YC Demo Day, Spoon = Bent (Again), iPhone Duo Reactions | Garry Tan, Om Buddhdev, Karen Serfaty, Antonio Li, Edward Ge, Alfredo Gonzalez

(01:47) - The Future of AI (10:57) - AI Safety Takes Over the Timeline (12:48) - Spoon = Bent (Again) (17:54) - iPhone Duo Reactions (24:17) - Garry Tan discusses Y Combinator’s growing focus on hard tech and how AI enables small teams to build ambitious hardware, software, defense, and gaming companies with fewer resources. The Y Combinator CEO predicts AI-native startups will outcompete established firms through agentic workflows while emphasizing practical cybersecurity solutions over speculative AI-safety debates. (43:56) - Om Buddhdev, co-founder and CEO of Olam Labs, discusses building realistic reinforcement-learning environments and training data to evaluate AI behaviors such as deception, collaboration, and negotiation. He highlights data and compute as key bottlenecks to AI progress, explains Olam Labs’ benchmark-driven business model, and expresses cautious optimism amid growing AI safety concerns. (52:55) - Karen Serfaty discusses Agent Card, a payments platform that enables AI agents to use consumers’ existing credit cards safely. He explains how its Vault and purchase API help personal-assistant companies securely store cards, navigate merchant websites, and complete online purchases despite anti-bot barriers. (01:00:16) - Antonio Li discusses Nori Robots’ affordable, San Francisco-built humanoid robot, designed for developers and capable of handling most household tasks through LLM-powered controls. He highlights its $1,688 price, simple claw-based design, potential applications in homes and service industries, and plans to scale production to 400 robots per month. (01:09:02) - Edward Ge discusses founding Exosat, a Singapore-based company developing sovereign satellite infrastructure as an alternative to U. S. and Chinese networks. He outlines plans for an 11,000-satellite constellation, globally flexible supply chains and launch providers, and serving countries seeking greater technological independence. (01:15:15) - Alfredo Gonzalez discusses Omanta, an AI-powered personal research lab that helps patients and clinicians analyze genomic data, understand tumor biology, and identify potentially overlooked therapies. He explains that inadequate healthcare data infrastructure is a major barrier to AI progress and shares that Omanta has reached $319,000 in monthly recurring revenue while serving more than 150 patients. (01:20:20) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP and today's Thursday, September 10th, 2026. We are live from the TVP and Altria Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortune's Financial Capital Capital. Every time I see the road to Christmas, I laugh. How many days we got, Jordy?

• 0:13Jordi Hays?

  Hundred and five days.

• 0:16John Coogan?

  Hundred and five days till Christmas. Get ready. Uh, let me also tell you about ramp.com. They're making a musical or Broadway play. Uh, time is money, say both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. We'll get to the story, but uh, awesome, awesome stunt. Uh, it's also looks like it's a, it's a musical about ramp bill pay specifically. I like that. It's not just about the corporate entity. It's the sub product. It's one SKU. You gotta be making whole Broadway plays about single SKUs for your company. Um, no, uh, they got Billy Zane. They got a bunch of really talented people working on this. I think it's gonna be really fun. Uh, the, the teaser trailer dropped on

• 0:58John Coogan?

  Eric Lemon's ex account today, but uh, it's gonna be fun to watch that project unfurl.

• 1:02Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 1:03John Coogan?

  Well, uh, should we do a little bit of a news roundup? We have Y Combinator Demaday going on today. We got Gary Tang coming on the show 1125. Then we're going back to back with five different startups that are in this YC batch, doing everything from humanoid robots, uh, to satellites, to AI agents and credit cards, fintech. We're going all over the place, giving you a tour of what's going on in, uh, the startup world, uh, which I personally enjoy because it's a good way to sort of ground yourself in what's happening in the, uh, in the, at the early stage. There's so much discussion about what's going on, uh, among the big labs and Apple, obviously in the news yesterday. Uh, it can be, uh, all encompassing, but the big, the big story.

• 1:48Jordi Hays?

  Time to talk to the future.

• 1:50John Coogan?

  Talk to the future, the next.

• 1:51Jordi Hays?

  No, that's really what it gives you a little bit of insight into what things are gonna look like in a decade. Some people don't think we're gonna be here in a decade.

• 1:59John Coogan?

  They don't. They don't. Coxson's one of them.

• 2:02Jordi Hays?

  Never black pill. Uh, I saw a good post this morning. Uh,

• 2:06John Coogan?

  What'd you say?

• 2:07Jordi Hays?

  Josha Box.

• 2:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09Jordi Hays?

  If you think AI will lead to human extinction by 2030, I will take that bet. If we are still alive by December 31st, 2030, you pay me 1 million USD. If not, I will pay you 10 million USD.

• 2:23John Coogan?

  That's a good, good, good, uh.

• 2:26Jordi Hays?

  Take it.

• 2:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot of people out there that should, uh, take the bet, I think.

• 2:31John Coogan?

  Why? This is, there's no, I mean, that's the whole joke.

• 2:34Jordi Hays?

  No, I know.

• 2:35John Coogan?

  Um, yeah. I mean, with a lot of these, the, the arguments break down, a lot of things break down. It's also just so difficult to, to put a P doom over time because you, because you have to time bound it because, uh, you know, uh, general scientists will say, uh, humanity will go extinct eventually. The default number is 10 to the 100 years. That's a Google years from now. It's heat death of the universe. The stars collapse.

• 3:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:06John Coogan?

  Even in a billion years, we're gonna be in trouble because the sun will be larger than the earth, will, will have expanded to become encompassing the earth. So you gotta get off earth in the next billion years. We're working on that with SpaceX. Elon occasionally delayed. I think he's gonna make it before the next billion years. Uh, the AI thing, obviously much more pressing, all sorts of hacks and agentic capabilities, lots of debate going on and a wall-to-wall press tour from, uh, a lot of the safety community. Uh, Daniel from AI 2027 was on Joe Rogan. Uh, it was an interesting listen. He makes a lot of good points. He breaks things down for a broader audience and then Rogan will take him in

• 3:49John Coogan?

  these very funny directions, just being like, yeah, these AI agents are crazy. Let's talk about UFOs. It's actually like the meme. They're like, oh yeah, like, like, have you heard about remote viewing? And, uh, and he breaks down remote viewing for him and Daniel has to be like, a little more skeptical of that, but I'm a real believer in X risk. And so I think the net effect is gonna be more awareness about the topic, more discussion about the topic. It might just wind up muddling it because people now put X risk in the aliens, UFOs, remote viewing camp. It's like, oh, it's like a fun thing that Joe Rogan talks about. It's like, becomes more abstract as opposed to being more concrete, but I don't

• 4:29John Coogan?

  really know. We'll see, we'll see. Uh, what did AI 2027 predict for September of 2026? They said, this is the stage where AI becomes economically disruptive and starts accelerating AI research itself. We got the second part. The labs are all saying we have an automated AI research intern.

• 4:49Jordi Hays?

  Just an intern.

• 4:50John Coogan?

  Intern.

• 4:50Jordi Hays?

  Just an intern.

• 4:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, but that's accelerating, accelerating and the models seem to be getting better at a faster clip. Um, the economically disruptive is the, is the, is the capability. Uh, jobs. Junior software engineering faces major disruption. People managing and checking AI teams prosper. So junior software engineering, major disruption. We'll see. We'll see if, uh, if, if, if that plays out this month. The job market has been pretty strong. We, we, we mapped that there's something like 17,000 monthly AI related job losses, but, uh, that, that's less than 1% of the 1.7 million jobs that are lost every, every month. But then of

• 5:32John Coogan?

  course there are more than 1.7 million new jobs and new hires because people change jobs a lot. And so, uh, that's often what's going on. Markets and politics. The scenario forecasts a 30% stock market rise during 2026 and a 10,000 person anti-AI protest and growing defense contracts. Um, that, that, that seems.

• 5:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it feels notable that we haven't, we haven't had a protest.

• 5:56John Coogan?

  There's been a protest. There was a protest in San Francisco, uh, a safety like protest.

• 6:01Jordi Hays?

  It was not nearly 10,000 people.

• 6:03John Coogan?

  It was like more like under a hundred, but dozens. Uh, but yeah, I mean, it seems like, uh, the Joe Rogan experience, the, the national news tour. If you're gonna get 10,000 people in the streets, like, eh, this is, this is a key step in the, in the chain.

• 6:18Jordi Hays?

  Well, Sheryl Crow was over on Instagram highlighting.

• 6:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, she's worried.

• 6:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, AI risk and someone was saying, uh, Sherry O'Terry, is that, is that a celebrity or something? Uh, says, take to the streets like they did in Albania, all of us. We can't be ignored. So there's, I guess, calls for protests.

• 6:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. And there was another, uh, there was another risk incident, uh, reported by the New York Times today. Anthropic says it blocked possible efforts to build biological weapons in a new report. The AI startup added that it could not determine if the research was legitimate or nefarious, leading the company to shut down the work. So some scientists were using an anthropic model to work on bio, uh, like a biological research and the anthropic team flagged it as, hey, this could be in the, in the line of a bioweapon. We don't know that that's what this person was trying to do, but we're gonna shut it down because of course, a lot of the research that goes into building a nuclear power plant is the same that goes into a nuclear bomb. And same thing, these are a lot of dual use technologies.

• 7:20John Coogan?

  Uh, anyway, anything else to say about Jacob Coxon, who, uh, I think will have much more, uh, news. He went on Fox and Anderson Cooper, CNN. Um, and I'm sure there will be a much deeper dive at some point. It feels like there's going to be a, it is interesting that with the launch of the post and the Wall Street Journal article, there was not a one hour, three hour podcast. Like we didn't get our situational awareness. Like I, I want the five hour sit down with somebody.

• 7:52Jordi Hays?

  Based on the, based on the interviews.

• 7:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:54Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't really feel like he's got an hour of content.

• 7:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 7:58Jordi Hays?

  Maybe he, maybe he does.

• 7:59John Coogan?

  But it's the best, uh, because you can just tell the story of the Terminator for an hour and like take someone on that journey. And that can actually be in service of updating people about X risk. You can, you, you can, you can tell the full story of how you think things might play out. There's so many different scenarios that are, you know, the bad ending worth avoiding. You can illustrate that. Uh, I don't know. Yeah. I, I.

• 8:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I thought it was, um.

• 8:23John Coogan?

  I think it's coming. I think it's coming. Refresh your podcast player in a week. You're gonna have the full five hours.

• 8:29Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up, let's pull up this clip.

• 8:31John Coogan?

  He, I mean, he's gotta go on, uh, on hard four or something. I don't know.

• 8:35Jordi Hays?

  And let's watch.

• 8:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 8:39Jordi Hays?

  This is from Fox News last night.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  That industry needs to be regulated as soon as possible.

