Rage Baiting is for Losers, Everett Randle’s 5x Controversy | Jordan Nanos, Brian Halligan, Dr. Fei-Fei Li, Scott Sanders, Jeremy Allaire, Vladimir Novakovski, Andrew D'Souza, Parag Agrawal

(00:43) - Rage Baiting is for Losers (27:45) - Everett Randle’s 5x Controversy (38:07) - Rage Baiting is for Losers (42:08) - Dwarkesh Patel’s Satya Interview (01:00:04) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:01:56) - Jordan Nanos, a Member of Technical Staff at SemiAnalysis, discusses the depreciation practices of hyperscalers like Meta, Azure, Oracle, and Google, noting their extension of IT asset lifecycles from three to five years up to six years, which Michael Burry argues artificially boosts earnings. He highlights that Nvidia's two-to-three-year product cycles could pressure companies to upgrade hardware more frequently, potentially leading to increased capital expenditures. Nanos also emphasizes the importance of considering the operational lifespan and performance of GPUs, suggesting that while hardware may be used longer, rapid technological advancements might necessitate earlier replacements to maintain competitive performance. (01:32:07) - Brian Halligan, co-founder and former CEO of HubSpot, now serves as a senior advisor at Sequoia Capital, where he coaches startup founders. In the conversation, he discusses his role at Sequoia, coaching CEOs building AI-driven companies, and his new podcast launching tomorrow, which explores modern CEO practices. He also reflects on the evolving CEO playbook, highlighting unique leadership styles of figures like Jensen Huang and Elon Musk, and notes the emergence of 'five-tool' CEOs proficient in vision, coding, design, recruitment, and sales. (01:59:16) - Dr. Fei-Fei Li, a renowned computer scientist and co-founder of World Labs, discusses her company's vision to advance artificial intelligence by enhancing spatial intelligence, enabling AI systems to understand and interact with the three-dimensional physical world. She highlights the development of Marble, World Labs' first commercial product, which generates 3D virtual environments from text, images, or video inputs, aiming to empower creators in fields like gaming, visual effects, and virtual reality. Dr. Li emphasizes the importance of human creativity, stating that AI should augment rather than replace human creators, and envisions a future where AI's spatial intelligence leads to breakthroughs in various industries, including robotics and medicine. (02:29:48) - Scott Sanders, Chief Growth Officer at Forterra, discusses the company's recent $238 million Series C funding and their focus on developing autonomous vehicle technology for defense applications. He highlights Forterra's efforts to equip military vehicles with self-driving capabilities, communication nodes, and advanced weaponry to enhance battlefield effectiveness and reduce human risk. Sanders also emphasizes the importance of open architecture and partnerships with other defense technology firms to deliver comprehensive solutions to warfighters. (02:38:53) - Jeremy Allaire, CEO and founder of Circle, is a prominent technologist and entrepreneur known for co-creating the web development tool ColdFusion and founding Allaire Corporation. In the transcript, he discusses Circle's impressive Q3 earnings, highlighting a 108% year-over-year growth in USDC and a 600% increase in on-chain activity, reaching $9.6 trillion. He also introduces ARK, a new layer one blockchain network, and mentions collaborations with major companies like Visa and MasterCard, as well as AI firms, to develop agentic payment standards. (02:50:05) - Vladimir Novakovski, a Harvard graduate at 18 and former Citadel trader, is the founder and CEO of Lighter, an Ethereum-based decentralized exchange. In the conversation, he discusses Lighter's mission to provide low-cost, low-latency, secure, verifiable, and composable trading solutions, emphasizing the importance of transparency and trustlessness in decentralized finance. He also reflects on his journey from finance to AI and then to DeFi, highlighting the need for decentralized exchanges to offer superior product-market fit to attract users from centralized platforms. (03:01:59) - Andrew D'Souza, co-founder and CEO of Boardy, discusses how their AI-driven platform connects founders with investors to facilitate business growth. Since its recent launch, Boardy has attracted 5,000 founders seeking to raise $16 billion and 600 investors managing approximately $1 trillion in capital. D'Souza emphasizes the platform's role in creating high-quality, meaningful connections that unlock economic opportunities for both parties. (03:11:24) - Parag Agrawal, former CEO of Twitter, has founded Parallel Web Systems, an AI startup that has secured $30 million in funding from investors like Khosla Ventures and Index Ventures. In the transcript, Agrawal discusses the company's recent $100 million Series A funding round, highlighting the growing demand for AI agents capable of conducting real-time web research across various industries, including sales, finance, healthcare, and scientific research. He emphasizes Parallel's commitment to providing high-quality, authoritative data for AI applications, aiming to outperform existing models like OpenAI's GPT-5 in delivering accurate and reliable information. (03:18:16) - 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 Polymarket - https://polymarket.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 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 TVPN. Today is Wednesday, November 12th, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. What's going on over there, Jordy? You got caught lacking?

• 0:17Jordi Hays?

  I was publishing an essay.

• 0:19John Coogan?

  You were publishing an essay. It's live on X now. You can go listen to it. You can also subscribe at tbpn.com. Our Substack will email you every morning with the TBPN newsletter and, you know, 500 words from me or Jordy. It's a lot of fun. Go check it out. Also, check out ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payment, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. The thing that got Jordy to learn to type was this video, this launch video. You were like, I gotta write an essay. I gotta learn. I gotta lock in. I gotta learn how to write because this is, this is, this is, it's enraged me. Were you enraged?

• 1:01Jordi Hays?

  I wasn't enraged. I try not to let the internet make me mad.

• 1:04John Coogan?

  Okay, but they were trying to enrage you and the fact that they tried made you angry.

• 1:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10John Coogan?

  You got angry. You weren't enraged. You were below enragement, but you were above angry. And so you had to put him in the truth zone. You had to write a long post, an essay about it. We'll go through it, but I'd love to watch the Chad IDE Brainrot Code Editor video. First, I want to see, I want to see the video for myself. Let's play it.

• 1:33John Coogan?

  Okay, so he's got some Newport cigarettes. He's packing, pulls out a cigarette.

• 1:40Jordi Hays?

  With the Stanford.

• 1:41John Coogan?

  Lights it up. He's got the cutoff.

• 1:43Jordi Hays?

  Stanford cutoffs.

• 1:44John Coogan?

  What is this music that's playing? He's got the guitar in the background. And what is he playing? Some sort of plink?

• 1:50Jordi Hays?

  This is steak.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  Oh, this is steak. Okay, so this is gambling. So he's gambling and...

• 1:56Jordi Hays?

  He's gambling in the IDE.

• 2:01John Coogan?

  Okay, so I assume that means he's won something or other? I actually don't know what the steak UI looks like. Okay, so he's done winning. He has won the gambling session with steak and now he's back in his IDE. And he writes a prompt and he says, "Test the code." And it pulls up some sort of mobile game that it's playing.

• 2:23Jordi Hays?

  This is Clash Royale.

• 2:24John Coogan?

  This is Clash Royale, okay.

• 2:26Jordi Hays?

  Have you played? I have played, uh, in middle school, yeah.

• 2:29John Coogan?

  Hmm, interesting. I never played, uh, I never really got into any mobile games. I did play, um, Polotopia. I like Polotopia, that's a good game. It's a mobile game, it's like Age of Empires, but on your phone.

• 2:42Jordi Hays?

  Elon is a big fan of that.

• 2:43John Coogan?

  Elon's a big fan of it. And with Polotopia, actually, the entire Elon universe is sort of into Polotopia. It's like, it's like how you gain status at some of these companies is like waiting in Polotopia.

• 2:52Jordi Hays?

  So I'll start by saying I think the video is funny.

• 2:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:56Jordi Hays?

  And I'm sure the founders are smart.

• 2:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:59Jordi Hays?

  And I think they, they, uh, for a low budget launch video, I think they did well, they broke through.

• 3:05John Coogan?

  That is a very low budget launch video. That, that literally costs nothing.

• 3:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:09Jordi Hays?

  So I think that's great. Uh, and I'm not, and I want to be clear that I'm not bearish on the founders.

• 3:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16Jordi Hays?

  At all. Uh, but this made me think of something and I'll read through my post, so. Uh, the title of the essay that I just put out, uh, Rage Baiting is for Losers. Uh, this is in itself rage bait, if you have been rage baiting.

• 3:32John Coogan?

  There's levels to it.

• 3:34Jordi Hays?

  But I said yesterday, YC announced Chad IDE, AKA the brain rot code editor. Chad is an AI code editor that allows you to gamble, watch TikTok and use dating apps while you work on coding tasks. Their launch rightfully got a lot of attention. On one hand, it's funny. On the other hand, what are we doing here and why does this belong on the official YC account? To understand Chad IDE, Clouly, Icon, Friend and the new class of Gen Z startups, you have to understand the online environment that these founders grew up in. If you grew up on the internet and you studied how and why certain people would regularly go viral. You know that making people mad has and always will be an effective way to get attention. The feedback loop is simple. You make something that makes people angry, and people comment, share, and dunk.

• 4:17Jordi Hays?

  And because feeds are optimized to show posts with high engagement the most, you get a lot of reach. Rage baiting for commercial purposes, in my view, was pioneered by course bros. People like Tai Lopez realized that making the masses mad was an effective way to drive course sales. You could flaunt Lamborghinis, make a bunch of people angry, and as long as a handful of people found their way into their course, it was a viable, repeatable strategy. Historically on X, rage baiting was a marketing strategy, not a product strategy. Accounts like Sweaty Startup, aka Nick Huber, frequently post things to get an angry reaction and the subsequent reach. But behind the scenes, Nick has always been running a pretty normal commercial real estate fund. In 2025, rage baiting has become a product strategy. Clearly started as an app for cheating on coding interviews.

• 5:02Jordi Hays?

  Chad IDE's only known differentiation from the other 100 AI-native IDEs is that you can gamble and swipe on dating apps in it. The rage bait is sitting at the product level now. It's becoming clear that while rage bait might occasionally work as a marketing strategy, it really should not be employed as a product strategy. Running a successful VC-backed company requires you to build a coalition of people that want to see you win. Getting media, investors, talent, and customers on your side is not an easy task. Rage baiting, whether at the marketing level or product level, is the most effective way to get people, who could be potential investors, customers, or team members, to actively prey on your downfall. YC has long provided some of the most durable, high-quality, generalizable advice for startups, and I believe that it has had a tremendously positive impact on the companies that go

• 5:46Jordi Hays?

  through YC and even those that don't. Launch now, make something people want, do things that don't scale, ignore your competitors, are just some of those. So as someone who believes that YC is one of the most important and influential institutions in tech, I believe it might be time to include this in their list of essential startup advice: Rage baiting is for losers. So again, I think, you know, I'm sure that I'm sure that there's like more to chat IDE than than we've seen so far. But I do think it's notable that Ragebait has moved from kind of a fringe marketing strategy to a marketing strategy within tech to now living at the product level.

• 6:28Jordi Hays?

  And I just don't think that's going to create a lot of enduring value for the companies that pursue that strategy.

• 6:33John Coogan?

  Yes. So the the the reaction to this was very negative. And I think there's a few it really has to do with that layer of the stack.

• 6:42Jordi Hays?

  It ends up it ends up it ends up impacting the brands of the firms that fund these ideas.

• 6:48John Coogan?

  Of course, of course.

• 6:49Jordi Hays?

  There's a post, I'll try to pull it up here. Let's see here.

• 6:55John Coogan?

  The the most important different like the most important thing in your piece that I liked was this idea that there is Ragebait marketing, doing a stunt, doing something a little bit crazy, but then delivering a quality product is separate from making the product itself Ragebaity. And so I think a lot of people, when they saw this video, they wanted they were wondering, what does the product actually do? Because all you've told me is that you created an April Fools joke and Google's been doing April Fools jokes for years. Some of these April Fools jokes I was looking at were insane. They in 2000, just a couple of years after they launched,

• 7:37John Coogan?

  they created a fake mind reading search engine. Then they did Pigeon Rank, an explanation that Google's algorithm relied on trained pigeons. They launched a free home broadband service. So internet delivered through your toilet. They they announced Google Translate for animals. You could talk to your dog and it would try and translate. These were all jokes. They were never real products. It was just the Google team having some fun on on April Fools Day. They would get a bunch of attention and then they would route you to the safest, fastest, most secure email system possible, right? Like a real product. But they would have a lot of fun. And sometimes they would even build a little like web experience around it.

• 8:19John Coogan?

  But at the end of the day, it was like, yeah, but also, we're ready to sell you servers with Google Cloud Platform. We're ready to sell you like, you know, ad units on Google. Like, it was like, we have a serious business. And so. The, the question for me and the question I had for Tyler was what's actually under the hood at Chad IDE. The company is not called Chad IDE. It's called Clad Labs. The steel man here is that, hey, IDEs are boring. You gotta do something funny. Film a funny video, create a fake product, but then have something under the hood that is actually real, that does actually advance the conversation and is maybe something that a real product would-

• 8:57Jordi Hays?

  Try to sign up and need a code.

• 8:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. So what happened? We, we asked you to sign up. What happened?

• 9:01Jordi Hays?

  And one, one thing I would say before we go further, I think this would have been a brilliant kind of like stunt, if they did it as a stunt and it wasn't core to the brand that they're building. It wasn't core to the product. If they did it, if they released a product and then later said, hey, we're adding this brain rot functionality. Like that would have been, that would have been, I think, a good reaction.

• 9:23John Coogan?

  If it was April Fool's and, and Michael Truell at Cursor or Scott Wu with Windsurf were like, we're doing, we're doing a brain rot version of the IDE. Everyone would be like, that's hilarious. Okay. Now back to using Windsurf and Cursor, right? Like that's just what-

• 9:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I don't think it, it certainly probably is not a fit for Cursor's brand.

• 9:40John Coogan?

  No, not at all.

• 9:41Jordi Hays?

  If you were creating something to try to compete in that space, it would have been a good strategy.

• 9:44John Coogan?

  But I, I even, even, I would actually fight you on that. I, I think that Cursor has this very, Michael Truell has only done like a few podcasts. He's, he did that podcast with Patrick Collison. He's, he's this very like thoughtful software engineer. Scott Wu is this IMO gold medalist. Like there's something that actually would be very funny and might actually break through if they did some silly brain rotty stunt because it, because it would be like, well, obviously they're not actually doing that. Obviously what they're focused on is just improving developer productivity and instead this, it just, it hasn't answered a lot of the question of like, what's behind the curtain? What's behind the marketing? Because if it's, if it's brain rot stuff, if it's, if it's jokes all the way down, like what are we really doing here?

• 10:29John Coogan?

  But Tyler, what was your experience actually trying to use this product?

• 10:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah. So, so I, I go to the website. Um, you can't download it yet because it's still in beta. You need, you need a code. I DM'd the founders, but they didn't get back to me. Um, but like-

• 10:41Speaker 02

  I mean, the company is not Chad Labs, it's Clad Labs.

• 10:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  This like, it's the Chad ID, but like, this is obviously a marketing stunt. I kind of disagree.

• 10:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, but can you get a product from Clad Labs? Like, Google would come out with a joke, you know, pigeon-based algorithm or something like that. That would be out, or like, Google Translate for animals would be at like, animals.googletranslate.com that day. But Google Translate would still work. So like, walk me through the Clad Labs product. Like, what is their core product outside of the stunt?

• 11:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I, I mean, obviously I haven't tried it, so I'm kind of giving them the benefit of the doubt here, but like, when you go to the download page, there's options like, which brain rot do you want?

• 11:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  And it's like, you know, steak, or like Minecraft parkour, whatever. And then there's an option that says, I don't want brain rot.

• 11:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  So there is obviously a product here that is like, not just, it's not just the brain rot. That's not the entire company.

• 11:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  Like, when you go to the pricing page, it says, it says like, there's, you know, the free, pro, super, whatever tiers. It's not listing like, oh, this one has the Minecraft one. It says like, oh, it has unlimited, you know, agent tool use.

• 11:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  Like, there's obviously a product here. This is a marketing stunt. I like, believe that.

• 11:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  I like, I kind of disagree that.

• 11:51Jordi Hays?

  I just think, I just think it's, I just think it's a poorly executed stunt.

• 11:54John Coogan?

  Because you have not told me what the differentiator is. Like, how is this better than Windsurf? How is this better than Cursor? Like, what is their value prop? Other than just like, oh, cool, it's a newer, it's a newer cursor with less funding, and the team's less serious, but they're good at making viral videos. Like, what does that do for you?

• 12:11Jordi Hays?

  And part of the reaction here that I think is, you know, there's an account, uh, developing Valhalla, is quoted the, the post from YC, said, "This is what we're promoting. Instead of, instead of telling young 20-year-old founders to take us to the moon, to create better societies, to improve the material conditions of our fellow man, YC is funding garbage that is only making our society worse. You don't hate VCs enough." So, I think there's just naturally, like, I just look at YC as, as an institution that has consistently provided just very, sort of like, like, the best quality advice that's generalizable, right? For, for just any, any person that wants to get into startups, so.

• 12:54John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30+ destinations, multi-stream, reach your audience wherever they are. There is, there's this post by Shilmo Not here, he says, "Met a very successful founder who said, 'I chose fund, blank, because they gave me credibility when I needed it. Now the fund backs everything, including the dumbest ideas I've ever seen. I don't think the next wave of founders will pick them. The credibility they had is gone.'" And I was thinking about how AUM weighted brain rot, or AUM weighted slop, is not an excuse for slop and controversial investments. Like, if you, if you put, if you put 1% of your fund into something that is just going to go all over the internet and be like, "We're

• 13:38John Coogan?

  the most degenerate, we're the craziest, we're the most insane, we're the most fraudulent", like, in-your-face company, even if it's only 1% of your fund, you're not going to be able to say like, "No, no, no, 99% of my investments are just, like, you know, trying to cure cancer genuinely, or like, actually trying to improve developer productivity, or like, 99% of my investments are just reasonable down the fairway, like, good businesses." But 1% of them, I took a flyer, 1% is a little bit crazy. Well, if that 1% gets 1,000 times more views than your enterprise SaaS portfolio, like, you're going to be known as the slop fund. So like, you need to be careful about that.

• 14:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:15John Coogan?

  Because, because the nature of the internet is that, is that a viral rage baity video can get 1,000 times more views than your latest bet on AI legal services that might actually be helping improve lawyer's efficiency, or something like that, you know?

• 14:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:33John Coogan?

  So like, in terms of branding, it's a real mess.

• 14:36Jordi Hays?

  YC has always had, you know, one of YC's challenges as an institution is that they can only accept something like... I think it's like less than one, isn't it less than 1%?

• 14:47John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:47Jordi Hays?

  So, super small, you know, very, very low acceptance rate.

• 14:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:52Jordi Hays?

  And so if you're a founder that applied with an idea that you think is, you know, world positive, and then you see them announcing this kind of stuff, they're going to be, you know, that those founders are going to be even more frustrated, right?

• 15:03John Coogan?

  I want Tyler's reaction, but first I want to tell you about Privy, wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, integrate on-chain infrastructure, all who wants to play API. Tyler, what do you think?

• 15:14Speaker 02

  Okay, so like as a steel man, like say that I have some new way to do, you know, agents in my editor.

• 15:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  And it's like, it actually works way better than Cursor, it's way better than Wind Surf, it's better than everything else. And I applied to YC with this thing. Okay, there's like probably, what, like 10 other YC companies that are, like little YC companies in the same batch doing similar, you know, coding editor stuff. How do I differentiate myself? I feel like this is like fairly reasonable, like to get more views. Like, imagine, I think from their opinion, the idea is like, okay, we get some users that are, think it's like funny to gamble in their IDE, and then they realize like, oh, this is actually a pretty useful feature. And this is all assuming that they actually have good tech underneath. But like what, like Jordi, if you were in YC and you had a coding editor company, like,

• 16:02John Coogan?

  How would you launch it?

• 16:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, how do you like recommend, like, instead of doing stuff like this, how do you, how do they differentiate themselves?

• 16:07John Coogan?

  If Cloud Labs had launched something and they were just like, hey, like we're, you know, we're building a better IDE, here's how we use our model. Oh, Cursor, they're currently in a fight with Anthropic, the rates are through the roof. Ours is cheaper for this one reason, and we have this better UI and better functionality. And we also have this engineer who figured out this little, this little solution. And we work on mobile and they don't, or we work on iPads and they don't, or we work for Fortran and they don't, they only do Python. You know, there's a million ways to like articulate your differentiation. They certainly, it doesn't seem like they even tried to do that. It doesn't seem like they even tried.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  Sure, but I, I think there, you could probably find companies in this YC batch doing exactly that.

• 16:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  You don't know their name.

• 16:47John Coogan?

  Yes, yeah, yeah, that is true. That is true.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  And you do, like, I'm not asking that.

• 16:51Jordi Hays?

  I just go back to what I said, which was, which was separate out the rage from the core product and have it be like a marketing stunt. I still think you could have gotten the same amount of attention, but then people would go in and they'd be like, wait, this is actually a really cool, novel approach.

• 17:04Speaker 02

  But I, I don't think we know for sure that they're not doing that. This seems to, like, when I read this, I see it as a marketing stunt.

• 17:09John Coogan?

  But it's like, like, so, so I would, I would agree with you. If I could go to cladlabs.com and like, see the actual product. But it's like cladlabs.com is not even purchased. Like, they, like, there's literally no information.

• 17:25Jordi Hays?

  Okay, cladlabs.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  But I, but when you go to the site, it, it is just like the brain rot.

• 17:29John Coogan?

  Exactly. Like, like, where is the real product? Like, like, there is no real product here. And that's, and that's what Jordy's risk is, is that, is that they, they, they're, they haven't built anything behind the scenes. It's all marketing. It's all stunt. And it's like, yeah, doing a stunt is maybe fine, even if it's designed to enrage people. It, it's like, I, I, I don't know. Maybe you shouldn't do that. Maybe people are against even doing the stunt marketing. I think it's actually okay. I, I think we went through this clearly. Like, there was, there was a moment where like, it was, it was clearly was doing rage bait marketing and there were people that were upset about that. But there were other people that were upset about this idea of like, the product you're making is to help people cheat and cheating is bad.

• 18:12John Coogan?

  It's like, the product you're making is to help people gamble and gambling is bad. And so if you're anti gambling, you are anti this product that they built and they, and they, now they have the opportunity to say, no, no, no. Like, here's the real thing. And they haven't done that yet. And there's no like, oh, click seven layers deep in the menu and you can see that it's like, oh, this was a stunt for this other thing. Like, they haven't actually put out any breadcrumbs of like, what they're actually building. And so I, I think that's why it leaves such a bad taste in our mouth. Is that it feels like they spent all YC just working on a stunt.

• 18:46Jordi Hays?

  And I'm gonna give them the benefit of the doubt that I'm sure they're I'm sure they're smart and I'm sure they have a have a have a deeper, broader vision. And I think solve, you know, the the reality is, is like, having these moments between prompts, like, is a sort of is a sort of an unsolved problem.

• 19:06John Coogan?

  100% 100%. And so, um, yeah, they they it feels like it feels like they they risk sort of going the Clouly route, which is over optimizing for rage bait product development even. And and then they have to like, figure out what the final product is where it's like, okay, I think it's okay to spend to spend, you know, a day in Y C, thinking about like, what's our marketing strategy? That that video did not look expensive to film.

• 19:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:42John Coogan?

  What feels what feels expensive is like, it seems like they actually built the full product. Like, it feels like they built the full Brainrot product.

• 19:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:48John Coogan?

  And it's like, you didn't need to do that. You could have just gone viral for the video and then followed up and been like, it would have been so easy if at that end of that video, they like, be like, like, that's what people feel like Gen Z entrepreneurs build.

• 20:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:04John Coogan?

  But we didn't want to do that. So we actually built this.

• 20:05Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this video.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  But I'm not gonna I want to try the I don't want to gamble, but I want to see it actually like in I D. That's like funny. But if they at the end, they say, oh, it's all a joke. It's like, okay, it's another I D. I don't need another one. But I want to

• 20:18John Coogan?

  What do you?

• 20:19Speaker 02

  I want to try it.

• 20:20John Coogan?

  You can just do window management. Like, what are we actually talking about here? Just put TikTok on the on the left side of your screen. I have two windows open right now. This is a Mac native feature.

• 20:29Jordi Hays?

  Okay, well, let's pull up this video from Sharav Aurora, who's going viral this yesterday.

• 20:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 20:36Jordi Hays?

