"The Information" Profiles TBPN, AI Ups and Downs, Nuclear Regulation | Zach Weinberg, Leigh Marie Braswell, Stephen Balaban, Sam Lessin, Bobby Goodlatte, Auren Hoffman, Doug Bernauer, Isaiah Taylor

TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV (05:41) - The Information Profiles TBPN (39:44) - Apple's AI Struggles (41:22) - Sam Altman's Trillion Dollar AI Device (46:15) - Jori Lallo. Jori is the co-founder of Linear, a streamlined product management tool used by top startups and engineering teams. He previously co-founded Coinbase and has a background in building elegant, fast, and developer-centric software products. (01:01:43) - Zach Weinberg. Zach is a co-founder and general partner at Operator Partners and previously co-founded Flatiron Health, which was acquired by Roche for $1.9 billion. He is an active seed investor and operator across healthcare and software startups. (01:31:50) - Leigh Marie Braswell. Leigh Marie is a partner at Founders Fund, focused on early-stage AI and infrastructure companies. She previously worked at Scale AI and has a background in electrical engineering and machine learning. (02:00:19) - Stephen Balaban. Stephen is the co-founder and CEO of Lambda, a company building high-performance GPU infrastructure for training AI models. He’s been at the forefront of deep learning hardware and computer vision since the early days of modern AI. (02:31:06) - Sam Lessin. Sam is a general partner at Slow Ventures and a former VP of product at Facebook. He writes The Information’s Private Tech column and invests across consumer, media, and frontier tech. (02:59:35) - Bobby Goodlatte. Bobby is an early-stage investor and designer, known for his early role at Facebook and his investments in companies like Coinbase and Lambda School. He is a founding partner at Form Capital. (03:14:47) - Auren Hoffman. Auren is the CEO of SafeGraph and previously founded LiveRamp, which was acquired by Acxiom. He is an expert in data infrastructure and frequently writes about technology, policy, and markets. (03:31:04) - Doug Bernauer. Doug is the founder and CEO of Radiant Industries, a company developing portable nuclear reactors to power remote locations and space missions. He previously worked at SpaceX and is focused on building scalable, clean energy infrastructure. (03:47:28) - Isaiah Taylor. Isaiah is the founder of Valar Atomics, a company focused on developing advanced nuclear technologies. He previously advised leading AI labs on public policy and now works at the intersection of energy, national security, and deep tech innovation.

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 TV.

• 0:01Jordi Hays?

  TV.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Friday, May 23rd, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology.

• 0:08Jordi Hays?

  The Fortress of Finance.

• 0:09John Coogan?

  The capital of capital.

• 0:11Jordi Hays?

  And John.

• 0:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 0:12Jordi Hays?

  This is our last show in this studio.

• 0:14John Coogan?

  It is. It is. But the Fortress of Finance lives on. The capital of capital lives on.

• 0:18Jordi Hays?

  It's a state of mind.

• 0:19John Coogan?

  It's a state of mind. It's a place on the internet that we, we bring. We create the Fortress of Finance, the Temple of Technology, wherever we are. And soon it will be in Hollywood, California, the future home of media.

• 0:30Jordi Hays?

  And entertainment.

• 0:32John Coogan?

  Once we're done with it, baby. We'll bring in media to Hollywood. We got a great show for you today, folks. We got a banger lineup of guests and topics. Wow, we really filled it out. I thought we had four people booked. Turns out we have seven now. It's great.

• 0:46Jordi Hays?

  I don't know how that happened, John.

• 0:48John Coogan?

  We're talking about the, the information. They profiled us. Abe came down, hung out with us for a full day.

• 0:53Jordi Hays?

  And the allegations are extreme.

• 0:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, the allegations of bro culture over here are extreme. We'll talk about Apple's AI struggles, Sam Altman's trillion dollar AI device. There's a banger quote in the Wall Street Journal from Berber Gin. And then we got a whole bunch of guests. Jory from linear, Zach from Curie, Lee Marie Braswell, former colleague of mine over, over at Founder's Fund. Now she's at Kleiner Perkins, coming on to talk about artificial intelligence, some of the seed investing she's been doing. Remember she was like a seed investor in windsurf, I believe. Absolute banger.

• 1:25Jordi Hays?

  Absolute dog.

• 1:26John Coogan?

  And we got Sam Lessin coming on. We got the founder of Lambda.

• 1:30Jordi Hays?

  And the great thing, so Sam Lessin.

• 1:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33Jordi Hays?

  Many people call him Jessica Lessin's husband.

• 1:35John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:36Jordi Hays?

  He usually goes by that.

• 1:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37Jordi Hays?

  In most tech circles. So Jessica Lessin's husband is coming on and, and this was booked before we knew if the information was going to be a hit piece or a puff piece. And so it could have been, we don't, you know, still unclear exactly where it landed. But it could have been a very, you know.

• 1:54John Coogan?

  Oh, it could have been extremely confrontational.

• 1:56Jordi Hays?

  And it still could get heated.

• 1:57John Coogan?

  And what I think the first or second time he came on, Jessica Lessin was in the background and kind of stopped by and said, hey.

• 2:03Jordi Hays?

  She said, hi.

• 2:03John Coogan?

  Hi. And so, you know, if this, if this piece hadn't gone down the way it did, we could have been screaming on the call and she would have overheard us berating her husband about what happened. But fortunately, the piece turned out pretty.

• 2:15Jordi Hays?

  It'll be pretty PC later. And I'm excited to talk to Sam.

• 2:18John Coogan?

  And then

• 2:19Jordi Hays?

  One of the greatest yappers of all time.

• 2:21John Coogan?

  Bobby and Orin also calling in at 2:00 and 2:15. And so we're going to be going late. It's a three and a half hour show. Let's do it.

• 2:29Jordi Hays?

  They said, hey, it's Friday. Are you going to take your foot off the gas?

• 2:32John Coogan?

  Absolutely not.

• 2:33Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely not.

• 2:34John Coogan?

  Absolutely not. Anyway, let's read through how the technology brothers seized Silicon Valley. The big read in the, in the weekend section of

• 2:44Jordi Hays?

  And I thought this image, by the way, if we can pull it up, I thought it was, my immediate thought was AI. And you think it's handcrafted. You think they went

• 2:53John Coogan?

  I think there are pieces of AI in here, but then there are also things in here that are collage. There's a lot of Photoshop.

• 3:01Jordi Hays?

  Kind of like VPN.

• 3:02John Coogan?

  Might be AI, but the faces are just photos that have just been tuned up. And then

• 3:09Jordi Hays?

  I like how they made me, they made me

• 3:11John Coogan?

  That is not AI.

• 3:13Jordi Hays?

  They made me quite a bit wider than you even.

• 3:16John Coogan?

  Extremely wide.

• 3:17Jordi Hays?

  Which is not my exact build, but I'll take it.

• 3:20John Coogan?

  So the, so the screenshot that's up on the stream is the, is the real one. But for some reason, if you, on the information, there's a, like an HTML bug. And so if you shrink down the website, I don't know if we can pull up the one from the PDF, but it makes us look even wider. And so

• 3:37Jordi Hays?

  How do you have a PDF, John? Why do you have a PDF?

• 3:40John Coogan?

  I always make a PDF of everything. I have every article so that we can read through it here on the show.

• 3:45Jordi Hays?

  Paid subs.

• 3:46John Coogan?

  Yes, I am, I'm a paid subscriber of the information. PDF allegations are flying around today.

• 3:51Jordi Hays?

  The black market is hot right now.

• 3:54John Coogan?

  There's an article that people want to read. It shares around. But yeah, he says, at a time when, when tech has been at loggerheads with the traditional media, the industry elite have gladly accepted a warm embrace from a pair of insider-y talk show hosts, Jordan, John Coogan and Jordy Hayes.

• 4:12Jordi Hays?

  A warm embrace.

• 4:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:14Jordi Hays?

  I mean, part of it is that we, we typically don't want to have someone on the show unless if we saw them, we'd give them a warm embrace.

• 4:22John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 4:22Jordi Hays?

  So I think that's generally accurate. We try to sort out and not have people on that we want to, you know, get into

• 4:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:29Jordi Hays?

  Conflicts with. At some points, we'll have people on the show that we disagree with. But.

• 4:35John Coogan?

  But in general, the, the, like.

• 4:38Jordi Hays?

  We're trying to have people on.

• 4:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, instead of trying to have people on just to fight, argue. You know, we want to just hang out with our friends.

• 4:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if we get to the point where we're getting ultra contentious, we'll probably move to like a pay-per-view model for that.

• 4:53John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:54Jordi Hays?

  So if you want to see.

• 4:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:56Jordi Hays?

  Keith Raboy fight with a journalist.

• 4:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 4:58Jordi Hays?

  You know.

• 4:59John Coogan?

  We'll set that up.

• 5:00Jordi Hays?

  Potentially, physically, not, not just on the timeline, we could set that up.

• 5:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'd love to.

• 5:06Jordi Hays?

  But anyway, so in recent months, John Coogan and Jordy Hayes, co-hosts of TVP and a daily tech news show that has captured the attention of Silicon Valley's investors and founders, have followed the same morning routine. The two men meet in downtown Los Angeles at a members-only Jonathan Club to work out, then sauna together while reading print copies of the Wall Street Journal.

• 5:24John Coogan?

  Fact check true.

• 5:25Jordi Hays?

  Fact check true. You have your sweaty copy on the table today. It's real. The image of Coogan, 36, and Hayes, 29, schvitzing away in such a manner is, well, a little ridiculous in this day and age. And I posted that, God forbid, men have hobbies. There's nothing ridiculous about two guys meeting up at a members' club.

• 5:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:46Jordi Hays?

  And having a sauna and reading, reading the journal.

• 5:48John Coogan?

  And he thought I was joking with him, but I was dead serious that we had actually been in the, in the sauna just a little bit earlier.

• 5:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you quote in the article, "This was in the sauna," pointing to a bedraggled A-section of the journal besides him on the club's dining room table. It has sweat all over it.

• 6:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's the wide version of us because it's been stretched.

• 6:06Jordi Hays?

  The extra wide.

• 6:07John Coogan?

  So you look even wider. It's great.

• 6:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, so I had to prove to him. I actually did invite him to the morning workout. I said, "Meet up with us at 6:30. It's chest day. We'll, we'll, we'll hit some PRs on the bench and then we'll go in the sauna. We'll talk. We'll get breakfast." He was, he was traveling around, couldn't make it, so he just came to breakfast. So I had to prove to him.

• 6:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:28John Coogan?

  By showing him the sweat on my Wall Street.

• 6:30Jordi Hays?

  Not the first, not the first time we've invited somebody to do a workout, though.

• 6:32John Coogan?

  It's the best.

• 6:33Jordi Hays?

  And then had them. Come up with some range of excuses. Oh, I'm not going to be able to get there at six.

• 6:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:39Jordi Hays?

  I'm sorry.

• 6:40John Coogan?

  It is a, it is a high bar, but yeah. Um, we don't do coffee meetings. Naval says, uh, set your opportunity cost extremely high.

• 6:47Jordi Hays?

  Said, meet like a lion.

• 6:48John Coogan?

  Meet like a lion.

• 6:50Jordi Hays?

  Be hitting bench when, when you're meeting with somebody.

• 6:53John Coogan?

  Naval is the original, the lion does not concern himself meme. Like that's where that came from, basically. Work like a lion.

• 7:00Jordi Hays?

  Basically, he doesn't concern himself with much.

• 7:02John Coogan?

  He doesn't. He doesn't concern himself with email.

• 7:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:04John Coogan?

  Doesn't concern himself with coffee meetings. Um, but the gym meeting, it's highly efficient. Uh, actually, I mean, I, I, I Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Take Two.

• 7:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:14John Coogan?

  Owns GTA, putting out GTA six soon. Uh, he is famous for, uh, doing workouts and doing workout meetings. And so I read that book and I kind of adopted that and started doing workouts with Ben and talking to him about the business while we're working out. And it's just a fantastic flow.

• 7:31Jordi Hays?

  It's the best way to hang.

• 7:32John Coogan?

  Um, so they go, he goes on, Abe goes on to write, Coogan and Hay's livestream TBPN, which they originally christened the Technology Brothers as a knowing nod to the concept of a tech bro on X and YouTube. From 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Pacific and published the recording on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. When I found them sitting down to breakfast at the Jonathan Club, they had mostly prepped their opening commentary on the news. Airbnb's revamp, the Trump administration's proposed changes to chip, AI chip exports, and they had a number of guests booked such as Founders Fund, Delian Asperuhav, Lux Capital's Josh Wolfe and Eugenia Kudia. Kudia, who startup replica AI, hopes to develop chatbots that can serve as human companions.

• 8:10Jordi Hays?

  So here's where it gets interesting, John.

• 8:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 8:12Jordi Hays?

  Says, like the show's audience, the guests are attracted to quote unquote TBPN.

• 8:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, like it doesn't, it's not a real thing.

• 8:19Jordi Hays?

  Like it's not a real thing.

• 8:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:21Jordi Hays?

  As a safe refuge from the mainstream media.

• 8:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:23Jordi Hays?

  One that projects an unabashed, unapologetic enthusiasm for tech.

• 8:28Jordi Hays?

  I think this is my best line in here. I'm glad Abe included it. We genuinely love the private markets, the venture capital industry, the startup industrial complex, and I do.

• 8:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, so there's something interesting here. TBPN is in quotes, but I'm on a different article from the information and it reads, "Jim Cramer, CNBC's Mad Money host, took a swipe at our report today." And CNBC isn't in quotes.

• 8:53Jordi Hays?

  Why is it?

• 8:54John Coogan?

  That's so interesting.

• 8:55Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they see it as more legitimate.

• 8:57John Coogan?

  In the CMS, in the content management system?

• 9:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:01John Coogan?

  Maybe they should switch content management systems.

• 9:03Jordi Hays?

  I like.

• 9:03John Coogan?

  If bugs like that are sneaking it into articles.

• 9:06Jordi Hays?

  Abe's our boy.

• 9:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:07Jordi Hays?

  And I'm gonna just, I'm gonna assume that it was just an accident.

• 9:10John Coogan?

  Probably just a mistake.

• 9:11Jordi Hays?

  It was some type of bug.

• 9:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, probably just a mistake.

• 9:17Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, since TBPN debuted last October, Hayes and Co. can have warmly welcomed investors from pretty much every major firm, venture firm in existence.

• 9:25John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 9:27Jordi Hays?

  We're Switzerland.

• 9:27John Coogan?

  We live for your venture firms.

• 9:28Jordi Hays?

  We're Switzerland over here. A marker of the podcast widening appeal, Sequoia, Cosla, Lightspeed, I could go on. A week or so ago, they dispatched one of their four producers to Las Vegas to set up a mini-studio at Andreessen Horowitz's Annual Investor Day Summit, where the firm's executives could chat about tech, the news, and what they were presenting to their investors, a level of access no one in regular media would ever get. Thank you to Eric and the whole team at Andreessen for making that happen.

• 9:54John Coogan?

  And I want to do more of those. I'm talking to Cosla about that. I think that's like an interesting thing, the sit-down with like the full partnership to get the full scope of like how everything fits together. Because most founders, even in my career, have interacted with like every fund, but usually just a single partner. And so, you usually have this very like point, like maybe you've listened to Mark.

• 10:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:18John Coogan?

  And then you've interacted with, you know, David George on a deal.

• 10:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:23John Coogan?

  Or David Haber on a deal.

• 10:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:25John Coogan?

  Or something like that. It's rare to be able to see like all in one. I like the way that that came together, so I'm hoping to do more of those.

• 10:33Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so it goes on. He includes TBPN in quotes again, which is...

• 10:39John Coogan?

  TBPN is in quotes every single time it's listed.

• 10:41Jordi Hays?

  And the information includes TBPN in quotes. Anyways, he goes on, talks about some of the guests that we've had. I thought this was funny. Augustus Rico, who's startup Rainmaker Technology. Has come on the show, has a sky high dream of commercializing cloud seeding, a process of adding chemicals to the atmosphere to increase precipitation.

• 11:05John Coogan?

  He's a good writer, sky high dream. It's a good line. As Hayes and Coogan have won attention from a swath of the technorati and have achieved a constant social media virality, their consistent social media virality, their audience has remained incredibly niche while they see X as their main platform. They have just about 130,000 followers on their accounts and the one belonging to the show on YouTube, TBPN, has only around 7,000 subscribers. It's weird to be like incredibly niche, 130,000 followers. Like, how many you got, Abe? How many?

• 11:39Jordi Hays?

  Hey, let's, let's pull up.

• 11:40John Coogan?

  Let's pull up your.

• 11:41Jordi Hays?

  Analytics for analytics. No, let's go analytics for analytics.

• 11:44John Coogan?

  When was the last time you dropped a 20K banger on the timeline? Let's check it out. Let's see. Let's see how wide. You know Jordy has 100,000 likes on a post?

• 11:52Jordi Hays?

  150.

• 11:53John Coogan?

  150K likes. Is that niche?

• 11:55Jordi Hays?

  Is that, is that niche?

• 11:56John Coogan?

  Oh, you know that my Xi Jinping video on YouTube has 3 million views? You know that my analysis of Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse attempts has 8 million views? How niche is that? How niche is that?

• 12:07Jordi Hays?

  No, we're niche. We're proudly niche.

• 12:09John Coogan?

  Proudly niche. Yeah. I mean, this is actually something we think about is like, is like, there are obvious TAM expanders. Politics is the obvious one. And we've, and we've deliberately said, we're not going to try and TAM expand. It's Abe watching.

• 12:22Jordi Hays?

  Abe's watching. He says, I demand a rebuttal.

• 12:25John Coogan?

  Should we let him call in right now?

• 12:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's have him call in.

• 12:28John Coogan?

  Okay, send him the link.

• 12:29Jordi Hays?

  Send him the link, Abe. Come on in. Come on in.

• 12:34Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, they have no investors and profess to have zero intentions of raising capital lest those investors disrupt their plans.

• 12:42John Coogan?

  Incredibly complex corporate structure because we do have a nonprofit that feeds into an LLC that feeds into a C corp.

• 12:48Jordi Hays?

  That feeds into the labs, which, you know.

• 12:50John Coogan?

  Which is of course owned by Willmanitis.

• 12:52Jordi Hays?

  Willmandis.

• 12:53John Coogan?

  Willmandis.

• 12:54Jordi Hays?

  I, I, this was a fun quote, which I stand by. We could go out and within an hour, I guarantee you, we could raise probably like 15 million and I believe that would destroy us.

• 13:06John Coogan?

  I think that's true.

• 13:07Jordi Hays?

  So we very intentionally not raised.

• 13:10John Coogan?

  It would be, it would be your final party round.

• 13:14Jordi Hays?

  The final party round.

• 13:15John Coogan?

  The final party round.

• 13:16Jordi Hays?

  The final party round.

• 13:17John Coogan?

  Because, I mean, realistically, we could get everyone, but it would very much change, it would very much change the dynamic of the show.

• 13:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:25John Coogan?

  It would be, it would be less fun. I asked Ramp CEO Eric Gleyman what he found so appealing about the show, and he likened their approach to how ESPN chronicles sports, where SportsCenter has players, coaches, and games to celebrate and explain. TBN has founders, investors, and developer conferences. They're, they're able to bring to life the personalities, the play-by-play, and capture the zeitgeist. Thank you, Eric. That's a great quote. That's exactly what we're going for. Coogan and Hayes often hear themselves compared to ESPN commentators, but the analogy is sort of lost on them because putting a major dent in their broker credentials, neither watches much sports content. To Hayes, the natural comparison is to Clubhouse, an audio social media app that was popular for a moment during the pandemic.

• 14:06John Coogan?

  We've taken what the magic of early Clubhouse was, where you could hear an interesting, an interesting investor or founder talking in real time about what was happening that day, what's in the news, and turn that into a show. Ultimately, TBN, allegedly, if it exists at all, if it's a real thing, hopes to better capitalize on the same broad truth about tech's relationship with old-school media that underpinned Clubhouse. More and more Silicon Valley has come to distrust traditional journalists, perceiving them as holding an unshakable bias against the industry, part of an undeniable broader shift in American culture against the established media. Many within tech have tried to build their own in-house media operations, or have rapaciously thrown millions of dollars at would-be disruptors like Clubhouse. Most such efforts have flopped, mounting to little more than lame public relations.

• 14:52John Coogan?

  Coogan and Hayes seem to have found their sweet spot. They maintain just enough independence from their subjects, but feel none of the pressure for critical coverage most journalists in their position would. They also get far on their twin blessings of easy charm and boyish good looks. And now, this is interesting because charm's a little, it's a little bit of a charged word in my culture.

• 15:11Jordi Hays?

  Totally. Irish culture.

• 15:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, so I'm Irish, obviously.

• 15:15Jordi Hays?

  For those who don't know, Hayes and Coogan.

• 15:16John Coogan?

  We're both Irish.

• 15:17Jordi Hays?

  Scott's Irish.

• 15:17John Coogan?

  And so, you know, St. Patrick is obviously a famous snake charmer and charmed all the snakes out. Out of, out of, out of Ireland. And so it's, it's, it's kind of like racial humor. Is this like?

• 15:29Jordi Hays?

  Is it racial?

• 15:30John Coogan?

  I don't want to go racist, but it's racial. It's definitely racial. And so

• 15:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:35John Coogan?

  It's a little bit edgy, but I, I mean, I appreciate it. It's fun. I guess we're in the post woke era. We're in the anti woke era.

• 15:41Jordi Hays?

  Totally. And so If Abe wants to go there, Abe can go there.

• 15:44John Coogan?

  Go there. He can go there.

• 15:45Jordi Hays?

  We can go charm for charm with anyone.

• 15:47John Coogan?

  We can go charm for charm with the best of them.

• 15:53John Coogan?

  It's just a little crazy because I haven't been called a snake charmer.

• 15:55Jordi Hays?

  You don't, you don't normally think of

• 15:57John Coogan?

  Potato, potato eater.

• 15:57Jordi Hays?

  Think of information

• 15:59John Coogan?

  Drunk Mick.

• 16:00Jordi Hays?

  Editor as an edgelord.

• 16:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, you don't. But, but he snuck it in. Yeah, it's good.

• 16:05Jordi Hays?

  It's a little

• 16:06John Coogan?

  It's a good, it's a little good, little dig, little dig. Oh yeah. I saw him chugging Guinness, passed out like a drunk Irishman. You know, he didn't go that far.

• 16:13Jordi Hays?

  He didn't go that far.

• 16:13John Coogan?

  He stepped it back.

• 16:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:14John Coogan?

  But he still threw in a little bit of the Irish, a little, a little dig into Irishness.

• 16:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:18John Coogan?

  Makes sense.

• 16:21John Coogan?

  They have an interesting, they have an interesting voice that I don't think many people could pull off, said Ashley Vance, the Elon Musk biographer and former New York Times and Bloomberg journo. Jurno? They used journo? I thought that was our word for them.

• 16:34Jordi Hays?

  And Bloomberg?

• 16:34John Coogan?

  He's taking it back. Abe's taking back journo.

• 16:38Jordi Hays?

  Wait, that's actually interesting.

• 16:40John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 16:41Jordi Hays?

  He, he highlights earlier, no, he highlights earlier in the article that we took back tech bro.

• 16:45John Coogan?

  They're taking back journo.

• 16:46Jordi Hays?

  And, and, but, but you know, tech bro was a slur.

• 16:50John Coogan?

  Slur.

• 16:50Jordi Hays?

  We took it back as technology brothers, but he's taking back journo.

• 16:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:54Jordi Hays?

  He's kind of inverting it.

• 16:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:55Jordi Hays?

  He's saying, I'm not a journalist. I'm a journo.

• 16:57John Coogan?

  A journo. It's kind of cool. I like it. I'm into this.

• 17:00Jordi Hays?

  It's kind of cool. Jurno, journo-ism is back.

• 17:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. What is it? What is it? Kibbutz?

• 17:07John Coogan?

  Do you know what that is? Cause it said, Ashley came on for a kibbutz.

• 17:12John Coogan?

  Look on and offer unwelcome advice, especially at a

• 17:14Jordi Hays?

  A chat.

• 17:15John Coogan?

  A chat. Oh, a chat. Okay. So he came on for a chat. Yeah. And he's coming on. Uh, he's coming back next week. Uh, he's been traveling, shooting a movie. Very cool stuff. I don't know if you saw his cinema rig, but he's got like 25 different cinema cameras. It's amazing. I'm very excited to see what he's doing. I don't want to leak too much.

• 17:29Jordi Hays?

  Abe, Abe is, Abe is in the temple.

• 17:31John Coogan?

  He is? Okay. Let's bring him in. Abe, we got to get to the bottom of this.

• 17:35Jordi Hays?

  Abe?

• 17:37John Coogan?

  Okay, we're pulling it in.

• 17:40John Coogan?

  Wow, Abe on TBPN for the first time.

• 17:44Jordi Hays?

  Ah, Adrian.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  I could go into exactly why, you know, CNBC doesn't get quotes and you guys do, but that seems boring. Let's talk about it. It'll be more fun.

• 17:57John Coogan?

  Wait, wait, hold on, hold on, editors. The Chyron's way wrong. Can we put the information in quotes?

• 18:04John Coogan?

  Can we put the information in quotes?

• 18:05Jordi Hays?

  Put the information in quotes.

• 18:07John Coogan?

  We have to.

• 18:07Jordi Hays?

  Abe, Abe, it's fantastic to have you on. We talked about this earlier.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  Hey, grab him.

• 18:12Jordi Hays?

  We knew, I mean, Jessica Lessin's husband was gonna come on later, later today, and it would have been a funny kind of dynamic if this had been a hit piece, which we obviously didn't know until around 9 a.m. when you, when you hit publish. So this will be a fun show end to end.

• 18:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was great. I, I don't know. Is there anything else that, I mean, you've been listening to our analysis. Anything else you need to get off your chest?

• 18:42Speaker 02

  No, I, I think the story, you know, is a piece of fair and accurate journalism. And, you know, you guys are, you guys are doing what you do best, which is, you know, common, commentating on the news, on the breaking news about the Schenner Brothers.

• 18:56Jordi Hays?

  Wait, I have to ask, did you intentionally use the word journo instead of journalist when talking about Ashley Vance?

• 19:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, because we think of journo as like a tech bro style, like slang word. Like it's almost a slur for journalist. It's kind of like a short.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  You know, guys, in the way that you're funny on camera,

• 19:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  I also try to be funny in the way I write.

• 19:17John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  You know, just to, you know, make the, make the, make the jokes go around.

• 19:22Jordi Hays?

  No, you nailed it. You nailed it. I mean, you got us. We're, we're cracking up.

• 19:27John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 19:27Jordi Hays?

  It's really good.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  I'll be back in L.A. soon and I'll take you up on the sauna.

• 19:32Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 19:32John Coogan?

  Fantastic. We can't wait.

• 19:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we gotta get a big one in the new studio. Like, we gotta like basically dedicate 2,000 square feet.

• 19:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, for the sauna.

• 19:40Jordi Hays?

  A single sauna.

• 19:41John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 19:42Jordi Hays?

  Abe, thank you for the fun and fair coverage of what we're doing.

• 19:48John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  Likewise, you guys are a good hang. Don't be a, don't be too nice to Sam.

• 19:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 19:54Jordi Hays?

  Okay, we won't. We'll be, we'll be, we'll be rough on him.

• 19:57John Coogan?

  We'll put him in the streets, though.

• 19:59Speaker 02

  Bye.

• 19:59Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Thanks for jumping on. See ya. Look at that. Look at that. Media, technology.

• 20:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:07Jordi Hays?

  You know, just growing down. It's great to see it.

• 20:11John Coogan?

  They give a little bit of our background, but then go on to talk about how we met. Mutual friend. Do they actually not, they didn't?

• 20:17Jordi Hays?

  They didn't name Will Mandis.

• 20:19John Coogan?

  He didn't name it Will Manitis. Saw an opportunity for a tech-focused podcast that could analyze industry news with a light irreverence and wasn't tied to a single company or venture firm. Last fall, they had enough free time on their hands to record a couple of test episodes when they attended Peter Thiel's Hereticon at the Faina Hotel in Miami.

• 20:35Jordi Hays?

  They put founders in quotes.

• 20:41John Coogan?

  No. They sought out feedback from David Senna, host of the popular Founders Podcast, if you can call it that. Wait, did Abe actually tell us why they put it, why he puts it in quotes?

• 20:54Jordi Hays?

  No, he said, he said it wouldn't be fun. He said it wouldn't be fun, which is.

• 20:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:58Jordi Hays?

  Which is fair.

• 20:59John Coogan?

  No, I mean, it makes sense. You're introducing this to the first time to your audience. Like, we're given a hard time, but like.

• 21:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's called TBPN.

• 21:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, like if TBPN becomes like driving news and the information months from now has written about comments that were said on TBPN and they're citing us. I imagine that we will become unquoted. Like, we will, we will earn the removal of our quotes.

• 21:25Jordi Hays?

  Earn your stripes.

• 21:25John Coogan?

  Throwing off the shackles of the quotes. I'm excited. That's, that's definitely on the, on the vision board, right next to TBPN, Arrow on Smoothie. You heard it here first. We're working on it.

• 21:37Jordi Hays?

  Life's goal.

• 21:38John Coogan?

  David Senna previously advised Coogan on his YouTube channel. This is funny because like, it was very, very informal, but I did learn a ton from David. I remember the very first time I talked to him, I was doing my YouTube channel, like very much part-time, just like one day a week on the weekend. When I was bored, I'd just put up a video and I did one a week and it was growing and it was doing well. And I was just like, wait, like you have this podcast that's like, this is pre-deal, this is pre-invest, like the best partnership and pre-meeting Patrick and stuff. So the show was pretty small at that time. And I was like, well, you do this like full-time? And he was like, yeah, and he swore upon it.

• 22:16Jordi Hays?

  I was one of the first advertisers on Founders Podcast.

• 22:20John Coogan?

  I had no idea. No, no way.

• 22:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was, I was like one of the first one or two and. I certainly won't mention it here, but and the funny thing is I'd actually reached out to David and I really didn't, I listened to the first episode and I reached out to him and I was like, would you, this was, this was at a time that was like, every tech company should be a media company, which I don't agree with anymore. But I was like, would you consider like joining, like he told me his ad rates and I was like, well, what if we just like acquired founders? And in hindsight, that was like such a ridiculous thing to ask because David never, under any circumstances, would have done that or anything like it, nor would it have been good for the show. But, but yeah, at that time, it was like

• 23:05Jordi Hays?

  very, very, you know.

