the open source models fit into that. But how are you thinking about open source AI models developing maybe in next, next year or the year after?

• 2:58:30Speaker 08

  Yeah, I would just say that open source has always been a commoditiser in business.

• 2:58:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:58:34Speaker 08

  You know, like when Linux showed up.

• 2:58:35John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:58:36Speaker 08

  Like, is the greatest thing that's happening right now in the world Linux? No. But what did it do? It kind of commoditized Windows.

• 2:58:42John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:58:43Speaker 08

  Right? And significantly so.

• 2:58:44John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:58:45Speaker 08

  And we've seen that again and again and again. So what it does, it really, it's, it sets the price of the IP of the open source project down to zero. So that price of that intellectual property shrinks to zero overnight.

• 2:58:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:56Speaker 08

  Uh, and that's great because that basically puts pressure on the L L M foundation model layer to have lower and lower prices. And the lower those prices go, the complementary markets, the, you know, market on top, which is us with agent bricks and, you know, Lakebase or, you know, our, our database for agents.

• 2:59:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:13Speaker 08

  Uh, helps that market because, you know, it makes our COGS, our cost of goods sold, which is we would pay for those L L Ms, lower. So I think that's going to continue happening. Uh, and in particular, one interesting trend is that China is putting the pressure on just open sourcing everything. They're not just open sourcing the large language models and the weights. They're open sourcing the whole stack, everything they did. This is the way we open source it. This is the data we use. Here's a research paper and they're having really fast diffusion of innovation happening in China. And that also puts pressure on the West over here. We're like, okay, we can't fall behind. So we're doing the same thing over here. So I think that's just going to continue.

• 2:59:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, so I mean, people, be, be, be, I, I, I completely understand that narrative and it does seem like it's feels like China's commoditizing American foundation labs, uh, and it, and you easily like fall into this like geopolitical narrative. But is there a world where in China, it's, it's really just like, uh, the, the classic open source technology with a for-profit corporation wrapped around it. And they're trying to build like the red hat of L L Ms over there and like, that's the real uh, motivation more than just some like crazy wrench in the system?

• 3:00:24Speaker 08

  Well, I think that I I don't exactly know how the communist party thinks and what they are doing. But I think that over here, we will have companies that are already doing that. Like if you talk to startups already, many, many of the startups in the United States are actually using the open source models and the Chinese. Uh, models. By the way, what's already happened, which people don't talk about openly, is really hush, hush, is that they're taking these Chinese models. And kind of distilling them and you get an American model, right? With an American name and you don't know that it actually tracks back to Quinn from Alibaba or something like that. That's already happening in this market. Like, look at the vast majority of startups, a huge amount of open source Chinese models that are being used. By American open source models. And I think you'll have actually red hat like companies here, even here in the United States that will say, hey, you know, we'll help you get up to speed.

• 3:01:09Speaker 08

  Use the right ones, make sure it has the right safety and guardrails and you're not taking any risk and we do it at low cost. That's already happening in some sense. And then there are people who do that in the cloud. We actually help you do that. We at Bitrix, we are multi L L M. So we have O E M. So OpenAI is available natively to all of our customers. Anthropic is natively available to all of our customers and Gemini is natively available. So it's like if you're using the Eterix, those three are actually under the hood. And then we have all the open source models to let you. So since we are the next layer on top, right? That's the complementary market that I was talking about. Uh, so I think this will continue. And I think actually that's good for innovation that that's happening. There's so much pressure on that middle layer. Cause it is a very lucrative layer, right? I mean, you know, as judging from the evaluations of Anthropic and OpenAI that are very well deserved.

• 3:01:53Speaker 08

  Uh, you know, that's an important market. So, uh, I think this will just continue. You'll see more and more open source. That's not going to stop. And it's going to be from China. My prediction is that you're going to also see that now from Europe and United States. Cause you know, do we want Chinese models to take over the whole planet in open source? I think that some nations will say, hey, why don't we just get together and fund a supercomputer and then build one here? By the way, we used to do that back in the day. It was called supercomputers. National labs that had supercomputers, the largest computers on the planet used to be supercomputers, state funded. That's going to start happening, you know, in either this country or that country. And once that starts, you know, everyone wants to get in like, you know, United States is going to have the biggest one, right? Uh, so my prediction.

