Peter Thiel Gets Apocalyptic, The Myth of AI Millions, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions | Joe Lonsdale, Bret Taylor, Riley Walz

(00:11) - Peter Thiel Gets Apocalyptic (13:55) - The Myth of AI Millions (49:20) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (54:34) - Bret Taylor, co-founder of Sierra and chairman of OpenAI's board, discusses how Sierra's AI agents are transforming customer service by autonomously handling tasks like answering calls and managing complex processes, thereby reducing costs and enhancing customer experiences. He emphasizes the importance of aligning AI solutions with business outcomes, advocating for outcome-based pricing models where clients pay for successfully completed tasks, ensuring that Sierra's services directly contribute to measurable business improvements. Taylor also highlights the challenges incumbent software companies face in adapting to AI advancements, noting that transitioning both technology and business models is complex, and that startups like Sierra have the advantage of agility and focus in this rapidly evolving landscape. (01:31:07) - Joe Lonsdale is a serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist, known for co-founding Palantir Technologies and serving as managing partner at 8VC. In the conversation, he discusses the rapid growth and high valuations in the AI sector, emphasizing the importance of investing in top talent and innovative ideas. He also highlights the potential of AI to transform various industries, including healthcare and construction, and shares insights on the evolving startup landscape in Texas. (01:59:04) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:07:16) - Jim Cramer's Daily Ritual (02:11:50) - VCs Scramble For AI Darlings (02:22:27) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:26:59) - Riley Walz, a 23-year-old software engineer, discusses his creation of "Find My Parking Cops," an app that used publicly available data to track San Francisco parking enforcement officers in real time, allowing users to see their locations and ticketing activity. He explains how he identified predictable patterns in ticket ID numbers to scrape this data, leading to the app's rapid viral success. However, within four hours of its launch, the city altered its website to block data access, effectively disabling the app. (02:43:20) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com fal - https://fal.ai Privy - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Wednesday, September 24th, 2025. We are live from the TBN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. The Wall Street Journal has a post because they wrote an article about Peter Thiel's lecture circuit on the Antichrist. They write, "Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor in data, AI, defense, and weapons development technologies wants everyone to think more about the end of the world." And it got me thinking more about capital allocation, honestly. This circuit, we've covered this a little bit. Thiel has been on a lecture series that's now four parts up in San Francisco. Tyler, do you know why Peter is doing this? What do you mean?

• 0:45John Coogan?

  Do you know why he's doing this lecture circuit? You're supposed to say, "Why questions are over-determined." Oh.

• 0:51Jordi Hays?

  That was a layup. That was a layup.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  As always, why questions are over-determined.

• 0:57John Coogan?

  Tyler made this. Anyway, never ask why. Ask how to save time and money. Go to ramp.com. Easy use corporate cards, bill payment, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. They are not live streaming this. They should be live streaming it on Restream, one livestream, 30-plus destinations, multi-stream, reach your audience, wherever they are. No, it is off the record, and if you go and you get a ticket and you post about it, you get axed.

• 1:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, somebody summarized the first couple and just immediately got a comment from Miss Stevens who said, "Your band."

• 1:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, they were running the Blake Masters, they were trying to run back the Blake Masters playbook. So if you're not familiar with the lore here, back in spring of 2012-

• 1:38Jordi Hays?

  He was basically kind of making a run at, "I want to be the Blake Masters of the Antichrist."

• 1:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, which is like a wild, wild thing to play out because, I mean, so let's give a little history here. Back in spring of 2012-

• 1:52Jordi Hays?

  He wanted his name in the history books next to the section on the Antichrist.

• 1:55John Coogan?

  Exactly, which is very different than what happened last time Peter gave a set of lectures. It was at Stanford and it became the backbone of the bestselling book Zero to One. The talks were focused on entrepreneurship, but it could be seen as a history lesson or political treaties or referendum on American culture. There was a lot that came into that lecture series and there's a lot of facts in that book, a lot of stories in that book that aren't strictly directly applicable to just building a company, even though the course was literally called How To Start A Startup, CS183. And Zero to One kind of turned into a playbook that Founder's Fund ran for a long time and still runs and has produced a bunch of alpha. The ideas of being founder friendly, the monopoly thesis, the definite optimist,

• 2:40John Coogan?

  like these Thielisms became real investment strategies for the following decade and are still holding true today. It was a bit shocking, it was always shocking to me that like the be founder friendly, don't fire founders like stuck around as durable alpha for as long as it did. But VCs just love firing founders, like it's just nothing.

• 2:59Jordi Hays?

  Sometimes they can't help themselves.

• 3:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've never done it personally, but I imagine.

• 3:02Jordi Hays?

  You've always wanted to.

• 3:03John Coogan?

  I imagine the thrill must be electric because even though.

• 3:06Jordi Hays?

  Ripping somebody from their creation.

• 3:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, it must be because it clearly doesn't produce alpha. Because if you look at the companies that are founder led, they tend to outperform. So you're sacrificing a lot of, a lot of financial gain when you fire a founder. But the rush, the rush must be incredible. It must be better than even returning billions of dollars to your LPs. But so this new lecture circuit is about the Antichrist and the series doesn't fit neatly into the previous Stanford course calendar. It's not listed as CS184, Antichrist, no. It's not a computer science course at Stanford. It's being put on by Michelle Stevens at ACTS 17 and is much more focused on religion, specifically in Christianity.

• 3:52John Coogan?

  So the Wall Street Journal characterized one of Thiel's core theses this way. Thiel draws on a theory that the Antichrist could be an individual or entity that is incredibly charismatic, but talks repeatedly about the end of the world, thereby convincing society to give it the power it needs to regulate the existential risks from science and technology. And there are lots of people that come to mind when you think about talking about Dumerism. And Thiel cites Greta Thunberg. She said, "Our house is on fire. We must act like the house is on fire." She said also, "We are in the beginning of a mass extinction." This is in September of 2019, "And all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth." She told this to, I think, this was reported by PBS, the UN

• 4:37John Coogan?

  Climate Action Summit.

• 4:38Jordi Hays?

  This is her campaign to increase human suffering?

• 4:42John Coogan?

  It's been a mixed bag, but Eliezer Yudkowsky said other doomer things. He has a new book out. He's on a book tour. He says, "If we go ahead on this, everyone will die." He's referring to AI, not climate change in this case, "including children who did not choose this and do not do anything wrong." Sam Altman has also said some stuff that's sort of apocalyptic. You know, he told the US Senate in his testimony in 2023.

• 5:09Jordi Hays?

  If I don't get $200 trillion.

• 5:11John Coogan?

  If I can't automate enterprise workflows.

• 5:15Jordi Hays?

  If I can't get $500 trillion, million, billion dollars.

• 5:19John Coogan?

  Zillion, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine. I need nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, billion dollars. Yeah, round numbers are out. You need to go to a VC and say, "For this round, we're raising nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine dollars, please."

• 5:35Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 5:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 5:37Jordi Hays?

  Don't make me choose. Don't make me choose. Don't make me choose between curing cancer and free education.

• 5:44John Coogan?

  Don't make me choose.

• 5:45Jordi Hays?

  I will do it.

• 5:46John Coogan?

  Saving time and saving money. Just.

• 5:48Jordi Hays?

  Save both.

• 5:49John Coogan?

  We can save both with random.com. Anyway, no, but he did. He did give, you know, a bit of a doomer take. He was talking about how this could go wrong. He said, "If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong." Elon Musk also said something similar. He said, "With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon." And the original SpaceX thesis was.

• 6:09Jordi Hays?

  When did he say that, by the way?

• 6:10John Coogan?

  He said that in October of 2014 at the MIT Centennial Symposium.

• 6:15Jordi Hays?

  And what did he mean by that? Because now he's got a XAI.

• 6:20John Coogan?

  Summoning a demon. I think he thinks that if you shape the demon portal in the right shape, the demon comes through and is kind of friendly, maybe?

• 6:28Jordi Hays?

  Friendly demon.

• 6:29John Coogan?

  Kind of nice? I don't know.

• 6:30Jordi Hays?

  Friendly demon that increases enterprise value through business automation.

• 6:35John Coogan?

  Hopefully.

• 6:35Jordi Hays?

  Increased efficiency.

• 6:36John Coogan?

  Hopefully, and vibe coding three JS apps. That's the demon that I want. But even SpaceX, you can view as a rebuttal to the apocalypse. What would be apocalyptic? Humanity remaining on the earth alone. An asteroid comes, hits the earth, we're all done. But if we become multi-planetary, we are no longer a single point of failure. If there's humans on Mars and the moon and earth, if something bad happens to earth, humanity continues. The stakes that Elon framed SpaceX in were world consequential.

• 7:15Jordi Hays?

  By the way, if you go to XAI.com, it's this random company called UNK AI.

• 7:22John Coogan?

  What?

• 7:23Jordi Hays?

  U N K AI.

• 7:24John Coogan?

  No way.

• 7:24Jordi Hays?

  And they feature popular AI brands like Grok4, ChatGPT.

• 7:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 7:29Jordi Hays?

  DeepSeek and Xiaomi and Unitree.

• 7:34John Coogan?

  Weird.

• 7:34Jordi Hays?

  Seemingly a Chinese company.

• 7:36John Coogan?

  Okay, odd.

• 7:37Jordi Hays?

  That's using it to promote a range of products.

• 7:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:41Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, it's very strange.

• 7:41John Coogan?

  So my question was, there's a lot of focus on if you speak in millenarian terms, if you speak of apocalyptic consequences to not building your technology, you might be the Antichrist, it might be bad. But at the same time, I'm just looking at history here and looking at these folks who have become popular and thought leaders on apocalyptic scenarios. Elon, Sam, Udikowski, Greta. If you backed these folks as a basket, you would have done quite well. You're in SpaceX, you're in OpenAI, you've done quite well. And I'm wondering where the line is for.

• 8:22John Coogan?

  Uh, you know, using, uh, speaking about apocalyptic consequences to the lack of technology, to the lack of not solving a problem and then balancing that with, uh, delivering something that isn't authoritarian, but is actually just a really, really big, ambitious project. So if you, if you, if you read into, you know, uh, we're summoning the demon, we need to go to Mars because humanity could be wiped out and Earth is cooked, right? Um, there's one world where it's like, that is apocalyptic thinking. There's another, which is just like, this is a reframing on the classic, like, I want to save the world. I want to change the world. We want to make the world a better place. All those terms have kind of fallen out of fashion as, as a lot of founders just kind

• 9:03John Coogan?

  of wound up, you know, building, automating manual workflows, right? And so they, they stopped saying, we're going to change the world with a better database. But there's still something, if you're a VC and you want to back a moonshot, you want to back something that's either going to be a zero or trillion dollars, that where I feel like your, your

• 9:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Augustus is, is a great example of this pitch because, um, everyday people experience rain all the time. They're not necessarily like droughts or not something super tangible, right? Because you just, you turn the faucet and the water runs regardless of if you're in a drought or not. Obviously farmers feel this much more intensely, but he's come out and said, you know, we need to be able to control the weather. We need to be able to increase precipitation.

• 9:50John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 9:51Jordi Hays?

  And you should fund me so that I can do this, right?

• 9:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. There's something about these bold missions that rally employees, they rally investors, they rally media attention. You look at like what Augustus is doing is deeply controversial, but he's on podcasts that are so much bigger than what normal, what is he at, series A? Like a series A founder typically is not on multiple million plus subscriber podcasts.

• 10:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:24John Coogan?

  Uh, doing a tour.

• 10:25Jordi Hays?

  Going, going and talking to people that are, are actively disagree with what he's doing.

• 10:31John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. Yeah. I mean, we talked to founders all, all day long who come on and, oh, they raised at a billion dollar valuation or they raised a billion dollars. We had five series E companies on Tuesday. Uh, those folks are not getting calls from the biggest media platforms in the world on day one consistently on a regular basis. And I think it's because of That they're going after more tractable problems, they're going after things that are less controversial, but also there's just something interesting about actually refocusing on tackling those really, really big issues. And so there's something where I feel like the fear of like targeting the Antichrist turns into like, you know, Girardian scapegoat, you got to find someone to blame everything on. I'm worried about how all that shapes

• 11:15John Coogan?

  up, but I am optimistic about this idea of venture capitalists returning to the super high risk. It's either zero or trillion dollars. It either is a completely useless company that doesn't get anything done, or they cure cancer, or they build a flying car, or they build the rocket that goes to space. And even if Elon hasn't gotten us to Mars, we're not multiplanetary yet, he's still able to ship Starlink. It's great business. And then also keep everyone still motivated on how cool would it be if we actually got to Mars. That's amazing. It's another 20 years.

• 11:49Jordi Hays?

  We need AI to benefit humanity, very oriented around safety, right? This is a nonprofit. This is work that needs to be done that's not going to get funded through the capital markets and it turns into an internet software.

• 12:04John Coogan?

  And so, and so I don't know, I don't know what your timeline is for SpaceX getting to Mars. It might be 20 years, maybe 30 years, but at least it keeps them focused on, you know, chopping wood and working hard to actually advance the underlying technology that we get a lot of value on through just satellites and stuff. And I think that the same thing could be true for the AI companies where, yeah, maybe we don't get the AGI god ASI, you know, super soon, but there's just like a ton of value and you keep working at it because it's delivering value in the short to medium term, but you're able to keep the sights really, really, really high. And that drives just like, that's just what you need to actually marshal all the energy to go back something really huge. Anyway.

• 12:47John Coogan?

  Tyler, have you been following the Antichrist Lecture Series vibes at all? What's your take?

• 12:55Speaker 03

  I read the first set of notes that came out by the person who I think got in trouble.

• 13:00John Coogan?

  The banned notes, you got to them before they were taken down off the internet?

• 13:02Speaker 03

  Oh, they were taken down.

• 13:03John Coogan?

  I believe so. I couldn't find them.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  Well, I don't think people are really missing anything because most of that stuff was like...

• 13:08John Coogan?

  In other podcasts?

• 13:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, most of it was in the Hoover Institution podcast with Peter Robinson. So, I mean, the vibes are like, most of the stuff I've seen online were just like the protests outside of it that I thought were like pretty funny.

• 13:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does feel like this is definitely in the early stages of action. Like, he's definitely like working these bits out and figuring out how all the pieces fit together into some sort of narrative or conclusion. But it's interesting and not many other venture capitalists are talking about it. So at least it's different and fresh. Anyway. Privy, wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API.

• 13:55Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 13:57John Coogan?

  We got a little bit of a bear take from Jerry Newman over in Colossus. AI will not make you rich. I feel like AI is already making tons of people rich. I wonder what's going on. Let's read through some of this.

• 14:10Jordi Hays?

  Kick it off.

• 14:12John Coogan?

  Jerry writes, in Colossus Mag, which you should subscribe to of course, fortunes are made by entrepreneurs and investors when revolutionary technologies enable waves of innovative investable companies. Think of the railroad, the Bessemer process. I actually don't know what the Bessemer process is.

• 14:27Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, what's the Bessemer process?

• 14:29John Coogan?

  Electric power, the internal combustion engine.

• 14:31Jordi Hays?

  That was mass producing steel.

• 14:33John Coogan?

  Mass producing steel.

• 14:34Jordi Hays?

  Or molten pig iron.

• 14:35John Coogan?

  Were there lots of steel startups at the time, I suppose? Interesting. Each of which, like a stray spark in a fireworks factory, set off decades of follow-on innovation, permeated every part of society, and catapulted a new set of inventions and investors into power, influence, and wealth. Yet some technological innovations, though societally transformative, generate little in the way of new wealth. Instead, they reinforce the status quo. Fifteen years before the microprocessor, another revolutionary idea, shipping containerization, arrived at a less propitious time when technological advancement was a red queen's race, and inventors and investors were left no better

• 15:16John Coogan?

  off for nonstop running. Interesting. I didn't know that about the containerization story. Anyone who invests in the new, new thing must answer two questions. First, how much value will this innovation create? And second, who will capture it? Information and communication technology was a revolution whose value was captured by startups and led to thousands of newly rich founders, employees, and investors.

• 15:40Jordi Hays?

  Also called high technology, high tech.

• 15:42John Coogan?

  Yes. I am, I'm very excited to see where he takes this because I feel like there are already, what, thousands of new millionaires in the AI boom, just from secondary sales?

• 15:53Jordi Hays?

  Check out the prices of starter homes in San Francisco.

• 15:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, like it's happening. Didn't OpenAI just do a $10 billion tender offer or something? Like, there's liquidity flowing, people are getting rich.

• 16:03Jordi Hays?

  Not to mention how many individual indie founders are making a lot of money

• 16:07John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 16:08Jordi Hays?

  building various AI apps and experience.

• 16:10John Coogan?

  Also, just people that went long Nvidia or have been buying, you know, calls on Nvidia at various times, or Leopold Ochenbrenner. Like, there's a bunch of people that have figured out different ways to make money. What do you think?

• 16:22Speaker 03

  I mean, yeah, there's that stat of the, like, this was like, maybe three years old or something, but about the Nvidia employees, and it was like 75% of them are worth over a million dollars.

• 16:30John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  I'm sure that's like probably 90% now.

• 16:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, I don't know, maybe he has to argue for like, collapse of everything? We'll see where this goes.

• 16:39John Coogan?

  Is generative AI more like the former containerization or the latter IT revolution? Will it be the basis of many future industrial fortunes or a net loser for the investment community as a whole with a few zero sum winners here and there? There are ways to make money investing in the fruits of AI, but they will depend on assuming the latter, that it is once again a less propitious time for investors and inventors, that AI model builders and application companies will eventually compete each other into an oligopoly. I believe that's true. And that the gains from AI will not accrue to its builders, but to customers. A lot of the money pouring into AI is therefore being invested in the wrong places. And aside from a couple lucky early investors, those who make money will be the ones with

• 17:23John Coogan?

  the foresight to get out early. What do you think, Jordy?

• 17:28Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I mean, we got it. We got to, I don't want to, I don't want to just start.

• 17:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 17:33Jordi Hays?

  Just dunk it.

• 17:34John Coogan?

  Keep reading the microprocessor.

• 17:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So the micro, but, but the main thing is in venture, it's really hard to get out early if you're investing with real size.

• 17:43John Coogan?

  Yes, totally.

• 17:43Jordi Hays?

  If you're writing a $200 million check, it's not like at the next round, you're like, oh, nice, I got a 3X markup. I'm gonna, I'm gonna.

• 17:50John Coogan?

  I'm gonna sell 600 million in secondary.

• 17:52Jordi Hays?

  You're not. And this is, this is something you see on the timeline. People, people usually add on accounts saying like, oh, these multi-stage funds are just dumping on you and all this stuff. And it's like, like, yes, at times funds can exit some of their positions, smaller funds can exit entirely, but by and large, if you led an early round, you're not able to just fully exit.

• 18:19John Coogan?

  And you might even be locked up post-IPO. There's a bunch of ways. It would be very funny if, you know how everyone's like, let SPF out of jail. He, he got, he got a stake in Anthropic and then Elon today.

• 18:30Jordi Hays?

  Something else somebody was sharing this morning, I forgot about this, but he bought almost 7% of Robinhood at the bottom.

• 18:36John Coogan?

  And there's like two other companies that he got that he like nailed. He was like a fantastic trader, but did you see what Elon posted about Anthropic? He said, winning was never in the set of possible options or possible outcomes.

• 18:50Jordi Hays?

  How did he say that?

• 18:51John Coogan?

  He said that on X yesterday, I believe. So Elon is a giga bear on, Elon is a giga bear on Anthropic, saying that Anthropic's a zero. And if Elon's right, then SBF looks bad again. Cause he looked bad because he lost all the customer money.

• 19:09Jordi Hays?

  Was Elon scolding about SBF?

• 19:12John Coogan?

  No, no, no, completely unrelated, completely unrelated. Elon's just trash talking the other labs, because he trash talks a bunch of labs, right? But he was, he was saying that, you know, oh, Anthropic's not gonna lose, it's gonna, he's not gonna win, it's gonna be a zero or whatever. He wasn't exactly saying it was gonna be a zero, but he was saying, he was saying, you know, winning was never in the, in the set of possible outcomes. And so it'd be very, it'd be very funny if we go, if we round trip on SBF.

• 19:36Jordi Hays?

  Anthropic's like, to everyone that preyed on my downfall, pray harder.

• 19:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I, I, I think it's kind of a silly, silly.

• 19:43Jordi Hays?

  I'll continue. The microprocessor was revolutionary, but the people who invented it at Intel in 1971 did not see it that way. They just wanted to avoid designing desktop calculator chipsets from scratch every time. But outsiders realized they could use the microprocessor to build their own personal computers, and enthusiasts did. Thousands of tinkerers found configurations and uses that Intel never dreamed of. This distributed and permissionless invention kicked off a great surge of development, as the economist Carlotta Perez called it. Triggered by technology but driven by economic and societal forces. There was no real demand for personal computers in the early 1970s. They were expensive toys, but the experimenters laid the technical groundwork and built a community.

• 20:27Jordi Hays?

  Then around 1975, a step change in the cost of microprocessors made the personal computer market viable. The Intel 880 had an initial list price of $360, which is $2,300 in today's dollars. MITS could barely turn a profit on its Altair at a bulk price of $75 each, which is $490 today.

• 20:48John Coogan?

  Donald Boat would have gotten it done in 1975.

• 20:51Jordi Hays?

  He would have gotten it done, he would have been putting.

• 20:54John Coogan?

  Gordon Moore, send me an Intel 880, you're on notice.

• 20:58Jordi Hays?

  He'd just be putting ads in the newspaper.

