Vibe Rounds, Tech Ecosystems, Foreign Money in US Venture Funds

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. You read the Wall Street Journal today?

• 0:06Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  OpenAI.

• 0:10Jordi Hays?

  I need my coffee. What are they, are they covering the departures?

• 0:14John Coogan?

  Not the fir-, yeah, it's interesting because OpenAI, I mean, the chief technology officer quit yesterday. There's like rumors about a fundraising round, a bunch of executives left. So it's like kind of a chaotic moment.

• 0:28Jordi Hays?

  I saw somebody, somebody's take that I think was totally on point is the way that OpenAI's like employment contracts are set up is if you talk poorly about OpenAI after you leave, they're just like, okay.

• 0:40John Coogan?

  You get your equity clause back.

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  So if you wanted to make a statement about how fucked up things were while still holding on to your equity, you'd leave right in the middle of the fundraiser, right? What sends a bigger mess? Like, cause if you're like, let's say we're running.

• 0:56John Coogan?

  That's not different than, but that's not the same as like actually violating that clause.

• 0:59Jordi Hays?

  No, that's what I'm saying. If you wanted to make a very large, public, dramatic statement about something being wrong at OpenAI, but you couldn't say that.

• 1:07John Coogan?

  Oh, but you couldn't say that because.

• 1:08Jordi Hays?

  You would leave in the middle of a fundraiser.

• 1:10John Coogan?

  But if you want the equity, why would you want to hurt the company?

• 1:14Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's not, you know, you could argue that somebody could say, I want no part of this, but you still want to kind of keep.

• 1:21John Coogan?

  Get the money. I hate that. That pisses me off so much. That's like that fucking guy from, from Meta, from Facebook who like made this huge bag and then was on Netflix. Tristan, you know this guy?

• 1:32Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:32John Coogan?

  He was in this documentary called like The Social Dilemma. He was like, oh yeah, like it's so bad what Instagram has done to this generation, it's so bad. It's like.

• 1:40Jordi Hays?

  And he's just sitting there for Montag.

• 1:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. He made so, made so much money. And it's just like, I actually love that clause. I think that clause is interesting because if, if you are seriously.

• 1:53Jordi Hays?

  Are we an XL character right now?

• 1:54John Coogan?

  No, no, no. I, I, I, this is what I actually believe. I love that clause because if you were actually terrified of AGI and you were like, holy shit, this stuff is going to kill everyone.

• 2:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:07John Coogan?

  What the fuck is, your equity's worth zero. Your equity's worth nothing. So you're going to just be like, yeah, go for it.

• 2:12Jordi Hays?

  No, I think it's much more of a statement on Sam's character to leave during the fundraiser, which is.

• 2:19John Coogan?

  I don't know. I mean, like, I, I, I hear what you're saying, but it's, it's just weird because it's like, it's like, it's this half measure. Like, either, either you'd want to just be like, let me, like, I want the value of this stock to be as high as possible. Therefore, let's find the chilliest place for me to get out, because like, I am, I am tired, right?

• 2:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:39John Coogan?

  So, I do want to leave, but I don't want to fuck over the company at all. So, let's figure out a way to get out. And I thought it was originally interesting that they launched this, like, all this stuff broke the same day that Zuck had the big meta announcement.

• 2:53Jordi Hays?

  Think it was timed?

• 2:54John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, I mean, if you, it's, it's like, you know, bury your news. Yeah, try and bury your news on, you know, a day when something else bigger is happening, right? And like, OpenAI historically has been really, really good about releasing information, like, front-running, like, putting, putting their AI announcement, like, the day before Google's, right?

• 3:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:13John Coogan?

  So they clearly know when the other things are happening.

• 3:16Jordi Hays?

  Has Lucy ever been approached by OpenAI? I mean, maybe she can't say that, that she worked for them?

• 3:21John Coogan?

  Which Lucy?

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, sorry.

• 3:22John Coogan?

  My company?

• 3:23Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, no, they've definitely worked at Lucy.

• 3:26John Coogan?

  Of course, of course, massive shipments.

• 3:28Jordi Hays?

  Lulu, Lulu, not Lucy.

• 3:30John Coogan?

  Lulu, I mean, I think Lulu is working with, uh, SSI.

• 3:34Jordi Hays?

  Got it.

• 3:34John Coogan?

  Ilya's company. Cause she's on like, the Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross crew.

• 3:38Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 3:39John Coogan?

  Um, although she's, you know, like, it has a bunch of different companies and stuff, but.

• 3:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:45John Coogan?

  But I, I, when I initially saw that all this was breaking, right then, I was like, okay, maybe they're trying to kind of bury this news. I mean, obviously, it didn't really work because the, it's on the front page of the business section.

• 3:56Jordi Hays?

  Which every self-respecting person reads daily.

• 4:00John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, you, you, you know, like, like, the meta platforms announced deals with celebrity actors to use their voices in a new artificial intelligence assistant. That's B4, and the OpenAI stuff is B1. So, so it, it, it did break through. Uh, that, that, that's the way I thought they were framing it initially, was like, let's try and, let's try and get this news out the same day that something else big is happening in tech. We know that this Facebook thing's happening. And then, but I mean, then again, like, there is one narrative where it's like, the whole company's falling apart and everyone's leaving. But then there is another narrative, which is like. Great, great man theory of history. Maybe you just need one person. Executive teams turn over all the time. They often turn over in the midst of financing rounds because it's like, okay, we're actually changing

• 4:45John Coogan?

  what the business is going to be doing. We're going a different direction. So like, yeah, we are wiping out a bunch of the staff. I don't know. I'm not, I'm not ready to say like, it's, it's, it's so over.

• 4:56Jordi Hays?

  No, it's, it's

• 4:57John Coogan?

  Unclear that we're so back.

• 4:58Jordi Hays?

  The thing that's most, the thing that's most, uh, the thing that makes it the most interesting is how opaque it all is.

• 5:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:06Jordi Hays?

  Like, nobody, nobody, even seemingly insiders, don't actually know what the fuck's going on.

• 5:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, like

• 5:11Jordi Hays?

  And to have that many, that many billions of dollars in a company and nobody can figure out what's going on.

• 5:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:17Jordi Hays?

  And there's this broader public back, like, like Sam went, you know, a year ago, it felt like Sam was, he was on top of the world.

• 5:26John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:26Jordi Hays?

  Right? Like, he was, everybody was like, was in his comments, like, worshiping him on every single post.

• 5:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:33Jordi Hays?

  Like, you know, this like, sort of tech demigod. And now it feels like that has

• 5:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, certainly, like, the

• 5:42Jordi Hays?

  Certainly snapped back.

• 5:43John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 5:43Jordi Hays?

  Like, at least the X AI X community is

• 5:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:47Jordi Hays?

  deeply against him at this point.

• 5:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and a lot of that has to do with like, the open sourcing.

• 5:53Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 5:53John Coogan?

  And kind of commitment to the developer community and a lot of different stuff, but

• 5:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's funny, the, I feel like the first, um, one of the first critiques of Sam was how he would give those interviews where it genuinely felt like he was just lying, but like, with a very straight face. And he's like, I own no, I own no equity in OpenAI.

• 6:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 6:17Jordi Hays?

  And it's like, who knows what's actually true?

• 6:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:19Jordi Hays?

  I actually was curious and I tried to do some digging and, and people were like, yeah, like, from what I can tell, it's like legit.

• 6:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no. It was legit, but there was always the soft power element.

• 6:31Jordi Hays?

  The soft power element.

• 6:32John Coogan?

  And there was always the question of like, could he get equity eventually?

• 6:34Jordi Hays?

  In the for-profit shift, there was this discussion of getting him, you know, what will effectively be like $10 billion of equity in the for-profit. And so to me, if you actually think about his sort of game theory is like, let me come in, sort of run the company, get so much control and power and influence and not have equity while it's still this nonprofit structure.

• 6:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:55Jordi Hays?

