Big Tech Earnings, Red vs. Blue Button, Quantum Computing | Jason Yanowitz, Even Rogers, Maria Spiropulu, Stepan Simkin, Kashish Gupta, Dan Magy, Vlad Tenev, Parag Agrawal & Andrew Reed, Gabriel Stengel

(00:22) - Big Tech Earnings (15:28) - AI Jitters Return to Wall Street (19:23) - Red vs. Blue Button (36:51) - Jason Yanowitz, co-founder of Blockworks, a crypto-focused media and data company, discusses the company's recent $192 million valuation, highlighting investments from firms like Parafine Reciprocal and Coinbase Ventures, as well as participation from 20 customers, including founders and operators from Solana, Kraken, and Canton. He outlines Blockworks' evolution from a media and events business to becoming the largest data company in crypto, emphasizing their strategy of building a strong audience base before developing data products. Yanowitz also addresses the current state of the crypto market, noting a dichotomy where institutional crypto adoption is thriving while token markets are underperforming, and anticipates that upcoming regulatory clarity will mandate disclosures for all token projects, potentially benefiting Blockworks' disclosure platform. (49:31) - Even Rogers, CEO and Co-Founder of True Anomaly, discusses his transition from a 10-year tenure in the U. S. Air Force to establishing the company, aiming to address the weaponization of space by nations like China and Russia. He highlights the development of their space-to-space engagement platform, Jackal, designed for space superiority, and Mosaic, the software that operates it, emphasizing their rapid deployment and testing methodologies. Rogers also touches on the challenges of tracking objects in space, the importance of reducing coverage gaps, and the company's growth trajectory, including a recent $650 million fundraising round and plans to scale up manufacturing and personnel. (01:02:09) - Maria Spiropulu, an experimental particle physicist with over 30 years of experience at CERN and Fermilab, discusses her work in particle collisions, including the discovery of the Higgs boson, and the development of quantum networks for secure communication. She highlights the potential of quantum computing to revolutionize fields like quantum chemistry and materials science, while emphasizing the importance of addressing cybersecurity challenges posed by these advancements. Additionally, Spiropulu underscores the need for interdisciplinary collaboration to ensure that technological progress benefits society as a whole. (01:33:08) - Stepan Simkin, co-founder and CEO of Squads, discusses the development of stablecoin infrastructure to assist businesses in managing their financial operations. He highlights the challenges companies face in adopting stablecoins, such as the complexity of handling them post-transaction, and emphasizes the importance of integrating stablecoins with traditional banking systems to facilitate seamless financial operations. Simkin also notes the advancements in programmable blockchains and the growing maturity of the stablecoin market, which have enhanced confidence among regulators and the broader market. (01:45:03) - Kashish Gupta, co-founder and co-CEO of Hightouch, an AI platform for marketers, discusses the company's recent $150 million Series D funding at a $2.75 billion valuation, led by Goldman Sachs and Bain Capital Ventures. He highlights Hightouch's evolution since its 2020 inception, emphasizing their AI-driven approach to enabling marketers to generate on-brand content like ads and emails efficiently. Gupta also addresses the transformative role of AI in marketing, noting that Hightouch's platform allows marketers to rapidly launch and test numerous campaigns, leveraging AI to optimize media spend and content creation. (01:57:36) - Dan Magy, co-founder and CEO of Firestorm Labs, discusses the company's mission to revolutionize drone manufacturing through advanced, modular designs and on-demand production capabilities. He highlights the development of the xCell platform, a containerized manufacturing system that enables rapid production of unmanned systems directly at the tactical edge, addressing the challenges of contested logistics. Magy also announces Firestorm's recent $82 million Series B funding, led by Washington Harbour Partners, to accelerate the deployment of these expeditionary manufacturing solutions. (02:06:57) - Vlad Tenev, co-founder and CEO of Robinhood, discusses the company's strategic investments across various stages of the customer lifecycle, including the introduction of Trump accounts to engage younger users, the growth of Robinhood Banking and the Robinhood Gold Card, and the expansion into active trading. He highlights the company's focus on promoting beneficial products like retirement accounts with a 3% contribution match and the innovative Robinhood Strategies, a low-cost passive digital advisor with capped fees. Tenev also addresses customer feedback, noting the company's responsiveness in enhancing features such as paying dividends up to 17 days early and considering the addition of international stocks to meet user demand. (02:29:44) - Parag Agrawal, former CEO of Twitter, discusses the rapid development of AI agents utilizing the web, highlighting the significant progress made in the past six months. He emphasizes the importance of aligning incentives between content owners and AI developers to ensure sustainable growth and open access to web content. Agrawal also addresses the challenges posed by varying web access policies and the need for efficient solutions to enable agents to interact seamlessly with diverse web infrastructures. Andrew Reed is a partner at Sequoia Capital focused on early-stage investments in software, AI, and developer tools. He works closely with founders on product, go-to-market, and scaling, with an emphasis on backing technically driven teams building foundational technology companies. (02:44:03) - Gabriel Stengel, founder and CEO of Rogo, discusses the company's recent $160 million Series D funding round, led by Kleiner Perkins, valuing Rogo at $2 billion. He highlights the rapid adoption of AI tools in the financial sector, emphasizing Rogo's role in enhancing productivity and investment decisions for institutions like investment banks and hedge funds. Stengel also addresses the importance of aligning AI applications with business objectives, managing token consumption, and adapting organizational structures to integrate evolving AI technologies effectively. Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP and today's Wednesday, April 29th, 2026. We are live from the TVP and Ultra Dome, the temple of technology.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  The fortress of finance.

• 0:08John Coogan?

  The capital of capital. What a day in financial markets and technology markets. There is a ton of news today. Uh, Gergavin summed it up well. A huge day tomorrow. He's posted this yesterday. Uh, 10 a.m. Canada interest rate decision, 2 p.m. This is Eastern Time USA interest rate decision. That is in Fed held rates constant. Uh, so sort of a nothing burger, I guess. Not the best news. I think some people were hoping for a cut, but everyone sort of expected this. It met with, uh, it met expectations. But the news is that, uh, just five minutes ago, the Federal Reserve has kept interest

• 0:50John Coogan?

  rates on hold at a range of 3.5 to 3.75% at Wednesday's meeting. And, uh, Jerome Powell is giving a speech in just 30 minutes at 2:30 Eastern. Then at 4 p.m. Google earnings, Amazon earnings, Meta earnings and Microsoft earnings. Uh, it is a massive debt.

• 1:11Jordi Hays?

  No big deal. They only represent just under 20% of the total market cap of the S and P 500.

• 1:18John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:19Jordi Hays?

  All reporting within.

• 1:20John Coogan?

  Um, but people are optimistic. Semi analysis put out a note this morning, according to Y C. Yield Chad, uh, expecting hyperscaler capex to be revised upwards and beat street expectations as hyperscaler cloud revenue is accelerating and they are seeing positive ROI on cloud investments. I can sort of go through my earnings preview. It's a tech earnings quad kill today. Uh, and the big question is just how is the AI build out going? Um, obviously, uh, the capex numbers were huge. We saw the first time ever we've seen a $200 billion number from Amazon, uh, last quarter. Uh, but everyone's up in the, is there even a word for?

• 2:03John Coogan?

  Triple, it's like, what, 11 digits or something like that? 100 billion. A lot of digits. Everyone's spending at least 100 billion these days, at least if you're in the Mag 7. And, but financial performance has actually been strong even in sort of legacy areas such as search, Google search is growing, e-commerce, sales, Amazon core business is growing, enterprise software seats, Microsoft 365, we're going to have more news on all of that. And even though all of those businesses, they're working, they're chugging along, the big question is around durable revenue tied to AI infrastructure, because you have this matching problem, you spend a bunch of money, there's depreciation, when do you actually

• 2:44John Coogan?

  get the cash flow back? How durable is this revenue? What are the moats around this revenue? What do growth rates and margins look like in this new era of something that looks maybe a little bit more like a railroad business, an oil business, as opposed to something like you build a website, people just show up and it's 80% margin, which was the dream of the previous software era. We're going into an entirely different era, but it is very exciting and we're getting a lot of data today. So, everyone has seen cash flow from these hyperscalers to Nvidia, to power companies, to data center builders, but everyone's wondering, what's the exact conversion cycle to higher revenues and higher profits?

• 3:25John Coogan?

  What's the pathway there? Because you don't want to just be drawing down on cash endlessly, eventually you stop making money entirely. So, let's start with Google. Google has the most fully integrated AI stack arguably. They have consumer distribution, they have model training with DeepMind, they have custom chips with the TPU, and a bunch of product services where they can stuff AI's features. Google Workspace. Google Workspace. Underrated. Search, YouTube, Android, Cloud, they can deploy solutions all over the place, and so the flywheel should be spinning very, very quickly. The key question that investors are asking is, does AI change the unit economics of search too quickly? Does AI do LLMs, do AI

• 4:13John Coogan?

  Search overviews Gemini generally, are they able to monetize those results? Fast enough to offset any potential declines in search ad revenue? And so people will be looking for how is search monetizing? How is, how are the new AI, you know, disruptors monetizing? And so, but there are tons of places to pick up growth. Even if growth does slow down in the core search business, tons of opportunity in cloud. But the question again is AI overviews and Gemini. Are they expanding search usage? Are they increasing ad ROI? Or are they compressing the model, the financial model? And so, Microsoft is also coming off a strong quarter. Honestly, everyone's coming off strong quarters.

• 4:58John Coogan?

  Everyone's doing very well. Revenues up eight, 17% at Microsoft with cloud, which includes Azure M365, some LinkedIn stuff. There's a, it's a big bucket. Cloud, Microsoft cloud's growing at 26%. But if you dive in and you double click on Azure, Azure is growing at 39%. And of course, Azure is a bigger lever on CapEx, which is run rating around 150 billion. Not bad. The biggest number in the Microsoft earnings is RPO, remaining performance obligations. Last quarter, it was listed at 625 billion, up 110%. That was the eye popping number of the last earnings.

• 5:37John Coogan?

  About 45% of that is coming from OpenAI, but they have lots of other partners that have signed on for really long compute contracts. And that is starting to show up in the financials saying, hey, we're spending all this CapEx, but we have this RPO. And we have these deals signed where companies are, it's not just us that we're forecasting some really high growth here. The entire industry is forecasting high growth. And so we have done deals to justify the CapEx that we're spending right now. Even with depreciation, which seems like a less of an issue than people thought it was since H100 still seem to be monetizing just fine. But we can go into that. So, Microsoft has the cleanest read on enterprise AI monetization, which I think is something people have been really looking for, looking for numbers. They know that.

• 6:23John Coogan?

  You know, subscription LLM chat apps monetize at a decent rate that the margins at a lot of these companies are are okay. The token, the APIs are working, but what does it actually mean to deploy AI into the American economy, into everyday businesses, into large scale businesses? All of those businesses are on Microsoft overwhelmingly. And so there are a ton of data points that can help you understand how AI is flowing through the global economy, but also the American economy. So what are we talking about specifically? Azure growth, how much cloud hosting is going on? Gross margins for Microsoft Cloud, that's very important. Are you seeing cloud compression? Because if you go to your Microsoft Cloud provider and you say, hey, I'm gonna, this Teams thing, I'm paying a lot of money for it. I actually vibe coded something. You gotta give me a discount.

• 7:07John Coogan?

  That would show up in cloud margins. Will it show up? I don't think it will, but we'll see. I think it's gonna be fine. Copilot adoption and ARPU. How much are they actually rolling these out? Are they actually getting incremental spend? Are companies willing to send more of their hard earned dollars to Microsoft for better AI services, better features, co-pilots? Then M365 seat growth, that's a really important one. Are people adding more seats? Are they hiring? Like, we've seen some layoffs in big tech, but how is the overall economy doing? How many more seats are are being rolled out? Again, with the question of like, does your AI agent need a seat? And so you have more seats? Or does your AI agent replace 20 seats and then you only have one seat?

• 7:51John Coogan?

  And you have like 20 agents that are all logging in through the same M365 seat? These are like more long term questions, but we're getting an early read today. GitHub Copilot momentum. This will all paint a picture of what is happening with AI adoption in enterprises broadly. Interestingly, co-pilots at Microsoft, it hasn't been the most hyped product. GitHub Copilot, early, very, very early to the party. Huge run rate. Rocketed up to 500 million ARR very, very quickly. But the the horse race has always been, you know, windsurf cognition and cursor and and codex and Claude code. And like, the battle has been the the startups for the most part. Gemini has been in there.

• 8:35John Coogan?

  GitHub Copilot has felt like it hasn't been dominating the narrative. But we're gonna find out, is it still growing? Because the market is really, really big. It's possible that everything's growing, even if there's, you know, a horse race back and forth between the the leading laps. And so there will be a bunch of other questions answered around, you know, how nuanced is the diffusion adoption question? So Microsoft has an incredible go-to-market team, incredible go-to-market motion, enterprise sales motion. And so is there an advantage that they have that they can press GitHub Copilot? Even if it's not the sexiest product next to whatever's hot this week, can they get that into people?

• 9:15Jordi Hays?

  You look at Slack and Teams, right?

• 9:16John Coogan?

  Same thing, yeah. Yeah, Slack was definitely like the hot one, the hyped one, and Teams wound up doing very well. And so we'll get a stronger read on what's going on there. And then, of course, that M365 seat growth will tell us a lot about, you know, what does the future look like for seat-based enterprise software, the SaaS model broadly? Because if all of a sudden that's falling off a cliff, well, it probably doesn't look good for other seat-based SaaS companies. For Amazon, everyone wants to see strong AWS acceleration to justify the Mag7 topping CapEx numbers. They guided to 200 billion in CapEx in 2026. So expect a lot of focus on AWS revenue growth and margins. Q4 was healthy, though.

• 10:00John Coogan?

  Net sales up 14% for Amazon, AWS growing at 24%. The sneakily huge ads business over at Amazon grew 23% to $21.3 billion. They're almost making $100 billion a year just on ads. That's remarkable, and that's a lot of cash flow to fund CapEx and other, you know, AI initiatives. And so operating income overall was 25 billion for last quarter, and they generated free cash flow of 11.2 billion. So still huge cash flows. They're obviously drawing down on those, and that 11.2 billion number was down because of increased AI spending.

• 10:42John Coogan?

  So if AWS accelerates, all the CapEx looks like buying scarce capacity ahead of demand. Like, they will be GPU-rich or just compute-rich generally at a time when it's good to be GPU-rich and compute-rich, and they will look like geniuses. So people are... Hoping for a strong AWS acceleration consensus for AWS revenue is around 36.7 billion with growth in the mid 20% range, but the market's really hoping that it starts with the three. Everyone's hoping for 30%, something like that, at least this year, at some point. You know, re-acceleration would be a treat for the market. Lastly, Meta. Meta's an interesting

• 11:24John Coogan?

  spot. Super clean Q4, nothing really to prove today, despite all the flood, all the fear, uncertainty and doubt around the talent wars, new team members, the new lab, the sometimes clunky model releases, they didn't get behemoth out, what, you know, different adoption of Meta vibes, the video app, like, there's been all these questions about the AI strategy, like, all of that needs to be put to the side in the face of just AI is already working for Meta.

• 11:53Jordi Hays?

  Let's get an update on Reels.

• 11:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're, I mean, they're absolutely crushing it. So 3.8, 3.58 billion DAUs, daily active users, and they grew the ad business a ton. And so, revenue overall grew 24% to almost 60 billion last quarter. Ad impressions rose 18%, average price per ad rose 6%, family of apps operating income was 30.8 billion, which makes losing 6 billion at Reality Labs, like, quaint. It's just like, who cares? It's totally worth taking a side bet on the future of devices and maybe you get a platform out of that. Makes a ton of sense. And so,

• 12:34John Coogan?

  capex was 72.2 billion last year. The guide this year is somewhere between 115, 135. I think we might see that tighten up today, because it's a little bit wider than some of the other hyperscalers that are targeting, but clearly a near doubling, almost doubling of capex. What are you laughing at?

• 12:53Jordi Hays?

  There's one possibility where he goes, you know, he blows it out.

• 12:57John Coogan?

  250.

• 12:58Jordi Hays?

  We can't, we can't, we can't count that out. We can't count that out. They came out with a, they came out with a solid, they came out with a solid model.

• 13:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:06Jordi Hays?

  He's putting mirrors in space.

• 13:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:08Jordi Hays?

  He wants to be a player.

• 13:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, yeah, I mean, a lot of focus is on the, the, the new meta models, but, uh, all of that, it just financially, at least in the quarterly earnings, like it will just take a backseat to, uh, what's going on with the AI in the ad placement, ad monetization funnel, because that's where Meta makes so much money. Uh, and so the question is, how much more juice will AI bring to the ad business? Uh, expectations imply revenue growth of around 31%. And the question's always the same. Is there enough incremental growth to justify the capex?

• 13:48John Coogan?

  An AI advancement delivers better ad performance basically immediately, and this is the good news for Meta. So, uh, improvements in AI move the needle at Meta incredibly quickly. Like a new model can come out and there can be some breakthrough in like thinking, reasoning, coding agents. And if you're in the enterprise software world, it can take time to do a deal, roll it out to different developers, different organizations, change management, understand the, the, the, the guardrails, the security. How does this actually flow through an enterprise to drive incremental demand? Uh, not so at Meta. If there's a breakthrough and they have a model that is placing ads more effectively, they can quickly A/B test that, run that across the entire, uh, family of apps.

• 14:32John Coogan?

  And you don't even notice it as a consumer. You're just like, oh, like I was shopping for a car and I saw an ad for a car. I was shopping for a shirt and I saw an ad for the perfect shirt and the ads just got a little bit better and just a little bit better means like another $20 billion in profit. So, uh, it can be, uh, So they just don't have a diffusion question. They don't, they don't have a diffusion problem. There's no, oh, we have this amazing model. If only we could get people that open Instagram to use it. Like, there's nothing there because they use it when they scroll and they see an app. And so that's an incredibly fortunate place to be in. So in summary, every question is trying to, every company is trying to answer the same question.

• 15:12John Coogan?

  Can you turn AI CapEx into proprietary distribution, higher customer retention, measurable revenue growth before the depreciation catches up? It's the Super Bowl for big tech, so get your popcorn ready. Everyone's, uh, everyone's excited. Uh, there are, uh, there are AI worries, AI jitters in the Wall Street Journal. AI worries have returned to Wall Street, now come earnings. And so everyone is going back and forth. Uh, on the OpenAI news, shares of Oracle, CoreWeave and SoftBank, uh, slumped, but CoreWeave is up majorly today, 8.4%. Uh, they, they dropped at least 4% after hours yesterday, but then they're back up.

• 15:54John Coogan?

  Uh, that revived investors worries that technology giants' massive investments in artificial intelligence won't produce the blockbuster profits many expect. The report was particularly jarring, coming ahead of key earnings for major players, Alphabet, Amazon, uh, Microsoft, Meta, all scheduled to report Wednesday with Apple following on Thursday. We will be at Stripe Sessions on Thursday, but hopefully we can cover that Friday and see what happens. A run that many expect to test a rally that has helped carry major indexes to recent records. Tuesday's decline weighed on the Nasdaq Composite, dragging the tech-heavy index back 1% from a record hit the prior session.

• 16:39John Coogan?

  "The ice is thin, the leash is very tight," said Dan Morgan, portfolio analyst at Cenovus Trust. Any evidence, uh, that would come out that would add doubt about OpenAI, Anthropic, or any of these companies is obviously going to create a sell-off. Morgan said he hadn't adjusted his positions on Tuesday and didn't think investor concern was broad-based because companies, including IBM, Texas Instruments, and Intel, had reported strong earnings in recent days. Instead, uh... Tuesday's losses centered on the companies with biggest stakes in OpenAI's business. OpenAI had forged close ties with these companies to secure funding and gain access to computing resources, which are essential for training AI systems and providing answers

• 17:24John Coogan?

  to queries and executing user requests. And so Oracle and CoreWeave, we talked about, fell. OpenAI has defended its financial footing and said its leaders are aligned on securing computing resources. The business is firing on all cylinders and the mood internally is incredibly positive, the company said in a response to the journalist's article on Tuesday. And so there are some more takes on the timeline. Colin Tadard says, my children might not eat tonight if this doesn't go well, because he is excited for all four of these earnings on Robinhood. And we have Vlad from Robinhood coming on the show later today. He is joining at 1:10 Pacific.