• 21:00John Coogan?

  He'd be writing letters to Gordon Moore. And Bob Nois, "Send me an Intel 8080."

• 21:06Jordi Hays?

  But when MOS technology started selling at 6502 for $25, Steve Wozniak could afford to build a prototype Apple. 6502 and the similarly priced Xilog Z80 forced Intel's prices down. The nascent PC community started spawning entrepreneurs and a score of companies appeared, each with a slightly different product. You couldn't have known in the mid 1970s that the PC would revolutionize everything. While Steve Jobs was telling investors that every household would someday have a personal computer, a wild underestimate, as it turned out, the others questioned the need for personal computers at all. As late as 1979, Apple's ads didn't tell you what a personal computer could do. It asked what you would do with it.

• 21:48Jordi Hays?

  The established computer manufacturers had no interest in a product their customers weren't asking for. Nobody needed a computer and so PCs weren't bought, they were sold. Flashy startups like Apple and Sinclair used hype to get noticed, while companies with footholds in consumer electronics like Atari, Commodore, and Tandy, Radio Shack, used strong retail connections to put their PCs...

• 22:07John Coogan?

  Look at this controversial ad that they ran with a naked man, Adam, holding an Apple computer, the original "Clearly, maybe Steve Jobs was on to something" with the viral marketing being controversial.

• 22:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is an insane ad.

• 22:23John Coogan?

  "We're looking for the most original use of an Apple since Adam." What in the name of Adam do people do with Apple computers? You tell us in a thousand words or less. If your story is original and intriguing enough, you could win a one-week, all-expense-paid trip for two to Hawaii?

• 22:42Jordi Hays?

  Giveaways.

• 22:43John Coogan?

  Giveaways. This is wild. What insane Apple lore. Steve Jobs is really on one.

• 22:49Jordi Hays?

  The logo too, with the Apple...

• 22:52John Coogan?

  The stripes.

• 22:53Jordi Hays?

  Stripes.

• 22:54John Coogan?

  Oh, so good.

• 22:54Jordi Hays?

  So, the market grew slowly, at first accelerating only as experiments led to practical applications like the spreadsheet. Let's give it up for the spreadsheet.

• 23:02John Coogan?

  One of the best inventions of all time.

• 23:04Jordi Hays?

  Hit that horn. As use grow, observation of use caused a reduction in uncertainty, leading to more adoption and a self-reinforcing cycle. This kind of gathering momentum takes time in every technological wave. It took almost 30 years for electricity to reach half of American households, for example, and it took about the same amount of time for personal computers. When a technological revolution changes everything, it takes a huge amount of innovation, investment, storytelling, time, and plain old work. It also sucks up all the money and talent available. Like Kuhn's paradigms in science, any technology not part of the wave's techno-economic paradigm will seem like a sideshow.

• 23:40John Coogan?

  Well, let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devon. Devon is the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with personal AI engineering team at your fingertips in your Slack. Let's continue. The nascent growth of PCs attracted investors, venture capitalists, who started making risky bets on new companies. This development incentivized more inventors, entrepreneurs, and researchers. You don't hear enough about inventors anymore. Everyone wants to be a founder. No one wants to be an inventor. I want to show up, I want to meet some folks who just are like, "Yeah, I'm just working on..."

• 24:13Jordi Hays?

  Well, what about Riley Walls, who's joining the show later today? He's kind of inventor-coded.

• 24:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think he's an inventor. You called him a rascal, something like that.

• 24:21Jordi Hays?

  Internet rascal.

• 24:22John Coogan?

  Internet rascal, which is, I think, fantastic. But I think of him as an inventor. Which in turn, and all of this drew more speculative capital. Companies like IBM, the computing behemoth before the PC, saw poor relative performance. They didn't believe the PC could survive long enough to become capable in their market and didn't care about new, small markets that wanted a cheaper solution. Retroactively, we gave the PC, we give the PC pioneers the power of profits, well, that's a lot of alliteration, rather than visionaries. But at the time, nobody outside a small group of early adopters paid any attention. Establishment media, like the New York Times, didn't take the PC seriously until after IBM's was introduced in August of 1981.

• 25:03John Coogan?

  In the entire year of 1976, when Apple Computer was founded, the NYT mentioned PCs only four times. Apparently, only the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, and the troublemakers were paying attention. This is, uh, yeah, total mentions of personal computers in the New York Times over time, and, uh, exponential growth from nineteen seventy-nine to nineteen eighty-four.

• 25:28Jordi Hays?

  Crazy that it actually peaked in ninety-four.

• 25:31John Coogan?

  Eighty-four?

• 25:32Jordi Hays?

  Sorry.

• 25:33John Coogan?

  It peaks in eighty.

• 25:34Jordi Hays?

  Eighty-four, sorry. And then it was dropping throughout the eighties.

• 25:37John Coogan?

  Well, it's old news, you know?

• 25:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's over.

• 25:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, everyone has a PC. I mean, how many articles are there about, like, social media today, this year, or, like, smartphones? Like, there just aren't as many as there were during the boom. Right? That's the nature of these things.

• 25:49Jordi Hays?

  Still, the full New York Times.

• 25:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, but, I mean, there's just so many times when you can just, like, you know, it just melts into the background of the story. But, it's a good point. Uh, it's the element of surprise that should strike us most forcefully when we compare the early days of the computer revolution to today. No one took note of personal computers in the nineteen seventies. In twenty twenty-five, AI is all we seem to talk about. Big companies hate surprises. You want to continue here?

• 26:14Jordi Hays?

  Big companies hate surprises. That's why uncertainty makes a perfect moat for startups. Apple would never have survived IBM entering the market in nineteen seventy-nine and only live to compete another day after raising a hundred million in its nineteen eighty IPO. It was the only remaining competitor after the IBM-induced, uh, winnowing.

• 26:32John Coogan?

  IBM and Apple, they're the only two survivors. All these other companies, the Altair, the Amiga, the Atari ST, uh, all fell off, but the Mac and the IBM PC ripped onward.

• 26:47Jordi Hays?

  International business machines.

• 26:48John Coogan?

  Love to see it.

• 26:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh, as the tech took hold and started to show promise, innovations in software, memory, and peripherals like floppy disk drives and modems joined it. They reinforced one another with, with each advance, putting pressure on the technologies adjacent to it. When any part of the system held back the other parts, investors rushed to fund that sector. As increases in PC memory allowed more complicated software, there became a need for more external storage, which caused VC, uh, Dave, uh, Mark, Market? Mark, uh, to invest in disk drive manufacturer Seagate in nineteen eighty. Seagate gave a forty extra term when it went public in nineteen eighty-one. Other investors noticed, and some two-hundred-and-seventy million was plowed into the industry in the following three years. Seagate's been ripping, right?

• 27:33John Coogan?

  All the hard drive makers, because all the... All the AI companies need to store a ton of training data, RL data. They're generating a huge amount of data, images, videos, all sorts of stuff. And all of that needs more storage.

• 27:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, up 109% in the past.

• 27:49John Coogan?

  I remember, I, I think we read an article about the hard drive boom like a year ago. And it was, we're still early.

• 27:56Jordi Hays?

  I know. That, that's actually crazy. I remember it was like

• 27:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, remember this?

• 27:59Jordi Hays?

  First like 10 episodes.

• 28:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were like, oh, this is kind of a boring story, but it's kind of interesting and it seems important. So we read about C gate.

• 28:05Jordi Hays?

  Let's check in with Western Digital.

• 28:06John Coogan?

  Western Digital.

• 28:07Jordi Hays?

  Another 118.

• 28:08John Coogan?

  Another 100, another 100 bagger, little easy double.

• 28:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Money also poured into the underlying infrastructure, fiber optic networks, chip making, et cetera. So that the capacity was never a bottleneck. Companies which use the new technological system to outperform incumbents began to take market share. And even competitors realized they needed to adopt the new thing or die. The hype became a froth, which became an investment bubble. Let's give it up for bubbles. The dot com frenzy of the late 1990s, the ICT wave was therefore similar to the previous ones, like the investment mania of the 1830s and the roaring 20s, which followed the infrastructure build out of, of canals and railways respectively, in which the human response to each stage predictably generated the next. When the dot com bubble, bubble popped, society found it disapproved of the excesses in the sector.

• 28:55Jordi Hays?

  And governments found they had the popular support to exert authority over the tech companies and their investors. This put a break on the madness. Instead of the reckless innovation of the bubble, companies started to expand into proven markets. And financiers moved from speculating to investing. Entrepreneurs began to focus on finding applications rather than on innovating the underlying technologies. Technological improvements continued, but change became more evolutionary than revolutionary.

• 29:22John Coogan?

  Look at this chart, technological waves over time, the industrial evolution, the canal mania. I wasn't even familiar with this. Arkwright Mill opens in 1771, the Great British League.

• 29:35Jordi Hays?

  I would love to, I would love to

• 29:37John Coogan?

  Then.

• 29:37Jordi Hays?

  Watch a documentary or, or even a drama.

• 29:40John Coogan?

  Canal mania? Yeah, this has the, the trap.

• 29:42Jordi Hays?

  Underrated mania. People always talk about tulips.

• 29:45John Coogan?

  Tulips, yeah. Tulip doesn't even count because it's not a real technology. So the actual technological waves that are highlighted here, the industrial revolution, steam and railways, steel, electricity and heavy engineering, then oil, the automobile and mass production from 1908 to 1974. And then 1971 onward is information and telecommunication.

• 30:05John Coogan?

  And pretty remarkable results from this. 27% rise in real GDP through the 2010 to 2019 era. That's pretty good. In contrast, society did not need a bubble to pop to start excoriating AI, given the backlash to tech that has been going on for a decade. This seems normal to us, but the AI backlash differs from the general high regard earlier in the cycle enjoyed by the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and the others who built big tech businesses. The world hates change and only gave tech a pass in the 80s, 90s because it all seemed reversible. It could be made to go away if it turned out badly. This gave the early computer innovators some leeway to experiment. Now that everyone knows computers

• 30:46John Coogan?

  are here to stay, AI is not allowed the same wait and see attitude. It is seen as part of the information technology revolution. Perez, The Economist, breaks each technological wave into four predictable phases: eruption, frenzy, synergy, and maturity. This is a new Gartner hype cycle. We need to know where are we on the curve?

• 31:05Jordi Hays?

  The Perez Tech Wave.

• 31:07John Coogan?

  I think we're right around frenzy. We're definitely past eruption, maybe going into synergy and maturity next. The middle two, frenzy and synergy, are the easy ones for investors. Frenzy is when everyone piles in and investors are rewarded for taking big risks on unproven ideas culminating in the bubble. When paper profits disappear, when rationality returns, the synergy phase begins as companies make their products usable and productive.

• 31:31Jordi Hays?

  Everybody's scared of a crash. They're not eager for synergy.

• 31:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. So investing in the maturity phase is even more difficult. In eruption, it's hard to see what will happen. In maturity, nothing much happens at all. Nothing ever happens. The uncertainty about what will work and how customers and society will react is almost gone. Things are predictable. Everyone acts predictably. The lack of dynamism allows successful synergy companies to remain entrenched. See the Nifty 50 and FAANG. But growth becomes harder. They all start to enter each other's markets, conglomerate, raise prices, cut costs. The era of the, it feels like Microsoft's in that bucket certainly already. Companies frame this as a drive to win, but it's really a fear of losing. Should we read about the shipping container wave?

• 32:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:19John Coogan?

  Shipping containerization was a late wave innovation that changed the world, kicked off our modern era of globalization, resulted in profound changes to society and the economy, and contributed to rapid growth in well-being. But there were perhaps only one or two people who made real money investing in it? That is insane to hear if that's true.

• 32:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and key words here are investing specifically in that technology versus benefiting from it broadly.

• 32:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:47Jordi Hays?

  Because if you were in any type of business that required shipping and receiving goods from all over the world, you benefited directly from the technological change, even if you weren't like investing in companies that were functionally creating it.

• 33:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, I would certainly agree. So they marked the containerization wave, starting the year is 1956. It was late in the previous wave, but that year, the company soon to be known as Sealand revolutionized freight shipping with the launch of the first container ship, the Ideal X, or the Ideal 10. Sealand's founder, Malcolm McLean, had an epiphany that the job to be done by truckers, railroads, and shipping lines was to move goods from shipper to destination, not to drive trucks, fill boxcars, or lay boats. Sealand allowed freight to transfer seamlessly from one mode to another, saving time, making shipping more predictable, and cutting costs, both the cost of loading, unloading, and reloading, and the cost-

• 33:48Jordi Hays?

  So prior to this, you would just have like a wooden crate that would just get thrown on a ship-

• 33:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:53Jordi Hays?

  And then you'd-

• 33:53John Coogan?

  So you have to stack it, unstack it, figure out how, you have to do a puzzle every single time. You want to load and unload.

• 33:58Jordi Hays?

  Tetris.

• 33:59John Coogan?

  Tetris, yeah. And now it's just stacking blocks, Jenga instead-

• 34:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:03John Coogan?

  Of Tetris. Much easier to play, to play Jenga supposedly. The benefits of containerization, if it could be made to happen, were obvious. Everyone could see the efficiencies and customers don't care how something gets to when they can, where they can buy it, as long as it does. But longshoremen would lose work, politicians would lose the votes of those who lost work, port authorities would lose the support of their politicians, federal regulators would be blamed for adverse consequences, railroads might lose freight to shipping lines, shipping lines might lose freight to new shipping lines, and it would all cost a mint. Most thought McLean would never be able to make it work, but he squeezed through the cracks of the opposition he faced, he bought and retrofitted war surplus ships, lowering costs, he went after the coastal shipping trade, a dying business, in the age of new

• 34:45John Coogan?

  interstates to avoid competition, he set up shop in Newark, New Jersey, rather than the shipping hub of Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan, to get buy-in from the port authority and avoid Manhattan congestion, and he made a deal with the New York Longshoremen's Union, which was only possible because he was a small player whom they figured was not a threat. What's interesting is that, yeah, I think it's like the direct investment might be very concentrated, but when I think about the rise of the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, like globalization, I'm thinking of Nike, and I'm thinking of companies that were built on the back of globalization, even the iPhone, Apple, like these companies exist in part

• 35:25John Coogan?

  and are beneficiaries of containerization, and so it's not a direct investment in the fundamental technology, but it is enabled by it?

• 35:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, we'll have to get through the article, but it's already feels like it's somewhat, somewhat clickbait, not clickbait, but to say like, no one's gonna make money on AI, or you're not gonna make money on AI.

• 35:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 35:56John Coogan?

  Let's skip to his conclusion about generative AI. He says, let's grant that generative AI is revolutionary, but also that, as is becoming increasingly clear, this particular new tech is now already in an evolutionary stage, it's towards the end of its cycle. It will create a lot of value for the economy, and investors hope to capture some of it.

• 36:17Jordi Hays?

  This is the key point.

• 36:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 36:19Jordi Hays?

  I totally, and...

• 36:20John Coogan?

  Agreed.

• 36:22Jordi Hays?

  When, who and how depends on whether AI is the end of the ICT wave or the beginning of a new one, right?

• 36:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:29Jordi Hays?

  Is it SaaS or is it God?

• 36:31John Coogan?

  Is it the final SaaS product? And then we're stuck? Or is it something entirely new and we're just gonna start?

• 36:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Is it? Is it consumer software? Is it enterprise software? Something entirely new, right?

• 36:46John Coogan?

  I don't know. If AI had started a new wave, there would have been an extended period of uncertainty and experimentation. I feel like that's the last decade of OpenAI. I feel like 2015 to 2025 was that period of uncertainty and experimentation.

• 37:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you have to understand, is it? Is it people in 2015 that were trying to make chatbots, right? With no hype.

• 37:08John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 37:08Jordi Hays?

  Really no user, not a lot of users, right?

• 37:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:11Jordi Hays?

  Or are you just counting like when OpenAI was like, okay, we can actually be a for-profit company now and we can productize this. But even then, there was like a pretty large gap between them deciding like, hey, let's, let's actually raise traditional capital for this.

• 37:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:26Jordi Hays?

  Before they could get out the API.

• 37:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:29Jordi Hays?

  Before they could get out ChatGPT.

• 37:31John Coogan?

  Totally, yeah. And also like, there was this in AI, the period of uncertainty and experimentation, that was the TikTok algorithm, the Netflix recommendation algorithm, Facebook's core AI investments. They have bought billions of dollars of GPUs, not for generative AI, not for LLMs, but just to make better ad recommendations, better content recommendations. And so there's, I don't know, there's a lot there. We'll have to continue to dig in, but let's keep reading. He said, "When thousands or millions of tinkerers use the tech to solve problems in entirely new ways, its uses proliferate. But because they are using models owned by the big AI companies, their ability to fully experiment is limited to what's allowed by the incumbents who have no desire to permit

• 38:15John Coogan?

  an extended challenge to the status quo. This doesn't mean AI can't start the next technological revolution. It might if experimentation becomes cheap, distributed and permissionless, like Wozniak cobbling together computers in his garage, Ford building his first internal combustion engine in his kitchen, and Trebeknik."

• 38:34John Coogan?

  Building his high-pressure steam engine as soon as James Watt's patents expired. When any would-be innovator can build and train an LLM on their laptop and put it to use in any way their imagination dictates, it might be the seat of the next big set of changes, something revolutionary rather than evolutionary. But until and unless that happens, there can be no eruption. Tyler, like, don't you think it's possible to build and train an LLM on your laptop and use it in any way your imagination dictates?

• 39:03Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah. I mean, I, I mean, I don't know about training a whole new LLM, but like, people are getting a lot of value out of open source once that they're locally.

• 39:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, Llama, Deepsea, Quen.

• 39:11Speaker 03

  It's like fairly obvious, yeah.

• 39:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. It, it doesn't, I mean, I, I somewhat agree that we haven't seen that many totally new, crazy, like, unprecedented uses of LLMs where it feels like it's an entirely new category. Like, it's hard to point at like the Uber for AI where it's like, this company would never have existed. It feels like a lot of the companies are kind of evolutionary, like, you know, we have, we, we have site builders and then we have vibe coding platforms that's built sites on top of them, figma.com.

• 39:44Speaker 03

  A lot of the companies.

• 39:45John Coogan?

  I think bigger builds faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together, get started for free, use Figma Make if you want to develop a website.

• 39:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of times, companies come on TBPN to talk about what they're building. They're building an AI application.

• 40:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:03Jordi Hays?

  There is a company started 10 years ago, basically doing the exact same thing.

• 40:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 40:09Jordi Hays?

  They just didn't position it in the same way. They weren't using prompts and they weren't, weren't using reasoning and things like that. Uh, but, but still, it, it looks, and it looks and it's not like SaaS.

• 40:22John Coogan?

  It looks like it's solving the same SaaS problem definition. It's like, the problem was like organizing information for lawyers. Or answering the phone. And we had a phone tree that was just deterministic, like robotic, uh, press two for, you know, customer support, press three for...

• 40:38Speaker 03

  And oftentimes they can solve a problem.

• 40:41Jordi Hays?

  It's like product can be twice as good.

• 40:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 40:43Jordi Hays?

  Which is enough to to to kind of eat into existing market share.

• 40:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 40:47Jordi Hays?

  Maybe create new.

• 40:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 40:48Jordi Hays?

  Markets, right? I think the market for people that can create software is obviously exploded.

• 40:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:55Jordi Hays?

  Right? Which is why you see vibe coding.

• 40:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 40:58Jordi Hays?

  You know, revenues just exploding to billions of dollars collectively.

• 41:03John Coogan?

  But it does seem like the video games are getting more realistic. Video games are getting more realistic, the software is getting better, the spreadsheets have more useful tools. Like, there's just a little extra helper everywhere. It's a lot of co-pilots. It's not a lot of like entirely new plans.

• 41:19Jordi Hays?

  And then you see chat GPT and it's, the usage looks a lot like the way that people use Google search.

• 41:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:26Jordi Hays?

  Granted, it's better in many ways, but the the core value that's being delivered is quite similar.

• 41:33John Coogan?

  He actually talks about domain-specific models. So first, he says economists are predicting that AI will increase global GDP somewhere between one to more than seven percent over the next decade, which is one to seven trillion of new value created. The big question is where that money will stick as it flows through the value chain. Most AI market overviews have a score or more categories, breaking each of them into customers and industry served. But these will change dramatically over the next few years. You could instead just follow the money to simplify the taxonomy of companies. There are data infrastructure companies, there are model companies, user application companies, AI customers and consumers. But what the history of containerization suggests, if you aren't already an investor in a model company, you shouldn't bother.

• 42:15John Coogan?

  Sam Altman and a few other early movers may make a fortune, as McLean and Ludwig did. But the huge cost of building and running a model, coupled with the intense competition, means there will, in the end, be only a few companies, each funded and owned by the largest tech companies. If you're already an investor, congratulations, there will be consolidation, so you might get an exit. Domain-specific models like Cursor and Harvey will be part of the consolidation. These are probably the most valuable models, but fine-tuning is relatively cheap and there are big economies of scope. On the other hand, just as Google had to buy Invite Media in 2010 to figure out how to sell ad, sell to ad agencies, domain-specific model companies have, that have earned.

• 42:55John Coogan?

  The trust of their customers will be prime acquisition targets. That sounds like another group of people who may be making money. Like when you say like only OpenAI investors will make money. It's like, well, there are like 7,000 people on that cap table in one way or another. Like all the investors, all the LPs and the funds that are investors, all the employees, all the people that got in through SVVs. Like it's not just two people. I feel like it's a lot of people that are in the big winners. Like even if there's just a few power law winners.

