Kushner and Iger Buy The Lakers, Grok 4.6 Launch, NVIDIA Nemotron | Darren Rovell, Patrick Whitesell, Harjot Gill, Jeff Huber, Soren Monroe-Anderson & Shaun Maguire, Andrei Georgescu

(00:29) - Kushner and Iger Buy The Lakers (11:46) - Grok 4.6 (15:52) - NVIDIA Nemotron (23:58) - Darren Rovell is a sports business reporter and industry analyst. Darren Rovell discusses the Lakers’ record-setting sale, the growing role of institutional investors in sports ownership, and the risks surrounding prediction markets, sports betting, and gambling-like commerce platforms. (43:13) - Patrick Whitesell is a veteran entertainment executive and investor who co-founded WME and now leads the investment firm Weitzel and sports agency WIN Sports. Patrick Whitesell discusses investing in creator-led media companies, his partnership with Alex Cooper’s Unwell, and how digital creators could reshape traditional Hollywood through authentic audiences, diversified businesses, and new production models. (59:09) - Harjot Gill is the co-founder and CEO of CodeRabbit, an AI developer tools company building automated code-review software that analyzes pull requests for bugs, security issues, and code quality problems. He previously co-founded Netsil, which was acquired by Nutanix, and has spent much of his career building developer infrastructure and observability products. (01:08:25) - Jeff Huber discusses Chroma’s growth and its new Zeitgeist shared-memory solution, which helps AI agents retain, retrieve, and securely share organizational knowledge. The Chroma founder and CEO also explains advances in agentic search, fast model inference, and context engineering, arguing that better memory remains essential to more capable AI agents. (01:16:08) - Soren Monroe-Anderson & Shaun Maguire. Soren Monroe-Anderson, a former world-champion drone racer and co-founder of Neros, discusses the company’s $250 million raise, rapid drone production growth, and expansion into interceptor systems. He explains Neros’ vertically integrated supply chain, modular hardware ecosystem, military and international customers, and recruitment of elite drone pilots and former special forces operators. Shaun Maguire is a partner at Sequoia Capital focused on AI, infrastructure, defense, and frontier technologies. Before joining Sequoia, he co-founded Expanse, a cybersecurity company acquired by Palo Alto Networks for $1.25 billion, and previously invested at GV (Google Ventures). He has led investments in companies including SpaceX, xAI, Bridge, Decart, and Lightmatter, and is known for backing technically ambitious founders building foundational technologies. (01:32:28) - Andrei Georgescu discusses how Vivodyne grows human tissues at massive scale to test thousands of drug candidates without relying on animal models or human trials. He explains how the technology could reduce drug-development failures, support personalized medicine, and advance safer, more effective treatments. (01:43:50) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVBN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Wednesday, August 12th, 2026. We are live from the TDP in OPL, the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.

• 0:11Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:12John Coogan?

  Tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Use these corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Uh, some really interesting data out of ramp. We'll go through the, uh, the latest workings of Arakarazi and over at the ramp economics lab soon, but first we got to talk about Josh Kushner, Bob Iger, they bought the LA Lakers. They're buying the Lakers. He's done it again. They said he couldn't do it. They.

• 0:38Jordi Hays?

  In the sauna this morning.

• 0:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:40Jordi Hays?

  I was thinking about the name thrive eternal. I think it's one of the best names for a fund ever.

• 0:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:48Jordi Hays?

  Like eternal is such a powerful statement and it fits the strategy so well.

• 0:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:53Jordi Hays?

  And it does, you know, people have been talking about this this morning, but it feels like, um, with all of the technology disruption happening, it just feels like these sports franchises could be more durable than many of the biggest companies in the world today.

• 1:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, we have Darren Rovell coming back on the show to discuss it 1130. Uh, let me take you through.

• 1:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I figured out how to put on a suit.

• 1:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. Doesn't he look great? Look at this guy. It's incredible.

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  I cleaned it up.

• 1:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25Jordi Hays?

  I cleaned it up.

• 1:26John Coogan?

  Super clean, looking amazing. Uh, yeah.

• 1:29Jordi Hays?

  Finally, truth be told, we, when we started the show, I went from, we started hitting the gym.

• 1:38John Coogan?

  We did a little bulking season. It was bulking.

• 1:39Jordi Hays?

  And I added, I added some weight and I basically over.

• 1:43John Coogan?

  You added 45 pounds of lean muscle. You don't need to undersell it, Jordy. And you lost 20 pounds of fat. Yeah. So.

• 1:49Jordi Hays?

  I added a little weight and I basically grew out of my suit slowly about two pounds a month.

• 1:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57Jordi Hays?

  For 18 months.

• 1:58John Coogan?

  It went exponential.

• 1:59Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 2:00John Coogan?

  It was a fast take off.

• 2:00Jordi Hays?

  It became extremely uncomfortable to sit here, even though all these, the, the suits.

• 2:04John Coogan?

  Suits are beautiful.

• 2:05Jordi Hays?

  That, uh, that we had gotten made.

• 2:07John Coogan?

  But they got a little tight.

• 2:08Jordi Hays?

  I'm going to have to save them for when I'm an elderly man.

• 2:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 2:12Jordi Hays?

  Cause at some point we'll shed, we'll shed the muscle.

• 2:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. Cutting season's coming.

• 2:16Jordi Hays?

  We'll be lean maxing.

• 2:17John Coogan?

  Summer's only.

• 2:18Jordi Hays?

  Cutting season is coming.

• 2:19John Coogan?

  Nine months away.

• 2:20Jordi Hays?

  Forty years.

• 2:21John Coogan?

  Forty years.

• 2:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. But it's good to be back.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25Jordi Hays?

  It's good to be back.

• 2:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. Looks good. Uh, let me take you through the story. So everyone has the facts straight about this, uh, incredible deal for the Los Angeles Lakers. The headline is the Los Angeles Lakers are being sold to American businessman, Josh Kushner and Bob Iger for a record breaking price of $12.5 billion. Multiple sources have told this to ESPN. So Kushner and Iger made the offer to Mark Walter, who only last year purchased, purchased a controlling interest in the Lakers from the bus family at a then record valuation of roughly $10 billion. Walter, the CEO and chairman of holding company, TWG global officially became the Lakers majority owner last October after the NBA unanimously approved the deal.

• 3:11John Coogan?

  The new sale will likewise require approval from the NBA's board of governors, which is scheduled to meet next month in New York. But looking at that picture, it seems like they've had this conversation with the relevant people. Uh, they're not some, uh, random businessmen coming in from out of town.

• 3:28Jordi Hays?

  In the cellar, under federal investigation.

• 3:31John Coogan?

  Yes. Uh, for some very complicated deals where some private credit transactions were put into an insurance firm that they own, uh, those affiliated transactions, if you originate the deal and then you put it in your insurance companies, uh, on your insurance companies books, you need to, you need to disclose this. Uh, now you can actually do this Berkshire Hathaway, about 46% of their, uh, insurance assets are related party transactions. So there's a way to do it above board. The allegations are that, uh, he disclosed that only 3% of the insurance, uh, assets were related party affiliated transactions, but in fact, it was much higher when you considered some of the other assets that had made their way through a third party.

• 4:16Jordi Hays?

  Capital allocator, bit of a bad, bit of a, bit of a bad boy.

• 4:19John Coogan?

  Even the bad boy thing. Yeah, maybe. Um, but you know, innocent until proven guilty. Obviously these are just allegations. He's just being investigated and he's denied. Yeah. And he's denied all wrongdoing, but it does, it does give you a little bit more context on what might be motivating a sale so, so soon after buying an asset that he was clearly, uh, optimistic about. So, uh, Kushner is the founder and CEO of venture firm thrive capital and co-founder and vice chairman of Oscar Health. He also is the brother of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump's son-in-law. Kushner currently owns minority stake in the Miami heat, which he will have to sell to complete the Lakers deal and was previously a minority, uh, owner of the Memphis Grizzlies. Iger, well, meanwhile, stepped

• 5:01John Coogan?

  down as Disney CEO earlier this year and has already made a major investment in the Los, in Los Angeles sports. He and his wife, Willow Bay, become controlling, became controlling owners of the national women's soccer leagues, Angel City FC in 2024. Uh, the prospective new owners are already getting a warm reception from some of the biggest names associated with the franchise. Uh, Luca Doncic said, being a Laker means everything to me and I'm excited to get back to the court and bring a championship to LA. I've gotten used to big changes over these last few years, but I know that no matter what, there's no limit to the potential of this iconic franchise. I look forward to meeting Josh and Bob so we can get to work building something special in LA together. You'll love to see it. Magic Johnson chimed in as well. He said Lakers fans couldn't have any, you couldn't have

• 5:45John Coogan?

  two better owners, Johnson said. I've known Bob personally for over 40 years. He has always loved the Lakers and basketball, and he will bring championships back to LA. So Magic Johnson is optimistic about this deal.

• 5:59Jordi Hays?

  Weirdly, this is making me optimistic on LA overall.

• 6:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:02Jordi Hays?

  I've had a generally bad outlook. I have had extreme confidence that the weather is going to be very nice for a long time.

• 6:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:10Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but that's really been the only thing I'm willing to really lean on.

• 6:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:13Jordi Hays?

  But this is giving me a slightly more positive outlook.

• 6:16John Coogan?

  And, and you've been pitching thrive on your new incubation, uh, the pothole company of Los Angeles, the pothole filling company of Los Angeles.

• 6:24Jordi Hays?

  Huge opportunity. It's really balanced here for potholes.

• 6:27John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 6:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:28John Coogan?

  Hiring the best AI researcher.

• 6:30Jordi Hays?

  No, I want somebody, I want somebody to do this. Figure out how to fix potholes.

• 6:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:34Jordi Hays?

  Quickly.

• 6:35John Coogan?

  I think it starts with its own satellite constellation. You have to put up 10,000 satellites in low earth orbit with cameras pointed directly at.

• 6:43Jordi Hays?

  Small, small, effectively missiles fired at potholes.

• 6:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 6:48Jordi Hays?

  And then a laser that sort of like melts the debris down to fill in the hole.

• 6:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. It just kind of sort of, you, you bring the molten asphalt up to space. It comes down, warms up and as it travels through the atmosphere, lands directly in the pothole and smushes in fills it in.

• 7:04Jordi Hays?

  But, but you know, people are always saying, oh, why is like, you go to LA, every other car is a G wagon. Well, you know why? Because the roads are absolutely terrible. You pretty much need something that's four wheel drive.

• 7:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:16Jordi Hays?

  Otherwise you're going to have a bad time. I was talking to, I was talking to, uh, to a, to a, to a Maybach owner, uh, a couple nights ago, and he had blown out multiple tires in the last year. I, I've blown out multiple tires last year. It's a, it's a disaster.

• 7:32John Coogan?

  We have a moment of silence.

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  The pothole company of Los Angeles.

• 7:37John Coogan?

  It's a banger idea, right?

• 7:38Jordi Hays?

  It's a banger idea.

• 7:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:41Jordi Hays?

  I might become the Batman of potholes.

• 7:43John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 7:44Jordi Hays?

  Sneaking out late at night.

• 7:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:47Jordi Hays?

  It might, look, I could go out in this suit.

• 7:49John Coogan?

  You could, you could. Yeah. Like that guy who was cleaning up the FDNY, uh, corner call box, like same thing.

• 7:55Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 7:56John Coogan?

  Potholes in LA. They're really, really bad. Every day I drive to work and I have to swerve into the other lane to avoid one and on this one particular road that's just been a disaster for the last six months. Anyway, uh, the last quote related to this deal, uh, as lifelong NBA fans, we are deeply honored for the opportunity to become the stewards of the Los Angeles Lakers, one of the most iconic sports franchises in the world, Kushner and Iger said in a statement, they said they have immense respect for Jerry and Jenny Buss and intend to build on the family's legacy. I don't know what you're laughing at. Compete at the highest level and serve this extraordinary team, its fans and the city of Los Angeles. If approved, the deal would give the Lakers their third controlling ownership.

• 8:38Jordi Hays?

  Of potholes.

• 8:40John Coogan?

  I think he got something.

• 8:40Jordi Hays?

  DT and Tyler says he's going to film the, the missions. This would just be absolutely riveting content. You're out on the four or five, 2 AM, just you and a nasty pothole and a little bit of traffic.

• 8:54John Coogan?

  And a little bit of asphalt slathered it in there. Right? Is that what you're doing?

• 8:58Jordi Hays?

  Well, my big issue is when they, they, when they fill in, they just do a really bad job.

• 9:02John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 9:03Jordi Hays?

  And so it basically creates a bunch of mini speed bump.

• 9:05John Coogan?

  And you get a sinkhole. So then you just start a sinkhole company.

• 9:09Jordi Hays?

  That's a whole other problem.

• 9:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. That was crazy. Well, whatever happened with that in LA? It was really bad for a while. I guess they fixed it.

• 9:15Jordi Hays?

  I would like to, um, get somebody to throw on a tinfoil hat and figure out why a bunch of pipes started exploding everywhere around the city.

• 9:24John Coogan?

  Somebody's got to ask the question. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. Uh, there's a bunch of reactions hitting the timeline. Uh, Sag Harbor Capital says, while there are plenty of issues you can point out with sports investing, I think this actually makes a simple, yet incredibly compelling case longevity. Sports is a portfolio diversifier. Investment firms and wealthy individuals now view investing in sports properties as a hedge against higher risk investments. Very interesting. Everyone has always said sports investing is just, uh, it's a trophy asset. It's just because you like the team, um, but you're locking up a lot of capital. And when you're long AGI, the future, the most cutting edge technologies, also building a portfolio with some things

• 10:09John Coogan?

  that are going to be around forever, no matter how many robots there are, um, makes a lot of sense. And so that, that, that balancing effect seems to be a new thing that's driving demand in, uh, in sports investing. Do you agree with that?