• 23:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, I remember getting on the phone with him and he was telling me like, I was like, so do you do this like full time? Like, how do you even make that work? He was like, and he swore about, he was like, absolutely. Like, I don't do anything else. This is all I do. And I was just like, super impressed that he'd been able to make this work. And it is like a niche show. It certainly wasn't the time, but he obviously found a really high value audience and was already monetizing very well. At that point, he had like a pay wall for some of the episodes. He was starting to do some advertising. He's evolved the business model a ton and probably

• 23:36Jordi Hays?

  But it was very humble.

• 23:37John Coogan?

  Like a hundred X.

• 23:38Jordi Hays?

  The product quality was incredible.

• 23:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 23:40Jordi Hays?

  But he was like, it was still

• 23:42John Coogan?

  It was just him. No employees, nothing, like just like building, building, building. So it was very, very cool. And so, yeah, I mean, I learned a lot from him and kind of kept growing the, the channel and then eventually evolved into this. He thought that the two shared natural chemistry and encouraged them to go all in on the concept, which we told about, which we've talked about before. For a model, he suggested they look at sports commentator Pat McAfee. Senator admires McAfee. He's always on persona. What is Pat doing right now? I bet he's live streaming, he said. And I wasn't exactly sure, because we've, we've looked at Pat for, as like a role model in many ways. But I wasn't exactly sure where that came from. But I thought the most interesting lesson that I learned from David was that he actually did not tell us, you guys should live stream. He told us, you should take this

• 24:27Jordi Hays?

  Go hard.

• 24:28John Coogan?

  A hundred X more seriously. You should go harder. You should go full time on this. And what was interesting is that The, we were doing a weekly podcast with no guests. And once we started taking it way, way more seriously and working on it constantly, then switching it into a daily show, switching it into a live show, switching it into a guest-led show, all of that just happened very naturally. He didn't tell us tactics. He just told us exactly what he says in every episode.

• 24:56Jordi Hays?

  Even we left Miami and we decided to go to two or three days a week.

• 25:00John Coogan?

  I think we did three days a week.

• 25:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe it was three days a week. But then I remember the realization that we would stop recording.

• 25:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:08Jordi Hays?

  And, and we would be on X like an hour later.

• 25:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:11Jordi Hays?

  And I'd just be like, I wish we were doing the show tomorrow.

• 25:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:13Jordi Hays?

  And then we just eventually, we decided to go to five days. Then we decided to go live. Then we decided to add guests.

• 25:18John Coogan?

  I even remember talking to you about like, maybe we should do like one day a week, five hours, and then slice it up. So we're releasing one hour per day.

• 25:28Jordi Hays?

  Never podcast weekly, John.

• 25:29John Coogan?

  And, and it was a terrible idea. I'm so glad we didn't do it. It's, it's a way, way better, way better format. And so Abe goes on to write, soon Coogan and Hayes landed on an early gag that helped them gain attention. Print out posts from X from founders and investors, then dress up in suits and film themselves with top end 4K cameras discussing the posts. A very high-touch approach to assembling retweets. Later, they started to share the clips and tag the, the posts authors on X. And the authors would often frequently pass on the clips themselves, giving Coogan and Hayes some of their first virality. The pair set themselves up on the 10th floor office that Coogan rented in the Jonathan Club, hired a small video production crew.

• 26:12Jordi Hays?

  They sometimes refer to as just the guys.

• 26:16John Coogan?

  Well, since, well, they're all young then. And over the course of the next several months, the TBPN hosts and the guys have adopted a steady rhythm. When Coogan and Hayes go live, two of the guys control what appears on the stream, including the Chyrons, the bit of text below the guest.

• 26:33Jordi Hays?

  Funny, I didn't even, we didn't even know the, the term Chyron for like, we had been doing a Chyron for quite a while.

• 26:41John Coogan?

  I knew it. I knew. I had to explain it to basically. Everyone on the team, you all learned, but I had in fact heard the term before.

• 26:49John Coogan?

  But yeah.

• 26:49Jordi Hays?

  You have a background in big television jobs that you don't know about?

• 26:53John Coogan?

  No, I've been to NAB. I've been a nerd for like production for like several years.

• 26:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:57John Coogan?

  And so I've been like loosely familiar with all this stuff. I watched a lot of YouTube videos explaining how churches do live streams.

• 27:03Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:03John Coogan?

  Mega churches are

• 27:05Jordi Hays?

  Elite.

• 27:05John Coogan?

  Delivering at a level that is equivalent to Fox News on one one hundredth of the budget. And so you can just go on YouTube and search church live streaming setup and they will have tested everything and they share all the information. It's a bevy of resources. It's fantastic. And some of them do like virtual productions. It gets crazy. Anyway, they tried, they tried to make these funny. One example, venture capitalist yaps about venture capital. I'm excited to share a screenshot of Abe Brown, writer at The Information. Did you see the file Chyron?

• 27:39Jordi Hays?

  So good.

• 27:39John Coogan?

  So good. Steady crawl of the show. Sponsors appear next to the Chyrons, along with a ticker available of available polymarket bets with Coogan Hayes. See as telling indicators of market sentiment and their audience's interests. That's true. Another of the guys spends the entire show entirety of the show, cutting up clips to publish across social media as quickly as possible. Fourth, Ben Kohler. Let's hear it for Vice President Ben, who worked with Coogan on his YouTube videos, serves as head producer. On a traditional TV show, a producer would normally pre-interview a guest. Sounds really boring.

• 28:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:13John Coogan?

  To help both the guests and the host. But Coogan and Hayes prefer to wing it. And since they're never brandishing any sort of gotcha question, we'll hit you with some gotchas. We're just going to do nerdy gotchas about scaling laws and

• 28:26Jordi Hays?

  Gotcha.

• 28:26John Coogan?

  And build out timelines and, and end to end algorithms. We're not going to ask you about your personal life or your politics.

• 28:33Jordi Hays?

  We do not discuss politics.

• 28:35John Coogan?

  The informality doesn't discomfort the guests. There's no prep. They just sent me a Zoom link and I joined, said Trump Sankar, Palantir's Chief Technology Officer and a veteran of many CNBC hits. To fill the guest spots, Coogan and Hayes tap their Rolodexes and industry connections. Unsurprisingly, they've started to get inbound requests. We're at the point where we're getting 20 pitches a day from PR firms. Coogan said, we turned down 95%. His rejection method is simple. He goes to X. And checks whether they've shared recent, what they've shared recently, their number of followers, and whether they follow the same people. Yeah, I'm generally looking for like, are they tapped into the news? Are they following technology stories? Are they, are they, you know?

• 29:12Jordi Hays?

  I wouldn't say this is, this is, this is one part of the process, but certainly we've had people on that don't have a presence.

• 29:19John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 29:20Jordi Hays?

  And we actually want to do a lot more of that.

• 29:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 29:23Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 29:23John Coogan?

  But, but, but if you're getting a, but if you're just getting a pitch instead of a warm introduction.

• 29:27Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 29:28John Coogan?

  It's very hard to get a pitch from someone that's very dry. And then, because every once in a while, there's someone who, who is interesting that just happens to have a stale PR team that's kind of pitching broadly. And that you gotta just deal with that. But most of the time, if there's just some stock, like you get these big emails with all these bullet points about everything the person's accomplished. And then they link you to their LinkedIn account and you search them on X and like, they're not really in the conversation. And if they're not in the conversation, it's going to be hard for them to join and have a conversation.

• 29:59Jordi Hays?

  And actually bring something really.

• 30:00John Coogan?

  They're just going to come on with talking points. And so.

• 30:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:02John Coogan?

  It's pointless.

• 30:03Jordi Hays?

  Or if they come on with LinkedIn takes from.

• 30:05John Coogan?

  It's not good.

• 30:06Jordi Hays?

  Two months ago.

• 30:06John Coogan?

  Not good.

• 30:07Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be rough.

• 30:08John Coogan?

  Hayes and Coogan delight in their shtick for the show, which includes opening bottles of Dom Perignon to market its growth, a constant tongue in cheek shilling of Ramp, Ramp, Ramp, Ramp, which makes expense account software that would exasperate many mad men, but not us.

• 30:22Jordi Hays?

  Not us.

• 30:23John Coogan?

  Not us. Switch your business to ramp.com. Save time and money.

• 30:26Jordi Hays?

  Just do it.

• 30:27John Coogan?

  We had a whole running gag with Abe the entire time. We probably pitched him Ramp seven different times.

• 30:32Jordi Hays?

  At least.

• 30:33John Coogan?

  At one point, I introduced him to Eric over at Ramp and I, and then I immediately followed up, acted like I took him off the email thread and told Eric, here are the talking points we're sticking to.

• 30:44Jordi Hays?

  You gotta post that.

• 30:44John Coogan?

  I gotta post that. And it was just a whole bunch of details about Ramp and how.

• 30:49Jordi Hays?

  Abe at one point said, guys, I don't care about expense management software. Please stop pitching me, something to that effect. And we said, well, Abe, you know, a lot of Ramp customers felt the same way at some point. But once they understood just how much time and money they could sit.

• 31:06John Coogan?

  We had so much fun with it. It was great.

• 31:07Jordi Hays?

  So much fun. Thanks for, thanks for being a good sport.

• 31:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, he was a good sport about it.

• 31:11Jordi Hays?

  And a preference to always appear in suits, their visual trademark. Coogan gets his suits from a tailor whose identity he wouldn't reveal. Hayes likes Jemison, a New York-based, I guess they're a brand now, but they are primarily a tailor. It's Laura Piana fabric.

• 31:29John Coogan?

  He assured me.

• 31:31Jordi Hays?

  Guess me and Jamath have that in common.

• 31:33John Coogan?

  A watch peeking out from underneath the sleeve.

• 31:35Jordi Hays?

  And an Audemars Piguet.

• 31:36John Coogan?

  Doxed, they doxed your watch.

• 31:37Jordi Hays?

  They doxed my watch.

• 31:38John Coogan?

  They doxed your watch. The suits are a little dig at Silicon Valley's preference for the informality of Coto Paxi, which, is that how you pronounce that?

• 31:46Jordi Hays?

  I think so.

• 31:47John Coogan?

  I've never heard that before.

• 31:48Jordi Hays?

  Never worn it.

• 31:49John Coogan?

  Kugan hopes they serve another purpose too. It's gonna make it easier to appeal to a public company CEO who's running TBN. Oh, we got single quotes now, we're upgrading. Oh, because it's inside double quotes. He still hit the quotes.

• 32:00Jordi Hays?

  He got us.

• 32:01John Coogan?

  I was so excited that we were halfway to no quotes.

• 32:04Jordi Hays?

  Halfway, yeah.

• 32:05John Coogan?

  We were getting double quotes, now we're getting single quotes. The next thing's no quotes. By his PR team, that's maybe more conservative and more risk averse, he said. So when they pull up an example, they see a very clean package and everyone's in suits, and that's true. I want to be a place where big public company CEOs can come on and it doesn't feel like we're disheveled, not taking this seriously. It needs to be brand safe, even for big tech companies that want to uphold a very serious brand standard, that they would feel comfortable on Bloomberg or CNBC, they should feel comfortable here as well. The external appearance?

• 32:38Jordi Hays?

  He says, "That's the external appearance at least." This is when he's putting us in the true zone. Putting us in the true zone, Abe. Internally, the atmosphere is decidedly informal. When the show wrapped on the day one, "On the day I was at the Jonathan Club, Kugan and Hayes casually stripped down to their boxers in front of me and the crew, changing into t-shirts, shorts, pants, and sneakers, and then issued a few instructions on finishing the day's production and preparing for the next day's show." Well, he got us, John.

• 33:06John Coogan?

  We're schmitten.

• 33:07Jordi Hays?

  There is, we do at times wear normal clothing.

• 33:11John Coogan?

  We do. Waving goodbye to the guys, we loaded into Hayes Mercedes-Benz G-Wagon. Wow, he didn't even, he didn't even say the most important part.

• 33:21Jordi Hays?

  It's an AMG.

• 33:22John Coogan?

  It's an AMG. It's a G63.

• 33:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a really important detail. Leaving that out, that feels intentional. Trying to take you down a peg. Could be a G550.

• 33:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I like it though. It's more subtle.

• 33:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's a dude. He's just leaving it open. Could be any type of G-Wagon.

• 33:40Jordi Hays?

  Yep. And so we drove Abe over to Hollywood to see our new 4,000 square foot studio that we just signed a lease on. Abe says it dwarfs the size of the current set they have in the Jonathan Club. We are in a very small space on this set. And they're looking forward to the increased flexibility it can give them, including the ability to get up and walk around while streaming and basically screaming too. Right now, we basically sit down for three hours.

• 34:05John Coogan?

  Three and a half hours. We get up for like a minute in between, but the energy I think will be so much better when we can stand. It's gonna be great.

• 34:11Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be great.

• 34:13John Coogan?

  They'll also have the opportunity to host in-person guests, something we're very excited about. We have a bunch of people lined up and we should be able to make those in-person sessions really special. And I asked them about the dream bookings. Of course, we've talked about this before. Our dream bookings are the magnificent seven, like all of them. We want the CEOs of Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia and Meta Platforms and Tesla. We want them all. The Thanos glove of technology leaders. We want them all on the show. So if you know someone who can give us an introduction, please, if it happens.

• 34:48John Coogan?

  But we still have a lot to do on the production side. We want to be a fantastic show. We want their first appearance on TBPN to be memorable and and cinematic and enjoyable. And I think, you know, and most importantly, I think it's less about like asking like the hard hitting questions. It's more like, what are the questions that the investing community actually wants to hear? How can we dig through those? And drive those questions that move markets. That's what's most important.

• 35:18Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 35:19John Coogan?

  And so the questions are less gotchas about

• 35:25John Coogan?

  Random things that don't really matter to earnings, which is what a lot of the news has become in tech and business because the audience are not investors. We want to focus on the questions that investors actually care about, which is more often, how's CapEx looking? Which is like, is that a gotcha? Well, for some companies, it might be if their CapEx is looking rough, it might be.

• 35:47Jordi Hays?

  Satya says, we're happy to be leasing.

• 35:51John Coogan?

  Is that, is hitting him with a question about his pivot away from data center built out as a gotcha? Certainly not to a normal person who doesn't invest in the stock, right? But to someone who really cares and owns a lot of Microsoft stock, it's probably pretty important. Anyway, it might be easy to design a show that would appeal to one or two of them, but it would be difficult to do one that could attract the entire set. They've all done podcasts, but there's no podcast that has done all seven. And says Coogan, that's me. On the drive over, Hayes mentioned a dream prop for their Hollywood set. He and Coogan have already, already have a small gong in their Jonathan Club that they ring on the show when talking about a company's notable achievement, but he would like to

• 36:32John Coogan?

  buy an even bigger gong. Looking around at the Hollywood studio, he could see how nice a lot, an extra large version might look. Yeah.

• 36:43John Coogan?

  Oh, what a fun piece.

• 36:44Jordi Hays?

  I can't wait. We need a 50 foot by 50 foot gong that requires a group of people to stop it from ringing when you drive a car into the gong.

• 36:53John Coogan?

  We do.

• 36:55Jordi Hays?

  We're working on it.

• 36:56John Coogan?

  What should we move on to?

• 36:57Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the main thing we have to cover. So yesterday X was a nightmare.

• 37:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:02Jordi Hays?

  DMs weren't working for a lot of the day, which was rough for us on the show.

• 37:06John Coogan?

  Apparently there was literally a fire in the data center.

• 37:08Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, a fire broke out Thursday morning at a data center in Hillsborough, Oregon, leased by Elon Musk's X, forcing an extended response from emergency crews, according to multiple sources who spoke to Wired. The sources required anonymity as they weren't authorized to speak publicly about the company. Firefighters arrived at Hillsborough Technology Park in a suburb west of Portland at 10:21 a.m. Man, John, Portland, Oregon, vandalize, you think this is, you call an arson?

• 37:40John Coogan?

  I have no idea. I don't even know how you, how you vandalize or commit arson in a data center. They seem pretty locked down.

• 37:47Jordi Hays?

  The, yeah, but.

• 37:50Jordi Hays?

  The every time I see Portland in a headline in tech, it's some type of.

• 37:55John Coogan?

  This is pretty advanced stuff to figure out where the data centers are.

• 37:59Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I'm sorry. If you're extremist and you want to bring a bunch of gasoline.

• 38:05John Coogan?

  Will Minnitis posted that whole thread about shooting the transformer and taking down all the electrical infrastructure and how like you can basically take out the energy infrastructure with just small arms. So like an AR 15 shot at a transformer can take off a whole, a whole, whole piece of the grid. And so you would think that they'd go after that. I don't know. It's very, very, very odd. Hopefully they sort it out quickly.

• 38:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So it's interesting. So before.

• 38:28John Coogan?

  I mean, Tesla's have been setting on fire. So maybe X data center.

• 38:31Jordi Hays?

  So this is interesting. So before Elon bought Twitter, the company had three data centers in Sacramento, Portland and Atlanta. This ensured that if one data center went down, traffic could be shifted to the other two and split. So no single data center was overwhelmed around Christmas Eve 2022. Musk shut down X's data center in Sacramento in an effort to cut costs. The company experienced a major outage in the wake of the shutdown. Over the next six months, the company moved more than 2,500 server racks from the Sacramento facility to data centers in Portland and Atlanta. So it sounds like they have two core data centers now.

• 39:08John Coogan?

  Okay. I want to rip through a bunch of stuff really quick. I'm just gonna rip through this stuff. So Donald Trump just signed an executive order about nuclear. And so we're going to try and have some folks on very quickly and slot them in might be 2:30, but I'm talking to some nuclear folks about coming on and breaking it down. I haven't even had a chance to read it yet, but it's out apparently. I don't know if you want to dig into that. I also want to give you the final analysis on Apple's AI struggles. We've been dipping our toe in and out of the story all week, but Ben Thompson had a great summary of the problems with Apple's AI issue with Apple's AI strategy. And he sums it up in these bullet points, which are really rough. One. Apple's head of software engineering didn't believe in AI.

• 39:53John Coogan?

  Apple's head of AI was skeptical about LLMs and chatbots. Apple's former CFO refused to commit sufficient funds for GPUs. Apple's commitment to privacy limited the company to purchased data sets instead of using like their own, where Meta and Google and YouTube are all highly valuable training, uh, training sources. Apple's AI team is understaffed and the relative talent of the, of an AI staffer still at Apple is uncomfortable to speculate about, but given the opportunities elsewhere, relevant. What should Apple do now? The baseline advice from Ben Thompson is make Apple's on-device models available to developers as an API without restriction.

• 40:32John Coogan?

  Make Apple's cloud interface, uh, in cloud inference available to developers as an, as an API at cost. Allow Siri to be replaced by other AIs, perhaps for subscribers to, to those, to those AIs who would revenue share with Apple. So you could bring chat GPT into, into.

• 40:50Jordi Hays?

  I bet for the access to the Siri button, Apple could get like 50%.

• 40:54John Coogan?

  50%.

• 40:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Up from their, their typical.

• 40:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, just hold an auction, just hold an auction and be like, hey, yeah, like we're, we're just not going to hit this out of the park. So we're just going to auction it off. That'd be great.

• 41:04Jordi Hays?

  They have precedent of selling the search bar.

• 41:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:07Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 41:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:08Jordi Hays?

  Why wouldn't they do?

• 41:09John Coogan?

  Um, anyway, the other, the other news is people are now speculating about the exact device that, uh, Sam Altman and Johnny Ive will be building together at OpenAI with the I/O acquisition for $6.5 billion. Swix, who's been on the show, says they literally copied Avi Schiffman. 6.5 billion for what Avi Schiffman built in the cave with a box of scraps, quoting, uh, Iron Man, of course. And there's an old video from Avi pitching the first friend and man, I mean, uh, what a throwback. I remember this was 2023.

• 41:38Jordi Hays?

  Saying, I think on Wednesday or Tuesday, it was like, yeah, this could end up being extremely validating for Avi.

• 41:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:47Jordi Hays?

  Friend.

• 41:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:48Jordi Hays?

  If he, if he ends up nailing, I mean, to be clear, he's also, I think, focused on a much different use case.

• 41:54John Coogan?

  I, I agree.

• 41:54Jordi Hays?

  Like friend.com.

• 41:56John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 41:56Jordi Hays?

  He's building a companion.

• 41:57John Coogan?

  To be fair, like the bear case for friend is that they wind up in the same position as Pebble, which is that they do the discovery to find out that smartwatches are a good thing. And then Apple comes out with the Apple Watch, they just leverage integration and it's just a much better product. And then Google doesn't, didn't need to buy. Pebble. They just created the Samsung Galaxy Gear or whatever, the Samsung Watch. And so the, the existing hardware manufacturers, they haven't had to buy companies. And so they've wound up putting like a lot of the, there's not, there's not a winner in independent smartwatches. And so if, if there is a pioneering new format and OpenAI has a serious hardware,

• 42:39John Coogan?

  hardware product in the space, and then Apple copies it quickly, and then Samsung copies it quickly for the Android ecosystem, you're kind of left out to dry. So obviously I'm pulling for him and I hope he, I hope he can wind up navigating it and counter positioning in a way that he creates something that's truly disruptive. But it is, it is serious business right now. Uh, but Augustus sums it up, sums it up well. He says, I have no stake in SFAI hardware, but this seems right. And it's, uh, the giant, uh, going up against Avi Schiffman and friend.com. So good luck to him. But yeah, the current prototype is slightly larger than the AI pin with a form factor as compact and elegant as an iPod shuffle. One of the intended use cases is wearing.

• 43:16Jordi Hays?

  Shuffle really was a magic product.

• 43:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:20Jordi Hays?

  Were you two, were you kind of too mature for shuffle?

• 43:25John Coogan?

  Hmm. I don't know if I ever had one, but I think it was more like a poverty problem. I don't think I had the money for it. But it was, it was very much like an accessory.

• 43:33Jordi Hays?

  Didn't inspire you to grind?

• 43:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, I should have been grinding harder, but honestly, no, you know what it was? I was too much of a nerd. So I had, I had something called like an iRiver, which was like

• 43:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's what I, that's kind of what I was.

• 43:43John Coogan?

  Very unique thing that like, it was, it was technically more advanced than the iPod at the time. Like I had one that had a color screen that you could watch movies on. It was like a two inch screen and it was well before the iPod video came out, uh, by like a year. And so the release cycle was high, was, was, was faster and you'd get newer tech, but it was like borderline unusable because there was no focus on user experience. And so the company wound up kind of just not, not, not ripping. Um, what else? Uh, oh, Sam Altman, uh, there's a exclusive in the Wall Street Journal by Berber Jin, uh, a quote in here about what he's planning here. And we just got to read this one quote. Uh, Altman suggested that the $6.5 billion acquisition has the potential to add $1 trillion in value to OpenAI,

• 44:28John Coogan?

  which is, is such an insane thing to say. It's so crazy, but at the same time. How much is Apple worth? If you get a play in that space, like, yes, a trillion dollars in market cap is totally up for grabs. And so I think it's like, it sounds ridiculous. It sounds like over the top, but that really is the the the expected value. And so when you think about it as like, you know, what is that? A 0.6% or yeah, 0.6, 0.65% chance at a trillion? Probably worth 6.5 billion, right?

• 45:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:05John Coogan?

  In equity. And so that's the deal that they made was that, hey, we're going to get this team that's going to run really hard at this. If they hit it, it's low probability, probably, you know, a couple percent chance that they pull it off. But if they do, it's a trillion dollars, so it's totally worth the high number. At least that's probably like, that's one way to do the discounted cash flow and like the the valuation. And and we've sliced and diced the 6.5 billion a bunch of different ways. And we, I think we both came away with this idea that like, it's not as crazy as it sounds. It's 2% of the company. You know, you're getting a great executive. You're getting a whole team. And like, it seems like a big number. They haven't shipped anything yet. That's that's crazy to buy something that doesn't even have a product for 6 billion.

• 45:45John Coogan?

  But when you think about the market, the opportunity, things start piecing together and it could wind up looking very good in hindsight. But who knows? Anyway, I don't think there's anything else we need to go into before we bring in our first guest.

• 45:58Jordi Hays?

  We got Jory from Linear. Let's bring him in.

• 46:01John Coogan?

  Let's bring him in. How you doing?

• 46:04Speaker 03

  Hey, guys.

• 46:05John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 46:06Speaker 03

  How are you?

• 46:06John Coogan?

  We're great.

• 46:07Jordi Hays?

  Good.

• 46:07John Coogan?

  Having fun reading through the information, looking at the new Sam Altman I/O acquisition. Have you, do you have a take on the new device? What do you want to see in the world of AI hardware?

• 46:20Speaker 03

  I don't know, to be honest. Let's see when like things start shipping and like how things like evolve.

• 46:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have you had a chance to play?

• 46:27Speaker 03

  I mean, it's great to see like I've again, like, you know, a driver see than like on the on the news, like doing doing interviews and so on. So I think like it's still like, you know, I had a had a break from for like, whatever, like four years or like so. It's it's been a while.

• 46:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, John, John called out, it was like, very strategic to go have him do a big interview at Stripe Sessions and then immediately the next week, you know, come in with this massive announcement. Uh, but I but I'm excited to see, I think, uh, every every technology.

• 46:55John Coogan?

  Call it a coincidence in my parts.

• 46:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, but I think every every technology enthusiast will benefit from him taking a real crack at AI.

• 47:04John Coogan?

  What what else in the news this week? It's been kind of an informal AI week over here at TBPN between Microsoft Build, Google I/O, OpenAI I/O.

• 47:15Jordi Hays?

  Linear agents.

• 47:16John Coogan?

  Linear agents and Anthropic Claude four dropping. Uh, what's been most interesting to you? What are you most excited to leverage?

• 47:24Speaker 03

  Uh, pretty, pretty bad week for me for like following the news. This is like finished up moving. So I've actually been like relatively like off news and like, I think like so on the docket for like a long weekend to like start catching up more on the on like all the keynotes and so on. But I don't know. It's it's it's good stuff like having more agents or like it's really coding agents and like different like players like coming coming to the space. So, uh, I don't like it's it's a little bit like interesting to see like over the next couple of weeks, kind of like what like performs like how well and also like, uh, what kind of like, like, uh, user experiences are gonna be there? Uh, because I feel like that's that's kind of like the bit that we're we're like at linear like now following much more.

• 48:08Speaker 03

  As we're like also, you know, trying to like work with like different players and like integrate stuff into linear. It's like, what are like the patterns of like usage that will happen with this?

• 48:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's more important? What's just vague definitions around user experience patterns for agents versus standards like MCP and more technical advances?

• 48:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, like, those are like very two different things. I don't like, you know, like MCP and like open standards like that's. Like personally, I'm like very, very like pro, of course, as an engineer. Uh, but it's been something like I don't like we can like lost in like last decade of like the big platforms. Owning more and more on their like own like trying to like court everything, but like now. Things are pretty much like being pushed out in the open. Uh, and people are like companies are like almost like forced to cooperate in like the new world. There's just so much demand. Uh, and it's been interesting to see from our side too, is like large companies like jumping very early and like. So like a whole space is kind of pushing all the companies to like act fast.

• 49:15Speaker 03

  Uh, let's see how much is like, you know, hot air, like what like will come out of it, but I think like overall it's like push for openness is good. Uh, but then.

• 49:24Jordi Hays?

  How have you so? Yeah. So for for linear's agents product, how do you evaluate? How how open is the product if if somebody's building an agent? Can can they build an integration with with linear by themselves? Are you guys really kind of? Uh, doing your own internal testing to kind of qualify potential partners there?

• 49:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're we're kind of looking more on the promotional side, I would say, like. We believe in like open APIs and like trying to like have people access, but they're not like the. Uh, when it comes to like security and these kind of things, it comes more on like what do you like promote?

• 50:02Jordi Hays?

  Sure, yeah.

• 50:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, at the same time, like if I get a really amazing agent that just can puppeteer my mouse and keyboard. You can't really do anything about that. Maybe you throw up a captcha, but. Uh, agents are going to be able to solve those pretty quickly. Uh, and so at a certain point, you have to think like. Like you're, you know, there's a reason why you have an API. There's a reason why you have an MCP server. There's a reason why you have maybe an agent integration. But are these like temporary steps in your mind? Or do you think that there's real durable value to? Um, an agent, like a standardization, something that you build in-house, some sort of protocol or some. Or standardizing against things versus just. Uh, MCP I kept coming back to like.

• 50:47John Coogan?

  Can't the L L M's if they're really so smart, can't they just use websites? Um, but what what's your take on that trend?

• 50:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, it probably comes to like down to like the user experience that you want to like offer. So. In like uh controlling a computer or like V M or whatever like that's the kind of ultimate like Bandaid to like everything like it allows to do everything but it's still like it's not purpose built.

• 51:13Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 51:13Speaker 03

  But and like M C P to a degree is like a little bit like similar. It's just like a way to like do like do uh Re- um request response like calls and get the information in and like share that. But then it's more about I think like in our mind is like what is the Experience like inside the product that like you're gonna offer that maybe is like specific to our product. Uh and how that does, how does that work? Like today, like our implementation is like, You know, somewhat like rudimentary that we would expect like agents look like regular users, but It's not very exciting to see the um the progress of the agent when they're like

• 51:54Speaker 03

  Posting new comments in their thread. That's a little bit of a hack uh that you can like have to like live without Uh while we still like see what's actually like required and like what can we like build to like better like Support like the agent developers, like what what can like experience like give them? Um of course, like we're, you know, like looking at this from the lens of like linear uh Of course, like running the company and like building the product, uh but it's also like it's it's interesting to see how Um the like where does the invocation of like agents happen? Like, is it like your C L I is like a text editor? Is there like some kind of web tool?

• 52:36Speaker 03

  Or like the desktop app? Um of course, like for us, it's like it's it's pretty natural like being like close to like Where you work, so like integrating into that workflow. And I think that's why A lot of these like smaller companies, especially like are pretty excited to like Built in linear because they're already using linear themselves.

• 52:54Jordi Hays?

  What what agent uh gets the heaviest usage internally at linear today?

• 53:02Speaker 03

  I think it's been like a couple of the coding agents, but those were like the first ones to, you know, to the market.

• 53:08Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, I mean, not even, I mean, specifically like your team at Linear.

• 53:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:14Jordi Hays?

  Like coding agents or?

• 53:16Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I kind of like mentioning names because like, of course, we're, we don't have a horse in the race.

• 53:24Speaker 03

  Where's the interface for this?

• 53:25John Coogan?

  I love, I love horse races and I love having horses in races.

• 53:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:30John Coogan?

  Pat, pick a horse.

• 53:32Speaker 03

  Well, it's changing like every week. I said, like you said, like there's like a lot of like new, new agents that like came out this week from Google and like OpenAI and so on. So like this kind of like, it'll be like interesting to see like how those like play out. And we're like looking for like, working with like all of them, of course, but I don't want beyond, like, like currently the focus is a lot on just coding agents. Like it's, it's natural because there's a lot of like value to be created over there, but I think like we'll, in the next couple of months, we'll start seeing much more like non-coding agents, like augmenting like in alongside with the coding agent.

