Our Super Bowl Ad, Walmart hits $1T, Ken is Sick of Griftin | Dara Khosrowshahi, Mati Staniszewski & Andrew Reed, Gergely Orosz, Mitchell Green, Simon Hørup Eskildsen, KJ Dhaliwal, Nicolas Sharp

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (00:17) - Our Super Bowl Ad (06:43) - Ads in AI Commercial Reactions (31:11) - Walmart hits $1T (35:05) - Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, a company specializing in AI-driven voice synthesis, discusses the company's recent $500 million Series D funding round, valuing ElevenLabs at $11 billion, and highlights the rapid growth in annual recurring revenue, reaching $330 million by the end of 2025. He emphasizes the expansion of their product offerings, including advancements in voice agents and conversational models, and notes significant enterprise adoption with clients like Deutsche Telekom and Revolut. Additionally, Staniszewski introduces Andrew Reed from Sequoia as a new board member, underscoring the company's commitment to innovation and leadership in the AI voice technology sector. (50:53) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:01:06) - Gergely Orosz is a seasoned software engineer and author of "The Pragmatic Engineer" newsletter, focusing on in-depth topics for experienced professionals. In the conversation, he discusses the transformative impact of AI on software engineering, emphasizing the shift from traditional coding to AI-assisted development and the importance of adaptability in this evolving landscape. He also highlights the value of hiring interns proficient in AI tools to enhance team productivity and underscores the need for engineers to develop business acumen and product sense to remain competitive. (01:22:31) - Dara Khosrowshahi, an Iranian-American business executive born in 1969, is the CEO of Uber and previously led Expedia Group. In the conversation, he discusses Uber's strong earnings, highlighting a 22% trip growth and nearly $10 billion in free cash flow, emphasizing the company's supply-led strategy and the integration of rides and Uber Eats to enhance customer engagement. (01:48:37) - Mitchell Green, Founder and Managing Partner at Lead Edge Capital, a $5 billion growth equity firm, discusses the rapid evolution of software development through AI-driven "vibe coding," expressing skepticism about its ability to replace complex, trust-based enterprise software solutions. He highlights the undervaluation of established software companies like PayPal and Workday, emphasizing the importance of trust and reliability in their offerings. Green also touches on the dynamics of the IPO market, noting that strong companies can go public successfully even in uncertain times, and shares his personal interest in motorsports, including plans to participate in races at Le Mans and Monaco. (02:16:16) - Breaking News: Sama Responds to Anthropic Ads (02:19:50) - Simon Hørup Eskildsen is the co-founder and CEO of Turbopuffer, a company specializing in serverless vector databases. He discusses the rapid adoption of agentic coding, emphasizing the need for efficient search engines to handle vast data volumes, and highlights Turbopuffer's role in enabling companies to build their own scalable search infrastructures. Additionally, he addresses challenges in compute resource availability and the importance of honest representation in client partnerships. (02:36:56) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:43:17) - KJ Dhaliwal, CEO and co-founder of Lotus Health AI, discusses the company's mission to provide free, AI-powered primary care directly to consumers, addressing the shortage of primary care physicians in the U. S. He highlights the platform's ability to handle 80% of primary care needs virtually, including prescriptions and lab orders, by integrating patient health data with AI and real doctors. Dhaliwal also mentions their recent $41 million funding round led by Kleiner Perkins and CRV, and outlines plans for monetization through premium content and employer partnerships. (02:53:16) - Nicolas Sharp, Co-Founder and CEO of Attio, discusses the launch of "Ask Atio," a conversational AI interface designed to help users interpret and act on extensive CRM data, including calls, emails, and customer interactions. He highlights the industry's growing consensus on the potential disruption of incumbent CRM systems by AI-native solutions and emphasizes Attio's commitment to supporting diverse integrations through a robust SDK and open platform. Looking ahead, Sharp outlines plans for rapid product development, aiming to balance scaling the company with continuous innovation to meet ambitious targets. (03:00:52) - Ken Griffin Blasts White House "Favoritism" (03:06:04) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com AppLovin - https://axon.ai Cognition - https://cognition.ai Console - https://console.com CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io Figma - https://figma.com Fin - https://fin.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Graphite - https://graphite.com Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Labelbox - https://labelbox.com Lambda - https://lambda.ai Linear - https://linear.app MongoDB - https://mongodb.com NYSE - https://nyse.com Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com Public - https://public.com Railway - https://railway.com Restream - https://restream.io Shopify - https://shopify.com Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Vibe - https://vibe.co Sentry - https://sentry.io Cisco - https://www.ciscoaisummit.com/ai-virtual-summit.html Okta - https://www.okta.com Kalshi - https://kalshi.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TBPN. Wow, look at those flashes. Today's Wednesday, February 4, 2026. We are live from the TBPN Ultra, the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both, easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. Ramp's doing a Super Bowl ad, we're doing a Super Bowl ad.

• 0:18Jordi Hays?

  Ramp is in our Super Bowl ad.

• 0:19John Coogan?

  Ramp's in our Super Bowl ad. We're very excited for the Super Bowl, just a couple of days away. This was a very fun project. Do you want to take us through the thesis and sort of what we put together with this? I just got all the credit, but I had nothing to do with it, basically.

• 0:37Jordi Hays?

  Let me pull up the Adweek.

• 0:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. There was a very nice post from Blake Scholl over at Boom Supersonic, and he said, there's clever, and then there's John Coogan and Jordy Hayes at TBPN clever. Behold, a masterclass in marketing, and I had nothing to do with it, and I get the credit.

• 0:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this was, of course, Dylan on our team led the charge here. This is something he's wanted to do for a long time. We had done something similar back at Party Round. We ran a billboard with a bunch of different friends, companies, customers, et cetera, did really well. And so doing this is the final stage in terms of advertising.

• 1:16John Coogan?

  Fun fact, Dylan also spoke this week at the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Very happy to be partnered with them.

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  But Kendra Barnett over at Adweek covered our ad.

• 1:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:29Jordi Hays?

  Of course. And she says, "The 15-second spot isn't selling anything. It's simply what co-host Jordy Hayes calls a love letter to our community." That's really what it is. TBPN is nothing without the community, the people that join the show. We made the 15-second spot in-house. We featured a bunch of our guests. And then if you've been on the show as a guest, whether it was for five minutes or five hours, your logo made it in here. So, yeah, this will be a, doing it a regional buy. We basically looked at where the majority of our audience was, and we bought segments around that. So, very excited for Sunday.

• 2:12Jordi Hays?

  And I said in Adweek, "It's completely unnecessary for a media company to buy advertising." The nature of media is that you're constantly putting out things that are promoting the business naturally, just through the content. So why do it? And we basically did it. I said, we believe in doing things purely for fun.

• 2:27John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 2:28Jordi Hays?

  So we're certainly having fun.

• 2:29John Coogan?

  Some people screenshotted that and texted me that. I thought that was a good quote. Let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. There was another reason beyond fun. I do think it's an important opportunity to introduce the football community to technology, to business. And that's really, that's my goal with this ad. Hopefully, let people know, if you're watching the Super Bowl, technology, it exists.

• 2:57Jordi Hays?

  We gotta raise awareness for technology and business. Let's play the ad.

• 3:01John Coogan?

  Let's play the ad. Let's see.

• 3:06John Coogan?

  If you're watching this podcast, you've already passed the test. It's a great question.

• 3:10Andrew Reed?

  I think it's super important and awesome.

• 3:12Speaker 03

  This is going to be one of a hundred bagger. You guys are the number one podcast in the world.

• 3:18John Coogan?

  The gong hit. This is great.

• 3:20Jordi Hays?

  Short, sweet, and we look forward to seeing it live on Sunday.

• 3:25John Coogan?

  Yes. Eleven Labs, build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with Eleven Labs. We have some massive news from Eleven Labs coming up on the show at 11:30. Let's pull up the linear lineup. I will tell you that linear is the system for modern software development. Seventy percent of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents. And we have a stacked show. Andrew Reed's back on the show. Matty from Eleven Labs is coming on. We have Gergay from the pragmatic engineer coming on.

• 3:54Jordi Hays?

  Super pumped for that one.

• 3:55John Coogan?

  Dara from Uber's coming on. Mitchell Green, one of our close friends, is coming on to talk about all sorts of stuff going on in the market. And then we have an awesome lightning round lined up. So is there anything else we should, we should cover about the Super Bowl? Or should we move on to other Super Bowl coverage? Because we're not the only ones running ads. Lots of tech people are coming out.

• 4:16Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely. Wild, wild morning.

• 4:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 4:20Jordi Hays?

  I was not expecting this out of Anthropic. They basically took, the vibe war was like effectively. Uh relegated to X.

• 4:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh it just felt like the same hundred thousand people saying it's so over, we're so back.

• 4:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:33Jordi Hays?

  It's so over, we're so back. Uh they're taking it to the main stage, right? And it shouldn't be that surprising, right? Anytime Dario gets on a mic anywhere, he's taking shots at OpenAI.

• 4:42John Coogan?

  But he's, he's not taking direct shots.

• 4:44Jordi Hays?

  Not direct shots.

• 4:45John Coogan?

  He's always.

• 4:46Jordi Hays?

  And this arguably is not a direct shot either.

• 4:48John Coogan?

  I guess he didn't drop an ad.

• 4:49Jordi Hays?

  They just said ads are coming.

• 4:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:51Jordi Hays?

  To AI.

• 4:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:52Jordi Hays?

  The clot.

• 4:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you're right.

• 4:53Jordi Hays?

  And anyway, so.

• 4:54John Coogan?

  But truthfully, like a lot of the previous Anthropic advertising has been uh very in their own lane. Uh they've run a number of campaigns that have been sort of above the.

• 5:02Jordi Hays?

  We're just thinking.

• 5:03John Coogan?

  Thinking, we're your thought partner. This one does feel like it's a response to what's happening in the industry, so.

• 5:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and we'll, we'll get into why they took this approach.

• 5:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:11Jordi Hays?

  Clearly, they, I think, uh, we're just excited to spike Sam's cortisol. And I think, I think they uh probably did.

• 5:19John Coogan?

  They've definitely been watching some, some height, uh.

• 5:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's, should we just play all four ads?

• 5:23John Coogan?

  Let's play, let's play at least one of them. We gotta play the height maxing one. That one's particularly funny, but uh we did, are, are they here in the timeline? While we pull those up, let me tell you about App, App Loving. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over one billion daily active users and grow your business.

• 5:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and you were saying earlier off the show, you were starting to like Anthropic until they came out against that.

• 5:45John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, I, I, I see this as an attack on me. I see an attack on one advertiser as an attack on all advertisers. I'm pro ads and.

• 5:54Jordi Hays?

  Wait, this is not, this is not the right ad. We'll come back to this one. That's another Super Bowl ad that we'll have later in the show.

• 6:00John Coogan?

  Anthropic, uh, the Anthropic attack on advertising, it does cross the line for me. It goes too far and I think that they should be supporting the advertising economy. Almost 10% of the American workforce is somehow tied to advertising.

• 6:12Jordi Hays?

  The first ad is can I get a six pack quickly?

• 6:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 6:15Jordi Hays?

  And uh this one I immediately thought, okay, they're definitely not just watching clavicular, they're studying.

• 6:22John Coogan?

  Apparently, let's watch it.

• 6:24Jordi Hays?

  I was not expecting this to be the looks maxing Super Bowl.

• 6:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh but let's play it.

• 6:31John Coogan?

  Do we have it? No, almost. Well, we're doing that. Let me tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service.

• 6:43John Coogan?

  Without further ado.

• 6:44Jordi Hays?

  Play it.

• 6:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is, I was gonna say violation.

• 6:46Jordi Hays?

  It starts out by just saying violation.

• 6:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:51Speaker 04

  Perfect. That is a clear and achievable goal. Would you like me to tailor a personalized workout plan?

• 6:57John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 6:59Speaker 04

  Perfect. Let me personalize this for you.

• 7:02Jordi Hays?

  The lag, the slight delay?

• 7:03John Coogan?

  This is a whole meme on Instagram reels. People will do impressions of ChatGPT voice mode, like this. 140 pounds.

• 7:11Speaker 04

  Got it. I'll create a plan that focuses on aesthetic strength training.

• 7:14Jordi Hays?

  Pause for a second. Like the slight delay?

• 7:18John Coogan?

  It is iconic.

• 7:19Jordi Hays?

  Is so good.

• 7:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:20Jordi Hays?

  And clearly this was written with ChatGPT.

• 7:24John Coogan?

  No, no.

• 7:25Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. I'm like, like, it's designed to sound like it was, like, it's, it sounds exactly like, got it. I'll create a personalized plan.

• 7:34John Coogan?

  I don't think that's actually how ChatGPT sounds. I, I, I, I think, in fact, when I've watched the Instagram reels, they, they do the ChatGPT impression and it's, it's a little more, like, this is written for comedy. And so the fact that he says, what did he say? Absolutely twice in a row, like, that's something.

• 7:52Speaker 04

  Isn't just built in the gym. Try Step Boost Max. The insoles that add one vertical inch of height and help short kings stand tall.

• 8:03John Coogan?

  What?

• 8:04Speaker 04

  Use code HEIGHTMAXING10 for big discounts.

• 8:09John Coogan?

  Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude is a good ad.

• 8:15John Coogan?

  The height maxing thing is so crazy.

• 8:17Jordi Hays?

  So crazy to run an ad like this and not even do a call to action?

• 8:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:21Jordi Hays?

  That was probably intentional, because if they're anti-ad.

• 8:24John Coogan?

  It's like, you know, you Google Claude and you land on the app.

• 8:26Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny. It's just truly the, the, the irony of being anti-ad and then just spending. How much do you think they're, they're running? They have four individual ads. You can imagine them. This will probably be one of the biggest buys of the Super Bowl.

• 8:41John Coogan?

  Someone ran the numbers and if they did all, if they aired all four, it would be something like $80 million or something. I don't think that they're gonna run all four. That seems like a lot. Maybe there'll be some regional buys in there. I don't know. $80 million seems like a lot to spend. I mean, it's a big company. They raise tens of billions. So, you know, it's possible, but that feels like that feels aggressive.

• 9:03Jordi Hays?

  There's also bulk discounting.

• 9:04John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 9:05Jordi Hays?

  And there's, again, they could do, they could choose to do regional.

• 9:10John Coogan?

  And isn't there something where if you buy a massive ad campaign like this, you'll also have to buy in the Olympics as well? NBC sells both, so we could see a rerun of these or another buy later.

• 9:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Super Bowl has an insane amount of demand. Olympics has way less.

• 9:26John Coogan?

  But this is clearly like a particular moment in time and.

• 9:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's insane. It's insane. I mean, it's incredibly clever. It's also incredibly dirty. Like they're, I think they're like trying to muddy the water around the ads rollout.

• 9:41John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure.

• 9:42Jordi Hays?

  As the ads, the ads that are coming to chat GPT are effectively display ads, right? Uh, everybody in the industry by now should know this. Uh, yet this, this campaign implies that the, the ads will influence the response and that you cannot trust it.

• 9:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:58Jordi Hays?

  And so it's, it's fair game.

• 10:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:01Jordi Hays?

  But it's, it's like, it's like dirty.

• 10:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's, it's sort of fake newsy a little bit. It's a little bit, uh, it's a little spin on top of what will wind up happening. And yeah, I mean, the, the, it wouldn't even make sense for the ads to really influence the content. They're probably just going to wind up doing what Instagram does and just showing you things that you're actually likely to purchase, no matter what you're looking at. Because that will just be what optimizes, uh, CAC and ROAS.

• 10:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, at some point, I affect, I, I expect that the ads will be certainly targeted.

• 10:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:36Jordi Hays?

  Like if you search, I don't know, uh, yerba mate.

• 10:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:40Jordi Hays?

  What yerba mate should I get?

• 10:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:42Jordi Hays?

  It might show you like what it thinks you should get. And then separately, it will have like, here's also another ad.

• 10:48John Coogan?

  Where, where, where you see a sponsored, you know, result and it's flagged and there's a little ad, ad tag or slightly different background color. And people are used to that. So I don't think anyone really expects, you know, ads as they roll out in chat GPT to be some major violation of the social contract of what people understand ads to be. But what's interesting is that they don't actually say OpenAI. They don't say chat GPT. This is just what comes with the territory when you're the dominant player. Someone can just take a shot at the category.

• 11:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:18John Coogan?

  And it feels like it's a shot at you. And it's sort of a, it's sort of a champagne problem, you know? If, if chat GPT wasn't in the position that it was in. They wouldn't, everyone wouldn't be like, oh, this is a shot at ChatGPT.

• 11:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:29John Coogan?

  They'd be like, oh, this is a shot at the category because there's seven players that are all equally used.

• 11:35Jordi Hays?

  It's like, no. Let's pull up the next one.

• 11:37John Coogan?

  It's a dominant, uh, app. Yeah, let's pull up the next one.

• 11:45Jordi Hays?

  How do I communicate better with my mom?

• 11:47John Coogan?

  They went off with this.

• 11:50Speaker 05

  Great question. Improved communication with your mom can bring you closer. Here are some techniques you can try. Start by listening. Really hear what she's trying to say underneath her words. Build conversation from points of agreement. Find a connection through shared activity. Perhaps a nature walk. Or if the relationship can't be fixed, find emotional connection with other older women on Golden Encounters, the mature dating site that connects sensitive cubs with roaring cougars.

• 12:23John Coogan?

  For Anthropic?

• 12:24Jordi Hays?

  Anthropic.

• 12:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, they haven't been like a funny, edgy brand.

• 12:27Jordi Hays?

  It's not classy.

• 12:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:30Jordi Hays?

  Like, it's, it's, I'm not saying, I'm not saying it wasn't a good move.

• 12:34John Coogan?

  It feels, it feels appropriate for the Super Bowl. This feels like the level of humor that you would see in Super Bowl ads. Like, if this was a Bud Light commercial, I'd be like, okay. But yes, I agree with you. It feels like totally unexplored territory for them. It's, yeah, it is a little, it's spicy.

• 12:47Jordi Hays?

  It's spicy.

• 12:48John Coogan?

  It's, yeah.

• 12:50Jordi Hays?

  All right, pull up the next one.

• 12:50John Coogan?

  Pull up Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity, so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent.

• 13:00Jordi Hays?

  Pull up the next one, please.

• 13:05Jordi Hays?

  Deception.

• 13:10Speaker 06

  So, what do you think? Absolutely. That's such a fun and creative business idea. You've got something really special here. Getting started can feel daunting. I can make a step-by-step mini-business plan. Do you want me to do that? Yeah.

• 13:28Speaker 06

  Absolutely. Here's some steps you can take. One, research. Really get to know your audience. Two, think of a catchy name and start your social presence early. Three, new businesses often struggle with cash flow. So try quick-dash payday loans because girl bosses need CEO money quick.

• 13:48John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 13:48Speaker 06

  400% APR rates may vary, possibly doubling or tripling without notice.

• 13:53Speaker 05

  What?

• 13:54Speaker 06

  Would you like to make a quick credit check?

• 14:00Jordi Hays?

  Incredibly well-played and incredibly dirty.

• 14:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:04Jordi Hays?

  Like, this, I, I, I don't know if it's worth trying.

• 14:08John Coogan?

  Worst possible outcome in an ads world, but so easily avoidable. And OpenAI has been messaging, they would not do this for ages. And they've stated this multiple times on podcasts and in blog posts and in essays. Like, they've been beating the drum on this for a long time. That clearly they will gate who is allowed to advertise, what the context is, how these ads will be displayed. There's a, there's a million ways to land.

• 14:33Jordi Hays?

  Examples of these type of Super Bowl attack ads from like the history of Pepsi and Coca-Cola, Apple, IBM.

• 14:42John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, yeah, the I'm a Mac guy. Yeah.

• 14:46Jordi Hays?

  And, and none of them were as direct or effectively as.

• 14:51John Coogan?

  The 1984 ad was saying like IBM is authoritarian dictator. It's like so aggressive.

• 14:58Jordi Hays?

  But still, but still less.

• 15:01Jordi Hays?

  It, it, it wasn't as, as, like, the timing here is a big factor, right? Right when the ads are rolling out.

• 15:09Jordi Hays?

  And just like really muddying the water. I don't know. Obviously, OpenAI is gonna do, is gonna do fine. But this really makes their life a lot harder.

• 15:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:22Speaker 07

  That one was also funny because, um, like, she's like, absolutely. And that's what like Claude usually says, like when the, you're absolutely right. That's like a Claudism.

• 15:30John Coogan?

  It's a Claudism.

• 15:31Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's not ChatGPT.

• 15:32John Coogan?

  What is, what is ChatGPT usually say?

• 15:34Speaker 07

  Uh, I don't know if there's like specific phrases exactly like that.

• 15:38John Coogan?

  Well, the specific phrase that I think of is like, it's not this, it's that. And I didn't hear that coming through. It was interesting. But I don't know. Do you think these are gonna be effective? Do you think?

• 15:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's a question. So, so really bold campaign for a company that hasn't been able to consistently top, crack the top 25 of the iPhone app.

• 15:56John Coogan?

  In consumer, in consumer.

• 15:57Jordi Hays?

  And so my question is like, does this mean they're going into consumer or is this purely to piss off OpenAI? And make their life harder?

• 16:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, like there's a world where there's, where there's business leaders.

• 16:10Jordi Hays?

  Like, is this like, like somebody's walking by and you just stick your foot out and try to like trip them? That's kind of what it feels like.

• 16:16John Coogan?

  It does feel like vibe.

• 16:17Jordi Hays?

  It feels like consumer is so far gone.

• 16:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, we'll see, we'll see. Maybe at the end of the Super Bowl, we'll, we'll check the App Store charts and Claude will be up at the top. Because so many people have seen this, they thought it's funny, but it does feel like such inside baseball. Like I bet a lot of, I bet a lot of average consumer, AI consumers don't even know that ads are coming.

• 16:36Jordi Hays?

  Again, they're not even, they're not even pushing, they're not actually trying to push downloads with this, or they would put a call to action.

• 16:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, or QR code, like download the app now.

• 16:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:45John Coogan?

  Ad free, ad free AI is here with Claude, like download this, this thing.

• 16:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:49John Coogan?

  Interesting. I mean, maybe, the thing is that I don't even know.

• 16:53Jordi Hays?

  Noah was saying, all this to IPO first, I can, I can see it being beneficial in just terms of preparation for, for the IPO, right? There's a lot of people that are just retail investors that, that aren't aware, that, that aren't really super aware of Claude, right? They may have heard of Anthropic, that actually aren't really aware of, of their different product.

• 17:14John Coogan?

  I just think like, if you're, if you're, you know, an enterprise that's deploying AI APIs and LLMs like into your organization. And like, you're not worried about the ads product in ChatGPT. You're like, oh yeah, like OpenAI Codex is, is this quality Gemini three is good for this and Claude 4.5 is good for this. And like, my team will deploy and we'll look at costs and Pareto curves. It doesn't feel like, it doesn't feel like any, any CIO or CTO of a big company is going to say like, oh, like I couldn't possibly you'll use OpenAI in a business context.

• 17:52Jordi Hays?

  Gabe says, ad free AI is here with Claude. Ask three questions before hitting limits.

• 17:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:59Jordi Hays?

  Or use AdGPT and be able to ask a bunch more.

• 18:01John Coogan?

  Interesting. Here's a Super Bowl ad they should run. MongoDB.

• 18:06John Coogan?

  Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best-in-class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. That would just be a clean ad read, clean ad read.

• 18:16Jordi Hays?

  Does this ever come back to bite them? Because the idea that you're going to offer products to consumers and never monetize transactions, never monetize commerce, never run ads, like it hasn't really been done in the history of the internet, even Spotify, right? Netflix, they always, over, over, look at, look at Apple, right?

• 18:34John Coogan?