• 10:21Jordi Hays?

  I do. Fits the strategy.

• 10:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. Spore agrees. If you truly believe in AGI, buying a massive sports franchise is actually one of the best financial decisions you can make right now. Uh, and we've seen uh, hints and rumors of this for a while. Uh, anything else on the Lakers? We're going to talk to Darren in just, uh, 13 minutes about it. Get him to explain.

• 10:41Jordi Hays?

  He's going to walk us through the, the whole rule set.

• 10:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:44Jordi Hays?

  Very excited about that. Anyway, apparently there's a solar eclipse going on right now.

• 10:49John Coogan?

  Oh, is that going on right now? I saw a link to a whole bunch of different webcams that you can use to watch it. Uh, the last time, a couple of years ago, there was a full solar eclipse, not a partial one. And everyone who went said it was one of the most insane experiences of their life. So I would highly recommend it. Tyler.

• 11:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So it's in Europe right now. Full solar eclipse.

• 11:13John Coogan?

  Full solar eclipse.

• 11:14Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 11:14John Coogan?

  Wow. Should've gone. I missed this one. When's the next one?

• 11:18Jordi Hays?

  What does it mean? What's the meaning, Tyler?

• 11:21John Coogan?

  What does it mean? Uh, it's a great omen for high beta AI stocks.

• 11:28John Coogan?

  That's what I choose to read into it. Lever up. That's what the that's what the eclipse is trying to tell you. Anyway, let me tell you about console. Console built AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Grok 4.6 is roughly the same performance as Fable 5 Max at an 85% discount, 80% cheaper for input tokens and 88% cheaper for output tokens. Pareto dominance has Gavin Baker. Grok 4.7 will be significantly better as is a much larger model with the cursor and SpaceX data included in pre-training. So the headline is SpaceX sort of jumped to the frontier, at least on these benchmarks.

• 12:12John Coogan?

  We'll see how this comes out, how people adopt it. Obviously, Cursor has huge, huge usage all across the enterprise, across businesses. Grok has been slower on adoption with a bunch of different pushback there, but the model seems to be catching up. The teams seem to be gelling and things seem to be pretty good over there. We'll see how, I mean, I'm sure on X we'll see lots of people demoing examples of what they build with Grok 4.6. There's already some games that have hit the timeline. There'll be a whole bunch more on benchmarks.

• 12:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so seems incredibly impressive. Excited to get reactions and get people's lived experiences with the model. Price wars have definitely begun. You know, we saw this with Meta, we're seeing this with Grok now. And then third, I would say, trust in benchmarks has to be at an all time low. Right? There's been enough, you know, moments, releases so far where the benchmarks looked amazing, but then the actual lived experiences is, you know, less significant. They also had a great launch yesterday, so they're building momentum.

• 13:32John Coogan?

  Sure. SpaceX is up almost 40% just in the last five days. That's a pretty

• 13:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I'm so curious, I wish I wish you could figure out a way to parse out what's driving that. Is it the semi-analysis?

• 13:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:45Jordi Hays?

  Semi-analysis.

• 13:46John Coogan?

  That felt like Friday.

• 13:47Jordi Hays?

  Friday, well, yeah, that was Friday at the close.

• 13:50John Coogan?

  It popped during the day, though, right? So

• 13:53Jordi Hays?

  But then up 10% today.

• 13:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. Maybe it was leaking out.

• 13:57Jordi Hays?

  CNBC says SpaceX short sellers are running out of bullets as stock rebounds more than 30% off. We're running out of ammo.

• 14:09John Coogan?

  I'm tired, boss. I can't keep buying these prices. I'm buying, you gotta buy more. Michael Truell, Cursor founder, CEO. Excited to release Grok 4.6. With each release, Grok is becoming a more capable digital colleague. The age of work is upon us. Grok for work, it's happening. 4.6 is significantly better at difficult tasks and knowledge work. It combines OPUS-class intelligence and polish with very low cost and high speed, which people love. Even even just in the cursor workflow, the more iterative approach, instead of having to come back a day later and see what goes on, there's a lot of value to that workflow in particular. Grok 4.6 is a very impressive test time curve on Cursor Bench in a league of its own.

• 14:53John Coogan?

  They did more mid slash pre-training on the Grok 4.5 checkpoint and newer SFT stages with Grok 4.5 traces and model-based filtering. Once again, shows how important a good SFT checkpoint is. Interesting, getting some more details on what's going on with Grok. They also launched Grok Bot. We recently hired a new teammate. Bots are AI teammates that do real work for you. They sign into your tools, use them just like you do and come back with finished work. So I guess I guess work isn't going to happen. It's going to be Grok Bot, which actually it has a nice little rhythm to it. I like I like Grok Bot. Also, very good results on the artificial intelligence index joining the frontier. It's 61.

• 15:38John Coogan?

  Strong agentic performance, lower cost, obviously, and the model wars are upon us. Nvidia is also joining the model wars, selling weapons to both sides potentially. Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, their open source model came out. But they also launched a model router, Nemo Switch Yard, to deliver faster, smarter, more efficient, agentic AI.

• 16:02Jordi Hays?

  Switch Yard.

• 16:03John Coogan?

  Switch Yard is a good name.

• 16:04Jordi Hays?

  Good name.

• 16:04John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 16:05Jordi Hays?

  Kind of railroad connotations, which

• 16:08John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:09Jordi Hays?

  Which is maybe

• 16:10John Coogan?

  Interesting, yeah. We gotta go through Ben Thompson's stuff at some point, but interesting to see where this goes. I mean, it does feel like if you're if you're a organization that has Nvidia chips, you have your own data centers because you're a mid-scale, maybe not a hyperscaler, but you're pretty big, you know, being all in on the Nvidia stack and then using their model router could make a lot of sense. Like, it's a logical place for it to live. And and then you're, you know, it has more it has more integration with the rest of your Nvidia stack because you have a whole bunch of GPUs racked for the lowest possible cost. If you're cost optimizing, you'll probably eventually have your own racks

• 16:52John Coogan?

  and your own Nvidia work, you know, data center, basically. Anyway, should we debate Anthropic's watermarking? Or is our next guest here early? Should we bring in our next guest?

• 17:06Jordi Hays?

  Why don't you, yeah, dive into this? I don't I don't know that I have a strong take yet.

• 17:11John Coogan?

  Ben Thompson has a strong take on Anthropic's watermarking. So the basic news is that you might soon be able to know for sure if something came from a human being or from Claude. Anthropic said this week that text and files generated by its family of AI models will be watermarked to let consumers know. Now, they won't be watermarked, like, you'll still have to take the text and then go to their watermarking tool and validate that it was that it was

• 17:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Bill Gurley was making the point that watermark and a traditional watermark on an image is very visible.

• 17:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 17:44Jordi Hays?

  Just like immediately visible.

• 17:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 17:46Jordi Hays?

  And so it's not actually, it's more like leaving, basically, we're going to leave evidence that this was generated.

• 17:54John Coogan?

  Bread crumbs. Yeah, breadcrumbs. And so in theory, a LinkedIn or an X could integrate with an Anthropic API to check the watermarks. But the interesting read on this is that this was actually this was actually implemented by the regulation in the European Union. So Anthropic, in theory, could watermark, could only watermark text in Europe, but the EU has achieved their dream of regulating the world, according to Ben Thompson. And so they actually instead, I think the idea is instead of instead of doing a last step at the end of the generation to add the watermark in,

• 18:38John Coogan?

  it's baked much deeper into the model level, which means it will be watermarked whether you're in Europe or not. And so Ben Thompson explains a little bit on how it works. Obviously, they're not explaining too much because then you can avoid it easier.

• 18:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's so it's so interesting, like, how much of their revenue is coming from Europe?

• 18:58John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:58Jordi Hays?

  Given how compute constrained they are, like, was there, I wonder if they ever considered, like, hey, let's just say, hey, if you're gonna if you're gonna go forward with something like this.

• 19:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 19:09Jordi Hays?

  We're just gonna exit the market entirely.

• 19:12John Coogan?

  But I don't think people care. I don't think Anthropic cares about watermarking. I think they're fine. I think it's nice. I think it's a good thing. And then also, I think business users don't care because they're like, yeah, I want AI-generated code all over my code base. I want it to be clean and efficient and I want it to just do the job. And I'm totally fine with it. I don't, I'm not, that's not my business. And so I don't think people will be upset about this, at least in the enterprise. Ben Thompson points out that he is somewhat frustrated by this because even if you're using an LLM for proofreading and making individual changes in your text editor, like you just upload your blog post to Claude now and you say, oh, like, what could be better about this? What's wrong with this? Did I make any grammatical errors?

• 19:56John Coogan?

  Did I make any spelling errors? If you go and implement those, there's a small risk. It seems like a very unlikely risk, but there's a small risk that even in just accepting those changes, you accidentally insert a little bit of the watermark in or potentially all of the watermark in. And then you don't get credit potentially because people will be like, oh, this is AI, when really it was like the last step that was AI. We had a back and forth on this a little bit where I would read an essay by hand. We would throw it into ChatGPT to proofread it and it would put in a bunch of M dashes. In the earlier model, it was really heavy on M dashes. And so people would just be like, oh, this is AI. And I was like, well, like the last step, but it's like, but does that matter? It does matter to a lot of people.

• 20:41John Coogan?

  They do care about that, but it's odd. And Ben Thompson's point is saying what the EU is doing is stealing the last thing humans have, creation, and demanding it be bundled with substantiation, effectively giving the AI the credit. Even if you come up with a great idea, you write a great book. If you have AI edit it, if it has a watermarking feature, it will be watermarked. And people will be like, nah, that was all, well, it was the prompt. And it's like, well, maybe there wasn't a prompt. Maybe there was a whole process that you went through to develop your idea and then you took it at the last step. And so that's the source of frustration. At the same time, it does feel like there's ways to work around this. If you become more collaborative with the AI system,

• 21:24John Coogan?

  you can avoid the watermark by only using it at one certain step and then doing an editing pass yourself. People have been Going back and forth these all all day long. He says, the human that gave AI the text to proofread, or even the prompt to generate writing, doesn't matter to the bureaucrats in Europe. Everyone is worried about being replaced by AI. The EU is mandating it. That's what he says. He's got some harsh words. What do you think, Tyler?

• 21:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so I don't think the actual, like, underlying, the way they watermark it is like, public, but presumably, it's like, basically during the sampling process. When you're like, generating tokens, right? It generates some distribution over the tokens, like, which one is it going to select? And it uses like, a slightly different method than just choosing like, the most likely one. And that way, you can like, see, oh, this is like, less likely, so it's probably, you know, written by AI. But like, if you basically have, you know, some essay that you wrote, and you replace like, one sentence, then like, 99% of the tokens are still the same, then like, it's like, it's, it shouldn't mark the whole thing as being like, AI written. That doesn't make any sense. Like, only the sentence that you changed would be marked as AI written.

• 22:30John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure, sure.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  If you look at the new handgraffle, or whatever, it doesn't like, say the whole document is AI. It says like, this sentence is AI.

• 22:37John Coogan?

  No, no, no.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  These tokens are like, very

• 22:39John Coogan?

  People think of a watermark as it's a binary. It's either going to say, it's AI or not.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, for what it's worth, I think people are going to just look, you know, like, the peanut gallery online is going to be, it'll be very binary for them. Like, if somebody puts out even an Instagram caption, they'll get dunked on, even if it's one sentence, right? Like, if you look at the Google Synth ID, so Gemini has done this for like, a few years. If you look at their blog, that like, explains how it works, it will like, highlight specific, basically, words in the, in the blog, or whatever piece of text. It's like, okay, this is probably AI written. It's not saying the whole thing is, is like, yeah, 0-1. So, I think this is kind of like, blowing it out of proportion.

• 23:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't think that many people will have a problem with it.

• 23:21Jordi Hays?

  How long till someone ships the Claude Watermark Remover app?

• 23:25John Coogan?

  I mean, somebody shipped a Pangram fighter, like, yesterday. There's something where you take the text, you put it in this model, and then it, it reads 100% human to Pangram, because it rewrites it in a style that Pangram can't detect. And so now, the Pangram team has to go figure out how to defeat that. It's all a game of cat and mouse, I guess. But let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. We've been keeping our next guest waiting for far too long. We've got Rovell coming back on the show. How are you doing? Welcome back.

• 24:01Speaker 03

  Good to be here.

• 24:03John Coogan?

  Big day. Take us through the story, how you're processing it, what this means. Set up the story of the Los Angeles Lakers changing hands again.

• 24:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, just as, just a surprise, obviously. Teams just don't change like this. You know, I don't think, hold on, I gotta get off my center stage. There we go. I don't want anything to follow me. Give me a second here. I'm a pro.

• 24:29John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 24:30Speaker 03

  There we go. I don't want to, you know, Mark, Mark Walter clearly did not say, oh, I could get in now and I could make $2 billion quick. I mean, it is amazing that in 2014, I was saying, oh my God, Bomber bought this team for $2 billion, and now that is the profit that Mark Walter is making, just from getting out of here. I will tell you this, because I know your, your show well. I have never understood Guggenheim's insurance business. It's one of those things where I could never follow the buckets. It's buckets upon buckets

• 25:10Speaker 03

  upon buckets, and this going to this, and this going. I would say it's purposely obfuscatory. And so, the fact that there are third-party loans, apparently, where they can't, they don't understand it, and that the report that at least Bloomberg had, that he had to, you know, get loans quickly to perhaps make them kosher, does make a lot of sense, given my previous work with trying to investigate exactly how Guggenheim works.

• 25:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, so a little bit of motivation for the early sale?

