Bridgit Mendler, Aravind Srinivas, Ted Feldmann, Karol Hausman & Lachy Groom, Sam Lessin, Kevin Systrom Says Meta Denied Instagram Resources

TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV (01:10) - Kevin Systrom Says Meta Denied Instagram Resources (08:55) - Aravind Srinivas (51:06) - Ted Feldmann (01:24:41) - Karol Hausman & Lachy Groom (01:55:43) - Sam Lessin (02:27:23) - Bridgit Mendler

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 TVPN. Today is Wednesday, April 23rd, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. We're starting late. We are under attack, folks. Likely by a nation state, likely by a state actor. That's why we're six minutes late, uh, seven minutes late. But we got a great show for you. They didn't, they didn't, they knew, they knew the lineup was too unbelievable. We're gonna pull it up on the screen for you folks. Today, we got a massive lineup. We got funding announcements. We got Sam Lessin coming on, yapping about VC stuff. Uh, we got perplexity, big announcement. They're, they're going head to head with Siri. They're launching an iOS voice assistant.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  Uh, during physical intelligence, Northwood, we're gonna be covering it all. But first, we need to cover Kevin Systrom, the founder of Instagram, has changed his mind. Turns out, billion dollar acquisition, it's not enough. He went to court and said, you know what? Testified. Testified and said. His acquirer. Was being mean, I guess. Um, so Alex Heath kicks it off with a post here saying, Lord gave me the confidence to sell a company for a billion dollars. Basically disappeared for seven years. Not true. He built another app. Uh, it didn't really go that well and they wound up, uh, selling it, but. I used it for a while. I used it for a while too. Little news app. Yeah, news app, very cool. I wanted that to be like a modern incarnation of, uh, Google Reader. I thought it'd be very cool if it was like AI assisted news reading. They had some summaries.

• 1:26John Coogan?

  It wasn't quite there, uh, and I think they didn't find their like early adopter. It wasn't clear if it was for like tech, tech, tech people or like normies. Uh, and so it didn't really go anywhere, but it was pretty cool at the time. Um, and so he basically disappeared for seven years and then reappeared in court to basically SHIT on my acquirer. Uh, and I went back and found a great Sam Parr post from five years ago, basically. With some chat logs, you know, we love some leaked emails on this show. This is amazing. The chat logs from when Zuck was buying Instagram. The highlights, Zuck, I can't get to $2 billion. Systrom, 2 billion was my absolute say yes number. I'll have to think on it. Just two dudes negotiating the best $1 billion acquisition ever via Facebook Messenger. Yeah, the deals go down in the DMs.

• 2:12Jordi Hays?

  As they do.

• 2:13John Coogan?

  Deals die in the data room and they flourish in the DMs, I guess. Sarah Fryer says, wow, after years of silence from Instagram, co-founder Kevin Systrom is on the stand in federal court confirming what I reported in my book, including that Zuckerberg starved Instagram's headcount around safety issues, leading to major problems. And so Alex Kantrowitz posts, Kevin Systrom watching Zuckerberg saying Instagram would be nothing without him.

• 2:37Jordi Hays?

  Curious.

• 2:37John Coogan?

  No, I was on to something here. And so there's another funny post from Will.

• 2:43Jordi Hays?

  Do you think Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger envisioned this when they created Instagram?

• 2:48John Coogan?

  Chat with AIs.

• 2:50Jordi Hays?

  Chatting with Walter White.

• 2:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:52Jordi Hays?

  Or YN.

• 2:53John Coogan?

  I don't know who YN is, but 8 million messages. Wow, that's a lot. Anyway, also Kevin Systrom, apparently he's on the board of Walmart.

• 3:01Jordi Hays?

  Not bad.

• 3:01John Coogan?

  Pretty, pretty awesome post-exit founder mentality.

• 3:05Jordi Hays?

  Good place to land.

• 3:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, I grew up with a buddy whose dad was on the board of Walmart. And we'd go to Walmart and, and he was just like, buy anything you want. It's customer, it's research. I was like, that's awesome.

• 3:20Jordi Hays?

  Well, if you think about it for Walmart.

• 3:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21Jordi Hays?

  The amount of purchasing activity that Instagram drives is obscene.

• 3:25John Coogan?

  That does make sense, actually. Yeah. And that's why Ben Thompson was saying that Walmart should buy TikTok.

• 3:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:33John Coogan?

  Which seems weird, but it actually makes so much sense when you actually play it out. Right? And so this all comes from a report in the New York Times. A trial Instagram co-founder says Meta denied his company resources. Kevin Systrom said during testimony in a landmark antitrust trial that he believed Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executives viewed Instagram as a threat. Kevin Systrom, a co-founder of Instagram, testified on Tuesday. He said, quote, Mark was not investigating, not, not investing in Instagram because he believed we were a, we were, he, Mark was not investing in Instagram because he believed we were a threat to their growth. But they'd already done the acquisition.

• 4:10Jordi Hays?

  It was interesting. So, so I think the high level Systrom is basically saying that Mark wanted to own Instagram and he knew it could be successful, but he didn't want it to be too successful because it would, it was basically, would have, would have been damaging to Facebook's metrics.

• 4:26John Coogan?

  Yes. Systrom called it a buy or bury strategy to illegally cement the social media monopoly by killing off its rivals. The Instagram co-founder made millions when Mark Zuckerberg bought his company, but Systrom sharply contradicted Meta's defense during hours on the stand. And so what I-

• 4:40Jordi Hays?

  Millions is sort of an understatement.

• 4:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was more like a hundred million, I think, a couple hundred million. But, but I'm confused about this because once, it's a whole co-acquisition, like he owns the whole thing. Was Zuck optimizing for like short-term earnings in the public markets? Because yes, if you funnel everyone over to a lower monetizing product, this happened with Reels too. When they started pulling people away from the feed, which was very pot, which was very efficiently monetized.

• 5:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:09John Coogan?

  They moved people over to Reels. Reels wasn't monetizing as well. Then they had, they had to keep giving guidance to the market and say, hey, Reels is going to get there. It's going to get there. Trust us. It's starting to monetize really well. The, the ARPU is going to be there. The retention's there. It's going to be additive to our business. It's not going to be destructive. Because there's always a fear of that.

• 5:25Jordi Hays?

  No, it's very, it's very possible that Zuck at the same time was being, you know, wanted to be aggressive over the long-term.

• 5:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:31Jordi Hays?

  In terms of building out a new platform, but short-term, you know, wanted to basically be able to control the process, basically. And I think that's a great take, being like, hey, we don't want to move a bunch of users over to this app that we're monetizing well on Facebook and move them over somewhere where we just can't make nearly the same amount of-

• 5:48John Coogan?

  It's just odd to, to sell your company to Facebook and then you have Facebook stock or cash or some mix of those two and not just immediately, and still have it be like your baby. Like, I feel like if you're, if you sell your company to Facebook, you should be very much on like the Facebook team. And you should say, hey, yeah, I have my thing, Instagram, that I want to grow. But really all I care about is the Facebook share price. And so like if, if, if what's best for the Facebook share price, because that's what I own now, is slower growth of Instagram, faster growth for Instagram, for Facebook, you should be fine with that. So I don't really understand the, the problem here. It does seem like he has a bone to pick. Lots of people do. I was listening to Palmer Lucky talk about the Facebook acquisition and he said that the thing that got him over the line

• 6:29John Coogan?

  was that Mark told him that, yes, we're going to acquire you for, for, uh, single-digit billions, I think three billion, something like that. But- If you let us acquire you, we will invest $10 billion a year for a decade in VR and AR technology in reality labs. And Palmer was running the numbers and was saying, well, I'd either have to raise $100 billion to make that happen, or I'd need to sell, you know, millions and millions of headsets like every quarter to justify that type of R and D investment. And so in terms of like making VR a reality in the way Palmer wanted, this was a great option. And of course, like Zuck did do that. He did actually back that up, did wind up investing in reality labs very heavily. Of course, there was all the political stuff

• 7:11John Coogan?

  and the fallout from that that left like a bad taste in Palmer's mouth, obviously, but then he built Andrew also, it all worked out.

• 7:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'll be interested to hear if Adam Mosseri ends up having to, is basically dragged into this because he was, had a product at Instagram. This was, you know, I think long after Kevin had left. But, but ultimately, he was the VP of Product Management at Facebook during the period in which they were kind of integrating the platforms and then eventually kind of moved over and focused exclusively on Instagram.

• 7:44John Coogan?

  Yep. Another quote from Systrom here. As the founder of Facebook, he felt a lot of emotion around which one was better, meaning Instagram or Facebook. And I think there were real human emotional things going on there. That's funny because the, the, the diss on Zuck during this, oh, he has no emotions. He's a robot. And now it's like, oh, he's too emotional. I don't know. It's hard to tell.

• 8:05Jordi Hays?

  He was picking favorites.

• 8:06John Coogan?

  It seemed like it all worked out and it didn't, it didn't feel as a consumer like Instagram, oh, they're not investing in this. Oh, they're trying to sunset this. It was like, no, they're trying to monetize this like crazy. They're putting more ads, they're adding video, stories, reels, everything. They went crazy with the, with that business and it became very, very, very, very successful. So.

• 8:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, hands down, one of the best consumer tech acquisitions of all time.

• 8:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 8:29Jordi Hays?

  Can you think of anything bigger or better? It's not like WhatsApp, like WhatsApp was significant and was probably a good buy.

• 8:36John Coogan?

  But it was also 19 times the cost.

• 8:37Jordi Hays?

  And doesn't generate nearly the direct revenue.