• 54:10Speaker 03

  So you might have a, you might have a task where you have a, you know, like a feature, like feature flagging, like agent, coding agent, and I don't know, like, who knows, a marketing agent, like helping you out, like write the change log blog post or, and so on.

• 54:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 54:27John Coogan?

  Uh, are there any other AI features that you're implementing that feel like winserv for cursor for project management, like something that like lives in linear alongside, but it's not that asynchronous? Because in coding, we're seeing a lot of like, there's synchronous AI and there's asynchronous AI and these two, two different patterns. And it feels like the, it feels like the market's bifurcating, but no investors want to admit that because they want to say it's going to be winner take all. But in fact, uh, we're seeing two different paradigms, kind of a merger, maybe even three different paradigms emerge. What are you seeing on the project management side?

• 55:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, um, yeah, I don't like the agents are roughly, especially in our case, are tied to issues or tasks. And that's kind of like the interface for them. Outside that, where of course, like linear is not only like issue tracking tool, it's like for project management, like organizing like your, your work at the company level. Not only like an individual level. So, and that's where can like have a separate work stream of, uh, we're building our own like AI tooling around that. How can we augment the project managers and like the product leaders to like do their work better? And that you could like imagine looking a little bit more like a, a cloud or cursor, like

• 55:47Speaker 03

  it had alongside your linear data. And but like with that, it's going to be interesting to see like how we can start like introducing like the external like agents or like MCPs as like part of that. Um, that of course, like the issues is that's like the first, first step because they're like much more natural.

• 56:05Jordi Hays?

  What's your team's approach to testing new, for example, coding agents, right? It's, uh, in many ways, like the linear approach from my perspective is, you know, really thoughtful, ideally long-term planning around building, you know, beautiful products and, and taking a calm approach to doing this and, and in, in that way, you know, enabling other people to maybe have more calm, uh, uh, effective, uh, product development. Uh, but at the same time, like testing new tools, they can be super effective, but testing new tools can also be super distracting. You know, we don't do a ton of engineering on TBPN. We actually do a surprising amount.

• 56:48Jordi Hays?

  Um, kind of like back office stuff to kind of automate production. But, um, I, I can imagine an environment where you have, you know, call it 50 engineers and, and on any given day, one of them can send a message into Slack, hey, guys, you gotta check this out. It's like amazing, blah, blah. Maybe they just got like a couple of good results and it's actually not worth directing everyone's energy to, but at the same time you want to stay at the edge. But do you have a philosophy or kind of an internal ethos around testing new tools?

• 57:17Speaker 03

  Not really. I think like mostly comes from people themselves. We're not like enforcing like certain tools. We're of course encouraging couple of like, couple of tools where we can, you know, like maintaining like security and those kind of things. We're like mature company at this point. So like we need to, we need to look after like our customers information and like a lot of like, like also lives inside Linear. So, you know, we, we need to like look after stuff. Um, but when it comes to like new tools, what the, the team is like looking at the news the same way we are. And like trying out stuff and I think it's a little bit more, so you put out like Linear's way is a little bit more calm.

• 57:59Speaker 03

  And I think like that also shows on the tool adoption and so on. Like you, you're like excited like to try out stuff. But like, you know, you take it with a grain of salt instead of like going on Twitter and like blasting like we've replaced like all of our team like with AI. Uh, I mean, that's one way to do it, but that's definitely not us.

• 58:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:18Speaker 03

  Nothing against that either, but yeah.

• 58:21Jordi Hays?

  The Klarna method.

• 58:24Speaker 03

  Not naming any names.

• 58:26Jordi Hays?

  I said, I said it. I said it. I, I respect it. It's good marketing. It's good marketing, but it's not for everyone.

• 58:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. I don't know. Like that, that's, that's being like overall, like when it comes to developing AI tools, like we started like when, like everyone else started like a couple of years back, when like the first GPTs like came out and I tried to do stuff and like, you know, tried to build a chatbot. And so on, like, but I don't like very early on, like we realized like, well, you get to like whatever sixty, seventy percent, but like then it's like falls apart. Uh, the experience and like it's not, and then it's really like hard to figure out like what's actually path to get to like the ninety-five percent where you want to be.

• 59:08Jordi Hays?

  This is an Apple problem. You, you, Linear and Apple have similar sort of like desires for perfection, right? And, and generative AI is in many ways completely imperfect, right? And unreliable. So that's an interesting, it's an interesting challenge.

• 59:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, but we, we built, we built a few things. We shipped a few things. We didn't make like a, maybe like the biggest fuss about it. We're not the AI powered like issue tracking software, uh, raising like gazillion like dollars. Uh, but now.

• 59:44Jordi Hays?

  Raising a lot from customers though.

• 59:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And you know, I mean, like in the end, like they they want to get their work done. And like, do they want to like buy hype or do they want to like buy product?

• 59:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:55Speaker 03

  Maybe today, like you, you want to like buy more like AI and that's where we're seeing like a lot of like demand for AI solutions and like now we're heavily investing in that.

• 1:00:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:05Speaker 03

  And that kind of like our, we did a course correction over like the last, uh, like roughly six months ago. When I think like the tools has got so much better. Like for me personally, I was like on parental leave, I leave and like when the deep seek like came out and like just trying like the thinking mode was just like the light bulb moment like I think.

• 1:00:28Jordi Hays?

  Interesting, yeah.

• 1:00:28Speaker 03

  A little bit of background on that. I think, uh, it's just because of like linearist philosophy is like try to build really like, you know, snappy, like purposeful tools. Like we always like chase the millisecond and like try to get something like really fast. And when it comes to like L L M's, like you have like inherent latency to it.

• 1:00:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:49Speaker 03

  So it's just felt like, how do we, how do we bind this like weight into the product that's instant?

• 1:00:56Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:00:56Speaker 03

  And I think like now with the, the new like, like thinking modes and so on. Like that's a change the like user, like, um, what people expect, like that paradigm. And now we can like build towards that and like people expect to take a little bit like more time. Uh, and also like more UI patterns to support that. But like you get a lot of value out of it.

• 1:01:22Jordi Hays?

  Totally. Well, yeah. Check out some of Google's launches from earlier this week. What was it? They were doing 3000 tokens in like half a second.

• 1:01:30John Coogan?

  With the diffusion models? Yeah, very cool.

• 1:01:32Jordi Hays?

  Um, anyways, this was awesome. Congratulations, uh, on the launch this week and, uh, come back on again soon.

• 1:01:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, hopefully. Yeah.

• 1:01:39Jordi Hays?

  Cheers. Better, Joey.

• 1:01:41John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon. We got Zach Weinberg coming into the studio and, and we also have

• 1:01:51John Coogan?

  Doug Burnhour from Radiant joining at 2:30 to talk about the nuclear, which I'm very excited about. Welcome to the stream, Zach. How you doing?

• 1:02:00Speaker 04

  I'm good. We have like.

• 1:02:03John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream.

• 1:02:04Speaker 04

  Bull soundboard now.

• 1:02:06John Coogan?

  Bull soundboard. We're getting better every single day.

• 1:02:08Jordi Hays?

  Constant iteration. Constant iteration.

• 1:02:10Speaker 04

  What other product updates have there been since I was last here?

• 1:02:13John Coogan?

  Oh, I mean, our Chyrons. Yeah. Stop asking about, stop asking hard questions about our updates. We're doing fine.

• 1:02:20Speaker 04

  I noticed the sponsor, whoever makes the yellow drink, I assume.

• 1:02:24Jordi Hays?

  No, to be honest, to be honest.

• 1:02:26John Coogan?

  They're not sponsoring us.

• 1:02:27Jordi Hays?

  To be honest, I did grow up in the town that this company is from, but we have no connection.

• 1:02:35John Coogan?

  Proper affiliation.

• 1:02:36Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, if anything, we should just, we should just wrap these in ramp yellow.

• 1:02:39John Coogan?

  We should, we should.

• 1:02:42Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, good to see you.

• 1:02:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Good to see you guys. Thanks for.

• 1:02:46John Coogan?

  I mean, we wanted to have you on initially to talk about the most favored nation drug pricing EO. It's been a week or two since then. There was kind of like, I think it dropped Sunday. It felt like years ago. But, but I mean, it felt like Sunday, like, oh, this is going to be Black Monday for biotech. It didn't happen. The biotech stocks did fine. They also, this was coinciding with the pullback on the tariffs broadly. So the market rose overall.

• 1:03:15John Coogan?

  Can you give us how you process the information, how you're thinking about it now? Does this thing matter? Should we even be talking about it? Should we just move on?

• 1:03:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, maybe let's start with like,

• 1:03:27Speaker 04

  why it's probably just like a misguided idea in the first place.

• 1:03:31John Coogan?

  Please.

• 1:03:32Speaker 04

  Or at least the trade that I think Americans would need to understand that you're making and as it relates to drug pricing. And what I, I think we may have talked about this last time, or I've talked about this with a lot of people, like the, the idea that America pays a lot for new therapeutics, right? And, and we do, we do, by the way, like this idea that we pay materially more, even on like a GDP adjusted basis than other countries and in particular other wealthy countries. So you take Europe is probably like the best example where the amount that we spend on new therapies as a percentage of our. Like it was called GDP adjusted price.

• 1:04:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:04:13Speaker 04

  If you will, is is still on the upper bounds. So like, America pays for the innovation for the rest of the world.

• 1:04:19Jordi Hays?

  But don't we, don't we, don't we get the innovations like five to 10 years faster than the rest of the world?

• 1:04:27Speaker 04

  We definitely get them faster. We are usually the first place all these new drugs launch. There is also a set of therapies that we have that you just cannot get anywhere else. Like the, you know, other countries refuse to pay for them. It's, it's, you know, socialized medicine, right? So it's like a single budget.

• 1:04:43John Coogan?

  And then there's also the, the factor of the rebates where the headline price that you see quoted in America is not what Americans typically pay, even if they don't have insurance. So you might see that some like Alzheimer's drug is 10 times or 100 times the headline price in America versus Japan. But realistically, Americans are paying three times more, five times more, which is still a lot, but it's not, it's not the scary number that people often quote.

• 1:05:12Jordi Hays?

  Personally, I like, I like paying more for drugs because it inspires me to grind harder.

• 1:05:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:18Jordi Hays?

  I think many Americans feel the same way.

• 1:05:20John Coogan?

  Which drugs are we talking about here? Caffeine, nicotine, creatine, protein, testosterone, mostly.

• 1:05:26Speaker 04

  Protein, yeah, yeah, yeah. Full just TRT juicing before the show.

• 1:05:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:32Speaker 04

  No, so like, we do pay more, was where I was going on a net basis.

• 1:05:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:37Speaker 04

  Like where you add in all the discounts that are, that are given out. It's not as bad as it makes it seem, but obviously like when you read about it in the headlines and they're like, oh, this drug's like $65,000 a year, 100, that is the list price. And so, you know, the media doesn't understand net pricing versus list pricing. And so the headlines are much more sensational than they actually are in reality. But yes, the delta still does

• 1:06:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:02Speaker 04

  exist. And we are, we do pay more. Now, part of the reason why we pay more is because if we, if we don't do it. The drugs don't exist.

• 1:06:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:13Speaker 04

  And I just think that little like piece of this is really hard for most people to understand, which is like biotech, there's this really amazing analysis that was done by RA Capital, which is like a giant biotech venture fund.

• 1:06:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we had one of their principals on the, I think the Monday after.

• 1:06:28Speaker 04

  Super, super sharp group, top five, you know, do mostly publics, but like this is like a, you know, expert, expert, expert group in therapeutics.

• 1:06:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, we had, we had. Test Cameron on.

• 1:06:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, and they have like a few hundred people, their founder Peter is super sharp. We respect them a lot. They actually were investors in one of our company's next rounds. All that. Anyway, good group. They did a very beautiful analysis of the expected value of a biotech investment at various rounds, seed round, A round, B round, so on and so forth. Like what is the EV of a dollar that you put in? And I will tell you that at both seed and series A, the EV is negative, negative at our current prices. And, and the reason for this is like drug discovery is the single hardest fucking problem that you will ever encounter in your life. Because you are trying to make a drug and using all of these tools

• 1:07:22Speaker 04

  that are not actually the human being until the absolute end of it. So you take all this insane amount of risk and spend tons and tons of money and the data that you have to make your decisions are like in a Petri dish, or in a mouse, or in a monkey, or in a dog. And like, yes, that's useful, but it's not a human. And so like the amount of companies where, because you don't see this in tech, right? You don't see companies that have raised $300 million, do one product launch and then go bankrupt.

• 1:07:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:50Speaker 04

  And like that happens all the time in biotech. That's actually like the norm is basically, you know, you've spent a few hundred million dollars, you think this thing is possibly going to work, it works in a dog, it works in a monkey, whatever. The drug-like properties seem all really great. And then you run a human clinical trial for $150 million and it doesn't work and the company's bankrupt and everybody loses their money. And like, and it's not like 20 million. It's like hundreds. So, you know, biotech is is an expected value negative investment business, even at current prices. And so what that means is like

• 1:08:24John Coogan?

  Is that just a power law thing where where the best about biotech venture funds are doing great at seed and series A? And just like, you know, there's plenty of funds that I could point to in consumer SaaS or enterprise SaaS that are terrible and negative EV, right?

• 1:08:39Speaker 04

  I don't think I don't think you could point to the asset class being negative EV.

• 1:08:42John Coogan?

  True, true, true.

• 1:08:43Speaker 04

  Right? Like, yes, there's always a skew in the results. But here we're talking about the entire asset class is negative EV. And so if you're on the front end of it, great, but like, you know,

• 1:08:53John Coogan?

  It's rough.

• 1:08:54Speaker 04

  You stick it in the middle, you lose money. In tech, I don't think you get the median fund in tech and you lose money.

• 1:08:58John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, no. So you're gonna be like one and a half acts or something.

• 1:09:03Speaker 04

  Exactly. Yeah. So it's not shifted this way. The whole category. Why is it shifted this way? There's a bunch of reasons. The biggest one, in my opinion, has to do with this concept of called like better than the Beatles, which is basically like, it's a very simple idea when it clicks for you. When I try to launch a new drug, the thing that I have to beat in terms of its efficacy, like how good of a drug is it, is the current standard of care, meaning what a patient would get if this drug didn't exist. So it's not placebo. In most cases, it's not like a water, you know, sugar pill, right? It's like the current thing. And so as we get better at treating the current thing, the bar gets higher.

• 1:09:45Speaker 04

  So it actually like the better we do a drug discovery, it gets harder, not easier.

• 1:09:50John Coogan?

  We should do that with payroll software. Unless you're better than the best payroll software, you shouldn't be allowed to promote your product.

• 1:09:57Speaker 04

  Well, even more like here's the crazy

• 1:09:59Jordi Hays?

  You shouldn't be allowed to launch.

• 1:10:00John Coogan?

  You shouldn't be allowed to launch.

• 1:10:01Speaker 04

  Here's the analogy. You wouldn't be allowed to launch the product. Okay? The government would say, no, no, no, no, you cannot launch until you're better than the current.

• 1:10:11John Coogan?

  Your corporate card isn't better than ramp, so you can't launch. It's just ridiculous.

• 1:10:16Speaker 04

  Could you imagine that world where you're like, oh, my new, you know, someone who would launch like, I don't know,

• 1:10:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:10:22Speaker 04

  Chat GPT search engine. And then like the federal government's like, nope, Google's better. You can't do this until you're better.

• 1:10:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:28Speaker 04

  That is how biotech works. That is how biotech works. And by the way,

• 1:10:32Jordi Hays?

  Is that the right? Is that the right way for it to work?

• 1:10:37Jordi Hays?

  Does that contribute, does it, I, you have to imagine it contributes to prices being high because it's somewhat anti-competitive, right? If I, like, in the payroll, in the payroll market, right? Like, a payroll platform gets super bloated, some founders, like, and it costs, you know, a hundred dollars an employee, some founder comes in, launches an okay version.

• 1:10:58John Coogan?

  Also, there's just less iteration on drugs, I would imagine, than on software, right?

• 1:11:03Speaker 04

  No, no, you can't, like, iterate through it, there's no, like, learning, you gotta, like, it's either, it's better or not. Here's the problem, are you gonna take the drug that's 30% worse, but 50% cheaper, even though you don't pay for it?

• 1:11:14John Coogan?

  Absolutely not.

• 1:11:15Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:11:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:16Speaker 04

  Exactly. Now, if you, if you were on the hook, or maybe you saw some of the rebates, and, you know, went into your pocket, maybe you'd be like, alright, you know, like, my psoriasis isn't, like, that bad, I'll take the, like, 30% less effective drug, and I'll, like, clip some, you know, coupons, and, but that, we don't do that.

• 1:11:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:35Speaker 04

  Because, you know, in, in, in America, we view healthcare as, like, it's supposed to be free for everybody, and so...

• 1:11:42John Coogan?

  I mean, we kind of do it with, with over the counter stuff, like, if you get, like, the mucinex extra strength, max, like, it might be three dollars more than just, like, generic stuff.

• 1:11:51Speaker 04

  Try telling, try telling the cancer patient that you're gonna get the slightly less effective.

• 1:11:55John Coogan?

  Very different for that, absolutely.

• 1:11:55Speaker 04

  Like, you're just not gonna do it. And so, you know, the FDA is kind of like, well, what's, the bar is current standard of care, that's the standard we've put in place.

• 1:12:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:12:04Speaker 04

  Look, if we wanted to create a system where you could launch slightly worse drugs cheaper, like, that would be an interesting system, but the problem is, the people using the drugs aren't the one paying for the drugs, at least not directly, and so, cheaper doesn't win, right? Like, you can't shift, because the patient, at the end of the day, does not want the worst drug, like, I can't even, there's so many situations where you're just like, absolutely not, especially in, in serious disease, chronic disease, cancer, all the stuff that really matters. So, going all the way back to pricing... One of these like weird, weird issues in biotech is simply like as the industry gets better, it gets harder, not easier, which is there is almost like no other industry where that is true.

• 1:12:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:45Speaker 04

  And so.

• 1:12:46John Coogan?

  It's the opposite of learning curve pricing. It's like the opposite of fabs, the opposite of software, the opposite of the internet.

• 1:12:52Speaker 04

  Yeah. When you see all these stats of like innovation in biotech has slowed and all, you know, a lot of it is because of this, and they call it better than the Beatles, which is this idea of like, imagine if you wanted to release music and the only way it would work is if you were better than the Beatles, because that's the best. And so like, how much music would you really have? And that's, that's the, I like the phrase because it, whatever, catchy, like the Beatles. Anyway, so.

• 1:13:16Jordi Hays?

  It is, it does, the, the one thing I'll say is it has an interesting effect of, of pushing for true excellence, right?

• 1:13:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:25Jordi Hays?

  That does not happen, that certainly doesn't happen in SaaS. There's a lot of people that see a good SaaS product and they're like, I can make an okay version of that and make.

• 1:13:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:33Jordi Hays?

  A couple of million dollars a year.

• 1:13:35John Coogan?

  Totally. There's less cynicism and there's less like, we don't have a slop problem in the environment.

• 1:13:40Speaker 04

  Well, there's no, and there's no like move fast and break things because you can't tweak your way to the front, right? You've got to build the best drug before you put it into people, right? There is no tweaking. So I, I say all of this, which is to say like, yes, drugs are expensive in the United States, but like, if you wanted cheaper drugs today, you are basically not going to get any in the future. And I know everyone's like, oh, that's not true, blah, blah. Like I am on the front lines of this every single day. I mean, we are one of now, one of the larger biotech venture funds at seed, meaning like we take the most, we're in that negative EV category.

• 1:14:19Jordi Hays?

  It felt different.

• 1:14:20John Coogan?

  Risk on.

• 1:14:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And so, um, if the price on the other side is not big enough for the risk that you take, it's not that you like tone it down, it's that you just don't do it.

• 1:14:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And just to be very clear, like you don't need to do this, right? Like you could, you could walk away from the game, right? And like, there's that.

• 1:14:42Speaker 04

  And by the way, it's not just me. It's, it's our investors, our LPs. Like if, if, if my fund and every other biotech in early stage investor can't make money. Our job will cease to exist because our investors won't let us exist, right? Like, there's this, oh, money will always be there. No, absolutely not. And so, you know, you need a reward on the other side of it. And I think that trade is really hard for people to think about because you're like, well, it's a lot now. And you're like, yeah, it's a lot now. But if it weren't, that means 10 years from now, you're going to have the same drugs available in 10 years as we have today. Your kids are not going to be any better off from a medicine perspective. So the reward does have to be really big.

• 1:15:23Speaker 04

  But at the same time, like, do the Europeans kind of like preload off of us? Yes. And so, this kind of like rough idea of like, all right, this is what they're trying to do is say, we're going to index the US price to like a basket of comparable international countries, basically like wealthy first world countries. It's mostly European countries. And that we can't be like materially higher than they are on a GDP adjusted basis. At least that's the idea behind the executive order. Maybe two thoughts. One, all, this will not take US drug prices down. It will not happen. What will happen, this is not a good thing, is it may force, first of all, okay, this is likely not enforceable.

• 1:16:08Speaker 04

  I don't believe the, legally, I don't think the EO works. And that's part of why you didn't see the biotech market react is every expert is like, no chance. Like, it's not, there's not, it'll fail in the court 1,000 times. It'll never get implemented. That doesn't mean some future version of this, there isn't some like, you know, loophole or whatever that maybe the government slowly figures out. But like, this EO seems as if it's basically never going to happen.

• 1:16:29Jordi Hays?

  What about, what about the, is biotech being squeezed on both sides in some way right now? Given that there's kind of an attack on the fundamental foundational research as well? And so like, if you take that, basically that's like investment that's sort of like, you know, non, effectively, the biotech industry gets the benefit of.

• 1:16:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, like the negative EV bets are already being subsidized to be closer to zero, but not.

• 1:16:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, this administration is doing absolutely everything it can to destroy the future therapeutics that you want. Every single decision they've made, basically, so far, has been negative to future medicines existing. Right? Like, you cut biology research, so we don't really understand what drives disease. You cut skilled immigration. Do you know who is like? Half of biotech, if you go to like any biotech company's website, you go to R, usually somewhere between thirty and fifty percent of the people on staff are foreign born.

• 1:17:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:27Speaker 04

  Because you know who like doesn't want to do the seventeen years of school to become a chemist? And like do all the training, Americans. And so, you know, we already have a science, a skilled scientist shortage. And that's even with current immigration. And so like kicking these people out of the country, not letting them come here in the first place to train. Like, we're just gonna have a massive, you know, skills gap. This isn't like bring manufacturing back. This is like, you need to be a PhD in chemistry plus fifteen years. Like, these people don't exist. And so, most of our senior team at Kiri is foreign born.

• 1:17:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I imagine that, I imagine that the biotech industry could very quickly absorb like twice the amount of PhDs and just do more research, right? And it's not, it wouldn't be like job displacement if that happened.

• 1:18:11Jordi Hays?

  So the solution.

• 1:18:12Speaker 04

  And like biology and chemistry PhDs and proteins, like specific types of PhDs. You know, do we, do we need like marine science PhDs? No. But, you know.

• 1:18:22Jordi Hays?

  So I don't want to put words in your mouth, but are you saying the solution is that we need a million Brian Johnsons?

• 1:18:29Speaker 04

  We're looking for scientists, not crazy people. So, you know, no, we need, we need a million, you know, David Lues at MIT.

• 1:18:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about, what about that guy in China? Hu Zhongqi, have you been following this guy? He edited the first Chris.

• 1:18:48Speaker 04

  Testing stuff on himself?

• 1:18:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And he posts these like very vague posts where it sounds like.

• 1:18:54Jordi Hays?

  AI, I thought it was an AI like meme account for months.

• 1:18:57John Coogan?

  And he keeps posting like, you know, biotechnology should never be used for, to create super soldiers. And it's just like a selfie of him. And it's like, it sounds like you're making a super soldier, man. And it's unclear how much he's in on the joke, but recently like he, he got married and his wife can't get into the country. Have you been tracking that story at all?

• 1:19:14Speaker 04

  No, because it's like fringe. It's like, you know, it's like the New York Post of science.

• 1:19:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. What about?

• 1:19:21Speaker 04

  All right, I want to go back.

• 1:19:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, please, please, please.

• 1:19:23Speaker 04

  Because I just like, this is the class, this is this administration being like, I'm angry about something. And then I make a decision and nobody thinks about then what happens. And it's just like over and over again. You're like, these are, these fucking people are so stupid. And I hope they're listening, like you are all so stupid. And like, you're just, you're just ruining. The thing that has made America excellent in science by killing all these things in, you know, science funding, immigration, blah, blah, blah. It's like, it is idiotic. But even even if you say like, we're going to index the US price to international prices, remember that the United States is a giant fucking country. If 350 million people were the wealthiest in the world, like, all 50% of pharma revenue comes from the United States. And then you have like Japan is kind of second.

• 1:20:08Speaker 04

  Okay, so now put yourself in the shoes of a pharma company, right? You're going to index, you're going to index our price to the European price. And let's say the Europeans are like 15% of your revenue and the Americans are 50. Are you going to lower your price? Absolutely not. You're just going to raise the European price, right? And just to bring it up because you can't lose the US revenue. Yep. So like, you'll never give this revenue up. So the US price will not change. This does not work. All it does is it may, even if it were legal, it may force pharma to bring its European price up. And you know what happens when that happens? Because this is like, and then what? The Europeans will go, okay, we can't pay for it. We're not going to buy it. And all it does is it keeps the US price the same and it shrinks pharma. Like, the net net is the United States will pay exactly the same

• 1:20:52Speaker 04

  that we paid before, because pharma is not going to drop price in its largest category by far. It's the only place you can make money in pharma is in the US. So that price is not coming down. If you have to bring the price externally up, it shrinks the revenue in that market, which shrinks pharma, which shrinks biotech. Because if you, if pharma is a smaller, you know, dollar value, if the profitability of pharma comes down, you know what they stopped doing? Buying biotech companies, right? All this, the same effect, which is like, well, if this is less prof, it's just a different way of making it less profitable, right? It's the same thing of like, if it's less profitable, I can't take as much risk. And if I can't take as much risk, I stop doing risky drug discovery and

• 1:21:34Speaker 04

  therefore, the whole industry just kind of like, like this. And that's not a win.

• 1:21:38Jordi Hays?

  How do, how do, how do companies get valued if they have one drug that's like working? And maybe it's the best, right? So it's actually able to be in the market. Yet, there's a sort of sense that there are very real competitors that might come in with a drug that is substantially better. Like, how is a pharma company that's, you know, exploring M and A going to value that? Is it still the same, same?

• 1:22:08Speaker 04

  This is, this is what they do all day. What you just described is exactly what these people are spending teams and teams of people on, which is like, okay, what is the value of the current drug that we've got? Which is usually if it's at the place where it's approved, you're looking at, you know, say, what are the peak sales and how long am I going to be, how long is my patent? Right? What do we, what do we expect generic competition to come to, to, to look like? And then you're looking at the pipeline of competitors and you're looking at the data that they shared. And sometimes there's some data and sometimes there isn't. And then you're trying to predict the future, which is like, okay, just because, you know, company access working on a competitor doesn't mean it's going to work. So do we think it's going to work? Why do we think it's going to work? If it does work, what are the, so you do like scenario planning, like, okay, you know,

• 1:22:52Speaker 04

  10% chance this beats us, 50% chance it doesn't, like, should we be concerned? And all of this math goes into the spreadsheet of like, what do we think this drug is worth? And what's the risk appetite? So like, this is, this is day to day, you know, biotech, pharma, commercial analysis. There are very, very smart people who do this.

• 1:23:12Speaker 04

  You know, this is what the public hedge funds do, this is what the RA guys will do, you know, and it's, it's, it's deep science.

• 1:23:18Speaker 04

  But all of it is just like, at least the drug pricing stuff is just, it's a trade that is hard for people to understand. But it's kind of like, if you don't put a reward on a very risky thing, the risky thing doesn't happen. And you just don't feel it until 10 years. You won't even really know because it's the drug that never got started in the first place. And then eventually what you're doing is you're outsourcing all this to China because the Chinese will pick it up and, and, and do, we have a longer conversation about China. So I, I, all, all of it is just kind of like stupid. The other thing I would say, we don't have to jump, but like, this is my defense of, of, of medicine and therapeutics, if you will, as like a great investment, they go generic.

• 1:24:03Speaker 04

  Like nine to 12 years, let's say roughly, these are generic, which means they are basically free for you in 10 years. I know your kids and your grandkids and your future kids. Like it is an unbelievable investment. You pay a lot upfront. You get a lot of innovation, a lot of people taking risks. You have this like window in time. Yeah, you know, you gotta eat it. You're gonna eat, you're gonna pay a bunch for it. It's not gonna feel great. And then everybody gets it free. There's no other industry in the world where that happens. And even within healthcare, you know, doesn't go generic, doctors, hospitals, surgeries, like, why, why, why is there so much focus on the therapeutic, which is also only about 10% of, of, of medical spending is drugs, which then eventually goes generic

• 1:24:48Speaker 04

  versus the 90% of it, which is basically physicians. And those physicians, they're not

• 1:24:53John Coogan?

  Well, it's because of the margins, right?

• 1:24:55Jordi Hays?

  What, what?

• 1:24:56John Coogan?

  It just strikes you as something that like the pill only costs a cent to make.

• 1:24:59Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:25:00John Coogan?

  Just emotionally, you think about high margin things is wasteful.

• 1:25:04Jordi Hays?

  What's something positive that could come from the EO? We, we, we had a infamous healthcare exec, actually, actually, no, we had an infamous healthcare exec message us while we're live, said, ask him if he reads that the EO is maybe trying to solve the consumer pricing problem gross to net, rather than actually making pricing comparable in the end, given that there was a specific call out for consumer D to C pricing and which might have been why.

• 1:25:34Speaker 04

  Consumer D to, like, healthcare is about the new drugs that are really expensive, not like consumer D to C pricing of like, you know, whatever, consumer medicine. Like, I'm talking about real healthcare, very sick, chronic disease people with neurological conditions, with, with cancer, with heart disease, like the serious stuff, which is what we care about.

• 1:25:59John Coogan?

  I just saw a company that they'll give me one pill that has erectile dysfunction medicine and hair loss medicine in one pill. Is that not real medicine? What's going on?

• 1:26:07Speaker 04

  Those are generic meds.

• 1:26:09John Coogan?

  Sounds like amazing.

• 1:26:10Speaker 04

  It's amazing. And you know why they're so cheap?

• 1:26:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:12Speaker 04

  Because they're generic, because 15, 20 years ago, we invented this shit. We, you know, Pfizer made like a crap ton of money selling Viagra.