• 25:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. And the other motivation for the early sale, you would think, is the NBA in general. The NBA is a hell of a lot more progressive than Major League Baseball, not to suggest that he would have lost the Dodgers. But when you have the Bomber situation, that investigation, that's in LA, you have, I wrote on Twitter today, kind of the, this world where people are going to become rich really quickly, but they also could become poor really quickly. We've seen that before. But I think that in the degenerate, you know, I think we wake up every morning, and we're more in a casino than ever before. And that, that means that you're going to hear people buying teams for massive values, and you're

• 26:35Speaker 03

  going to see a higher percentage of those people be poor in two seconds. So, while I don't think the assets of sports teams, and the assets in general, obviously, the macroeconomy is important, falling, I do see individual people falling, and replacement people have to come in more than ever before.

• 26:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, we saw that just a few weeks ago. Situational awareness, a fund, a hedge fund that scaled from $250 million to almost $50 billion. Round-tripped very, very quickly in dramatic fashion. Fortunes are won and lost extremely quickly in the modern, modern era.

• 27:16Jordi Hays?

  Very basic question. But, but what are, what are the kind of groups that can own an NBA team? I thought it had to be individuals. Obviously, they can bring in partners on it. There can be, you know, a bunch of, you know, co-owners. But then I was looking it up, and like, Madison Square Garden owns the Knicks, like?

• 27:39Speaker 03

  Any, anyone now, I mean, you know, they've recently even allowed, you know, Blue Owl has a home court ventures fund, you know, which came, when Blue, when Blue Owl had their whole, you know, we're not giving any distributions, and we're locking everything up. Of course, people would say, well, you own 5% of a bunch of NBA teams, which wasn't convenient at the time. But, yep, I mean, pretty much, anyone can own anything now. Even the NFL now, opening up, you know. But, listen, the Yankees and their Apollo deal

• 28:16Speaker 03

  yesterday, I think sports leagues are willing to have pretty much anyone as owners, as long as the value continues to go up.

• 28:28Jordi Hays?

  So, do you think we could see a hyperscaler just end up buying a sports team, just as basically, a part of their treasury? It seems like a relatively stable asset. They get some, potentially, some halo effect from it.

• 28:43Speaker 03

  I think, I think, I think leagues will still be very careful as to who they let in, just because they're worried about information as a whole, right? They don't want things to come out, especially as long as a lot of these teams are going to still be asking for public financing for their stadiums. So, so I do, I do think they, they, I know I'm contradicting my, contradicting myself, but I do think there are some caveats. And if they open it up to many people who are, say, invested in a fund, who then have to have access to those financials, I don't think major sports leagues think that's interesting.

• 29:24Speaker 03

  So, that's the only thing that I think is, is probably, like, prohibitive to all of that.

• 29:30John Coogan?

  Got it. So, when you say information, you mean, financial details about how that particular team operates? Because there's been

• 29:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but can't you, can't you, you could certainly raise from a number of people, and just have it be a condition that they don't get any information, right?

• 29:46John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 29:47Speaker 03

  Yes, yeah.

• 29:48John Coogan?

  But that would be hard if it's like, Microsoft owns the Bulls.

• 29:52Jordi Hays?

  For example, I know a bunch of people that would happily co-invest with Kushner and Iger, on the condition of like, you don't have to tell, you don't have to tell me anything ever. I just want to be, effectively be able to say, yeah, I, I own part of the Lakers.

• 30:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 30:09Speaker 03

  And that's the thing, by the way, minority ownership, it's ridiculous. I mean, I can't believe people say, hey, I'm going to put 100 million in, and, and I'm going to own, like, an infinitesimal part of a team. I mean, it's like, yes, there is a trophy value, but there are seemingly better investments. I will say, obviously, I have been wrong at every stage of, since covering this for 30 years, I've been wrong. If you want to pull all the videos, you could see me on CNBC, saying in 2011, $450 million for the Warriors? That is crazy!

• 30:50Speaker 03

  And then, and then, and then the next year, the, the Bucks sell and, and I even said in 2014, bomber for $2 billion is 12, it was 12 times expected gross revenues. And this deal is now 20, probably 20, with LeBron leaving, it's probably 22 to 23 times gross revenues.

• 31:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:12Speaker 03

  12.5 billion for next year.

• 31:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's crazy.

• 31:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, someone, uh, some, under the numbers in the chat said, uh, most of the leagues allow up to 30% institutional ownership.

• 31:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:24Jordi Hays?

  In individual teams.

• 31:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:26Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 31:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. But I think that's going to, I think that will change a little bit more. Again, I mean, there's not, there's, there's been relatively little, that we, we haven't seen, uh, like majority Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth funds, uh, come, coming into American sports. I know that the monumental Washington Capitals and Wizards, you know, small piece in there. But, and it's obviously infiltrated European soccer, football, a lot more than it has here.

• 31:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and for all the existing owners, no one is probably sitting there owning one of these assets and thinking like, no, I don't want to unlock large institutional buyers for these assets. Like, of course, there's a massive incentive to, um, allow these like much, much bigger buyers to come in.

• 32:16John Coogan?

  Do you think, do you, do you think the trophy asset thesis is still driving the market? Or is there something else going on? Because, I mean, I guess the trophies can just keep getting bigger and bigger as the pool of capital and the larger buyers come in and people are wealthier, so they need a bigger trophy. But it feels like there are other things afoot in the US economy, changes to, like, the big, the big, like, macro thesis around sports is usually like, we're all on our phones and that means we're craving.

• 32:46Speaker 03

  Experiential.

• 32:47John Coogan?

  Experiential, right? And so I'm wondering if there's, if there's some other way that we should be thinking about a deal like this outside of the typical, uh, it's a trophy asset.

• 32:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, you have a lot of people who are interested in ownership because they're rich and no one knows who the hell they are.

• 33:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:03Speaker 03

  And that's obviously not the case with Kushner and Iger.

• 33:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:08Speaker 03

  Um, you know, one of the things that's not a surprise is Kushner and Iger. I mean, Iger's been around forever. And, and, and he obviously was at the helm of Disney, which owns ESPN, and he's had a first look at, you know, everything in sports over the years, and I just, I just thought they were going to get the Vegas team. I mean, they were looking at Vegas a week ago.

• 33:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:30Speaker 03

  So, you know, that just shows you how quick this is. Um, you know, and, and Kushner and, you know, obviously what he's been doing, um, and always, you know, hey, every day you gotta throw in a Trump connection somewhere.

• 33:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 33:43Speaker 03

  So, so, uh, the, what I'm interested in though, um, and I'm not.

• 33:48Jordi Hays?

  But, but you said, you said, so, so I haven't been following the, the Vegas team at all.

• 33:52John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:53Jordi Hays?

  Uh, or anything in the NBA.

• 33:56Speaker 03

  The opportunity that there'll be a Vegas team.

• 33:58Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but, but my question was like, is it, is it possible that they always wanted the Lakers and they wanted? And, and these were, this was going on in the background and, and they just were using that, the, the Vegas.

• 34:11Speaker 03

  Not, not, not what I was told. They, they wanted a, a great team, they, and, and this happened over the last 100 hours.

• 34:20John Coogan?

  What is the shape of Las Vegas sports these days? I, I, I, I know like teams have relocated there, um, and there's F1 and, but is, i- is there like an indigenous fan base that's strong enough? Is the indigenous fan base relevant?

• 34:34Speaker 03

  How big it is. Listen, I was, I was, I was there the day that they announced, uh, the Vegas Golden Knights. And obviously their first year going to the Stanley Cup helped.

• 34:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:44Speaker 03

  I mean, that crowd is probably in the top five best crowds in hockey.

• 34:49John Coogan?

  Well.

• 34:50Speaker 03

  Um, everyone go, you know, people go there for road trips, like they go when, when teams play, uh, you know, the Raiders. The Raiders stadium, Allegiant Stadium is, is amazing, is great. They've won. You know, Vegas is very hard to win at, and people laugh at me when I say this, but, you know, eating has become the next act. And it becomes eating versus Cirque du Soleil. It used to be eating and then show. Now eating is actually an activity. And so you're competing with eating over the last five years because of the chef, the chef brands and everything else, else that's out there.

• 35:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:28Speaker 03

  And so, uh, I think they think, you know, the, the, um, the A's are really gonna make a lot of sense and, and, and listen, uh, if you look at the Knights and you look at, uh, uh, where the Raiders are, I mean, 10 years ago, you were concerned about gambling. Now, now Kalshi has you gambling on, uh, what flights are late.

• 35:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:50Speaker 03

  You know? We've gone, we've gone from, uh, from, oh my God, I, when I asked Gary Bettman, uh, that day when they said they were moving to Vegas, I, he said, oh no, we're gonna have, um, the odds will be off the board at the two closest casinos to T-Mobile Arena. We're concerned.

• 36:07John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 36:07Speaker 03

  And, you know, and, and now you look today and you look at the prediction markets and.

• 36:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:13Speaker 03

  Uh, we're, we're, we're literally betting on toad races every two seconds.

• 36:17John Coogan?

  Or is prediction, are prediction?

• 36:19Jordi Hays?

  Is toad racing, is toad racing a thing?

• 36:21John Coogan?

  I mean, there's.

• 36:22Speaker 03

  There will be though.

• 36:23John Coogan?

  I showed you that crazy Russian live streaming site where people play fake sports, like, there'll be two guys sitting in a chair and they're.

• 36:31Speaker 03

  You can bet on, you can actually, there, you can bet on how many cars will go through a traffic light.

• 36:38John Coogan?

  I've seen those.

• 36:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, until it turns red. I mean, listen, prediction markets are, uh, the, the dopamine that is going on, whether it's gambling, whether it's opening packs, collectibles, obviously I'm close to.

• 36:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:53Speaker 03

  Um, you know, my son who's 12 is on a free to play app and he's looking at whether, you know, Giannis is gonna, uh, sneeze during a game. And by the way, I, I don't, I don't say, don't play that. I say, yeah, play that, play that and make you, use your fake money. And when you lose 14 times in a row, that's a learning experience. And if you had real money, you'd be screwed. But, but I don't, I mean, it's, the prediction markets are the craziest thing that I've ever had to watch in my entire, you know, reporting, gambling life.

• 37:28John Coogan?

  Are prediction markets net good for sports?

• 37:33John Coogan?

  In terms of the businesses of like the Lakers, there's more points of entry? And so you wind up buying tickets and going in person? Or does it not affect or does it pull people away because?

• 37:44Speaker 03

  No, I, I, I think until people run out of money.

• 37:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:48Speaker 03

  You know, people, people, people run out of money. These are, these are, it's there, it's very, very addictive.

• 37:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:54Speaker 03

  Uh, and it's, you know, and it, and it's, uh, it's difficult to avoid because again, we need to be on dopamine. We are degenerate nation. And, uh, and this, this is in a way the perfect and most horrible product.

• 38:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, interesting. Uh, we talked to the head, a former head of the CFTC yesterday about it, about where the regulation might go, whether you're going to get some of those, uh, gambling addiction warnings applied to prediction markets.

• 38:22Speaker 03

  And what about, what about Kalshi and Polly markets market cap? And, you know, what if you're Andreessen Horowitz or how, how are you predict, you know, if you're raising at a $50 billion valuation? But, you know, at some point you have to believe that with the sports books and you get a complete proctology exam, if you're related to the sports books, and then if you're Kalshi or Polly market, you get a free pass to do anything. Um, you'd think that that would have to come to an end at some point, but I, and is that end when Trump is out of office?

• 38:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, who knows?

• 38:57Jordi Hays?

  Uh, breakdown, what, what's, what's your updated view on whatnot?

• 39:03John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:03Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we had Grant on the show, uh, I believe it was on Friday. The, the business is growing like crazy. It seems like there's a lot of like traditional online commerce happening in this live format. Uh, you know, he gave an example of a guy, uh, selling fish, doing quite well selling fish.

• 39:23Speaker 03

  Yes, I love, I love that example. That was crazy. That was live fish.

• 39:29Jordi Hays?

  And that's like, you know, the example that people always would give with China is like, you can go on these Chinese live streaming apps and buy like mangoes and kiwis and fruit and all this stuff. And we hadn't, haven't really seen that at scale in the US yet. Uh, but, but if you were gonna put a number on it, what percentage of the activity on whatnot, uh, or what percentage of the volume on whatnot is like closer to gambling than commerce?

• 39:58Speaker 03

  Ninety percent? I mean, I mean, I, you know, it is so much breaking that I'm surprised that they don't have an insurance policy against breaking by selling, you know, normal memorabilia. Right? I mean, that, that, there, if, if, and this is, it's not as close to prediction markets, but if a bunch of attorneys general, you know, decide that they're going to go after breaking, you know, whatnot's going to go all the way down.

• 40:30Jordi Hays?

  And break it, break, break down breaking for us. It's like, it's like I buy, you're sitting there with a pack of cards, you're about to open it, I can buy it for $10 and it's possible you pull a card that's worth 100? Is that, is that how it works? And then people just spam that all day?

• 40:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, but they'll buy that by three. You put in, you put in 300 to win 3,000, or you put in 700 and then potentially you could get nothing, which is, which then becomes a lottery rule issue. And whatnot has done a lot more recently to try to curtail it, but it's very hard to say that it's not gambling. And so I, I think they should be doing a lot more regular, traditional eBay type memorabilia sales. I didn't believe in them in the beginning because I confused the smallness of their transactions, that the average transaction, I think, was like $15, that they wouldn't be able to get a critical mass. And to their credit, they certainly have gotten that.

• 41:31Speaker 03

  People enjoy watching the shows, you know, they enjoy being a part of it. But again, as they get bigger, I'm surprised that they're not investing more in traditional commerce, almost as an insurance policy.

• 41:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, we gotta figure out if they're gambling on fish. Because it's like, it's, we gotta watch Tyler.

• 41:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, because this fish might have caviar inside, you don't know how much caviar's inside. This is a real thing, the fish?

• 41:59Speaker 03

  By, by the way, by the way, if anyone wants to have a great time, you should go to Oklahoma, where you can fish for paddlefish, which is pretty much a fish, when you pull it out of the water, it looks like it was on The Simpsons.