  If, if the Claude app does go to the top of the App Store, if they do wind up eclipsing ChatGPT and become the most dominant force, like.

• 18:41Jordi Hays?

  No, it is really funny if you drive a bunch of people to an app that has pretty low usage limits.

• 18:46John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 18:47Jordi Hays?

  They try it for a little bit and they're like, eh, like, they're not going to notice that the model might be better. They're just going to be like, ah, I'm going back to ChatGPT.

• 18:56John Coogan?

  That's funny. That's funny. I want to see, I want to see what the battle between Mac, Apple and Windows looked like. This is maybe back in 2006, 2009, the I'm a Mac, I'm a PC campaign. It's a, it's a 10-minute compilation video, but we can just watch like the first one. It's on, it's on YouTube.

• 19:14Speaker 08

  Hello, I'm a Mac and I'm a PC. Because they get viruses. You okay? No, I'm not okay.

• 19:23John Coogan?

  Because PCs got viruses, Macs didn't.

• 19:25Speaker 08

  Oh, yeah. In fact, you better, you better stay back. This one's a doozy. That's okay. I'll be fine. No, no, do not be a hero. Last year, there are 114,000 known viruses for PCs. PCs, not Macs. So just grab this. I think I got to crash.

• 19:40John Coogan?

  Hey, if you feel like that'll help, good. Is this that far off?

• 19:44Speaker 08

  Hello, I'm a Mac and I'm a PC. And I'm a PC too. And I, what? Yeah. See, now you can run macOS 10 or Windows on a Mac. So in a way, I'm kind of like the only computer you'll ever need. Wow. Touche. No, I don't think you're using that right. Touche. No, listen, see, you can only say touche if you make a point that I make a counterpoint. You see, so I said I run Windows, but you haven't made a point yet. Let's try it again. You can get a Mac and still run all your Windows stuff.

• 20:11Jordi Hays?

  Touche.

• 20:13Speaker 08

  Hello, I'm a Mac.

• 20:14John Coogan?

  Okay, what do you think? I mean, they're not taking a shot at Windows specifically, or Microsoft, or Dell. It's like, all, it's the whole category, but everyone knows it's really, you know, Apple versus Microsoft. Talking about viruses, talking about this other stuff, these are features, I don't know. It's not that far off.

• 20:33John Coogan?

  It's certainly not edgy. It's certainly not edgy, like, it definitely fits.

• 20:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Anthropic's edgy. It's also, it's also a timing thing, where again, they're actively trying to make their, and again, I'm not saying anything of this is, is, is not fair play, technically. But the gloves are, the gloves are off.

• 20:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does feel like.

• 20:54Jordi Hays?

  And, and, and there is zero, I will go out now, and say, I would say there's effectively a 0% chance that OpenAI can win the Super Bowl this year. They will be running an ad, it would be insane if they didn't run an ad, it'd be a huge missed opportunity.

• 21:09John Coogan?

  Way harder.

• 21:11John Coogan?

  Sam calling out Dario by name directly. Dario, you suck. Just a diss track.

• 21:21Jordi Hays?

  I mean, mate, yeah, yeah, just a bunch of Sora slop.

• 21:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, I, I think like, the, the other thing is, OpenAI, I really doubt can react to this now.

• 21:34John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 21:35Jordi Hays?

  Like, the right, like, if, if this had dropped like, a couple of weeks ago.

• 21:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:39Jordi Hays?

  They would have been able to say, hey, we need to respond to this. But they can't now. At least, at least, uh, our experience buying an ad this year, we were, the content was locked last week.

• 21:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 21:51Jordi Hays?

  And there's a whole process, right, there's subtitling, all this stuff. Like, they're not, you can't just switch it up, maybe OpenAI.

• 21:57John Coogan?

  Well, maybe, maybe they win in the sense that, like, the vast majority of audiences have the reaction that you're having, which is like, actually, I don't mind ads, and actually, this is sort of a weird ad, and I still like ChatGPT, and then ChatGPT comes out with an ad that's just like, very vanilla, like, hey, use it, we'll help you cook, we have health now, you know, we have a bunch of features, that seems helpful, like, and then they wind up winning.

• 22:19Jordi Hays?

  Has the right word.

• 22:20John Coogan?

  What is it?

• 22:20Jordi Hays?

  He says it's propaganda. IMO. It really, it really is. It's, it's not, it's not.

• 22:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:27Jordi Hays?

  They're not being, they're, they're, again, they're just kind of calling out the category.

• 22:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:31Jordi Hays?

  In general about it, but they're implying that ads are gonna.

• 22:34John Coogan?

  It's fear mongering.

• 22:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:35John Coogan?

  It's fear mongering, that, that, that the, that the AI that you're used to being truthful and accurate and not trying to sell you some slop product.

• 22:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, they took like Mark Cuban's, like, main concerns.

• 22:47John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 22:47Jordi Hays?

  The things that he'd been like.

• 22:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 22:49Jordi Hays?

  Going on and on and on about, that everyone is like, hey dude, you can calm down, like, that's not how it's gonna work.

• 22:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 22:54Jordi Hays?

  And then they just like went with.

• 22:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:56Jordi Hays?

  His point of view.

• 22:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, which is a little out of date. I'm gonna tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business, lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And then I want to go to Tyler.

• 23:07Speaker 07

  Yeah, I, I was gonna say, like, it feels like the, the vibe war is like really heating up, right?

• 23:10John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 23:11Speaker 07

  Like, over the summer, there was talent war.

• 23:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 23:12Speaker 07

  It's kind of a cold war.

• 23:13John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 23:14Speaker 07

  Right? It's kind of like, okay, we got your guy, but on Twitter.

• 23:16John Coogan?

  And it was all leaks behind the scenes. Like, Mark Zuckerberg didn't even really give an interview during that whole time.

• 23:21Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 23:21John Coogan?

  And, and there was like that leaked memo from Mark Chen saying like, I feel like something has been stolen from us.

• 23:26Speaker 07

  Yeah, and now you're seeing at Davos.

• 23:27John Coogan?

  They were not coming out and saying, yeah.

• 23:29Speaker 07

  At Davos, like, Dario is like basically.

• 23:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:31Speaker 07

  I mean, he's still not saying OpenAI the words, I think.

• 23:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 23:34Speaker 07

  But he's saying like, companies.

• 23:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:36Speaker 07

  Are doing ads. There's only one company that's doing ads.

• 23:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's sort of like the anti, there, there's these, Ben Thompson has a great formulation of like, the anti YouTube alliance between like Spotify and Netflix. So like, once one company starts pulling away in a category, all the other companies sort of have a incentive to team up. And right now, it does feel like we're getting a little bit of an anti OpenAI alliance because everyone's like, well, they pulled away, and so, like, let's gang up on them. And they, you know, they, they did so much stuff on the supply side. They locked up all these different, all of these different supply chain partners, like, we gotta push back, we actually gotta team up. And that's where you see at Davos with, uh, the, the, the Buddy Cop movie emerging. Between Dario and Demis. Uh, we will see. And.

• 24:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Katie, uh, the CMO of OpenAI, fired back. She says ChatGPT has more free users in Texas than it has globally.

• 24:28John Coogan?

  Boom.

• 24:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, nothing like some stats. They should run that in the Super Bowl potentially. Let's watch some of these other Super Bowl ads, because I want to see this General Motors robot. What happened here?

• 24:41Jordi Hays?

  This was, this was.

• 24:43John Coogan?

  How'd you find this? 14 years ago.

• 24:44Jordi Hays?

  I was digging around.

• 24:45John Coogan?

  Is this for the worst Super Bowl ads or the best?

• 24:47Jordi Hays?

  I would say this is the worst ad I've ever seen.

• 24:49John Coogan?

  Okay, let's play, let's play General Motors robot.

• 24:53Jordi Hays?

  They've tried to scrub this from the web, but we're bringing it back.

• 24:56John Coogan?

  Let's play it. Let's see.

• 25:04Jordi Hays?

  Robot makes a mistake.

• 25:05John Coogan?

  General Motors make cars.

• 25:10John Coogan?

  You make Cadillacs.

• 25:13John Coogan?

  Okay, robot makes a mistake, leaves the factory.

• 25:15Jordi Hays?

  Gets fired.

• 25:17John Coogan?

  Whoever produces that is not, not going to do well in the singularity.

• 25:24John Coogan?

  You did not consider Rocco's Vaseline. Oh, sign holding.

• 25:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:29John Coogan?

  Cadillac going by.

• 25:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, now, now the robot's trying to get a new job.

• 25:34John Coogan?

  Okay, robot's working at McDonald's or something.

• 25:39John Coogan?

  Robot goes to the bridge.

• 25:41Jordi Hays?

  This is like, who approved this?

• 25:43John Coogan?

  Robot watches the Chevy's drive by, the General Motors cars, and jumps into the water. And then wakes up?

• 25:56Jordi Hays?

  Like, how do you run this ad?

• 25:58John Coogan?

  Whoa, so it's saying like, like, we care so much about the 100,000 mile warranty that like, we will end it all if it doesn't, if we don't stand by it.

• 26:06Jordi Hays?

  I think so. I'm still confused. Obviously, they got an insane amount of pushback from people saying like, hey, you're, you're, you're effectively advertising like the darkest thing ever.

• 26:16John Coogan?

  No, really sad, like ridiculous. Well, the bar has been lowered, so don't worry. Uh, let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from 1 GPU to hundreds of thousands.

• 26:31Jordi Hays?

  One more ad we'll play for you. This is a Bud Light commercial.

• 26:34John Coogan?

  Okay. I like Bud Light commercials. They usually deliver perfectly, flawlessly. I feel like Bud Light is very, uh, very steady. You can always count on them for pretty solid Super Bowl entertainment.

• 26:47Speaker 09

  Um, my king, this corn syrup was just delivered.

• 26:51Speaker 10

  That's not ours. We don't brew Bud Light with corn syrup.

• 26:54Speaker 09

  Miller Lite uses corn syrup.

• 26:55Jordi Hays?

  Let us take it to Miller Lite.

• 26:56John Coogan?

  By name, by name, okay.

• 26:58Jordi Hays?

  Because that's in the ingredient.

• 27:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:00Jordi Hays?

  So they can say it.

• 27:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:02Jordi Hays?

  Pause, pause for a second.

• 27:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:03Jordi Hays?

  So, so if Claude had named ChatGPT and done this, ChatGPT could have said like, we are suing you for defamation.

• 27:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:13Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 27:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:14Jordi Hays?

  And potentially.

• 27:14John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. Otherwise, you just gotta go with the category, brother. Anyway, let's, let's keep playing.

• 27:20Speaker 10

  Oh, brewing syrup to the light. We received your corn syrup by mistake.

• 27:25Andrew Reed?

  That's not our corn syrup. We received our shipment this morning.

• 27:28Speaker 10

  You're joking.

• 27:29Andrew Reed?

  Try the Coors Light Castle. They also use corn syrup.

• 27:37John Coogan?

  Dude, this is still like a little bit more playful and, and like classy. It doesn't go to like an edgy place.

• 27:43Jordi Hays?

  It's also not misleading because you can see on the ingredient list.

• 27:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 27:47Jordi Hays?

  That you can just look up and see they have corn syrup.

• 27:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:50Jordi Hays?

  Like my, my, my.

• 27:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, it'd be very different if it was like, we're delivering your ads to the ChatGPT castle. And it's like, oh, we already got our shipment of ads. Like, take that over to Google, AI search overviews, you know, like.

• 28:02Jordi Hays?

  Take it over to Grok.

• 28:03John Coogan?

  They should have just done, they should have done a direct rip of that, yeah.

• 28:07Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean incredibly, incredibly well played by Anthropic.

• 28:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. So you think it'll be effective?

• 28:12Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, I'm.

• 28:13John Coogan?

  To what degree will it be effective? That's my question.

• 28:15Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's, I'm not even sure they care about it being effective.

• 28:17John Coogan?

  Okay, it'll be, this is effective. Like, the fact that people are talking about it, the people that right now on the timeline, people are dunking and being like, oh, good point from Anthropic.

• 28:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:26John Coogan?

  Like, they won.

• 28:27Jordi Hays?

  Points in teapot and axe.

• 28:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 28:30Jordi Hays?

  And they're able to score some points in the real world and just make, like, senators are gonna see this.

• 28:36John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:37Jordi Hays?

  That's wrong.

• 28:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the whole like Senator, we sell ads thing in, in Facebook, like they stealing your data, that whole thing is like very like, it's still, it's still a meme, it's still, it's still a thing in the general populace, which is unfortunate because, um, advertising is the greatest business model ever and, uh, companies don't want your data. They want conversions. They want you to purchase. They want a black box where they can put money and then get customers and get money out. That's it. Like, I've run businesses that advertise many times and I don't wanna know anything about these customers. I just wanna know, they're ready to buy and they're down and, and send them the link.

• 29:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, the difference, the difference went between. Like a Bud, you know Bud Light going after some of their competitors is that they're actual competitors.

• 29:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, it's a very, very pure oligopoly. But maybe, I mean, doesn't that, doesn't that lend itself to like Anthropic is punching up because they're coming from behind? Because they're a smaller company? They have less market share in this particular market? It would be like, I don't know, uh, it'd be like if the Athletic Brewing guys ran an ad that was defaming all of the beer companies for all the bad things that beer can do to you. Right? Eh, something? I don't know. Anyway. Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.

• 30:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, according to app figures, Claude got around a million downloads in February, which was actually down from the month prior.

• 30:11John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 30:12Jordi Hays?

  So not a real player in consumer.

• 30:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll see what happens. I'm, I am going to be watching the app charts like a hawk. I want to know.

• 30:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the entire game, while we're at the game, we're just going to be glued. We're just going to be in the back.

• 30:27John Coogan?

  Probably.

• 30:28Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, I'm so excited for all the other, all the other tech ads in the Super Bowl. We got Mr. Beast.

• 30:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:36Jordi Hays?

  And Salesforce. We got it, we'll have a bunch more.

• 30:39John Coogan?

  That'll be good.

• 30:40Jordi Hays?

  And I'm looking forward to it.

• 30:41John Coogan?

  Anyway, we got a, uh, do we, are our guests here yet? We have, we have guests joining in just a few minutes, but in the meantime, we got to bring down the mallet from the heavens because we got to ring the gong for Walmart. They reached $1 trillion in market cap as e-commerce booms. Let's bring it down from the Lambda Cloud.

• 31:01Jordi Hays?

  Hit it.

• 31:10John Coogan?

  Let's understand what's going on with Walmart. They've been written off, Amazon was going to kill them, but seems like the retail behemoth is growing faster than ever. Let's see. The achievement places Walmart among a small but growing club of companies that have a 13-figure valuation. Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft. In trading, Walmart stock passed $125 a share. Shares closed up 2.9%, giving the company a market cap of $1.018 trillion. The stock has surged in recent months, fueled in part by Wall Street's enthusiasm for the growth of the company's online business, as well as investments in automation and AI technology aimed at improving efficiency.

• 31:53John Coogan?

  Sales have also ballooned as more shoppers have turned to Walmart for low prices, fast delivery, and broad selection. The change at Walmart over the past decade, culminating with its trillion-dollar valuation, "has been seen as a profound shift at a retail company that we've ever seen," said a retail analyst at Morgan Stanley, who studied Walmart since 2001. Wow, Simeon Gutman, overnight success here. 25 years studying Walmart. Walmart's growth, along with Amazon's, creates challenges for competitors, he said. Meanwhile, Bentonville, Arkansas-based company will have to navigate the ascension of a new chief, as longtime executive John Ferner took the helm this month. Most of the 11 companies that at any point reached 1 trillion are technology-focused,

• 32:35John Coogan?

  even though Berkshire Hathaway is in there, and Eli Lilly is in there as well. A decade ago, some Walmart investors didn't see the company's success as a sure thing. Rival Amazon was growing fast, and the then-new Walmart CEO Doug McMillan was investing billions to raise worker pay, clean up stores, and grow online. Investors wanted to see whether the investments would pay off. Walmart's market value was $212 billion at the end of 2016. Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway famously sold a large portion of its longtime stake that year and fully exited the position by 2018. Retail is changing so much, I don't think I understand it as well as I need to, Buffett said during a call with the CEO about the Berkshire stock sale.

• 33:19John Coogan?

  He said, I don't, I don't understand the, the change. What will e-commerce do to your business? Buffett offered, Buffett offered kind words about Walmart's potential to succeed, but the snub was motivating for company executives at the time. Walmart's sales have since soared propelled by e-commerce, then the pandemic, followed by shoppers' more recent hunt for lower prices amid inflation. Companies, companies' investments played a big part. Walmart made an effort to offer more items that appeal to higher income shoppers such as trendy small appliances and store brand foods. The company accelerated home delivery capabilities and can now deliver orders the same day to 95% of US households. So they've like fully responded to Amazon Prime, which was the main differentiator for a long time.

• 34:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Youssef in the LinkedIn chat says Walmart is just super secretive about its capabilities. He's a previously was over at Walmart.

• 34:09John Coogan?

  Thanks for leaking it to us.

• 34:10Jordi Hays?

  Socks on X says, nobody talks about Walmart much in the age of tech giants, but if Sam Walton's fortune hadn't been split up, it would still be a fair bit greater than even Elon's and they're still the largest.

• 34:19John Coogan?

  That was true back then. He posted this six months ago. I think Elon's way above this now, but it is interesting how, how successful Walmart.

• 34:25Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, Jim Walton, Rob and Alice all are over in the $100 billion.

• 34:30John Coogan?

  I mean, a lot of this, a lot of this growth has to be because of the rebrand. We got to talk about the Walmart rebrand. You've seen this?

• 34:36Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 34:37John Coogan?

  Okay, let's pull, let's pull up the graphic and see.

• 34:38Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 34:39John Coogan?

  That's probably stunning.

• 34:41Jordi Hays?

  Stunning and brave.

• 34:42John Coogan?

  That probably adds 600 billion to the market cap, right? I mean.

• 34:46Jordi Hays?

  Easily, easily.

• 34:47John Coogan?

  They really just did a, a slightly bluer, slightly bluer background and they called it a day.

• 34:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, without further ado.

• 34:54John Coogan?

  Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real and stay connected to how teams build, create, code back prototypes and apps fast. And that's right, we have Marty from 11 Lives, the man of the hour. How are you doing?

• 35:09Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 35:10Mati Staniszewski?

  John, Jordy, great to see you again.

• 35:12John Coogan?

  You look fantastic. This cover is iconic. I mean, props to you, but also the photographer on this, like, perfect lighting. I've always been a fan of Forbes Photography.

• 35:22Jordi Hays?

  It's so nice to see somebody just beaming, too. Just having a good time. Usually, people are on the cover acting all serious, mysterious, you know. I like to see you.

• 35:31Mati Staniszewski?

  We are having a good time at 11 Labs. It's a good, good, good, good and happy moment building at the current age and everything is changing with AI. We have a chance of building at the frontier of that change. But a little bit surreal to see the cover in a zoomed-in picture. So it's always a tip of the iceberg and reflection of the entire team. So, great, great to see it.

• 35:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's amazing. How did the negotiation go with this current round? I'm sure you had a sort of, your interest was, you know, coming in at 11. I'm sure that gave you, gave some leverage.

• 36:04John Coogan?

  Couldn't do 10.9?

• 36:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:06Mati Staniszewski?

  This was, in this round, the valuation was known far before the round even started with our aspirations from the early days to get that. And of course, just surreal to be able to announce today that we've raised 500 million, so it is the 11 billion dollar valuation.

• 36:25Jordi Hays?

  The next leg up will be tough getting to 11 trillion, but we believe.

• 36:35Mati Staniszewski?

  We have it all planned. It's going to be 11 squared next, 121 billion as the next proxy of valuation. But this funding is great. We think this is what we need to get and transform how we interact with technology. Sequoia is leading the round. Andrew is joining the board. A16Z is quadrupling down. Iconic is tripling down. And alongside the round, as always, we are releasing incredible updates to our voice agents to make them more expressive, quicker, lower latency, so people, companies can build even better experiences and customer experience, internal enablement, and sales. So.

• 37:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we were just laughing, we were just laughing, we were watching some of the new Super Bowl ads from Anthropic, and they intentionally put a bit of lag in there when in the model.

• 37:19John Coogan?

  That's your opportunity, seriously.

• 37:20Jordi Hays?

  And that's the opportunity. It's like reducing that latency to human or even superhuman.

• 37:27John Coogan?

  What has the

• 37:28Mati Staniszewski?

  Hundred percent.

• 37:28John Coogan?

  What's been the biggest driver of growth? Just, uh, just more growth on the core products, new products. What's, uh, walk me through sort of how I would visualize the growth chart that went in the, in the lead slide of this deck.

• 37:43Mati Staniszewski?

  So we started in 2022. The first model was text to speech. And then we continued expanding with incredible researchers in the team, still learning speech to text with the best transcription model. Eleven music with the highest quality music model, productions with Dabbing. But the real innovation that we brought in 2025 was agents and conversational models. So helping enterprises build that, uh, customer experience work, internal enablement. And in 2025, we got to 330 million in ARR at the end of the year, powered by work of Deutsche Telekom.

• 38:17Mati Staniszewski?

  Amazing. Deutsche Telekom customer support, square delivery row with training riders and onboarding them into the ecosystem better, or calling restaurants to capture what's happening with the menu, what's happening with the opening hours, um, all the way through to Revolut, working with us across four million of their users in Europe to be able to, uh, to bring that level of customer care that frequently wasn't possible. Um, and we are seeing that, I think, something that wasn't possible just a year prior. You have a real time voice agent interactions. Jordi, you were mentioning Anthropic. We think all companies in the future will want to optimize that latency, will want to optimize that reliability so they can interact with that, with that, with that, with their audience, with their customers.

• 39:02Mati Staniszewski?

  Um, and whether that's in customer care, whether it is devices around us, hopefully some of the devices you have will be able to speak back to you and converse with you as the guys come in, all the way through to the, to the future robots. And, um, and that enterprise adoption over last year has been tremendous. We grew to 330 million and it took us 20 months to get to first 100 million in ARR, 10 months to get to 200, and five months to get to 330. So hopefully that continues and it's a good proxy of the value that we can, we can deliver.

• 39:31John Coogan?

  Incredible.

• 39:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, well, we have a special guest.

• 39:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:34Jordi Hays?

  We should bring him in.

• 39:34John Coogan?

  Let's bring in Andrew Reed from Sequoia, new board member.

• 39:37Jordi Hays?

  New board member alert.

• 39:38John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 39:39Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 39:40Andrew Reed?

  Hey guys.

• 39:40John Coogan?

  Hey, good to see you.

• 39:42Andrew Reed?

  Good seeing you. I was enjoying when you were bringing on Matty. And I've realized that's very important for a Polish entrepreneur to become a one-name entrepreneur. Because no one wants to go for the last name. And you're not brave enough to do it either.

• 39:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, much easier when you're just a reader. So talk to us about like the surface area of the business now. There was someone in the chat saying that they were just using Eleven Reader last night. Is that more of like a demo and a showcase of the product? Or do you see that as growing into its own sort of consumer AI application?

• 40:23Mati Staniszewski?

  Yeah, and first of all, great to see you here, Andrew. Welcome to the board. Welcome to Eleven Labs. After 10 and a half years knowing each other, it's going to be a great fun after serving on the board together.

• 40:32John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that's right.

• 40:33Mati Staniszewski?

  It's great to have you with us. And it was the last time we saw you guys, which is great. So it's a full circle, full circle moment. But you know, to your question, as we think about our business, we have the foundational research layer where we do everything across audio. Whether it's text to speech, speech to text, whether that's the expressive narration, expressive voiceovers, the music work. And on top of that work, we have the agents work that we spoke about, but also the creative use cases. And really, there is a great example of that, of how we can let our community create the narrations, create audiobooks, and then serve them in an easier way. You know what's crazy is that today, Audible will block AI audiobooks.

• 41:11Mati Staniszewski?