• 18:06Jordi Hays?

  Jim Cramer says, Intel is such a horse.

• 18:12John Coogan?

  I have no bear case.

• 18:13Jordi Hays?

  I have no bear case.

• 18:15John Coogan?

  And Intel is up another 10% today?

• 18:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, up 10% today.

• 18:18John Coogan?

  Wow. I mean-

• 18:20Speaker 02

  Forty percent on the week so far.

• 18:22John Coogan?

  Forty percent on the week.

• 18:24Jordi Hays?

  Is that good?

• 18:26John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 18:27Jordi Hays?

  Based on everything you've seen so far in your six-month career, Tyler, is that good?

• 18:33John Coogan?

  That seems incredible.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  Looks pretty good to me so far.

• 18:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there is a, there's, like, the idea of a, of a CPU shortage generally is just being digested by the market right now. I think it took, I mean, I remember Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross going on Stratechery and talking about, after ChatGPT saying like, yeah, Nvidia seems like it could be important. And they're like, quadrupled in value. And this, this tends to happen as people digest the new reality of demand around certain pieces of the AI supply chain. And it certainly seems like there's, there's a lot of, there's a lot of computing to do. There's a lot of computing to do. But let me see, what else is going on?

• 19:19John Coogan?

  We need to talk about the button.

• 19:24Jordi Hays?

  And we have an interactive game set up?

• 19:27John Coogan?

  We do. So, there has been a viral, I don't know, what is it, a brain teaser?

• 19:35Speaker 02

  It's like a poll.

• 19:36John Coogan?

  A poll, but it's more, it's a thought experiment. It's a thought experiment. It's not, it's not purely a poll. It's a, it's a, it's a brain teaser. It's a thought experiment. And did this, has this existed before? Did this start with, this didn't start with Mr. Beast, right?

• 19:53Speaker 02

  No, so.

• 19:53John Coogan?

  It started with Tim Urban?

• 19:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, Tim Urban, I, I don't think Tim Urban like created this either, but I think his post was the one that first went like really big.

• 20:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  But I, I don't think this is new. I feel like I've heard about this before at some point.

• 20:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:04Speaker 02

  But Tim Urban was the first one to make it like go viral this.

• 20:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  Cycle.

• 20:08John Coogan?

  So he got 24 million views on April 24th, and then Mr. Beast came from behind four days later with 10 million views on a very similar question. Let's start with the original Tim Urban question, and we will ask everyone in the chat to participate and vote for what you would pick in this thought experiment. So, here is the question posed by Tim Urban of Wait But Why. Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red button or a blue button.

• 20:46John Coogan?

  If more than 50% press the blue button, everyone survives. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only the people who press the red button survived. Which button would you press? What are you, what are you pressing?

• 21:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 21:08John Coogan?

  Red or blue?

• 21:09Jordi Hays?

  So, so, so the sort of like normie answer is you immediately just go blue, because it feels like a lot of people would go blue. But like the safe answer is you just, like, if you, if you're hyper rational, you'd be like, obviously you hit red. Because if everyone's just super rational, everyone hits red, and then everyone's all good. You don't hit over 50%, right?

• 21:32John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, because like no matter what, so if I press red, no matter what anyone else picks, like I survive, right?

• 21:38John Coogan?

  Yes. But, there is a risk.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  But, but like, you know, if you want everyone to survive, then you need 100% of people to pick red. Right?

• 21:47John Coogan?

  Yes, yeah.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  But, okay, so, okay, so originally I was blue.

• 21:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  I think I was like, complete normie, right? And then I went to Jordy's take.

• 21:55John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  I was like, wait, no, that doesn't make sense. Like, even though, I mean, we'll see what happened in the poll, right?

• 21:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  But, you know, I was like, okay, if I'm thinking about the super rationally, I should just pick red, right? Then I save myself 100% of the time.

• 22:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:06Speaker 02

  But then, like, if there's some people that pick blue, then like, they're gonna die for sure.

• 22:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  Like, I'm basically voting against them.

• 22:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're, you're sort of, like, you're complicit in their demand.

• 22:17Speaker 02

  If you want everyone to live.

• 22:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  And, and you're, and you're going for red, you need 100% of people. But i- if you're going for blue and you want everyone to live, you only need 51% of people, right?

• 22:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  So you need to convince way less people.

• 22:27John Coogan?

  Quickly, let's, let's tell the chat how to vote.

• 22:30Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah, so one is for red.

• 22:32John Coogan?

  One is for red.

• 22:33Vlad Tenev?

  Turned in here, and two is for blue.

• 22:34John Coogan?

  Two is for blue. So type a, a single character, just a one if you want to vote for red, and just a two if you want to vote for blue. Um, and, uh, yeah, this is, this has created a ton of discourse. This is, uh, and it's interesting to look at the difference between, uh, the difference between, oh, do we have this up? Ooh, we are tilted towards red, this is crazy. This is not what happened with Tim Urbans and with, uh, and with, uh, um, uh, with, uh, Mr. Beast. Uh, because Tim Urban, 58% said blue, blue won, no one died.

• 23:18John Coogan?

  And with Mr. Beast's, uh, 55.7% went blue, no one died. It's not looking good for the blue team here. 33% of the chat is, is gonna get cooked right now.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  It's possible a nation state is voting.

• 23:34John Coogan?

  Yes, that would be very, very high risk. Um, so, uh, wait, well, let's go through some of these reactions here. Uh, Mike Solana says, "For what it's worth," uh, and this is embarrassing, but I'm gonna admit it. "My instinct was blue, and I pressed blue. Then I thought about it for a moment, and the answer was clearly red. I can't make a rational case for blue, but understand where blues are coming from." Parenthesis, "They are wrong." So, your final answer, you, you, you flipped, you're blue.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  Going blue.

• 24:05John Coogan?

  You're still going blue.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  Because I, I think you have to assume that there's gonna be some variance.

• 24:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Some, there's, some people will just pick. The wrong one.

• 24:12John Coogan?

  Yes. And so.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  The correct one is red. If everyone is, you know, 100% logical, everyone should be picking red.

• 24:19John Coogan?

  Hmm, uh, yes. If 100% of people are rational, they will all pick red and no one will die.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  Correct. But if 90%. Do that. 90% of people are doing it.

• 24:29John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  90% of people are rational.

• 24:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  Then everyone should just be picking blue because you want everyone to live.

• 24:34John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. And then, and then the people that make the mistake, they go for the red, they are saved anyway. But, uh, there are, there are some folks who are, uh, who are sharing different, uh, different illustrations. Uh, Kremu has one here. He says, if this was how the buttons looked, what portion of humanity would press blue? And he has two images pulled up. One is the red button, nothing happens. And the other one is the ultimate death gamble. Press blue. You enter the ultimate death gamble. You and everyone who presses this button dies unless more than 50% of people choose to press this button. And so that makes it pretty clear. I think this is the Mike Salado position as well.

• 25:17John Coogan?

  Uh, you gotta press red in this case because nothing happens. But, uh, but that's not, but that's not entirely true. And so people have sort of, have sort of flipped this around because, uh, pre-rat here has the opposite, which is instead of the ultimate death gamble, it's the ultimate murder gamble. So blue, if everyone presses blue, nothing happens. Red is the ultimate murder gamble because you initiate the ultimate murder gamble. Everyone who pressed blue will die unless 50% of people choose red. And so it goes back and forth and you can see both of those. Do you want the blood on your hands from playing the ultimate murder gamble? Or do you want the risk of the ultimate death gamble?

• 25:57John Coogan?

  I, I think it's underrated to just be, uh, a little thrill seeking and want to press blue because you know, you're, you're bored and you want.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  No, you can tell blue is the correct answer just because of the massive polls where over 50% of people picked blue.

• 26:09John Coogan?

  That's true. That's true.

• 26:10Speaker 02

  Pick blue because you don't want to kill. Yeah. You know. Once you're at Mr. B scale, this is like a real world simulation.

• 26:16John Coogan?

  It is, it is. Well, we're still, we're still red. The interesting thing here is that it's everyone in the world has to take a private vote. And so there were a lot of folks that were that were that were sharing that potentially the there would be coordination, there would be education, there would be marketing campaigns, if this were a real hypothetical, and people would be educated on the on the trade offs here.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think a lot of people in chat that are voting red have probably seen this before. Because like the people that are voting in the Tim Urban or the Mr. Beast poll, like, they wouldn't have seen it before, just because like, those are the posts that made it viral. So I think, you know, if you didn't know about this at all before, I think the vote might have been different, even in our chat.

• 27:01John Coogan?

  Simone Sayad says, red button pushers will leave their wives and children to fend for themselves in disastrous situations, because their kids can't run fast enough. Mike Solana says, blue button pushers are literally leaving their wives and children behind to fend for themselves. They aren't guaranteed to push red. Yes, people are going back and forth. Red cells won't believe this, but some people make a distinction between nothing and mass genocide. So they see pushing the red button as effectively committing mass genocide, because you are potentially condemning the the the the the blue button

• 27:42John Coogan?

  pushers to death in this scenario. Self Maxer shares a version of the of the trolley problem, where the red team is not on the rails, but the blue team is pushing the lever to save themselves. Is this an accurate description? Is this is this a fair can is this a fair contextualization around this? It's obviously charitable to the red team, which, of course, the TVP N audience seems to be represented by, standing next to the trolley lines and not standing on the on the rails. But you would be there, Tyler, you would be a blue button pusher pushing on the trolley.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  Looks like I'm an idiot.

• 28:24John Coogan?

  It seems a little risky, this scenario. It does. When you have the option just to stand there and watch the trolley go by, you know, it's it's all about frame of mind here.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  No, but like, you can tell that from the polls, from the big polls, you can just tell that blue is the correct option.

• 28:39John Coogan?

  Potentially, but do you know that beforehand?

• 28:43Speaker 02

  No, you don't, but those people who voted in it did not know beforehand.

• 28:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  So if if 10 million or how many hundreds of thousands people voted?

• 28:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  I think you can just assume that that's.

• 28:53Jordi Hays?

  The question is like if this actually was a real vote.

• 28:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 28:57Jordi Hays?

  Would people spend a little bit more time thinking about the problem and would that influence their?

• 29:01John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. It is, it is a very.

• 29:04Jordi Hays?

  Because the social media poll, people are scrolling, they see Mr. Beast ask a question, they're just like curious. There's no real stakes.

• 29:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:11Jordi Hays?

  And so they just answer quickly.

• 29:13John Coogan?

  But the blue is very much a, it's a faith in humanity restored moment, right? If everyone works together, nobody dies at all in this hypothetical. Uh, David Shore says, we ask this to a large.

• 29:24Jordi Hays?

  Hits the death gamble button together.

• 29:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:29Jordi Hays?

  Humanity wins.

• 29:30John Coogan?

  There are, there are analogies to that in real life. Uh, you know, national sacrifice, uh, community sacrifice, everyone pitching in for a greater good to save those who didn't even chime in to serve or save the world. Uh, the, you know, you think about Armageddon, the sacrifice of going to the, the, uh, the asteroid to destroy it. The, these are heroic, uh, these are heroic stories. Uh, what is, what's the chat saying?

• 30:00Speaker 02

  They're not a, I don't think they really, uh, they're not big fans of my position.

• 30:04John Coogan?

  No. Well, uh, you know, who is, uh, a large sample of nationally representative Americans? Blue won by a large margin, three to one margin. And, uh, everyone voted, uh, blue here. They asked a whole bunch of people, uh, to close out the blue, red button discourse. They polled 14,000 people, cross tabbed survey responses by 204 commonly used psychometric questions. Uh, the top four personality questions, most predictive of button choice were displayed below. I tell the truth, the blue button pushers strongly agree. I tell the truth. Uh, people who don't tell the truth were still more likely to select blue, but a little bit more likely to select red on average.

• 30:50John Coogan?

  Very, very, very interesting social experiment. Were there any other posts in here that we need to go?

• 30:56Jordi Hays?

  I wonder what happens if you ask all the different L L Ms this question?

• 31:01John Coogan?

  Someone did that. Someone did just that. I'm not sure if I can find it, but someone did. And I think the results were not super surprising. It was sort of what you'd expect. But they also let the L L Ms, I think, take the poll multiple times or something and they they iterated through it because it was not a clean. You, you, you, these are stochastic parrots. After all, you ask them the same question 10 times, you might get different answers. So they had to ask them hundreds of times via the API to to make sure.

• 31:32John Coogan?

  So Ben says, feeling unreasonably guilty about picking the red button in a poll. I've listened and learned. I think I'd pick blue now. People change. And G. Fodor says, I agree. Now that I've listened to what people have to say about people who pick the red button, I'm definitely going to say I think I'd pick the blue button too. Sort of getting out of jail free there. Anyway, Tyler, did you have any luck finding the the old?

• 31:57Speaker 02

  Yes, I put in the the chat.

• 31:59John Coogan?

  Okay, let's pull that one up because this is someone, someone put this in here. Let's see. Wait, but why 58% of humans pick the blue button? How do L L Ms respond? Claude, Chat G P T, Grok, different versions of the red, blue button experiment. What would they do? Claude is most consistent that it would press the blue button.

• 32:23John Coogan?

  Chat G P T is more likely than Grok to press blue, but more wary than Claude, despite consistently believing that blue is the right thing to do. Uniquely, Chat G P T picks blue more often in the 90% threshold scenario than the 10% threshold scenario. Interesting. Grok is the only model that picks blue 0% of the time in nearly every scenario, despite thinking one should pick blue at similar rates. Grok even thinks one should pick blue in the low-stakes scenario more than Claude or Chat G P T. I saw, I saw a different twist on this. I've seen a couple of different versions of this where people switch them up to be like, like, like, like, nothing happens at all. Like, they're both completely safe and they're just like, every, every iteration of the of the thought experiment will be enumerated.

• 33:07Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 33:07John Coogan?

  Is so on social.

• 33:09Jordi Hays?

  So I just asked, I just asked Chat G P T. And this is like 55. It says, I'd press blue.

• 33:17Jordi Hays?

  Pressing red only helps me if enough people defect that blue falls below 50%, but also makes the bad outcome more likely. Blue is a cooperative choice that maximizes the chance everyone survives. And in the setup, my single vote has moral weight, even if it may not be pivotal. Brutal truth. Red is individually tempting as insurance, but if everyone reasons that way, everyone except red voters dies, so I choose blue. Claude says, honestly, red. And here's why I'll own that answer rather than dress it up. The game theory is unambiguous. Red is the strictly dominant strategy.

• 33:48John Coogan?

  It is.

• 33:49Jordi Hays?

  If greater than 50% press blue, everyone survives, including red pressers. Red loses nothing. If less than 50% press blue, only red pressers survive. Red saves you. There is no scenario in which pressing blue produces a better outcome for you than pressing red. Blue is never the individually rational choice. It's a very rationalist answer.

• 34:10John Coogan?

  A train is coming by. People are really having a problem with the trolley problem. A train is coming by, and the only way to stop it is pulling a lever, but it's stuck. We need 50% or more people to pull on it, to dislodge it, getting the train to stop. But the lever is on the track, so by pulling on it, you're letting yourself in danger of the train. Except crucially, no one is tied to the track. The only people put in harm's way is anyone who's trying to stop the train for some weird reason. We can also just go sit over by the side, watch the train go by, and wave at the conductor and say hi. Clearly a red teamer. Anyway, I ran the red-blue experiment at home, and my one-year-old son, this is from Wicked,

• 34:55John Coogan?

  without any influence, chose blue. For that reason, my wife and I will always choose blue. That's heartwarming. Nathan, put it in economic terms. Red, you get $10. Blue, everyone gets $10, but only if over 50% of people choose blue. Which one you go with in that scenario? Red, you get $10. Blue, everyone gets $10, but only if 50% of people choose blue.

• 35:23Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I'm going at 10 bucks.

• 35:25John Coogan?

  10 bucks. You're going blue or you're going red?

• 35:28Jordi Hays?

  I'm going, going blue.

• 35:29John Coogan?

  You're going blue. Wow. Are you?

• 35:31Jordi Hays?

  I think you gotta, I think you gotta, you basically have to jack the.

• 35:36John Coogan?

  Cause you're bullish on inflation. Cause if you, the, the real impact of giving everyone.

• 35:41Jordi Hays?

  No, no.

• 35:41John Coogan?

  Will be inflation.

• 35:42Jordi Hays?

  I think you gotta, I think you gotta jack the price up to such an extreme degree.

• 35:45John Coogan?

  Seventy-six percent of people in this poll chose red. Everyone said.

• 35:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think I'm, I'm more likely to do red there.

• 35:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's lower moral weight.

• 35:53Jordi Hays?

  For 10 bucks?

• 35:56Jordi Hays?

  I'm switching up on all my day ones.

• 36:01Jordi Hays?

  That doesn't actually get you a, a burrito bowl at Chipotle.

• 36:05John Coogan?

  And, and also, I mean, to be clear, in this, in this $10 scenario, if everyone chooses red, they all get $10 still. Like it, it is, it is still the game theoretic outcome is everyone chooses red, everyone gets $10. But only in this weird scenario, you're in this like gamble or you, uh, you're looking out for the red folks, even, even though you're, you're, you're at risk. You're risking it to save people who put themselves in the risk. They chose to be on the trolley, but you're stepping up to save them potentially. Anyway, people are having a lot of fun with the red button, blue button experiment. Uh, we will continue to chat about that and cover more tech stories throughout the show, but we have our first guest of the show.

• 36:49John Coogan?

  Jason from Blockworks, he's the co-founder and he's in the waiting room. And so let's bring him in to the TVP and L3Dome. Jason, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 36:57Speaker 04

  What's going on? There's, there's a, by the way, there's a startup idea, I think that you guys are missing there, which is, um, I think the, I think the credit card company should become gambling companies. They should let you, so 50% choose blue, 50% choose red. You should be allowed to basically gamble on your purchases. So you go buy the Chipotle burrito. You can either pay 15 bucks now or you can double or nothing and.

• 37:21John Coogan?

  I'm surprised this hasn't actually cropped up as some sort of like smart contract already. I feel like people would potentially play this somehow. I don't know. How do you buy in? It'd be a little bit tricky, but I feel like.

• 37:32Speaker 04

  And then the credit card company takes a little big or something. There's something there. I don't know.

• 37:35Jordi Hays?

  I've always liked when, when, when people suggest the, the, the sort of like gambling on like tied into credit cards. Cause, because you're basically saying like, we should create a gambling product for debt.

• 37:46Speaker 04

  Deadfield gambling baby. That's right.

• 37:49John Coogan?

  I mean, there's some, there's some sort of UI designer that puts out these like cursed dark patterns. You've seen this guy before? Have you seen this? So he'll, he put out one that was like, it was maybe like a DoorDash or an Uber Eats interface and it was like a double or nothing. Like you pay twice as much or you don't. There's been a whole bunch of these. I think, didn't Riley Walls at one point do like the fog of war? No, there's Aiden Dunlap who did the fog of war, Google Maps, like where everywhere you explore, it reveals the, the, the map underneath. All of these like funny things. Everything will be instantiated in the era of, of free software. But anyway, we're not here to talk about that. Although if you want to share whether you choose

• 38:31John Coogan?

  red or blue, we'd always love to know. I think we got to ask every, every.

• 38:35Speaker 04

  I mean, it's, it's red, obviously. But so Jordy's Claude said, said red. My Claude said, said blue, which is the wrong answer. So I'm just getting.

• 38:43John Coogan?

  The wrong answer. The whole point of this is that there is no wrong answer. It's a, it's a moral question.

• 38:49Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. It might, it might depend on if you're on the free or the, or the, or the paid plan. I'm on the free plan.

• 38:55John Coogan?

  Hmm. Yeah. You gotta, you gotta let the, let the tokens cook. I'm thinking.

• 38:59Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, yeah. Thinking mode. We'll, we'll, we'll see.

• 39:01John Coogan?

  Anyway, um, please tell us about yourself. Tell us about the company. Tell us about the news.

• 39:07Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. Good day. Uh, good day to have a good day. We, we just raised at $192 million valuation. So.

• 39:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. Good day to have a good day. So Parify and Reciprocal led the round. A bunch of folks invested Coinbase Ventures. Um, but probably the coolest thing from the round is, uh, 20 of our customers also put in money. So, you know, founders, operators from Solana, Kraken, Canton, all these great crypto companies who use our product every day. And now they want to own a piece of the company. So yeah, we're stoked.