  And then flip it into a for-profit structure and get equity then, right? Like, it almost is like, it almost is like, well, If you were always doing, like, why is there even a discussion of you getting 7% of the company at $150 billion valuation if you never wanted it and there was never a motivation in the first place? But it was kind of, if Sam had come in and taken a huge stake in the company in exchange for taking on the CEO role while cucking Elon out of, then there would have been like a lot of, you know, there would have been probably even more. Now he can make the argument where it's like, "Well, the board just really wants me to be properly incentivized now that we're a for-profit structure, it's only right." And now the next time, you know, he's up in front of the Senate, what's, you know, getting

• 7:39Jordi Hays?

  grilled, they're gonna be like, "So what, you know, what changed? Like, I thought you just were doing this for humanity and now all of a sudden you have your, you know."

• 7:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I wonder, like, I always wonder, like, how seriously people believe, like, superintelligence is right around the corner and the revealed preference.

• 8:00Jordi Hays?

  It's a few thousand days away.

• 8:01John Coogan?

  It's a few thousand days away now, it used to be a few quarters away, it's like, it's kind of shifted so much. And like, that informs your decision and like, your actions like, so much. And there's like, a lot of like, revealed preferences versus stated preferences, a lot of the doomers are like, you know, "Oh, 99% chance that AGI is gonna like, kill us all, but like, yeah, I'm still like, investing in like, bonds because I want my 401k." Exactly. And it's like, okay, well, like, you kind of don't, it doesn't seem like you believe that, it doesn't seem like you're really taking actions that are consistent with what your, what your stated beliefs are, like, maybe you're just trying to, you know, get attention. But, but I do think, like, even internally at these, at these research organizations, like, they might have shifted their, their views. Like, it's totally possible.

• 8:46John Coogan?

  I was talking to somebody about Jensen Huang and like, how Nvidia has done a lot to like, kind of get around the chip bans. And whether or not that was like, un-American. Because they're, like, American companies will buy 100% of Nvidia's supply right now. So the fact that they are taking any TSMC line time-

• 9:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's what he's saying, right, is we're still deeply supply constrained and will be for the next-

• 9:10John Coogan?

  Everyone is like, yeah, like Nvidia could very clearly just make a statement saying like, we're only going to sell to American companies and I'm going to call up Oracle and Elon and Zuck and Google and all these people and just say, I have, you know, 100% of my supply. You guys better take it all and they would.

• 9:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:28John Coogan?

  And so, so, so it's not an economic consideration. It's, it's more like this long-term diversification. You want to be more of an international, an international company. And, and so if you really, really believe that like AESI, AGI is around the corner. It's going to be this super like, you know, bioweapon level, like super critical geopolitical thing, then putting in the hands of the CCP is, is very dangerous. But if you deep down actually just believe that it's just like, it's just spell check. Like it's just, it's just like a useful tool. Like then, then as just like a libertarian, normal person, it's like, yeah, like, why would you respect the spirit of the law? Like you're only going to go after the letter of the law. And like the chip band says it can't have this much memory bandwidth. And so you'll go one point under that.

• 10:11John Coogan?

  And like, that sounds treasonous if you believe that AGI God is coming, but it doesn't sound treasonous if you're just selling spell check, right?

• 10:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:17John Coogan?

  And so it was a very, very interesting discussion. And, and I think, I think that's happening at a lot of these labs. I think that a lot of the labs are starting to change their view from like, okay, well, we thought we were just going to like nail the algorithm and get God and we wouldn't even be able to process it or something.

• 10:34Jordi Hays?

  Entry level, white collar workers.

• 10:35John Coogan?

  Exactly. And so, and so, and so like, like, and, and not just that. It's like, also God might be like decades away, right? Even a few thousand days, that's a, that's a full decade and you got to do a lot in between and also just the scaling laws and all of the different things.

• 10:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the few that we talked about this, but the few thousand days away. Yeah. Sounds way better than 10 years.

• 10:56John Coogan?

  Than 10 years, which is exactly what it is. If you just assume a few is three and you just do the math and it's like, okay, that's, that's a decade. And, and we've been hearing about like self-driving cars a decade away. And then, you know, it took like a little bit more than that, took like two decades. And so it's still not even here. And then, and then the actual build out and rollout of these things is, it takes forever too, like.

• 11:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I was disappointed disappointed to see when you said you shared this earlier that TSMC is slandering Podcast Bros.

• 11:27John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:28Jordi Hays?

  They called Altman a Podcast Bro as if it was some type of like attack.

• 11:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:33Jordi Hays?

  Which I didn't, I had to reread it a few times to try to get their meaning.

• 11:36John Coogan?

  I was confused because that's kind of the highest food chain in the

• 11:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:41John Coogan?

  in the tech food chain.

• 11:42Jordi Hays?

  Podcast bros, finance people that can navigate Excel without, you know, the mouse, you know, venture capitalists after that.

• 11:51John Coogan?

  Then founders.

• 11:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, right. But, but yeah, it's sort of interesting. If, if you would think that TSMC knows what they're doing, right?

• 12:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:07Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that they're, do you think that they're seeing through the, all the narratives and just being like bullshit? Because that's kind of what it sounds like.

• 12:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. In that one, in that one interview clip where they kind of talked about, I have fours too, if you want them.

• 12:25Jordi Hays?

  I'll take a four. Thank you, sir.

• 12:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. In that one interview clip, they, they are talking about like, you know, Sam coming in and saying like, we need like 35 more plants and like, you know, if you go back to the

• 12:41Jordi Hays?

  Seven trillion.

• 12:42John Coogan?

  history of Morris Chang and TSMC, like just getting that one plant up was like immense risk and required like massive government, you know, intervention to make it happen.

• 12:51Jordi Hays?

  I hadn't realized, but I guess the Arizona plant is actually producing product?

• 12:56John Coogan?

  I didn't know that, but I mean, it makes sense. The question is just like, what process is it on? How small are the chips? Like, because we, I mean, America does have plenty of chip making capacity for, you know, the like, the, the much larger, the stuff that goes in like a toaster and a washing machine. Like global foundries and a few other companies have like

• 13:17Jordi Hays?

  Autonomous toasters are going to be.

• 13:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, but, but it's, it's when you get down to like the really important like iPhone chips and stuff that's in the

• 13:25John Coogan?

  In the GPUs, it gets really, really difficult. But yeah, I don't know. Speaking of AI, I, there's been a lot of talks about, we can do this later, but there's been a lot of talk about like, you know, the AI that Elon is applying to the X algorithm and whether or not it's good for the world or good for the user experience.

• 13:46Jordi Hays?

  And the question is, is it actually AI or is it 300 people in a room just looking at videos and hitting a button that says degenerate? Or like, or like, or like, good for society and they're just going like this, you know? And then they're just like feeding those videos, right? Cause you, you remember early TikTok days when TikTok, the algorithm was like getting good and you, you, I remember going on it. Never, never, I don't think I've ever posted anything there, but I remember going on it and being like, wow, I'm like, kinda shocked that they would feed me that video with how little I've used it, like it was so on the nose.

• 14:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, just pausing a little bit on like, oh, there's a car in the background, the next video is a car video. Then the next video is the deepest dive on a car you've ever seen.

• 14:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:31John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, it knows I'm a car guy.

• 14:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:33John Coogan?

  Just like that.

• 14:34Jordi Hays?

  And I remember at the time, there was footage coming out of these effectively like farms in, algorithm farms is how I would describe them, right? Where there's just like people in rooms, just like sorting like videos like manually.

• 14:48John Coogan?

  There's a little bit of that, I mean, mostly it's just like, it's just, it's just like, like how much time is spent on this particular thing? How much time are you hovering over it?

• 14:56Jordi Hays?

  But, but, but yeah, it's like, no, of, of course, but, but there, it's funny to imagine Elon getting so, his dopamine rush, his engagement. Right? Like he's all about like the metrics. He wants to put points on the word. And so you can see him just like dialing up the degeneracy to the point where he's like, he walks into the room, they're like, sir, we can't, we can't go anymore. Like, we're already showing the people fighting in the streets, like, and he's like, more! And it's like, showing like, like racial crimes, yeah, bum fights. Like, he's just like, more! And they're like, 11, put it to 11.