  The only platform that allows you to serve the content on Audible is only the Amazon-created AI content. So we need to find an alternative for the community to serve that. And similarly, happily, I have a partnership with Spotify to allow our users to bring that. And we have a lot of users. It's 5 million users doing. Doing that work.

• 41:32John Coogan?

  There you go. Andrew, how are you processing the SaaS apocalypse, the turmoil in the markets? Is this like, hey, you know, 11 Labs needs a war chest, battening down the hatches, R I P good times? Or is this something else that, you know, you don't really need to worry about who's getting beat up in the public markets because you're the reason why they're getting beat up?

• 41:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, I go back to what Jason Lemkin was saying. He was bringing up 11 Labs as an example last week because he said he has a lot of portfolio companies and they're like, we're AI native, we're AI native. And he's like, show me the numbers. 11 Labs is AI native and they're adding a hundred million dollars in new ARR every few months. So like, that's what it looks like. That's what real pull from the market looks like.

• 42:14John Coogan?

  But yeah, Andrew, what do you see in the market?

• 42:17Andrew Reed?

  Yeah, I think the, you know, like the scorpion and the frog, the voting machine will be a voting machine. And I think in the public markets with software, there is a lot of baby being thrown out with the bathwater. And I think as far as I can tell, the only prerequisite for being an AI native company is being a private company. And I'll leave that there. I do think what really matters is our business is accelerating as these models are getting better. And are they delivering value in a way that's like differentiated and unique? And we are seeing companies like 11 that are growing faster with better economics, better

• 42:58Andrew Reed?

  customer references, and as faster deployment than anything else we've ever seen. Like I've, going back to when I first met Marty, 2023, I remember when I first looked at 11, it was not obvious like what kind of company this is. Is it a, is it a consumer company? Is it an enterprise company? Is it a foundation model lab? Is it an application company? And it turns out it was all of those things. And I think for like these truly like the true AI winners.

• 43:34Andrew Reed?

  It's a, you know, like the phrase going from strength, strength to strength. It's like everywhere 11 has been competing. They have just been dominating and you're like, shame on me for not investing a zillion dollars three years ago. Fortunately, we were lucky to invest a little bit and I got to know Marty. But yeah, these like the new wave of these AI companies are just incredible.

• 43:57John Coogan?

  Can you both talk about a little, like, take me through more of that focus? Because you're saying, you know, 11 is a, is a research lab and an enterprise company. And there's consumer product and, but there's still a focus on audio, still focus on voice. And we've seen, you know, the, a lot of the good vibes that are coming around. Anthropic is like they're focused on code. You know, we've seen this like mid journey focused on images and you get to this opinionated thing. Is that where you're narrowing or, or do you see yourself kind of expanding out on all surface areas over time?

• 44:31Mati Staniszewski?

  Right. And it's, it's true. Like as we, as we started the company, the one connective tissue from model through platform to application is audio and voice. We know that we can create the best models. We know we can serve them, build for the users, understand those use cases and then bring them for production. But of course, to get most of voice frequently will stretch from other sister fields to bring those integrations into default. With agents example, you need the knowledge base to really integrate. You need telephony systems to make sure the agents interact in WhatsApp or can call the phone numbers. You need the evaluation, testing and monitoring to really be able to understand that. So as we think about this work, voice, audio is our superpower. That's the one connective tissue across all those domains.

• 45:14Mati Staniszewski?

  But if we can bring from other fields and elevate the entire voice experience, whether it's in voice agents, whether it's in a voice, a creative space, I will happily do that.

• 45:26Jordi Hays?

  Where are you frustrated with slow adoption? Like where is there a lot of potential that where companies are not kind of like they haven't fully processed that that the models are advanced to the level that they have and you guys have this sort of feature set. On a personal level as a user, there's still a bunch of different like media subscriptions that I have that have just like really poor like audio functionality. It's like if you publish an article, you should immediately have like, you know, a mini podcast equivalent that I can listen to in real time. It shouldn't be like this doesn't seem like a hard problem anymore. But I'm sure you're seeing that kind of in other categories too, where you want industries to wake up and say like, hey, voice, the voice is here. You should be implementing it immediately.

• 46:13Mati Staniszewski?

  Yeah, I can go quick, quick on first on things that we believe in and Andrew is helping us push us to think about that space. The one audio will be default and all the content, stories, knowledge that's available. It will be global. You will have all the languages, all the voices represented and voice will be the interface of technology around us. The big opportunity to your project already will be in the media entertainment space that we haven't seen. On the agent side, today, a lot of the use cases are reactive supportive, but we'll see that proactive side where you have an AI assistant that can help you for the entirety of that journey. And as we work with Andrew, we frequently think of like, what's that connective tissue between research and product? How we can combine that experience together to deliver that?

• 46:57Mati Staniszewski?

  Andrew, I'm curious what you think. We spoke a little bit about this, but what's top of all your mind for the next year?

• 47:02Andrew Reed?

  Yeah. Well, I think at a high level, it's very hard to find like markets where voice is not taking off. And I think I'm old enough to have lived through the initial wave of like chatbot voice agent companies in the kind of 2015 to 2019 era. And for those companies, it was, you know, enterprise vendors foisting.

• 47:25Andrew Reed?

  Voicing audio upon consumers and consumers, you know, asking for a real agent over and over and over again, like that was sort of.

• 47:33Jordi Hays?

  Talk to a human, talk to a human.

• 47:37Andrew Reed?

  You know, like the customer research that like created, you know, like voice agents was people asking for agents over and over and over again. I think the difference now is, if you look across like basically every sector, people like interfacing with technology through voice and audio, like it's, it's, there's a lot of end customer pull. I do think there's a big gap between, you know, what people expect the voice agents to be able to do and how they communicate with them versus what they're actually capable of.

• 48:07Andrew Reed?

  Like, I think humans are very adaptable and I think once everyone used chat GPT and realized, you know, what the chatbots can do, people started, you know, started interacting with text boxes on the internet very differently. I think with voice agents, still, like people think they're in a phone tree and are trying to talk to it like a phone tree, when in reality, it's this magical interface that overlaps all of the company's capabilities and it allows you to express yourself and receive information back in a brand new communication style and a brand new interface. I think once people realize what these agents are capable of, my guess is the way people interact with their institutions, with their governments, with their, you know, the companies that they buy services and goods from is going to change very quickly.

• 48:51Andrew Reed?

  And I do think it's going to take like the leading, the leading companies in this space to show people what's possible and then the whole thing's going to flip.

• 48:58Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 48:59Mati Staniszewski?

  And you know, on the, on the last one, just to add a quick example, we've seen that we work with the government of Ukraine on exactly that. And one incredible case was they are creating an effective voice agent for their citizen support where you can call and ask about the services. And what's just transpiring is that the moment you can call in and you frequently just don't know where to find information, if you can just speak through and let the agent navigate through to the right help, it just opened up so many more programs that were just not available, whether that was in the, how do I travel, what's happening around the country, how do I apply for certain, certain help, just opens up a completely. New ways of you exploring that information altogether.

• 49:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm excited about seeing some new UI patterns. Like, I feel like the walkie talkie is potentially like a better even comp than like the phone call. Because if I'm like using a product and I have a question, I don't really want to like place a phone call necessarily, even if it's instant and quick and I know like an agent, you know, an AI agent will like pick, effectively pick up the call immediately. You can imagine like, hey, how like where, what's the best document for like this part to understand this part of the organization? It can like pull it up. And it's like having, having these kind of new UI patterns, I think will be very cool.

• 50:12John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on the round. Thank you so much for taking the time to stop by and chat with us.

• 50:17Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff, guys.

• 50:17John Coogan?

  Catch up with you guys soon.

• 50:18Jordi Hays?

  Looking forward to the next one.

• 50:20John Coogan?

  Have a good rest.

• 50:20Mati Staniszewski?

  Thank you so much for having us. Congrats on that new Super Bowl app.

• 50:22John Coogan?

  Thank you. Very excited.

• 50:24Jordi Hays?

  Congrats to you, to you both.

• 50:25John Coogan?

  Thank you for supporting us. We appreciate it.

• 50:28Mati Staniszewski?

  Thank you for having us.

• 50:29Andrew Reed?

  Just make sure that, make sure the ad's available in Polish, too.

• 50:32John Coogan?

  We will. We'll do a translation.

• 50:34Jordi Hays?

  Help us out. Help us out, man.

• 50:35John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Goodbye. Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. Let's go over to Gastown, what I wrote about in today's newsletter. And I want to pull up this very simple to understand graphic. As soon as you see this, Jordi, you will understand how Gastown works.

• 50:58Jordi Hays?

  I get it.

• 50:58John Coogan?

  Said, Robert says Gastown is the modern day Temple OS. You have to be on the spectrum to design something this insane. And it does have a lot of layers of abstraction. I'll try and take you through it a little bit. Basically, my, my, my, my theory is like, there's a lot of excitement about this project. You might already be familiar with Gastown. But the broader category is called orchestration, how you orchestrate a whole bunch of different agents. And Steve Yegi wrote a great breakdown of his new Mad Max themed orchestrator. It's, he says it's a new take on the IDE. It's called Gastown. He dropped it on January 1st on New Year's Day, so he has been locked in. He says that he's like having trouble sleeping because he's so obsessed with this thing. He's, he's really pushing a ton of code.

• 51:44John Coogan?

  And now he's getting one call per day from VCs, asking to invest, apparently. And so it's basically a continuation of the developer experience and he maps out how this evolved. So you know, you used to write code in a text file, save it, execute it in a terminal. Then we got basic IDEs with some code completion, links to file systems, REPLs, etc. LLM chat windows work their way into the IDE eventually with a coding agent asking you for permission to run tools, run code. Once models got better, developers trusted them more and the IDE sort of melts away and you're basically just interacting with the agent. So Karpathy has put it, he says, "Your code writing skill atrophies, but your code reading skill improves because you're prompting and then you're just reading the

• 52:29John Coogan?

  review and you're saying, okay, yeah, this is going to do what I think it's going to do. We'll test it." And so the most popular workflow currently is probably a single agent CLI. So Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI are the most popular. They all have web and desktop frontends now, but it's sort of too soon to tell how fast those will get adopted. And we can move on from this slide. So Gastown is like way, way more aggressive going fall into vibe coding. So Steve, in his post, just all caps says, "You will die if you don't know what you're doing." It's like very risky. The codebase is only weeks old.

• 53:10John Coogan?

  Maybe it's over a month now. It's 100% vibe coded. He's never seen the code and it's 225,000 lines of go. Like not a very simple...

• 53:21Speaker 07

  Yeah. He said you should only be using it if you're already at the stage where you're using 10+ agents. Otherwise, like you will not be able to use it.

• 53:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So, but, so there's tens of thousands of people using this. Some folks have dozens of accounts with the big labs because they're maxing out their subscriptions. They're like, "I got the 200 a month plan over here. I ran out of rate limit, so I got another one. I got another one." Some of them get flagged for fraud. Like it is boom time in Gastown. And bills run into thousands of dollars per month and you're getting close to having basically a full-time software engineer salary on the line. Despite all the warnings, Steve has created a delightful little metaphorical taxonomy for how to explain how things work. The town is your HQ. This allows you to work on multiple projects. The projects are called rigs.

• 54:10John Coogan?

  And then you sort of play, I guess that's the word, as the overseer, you're the boss. But you also have a mayor who reports to you, like a chief of staff. That's an agent that you talk to. And the mayor kicks off work convoys to different agents. They're called like pole cats. These are ephemeral agents that go and do like one little thing and then they write code. That code lands in a merge queue, but then you have another role, another agent called a witness that oversees all the pole cats to help them get unstuck. And then there's a deacon that goes around patrols the town, finds stuff that's like, needs to be taken out or deleted. There's dogs that do maintenance, like cleaning up code branches that have gone stale. There's a crew that are specific to a particular project and those are longer lived than pole cats.

• 54:53John Coogan?

  So if you have like back and back and forth design work, you'll create a member of the crew who he says you'll love and you'll like develop a relationship with. And you'll be updating their agent workflow and their their skills so that they can, so that, you know, days later, you can go back to the same agent about how you're architecting the app. And it has all the context, whereas the pole cats are just off doing one little implementation at a time. And so there's a bunch of different roles. It's all, it's a lot. It's very cool. And it feels like a glimpse of what's coming this year. You still have to have an idea of what to build. So, you know, we talked to, I've searched around for like, what are people actually building with this? And a lot of people are like, well, I re-implemented this open source library in Rust.

• 55:37John Coogan?

  It's like, it's probably valuable, but that's not exactly like the breakthrough one billion dollar individual solo developer project just yet. Like you still gotta have a genius idea, but then you can build it. And, uh, and you still have to have a really good ability to manage agents and understand when things are going off the rails. But the rough edges are getting sanded down like as we speak. Orchestrators, it feels like these are the next, it's the next easy unhobbling that will cause another doubling in the meter, software engineering time horizon benchmark. If you remember that benchmark for how long a software engineering task can run without going crazy. It used to be a couple of minutes, then it became a couple of hours.

• 56:17John Coogan?

  Like if you set up your gas town appropriately, you could potentially do weeks of software engineering work.

• 56:25John Coogan?

  autonomously. Do you have more context on the meter eval? I mean,

• 56:28Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, it's

• 56:29John Coogan?

  meter only does LLMs.

• 56:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's not the actual model running for like four hours.

• 56:33John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 56:33Speaker 07

  It can do a task that takes people four hours.

• 56:36John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. So now I think you won't just be able to slot Gastown into the meter eval because meter has like Opus 4.5, Codex 5.2, Gemini 3 Pro. And so you can't really just slot it in. They might need a new category or something for orchestrators. But you could imagine getting a week's worth of software engineering work done with sort of a single prompt or a single setup.

• 56:59Speaker 07

  Yeah, it feels very similar to, you know, you see where people talk about like their custom Vim configurations.

• 57:04John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 57:04Speaker 07

  They spend like hours working on these things.

• 57:05John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 57:06Speaker 07

  I've seen a ton of people on Twitter like build their own like orchestrator. I mean, this is like very complex and

• 57:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally. Yeah, no, no. A lot of people are already building these orchestrators themselves. Gastown is just one that's open source, but a lot of people are building these like various harnesses. And so orchestration and delegation, they make sense even in a world where models are improving in capability and declining in cost. Like a stock LLM just cannot spin up multiple instances of itself if you give it a huge task. So imagine you're just like categorize every receipt in my company has ever processed. Like an LLM can do it, but it's just going to take a long time. You should use 50 instances of LLMs and you have to write some code for that. An agent should be able to do that. That's what you're

• 57:50John Coogan?

  sort of getting with this. And so, but there's obviously still a bunch of kinks to work out in 2026. It's a very interesting paradigm to me. It's also sort of in hindsight obvious that we'd get here.

• 58:04John Coogan?

  And I think we'll see all the major AI labs do something in this space. I don't know if that means launching new products, but they need to deliver on this experience in a more polished package soon. I also expect a number of startups to try and own the category or carve out sub niches. You know, Gastown 4, Legal or something like that will probably be something we hear a pitch for at some point. And in the end, the multi-agent experience might be completely abstracted to certain end-users. Like, most people using chat apps don't care about the details of a mixture of experts' model. They just want a good answer, and they want the model to be good at math and poetry and writing and research and history and all these things. And MOE

• 58:44John Coogan?

  models succeed at that, but it's buried below the fold. And so even auto routing between different models, I don't think a lot of people care about that if they're just in the consumer world. And I think that this will be more and more abstracted. So, all this will make 2026 more exciting than ever. You have Anthropic and OpenAI fighting over the vibe wars at the Super Bowl. You got Elon and Sam under oath in an Oakland courthouse, and another thousand startups just got funded to make something people want. And so...

• 59:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so basically, if you're working on AI agents and you just pivoted to building a harness, pivot to...

• 59:16John Coogan?

  Orchestration.

• 59:17Jordi Hays?

  Orchestration.

• 59:18John Coogan?

  It does feel like it might be like the next hot keyword that we're seeing. Orchestration, market map orchestration, you know, all sorts of stuff. Anyway, Vanta, automated compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And, yeah, people are having fun with Gastown. Will Brown got nerd-sniped into finally reading the original Gastown post, and wow, it's beautiful and terrifying and hilarious and probably a glimpse of the future that will feel normal in six months. I couldn't agree more. Steve Yegi is a great writer, just very, very, very interesting to read all of what he writes. And he talks about his neighbor's squirrel in a very fun way and how chubby the squirrel is.

• 59:56Jordi Hays?

  Where his neighbor's squirrel?

• 59:57John Coogan?

  His ADT, he has an 82-year-old neighbor who feeds his local squirrel against the city ordinance, but he's 82, so he's like, what are you gonna do to me? And then he uses this, like, fat squirrel as an analogy for the Gastown that he's building. It's fascinating. And then, people are having fun with this. tetso.ccp says, "Last month, I was generating 15,000 lines of codes per day with Claude Code. Once I discovered the Ralph Wiggum loop, my productivity shot up to 10x. This week, I finally set up Gastown, and I'm generating 1 million lines of code per day. At this rate, I'm mere days away from completing my Minesweeper clone." And, like, there is something here, people.

• 1:00:36John Coogan?

  You know, you gotta have, you gotta know what to build. You gotta have a good idea.

• 1:00:40Jordi Hays?

  There's, there's gonna be a lot of people spending

• 1:00:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:42Jordi Hays?

  15 grand to recreate a game that's 60 bucks.

• 1:00:45John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. But if it has me in the game, maybe I'll play it. Who knows? Anyway. Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. And without further ado,

• 1:00:58Jordi Hays?

  Further ado.

• 1:00:58John Coogan?

  Our first in-person guest of the day, Gergay, correct? Did I say that correctly? The pragmatic engineer, welcome. Grab a seat, please, sit down. And first time on the show, please give us an introduction.

• 1:01:12Speaker 10

  Yeah, good, good to see you in person. In person, this place is even, even better than on, on, on the show.

• 1:01:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:18Speaker 10

  Yeah, so just flew in from Amsterdam and I got you guys some, some special stuff.

• 1:01:22John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:01:23Speaker 10

  This is stuff that they don't know about in the Netherlands. It's called Crowdnoten.

• 1:01:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:01:27Speaker 10

  And it's best kept secret in Netherlands.

• 1:01:28John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:01:29Jordi Hays?

  Little mini cookies.

• 1:01:30Speaker 10

  Mini cinnamon cookies. Before Christmas, the whole city sells this all the time. But as per, as per the Dutch, you can only have it before Christmas. So there's this one shop that sells it year round. Locals hate it.

• 1:01:41Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 1:01:41Speaker 10

  It's kind of unknown, but I, I, I think it'll be all right. And yeah, just some pragmatic engineer stickers for you guys.

• 1:01:47John Coogan?

  Thank you. And how, how do you, how do you introduce the pragmatic engineer these days?

• 1:01:51Speaker 10

  I, I

• 1:01:51John Coogan?

  Purely Substack writer, a media company. What do you like?

• 1:01:54Speaker 10

  I, I like to say that I'm, I'm a software engineer who, who has been a software engineer for like 15 or so years. I was a manager as well.

• 1:02:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:02Speaker 10

  And then I, I just started writing for software engineers.

• 1:02:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:06Speaker 10

  I didn't think there would be any demand for this. I don't think anyone thought there would be any demand for this. And, and turns out there is.

• 1:02:12John Coogan?

  There is demand.

• 1:02:12Speaker 10

  There was a ton of demand for, for people writing about just like for, for me, writing about in-depth topics that I don't write for beginners. I write for experienced folks talking about, I started talking about stuff like how did Uber create platform teams? Like, you know, tech depth, how do you deal with that stuff? And people were paying attention, subscribing, paying. So it surprised me the most.

• 1:02:32John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:02:32Jordi Hays?

  Well, and I feel like timing, timing wise, what better time to be writing about software engineering than right now?

• 1:02:40Speaker 10

  It's a crazy time. Like I, I've been in industry for about, you know, like 20 ish years, depending on how you count it. And I'm now luckily been able to talk with people who've been or are still alive, like Grady Buch, who is a legend, who had been around since closer to the beginning of it. And I don't think there's ever been a time like, I remember when I was working, you know, I was a software engineer, like, we were, we loved our jobs and I think we still do, but what we were doing is kind of automating other people's jobs. Like, like our customer support, we were saying how many savings we had, but we, we kind of took this for granted. And there's a bit of existential crisis now with, with devs, because this is the first time in history where the stuff that we build could potentially automate our work. And, and there.

• 1:03:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe more software engineers used to have the luxury of like, I'm not gonna, I'm just gonna do my work. I don't need to really pay attention to what's going on and the big changes that are happening. And now it's like, oh, I should really pay attention, just so I stay, stay on the edge. And, and, because if you're not getting efficiency gains right now, I think you will be left behind. That feel, that feels obvious.

• 1:03:43John Coogan?

  How wide is the spread of, of experiences that folks in your audience share with you? Because I imagine that there are some folks out there saying like, I'm, I'm using Gastown and agents and I'm vibe coding, I'm doing everything and my job has completely changed. And then I imagine that there's some people that are like, it's kind of business as usual at my company.

• 1:04:02Speaker 10

  So interesting enough, you, you would think that, so first of all, like the, the people who are using the agents and doing all this cool stuff and being on the cutting edge, and you guys shut off a gas out on Stevie, I was just hanging out with him yesterday. Yeah, we were together at this place called the Future of Software Engineering Summit. So 25 years ago, there was the Agile Manifesto that back in 2001, it kind of shook the industry because it said like, talk to customers, iterate fast. It was like four simple things.

• 1:04:28John Coogan?

  Sort of anti waterfall.

• 1:04:28Speaker 10

  Anti waterfall. And there were a bunch of people who gathered at this resort in Utah, and you know, they came up with it. And 25 years later, Martin Fowler, one of the Agile Manifesto founders, who organized your retreat with like, a bunch of thinkers of, of today. And we went there and we gathered and a lot of, about half the people were like more traditional companies. Think about like John Deere, 200 year old company. Enterprises, Cisco, etc. And then some of them for startups. And the crazy thing was that, like, I was thinking, you know, there will be business as usual. No, like, this is the first time I'm seeing a technology where even in the kind of most old school companies, they're using it, they're trying it, they know that they need to catch up. And funny enough, some of those old school companies are a little bit ahead of like, I don't know,

• 1:05:11Speaker 10

  some mid-level tech companies because they kind of have processes to like approve vendors and all that. They've been used to this stuff. Yeah. So like, I don't see anyone who's, who's not. Everyone's changed. Impacted by it, but there are some people who are on the cutting edge and, you know, using Gastsound and, and playing with Claude, etc. I think they're still the minority, but the gap used to be massive. It used to be like years or something, even a decade behind.

• 1:05:33Jordi Hays?

  Steve, Steve, you put him in the same kind of camp as Peter from Open Claw and that like just loves the craft and just loves experimenting and it's like non-commercial. Because it's just like, we have this interesting dynamic right now where you have these like hyper, hyper, hyper-commercial labs, like Anthropics, which is like idealistic, but like very focused on like, let's make as much money as we possibly can from generating code. And then you have the Peters of the world and maybe the Steves of the world that are just in it for the love of the game.

• 1:06:03Speaker 10

  Yeah, so I was hanging out with Peter two weeks ago. Right when Claude was starting to blow up and then my podcast went out when it was at peak popularity. People thought I was talking with him that same day, but I would say Peter is way more obsessed than Steve. Like, when I met him for two weeks, I was the first human that he met.

• 1:06:23Speaker 10

  That guy is pulling it, but he's very clear that it's obsessive. But the thing that both him and Steve share, so first of all, both of them are, I think they're a little bit like on the kind of like FU category in terms of like, they're doing what they want to do. Yep. And they want to build. Yeah, yeah, pretty much. However.