• 3:02:37Jordi Hays?

  What does your sales process look like at this stage? Like where are you investing time specifically with customers that are in the pipeline? Like what's the highest leverage and what is even the workflow look like?

• 3:02:53Speaker 08

  I mean, we have many different segments at Databricks. There is a self-serve segment.

• 3:02:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:56Speaker 08

  You can actually sign up. There's a free edition of Databricks. That's really important funnel for us. The free edition, anyone can just sign up with their Gmail and use Databricks forever. But you don't get lots of compute. You don't get lots of AI. You get a little sliver. So you get a taste of Databricks forever. Then, you know, we have.

• 3:03:14Jordi Hays?

  Good. This is your sales process. You're selling right now. Always.

• 3:03:18Speaker 08

  You should try it out. You guys have a Gmail address. If you have a Gmail address, you know, go to databricks.com/try. And so once you've done that, then comes, yeah, then comes the trial. The trial, it's like, okay, but that was just a sliver of compute. I mean, you know, I want to, I want to process a lot of LLMs. I want to use the bigger models. I want to do more interesting things with Agent Breaker. I want to have my database with Lakebase. Then I would say get the free trial. So free trial will give you, I think, $200, something like that. And you get to spend $200 for free with us. And so that's sort of the funnel. And then from there, people convert. This is really how most SMBs, mid-market companies, that's how they get started on Databricks.

• 3:03:57Jordi Hays?

  I'm talking about, I'm talking about the big dogs.

• 3:04:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. How different is the organization? Do these people, like the person who maybe is responsible at some level for the biggest deal you've ever done and the person who's responsible for the smallest deal? Are these like, have these people ever met in the organization? Are they completely separate? Is there some cross-functional opportunity? They're very different functions, I imagine. One is steak dinner, the other is like UI UX, I would imagine, but I don't know.

• 3:04:22Speaker 08

  Well, believe it or not, the steak dinner days are kind of over.

• 3:04:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:04:25Speaker 08

  You know, I mean, it's not like, hey, we'll just take you out and we have like the best golf players and we have the best drinkers that, you know.

• 3:04:31John Coogan?

  To be clear, if you take us out to a steak dinner, I mean, we'll go to databricks.com/try. I would.

• 3:04:38Speaker 08

  Yeah. Yeah. And you're paying me $0. Right?

• 3:04:42John Coogan?

  I was hoping I would sneak that by you.

• 3:04:45Speaker 08

  Exactly.

• 3:04:46Jordi Hays?

  Stake futures are selling off massively right now.

• 3:04:51Speaker 08

  Stake prices are just going down. Exactly. I'm sorry, guys. What I would say is that, you know, we actually have a funnel. So, you know, you start maybe as a sales development leader. Actually, we have one at DataBrix, you know, guy called Matt started just, you know, hitting the phone, just getting these SMBs and then grew with the business, then got into the sort of more mid-market accounts and then now like on the enterprise side. So, you know, we have people who grew up with DataBrix and they can, you know, you learn to do the whole, all the way to the, you know, it's a lot of it is just getting comfortable. Right? Because it's like, it's one thing if I'm negotiating with you a $30,000 deal. It's another thing if I'm negotiating with you a, you know, $250 million deal. And, you know, a lot of folks will just get nervous and they'll just start shaking. Right? So, but how do you do that? How do you get that, you know, $200 billion, $200 million deal?

• 3:05:37Speaker 08

  You know, it actually goes back to those free editions and those things. In that conversation with an exec high up, we will say, did you know that you're already leveraging open source sparks throughout the organization already? Did you know that you're already having people using the free edition with their Gmail accounts? You know, you have all these trials. By the way, the things I'm telling you about today, if you don't trust me, you can go yourself try it out in the free edition. So, actually that kind of motion, bottom-up motion helps a lot, even in the top-down big enterprise sales. And that, but there, the goal is what are the transformational projects that you want us to help you with? And how do we really drive business value for your organization? Like, what's a big strategic board level initiative? Let us help you, make you successful with that.

• 3:06:20Jordi Hays?

  We're trying to get to, we're trying to get to 24 hours a day. And so, we're really trying to use AI, 24 hours a day live, use AI to optimize when John sleeps, when I sleep, all that stuff. Anyways, this has been super fun. Congratulations to the whole team on the milestone.