• 1:26:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:26:20Speaker 04

  Everybody, now you get to get your six in one dick pill for dollars. And like, that's a pretty cool deal, right? Like, it's cheap and all this. Like, shores, there's some like gross to net, whatever. That's not what healthcare is. That's not, I'm sorry, like, hair loss is not healthcare.

• 1:26:38John Coogan?

  Interesting. What about CRISPR On Demand? There was this, this infant child that was saved with a custom gene therapy. It seemed like a very inspiring story. There was inspiring video all about it. It seems like an amazing testament to something we've been hearing about for a long time, which is CRISPR. Maybe a decade we've been talking about this. Is that an opportunity for new companies? Is that, is there already a company that's like ripping on the back of this? Or is that just kind of like an outgrowth of what we'd expect with the technology, given the maturity?

• 1:27:07Speaker 04

  I believe the company that did this was Beam Therapeutics. Is that them? Who did it?

• 1:27:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's cool. This is, I mean, this is a perfect example, right? Which is like, that, I think it's, I can't remember offhand which one it is. They, that company that successfully developed this, this therapeutic is trading for less than money raised.

• 1:27:33John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:27:34Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:27:35John Coogan?

  Moment of silence.

• 1:27:36Speaker 04

  Right? And why? Well, because like these gene editing technologies where you're going after essentially like disease that is very clearly defined by some mutation in your DNA, and that's a, that's a small subset of total disease. It's like very, very rare conditions that this applies to. So like the market, the way I think about it is like the patient market for this technology is very small. These are horrible diseases that in theory can be, can be treated through gene editing. There's not that many of them, but you can, you can do some really amazing things if, if you can, if you can make these edits, which is the first time this has ever happened. But like, if you add up the patient population of like all of these conditions where you could possibly do this.

• 1:28:19Speaker 04

  It's not that many. I don't know the math offhand. I bet you it's probably like tens of thousands at most. Okay. And so like, plus the variable cost of manufacturing this stuff on a per patient basis can be hundreds of thousands of dollars.

• 1:28:30John Coogan?

  Just are we gonna get some blockbuster gene editing for hair loss and then we're back in business?

• 1:28:35Speaker 04

  No, uh, because hair loss is not, you know, there's no like one base edit to, you know, fix hair loss, but.

• 1:28:41John Coogan?

  Yet, yet.

• 1:28:43Speaker 04

  I think, I think.

• 1:28:44John Coogan?

  I don't like this techno pessimist on my stream, Zach.

• 1:28:47Speaker 04

  Well, one of the things you learn as you go into science is that the DNA is not actually the whole story. It's not even close to the whole story. And so like, it's not even, you wouldn't, there's no one spot.

• 1:28:57Jordi Hays?

  Is vibes a part of it? Is that?

• 1:28:59John Coogan?

  It's actually astrology. It matters. Taking account of the DNA, but also the astrological sign.

• 1:29:05Jordi Hays?

  Infamous astrologist.

• 1:29:06Speaker 04

  I mean, vibes are kind of like it in a way that like your behavior as you're alive does affect your.

• 1:29:11John Coogan?

  Epigenetics are the vibes of the DNA.

• 1:29:14Speaker 04

  Your epigenetics matter, right? Like you sit in, in, uh, smoke all day, like you're gonna have some problems. Uh, anyway, I, I like this as an example because this company that just made this like unbelievable breakthrough is has never been done before in humans. They're curing diseases, is now trading for basically less than cash raised. I gotta go find the actual numbers. I swear it's.

• 1:29:35John Coogan?

  So, so there's, uh, I, I just got an answer. So this was a bespoke CRISPR based editing drug. It was built and tested by physician scientists at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine with translational help from Innovative Genomics Institute at UC Berkeley. Reagents and GMP grade components were donated by several suppliers, including Acutas Therapeutics and Integrated DNA Technologies and Aldeveron. Uh, both Danaher companies got for guide RNA and production.

• 1:30:04Speaker 04

  Yes, on that one. There was another.

• 1:30:06John Coogan?

  There's another story.

• 1:30:07Speaker 04

  Yes, there was another story and I have to find it. Um.

• 1:30:12John Coogan?

  Well, we'll have to, we, we have to jump, but, but, but, but why, we'd love to have you back and kind of dig into some of these other biotech companies and take us through like the wins and losses. I think it'd be very interesting to see.

• 1:30:22Speaker 04

  By the way, imagine, imagine if that becomes a drug and we go, oh, we can only pay $20,000 for it. Do you know what happens to that drug?

• 1:30:31John Coogan?

  It sits on the shelf.

• 1:30:32Speaker 04

  It sits on the shelf. No one ever does it. No one ever makes it. And there's your drug pricing in, in reality, which is like.

• 1:30:39Speaker 04

  Well, it's gotta be a reward.

• 1:30:41John Coogan?

  So we're pro higher drug prices, I guess. You pilled us on that? We want that. We want the highest prices possible is what I'm hearing.

• 1:30:47Speaker 04

  You wanna fly. You'll get a lot of shit. You you put real high prices like people will come and and and take risk. You know, I'm sure there's some balance.

• 1:30:56Jordi Hays?

  We gotta have you and Skrally on together.

• 1:30:59Speaker 04

  We need like gold. Here's my favorite stat. My favorite stat. The the I I I'll pull these for you. So I want to sound like an asshole, just like spitting numbers that aren't true. I believe on a per American basis, like you take our drug spend and you divide it essentially over like, you know, Americans, we spend drugs on. It's something like $1,000 a year or so per person, if you will. We spend more on cosmetics than we do on medicine.

• 1:31:22John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:31:24Speaker 04

  More on cosmetics.

• 1:31:26John Coogan?

  Let's hear it for America. We're looking good.

• 1:31:27Jordi Hays?

  What about fast food? What about?

• 1:31:28John Coogan?

  We might be dropping dead at 45, but we're gonna look good doing it. Thanks so much for stopping by. This is fantastic. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:31:35Jordi Hays?

  Always a pleasure. Cheers.

• 1:31:36John Coogan?

  Next up, we have Lee Marie Braswell from Kleiner Perkins coming in, former colleague of mine at Founders Fund briefly. Excited to talk to her about artificial intelligence, AI agents, all the news of the day, and we'll bring her in. And we got some. We got some good Chyrons for her coming up. We'll see if we can get them up on the stream. What do we? What are we talking for her? The term she tyrant herself. Lee Marie, are you there? Can you hear me?

• 1:32:04Speaker 05

  Oh, what's up, Kugan? How's it going?

• 1:32:06John Coogan?

  It's good. What's what's new with you? I'd love to get your initial take on AI week. We got Microsoft Build, Google I/O, OpenAI I/O. We got Claude 4 from Anthropic. It's been a massive week. What has stuck out to you as like the most interesting, the most underrated, the most worth digging into of the news of the week?

• 1:32:30Speaker 05

  Well, I guess just to start off, and it's so good to see you again. It's been a while.

• 1:32:33John Coogan?

  It's been too long.

• 1:32:34Speaker 05

  So yeah, thanks for having me on the show. Um, yeah, it's no, there's never a dull moment, really, you know? Um, yeah, you know, you know, I feel like every day there's, there's something really, you know, significant that you need to be paying attention to if you're going to try to make money investing in AI companies.

• 1:32:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:50Speaker 05

  And so, yeah, I mean, I think the big thing that's, actually, there's so much this week. I mean,

• 1:32:53John Coogan?

  Right.

• 1:32:54Speaker 05

  You know, starting with some of the stuff you said, the I O.

• 1:32:56John Coogan?

  It's the best time to be a technology podcaster.

• 1:32:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:32:58John Coogan?

  Investors is a close second, but podcasters really where you want to be. That's where the action is because every day there's new news. Anyway, yeah, what, what is sticking out to you?

• 1:33:07Speaker 05

  Hey, Jordy.

• 1:33:07Jordi Hays?

  Um, hey.

• 1:33:08Speaker 05

  So, so there's, um, the, I mean, the I O acquisition in particular, that news, um, what incredible video, what incredible team. Um, I mean, just really showcasing OpenAI's ambition to really, you know, get into, get into a lot of stuff. And I mean, obviously there's a lot of speculation about what the device will look like. I was actually looking this up.

• 1:33:26Jordi Hays?

  My favorite, sorry, sorry to interrupt. My favorite part was, uh, John and I are, I guess, ex hall monitors. We're in the community notes program.

• 1:33:34John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:33:34Jordi Hays?

  So somebody was trying to community note the OpenAI launch video and the suggested community note was this video uses AI. The, these two scenes aren't real. If you look at this section, it's like, you're trying to gotcha an AI company for using AI in a marketing video? Like, what is this? That's very silly.

• 1:33:54Speaker 05

  What do you expect, you know?

• 1:33:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:56Speaker 05

  They don't use all AI.

• 1:33:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:59Speaker 05

  Yeah. Um, so I mean, yeah, I mean, super excited about what potentially that could, that could imply for just, you know, OpenAI's ambitions, especially as it relates to consumer, consumer hardware. I was looking it up on, on O three, but O three kept then kind of giving me some different answers, but it might be, and to be fair, I don't, you know, kind of know the current state of things inside of I O, um, Johnny I's company. But it might be one of the largest, if not the largest sort of pre-product acquisition of all time. So, you know, I mean, six point five million dollars is a lot of money.

• 1:34:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, we've been noodling on it.

• 1:34:28Jordi Hays?

  It's a couple of points. It's a couple of points for a key exec.

• 1:34:30John Coogan?

  Exactly. It's 2% of the company, which when you think about bringing in an executive at that level, that like comp for that team.

• 1:34:36Jordi Hays?

  Industry legend.

• 1:34:37John Coogan?

  It's not that crazy to get to that number. And then today in the Wall Street Journal, Sam Altman is quoted saying that if they can nail it and get a major consumer device, that's a trillion dollar opportunity. And that sounds crazy, but you look at Apple's market cap, you look at, you know, Android, Samsung, like, yeah, there probably is a trillion dollars in market cap.

• 1:34:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, there was also, there was also the, the tinfoil hat saying like, oh, he's trying to dilute the nonprofit. It's like, you know that they are issuing billions of dollars of stock to employees like all the time.

• 1:35:04John Coogan?

  That's happening a lot, yeah.

• 1:35:05Jordi Hays?

  This is not some like, you know, crazy conspiracy.

• 1:35:08John Coogan?

  I, I do want to get your take on the actual device. We, we've seen some pre-render, some AI images around like a pendant with a camera on it, the her model, maybe it's an earpiece. I imagine you get pitched a lot of AI devices. We've seen the rabbit, the humane, the friend. Are there any other, any other ideas that you've seen that could potentially be just AI devices, even not from OpenAI, but just in general, because Apple's got it pretty well covered. They got your ears, they got your eyes with the Vision Pro, they got your phone, the watch, the iPad, the laptop, the desktop. Like, Apple's, there's not a lot of white space in the Apple catalog, but it'll be interesting to see if somebody can come up with something that's new. Have you seen anything that's interesting?

• 1:35:51Speaker 05

  Oh man, I really wish I could, I could tell you about it. But yeah, we actually have a company in stealth. I can't say much, but they're certainly different, you know.

• 1:35:57John Coogan?

  I'll be on the show when they're ready.

• 1:35:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'll, I'll be, I'll be super excited to, but people are being really creative. And then also, I mean, just generally, and I'm sure you're seeing this too, just given like the pace of how much is happening. And then also the competitive nature of these markets, like it's clearly there's this big prize, maybe bigger than ever before.

• 1:36:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:36:16Speaker 05

  And so if you've got a really good idea, like, and if you don't have trouble raising funding, getting customers or hiring people, like, you know, why, why talk about it too soon? So, yeah, I'll be excited to, to share more on that.

• 1:36:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's also, I feel like people have just been generally willing to fund hardware, but also kind of categorically bearish, right? People are just like, oh, like hardware's really hard. Like, I'm going to make this bet, but like, it's really hard.

• 1:36:39John Coogan?

  The meme hardware is hard used to be about supply chain. It used to be about all the things that can go wrong.

• 1:36:44Jordi Hays?

  But then also look at, look at.

• 1:36:45John Coogan?

  Working capital.

• 1:36:46Jordi Hays?

  We're at a point where like Aura and Whoop are like big businesses that I, you know, I don't know, like. Ultra specifics on either, but I bet that Aura will be a really big company in 10

• 1:36:58John Coogan?

  From my perspective, it's almost harder. It's not, it is hard to make the device and manufacture it and deal with the fact that 90% of your revenue comes in Christmas. But like the real hard part is actually changing consumer behavior and getting someone to take off their Apple Watch or add a Whoop band to the other wrist, which is, I think, the predominant pattern for most Whoop users. But what, what, what are you looking for in hardware startups that you're looking at? What are the pitfalls that you want to see founding teams overcome before potentially backing them?

• 1:37:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I'll, I'll say I don't have a massive background in hardware. I mean, I will say I was, I was at Scale. Yeah, I was relatively early there for, you know, and was an engineer there for four years and then a PM. And we worked with a lot of hardware companies there. So I mean, the main customer of Scale back in the very early days was self-driving car companies and robotics companies. And so I have seen, just through to working with them as customers, you know, some potential pitfalls. And I mean, the, the, the quip is that hardware is hard. You know, that you've got all of the challenges of building a company, and then you've also got to just manage supply chains. And you have to be a lot more careful about, you know, the economics, you know, software is usually relatively high margin, or it's easier to make a high margin. Hardware, obviously, much harder

• 1:38:14Speaker 05

  when you've got to figure out where all these materials are coming from and ramping up. So even if you have demand, like ramping up in a sort of scalable way, and then also implementation can generally just, just take a really long time.

• 1:38:25John Coogan?

  And it distributes at the speed of the internet. Like, you can go viral and get 100 million people on a website in the day. You, you just can't ship 100 million things anywhere in any reasonable amount of time. It just takes time.

• 1:38:36Speaker 05

  Like, maybe one day. But yeah, it's like, interesting to remember, like Waymo was founded in 2009.

• 1:38:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:42Speaker 05

  Right? So like, just as that, like, it took, you know, 20 years to now become this overnight success. But yeah.

• 1:38:48John Coogan?

  You mentioned robotics. I'm interested in the pools of training data that are out there. We've been joking about Scale AI. Are they going to put everyone in motion capture suits eventually to get to the humanoid data sets? There's also a lot of work being done in, in simulated environments. Is there a Data wall that we're gonna run into with humanoid robotics? How are you thinking about the data challenges in robotics? Generally, whether that's in the humanoid side or elsewhere. Because it feels like the humanoid narrative is taking hold. People are funding companies that's getting big. But if it's a 16 year journey like it was with Waymo, we could be, you know, in for, in for a long one here.

• 1:39:25Speaker 05

  Definitely, definitely. It's been interesting. I mean, like, I do think there are a lot of really good arguments for why we'll see robotics like progress accelerate. And that's really, you know, obviously, the data is more challenging to get, you know? It's not like you can just scrape the Internet like we did with a lot of these, these L L Ms. And the data is kind of like there and ready for the taking for at least like some of the early transformer based models. Though with an asterisk like as, as we're now moving into agents, I actually think you have to be more intentional about creating different types of data. But then now with robotics too, like, you know, you've got to figure out ways to get real world data. Whether that's, you know, internally or using somebody like a scale. Or, you know, there's a lot of really exciting work going on in world modeling and simulation.

• 1:40:09Speaker 05

  So, you know, I think hopefully a combination of being really intentional about the data, both on the sort of like human collection side, and then also some of this work that we're seeing in simulation and world models. Will hopefully mean that, you know, we don't all hit this data wall and we'll be able to to sort of scale these systems more effectively. However, I mean, with robotics is always a little, a little bit challenging to tell what that exact timeline is.

• 1:40:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, be interesting. We were talking earlier about the agentic, the coding market, the AI coding market. I was kind of breaking it down to you and is it three markets? Is it two markets? Is it synchronous work asynchronous work? Is there a consumer, prosumer, bottom up enterprise, top down enterprise, sales motion? How are you thinking about just AI coding generally as a market as the businesses evolve? Just give me kind of where you're at and then we can kind of tug on that thread in a bunch of different ways.

• 1:41:06Speaker 05

  For sure. My favorite, my favorite topic of conversation, definitely one of my favorites is AI code gen. Near, near and dear to my heart. But um, yeah, as a disclaimer, so I'm, I'm on the board of this company, Windsurf. So, Agentic IDE, AI-powered developer tooling platform. Yeah, it's been, it has been just utterly sort of shocking to me. Like, you know, when you invest in a company, you expect, like, okay, you know, think, hopefully things will go well. Like, hopefully, market will be there. And I just don't think anybody, uh, I don't think anybody really saw this coming. Just in terms of like, how widespread tools like Windsurf would become. And so right now, you know, you're certainly seeing like, there's this sort of segmentation, specialization, you know, you have

• 1:41:51Speaker 05

  tools like Windsurf and Cursor that are, you know, prosumer. So you've got people even with basically no coding or definitely no coding experience that are able to get up and running very quickly with these tools. And really sort of like talk to it and it acts like this sort of programmer that will, you know, like, respond to what you want to do. Maybe it comes back and becomes back with error, but it can maybe automatically fix that error. Once you kind of give it some more guidance. And you know, it's just been incredible seeing like, you know, even, even though I talk about Windsurf all the time, my father-in-law, who I'd never mentioned it to, not a programmer, just like once he was on a, we were just talking, all talking, he's like, you gotta go, you're a VC, you gotta go check out this company Windsurf. I'm like using it to like, you know, help me out at work and create apps. And I'm just like, wow, this is incredible.

• 1:42:36Speaker 05

  How widespread, he's like, you know, outside of Silicon Valley, all of that. So.

• 1:42:39John Coogan?

  So for those types of tools, I mean, you don't have to speak about Windsurf specifically, but just how much of it is just a ton of people on small consumer plans versus bottom-up enterprise adoption that gets rolled into a much larger consumption-based plan? Or even like a seats-based plan? Like, how is, how is the market for AI tooling in the enterprise evolving in terms of pricing? Because we've seen Salesforce is talking about, we want to price things not based on seats, but based on resolutions of customer service tickets. You could imagine charging someone for lines of code that get approved in pull requests, or seat-based, or usage-based, or just pure inference-based. So how is that, how is that side of the market just evolving broadly?

• 1:43:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, so what we're seeing is, you know, there's certainly the prosumer segment for these tools, but it very quickly goes up, you know, bottoms up into the enterprise. And in particular with Wind Surf, I mean, from day one, we've been quite focused on the enterprise segment. And so it's, you know, we're but we both have a large enterprise sales team. And then these tailwinds from now, all these prosumers. And then, you know, sort of like professional developers that that pick it up on their own and bring it in into their company. Um, I think pricing, it's always interesting. It's something that we constantly think about. It's a very competitive market. So, I mean, you know, you also have to kind of pay attention to what other people are doing. I mean, per seat, easy to understand, but then, you know, obviously, a lot of these models cost, you know, cost money to run.

• 1:44:08Speaker 05

  And so you've got to figure out some sort of either credits or usage system. Um, I don't think, you know, in coding, we're yeah, to the point where it's, you know, let's price based on outcome. Like, oh, well, if we get this done, then then you pay. Um, like maybe, you know, I've seen sometimes in like customer support and things like that. Um, but yeah, certainly having like a usage element, I think is pretty, pretty, pretty.

• 1:44:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What's your reaction when an entrepreneur pitches you and they're like, well, we're, we're building agents to go after this labor, this like end labor market and and the the TAM is, you know, a trillion dollars because they're just adding up like global payroll for like that type of work. Like, what's your reaction to that? Is that the wrong way to think about market sizing? If ultimately, these are software products that can be delivered very inexpensively, which will ultimately create competition and drive maybe pricing down for that end service.

• 1:45:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, definitely, definitely some good points. I mean, generally, generally, I'm pretty optimistic. Um, I think now just like kind of living through the codegen market where, you know, just to use this as an anecdote, you know, GitHub Copilot came out. My first kind of pessimistic reaction was just like, oh, well, this is like so useful already. And GitHub's got all these advantages. Okay, that's like markets done. And they will be like, okay, every developer like uses it and then it's kind of over. And and it just the opposite of this happened like it turned out that there is a lot of white space in the market for teams to innovate and to create really great product experiences. Um, whether it's a startup, whether it's a foundation model company. Uh, and then also just like, I think the market blew my mind.

• 1:45:46John Coogan?

  What was the secret? Uh, what was the secret to either the the challengers to GitHub Copilot? I I haven't really used them. Um, is it is it more driven by uh, flexibility around which model you're plugging into and and GitHub Copilot kind of locking you into their model and not moving quickly enough? Or is it something more on the user experience side?

• 1:46:08Speaker 05

  So I forgot the exact date GitHub Copilot started, I think, OpenAI only, given those sort of relationship. But it relatively quickly moved to an option.

• 1:46:16John Coogan?

  So you can put in Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which everyone loves.

• 1:46:19Speaker 05

  Yes, and I think actually recently, um, you know, I I think I was reading this this morning, but you know, um, you know, GitHub announced like, okay, for these particular features, we're going to go with anthropic only. Like particular backend features. So it's clear like, you know, their their GitHub is not locked into to one model provider. I think, you know, what Cursor, Windsurf and others have done is just create, you know, different product experiences. Um, and obviously GitHub Copilot is still doing very well. But I think what this is all has told me and kind of back to your original question was these these markets are actually much bigger than we give them credit for. Uh, and so when I'm kind of sort of being pitched maybe a ridiculous TAM, sure, it's probably good to like verify that and really drill in on that.

• 1:47:02Speaker 05

  But I mean, we are in the world where now software can do work. And so you do have to kind of, you know, you don't just get the sort of TAM being, okay, it's the, you know, incumbent software spend. I think you have to also realize once the product gets that much better, people will want to buy more software and then also think about it as a work replacement. So you kind of get all these kind of bonus markets that. You know, TV, you know, end up being just like this hu- huge thing.

• 1:47:27Jordi Hays?

  How do you, how do you, how do you process the tension between model providers kind of figuring out if they're wanting to end the own consumer or be a platform? I mean, the most obvious example was when surf didn't get immediate access to anthropics new models, uh, which seems, uh, you know, I'm sure you can't comment on that specifically, or maybe, maybe you want to come in. Put him, yeah, put him in the hot seat. But, um, but yeah, I, it just feels like, it feels like, uh, it feels like a very real tension that's gonna have to get resolved quickly because these are all big companies now, or at least the main players are big companies. There's billions of

• 1:48:10Jordi Hays?

  dollars of revenue on the line and, uh, everybody's in a, you know, constant race to be at the edge.

• 1:48:19Speaker 05

  You're right. I probably shouldn't say too much. Um, I mean, what I, what I, what I will say, yeah, it's something that I think is going to have to be, you know, addressed in the next year or two. Like, and I think it's just very clear that Coogan in particular is this, is this market that everybody kind of wants to get into. You know, I do ultimately think that, you know, I'd be shocked if in a year or two, we don't see Coogan products that are both, you know, synchronous. So like assistant, you know, I can talk to it and from the same interface, I can delegate task. I just think that that is something that a lot of people are building towards. It's like, there isn't a great experience today that kind of has both. Um, at least, you

• 1:49:01Speaker 05

  know, sort of a generalized both. But I mean, ultimately, like, all these companies are, I think gonna in the, in the sort of like even medium term, come up against each other. And ultimately what you want is sort of this distribution. And I think, you know, all these companies too are realizing you also want the model. Um, and you want to be able to, you know, give yourself really favorable, favorable economics. So, yeah, it's, it's going to be a super exciting, even, you know, probably, probably six to 12 months, I imagine.

• 1:49:28Jordi Hays?

  So legal, the, the sort of legal AI space has been heating up, kind of a, you know, interesting comp. In many ways, it felt like cursor had like a ton of mind share and then windsurf just kind of exploded. People realized how quickly it was growing. At least that was my. Perception and then Harvey similarly has been more in the sort of cursor bucket and that like tons of attention, bunch of rounds back to back. And then Legora came out of, feels like it came out of nowhere and they raised a big series B this week. Is there, are you, do you have a kind of prediction or a take on what the next category to see these sort of battles play out?

• 1:50:10Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure you guys already have some bets and whatever category that is.

• 1:50:14John Coogan?

  She's already on the board of four companies that are going to dominate it.

• 1:50:18Jordi Hays?

  The next four categories.

• 1:50:19John Coogan?

  Actually, I had to jump to the board meeting and exactly what you just said.

• 1:50:23Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. Um, you know, I'm, I'm very lucky in that, you know, I think, I mean, even before I joined, so I've only been at Kleiner Perkins for two years. And even before that, a lot of my partners made really great app investments. So for example, my partner, Moon, incubated Glean, which is now, you know, kind of the enterprise knowledge discovery platform in this kind of new, new AI era. So certainly like we've got a lot of apps in the portfolio. I mean, Harvey, we, you know, did their series B, Ambience, which is a medical scribe also in the news recently. We did their seed in series B. So, and then, you know, we have some, some investments in sort of sales AI as well. I work with this company, NOX, which has started with a power dialer that people really like and is now expanding into other, other parts of assisting salespeople with AI.

• 1:51:09Speaker 05

  I'd say like those, you know, those categories plus maybe add customer support, which we don't yet have kind of a generalized play in. Those are kind of like the, the battleground spaces. These are where it's going down right now. Like it's clear, the models work for the use cases. It's clear there's a giant prize at the end. So you've got, you know, inevitably a lot of companies competing for it. In general, especially with software, you know, I think it's basically impossible to be the only company in your category.

• 1:51:35Jordi Hays?

  Can you, can you fund a company that will just pick up the phone when I get like a robo AI call that's like trying to do some social engineering hack or whatever and just pick up the phone and waste their time really inexpensively? That's, I feel like that's what I need.

• 1:51:48John Coogan?

  There's definitely some cybersecurity companies out there.

• 1:51:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:49Speaker 05

  I think I've, I think I've actually been pitched, been pitched one and I would have to find the name, but yeah.

• 1:51:55John Coogan?

  Well, what do you think about competition from the hyperscalers? Obviously, Microsoft Build and Google I/O happened this week. And there's one narrative that's like, oh, so many startups are now just bullet points in a Google I/O keynote. But Ben Thompson wrote shortly after Google I/O that Google only cares about search and they only win when it's directly impactful to search. And so you might, as a startup, not need to worry if you're doing something that's more in the labs or experimentation phase for Google. And Google is more just almost doing it as a demo of their, of their platform.

• 1:52:31John Coogan?

  And then they really would be fine with another company just buying a bunch of TPUs on GCP and, and, and building a real company on top of their innovation. But how are you thinking about startups competing in these new AI markets with the legacy incumbents?

• 1:52:48Speaker 05

  It's, it's, it's a, it's a really good, good question and it's something that I think about a lot. And like, obviously, you know, somebody like Google has giant advantages, distribution, money. I mean, Google literally created the, you know, first Transformers paper. So, I mean, certainly, certainly it's something that whenever you're investing in, in an app company in particular, you know, you, you need to, I think, at least think very deeply about what's, what's the roadmap of, of all these companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, et cetera.

• 1:53:17Speaker 05

  I mean, certainly, certainly seems like sort of areas in search and sort of like social and, and prosumer that, you know, seemed like kind of the most under the microscope with these big companies. But, you know, it, it wouldn't shock me if they tried, tried to compete in some of the other app categories we've talked about too. So, in general, though, startups, I like to bet on startups. Focus is important. And then, you know, I think if you move fast, if you're very strategic, there are a lot of good sort of like wedges you can sort of start with and then, and then expand from there.

• 1:53:48John Coogan?

  What about M and A markets in particular? I mean, my, my reaction to the Windsurf acquisition was, and it's going to be kind of hard for you to answer this, but was, was basically that like, whoa, like maybe that whole meme of like, oh, don't build a chat GPT wrapper or whatever. Maybe that was overblown. Maybe that there's going to be a lot of app layer companies that gets scooped up. Obviously, OpenAI is moving very quickly, so they're kind of early to this, but you could imagine every hyperscaler needing application layer AI companies to slot in, especially if they've had distribution and they've actually scaled revenues and they have a really great team.

• 1:54:26John Coogan?

  And it feels like unlike in the previous era, like 2010 ish, like the hyperscalers are more sclerotic than ever. It's been 15 extra years. They're less founder mode. And so I don't know what your reading read is on the M and A markets broadly, but how are you thinking about the hyperscalers approach to staying on the leading edge of these AI application layer companies?

• 1:54:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's important to remember and after remind myself that chat GPT is less than three years old. I think it's like this is happening so fast. And so when you think about like, I'm a hyperscaler and I see a market that is like, makes sense for me strategically. You know, is it really faster for me to go and try to build it internally? Or is it faster for me to find a really great startup, perhaps with expertise that I don't have? And maybe, you know, some other advantage, whether it's the product or the distribution or or something else. And then, you know, explore, explore partnership conversations with them. And so, I mean, you know, the one, one, you know, acquisition I can talk about is I a company that I worked with

• 1:55:38Speaker 05

  at a founders fund and still on the board of Neon is partnering with.

• 1:55:42John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:55:43Speaker 05

  And it makes sense because it's like, you know, you've got this team of database infrastructure experts. And then you've got this company who clearly wants, you know, their customers to be able to realize the full potential of AI agents. And so you do need, you know, a database and memory for those agents. And so, you know, it certainly now, you know, now I'm trying to think in my mind like, oh, well, what are the other categories that that hyperscalers might, uh, might, might be looking in and what makes the most sense for each one?

• 1:56:09Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the, the, the big one to me that I'm trying to figure out is just video generation, which we had, I wouldn't call it a Ghibli moment this week, but VO three was, was close. Took a little bit. It just takes a lot more work and it's harder to get a consistent quality output.

• 1:56:26John Coogan?

  And there isn't a single meme where everyone, like the Ghibli thing was like, just take your profile picture. Take your whatever's in your camera roll. Two words, boom, one shots and you have something cool. With VO3, you have to be more creative with the prompt.

• 1:56:39Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, the interesting thing there is I can, it's so easy to imagine in the future where consumers are using video generation tools daily, just for fun.

• 1:56:49John Coogan?

  Oh, totally.

• 1:56:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's, there's some like consumers just like making memes on the internet. Then there's like kind of prosumer SMB, I'm going to make like an advertisement.

• 1:56:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:56:58Jordi Hays?

  And then there's the like Hollywood studio that's like, I'm going to make a movie or independent filmmaker. But where companies kind of fit into that, I can see a world in which hyperscalers are kind of dominating. Like Meta, for example, figures out a way to get really good at, at, at video generation because it fits into the Meta ecosystem or YouTube, uh, you know, with, with VO3. And I think that from my point of view, I can see some of these more independent foundation labs that are focused on video having to really move up market to actually dominate because that feels like an area that like, Google's not going to necessarily build the thing that creates the next blockbuster video.