• 43:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's other, you know, another way to look into this is like if you're investing in a series A at three, at a $300 million valuation.

• 43:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:35Jordi Hays?

  Assuming just crazy explosive growth.

• 43:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 43:38Jordi Hays?

  It's very possible the company, even if it does well, would someday sell for a few hundred million dollars and you wouldn't have actually made any money even though you got an exit.

• 43:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, here's, here's a good like counters point to some of the companies that are potentially in a more precarious situation. So he says, while it's too late to invest in the model companies, the profusion of those using the models to solve specific problems is ongoing. Perplexity, Inflection AI, Writer, Abridge and a hundred others. But if any of these become very valuable, the model companies will take their earnings, either through discriminatory pricing or vertical integration, launch their own competitors. Success, in other, in other words, will mean defeat, always a bad thesis. At some point, model companies and app companies will converge. There will be simply AI companies and only a few of them. There will be some winners as always, but investments in the app layer as a whole will lose money.

• 44:30John Coogan?

  The same caveat applies, however, if an app company can build a customer base or an amazing team, it might be acquired. But these companies aren't really technology companies at all. They're building a market on spec and have to be priced as such. A further caveat is that there will be investors who make a killing arbitraging FOMO panicked acquirers, willing to massively overpay. But this isn't really investing, he says. And so again, it's another group of people that will get rich, but it's maybe not a durable source of alpha, which is an interesting thought.

• 45:02John Coogan?

  Where else? Let's keep going. This is a very long article. You should go read the full thing. So let's, let's close this out by reading his conclusion. And of course, if you want to read the full piece, you can head over to Colossus Mag. There is nothing better than the beginning of a new wave when the opportunities to envision, invent and build world-changing companies leads to money, fame and glory. But there is nothing more dangerous for investors and entrepreneurs than wishful thinking. The lesson learned from investing in tech over the last 50 years are not the right ones to apply now. The way to invest in AI is to think through the implications of knowledge workers becoming more efficient, to imagine what markets this efficiency unlocks and to invest in those. For decades, the way to make money was to bet on what the new thing was.

• 45:46John Coogan?

  Now you have to bet on the opportunities it opens up. Jerry Newman, he's a retired venture investor.

• 45:54Jordi Hays?

  Totally, totally agree with this conclusion, right? I think if you come in with a $200 million venture fund right now and are just investing at crazy multiples, pre-revenue, investing in new foundation model labs, you're going to have a really tough time. But that doesn't mean, and I don't know, I think saying like the app layer as a whole will lose money. At least when you look at private markets, right?

• 46:25Jordi Hays?

  The whole point is that a lot of the companies can go to zero and like a handful of them will create enormous value. And that's okay, right? So not that bearish, but I do think it's, it's not a, you know, at this stage in the market, spraying and praying is going to lead to some bad outcomes. Really understanding the opportunities, really understanding that maybe this is, a lot of the winners here are going to look more like traditional software. And that's okay, but it just means you have to be, you know, I think the company we had on yesterday, Filevine, a good example of this, started as enterprise software for law firms.

• 47:06John Coogan?

  Already has a ton of clients.

• 47:07Jordi Hays?

  Now, you know, they have 100,000 lawyers actively using the product every day in a really good position to vend in a variety of different models. And they will, depending on how they execute, prove to be a big challenge for new AI-native companies that will have to decide, do we want to be sort of a? Ancillary product, or do we want to own the workflows? And if we want to own the workflows, we have to rebuild all these different products that help a firm run.

• 47:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:36Jordi Hays?

  And, and do that with maybe a 10 year, 10 years behind other players in the category.

• 47:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, venture's always been the game of pick the winner in the category, but it feels like it's more important than ever to actually define the category. Because, and, and understand, is this particular category going to have one winner? Or three winners, or two winners? Is it going to wind up being a duopoly or a oligopoly?

• 48:04Jordi Hays?

  I'm excited to talk to Brad Taylor about this. He's building, you know, he's the 800, 800 pound gorilla in AI for customer engagement experience.

• 48:15John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 48:16Jordi Hays?

  Right, but it's a category that has act, an active capital war going on. You have heavily funded new players like Sierra and Decagon. You have the intercoms of the world that are taking.

• 48:29John Coogan?

  Our partner, fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. We're going to ask Brad Taylor about his performance benchmarks, his competitive bake offs, his ranking on G2. Because we are obviously supporters of Finn, but interested in following the, the, the fight. And I'm, I am very interested in how oligopolistic will that particular market be? There are certain markets that have just kind of run away. It, it, it certainly feels like, it just in terms of knowledge retrieval, we could be looking at a monopoly with OpenAI and ChatGPT, or a duopoly with Gemini. But it doesn't seem like there's going to be 10 search engines and 10 default chat apps that people are going to. Certainly not going to be 20.

• 49:11Jordi Hays?

  Or 10 deep research APIs.

• 49:14John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 49:14Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 49:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like there's going to be one or two that kind of compound and people get comfortable with and they stick with.

• 49:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, in other news, Emmet says, I'm excited to share Rora Water is the official partner of Huberman Lab for water. Rora is of course, a company I co-founded a while ago and worked on this partnership with the Huberman Lab team, Rob and Andrew, for. A very, very long time at this point.

• 49:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:44Jordi Hays?

  We started talking about it probably.

• 49:46John Coogan?

  Probably a year ago.

• 49:46Jordi Hays?

  Well, started talking about it maybe a couple of years ago. Actually got them product over about a year ago. They used it a bunch. They tested it a bunch and finally launched this partnership earlier this week. So absolutely thrilled to get this across the line. And yeah, big vote of vote of confidence from the Huberman team.

• 50:08John Coogan?

  I love it. And in other Huberman world news, his, his network, SciCom Media is working on a new show with none other than David Senra.

• 50:19Jordi Hays?

  It's David Senra by David Senra.

• 50:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, the show is called David Senra and interestingly.

• 50:24Jordi Hays?

  Hosted by David Senra.

• 50:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, they picked David Senra as the host of the David Senra Show.

• 50:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:29John Coogan?

  And so we will watch the launch video that he put out on X yesterday.

• 50:35Jordi Hays?

  Pull it up.

• 50:35John Coogan?

  Nine years ago, I launched Founders. Today, I'm launching a new podcast called David Senra.

• 50:41Speaker 04

  Nine years ago, I launched the Founders podcast. On Founders, I tell the stories of history's greatest entrepreneurs and extreme winners. This week, I'm launching a new podcast called David Senra. On this show, I sit down for conversations with the best living founders in the world. I'm ready when you are, man.

• 50:55John Coogan?

  How many camp? You got three cameras?

• 50:56Speaker 04

  People like Daniel Ek, Michael Dell, Brad Jacobs, Todd Graves, Michael Ovitz, and many others. My goal with everything I do is to obsessively study the greats and find timeless ideas that you can use in your work. We have to change or we're going to go out of business. And now you can learn directly from these legendary founders.

• 51:17Speaker 05

  You know what I see the most common core of all the people that are successful for me is they're never satisfied.

• 51:23Speaker 04

  You said something interesting. I like the pressure. I do. Thrive on it. Founders will still come out every week and this new show will now have episodes dropping every other Sunday on all platforms like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, X, and everywhere else that you find your podcasts.

• 51:39Speaker 06

  There are parts of me that still live in the valley.

• 51:42Speaker 04

  When did you know you were good? I don't know that I'm good. I know I'm different. And I'm out there for this chicken finger dream. Failure's not an option.

• 51:48John Coogan?

  Chicken finger dream.

• 51:49Speaker 04

  Nothing was gonna stop me from doing it. It's binary. There's no option.

• 51:52Jordi Hays?

  We need a, we need a wall that we can set up here and run through.

• 51:55Speaker 04

  Or death.

• 51:57John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 51:59Jordi Hays?

  Dan in the chat says, "The market is not ripping. What are the white suits for today?" Bitcoin is up 1.5%. It's a bright spot.

• 52:11John Coogan?

  It's a bull market in

• 52:14Jordi Hays?

  Podcasting.

• 52:14John Coogan?

  A lack of volatility. If you were short volatility, you've done very well today, right? Because it's not a volatile market. There's always, there's always a bull market.

• 52:22Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, it's a little rough out there.

• 52:23John Coogan?

  It's just a, it's just a fun day to put on a white suit. We just feel like, we're feeling some optimism. We're, you know, having fun.

• 52:30Jordi Hays?

  We just had some good energy in the studio this morning. We wanted to, we thought maybe if we put on the white suits, the market

• 52:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'd be able to materialize a bull market. Let's make it happen.

• 52:40Jordi Hays?

  We're trying to send it.

• 52:41John Coogan?

  Anyway, before our next guest hops on, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

• 52:57Jordi Hays?

  Did you see this post from Sheil? He said, "Interesting. We might see in New York Stock Exchange IPO where the underlying asset is a bunch of paintings."

• 53:05John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 53:05Jordi Hays?

  Billionaire Thomas Kaplan is exploring taking his Leiden collection.

• 53:11John Coogan?

  Seventeen Rambrans of Hermier, etc.

• 53:13Jordi Hays?

  Worth 1.5 to 3 billion public.

• 53:19John Coogan?

  This is the next generation of the digital asset treasury, the DATs. You have the physical asset treasury, the PATs. And these will be, be able to invest in art. There's been a couple of companies that allowed you to

• 53:29Jordi Hays?

  It would be so.

• 53:30John Coogan?

  To invest in art. There was an art platform for a while that was doing that.

• 53:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I, in general, taking art highly, I mean, art is liquid, but not at, at sort of like market prices, right? So if you want to sell art quickly, you have to sell it at a massive discount, right? You need to be super patient.

• 53:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:51Jordi Hays?

  If you have a big collection and you're holding it, especially if you have the, a bunch of works from a single artist, if you bring 10 pieces online,

• 53:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:59Jordi Hays?

  Right? At the same time, you flood the market with supply, prices will come down. So it's a very weird thing, but this makes sense. If Thomas wants to be able to get out all at once, or get out, Get out partially, get some liquidity, this is probably more effective than.

• 54:20Jordi Hays?

  Than selling, you know, just selling it, selling it piece by piece. And he gets to hold on to the art, too. That's the other thing.

• 54:26John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, he can still store it.

• 54:28Jordi Hays?

  Probably keep, keep some in, you know, different properties, et cetera.

• 54:34John Coogan?

  Well, we have our first guest of the show, Brad Taylor, coming into the room from the Rooster Manor. Brad, how are you doing?

• 54:41Speaker 02

  I didn't get the wardrobe notice.

• 54:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, we normally wear white suits when the market is ripping and, and we're celebrating.

• 54:48Jordi Hays?

  But Sierra's ripping.

• 54:49John Coogan?

  But Sierra's ripping, so we're celebrating you. We're wearing them for you.

• 54:52Speaker 02

  Thank you for celebrating our growth. I really appreciate it.

• 54:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's been fantastic. Give us, give us the brief history, the, the founding of the company to the news just last week.

• 55:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Sierra, we help companies build AI agents for customer experience. So think, uh, maybe it's on a website, maybe it's answering the phone. Uh, no one likes to wait on hold. Now you can chat with an AI agent. We're helping do everything from originate mortgages to help you get a better rate on your SiriusXM plan to helping, you know, when your ADT home alarm system doesn't work, you'll now chat with an AI agent to fix it. Uh, we're a couple of years old. Uh, we're the leader in this space. Uh, we kind of uniquely have run towards, I would say, larger enterprise businesses. We're trying to help companies that, uh, candidly, it's, it's hard for them to deploy AI because they've got lots of legacy systems. Maybe they're in a regulated business like the health insurance market or banking.

• 55:46Speaker 02

  With the whole hypothesis is if we can help them be successful, there's just a ton of value and leverage in that. So, uh, as you mentioned, a couple of weeks ago, we announced a, a recent round of financing, which is, uh, we're proud of just a milestone on the path, but I think kind of recognizes our leadership in this space.

• 56:03John Coogan?

  You're the chairman of OpenAI. How should I think about application layer versus model layer? I'm sure you get this all the time. Uh, there was a meme for a long time about, oh, OpenAI is going to go on stage Dev Day and just steamroll a bunch of companies. You seem to have good information on what they're going to steamroll and not.

• 56:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the other thing is there was, there was so many, you know, two years ago, so many different companies that, that had thriving businesses doing customer, various customer service platforms.

• 56:31John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 56:31Jordi Hays?

  And. You know, many people would have said these companies are just going to move quickly on AI, get this, you know, they have the customer relationships. But you clearly saw it differently and have proven that that that hasn't been necessarily the case.

• 56:46Speaker 02

  I'll answer both. I'll start with the foundation models. My my theory of how the market plays out is that the foundation model market will look a little bit like the infrastructure as a service market where it, you know, primarily provides technology, low level technology to a lot of applications companies. And then there's all the adjacencies, you know, like if you look at Amazon Web Services, they've got some developer tools. If you're kind of in the area like Snowflake and Databricks, there's probably an Amazon product that competes with you. The farther you go towards serving a line of business, you know, like ERP systems or CRM systems, the less likely it is that you're going to run into, you know, an infrastructure provider competing with you. I think the same is roughly true in the AI market, you know.

• 57:30Speaker 02

  If you think about what's required to make AGI, it's a lot of like, you know, training stuff, but it's also maybe software engineering agents. So that's probably sort of in the the the target of these foundation model companies. The closer you get to, you know, Harvey doing legal AI or Sierra doing customer service AI, probably doesn't seem in the core of these, you know, research labs, you know, primary functions. The reason I think that the applied AI market is exciting, not just for Sierra, obviously I'm a, you know, very loyal to my own company. I don't think most companies want to buy a bag of floating point numbers and then figure out what to do with it. You know, they want to buy a solution to their problem. And if they can, you know, turn on Sierra and it will answer the phone and bring down their customer service

• 58:12Speaker 02

  costs by 50% overnight, they're going to do that, not try to, you know, take these models and try to do it from scratch. If they can buy Harvey and get an antitrust review for one tenth the cost, they're going to do that. And I think, you know, I was I was talking to Toby Lukie at Shopify one time and he was joking, how many people come up to him and me and like, aren't you just a database in the cloud? And you're like, yeah, I guess so, but there's a lot more to it. And it turns out these workflows are valuable. So I'm I'm really banking on our company that there's a lot of value in these agents. And I But going to the second question on the incumbent software providers in this space, it's very hard to disrupt your own business model. If you're licensing customer service software per seat

• 58:54Speaker 02

  and you have to make an AI agent that will actually cannibalize your own business to realize the value of this new technology. That's not just a technology problem, right? That's a business model transition. And the history of technology is littered with companies that saw the slow motion car wreck of their business model being hurt by a technology trend and not really being able to respond to it fast enough. And I have so much respect for people like Satya who navigated those transitions. But candidly, there's a lot more companies in history that didn't navigate transitions like that. And I think that's candidly just a simple reason why it's hard for a lot of the incumbent companies to respond to this new technology trend.

• 59:34John Coogan?

  When you were thinking about starting this company, did you, did you, like, how methodical were you about mapping the market? Is there like a whiteboard picture of you looking at, maybe I should do ERP. Maybe I, you know, was this one of a few options that you narrowed down once you studied the market? Or was it something that just came to you in a fugue state or something?

• 59:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's such an interesting, you say that. We actually did call up some, you know, potential customers. We started those conversations just saying, hey, if you could put us on one problem, what would it be? And by the end, we had a pretty clear picture of the available markets. I don't think any of it was particularly surprising in some ways. You know, it's like software engineering, customer service, content marketing, you know, all these things that come up when you think about, if you have a technology that can see and understand text and voice, that can reason, you know, what are the direct applications? But kind of the, to the, the thing that we're most excited about is not where we are today, but where it might head. And our whole theory is that your AI agent will end up more important than your website or your mobile app in the future.

• 1:00:40Speaker 02

  And as a consequence, we think the addressable opportunity here isn't just customer service, which is really compelling and interesting, but saying, you know, how can you actually drive more sales? How can you actually create a personalized concierge for your, your brand? I mean, just to give the math of it. If you actually have a phone call with a human being, it probably will cost on the order of $20 at least. And it really depends whether it's onshore or offshore. If you think about running a large scale consumer brand with an ARPU of $20, you know, how do you afford that? And you can't. And as a consequence, it's almost impossible to talk to most consumer brands. You bring down that cost to 20 cents or even two cents over time. You just think about the dynamics.

• 1:01:22Speaker 02

  Let's say you're a large mobile phone carrier and you're fighting for retaining your subscribers. You're not just going to recoup cost savings in customer service. You're going to say, how many phone calls can I have with my customers? So that I retain this subscriber for five more years. Think about the impact on your lifetime value of your customer. So what's exciting about this, like so many new technologies is like the first order effect is obvious, which is saying, hey, let's reduce the cost of customer service by, you know, 50%. The second and fourth effects are almost more exciting, which is the companies that lean into this faster will actually grow their top line faster than their competitors. So that's what's so fun about technology disruption, right? Is that, you know, you can end up sort of upending, you know,

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  sort of the incumbent versus insurgent dynamic. At the same time, the value proposition to the companies using Sierra is more than just cost reduction. It's saying like, how can we actually give you a competitive edge by moving faster in this new world of AI?

• 1:02:20Jordi Hays?

  How are companies actually, you know, you're going and landing some of the probably just crazy logos, right? And, and these are, you know, massive companies with, you know, operations all over the world. How are they actually rolling it out? Are they, are they giving you specific sort of segments, regions? You're proving it out at a smaller scale or what does the actual rollout look like?

• 1:02:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so starting, you're right. One of the things I'm most proud of is the scale of some of the companies working with us. Over half of our customers have over a billion in revenue. Over 20% have 10 billion in revenue or more, which is pretty, I'm just really proud of that. And I think it shows you do not need to be a small startup to deploy AI successfully with Sierra. On the rollout, it's a very. Kind of a variation of what you said. Some companies start with us on a use case or two. We're going live with one of the largest healthcare companies in the world and actually replacing their IVR system, you know, and it was just in a handful of months to do that. So, you know, it can really, I think it's really up to the customer how assertively or aggressively they want to roll out these new technologies.

• 1:03:28Speaker 02

  And the thing that I've been most pleasantly surprised is some of the largest, more well-regulated companies in the world actually want to move faster. I was having a conversation with my co-founder Clay about one of our largest clients and kind of being awe-inspired about how fast they're moving. And I said, now I know why they're big. You know, now I know why they're successful because they're moving faster than some of their smaller competitors that we also work with. And you kind of, you really learn to respect the, I say intentionality, assertiveness of a lot of these like really well-run companies.

• 1:03:59John Coogan?

  What's the sales process for a huge company like that? Is that like you meet the CEO at a, you know, fancy conference and start pitching? Or, I mean, like, it feels like an advantage of like having a career like yours and the Rolodex that like, that's sort of like the unfair advantage here?

• 1:04:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, in many ways, Sierra, like, you know, doing what you guys have done in two years is incredibly impressive, yet at the same time, it's what I would expect out of the team, right?

• 1:04:25John Coogan?

  I mean, we see this with like Palantir and Karp, like, he's just so fun to talk to. He's in all these interesting places. And it's like, yeah, I could imagine that some big Fortune 500 company just wants to hang out with Karp and like, talk to him. And then, ah, they do a deal together. Is that how it works?

• 1:04:38Speaker 02

  Well, it's funny when you said, this is what I expected. This is like why it's hard to start multiple companies. Like, yeah, of course it's going to be exhausting. Like, have you ever started a fucking company? It's hard, you know? But, uh...

• 1:04:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I mean, it's, and I, and I say that as like a, as a compliment, where it's like, it's, yeah, going from zero to a $10 billion company, having, you know, this crazy, you know, list of customers is incredibly difficult. But I like when people have a lot of advantages through what they've done in their career and their network, and then they just put on an absolute masterclass. Like, it's, it's very satisfying.

• 1:05:12Speaker 02

  Well, I appreciate you saying that. You know, it does all have to start with the product, though, you know, because certainly I would say, my guess is, the way I think of Sierra is, we have the best product, but because we have a founding team that's sort of been there and done that, we're not like a hugely risky bet. You know, we know how to work with large companies. We're not going to show up and be learning from, you know, first principles, how to engage with a large bank or a large health insurance company. And that's a unique value proposition because right now, most of the incumbent technology platforms, their products don't really work. And so you really want to use a best of breed product right now. And I think our value proposition is, we are a best of breed, I believe the best of breed product in this space. But we also know how to like work with complex companies.

• 1:05:56Speaker 02

  You know, we're going to show up with as many people necessary to help you be successful, as opposed to just throwing a product over the wall and saying good luck to you. And so that, I think, I, you know, certainly our reputation helps, but at the end of the day, it's the quality of the product that really matters here. And just, you know, think about it this way. If you have 400 million phone calls a year, the difference between having an AI answer 100 or 300 million of them is probably measured, you know, and, you know, at least eight or nine figures, right? In terms of like the impact on your business. And so we always start with the product. And as you said, take advantage of our unique, unique advantages as a company, which fundamentally means we know how to work with you. It's sort of interesting, like, it just turns out that, you know,

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  there's lots of different stakeholders between a business team, a technology team, compliance, understanding, and just like the constraints that a company is dealing with. We just try to show up with a ton of empathy and, you know, show up recognizing this isn't just a technology problem. You know, it's sort of a kind of bureaucratic word, but it's a change management problem. You know, how do you get from point A to point B when your auditor and your regulator is scrutinizing everything you do? Well, we understand that, like, we're going to help you with that problem, not just the technology problem.

• 1:07:09John Coogan?