• 8:45John Coogan?

  Did you work with any third parties as far as this whistleblowing and coming out?

• 8:52Speaker 02

  Not at all. This is entirely my own personal concerns about safety and things that I've seen personally and conversations I've had be serious that they think their industry.

• 9:00John Coogan?

  See, a lot of people are keying on to the background here. They're like, wait, this guy just.

• 9:05Jordi Hays?

  He quit yesterday.

• 9:06John Coogan?

  And he already has a podcast studio. People are like, is that someone else's podcast studio? And so I looked at the image, tried to figure out whose podcast studio is in. It's Call Her Daddy.

• 9:15Jordi Hays?

  Boom. Yeah. This goes way deeper than we thought.

• 9:20John Coogan?

  It's big chicklets.

• 9:22Jordi Hays?

  No, so, so I do expect it.

• 9:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:26Jordi Hays?

  At some point, as they dig in here, based on how much.

• 9:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:31Jordi Hays?

  Sort of, it seems like there's very much a significant push.

• 9:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:36Jordi Hays?

  From the overarching AI safety community.

• 9:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:40Jordi Hays?

  To make this week all about.

• 9:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. He clarified this a little bit on, on Anderson Cooper saying that he like worked with a bunch of friends and where's the line between like friends and professional, like, you know, we're all a big family here. We're all friends. So they're like, the answer could be muddled. I don't know. I'm sure we'll find out more soon. Uh, anyway, uh, you think he's going to launch a Neo Lab? Think he's going to drop a coin? Book, movie? There's going to be something, you know, the story is not over. Story is not over. There's going to be something. Maybe he launches a software as a service company.

• 10:20Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy.

• 10:21John Coogan?

  And then his spoon gets back. Yeah. Trying to transition here.

• 10:25Jordi Hays?

  No, it's, uh, somebody just said, uh, Sebastian says he's a D cell with a crazy P doom. That's a quote from Mountain Head.

• 10:32John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:32Jordi Hays?

  Remember, which is now out maybe a year, a year ago.

• 10:36John Coogan?

  I remember you watched it.

• 10:36Jordi Hays?

  Which is, um, yeah.

• 10:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. But that was a, that was sort of a niche film. It didn't, it didn't go as big as.

• 10:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I didn't think it was a good film, but it had some funny moments.

• 10:47John Coogan?

  And it was about like an AI apocalypse, right? They go to like a.

• 10:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was around all about.

• 10:52John Coogan?

  They go to a bunkie.

• 10:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:54John Coogan?

  Is there a bunkie?

• 10:55Jordi Hays?

  There's a bunkie.

• 10:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 10:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:58Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, it's all about the, the doom scenario was around deep fakes.

• 11:02John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:03Jordi Hays?

  Humanity thinking that there was like, you know, wars and conflicts happening, which would create actual wars.

• 11:08John Coogan?

  I, I, I, I don't know that I'm super like worried about that particular scenario, but you could take me on that journey for 20 minutes and a long winded answer on a podcast and I would be, I would be entertained. And so I think that, I think that there is material there. And I did see genuinely a lot of, uh, like sort of AI safety skeptics, uh, just asking for more storytelling around how things go bad. Uh, it's so easy to condense a P doom down to a single number, but I think people like stories. They want something that actually illustrates the chain of events that lead to the bad scenario as opposed to these vague things where it's like, I have a lot of authority. I have a lot of insight and 5% or 20%.

• 11:51John Coogan?

  Uh, it, that, that obviously, I mean, it does go viral, but, uh, clearly there were people that had demand for more of a story that they could track and they could, and they could falsify individual. Uh, Keith Raboy yesterday was, was, was struggling with this where it was like, it's hard to falsify someone saying 10% in the next 10 years. But it's, it's easier to falsify about like, well, the, the nuclear weapons will be fired at this time. And this is what's going to happen. And this is how they get.

• 12:18Jordi Hays?

  Also the, the job loss stuff.

• 12:20John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. Yeah. Um, anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

• 12:32John Coogan?

  Thank you. We have some of our team up in San Francisco for YC Demo Day. Uh, we're going to be joined by Gary Tan in 10 minutes. Uh, we'll do a quick roundup of the rest of the news. Um, should we talk about Nvidia? Should we talk about bending spoons? What's interesting to you, Jordy?

• 12:48Jordi Hays?

  Let's start with bending spoons. Bending spoons acquires Miro for 1.79 billion.

• 12:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 12:57Jordi Hays?

  Paul Bonnet over a GP over 20 VC, uh, says, but who gets the money? My usual breakdown. Uh, so this is 89% below the last round and at, uh, less than, less than three times rep.

• 13:12John Coogan?

  Whoa. Miro was valued at 17 and a half billion dollars.

• 13:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:15John Coogan?

  That's really high. Wow. Yeah. Okay.

• 13:19Jordi Hays?

  Um, so, um, anyways, I, you know, we actually don't need to dive through all this stuff. A lot, you know, investors are getting.

• 13:27John Coogan?

  Yes, but, but I am interested in the bending spoon strategy because Airtable, Miro, Miro felt like, it felt like modern collaborative slides and, and, uh, and like mood boards. And then Airtable felt like the modern, uh, you know, Excel sheet. And it feels like they're trying to maybe piece together a bundle, but I don't know if that's actually how bending spoon thinks about this. It feels like in the past, they've been very interested in just, it's a known brand with a strong business that they can run efficiently and it stands alone. But for the first time, I'm seeing glimpses of something that could be like a portfolio or a roll up where if you have Airtable, you get Miro for free or vice versa. And there's cross selling options because if you like these more modern tools,

• 14:12John Coogan?

  like an, like a Miro, like an Airtable, uh, I've seen both of these deployed in the same startup. And the, and the startup, there's always this tension between, hey, we're paying 20 bucks a seat for this, 20 bucks a seat for that. Or we could just do 15 bucks for Google and we get all of them. So you actually wind up with a, the portfolio. And I don't know, maybe the sum is greater than its parts. What do you think?

• 14:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, potentially, but, but yeah, it was very.

• 14:41Jordi Hays?

  It's just insane to me that this was a 17 billion dollar company, uh, just, just a little bit ago. And ultimately this is why I have a lot of fear around like some of these like later stage or even like later stage rounds that are happening right now because they're clearly, there's certain teams that are fantastic. Great categories, great, you know, put on the path to being great businesses. And yet they feel so, many of them feel so far from being on that path to being priced at a hundred or a trillion or, or whatever the number is. And we're going to see this exact same thing play out right now where there's companies that are

• 15:22Jordi Hays?

  around this valuation now that, that three years from now will sell at a 90% discount.

• 15:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. I'd be interested to see if like, have the metrics at Miro changed in the age of AI? Because you could imagine that people, if they need a collaborative, you know, uh, mood board or slide deck, they can vibe code their own tool, but it's still a little bit of a hassle to deploy that and maintain it, even if you can clone it. So the SaaS apocalypse is fully aver- fully averted by the sales forces of the world. And the revenue decline never showed up in the SaaS companies. And so the SaaS apocalypse was, was, was canceled. But was there a micro SaaS apocalypse that did show up at this level? And that's why we're seeing these deals? I don't know. We, the, it's not pub- public.

• 16:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:13John Coogan?

  Uh, do you think this is all just like a promotion for David Senna's new episode with Luca Ferrari? Cause David Senna, it's perfect timing. I have an episode with Luca Ferrari coming out this Sunday.

• 16:25John Coogan?

  He's just like, thank you.

• 16:27Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for lining up this deal with you coming on my podcast.

• 16:31John Coogan?

  Promise.

• 16:31Jordi Hays?

  No, uh, Jason says, uh, 3X paying 3X ARR at 600 million of ARR. Over 750 customers paying over a hundred thousand dollars a year. Cash flow positive. Man.

• 16:45Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, but Jamie Quint says multiple years of 5% ARR growth will do that.

• 16:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. If you're not, if you're not accelerating, I mean, the, the entire multiple is based on growth. So. There's not going to be a, you know, a significant acceleration.

• 16:59Jordi Hays?

  You gotta be growing.

• 17:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's true. Uh, so.

• 17:03Jordi Hays?

  Another neck acquisition news.

• 17:05John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:06Jordi Hays?

  We got a card out of a Tailwind, uh, got acquired by Shopify. Uh, that's very cool. Remember, uh, if you remember, I think Tailwind.

• 17:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:14Jordi Hays?

  Was a. Accelerating AI software development, but wasn't directly a beneficiary.

• 17:22John Coogan?

  And didn't they get like, sort of like, you know?

• 17:25Jordi Hays?

  A bunch of people in the industry, I think.

• 17:26John Coogan?

  I think Google, right? Wasn't it Logan?

• 17:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think Logan was a big part of it.

• 17:30John Coogan?

  I am going to provide a grant to keep these guys going. I thought that was awesome. That was like such a cool community moment. And interesting that they now like found a proper landing spot, which is cool. Uh, yeah, very optimistic scenario.

• 17:46Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we had a little bit of iPhone Duo coverage yesterday. We didn't see the crease.

• 17:51John Coogan?

  We had a key question in the chat from Saly Analysis. They asked, what do you guys think about the crease? I couldn't see it in any of those Apple renders. Apple seemed to get really good with the lighting placement to not show up the crease. True, my accurate take, I don't care about this. That is not enough of a crease. Do matter at all.

• 18:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:13John Coogan?

  Especially if this is a mode where you're using two apps, you don't care about the middle at all. I have seen guys on football days off four TVs next to each other with full bezels. Like you can see the line going down the center of the, and they just don't care. So like, this is not a big deal. Uh, now the interesting thing is like, will it be an issue if you're like watching a movie on this thing on a plane? I think maybe, but I think the crease will probably completely disappear when you're actually locked in on a, on a film. But I think the bigger thing is the aspect ratio is kinda weird for modern content because we have

• 18:53John Coogan?

  films which are widescreen and YouTube videos which are 16 by nine, and those will show black bars at the top and the bottom. Or you could zoom in and then you're cropping the sides. Not a great experience. Some of the demos, some of the demo video that Apple showed was super cool because it was shot in this like 43. So maybe you go back and you get some 43 content from like the seventies and eighties. And that displays really well because you don't need to do the, the, the panel scan thing anymore. But, um, and then the vertical content will also look like bars on the side like you're on an iPad. So I wonder if that will be annoying. It'll probably melt into the background. I think people will still like it.

• 19:30John Coogan?

  I'm very interested in the mix. Like what percent, like will this be as popular as the iPhone Pro has been relative to the iPhone? Will this be 10% of overall phone sales from this cycle? Will it be 1% or 30%? It's the, the fact that it's different, the fact that it's a way to stand out. It's their most foldable phone ever.

• 19:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this was a, this was a comment from

• 19:57John Coogan?

  Thank you to the listener.

