Ali Partovi, Tim Fist, China's Semiconductor Evolution, NVIDIA's China Business

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TBN. It is Wednesday, April 16th, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Jordan, you want to talk about what you're wearing?

• 0:12Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I got a new jacket on.

• 0:14John Coogan?

  New jacket, merch.

• 0:16Jordi Hays?

  These are the moments you never forget, right?

• 0:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 0:18Jordi Hays?

  First time you put on a jacket that you really love. I have, you know, I put this on this morning. This is a early edition of a jacket that will be being sent out to the TVP N network very shortly. But uh, pretty happy with how it turned out. I posted a picture of it a while back.

• 0:36John Coogan?

  Stand up a little bit, can we see? Yeah, okay. So we got some bezel, public, eight sleep, ad quick, wander, ramp on the front, ramp on the back, ramp on the left, ramp on the right. It's ramp, all you can see. And we thank you to Ramp for sponsoring the show and make it, making it possible.

• 0:56John Coogan?

  But speaking of ads, I wanted to run an ad for ad quick.

• 1:00Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:01John Coogan?

  It's kind of the, the jacket of the real world.

• 1:05Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:06John Coogan?

  It's the way to get your logo.

• 1:08Jordi Hays?

  Express your brand.

• 1:09John Coogan?

  Out into the.

• 1:10Jordi Hays?

  In the built environment.

• 1:11John Coogan?

  So if you're looking for out of home advertising made easy and measurable, head over to adquick.com. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe.

• 1:25John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's move on to the big news in tech today is clearly Nvidia with the H20. It has been restricted in China and there's a bit of a debate emerging between stratechery and semi analysis. Ben Thompson and Dylan Patel are, they have slightly different takes. They think they agree on a lot of what's going on in, with this project and with the story as it's developing. So we'll take you through some of the, the debate that's raging about how important chip bans are, what this means for Nvidia, what this means for China. And then also I wanted to do a little bit of a deep dive again on the history of semiconductors in China and how we got to this particular configuration where America is kind of dominant.

• 2:11John Coogan?

  China's kind of catching up, but you know China's been working on this for a long time. It's not like semiconductors are new and they never thought of them.

• 2:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:17John Coogan?

  They've been working on this since the 70s and they've had a variety of government programs and private enterprises, programs that have driven them to kind of where they are today.

• 2:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:28John Coogan?

  And so Huawei is the big...

• 2:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this kind of goes off, yeah, the conversation with Aaron yesterday.

• 2:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:32Jordi Hays?

  If you haven't listened to, go back and listen to Aaron Gin's segment. One of my favorite guest appearances.

• 2:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was great.

• 2:38Jordi Hays?

  To date on the show. And he basically said, "What we don't want is Huawei going around the world giving people worse but cheaper chips and just sort of like flooding the market and becoming dependent on Chinese chips."

• 2:54John Coogan?

  Yep. And so we have some posts from the timeline to kick it off. The Kobesi letter, Kobesi letter? I don't know how to pronounce that. Breaking, Nvidia says the US government has banned them from selling H20 chips to China for the indefinite future. Nvidia says this will come with a $5.5 billion charge to Q1 earnings and the stock traded down 5% in this screenshot. You can certainly pull up Nvidia's stock on public.com and tell us what it's doing today. But Luke Metro quote tweets it and says, "Probably the right decision, but LOL at Nvidia designing a chip to get around export control laws, then being so successful that they changed the laws." And so this is the nature of these chip bans.

• 3:33John Coogan?

  They're always evolving. And so we'll take you through some of that. But I thought it would be interesting to start with some history. So China's semiconductor ambitions really began in 1978. They started working on semiconductor R&D. This is during the Deng Xiaoping leadership that we talked about yesterday. China launched economic reforms aimed at modernizing technology and industrial output, including early research into integrated circuits, which of course the US was doing. But during the Cold War, the US export controls severely limited high-tech transfers. And so Chinese labs were working with outdated technology.

• 4:13John Coogan?

  There were small state-backed institutes that emerged and the first big one that everyone kind of focuses on is this 863 program, which is interesting. It's named after when it was launched, which was March of 1986. And so in Chinese, it's 86 is the year and 3 is the month, so 863. And this prioritized strategic areas like semiconductors, telecommunications, and biotech. And so the program set conditions whereby foreign firms entering China had to share technology, although core IP usually remained garden. But this is like, it goes back to the 80s, like the strategy of like, oh, you're coming here, like, let's, let's share some IP.

• 4:53Jordi Hays?

  Share IP. What's, what's the big deal?

• 4:55John Coogan?

  Come on, just open the kimono.

• 4:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:57John Coogan?

  Right?

• 4:58Jordi Hays?

  Send us a design file. We won't, we won't do anything with it.

• 5:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can trust us.

• 5:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can trust us.

• 5:02John Coogan?

  I just, just let us hold it.

• 5:03Jordi Hays?

  You can trust us.

• 5:04John Coogan?

  Just let us hold it.

• 5:04Jordi Hays?

  You can trust us with your IP.

• 5:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, just let us hold it.

• 5:08John Coogan?

  Just let, just let me hold it.

• 5:09Jordi Hays?

  Let me hold it for a second.

• 5:10John Coogan?

  Just let me hold it for a second. Universities and research institutions expanded semiconductor curricula, training a generation of engineers who later contributed to domestic breakthroughs. And so the China's government in 1988 designated semiconductors a pillar industry. So this is not like some new, oh, China's waking up to AI and now they're, like, this has been going on for a very long time. And they initiated early state-sponsored projects and forged a bunch of joint ventures with foreign partners. And so reflecting on a nascent domestic industry, state plans began to include establishing manufacturing hubs and incentivizing technology transfers, as we mentioned. So imported equipment helped set up primitive fabs operating at

• 5:51John Coogan?

  suboptimal process nodes. And this, this technology gap wound up persisting for decades and it exists today. The 3 nanometer node works in Taiwan, doesn't really work anywhere else. Although we're trying to bring it to America.

• 6:02Jordi Hays?

  What Aaron was saying is like, the, the gap is, is real, but not as significant as, you know, TSMC or Nvidia would like maybe the market to believe.

• 6:13John Coogan?

  Yep, yep. And so after the 863 project that started in March of 1986, they launched the 908 project, which starts in 1990.

• 6:26John Coogan?

  And this was their first major attempt at creating a world-class semiconductor manufacturer through state-led initiatives. And so they had the state-owned factory in Wuxi and they converted into a competitive integrated device manufacturer, or what's called an IDM. And so there were some partnerships with American companies like AT&T's Bell Labs. And this was supposed to speed up technology transfer despite significant limitations on core process knowledge. So they didn't have everything that they could do internally, but they would pay Bell Labs to bring over some of the tech. The project's execution was hampered by bureaucratic delays because it's a state-owned and state-run enterprise, and there was slow adoption of the advanced methods. And so by the time

• 7:09John Coogan?

  production began, the fab was already obsolete, which is like an ongoing theme. Now it's a little bit less relevant because if you're trying to build a 3-nanometer node and you wind up with a 7-nanometer node, like you can put those chips in cars. You can put those chips in... Like, yes, you're not going to be on the bleeding edge of AI or phones, but you're going to be...

• 7:27Jordi Hays?

  There's a use for them.

• 7:28John Coogan?

  There's a use for them. You're going to put them in smart fridges and smart toasters and smart thermostats and all sorts of stuff. There's chips everywhere.

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  Smart home will be dumb as rocks.

• 7:35John Coogan?

  And so then there's Project 909, which was designed as a rapid push to build an 8-inch wafer fab that could meet international standards, though later they ran into some trouble here. This was ordered by President Jiang Zemin. Project 909 set up a modern 8-inch fab in Shanghai within two years, marking China's first serious stride in modern wafer production. This initially showed promise because they achieved this 0.5 to 0.35 micron process in 1997, but soon encountered profitability issues exacerbated by the 2000s.com crash. And so this is the nature of building a fab. If you're not on the leading edge, you don't get the crazy margins. And so you have to invest a ton in CapEx and then recoup that

• 8:20John Coogan?

  over a number of years. And so if you're not on the leading edge and you can't have those high margins that then...

• 8:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's basically a commodity, or, you know, do you actually have IP?

• 8:29John Coogan?

  Exactly. And so in the late 90s, China focuses on... For the first time on chip design, this is what Nvidia does, but also Google with the TPU.

• 8:40Jordi Hays?

  Meta.

• 8:41John Coogan?

  Meta has a new chip as well, Amazon and pretty much everyone at this point, Apple.

• 8:46Jordi Hays?

  Microsoft, but that's more quantum focused.

• 8:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think Microsoft is probably developing like an AI accelerator chip, just like everyone else, but we haven't heard that much about it.

• 8:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:55John Coogan?

  All these companies are still huge buyers of Nvidia, but the chip design is obviously different than Fab. And so this was the China's first step towards self-reliance in semiconductor design. Previously, they'd been licensing designs and then say, hey, we'll just be do the manufacturing, but having that integration seemed critical at the time. So Huawei's HiSilicon was formed to supply ASICs for telecom, while companies like Godson or Longson emerged to design CPUs. And so, you know, if you have a telecom tower, it needs to do certain calculations. It's not entirely a general purpose CPU. It doesn't need to be able to do any program, but it needs to be able to do very specific things again and again. And that's what an ASIC is great for. So it's essentially like an algorithm on a chip, is how I think about ASICs. Like Bitcoin is the classic one.

• 9:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so they launched JVs at this time.

• 9:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:43Jordi Hays?

  With basically foreign firms.

• 9:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:45Jordi Hays?

  Alongside state projects, a growing number of private enterprises began designing chips tailored for the domestic market. So remember this point, this is the 90s. We still had this feeling that China wasn't necessarily gonna destined to be an adversary.

• 10:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:00Jordi Hays?

  If we could turn them to the fantastic, incredible system of capitalism.

• 10:05John Coogan?

  Democratic capitalism.

• 10:06Jordi Hays?

  That we could, you know, get along and everybody would have a great time. And that was like basically like top down, sort of like admin view at the time.

• 10:17John Coogan?

  And so this was all pre-World Trade Organization, but they joined, of course, in the late 90s. And this spurred greater openness and then a lot of multinational corporations.

• 10:28Jordi Hays?

  More IP transfer.

• 10:29John Coogan?

  Love to see those. But they were also built out of like these high-tech parks. So Shanghai has a high-tech park that has semiconductor-related research and light manufacturing going on. And this is really the key to what makes China amazing. Like the iPhone City, iPhone City is not just Foxconn. It's not just the final assembly. It's that they have glass manufacturer, the lens manufacturer, the chip manufacturer.

• 10:50Jordi Hays?

  Camera.

• 10:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, all these different pieces start forming and China is learning that having a somewhat free market, somewhat decentralized process for building these industrial parks is actually the dominant. Philosophy. And so they let different companies compete in these segments, but they wind up creating this, this like rainforest of value creation. And so the company, China is still facing challenges at this time. They never really master the high end process technologies and most advanced production remains abroad. But in 2000, this is the founding of SMIC, the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation. Great name. And, and you've been hearing a lot about SMIC now.

• 11:28Jordi Hays?

  Names are coming back too, right?

• 11:30John Coogan?

  These names, yes.

• 11:31Jordi Hays?

  Advanced manufacturing company of America.

• 11:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:34Jordi Hays?

  We saw.

• 11:34John Coogan?

  Alan Control Systems kind of fits in here.

• 11:36Jordi Hays?

  Earlier this week.

• 11:37John Coogan?

  General matter.

• 11:37Jordi Hays?

  Somebody was kind of ripping SF compute.

• 11:40John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 11:41Jordi Hays?

  Doing the general intelligence.

• 11:42John Coogan?

  Of New York.

• 11:43Jordi Hays?

  Of New York.

• 11:44John Coogan?

  The browser company of New York.

• 11:45Jordi Hays?

  Company of New York. So this meta is dead now.

• 11:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:48Jordi Hays?

  Go back to short.com, but, but it's.

• 11:51John Coogan?

  Portman toes, actually. I want, I want to go back to Portman toes.

• 11:54Jordi Hays?

  It's been cool.

• 11:54John Coogan?

  Bitly, these like cute little feedlies.

• 11:57Jordi Hays?

  Just add an, add an LY to it.

• 11:59John Coogan?

  We got to bring those back now.

• 12:00Jordi Hays?

  TBP Enly.

• 12:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:04John Coogan?

  So SMIC was set up as a pure play foundry and it was modeled directly on Taiwan's TSMC. So they saw what, what Morris Chang was doing in Taiwan with support of the government. Remember the government came in back TSMC and, and China's just like, yeah, let's just do that with SMIC. And they've been doing that for 25 years now and they're, and they're like slowly going down the learning curve, increasing the process nodes. And so they progressed from 180 nanometer to 90 nanometer nodes within a few years. Remember we're down at three nanometers now.

• 12:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the interesting thing, you have these, you know, basically like state run corporations that. Have bureaucracy, they aren't hyper efficient, but they are strategically important enough to the country that they just get, you know, they just like, you know, become these sort of like snowballs of capital and over time sort of brute force their way into some amount of relevancy.

• 12:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. So SMIC is moving down the process nodes. They go from 180 to 90. Remember now we're down at like three nanometers and some of these, some of these terms are more like marketing terms now, like 4K TVs have different specs and whatnot. At a certain point, I believe the, the width of a silicon atom is one nanometer. And so you can't go, you can't pack them closer. You could never have like a zero nanometer chip because it wouldn't work. So that's where like quantum comes in.

• 13:23Jordi Hays?

  Never say never.

• 13:24John Coogan?

  Never say, yeah, I don't know. I'm not, it's totally possible.

• 13:27Jordi Hays?

  Ben's working on something there.

• 13:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, someone's cooking something up. Someone's going to raise a mango seed for that idea. One nanometer chips, zero nanometer chips.

• 13:36Jordi Hays?

  We're only one mango seed away from it.

• 13:37John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 13:39Jordi Hays?

  Never lose faith.

• 13:39John Coogan?

  But, but at this point, like SMIC is starting to position itself as a found, as a serious foundry, not at the leading edge, but at the trailing edge. And so in the early 2000s, there's a boom in Chinese chip design firms, which lays this foundation for more domestic semiconductor innovations and companies are embracing the fabulous model like what happened in America with Nvidia. So Spreadtrum and Godson started designing chips specifically for mobile and computing applications and, and just in general, China is improving domestic R and D, state sponsored initiatives, university programs, that type of stuff. And so.

• 14:18Jordi Hays?

  Sure. Corporate espionage as well.

• 14:20John Coogan?

  And so in 2004, policymakers acknowledged that domestic production was meeting only a fraction, around 10% of China's enormous semiconductor demand. So they're making a lot of electronics. Obviously they want to be a major player there, but they keep having to buy 90% of the semiconductors abroad and that is seen as, as unacceptable. And so they want to continue to compete in semiconductors. So China's domestic chip production capacity was far from adequate to service its $40 billion annual chip consumption. So by comparison, China's only producing $4 billion in annual chips, but they're consuming 40 billion. And so.

• 14:55Jordi Hays?

  Trade imbalance.

• 14:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, they did have a trade imbalance in chips and they wanted to take that very seriously. And that's how, kind of how we got here. And so they did some policy reforms, they set up some frameworks for future government-supported R and D, they're just continuing to invest government dollars in new semiconductor projects. And so from 2005 to 2007, you're seeing a maturation of the global supply chain, foreign investment and technology transfers. Intel actually expands into China, and this is all accelerating these modern semiconductor practices, and China is going down the learning curve. So Intel built key assembly and testing facilities, including a major plant in Chengdu,

• 15:35John Coogan?

  and later a 300-millimeter fab in Dalian, announced in 2007, marking significant technology transfers to Chinese engineers. The spread of multinational semiconductor companies' operations in China bolstered local expertise and catalyzed market growth. Although Nvidia was founded in 1993, and initially focused on the US gaming market, by the mid-2000s, it began establishing R and D centers in Shanghai to support increasing demand in China.

• 16:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is the start of a long, complicated relationship.

• 16:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, these are global companies, and they have employees in China, and so turning off the faucet, it sounds really easy when it hits the front page of the Wall Street Journal, but it is much more complicated than that, because all these entities are super intertwined. So then, of course, the global financial crisis hits 2008, 2009. Chinese government is dropping huge stimulus packages and funding more and more semiconductor expansion. They don't want their fabs to go out of business if there's a hiccup in demand for the final goods, and so they are just continuing to back these semiconductor projects because they know that it's critical to their industry. So effectively, like a bailout for the Chinese semiconductor industry during the global financial crisis.

• 16:48Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, amazing foresight all around.

• 16:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you shouldn't let that die. It's a very big mistake. And I mean, people have argued that America has made mistakes during downturns, not supporting certain industries, letting them de-industrialize or move abroad. So in around 2014, the Chinese government established the National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, or as they call it, the big fund. $20 billion going into semiconductor sector, all about Innovation that is led in China, indigenous innovation as they call it. The big fund provided capital for upgrading fabs, design houses and even research into next generation semiconductors. And many of China's now leading semiconductor companies like SMIC and Huawei's high silicon received funding boosts to accelerate their competitiveness.

• 17:37John Coogan?

  Around the same period, Nvidia set up R and D centers in China and deepened partnerships with companies like Baidu and Alibaba. 2015, we talked about this with Xi Jinping, the Made in China 2025 Plan was unveiled. And we didn't dig into the details of that, but within the Made in China 2025 Plan, they specifically called out semiconductors, said, we need self sufficiency in semiconductors. And this was also while the US started restricting chip imports and this affected Intel and Qualcomm most directly. And so the specific line in Made in China 2025 is that they wanted to hit 70% of domestic

• 18:18John Coogan?

  production of chips by 2025. And I'm not exactly sure where they are, maybe we'll get to that later. But you can see how serious they're taking this. At one point, they're at 10% and they're like, okay, but we have a firm plan and we're willing to invest government dollars to get to 70%. This is very important. And so how

• 18:39Jordi Hays?