  What do you think the steady state of commerce interactions look like? Because I imagine that companies will be using AI to interface with their customers. But then customers will be using AI agents to negotiate on their behalf and select products. And without leaking too much of the OpenAI roadmap, I think we're all pretty convinced that some sort of agent to commerce thing is going to happen. I'm already seeing pop ups for, you know, links to products. When I search for things, I'm going to be able to say, hey, go get me the best option, the best price. Is the future a voice agent talking to another voice agent? Or do they just interact at some lower level API level at some point?

• 1:07:53John Coogan?

  Like, how does that all play out when you get agent on agent warfare?

• 1:07:57Speaker 02

  I think you're right about your intuition, but it's also, as you were sort of alluding to, the future's not perfectly clear, even for people in the middle of it like me. But I think in general, I think a lot of intent has already gone from search towards ChatGPT, especially for the more considered the purchases, the more you're likely to use something like AI. You know, when I was traveling this past summer, I used ChatGPT to plan the entire trip. If you think about something serious like purchasing a home or, you know, I've talked to so many friends who are using ChatGPT to figure out, how's the school district in this area? What neighborhoods are good, you know? And you think about that just from a commercial standpoint, that is extremely qualified intent at the very top of the funnel. And so much research is already being done there.

• 1:08:42Speaker 02

  But as you alluded to, the thing that's not happening is you're not kicking off your agent to go fulfill that transaction. It sort of stands to reason to me that that will likely happen at some point. And then the question is, for a lot of our customers who are sort of on the other end of that is, what do you, how do you want to show up in that new world? You know, how do you ensure that, you know, your goods and services show up in the right way, you know, when you're engaging with an agent? How much do you want to directly engage with consumers? How much will you be able to directly engage with consumers? I don't know all the answers, but step one is make an agent. You know, step one is, you know, make an agent so that whatever inter-agent protocols emerge, you can be present and do business in that new world. And that's one of the main value propositions Sierra provides its customers is like,

• 1:09:26Speaker 02

  we don't know exactly where the world's gonna go, but a prerequisite is to technically be able to interoperate in that new world.

• 1:09:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:35Speaker 02

  And I think it's gonna impact different industries differently.

• 1:09:37Jordi Hays?

  Do you think the, do you think the form will generally die? Where there, there's certain businesses out there that sell, basically sell product. Let's say like a, a company that makes aircraft, right? If you go to their website, you're not just like browsing inventory and checking out. It's like you submit.

• 1:09:53Speaker 02

  Add to cart.

• 1:09:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're not adding to cart. Tesla's likes to do add to cart buttons on, you know. Most, yeah, many companies out there. Let's say somebody. Contact sales. Aviation enthusiast wants to buy a small plane. They've got a contact sales and then like the second you get to the form, so much like, so many leads just die at the form. And something I've been doing with L L Ms is just ask, talking to them about like the pricing of different products. Cause I don't want to go to the forum and like get a sales rep to call me. I don't want to be waiting or I'm, I don't want to just get a call back at a random time. I don't really want to go through the, but, but I want to kind of understand. And so it feels like the form is something that fundamentally could just potentially go away. And it's, you go to a website, you talk with an agent, maybe you give them your information

• 1:10:38Jordi Hays?

  because you do want to hear more, you do want to talk to somebody at some point, but feels like, feels like that could be going away.

• 1:10:46Speaker 02

  I agree. I mean, if you just think about qualifying a lead, which is basically what those forms are, why not ask follow-up questions? Why not collect enough information so that when that great salesperson does follow-up, 80% of the work is done and it's just the, the human touch part of it. You know, agents are already doing outbound sales, debt collections for credit cards, processing payroll for small businesses. These agents are already doing sales and I think that, you know, the best salespeople, the reason why they're the best paid people in most companies, because they're worth their weight in gold. But what about the median salesperson? And my guess is you could make an AI agent that's actually quite a bit stronger than most, you know, just because you're standardizing the best practices really, really fast.

• 1:11:31Speaker 02

  You can run A B tests on AI agents. It's hard to run A B tests on people, you know, and. There's so many advantages, as you said, to not only just forums, but really thinking about agents as not stuck in one part of your customer lifecycle, but really managing the whole thing. And let's just take, I don't know much about airline, you know, buying a airplane for a hobby pilot. But imagine this AI agent, sort of the concierge to the whole experience. So you're browsing around in planes, you set up an appointment. You know, what if it's collecting a bunch of information before you get on site? After you, I don't do test drive an airplane, but let's say you do that, you know, afterwards, it's asking you questions, maybe helping you with financing. I think that's the future of where these things are going, which is

• 1:12:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's something about

• 1:12:17Speaker 02

  whether or not a person's involved, it's a concierge helping you through the whole process.

• 1:12:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's something about, you know, the, the consumer being proactive, engaging for information. But then, yeah, using the, the airplane example, let's say they don't have something in stock. You know, the, the agent, at what point are you guys already thinking about agents being proactive and, and reaching out to, to a customer after they already engaged? Like, I imagine a lot of the core of what you're doing today is just reacting to customer needs, inbound questions, things like that, or, or problems with a product, whatever it is. But then at some point or another, the, the agent is going active and actually going outbound. But how do you think about, how do you think about that?

• 1:12:59Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. I almost think of it as like Maslow's hierarchy of needs of agents. Step one is answer the phone, you know, when your customers call. Step two is can you actually get in front of, of customer issues? I noticed the Ramp logo on the top right. They're, they're one of our customers and like, they have like the coolest implementation of our platform. The, it's, you know, not only doing service, but really like, I love their Ask AI function and their product. It's just one of the coolest experiences and it's just, it's not service, right? It's basically a conversational experience around one of the best design technology products in the world. And I think, you know, Ramp is obviously one of the, the best engineering teams in the world, but can every, can every brand do that?

• 1:13:42Speaker 02

  You know, can every brand make their, their agent proactive? Offer a conversational experience. I look at you've ever visited like Brazil or India and you look at the impact of WhatsApp. It's like, well, can you be present there in a way you weren't before? Well, yeah, you can. What an awesome opportunity for agents. So it's new channels, it's proactive. And this is really where we're trying to to guide our customers. And I think, you know, kind of represents the future of our platform in a lot of ways.

• 1:14:10John Coogan?

  The the latest round, I think it's three fifty on ten billion. That feels low on the dilution side. How did you think about the amount of money you needed to raise, sizing that? I mean, you've been part of so many interesting financings throughout your career. How did you land on that? And what does it say about the the usage of that fund? How in capital intensive your business is, the state of the markets right now? Just take me through the the thesis for the round.

• 1:14:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I always think of rounds in pretty simple ways, which is what valuation are you raising at?

• 1:14:45Speaker 02

  What do you need to fill in that valuation? So that if you need to raise another round or if you're going public, that you've, you know, more than filled out that valuation with fundamental business metrics, like in your revenue and growth rate. And and then you start and then you say, OK, how much capital do you need to to reach that milestone? And so that's kind of how we reached it and and that three fifty number. It's not, it's obviously, there's a lot of precision involved, but it is a bit of an art form because you're making a lot of assumptions about the future, which is what are the capital that we need to reach the revenue scale? Where, you know, we can reach the next milestone in our business? So that's how we think about it. I I'm I'm pretty methodical about it.

• 1:15:29Speaker 02

  And I think a lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake of raising too little at too high of a valuation. And they end up sort of sort of walk in sort of a zombie company just because they've they don't have the capital they need to to reach the next milestone. But they've, but their valuation is such that they've sort of priced themselves out of the market. So that's the main sort of thing I'm paranoid about. And I feel really good about how much we've raised. But more than anything, too, I feel great about the investors we have around the table. Benchmarks, you know, Green Oaks, Neil Mette at Green Oaks is just remarkable. And so love, love our board. And in particular, you know, I think about who do you want to be on the journey with to get to that next milestone? And I'm really happy with the folks we have around the table.

• 1:16:11Jordi Hays?

  How are you thinking about IPO timelines just generally? Do you think Sierra is going to be another Stripe or Databricks where you just stay private forever because you can and it's probably allows you to, whatever, take more risks, think long term, et cetera? Or given that you've been, you know, done your tour of duty on the, on the public side in the past, I'm curious how you think about it?

• 1:16:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't think we're, Clay and I have talked a lot about this. I think our intention is to eventually go public. You know, we, there's a lot of advantages to stay in private. I also think there's a lot of advantages to sort of having liquidity for your employees, you know, that access to capital. You know, I really admire the way, I know the Stripe founders pretty well and, you know, they're in a really unique position. I respect what they're doing. I think we'll probably take the more traditional path, though it's far enough in our future. You know, that's just more our philosophy because I think that's where you're going. We don't have reticence to do it eventually and we'll probably more take the traditional path.

• 1:17:17Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense.

• 1:17:18John Coogan?

  How do you think about the Sierra fundraising process versus what's happening at OpenAI? Is it just so much simpler to underwrite this business?

• 1:17:29Speaker 02

  Add a few more zeros.

• 1:17:30John Coogan?

  Have you, have you learned? It's not, it doesn't feel like it's just add a couple more zeros. Like the OpenAI stuff, it seems deeply complicated. Is it refreshing to have more of a simpler business to underwrite? Or are there at least lessons that you've ported over? Have you learned something from OpenAI that you've brought back? I'm interested.

• 1:17:46Jordi Hays?

  They're like C corp, traditional equity financing. It's pretty, it works pretty well.

• 1:17:52Speaker 02

  OpenAI is just a really, I mean, it's a one of one business, as you all know really well. The thing that's just so different about building the AGI versus building an API company, they're just so different from a capital standpoint. You know, as Sam has articulated better than I could, AGI will fundamentally in some ways be driven by compute and so much of the capital strategy that Sam was articulating. Is really how can we have the best compute infrastructure and the most resources available for both training and inference, especially with these reasoning models? And and meet the scale of demand there. And when you have something that capital intensive,

• 1:18:36Speaker 02

  it just changes your approach to fundraising partnerships. And I really admire, you know, what the management team of OpenAI has sort of orchestrated there just because I think it's the company that is best positioned to essentially build the the best computer, the largest computer in the world and have the best research team, which I think if you're saying, what are the ingredients to winning in that market? I think they've checked both those boxes. In some ways, the applied AI market. I I'm not sure other founders in the space would agree. Like, I don't think, you know, we're like an AI company. I mean, we're using AI to solve business problems, but you know.

• 1:19:12Jordi Hays?

  And that's what that's what I what I love about kind of the whole approach is that we, you know, we talk to a lot of companies that say we're an AI agent company or we're an AI company. And then you look, you ask a few questions and you realize like you're building enterprise software. There's a bunch of things. There's a bunch of things that

• 1:19:29Speaker 02

  There's no shame in that.

• 1:19:30Jordi Hays?

  And there's nothing bad about that. We love. We love enterprise SaaS more than anyone. But, you know, if you forget that and you get fixated on, you know, we're building, you know, we're just building agents. It's like you're gonna do, your customers will eventually ask you for a feature set that looks like traditional software, although maybe it's a different workflow.

• 1:19:49Speaker 02

  Or you might burn 20 million of capital training the model because it makes you cool at a San Francisco cocktail party and lose sight of why your customers are hiring you to do the job that you're doing. And so, you know, to some degree, I, as you said, I'm, we're un unashamed of being an enterprise software company. And more than that, you know, I think the way we invest our capital is very different. Thank you. Thank you.

• 1:20:12Jordi Hays?

  How do you, what's your framework for understanding SaaS companies in the public markets today? What percentage do you think will be, it feels like everybody will have to transition at some point from traditional seat-based pricing to value-based pricing. You guys have the benefit of starting out with value-based pricing and saying, how many phone calls do you get? How many, how many, how many individual reps do you have? You know, what percentage of that can we, you know, augment or replace? But it just feels like doing that transition on a, on a, on, you know, a quarterly reporting cadence feels completely, you know, miserable.

• 1:20:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, my high-level premise is it's easier to transition your technology than it is to transition your business model. And it's especially if you're public, just because if you just think about, let's say you have your, I'll just pick an ERP company and you have an enterprise license agreement for some number of seats, you know, and, or, you know, ITSM or something like that. And then you say, okay, we're going to make an agent to automate 70% of what this platform does. That's easy in theory, but what happens in the next renewal, like in six months? Maybe your AI agent platform isn't quite mature enough to actually, you know, make up for the difference in lost seats.

• 1:21:35Speaker 02

  So maybe your sales rep who's incentivized on increasing the size of that contract goes in and says, you should buy both, you know, buy the same number of seats and an AI agent. And all of a sudden, the CFO of that company is like, wait, I thought this was supposed to reduce costs. You know, like, what's going on here? And so I think the, I think all these incumbent SaaS companies have an opportunity to come out strong in this market, but they have to really transition their business model and their technology model at the same time. And anyone who says it's easy has never been a public company CEO because it's, it's really hard, you know, because you end up having to tell a story to your investors, to your customers, to your employees. You have to go through a trough of despair, probably.

• 1:22:19Speaker 02

  And, you know, if you look at Microsoft's transition to the cloud and, and it was really complicated to go from Windows revenue to Azure revenue, now Satya is, you know, a hero for having. Done it, but at the time, you know, there's a lot of people, including me, who wrote them off, you know? And and then afterwards, you're like, wow, props to them for making that transition and coming out so strongly. But for every Microsoft, there's a Siebel Systems who didn't make a transition, you know? And for those of you online who don't know Siebel, that was the company that Salesforce beat in the transition to the cloud. And and now you probably don't know their name because, you know, they they didn't sort of make it through that that transition, despite being the market leader in the on-premises software era.

• 1:23:00Speaker 02

  So, you know, I think all these companies have an opportunity, and I think that it really takes leadership. I think it's very hard to do as a public company, just because it's very hard for investors to sort of see through the quarterly earnings to see, because you can, it's just hard. It's just like, is this company mid-transition to something great, or are they just dying? You know, and like, it's easy, and it's like, and a lot of it, a lot of it is ambition and storytelling. And so it's just a complicated time in software. I think it's really going to come down to leadership, both like stakeholder management and technology leadership for companies to make this transition.

• 1:23:38Jordi Hays?

  Are you getting a bunch of calls yet from AI application companies that haven't found product market fit and need to find a soft landing? Or do you think that's a few more quarters out because those companies are still well-capitalized?

• 1:23:55Speaker 02

  We are. There's definitely the, you know, just given the amount of revenue growth for the ones that are working, it's pretty clear the ones that aren't. There's some good teams, some good technology there, too. So we try to look if it makes sense at all of them, if there's a good team that could contribute.

• 1:24:13Jordi Hays?

  When did that, when did that start?

• 1:24:17Speaker 02

  About six months ago.

• 1:24:18Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:24:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:20John Coogan?

  What's your?

• 1:24:21Speaker 02

  I assume it will accelerate.

• 1:24:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're having Hamad from General Catalyst on the show Friday. What's your reaction to his sort of hot take? I don't know how much was taken out of context, but this idea that triple, triple, double, double, double is kind of dead. You need to be 10x-ing every day. You're not interesting unless you're 10x-ing. Is there something there where like the power law is getting steeper? There's a, there are more winner-take-all markets, more faster-growth companies, but then also just some that are, you know, triple, triple, but then going to be nothing.

• 1:24:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I have a complicated opinion on this one. So first I'll say, the faster you grow is sometimes correlated with a lack of a moat. Just because what enabled you to grow fast might enable your future competitors to grow there as well. You see this in some social services as well. You know, you'll have these social services grow from zero to whatever million users overnight, based on a social mechanic. And very few of those have ended up durable. Some of them ended up incredibly valuable, like TikTok, but there's like, you know, the clubhouse.

• 1:25:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but TikTok also spent like billions of dollars on user acquisition.

• 1:25:34Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. In enterprise, I do think that growth is greater in agents, in part just because there's more value in agents than there is in software, because you're, you know, essentially doing things like that were people were doing before. So you're, you're just achieving more valuable outcomes than just slight productivity enhancement. The reason I'm cautious on it is I think growth can sometimes be artificial, you know, so you can basically juice the numbers. And, and the question is, are you creating a durable business? And, you know, we talk a lot about, like in our board meetings, just about first mover matters, and there's definitely like a green field right now, but what matters is where you are 10 years from now. So like, are you creating a machine to make happy customers at scale?

• 1:26:19Speaker 02

  And so many of these businesses can grow to like, you know, 50 or maybe even 100 million in ARR and plateau. And you saw this with a lot of different businesses, actually. I mean, it was, and so the question is, what is your addressable market? What are your product advantages? What are your go-to-market motion? And can you scale to add to the next zero? Can you grow to the next order of magnitude? And the only reason I, I think he's a smart, I thought it was a smart point, that growth has definitely accelerated in this world of agents. But as an investor in particular, you're, you're really worried about, can they get a billion in revenue? Can they get 10 billion in revenue? And it turns out that like growing really fast to 20 million is like loosely correlated with that, you know, it certainly means there's product market fit.

• 1:27:02Speaker 02

  But the question is like, was it with a very small niche of startups?

• 1:27:07Jordi Hays?

  Or selling or selling tokens at a loss and you're subsidizing it, right?

• 1:27:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I'm a huge believer in quality annual recurring revenue and very happy customers. And my view is if you can do that quickly like we have, that's great. If you had someone growing more slowly, but it was very high quality revenue from very happy customers, I'd probably bet on them over just the fast growth rate because to me that's a more durable business over time.

• 1:27:32Jordi Hays?

  Do you think, do you think X like just raw execution can be a moat? Because some of those things you were saying earlier, it's not like you guys have access to different L L Ms that someone else in your category might not, but it's just this kind of like know how of selling into the enterprise and being able to do that at, you know, just with with pure excellence that feels like it's separated you guys from.

• 1:27:56Speaker 02

  I'll say it's a, I think it's, I think it's all of the above. You don't want the best technology, best product, best go to market. But I think right now, because the technology is changing so fast, execution compounds over time, you know? So if you had a great product today, but you weren't executing well, you will not have the best product a year from now. So that's where I think execution is maybe the main thing we focus on because it's basically the pace of innovation in your product and the pace of reaching and making new customers successful. And we won't have the best pace because I think what we want, if I, if I come on this show a year from now, I want to be farther ahead of our competitors than we are now. And that is all a function of execution.

• 1:28:35Jordi Hays?

  Last question I have, I know, I know we're a few minutes over, so hopefully you don't have to jump, but how, how are you thinking about the evolution of the cloud market broadly? You have companies like Oracle waking up and getting extremely aggressive. You also have a bunch of Neo Clouds. I'm sure all of these different players are calling you every day, hopefully not sending you AI chat GPT generated cold emails. But, but I'm curious like, you know, where you expect to be and what kind of vendors you expect to be using on that side over the next five, 10 years?

• 1:29:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, the Oracle story is pretty incredible, isn't it? I don't like, who would have predicted the

• 1:29:16Jordi Hays?

  What's your backlog? If you were gonna

• 1:29:19Speaker 02

  It's amazing. Well, it's really impressive, too, just because it sort of shows you, you know, sort of like a founder-driven, big view of the market. It's super impressive. And I just like, kind of, I just, I love stories like that, just because it's like, just like I mentioned, the Microsoft story where so many of us had written them off. And like, it's just super impressive, the level of execution and clarity that Larry brings to that business. You know, broadly, I think the things that change in cloud is just the shortage of supply of GPUs and the demand for compute. And I think that is bringing a lot of, you know, there's a geopolitical angle, too. Where are these data centers built? Data sovereignty, all of that as well.

• 1:30:00Speaker 02

  So I think we're in this new era of cloud infrastructure where, you know, the capex is getting larger. You're seeing like the market crediting boldness in a lot of ways because if there's truly a scarcity here, you know, and I think Sam has been articulating, you know, it's like, whoever has the best infrastructure will really contribute to this world of AI in different ways. And so I do think we're definitely in a new chapter there, just because it's like, you know, different players are making different bold bets. And one of the things that's been really fun to be involved with OpenAI is just seeing sort of OpenAI's influence on that as we try to, you know, pursue our mission of ensuring AGI benefits humanity. And a huge part of that is related to cloud, right?

• 1:30:42Speaker 02

  It's if you don't have the right computer, you're not going to achieve that mission.

• 1:30:46John Coogan?

  Makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you so much, Sarah.

• 1:30:49Jordi Hays?

  Super fun conversation.

• 1:30:50John Coogan?

  We took you a couple of minutes over. Congratulations, and we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:30:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 1:30:54Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:30:54John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Let me tell you about Graphite dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher-quality software faster. We are joined by Joe Lonsdale next. We are going to welcome him from the Restream waiting room into the TVP and UltraDome. Joe, how are you doing?

• 1:31:13Jordi Hays?

  Look at that audio video quality.

• 1:31:16John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:31:17Speaker 06

  How you doing?

• 1:31:18John Coogan?

  You look younger than ever. You're aging in reverse. The camera is helping as well.

• 1:31:23Speaker 06

  The young, the six young kids, I guess, are keeping, keeping me young, running around with them. My one and a half year old was your competition for this. He was angry. I wouldn't drive him in the car.

• 1:31:31Jordi Hays?

  Do you have the most kids of any, uh, you know, top GP? Anybody got you beat that you know?

• 1:31:38Speaker 06

  Oh, I'm sure, I'm sure some have more. I probably, you know, my wife and I are pretty traditional. So just with her, which makes it tougher to coach.

• 1:31:46John Coogan?

  We were gonna get there eventually. I wanted to ask you about this, uh, Trey Stevens post. He said he found a Palantir branded iPod Touch Generation 2 that he had custom engraved back in 2009 while digging through a box at my house. Did you get one of these? Do you know the story of this? Is this a Trey Stevens exclusive?