• 3:06:35John Coogan?

  We'll save it for next time.

• 3:06:36Jordi Hays?

  Looking forward to the next letter.

• 3:06:38Speaker 08

  Awesome.

• 3:06:38John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Thanks so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:06:42Jordi Hays?

  What a legend.

• 3:06:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, what a legend. He's such a great, such a great CEO, such a great conversation.

• 3:06:48Jordi Hays?

  More breaking news. Kushner's affinity withdraws from Warner Bros.

• 3:06:53John Coogan?

  No way.

• 3:06:54Jordi Hays?

  Takeover.

• 3:06:54John Coogan?

  Wow, this is breaking news right now. That is wild.

• 3:06:58Jordi Hays?

  Jared Kushner is exiting from the takeover battle. Affinity was helping to finance Paramount's bid for Warner Brothers, but now believes the dynamics of an investment have changed since it became involved in the process. The battle for Warner Brothers stands to reshape the entertainment industry regardless of which bidder emerges victorious. With both bids raising.

• 3:07:16John Coogan?

  Reading between the lines, I think we know what happened. Jared Kushner, clearly a Foghorn Leghorn fan.

• 3:07:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:23John Coogan?

  When not enough Looney Tunes in the deal, not enough Porky Pig.

• 3:07:26Jordi Hays?

  I'm out.

• 3:07:27John Coogan?

  Not enough Foghorn Leghorn.

• 3:07:28Jordi Hays?

  And on that, I'm out.

• 3:07:29John Coogan?

  I'm out. I can't, I can't support this. If, if David Ellison is going to pull the plug on the Looney Tunes Cinematic Universe reboot and three trilogies of Foghorn Leghorn live action, I'm out. I'm not doing it. This is very exciting. It feels like, is it going to land with Netflix? We're back and forth on this now. But it feels like Netflix has certainly the upper hand, a lot of support, and barring some wild card in Washington, wild card with the, with the shareholders, they're set up. I mean, the board has accepted the offers. Aslove is moving his thumbs up on it, right?

• 3:08:05Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. Ellison's haven't given their best and final offer though. We know that. They said that themselves. So.

• 3:08:10John Coogan?

  And I mean, to be clear, there are other sources of capital beyond affinity partners. So, like, they could clearly marshal the capital. I mean, Larry Ellison himself has it. He's worth 250 billion. We're talking 80, we're talking 90, we're talking 100. It's a lot, but there is a lot of money there to, you know, pool around if you need to. Anyway.

• 3:08:32Jordi Hays?

  I wouldn't be, I wouldn't be surprised if in the next 24 hours, we see a new, a new offer, right? There, you have a current one likely, you know.

• 3:08:44Jordi Hays?

  Zaslav pushing to reject the offer.

• 3:08:46John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:08:46Jordi Hays?

  This is the moment where they kind of need to up the ante a little bit.

• 3:08:51John Coogan?

  Well, we got to get one of our, our media correspondents back on the show because that's been the highlight of last week was talking to Dylan Byers and Ben Smith about media and getting up to speed on the, the story behind the Warner Brothers Netflix, you know, Paramount deal. Anyway, in other big company news, the Unilever CEO disclosed Nutriful and Liquid IV revenues. Have you ever been a Liquid IV guy?

• 3:09:23Jordi Hays?

  No. Element guy.

• 3:09:24John Coogan?

  You're an element guy. That's right. You like salt, not whatever's in Liquid IV. Sugar?

• 3:09:29Jordi Hays?

  Sugar. It is base though. Sugar is very good for hydration.

• 3:09:32John Coogan?

  You like, you like it. I, I really enjoy the Liquid IV. Actually, I gotta say, I just turned from Liquid IV because I'm on the new Chris Williamson creatine in the, in the stick pack. Yeah, that one, the new tonic that the elf is putting under the tree this week.

• 3:09:50Jordi Hays?

  A shot of Tyler?

• 3:09:51John Coogan?

  The new tonic creatine stick, stick pack. You can open it up and show what they actually look like. Just pull the whole thing off. Oh yeah, that's fine. So it's this little stick pack like, like Liquid IV, like the one that you were having, Elemente. But it has creatine in there, five grams of creatine in there. And, and normally I'm used to drinking the sand, the creatine sand. And this is fantastic. It's so, it's so delicious. Yes, you can just shoot it back if you want to be the boldest elf in the, in Santa's workshop.