  And it's an interesting dynamic, right? Because you can imagine, you know, these are state mandates and their goals, but there's real people's livelihoods on the line to deliver those. So you can imagine the pressure to actually deliver against these timelines is intense. This is not like, you know, a US corporation saying, you know, we're hoping to reduce, you know, energy, you know, use more clean energy in 2035. It's like, we are going to do this one way or another. And they would cycle through executives in order to achieve these goals, right? And so even though it's bureaucratic, there's still, I think, this intense pressure that in many ways is greater than the pressure that even individual companies feel from their VCs, right?

• 19:24Jordi Hays?

  If you have the party saying like, this is strategically important to the country and you need to achieve this. And this is the goal we're setting as a country, then you better figure out a way to do it, right?

• 19:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, and so Huawei is really emerging as a champion around this time. They actually have an internal chip design arm high silicon. You can think about this like the relationship between Apple and the Apple silicon team. So we think of Huawei as making phones. They make a lot of stuff now, but they also design chips specifically. And the Huawei AI chip is the one that's the focus of Dylan Patel's analysis and semi-analysis yesterday or today. So this is also starting to become the beginning of what becomes chip bans, chip acts, restrictions. The US Department of Commerce blocked transactions with entities such as ZTE. And this was the beginning of this confrontational phase in semiconductor export controls. And so in

• 20:18John Coogan?

  2016, Chinese companies, they're getting a lot of state funding, and there's clearly a lot of strategic urgency. They're starting to attempt cross-border mergers and acquisitions, and the US regulatory system is saying, hold on, like, let's not do that. So Tsinghua Uni Group acquired domestic players, Spreadtrum, RDA, Microelectronics, we talked about before, in a drive to build integrated chip manufacturing and design ecosystems. And this is all waking up the US to the increasing need to restrict technology transfer and stop Chinese firms from buying.

• 20:54Jordi Hays?

  A little late, but.

• 20:55John Coogan?

  A little late. But this is, who was saying this, like, you know, America's like the sleepy student that wakes up and then just goes for it?

• 21:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You wake up, and you're sitting on the couch, you put on, you know, 50 extra pounds, and you're like, wow, I gotta get in shape. And then we do it. Historically, you've done it.

• 21:14John Coogan?

  We've done it. And so that's what's happening right now.

• 21:16Jordi Hays?

  We just woke up on the couch.

• 21:17John Coogan?

  A little chaotic.

• 21:18Jordi Hays?

  We overate for, you know, a couple decades.

• 21:22John Coogan?

  Couple decades.

• 21:23Jordi Hays?

  And now we're gonna get in the gym.

• 21:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, now we're going to the gym. So in 2017, China unveiled the New Generation AI Development Plan, and the global AI revolution took off. US policymakers intensified restrictions that would limit access to advanced chip technologies. So a lot of this was driven by Google's AlphaGo success when they beat Lee Sedol. Everyone in tech and venture was starting to see the power of artificial intelligence. And so AI investment was increasing dramatically. This wasn't, I mean, obviously, OpenAI was working on like, superintelligence, talking about AGI, but even.

• 22:01John Coogan?

  X that people were thinking about, well, AI is just an incredibly valuable technology, even in the context of like for you feeds and automated data analysis and just back office opti- uh, like automation, all that stuff is like AI is going to be an increasingly important part of the economy, aside from all the AGI, ASI conversation. So the US administration blocked several Chinese tech deals, including targeting companies on the entity list. And, and this is kind of like the precursor to the controls on AI chips that we've seen more recently.

• 22:37Jordi Hays?

  And it's so wild to put this in the context of OpenAI actually starting in 2015 and being a hyped, but still under the radar organization because it was, it wasn't in the headlines constantly, right?

• 22:49John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 22:49Jordi Hays?

  It was really a research organization.

• 22:52John Coogan?

  Yep. And that was the branding.

• 22:53Jordi Hays?

  Like, yeah, that was the branding, really cool initial branding, but you can guarantee that China was paying attention to this, right? It's like, okay, if Elon and Sam Altman and all these people are involved in this project, there must be something significant.

• 23:07John Coogan?

  I remember there's this photo that Elon shares of Jensen Wong delivering one of the first kind of AI specific Nvidia servers to the OpenAI team in like 2017, something like that. And I remember seeing posts on then Twitter about from like Greg Brockman being like, oh, we just got the latest box from Nvidia. Thank you so much to them. This thing costs like a couple hundred grand, but it was really important because it had enough, I believe it had enough memory on the single server chip that you could put basically the entire text of Reddit in it in memory and then train on that. And that's where like the GPT one, GPT twos were trained. They weren't even trained on like massive clusters. I'm pretty sure they were trained on like boxes.

• 23:48Jordi Hays?

  If it was 2017, I'm assuming that Greg and Sam already had a sense that they would go need millions of these GPUs to achieve their goal.

• 23:55John Coogan?

  So I think they're like getting scale pilled at this time and kind of discovering the scaling laws, but not maybe fully realizing them. But globally, I think people are just realizing that.

• 24:07John Coogan?

  The increasingly Nvidia is going to run away with the game when it comes to AI development. Like you can look at that server and and you and there was never a question that a team like OpenAI would train on anything but Nvidia. And then that just had this compounding advantage that when they want to scale up and they want to go from one rack, one rack of chips to 10 racks to an entire data center, it's just going to be Nvidia all the way because they're writing code that runs on CUDA. CUDA is this like ecosystem that Nvidia has built and it's going to be very hard for them to port to something else, even if another company is better on like a flop per dollar ratio. Nvidia is just kind of running away with it. And this is, this is something that it's a meme that goes global. So China's major

• 24:52John Coogan?

  cloud provider start ramping up orders for Nvidia chips all the way back in 2017. And so in 2018, this is kind of the beginning of that first trade war that we talked about, the one that's kind of like a nothing burger now, but was kind of dramatic at the time. And so there were tariffs and export controls that we talked about, but the severely impacted companies like ZTE and it forced Nvidia to recalibrate its product strategy. In April of 2018, the US imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Chinese goods and China retaliated with similar measures. The harsh punishment of ZTE forced companies to reexamine resilience on US components and Nvidia, the gaming and AI division saw robust demand, solidifying the company's importance in both sectors. But obviously

• 25:35John Coogan?

  there's mounting regulatory pressure. And so

• 25:38Jordi Hays?

  We should go back and find interviews with Jensen around that time.

• 25:42John Coogan?

  In 2017, 2018.

• 25:43Jordi Hays?

  Because again, he's always just been caught in this tough spot, right?

• 25:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:45Jordi Hays?

  Because Nvidia had offices in Shanghai.

• 25:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:50Jordi Hays?

  It had R and D in Shanghai.

• 25:52John Coogan?

  All of that doesn't even matter. It just has shareholders that want to maximize value. And so like, yeah, like their money is green.

• 25:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:59John Coogan?

  As long as they convert it to dollars, I guess. But, you know, like, you want to expand your market and, and every tech company tried to go to China. Many of them got blocked. Nvidia was just the one hyperscaler that really didn't get blocked because they were just selling in the hardware. And China wasn't worried about that, but they were worried about Google. They were worried about Facebook and, and many other companies didn't have a good, a good opportunity. Mostly because of like free speech stuff, but Nvidia, that doesn't matter because it's just hardware and you can run whatever you want on top of it. So.

• 26:29Jordi Hays?

  It was a lowly $80 billion company in 2018, too. So it was hardly even on the map.

• 26:34John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 26:36John Coogan?

  And so in 2019 Huawei gets added to the US entity list. This is kind of the blacklist. China accelerates investments in domestic chip design while Nvidia deepens its relationship with cloud giants like Alibaba and Tencent. And so being blacklisted meant that Huawei lost access to US technology. So they couldn't buy because if you're on the entity list, you can't sell or you can't do any business with any American company. And so that means that it also applies to companies like ASML that use patents that are American. And so if you can't buy a lithography machine from the Netherlands, you can't fab the chips. And so it's just a major setback when you get added to the entity list. And we've seen the opposite happen where American entrepreneurs are now being added to the Chinese version of the entity list.

• 27:21John Coogan?

  And they can't buy products from China or they can't sell products to China, not that they want to.

• 27:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just to give you a sense of Huawei's scale, they did over $118 billion in revenue in 2024.

• 27:32John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 27:32Jordi Hays?

  As a private company.

• 27:33John Coogan?

  Oh, private, interesting.

• 27:34Jordi Hays?

  Private, interesting.

• 27:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, they probably don't want to deal with the oversight of being public. That's probably what it is.

• 27:40Jordi Hays?

  Simply don't want to deal with.

• 27:41John Coogan?

  But, but all these restrictions basically force the high silicon unit within Huawei to be like ultra self-reliant. Because they're just like, we, we can never count, like, we're probably never getting off the entity list. Like, it is pretty bipartisan, even though it's like a Trump thing. It's like, they're not expecting it to just flip. It's not like Americans are, are yelling like, Trump is so crazy because he put Huawei on the entity list. Like, we gotta get Huawei off the entity list. Like, it's not a culture war issue. And so it's, it's just truly not, it's like, there's no sign that this would ever flip. And so as Huawei's orders dried up, the other Chinese tech giants stepped in to purchase Nvidia's GPUs. And so. The the US like Nvidia maintains significant share of the Chinese data center market because

• 28:24John Coogan?

  the Chinese data centers, they obviously, you know, they kind of want to support Huawei. But if Huawei is way on the back foot because they don't have amazing machines to build the stuff. Well, the, you know, Alibaba and Baidu, they just need to run servers. They need to do accelerated computing, AI inference, all sorts of different, you know, recommendation systems. And they're like, yeah, like, we just need, we just need the best.

• 28:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:47John Coogan?

  And so there was an entity list expansion that, you know, covered even more advanced chip technology. And this has just been growing and growing and growing. So in 2020, there's even more US restrictions. The for the foreign direct product rule or F D P R was expanded to halt Huawei's access to advanced chips, whilst China simultaneously launched its second generation big fund.

• 29:14Jordi Hays?

  Big fund.

• 29:14John Coogan?

  Funds. A little size going for the big fund. Nvidia attempted a $40 billion acquisition of ARM, and it was announced via this like amid like all the turbulence in the F D P R expansion. And there was more sanctions on SMIC in December of 2020 that again set back China's progression down the learning curve into these advanced nodes and made it even more important that they focus on domestic semiconductor manufacturing capabilities. So now we get to the Chips Act. This is like where the story usually starts, but we went a little bit further back. But the US Chips and Science Act passed in 2021. This is a

• 29:55John Coogan?

  Biden administration law, and this had coordinated export controls by key allied nations, and it accelerated the decoupling of the US and Chinese semiconductor supply chains. And of course, this was a multilateral effort.

• 30:10Jordi Hays?

  This is almost three years after the US had organized for the arrest of the CFO of Huawei, which was the founder's daughter.

• 30:20John Coogan?

  Yes. Wasn't that in like Canada?

• 30:21Jordi Hays?

  In Canada.

• 30:22John Coogan?

  It was like really aggressive.

• 30:23Jordi Hays?

  So this feels like a really long time ago at this point.

• 30:26John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 30:26Jordi Hays?

  But it's important to understand like just, just how serious. Kind of everybody in Washington was taking this at this point.

• 30:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so this is specifically restricting critical chip making equipment such as ASML's EUV lithography machines. That's extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, the most advanced machines that that can, you know, place the etch the silicon atoms like as small as possible, right? And so the US is coordinating with the Netherlands and Japan because Japan also makes a lot of like lens technology and a lot of different things deeper in the semiconductor supply chain. And so all of that is now restricted. And so China, in response, is doubling down on self reliance through the 14th five year plan, and they have extensive subsidies for semiconductor development. Just one more five year plan, bro. Just one more five year plan.

• 31:19Jordi Hays?

  Please, just one more. No, it's actually if you're gonna be, you know, if you're gonna run, do state run industries, you know, working in five year increments, like probably is pretty effective. If they're on their their fifth or their 14th five year plan, the five year plan model, I would imagine works.

• 31:35John Coogan?

  I think it's working pretty well. They like it. And so Nvidia struggled with delays in its ARM deal, or ARM, they were trying to buy ARM. And and they keep seeing resilience from the Chinese cloud providers even as political risks mounted. And so the China, the AI hardware race is just heating up even further. And so in 2022, October 7, 2022, US export controls targeted high end AI chips. This is banning Nvidia's flagship products, the A100 and the H100 to China while forcing the development of workaround products. And so the new rules blocked shipments of advanced chips and manufacturing equipment for nodes

• 32:16John Coogan?

  below 14 nanometers for logic and 18 nanometers for DRAM, which is the memory.

• 32:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So what did Nvidia do? They introduced the A800 GPU, an adjusted version of the A100 with lower interconnect bandwidth to skirt the US limits without fully matching performance. So again, this is like one of those situations where people in the US, I think, would be like much more frustrated with Nvidia's behavior if they didn't. We're not Nvidia shareholders.

• 32:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, this always struck me as interesting because when you think about the US government regulating interconnect bandwidth on an AI chip, that's like extremely complicated. And this is like, when I think of the government and technology, I think about like, how does Facebook make money? Like, the internet is a series of tubes. Like, the lawmakers typically get this stuff wildly wrong. Clearly, they had some great consultants on this project because they actually got to a level where they were able to understand some of the trade offs in chip design to design a policy that targeted specifically AI training around interconnect bandwidth. Like, they did hit that. But at the same time, they weren't able to go deep enough to understand that Deepsea could

• 33:31John Coogan?

  like figure out a way around the internet can, the interconnect bandwidth limitation and still train a GPT-4 class model, right? So they were like 99% there, but not 100% there. And like way better than any layman, especially at the time, like back in 2022, not many people could, you could just be like, hey, oh, you, you know a little bit about semiconductors, like, what's important right now? And people would be like, interconnect bandwidth, like, yeah, right.

• 33:57Jordi Hays?

  But somehow they got there. They make the A800, and Chinese firms just go, oh, sweet. And they just start stockpiling these things, right? They just start saying like, we'll basically take as many as you can get us.

• 34:07John Coogan?

  Yep. And so in 2022, in December, SMIC gets added to the NTC list. Kind of crazy they weren't on there before, since Huawei has been on there for like years. But this like further isolates China from the US semiconductor equipment and technology. They really can't buy anything now. And, and people start worrying about Nvidia's future revenues in China because of these controls. As market participants observe these trends, analysts begin to speculate about the long term feasibility of China specific products from Nvidia, saying, hey, they have a workaround right now, but how long will this really stick around? There's a bunch of different ways to, Create limits on chips, you can just do total flops or flops per dollar.

• 34:49John Coogan?

  Or, you know, Jensen, in his Blackwell presentation said, you know, we're no longer on chip scaling. We're on energy scaling, which is like the most foundational level of computation. So like, not even flops per dollar, but flops per watt is like what really matters. And so you could just limit that. And then, and then, but then there's a whole question about like, how do you measure that? What it, what are you training on? And, and there's ways to get around that. There's always like loopholes, but you could, and we're seeing this now that like the, the, the definition of what's banned is growing and growing and growing. And there clearly are a bunch of ways to basically just tell Nvidia, no. And that's kind of what's happening now.

• 35:28John Coogan?

  There's a huge debate over whether or not these chip sanctions should be in place and whether or not they should, they're effective, right? So we'll, we'll get into that debate, but let's continue with the timeline. 2023, so China is facing persistent export controls. And also there's a global chip shortage, remember from COVID and whatnot.

• 35:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:48John Coogan?

  And also just increased demand for AI chips. So they continue to innovate with tailored products specifically for the Chinese market, like the H800. This has reduced performance parameters.

• 36:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Sounds bad when you say it like that.

• 36:01John Coogan?

  It complies with export restrictions. At the same time, like every company, whenever there's like, it's so easy to, if, if there wasn't the crazy geopolitical thing here, it's so easy to be like, oh, like the, like, you know, the, the speed limit is 65 miles an hour. So I'm going to go 64, right? It's like every, every business is like, oh, I, I can't.

• 36:22Jordi Hays?

  Responsibility to shareholders.

• 36:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, like every company is like, oh, I'm like, like I can't sell this product in this market. Okay. I just need to find a different product.

• 36:29Jordi Hays?

  This is why over the last couple of weeks, if you're an American hedge fund manager

• 36:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:33Jordi Hays?

  And you're unclear of what's happening in the American market, even if you're a. True patriot.

• 36:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:39Jordi Hays?

  You're going to look over at European defense companies and say, you know, this suddenly is interesting.

• 36:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:45Jordi Hays?

  Because they're just like, their mandate is to chase yield.

• 36:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:48Jordi Hays?

  And put up numbers for their LPs.

• 36:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:49Jordi Hays?

  And so that's just a unfortunate reality when it comes to these sort of geographic, geopolitical, sort of like hot button issues.

• 37:00John Coogan?

  And so even though the H800 is lower performance than the H100, which is the popular one in America, Chinese cloud adopters or cloud providers are just buying them nonstop because they need advanced hardware and they're willing to work around the limitations there. And so at this time, Ben Thompson writes Nvidia on Tuesday, this was yesterday, said it would take a $5.5 billion charge after the US government limited exports of its H20 chip to China. And that's like the kind of the main story that's driving the news today. So in 2023, Chinese tech giants accelerate their own product developments. And this is what we're, this is like the hot topic in semi-analysis right now.

• 37:44John Coogan?

  Huawei has this cloud matrix 384 and this, and the goal here is to challenge Nvidia's dominance. And so it's described by the South China Morning Post as a nuclear level product. Sick. It's like Stargate, but for China, basically like they're.

• 38:00Jordi Hays?

  Let me guess. I wonder if the South China Morning Post has any ties to the state.

• 38:08John Coogan?

  I think they're just pumping up their bras.

• 38:10Jordi Hays?

  No, I agree.

• 38:11John Coogan?

  Who knows? No, no, obviously they're.

• 38:14Jordi Hays?

  It can be both.

• 38:14John Coogan?

  They're biased, but, but you know, they're, they're, they're talking their book. They're excited about this. So the cloud matrix, it's funny because I had never heard like the, I mean, I've heard like the nuclear analogy once or twice, but Aaron Gin yesterday wrote a whole piece about like this idea of like a nuclear, a cyber nuke in the form of a massive data center. So the cloud matrix 384 utilizes 384 Ascend 910C chips to deliver up to 300 petaphlops. So despite outperforming Nvidia's NVL 72 system on raw compute, 300 petaphlops versus 180 petaphlops, the system is significantly more power hungry and costly, thus highlighting trade offs imposed by export controls.