• 8:42John Coogan?

  Very important to the strategy, but I'm sure we will have more to talk about on big tech strategy, but we have the founder of Perplexity in the studio. So, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 8:54Aravind Srinivas?

  Thank you. Thank you for having me here, John. I'm doing well.

• 8:58Jordi Hays?

  What's going on? Great to have you.

• 8:59John Coogan?

  Can you tell us about the announcement today? What are you announcing? Who are you taking a shot at?

• 9:05Aravind Srinivas?

  Well, uh, we are uh gonna be partnering with a OEM. I think uh Bloomberg's already written about it.

• 9:14John Coogan?

  Uh.

• 9:15Aravind Srinivas?

  Replexity will be pre-installed on the phones of uh uh that OEM and uh we'll be able to like

• 9:24Aravind Srinivas?

  push notify all those users to set perplexity to default assistant on the Android phone. Uh, this is a pretty big deal because um until now, like people with OEMs would just not even take a meeting with you. If you ever go to them and say, hey, like, what do you think about using an alternative assistant or an alternative search?

• 9:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:42Aravind Srinivas?

  They'd be like, uh, Google's just paying too much money. I'm not gonna do anything. So uh it took this long to actually build something pretty differentiated and new, which is obviously, you know, taking actions. Uh, we put out a Twitter announcement today morning to saying uh we got most of it working on iOS as well. So I feel like this is the next stage, like, you know, moving all these AI chatbots to native assistants on the phone that uh not just answer your questions, but also help help you get things done.

• 10:11John Coogan?

  Is there any hope that um there will be a more open ecosystem on the iPhone? Uh, I've used, I've used the shortcuts function on the action button. It's pretty janky. Uh, I'd love to just remap Siri. I love Apple. I love my phone, but I don't love that particular product. I'd love to swap it out with one of the more founder-led AI companies like yours. Um, is there any hope there or is Apple just too dominant in that and do they view it as too valuable?

• 10:45Aravind Srinivas?

  Uh, I would, I would assume the latter. Uh, I think my hope is at least like, let's start with Siri being able to call multiple AI apps.

• 10:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 10:55Aravind Srinivas?

  Um, you know, um, they let the user provide some preferences on what apps they like for what different things. Um, at least we can start with that and um I think calling other apps could be interesting. Uh, most of, actually, to be fair to Apple, a lot of it is still exposed in the app. Apple SDK through the events kit. Uh, so that's how we got things done like calendar, mail, reminders. Uh, these are all part of their SDK. So, uh, you can actually call it, uh, podcasts, Apple Music. Uh, that's Apple Maps. All of these are possible to integrate into. Uh, you cannot do stuff that's more native like alarms and volume or brightness. Uh, you know, people want and everything, uh, system at the end of the day.

• 11:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 11:40Aravind Srinivas?

  So that's their advantage. Um, so I hope like, you know, what they can do is stuff that's so easy and obvious. Like setting an alarm or making a phone call or sending a text message. They can just continue to be pretty reliable there. But, uh, anything that's more multi-step in nature, uh, they let the user invoke their favorite AIs to get things done.

• 12:01John Coogan?

  Uh huh. Uh, what, uh, what lessons have you learned from the antitrust history in big tech? And what are you watching today with the antitrust stories that are unfolding around Google and Meta on Capitol Hill recently?

• 12:17Aravind Srinivas?

  Yeah. So, uh, our, uh, one of our executives, Dimitri, is testifying today, uh, for the Google versus DOJ case. Um, I've already wrote, wrote on X, our core points. Uh, I don't think Google should be broken up for two main reasons. One is it's not even in the interest of America for, uh, Google to be broken up. And, uh, number two is it doesn't actually increase competition. Uh, it's just gonna like, uh, transfer from one monopoly to another. Uh, and actually they've done a pretty great job at, uh, helping other people with browsers. Like Edge, I mean, if you want to use the word wrapper, since I get accused of it a lot, uh, Microsoft Edge is a Chromium wrapper.

• 12:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 12:58Aravind Srinivas?

  Ray was a Chromium wrapper.

• 13:00John Coogan?

  No, that's great.

• 13:01Aravind Srinivas?

  Everything, everything, every other browser that's even managed to take, uh, even a tiny bit of market share from Google Chrome has been built on technology that Google did. So we should actually credit them for that. And, uh, I don't trust another organization to maintain that open source repository, uh, in the same way that they have. And, uh, the other, the, the other thing honestly though, that we're pushing back on against. Google is there how they couple uh OEMs to keep them as a default uh and don't let the OEMs put in Play Store otherwise.

• 13:33John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 13:33Aravind Srinivas?

  So basically, it's very simple to understand. If if there is like an enthusiastic OEM who wants to ship AIs on their phones.

• 13:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:40Aravind Srinivas?

  Uh what Google does is, okay, you can do whatever you want. It won't be an approved Android version of Google. Um and and if it's not, uh you're not allowed to put Maps, YouTube, uh Play Store. The one that affects the most is the Play Store because nobody can see the phone where you cannot install other apps.

• 13:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:59Aravind Srinivas?

  And most developers of other companies are not interested in like maintaining versions of their apps for multiple Play Stores. It's a lot of work. Even Samsung couldn't really get Galaxy Store to work.

• 14:08John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 14:09Aravind Srinivas?

  Uh and Meta, Amazon, all of them tried making their own phones and failed for this very reason. Even if you fork Android and try to make your own phone, uh you have to convince everybody to actually ship to that particular new Play Store and maintain it and keep improving it. And you're not going to be able to share the uh Play Store ad revenue and subscription revenue uh with with the uh OEMs that Google can. So this is the primary problem and uh but that said, like, you know, the system that they have Gemini is actually pretty horrible. And uh the model is great, but the product is not.

• 14:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:42Aravind Srinivas?

  And um there should be no reason to uh force people to keep that as the default when you have an inferior product. Uh just because you have all these deals and lock-ins. So that's what we are pushing back on in our testimony.

• 14:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, just because you build a great foundation model does not give you a guarantee that you'll win at the application layer. And so these wrappers, although they've been derided, like that that's the UI layer. That's what's so important to the actual consumer. Um I want to talk about uh social networking in the context of foundation models. We've seen the partnership between uh the merger between X and XAI. Uh there's been rumors that OpenAI might be thinking about doing some sort of social network. Obviously, Zuck has been able to vend Llama into all of the meta-core products. Uh what do you think the future, does every, does every AI company need a social media dance partner?

• 15:31John Coogan?

  Are we going to see uh Pinterest and Snap do things? I know some of them have have experimented with AI features but haven't brokered a huge partnership yet. Uh what does the future look like? Are these two technologies like intrinsically linked and destined to be part of one organization? Or can an AI company operate independently forever?

• 15:53Aravind Srinivas?

  Um, I mean, I I don't I don't know how social AI go hand in hand that it's not it's not that straightforward like like if it was then Meta AI would have already taken off.

• 16:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 16:04Aravind Srinivas?

  Um, pretty massively, right? E- even though it's not the leading model, uh, you could imagine most of the co- uh, like say, let's assume chat G P T, um, you know, get like a billion queries a day or something, um. I don't think like like sixty to seventy percent of them are probably gonna be super simple enough that Meta AI is gonna work for it.

• 16:22John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 16:22Aravind Srinivas?

  Uh, you don't need the fancy models. In fact, most people using chat G P T in the world don't even know there's a model called O one or O three.

• 16:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:30Aravind Srinivas?

  And and don't even know what the difference is for G P T four. So, um, I would say the main problem is it's not, AI is still very single player.

• 16:39John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 16:39Aravind Srinivas?

  Uh, the only experiment that I feel took off on social, uh, is this, uh, thing that we did first called Ask Perplexity Bot on X.

• 16:48John Coogan?

  Hmm, yeah, I remember that.

• 16:49Aravind Srinivas?

  And, um.

• 16:50John Coogan?

  I see that all the time in the comments. Yeah, it's great.

• 16:53Aravind Srinivas?

  X A I also, you know, implemented that with at Groom and they have way more advantages because they own the platform, no rate limits and like. They can drive installs of their app through that. So it's it's like a pretty good, uh, experiment that worked. So I could imagine Meta doing this, like, you know, on threads. That could be like, uh, at Meta AI and and or it could automatically reply. You could do all sorts of cool things.

• 17:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:19Aravind Srinivas?

  So it's more like the other way where a social network can help you grow usage of an AI app.

• 17:25John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 17:25Aravind Srinivas?

  Pretty, pretty immensely.

• 17:27John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 17:27Aravind Srinivas?

  Uh, compared to like an AI app benefiting from, uh, social layer, so far at least. Uh, but if you could figure out social for an AI app within the app itself, uh, it can definitely make it more daily usage and higher retention. Which is what most AI apps struggle with today.

• 17:43John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 17:43Jordi Hays?

  Can you talk about how you're thinking about your own models going forward versus leveraging the existing models? You guys have Sonar and then.

• 17:50Aravind Srinivas?

  Yeah.

• 17:51Jordi Hays?

  R, uh, seventeen seventy six. Uh, I'm curious how you're, um, where where you're looking to, uh, focus going forward.

• 18:00Aravind Srinivas?

  I think we'll continue to keep the same strategy, which is have a version of our product that can run with our own models, but not hinder or disrupt the user from this best experience that we can provide to them. If we are not able to do it with our own model, we'll just use other people's models. We have no problems with that. My, our belief is that nobody's gonna have a lead in the having the best AI model for more than a few weeks. The pace at which the field is moving, like Anthropic did the 3.7 on it, and then within a few weeks, like Google did Gemini 2.5 Pro, which was way better. Groom 3 came out, and then OpenAI has O3 and O4. There's always some debate on like, what is the best model, but

• 18:44Aravind Srinivas?

  they're all looking the same, and they're all good for a certain specific set of things.