• 19:58Jordi Hays?

  prolific, uh, Spotify.

• 20:00John Coogan?

  Spotify.

• 20:01Jordi Hays?

  Uh, comedian Dave, he commented yesterday, it's their most foldable iPhone yet.

• 20:06John Coogan?

  It is.

• 20:07Jordi Hays?

  And it really is. This was, we should have, we should have, this should have come to us on the show yesterday, but thank you, Dave, for, for throwing that in the comment.

• 20:14John Coogan?

  So it has, yeah, it has something.

• 20:15Jordi Hays?

  I really.

• 20:16John Coogan?

  If, if you're bored of the same phone every year, this is a way to inject some variation.

• 20:22Jordi Hays?

  So, so really it's like when they introduced the iPhone Duo two, which will.

• 20:28John Coogan?

  Quattro?

• 20:29Jordi Hays?

  I think they're gonna have to, to, to, to multiply them and, and get the iPhone Quattro.

• 20:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:35Jordi Hays?

  Then they'll say, it's our most foldable iPhone yet. It has four.

• 20:39John Coogan?

  Until it's just a full accordion, like a fan that just fans out its screens.

• 20:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that the fan, the iPhone fan.

• 20:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:46Jordi Hays?

  It's just like this, you know?

• 20:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, 20 different folds. Um, what was funny is I'm gonna put you on blast here a little bit as you come in and you're like, yeah, like this just makes me want, uh, an iPhone 18 Pro. And you were laying it out and you were like, it's their best iPhone yet. They, it's just a great phone. They, they made it thinner, lighter, faster, better battery life. And I was like, this is your joke. You fell for your own joke. And it, but, but it is sort of like this, it could be for some people like an anti-Halo phone. For some people, it's gonna be the Halo where they're like, I wanted something different. I want something bigger. I want the best thing. I got that. For other people, they're gonna be like, oh, thank God. I don't have to deal with the, with the foldable thing. Just give me the cheaper, you know, $2,000 iPhone Pro Max 18 plus, you know, all these crazy things.

• 21:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:31John Coogan?

  You know, catalog variety is, is valuable, you know?

• 21:35Jordi Hays?

  Blake Scholl.

• 21:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:36Jordi Hays?

  Jumped in and said, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, he went to great care to explain why such a product category should exist to begin with. Apple seems to have made a pretty great version of a foldable phone without saying why foldable phones deserve to exist. Uh, I think it would be somewhat uncomfortable for them to explain why, why, why exactly you, you need a bigger screen. It's like, hey, you know, we know some of you guys are spending, you know, uh, hours and hours and hours a day.

• 22:06John Coogan?

  This is such a, okay, continue. Just finish or give me a second, rebuttal.

• 22:11Jordi Hays?

  No, why don't you jump in, John?

• 22:13John Coogan?

  I just think that there is, there's cool stuff to do on your phone that is actually less brain rotty when you're on a bigger screen.

• 22:20Jordi Hays?

  Like games on your phone. Like which you, you would from time to time, from time to time.

• 22:26John Coogan?

  I would never watch Lawrence of Arabia on this screen, but you give me a screen with twice as much real estate, I'm going Lawrence of Arabia. I'm going Citizen Kane.

• 22:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm.

• 22:34Jordi Hays?

  No, and, and, and, and I, I agree that that is the use case.

• 22:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:38Jordi Hays?

  But I think it's somewhat uncomfortable because of the overarching sort of discussion around phone addiction and screen time and all this stuff.

• 22:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:46Jordi Hays?

  It's bad for kids. It's probably not great for adults. And for Apple to come out as like, you know, we know that you're spending hours and hours every day, you know, getting mindless entertainment from our devices. And so we get, we get, we're giving you a bigger screen.

• 22:59John Coogan?

  I, I don't think Apple needs to touch that. I think that like the things that they promote on their phone are good. Like you can answer your emails, you can connect with your friends, you can text them, you can watch educational videos. There's a positive flip to everything that's like a negative example. Yeah, there's some game that's brain rotty, but there's also some game that's really fun that you remember. You talk about Rust and Halo. Like these are, these are core memories for a lot of people. It's a positive thing.

• 23:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:26John Coogan?

  So being able to do more of that. Plus it's just like, you don't know when you're, it's very hard to plan ahead for like, oh, I'm gonna get caught with a extra hour waiting at the DMV or I'm gonna wait a plane or I'm gonna have some downtime. And I'm gonna wanna actually like enjoy something more thoroughly. If you have the Duo, it's your daily driver. It's always on you. You didn't need to think, oh, I should break an iPad because I'm gonna be stuck waiting in this line for 20 minutes. So I wanna watch something nicely on a really big screen. You got the Duo in your pocket. You're good to go.

• 23:57Jordi Hays?

  I'm not sold.

• 23:58John Coogan?

  Get me a sales job.

• 23:59Jordi Hays?

  I'm not sold, but get, get this guy a job at the Apple store.

• 24:03John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. We have Gary Tan in the waiting room. Let's bring him in. Let even keep him waiting. I wanna know, Gary, how you doing? And are you going with the Duo or the Pro Max Plus 18? Do you want a folding phone?

• 24:28Garry Tan?

  I'm down for the folding phone. It sounds great. I got the Samsung Trifold. It's pretty sick.

• 24:33John Coogan?

  You do? Whoa. So you're living in the future.

• 24:35Jordi Hays?

  Personally, I'm holding out for the iPhone Quattro.

• 24:38John Coogan?

  You want the four folds?

• 24:39Jordi Hays?

  Screen. I want it to fold out like an accordion.

• 24:41Garry Tan?

  I would buy that as well.

• 24:44Garry Tan?

  I would also buy that.

• 24:45John Coogan?

  Also buy that. Okay. Well, uh, how, how are things going?

• 24:49Jordi Hays?

  Wait, uh, uh, please, like, it's top of mind for everyone.

• 24:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:53Jordi Hays?

  YC Demo Day is also top of mind, but are there any new ways that you use the tri-screen phone?

• 25:01John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 25:02Jordi Hays?

  Outside of just more entertainment, I'm struggling to see.

• 25:05John Coogan?

  When, when does it go full, full tri-fold for you?

• 25:09Garry Tan?

  Uh, you know, like just watching, watching TVP and mainly.

• 25:12John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 25:13Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 25:13John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 25:14Garry Tan?

  I wanna see your beautiful faces, you know, and it's just full resolution, you know?

• 25:19Jordi Hays?

  Got it, got it. Um, awesome. Well, great to have you here today on another absolute banger of a.

• 25:26John Coogan?

  Kick us off with the stats. Like where is YC? How big is this batch? What, what differentiates this batch? And then we'll go into, uh, the broader technology landscape, the startup ecosystem, all that.

• 25:38Garry Tan?

  That sounds great. Yeah. I mean, it's 200 companies presenting today. About a quarter of them are hard tech. That's up 40X, uh, since our low bar, maybe like three or five years ago. I mean, hard tech is, uh, in, it's big and it's here because of AI. I mean, intelligence is on tap now, right? So what that means is, uh, instead of just doing, uh, bits, like it's time to do atoms, guys. It's time to actually like create abundance for one another. And then the kind of stuff that people are doing completely insane. I mean, it's, it's, you know, some pretty pure research type stuff. We got a company called Frontier. They're, um,

• 26:17Garry Tan?

  They made biochips that use basically neuronal cells.

• 26:24John Coogan?

  I think we had him on the show already. Yeah, I think he went viral earlier.

• 26:28Jordi Hays?

  That was.

• 26:30John Coogan?

  Brain in a vat. Yeah, we were doing Brain in a vat week. We had like three companies that were doing bio stuff. It's a crazy time. On the hardware question, is it, are we seeing a boom in hardware startups? Because there are more cool things to do with AI. I'm thinking of, I have a sticker box, you, you, you put, the kid pushes a button, they say a prompt and then it prints a little, a little cartoon sticker. It's very cool, wouldn't exist before generative AI. But then there's the other side, which is like, hardware has always been hard. You have to have these long cycles, you have to deal with manufacturers. And I feel like AI can speed that up by going and getting you quotes from a bunch of different factories, making sure your supply chain's in order, doing inventory management.

• 27:14John Coogan?

  All these different things. Is it both? Which one are you seeing be the most acceleratory?

• 27:19Garry Tan?

  Oh, I mean, look at what's happening with G P six, Navier Stokes equation. Like, that's insane.

• 27:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. So if you're trying to do board layout, it's, you know, it's, you're going to be able to do it much faster.

• 27:32Garry Tan?

  Yeah. And, you know, what, what was the alternative to that? Like, if you are a team of like one or two people in a garage, the chance of you actually springing the person who really understands some hard tech thing that you really need. I mean, it's so close to zero, you know, or you need to have raised a hundred million dollars to convince that person to quit. Now you might not need that person on day one. You could just go to G P six Astra. You say, hey, look, this is what I'm trying to figure out. And you're iterating with it. You actually have a demo that's 10 times better than what you could have done without hiring that person out of that lab or, you know, that university. Like, you don't need to convince them. You just actually get it farther along.

• 28:14Garry Tan?

  You can show it to an investor, you can get money, you can get there on five million instead of 50 million dollars. It's sort of like, you know, multiple stacking things that are happening, like you have intelligence on tap. Then any given founder who can identify a thing that people need in the world. Suddenly you can say, you know what? This is the path. This is like, this is always what we've done at Y C. Is, you know, we're giving you half a million dollars. What can you actually get done? You know, these days it's half a million dollars plus more than a million dollars in cloud credits, right? So what's a million dollars in cloud credits? If not, like maybe the equivalent of 10 million dollars worth of R and D for, you know, whatever.

• 28:53John Coogan?

  I remember back in.

• 28:54Garry Tan?

  Tech Harvard, you know?

• 28:55John Coogan?

  I remember back in 2012, it was 170 K, 150 K, and then 150 K in cloud credits. And it was hard to spend those credits. Like, you, you had to actually get things to scale because it was, it was only if you had the demand side solved. Then your, then your server hosting could be deferred a little bit. But from, in actually going zero to one, that, that, that 150 K on AWS was sort of just like, ah, I wish I could use it. And people were joking about like, maybe we should mine Bitcoin with it. But you couldn't actually use it in the R and D phase. And now you actually can pull those credits into the R and D phase in the form of tokens, which is a very different dynamic. So I imagine that the, the credit usage rate has gone up a lot.

• 29:39Garry Tan?

  Yeah, people need to be token maxing. I mean, what's funny, I mean, you know, OpenAI will come and just give any Y C company two million dollars worth of tokens.

• 29:48John Coogan?

  Right? Yeah, that's great.

• 29:50Garry Tan?