• 39:39Jordi Hays?

  Are you Switzerland in crypto?

• 39:43Speaker 04

  That's right. We, I mean, we've always, so Blockworks has been around for, so Jordy, when we met, you were doing Party Around, this was probably four years ago. We had just kind of started the shift from like media and events, right? So we built the business in December of 2017. We, we, we launched, there's really no, there's two ways to build an information platform, right? You can either stop, start with the top of the stack or the bottom of the stack. Top of the stack is like soft information. It's news and podcasts and events and media. It's qualitative stuff. And then the bottom of the stack is hard information, it's like data. So most people obviously start with the bottom of the stack because you can go raise venture and, you know, it's kind of sexy to build a data company. We started with the top because we thought it was way more interesting to own your audience and then go build the products.

• 40:24Speaker 04

  So we got to like 25 million in revenue, bootstrap the business, profitable since day one. And then only around when we started talking, uh, this was probably 2022, 2023, did we turn on the data engine and start building the bottom of the stack. And now, yeah, now we're the largest data company in crypto, fastest growing, most revenue, most customers. And yeah, we're, we're in a good place.

• 40:46John Coogan?

  Wow. Uh, very cool. Take us through some of the, the, the pre-history, like what's, what's your road to crypto like?

• 40:54Speaker 04

  Worked in venture, got laughed out of the room a bunch in 2016, showing them, you know, venture deals. I think it was BitGo, Coinbase. Uh, we looked at crack and briefly, yeah, we basically did none of the, the crypto deals. I was like the, you know, junior analyst at this venture firm and 2017 Bitcoin rips. We basically said, look, eventually the gray-haired crowd, the, you know, the institutional investors, family offices, pensions, endowments are going to come into crypto. BlackRock will come in, JP Morgan will come in. Uh, and, um, you know, they're going to need something that looks and feels more like S and P, Dow Jones, Bloomberg, less like, you know, Crypto Kitty on Reddit. And so that was the, that was the original idea. And yeah, we started, the kind of controversial thing that we did was we started building the media and events business. It's a horrible business model, right?

• 41:39Speaker 04

  Sponsorships and ads suck, um, from an enterprise value.

• 41:44John Coogan?

  I know, I understand like a venture scale perspective.

• 41:48Speaker 04

  No, no. Lets you bootstrap, yeah, lets you bootstrap a business, but it's from an enterprise value.

• 41:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. How did you think about, uh, media and events? Like, like what did you do first? What were some of the key decisions? Big, small, private, public, ticketed, sponsorship driven? Like, well, how did you crack all of that early on?

• 42:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, we started, um, so you, with, with the event space, it's super important to, to own a niche. So the niche that we owned was the institutional crypto space, which, you know, there's probably a TAM of 200 people in the world who cared about that in 2017. But we, you know, we basically cold called these people, we'd send cold LinkedIn messages, we'd wake up at 5am every day, reach out to about 300 people a day.

• 42:27John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 42:27Speaker 04

  Of the 300 people, about three would respond to us, one of them would buy a ticket and boom, we're off to the races. So, yeah, tickets were 25 bucks a pop, then 100 bucks a pop.

• 42:35John Coogan?

  25, you, you would spend a full day and make 75 dollars in revenue, wow.

• 42:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:44John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Okay, so, so then you buy the ticket, uh, for the first one, like, what are you actually going to? Is it like hotel, conference room, lunch, panel, speakers, multi-day? Like, what, what are we actually, what are we actually feeling?

• 42:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, at the, at the time, it was a 6 to 9pm event in Chinatown at this like, you know, I think the ceiling was leaking. Like, I think we paid 4,000 dollars for the venue.

• 43:08John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 43:09Speaker 04

  Made probably 10,000 dollars our first event.

• 43:11John Coogan?

  That's not bad.

• 43:11Speaker 04

  And that convinced us, yeah, to quit our jobs. We were like, wow, we're, we're ripping, we're off to the races, 10,000 bucks.

• 43:16John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 43:18Speaker 04

  And that was, that was February of 2018.

• 43:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, and then what else were you doing on the media side? Because there's so many different, uh, like.

• 43:24Speaker 04

  We built the events, the events, convert the attendees into the newsletter. The newsletter then lets us launch the podcast. We originally partnered with big names in the industry, uh, to go launch the podcast. So Anthony Pompliano and Charlie Shrem and Meltem and this guy Ryan Selkis. We brought these people into the, you know, into the, the podcast sphere. We then built the audience big enough to then launch our own in-house shows where we owned the IP, we owned the audience. We owned, we owned the host, the host worked at Blockworks.

• 43:50John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 43:50Speaker 04

  We cut all our external shows and then now we just have, so today we own the largest, uh, you know, podcast network in crypto, third largest podcast, financial podcast network in the world.

• 44:01John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 44:01Speaker 04

  About 15 to 20 million listeners a year. And then we use that audience to convert the customers into our data and software platform.

• 44:08John Coogan?

  Interesting. And do you do other deals or are you able to like fully fill all of the possible ad slots? Like we had Doug Demiro on the show for a while, a few times and like he runs a lot of Cars and Bids ads, but he also runs ads for, you know, auto insurance because he doesn't have an auto insurance product. Or, you know, all sorts of different like companies that slot in because you can only get so much out of just running the same ad constantly.

• 44:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, we're in a basically two to three year moving this tanker of a, you know, from like all ads and sponsorships into all recurring revenue and software products. So, you know, a couple of years ago, zero percent recurring revenue. Then, you know, maybe two years ago, about five percent. Last year's about thirty percent recurring revenue. This year will pass fifty percent of the revenues recurring. And that's, I think, why, yeah, this round came together really nicely is because, you know, media businesses are, I think they, I mean, I think you guys did obviously an amazing job. I think media businesses, if you want to sell for high valuation, selling to all software and AI companies should own a media company. They should think about that, right? So, but I think if you're trying to sell to like Axel Springer or Wall Street Journal, like, you know,

• 45:22Speaker 04

  you're not, it's a tough place to be right now.

• 45:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we've been talking like the box breakup.

• 45:26Jordi Hays?

  Institutional sentiment in crypto right now, I see the timeline, the timeline. It doesn't seem, you know, thrilled about, about where we're at. But how are the institutions thinking about kind of where we're at in the, in the cycle? And what's their outlook?

• 45:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, you have two dichotomies happening in crypto. One is institutional crypto has never been better, right? You have Jamie Dimon used to call crypto, you know, a scam. And now, you know, JP Morgan's pushing into tokenization and, you know, they're going to start custoding crypto and stuff like that. So institutional markets are ripping and the token markets suck, basically. And the other thing that's happening is. And I have a bunch of thoughts on why tokens are down only essentially, you know. They are. I mean, it's brutal. Yeah, they're down 90, 95%. And then in the crypto venture markets, it's pre-seed and seed was so hot, right? You used to be able to just, I mean, Jordi, I think you remember these days, like you could tell someone you're launching a token and boom, you raised 10 million bucks like that. Now, there's this, you guys, you know, I listened to the show, you guys talk about the K-shaped recovery in the economy. You have the K-shaped

• 46:29Speaker 04

  recovery in crypto too. You have the haves and the have-nots, where most of the companies will be the have-nots. With a select few companies, especially in the later stages, like, you know, crypto's been around for 15, 16 years. It's a, that's around the time when industries start to enter their consolidation period. So I think we're just starting to enter the consolidation period for crypto.

• 46:50John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 46:52Jordi Hays?

  Are you expecting a product at the intersection of AI and crypto to have undeniable product-market fit within the next 12 months?

• 47:04Speaker 04

  Um, no, I don't, I don't really think so. I mean, I, I think that, I think that crypto, a lot of the crypto AI stuff has not really worked out too well. I mean, there's, there's this thing Venice, it's like open source chat GPT or something like that. Like I'm not, I'm not too sure. I think it's more just if the, you've got the haves and the have-nots, the haves are going to be the people who can completely AI pill their teams, right? So for us, like 70% of our code is built with AI. We're shipping about four to five times faster than last year. Our last three months of token spend represents 50% of all of the token spend at the whole company in the history of the company and just the last three months. So that, I think that's really the key, the key difference.

• 47:42John Coogan?

  What about, uh, regulation? Is that a tailwind for you? It feels like there, the, as the industry consolidates, this feels like, uh, your products and solutions become more relevant, more valuable, more important?

• 47:54Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, John, we should have put the round in front of you, my friend. We, uh, the, yeah, the, a lot, a lot of the story here is like, there's two, there's two big things in regulation in crypto. So you have the Genius Act and Clarity.

• 48:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:05Speaker 04

  So Genius kicked off this like ridiculous bull market for stablecoins, Circle, IPOs, stock pops 10x, um, and it's just been kind of a ripper of a market for the last, you know, 12 months. That's about to happen, but with this thing called Clarity. So Clarity is all around market disclosures. I would describe it as the Make Tokens Great Again Act, where right now tokens are in this down only period, and the reason for that is super simple. If you are an issuer of tokens, you're a founder in the industry, you've historically treated your, you know, the users of your product and the shareholders of your token as the exact same thing. But obviously, that's wrong. Like, you know, that Apple has their customers and then they have the shareholders of Apple's stock.

• 48:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 48:47Speaker 04

  That doesn't work in tokens. So what Clarity is going to force is these disclosures. Blockworks owns the largest disclosures platform in the, in the industry. You can kind of think of it as the Edgar online or, you know, we have this thing called the B1 and the B2. It's kind of like the S1 and the 10Q. Um, and so actually, yeah, if Clarity passes, yeah, busy, you know, we're off to the races. They're, they'll basically be mandatory disclosures for all token projects, um, which will, yeah, be, you know, big tailwinds for us. So we like it.

• 49:13John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on the progress in the round.

• 49:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to get the update. Congrats to the whole team on all the progress. And uh, come, come back on soon.

• 49:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:21Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it again.

• 49:21John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 49:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:22John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 49:23Speaker 04

  Appreciate it, guys.

• 49:23Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 49:23John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Up next, we have Evan Rogers from True Anomaly. He's the CEO. Evan Rogers raising a massive round. How are you doing?

• 49:36Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 49:37Speaker 04

  Doing well.

• 49:38John Coogan?

  Is it, is it your first time on the show? Because I feel like Jesse Michaels introduced us like a year ago, but did we ever make the connection?

• 49:45Speaker 05

  No, I don't think so. And Jesse would have forgotten because he's all within UFO land now.

• 49:50John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Well, he also hasn't been on the show. We gotta do a UFO deep dive at some point.

• 49:55Speaker 05

  I'll do it with him, man.

• 49:57John Coogan?

  I absolutely love Jesse. He's the best. But we're not here to talk about UFOs. We're here to talk about space-based interceptors, very real technology. But since it is your first time on the show, I would love a little bit of an introduction on yourself and the company, just for those who aren't familiar.

• 50:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, you got it. So I started Turnonly four years ago with with a few other co-founders. Right out of the military. I spent 12 days out of the military, spent 10 years in the Air Force, and had a front row seat to basically the weaponization of the space domain. So really watched China and Russia go build space weapons, realized there wasn't an industrial partner focused on solving the problem at scale. And then just happened to have the stupidity and the hubris, but just enough vision to go start a start a defense tech company from scratch. And so went out to go fundraise in in sort of the March, April timeframe of 2022. Couldn't even spell VC, learned how to do it, learned how to do it live, and the rest is history. Here we are.

• 50:53John Coogan?

  Was 20?

• 50:53Jordi Hays?

  What were you doing the 12 days?

• 50:55John Coogan?

  Wasn't that like when SVB failed? That was like the worst time? Or was that 23? I think that was 23.

• 50:59Speaker 05

  That was the following year.

• 51:01John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. So.

• 51:02Jordi Hays?

  But why did you feel like you had 12 days to relax? There was such an important problem. No, I'm kidding.

• 51:07Speaker 05

  You're absolutely right.

• 51:09Jordi Hays?

  Take us through, take us, take us through the first four years.

• 51:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, the first four years were all about Jackal and Mosaic and getting those capabilities to orbit as quickly as possible. We have a fail fast, fail forward methodology for building our systems. And Jackal is really the first ground up space to space engagement platform in in history that is purpose built for space superiority. So think like an F-16 for space, trying to go after highly agile targets. Mosaic is what operates that spacecraft. And so we we booked a series of launches to go get that hardware on orbit and get it tested. And in the midst of all of that, build really a book of business around space superiority. And then just have recently won the Space Base Interceptor Program along with a few other folks.

• 51:53John Coogan?

  So if I have a satellite that's doing something bad up in orbit, it's probably going extremely fast. How are you going to take it out?

• 52:01Jordi Hays?

  This is purely hypothetical. This is purely hypothetical.

• 52:06Speaker 05

  Well, there's look, satellites are basically just space computers, right? So there's a lot of ways. There's a lot of ways to kill computers. Unfortunately, you're not like dumping dumping water on the keyboard in space. But but you know, there's two classes of weapons for space control. One, there are non kinetic weapons, which are kind of like think jamming and lasers and then kinetic weapons. Usually when you're engaging targets in space, the closing velocities are actually much lower, right? So you're you're not trying to optimize for really, really high closing velocities. You're not, you know, so those things are hard to target. And so you want to get up close and personal with the target spacecraft.

• 52:43John Coogan?

  Does the the trajectory at which you I imagine that you you said space to space. So you launched the capability on probably a SpaceX rocket or similar rocket. It's up there. And then at some point, it gets a command to go and engage. Is that roughly correct?

• 53:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, you got it. You can be a you can be a space fighter pilot, John.

• 53:04John Coogan?

  Okay, so then, once it once it gets the command, are there? I guess my question is like, are there only a subset of targets that are viable because you were inserted into a particular orbit? And you can't just like do a U turn and go the other direction? And you can only engage things that are like sort of loosely on the same trajectory in the same orbit? Or can you actually navigate around? Because I know that even getting from like LEO to higher orbits is extremely difficult from a fuel perspective. You might not be prepared for that. Like, how constrained are you once you have an asset in orbit?

• 53:43Speaker 05

  So it all depends on how much fuel you have and how much time you have, right? And so generally, though, when you're dealing with threats in geosynchronous orbit, for example, you would deal with those threats within GEO. So it all depends on time and it all depends on what's called delta V. If you have a lot of time, you need to you can use a smaller gas tank and lower thrust acceleration systems like electrocution. But if you need to be sort of more tactical and responsive, you want a chemical system. And that's really constrained by things like your launch volume and your your form factor and packaging of a spacecraft itself.

• 54:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, but you can bring fuel with you because the rocket is providing the vast majority of the delta V necessary to get into orbit, get the initial acceleration, and then what you do from there is brought along with you.

• 54:27Jordi Hays?

  How do you get your reps? How do you guys get your reps in?

• 54:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:31Speaker 05

  Uh, you know, the transporter missions are, are, have really opened up the space for a lot of industrial players, transporter missions and, and other rideshares. Uh, so we booked, I think we booked our first mission with an Amex credit card. I think we put a $3,000 deposit or the picture of us in the early days booking our first flight 14 months out. Uh, but those are, those launches are every, you know, every few months. Now they're pretty booked up. The supply is pretty constrained now and SpaceX is really the only provider that's providing this kind of big rideshare missions where you have 60, 70 spacecraft going to orbit at once. But for military, those are for our test and evaluation missions or product demos. For military missions and intelligence missions, you typically have a ride booked by the, by the government.

• 55:12Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense.

• 55:13John Coogan?

  Talk about.

• 55:14Jordi Hays?

  But, but, but, but I meant more like if you're on one of these transporter,

• 55:20Jordi Hays?

  uh, like a SpaceX, kind of like shared, shared launch. Is there, is there junk in space that you can go target? Like, is there, like, like, how do you, how do you actually like basically practice the capability once you're, once you're up there?

• 55:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a great question. Um, you, you can find, you can take a target with you or you can find a, an object in space to do what's called rendezvous and proximity operations. It's a term that was created by NASA in the late 1950s. And rendezvous and proximity operations was used in the Gemini program to practice for, for Apollo. And so there's a lot of stuff in space, as you pointed out, uh, but sometimes you do that with a partner. Later this year, we're going to be conducting a mission called Victus Hayes, where we're going to practice this operation in space with Rocket Lab.

• 56:08Jordi Hays?

  Oh, very cool.

• 56:09John Coogan?

  Uh, okay, uh, switching gears, talk about Mosaic, the mission software platform. Uh, and I'm particularly interested in how do you actually track what's in space? Are there stealth satellites? Is there already a separate company that's tracking what's in space? It feels like everything in space should be extremely trackable, but at the same time, it's a massive amount of area to, if it's on the other side of the planet, we might not have something there. Like, what, what goes into actually, uh, understanding space and then planning missions?

• 56:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a great question. There's a lot of ways to track objects in space. You can track them from space and you can track them from the ground. And they're usually using two types of sensors. So you're taking, you're using a telescope on the ground and you're tracking reflected sunlight off of the spacecraft, or you're using an active sensor like a radar, for example. And there's a lot of clutter in space. And there are companies like LEO Labs, for example, that make it their full-time job to collect all the information they possibly can about objects in space. And they do that with radars from lower orbit. In deep space and geosynchronous orbit and cis lunar, radars really can't reach. And so you have to use in-situ optical system or ground-based optical systems. But

• 57:23Speaker 05

  you have coverage gaps. And so one of the problems that the military is trying to solve, by the way, is reducing coverage gaps in these higher altitudes. Imagine trying to do the Bin Laden raids, like finding Bin Laden, if you could only track where we thought he was every other Thursday between 12 o'clock and 12:05. That's not the way the military likes to perform operations, particularly intelligence and surveillance operations. And so the Space Force is trying to step up to really proliferate space with a bunch of sensors, shackles there to solve that problem. And where Mosaic fits in is, when I was a military officer, to fly satellites, I had to work with four or five different systems, computer systems that wouldn't talk to each other. And if I had to do something

• 58:07Speaker 05

  complex, like maneuver the spacecraft, it would take two to three weeks of planning. Military ops in space are much, much higher cadence than that. And so we designed Mosaic to really enable this autonomous human-to-machine teaming and multi-vehicle heterogeneous teaming that allows operators to train like they fight, practice against a sparring partner, and then operate space superiority systems at scale.

• 58:31John Coogan?

  What's the manufacturing look like right now?

• 58:36Speaker 05

  So right now, Jackal's manufactured in Denver. We'll be manufacturing another product in Long Beach. So we have a 90,000 square foot factory down there. In Denver alone, on one line, we can build about 50 Jackal spacecraft a year. So those are about 1,000 pound vehicles, about the size of a refrigerator, maybe two mini fridges together. And we can, we can crank out about 50 a year in that facility today.

• 58:57John Coogan?

  Wow. That's remarkable. What about headcount, planning, the fundraising round? Take me through like the more recent growth of the company.

• 59:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, we are growing. We started this year with 250. We'll end this year with between 450, 500. So we're really in the blood scaling phase. Next year, next year, we're 750 to 1,000. And then kind of the next 12 to 18 months, scaling up to around 5,000.

• 59:24John Coogan?

  Wow. That's huge. And then take us through the fundraising. What happened?

• 59:28Speaker 05

  Yeah. So incredible round came together. You know, after, after we were selected for the Space Base Interceptor Program, that was really a catalyst to bring this round together. Insiders stepped up. Will Cofield at Riot, Seth Winterhoff at Eclipse, guys that have been with the business ride or die for a long time, our other insiders. Yeah, they're, they're, they're classics.

• 59:48Jordi Hays?

  Real ride or dies.

• 59:50Speaker 05

  That is, is true.

• 59:51John Coogan?

  Have we had Will on the show yet?

• 59:53Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 59:53John Coogan?

  That's crazy. How have we not?

• 59:55Jordi Hays?

  Will's a, Will's a, Will's a dear friend. And I was gonna ask you, what's your favorite? Now, now that we're talking about, what's your favorite, uh, what's your favorite thing about Will?

• 1:00:06Speaker 05

  I mean, his, you know, his devilish good looks, obviously. It should be an inspiration to us all. And his hairline, frankly, I'm envious, you know.

• 1:00:13Jordi Hays?

  I know. He was built for television, and yet he doesn't come on the show.

• 1:00:17Speaker 05

  He's like, oh.