• 42:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 42:15Speaker 03

  And, and you can fish all you want, but you must give Oklahoma the fish. They will then clean out the caviar and then hand you back the fish.

• 42:26John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 42:27Speaker 03

  American paddlefish.

• 42:29John Coogan?

  American paddlefish. Well, thank you so much for the tip and thanks for coming on the show.

• 42:33Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 42:34John Coogan?

  Great to see you. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. Our next guest is Patrick Weitzel. He's the founder of WTSL, here with us, with his first appearance, joining in just a minute or two. There are some other posts in the timeline, but while we wait, let me tell everyone about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace. We're getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. And our next guest is with us here in the TVP and Ultra Room. Let's bring in Patrick. How are you doing?

• 43:17Speaker 04

  What's up, boys?

• 43:18Jordi Hays?

  What's up? How's it going on?

• 43:20John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 43:21Speaker 04

  I'm good. I'm just in New York City. Can you see me okay?

• 43:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, you look great.

• 43:25Speaker 04

  I'm in this hotel room here in New York.

• 43:26John Coogan?

  You look great.

• 43:27Jordi Hays?

  There's, there's a little bit of lag, but I can hear you fine.

• 43:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:31Jordi Hays?

  So, make it work.

• 43:32Speaker 04

  Well, let me.

• 43:33Jordi Hays?

  It's that hotel wifi.

• 43:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. Classic. It'll get you every time.

• 43:38Speaker 04

  All right. Well, sorry about that, boys.

• 43:40Jordi Hays?

  No, you're good. We can hear you fine.

• 43:42Speaker 04

  Okay, good.

• 43:43John Coogan?

  So, yeah, give us a little bit of an overview of your firm, the thesis, and then the recent deals.

• 43:49Speaker 04

  So, the idea was, you know, when we took Endeavor private, essentially what we, what that effectively did was kind of, we dismantled the company and essentially sold everything but our ownership interest in WME, the talent agency, and our position in TKO, which is now around 61%. But everything else that we ran and sat on, we sold. And so effectively, kind of eliminated the job. And going forward, in the next chapter, I didn't really want to start, you know, a new company right away.

• 44:31Speaker 04

  And one of the things Egon Durban and I talked about, we had a really great, long relationship with Silver Lake, everything we kind of did at Endeavor was really fueled by them and with their partnership. And so out of that, I talked to Egon, he goes, well, why don't we just keep investing in the field that you're in, you know, kind of entertainment, sports, content, the things that I've kind of spent my, you know, 30 years in, but on a much smaller level, you know? So, we just started with $250 million and the idea was to make, you know, kind of 20 to $100 million investments in different things that were in our sector and help companies

• 45:13Speaker 04

  that I could, you know, have some influence on, help build. And so that's kind of what the whole thesis is around Weitzel, the investment company. And then the other part of it is, when Egon bought Raiders, or invested into the Raiders, I should say, we had a WME, had a football representation business, and per the league, you can't be a buyer and a seller. So, I took that entire group out and started Win Sports, which is predominantly a football agency. We're starting, and do a little bit of golf, too, but it's really focused on building a really great, dynamic football agency. And we have also a handful of artists in there, clients of mine that I've worked with

• 45:56Speaker 04

  forever, of actors predominantly and directors that just have been longtime clients, so they're also a part of it. But the investment that we put into Alex Cooper's company came from Weitzel.

• 46:09John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 46:10Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 46:11John Coogan?

  What are the key ingredients to a great investment, great media company in the modern era, where it's individual-led, influencer-led, podcasting, live streaming, these types of things? What are you looking for?

• 46:25Speaker 04

  I think the reason why I was attracted to Alex is, I mean, again, going back, you know, 30 years, the one thing that's always the most important thing is having someone really talented and really special. And Alex, to me, I mean, obviously her podcast, you guys know how big it is, how influential she is, she's a cultural powerhouse to, you know, kind of Gen Z women. And, but she's also built out already at Unwell, a really diversified company that is not only in these other sectors, but doing very well. There's in live events, there are consumer products, of course, they're in content, both,

• 47:10Speaker 04

  you know, kind of scripted and unscripted. And that's at, you know, kind of the traditional media companies like Hulu or Netflix, but it's also, she's kind of started her own network of channels on YouTube and funding and producing content for YouTube, everything from micro dramas to just reality shows. And that's gone exceedingly well, you know, on top of it. And then lastly, an advertising agency, kind of for digital solutions for people, creative agency, that, you know, Alex was saying yesterday, that she thinks that by the end of 27, that the revenues of that will exceed her podcast revenues, which is, you know, quite a feat. So, what I thought was interesting is, yes, she's a big force as a podcaster and talent,

• 47:54Speaker 04

  but she really has built a company that I think can only grow in every one of these sectors that we're in. So, that's what kind of attracted me to her. I think also the part about, you know, what you're seeing with, in this kind of creator economy is, they can, they don't, for 30 years, when we built our company, if you had someone who had an idea like Alex's, you had to go to one of the traditional media companies, convince them to pay for it, you know, and finance it, distribute it, market it. Now, of course, people like Alex and others have done it themselves, you guys know that very well, and didn't need to go to the traditional players. But in that, I think now you're seeing a bunch of capital coming to this space and

• 48:39Speaker 04

  are going to invest in it, you see people raising funds for it. I think that what Alex has done is really, really hard. And so I don't think it's, at the agency business, you do it at scale. I don't think this is a thing you can do at scale. I think there are going to be unique individuals and opportunities that can build multi-billion dollar media companies. And so that's where I think, kind of where I want to kind of spend my time. And, and I think I hopefully can help them think through the strategy, whether it's M&A, or just in kind of figuring out how to grow their content business, their live event business. Hopefully, my, you know, kind of three decades of doing this could be additive and, and fun.

• 49:22Jordi Hays?

  That's great. All makes a lot of sense. I, I feel like so many different investors have been so excited about the creator economy for so long and have struck, despite that excitement, they tried to invest in, the best thing to do is invest in the actual platforms, right? A decade ago, go invest in Spotify and, and, and, you know, Google, Meta, do the YouTube seed round, things of that nature. But then all the other attempts, you look back at like 2019, 2020, people were like, well, what if we can invest in the, in the sort of tools that these businesses are using? The problem there is that these businesses will just like, they don't need a QuickBooks for creators, these are just media businesses, right? They just use QuickBooks.

• 50:06Jordi Hays?

  You can use Bank of America, you don't need a fintech just for your business, you don't need a, creators don't need an Amex card, they can just use Amex or Ramp or whatever it is. And so it's come, it's becoming a lot more clear to me. And then even looking at investing in the early stage of creators, the best creators early on are scrappy, they figure out how to get an audience without a lot of capital, they can just turn on their phone and start recording, maybe they hire an editor, and so they can ramp revenue pretty quickly. And I think what investing in this category is going to look like is like, people like you waiting to, to see who these sort of power law creators are, and then going in

• 50:47Jordi Hays?

  and investing real dollars once they've established like, at least the beginnings of, of a, of a platform. Just because I'm looking at the early stage, I don't, there's a lot of early stage content creators that I'm bullish on, but none of them, the smart ones, would take money because they're like, well, capital's not a constraint for my business. The constraint is like, how do I reach more people? How do I, how do I grow my existing business? And these businesses, at least on the advertising side, just generate a lot of cash.

• 51:17Speaker 04

  I think perfectly said, and I think it's all the more reason where I think there will be a lot of people rushing to this space and will, I think, make the wrong decisions because to what you just described, you have to get to this place. And where Alex came to us, it isn't like she needs the money. I mean, obviously, you know, it's well documented what her Spotify deal is alone. And, you know, and will only grow there. The, oops, what was that?

• 51:43Jordi Hays?

  That was an air horn for the Spotify deal.

• 51:45John Coogan?

  Ching.

• 51:46Jordi Hays?

  And the serious deal.

• 51:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, she's put out some huge numbers.

• 51:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, but the point of it is that she's like, listen, you know, I need help, you know, I want, you know, smart people around us to help kind of grow it and think through exactly what you described. And what's interesting is the traditional media companies, they, they are kind of saying, listen, we don't know how to get to this audience that you reach, and we don't really know how to do creator stuff. So she's kind of going to, I think, be able to, if we do this right, go back and forth, have their own ideas, their own kind of things that we will incubate and do on YouTube, but also for the traditional media companies. And that's a kind of a hard thing to do because I don't know many people who can do both, at least that have come along historically. So, you know, and also,

• 52:34Speaker 04

  she's, you know, her audience follows her as she's becoming a new mother. And I think that's going to open up a whole different, you know, categories, not only consumer products, but other things that she can kind of get involved in, that her audience is going through those same things. And I think there's just an authenticity to her and a connection that is real. And it always starts with that. You got to have like great talent to build these things. And she is very ambitious and, you know, and loves it. I mean, just loves what she's doing every day. So, yeah, it's gonna be fun.

• 53:05John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about flowback from the creator economy to traditional media to Hollywood? Obviously, we've seen the Netflix, the Spotify deals, but the more interesting trend that emerged this summer was around obsession and backrooms and iron lung, these YouTube creators, these independent, you know, new, new filmmakers who were able to put up really incredible numbers at the box office. If we were having this conversation in two years and you told me that there was an Alex Cooper directed rom com that put up 200 million at the box office, I'd be like, yeah, that tracks. But is Hollywood

• 53:44John Coogan?

  set up to embrace a new, modern creator now? Because it's, because in the past, it's always been, well, take, take, take six months off your current podcast to come do a Hollywood project, and maybe you'll make six figures, maybe, maybe a million dollars is in the mail. And that's just not enough to take the whole podcast down for six months while you go do a project.

• 54:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think you're right. I think where you're gonna see it is, and you referenced those two movies, is what's, what's happened with the tools, and this is not, not brand new, but like, you know, when Chris Nolan was 15 years old, right, he either had to get his like, you know, video camera out, or go rent film equipment, if he actually wanted to shoot a short film, he'd actually go rent lights and cameras and all that. And so the kid today, and whether it's just on TikTok or YouTube, that 15 year old Chris Nolan, is doing that every day, and getting really, really good at making content and coming up with ideas and very fast with the technology. And that's where I think the next generation of filmmakers are going to come from. And, you know, we would used to

• 54:51Speaker 04

  go to film schools, and not that they won't still come from film schools, but I think what you're gonna see is the writer, director, creator in the film business and in television is going to come there. And the power of like, both of those things, when you kind of like, you know, get the kind of virality of online, and you could incubate things there. So I think, part of what I think will happen with Alex is she'll have an idea that will do there, and just to start as a micro drama or something for YouTube, and it'll catch on like this. And then you're going to socialize this. So by the time you go out, then you could go make it as a feature film, or as a show for Netflix, or whatever, but you've also got this built in awareness. I mean, obviously, you guys followed it, but Backrooms was, you know, massively well known by a target audience long before it went out, right?

• 55:36Speaker 04

  And so I think that's where I think it'll land. I think the idea of like, leaving your podcast to do it, I think is still gonna be risky, but these other people are sitting here every day, and making really, really good stuff, really good content. And so I think that's exciting. And, you know, we'll see long term how Hollywood embraces that because ultimately, like, you know, where the role of the studios are in that, and how does the studios compete? You know, they made that movie for $700,000. It looked really good, you know, for, for, you know, for that. And, and those efficiencies are only going to get better and better.

• 56:13John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 56:15Jordi Hays?

  Last, last question I have before you leave. I'm curious how you think about generating returns from, from an investment, like, like you're making it unwell. I'm, I'm sure, I'm sure you have a preference on it. You probably make back the original investment over the next few years. And on top of that, it's just, you're, you're, you're in the money. But is this the kind of thing that you and, and the team want to just own and, you know, help operate for 30 years? Or do you think that there's going to be in 10 years from now, you know, a bigger set of buyers that would come in and, and do, you know, majority buyout of these type of platform creator businesses?

• 56:55Speaker 04

  You know, we, it's funny to talk to Alex about that. I mean, because obviously, it's her company and how she decides to kind of grow it. And she's not really sure. I think she wants to keep doing this kind of forever. And I think one of the things that, you know, when we went through it, you know, we started our own company, Silver Lake came and invested. And over time, as we bought other things, obviously, our shares got diluted down, and we owned less and less of the company. But the company became worth, you know, obviously exponentially more. But we still have control of the company and had the governance of that. And so I kind of look at it in a similar light here, is I think as long as Alex wants to do it, yes, I think there'll be room for other capital partners to come in if they,

• 57:35Speaker 04

  if, if needed, and if wanted. But I think my experience with Silver Lake is kind of like, you know, I got a bias to, let's keep building something great as long as we can, and as long as we're enjoying it. And, and then I think the, you know, the exits and all that will kind of take care of themselves. But, you know, she started this company, it's, you know, it is her. So I, I think, and she's got such an incredible work ethic, I just think she's going to be doing it for a long time, and, you know, just going to grow it and own it. That's, that's my.

• 58:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, she's done a fantastic job.

• 58:09Jordi Hays?

  Love it.

• 58:09John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 58:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you. Let's get to it soon.

• 58:13Speaker 04

  Likewise, and congrats on whatever you guys have done.

• 58:16John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 58:16Speaker 04

  It's incredible. You know, start this thing, and, you know, the OpenAI deal, it's just awesome. And even down in LA, people are watching you guys. So, you know, spend some more time. I saw, I saw the Bob Iger thing today.

• 58:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:33Speaker 04

  That was incredible.

• 58:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of, that was the first thing that made me optimistic on LA in a long time. Everyone's like, oh, California is falling apart, LA is a disaster, Bob and Josh are just like, we're dropping 12 and a half billion, we're setting a new record, we're going.

• 58:52Speaker 04

  It's incredible.

• 58:52Jordi Hays?

  It's going great.

• 58:53John Coogan?