• 38:59Jordi Hays?

  So they're like, great. Well, uh.

• 39:01John Coogan?

  Fire up the three gorgeous, damn, yeah. I mean, like, they are adding 20% energy every year now in China and we're adding zero. So you play that out and being power hungry and costly, totally the trade you want to make. Just to be able to actually run the, the, of course, there is an economic calculation. If, if, if they have, you know, like an ASI system that's less economically efficient. It's like having, you know, a hundred dollar drone shoot down a million dollar drone. You can only do that so many times. And so if you're running an AI system, it's fighting with another AI system. Oops.

• 39:35Jordi Hays?

  John lost his.

• 39:36John Coogan?

  I lost my headset.

• 39:39John Coogan?

  If you have one AI system that's fighting with another AI system, like at a certain point, you need to be able to.

• 39:43Jordi Hays?

  You need to be efficient.

• 39:44John Coogan?

  You need to be efficient, yeah.

• 39:45Jordi Hays?

  This is the issue we talked about with, with, uh, US, uh, military countering drones with missiles. It's like, okay, if your missile costs 500K.

• 39:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 39:56Jordi Hays?

  And you're taking out a drone that costs 600 bucks.

• 39:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 39:59Jordi Hays?

  Like it just, the, the math.

• 40:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, that was the whole math behind the Roadrunner at Anur.

• 40:02Jordi Hays?

  You would just like continuously launch them to just sort of like bankrupt the enemy.

• 40:06John Coogan?

  Apparently, I think, I think a Patriot missile, which is an anti-missile missile, shoots down a cruise missile.

• 40:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:12John Coogan?

  It, uh, it costs like a million dollars and it's not super reliable. So we fire two every single time and they don't come back. Like they're just gone. Like if you, if you sense a threat, two million bucks. And so the Roadrunner, which I think is cheaper, I don't know the pricing, but like it can fly and you only need one. And if it doesn't, if it misses or there's a false alarm, it comes back, right? And so, uh, in, in theory, like this economic warfare is, is important. Um, but China has a huge advantage on power and energy. So, um, the, uh, and just to set the table a little bit on this, like what these systems are, the Cloud Matrix 384, Nvidia's NVL 72. Uh, basically these are a bunch of Nvidia chips that are racked together and NVL means an NV link, I believe,

• 40:55John Coogan?

  which is a system that links the different chips together so they can, so they can communicate kind of as one server. And then of course you do network them together, but it allows you to store even, it allows you to treat the server as like a single abstraction, I believe.

• 41:07Jordi Hays?

  Um, yeah.

• 41:08John Coogan?

  And so, uh.

• 41:11John Coogan?

  The main, the main difference, again, power efficiency. And this is what Jensen has been talking about with Blackwell. He's really focused on energy efficiency, power efficiency, not pure petaflop output, because this is becoming more and more of an economic calculation. So 2024, last year, with further regulatory adjustments, 2024 marked the shift where US policy began targeting AI inference chips as much as training chips, prompting a pivot to inference optimized design. As the restrictions on training chips tightened, US authorities announced new export control parameters set to become effective January 2025 that also scrutinized inference performance metrics.

• 41:51John Coogan?

  In anticipation, Nvidia began developing a range of China-specific GPUs for inference. And this is the H20, the L20, and the L2, each tailored to slight, to meet slightly different performance and regulatory thresholds. And so Ben Thompson yesterday wrote, "The H20 is a pretty lousy AI accelerator compared to the H100. It has fewer cores, much lower memory bandwidth, no NVLink support." And this underscored the workaround, that the workaround chips were compromises rather than true performance products. But it doesn't really matter because you need to have the best, like, if you're just thinking about the Chinese chip market, as long as, it doesn't matter that you're worse than American Nvidia chips if you're still the best in the market. And so Nvidia can go still win, in theory, until these were banned, and make $5 billion.

• 42:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:36John Coogan?

  But not anymore.

• 42:36Jordi Hays?

  Or high flyer slash deep seek is saying, "Okay, we're gonna basically train our model on your model that you used all your H100s to make."

• 42:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, and, and the inference is, the inference, in theory, if you can, if you can, if you can do all these crazy workarounds to get the training done and, you know, maybe export a bunch of GPT weights and stuff and do whatever you can to get the training done. The inference is where the economic value is created. Like, you can think about training as CapEx and then the, the inference is the OpEx that allows you to actually derive economic value from the intelligence, the magical intelligence from the sky, right?

• 43:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:14John Coogan?

  Like, no one cares if there's just a super intelligent model that you can't actually And so having good enough models, having state of the art models, open source models, but then being able to pump them out in a way that all 1 billion Chinese people can use them on a daily basis for all sorts of things, to create new businesses, optimize their current businesses. There's a million things that you do with AI that should lead to GDP growth. That's really important. And so inference is becoming increasingly valuable. And so the phrase I was looking for that Jensen was using when he talked about the power efficiency metrics of Blackwell, it was ISO power. And so he's, he's really focusing on the, the scaling laws as they apply to just energy specifically, not chips.

• 43:58Jordi Hays?

  And this is the advantage that Nvidia has had by always being ahead is they have the luxury of, yes, they need to continue to innovate. They need to come out with Blackwell, the chip beyond Blackwell, but at the same time, they're able to focus on these things that a second, third, fourth, fifth mover or somebody that's, you know, not in the same competitive realm, doesn't have the luxury of thinking about energy efficiency.

• 44:23John Coogan?

  Yep. And so we're, we're seeing like a bifurcation in the chip market and just the approach to design. So Jensen Wong is claiming that modern data centers, probably just in America, are power constrained. ISO power means delivering maximal compute within a fixed power envelope. Newer generations like Blackwell greatly improve efficiency when you're under that one megawatt constraint, which is kind of where most of the, I mean, I guess, I guess a lot of data centers that want to do inference are sitting. Contrast that with Huawei's Cloud Matrix 384. This sacrifices power efficiency in exchange for higher aggregate compute. Semi Analysis noted that while its raw performance is impressive,

• 45:07John Coogan?

  the trade offs in power usage make it unattractive outside of China, where competitive pressures and cost structures differ. So if you don't have energy too cheap to meter, well, then you gotta get, you gotta go ISO power and deliver maximal compute within a fixed power envelope. So.

• 45:24John Coogan?

  As there's the preparation for the regulatory changeover in 2024, the new export controls solidify. Nvidia and other firms accelerated development of their next generation products aimed at circumventing increasing restrictions while meeting customer demands. So they developed the H20. Chinese companies, including domestic alternatives such as Huawei's in-house designs and Alibaba's Tea Head initiative, continue R and D efforts eventually replace depend to eventually replace dependence on US origin chips because they see the writing on the wall. They're not going to be getting any US chips in the near future. So they got to bring it in-house. So analysts are forecasting that by 2026, AI inference compute demand could outstrip training demand by a factor of four, increasing the strategic importance of these new designs.

• 46:08John Coogan?

  Remember, just a few years ago, it was all about inference because OpenAI would spend a hundred million dollars on a training run and then be like, oh, like it's a toy or like, oh, like some people are playing around with it or someone built a wrapper that's like, okay, now it's like everyone needs to inference constantly. And so as Trump comes in 2025, US tariff and export controls tightened to unprecedented levels. Obviously, we talked about this a lot, raising rates to over a hundred percent. There's some internal debate, but the new policies reaffirmed a longstanding US strategy to limit China's access to advanced semiconductors and semiconductor analysis strategies.

• 46:51John Coogan?

  In April 2025, the US government informed Nvidia that its H20 AI accelerator would require an export license for shipments to China, effectively halting and triggering a planned $5.5 billion write-off, triggering a planned $5.5 billion write-off. So Nvidia is expecting, they're kind of messaging this to their shareholders ahead of earnings, taking the, taking the, the, the hit on the shoulder.

• 47:16Jordi Hays?

  And Nvidia is down 10% today on the news.

• 47:20John Coogan?

  Because that, I mean, I think 10% of their business is probably in China still and like now that doesn't exist. And sure, they'll probably make some money selling to Malaysia, which will create a data center that China can train on.

• 47:31Jordi Hays?

  And all this just comes down to how this comes down to how somebody feels about these type of restrictions on China is going to come down to whether or not they truly believe that we are in an AI war with China, right? We've been in a trade war, that much is obvious. We've had numerous cybersecurity. Incidents with China. We're clearly in this sort of economic war. And I think that Nvidia Jensen, Nvidia shareholders are probably super frustrated with this. But it's very possible that this is, you know, 100% the right decision, given how fast AI

• 48:13Jordi Hays?

  is accelerating and, and, you know, even going back to the conversation with Aaron, you know, yesterday around the US needing to take this issue as seriously as we possibly can.

• 48:27John Coogan?

  And so the dividing line here is whether chip controls are good or not. And Ben Thompson has been against the chip controls and I'll kind of read from his position. He says, "My heterodox position on this matter is clear. For the same reason that I am against the chip controls, but in favor of banning the sale of semiconductor manufacturing equipment into China, I think that that this is a good thing that the cloud matrix 384 is dependent on TSMC and Samsung, because that is a reason for China to maintain the status quo with Taiwan in particular. Semi-analysis is much more hawkish on chip controls than I am. At the same time, the reality is that right now, we are in the messy middle.

• 49:10John Coogan?

  We're not actually stopping Huawei from building a system that is capable of doing large language model training, albeit inefficiently, but we are hurting the fortunes of US AI champions of Nvidia by limiting their long-term competitiveness. And of course, we are incentivizing everyone in China, from the government to private enterprise, to ultimately remove the point of leverage that we can't even wield properly." And so Dylan Patel had a different flip on, different take on this. Let me see if I can pull it up. He says-

• 49:42Jordi Hays?

  We might need to have a newsletter goat debate on the show.

• 49:45John Coogan?

  We should, we should. I'm gonna, I'm gonna invite them both. But, but he basically said like, like, "Stop focusing on the chips. You have to focus on the entire supply chain. And as long as there aren't expert controls on everything in the, in the, in the entire chain, it's, it's mostly ineffective." And so, what else? Let's see.

• 50:09John Coogan?

  I think we covered most of this cloud matrix stuff. I mean, you can go read the full deep dive on semi analysis. It's fantastic and extremely deep as usual. But let's move on to the other story with Mark Zuckerberg.

• 50:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:25John Coogan?

  But first, if you're selling chips all over America, you're going to need to pay sales tax.

• 50:30Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 50:31John Coogan?

  Get on numeral, go to numeralhq.com. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

• 50:37Jordi Hays?

  Numeral works with a thousand plus different companies, helping them with sales tax compliance and automation. And we weren't working with numeral when we got the sample ordered, but we got a place for them right here.

• 50:51John Coogan?

  Right here.

• 50:51Jordi Hays?

  So, thank you to numeral for supporting the show and go to numeralhq.com to check it out.

• 50:56John Coogan?

  So, Adam Carlson posted some screenshots from a story in the Wall Street Journal. But basically, it's about how Mark Zuckerberg spent millions trying to suck up to Trump. So Meta only had to pay 450 million instead of 30 billion that the FTC wanted to settle an antitrust case against them. This is, of course, about the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions and the accusations that Meta is running a monopoly. And so Meta has offered $450 million to settle the antitrust case. This is far less than the FTC's $30 billion demand. And Zuckerberg has cultivated ties with Trump. FTC sued Meta in 2020, accusing it of stifling competition by acquiring startups. And it is crazy. I mean, this feels like

• 51:41John Coogan?

  tech history, like Instagram and WhatsApp, that happened in like, what, 2012, 2015? Like that era? And we're now 10 years later and we're still litigating this. It is pretty wild. But we went through some of the screenshots.

• 51:56Jordi Hays?

  At the time, at the time of the Instagram acquisition, it was a photo sharing app that was not monetizing, right? Maybe, did they have any monetization at the time?

• 52:03John Coogan?

  I don't think they did.

• 52:04Jordi Hays?

  And so it was impossible to know at the time that this was going to be a historically significant acquisition. And

• 52:11Jordi Hays?

  It's very possible that there's no other company in the world that would have been able to unlock the value of Instagram in the way that Meta has.

• 52:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:17Jordi Hays?

  Right? And so.

• 52:19John Coogan?

  It's not just that, like pundits and analysts at the time said, like, this is a massive waste of money. Like, why is Zuck spending a billion dollars on Instagram? This is such a big acquisition. Well, he should just build it himself. Like, it doesn't, it's not necessary.

• 52:34Jordi Hays?

  And back then, social media apps didn't just immediately copy all their most successful features, right? It was like, people kind of like stayed in their, in their lane a little bit more.

• 52:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 52:43Jordi Hays?

  You went to YouTube for long form. You, you had, you know, sort of short form iterations on, over on Snap, on stories. And so everything has converged dramatically since then. And anyways, all, all the drama around this is just funny in the context of that we can't force, we have not been able to force the sale of TikTok despite it being.

• 53:05John Coogan?

  It was wild.

• 53:07Jordi Hays?

  Directly against America's national security interests.

• 53:10John Coogan?

  So the initial offer was 30 billion. Meta wanted to pay half a billion, I guess. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson found the offer not credible and was ready, wasn't ready to settle for anything less than 18 billion and a consent decree. As the trial approached, Meta offed its, upped its offer to close to 1 billion. And it wasn't enough. On Monday, the trial kicked off. The FTC called Zuckerberg, who privately expressed reluctance about taking the stand to testify for four hours. That's brutal. He had to throw on the suit. He was not rocking.

• 53:44Jordi Hays?

  Can we pull up that picture that John posted this morning?

• 53:46John Coogan?

  I mean, he looks fantastic in the, in the Wall Street Journal photo. But he's not able to wear his, his dripped out designer t-shirt. He had no chain today. It's, it's very sad when a, when a tech CEO has to put on a suit. It's always a sign that things aren't going well, unfortunately.

• 54:03Jordi Hays?

  You can tell the jujitsu is working. You can tell that he's hitting the weights.

• 54:06John Coogan?

  He looks extremely strong.

• 54:07Jordi Hays?

  His neck is. Going to clearly, if he keeps, you know, growing at 1% daily, he will eventually be as wide as his shoulders are.

• 54:15John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. But he's, I mean, he is looking in, in fighting form because he is fighting all the time. Fighting in the FTC courts and also fighting in the ring or the octagon or whatever he fights in. I don't know how it works. Zuckerberg was back on the witness stand Tuesday where he faced questioning from an FTC lawyer over whether Facebook had paid $1 billion to buy Instagram to neutralize a competitor. Asked if he would have preferred that Facebook's own camera app would have grown faster. Zuckerberg responded, I guess so. Yeah. A billion dollars is very expensive. Love it. Former FTC Chair Lena Kahn told the Journal that the company's 450 million settlement offer was delusional.

• 54:53John Coogan?

  Mark bought his way out of competing, so I'm not surprised that he thinks he can buy his way out of law enforcement too, said Kahn, who was nominated by former President Joe Biden. His proposed remedy, like his marketing strat, like his market strategy is let my illegal monopoly keep monopolizing. So Lena Kahn's coming for such.

• 55:11Jordi Hays?

  What is she, uh, what's Lena doing these days?

• 55:15John Coogan?

  Associate, uh, uh, multi-billion dollar, multi-stage venture firm? I could imagine that being a good, uh, good spot to move on to. Clip some fees, earn some carry. What's not to like? If she can identify a monopoly with the best of them, she's going to be a great VC.

• 55:31Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 55:31John Coogan?

  Think about it. Just flip it over, start, start printing. And so, uh, we can go through some of, uh, Ben Thompson's analysis here. I liked his framing. He describes the three Facebook eras. Uh, he is very against this case. He says, he thinks it's a poor one and the government's market definition in which Meta's only cap, only competitors are Snap and MeWe. I've never even heard of MeWe.

• 55:55Jordi Hays?

  What's MeWe?

• 55:56John Coogan?

  What is MeWe?

• 55:57Jordi Hays?

  MeWe.com, the next gen social network.

• 55:59John Coogan?

  We have to buy shares in MeWe, I guess.

• 56:02Jordi Hays?

  We should acquire MeWe. If it's competitive with Meta, one of the greatest businesses of all time, it must be. Must be a fantastic business.

• 56:08John Coogan?

  I now I feel bad because I feel like there's probably a entrepreneur who's working really hard behind me. We you're welcome to come on the show. We'd love to learn about the business.

• 56:16Jordi Hays?

  No, let's have him on.

• 56:17John Coogan?

  But no offense, but not typically in the conversation with Meta, but good luck out there. I hope you're printing, probably doing very well if you're being mentioned by the FTC. Is absurd, says Ben Thompson. Unsurprisingly, I find Meta's opening statement presentation, which is particularly focused on the market definition question, very persuasive. What is striking to me, however, is the temporal aspect of this case makes everything a bit of a muddle. To my mind, there are three distinct periods at play. Facebook and the mobile transition, that's 2004 to 2013. Facebook started in the browser, only really became Facebook in 2016 with the invention of the newsfeed. And then it was mobile that forced Facebook's hand. Mobile made Facebook more just an app, which was good news for the company's fortunes. The dominance of the iPhone and Android left Facebook no choice

• 57:02John Coogan?

  but to become an ad company and to give up on its platform ambitions. Remember the whole like sign in with Facebook, Facebook's going to be everything, unified messaging, like all of that kind of needed to take it back a step.

• 57:13Jordi Hays?

  You know, you go back to AOL.

• 57:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:14Jordi Hays?

  That was America online.

• 57:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:16Jordi Hays?

  They had platform ambitions.

• 57:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, totally.

• 57:19Jordi Hays?

  And so that that seemed like probably the best thing you could do if you wanted to create a lot of value.

• 57:23John Coogan?

  Yep. And so then

• 57:24Jordi Hays?

  Turns out ads are a great business model.

• 57:26John Coogan?

  Then he defines the second era as Facebook's monopoly period, 2014 to 2019. Facebook's most dominant period coincided with the worldwide growth of the smartphone market, which was for the company, a worldwide expansion in its addressable market, along with a worldwide expansion in its advertising base, which was predominantly mobile apps. This is when Facebook most definitely, most definitively won the social networking competition. Probably the peak of the company's dominance was in 2016.

• 57:51Jordi Hays?