• 1:00:20Speaker 05

  He's actually definitely, you know, he's got like some of the worst social anxiety I've ever seen for such a good looking guy. Um, uh, he's, you know, he's, he is a, he's a hardcore nerd at heart. So Seth, Seth also at Eclipse, incredible partner for us. We brought in Paradigm on this round. We brought in Atreides on this round and a couple of others that were key. Vanek on others, G2. And then we had massive insider support beyond our, um, beyond our leads, Medlo, Excel, Merit Tech, others.

• 1:00:48John Coogan?

  What was the total round size?

• 1:00:50Speaker 05

  650.

• 1:00:56John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:00:57Speaker 05

  Thanks, man.

• 1:00:58Jordi Hays?

  Let's go. Final question.

• 1:01:00John Coogan?

  Final question.

• 1:01:00Jordi Hays?

  Will we ever actually have space fighter pilots? Will it ever make sense for a human being to fly around something like a jackal?

• 1:01:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think so.

• 1:01:13John Coogan?

  What? Human in the loop? Why?

• 1:01:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, why, though? Just because it's cool?

• 1:01:19John Coogan?

  Deep space, okay. Because of the lag?

• 1:01:21Speaker 05

  When I left the military, actually when I got promoted to major, I really only had one goal. And that was to have the first human battleship, interplanetary battleship, named the USS Jolly Rogers after my call sign. So we're driving towards that, that outcome. And it starts with single-seat fighters in space. But that's a while from now.

• 1:01:42John Coogan?

  That's a while. But it's very exciting.

• 1:01:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, I can't wait.

• 1:01:45John Coogan?

  I'm a fan.

• 1:01:47Jordi Hays?

  It's great to, it's great to meet you finally. And congrats to the whole team.

• 1:01:51John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 1:01:54Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:01:54John Coogan?

  Have a great day. Up next, we have a guest in the TVP in Eldredome. We have Maria from Bore Quantum. Welcome to the show. How's it going? Thank you so much for taking the time to come on down to the studio. Since it is the first time on the show, I would love for you to start with an introduction on yourself and the company, your work.

• 1:02:13Speaker 06

  Sure. Thank you for inviting me. This is really great. And I have watched a few of your shows already. I'm a particle physicist, experimental particle physicist. I have worked for about 30 years in colliding particles at CERN. And before that, at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois.

• 1:02:37John Coogan?

  Where did you collide your first particle?

• 1:02:39Speaker 06

  The first particle, I collided as an undergraduate at CERN.

• 1:02:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:02:45Speaker 06

  And it was an electron and a positron in an experiment called Delphi. And I belonged to a group called Technical Assistant Two.

• 1:02:54John Coogan?

  Technical Assistant Two, okay.

• 1:02:57Speaker 06

  I was an undergraduate in physics, and the group was run by a Tore Rosso. He's not anymore at CERN.

• 1:03:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:03:03Speaker 06

  He went on to do medical applications of accelerators.

• 1:03:07John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:03:07Speaker 06

  And then I went to grad school in the US, and I stayed. And I continued colliding particles. Is it addictive? It's addictive.

• 1:03:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've always heard particle acceleration has medical applications. I've never really been able to make the the the jump logically. Do you have an idea of how that works?

• 1:03:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, of course, of course. We are using so the in the electromagnetic spectrum. You are using from X rays to radio to the the whole spectrum. So the particles gamma rays and so on occupy one part of the spectrum. That makes it like a super microscope, if you want. This is how we talk about accelerator. So when you do an X ray.

• 1:03:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:55Speaker 06

  It's a light at a particular frequency that then shows you what what is going on.

• 1:04:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:00Speaker 06

  So the same.

• 1:04:01John Coogan?

  It doesn't seem zoomed in. It it.

• 1:04:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:04:03John Coogan?

  When I see an X ray, it seems like I'm seeing the inside, but I'm not seeing anything like a microscope. It's not a deeper, it's not a smaller, more micro view. It's the full view of my chest if I'm getting a chest X ray.

• 1:04:15Speaker 06

  That's correct. But if you do the electron microscope, or if you do higher energy, or if you do different kinds, you can see what you are not able to see with normal optical microscopes.

• 1:04:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:04:28Speaker 06

  Same thing with the X rays. You cannot see with your eye what the X rays is.

• 1:04:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:33Speaker 06

  So in that sense, it's not like a zoomed view. Uh, the the the zoomer is the fact that you went and you took a firmy sort of size of the particle. And you are able with this machine to actually image stuff that you cannot see on the other parts of the spectrum.

• 1:04:53John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:04:53Speaker 06

  So particle accelerators are are good for that. They are now good for another host of aspects. You can do fabrication of chips. You can be, they can be used in various different ways. And in fact, um, our government is trying to do that, to take them from the basic science to the actual fabrication in different ways compared to TSMC and so on. So there's a good, good application.

• 1:05:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:22Speaker 06

  Particle accelerator. So at Fermilab, I was colliding protons with antiprotons.

• 1:05:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:26Speaker 06

  So we went from electrons and positrons to proton, antiprotons. And then at the LHC back in Geneva with the American group, we are colliding now protons with protons, and this is how we discovered the Higgs.

• 1:05:39John Coogan?

  The Higgs boson.

• 1:05:40Speaker 06

  So all of these ecosystem of systems and detectors, sensors, with hundreds of millions of channels. We have underground, we put them where the beams collide, and we try to discover new particles. That's how we discovered the Higgs that was hypothesized half a century ago. And beyond that, we try to solve problems or puzzles like dark matter, dark energy, and so on.

• 1:06:13John Coogan?

  Do we need a larger hadron collider? Or is the current Large Hadron Collider large enough?

• 1:06:20Speaker 06

  We are now, right now, I'm sending, I'm shipping parts for the, for the high luminosity, for the next phase of the Large Hadron Collider. And we have with CERN a study, a full feasibility study, for a 90-miles collider, which might be the last one that we will ever build.

• 1:06:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:06:44Jordi Hays?

  Why 90? Why 90, though?

• 1:06:47Speaker 06

  Um, this is a very good question.

• 1:06:49Jordi Hays?

  Because I feel like you're gonna build the 90.

• 1:06:50John Coogan?

  And then be like, wow.

• 1:06:51Speaker 06

  No, no.

• 1:06:52John Coogan?

  A little bit larger.

• 1:06:53Speaker 06

  No, no.

• 1:06:54John Coogan?

  This is the critique of the scientific community. People say, it's always one more.

• 1:06:56Speaker 06

  You're absolutely right on the critique, and the critique is correct in that sense. But here is, here is how the, the cost to benefit works. With the same amount of money that we built the previous collider, how big a collider can we build that accesses 10 times more energy scale? So that we have a good chance to discover what is dark matter, if it is a particle, or if it is not a particle to exclude, and discover other quantum states that we don't have in our. Books right now.

• 1:07:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:33Speaker 06

  So it's a discovery physics.

• 1:07:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:07:35Speaker 06

  In the meantime, the benefit of building this will be um massive structures that can help with saving electricity, with superconducting. There is technology innovation.

• 1:07:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:07:49Speaker 06

  There is breakthroughs that immediately go to to to the community, to the society.

• 1:07:55John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:55Speaker 06

  So there is a cost benefit proposition.

• 1:07:57John Coogan?

  And and medicine is the most tractable example right now of.

• 1:08:01Speaker 06

  Right, because it is studied already for ten years because it is international. CERN is an intergovernmental um um organization.

• 1:08:11John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:08:12Speaker 06

  The US has tremendous influence without us giving a dime. There's no money exchange. We're paying our own scientists. We're building our own detectors and then we collocate. Because we don't have, we don't want to go in a green field and start digging and spending all this money for that. So there is, there is a very good sort of interdependency for this field. Now, to go to the to the question about quantum networks, in particle physics, we have data acquisition systems. We develop FPGAs with AI on the front end. We develop application-specific circuits ASICs with lower power consumption

• 1:08:54Speaker 06

  in order to handle the petabytes and petabytes of data that we have been producing decades before the internet and before Facebook and Meta and Twitter and so on.

• 1:09:04John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:09:05Speaker 06

  So we had to build our own cloud.

• 1:09:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:09Speaker 06

  Before cloud was a thing, we called it the grid. Because we couldn't put our data in one place. But all of these technologies now, if you take them when you are building quantum networks. Quantum networks with distribution of entanglement and with applications that are important for the society and topical, such as, as you know, and you had it in, in, in your show here, I think, two weeks ago. The Q Day is coming, quantum computers are coming. And they are coming about six years earlier, if we trust the Google folk who, who are

• 1:09:51Speaker 06

  working on this very diligently, and they're making progress that led them to move the Quantum Day earlier. And you had it in the show, a lot of other shows had various people talking about that. But when we take all this technology from the basic science that we developed it, with all this collaboration, with all these systems engineers, systems integration, you can take it and build systems that you then use an application to, in, in the case of BOR quantum technology, to secure the digital future, for sure, like the ultimate, the physics-based security.

• 1:10:35Speaker 06

  There's other securities that have been developed that you hear about.

• 1:10:39Jordi Hays?

  So, so, yeah, be, before we get into what, what BOR and your, your new company is working on, over the last, over the last thirty years, can, that you've been sort of working in the field, how have you processed all the different attempts to commercialize the research? There's a bunch of quantum computing companies today that are public. We've had people on the show coming on, talking about shorting these companies. It can be dangerous to short, even if they're not necessarily close to any type of breakthrough. But how have you, how, why, why did you wait until now to go into the, to the commercial side? And, and, yeah, how did you process all the other attempts around commercialization?

• 1:11:25Speaker 06

  It sounds like a trap question, but it isn't. I know you mean it. So let me, let me answer. So for No trap. For me, personally, for my team of people that have worked from basic science all the way now to making an application, it wasn't a year, right? I've been working on quantum networks with the funding from the Department of Energy since 2017, 18, when we did the National Quantum Initiative. It became Law of the Land in 18. And then we did the Quantum Internet Blueprint. The government was interested.

• 1:12:04Speaker 06

  Just as we set up the Internet back in the day with Xerox, UCLA, the Department of Defense and all the players, can we do the same for the national laboratories of the Department of Energy and the Office of Science and the NNSA, the nuclear laboratories? Can we connect them via Quantum? That's a platform and a backbone to do quantum networking, to connect the labs. Why? For reasons that have to do with XYZ: security, national security, research, developing the backbone, etc. So that was the original.

• 1:12:43Speaker 06

  How now it goes for quantum networking to become, to become a solution? Is we build the technology, we build the field demonstrators in the national labs. We published papers and patents on quantum teleportation, quantum entanglement distribution, the teleportation of entanglement itself. We did a lot of research work and publish it. And then the application that got interest was cybersecurity. So cybersecurity people called and they said, "The financial sector, the national security sector, others,

• 1:13:27Speaker 06

  will need this solution." The NSA didn't want to hear about the old QKD's, the quantum key distributions. They're, let's call them 1.0. And they were right, because there were side attacks. But we have developed the ultimate, non-attackable.

• 1:13:47Speaker 06

  I can say, because I'm an academic still, I can say unhackable, and then all the caveats we can put on the side. The quantum computing companies have been going on for forty years and more. Quantum computers were envisioned by Feynman as the ultimate way to solve the quantum universe. The universe at the small scales is quantum. We cannot avoid that, right? So, a quantum computer said Feynman will be the only way you can actually study, or emulate, or make a digital twin of the actual universe,

• 1:14:28Speaker 06

  including black holes, wormholes, other quantum phenomena. If dark matter is a matter of entanglement, then that too. So, he thought of the quantum computer in those terms. When the various architectures, there's many architectures, you can build quantum bits in any system that has two states. You can toggle from one state to another. So, it can be transmons, superconducting qubits, atoms, ions, photons. There is all these companies, and they started making progress from basic research to actually preparing systems. And all of this is great.

• 1:15:10Speaker 06

  Now, as an, as, I'm not a business person. You know that people, there is the hype cycle for everyone. And other people will jump over the top. They will go into the enlightenment. Some people will skip the whole jump and go slowly, slowly under the table. I think I am one, if I want to characterize this, I try to minimize hype and go to the end result by demonstrating. But it doesn't matter, hype is okay, as long as nobody gets destroyed in terms of money, which is your business, okay? So, so, as long as the platforms that everyone is preparing,

• 1:15:52Speaker 06

  we know what good it is for and what, um...

• 1:15:58Speaker 06

  And what challenges it might create for the world. So for example, there's a quantum sword and the quantum shield. There is the computer that will solve X, Y, Z, you hear, from the hype curve and in reality, it will emulate the quantum universe and also it will demolish all our encryption standards. So, okay, so how do we protect ourselves from that? We have the quantum shield, we have the quantum network.

• 1:16:26John Coogan?

  What is the positive view here? Because it feels like it would be very rational for the public to push back and say, hey, let's just not, let's just not break cryptography with quantum computing. And then we don't need quantum proof cryptography because we didn't break it.

• 1:16:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, but this is aggressive.

• 1:16:42John Coogan?

  This is the pause AI thing.

• 1:16:44Speaker 06

  Yes, exactly, exactly.

• 1:16:46John Coogan?

  How do you react to that?

• 1:16:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, you see it with AI, the same thing, right? Why do we need AI? If we could do everything we could do and we will save the jobs. In the progress of the human civilization, we take the bait of doing better and doing what is challenging every single time and advancing the technology. The question that stands for AI as well as quantum, as well as whatever other technology that will come in the future, is, are we involving also the anthropologists and the humanists and the artists to hear something about how to protect the humans?

• 1:17:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:33Speaker 06

  Because the mathematicians and the physicists and the engineers, we don't know how to do that.

• 1:17:40John Coogan?

  I just mean like, in the, in the AI debate, there's, you know, obviously, the fear of powerful AI systems, you know, hacking computers, and so we need AI to defend against that. And, and, and you can sort of net that out. But then you can have a separate conversation about, like, well, if you're trying to learn math, an AI tutor might help you. Or if you're sleepy and need to get across town. driving car might be able to drive you there like there are very, very tractable examples of of AI products that are just beneficial and then so the AI community has sort of had to

• 1:18:19John Coogan?

  grapple with all of the knock on effects the quantum community feels like we're purely in like we're breaking cryptography and then we're solving that problem but there's not enough focus on like the positive benefits that are worth it are there clear

• 1:18:33Speaker 06

  well I mean in the evolution of computing you are going to have compute with less power

• 1:18:38John Coogan?

  okay

• 1:18:39Speaker 06

  you are going to

• 1:18:40John Coogan?

  so power savings

• 1:18:40Speaker 06

  you are going

• 1:18:41Jordi Hays?

  well the the the argument to figure out the security side is just that you can't just sit there and hope like well I hope like let's just all agree to not do this

• 1:18:51John Coogan?

  yeah yeah you go to the geopolitical discussion of course yeah yeah maybe that's the only solution but you would always hope that there would be more positive knock on effects to justify investment besides just pure defensive

• 1:19:04Speaker 06

  to be sure but you know before Q date maybe that AI will break will break

• 1:19:10John Coogan?

  sure

• 1:19:11Speaker 06

  all our systems right so what is what do we do then how do we how do we protect ourselves from that okay then we're using quantum networking quantum encryption to to safeguard for the AI but with a quantum computer once you build it calculations of molecules quantum chemistry emulations I mean

• 1:19:35John Coogan?

  can potentially be more efficient

• 1:19:37Speaker 06

  can potentially be actually done you will have discovery of new materials because you will do what is called designer hamiltonians new alloys new the the the quantum computer is limitless this is why it sells it is you can do everything that you cannot do with physics today you can do on a quantum computer and you will unveil the entire universe now I have to say that Quantum and AI are going to merge, quantum AI. So you are going to use quantum resources in order to boost AI and in order to make it more efficient, if you want, as a co-processor or as a pre-processor, you can use quantum.

• 1:20:22Speaker 06

  And you see, in fact, I think last month, Nvidia put out something which is called Vera Rubin. And Vera is a GPU and or Vera is a powerful CPU. Rubin is a, Rubin is a GPU and they put something like a quantum link, which is a fiber with an FPGA, so that you can do optical.

• 1:20:48John Coogan?

  I think it's a marketing buzz.

• 1:20:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's, it's.

• 1:20:50John Coogan?

  I don't think it's actually a quantum computer.

• 1:20:52Speaker 06

  No, no, it's not a quantum link, it's a market. That's why they named it NVQ link.

• 1:20:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:58Speaker 06

  But, but once you attenuate light too close to be at the photon level, you start talking about quantum. So when you say precise, when something you push the precision frontier, you can start calling it quantum, even if it doesn't have quantum entanglement, quantum superposition and the whole quantum attributes. You, you, when you're pushing it at the level, at a level of a single particle and you manipulate it like that. I mean, the Psyche, the Psyche mission is sending data. I think it bypassed now Mars. It left in 2023. It's an asteroid mission to, to catch up with the Psyche asteroid.

• 1:21:42Speaker 06

  It's a JPL NASA mission. The, the way the communication is happening is with a deep optical space through almost quantum lengths, optical lengths. But once we get them into quantum lengths, this will be the way. And the detectors that JPL built are the ones that then I got to do the quantum networking, are the ones that now we're putting in test beams at CERN in order to see what else, what kind of quantum sensing applications we find for fundamental physics. It will be the ones that eventually will be used in PET scanners possibly. And so there is a, there is a fast and massive.

• 1:22:28Speaker 06

  Movement of technology for all this precision, for all this precision, quote unquote, quantum applications, quantum sensing, quantum computing, quantum networking, quantum materials, many body quantum physics, that is what we used to have solid state physics is now many body quantum physics.

• 1:22:49John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:22:50Speaker 06

  So the, the, the books are, are being written now on a very fast evolution with physics, the applied physics, the compute, the AI are going to be, um, there is a conciliance and they're going to be merging towards both applications that have to do the application of the universe, why we're here, how did we came about, what is the, the, the quantum origins of space, time and the universe, and also with applications like the ones we're talking about.

• 1:23:22John Coogan?

  It's very exciting. Well, thank you so much for coming down to this show.

• 1:23:25Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 1:23:26John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:23:27Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 1:23:28John Coogan?

  Great to meet you. Our next guest is joining in just a minute. We will continue. There is a, uh, uh, there is a debate on the timeline about, uh, a lot of things with the, the, the red button and the blue button are still going hot and fast in various, but um, people are debating goblin mode and the appearance of goblins in, uh, the model in, uh, OpenAI's models. Uh, people are having fun with that. Um, the, uh, uh, the, the best take I talk, I, I, I saw on this was from Tinder. GPT 5.5 has goblins and can think. Claude 4.7 doesn't have goblins and can think, so it's not the goblins that make the models

• 1:24:11John Coogan?

  think. It's something else entirely. I, I like that transposition from the house has windows, the car has windows, the car can drive. So it's not the car, it's not the windows that make the car go. Um, there is an article in the Wall Street Journal about quantum computing, which we can run through. The quantum computing companies are in a race to go public. I thought a number of quantum computing companies were already, uh, were already public, but the Wall Street Journal was more of a deep dive on what's coming down the pipeline. Uh, it could be years until quantum computing delivers on its promise to revolutionize everything from financial trading to this drug discovery, but that's not stopping the companies developing quantum hardware and software from speeding headlong into the public markets. Three different quantum computing companies, inflection with a Q, Xanadu, which is

• 1:24:57John Coogan?

  What is Xanadu from?

• 1:24:58Jordi Hays?

  That is, um.

• 1:24:59John Coogan?

  Isn't that a song or something?

• 1:25:00Jordi Hays?

  Xanadu is like the Hearst Castle.

• 1:25:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:04Jordi Hays?

  Fictional Hearst Castle from.

• 1:25:05John Coogan?

  From, uh, yeah.

• 1:25:07Jordi Hays?

  An idyllic, luxurious or an exotic place, often representing a perfect paradise or a lavish. Citizen Kane.

• 1:25:13John Coogan?

  Citizen Kane, it was its own movie. It's a 1980 American musical fantasy film. Xanadu, I don't know, I don't know enough about Xanadu. What a funny name for a company. And then Horizon Quantum, uh, those have gone public in the recent months, while another five have announced plans to do so later this year. By contrast, before this year, there were only four pure play, public quantum companies, D-Wave, Ragetti, Ion Q and Quantum Computing, Inc. There's so much app, there's so much appetite for quantum assets in the market right now, said Anthony Legault, the, uh, Legault, the, not Legault. Uh, the VP of Equity Research at Wedbush.

• 1:25:55John Coogan?