  I love it. Well, thank you so much.

• 58:55Speaker 04

  Thanks a lot, man.

• 58:56John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Our next guest is from Code Rabbit, we have Hard Rock Hill, the CEO, here with a big fund raise. We got to warm up the gong. How you doing?

• 59:14Speaker 05

  Hey, folks, I'm pretty good. How are you?

• 59:16John Coogan?

  Welcome. Tell us the news.

• 59:19Jordi Hays?

  Welcome back.

• 59:20John Coogan?

  Well, he's been on the show before, haven't you?

• 59:22Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah. Have you? But it's been, it's been maybe a year, and you didn't have an orange background.

• 59:29Speaker 05

  Can you up the volume, please? Sorry.

• 59:30John Coogan?

  Oh, sorry. Well, give us the news, tell us what happened. I want to hit the gong for you. And then we have a bunch of questions about the business.

• 59:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we're pretty excited to announce like, series C round of funding. So we just ended up raising $143 million at a billion valuation. So officially a unicorn now. And in a, in a short, like, we started like, two and a half years back. So it's been an amazing ride for the team.

• 59:57John Coogan?

  What's been the biggest driver of growth?

• 59:58Jordi Hays?

  Just creating only $500 million of value a year.

• 1:00:02John Coogan?

  Not bad, not bad. Yeah, what's been the biggest driver of growth? What do customers like about Code Rabbit more than anything else? What is, what's the real, the real growth vector?

• 1:00:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, we're pretty much like riding the wave of AI code generation here. So the growth is, it's a second order effect of growth of Claude Code, Codex, as you know, like, the biggest use case for generated AI has been code generation. And that's what's leading to the bottleneck downstream with code reviews now being a massive, massive bottleneck and a choke point. And that's where Code Rabbit is right now the market leader, like, providing automated validation and building trust in these AI outputs. And that's what is bringing all the growth to our doorsteps.

• 1:00:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, unpack a little bit about, I was just reading on Hacker News, the death of the, the mid-tier engineer. You either need a vibe coder who can just, you know, hammer prompts, or you need a real experienced expert architect to make any headway. And the messy middle is getting much messier with endless code, huge PRs, huge code reviewing steps that are unmanageable without AI. What is the correct balancing act that a company should be pulling off to actually move quickly, not run up the budget, but still be able to understand their system and get a good result?

• 1:01:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's pure chaos right now. I mean, especially like the recent inflection point we have seen with these agents becoming more and more capable. Like in the last, I would say, three to six months have been amazing with some of these models like Opus four five being so capable and being able to run for longer periods of time. And what that means is that the inner loop of coding is now fully automated. Like you can just go from idea to code without even going through like planning process of linear and Jira tickets anymore. Even linear famously did a blog was that issue systems are dead, which is a truth. Like now your ideas are just being translated to code directly.

• 1:01:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:58Speaker 05

  And it's not just the developers writing code now you are seeing, as you said, like product managers, even designers who are non-technical in terms of coding capabilities are now actually opening pull requests. And on top of that, we are now seeing every company wants to be a coding company. Like now we are seeing Spotify release a coding app.

• 1:02:15John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:02:16Speaker 05

  I mean, Linear is writing code, Notion is writing code.

• 1:02:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:18Speaker 05

  Um, Data Dog wants to write code or Sentry, everyone's writing code, right? So what that is leading to is like a massive like backlog of the code changes you now have to validate and um, understand those massive outputs and then ship to production. So the role of human um, has become more of a reviewer now. So you are, every day you are waking up, you are deciding which AI task I take to completion. Where I, where do I add my taste? And it's a taste thing, it's a judgment thing now, which is cares now. So that's what we are helping scale. So what Code Rabbit does is it first of all, uh, fights, uh, fire with fire, essentially like you're making Claude code fight with Code Rabbit in a loop.

• 1:02:58Speaker 05

  There's a lot of loop engineering aspect of it, uh, making sure your changes are all, um, we meeting all the guardrails or the, or the premer checks that you have.

• 1:03:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:07Speaker 05

  Then after that, we are helping the reviewers also triage and prioritize the work. So the nature of planning has now shifted downstream because that's the joke point. And thirdly, we are helping the reviewers also understand the changes. So no one's looking at the code, which is the fun part, like the, uh, this is like the biggest inflection I've seen, like when I'm not reading the code anymore. Like expecting a reviewer to do that is, is certainly impossible now. So that, what Code Rabbit is also doing is like raising the abstraction of understanding these changes. Like where you're not looking at lines of code, but understanding the blast radius and architectural impact of those changes.

• 1:03:41John Coogan?

  Uh, I have one last question, Jordi.

• 1:03:42Jordi Hays?

  Go for it.

• 1:03:43John Coogan?

  Uh, I'm interested in the opportunity internationally. You're expanding, uh, how big is the opportunity in Europe, in Asia, abroad? How focused are you on it? Is there a unique opportunity because, uh, other companies are maybe less serious about international expansion? And so you can be a more trusted partner, faster accelerate there? Or is it just the logical, uh, next step for your company to, to expand internationally because there's demand and pull everywhere?

• 1:04:13Speaker 05

  Right. For us, like, we have always had, like, pull from all segments of the market, even globally. Like when we started, like initially we went viral in Japan, which was so funny, right?

• 1:04:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:23Speaker 05

  Um, and even in this round, like we are partnering with a partner in like, um, the one of the VCs who led that round, Atomico is a very large fund out of Europe.

• 1:04:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:33Speaker 05

  Uh, BMW Ventures invested in that round. So BMW has one of our early customers who believed in us. Um, so massive opportunity. I think it's a global opportunity, like the developers.

• 1:04:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:44Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, we like cars.

• 1:04:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:04:48Jordi Hays?

  I hope they have an M three, M two, M four.

• 1:04:53John Coogan?

  I was thinking in a wrapped I eight.

• 1:04:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:55John Coogan?

  Ideally.

• 1:04:56Jordi Hays?

  Yours do go up.

• 1:04:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:58Jordi Hays?

  On the I eight.

• 1:04:59Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:05:00John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 1:05:01Jordi Hays?

  Sorry to interrupt, but what was, uh, what were people most skeptical about with, uh, in regard, like during the financing process? Obviously a bunch, you know, it sounds like a bunch of customers invested. They don't, they, they have a good, uh, deal, uh, for the product. But, um, you know, space, uh, cursor buys graphite. I'm sure that was an accelerant to your business, uh, in some ways. But it also signals that like these companies that are generating code want to.

• 1:05:32John Coogan?

  Do everything.

• 1:05:32Jordi Hays?

  Do everything.

• 1:05:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:34Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, and so I think you can, like, I imagine a good argument is like, you know, it, it's helpful to have, um, a non-lab review your code. You know, like a third party be, be in that flow. But how did you answer that question?

• 1:05:50Speaker 05

  No, that's a great question. I mean, this was one of the interesting fundraises I've done. Like this is my third startup, by the way, like seeing all kind of fundraises. This one, you can clearly see like there's a lot of like anxiety in the market when it comes to the S D L C space. Like everyone's like just concentrating their capital on a few model labs. Everyone wants to be in Anthropic, for instance, right? And the other dynamic itself is like, what does the future of S D L C look like? I mean, is code review step even needed, right? I mean, people are like completely on the fence on what the future of, I mean, you know, like Dario gets on the stage and says that you don't need software engineers anymore, right? Um, so all those like anxiety had been there, which we had to like talk to the investors who under, make them understand where this is all going to land, where the stable ground is and code reviews.

• 1:06:33Speaker 05

  In fact, like if you bring up cursor, it's a great example. Like what we have seen in the last three years, even the code editors are not future-proof. Like, like cursor started with tab completion and then they got blindsided by Claude code, which was almost like a Yahoo versus kind of a Google movement for them, right? On the other hand, the code reviews, the guardrails never go away. Like you can never have a scenario where you're gonna take AI code and ship it to real customers without having any sort of guardrails in place. So the GitHub is becoming like a choke point for a good reason. It's in a lot of distress, as you know, but that is kind of a sign of things to come. Like that is the only place where you can actually take a look at the changes and then approve them.

• 1:07:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:12Speaker 05

  And this is kind of like example, um, that I'll give you from my first startup was in the observability space. I had seen kind of the same thing happen, um, where, um, when microservices were taking off, cloud was taking off, there was a lot of chaos. So operators were kind of flying blind and then Data Dog comes in and defines this whole category of observability, right? And became a massively valuable business, like while AWS, GCP and they were all growing, but this Data Dog also continued to become a standalone company. Uh, same thing we had seen with code reviews now, there's a lot of chaos. Explainability has become a bottleneck, just like observability, now you have an explainability problem.

• 1:07:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:49Speaker 05

  So in a way like code, uh, their, um, Code Rabbit is now kind of becoming the Data Dog of this new world. And very interestingly, Data Dog is one of the investors in this round as well. So they understand, this is analogy here as well.

• 1:08:01John Coogan?

  I love it. Well, congratulations and thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:08:04Jordi Hays?

  Awesome progress.

• 1:08:05John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:08:05Jordi Hays?

  Congrats to the team on the milestone.

• 1:08:06John Coogan?

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

• 1:08:08Speaker 05

  Thanks, folks.

• 1:08:09Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:08:09John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Our next guest is Jeff Huber, returning to the show. I think it's been over a year. He's the founder and CEO of Chroma. Uh, and we got some good news from Jeff Huber. Let's bring him in. I know we were keeping you waiting, Jeff. Sorry for that, running late today. How you doing?

• 1:08:33Speaker 06

  Good. Good, guys. Good to see you again.

• 1:08:36John Coogan?

  Good to see you again.

• 1:08:37Jordi Hays?

  Been too long.

• 1:08:38John Coogan?

  Give us the latest in your world, take us through recent announcements and then we can go all over the place, I'm sure.

• 1:08:45Speaker 06

  Let's do it. Um, I think it's been a really interesting, uh, year in AI. And in particular, you know, seeing how companies are more deeply adopting AI agents. I think like, as we sort of reflect on, like, the biggest gap in AI still feels like memory is the biggest gap. I mean, I'm sure you all try to use agents all the time and they're constantly forgetting how to do things and they're not the right context. And so, uh, yeah, we're, we're announcing on the show, uh, kind of our, uh, solution to that.

• 1:09:11John Coogan?

  Yes. Take us through it. What is Zeitgeist?

• 1:09:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think like, uh, in short form, um, there's probably a lot of sophisticated approaches to solving memory for AI. But in very simple form, if you can get AI agents just to be able to write things down and then later find those things. Uh, you know, that's all you need. And in some ways, I think Wikipedia solved it 20 years ago. You can call it a revolutionary data model. It's just a Wiki. Um, and so I think really inspired by like how Open Claw and Hermit Agent have been managing markdown files.

• 1:09:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was about to ask.

• 1:09:43Speaker 06

  Kind of thinking through.

• 1:09:44John Coogan?

  Why not just a bunch of markdown files? Why not just take the Open Claw vibe coder Mac mini guy and scale it up to the organization of a thousand people in the enterprise?

• 1:09:56Speaker 06

  It's a great place to start. Um, you know, as our team was adopting this technology over the last like three or four months, uh, you know, we wanted like this shared memory layer for our whole team that knows everything about our whole company, really. And you've got to think about concurrency control and access control and versioning and lineage, just a bunch of infrastructure things that matter, um, as the dataset scales.

• 1:10:16John Coogan?

  So, so as a concrete example, like there might be someone in human resources that's developed a skill to give people raises, but you don't necessarily want that skill proliferating across the entire organization. So maybe otherwise everyone's just giving themselves raises left and right. Is that, is that a reasonable example?

• 1:10:34Speaker 06

  I think so, yeah. Hopefully the other access control systems would not allow anybody to give anybody a raise, right? But, um, uh, yeah, maybe more grounded, like what we've seen amongst our own team is that like now our engineering team, the first place they go and they have a technical question is they ask Foundation, that's what it's called, they ask Foundation that question. And Foundation has seen all of our Notion docs, all of our Google Drive docs, all of our coding agent sessions, which actually have so much like high value, tacit information in them about how our team works, how they operate, what we care about. Um, but now it's spread. So customer support's constantly asking it questions, sales, GTMs asking it questions. It's become this like repository of everything we know. So.

• 1:11:13John Coogan?

  Uh, what we, take us through the, the shape of the core business, uh, the, the launch of Chroma Cloud, how that business is going? Just overall demand for, for core products in and around the AI boom? Because everything's sort of booming and ivory systems like straining, what's your experience been?

• 1:11:32Speaker 06

  Yes, we launched Krym Cloud in late 2025. We now have close to 1,000 paying customers on the product and tens of thousands of other users who, you know, will bring on board soon. You know, I think like these lower level infrastructure primitives are cool, right? A core, core database, core search, core operations. They allow developers to pick it up and build useful applications. As we were looking at the market and seeing really what our customers were building, we realized there was an opportunity to meet them where they were. They were all asking us, hey, how do we build, how do we build wikis? How do we solve access control? How do we solve versioning just time and time again? And so, you know, us just building those infrastructure primitives for customers to

• 1:12:17Speaker 06

  use allows them to, you know, focus on what actually differentiates their business.

• 1:12:22John Coogan?

  So. Give me your, not your AGI timelines, but your timeline to just good search. I feel like I go into my Gmail and I search for something and it's still bad and I want an LLM to be involved, but I don't want it to be as slow as a current LLM. I know I can wire it up to Codex or whatever and have it read through everything, but I don't want to wait 10 minutes, but I also don't want the current experience. And I feel like there will be a merging of these two, but do we need to bake it into an ASIC or something like, how complex is it going to be until like you just show up to a website and the search function is magical and also as fast as you remember it?