• 3:10:23Jordi Hays?

  Ben just texted wrist check the elf.

• 3:10:26John Coogan?

  Wrist check the elf. That's hilarious. But anyway, back to Liquid IV world. In a fireside chat with JP Morgan, the Unilever CEO, revealed that both Nutriful and Liquid IV have entered the billion dollar brand club. I don't know if you want to ring the bell.

• 3:10:44Jordi Hays?

  Go for it. I'll take the next one. Entered the billion dollar brand club. Great execution from Unilever. Sometimes when they announce these acquisitions, it sounds a little crazy. They pay a lot, but they know how to scale. They have the distribution.

• 3:10:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:59Jordi Hays?

  They are soft circling one and a half billion euros per year for M and A. I was thrilled to see this. I have a lot of friends with CPG. Businesses that are starting to get to a scale where they are prime targets and I am, I'm just very excited for them.

• 3:11:16John Coogan?

  So Liquid IV, they bought it when it was doing 120 and now it's doing over a billion. What a good run. Do we know what they paid for Liquid IV back in the day? How much actually, how much did that deal cost them? That would be interesting. Because, but, but I mean, it just, it is, it is, it is a testament to the CPG founders.

• 3:11:38Jordi Hays?

  500 million.

• 3:11:39John Coogan?

  500 million and now they're making a billion a year in revenue. I mean, I don't know that they're 50% net margins.

• 3:11:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's very high margin.

• 3:11:47John Coogan?

  I would think it's high margin. And so imagine you sell for 500. You're, you're the founder of this, of this company. You're doing 120. You sell for 500. You're like, this is amazing. I have 120 million dollar business. But then five years later, they're making 500, what they paid for you in that one year. They're making that every year for as long as the brand's around. So don't underestimate just compounding at scale with these businesses. Get what you deserve. Don't, don't take it.

• 3:12:14Jordi Hays?

  No, I think, I think Liquid Death will be a good case study there because they certainly would have had opportunities to sell. They raised a huge amount of money and they kind of probably took them out.

• 3:12:23John Coogan?

  And there were a lot of people saying, oh, it's overvalued now, but you know, if you just keep compounding.

• 3:12:28Jordi Hays?

  Let Mike cook.

• 3:12:29John Coogan?

  More, I, I completely agree. Just like, like there's no one else that's really going after that particular brand positioning. You let it compound, it becomes this unique thing. It becomes Lindy, basically. And whenever we talk about CPG.

• 3:12:41Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of compounding.

• 3:12:43John Coogan?

  What's compounding?

• 3:12:44Jordi Hays?

  Anne over at Forbes says, beloved productivity app Notion told employees today it is doing a $300 million tender at an $11 billion valuation. The company crossed 600 millionaires, half of which comes from AI.

• 3:12:57John Coogan?

  That is fantastic.

• 3:12:58Jordi Hays?

  Watch out for more Notion rounds slash an IPO. I expect that they will get out in, in.

• 3:13:06Jordi Hays?

  God willing in the year 2026.

• 3:13:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but we'll see.

• 3:13:10John Coogan?

  That'd be amazing.

• 3:13:11Jordi Hays?

  They are on, on a tear. Uh, Notion was a $2 million seed, according to Jason, to 11 billion in 12 years.

• 3:13:20John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 3:13:21Jordi Hays?

  Great case study of growing into your valuation, Jason says.

• 3:13:23John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 3:13:24Jordi Hays?

  2013, $2 million seed.

• 3:13:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, if you scroll down on this, on this, this chart, you can see a huge jump in valuation and it takes them a while to catch up.

• 3:13:32Jordi Hays?

  This, this was the journey. So they, 2013, they had a $2 million seed. 2019, they had 3 million of ARR and they got to an $800 million valuation.

• 3:13:40John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 3:13:41Jordi Hays?

  2020, they're at 13 million of ARR to a $2 billion valuation. 2021, 31 million of ARR to a $2 billion valuation.

• 3:13:49John Coogan?

  That is so crazy because I mean, if this number is right, they, they, they basically triple revenue, not even triple revenue. And they, and they see their multiple double, their multiple doubles from 150x to 300.