• 1:32:05Speaker 06

  iPod Touch from 2009? Actually, I, I, I have a lot of early Palantir kind of gear. Mostly, I had these like giant things we used to carry around, like these big computers and, uh, whatever their cases are called. Usually for guns, we use them for computers. I'm not sure about the iPod Touch.

• 1:32:20John Coogan?

  The Pelican case. You probably.

• 1:32:21Speaker 06

  The Pelican. There's like the really serious ones and I, the very first time I brought to DC, we had a rental car. It was like 2005 and I went to the address we were gonna stay at and then there's this very nice black man. He's like, you boys are in the wrong part of town. And I'm like, oh, what's this Northwest, Southwest thing, you know? So if you're not DC.

• 1:32:41John Coogan?

  What was it like early in the Palantir days? Gary Tan tells the story about, uh, you're not selling Holiday Inn software. You gotta stay at a Four Seasons. I forget exactly what hotel chains he mentioned. Uh, is that apocryphal? Is that true? When you traveled for business, would you stay at the top tier place?

• 1:32:59Speaker 06

  I think the very top of the company would stay at like relatively nice places. We weren't upgrading to the nice rooms, but there is probably like six, $700 versus $200 a night sort of thing, which, you know, in retrospect, I think there's multiple ways of running a company. I do think when you're meeting important people, you had to make sure you're not meeting them at the holiday and that would make probably not be a good idea for trying to network with the very top people in these contexts. So I think that's, listen, I think a lot of people waste too much money when they're starting companies, so I don't want to set a bad example. I was, I was actually a top trader at Peter's Fund and I like brought on my friends to like start this with me because a lot of them I brought on to the hedge fund and it turns out they didn't really like finances, so we ended up building out this company. And, and the fund part of our comp was you can basically spend whatever money you want

• 1:33:44Speaker 06

  if you were one of the top guys there. So it was like a very kind of bad place for me to start from in terms of being spoiled already because we have to be honest here.

• 1:33:51John Coogan?

  Thank you for being honest.

• 1:33:54Jordi Hays?

  Where should we start? There's a bunch of stuff.

• 1:33:57John Coogan?

  I mean, I, we were just talking to Brad Taylor about this, uh, Hamon, uh, over at General Catalyst was saying that like the world has changed triple, triple, double, double, double for revenue growth is no longer interesting. The only thing that's interesting is 10 X-ing revenue every year, something crazy. The power law is getting steeper. I would love your take on just what it takes to be interesting as a startup in the era of AI where if you are in the right market or you're indexed to the right thing, or maybe you're selling tokens at a discount, you can get to a crazy revenue run rate very, very fast. What are you watching out for? What are you optimistic about? How does all that play out?

• 1:34:36Speaker 06

  I mean, listen, it's definitely a very different world right now because there's so many new possibilities. I think we were looking at something, uh, I don't want to out the person because I'm not doing it, but we were looking at something that was like going zero to five this year and I thought it could easily have gone to at least 15 or 20, if not more, next year. But I thought the team was kind of like a BB plus and it wasn't like the very, very best people. And that is just insane. By the way, that, that two, those two things combined, you can grow that fast with something that was like maybe not the very best people having trouble hiring. And, and I mean, the bar is just a lot higher right now. And by the way, this changed-

• 1:35:07Jordi Hays?

  And to be clear, that, that round will probably get done at-

• 1:35:10Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:35:10Jordi Hays?

  Like a couple of hundred-

• 1:35:11Speaker 06

  Probably a hundred million at least.

• 1:35:12Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:35:12Speaker 06

  Exactly. And, and I'm pretty sure it will. And it's like- It's like it also raises the bar for everything else. We were looking at this really cool thing in bio infrastructure that could be very important for the future of humanity and for what it could do in the bio world. And it's just gonna take three or four years. And these things in bio, as you know, are just hard. And it's like, you know what? Even though this is so important, like we have to, on the margin, you have to be in like the greenfields right now. The very, very top AI teams are just so far ahead of everyone. So, you know, I do think there's like, I mean, what Hamas says, to me, it's not as much about like exactly the metrics. I think some people like live in metrics and they should. And one of my partners does too. And you know, my view tends to be like,

• 1:35:54Speaker 06

  who are the very best talent in the world? Who has the very best cultures? I mean, you see something like cognition with, you know, 20 gold medal winners or whatever. Scott used to work for me at Atapar after winning, you know, programming, you know, competition globally three times in a row. And like, like, like, obviously, that's like the extreme. But the extreme works in AI, right? It's like, so I think for me, it's more about like, what is the very best talent? And then let's build something that no one else can build. And of course, yes, if it works, it's gonna, it's gonna grow insane speeds.

• 1:36:20John Coogan?

  Tell me the story of finding Scott, identifying him, recruiting him. It seems like one of the greatest talent acquisitions of all time. You've developed a business relationship over a long time now. How did you even think to back him early, work with him early, any of that?

• 1:36:39Speaker 06

  I mean, I mean, to be honest, to be honest, like Scott is a really special and amazing person. But, you know, I hired most of the first 200 people at Palantir. Atapar had eight kind of gold medal winners, along with Scott, who came in at the same time with my friend Vlad Novakowski, who was helping me at the time, amazing guy as well. Just give away all my secrets here. We're gonna go get his help now. But you gotta hide some of these names from you guys. This is dangerous. But, but you know, you know, and then Scott was one of eight that year. And I think another one of them was Alex from Scale. And he was an intern there, too. And, and, you know, it was actually very funny. I mean, both, both amazing people. I think, I think Alex left in a way where we didn't stay as close and Scott left in a way where we did stay a little bit closer. But even Scott, I think

• 1:37:21Speaker 06

  he was running around the world. And I'd been in touch. I actually invested in his new thing after that, which was not cognition, just a little bit, because I thought it was a terrible idea. By the way, this is a very good idea. When you have the smartest people in the world, you should invest in their terrible ideas. Just as a sidebar, we went back to 2022 and we met these people who were doing something really dumb. And like, we kind of want to give money anyway. We didn't. It was out of MIT and ended up pivoting into cursor. There was other people. There's another one where it's like, I have this chain from yesterday where Coley, my partner, is like, forged it to me. And it's like, these guys are really good. They're raising seven million at like 40 posts. It's 2022. And I'm like, oh, God, it's just, we all think it's a dumb idea. I'm like, we can't, we can't keep doing dumb ideas, guys. And it turns out they pivoted and they're raising a five billion post right

• 1:38:05Speaker 06

  now. I'm like, oh, God, we just need to like, I just need to give smart people money. It's just like, it's just like, all you have to do is so annoying.

• 1:38:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's like the bell curve. It's like, you know, I'm one end, just give smart people money. On the other end, give smart people money. And in the middle, it's like, oh, like.

• 1:38:20John Coogan?

  Oh, what's the idea? What's the attraction?

• 1:38:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's just like, even though it's like actually actively a bad idea, like give them money. And by the way, even the thing that was a bad idea, like Vlad, Vlad's in charge now that he's pivoted to something that's working. It's probably, it's also a unicorn. So it's like, they figured it out. So it's just insane. Like, it's just all about talent. And so I lost, I was touched with Scott a little bit and I got back in touch with him. Unfortunately, I've been in the last three rounds of cognition. I wish, I wish I'd stayed as his best friend. It's hard to keep in touch with all the smart people you admire flying around when we're busy. But it's, he's someone I really enjoyed getting to know. And he's someone, he's really grown as a leader more than I expected. Sometimes you know people when they're like 18, 19, 20, 21, and you get one impression of them and you're so impressed, but, but like, was not like the leader personality.

• 1:39:04Speaker 06

  And now he's just such like a fierce leader personality. Plus, plus, you know, the global champion thing. So that's pretty amazing. He's doing, he's doing good work.

• 1:39:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, we read a Wall Street Journal article about the latest IMO gold medalists. And I was surprised because I was texting with a GP at a big fund and they were not tracking it. They were not, our joke on the show was like, every single one of these kids mentioned in this Wall Street Journal article that beat both DeepMind and OpenAI and got the full score on the IMO, they're going to be getting term sheets. But people weren't tracking it as closely.

• 1:39:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, it seems like when you were hiring, you know, these IMO winning.

• 1:39:43Jordi Hays?

  Folks back with Adipar and maybe a Palantir. The Meta at the time was like you want to invest in the kid who's like sleeping on a mattress on their floor, like sleeping in a closet in San Francisco. Maybe it was like somewhat of a narrative, like a different, different track then, even though you can see it becoming consensus now because

• 1:40:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:03Jordi Hays?

  Scott has, you know, shown.

• 1:40:05Speaker 06

  No, it's Scott and Alex and a few others. But listen, I don't think there's too much alpha left in that, in the sense that like, when you have all these people at OpenAI and at Anthropic and they've raised infinite amounts of money, like, you know, it was a problem for me in Palantir in 2008, 2009, when Meta and Google, it doesn't even call Meta at the time, started giving 100K bonuses to these kids out of the top schools. Cause we had like a monopoly on, on just the playbook for the top 20 universities. And they started just like giving like 100K bonus, that's insane. And like now it's literally like 100 times that. And for these, I mean, there is some alpha, I'm not going to tell you all my secrets in this show. Required to you, you tell me, I don't know.

• 1:40:45John Coogan?

  Oh, you are required to.

• 1:40:47Speaker 06

  But it's like, but it's like, I don't think.

• 1:40:49Jordi Hays?

  If you want to tell every investor.

• 1:40:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:53John Coogan?

  You can text us after the fact, the real secrets.

• 1:40:55Speaker 06

  All right, all right.

• 1:40:56John Coogan?

  And we'll keep it private.

• 1:40:57Jordi Hays?

  How are you, um, how are you thinking about, uh, you know, you've obviously had numerous plays in traditional enterprise software. It feels like a lot of public SaaS today is, has this challenge of transitioning from, you know, the traditional seat based model to something more like Palantir, the sort of like value based pricing. How are you think, you know, are you just bearish on public SaaS broadly? Do you think some of them are going to be able to transition? Bret Taylor just said it's easier to, you know, do a, a transition your tech.

• 1:41:30John Coogan?

  Your business model.

• 1:41:31Jordi Hays?

  Your tech than your business model.

• 1:41:32John Coogan?

  Especially in the public markets.

• 1:41:34Speaker 06

  It's, it's so funny to live in this world because it's like I woke up in Oppositeland where I was like, people just beat the shit out of me for like a decade for doing the wrong thing, the wrong model. And suddenly, suddenly like, how did everyone do that model? I mean, that's great, I guess. I, I, I don't, I don't actually know if everyone needs to do a change in model overall. I, I guess, I think the more interesting question is like, which of these? SaaS companies owns important infrastructure and workflows that are juxtaposed to other value they can capture with AI and then also still has a technical culture to do that. So this is like a motion at Atapar I'm working on really hard as an example. I started Atapar 15 years ago. It has over $8 trillion in the platform. The core infrastructure business

• 1:42:17Speaker 06

  is still growing. Infrastructure SaaS business is still growing at like 25 plus percent, just that core. There's all these things on top of it starting to grow because it just touches everything. It provides value for wealth managers. And so I think to get that business growing 40 or even 50% potentially, it has to like build really strong AI teams and workflows that take advantage of where it is. And I think there's going to be a bunch of SaaS companies that do figure this out in the next few years, and those are going to be really valuable companies. And then the ones that don't figure it out at all, there's probably some danger that they even lose the motive, their core thing to begin with because it's going to be too easy to copy or something if they're not, if they're not like scaling it. So, so, so I, I think, I think, I again think it's like a power law thing where some of these are actually worth a lot more. And then most of them don't have the talent to do it.

• 1:42:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's been fascinating watching the narrative shift from the foundation model companies are going to eat everything to the foundation model is going to commoditize. There'll be a couple application layer companies to the idea that AI would be sustaining in enterprise SaaS because you actually, even if you have a semi-technical culture, you don't need to train a foundation model. You can just go grab an OpenAI API and implement that. But there's this business model tension now. And if you're stuck in your business model, there's going to be a lot of startups that are counter positioning against you and you're going to be kind of screwed.

• 1:43:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's, it's interesting because I do think if you own the customer really well, you cut out these things much more easily, but you're going to have to go faster. The startups are going to eat it away. There's so many areas where we're kind of seeing this.

• 1:43:39John Coogan?

  Or the system of record or some sort of database, some sort of relationship.

• 1:43:42Speaker 06

  This is like, like Socotra is a company I mean, that's like a great system of record for the insurance space. And it's, it took a long time to build. It's a bunch of Palantir talent. They're really coming into their own a system of record now, which is very slow. And then they're trying to add the AI in before all the new AI things that people are funding. And it's, I think it's pretty interesting. I think the system of record has a very good chance of winning, but that's a question.

• 1:44:04Jordi Hays?

  How are you thinking about macro broadly? I feel like everybody's, I mean, every asset all time highs.

• 1:44:11John Coogan?

  Gold, Bitcoin.

• 1:44:13Speaker 06

  I like, I like, I like the meme, I like the meme that says printer is coming with, and he's dressed up as, as Lord Stark of the North.

• 1:44:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but for your angle, it's probably generally better use of your time to like, think about, you know, the opportunities at the early stage today. You could incubate a company, you could fund a company, what is the world?

• 1:44:33Speaker 06

  I am, I am, I'm incubating a lot, listen, I started incubating a lot more in 2021, partially because I was just so annoyed that everything was like insanely unreasonably expensive and they have access.

• 1:44:41Jordi Hays?

  And you kind of have a monopoly on the first couple of rounds, right? Is the?

• 1:44:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, we probably were too generous letting friends in. I'm always just like, I have these business friends who are just like much more hardcore than me and just like, just like very sharp elbows and kind of even a little bit nasty. And like, I'm, I'm, I tend to like just like everyone around me to make money. So I probably should have taken just only myself the first two rounds. That's especially Serronic, I should have done that, but whatever, we still, we own plenty of it. Um, it's, it's fun to start things that are important for the country and that win and we make enough money for everyone. Um, but no, we, we do do the whole like big first round ourselves now, just because that's the right thing to do for the fund. And then like do a lot of the second round. Um, and listen, I, I think building is still the best. I mean, even right now, today, you guys tell me, I'm seeing AI rounds. Where like, I'm really happy if I get 15% in a series A of a really hot AI company right now. I think I got 16% something the other day by overpaying.

• 1:45:29Speaker 06

  And I think it was the right thing to do. And it's like, but, but I mean, I've seen a lot of things where I get 5% and I'm, or 6%.

• 1:45:35John Coogan?

  We just talked to Brad Taylor, he raised 350 million at $10 billion valuation. Like, that's not a lot of dilution. It's going to be hard to build a huge position in that company. And that's a one-year-old company, like, and these are happening all the time. I mean, he's special, but yeah, it's still a, it's a unique situation.

• 1:45:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's, there's a special, the specialist ones, I may only have two or three percent and I'm really optimistic because I think they could be $100 billion companies.

• 1:45:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:45:56Speaker 06

  It's, it's very weird. It's different than it was.

• 1:45:58John Coogan?

  Uh, talk to me about the, the early stage startup market in Texas. Yeah, obviously you were in San Francisco for a long time, buddies with Gary Tan, coworkers at some point. Uh, Gary's leading a revitalization of Y Combinator. Is there something adjacent? Like, if I wanted to go talk to 50 young people building startups, the next up in Texas, like where would I go? Who would I be talking to?

• 1:46:26Speaker 06

  So, and I've been fighting for California to fix itself for a long time. Gary's an old friend, obviously, from our fraternity days through Palantir, and I think he's come more to my point of view on these things, which I really appreciate. He's doing a good job. We used to argue a lot. You know, it's, yeah, there's a lot of history there, Gary's crushing it. The thing about Texas, there's a few things. I'd say if you want to build like the very top AI startup in the cloud, application layer model, whatever, like doing something really hard and new there, you probably should be in San Francisco today. Like that's just where the talent is. It's a very strong network effect. I would love it if it wasn't, but it is. And it's there. And that's it. So what do you do in Texas? Well, I think we

• 1:47:10Speaker 06

  have, we, like I mentioned Sironic earlier, I think if you're building in the land of atoms, if you're manufacturing, I think that's probably the most important company in the country for the US Navy, as well as doing very hard things in robotics, very hard things in software around it, as applies to defense. We do have like, you know, 10 or 15 of the very best AI software people for that there. So I think what you're seeing in Texas is it's a really good place to manufacture. You have a lot of the best people, like Boring Company, a lot of the top SpaceX talent, others are coming out here. I think you have a lot of things that go really deep in healthcare here. Obviously, MD Anderson in Texas is one of probably the best cancer center in the country alongside Memorial Sloan in New York. And you have just a lot of other really deep kind of healthcare research, healthcare services

• 1:47:51Speaker 06

  groups, healthcare services. There's multiple, multi-billion dollar new companies in healthcare here, there. So, and I do think like, like when I was talking, Reid Hoffman, I was trolling because we have different politics, like where do you test your like self-driving trucks? And of course, you test them in Texas. I mean, if you're trying to like do things, you know, if I'm trying to like automate, one of our companies that I'm really bullish on is a bunch of ex-Waymo guys and they're automating construction with excavators and they're gonna like automatically run all sorts of construction and quarries and other things. And of course, they're doing it in Texas. So Texas is just like a great center for industry, for building things in the real world, for robotics talent, for defense talent, for healthcare talent. It has great AI talent, but it's not gonna compete with

• 1:48:33Speaker 06

  like the next new AI models in San Francisco. San Francisco right now is just, is just obviously an awesome place for investing for that type of stuff.

• 1:48:39John Coogan?

  My current like understanding of the startup like micro worlds is that you're you're still probably going to be doing a roadshow on Sand Hill Road or in San Francisco. When you're later stage, you're going to be talking to crossover funds in New York. You're going to be in DC if there's a lobbying component, but then you're going to need to build your company wherever makes sense. And for certain industries, Texas makes a ton of sense.

• 1:49:04Speaker 06

  And For a lot of things in the real world, a lot of things in healthcare.

• 1:49:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:49:09Speaker 06

  Texas is by far the best place to do it. It's it's it's listen, I love you can go to government. It's not like they agree with me on everything, but you can go to them and you could talk and they're reasonable and they respect you and you go back and forth. And you don't have to be Republican or Democrat to do it, by the way, like they actually. It's like you can't they actually care about business succeeding. It's very cool. It's like it's a new idea to me to have a government that has a group like, wow, how do we help business succeed? It's really great. And then you can get things done and it's reasonable. So I definitely like building things here.

• 1:49:35John Coogan?

  Jordy?

• 1:49:36Jordi Hays?

  Without giving away too much alpha or feel feel free to put people down the wrong path. But what do you think is the most under under hyped trend adventure right now? Obviously, AI is just drowning everything out, but feels like could be at the, you know, beginnings of a new robotics wave. But how are you seeing it?

• 1:49:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm really interested. You say robotics, I'm really interested in the stuff going on in the real world using AI, which I think is like a whole new area that it's still early. But I think you're going to, I think it's just like a much bigger part of the economy than people realize. So for example, if you can do a certain part of construction automated with Bedrock, like I think people don't understand like that means you can run a quarry better. And there's a hundred billion dollars of quarries. And if you can make quarries have higher cash flow, that's worth like, it's worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. I mean, it's just like, and there's like, there's like so many things like this where the real like the real economy is like 85% of the capital. And that's all about to be transformed. And I think that people underestimate like how much we're going to need in credit to do that, how much just like, just like, just like how much big stuff is going to happen? You can create in the economy in the 2030s there.

• 1:50:41Speaker 06

  So, you know, even stuff like boring company and like, and like automating that. And making it much, much, much better is obviously using modern AI and other modern technologies. They iterate with engineers on it. And it's just really impressive how much cheaper you could do things, how much better you could do things. So I think that's underhyped and misunderstood because it maybe takes a couple of years longer to really get out there and start spreading quickly. But I think it's just like much bigger than people realize. And that's one of my favorite areas. I guess the other one, you know, I think in general, people spend too much time on like the super giant companies, like people call them the infinity stories or the things that can be worth trillions. And I talked to some of my friends who are running very big funds and they're really only interested in something that could be worth trillions of dollars and have all the top talent. And it's, it's almost like, I think, I think one of them is a good guy, but he said to

• 1:51:26Speaker 06

  me, I want to be in the room with the powerful people doing the most important things. And I think that's like an instinct of a lot of our top investors right now. And actually, I think there's going to be literally like a thousand, like five to 50 billion dollar companies and like so many niche application areas that do need you to build out the workflow, do you need you to build out the operations, and do you need to kind of go after the different services of the economy?

• 1:51:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what about it? It feels like, you know, when you look at like Palantir, Adapar, OpenGov, it feels like you've had a lot of success with companies that were very under, you know, not, didn't have a ton of like crazy hype and, and did the kind of like behind the scenes heavy lifting to get to the point where you could have a massive outcome or be really critical to an industry. Are you, do you think there's not enough of that? Like, it feels like a lot of, every company gets hyped, you know, incredibly quickly now if they're talent dense. And are you still like trying to find opportunities where you can just kind of quietly build in a category for four or five years?