• 1:13:02Speaker 06

  Yeah. I think there's a few different pieces of the puzzle. So number one is like having highly expressive, accurate and fast search throughout the database layer, right? And the second piece of that is like the agent itself and the model being really fast. You know, one thing that we made a bet on earlier this year was agentic search becoming like the default, that really all searches will go through a model. This is what it, I think the bitter lesson means for search is that like, you know, you'll spend more tokens, you'll use more inference, that's how you get better at search. And so we released a model in the spring called Context One. It's a fine tune of GPT-OS S20D and that model on three bursts today already runs at 3,000 tokens per second.

• 1:13:43Speaker 06

  And we were targeting, I think, you know, Talos got a bot last week, I think you guys covered that.

• 1:13:49Jordi Hays?

  Chat Jimmy.

• 1:13:50Speaker 06

  You know.

• 1:13:51John Coogan?

  Chat Jimmy.ai.

• 1:13:52Jordi Hays?

  The best demo ever. Proof that names don't matter when the product is.

• 1:13:57John Coogan?

  When the product is really technically really good.

• 1:13:59Jordi Hays?

  The team is that cracked, you can name your product, whatever you want. Chat Jimmy.ai.

• 1:14:05Speaker 06

  We were a shared investor, you know, we were targeting Context One running at like 15,000 or 20,000 tokens per second on that chip. And I think like, if you think about, that's going to come, right? That's coming this year and that's going to change how we really, we wire how people think about language models.

• 1:14:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is there still, like, even though the, the, the token speed is very quick in that example, is there a delay to sort of like fire up the chip, like load, load data into memory, build the context window, like do whatever you need to, to actually get the, once the inference is cooking, I can imagine it being very fast, but is there, i- i- if you're dealing with something that's like a scaled email product and you have millions of users that are going to be searching things randomly, like you can't store all of that in, like in memory all the time. So like, like what, like what is the process there? Is that a meaningful barrier or not?

• 1:14:57Speaker 06

  I think fast inference, maybe sort of what you're implying here, like fast inference does not solve just sort of for you context engineering. Like you still have to make sure that you're bringing the model, the right information, the right granularity of information, letting it forget information successfully such that it can refocus. And so, and I think it's been cool to see like context engineering to some degree get folded back into the model, but also as we've seen as of late, like, you know, really good harnesses, like the stuff from Prime Intel, like really good harnesses that are targeting specific tasks, you know, that is in some ways context engineering and like they can outperform frontier models by a huge margin. And so I think there's still a huge gains to context engineering.

• 1:15:38John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm. Jordy, anything else?

• 1:15:40Jordi Hays?

  I got more questions, but we're, we're running behind.

• 1:15:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, sorry.

• 1:15:43Jordi Hays?

  Great to, great to see you, Jeff. Let's not let it be so long again.

• 1:15:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's do it again soon.

• 1:15:47Jordi Hays?

  Congrats on all the, all the progress.

• 1:15:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.

• 1:15:52Speaker 06

  Bye.

• 1:15:53John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with Design System Context. Go check it out. Up next, we're going back to back again. Sean McGuire is doing deals left and right. He said, I want entire Gundo. I want every Gundo.

• 1:16:12Jordi Hays?

  Kind of like the Kushner of deep tech, just running around into everything.

• 1:16:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, look at this. But we got Sean McGuire and Soren Monroe Anderson from Nero's.

• 1:16:20Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you guys.

• 1:16:21John Coogan?

  How you guys doing? It's fantastic.

• 1:16:23Shaun Maguire?

  How's it feel to have a lot of money?

• 1:16:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:25Speaker 08

  It's great.

• 1:16:27Jordi Hays?

  Job's finished.

• 1:16:28John Coogan?

  Take us through, take us through the deal. What happened?

• 1:16:31Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, overall this year has been super, super strong. We've been growing like crazy, building the team, producing a lot more drones. We're up to about 1,200 a week in terms of production output. So things are going really, really well there. And we've also started expanding into multiple product lines. So we just started talking publicly about Bandit, which is our interceptor drone. And really this round is fuel on the fire to go expand to, to new verticals and make bigger investments into the, the core technology behind the platform. So, you know, core business doing extremely well and now we're ready to take some, some big swings.

• 1:17:11John Coogan?

  How much did you raise?

• 1:17:12Speaker 08

  We raised 250 million.

• 1:17:15Shaun Maguire?

  Let's go. All right. My most interested. This is the third round we've either led or co-led in this company.

• 1:17:26John Coogan?

  You were early.

• 1:17:28Shaun Maguire?

  Yeah, led the seed. There was a pre-seed led by Ian Roundtree from Kanto. Got to give him a shout out.

• 1:17:34John Coogan?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:17:35Shaun Maguire?

  He connected me with Soren back in the day. But then we also Sequoia co-led the B and co-led the C. And so that is, I'd say that's max conviction, boys. Like that's, that's up there.

• 1:17:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Really, really cool. Thing I'm most interested in for you, Soren, is like, how is the American supply chain developing? How much are you guys having to take on yourself versus are there, are there companies coming out of the woodwork hitting you up saying, hey, I can make this, I can make that and you're, and you're vetting them?

• 1:18:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, we heard rumors of an American drone motor company because those were in really short supply, but walk us through what's going on on the supply chain side. Where are their green shoots? Where are they, where, where, where are you issuing like a call for new startups?

• 1:18:20Speaker 08

  Yeah, it definitely depends on what part of the supply chain and it's pretty varied across. So we have taken the overall strategy of designing our core components in-house. We really specialize in the electronics design. So this is things like the radios and the flight computers. So when we're going and figuring out how to build these at scale, we're going directly to the chip companies, we're going to many different board houses. We get a lot of control down at the granular level of the subcomponents and the materials going into these parts. We do a similar thing with motors where like we are sourcing neodymium, non-Chinese neodymium, where we have a place where we can get that processed outside of China.

• 1:19:04Speaker 08

  And then we're also working with multiple motor companies, including one of the American motor companies that has started up recently. So I think because drones are getting so much attention, there are some really capable companies, you know, like West Mag is one of the, the motor companies that's making fantastic progress. We benefit from that, but we also know that we need to control our own destiny in many of these areas. So we are going very vertical in our design and our manufacturing and the intent is to be multiple, like sourced, have multiple sources for all of these critical things.

• 1:19:38Jordi Hays?

  Uh, problem number one feels like you're on the path, which is as a country, we need to figure out a way to make a ton of these as fast as possible. Second is maybe like capability and form factor and how do you basically push the form factor forward? Sometime between when the last time you were on and now I saw a video of a drone where effectively the whole body of the drone was spinning and it almost made it invisible. Uh, and it was very, very scary looking. It feels like there's a lot that can be done on the form factor side. How important is that to the company right now versus just problem, solving problem number one?

• 1:20:21Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, we're constantly iterating on form factor for Archer, basically figuring out ways that it can be a better product for the soldiers. These are really granular things, like, for example, you know, every time they train with it, they find this one little like plastic part breaks. And so then now you need to go and figure out how to change that plastic part. That's a really, really specific example, but it we get a lot of advantage by having now tens of thousands of drones deployed and constantly doing that iteration with the end users. But in terms of overall form factor, the biggest thing I would look at right now is Bandit, which is our interceptor. So it is pretty much all of the same components from Archer, but in a new airframe with a different payload.

• 1:21:06Speaker 08

  It's designed for maximum speed versus really like maximum range with a with a heavy payload. And it's designed to go and chase down other drones. It's a great example of how we've built this ecosystem of these core components that we can produce at scale with a secure supply chain. And now we're applying all of that to a new form factor. And we're able to go and, you know, chase down shot heads with it, which is something that we cannot do with the current product line today.

• 1:21:34John Coogan?

  Wow. Can you explain like M5 sort of the buyer here? And how the how the drone procurement process will change over the next few years? Because drones don't you'd think like Air Force, they fly. But I'm sure the Navy needs drones. I'm sure the Army needs drones.

• 1:21:55John Coogan?

  Recently, Space Force was built up and that makes very that makes a lot of sense for where space is. But you can see selling to the Coast Guard, selling to different branches of the military.

• 1:22:04Shaun Maguire?

  John, are you saying we need drone force?

• 1:22:06John Coogan?

  We maybe, maybe that's the solution. But but I can imagine like the Navy SEALs needing something different than other Navy servicemen. And so how diverse will your customer base be within the armed forces, within the Department of War? How how does it break down currently? Is there one buyer and then they do deployment and repurposing? Or are you actually interfacing with smaller segments of the armed forces?

• 1:22:34Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's a great question. So today we sell to every service branch of the US military. But the Army and the Marine Corps are the largest volume customers. Navy and Air Force have less of a, you know, a large quantity demand, at least for Archer, because Archer is really designed for maneuver forces, you know, striking targets within 20 kilometer radius. And that's really the specialty of the Army and the Marine Corps. However, with with Bandit, you know, the counter UAS system, that is, I think, very applicable to the Air Force with protecting air bases as one example. But we design all of our products to be useful in many different domains.

• 1:23:19Speaker 08

  And the, you know, in our business development team, they are broken down by service, but not by product. And so we really want our the folks who are interfacing day to day with the customers. So this is our our BD team and our mission success team. We want them to be really intimately familiar with the the customers' needs and focusing on, you know, what does that specific service want? So we can deliver them the best product.

• 1:23:43John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about lessons from?

• 1:23:45Shaun Maguire?

  John, let me just add to that. So, you know, you talked about a bunch of the American Department of War customers.

• 1:23:51John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:23:52Shaun Maguire?

  Soren has also already started international sales.

• 1:23:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:23:55Shaun Maguire?

  So obviously, these products are needed all over the world.

• 1:23:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:59Shaun Maguire?

  And then with this next product, Bandit, the interceptor product, you get into like, we need to defend pretty much all critical infrastructure. And with the Iran war, especially what happened in the Gulf.

• 1:24:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:10Shaun Maguire?

  It's it's not just going to be government customers. I think that if you're building a data center, you're not going to buy interceptors, you know, and you'll do it in cooperation with your government. But maybe the dollars will come from, you know, whoever has owns the oil rig, Exxon or anyone. And it just this this problem is so big. And it's gone, it's like already going beyond the traditional just Department of War procurement cycle. And we're seeing it just extremely strongly at Nero's with their demand.

• 1:24:43John Coogan?

  Lessons from the F35 program, some really amazing technology, also tensions between different branches for different features that might have delayed, might have caused cost overruns. There's a bunch of different ways you can tell the story of the F35. But are you leaning more into modularity than another company might? Are you trying to are there benefits and trade offs of modularity at your current scale? Or is there something where you're thinking, OK, down the line, we'll need different products. So let's set things up now to be prepared for when that comes?

• 1:25:21Speaker 08

  Yeah, that's exactly right, actually. And we've started really trying to instill this in the engineering team, which is breaking down our systems by, you know, the logical component and subcomponent level. And thinking about what is going to transfer to the next product and being really smart about what every interface between components looks like. Nero's, our our theory of victory is building a component ecosystem and making it so every new product is utilizing that. And so we just build this flywheel. You know, a lot of companies have done this really well with software. Nero's is trying to do this with hardware as well. And that that is very clear as we're developing Bandit, that we're able to reuse so much of the component tree.

• 1:26:05Speaker 08

  I will say that modularity is generally hard for mass manufacturing. Like, you can take parts of a design, but actually having individual components is generally harder for making a really mass manufactured product. But it is something that our customers demand, especially with components like radios. We've just seen that you have to be able to switch out your comms quickly. And as we redesign this next generation of the drone, we're doing a full ground up redesign from what you see today. And that is going to be in service, partially in service of modularity, but also setting the requirement to be manufacturable at a million per year. So those things are somewhat at tension with each other, but we have to we have to figure out the right line in between.

• 1:26:49John Coogan?

  Sean.

• 1:26:50Jordi Hays?

  How about it?

• 1:26:51John Coogan?

  It's your third investment into this company. You have a ton of capital. Are you in terms of your defense tech investing arc? Are you in growth investor mindset now? Are you going to be? Do you expect to do fewer seed checks, really early stage companies, and focus on growth stage board seats, figuring out the public markets, doing later stage deals? Or is there still an opportunity for early stage defense tech in your mind?

• 1:27:22Shaun Maguire?

  Yeah, I mean, many people will disagree with me on this, but I am personally more in the growth mindset now. I think there are these moment in time, you know, these why nows that happen that an opportunity for the first movers to go just like build companies that could not have existed prior. And the Ukraine war was that for a lot of defense tech. And so like the companies that were started immediately then or right before and are actually delivering value, you know, abroad in some of these active theaters, like they're just in a different level than the ones just getting started now. And I personally think it's going to be hard to catch up for a lot of these. I do think there are, you know, like, let's say there are 10 very successful defense tech companies

• 1:28:06Shaun Maguire?

  started in this decade or so. My guess is seven of them have already been started. We know the names.

• 1:28:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:13Shaun Maguire?

  Maybe there's opportunity for like two or three more. So I am open minded and paying attention to the space. But like, it's is more active on the growth side.

• 1:28:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:23Shaun Maguire?

  And I got to say on that, Nero's is still today a deeply underappreciated company. Like, 2.5 billion dollar valuation, that's cool and great. These guys, their revenue is growing at an insane clip, actually very efficiently from a financial perspective, which is very rare for a hardware company. They are actually like having profound impact in theater right now in multiple places. And it's like that caliber of company is very, very rare. There's maybe another couple of companies in that, you know, group. But this company kicks ass.

• 1:29:00John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:29:02Jordi Hays?

  Great way to sum it up. Last question I have. How meaningful is drone racing as a pipeline for talent? Like, are there people that that I'm sure I'm sure you have plenty of attention from from that world? Given, you know, the meteoric rise of Nero's is like the what what the IMO medalists are to Scott Woodward? Is that what drone racing is for Nero's?