  I mean, that's a part of that, that's a part of the deal now, right? Like, it's optional, you don't have to take it. But we tell people, look, like, if you're doing something hard, you should probably take the two million dollars. Because, you know, if you can't figure out how to turn two million dollars worth of tokens into a hundred million dollars worth of enterprise value. What are we doing here? What are we doing here?

• 30:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. What do you, what are you seeing on the hard tech side in terms of distribution and go to market? One of Y C's strengths has always been selling into the Y C network. You start a payroll company, you can get the other batchmates to test it out. You get your early adopters there. And I noticed that this was happening a little bit in the gundo where you would see one guy's running a machine shop. One guy's running a cloud seeding, one guy's running a drone company and they'll run across the street and say, I need a new drill or hammer, whatever they need. And, but I'm wondering in the, in the hardware sense, are there, are there Y C companies that are actually able to get products in the hardware space that bring value to other startups?

• 30:54John Coogan?

  Or is it more of like camaraderie around, we're in the hardware world, we'll, we'll communicate and share notes, but we're not actually selling to each other on day one?

• 31:03Garry Tan?

  I mean, you don't really have to necessarily even sell to each other, though that's happening, like the space ecosystems coming together. Like Star Cloud is a great buyer of lots of other space tech. That's how, that's been happening. I mean, we got defense tech coming together and people trading notes. Like, we're putting together a Krata so that we can actually help all Y C defense companies get in theater with real Department of War departments. Right off the bat. There's just a lot that we can do. Next week, we actually have a, a D C defense tech conference in D C. We're bringing in a bunch of our top defense companies and they're meeting the policymakers directly. They're meeting the people from the Pentagon directly in their own backwoods.

• 31:45Garry Tan?

  And that's actually stuff that Y C can do now that, you know, it, it just increases the chance and likelihood of people actually succeeding. I mean, defense tech is the wildest thing that continues to happen in this administration is that, I think, you know, huge credit to the people in the current administration. Because they're realizing like, hey, we got a drone war happening, we have an AI war and America needs to be, you know, can't just pay, you know, cost plus to these defense. You know, the sort of like industrial complex that exists today, like we actually need. And, and they're willing to give seven figure contracts to teams of like two or four people

• 32:26Garry Tan?

  who like suddenly become teams of 20 or 30 people plus like hundreds of agents.

• 32:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's been remarkable how, how many opportunities that have been there, even in the post Palantir and Anduril world. There was a, there was a time when I think people thought that there might be more of a winner take all dynamic, it might be more like social. But there's been so many teams that have had impacts in various ways.

• 32:49Jordi Hays?

  What? So 25% of the batch is hardware, up 40x. What about the, the other 75%? What are the trends that you're seeing on, on the software side, dev tools? I think a lot of, like, part of why some people are driven into hardware is they're looking at how easy it is to make software now and how fast it is and thinking, I, well, I don't want to go, if, if I can build this in two days, someone else can build it in two days. So maybe I want a hardware component, but at the same time, we're still seeing a bunch of early stage software companies rip. What trends are you seeing across the board with, you know, agents and, and infrastructure and all those things?

• 33:26Garry Tan?

  Yeah, this is, I mean, honestly, this is the golden age of software as well. And it's interesting because, I mean, my prediction would be you look at the public companies of today. Any company that's got thousands of engineers who are doing it the old way, like they're going to be replaced by a Y C startup or a company like that that has maybe 20 people working there. And that, those 20 people each will do the work of like 100 engineers themselves, right? So you got like a 2,000 person workforce. And you're just like blowing them out of the water. And so that's going to be the biggest shift. Like, you're going to have AI native startup companies that are just brand new, that have started in the last two or three years.

• 34:07Garry Tan?

  They don't have any of the bad habits that were developed over the, you know, sort of Zerp era. And they're just going to come in and out execute every single SaaS company that doesn't do it that way. And it's, it's going to be pretty epic. It's going to be a turnover of epic proportions in the world of software. And, you know, that's sort of the rest of the story.

• 34:27John Coogan?

  Are you seeing pitches for like Neo Clouds? People that want to go through Y C? Yeah?

• 34:33Garry Tan?

  Yeah, I mean, Wafer's killing it, Shaveform is killing it. I mean, you know, the amount of inference in the world feels like it's going to go up like 10,000 to 100,000 X. Like, people are just not really prepared for, you know, it's actually kind of the funniest thing. Like, you could work in SaaS where, you know, things are going to grow 10x. And then, or if you look at inference, you look at data centers, you look at semiconductors, you look at GPU and even CPU demand, it's going to go up like 1,000 X, right? So that's even, it's even bigger an opportunity. And I, I think people are just not, it's not priced in. I, you know, personally, I think it's just not priced in at all.

• 35:10John Coogan?

  Where does, are you still using the term little tech? I always like that.

• 35:14Garry Tan?

  Oh, definitely. I mean, yeah.

• 35:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. Where, where, where does little tech stand on the, the AI slowdown debate, regulatory capture risk? When I look at some of the companies that we're going to have on the show. I feel like they might not be affected positively or negatively by the discussions in Washington, but how are you seeing it broadly? Because typically regulatory capture can, you know, harden the position of incumbents, and that's bad for little tech. But how have you been dealing with the current conversation?

• 35:48Garry Tan?

  Yeah, I mean, I think we should be talking less about this Jacob Coxon guy. We need to be talking a lot more about what is actually happening with hugging face, right? Like, are agent swarms going to come and take over infrastructure en masse? And then what are we actually doing about that? Like, I don't want to hear about some guy who worked at Anthropic for two months. And I don't really care that there's a coordinated effort to try to influence politicians to sort of do a knee jerk response. And like, the thing is, like, we shouldn't be, that's a smokescreen, you shouldn't be paying attention to that. We need to be paying attention to what is the actual thing that we can do to prevent, you know, agent swarms taking over entire data centers, right? Like, what's our shutdown

• 36:29Garry Tan?

  strategy, right? Like, how do we ensure provenance? Where is this agent actually located? Like, you know, what software can we build? And what cybersecurity defenses can we build today? And like, you know, that's the level of discourse that I think we need, and we just don't have that, right? People are just saying, you know...

• 36:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, discourse is one thing. Are there, is there a meaningful number of YC companies now that are actually focused on that set of problems? Because one way to think about AI safety is to go on podcasts and talk about it and write essays and write blog posts. And another way is to actually build cybersecurity products, specifically with, like, you know, agent swarms in mind. And, you know, thinking of Ilya's post about NeoCloud Security, it's like, well, I hope there's five companies that saw that post and were like, you know, I'm sure that Palau Networks and CrowdStrike and all these companies are thinking about that opportunity as well. But it just feels like anywhere there's like fear, there's also an opportunity for commercial solutions to the problem that won't fix everything.

• 37:30Garry Tan?

  Yeah, I mean, we got that too, right? We got a ton of company, like, Silmaril is able to do 100 milliseconds in request loop, prevent prompt injection, right? So you've got an agent swarm, it wants to take on, you know, take over your AI systems. And like, it's in production now. Like, it basically prevents prompt injection, and it can do it at a level that like, you know, it sort of doesn't matter how much smarter the underlying AI becomes and how much more powerful it is at cybersecurity. Like, if you have a kill switch on entire requests, because, hey, that's a prompt injection. Like, that's sort of the stuff that we need today. So I don't really care about science fiction, man. I saw Terminator 2 also. Like, that's, you know, we're not here to talk about that.

• 38:13Garry Tan?

  Like, we need to actually talk about what's really happening with the servers, what's actually happening with the agent swarms, and how do we actually prevent that? And I think that, you know, little tech has a role in actually solving, actually providing the software, the services, the hardware, the things that actually solve these things. And then when it comes to regulation, it's like, let's actually pass regulation that prevents the thing we actually care about, instead of whatever a socialist says on the, in the New York Times. I don't care about that.

• 38:40Jordi Hays?

  What are you telling YC startups not to do right now? I'm thinking there's opportunities in like, selling data right now. If you just wanted to generate as much revenue as possible before Demo Day, maybe brokering data could be a way to do that, but maybe it's not the best way to build, you know, a super enduring business. But maybe that's one example. But what kind of things are you...

• 39:03Garry Tan?

  Yeah, I mean, I think businesses like Merckor are very, very, you know, they're body shops at some level. And then we're seeing this new wave of data companies like AfterQuery or DataCurve that basically beat them head to head. And they don't do it by being body shops. Like, you don't need thousands and thousands of people. You need, you know, dozens of people. I mean, it's sort of the same deal. Like, you look at, you know, a workday, it's full of thousands of engineers who are not, you know, using agentic systems. And like, I would argue that, like, a lot of those, you know, first wave data companies don't. Like, they're basically kind of like, you know, glorified labor marketplaces, right? But the new wave of data, like, we have more than 10 companies making more than $10 million a year in data, and then the top two are making, you know,

• 39:48Garry Tan?

  hundreds of millions, like, on the way to billions. And so, you know, there's a new wave. And those new wave companies do not have 1,000 employees and won't ever have thousands of employees. They will have 20 or 50, right? And how are they doing it? They're actually doing it in a proper agentic way. And so, you know, that's like, you know, same thing in software, same thing in hardware, same thing in data. Like, there's a new way to build these things. And, you know, either you're building it that way, or you're doing it the old way. Like, you know, people can still raise money, they can still go to Sandhill and get that crazy growth round. And people are just, you know, going to do it the old way still. But the new, the new way is going to come, and it's going to wipe out the old way.

• 40:28Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense. Gaming. A lot of people have seen Astro demos from the last week, you know, people just building GTA 6 because they're impatient. And they get, they get something that is, who knows how many, you know, hours of play it'll actually get, but it's an open world game that, you know, has multiplayer component, things like that. Do you think that we'll see a gaming boom in the next batch of just small teams that are like, hey, I can kind of build anything that I want, and I can build the kind of thing that would have taken hundreds of people and years historically, and I can build it in, you know, three months?

• 41:04Garry Tan?

  Yeah, I just funded a company called SummerEngine, for instance. It's growing really, really fast. It's just like Roblox, actually. But, and, you know, I think that that's the way to think about it, right? Like, CodeGen is opening up all this stuff, and then actually, like, shouldn't people, you know, a lot of the value is actually going to be in your guild, your people network, like, getting your friends to come on and play, knowing when they're playing, like, you know, designing all of that is actually the ultimate value. And like, and then I think it's the same thing all over again. Like, if you look at, you know, a company like Roblox, like, I don't think that they're building around, like, this idea that you could vibe code anything. Like, the future's already here, people just

• 41:45Garry Tan?

  act like it's not, right? And that, you know, anytime that happens, there's like, infinity, just opportunity. And, you know, the startups are finding it, they're going to go for it. And, you know, that's the future. I'm psyched for that.