• 3:14:00Jordi Hays?

  But then from 2021, they grew, they grew revenue from 31 million to 600 million and the valuation went up 10%.

• 3:14:08John Coogan?

  And it was the correct, yeah, it was the correct, uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It eventually caught up. Wow.

• 3:14:14Jordi Hays?

  Amazing, amazing execution. Obviously the, the VCs in 2021 are not getting an insane.

• 3:14:21John Coogan?

  No.

• 3:14:21Jordi Hays?

  ARR on that, but.

• 3:14:22John Coogan?

  But job's not, job's not finished and story's not over.

• 3:14:26Jordi Hays?

  You're in the green.

• 3:14:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, what, yeah, what a, what a remarkable revenue ramp. So yeah, everyone that was paying for it, they're.

• 3:14:32Jordi Hays?

  Says, price of the brick going up.

• 3:14:35John Coogan?

  Price of the brick.

• 3:14:36Jordi Hays?

  We, we missed saying that.

• 3:14:38John Coogan?

  We should have, we should have hit him with the bricks. But it was good chatting with him. So yeah, as we know, DataBricks raised us.

• 3:14:44Jordi Hays?

  Brandon Balo says, this is crazy. The lululemon leggings to oil ratio just hit a new high. You can now buy two barrels of oil for every one pair of lululemon.

• 3:14:54John Coogan?

  What are we talking about?

• 3:14:55Jordi Hays?

  High rise. Like this is one of the most important economic metrics in the world, John, obviously.

• 3:15:00John Coogan?

  What?

• 3:15:00Jordi Hays?

  This says so much about.

• 3:15:04Jordi Hays?

  The state of of of markets.

• 3:15:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, hilarious. Also, uh, it it is making me feel like Lululemon leggings are made from oil.

• 3:15:15Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think they are.

• 3:15:16John Coogan?

  They sort of are, right? Isn't it? It's like petroleum-based polyester or something. I don't know.

• 3:15:20Jordi Hays?

  Yes. My understanding, yes. TJ Parker.

• 3:15:23John Coogan?

  Maybe this is fake news.

• 3:15:24Jordi Hays?

  Posted this.

• 3:15:26John Coogan?

  This is so good.

• 3:15:27Jordi Hays?

  Before there was TVPN.

• 3:15:28John Coogan?

  Look at him on Fox Business.

• 3:15:30Jordi Hays?

  It's funny because this headline is crazy. The CVS killer, he looks kinda like a guy that would kill someone in a CVS.

• 3:15:36John Coogan?

  Is this the CVS? Yeah, who is the CVS killer? Did they ever find the real one? Or did did he ever got, did he ever get brought in for questioning?

• 3:15:45Jordi Hays?

  He does. I'm gonna say, I'm gonna say, he looks more like a young Santa Claus.

• 3:15:49John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. That's a much nicer thing to say.

• 3:15:53Jordi Hays?

  I take it, I take it back.

• 3:15:54John Coogan?

  But wow, countdown to the closing bell. In three minutes, he hops on CVS killer. And, uh, I don't know, he didn't quite kill CVS, but what a fantastic run with PillPack. Uh, absolutely legendary business and, uh, he's already on to the next one at General Medicine, so it's, uh, it's fantastic.

• 3:16:14Jordi Hays?

  Singer Vehicles just put up a minute 22 seconds.

• 3:16:17John Coogan?

  This is huge news. This is the biggest news in technology these days, I think, I think. So Laguna Seca, the legendary, uh, racetrack in California. Uh, this is an American hypercar, so the.

• 3:16:29Jordi Hays?

  Production car lap record.

• 3:16:30John Coogan?

  The story here is that, um, the, um, the story here is that, uh, Koenigsegg set the lap record just a few weeks ago and Lucas Singer took it personally. And he said, I'm gonna go and put up a better time, and he did. Uh, but this car is insane. So it it has, it's a two-seater, but they're both centered. So it's like a fighter jet. I don't know why everyone's lying like that's laughing. That's like a fact.

• 3:17:03Jordi Hays?

  It's a very cool setup.

• 3:17:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, so, so you sit, you sit like this, one after the other, and the doors, we need to pull up a picture of

• 3:17:11Jordi Hays?

  Why are you guys laughing? That's just fire. I've never heard anything like that. I've never heard of that before.