• 15:34John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah, it's unbridled, but I mean, I think that's like the only thing that'll turn the business around, really. I think this nice little garden that we had in tech Twitter, like, it was truly like, like, the tech community was subsidizing that.

• 15:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:49John Coogan?

  Because Twitter was never particularly profitable, the business never really worked that well.

• 15:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and what's funny is like, how much of the market cap was oriented around how much people love the product?

• 16:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:01Jordi Hays?

  Like, it was something when I discovered Twitter.

• 16:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:04Jordi Hays?

  When I credit Twitter with massively accelerating my professional development from the lens of I was able, as a 21-year-old in the school, you know, it was at UC Santa Barbara, it's not a tech school, I didn't know, we had a technology management program that I was in, but it wasn't like, everything we were studying in school was like 10 years behind, right? So it was like, I could go on Twitter and, and the biggest thing for me was like picking up the vocabulary of the industry, so that when I would go meet somebody, I knew what they were talking about.

• 16:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:40Jordi Hays?

  Even if I'd never done the thing.

• 16:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:42Jordi Hays?

  And so to me, I credit Twitter with accelerating my career like, you know, five years, something like that. Because I just felt like I was, I felt like I was a part of it, just because I was, even though I was just like, kind of soaking it all in, I wasn't even a part of the conversations. And unfortunately, so I think that a lot of their market cap was just the fact that the technology industry and many other industries just love the product. It's like, you don't want to short Twitter.

• 17:09John Coogan?

  It's kind of like this option value on like the value of the network.

• 17:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:13John Coogan?

  Because it had, it had like world leaders there, the Pope, but then also every journalist who's posting every news story is breaking there. Like, there was just like something, everyone felt like there was going to be some sort of value to come out of that.

• 17:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the big critique was like, you guys don't ship anything, everything's broken, nothing like works, like the DMs suck.

• 17:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:32Jordi Hays?

  And Elon's like, okay, you guys want change? Like, I'll give you some, I'll give you some change.

• 17:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:36Jordi Hays?

  And then it's, we're like, oh, actually, like, like, I still type in twitter.com on my browser, and every single time I get this pang of like sadness.

• 17:47John Coogan?

  But, yeah, I mean, I think there's, there's something interesting where it's like, he clearly bought it because it was like, the festering hive of scum and villainy in the sense that like every cancellation campaign started on Twitter.

• 17:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:58John Coogan?

  It would usually, like, the anatomy of a cancellation campaign would usually be like... Someone figures out that they don't like this tech CEO.

• 18:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:08John Coogan?

  Then they go back, they dig up some tweet where they're like, capitalism is good. And then some like tiny like communist account quote tweets is like, actually capitalism is bad. And then gets like a thousand retweets.

• 18:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:20John Coogan?

  And then, and then all of a sudden, there's like more people piling on, more people piling on, a real like back and forth fight. And then the low tier journalists can start reporting on the backlash on Twitter. And they can start saying, oh, well, like, you know, how are they going to respond? There's been this uproar on Twitter. This person needs to like, talk about this. And then, once the low tier outlets are reporting, then like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post can like, report on like the crisis that's happening.

• 18:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:50John Coogan?

  And Elon just completely killed that by like kicking a lot of people off, de-amplifying thing, community notes. Like, there's so many different changes that he made, just chaos.

• 18:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's a bunch of.

• 18:59John Coogan?

  Got rid of the blue checks, like, so like, there wasn't this moment where it's like, oh, well, like, a blue check person amplified this hate, like this hit piece on my company, or like.

• 19:07Jordi Hays?

  That was particularly devastating for me because I got my blue check and had it for like three months.

• 19:12John Coogan?

  Me too, I had the same thing, I had the same thing.

• 19:14Jordi Hays?

  I was like, really?

• 19:16John Coogan?

  And then Elon just gave it away.

• 19:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, gave it away.

• 19:18John Coogan?

  I was like, damn it.

• 19:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think a big, I don't think that, um, I don't know how virtuous the decision was as much as it was. I believe there's a factor there, right? I'm not going to psychoanalyze Musk. Like, the logical decision to buy X is, one, there clearly was a lot, always a lot of potential, right? And if you're worth hundreds of billions of dollars, if you want to make another hundred billion dollars, like, you have to take these like colossal bets, right? Buying Twitter and trying to make it a, like, as big, a half as big as Meta is like a pretty good way to try to do that, right? Who knows if he'll be successful?

• 20:01Jordi Hays?

  So there's the purely financial, and like, if you overpay for something, but then, like, make it 10 times more valuable, doesn't, you didn't overpay. Like, you paid like a fair price, right? It was just risky. The other factor is it being like. Such a critical comms channel for all of what Elon's doing, specifically Tesla, right? Like, the whole, there was years where people were like, Tesla doesn't spend money on marketing. Tesla doesn't do this. And it's like, okay, they ended up like, like their marketing channel was Elon, spreading the gospel, being Elon. And there was a lot of value in making sure that that always stayed the same, right?

• 20:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think that makes sense. I think, I'm a little more pilled on like the psychoanalysis side of like, of like, if there was going to be like a communist revolution, like it would have started on pre-Musk Twitter.

• 20:58Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 20:58John Coogan?

  And, and, and there were, and there were, and like, he would be the first one to go.

• 21:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:04John Coogan?

  And so there's a little bit of self-preservation there.

• 21:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No, and that's, that's the thing, is that the real answer is probably not that he did it for one specific thing.

• 21:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:13Jordi Hays?

  He made like, one of the smartest business minds, the smartest business mind, probably of the hundred years-ish that were on this earth.

• 21:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:23Jordi Hays?

  And he made like a very calculated decision across a bunch of different-

• 21:26John Coogan?

  Different parameters.

• 21:27Jordi Hays?

  Parameters. And he's fine if people think it's because of one of those reasons, but really like, you usually don't make a decision just for a single reason.

• 21:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And then, I do think like, he's, he's been successful in kind of like, just destroying the like, cancel culture, like boiling pot, like, it really served as like the kindling.

• 21:50Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 21:50John Coogan?

  But everyone was hoping that it's like-

• 21:52Jordi Hays?

  And it gave other VCs a permission to-

• 21:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, he kind of like canceled dystopia, but I think everyone now is like, we're waiting for utopia.

• 22:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:02John Coogan?

  And it's like, maybe we're not going to get that. Maybe it will, maybe the answer was just like- Yeah.

• 22:07Jordi Hays?

  Maybe the town square is always gonna be chaos.

• 22:09John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. It's gonna be a lot more chaotic and maybe that means everyone uses it a little bit less, or at least like the the high signal. Like, the people that are having a really bad time right now are not the normies on Twitter. Like, the normies on Twitter are like, oh, I'm getting like even more entertaining junk.

• 22:25Jordi Hays?

  That meme with the guy hitting the bong while these two people are fighting.

• 22:28John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 22:30Jordi Hays?

  Getting high off the algo and just...

• 22:32John Coogan?

  There's a lot of people that are that are in that boat and and and the people that are are upset are like the this very small niche like tech Twitter community that was very interested in like sharing links and like meeting new people and like amplifying small accounts and stuff and like all of that stuff is kinda going away.

• 22:48Jordi Hays?

  Party around go-to-market strategy probably would have worked but been much less effective.

• 22:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:53Jordi Hays?

  Where there was a time where if you understood the algo and you had the right people around, you could dominate the timeline for an entire day, genuinely dominate it, where like you could open, you could make sure that when people open the app, they would see your stuff three, four times in a single session. And I miss those days.

• 23:14Jordi Hays?

  That's why we're creating our own channel here.

• 23:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think there will continue to be hacks, like, especially in...

• 23:22Jordi Hays?

  Like in Excel work.

• 23:23John Coogan?