  Said tips to apply at Y C batch winner 2026. And I think I think Sharav is an is a literal is a literal child. Uh, it seems to be under, uh, under, I don't know, under 10 years old, something like that.

• 20:51John Coogan?

  He looks very young. Yes.

• 20:52Jordi Hays?

  Looks very young.

• 20:53John Coogan?

  And the reason that I think

• 20:54Jordi Hays?

  Why?

• 20:55John Coogan?

  I'll tell you about cognition. Here's Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. You want to play this video?

• 21:05John Coogan?

  What do you have?

• 21:07Speaker 03

  First tip, you should have some clear goals in mind, like what you should do after funding and you should have at least some.

• 21:15John Coogan?

  I can barely hear this, but.

• 21:16Jordi Hays?

  Okay, we can pause it, but the reason, the reason I included this is because I think there's a lot of people like shurav and tons of young people that look to Y C as like, like whatever Y C is promoting, they approve.

• 21:28John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 21:29Jordi Hays?

  They give, they give a lot of advice.

• 21:30John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 21:31Jordi Hays?

  If, if they're sharing something on their social account, it means it has weight, it means it's a valid strategy. And so I just, I want to avoid a scenario where the shurabs of the world think that they need to rate, put rage bait in order to like break out in this industry.

• 21:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:46Jordi Hays?

  Because it's just, that's not, it's not the reality. You can just build a great product. Uh, you can get, let that speak for itself. You can find ways to market it along the way.

• 21:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I feel like, I feel like that's part of the reason why Gary Tan was tapped as the, as the president, like he, he, I don't know all the complex behind the scenes stuff, but he was putting out content on his YouTube channel. And certainly carrying the torch of Y C forward where he was definitely speaking to the next generation entrepreneurs in an extremely positive way. Uh, telling all these fascinating stories about his entrepreneurial career, his values. Uh, I mean, he hosts meetups at churches and, and has really focused on building an extremely positive community. And there is a question about the Y C X account. Is it a, is it a, a portfolio list?

• 22:39John Coogan?

  Is it every company that launches or is it, or is it a, a library that they're building for startup advice? And they stand by everything that happens there. There's, there's two different things that you can use the account for. Right now it feels like it's a little bit of like, hey, like, you know, if it gets views, we're going to put it up there. If it's fun, if somebody's doing something fun, but you don't always have the same, you don't have the same, uh. Like, like the context really matters. Like, I think that video goes more viral because it's on the YC brand account as opposed to, "Oh, some people got into YC, they pivoted, they came up with this funny video, like they're just having fun, like they're kind of..." After YC, there's a whole, there's a whole era where you go through YC, you hit Demo

• 23:23John Coogan?

  Day, and then, and then a few months later, like, there's companies that still have a little bit of cash, but they're not really building the same thing, and they're, and it's not like, I would not hold the YC founders, the YC partners responsible for what YC companies do post pivot, post Demo Day, where, yeah, the company is still a YC company. You know, you do have, there is sort of a code of conduct in YC, and they can kind of kick you out a little bit. But legally, like, there is a contract where, once they invest, you can't just take the money back because they think you're doing something immoral. Unless it's like fraud. If it's legal, like, they can't just ask for the money back.

• 24:00Jordi Hays?

  Teddy Blank says, sharing a video of Albi, who is a 14-year-old applying for YC, went extremely viral earlier this week, got 3.6 million views.

• 24:12John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 24:13Jordi Hays?

  14-year-old's founder. Yeah, let's play it.

• 24:17Speaker 04

  I'm Albi, I'm 14, and I'm based in Sydney, Australia. I've been building things ever since I was six or seven.

• 24:25Speaker 04

  Don't get the joke.

• 24:26John Coogan?

  Really good editing.

• 24:27Speaker 04

  Well, I've been building things ever since I was nine. First writing code at CodeCamp, then building Roblox games, and even launching a soccer gear brand when I was 12.

• 24:36John Coogan?

  Wait, did he edit this? We gotta hire this guy to edit for us.

• 24:39Speaker 04

  A gamified learning platform where teens learn the real-world skills that school forgot, like entrepreneurship, coding, AI, content creation, etc. Instead of boring textbooks, you level up, earn XP, and unlock challenges as you go, all while learning from top founders, creators, innovators, and other young people doing amazing things. I started Finkel because school wasn't teaching me or my friends how to actually build, create, or launch something in the real world.

• 25:02Jordi Hays?

  Teddy says, "My default reply to high schoolers hitting me up for VC funding is, 'Put me on the phone with your parents.'"

• 25:08Speaker 04

  I'm Albie, I'm 14 and I'm basically

• 25:09John Coogan?

  This is awesome. I love this. I hope he gets in. Uh, I, I should recommend this guy.

• 25:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, if he doesn't get into YC, Albie will hire you.

• 25:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. Head, head over to Los Angeles. Head over to Hollywood. Um,

• 25:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't.

• 25:24John Coogan?

  This is, it's interesting because it's sort of a, uh, sort of a, you're like, you're not really supposed to do this when you apply to YC. Like the application video is not, like, they definitely don't want a game of, uh, like a Red Queen's Race where it's about the video production.

• 25:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:40John Coogan?

  But at the same time, like you gotta play the game on the field. Like you're supposed to just turn on the webcam and basically just talk for one minute. That's how you apply to YC.

• 25:48Jordi Hays?

  One shot it.

• 25:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. You're supposed to just one shot it. No editing because they don't want it to turn into, oh, to apply to YC, you spend two weeks doing an edited video. They're like, no, work on your product. And then the marketing is like the last little cherry on top. Like that's always been the YC mantra. And that's a little bit of like this Cloud Labs thing, although the weird thing is like the video, I love the video. It's funny and it's cheap and it's clearly just like a bit and they did it and it was two seconds, but then it feels like, like they didn't, they didn't, they didn't give me the payoff of like, oh, okay. You guys are funny and you're working on something cool and interesting and hard and different. Um, and so I, I just feel like I didn't, I didn't get the payoff of the joke. Uh, like the beauty of those Google April Fools' Day was that that was the era when they were on such a tear.

• 26:32John Coogan?

  You would go and you would go to a Google April Fools' joke and then you would land on their product blog and you would be like, oh, wow. Like they did some crazy update to Google Maps and now you can see your house from the street because they just invented street view. Like this is incredible. They were delivering on so many different levels that they earned the right to make the April Fool, the April Fools' joke. They earned the right to joke around because they were also had a massive monopoly in, in, uh, in search engines. And, and so they were, they were printing money. So no one was like, oh, this is so unreasonable that they took a couple hours out of their developer's time to go build some funny gag. Anyway, bigma.com, think bigger, build faster. Bigma helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free.

• 27:18Jordi Hays?

  Sheal says, "Met a very successful founder who said..."

• 27:21John Coogan?

  Oh, I read this one.

• 27:22Jordi Hays?

  "...shows fund because he gave me credibility..."

• 27:24John Coogan?

  We covered this.

• 27:25Jordi Hays?

  What?

• 27:25John Coogan?

  I read this one. We covered this. Sorry.

• 27:27Jordi Hays?

  Oh, sorry.

• 27:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, we jumped ahead.

• 27:28Jordi Hays?

  Earlier.

• 27:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, this was my point about, about if you, if you, even if you put 99% of your AUM into boring B2B SaaS, or even curing cancer, if you do one deal, that's going to get a little crazy and go viral, like, that's going to have a big impact on the fund overall. Should we go to more drama in the venture world? Ev Randall, who's coming on the show on Friday, went on Harry Stebing's show, 20 VC, and is putting the timeline in turmoil over some comments about other funds. I'd love to play this clip from the actual interview. It's in a minute and 32 seconds.

• 28:10Everett Randle?

  I don't think Rabir Hamant, or even Ben and Mark at this point, I don't think that they can go to LPs, one of those legs of the stool, and say, "Hey, this basket of funds that we're making you invest Paripisoo across, we're going to get you 5X net on that." I don't think they can say that, or they at least can't say that with a straight face. And if you look at the recent return data, I think it suggests that. So I think they'll be able to make an immense amount of money on an absolute basis, but I think a lot of these LPs are in the business to make, or in venture, to make high money on money returns. Like, they had PE for the low-return stuff, and they probably get better liquidity from PE. They're here for the high money on money returns. And this is one of the reasons why I'm extremely excited about benchmark's competitive position in today's market, because we can go to LPs, we can say, "Hey, we're shooting for higher than 5X net.

• 28:53Everett Randle?

  We have the historical track record to back it up, and we have the fund sizes to back it up as well." I mean, you had Miles from Carnegie Mellon come on here and do the awesome math, and the very clear math of, "Hey, do you know how hard it is to return 4X net on $8 billion, $10 billion?" It is immensely hard and it like defies the laws of physics. So I think there's a difference between are they going to make a ton of money and are they going to produce the returns that LPs really want this asset class to produce? Two very, very different things. But for now, like the rubber is like the rubber won't meet the road because as you mentioned, there's just so much global demand from LPs for exposure to private technology and they are happy to take lower returns. And so I don't think there's any end in sight. But I think on a relative basis between all of these different constituents and all these different GPs, there's a huge, huge delta

• 29:38Everett Randle?

  and a huge differentiation between who can actually produce venture-like returns.

• 29:41John Coogan?

  Boo, he's not AGI-pilled. Boo. 10x. You're gonna 10x the fund. Just 10x it again. Just 10x it again.

• 29:48Jordi Hays?

  10x it again.

• 29:49John Coogan?

  10x the fund. Raise a hundred billion dollar fund and 10x it. Just 10x it and we're gonna 10x it again. No, obviously.

• 29:57Jordi Hays?

  Ev was on a little bit of damage control this morning.

• 30:00John Coogan?

  Wait, wait. So I want to hear what exactly did he say the first line? He says, they cannot go to LPs and say with a straight face that they can do 5x net. Can we play the actual clip? Because I feel like that's not quite right. What did he say?

• 30:13Everett Randle?

  I don't think, Ravi or Hamant or even Ben and Mark at this point, I don't think that they can go to LPs, one of those legs of the stool.

• 30:19Jordi Hays?

  Said, I don't think they can go to LPs.

• 30:21Everett Randle?

  And say, hey, this basket of funds that we're making you invest Paripasu across, we're gonna get you 5x net on that.

• 30:26John Coogan?

  We're gonna get you 5x net.

• 30:27Everett Randle?

  I don't think they can say that.

• 30:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, because maybe they can go with a straight face and say, we're gonna get you 6x net. Boom. We're gonna get you 10x net. Maybe they can say that with a straight face.

• 30:34Jordi Hays?

  Taylor knows. Nancy Pelosi is not afraid to say, I'm gonna 10x it.

• 30:38John Coogan?

  I'm gonna 10x it again. I'll 10x it every day. Yes, Ev is fighting for his life a little bit. Tagging big shots, quick edits, clickbait callouts, giving me pick me vibes. People are not happy about this clip hitting the timeline. People are taking shots back and forth. What actually happened here?

• 30:57Jordi Hays?

  I mean, part of the reality is, I don't think. No fund manager can really go to LPs and you can you can share that you you believe there's a chance we'll get a 5X net, but isn't it like

• 31:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:13Jordi Hays?

  99% of funds just don't come anywhere close to that?

• 31:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's yeah, that's for sure. True. Also, I mean, I think the point that I think the broader point that he's making is something along the lines of like, like, I saw some other posts about like, there will be fortunes made just by getting getting retail investors and the broader capital that's out there in the world into the private mag seven. So the OpenAI is the anthropics, the SpaceX is the and rules. There's a whole host of companies.

• 31:45Jordi Hays?

  That was also an Ev Randall tweet.

• 31:47John Coogan?

  Oh, that was that was him from was that him recently or?

• 31:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was, I think, yesterday.

• 31:52John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. So so like, there is a world where where you set up a fund that has lower return expectations, but also lower risk and it's a great deal and LPs love it. And so I don't know. I don't know that it's that hot of a take, but it certainly certainly put the timeline in turmoil. Christian Garrett here is sharing the gif of digging himself deeper into the hole, I imagine. So what did you have to say?

• 32:22Jordi Hays?

  Part of it is that Benchmark is feeling feeling pretty good right now. If you look at their 2020 fund, they have Merck four, they have fireworks. What's the other one? They have they have a number that are that have that have they have a bunch of like multi 10 baggers at this point in that fund. So they're feeling pretty good about going to LPs and saying, look, we still got it.

• 32:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:42Jordi Hays?

  Still cooking.

• 32:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. And and yeah, I mean, it ever ever in Benchmark, newly at Benchmark, Benchmark has not become the the platform fund mega scale fund has not 10x the the LP base certainly. Ev says, to be clear, I slash we love working with our friends at all of these funds and this part was not meant as a slight slash commentary on the on their quality as investors, just POV on fund strategies and the unique value prop of Benchmark. I think it's I think it's a fair. Fair tweet, but it's amazing because everyone is coming out and just

• 33:24John Coogan?

  Spencer Peterson in the comments, there's like, I took that personally. I run a big fund. I met Co2. We got 60 billion. What are you saying about me, buddy? You don't think I can put up a 5X? Watch me. Watch me. I take that personally. I'm gonna put up 5X. I'll call you when I have, when I have 500 billion under management.

• 33:41Jordi Hays?

  I think part of what made it feel super personal is that Harry tagged Robbie, Ravi.

• 33:47John Coogan?

  Totally, totally, totally.

• 33:48Jordi Hays?

  And Ben.

• 33:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, we actively try to avoid like tagging people if someone is talking trash about someone else or like sub tweeting them. We don't really try and like hand hold into drama. But it is an art and it is delicate. Like sometimes it's like, oh wow, like they're really talking trash about that person. Sometimes, sometimes it's fun. Like sometimes we've done this where, I mean, we've done this with Ev, right? We've, we've had Delian on the show. He's called out Ev and we've tagged Ev in a clip. And then, but it's all been fun. We've all been, you know, chatting about it behind the scenes and then obviously had them all on the show to duke it out and stuff and that was a lot of fun.

• 34:25Jordi Hays?

  This felt personal.

• 34:26John Coogan?

  This, I don't know. It doesn't feel that big of a deal. But let's go to Scott Kapor, obviously speaking for his, his, his former colleagues at Andreessen Horowitz. Now he is the director of the Office of Personnel Management. Scott Kapor says, "Since my former colleagues at A16Z are RIAs and thus cannot legally comment on what they can slash cannot say with a straight face to LPs, this sounds a lot like what crappy board members say. They think they understand your business in depth and make inane comments about what you should slash should not do when as an outside observer, they have zero clue what actually happens day to day in the business. Buyer beware."

• 35:12John Coogan?

  What? I, I, I'm so confused by this. Uh, okay. So, so he's saying that Ev, Ev thinks he understands Andreessen's business, but in fact, he does not understand Andreessen's business. So, but I want to know like, what is the misunderstanding? Because the, the, the, the steel man, the bull case on the Andreessen strategy is that, um, Ev is, Ev is making the claim that they will make more money dollars, total dollars, because they're, they're investing out of a bigger fund size. They don't need to go and say, we're going to 5X it. So it's a different pool of LPs.

• 35:45Jordi Hays?

  Also, part of, part of like the major appeal of investing in A16Z is that you pretty much know that you're going to get in every important company through this one, a single check.

• 35:57John Coogan?

  Okay. So yeah, maybe that's something that Ev didn't, didn't articulate fully. I don't know. I don't know.

• 36:02Jordi Hays?

  That's, that's my, that's my point of view. I'm not an LP, but, uh, I, I happily would be. And it's because you know, you're going to get some exposure to pretty much every important company, not necessarily always super early, but at some point in the company's life cycle, it's very likely that they will take a meaningful check from A16Z.

• 36:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, uh, I wonder, um, how the, the, the RIA dynamic is playing out at, uh, at Benchmark. It's, it, it seems like such an advantage in the vibe wars to not, to be able to speak freely. Uh, if, if, if Andreessen can't defend themselves because of RIA rules, uh, and Ev can just go on podcasts and talk trash, like you gotta win by default. Like you gotta get out there, guys. You gotta convert. You gotta, you gotta de- de-convert from the RIA. I don't know. Uh, you gotta get on the timeline, fight it out. Uh, what does Ev say? He says, "I think smaller constrained funds can produce higher returns in venture." Quote, "This must be a shitty board member. Don't work with him."

• 37:08John Coogan?

  Uh, incredible non sequitur. Thanks, Scott. Uh, Chad Byer says, "While I actually agree with Scott in general, my lived experience is most board members are useless. I've been on a board with Ev and he was consistently the most prepared slash founder raved about his contributions." And Alex Klein is saying, "Love you both," because they're beefing. Um, interesting. Hmm. Yeah. Uh, smaller funds can produce, smaller constraints, constrained funds can produce higher returns in venture. Uh, that seems to be... Like a reasonable take, but I don't know what they're actually saying to LPs.

• 37:45John Coogan?

  Where is, wasn't Emile Michael going chiming in as well? What did Emile have to say?

• 37:51Jordi Hays?

  I tried to pull that up, but underlying post got deleted.

• 37:54John Coogan?

  Oh, it got deleted? Okay. Well, we'll move on from it. We'll tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve thrust with Vanta. Vanta helps get you compliant fast. We don't stop there. AI automation powers everything.

• 38:08Jordi Hays?

  Meanwhile, over on X, people are saying, calling me unk. They're saying I'm a boomer.

• 38:13John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 38:14Jordi Hays?

  For my, for my posts, which I think is fair. But again, there's more nuance. I don't know. I like, there's a lot of it that I think is cool.

• 38:24John Coogan?

  Should we have the founder on?

• 38:26Jordi Hays?

  The founder, the open invite to the founder.

• 38:28John Coogan?

  Okay, open invite to the founder of the Brain, IDE, Cloud Labs. I am, I am actually very interested to hear what is, what the actual product is. I, I feel like the, the narrative around, around these, these like, you know, rage baity stunts is always, is always like, oh, don't play into it. Don't play into it. I'm happy to play into it. We played into it with Cluey. We had, we had Roy Lee on the show three times. And, and what I said the first time was what I continue to say, which is that like, hey,

• 39:04Jordi Hays?

  And part of my thesis, part of my thesis is that Roy like effectively ran this strategy as aggressively as you could. Like he, he posed, there was a picture of him with a stripper.

• 39:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, that was very rage baity.

• 39:17Jordi Hays?

  And that was like the peak. And then I think he's walked it back and he's adapted his strategy and now he's.

• 39:21John Coogan?

  And so, and so our take was like, was like, he's gonna have to build some good, good software at a certain point, a good product. And we tried the product and Tyler churned and like, it just wasn't adding a ton of value. It wasn't moving.

• 39:31Jordi Hays?

  But now they're iterating on the product.

• 39:34John Coogan?

  And now they're iterating on the product. And so now I would imagine during the Cluey heyday, I would imagine that 80% of the team's hours were spent on marketing and 20% were spent on, on product, maybe. Now I think it's flipped. And I think that's very bullish. I think that's good. But Tyler, you had a rebuttal?

• 39:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I would just say like, this seems very different from, like you see the, the gambling on your credit card statements or whatever, like from other accelerators. Uh, like this feels very different. Like this is like the marketing, like I, I, I think people kind of tend to group all this stuff together where it's like, like what growing Daniel was talking about yesterday where it's like, some of these are like immoral companies that you could say.

• 40:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 40:14Speaker 02

  I think this feels different than that. It feels much, at least to me, it feels much more of a marketing stunt than like,

• 40:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 40:20Speaker 02

  this is the product we want people to be gambling while running code.

• 40:23John Coogan?

  Yes, but, but, but what if, what if the whole, if the whole product is, and this is all we've, this is all we've seen, is a, you know, a, an, a VS code fork with minimal autocomplete, it, they're always, you know, a year or two or five behind cursor and wind surf. And yes, it has the ability to add Tinder and steak and sports betting in it. And like that, the product that they are telling us they're building is what they're building and they stay with it for five years. Like, what do you say then?

• 40:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, then that's not good.

• 40:59John Coogan?

  Okay. So, so basically you're, you're, you're just saying you're open to a pivot.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  It's, it's not even a pivot. I, like, it seems to me like the company is, everything, at least in my opinion, points to this being a marketing stunt. The company is named Cloud Labs. It's not Cloud Labs. This feels like a marketing stunt. The marketing stunt, it tells me that there actually is something different underneath than just adding.

• 41:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no. I, I, I am super optimistic about it. I would love to see, like, I don't know, by the end of the month, we know what is actually going on here. Uh, certainly by demo day. When's demo day? Uh, December 3rd, I believe. December 3rd, we should, we should, we should know what's actually going on, uh, with the company. What's the real product? So they did their stunt. They got a bunch of people hopefully to sign up, check out the website. Uh, you got your early user base. Typically in YC, you just ask your other, your other, uh, YC batchmates to try it. Maybe you need to go broad, go viral. Uh, you did that. Now. Build the, draw the rest of the owl, basically, is the, is the prompt.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  Uh, well, let's.

• 42:03John Coogan?

  Or at least, or at least, or at least say what you're planning to do. Say what you're planning to do.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  Uh, let's move on to, uh, Dwar Kes.

• 42:12John Coogan?

  Dwar Kes. Uh, uh, I haven't watched the full thing, but a massive, uh, interview has hit the timeline. Uh, Dwar Kes Patel, Dylan Patel, sat down with Satya Nadella, and they got an exclusive tour of Fairwater 2, the most, the most powerful AI data center in the world. I feel like everyone's been saying they have the most powerful AI data center. Uh, it appears that, uh, open, uh, that Microsoft has leapfrogged, uh, Colossus 2.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  Well, I, I think, uh, maybe this is wrong, but I think Colossus 2 will be bigger. It's just currently, it's not big. Like, this is the current.

• 42:46John Coogan?

  Current biggest.

• 42:47Speaker 02

  It's the current biggest.

• 42:47John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Okay, great. So, so you had, you had a chance to actually sit down and watch this whole interview, uh, before we started the show. Uh, can you give me some takeaways? Where should people, are there any timestamps that we should pull up? Are there any takeaways that people should know before they go and watch it?

• 43:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, uh, I wrote a bunch of notes, um, so maybe some of these aren't as interesting, but.

• 43:06John Coogan?

  Well, before you take us through those notes, let me tell you about Graphite Dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. GitHub, of course, is a Microsoft product.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay, so, so I think, um, broadly, I would say it was pretty enlightening. Um, I, I usually think of Satya as being very, uh, non-AGI-pilled. And I think this was a bit of an update, so, um, there's, there's a bunch of reasons for this. I think so, so early on, he, like, in the very, I think it was one of the first questions, he's like, what is AI? AI is basically two things. Uh, this is Satya saying this. There's, um, cognitive, like, enhancement. So this is like your, like, tools, or this is your autocomplete, this is your.

• 43:43John Coogan?

  Copilot.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, copilot, stuff like this. And then there's like the guardian angel, and this is like the, the very AGI-pilled where, I mean, it's like, kind of lording over everything. And, and so he, he actually does like, say these two things are like very possible. Um, so, and then we kind of move on, he says, um.

• 44:00John Coogan?

  Copilot and actual pilot.

• 44:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically. Okay, so the next thing, he's talking about kind of how he thinks about pricing structures of AI broadly. So there's this this kind of conflict between subscription models and usage model of pricing. And he says, I think he's broadly more kind of focused on, at least in the in the short term, on this subscription kind of thing, right? Which like, it's, he makes a big emphasis on this, right? Because you need to be very specific on how you price these things. Because doing actual like, serving of the models is so expensive. Okay, so then, throughout the interview, he keeps emphasizing the point that like, Microsoft is a hyper scaler. And so that means like, a bunch of things. That means that they're gonna keep supporting multiple models.

• 44:48Speaker 02

  It means that they are going to, like, they want to prioritize prioritize the kind of long tail of like, high margin users. So you can like, you can kind of compare that to Oracle, who you can think of Oracle as basically

• 45:04Jordi Hays?

  Prioritizing one potentially low margin

• 45:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. You're giving bare metal, essentially, to one customer, OpenAI. And you're betting the whole company. And he says, like, if you're gonna do that, you should just vertically integrate that company, like, you're part of that company. That's what Satya says, like, in response to, like, why is Oracle basically eating your entire business?

• 45:26Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  Like, in the past, like, five years, Microsoft was super ramping up their their capex, their build, and then they just basically stopped and let Google, Oracle, Amazon basically build that up. So that's kind of the main reason. There's a bunch of other stuff he's talking about. They asked him about chips. So all the big hyperscalers have their own chip play, right? There's Traneum, there's TPUs, OpenAI is doing their own chip. And Microsoft does have their own chip. But it just kind of, it's like, the actual production is like, way behind everyone else.