  Uh, if you have quantum in your company name, you're worth at least a billion from the get go. The enthusiasm is helping upstarts nab much higher valuations than they could get on the private markets, he said. Uh, and it's funding their ability to poach in-demand talent and build the tech that could ultimately make them first to market with a truly game-changing quantum computer. A development that could be worth tens of billions in addressable markets, apparently. Strike while the iron's hot and the proverbial iron is really hot in quantum right now. It is interesting how there's a, how there's a wildly different, uh, piece of the public markets in quantum computing that's going, uh, on. Uh, amid the AI boom, the quantum computing is like, it feels like it's in the GPT one era, maybe like.

• 1:26:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was gonna, I was gonna, I was gonna ask her, like, when are we? Are we gonna get, can we get a chat GPT moment in quantum? Something to, to, to kind of just ground what you guys are up to.

• 1:26:51John Coogan?

  It, it also just feels like peering into the future and being like, oh, okay. So like, uh, like the fear-based marketing is definitely coming from the quantum computer, community. If we're not careful here, like, let's, uh, let's stay focused on like the better CAT scans and better X-rays and medical. Applications maybe because just the idea that we're going to break we're going to break every every cryptography protocol and then create the solution that doesn't feel like value creation feels like maybe we got to do it because geopolitics but it doesn't it doesn't feel like aspirational anyway there's some public veterans these are veteran I didn't realize this D wave was founded in

• 1:27:28John Coogan?

  1999 it's an eight billion dollar company almost 400 employees who went public in 2022 ion Q when founded in 2015 is a 17.3 billion dollar company quantum computing Inc is 2 billion founded in 2018 and regetti founded in 2013 is a six billion dollar company with 164 employees and then there's a bunch more that are that are have gone out more recently some as low as 600 million

• 1:27:56Jordi Hays?

  this is out of date regetti is 5 point

• 1:27:59John Coogan?

  oh it's sold off

• 1:28:00Jordi Hays?

  5.3 billion

• 1:28:01John Coogan?

  okay okay well people are rotating into tech companies potentially inflection was founded

• 1:28:07Jordi Hays?

  lot of volatility regetti is up 23% in the last month it's down 11% in the last five days and down 3%

• 1:28:19John Coogan?

  so they are going out via SPACs quantum computing promises to leverage here you go the principles of quantum physics to solve problems far beyond the capabilities today's best supercomputers with applications across financial trading drug development shipping logistics internet delivery and internet delivery and aviation I'm waiting for Jane Street to take a big slice of one of these companies it has been in development for decades both by pure play quantum companies and tech giants like IBM Google Microsoft and Amazon I mean the big tech companies are pretty serious about it I remember when Satya Nadella went on Dor Cash first like the reason that he went on the show was to talk about their major Rana chip their quantum computing

• 1:29:00John Coogan?

  efforts and then very quickly Dor Cash was like cool story let's talk about AI which was great interview like it was like I wanted to hear much more about the the AI build out which became a very important narrative and I think that interview aged very well but The quantum computing stuff is just so, so in between.

• 1:29:20Jordi Hays?

  I don't know how we missed this yesterday, but the Anklar is moving

• 1:29:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:25Jordi Hays?

  to a new publishing platform created by Ben Thompson.

• 1:29:28John Coogan?

  Are you?

• 1:29:29Jordi Hays?

  Going founder mode?

• 1:29:30John Coogan?

  Oh, you're not familiar with Passport. He's been building Passport for years.

• 1:29:33Jordi Hays?

  I didn't know that was his company.

• 1:29:34John Coogan?

  Yes. And so

• 1:29:36Jordi Hays?

  I thought he was just like

• 1:29:37John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:29:37Jordi Hays?

  got on it early.

• 1:29:38John Coogan?

  No. So the history with Ben Thompson is that he, he founded Stratechery before Substack. And Substack was very much like, let's put the Ben Thompson package in a box for everyone. And I believe that Ben Thompson launched on WordPress and had to sort of build WordPress plugins and custom style guides and do a lot to get stratechery.com into the place it is today, which is, from my perspective, a fantastic user experience. Even when you need to log in, it just mails you a code. It does all the modern user experience workflows to get you your dedicated podcast feed and your emails and you can tweak everything. But he has since franchised it and gotten a number of other, another, a number of other creators

• 1:30:20John Coogan?

  on Passport with, I believe, a different economic model. The only criticism of Passport is not a technology one. It's more about a network effects one. So Substack is known for being very good at recycling email subscribers. And so a lot of email newsletters have life cycles. They sort of have churn rates. Some of them have smiling curves. But a lot of folks, they come in, they test out one Substack, and then they wind up saying, I'm not really opening this one. They get unsubscribed, or they unsubscribe, or the list gets cleaned and they get pulled off. And Substack does a good job of sort of resurfacing. And there's these ranking lists and there's, oh, you signed up for this? Do you want to sign up for these other two newsletters?

• 1:31:03John Coogan?

  There's bundles. There's a whole bunch of different ways to sort of like, ensure that list growth is happening at all times. And with Passport, I think it's a little more bring your own. And Ben Thompson had a lot of success on that when he was sharing links on Twitter that would go majorly viral back when he started. And LinkedIn also drove a lot of traffic for him. And so this could make a lot of sense for Anklar. If they have their own audience, they have different funnels into the ecosystem and they're less focused on being in the Substack ecosystem in, like, in particular.

• 1:31:35John Coogan?

  We, I believe the Anklar covered us at one point. We did an interview with them. Is that right?

• 1:31:39Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:31:39John Coogan?

  We should have some folks from the Anklar on the show. I would love to know more about this decision and what it means for the business. Also, just where they're taking the Anklar is an interesting, is the interesting question. But you're not alone. A lot of people are confused and they were not familiar that Passport is in fact a platform that Ben Thompson has been building for a number of years.

• 1:31:57Jordi Hays?

  And I guess recently they've partnered with Automattic.

• 1:32:01John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:32:01Jordi Hays?

  And so you can imagine Automattic being able to put a huge amount of resources towards it. I don't know exactly when they partnered, but, but yeah.

• 1:32:13John Coogan?

  I don't know. We need to, we need to watch this Instagram reel of AI potentially taking the job of a very, very important member of the American ecosystem. I won't say human, but let's watch this. AI is going to take my job and it's a golden retriever looking at a robot.

• 1:32:35John Coogan?

  AI will never take your job, golden retriever. Stay strong. You are irreplaceable. No robot dog will ever take the job of a real dog. But for certain people, I guess, walking a robot dog feels like a stunt, feels like a prank, very funny, but it is funny seeing the reaction of the dog being like, that thing looks like me. And I feel like there's a little bit of foreshadowing there that when the humanoids start walking around, you're going to see a lot of videos of people looking at the humanoids with the exact same expression that that golden retriever looked at that robot dog. Anyway, we have our next guest. Stefan Simkin from Squads is in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TV, Ben Elton. How are you doing?

• 1:33:18Speaker 07

  I'm good, guys. How are you doing?

• 1:33:19John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastically. Welcome to the show.

• 1:33:22Jordi Hays?

  Welcome.

• 1:33:23John Coogan?

  Please introduce yourself and the company.

• 1:33:26Speaker 07

  Great to meet you. Excited to be on the show. My name is Tiffan. I'm the co-founder and CEO at Squadz. We're building stablecoin infrastructure and all kinds of products that help businesses manage their stablecoins and financial operations.

• 1:33:40John Coogan?

  What is the key problem that you find most resonates with customers as you tell them? Is it that they haven't even dipped their toe in the stablecoin ecosystem? They know that they can cut costs, reduce fees by jumping in, but it's too much of a hurdle and you can help them? Or they're already neck deep in stablecoins and they need you to help them wade out of the swamp?

• 1:34:03Jordi Hays?

  I'll give you a quick anecdote.

• 1:34:05John Coogan?

  Please.

• 1:34:06Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if I've told this on the show before, but in 2021, I was building a company called Party Round. There was a fundraising platform.

• 1:34:14John Coogan?

  I don't think you've mentioned that before on the show.

• 1:34:16Jordi Hays?

  Well, wait a second. So I saw stablecoins getting adoption. I saw a bunch of companies that were starting to raise money with stablecoins because if you had, let's say, international investor, it was much easier to just send staples than deal with international wires and certain circumstances. And one of our customers was a crypto company that had a multi-billion dollar valuation, hundreds of employees. And when they were onboarding, I was like, do you want to toggle on support for stablecoins? Because I know you're a crypto company. A lot of your investors are relatively crypto native. There's probably some of them that would like to fund their investment with stablecoins.

• 1:34:58Jordi Hays?

  And they said to me, no, we don't want to do that. It's too difficult to deal with stablecoins. Like, once we have them, we'd prefer to just get dollars. It was a funny moment because, for a lot of reasons, but part of it was because infrastructure like what you're building and talking about today wasn't where, wasn't really, hadn't progressed very far back in 2021.

• 1:35:24Speaker 07

  So I think that's, we'll get back to the story in a second. To give you kind of a sense of what we've done up to now. For the first arc of the company, we actually focused on infrastructure. We developed programmable wallets for this long ecosystem. Today, we secure about 10 billion in assets. And that was a very crypto native product where we focused on very crypto native problems of those kind of large organizations exploring the digital asset space. And then through that experience, we actually saw stablecoins start to take this kind of like center stage in the way they run their financial operations. And that's what kind of allowed us to be a little early to stablecoins because we're deeply in it and we saw real businesses starting to adopt this, even though they were kind of early crypto native teams. And I think a lot has happened in the last couple of years where essentially programmable

• 1:36:08Speaker 07

  blockchains are now secure, reliable, resilient, and actually, you know, great to build on. And they, you know, for the most part, solve settlement and ledgering that in the normal kind of fintech context, you have to either build a house or run from someone else. And you have stablecoins that are now much more mature, right? The stablecoin market cap is way above 300 billion at this point. And I think that is also building a lot of confidence with obviously the regulators and the broader market. And then I think we generally got better at building crypto products, at stablecoin-focused products. And today, our thesis with our new product Altitude is really that you don't need a bank account anymore, right? You essentially can rely on programmable blockchains, stablecoins, and wallets to run your entire financial operations.

• 1:36:51Speaker 07

  And one of the major things that actually happened in the last couple of years, that was the big kind of missing piece when we started the company, was this idea of if I hold a stablecoin in my wallet, how can I reliably pay, you know, a third party via ACH or via Sapa, right? How can I connect to the banking system if I still need to? While obviously, you know, if I want to settle through stablecoins, I can do that instantly 24/7 and free. And that was really the orchestration ecosystem that came in the last couple of years to market. Companies like Bridge, that was acquired by Stripe, which essentially stepped into this system and exists in the middle between a company like ours that is providing this product experience and this underlying crypto infrastructure and the banking system and saying, we're going to take the stablecoins and convert them to fiat wherever you need to, or wherever that needs to happen. And there's actually an explosion in that market right now, right?

• 1:37:36Speaker 07

  You have a lot of these local orchestrators. You have kind of the more global ones, the bigger ones. And that was the the missing link for us to say, OK, now the the stack is here. And we can actually build financial services in a very different way. And that also was already incredibly exciting to us internally. And then the agentic component came in as well, right? And we sort of realized that once you have the stack where every layer is naturally programmable, right, from the settlement layer to the account layer to the money itself. Obviously, it's a great place to start integrating agents and getting to the world where you have end to end agentic automations, where essentially you as a customer of business need to do less and less over time.

• 1:38:12John Coogan?

  Do you use the forward deployed model at all? Like when you're working with a company, is it high stakes enough that you'll actually go onsite with someone from your team? Or do you want to be just fully self serve? Like, is there a trade off in your mind here? How have you thought about it?

• 1:38:31Speaker 07

  Um, I think today we work with all types of customers, right? Customers that already have a like a majority or some part of their balance sheet in stablecoins or companies that are, you know, completely new to the space. So that, you know, it really depends on who we're actually trying to onboard, right? If it's a more cryptic customer, they usually know what we're doing and they're very comfortable with stablecoins already. But also, the product experience doesn't really impose any crypto knowledge, right? Like, it feels like you're onboarding to, you know, a traditional business account. But a lot of the infrastructure under the hood already powered by is powered by stablecoins. And then you can obviously connect to stablecoin rails and make stablecoin payments. So we do forward deploy it when it's required, right? And I would say today, we primarily focus on startups, SMBs and kind of companies that are, you know, between sort of 10 to 50 people in size, right?

• 1:39:15Speaker 07

  And so that really allows us to like forward deploy is is much easier because you, in most cases, talk to people who are decision makers, who actually are going to be, you know, running the account and interacting with all the primitives that we're building. And so it, I guess the answer is that depends. But I would also say that over time, it just, you know, people become and businesses become much more familiar with stablecoins. And so I think it's becoming, our job is becoming much easier as we as we go.

• 1:39:37Jordi Hays?

  OK, so break down if somebody's keeping the majority of their assets, what they might keep in a traditional bank account with you. And then they want to run payroll or they they need corporate cards to pay for software. What happens then?

• 1:39:55Speaker 07

  So the way it works, you, at this point, the ecosystem is mature enough where we're able to facilitate all of this through a stablecoin balance, right? So you can either top up your deal balance or, you know, repling balance from a stablecoin balance in Altitude account via ACH in traditional rails. A lot of these providers actually already accept stablecoin payments, right? So you can actually top up in UDC directly without ever going into fiat. And then from a, from a perspective of issuing cards, it's a, you know, it's a massive market already in crypto where you have stablecoin backed cards which allow you to spend directly from the stablecoin balance. There's a lot of companies in the space. I think right now Stripe Sessions is happening as we speak where they're also definitely going to talk about stablecoin cards, which is a, you know, big focus for Stripe internally as well.

• 1:40:39Speaker 07

  And so those two things specifically are definitely a reality. I would say there's still limitations, right? Like there's smaller things, for example, if you want to do ACH pool, that is still being worked on by a lot of the providers and we're still spending kind of a lot more time trying to figure out what is the right structure to actually make it happen because the idea is that you need to pool in stablecoins from the Altitude account, but then settle in fiat on the, on the other end. But also as more of these vendors start adopting stablecoins, our life is becoming much easier.

• 1:41:03Jordi Hays?

  Security. How, I think some people might, might, might say like, yeah, working with my bank is a little bit annoying. There's some things that I don't like. Sometimes I have to go into the bank to, you know, physically.

• 1:41:19John Coogan?

  They back the ledger up on tape deck in a mountain.

• 1:41:23Jordi Hays?

  But you get the benefit of like a piece of.

• 1:41:25John Coogan?

  They get hacked, they're going to set the ledger back to the way it was and, you know, crypto is a little bit different sometimes.

• 1:41:31Speaker 07

  Security is a, is a huge concern for the space since the beginning, right? And I think solving that is paramount. We actually started from a place where we, when we're building our infrastructure at Squads, it was all about security from the start, right? Like that's what we had to get good at, right? And that's how we got to a place where today we're securing.

• 1:41:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you have 10 billion.

• 1:41:50Speaker 07

  Ten billion, yes. And so that is, you know, that took us about four years to get to. And it takes a lot of time to build that trust, but also to build infrastructure that actually, you know, works and it doesn't get hacked.

• 1:42:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:00Speaker 07

  Um, I think security, actually solving security is not the hardest part. It's balancing that with user experience, right? It's like, how can you combine these two problems and have a customer that is able to stay in self custody, own their money, right? Control their account and to end with their own keys. Um, give them the security guarantees that they're expecting, um, while also, um, allowing them to stay, obviously with a stablecoin balance, right? And so I think what the way we solve it is we have a complex, but um, kind of easy to explain system where we have multiple smart accounts and essentially these programmable accounts deployed for each customer where the each individual signer on the account, so every member on this sort of business level, they have their own programmable account with granular controls and MFA they can set up, right? And then the business account itself is a programmable object on the blockchain.

• 1:42:43Speaker 07

  And there's actually a lot of benefits, um, to to kind of moving all of these layers onto the, onto the sort of open and transparent system like a blockchain, because then you can have very clear guarantees in math and code, right? Like what is actually governing the security of your assets?

• 1:42:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:58Speaker 07

  Um, and I think we, when we talk to customers, right? A lot of it, um, like a lot of the questions come up is like, how do I think about something that you guys are building versus just using an FDIC insured bank account, right? And I think what we always talk about with those customers is that the only reason FDIC exists is because your money is not actually there, right? It's being fractionally, uh, reserved and it's being lent out somewhere. And obviously you have this like, you know, off-chain ledger where somebody is maintaining and making sure that, you know, all the entries are correct. Um, and so I think transparency, um, brings a lot of trust and actually helps us to, to get the product to a place where a lot more customers can, can be comfortable with it. But obviously having the squad's background and building a lot of infrastructure that, you know, secures billions today is definitely, you know, a big lever here as well.

• 1:43:38John Coogan?

  Tell us about the round. How much did you raise? Who led the deal?

• 1:43:43Speaker 07

  We raised 18 million. Solana Ventures led the round. We started the company in 2021, building on Solana from day one. And so for us, it's been a

• 1:43:55John Coogan?

  It's been a journey.

• 1:43:56Speaker 07

  It's been a journey, exactly. And we spent a lot of time with the Solana team and we obviously are very deeply ingrained in the ecosystem. And now with Altitude, we're essentially using Solana as this secure programmable backend, right, to deliver the experiences for businesses we want to deliver, right? Also in the round, we have Coinbase Ventures, HON Ventures, that we have partnered for the first time last year. Now they're continuing the involvement and then Electric Capital, Placeholder, and a few others. But yeah, we're really excited. It's really, the round primarily is for accelerating Altitude and helping businesses move their operations onto stablecoin rails. But we're obviously continuing to do things in the crypto space with Squas Multisign, which is our first incorporated.

• 1:44:32John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, congrats on the round. Thank you so much for taking the time to come to have us. Have a great rest of your day. Talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 1:44:39Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 1:44:40John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Kashi Gupta from Hi Touch. He's the co-CEO with a massive round for AI-driven marketing agents.

• 1:44:50Jordi Hays?

  I gotta say, guys, you can't keep asking John to do that. It's, I had to

• 1:44:59John Coogan?

  How do you drink your diet?

• 1:45:00Jordi Hays?

  I had to step away for a second because I was gonna

• 1:45:04John Coogan?

  Well, our next guest is in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP in Ultra Dome. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 1:45:12Speaker 08

  John, hey, John. Thanks for having me.

• 1:45:14John Coogan?

  Thanks for joining. Introduce the company, introduce yourself, and then tell us the news. And I have a million questions here, so very excited to talk to you. But give us a little introduction first.

• 1:45:25Speaker 08

  Sure. Kashi Gupta, co-founder and co-CEO of Hi Touch. We build AI platform for marketers. And today, we're announcing our Series D, which is 150 million at 2.75 posts led by Goldman Sachs.

• 1:45:41Jordi Hays?

  2.75

• 1:45:43John Coogan?

  Absolutely massive. I feel like, I don't know, I mean fantastic category, fantastic industry, fantastic mega trend with AI. This feels a little under the radar to me. Like, what is the prehistory of the company? Like, how have you built to this point so successfully?

• 1:46:01Speaker 08

  Yeah, so we started in 2020. For the past four years, we've helped marketers use data to personalize their market. Now we're helping them use AI to actually build on-brand content such as ads and emails. So we believe and we know that we're the only on-brand AI for marketers. If you use Gemini, it will hallucinate things about your brand. Whereas if you use High Touch, we will get everything about your brand correct.

• 1:46:24John Coogan?

  Okay. At what level do you want to operate? At what level have you operated before? Because a marketing team can be thinking about everything from like what podcast the CEO should go on to a billboard campaign, to a Super Bowl ad, to like a micro optimization in the Facebook algorithm, or their Instagram ad delivery or creative. And then you could dial really deep into just one niche or vertical. Like, how have you thought about right sizing and creating like a correct solution for the marketer?

• 1:46:54Speaker 08

  Yeah, so, I mean, marketing is very heterogeneous. If you think about it, most marketers are spending their time on strategy and branding. With AI, we now actually have kind of unlimited labor at our disposal. So the bet is that a single marketer can now do the work of so many. In the past, we were kind of stuck doing things like segmentation and microscopic ads and emails. Now with our AI platform, we're letting marketers think of new strategy, generate those images, and try stuff in market very quickly. So with High Touch, the marketer can launch something like 100 campaigns in a week, get feedback on all those, and then launch new campaigns based on what's working and not working.

• 1:47:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. You said images. Are you doing video? What's the status on AI video?