  Chaos is a ladder.

• 23:24Jordi Hays?

  Chaos is a ladder, right?

• 23:26John Coogan?

  And I see a lot of chaos and I see a lot of opportunity. But yeah, I mean, there will be a lot of like sludge, like the Thread Boys existed beforehand. They've clearly amplified in the new era, especially with the rev share stuff. But then also just like the, I think what's really thriving is like the the culture war politic. It's also because we're going into an election, so it's even hotter than ever. But that type of stuff, like, I think there's a lot of people that don't want to see that stuff at all. And so going back to the AI thing, what what I would love is like, I don't want to go in there and every time there's a new trend, like, there's this like hippo moodang. Have you seen this thing?

• 24:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 24:03John Coogan?

  I I like, I have no desire to see any of that, like, and I could put in like a block. Keyword, but like, what if somebody just shares a meme with a picture being like, "This is cute"? Well, then I'm seeing it anyway.

• 24:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and then, and then you're kind of not in the, in the, in the meme sort of network, but then Daniel, Daniel shares like, "Mo Dong has left OpenAI."

• 24:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 24:25Jordi Hays?

  And it's like, "Okay," and then now it's back.

• 24:27John Coogan?

  I want to know a little bit, but I, I basically just want to tell, I want to, I want to talk to the algorithm, and I think that that would be the most interesting thing.

• 24:34Jordi Hays?

  The cool thing would be if, and who knows if this will happen, but if Elon could some, I invested in that company, Farcaster, which was like a decentralized, you know, and their whole vision was like, "Hey, you build one network and then other people can build network, specific networks effectively on top of the network," right? Like, so if we could take the Twitter social graph and all the mechanics and build effectively our own service for that, like you could bring back OG tech Twitter to some degree, right? Like, it probably wouldn't be that hard, like, you know, to, I mean, it would be hard, but if you, the social graph is still there, all the users are there, they're just not being coordinated in the same way.

• 25:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's this theory of like the algorithm store, like you should be able to pick your algorithm or whatever, but I, I actually would prefer to just basically talk to the, talk to the LLM, like Grok, and tell it like, "Hey, like, cool it with the..."

• 25:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's why I don't...

• 25:36John Coogan?

  The political, social, like, like the, the culture war stuff, like, "I want to see less of that." I know that it's grabbing my attention, and so you're getting this signal that, that does retain, and, but I want you to push back on that in the way that, basically...

• 25:51Jordi Hays?

  I found the not interested...

• 25:54John Coogan?

  Does that work?

• 25:54Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't work for me at all.

• 25:56John Coogan?

  Doesn't work at all.

• 25:57Jordi Hays?

  Like, I've experimented with it, where every single time I've seen something about Diddy, I just click and say, "Not interested in this post," and the next time I open the app...

• 26:05John Coogan?

  You still see it.

• 26:05Jordi Hays?

  There's something else about it. So you, the only thing you can do is, is, is, is effectively mute that word, but then what if somebody posted a picture of baby oil?

• 26:16John Coogan?

  Exactly, you get it, yeah.

• 26:17Jordi Hays?

  It needs to actually, and that's the... The issue with Grok is it's a completely useless.

• 26:22John Coogan?

  It's completely separate. Like, what I want to do is I want to, every morning, like, have something scrape every tweet that would be in my For You page and my following page. And scrape all those tweets out and then run those through an LLM that says, would John like this based on what we know about him? And I've told it a lot about what I like and express those opinions. You can sometimes do this when they, like, when you initially onboard, they ask you, like, are you interested in sports or technology? And then they tell you, like, you should follow Cristiano Ronaldo or whatever. But like, that's not enough. I want to have a much more rich conversation. And then have the LLM like kind of score each one based on my individual expression of that.

• 27:02Jordi Hays?

  I'm surprised that social networks haven't adopted that because every once in a while.

• 27:10John Coogan?

  It's really expensive.

• 27:12Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 27:12John Coogan?

  Like, I think, I think actually, like, like, like, right now, the, all it's doing is just like, is just like, like, you know, this is recommended to, like, this has, this tweet has high retention. When someone sees this tweet, they click on it, they read the comments, it's a good tweet. The average time they spend on a tweet is a minute or 10 seconds. If it's one second, then don't show it to anyone, right? And so they just, they just blast this out. And there's a little bit of like fit where it's like, okay, we know that you like a little bit more of this, that, more like this. But it's not, it's not customizable in any way.

• 27:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:46John Coogan?

  And, and, and really what I want to do is just like, print out all of them, have an AI do that. But until, like, that becomes affordable, the next best thing is I just, I just ask my secretary to print out tweets for me and I just read it on paper. And so I have a bunch of these here that my secretary printed out for us to look through. Did you get a chance to look at any of these? Oh, you were talking about your favorite. You would have missed this tweet if you had your mute button on because it's about Diddy.

• 28:15Jordi Hays?

  Thank, yeah, thank God I didn't mute it. Yeah, I think this tweet.

• 28:23John Coogan?

  We'll read it out first.

• 28:26Jordi Hays?

  Put Diddy, SBF, and Eric Adams in the same cell and make A16Z invest in whatever company they come up with. This hurts because it feels like there's a reality where like one of these people would raise for Andreessen.

• 28:43John Coogan?

  That's a fact.

• 28:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, it's more like looking at like the Adam Newman thing. Like, Adam Newman, you know, came out, probably a generational entrepreneur and like deserves to come back and raise a bunch of money because like even though he, you know, there were some issues with how WeWork was ran, like that guy just willed something into existence that, and I never had a, I never understood the Adam Newman critique in general because I'm like, alright, he took a bunch of ugly office buildings and used, you know, Miyoshi Son's money to make them beautiful and cheap and like available to everybody. Like, how could you hate this guy?

• 29:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:23Jordi Hays?

  Right? These three, these three, I think, are harder to defend.

• 29:29John Coogan?

  I mean, like the Diddy story has become like, he's like a murderer now.

• 29:33Jordi Hays?

  A murderer, rapist.

• 29:34John Coogan?

  It's like insane.

• 29:35Jordi Hays?

  No, he's...

• 29:37John Coogan?

  I actually haven't looked into the Eric Adams stuff.

• 29:40Jordi Hays?

  I haven't looked at it enough either.

• 29:42John Coogan?

  What's funny is that like, it's not like A16Z invested in FTX. Like, they didn't at all.

• 29:48Jordi Hays?

  They specifically didn't, and it was because there were so many obvious conflicts, right? Like, anybody that would look at, hey, the most prolific crypto hedge fund that does the most degenerate, crazy shit that is antithetical, that is, you know, that is basically like manipulating all these markets, also wants to own the biggest exchange.

• 30:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:10Jordi Hays?

  We should fund the exchange.

• 30:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:12Jordi Hays?

  Like, what could go wrong?

• 30:13John Coogan?

  But you know who this is, right? Dan Toomey, do you know who this is?

• 30:17Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 30:18John Coogan?

  So, he works for Morning Brew, he has a YouTube channel.

• 30:20Jordi Hays?

  Oh, he does some of those videos, yeah.

• 30:22John Coogan?

  And he's like, he's much more like a video creator than like an insider tech person. I don't think he's done a startup, I think he kind of comes from like the comedy, stand-up, like, video world. Now, he's done a lot of research and he actually understands things like really well, but it's just funny that like he frames it as like, oh, this is something Andreessen would do, when like, I think it's just because like they're a big name or something. It was kind of interesting to like, that's what he picked because like...

• 30:49Jordi Hays?

  No, I read it as the... Oh, you're kind of making a play on Adam Neumann, but like.

• 30:54John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, okay.

• 30:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, because that's the most high-profile company that Andreessen.

• 30:59John Coogan?

  That they went back to after.

• 31:00Jordi Hays?

  Went back to founder who had had a fall from grace.

• 31:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:07John Coogan?

  Bizarre.

• 31:07Jordi Hays?

  No, but Andreessen doesn't get enough credit for not doing FTX, right?