• 45:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:58Speaker 02

  It's like, okay, why is this chip so bad? Or why are there so few of them? And then Satya basically brings up that, like, Microsoft has IP to everything OpenAI has, except for consumer hardware.

• 46:11John Coogan?

  And chips are not consumer hardware, they're enterprise hardware.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  So he's like, well, okay, how do we get the best chips, the best like, you know, model specific chips, we'll just take OpenAI and we'll just like bill on top of that.

• 46:22John Coogan?

  I wonder how much that actually transfers though, because where does the chip development live, where does the IP live, like if, if OpenAI goes to...

• 46:31Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's designed and they can get line time at TSMC, then they can just produce it and sell it to any customer they want.

• 46:36John Coogan?

  Yes, but what if they do it within, within Nvidia or something, like what if they go to Nvidia and they're like, hey, for the next run of Nvidia chips, we'd like you to consider this architecture.

• 46:47Jordi Hays?

  Do they need, why would, why would they need to do that?

• 46:49John Coogan?

  Because they want their models to be more performant on the chips. And so they go to Jensen and say, hey, we're, we're the biggest, we're one of the biggest buyers. So make the next version extremely performant for our chips. And I think they're already doing this. They're co-developing chips with Nvidia, they're co-developing chips with other companies. And if they co-develop with Broadcom or they co-develop with AMD or maybe even Intel in the future and, but that IP lives with Intel, then no, Microsoft doesn't just get it, right?

• 47:18Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah.

• 47:18John Coogan?

  So there, so it's like only in the event that, I mean, but both of these are going to happen. Like there's going to be internal efforts and there's going to be external efforts, but it is, it is a funny reminder that the internal, that the internal efforts get, get copy pasted over to Microsoft.

• 47:34Jordi Hays?

  One other, one other note, Satya signaled that he's open to buying capacity from Neo Clouds, like Oracle, Nebius, Lambda, Iron, N scale.

• 47:44John Coogan?

  Isn't he already doing that?

• 47:45Jordi Hays?

  To fill the, yeah, he is, but, but he, he, Semi Analysis has a concept called like the pause, which is like, um, basically a gap of like this like insane period of demand.

• 47:57John Coogan?

  Oh, right now.

• 47:57Jordi Hays?

  To try and meet that demand.

• 47:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:59Jordi Hays?

  And Satya actually says specifically, you're right, you're rightfully calling out the pause in the interview.

• 48:05John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think continuing on like why he basically stopped building out. Yeah. The like chip question is also like very important because you can think of it like if you build a bunch of data centers right now. They need they have very specific like power requirements that are directly based on the chip like if you're building based off the H100 chip. That's different than if you're building a data center based off GB200s. And it's like there you can't really it's not like fungible like you can't just trade one out for another. So that that's another one of the reasons why you don't want to basically have insane build out right now because you think. You don't think you know that chips are going to get much better. Sure, especially with like ASICs, right? Yeah, exactly. And Nvidia is like constantly they're saying we got this next chip coming out. Yep, yep, yep.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  You want to build up your data center with those chips because otherwise they're going to depreciate and you're going to have these basically data centers in like five years that like. Are using, you know, the old gen chips or two generations back. Yeah.

• 49:01Jordi Hays?

  Anything on depreciation?

• 49:05Speaker 02

  Capex. Yeah, I mean, so.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically, he gives like two reasons how you can justify data centers, right? Because you think of data center basically depreciating in like five years or the chips, which is a big part of the the cost. And so there's basically two ways to like justify the actual build out. One of them is basically you can think of like research as just being like R and D spend. So you basically just have to like you got to do the research like you need to do the spend basically. Yeah. And the other is just like he keeps bringing this up is everything has to be like super demand driven. So that's also why he's not. It's like again, in comparison to Oracle, Oracle is basically. Maybe you could say that they're kind of skating to where the puck is going or trying to figure that out and then.

• 49:50Speaker 02

  Doing a bunch of debt, etc. And then Microsoft Satya is saying, no, where is demand right now? How do we fulfill that demand? Basically, exactly. If we're not fully built up, then we can. You know, lease from the, you know, Neo Clouds.

• 50:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense. I'm, I'm super excited to listen to this full episode. The Wall Street Journal also had an article about the, the news as well. It seems like this is all in, in line with Microsoft's just announcement that they have a super factory. I like it. We went from AI factories to AI super factories. We went from regular artificial intelligence to super intelligence. We're ramping up, but we're still like seven levels away from the final, the final boss. Cause after super intelligence, of course, you have giga intelligence, then ultra intelligence, then super duper intelligence and, and mega factories, exa factories, terra factories. There's all these different terms.

• 50:47Speaker 02

  Okay. So I will say one last thing I thought was funny.

• 50:49Jordi Hays?

  Extraterrestrial intelligence factories.

• 50:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, very sure.

• 50:53Speaker 02

  Okay. One last thing. Dorakesh asks Satya, like, does he buy basically the revenue growth of like when OpenAI or Anthropic says they're going to be like 70, 100 billion in like three years? He's like, well, you know, they have to justify their fundraise somehow. And then he basically doesn't say much else besides that.

• 51:11John Coogan?

  Wow, Satya, absolute dog. I love him. He's the best.

• 51:16Jordi Hays?

  Cooking. Cooking. Chat was asking about hair routines. I think we have to comment and unfortunately disappoint because I think we both ride the, to apply the same approach, which is.

• 51:29John Coogan?

  Sleep, diet, exercise, baby.

• 51:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, and no, no hair products.

• 51:32John Coogan?

  No hair products.

• 51:33Jordi Hays?

  No hair products.

• 51:34John Coogan?

  Just water and.

• 51:35Jordi Hays?

  Water.

• 51:35John Coogan?

  Some sauna, some workout, some, just keep the rest of your body healthy. And I think the hair will be healthy as well. I, I actually think that's how it works, you know?

• 51:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just, it's just funny. We're never, we're never going to have a shampoo or a hair product sponsor because we don't really use either of them.

• 51:51John Coogan?

  Uh, but I like creatine and people say that that's bad for your hair, but it's

• 51:56Speaker 02

  Creatine, the hair loss medication?

• 51:58John Coogan?

  Hair loss medication. People think it, people think you'd lose your hair if you're on creatine, but I certainly haven't experienced that. I have experienced that Julius helps with maintaining good hair because it's the AI data analyst that works for you. Connect your data, ask questions.

• 52:12Speaker 02

  Pulling your hair out.

• 52:14John Coogan?

  Plain, yeah, plain English. Get insights in seconds, no coding required. Uh, yeah, stop pulling your hair out and get on Julius. What are the other factors in here? Microsoft spent more than $34 billion on CapEx during its first fiscal quarter and said it would increase its total infrastructure investments over the next fiscal year. It is among several tech companies pouring a combined 400 billion into AI efforts this year with demand for AI computing and companies saying they need ever more capacity. Very fun.

• 52:46Speaker 02

  Okay, one last thing. Another thing that I was, I was surprised to hear is that Satya, he made a big point of saying that like, there is a super intelligence lab within Microsoft. They're going to be training their own models.

• 52:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, isn't that Mustafa Suleyman is running it?

• 53:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so he says, uh, maybe they'll be completely trained by Microsoft. Maybe they'll just do like fine tuning, mid-training on like GPT, OpenAI models.

• 53:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 53:12Speaker 02

  Um, but like they are going to like actually have, they're going to be training their own models. They're doing kind of the full stack.

• 53:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. When we were, when we were about to go on stage with Satya, I was texting with Doug Loflin from Semi Analysis and, uh, and he was like, ask about MSL or not MSL, uh,

• 53:26Speaker 02

  MAI.

• 53:26John Coogan?

  MAI, MAI. Ask about MAI. Like what's the strategy for MAI? Uh, and we, and we asked a couple of people and we got a little bit, uh, it was, it was sort of hard to like, uh, really pin down a clear strategy. I don't think that they were ready to really, uh, divulge exactly the full strategy. Uh, it'll be interesting to see what models they train. Like, do they just go bigger? They have the biggest factory. Could they just take this, uh, this Fairwater facility and say, hey, let's go, let's go train something that's 10 times bigger than GPT 4.5. Do they believe that pre-training scaling laws hold or not? That's what I'm, I'm Curious about, or are they going to do something that's more precise? Like, will they do a pre-train for Excel? Will they do a pre-train for Word or something like that?

• 54:10John Coogan?

  Is there some other tactic that they're going to employ? There's a bunch of interesting things. They clearly very GPU-rich, tons of sharp engineers, tons of interesting product surface area. Where will they actually go? Interesting times.

• 54:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, he talks a lot about like application layer stuff. He actually says, like, the wrapper model, wrapper companies are basically debunked by models getting better. So I think he thinks that Microsoft will basically take over a lot of that, like, application layer stuff, right? He's he talked about Excel agent a lot.

• 54:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:39Speaker 02

  There's like the PowerPoint stuff.

• 54:41Jordi Hays?

  I so. That's why I've always felt like the dynamic between OpenAI and Microsoft is so interesting because OpenAI just has massive ambitions in the enterprise. They want to create, Sam, you know, alluded to a AI-native Slack recently. Microsoft has Teams. Imagine those.

• 54:56John Coogan?

  It's going to be AI-native.

• 54:58Jordi Hays?

  You can imagine OpenAI having like word processing.

• 55:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:02Jordi Hays?

  Excel-like product, you know, you can imagine them ultimately competing on like every single layer, including at the eventually at the cloud layer.

• 55:10John Coogan?

  What do you think the dynamic is between this, like, you know? Microsoft always loves to say like, hey, yeah, we have all the IP, but it feels like they're not actually fast following like they could. Like, OpenAI launched Atlas, like, they could have launched like Edge Atlas. Microsoft could have launched like Edge Atlas like the next day. And that would have been like, whoa, what are we doing here? Like, that's a shot. They could have launched Sora 2. They could put Sora 2 in Excel. How about that?

• 55:40Speaker 02

  The brain rot. Brain rot Excel.

• 55:43John Coogan?

  Excel, you know, they could have done that. They didn't. And so there's clearly like, even though they have access to all the IP, they still have, they still have a different differentiated view on like how the products get built. They're not just saying, yo, yes, one copy of Atlas, please. One copy of Sora 2, please. We'll just launch our own competitor app. They could have put it in LinkedIn, like, they could have, they could have. There is a way to integrate that. Microsoft's clearly like not moving so fast on that front. They're they're being a little bit more methodical.

• 56:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is why I'm very excited to what what comes out of M A I.

• 56:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 56:18Speaker 02

  Because it seems like. They have a lot of good people.

• 56:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:21Speaker 02

  Like, they've been doing a bunch of, like, talent acquisition stuff.

• 56:23John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 56:24Speaker 02

  So I'm curious if they're gonna start, like, like, right now, it just seems Microsoft is still very slow, they're kind of reactive.

• 56:31John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 56:31Speaker 02

  And they're like, okay, we should add, you know, another AI helper to Excel or something. But it's not, like, really kind of built in, like, low level yet.

• 56:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. I'd like to have Mustafa on, I'd like to talk to him about where their training models, whether or not that seems like an interesting conversation. I'd like to ask him some hard questions, there's been a debate on the timeline.

• 56:48Speaker 02

  John, in the next chat, says Edge has every single feature that Atlas has.

• 56:52John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 56:53Speaker 02

  Copilot mode, it's better than Atlas or Comet, actually.

• 56:56John Coogan?

  Okay, interesting. Maybe they don't need a copy, then. They're good. But there has been a debate over, over how hard of questions we ask. Is it hard, is it a hard question to ask Mustafa at, at MAI, you know, what type of model he's training, or should we ask some sort of other hard question? I wanted to practice some hard questions. I think we should start asking harder questions. I have some hard questions here for you, and I think if we practice, we'll, we'll, we'll become better interviews. Are you guys ready for these?

• 57:26Speaker 02

  We just started hitting guests with, like, insane math.

• 57:29John Coogan?

  I, I, I wouldn't call them insane. I, I do have one here for, for Tyler. Is every even number greater than 2, the sum of 2 primes?

• 57:40John Coogan?

  Answer the question.

• 57:42Speaker 02

  He's looking around for clues.

• 57:43John Coogan?

  It's a simple, it's a simple yes or no question.

• 57:46Speaker 02

  Every even number.

• 57:47John Coogan?

  Is every even number greater than 2, the sum of 2 primes? Answer the question. Stop dodging the question. Just answer the question. It's a yes or no question. Is every even number greater than 2, the sum of 2 primes? It's an unanswerable question, of course. It is the Goldbach equation, or the Goldbach conjecture. There's also, can there exist an algorithm that decides whether any computer program will halt or run forever? It's the halting problem, it's a possible question. What about, what will OpenAI's valuation be in 2035?

• 58:18Speaker 02

  Hundred trillion.

• 58:19John Coogan?

  Hundred trillion? Oh, he answered that quickly. We'll come back to that in 10 years, see if that was a hard question. What's the nicest thing ever done by Adolf Hitler?

• 58:30John Coogan?

  Answer the question. Stop dodging the question.

• 58:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Tyler, ask that to Karp. Karp was on a roll yesterday. Some of those clips were...

• 58:41John Coogan?

  Here's a question we should ask a lot of founders that come on here. Does your dad know you're bankrupt? I think if we hit them with that, people will be like, "That's a hard question. That's a hard question." Here's one for Tyler. Prove God exists.

• 58:58Jordi Hays?

  There was the go-to...

• 59:01John Coogan?

  What is truth? That's a hard question.

• 59:06John Coogan?

  Have you ever done illegal drugs, Tyler? Answer the question.

• 59:10Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 59:10John Coogan?

  Answer the question.

• 59:11Jordi Hays?

  Good answer.

• 59:12John Coogan?

  Who's your favorite host? Me or Jordy? Answer the question. Answer the question.

• 59:16Jordi Hays?

  I'm my favorite host.

• 59:17John Coogan?

  Oh, taking shots. What is time?

• 59:22John Coogan?

  I like these hard questions.

• 59:23Jordi Hays?

  Okay, Jordan at Semi Analysis is down to hop on and correct a few things we said on the article. I'm gonna drop him the... He was listening, said, "L in the chat."

• 59:40John Coogan?

  Where is he? Let's bring him on.

• 59:42Jordi Hays?

  I'm working on getting him the Zoom link.

• 59:45John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Fantastic. In the meantime, let me tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine-tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. You can get started.

• 1:00:01John Coogan?

  Let's see, what else?

• 1:00:04John Coogan?

  Henry Kravis gave a talk, the founder of KKR.

• 1:00:09John Coogan?

  The post appears to have been deleted, but I won't say who it's from, but I will read it to you anyway. "The world needs another fund like it needs a hole in the head." I think it was supposed to be off the record, and I think one of our friends was maybe live tweeting it against their request. Or maybe he just cracked it and realized that he didn't want to post that. But there are a lot of funds, I suppose. I was doing a little deep dive on Blue Owl. I want to get to know Blue Owl more. It's a fascinating company. Merger, there's a SPAC involved. They have two co-CEOs and three co-presidents. The top ranks at Blue Owl are absolutely stacked, from what I read.

• 1:00:49John Coogan?

  They are, of course, powering the AI build-out with debt, private credit. They are a private credit fund up there with Aries. They've done very well. They actually have three different businesses. Only one of them is doing AI data center build outs and and even within the AI data center build out fund they they they fund other stuff. So it's interesting to see how how much risk they're taking, how much their business is really dependent on the AI build out. It's also there was a they got a little they got a little battle with with Jamie Dimon because Jamie Dimon was saying that some of these bank failures are the fault of private credit. When you see one cockroach, there's usually more. He's kind of saying like, hey, like, you know, we see these defaults. We see

• 1:01:33John Coogan?

  these we see these these large companies defaulting. Maybe this is the start of something bad. Maybe there's a lot of other bad companies out there.

• 1:01:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there was something with BlackRock had lent, I think, $100 million to a business recently as of like two weeks ago. They had it. They had it marked as, you know, fully sound.

• 1:01:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:51Jordi Hays?

  And then the company almost immediately went bankrupt. So concerning, we have

• 1:01:57John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 1:01:57Jordi Hays?

  Jordan from Semi.

• 1:01:58John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 1:02:00Jordi Hays?

  Jumping.

• 1:02:00John Coogan?

  How are you doing? Hey, Jordan. Good to see you again. Welcome back.

• 1:02:03Jordi Hays?

  All right. What did we what did we get wrong?

• 1:02:06John Coogan?

  What's going on?

• 1:02:07Jordi Hays?

  This is all, of course, Tyler's fault. He was.

• 1:02:13John Coogan?

  Break it down. Give us some notes.

• 1:02:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, I don't think you guys got anything wrong, but I think just wanted to promote that we we put out a companion article that comes out with the interview.

• 1:02:24John Coogan?

  Oh, fantastic.

• 1:02:26Speaker 06

  Was in there. He was he's being called out by some other people on Twitter for hunting around in the background while they're interviewing the Azure teams.

• 1:02:35John Coogan?

  Wait, Dylan Patel, you mean?

• 1:02:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:02:38John Coogan?

  We we got to go through frame by frame and find him like, oh, he's gonna go look because he's wait, actually break down what what is a Dylan Patel scoop look like when you're on site and security turns their back? Is he like looking for like, oh, there instead of this Nvidia switch, they're using AMDs? I've seen him call stuff out where it's like, wait a minute, this company is using a different company's technology. Is that what he's looking for?

• 1:02:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know if he was looking for the credo cables or anything.

• 1:03:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:03:03Speaker 06

  Those are obvious with the purple housing, but if you look at his last tweet, he just said, to be clear, while Scott was explaining the data center, he was super intently focused on figuring out the fiber patch panel config. We know about some, we know about some providers that have gone out and bought cables, like 20,000, 40,000 cables, and then they they mess up the config of the patch panel and they end up filing it through Jordan and they just have to send them back and get all new cables, which is like not a negligible amount of money. These these cables are like at least a thousand bucks a piece.

• 1:03:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:41Speaker 06

  They're really heavy. We've been talking about internally, how many cables can you bench?

• 1:03:45John Coogan?

  Okay, there we go. There we go. Yeah. Dylan Patel seems like a bit of the fox who in Microsoft is the hen house and they really shouldn't have let Dylan Patel into the into the new data center because you know, he's going to find some stuff. There's going to be some scoops that like, I'm sure there's like a PR team at Microsoft. It's like, okay, like here are the talking points. Like, we're going to keep them here. He's not going to look behind this curtain. Like, there's a bodybuilder over there. Like, don't go in, don't go in that closet. And and Dylan's, I'm sure, on the case, probably, you know, quickly becoming the greatest investigative journalist of our of our generation.

• 1:04:19Jordi Hays?

  What what like?

• 1:04:20John Coogan?

  The big pause.

• 1:04:21Jordi Hays?

  Give us some more insight on the depreciation comments.

• 1:04:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, definitely. So there's a section of the article that kind of goes through this. I think you guys asked me this on Monday. I didn't have a properly prepared answer because I actually didn't know what Michael Burry had been tweeting about and kind of talking about with this. So maybe for background, Burry is claiming that the hyperscalers, like including Meta, but also Azure.

• 1:04:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:51Speaker 06

  On Oracle, Google are artificially boosting their earnings by extending the useful life of the IT assets. You can see from 2020, when they would report their numbers, these IT assets like servers, switches, storage would be three to five years.

• 1:05:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:08Speaker 06

  On a lifecycle, and they've now extended that to five, five and a half, or six, all the way across the board. In some ways, I think this is a bit of a.

• 1:05:18Speaker 06

  You know, game of catch up if one provider does it, everybody else has to follow suit.

• 1:05:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:05:23Speaker 06

  But we go into detail in the article about like what this actually means and you know, Burry's argument that this is understating um the amount of or it's boosting their earnings, it's understating the amount of of depreciation that's going on on these uh these GPUs is really predicated on Nvidia's comments that the product cycle is now two to three years long. Right?

• 1:05:47John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:05:47Speaker 06

  And I think that is is like.

• 1:05:49John Coogan?

  But that's on that's on the development of a new chip like from my perspective depreciation, although there is the economic question about how much how much value can you get out of the tokens that you sell generated by an A100 in five years? That's a good question, but that's not how we think about depreciation. Like if you buy a mechanical arm to put a glass windshield on a car at a automotive factory, you're just wondering how long until that mechanical arm breaks? And and I'm sure there's been immense pressure on Nvidia to let the chips not burn out in two years like they you know, they probably have done a lot of work. It's a very expensive chip. It's a very expensive rack. Like, is it that crazy to assume that that the 50th percentile might be five years now?

• 1:06:34Speaker 06

  No, and there's basically no precedent to say that a chip would fail or wear out as you're describing it in two to three years.

• 1:06:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:42Speaker 06

  Like there's the hardware OEMs, they have contracts that are standard for three to five years and they offer extended warranties for six and seven years.

• 1:06:50John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:06:50Speaker 06

  The big supercomputers in the world that run as a total system or even individual servers kind of get life cycled, they run for five, six, seven, some of them up to 10 years in in production, right? Not to say the years that it takes to actually turn this thing on. And and these are the environments that use liquid cooling and some of the latest and greatest chips that are actually, you know, similar in comparison to the GB300. And then even if you go to the providers directly and you try to rent a V100 today, which was launched in 2017, right? Seven, eight years ago, I can still rent V100s in data centers from providers like Amazon. I mean, there's plenty of A100s for sale right now. So there's there's nothing.

• 1:07:32Speaker 06

  To me, you know, the, the, um, the proof of this argument would be predicated on Nvidia releasing chips that so drastically outperformed the current generation in two to three years that all hyperscalers everywhere are so incentivized to go through another capex cycle. They gotta buy all new chips and rip out all the existing ones and we're still so power constrained that they have to do all that. And that seems like a much farther leap than saying, uh, we might be able to run these chips for five or six years in the data centers themselves.

• 1:08:04John Coogan?

  Hmm. I, I wonder, do you have a reaction? So, uh, Ben Thompson's been writing about the AI build out and the bubble potentially, the benefits of a bubble. And one of his like bull cases for a bubble was basically that, uh, in previous bubbles, you get a glut of, uh, IT infrastructure or, or even just, you know, steam engines or railroads. Uh, but his example was dark fiber. And the idea was if you overbuild, well, then you get a bunch of extra infrastructure that you can use and it's cheap. And his, his like counter to the AI build out was that, uh, depreciated H100s just

• 1:08:45John Coogan?

  aren't as valuable as depreciate, fully depreciated, uh, you know, fiber lines. But I just don't know if that's true. I feel like if there's a ton of depreciated H100s out there in 10 years from now, I think there's still something useful that you can do with that in the same way that you can push bits across fiber lines. It just, it won't be super intelligence, but there will be a base load of, you know, generic knowledge retrieval or just, hey, people just wanna chat. And the fact that it's so cheap now because the assets are fully depreciated means that you can just have a chatbot in, interface every single conversation in every app and it'll just be so much, it's sort of like a Jevon's paradox thing. I'm not saying that the economics will stay the same. The margins will go way down, but there will be a benefit.

• 1:09:30John Coogan?

  It's not like these things just disappear after five years. They don't just break.

• 1:09:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, they they they don't just break. I think there are some new, your comparison makes sense, but there are some nuances compared to the fiber lines, just to say that if new GPUs come along from other providers that are so much more performant than the current ones, then at some level, it doesn't make sense to keep the power turned on for the old one because the operating expense is too much. Like, we estimate this at thirty cents per kilowatt. So if the bottom of the H100 price gets below thirty cents or somewhere close to it, you're probably better ripping them out and replacing them with something new, even if, you know, for the car analogy, this is still a beater that somebody else could drive for the price of gas and insurance, right?

• 1:10:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:10:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:10:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was talking to Jordy about it, and I was saying, like, there is a world where, to just put in really concrete terms that most business people might understand, just, you know, if your job is, you know, you're, you have a Diet Coke business, you deliver Diet Cokes, you have a, you have a, you have a gas car that delivers the Coca-Cola, and you have the opportunity to switch to an electric vehicle, you, you might do that because the low, bringing down your total cost of ownership, your annual OpEx would be great, but sometimes companies just don't want to spend the CapEx to actually do that. And so I'm wondering if there's a world where the GPUs get traded down to a point where people are like, yeah, the OpEx is higher, but I still, I'm still running it for this niche use case. Like, there are still mainframes that are running. There are still on-premise

• 1:11:05John Coogan?

  cloud, there's, there's companies that haven't fully moved to the cloud. And I'm just wondering how long some of these, like, GPU racks might just be sitting around where someone gets it cheap, and they're just like, yeah, like, that's the thing that filters every invoice that we get, and it just runs, and it runs, like, it runs Grok 2 on it or whatever, and it's fine. It's good enough.