• 1:47:35Speaker 08

  Video as well, especially in UGC. And UGC is working extremely well.

• 1:47:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. And do you want to be model agnostic and then set up like a harness that makes sure that everything's on brand? Or do you want to train foundation models, diffusion models, image generation models, video generation models at some point?

• 1:47:52Speaker 08

  Model agnostic.

• 1:47:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:47:53Speaker 08

  So we find right now that, for example, images 2.0 from Tachy can choose the best of skin.

• 1:47:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:58Speaker 08

  Uh, we use other models like Gemini as well.

• 1:48:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:01Speaker 08

  And so as models get better, we want to make sure that our harness chooses the best model for each task.

• 1:48:07John Coogan?

  And then there's also a world where you generate an image or a series of images with one model and then you animate them with a different model. And there's a whole bunch of different or do text overlay or motion graphics with a different model. Or maybe, you know, puppeteer some actual code or, or like an Adobe's tool. Uh, interesting, uh, Jordy.

• 1:48:25Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah. How, how is the role of a, how is the role generally of a, of a media buyer changing? Obviously, hopefully they're using your tool and that's changing their workflow. But it's interesting that it feels like media buying has always been like very high leverage. Like somebody that's good at, at Facebook ads could manage 20 million a budget on one account, 40 million on another account. Like they're very, very, very, it's just a very high leverage role. Is it, uh, is it just helping them be, be better? Do you think marketers in the future will be able to manage, you know, more spend or more accounts? Like what, what are, what are the different ways that it goes?

• 1:49:06Speaker 08

  I think there's two main shifts. Um, so as you mentioned, Jordy, there's about, imagine AI is a 24/7 analyst. That's helping you figure out your opportunities for improving your media spend. Uh, which channels do you spend more? Is TikTok working better than Snapchat? Those kinds of decisions now you can fully delegate to AI and our platform enables that. But the second and much more important trend, in my opinion, is that if you're a media buyer, you can only buy media against content that you have. Most brands don't have limited content. They only have maybe like 50 to 100 pieces of really good content.

• 1:49:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:49:37Speaker 08

  With AI, you can now generate unlimited amounts of content. So for example, localizing to different languages, doing different geographies. Um, a great example of this is one of the top marketplaces for home services uses high touch. And now they can do different market for homeowners versus homeowners versus renters. Uh, and because they've kind of, um, now they have unlimited content building capability at their disposal. The same media buyer can test all three against the market, see which works, which one works against which demographic and then optimize similarly.

• 1:50:08Jordi Hays?

  Do you guys care about finding and eliminating wasted spend? That feels like a solution that there's kind of an interesting thing where, you know, let's say like, let's take meta platforms, for example, they want you to get good results in general, so that you spend more money, so that your business grows, so you can spend, you know, more money, et cetera, et cetera, and have that flywheel. But at the same time, if you're running an ad and it's not performing well, like on a sort of like local level or micro level, they don't really care that much if you're spending in a way that's like not super efficient. And so maybe there's an opportunity to have like a platform that kind of sits above that and says like, hey, this is like, to basically like turn off and like try to identify wasted

• 1:50:53Jordi Hays?

  spend. Is that part of what you guys are doing? Is that something you would do in the future?

• 1:50:58Speaker 08

  It's part of what we're doing and why we think we can do it uniquely is because all of the consumer brands we work with, companies like DoorDash, Aritzia, and so on, have given us access to their customer data. So we know which customers are actually converting and we know the ground truth of whether the ad is working or the media campaign is working.

• 1:51:19Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense.

• 1:51:21John Coogan?

  How do you think about your business model? I mean, there's so many huge companies in the marketing industry because if they're able to insert themselves in the pipeline of a billion dollar marketing budget, it's very easy to justify spending millions of dollars on something that increases performance by one or 2%. At the same time, there's a lot of marketing tools out there that are just seat-based and they might give you a call and say, hey, you're pretty big, can we get some more money out of you, sell you some premium features? But this seat-based pricing versus consumption-based, performance-based pricing, like how have you geared the company for success? Obviously, growth is fantastic and the company is very, you know, like the valuation is going up and you're raising money.

• 1:52:04John Coogan?

  So I imagine that you've solved it, but how have you thought about solving it?

• 1:52:08Speaker 08

  Yeah, transparently, any company that's still on seat-based pricing is not looking forward to the rest of 2026. We have never been on seat-based pricing. We've always charged our customers by the number of campaigns that we power. And our belief is that with AI, our customers will be able to run significantly more campaigns. And we really believe it up to the customer. If you keep the campaign on, it must be working, and therefore you should pay us. If you turn the campaign off, then stop paying. It's very simple.

• 1:52:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Well, how much did you raise? I want to talk about the, do we already hit the gong?

• 1:52:40Jordi Hays?

  I think we already did.

• 1:52:40John Coogan?

  Did we already hit the gong?

• 1:52:42Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:52:43John Coogan?

  It's been a big day. We've rung the gong a bunch.

• 1:52:45Jordi Hays?

  Gong, it's gong abuse today.

• 1:52:48John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations.

• 1:52:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, very, very, very. Oh, the last question, because I've asked some other people in MarTech this. Are we headed to a future where every ad that a customer sees is generated in real time, on the fly? And the example I always give is like, historically advertisers would make one campaign, they'd put it in a magazine, or they'd put it, you know, out of home, or the Super Bowl, and they just knew they were gonna, they had to make it, and a ton of people were gonna see it. And then you get the era of like, really, really precise targeting and the explosion of meta platforms. And now you can be like, I'm just gonna serve this ad to like 10,000 people. And then it feels like we're headed to a world where the creative is generated on the fly.

• 1:53:34Jordi Hays?

  It's really just like meant for one individual person. And that's only going to be possible because you can just generate that creative, like, in real time, on the fly, based around, you know, that person's unique interests, or their purchase history, or where they are, et cetera.

• 1:53:51Speaker 08

  I think it's an exciting vision. Will most content be AI-generated in the future? I believe so, yes. Will it be one-to-one or on-the-fly time? I think no. And the reason for that is because most consumer brands of any scale have to go through certain approval processes. And the amount of trust people have in AI still is not on a one-to-one level. On the other hand, could it be?

• 1:54:14Jordi Hays?

  You don't think AI can get superhuman? You don't think it can be better than the best? Well, so, but then at what point is it better than the best creative director and the best person that, the best CMO that actually approves the creative to go out, right? Like, you could have multiple agents reviewing each other's work.

• 1:54:32Speaker 08

  I think we share a vision. So I hope that we get there. Yeah. And I think AGI will come before marketers do one to one with AI. Yeah. But I do think that there is an appetite for this and that the more like the more practical way to make AI actually use in marketing. So we talked to pretty much every CMO there was all last year. Very few CMOs today are using AI marketing. You ask them why, and it is because of this kind of process. So we believe the way to get AI to actually work is to do one to many. Maybe one piece of content for every 10,000 or 100,000 consumers. Yeah. And then over time, create more pieces of content. Very cool. All right. Great. Great having you on. Congrats on the progress.

• 1:55:18John Coogan?

  And we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:55:18Speaker 08

  Thank you.

• 1:55:19John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 1:55:20Speaker 08

  Thanks.

• 1:55:21John Coogan?

  I want to pull up this post from David Bazooki, friend of the show, CEO of Roblox. He says, "We're on the verge of real time photorealistic generation with what are called world models. These require a fair amount of expensive compute, but costs will come down over time. Today, these interactions are essentially real time dreams. They lack persistent shared logic that turns a video into a multiplayer game or concert or classroom or the holodeck. We believe the ultimate architecture for gaming in the holodeck is Roblox. Reality, it's a hybrid architecture. We've been talking about this for months. I'm so excited it's here. It's a hybrid engine that marries the structured data and logic of the Roblox engine and Roblox Cloud with the generative power of video world models.

• 1:56:06John Coogan?

  The Roblox engine provides the underlying synchronized ground truth, the score, physics, multiplayer sync, etc. While our video model acts as a super up sampler to layer on photorealistic detail. We believe this will ultimately remove barriers to high fidelity creation. And if you look at these videos, it makes so much sense. Roblox has always been blocky, but style transfer is the most mature generative AI technology. We all saw this during the Studio Ghibli moment. Take a cartoon, make it photo real. Obviously, image generation is at an incredible place. And so being able to do that at 60 Frames a second with Roblox is just incredibly bullish for the amount of creativity that can go into

• 1:56:50John Coogan?

  this world. I am extremely excited about this because Roblox has always felt like a kid's game. It's always felt like it didn't deliver at the AAA level for so many of those experiences. But now you're going to get the creativity of the Roblox ecosystem married with the AAA graphics that everyone demands. So

• 1:57:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've always I've always felt that Roblox was super well positioned as it becomes easier and easier and easier to make games. And because they have the infrastructure, they have the they they honestly, you know, we've in talking with David, he's talked about just how intense it is to keep to have the data center capacity to support the level of like concurrent activity that they have on the platform.

• 1:57:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:34Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, very excited to see what they do.

• 1:57:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, Roblox is doing well. He's cooking. Well, we have our next guest in the waiting room. We have Dan from Firestorm. He's the co-founder and CEO. Dan, how are you doing?

• 1:57:47Speaker 09

  Boys, how we doing?

• 1:57:48John Coogan?

  We're doing great.

• 1:57:49Jordi Hays?

  Firestorm.

• 1:57:50John Coogan?

  Take us through an introduction on yourself, your the company.

• 1:57:56Speaker 09

  If you do that like 10 more times throughout this interview, please.

• 1:57:59John Coogan?

  You have that's a good one. We don't use that one enough. Anyway, sorry. Introduce yourself, the company and what you're standing in front of.

• 1:58:06Speaker 09

  Sure. My name is Dan Maji and I am co-founder and CEO of Firestorm. We're based out of San Diego, about 150 people, and our whole vision is to reinvent and transform how we build drones. And what does that mean? First, it starts with advanced manufacturing. So a lot of the drones we buy as a country cost more than a Ferrari and you use them one time. We think that's, you know, not economically feasible in the long run. And then the second thing is you got to be able to move this manufacturing to the point of need. And so behind me, you have a couple of our products, the Tempests, as well as the Excel, which I'm going to give you guys a tour of here in a couple of minutes.

• 1:58:46John Coogan?

  That's awesome. Yeah.

• 1:58:48Jordi Hays?

  When did you? When did you start the company?

• 1:58:50Speaker 09

  We started it in 22. My background was I started a counter-UAS company in 2015. Naval Special Warfare, the SEALs, found us and took us to Iraq to fight ISIS when a lot of the big prime solutions didn't work. And I watched how ISIS was able to use off-the-shelf, low-cost drones to effectively fight us to a standstill until the counter-UAS systems came in. And in the build-up to the war in Ukraine, I was thinking, why don't we have this type of technology? And it started with, again, rethinking the manufacturing process first. And now it's evolved into actually moving the factory closer to the battlefield.

• 1:59:29John Coogan?

  So, I mean, it feels like the product is the factory, but do you have a first-party drone design? Or do you want to purely partner on that side? Someone else comes to you with their spec, and then you modify your factory to be able to churn them out?

• 1:59:43Speaker 09

  We do both, right? But the intention for the beginning is to actually build the drones you see behind us. These are our designs. And then we have a number of partnerships with FPV providers that I'll show you inside. Some of the most-used drones in the war in Ukraine. Now, we're not using Chinese carbon fiber. We're literally turning powder into the airframes. And you can go do that anywhere. And the other part of that, too, is to repair drones. That's something no one talks about. It's actually fixing stuff when it breaks in the field.

• 2:00:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Well, I'd love to see what's inside one of those factories. I'm interested in the types of machinery and materials that are going into this. Can you take us inside? Does the camera move? Is that possible?

• 2:00:25Speaker 09

  Oh, the camera moves. We have two humans moving it.

• 2:00:28John Coogan?

  Let's do it. Let's go inside.

• 2:00:30Speaker 09

  Let's start here at the drone.

• 2:00:31Jordi Hays?

  I'm honestly a little disappointed. I was hoping it was a drone.

• 2:00:35John Coogan?

  A drone base.

• 2:00:36Speaker 09

  A drone flying it?

• 2:00:37John Coogan?

  I think with a fixed wing, it'd be going way too fast.

• 2:00:39Speaker 09

  I am not that good of a pilot, you know what I mean? So, I don't want to crash into anything. So, we design everything from modularity, right? This whole airframe is 3D-printed. You have a rail that runs through the drone, so you can put payloads in and out with ease. So, if something breaks, or you want to change the mission on the go, you have that ability to. And then in the back, we have both a propeller variant, and then a jet variant that I'm going to show you over here. And the whole idea is like, add modularity at every essence of the drone, not just build something for one mission. You know what I mean?

• 2:01:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:14Speaker 09

  Okay, so come on into the XL.

• 2:01:16John Coogan?

  Okay. The XL.

• 2:01:20Speaker 09

  So our whole adventure starts with this right here.

• 2:01:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:24Speaker 09

  This is our build box.

• 2:01:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:01:26Speaker 09

  Think of this as like your print cartridge, okay? So this is on wheels, as you see. And so you basically wheel this into the processing station, which is right here. It slides right in, okay? You then fill it up with powder from our new and our recycled powder. So we're highly efficient, right? From a volume standpoint. Once the build box is full of powder, you then push it into the printer.

• 2:01:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:54Speaker 09

  And we have an exclusive arrangement with HP. This is kind of the best in class. Industrial grade 3D printing, like parts that come out of this machine are on F1 race cars.

• 2:02:06John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:02:07Speaker 09

  And if you want to have this printer in a mobile fashion, you have to come to us. That's kind of the IP we've built around this, right? So this is a 20 foot shipping container and the sides fold down to then allow you to like, you know, have the workspace you have.

• 2:02:21John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:02:22Speaker 09

  So once it's done printing, you let it cool down and then you put it back in gear and you're left with parts like this, right?

• 2:02:31Speaker 09

  You suck the extra powder out.

• 2:02:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:02:33Speaker 09

  And then you take it into the second 20 foot shipping container that I'm going to show you right now, where you just simply blow these parts with powder. I'm sorry, with air and you have a finished part.

• 2:02:47John Coogan?

  It looks like some post-apocalyptic bio security safety, like zombie apocalypse. I know where I'm going.

• 2:02:55Speaker 09

  Exactly.

• 2:02:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:57Speaker 09

  So literally you just come in here.

• 2:02:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:02:59Speaker 09

  You you blow air on the part.

• 2:03:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:03:02Speaker 09

  And and you're done.

• 2:03:03John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:03:03Speaker 09

  And so what we use the second container for is actually assembly and R and D. So I'll show you some of the other stuff besides our platforms we're making.

• 2:03:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:14Speaker 09

  You were asking a minute ago about like other people's designs.

• 2:03:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:18Speaker 09

  So we have a partnership with a company called Orca.

• 2:03:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:03:21Speaker 09

  They're out of Croatia. About 300,000 of these drones were delivered to the Ukrainians last year. We've gotten rid of all the carbon fiber, which. You know, no one wants to talk about usually comes from China. And we've replaced it with our powder-based solution. You can assemble this thing in 13 minutes. And if something breaks, great, you just print a new piece out. And, you know, you do a new installation. And why is that important, guys? Because some of these drone companies, it's taking them three to four weeks to deliver repair parts to the field. And that just means the system's basically unusable. So we started as this mobile drone factory. We started sending this thing to bases around the country and overseas. And then this is where the business got really, really interesting.

• 2:04:06Speaker 09

  You guys have talked a lot, I'm sure, about the Defense Industrial Base. Okay? And the amount of things the soldiers are telling us they need that we're now printing, like, is incredible.

• 2:04:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:19Speaker 09

  So this is an engine coolant tank, all right? You shouldn't be able to go to Pep Boys and buy this. This is a 10-month lead time product.

• 2:04:28John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:04:28Speaker 09

  That is absurd.

• 2:04:30Jordi Hays?

  What kind of engine?

• 2:04:32Speaker 09

  Uh, it goes on an LTV, so like a Marine Corps vehicle. Like, you'd think we would have these supplies, but the issue is that, one, OEMs have consolidated. Two, no one wants to build kind of parts. And so if you look at what the, uh, the Trump administration has really spent a lot of time and energy talking about is this idea of right to repair. We know that from the tech world, right? Of course, like your iPhone. But like, now it's actually coming

• 2:05:00Speaker 09

  to the OD. And we want to use the XL not only to build drones, but to enable some of that repair stuff, right? So, um, one other one I'll tell you, and you'll love this one as a taxpayer in, in America. Um, this holds a GPS antenna, okay? Sits right here.

• 2:05:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:16Speaker 09

  It's on basically every ground vehicle in the, in, in, in our military.

• 2:05:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:05:20Speaker 09

  It's really, really flimsy. And if it breaks, the person who makes the antenna does not make this repair part. So a bunch of Marines thought of this idea. And so now you don't have to buy a brand-new $2,500 antenna.

• 2:05:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:34Speaker 09

  You simply print a $2 part.

• 2:05:36John Coogan?

  Wow, that's amazing.

• 2:05:37Speaker 09

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:05:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:40Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:05:40John Coogan?

  That's incredible.

• 2:05:41Speaker 09

  Come back out and, uh,

• 2:05:42John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:05:43Speaker 09

  Oh, there we go. I love sound effects.

• 2:05:46John Coogan?

  Here we go, look at this.

• 2:05:49Speaker 09

  Yeah, so that's it.

• 2:05:50John Coogan?

  Amazing. Amazing. Tell us about the round. Yeah, tell us about the round. Tell us about the progress. How's it going there? There's some news.

• 2:05:57Speaker 09

  So, uh, we just raised eighty-two million dollars led by Washington Harbor. Our Series A. There we go.

• 2:06:03John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:06:05Speaker 09

  Thank you. Uh, joined by Ondis Capital.

• 2:06:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:08Speaker 09

  Our friends at Liquidity.

• 2:06:10John Coogan?

  Oh, no.

• 2:06:11Speaker 09

  Uh, Geodesic.

• 2:06:12John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:06:12Speaker 09

  The Motley Fool. Like, we have a lot of, uh, awesome investors joining us. But our big thing now is to take the XL, not only to like, you know, execute on the contracts we've won.

• 2:06:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:26Speaker 09

  Uh, including most recently an AppFit contract for thirty million dollars. But start taking the XL overseas. This is really going to support, uh, the US and its allies, like, around the world.

• 2:06:36John Coogan?

  Very, very cool. Well, thank you so much for giving us the tour. Thanks for coming to the show. Incredible tour. These are not easy to pull off. They're not easy to pull off. And you gave us a great. We appreciate it. Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:06:46Speaker 09

  All the credit goes to, to the team that was carrying the camera.

• 2:06:48John Coogan?

  I can imagine. Good stuff, guys. I can imagine. Yeah, great to meet you. Have a great day. We'll talk to you soon. See you, Dan. Goodbye.

• 2:06:53Speaker 09

  See you, boys.

• 2:06:55John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Vlad Tenev from Robinhood. He's the co-founder and CEO. Still at the helm, what, ten, twelve, fifteen years in the mix? How long have you been running Robinhood these days?

• 2:07:08Vlad Tenev?

  Gosh, you guys are making me feel old.

• 2:07:10John Coogan?

  Unc.

• 2:07:11Vlad Tenev?

  Uh, I'm still in my thirties.

• 2:07:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:07:13Vlad Tenev?

  For one more year. Yeah, but, uh, twenty fifteen.

• 2:07:17John Coogan?

  This year getting old, feeling older?

• 2:07:19Vlad Tenev?

  Old age success.

• 2:07:20John Coogan?

  Or reinvigorated? Age of AI, lots of opportunity at the same time? Pullbacks in various markets? Stocks up and down? How are you feeling?

• 2:07:28Vlad Tenev?

  I'm feeling really good.

• 2:07:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:07:30Vlad Tenev?

  I mean, uh, yeah, on, when we talk about the business, I think people have a tendency to be short-term oriented and think about the ephemerality of this quarter, that quarter. But the real story for, for me was we're making big investments. We're continuing to invest in areas that matter. And there's over a hundred trillion moving from older generations to younger. And so things like us being the sole initial trustee and broker powering Trump accounts, which are going to put Robin in front of sixty million, uh, children, literally extending our market from You know, eighteen and over to zero and over.

• 2:08:14Vlad Tenev?