• 31:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:11Jordi Hays?

  Because you know they pitched it.

• 31:13John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 31:13Jordi Hays?

  Over and over and over and over and over and had to have said no.

• 31:17John Coogan?

  So many times.

• 31:18Jordi Hays?

  It's not like it was an issue of price, right?

• 31:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:20Jordi Hays?

  Because that's not the.

• 31:21John Coogan?

  And their fund was already so scaled, like, right?

• 31:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:25Jordi Hays?

  That was an intentional decision, which is why, from an investing standpoint,

• 31:31Jordi Hays?

  you always have to ask yourself, why am I the one that is doing this deal? Right? Like, why are all the, there's, the market's not perfectly efficient, but it's pretty efficient, right? And so, anybody who is backing FTX, meanwhile, Andreessen has their multi-billion-dollar crypto fund and has a mandate to be in every important company.

• 31:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:53Jordi Hays?

  Why did they not do it at any point?

• 31:55John Coogan?

  That's, yeah, that's interesting.

• 31:57Jordi Hays?

  I don't think Founders Fund did it either, right?

• 32:00John Coogan?

  No. Yeah, I mean, the, the, the, the team always talks about, like, yeah, there were a bunch of red flags. But.

• 32:07Jordi Hays?

  Here's, here's another.

• 32:07John Coogan?

  There was, there was another thing. I mean, some people passed, I mean, obviously, like, the best people passed just because they clocked SBF as like a fraud. But other people passed because either they were already in Coinbase or, what's that?

• 32:22Jordi Hays?

  Finance.

• 32:23John Coogan?

  Finance. So if you're in those, you might be like, I don't want to do FTX as well.

• 32:27Jordi Hays?

  People always figure out how to do yoga to.

• 32:31Jordi Hays?

  Oh, he's building a finance super app. It's not an exchange.

• 32:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's true. And then, yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of stuff there, but.

• 32:42Jordi Hays?

  I, I think that the, the, uh, this reminds me of, of, um,

• 32:51Jordi Hays?

  another story that I don't think is printed out, but is worth covering.

• 32:56Jordi Hays?

  Came out yesterday that the FBI is probing this group called Hone Capital.

• 33:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 33:01Jordi Hays?

  For ties to the CCP.

• 33:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:03Jordi Hays?

  And I think it was between 2016 and 2018, Angel List took $80 million.

• 33:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:09Jordi Hays?

  In sort of direct investment from Hone.

• 33:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:12Jordi Hays?

  Under the conditions that Hone could get full visibility into every syndicate happening on the platform.

• 33:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:19Jordi Hays?

  And presumably, all the data.

• 33:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:22Jordi Hays?

  Associated with those, which as you know, is Dex Financials.

• 33:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 33:27Jordi Hays?

  You know, other, you know, basically, so like that to me, that to me is like the biggest story in tech right now. And there's.

• 33:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:35Jordi Hays?

  And there is enough, um, there's enough people that have vested interests in Angel List. I think it's generally great for the innovation ecosystem and is like a positive platform in force. But that to me is, um, potentially one of the first stories of a series of stories around foreign money and venture. That will just continue to.

• 34:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:02Jordi Hays?

  Drop.

• 34:03John Coogan?

  I always, I always wonder about the actual impact of that stuff, though.

• 34:07Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 34:08John Coogan?

  Because it's like, I, I was, I was joking about like, imagine you're some spy and you work your way up and, you know, you weasel your way into a big venture firm and you're like, oh yeah, I'm with like the top dog, like I.

• 34:20Jordi Hays?

  I'm seeing everything.

• 34:21John Coogan?

  I'm seeing everything. And then the GP is just like, the future is NFTs. And you're like, god damn it.

• 34:28Jordi Hays?

  I will never bring honor to my.

• 34:30John Coogan?

  Weapons.

• 34:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:32John Coogan?

  Like, yeah, okay, so they steal the code to the, the monkey pictures. It's like, it's like, like, there are a lot of companies where actually the IP is not that valuable when stolen, like.

• 34:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I'll give you a story that is relevant. So Deterrence, defense tech startup.

• 34:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:54Jordi Hays?

  Was speaking with a high-profile, rolling-fund GP on Angel List.

• 34:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:59Jordi Hays?

  And because Deterrence will be doing sort of stuff that's critical to national security.

• 35:06Jordi Hays?

  We need to know who your end LPs are.

• 35:09John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 35:09Jordi Hays?

  And so we pressed said GP on who their LPs were. And he basically had to say, I don't know. I cannot verify that they're not, that it's not Russian money, CCP money, et cetera.

• 35:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:23Jordi Hays?

  And I independently verified with another.

• 35:28Jordi Hays?

  Probably won't run this, but I independently, between you and me, I independently verified with somebody who worked with the fund. Who was like, yeah, there's Russian money, like 100%.

• 35:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I, at the same time, like, I get that it's a bad look, but like, I mean, I better give the cap table to my own investors.

• 35:43Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but if, the problem is if some, if that money gets invested into the company, it damages the company. Prospects, right?

• 35:51John Coogan?

  Purely brand and optical? Or do you think there's actually a path to?

• 35:55Jordi Hays?

  No, USG, USG being like, hey, we don't want to work with a company whose end investors.

• 36:00John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. Yeah.

• 36:02Jordi Hays?

  That, that's just, that can damage the company.

• 36:05John Coogan?

  I just, I just have trouble because like, like, most investors, it's like, you take a small check from them and you never hear from them again. And then a few of them, it's like, okay, they got some information, right? It's like, maybe they get like a P and L.

• 36:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:17John Coogan?

  Or like, maybe they get a cap table once in a while. But it's like, they're never getting access to like the Git repo. They're never getting access, like, they don't, they don't have any, they're not badged. Like, they don't get to go in the company. And so, like, I get that it's like a huge problem and like, and like a big thing in like the abstract, but I feel like, like, even if you found like six degrees of separation, there's some like, you know, Russian or Chinese money in something like, I don't know that that's as dangerous as we think it is. As opposed to like the, the more obvious thing of just like, there's an employee who's been compromised and just has access to the whole network.

• 36:51Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 36:52John Coogan?

  Like, that might be, that might be what we actually need to be worrying about, like more.

• 36:56Jordi Hays?

  I would say the other.

• 36:58John Coogan?

  And then, and then there's also like the, the Chinese and Russian money. There are expats, there are people who are just rich kids over there who like want to play in this market.

• 37:07Jordi Hays?

  They want to YOLO.

• 37:08John Coogan?

  They want to leave, or they, or they like America and they're just like not actually aligned. Of course they could be turned, of course there could be spies, like, like that, that definitely happens. And that is, that is an issue.

• 37:19Jordi Hays?

  I would say that, I would say one.

• 37:24Jordi Hays?

  Again, all this information is possible to get in numerous different ways.

• 37:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:29Jordi Hays?

  Like if you want to find out about a company, almost any company, any tech startup that is like pre-seed through Series B right now, you or I could get their their most recent fundraising deck by the end of the day.

• 37:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 37:45Jordi Hays?

  If we actually wanted to, right?

• 37:47John Coogan?

  And for 99% of companies, it's a bad idea to even copy it. For, you know, for like the rest of the, it's like for, for, for the next, for the next like order of magnitude of companies.

• 37:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:58John Coogan?

  They're, it's like, okay, so, you know, maybe there is something there, but like just having the deck isn't enough to really like create some sort of like geopolitical advantage. There's just a lot of steps to like actual like, you know, shifting the geopolitical balance. Again, it's going to blow up and it's going to be really, it's going to be a really big like brand issue and it's going to be something that people really have to fight through and like work through these questions.

• 38:20Jordi Hays?

  It's tough for, it's tough for Angelus because founders already are not generally super excited about their deal going on that platform because of the information issues just getting a thousand people.

• 38:33John Coogan?

  And Carda had a similar thing where they were like kind of selling data or something or like letting people.

• 38:38Jordi Hays?