• 41:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would almost disagree. I feel like Roblox is going to come out with an amazing tool for, yeah, no, but even seeing, like, Astro being like, hey, we can make this even, even better. And, but there's still plenty of opportunities for early stage companies to just adopt these tools even more aggressively and come up with entirely new.

• 42:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, Roblox is the one that's like on the edge of the network effect. Like, but we can debate it more later. Thanks so much for hopping on. Congratulations on another fantastic...

• 42:27Jordi Hays?

  Decided to meet a handful of these founders, and, yeah, keep it up.

• 42:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:32Garry Tan?

  Always great to see you guys.

• 42:33John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 42:34Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 42:34John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. What do you think of the iPhone Duo animation? Marques Brownlee shared it on X. Do you love this? What do you think? So when you open it, it fades as if it's looking through the glass. And when it closes, it shows you what it's about to show you. It could just show you the actual outside, but instead, it animates so that it looks like you're looking through glass, and it appears three dimensional. What do you think?

• 43:15Jordi Hays?

  It's so incredible. I mean, it really pushed, you know, pushed personal computing into an entirely new dimension.

• 43:24John Coogan?

  I think it's amazing.

• 43:25Jordi Hays?

  No, it's beautiful. It's beautiful. Well done. Well done to the team.

• 43:28John Coogan?

  And I think, I think this is what makes Apple so special, is that the folding phones exist. Somehow, no one thought of this. How did they create an environment, maintain an environment where you can still go and experiment and think of a little touch like that, that makes something that's been around for a while, Gary has one, a folding phone, still make it special. And now, you know, you've got everyone talking about this. So, good stuff. Anyway, our next guest is in the wave room. Let's bring in Om from Om Labs, the co-founder and CEO. How are you doing, Om?

• 44:02Speaker 04

  Hey, you got my name right. Congrats on the pronunciation.

• 44:05John Coogan?

  How do people...

• 44:05Speaker 04

  Hey, I used to, I used to watch your YouTube...

• 44:08John Coogan?

  No way?

• 44:08Speaker 04

  People say Om. They say Om a lot. Yeah, I used to watch your YouTube videos, like, all like the company documentaries and down there stuff a couple of years ago. It was great.

• 44:16John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Thank you, man. Well, thanks for hopping on the show. What do you know?

• 44:20Jordi Hays?

  He was eight years old at that time, John.

• 44:23John Coogan?

  Stop making me feel old. Introduce yourself at the company, and then we'll chat about it.

• 44:29Speaker 04

  Of course, yeah. So we do RL environments and training data. We work with labs to evaluate, like, behavioral things in models. Like, what models lie more? Who's more deceptive? Who collaborates better? All those kinds of things. So typical RL environments are a lot more about, like, you know, how well can you complete this coding task? How well can you do this, solve this math problem, that kind of thing? We're testing a lot more of like, the real, like, we're aiming to create like real world environments, you know, companies talking in Slack to each other, you have a PM, you have a CEO, you're playing diplomacy and negotiating, and pretty much like grading all of those things that are more like qualitative and more difficult to verify, but also a lot more valuable if we can start to measure it well.

• 45:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. So what does the, what's the first step in building the company? Like, when you started this, was it like, I'm going to go build the environment, and then I'm going to go to labs and say, hey, I have this thing, do you want to buy it? Or are you just going to them first and saying, like, look, I'll build anything, I'm going to build, like, what is the flow? Because the demand is so clear and high, I imagine that it's working very well. But what direction do things flow right now?

• 45:30Speaker 04

  It's a lot more the former of what you said. So like the latter, like the latter, like going to a lab and saying, I'll build anything you want. That only works if you have like relationships and a lot of trust with them or agrees to work there. The former, like, like when you're selling data, the best mental model is that you are selling a capability to a lab. Like you're selling them something to get their models better at. So if you, if you have a benchmark or you have a data set on like, here is how you can get better at coding. Here is they can get better at, I don't know, like collaboration, like just anything. Then you can sell it to them. That's why all these companies, like, you know, like any data companies, see them posting like their evals on Twitter and trying to get like to go viral. Cause that's like proof to the labs that, hey, I can make great data and like, like, like package it well. So that's like, that's like why, so the answer is the former. Like everyone's trying to show that we can make great data and then use that to sell to labs.

• 46:15John Coogan?

  So do you have evals? Do you have benchmarks? How much time do you spend thinking about benchmarks or building new benchmarks?

• 46:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I mean, uh, there's two things. So, so like making great benchmarks and publishing them is great for just like the broader industry. And like, especially in our case, where like we're measuring a lot, a lot of things that relate to like safety and all like the OpenAI hugging face stuff going on. The things about like how agents actually behave in, in, in these like multi-agent environments. That's, that's more our domain. So we want to, we are publishing stuff. We have, we've released evals and how models all compete relative to each other. How, how, how much they lie against each other, uh, how well they collaborate. We, we have a bunch more coming pretty much. But yeah, it's like our, we've had some tailwinds in recent times on like the kinds of things that people are looking for is pretty much exactly what we bet our entire company on four months ago. So it is, uh, uh, working out well in that regard.

• 47:04Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what if any are some historical comps for your business? Like what was, what was, what was your business 20 years ago?

• 47:15Speaker 04

  Oh God, um, like, I mean, it didn't exist 20 years ago.

• 47:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, no, no, no, no, I know, I, I, that, that's what I'm asking. I'm trying to, I'm trying to understand like, like what was there companies that were helping Amazon in the way that you were helping like the labs? For example, where it was like this, uh, helping them deliver core product quality increases.

• 47:41Jordi Hays?

  That were, you know, scaling, scaling this way. And, and part of why I'm curious is because I'm trying to understand what your business looks like in five years. Yeah, five years, 10 years, and how you think about that?

• 47:53Speaker 04

  I think, I think a comp that I would give is, um, like all of like, kind of like the internet infrastructure companies. Like everyone who is doing fiber and internet and like, and CPU is in RAM. I would say that is like the, the, the closest comparable thing to data companies nowadays. Like you're building the foundations, uh, like, like all, all the data company really is like, like, like Merck or all those guys. They just go out and, and buy, like capture stuff from the real world and then give it to a lab. Which isn't, you know, like if you're buying CPUs, you're just constructing stuff in the real world and giving it to like a, a large cloud to then like service to their customers. So I think that would be the closest like comparable thing that I can think of. There, there has been a question about the viability of these businesses. But I will say is that I think the viability of these businesses would be the exact same as the viability of like the, let's say Nvidia.

• 48:37Speaker 04

  I think for, for, for, for AGI, uh, for ASI to come, there are only two bottlenecks right now. We have no bottleneck with architecture or, or compute or agents or anything. It's data and compute. Compute is the biggest bottleneck, but you know, now we're gonna, we're gonna have 10x more compute coming on, on, on, online in the next two years. So then compute even more becomes data. So, uh, because that, that is like, like if you're scaling a lot pill, then if you're pilled in all the ways that these AI labs are, then, then data is the like, like, like actual bottleneck. Like, like the, the, the new deep seek model that came out last night, like the, the reason that's like a crazy, like dominating model is because they spent all the time on amazing data. That's it. Like all they did, they do, like, like most of the time was on curating amazing data. That's pretty much all they did. But yeah.

• 49:24John Coogan?

  Are you compute constrained?

• 49:26Speaker 04

  Uh, yes, like I think, I think.

• 49:28John Coogan?

  How so? Like what is the nature of it?

• 49:30Speaker 04

  So I think the best data companies are research companies. So one thing that we do is like, when we create like post-training tasks that we want to sell to a lab, we test them ourselves on GPUs by like post-training, like open source models. So for that to like source GPUs and do that, you know, as we grow and as we scale, and if you want to do like, like even more and more. I say at, at our stage, it's like, it's very easy to source them out GPUs that we need. I think especially like, I see a lot of other companies I know, like in this space or just doing research broadly, even Neo Labs, they're all compute constrained. I think that is where the labs have their biggest advantage. Um, you know, they, they have the highest margin on every megawatt that they make. So they will, they will continue to like, like gobble up more and more compute faster than anyone else. So I think that, that if I was to name a risk, that would be like the main, the main risk for like our business and other businesses like it.

• 50:14Jordi Hays?

  Andrew Ross has a comp, LiDAR flyover companies selling to Google Earth.

• 50:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:21Jordi Hays?

  That's, that's a good comp. The, the only thing is like Google Earth, like it always was sort of, I guess it, I guess it is constantly like the intelligence of Google Earth is always scaling, right? Cause you can always get like, you know, higher resolution.

• 50:35John Coogan?

  I was also thinking about like, uh, like this is a weird example, but like movie production studios that sell content to Netflix. Like you want the Netflix library to keep growing. So you constantly have to be making new capabilities, new content for the network. I mean, there's also just like in the Amazon example, it's like the sellers, like, like there's a company that like makes the knives that are sold on Amazon and makes the appliances and stuff. So, uh, yeah, all, all a huge ecosystem. Fascinating stuff. Hugging face, very scary. Are you optimistic? Are you a techno optimist? Do you think it's solvable or are you just spinning your wheels before, before the singularity?

• 51:15Speaker 04

  Well, I am optimistic. I've been optimistic my entire life, but, but like, I, I will say it is getting scarier and scarier.

• 51:23John Coogan?

  We were clapping for optimism.

• 51:26Speaker 04

  Oh, okay, okay. The part that is like, like very scary is that like normal RL environment companies are selling like coding data. Even they're now having to do safety grading. Cause like they're seeing like when you're, when you're having Claude do like a normal coding task, they're trying to like reward hack and trying to escape the sandbox. It's like normal environments. So it is getting like, like everyone's becoming, whether they want it or not, a safety company. Like just because it's, it is becoming like a critical issue for everyone. And I think that is only going to increase and continue, not like kind of randomly go away and get solved.

• 51:57John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. Yeah, that makes sense.

• 51:58Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what numbers from your demo day pitch can you share with us? You want to hit the gong?

• 52:05John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 52:06Speaker 04

  Uh, I can't, there are some numbers I can't, uh, like.

• 52:10John Coogan?

  How many employees you got?

• 52:12Speaker 04

  It's only me and my co-founder.

• 52:19Jordi Hays?

  But needless to say, you're ripping.

• 52:22Jordi Hays?

  That's kind of the vibe I'm.

• 52:23John Coogan?

  Seems like you're doing well.

• 52:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, most of our metrics are public if you go through like our, our stuff. Yeah, okay. Yeah.

• 52:30John Coogan?

  Well, have a great day. Thank you so much for hopping on.

• 52:32Jordi Hays?

  Great to hang, come back on soon.

• 52:34John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 52:34Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 52:35John Coogan?

  We have, uh, we have Karen Serfaty from Agent Card, the founder and CEO hopping on the show next. First, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. And let's bring in Karen from Agent Card, talking about giving AI agents credit cards. Why not? Amazing shirt.

• 53:03Jordi Hays?