  This is interesting. So in August of that year, he wrote the audacity of copying well about why Facebook's plan to compete with Snap, which is supposedly the behavior that FTC wants to encourage, was likely to be successful.

• 58:05John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 58:05Jordi Hays?

  And so they were like, Yeah, we want competition.

• 58:08John Coogan?

  We want competition. You're going to compete with Snap directly in Stories and all the different features and then eventually Reels. And yet, and yet, it's not enough competition.

• 58:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so this, he says, the reason slots in very nicely with FTC's current case. This is why it is so fascinating that Facebook is leveraging Instagram in this way. For all of Snapchat's explosive growth, Instagram is still more than double the size with far more penetration across multiple demographics and international users. Rather than launch a Stories app without the network that is the most fundamental feature of any app built on sharing, Facebook is leveraging one of their most valuable assets, Instagram's 500 million dollars, sorry, 500 million users. And so Ben says, it's not a surprise that the initial version of this case was filed in 2020, just after this era ended. Unsurprisingly, the FTC hadn't yet caught on to this reality. The initial version of this case didn't even include the name TikTok, which is interesting, which is why the government's arguments are

• 59:03Jordi Hays?

  rooted in the assumption that personal social networking is, one, the only pertinent market in, two, defined to be whatever it is that Meta's apps do. So Ben putting them in the true zone.

• 59:15John Coogan?

  So he closes out with Facebook's competitive convergence. This era is 2020 to the present, 2025. By 2015, I was already writing that Facebook needed to move beyond mere social networking from Facebook in the feed. And this is the video slop era where everyone, everything converges on the identical feed of vertical video, algorithmic content, comments, likes, shares. We saw the photos yesterday.

• 59:38Jordi Hays?

  Following list doesn't matter anymore. It's just about the app serving you what it thinks you're most likely to, you know, keep using the app.

• 59:45John Coogan?

  And there's a slide in here. What people want to do today? Consume video. And that's why we're doing this. Well, we have a, an early investor in Facebook coming on the show, Ali Protovny. He's announcing Neo and a bunch of fun stuff, but it'll be interesting. Maybe we'll get his take on what's going on with Facebook since he's been in the company and been involved in Silicon Valley and angel investing for, for decades now. But until he joins the studio, let's tell you about Eight Sleep. They got a five-year warranty, a 30-night risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping. And Pod4 has all the signature features you love about the pod, plus new groundbreaking updates. It's

• 1:00:31John Coogan?

  It's fantastic product unless you're up late negotiating and then you get a terrible sleep score. I got a 54 last night. It's awful. Anyway.

• 1:00:39Jordi Hays?

  Brutal night. Uh, let's see how I did. I actually, oh, I got a hundred.

• 1:00:44John Coogan?

  Oh, you got a hundred. Wow.

• 1:00:45Jordi Hays?

  Proof of work. Eight hours and 13 minutes slept.

• 1:00:49John Coogan?

  Oh, well.

• 1:00:50Jordi Hays?

  Two and a half hours of REM sleep.

• 1:00:53John Coogan?

  That feels like a lot.

• 1:00:54Jordi Hays?

  Which is a lot.

• 1:00:55John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:00:55Jordi Hays?

  And you know why it's a lot? Because autopilot made adjustments in the temperature of my bed to boost it.

• 1:01:01John Coogan?

  Boost it.

• 1:01:02Jordi Hays?

  I got boosted.

• 1:01:03John Coogan?

  You got boosted.

• 1:01:04Jordi Hays?

  I got boosted.

• 1:01:05John Coogan?

  Okay. Uh, well, uh, in the meantime, while we're waiting for Ally to join, um, I thought this post was funny. Uh, Prateek Joshi says, someone accidentally referred to Eric Lyman as Eric Ramp Man and as a founder, that's how synonymous you want to be with your startup. I thought that was very funny. And Juwan says, my fearless leader knows no bounds synonymous with saving businesses time and money. He is Eric Boss King Time Money Saving Man. His last name rolls right off the tongue.

• 1:01:36Jordi Hays?

  Ramp Man.

• 1:01:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is a, this is.

• 1:01:38Jordi Hays?

  Eric, it's not too late to, you can actually change your name.

• 1:01:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:41Jordi Hays?

  Whatever you're born with, it's possible to change it.

• 1:01:43John Coogan?

  Ramp Man.

• 1:01:43Jordi Hays?

  And if you're gonna change, if you're gonna go through the hassle of changing it, at least make it an ad.

• 1:01:47John Coogan?

  This is the, this is the concept of, uh, like the method entrepreneur, like live your brand. I mean, you're doing it right now.

• 1:01:53Jordi Hays?

  Doing it right now.

• 1:01:54John Coogan?

  You're, you're, you're living the TBPN brand, uh, by wearing all of our sponsors on your jacket.

• 1:02:00Jordi Hays?

  Not all. We're missing a few.

• 1:02:01John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Most of our sponsors.

• 1:02:03Jordi Hays?

  They're getting on the next round.

• 1:02:06John Coogan?

  Anyway, did you see that, uh, someone is selling a Mint Fitbit Inspire 3 on the Bloomberg Terminal for $66? Special Situation says, someone got margin called so badly last week that they have listed a mint condition Fitbit Inspire on Bloomberg Marketplace. The terminal itself costs like $3,000 per month. It's rough.

• 1:02:26Jordi Hays?

  I just gotta say, we gotta get a Bloomberg Terminal at the new office.

• 1:02:30John Coogan?

  100%. And I definitely want to, I mean, this is, seems like just, just this access. People are selling cars on here. There's a Cayenne Turbo V8 for $57,000. They're selling all sorts of stuff. A VW Golf is on here for $6,000. A porcelain jar, 200 years at City for $100. Some of these seem like great pickups. Nespresso.

• 1:02:52Jordi Hays?

  Somebody here saying, "Brand new Rolex Submariner, date, skip the Q. Put that thing on Bezel."

• 1:02:57John Coogan?

  Put that thing on Bezel. Your Bezel concierge is available to help you source any watch on the planet. Why stick to what's just on the Bloomberg Terminal? Head over to Bezel. Find exactly what you want. Create a wishlist, talk to the concierge, get the perfect watch. Don't leave it to chance on the Bloomberg Terminal, unless you're trying to get a Lexus LX 570, 2009 model year for $1975. Very funny. Anyway, I always find these screenshots from Bloomberg like sales are always so funny because it'll always be like, "Oh, the market's down. Somebody's selling their private jet or something." It's great.

• 1:03:38Jordi Hays?

  But it's a good meme, but it's actually going on all the time, regardless of market conditions.

• 1:03:46John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 1:03:47Jordi Hays?

  Did you see this post? Somebody in the admin said, "The golden age of American innovation is on..."

• 1:03:53John Coogan?

  It's not just somebody in the admin. It's Michael Kratzios.

• 1:03:54Jordi Hays?

  Michael Kratzios. Sorry, I didn't even look at his name. He said, "The golden age of American innovation is on our horizon. If we choose it, today we share the Trump administration's technology policy agenda." And then if you look in the agenda, it says stagnation was a choice. "We have weighed down our builders and innovators. The well-intentioned regulatory regime of the 1970s became an ever-tightening ratchet, first hampering America's ability to become a net energy exporter and then making it harder and harder to build. We seem to have lost focus and vision to have lowered our sights and let systems and structures and bureaucracies muddle us along, but we are capable of so much more. Our technologies permit us to manipulate time and space.

• 1:04:35Jordi Hays?

  They leave distance annihilated, cause things to grow and improve productivity." And somebody highlighted that this line, "Our technologies permit us to manipulate time and space," which sounds really dramatic. I think he's potentially just referencing the internet.

• 1:04:49John Coogan?

  I think Kratzios has discovered time travel.

• 1:04:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, very possible.

• 1:04:53John Coogan?

  He was formerly the CTO of America. He went away for a couple of years, worked at Scale AI. Maybe while he was there, he's tinkering on time travel. You never know.

• 1:05:01Jordi Hays?

  You never know.

• 1:05:01John Coogan?

  Teleportation.

• 1:05:02Jordi Hays?

  You never know.

• 1:05:03John Coogan?

  We're so back.

• 1:05:03Jordi Hays?

  He's got a clearance.

• 1:05:04John Coogan?

  Anyway, we have Ali in the studio. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  Hey, guys. Do you hear me okay?

• 1:05:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, you sound great. How are you doing?

• 1:05:11Speaker 02

  Great to see you. I'm awesome. I'm so excited to be here. Love the show. Great to see you, John and Jordy.

• 1:05:17Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you.

• 1:05:17John Coogan?

  Can you, can you kick us off with just a recap of the announcement? What's going on today? Give us a little bit of your background and then we'll go from there.

• 1:05:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm so excited. Today, we just announced that we have raised $320 million in new funds.

• 1:05:32John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:05:34Speaker 02

  Thank you. It's our fourth fund on the heels of really successful bets on companies that we were the seed investor in, like Cursor, Kalshi, Blue Sky, and many more. And I'd say more importantly, I'd say this is the moment where Neo is really coming into its own as becoming Silicon Valley's premier community for tech talent and startups, which is, you know, I've been a member of a lot of great tech communities and, you know, and it's, it's very exciting to be building what I think is the, you know, the next really great source for innovation in Silicon Valley.

• 1:06:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you talk about some of your early career investments and how your strategy around investing at the earliest stages has evolved over the last, like, I don't know, it's been like 20 years of investing for you, maybe more? How long have you been doing this?

• 1:06:26Speaker 02

  Well, my, I, I was a CS student at Harvard and started a company shortly after college with two other Harvard grads, a company called Link Exchange that was one of the first advertising networks on the internet. And the success of that, when I was 26, we sold to Microsoft. Ever since then, I've been a mentor to other startup founders. And I realized the, the most surprising and important lesson of my career was the difference that a single individual can make. And I realized there was a super skill I wanted to have, which was the ability to spot talent at a very young age. At the time, it was trying to hire the smartest young people to join my company. But then this kind of pivoted towards being a mentor to young founders and then an angel investor in those founders.

• 1:07:10Speaker 02

  And so I was fortunate enough to be really early in companies like Facebook, Dropbox, kind of Airbnb. I missed the very early round when Brian Chesky accidentally kind of pitched me in a restaurant. He was not even at my table. It was like a chance encounter.

• 1:07:26Jordi Hays?

  Just listening over.

• 1:07:27Speaker 02

  But I invested in a later round. So, yes, also Zappos, Uber, a couple of others. And, yeah, I'd say the common theme there was not just being an investor, but helping these companies build their early teams and impressing on them the importance of hiring exceptional people. And in 2017, I started Neo with the really audacious belief that it is possible to identify future tech leaders when they're still in college. And not only that, but that we could build a machine, a systematic institution, that identifies superstars and helps them maximize their potential. And today, I have to pinch myself that I really feel like we've proven that this is possible and that we're doing it systematically.

• 1:08:12Speaker 02

  Neo scholars have founded companies like Cursor, Pika, Cognition, Chai Discovery, and many more. And at this point, it's an institutional system, not just like one person going around with a knack to make investments.

• 1:08:27Jordi Hays?

  The meme of dropping out of college to start a startup has been, you know, fundamental to the history of Silicon Valley. Do you think more students should be dropping out? Is it not enough dropping out?

• 1:08:41John Coogan?

  And how early is too early?

• 1:08:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, how early is too early?

• 1:08:43John Coogan?

  Should we be dropping out of high school, middle school?

• 1:08:44Jordi Hays?

  Should they get a year in the dorms to get a little bit of...

• 1:08:47John Coogan?

  I got a four-year-old if you want to write a check. He's ready.

• 1:08:51Speaker 02

  I love it. First of all, when you mentioned meme, I thought you were talking about there's, there was a Twitter meme a month or two ago saying these are the institutions that, you know, students would drop out of Harvard and Stanford for, and it, um, it showed Neo, it showed the Teal Fellowship, but I loved it because it also showed Zach Frankel.

• 1:09:12Jordi Hays?

  We don't say that word on this show. We don't say the F word on this show.

• 1:09:18Speaker 02

  That guy's a legend. He's a one man. But to your question, first of all, if you have a four-year-old, have them use code.org, which is the nonprofit my brother and I founded that teaches young kids how to code. Literally, I started my four-year-old on it. Highly recommend it.

• 1:09:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but.

• 1:09:34Speaker 02

  So the question about dropping out of college, I think about it all the time. I mean, some of the names I mentioned were dropouts and one of our best investments of the past year was in Sapian, which was three dropouts who didn't even finish sophomore year at Harvard, Stanford, and UT Austin respectively. Having said that, I think there's way too much of a emphasis on you have to drop out and you're not good enough if you don't drop out. Among Silicon Valley, obviously, not everywhere, but in the tech industry, I think that can be a little unhealthy. What we offer is a gap semester grant. So it's like a Teal Fellowship, but much less scary because

• 1:10:14Speaker 02

  at the end of the semester, you can go back to school. In fact, that's expected. It's just spend this, take a semester off, but build something of your own, experience entrepreneurship, and if you strike it big, keep going. You can then drop out. You can then, and then would fund you and, you know, there are some people for whom that would totally make sense. But if, you know, but if that doesn't make sense, I would say it's better to stay in school until you have found the thing worthy of leaving school for, the thing that your heart and your passion is really ready to commit to for years.

• 1:10:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, this was kind of the story of Mark Zuckerberg. He takes the summer off and is actually on deferral and then eventually never goes back, but then gets the honorary degree years later. But, but I have to ask, I mean, I want to go into the present, obviously, but how did you get in the early Facebook rounds? Like, what was that story? I know Brian Chesky, you meet at a restaurant. Was it a different restaurant?

• 1:11:12Speaker 02

  Uh, my stories as an investor are mostly about what an idiot I am. And I'm really, honestly, I'm not being humble. Brian Chesky, I'm at a meeting with a Wall Street Journal reporter. That I thought was an important meeting. Random person at the table next to me pops in and starts entering our conversation. I think the Wall Street Journal guy actually started, asked him a question. And then before I know it, like this guy's pitching me his, you know, his thing, Airbnb. And I remember thinking, this is such a cool concept. It's batshit, it's super ambitious, but if it works, this would be huge. But I was also annoyed, like, don't you see I'm in an important meeting with a Wall Street Journal reporter here? So I never forgot him, but I didn't, didn't follow up to my, to my regret.

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

  I invested in a later round.

• 1:11:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:59Speaker 02

  Facebook, I cannot claim any credit for. My twin brother, Hadi, uh, who is absolutely brilliant, deserves all the credit for that connection. Um, uh, he was introduced to them by Sean Parker when it was a nine-person startup. Uh, and we, we referred the very first summer intern to Facebook, Darian Shirazi. And, you know, served as advisors, but at the time, I remember talking to Hadi and saying, this company seems like a online fraternity. Are you, like, I'm not sure I see the business here. It seems like it's really cool and I wish I could be back in college and be a member of this. You know, it was, you had to be a college student to be able to use it. It had like maybe a million users.

• 1:12:41Speaker 02

  And I remember Hadi saying to me, no, Ali, we're not betting on the company, it's the person. And this, you know, nineteen-year-old Mark Zuckerberg reminds me more of Bill Gates than anyone I've ever met. And the team around him were stunning, you know, and so, uh,

• 1:12:58Jordi Hays?

  How, how do you think that?

• 1:12:59Speaker 02

  If it hadn't been for my brother, I would not have been involved in Facebook. But this was two thousand four or five or so, and two thousand five, and was the germ of this belief of investing in people.

• 1:13:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:10Speaker 02

  That is the core of what Neo is today.

• 1:13:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:12Speaker 02

  And Neo, today, we discover college students long before they start startups and start mentoring them. We invest in them by investing our time.

• 1:13:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, do you think it, uh, is, has been very, like, My friends that are investors, I think it's actually helpful if they get a huge win early in their investing career because they one know what what great really looks like. They know what great operators look like and they have less FOMO in the sense that, you know, when they get pitched an idea that they like, but the founders maybe not the right fit. It's just easier for them to pass. Do you think, do you find that, um, do you find that like, you know, getting, you know, big early wins has allowed you to like, you know, be a better?

• 1:13:53Speaker 02

  More risk on even?

• 1:13:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, more, more risk on, but also just being okay, not like having that sense of FOMO of being like, you know, I like this idea, but you know, I'm not going to invest.

• 1:14:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:06Speaker 02

  I'd say I still have all sorts of insecurities, both the FOMO as well as, you know, sometimes being unsure about what something is the right investment. But what I've definitely got incredible confidence about is my ability to spot talent. And, and, um, you know, when I started Neo, this idea that you could find future tech leaders when they're still in college, this was a, you know, kind of a crazy suggestion. Now I feel incredibly sure about not just my ability, but the company's ability to do that. But the other thing I'd say for me, I would say my path as an investor has grown more from my mistakes than from those early wins.

• 1:14:45Speaker 02

  You know, I, um, I remember when the smartest engineer at my own startup left to start something. He was a contractor, this guy Max Levchin, who was 22 at the time, started what was called Confinity, which became PayPal. We all knew Max is brilliant, brilliant as an engineer. And we also all thought that Confinity was kind of a joke. It was like an app for the Palm Pilot to send money with infrared. And today I didn't, I would, I would just say if Max is involved with anything, whatever involvement, I would invest in it because of the person. Whereas back then, as a 26 year old, I had a lot of hubris. I had just sold my company. I thought I'm the, you know, bees knees and so.

• 1:15:31Speaker 02

  When you're too arrogant as an investor, you start trying to pretend like you're the smartest person in the room and poke holes in the other person's idea and like come up with ways it would fail. Whereas today, my approach is maybe I'm not the smartest person in the room. Let's figure out if the other person is actually the smartest person, even if they're half my age. And if so, and if they're committing their life to something, I just want to, you know, support them and help them. And maybe I have wisdom to give or ways to help, but not miss out in any way. I should say similar miss, same timeframe, nineteen ninety-nine or so, my, um, one of the smartest people from Harvard Computer Science, Craig Silverstein, kind of reached out to a whole group of us saying, hey, I need advice. I'm joining as

• 1:16:14Speaker 02

  the CTO of this startup my Stanford PhD friends Larry and Sergey are starting. And I remember thinking, poor Craig, he used to be so smart. Doesn't he know there's ten other search engines, this Google company, just because they have a better algorithm, you know. And honestly, it was a foolish business idea. Like, if you were to apply kind of MBA type, is this a good business plan? It'd be like, it wouldn't make sense. What made sense is that the people were freaking brilliant. And today, I would, in a heartbeat, bet on people of that caliber, even if they're taking on much bigger companies.