• 1:11:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, I mean, look, I, I put in the article, like, to Azure's announcement from September, kind of pleading with their users to move workloads off of V100 GPUs that are eight years old. So. Please.

• 1:11:45Speaker 06

  Please don't get upset at us when we turn off this instance and you, you know, I don't think they're doing payroll on these things, but like, thing's gonna shut off, so.

• 1:11:53John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:11:54Speaker 06

  I, I mean, I totally take your point. Working in IT for years, there's, there's so many people that come along and when there's like some sort of last call for the sale of spare parts for these old GPUs and they want to keep these systems running, they, they suddenly show up and want to order a bunch of them.

• 1:12:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:13Speaker 06

  And it could be for all sorts of reasons, but usually it's just inertia of not wanting to move the old workloads onto the new stuff.

• 1:12:18John Coogan?

  We're also completely discounting the nostalgia market. I mean, people like air-cooled Porsches. I imagine that, that Dylan and you guys are going to be like, yeah, I need a V100 just, you know, sitting in the office, like, I don't like this new technology, this new.

• 1:12:33Speaker 06

  V100, man, we gotta, you want to talk nostalgia, we gotta go back to Kepler, Pascal, you know, way before Volta guys, I don't know.

• 1:12:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, way before Volta.

• 1:12:42Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what, what about on the, what about on the chip side? Uh, what, what was most notable about, uh, Satya's comments there?

• 1:12:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I find it fascinating that Satya clarified they have access to all IP, including chips and including systems. So.

• 1:12:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:57Speaker 06

  This is one of the models that everybody jumps to. I think OpenAI has a ton of IP that's going into their chip program that Azure could actively take and sell as part of the cloud services if they want to partner up with Broadcom and just produce a bunch of chips that are, you know, more similar to a TPU than they are to a GPU in the future.

• 1:13:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:18Speaker 06

  Um, they've got that optionality.

• 1:13:20John Coogan?

  I wonder if there's a way to puzzle around that, though. Like, I, when I was debating with Jordi, I was saying like, well, you know, obviously OpenAI has a team that works with Nvidia and with Broadcom and with, you know, maybe Intel in the future, AMD now. Uh, is there a world where the IP lives with the other companies for the next five years or something? Uh, it seems like maybe tricky, but I'm just wondering like, how much of the IP actually lives within, within OpenAI versus the, their partners?

• 1:13:49Speaker 06

  Well, I, I think it's, um, so Satya made the point in the podcast that in some cases, Microsoft seeded parts of the OpenAI chip program with IP from their Maya program.

• 1:13:59Jordi Hays?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:14:00Speaker 06

  I think it's this whole mosaic of where the actual IP sits.

• 1:14:04Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:14:04Speaker 06

  But at the end of the day, there's going to be something that comes with OpenAI that they learn. And you can even go beyond the chips to the systems that the chips go into, to the network that connects the chips, or to the software, like the runtime and the like inference stack, which is to say, how they run inference efficiently on these chips. There's a whole stack that gets built from the actual hardware through to the API that produces tokens to the user in the chatbot. And they have access to all of that, that OpenAI would consider proprietary. So I, maybe to the point you guys were making earlier, comparing to Excel or to Microsoft's other strategies.

• 1:14:45Speaker 06

  It, it seems like, um, this is a case of OpenAI going really fast and executing really quickly and their moat being speed. And you compare that to Microsoft, who has an existing moat of distribution. So they've got 400 data centers in Azure, 70 regions.

• 1:15:06Jordi Hays?

  Free cash flow, free cash flow is also a bit of a moat, too.

• 1:15:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, definitely. Um, they've got all the makings for like, you know, who, who do you, who do you think wins the race to turning on public instances of an OpenAI chip that anybody can rent, right? OpenAI or Microsoft Azure with a bit of a head start. Like, I, I think they have some good optionality there with, with OpenAI's program, with the relationship with Nvidia, with Maya. But the point is that right now, they are losing the race on chips to Nvidia, the TPU from Google, maybe AMD, they use some AMD GPUs right now. So they've got to go and execute, right?

• 1:15:53Jordi Hays?

  Do you think Satya, do you think Satya expects Azure to compete with an OpenAI cloud in the next few years?

• 1:16:01Speaker 06

  I think if OpenAI really develops a cloud, absolutely, because Satya says in that article that they, well, in the interview, that they don't want to be beholden to one customer, right? I think he says, like, we have five big deals with five customers, and that's like the bulk of Azure's compute right now. And I would say it's really one deal with one customer. That is the bulk of incremental revenue in Azure right now. So, like, I mean, I go hands-on testing this stuff, and I've talked to 140 different companies about actually using Azure, and they are a distant third compared to just AWS and Google from a hyperscaler perspective.

• 1:16:43Speaker 06

  And I talked to Clem from Hugging Face this morning, and he shared some data with us that backs this up. Like, if you look at the downloads from Hugging Face of open source models, the downloads that originate from an Azure IP, there's more than five times less when compared to AWS.

• 1:17:00John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:17:01Speaker 06

  Right? OpenAI can use it all with their private repos and stuff, but if you look at the long tail of the market, where the long tail represents everybody but OpenAI, basically, they're getting five times less of that business right now because they're so focused on OpenAI. So I think Satya wants to do more than just OpenAI. It's just a matter of actually going and doing it.

• 1:17:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do we have more of a clear narrative now on what motivated the pause? Like, you can see it so clearly in this data center pre-leased capacity in the semi-analysis article. It's so obvious what's happening from 2023. You see the blue bars just increasing, increasing, and then just complete flatlining. Everyone else is growing. It seems like this, it seems like this, this, this piece, this video with Dorkesh and Dylan feels a little bit like him maybe teasing like, hey, I'm getting back in the race. Like, the headline with the Wall Street Journal is like, I got the biggest data center. That feels like I'm unpausing. But, but, right?

• 1:18:04John Coogan?

  You're not like, oh, I'm happy to be a leaser, and oh, by the way, I have the biggest thing. Actually, I own the biggest thing. Like, that's kind of a... It's kind of an odd dichotomy there. And I'm wondering if there's a if there's a clear narrative. Was it specifically like the nature of the OpenAI relationship that that led to the pause? Or was it just concern about the overall market or the viability of the technology? Or was he like plateau pilled and had seen that GPT four point five wasn't getting adoption too expensive to serve? Like, like, do we have a narrative for like, what motivated the pause yet?

• 1:18:41Speaker 06

  I don't know if it's clear. I think we have different pieces that we can piece together. The the things that Satya says in the interview point towards fungibility, diversification outside of OpenAI.

• 1:18:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:55Speaker 06

  A lack of foresight in two years ago to what the actual demand would be. They like fishtail where they went too far on building demand. And then they wanted to come back and now they didn't have enough. And so now they're renting from Neo clouds like

• 1:19:11Speaker 06

  Nebius, like Lambda, Iren, Oracle directly. They've got N scale deals. I mean, they're clearly using Neo clouds to take on that extra bit of risk. And going forward, I mean, we are, I think the result is that it's incredibly bullish for Microsoft actually serving this demand when they have the first right of refusal. And OpenAI's growth continues to go crazy and they they are kind of back on track to leading the way with coding models in a way that they were, you know, maybe forecasted not to with Anthropic coming and taking a bunch of share there. They are like all in on taking down Anthropic as a direct competitor with their Codex models now. So I think they just kind of, Microsoft just flinched a bit.

• 1:19:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:55Speaker 06

  And they're they're back on track and we're pretty, I mean, we're pretty bullish on them growing in the future. But it's notable that Satya talks about things like diversification around OpenAI and around globally. Like, the idea to me that there's a there's a geopolitical conclusion that you can draw from his response. On the question about the pause where he says, what if I want to build in India? What do I want to build in Europe? What if I want to build, you know, elsewhere? And therefore we pause North Carolina. That seems to say that governments around the world can attract investment in data centers if they implement a bunch of harsh regulations on data privacy.

• 1:20:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:32Speaker 06

  Um, and more and more companies are going to want to train models based on personally identifiable information or other types of data that's regulated and needs to stay in those countries and therefore any GPUs around the world.

• 1:20:46John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:20:47Speaker 06

  You know, that could be something that they just kind of learned and therefore pause North Carolina spit up something else.

• 1:20:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:55Speaker 06

  Haven't seen that exactly play out on the global deployments, but it could be coming.

• 1:21:00John Coogan?

  How, how real is this fungibility of the fleet thing? Because, uh, the, the narrative around Google is that they have a TPU. They're so vertically integrated, the DeepMind and, and the, it just feels like when you go to Gemini, you get something that's like down to the metal. And then at, at Microsoft, it's like, pick your model. And then also they're, they're subleasing from all these other clouds. But as, as I see from ClusterMax, like there is a wide variety of performance metrics and results and qualitative, like even like the feel of these different NeoClouds. And so is there, is there some sort of risk to you go to Azure and they put you on the, the lowest ranked ClusterMax NeoCloud?

• 1:21:43John Coogan?

  And it's like, I would rather be up here on the, the top tier lease. I want to be, I want to be sub, I want to be subcontracted down to the platinum tier, not the D tier. Uh, is there any risk to that? Or, or, or is, is Microsoft actually able to take a NeoCloud that is in the D tier and, and give you the Azure level of service?

• 1:22:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, I, I think it really depends on at what level you're assessing the fungibility. So I think in some ways the tokens or the tokens produced by the model endpoints are almost completely fungible.

• 1:22:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:16Speaker 06

  You know, you can find in the models on private scenarios, but generally speaking, like tokens from one provider versus tokens from another provider are effectively the exact same. As long as you're, you know, hitting the like quality metric you need from that model deployment on that GPU.

• 1:22:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:30Speaker 06

  But if you look at the underlying architecture, like when Azure claims to add a hundred thousand GB three hundreds coming along online this quarter. I mean, that is not fungible to every single user on a cloud service like. GB three hundreds are rented seventy two GPUs at a time in a hundred and thirty five kilowatt rack. Your workload needs to be ported to ARM because it's a gray CPU. You need to have the performance per dollar benefits of the Blackwell GPU to justify it over the previous generation hopper. It needs to use a GPU in the first place, such as spend a bunch of time in the article talking about the importance of.

• 1:23:06Speaker 06

  You know, in the in the interview, talking about the importance of databases of like. You know, non GPU related services that actually run the web app that actually store the data, right?

• 1:23:17Jordi Hays?

  Turbo.

• 1:23:18Speaker 06

  Lots of Azure capacity beyond GPUs coming online too, right?

• 1:23:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:23Speaker 06

  You know, I call them CPU data centers now and they consume a little bit less.

• 1:23:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, cup. Wanted your take on a couple of other things. One, the new Anthropic news fifty billion dollar investment. Any, any, any reactions to that?

• 1:23:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think notable that they called out Fluid Stack by name and they're not calling out the underlying providers, as you said, like. You know, if if somebody like Fluid Stack can help them deliver on a, a bunch of what we think is TPUs deployed directly first party.

• 1:24:00Speaker 06

  You know, then there's, I mean, there's all sorts of stuff that they can do because. Under the hood, it's it's pretty clear that Fluid Stack is deploying these TPUs in terror wolf data centers in Buffalo. Uh, their Lake Mariner facility and, uh, in Elsmore, Texas, and then at Cypher Mining in Texas, if you look at some of the. You know, you, you got to pair two new press releases together. The one from the underlying provider and and Fluid Stack and then the one from Anthropic with Fluid Stack. But the point is that Anthropic is, is definitely ramping up just at the same level as OpenAI, maybe not quite at the same level, but. They, they both seem to be clearly believing that.

• 1:24:41Speaker 06

  That statement from Greg Brockman, like if we had 10x more compute right now, we'd have 10x more revenue. And so therefore their constraint is compute, bring it online and just keep growing.

• 1:24:53John Coogan?

  That was certainly the case with the early iPhone launch, like the iPhone, like Apple's earnings were extremely predictable every quarter because they knew they they were like, as many as we make, we will sell. And so they were completely can supply constraint. Um, I, I, it does feel like on the, on the question of backlogs, uh, Anthropic has just been much less aggressive. Like they have been somewhat saying the biggest number every once in a while, but they haven't gotten into the trillions of backlog. And it feels like OpenAI, Sam's almost like, oh yeah, sure. Like give me all the weight of Stargate, even though that's sort of a separate entity. And he could have easily fended that off and been like, well, that's Stargate. That's sort of a separate thing. That's not all on OpenAI. Like we need to clarify what, like how this all fits together.

• 1:25:38John Coogan?

  But Anthropic's been a little bit quieter on the, on the like, okay, we have this crazy RPO that's going on all over the tech industry.

• 1:25:45Jordi Hays?

  What was your reaction to CoreWeave's quarter? Uh, Jim Cramer was going pretty hard.

• 1:25:51John Coogan?

  What did, what did Kramer say?

• 1:25:52Jordi Hays?

  He, he was just like.

• 1:25:55John Coogan?

  He was blackpilling?

• 1:25:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was just a funny interview. He's like, what's going on? What's going on?

• 1:25:59John Coogan?

  Because they doubled, they doubled revenue, but they sold off. Is that what happened?

• 1:26:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, they sold us a ton in the last month. Uh, I think like 20, about a, yeah, 26%, something like that. But, uh, Kramer was saying like, why are you relying on a Bitcoin miner, uh, to like help fill your capacity? Are you sure they can deliver? And he was talking about Core Scientific, which CoreWeave attempted to acquire. It got rejected. Um, but, uh, I know it was, uh, I, I know it was just yesterday.

• 1:26:30John Coogan?

  Platinum on ClusterMax. That's all I need to know. Buy and hold. Get lost, Kramer.

• 1:26:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And, um, and, uh, the CEO was saying like, yeah, and like, he didn't name semi-analysis because I think the CNBC audience is maybe not familiar yet. But he was saying like, we're platinum rated, we're platinum rated.

• 1:26:47John Coogan?

  Oh, we said platinum rated? Oh, that's amazing. I love it.

• 1:26:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, it's it's in the earnings calls. I mean, Alice has mentioned, I think, three times. But that's definitely, yeah, we we went into this, the

• 1:27:00John Coogan?

  We're very excited for this. This is big.

• 1:27:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think we like we went into this, Jeremy and the data center guys rake. Dan, they put out a note earlier in the day to the core research subscribers that

• 1:27:14Speaker 06

  the core is at risk of short term delays in their CapEx, but not to their revenue, which is driven by the data center partner core scientific. So, yeah, when you're relying on somebody to add 250 megawatts and you know, they're only going to get you 150 by the end of the year, that changes your guidance on CapEx.

• 1:27:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:27:33Speaker 06

  I think the, you know, this is like, yeah, look, this is the the reality of the industry right now, which is that

• 1:27:44Speaker 06

  when projects are so big and measured in the hundreds of megawatts, small delays or small changes in a plan can really impact like, short term financial guidance that that people have in place. I don't like personally, I don't think this changes any of the fundamentals of like core weaves engineering or a lot of the like experience and what customers they have signed. But we saw the same like a very similar reaction when when the information put in an article about Oracle having delays, right?

• 1:28:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:14Speaker 06

  And, you know, I think people are, people who don't know about the data center industry or or things like this, they they see things like, oh, yeah, these these GPUs take a month to come online after they get installed and they're starting to depreciate the asset, but they're not generating revenue yet. Like, what's going on? It's like, yeah, that's that's typical. I mean,

• 1:28:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's completely standard.

• 1:28:34Speaker 06

  That's business.

• 1:28:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:37Speaker 06

  It stuff takes, I mean, you know, maybe US federal government is is different, but in my previous job, we tried to hand over these supercomputers to the US federal government. It'd take like a year and a half to pass accept it.

• 1:28:47John Coogan?

  But at the same time, if if if investors aren't aware of that, and then they learn that for the first time, they could be surprised. And so that could be something of what we're seeing in the gyrations in the public markets, I suppose.

• 1:28:57Speaker 06

  It makes sense. And there was a, I think there was a broad

• 1:29:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:01Speaker 06

  recognition that the Bitcoin miners have an uphill battle to figure out how to run these facilities when compared to established players like an Equinix or a digital realty or, you know, switch or someone, somebody that's like, has been running tier three data centers for a long time.

• 1:29:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:17Speaker 06

  It's just different.

• 1:29:18John Coogan?

  Give us an update on the energy model that's coming. What can you tell us? Is it this year? Next year? Is it my Christmas present? How does this work?

• 1:29:27Speaker 06

  There's some previews. I think you should, you should have a Jay on the, on the program next time or bring Jeremy back.

• 1:29:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I would love to have.

• 1:29:35Speaker 06

  Talk about it.

• 1:29:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I'm specifically, I'm very, very interested in, you know, the just American energy forecast for the next couple of years. Because it feels like the entire industry is sort of hinging on like the trend changing, in my opinion. It feels like we're, we need to bring up the level of energy production for everything else to happen. And whether we hit some sort of regulatory block or some massive scale block or a capital block or a glut of some sort or some gyration correction, there's so many things that could go wrong. But I'd love to know what the forecast actually is from the folks who have gone so much deeper.

• 1:30:14Speaker 06

  I'll give you the quick, the quick hit. So everybody's trying to do turbines behind the meter right now, not gas, right? And you've got a number of different players, but if you look at Schneider, Vertiv, Bloom, one of them, Bloom is ramping up. First of all, they're all sold out. So the model will cover like how sold out and exactly, you know, exactly how sold out. But yeah, you, you want to look at Bloom ramping up production and you want to get Schneider and Vertiv on here and try and figure out exactly why they're not. Let's, uh, let's see, you know, what does it take to get those guys to recognize what everybody else in the industry is recognizing right now? And then, uh, and then let's dig into solar, wind, nuclear, hydro, all these alternatives that, you know,

• 1:30:59Speaker 06

  you'd like to, you'd like to have in there, right? Why, why is Elon putting power plants on the other side of the border? And then piping the electricity back to his data center in Memphis because of, you know, short-term regulatory approvals? Like there's all of that political stuff that goes on to influence this market.

• 1:31:18John Coogan?

  I'm so excited for it. Well,

• 1:31:20Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for coming on again twice in a week. We'll see what happens.

• 1:31:24John Coogan?

  We really appreciate you taking the time.

• 1:31:25Jordi Hays?

  For a three-peat.

• 1:31:26John Coogan?

  If you're, if you're not already subscribed, what are you doing? Head over to semianalysis.com. Buy the most expensive subscription you can find, especially if you're a venture capitalist. You can't call yourself a VC in the age of AI. If you're not paying semi-analysis, the big bucks.

• 1:31:43Jordi Hays?

  At least a couple hundred thousand dollars per month.

• 1:31:45John Coogan?

  Per month. I demand it.

• 1:31:47Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, great. Thanks for coming on.

• 1:31:49John Coogan?

  We'll see you soon. You mentioned TurboPuffer. I'll tell you about TurboPuffer. Search everybody. Serverless vector and full tech search built from first principles on object storage, fast, ten X cheaper, and extremely scalable. The soundboard is doing very well.

• 1:32:03Jordi Hays?

  Someone leaked their revenue recently and it was quite shocking.

• 1:32:07John Coogan?

  Well, we have a shocking guest. Brian Halligan from HubSpot joining us. He's the co-founder of HubSpot. Welcome to the stream, Brian. How are you doing?

• 1:32:14Jordi Hays?

  Sorry to keep you waiting. Welcome to the show.

• 1:32:16Speaker 07

  Never better. How are you guys doing?

• 1:32:18John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastic. What is the, what is the latest in your world? Have you been captured by the AI buildout? Is this something that's keeping you up at night? Or are you watching it more as an observer? Or are you checked out entirely? Where are you on the, the, how much does it get your pulse up? Cause me and Jordy, it's every day for us over here. We're in the trenches.

• 1:32:41Speaker 07

  I'm very checked in. I come at it from another angle. What I've been doing for the last year is I'm like the, I run an in-house CEO practice at Sequoia.

• 1:32:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:55Speaker 07

  And I do three things. I coach CEOs, most of which are building companies on top of the AI wave, all of which. I create communities of CEOs so they can collaborate together. I have a kids table of CEOs of kind of small company and an adults table of CEOs in large companies. And then I'm creating content. So I've got a podcast. Launches tomorrow.

• 1:33:15John Coogan?

  Oh, let's go.

• 1:33:17Speaker 07

  Yes. About CEOs and how to be a CEO.

• 1:33:20John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:33:21Speaker 07

  How do you go from startup to scale up?

• 1:33:24Speaker 07

  Tune in tomorrow.

• 1:33:25John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:33:27Jordi Hays?

  What, what's, what's the format? What's the format? Is it, is it guest-driven? Is it, is it turning kind of the lessons that you talk about at the kids table and at the big kids table?

• 1:33:37John Coogan?

  It's a six-hour daily livestream, actually.

• 1:33:41John Coogan?

  It starts, it starts at 9:00 AM and ends at 3:00 PM. Makes us look lazy.

• 1:33:47Speaker 07

  The basic thesis is like the playbook I grew up running HubSpot from 2006 to 2021. Like a lot of those plays don't seem to work as well. Sure. And the rulebook. Like what? Like the rulebook we thought like, for example, I think what's how the way Justin Wong runs this company is super interesting with 60 direct reports and no one on ones and kind of public criticism. The way Elon runs this company, his empire is really interesting. Uh, the way Brian Chesky does it is quite interesting. And I notice all these CEOs have kind of new plays and they've got a new perspective on things. And so I'm inviting them on kind of one by one to chat about how did you become a CEO? How do you like your job? What are the best practices? What is all wrong about CEOing these days?

• 1:34:31Speaker 07

  And I think it's my first guest is Parker from Rippling tomorrow. Nice. And it's a good one because Parker gives all the tea on getting fired by David Sacks from Zenefits. All the tea on the drama with D L on Spygate. And then in between all that, he is a very, very thoughtful CEO. He's not a big fan of conventional wisdom, as people know, but he, he's doing some really cool stuff. So that's kind of episode number one tomorrow.

• 1:35:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, I like that framing as like focusing on the actual job of the CEO. Cause there, there's, there's, there's other shows that could do like, okay, let's do the product review. Let's, let's do the product announcement, uh, but having one feed where you can go and actually uh, understand the philosophy of a whole host of CEOs. That's fascinating.

• 1:35:20Speaker 07

  Uh, what? I think, I think it's kind of interesting because I was a CEO for so long. So it's like, I'm really a journalist. It's like a conversation about what the hell's really going on here. Yeah.

• 1:35:29Jordi Hays?

  How did your approach evolve over the 15 or so years that you were CEO of HubSpot?

• 1:35:35Speaker 07

  I don't think it evolved that much is the interesting part.

• 1:35:39Jordi Hays?

  You just one shot it.

• 1:35:41Speaker 07

  You just. I was basically the same guy from 2006 to, to, uh, 2021. Uh, but, and I followed like ye old playbook of the way people run companies, like the Bill Campbell style playbook. And that's what I think is interesting. It's kind of changing and that's what I'm trying to dig into and kind of go deep on. It's like Stanley Tucci, you know, Stanley Tucci show and he goes to Italy and he's trying to find his roots. I'm searching, I'm searching.

• 1:36:08John Coogan?

  What are your thoughts on?

• 1:36:10Speaker 07

  You want to know some surprises?

• 1:36:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, please.

• 1:36:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:14Speaker 07

  Okay, a couple of things. There's a, there's a breed of CEO that I see a lot of these days that I call a five-tool CEO. Now, I'm the big baseball guy, and there's such a thing in baseball as a five-tool player. Somebody who can hit, somebody who can hit for power, somebody who can catch, somebody who can throw, and somebody who can run at an elite level. Very, very rare in baseball.

• 1:36:39Jordi Hays?

  Who's an example, who's an example of a, of a modern five-tool player?

• 1:36:44John Coogan?

  Shohei Ohtani.

• 1:36:45Speaker 07

  I mean, a six-tool player is Shohei Ohtani.