  Carda was.

• 38:39John Coogan?

  They were trying to do secondary transactions, right?

• 38:41Jordi Hays?

  Private, or cap tables are, should inherently be private and owned by the company. And Carda was leveraging that information to catalyze their.

• 38:51John Coogan?

  Secondary transactions.

• 38:51Jordi Hays?

  Their secondary's market, which was the entire reason that they were going to be a $10 billion company.

• 38:56John Coogan?

  Because if they become like the NASDAQ of secondaries, that's about it.

• 38:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like massively that. They can make 5% on every trade. They're huge blocks of trades. You could be facilitating billions of dollars of trades a year. If it worked, it would have been.

• 39:08John Coogan?

  Much more valuable than just a SaaS product.

• 39:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, the people that are like, who's investing in Carda at an $8 billion valuation? It's like, well, if you can be the platform for secondary transactions and get 5% rake on everything, like you're such an unbelievably large business. It's insane.

• 39:25John Coogan?

  But yeah, I don't know. Do we know who, like, do we know who was running Hone yet? Like, who's this guy? There's some dude who was like running around, right? Investing.

• 39:33Jordi Hays?

  He probably was very well loved. Cause he's like, you get 2 million for your fund, you get 2 million for your fund, we're backing your next syndicate deal, right? Like, it's really like, money is like a way to make fast friends in the valley, right?

• 39:46John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, that's true.

• 39:49Jordi Hays?

  Everybody loves a loose LP.

• 39:54John Coogan?

  What else should we do? Should we do this one?

• 39:59Jordi Hays?

  Oh yeah, that's great. I mean, so it's funny, I have no idea. I actually don't know who's behind the account at all.

• 40:10John Coogan?

  I don't.

• 40:11Jordi Hays?

  But they seemingly came from like Finance Twitter and like just inserted themselves because like...

• 40:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's one of those things where it's like it might not even be a girl.

• 40:20Jordi Hays?

  Totally, totally.

• 40:21John Coogan?

  Who knows? But good, good posts. So Sophie says, "I think we can do away with seed, Series A, B, etc. Either a round is a vibe round or an Excel round." And then Matt Turk says something like this with a midwit meme. And the midwit meme is just, at the early stages vibes, in the midwit is Excel.

• 40:42Jordi Hays?

  It's all vibes.

• 40:44John Coogan?

  And I mean, we're certainly seeing that with like vibe rounds getting done in the seed stage and then also vibe rounds getting done in, you know, tens of billions and beyond.

• 40:53Jordi Hays?

  The tens of, those are the real vibe rounds.

• 40:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you think it just all comes down to the founders' ability to create a vibe round at any point in time? Is it always better to have a lower cost of capital for a vibe round? Vibe round feels like inflated valuation, like higher multiple. When I hear 100x revenue multiple, like that's, that sounds vibey.

• 41:15Jordi Hays?

  I think it's, I think a better way to look at it is, does a company have product market fit? Or narrative market fit? And you actually get crazier multiples for narrative market fit. Because it's all just, and so, an example being if you have product market fit and you have 2 million of ARR and you're adding a million of ARR every three months, you could probably go out and raise at like 60, right? Because somebody's like, okay, like this is, you know, great momentum, this thing's working. If you have narrative market fit and like venture capitalists are sort of applying this lens to your business, which is like, this is a crazy new market and a crazy team and they're just going to figure it out, you can also get the 60, right?

• 42:00Jordi Hays?

  And so, I often think whether it's truly like a PMF round or a vibe round, they get done in a similar range if the founder of, if the caliber of founder is... Is relatively equal. The real crazy multiples come when it's both, right? When you have the product market fit and the narrative market fit.

• 42:22John Coogan?

  That's very interesting.

• 42:24Jordi Hays?

  I'd give the example of that company Harvey, which like has, they're the legal AI company. And, you know, they have probably 10 million of ARR or tens of millions. I don't actually know. I think like people talk about their metrics, but it's sort of unclear. But the narrative market fit, which is that LLMs are going to dominate the legal industry is so strong that why would you not do this round at 800 million? Right? Like just crazy multiple because yeah, they're the category winner and like the narrative tracks.

• 42:59John Coogan?

  And it's not like the early days of LLM development where, I mean, what? OpenAI probably made no money for like eight years, right? It was incorporated in what 2016 or something like that? Like as a nonprofit for that reason. And like all of those labs didn't really have products that anyone wanted to buy for a very long time.

• 43:14Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 43:15John Coogan?

  Even GPT one, GPT two, like they had APIs. Even the first GPT three, it was like kind of cool, but no one could figure out a way to like really incorporate it in a product.

• 43:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there was a company, this company copy.ai.

• 43:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:30Jordi Hays?

  Rocketed to like 20 million of ARR.

• 43:32John Coogan?

  Cause they've kind of figured out how to actually make that.

• 43:34Jordi Hays?

  They figured out how to, how to leverage the API and it was great. And I think they had to completely pivot because people just started using chat GPT.

• 43:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:44Jordi Hays?

  Cause it did exactly that for way less money.

• 43:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, there was another one too, some sort of writing assistant. I think it had like one of those personal names, like not Harvey, but it was like a human's name.

• 43:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So I think, I think vibe rounds or Excel rounds is right. But the way to look at it is to say, is this a product market fit? You know, sort of like we're doubling down on this like momentum, like actual business traction? Or is it narrative or is it both? And that's the crazy stuff.

• 44:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, there does seem to be like a certain type of founder that you can just like will a vibe round into like, like Adam Newman to your point earlier.

• 44:18Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's category dependent, right? But right now, if you're.

• 44:21John Coogan?

  Because like, yeah, I mean, like WeWork was not in some like AI mega trend, right? Like there was no, there was no like mega trend in like, oh yeah, of course. Real estate in 10 years is going to be completely different. Like whereas like the legal profession is pretty consensus that like like the tools are going to get better.

• 44:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:38John Coogan?

  Who's going to be the winner? How? What will the market structure be? There's a lot of questions there.

• 44:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:42John Coogan?

  But you can clearly build a thesis around that.

• 44:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:45John Coogan?

  Whereas saying that, you know, the the real estate market is going to be dramatically different in 10, 20 years.

• 44:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:51John Coogan?

  Like, that's not an

• 44:52Jordi Hays?

  I think it was, the WeWork was incredible product. Partially because it was venture subsidized, right?

• 44:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:59Jordi Hays?

  The fact that you could pay $300 a month to walk into a beautiful space and have a desk and have coffee and snacks. Like, they were just not charging enough, right? And then you combine that with incredible positioning around and storytelling from Adam around. What has this actually become? And WeWork is, you know, a dominant brand within all, within everyone's daily life, right? Like, something that is the the whole vision of apartments and offices and.

• 45:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:32Jordi Hays?

  You know, it was easy to buy into that when he was adding a new WeWork every two days. And I'm sure the retention when it was really cheap was great and, you know, people love the product and, you know, I think. So again, that's him. He was forcing the narrative.

• 45:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:48Jordi Hays?

  But the product market fit was real.

• 45:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. He was able to like sprinkle the vibes on top.

• 45:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think it's funny as founders, really convincing founders. The most convincing founders convince themselves first. And then by nature of being 100% convicted.

• 46:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:08Jordi Hays?

  They, like Breslow is a good example, right? Breslow, when he goes out and pitches, is 110% convicted in what he's saying. So much so that other people are like, this sounds crazy, but like, this guy's convinced and he's gotten this far. So like, why would you not bet on him?

• 46:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:28Jordi Hays?

  I think that wears off eventually.

• 46:30John Coogan?

  You think it wears off just because you become jaded because of like you're like as you get further in your career like you realize like wow I was 100% convicted about that particular thing and it didn't pan out therefore maybe I should be less convicted about the next thing.

• 46:46Jordi Hays?

  I think it wears off on a founder to founder level, right? Like, nobody stopped believing in TK, right? Imagine what Uber would be today.

• 46:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:54Jordi Hays?