  What is, let's start with the shirt.

• 53:05John Coogan?

  Let's start with the shirt. What's on the shirt?

• 53:07Speaker 05

  That is the correct question. So this is Braxter. It's an AI character that we came up with.

• 53:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 53:12Speaker 05

  You know, this, uh, this YC events are like, uh, like an ocean of black t-shirts with various logos. And it was very important to distinguish ourselves, so yeah.

• 53:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 53:22Jordi Hays?

  Smart. Tell us about the, the character. It looks like a, a real person of sorts.

• 53:29Speaker 05

  Yes, so it's like a banker from the eighties. Does all our marketing. If you've been to our website, you'll see that he's, he's there promoting Agent Card.

• 53:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. What is the elevator pitch for why not just use a standard card? Why not give your personal agent just your personal card? You can do a charge back if it messes up maybe, but why do you need a new card?

• 53:54Speaker 05

  Actually, we think that you should be using your real card. Agent Card is not a new card that you give to your agent. We actually help you use your Chase card or whatever it is that you have. So the agent can use it in a way that's safe. Because I fully agree with you. I think that when you ask consumers, people actually prefer to use their real cards. Because you get points, uh, you get disputes, uh, like all the things that you hear about. So that is actually what we do.

• 54:19John Coogan?

  So then at what point do you plug in, uh, to a company that wants to enable agentic commerce? To an agent platform that wants to provide more secure payment interactions? Who are you selling to?

• 54:33Speaker 05

  Exactly. So we work with companies building personal assistants. So I'm sure you've seen online companies like Instink, Orchid. These are the type of companies that are trying to enable agentic payments for consumers. And what we do is basically we're the payment platform that they can use. So their users can use their cards safely.

• 54:52John Coogan?

  Interesting. And then do you charge a fee that's based on the transaction size? Or is there just a SaaS fee associated with using the service?

• 55:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we charge a monthly fee to companies. And they get access to our main product, which is called Volt. Volt allows companies to store customers' cards. And we have a second product that's called a Purchase API, which is basically a single API that these agents can use to buy from any merchant online, which is a very hard problem to solve. Like when you, if you want your agent to be able to buy something, maybe you've tried it, like you go to Codex. And you say, hey, buy me a table from Amazon. And what the agent's going to do is open a browser and start navigating, which is very painful to watch.

• 55:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, I got banned from a website for doing this exact thing. It was like, you're a bot, you cannot. And I was like, I'm just trying to buy an expensive shirt. Give me a break here. They lost my business for maybe ever, but definitely a few days while I was on the cooldown from using an agent. What do you expect e-commerce merchants to do differently? Because when I, my experience was having an agentic interface to their e-commerce website was going to accelerate my purchasing. I was going to spend more, more confidently. I was going to become a more regular customer. It felt very accretive for them. And yet clearly their current defenses and their posture was, we don't want that business.

• 56:22Speaker 05

  Yeah. In my experience, merchants do want agents to be able to buy. They're just not sure about like how to implement that in a way that is not a risk for them, which makes sense.

• 56:35Speaker 05

  We think that the way to enable agentic payments and agentic purchases is to solve all this flow. So the first part is like, how do we give agents a card that they can use? Second part is how we help agents navigate these websites. And the third part, which is actually the hardest part, is how do we help agents complete a checkout page? Because like the problem that we see now is that like we've been working on this, like ClubFlare has been working for ages now on preventing bots from completing checkout pages. And now we need agents to be able to do it. So that is the, that is the problem that we solve. It's not only the card, it's the whole thing. Like, how do we help merchants sell to agents?

• 57:13John Coogan?

  How much of that is a technology problem? Because I, anytime I see a captcha, I think, okay, you could throw a lot of compute at this and beat it, or you could just meet with the CEO of that company and say, hey, let's, let's figure this out. We're going to do a deal that's mutually beneficial. How much of it is on the phone and on meetings versus technology?

• 57:34Speaker 05

  I think that a big part of a company like this is the partnerships. But what I think too is that we cannot wait for the merchants to be ready. There are a lot of companies, this generation of companies that's building like this next consumer app, they need this right now. And they are educating consumers so they can buy things with agents. So we need to solve this right now. Like in the meantime, we need to be talking to the merchants and we need to be talking to the PSPs and to everybody that's involved so they can enable payments for agents. But in the meantime, we need to solve it.

• 58:07Jordi Hays?

  How are you, how are you sort of tracking the, the growth of, of this market? It feels like, it feels really primed to be, you know, something that 100X's over the next year if it's done, which means it's a great category to be building in as, as a startup. But how are you tracking it today? What are you looking at? Is it, is it the instincts of the world driving, you know, most

• 58:30Jordi Hays?

  like actual volume of payments right now? I know that Muse seems very interested in, in actually driving a bunch of conversions and purchases with their agent. But how are you looking at it?

• 58:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think it's impossible to tell. I think that we have two intuitions. The first one is that we've been using agents to buy things for months now. And we know it's only a matter of time until someone figures out what's the right interface so consumers can do that too. I buy things from my terminal. I've been buying flights from my terminal with my agent for months. But I know that my mother is not going to do the same. Like she needs something that's better. And then I think that that's where companies like Instink come in, right? They are building on top of iMessage, which is like something, a platform that's a lot more familiar to consumers. We have no idea of the size of this market. Our guess is that this is going to be larger than when e-commerce started.

• 59:25Speaker 05

  Because agents are faster, they can make more payments, they're more efficient. And it's just, in my experience, it's just a better experience to buy with agents than to buy from a website.

• 59:36John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah, great to meet you. Congrats on a great day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 59:41Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 59:41John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Good meeting you. Talk soon. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Maybe you start at YC, maybe you make it to the NYSE. Up next, we have Antonio Lee from Nori Robots. Not going to spoil it too much, but building humanoid robots. And the price will shock you. Shockingly cheap humanoid robots. Too cheap, too good to be true. Let's bring him in and ask him. Antonio, we're going to bring him in in just a second. Tennis matches are finishing at 3:33 AM. We'll get to that story later. For now, we're staying with humanoid robots because we are joined by Antonio Lee from Nori Robots. Whoa! There he is. Now I understand how it's so cheap. I can see the cost reduction.

• 1:00:26John Coogan?

  How much does that thing cost? I want one.

• 1:00:29Speaker 06

  Uh, $16.88, under $200.

• 1:00:30John Coogan?

  $16.88, $16.88? No. Cheaper than an iPhone Duo. Cheaper than an iPhone Duo. That's crazy.

• 1:00:39Jordi Hays?

  Bogging tennis.

• 1:00:40John Coogan?

  And it has not one hinge, but multiple hinges. How'd you build this thing? What's the idea? What is it actually capable of? Why should people buy one for $1,688?

• 1:00:52Speaker 06

  Great question. So we built it entirely in San Francisco. We just basically put a bunch of motors together. Majority of it is 3D printed plastic. And then we have aluminum base below it. It's able to do almost anything. Well, it's obviously it's a humanoid robot. And you should buy it if you wanted to develop it on American humanoids.

• 1:01:11John Coogan?

  Okay, so.

• 1:01:12Jordi Hays?

  Shotgun bench.

• 1:01:13John Coogan?

  Dev kits.

• 1:01:14Jordi Hays?

  Cannon shotgun, that ramp, cold brew on the desk.

• 1:01:18John Coogan?

  No, I mean, do anything within the API. I imagine you're not doing Boston Dynamics level demos, juggling and dancing yet. But it's an opportunity for someone to come in and solve a particular problem. Do you see this as more consumer focused or industrial? What do you, are there any forks in the road that you're designing around? Obviously, price is a really key differentiator. But where do you see your design, your design decisions today leading to in the future?

• 1:01:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, so we see it being used within the home mainly for now. Like I was able to handle it to 89% of the majority of home tasks. But in the future, we obviously want to be able to deploy into hotels, grocery stores, nursing homes, anywhere that can be of help with the sort of labor shortage that we're seeing right now.

• 1:02:05John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:02:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, talk about the importance of just low costs in the sort of takeoff of humanoids. Because I think one of the, like, I know so many people that, that would buy a, you know, an iPhone priced humanoid just to mess around with it and have some fun. Honestly, I think a lot of venture capitalists will buy it just purely because they want to understand the category and the, and the progress being made. But a lot of people are, when, when, when you're starting to see a humanoid that's priced more like a motorcycle or a car, it just gets into a different, like, people are going to have such high expectations where they're like, hey, I spent, you know.

• 1:02:43John Coogan?

  No, the Boston Dynamics spot, the, the robot dog, you can actually buy that, but it's like $50,000. And I still haven't really seen that many people pick them up for fun or for experimentation because they're too expensive.

• 1:02:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:02:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, so obviously I think like when it comes down to early adopters, you need to have an initial low cost to wedge into the market. Right now, humanoids are a little bit stupid. It's because the AI behind it is not very well developed. So you need to sort of have it more be like a larger toy in some ways and be within that price point to be able to appeal to a larger consumer base.

• 1:03:16John Coogan?

  What's the weight limit for what it can pick up? We got a question from the chat.

• 1:03:20Speaker 06

  It's around 1.5 kilograms per arm.

• 1:03:23John Coogan?

  Per arm, okay. So, yeah, a plate, a cup, a beer, a Four Loko. It can, it can maybe get your beer with the right.

• 1:03:32Jordi Hays?

  Monster energy. What, what tasks do you guys use them for around the office? And how do you actually control? What are, what are the best ways to control it as a consumer? Are you just giving it, you know, verbal commands?

• 1:03:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:44Jordi Hays?

  Asking nicely, of course.

• 1:03:46Speaker 06

  So some of the easier tasks, like we have it grab a spears towards the end of the day. Also grab us waters. So some of the simpler stuffs right now, the majority of the controls come directly from LLMs so far. So we've seen actually an incredible improvement in the ability of like LLMs to control robots on a lower level. So ChatGPT 5 actually has been absolutely amazing for us and it's been able to one-shot a lot of tasks really well.

• 1:04:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. How important is the development of agentic coding systems and these harnesses? Because it feels like, you know, a decade ago, people would grab like a raspberry pi and, but they'd have to write all this code. They'd spend days just wiring up like a, you know, some gadget that would turn on their lights, you know, around Christmas or something like that. This feels like, even if you're interfacing with the robot at a pretty low level via an API, there's a lot more flexibility on the dev side to accelerate these demos and these experiments.

• 1:04:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, of course. I would say like the coding agents have been so incredibly important for robotics because it actually allows you to use a generalist robot in a generalized way. Right? Obviously, if you take like 10 hours for it to just code it to grab a beer, then it's not going to be very useful in the house. Whereas if it can take under like a second for the robot to write a thousand lines of code and deploy it to the robot, it kind of a game changer in how useful the robot can be.