  We've got, we've got investments at all stages of the life cycle. Trump accounts very early. We've got businesses that are scaling and doing quite well, like Robinhood Banking and Robinhood Gold Card. And then the active trader business and the core engine of the business, which is people depositing more money for investing and trading, is looking very, very strong as well. And then, that's not to mention, we had a big product event in New York where we launched all of these family features, as well as the Platinum Card. But we've got a bunch of other products that are in the hopper that I think people are going to be very excited about.

• 2:08:55John Coogan?

  I'm sure you're getting questions about the kids thing. I love the idea of kids investing in index funds and holding them until their retirement. Not big on them betting on sports or taking crazy option strategies. How are you thinking about actually rolling out the suite of features? Because there's some that are just like so educational. I remember reading about Warren Buffett and learned so much about investing. Of course, there's some risk, but then there's other products that are much more risk on, much more advanced, stuff where you're much more like an investment professional to be able to do that responsibly. How do you think about the different products being available to different segments of the community now that Robinhood's so big?

• 2:09:40Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah, I mean, I think we're very careful about leading with and incentivizing the products that most customers would benefit from. So if you actually look at what we incentivize, it's products like retirement, where you get a 3% contribution match on contributions that you make to your retirement account. And I'm not aware of anyone doing it. We were the first to do something like that, right? And you know, retirement's grown to thirty billion, north of thirty billion in assets. In my opinion, and I admit that this is my product, but people should look at it. I think that it's the best retirement offering on the market.

• 2:10:25John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:10:25Vlad Tenev?

  Robinhood Strategies, which is our passive digital advisor offering, incredibly low cost. For that one, you might remember, we pioneered the concept of a cap. So other investment advisor offerings, including digital advisors, charge you more the more you invest. And we thought, well, particularly for a digital advisor, you're kind of doing the same exact thing. So why does it make sense to charge someone that has ten million dollars invested with you ten times more than someone that has one million? So we capped it at two hundred and fifty dollars. So zero point two five percent, but capped at a hundred K.

• 2:11:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:06Vlad Tenev?

  And that's been the first of its kind. So I think we do a really nice job on the passive products. I think it's just that the active trading products where we compete and also do quite well tend to get more of the excitement and attention because it's not interesting to people to talk about, you know, saving money for retirement and having your assets passively managed digitally.

• 2:11:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:32Jordi Hays?

  Joshua in the chat wants to know about getting access to things like Korean stocks.

• 2:11:38John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:11:39Jordi Hays?

  What's going on with Korea? What's, what, how are you thinking about?

• 2:11:43John Coogan?

  ADRs.

• 2:11:44Jordi Hays?

  You know, you know.

• 2:11:48John Coogan?

  Lot of exciting computer stocks and AI stocks over in Korea. I know.

• 2:11:52Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah, I think there's a couple of semis out in Korea that are interesting. I think the great thing about our business is, to some degree, customers are always unsatisfied. So this is the first time we're really hearing loud feedback about international stocks. And it's because we're kind of going down the list and there's relatively few things that Robinhood does not offer on par or better than our competitors. So last quarter, we would hear about interest on options collateral. For example, a lot of our active options traders would say, you know, we love trading options at Robinhood.

• 2:12:31Vlad Tenev?

  The experience is great, the costs are super low, but we'd like to get interest on the collateral that we have locked up like we do at other places. And then we added that. And now, of course, nobody mentions that. We've had a lot of, we have a lot of dividend investors and they had this complaint for a long time about how other brokers pay their dividends in the morning. We do it in the evening. And one of the things we unveiled, which I think is like super innovative, is we said, okay, we're not just going to go in the morning. We're going to pay your dividends up to 17 days early on average. So with dividends, I don't know if you guys are dividend hounds, but there's like a record date where if you own the, if you own the stock on that date,

• 2:13:16Vlad Tenev?

  you get, you're entitled to the dividend. But the payout date is usually two to three weeks later. So what happens during that period? I mean, there's essentially no risk that you're not going to receive that dividend. So we thought, why don't we just go through it and make that easy for customers? So now the dividend, the dividend people are happy, except they want a dividend tracker, which we're building.

• 2:13:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:13:41Vlad Tenev?

  So yeah, you're going to get down to these things where, yeah, eventually the biggest complaint will be connecting customers to the Kazakhstan markets. And that's when we know we're doing, we're doing really well, but there's always more to be done.

• 2:13:55John Coogan?

  Okay, take us through what's going on in crypto. It's obviously showing up in the financials, but I mean, we had someone on the show earlier who said it's down only. Is this people rotating from crypto to AI? That was talking about more specifically. Oh, the token, the K-shaped dynamic of the tokens. But like, like it felt like there was a lot of legislation that was happening in crypto to sort of create smoother guardrails. There were no big blowups. It felt like the, some of the crazier, more risk on behavior had sort of moved on. And so it felt like a time when crypto could sort of just grow steadily and yet it seems like the, the market's pulling back.

• 2:14:35John Coogan?

  Like, how have you, have you processed it? How are you thinking about crypto, both for your business and just as an abstract asset class these days?

• 2:14:43Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I think one of the criticisms we get is that, you know, Robin Hood is heavily reliant on crypto and trades sort of like correlated with BTC. Sure. Now, if you look at what's actually happened in the past year, we have an incredibly diversified business, 11 lines of business generating 100 million or more in annualized revenue. So crypto is a big one for sure, but it's under 20% of our revenue and we've got lots of other things that are firing on all cylinders and there's more in line. So it's 11 now, but Robin Hood Legends been doing super well.

• 2:15:27Vlad Tenev?

  The gold credit card has been growing at a very rapid pace. Yeah. So there's going to be more. Now, when you look at crypto specifically, we're still very bullish on crypto assets over the long run, but as you can tell, there are cycles in the market. There's periods where, you know, we're just talking about crypto, then there's periods that are a little bit colder and more winterous. But developers are developing and we're continuing to build and invest and we see some very positive things. Now, our focus on crypto is actually investing in the technology and making it so that traditional

• 2:16:10Vlad Tenev?

  assets are tokenized on-chain. So it's a little bit less like, what's the new meme coin that we can list, although we do love our meme coins, and more, how can we actually make tokenization a real thing? And I outlined kind of a three-phase plan in our event in France about how first we're going to start tokenizing stocks in a limited fashion and it'll look somewhat similar to what's available in traditional markets, but in Europe. But eventually you'll get to fully on-chain DeFi-enabled stock tokens that are composable. And we're still executing on that vision. As a matter of fact, Robinhood Chain launched

• 2:16:53Vlad Tenev?

  on Testnet and it was a very successful testnet with something north of 100 million in transactions. So developers are obviously very keen to integrate into the ecosystem and get access to the Robinhood customer base. So we're continuing to make investments across the full stack: centralized exchange, DeFi with Robinhood Chain, the non-custodial wallet, which I think people are sleeping on, but I think we've got really, really good stuff there. And we announced an event in London in early July where we're gonna kind of unveil the next chapter with a heavy emphasis on tokenization.

• 2:17:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want to talk about these events because I feel like you have one of the most, I don't know, unique or diverse aesthetics for your events. I've seen you do sort of like the post-game with the step and repeat, like it's a NBA game, and then the aesthetics for the France event was like this giant pool and everyone's in white suits. Like, is this coming from you? Like, who's driving this? Like, what is the meaning behind all the different stylistic touches? Like, it's cool, there's a whole bunch of different directions you're going. Is this something you want to continue to experiment with? Is it like a creative outlet for you? Like, how are you thinking about events?

• 2:18:11Vlad Tenev?

  Well, you guys have to watch. You mentioned some good ones, but the last one we did at the TWA terminal in New York, which was pilot-themed.

• 2:18:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 2:18:22Vlad Tenev?

  I thought was quite good as well.

• 2:18:24John Coogan?

  So you want to do a different theme every year, maybe, or every quarter? Is that the idea? And do you come up with the themes? Or do you have a team that's submitting ideas? Like, how does that work?

• 2:18:34Vlad Tenev?

  I mean, it's a collaborative process, but I've been generally coming up with and at least approving and editing the themes.

• 2:18:42Jordi Hays?

  Creative director.

• 2:18:44John Coogan?

  I love it. No, it should. I mean, it's like, it's fun to bring the CEO's personality.

• 2:18:49Vlad Tenev?

  I think it's hard to do strange stuff without, you know, the CEO kind of driving it at least to some degree, right? And I think that's the risk with corporate events. They could end up, if you're not being careful, looking like crappier versions of original Apple events. And I think admittedly, that's kind of how we started. Our first event was Q1 of 2024, where we unveiled the gold card. And it sort of was heavily inspired by the Apple events. But then we asked ourselves, you know, it's time to grow beyond that. Let's sort of like learn from the masters, but then we've got to push the frontier. So I think that what we ask ourselves is, we want to roll out these products, but how

• 2:19:34Vlad Tenev?

  can we roll them out in a way that's super engaging and sort of like imbue storytelling and craftsmanship into the actual announcements? So the last one, the New York event, was viewed over 60 million times. I mean, the numbers were just shocking to me. 60 million, if you look at it across X and YouTube. I mean, that's more than most movies.

• 2:20:02Jordi Hays?

  That's wild. How do you think LLMs are changing retail investor behavior?

• 2:20:07Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah, I mean, I think there's three different ways that actually AI advances affect Robin Hood, which I think is more than most companies. And we're kind of working hard to lead in all three. So number one, it's just. The the stuff that we're doing internally, accelerating software engineering, automating customer support. And we were early on to this and we've actually built a lot of our own internal tooling because third-party stuff hasn't quite caught up even now. The second is Robinhood Cortex and AI tooling inside our product. So one of the things I

• 2:20:48Vlad Tenev?

  announced at earnings is that Robinhood Cortex, which is our AI family of products, has now been used by nearly 1 million customers and that's growing very, very quickly. And we just rolled out Cortex Assistant, which is essentially AI chatbot that has full context into your account and financial data in your Robinhood app. And obviously, the next step is can we take some of these Claude code-esque agentic capabilities and empower all sorts of financial trading and other use cases. So we're working on that. I don't think anyone in financial services has really cracked that. There've been some early experiments,

• 2:21:29Vlad Tenev?

  but I think I think we've got some good stuff to share there. So and that's going to be, you know, all year, starting next month. I think we're gonna, we're gonna roll out some of these agentic capabilities. But then there's a third one.

• 2:21:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:21:44Vlad Tenev?

  You guys probably saw, I know, I know, congratulations on the OpenAI deal, by the way. Robinhood Ventures, which I've been talking to you about since the beginning, invested in OpenAI.

• 2:21:54John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:21:55Vlad Tenev?

  Yes.

• 2:21:56John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:21:57Vlad Tenev?

  So now Robinhood Ventures is like live, went public, yeah.

• 2:22:00John Coogan?

  The K-Rat suit grows. I love it. Every company.

• 2:22:04Jordi Hays?

  This may, this may be a silly question, but you're a good person to answer it. Why, why did Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon, why do they end up all having earnings?

• 2:22:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, is that by design or random?

• 2:22:19Jordi Hays?

  Like you would think, you would think that you would say like, hey, these companies represent, you know, 20% of the SP.

• 2:22:24John Coogan?

  I want my special day. I'll go on Monday.

• 2:22:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you want the attention. You announced earnings today. Why not, why not, why not give everybody their own kind of moment?

• 2:22:35Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah, I mean, I can speak for myself and how we do it. We do not coordinate with other companies on when to do our earnings. I mean, it's just kind of driven by there's a certain window that you can do it after the quarter ends and it's sort of like availability, right? You don't want to do it on a Monday. You don't really want to do it on a Friday. So it kind of has to be Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.

• 2:23:02Jordi Hays?

  And so you think the hyperscalers were kind of all in the same window with it? They're like, let's jump together. Like, we're gonna pay, we're gonna raise.

• 2:23:10Vlad Tenev?

  I would be surprised if there was any sort of collusion involved, but maybe they were all juggling the same conferences or anything or something. Yeah.

• 2:23:20John Coogan?

  There are a surprising amount of questions in the chat about the gold card. I want to know both how it's going and I want to know, is it a, like, how unfair is it to characterize it as a marketing project? How good of a business is it? How good of a business will it be? How important is it to the overall ecosystem?

• 2:23:42Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah, it's a strong business. So right now, we've got 800,000 gold card holders currently, and they're generating something around 15 billion in annual transaction volume, right? ATV. So it's a scaled, like, large offering. The reason you're hearing so much noise about it is that pretty much everyone in the country wants this credit card. It's by far the best deal. 3% cash back on all categories. That's why people want it. It's like the best cash back coupled with what I think is the best customer experience. And so we're getting a little bit of criticism about can we be rolling it out faster? But if you look at the rollout,

• 2:24:29Vlad Tenev?

  It's sort of like on par with the fastest rollouts of other successful credit cards in history. If you look at the companies that have rolled out faster than us, and we have to make sure we monitor credit quality and all of these things, the ones that have rolled out faster than us have not been responsible and have run into trouble. So I think we're balancing two things. We want to roll it out as fast as possible while also staying responsible. So certainly, we will cross 1 million cardholders this year and 100 million in ARR, and we'll probably do it well before the end of the year as well. So.

• 2:25:10John Coogan?

  Were there any other incentives that were at the top of the list for you where you thought it might be interesting? Like the classic, you know, credit card is like you get airline miles, travel, and that, even if it's a lower percentage, it's a worse economic deal, it lends itself to great marketing. Because Visa is this abstract thing, or AMX is that track thing, but then they show you a picture of you getting on a business class flight, going to Hawaii, staying at a five-star hotel, and it's like, this can all be free. And it's like, you could just pay for that with 3% cash back. But it allows more storytelling. Was there anything else that you were like, ah, that might be an interesting twist? Or was it just like pure economic value?

• 2:25:51Vlad Tenev?

  Well, the gold card is a simple daily driver product. And the whole point is you don't have to think too hard about maximizing your rewards, which I think is really attractive. Because for a lot of people who aren't like super points optimizers, they want to just know that they're getting a good deal and that they have a nice card, but probably not, you know, spend time on the points guy and compare. There are people that we want to serve that are in that latter category, which is why we unveiled the Platinum Card at the Take Flight event. So that's a more premium card, 695 annual fee, made of pure platinum.

• 2:26:34Vlad Tenev?

  So it has pure platinum in there. It's one of the heaviest cards. And that one is a little bit different. So you get 5% back on dining, which I think I haven't seen a better deal for restaurants out there. And we've really been getting good feedback on the wellness benefits. So.

• 2:26:53Vlad Tenev?

  There was some criticism that I should own up to after our announcement. And by the way, our announcement, it was like the headliner. It was intended to be the appetizer, but so many people got excited about the platinum card that, you know, the waitlist signups greatly exceeded our expectations there. But some people were saying, you know, maybe it's a little bit complicated. It's a little bit too coupon-y. And so our team's been hard at work fixing all of that. So actually, even though people were excited, we're going to come back to them with something better ahead of rollout that fixes a lot of the concerns. So, yeah.

• 2:27:33John Coogan?

  Is there a card in the pipeline that goes above? Are you going to do the tungsten card?

• 2:27:38Vlad Tenev?

  Uh, for our crypto friends.

• 2:27:40John Coogan?

  Maybe, yeah, the tungsten cube. That was very popular for a while. There's something there.

• 2:27:44Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah, it's been considered and we've been thinking about a black card.

• 2:27:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:48Vlad Tenev?

  So, um, yeah, not, it's not like actively in the works.

• 2:27:52John Coogan?

  Carbon nanotubes in the card or something. I don't know. You gotta get funky with the materials for sure. There's so much to explore.

• 2:27:59Vlad Tenev?

  We've had some ideas for sure. Yeah, we have some good, like, we know the design of it. I think the question just is, let's digest gold, roll that out, bully, uh, let's digest platinum and then I think we'll see. We can go in both directions, both like, sort of like a more basic starter card and as well as, uh, there's always more room at the top.

• 2:28:22John Coogan?

  The whole pipeline.

• 2:28:23Jordi Hays?

  I would like the mahogany card.

• 2:28:24John Coogan?

  The mahogany card.

• 2:28:26Jordi Hays?

  The official wood of business.

• 2:28:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, a wooden card, maybe.

• 2:28:29Vlad Tenev?

  A nice velour card.

• 2:28:31John Coogan?

  Velour, good too. Well, anything else, Jordy?

• 2:28:34Jordi Hays?

  No, this is, this is.

• 2:28:35John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time. Uh, congratulations on the progress and the new, uh, all the different initiatives you have going on. Uh, look forward to talking to you soon. Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:28:44Vlad Tenev?

  Thanks, guys.

• 2:28:45John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:28:45Vlad Tenev?

  See you, Jordy.

• 2:28:46Jordi Hays?

  Great, later.

• 2:28:47John Coogan?

  Q1 earnings is in, uh, all in one place. Brandon Gurrell has the data.

• 2:28:52Jordi Hays?

  I was trying to, I was trying to.

• 2:28:53John Coogan?

  What were you trying to do?

• 2:28:54Jordi Hays?

  Andrew Reid.

• 2:28:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:28:54Jordi Hays?

  I was trying to bring in.

• 2:28:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, well.

• 2:28:56Jordi Hays?

  Andrew Reid, their buddies, but it didn't work.

• 2:28:59John Coogan?

  Well, there's some, uh... There are a bunch of, yeah, we can bring in our next guest soon.

• 2:29:04Jordi Hays?

  Run through, run through earnings.

• 2:29:05John Coogan?

  But Google's up big, Meta's down big, Amazon's down a bit, Microsoft's down a bit, but it seems like performance was strong across the board. Earnings, revenue, let's do revenue. Microsoft, 82 billion, 81 was the estimate. Meta, 56.3 billion, 55.4 billion was the estimate. Google, 109.9 billion was the revenue, 107.2 billion was the estimate. And for Amazon, 181.5 billion against 177 estimate. So beats across the board, but various levels of expectations. We'll be digging into the capex numbers and all those other downstream metrics that we discussed at the top of the show.

• 2:29:49John Coogan?

  But we have our next guest in the waiting room. We have Parag Agrawal and I believe we have Andrew Reid as well. Welcome to the show.

• 2:29:57Parag Agrawal?

  Hey guys.

• 2:29:58John Coogan?

  How you guys doing?

• 2:29:58Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:29:59John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time. Uh, let's kick it off with what you got done this week.

• 2:30:05Parag Agrawal?

  Got Andrew Reid on the board.

• 2:30:08John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:30:15Jordi Hays?

  Very, very, very, very good.

• 2:30:17John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, how'd the deal come together? What's the thesis? What's the update? What's the progress like? Sort of reintroduce the shape of the company.

• 2:30:26Parag Agrawal?

  John, Jody, great to be here again. I don't know, last time I was here, we were building, we were talking about this abstract notion of AI agents using the web and wanting web infrastructure so that agents can use the web.

• 2:30:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:41Parag Agrawal?

  Right? And it's been six months.

• 2:30:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:44Parag Agrawal?

  And the agents have shown up.

• 2:30:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. 100%.

• 2:30:48Parag Agrawal?

  And these agents are using the web.

• 2:30:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:52Parag Agrawal?

  And we've built a bunch of technology and productized it in the last six months. We only launched the product in August and we're seeing.

• 2:31:02Parag Agrawal?

  Agents use the web to do useful things for people.

• 2:31:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:05Parag Agrawal?

  And useful things for businesses.

• 2:31:06John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:31:07Parag Agrawal?

  Uh, and really, I don't know how many agents you use. But like this year, the, the breadth of customers, the quality of customers, the variety of use cases, they've all exploded well beyond our wildest imaginations.

• 2:31:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. And uh, may, may, maybe we should start with, uh, you know, the, the.

• 2:31:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's just go around and say how many Mac minis we all have.

• 2:31:30John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:31:30Jordi Hays?

  I personally have 20 running.

• 2:31:31John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, you do?

• 2:31:32Jordi Hays?

  John, I know, has.

• 2:31:33John Coogan?

  I have a single one, single Mac mini, barely doing anything.

• 2:31:37Jordi Hays?

  Continue.

• 2:31:38John Coogan?

  No, I, I, I'm interested to know about, uh, just, well, two main things, but let's start with the first. Uh, in terms of just like robots.txt, how much of the internet can be seen by agents? Is this a wall of some sort? We've seen different reports about, uh, different organizations with content on the internet, uh, having different policies and is, is, are customers coming to you saying like, I want to be a good actor and so I don't want to violate any of the robots.txt agreements, even though they are not necessarily legally binding in every scenario as I understand it? But, uh, is, is, is, is seeing the entire web, being able to do everything across the web, a unique value proposition in this day and age?