• 1:52:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I think I am building a bunch of stuff that's not really that hyped right now that's using AI that's, that's going to change these different categories. And there's this like, When you look at the talent out of Palantir, it's a lot like the talent out of PayPal, except on a bigger scale in a lot of ways, because Palantir had many more years to compound with the very top talent. And so you have things like, I mean, just like random things, like Candid is just like, probably I do, I don't know, they want me to give their numbers on this show, I guess, but it's like they're doing healthcare billing, they're growing really fast, they're gonna do, you know, they're gonna get into the billions of revenue like within the next few years probably. And it's just like, just like, I guess, you know, it's a $280 billion space and there's not that much hype around it. And it's just like, wow, this is like, this could be absolutely, this could be like a

• 1:53:12Speaker 06

  $100 billion company in the early 2030s and almost no one will have heard of it. And it's like, there's just so much stuff like that right now, which is pretty fun. So, I mean, I think I'm pretty bad at hype. I think Palantir eventually got hyped, like despite us being bad at it, which is why people are just pretty shocked at people.

• 1:53:29Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, like I'd say like Sironic's an example of something that, you know, got a ton of hype, ton of capital, ton of attention really quickly.

• 1:53:35Speaker 06

  That, that, that, that did. I think we did get a lot of the right talent and we were kind of the right place, right time, where there's no one else who was doing this for the Navy and had like, and no one else who had like that density of talent and operational. Like Dino's just such an amazing, he's such a fast CEO and he brought in kind of other co-founders who were also really top people. So I think like Androl, they just had so many of the best people, right place, right time, going hard. So I guess that got hyped earlier than I would have expected. That's fair, but most of the things I'm doing are not like that.

• 1:54:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:54:04John Coogan?

  Do you think there's any positive knock-on effects of the insane CapEx that's going into the AI foundation model world? Like, we saw Sam Altman say he's gonna build 10 gigawatts, Mark Zuckerberg saying he's doing a gigawatt, Elon just did Colossus 2, it's a gigawatt. And the interesting thing to me is like, this is in some ways like the, like, you know, Sironic, Palantir, Androl, SpaceX, like those are American dynamism companies, but if you're talking about re-industrialization and just making big things in America, doing stuff that requires government approval, like Elon's, like, Colossus 2 across three different states, like, that feels like that unblocks some crazy stuff and then it's gonna be easier to work on healthcare or work on automated trucking.

• 1:54:49Speaker 06

  This is very, very good. No, you're a hundred percent right. Um, whether or not it's a bubble and whether or not they should be investing this much money. Uh, I'm not even gonna comment on because I think it's just like really good for America.

• 1:55:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:02Speaker 06

  That they're like practicing, building these things at this scale. You're a hundred percent right. They have to fix some of the permitting stuff.

• 1:55:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:55:07Speaker 06

  They have to create all this infrastructure we can use now for advanced manufacturing. We can use the advancements to make things cheaper to do. Uh, scale for building related things in America. We're gonna build a ton of stuff on top of this. I mean, for me, I just love it because.

• 1:55:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:20Speaker 06

  You know, I talk about the different levels of AI investing where it's like zero is energy infrastructure. One is chips. Two is data centers. Three is the models. Four, software infrastructure. Five is apps and services. And like, I'm mostly doing things at five and some four. But by people doing all those stuff at the bottom with insane amounts of money, that makes my life very easy. It makes everyone else's life easy too. So this is great for America.

• 1:55:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, for so long, we've, we've heard like, oh, America, we can't respond to DJI. GoPro got roasted. Oh, we can't respond to Unitree. Maybe Elon will figure it out. And it's like, I feel like we're getting close to like, no, you can actually marshal $10 billion of capital. Set up a massive facility in a couple of months and get approvals and do the thing that you need to do to build a ton of stuff in America.

• 1:56:02Speaker 06

  I, I think, I think this is really, really good. I'd love to see a wave like this for bio.

• 1:56:06John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:56:06Speaker 06

  Decade as well, because right now our bio regulatory apparatus is completely effed up. There's been some really strong hit pieces in the journal recently. There's some huge messes there, but. It's the same sort of thing where if you could like take this energy, apply it to that infrastructure.

• 1:56:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:20Speaker 06

  And, and, you know, hopefully apply some breakthroughs we're gonna see there to own it. Like, like, but the fact that America is can still do this, these companies can still do this. It's, it's awesome. It makes us very bullish.

• 1:56:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:29Jordi Hays?

  You had a pretty viral post yesterday responding to Nick Huber, who was taking, taking shots at the great citizens of Austin.

• 1:56:38Speaker 06

  He's going after Austin.

• 1:56:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And, and it turns out the photo was from like after school ended, so like very clearly.

• 1:56:47Speaker 06

  I'd see, I could totally tell it was a joke photo.

• 1:56:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but I wanted to ask something. You said, sorry, Nick, many, but many of these people relaxing in the nice weather in our hometown are the spouses, mistresses and children. Where did, where did you? Where'd you get?

• 1:57:00John Coogan?

  Where'd you get number two?

• 1:57:01Jordi Hays?

  Number two there. Where did that come from?

• 1:57:03Speaker 06

  He was trying to, his whole post was like, these people are lazy, I'm gonna outsource them for $5 an hour jobs to the Philippines. And, and it was like an anti-American kinda like, negative post. And then, so my clapback is actually, our US employees are, are so wealthy and so successful and have built things so much bigger than anything you're doing, that they can afford to have their families relaxing and...

• 1:57:25Jordi Hays?

  And mistresses.

• 1:57:28Speaker 06

  The joke, the joke of mistresses is they're so wealthy that maybe they have mistresses, they're just relaxing in the sun while they're working, because they're creating so much wealth. We don't need to outsource to throw a rolled slop. We can, we can have great wealth in this country and great success and don't make fun of my city. So it was, it was obviously a joke, but some people, some people got really sensitive about that.

• 1:57:44John Coogan?

  Well, your masterful poster.

• 1:57:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you used his own tricks against it.

• 1:57:49John Coogan?

  You did, you did. I was a strong ratio. I appreciate it.

• 1:57:52Speaker 06

  No, I, I, it was like, this is, so it's, it's a Jewish New Year, and I was like stepping out of the, the synagogue service and I was just like, I probably should've stayed in the synagogue and been on my phone. It's not been on my phone. So, it's dangerous when you give me like, a little bit too much free time on a day. It's dangerous what happens.

• 1:58:10John Coogan?

  Well, never stop posting. Never log off, Joe. We enjoy your posting. We have enjoyed your appearance. Thank you so much.

• 1:58:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would actually like, I think X would like it broadly, if every time Nick Huber posted, you just quoted it and dunked on him. Because he's always leaving something open.

• 1:58:24John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:58:25Speaker 06

  I, I worry that I hurt him, because he like has these really angry replies. And I was, I, I thought it was kind of a joke slapback, but I think he was like, pretty offended. So if he's listening, I, I didn't mean to be offensive. I appreciate his hostile porn, even though I disagree with attacking America.

• 1:58:38John Coogan?

  He, he, he knows what he's doing. He's getting in the arena.

• 1:58:41Jordi Hays?

  It's purely, it's just this.

• 1:58:42John Coogan?

  He's rolling around in the mud. He's gonna get a little dirty. It's gonna happen. But thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:58:48Jordi Hays?

  Come back on anytime.

• 1:58:49Speaker 06

  You guys.

• 1:58:50John Coogan?

  Have fun hanging with your kids. We'll talk to you soon, Joe. Have a great rest, dude.

• 1:58:55John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Julius.ai. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert at level insights in seconds. Loved by over 2 million users and trusted by individuals at Princeton. BCG Zapier. I got the name right this time. Did you see the Carhartt jacket that Turner Novak says? If a VC shows up to the meeting wearing this, you should sign the term sheet immediately. Is this a callback? Didn't Bain Capital do a Carhartt collab for merch? And they got some backlash from that.

• 1:59:26Jordi Hays?

  Solon Baller allegations.

• 1:59:29John Coogan?

  VCs keep it in the... I mean, there's nothing wrong with putting on a suit. You saw Joe Lonsdale just came on the show in a beautiful suit. Nothing wrong with the suit. The, the, what's the, what's the Patagonia vest? That's very iconic VC attire. You throw on the, this looks like Han Solo. Like this, this, this jacket looks like something Han Solo would wear. It looks good, though. Anyway, in other news, YouTube restored some suspended accounts. Ben Thompson has been breaking it down. He said that he gave kudos to the information for their headline, which is YouTube to reallow accounts banned over COVID-19 integrity election violations.

• 2:00:10John Coogan?

  And Ben says this stands in marked contrast to other headlines that, that characterize it as people who spread COVID misinformation. And he's quoting The Verge on that case. And he says, it's true that there was some misinformation, but there's no question that not just, that not just legitimate, but in retrospect, true content was censored and its, and its creators kicked off the platform. Google, in, in that letter to Jordan, who is a Republican legislator, said that they placed the blame squarely on the Biden administration. Google is saying the Biden administration twisted their arm. And so this obviously goes back to the discussion about what is happening with Jimmy Kimmel?

• 2:00:55John Coogan?

  What is the role of the government in free speech? I think it's that... The government shouldn't be involved at all, actually, and that no government should be involved in this stuff. There's been debate over what level of involvement.

• 2:01:06Jordi Hays?

  Find one person that didn't spread at least a little misinformation during that era, right?

• 2:01:11John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 2:01:12Jordi Hays?

  Whether you're a government, whether you're some schizos, conspiracy theorists, right? Everybody was.

• 2:01:16John Coogan?

  And that's what makes America great, is that during the COVID era, we were, we were suffering through the same pandemic that China was suffering through, but we, you know, supposedly had free speech, and so we could talk about it and throw out crazy ideas and pitch all sorts of different solutions and debate them in the, in the great online marketplace of ideas. And so, um, this seems like a positive, a positive shift, uh, you know, more, more speech is probably better, uh, more free speech is probably better. Um, Ben says his concern on strategery is more narrow, and that is how tech companies should have approached challenges like these over the past years, and how he hopes they approach them in the future. And so he says, "Google and YouTube are obviously not the only tech companies

• 2:02:01John Coogan?

  under pressure during the COVID era. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the same thing a year ago. Another was Spotify and Joe Rogan," uh, which Ben wrote about at the time. Um, and he got a lot of angry responses to, uh, his take on how Spotify should have handled the Joe Rogan situation, the pressure on Joe Rogan during the COVID pandemic. Uh, and Ben says, "But I think in the, in the revelations of the intervening years, and I might add, a lot of those headlines I complained about above proved my point. And most disturbingly, we have just this month seen some of the most discouraging and devastating consequences of losing the cultural value of free speech. Still, that wasn't the part of that update. Rather, I was writing directly to Eck and other tech CEOs, declaring an adherence to

• 2:02:43John Coogan?

  free speech was not a get out of jail free card in terms of avoiding criticism for content hosted on your platform. And in that light today, I don't have so much advice as I have an extortion. Tech platforms need to lead the way in reestablishing the cultural mores around free speech and not just..." To get their get out of jail free card back. Tech is dominant culturally in a way it wasn't when the cultural mores around free speech were established, of course, centuries ago. And the most generous interpretation of their actions over the last decade is that they were afraid to assert their power, bowing to the wishes of the loudest voices in the media and in their own companies.

• 2:03:25John Coogan?

  In fact, the best way to avoid partisanship is to be the natural arbiter of all the platforms say they want to be is to decline to take positions on all issues but one, the importance of free expression. That is the key enabler of finding a path forward on all those other issues and is the foundation of a free society. That in a nutshell has been Stratechery's approach to politics and it has served me well. I think it would scale just as well to the largest companies in the world. He says, "Take a page out of my book, it's working for me."

• 2:03:56Jordi Hays?

  Page out of the First Amendment.

• 2:03:57John Coogan?

  Page out of the First Amendment, potentially the first page.

• 2:04:01John Coogan?

  The first page of the, of the list of amendments.

• 2:04:03Jordi Hays?

  Did you see this post from Lachlan Phillips? He said-

• 2:04:07John Coogan?

  I did.

• 2:04:07Jordi Hays?

  My-

• 2:04:08John Coogan?

  Break it down.

• 2:04:08Jordi Hays?

  This is, this is Coogan thought. My most toxic trait is the belief that instead of jailing Elizabeth Holmes, she should have been placed, she should have, we should have placed her under YC arrest, under the watchful supervision of Gary Tan, and forced her to rebuild and rebuild her device over and over again like Iron Man for the next 11 years or until she gets it working.

• 2:04:28John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:04:30Jordi Hays?

  And this is what you wanted to see. Instead of the, the kind of shitposting that she's doing-

• 2:04:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:04:34Jordi Hays?

  -it'd be great if she was like, "Guys, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm figuring out kind of what went wrong-

• 2:04:41John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:04:41Jordi Hays?

  -before. Here's a, here's a more narrow solution-

• 2:04:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:04:45Jordi Hays?

  -that we could kind of create."

• 2:04:46John Coogan?

  Yes. I mean, there, there, it doesn't even need to be, I mean, I understand that from prison you are not going to be able to build a, a, a, a device that tests your blood. Like, she's just not gonna have the equipment for that, but- She could be reading papers. She could be, she could be reading the analysis and giving thoughts that over time could look very good. Like you see it today with the news of Donald Trump and RFK are talking about Tylenol. It's being hotly debated. The administration is taking one position, different media figures and health experts are taking different positions. I'm sure Andrew Huberman will comment it on, comment on it at some point, right? But like, she has the opportunity to, to read all the research, comment on it, and then we will

• 2:05:29John Coogan?

  see in a year or two, or maybe more, how that, how those predictions panned out. And that's what we've been seeing with Martin Shkreli, where he has made a bunch of bets on, he's very bearish on quantum computing right now. We'll see what happens. We just get to wait. And we will remember, wow, he was correct about his bear call on quantum computing. And so that updates us to think that he is a, he is an interesting thinker on the valuation of new technology companies, right? Whereas right now, she's kind of just like leaning into this character of, oh, wow, she's posting from prison. I think that novelty will wear off.

• 2:06:04Jordi Hays?

  I'm cool and fun.

• 2:06:05John Coogan?

  I think that novelty will wear off and we'll want to see something more meaningful.

• 2:06:07Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's definitely broadly changed people's like general feelings towards her.

• 2:06:12John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 2:06:12Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 2:06:13John Coogan?

  For sure. Anyway, Fall. Generative media platform for developers, the world's best generative image, video and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters.

• 2:06:26Jordi Hays?

  Head over to tbpn.com/sounds, which is brought to you by Fall.

• 2:06:30John Coogan?

  Printer is coming. Amit is investing, writes from Besant, "We are going into an easing cycle and we'll see a massive decrease in mortgage rates. Powell should have signaled 100 to 150 basis points of cuts, not just 75 points. We'll begin Fed candidate interviews next week, looking for someone with an open mind."

• 2:06:51Jordi Hays?

  Looking for someone with an open mind.

• 2:06:53John Coogan?

  Open mind to low interest rates.

• 2:06:54Jordi Hays?

  To what we want.

• 2:06:55John Coogan?

  Potentially. We'll see. I would, I would love to see mortgage rates come down. I would love to see the cost of housing come down. I'm still feel like the opportunity is probably in just building more housing, building a lot more, but certainly.

• 2:07:08Jordi Hays?

  Love when the rates are low, hate when they're high.

• 2:07:10John Coogan?

  Certainly helps, but of course, that, that tenure isn't really behaving.

• 2:07:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:14John Coogan?

  It's gotta, you gotta whip it into shape.

• 2:07:17Jordi Hays?

  Jim, Jim, Jim Cramer with the... That tenure better start behaving.

• 2:07:22John Coogan?

  It's great. There is a fantastic profile on Jim Cramer in the news today. We should take a gander through this because it's a fun one. This was brought to my attention from, let me find it, from Joe Weisenthal. He says, "Great profiling business insider of a guy who was on the Odd Lots podcast who wakes up at insane hours every day to cover the markets." Did you see this?

• 2:07:47Jordi Hays?

  I did not.

• 2:07:48John Coogan?

  So Jim Cramer is a businessman. The Mad Money host, known for his emphatic delivery and bold stock calls on the air, gave a rundown of his hectic schedule when speaking on Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast last Monday. Here were the highlights of his routine. And get ready to be mugged, Jordy. He wakes up, he kicks off his day at 3:15 a.m. 3:15 a.m. Do you know what time he goes to bed?

• 2:08:11Jordi Hays?

  Six?

• 2:08:12John Coogan?

  11:00 p.m.

• 2:08:13Jordi Hays?

  What?

• 2:08:14John Coogan?

  He gets four hours of sleep a night.

• 2:08:17Jordi Hays?

  Just doesn't need to sleep? Does he nap?

• 2:08:19John Coogan?

  There's no competing with this guy. This is insane. I like, we try so hard. I feel like we do a really good job, but we're putting up eight hours of sleep a night. How did you sleep last night? Go to eightsleep.com, get a Pod5 Ultra, 30-night risk-free file.

• 2:08:37Jordi Hays?

  I wish that I could.

• 2:08:38John Coogan?

  I got a 96 last night, but I slept for seven hours and 41 minutes. That's about four hours more than Jim Cramer slept.

• 2:08:44Jordi Hays?

  I got a 90, seven hours, 23 minutes.

• 2:08:46John Coogan?

  Ooh, I win again.

• 2:08:47Jordi Hays?

  You win again. You, yeah, I just, I guess I gotta go to bed.

• 2:08:52John Coogan?

  So Cramer wakes up at 3:15 a.m. The first 45 minutes of his day are on, quote, "A tight schedule due to his 4 a.m. workout." We're getting into the gym at 6:30 at best. He's getting in two and a half hours ahead of us, and he's on East Coast time. This man lives in the future compared to us. It's remarkable. Before the hour, he brushes up on the market by perusing the Financial Times, Bloomberg, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and CNBC. I get two of those done. He's doing six. Okay, he's ahead of me there. Cramer also said he sifts through stock research in his inbox, combing through about 700 emails a day. That's remarkable.

• 2:09:27Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:09:28John Coogan?

  I read everything I think is relevant. I'm looking for something to say. I have a memo that comes out, 10 things I'm looking at. I do one thing I'm looking at. He does 10. I try and just do the current thing, and he's got 10 of them. He's an absolutely Absolute beast. Kramer said, referring to his weekly weekday morning newsletter for CNBC's Investing Club, he said, "So that's my overlord," he referred to the newsletter as. "I'm starting to feel that the newsletter is my overlord. I respect it. Go subscribe, tbpn.com. Throw your email in there. You will get the TBPN run of show every week, the current thing, my newsletter." Then Kramer appears on CNBC's Squawk on the Street, begins writing Mad Money, his flagship show on the network in the mid-morning. Throughout the day, Kramer spends a huge amount of time

• 2:10:12John Coogan?

  reading up on company news and earnings reports. He finishes taping Mad Money around a quarter to six. We saw him there doing that.

• 2:10:18Jordi Hays?

  Zach Meyer in the chat says, "This guy does not go to the gym at 4:00 a.m. Look at him."

• 2:10:23John Coogan?

  You think he's lying?

• 2:10:24Jordi Hays?

  I think it's more like he's not working out for physique, right? He's, I mean, we got to hang, a couple of weeks ago, we got to hang with Kramer for about 20 minutes. It's the end of the day. He had a ton of energy. He was incredibly locked in.

• 2:10:38John Coogan?

  He did have a ton of energy.

• 2:10:39Jordi Hays?

  This was at like, probably five, four, five.

• 2:10:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's probably doing something low-impact, but I like to imagine him benching three plates, squatting five, throwing up some 200-pound hang cleans, some clean shirt.

• 2:10:51Jordi Hays?

  PRs every day.

• 2:10:52John Coogan?

  PRs every day, getting a robe, getting athletic with it.

• 2:10:55Jordi Hays?

  Throwing on a stringer?

• 2:10:56John Coogan?

  He'll fit, yes, absolutely. We, yeah, we, get a, get a GigaChad Mass Monster Kramer photo up ASAP. I need to see that. He finishes taping Mad Money around a quarter to six and comes home. He'll go out to dinner around 10:00 p.m. and then say goodnight to his wife before tucking in. Kramer acknowledged that the intensity of his schedule puts a strain on his marriage. "I have a great marriage. I put that out first because I wreck it every day. I go to bed at 11. She goes to bed at like a normal time. So that's where I, when I really wreck the marriage. That's not the plan. I didn't set out to do that," he said. Kramer's routine doesn't seem to have much changed. In 2015, he told Business Insider, that he followed a similar schedule. He's been saying this. He's been waking up at 3:00 a.m., tweeting about stocks and puppies in the morning, making a pit stop at the headquarters

• 2:11:38John Coogan?

  of the street, which he co-founded in 1996. What an absolute run for Jim Cramer. Anyway. TurboPuffer. Search every byte, serverless vector and full-text search. Built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable.

• 2:11:53Jordi Hays?

  This little TurboPuffer is used by Notion, Linear, Cursor, and many more.

• 2:11:58John Coogan?

  I want to go through VCs to AI startups. Please take our money in the, in Bloomberg. This is from Kate Clark. She says, "Private jets, box seats, and big checks. Investors are doing whatever it takes to get into top AI deals." Jordy, would you mind reading the first few paragraphs of this article?

• 2:12:20Jordi Hays?

  I'm trying to catch up to this article.

• 2:12:22John Coogan?

  It's page 90. "Raising venture capital money has been a breeze for Decagon AI." We're all over the place with the customer service startups.

• 2:12:31Jordi Hays?

  AI CX.

• 2:12:32John Coogan?

  It's a very hot industry. Decagon's doing well. Finn, our partner, is doing well. And Bret Taylor's doing well, too. Decagon's two years old. They're developing artificial intelligence tools for customer service. All four of Decagon's funding rounds totaling more than $230 million were preempted, meaning firms like Andreessen Horowitz offered to invest before the company started fundraising. Now, just three months after a round that valued at 1.5 billion, we have the founders on when they announce that round, Decagon is fielding unsolicited offers at valuations as high as $500 million.