• 18:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, do you think in, do you think in five years, can the average internet, you know, user will have a favorite model, or they just won't even know the underlying model that they're using, and they'll just be sort of, you know, the, the software application layer will just be serving, you know, the, the, the most effective model for the task?

• 19:07Aravind Srinivas?

  I think it's gonna be more like the second case. The main reason I believe that's gonna be like that, because everybody's just chasing the same benchmarks. Everyone has the same set of benchmarks, LMS, LMA, GAI, GPQA, and, and humanity last exam, and, and they're just trying to like, show their AIs the best. And so they do all the same sort of things that you do in RLHF, and it ends up making models like, look similar. Yes, there are some like tasteful things some model developers do, like some people like the way Claude responds, some people like Groom's attire, but these are all like, easy to build. It's not that hard. The difficulty, which is why everybody's working on the difficult

• 19:51Aravind Srinivas?

  problem, is making these truly smart and like, better, all these reasoning tasks. And so that's gonna end up making all these models roughly similar looking to the average user.

• 20:01Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. When do you and the team decide when something is ready to ship? With the voice assistant today, one of the massive advantages that I think you guys have is the culture of Apple specifically is about perfection, right? It's about pixel perfect design, you know, it's not, it doesn't feel like the culture is sort of comfortable making mistakes. You can see the even iMessage summaries being very embarrassing to them, right? Whereas like as a, you know, a big company now, but, but still relatively young, you guys have the advantage of being able to, you know, move quickly, try things and iterate.

• 20:39Aravind Srinivas?

  Yeah, so I'll literally read out to you the chat I had with, with our engineer who worked on this. Be good to launch and announce today, question mark. And then he's like, yes, still making improvements, but let's launch. And me, like, do you want to address some of the onboarding concerns people had? Like all the which calendar or which maps to use? And he's like, yeah, they're valid concerns, but I'm worried about waiting too long to launch. The Apple engineer in me says to wait until it's perfect. The perplexity engineer in me says that's why Apple has never launched anything.

• 21:11Aravind Srinivas?

  So, and then I said, okay, let's roll.

• 21:15John Coogan?

  Do you have a sound effect for us, Jordi? Founder mode.

• 21:22John Coogan?

  You posted, what, what's a social app that doesn't exist yet, but you wish existed? Doesn't need to get to 100 million or billion users? What did you learn from that? What was exciting and what do you think you might stay away from?

• 21:35Aravind Srinivas?

  Yeah, yeah. The major learning was the OG Facebook and Usenet. These were the two main ideas. Mark Andreessen actually talked to me after that. He's, this is like his pet, like, you know, idea that he always keeps coming back to apparently. And

• 21:56Aravind Srinivas?

  Bloomberg Terminal is another interesting thing where you know, nobody thinks about it as a social network, but it is what it is today. People are not leaving it because of the network it has, right? And it's very elite because you have to actually pay that much money to get into it. But then because of that, the quality of like exchanges are also high. Or at least that it gives you this feeling of exclusivity, which is what Facebook leaned on to in the early days where they were only in Ivy League colleges and stuff. Uh, and so I I think that concept can be explored. Clubhouse definitely tried that and failed. So it's not like, you know, bulletproof, but that can certainly be explored again. If you wanna build an app that doesn't have like too many users. Uh, you need to gate it in some way.

• 22:42Aravind Srinivas?

  Whether it's by pay to play or like some other kind of uh, eliteness criterion, it's not clear. Uh, but then what after you get in should also be uh, thought about.

• 22:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:54Aravind Srinivas?

  Uh, the quality of exchanges should be high. Like in in some sense, Elon has turned X into some something like that. Uh, there are a lot of trolls, a lot of random accounts and all that stuff, but because by forcing people to have the blue mark and paying eight dollars a month and um, and all that stuff. I think he's already made it like much better than it used to be. So uh, a more aggressive version of that could be explored. He could explore it himself, like if there's a super premium version where um, you only get to like respond to some people if you're paying even more. Um, how how would that make the quality of exchanges on the platform? It's not clear because the other side of the story where some people like Bill Ackman come and respond to random people on X.

• 23:38Aravind Srinivas?

  And and the reason he gives us like, I like the attention. I like, I like, you know, I'm I'm even on a vacation. I wanna come in like keep replying. I like the dopamine hits of like uh, getting notifications. You know, I so it's not like if you get billionaires, uh, they wanna stay with the other billionaires or stay exclusive. I think they actually like using a product like X to stay connected to the normal people.

• 24:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:01Aravind Srinivas?

  I haven't quite tracked the idea yet.

• 24:03John Coogan?

  I want to pitch you an idea that we've been kicking around here. Might be terrible, but in terms of like the LLM research, AI-driven social network, I find myself doing a lot of very niche, deep research reports. Sometimes I did a whole deep dive on, deep research report on Tomo Bravo. And then I did another one on the, the, the story of Johnny Carson, the, the, the original host of The Tonight Show. Fascinating. I don't know how I wound up down that rabbit hole. I really enjoyed it. If I'm on perplexity and I find some, and I ask some really interesting question, because asking interesting questions is often more, more challenging than getting a great answer.

• 24:44John Coogan?

  What if I just could just click a button and share, publish it to an internal network? And then Jordy can follow me on perplexity that he can see my most interesting question. Not, not going to see the whole feed because maybe I'm asking about a health, a healthcare issue. But if I choose to share it, I'm just sharing my result. And then they can click in, oh, John was interested in, you know, this specific thing. Maybe I'll take a tour down his research result. Is that an interesting option? Or is there something I'm missing that's like, that's actually a terrible idea?

• 25:11Aravind Srinivas?

  No, it's not a terrible idea. We've exactly, we've considered this exact idea.

• 25:15John Coogan?

  Awesome.

• 25:16Aravind Srinivas?

  You know, obviously we, the more I keep working on features, I, people ridicule me that, what are you doing when your core product is failing and buggy and like going down? Like you're going down the drain and like you're taking the company down. So all, I, I read all that stuff too.

• 25:31John Coogan?

  So don't let the haters get to you. Don't let the haters get to you.

• 25:35Aravind Srinivas?

  I think some, some of them have a valid point though. Like you, more features you keep in using the product, you just lose sight of the core focus. Why the product even exists in the first place and making it like a pretty bad experience. And then you, and you win on neither of these things. But I do agree with you, like it'd be great to share that the perplexity threads or like that you create. We have this thing called Discover and, and we're trying to increase the volume of content on Discover. And once we do that in an automatic way, with curation to users' interests, like we're going to let. Some of the users pub try to like publish it to discover on their own, just like a creator on YouTube does it. Yep.

• 26:16Aravind Srinivas?

  And um and then if a few people engage with the like the TikTok algorithm, we're gonna try to surface it to more people. That is the long term idea. That's why I'm even having to discover a lot of people even ask me, why, why does this thing even exist? Yeah. Uh, because I I wanna keep it as the optionality to like have a social product within perplexity. Yeah, that makes sense.

• 26:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, if you have another minute, I'm curious how you're thinking about shopping, how much time you and the team are are putting into this. It's obviously a very exciting opportunity.

• 26:45Aravind Srinivas?

  Yeah.

• 26:46Jordi Hays?

  And I know you've shared some about what you guys are doing uh before.

• 26:51Aravind Srinivas?

  Yeah, so last year, it was end of last year, we launched uh perplexity pro shopping where you can. And once, once you do a shopping query, we're not just giving you the, the answer, but giving you the product cards. And we could even let you buy it directly from there. Some of the things we surface from Shopify with their API and like. Let you buy with shop pay and some of the things we ourselves integrated with some merchants and like uh did the check out flow ourselves. And um you wouldn't even have to go and check out on the merchant side. You can just do it directly on perplexity. We thought this would be the best uh innovative dilemma angle against Google. Because Google, uh even if Gemini gives you shopping answers, they have no incentive to like let you transact.

• 27:33Aravind Srinivas?

  Uh, because like the they lose, they they make money by sending you a merchant sites. That's why Google flights doesn't let you book flights on Google. Uh, you have to book it on Expedia or booking.com. Uh, hotel, same thing. So uh, I think that's, that's why we worked on travel and shopping where we let people try to book directly. Uh, we have some ideas on how to incentivize it, like free shipping or like X percent off on hotel bookings done on perplexity. Uh, and but but what we learned hard, the hard way is people actually want really good results first. That's why they're even coming here. They don't care if they transact here or not. It's, it's a secondary thing. Uh, that is only if the result quality is so good.

• 28:13Aravind Srinivas?

  Are they interested in the last step? And we uh didn't quite get that right in the whatever we did end of November. So that's what. We spend time on the first quarters to just improve the UI, improve the latency, improve the relevance. Make sure the cards are like up to date, high quality, uh, filter all the low merchants, uh, like the quality merchants. Uh, make sure like even images for every card is present. Like this is all a lot of boring work that L L M stone solves. Same thing with hotels, like TripAdvisor data is great. We work with them, but like there are so many other places on the web where there are good reviews that people wanna know. And you gotta like aggregate all of that. And this is why I think like model companies are not guaranteed to win the application layer because you have to work on all these boring things.

• 28:57Aravind Srinivas?