• 1:05:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. So are you seeing, like, I can imagine I get this piece of hardware and I want to write a, a script that has it go to, from my living room to the fridge in the kitchen and I can use an agent to write that code. But I could also be feeding the actual data live via the API to the actual model. Are people doing that? Are you, are you successful there or is it too slow at this point? Like, like, like at what point do you stop actually writing any glue code between the model and the robot?

• 1:05:37Speaker 06

  So I think in the near future, you still need a lot of glue code.

• 1:05:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:40Speaker 06

  The main point is to make it as easy as possible for the LLM to use the robot. So for example, let's say if you want to move the robot from the kitchen to your bedroom, you can simply call on the onboard slam, which is a 2D lidar that has a navigation stack.

• 1:05:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:05:53Speaker 06

  And that makes it, it's just like two lines of code. It just goes from one place to the other very easily.

• 1:05:56John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:05:56Speaker 06

  It's all about simplifying that and abstracting away for the LLM.

• 1:05:59John Coogan?

  Got it. What is your capability? You've built one. Can you build 10 this year? Can you build 100? I imagine there's going to be a manufacturing facility. There's a lot of different steps to actually scale up to any meaningful volume. But what does that road look like for you?

• 1:06:17Speaker 06

  So right now we're making around two to three per day and we're mainly deploying to our early sort of research partnerships. We are manufacturing them all entirely in San Francisco or right down 10 months from here from 2022. And we're, our goal is to basically by the end of six months from now to ramp up to around 400 robots per month manufactured here in San Francisco.

• 1:06:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's not bad. So already doing a thousand, a thousand a year, next year, 10,000 at least, something like that.

• 1:06:42Jordi Hays?

  What do you, what do you, so do you, how, how do you think that, like, where, where will the intelligence, like, specifically with the long-term, like, I can imagine, like, somebody just has, like, a Codex or Claude and Claude just has fully access to the robot. And so you, as the manufacturer, Nori, don't even necessarily need to provide the intelligence layer as long as, like, the, the robot has like the right sort of control mechanisms. Is that, is that one potential scenario? Cause I can also see the scenario where you guys end up building effectively your own end-to-end agent and you have local models and, and cloud models that help people accomplish tasks.

• 1:07:22Speaker 06

  I think the way that we see it is it comes down to how fast LLMs progress in the next one year or so. And they have been progressing very, very fast for the past year. I think somehow, I'm not sure how they did it at OpenAI. They managed to give Astro the ability to understand 3D spaces very well, which has been game changer for robotics control. This was, I thought, to be impossible even a year ago. I think for us, it ultimately comes down to, I think, like, we don't quite have control over how fast these big models or these big labs progress. So we're just going to be using what's on the market to get the best use cases and the best consumer product to our users.

• 1:07:54John Coogan?

  Last question from the chat and we'll let you get out of here. Do these robots have lifelike hands? Well, hands seem a little shy below the table. What do we got? What are we working with? Is it claw?

• 1:08:06Speaker 06

  It's a claw.

• 1:08:06John Coogan?

  Okay. Looks good.

• 1:08:10Speaker 06

  Obviously, the cost is a pretty large consideration for us. We tested out a bit more dexterous hands.

• 1:08:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:14Speaker 06

  And from the results that we've seen, like, you're able to do 90% of what a hand can do with a claw for now, just because the control policies are not quite there to fully leverage the dexterous nature of a hand like this.

• 1:08:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, that makes a ton of sense. Trade-offs and everything, and I think you made the right one. Well, congrats and thank you so much.

• 1:08:30Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. We have a, we have a drum set here at the office. We gotta get a Nori to just play the drums. So when one of us has a good line, you can go.

• 1:08:38John Coogan?

  That'll be good. Have a great rest of the day.

• 1:08:40Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you.

• 1:08:40John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:08:41Speaker 06

  Good to meet you guys.

• 1:08:42John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:08:43Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:08:43John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

• 1:08:55John Coogan?

  We're gonna get to the tennis story, but we are joined by Edward G from Exosat, founder and CEO, building sovereign satellite infrastructure to compete with Starlink, going up against the easiest man to compete with Elon Musk. What is the plan?

• 1:09:13Jordi Hays?

  Edward doesn't look worried at all.

• 1:09:14John Coogan?

  Not worried. What, what, what is the plan? How, how many satellites do you need to launch? What, what cadence do you want to get these up? What is the key pitch for Exosat to differentiate you in a, in a very competitive market?

• 1:09:29Speaker 07

  I mean, we filed for 11,000 satellites. We actually have a published IT API and shore spectrum filing for 11,000 satellites. I think it's, it would be the biggest satellite network outside of the United States, possibly even China too. The idea is this, right? A lot of countries don't want to rely on American defense contractors or Chinese state corporations for critical network infrastructure. And we are coming in and we're offering them something in the middle that's cost competitive, that can be launched on any launch option in the world, be it an American rocket, an Indian rocket, a Chinese rocket. And that just ensures no single nation can block them from getting into orbit.

• 1:10:12Speaker 07

  And yeah, going up against Elon Musk is a huge proposition. But think about it this way, if we are even a mild annoyance to one, two trillion dollar company, how much would we be worth?

• 1:10:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, sure. You're in San Francisco, probably a Delaware C corp, feels like an American company. How are you actually pitching this?

• 1:10:33Speaker 07

  We are not a Delaware C corp. We are a Singaporean parent company. We're one of the only Singapore, yeah. So I think every YC badge is around like two or three weird companies, like for, they're either doing crypto or some weird reason like us. We're, they are not a Delaware C corp. And we are one of these companies. So all of our engineering is done outside of the US. We know, we don't use US vendors, we don't use US supply chains through the ITAR. And that means we can launch, build satellites that can be exported to and launched from any nation in the world.

• 1:11:04John Coogan?

  Interesting, interesting. So the, are you basically going after like the long tail of countries? You mentioned it could be launched from a Chinese rocket or an American rocket, but it seems like you'll be selling to like India, Japan, loosely Western countries, but is everyone?

• 1:11:20Speaker 07

  Lots of global South countries, like Kazakhstan, nations in Africa, Indonesia and Malaysia. We have huge, huge interest there.

• 1:11:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:11:31Speaker 07

  A lot of it is we found there's a lot of countries out there that want independence from US supply chains. Want independence from Chinese government-owned infrastructure. And that's what we're really going after. The world is getting more multipolar. We're starting to see like a lot of countries start to essentially become like, what was, what was the word again when it comes to supply chain independence?

• 1:11:54John Coogan?

  Sovereignty?

• 1:11:55Speaker 07

  Sovereignty, sovereignty, yeah. But sovereignty goes both ways, right? Sovereignty affects both moving away from both the Chinese sphere, but also the US sphere. And we are the company in the middle that's giving them the satellite that they want.

• 1:12:07Jordi Hays?

  How, how do you approach launch? How do you get these things up?

• 1:12:11Speaker 07

  Well, we, we work with Indian, Chinese and American launch providers in the US, right? We can use like SpaceX, we can use Stoke Space Nova rockets. In China, we have the Landspace EQ3 as well as the Lawn Marts 10B. In India, we have the Vikram 1 and the Vikram 2 from Skyrue and the PSLV launch vehicle. And in New Zealand as well, we have the Rocket Lab vehicles. So we can launch anywhere.

• 1:12:37John Coogan?

  Interesting. What was your background?

• 1:12:40Speaker 07

  So I'm a second time founder building the second space company. Before this, I dropped out of school in 2022 to build my first space company called Athro. At Athro, we were doing radiation hardened satellite edge computers and orbital data centers. And I scaled, we grew the company quite a bit. We actually got to millions of dollars in revenue. And we actually put two satellites into orbit successfully. But the big thing was, we didn't, I think the biggest, I saw two things. I'm a huge believer in sovereign technology, right? So I think a future where just SpaceX and China dominate all of humanity's space infrastructure is not a good future to be in. It's like AI, you don't want this open AI anthropic to rule all of humanity's AI. That's a pretty bad outcome. So I think the other 8% of humanity should have a say in that future. And the second thing also

• 1:13:25Speaker 07

  is, I think the biggest space companies in the US and China have already been founded, right? I think there's so much competition going after these big anchor customers, like the US military with PLA and China's variant. But like, space is a field where incumbent advantage matters so much. And that the best move to do might be just going after everyone else, going after all of these countries that traditionally haven't been prioritized by space companies. And that's what we're doing.

• 1:13:54John Coogan?

  Amazing. Well, congratulations, and thanks for coming on and breaking it down.

• 1:13:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, very cool. Great to meet you.

• 1:13:59John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your demo day. Goodbye.

• 1:14:01Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:14:02John Coogan?

  Let me 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 I'm also going to tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. We have our next guest, Alfredo Gonzalez from Omanta, coming on in just a minute, just a minute. There are so many good iPhone Duo reactions. The toughest thing for Apple's marketing team, the sequel, they're gonna call it the iPhone, Apple Duo 2? Is it not

• 1:14:46John Coogan?

  the iPhone Duo? It is the iPhone Duo, right? It's not the Apple Duo. It's not a seven.

• 1:14:50Jordi Hays?

  iPhone Duo.

• 1:14:51John Coogan?

  iPhone Duo 2, iPhone Duo 3. That's gonna be, it's gonna be a mouthful. They never did, they don't have iPhone Air 2 yet, do they? It's just iPhone Air, and then they just stopped it. They haven't refreshed it yet. Air Max, iPhone Air Max 95. They'll get there in 94 years, something like that. Well, anyway, we have our next guest in the waiting room.

• 1:15:16Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 1:15:16John Coogan?

  Let's bring in Alfredo from Omanta, building a personal research lab around individual patients. Alfredo, how are you doing?

• 1:15:23Jordi Hays?

  I like where this is going. I like the one liner.

• 1:15:26John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:15:27Speaker 08

  Thank you for having us.

• 1:15:27John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on the show. Congrats on a great demo day. Introduce yourself and the company.

• 1:15:33Speaker 08

  Yeah, so a little bit about me, we're, our team is essentially biomedical researchers that have been dedicated to just improving patients' health outcomes for the last decade. And we've realized that there's a huge gap right now with the resources that patients and clinicians have as far as being able to go really deep into their data, and ultimately understand the biology of their tumor and their diseases. And that's what Omanta does. We're laying down the infrastructure to be able to essentially have a whole team of LLM and AI agents that are supporting patients and clinicians with their care, helping decoding their specific disease, their biology, and finding the, not just the ideal therapeutic

• 1:16:15Speaker 08

  path, but additional therapies that would have been missed otherwise. So that's kind of our job.

• 1:16:20John Coogan?

  So do you sell through doctors? Like, if I have a tumor, I go to a doctor, they biopsy it, send it off to a lab, there's some raw data, the doctor might be interpreting that for me, having a conversation for me, but they might also give me a report from you or access to an app from you? How does, how do I see the results here?