• 3:17:15John Coogan?

  If you go to four seconds on this, on this main video, the Laguna Seca video here, uh, on X, um, you can see the door. So the door, yeah, the doors are two, two doors long because you need to let two people in. So when you open the doors.

• 3:17:33Jordi Hays?

  And I'm sure they're planning to let it fly at some point.

• 3:17:35John Coogan?

  It's cra- it's, yeah, it's absolutely crazy.

• 3:17:37Jordi Hays?

  Don't you think part of that, it's ready to, they, they have a secret feature?

• 3:17:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:40Jordi Hays?

  Trying to beat Elon to the flying car like he was alluding on, on Joe Rogan.

• 3:17:43John Coogan?

  So there, so there has been a recent hypercar war at Laguna. This is specifically for the production car record. Uh, Zinger, uh, Zinger just took it by two seconds. So on, in August of 2024, Koenigsegg strikes. Koenigsegg brought the Jesco attack to Laguna Seca for the first time. Uh, they got a 124, 86, um, beating the previous longstanding benchmark held by the Singer 12, uh, 21C and the McLaren Senna at 125, 120, and 127. So Singer had it at 125. Then Koenigsegg shows up with the Jesco attack, gets it at 124.

• 3:18:22John Coogan?

  Then, uh, then they come back, lowered the speed record. There was this new, there was this new, uh, you, there's a new, uh, noise limit at Laguna Seca. Your car cannot make more than 90 decibels of noise from the exhaust. I assume Brian Johnson had something to do with this. But you have to bolt on a special exhaust so you're not too loud while you're going on, going on the track. And of course that affects track performance. And so, uh, they reset the record. And Koenigsegg comes back. They have a specific Jesco attack for this new Laguna restriction.

• 3:19:00John Coogan?

  They get a 124 and then Singer comes back on December 9th, just weeks after their Koenigsegg November run. Singer returns with their 3D printed hybrid 21C. Uh, driver, Joel Miller runs a blistering 122. And so, uh,

• 3:19:18Jordi Hays?

  And put into context, the 992 GT3 RS is doing it at 128.65. So quite a big gap.

• 3:19:27John Coogan?

  Basically walking, basically walking speed.

• 3:19:29Jordi Hays?

  Walking speed.

• 3:19:30John Coogan?

  Well, congrats to Lucas Singer.

• 3:19:32Jordi Hays?

  This is all is almost unbelievable. I for me to believe that it's real, he's gonna have to drive it into the.

• 3:19:38John Coogan?

  I I think he is. He wants us to believe that this was built by humans. I I don't, uh, it seems like really in technology, probably.

• 3:19:44Jordi Hays?

  Make it make sense. Make it make sense.

• 3:19:47John Coogan?

  Uh, no, it's beautiful, beautiful vehicle. Uh, anyway.

• 3:19:50Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, final, final, uh, post of the show.

• 3:19:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:19:55Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we posted this yesterday as well, but Future was named friend of the house by Louis Vuitton for embodying its values. And, uh, Louis Pisanos says, and what values would those be? Uh, and, uh.

• 3:20:10John Coogan?

  I don't, I don't, I don't know enough about Louis Vuitton to understand what this means.

• 3:20:13Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's funny. Do you know about Future's values?

• 3:20:15John Coogan?

  No.

• 3:20:15Jordi Hays?

  Have you ever, you haven't listened to a Future song?

• 3:20:17John Coogan?

  I just know, uh, no, I, I really don't know.

• 3:20:21Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I think his primary value is, is getting, getting the bag.

• 3:20:25John Coogan?

  Getting the bag.

• 3:20:26Jordi Hays?

  And so that's kinda how I read it.

• 3:20:28John Coogan?

  Well, they make bags.

• 3:20:29Jordi Hays?

  Other people, other, you know, he, he has, I think, a lot of, a lot of children with a lot of different women.

• 3:20:34John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 3:20:34Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think, maybe that's, I don't know if that's one of Louis Vuitton's values, but.

• 3:20:38John Coogan?

  You know, we were talking about a friend and he was saying like the whole goal, we're in the getting the bag business. Everyone wants to get their bag, get the bag, secure the bag. And I thought that, you know, that, that is a good goal, but there is an alternative, which is to secure a series of smaller bags every two weeks.