• 1:36:47Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:36:48Speaker 07

  Uh, but he can do, he, he can actually run, he can hit, he can hit for power, he can throw, he can catch.

• 1:36:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:55Speaker 07

  He's a very talented, very unusual cat. Um, Alex Bregman's one of those in the red, some red subs. But there's a bunch of these folks who kind of remind me of that in, in the software industry where they've got vision, they can code, they can design, they can recruit, and they can sell their product. And they're, and that's, I think, was pretty rare in software. They're all over the place now. And they're getting funded, and I work with a bunch of them. Just a few examples, like Parker's one for sure, Brett Taylor for sure from Sierra's one, Gabe Stengel from ROGO, kind of a new company's ripping is one, uh, Matty from 11

• 1:37:35Speaker 07

  Labs, I have no idea how to say his last name, Kareem from Clay, Dara from Delphi, like, on and on and on. I'm super impressed with the new breed that's coming out and how talented they are.

• 1:37:45John Coogan?

  Who do you think the Barry Bonds of business is? Or the Mark McGuire of business? Fantastic performance as a CEO, clearly using performance-enhancing drugs.

• 1:37:58Speaker 07

  If someone, if someone tapped me on the shoulder and said...

• 1:38:03Speaker 07

  You know, I don't know if you heard this, but Elon's actually an alien.

• 1:38:06John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:38:08Speaker 07

  That that that puts, you know, would you guys be surprised if someone said, it turns out he was an alien? Would you guys be like, oh, no, no, no, no, that's that's crazy. You'd be like, yeah, maybe.

• 1:38:17John Coogan?

  It is. It is funny, the performance sensing drugs thing, because like me and Jordy have joked about how it's not illegal to be on a stimulant. I obviously partake in in caffeine, the legal stimulants, but some folks go a little bit further. But the reason that it was so controversial and so illegal in baseball is because isn't baseball a sanctioned monopoly by the government? I believe that's I believe that's why. And so that's why during the whole baseball scandal, the steroid scandal, they came in and they had to do like a hearing in on Capitol Hill. It was a crazy, crazy moment. I don't know if you tracked that.

• 1:38:52Speaker 07

  That I think the real reason is because baseball's been around for 150 years. People who broke records in the 1920s, like Babe Ruth broke important records in the 1920s. But you can have like a ranking of who's actually done the most home runs, best batting. You can't do that in basketball because they change the rules so much. You can't do that football, they change the rules so much. So that's why they were so resistant to change the rules in baseball. And that's why they were so up in arms about the steroid thing. But I do think founders do the equivalent. Like when I was growing up, I'm a beer drinker, you know?

• 1:39:27Speaker 07

  When I was a team, definitely Todd Ron. You go to you go to a Sequoia founder dinner?

• 1:39:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:32Speaker 07

  First of all, it's at 5:30. You know, like early and everyone has a salad and it has water and there's back in the room coding by 7:30. That's definitely not how I grew up.

• 1:39:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:45Jordi Hays?

  Do you think beer? Do you think beer gave you an edge back in the day?

• 1:39:48Speaker 07

  I I don't think beer gives anybody an edge. I think it helped me connect with some employees along the way, for sure, particularly salespeople.

• 1:39:56John Coogan?

  What do you think about co-CEOs? Yay or nay?

• 1:40:00Speaker 07

  OK, I think I Sand Hill Road is very negative on this.

• 1:40:04Jordi Hays?

  Except on stewards. We have co-stewardship.

• 1:40:08Speaker 07

  Uh, yes, we can talk about that, too. But I talked about this on one of the pod episodes with Vlad Tenev. He was a co-CEO for like the first seven or eight years of the company. And I was very surprised to hear that and he was very positive on it. I think you can do it. I think it's a little dangerous. You better know the person very well and be able to finish your sentence. It's like my co-founder Darmesh and I, we weren't co-CEOs, but we ran it like a partnership and we thought of it like a partnership and the employees thought of it like a partnership. If we called ourselves co-CEOs, that would have actually worked quite fine.

• 1:40:43John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 1:40:43Speaker 07

  Yeah. Want some other things that surprised me?

• 1:40:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:50Speaker 07

  Here's the weird thing. Two of our most successful entrepreneurs of our generation are Jensen Huang, Elon Musk. And they've obviously got really unique playbooks. Like Jensen's got his 60 direct reports and the no one owns all this stuff we just talked about. Elon has his algorithm and like credits the algorithm with a lot of his success. I ask all of the CEOs on the pod, like, who's on your Mount Rushmore? Who do you follow? Like, who's your inspiration? For me, it was Steve Jobs, like my generation is Steve Jobs.

• 1:41:24Speaker 07

  None of them really say Elon or Jensen, like, no one's copying their playbook. No one, none of these CEOs have 60 direct reports. And not a single person has mentioned the algorithm. I think that's quite odd. Do you?

• 1:41:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, we actually polled YC founders of the last demo day. We asked probably 20 or so, who was their favorite entrepreneur? Like, who'd they look up to? And I was expecting like half to say Elon and maybe, you know, a third to say Jensen, something like that, just like vanilla market cap. It's a question, we didn't prep them, we didn't tell them we were gonna ask them this. This is off the top of their head. And there were maybe like two or three Elons, but it was all over the place. And it was, it was way down the stack. I mean, there were some people who were like, the founder that I look up to most is, is like, A founder who started their company five years ago and is a unicorn now, but like certainly

• 1:42:20John Coogan?

  not like one of the greats, like obviously doing fantastically, but like, you know, this is like a series B or series C level founder. And they're like, that's who I actually look

• 1:42:28Jordi Hays?

  I was shocked. I don't think, I don't even think a single person said Jeff Bezos.

• 1:42:33John Coogan?

  I don't think anyone said.

• 1:42:34Jordi Hays?

  A guy with 120 billion of 2024.

• 1:42:37John Coogan?

  Free cash flow, yeah, yeah, it was crazy. It was, it was much less concentrated in the mag seven than I thought it would be. And I don't know if that's a shift in, in how younger entrepreneurs or newer entrepreneurs are thinking about what success looks like. Like the, maybe the downstream critique of like the, the teal monopoly thesis is that, like, it's actually really hard to go start a business that is in the social networking category or in the online commerce category. It's just harder to do that. And so, uh, maybe people, some people read zero to one and they said, hey, I gotta start a company. But then other people read zero to one and says like, hey, I, I better not, I better

• 1:43:20John Coogan?

  not set my sights too high because realistically, how am I going to compete in, you know, some of these monopolistic categories that have been truly dominated by the hyperscalers? It's going to be hard for me to go zero to one in those categories. And so I need to maybe find a smaller market. I don't know. Maybe it's a trend.

• 1:43:37Speaker 07

  One of the things that surprised me about them is they don't really have anyone that they're really following or looking up to. They're very much their own people.

• 1:43:50Speaker 07

  And they're kind of making it up as they go and they're, and they're writing the rules kind of based on what they think makes sense. They don't have, like when I grew up, I had two people, I have two CEOs, Steve Jobs, Jerry Garcia. Those were my two heroes that I tried to base my behavior around. And they were my courses. These guys don't have courses. The other thing that's interesting about all of them is like be yourself, everyone else is taken. They're all very, very, very different homo sapiens. Like Vlad Tenev is very, very, very different from Parker at Ripley. Anton from lovable is very different than Matty from 11 labs. They are all quite unique, um, which I like to see that. And

• 1:44:35Speaker 07

  they're, and they're, they're their own people. Um, they have a lot of agency.

• 1:44:39Jordi Hays?

  Are you interviewing, interviewing anybody that runs her company remotely?

• 1:44:44Speaker 07

  Nobody's doing remote. Everybody is in the office. Remote is dead.

• 1:44:49John Coogan?

  Remote is dead.

• 1:44:50Speaker 07

  And everybody talks about 996. I think there's a lot more talk about 996 than walk on 996. I don't think very many people are actually doing it. The CEOs are though. Every CEO I talk to is under a like I say, what's your stress level, one to 10? Almost all of them say 10.

• 1:45:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. What do you think about this idea that a lot of companies are 996ing in a hybrid sense? That because the tools have gotten so good, I mean, a software engineer can fire off a prompt at home on their phone that will go and, you know, start doing work that gets reviewed in the morning. I'm firing off a deep research prompt for something that we are going to talk about on the show. Yes, tomorrow. And so there's this like ambient level of remote work that's happening on top of the in-person work that's happening. And so I might, if I were to push back, it might be that remote is not dead.

• 1:45:48John Coogan?

  We said, yes, and we said, let's go back to the workplace. Let's work in the office and then let's also work remotely at home on Saturdays, on the nights and weekends, because that's what it takes to win. And so the 996 thing is happening, but across two, two spaces.

• 1:46:07Speaker 07

  I'm a little, I totally buy that so much work is asynchronous now. I just think like we went remote at HubSpot pre-COVID and like the culture is great. It's still great, but you lose something. You lose, you definitely lose something. So I'm very supportive of the enough thing. Like if I were starting a company today, I wouldn't do remote. You know, your headquarters in San Francisco. San Francisco is a bear of a place to scale a company. Salespeople are hard to find and really expensive and not loyal. Developers are even harder. And so I do a big hub in San Francisco and then another big hub, let's say in Toronto, where there's a lot of salespeople, a lot of developers and be like, we're in office and at least four days a week. I think that's a good call. Ironically, the people who I think that CEOs, who I think are the hardest core

• 1:46:50Speaker 07

  are the two European founders I interviewed, Anton from Lovable and Mathieu from Eleven Labs. Like they are seven days a week. They expect everybody in the office for seven days a week. Those two are the hardest core, even more so than our American brethren.

• 1:47:04John Coogan?

  Well, the pressure on them is immense because people have such so low of expectations for Europe. So, you know, they have to deliver for their country. It's really, it's really high stakes for them.

• 1:47:13Speaker 07

  And it is kind of patriotic, uh, for sure.

• 1:47:16John Coogan?

  Of course, of course, they need to lead the thing. Uh, talk about the stewards.

• 1:47:20Jordi Hays?

  Wait, one, one, one, one second. I, I was curious. You said, uh, the CEOs you interviewed, all of them are the CEOs you talked to. All of them say their stress level is 10 out of 10. For the most part, they do. 15 years running HubSpot. When, when was your, like, did, does that resonate? Was it kind of steady state 10 out of 10 the whole time? Or did you at some point figure out a motion that allowed you to maybe hover at, you know, a seven? Which is maybe like a healthy amount of stress.

• 1:47:50Speaker 07

  Hmm. It was pretty close to 10 the whole time. Um.

• 1:47:53Jordi Hays?

  Just white knuckling it?

• 1:47:55Speaker 07

  It was pretty stressful. Like, the whole thing was stressful. And, and like the thing with HubSpot and most companies, like it looks pretty smooth from the outside, but it's like two steps forward and like one frigging giant step back and two steps forward, giant step back. Um, you're stepping in it. Um, and in HubSpot, like we were kind of a wartime company. Like, I like Ben Horowitz's book and he's got a whole chapter on wartime versus peacetime CEOs. All of these CEOs are wartime, all of the time. And if they don't have a war going on, they kind of create a war. I thought that was kind of interesting. It's a wartime era. The only CEO I interviewed that is not like 10 out of 10 stressed is Nikesh from Palo Alto Networks. He's a cool number.

• 1:48:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder why.

• 1:48:38Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:48:41John Coogan?

  So secure.

• 1:48:43Speaker 07

  He doesn't work. A lot of these guys are on.

• 1:48:45John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah, like this has to correlate with strength of, strength of market position, right? Like, if, if you are running a company where Sam Altman's out there being like, I would love to eat off of your plate. I would love to launch a competitor. And then like Satya Nadella is like, oh yeah, we're going to do that too. Like, you better be operating at a 10 out of 10.

• 1:49:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Sam, Sam competing. Sam competing, you know, effectively competing with Microsoft while Microsoft has all his IP. Andy has to give him 20% of his revenue and he's got to pay him a quarter, quarter of a trillion over the next few years.

• 1:49:19John Coogan?

  He might come for your, for your nice little startup, you know?

• 1:49:23Speaker 07

  Virtually every company, I was just looking down my list of kids table, adults table. Virtually all of them are extremely nervous about what OpenAI is going to do.

• 1:49:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:49:33Speaker 07

  It's a long conversation at every board meeting.

• 1:49:37John Coogan?

  Of course, of course. The steward thing, I'm so interested, like, like, why doesn't Sequoia just have one CEO? Why don't they have a, you know, like a super GP, like a head partner, named, named partner? You could just rename the fund. Kleiner was doing that for a while with Caulfield Buyers. There's so many different ways to approach it. The Blue Owl we were talking about earlier, they have two co-CEOs and I think they have three co-presidents. You know, these names kind of mean nothing, but they also have extreme weight. So what is, what is a steward in the Sequoia Capital context? Why not CEO? Why not president? Why steward? And then what does it mean to have two now?

• 1:50:18Speaker 07

  Okay, I like, I actually like the word steward because, you know, Don Valentine started and Michael Morris and Jim Getz and Doug Leoni. Like, it's been a long line of really strong leaders and Rulaf that they've handed it down to. And the thing that's interesting about Sequoia, so I've been in there for a little over a year, is they are not at all, like even remotely resting on their laurels. They are paranoid, they are aggressive. They don't want to blow it. And so steward is actually a decent word. In this particular case, I think Rulaf was ready to move on. He wanted to move on on top. And there were just two really obvious candidates. Alfred Lin's got an incredible track record.

• 1:51:02Speaker 07

  He runs the early team. He's a good leader. Pat Grady's got an amazing track record, runs Growth Team. Like, picking one of those would have been tough. They work well together. It's like, let's give it to them both. And I think Sequoia has done that kind of thing in the past. So it's not unprecedented. And I think it's going to work well. And they don't call themselves, they call themselves stewards, but internally they're like just called partners and they've made a big deal out of that, which I think is pretty good.

• 1:51:25John Coogan?

  I imagine that they go around the office saying, you have to call me Stuart Lin now. You have to call me Stuart Grady now. And also, don't make eye contact with me.

• 1:51:37John Coogan?

  I will wear long flowing robes. No, um, it, yeah, it's just, it's just interesting, the, the actual, um, the actual aesthetics of it. I mean, we don't need to get into the actual dynamics of the, of the changeover from roll off to, uh, the, the co stewards. It's just, I, I wonder, uh, if, if a co CEO, uh, dynamic is sustainable or if it is an audition process for the final boss, the final CEO.

• 1:52:08Speaker 07

  I mean, it hasn't worked a lot.

• 1:52:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:11Speaker 07

  I mean, Netflix is doing it, Spotify is doing it, but you can't think of a lot of examples. And it looks like it kind of works with Netflix. Like that's been going on for a while and it's doing pretty well. I mean, Spotify is early, there's just not a lot of precedent for it. So I don't know. It, it wouldn't be my first choice to, to be a co CEO or to fund a co CEO. But in some cases it can work. I think it's a little more orthodox.

• 1:52:36John Coogan?

  There is an interesting dynamic where, uh,

• 1:52:40Speaker 07

  They call it a partnership for a reason.

• 1:52:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:43Speaker 07

  You know, it's not a corporation, it's a partnership. And so that vibe has stretched over five decades for these folks.

• 1:52:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. I wonder, I wonder the benefits of having two people in the same, in, in the role, like, uh, it becomes less pressure for one person, but then you also don't have necessarily like the buck stops with one person. There's all these like odd dynamics, like there's benefits and costs to, to having, uh, the do, the.

• 1:53:12Speaker 07

  I think they can get a lot done and they can divide it and get a lot more done. That was the case with my co-founder and I, like, we divided a lot of stuff up and we got a lot of shit done together in, in our respective parts. And I deferred to him a lot. He deferred to me a lot.

• 1:53:27John Coogan?

  What do they call it? Du- duarchy, where there's two kings. Monarchy is one key, duarchy is two kings, uh, very rare.

• 1:53:34Jordi Hays?

  How have you been processing this new wave of AI agent? Startups that are, in my view, oftentimes competing with traditional SaaS companies that may have only been started a few years ago. How, how have you been processing it?

• 1:53:53Speaker 07

  Well, I'm involved with a lot of them. I mean, they have escaped the gravitational pull of the of the Earth's revenue. Like, holy crap, are they going fast? And HubSpot grew fast in its day, and it's like, wouldn't even get a second look from a VC now. And it's remarkable what's going on. And I tweeted a week or two ago that like, it's a bubble. If you get an offer to sell your company, you should do is take money off the table. And on one shoulder, I'm like, it's definitely a bubble. The valuation is crazy, 100X and whatnot. On the other side of my shoulder, like, I just have never seen in the history of mankind growth like this, so maybe it's not. I don't know, where do you guys come out of that? Are we in the middle of a bubble, or is it just matched the growth?

• 1:54:39Jordi Hays?

  I think we've had a, you know, we talk with a lot of investors, and sometimes we get a little concerned when people come on and say they don't care at all about margins. We worry a little bit about those clips ending up in documentaries about, you know, whatever, whatever this moment in time.

• 1:54:55John Coogan?

  You're either in a bubble, or you're in a crash, and we're definitely not in a crash right now.

• 1:55:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I get, I get, I get, I would say, I get, like, my concern comes from companies that spring up and are raising because they're positioning their product as this like AI agent, when in reality, it's hard to tell why it's going to be a better solution oftentimes than something that looks like a normal SaaS product. And so I just get, I get concerned because I know that the SaaS companies in their category are, have access to all the same tools, and they have distribution, and they can potentially use the advantage they have of having this big product surface area

• 1:55:38Jordi Hays?

  and a bunch of core existing product, and then just compete on all these new product lines. And I just wonder if some of these like AI agent, these more native AI companies will struggle to actually compete with, and you've seen this, like, it's not like companies like Notion, for example, didn't sit around and say like, no, we're not going to integrate LLMs into our product. Like, that seems cool, but we're just, we're, we're.

• 1:56:09Jordi Hays?

  You know, a notes product and we're going to stick to handwritten text like they were incredibly quick to integrate all the best models into their product. And so I just don't, I don't see like the most recent generation of teams like asleep at the wheel at all.

• 1:56:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, I'm old enough to remember the last platform shift from client server to SaaS. And the client server companies were very much in denial of SaaS for a long time. I remember Oracle just being very vocal that SaaS is, it's a bunch of BS. And obviously SaaS did very well. Some of those folks did well and they, and they came across SAP did pretty well. Oracle did pretty well. Oracle did fantastic, actually. The thing that's different this time around is all the SaaS players, including HubSpot, were very early on it and are investing heavily in it and are building cool stuff. And they have a little bit of advantage and they have a lot of data and a lot of context, which is really useful if you're building agents. So I wouldn't, I don't, I think SaaS is alive and well, and I think a lot of these SaaS

• 1:57:07Speaker 07

  companies, HubSpot, ServiceNow, Notion, so many of them are building cool stuff. Like inside of HubSpot, I think of it as like a platform with applications and agents. You can build agents on it. You can use our agents and then it's got a co-pilot that you can refer to. It's all starting to work. People are using it. The thing that's interesting about some of these agent companies is they're working in areas where there's, there weren't SaaS companies like Harvey is doing incredibly well. It wasn't really a, you know, it wasn't an area with a lot of big SaaS companies in there or Rogo selling to investment bankers. Like a lot of, a lot of the early huge wins on the agents are in funny areas.

• 1:57:49Speaker 07

  This company called Juicebox, absolutely ripping, is in recruiting. Areas where they're like a big incumbent, like they're filling in the air and some of them are co-pilot-y, sort of be working alongside of it and some are autopilot-y. And the autopilot ones, I think will be the ones to really watch.

• 1:58:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels it feels really hairy for Microsoft to go after legal AI. Just because that's not really they they sell mostly general purpose tools. Uh, and so if you're building an Excel plugin, who are you bringing AI to Excel? I'm worried a little bit about where that goes. But if you're building something that, yes, it ostensibly is a Word document, but your entire business is off in this industry that's heavily regulated. And Microsoft has only penetrated with the broad tools and has never really built a vertical solution in that category. I I feel much less worried about you being attacked from the labs. But thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us.

• 1:58:48Jordi Hays?

  I'm excited for your new show. Excited to check out the first episode.

• 1:58:51John Coogan?

  And the number of stewards at uh at Sequoia is doubling. So uh, any day now, you might get the tap on the shoulder, be the third, fourth, fifth steward. They're adding more stewards every day and we're pulling for you.

• 1:59:03Jordi Hays?

  See you guys.

• 1:59:04John Coogan?

  See ya.

• 1:59:04Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:59:05John Coogan?

  Google AI Studio, create an AI powered app faster than ever. Gemini understands the capabilities you need and automatically wires up the right models and APIs for you. Get started at ai.studio/build. Our next guest is Dr. Fei-Fei Li from World Labs. She is a world renowned computer scientist. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today and congratulations on the launch.

• 1:59:27Jordi Hays?

  Massive.

• 1:59:27Speaker 08

  Hi guys, how are you?

• 1:59:29John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastically. Um, I I have so many questions about um what you're building. I'd like to start with why you're building it specifically. What was the moment where you decided to go and start the company? Because uh, the big institutions uh haven't exactly given you the cold shoulder. You've been associated with Stanford and Google and on the board of Twitter at various times. You could be doing work inside of a hyperscaler, I'm sure. Uh, why did you want to build a company outside of the big labs?

• 2:00:06Speaker 08

  Well, because we had a vision.

• 2:00:08John Coogan?

  Um.

• 2:00:08Speaker 08

  We had a vision we really believe in. We believe that um AI as a civilizational technology will um will help humans and superpower humans in many aspects of the intelligence industry.

• 2:00:24John Coogan?

  Um.

• 2:00:24Speaker 08

  And one of them is spatial intelligence. And that is something that is, uh, in my opinion, still um um s- still in the, in the, in the budding stage. And our vision was ahead of most people. And this is something that my co-founders and I really feel passionate about. Because uh, because without this, AI or AGI would not be complete. And we wanna pursue that vision and that mission.

• 2:00:52John Coogan?

  Talk about how you think about spatial intelligence. Uh, that, there's so many data primitives from uh GIS data, GPS data. There's, you know, po- d- dot clouds and all sorts of different ways, even just video footage, like what we're generating right now. We're generating uh spatial data to some degree. Uh, how do you, like, where, where did you think the initial uh, the initial data sources were like lacking? And then how did you want, how do you think about building up the stack to kind of advance this and move it a step forward?

• 2:01:29Speaker 08

  Yeah, you're totally right. Spatial intelligence is actually as huge or horizontal as uh, uh, say linguistic intelligence or language intelligence. So there is many aspect of it. But fundamentally, I think it's, it's uh, it's deeply perceptive.

• 2:01:47John Coogan?

  Um.

• 2:01:47Speaker 08

  Um, you know, it involves seeing and understanding. It involves reasoning. It involves the ability to create in the mind's eye what uh, what worlds look like. And also the fundamental ability to, to be able to interact with the, with the worlds, whether it's physical or virtual in a very profound way. And if you put all these together, uh, we haven't had technology that can um. Can really do all of the above and we're still on the journey to unlock that. But one of the things we just have done is really putting out the world's first three D world generation model that is available to everybody.

• 2:02:28Speaker 08

  And not only it's generative, it allows users to interact and create and edit. And your your question about data is uh is is actually of a important one because it's hard. Unlike language, unlike videos, unlike images, you don't have too many three D data, too much three D data out there on the internet. They're much more speci- uh specialized. So as a group of technologists, we actually have to um we have to just work harder and you know, and and frankly, we use a hybrid approach in data. Some are um large scale from the internet.

• 2:03:11Speaker 08

  Some are um large scale from simulation. Some are um real world captures. And a lot of data also comes from algorithmically processed data. That's really important because um it's just a much richer problem. Three D is a much richer problem.

• 2:03:29John Coogan?

  So the, I mean, the product that we just saw, uh it it looks a little bit like a video game. I can imagine a bunch of different ways that this gets uh built into something that feels like a video game. Or uh maybe there there's this new trend of folks who are using AI tools almost as like these, they just enjoy generating songs on Suno or they enjoy just creating for the sake of creating. It's like you sell a guitar and then someone plays the guitar and they never commercialize their music. They just enjoy playing the guitar. And so I'm wondering if you have a view on uh is it, is it too early to tell what your customer base or what the user base will look like? Are you just hoping to get this out and then see who shows up?

• 2:04:14John Coogan?

  Maybe there's a robotics company that needs a bunch of data and so they use your model to generate synthetic data? Or there's people that just have fun with it and they wind up paying because they enjoy the service.