• 1:57:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:43Jordi Hays?

  But if you're competing for the prosumer SMB, like feels like a really tough place to compete purely from a cost standpoint and with YouTube or Google's sort of YouTube data advantage.

• 1:57:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I don't know. Any, any, any reactions to VO3 this week?

• 1:57:58Speaker 05

  Oh, I mean, super cool. Uh, and we're playing around with it. My husband's a founder and he was like trying to make this new video for something that they're developing internally. And oh my God, just insane. So it's, yeah, really cool. And I mean, I, I kind of agree with some of the points that have been made. But then on the flip side, I will say like, especially in video, there's so many really great models and they excel at a variety of different things. And so if you're like kind of a third, you know, a startup that is not connected to, I mean, Google obviously is developing their own models. So if you're not connected to any one of the particular models and you can offer like kind of a best in class, like, okay, you can pick from, you know, many of them, um, maybe, maybe that's an opportunity or if you're in sort of like very, very specialized. So, um, yeah, I mean, generally still, still optimistic, just kind of given, at this point, there's not,

• 1:58:43Speaker 05

  in my opinion, a ton of platform risk. You've got so many of the hyperscalers and labs like that are, you know, both closed and open source, offering, offering these types of models.

• 1:58:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, very cool. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. Uh, we'd love to have you back. This is fantastic.

• 1:58:56Speaker 05

  This is great. Thanks guys. All right. See you later.

• 1:58:59John Coogan?

  Really quickly, let me tell you about Figma.

• 1:59:02Jordi Hays?

  She has been on an absolute terror. Barely got to Neon. Another $1 billion acquisition.

• 1:59:07John Coogan?

  Fantastic. But really quickly, let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free at Figma.com. Redesign how you design. Explore your ideas freely and iterate quickly. Let's also tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program, go to Vanta.com to get started.

• 1:59:43Jordi Hays?

  Thank you to Vanta.

• 1:59:44John Coogan?

  Thank you to Vanta. Anyway, we have our next guest coming in. Steven from Lambda Labs. We've had Lambda School on. We're waiting for Steven.

• 1:59:52Jordi Hays?

  Should we hit some timeline?

• 1:59:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's hit some timeline. What's, did you see Yohei? Pocket is shutting down and so this.

• 2:00:05Jordi Hays?

  We need a sound.

• 2:00:06John Coogan?

  Creator, basically.

• 2:00:07Jordi Hays?

  We need a soundboard that says, "Moment of silence."

• 2:00:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, Vibe coded a quick, free, open source prototype with some AI features called Keep Yard. It still has issues, but I challenged myself to push this in one night. I thought this was very cool. I've been joking about, we need someone to vibe code a new Google Reader since that was such a popular product. It should just be out there and it's already starting to happen with replacements for Pocket. And it seems like Steven's in the studio, so let's bring him in and talk about Lambda. How are you doing? Welcome to the stream.

• 2:00:36Stephen Balaban?

  Hi guys, how you doing?

• 2:00:37Jordi Hays?

  Welcome.

• 2:00:38John Coogan?

  Great, how are you?

• 2:00:39Stephen Balaban?

  It's great to have you. It's good to see you.

• 2:00:41John Coogan?

  Looking fantastic, by the way.

• 2:00:42Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for wearing a suit.

• 2:00:43John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:00:44Stephen Balaban?

  Naturally, I guess, when in Rome, but that said, this is how, you know, everyone in Silicon Valley should dress.

• 2:00:53John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 2:00:54Jordi Hays?

  We agree.

• 2:00:55John Coogan?

  Are you in Silicon Valley right now? Can you give us a little?

• 2:00:58Jordi Hays?

  Drinking a Monster. Drinking a Monster, let's go.

• 2:01:01John Coogan?

  This is so on brand, it's amazing.

• 2:01:03Stephen Balaban?

  So, I'm actually in my hometown of Charlotte, Vermont. It's where I grew up and it's where I live. And I just got back from landed this morning from.

• 2:01:17John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:01:18Stephen Balaban?

  That stuff.

• 2:01:19John Coogan?

  How would you describe the business these days? I know that.

• 2:01:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, first, we gotta talk about the AI scene in Vermont.

• 2:01:25John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:01:26Jordi Hays?

  Picking up?

• 2:01:27Stephen Balaban?

  You know, uh, yeah, I'd say that there's, there's, there's, there's like one or two, one or two companies. There's, there's a lot of, uh, uh, I'd say, uh, independent minded founders out here, uh, but generally speaking, I'd say, um, it's, uh, more of a farming, farming.

• 2:01:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my little, my little brother who's not in tech went to college in Vermont and just stayed. I've, I've tried to get him to come back forever. He's committed, committed to, to the great state of Vermont, but.

• 2:01:59John Coogan?

  Well, let's introduce him to Masayoshi Son and maybe he gets started with, uh, you know, building an AI company out there.

• 2:02:04Jordi Hays?

  It could happen.

• 2:02:05John Coogan?

  It could happen.

• 2:02:05Jordi Hays?

  It's not off the table.

• 2:02:06John Coogan?

  Um, so yeah, uh, brief introduction, how would you introduce the company? How are you describing, uh, the different offerings and kind of challenges right now?

• 2:02:17Stephen Balaban?

  Yeah, so Lambda is an AI cloud. It's a essentially really massive GPU cluster that all kinds of startups and hyperscalers use. And we've both sort of taken, invested a ton of work. It's basically around a billion dollars worth of GPUs that we've deployed.

• 2:02:46John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:02:46Stephen Balaban?

  Um, and we've invested, you know, at this point, probably around a hundred million dollars into the virtualization software. That allows us to essentially take that massive cluster of GPUs. So you can imagine taking a cluster, let's say 16,000 GPUs. And you can sort of dynamically partition it and hand out little slices to people.

• 2:03:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:08Stephen Balaban?

  Uh, you know, on a, as, as little as a 15 minute, uh, basis. And the, the, it's, it's, it's quite different from, let's say, a bare metal cloud where you need to sign a three year contract. Um, we've, we've basically implemented all this virtualization software that lets you hotel on and off of it.

• 2:03:28John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:03:28Stephen Balaban?

  Um, while still, you know, maintaining high speed, infinite and.

• 2:03:32John Coogan?

  You did the meme, you, another billion dollars for Jensen.

• 2:03:37Stephen Balaban?

  Another billion dollars for Jensen.

• 2:03:39John Coogan?

  Is it, is it actually primarily Nvidia chips? Or are there other GPU providers that are competitive at this point? I've been following George Hotz's journey with AMD. Is, is anything competitive with Nvidia right now from your perspective?

• 2:03:57Stephen Balaban?

  I don't think that there's anything that's competitive with Nvidia right now.

• 2:04:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:01Stephen Balaban?

  And what you just see in the customer demand is, you know, total and utter Nvidia supremacy.

• 2:04:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:09Stephen Balaban?

  And I think that this is going to continue on for some time. The, the test I always like to say is you've got to get a customer. They've got to be able to download kind of any arbitrary model off of Hugging Face. Run that model, train the model, fine tune the model. And then they have to buy from you and then buy again. Right? So that's, that's, that's the test, I think, for any chip manufacturer.

• 2:04:39Stephen Balaban?

  And it's really hard to get a stable software stack.

• 2:04:44John Coogan?

  Do you like the term NeoCloud? Is that appropriate?

• 2:04:50Stephen Balaban?

  You know, I think it's, I think it's fine. I don't, I don't really have any opinion on it. We kind of look at ourselves as, we've always described Lambda as what would the cloud look like? If it was reinvented from the ground up for AI?

• 2:05:07Stephen Balaban?

  You know, training and inferencing large language models, training and inferencing large scale neural networks.

• 2:05:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:14Stephen Balaban?

  And I think that NeoCloud is an appropriate description for, for that concept.

• 2:05:20John Coogan?

  What is the balance between training and inference right now? And how has that evolved over the last couple of years?

• 2:05:28Stephen Balaban?

  Yeah, so, you know, we.

• 2:05:35Stephen Balaban?

  We're, we're, for, for, for the overall business, we're, we're just, we're just a bit over $500 million of top line revenue. And I'd say that, um,

• 2:05:50Stephen Balaban?

  essentially,

• 2:05:51John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:05:52Stephen Balaban?

  Thank you, thank you. Um, essentially, historically, that's been majority training and then, um, sort of minority interest, you know, maybe 80, 80, 20 for, for, uh, you know, training to inference. And, um, now we've started to see that kind of switch over. Um, I would generally say that when I see any sort of net new deal in the, in the space for large scale GPU capacity, it tends to be more inference driven these days.

• 2:06:27John Coogan?

  Sure. That's great. We're actually using the models. It's not just training every bigger models with no, with no, uh, I mean, we saw that, uh, at Google I/O, Sundar Pichai pulled up the chart of tokens generated and it's just completely up until the right.

• 2:06:41Stephen Balaban?

  It's completely up to the right. I mean, you, training is always going to be something where

• 2:06:46Stephen Balaban?

  you do it once. And the whole point of training is that you want to amortize that over as many tokens as possible, right? Cause that's just your fixed cost that you're, you're wanting to spread across as many generations as possible. And so that's the point. The point of training is inference. Um, we're there. I always kind of look at this as like a, I always like to sort AI companies by revenue and just go, okay, well, who's at the top? Probably like OpenAI today, you know, four billion, five billion. It's, it's a little bit hard to, you know,

• 2:07:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, clock it.

• 2:07:13Stephen Balaban?

  to, to exactly guess. But then, you know, next one down, you kind of look, um, it anthropic, 800 million last published, uh, mostly developer API, uh, but probably fast growing. I would imagine they're probably in the billions now because Sonnet 3.7 was really good for code generation. Um, Google doesn't seem to be charging. From what I can tell.

• 2:07:37John Coogan?

  They're charging me $250 a month now, just to.

• 2:07:40Jordi Hays?

  It'll pop up to 500 too.

• 2:07:42John Coogan?

  So they're getting my money.

• 2:07:43Stephen Balaban?

  What are they charging for 250?

• 2:07:44John Coogan?

  So I am now on the Gemini Ultra Plan.

• 2:07:48Stephen Balaban?

  Okay.

• 2:07:49John Coogan?

  And and I have 2.5 Pro Preview. And then I also have access to VO3, but it's very limited. They can only generate two or three video clips per day. It's heavily throttled, but it's a $250 a month plan right now. And it's going to jump up to $500 a month in a few months. So I imagine that across Gemini Pro subscriptions, they're probably going to grow that pretty quickly. Just because I'm seeing the number of five star reviews.

• 2:08:15Stephen Balaban?

  Zero to billion dollars in.

• 2:08:17John Coogan?

  100%.

• 2:08:18Stephen Balaban?

  In a couple of weeks, right?

• 2:08:19John Coogan?

  Absolutely.

• 2:08:19Stephen Balaban?

  And so when you kind of do that breakdown, what do we see in terms of like total top line revenue? It's all inference, right? I mean, you know, all of that is inference demand, whether it's image or chat GPT or or video generation. Then, you know, mid journeys, probably, you know, in the hundreds of millions of dollars, revenue run rate. And so there's some substantial businesses that are being built right now.

• 2:08:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what are some kind of narrative? What are some narrative violations, things that you feel like the broader ecosystem is getting wrong right now? Given you guys have unique insight into actual usage and activity?

• 2:09:01Stephen Balaban?

  Yeah, um, okay. So the the first one is just, obviously, I think if you look back, there was that that Sequoia Think Boy piece that was published on like, where's the Jeep? You know, where's the AI revenue? What's, you know?

• 2:09:20John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:09:21Stephen Balaban?

  They sort of did that. There's a lot wrong with that analysis. So I don't need to go into that, but I'd say like the general pessimism of like, oh, it's a bubble. It's a bubble. It's a bubble.

• 2:09:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:32Stephen Balaban?

  I just remember, you know, I started Lambda in 2012. 2013 was the year that like Mark Zuckerberg went to NERIPs and hired hired Yan Le Cun to to start Facebook AI research at the time. And I just remember everybody in the field kind of at the time looking at, oh, is it a bubble? You know, Google's just bought DeepMind and, you know, Facebook's buying Yan Le Cun. So it must be a bubble because because Mark Zuckerberg just came to NERIPs. But um, I think that, I think that in general, everybody underestimates how, just what exponential growth looks like from, you know, it, it always looks the same in the, the same, you know,

• 2:10:16Stephen Balaban?

  wherever you are, it always looks, looks essentially the same. Um, and how good the code generation has gotten over the last 90 days, right? If you were to flip back before January, um, you know, state of the art for code generation was uh, 4.0 and then oh, oh one hadn't even, I think, been exactly released yet. Um, with oh, one, oh, four, Claude Sonnet 3537, all this stuff, the code generation is getting so good that we, I, I think I can see here, which is in a couple of years, you're just going to have a function that goes from

• 2:11:00Stephen Balaban?

  cash into software. And that is going to completely change the way that businesses operate because, you know, you're going to spin up 500 different versions of the pieces of software that you're searching for. You're going to be able to do this sort of like high throughput search through software space. It's going to spit out a bunch of things. It's going to have like a, maybe a tastemaker model that just rates it based off of, you know, the computer use compiled version of that software. It's like, well, these are all the source code bases for all 500 pieces of software. These are the top five. I'd recommend you launch this one. Go for it. And I think that's going to really change the way that the world operates on the, in, in technology.

• 2:11:42John Coogan?

  So should you learn to code if you're a teenager?

• 2:11:45Stephen Balaban?

  Yeah, absolutely. I, I think that you, you still, you still need to learn how to code. Um, I, I, I don't see, I, I think it's, it's really hard to.

• 2:11:55Stephen Balaban?

  In the intermediate period, you're still gonna need to to learn how to code.

• 2:11:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:12:02Stephen Balaban?

  I think that you're just gonna see just much higher leverage teams in the world.

• 2:12:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, you might always need to think like a programmer and so learning to code is part of that process. That makes sense. What about the evolution of chips and semis?

• 2:12:18Jordi Hays?

  Before we dive into that, I I feel like there's this general thesis that

• 2:12:26Jordi Hays?

  sort of, we've talked about this on the show, this idea of like, we call it like Jiro dreams of sushi software, right? This like really craft.

• 2:12:36John Coogan?

  More art than science.

• 2:12:37Jordi Hays?

  More, yeah, art and science, like super intentionally built software that that is just, you know, super, super thoughtful. And you can see this in companies that like maybe go after a category like CRM where it's like, okay, Salesforce dominates CRM, but they come in and they build this sort of really beautiful, really thoughtful experience and and typically if the teams are good enough, they'll end up doing doing well. I I think there's this sense that like that class of software is like safe from completely AI generated software, but in the in the scenario you laid out where you generate 500 different variations of a potential tool that you'd use and it sort of automatically ranks it

• 2:13:22Jordi Hays?

  based on some taste driven benchmark. Is is it possible that that class of software is is at extreme risk to disruption as well?

• 2:13:32Stephen Balaban?

  Yeah, certainly, I think anything that's just software is is at extreme risk. You you look at a business like Salesforce, right? It's almost as if, I mean, how important is the software? How important is the brand? How important is the distribution model? And I think that when you look, the bigger the company gets, the more important the the ladder become, you know, the distribution model. The the brand of the company, how deeply embedded it is inside of the day to day life of the customer that's using it. And it's sort of like, well, what is the value of Salesforce? Is it the software? No, not at all. The value of Salesforce is the fact that every single company in the world, the first thing they they do when they hire a VP of Sales is

• 2:14:15Stephen Balaban?

  like, make sure they have a Salesforce implementation. And then it sticks with the company until their S and P 500 component. And then all the company's data is in Salesforce, right? Does that have anything to do with the software that Salesforce has written? Is that the anything? Does the mode have anything to do with the replacement cost of developing the software? Crowd app?

• 2:14:34Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:14:35Stephen Balaban?

  No. Right? So it's kind of interesting because like, stuff like software will be solved, but then stuff like, how do you build mode? And how do you build a business won't be solved? So it's sort of like, maybe just, you know, this is, we're in the, we're in the world for just, uh, the, the, the business co-founder dominates.

• 2:14:55John Coogan?

  Wow. The era of the ideas guy. The era of the ideas guy is upon us.

• 2:15:00Stephen Balaban?

  Yeah. That'll be really exciting.

• 2:15:03John Coogan?

  Okay, I, I, I want to talk more specifically about the, the path to this future of like, turning money into software and creating value that way. What is more important? Just bigger training runs, knocking down higher MMLU numbers, benchmarks, higher IQ points versus distilling models, faster inference, cheaper inference, baking some of these models down into silicon, what we're seeing with etched and, and putting the transformer architecture on a chip. They seem like two different vectors. Every time a new model comes out, my reaction is always like, well, this is good enough. I just want it to be faster.

• 2:15:45John Coogan?

  And so mid journey V six or whatever, I'm usually just like, yeah, I just love this to be instantaneous. As soon as I type the words, just generating in milliseconds. At the same time, the labs seem to be iterating towards bigger and better models and they, and, and they, they have a mentality of like, job's not finished. But what's your take on, on those, on the trade offs there?

• 2:16:09Stephen Balaban?

  Well, what we're seeing with the advent of reasoning models, a- a- as well as like the, the, the models that basically will do reasoning and then sort of like retrain the model to not do any reasoning, but sort of baking in the reasoning. Um, is that this, the, the amount of compute that you, you know, the, the, the performance improves as a function of how much runtime compute you do.

• 2:16:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:16:36Stephen Balaban?

  And so if you can make a faster model, uh, and you can reason faster about it, you, you could, you can make an argument that, that, that actually, um, might perform,

• 2:16:49Stephen Balaban?

  might perform better, um, in some circumstances. I think that we're, we're going to see all dimensions of that space explored by a variety of companies. You know, there will be people out there at the edge, building the biggest frontier models. There'll be, be people quantizing and distilling those models down to something that runs locally on your phone. Um, that was actually kind of one of the things I did before this iteration of, of, of where Lambda is. It was sort of trained ConvNets that ran locally on the, on the iPhone.

• 2:17:21Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 2:17:21Stephen Balaban?

  Uh, and this is like 2013 and it, it, you, you kind of see the same thing. There's use cases for that. It's super useful. You, you can have privacy preserving image recognition on your phone. Um, but it's not going to be the same quality as like something that goes back to a data center. I think actually if there's one narrative violation, just going back to, you know, you said this like world of software generation. A lot of people are kind of stuck in this like, okay, AI is, is generating software. And I've got this entire, I think thesis on where the future where we're going, you won't need any software at all and that the neural network is going to completely replace all the software.

• 2:18:04Stephen Balaban?

  And so, uh, let me walk you through this. The idea is that instead of generating a program, let's say a calculator, an Excel spreadsheet, just go to chat GPT and say, hi, please behave like a program. Please behave like this calculator or behave like this spreadsheet. Generate an Ask a User interface for me and I want you to, um, essentially just. Respond, you know, implement the logic of that program in your mind. And that is what I call neural software. And it's really squishy, you know, normal software is really brittle, right? If you make a typo, you you leave a keyword out, you miss a semicolon, it's not going to compile.

• 2:18:48Stephen Balaban?

  This type of neural software, it's not really possible to have a bug. It's really more just that you have a misunderstanding or you've misprompted it or something. And I think that that's where all of this is going. It's not code generation, but it's going to be your your large language models are going to be, you know, sort of take over more and more of program space. And you you will be largely interacting with these sort of transformer models or next, you know, token, you know, prediction models generally. And they will be the software that you interact with.

• 2:19:27John Coogan?

  What about diffusion models? We saw Google bring diffusion to text models. I was seeing something like 900 tokens per second. They generated, I saw a demo where someone generated a full calendar application, all the code for the calendar application in three seconds. It was 3,000 tokens or something like that. That feels like a, you know, an algorithm from image generation that now we're seeing in the text world. Simultaneously, we're seeing images in chat G P T, maybe do something more transformer or token based. And so these lines are blurring. Can you give us any insight into what's happening there? Is that exciting?

• 2:20:10John Coogan?

  Or is this kind of just in the experimental phase?

• 2:20:14Stephen Balaban?

  Well, I mean, this is like, if it's, whether it's exciting or not, is going to kind of answer the question you had earlier, which is how successful are baked in transformer ASICS going to be? Right? Because sort of like as the space, the underlying space changes,

• 2:20:31Stephen Balaban?

  then every one of those sort of ASICS now becomes a lot less valuable. And you kind of have to go back to the the more general tensor processing that you see inside of tensor cores and you see inside of the architecture of like things like T P U's. And Away from, you know, really specific things that have to do with like the KV cache and different transformer specific architectural things you might want to put into an ASIC. And so I think that it's it's interesting to see you've got diffusion models, you've got things like Mamba. And and where where where you there's there's alternatives to the transformer that have.

• 2:21:13Stephen Balaban?

  What's what's called basically linear complexity in terms of the. The the amount of memory that that you're that you need for. The context length growing, which is better than the quadratic complexity you see inside of normal transformer models. And.

• 2:21:35Stephen Balaban?

  I think there's there's going to continue to be a lot of innovation in the model architecture space. And that will probably benefit Nvidia a lot.

• 2:21:44John Coogan?

  Got it. Are there any other side projects in semiconductors that are exciting to you? Huge wafer scale computing like Cerberus, we talked a little bit about baking things down onto ASICs. We saw that path play out with Bitcoin with the FPGAs and then the ASIC kind of Bitcoin mining. There's other approaches and I'm sure Nvidia is not asleep at the wheel. Jensen Wong is in founder mode. He's he's he's aware of the boom. He's aware of the demand. I'm sure people are asking him, how can we run diffusion models faster? How can we run transformer models faster? What are you expecting on the semiconductor side over the next like few years?

• 2:22:25Stephen Balaban?

  Well, it's pretty clear that I'd say the the front runners for competing with Nvidia, which are all very far behind Nvidia. But the ones that are sort of. I think the farthest along is probably, I would say today is Google and to some extent, Amazon with Tranium and Infrasia.

• 2:22:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:51Stephen Balaban?

  That space is always evolving fast, but

• 2:22:57Stephen Balaban?

  I think it's it's it's kind of a little bit telling that AMD hasn't with all the resource with all the resources with all the sort of

• 2:23:10Stephen Balaban?

  clarity on what you're supposed to build for the market, hasn't been able to kind of capture enough market share.

• 2:23:17John Coogan?

  Dylan Patel is going to turn it around. He's he's going to write just one more report and AMD is going to be back. I'm bullish. All it takes. I love it. But in terms of, can you give us a little perspective on on? Obviously, if I'm if I'm doing a ton of inference on Lambda, I'm probably in the CUDA ecosystem, probably in Nvidia land. If I want to take that over to Amazon or Google with TPUs, how much of a barrier really is that? Can you kind of explain? Because at the same time, we have these, we have these incredible code generation models. It feels like putting an AI agent on rewrite this CUDA for TPU. That seems like the easiest thing to do.

• 2:24:00John Coogan?

  It seems like a problem perfectly tailor made for AI agents to just sit there and write boring translation code. It's not even it's not even feature design, right?

• 2:24:11Stephen Balaban?

  Wasn't that in the TL where this was making a joke about the the anthropic safety snitching on the user and someone said, port this PyTorch code over to JAX. And then it says, you know, searching calling FBI.

• 2:24:26John Coogan?

  Calling FBI, do not do this.

• 2:24:31John Coogan?

  Pull the rug out of the entire economy.

• 2:24:33Stephen Balaban?

  Preserving the the underlying chips that it's running on.

• 2:24:36John Coogan?

  It's so important to America.

• 2:24:39Stephen Balaban?

  So, so I think that I think that.

• 2:24:44Stephen Balaban?

  Okay, the the the the stuff that this code generation is really good at today is still sort of what I would call within the realm of what, you know, one-shotting a basic program, one-shotting sort of a one-page program where it could be much longer than one page, but it's sort of like single file.

• 2:25:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, or a function, or or, you know, a class, something like that, not necessarily.

• 2:25:07Stephen Balaban?

  Maybe I'm just behind on it a little bit and I'm not, you know, doing what the kids are doing or something with with with sort of an AI IDE, but I just kind of like when I'm when I'm vibe coding, I will just tell either ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude, I'll go, do this in one page, like have it be a one thing, I want to copy and paste this into my my thing and run it. And it's it's quite good at that. Now, when you talk about like going through an entire code base, fixing the compilation errors, because there will be like subtle, subtle bugs that get introduced, it's not quite there yet.

• 2:25:50Stephen Balaban?

  It's the problem is that I now am at like 100% confidence that it is going to be there in just a couple of years. And that that's kind of why why I know that every sort of megawatt that that we build and every GPU that we deploy is just going to get met with demand on the other side because just two years out, like if you just look two years ago, 2023, code generation is primitive.

• 2:26:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:20Stephen Balaban?

  Primitive, it didn't work. Now, today, it really works for more simple programs. I think two years from now, it's just gonna, it's gonna make you feel sick when you look at it.

• 2:26:30John Coogan?

  So what are the big bottlenecks you you foresee between like, energy, water, land? Are you going to be building a data center in space? What do you think in the future looks like for you?

• 2:26:43Stephen Balaban?

  Um, so I think that the, the, the bottleneck is definitely what I call like wrapped power. So the, I think there's plenty of generated power. Right now, it's just not wrapped up in a data center shell. It's not in a powered shell. It's not in a facility that has direct to chip, uh, liquid cooling integrated into it. And so it's sort of like that wrapped up power that's like ready for the current generation and next generation of chips.

• 2:27:17Stephen Balaban?

  I think that there's, there's definitely some like regulatory bottlenecks, or I would just say regulatory hurdles that can be removed. And I think there's a lot of hope that this administration is going to start to remove those. That's like, whether it's like looking at sort of the way that we run utilities where, um, it, it, you kind of have to, in some cases, become, um, an unregulated utility and put like, let's say, you know, build a data center power plant, which is to say behind the grid or not attached to the grid, power generation station next to a data center. And not every state's going to allow that. And I think that there's, there's probably a lot to do in the regulatory side to unleash the free market and let people build.

• 2:28:01Stephen Balaban?

  And so I think that I, I think there's some hope there. And the, the other thing is just,

• 2:28:09Stephen Balaban?

  really, I think, building, uh, large contiguous spaces is like, is pretty clearly the, the answer in my opinion.

• 2:28:19John Coogan?

  Well, good luck with that. Uh, I'm glad I don't have to deal with it.

• 2:28:23Stephen Balaban?

  It's a lot of logistics. It's a real pain.

• 2:28:25John Coogan?

  It sounds like a lot of work, but you've been doing it for 14, 13 years.

• 2:28:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, classic overnight success.

• 2:28:31John Coogan?

  Another decade in you at least, so good luck to you.

• 2:28:33Stephen Balaban?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:28:34John Coogan?

  We'd love to have you back on. This is a fantastic conversation.

• 2:28:36Jordi Hays?

  Come back on again soon.

• 2:28:37Stephen Balaban?

  Thanks, guys.

• 2:28:37John Coogan?

  It's so many fun.

• 2:28:38Stephen Balaban?

  Love what you, love what you do. Long time fan.

• 2:28:41Jordi Hays?

  I didn't, I didn't clock you as a monster guy too. We gotta go deeper on energy drinks.

• 2:28:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's so much to talk about.

• 2:28:47Jordi Hays?

  Lots to talk about.

• 2:28:48John Coogan?

  But this is fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on.

• 2:28:50Stephen Balaban?

  Take care, guys.

• 2:28:50Jordi Hays?

  Great chatting.

• 2:28:52John Coogan?

  Quickly, let me tell you about Numeral Sales Tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes

• 2:28:56Jordi Hays?

  Sales Tax AGI.

• 2:28:58John Coogan?

  On sales tax compliance.

• 2:29:00Jordi Hays?

  Should we sing Sales Tax AGI?

• 2:29:03John Coogan?

  Sales Tax AGI. Uh, go get, uh, go get Numeral. Head over to numeralhq.com.

• 2:29:09Jordi Hays?

  How'd you sleep last night, John?

• 2:29:10John Coogan?

  Um, oh, terrible. I woke up at 4:00 AM. It was a disaster. I'm, I know I'm gonna get cooked, but you don't have to be cooked because you can go to eatsleep.com.

• 2:29:19Jordi Hays?

  Use code TBN.

• 2:29:21John Coogan?

  I got a 76. It was brutal. Oh.

• 2:29:23Jordi Hays?

  99. I can't, I can't get to.

• 2:29:26John Coogan?

  99.

• 2:29:27Jordi Hays?

  I'm back to back 99s. I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

• 2:29:30John Coogan?

  And then also, we got to tell the folks about public.com.

• 2:29:33Jordi Hays?

  Inspire me to grind harder.

• 2:29:34John Coogan?

  Investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields. They're trusted by many.

• 2:29:38Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for multi-asset investing.

• 2:29:40John Coogan?

  Yep. And, uh, and their partnership with Aston Martin, which we might have more information on soon, but stay tuned.

• 2:29:46Jordi Hays?

  I cannot wait.

• 2:29:47John Coogan?

  We got Sam Lessing coming in, the Temple of Technology, very quickly. Um, uh, do you want to do some timeline while we wait for him? Is he here?

• 2:29:55Jordi Hays?

  You know, I love timeline, John.

• 2:29:56John Coogan?

  I know. Uh, Dwarash Patel dropped a banger on Claude 4 day. He sat down with Trenton Bricken and Sholto Douglas, um, talking about Claude 4, how far reinforcement learning can scale. I haven't had a chance to listen to the whole thing. I listened to about half of it, kind of in and out while I was trying to sleep last night. Um, but, uh, I mean, just a very cool vibe of like three people having a conversation right on the day when you want to know this stuff, talking all about, uh, this fascinating metaphor for, for AI safety. Because it's just been controversial. Of course, there's like some drama around some random anthropic news, but the cool thing that I liked was, um, they said, um, basically,

• 2:30:36John Coogan?

  if you want to tell the AGI what to do and how to behave in the best interest of humanity, uh, you could give it specific rules, but it might actually be better to say, imagine there's an envelope, AGI, uh, and in that envelope is what I want you to do, all the rules I want you to follow. You can't access this envelope, but you have to behave in accordance to what you imagine to be in this envelope. And so the HJ is just like, I have to behave in the interest of humanity. It was a cool like thought experiment almost. It was very cool. Anyway, Patrick O'Shaughnessy was shouting it out. He says one of his favorite genres of podcasts is recurrent expert guests on the same show. If you're interested in the nitty gritty of AI model progression, you'll enjoy this. So go check that show out this weekend.

• 2:31:20John Coogan?

  It's a great listen. And we have Sam Lessin from Slow Ventures in the studio. Welcome to the studio.

• 2:31:25Jordi Hays?