• 1:06:41Speaker 10

  One thing that they both share, and Steve was telling me this, I was asking, how are you, man? Because I saw him like about a year ago last time, and he looked a little bit more pale. And he said, like, dude, like, we need to talk about something that is really getting to us like early adopters. This thing is like a vampire. It drains you out. You have trouble sleeping. Like, a lot of people who are in this like multiple agents mode, they're napping during the day. You know, there's an email list, the kind of secret AI email list with these folks, and they share this stuff. And so both of them are seeing, and Peter was telling me the same thing. It just really is draining. This might be, maybe this will pass. But back to your question, like, yeah, I think they're both, they're just building for the fun of it. Both of them are being chased by crazy investors, like crazy amounts. And they're, at least for now, saying no. Same with Steve.

• 1:07:26Speaker 10

  And I love it. I feel we're finally back.

• 1:07:28Jordi Hays?

  It's so refreshing.

• 1:07:30Speaker 10

  This, the last time I remember, it was like 90s or 2000 when there was a hacker culture. And this is it.

• 1:07:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, you go back to like the Linux folks and like there's so many open source folks who did say no to the business community and wound up building great. Yeah, please, this one's empty, but we can add that one. So, so, yeah, but it does feel like a return because while the mobile platforms were so closed down, there was less opportunity. And now we're sort of migrating back to desktop and, you know, open source.

• 1:08:00Speaker 10

  And I think both what Peter and Steve are doing, the reason it resonates so much, they're doing the stuff that the big guys will not do because it's too risky. You know, Peter, like Claude took off because he himself connected to all these things. And of course, it's risky and security risk, he knows that. But like, and I think one of his.

• 1:08:16Jordi Hays?

  Read the disclosures.

• 1:08:17Speaker 10

  Read the disclosure, but no one would do this because it's not ready.

• 1:08:20Jordi Hays?

  Steve. Also, the other labs would build it, but they wouldn't make it. You wouldn't be able to use multiple models. They would be like, it would be pretty kind of clamped down.

• 1:08:29Speaker 10

  Yeah. And Steve was telling me that what he did with Gastown, like, so both Steve and Peter are amazing software engineers. They have built incredible systems. Steve's had built a lot of Google's internal systems. He's been at Grag, at Amazon. Peter, you know, built, if you see a PDF on the web or online, it's probably his business. That, seriously, it's so big.

• 1:08:49Speaker 10

  And Steve said that the reason he built Gastown is not because he believes that Gastown will work. It's crazy. You guys have the mayor, the mayor, the pole cats, all that. It's a mess. The reason he did it is he wants to push the boundaries and kind of like wake people up that something will be coming. It's not going to be Gastown. This is just a start. And he said to me that he feels that he succeeded because so there like Steve is, I think Steve is a lot more provocative.

• 1:09:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:09:13Speaker 10

  Peter is a lot more like, I'm just gonna build whatever I want to build.

• 1:09:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. How have you been reacting to Steve's position on like the death of the junior programmer? The revenge of the junior programmer? Like what advice do you have for young people that are joining the software engineering community today?

• 1:09:29Speaker 10

  I, my position changes, changes so fast.

• 1:09:34John Coogan?

  Week to week.

• 1:09:35Speaker 10

  I used to be really, really worried about junior folks, like, you know, because you look at it like it's just, it's just been like such a bad like five years. Covid started, no one started, like I was at Uber when Covid started, we just stopped hiring, well, we still hired a we were paying people a lot more after we rebounded, but we didn't hire junior people because you didn't want to onboard them remote. And it's difficult and we didn't know how to. And then when remote was returning, AI started, and of course now there's a thing like, why would you hire a junior when a senior can like pair with an AI?

• 1:10:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:10:02Speaker 10

  Now, on the other hand, what I'm seeing, so it's just really hard to get a job. But when I think back of when I started, like my first job was around the financial crisis, it was just really hard to get a job.

• 1:10:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:10Speaker 10

  I didn't realize at the time, but.

• 1:10:12John Coogan?

  And there's so much else, there's so many other things going on, like there's Ukraine and like there's, there's all this geopolitical stuff and the economy, what's the dollar and the gold doing? And business leaders are not, we think of them as only focused on AI in terms of hiring, but there's a million other things going on in the economy.

• 1:10:26Speaker 10

  Yeah, but when I started out, like I remember like a lot of people in my, in my class, university class, they just dropped out, they never became software engineers. But I never thought of it that I would be given a job. I knew I needed to earn it. So what I did is I did a bunch of projects on the side, I entered competitions, I built a bunch of things. And honestly, I was probably like a more impressive, and I think like, first of all, like we don't need, I'm not gonna like, when I remember this, I'm not gonna feel sorry for this generation. Because I did a study with like Gen Z, like I talked with a bunch of like, you know, Gen Z or young folks, and some of them are like friggin amazing. It'll be Android, so, so the kids are gonna be fine. That's one.

• 1:11:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:11:01Speaker 10

  The other thing is, the. Turns, there's this, I'm, I'm gonna spill it, I guess, to all, everyone who's watching TBN. There is a massive advantage of hiring young people and Shopify is the first one to figure it out. Farhan Tawar, head of engineering at Shopify, told me that he saw something interesting years back. Shopify was so early to AI, you know, they, they got copious licenses, everyone, but, and no cost of it and all that. But they didn't see many teams using it, but there was this one team that was using it a lot more, you know, tracking tokens. And Farhan, look, what happened? Oh, there was an intern on the team. And so it's like, oh, what happened? So they onboarded the intern and gave the intern this two week task and the intern was done in a day. And, and you know, the, and he goes like, okay, what, what, what next? Right?

• 1:11:44Speaker 10

  And they're like, how did you do that? It's like, oh, well, you know, like I, I just like use this AI and did this, like what next? You know, they're, they're worried. They want to get a return offer. And suddenly the people on the team felt stupid, right? So they started to like learn from the intern and use AI. But the intern was not threatening them, you know, the intern was never going to take a position. So next thing Farhan did, hire an intern every single Shopify team. So this is why Shopify had a thousand interns.

• 1:12:07Jordi Hays?

  Oh, no. Wow.

• 1:12:08Speaker 10

  He's in some CTO groups, so why do you think Cloudflare is hiring 1,100, 11111 interns? Why is GitHub hiring more interns? Farhan told them, this is the biggest, the biggest hack in, in actually getting your team more productive. Get an intern, a good intern, like, you know, from, from one of the things.

• 1:12:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The other, the other thing is I've heard, I've heard stories of people saying like, ah, I've submitted a thousand resumes or a thousand applications. I'm like, if you want a job as a software engineer, build a piece of software without asking.

• 1:12:38Speaker 10

  Yes.

• 1:12:39Jordi Hays?

  Just, you don't need to be invited.

• 1:12:41Speaker 10

  One job a week, you should be applying to, not 150 a day.

• 1:12:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, not even that, or one job a day. Like we, we hired somebody last summer, we hired somebody last summer that built us a guest directory. That like in real time would take, we'd had an episode, it would scrape it.

• 1:12:54Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:12:54Jordi Hays?

  It would put it into a little dashboard.

• 1:12:56Speaker 10

  Shopify, build a plugin, show them what you're doing. There's so many different ways to plug in.

• 1:13:00Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, you can, every single company out there, if you're, want an internship or, or a junior job.

• 1:13:06Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:13:06Jordi Hays?

  Just go build a product for the company, make it look, make it match the brand kit exactly. Make it look like something that you could ship, even if it's just built, rebuilding something that's existing. That's how you're gonna get attention.

• 1:13:17Speaker 10

  For sure. Yeah.

• 1:13:19John Coogan?

  I completely agree.

• 1:13:21Speaker 10

  Totally agree. And also, like, you know, one thing that I think will will happen with software engineering, which has happened like for twenty or something years, software engineering is is not too different to like electrical engineering, mechanical engineering. When I graduated, a lot of my friends were in that domain. And those domains, to get a job, if I'm a mechanical engineer, you need to go to university and you go to one where you get a placement. So I think honestly, this will probably return. That that the most straightforward way to get a job is go to a reputable university that has placement programs and has industry connections and get in there. If you go to a lower rank one, you can still get it, but it'll be hard. And if you're self-studying, you can also do it, but now you need to do amazing work, you know, like, like, build something like OpenClaw in that or some something like that. But the the lower, like, prestige, like it or not, tech was this really special

• 1:14:06Speaker 10

  place where pedigree did not matter for years or decades. This might be ending, unfortunately.

• 1:14:12John Coogan?

  Are you interested?

• 1:14:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the the other thing is, you don't need to, I think, you know, telling somebody they need to, if somebody can go out and create something like OpenClaw and go viral, like, amazing. But you can also just look at a company, look at a feature, find a feature that their competitor has, and just build the feature and say, here, you don't need to, like, create something totally novel, just build the thing, share it, and that's how you get attention. I guarantee if you cold email four people in the org with, like, a link to the product, you will get an interview.

• 1:14:38Speaker 10

  Yeah. And don't forget, I think, the interim disclosure, like, all of these, like, how to get things. A lot of people, when when you do the thing that most people do, you no longer stand out. So there's a lot of advice. There used to be how to get into Fang of like, all right, do lead coding. And what happened is everyone is really good at lead code, the algorithmical problems. And those companies don't really look at that signal anymore, because everyone is so good. So I think every, every, any point in time, you want to do stuff that others don't do, and it'll be a lot more effort, it will be more risky. But that's the way you're going to stand out. So like, you know, if if you're young, just just do crazy stuff, especially with AI.

• 1:15:12John Coogan?

  Help me understand more about standing out. I remember, there used to be job titles for Django developer. It's like, not just backend, not just Python, the Django framework, right, Rails developer, right, front end in a specific framework. Now, it feels like

• 1:15:29John Coogan?

  Every developer can use every tool, front end, back end because of vibe coding and models. Do you, would you recommend someone say, okay, yes, you're a great developer, you can use all the tools, you can write any language whenever you want. But in order to differentiate yourself, why don't you add design or add finance or understand a little bit of legal? So, you know, is there, is there something else that you should pull in so you can be a dual threat?

• 1:15:52Speaker 10

  Yes, and this is, so this is what's happening. When I looked at, for example, the job listing WorkOS. WorkOS employs what they call product engineers. They don't have a product, they have one product manager for like 80 engineers. And when I looked at the job description, like I remember this evolution where it started, you know, in the 2000s, like a specific language, then a framework, then a backend or something. And the job description actually had things like, you know, like soft skills, like emotional intelligence, like good communication. So first of all, hiring is turned to like the stereotype of the gill foil developer. It's just not going to get hired in a lot of companies these days. And work, most places are expecting business sense, product sense. And the thing that almost every modern company from linear to WorkOS to all of the other similar ones are saying is taste for software engineers.

• 1:16:37Speaker 10

  Now, this is pretty, pretty difficult. Interesting enough, inside Microsoft, there's an internal course that they're trying to teach taste to people. Yeah, crazy. Scott Hansel was telling me this. But it's kind of hard to, hard to define, but it's a mix of, I guess, do your own projects, try to do real work that actually like, either like, you know, makes money or helps people or does things. Keep trying and, and you know, use, use latest tools. It's, it's, it's hard to give universal advice because the thing has changed so much. And one other thing that's happening, some companies, like the big change we've had over the winter is everyone has realized who has paying attention, paying side projects that, us software engineers will no longer write the code. The agent will write the code, we will prompt it, which is, some people are grieving, are grieving, I'm kind of over that.

• 1:17:22Speaker 10

  But a lot of companies have paused hiring for now because they need to figure out who are we going to hire? Because there's no point in coding interviews or much, much less point when the agent is, is doing it. So there might be like a cool of like six months to 12 months where there's a lot less hiring as companies figure out what is this new person? So in the meantime, though, people looking for the job is like, first of all, if you get a job offer appreciated, probably just take it, get your door in the industry, doesn't matter where. And then yeah, keep pushing.

• 1:17:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder if.

• 1:17:49Jordi Hays?

  I feel like a big opportunity right now is software engineers finding the companies. Of course, the companies that are really beat up in the public markets right now, the software. There's tons of companies that people are just saying it's over. Of course, many of them will recover and and, you know, a few years from now be worth multiples of what they are today, but like doing the work to figure out which one of those companies have durable customer relationships, aren't just going to be fully ripped out. And then you could have a situation, you know, not not that dissimilar from people that ended up joining companies in like 2022, 20 late 2022, 2023, when things were really corrected, where then the stock just trades up three X over the next two years and you look like an absolute genius.

• 1:18:29Speaker 10

  Yeah, and one thing that companies are starting to hire for, but they're struggling. I talked with a startup in Amsterdam. They were looking for an AI native junior engineer. They're like, let's hire junior engineers and their expectation was like knows how to use all these modern tools, has built some, doesn't have to be work with some projects with L L M's, you know, like built a bot or something. They couldn't find find anyone. So like, like go and use these tools, build some stuff, put it on GitHub, launch it on the App Store, etc. And the reason they want to bring it in, again, they want like some of these folks will use it a lot better. So there's a lot of opportunity, I think, you know, we're might be overthinking this a little bit. It's a massive tech tech change. A lot, a lot of existing folks inside the industry with like five plus years of experience are paralyzed because that's skill coding.

• 1:19:13Speaker 10

  It takes, it takes frigging hard effort to like get good at coding. It took me, you know, like three years to like get okay, and then 10 years to get really good. And that's kind of down the drain on one end. So a lot of people are grieving that. So there's an opportunity for people who are kind of like stepping over this and like, all right, how am I going to be effective with these?

• 1:19:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is great. Last question for me. How do you think about the like, it used to be that software engineers would join a company because they were obsessed with the technology. They joined 37 signals because they wanted to work on rails or, you know, Shopify. And there were a whole bunch of like rail shops and if you enjoyed rails, you would go there. Now it feels like there's more opportunity than ever to find a, an industry or category, like if you're obsessed with travel or you're obsessed with gaming or music, you can. The tools are maybe less important, but the willingness to be excited about the product that you're making is going to be the differentiator as opposed to just, yeah, I work at this company,

• 1:20:10John Coogan?

  but I don't really listen to music. So why am I at Spotify? It's like, you know, you should, if you love music and you love advancing that industry, you should go there more than anywhere else. Does that resonate with you?

• 1:20:21Speaker 10

  It resonates a hundred percent. At my brother's company, he's building a startup craft docks.

• 1:20:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:26Speaker 10

  Over the winter, he realized like these agents are really good. And he just mandated his team, everyone using Claude code, everyone needs to do prompting and you need to generate your code. And he said about 50% of his team got really demotivated and one engineer quit because he told him, I do not want to be a prompter. I love the craft. That engineer was really in code was, was, was his kind of like

• 1:20:48John Coogan?

  Language.

• 1:20:49Speaker 10

  identity. He was the go to guy. He understood the code base better than anyone. And what happened in this first week is people used to go up to this person asking for like, hey, how does this work? Et cetera. No one walked up to him because the AI could answer it. And on this retreat in Utah, I talked with a bunch of people who've been in larger enterprises, like big companies. And they were telling me the same thing, that the people who are struggling, whose identity is the code and the craft and the people who are thriving, their identity is less of the code. It's the impact.

• 1:21:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:16Speaker 10

  Let's build cool stuff. Let's help the business or let's, I love this industry and I want to advance it.

• 1:21:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:22Speaker 10

  So I think that that's going to happen. Like builders who don't care about the tools that much are going to thrive. People who care about the craft, there, there might be niches for them and it's not going to go away, but it'll be harder.

• 1:21:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. You always see that in the video game industry.

• 1:21:34Jordi Hays?

  Or, or I'm thinking of the Dwight, Dwight.

• 1:21:37John Coogan?

  Every programmer loves video games. And so, I mean, not everyone, but a lot of them. So they go there and they'll be like, oh yeah, pay me half as much as if I was doing ads because I, I want to work on League of Legends or whatever.

• 1:21:48Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:21:49Jordi Hays?

  Reminded of the scene Dwight Schrute trying to outsell, selling against the computer. Right? Like immediately he's like doing fine and the website just steamrolls.

• 1:21:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's wild times. Well, we really appreciate you coming by the show.

• 1:22:02Jordi Hays?

  Come on anytime.

• 1:22:03John Coogan?

  Anytime. This is great. We'd love to have you more.

• 1:22:05Jordi Hays?

  We'll do so.

• 1:22:06Speaker 10

  It was great.

• 1:22:07Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for the, thank you for the cookies. I'm a...

• 1:22:09John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full tech search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. And I'm also going to tell you about Consol. Consol builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, finance and support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And without further ado, I believe we have Dara Khosrowshahi from Uber in the restream waiting room. So let's bring him into TVP and Ultra. Dara, good to meet you. How are you doing?

• 1:22:38Speaker 12

  Nice to meet you. I'm doing great. Thank you. We just had earnings and they were really strong, although the market is going crazy as we speak. So who knows?

• 1:22:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's, let's start there. Break it down for anybody that, that wasn't paying attention to your guys' fantastic quarter.

• 1:22:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. What happened and maybe why did you have this particular quarter?

• 1:22:58Speaker 12

  So the quarter ended a great year for us. In the quarter, we announced trip growth of 22%. We're now at a run rate of 15 billion trips. Well, there you go. 15 billion trips.

• 1:23:11Jordi Hays?

  So many trips.

• 1:23:12Speaker 12

  For, for the year, that's 40 million per day. So the business is really scaling. Gross bookings growth actually accelerated. You know, usually as companies get bigger, they slow down. We're actually accelerating. Profits is defined by EBITDA. We're up 35% on a year-on-year basis. And then we threw off almost, almost $10 billion of free cash flow, 9.8 billion, of 40% year-on-year. So the business is really scaling. And at the same time, you know, you've got the mobility business that's growing at really healthy rates, 19%. And then Uber Eats, that really we built like entirely organically now is

• 1:23:51Speaker 12

  over $100 billion run rate, solidly profitable, and that grew 26% in the last quarter, really accelerating nicely since the beginning of the year. So the business actually looks really, really great. And then obviously, we've got the onset of autonomous and autonomous vehicles. And we kind of, in our investor presentation, we had a lot to say about autonomous, which we could definitely get into if you guys want to.

• 1:24:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, before we get into that, like, what are the key drivers outside of, obviously, the businesses, you know, maturing? You've been in the driver's seat for long enough now to really start having clearly a tremendous impact, but like, what's really, what's driving, you know, this acceleration?

• 1:24:31Speaker 12

  Yeah, so I'd say one in terms of the businesses, our business is really supply-led. So the more cars we get on the road, the more restaurants we have on the platform, our product gets better, there's the conversion of the product. You know, when you open up your app, your ETA is lower, you have more restaurants available. So the, basically, we are a supply-led business, and we continue to add supply onto the platform. We've got almost 10 million drivers and couriers on the platform, well over a million merchants. And first, it starts with supply, and our selection and supply just keeps getting better and better and better. I'd say that's number one.

• 1:25:12Speaker 12

  The second is, we're the only platform out there that has both rides and eats, and it's global as well. And that allows us to more deeply embed with our customers. About 30% of our eats first trips come from rider, so to speak. And we can promote, cross-promote from the rides platform to the eats platform. If you open up your Uber, Uber app now, you see eats being offered, you'll see grocery being offered. If you're looking to go to a restaurant for dinner, we'll also offer that restaurant for delivery as a reminder that it's available for delivery as well. So this cross-platform kind of promo that we can do, it's just no one else is doing it.

• 1:25:56Speaker 12

  It's taken us years to perfect it, because any pixel that is promoting, let's say Uber eats on the Uber app, it can get in the way of your experience on Uber. So you have to be very careful to have an optimal experience for your base business while at the same time nudging you over to the other product, you know?

• 1:26:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, was there a period where it just felt like you were running two very distinct businesses, and now it feels like they're actually coming together and it's working?

• 1:26:23Speaker 12

  Totally, and you know, my philosophy is that when you're building businesses that are younger, you want kind of full stack teams. So for example, our technology team, we had a dedicated technology team for eats. As that business got more mature and larger, we combined our tech teams, we combined our product teams, so that you can build one core infrastructure, one matching stack, for example, bring the customer data together, and kind of create more commonality between the businesses. Now, for example, I promoted our head of global mobility, Andrew McDonald, he's been here for 12 years, he's now president and COO, so he's running one P and L, and essentially, we can trade off between benefits

• 1:27:08Speaker 12

  on one business for the other business to kind of grow the whole. And there's no one else who, again, has the breadth and depth of offerings that we have. And then on top of that, we've got the Uber One membership program. We've got 46 million members, close to 50% of our gross bookings come from members, and that membership provides a real lock-in. Members spend three times more than non-members. Customers who shop on both eats and rides spend three times than the ones who don't. And so it's that combination of the whole platform coming together that lets us grow fast, that lets us accelerate, it lets us gain category position versus the others, while at the same time having a lot of profitability.

• 1:27:52John Coogan?

  What's the biggest lesson from Expedia that you've been able to apply to Uber?

• 1:27:57Speaker 12

  Yeah, it's a great question. I would say, and it was a mistake at Expedia, was not recognizing that the business is supply-led. So with Expedia, we were very much focused on the customer and bringing in more audience, so to speak, and then following with supply. And I think one of the regrets, and you have to kind of learn your lessons as a CEO, it's like, we're humans too, we make mistakes too, we learn as well. Is that Booking.com was really focused on more supply in Europe, for example. And because they had more supply, they were able to build a more compelling platform in Europe than Expedia was.

• 1:28:36Speaker 12

  And so I took some of those learnings and then, of course, you know, some tips from the OG Uber folk, including Travis as well, that this is a real supply-led business. And so it was, to some extent, learning from my past mistakes and then making sure I don't make those mistakes again in the new job, so to speak.

• 1:28:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, I remember when Uber came to LA, the push for supply on the platform was so aggressive that I was getting directly targeted. Hey, do you want to drive for Uber? I was employed at the time. I wasn't signing up. But I haven't seen those ads. Is that a function of better targeting? Or do you just have a more natural driver acquisition flywheel? Like, what's working on the supply side in increasing the supply of drivers these days?

• 1:29:21Speaker 12

  I think that supply is definitely cyclical. So in the early days, obviously, it was kind of a new thing. No one knew what gig work was. So Travis and team had to introduce it to drivers, had to pull them off of, you know, driving for carry limousines or some of the traditional players onto the Uber platform.

• 1:29:39John Coogan?

  It was very broad. You'd see ads everywhere.

• 1:29:41Speaker 12

  Yeah, totally. And then we had to kind of grow the overall marketplace as well because there are way more Ubers on the road now than taxis, et cetera. But we have had kind of supply shocks in the past. So for example, with COVID, one of the great things about COVID as it related to Uber, it was a terrible event, obviously, was that we were able to move our drivers who were driving for Uber to make money on Uber Eats. But then after COVID, we thought when the world would open up, everyone would get back to driving because why the heck not? It turned out that a lot of our drivers, rightly so, they were worried about their health. They didn't want to catch COVID. I remember I was talking to a driver and I'll never forget this line. I'm like, Well, why don't you go back to driving people because you can make more money that way?

• 1:30:26Speaker 12

  And she said, well, a Big Mac isn't going to give me COVID. You know, it's so safety was a big issue. So we had to reinvest in supply.

• 1:30:36John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:30:37Speaker 12

  Very aggressively post-COVID. We did so faster than our competitors, which helped us. Now we have a pretty finely tuned machine.

• 1:30:45John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:30:45Speaker 12

  In that the retention of drivers is really high.

• 1:30:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:48Speaker 12

  On average, drivers are driving more supply hours. They're spending more time on our platform because they can drive, they can deliver, they can shop. They can even do, they can judge AI algorithms now. We have a group called Uber AI Solutions where they can, you know, look at algorithmic answers and decide which is better, et cetera. There's much more to do on the platform. So the position that we have in supply is pretty strong. But believe me, we're investing. I guess we figured out that you guys are more consumer customers than drivers. And good for our algorithms.