• 2:04:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wonder if people sort of underrate world models because they look and feel today often like video games and so they don't understand kind of the significance. And so, yeah, I would love to understand.

• 2:04:34Speaker 08

  You're so right.

• 2:04:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:36Speaker 08

  You're you're so right. I think people underrate world models because we haven't had world models. It's not people's problem. It's that the technology is really hard. It's the next frontier of AI. And and like I said, this is the first time a generative 3D world model is available to everybody. And humanity has only known one world, that which is the 3D physical world. But now suddenly, we are in a multi-universe, multiverse situation because of this technology. So who will use it? I agree with you, actually, you know, just the sheer joy of the immersive experience for for the sake of enjoyment itself is really fun.

• 2:05:19Speaker 08

  I I was just talking to a user earlier today about the VR button. You know, we on our product, click on the VR button. It takes you to, if you have a headset, you can just purely enjoy the immersive experiences. And of course, add some favorite music of yours. That will be even better. But dialing all the way to professional use, there is a lot of professional use cases. If you go on our website, we have a page called Marble Labs, where we show creators from VFX, from game developer, developing world, from design world, architecture, from robotic simulation,

• 2:06:04Speaker 08

  even clinical research, which I personally never thought about, are are already finding use cases. So it's very horizontal. But I think creativity and simulation are going to be two very large areas that people will will find as really useful and superpowering.

• 2:06:25John Coogan?

  Okay, help me understand tool use in the world model context. So there was a moment where the the large language models, the transformer-based GPT-3, GPT-4, those models were Getting really good at math and they were basically just memorizing math and you could just ask them what's 100 plus 50 and it would just tell you 150 and it was sort of learning math and then at a certain point it broke down and it couldn't do really complex math just in the actual weights and so the solution was to teach it to write Python and give it a Python REPL and let it write some code and then you get the perfectly

• 2:07:07John Coogan?

  accurate math when you need that from the not just the LLM weights but the actual model, the experience. And so what I'm interested in is that I've seen, I've seen evidence from Genie and your model and world models generally, there's this idea of persistence and the base model getting good enough that if I go up and I paint the wall and I come back later, the paint's there, the model remembers this, maybe gravity, there's all these things that are simulated. But at a certain level, it feels like if I need an inventory in my game, maybe we should just use a database. And so I'm wondering where you see tool use coming in to layer on top versus your, where you think you're

• 2:07:48John Coogan?

  on like a scaling law where if you just keep working on the base underlying model, you will get all of that functionality for free?

• 2:07:57Speaker 08

  Yeah, great question. So I want to answer your question in two different ways because you, you ask a very important question technically, which is the scaling law of, of these models. But then you also ask the really important question of the tool use, right? On the scaling law side, 3D generative world or just world model in general is actually a, a earlier technology than language models. So we're seeing budding signs of scaling law, but, but this is an interplay between model architecture as well as data. So what I can say right now is we're absolutely seeing budding signs of it, but it's not, the, the curve hasn't

• 2:08:39Speaker 08

  gotten to the point where we see LLMs, you know, yet. So which makes the technology really, really exciting and, and being at the forefront of it, we really do have the best 3D generative world model is, is exciting. On the tool use side, this is where I find it fascinating. I think when it comes to, The usage or the use cases of world model. There is a lot of professional use cases, whether we're talking about VFX. Um, you know, for movie industry or um, or game developers. Uh, uh, when it comes to professional use cases.

• 2:09:21Speaker 08

  I personally really believe that superpowering creators and developers is very important. That means it uh needs to give them the sense of control and uh and uh um agency. You know, if if uh if you try our uh model and product, there is an option just prompting and and result out. And sometimes it's a slot machine, but it's it's setting to be a pretty good slot machine.

• 2:09:48John Coogan?

  I love a slot machine.

• 2:09:49Speaker 08

  Yeah, and that's great, right?

• 2:09:52John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 2:09:54Speaker 08

  But um as a creator, in your mind's eye, there is actually so much nuance. There is so much story in your mind, so much um. So much you wanna express, whether it's for a game or for a movie, for a story, for for even like. Trying to get the robot to do or train the robot. So we actually uh put a lot of thought in using native AI. Uh capabilities to allow the the the users or the customers to. Engage in the editing and controllable creative loop. So if you prompting something and you don't like the the wall color here.

• 2:10:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:38Speaker 08

  We actually allow you to say, well, change the wall color from green to purple. Or say, add this object. Or say, I wanna expand here. Or allow you to stitch together the worlds that you see. Or allow you to actually give a three D layout.

• 2:10:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:57Speaker 08

  So that you you can put the couch where it is. So so this is very important, and this is the tooling side of it, right? It gives the controllability and uh agency to the human collaborator.

• 2:11:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. You can go.

• 2:11:11Speaker 08

  By the way, my team told me I have to put this on there.

• 2:11:14Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:11:15John Coogan?

  Wow, thank you.

• 2:11:20Jordi Hays?

  Love it.

• 2:11:20John Coogan?

  You look fantastic in that.

• 2:11:23Jordi Hays?

  What what kind of progress can we expect from World Labs on the next two, three years? Like, what are your kind of ambitions in terms of just general progress?

• 2:11:33Speaker 08

  Oh, my God. Two, three years? I I think we need to, um. Two, three years is a long time. I things are moving so fast. Spatial intelligence is so horizontal and it's a platform. I do envision that Marble, our product, is a platform that can empower creativity simulation. And and I. I think we're gonna see a sea change in multiple use cases. On the gaming side, on the VFX side, on the metaverse side, on the robotic simulation side, on design side.

• 2:12:16Speaker 08

  All these are really, um.

• 2:12:21Speaker 08

  I wouldn't say it's it's almost ripe for changes. And we we're seeing that level of excitement from many, many users now.

• 2:12:32Jordi Hays?

  What what game developers or platforms do you think will be most quick to adopt world models? Because it feels like it feels like it feels like Roblox. I'm sure you've chatted with them. Like, Roblox should be jumping on this because it could be something that any of their users could get a lot of value from. Immediately speed up that creative process. But I can think of any. And some of the visuals we've shown on the screen, I'm just like, I wish that I had. World Labs when I was playing first person shooter games as a kid because you could just generate infinite maps for the games that you were playing.

• 2:13:08John Coogan?

  You're watching this and you're like, yeah, the environments look beautiful. I just wish I had an assault rifle in this game and they were bad guys.

• 2:13:16Speaker 08

  Yes, and if you look at our page on Marble Labs, you there are, you know, shooting.

• 2:13:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, shooting games.

• 2:13:22Speaker 08

  Examples already, so I don't know. I I I think I think the the the sky is the limit, literally. Of course, I think what's exciting in this Gen AI era is that a lot of a lot of just. Creators and technologists, many of them are individual developers or indie, you know, studios and teams, small teams are really jumping in really fast and Gen AI models like ours really lowers the bar of entry for many of these, many of these use cases. So we were,

• 2:14:05Speaker 08

  we're also, to be honest, we're also talking to bigger teams. I'm actually very pleasantly surprised by the level of enthusiasm from bigger teams as well.

• 2:14:17John Coogan?

  The teams, the teams going crazy. They're actually playing.

• 2:14:20Jordi Hays?

  Is it possible that we're in a, we're in a world labs model?

• 2:14:24John Coogan?

  Simulation?

• 2:14:24Jordi Hays?

  Simulation at this very moment? Have you?

• 2:14:29Speaker 08

  Sure, yeah.

• 2:14:31John Coogan?

  After this, it's time travel.

• 2:14:33Speaker 08

  I'm glad this we ever generated this way.

• 2:14:35John Coogan?

  Um, getting back to somewhat reality.

• 2:14:38Jordi Hays?

  The model is getting really good.

• 2:14:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I would love to know your thoughts on market structure and how things might play out because I, I've been completely convinced of your vision for how, where we are on this technology, how early we are and what's going to happen over the next few years is like just the, I don't want to call them easy wins, but like the logical play out the scale and you get somewhere really exciting. But I'm interested in the market dynamics. So in, in chat, in LLM, we saw sort of a somewhat of a monopoly, you know, emerge a clear winner in consumer chat knowledge retrieval with OpenAI's ChatGPT, of course. Now, other firms

• 2:15:23John Coogan?

  are obviously working on that and competing. Then in the enterprise, you have more of an oligopoly maybe emerging between Anthropic, Gemini and OpenAI's API. There's obviously a long tail of other providers. Then you have the wrappers. And I'm wondering if there's going to be something similar that happens in world models. Is, is it worth?

• 2:15:49John Coogan?

  Thinking very hard about being the winner in consumer specifically and being not partnering with Roblox, but being the next Roblox, being the platform that wins consumer, even if it means pulling back from an API business in the short term? Or is it just too soon to tell and it might be kind of totally different? I'm just wondering how you're thinking about the long-term market structure for what feels like a distinct technology from LLMs?

• 2:16:17Speaker 08

  That's a great question, actually. By and large, I think it's a little bit early to tell. So right now, like I said, we we just rolled out the first, you know, generally available, publicly available model. And we're going to focus on being a model company for a while because science is still early. We want to move fast and and there is a lot to be unlocked. I also think that I don't think we're a model in a way that we are defining it, especially in the deep spatial intelligence way, is as consumer as a chatbot.

• 2:16:59Speaker 08

  Because I think, you know, like 3D is a a representation, it's a it's a medium that is that has its own own characteristics. So I think that we're gonna see we're gonna see products that are going to build around these models in in in different ways. Some are for creators, some are APIs, some are for possibly even different use cases. And I'm not saying there is no consumer. I actually think. Uh, the market might surprise us for especially on the metaverse side.

• 2:17:44John Coogan?

  I think it's gonna surprise you. I, I, I think it's gonna be a huge consumer category. Uh, there's, there's a lot of work that needs to be done to actually make it a place where people wanna hang out for hours and hours and hours, but

• 2:17:54Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:17:55John Coogan?

  But, but I, I, I do think it's gonna happen. Uh, and I think that it's a bit of a race. But it's, it's extremely exciting to even just be on the, uh, at the, at the, at the, uh, at the model layer and then, you know, experiment at the application layer because just today.

• 2:18:10Jordi Hays?

  We've seen model companies get in, get in, get into the application.

• 2:18:14John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, exactly.

• 2:18:16Speaker 08

  Of course, right?

• 2:18:17John Coogan?

  Of course, of course.

• 2:18:18Speaker 08

  No, we are, we're absolutely, I mean, Model itself is an application today.

• 2:18:22John Coogan?

  Of course, of course.

• 2:18:23Speaker 08

  A fast app.

• 2:18:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:18:24Speaker 08

  Uh, um, but we are gonna focus on Model. This is the, uh, World Apps is a deep tech company and, uh, uh, I think focusing on Model is the right thing to do right now.

• 2:18:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you thinking about fungibility between formats? Um, it feels like there's maybe a uniquely, unique value in having a world model that can export, uh, Gaussian splat, but then also export geometry, also export, oh, just an MP4 for different stages of like a VFX pipeline, for example, something that Hollywood might wanna do. Um, do you think that you need to have like translational models or is there like one model that becomes like multimodal that can handle all the different formats, whether I want an, an OBJ file and I want a 3D, you know, point cloud or an Olemic, I can just get whatever I want from the same model?

• 2:19:19John Coogan?

  Or do I need specific models to translate between them?

• 2:19:23Speaker 08

  Um, I don't know if you have played Model yet. We are actually multimodal. Uh, we, we are right now exporting, you know, Gaussian splats, mesh, mesh colliders, MP4s and edges and panels.

• 2:19:37John Coogan?

  But is that, is that all from one, one model that's trained or is there like a translation layer between the outputs? Is there like one foundational truth and then like, it's like, uh, ChatGPT is not specifically trained on, there's not a Spanish version and an English version and a French version. It just learned every language when they did the big pre-train. Is it the same thing or is there actual like, uh, or is there a, uh, like a translation layer that you need to do in a series of different models?

• 2:20:03Speaker 08

  Oh, what I can say now is we are a foundation model. Marvel is a foundation model.

• 2:20:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Okay, got it. Cool.

• 2:20:10Jordi Hays?

  Uh, more, more broadly, where do you think AI is underhyped? And where do you think it's overhyped?

• 2:20:17John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:20:18Speaker 08

  Oh, that's a spicy question. World Model is underhyped.

• 2:20:23John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:20:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, talk your book.

• 2:20:26John Coogan?

  Just talk your own book. I love it. I agree, though. I completely agree. I think this is a deeply underhyped category.

• 2:20:32Speaker 08

  So, so to be honest, um, you know, one, one thing, I consider myself a scientist in my heart. And I actually really don't like hyping. Um, I think, you know, that's just, you probably have seen me not on the hype train in most of these discourse, right? So as a scientist, I think World Model is underappreciated because it's so new. And uh, in terms of uh, overheated, I do think that um, Silicon Valley as a whole tend to mistaken clear vision with short distance.

• 2:21:14Speaker 08

  Um, sometimes, for example, uh, 2006, Stanford self-driving car drove the first 140 miles in the Nevada desert for mankind, self-driving car. It took 20 years for Waymo to be barely uh, on the road as a L4. And there's still, it's still so limited. And, and this is a massive amount of effort. And it's also riding on the coattail of a very mature industry, especially a, a hardware and then distribution and use cases and all that. So uh, this is an example to show you, um, there are

• 2:21:58Speaker 08

  Clear visions, for example, you know, robots that can do all kind of um uh house doors and and as as a mom, I'll tell you that that would be amazing, you know, start with cleaning my bathroom. But but that clear vision is important. But the journey is gonna be long. It's uh the, you know, we have issues with hardware. We we still need to figure out data. The world model brain of the robots also need to improve and and and all that. So that's just an example. And and also creativity, right? Creativity industry, which we are also engaging in.

• 2:22:38Speaker 08

  Um, one thing I don't, I don't call it a hype. I call it a misleading sentiment, which actually really bothers me is that I don't, we don't wanna replace human creators. You know, human creativity is precious. It tells the story of our species, of our culture, of our society, of our community, of each one of us. What we wanna do is to superpower and augment creators' capabilities. And sometimes the the communication of technology um is a little skewed towards, oh, the model can do all the work in creativity.

• 2:23:20Speaker 08

  And I I personally really wanna highlight human creativity as as something that's so fundamental to who we are and and AI is here to help and augment.

• 2:23:32John Coogan?

  Can you help me understand the relationship between the current AI hardware build out and your technology, your model, your business? Uh, I would imagine that you're a beneficiary because there's all these data centers. There might be some slack capacity in the future. But at the same time, I've been hearing that a lot of the uh L L M foundation model companies are are partnering with Nvidia to try and steer the development of the next generation of chips to be hyper optimized for L L M inference. And that might be okay for you, but it might actually take us, you know, away from something that's optimized for for what you do.

• 2:24:14John Coogan?

  And so I'm wondering if if you could just take me on a tour of what's exciting on the AI hardware build out from your perspective. Where are the risks?

• 2:24:24Speaker 08

  Yeah, so actually, I was just in London, receiving this award with both the algorithm folks, as well as the hardware folks for AI.

• 2:24:35John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:24:36Speaker 08

  Yeah, so, I think, as you... Is it AI-generated?

• 2:24:43John Coogan?

  It's the Queen, no, it's not AI-generated. I believe it is a recording of an audience clapping, but Jordi triggered it from his soundboard. That is the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering from King Charles himself. Congratulations. We had it here to mention to you, but I'm glad you brought it up.

• 2:24:59Speaker 08

  Yeah, because you're talking about hardware. I was literally in the room with my friend Bill and Jensen. So, as you know, the most exciting, the most exciting thing for modern AI, for the birth of modern AI, is the convergence of hardware, software, and data. So, from hardware side, I think it's, it continues to evolve. For world modeling, especially our technology relies on rendering, we do think we will keep our conversation, our side of the conversation going with the chipmakers, because some of the, our requirement, especially on the rendering side, as well as on the training, the model

• 2:25:44Speaker 08

  side, will be somewhat different from LLMs. And, you know, I would love to, I will, and I would love to call for the chip industry to also work with us on this, on this front. What is exciting? I think, that's a great question, actually. I'm trying to, so I was in Middle East, visiting some of the, the construction of data centers, and, and that was pretty epic, seeing how, how large the, this Stargate data centers are, are being constructed.

• 2:26:26Speaker 08

  And it really feels that we're in a different phase of industrial revolution, you know, we, we never, none of us lived in the days of the, the steam engines, this electricity, when the, the scale of industrialization in that time was just multiplying for, for humanity. I think we are now living in the AI industrialization era, and seeing that scaling up. Is quite exciting.

• 2:26:54John Coogan?

  Hypothetically, last question from me. Hypothetically, if I gave you unlimited access to a one gigawatt data center, the best and brightest, the hot off the presses, the freshly installed one gigawatt data center, you know, probably billions of dollars invested in this. Would you, would you run your, would you do a training run? Would you, would you run your, your model? Would you just scale up? Or would you say, hey, I, I, I would need more time to actually advance the way we think about training before we press go on the big run?

• 2:27:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was gonna be my question is like, at what point does world labs become capital constrained? And are you capital constrained today?

• 2:27:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's the whole bitter lesson.

• 2:27:45Jordi Hays?

  Research and new ideas.

• 2:27:46John Coogan?

  There are different parts of the business that are bitter lesson pilled and others that aren't. And I'm wondering like, what, what pieces are, are currently on the great scaling curves?

• 2:27:57Speaker 08

  Yeah, like I said, the scaling curve from a model architect or point of view, we're still early. So if I have, if I have one gigawatts and, and that many chips, I, I'm more likely gonna actually run some parallel models and experiments to really hole in the, the, the, the bet. So, so it doesn't mean we're still training large models. It's just not at the level of today's LLMs yet. So are we capital constrained? We are capital constrained.

• 2:28:34Jordi Hays?

  You gotta start hyping more.

• 2:28:36John Coogan?

  Okay, well, we're gonna, we're gonna hit the gong. We hate capital constraints. How much have you actually raised? How much can you do? How many can you share?

• 2:28:45Speaker 08

  Publicly, it's known that we've raised more than $240 million.

• 2:28:53Jordi Hays?

  Publicly.

• 2:28:54Speaker 08

  Let me explain why, why did you hit the golf just now?

• 2:28:58Jordi Hays?

  Cause we're increasing the hype.

• 2:29:00John Coogan?

  We, yeah, we, we hit the golf.

• 2:29:01Jordi Hays?

  We heard your capital constraint. We hate that.

• 2:29:04John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Uh, it's, it's a good sign.

• 2:29:06Speaker 08

  It's a mutual hype. I'm wearing your hat.

• 2:29:08John Coogan?

  Yes, we appreciate that. And we appreciate you taking the time to come talk to us. Thank you so much. This was extremely exciting, uh, extremely enlightening.

• 2:29:16Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, we're very excited for you and your whole team.

• 2:29:19John Coogan?

  And we'll talk to you soon.

• 2:29:21Speaker 08

  Yeah, thank you, guys. Thank you.

• 2:29:22Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:29:23Speaker 08

  Bye.

• 2:29:24John Coogan?

  See you soon. Uh, before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT, reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Let me also tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development.

• 2:29:41Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna ask Kari to add this sound effect when you open Linear.

• 2:29:44John Coogan?

  Projects and product roadmaps. I'm loving the new stingers. Look at that. That looks fantastic. Uh, our next guest is Scott Sanders from Fortera. He's got some big news. How you doing, Scott?

• 2:29:53Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:29:54Speaker 09

  Good to see you. Good to see you too.

• 2:29:57John Coogan?

  First time on the show. Introduce yourself. Let us know what you, what you do, how you describe Fortera, for those who don't know.

• 2:30:04Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, first, first off, a long time listener, first time caller. Uh, I think it was actually the subject of the original TVPN, uh, Print the Internet situation.

• 2:30:14John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 2:30:15Speaker 09

  Where you were printing out physical memes. Um, and I criticized that.

• 2:30:18John Coogan?

  You criticized it?

• 2:30:20Jordi Hays?

  Okay, well, you came around.

• 2:30:22Speaker 09

  I came around.

• 2:30:23Jordi Hays?

  Was it, was it like we were using up too many pieces of paper?

• 2:30:27John Coogan?

  Is this environmentalist thing? You were anti-printing or something? What was going on?

• 2:30:31Speaker 09

  No, I was just, you know, the internet exists on your computer. What's the need to physically print it off, uh, every day?

• 2:30:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, I printed your news. We printed, I will put it out there. We printed your news here.

• 2:30:42John Coogan?

  We printed your news.

• 2:30:42Jordi Hays?

  Because we care so much. We wanted to physically hold.

• 2:30:45John Coogan?

  The Wall Street Journal, we like the Financial Times, you know, uh, you'll come around.

• 2:30:49Jordi Hays?

  We should, we should do like a TVPN, like for every episode, we plant a tree, just to make sure that, you know, we're, we're replacing.

• 2:30:57John Coogan?

  But I feel like you, I feel like we're kindred spirits. You, you work on physical things. We, we work in, in physical, in the physical realm. Of course, there is a software element to everything that both of us do, but, uh, give us the update on, on, on what you're building because, uh, it does touch the physical realm, correct?

• 2:31:14Speaker 09

  That is, that is true. We do, we do build hardware. Um. Yeah, we uh, we announced a $238 million

• 2:31:20John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:31:21Speaker 09

  Uh, Series C today. I think there's a

• 2:31:24Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:31:26John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:31:28Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Massive.

• 2:31:30John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:31:32Speaker 09

  Yeah, but we're, we're building distributed systems for defense, starting from the ground up. You know, we feel the warfighter, you know, you need drones, you need maritime capabilities. There's great companies building that.

• 2:31:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:31:42Speaker 09

  Um, but we're focused on building stuff that primarily goes on vehicles. Cause at the end of the day, you know, try not to walk into combat if at all possible. And we want to be able to equip those warfighters with technology and distributed compute at the tactical edge that enables vehicles to be self-driving, act as communication nodes and relays, launch things like loading munitions, put radars into place to uh, you know, detect aircraft or detect enemy shipping. Um, and then put, you know, anything from cruise missiles to um, anti-ship ballistic missiles in the back so that we can deter our enemies from invading countries and walking in and in.

• 2:32:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, my, my mental model for this stuff is uh, a little, a little hazy. Maybe you can help clean it up. I, I feel like uh, there's, there's usually like one company that does just autonomy. There might be another that's doing um, some sort of battlefield tactical mapping, some awareness things. Uh, it sounds like you're doing multiple. How, how do you actually interface with the other, the other touchpoints? I mean, if, if uh, who, who do you need to integrate with? Since some people might be familiar with maybe what Palantir builds or what Anduril's built on the uh, on the operating system level. Uh, how, how like what, what, can you give me some concrete examples of like uh, groups that you're working with or technologies or platforms that you're building on?

• 2:33:02John Coogan?

  Like what's the uh, what's the wheelhouse case study for, for Terra?

• 2:33:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And on, on top of that, I feel like the challenge from a product roadmap standpoint, a product planning standpoint is you have to understand what are the systems that we have in place in our armed forces today? And then how the battlefield is actually changing. Because we've heard from other people on the show that, you know, a lot of the equipment that we have might not be relevant in a world where the frontline is, is just drone on drone action.

• 2:33:31Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think one of the best examples of doing this is actually with one of our partners, Raytheon, where we, or in this case, Chaos, in that quick little snippet, where with Raytheon, we and Oshkosh, we integrated our edge compute platform and our self-driving software to take a traditionally manned vehicle and make it unmanned. So one, by putting edge compute on self-driving vehicles, you're enabling other algorithms and other platforms to run on top of them. So we think about the ecosystem as a partnership approach where we're not going to make everything that a warfighter needs. In fact, no defense company, defense tech or otherwise, can do that. And so we open up our architecture and our system so that a Palantir can run at the tactical

• 2:34:13Speaker 09

  edge, not a giant server rack somewhere. Or in the case of the small multipurpose equipment transports that you're looking at, we put Chaos's long-range bi-static radar system on it to detect drones. And our future integrations with those guys will enable them to utilize our compute and our autonomy later. We don't care who's doing the C2. We obviously do our own because you kind of have to. But if that's Android's Lattice or Palantir's Gaia or smart system, we're very open to that. And we've broken up our system in a way that enables the user to sort of make the decision of what capability they want for each different application layer and not wrapping it all

• 2:34:58Speaker 09

  into one holistic platform, unless that's what the end user and the customer want to do.