  Gentlemen.

• 2:31:25John Coogan?

  There he is. It's Jessica Lessin's husband. There you go.

• 2:31:30Jordi Hays?

  In the flesh.

• 2:31:31Sam Lessin?

  I saw her like literally minutes ago. That's how famous I am.

• 2:31:34Jordi Hays?

  Tell her to, tell her to come by at least and say hi if she's not busy.

• 2:31:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:31:40Sam Lessin?

  She's, uh, she's, she's busy this moment, but you know, maybe later.

• 2:31:43Jordi Hays?

  Well, we got 30 minutes, you know?

• 2:31:44John Coogan?

  We got the crossover of the century. TBPM, the information. It dropped today. It was great.

• 2:31:49Sam Lessin?

  I love that. Yeah, I actually, I, I knew about the development of that story from dinner conversations.

• 2:31:54John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. It was a lot of fun.

• 2:31:55Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I bet. I bet. Abe is, Abe is man.

• 2:31:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:59Sam Lessin?

  There you go.

• 2:32:00Jordi Hays?

  It was, it was fun hanging out with him and, um.

• 2:32:03John Coogan?

  Kind of the Seymour Hershaw.

• 2:32:04Sam Lessin?

  So are you guys, you guys are the cover of the weekend section? Is that right?

• 2:32:06John Coogan?

  We are, we are.

• 2:32:07Sam Lessin?

  The big read?

• 2:32:08Jordi Hays?

  Are you guys gonna do a print edition for us?

• 2:32:10Sam Lessin?

  That's coveted space. I always thought that they should actually do a print edition. I think it's time. Everything goes in a cycle.

• 2:32:16John Coogan?

  I got the, I got the Wall Street Journal here. I need them.

• 2:32:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it really.

• 2:32:19Sam Lessin?

  I know. I was, I was in a.

• 2:32:20Jordi Hays?

  A once weekly, uh, Saturday dropped off on the doorsteps of every home.

• 2:32:25Sam Lessin?

  A hundred percent. I would like hire the kids to like deliver it with the, with the, you know, throwing it out the window.

• 2:32:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:31Sam Lessin?

  Look, I was in an airport lounge in Germany two days ago and they had all the, the print newspapers. And I'm like, look, there's a missing opportunity here. The Germans want to read about the information. They want to read about technology, brothers.

• 2:32:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Let's get it to them.

• 2:32:43Sam Lessin?

  You guys are big in Germany, I'm sure.

• 2:32:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, somebody started translating our streams into Dutch and they're doing other, other things.

• 2:32:51Sam Lessin?

  That doesn't seem like the first choice. Like, don't you want like Mandarin or something? Like Dutch doesn't seem like your number one.

• 2:32:56Jordi Hays?

  We're trying to get, we're trying to get big on Weibo.

• 2:32:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's next. Yeah.

• 2:33:00Jordi Hays?

  But we're expecting to have some.

• 2:33:01John Coogan?

  Some pushback.

• 2:33:02Jordi Hays?

  Some pushback. Um, anyways, uh, it's great to have you on as always.

• 2:33:08Sam Lessin?

  Congrats on your success. You guys are everywhere. This isn't the new studio yet, though.

• 2:33:11Jordi Hays?

  Well, you're a part of it. You're a part of, you're a part of that success.

• 2:33:13John Coogan?

  You have to come down. Next time you're in LA, come by in person. It'd be great.

• 2:33:16Sam Lessin?

  Come by in person.

• 2:33:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Tuesday will be the first show.

• 2:33:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:19Sam Lessin?

  It's a lot closer than Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, you know?

• 2:33:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:23John Coogan?

  What's, what's there?

• 2:33:24Jordi Hays?

  Is that the new Netflix?

• 2:33:26Sam Lessin?

  CNBC. CNBC.

• 2:33:27Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 2:33:28Sam Lessin?

  You can't make this whole CNBC rival thing and not know where CNBC is.

• 2:33:33John Coogan?

  Everyone always says, like, yeah, Andrew Reid was like, oh, they're making Squawk Box for tech. And I was like, gotta start watching Squawk Boxing.

• 2:33:41Jordi Hays?

  Netflix, Netflix is also, Netflix has a new billion dollar New Jersey studio.

• 2:33:48John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe some New Jersey and maybe we're taking the fight to New Jersey in the future. We'll see.

• 2:33:51Sam Lessin?

  Let's pick it. LA is fine.

• 2:33:53Jordi Hays?

  Where were you, where were you traveling this week?

• 2:33:56Sam Lessin?

  I, I, I went, I've had an insane travel schedule, but I was, Monday I went, I was New York, Frankfurt, New York, San Francisco was my, was my week.

• 2:34:07Jordi Hays?

  What's going on in, in Germany?

• 2:34:09Sam Lessin?

  Germany was a personal thing I'd take care of, but, but New York was the Solana acceleration. What is it? The Solana, big Solana conference, which they call, which is ship or die. Very dramatic branding.

• 2:34:20Jordi Hays?

  Nice. You're infamous there, right? The GM, the GM guy, do you still get comments on that?

• 2:34:26Sam Lessin?

  You know, I saw, I saw Raj backstage, you know, I was, I was one of Solana's first investors. I like, my, my, Jason Calcanis, I was the first investor in Uber. It was like, I like do that for Solana, right? And so, you know, I've, I've known those guys for a long time. And I saw Raj backstage, we were reminiscing when I did the GM thing, which became one of the first meme coins and blew up. And got, if you remember, it got Raj banned.

• 2:34:49Jordi Hays?

  No, I know. I know, that was crazy.

• 2:34:53Jordi Hays?

  It was such a funny.

• 2:34:54Sam Lessin?

  About that.

• 2:34:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that, this was like Twitter still, right? So it was like somebody at Twitter was like, didn't get the joke, obviously didn't have context that like you guys are boys and just.

• 2:35:05Sam Lessin?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:06Jordi Hays?

  Hit the ban button.

• 2:35:06Sam Lessin?

  The thing is, I unfortunately have other people on Twitter legitimately threaten to kill me, which that's not so good. You gotta get that taken down, but the, the Raj was a pretty funny one for them to respond so, so quickly to.

• 2:35:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, quick reaction. There's so much, so much to cover.

• 2:35:21John Coogan?

  It's AI week.

• 2:35:22Jordi Hays?

  It's AI week.

• 2:35:23Sam Lessin?

  Isn't it every week AI week, boys?

• 2:35:25Jordi Hays?

  No, but this week.

• 2:35:26John Coogan?

  This one was particularly AI week.

• 2:35:27Sam Lessin?

  Because of I O.

• 2:35:28John Coogan?

  Microsoft built, Google I O, Open I I O, Anthropic, a big, are you, are you taking a victory lap on the idea that this is a sustaining innovation that Google's gonna win?

• 2:35:41Sam Lessin?

  You guys actually, I'll tell you a funny, a funny anecdote. You guys know my associate, Jack Rains. You know this guy?

• 2:35:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:48Jordi Hays?

  Your associate.

• 2:35:49Sam Lessin?

  He's right over there. Jack, he can come wave for a second.

• 2:35:52Jordi Hays?

  Hey, Jack, come say hi.

• 2:35:53Sam Lessin?

  Jack sends me this long missive this week about how amazing Google is and how Google is gonna win the AI war.

• 2:36:02Jordi Hays?

  What's up, dude?

• 2:36:02Sam Lessin?

  And I'm like, what value are you adding? I've been saying this for two years.

• 2:36:08Sam Lessin?

  I'm like, thank you. I'm like.

• 2:36:10Speaker 09

  I wanted to check out all the little Google.

• 2:36:11Sam Lessin?

  I was like, I was like, Jack, I was like, Jack, you know, you're an associate at an early-stage venture capital fund, telling us to buy Google stock is not exactly.

• 2:36:19Jordi Hays?

  Hey, you guys, I want to see Slow as the next crossover.

• 2:36:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, crossover. Become an R I A, do it.

• 2:36:24Jordi Hays?

  Put 30%.

• 2:36:25Sam Lessin?

  No, never. We've actually looked into it. Definitely not a thing we will ever do.

• 2:36:28Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, I mean, the, the, my favorite comparison, I forget who posted it, but they were like, would you, do you want, you know, Google at, you know, 17 times earnings or Costco at 50 times earnings? Like at this moment, this AI inflection point.

• 2:36:43Sam Lessin?

  Look, here's the negative on I O. The negative I O is that, per usual, Google's actually terrible at marketing, right? And so they just launch everything. And so you're like, I have no idea even where to focus right now, right? Like, it's, it's not.

• 2:37:01Speaker 09

  Thanks, Jeff.

• 2:37:01John Coogan?

  Focus on generative AI videos, V I O three, that's the thing.

• 2:37:05Sam Lessin?

  It's like so many things. You're like, I don't know. But the net of it is like, they're just crushing it, right? Like from a tech perspective. And I gotta say, I'll tell you a funny story. I spent like 20 hours quote unquote vibe coding over the last week because I was on so many airplanes. And it turns out airplane wifi vibe coding, perfect match of activity. So I just like. Was like messing with these things till my eyes bled. And you know what happened in hour 11? What? I stopped using ChatGPT and went all in on Gemini. Cause it's actually better. Two, five pros is like way better at a bunch of these coding tasks. It's better at structuring. It's like a bunch of stuff. So it's, I think it was absolutely a Google week.

• 2:37:40Jordi Hays?

  But we're using Codex.

• 2:37:43Sam Lessin?

  No, I wasn't using Codex. Oh, there you go.

• 2:37:47Sam Lessin?

  Look, this is one of my other insights from the week. Spending a week, you know, literally flying around the country, vibe coding in the air. Is, um, you know, the, the, the whole what model to use thing is a complete fucking mess. Right? And I think the analogy I now have in my head is it's kind of like, imagine walking into a crowded room where you don't know anyone and saying, who should I trust? Right? And then by the way, every two seconds, a new person pops into the room. You've no, and like I, people are like, oh.

• 2:38:13Jordi Hays?

  Or, or, or you can trust this person 95% of the time. You can't trust them with your life, you know, but.

• 2:38:20Sam Lessin?

  That's a totally, that's a totally separate chain of thought. I think it's important. I was talking to some entrepreneurs today about, if you think about what AI is today, it's like having it a B minus employee. Or like an 80 percenter. And the question is, how do you get value out of 80 percenters is actually more difficult than it looks in a lot of ways. Right? Because the reality is so much of work is about trusting someone.

• 2:38:39Jordi Hays?

  But isn't it more, isn't it more their B minus because it's, you're averaging their effectiveness on different things? In my experience, it's like for certain tasks, it's like 80, 90% of the time it's amazing. And then some percentage of the time, it's so bad that you would want to, you would ask the employee, is everything okay? Like you've never done.

• 2:38:59Sam Lessin?

  Kind of, but I think the other thing, the thing I really think about guys is, you know, if you think, people are always like, oh, there are all these tasks that AI is more efficient at. And so clearly those jobs will just go away and it'll be, and I think that's exactly the wrong model. Cause the reality, what people don't understand is the real reason you hire people to do work is not to do the work. It's to have a throat to choke when the work goes badly, right? It's like, why do you have an accountant? You don't have an accountant to do your taxes. You have an accountant so that when the IRS comes and says, what's wrong with, why you get this wrong? You're like, I didn't do it, that guy did it, right? And so the, I think that's the interesting thing is like, there's all these models like, great, good news. You get rid of the employee and now you get a queue that's mostly right and you approve. And you're like, I don't want to approve that stuff. Like, the whole point is to have someone else.

• 2:39:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think our, our example is like, we use a lot of the different deep research products. And like, we still would love to hire an amazing researcher.

• 2:39:48Sam Lessin?

  Yeah, so that you can fire them when they're wrong, right? Like, you need like, it just, the point is like, there's this whole, I think there's a lot of like.

• 2:39:54Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's an agency thing too. It's like, if you could tell, if you could tell deep research to like, try itself and then try other products and then combine the outputs of all the different things. And maybe that's a research agent that can.

• 2:40:10Sam Lessin?

  There's, there's all these things, but I think the ultimate model in my mind is I don't even care what the average persons are using. I don't care about some review online that's four stars for coding for this type of, I don't care. What I care about is what are the smartest people I know in the world using? And like, how do you make that transparent? So I could just be like, oh, it's this type of task, I'm going to trust this model for that. And like, that needs to be up to date. It's much more of like an identity problem or like a human trust problem, right? Than it is, you know, a technology problem in a lot of ways. And it's just changing really fast. So it's been a fascinating week, but yeah, net, I mean, pulling, pulling all the way up. Yes, I'm taking a victory lap on Google wins. And yes, I'm taking a victory lap on incumbents win, because that's what's happening.

• 2:40:50Jordi Hays?

  So you're, you're saying to Jack, like, thanks for reading my memo from two years ago?

• 2:40:55Sam Lessin?

  Yeah, exactly. Well, in fairness to Jack, he wasn't on the team two years ago. He was very excited to discover Notebook L, but.

• 2:41:04Jordi Hays?

  Love you, Jack.

• 2:41:05Sam Lessin?

  I gotta, I gotta, gotta get him out of the pool house. Anyway.

• 2:41:10Jordi Hays?

  I want to talk about some other stuff. What, what do you think about the Johnny Ive news and, and hardware generally?

• 2:41:19Sam Lessin?

  I mean, where to begin?

• 2:41:20Jordi Hays?

  I know, I know. This is my favorite part of having you on the show. We don't have to prompt at all. We just like, we could give you three words. Johnny, I've hardware.

• 2:41:28Sam Lessin?

  Well, okay, a few things. First of all, I mean, my tweet on this when it was happening was like, well, I guess all these hundred million dollar AI researchers are cheap, right? Like, it's the designers that are gonna get paid bank on aqua hires in this era, right? Look, I think it was marketed in a really interesting way, right? Like, it's marketed as like, they tried to pick the biggest number possible. It's a 2%. They paid 2% for this thing, right? For him. They marketed as it's this big number. I think because that's, it's kind of the pissing match of AI, right? Is you're supposed to look really big and powerful with big number. And I'm sure Johnny doesn't mind being told that he's worth $6 billion. But like, it's kind of one of those interesting PR stories of like, how you shape the narrative as much as anything else.

• 2:42:10Sam Lessin?

  The hardware thing is interesting. Like, on one hand, I actually think it's like, if you're open AI, you do need a hardware play. You're gonna get fucked otherwise, right? Like, you know, Meta discovered this years ago, which is like, being beholden to other people's hardware is really tough, right? In this case, it's only more so, right? Because of kind of the way these chips are gonna fall with Android and iOS. So I don't think they're wrong. And like, Meta's got its glasses. Everyone's, so like, it's not strategically wrong from first principles. I think the problem is that I have is, I just think that like, the likelihood they're gonna successfully introduce a new piece of hardware is like, zero, right? Like, and that's just, you know, it's, you know, you're gonna have a phone, and they could try to compete on the phone,

• 2:42:52Sam Lessin?

  but it's very hard for them to imagine building like, a fully featured phone that, you know, whatever, and then also having something that's so great.

• 2:42:58Jordi Hays?

  Well, the one thing that does seem clear, haven't they said this is a new type of device that will integrate with your phone and your computer? And that screams to me, okay, well, is app, yeah, yeah, I said septum piercing where AI.

• 2:43:13Sam Lessin?

  I saw that. Well, you know, my tape was E-Kane. Did you see e-cane? So when I left, in 2014.

• 2:43:20Jordi Hays?

  No, but sorry, sorry to finish my thought. The issue with that is if you're saying we're going to create a new device that integrates with your Apple ecosystem, that seems like a bit of like an uphill battle. Look what happened to Pebble, right, and the Apple Watch, right?

• 2:43:35Sam Lessin?

  In the end of the day, it's like, look, you know, you have, the iPhone is a hugely breakthrough device. This is, by the way, not my line, it's a friend's line, but like hugely breakthrough device. You already had a phone, right? You know, it wasn't like a new thing you were putting on your body. The glasses work, that's a thing that was already on your body. The watch work, it's a thing that, you know, it's really hard to imagine you're going to get through with some new device. So my joke, but it's only half a joke is, look, you know, 12 years ago, I got obsessed with the idea of making an e-cane. So imagine like bringing back the cane, right?

• 2:44:08Jordi Hays?

  That's what you meant.

• 2:44:09Sam Lessin?

  And like, no idea where you're at.

• 2:44:10John Coogan?

  Nova cane.

• 2:44:11Sam Lessin?

  And if you think about, if you think about the cane, it's actually, you put a shitload of batteries in it.

• 2:44:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:44:17Sam Lessin?

  Big antenna, right? And you know what the nice part is, like, the world is getting less safe, you can beat people with it.

• 2:44:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:44:25Sam Lessin?

  The world is like, the world is aging, so like, everyone needs canes, you know, like, there's all these like macro trends in favor of bringing back the cane. And then, you know, could you drop like a GPU and a microphone and a camera in the top and like talk to your cane?

• 2:44:39John Coogan?

  Smart cane.

• 2:44:40Sam Lessin?

  You know?

• 2:44:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, smart cane.

• 2:44:41Sam Lessin?

  A smart cane.

• 2:44:43Jordi Hays?

  No more dumb, I don't want to be pitched anymore non-AI cane, okay? I've had enough.

• 2:44:48Sam Lessin?

  I'm just saying, like, if they actually, if OpenAI came out and like, we're bringing back the cane, I'd be like, all right, listen, for all my shitting on this.

• 2:44:56John Coogan?

  You know that Johnny Ive got his start at a design firm that was working on bathrooms? And so maybe there's all like smart toilet, you know?

• 2:45:04Sam Lessin?

  Yeah, well, there is, someone just came out, there's a, there is like a new Fitbit for your poop. I know some friends that have funded that, that's the whole thing.

• 2:45:12Jordi Hays?

  I funded that.

• 2:45:13John Coogan?

  You funded that? I know some people that funded that.

• 2:45:15Jordi Hays?

  It's called, it's called Thron, it's called Thron. I think it's interesting for a bunch of reasons. One is, it's just like personally as like a quote unquote biohacker, there's so much information on how your digestion, what's happening with your digestion, your hydration, all these different things.

• 2:45:33Sam Lessin?

  In the end of the day, you want to copy behaviors people are already doing. And you know, in college, one of my roommates, Brian, would send me pictures of his poop all the time. So like, you know, you just gotta double down.

• 2:45:42John Coogan?

  Let's move on. Let's move on.

• 2:45:44Jordi Hays?

  Brutal.

• 2:45:44John Coogan?

  Uh, hyperscaler capex, give us anything to get us off of this.

• 2:45:49Sam Lessin?

  Well, here's my hyperscaler capex, here's my line on it. I flew through JFK today. They're spending $20 billion renovating JFK. I'm like, this capex is nothing. Spend more money on AI. Like, if you're gonna spend $20 billion on like renovating JFK all of a sudden, spending $100 billion on AI doesn't seem so crazy.

• 2:46:09Jordi Hays?

  What about, uh, say, say as much as you can about what Meta, you know, Meta's playbook over the next kind of six to 12 months. I know they've been having talent, you kind of retention. Yeah, Lama, Behemoth, delayed.

• 2:46:26John Coogan?

  Delayed.

• 2:46:27Sam Lessin?

  Look, in the end of the day, I, again, I, as you know, have huge respect for the team there and the leadership there. I think the beauty of Meta, as I've said many times, is it's a heads you win, tails you win. Right? You know, from, from a, from a investor perspective, right? Which is, if you think about it, it's like, the most obvious, highest value use case in the world for everything that exists is making ads way more targeted and effective. Right? And that's happening and it's an incredible trend to ride and they're gonna crush it. You know, Mark and that team is like deeply competitive. They want to win, win, win, right? And so just from a pure competition perspective, I think they're gonna like go to the mat to win, win, win. And like, there'll be many chapters to that, but the good news is they have a massively profitable business and a immediate use case, right?

• 2:47:09Sam Lessin?

  That is deeply aligned. And so I just, you know, I learned a long, long, long time ago to never bet against Mark, especially when he cares about it.

• 2:47:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like with Meta, there's huge value to having Lama be a, a free LLM for them that they can vend into every corner of the app, even in places the consumer doesn't feel or, or see. So profanity filtering and, uh, understanding what content goes where, ad matching, uh, generative AI to clean up Instagram photos, all these things that will just be under the surface. Yeah. As opposed to what Google's doing, which is like, now we have 10 new apps, Notebook LM. Like you're, we're not seeing that for Meta and maybe that's the right strategy.

• 2:47:48Sam Lessin?

  I, look, in the end of the day, Meta has the most natural, beautiful use cases for AI, which is what you're pointing out. And therefore, like, they don't need to do a bunch of crazy shit, right? They just need to like win at like the core. And then basically, again, the open source thing is clear. It's like, they actually for, like, think about ads. They don't really care if they're doing the AI or someone else's because it's all going to go to them either way. Right. At the end of the day, it's just better if more people have access to it and the innovation will happen. So, look, one of the things I did in my vibe when I got really into like all the platforms, right? I spent a bunch of time, remember Digital Ocean? Like Digital Ocean is doing a great job with AI, right? Like it turns out like their services are really good and like it was really easy to boot up some agents on top of like, you know, a knowledge base on top of, you know.

• 2:48:29John Coogan?

  That's always the worst part is like to play, you, you write some code and you want to actually get it on a server. It's always still a hassle.

• 2:48:34Sam Lessin?

  And it's like, they've actually done a great, I was like incredibly impressed, but like, you know, and then you say like, where is Lama showing up? It's like, oh, it's like right there. Like you just click a button and you're using Lama. It's like no bullshit.

• 2:48:44John Coogan?

  We gotta get a killer video generation model out of Meta. Like they, they're the only one that has another data source that's similar to YouTube.

• 2:48:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How do you see that market? How do you see that market evolving? There's a bunch of foundation model labs doing video generation and I can see some of those getting to the point where they could crush it for big Hollywood movie studio, you know, making very specific types of scenes or assets. But then it feels like the low end of the market for, you know, if you're a random SMB and you want to make an ad or something like that. Yeah. Maybe use some vertical SaaS, but also.

• 2:49:20Sam Lessin?

  I wonder how much it matters. I mean, like we, I had this conversation actually with my good friend, Dave Moran on our little weekly, you know, bullshit session.

• 2:49:27John Coogan?

  More or less.

• 2:49:29Sam Lessin?

  More or less. We were talking about the fact that.

• 2:49:30Jordi Hays?

  Well, Dave also somehow cracked like the top of the angel. There was like the top angel investor list and he, he was the top dog.

• 2:49:39John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 2:49:39Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 2:49:40Sam Lessin?

  Well, let's take on, listen in the AI. We won't talk about the validity of that list. We'll talk about.

• 2:49:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I just like to see my boy Dave at the top.

• 2:49:47Sam Lessin?

  I like to see, look, my boy Kevin, my boy, my partner Kevin was like number four on the list. It was a very interesting list.

• 2:49:52John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:49:53Sam Lessin?

  But the, uh, I wasn't on the list, but you know, that's okay. The uh, but uh, what I was gonna say is the um, the thing Dave and I were talking about is like, look, you know, if you think about what's going on like with memes, right, in this whole world, you have, this is like high road, low road thing. Everyone's really excited about like, super high-end video generation and Hollywood and da-da-da. You know what's happened in the media landscape? Those things don't make any money. No one cares about these movies anyway. Like, they're consuming like, low-end crowdsourced memes on the internet. Like, that's where attention is, that's where the energy is, that's where entertainment is. And so, I think obviously the pure technologists and like, the highfalutin people are really excited about like, the narrative storytelling, beautiful da-da-da-da.

• 2:50:35Sam Lessin?

  But when it comes to like, what tools will actually be used, how things will be marketed, how humans will interact with each other and communicate in the store. I think actually it would be much more budget-y tools that actually win. And the other stuff is kind of just, you know, intellectual, you know, masturbation a little bit. It doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, like, people should do it.

• 2:50:52Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of that, speaking of that, why is, speaking of uh, masturbation, why is OnlyFans getting priced at eight times earnings?

• 2:51:01Sam Lessin?

  You know, I, I so desperately wanna buy OnlyFans, guys. I've wanted to buy it for years. I had plans, like, there, there's been a few iterations of this.

• 2:51:10Sam Lessin?

  No, it's so good. It's so good. I just keep it going.

• 2:51:15Sam Lessin?

  What do you have against OnlyFans?

• 2:51:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I just...

• 2:51:19Sam Lessin?

  It's a mess. So good. This is, but your reaction is part of the reason I wanna buy it, right?

• 2:51:23Jordi Hays?

  No, no, you love the controversy.

• 2:51:25Sam Lessin?

  The buyer pool is small, so the price is low. The, well, that's part of it. The other thing is everyone, because of the buyers, it's actually the best AI short you could possibly think of, right? Because part of the reason it's getting sold, my understanding, and like, the whole story is like, well, we're gonna have all these AI girlfriends. Sure. So like, the creator economy is gonna get crushed on these things. And I think that is like, a very 101 simplistic take on what's actually...

• 2:51:45Jordi Hays?

  The other thing is a lot of the, a lot of the costs that goes into... Basically, generating revenue on OnlyFans is from messaging, which is done by people in

• 2:51:57John Coogan?

  It's already all LLMs already.

• 2:51:59Sam Lessin?

  And AI. So this is the thing. Everyone, the, the, OpenAI is like the greatest human loop AI platform in existence, right? From positioning, because you have, I think you still need real brands. I think that having human brands matters at the top end. Your ability to then like effectively automate, it's kind of like the Facebook story, which is your ability to slot an AI and bank it, right? On messaging is like off the charts with OnlyFans and improve the quality. So I think it's interesting. I think it's like this classic thing where it's being sold. I've always loved the asset. It's the number one creator platform in the world. It's so defensible because they actually have a very low take rate because they're so big that no one can, no one can assault them, right? Because of how they're kind of set up.

• 2:52:37Jordi Hays?

  What's the take rate?

• 2:52:39Sam Lessin?

  It's like, it's really low. I want to say it's like 10%, maybe 15, but it's like much lower than you think. And as a result, like you have this incredible cash engine.

• 2:52:48John Coogan?

  I mean, YouTube's like 45% and many other sites are 30% just for general content creation platforms.

• 2:52:55Sam Lessin?

  The upshot is like this incredible position. It's, it's, I think there are huge product opportunities that always have been with it. But then you have this double storm of like, one, people like you guys boo it because you're, you patrician technology brothers, right? Like, and you won't like acknowledge human nature. People want to do this. And then two, there's all these fancy investors who like, think it's dead because they read the front page of the Wall Street Journal about AI and don't understand what's actually going on. I'm like, that's great. This is my zone.

• 2:53:22John Coogan?

  Underpriced.

• 2:53:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I have no, I-

• 2:53:24John Coogan?

  You're gonna have to become an RIA to do it probably. So good luck.

• 2:53:26Sam Lessin?

  Well, I gotta figure out how to not do that. I also like, for what it's worth, I'm a seed investor. I don't know how to raise the $2 billion. But call me if you got it.

• 2:53:32John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of seed investors, I don't know if you saw this chart from PitchBook. Emerging managers are on track to raise less money this year than they have in a decade.

• 2:53:42Sam Lessin?

  That sounds right.

• 2:53:43John Coogan?

  Uh, it's now under $20 billion. During 2021, it was up at 60 billion. It was really, really speed, uh, really spiked. 2022 was around 50 billion and now we're down in like the single digit billions.

• 2:53:56Sam Lessin?

  Just one JFK renovation.

• 2:53:58John Coogan?

  That is, that is a lot of money for emerging managers. This is, I assume is defined as like first

• 2:54:03Sam Lessin?

  We're gonna put $20 billion as an emerging manager.

• 2:54:05Jordi Hays?

  Wait, how much did they get in 2021?

• 2:54:06John Coogan?

  Well, you put it, I mean, you put it in like 20,000, $50 million funds. That's the idea at least, or that's what happened.

• 2:54:13Sam Lessin?

  They're all, I just, I've been so skinny. I don't see any of this working out for anyone, right? Like, you know, I, I know it's, it's one of the, the, they'll always be the random winner.

• 2:54:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, but, but isn't that the nature of the game? It's like startups follow a power law, so do funds.

• 2:54:29Jordi Hays?

  I just think we have to hit a size gong because the 64 billion that they raised in 2021

• 2:54:34John Coogan?

  Still earning fees.

• 2:54:35Jordi Hays?

  12 billion of fees.

• 2:54:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:54:37Jordi Hays?

  And so let's just give it up.

• 2:54:39John Coogan?

  Congratulations to the emerging managers.

• 2:54:41Sam Lessin?

  Guys, but it's kind of, guys, I think you guys are cheering too much. If you do the math on being

• 2:54:46Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm joking to be clear. I mean,

• 2:54:48Sam Lessin?

  Yeah, being, doing the math on being a small fund and being locked in for 10 years as like a solo GP with your emerging manager fund and your kind of shitty subscale, it's actually a pretty bad business.

• 2:54:58John Coogan?

  What's more than being locked in?

• 2:54:59Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, no. Like what, what you're saying, what you're saying is so real, which is imagine you have a startup and it's like, okay, you have to commit to this startup for a decade, even if by two and a half years in, like it's not working.

• 2:55:13John Coogan?

  Is that real though? I feel like most emerging managers, they, they write the checks in the first year and a half, two years. And then, yeah, they get investor updates to pass them along to LPs, but like they could go and get a job at big tech and

• 2:55:23Jordi Hays?

  Sure, but it's still, even if it's a couple hours a week for 10 years.

• 2:55:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I guess that is a kind of hassle.

• 2:55:29Sam Lessin?

  Look, it's also, it keeps you from doing other, it, it's just messy and complicated. And the reality is again, like if you're earning two in 20 and you're never going to see the 20, right? Like the two ends up actually, you know, on a $50 million fund after you pay for actual things, you're doing fine. Like no one's crying, but like, it's not like some great business, right? Like, I think the only reason to raise a $50 million emerging manager fund is like to have enough card flips to prove that you can size up a bit. Now, I think the flip side is true too, which is I don't know how anyone makes money on a seed fund that's over $200 million. I, I just know the math doesn't work, right? I think there's like a sweet spot of fund sizes that work. Too small, you know, the economics to make it work. Even if you have a banger, it's like not that important.

• 2:56:10Sam Lessin?

  And like too big, it's just like the law of big numbers. You're never going to produce an important fund, right? From a returns perspective. So. Look, what we do, seed investing, we're, I think, in the sweet spot, obviously, because why would I not think that? You know, we've made money, I'm very proud of that, I care about DPI, whatever. But here's the thing.

• 2:56:27Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, sorry, we're laughing, we have to explain because you can't see it, but the Chyron right now says, "Seed investor, don't become a seed investor."

• 2:56:37Sam Lessin?

  Stay the fuck out.