• 1:16:54Jordi Hays?

  Besides, besides raw intelligence, what it, what it, what's your, what are you looking for?

• 1:16:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's a conversation with you like if you're a sophomore in college? What are you looking?

• 1:17:04Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, the one to talk about is, uh, Michael Truell, the CEO, now the CEO of Cursor. I met him when he was a rising sophomore between freshman and sophomore year in college, uh, when I was interviewing him to become a Neo scholar. And, um,

• 1:17:21Speaker 02

  So at the time, today, to become a NeoScholar, thousands of people apply through our website. But back then, I was basically the website. I was like, you know, it was such a grind, visiting different campuses and so on. And I would give people technical interviews instead of what's today, an online coding test. So I gave him a coding test equivalent to what it would, you know, evaluate whether he could get a job at a big tech firm or so on. He crushed it within the first 10 or 12 minutes, which meant we had the rest of the hour. I let him give me a coding test, which was actually much harder than the test I had given him.

• 1:18:00Speaker 02

  And I kind of, I solved it, but that ate up much more than the other one. But the real thing I look for, besides, I'd say, technical ability is a kind of, it's an important prerequisite. We back technical founders. But I asked myself, how magnetic is this person? The word magnetic, specifically, I'm asking myself, if this person started a company, how many of his or her smartest friends would drop whatever they're doing to join it? You know, and you can get a sense of that just from your, from the vibe of a person. You can also get a sense of that from looking at what else they've done. You know, Michael Truul had had two startups when he was in high school.

• 1:18:45Speaker 02

  I wouldn't call them startups, but they were like small businesses that he had run. And, you know, and there's other people you can see where, you can see what their role is in campus organizations. Do they join campus organizations? Or do they become the president of the campus organization? Or do they start a new organization? And, yeah, so how magnetic are they? And then I'd say the other thing is willingness to kind of not, not accept the rules or not accept the status quo. And I'm not talking about breaking rules or breaking laws, but just to see beyond them. And to, you know, to have such a kind of dogged.

• 1:19:26Speaker 02

  Commitment to what you're doing, that if you see a rule or a law or people saying this has never been done before, never been done before, to figure out a way around it, including changing the law or getting the, you know, getting the government approval. So a company like Kalshi, we were the, uh, one of the earliest backers in, um, this is, I guess it's a tech company, but I'd say their biggest innovation is regulatory. They have legalized trading on event outcomes, starting with things like pandemics and COVID to election results. And now they're, um, they're now the largest sports, uh, within two months or three months of launch, they're the single largest sports, uh, betting market in the United States.

• 1:20:08Speaker 02

  All legally, when everyone told them this is not going to be legal, you'll never succeed at this. We bet on them because of their doggedness to kind of see beyond those naysayers.

• 1:20:19John Coogan?

  Jordy?

• 1:20:20Jordi Hays?

  Um, how much time do you spend thinking about the future today versus just obsessing over finding talent, right? There's a lot of venture capital firms that spend a lot of time thinking about their visions for the future, you know, understanding markets, right? And, um, that's really fun to do and it's a strategy that can work. And when it does work, it's like amazing, right? We all love these stories where VC puts out like a request for startups and then they get, you know, and then somebody kind of like goes and does it, like it's, it's amazing. But at the same time, like to me, uh, you probably, I, I would imagine you're spending time thinking about the future in the context of what an incredible, uh, founder's vision for it is.

• 1:21:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a great question. Look, I love business ideas. In fact, you know, I, I am starting a new business on my own on the side with, that I've got an amazing team that's, that we're incubating now. And I'm, I love brainstorming business ideas, but I don't spend time making predictions about the future and kind of claiming that I know what's going to happen. Frankly, I just, I, maybe it's insecurity or humility, but putting out a request for startups where we say this is what's going to succeed, that's not how we operate. We focus on is the other person smarter than me? We're obsessed with finding the top talent. In fact, I'm, I'm dialing in from Stanford University. I don't know if you can see the background right now.

• 1:21:48Speaker 02

  You know, like, uh, yeah, I'm in a room.

• 1:21:51John Coogan?

  On the ground, in the field.

• 1:21:52Speaker 02

  I'm in a room at the Huang Engineering Center.

• 1:21:53John Coogan?

  You, you, you, drop out, drop out, right now, come over here. Come over here. Here, take my money. Do you bring, uh, do you bring check? Do you bring handwritten? Yeah, yeah, he's, he's flipping a sign on the, on campus, but it's just a big check, just say.

• 1:22:05Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:22:06John Coogan?

  It was fifty K.

• 1:22:07Speaker 02

  I love it.

• 1:22:08John Coogan?

  Hey, drop out, drop out, please, take my money.

• 1:22:10Speaker 02

  Joking aside, what we do actually is we come in and, not just at Stanford, also at Waterloo, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, um, MIT. Myself and my team members will go in and provide an entire day of office hours. If anybody wants mentorship, book, you know, book twenty minutes or thirty minutes and it could be on your career, it could be on job search, it could be on some startup idea you're thinking of. We almost never try to encourage anyone to drop out. We're here to lead with mentorship and helping young people. And by the way, I don't even define Neo as being a VC firm. If you look at our website, we call ourselves first and foremost a mentorship community.

• 1:22:51Speaker 02

  Our North Stars are about mentorship and community and our business model is investing. But I can tell you, it is so exciting to meet a college student who might be nineteen or twenty and to realize I'm talking to somebody smarter than myself, whose potential is to be bigger than myself. And, you know, that's what I felt when I met Michael Truell, um, five years ago and started investing in him. And what I mean by investing means spending time, inviting him to events, you know, inviting him, connecting him to my network. And we, uh, introduced him to his first startup internship at a company called Octant. His, uh, MIT friend, Amon Sanger, we connected to his first startup internship at a company called U.com.

• 1:23:36Speaker 02

  And when the two of them. Two and a half years later, their senior year said they're thinking of doing a startup. I started booking time to mentor them every few weeks to help brainstorm ideas. When they decided finally that they're ready to fully pursue it. And they weren't dropping out, they graduated. We were like, no question, first to to invest in them. And uh, and

• 1:23:59Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing.

• 1:24:00Speaker 02

  At the time, it was just two guys and an idea. And they even changed the idea.

• 1:24:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:06Speaker 02

  So we were just investing in the two guys.

• 1:24:08Jordi Hays?

  Do you end up, uh, I'm curious, do you, how many times a year do you end up, uh, having one of these founders, you know, saying like, hey, can you, can you talk to my parents? Like, they wanna know if, you know.

• 1:24:18John Coogan?

  This is the story of Michael Jordan.

• 1:24:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, when they were recruiting, they went to the family.

• 1:24:22Jordi Hays?

  You wanna, like, you want, like, total alignment between, you know, the entrepreneur and the family, like, ideally, it's not necessary, but I'm curious. I'm sure you've had some of those conversations being like, no, I, yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to give your son a million dollars. And yes, you know, they're not gonna have a degree, but like, you know, they, they have a real, you, you know, I think, uh, not, not every parent understands, uh, that, you know, just getting across the line and raising venture capital is a signal to the market that, uh, that that's similar quality in many ways to a college degree.

• 1:24:56Speaker 02

  I, what I love about this question is that you recognize the human part of what's going on. This is not just like, oh, how much money or so on. It's not just about startups. These are, we're talking about human beings who have the same hopes and fears and parents as, as you and I do. And, um, and it's, I love that you are in like twenty minutes, thinking of the things that it's taken us a few years to think of. But yes, I speak to parents every year, a few, a few one-on-one type Zooms, but this year, we actually created a, an event called Parents Weekend, where we flew out the parents of the Neo Scholars, all for like a weekend long of like talks by Scott Wu from Cognition and, um, other, you know,

• 1:25:40Speaker 02

  other people who, whether they dropped out or started a company a couple of years after college, leaders that the parents could look to and see, oh, my gosh, yeah, I guess my daughter or son could end up being like this person. And this is legit and it's, you know, uh, it's not riskier or less prestigious than getting a job at. You know, OpenAI or Ramp or whatever big company.

• 1:26:05John Coogan?

  Can you talk a little bit about the business model right now? I mean, if you take a scholar who is going to do something entrepreneurial for the summer, is that like, we're setting up a C corp for you, we're taking 7% or something like that? And then if it winds down at the end of the summer, you go back to school, that's fine. But we're set up for the corporate journey and just putting you on Sand Hill Road and raising a mango seed? Or is it more like, you know, Thiel fellowships and nonprofit? But then obviously, once you do the Thiel fellowship, you go out and raise and, you know, plenty of people aligned with the Thiel fellowship have, you know, access to those deals, et cetera. But how do you think about just mechanically going through a partnership with you?

• 1:26:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, so in some ways, I would say we are the signal of finding the great undergraduate talent that the Thiel fellowship once was. You know, if you talk to anyone at top universities, they now, what they'll tell you is, you apply to become a Thiel fellow after you've dropped out and after you've raised three to five million dollars in funding, then become a Thiel fellow. And the majority of the Thiel fellows followed that path. They became a Thiel fellow long after raising money, long after dropping out of college. We identify people years before they might start a company. And the main thing we offer them is not cash, it's the network and the mentorship

• 1:27:31Speaker 02

  and the real care and attention to helping them figure out what, whatever path is best for them. That might be graduate school, it might be getting a job at OpenAI. Last year, OpenAI hired all of their new grad hires through Neo. And it might be a job at a startup. If they want to do though, like you said, do their own thing. The way we are currently structuring it is a gap semester grant. So it's not a summer, it's a gap semester because we want that person to do, to show a little sacrifice. If it's a summer program, it'll attract, you know, fund entrepreneurs who are just kind of looking for a summer camp and, oh, this will look good on my resume instead of interning at Google. You know, there, there might be other programs that do that.

• 1:28:14Speaker 02

  But our view is if we're going to give them a grant, we'll make them take a, we'll offer them a chance to take a semester off. With other students doing the same thing in a shared workspace, so we provide shared space, community, so you're not alone, and $20,000 equity free, just grant.

• 1:28:33John Coogan?

  Grant.

• 1:28:33Speaker 02

  And, um, and, and mentorship on a week to week basis. I'll spend time with them. We have other mentors who spend time with them. But this aspect of being in a shared space and having the other students who are doing the same thing is very different than programs like the TIL Fellowship.

• 1:28:48John Coogan?

  So of the 350 that you just raised, some of that's going to, some of that's going to grants and then some of that's going to probably like participation in seed rounds once the C corp set up and then, but then like, are you trying to do pro rata? Are you trying to concentrate into the best companies as they grow? Or will you set up a separate growth vehicle or is that just not in the cards?

• 1:29:08Speaker 02

  We're not planning on doing a growth vehicle and it's a, this has been, is a very conscious decision because it sounds like you're quite familiar with how VC works. The standard path, if you're a VC and you're ambitious and you want to be number one, the standard path is to raise more and more and more capital, which means invest in later and later rounds and become over time, an asset collector. It's, you know.

• 1:29:32John Coogan?

  Well, you gotta go public. That's the new hot thing in 2025. If you're not taking your firm public this year, what are you doing?

• 1:29:40Speaker 02

  Exactly. Um, but yeah, the, the, the industry term for it is AUM bloat, assets under management bloat. And we consciously thought about this and said, that's just not us. That's not what we want for our future. We would rather bet on our own returns. We would rather grow in quality than quantity. Um, we'd rather stay small. Uh, so the program I mentioned for college students only accepts 20 to 30 Neo Scholars a year. We also have an accelerator, which we haven't talked a lot about, but it is aiming to be the most selective program for young technical founders there is, and it offers 600K, um, you know, standard deal to participants. That's only funding 20 companies a year.

• 1:30:23Speaker 02

  We want to stay selective rather than ballooning and growing based on volume and.

• 1:30:30Speaker 02

  That said, we're also very ambitious. So we were thinking about how, what's our path for growth? What's our plan for world domination? And it's betting more on our own returns. And what that means is this fund, even though it's barely larger than our last fund, our partner's investment, meaning, you know, my own money from my pocket into this fund, is far more than any of our previous funds. In fact, it's about the same as all the previous funds combined. And so we are going to be betting a larger and larger share of our own money into the, into our funds over time, and essentially betting on our own ability to, to identify killer talent and killer.

• 1:31:07John Coogan?

  We love betting. We love betting on yourself, your own fund. Congratulations on the fund. It's been fantastic talking to you. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

• 1:31:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm excited to see the new scholars and companies coming out of Neo.

• 1:31:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then snipe them and do their rounds before Ali can get to them.

• 1:31:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:22John Coogan?

  Just kidding.

• 1:31:23Speaker 02

  Good luck with that.

• 1:31:24Jordi Hays?

  Be wary, be wary of, you know.

• 1:31:26John Coogan?

  You don't want to publicize these guys too much.

• 1:31:28Jordi Hays?

  If you get, if you get some spies in Neo, they're going to start front running.

• 1:31:31John Coogan?

  Front running.

• 1:31:32Jordi Hays?

  You gotta get your cybersecurity up.

• 1:31:33John Coogan?

  Yep. Yeah.

• 1:31:34Speaker 02

  I, I am, I'm not worried about that because we have such good relations. I could tell you right now, who are the college students right now that are going to be future tech leaders.

• 1:31:43John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:31:44Speaker 02

  And, and there are other VCs who look to see who Neo scholars are. In fact, the Forbes feature we had this morning, Christina Shen, who is an absolute superstar, formerly from A16Z, now she has her own firm. She said Neo is the number one signal that she looks to more than any other program or accelerator for where future founders are. And yeah, so it is hard when we do this and identify someone so young, because then there'll be actually competition for who gets to invest in them. But our view is that we want to be their most supportive advocate and mentor and earn the privilege to invest in the tech leaders of tomorrow.

• 1:32:25Jordi Hays?

  Well, your work ethic is inspiring, and the only thing I would ask from you is put, as you leave that room, put TVPN on, on the TV, on the TV behind you. Just let it play.

• 1:32:37John Coogan?

  Let it play.

• 1:32:38Speaker 02

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna put it on the whiteboard here right now.

• 1:32:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there we go. All right. Thank you, Ali.

• 1:32:44John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:32:45Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:32:46John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:32:47Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:32:48Jordi Hays?

  There we go. There we go.

• 1:32:50John Coogan?

  There we go. Thank you so much.

• 1:32:51Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:32:52John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:32:53Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:32:55John Coogan?

  Next up, we have, we're pivoting back to China. There's a new IFP report from the Institute of Progress all about Nvidia and the H20 problem inference, supercomputers, and US export control gaps. We have Tim coming on the show to talk about it. Editor's note at the top of this thing. Shortly after this piece was published, Nvidia disclosed that the US government had informed it that the export of H20 chips violates supercomputer end-use restrictions. As we claim in the piece, we applaud the Bureau of Industry and Security for its quick action. I'm sure they read the... Yeah, they probably read this. There's probably a pre-print going around, but it's a very, very detailed report all

• 1:33:40John Coogan?

  about chip competition and everything that we just talked about in the opener and in the deep dive. So I'm excited to get him to break some of this down. I'll read from the summary while we're waiting to get set up with him. "The United States is on the verge of repeating a critical strategic error despite having the legal authority and technical tools to constrain China's access to advanced AI chips. The US government is failing to enforce existing export controls or adapt them to new threats. As a result, Chinese firms are exploiting loopholes to acquire powerful US hardware undermining America's lead in frontier AI. The most immediate risk is the pending export of over 1.3 million Nvidia H20 chips worth more than 16 billion."

• 1:34:22John Coogan?

  When we talked to Jordan yesterday from China Talk, he was saying, "It's $2 billion." Like, that's a lot. And we were, remember, I was saying like, "That's not that much." Like, Stargate's 500 billion. Well, it turns out that the proposed number was actually more like 16 billion. Jordan very thoughtfully posted and mentioned me to flag this, but it is a much bigger number than people thought. Of course, the chips are worth 16 billion. The economic impact to Nvidia is 5.5 billion, and these chips were going to go to Chinese tech giants, including ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent, et cetera. They're optimized for AI inference. Odd, one second. We're getting some errors. Hmm.

• 1:35:06John Coogan?

  The team will email you.

• 1:35:10Jordi Hays?

  While we're getting errors, I'll just put this up.

• 1:35:13John Coogan?

  Put this up. Yeah, I mean, it's a great time to do some, some ramp ads, some ads of all types. What else do we got in here? We've done numeral, we've done eight sleep, but we haven't done wander. Find your happy place.

• 1:35:25Jordi Hays?

  Find your happy place.

• 1:35:25John Coogan?

  Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks.

• 1:35:34John Coogan?

  And we can go back to the IFP.

• 1:35:37John Coogan?

  So, uh, uh, these chips are optimized for AI inference, as we discussed, and, uh, they're likely to be used in Chinese supercomputers, which violates US export controls. At least one of the buyers, Tencent, has already installed H20s in a facility used to train a large model, very likely in breach of existing controls restricting the usage of chips to, in supercomputers exceeding certain thresholds. DeepSeek's supercomputer used to train their V3 model is also likely in breach of the same restrictions.

• 1:36:08John Coogan?

  Can you, should I just call him? Let me see. What would be the best?

• 1:36:12Jordi Hays?

  He's having a Zoom issue?

• 1:36:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's getting an error on his end. Something. Let me see.

• 1:36:21Jordi Hays?

  Could try on his phone, too?

• 1:36:23John Coogan?

  Maybe. Let me see.

• 1:36:26Jordi Hays?

  All right, I'm gonna keep reading.

• 1:36:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:27Jordi Hays?

  Failure is part of a broader problem, problem, uh, broader pattern. Huawei stockpiled restricted chip components, including chip dies and high-bandwidth memory, before controls took effect. We talked about this earlier. Just stockpiling that happened, um, over the last few years. TSMC has facilitated production of over 3 million cutting-edge chip dies directly for Chinese firms for Chinese AI efforts, sometimes in violation of US chip, uh, rules. DeepSeek, a Chinese lab-trained state-of-the-art models using American chips, sold legally due to delayed restrictions. The rationale behind export controls remains sound. AI models trained and deployed on the most advanced chips pose national security risks.