  And then sometimes when people book a hotel on perplexity, like when you actually go to the hotel, like they say the booking never came through. Uh, so there's a lot of real world problems you hit in, like packages might not get delivered. You don't have a way to track the package. Because the merchant still does the shipping. We don't do that. So TikTok, if you noticed, TikTok has a shop tab. Uh, which literally looks like Amazon now, and I heard that they even have their own fulfillment in Seattle. They hire people from Amazon and like they're doing their own shipping.

• 29:27Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy.

• 29:28Aravind Srinivas?

  That's my lesson from this is you wanna go to a vertical, you have to go all in and like nail, like, like be prepared to like, uh, play the long game there.

• 29:37Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about, uh, manufacturing viral moments? You guys had a cool experiment with your, uh, Super Bowl. Uh, activation. I'd love to get a postmortem on that, but then you're also not afraid to go and you did this sort of Squid Games campaign that I saw getting a lot of attention as well. Um, how do you, how do you think going forward, sort of balancing these more like scrappy kind of organic activations versus, you know, going big and, and working with, you know, global celebrities to build the brand?

• 30:04Aravind Srinivas?

  I think we should keep being scrappy. Uh, the thing, it's, it's, by the way, like, uh, he's a pretty global star, like well-known star. Uh, like people recognize his face pretty quickly, but he's also not like as expensive as Hollywood people. And so, uh, that's why we decided to work with them. And, uh, the other, other things like. It's a concept that matters at the end, right? Like, coming up with the right concept is more important than like who you work with. And we we will still try to keep doing these one-off viral moments. It's all it's about taking bets, not all of them land. The Super Bowl was good, like, in fact, like, the retention from people who came to the Super Bowl exceeded my expectations.

• 30:47Aravind Srinivas?

  And again, like, whether it's better than doing Instagram ads, it's not clear to me yet. We have to explore all these different platforms. But I do think there's like, you know, two things you benefit from, right? Like, we did this thing with Ben Shapiro over in his podcast, like, he pulls up perplexity and asks questions. I think like, that doesn't actually convert, like, you cannot track performance. But it it it it does lead to more brand awareness, like, if they're like, he has a lot of listeners and it's a different way of doing ads on a podcast, where you're not actually like, having him say perplexity is awesome, go and install it.

• 31:27Aravind Srinivas?

  It's more like watching him use it and then you learn what the product is and what it's meant to be used for. Kind of inspired by Joe Rogan's Pull It Up, Jamie, where all the time Google is being used there.

• 31:38John Coogan?

  Yep. Yeah, we do that with Polymarket. We pull up Polymarkets all the time and recommend that people go and download and install.

• 31:45Aravind Srinivas?

  Yeah, that that's pretty awesome, yeah.

• 31:47John Coogan?

  It works really well.

• 31:48Jordi Hays?

  I'm I'm curious. You mentioned earlier, you know, people sort of yapping on X, you know, trying to trying to sound in on on your product strategy. How do you how do you balance like, you know, on X, it's like an echo chamber of people that are in Silicon Valley working on AI? But like perplexity in theory doesn't really care about people on like, you know, in San Francisco or or New York or these sort of hubs, right?

• 32:14John Coogan?

  It's the final market.

• 32:15Jordi Hays?

  You care a lot more about like, you know, some, you know, random person in in Arkansas is like, you know, you know, wanting to wanting an answer about something and using the app. How do you how do you personally kind of like?

• 32:28John Coogan?

  Everyone in Silicon Valley can switch to DuckDuckGo and Google would be unaffected. That's like the lesson from the last era. And so you could do the same thing. But yeah, I'm interested to hear your take.

• 32:38Aravind Srinivas?

  I think this is both my uh like weakness and strength. I I I spend a lot of time on this platform, so I understand it better. But then uh eh like we are living in a bubble, like there there. Most people are only using chat G P T and and they don't, they haven't even heard about like most of the other apps. I think Elon has managed to break that a little bit because he has two hundred million followers, so essentially he reaches a lot of people. Uh but wha- that's kind of why we wanna do more of these uh Instagram related things, um the commercials. Uh Super Bowl, like these are our attempts. Actually, if you notice, the Super Bowl tweets uh didn't actually matter uh on X. Like, most people made fun of it or didn't even engage with it.

• 33:20Aravind Srinivas?

  But it did help us get a lot of like mainstream, normal people uh become aware of the app and use it. Uh same thing with the Legion J commercial, like it had helped increase our usage in other countries outside, uh you know, countries that don't even use X. So uh I believe the platform that has the most people in the world is Instagram, uh for good or bad. Like, if you go to any city outside the Bay Area, just watch which app like people are having on their phone, it's mostly Instagram or WhatsApp. It's not really uh X.

• 33:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Uh do you spend a lot of time thinking about A G I or is there just enough uh consumer application uh features to build that that it's it's almost a distraction?

• 34:02Aravind Srinivas?

  I do spend time thinking about it. In some sense, it's a unique opportunity to have like uh the ability to have the front end. Which people can feel the A G I, let's say.

• 34:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:13Aravind Srinivas?

  Uh uh so you do wanna think about experiences where people can be made to feel A I and that creates that. Jaw dropping, magical end consumer experience. So uh that we, so that's kind of why we worked on all these Pro searches, it was vo- voice assistants, agents. Uh we're working on the browser, browser agents, all the, you can only do all that if you're like making some predictions of where these models could potentially get to and try to build. Before even they get there, you don't wanna be late. Uh, you wanna build at the right moment where like kinda like how we book reflex here on the G P T three point five time, not G P T four time. It would, it would have been too late then. Uh, you need to fi- pick your moment, so you do need to think about A G I. Uh, that said, I'm not a believer in like, you know, um, fear mongering.

• 34:58Aravind Srinivas?

  I, I just think, uh, it's already happened, like the, the genie's out of the bottle. China versus America, that race is already going on, nobody's gonna slow down, um, and everybody wants glory. No, nobody cares about the other people or something. Everybody wants glory and, and, and some kind of power to control the future. So, uh, let's just, uh, like, like, accept the truth and move on and try to like, make sure everyone knows how to use the A I so that their livelihood doesn't get affected.

• 35:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, that makes sense. You're, I, I was thinking about it. I don't know of another ten billion dollar plus, uh, A I startup, uh, founder who's not constantly promising that A G I is like two months away to get, you know, you're just like, you know, let's focus on our users and focus on the opportunity.

• 35:41John Coogan?

  It's probably the right thing. Uh, I mean, speaking of the, the, the foundation models on a more practical level, uh, where are you seeing the most interesting vectors of optimization? Uh, you know, people are focused on, uh, large context windows, uh, huge pre-training runs, but there's been some debate about, are we hitting a pre-training wall? Are we hitting a data wall? Uh, R L's very hot right now. Um, where do you think the foundation model labs need to go? And, and what are you specifically excited about? I imagine that maybe a code generation model, not super important to your business, but something that's more knowledgeable and hallucinates net less about facts, extremely valuable. So what do you wanna see?

• 36:23Aravind Srinivas?

  Uh, I think R L is the, uh, place where most investments are gonna go to, um, especially with, with models like O three that are able to do two calls pretty natively, uh, rather than being prompt engineered to do that or be like. For example, before O three, the way we built like our agents is there would be one model that gave came up with a plan for the query, another model that would execute the plan by converting the plan to like smaller queries, filtering links, calling searches.

• 36:52John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 36:52Aravind Srinivas?

  And then another summarization model that actually takes all the results of the planner and the router and like summarize things. Now it's all like one single model.

• 37:00John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 37:00Aravind Srinivas?

  Uh, that's great. Like that, that, that, that means like you have to like rebuild it, you have to throw away lines of code and rewrite it. But we've been doing this uh since the beginning, like people think like perplexions remain a stagnant code base or something. It's always changed as soon as like models became more capable. But the interesting thing about the native tool call kind of models is that if we want like a sonar version of the product that runs on our own uh setup. Uh, we also need to start doing post-training beyond just uh training for instruction following and summarization, but uh like also like tool calls and and and and completing tasks using R O. Uh, and and we hope to collect all this interesting data through the browser uh platform.

• 37:41Aravind Srinivas?

  Where like people are giving tasks on on our browser and then we obviously some of the agents will fail there. Where we'll collect all the data and like try to uh create like positive trajectories, create like eval suites. And then uh do R O post-training on that. Uh, and so the the nice thing is a lot of open source code bases exist on how to replicate G R P O or P P O.

• 38:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:03Aravind Srinivas?

  And post-training these models. And we've been doing that work already. So uh that's where we plan to invest more resources into for this year.

• 38:11John Coogan?

  Uh, how are you thinking about advertising in the context of search? It's historically been an ad-driven's business, but we're seeing a lot of A I product companies just charge twenty bucks a month, uh two hundred dollars a month, two thousand dollars a month, who knows? Um, is there a future where if you search for what's the best corporate card, it's gonna ramp is gonna show up at the top if they bid on bid on that?

• 38:33Aravind Srinivas?

  Uh, hopefully not. I I think that's that's the main reason why people like using the AIs. They they think it's giving them something that Google doesn't offer. Uh huh. Uh, and and um, so I think the subscription revenue is very healthy and positive, like OpenAI is making ten billion a year or something like that, right? Or seven billion, something like that. So definitely, uh, that's only gonna grow. Uh, and and if AIs start doing things, not just answering questions or or writing code, uh, people will pay even more because they kind of think about it as hiring somebody. Uh, if you look at the amount of people, people pay for personal assistants, chiefs of chief of staffs, personal chief of staff, estate managers, nannies, like, you know, it's a lot of money. And there are a lot of people who can afford all that.