• 1:29:26Speaker 08

  A little bit, yeah. Basically, our whole flight test team is insanely good drone pilots. And we've actually started going to the biggest drone racing events, just to be there, have a presence and show people that there is something that they can come and work on that is actually a real career. Drone racing is not much of a career, at least for the majority of people who partake in it. And honestly, I just wish it was bigger because it is such a fantastic source of talent. So my theory is that over time, as military FPV is really growing, it'll eventually mean that the hobbyist FPV world will come along with it and we'll see more very, very cool racing events happening.

• 1:30:10Shaun Maguire?

  I just gotta add one more pipeline, which is now that these guys are doing very, very real deployments, they have a pipeline of former special forces operators joining the company. And I mean, for me, as a good American that used to work in that world, as a civilian, makes me very, very proud. So the drone racing, you know, is where Soren comes from, but it's really incredible to see these guys hiring a bunch of ex-mil guys.

• 1:30:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, there was the story of Palantir, a lot of guys like used it and they're like, let me go work for this company. It did very well for them.

• 1:30:41Speaker 08

  We have had that happen multiple times. So that is saying something good.

• 1:30:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Are you the best drone racer at Neros currently employed? Or have you hired somebody better? What percentile are you? If there's a company outing?

• 1:30:55Speaker 08

  Oh, man. I'm definitely not the best, and I'm probably not even the second best. I have not flown very much in a long time.

• 1:31:05Shaun Maguire?

  That's because he's old at 23 and his skills are exponentially decaying.

• 1:31:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's like Formula One.

• 1:31:09Speaker 08

  Yeah, I'm washed at this point. I would say Levi, Levi's our lead flight test pilot. He runs the whole flight test team and he was a professional pilot before. He's like the most naturally talented pilot I've ever seen. He's probably the best at the company.

• 1:31:26John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 1:31:27Speaker 08

  He also flies for a living, so it helps.

• 1:31:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 1:31:29Shaun Maguire?

  And for those of you that don't know, Soren was the world champion drone racer in multi GP.

• 1:31:34John Coogan?

  I've watched him in person. Ben over there and our team came and filmed you in the park in El Segundo. And it was one of the craziest things I've ever seen. Because I'd seen a DJI drone sort of like take off and sort of float away, maybe it goes a little quick. And Soren puts on this headset and is just whipping around this tree, going as fast as he can. It was crazy video. It was a lot of fun. But thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:32:03Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you guys.

• 1:32:04John Coogan?

  Great to see you.

• 1:32:05Jordi Hays?

  Amazing to talk to you.

• 1:32:06John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scale, monitoring, and security. Our next guest is the real Liver King, not the social media influencer, but the CEO of the world's largest human biological data center. Fascinating story. Andre from Vivodyne. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:32:39Speaker 09

  Doing well. Thanks for having me.

• 1:32:42John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on the show. Please introduce yourself and the company a little bit.

• 1:32:47Speaker 09

  Sure. So Vivodyne grows human tissues at very massive scale, so we can test drugs in humans without testing in people. And we do it at very massive scale. So many times the total amount of clinical trials run in the US every year. And the reason for doing all this is the failure rate of drugs is huge. So 19 out of 20 drugs fail because all the animal experience we've done just to translate to people. So we can cure cancer and Alzheimer's and all these things in mice and then they tell in people.

• 1:33:17Jordi Hays?

  When did humans first grow human tissue in a lab?

• 1:33:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:24Speaker 09

  This is the first time we're able to grow like large pieces of human tissue. So hundreds of thousands of cells in each individual piece. And we're growing tens, hundreds of thousands of these tissues at a time to test all sorts of different drugs and permutations. So it's a

• 1:33:42Jordi Hays?

  Hundreds of thousands of cells. This is still microscopic or?

• 1:33:48Speaker 09

  Oh, you can see them. Yeah, you can see the little blood vessels growing in them. So it's like inch scale, centimeter scale.

• 1:33:55John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:33:56Jordi Hays?

  Have you ever had a rogue tissue?

• 1:33:58Speaker 09

  Yeah, I am the first rogue tissue. I crawled out of this guy back here. Here I am.

• 1:34:06John Coogan?

  What is the key unlock that allows this? Because I imagine that 50 years ago, there were scientists that were like, it sure would be nice to have a ton of human tissue to test drugs on. They couldn't do it then. Why is it possible now?

• 1:34:18Speaker 09

  So one of the things that made it possible is having the throughput to test all the different formulations for like the medias and the protocols that we use to grow them, which the robotics, by kind of dog footing our technology, we also get better at. So it's, you know, with biology, it's like climbing a big mountain with a little valley at the top, right? It's the kind of skill is like getting the ball up and having it just kind of nest there. And that is when it kind of falls into what it would naturally do. So gains the function it would normally have. We can dose these blood vessels that self-assemble. And this tissue actually performs the function of its native organ counterpart.

• 1:34:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Is, are humans like sourdough? Like, do you need a little starter? You know, like, how do you actually kickstart tissue?

• 1:35:09Speaker 09

  Yeah. So we use, that's a, it's a very good analogy. So we use primary human cells, right? So we get them from donated blood or biopsies of things like tumors. And we get the primary cells out of there. We're not using, you know, like transformed stem cells or the old cell lines. They are primary human cells. And they are what kind of seed this process of the tissue self.

• 1:35:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. So someone has a tumor, they do a biopsy, and then instead of just saying, okay, you can test one drug on it, because if you kill this, you're done. You can scale it up and clone it effectively. And then you can say, let's test 50 drugs on this and see what actually works.

• 1:35:50Speaker 09

  Yeah, 50,000. The search space is just so big, right? I mean, the kind of real problem I think drug development is butting up against is, you know, over the past decades, we've tried to find like single target cures, right, for disease. So like maybe this receptor or maybe this compound in the blood by reducing it or by increasing it, we can fix some disease. But things like cancer and fibrosis and Alzheimer's and all of these just like keep getting away from us, right? We might get a little bit close and then does nothing in people. And you imagine like if the check engine light comes on in your car, the solution is not going to be you turn a single screw. It's like a little more complicated than

• 1:36:31Speaker 09

  that. And so the hard part about drugging multiple targets and interfacing with biology like at the complexity that it has, is how do you search that space? How do you know which things to bind and how it all works? And to really address such a large search space, you can no longer just do screening. Like, it just runs away from you, right? It's like a cliff of, just like numerical climb. And so you have to do the inverse. So just understand biology and back solve the things that you should drug to make it do the things you want, instead of trying to drug everything and seeing what happens. And so to understand biology at that level, especially human biology, we have to be able to test it.

• 1:37:14John Coogan?

  We read a story about the price of monkeys spiking based on demand from biotech companies to test drugs on monkeys. Where does this technology fit in the new drug development process? Because it feels like we're very close to like the computers being really good at testing a bunch of ideas. But then, of course, you go, what was it? Mouse or monkey or something at some point?

• 1:37:42Speaker 09

  Yeah, mouse, dog, monkey, right?

• 1:37:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. But this feels like an interim step that could be before mouse models? Or would this be a full replacement for mouse models? Or would this be after a mouse model? Like, where does this fit into the story arc of a new biotech company?

• 1:37:59Speaker 09

  So, you know, we're currently working with like the very large majority of the top 10 pharma. And the majority of the projects that we're working on are things that do not translate from monkeys into people. So even the primates are not giving the same responses that humans are. Or strange things are being seen in the primate that were not seen in the mice and dogs. And you wonder like, which one is it, right? And so the, instead of just jumping, you know, we have some cells in a dish here, we have some inorganic acid here, now we're in mice and then, you know, woodchucks and this sort of, we just need to test on human tissue from the get-go and replace this whole outdated approach to, you know, maybe the mouse is going to tell us. Because all these drugs that are

• 1:38:44Speaker 09

  failing in clinic, right, these 19 out of 20, like they are working in the animals, right? They're safe. They're pretty efficacious, right? So it's like, you know, fuck, where are our cures, right? Instead of all these cures to mess with these. And so we are working from discovery all the way through to like supporting clinical trials with these tissues, both to do things that you cannot search easily enough in people, and also things that might be too unsafe to search in people.

• 1:39:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Jordan, you have another?

• 1:39:14Jordi Hays?

  What were you doing before this? How'd you get into growing human tissue?

• 1:39:19John Coogan?

  Doing it for fun, probably. Hobbyist.

• 1:39:22Speaker 09

  I didn't get into this. Yeah, so my background was in designing high throughput microfluidics. And then I met my co-founder Dan as my PhD advisor. And he had invented this concept of the organonic chip of growing, you know, these functional units of human tissues. And we kind of came together and said, we need to scale this up dramatically and also improve like the fidelity of these tissues and make them basically indistinguishable from what we'd get in a deep biopsy punch.

• 1:39:54John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:39:55Jordi Hays?

  That's, what is, like, what are the regulatory guardrails for creating, like, I just imagine like you kind of, if your company continues to gain traction?

• 1:40:13John Coogan?

  You're worried about accidentally creating like a Frankenstein type?

• 1:40:16Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, like, I feel like that's the natural path here. And I'm just wondering, like, there's a lot of like moral and ethical dilemmas surrounding that. There will probably need to be regulations surrounding that at some point. And yeah, it just feels like that's probably the end state is just vats of people living in this.

• 1:40:39Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, I, I, I'm not a big movie guy, but the ma, the, it's the Matrix, right? Where they're all.

• 1:40:45John Coogan?

  Pretty far away from the Matrix.

• 1:40:47Jordi Hays?

  I don't, it doesn't feel that far. I see the, I see the.

• 1:40:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:40:50Jordi Hays?

  I see the robotic arm in the background.

• 1:40:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, the real movie is the island. Yeah. With Michael Bay's The Island, they, they, they clone a human.

• 1:40:57Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:40:58John Coogan?

  The rich person can be like, oh, I need a kidney transplant. And they're like, well, we got a direct clone of you over there on that island. Let's go get that liver out of them. It's very, uh, very, uh, dystopian.

• 1:41:11Speaker 09

  Yeah, we can do this hopefully without the, the full person.

• 1:41:15John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:41:17Speaker 09

  And the FDA, you know, like the, the FDA is actually, I, I think among all of these cases where there's a new technology and you're like fighting with the regulator to, to push something forward. Um, the, the FDA has been, you know, has put out now like three, uh, modernization acts that drive the uptake of these animal alternatives. Right? Like, like given the failure rate and, and it really gets worse with biologics, right? Like antibody based therapies and, you know, bi-specific antibody drug conjugates and all these like new modalities for drugs. That are, that are good because they're specific, but they're specific to human, you know, targets.

• 1:41:51John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:41:51Speaker 09

  And so it's even harder to test those. Um, and, and, and so the FDA has been an extremely strong tailwind actually in, in, uh, in making these.

• 1:41:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And then, and then at some point, like, would, you know, would, would you grow a specific individual's tissue and then test a wide range of drugs on that to figure out what was going to be most effective? Like, that also feels like the next logical step is.

• 1:42:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. Personalized medicine?

• 1:42:17Jordi Hays?

  Personalized medicine.

• 1:42:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Take, take, take.

• 1:42:20Speaker 09

  That is what we're doing.

• 1:42:21John Coogan?

  Or something. Okay.

• 1:42:23Speaker 09

  Yeah. So, so, so, so by definition, these cells have to come from someone, right? And so, um, you know, we, we, we are usually kind of broad across the different demographics that we test on both, you know, age, sex, race and so on. Um, but ultimately too, for, for various patient specific diseases, cancers, right? As a, as a great example. Um, I mean, just imagine being able to, um, if you have a solid tumor. I mean, the, the island is like the perfect movie, right? You imagine like 50,000 phones of yourself and you say, all right, like cool, survive.

• 1:42:52John Coogan?

  There's a lot of moral weight to that movie though. You gotta actually watch the movie, I think. You're gonna get into some hot water.

• 1:42:59Speaker 09

  We'll pick out the good parts. Yeah.

• 1:43:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Uh, yeah. I mean, just the tissue in a, in a petri dish. I think most people can get behind that.

• 1:43:07Speaker 09

  No brain.

• 1:43:08John Coogan?

  As soon as it's Scarlett Johansson walking around with emotions and ideas and history, uh, it gets a lot darker.

• 1:43:16Jordi Hays?

  Most fascinating company we've had on the show this year, I think.

• 1:43:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. Very interesting. Well, congratulations on the progress.

• 1:43:23Speaker 09

  I appreciate it, guys.

• 1:43:24John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 1:43:24Speaker 09

  If you want to grow, uh, copies of yourself.

• 1:43:27John Coogan?

  No, uh, when we hired Tyler, I made sure I was a perfect match on blood type and everything. So I'm, I'm pretty much good to go. But, uh, this sounds good for, for those who don't have a type.

• 1:43:37Jordi Hays?

  Where are you based, by the way?

• 1:43:39Speaker 09

  San Francisco. We're, we're right in the Bay area.

• 1:43:41John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:43:44Speaker 09

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:43:45John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

• 1:43:56Jordi Hays?

  Let's head over to the timeline. Alfred Wallforce.

• 1:44:00John Coogan?

  What'd he say?

• 1:44:01Jordi Hays?

  Over at Listen Labs. He's been on the show before, coming in with, uh, one of the hottest takes.

• 1:44:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. Got some pushback.

• 1:44:08Jordi Hays?

  Said founders only send investor updates.

• 1:44:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Give me the boat horn.

• 1:44:14Speaker 10

  When you're winning, listen, has sent to we its history, all fundraiser announcements. Nobody reads a bad update and helps. They just mark you as dying.

• 1:44:23John Coogan?

  I think your crazy voice sounds crazier than mine.

• 1:44:27Speaker 10

  Let me check. Oh, it sounds about the same. It sounds about the same.

• 1:44:32Jordi Hays?

  Um, yeah, this is just, uh, I think this is terrible advice.

• 1:44:36John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:44:36Jordi Hays?

  Except if you're winning.

• 1:44:37John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:44:39Jordi Hays?

  Um, I think it should be founders. If you're winning, only send investor updates.