• 1:37:09Jordi Hays?

  But the administration of export controls is failing to keep pace with new developments in the field. Inference, once seen as secondary, has become central to training, fine tuning, and increasing the capabilities of deployed models. The H20 chip specialized in inference is already 20% faster than the H100 for inference tasks. That's very significant.

• 1:37:31John Coogan?

  And so this is where they get to like straight up policy recommendations. The US must act now. We recommend that BIS should immediately block the H20 shipments using its existing authority. And so a lot of times these laws are written and people just don't really know how they can be interpreted. Obviously, different companies are arguing for different interpretations. It lands in the courts. But IFP is arguing that there's an existing rule here, 15 CFR 744.23, that will allow them to block H20s, which I think is what happened. Nvidia must investigate and halt transactions that raise legal red flags under its know your customer obligations. BIS should update export controls to cover inference chips, which is what's happening. And the White House should empower a technical

• 1:38:16John Coogan?

  team, ideally within the AI Safety Institute, AISI, at NIST, to forecast AI threats and proactively shape control policy. And five, BIS should track chips once exported to high-risk locations by incentivizing industry adoption of chip geolocation features.

• 1:38:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we've sort of referenced this before, but it'd be interesting to kind of get a sense of what the black market, chip market, looks like. Just because you can imagine chips flowing to various countries, you know, to presumably an end customer that then get resold and moved across borders, things like that. So, very fascinating.

• 1:38:58John Coogan?

  X is saying that Zoom is down.

• 1:39:01Jordi Hays?

  Oh, really?

• 1:39:01John Coogan?

  It seems like there might be actually like an attack like all over the internet. Spotify and Apple are having trouble today. But, you know what? The haters of X. X seems to be working.

• 1:39:14Jordi Hays?

  We're live. We're live on X, reporting downages across the rest of the internet.

• 1:39:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. And everyone was saying, oh, X is going to be the first one to go down. He can't possibly keep the servers on. That Elon guy knows nothing about software engineering. But the X server stays live. And I think we're still live on YouTube, which is great.

• 1:39:31Jordi Hays?

  Glad to see it.

• 1:39:32John Coogan?

  Anyway, maybe we should do some timeline while we get that set up, settle into this debate all about Katy Perry going to space.

• 1:39:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we should. When I heard that Apple Podcasts and Spotify were down, you know what I thought about? Big radio.

• 1:39:46John Coogan?

  Big radio?

• 1:39:47Jordi Hays?

  Big radio.

• 1:39:47John Coogan?

  We really need a Sirius XM deal. You know, the satellites are still cranking out content. You just turn on the radio when the internet's down in your car.

• 1:39:56Jordi Hays?

  Turn it up.

• 1:39:57John Coogan?

  You get three years free when you buy a new car and TVPN should have its own channel on there.

• 1:40:02Jordi Hays?

  We should do a deep dive on Sirius XM.

• 1:40:04John Coogan?

  Interesting business. Yeah.

• 1:40:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:05John Coogan?

  I want to do more of those like weird niche deep dives that aren't covered that much. I was reading about Jim Cramer's career yesterday. That was a really interesting one. Even the Johnny Carson show and how that, that, that like whole industry developed. Like, have you followed any of the, have you followed any of the late night wars? Are you familiar with this?

• 1:40:25Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:40:26John Coogan?

  So Johnny Carson started the late, late, late night or The Tonight Show. It's called The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. He started that, eventually became like the highest paid celebrity in all of Hollywood. And then when he retired, Jay Leno took over. I believe I'm getting this right. I'm kind of doing it off the top of my head, but Jay Leno took over. Jay Leno had like another historic run and The Tonight Show was like more popular than ever. So Jay Leno buys McLaren F1, he builds like this massive garage of like hundreds of cars, has like, he's fabulously wealthy. Then there's this weird, there's this weird wrinkle where he's going to retire and I think NBC owns the whole thing. They say, hey, Jay, it's time for you to step down. You're under contract. We're going to maybe put you on something else.

• 1:41:09John Coogan?

  You're going to go to an earlier slot, I believe, different show, but which I think would be like not a big deal at all. It didn't go well at all. So Conan comes in, takes The Tonight Show.

• 1:41:20Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:41:20John Coogan?

  And, and that's, I think, kind of working, but there's always an adjustment because the audience is slightly different. The lead in is slightly different. It's like, because if you think about it, if you're just, the, the average TV viewer is like watching primetime. So they're watching CSI or they're watching Law and Order or they're watching, I don't know, like whatever is on primetime. I don't watch TV. You know, these normal shows.

• 1:41:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, prime time. You know.

• 1:41:43John Coogan?

  Prime time. Yeah. Well, what's a modern family? That's like a prime time show, right? Those types of things. So you're watching that and then it flip or The Simpsons, right? Probably comes on seven, whatever. Then that flips over to late night and you're getting the news, but in this like funny comedy variety way with interviews with celebrities and stuff. But then the second, there's, there's actually several blocks. So there's like the 10 a.m. late night show, then there's 11 a.m., 11 p.m., 10 p.m., 11 p.m., midnight, et cetera. And it kind of moves through. And so if you're the second show, you can't just repeat all the same things that are on the first show, because then the person might be, ah, but why am I getting repeated information? And so you kind of have to retool the show. Anyway, Conan comes in, Jay Leno doesn't like it and gets like, he's like, hey, I want

• 1:42:28John Coogan?

  to come out of retirement. I actually want my show back. And so he comes back and that kind of kicks Conan out of his whole flow because he had a show. And so then he goes off to like TBS and does his own show, starts a podcast. He winds up becoming very successful, but it's like this big drama about like, you know, how that happened. And then I think the final Tonight Show landed with Jimmy Fallon, I believe, one of those guys. There's so many of these late night shows, show hosts at this point. But anyway, we, we should dig into how that all.

• 1:42:56Jordi Hays?

  Let's talk about Blue Origin.

• 1:42:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:42:58Jordi Hays?

  Maria posted yesterday on X, at Jordy Hayes, at John Kugan, please discuss Katy Perry and Blue Origin on the pod tomorrow. Here we are discussing it. Do you want to give some context, John?

• 1:43:10John Coogan?

  Yes. So when I first saw this.

• 1:43:13Jordi Hays?

  First of all, Monday morning, on every single mainstream television, every mainstream television outlet was reporting this live or relatively live.

• 1:43:24John Coogan?

  Yes. We were in the gym.

• 1:43:26Jordi Hays?

  We were in the gym.

• 1:43:26John Coogan?

  And every TV was, it was, as they say, wall to wall.

• 1:43:30Jordi Hays?

  It was wall to wall.

• 1:43:30John Coogan?

  It was wall to wall. But it was very interesting watching because, so Gayle King was one of the. Crew members, right? And she is an American TV personality on CBS mornings. She co-hosts CBS mornings. And so CBS was like, this is our girl. Like, we got to cover this for an hour. And then you'd flip over to what NBC was doing. And NBC was like, this is important, but it's not our girl that's there. So like, we're going to cover it for 20 minutes. And then even CNBC and Fox Business would cover it for like a few minutes, just to be like, hey, this thing just happened. It's live. So just like tune in for a little, the rocket launch, like, give you a little update. But they're not like lingering on it.

• 1:44:13John Coogan?

  But anyway, I thought the take that people wanted to hear was just like, space travel is cool. Or like, space tourism is cool.

• 1:44:21Jordi Hays?

  First of all, space tourism is cool. It's cool to see these big celebrities going up. And it not just being another, you know, guy who sold some company in the 90s and wants to go to space.

• 1:44:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. You mean Jeff Bezos? He literally was on the first.

• 1:44:34Jordi Hays?

  Jeff Bezos did it.

• 1:44:35John Coogan?

  He did the whole thing.

• 1:44:36Jordi Hays?

  The history of space tourism is usually a technology brother.

• 1:44:41John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:44:41Jordi Hays?

  Who just really wants to go to space, figures out a way to get it done. It's not as high profile.

• 1:44:46John Coogan?

  I mean, that's the story of the new NASA administrator. The new NASA administrator did the first civilian spacewalk on SpaceX. Like, he went to real space. So Blue Origin takes you past the Karman line, which is like 300 nautical miles, I think, something like that. And so you go to space, but like just barely technically. And you're not, it's not nearly as risky or aggressive as being like on the International Space Station, like way, way up there.

• 1:45:09Jordi Hays?

  And so what was the, first of all, one, space is awesome.

• 1:45:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:45:13Jordi Hays?

  I thought they handled themselves very well.

• 1:45:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:15Jordi Hays?

  Just a really cool story.

• 1:45:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:18Jordi Hays?

  Bezos was looking absolutely diced.

• 1:45:22John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:45:22Jordi Hays?

  He did fall right next to the capsule, which was unfortunate.

• 1:45:25John Coogan?

  But, but he picked himself right up. He's clearly in the gym. He doesn't skip leg day because he popped right out of the thing.

• 1:45:29Jordi Hays?

  Maybe he just wanted an opportunity to kind of push up.

• 1:45:32John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure.

• 1:45:33Jordi Hays?

  Show off the triceps. But what was the controversy surrounding it? So a lot of people came out and said it was faked or certain aspects of it were faked.

• 1:45:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:42Jordi Hays?

  I'm not going to put on the tinfoil hat because I don't.

• 1:45:46John Coogan?

  Well, I think that I think that there is an alleged conspiracy that they never even left Earth, I guess, which is very funny. But I do think that there is a conspiracy here that we should get into. So this is a viral post that got forty four thousand likes and eleven million views. Here's definitive proof that the Blue Origin mission was faked. And it all centers around the fact that when they landed, the door opened and Bezos is there with like, one of the hosts or someone. And they kind of say like, hey, close that door. And then they wait and then they open the door and everyone comes out. And so there's this question about like, how did they open the pressurized door without like knowing, right? And so, but the interesting thing, oh, you just want to put the thing in here?

• 1:46:30John Coogan?

  Okay, cool. Just up here. Hey, Tim, how you doing?

• 1:46:34Speaker 03

  Not bad. How are you?

• 1:46:36John Coogan?

  I'm good.

• 1:46:37Jordi Hays?

  Are we in the midst of a major cyber attack?

• 1:46:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's going on?

• 1:46:41Jordi Hays?

  Spotify was down this morning. Apple is down. Zoom's down now. Remote workers are in shambles.

• 1:46:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a disaster. I mean, I guess everyone was just taking the day off.

• 1:46:52Speaker 03

  I appreciate you guys have a backup plan. This is great.

• 1:46:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's great.

• 1:46:57John Coogan?

  Well, can you give me the high level on the report? It seems like you published right before there were some changes. Give me the high level and how things are developing.

• 1:47:06Jordi Hays?

  And in all, half joking, half serious, but do you deserve some credit for the shift here?

• 1:47:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, it seems on the credit side, I don't think we can take much. It looks like there was a lot of things happening behind the scenes. I will say that fix that we have now is just a short term thing. And there's a lot of long term stuff that needs to happen. But so I guess back up as to what's actually going on here. So yeah, it's been a pretty well winded twenty four hours for the AI chip export controls. So you guys might know in early twenty twenty four, Nvidia launched this new AI chip, this AI GPU called the H20. It was specifically designed for the Chinese market. So it was designed to stick within the computational limits that were defined through export controls. But it turns out that the H20 actually had great performance for doing inference. Running AI models as opposed to training it.

• 1:47:58Speaker 03

  Um, and this resulted in a situation where actually it was really good at inference and even better than some chips that are already banned. And this all happened during this sort of twenty twenty four trend of inference for AI models becoming way more important for capability growth through, you know, models like O one and DeepSeek using test time compute as well as other techniques like synthetic data generation RL. Um, so definitely a bunch of these like sold like crazy, uh, over a million were shipped in twenty twenty four. Uh, and so this is like a really big deal. We had inference compute flowing freely from the US to China during this period where, um, inference compute was becoming the key strategic input to AI development. And people like myself were going, wow, but Washington should really be reacting to this, uh, but they were really slow to react.

• 1:48:39Speaker 03

  Um, and, uh, it became sort of a couple of things that we learned last week. One, there was a meeting between, uh, Trump and, uh, Jensen, the Nvidia CEO at Mar-a-Lago, which is apparently a one million dollar a head dinner. Uh, and after that dinner, the White House reportedly reversed course and made plans to, um, uh, control the H twenty chip. Um, and then last week, we also learned that Chinese companies had placed massive new orders for these H twenties, so over one point three million, um, so far this year. And this is like recently over just the last week, part of this, uh, a lot of calls, including from us to stop these orders going through. And yesterday, yeah, it became clear that BAS is actually BAS is the Bureau of Industrial Security who does export controls, have taken action on this. Uh, I just throw a lot of info at you, but that's just where we're at now.

• 1:49:23Speaker 03

  Um, could talk more about sort of what we think should happen next, but yeah, it's a pretty crazy situation to run it.

• 1:49:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I'm curious, what, what, um, what's your broad stance on, on, on Nvidia at the moment? Jensen has obviously been in a tough space of, you know, being, being an American, uh, yet at the same time needing to represent the interests of Nvidia and its shareholders. China is a massive market. Um, and, uh, you know, do you, do you imagine that, uh, everybody just needs to move on from, from China? And, and focus on servicing demand in the US and, and our, and our allies? Or, or how do you think, uh, it should be approached at this point?

• 1:50:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a tough situation for Nvidia. I think the line that they use is, you know, if you set the speed limit at sixty and we're going at fifty-five, that should be fine, right? Like, we're just trying to stick by the parameters that you set in these export controls and sell chips that are compliant. And then you have the government sort of, you know, making these big changes to sort of after Nvidia has designed these chips and is like ready to start selling to the market, making these big changes that like prevent their market access overall. So, you know, if I'm a Nvidia shareholder, I'm like pretty annoyed about this, right? Okay, let's, uh, let's have like better proactive policymaking around this stuff. Like, I'm pretty sympathetic with that perspective. But yeah, I think realistically, uh, you know, Nvidia is a publicly traded company that is accessing their revenue.

• 1:50:45Speaker 03

  They want to sell chips into China. They're not sort of seeing the same national security concerns that a lot of people in Washington now are seeing, and to be frank, a lot of people in the AI industry, uh, directly as well. Um, whether, yeah, I think there's some, some question marks around whether they have been fully responsible with sort of doing their due diligence for shipments that are going into China and ensuring that, like, controlled chips aren't being smuggled, uh, and that they're sort of complying with the letter of the law. Um, yeah, but yeah, overall, I think we just need clearer policymaking ahead of time, so it's easier for them to make these decisions.

• 1:51:17Jordi Hays?

  Do you have a sense of what the black market for GPUs looks like? Um, I imagine, you know, you guys made a recommendation to add sort of like geolocation to these high-performance chips. Um, and I'm curious if you have any insight into how, um, chips are flowing around the world in a way that that may not be aligned to US national interest?

• 1:51:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we've been making this for the past couple of years. So, we put out a report in late 2023 that sort of looked at this question of, okay, we've got these chip export controls now. Uh, what sort of scale of smuggling should we expect? And at the time, based on sort of news reports, mainly is the sort of cases that were being surfaced were just sort of single-digit number of GPUs at the time. So it most sort of like, you know, a single server, like a GPU is being smuggled at once. Um, and now, uh, sort of like a bunch of reports came out last year that this is now just a huge industry. Some estimates is there's sort of around a hundred thousand GPUs went into China last year, controlled GPUs. Some people think it's much more, there's individual cases that have been uncovered where there's over twenty thousand GPUs being smuggled at once.

• 1:52:23Speaker 03

  And so this is some pretty serious dip mid sizes, like going into the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. And it was likely a lot we just don't know, especially for these large orders, which is sort of happening through professional operations behind the scenes. And in as much as it is happening, this, you know, shouldn't be a surprise, you know, China has a long history of smuggling controlled goods despite sanctions and export controls and, you know, it's proven that they were instrumental in helping to smuggle chips to Russia over the last two years to support their war in Ukraine despite sort of US sanctions. So this would be like pretty on brand with the China playbook for this kind of thing.

• 1:52:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh, how far behind do you think that China's domestic chip, uh, chips really are, right? You know, we, we just did an entire backstory on, on SMIC and Huawei and things like that for, for our audience, but uh, and we had Aaron Ginn on the show yesterday talking about how the gap, um, the gap in capabilities is maybe not as significant as companies like Nvidia or TSMC would, would, um, have people believe, but, um, I, I'd love to get a sense, um, from you of how, how wide the gap, the capability gap is.

• 1:53:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I think there's two dimensions to this. First is the quality of the chips themselves. Um, so if we look at that, you know, how, how many flops you are able to get a thing per second.

• 1:53:47Speaker 03

  The bad chips that are coming out now are sort of three to four years behind the best stuff that's available from Nvidia. Um, but you know, that has been a, um, move towards catching up over time. I think export controls are the one thing that could reverse that trend is these have only really just become effective over the last year or so. Um, the other, and this is sort of like a really important factor is not just how good each chip is, but how many they're able to produce. So, you know, in, in AI especially, it's a, it's a not so much a, um, matter of quality of chip that that is important. It's also very much quantity, like how many you're able to produce. And there it's where they're really constrained. Um, so being able to produce, you know, high end chips by the sort of millions like TSMC is able to do is a very serious manufacturing operation and China doesn't have that level of scalability.

• 1:54:32Speaker 03

  And because we have export controls across the stack with tooling and fabs as well, um, that is one of their key bottlenecks.

• 1:54:38Jordi Hays?

  What do you think Chinese state investment into semiconductors looks like today? It's obviously they've had 14 separate five-year plans, I believe, around around the industry. So at this, you know, at this point, I don't know how many hundreds of billions or, you know, who knows even dollars have gone into the industry, but I imagine this is, you know, one of the, you know, will just continue to be more and more important every single year.

• 1:55:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the way this has been

• 1:55:19Jordi Hays?

  Hello?

• 1:55:21Speaker 03

  To revitalize the American domestic semiconductor manufacturing industry.

• 1:55:27Speaker 03

  It's been over time. China is doing this, this sort of equivalent amount of funding roughly every year to support its own domestic industry.