  It would, it would probably be Waymo, you know, I think they have a partnership now or something, but.

• 47:00John Coogan?

  I wonder, yeah, I wonder if there's anything that you can do to like upregulate conviction. Almost like the, it's like the inverse ayahuasca thing, you know?

• 47:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:10John Coogan?

  I mean, I guess for some of the psychedelics, like it does seem, you know, there was kind of that counteraction to, well, like Steve Jobs took psychedelics and he came back like extremely, you know, you know.

• 47:22Jordi Hays?

  Focused.

• 47:23John Coogan?

  Focused and, and probably more aggressive about, you know, I know the truth. I know that like this product is the right one and he was like, you know, unwilling to accept a plastic, you know, like a plastic screen on the phone. Like it had to be glass because like that's what he like knew to be true.

• 47:43Jordi Hays?

  Meanwhile, the Apple designers today are like, we're gonna put the camera offset from the back of the phone so that people have to buy a case. Which is gonna increase our AOV by 6% and drive meaningful.

• 47:59Jordi Hays?

  Where it's like, oh, you made a phone that like doesn't sit flat and the camera lens sits on the like.

• 48:06Jordi Hays?

  So, yeah, I think, I think the, the topic of psychedelics is, is a funny one because I do think that the technology industry has for a long time benefited from it. But it actually went too far, right?

• 48:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:22Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 48:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the whole ayahuasca by itself, I think, will be studied. Like, to me, that's like the overdosing on LSD of our generation.

• 48:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 48:35Jordi Hays?

  Where like, a lot of people use LSD and, you know, experience some

• 48:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:40Jordi Hays?

  range of benefits from it, right?

• 48:42John Coogan?

  I mean, the psychedelics might have just straight up been weaker back in the jobs days.

• 48:46Jordi Hays?

  Totally, yeah.

• 48:46John Coogan?

  He might have been taking like one tenth of the dose that like some tech middle manager takes on some ayahuasca retreat.

• 48:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:54John Coogan?

  Like turbo fries their brain or whatever.

• 48:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the funny thing about the average, I've always, always avoided it, had no interest in it.

• 49:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, me same.

• 49:02Jordi Hays?

  And fundamentally, like, you know, would have had, had plenty of opportunities where I could have, and opportunities where I could have chosen to do something like that. But, once people understand the actual nature of an ayahuasca retreat, most of them involve going with a hundred, twenty to a hundred strangers and sitting in a room. And the stories I've heard of people saying like, "Yeah, I was in a room with a hundred people, everybody's laying in a cot, throwing up, having an exorcism." The funny thing is, is people end up ultimately losing themselves so much that, that I've heard of men starting to masturbate in these sort of like group settings.

• 49:47Jordi Hays?

  I know these two girls that run a popular health podcast in LA, and they were approached by this, they were approached by this company in Costa Rica that said, "Hey, come, come down and experience, like, you know, it's, it's on us, it's comped." And they were, they were telling me the story, they were like, "Yeah, a bunch of, like, half the room was throwing up, ten percent of the room was just masturbating."

• 50:11John Coogan?

  What?

• 50:11Jordi Hays?

  And, and I was like, "Oh my God, I'm so sorry." And they were like, "No, no, it was incredible."

• 50:17John Coogan?

  (laughter)

• 50:18Jordi Hays?

  I was like, yeah.

• 50:19John Coogan?

  They're like, "This is exactly what I wanted."

• 50:21Jordi Hays?

  I was like, "Woo." I was like, "And what did you get out of it?" You come, these people come back and they're even more... Lost, like it seems like it sends you down this. The turbo fry, I think, I think Mark called it turbo frying.

• 50:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, there was a land shark who he posted like the screenshot of land shark saying like, you know, you get your giga fry your brain, turbo normies get their, get their brain giga fried because they're like, they're not settled spiritually and then they go into this.

• 50:51Jordi Hays?

  And that's the thing with psychedelics, if you are incredibly mentally stable and fortified.

• 50:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:58Jordi Hays?

  And you do these things, it can have a positive effect in terms of helping you see things in a new way.

• 51:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, you have to imagine that, I mean, I don't know exactly Jobs timeline for this stuff, but it's possible that like, he had already created a billion dollars of value and created like some of the greatest like advances in computing history ever. And so going into that, you're probably like pretty confident. You're not like, where's my place in the world? Like, he's going into that experience thinking, my place in the world is to create great technology and I'm really fucking good at it. And so I'm just doubling down on that when I come out of this.

• 51:36Jordi Hays?

  And psychedelics help you see things from new angles. That's the best way that I think it for somebody that hasn't ever tried them to look at it is like, you're looking at an object, like you're looking at a computer and your entire life, you've looked at it one way and psychedelics help you view it from like this way. And you're just like, okay, what if we, you know, made the whole back structure clear so you could see into the machine, right? And it's like, that becomes an iconic feature of the product. But it wasn't like Steve went into a cave and then invented computing, right? Like it was like, he didn't come out with like the circuit board. It was more so, I think he deserves credit for things like.

• 52:24Jordi Hays?

  Design and deeply prioritizing the user and coming and thinking about products in new ways and delivering elegant versions of that.

• 52:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, I do have a friend who is already like one of the most aggressive people I know and has always been. And he did acid one time and he and I was like, oh, what was that like? He's like, yeah, like stuff like, you know, wiggled around. But my number one takeaway was that I need to be more aggressive.

• 52:47Jordi Hays?

  It just makes you more of you.

• 52:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. And I was like, that's the opposite of what you normally hear about where it's like, oh, it's like, it's so at peace with the world. Like, you know, I need to like think completely different. It's like, no, I need to be even more aggressive.

• 53:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:01John Coogan?

  Already one of the most aggressive guys. Okay, should we talk about Turner's tweet? I kind of like this one. You see this?

• 53:08Jordi Hays?

  Tech tech ecosystems right now. SF, our most important startup is imploding. NYC, our mayor just got indicted for corruption. Europe, we are banning AI. China, VCs are suing all the founders. Des Moines, Iowa, we'd like to buy 50% of your company for 50K. I think it's great. I mean, it's it's pretty much.

• 53:33John Coogan?

  Well, did you see the chart of the Chinese like startup formation? How it just like fell off a cliff?

• 53:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:39John Coogan?

  And like no one's starting companies there?

• 53:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because they can claw. So for those who didn't see it, the basically if your company fails, they can like come after all of your.

• 53:48John Coogan?

  Personal assets.

• 53:49Jordi Hays?

  Personal assets, which feels fairly communist.

• 53:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 53:53Jordi Hays?

  Which makes sense.

• 53:54John Coogan?

  Makes sense.

• 53:54Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, I mean, I think it's like, that's why that's what makes technology beautiful, right? It's not just like is people like try to want to put tech in a single bucket and this and even to people that aren't in the industry. If I ask me what I do, I say I'm in tech, right? And then they have an idea of what that means. But tech is so different in different like you it's surprisingly like different in different locales.

• 54:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:22Jordi Hays?

  Right? Like it's still operating. Yeah, if you, the real alpha, the real alpha is to go to the Midwest and just start offering slightly better terms.

• 54:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 54:32Jordi Hays?

  I'll give you fifty on five hundred.

• 54:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, fifty five K, fifty percent of yours. Yeah, I mean, the funny thing is that like, these are, these are framed as like, they're all in chaos. Like, it's all bad news everywhere, like, everything's falling apart. But I read this as like, you have to be in a major American city.

• 54:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 54:53John Coogan?

  I would choose SF in New York where one startup is imploding and the mayor's getting indicted versus banning AI, VC suing founders, or clearly like, like, you know, capital markets that are just like, you know, defunct.

• 55:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:09John Coogan?

  It's like, yeah, like, SF, I don't even know if I buy the imploding narrative, but like, if it is, that's a lot of opportunity. That's maybe creative destruction, creative disruption, maybe there'll be, you know.

• 55:19Jordi Hays?