• 2:13:03Jordi Hays?

  Give it up for unsolicited offers. They're some of the best offers.

• 2:13:06John Coogan?

  For Decagon and a few other AI startups, the fundraising script has flipped. Instead of pitching venture capitalists up and down Sand Hill Road, VCs are pitching them, hoovering them with gifts and favors in hopes of leading their next round. Can you catch us up on the rest of the article?

• 2:13:25Jordi Hays?

  So Jesse.

• 2:13:26John Coogan?

  And I want to go into some ideas because I think the VCs aren't thinking big enough.

• 2:13:28Jordi Hays?

  Big enough. We'll get you back in a second. So Jesse Jiang, the 28-year-old co-founder and chief executive officer of Decagon, says investors hoping to back him have offered him everything from tickets to Golden Gate Warriors games to an autographed poster of MMA legend Khabib Nurmagomedov. John would not know who Khabib is, but I'm sure many of you do. One investor even folded origami cranes into a mosaic of Decagon's logo and hand-delivered it to the company's San Francisco office with a term sheet hidden inside. Decagon took the deal, so that's a good one. That works. Investors are emailing term sheets. They're giving verbal offers. They're inviting founders to sports games. They're inviting

• 2:14:11Jordi Hays?

  founders to race Ferraris, and they're inviting them on private jets, says Bennett Segal, a co-founder of investment firm A-Star and an early investor in Decagon. What you tend to see is the best companies are getting preempted every round and the time between rounds is shrinking. The lavish VC overtures are part of a larger Silicon Valley frenzy for AI driven by startups' astonishing revenue growth and investors' belief that these companies can dethrone tech giants. US startups have raised around 200 billion this year so far, according to PitchBook data, but 41% of that went to just 10 companies, highlighting VC's relentless focus on a small group of AI frontrunners like OpenAI and Anthropic. Last year, the share of funding that went to the top 10 companies was less than 10%.

• 2:14:55Jordi Hays?

  A few smaller AI startups have also emerged as investor favorites, drawing outsized attention and capital. Among the rising group of hot companies is legal startup Harvey, customer service firm Sierra, and coding company Cognition, all of which have drawn big offers from VC firms. AnySphere, the maker of AI coding tool Cursor, has become a central example of the rush to fund newer AI companies. It's kind of funny that...

• 2:15:19John Coogan?

  I heard you talking trash, by the way. I do know who Khabib is. He's an athlete.

• 2:15:24Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 2:15:25John Coogan?

  Nailed it.

• 2:15:26Jordi Hays?

  You know...

• 2:15:27John Coogan?

  What else is there to know?

• 2:15:28Jordi Hays?

  What else is there to know? He punches and he...

• 2:15:32John Coogan?

  He kicks.

• 2:15:33Jordi Hays?

  Kicks.

• 2:15:34John Coogan?

  Does he do kicks?

• 2:15:35Jordi Hays?

  He does kick.

• 2:15:36John Coogan?

  He does kicks as well?

• 2:15:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he does kicks.

• 2:15:38John Coogan?

  He's into kicking?

• 2:15:39Jordi Hays?

  And wrestles. Isn't it... This trend of companies having like one name and then the product name being called something else?

• 2:15:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:49Jordi Hays?

  AnySphere and Cursor, Windsurf had the same situation, right?

• 2:15:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, there's this story about Decagon. One investor even folded origami cranes into a mosaic of Decagon's logo. I saw a picture of this and I was confused because a decagon is just a 10-sided shape and so it's actually like extremely easy to fold something into a decagon, but I guess they did cranes into the shape of a decagon or something?

• 2:16:14Jordi Hays?

  Just cranes.

• 2:16:15John Coogan?

  Because like, imagine if you're like, "Oh, I really want to invest in square. I'm gonna fold you a square. I'm gonna take a piece of paper. I'm gonna turn the term sheet into something square." It's like, I want to see true origami mastery from a VC if you're gonna try and preempt a round.

• 2:16:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think I think investors should be thinking of it as as what is the right kind of effectively bribe at each stage?

• 2:16:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:16:43Jordi Hays?

  Right? So.

• 2:16:43John Coogan?

  What's the budget? What's the what's the math that you should be doing? How much should you put towards the bribe? Towards the tip?

• 2:16:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a tip.

• 2:16:50John Coogan?

  There's no tax on tips.

• 2:16:51Jordi Hays?

  It's a tip. Yeah, I don't know, you know, it depends on the round.

• 2:16:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:55Jordi Hays?

  But if it's really competitive, maybe thinking about 10, putting 10% of the check size.

• 2:17:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:01Jordi Hays?

  And then paying out of your own management fees for some type of experience, right?

• 2:17:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, if you're just paying 10% over, if there's a $300 million round, and it's between you and another firm, and you just take just 10% over, that's not going to hurt your returns. Like, if you win the round, it's going to be, you know, 10x. And so 10x on 300 as opposed to 330.

• 2:17:23Jordi Hays?

  Just making, just making insane assumptions.

• 2:17:26John Coogan?

  Just take the 30 mil.

• 2:17:28Jordi Hays?

  All math out.

• 2:17:28John Coogan?

  Buy a McLaren F1 and be like, I see you as the next Elon. I see you as the next Sam Altman. They drove McLaren F1s.

• 2:17:37Jordi Hays?

  You should drive one.

• 2:17:37John Coogan?

  You should have this car. It's yours. Take it.

• 2:17:40Jordi Hays?

  Or keep a, you know, a fleet of supercars.

• 2:17:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:44Jordi Hays?

  At Sand Hill, and and say, you can have this from between the A and the B, right?

• 2:17:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:48Jordi Hays?

  So it's, and you could have an adverse effect of founders being like, I like this P1. I'm gonna, I don't really want to raise my B. I'm dailing it. But in general, I think it should work out. So I think it should be like, writing a 250K flyer, why not get a founder a long weekend at an Aman property of their choice?

• 2:18:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:08Jordi Hays?

  You know, something, something straightforward.

• 2:18:10John Coogan?

  You just, just, just a weekend? I feel like a couple of weeks.

• 2:18:14Jordi Hays?

  A long weekend.

• 2:18:15John Coogan?

  A couple of weeks. Like, at least you could.

• 2:18:16Jordi Hays?

  I know, but you're getting, you're getting well beyond that, you know, that 10% mark.

• 2:18:21John Coogan?

  Two days in Aman is two weeks at a Four Seasons.

• 2:18:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I think you kind of going, going up the ladder.

• 2:18:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's next? If I'm trying to win a $20 million Series A, what should I budget for the tip, for the bribe?

• 2:18:34Jordi Hays?

  For the tip. Tip, tip sounds better than bribe.

• 2:18:37John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah, tip. We're sticking with tips.

• 2:18:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it is. You know, we are coming up into VC tipping season, so founders got to be thinking about what kind of tip makes sense.

• 2:18:46John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 2:18:46Jordi Hays?

  For each person on your cap table. We've, we've talked about this before, but. But yeah, how can you take it up? How can you take it up a notch? You know, racing Ferraris, private, private.

• 2:18:56John Coogan?

  You gotta.

• 2:18:57Jordi Hays?

  But I, I, I think these like one-time offerings are super weak.

• 2:19:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:01Jordi Hays?

  You know, it's like, uh, race Ferraris for a day.

• 2:19:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:04Jordi Hays?

  That's not that interesting.

• 2:19:05John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:19:05Jordi Hays?

  Founders doing nine nine six, they're like, I don't want to go to your racetrack.

• 2:19:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:08Jordi Hays?

  So I think, um.

• 2:19:11John Coogan?

  Buy the racetrack. I think the thermal club was up for sale.

• 2:19:15Jordi Hays?

  Or a lot of, or, or, or saying, uh, you can use my jet one time.

• 2:19:20John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:19:20Jordi Hays?

  One time.

• 2:19:20John Coogan?

  One time.

• 2:19:21Jordi Hays?

  One time. It should be, it should be.

• 2:19:23John Coogan?

  Here's the full jet.

• 2:19:24Jordi Hays?

  The jet.

• 2:19:24John Coogan?

  It's yours.

• 2:19:25Jordi Hays?

  Should live with you until the IPO.

• 2:19:27John Coogan?

  Tossing the keys.

• 2:19:27Jordi Hays?

  Until the IPO.

• 2:19:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. Then, then you get your own jet.

• 2:19:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Until you, you're, you're in the position to be able to get your own, your own, uh.

• 2:19:36John Coogan?

  Tyler, what would get you to sign a, a, a term sheet? What would stick out to you, uh, if a VC came to you and said, I gotta do this deal.

• 2:19:43Jordi Hays?

  Look at this, look at this picture.

• 2:19:45John Coogan?

  I like that you're, you're David Senna, a fan. You have a framed photo of him.

• 2:19:49Speaker 03

  I think something compatible, like i- if the founder is doing nine nine six.

• 2:19:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:52Speaker 03

  Right? There's this thing, you know, the, the current vibe is stakes, right? So maybe you buy, uh, you know, kettle farm.

• 2:19:58John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:19:58Speaker 03

  With very high quality cows, like, you know, Zuck's Island.

• 2:20:01John Coogan?

  Zuck has that on his island.

• 2:20:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:20:03John Coogan?

  For sure. Uh, Gold Rock said, I, I had a VC try to take me hot air ballooning. That's a wild one.

• 2:20:11Jordi Hays?

  Are you, would you go on a hot air balloon?

• 2:20:13John Coogan?

  I would absolutely go on a hot air balloon.

• 2:20:15Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:20:16John Coogan?

  It's extremely aristocratic.

• 2:20:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:19John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 2:20:20Jordi Hays?

  I saw a video of a hot air balloon, uh, crashing.

• 2:20:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:23Jordi Hays?

  From, from somebody that, that took the video inside the hot air balloon. It was.

• 2:20:26John Coogan?

  Okay, it scared you?

• 2:20:27Jordi Hays?

  Wasn't super appealing. Oh, we got Tyler on the big screen now, and we got Senna here on the big screen.

• 2:20:32John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:20:32Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:20:33John Coogan?

  I feel like that's a skill issue.

• 2:20:35Jordi Hays?

  Skill issue, just.

• 2:20:36John Coogan?

  Just hit chat GPT, how do I fly a hot air balloon? Get up to speed, summarize that for me, don't make mistakes. And then we got a little inception going here.

• 2:20:44Jordi Hays?

  I like that. That's a good start.

• 2:20:46John Coogan?

  Uh, anyway, profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Maybe that's what the VC firm should do. Get on profound. When people, when founders type in, who should I raise money from? I'm building this. Show up in chat.

• 2:21:02Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think founders should just ask, uh, I don't want you to just join the board. I want you to actually become a, a BDR at my company for the next two years.

• 2:21:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, you're, you're joking, but like, that's sort of, I've seen that happen with Elon companies where to win allocation, you're going not BDR, but recruiting.

• 2:21:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:22John Coogan?

  So come in and, and, and import your entire network. Everyone you know, who's an engineer who could work at this company, come and work basically full time for like a month to like really do, do everything you possibly can. Because there's always, you write the check and then you're like, they hit you with like, oh, like, do you know any software? It's very different from being like, I'm doing three full-time weeks of just actually racking my network, actually making calls, catching up with everyone who'd be relevant.

• 2:21:50Jordi Hays?

  Two most convenient.

• 2:21:51John Coogan?

  No, no, no. Going really deep into the actual, um, in, in, in, into the Rolodex. Does the Hindenburg count as a hot air balloon? I don't think so. Is it dirigible? It was a, it was a blimp. Um, but, uh, anyway, numeral, sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

• 2:22:13Jordi Hays?

  Let numeral know about sales tax.

• 2:22:15John Coogan?

  Dot com. Google just built Dingboard. You saw this? Are you familiar with Dingboard? Yakseins project?

• 2:22:20Jordi Hays?

  They just killed it? What do you mean?

• 2:22:21John Coogan?

  Have you seen this? You, you?

• 2:22:22Jordi Hays?

  Of course I know Dingboard.

• 2:22:23John Coogan?

  Did you, were you a subscriber?

• 2:22:24Jordi Hays?

  I was very early on. He gave me, I was like, I, I, I DM'd him for some reason. He gave me a code.

• 2:22:29John Coogan?

  I love the product. I thought the product was amazing. I, it wasn't, it didn't really work that well on mobile. Um, but it was, it was super cool. You could like go in and with AI, remove backgrounds, merge images, blend things together. It was a fantastic product. He goes to work for Axe.

• 2:22:44Jordi Hays?

  How did they kill it?

• 2:22:45John Coogan?

  Well, because Google Labs just launched Mixboard, an experimental AI-powered concepting board designed to help you explore, visualize and refine your ideas powered by our latest image generation model, of course Nano Banana. And with Nano Banana and, uh, you know, it, basically it's not that they killed Dingboard. It's just that they launched a product that is clearly inspired or, or lives in the same kind of work stream as Dingboard where you can remix images, bring things in. Very, very cool product. I would love to see this on an app for sure. I've always, when I'm making images and memes on my phone, I'm always going back and forth between like Photoshop Express and Image Flip and a few different sites.

• 2:23:30John Coogan?

  There's not a lot of stuff. This is a great product and I hope someone can take it across the finish line. Obviously, Yaxin had to go work at X and now he's working on robots and stuff, but.

• 2:23:40Jordi Hays?

  What do you think of Stillers?

• 2:23:42John Coogan?

  Stillers?

• 2:23:43Jordi Hays?

  Soda, Ben Stillers Soda Company.

• 2:23:46John Coogan?

  I have no idea. Does he have that type of audience that's like ready to rip soda?

• 2:23:52Jordi Hays?

  From Walmart?

• 2:23:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Like, I guess, like, we were talking to John Shaheen about this, like, Ben Stillers is the type of person that could probably call the CEO of Walmart and get a meeting, right? Like, he's so famous. If you're a CEO of a big retail chain and you hear Ben Stillers on the line, you're gonna take that call, right? So, maybe it advances your, you know, distribution quickly. Stillers is also just a great name.

• 2:24:20Jordi Hays?

  I do, that's, that's.

• 2:24:21John Coogan?

  The name is great. And when I saw it, I was like, oh, that's a cool name. I'll take a Stillers. That's a great name. Is that related to Ben Stillers? And then I found out it was. So, I could see it working. I would love to do a taste test. We'll have to actually see, is the product good? Because if he has great product sense, kind of doesn't, the distribution and the celebrity will take care of itself.

• 2:24:40Jordi Hays?

  Some of the copy is a little millennial coded.

• 2:24:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:24:42Jordi Hays?

  Says, "Made by 100% real human celebrity people."

• 2:24:46John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, that's a little.

• 2:24:47Jordi Hays?

  And the, and the, the copy on it says, "No fake stuff."

• 2:24:51John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:24:53Jordi Hays?

  And, and crowded category.

• 2:24:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:57Jordi Hays?

  Just, they, they, they're competing with, with Ollie Pop and what's the other one?

• 2:25:02John Coogan?

  There's been a huge, there's been a huge lineage of trying to find, make a product that's free of. Free of sugar, free of fat, free of carbs.

• 2:25:12Jordi Hays?

  I would say I would have been incredibly bullish on this company if it launched in 2019.

• 2:25:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:25:16Jordi Hays?

  But launching into a category that Pepsi's already gonna buy their one, I'm sure Coke will eventually.

• 2:25:23John Coogan?

  I mean, I believe Pepsi already has Poppy, which was a direct competitor to.

• 2:25:27Jordi Hays?

  Peppy.

• 2:25:28John Coogan?

  Wait, there's Poppy, but then there's also.

• 2:25:30Jordi Hays?

  Pepsi bought Poppy, you could imagine Coke buying Ollie Pop.

• 2:25:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:34Jordi Hays?

  And then that's, then it's kind of over.

• 2:25:37John Coogan?

  But then there's, there's another, there's another company that's a seltzer, that's, uh, it's bubbly, bubbly. Do you know bubbly? Bubbly sparkling water? Who owns bubbly?

• 2:25:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, we should get Ben on the show to talk about stillers and we should get, uh, Tyler.

• 2:25:54John Coogan?

  Bubbly was incubated by.

• 2:25:56Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna, we're gonna.

• 2:25:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Bubbly was incubated, incubated by PepsiCo to compete with like the Spindrifts of the world. And remember the big boom in, in seltzers? Uh, there were a whole bunch, Topo Chico and a bunch of other products that were really popular in, uh, in offices in, you know, 2017, corporate offices. People would be drinking, um, La Croix all day long. Uh, bubbly was like their answer to that. I don't know how it actually panned out, but that's kind of interesting. But in much more interesting news, OpenAI, SAP and Microsoft are launching OpenAI for Germany, a partnership to bring frontier AI to Germans.

• 2:26:33Jordi Hays?

  A moment you've all been waiting for.

• 2:26:35John Coogan?

  Public sector through a sovereign certified cloud environment. We haven't rung the gong enough on the show. Let's ring it for, uh, OpenAI for Germany.

• 2:26:43Jordi Hays?

  There we go. And we gotta hit it for, uh, Claude getting into the Microsoft ecosystem. That also happened. We love it. Uh, well, without further ado, I think we have our next guest, Riley Walls in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in. He has been.

• 2:27:05Jordi Hays?

  Being a rascal the last 48 hours. Riley, welcome to the show.

• 2:27:11John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 2:27:12Speaker 05

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:27:13Jordi Hays?

  The most viral man on X, the current thing.

• 2:27:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, take us through the current thing, the current project. What did you build? What inspired it? What's the reception been? Is there those GPUs on fire? Are the servers on fire? Is it staying up? Walk me through it all.

• 2:27:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was on a project kind of going on. Yesterday's project was I figured out you could scrape the parking ticket system in San Francisco to reveal more or less the real time locations of parking officers as they wrote tickets.

• 2:27:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:27:44Speaker 05

  So I made a website called Find My Parking Cops. Looks very similar to Apple's Find My Friends. And yeah, you could see where the cops were as a traveler around SF.

• 2:27:56John Coogan?

  Take me a level deeper on the technical.

• 2:27:57Jordi Hays?

  What inspired this?

• 2:27:58John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Did you get a lot of tickets? Is that what inspired this?

• 2:28:02Speaker 05

  I actually don't even have a car. My roommates, all my friends have cars. And yeah, I mean, you hear a lot about tickets. It's pretty notorious in the city.

• 2:28:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, take me through one layer deeper of the technical side. Did, is this just a function of the SF parking ticket office integrating with some sort of, you know, IT or ERP system? That basically as soon as the ticket's written, it gets loaded into a database? And then is that, is there a public API? Is this stuff that you can just look up on the, on like an actual website? Are you finding like an entirely private API?

• 2:28:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's all, it's all public. The magic is right when they write the ticket, it goes up online and you know, you have to enter the ID number to be able to see the ticket. Like there's a website, you can, you can pay your ticket. And when you pay it, you can see a copy of the ticket. So I figured out that the ID numbers for all the tickets were predictable, meaning that like there's a, there's a pattern to it. So I could, I do kind of the pattern and I could see, okay, like this ticket just simplified a lot. Like if like ticket number like 83 was just written, I know 84 is going to be next. So I just keep checking for the next one. There's a little more technical than that, but like, you know, it's, it's pretty magical when predictable IDs are a thing. Like there's so many cool ideas you can, you can scrape knowing that, so.

• 2:29:18John Coogan?

  Talk to me about your actual workflow. Is there, are you using vibe coding tools?

• 2:29:23Jordi Hays?

  Well, before that, what was the current state of things?

• 2:29:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:26Jordi Hays?

  SF, obviously.

• 2:29:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:29:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you could potentially really, you know, uh, if enough people in SF started using this, it would be, could.

• 2:29:34John Coogan?

  I would hope that the mayor would write you a letter of, of recommendation for this.

• 2:29:38Jordi Hays?

  And ask the.

• 2:29:39John Coogan?

  You should win a medal for this.

• 2:29:40Jordi Hays?

  You should.

• 2:29:41John Coogan?

  This is, this is the highest calling. Yeah, you should get the key to the city for this, but what's the actual response from SF been, if anything?

• 2:29:48Speaker 05

  Yeah. So I, I do websites like these that are provocative a lot, and I think a lot about framing it and like how I want to present to people. So I thought this would be maybe a little like mildly viral among people in SF, but it actually went pretty viral like around the world yesterday. Uh, within four hours, the, the SF government mobilized and they changed their site to prevent me from getting the data. Like only four hours, it took them to prevent me from, uh, make the site useless. So yeah, the, the site is not up anymore because they changed the way that their data.

• 2:30:15Jordi Hays?

  Those four sweet hours though were, uh.

• 2:30:18John Coogan?

  Everyone was free of, free of parking tickets.

• 2:30:22Jordi Hays?

  It actually is, if, if, if it had gone less viral and not, and people hadn't, you know, if they hadn't noticed so quickly, I could imagine this being highly, somebody's pulling up, they want to grab a coffee. You know, they're like, they just checked the map, they can run in and out. It's not a, not a, not a, uh, I can see it actually being pretty valuable.

• 2:30:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. Walk me through some of like the, how you like to build these projects, how you like to host them. Um, what, what problems you typically run through. Would love to know just a little bit about your stack these days.

• 2:30:52Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, use AI a lot. It makes things so much faster. I have like, I guess a lot of ideas, these are all sticky notes for different like data ideas I want to make. So just kind of every weekend I'll try to knock one off. Um, in my free time. Um, I, you guys talked about, you saw the other one I made, Panama Playlist.