• 1:31:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, good work on the marketing side. Everyone's been able to make the bare case for traditional enterprise software over the last year as models have gotten better. There's been some chatter about kind of risk to marketplaces with agents. I'm not necessarily bought into some of those theories yet. You know, you're operating this, you know, massive network of drivers and supply. And it's just a lot more difficult to sort of, no, no, no model is going to one-shot that anytime soon.

• 1:31:55John Coogan?

  I'm expecting to go to my terminal and it will call people randomly in my neighborhood and ask them if they want to give me a ride. That's the future I want to live in.

• 1:32:04Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so we're not really quite seeing that yet. But how are you thinking about kind of risks and opportunities with, with a more agentic kind of internet and consumer product?

• 1:32:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:16Speaker 12

  I think that if you have unique fragmented supply and the global scope that we have, then you are safer than, let's say, others who might not have unique supply or they don't have the fragmentation of supply that we do. Like, we've got over nine million couriers and drivers on our platform. That's very difficult for anyone, whether human or agent, to replicate as well. So we are working with agentic platforms. We've got a great relationship, for example, with OpenAI. And so you will be able to call an Uber using ChatGPT. One of the things that we want to do is we want to get our brand in front of you as well. So, once you call it, for example, it's an Uber map, so you can track your car, do

• 1:32:59Speaker 12

  all that good stuff. So I think like companies like ours who do have, you know, we're in over seventy countries, we've set everything up, the membership program is very, very deep and embedded. We have a fragmented supply base that's going to be very difficult for anyone to recreate. I think we can rest easier. And for me, I want to make sure that my brand gets out to the customer. And at the same time, I'm building those experiences within the Uber app. So a driver can interact with an app using voice, they can, they have an agent who can help them out if they don't know why they're not making more money. We've got agents for ordering, we've got agents for ordering your rides, et cetera. So I

• 1:33:39Speaker 12

  think as long as the experience on app doesn't trade, trail the experience off app, I think off app actually can ultimately, for players like us, expand the marketplace. And that's definitely something that we're looking at.

• 1:33:52John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about the next iteration of Apple Intelligence rolling out? We were talking to Mark Gurman, and he was saying that we've been able to call Ubers from Siri for, I think he said a decade or something like that. It's been there. Obviously, I'm sure you have the numbers, and there's probably a lot of people in nominal terms that are using that functionality. But it feels like it hasn't broken through, but it feels like it's about to with the next iteration of Siri and Apple Intelligence. Is that, that's lower friction, that feels good for you. At the same time, if I don't open the app, maybe I don't go and do other things and I lose a little bit of connection. What, how are you seeing that trade off?

• 1:34:30Speaker 12

  You know, my, my view is, um, don't think too hard and build great consumer products.

• 1:34:36John Coogan?

  I love that.

• 1:34:37Speaker 12

  And so if someone wants to, if someone wants to get us through Apple Intelligence, ChatGPT, or they want to come to the app, um, I don't care.

• 1:34:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:45Speaker 12

  You know, as long as, as long as we're, we're, we're getting used and we're getting used, used often. Now, yes, there are considerations. We have a $2 billion advertising business.

• 1:34:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:56Speaker 12

  If that is subsumed underneath an Apple Intelligence, um, that could hurt our advertising business. But for me, like, if, if the North Star is build out consumer experiences that are absolutely first rate, and then we have this, the multi-product category and the membership underneath, I think the economics can kind of take them, uh, take care of themselves over the long term. And if we make a great app, you know, like, people will keep coming to that app. And, and I remember when, um, uh, Google Maps was at, at some point amalgamating Lyft and Uber content. People were worried about that. You talked about Apple Intelligence. Our app is pretty damn good.

• 1:35:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:38Speaker 12

  And my job is to make sure that it remains, you know, leading and keeps attracting audience because ultimately that is the most engaged audience that you can have, that direct audience.

• 1:35:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:35:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, with food, with the, the benefit with, with the Uber Eats business is like, I don't really want, uh, plain text experience ordering food in chat. And then, yes, you know, ChatGPT can generate images and stuff like that, but.

• 1:36:03John Coogan?

  But it's several jumps in UI.

• 1:36:05Jordi Hays?

  Eventually you're like, well, I can just pop over to the app.

• 1:36:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:36:08Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we got to talk about autonomy. Uh, I'm sure, uh, I'm sure you spent a bunch of the earnings call on that note, but what, what were the highlights? What should people be paying attention to?

• 1:36:18Speaker 12

  I think the, the biggest highlight, um, and, and we have a big section in our supplemental materials that I, that I encourage folks to look at is that what we're seeing with autonomy is that it's a net positive. In terms of demand into the ecosystem. So there's one view of looking at it, hey, autonomous is just going to replace humans and, you know, robot cars don't get tired, they don't get distracted, they can work 20 hours a day, they do need to get recharged and cleaned, et cetera. So they will replace the workforce, so to speak, that I think a lot of people are talking about in other markets as well. What we're seeing in markets in which we have launched autonomous is that actually those markets are growing faster.

• 1:37:00Speaker 12

  There's a new audience segment that comes in, our new customer acquisition, you know, overall now we have 200 million consumers coming to our front door every single month, growing 18%, growing pretty quickly. But in the markets in which we have AV, our audience growth has actually accelerated and we're gaining new customers because it's a really frickin' cool product. So one is that we've always had the hypothesis, hey, mobility is a trillion dollar marketplace, but autonomous can add more to that market. It can be trillion dollar plus or another trillion dollars. And the early signal is that, yeah, it is actually additive, it's not replacement only.

• 1:37:45Speaker 12

  The second, I would say, big finding, if you want to call that for us, is we've always had the hypothesis that autonomous on our platform is going to take advantage of the platform to be much more utilized than off-platform. You know, like, to some extent, a car is a box with wheels. The autonomous car is super expensive, so you want to keep it running and you want to keep it earning money for as long as possible. And we're finding that the utilization of those cars on our platform is 30-plus percent higher than cars that are not, that kind of are building their own platforms. That utilization bonus is hugely important as it relates to the value of our platform.

• 1:38:30Speaker 12

  And so we're seeing that come through too. So, one is it's additive, which is great, and the platform is doing what it's designed to do, which is bring more business to a driver, where that driver happens to be human or happens to be a robot.

• 1:38:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so you're saying, so the unit economics of AV provider can actually be better if they're adding it to the Uber platform?

• 1:38:53Speaker 12

  Yeah, I mean, that's how we have to earn our take rate, right? It's if we're not driving higher utilization, we won't earn our take rate. And right now, the utilization premium that we're seeing suggests that our take rate is, you could argue, too low, but we have a very strong case to be made for the take rate of the platform.

• 1:39:13John Coogan?

  Is there any role for Uber in the rest of the self-driving car stack from cleaning to service to storage? There's a lot of these things that could be handled, and they're currently handled by the sort of OEMs and the big autonomy companies.

• 1:39:28Jordi Hays?

  Or just other smaller vendors.

• 1:39:30John Coogan?

  You could imagine in the future it being much more distributed, but does it go full individual maintenance and whatnot?

• 1:39:37Speaker 12

  Yeah, yeah, totally. So if you think about the AV stack,

• 1:39:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:41Speaker 12

  there's the distribution, you know, that could be Uber, it could be Waymo, it could be Tesla, right? And there's a driver, and the driver, we're partnering up with a driver. Then there's the operator, and the operator has depots, is cleaning the cars, recharging the cars. We have a network of fleet partners now on a global basis, because about 15% of our supply is provided by fleets today. And, you know, they rent out cars to drivers. We're taking those fleet operators and we're saying, hey, we want you now to operate AVs. So that those fleet operators in partnership with us, we have investments in a bunch of them. They are the ones who operate the fleet, and they can do it in a really low-cost manner.

• 1:40:24Speaker 12

  They're doing it with hundreds of thousands of cars, and so AV is different, but not that different. So you got the operator, then you have someone who owns the car. That could be us, it could be Waymo, but ultimately, I think it's going to be third parties like private equity players and all this stuff, who are going to want to own these big assets, just like they kind of do rental car fleets. And then you will have kind of debt out there. So there will be the financialization of the marketplace as well. But we are definitely playing in the demand side, we're partnering on the driving side. And then we can and are providing, through our fleet partners, all of the operations in a city, including depots, cleaning, et cetera.

• 1:41:09Jordi Hays?

  What kind of conversations have you had or what should people expect from other OEMs outside of Tesla on the autonomy side? It's an interesting dynamic now where Teslas are getting, FSD is getting really, really good. It's a meaningful differentiator if you're a consumer and you either want to drive less on your way to work or one day be able to add your car to a platform like Uber. What's kind of coming down the pipeline in terms of just overall competitiveness from other OEMs?

• 1:41:40Speaker 12

  So what's interesting is that when I was having discussions regarding autonomous with OEMs, it was more, they were more interested in L2, which is where FSD is now, than they were L4. You know, the prospect of every single car being sold with a $5,000 priced piece of software that has a cost of goods of zero, it's like OEM's eyes went like this. They were super, super interested. As it turns out, I think that L2 is proving to be less interesting than people thought because you still kind of have to watch your road, et cetera. You can't really turn off.

• 1:42:21Speaker 12

  I think the great, great customer product is just, I can relax, I can do whatever I want and I can get my time back, the way that you get your time back in an Uber. Sit in the backseat, do whatever you want, make a call, et cetera. So the conversations with OEMs actually are getting a lot more constructive for us because they see L3 and L4, and we want L4 obviously, as the big prize now. And that was not true three years ago. So we're having actually really great conversations with OEMs. We have a deal, for example, with Lucid, who builds awesome EVs, and one of our other partners, Neuro and Lucid coming together. And there are many other discussions that we're having with OEM partners.

• 1:43:05Speaker 12

  And then, of course, now Nvidia is in the game, right? They were building the reference compute architecture. Now they're bringing in the sensor stack and now they are building self-driving as well, the model as well. So Nvidia will provide a full stack software and hardware solution to any OEM provider. And as you can imagine, Nvidia brings a lot of heft. A lot of know-how and then a lot of credibility to the ecosystem as well. So the direction of travel.

• 1:43:36Jordi Hays?

  And you're sitting there as like a supply-driven business, just being like, let's go. Every, every car outfitted with this when, when it's, when it's ready. And you can imagine a world where, you know, the Uber wait time is 20 seconds every time. It's just like.

• 1:43:52Speaker 12

  Yeah, I mean, the dream is, the, the dream is 10 years from now, every single new car sold is L4 capable. Because that is obviously very strong prospect for a supply, what I started with. And hopefully you'll get that 20-second ETA, or you'll be pissed off if you have to wait for more than a minute.

• 1:44:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, if you step back from maybe the specifics of, of Uber and just think about how autonomy might change the American landscape, like how, are you, do you, do you agree with the thesis of like the suburbs will become more popular? People will be commuting longer, like what, what knock-on effects do you think are potentially underrated or under discussed of, of moving in a more autonomous direction?

• 1:44:37Speaker 12

  Yeah, it's a great question. I, I'd say generally in the US suburbs are growing faster than cities. So if this is a trend that started with COVID, it continues. And our growth in the suburbs and less dense areas is about twice our growth rate in the cities. So it's been a really attractive growth driver for us. I do think that it's going to create a lot of space in cities, you know? I think 30% of space in cities is for parking. A huge amount of it goes on unutilized. Some of that will be taken up by depots, et cetera. But I do think that it is going to increase the, the breadth of where people get to live. And I think it's going to make transportation available for many, many more people.

• 1:45:19Speaker 12

  As the cost, it's going to take a while and it's probably going to take two or three generations of cars. But the hardware costs for these sensors, for the computers absolutely coming down. And this will result in lower cost mobility being available to many more people in the world, whether they live in the city or they live outside of the city. And I think it's going to have a great impact on society, having more transportation available, more affordably to a higher percentage of the population. Yes, it's good for our business, but it will undoubtedly be great for society.

• 1:45:55John Coogan?

  Last question, what advice do you give to someone who wants to be a public company CEO?

• 1:46:02Speaker 12

  Ah, one is, I would tell you, like, don't hunt for it. Pick, I'd say that the advice that I give folks is, people get way too hung up on what their title is, or how much they're gonna get paid, etc. I have always, you know, what's worked for me is, I have been very, very specific about who I want to work for. And when you pick the right people to work for, one, you learn a lot from them. But the one thing that I've seen in every environment, like, environments are unpredictable, but people usually stay successful. Like, you look at Elon, right? Like, he succeeded in so many different areas, and that's true for really exceptional people.

• 1:46:46Speaker 12

  So, exceptional people stay exceptional regardless of the environment. You know, if you pick a company, or you pick a position, that can change, that can go the wrong way. If you pick the right person, you pick the right person, not only do you get to learn from them, but they usually move up in the world.

• 1:47:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:02Speaker 12

  And so, as they get promoted, as they build a bigger company, you kind of get a free ride off of them. So, you get double the benefit, which is, you learn from someone who's awesome, and you get to move kind of in their wake until you're ready to strike out on your own. I'd say that's number one. And then, the second thing I'd say is, like, you know, advice for young people in terms of learning, just learn how to work hard. Like, it's, again, your skill sets may change, your profession may change, people are like, discussing is coding the right thing, or, you know, learning the liberal arts. The most important skill in life is the skill of working friggin' hard. And if you work for the right person, and you learn how to work hard, you're gonna do just fine.

• 1:47:47John Coogan?

  I love that.

• 1:47:48Jordi Hays?

  I love both those answers.

• 1:47:49John Coogan?

  That's a fantastic answer, thank you so much.

• 1:47:51Jordi Hays?

  So great to finally have you on the show. Congrats to the whole team on a fantastic quarter, and we'll hope to have you back on very soon.

• 1:47:57John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:47:58Speaker 12

  By the way, I don't know if our IT people have been watching you guys, but we have Ramp coming on to Uber, so...

• 1:48:03John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:48:04Speaker 12

  There's something happening with your commercials that are working. My IT people are watching way too much of PDPX.

• 1:48:10John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:48:11Jordi Hays?

  Love it.

• 1:48:11John Coogan?

  That's great. Well, congratulations, and we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:48:14Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, Dara.

• 1:48:15John Coogan?

  Thanks so much.

• 1:48:16Speaker 12

  Thank you, guys.

• 1:48:16John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:48:19John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30+ destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. And let me also tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest. Securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending. Now with AI.

• 1:48:36Jordi Hays?

  Up next, we have-

• 1:48:38John Coogan?

  Public company CEO.

• 1:48:39Jordi Hays?

  We have our dear friend, Mitchell.

• 1:48:41John Coogan?

  Mitchell Green, Lead Edge Capital.

• 1:48:43Jordi Hays?

  Coming into the show. Let's bring him in.

• 1:48:45John Coogan?

  Oh, he's here. Mitchell, how you doing?

• 1:48:47Mitchell Green?

  Brian, you should have had Dar and I on together. We're buddies.

• 1:48:49John Coogan?

  Oh, you are? That's awesome. That's great.

• 1:48:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we should. If we planned better, we would have-

• 1:48:54John Coogan?

  It doesn't surprise me.

• 1:48:55Jordi Hays?

  We'll add you both next time.

• 1:48:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:57Mitchell Green?

  How's life?

• 1:48:58John Coogan?

  Oh, it's good. It's good. Yeah, we're going all over the place today. We're talking about the market collapse, the end of SaaS, but the birth of agentic coding and all these crazy things the developers are doing. Yeah, what's up?

• 1:49:12Mitchell Green?

  I got a question for you. If everybody, my partner actually came up with this idea. He's like, so if all the SaaS companies, if all the software companies are all going to disappear because you just like vibe code your way to building one of these companies, well then can't the next AI company vibe code that AI company?

• 1:49:29John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. And I mean, there is seriously a push in the open source software community now to loosely vibe code everything you need. Like, you build all your own tools, you build your own, all your own software. This used to be the domain of programmers that would stay up all night for months on end to build a little to-do list app. And now it's much more robust, but we haven't really seen where all of this goes. It's still pretty early and most people are just building like tools that build more tools at this point. But yeah, I mean, the iron law of the universe, I don't know if you agree, is like, if it goes up quickly, it comes down quickly. There's always, you know, you see these amazing growth charts and you get a little nervous because if it, easy come, easy go.

• 1:50:11Mitchell Green?

  Yeah, so it's funny. I think people are, people are gonna be in for a rude awakening. I think some people

• 1:50:17Jordi Hays?

  I mean, you were calling this, you were calling this the last time, the last time you were on the show, you were kind of more just kind of skeptical, a lot of these valuations, so.

• 1:50:27Mitchell Green?

  Yeah, what, no, what's funny is, is like, public market software is not cheap. We're buying it, but we think companies like Workday are incredible businesses. Company like TransferWise in the payment space, Remitly, Toast has been crushed. We're not in a company called AppLovin', but I, a huge aiming company. I have a good buddy who's made billions on it and is now rebuying it. Like, these things are just like, the things are like all sent out at the same time, so.

• 1:50:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I was looking at, looking at PayPal, you have a, it's trading at seven times earnings now, when I looked this morning. They have half a billion users. It's, it's a global payments network.

• 1:51:06Mitchell Green?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:06Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't seem like anything you can just vibe, you're not gonna vibe code your way to like money transfer license.

• 1:51:12Mitchell Green?

  We're gonna vibe code it. We're gonna build it. We're just gonna make money. Same with Workday as well. We're just gonna vibe code our way, you know. Only took Workday 20 years to get companies like Nike and Procter and Gable to give them all their ERP data. Of course, you know, Mitchell and Jamie, John and Jamie, and we're gonna like, we're gonna vibe code our way.

• 1:51:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I think people are, people are undervaluing trust right now. Totally.

• 1:51:32Mitchell Green?

  People forget how software companies, like, building code has never been the actual, like, hard thing about a software company. It's not like building semiconductor chips.

• 1:51:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:42Mitchell Green?

  It is like distribution. People forget, you build a piece of software.

• 1:51:46Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:51:46Mitchell Green?

  Then you have to sell the software. Then you have to maintain the software. Then you have to add features to the software. Then you have to, you know, you connect it with other systems. Those systems change. You have to have user permissioning. This stuff is really complex. And oh, I'm sorry, the dude sitting in, you know, in Silicon Valley and in a shed on, you know, Sand Hill or in San Francisco who's gonna vibe code their way, oh, I'm sorry, how about the other 10,000 software engineers that Salesforce has? Or the 3,000 software engineers at Workday have? I mean, are they just like sitting around, you know, on their thumb? No, of course, they're gonna try to innovate and what's gonna happen is no different than what happened in 99 and 2000.

• 1:52:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:27Mitchell Green?

  If you look at the top 50 sellers on the internet today of like the largest e-commerce companies, like, yes, Amazon is one, but Walmart, Home Depot. You know.

• 1:52:37John Coogan?

  They made it through.

• 1:52:38Mitchell Green?

  Macy's.

• 1:52:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a good.

• 1:52:39Mitchell Green?

  Our huge covered businesses.

• 1:52:40Jordi Hays?

  Like, one way you can.

• 1:52:41John Coogan?

  Really quickly, you can actually test the thesis empirically by looking at R and D spend of tech companies and how much they actually spend of the money they raise before they IPO on software development specifically. And it's shockingly low, way lower than you'd think. You feel like software company goes.

• 1:52:57Mitchell Green?

  If you literally add all these like pod shops and all these hedge funds, all these hedge fund guys. And by the way, the trade, there's a great chart I could, I wish I could pull it up. Which is like, um, you know, it's like software exposure for hedge funds has gone like this.

• 1:53:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:11Mitchell Green?

  Semiconductor exposure has gone like this.

• 1:53:13John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:53:14Mitchell Green?

  And, you know, usually if you do the opposite of what everybody's doing, you'll make a lot of money.

• 1:53:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:53:19Mitchell Green?

  But.

• 1:53:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like one, you know, one, one kind of test you could run is like, uh, if you're thinking about a company like Workday, is if you went to all of Workday's customers right now and you said, hey, I can, I can, I can build this for, and I'll sell it to you at 20% of the price. Would anybody actually change, switch over? Because it'd be like, okay, it's going to be cheaper, but what if it's like way less reliable? What, what if I get, what if it's so unreliable or has so many issues that I get fired over it?

• 1:53:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:53:50Mitchell Green?

  You know, there are like multi-billion dollar revenue businesses that are literally built to sit on top of companies like Salesforce and Workday to help them manage the companies, um, to manage the software. It's, it's, it's now again, so then you think about like, I think companies that are like selling to big enterprises are, are actually going to end up great. Now again, you might have the Sears and K Mart's of the world.

• 1:54:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:14Mitchell Green?

  That, you know, didn't innovate or were over levered. Though I do worry about some of these private equity software companies that get way over levered. And if they try to drive too high EBITDA margins and sacrifice R and D. Now there are other firms like a Vista, like what Robert Smith does, and he's actively like, they're trying to be like, no, we need to like, double down on AI and like double down in R and D and these things. But I think there will be some people that are just trying to maximize EBITDA margins that'll be hurt. And guess what? Somebody will go build the next competitor of that. So then you're like, look. We think about like an area that's probably more ripe for AI disruption is companies selling into like SMBs. Cause the software isn't nearly as complex. Yep. But again, there are companies, it's not like companies like HubSpot, which is a great business. Yeah.

• 1:54:59Mitchell Green?

  That sells into SMB, they're, they have probably a thousand software engineers. Yeah. They're sitting there trying to disrupt themselves constantly. So it's not, I don't know. I think it's. Yeah, it's definitely market by market, sector by sector. Cycle for sure. Like I think, I think people just don't truly understand how like software companies actually sell. Yeah. Um, that to say that people are gonna vibe code it away. Now, what is incredible is how fast some of these AI businesses have grown. Yeah. Uh, that are built off the tailwinds of some of these companies, even like a company like a ClickHouse, which just raised a big round. We were one of the early investors in it, luckily, totally by dumb luck. Um, somebody, like, yeah, like, you know, we have four, couple more investors in Grafana Labs. Yeah.

• 1:55:44Mitchell Green?

  You know, this software company, but embracing AI and just had an incredible quarter and. Yeah. Plan. And so like, you are, you are seeing there are, there are gonna be a bunch of companies in software that, that continue to innovate.

• 1:55:55Jordi Hays?

  Could you vibe code, uh, could you vibe code equipment share? That was one of your, they, they just.

• 1:56:00Mitchell Green?

  Yeah, that's a great one. Oh, it's funny. I am vibe code, I was gonna vibe code, uh, car, uh, collection software. But then I decided, since I actually have a job for a living, I'm gonna hire somebody else to vibe code it for me. Job creator.

• 1:56:12Jordi Hays?

  Total software engineer victory.

• 1:56:14Mitchell Green?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:17Mitchell Green?

  Another job. Actually, some, some eighteen year old senior at Central Public High School has benefited from this. That's fantastic. Could build me software.

• 1:56:24Jordi Hays?

  They're gonna have, they're gonna have a job forever because you're never gonna stop buying cars.

• 1:56:31Mitchell Green?

  They're gonna be maintaining this thing for years. I'm gonna get you guys in on it as well. So. Oh, I like it. I'm down. No, but on, on, on equipment chair, equipment chair, look, I mean, it's, it's up almost thirty percent from the IPO. It's, uh, with my partners, Tim and Zach. My partners Tim and Zach led that deal. I take no credit for it. They did a phenomenal job. It's looking to benefiting from, you know, the ongoing, there's a massive. If you were to isolate, you know, CapEx and infrastructure spend outside of like GDP, you know, driving GDP growth right now. I think it's like a very meaningful part. Um, highways, energy products, data centers. Um, I think another big thing that's going to drive a lot of CapEx is this, uh, you know, accumulated depreciation, this accelerated depreciation.

• 1:57:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:16Mitchell Green?