• 1:55:38Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Tim, we, we keep, uh, we keep losing you, by the way. You're kind of cutting in and out. Um, I don't maybe there, maybe the cyber attack has shifted onto your personal mobile device. They really don't, they really don't want Tim talking right now, uh, cause he's dropping, uh, dropping bombs. Um, but could you repeat, I think we have you now. Could you repeat, uh, what, what you said your potential estimate was?

• 1:56:01Speaker 03

  Chip and flip out in the States, uh, this big landmark piece of legislation to revitalize the semiconductor industry here. That was about 52 billion as sort of a once-off package that's being distributed over a few years. Uh, best sources I've had say China is distributing like this equivalent amount of money roughly every year to their own semiconductor industry.

• 1:56:21Jordi Hays?

  How do you think Huawei is, uh, you know, reacting to the tariffs? Uh, they're a private company, so I feel like we have a lot less just information on, on, on a lot of things, but, uh, are they, you know, approaching some of these other company or, you know, nations that are facing tariffs, uh, specifically with kind of like new op, you know, basically trying to take advantage of the situation?

• 1:56:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I didn't use it and I'll be doing in this situation. So similar to how Huawei managed to outmaneuver the United States with 5G, installing base stations all over the world and surpassing the US in that technology. A similar play that they could be executing now is trying to do the same thing on data centers, especially if US equivalents are becoming much more expensive. But now they don't have comparable technologies on the AI chip side, but they certainly do on the lower end stuff. You know, Alibaba Cloud, like Huawei, they all have their own data center offerings that they're sort of pretty aggressively caught in the global market with.

• 1:57:26Jordi Hays?

  Makes a ton of sense. What else are you thinking about right now in terms of, you know, now that the news came out that the order is being stalled? What do you think the admin should be focused on, you know, over the next weeks and months?

• 1:57:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think that one big lesson from all of this is that we keep making the same mistakes. In the sense, we keep acting too late to really be effective. The thing with Xbox controls is you want to act early because there's always the risk of things like stockpiling. Like if there's a room that Xbox controls are coming and they don't happen for another six months, it just gives a huge opportunity for companies to take preventative action and you can completely ruin the effectiveness of what you're trying to do. This has already happened with HBM memory, so like high-end memory that's really crucial in AI chips. The rumor was leaked that controls for this stuff was coming and Huawei reportedly stockpiled around 2 million chips worth of this before the new rules came into place.

• 1:58:26Speaker 03

  We've also been caught blindsided, you know, by DeepSeek finding out that they trained their models with US chips that were sold before the restrictions and policymakers being like, wait, what's going on here? The sort of SMIC when they came out with their seven nanometer breakthrough in 2023, it turns out they were using secondhand DUV machines, which we have since controlled, but they already got their hands on them. There's been a bunch of cases like this and really, yeah, we've just been much way more reactive than we need to be. I think if you just had a team within government who is technically competent and would actually see what's really important, going to be really important for AI technology in six months, you could actually be doing much better productive policymaking. So one thing we're advocating for is just setting up this kind of situational awareness capacity

• 1:59:09Speaker 03

  within government so we can get it right next time.

• 1:59:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Well, we should have you back on when we have

• 1:59:16John Coogan?

  When we have video and the internet is not under attack. Apparently, Google Meet is down as well. I don't know exactly what's going on, but story is still developing. But I mean, thank you so much for taking the time. We really, I really do want to have you come back for a much deeper dive into all of this because it's fascinating.

• 1:59:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's get it on the calendar today.

• 1:59:36John Coogan?

  Absolutely.

• 1:59:37Jordi Hays?

  If we can do this properly. But thank you for making it work, Tim, and thank you for, you know, following the situation so closely and trying to get us on the right path here.

• 1:59:48Speaker 03

  All right, guys. Catch you later.

• 1:59:49John Coogan?

  Cheers. Talk to you later. Bye. Awesome. This is crazy.

• 1:59:53Jordi Hays?

  Everything is down.

• 1:59:54John Coogan?

  Everything is down. Down Detector is showing that not only is Zoom down, but Google Meet is down as well. I thought we could shift over, but we will have to figure it out. Let me message the rest of our guests. Zoom down, BTW, Google Hangouts, two, working on a fix. Pretty, pretty crazy time. I don't know if there's anyone actually reporting on what's going on. All I'm seeing is that apparently.

• 2:00:27Jordi Hays?

  Well, I have some reporting.

• 2:00:29John Coogan?

  Opening eyes and talks to buy Windsor. Yeah, I was about to say, we should just talk about that. Maybe we just do the timeline and we, and we, and we get the, we get the guests to come back tomorrow and just do a stacked meeting because it seems like we are absolutely under attack.

• 2:00:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:48John Coogan?

  And hopefully, hopefully it resolves tomorrow. But we had, we had two interesting companies coming on. Captions is launching some stuff today. That's the app that, actually, Ev Randall over at Kleiner invested in.

• 2:01:01Jordi Hays?

  An absolute dog.

• 2:01:02John Coogan?

  And I use that app all the time. Anytime you see me post a video that has some captions on the bottom, always captions app.

• 2:01:07Jordi Hays?

  Caption.

• 2:01:08John Coogan?

  And then Dec announced a big fundraiser today, something like $12 million. And we were excited to talk to them. But instead, we might just talk about the timeline.

• 2:01:20Jordi Hays?

  Let's talk about the timeline.

• 2:01:21John Coogan?

  Nothing's working. So yes, this is a scoop from Bloomberg. OpenAI is in talks to buy coding app Windsurf, formerly known as Codium, for around $3 billion per sources familiar. It would be OpenAI's largest acquisition to date. They haven't been super acquisitive, but it makes sense. It's like if they need a wrapper in every single space, maybe they should just go and acquire them. We've been hearing rumblings about like a code-first model, something that's really, really trained. It seems like OpenAI on the API side has become, at least this is the vibe on X is like, oh, if you're going to use Cursor, you're going to use Claude, right? And for most consumers, there's still, yeah,

• 2:02:04John Coogan?

  ChatGPT app, I use 4O or whatever. But for the developers who really care about the quality of the code, that little extra push is what's valuable. And so having both a model that's trained by OpenAI to be specifically good at programming, and then also having something that's popular, like, you know, the wrapper built on top of it, all the integrations that you get from Windsurf, makes a ton of sense. So Zach DeWitt, over at Wing VC, I believe, yeah, partner at Wing VC, I clocked it. Good memory. He says incredible outcome in four years. They did a seed 3 million on 26 posts by Green Oaks.

• 2:02:43Jordi Hays?

  Another billion dollars for Green Oaks.

• 2:02:46John Coogan?

  Another billion dollars for Green Oaks.

• 2:02:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, seriously. Quick plug for Patrick O'Shaughnessy, latest episode with Neil Meta over at Green Oaks. You can go find the episode, Finding Future S&P 500 Companies on Invest Like the Best. Go check it out.

• 2:03:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. Then they did a Series A, 25 million on 215 posts, again by Green Oaks, doubling down. Then Kleiner comes in for the Series B, 65 on 510 million posts. And then 150 million dollar Series C at 1.25 post by General Catalyst. So founders and the team likely own 55%. So that's over a billion dollars in liquidity to the founders and the team. And at 20% of 3 billion, Green Oaks will be just shy of that billion. So, you know, a small size gong for a mere 600 million.

• 2:03:36Jordi Hays?

  I would assume they own. Do you think?

• 2:03:39John Coogan?

  Oh, maybe they did like Pro Rata and stuff.

• 2:03:40Jordi Hays?

  No, but I just assumed they they bought, you know, they continue to buy up, so.

• 2:03:45John Coogan?

  I don't know. I mean,

• 2:03:49John Coogan?

  .25 of 30, what was it? 3 billion, right? It's 750 million, so something around there. Not bad, not bad for

• 2:03:59Jordi Hays?

  An honest day's work.

• 2:04:00John Coogan?

  For a $28 million investment.

• 2:04:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:02John Coogan?

  To go from 28 million in to 750 out.

• 2:04:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting because you often see Green Oaks doing some of these later stage rounds.

• 2:04:09John Coogan?

  Yep, they're known for like growth and being very analytical, but.

• 2:04:13Jordi Hays?

  But doing this one from seed.

• 2:04:14John Coogan?

  They got into seed and the Series A. You'd love to see it.

• 2:04:17Jordi Hays?

  Very impressive.

• 2:04:18John Coogan?

  Your jacket is going viral right now. People love it.

• 2:04:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we should just, since our video stream is still up and all the other platforms.

• 2:04:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, just do some, let's just do more ad reads for the rest of the hour. Yeah, the back is great. Lucy and Ramp. We put, we put our sponsors on here. We also just put companies we're affiliated with.

• 2:04:39Jordi Hays?

  We still have a.

• 2:04:40John Coogan?

  We still have space.

• 2:04:41Jordi Hays?

  This is gonna be, you're gonna have to.

• 2:04:44John Coogan?

  That's legacy, so that's, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, if you're in the audience and you got some dough, maybe you want to get on the jacket. Now's the time to email Jordy.

• 2:04:53Jordi Hays?

  We're almost, pretty much out of inventory.

• 2:04:55John Coogan?

  Get out your Ramp card and sponsor us. We are 100% corporate backed, by the way, just so you know.

• 2:05:03Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:05:03John Coogan?

  We will never ask our audience for a dollar. We're not audience captured. We do what's in the interest of the corporations that sponsor us. Independent media is dead. Corporate media, as I call it, is the future.

• 2:05:16Jordi Hays?

  That's right. Free media for all.

• 2:05:17John Coogan?

  Anyway, speaking of corporate media, the media around Blue Origin, we should go back to this because we didn't get to finish the conspiracy theory.

• 2:05:26Jordi Hays?

  Can we play the video?

• 2:05:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, we can probably play the video if it's up. We'll have the, we'll have the team try and pull that up. But, so, the door opens to the Blue Origin capsule as it descends. Then they say, hey, don't open the door, close it, and then finally they open it up and everyone comes out. And so, this was seen as proof that the mission was faked. And there is a conspiracy here, theory here, but my conspiracy is a little bit more anodyne. It's that they wanted all the cameras to be turned on before they did the big reveal of like getting out of the spaceship. And so they opened the door. Yeah, you can see they opened the door and then they closed the door. Not yet, because you know, NBC is here, but CBS hasn't arrived yet with the truck. Because these capsules, they come down, you can't just be right there. They don't know

• 2:06:12John Coogan?

  exactly where they're going to land in the desert. So if you watch the zoomed out feed at the very beginning, I think, the very beginning of this, you'll see all the trucks are driving, they're, they're scrambling to get to the landing site. Bezos was clearly just the first one in the chase vehicle to be like, I'm gonna get there first. Make sure my wife's okay, you know, check in on the girls, the girls, the girls chat.

• 2:06:33Jordi Hays?

  The girls group chat?

• 2:06:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, he sent the group chat to space.

• 2:06:36Jordi Hays?

  Send the group chat to space.

• 2:06:38John Coogan?

  Send the group chat to space. But oh, Bezos falling down the hole. But he gets right back up. He gets right back up. That is crazy.

• 2:06:46Jordi Hays?

  Oh, my gosh. That is a big drop.

• 2:06:49John Coogan?

  I hope he's okay. I hope he's okay.

• 2:06:52Jordi Hays?

  Isn't that what Brian Johnson is deathly afraid of?

• 2:06:55John Coogan?

  Falling?

• 2:06:55Jordi Hays?

  Like a fall?

• 2:06:55John Coogan?

  Oh, really? I didn't know that.

• 2:06:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:57John Coogan?

  I thought he does leg press.

• 2:06:59Jordi Hays?

  I think it's because.

• 2:07:00John Coogan?

  He doesn't do that much leg press. So he's worried about it.

• 2:07:02Jordi Hays?

  Andrew Coate.

• 2:07:04John Coogan?

  Coate.

• 2:07:04Jordi Hays?

  Coate says, can any space nerds help me understand how the Blue Origin capsule came back down without any reentry burns? Was this a trajectory thing or some kind of superior material used? Falcon Crew capsule for comparison. So Scott Manley jumps in, he says, it only flew at Mach 3, fast enough to reach space for a moment.

• 2:07:22John Coogan?

  And to be clear, Andrew is trolling. He knows what's going on here. He's baiting the timeline to make it be like, oh, it's a conspiracy. But he, he, everyone's like laughing like this is like S tier bait. Because like, he knows that when like this mission, I mean, they've done these missions like all the time, and they never get burnt because they don't go that fast. And so that's what Scott's enumerating here. He's, he's laying it out. Scott says, it only flew at Mach 3, fast enough to reach space for a moment, not fast enough to stay in space. For that, you need Mach 25. As you can imagine, there's a huge difference in the kinetic energy between those speeds. And so the real conspiracy theory here is that this was a, you know, a fun space tourism thing.

• 2:08:05Jordi Hays?

  Marketing for space tourism.

• 2:08:06John Coogan?

  It's, it's, it's marketing for Blue Origin. They did a great job of puzzling together. What is the crew that would probably go the most viral? So it's not just Lauren Sanchez, because that's probably not newsworthy. You gotta put Gayle King on there. So CBS has bought in, but then also throw in Katy Perry, because throwing Katy Perry, you, you create an even wider audience of, you know, she's a global celebrity. Everyone needs to know about Katy Perry going to space. And it just seems like it's a lot of fun. So I would definitely go on one of these. I think this seems like a really fun trip. It's only a quarter million dollars. So I was thinking.

• 2:08:37Jordi Hays?

  They're basically given space trips away.

• 2:08:39John Coogan?

  They are, they are. I was thinking like, there might be a trend of like, send the girls chat, the group chat to do something extravagant like this. We might be seeing this with other tech people. Maybe you don't own a space company, but maybe you just.

• 2:08:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, guys out there, if you want to have a boys weekend.

• 2:08:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:55Jordi Hays?

  Send your wife and her friends to space.

• 2:08:58John Coogan?

  To space. But then they're only up there for 12 minutes.

• 2:09:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, 12 minutes. I mean, still.

• 2:09:04John Coogan?

  Needs to be like, uh, how about, uh, you know, cross the ocean on a sailboat? Then, then the boys can go do the Nürburgring for a month.

• 2:09:14Jordi Hays?

  Get them a wander.

• 2:09:15John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 2:09:17Jordi Hays?

  This was funny. Jeff Tang highlighted.

• 2:09:20John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, this is amazing.

• 2:09:21Jordi Hays?

  So this, this icon, uh, we had Kenan Davidson on the phone, uh, before on the show. He is a funny guy. He put out a competitor landing page, uh, with a comparison page. And it was pretty hilarious as, as every competitive, uh, sort of comparison page should have. Icon checks every single box, including a hundred percent money back guarantee, script writing and creative briefs, audience research, video ads, static ads, creative storage, asset tagging and splitting.

• 2:09:50Jordi Hays?

  Lip sync UGC videos, creative analytics, competitor ads buying, ad manager upload, tier one investors, tier one engineering team, seven day work week. And he did not give OpenAI credit for tier one investors or tier one engineering.

• 2:10:05John Coogan?

  Which is brutal because they have the same investors.

• 2:10:08Jordi Hays?

  Well, and they're probably, Icon's probably using various chat GPT.

• 2:10:12John Coogan?

  Oh, for sure, for sure. And also like, yeah, it's like Founder's Fund is in Open, is in OpenAI and Icon. And so it's just such bait to be like, yeah, we're the only one with tier one investors. Like, no one else in the AI category has tier one investors.

• 2:10:27Jordi Hays?

  That whole AI thing.

• 2:10:29John Coogan?

  Like, this is true in other categories. Like, we talked about general matter. Like, there aren't a lot of.

• 2:10:33Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up the website too, because I actually think it's.

• 2:10:36John Coogan?

  Icon?

• 2:10:37Jordi Hays?

  I think the icon.me website is like fascinating in general. Pull it up real quick.

• 2:10:42John Coogan?

  So, so the story here is that, is that obviously Jeff Tang is very much like trolling, trolling Kenan being like, this is a ridiculous comparison. I love comparison pages, competitor comparison pages, because this is hilarious. And then Kenan says, what a lame comparison chart. This seems to be the website. And so he's, he's like dunking on his own thing just to link to his own website because he just wants the traffic. He's like a total, like, just drive the bottom line, doesn't matter if it's embarrassing, just make the money. And Jeff Tang quote tweets.

• 2:11:12Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so look at this website. This is the most conversion optimized.

• 2:11:16John Coogan?

  This is hilarious.

• 2:11:17Jordi Hays?

  It's actually so, it's actually so chaotic that I actually think it's good.

• 2:11:21John Coogan?

  Investors tier one.

• 2:11:23Jordi Hays?

  Team tier one engineers. I've never even heard the term tier one engineers before. And, but look how optimized this is.

• 2:11:31John Coogan?

  Wow. Us versus them. There it is. Hey, hey, they changed it. They updated it. They updated it. They put OpenAI tier one investors. And wow, they must have gotten some feedback on that.

• 2:11:42Jordi Hays?

  They're selling the product as you can become a founding advisor.

• 2:11:45John Coogan?

  What?

• 2:11:46Jordi Hays?

  To Icon.

• 2:11:47John Coogan?

  What? It's like, it's like, almost like MLM coded. It's like a pyramid scheme now.

• 2:11:52Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I don't know. But they also sell, they sell.

• 2:11:55John Coogan?

  You can just sign up for this, right?

• 2:11:56Jordi Hays?

  You can go and app, like, go on the, go on the pricing page, just click, I'll send it in the chat.

• 2:12:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:02Jordi Hays?

  This is the most chaotic SaaS website I've ever seen. It's honestly, it's honestly kind of brilliant. So look at the pricing page on here. They basically built it like a, they basically built it like an e-commerce.

• 2:12:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, it looks like checkout on e-commerce. Wow.

• 2:12:16Jordi Hays?

  Limited offer, only four spots left. Ends 4/18.

• 2:12:20John Coogan?

  No, no, no. For a SaaS product?

• 2:12:22Jordi Hays?

  And scroll down. They sell a premium banana, which is, I guess, a banana you can just check out with Apple Pay.

• 2:12:29John Coogan?

  This is so hilarious. I mean, at this point, it seems like with him, with him like retweeting these and engaging these, like he's in on the joke. And so it's gotten way funnier. Like if this was just, oh, he's really, really serious about all this stuff. Like he really thinks that he has two investors and OpenAI doesn't.