• 1:44:45John Coogan?

  Yes, I, I, I, I do think.

• 1:44:47Jordi Hays?

  No, it's just like, it's, it's, it's just such bad advice. Cause I've had so many, I mean, I've had instances like kind of surprise and delight moments where I haven't been getting an update from a company in a year. And I just assume the company is like dead and dying. And then they pop up with an update. I, I had this happen where a company that I thought was fully dead, I didn't even want to, I, I almost felt bad asking. Uh, it was a small angel check. I thought they were dead until I got an update that I needed to sign something because they were selling for like, you know,

• 1:45:16John Coogan?

  Wow, there you go.

• 1:45:17Jordi Hays?

  Quarter of a billion. Um, so any, anyways, like, I, I just think like investors, oh, yeah. If you have 10 investors and you send a bad update, a lot of people aren't going to be able to help. But if there's a chance that one helps.

• 1:45:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:32Jordi Hays?

  Um, then, uh, then that's great. And, and, uh, even if you're not winning, you can show momentum, which is going to like, Updates are how you build trust. It's how people.

• 1:45:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:43Jordi Hays?

  Start to process, like, how is this team and this founder performing? Even if they're not winning yet, are they making progress? Are they iterating quickly? It's how, and if, if you're not sending any updates and then suddenly you need to raise more money, like you need a bridge round or something like that. The likelihood of getting that round done is much lower because you just don't have the, you don't have the trust. The people can't get a good read on like, okay, do I believe, do I have more conviction in this team today than when I invested, even though they haven't figured it out yet?

• 1:46:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:46:15Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 1:46:15John Coogan?

  So I'm taking the other side of this with some reasonableness, maybe. I don't know. Uh, you, you can debate me on this. So, uh, do you think it's important to send investor updates when you're a pre-seed company? Like you're, you're purely in the idea maze, very early stage, they're, the revenue zero every month. You're just sort of like, you know, out figuring out the first product.

• 1:46:41Jordi Hays?

  I mean, at that, at that stage, it, it depends. Hopefully you only have like one or two investors.

• 1:46:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:47Jordi Hays?

  And, but, but it's still important to see, it's still important to see, like, uh, it's, it's valuable to see a snapshot. It doesn't have to be the, the, if, at that stage, if I get an investor update that's paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs, I'm like super, super bearish.

• 1:47:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:47:01Jordi Hays?

  But it's still better to just have like even quick bullet points. Hey, here's what we're working on.

• 1:47:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:06Jordi Hays?

  Um, we'll come, we'll, we'll, we'll have another update in a month.

• 1:47:09John Coogan?

  Okay. So, because Listen Labs is only a three-year-old company and they raised their series A in April of 2025. So, and he, and there's a, there's a rumored series C going on right now. And so if he sent three investor updates, that might be April of 2025, January of 2026, and August of 2026, which is like every six months, which doesn't feel like that crazy of a cadence. It's like, yeah, it's not quarterly, it's not monthly, but it's a pretty regular pace because they're raising money regularly. So if, it's very different if it's like, okay, this is like a more like less like hot time in the market. You're not going to be fundraising every three months. You're going to be raising money every 18 months, realistically every 24 months.

• 1:47:54John Coogan?

  It's a harder industry. And so I, as an investor with a series A check, I want to know, okay, how much runway is actually left?

• 1:48:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:02John Coogan?

  Because, but, but that's not the equation here. So little bit of a, of a unique, this post reveals a little bit more about the level of fundraising activity that you can only send investor updates and still be emailing all of your investors every six months.

• 1:48:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:18John Coogan?

  So there's a little bit of that.

• 1:48:19Jordi Hays?

  And, and a lot of this comes down to Alfred. Listen Labs has been crushing.

• 1:48:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:24Jordi Hays?

  I remember when they first came on the show, it seemed like the company made a lot of sense.

• 1:48:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:48:28Jordi Hays?

  They quickly raised follow-on rounds from great investors. I'm sure they're still doing well. You wouldn't post this if you, if you weren't winning. Still sure they're doing well, but like just really, really bad, uh, just really, really bad advice.

• 1:48:42John Coogan?

  It's not one size fits all advice. I completely agree. Uh, the other.

• 1:48:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the other, the other thing I would say is like, how do you know a company that's building in public is struggling? They stopped building in public.

• 1:48:51John Coogan?

  No, yeah, that's true.

• 1:48:53Jordi Hays?

  They haven't like, I've, I've seen this like at least 10 times right now.

• 1:48:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:48:57Jordi Hays?

  You see the company that, that's got all this momentum, founders like, I'm sharing our, here's our, I'm sharing our investor updates.

• 1:49:04John Coogan?

  Cause they're just proud of it.

• 1:49:05Jordi Hays?

  And they usually will string together like six months of that.

• 1:49:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:49:08Jordi Hays?

  And then they go dark. It's like, oh, what, what, oh, you don't want to build in public when you're not growing anymore?

• 1:49:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:13Jordi Hays?

  And, and revenue is declining or, or, um, you were, you were a thin wrapper, whatever it is.

• 1:49:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Uh, the other side of this is, uh, this, nobody reads a bad update and helps. They just mark you as dying. I think that maybe that's not a hundred percent accurate, but.

• 1:49:33Jordi Hays?

  The thing is like you're dying unless you're winning.

• 1:49:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. I, I, I, I think there is something where in investor updates, a good investor update can be a pitch for the company a little bit. And it can be an opportunity for the founder to sort of rehearse their next round's pitch with their current investors and say, okay, let me restate the vision, the mission, the progress, what we're doing. And instead of, instead of framing things as like, I need all these different things. It's more just like, I'm, I'm going, I'm working. And, and then also there's the dynamic of sometimes companies stop sending investor updates because there's a tier one like partner on the board who's like shepherding the company and all of the activity really happens at the board meeting.

• 1:50:19John Coogan?

  And maybe one of those early angels has a bigger stake in a competitor. And so you don't actually want to share the update broadly. But the board meeting is still happening. There's still like oversight and infrastructure around the business. And so in fact, you're getting something that's bigger and more important than an investor update, which is a board deck and a board meeting. It's just not being shared to all investors.

• 1:50:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The other thing about updates is they just keep companies top of mind. Like I have a friend, I have a friend. Uh, he has a bootstrap company. He effectively sends a monthly update.

• 1:50:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:49Jordi Hays?

  And it gets him so many customers.

• 1:50:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:50:51Jordi Hays?

  It's just at the top of the inbox. He's like, hey, I'm trying to connect to this company.

• 1:50:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:50:55Jordi Hays?

  And people just loop him in all the time.

• 1:50:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:57Jordi Hays?

  It's amazing way to just stay top of mind.

• 1:50:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. That's happened a few times, like companies that I'm not even invested in, I get on the investor update list and I'll just be getting it months later.

• 1:51:04Jordi Hays?

  The other thing is like, if, if you're not updating somebody, like I, I had, uh, one of the 70 odd angel investments that I've made. Like hadn't heard from them in a year. And then they, they, they texted and said, hey, like, are you free to catch up? And the ask was basically like, will you, will you like do a bridge round?

• 1:51:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:25Jordi Hays?

  And it's like. Yeah, if I, I can ask all the questions to try to understand what has happened between now and when the investment was made, but it's so much different to be getting like those updates in real time, seeing how they're dealing with adversity, ceiling, seeing how, how they're building momentum as a company. And yeah, so anyways, don't do this. Just don't do it.

• 1:51:54John Coogan?

  Don't do it in every, in every case.

• 1:51:57Jordi Hays?

  Don't listen to Alfred, the founder.

• 1:52:00John Coogan?

  I'm sure it applies to some companies. I'm sure it applies to some companies.

• 1:52:03Jordi Hays?

  I'm fully, I can fully get behind not sharing up if you have a ton of.

• 1:52:10John Coogan?

  What if you raise money every month?

• 1:52:11Jordi Hays?

  If you have a ton of.

• 1:52:12John Coogan?

  And you're only sending fundraising announcements.

• 1:52:15Jordi Hays?

  If you have a ton of, if you have like a really kind of crazy cap table, I think it can be, I think it can be fair to, and you're in a competitive category. I think it can be fair to say like, we're.

• 1:52:26John Coogan?

  We're keeping these numbers closely held.

• 1:52:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're going to specific numbers or, or even just say like, hey, we're basically sending updates to people that have invested like more than a million dollars, right?

• 1:52:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:38Jordi Hays?

  Or like leads and things like that. But anyways, very, very funny, very funny post.

• 1:52:43John Coogan?

  Put the timeline in turmoil. We love it.

• 1:52:44Jordi Hays?

  Definitely got the people going. And we should have Alfred back on the show to get an update.

• 1:52:49John Coogan?

  Get an update.

• 1:52:50Jordi Hays?

  On the company. They must be crushing. This is the only thing you post when you're just on fire.

• 1:52:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:56Jordi Hays?

  He must be ready to send another update.

• 1:52:58John Coogan?

  Let's churn. Let's churn. Walk us through the funnel. Pull up the slides. I want to see them. Anyway, we got one last news story. It's good news for the gamers in the audience. If you're a gamer, the US government wants you to consider becoming an air traffic controller. You've had the practice. Now it's time to go into the real world and become an air traffic controller. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says a federal campaign specifically targeting gamers has helped the FAA hire more than 2,000 people to train as controllers, putting the agency at 94% of its hiring goal with another 200 or another 2,000 plus candidates moving through the pipeline. Duffy launched the effort in April, arguing that the government

• 1:53:43John Coogan?

  needed to look beyond its traditional recruiting pool and that gamers already practice some of the skills controllers need, including rapidly processing information, maintaining focus and keeping track of multiple things at once. You don't necessarily need a four degree, four year degree either. The FAA accepts candidates with qualifying work experience, education, or a combination of the two, ideally a steam account as well. It's also a potentially lucrative career. The median air traffic controller earned $144,580 in 2024, according to the BLS, while the top 10% of air traffic controllers earned more than $210,000. Getting

• 1:54:25John Coogan?

  the job, however, is another matter. Applicants generally have to be US citizens, under, under 31 years old, pass medical and security screenings and take the FAA's three and a half hour air traffic skills assessment, which is designed to predict whether they have the cognitive aptitude for the work. Those who make it through then undergo extensive training at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City before continuing their training at an air traffic facility. The recruiting push comes as the FAA tries to dig itself out of a longstanding staffing shortage. A government accounting, accountability office report published in December found that the controller workforce had shrunk 6% over the past decade, even as air traffic

• 1:55:07John Coogan?

  increased 10%. So the number of air traffic controllers relative to the amount of flights was decreasing really, really in a bad way. At the end of fiscal 2025, the FAA employed 13,000 controllers and shortages at critical facilities were already contributing to delays and cancellations. We've all seen the reports of those. The problem.

• 1:55:28Jordi Hays?

  Mac in the chat says, being an air traffic controller must be like being a lifeguard for planes. Just MFs doing laps all day. Just shoot me instead.

• 1:55:38John Coogan?

  Say you're not a.

• 1:55:39Jordi Hays?

  Speak for yourself. Some people like controlling air traffic.

• 1:55:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's the same thing as playing SimCity. I don't know. You think you could make it?

• 1:55:46Jordi Hays?

  No, not for everyone. Not for everyone. But the few, the proud, the air traffic controllers. Do you think there's specific games that they recruited from?

• 1:55:55John Coogan?

  I mean, you have to imagine.

• 1:55:56Jordi Hays?

  Starcraft.

• 1:55:57John Coogan?

  RTS is better. Yeah. I would go with a Starcraft player over a FPS player.

• 1:56:02Jordi Hays?

  All day.

• 1:56:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. I don't know.

• 1:56:06Jordi Hays?

  All right. Final post of the day.

• 1:56:08John Coogan?

  Hit me.

• 1:56:09Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, I want you to read it.

• 1:56:11John Coogan?

  What does he say?

• 1:56:13Jordi Hays?

  Got a post here from Hamant over at Lightspeed.

• 1:56:17John Coogan?

  Wait, oh, really? Okay.

• 1:56:20Jordi Hays?

  Let's see if your, if your new app works, Tyler.

• 1:56:22John Coogan?

  Hamant over at Lightspeed.

• 1:56:26Jordi Hays?

  The curse of.

• 1:56:33John Coogan?

  That's some great wisdom. The curse of discipline is that every day looks the same. The curse of indiscipline.

• 1:56:39Jordi Hays?

  This one.

• 1:56:40John Coogan?

  Every year.

• 1:56:41Jordi Hays?

  Did crazy numbers.

• 1:56:42John Coogan?

  Whoa, I did not realize.

• 1:56:45Jordi Hays?

  Not every day you see a VC other than the.

• 1:56:48John Coogan?

  True.

• 1:56:48Jordi Hays?

  All putting up numbers like this.

• 1:56:49John Coogan?

  True, true. Very, very rare.

• 1:56:52Jordi Hays?

  He went mainstream.

• 1:56:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Very good post.

• 1:56:54Jordi Hays?

  Mainstream.

• 1:56:55John Coogan?

  You're going mainstream. You're going mainstream with some advice for everyone in the boys group. If you, if you have a boys group chat, take the picture of Adam Silver, Josh Kushner and Bob Iger and send it to your boys chat and just say us. It's going, it's going to 3K for sure.

• 1:57:15Jordi Hays?

  It's gone.

• 1:57:16John Coogan?

  It's going, it's going, it's ripping. Well, thank you for tuning in to TBPN. We'll be back tomorrow at 11 AM Pacific.

• 1:57:23Jordi Hays?

  Can't wait.

• 1:57:24John Coogan?

  Five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com.

• 1:57:29Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor and a privilege.

• 1:57:31John Coogan?

  And have the best Wednesday ever.

• 1:57:33Jordi Hays?

  Please do.

• 1:57:34John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:57:35Jordi Hays?

  We love you.