  In the big beautiful bill, that will benefit people like equipment share. And to put it in perspective, I think companies like equipment share. And then the S one, uh, cause they haven't filed results yet. I think last quarter, you know, in the S one result in the last quarter, the S one in the S one was like growing nearly thirty percent a year. Yet you have companies like United, Hertz and Sunbelt that grow like single digits. And yet these things traded almost similarly but down margins. Now, the reality is, is people that tend to buy companies like equipment share or Hertz equipment are not used to businesses that grow thirty percent. So they need to just like continue to put up results. And I think they'll look at the, they'll get the multiple expansion over time, but they are. It is like a great second derivative play on AI.

• 1:57:59John Coogan?

  Totally. In the public markets, when you look at a software company, um, it feels like a lot of people are looking at, you know, is top line accelerating? That should be happening. If you're a true AI company, you're also looking at stuff like, are you over leveraged? Then you can also just talk to the management team and it doesn't sound like they know anything about AI. You could be very, you know, skeptical of the company. How do you think about when you find a new company? Uh, what, what research, what's your process for understanding how they'll be positioned over the next couple of years?

• 1:58:29Mitchell Green?

  Yeah, that's a great question. I think what we should do is just count the number of interns they have, frankly. Because, uh, you know, twenty four year olds and twenty two year olds are going to know more about this than fifty and sixty year olds and forty year olds like myself. Uh, no, all kidding aside, we, the way we think about it is we just think of how is this like squarely in?

• 1:58:52Mitchell Green?

  An area that could be like very easily disrupted by AI. We we just and like, how deeply is this product integrated? How many people are using the product? Is it is a result of stuff coming out of? Do they own their own data? Um, yeah, I think we just, we think about how complex the product is to build. Um, you know, like, we talked to a company that's growing like a rocket ship and that makes um, like, software to help like voices in call centers. And and for us, and it's growing like a rocket ship, but we're just like, but they sell into call centers. But the call center software companies just build this themselves and like, and then it's like a function of, okay, well, what valuation then do they want? And then you dig in deep and it's like,

• 1:59:36Mitchell Green?

  and I'm not saying there's one way or another, we have, uh, do they have like, one or two customers that are thirty, forty percent of sales?

• 1:59:41John Coogan?

  Concentration.

• 1:59:42Mitchell Green?

  You know, we were, we were looking at a company recently where like forty percent of their sales is to a company that, you know, we're pretty skeptical on whether it should exist in ten years. And it's like, you know, thirty, forty percent of their sales.

• 1:59:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. It's kind of like a dying gasp from that bigger company and they're sneaking the money out the back through this new startup. Uh, talk about the IPO window. Uh, feels like it's been open. There's a lot of rumors about the big companies SpaceX, uh, OpenAI, Anthropic. But what does it mean? You mean, you saw in equipment share, like, what what's your take on the IPO market and where it might evolve over the next year?

• 2:00:18Mitchell Green?

  Good companies can go public at any time.

• 2:00:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:00:21Mitchell Green?

  Except like, uh, you know, equipment share was up thirty percent.

• 2:00:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:25Mitchell Green?

  Like, boy, it was a great, it was a good deal.

• 2:00:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:28Mitchell Green?

  Um, I I think, I think what's gonna be very interesting about some of these giant IP, equipment shows like a billion dollar deal.

• 2:00:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's not sucking liquidity out of the markets like, oh, we're going out and raising two hundred billion dollars.

• 2:00:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of people seem super confident that that, uh, the the market will fully support a SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI.

• 2:00:51John Coogan?

  David Goggins market.

• 2:00:52Mitchell Green?

  We we shall see. By the way, the money has to come from somewhere.

• 2:00:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:56Mitchell Green?

  So you have to say, well, is it gonna come out of cash? Is it gonna come out of treasuries? Is it gonna come out of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft?

• 2:01:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:05Mitchell Green?

  Probably, uh, the reality is, is

• 2:01:09Mitchell Green?

  A company like a SpaceX or an OpenAI or Anthropic or Stripe or let's see, let's use like ByteDance. So Byte, by the way, ByteDance trades as massive amounts of earnings. You know, the negative is it's China, right?

• 2:01:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:22Mitchell Green?

  Um, but the positive is it has massive amount of earnings and you know, you can get to a giant number like valued like SpaceX of a fundamental earnings number.

• 2:01:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:33Mitchell Green?

  So you're like, where is a hundred and fifty billion dollars gonna come from? And so in that one, you probably say, well, it would probably attract new money back into China.

• 2:01:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:44Mitchell Green?

  But then might people pull out some, pull some money out of Tencent and pull some money out of Alibaba or Google or Microsoft to get exposure to this thing.

• 2:01:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:53Mitchell Green?

  I'm sure in the case of a SpaceX, it would take money out of a, um, you know, it would take money out of Tesla because it's like Elon, you know, it's like diehard forgivers, but I don't know. Maybe he's just gonna merge, you know, SpaceX and Tesla together. Then they'll have to, then change it to the Elon Musk company.

• 2:02:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I mean, I think Tesla shareholders would have been, uh, very frustrated to get XAI merged in. But getting SpaceX merged in.

• 2:02:18John Coogan?

  Not bad.

• 2:02:19Jordi Hays?

  And maybe you got a little X.

• 2:02:20Mitchell Green?

  I would not. I knew nothing. Would it shock me if it happened? No.

• 2:02:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, someone in the chat just said that act, the ticker X just got reserved at NIC. So we'll see what that means.

• 2:02:30John Coogan?

  That's exciting. Uh, what do you think of the secondary market? When I, when I moved to Silicon Valley, it was like seen as a total bear signal if a founder, CEO was selling stock at the early stage. Now companies stay private so long. There's mass and massive secondary sales. Elon's been a master of, you know, liquidity, keeping SpaceX private for 20 years. How is the secondary market evolving? What are you seeing?

• 2:02:55Mitchell Green?

  It's definitely evolved, uh, a lot. When I started working at Vester in two thousand four, two thousand five, you know, it was a very, you know, it was very.

• 2:03:05Mitchell Green?

  You know, world-class venture funds were like, oh my, absolutely not.

• 2:03:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, right.

• 2:03:09Mitchell Green?

  Big secondaries.

• 2:03:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:10Mitchell Green?

  And I got into my first investment ever in 2009, but in a company called Bazaar Voice. Doing a secondary.

• 2:03:17John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:03:17Mitchell Green?

  Uh, now I will tell you, most deals have a secondary component. It feels a little bit frenzy-ish right now, like the Facebook Twitter, um, back then. Uh, it, it is, I was just at an investor conference yesterday. Uh, speaking in, in Arizona and it shocked, I had multiple people come up to me. Now, like institutional investors, like, like random companies pension funds. That were like, oh, what do you think of Anthropic? We're like buying into it here.

• 2:03:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:49Mitchell Green?

  Like, oh, this doesn't end well. Uh, not just for like, it, it, it needed Anthropic.

• 2:03:55John Coogan?

  No, no, no. It is one of those signals when like, the, the person who's not a professional investor is talking to you about things that feel like professional investments.

• 2:04:03Mitchell Green?

  Yeah, I got even a better one. Uh, one of my big institutional investors, fantastic guy.

• 2:04:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:09Mitchell Green?

  Uh, name, name will be, uh, as I said, but he's like, you need to start a micro secondary fund that will buy secondary interests in these tender 30 act funds. Uh, you know, you have like, you have like the code, the new code two fund and the business fund and all these, and it's a huge wave coming.

• 2:04:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:27Mitchell Green?

  And, and it basically offer like quarterly redemptions, like you can take out like five or 10% a year. It's what like Bree was, right?

• 2:04:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:35Mitchell Green?

  And then, but occasionally if there's too many people that want to, uh, redeem, you have to gate them. But you never want to gate. But when do you think everybody's going to gate? Like everybody's going to, all the dentists and doctors are all going to pull out at the exact same time.

• 2:04:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:04:50Mitchell Green?

  And, and my buddy was like, oh, you should start a sec, a micro secondaries fund to buy out their interests in all these interval funds when they all, when they put it, when, when the gate comes up and all of them want out at the same time. And they're like, wait a second, we can't get out, we're, we're locked up. What do you mean? I thought this was like liquid.

• 2:05:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:07Mitchell Green?

  It's coming, don't worry.

• 2:05:08John Coogan?

  It's, don't worry.

• 2:05:09Jordi Hays?

  What do you, what do you think, uh, what do you think Ferrari, the business is worth?

• 2:05:15John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:05:16Mitchell Green?

  Oh boy, I thought you were going to ask me what I thought of the new car. Lewis was, the Hamilton was fast at testing, at preseason testing, um.

• 2:05:24Mitchell Green?

  It's an amazing business. The stupidest thing I ever did was buy the cars and not the stock. Um, I actually have several friends that I raced Ferrari Challenge with that bought the stock at the IPO and now they slowly dribble the stock out to buy cars.

• 2:05:38John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:05:39Mitchell Green?

  Uh, it's an amazing brand. I don't know what it's.

• 2:05:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it only, it only IPO in 2015.

• 2:05:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:44Mitchell Green?

  What is the stock like? I mean, what's Ferrari's stock price now?

• 2:05:46Jordi Hays?

  Stock's down 10% in the last month. It's a $63 billion, uh.

• 2:05:51John Coogan?

  We'll just vibe Coda Ferrari.

• 2:05:53Mitchell Green?

  Buy, build a Ferrari factory. The nice thing is you can't, yeah, uh, yes, it's stock.

• 2:05:58John Coogan?

  You can't vibe Coda.

• 2:05:59Jordi Hays?

  But it's up 500% since the IPO. So yeah, right when you got into cars, you should have been getting into Ferrari.

• 2:06:05Mitchell Green?

  I should have just bought the stock.

• 2:06:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. What, what advice would you give to someone, uh, just getting into venture, private equity, raising a fund, looking at opportunities? Uh, we're seeing this like K shape right now with the mega funds scaling up. Feels harder than ever to start sort of a mid-sized fund. What, what, what are you seeing that's interesting that new managers are doing?

• 2:06:29Mitchell Green?

  That's a great question. I'm going to steal a word, I'm going to steal a line from Jeremy Levine, who's a senior partner at Bessemer Venture Partners and probably one of the best venture capitalists over the last 25 years. If you guys could ever get him on, he's incredible. Um, like an amazing investor. It was like that very early investor in Pinterest and LinkedIn and Yelp and like Shopify with Alex Ferrara, like the total stud. Like he said to me, I would always complain about what they were paying me, uh, at the time. And he's like, but Mitchell, you're learning a lot. And so the most important thing is actually to go find, if, if you're trying to get into this industry, and I think there's too many people that are young, starting funds and they're going to actually like, or entrepreneurs that have actually never really professionally invested. I, I would

• 2:07:13Mitchell Green?

  actually tell you, you're better off going to find the apprenticeship. And like, and literally go find an amazing venture capitalist or venture capital firm that you can go work for. Convince Sequoia or Benchmark or Mike Maples or Josh Koppelman or Sean, like guys that have been doing this, gals that have been doing this, Theresa Gao, who have been doing this for a long time and go shadow them for two years. That's how you're gonna really, that is honestly the best.

• 2:07:36Jordi Hays?

  Or 10. 10. Like, like so, so many.

• 2:07:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, a lot of people get into these funds, like two years later, I'm raising my own fund. It's like, you haven't seen a full cycle.

• 2:07:46Jordi Hays?

  Going like, may, maybe you're a good investor, maybe you've made some good angel bets, maybe you did a couple of years at a fund already, but going and saying, I'm gonna do the, the, the path of doing the 30 to 50 to 100 million to 200 million dollar fund, like, that is like, uh.

• 2:08:00John Coogan?

  It's tricky, especially where prices are.

• 2:08:02Mitchell Green?

  I mean, I, I give Harry at 20, 20 B C a lot of credit. Like, he started off in the podcast. He like hustles his way. Like, I'm sure you guys are gonna get to start to see like really interesting deals from doing this. And it doesn't mean in like 18 months, you're gonna go start a fund.

• 2:08:15John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:08:17Mitchell Green?

  Um, I think it's, people confuse angel investing and being successful with angel investing with all of a sudden, if you get 100 million bucks, you'll be really successful. Um, it's really, really hard. And I think people need to find mentors and go work for people that have, that have invested as you through cycles. 100%.

• 2:08:38Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what does it take to actually be contrarian? Because it's, it's, it's like, whenever, you know, it's such a popular word in this industry now, everybody says they're contrarian and yet, of course, only.

• 2:08:53Mitchell Green?

  That's consensus.

• 2:08:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, consensus. Yeah, exactly. Um, and so I feel, I feel like it's something like, you, humans have an innate sort of instinct to kind of go with the herd and, and, and so you have to like, fight that. But how do you fight it?

• 2:09:07Mitchell Green?

  Steve Cohen has always told me, if you want to know where the stock market goes, but he's like, look, he's like, you got a lot of smart hedge fund guys in your fund, you know, himself included, ask us all where we think the market's going. Like, eight of us tell you one thing and two say the other, please call me and say what the two said.

• 2:09:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:21Mitchell Green?

  That's where it's going. Like, the market causes the greatest amount of pain to the, you know, greatest number of people.

• 2:09:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah. And to be honest, right now, the, if you looked at, at X, you would say. The consensus view is that AI is in a bubble and then we're going to have this massive correction. And the contrarians are saying, you know, are the runes, obviously he's very incentivized. Dylan Patel saying like, people aren't prepared for this. Anthropic's not going to load.

• 2:09:49Mitchell Green?

  Yeah, look, my view is, is my view on all that is good company and good investment can be two very fundamental things. Like you may wake up in five years and Anthropic is worth 350 billion dollars, but it's 350 billion dollars. Uh, I want to go back to the contrarian thing in a second.

• 2:10:08Mitchell Green?

  People are underestimating over the next 10 to 15 years, what AI is going to do, myself included, every one of your guests included. In 2000, I could have sat on your show if it was around and nobody would have talked about the $3 trillion of social media that's been created, value. Yet, people always overestimate the near term. The bubble will probably, whatever bubble we're in will be different than 2020 and 21, it'll be different than 99. There will be some correction, nobody will be able to predict when it happens and the correction will just happen. But then, that is probably the best time to then buy a bunch of these names. Uh, and hold on to a blunt word, how do you be a contrarian? I don't know, you'd be like Lindsey Vonn in Terry, AC, Ellen, trying to now go win an Olympic medal.

• 2:10:51Mitchell Green?

  You, you know, I, I think people that have, I think contrarians tend to be people that understand like how to take very calculated risks. And are not afraid of doing that. So like, what we look for in our analysts that come and work here, you know, cold call companies all day long. You know, by the way, a good CEO doesn't call you back. It's a CEO you call every 10, 10 times and calls you back after 10 times. Like, that's, it's like grit, persistence, not being afraid to be different. So like, you look for like athletes. I'm sorry, but if you drop the ball at the Rose Bowl, like you have faced adversity. I'm sorry, getting a D on a test is not adversity.

• 2:11:32Mitchell Green?

  Like, you know, but like, so I think like a lot, we like a lot of like athletes.

• 2:11:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:37Mitchell Green?

  Or like, people like, were really big in like arts or music or just. Doing something different. Being a straight A student is not different, especially with grade inflation.

• 2:11:47John Coogan?

  Talk about the differences culturally between the hedge fund guys you know and the venture capitalists. I was reading, Dan Wong was talking about how in the hedge fund world, you're wrong five times before breakfast because everyone has a different thesis and then it's immediately proved right or wrong. So you get more used to being contrarian and everyone wants to find that edge, whereas in Silicon Valley, there's a little bit more incentive to go with the herd because you can just ride the wave. What else have you seen and do you agree with that take?

• 2:12:19Mitchell Green?

  Yeah, yeah. So hedge funds are, it's like, I think a very, very generalist view, extremely generalist view.

• 2:12:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:27Mitchell Green?

  Broad view. What I would say is I think if you were to take the best hedge fund managers I know and the best venture capitalists I know, we've been fortunate to like partner with a bunch of people, work with people, have people back us, I would tell you that in three month or six month increments, I think the smart, the hedge fund guys are smarter and like have a better sense of where the world is going. But I think over like a five to 10 year period, the venture capitalists have a better view, just in general, like how they think.

• 2:13:00John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Yeah, kind of aligned with the business. Contrarian takes, I saw one here. The center of gravity is shifting. More innovation is happening outside of Silicon Valley with countries outside the US producing category leaders earlier in their life cycle. I read that. I felt like I disagreed with it. Defend it.

• 2:13:19Mitchell Green?

  I, in a world, if you believe AI is coming and it's easier to build software or build whatever, well, who says you have to be in Silicon Valley where it's really expensive to live, it's really expensive to get talent. If you can build it anywhere, but people have built now public companies that are completely, you know, grafted by the way, is a Big business.

• 2:13:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:42Mitchell Green?

  And it's completely distributed. There are other big companies like if you talk to people like Dell and Microsoft, they will tell you that they've they've shut down a lot of like small, small regional offices and just have people work remote. So I think and actually the more you believe in AI, the more actually stuff could come out of select application layer. I think at the models, at the at the model level, um, it becomes about recruiting the best like, you know, PhD level talent and stuff like that, but just to build application companies, I think you can build them anywhere.

• 2:14:11John Coogan?

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

• 2:14:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 2:14:15John Coogan?

  This is great.

• 2:14:16Jordi Hays?

  What uh, what's the update on on the racing side?

• 2:14:19John Coogan?

  Did you watch the Rolex 24?

• 2:14:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Any, any reactions?

• 2:14:23Mitchell Green?

  Part of it.

• 2:14:23Jordi Hays?

  Why, why weren't you, why weren't you racing in this Rolex 24?

• 2:14:26Mitchell Green?

  Couple of years, I got more years. Um, I uh, was so race season, we are first race for Ferrari challenge kicks off in like the middle of March.

• 2:14:36John Coogan?

  Awesome.

• 2:14:36Mitchell Green?

  Uh, at the Thermal Club, uh, I was at a Palm Springs where you guys have been.

• 2:14:40John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 2:14:40Mitchell Green?

  Uh, I'm actually gonna race a support race at Le Mans this year.

• 2:14:43John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 2:14:43Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 2:14:44Mitchell Green?

  Uh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna race the Monaco vintage races in an old F1 car.

• 2:14:48John Coogan?

  Nice.

• 2:14:48Mitchell Green?

  Uh. My goal is to run Le Mans in the next like five years.

• 2:14:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:14:53Mitchell Green?

  Like 24 hours at Le Mans.

• 2:14:54John Coogan?

  Wow. That'll be amazing. Well, we'll be.

• 2:14:56Mitchell Green?

  Well, you know, you got, you got, you know, the guys you gotta have come on here though, cause you like cars. I don't really know him, but George Kurtz is like.

• 2:15:02John Coogan?

  Oh, he's a sponsor.

• 2:15:03Mitchell Green?

  Oh, he's bad. He's very good. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:15:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:06Jordi Hays?

  No, his, his race at Daytona was insane. I mean, from getting taken out in that opening

• 2:15:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:13Jordi Hays?

  corner to uh, getting the win.

• 2:15:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, absolute legend. Well.

• 2:15:17Mitchell Green?

  F1 gonna be, F1, it was funny, George Russell was talking

• 2:15:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:21Mitchell Green?

  that he thought F1, I thought I saw like a interview with him where he thinks it might be a lot closer this year. Cause there's a bunch more teams that could be in the mix. It's still obviously very early on, but like the car that Adrian Newey built at, at uh, for Aston Martin is totally wild. So it'll be fun.

• 2:15:35Jordi Hays?

  We're putting, we're putting together a market map of F1 teams based on the tech companies that are sponsoring them. So.

• 2:15:42Mitchell Green?

  Oh my, that's amazing, by the way.

• 2:15:45Jordi Hays?

  Cause there's, I mean, I think uh.

• 2:15:46John Coogan?

  The easiest way for tech people to understand.

• 2:15:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, motorsports are definitely a beneficiary of the AI boom so far.

• 2:15:53John Coogan?

  You guys gotta come to a, you gotta come to an F1 race. We're excited. Yeah, we were in Vegas. It was fun. Well, yeah.

• 2:15:58Jordi Hays?

  I'm assuming we'll be at all three American races this year.

• 2:16:01John Coogan?

  I hope so. I hope so. Anyway.

• 2:16:03Jordi Hays?

  Great catching up, Mitchell.

• 2:16:05John Coogan?

  We'll see you soon, Mitchell. Cheers. Go bye. Let me tell you about Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software. And I'm also going to tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR, built to evolve with modern, small and medium sized businesses. And we have some breaking news. Sam Altman has responded to the Anthropic ads. He says, first, the good part about the Anthropic ads, they are funny and I laughed. I like it. But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest. Our most important principle for ads is that they, is that we won't do exactly this.

• 2:16:44John Coogan?

  We would never obviously run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them. We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that. I guess it's on brand for Anthropic doublespeak to use a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren't real. But a Super Bowl ad is not where I would expect it. More importantly, we believe everyone deserves to use AI and are committed to free access because we believe access creates agency. More Texans use ChatGPT for free than, than total people use Claude in the United States. So we have a differently shaped problem than they do. If you want to pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro, we don't show you ads. Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people.

• 2:17:25John Coogan?

  We are glad they do that and we are doing that too, but we also, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can't pay for subscriptions. Maybe even more importantly, Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI. They block companies they don't like from using their coding product, including us. They want to write rules for themselves for, for what people can and can't use AI for. And now they also want to tell other companies what their business models can be. We are committed to broad democratic decision making. In addition to access, we also are committed to building the most resilient ecosystem for advanced AI. We care a great deal about safe, broadly beneficial AGI, and we know the only way to get there is to work.

• 2:18:06John Coogan?

  With the world to prepare, one authoritarian company won't get us there on their own to say nothing of the other obvious risks is a dark path. As for our Super Bowl ad, it's about builders and how and how anyone can now build anything. We are enjoying watching so many people switch to Codex. There have been 500,000 app downloads since launch on Monday, and we think builders are really going to love what's coming for them in the next few weeks. I believe Codex is going to win. We will continue to work hard to make even more intelligence available for lower and lower prices to our users. This time belongs to the builders, not the people who want to control them. So he fires, fires back.

• 2:18:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was, it was, uh,

• 2:18:43John Coogan?

  More responses.

• 2:18:44Jordi Hays?

  This is why I said in general, like, again, I think Sam has to admit that the ads are like pretty entertaining and it's just such a wild move and unexpected from from Anthropic, given that they've been, you know, trying, I mean, I'd say like from a brand standpoint, going with like the sort of edgy adult humor was was

• 2:19:07John Coogan?

  Risk.

• 2:19:08Jordi Hays?

  Unexpected. But yeah, ultimately, it's deceptive. Like, they're trying to mislead people about OpenAI's ad product.

• 2:19:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's not corn syrup.

• 2:19:17Jordi Hays?

  Like, the entire strategy of the campaign is clearly not to drive downloads.

• 2:19:21John Coogan?

  It's FUD.

• 2:19:22Jordi Hays?

  It's fun.

• 2:19:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:23Jordi Hays?

  And, yeah, I think there will probably be a Harvard business, you know, case study on on this campaign.

• 2:19:32John Coogan?

  We should do TBPN business case studies. I think that'd be fun. Should generate those. Also, it's just anti-ad, which I don't like. I like ads. Here's another ad. Labelbox. RL Environments, Voice, Robotics, E-Vows, and Expert Human Data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And we have our next guest in the restream waiting.

• 2:19:53Jordi Hays?

  Is it time to puff?

• 2:19:53John Coogan?

  It's time to puff. We got Simon from TurboPuffer.

• 2:19:56Jordi Hays?

  Let's puff.

• 2:19:57John Coogan?

  In the restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TBPN Ultra Dome.

• 2:20:01John Coogan?

  Simon, how you doing? Good to see you.