• 2:12:45Jordi Hays?

  They got Saquon Barkley in here, too.

• 2:12:47John Coogan?

  Did they? Who knows? That is the thing with like this comedy landing page. I don't know what's real anymore. Like if.

• 2:12:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, hopefully the product is real.

• 2:12:55John Coogan?

  Hopefully the product is real. We, I mean, we did talk to the Ridge guys. They said they were using it. It was pretty useful. I think obviously it's an early stage company. Uh, Kenan is trying to get some eyeballs, get some attention and just kind of break through the incredibly crowded market of like AI tools, right? And so you've got to make some noise to be able to just get, get through. But, uh, we'll have to put that whole site in the truth zone, figure out if Saquon's really in Icons, uh, icon.me.

• 2:13:26Jordi Hays?

  So far, to our knowledge, he's in Anduril and Ramp.

• 2:13:29John Coogan?

  That's what he's disclosed.

• 2:13:30Jordi Hays?

  Two company portfolio.

• 2:13:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, but he could be ripping checks all over the place, all over the valley. We'll have to figure it out. But speaking of Ramp, time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more, all in one place. Go to ramp.com. Switch your business to ramp.com.

• 2:13:43Jordi Hays?

  Switch your business to Ramp.

• 2:13:45John Coogan?

  And, uh, Ryan Peterson had a good post. He said, uh, a 1% daily improvement compounds over a year to a 37X improvement over the entire year. But I think he's thinking too small. So I asked ChatGPT, what does a 100% daily improvement compound to over a year? If you compound by a hundred percent every day, you're doubling each day. That's exponential growth, baby.

• 2:14:08Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:14:08John Coogan?

  So if you start with one as a base and double it every day for a year, by the end, you will be 1.52 times 10 to the 109th power better than you were at the start of the year. That's one followed by 109 zeros or.

• 2:14:23John Coogan?

  1.52 novem decillion in the short scale doubling every year, every day for a year gives you 1.52 novem decillion times your original value. This is absurdly huge. A classic example of why compounding growth explodes with even modest periods.

• 2:14:45Jordi Hays?

  You won't understand.

• 2:14:46John Coogan?

  So if you're thinking about improving 1% daily, just do 100% daily and then you'll just be so much better off. So risk off. Risk off. It's great. Soundboard is not broken. They haven't hacked the soundboard.

• 2:15:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this has been our most chaotic show today.

• 2:15:02John Coogan?

  It has, it has.

• 2:15:03Jordi Hays?

  Facing cyber attacks.

• 2:15:04John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:15:04Jordi Hays?

  We have a new soundboard.

• 2:15:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:15:07Jordi Hays?

  Zoom is down. Google Hangout is down.

• 2:15:09John Coogan?

  You're not in a suit.

• 2:15:10Jordi Hays?

  I'm not in a suit.

• 2:15:11John Coogan?

  I think it's a more relaxed show. We're just having fun with it. It's okay. It's okay. The show must go on. That's the most important thing.

• 2:15:17Jordi Hays?

  Well, you know what service is not down, John?

• 2:15:19John Coogan?

  getbezel.com.

• 2:15:20Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:15:22John Coogan?

  And the Bezel Concierge, they're working overnight. They're working overtime. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Pick up a, you know, they're not gonna, they're not gonna hack your GMT Master Batman. They're not gonna, they're not gonna hack your Submariner.

• 2:15:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:40John Coogan?

  They're not gonna hack your Paul Newman Daytona.

• 2:15:42Jordi Hays?

  I'd like to see him try.

• 2:15:43John Coogan?

  I'd like to see him try. It's gonna keep, your, your, your Patek Philippe Cubitus is still gonna tell time after the AI overlords have destroyed all of the data center infrastructure in this country. We'll see.

• 2:15:56Jordi Hays?

  Should we pull up this post from Josh Kushner?

• 2:16:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, sure.

• 2:16:01Jordi Hays?

  He says, so we talked about this yesterday.

• 2:16:03John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 2:16:04Jordi Hays?

  Somebody asked, do VC funds invest in competitive companies? Kyle Harrison pulled up a chart that said evidence would point to yes, showing how many of the big venture capital firms have invested in multiple, or at least a couple foundation model companies. And Kushner over at Thrive Capital has, I don't even think he's on the chart because he's only invested one. And he's invested in a very important one and he likes, I think, staying off of charts like this for the most part. I think Benchmark, or sorry, Jeff Lewis and the team have also just gone all in on OpenAI. So there's still quite a few.

• 2:16:50Jordi Hays?

  But again, I think that this is an evolution of venture capital and it is a natural evolution that firms will invest in competitive companies. And I do think that firms generally do a great job of keeping firewalls up and not, you know, sharing information that would be, you know, damaging to any, any of the individual companies.

• 2:17:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I, I think that obviously there are secrets in these foundation labs and there are algorithms and just even just, you know, the path down the R and D tech tree, like reasoning models came from Ilya Sutskever, working on Q-Star at OpenAI. When he leaves to start SSI, you know that there's going to be a reasoning component, a reinforcement learning component on top of LLMs. There's going to be self-play. Like this worked well at OpenAI. He takes that and you can't patent that idea of like a reasoning model or applying reinforcement learning on top of LLMs. And so not only

• 2:17:54John Coogan?

  can you not control that or patent that or keep that out of the hands of Grok or Thinking Machines or Mistral or any of these other companies, but I don't think that the VCs are the vector for these types of leaks. I think it's like the AI happy hours and the parties in San Francisco where people are talking and they're like, oh, did you see this paper that someone just published? Like, or somebody, you know, re-implemented the open source version.

• 2:18:18Jordi Hays?

  And I think this is founders in the early part of their career, I, I've seen them be worried to pitch a firm because they were invested in something that was competitive or adjacent to what they're doing. And the reality is, is your competitors are going to find out about what you're doing generally.

• 2:18:35John Coogan?

  Yes. That's not necessarily your moat. It's rarely your moat. Like the Coca-Cola formula rarely applies, but at the same time, like it is reasonable to say, if I'm, if I'm really partnering with a firm and they're going to take 20, 30, they're going to build a big position, they're going to be on my board, do I really want them to have this weird? Like incentive, yeah, this weird conflict where they they find a great VP of engineering and they're like, well, I could send it to you or I could send it to your direct competitor that I'm also invested in. Like any sort of like value add does get, does kind of get spread thin. But I guess it, I guess it gets back to this idea of like, how commoditized is the foundation model layer? And how different will these companies look over, over time?

• 2:19:20John Coogan?

  I mean, you know, Andreessen here is in OpenAI and XAI. Those two companies seem at each other's throats, like, like OpenAI is launching a X clone, XAI bought X. And so they're like really direct competitors. But at the same time, like, if OpenAI is, is buying windsurf and developing more consumer products. And then SSI is saying, hey, we're staying out of that entirely. And then Mistral seems to be focused more on B two B and government implementation. And Anthropic is very much on like the API side. For example, you could imagine that the, that foundation model just becomes like cloud.

• 2:19:59John Coogan?

  And at that point, like, you wouldn't be that upset about investing in like a sales force and a pager duty and a, and a Twilio. Like, these are very different companies over time versus if they

• 2:20:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's clear the end state is not just 10.

• 2:20:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:20:13Jordi Hays?

  You know, chat apps.

• 2:20:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, so, so it's like the foundation model layer may commoditize, but that doesn't mean that the companies are going to commoditize. Like Lyft and Uber are true, true supplements to each other. Like they are, they are not complementary. And in any way, you're either spending money on Lyft or Uber. They're very similar experiences. Now, one might be way better than the other.

• 2:20:33Jordi Hays?

  Businesses.

• 2:20:33John Coogan?

  For a long time, it was capital fight.

• 2:20:34Jordi Hays?

  Because people would open both apps.

• 2:20:36John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:20:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was capital fight. Which is faster, which is cheaper?

• 2:20:38John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep. But, but if, if OpenAI winds up looking completely different than thinking machines or SSI or Mistral in a few years, that like, there could be. Winning companies that are very different, but just built on the same, you know, foundational technology.

• 2:20:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I, and I assume that we'll see even some of the foundation model companies merge.

• 2:21:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:03Jordi Hays?

  I mean, we're yet to see that because they're still extremely well-funded.

• 2:21:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. Didn't, was it Sequoia that did Intel and Nvidia? I mean, they're like a decade apart, but in theory, they're both like chip companies, right? But they operate in very different spaces and they have very different models now, Fabulous versus Integrated. But, uh, you know, there are some funds that have stayed the course. Josh Kushner over at Thrive is serial monogamist. Delian also chimes in to say, sorry, can someone explain to me why we're on this? If we only have one arrow? Doesn't that mean we're not spraying and praying?

• 2:21:39Jordi Hays?

  Josh managed to stay off the list. Founder's Fund was not as lucky.

• 2:21:43John Coogan?

  Was clocked on there. Yeah, but it is, it is weird that like this is, I mean, I guess it's just, I guess this original, uh, this original diagram was just to show like what funds are in what, uh, are in what foundation model companies. But then very quickly became, you know, oh, they're investing in multiple, uh, but and then it makes less sense for, for FF to be on there.

• 2:22:05John Coogan?

  Anyway, did you see Black Flag launched today? The founder sent me this. It's an incubator for, uh, hard tech companies and they are split across a variety of, uh, different industries.

• 2:22:17Jordi Hays?

  Well, John, I'm actually launching an incubator for incubators.

• 2:22:20John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:22:20Jordi Hays?

  So I'm going to reach out to these guys and see if they want to be a part of my incubator, incubator.

• 2:22:25John Coogan?

  The meta incubator, I mean, I think that's just being called the LP, but, uh, Harpoon Ventures is the, is the, the main firm behind this and they're in collaboration with Shield Cap VC, who we've talked to before, and Incutel is an investor, which is the CIA's venture fund. So that's, uh, pretty, pretty fun and good news. I mean, I think that there's a lot of, a lot of folks that, you know, I, I think you could say like YC is the incubator for defense tech and YC has been open to this, but at the same time, like there might be some benefits to having an incubator for like specific hard tech companies. So, you know, you maybe amortize the cost of.

• 2:23:04John Coogan?

  Some like CNC machine or some like, you know, shared hard workspace or some CapEx stuff, but I don't know if they're planning to do that.

• 2:23:12Jordi Hays?

  No, I think it's awesome. I just want to see.

• 2:23:14John Coogan?

  Just more of this stuff is great, more competition. You know, companies are now going through multiple programs. I mean, we talked to Ali and it seemed like some of those companies had done, had done Neo and then also done Teal fellowships and then the Teal fellowships have all the Z fellows and then they also raised YC, exactly. It's like, yeah, there's an overlap of these. There's just like, at the end of the day, it's just like money.

• 2:23:36Jordi Hays?

  For, for Black Flag, I don't know anything about it other than this graphic, but what's cool about specifically defense and aerospace and anything government related is that there's an entire, they can provide a very clear benefit to founders that maybe don't have a defense aerospace background.

• 2:23:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:23:57Jordi Hays?

  But can sort of, they can really accelerate that knowledge and, and networks and things like that and allow people that maybe were building in SaaS to come in and, and play in a new arena. So.

• 2:24:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, if you wind up with 20K from one of these incubators and it's no strings attached money, why not throw it in public?

• 2:24:19Jordi Hays?

  That's only Neo, by the way. Neo is the one that.

• 2:24:22John Coogan?

  I mean, we've heard stories about Teal fellows investing their, their money. They're profitable because it's, it's, it's kind of no strings attached money.

• 2:24:29Jordi Hays?

  They're not recommending venture dollars. These are grant, basically grants.

• 2:24:33John Coogan?

  But, uh, I mean, why don't we have an accelerator for hedge funds? Like you go in, they stake you. I know they exist, but like, you know, you just, the first like high frequency trading shop from YC, that's going to be a banger company. Come in, it's like, your, your demo day slide is just like, we started with 500K from YC. AUM's 5 million now. We 10x that.

• 2:24:53Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:24:53John Coogan?

  We got a couple more 10xs. It's a billion dollar company. Get in now.

• 2:24:57Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:24:57John Coogan?

  Here's the LP agreement. We're not, we're not doing safes.

• 2:25:00Jordi Hays?

  No safes here.

• 2:25:01John Coogan?

  That'd be funny. Uh, anyway, you know about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields and they're trusted by millions, folks. Um, anyway, I think we've been through most of the timeline, most of the great posts.

• 2:25:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this was great. This was a chaotic show. I'm excited to figure out why all of our. You know, internet services are down.

• 2:25:23John Coogan?

  We need a polymarket on this right now. We need a polymarket. Why did Zoom and Google Hangouts, Meet, Video, whatever they're calling it these days, why did all the, why did all the services go down? Was it a cyber attack? Was it not? I want to know about it on Polymarket. That's our other sponsor. So go to Polymarket and check it out. We'll try and get a market up ASAP.

• 2:25:43Jordi Hays?

  And I just want to say, I've, I think I've gotten at least 30 individual messages about the TVPN jacket from people.

• 2:25:50John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:25:51Jordi Hays?

  Who are wanting it.

• 2:25:51John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:25:53Jordi Hays?

  We weren't even planning to release, to sell these.

• 2:25:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Should we, should we tell them? It's, it's 9.99, but financing it will be available. You can buy now, pay later. It's, it's 12 payments of $99 if you want one. So that's just kind of what the market will bear.

• 2:26:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And we're going to donate the profits to All In, which doesn't run.

• 2:26:15John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no. We're going to donate the profits to my next watch on Bezel.

• 2:26:19Jordi Hays?

  That's right. Okay.

• 2:26:21John Coogan?

  Get Bezel.com, folks. They got concierges. They'll find you a great watch.

• 2:26:25Jordi Hays?

  John loves watches so much. He's running two Bezel ads on the same show, but thank you for tuning in, folks. I'm excited for tomorrow's show.

• 2:26:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:32Jordi Hays?

  Do we want to talk about who's coming on?

• 2:26:33John Coogan?

  We're coming back. We're going to bring on tons of people. We're going to stack it. Maybe we'll do a six hour stream to make up for the lost half hour. I feel like if you lose a half hour, you owe the fans four hours.

• 2:26:42Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:26:43John Coogan?

  Right?

• 2:26:44Jordi Hays?

  Every half hour, it's four hours.

• 2:26:45John Coogan?

  No, I mean, we, we, we got a great show tomorrow. We got Delian coming on. We got Shom Sankar from Palantir.

• 2:26:51Jordi Hays?

  CTO of Palantir.

• 2:26:52John Coogan?

  CTO of Palantir. First forward deployed engineer. He's been in the company for like 20 years. It's incredible. I was hanging out with him and he was a public company and I was like, so what's next? Like you're a public company. Like what's your goal? And he was like, oh, we got to get into the Fortune 500. And I was like, that's an insane goal. I've never heard anyone like frame it like that. And then like a couple of months later, I had to send him a congrats message because it was like, they are now officially in the Fortune 500. That's sick. Congrats.

• 2:27:18John Coogan?

  And then we're also gonna have some robotics CEOs come on, work on a couple of different robotics companies and talk about those. And of course, we'll be bringing you to the news, talk about whatever's top story. I think we covered the Nvidia stuff pretty well, but I'm sure there'll be more developments.

• 2:27:32Jordi Hays?

  I just realized we completely missed a major story, which was Figma.

• 2:27:36John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, the S1 dropped.

• 2:27:38Jordi Hays?

  Did an S1.

• 2:27:39John Coogan?

  Congratulations to everyone who's been working on Figma.

• 2:27:42Jordi Hays?

  Amazing milestone.

• 2:27:43John Coogan?

  I mean, it is one of those rare companies where it is an overnight success. It's been like, what, 14, 15 years, but.

• 2:27:54John Coogan?

  But congratulations to Dylan Field and all the folks over at Figma. What a roller coaster ride, years in stealth, back and forth with Adobe.

• 2:28:02Jordi Hays?

  Wasn't it like four years before they shipped a product?

• 2:28:06John Coogan?

  Something like that, and they were still raising money. It was sheer force of will, classic overnight success, and you love to see it.

• 2:28:13Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 2:28:14John Coogan?

  We're gonna be diving in deeper to Figma. We should tell the whole story. We should do the whole, a whole deep dive on the company. It's a fascinating story.

• 2:28:19Jordi Hays?

  And we will be at config.

• 2:28:21John Coogan?

  Yes, we will. We're gonna be doing a post-game interviews from config, interviewing some of the greatest designers in the world, some entrepreneurs, some investors, all sorts of folks in the design world. That should be fun. I'm newer to the design world than you, not a, not a Figma daily driver like you, but I'm excited to learn a lot about it.

• 2:28:42Jordi Hays?

  You're a creative athlete, though.

• 2:28:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, creative athlete. Yeah, a little bit. I mean, there's creative stuff all over. Design is in everything in this world. Anyway, thank you for watching.

• 2:28:54Jordi Hays?

  All right, folks.

• 2:28:54John Coogan?

  We will see you tomorrow.

• 2:28:56Jordi Hays?

  Have a fantastic afternoon. We are gonna call up Tim Cook.

• 2:29:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:29:00Jordi Hays?

  David, Daniel Elk from Spotify. Ek. Try to get these services back online.

• 2:29:07John Coogan?

  And Sundar, because Google went down. That's unacceptable. I think our SLA says no downtime.

• 2:29:12Jordi Hays?

  And who's the Zoom CEO again? It's Eric.

• 2:29:14John Coogan?

  Eric.

• 2:29:15Jordi Hays?

  You on?

• 2:29:15John Coogan?

  I just know him by Eric. When I text him, I just say, what the hell is going on?

• 2:29:19Jordi Hays?

  We'll put them all in a group chat, and we'll say, let's get it together, guys.

• 2:29:23John Coogan?

  Let's get it together. Let's step it up. Now is the time. You can't be slacking off.

• 2:29:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:27John Coogan?

  Can't be slacking off, guys.

• 2:29:28Jordi Hays?

  Every minute of productivity counts.

• 2:29:30John Coogan?

  It does.

• 2:29:30Jordi Hays?

  All right. Have a great afternoon. We'll see you guys tomorrow.

• 2:29:33John Coogan?

  Bye.