• 2:35:03Jordi Hays?

  What was yours or the team's reaction to Pete Hegseth's speech last Friday? We had Catherine Boyle from Andreessen on talking about how Hegseth was basically making a case that, was it Cheney made back in like 2001? So these are basically reforms that have been, people have been asking for for a long time, but we haven't been able to actually deliver.

• 2:35:31Speaker 09

  Yeah, we were we were lucky enough to be at that event and, you know, defense tech reform is people is a thing people have been talking about since before defense tech was a thing. Um, you know, the acquisition system has become extremely complicated and I think difficult to work with for many companies. And it's, you know, to have a Secretary of War coming out and saying like, look, this is a, this is an actual problem. Right? Like the rate limiting step on getting technology to operators is very rarely, whether there's the technology that exists that can solve the problem. It's can it work its way through the prototyping into production phases? And get in, get into scale production with a, with an end user. And that's been very hard. Um, Palantir has been at this for 20 years.

• 2:36:16Speaker 09

  Android's been at this since 2017 and definitely not going to do that math in public, although it'd be quite easy to do.

• 2:36:27Jordi Hays?

  He's a growth guy.

• 2:36:29John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Okay. Speaking of growth, where, where, how, how is the company growing? Uh, I mean, we, we, we've texted about this. Uh, it's all SBIRs, right?

• 2:36:38Speaker 09

  Yeah, it's all cibbers all day long. Actually, no, too big for SBIRs now, which is great. Um, we're about about 550 people total.

• 2:36:50Speaker 09

  And so, you know, we're not, still not that big in defense tech or defense world, still relatively small.

• 2:36:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:56Speaker 09

  Uh, trying to be a scrappy startup and, you know, work with not only legacy primes, um, who build incredible systems, right? There's no one in defense tech building eight by eight, 25,000 pound armored vehicles that can go head to head with, uh, you know, major land forces across Europe. And there's only a couple of small startups that are starting to do, uh, the missile systems that we want to put on the back of these platforms. But our approach is we open up and enable our architecture to work with nearly anyone, uh, to deliver that, that capability at the tactical edge. We really just feel like humans being the blunting force of combat is a pretty bad idea. We have probably 20% veterans at, at Forterra and a lot of us feel very strongly and very passionately that

• 2:37:40Speaker 09

  I would much rather have a robot make first contact with the enemy or be the platform that is emitting a large signature on the battlefield, something firing a missile, firing a howitzer, moving a radar. So the platform is inevitably targeted. It's not a human that's getting targeted, it's a machine. And we're trying to change that dynamic, you know, one platform, one program at a time.

• 2:38:00John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and thank you to all the veterans. It was Veterans Day yesterday, right? Thanks everyone for their service. And congratulations on all the progress and congratulations on the Series C.

• 2:38:12Jordi Hays?

  And next time you come on, we will not print out your news. We'll just go in blind.

• 2:38:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:18Jordi Hays?

  Because we don't know how to use computers.

• 2:38:20Speaker 09

  As long as the next time isn't at 10:30 at night, I'll be stoked.

• 2:38:25Jordi Hays?

  Wait, are you in Lisbon right now? Were you guys at?

• 2:38:29John Coogan?

  Web Summit.

• 2:38:30Speaker 09

  Josh is at Web Summit. I'm in Paris at Tech Talk. I'm in with some customers.

• 2:38:35John Coogan?

  Okay, cool.

• 2:38:36Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 2:38:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, we can coordinate better on the time.

• 2:38:38Jordi Hays?

  Congrats to the whole team on the progress.

• 2:38:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, awesome.

• 2:38:41Jordi Hays?

  See you soon.

• 2:38:42John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day.

• 2:38:43Jordi Hays?

  See ya.

• 2:38:44John Coogan?

  Numeral, numeralhq.com, not numeralhq.com anymore. numeralhq.com and sales tax autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Our next guest is Jamie Allaire from Circle. Just had earnings. Welcome to the show, Jamie. How are you doing? Good to see you.

• 2:39:02Jeremy Allaire?

  I'm great. Good to see you guys.

• 2:39:04Jordi Hays?

  Welcome back.

• 2:39:05John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:39:05Jordi Hays?

  Welcome back.

• 2:39:06Jeremy Allaire?

  Thank you.

• 2:39:07John Coogan?

  Give us the rundown. What's the latest in your world?

• 2:39:10Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah, well, this morning we announced our Q3 earnings. It was a tremendous quarter. We saw USDC grow 108%.

• 2:39:20John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:39:20Jeremy Allaire?

  Year on year, which is fantastic. The amount of activity happening on-chain with USDC grew about 600% year over year to $9.6 trillion of on-chain activity with the USDC.

• 2:39:36Jordi Hays?

  Hit the gong for that. I think that's the biggest gong ever.

• 2:39:41Jordi Hays?

  Maybe we've hit the gong for various countries' GDPs.

• 2:39:43John Coogan?

  I think we might have hit for a GDP once, but that's it. The only thing that's triggered.

• 2:39:47Jordi Hays?

  Transaction volume.

• 2:39:48John Coogan?

  That is, yeah, that is remarkable. That's a lot. Of course, that's the nature of these networks.

• 2:39:53Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah, a lot of other great stuff. I mean, we, we, we, we launched something called CPN, which is an on-chain money movement and payment network earlier this year. That that is growing very fast. You know, dozens of financial institutions coming on that network. It's already gotten to an annualized payment volume of about 3.4 billion. Key, though, just from a from a financial perspective, we saw adjusted EBITDA grow 78% to 166 million in the quarter. That's a 57% adjusted EBITDA margin, which is about 730 basis point expansion. And so, strong performance on that as well. And then I think

• 2:40:34Jeremy Allaire?

  really importantly, you know, we recently launched ARC into testnet. And ARC is a new Layer 1 blockchain network that Circle has been building into the market. We had over 100 major companies, major banks, payment system operators like Visa and Mastercard, you know, major AI companies, you know, major exchanges, e-commerce companies, gig economy companies, all these working with us, collaborating with us to deliver ARC. And we also announced this morning that we're exploring a token, a native token for ARC network, which is an exciting development for us as well. And and so we're seeing, you know, a lot of activity in the space. You know, we had the Genius Act pass recently, and so we're also

• 2:41:17Jeremy Allaire?

  just starting to see more and more major institutions, major financial firms, payments companies, getting in the game and collaborating with us and building products with us as well.

• 2:41:28John Coogan?

  Can you tell me anything about the Anthropic relationship? There's this very interesting concept of like, using stable coins to power agents in the future. There's that. And then there's also just like Anthropic might need to pay someone internationally. Can you give me any guidance on like, where we are on that?

• 2:41:48Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah, I mean, look, a couple of things on that. I think the first is that Uh, you know, we've been working alongside others on these standards for agentic payments.

• 2:41:58John Coogan?

  Like MCP, which does not have.

• 2:42:00Jeremy Allaire?

  MCP.

• 2:42:01John Coogan?

  Does not have three points yet, but it should be maybe in V2 or something.

• 2:42:04Jeremy Allaire?

  Well, yeah, and standards like X402 and Google's agent to payment standard. We're collaborating on both of those. We're releasing tools for those and, you know, we actually have a number of like agent developer tools, companies that are, that are supporting these things as well. And so that's actually happening. It's actually one of the key design centers for the ARC blockchain network that we're building, which is, we envision a world where over time, the velocity of money increases and more and more of our economic activity is machine intermediated. And, and, and that, that machine intermediation is going to be in these new computing networks, these provable trusted computing networks, which we call blockchain networks.

• 2:42:44Jeremy Allaire?

  And AI agents will become, we believe, the primary intermediary that's intermediating activity on these. And so we see that as, as sort of, if you look at these trends converging over the coming several years, we, we see these kind of compounding each other. And so, yeah, we were, we were excited to have Anthropic as a collaborator, a collaborating partner for us with ARC. And I think, um, you know, we had a number of other AI focused firms there too. And I think it just speaks to the fact that we need a substrate, we need an execution environment that AI agents can use that are trustworthy, provable. And look, AI agents need to be able to make, you know, a five cent transaction for consuming some tokens, uh, or, you know, a $50 transaction and needs to work anywhere in the world where

• 2:43:29Jeremy Allaire?

  software works. And that's what these, these, these new networks are really good at. And so, um, there's not a payment system that's ever really been built to support that. And I think something like USDC and then these new networks like ARC Network and, uh, and standards like X402 and others really help, help with that a lot.

• 2:43:48Jordi Hays?

  Talk, talk about just like the strategy of going full stack and how you guys are positioned against competition at the different levels. You guys are an issuer, you're build, you know, you're, uh, building your own network. You're going to have a native token. Uh, there's ton, there's, uh, Nowadays, it feels like there's probably a new stablecoin that gets created every second of every day, right? Not just a net new of an existing stablecoin, but an entirely new stable. You guys are well positioned in a lot of ways, but I guess, talk about how you view your competitive position as a variety of other networks come online and new stablecoins come online.

• 2:44:29Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the first to start with the core, which is our stablecoin network has really strong network effects. We have liquidity network effects globally. We have infrastructure network effects, just in terms of where we're plugged in around the world. There's tens of thousands of products and services that integrate to our network, which really drives the developer flywheels. And so, we're in a very strong position there. And we're taking that, and we're expanding kind of down the stack and up the stack. And I think in our view, if you think about where we are in the evolution of this, the global economic system is enormous. And we expect more and more of the economic system to, as I said, become machine intermediated on these new kind of economic operating systems. And we're still at the front edge of that.

• 2:45:13Jeremy Allaire?

  We have a market that really grew out of speculation on cryptocurrencies, and now we're seeing like, more and more of actual financial contracts, actual trade flows, payments flows, treasury activities, investment products, lending products. All of this is actually starting to come over, but we're at the front edge of that. And so, I think our view is that there are going to be some very significant scaled internet platform companies built out of this transformation over the next five, 10, 15 years. We think that these can be as big or bigger than prior internet platform companies that were built around, you know, centers of gravity around search, or social, or mobile, or cloud, or e-commerce. We think that that's going to take place.

• 2:45:55Jeremy Allaire?

  And we think that we're in a very good position to provide really great infrastructure across those different layers. And I think, if you look at what we've been able to do with ARC, even just getting to testnet, the range of major firms from around the world that touch literally

• 2:46:13Jeremy Allaire?

  You know, over a hundred trillion dollars of assets, whether those are custodians, exchanges, clearinghouses, payment systems, et cetera. We're putting forward a model that we think can work for scaled mainstream adoption. And so that's an infrastructure problem. And we're doing it in a way where we can build a distributed network of distributed stakeholder participation, distributed governance, and kind of bring that into the world. And obviously, that's what we're considering as we evaluate the the design of an ARC token as well. And then, on the other hand, you know, we definitely see an application layer emerging on top of these platforms. And I think likewise, we're still in the early stages of the application layers being built.

• 2:46:55Jeremy Allaire?

  We are definitely taking a crack at part of that by building a payment utility, this CPN, as a payment application. But we're designing it in a way where, you know, other financial institutions can use it, benefit from it, and generate revenue from it. We're not trying to compete with them as well. And so at every layer of what we do, we try and build kind of market neutrality and interoperability at the core, and that has served us well. I mean, one of the things we've pointed out this morning in the earnings call is, you know, we actually run, as of October, the largest cross-chain interoperability protocol in the world. CCTP, which is Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol, in October was greater than 50%

• 2:47:36Jeremy Allaire?

  of all cross-chain traffic, accounting for all assets across all blockchains. And that's really significant. We really want to be part of the solution to interoperability while we build at these different layers of the stack.

• 2:47:48Jordi Hays?

  We've had a number of conversations about the local regulatory environment, how that's changing recently, but what's going on internationally. Last time you were on the show, we talked about how, you know, part of Circle's Edge is having offices in a, you know, in a bunch of different countries and being set up to navigate what what will ultimately be unique regulatory environments in a bunch of different countries.

• 2:48:16Jeremy Allaire?

  Well, it's been amazing, actually. Since the Genius Act, we've seen almost every major government in the world accelerating plans around building local rules around stable coins. We've seen, for example, Hong Kong in August went effective with their new rules. We're seeing regimes working on this from major emerging markets to some of the largest developed markets like Korea, which is accelerating their efforts around stablecoin rules. UK accelerating their efforts. So now everyone's sort of getting behind this model of private sector, bank and non-bank issued stablecoins, clear supervision, usually supervision by the central banks, just like we're going to be overseen by the national bank regulator

• 2:48:59Jeremy Allaire?

  here in the United States. And so that kind of standard is cascading around the world. And I think also a lot of these regulators are looking at ways to support reciprocity or consistency as well. And so I think that's really important as we build infrastructure that we know that it'll work in all these different places around the world. So I would say the activity for us internationally has really, really accelerated, and you'll see a lot more as well as we go forward. But I think the US is actually really providing leadership right now in this whole area. And the rest of the world is taking notice and following. It's kind of a national competitiveness issue as well.

• 2:49:40John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, congratulations on a successful earnings season. We'd love to have you back on the show soon. Thanks, guys. Great to catch up. Have a great rest of the day.

• 2:49:51Jeremy Allaire?

  Likewise.

• 2:49:52John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you.

• 2:49:53Jeremy Allaire?

  Cheers. Bye-bye.

• 2:49:54John Coogan?

  Go bye. Before we bring in our next guest from the re-streamed waiting room, let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake-offs, number one ranking on G2. Our next guest is Vlad. He's building lighter, and we have some big news on the funding side. How you doing, Vlad? Hey, guys. Good to meet you. Welcome to the show. Welcome to the show.

• 2:50:19Speaker 11

  What's happening? Hey guys, can you hear me?

• 2:50:21John Coogan?

  Yes, we can hear you. Please introduce yourself, introduce the company for those who aren't familiar.

• 2:50:27Speaker 11

  Awesome. Yeah, good to be here. Actually, I think you had my former co-founder Scott on a couple of weeks ago, who's now working on Cognition.

• 2:50:35John Coogan?

  Oh, Scott, of course. We've had him on a bunch of times.

• 2:50:38Speaker 11

  TBN Hall of Fame.

• 2:50:40John Coogan?

  TBN is made possible by Cognition, the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. We love doing ad reads for Cognition.

• 2:50:50Speaker 11

  Oh, nice, nice, nice. Today, we're here to talk about you and Lighter.

• 2:50:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:50:57Speaker 11

  Exactly. So I'm glad I'm founder and CEO of Lighter, which is decentralized exchange built on top of Ethereum. We can talk more about, you know, how we built it and why, but, you know, we're we've we launched in January and kind of had a pretty strong growth this year with our mainnet. And we actually did a public launch in, you know, October 1. But yeah, and I guess before Lighter, I worked on Lunch Club, you know, with Scott. And prior to that, I guess I'm kind of like, like, I'm not a crypto guy that got into finance. I'm more like a finance guy who took a detour to AI and then, you know, got into DeFi.

• 2:51:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk about some of the some of the some of the choices that you've made, like, like, why Ethereum compared to other other chains, why decentralized exchange, like, like, of the of the technical decisions that you made, I feel like we've talked to a lot of folks who have picked out different quadrants. If we do a two by two quadrant or something like that, you've clearly landed in one particular piece, one particular spot on the market map. How would you describe the trade offs that you've made? And then why did you make those trade offs?

• 2:52:19Speaker 11

  Awesome. Yeah, that's a great question. And we actually started working on lighter right around three years ago. So like mid to late 22 is when we were thinking through that idea maze, as it were. So it's interesting to like, look back now. And the genesis of the idea, right, was that we were thinking about digital assets, right? Like, digital assets have been around for 10, 15 years, right? Like, they've been traded a lot. I mean, but most of them represent some kind of blockchain or, you know, decentralized protocol, or like rails for the future of finance. But the weird thing was that like

• 2:53:02Speaker 11

  99% of the activity of how they're traded actually did not use the rails of the stuff that these assets are building, right? Like, it's actually trading in a centralized way. And like centralized exchanges have, you know, there's some good ones, right? You know, they, you know, I think some of them definitely have provided value to customers, but like, at the basic premise, right, like a centralized exchange doesn't actually use the blockchain at its core to verify what's going on. And like, in some cases, it's actually worse than TradFi, right? Like, at least in TradFi, you have, you know, regulations and the legal system to fall back on if something goes wrong. Like, right? And we send the thing

• 2:53:42Speaker 11

  is that like, actually, almost three years to the day is when FTX collapsed. And we were looking at that when, when we were thinking about how to build lighter. And we thought, okay, well, now people will get it. And like, volume will move away from centralized exchanges after like, one of the big ones failed. And that didn't happen. So what that taught us was that, actually, like, the decentralized exchanges that existed at the time, like, their product market fit was so bad, that people would rather trade somewhere where there's like, a one in six chance of the whole thing being a fraud than like, using the decentralized products. So, right, so then we thought, okay, well, we, this is something we should be part of the solution to, right? And so for us, it's like, okay,

• 2:54:25Speaker 11

  what we want to achieve is low cost, low latency, secure, verifiable, and composable. And like, the first three of those are pretty self explanatory, but you know, what does verifiable mean, right? It means That everything that happens, there's a cryptographic proof that it happened fairly incorrectly. And like, why is that important? Well, if you ask the reverse question, like, what if, what if it's not verifiable? Well, that means there's some part of the system where you're just like, trust me, bro. Which is kind of, again, defeat super, even if there's one part like that, you know, like, the whole thing could be, um, you know, manipulated or, um, you know, corrupted, right? So that's a problem, right? And then composable is also important because at the end of the day, we're, we're not just trying to build a sandbox

• 2:55:10Speaker 11

  for people to speculate on. We want to build something that's composable with the rest of DeFi, whether it's lending, stable coins, you know, staking, you know, prediction markets, all this other stuff, so that can kind of all work together in smart contracts. So anyway, so we had those five goals and going back to your question, like, so Ethereum was the obvious choice for the security layer, right? For it to be secure, we had a pretty strong view that the layer one, that's by far the most secure out of things you can build on is Ethereum. Another, you know, we, you know, Solana has built a great L1 as well and others have too. But, you know, Ethereum is like very secure. It's been stable for a very long time. Um, so that was pretty clear to us.

• 2:55:53Speaker 11

  Um, and yeah, we can dive into how we achieve the other goals, but as far as like, why decentralize? And why Ethereum? I think that that gets into those points.

• 2:56:05John Coogan?

  I, I, I don't know if we have enough time to go super deep into more of the technical side. I'm more interested to hear about how you met Ken Griffin, honestly. So could you tell me the story of, uh, of, of the Ken Griffin, uh, recruitment? I would love to know, like, how did he even know to reach out to you? What, what happened there? Tell me the full story, because I think that's fascinating.

• 2:56:25Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah. Um, so, and by the way, I'm, um, you know, also based in Miami now, um, for the last five years. So, you know, not only did I learn a lot of stuff from Ken about finance and business, but also, uh, that South Florida is a good area.

• 2:56:43John Coogan?

  Location, yeah.

• 2:56:45Speaker 11

  Yeah, but, um, you know, so, so the, I guess, uh, you know, the thing with.

• 2:56:52Speaker 11

  My time at Citadel and, you know, so I was 18 when I finished Harvard and actually even

• 2:56:59Jordi Hays?

  Wait.

• 2:56:59Speaker 11

  While a student.

• 2:57:01Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for finishing Harvard at 18.

• 2:57:04John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:57:05Jordi Hays?

  Continue.

• 2:57:06Speaker 11

  What's that, what's that account like VCs congratulating themselves or?

• 2:57:10Jordi Hays?

  We're congratulating you. You just said a fact. You just said a fact.

• 2:57:15Speaker 11

  But, uh, yeah. So then actually like even at school, I did some trading and was, um, working on kind of a side project with two friends, um, around options. And so, you know, so I was doing that and that didn't quite get off the ground, but, um, I got to know the team at Citadel through, you know, essentially like the research firm. So, you know, it's not,

• 2:57:38John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:57:38Speaker 11

  You know, it's not like Ken personally gave me a call or something, but I got to know the team and they wanted me to join. And then kind of towards the end of the process, Ken got involved and spent a bunch of time with me, you know, um, to tell me more about what their uh, high level goals are at Citadel and their strategy and why it would be a good fit for me and kind of making sure that I'm comfortable joining them. And, uh, I guess without going into too much details, I mean, he made it a very attractive proposition for me and was pretty involved, um, you know, the first couple of weeks, especially of my work there. Um, and, uh, yeah, you know, uh, he's to this day, someone I thoroughly look up to and, uh,

• 2:58:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's just fascinating lineage here. There's just fascinating lineage here. Obviously, uh, Ken Griffin went to Harvard, was trading in his dorm room. Uh, it took him a couple extra, he didn't, he didn't graduate at 18. So you sort of mocked him on that front, but, uh, but then of course, uh, he had a deep relationship with Robinhood and Robinhood Markets came in and invested in this round. And so there's a whole bunch of like full circle moments.

• 2:58:47Jordi Hays?

  I, I did want to quickly ask if you think that the industry fully learned its lesson from FTX, because I feel like there's, I've seen some chatter over the last few weeks around, uh, various exchanges saying like, no, your, your funds are frozen, but don't, don't worry. Uh, we're, we're, we're working on it. Uh, and it's, you know, maybe sending some alarm bells.

• 2:59:11Speaker 11

  Right. So October 10th was an interesting moment for the space, I think, that actually DeFi kind of as a whole worked well, right? Whether it's Aave or Morpho, all those, all those protocols. And I think our competitors, you know, handled those market moves in different ways. But I think all of them in the context of DeFi worked the way they were supposed to work. You know, some of the centralized exchanges, I think, maybe, again, like, the problem there, right, it's like lack of transparency. You don't really know, like, did they actually liquidate

• 2:59:53Speaker 11

  their customers correctly or not? Like, maybe they did, right? Like, maybe, maybe everything worked exactly as expected. But if it didn't, there would be no way we would even know that. And so I don't, I'm not aware of any cases of specific wrongdoing by centralized exchanges in that cycle. But again, with the lack of transparency, there was no way I would know that. And, you know, we do know there have been some like blowups of kind of smaller hedge funds, like on-chain hedge funds, right? And what ultimately caused those is unclear. But the one thing I will say is I remember after FTX, there was this whole thing about, like, okay, let's even centralize exchanges, that's, like, let's make them more verifiable

• 3:00:35Speaker 11

  and like prove reserves. Now, of course, like, what does that mean? Because, like, you can prove assets, but how do you prove liabilities? But still, like, there was some push to do that. And I remember Vitalik had some ideas on how to do that. And Binance was looking into it. And then, like, I think someone asked CZ about it. And he was just like, well, you know, Vitalik is very technical. Some of the stuff is like too complex or something like that, right? So I don't, I don't know if the centralized exchanges have really truly learned their lessons on that front. But, you know, did anything particularly egregious happen that I know of October 10th? Like, I can't say that. But again, the, you know, the whole point is that

• 3:01:16Speaker 12

  You know, it's supposed to be transparent and trustless.

• 3:01:19John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:01:20Jordi Hays?

  Well, well said. Well, glad you're glad you're building what you're building.

• 3:01:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and congratulations on the massive fundraiser. Very excited to continue following the story as you continue to build this company. Uh, but have a great rest of your day.

• 3:01:35Speaker 12

  Awesome.

• 3:01:36John Coogan?

  Hope you enjoy.

• 3:01:36Speaker 12

  Awesome. Thanks for having me, guys.

• 3:01:37John Coogan?

  Beautiful Miami weather.

• 3:01:38Jordi Hays?

  Cheers. Come back soon.

• 3:01:39John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 3:01:40Speaker 12

  Thank you.

• 3:01:40Jordi Hays?

  See ya.

• 3:01:41John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free. Also, I'm going to tell you about eightsleep.com. Jordy's traveling, but I got a 91.

• 3:01:55Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 3:01:55John Coogan?

  Seven hours, 55 minutes.

• 3:01:57Jordi Hays?

  I'll give it to you.

• 3:01:57John Coogan?

  Let's go. And our next guest is Andrew DeSuda from DeSusa from Boardy. He's in the restroom waiting room.

• 3:02:04Jordi Hays?

  Welcome.

• 3:02:05John Coogan?

  Now he's on TVP and Ultra.

• 3:02:07Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 3:02:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, great, great to meet and welcome to the show. Kick it off maybe with a quick intro on yourself, background, and then let's talk about Boardy.