• 3:20:55Jordi Hays?

  Every two weeks.

• 3:20:56John Coogan?

  A directly to you, a bag that you have on your bank account. Yes, exactly. So you're getting a series of small bags that then compound over time. You throw them in a large sack like your Santa Claus in the, but no one talks about getting the sack. Everyone talks about getting the bag. No one talks about getting the Santa Claus sack. Um, but you have to get the bag. You get a small, you get a series of small bags and over a life, over a lifetime. You accumulate a bag that gets larger and larger until you have the real bag.

• 3:21:25Jordi Hays?

  Well, here's another post about life from Colty Bra. I know I said it was the last one, but I, I, I take it back. Colty Bra says, a fantastic poster over the years. Uh, he says, you can just do things, go from Olympic snowboarder to head of cartel. $50 million reward from FBI on your head. Life is short. Let it rip.

• 3:21:44John Coogan?

  Absolutely do not let it rip. I do not recommend becoming the head of a cartel. Uh, that is, is insane, but of course it's a very wild story.

• 3:21:53Jordi Hays?

  Maybe become. You know, maybe become the, the head of a $50 million annual revenue business in a, in a sort of legal domain.

• 3:22:02John Coogan?

  Maybe enterprise software.

• 3:22:03Jordi Hays?

  Enterprise software, SaaS.

• 3:22:05John Coogan?

  Maybe a database company.

• 3:22:06Jordi Hays?

  Life is short. Go from an Olympic snowboarder to a SaaS icon. Let it rip. Life is short. And we'll leave it at that. We are, we are actually going.

• 3:22:16John Coogan?

  Breaking news from Tyler.

• 3:22:17Speaker 03

  I have some other news if you want. Opening, I got rid of their model router for, for free users. I thought that was pretty interesting.

• 3:22:23John Coogan?

  What does that mean? Wait, they got rid of it for free users?

• 3:22:26Jordi Hays?

  So if you like, if you like 4O.

• 3:22:29John Coogan?

  It is always there for, is it the model picker or the model router? Is it always on auto or, or can you still, or do you have to pick thinking pro legacy models? Like, how do you pick the model?

• 3:22:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I think it's the, the router. So that means the picker is still there, but it doesn't automatically do it for you.

• 3:22:47John Coogan?

  It just defaults to fast or the basic model?

• 3:22:52Speaker 03

  Uh, I don't know which one it does.

• 3:22:54John Coogan?

  Unless you ask.

• 3:22:55Speaker 03

  I would imagine that, like, if I was thinking through it, like, I, I would, I would think it would be the opposite, right?

• 3:23:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 3:23:00Speaker 03

  Because as a pro user, I want to.

• 3:23:02John Coogan?

  Do pro all the time.

• 3:23:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I want to.

• 3:23:04John Coogan?

  You want to get what you paid for. Yeah, yeah. You want to get what you paid for, but the free user.

• 3:23:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. Who you think is like the unsophisticated person that I don't know which one to use.

• 3:23:12John Coogan?

  Hmm. Interesting. Well, we'll have to dig in. Uh, anyway, thank you so much for tuning in. Merry Christmas to everyone.

• 3:23:20Jordi Hays?

  Trey says cartels only get a bad rap because they don't have a head storyteller. I feel like some of the, I feel like Escobar was low key an incredible storyteller.

• 3:23:29John Coogan?

  Uh, I don't think so. I think people told stories about him. I don't think he was doing any story.

• 3:23:33Jordi Hays?

  He was in politics.

• 3:23:34John Coogan?

  Oh, maybe. Okay. Well, we'll get to the bottom of that tomorrow.

• 3:23:37Jordi Hays?

  He was a politician.

• 3:23:38John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day. Merry Christmas.

• 3:23:39Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for hanging out with us today.

• 3:23:40John Coogan?

  We will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. sharp. It does. When you put on the Santa suit.

• 3:23:44Jordi Hays?

  It does feel like a Friday. We are going go-karting. We are, we are doing a little end of year team outing. We're going go-karting as a, as a team.

• 3:23:51John Coogan?

  Which should be fun.

• 3:23:52Jordi Hays?

  Very excited for that. We will see you guys tomorrow.

• 3:23:55John Coogan?

  Tomorrow. Goodbye.