• 2:56:40Sam Lessin?

  But then, the reality is that like, you know, it's not, even from my perspective, it's not the best business. You do it because you love it, right? But if you just did the math, being an asset manager and earning 2% and just getting enough DPI to justify more 2% fees is for sure a more scalable business model, which is why most people do it.

• 2:56:58John Coogan?

  Do you think, do you think, uh, part of why every emerging manager jumps into seed is just like, they can't do growth? Because I, I, I feel like the skillset of being a growth investor is in some ways more repeatable, you know, you get people that come out of investment banks and they have all the skills to underwrite a company that's at a billion dollars, there's less risk. But at the same time, when you think about someone who's, you know, starting a new fund, if they're going out and raising a growth fund on Fund One, like, that just feels harder to marshal that capital.

• 2:57:26Sam Lessin?

  Well, I think that's an LP question. It's like, who's going to give you LP level dollars, right? And like, by the way, if you're, if you're going a later-stage fund, you're trying to like, model to like, a guaranteed, whatever it is, two and a half X or whatever, why would you give it to the crazy kid, right? The crazy kid you give money for, because they might be right.

• 2:57:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so you want that seed bet. And then also, I feel like a big part of the emerging manager dynamic is just like, essentially scout funds, and, and there's a lot of like, you know, horse trading around like, "Yeah, we will do, we will do the deal from our fund to funds."

• 2:57:54Sam Lessin?

  Look, we started that way, like, you know, 10 plus years ago, and like, that when there was, the market was much looser, and it was a different market.

• 2:58:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:58:02Sam Lessin?

  And it worked for us, and we were able to scale up into being like, a legit seed fund, you know, with legit dollars and legit institutional investors. I just think like, like most things, that path, all paths get super crowded, right? And so, once the path is super crowded, it's just really hard to differentiate, it's really hard to make a good business out of it. And I do think like almost everyone's gonna go away.

• 2:58:21John Coogan?

  Don't become a seed investor. You hear it. You heard it here first, folks.

• 2:58:25Jordi Hays?

  Uh, last, last, I want your quick take. XAI's Portland data center fire. You think that's just a little accident or you think Portland is doing Portland stuff?

• 2:58:36Sam Lessin?

  That'd be really funny. Um, that'd be really funny. It's, it's, um, God, have you guys ever read the science fiction parable of the sower?

• 2:58:43John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:58:44Sam Lessin?

  Great book. Great book. I'm just finishing it now, but there's a whole slub plot where there's all these people who are addicted to this drug that makes them like think that fire is the greatest thing on earth. So they're just like setting fire to everything. And like

• 2:58:56Jordi Hays?

  Wow, this is funny. It's, it's, I, I just looked it up. It's a post-apocalyptic story set in 2025.

• 2:59:02John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:59:03Jordi Hays?

  If you caught that when you

• 2:59:04Sam Lessin?

  Yeah. And like they're basically about people like trying to walk north from LA to like north to Seattle to escape craziness. But the, um, yeah. So I don't know. If you told me that that drug was invented in Portland, it wouldn't blow my mind.

• 2:59:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:18Jordi Hays?

  I think we gotta get a

• 2:59:19John Coogan?

  This is fantastic having you on. Thanks so much.

• 2:59:21Jordi Hays?

  Always a pleasure, Sam.

• 2:59:22Sam Lessin?

  Happy Friday.

• 2:59:23Jordi Hays?

  Happy Friday.

• 2:59:24John Coogan?

  Talk to you.

• 2:59:25Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:59:26John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And we got Bobby.

• 2:59:41Jordi Hays?

  They are

• 2:59:42John Coogan?

  Coming into the studio. Yep. Um, I'm going to do some VO3 generations for all of our partners. Get those in the mix, pull those up. I think it'll be fun. Get a little creative. Uh, we got Bobby coming into the studio. Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

• 2:59:56Speaker 10

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:59:57John Coogan?

  Where are you? Are you in Miami right now?

• 2:59:59Speaker 10

  I'm the last one standing in Miami.

• 3:00:01Jordi Hays?

  Yes, let's give it up.

• 3:00:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've seen some

• 3:00:05Speaker 10

  Around. Thank you very much.

• 3:00:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I love Miami. I, it's beautiful. Every time I get to go visit, it's always struck me as, uh, Like the it's like a classier version of Las Vegas for tech and it actually worked really well where in every industry, there's always like the CES conference that happens in Vegas and it's a little bit below tech's, you know, prestige. And so if tech could assemble in Miami for events, that's great.

• 3:00:32Speaker 10

  We tried. We gave it a real college try.

• 3:00:34John Coogan?

  It was happening for a while, you know, there's Heretacon and.

• 3:00:37Speaker 10

  I mean, the best conference I've ever been to.

• 3:00:40John Coogan?

  Exactly. And it was cool that you you get people that come from New York and they're not just going to go home on the after the conference, they're going to stay.

• 3:00:47Speaker 10

  And they might.

• 3:00:47John Coogan?

  Same thing with SF, same thing with LA. So it was actually a feature that not everyone was there. I feel like if you throw a conference in LA or SF, a lot, half the people are just going to go home.

• 3:00:56Speaker 10

  It was special for a moment.

• 3:00:58Jordi Hays?

  I anyway, I got a, what's up? I got a dox Bobby.

• 3:01:02John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:01:03Jordi Hays?

  Because he pulled up to Heretacon in a Ferrari.

• 3:01:06John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 3:01:09Jordi Hays?

  You remember I called it out?

• 3:01:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:01:12Speaker 10

  He's actually just getting the buttons be done.

• 3:01:14John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 3:01:15Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so you have the button, you have the button issue?

• 3:01:17John Coogan?

  Sticky buttons? Still you have sticky buttons?

• 3:01:20Jordi Hays?

  No, it's seriously, it's like the worst thing to be in this magnificent machine. And then it's like, I don't know, if somebody like ate a hamburger.

• 3:01:29Speaker 10

  You have a date and you you you, okay, great. I'll pick up my Ferrari. And then she tries to adjust the seat.

• 3:01:35John Coogan?

  It's sticky.

• 3:01:36Speaker 10

  It's like, she's like, this is disgusting.

• 3:01:38John Coogan?

  Oh, no, it's terrible.

• 3:01:39Jordi Hays?

  What were you doing in here? This is terrible.

• 3:01:41Speaker 10

  That's all fixed now. That's all fixed now.

• 3:01:43John Coogan?

  Okay, that's good. Yeah, that's good. Good to hear.

• 3:01:45Speaker 10

  Find us.

• 3:01:46John Coogan?

  But yeah, give us the news. Give us the update. Give us a little introduction on yourself for those who might not know.

• 3:01:51Speaker 10

  Yeah. So I'm so glad you guys had me on today. We had a very big announcement today. So this is something I've been thinking about for 15 years. And we announced our new email client called Sunflower today.

• 3:02:04John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 3:02:09Speaker 10

  Thank you.

• 3:02:12Speaker 10

  It is like basically the opposite of inbox zero.

• 3:02:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:02:16Speaker 10

  Like, I don't think you should have to have an email client that makes you work for it, right? In other words, like you load up inbox zero, I don't care how many keyboard shortcuts, I don't care what, what, what you give me. But if I'm having to triage every single email that comes in, you know, keyboard shortcut this way, that way.

• 3:02:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:02:34Speaker 10

  From the Applebee's email. You know, no.

• 3:02:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:02:40Speaker 10

  You need an email client that actually works for you.

• 3:02:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:02:44Speaker 10

  So, um, on our marketing website, we don't mention the word AI one time.

• 3:02:49John Coogan?

  Huh, wow.

• 3:02:50Speaker 10

  But this thing is entirely, this, this product would not be possible five years ago.

• 3:02:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:02:57Speaker 10

  It's, um. You know, if you want to be, if you think you need to be a superhero to use your inbox, there's a product for you.

• 3:03:07Speaker 10

  We're building a product for actual humans.

• 3:03:09John Coogan?

  Hmm, bold.

• 3:03:11Speaker 10

  And, uh, it, it launches, you know, the, the waitlist launches today, sunflower.me.

• 3:03:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:19Jordi Hays?

  And, and the product, the product is like.

• 3:03:21Speaker 10

  My phone before this because literally we, we broke Slack today, like that apparently there's a limit to how many notifications it can send you. It just is dinging, dinging, dinging.

• 3:03:33John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 3:03:34Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Uh, and the product is like already like you guys, you guys are, the product's like real, you guys are using it, right? This is not, you're not just launching a waitlist. Like there's, there's something under the hood.

• 3:03:45Speaker 10

  We've been working on this for a year and a half. I use it every single day myself.

• 3:03:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:49Speaker 10

  So about a dozen people right now who have this.

• 3:03:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:03:52Speaker 10

  Give you guys, uh, early alpha access.

• 3:03:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. So talk to me about the actual workflow. I imagine I still have an email address. People can still email me, but I imagine an LLM is scanning every email that comes in. Am I seeing the emails? Am I, I, I mean, I've used Gmail's Gemini features. I, one time I randomly clicked it and it just typed a response and it was like, kind of decent, but it's honestly just a lot of clutter in the UI right now. Um. How are you thinking about?

• 3:04:19Speaker 10

  You're kind of hot on the hunt here. I'll be honest. Yeah.

• 3:04:23John Coogan?

  Well, I've been thinking about this. I've actually was thinking I should just get a I should just get an LLM to summarize every email and just text it to me.

• 3:04:31Speaker 10

  No, it's not that.

• 3:04:32John Coogan?

  And then I can just text back if I want to respond and I just never look at my inbox ever again.

• 3:04:36Speaker 10

  Apple tried and

• 3:04:37John Coogan?

  Oh, it didn't work?

• 3:04:38Speaker 10

  Currentmail.app. It's, it's

• 3:04:39John Coogan?

  That's not good.

• 3:04:40Speaker 10

  Total dog shit.

• 3:04:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's just so funny that email, like the default state of email is like, here's stuff that's important. Here's stuff that's not important. And then it's only ranked by when it hit your inbox.

• 3:04:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:51Jordi Hays?

  Which is kind of silly because

• 3:04:52Speaker 10

  The status quo of email is a to-do list filled out by other people.

• 3:04:56John Coogan?

  Yep, totally.

• 3:04:57Speaker 10

  And that's, that's it, right? You should be beholden to that, right? Just because someone sends me an email doesn't, I mean, I get a lot of emails.

• 3:05:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:07Speaker 10

  Anyways, so yeah, you were, you were kind of close. We're going to reveal our hand more and more publicly. But today was like the firing the starting gun, like we're building in public now, so you're going to hear a lot more.

• 3:05:22John Coogan?

  Boo, don't share your revenue. If it gets too high, people will copy you. We don't like building in public.

• 3:05:26Speaker 10

  Based on the signups you had today, like we are cash flow profitable if, if everyone converts.

• 3:05:32Jordi Hays?

  How much, how much, uh, how much of your time are you, are you going to be spending here versus investing going forward?

• 3:05:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:38Speaker 10

  Um, that's a good question. You know, I personally funded this company, uh, for the alpha, like, you know, I, I

• 3:05:45Jordi Hays?

  To be able to read people's emails, you mean? I'm kidding.

• 3:05:49Speaker 10

  I can't, by the way, I can't read anyone's emails.

• 3:05:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:05:54Speaker 10

  An exhaustive security review process with Google right now.

• 3:05:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:58Speaker 10

  So no, there's no reading.

• 3:06:01Speaker 10

  You can sign up.

• 3:06:01Jordi Hays?

  Just Google. Just Sundar, just Sundar.

• 3:06:04John Coogan?

  Yes, yeah, Sundar can read.

• 3:06:06Speaker 10

  Sundar can read your emails, but not Bobby.

• 3:06:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:09John Coogan?

  I bet I bet he can actually I bet I bet they're pretty locked down over there.

• 3:06:12Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 3:06:13John Coogan?

  But yeah, I mean, and I remember the mailbox days and that launched. And one of the things that I loved that I loved was that once he got off the incredibly long waitlist, it basically tricked you into just archiving everything, which I thought was a great paradigm because you kind of declare email bankruptcy. You're not deleting these emails, so they're still there. And just that idea of, hey, you can archive things. I had never archived an email before, and I think a lot of people are in that boat where they have unread emails and they've read emails and they have a number that's like 10,000 next to their email app. What do you think?

• 3:06:50Speaker 10

  Funny story about that?

• 3:06:51John Coogan?

  Please.

• 3:06:51Speaker 10

  So I was friends with Gentry when he made mailbox.

• 3:06:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:55Speaker 10

  And I worked at Facebook at the time.

• 3:06:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:57Speaker 10

  And I went on this hike with my friend Beau. And literally, it's like the Kalalau Trail in Hawaii. It's like a two day hike. Like you're trekking it. The entire time, he just talked about email the entire time. He's talking about email and the fact that he was about to propose to his now wife.

• 3:07:17Speaker 10

  And I said, well, you're spending on this engagement ring. Anyways, so I took a photo of him. It's a beautiful photo, you know, right at the end of the trail. And if you remember that app, you know, when you got to inbox zero, right? You saw this beautiful image.

• 3:07:37Speaker 10

  And I, and he hated that app the whole time. It just, it just launched. He was ranting to me the entire time about how much he hated mailbox. And I was like, it's actually a pretty good app in front of Gentry, et cetera, et cetera. But anyways, so when I got back from the hike, I sent Gentry an email. And I said, hey, would you, would you guys put this image into the app? Like as the, you know, you're done, like inbox zero state.

• 3:08:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:05Speaker 10

  And so. And then I took a screenshot and I said to him, I said, you're in the app now. You're in the app that you kind of hate.

• 3:08:13Jordi Hays?

  You despise.

• 3:08:16Speaker 10

  And he took it a good, it was great.

• 3:08:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:19Speaker 10

  We're not about inbox zero. I think inbox zero is a flawed concept. I think like, you know, we're

• 3:08:25Jordi Hays?

  It's funny, I want you to do this for text right, right now. I have 3,873 unread texts and I have that because I don't feel an obligation, like just because somebody had my number at some point and like I really try to respond to the stuff that's important and pressing, but I'm not going to like get home from work and be like, oh, I, I gotta respond to this person instead of hanging out with my kids, right? Like it's, it's not.

• 3:08:54Speaker 10

  No, of course not. Everyone feels entitled to your time.

• 3:08:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:58Speaker 10

  Right? You know, look, I'm an investor. I get the same emails probably we all do, right? Like about 20 a day and they're all like drip auto campaign follow up. So it's like they send you a cold pitch email and then you get, you get the email, then you get the email and then, and then every single successive email like tries to guilt you into actually, you know, replying, like start using more and more emotionally manipulative tactics.

• 3:09:27Speaker 10

  And it's like, no, no, no, just because you know, my email address does not entitle you to my time.

• 3:09:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I think that's right. What do you think about? Are you gonna, are you gonna tag? Are you gonna, are you gonna like identify like emails that are being dripped versus, you know, artisanal, organic farm to table emails?

• 3:09:45Speaker 10

  We're working on that. Um, you know what we're also working on? Again, you know, there's a funny Steve Jobs quote, isn't it funny to ship at least from the top? But here you go.

• 3:09:59Jordi Hays?

  That's great.

• 3:10:00Speaker 10

  Um, you know, you know, like email trackers, you know, like obviously superhuman does this. I'm like, you know, you see, you've seen it.

• 3:10:08Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:10:08Speaker 10

  We both allow you to block inbound uh trackers and we'll also let you send your own.

• 3:10:16Jordi Hays?

  Hmm. Nice.

• 3:10:17Speaker 10

  So our thing is like, we are just so a hundred percent focused on the individual user. Um, so in other words, like if you want to block um these trackers, perfect. We'll let you do that. And then you can send your, you can send a tracker of your own.

• 3:10:34John Coogan?

  I like having those trackers. I like letting the SDR know. I read this 10 times and I'm still not responding.

• 3:10:40Speaker 10

  Yes, you know, that's, that's.

• 3:10:41Jordi Hays?

  That's the feature, that's, that's the feature you should build is a feature to open and close the email.

• 3:10:45John Coogan?

  That's a better feature. Yeah, yeah. It just keeps paying the pixel. So the SDR is like, this person, they're reading it for hours every day. What, but they haven't responded. What's going on?

• 3:10:57Speaker 10

  T D O S their tracking pixel.

• 3:10:58John Coogan?

  What, what, what is your take on Eric Mikovsky, founder of Pebble? He started this company Beeper, eventually sold it to Automattic. And the whole idea was get into the iMessage world, create one unified inbox for all the different messages. I think he had a knockout drag out fight with Apple, uh, cause he was reverse engineering some of the APIs. Obviously there's changes on in big tech around antitrust and it maybe now is the time to put pressure on that. Is there a world where we could see text and email kind of unify at some point? What's your view on kind of the long term here with big tech?

• 3:11:36Speaker 10

  I mean, look, we, we have a, we have a long-term strategy. I'm not going to come on your podcast and just spill all the beans.

• 3:11:44John Coogan?

  Spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill, spill.

• 3:11:53Speaker 10

  What was that?

• 3:11:54John Coogan?

  It was activate.

• 3:11:56Speaker 10

  What did I sign up for?

• 3:11:57John Coogan?

  Golden Retriever mode where you're.

• 3:12:00Jordi Hays?

  You knew it, you knew it. Yeah, yeah. Golden Retriever would just tell.

• 3:12:04John Coogan?

  Golden Retriever would just tell it all. Just say it to everyone.

• 3:12:07Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. No, you can, you can come on again and you know, you know, spill it every time.

• 3:12:11Speaker 10

  I'm in one of your companies and I passed another one.

• 3:12:16John Coogan?

  Anyway, yeah, future of text email.

• 3:12:19Speaker 10

  So I'm mostly concerned about email. I think email, it's like what's old is new again. Right? And so if I, again, if I, if I, if I were a ship that's spilled from the top, here's what you have to, here's what I have to say. Just like Apple built iMessage on top of SMS, I think there's a layer to be built on top of email.

• 3:12:42Speaker 10

  That's all I'm gonna, that's all I'm gonna tease.

• 3:12:43John Coogan?

  Give us more. Anyway, yeah.

• 3:12:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, no, I think, I think, I think that's an interesting

• 3:12:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:51Jordi Hays?

  framework.

• 3:12:52Speaker 10

  So I don't, I don't want to own all communication. Like I, I don't want to, you know, put, pull it on one place. I just want to clean up a mess that is email.

• 3:12:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:13:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it is an interesting time, right? Cause like AI, AI is transforming everything.

• 3:13:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:04Jordi Hays?

  But yet I feel pretty confident that I will have an email address that I have to use in 15 years and like, that sounds kind of crazy and silly, but at the same time.

• 3:13:16Speaker 10

  It's not going away.

• 3:13:17Jordi Hays?

  Fax machines. We talked with TJ yesterday about how he was spending 30% of their dev resources or something like that on fax machines.

• 3:13:24John Coogan?

  Right.

• 3:13:24Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 3:13:25Speaker 10

  At Pill Pass. When I worked at Facebook, we had, we, we launched as a joke, just the TechCrunch Network only. We launched a feature called Fax This Photo.

• 3:13:33Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 3:13:34Speaker 10

  And they covered it.

• 3:13:35John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:13:37Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah. It was literally launched.

• 3:13:39Jordi Hays?

  Just to troll them?

• 3:13:40Speaker 10

  Oh yeah. You can Google this story, like TechCrunch, Facebook, Fax This Photo. Um, my engineering buddy Evan, uh, we were, we were launching all these things one day.

• 3:13:53John Coogan?

  Fax your photos, not 2009. Wow.

• 3:13:55Speaker 10

  Yeah, there you go.

• 3:13:56John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Okay. So Facebook punked us. This isn't really going live for everyone.

• 3:14:00Jordi Hays?

  That's very.

• 3:14:01Speaker 10

  No, no, they, they, they, they tried to like pretend like they were in on the joke, but no, they were.

• 3:14:07John Coogan?

  That's very funny.

• 3:14:08Jordi Hays?

  Got him.

• 3:14:08Speaker 10

  Also, by the way, our comms team didn't know the joke either. And so this guy Blake Ross, he had to run upstairs like in a, in a, in a frantic rush saying, guys, guys, guys, guys, it's just a joke. It's just a joke.

• 3:14:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:22Jordi Hays?

  Full stack, verticalized mog.

• 3:14:25John Coogan?

  It's amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on.

• 3:14:26Jordi Hays?

  Bobby, this.

• 3:14:27Speaker 10

  What's the real thing?

• 3:14:28Jordi Hays?

  Bobby, this, this was super fun. Congrats on the launch. Uh, I'm excited to try the product and come back on, come back on as you have more, uh, more news to share.

• 3:14:36John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 3:14:36Speaker 10

  Uh, sunflower.me if I can get a plugin.

• 3:14:39John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 3:14:39Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 3:14:39John Coogan?

  Go check it out. We'll talk to you.

• 3:14:41Jordi Hays?

  Go there now. See you guys.

• 3:14:43John Coogan?

  And if you're trying to visit Miami, you gotta head over to wander.com.

• 3:14:46Jordi Hays?

  Find your happy place. Find your happy place.

• 3:14:50John Coogan?

  Book of wonder with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. Get on Wander. And we got Orin Hoffman coming in the studio. He is here. So, welcome to the stream, Orin. How you doing?

• 3:15:07Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 3:15:07Speaker 11

  I'm doing great. Happy to be here. Very excited.

• 3:15:10Jordi Hays?

  Great to, great to finally have you on.

• 3:15:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:12Jordi Hays?

  Probably should have done this a long time ago.

• 3:15:13John Coogan?

  We, we, we had a brief phone call, I think, a couple of years ago. Good to reconnect. What's the latest in your world?

• 3:15:19Speaker 11

  Well, things are great. We're, we've got a couple of different things. We run a, like a weird holding company where we own a bunch of data companies, start different data companies.

• 3:15:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:15:29Speaker 11

  And then, then we're also at Flex Capital where we do a lot of seed-stage investing. We did 20 deals last quarter.

• 3:15:36John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:15:36Speaker 11

  We're also doing about 100 per year.

• 3:15:38John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Yeah, we were kind of struggling to find what your title should be. So, we just put founder and investor because you got, you wear a lot of hats.

• 3:15:45Speaker 11

  Yeah, that's good. I think you got like Sam Lessin on today. I'm like an aspiring Sam Lessin.

• 3:15:50John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 3:15:51Jordi Hays?

  That's great. That's great.

• 3:15:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you on the slope? So, you a good skier?

• 3:15:55Speaker 11

  No, I'm not aspiring.

• 3:15:56John Coogan?

  Well, then, oh, then you're gonna fall behind.

• 3:15:58Speaker 11

  I'm not at that stage, yeah. I'm only aspiring on certain things.

• 3:16:01John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 3:16:02Speaker 11

  He's got like 20 other dimensions. I'll never catch up.

• 3:16:04John Coogan?

  He plays a lot of tennis. He yaps a lot, but yeah.

• 3:16:07Speaker 11

  Yeah. He runs like three-minute miles. Yeah.

• 3:16:10John Coogan?

  Three-minute, okay. I can talk to you about running.

• 3:16:12Jordi Hays?

  On the, on the data side of your business, how, was that an AI bet that you made a long time ago? Is it, is it, did you get lucky? Did you have incredible foresight?

• 3:16:25Speaker 11

  Um, I think I got on, I, I think I had the wrong bet. And so, I think on the data business, I think we had believed that as the, that these companies that sell data, like data as the ingredient, not just like analysis on top of data, the ingredient, we thought that these companies would become like way more valuable because we thought the number of buyers of data is, would go up significantly. So, if you think like, you know, people, this is 10 years ago, people made, oh, there are maybe 50 hedge funds that buy data today significantly. There's 11,000 hedge funds. The market's gonna go from 50 to 500. I think the market went from 50 to like 58.

• 3:17:05Speaker 11

  Over the last 10 years, so it really didn't go up retailers or maybe 20 retailers that bought a lot of data 10 years ago.

• 3:17:13Jordi Hays?

  How many out of your, out of your, if you, this will be tough to remember specifics, but a lot of like seed stage companies will be like, oh, well, we're going to generate this data and like, we're going to sell it eventually and it's going to be valuable. And it's like, oh, and then you kind of press them on it. And it's like, well, like hedge funds will buy it. And then it's like, okay, like, are you confident that those 58 hedge funds are, have you seen, have you seen any of your?

• 3:17:37Speaker 11

  They're a terrible market. It's a very small market. And they're really, most of them are, even like the biggest hedge funds in the world, like Bridgewater, like the amount of data they buy is miniscule compared to the AUM. It's like, it's basically zero.

• 3:17:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:51Speaker 11

  And

• 3:17:51John Coogan?

  And is that just because?

• 3:17:52Speaker 11

  They spend more on like lunch than

• 3:17:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Are they getting data from other sources, like more public sources? Are they scraping the internet or are they just not using data driven algorithms?

• 3:18:01Speaker 11

  I mean, they, they have some data. They have data that you could put in an Excel file and stuff like that. And they're not like, you're smart people who are thinking about quote unquote data. But we actually think of like a data business that's selling data, proprietary data, different types of data. And usually data that's like larger than you could like put in Excel file. Most funds are not doing it. Most, they're really, really, if you think of like real estate. So when we were starting, like the number of real estate investors that were using data was zero. And today it's Blackstone. It's like one, it's come from zero to one.

• 3:18:40Speaker 11

  Real estate is a pretty big asset class. Now they're using some data. So people are using still some data, but really like we're talking about like real alternative data, really have a very sophisticated system to be able to ingest it and use it. It's very, very, very small.

• 3:18:54John Coogan?

  Is that driven by the fact that maybe? It's almost like, I mean, we've been thinking a lot about Google I O and V O three and Google's advantage in video generation, particularly because they own YouTube and YouTube feels like an incredibly valuable data source.

• 3:19:10Speaker 11

  Correct.

• 3:19:10John Coogan?

  And it's almost, but the whole like data is the new oil. It's almost like no data is like a Rembrandt painting that there's only one of. And so Google doesn't want to sell that data. Like Google wants to keep that, right? And so the like, yes, the data market would be bigger if all of these assets actually transacted and were fungible like oil, but they're not. They're super proprietary and the companies that love them.

• 3:19:35Speaker 11

  If you have a brand, your data is more valuable.

• 3:19:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:19:37Speaker 11

  So if you, if you've got something like Reddit and everyone knows Reddit, they understand what people are talking about on Reddit and they say, okay, we're having all these like interesting conversations. They sell that to Google for $60 million or something to train their L M's. And, but if you, if you had just like lots of people having interesting conversations, but you weren't called Reddit.

• 3:19:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:58Speaker 11

  My guess is instead of 60 million, you might get 10 million or five million or something like the brand is actually the 10x thing of why people want to buy it as well.

• 3:20:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about just creating data for the purposes of artificial intelligence, not pulling data from other sources and trying to go find a round peg in a square hole with selling into a hedge fund? More like there is demand for robotics data right now, and we are going to go get a bunch of robots and generate a bunch of data.

• 3:20:27Speaker 11

  Yeah, I like that. Yeah. I mean, obviously like Scale AI is a great company, right? So they're doing that. They're actually going to building those types of data. We just, we're, we're messing in a company doing what you're saying with the robots.

• 3:20:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:20:38Speaker 11

  I, I think those types of things are good, but it's not always just for the AI. Like there's other types of buyers, because if you just are selling to like AI core model companies, you're, you're talking maximum of a dozen buyers. That's not a great market.

• 3:20:55Jordi Hays?

  And he went from 58 to, you went from 58 to 12.

• 3:20:58Speaker 11

  Yeah, exactly. So you just want to sell to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Facebook, like, and maybe a couple of others. Like, I don't know, that doesn't seem like a great business long-term either.

• 3:21:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And if the deal, the first deal that you do is 100 million, what's the deal size on the next one?

• 3:21:17Speaker 11

  Correct.

• 3:21:17Jordi Hays?

  You know, are you going to create a hundred million dollars worth more data that you can sell to them? Is it even that valuable? Anyways. I wanted to have you on specifically to talk about a post that you had yesterday that went pretty viral. You said that any VC that makes you pay for their lawyers is not founder friendly. Founders barely affording rent should not be footing legal bills for VCs with private jets, and yet this is standard. You kind of extrapolate on this, but you're writing, you know, 20 checks a quarter, maybe more. I'm sure that almost every single one of the companies you back ends up, you know, having to pay some VC's lawyer bill, maybe in the next

• 3:22:01Jordi Hays?

  round. But I would love for you to kind of break down the post and what inspired it.

• 3:22:06Speaker 11

  Yeah, so for those people who don't know, in a standard in a term sheet, somewhere in the term sheet, it says, usually it says, "The company must pay up to X dollars of the venture capitalist legal fees." And that X can be negotiated, and it can be as low as 10 grand, and I've seen it as high as 300 grand for more complicated deals and stuff like that. And it's there. And it just, it seems, it seems odd for a whole bunch of reasons. First, it's like, there may be many different investors, but you're only paying the lead investors, types of things. Second is that, you know, why are they, why are they actually having the company pay? It's like a little bit of a backdoor way

• 3:22:47Speaker 11

  to get your fees paid. And then, there's like, there's like a more complicated argument as well, which is, I don't think this is LP friendly. A lot of, a lot of VCs will say this is LP friendly. Because then I don't have to like-

• 3:23:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, wouldn't the person paying presume, you can pass it, I mean, that the VC could pass the fees on to their LPs, so in that sense they're saying-

• 3:23:12Speaker 11

  Correct. So they could pass it on to their LPs. And this is a backdoor way of doing that, without actually telling the LPs that you passed it on to the LPs.

• 3:23:21Jordi Hays?

  By taxing the company.

• 3:23:24Speaker 11

  It's taxing the company, but it's even the LP isn't aware of it. Whereas if you actually normally, if you, if you use Tegus or something and you pass it on to your LP, your LP sees the bill and they're like, why are you spending 50 grand on Tegus? Like you should be spending less and they can have a conversation. Or if you're like, if you're having air travel, they can understand that as well.

• 3:23:47John Coogan?

  Wait, wait, can you give me more clarity around like the idea of passing fees on?

• 3:23:52Jordi Hays?

  So like the real, the real fee, so, so VCs have like two and 20, right? But then there's certain fees that you can pass back that it gets it closer to even three. You could get it up to like two and a half, three, four percent. And that could even be like when, when a VC pays for lunch with a founder, you can pass that on, correct?

• 3:24:09John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:24:10Speaker 11

  Yeah. And every VC has a different model.

• 3:24:12John Coogan?

  Different structure.

• 3:24:12Speaker 11

  When we go to lunch with a founder.

• 3:24:14John Coogan?

  There's 2% fees and then you gotta do whatever you want with that. If you need a private jet, like that's coming out of the 2%. If you need to pay salaries, if you need to pay for Tegus, if you need to buy lunch, like it's all coming out of the 2%. But you're saying it can be passed on.