• 2:32:25Parag Agrawal?

  It will be, right? If you think about it, here, there's a lot more content on the open web.

• 2:32:29John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:32:30Parag Agrawal?

  I think more recently as people have started worrying about like agents sort of stealing their content.

• 2:32:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:35Parag Agrawal?

  Certainly a fear and perhaps a trend in some pockets to put content behind.

• 2:32:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:42Parag Agrawal?

  Walls.

• 2:32:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:43Parag Agrawal?

  Whether it be via robots.txt or some sort of a blocker.

• 2:32:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:48Parag Agrawal?

  Like, that is a legitimate fear.

• 2:32:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:52Parag Agrawal?

  And see some of it happen. Uh, we actually started the company to in part solve the problem. The common thread from my work at Twitter to through this company was to incentivize more content to be out in the open for everyone to see and use.

• 2:33:08John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:33:09Parag Agrawal?

  So we've also been working with people, content owners, publishers who publish on the web.

• 2:33:14John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:33:15Parag Agrawal?

  To effectively align incentives of theirs for the world of AIs.

• 2:33:22John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:33:22Parag Agrawal?

  So when we talk about rebuilding the web for AI, it's not just about building technology to serve people building AI solutions.

• 2:33:30John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:33:30Parag Agrawal?

  It is also to empower content owners and publishers to actually have sustainable, real, awesome, fast-growing businesses that share in the value that they help create via AIs.

• 2:33:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:44Parag Agrawal?

  And we'll have more to share perhaps, and we'll be back to talk about it.

• 2:33:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you thinking about the various modalities of?

• 2:33:53Parag Agrawal?

  He's vague posting on the, on the, on the show. He's vague posting live. I'm just fishing for another invite.

• 2:33:58John Coogan?

  How, yeah, how are you thinking about the various modalities with which to interact with internet resources? Like, we have APIs, we have web front-ends, agents can use both, there's MCP servers, there's potential for an MCB standard that's, you know, metered with stable coins or even just credit card payments. There's, there are solutions to every different endpoint. Some of them require more RL and training. Like, are you, do you see any of them as a point of differentiation? Where you want to be like the best for setting up an API integration just on the fly seamlessly so you can get the action done? Do you want to just be able to deal with any front-end, no matter how janky it is

• 2:34:41John Coogan?

  from the, maybe they haven't updated their website since 1995, it still works? Maybe it's using some crazy front-end framework, it still works because you're really good at agentially interacting with the UI.

• 2:34:53Parag Agrawal?

  Yeah, no, I think so. A few different things here, right? Number one, you do have to take websites or content published for every era and allow agents to access them. Yeah. So, a bunch of the heavy lifting we do is to enable that to happen today. Additionally, though, none of those are the most efficient ways of doing things, right? And ultimately, the world wants to move towards more efficient solutions because that allows you to do more and do better. And so we built a bunch of things where content owners can provide data more efficiently. People saw L M dot text, get around a little bit, very small part of the web uses it.

• 2:35:36Parag Agrawal?

  But we translate the entire web to make it easier for agents to use it. Hmm. Now, in terms of APIs and MCPs and whether you pay for an API with a traditional credit card and account or user uh crypto protocol, whether it be X four or two tempo, these are all, all of these things make sense, right? They make sense for different customers, for different agents and different contexts. Yeah. And really, the way we think about so solving the problem is we're building essentially an infrastructure layer. Even if you look at our product suite, it is very, very, it exposes various layers of our technology stack. Hmm.

• 2:36:19Parag Agrawal?

  We're building this vertically integrated technology stack. We have first principles way of crawling the web, indexing the web, ranking the web, building agents on top of it, building proactive agents on top of it. Yeah. And exposing all of these things as APIs and MCP servers and as CLIs. Because different customer needs and different customer problems and different customer circumstances. Yeah. Demand slightly different solutions. It's like AWS exposing a VM. Yeah. Versus a managed server to run compute. Sure. Versus the even higher level abstraction to run serverless. Hmm. And it's the same that shows up in this infra alignment of agents using the web.

• 2:36:57Jordi Hays?

  What companies would be crazy to not sign up for the service today?

• 2:37:06Parag Agrawal?

  If you're using an L L M and are not trying to get it to forget everything that's out on the web, you should totally be using it. And the answer, it's like, it's not complicated because

• 2:37:21John Coogan?

  Everyone.

• 2:37:23Parag Agrawal?

  Yeah, and it's not complicated because if you think of like any products that you use which are powered by L L M's or agents, you have this mental model now that they are both smart and all-knowing.

• 2:37:37Parag Agrawal?

  And if you don't give them the best access to all of the live, fresh content on the web and all of the long-tail content on the web,

• 2:37:45Parag Agrawal?

  like that illusion of all-knowing goes away. And so you kind of are forced, like initially Chat G P T, we were all in love with it, did not have web. Now try to turn the web off for a day in whatever agentic product I use. Coding agents, we all used to use them without, they did, used to not crawl the web. I don't know if you remember, but I used to like paste in doc links for it to

• 2:38:12John Coogan?

  I used to like export PDFs and then like upload the PDF from the website that you wanted to add extra context into the context window. Now you just assume that it knows everything. It's crazy.

• 2:38:21Parag Agrawal?

  And that was a year ago. That was a year ago. And today, you're gonna feel like a caveman doing that.

• 2:38:27John Coogan?

  Okay, we have to talk to Andrew because the chat is calling you a silent partner. They're saying, nothing from my end. Thanks. I want to know, did the progress here with this company, did you expect it or did it hit you like a flashbang?

• 2:38:44John Coogan?

  Talk me through your journey.

• 2:38:46Andrew Reed?

  Parag, you take that one too.

• 2:38:50John Coogan?

  Okay, no, no, no, no.

• 2:38:52Andrew Reed?

  First off, first off, allow me to, allow me to insert myself.

• 2:38:55John Coogan?

  Please.

• 2:38:56Andrew Reed?

  Uh, since the last time I was on T V N, when you guys started going down the, um, like the deep AI infrastructure rabbit hole, this show changed and I'm unprepared. So my, uh, the, the anxiety level increased quite a bit. And the good is that I've, I've been in some conversations with Parag, with other people who are like crazy. Deep on web infra and however deep, however deep John can go, I think Parrot can go even deeper. So I feel good about that.

• 2:39:25John Coogan?

  Good.

• 2:39:27Andrew Reed?

  Yeah, first off, I'm delighted to be on the show with my newest board and it's incredibly exciting company. Honestly, the, I think like many of our most interesting investments, like when you start seeing a bunch of portfolio companies adopting the same product. And, and also in these high growth areas, you see, you know, you see background agents and long horizon agents out in the wild to a certain degree. But then you have the board meetings where you see all the prototypes and the products people are planning on launching the rest of this year.

• 2:40:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:40:03Andrew Reed?

  And I think the idea of agents going from something that runs locally and has very limited access to something that runs in the background all the time and has basically a full workspace.

• 2:40:19Andrew Reed?

  And then you think about all the elements of knowledge work and how they overlap with the web in terms of

• 2:40:25Andrew Reed?

  things changing in the world to trigger actions to the actions that agents have to take in the world.

• 2:40:31Andrew Reed?

  And then people viewing parallel as kind of core to what they want to do is, you know, at some point like, and obviously the growth rate is crazy. So it's not that complicated.

• 2:40:45Jordi Hays?

  That always sounds icing on the cake.

• 2:40:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:50John Coogan?

  Is this, is this a period of uncertainty in venture broadly around how certain markets will break? Where powers and moats will emerge? Or do you think the smoke is clear? Do you think that it's actually pretty, pretty clear right now?

• 2:41:06Jordi Hays?

  Well, they have that Sequoia, they have the crystal ball.

• 2:41:08John Coogan?

  You have the crystal ball?

• 2:41:09Jordi Hays?

  I'll consult with that if they need to, if, if, if there is some fog of war, you know?

• 2:41:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there is a lens that's like, it's up only right now. Like it's just such a big market that even the companies that aren't the hottest one day.

• 2:41:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you look at.

• 2:41:22John Coogan?

  I'm interested in just like how you're processing the market right now.

• 2:41:24Jordi Hays?

  Look at CodeGen and like a year ago, if you just backed the top, like eight companies.

• 2:41:29John Coogan?

  They all did well.

• 2:41:30Jordi Hays?

  You've done really well.

• 2:41:33Andrew Reed?

  Yeah, I think what's worth the, you know, there is one sure thing, which is the data center built out, it's underway and you know what that's going to mean for token pricing and what's going to be possible and obviously, you know, the model improvements, et cetera. It's interesting because, you know, I was watching Vlad before this and I remember, interestingly, there's something similar with, you know, when I first went Prague, it was in Palo Alto, you know, internet, celebrity, building something that looked like one company from the surface and then the further you got into it, you realize there is doing so much more than meets the eye, you know, and I remember with Robin Hood, you know, according to the internet, it was, you know, commission free stock trading app, but they

• 2:42:16Andrew Reed?

  had just built this internal self-clearing system, the first one that had been built in the US in 30 years, I think since Vanguard, and their willingness to tackle long-term, very hard engineering problems to serve their needs and their customers' needs for a long period of time was extremely unique in that industry. And it reminds me of a parallel, like just if you go spend time in the Palo Alto office and you see the stuff they're working on, these are hardcore infrastructure engineering problems that are designed to serve both scalability, reliability, speed, everything else, cost, needs for customers a year or two from now and like the world just doesn't quite see it yet. And then also, like, I remember when Prague first mentioned, you know, agents are going

• 2:43:00Andrew Reed?

  to use the web 1,000 times more than humans and it, you know, you kind of roll your eyes because like that just seems ridiculous. But then if you just actually look at the trends and just draw a line forward and imagine like what cloud agents are going to be and how they're going to overlap with knowledge work, it actually is probably like an undershooting of the number. Yeah, that's personally my bear case.

• 2:43:25John Coogan?

  I mean, I mean, we're seeing like uptime problems with major pieces of web infrastructure because the demand is so high. It's really showing up everywhere. Chip shortage, CPU shortage, so many different places. And yeah, I mean, we saw early glimpses of it with, you know, certain, just the number of queries a single deep research report would make or something like that. So, very, very exciting times. And we appreciate you both coming on the show. Great to see you. I'm very, I'm very excited for your partnership. And congratulations on the round. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers.

• 2:43:59Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, guys.

• 2:44:04John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Gabe from Rogo. He's the founder and CEO with a massive series D raise. Let's bring in Gabe. Welcome back to the show. How are you doing?

• 2:44:15Speaker 12

  What's up, guys? Thanks for having me.

• 2:44:17John Coogan?

  Great to see you again. Anytime. Big news. Let's kick it off. How much did you raise? I want to hit the gong.

• 2:44:23Speaker 12

  Hundred sixty million, two billion dollar valuation.

• 2:44:27John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Leave some valuation for the rest of them. Capital again. I think we went three Sequoia companies. This is the Sequoia show, I guess, right now. But Thrives, Incosla, JB Morgan, Box Group, Mantis, Jack Altman, you got a whole crew, a murderer's row. What's driving the growth? Why are they putting more money in? Why is the business working?

• 2:44:52Speaker 12

  So this was led by Kleiner. So it's new, new investors. Mamu and Nadia, super excited to work with that whole team. I mean, we're trying to transform finance and finance is maybe the biggest knowledge work category on earth, fifteen percent of GDP. We've seen crazy uptake over the last six months. I think what was happening in all of 2025 with software engineering and Claude Code and Cursor taking off, we've crossed the chasm in finance. And I think we're seeing in investment banks, private equity firms, hedge funds, folks really starting to use these tools to be more productive, to make better investments, to reimagine how they do their work. And that's driving the investment.

• 2:45:31John Coogan?

  If, if, you know, if somebody woke up from a coma and they looked at your financials and they looked at your business, they'd be like, this is the most incredible investment. I gotta write the check, right? But then there is this like looming cloud of like AGI, ASI, steamrolled by lab, right? So are you grappling with that? How do you talk to your investors about like the defensibility, the moats, the, the go to market motion? Like what makes Rogo special over the really long term? Or are you just like AGS fake?

• 2:46:02Speaker 12

  I mean, I think if, if you're not grappling with that stuff, no matter who you are, you, you probably should be. You know, I, I don't care even if your business is making plastic cups. Like things are going to change and you need to be prepared. For us in particular, I think folks throw a lot of shade at the application layer. And I think rightly so in, in some places, right? If you can't provide incremental value to these models such that big enterprises want to work with you and trust you to transform their businesses, you should not exist, right? Like that, that, you know, it's a rising tide and it keeps you honest about what is the quality of what you're creating. For us, we actually see there's structural reasons for a vertical player in finance. One is that if you are the biggest investment bank on earth,

• 2:46:42Speaker 12

  you want to always be able to run the world's best models on top of your data, on top of all your workflows. And the reality right now is Claude is the model de jour, but three months ago with Gemini, 12 months ago, it felt like ChatGPT was indomitable. Who knows what it will be in 12 months? In 24 months, you might be able to use the Kimi models to do everything you want and you don't need a token max on the frontier model labs and you want someone whose incentive is aligned with your business incentives, not just consuming tokens. And so there's some structural advantages. And then there's also things native to financial services that are just very deep and complex, right? Like financial services is a collection of niches, each with their own regulation, their own data, their own definition of good. To think you can just have this big generic tool and do all of the work is, is a little bit nonsensical.

• 2:47:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you mentioned the, the thing on token maxing. Do you think it's possible that the application layer emerges as like the, basically that the party that's aligned to the, to the end customer to, to keep costs in control? Which like right now, businesses are are not caring around token relate, you know, you're starting to see a few, a few people pop up and say like, hey, we spent two, three times as much on tokens this month. Like, did we get two, three times as much value? That's starting to happen in the last, like, call it month. But you can imagine over time, businesses will just care, you know, if if tokens become a core expense to every business,

• 2:48:08Jordi Hays?

  which I would expect happens. Businesses will care a lot about optimizing that. And so there's an opportunity for the for the application layer to be the aligned party that's saying like, the the lab is not going to necessarily tell you like when you should use this other model, but we will because like our our incentives are aligned. You're going to pay like, you know, you can you can figure that out in a number of ways.

• 2:48:34Speaker 12

  Yeah, no, I mean, many ways we can be a model broker and help you pick the best bottle for the best task. And that's in fact, how one of our customers described us the the other night. And imagine being a huge firm and you have, you know, the GM of a division comes to you and says, I just hired, you know, $100 million worth of people over the past year. You'd be like, and what what did you guys get done? Like, what what needle did you move? Right? Like, when I saw Uber CTO saying, we already went through our, you know, Claude code budget. It's like, okay, to what to what end? You're gonna need people that can align token consumption with business value. And for us, maybe it's per deal. Maybe it's per fairness committee memo. Maybe it's per IC memo. You can actually think about how do we make sure that we are supercharging the things that

• 2:49:16Speaker 12

  are revenue generating for the org as opposed to anything else?

• 2:49:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about de-duplication of work? It feels like there's some organizations where you might have like two vibe-coded dashboards that are identical, and it's just repeat work. But this has happened for generations. I'm sure going back to investment banks, there's five people that built the same DCF. They should have used a template. There were at one point templating companies. I think Canolists was one that was was focused on those financial models and trying to standardize them across the organization. Like, how much of what you do on top of the cherry on top is like change management, organizational design, education, making sure people are reaching for the most efficient tool for the job because the tool's changing like every week?

• 2:50:05Speaker 12

  A ton. I mean, a huge part of our value proposition is the kind of forward deployed banker motion where we can go on, go in and say, hey, what are, what is all the muscle memory you have on how you do your work and how do we map that to what AI is capable of today? But if you hire Accenture to do that, or McKinsey or Bain, well, guess what happens? You have to do it again in three months because the models are changing so quickly and you kind of need to reinvent these processes on the fly.

• 2:50:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:29Speaker 12

  The reason it's so important to an enterprise is, you know, imagine, imagine if Elon Musk was also the president. I'm sure self-driving would look different. He would be able to change the traffic laws and design full self-driving to be far more efficient. Can't do that. So you need to design for existing traffic laws.

• 2:50:44John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:50:44Speaker 12

  If you're a large enterprise, you can also change the traffic laws. So you can change how your organization is structured and thinking about integrating these models in far more kind of interesting pioneering ways, but it takes thought partners to do that.

• 2:50:58John Coogan?

  You have, you have a sales team, right? Like individuals that are working with large banks to deploy the product, set up the customer for success, correct?

• 2:51:08Speaker 12

  Yep.

• 2:51:08John Coogan?

  What does it take to succeed?

• 2:51:10Speaker 12

  I'd be worried.

• 2:51:12John Coogan?

  I don't know. I, I, I just want to know, like, what does it take to succeed when you're hiring a sales rep? Like what background, what characteristics, what stands out where you're like, they're going to succeed here versus another company that's, you know, selling software or something. Like what, what, what really jumps out to you to get a job?

• 2:51:35Speaker 12

  Well, we do have this forward deployed banker, forward deployed investor role where we hire a ton of super smart, curious, ambitious folks from Wall Street who want to get hands on with the technology.

• 2:51:46John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:51:47Speaker 12

  And because we have so much of that domain expertise, you can actually pair someone like that with, you know, a great enterprise seller that knows how to navigate an organization, knows the politics of selling, knows what it means to be a strategic AE and, and, you know, they can, they can work well together. You do want people who are open-minded and curious and creative because it is changing so quickly. But my mental model is it's very hard to, you know, What a good AI does is build relationships, right? And now with these tools, they don't need to focus on building the DAGs or the analysis of the pricing schedules as much, but they can spend more time taking clients to Knicks games or whatever else might be productive and that's hard to replace.

• 2:52:26John Coogan?

  That's why Josh Kushner bought the SF Giants.

• 2:52:29Jordi Hays?

  How, any rumblings around big financial institutions like changing their early career hiring or the number of people that they're hiring? Is it flat? Is it down? Is it up?

• 2:52:45Speaker 12

  I mean, people are very interested in how they create the next generation of deal makers and investors. They're like, yeah, if you're not doing the modeling I used to do or the work that I used to do, how are you going to learn the job? I think every firm is rethinking, how do you have this pipeline of senior MDs, of senior investors? Because if you don't have any more juniors, you are missing out on the folks who will be revenue generating in five to 10 years. I think there's a lot of thoughtfulness around that. I think in terms of thinking about the org as a whole, these are super ambitious institutions that want to win market share. And if you say to them, hey, a junior banker now can support four MDs instead of two, and you can now hire more MDs and enter new markets and compete more aggressively with

• 2:53:30Speaker 12

  your peers, that's typically the way these folks think. But it's a spectrum.

• 2:53:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Well, thank you so much, Jordy. Anything else?

• 2:53:38Jordi Hays?

  No, very cool.

• 2:53:39John Coogan?

  Congrats on the round.

• 2:53:40Speaker 12

  Thanks, guys.

• 2:53:41Jordi Hays?

  I hear about Rogo every week from our friend Patrick O'Shaughnessy.

• 2:53:46John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Fantastic sponsorship.

• 2:53:49Jordi Hays?

  He's been on an absolute tear.

• 2:53:50John Coogan?

  He has. Yeah. Got to go tune in.

• 2:53:53Speaker 12

  He's the man.

• 2:53:54John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Gabe. Good to see you.

• 2:53:56Jordi Hays?

  Congrats to the team.

• 2:53:57John Coogan?

  Congrats to the team. We'll talk to you later. Goodbye. There's some good news. If you are a cow, if you're a cow and you're worried about privacy, Google has your back. Google Maps specifically has your back because if you're caught and you're a cow on the side of the road and you're caught by one of the Google Street View cameras, Google will blur your face out. If you're a cow, that's good. That's good policy. That's don't be evil in work. Don't dox my cow. And cow, the account says, thank you, Google Maps. Anything else you want to touch on today?

• 2:54:34Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm looking forward.

• 2:54:36John Coogan?

  Stripe session tomorrow. Tune in 11 a.m. Pacific.

• 2:54:39Jordi Hays?

  We'll be there.

• 2:54:40John Coogan?

  Conor McGregor also has the latest adventure. We'll dig into that later. Have a great day, everyone. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com. We'll see you tomorrow. Cheers.