• 2:31:08John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:31:08Speaker 05

  Oh, you did that. You did that. Okay.

• 2:31:10John Coogan?

  We're, we're on that. You scraped my data. I'm glad, glad you, I was wondering like, how did I make the cut on this? Like, these are some big people on, on there. Uh, yeah. What was the secret to that? Because it only.

• 2:31:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Was there any, was there any strange fallout? I mean, it's hilarious to read into people's music taste. I don't, I, you, you wouldn't have noticed this, but my, that, the playlist that I had public that you featured was like, seven songs I found that had like obscure references to venture capital. So when I saw it, I was like, I don't listen to any of it. When did I make this playlist? I don't listen to any of these. In like 2021, I had just started collecting.

• 2:31:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't know. It was just kind of trying to highlight like how much data is out there on Spotify and like, people just forget about it. And yeah, sorry you guys were part of it, but.

• 2:31:56Jordi Hays?

  No, no, we thought it was hilarious.

• 2:31:58Speaker 05

  I think it was, it was pretty amusing. I think a lot of people had a kick looking at it.

• 2:32:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was the, what was the reaction from either the people that were in it or Spotify directly? Has there been a change to the API or because we saw this even during the last election, like the Venmo public records, people forget about this stuff all the time. There's kind of a question about how tech platforms deal with like default privacy because there was an era when everything was public and then people started closing things down, becoming a little bit more private, but it's a, it's a, it's an interesting like user design problem for the big companies to shift.

• 2:32:31Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. In case your audience didn't see it, I scraped like the public playlist and listening data of notable figures on Spotify and like they're like, you guys were on it, like Sam Altman was on it. A bunch of politicians like Mike Johnson and JD Vance and like so many people just have stuff open on there. They haven't changed stuff yet. I feel like Spotify probably will change like the default behavior of playlists because right now they're public by default, which is kind of crazy. But yeah, I mean, it was, a lot of people took their playlist down. Kind of was a, yeah, interesting to see like kind of a lot of people embraced like Palmer Lucky. He was like, yeah, these are my songs and I love them.

• 2:33:10John Coogan?

  So did you have to guess some sort of code or was, did you just literally just search my profile and then it was there?

• 2:33:16Speaker 05

  Yeah. For you guys, a lot of it was just like real names. I just searched your game and then I found a profile with your picture and like probably a simple, because I could see like you guys follow each other or something probably.

• 2:33:28Jordi Hays?

  Walk us through some of the, some of the other stuff you've done recently. And then I want to talk about.

• 2:33:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. Specifically, what's the most underrated project or most underappreciated project you've worked on where you love it, it's one of your dearest children, but you feel like it hasn't gotten enough love?

• 2:33:49Speaker 05

  Hmm, uh, one like, interesting one, a few months ago, I, I, this was also very out much out there, but you know, you guys know looks maxing, um, I, I mean, it's like a looks mapping, where I, I scraped the Google Maps reviews of restaurants in New York, SF and LA, and then I ran the profile pictures of the reviewers through a very jank tracking this model. And I, I mean, the, uh, aggregate, um, map of like all these restaurants, like, okay, this restaurant is usually composed of like sixes or whatever, out of ten. Very off on the idea and premise, but it was kind of funny.

• 2:34:25Jordi Hays?

  That, that would, that would make anybody mad.

• 2:34:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, you can, you can, you can glean a lot of just information, because I also, I also had an age map, you could, you know, get their age from the profile picture roughly and gender too, so you could see which restaurants had like the most men or women in, in a city.

• 2:34:40Jordi Hays?

  Did it, what, what kind of pattern, like, how, how much did it track with just the general hype around restaurants? Like, what, what did you notice?

• 2:34:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, like, the oldest restaurant in SF is on a country club. Um, like, the most, um, like, male restaurant is a gay bar, the most female one's like a brunch spot. Like, it all kind of fits when you look at it.

• 2:35:01Jordi Hays?

  Predictable.

• 2:35:01John Coogan?

  That feels like a product that maybe it needs a little polish, but could just be something that would actually add value to the Google Maps experience. Has big tech companies reached out to you and said, hey, come work for us?

• 2:35:14Speaker 05

  Not for that, there's been a couple like smaller map startups that are like, oh, you should maybe add this. I, I think they should, yeah, I think this would be cool to, I feel like it's too politically risky for Google, but like, definitely a smaller startup could do it and it'd be useful.

• 2:35:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, I feel like even if you dialed back, uh, some of the framing on what you're building, like, there's, there's, there's product insight there, and there's like novel features that would surprise and delight, and I feel like that's kind of, um, what, what, what a lot of these projects like put on display.

• 2:35:41Jordi Hays?

  What were you doing, what were you doing before all these experiments?

• 2:35:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, does this pay the bills? Do you have a full-time job?

• 2:35:48Speaker 05

  It is not, yeah, I have a full-time job doing like data stuff. That's more commercially viable. I also, I mean, like you guys talked to Gabe Whaley of Mischief.

• 2:35:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:58Speaker 05

  I was an intern there.

• 2:36:00Jordi Hays?

  There you go. Mafia.

• 2:36:02Speaker 05

  Which was like very, I mean, you guys can kind of see like all this is very inspirational, very inspired by mischief.

• 2:36:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. The chat is literally saying he's like mischief for tech projects lol. Like people have clocked it for sure.

• 2:36:13Speaker 05

  At first hand, I got to see up close how they operate. They're like incredible people.

• 2:36:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:17Speaker 05

  And yeah.

• 2:36:18Jordi Hays?

  So you were at Mischief and you said, I need to pursue data science.

• 2:36:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, that was my calling. I think data is like really cool. And it's cool that you can combine it with like mischief elements to make like weird things like this.

• 2:36:30Jordi Hays?

  What are, let's, let's, I don't, I don't, it feels like you could talk through some ideas you have without giving away too much alpha, just because a lot of, I don't know. I doubt people would, would steal your ideas since a lot of them are like, don't make, are you not doing this to make money? But you want to talk through any workshop, any with us?

• 2:36:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, let me see.

• 2:36:50John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, what you got on the board?

• 2:36:52Speaker 05

  I was like, one, one like terrible idea that I'll probably never build because it's awful is there's a, OpenAI has like a API endpoint for like how, like a moderation endpoint for how bad a piece of text is, it will like return back like a string of like, you know, is this harassment or is this like racism or whatever? I don't know.

• 2:37:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:13Speaker 05

  The horrible idea is like somebody should make a leaderboard where you like have to type in a string of text and you want to like actually hit every single one of these categories.

• 2:37:23Jordi Hays?

  Say the most offensive possible.

• 2:37:26John Coogan?

  You have to create the most offensive string of text in history.

• 2:37:31Speaker 05

  And as few cases as possible, defend as many people as possible.

• 2:37:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:35Speaker 05

  Horrible, but.

• 2:37:36John Coogan?

  Horrible, but.

• 2:37:38Jordi Hays?

  Certainly, I think.

• 2:37:39John Coogan?

  You might not need to disclose what it was actually said. You could have it be anonymous, but you know, you, you, it would certainly spark creativity. I mean, Rune was talking about this, how there are certain strings of text that just go viral every time they're posted, no matter when they're posted, no matter who posts them. These little insights, we did this project, Banger Archive, where we took. The best posts by certain people just screenshotted them and just said banger. And they would get another 10,000 likes every time.

• 2:38:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we had posts that would get 50, you know, in a word of magnitude, more likes than the original post.

• 2:38:11John Coogan?

  And it was like a, a, an aval post about like, you should work like a lion, like, you know, take rests and then work really hard. And it's just like these universal truths that like, just continue to deliver value.

• 2:38:22Jordi Hays?

  What else, what else you got? What else you got?

• 2:38:24John Coogan?

  What else is on the board? Give us some other stuff.

• 2:38:29Jordi Hays?

  Cause I feel like 4chan would like one shot your leader. They'd figure out there's like, there's four words, you put these together and you make every person on earth mad.

• 2:38:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, that'd be, be terrible. One idea, this is something I asked you with parking tickets here. Um, I also found out that like vandalism citations have like a similar setup in the city. So I, I was able to scrape like half a million pictures of graffiti that cops took. So I was thinking it'd be cool to make an website that shows graffiti art through the lens of a, of a cop in San Francisco.

• 2:39:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be cool.

• 2:39:04Speaker 05

  They took on their, on their phone themselves.

• 2:39:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. It feels like a lot of your projects touch on, uh, touch on like public works projects, public like, like cities, like data in cities. And I'm wondering if you have a view on like, uh, should cities be more open to the hacker culture? Actually embrace some of this stuff, like some of the stuff that you're building is like very close to just like a tool that would make life in a particular city easier. And yet cities are notorious for long lines of the DMV and, and not being the most tech forward organizations or entities. Uh, how, how do you think about, um, actually like the, how cities deliver tech services?

• 2:39:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think there's a lot there, like, um, I think the, the asset government actually has a pretty good handle on this. They have lots of data sets that they publish, uh, pretty frequently. And there's a lot to work with there. Like they, they publish like 911 calls, uh, with like a 10 minute delay. You can see kind of like a anonymized data set of what people are calling 911 for, which is kind of cool. Like there's lots of things like that. Nobody really knows about, but, um, there's things there.

• 2:40:13Jordi Hays?

  Would you like, in a perfect world, in a, in a perfect world, would one of these, you'd do it for fun? And then, and then you discover some like enduring business or do you like just doing one idea after the next?

• 2:40:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, all these ideas are just things I find interesting to myself and, you know, usually that means somebody else will find it interesting too if I post online. I think it's just like an outlet to be creative and it's nice to have distinct like work, work and like this is more fun work. But yeah, no, definitely it'd be cool if something like that happened.

• 2:40:42Jordi Hays?

  Any, any ideas, are you, are you capital constrained on anything? Like if you had 25 grand, you would, you would do, because I feel like at this point there's enough people, ourselves included, we would, we would, as long as it was not offensive, we would happily chip in to make possible.

• 2:41:01Speaker 05

  There is, yes, I, I need 33K for a project next May for a very fun stunt in San Francisco.

• 2:41:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:41:10Speaker 05

  If anyone would like to.

• 2:41:10John Coogan?

  We should talk.

• 2:41:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:41:13Jordi Hays?

  All right, let's talk, we'll talk offline, we don't want to, we don't want to spoil it.

• 2:41:16John Coogan?

  Last story I want to talk about, I, I didn't really, I didn't put it together until just now that you're the person behind New York's hottest steakhouse that was fake. Tell me that story because I remember it happening and I didn't put it together until just now.

• 2:41:29Speaker 05

  You talked to the, my co-conspirator, Maran, the archaeology guy.

• 2:41:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, oh, no way.

• 2:41:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, that was an incredible, like one of the best nights of my life. We had so many things go wrong, but like somehow it just happened to go right. We, a long story short, we lived in a house together in New York, Maran made steaks and then we made a Google Maps listing called Maran Steakhouse. And then all our friends started writing these bizarre five-star reviews, like, you know, I converted out of like Hinduism so that way I could try some of his beef or like, he came in like drenched in blood from upstate, fresh with a fresh cow, like really bizarre reviews of people in New York thought it was real because the dining culture there is crazy.

• 2:42:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:05Speaker 05

  And we had this huge waitlist over a couple of years that we built up. So we actually opened it for one night, we opened a real restaurant, fully permitted, I was like licensed by the government to actually open a restaurant. We had 120 guests come thinking it was real. It was like a humongous operation logistics-wise, but it somehow ended up well. We did not get sued.

• 2:42:22Jordi Hays?

  How did the guests, how did the guests take it?

• 2:42:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, what were the, what were the reviews after the fact?

• 2:42:27Speaker 05

  Most of them were pretty good. Like, I don't think people really realized it was fake. We wanted people to find out it was fake in The Times, and they read it about the article. And a lot of people did.

• 2:42:36Jordi Hays?

  Oh, got it.

• 2:42:37Speaker 05

  Thought it was kind of a weird restaurant, but they thought it was like, okay, this is just how things are.

• 2:42:40John Coogan?

  It's like cool and avant garde, right? It's like edgy, new and different and pop up.

• 2:42:45Jordi Hays?

  Did you guys break, did you guys break even on it? Like, did you, did you end up, did you sell enough steak to, to?

• 2:42:51Speaker 05

  No, no. We, uh, we, we spent like 16K and then, um, made like 13K. So we lost like 3K. But for the amount of money we got, like, it was, it was viral everywhere.

• 2:43:04Jordi Hays?

  But that New York Times piece is forever.

• 2:43:06John Coogan?

  It is.

• 2:43:07Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:43:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:08Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:43:08Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. All right. Well, we will, we'll message you. We'll, we'll figure out how to, how to make this.

• 2:43:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'd love to talk about SF stunt. That'd be fantastic.

• 2:43:16Jordi Hays?

  Happen, uh, and, uh, keep up the great work.

• 2:43:18John Coogan?

  Fantastic. We'll talk to you soon, Riley.

• 2:43:19Speaker 05

  Thank you, guys.

• 2:43:20Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for joining. Cheers.

• 2:43:22John Coogan?

  Uh, let me tell you about customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level. Get started. Um.

• 2:43:32Jordi Hays?

  Opening AI says more compute in the making, announcing five new Stargate sites with Oracle and SoftBank, putting us ahead of schedule on the 10 gigawatt commitment we announced in January.

• 2:43:41John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:43:41Jordi Hays?

  Ahead of schedule.

• 2:43:43John Coogan?

  Massive. Uh, Stripe's also buying back shares from its VC backers at $106.7 billion valuation. Um, Sequoia bought 861 million worth of shares in 2024 at a $70 billion valuation. So they're getting a markup. And Amendin pretends has live shot of a swath right now. He's talking about a swath de modrin, who is, uh, uh, who is, um, obsessed with valuation, specifically liquidity premiums, illiquidity premiums. And, uh, it's, it's, it's just interesting that Stripe continues to find ways to stay private basically forever.

• 2:44:20John Coogan?

  And they've been on a tear, the Collison brothers. Um, well, the, uh, these, uh, we saw this, uh, we talked to Joe Lonsdale about being in the same fraternity at Stanford with Gary Tan. And you can zoom in on this photo and see a young Joe Lonsdale and a young Gary Tan hanging out at Stanford back in 2003. Pretty remarkable piece of tech lore. I want to know, what are, what is everyone else up to? We gotta go through this list because there's probably some interesting folks in here. I want to know what Michael Calhoun's up to. Or Justin Reynolds, or Adam Rodriguez. Gotta figure it out.

• 2:44:58Jordi Hays?

  Bunch of lads.

• 2:44:59John Coogan?

  Gotta get on public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields. They're trusted by millions.

• 2:45:07Jordi Hays?

  And we got anything else?

• 2:45:08John Coogan?

  Tyler Cowen is talking about the potential for stagflation, economic stagnation.

• 2:45:15Jordi Hays?

  No one wants that. No one wants that.

• 2:45:17John Coogan?

  Tyler says, it seems increasingly likely that the American economy is sleepwalking towards stagflation. In case you're wondering, that is not a good thing. Stagflation means an economy experiences excess inflation and excess unemployment at the same time. This is one thought to be impossible, but the OPEC oil price shocks of the 1970s triggered both high inflation and high unemployment. And voila, we were suddenly, we suddenly had a new unhappy economic phenomenon. If I had to guess, I think there's a decent chance that 18 months from now, America could well have an inflation rate of 4% up from last year's 2.5%.

• 2:45:52Jordi Hays?

  Well, John, we got some breaking news in the chat.

• 2:45:54John Coogan?

  What do we have?

• 2:45:55Jordi Hays?

  China agrees to terms of a US TikTok deal.

• 2:45:57John Coogan?

  Wow. Thank you, Bobby Cosby, for breaking the news. Thank you. Hello, hello. Thank you, everyone in the chat for keeping us up to speed.

• 2:46:05Jordi Hays?

  Is this not a little worrisome that they're agreeing with?

• 2:46:11Jordi Hays?

  Seems to have pretty, historically had a pretty hard line.

• 2:46:14John Coogan?

  Well, pull up any more information while I tell everyone about adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to ad-hoc out-of-home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out-of-home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad-buying across the globe. I want to tell you how Steven Spielberg works. He says, Steven Spielberg says, before he goes off to direct a movie, he always looks at four films. Can you guess what films he watches before he goes out and directs a film?

• 2:46:42Jordi Hays?

  Seven Samurai, Lawrence of Arabia.

• 2:46:45John Coogan?

  Borat.

• 2:46:46Jordi Hays?

  Borat.

• 2:46:47John Coogan?

  Dark Knight.

• 2:46:48Jordi Hays?

  Dark Knight.

• 2:46:49John Coogan?

  What was the other? Mountain Head and Office Space. Those are the movies you've seen?

• 2:46:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:46:54John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:46:54Jordi Hays?

  No, he does. Seven Samurai, Lawrence of Arabia, It's a Wonderful Life, and The Searchers.

• 2:47:00John Coogan?

  Have you seen any of those?

• 2:47:02Jordi Hays?

  Lawrence of Arabia.

• 2:47:03John Coogan?

  Lawrence of Arabia is a fantastic movie. Tyler, have you seen any of those?

• 2:47:07Speaker 03

  I've seen all of them but the Searcher.

• 2:47:08John Coogan?

  Same with me.

• 2:47:09Speaker 03

  No, I have seen.

• 2:47:10John Coogan?

  You've seen the Searchers?

• 2:47:11Speaker 03

  I have seen it, yeah.

• 2:47:12John Coogan?

  You need to give us a review on that. I need to check that out this weekend. I've seen Seven.

• 2:47:15Jordi Hays?

  Alright, since you've seen it, name every scene.

• 2:47:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:47:21John Coogan?

  Is there a tech equivalent of this? Before you start a new company, study the greats. Listen to these four founders podcast episodes. Who are you listening to? Pick four. Top four.

• 2:47:34Jordi Hays?

  Edwin.

• 2:47:35John Coogan?

  I'm going Edwin Land, Steve Jobs, Gaston Glock, and probably Rockefeller. You gotta throw Gaston Glock in there for sure.

• 2:47:43Jordi Hays?

  Underrated.

• 2:47:44John Coogan?

  And the Chicken Finger Dream. You gotta get up to speed on the Chicken Finger Dream before you can start your next company. I think every founder should have, should have four founders podcast episodes in the chamber before they go out to raise, before, pump up speeches.

• 2:47:57Jordi Hays?

  Or if they need to run through a brick wall.

• 2:47:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, if you need to run through a brick wall, that you need to have your top four founders podcasts ready to go. So when you hit the road, when you check into the Rosewood for your Sand Hill tour of pitches, you're ready to go. And you're also wearing a fantastic timepiece on your wrist that you picked up from GetBezel.com because your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. In other news, Palmer Lucky says that Mod Retro has teamed up with Ubisoft to re-release some of their greatest classics, starting with Rayman. It has some of the best graphics of any Game Boy Color title. Late-cycle developers truly mastered the hardware. It shipped months after the Game Boy Advance was announced. So congrats to Palmer Lucky on a new deal for Mod Retro. Company's been on a tear. Very excited for M64.

• 2:48:40Jordi Hays?

  Palmer Lucky also hit the timeline yesterday quoting a Meta post that, "See how US national security agencies are using Meta's LMA models to develop bespoke tools for America's military and intelligence professionals." It is crazy how much the vibe has shifted that Meta would have, imagine if Meta posted something like that in.

• 2:49:00John Coogan?

  2016 when Palmer was there for a couple of months. Yeah, would have been crazy.

• 2:49:04Jordi Hays?

  Palmer says, added to the quote from the announcement, "We're also supporting US national security through our work developing augmented and virtual reality technologies. Through our partnership with Anduril, we are developing a range of wearable products to help maintain America's technological edge."

• 2:49:20John Coogan?

  You know what I've missed recently? Singing, there hasn't been enough singing on this show, so we gotta bring it back. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. We gotta get Tyler to chime in when we're singing. We can close on this post. Vinnie Daniels says, "I'm seeing parallels between Nvidia and the Medici Bank failure of the 1490s."

• 2:49:48Jordi Hays?

  Who isn't?

• 2:49:49John Coogan?

  People are having fun drawing comparisons. Lots of the dot-com boom. Not so much to the 1490s, but fire up, crack open a history book.

• 2:49:59Jordi Hays?

  Should we do a deep dive on the 1490s?

• 2:50:02John Coogan?

  For sure. We should definitely read about the Medici Bank failure. Tyler, you in?

• 2:50:06Speaker 03

  I'm also...

• 2:50:06John Coogan?

  Get out the red string.

• 2:50:07Speaker 03

  I was gonna say, I see a parallel between Nvidia and the rise of the Roman Empire. We're early on.

• 2:50:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:50:13Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:50:14Speaker 03

  Taken over everything.

• 2:50:15Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:50:15John Coogan?

  Who is Jensen? Is he Caesar?

• 2:50:17Jordi Hays?

  The rise of Genghis Khan, the Mongols.

• 2:50:20John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe.

• 2:50:21Speaker 03

  Maybe.

• 2:50:23Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, that's a fun show, folks.

• 2:50:25John Coogan?

  Thanks for tuning in.

• 2:50:26Jordi Hays?

  Hope you have...

• 2:50:27John Coogan?

  Have a great Wednesday.

• 2:50:28Jordi Hays?

  A fantastic rest of your day. We'll be back tomorrow, and I cannot wait.

• 2:50:33John Coogan?

  We will talk to you soon.

• 2:50:33Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:50:34John Coogan?

  Goodbye.