• 3:02:18Speaker 12

  Yeah, yeah. So I'm the founder, founder CEO, creator of Boardy, the AI super connector. Boardy is helping, you know, helping founders meet investors primarily, but connecting people for, you know, business and economic reasons. We've had, we launched a program about two weeks ago to try and get 100 founders to help close the round. We have 5,000 founders raising $16 billion signed up and 600 investors spending about a trillion dollars of capital.

• 3:02:44Jordi Hays?

  Some size.

• 3:02:46Speaker 12

  So yeah, we've got, I think we've probably got about 10% of the active fundraising happening right now. Among founders that are, that is, are working through Boardy, um, which is pretty exciting.

• 3:02:58Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. So, yeah, I guess, I guess, um, yeah, I guess, I guess immediate thought is, um, with products like this, like one of the, one of the challenges is just like balancing the network, basically. And within venture, it's oftentimes the, the companies that have the most demand for their equity.

• 3:03:21Jordi Hays?

  Or, or the companies that are, that are, you know, maybe performing the best, oftentimes don't need intros. You know, they're in the position of like saying no. How are you thinking about kind of like maintaining quality on the platform? When you're a business and you want to be as, as big as you can possibly be. Uh, and I imagine you, you have a strategy there.

• 3:03:39Speaker 12

  Yeah, I think it's it's that was something that I was worried about. This is the reason why we didn't start with the idea of connecting founders and investors. It just sort of happened organically. This was this was the activity that was taking place. I've been shocked at the caliber of founders that have come in looking for help. And I think as a CEO, as a founder, like your job is to create demand for your shares. It doesn't matter whether you're Elon or, you know, Roy Lee or, you know, a Y C founder, like that's your job and you'll take all the help you can get. Most founders only raise capital, you know, two or three times in their life and and having someone that can help you navigate that, get the right introductions. I think there are probably fifty or hundred founders in the world. I think this is the reason why we talk about this sort of A I bubble right now.

• 3:04:23Speaker 12

  Maybe fifty or a hundred founders in the world that every investor is chasing, right? Because that's, you know, that's the hype cycle. There's probably thousands of founders who have incredible businesses. We're talking to them. They have incredible businesses, incredible metrics, and they're just, you know, they just haven't, they're not based in Silicon Valley or they're not, you know, straight down the middle. Pattern recognition.

• 3:04:45John Coogan?

  They're not based at all.

• 3:04:49John Coogan?

  I'm back.

• 3:04:50Speaker 12

  They may not be based at all.

• 3:04:53Jordi Hays?

  Good luck, good luck raising if you're not based these days.

• 3:04:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that that makes total sense. What like where where does this go? From here, this feels like a good early wedge, but you know, hard hard to build a billion dollar business yourself just within just within venture. So I imagine you have a number of other kind of pathways or or use cases for the for the kind of introduction engine or I don't know how you.

• 3:05:23Speaker 12

  Yeah. Yeah, we've built Boardy as like an A I board member. So what is the most important meeting for the CEO to take at any time? Right? Is it a customer meeting? Are they hiring an executive? Are they trying to get on, you know, a podcast? Are they, you know, like, is it? Is it a big partnership? Is it corp dev? It happens to be that fundraising ends up being a high urgency place where you can build a great relationship. But I think of Boardy as an economy. You know, Boardy, every time you connect two people, there's some economic opportunity that that is unlocked. There's some latent economic potential and

• 3:05:56John Coogan?

  We can financialize it.

• 3:05:58Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 3:05:59John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 3:06:01John Coogan?

  It's actually what you're doing. It's true. It's actually good.

• 3:06:03Jordi Hays?

  Okay, can I give, can I give feedback to Borty? If I get an intro and I, and I, and I take the call and I'm like, can I be like, yo, Borty, that, never again, never again. Cause we, I mean, everyone's gotten an intro from somebody and, and you're like, wait, why'd you make that intro? Like, I jumped on. They didn't know who I was.

• 3:06:21John Coogan?

  Why am I on with the venture fund that loves firing CEOs? Don't introduce me to them. Introduce me to the friendly ones.

• 3:06:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So how do you, how do you, cause, cause I can imagine that's like one way that you, you want to make sure, you want to get to the point where the entire industry is, is on Borty. Like every single founder, every single investor, but as an investor, for an investor to like not churn, they need to be able to like give feedback and say like, hey, like this didn't meet, this didn't meet my bar for a meeting. I don't, you know, if you, you know, and if you keep sending people meetings or intros that don't meet their bar, eventually they'll just say like, I'm, I'm gonna, you know, log off.

• 3:06:59Speaker 12

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, so this is, um, this is one of the things we take a lot of, we, we take feedback. Borty has goodwill with people, right? So his idea, the same way that if anytime I make an introduction, I'm gambling goodwill. I'm gonna, if I make a bad introduction, I burn some goodwill. If I make a great introduction, maybe I've gained some goodwill. And you're sort of doing that calculation at any given time.

• 3:07:18Speaker 12

  The version of Borty, if you just sign up, you, you're talking to a low latency, relatively low cost on, on the phone, on WhatsApp, you're just talking to, you know, the, the standard version of Borty. Um, what we tried to do, we had this experiment, we were running this fundraising thing. We said, what if you could remove the constraints of latency and cost? What if I could spend a hundred times the tokens? What if I could let Borty run for 30 minutes trying to find the perfect introduction and position you in the perfect way? Could I get better results? And that's kind of what we're seeing. So now we've had five thousand, and Borty's got to 5,000 founders that are raising and 600 investors in the last two weeks.

• 3:07:52Speaker 12

  He has now picked the top hundred that he knows he can help that are going to be in demand from the investors in his network and we put them into a shared Slack channel with us and Boardy and the founder and we've now got those shared Slack channels with people and we're like, hey, here's some investors, what do you think? Get feedback from the founders. We're doing the same thing with investors. So the investors are sort of signing up and saying, here's a few founders that are raising, we think they'd fit your thesis and Boardy's just learning. So you're like, actually, that's not a good fit. Or I've talked to this founder more like this, less like this. And over the course of a couple of weeks, we really dial it in on both sides. And we just make sure that you're spending time. And it's less about capital allocations, more about like, how are you allocating your time and attention onto the deals that are actually likely to materialize? As an investor, the deals you're going to win. As founder, the investors that are actually going to give you a term sheet and fund.

• 3:08:36Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. What are some other kind of like, like, types of work that you expect Boardy to do in the future?

• 3:08:43Speaker 12

  Yeah, we're already starting to see a lot in sort of corporate, you know, enterprise sales and biz dev and partnerships. There are, it starts with the corporate venture capital arms. So we're getting a ton of corporate venture capital funds coming in and now we're talking to their innovation teams. And it's the same thing. It's like, hey, look, I gotta, I gotta stay abreast of what's happening in my industry. And it's almost impossible, right? Maybe I'll watch TVPN and see who comes on there, but like, that's almost too late, right? It's actually like, I've got to, I've got to see who's starting a company, you know, who's just being funded, who, who is going, who do I want to be, who do I want to be tracking? And so Boardy's starting to help with that and making those introductions. Hiring is another one that I think is interesting. You know, especially when people are passive, they're not actively looking, they don't want to take a bunch

• 3:09:28Speaker 12

  of recruiter calls, but they'll talk to Boardy, like, I might start a company, but if there's a really great startup out there, I might join the team. And so those kind of conversations are quite interesting as well. But it's like, whatever you call your board member, whatever, whatever introduction is going to move the needle for you, that is worth the time of the CEO, that's what we want to work on.

• 3:09:46Jordi Hays?

  That makes a lot of sense.

• 3:09:47John Coogan?

  I'm looking for a board member who can take me on a track day. That's my only thing I want to get out of them. Take me to the track, put me in a race car. It better not have a passenger seat and then get out of the way because I'm building on my own. Uh, thank you so much. Yeah.

• 3:10:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, that's a good challenge.

• 3:10:03John Coogan?

  Development. Maybe once you get into the really high tier of boardy spend, you do a track day.

• 3:10:09Speaker 12

  Well, you know, so Nico Rosberg is a big boardy user.

• 3:10:12John Coogan?

  No way.

• 3:10:12Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 3:10:13John Coogan?

  Oh, he's been on the show.

• 3:10:14Speaker 12

  Big time boardy user.

• 3:10:15John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 3:10:16Speaker 12

  Uh, and so he, he could probably make it happen for you.

• 3:10:18John Coogan?

  Very cool. I love it.

• 3:10:19Jordi Hays?

  I like it. I like it. It's one of those things that in, in, um, kind of working on, uh, it, when you, when you describe it of just like a place that a founder can go to just get help with their business. Uh, it's not, it's surprisingly not something that, uh, not, nobody's, you know, made that pitch on, on the show to date, which is surprising because that's pretty much, you know, feels like very valuable to a lot of the companies that are, are coming on.

• 3:10:48Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 3:10:49John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us. Congratulations on all the progress.

• 3:10:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great. Great to meet you. We'll, we'll try out the product and, uh, you need to find like a guest.

• 3:10:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be great.

• 3:11:00Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 3:11:01Speaker 12

  Love to give it a shot.

• 3:11:02John Coogan?

  Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:11:04Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Andrew.

• 3:11:05John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields. They're trusted by millions. I'm also going to tell you about ad quick, out of home advertising made it easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combined technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Our next guest is Parag Agrawal from Parallel AI. Welcome to the show, Parag. How you doing?

• 3:11:29Parag Agrawal?

  Hey, hey. Hey, hey. Good to see you next.

• 3:11:32Jordi Hays?

  What's happening? Are you, uh, are you at a newcomer event right now?

• 3:11:38Parag Agrawal?

  I am.

• 3:11:39John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. You got the staff behind you. Cerebral Valley AI Summit. Congratulations. What did you announce on stage? What are you announcing here on TVPN?

• 3:11:49Parag Agrawal?

  I announced on stage that we just raised, uh, CDA. We raised a hundred million dollars from some of the best investors.

• 3:11:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:59Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for the best investor. Seven hundred and forty million.

• 3:12:03John Coogan?

  Kline Perkins, Index Ventures.

• 3:12:05Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 3:12:05John Coogan?

  Got some Spark Capital participation. We love to see it. Cosla's in there, first round. Terrain, wow, really, really murderers, wow. Uh, Mamoon, Kline is joining the board. That's exciting. That's exciting.

• 3:12:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, kinda looking like the Figma.

• 3:12:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:22Jordi Hays?

  Figma board.

• 3:12:23John Coogan?

  We got a, we got a good crew here. I like this. Um, so, so, so take me through, take me through the actual company progress, the progress that unlocked this hundred million dollar Series A. Uh, obviously, there was some demand, there was some research progress. What was the shape of the data points that went into the ultimate deck that got us across the finish line?

• 3:12:44Parag Agrawal?

  So, we did our first round two years ago. We started with this sort of find the sky idea that agents are gonna use the web and they're gonna use them a lot.

• 3:12:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:52Parag Agrawal?

  And we need to build new infrastructure for them.

• 3:12:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:55Parag Agrawal?

  There weren't any agents around in that moment. Right? None of them were using the web when we started.

• 3:13:01Jordi Hays?

  They were trying. Some of them were trying.

• 3:13:03Parag Agrawal?

  Yes. Uh, and this year, like, everything changed. Everyone's now building an agent and every agent wants to connect to those. So, the market just came alive, I wanna say six, nine months ago. The most, like, current tier customers started doing this last year and became our design partners. This year, the number of customers, the number of queries, the diversity of work. Like, there's coding agents using us.

• 3:13:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:32Parag Agrawal?

  There's people in sales, building agents using us. Finance, risk, compliance, insurance, healthcare. People doing scientific research agents.

• 3:13:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:44Parag Agrawal?

  People in pharma and biotech, figuring out how to use web search APIs to build agents. So, like, it's a completely different world this year as it relates to agents, agents using the web.

• 3:13:55Jordi Hays?

  So, yeah, to, to make it super simple, people are using parallel web systems within, you know, uh, maybe a SaaS provider is integrating parallel into their product so that if somebody's doing research, let's say in a CRM on a customer, you guys can help them use agents to do a web search and, uh, fill, fill in that CRM with data. That would be one example.

• 3:14:18Parag Agrawal?

  That is a perfect example. Um. You see this white offline.

• 3:14:22John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:14:22Parag Agrawal?

  Our products are APIs.

• 3:14:24John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:14:24Parag Agrawal?

  Our users are agents, our customers are people building agents, right? So if someone builds an agent to say, okay, I'm going to take your CRM and add very interesting data to it so that you can take better actions.

• 3:14:37John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:14:38Parag Agrawal?

  That agent that they built will call our APIs in order to search the web, in order to pull content from the web, in order to get the highest quality information to be able to fill up that it is.

• 3:14:48John Coogan?

  Uh. React to this post from Jim Cramer. Uh. He says, when I use ChatGPT or the others, I can tell quickly that they won't pay up for good sources. We all know this, so what's the point? They need to start paying newspapers and stop using bogus sources. We would never use ourselves. We need integrity, not volume. There's a bunch of ways you could read that, but my take was there is a data quality opportunity, especially in the enterprise, especially where willingness to pay is maybe really high. And so how are you thinking about uh making sure that parallel and the deep research API has the highest quality data forever?

• 3:15:35Parag Agrawal?

  Yeah, I I perhaps I've been partly with Jim Cramer.

• 3:15:39John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:15:40Parag Agrawal?

  I don't always, um, the uh. So the two things there, how do you get the highest quality deep research agents? That is a lot of things. High quality data, authoritative data is a part of it. And then there's a lot of other technology we're building on top, whether it be at the ranking layer, the retrieval layer, the crawling layer, the reasoning layer to get you higher quality deep resources. I I ask you to try our deep research product and compare it to OpenAI's and we win nine times out of ten.

• 3:16:10John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:16:10Parag Agrawal?

  So I want everyone to try that and tell us if I'm wrong. Uh, so go to the data question. Um, I think there are deals being done by people. Uh, the the world I don't want to live in is only Google and OpenAI's agents have access to some data. And most publishers don't get to make those deals and most other agents don't get to have that access. Uh, that is the core mission of our business. We started with building products for AI customers. We recently started uh figuring out what the incentives are for publishers to allow AI agents to use them. Uh, which will include payments, which will include

• 3:16:56Parag Agrawal?

  other forms of value, which is transactions. Uh, and which include distribution, right? Which is, which are the things that people care about on the web. Uh, I'm sort of having run Twitter before I understand the concerns of someone publishing on the web and uh, business models around ads are likely to evolve and that's part of the reason we end up doing this company. Because we think we have an opinion or two to bring to life here.

• 3:17:24Jordi Hays?

  Do large revenue multiples scare you?

• 3:17:30Parag Agrawal?

  No.

• 3:17:32Jordi Hays?

  Good.

• 3:17:32Parag Agrawal?

  No, as long as you know what you're doing.

• 3:17:34Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 3:17:37John Coogan?

  Confidence. I love it.

• 3:17:39Jordi Hays?

  Love the confidence. Gotta be confident.

• 3:17:40John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:17:41Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, I, I, I love how the, the, even, even since the last, uh, your last appearance, you know, the vision uh, and opportunity uh, just seems bigger and bigger.

• 3:17:51John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah. Makes a ton of sense.

• 3:17:53Parag Agrawal?

  Thanks for having me.

• 3:17:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:55Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you back. Uh, at this rate, I'm sure, uh, come back on before the end of the year.

• 3:17:59John Coogan?

  Weeks.

• 3:18:02Parag Agrawal?

  I'm gonna ship a product in a couple of weeks and be right back.

• 3:18:04John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 3:18:05Jordi Hays?

  Hit us up then.

• 3:18:06John Coogan?

  Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon, Frog. Have a good one.

• 3:18:09Parag Agrawal?

  Thanks for having me.

• 3:18:11John Coogan?

  Uh, let me tell you about Bezel. Getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. I want to do a lightning round. We got a bunch of posts. We're gonna try and go through them as fast as possible. Uh, first, Brian Johnson does, did confirm, this is from Brian Guarrel. Uh, Brian Johnson confirms he was not one-shotted by a recent magic mushroom trip. You said if Brian Johnson comes out of this five-gram trip and says, "Yeah, we're gonna conquer death. We're still on," then he's certainly a true believer. What did he say? He replied to TVPN's post. He said, "We're gonna conquer death." So Brian Johnson is feeling good, looking good, back on the timeline, uh, not one-shotting, I suppose.

• 3:18:48Jordi Hays?

  One of the founders of, uh, Chad IDE says,

• 3:18:54Jordi Hays?

  He quoted my post and said, "Really great post. However, it doesn't apply to Chad IDE. We're five steps ahead. Different plane of thinking, but really great post. So reposting for visibility." Nice post, little bro.

• 3:19:09John Coogan?

  Nice post, little bro. I want to say-

• 3:19:12Jordi Hays?

  I think that's a pretty hilarious-

• 3:19:13John Coogan?

  I did sneak a peek at your post during the show and I don't think you got called unk as bad as I expected. You made it sound like you were getting destroyed. You did very well. You got over a thousand likes and people are like, "Oh, you're taking shots at Gary Tan." No, Gary Tan chimed in. He said, "Good points. Big thanks." A lot of people did identify that you were rage baiting the rage baiters, which is funny.

• 3:19:39Jordi Hays?

  I had to use their own tricks against them.

• 3:19:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, you did. I think in this case you used the tricks for good and I think it's a great post and I enjoy. But you know, maybe we have to have the, you know, there's always room for follow-up. Maybe we'll talk to Gary Tan later this week. We'll get him on the show. Think about how he's thinking about the future of YC. Maybe we'll have the founder of Chad Labs, Chad IDE.

• 3:20:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we do have a lot.

• 3:20:05John Coogan?

  We will also be demoing the product at some point. I believe we'll be getting a preview of what the actual product is. If there's something awesome behind the scenes, we're going to tell you what that is. Let's also just-

• 3:20:15Jordi Hays?

  I just love responding and being like, "Actually, it doesn't apply to us. We're five steps ahead."

• 3:20:20John Coogan?

  Or five steps ahead. I mean, that is just a complete trump card. How do you respond to that?

• 3:20:26Jordi Hays?

  Levels.

• 3:20:27John Coogan?

  Levels. I think he wins.

• 3:20:30John Coogan?

  "Much like Wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views. Hotel-grade amenities. Dreamy beds. Top-tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better." What is this? La Lamp. Introducing a La Lamp, says Shavir Sharkei, Sharkei. "An emotional and expressive robot to reshape our attachment to technology." Is this a CGI vibral or is this a real product? Can we, do you have any idea, who put this in the, in the show notes?

• 3:20:57Speaker 02

  I put it in the show.

• 3:20:57John Coogan?

  Okay. Do you think this is real?

• 3:20:58Speaker 02

  I was trying to find where you are.

• 3:20:59John Coogan?

  It looks real.

• 3:21:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it looks real.

• 3:21:01John Coogan?

  Looks real? Okay. It looks pretty cool. I, I wonder, wait, wait, so would you buy this? What, what is the, what is the value of this? It's obviously very cute, very cool. It's the Pixar lamp, but uh, it should exist, but why, what does it do?

• 3:21:13Speaker 02

  Um, I don't, it's pretty cool. I don't know.

• 3:21:16John Coogan?

  It's weird. It just feels cool.

• 3:21:17Speaker 02

  It's a cool thing to have. There was um,

• 3:21:19John Coogan?

  Put a speaker on it.

• 3:21:20Speaker 02

  I, I'm like 90% sure it's real. There was a um, Apple research paper that came out like, I don't know, six months ago. And it was all about like expressive robots.

• 3:21:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:21:29Speaker 02

  And they had a bunch of like demos and stuff and how they could build this stuff.

• 3:21:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:32Speaker 02

  It looks very exciting.

• 3:21:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, the website is uh, lelamp.com. That's a good one. L E L A M P dot com. You can preorder it. The lamp like follows around your cursor. Pretty cool website. Let's see what the checkout is. It's only 50 bucks? Wow. Okay. This is, this is very cool. Uh, I, I have been uh, delight baited. I have not been rage baited by this. I think this is a great, great launch. Uh, and uh, in another news, uh, Jim Cramer is posting about uh, about quantum computing. He says, Rigetti, what an opportunity, ka-ching, buy IBM.

• 3:22:05Speaker 02

  What? What does that even mean?

• 3:22:08John Coogan?

  Cramer posts like a crazy amount. I mean, he's got 2.3 million followers. He's posting like every half hour. The guy's a machine. He, he's gonna be on the show in a couple of weeks. We're very excited.

• 3:22:19Speaker 02

  I cannot wait.

• 3:22:20John Coogan?

  Uh, it's gonna be a lot of fun. Uh, anyway, that's our show for today.

• 3:22:23Speaker 02

  I do not tolerate uh, Kramer slander.

• 3:22:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, no.

• 3:22:27Speaker 02

  I think he,

• 3:22:29John Coogan?

  He's, he's entertaining. He's insightful. He's controversial. He's a total package. We love Kramer here. Uh, he's great. Whoa, whoa, whoa, oh, there is a review from Andre Karpathy. I missed this one. Oh, there's a couple of posts that I missed actually. Um, uh, Andre Karpathy says, "I took delivery of a beautiful shiny new HW4 Tesla Model X today." I like this hardware for, he cares about the chip inside that thing. He doesn't care about what the light bar on the front is, or the door handles, or whether the doors go up. He, Andre Karpathy cares about the, the GPU inside. Um, so I immediately took it out for an FSD test drive, a bit like I used to do almost daily for five years.

• 3:23:08John Coogan?

  Basically, I'm amazed. It drives really, really well, really smooth, confident, noticeably better than what I'm used to on HW3, my previous car, and Elon's Aons and, and. An eons ahead of the version I remember driving up Highway 280 on my first day of Tesla nine years ago, where I had to intervene every time the road mildly curved or sloped. Note, this is V13. My car hasn't been offered the latest V14 yet. On the highway, I felt like a passenger in some super high-tech maglev train pod. The car is locked in the center of the lane while I'm looking out from the Model X's higher vantage point and its panoramic front window, listening to the incredible sound system, or chatting with Grok. On city streets, the car casually handled a number of tricky scenarios that

• 3:23:52John Coogan?

  I remember losing sleep over just a few years ago. It negotiated incoming cars in tight lanes. It gracefully went around construction and temporary in-lane stationary cars. It correctly timed tricky left turns with incoming traffic from both sides. It's a glowing review, glowing review of Tesla self-driving from the man who basically invented it and started the whole, started the whole process. I mean, I don't know if he started it, but he was incremental in the development of it. So.

• 3:24:23Jordi Hays?

  We also missed it, but OpenAI released GPT-5.1, rolling out to all users this week. Neer says, chat GPT is officially in its Fiji phase now, if you're wondering why the upgrade doesn't come with benchmarks. Have fun.

• 3:24:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, no benchmarks. So yes, there's two models. There's 5.1 Thinking and Instant. So if you go to like the actual like model router on like chatgpt.com or whatever, the only like, there's GPT-5, which you can do Pro, which is like the super long, almost like a deep, deep research product. And then the rest of them are just the 5.1 Thinking. But yeah, no, no benchmarks or like any kind of really technical report. In the blog post, it was a lot about the like personality of the model. She also released a separate blog post like on her Substack, and there was some mention of like, they're definitely like.

• 3:25:24Speaker 02

  They tried to address kind of the 4-0, like one-shotting stuff. They're like, okay, we're definitely aware that there are some problems with like a very small amount of people becoming very addicted to the models. But yeah, nothing like very technical out of this.

• 3:25:39Jordi Hays?

  Like it was only 1% of our user base.

• 3:25:42John Coogan?

  It wasn't 1%.

• 3:25:44Jordi Hays?

  Right, you're saying it was 10 million people that want to kill Rune?

• 3:25:52Jordi Hays?

  Rune, up your security.

• 3:25:54John Coogan?

  Yes, please do.

• 3:25:55Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, we actually have to go over to BASE, which is a conference hosted by my dear friend Will Kofield. So we gotta head over there. We're gonna have a little chat.

• 3:26:08John Coogan?

  That'll be fun. More podcasting.

• 3:26:11Jordi Hays?

  Another two hours of offline podcasting.

• 3:26:14John Coogan?

  We love it.

• 3:26:15Jordi Hays?

  Cannot wait. Cannot wait to be back tomorrow.

• 3:26:17John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of the day. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 3:26:21Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 3:26:22John Coogan?

  Subscribe to the email at tbpn.com and we'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye.

• 3:26:24Speaker 02

  Cheers.