• 39:16Aravind Srinivas?

  And we're talking about uh, doing something hundred X cheaper and also economically ten to hundred X more valuable in terms of end output. So, uh, I I think the subscription uh, TAM is way bigger than what it is today. Uh, I I believe like you can do a lot of interesting things with memory where once you understand the user deeply enough, uh, the user can probably trust you if you show them relevant sponsored content. As long as it's super uh, personalized and hyper optimized for that user. Uh, Instagram has shown some stats where the engagement time on their platform reduces if uh, you they remove the ads. Because that's the level of personalization of the ads. So if if uh, any of the AI companies can do that,

• 40:00Aravind Srinivas?

  uh, I think that could be like a thing where brands could pay a lot more money to advertise there. Yeah. So that's yet to be explored, but to in order to crack that, you need to crack memory properly. Uh, that's kind of one of the o- other reasons we wanted to build a browser is like, we wanna get data even outside the app to better understand you. Uh, because some of the prompts that people do in these AIs is purely work related. It's not like that personal. Yep. On the other hand, like, what are the things you're buying? Which hotels are you going? Where are you? Which restaurants are you going to? What are you spending time browsing? Tells us so much more about you that uh, we plan to use all the context to build a better user profile. And and maybe, you know, through our discovery, we could show some ads there.

• 40:45Jordi Hays?

  Makes no sense. How quickly do you want to launch Comet? Do you have a launch date?

• 40:50Aravind Srinivas?

  It was supposed to be launched already.

• 40:52Jordi Hays?

  This afternoon?

• 40:53Aravind Srinivas?

  Yeah, it was supposed to be out by now. We got delayed. I think partly because we underestimated the difficulty of the project and partly because we tried to do multiple things. And so we've tried to scope it down. We're aiming to get it out by mid-May.

• 41:09Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Good luck. Last question I have. You posted ByteDance of America is worth building. I'm assuming you're building the ByteDance of America?

• 41:19Aravind Srinivas?

  I hope to be able to, but we need to earn the right to do that. So let's first like, you know, I want to succeed with the Comet browser. I think that'll be like the real second product of Perplexity. Everything else we launched, like the Assistant or the like, like apps, platforms is all like just different versions of the same thing. The Comet will be the first really truly different product. And I think if we can do that a second time, I believe like we can and discover. That's the other product we're trying. Though it's within the app right now, but you could imagine spinning it out as a separate app too. You could imagine us like earning the right to do that. I think there's a lot, like I've spoken to the founder of ByteDance and one thing he told me is they're structured in a very different way.

• 42:04Aravind Srinivas?

  It's not like, like CapCuts or TikTok have like different growth teams.

• 42:11Aravind Srinivas?

  They do have their own growth teams, but there's one team in ByteDance that takes care of infrastructure for all their companies. One team that takes care of growth for all their companies. One team that takes care of front-end mobile development for all their apps. And so they share knowledge across apps very quickly. It's insane. So that sort of structure doesn't exist in, in the US. Like take, Google is actually the closest to ByteDance of America. If you think about it, they have so many different apps in one umbrella, but they don't share lessons. Like the YouTube team is so different from the Gmail team, so different from the Chrome team. And that's why it takes so much time to collaborate. So you need a very different leadership structure and a culture to make it happen in America.

• 42:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. That makes sense. Every time I ask you one more question, I get one more question in this. I promise is the last.

• 42:59Aravind Srinivas?

  That's why people use Perplexity.

• 43:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:03Jordi Hays?

  Without violating any NDAs, what's going on with TikTok? Speaking of ByteDance, there was a big flurry. Everybody was submitting. You know bids and then it's been quiet. Is there any, do you have any insight that is not necessarily confidential?

• 43:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, what is

• 43:21Aravind Srinivas?

  I really don't. We've submitted our bid. We never expected to be the leading candidate or anything. We're a very small company compared to them. Our bid was more interesting in the sense that everybody else who bid for them did not want to do anything to do with the algorithm.

• 43:38Aravind Srinivas?

  But I felt like the core problem is fact that like the algorithm is controlled by China in some form or the other. Even if they say, okay, the Chinese app is separate. Apps running outside the US and outside China, like European countries are all sharing the same code. And so they can get to like use that data and influence, you know, what feeds people in America see. So I think like that's where we wanted to do some real work and the search bar is another place where we want to do some real work. We thought our proposal was pretty interesting, but there are some, you know, we're not a data center company. We cannot guarantee them security and all that. Oracle can, so we'll see what happens. I think they've delayed the decision and it's probably going to be coupled with the tariff situation too.

• 44:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for wearing a suit as well.

• 44:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, you look fantastic.

• 44:30Aravind Srinivas?

  Thanks. You guys are, you guys are killing it like

• 44:33John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 44:34Aravind Srinivas?

  Technology brothers. I like the name. Yeah.

• 44:37John Coogan?

  It's awesome.

• 44:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's great to have you on, fellow technology brother, and come back on anytime when you have news.

• 44:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Thanks so much. Bye. On Polly Market, who will acquire TikTok? AppLovin has shot to the top of the charts, but on low vol. They have about $10,000 in a $2 million market in terms of volume, but AppLovin is at 20%. Oracle, Larry Ellison combined, if you consider them one entity,

• 45:03Jordi Hays?

  Over.

• 45:03John Coogan?

  21%. Oracle's at 12, Larry Ellison's at 9, Microsoft's at 8, Amazon's at 8, Tim Stokely at 8, Frank McCourt at 8, Alexis Ohanian at 6. Perplexity is down at 4% right there next to Mr. Beast at 4% as well. Walmart at 3%, who we discussed earlier, would actually be the Ben Thompson choice.

• 45:25Jordi Hays?

  We should get ourselves in the mix and

• 45:28John Coogan?

  Submit a fake bid just to go viral.

• 45:30Jordi Hays?

  We're not allowed to bid on anything on Polly Market, but

• 45:36John Coogan?

  But but we should

• 45:36Jordi Hays?

  We should throw our names in the hat.

• 45:37John Coogan?

  TikTok.

• 45:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:38John Coogan?

  And say hey.

• 45:39Jordi Hays?

  Bit on TikTok.

• 45:40John Coogan?

  It's just gonna be, we're gonna, no more slop content. It's just TVP N clips the entire time.

• 45:46Jordi Hays?

  Press release around it.

• 45:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 45:47Jordi Hays?

  It never, uh, never hit the wire.

• 45:49John Coogan?

  Played out pretty quickly. Anyway, uh, let's do some timeline while we wait for our next guest. Tyler, uh, says, Scoop, I found TBPN's hidden warehouse. Nice try. And he finds a picture of the brothers' supply. I wonder where this is, but we always love when fans share fun photos.

• 46:04Jordi Hays?

  You found us, Tyler.

• 46:05John Coogan?

  Caught us. Uh, we are in the, in the market for a new studio, hopefully moving into one soon. And, uh, this, this brick building looks like it's, uh, fireproof. Been, it's Lindy. It's been around for a long time, probably safe, probably great to record a show there.

• 46:19Jordi Hays?

  We love a fireproof.

• 46:20John Coogan?

  Uh, Luffy says, uh, there, there was this news yesterday in TechCrunch, ex Meta engineer raises $14 million for Lace AI, a revenue generation software startup.

• 46:30Jordi Hays?

  And this was shaking up the timeline.

• 46:33John Coogan?

  Everyone was quote tweeting this.

• 46:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Luffy says, hey Lace, make a hundred million ARR software for me. Do not make any mistakes. Fantastic prompt, by the way. Use it. Use it on any of, any, your preferred model. It'll, it'll work.

• 46:45John Coogan?

  Why don't people, why don't more people do this?

• 46:47Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I don't know. It's, it seems like one of those

• 46:49John Coogan?

  Seems obvious.

• 46:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Thelian sort of secrets.

• 46:51John Coogan?

  Secrets, yes, yes, yeah.

• 46:54Jordi Hays?

  No, but Lace, uh, Lace, I guess is, is focused on maximizing revenue for your call center with zero extra investment.

• 47:01John Coogan?

  It's more just like the TechCrunch, like headline went weird, but again, TechCrunch is so back.

• 47:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of startups don't generate much revenue.

• 47:08John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. So they're like, hey, we will, our, our business is revenue generation. Um, but, uh, yeah, TechCrunch is back. I don't know if this is accidental, but I feel like again and again, we're seeing more TechCrunch headlines post-acquisition. So they're doing well.

• 47:21Jordi Hays?

  It's great to see.

• 47:22John Coogan?

  Great to see. Uh, Patty, I just wanted to give Patty a shout out because he's a friend of the show.

• 47:27John Coogan?

  He says he's proud to announce he's starting a profitable startup, VCs, my DMs are open. So yeah, if you want to get in touch with Patty, he's a free agent, could be picked up at any moment.

• 47:39Jordi Hays?

  He's in Japan, live streaming.

• 47:40John Coogan?

  Could be picked up by a venture capitalist or a company, but we left Patty on this stream.

• 47:45Jordi Hays?

  This post from East Village Guy is 32 late for me to lock in. My brother Ray Karol was a 52 year old traveling salesman when he met the McDonald brothers. Get a grip.

• 47:56John Coogan?

  It's awesome.

• 47:56Jordi Hays?

  And I thought this was worth highlighting. There's so many great stories of this. Enzo Ferrari is another, he was 45 when he started Ferrari. Granted, he had spent a couple of decades in automotive racing.

• 48:08John Coogan?

  Founder of Zoom, founder of Workday, both 60s, 50s, when they started their companies.