• 2:20:03Speaker 03

  Good. Good to see you, guys. Hey, John. Hey, Jordy.

• 2:20:06Jordi Hays?

  It's time to puff.

• 2:20:07John Coogan?

  It's time to puff. What's new in your world? Were you thinking about doing an over-the-top attack ad on a competitor? Or are you locked in, focused for this Super Bowl? What's the strategy? How is the business growing?

• 2:20:19Speaker 03

  I mean, you were so generous to give us a front and send logo to the Super Bowl. Um, as, as a new entrant, yeah, as a new entrant to the new world, I can't, I don't really understand American football.

• 2:20:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:20:36Speaker 03

  But it seems right up your alley because when I think of it from first principles, it seems like a sport that has been designed to show ads.

• 2:20:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:20:43Speaker 03

  Which I think that is a great American invention, so I have to respect that.

• 2:20:48John Coogan?

  It's beautiful.

• 2:20:48Speaker 03

  It's very beautiful. Yeah.

• 2:20:51John Coogan?

  Uh, how has the, uh, the agentic coding boom been processed to you? What, what's the effect? Are you seeing any slowdown? There's been hype waves and sell offs and all sorts of turmoil. Uh, has the recent, uh, sort of re-acceleration, uh, taken you to surprise? Did it hit you like a flashbang?

• 2:21:11Speaker 03

  I, I, whatever is going on right now is hitting us like something.

• 2:21:16John Coogan?

  That's good. What is going on? Bring it down for us.

• 2:21:22Speaker 03

  You've been waiting to use this effect all day.

• 2:21:25John Coogan?

  Yes, all day. And the chat demanded it. Anyway.

• 2:21:31Speaker 03

  Bobby says billions, billions must puff.

• 2:21:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:21:34Speaker 03

  We need a puff one. We need a puff one. Like a puffer fist that's sort of just like, you know, when you want me to get off camera, you get a puffer fist that's sort of counting down.

• 2:21:42John Coogan?

  Well, we have a smoke grenade. We have a smoke grenade that kind of issues puffs of smoke, but maybe they need logos all over them. That would be good.

• 2:21:48Speaker 03

  I mean, look, the world, the world's puffing. Uh, I think you asked about coding. I think coding was the first vertical that really started puffing really hard. And I mean, in general, the way that we look at the world is that we can certainly take all of the knowledge in the world and we can distill it into a few terabytes of weights. And those terabytes of weights are extremely useful at reasoning over data. But in some way, they have to reason with the data. And, uh, to reason with the data, you need a search engine, right? That has all the canonical data and is that tool to search through the data?

• 2:22:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:21Speaker 03

  Um, I mean, that's what Cursor and Cognition and other coding tools are doing with TurboPuffer, um, is to search through the code. And so I think we're seeing that in other verticals now. We see it in legal, right? And we see every vertical sort of starts by just pushing a bunch of things into context. But then really what they want is to allow the agent to search by itself. And that's where TurboPuffer comes in is that as the search engine, it can index petabytes and petabytes of data to allow these agents to search.

• 2:22:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were, I mean, we were talking about ads. Is, do you have a burgeoning ads business or not, not ads in TurboPuffer, but powering ad tech systems? Because I can imagine a lot of new platforms, they have a lot of content, they have a lot of ads, they need to match those. And so your system should be valuable there. Is that a stretch or is that a good application?

• 2:23:11Speaker 03

  I think most of the ad businesses already have extremely sophisticated systems for this.

• 2:23:16John Coogan?

  I'm thinking new ad businesses, yeah.

• 2:23:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, we haven't seen that vertical really come alive for us yet.

• 2:23:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, I imagine, I imagine it becomes important. And what about other sort of applications or sectors that are growing in terms of this technology, adopting this technology, puffing broadly?

• 2:23:41Speaker 03

  Something that we're seeing puffing pretty hard right now is that people want to basically build their own Google. They want to take the entire web and make it searchable and allow the agents to reason over either literally the entire public internet or data sizes that are, that internal data that's of that kind of volume, right? Hundreds of billions of documents. And recently, we, we, we launched some product to support that where you can basically now build your own internet index on top of TurboPuffer for an extremely reasonable cost. So what we showed is that we can take 100 billion documents and make them available to you with a P50. So that's the median latency of less than 50 milliseconds.

• 2:24:21Speaker 03

  So this is pretty remarkable for an off the shelf SaaS product and something that we're seeing that some of the most sophisticated customers in the world need. And I don't think there's any other easy way to do it than to puff.

• 2:24:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, we talked a little bit last time on on just compute bottlenecks, AI bottlenecks, anything that you're that's keeping you up at night in terms of data center build outs, semiconductor build outs, even if it's not directly related to your business. Is there anything that you see that could potentially put a damper on the growth of the booming AI industry?

• 2:24:57Speaker 03

  I mean, I think everyone is everyone is struggling to get compute when you get enough scale. And I mean, that's it's it's good news in CPU land. I'm I'm not contending for the GPUs yet, but we are starting to see. I mean, you have to do that at any scale, right? You have to start requesting from the cloud providers. Hey, I want hundreds and hundreds of this machine in this particular region for these customers. So I think that's something that everyone's facing. Obviously, we're watching the DRAM prices and things like that, like everyone else. But hopefully, hopefully, that gets that comes down.

• 2:25:34Jordi Hays?

  Are there any any kind of like narrative? You have an interesting view into the usage of pretty much every popular AI product. Obviously, you can't talk about individual, the the sort of usage of any individual product. But is there any sort of narrative violations that you're seeing broadly? Every single day, depending on new products getting announced, people are saying, you know, it's over for this company, it's over for that company, or I just churned from this product. But overall, what are you seeing?

• 2:26:03Speaker 03

  I think, I mean, what we see is that the companies that are building the most exciting product are trying to operationalize very, very large amounts of data. That's difficult, difficult to copy. And so, I mean, we have some survivorship bias in the businesses that we see, but they come to us because they want to connect more data to AI than anyone else. I would say, yeah, if you're a thin layer and you're not trying to vacuum up a lot of data, then it's it starts to get really difficult. So I, I mean, I, I do see as with how powerful the models are now, you, you have to be investing in some pretty, pretty deep tech. To, to make it. Um, yeah.

• 2:26:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. Are you doing anything on this, on the, on this, on the front of like making TurboPuffer intelligible to agents? So if someone goes to a vibe coding app or a CLI tool and they just say, solve this problem for me. The agent pulls TurboPuffer off the shelf?

• 2:27:05Speaker 03

  I mean, we, we, we try as much as we can to make the docs very easy to read.

• 2:27:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:11Speaker 03

  Um, I think it's not completely clear how the LLMs make the decision of what the best database is. But I think that we're trying to do what we can to make sure that the LLMs like, like puffin as well.

• 2:27:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:23Speaker 03

  Um, I, I, we have made API decisions around what it would be easier for the, for the LLMs to guess.

• 2:27:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. I heard an interesting anecdote about someone building a CLI tool. They wanted to make it easy for an L, an LLM to grab or an agent to grab. And so basically they just rewrote the CLI to include every possible hallucination or mistake that could be made. And people often do this with, with URLs where they will say, well, you know, some people might type the wrong URL sometimes. But LLMs hallucinate in a slightly different way. They don't necessarily fat finger a single key. But they might, you know, drop the wrong token or use the wrong phrase or use the wrong term.

• 2:28:12John Coogan?

  And so they rewrote their CLI to include like every possible permutation that, that, that an LLM could, could think about in terms of like, update, edit, quit, exit, uh, you know, all the different keywords. They just created hooks and functionality for all of them. So even if the LLM shows up and is like, kind of clumsy, it can still use it and so it still likes it. But I don't know, I don't know where all that goes on the, on the commercial side. This is more for like open source.

• 2:28:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, I think maybe it's a little overblown how much you have to design for this. I think it's the same with humans. We eat fat finger stuff and the L L Ms are a lot more resilient now than they were even just six months ago. So to me, it's, it's just always good API design. If you're designing a good API or a good CLI or a good interface, you should sort of be able to predict like, oh, if I did this, it's probably going to work this way. And I think the L L M treats it exactly the same way. So I, I, I, I would maybe take back that we're doing anything super intentional for the L L Ms. Cause I think the same design that's good for humans is good for L L Ms. Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

• 2:29:11Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what if anything has changed since the funding round?

• 2:29:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:29:17Speaker 03

  Not much has changed. Uh, we got logo rights to the ramp, so that's exciting. No way. Congratulations.

• 2:29:25Jordi Hays?

  They were like, finally you raised a bit more venture capital. We'll let you use our logo.

• 2:29:29Speaker 03

  There you go. I mean, you know, it's, uh, it's in, it's, uh, yeah, I think we're really, really happy to work with that team. And I think there's lots more logos, uh, waiting beneath the surface to be unearthed. Um, so the murderers row will, will continue to, to evolve. Um, as we earn the trust of more and more of the lovely companies that we, that we work with.

• 2:29:53Jordi Hays?

  What was the, what was it? Early on, when companies were discovering Turbopuffer and realizing, hey, this is really good. And this is going to be sort of key to enabling all these different features and functionality that we want. Was it actually a challenge getting logo rights because they didn't want their competitors to be super aware of it? Right? You want like, hey, if I can have an even an extra month before another, uh, company that I might have some overlap with, I'll take it.

• 2:30:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, we have some verticals in, um, like there's a head fund that doesn't really want us to talk about, uh, um, because they, they see it as a competitive advantage, right? Um, and so, I mean, I, we like that tension, um, for sure. I think honestly, in the beginning, it was just, um,

• 2:30:44Speaker 03

  I'm sure that some of the companies that bet on us early were like, okay, this is like three or four people in Canada and we're betting our whole business and search on them being able to make it. And I've certainly heard from one of our early customers that that kept them awake at night. Now the company is 10 times that size, right, and of a different caliber and we owe them everything to have bet on us that early on. But it was certainly a challenge in the beginning, not just because they saw it as a secret sauce, but also because they were afraid of what their customers would think, right? Here's this like little like dinky company in the woods of Canada. Like, what do they know about writing search engines? I think they were concerned with their customers thought.

• 2:31:25Speaker 03

  And we've just tried to do everything that we can by keeping our uptime as good as possible and walking everything carefully and building good software to earn that trust. But I think every startup that gets logos, I think the founders have to really fight for it. And they have to build the relationships to make sure that people trust they're going to use the logo in good hands. And they're not going to plaster it all over contexts that they wouldn't feel okay with.

• 2:31:50Jordi Hays?

  How are you guys approaching vendor selection today? When are you running the calculus of should we build this ourselves or pull something off the rack?

• 2:32:02Speaker 03

  We were just discussing this recently where we've started our data stack now is just using like Claude Code or Cursor Agent in a repo and just giving as much information as possible what's going on. We've ditched, we're starting to more and more ditch just the tools because it's so easy to compose the charts and things like that with agents. So the shallow SaaS software, I think it's dire there because it's just so easy to replace it now. But I think there will also be a bit of a hangover from that, right? There is real value here in like permissions and enterprise, like all these enterprise features. So it will probably go very much in the direction of everyone's going to build their own little shallow thing.

• 2:32:47Speaker 03

  And then some of them are going to realize that this is a bit of a nightmare to maintain and then pay for it again. Could be dire for a little bit, but I think that that, I don't think it's going to swing. I still think there's a lot of value in that.

• 2:33:02John Coogan?

  What's the, what's the worst like logo crime that you've ever seen someone do? Is that just go in the customer database? Search has any employee from a hyperscaler signed up for a trial account? And then slap the logo on the landing page? What would you tell a young founder not to do in terms of throwing a logo on a landing page?

• 2:33:24Speaker 03

  I think we, we like, I think the logo crimes is actually great diction. I think we see this a lot where you see like, just you go on a page and it's like Microsoft, right? And it's all these, it's like, okay, like, we were talking about this internally because so for example, there's a, there's one small team inside of Versal that uses TurboPuffer.

• 2:33:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:45Speaker 03

  And I think a lot of companies might then just put the Versal logo on the website and say, Versal's puffin'.

• 2:33:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:53Speaker 03

  But I don't think that's fair, right? It's an acceleratory use case. It's one person who's using it for go to market and doing a phenomenal job over there. And so what we're trying to do is like, okay, that's, that, that logo might not make it to the front page because that would not be an honest association. And then on the use case page, we're going to be having to tag this as core and acceleratory. And then under acceleratory, right? It will say, okay, it's this particular team at this enterprise that's using it. Just to be completely honest about it. And I think that's, and then I think just sending a note to the teams that you work with of like, hey, is this a cool place to use your logo? You have to be very respectful about it.

• 2:34:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, just ask for permission.

• 2:34:30Speaker 03

  But you can't, yeah, you can't speedrun it. It takes time.

• 2:34:33Jordi Hays?

  Well, the chat, the chat's saying Versal's puffin'.

• 2:34:35John Coogan?

  Breaking news, put up a TBT on trading card. We got the scoop here. Yeah, we love Guillermo.

• 2:34:41Speaker 03

  Case study.

• 2:34:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:43Speaker 03

  Case study will come out, but as I said, it's an acceleratory use case and

• 2:34:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, but that's still cool.

• 2:34:48Speaker 03

  And we love the trust, but it's not like B zero is puffin' or something like that.

• 2:34:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, I know. That makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you so much for hopping by. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:34:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:58John Coogan?

  Have a great, best of your day.

• 2:34:59Jordi Hays?

  While we were live, Google reported earnings.

• 2:35:02John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:35:02Jordi Hays?

  Revenue grew 18%. Search 17%. Gemini has 750 monthly users and the stock is absolutely nuking. So, so just don't, don't look at your portfolio, stay in Slack.

• 2:35:15John Coogan?

  It's just barely over $4 trillion company though. It's so rough.

• 2:35:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, when are you coming, when are you coming to California next? After hours.

• 2:35:23Speaker 03

  I'm going to California next week. But when are you, when are you coming up to Canada? I keep like every time we talk about this and you guys are like, oh, it's so cold.

• 2:35:36John Coogan?

  The whole country, I just feel like the whole country is un-American from my perspective. It's just, it's

• 2:35:42Speaker 03

  I mean, have you met American Simon? I'm right here.

• 2:35:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:35:45Speaker 03

  I'm ready for you.

• 2:35:46John Coogan?

  Okay, you got me, you got me. Well.

• 2:35:49Jordi Hays?

  We would love, we would love to go fishing.

• 2:35:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, we need to do a weekend, weekend trip. It's too hard to bring the show.

• 2:35:55Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, yeah, family trip.

• 2:35:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be great. Let's do it.

• 2:35:58Jordi Hays?

  Realistically.

• 2:35:59Speaker 03

  It's great, great, great for kids.

• 2:36:01Jordi Hays?

  Bringing everybody.

• 2:36:02John Coogan?

  Awesome.

• 2:36:03Speaker 03

  You, you dump them in the lake and you have a great time.

• 2:36:07John Coogan?

  It's risky with some one-year-olds, but we'll give it a try. Anyway, thank you so much for

• 2:36:13Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, Simon.

• 2:36:14John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:36:15Jordi Hays?

  Great update.

• 2:36:16John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with a phantom card.

• 2:36:24Jordi Hays?

  Chat says we need red suits.

• 2:36:27John Coogan?

  Red suits. Yeah, we were talking about that today because we've been wearing the white suits a lot and now it's time for the red suits. We're gonna have to call the tailor.

• 2:36:36Jordi Hays?

  Guy here capital.

• 2:36:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:37Jordi Hays?

  Says Alphabet sees 2026 capex 175 to 185 billion versus 115 billion expected.

• 2:36:46John Coogan?

  We go.

• 2:36:47Jordi Hays?

  Uh, for the past decade, Mag7 were free cash flow monsters who poured money into buybacks to support their stock prices. That era is over.

• 2:36:56John Coogan?

  Well, let me tell you about vibe.co where D to C brands, B to B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, measure sales just like on Meta. Pavel says SaaS is dead, is probably oversold and sleepy companies get wrecked in technology shifts is probably undersold. I think that's a good take. There's a lot of people talking about the SaaS apocalypse. Uh, Patrick O'Shaughnessy shared a clip from Gavin on, uh,

• 2:37:25John Coogan?

  Gavin Baker on Invest Like the Best, saying, "Why it's a mistake for SaaS companies to resist AI because it has a lower margin structure." We can pull this video up. "When there's a transformative new technology, customers are demanding, it's always a mistake not to embrace it." Let's play this clip. Let's see what he says.

• 2:37:41Speaker 14

  Application SaaS companies are making the exact same mistake that brick and mortar retailers did with e-commerce. So, brick and mortar retailers, they looked at Amazon and they said, "Oh, it's losing money." You know, e-commerce is going to be a low-margin business. And so, they did not invest in e-commerce. They clearly saw customer demand for it, but they did not like the margin structure of e-commerce. That is the fundamental reason that essentially every brick and mortar retailer was really slow to invest in e-commerce. And now, here we are, and you know, Amazon has higher margins. So, margins can change. And if there's a fundamental transformative kind of new technology that customers are demanding, it's always a mistake not to embrace it. And that's exactly what the SaaS companies are doing.

• 2:38:24Speaker 14

  They have their 70, 80, 90% gross margins, and they are reluctant to accept AI gross margins. You know, the very nature of AI is, you know, software, you write it once, and it's written very efficiently. And then, you can distribute it broadly at very low cost.

• 2:38:39John Coogan?

  Such an underrated point that the CFO just knows, "My company has 30% gross margins. So, that's what I'm building my entire business around. My company has 90% gross margins." And that's how I'm informing every business decision when the whole structure and that you've built the foundation of your business on changes, that can be a little tricky. Quickly, yesterday, we went to the Cisco AI Summit. I'm sure you saw it. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. We had a lot of fun talking to the team at Cisco. They were very hospitable. I had a great time. Absolutely enjoyed talking to everyone. And we had a really wild, wide-ranging conversation with Dylan Patel at the end. That's in the RSS feed.

• 2:39:22John Coogan?

  If you didn't get a chance to listen to the full thing, we go all over the place. Space Daddy Centers, what Google's doing, what Apple's doing, what Microsoft is doing. We went everywhere. It was really, really great. Anyway, we can go through some more of the timeline. What is this? OMG Cap says, "He died doing what he loved, aggressively buying the dip on SaaS, like a guy averaging down on Blockbuster Video." In 2010.

• 2:39:48Jordi Hays?

  I'm averaging in.

• 2:39:50John Coogan?

  Averaging down.

• 2:39:50Jordi Hays?

  To zero.

• 2:39:51John Coogan?

  That is not good. There are a whole bunch of different takes on the SaaS apocalypse. Pierre Richelson has one. Why would I pay for SaaS if I can prompt the software and run it myself? My brother in Christ, have you heard of open source businesses? The last thing people want to do is be in charge of development and maintenance of software. You gotta get an intern. It's a bull market in interns. The interns are back. The interns, you heard from Mitchell Green over at Lead Edge. He's hiring interns to build stuff for him. It's a bull market interns.

• 2:40:23Jordi Hays?

  Everybody wants to be the one person billion dollar company.

• 2:40:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:40:26Jordi Hays?

  No one wants to be the billion.

• 2:40:28John Coogan?

  Billion intern company of America. Yeah, that's the business. I really, I hadn't actually heard that about Cloudflare, over a thousand interns. That's crazy. I didn't even know that about Shopify. That's very cool. Cluley got mocked for having 50 interns. Maybe they were just early. We, at one point, it felt like we had a ton of interns. We don't actually have that many interns. But interns are underrated. It's a, it's a, it's a good time. And it's a particularly good time with the new tools to let someone loose with it, which is a fresh start. They, they don't have to, they don't, they don't have to maintain the old system. They come in and they're able to start completely fresh with fresh tools. They can pick anything off the shelf, whatever's the most cutting edge. That's what they bring into the organization as opposed to saying, hey, you have to maintain this particular workflow or this particular technology, or you have to plug into this

• 2:41:13John Coogan?

  rest of this ecosystem. Change management takes a long time. Interns allow you to kind of pull that forward, which is a lot of fun. Let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.

• 2:41:28Jordi Hays?

  Unemployed capital allocator says, wait, I'm confused. Is it the software engineers that are obsolete or software companies? Or is it the software users? Or the software users employers?

• 2:41:40Jordi Hays?

  Take him says all of the above.

• 2:41:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, the book says you're not confused. None of these things will exist in five years. Everything. Sell everything and and quit all the jobs.

• 2:41:50Jordi Hays?

  It is interesting. Bloomberg had an article yesterday that shared that Google is expanding their footprint in India planning to.

• 2:42:00John Coogan?

  That was a weird headline, right?

• 2:42:01Jordi Hays?

  They'll have the capacity to add something like 10 to 15,000.

• 2:42:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:42:06Jordi Hays?

  New employees and, you know, I don't, you know, I would say like the, the, probably the catalyst there is sort of changes or unpredictability to US immigration law potentially, you know, being a factor in that, but it was kind of looking at it from a Tyler, Tyler point of view, just being like, hey, how how AGI pilled is is Google broadly, you know, is DeepMind if if they're planning to scale headcount?

• 2:42:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, the headline was from Bloomberg. It's millions of square feet. So that can accommodate somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 employees per million square feet, according to Gemini here. The industry standard is 60 to 80 square feet per person. I wonder how we're doing here in the TBN Ultra dump. I feel like I have way more than 60 square feet to myself. Standard tech office is 100 square feet per person.

• 2:43:03Jordi Hays?

  Tech note, she says India is also going zero tax on data centers until 2047.

• 2:43:07John Coogan?

  Whoa, what would the tax implications be of that?

• 2:43:10Jordi Hays?

  Property tax?

• 2:43:11John Coogan?

  You don't get, yeah, maybe no property tax because you can't possibly not pay income tax on the revenue that's generated from a data center. That would be

• 2:43:17Jordi Hays?

  Maybe.

• 2:43:18John Coogan?

  Crazy, crazy thing. But we will see. But our next guest is in the restream waiting room. We have KJ from Lotus AI. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Good to see you.

• 2:43:32Speaker 15

  I'm doing great, doing great. Good to see you guys too.

• 2:43:34John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on. First time on the show, please introduce yourself and the company.

• 2:43:39Speaker 15

  Yeah, my name is KJ Dollywall. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Lotus Health AI.

• 2:43:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:45Speaker 15

  We are building an AI doctor powered by real doctors.

• 2:43:48John Coogan?

  What's the go to market? How, how much do you like, who do you want to sell to? Like the hospital network, the individual doctors, even the individual consumer?

• 2:43:58Speaker 15

  Yeah, no, we're actually direct to consumer. So one of the big things that we believe in is going straight to the patient. Because innovation in healthcare sort of has always lagged it. The hospital systems or the insurance companies. My background's in consumer. I built a large South Asian dating app prior to this.

• 2:44:14John Coogan?

  Oh, no way.

• 2:44:15Speaker 15

  And so we just, you know, we thought, what are the things that people actually need?

• 2:44:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:19Speaker 15

  America's struggling with healthcare, so we decided to just go direct to consumer.

• 2:44:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, walk me through some of the, I mean, the most basic could be, you know, diet plan, exercise plan, all the way to a doctor can refer you to a lab to go get an MRI and surgery and all sorts of stuff like where, what do you see as the, the early go to market? The, the landing zone, like what do you want to be excellent at and then grow from?

• 2:44:44Speaker 15

  Yeah, we're really focused on primary care today. So when you think about America today, a hundred million people don't have primary care doctors. So that's sort of this huge sort of opportunity to really give people, you know, basic care. So that means, you know, sometimes you need a prescription, sometimes you need a referral, or even a lab order. If you're going to go see a specialist like a cardiologist and you don't have a lab ready, that oftentimes that visit is a waste of time for the cardiologist and for the patient.

• 2:45:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:12Speaker 15

  Right? So we can do a lot of that preliminary primary care virtually.