  Time for us to go join OpenAI and climb the ladder. That's the long term, what's, what's your long term vision for Technology Brothers?

• 55:29Jordi Hays?

  COO, CMO of OpenAI.

• 55:32John Coogan?

  A more, a more hostile takeover, you know, they always talk about like the, the Sam Altman, if you drop him on an island, he could become like the cannibal. It's like, no, I could even do it better, I can do it better.

• 55:43Jordi Hays?

  The knife.

• 55:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, who knows? But I, I do think that there's this tendency to latch on to headlines and just, everything behind the headline in every single one of those cities, there's amazing companies that are hitting their stride, finding, you know, I don't know.

• 56:04John Coogan?

  Except in Europe.

• 56:05Jordi Hays?

  Except in Europe.

• 56:06John Coogan?

  Europe seems in a lot of trouble, honestly.

• 56:08Jordi Hays?

  Shambles, shambles.

• 56:09John Coogan?

  It seems.

• 56:10Jordi Hays?

  We, it's time to colonize Europe.

• 56:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:13Jordi Hays?

  They colonized America.

• 56:14John Coogan?

  Well, I was.

• 56:15Jordi Hays?

  It's time to colonize it back.

• 56:16John Coogan?

  I was joking about like, yeah, like, either in Germany or. Or France, like, yeah, France specifically, like, you know, it just seems like authoritarianism is on the rise. Like, they're banning free speech, they're banning, like, they're arresting Pavel Durov, the Telegram guy. And it's like, yeah, every eighty years, like, America has to go in and like, clean it out.

• 56:34Jordi Hays?

  Clean house.

• 56:35John Coogan?

  Clean house.

• 56:37John Coogan?

  Like, we gotta go.

• 56:38Jordi Hays?

  All right. This was a fun social experiment, but there's only one form of government that actually works. And we're here to sort of bring it back.

• 56:47John Coogan?

  That's re-invade.

• 56:48Jordi Hays?

  We've brought democracy, we've exported, it's the greatest export, right?

• 56:53John Coogan?

  It is.

• 56:54Jordi Hays?

  Free markets and democracy.

• 56:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:56Jordi Hays?

  But sometimes people forget that.

• 56:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What else is on the docket today? What else do we have?

• 57:05Jordi Hays?

  I had a funny moment today, or a funny moment this week that you'll appreciate.

• 57:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:11Jordi Hays?

  Somebody asked me about Excel and blah, and they were like, yeah, I really thought that I've been working on a pouch concept. I think that it could be really good business to just get to like forty to fifty million in cash flow.

• 57:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:27Jordi Hays?

  And I was like, yeah, yeah, I mean, that's like, cool story, bro. I was like, I was like, you're gonna go into one of the most cutthroat competitive industries, seven to eight years behind Lucy, and then just think that you're gonna like, ride to like, cash flowing some asset from zero, as there's all this money coming in and like, turmoil. And it made me think of something that I think is a topic that more people need to understand. Is like, there's this attitude within like, the like, startup founder of like, I'm gonna try to find these like, easier ideas.

• 58:09Jordi Hays?

  And usually, usually they land on ideas that are perceived to be easy for some reason, which is like, okay, I get a plastic thing, I put nicotine pouches in it, and I just start selling it.

• 58:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:22Jordi Hays?

  And I'll get to like forty, fifty mil and just cash flow it.

• 58:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:24Jordi Hays?

  It's not a venture thing, but like, and there's this idea too, that for some reason...

• 58:32Jordi Hays?

  Cash flow businesses are easier to build.

• 58:34John Coogan?

  Easier, yeah.

• 58:34Jordi Hays?

  When it's like, okay, would you have been able to get, you wouldn't have, Lucy wouldn't have been able to survive without venture capital to get to the work.

• 58:42John Coogan?

  It'd be impossible.

• 58:44Jordi Hays?

  And so I think it's like, it's probably a topic that will, I mean, I just see it come up all the time where people are trying to find easy ideas.

• 58:52John Coogan?

  I mean, the exception in the tobacco category and the nicotine space is just straight up being illegal. Like, there are companies that cash flow a lot because they just break all the laws and they just don't do anything and so.

• 59:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:06John Coogan?

  But they're very short-lived and they're not, and there's no equity value and it's not like, when, I think when people think like a cash flowing asset, it's like, oh yeah, it'll cash flow for a long time. Not like, I mean, like puff bar cash flow for a while.

• 59:19Jordi Hays?

  All the vape, all the vape businesses, yeah, yeah.

• 59:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, a lot of these, a lot of these vape businesses like popped up overnight.

• 59:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:25John Coogan?

  Just like completely broke whatever rule was in place and it's like, well, you know, big tobacco isn't going to break that rule, Juul isn't going to break that rule anymore, like has been, you know, like if there's a flavor ban, they can just like move around it or whatever. But yeah, it's, it's wild.

• 59:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so that, that was something that, that came up multiple times this week where founders were just searching for what they perceived to be an easy idea because it was very tangible.

• 59:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 59:49Jordi Hays?

  And then you're just like, no, well, you know, you know that this is like going to be extremely difficult on all these dimensions and you've had a, and, and in that situation, I was like, best in class team with Lucy that's been executing on the same vision for almost, closer to a decade than a first year.

• 1:00:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:09Jordi Hays?

  And so that was funny. And then the other thing that, the other thing that came up that I think is funny, I was, the, the text that I sent to a buddy was, real men raise pre-product. Because like I, we have a friend, I have a friend who's starting a new company. And he's like, he's done well previously. He's like hiring engineers for the new company, but he hasn't, he hasn't raised yet. And I was texting him wanting to invest and he's like, yeah, we're gonna wait till we get to like some revenue traction. And I was like, God, like, it's so soft. Just like, you know, like, and that's again, like, the vibe round versus like, the traction round is like, I'll give you the valuation that you will get when you

• 1:00:51Jordi Hays?

  have the traction. I'll give it to you now. But like, just fucking sit like,

• 1:00:55John Coogan?

  Send it.

• 1:00:56Jordi Hays?

  Send it, dude. Raise. Like, be a man. Like, raise. If you have conviction, have some conviction in your idea, raise pre-product. Like, it's soft to do anything otherwise. Like, the venture economy depends on people going full send.

• 1:01:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:14Jordi Hays?

  You're hurting the economy.

• 1:01:15John Coogan?

  I always, I always laugh thinking about this, this conversation that Mark Andreessen was having with Ken Griffin. And he's talking about like his earlier funds and how he was like, kind of trading his own money. And then he like scaled up the fund, raised, got some LPs, like got some meat on his bones, so he could like size up the firm and like start going bigger and bigger. And now, you know, he still owns like a huge amount of it. But he was just like, you know, Mark, and obviously, as you know, like, you know, if you don't, if you don't get some capital behind you, like, you don't go very far. And he just said it, like, it was just like such a truism. And like, it was just such a funny like disregard, like, anyone who's like, oh, bootstrapping, like, it's easier. And stuff. It was like,

• 1:01:56John Coogan?

  no, no, no. Like, not if you want to play in his league. It was just like, it was just like, yeah, like, obviously, you need capital if you have a good idea and are moving quickly and want to like actually win and play some like deeper, bigger game. But the, but the myth of like, oh, yeah, a lot of, a lot of ventures burn out, therefore, there's some sort of lifestyle business must be easier or something. I've never liked it.

• 1:02:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, the, the issue when people analyze bootstrap versus venture businesses is they'll be like, look at this business. It was bootstrapped and it sold for a billion dollars. And they're like, look at this company. This company had to raise $300 million to get to a billion dollars. Discounting the fact that the bootstrap business took 30 years. You know, like they're like, look, they were able to bootstrap and it's like, yeah, you'll be 70 years old.

• 1:02:48John Coogan?

  Billion.

• 1:02:49Jordi Hays?

  Like, uh, um, so anyways, real men, I'll just end this podcast by saying real, real men raise pre-product.

• 1:02:58John Coogan?

  Indeed.