• 48:13Jordi Hays?

  Red Bull founder too, right?

• 48:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, Dietrich.

• 48:17Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 48:17John Coogan?

  I think he was pretty old, founder of Monster, very old, which was very funny because it's a very young brand.

• 48:23Jordi Hays?

  Estee Lauder?

• 48:24John Coogan?

  There's tons, yeah, there's tons of these examples. Never too late to start doing your life's work and start a generational company. Just do it. Why don't, why not?

• 48:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Estee Lauder was 38 years old.

• 48:33John Coogan?

  Why not just start a power law company? More people should do that for sure.

• 48:39John Coogan?

  Anyway, we have this bizarre TikTok or YouTube video. It's the third most viewed video on YouTube this week is an AI generated short of a pug that saves a baby from a plane crash and then they try surviving on an island. Can we play this?

• 48:58John Coogan?

  It's, uh, this is the future, folks. This is, this is entertainment now. It's great.

• 49:05Jordi Hays?

  Parachute.

• 49:05John Coogan?

  It does have a compelling narrative, you know? Inciting, inciting element, inciting action.

• 49:13John Coogan?

  You know, turn of events.

• 49:16John Coogan?

  Will he save the baby?

• 49:17Jordi Hays?

  The sound effects are brutal.

• 49:19John Coogan?

  It's really well designed. It's so optimized.

• 49:21Jordi Hays?

  It's got 400 million views.

• 49:23John Coogan?

  400 million views, yes. 400 million views, feeds the baby, starts cooking over the coconut, cooks fish over the coconut. That is adorable. Feeds the baby some sort of fish stew and then writes SOS in the sand and.

• 49:37Jordi Hays?

  Wow, they're boys.

• 49:38John Coogan?

  And then for some reason, the military shows up and they have like guns and stuff. And they've, overnight success and they rescue the baby and the pug. And then it just ends and it's like the ultimate, like you're, you don't expect it to end. So you watch it again.

• 49:54Jordi Hays?

  That is fine art.

• 49:55John Coogan?

  It's the future. It's the future. Again, you know, clearly some, some human element in there figuring out what's viral about it, but pretty sloppy, pretty sloppy.

• 50:05Jordi Hays?

  A little sloppy. Well, you know what's not slop? AI grant batch one.

• 50:09John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 50:09Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely insane. Jeff Huber, who had on the show, shared this.

• 50:13John Coogan?

  I didn't realize this was a throwback.

• 50:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So going off the initial batch.

• 50:17John Coogan?

  This is crazy.

• 50:17Jordi Hays?

  Flexity was in there. Cursor.

• 50:21John Coogan?

  I know Chroma, Wombo.

• 50:24Jordi Hays?

  Wombo.

• 50:24John Coogan?

  Who else do we know in here? Pretty cool. Pixel Cut, Dust, Forefront. Just so early. I wonder when AI Grant Batch One was. This is the Nat Friedman project, correct?

• 50:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:37John Coogan?

  Very, very cool. Little like under the radar. I guess, was it structured as a grant? It wasn't even, it wasn't even YC style? Or was it, did they take?

• 50:45Jordi Hays?

  No, it's an investment via no cap, no discount, MFN safe.

• 50:50John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, yeah. Pretty standard.

• 50:51Jordi Hays?

  So pretty standard investment. And you can imagine they've done pretty well.

• 50:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think some other cool, I'm almost sure Julius went through a later batch. I saw some other folks go through. Pretty, pretty cool.

• 51:03Jordi Hays?

  Julius was in batch two.

• 51:05John Coogan?

  We have our next guest here. Let's bring him in.

• 51:08Jordi Hays?

  You guys told us you yearn for the mines, so we brought the man himself.

• 51:13John Coogan?

  How you doing Ted?

• 51:15Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 51:15Speaker 03

  Great. How are you, John? Jordan?

• 51:17John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 51:18Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 51:18John Coogan?

  You're looking great in that suit. Welcome to the show.

• 51:20Speaker 03

  Thank you. It's Technology Brothers. You need to dress up.

• 51:22John Coogan?

  You gotta dress the part, for sure.

• 51:24Jordi Hays?

  And I love the map, too. That's the only market map that I care about personally.

• 51:27Speaker 03

  Yes, this is, this is our target market, at least in Italy.

• 51:30John Coogan?

  That is the market map. What's actually going on with that map? What do the different colors represent?

• 51:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is a geological map showing kind of the common rock types in a given area. And you can see the central and eastern US are not quite as exciting as the western US. And that's where all the minerals are.

• 51:47John Coogan?

  Interesting. Can you give us a brief overview of you and your company, just to kick us off?

• 51:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. So Ted Feldman, founder of Durin, started the company about a year ago. We are building and operating automated diamond drill rigs used in mineral exploration. So I'll start out kind of high level, what, how does mineral exploration work? And kind of get into what is the actual problem we're solving? So basically, building a mine is, in many cases, a billion dollar endeavor, incredibly expensive. In order to justify this capex, you need to have a really good understanding of what's actually going on underground. And so you have this kind of decade-long exploration process where you'll start out, maybe geologists walking around. They've seen some interesting rocks. You can do geophysics, look for a magnetic anomaly, a gravity anomaly, or do some seismic surveys. You do soil sampling, kind of pick up some, uh, some kind of tiny holes, see if there's kind of trace elements of what you're looking for. But really, in order to understand what's underground, you got to drill.

• 52:37Speaker 03

  And the main type of drilling used in mineral exploration is called diamond drilling or core drilling. This is basically where you're collecting cylindrical core samples of the rock, anywhere from a few hundred meters to a kilometer or more. Um, underground, generally a few inches wide, you pull it up in three meter intervals. But really, once you collect these core samples, you send them off to the lab. The lab will tell you exactly what the composition is. You do that every foot or every meter across hundreds of holes. You plug all this data into a 3D model and you have a kind of, yeah, 3D model of the subsurface. You can visualize where is the mineral deposit, see how large is the resource, what's the grade, the kind of percent of the metal you're looking for within that deposit, and then make a determination of whether it's economic to mine or whether you need to collect more data in order to make that determination. And so the problem here, go ahead.

• 53:19Jordi Hays?

  Before you go into the next segment, can you talk about the value chain? Is there different groups that are doing, you know, the core sort of like research? And then do they sell the rights, basically say like, hey, this is worth spending a billion dollars, but like, we're not going to spend a billion dollars. Like you should do it. And they sort of like sell access to it effectively?

• 53:38Speaker 03

  So, so the way this will normally work is you have an exploration company or junior explorer, junior miner. They either own the land outright, they have rights to lease the land, or they have some claim on federal land. But they have the rights to, to mine in a given area. And they basically have a hypothesis, uh, in geology, that there is some valuable deposit underground. And they raise capital primarily from public markets. Many of these companies go public. Like extremely early on on the TSXV or the ASX and they raise capital and spend most of that capital on drilling to actually collect more data. And so then this constant cycle of raising capital, spending most of it on drilling, analyzing those drill results, updating the geological model. Until they can either raise enough capital, raise a billion dollars, like in debt to actually build the mine.

• 54:21Speaker 03

  Or what happens more often is sell the mine or sell the deposit to a larger miner that will actually have the money on the balance sheet in order to develop the asset.

• 54:29Jordi Hays?

  Why?

• 54:30Speaker 03

  And so you.

• 54:30Jordi Hays?

  Why public markets versus private? Is it just because you need to raise so much money? You need to be able to basically effectively market.

• 54:38John Coogan?

  It sounds like biotech, like what happens with biotech companies going early, earlier out.

• 54:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Are these like typically like penny stocks where they're just trading?

• 54:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:47Jordi Hays?

  You know?

• 54:47Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 54:47Jordi Hays?

  And it's some random.

• 54:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, mining is historically a penny stock industry. We used to have kind of small exchanges in Denver or Phoenix in the US. But in North America, it's just dominated by Vancouver and Toronto, where a lot of these exploration companies are based. Canada has a lot more capital flowing into mining than the United States does today. And it's really just how it's been done historically. These investors, more of the kind of smaller retail investors, historically, they want liquidity and they can't, can't, can't just be called up for a private placement. If you're Joe with a hundred bucks to throw into a gold project.

• 55:18Jordi Hays?

  Did you ever, speaking of mining, did you ever join a call with a VC early and have them be like, sorry, I thought this was like crypto mining?

• 55:27Speaker 03

  That has happened a lot. It has happened less now than a year or 18 months ago, which I think is a very promising trend.

• 55:34Jordi Hays?

  Got it. That's good.

• 55:35John Coogan?

  How much of the business is kind of just you need to take off the shelf technology and just go do the thing? Versus you need to build new technology and, and is that more in like the hardware world or the software world? Or are you just like going and doing the actual exploring? Like, can you concretize what your?

• 55:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I'll get into what is Jiren actually doing? So we're a drilling contractor. We are building rigs from scratch and operating them for exploration companies. We're starting our first pilot with the Gold Explorer in Nevada in a little over a week. We'll be out in the field for that. We started building this rig about four months ago. And so. We get paid basically per meter that we drill for our clients. And so we're not taking any geology risk.

• 56:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. And why are you building the rig yourself? I imagine that i- is that just built? You're buying different pieces of equipment and then piecing them together? I mean, you've raised money, but not that much. Like, I imagine you're not reinventing the wheel. Plus, it's probably, there's good drills out there. I imagine you don't need to build a new drill. Or do you?