• 2:45:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:16Speaker 15

  And it turns out 80% of all care in general is actually, you know, possible virtually within the primary care setting.

• 2:45:23John Coogan?

  How important is image processing? You know, I got a mole, like you look at this, like that's a cloud, right? All right, I got a scab and it's not healing and I, is it infected? Is, is AI ready to handle that sort of use case?

• 2:45:37Speaker 15

  Yeah, definitely. So like, you know, we're seeing, I'm already seeing AI being implemented in, you know, obviously the the imaging space and MRI space. Um, but where we're focused more on is really getting the information from the patient, distilling it and summarizing it for a clinician to look at and make the final call.

• 2:45:56John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:45:56Speaker 15

  Uh, so that's really where Lotus is able to give Americans free primary care essentially, because we brought the cost of care down by a factor of 10.

• 2:46:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:04Speaker 15

  Uh, so you can upload images, you can, um, you know, chat with Lotus for hours. Uh, it will do the intakes and learn how you would answer questions on that clipboard when you go see a doctor. Uh, and then the doctor can review all that quickly. And the big thing sort of that we did is we, um, uh, sort of created this, what we call the personal health record, which is the richest longitudinal record on a patient. So when you sign up, the first thing we do is we ingest all your health data. So that's from all the EHRs, every doctor you've ever seen, um, your wearables data, your insurance claims data. That allows us to build sort of the foundation of the patient. And then we can really unlock a lot of the sort of agentic workflows and the clinical workflows on top of that.

• 2:46:47Speaker 15

  That just make care delivery a lot more accurate at that scale.

• 2:46:51John Coogan?

  Years ago, I remember this company Zocdoc was sort of like help you find a doctor nearby, almost like a Yelp for doctors. I don't remember what that business model was, but is there any overlap in or learnings from that type of business where maybe there's a referral fee to a specific doctor? Does that make any sense? Or do you just want the customer to eventually pay or ads? Like, what, how do you see monetization evolving?

• 2:47:16Speaker 15

  Yeah, Zocdoc did, I think, something interesting, which they, they would basically have doctors pay uh, some sort of affiliate fee to be listed on their platform. But, um, actually getting paid for referrals in healthcare is, is a big no-no and kind of illegal. That's why doctors, you know, shouldn't be paid actually for referrals, because then you can be incentivized to refer to a particular, you know, part. And so what we really believe in is in terms of, if you think about the largest tech companies in the world, they're consumer companies. And they make money through sponsored content. We actually think if we focus on premium content within fitness and wellness, which, you know, multi-trillion dollar sort of industry already, that's sort of how we'll be able to monetize.

• 2:48:00Speaker 15

  But really what we're focused on today is bringing the cost of the care down.

• 2:48:05John Coogan?

  So Anthropic's attacking you. They were talking about OpenAI. They were talking about you.

• 2:48:11Speaker 04

  They were talking about Lotus.

• 2:48:12John Coogan?

  Respond. No, no, no, but I mean, you are going to have to have the talking point that responds to that ad. I'm sure that Super Bowl ad will blow over. Everyone will talk about it in the ChatGPT context. But you're going to have to have a strategy for how you, you know, don't do the, hey, we're recommending lifts or we're being weird or creepy with your ads. Like, how do you think about messaging and setting the tone, the mission, the values of the company now? So that you never have a PR crisis in the future?

• 2:48:42Speaker 15

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's so important to do that, right? You know, trust and safety and privacy is is very foundational to what we're building here at Lotus and being, you know, we want to not only stand for the patient, but also for the doctor, right? And so when you look at the industry today, doctors are burning out. Right? We don't have enough doctors. So we're really giving them the technology to supercharge their capabilities. And yeah, in terms of, you know, advertising, it'll be optional and, you know, there'll be a premium subscription. If you don't want to see ads, you can sort of opt out. Or there's other avenues we're exploring, like your employers. Right? A lot of large employers that are self-insured, struggle to get their employees really good healthcare, or at least primary care.

• 2:49:25Speaker 15

  So the employee has to take time off of work, you know, drive an hour, go see a doctor. Half of the times around seeing the doctor is seeing a nurse or a PA because we have such a shortage. And it ruins their day and it, you know, reduces productivity for the company. So we have companies reaching out to us saying, hey, like, we'll pay you fifty dollars a month. Can you just give this to our employees for free?

• 2:49:44John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:49:45Speaker 15

  You know, so there's a lot of different revenue models we'll explore, but really what we're focused on is, you know, how do we get to a million, 10 million patients and grow this company to scale? Because that's really how we think this sort of primary care crisis can be fixed. Essentially, fee for service doesn't work in primary care. Right? And even value-based care doesn't work because we don't have enough doctors.

• 2:50:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. How, how are you reacting to the major LLM providers potentially going into this category? A lot of them have already made announcements, they've rolled out features, they have massive user bases. What's going to be the key differentiator that allows you to go the long haul?

• 2:50:21Speaker 15

  Yeah, no, we think that's actually net positive for the, for the industry because, you know, people are starting to trust AI with their health data. Uh, the one thing they can't do is they can't actually treat patients, right? Um, so we can actually, because we have real licensed clinicians.

• 2:50:36John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:50:37Speaker 15

  Getting treatment, we can actually close that care loop, right? We can give you that prescription, order the lab, refer you to a specialist, give you a diagnosis.

• 2:50:43John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:50:44Speaker 15

  Uh, and, you know, in fact, you know, one of our investors is an executive at OpenAI. And so we've been sort of following that sort of product that they've been looking for a while. But I think it's net positive. I mean, I think there's, you know, there's, you know, healthcare is a $5 trillion market, um, in terms of spend. Um, and a lot of that is just waste, right? That can be sort of cut out and, and taxed.

• 2:51:06Jordi Hays?

  Are you, do you think Lotus is, is really a threat to urgent cares? Where, let's say, uh, somebody has like a skin issue, uh, and they're used to the flow of like, I want immediate care, I want to get, uh, uh, like if somebody gets, I don't know, like poison, bad case of poison oak, and they want, they need to get some treatment for it. They'll go to an urgent care, be able to get like a prescription or a steroid or something like that. Whereas with Lotus, you could just get, you know, basically as long as you have your phone, you could immediately like get, get treatment. Is, is Lotus, uh, threatening to those kinds of businesses that rely on people just needing like convenience?

• 2:51:45Speaker 15

  Yeah, no, actually, it's the quite opposite because what those urgent care centers today, and even emergency rooms at hospitals, their biggest problem is they're overwhelmed with patients coming in that don't need to come in for, you know, things that can be treated through telemedicine or telehealth, right? We actually refer you to urgent care because we obviously recognize and our clinicians recognize that there are obviously certain things that can't be treated, you know, virtually and need to be done in person. And that's where we refer you to inpatient or urgent care, sort of, you know, care where the doctor needs to touch you or, you know, do a procedural thing. But it turns out, like I said earlier, you know, eighty to ninety percent of care can be done virtually. And that's sort of the big bottleneck.

• 2:52:29Speaker 15

  So what ends up happening is all these patients end up going to urgent care or, you know, hospital ER rooms, and then the patients that actually need that care end up not getting it because, you know, these systems are overwhelmed today.

• 2:52:41John Coogan?

  Well, we are in the Lambda Lightning Round. You raised some money. Tell us what happened. What's the deal?

• 2:52:47Speaker 15

  Yeah, we just raised, you know, a total of forty-one million in our C and series.

• 2:52:53John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:52:55Speaker 15

  Like Leonard Perkins and CRV co-led that round. And then we're, you know, very proud to have these guys.

• 2:53:06John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on the progress, and I'm sure we'll see you back here soon. Great to meet you. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And we will continue our Lambda Lightning Round with Nick Sharp from Atio, who's a co-founder and CEO.

• 2:53:27Jordi Hays?

  Welcome back.

• 2:53:28Speaker 16

  Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here again.

• 2:53:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, good to have you back.

• 2:53:33Jordi Hays?

  Give us the update on the last few months. I feel like the timeline has been loving. Atio feels like there's a ton of momentum.

• 2:53:43Speaker 16

  Yeah, well, that's good. We've had a, it's the end of a busy day here in London, and it's been, it's been a long one, but an exciting one. So I think it was about five months ago that I was on the show when we, when we raised our series B. And since then, we've been busy, deep in R and D land. And today, we are, we're showing the world the fruits of our labor and launching a product called Ask Atio.

• 2:54:07Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Break it down.

• 2:54:09Speaker 16

  Yeah, so it is a entirely new way to interact with Atio with your CRM. And it is a new conversational AI interface, which essentially does does something which has been the holy grail for CRM for a really long time, which is making sense of all of the ton of data that you're generating all the time. So that's that's calls, that's emails, that's all of the interactions you're having with customers, product data, etc. And essentially makes it intelligible and allows you to take action on it. So good example might be I now run a workflow at the end of every day, which essentially goes through all customer calls, all customer emails, and just flags things that are important for me.

• 2:54:53Jordi Hays?

  So that's like customer feedback or a place that you need to step in and have a conversation with a customer yourself, etc.

• 2:55:00Speaker 16

  Exactly. But imagine, you know, we have like thirty, forty people in our customer facing team now. So to do that previously, when we have hundreds, thousands of customer interactions a day would be impossible. And so it's, yeah, it's a very, very exciting step for us.

• 2:55:17Jordi Hays?

  What's been your reaction to, it feels like even even this year, a lot of people have been saying AGI is here. And yet there's a bunch of net new CRM companies being being formed. You guys have the benefit of having been around long enough to have a very strong foundation, yet not necessarily be fully kind of cemented in your ways and still a lot of functionality. And so it feels like you were already an AI native CRM. And so it must be kind of funny to see other CRMs coming in that are trying, maybe trying to claim they're more AI native.

• 2:55:52Speaker 16

  Yeah, totally. And what's what's funny for us is that there seems to be a level of consensus now that something's going to happen in this market, which has not been the case, right? So the consensus seems to have been building more and more and more. And in the last few months, we've just seen a, we've seen things fully flip in the other way, where everyone now believes that that these kind of incumbents are going to be disrupted. And so we're we're excited by the by the by the excitement of everyone else and the kind of belief in the market.

• 2:56:24Speaker 16

  And, you know, we we have the the job now of making sure that we continue to to be at the front of the pack, which is Lots of short term, just being very paranoid in the short term, very optimistic in the long term and just kind of keep, keep building, keep going.

• 2:56:41Jordi Hays?

  What, what are you paying attention to on the sort of sales agent side, just in general, this is, you know, big opportunity for Atio, but I know you guys will want to integrate with a bunch of players as well. So far, we've been hearing, you know, people are using a bunch of different agents on, on that front, but what are you seeing?

• 2:57:02Speaker 16

  Yeah, and the way that we think about this is, I think when the market is, when there's as much innovation and turmoil, et cetera, as we're seeing right now, you kind of want to see, you want to see how things play out a bit. So we're taking some pretty big bets, but equally, we're not building a closed platform and we're letting, we really want people to integrate with our platform. And we want our customers to go in whatever direction is right for them and make sure that we can, we can support that. So we took a huge bet on ecosystem and building a really strong SDK. We've, we've kind of quietly

• 2:57:41Speaker 16

  put out an MCP server in beta, so MCP dot atio dot com slash MCP. But we're, we're basically, we're, you know, CRM is always going to be the center of a GTM stack. And so as well as doing our own things in agentic workflows and that kind of stuff, we've also taken a huge bet on, on supporting all the other great companies that are doing stuff there as well.

• 2:58:05Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. What can we expect from you guys this year? Is this, are you calling it now? This is the last thing you're going to ship for the year? No, kidding.

• 2:58:13Speaker 16

  Exactly. Well, like, you know, for us, this is, this is day four of FY27. So we're, we're, we're just at the beginning. And honestly, it's gonna be, it's gonna be a bit of an onslaught. We have a huge, huge amount coming. And we're gonna follow up with this launch pretty quickly in, in, in sort of just over about a couple of months with another really, really big launch. And, and then of course, we, we're in this interesting phase as, as, as founders or as company builders or whatever, where you now have to do two things. You've got to scale your company and you've got to hit all of your really ambitious targets.

• 2:58:55Speaker 16

  But at the same time, you're, everything needs to be rebuilt every three months. So the way that you do go to market, the way that we think about product, et cetera. We're in kind of deep R and D mode across the company. And so you're, you're, you're, you're trying to be simultaneously be a extremely scrappy early-stage company, but then also trying to kind of compound, you know, compound growth and, and serve a growing number of customers. So we're up to about 7,000 customers now.

• 2:59:26John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:59:27Speaker 16

  Which is triple, triple this, this time last year. And so, yeah, lots of, lots of things going on at once.

• 2:59:35John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about outbound actually sending emails, draft?

• 2:59:40Speaker 16

  Yeah.

• 2:59:40John Coogan?

  Like, like going into more of like the AI agent for sales rep or place a sales rep? That's a, that's a space that feels like people are trying stuff, but nothing's really caught. Like, how, how far away are we from that?

• 2:59:55Speaker 16

  The, the interesting thing is that, that the, the, I mean, you might have seen this, the, the ramp post that was making rounds. Yeah, and these channels are getting saturated and it's, it's, it's a constant game of cat and mouse, right? Because the more emails that get sent, the better the, the, the Gmail or whoever else is detecting them and shutting them down, et cetera. So we take an ecosystem bet on those things. Again, you know, especially when it comes to outbound, we really want to be, we want to be the place where the customer contacts live, where your, your team live, et cetera. And we do, we integrate with, with a lot of these players.

• 3:00:34Speaker 16

  Now, over time, you, you want to be able to provide your customers with a pretty out-of-the-box solution to a lot of these problems. So never say never. But right now, we're, we're mostly focused, and when it comes to outbound, we're focused on just partnering with, with the best people we can.

• 3:00:49John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 3:00:50Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 3:00:51John Coogan?

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

• 3:00:52Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for staying up.

• 3:00:53John Coogan?

  Thanks for staying up late. We appreciate it.

• 3:00:55Jordi Hays?

  Long day.

• 3:00:55Speaker 16

  Exactly.

• 3:00:57John Coogan?

  And we will see you soon.

• 3:00:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'll see you back on soon.

• 3:01:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, have a good one.

• 3:01:01Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:01:02John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Uh, we have one last story that we should get through before we get out of here. Citadel's Ken Griffin says Trump White House has, quote, "enriched" family members. The Wall Street-figureed Republican donor offers rare public criticism of perceived administration's self-dealings. They're calling him Ken Doesn't Like Griffin. The billionaire investor.

• 3:01:25Jordi Hays?

  Sick of Griffin.

• 3:01:25John Coogan?

  Sick of Griffin. Uh, this, he said, this is the direct quote from, uh, Ken Griffin, the founder of the hedge fund Citadel. He says, "This administration has definitely made missteps in choosing decisions or courses that have been very, very enriching to the families of those in the administration." He said at a conference in West Palm Beach, Florida on Tuesday that was hosted by the Wall Street Journal. He added, quote, "That calls into question, is the public interest being served?" Uh, the, in response to Griffin's comments, a White House spokesman said, quote, "The only special interest guiding the Trump administration's decision-making is the best interest of the American people. The fact that major stock indexes have hit multiple all-time highs, real wages have grown,

• 3:02:06John Coogan?

  and inflation has cooled since President Trump took office is proof that this administration is delivering for every American." Uh, Trump and his family members have profited since he took office last year. This is the Financial Times. An FT investigation in October found the president's rapidly growing cryptocurrency empire had already reaped more than $1 billion in pre-tax profits over the prior year, partly attributed to a digital currency boom buoyed by the White House's own crypto-friendly policies. Companies backed by Trump's sons have been awarded contracts with government agencies and benefit from administration policies and cryptocurrency and prediction markets. Um, and a lot of this goes into the decision to sell Nvidia chips to, uh, the UAE, right?

• 3:02:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:48John Coogan?

  And, uh, and an associate.

• 3:02:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I meant to ask Dylan about that yesterday. This idea of like, where, do you think any lab CEOs or, or hyperscalers were looking at that? The reporting that came out over the weekend that, uh... Uh, the, the spy sheik.

• 3:03:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:04Jordi Hays?

  In the UAE had bought half a billion dollars of world, or sorry, half a billion, invested half a billion into World Liberty Financial.

• 3:03:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:11Jordi Hays?

  Bought forty-nine percent of the company right before the inauguration and quickly we approved a, a pretty massive sale to China.

• 3:03:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:19Jordi Hays?

  I wonder how many people were kind of reading that story and being deeply frustrated just given, hey, like, I would have.

• 3:03:25John Coogan?

  Oh, I would have bought them.

• 3:03:26Jordi Hays?

  I was a happy buyer.

• 3:03:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:03:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Trump, of course, said, Trump, of course, said he didn't know anything about, uh, anything about the investment, um.

• 3:03:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a big question. I mean, obviously, the, the Wall Street Journal, I think, had a piece on like the timing being suspicious. The Trump administration's denied that there's anything wrongdoing going on. Maybe there'll be an investigation at some point, but, uh, the, the, the, the question that's in my mind, aside from that one, is just, um, is, is the UAE suitable for selling GPUs to? Because if it's something that's like really obviously a thumbs up and everyone's happy about, then it's a lot less controversial to do it, I would think, because we're now at a point where many folks that I look to for guidance on, uh, like the geopolitical chip issue have come around to the idea that, hey, maybe we do want China to actually be buying Nvidia chips and there's maybe some

• 3:04:21John Coogan?

  good arguments there. Initially, it was like, cut everything off. Now the ball has moved to, don't sell them ASML equipment, don't sell them lithography.

• 3:04:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, come around to, we want people.

• 3:04:31John Coogan?

  To standardize.

• 3:04:32Jordi Hays?

  AI to be on the American AI stack. Is it better for the UAE to be running on Nvidia versus Huawei?

• 3:04:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, Dylan's point was like, not, this, these things don't happen in isolation. So if you, if you don't sell Nvidia chips to China, it's not that they're going to, you know, retaliate specifically with, with Huawei or SMIC or SME. Uh, it's that you could like, they could like, you know. Do something in a completely different part of the world, like Dylan's example was like, be more aggressive about Africa or something like that, like or the rare earth elements. So there's like a million different debate points going on and all of those sort of come together. But with regard to the UAE, I mean, I guess that there is a risk that you you you send a bunch of Nvidia chips and they just stay on the they stay on the on the

• 3:05:22John Coogan?

  container ship and then they just get forwarded straight along to someone who's maybe even less friendly. But I don't know that that's been a historical risk. There's been a lot of chip smuggling, a lot of it's gone through Malaysia. I don't exactly know how much of a risk the UAE poses. So I'd love to talk to Bill Bishop about how that fits in. We'll have to keep we'll have to keep digging in. But obviously, I think we're fans of Jimmy Carter's approach to leading the American people.

• 3:05:54Jordi Hays?

  Divest.

• 3:05:55John Coogan?

  Divest. Stay focused. Lock in. It's the great lock in. It's the great lock in. You got to stay focused on the on the job at hand.

• 3:06:03Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, crazy day. Mike Isaac over in New York Times says, by the number of OpenAI employees I see tweeting about Anthropic's Super Bowl ad, Anthropic should be paying OpenAI earned media fees.

• 3:06:17John Coogan?

  Funny. Oh, also related to Ken Griffin. I like this post from High Yield Harry, where it's Mr. Beast with Kim Kardashian and Ken Griffins just way in the background. And High Yield Harry said, guy like me would have taken a photo with Ken Griffin instead. And I don't know who he's who he's imagining him being. Is he imagining that he's Mr. Beast or Kim Kardashian? But it's funny to imagine being at this party and saying, I gotta get, I gotta get a photo with Ken. I gotta get a photo with Ken. Whoa. Okay, we got to close with this this G-Wagon. Look at this G-Wagon. You mentioned this.

• 3:06:50Jordi Hays?

  Pull it up. Pull it up.

• 3:06:51John Coogan?

  I did not see this. It's it's right after. Yeah, look at this.

• 3:06:55Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 3:06:55John Coogan?

  What is going on?

• 3:06:57Jordi Hays?

  Blake, I'm gonna pull up. I texted him to get some more context. So Blake runs an account called Found Objects on Instagram, and he is selling a very special G-Wagon that's effectively like a it's it's one of 10. Ever made.

• 3:07:14John Coogan?

  Why is Vladimir Putin seen next to it?

• 3:07:17Jordi Hays?

  Because he was, he was rolling in the.

• 3:07:19John Coogan?

  He was rolling in this?

• 3:07:20Jordi Hays?

  This was part of the presidential fleet. So it's basically like a Maybach converted with it with into a G-Wagon.

• 3:07:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh, in order to, you'd have to do an insane conversion to get this into the U.S. Uh, but for the right person, it could be, could be really.

• 3:07:37John Coogan?

  This has Mark Zuckerberg written all over it.

• 3:07:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:40John Coogan?

  He's got the Cayenne. He's got the extended, extended to West Coast Customs. Uh, this, this extended G-Wagon is.

• 3:07:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Go to the, go to the picture at the very end.

• 3:07:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. The picture at the very end.

• 3:07:51Jordi Hays?

  Goes incredibly hard.

• 3:07:52John Coogan?

  Just sitting, standing in front of it. It's like, why is he not getting into it or getting out of it? He's just like walking next to it. It's very, very.

• 3:07:58Jordi Hays?

  So this, this can be yours for the low price.

• 3:08:01John Coogan?

  So you, you, you know, the person that's seen this, this is not A.I. This is confirmed.

• 3:08:05Jordi Hays?

  This is real. This is real.

• 3:08:06John Coogan?

  Because there was, there was an A.I. car, uh, caught on Bring a Trailer. That's, that caused a firestorm in the car auction community. Uh, the pictures were absolutely hilarious. It, it, you'd look in the car and the car was, uh, was generated, I guess, on cobblestones. And inside the car, the A.I. had hallucinated more cobblestones. So it looked like you had cobblestones floor, cobble, cobblestone floor mats. And you could, and you can imagine getting into.

• 3:08:35Jordi Hays?

  So basically before you pay, you know, 225K for a brand new G-Wagon, first consider this 2010 G55XXL. I think that's a fantastic example. And we'll end on a white pill.

• 3:08:49John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:08:50Jordi Hays?

  I guess we didn't need the red suits for Google today.

• 3:08:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:53Jordi Hays?

  The stock has recovered. It's now up one, one and a half percent after hours.

• 3:08:57John Coogan?

  Let's hear it for Google earnings. Everyone like.

• 3:09:02John Coogan?

  We're investing in A.I. and the market loves it.

• 3:09:05Speaker 07

  Logan, uh, Logan also just tweeted, they, they just crossed 10 billion tokens per minute on Gemini.

• 3:09:10John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:09:10Speaker 07

  And 750 million, uh, M.A.U.s.

• 3:09:13Jordi Hays?

  I've seen it now. Give them a hundred trillion dollar valuation.

• 3:09:15John Coogan?

  It's a hundred trillion. They're 4% of the way there. They just need a 10x and then 10x again and they'll do it. Well, I'm rooting for them. I'm rooting for the entire financial market. I'm rooting for all companies because I love business and technology.

• 3:09:30Jordi Hays?

  Because we love you.

• 3:09:31John Coogan?

  We love you.

• 3:09:31Jordi Hays?

  And we'll be back tomorrow. We have a fantastic show planned.

• 3:09:35John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars. Plant the bomb. I'll tell them about where to leave us a review. Leave us a review on Spotify. Podcast, five stars. Please sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com. Follow us on all the social media platforms. And, and, and go to, go to Yahoo. Why not?

• 3:09:52Jordi Hays?

  Why not?

• 3:09:53John Coogan?

  This is the Yahoo team, the marketing team that were like, we need a jingle. We need someone to go sing it. This guy gets in the booth and starts singing and they're like, go harder. Yahoo. They're like, that's not hard enough. Goodbye.

• 3:10:11Speaker 14

  Nice work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one.