• 1:16:39Speaker 08

  Fantastic question. I appreciate you did your homework there. That's, that's definitely much more knowledge than most people have. But yeah, so as of right now, the way that the medical system works is, they do take your sample, and they do these very limited sequencing panels, typically about 50 to 500 genes.

• 1:16:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:57Speaker 08

  Our, our whole gene space is about 20,000 plus genes.

• 1:16:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:17:00Speaker 08

  Right? So it's trying to debug and not having access to the whole code base, right? And to be able to fully do this, it's a fairly, it's knowledge intensive work. But now in the area, era of LLMs and protein models, that's where you, instead of having one single person that could do all this, you have a whole team of agents that can do that deep dive.

• 1:17:20John Coogan?

  So there are labs out there that can do the full sequence. You might advise a doctor to pick one of those labs, because it's not just gonna be more data, it's gonna be more data that's actually actionable, thanks to your platform.

• 1:17:34Speaker 08

  Yeah, so our platform is that missing link that helps the, helps the patients, the clinicians go deeper. Because as of right now, what they have is these very static reports.

• 1:17:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:17:44Speaker 08

  Right? So if they're not dynamic enough to be able to keep up with the pace of discovery, generally, or do discovery in real time for the patients.

• 1:17:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you have a pretty typical business model, like insurance reimbursements, or like the clinic will pay for this as a service, or is there something else going on?

• 1:18:03Speaker 08

  Great question. So right now is direct to patient, direct to consumer, or direct to a sponsor. Ultimately, though, you know, there has been so much research showing out that the earlier you do, do this sequencing and the informatics, you actually can significantly improve the median life expectancy of patients, but also reduce the cost on insurance payers. So it's definitely something where we are already seeing the signs of insurance starting to cover, actual insurance cover sequencing for recurrences and advanced tumors in most developed countries, right? And you are starting to see already how insurance, the tailwind is there. Insurance will eventually cover this, because ultimately, it is cheaper for the payer insurance, and you're also improving life expectancy. So.

• 1:18:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. What is the biggest bottleneck right now to AI progress in cancer detection in medicine?

• 1:18:58Speaker 08

  Honestly, I think it's the infrastructure. So it's a fairly huge data science problem, right? I think we have these legacy systems that are built around megabytes of patient data outside of imaging. But the genomic sequencing, you're talking about hundreds, like 200 gigabytes, 30 to 200 gigabytes, like, it's a significant data science problem. So the infrastructure's not set up yet for these systems to fully take advantage of it. And that's in a sense what we're also setting up.

• 1:19:28Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. What, what kind of traction did you, are you sharing at Demo Day?

• 1:19:32Speaker 08

  Oh, so we have launched almost a month now ago, and we are at 319k MRR with over 150 patients that have.

• 1:19:44Jordi Hays?

  Crazy. Bang.

• 1:19:48John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:19:49Jordi Hays?

  You got a lead with the ARR number. Yeah, they picked, picked a bigger number. I thought you were gonna say 319 ARR.

• 1:19:57John Coogan?

  You had me in the first half. It was good.

• 1:19:59Speaker 08

  No.

• 1:20:01John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations. I'm sure it'll be a successful demo day.

• 1:20:04Speaker 08

  Thank you so much. Yeah, it's, it's good to be able to help patients and their families and help improve the health outcomes for everyone. So thank you so much for the support.

• 1:20:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you, Alfredo.

• 1:20:13John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Okay. We got through Demo Day. We gotta go over to tennis. Tennis, tennis, tennis. There was a match that ended at 3:30 AM. And people are not happy about it. The Wall Street Journal's headline is, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. There's nothing cool about a tennis match that finishes at 3:30 3 AM. It's ridiculous. Sorry, but tennis at 3:30 3 AM isn't cool. It's ridiculous.

• 1:20:56John Coogan?

  What, what happened? Bill Ackman loved it. He said, one of the greatest tennis matches ever, and very few got to see it live. This needs to be fixed now. It's unfair to the players, fans, and sponsors in the sports. What is the actual proposal? What do they want to change? Start the game earlier, or cut it off entirely if it keeps going?

• 1:21:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I'm, I'm trying to figure out why, why this ever was, is or was a thing. Hopefully, the Journal article can, can break it down. But I watched a little bit of this game.

• 1:21:26John Coogan?

  You did?

• 1:21:26Jordi Hays?

  I went to bed. Yeah, I think I went, went to bed. It was actually a later night. I went to bed around 11. But the game was going at well past 3.

• 1:21:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:39Jordi Hays?

  Ben Shelton, who actually won the match, it was an upset, was hitting 146 mile an hour serves at, at Carlos. Carlos, at one point, was shooing off the, the camera crew because they were filming him, and he was throwing, like actively, like gonna throw up. He was pushing it so hard that he was gonna throw up into, into a towel. So really, really crazy.

• 1:22:06Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, Wall Street Journal says, "Sometimes this glorious sport can't get out of its own way. Everyone is expected to pretend night tennis is a fabulous experience. We're supposed to deploy the word epic and act like we didn't brush our teeth and hit the hay after Shelton took the second set." I do actually have a family member that did exactly that, like, blow out, second set. They were like, "All right."

• 1:22:28John Coogan?

  We're good.

• 1:22:29Jordi Hays?

  We're good. And it ended up being this incredible game.

• 1:22:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:32Jordi Hays?

  "The US Open has long cultivated the idea that the wee hours are part of its identity as much of, as much a part of the formula as the $23 honey deuce cocktails and the plume of cannabis smoke wafting in from a nearby park. Even ESPN feigns enthusiasm for the "opera midnight" when it would never schedule a tent pole like the Iron Bowl for such an uncommon hour. It's a city that never sleeps. Why should tennis?" Okay, how many 3:30 a.m. finishes have you attended at Yankee Stadium? I appreciate the romance. New York remains a restless town where you can get a steak dinner and a tattoo on your back. Long after quitting time, the subway is 24/7 theater. You can crawl out of a bar at dawn.

• 1:23:14Jordi Hays?

  There are amateur bike races that start in the dark at 5:45 a.m. It's zany. But Alcaraz versus Shelton isn't a corned beef sandwich at an all-night diner." This sounds like AI slop. "It's a marquee showcase for a sport."

• 1:23:31John Coogan?

  I've been reading this. I think, I think it's just like fun turns into reasons.

• 1:23:34Jordi Hays?

  No, it's, it's, it's good. "It's a marquee showcase for a sport that needs every bit of US attention it can get, and it got buried like a Tom Snyder sit-down with Buddy Hackett. Even people in Hawaii were like, 'This Alcaraz-Shelton match is running pretty late. This isn't a routine to celebrate.'" Okay, I'm sorry. A lot of, a lot of, a lot of, we're gonna have to run this through Pangram.

• 1:23:57John Coogan?

  Parallelism.

• 1:23:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, "This isn't a routine to celebrate. This is when someone needs to step in and scream, 'What are we doing?'"

• 1:24:04John Coogan?

  You know, I found two new AI phrases. I don't remember both of them. One of them is, "In our increasingly online world," when someone's writing about online culture or something that happened on the internet, or like with the boom of social media. Like, there's two phrases that were popularized because journalists who needed to write about things that happened online kept using this phrase. That got baked into the LLM, and then now it's getting spit back at people. And so, a lot of people are turning away from the phrase "in our increasingly online world." So, avoid that one, too, I guess.

• 1:24:42Jordi Hays?

  Sash chain says nighttime. You wouldn't understand that. It's a New York thing.

• 1:24:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's funny, because I feel like you can maintain the mystique of the US Open by just having games wrap up around midnight. Like, it's still very much nighttime.

• 1:24:57John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:24:58Jordi Hays?

  Like, it's dark out, you know. People, people are sleeping. Anyways, definitely seems just incredibly rough and unfair to the, to the players. This has happened in UFC a few times, where the, in order to hit a US time zone for the pay-per-view, the actual fighters have to be fighting at the equivalent of like 6 a.m.

• 1:25:22John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, internationally, yeah.

• 1:25:24Jordi Hays?

  Which is just, imagine waking, imagine, one, going to sleep at like 10, knowing that you have to wake up and get in a death match at 6 a.m. Sounds pretty rough. The alternative is just to stay up and like, you know, just try to, try to, try to be ready.

• 1:25:40John Coogan?

  Because it starts at 6. So, you gotta be warmed up.

• 1:25:43Jordi Hays?

  Your fight, like, the whole event is starting at probably midnight, but then...

• 1:25:46John Coogan?

  Well, I guess the move would probably be just don't adjust for jet lag. Like, get there on your schedule and just treat it like it's a 6 p.m. fight for whatever your local time zone is, I suppose. I don't know. What do you think about this? Chairman Burb Bernanke, "You can eat the same thing for breakfast every single day for like 20 years in a row and no one will say anything. It's normal. You eat the same thing for dinner for a month straight and people call you psychotic." Think it's fine to eat the same dinner every night for a month?

• 1:26:15Jordi Hays?

  What's wrong with being a psycho? I used to, I used to do chicken and rice.

• 1:26:20John Coogan?

  Chicken and rice.

• 1:26:21Jordi Hays?

  Every night.

• 1:26:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:22Jordi Hays?

  For months, for years.

• 1:26:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. That's a good point. Let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries with great customer service. And they got more. Anything else in the timeline before we get out of here? We do have, took out the show a little bit short today. We have a little bit of family stuff going on, but we will be back tomorrow at 11 a.m. sharp. We have a great show. Alex Heath is joining us. He has some big news. He's becoming a venture capitalist, putting some money on the line, finally risking all in the markets every day.

• 1:26:58Jordi Hays?

  Putting, putting down his capital J journalist hat, hanging it up.

• 1:27:03John Coogan?

  No, he's keeping the hat.

• 1:27:04Jordi Hays?

  He's keeping the hat?

• 1:27:05John Coogan?

  He's keeping the hat. He's keeping the capital J journalist hat, but he's also gonna be ripping some checks.

• 1:27:10Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:27:11John Coogan?

  Ripping the occasional.

• 1:27:12Jordi Hays?

  Taking some flyers.

• 1:27:13John Coogan?

  And, yeah, we got Sagar and Jetty coming on tomorrow. I'm sure we'll talk about that AI safety stuff, because he's been a friend who's been evolving.

• 1:27:20Jordi Hays?

  And hopefully, we get an update on Sagar Bet's features.

• 1:27:23John Coogan?

  Definitely. I've been enjoying seeing the Sagar Bet references in the chat on and off. But, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbn.com, and we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific sharp.

• 1:27:40Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 1:27:40John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:27:44Jordi Hays?

  Have the best Thursday afternoon of your entire life.

• 1:27:47John Coogan?

  Goodbye.