• 56:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the initial idea was let's retrofit a rig, maybe save us a lot of money. And this was the avenue I was pursuing for about six months. And we really had two options. We could buy a Chinese rig for less than a hundred grand. We need to add a whole bunch of sensors. I talked to a lot of the operators. These things fall apart. They're not high quality. So we ruled that out. Or you could buy a Western rig for half a million bucks. And you need to hack into the firmware and probably void a warranty, which you do not want to do on a half million dollar piece of equipment. Or partner with a manufacturer and figure out how to actually pull data from it. We tried that with a couple of manufacturers. They were incredibly slow. And all the manufacturers, they sort of have their own half-hearted efforts on autonomy. And so they didn't seem particularly eager to partner up to partner with us. And so almost out of necessity, we had to design our own. And now the way this rig operates is really similar to every other sort of rig.

• 57:19Speaker 03

  All these drills are basically two hydraulic rams pushing what is called the drill head, which is what provides the rotary motion to the drill rods into the ground. So all drilling is really, so you have a bunch of pipes that you screw together and then push and twist into the ground. And you have a bit on the end to make sure you get a clean cut. And so we are, the off-the-shelf parts that we're buying is with the drill head. That's what grips onto the rods and rotates them. The other part called the foot clamp, which just clamps down onto the bottom part of the drill string to make it easy to load a new rod in and then rams to push it into the ground. And then the structure is ours. And then in order to actually retrieve the core sample from the bottom of the hole, think about it like this, you have your drill bit and then you have, which is a cylinder. That's what our logo is actually. And then your drill rod is coming up from that.

• 58:02Speaker 03

  But inside of that bottom rod, you have another tube called the inner tube. There's a latch on the top of that. So basically, once that inner tube fills up with rock, when you've gone down five feet, you can grab a tool called the overshot, lower it down on a wireline, it latches into place. You could pull up the inner tube containing the core sample. And then that's what you send to the lab to be analyzed.

• 58:21Jordi Hays?

  How how mature is the venture backed mining market like are there market maps that exist and are

• 58:29Speaker 03

  There's a few.

• 58:30Jordi Hays?

  And were you were you surprised everybody wants to go to space? Nobody wants to look, you know, beneath our feet and go down. Has it been surprising how how little investment has gone into the actual technology side of the industry?

• 58:44Speaker 03

  It's there's been very little surface area between mining and particularly Silicon Valley historically. Australia has a bit of a more mature mining technology ecosystem, but not nearly as much capital as we have over here. And so there's been a few kind of billion dollar multi hundred billion dollar mining tech companies over the last decade or so, but just a few. And like mining overall is a two to three trillion dollar industry kind of yeah, overall market size. Mining tech is a small portion of that. But it's a difficult industry to sell into. It's really much difficult to start a tech company here. Building a mine is incredibly capex intensive and you're basically making a bet on technology early and then utilizing that equipment or software system for a decade plus. And so these companies are risk averse. They don't want to bet, bet the farm on a on a new new

• 59:29Speaker 03

  technology where I think we come in, there's a few other companies with a similar model is as a contractor. So we're just replacing a separate service provider and any sort of innovation that we're creating is done internally. So we are more efficient, safer, and we're cost effective drilling contractor because of the autonomy that we're building. But it's really no rest of the customer. We get paid just like any other contractor to them.

• 59:49Jordi Hays?

  What's been the industry's reaction to the trade war? China very early came out and said that they were restricting access to various rare earths. Is that

• 59:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:01Jordi Hays?

  You know, what's been your read on the situation? How are how are US players kind of reacting?

• 1:00:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, rare earths are very close to my heart. Prior to starting Duran, I worked for MP Materials, which operates the only rare earths mine in the United States for about a year and a half. Their mine is in California, about three hours away from where we are right now in LA. They MP produces about fifteen percent of the global rare earth supply. They refine about half of it domestically right now. They announced last week that they are seizing shipments to China. So keeping it all domestic, going to Japan or Korea, which they have some uptake with through Sumitomo. It's, it's, I think it's certainly a tailwind for the Western producers, but there is fear because we don't have everything in the United States. Rare earths, we would be almost self-sufficient on, but we really need to ramp up the, the processing.

• 1:00:47Speaker 03

  The problem is that within this group of rare earths, about fifteen different elements, you have some rare earths that we have a good chunk of at mountain pass, like neodymium and praseodymium. But then you have heavy rare earths like turbium or dysprosium, which we do not have enough of. And MP materials, it's very heavily weighted towards these light rare earths and it's very little of these heavy rare earths. And so we really need to partner with countries like Brazil or Vietnam, or the two that I point to for rare earths that are potentially allies. And maybe we'll get closer to them over the next few years. We're going to need to import. There are no other decent rare earths deposits in the United States that we can just spin up production at.

• 1:01:22John Coogan?

  That we know of, you never know, we could find. The US has a long history. We have a long history. I see a bunch of gaps in that map in Ohio. We'll find rare earths there, I'm sure.

• 1:01:32Speaker 03

  That's, that's, that's where we come in is that in order to find that hundred deposit, you gotta spend a hundred million dollars.

• 1:01:37John Coogan?

  Drill everything, every suburban neighborhood, just drop a Durin miner in the back of my backyard and start finding stuff.

• 1:01:44Speaker 03

  What we'll do first is fly, fly planes over to do a, some sort of magnetic survey. That USGS is a pretty cool program called Earth MRI where they're mapping a lot of the country with tighter spacing than they have previously with these geophysical surveys. But we need to be doing a lot more on that because that's really the top of funnel that narrows down the potentially mine of sites.

• 1:02:03John Coogan?

  Can you talk, oh, sorry. Can you talk a little bit more about autonomy? I'm seeing the first prototype rig can core three hundred meters, around a thousand feet deep.

• 1:02:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:13John Coogan?

  Two and a half inch diameter. And these rigs can run unattended for something like two to three years. So what is the math on that? Is the rig moving around or does it just take that long to get a single core sample out?

• 1:02:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, so basically, I'll tell you kind of how it's done today, what we have now, and then where we're gonna be in twelve months. So today, you have a rig these things way, you do ten tons, you're normally track mounted, so basically on tank treads. You have, you put them on a truck as close to the side as you can, then you have a guy with a remote control driving it in the rest of the way. You generally have three operators on a rig, you have the driller, he's the guy listening to it and looking at a bunch of gauges. And he's really sort of interpreting what is the kind of rock that we're going through that, through, um, at that time. And from that, adjusting RPM, the amount of weight applied to the drill bit, the pressure of a fluid that you're pumping down hole to clear the cuttings and keep the bit cool. She's kind of constantly adjusting these parameters. Then you have another one or two guys called helpers, and they're doing a lot of the manual work. They're loading the rods into place, because you're normally, they're using five or ten foot rods.

• 1:03:09Speaker 03

  They're grabbing the overshot, lowering it down to pull up the inner tube, tapping on the inner tube with a hammer to actually take the core out. Putting it in boxes for the customer, greasing the rods, adding additives to the, the mud mixture, because you've got to adjust the viscosity of the fluid that you're pumping down hole. And so you really have this sensing problem, this controls problem of adjusting these drilling parameters. Then you have this more so robotics problem of just grabbing the rods, putting them into place, grabbing the core samples, et cetera. So on this first rig, we have a basically ability to collect a whole bunch of data, but everything that's going on on the rig at any given time. We're gonna use that data to build a sort of V1 autopilot system, deterministic at the start. Move to machine learning when we get enough data, really are not data sets available for this online. And so we've got to, got to do a whole lot of drilling before we can actually get to full autonomy.

• 1:03:51John Coogan?

  So follow up. How does it, how long does it actually take to drill a thousand feet deep?

• 1:03:57Speaker 03

  Yes, so a good shift is about fifty feet in a day. And so twelve hours, fifty feet, a thousand foot hole, like twenty shifts, ten days.

• 1:04:05Jordi Hays?

  And that's traditional, like, you know, human operated.

• 1:04:08John Coogan?

  So that's like a month of work, basically.

• 1:04:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:10John Coogan?

  Like a month on one hole. Right, wow.

• 1:04:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you're listening to about a hundred, a hundred dollars a foot.

• 1:04:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay, yeah, that's a lot. Interesting.

• 1:04:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, how are you so goaded?

• 1:04:21Speaker 03

  Really, what we're trying to do is we're, we've built this first rig manually operated at the start. We'll have some automation in terms of broad handling and kind of a B1 of this drilling parameter adjustment system. But then on the next version, which we'll start building in just a couple of months, we'll, we're kind of add on to the rod handling system to actually be able to cover the core sample, design our own mud mixer that can dump in the additives separately. And then you get most of the way there in terms of kind of removing these jobs on site. And it's really, it's, it's, yes, but I think we can save a lot of money because labor is incredibly expensive here, but it's more so about availability. We are in a workforce crisis in the mining industry right now. I heard someone say, well, I like that. We don't have an autonomy problem with the mining industry, but labor problem, just don't have enough people. And so

• 1:05:02Jordi Hays?

  Is Minecraft not providing the pipeline that one would

• 1:05:06Speaker 03

  No, I think the, the problem here is you play Minecraft when you're like eight to 14 or something, or maybe later. And then, then you have this kind of eight year gap between the start of high school and finishing college to where you're not involved in the mining industry.

• 1:05:20Jordi Hays?

  We need Minecraft for adults. I have to ask, how are you so goaded at marketing? You have like one of the most unique sort of like hard tech brands. Every time I, I, I think like it's very, it's very common for people to copy what Anduril does. And it's very hard to do something that feels like new and fresh and like super opinionated. And I've loved your out of home ads. And this segment is brought to you by Adquick. But you, I, I think you've been extremely strategic. I saw this hiring billboard that you had, that you can't have rocket science without rock science and sort of like placing these strategically in Hawthorne. Where does that come from? When did you figure out that you had a knack for this?