• 3:24:26Jordi Hays?

  The, the true loaded fees can be much higher than 2%.

• 3:24:30John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:24:31Speaker 11

  Yeah. Like at Flex Capital, we try to almost do everything in the 2%. So if we go to lunch with, we take it out of our own management fee, which means we get less compensation. Cause you, you, most VCs want to protect that 2% and that goes directly to them, right? So we get less compensation, but we think it's more LP friendly. And then we'll, you know, there might be certain things like your, your fund audit might be done to the, so you have to decide, okay, what is, what's actually done to the fund versus what's done to the management company? So well, we are more to the management company. Every VC will do it different on how they do it, but some can be like, but at least regardless, at least generally when I'm passing fees, at least the, the LPs do see it. And then they can have a conversation like, hey, why are you spending all this money with lunches to me?

• 3:25:15Speaker 11

  Why am I paying for your lunch to go to Spago or something? So whereas with the, with the, with the, with the. Legal fees, they don't know.

• 3:25:26John Coogan?

  What about?

• 3:25:27Speaker 11

  They have no, they know the LP has no way of accounting that money.

• 3:25:31John Coogan?

  What about like general pressure to bring down the cost of startup legal fees at the series A level? Justin Khan was working on a project with Atrium to try and automate the, the series A.

• 3:25:45Jordi Hays?

  Before you can even get there, there's like, I think Ahmad had a good response to your post from Mercury saying that like, he just basically tells the lawyers, we're going to cap it at this and you agree upfront and then the lawyers are super motivated. But that's still.

• 3:25:59Speaker 11

  That's, and that, by the way, that's, Ahmad's amazing and that's, that's definitely step one. Like you got to negotiate that cap. Maybe you can't negotiate all the way down to zero, which is what I would like to see happen more. But you've got to negotiate it. My guess is also, it also depends on how, the, the higher the cap, the longer it will be to close your round. So, you know, as most people know, you get a term sheet.

• 3:26:21John Coogan?

  Shouldn't it be the other way around?

• 3:26:23Jordi Hays?

  The higher, if it's a high cap, the, the lawyers are just going to be like, yeah, this is going to take six weeks.

• 3:26:28John Coogan?

  Because it should be, it should be surge pricing. I'll pay you 300K to close it this weekend or 50K and yeah, you can take a month.

• 3:26:35Speaker 11

  Like I can basically tell you, like, here's how you close your round. It's going to be, it's 15 days.

• 3:26:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:26:40Speaker 11

  Plus one day for every $2,000 that's in that cap. That will, I can guarantee you that that will, that will, that will be exactly what it is for every single round that is in there.

• 3:26:51John Coogan?

  So backwards.

• 3:26:51Jordi Hays?

  Shouldn't, shouldn't one, one defense of, of startups eating the cost is that, you know, if you're, if you have an emerging manager with a $20 million fund and they're barely, you know, paying themselves a dollar in, in salary and if they want to lead a round that, that ends up getting priced, it could get expensive. But your argument is still like, okay, well, the LPs are still eating that that cost.

• 3:27:19Speaker 11

  Yeah, I mean, look, it can be negotiated and it may be in some cases, it could make sense that's in there. But there if you're, why are you doing something so complicated? I mean, Y C created the safe, the safe doesn't have any legal costs, right? Really, you can actually use a pretty boilerplate thing. You knew that most of these terms you should be negotiating in the term sheet anyway. So going from term sheet to close, which is where all the legal costs come in from term sheet to close. Like, why is that expensive anyway? It's because probably you're not managing the lawyers. The lawyers have no incentive to to keep the costs low because they know what the cap is. If the cap says 50K, I guarantee you, you're getting a bill for no less than 49K.

• 3:28:04Speaker 11

  Like, in the history of the world, I doubt it has almost ever come in less than 49K for a cap of 50K. Like, how do they automatically always hit the cap? They're filling the space.

• 3:28:16Jordi Hays?

  They're built different. The other thing as an LP, what you don't want to pay the fees and not get the ownership is the other thing, right? It's like, if you're just getting past the costs and you're like eating that, but you're not getting like the incremental kind of dollars deployed into the company. Or like the incremental ownership, is it, does it? I mean, I guess like where I'd want to go with this is

• 3:28:44Jordi Hays?

  what do you have conviction or any excitement around tools that can be like AI tools specifically? That can be introduced into the process, like basically that term sheet to close period? To just make that more efficient where we could say, okay.

• 3:28:59Speaker 11

  In most cases, but first of all, we just said, we were just involved in a company that did term sheet to close in in six days. Like it's not that hard, especially in the early stages of a company like how much diligence do you need to do? You need to and look, the company did a good job. They got all their stuff in a data room. They did all the things that they were supposed to do. Then as the venture capitalist, okay, well, you've got to, you've got to somehow read it, read through it. Maybe you can use AI to read through some of it. You got to go check it. You have to make sure that the, the bank account is legit and all these other types of things that isn't fraudulent. But it shouldn't take that much time. The main reason it takes a really long time is just the back and forth. You put a red

• 3:29:43Speaker 11

  line in, I send it to you, then you don't have time to look at it that day. It takes you three days, then you send it to me. Then I, it's like, if we actually all got in a room, that's what they did. So they got all in a room on day six and they basically put like a four hour block and they said, we're going to just go through every single issue right here. And they're able to iterate on it just live. And then you would, you would, you would, you would put it on mute, you would talk to your lawyer to go back. It just got done. It's so much easier. And obviously, even M and A agreements, like you should be able to get those done so much faster. And actually, those often do get done faster. Like sometimes you can do an entire M and A

• 3:30:20Speaker 11

  from term sheet to close faster than you can do a VC financing. Many M and As go faster than VC because everyone's just motivated to really work on it and put in the time to make it happen.

• 3:30:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, thank you so much for stopping by.

• 3:30:34Jordi Hays?

  Come back on again soon.

• 3:30:36Speaker 11

  I love it. Invite me anytime.

• 3:30:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is great.

• 3:30:38Jordi Hays?

  We'll make it happen. Yeah. Great hanging.

• 3:30:40John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon.

• 3:30:40Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:30:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, we have some breaking news. The first nuclear executive order has dropped. I'm going to read here from one call out that people are celebrating. To maximize the speed and scale of new nuclear capacity, the Department of Energy shall prioritize work with the nuclear energy industry to facilitate five gigawatts of power uprates to existing nuclear reactors and 10 new large reactors with complete designs under construction by 2030. This is exactly what we were asking for with let's copy paste Diablo Canyon. We have Doug Bernauer from Radiant Nuclear in the studio. We're going to bring him in and get his breakdown on it because he's obviously been

• 3:31:23John Coogan?

  working in this industry for years and should be able to give us an update on what's happening. Thank you so much for joining the show, Doug. Been too long since I saw you. I think I saw you in DC last, but should be an exciting day, but can you give us your read and analysis on what's happening?

• 3:31:41Doug Bernauer?

  Yeah, it's unbelievably exciting. There's a whole lot of texts. I had these fact sheets that came out. I think went to the media on all these executive orders. It's unbelievably exciting, but it's all coming in like right now. I think the the actual official documents just got posted only minutes ago, so I haven't read. So you're an expert. You're an expert is what you're saying.

• 3:32:01John Coogan?

  Well, we really put you on the spot. But I mean, can you talk to me about a little bit of the a little bit of the history? What? I mean, first introduce yourself, what the company does, and then maybe we can build up to some of the maybe problems or areas for improvement that the industry has been asking for. And then we'll kind of dig into what's happening today.

• 3:32:24Doug Bernauer?

  Yeah, thanks. So I'm the CEO of Radiance, a nuclear portable microreactor company. We're focused on mass production of one megawatt reactors. We'd like to see 50 of those per year. And they've come off the factory line and then go up to the customer, wherever they are, run for five years and then come back and be refueled. So it's a very unique sort of model. And my background before that, I worked at SpaceX for 12 years. Worked on the first rocket with legs, amongst other really cool stuff for Elon, but eventually focused on nuclear. And it's a really unique model that we've been trying to work, you know, and a normal reactor is about 1,000 megawatts. The thing we're working on is one megawatt. It's got to be road transportable. We're trying to make the nuclear power that people want, because the problem that we see with why we don't have all this nuclear

• 3:33:06Doug Bernauer?

  technology today is really that there's not as many customers. But that is all completely turned around, I don't know, in the past, maybe just two years, right? With all these announcements of the big data center players coming in to buy nuclear, to restart old plants, to build new ones. And we've actually been fighting for a lot of regulatory reforms that that we see as probably being necessary for our particular model, where you've got a really a factory that makes reactors, where you have assembly and you don't have any construction. And if you read the rules that are 50 years old, you get you hear about construction a whole lot. And so it's not really focused on or talking about the right sort of thing.

• 3:33:44John Coogan?

  So yeah, when we last spoke, you were working on the helium loop, going to test at a dome in Idaho. How are things going? What have been the most recent updates for Radiant?

• 3:33:57Doug Bernauer?

  Yeah, there's so unbelievable updates. Just a month ago, we were announced as one of just five companies who will get access to fuel from the Department of Energy, something we've been working on for a very long time. It's unbelievably exciting. When I started the company back in 2020, we said we would do a critical test with a reactor at full scale in 2026. We are on target to do that. And really, I mean, because of that announcement and the support that we're getting from federal government, another change just recently, you know, we've been working through a process to have the national labs. We're working with Idaho National Laboratory. And the fun context that are here, they've tested actually 52 reactors in their history, although the last of which was in 1977. So it's been a while. I mean, we have a kind of old process and they are aware.

• 3:34:41Jordi Hays?

  Anybody, was there anybody that was a part of that last test that's still there? Or is it all just kind of lore at this point?

• 3:34:51Doug Bernauer?

  It is sort of lore. It is sort of lore for the new reactors, but they're definitely our staff who are there. You know, there are the advanced test reactor, the ATR reactors, where they test all the Navy fuel. That's been operational for a very long time. You can go tour it today, still operating. So there are definitely staff there who are very familiar with reactor operations and refueling. They also have a transient pulse test reactor, which is pretty amazing. It actually has an original core from the 1950s still running and operating. I forget what the numbers are, but it pulls us into the several gigawatts range. So that there's some expertise there, but certainly there are not people there from the early 1970s anymore.

• 3:35:29John Coogan?

  Okay, I have the Wall Street Journal article pulled up. I want to read some of the key points and just get your reaction. So the high level is that Trump signed executive orders to boost nuclear power industry citing the need to overhaul regulations and fast track licenses. A lot of this is driven by tech companies like Amazon and Google who are driving demand for nuclear power to support AI systems and data centers. And there's an interesting wrinkle there where a lot of the hyperscalers made very aggressive ESG targets and climate pledges before they knew that they were going to need

• 3:36:03John Coogan?

  50 gigawatts of capacity. And so now they're really, really pushing for clean energy. The executive order aims to shorten approval times for new reactors, but critics worry about the impact of safety. Now, I want to talk to you about that balance between speed and time to market and safety. I wouldn't trust myself to design a nuclear reactor and get it approved in a day. But it feels like we haven't had a new reactor design approved in way too long. And so we're probably on the too slow side of the curve. But where should we be? What is a reasonable amount of time to actually approve a new reactor design in your opinion?

• 3:36:42Doug Bernauer?

  Yeah, I mean, probably on the shortest scale, it's got to be something like six months. Like if I use that context I said earlier, 52 reactors in up till just 1977, nuclear technology only existing since the mid 50s. That means they were doing more than two per year.

• 3:36:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Let's get back to that standard, right? Walk us through what, what, what, just as a citizen, not as an entrepreneur or founder or executive, as a citizen, what type of tests do you actually think are the most valuable? Is this, I need a physicist to run all the numbers in a spreadsheet and run simulations? Do we need to just fire this up in a place where even if it explodes, it's, you know, we've seen that it didn't explode. And so we've done real word testing. Is it a balance of those? What kind of testing do you think is best that can be executed at speed?

• 3:37:31Doug Bernauer?

  Yeah, well, the great question. The best is immediate testing and incremental testing.

• 3:37:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:37:37Doug Bernauer?

  And there's no reason that you necessarily need to go slower. You can regulate along with the speed with which you can do the design, the analysis, the procurement, the assembly of a reactor. If a company is willing to spend capital to take that financial risk, you know, the goal is don't put fuel in unless you get an approval. But there should be really zero barriers up until that point because there's no safety risk.

• 3:38:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:38:03Doug Bernauer?

  But then when you get to that point of like, okay, now there is risk, we are going to load fuel in, you do want someone to go and check your numbers and you want them to dig deeply and thoroughly into what your reactor is and does and what the plan is. The fact of the matter is when you load fuel, it's not anywhere near critical. You can make a, you can look at subcritical multiplication factor. That will trigger little sensors that are effectively, it's something that sounds like a Geiger counter. We use fancier things today. We use vision chambers. We use Boron line proportional counters. You can do the analysis to show that you will get many, many counts per second, even with a very small amount of fuel loaded. Like, let's say you construct one-sixth of your core, you could already validate models. And yet you are ridiculously far away from being able to go critical.

• 3:38:45John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:38:46Doug Bernauer?

  They haven't even assembled the whole system, right?

• 3:38:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, so the, the FDA has similar approval timelines for new pharmaceutical drugs. But the, the, the reason that it takes a long time to, to approve a new pharmaceutical drug in America. It makes more sense to me because if I'm going to take a drug, I kind of want to know, hey, is it gonna, is it gonna have an effect on me in 30 years? So maybe I want to see a mouse model or a monkey model or a dog model or even human testing over a long period of time. And sure, there's some acceleration there. We don't need to wait a full lifetime to approve a new drug, but there is an element of time. Is there anything that's, that's comparable to that in nuclear where the behavior of a system

• 3:39:29John Coogan?

  over a two-year time period is different than a behavior of a system over a two-hour period?

• 3:39:36Doug Bernauer?

  Yeah, I, I think the, the most similar thing would be the effect of neutron fluence inside of the core. So if you hit some parts of your system with neutrons, they will generally swell up. Metallic parts swell up and their thermal conductivity will usually go down, their density goes down, but the physical shape of them changes.

• 3:39:55John Coogan?

  Sure. So you might have to test that in some special way to know what a 10-year lifespan looks like, right?

• 3:40:01Doug Bernauer?

  Yeah, but a lot of these materials have been tested and there are these giant data handbooks that, that it's very predictable. So there's like the Nuclear Systems Materials Handbook, which is like put together in the 1970s, actually just released finally through this lengthy process where we had a ton of help. We went and recovered this great national asset and it's now available for all reactor developers.

• 3:40:21John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 3:40:22Doug Bernauer?

  Yeah, so they're pretty predictable effects. So there's not, I would say there's really, other than the effects of neutron fluence. There's nothing really that challenging. We, we planned a test right next year in the Dome. That is a hermetic structure, totally sealed with its own radio nuply detection in it. And so. You can partially fuel a core and you can do it in a hermetically sealed chamber at a facility where it's surrounded by scientists, right? And experimental hot cells and other test facilities that would allow you to see what any problem is, solve any problem. But we are using all well-known standard materials.

• 3:40:59Jordi Hays?

  Got it. Makes sense. Were you, is it funny to you that the news of Taiwan decommissioning their reactor is hitting the same week that we're saying that we need more? Or is there something about Taiwan's as an island? I'd read something about there being a bunch of, you know, enough earthquake activity in the area that like there was some potential reasoning around that. But then I, we also had someone else on who said we have solutions for that at this point. It's not a risk that should require shutting it down entirely.

• 3:41:36Doug Bernauer?

  I don't know that these things are linked, actually. I think I'm behind on the Taiwan reactor news. Those might have just been around for a long time, might be coincidental.

• 3:41:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No, no, I'm not implying that they're linked. I was saying more that it's, it's kind of ironic in the sense that like, you know, we have one, one country saying we're shutting these things down meanwhile, and they're less, far less energy independent.

• 3:42:02John Coogan?

  And Germany kind of doing the same thing. It feels like some countries are following the American nuclear playbook from two decades ago. And maybe they should be adopting the playbook from today. And they need.

• 3:42:13Doug Bernauer?

  Well, we just announced it today.

• 3:42:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How monumental is this for you? Were you like betting the company in some way on eventually getting an administration that would like introduce an EO and like, you know, try to bring about policy?

• 3:42:30Doug Bernauer?

  I think, I think, yeah, in a lot of ways, absolutely. If you're working on something innovative, there's going to be regulatory gray areas. You have to know about those gray areas and manage the direction they're going in to make sure that the vision that you have is the right the way that the administration or the regulatory agencies go so that you're not decoupled from reality, but you do have impact on that. And you actually, you know, you can't write down rules ahead of time for something that's not invented yet. Right? So you, but you do always take some risk in doing that. But I, I think it's actually pretty beautiful. You lay out a vision, go like, imagine you have like a bunch of reactors, they're all built identical to one another. So they're super reliable. You deploy a whole fleet of them. They'll stream data back continuously. We're in the modern world. We're in the information

• 3:43:14Doug Bernauer?

  age. Why can't all that data just stream to the regulator? Why can't it be completely modernized? And we've been talking about that for a while. And I think that has led to now, that along with other things people said have led to these sort of events where the administration goes, okay, we're gonna just, we're gonna actually go and support this.

• 3:43:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. Last question from my side. Can you talk a little bit about how you see the market playing out? Obviously, there's some news about where we might be getting really big nuclear reactors at the one gigawatt scale, you're building at the one megawatt scale. Is there going to be a 10 gig, a 10 megawatt company, 100 megawatt company? Is it a smooth

• 3:43:55Jordi Hays?

  They're all the same company and you just.

• 3:43:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, or, or maybe they're, maybe they're bundled or broken down or scaled up or scaled down. Like where, like, how will this play out and, and who will do what, I guess?

• 3:44:10Doug Bernauer?

  Yeah. Well, as a consumer, what you want is for there to be two or more companies at each scale.

• 3:44:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:44:16Doug Bernauer?

  And yes, there will be something at the portable microreactor scale, maybe two, two companies there at least. And maybe that's one megawatt and smaller. If you are willing to put a reactor in the ground somewhere and pull the fuel out on that site and put it in a system, you can make a bigger reactor. I call it a microreactor 10 megawatt scale. So you want two companies there. You want two at the 100 megawatt. You want two or more at the gigawatt also. Because of different, different areas that need these amounts of power. So if you think about, and we never think about these places. They're remote places in the world. Like in Alaska, you have over 150 disconnected micro reactor locations or micro grid, sorry, locations that could use reactors.

• 3:44:57Doug Bernauer?

  Canada has over 200 of these sort of areas and these are coastal, you know, look at those land areas on the map. They're, they're massive. They have a need for heat and for power. They're extremely isolated. There isn't an actual grid. So you need a small system, right, on those, those types of regions. And if you put in a one gigawatt reactor somewhere, you had better have a lot of big power lines to move that power to enough customers to use that, right? So on the two, like, extreme ends of the scale, there's like pretty obvious use cases. And then in the middle, it's like if you don't want to wait years to upgrade the grid, or it would be very expensive, like million dollar a mile or more upgrades to power lines, then you might go, well, hey, we have this region where

• 3:45:40Doug Bernauer?

  we're going to use 10 megawatts. We could put a 10 megawatt reactor. That's economical for us, right? Without over complicating it or having to add power lines extending across states.

• 3:45:49John Coogan?

  Awesome. Well, thank you so much for popping on. We'd love to have you back again and go even deeper.

• 3:45:54Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations on the overnight success. The job's not finished, but I like, I like this for you guys.

• 3:46:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is great. It's great news.

• 3:46:02Doug Bernauer?

  Yeah, it's really exciting. I mean, one of the coolest things, they, they asked you to reform the process that we're using at national laboratories to test reactors. That's going to be extremely critical to us staying on our schedule. We will achieve going critical next year because of a lot of things happen today.

• 3:46:20John Coogan?

  That's great news. Thank you. Thanks for joining Doug. We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:46:24Jordi Hays?

  Amazing milestone. Cheers.

• 3:46:26John Coogan?

  Good luck. Talk to you soon. I wanted to pull up, we're, we're going to stay on nuclear for a little bit. We're going long. We wanted to pull up Scott Nolan, my former colleague at Founders Fund and the CEO of General Matter, a nuclear fuel refinement company, was in the White House.

• 3:46:45Speaker 09

  Trying to bring back the US's lead in producing nuclear fuel. So just like car engines need fuel, nuclear reactors need fuel. Right now, the US is completely dependent on other countries to make the key step of enrichment in this field. And these executive orders are going to pave the way for the US to regain its lead. So we really appreciate it.

• 3:47:03Speaker 07

  Would you be doing the AI plants? Because we have a lot of them going up now, or soon going up, and they need tremendous electricity. Are you going to be involved in mineral waste plant?

• 3:47:12Speaker 09

  Yes. Will Scott Nolan, CEO of General

• 3:47:14John Coogan?

  There we go. I was here for Scott Nolan.

• 3:47:17Speaker 09

  Richard

• 3:47:17John Coogan?

  Color temperature, a little bit off on that video, but otherwise fantastic.

• 3:47:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, we have Asaya from Valor in the waiting room.

• 3:47:29John Coogan?

  Bring him in.

• 3:47:30Jordi Hays?

  Let's bring him in. I think he's also, has he been in, he's been in the Capitol today?

• 3:47:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think he was over there today in DC. Let's bring him in. And he is building at the 10 megawatts scale. And so everyone's got, everyone's playing in the different market.

• 3:47:48Jordi Hays?

  Gotta play. There he is.

• 3:47:49John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for calling in. Can you give us the breakdown? How you doing?

• 3:47:53Isaiah Taylor?

  Doing really well. Thank you so much for having me on, guys. I'm actually just coming back from going live on a little upstart called Bloomberg TV. So, you know, it'll take a while for them to catch up to your stature.

• 3:48:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:48:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's kind of like a feeder, it's like kind of like a feeder system.

• 3:48:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, feeder system. Can you go horizontal with your phone?

• 3:48:12Isaiah Taylor?

  Yeah, yeah, sure. There you go. Yeah, that's right. A little feeder network for the technology brothers. So, yeah, great to be in the temple of technology today.

• 3:48:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's good to have you. Break it down for us. We read kind of the highlights, but what were the key, the key pieces of the EO in your opinion?

• 3:48:32Isaiah Taylor?

  Yeah, listen, this is a total rewrite of the regulatory system in the United States for nuclear energy. You know, nuclear grew up in the US with a total dominance of nuclear power in terms of US strategy, right? So we had the only nuclear reactors in the world for a while. We piloted essentially every nuclear reactor architecture that there is. And we wanted to protect that edge and protect that advantage. And so what we did is we built these high regulatory walls around the nuclear environment, hoping that nuclear wouldn't spread around the world. We wanted to protect this advantage. This is a natural instinct. I think it was a good instinct at the time. But the problem is that over time, our competitors or geopolitical rivals built nuclear anyway. And where we are now is that these walls that we built to protect our advantage in the

• 3:49:17Isaiah Taylor?

  United States actually eroded our advantage. And we ended up building a large wall around an empire of dirt. And so today, this is about bringing those barriers back down, allowing American entrepreneurs to build nuclear energy again. There's a couple of really important things announced here. One is revitalizing the Department of Energy. So the Department of Energy was created to be a nuclear test agency. Not a lot of people realize this, but the DOE, we kind of imagine it to be this broad-based energy agency, and it is, but it was actually created to be a nuclear reactor test agency. And since it was created, it's only done that one time. And so this is about revitalizing that. And actually, President Trump has given a strong commission to the nuclear industry.

• 3:49:57Isaiah Taylor?

  He wants three test reactors critical on US soil by July 4th, 2026, America's 250th birthday. And just a few minutes ago, we announced with the governor of Utah for the first time that we're partnering with the governor to full charge, full steam at hitting that goal, at turning on a reactor by July 4th, 2026, at the San Rafael Energy Test Center in Utah. So that's what we announced today.

• 3:50:22John Coogan?

  Congratulations. That's amazing news. Good luck.

• 3:50:25Isaiah Taylor?

  Thank you.

• 3:50:30John Coogan?

  So yeah, I mean, it seems like with any nuclear project, regulatory is always the main risk, the main rate-limiting factor with regulatory out of the picture. Is this more of an engineering challenge now? Is it a manufacturing challenge? Like, how do you weight the different challenges ahead for you to hit that deadline?

• 3:50:51Isaiah Taylor?

  That's absolutely right. Listen, you know, nuclear is a technology that we've been exploring for 70 years now. We've done an enormous amount of physics around this. We've done an enormous amount of research. The thing that has stood in the way is one company deciding to be the SpaceX of nuclear, right? Deciding to own nuclear energy, full verticalization from the design of reactors to construction, to manufacturing, to deployment, to operation. That's what Valar Atomics is attempting to do. There hasn't been a Ford of nuclear energy yet. There hasn't been a Tesla of nuclear energy yet. There hasn't been a SpaceX. Valar Atomics is intending to be that company and regulation has absolutely been the long pull in that tent. So this executive order is incredibly important. You know, I think this is really going to set the tone for the next 100 years of energy dominance. If

• 3:51:34Isaiah Taylor?

  we're going to win on AI, on manufacturing, on supply chain, we're going to do it with a ton of cheap energy.

• 3:51:40John Coogan?

  Talk about the first product, 10 megawatts, is that correct?

• 3:51:44Isaiah Taylor?

  25 megawatt electric is our commercial model. So Valar Atomics is, yeah, we've gone out and we've really hit an ambitious milestone. I founded this company about 17 months ago. We were intending to go out and build our first prototype reactor in 18 months. We finished it in 16 months. This is a test reactor sitting in our Los Angeles facility today. We've operated above temperature, above pressure, not with uranium, not splitting atoms yet, but with electrical simulation. And really what we proved is that it's possible to build a nuclear reactor in under 18 months. Now that we've done that, we go and actually build it again in Utah and another one in the Philippines and we actually load them with uranium for the first time, turn them on. After that, we go and build our commercial

• 3:52:26Isaiah Taylor?

  model, which is this 25 megawatt unit and build thousands of them around the world.

• 3:52:31John Coogan?

  Very cool. Jordy, anything else?

• 3:52:32Jordi Hays?

  Sounds pretty simple.

• 3:52:36John Coogan?

  Just draw the rest of the owl.

• 3:52:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:52:38John Coogan?

  Draw the rest of the owl.

• 3:52:39Isaiah Taylor?

  Yeah. We make thousands of nuclear reactors. We make trillions of dollars. I'm very excited. It's a good day in energy.

• 3:52:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it's fantastic. I, you know, we were just talking with Doug from Radiant and in many ways, like if you started A nuclear company at any point in history.

• 3:52:57John Coogan?

  Be rough.

• 3:52:58Jordi Hays?

  You were betting on activity like we're seeing today and action. And so

• 3:53:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:53:04Jordi Hays?

  Super validating for for you guys that had to get looked at like you were crazy and a bunch of pitch meetings early, uh, cause it feels like one of those things where like culturally, I think in 2020, people started kind of waking up to like, hey, wait, nuclear is pretty cool and probably good. And we probably want more reactors, not less.

• 3:53:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:53:24Jordi Hays?

  And then companies that, you know, have started picking up.

• 3:53:28John Coogan?

  How important is it for you to vertically integrate into the actual productive use of the energy? It feels like there's so much demand for energy. You could just become a mass manufacturing for nuclear reactors. And that would be enough of a business. When we talked last time, about a year ago, you were talking about generating fuel out of the air with this energy, but it feels like you might just want to let the free market decide what the best and highest use of the energy is. Is there still a plan to do something with the energy that you own and control and just and decide? Or is it just like, let's just make as many nuclear reactors as possible right now?

• 3:54:08Isaiah Taylor?

  Yeah. You know, one of the core realizations of Valor is that there are some products that the market actually doesn't know how to buy. Right? So I think this is one of the most important realizations that Elon had with SpaceX, which is that if you're going to make a rocket company that makes really good rockets, you also need to fly them. Right? You can't just build a rocket. You have to fly them too. And the reason is that the customer actually doesn't know how to fly the rocket. Right? A small sat company, a telecom company doesn't know how to fly a Falcon nine. And so it turns out the best way to use a Falcon nine is SpaceX is to actually own the entire operational cadence. And then you sell products like kilograms to orbit and internet connectivity. Right? So that's, that's the right way, you know, to think about these really, really complex technologies.

• 3:54:51Isaiah Taylor?

  Nuclear reactors are like this as well. So yeah, when we think about building lots of reactors, we think about building them on these very large energy campuses. And then we sell energy, right? We sell energy, not, not nuclear reactors. That might mean energy to AI data centers. Absolutely. It means hydrogen and it means eventually synthetic fuels, right? If we can make a synthetic fuel cheaper than diesel, cheaper than gasoline, we can actually become, you know, the energy company of the world, right? Because the majority of the energy today is in hydrocarbon format. So that's, that's kind of the core realization that we had when starting Valor.

• 3:55:23John Coogan?

  Very cool. Well, good luck. Thanks for calling in.

• 3:55:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, huge day.

• 3:55:26John Coogan?

  Huge day. Congratulations. Huge day. Thanks, guys.

• 3:55:29Jordi Hays?

  To you and the whole industry. Cheers.

• 3:55:32John Coogan?

  What a great show. Whole world tour.

• 3:55:35Jordi Hays?

  I guess we just, uh, I guess we just hit four hours.

• 3:55:38John Coogan?

  Anything else we need to cover before we get out of here?

• 3:55:40Jordi Hays?

  I think, uh, breaking news, John.

• 3:55:43John Coogan?

  What's that?

• 3:55:44Jordi Hays?

  It's the weekend.

• 3:55:45John Coogan?

  It's the weekend.

• 3:55:47Jordi Hays?

  And as always, our board has been very explicit about this. Leave us a five star reviews.

• 3:55:55John Coogan?

  Podcasts and Spotify.

• 3:55:56Jordi Hays?

  Feel like it, but if you've listened this far, you're four hours in, I'm guessing we earned that five stars. So.

• 3:56:02John Coogan?

  Just do it.

• 3:56:03Jordi Hays?

  Everybody have a great Memorial Day weekend. We actually won't have a Monday show.

• 3:56:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're moving.

• 3:56:07Jordi Hays?

  Into the new studio.

• 3:56:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:56:09Jordi Hays?

  But we'll be back in full force.

• 3:56:10John Coogan?

  Tuesday.

• 3:56:11Jordi Hays?

  In the new studio in the temple on Tuesday.

• 3:56:14John Coogan?

  We're excited.

• 3:56:15Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:56:15John Coogan?

  Have a great weekend.

• 3:56:16Jordi Hays?

  Have a good one.

• 3:56:17John Coogan?

  Bye.