• 1:06:04Jordi Hays?

  Cause I'm assuming it's, I'm, I'm assuming your, your team helps, but oftentimes marketing this good typically is, is very founder led.

• 1:06:13Speaker 03

  It's we've got an incredible team. My head of operations has really helped a lot with the marketing. We have a few incredible designers that help us out part time with all this as well. Hiring is a lifeblood of any company, particularly a company with as bold a vision as what we're trying to accomplish. And so we need to get the word out and have kind of this massive funnel of people that have heard of us. Some of them will be interested and some of them we are going to want to hire. And so we I think we need a cool brand for people to hear about us, both in kind of the we have the billboard across from SpaceX, obviously, you want to pull incredible talent from SpaceX, but also like there are very few companies in the mining industry that really care about, I think I care about the brand, there are very few that are particularly good about creating a cool brand. And so like

• 1:06:56Speaker 03

  we get like we get great engineers in LA reaching out to us because they they like our stuff, but even more so drillers and geologists in the mining industry who are like, you're the only cool company in the mining industry. I mean, we've hardly put anything out yet. And so both kind of both of those sides, the engineering and for kind of the mining customer and talent acquisition, we want to be very intentional about it. And there is much more to come. Once we get this first rig in the field in about a week or so, there'll be some really cool videos of us actually drilling and showing some hardware in the field.

• 1:07:24John Coogan?

  Love it. Can you talk us through the path to full autonomy? I imagine it's like a walk, crawl, or crawl, walk, run situation. Is teleoperation a big deal here as you get towards a fully autonomous autopilot system?

• 1:07:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's we need a whole lot of data for this. And so it's mainly controlled at the start. You can have a driller there with an iPad or laptop. The infrastructure's there, but it's really like Tesla full self-driving sort of system. Like you build the software to actually control it, a drill by wire system is what we're calling it. And then you need data. And so we're going to have a driller onsite, operating it initially, collect this data. We need them there to actually test the robotics side of this in case anything goes wrong. And I think Ron Han, I think we should have found over the next few months, like extraction system by the end of the year. There's a bunch of little stuff like how are you going to grease the rocks to figure that out. Um, we're dropping additives into the, um, the mud mixer. And so we're, we're going about this incrementally. We'll have three guys at the rig initially, get

• 1:08:24Speaker 03

  out of two, then hopefully have one can operate it from a safe distance. And if something goes wrong, bring another guy in. But we're never getting to a point where you don't need at least someone on site, at least not over the next five years. Cause you need a flat surface to drill on. Two guys out there, uh, with dozers clearing these drill pads. You need to dig a some bit to put the, the water into after you use it. Um, you need to deliver your consumables, your water, your fuel, you need to pick up the core samples to deliver to your customer, the exploration company. Um, and so there's always going to be things to do. Like you need someone to get the rig there and then maintain it. But the point is like, we don't need someone there listening to the rig and loading rods into place. Like, uh, they're, they're, they're using their time operating a fleet of rigs.

• 1:09:04Jordi Hays?

  Uh, two weeks ago, uh, it came out that, that China was, uh, limiting rare earth exports. Chamath, uh, chimed in. He said, this may be a good moment to let everyone know that I control one of, if not the largest rare earth supplies outside of China. At full capacity, it can be 25% of what the world needs, all located within countries allied with the US and the US itself. A lot of people pushed back on this. They said, okay, what's the company? He said it was in stealth. Uh, I want to give him the benefit of the doubt and, and say, you know, it sounds very, uh, it's almost, it sounds almost unbelievable that a stealth company could control, uh, 25% of, uh,

• 1:09:47Jordi Hays?

  the world's rare earth, uh, supplies. Is that, is that possible? Could, could there have been some sort of like roll up behind the scenes? What was your reaction to that exchange?

• 1:09:56Speaker 03

  Perhaps. I haven't heard anything about Chamath's involvement in any rare earth project beyond, he helps back company materials five or so years ago. Um, I haven't heard anything. Maybe he does. I hope he does. That would be great. There was some massive rare earth mine that, uh, that, yeah, myself and my friends who are rare earth analysts, uh, haven't heard of. And so I wanted to surprise us, but I haven't heard anything.

• 1:10:17John Coogan?

  Sure. Cool. Uh, can you talk about the challenges of putting a sensor a thousand feet underground? Like I just imagine if there's like, Dirt and grime and crust and whatever else is down there, plus like a diamond tip drill churning everything up, like even putting like a thermometer down there is going to be difficult. How are you actually collecting data? Is the, does this exist off the shelf? Is this something like oil explorers do? I imagine that's mature.

• 1:10:46Speaker 03

  So the short answer is we're not collecting any data underground at this point. Everything we are measuring, you can measure from the surface.

• 1:10:52John Coogan?

  Just like the human does, right? Cause the human's listening to everything and collecting that data from above.

• 1:10:57Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:10:57John Coogan?

  Got it. Okay.

• 1:10:58Speaker 03

  And vibration, we're not even using vibration right now. So you can measure your, your weight on bit, basically how much force are you pushing into the ground with? Your RPM, how fast are you spinning? The pressure going into the hole, your rate of penetration, just how quickly you're moving into the ground, your torque, can do that through a secondary pressure reading. There are, you can't put sensors down hole. There's a whole kind of field of study within the, in the gas industry primarily called MWD or RWD, measurement while drilling, locking while drilling. You can put sensors down hole. It's something we're going to be looking into. One of the, the things that you'll do when you're doing this sort of drilling, mineral exploration, is you can send on a survey tool that can tell you just sort of exact position. Because your hole, you want to drill it straight, it's not always going to go straight. It might deviate a degree, degree or two every hundred meters.

• 1:11:41Speaker 03

  And if you're trying to hit a 50 foot wide target, 500 feet underground, you might miss. And so making sure you know exactly where the tip of the drill is at all times is paramount. So you can lower a tool down either every run or every 50 meters, really whenever you want. And that'll tell you your exact position, basically a gyro probe. And so if we can integrate that into our core down hole, that would be cool. Not doing that yet. Or, or doing some sort of EM survey or XRF to scan the core or the sides of the walls as you're actually drilling, that'd be great. We're not doing it yet. It's going to be done soon.

• 1:12:15John Coogan?

  Are cave-ins a problem? Like as you dig down, you, you get, you know, you have a two inch hole that you're digging and then if you pull up the rods to send something else down and then all of a sudden it collapses on itself, that seems like a problem.

• 1:12:28Speaker 03

  You're you're thinking like a driller. That is a huge problem in this space. Basically, what you do as you're drilling through the first, call it hundred feet of kind of unconsolidated sediment or looser rock in the surface. What you'll do is you'll drive casing. And so casing is basically a wider diameter pipe that you'll drill down with and then drill through that hole. And that basically prevents if there's some sort of collapse near the surface, it goes around the casing. And if your casing gets stuck, but at least it's not around your drill string. And that continues drilling through that. The problem is, what if you don't drive the casing deep enough? Or there's some sort of fracture down hole, uh, like five hundred feet down or whatever that does collapse in. And you'll basically, what you're trying to do then is try a whole bunch of different RPMs, pull up with maximum force.

• 1:13:09Speaker 03

  But sometimes you get stuck. There's really two options. You could try to, if you try to guess where the cavern is, actually tools to cut the steel above that and just recover everything above that. You lose some some steel in the ground. Oh, well, around ten, twenty grand at least. Uh, or you can kind of say you're stuck, but you can actually drill through it. So there are tools that you can literally drill through your previous tools that were down hole at a smaller diameter and should get some steel in the steel in the inner tube, which is pretty cool to see. Uh, lets you continue the hole. You don't have to abandon it. You're decreasing the diameter and that was valuable data. And you are still going to lose some equipment. And so you basically don't want to, don't want to push it too hard to, uh, to avoid, uh, risking a cave in.

• 1:13:47Jordi Hays?

  Uh, last question on my side, just curious, how has the, uh, have have, I I'm assuming throughout history, the the sort of drill bits, diamond drill bits were just actual diamonds that people pulled out of the earth. And then at some point they were lab grown or were they always? So what what's the history there?

• 1:14:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the way these job bits work is you have a, it's primarily iron to the soft iron matrix with diamond particles and stuff were impregnated into it. And so you can like, kind of see, I should have brought a job it over here to show you all. That would have been cool. Um, you can see the tiny diamond particles. It looks like glitter, um, on it. And then as it, as it cuts the diamonds, the hardest material on earth, but they do wear, they dull. And so the bits are designed such that as the diamonds dull, the iron wears at approximately the same rate to reveal new sharp diamonds.

• 1:14:39Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. Very cool.

• 1:14:40John Coogan?

  Last question from me.

• 1:14:43John Coogan?

  Armageddon, in the plot of Armageddon, they say it's too hard to teach drilling to an astronaut. They got to teach going to space to the drillers, to the miners. Realistic or unrealistic, based on what you know about how complex mining is? Would you have trained the drillers to go to space, or would you have trained the astronauts to drill?

• 1:15:07Speaker 03

  I think we're doing both here. We are, we're teaching SpaceXers how to drill, and drillers how to participate in a high functional, high functioning engineering organization. And so, I think you gotta do both. If you're trying to, trying to build, build a large organization and manufacture thousands of these rigs over the next five, six years, become a leading drilling contractor.

• 1:15:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, they really didn't bring any space, any astronauts on that trip. It's all drillers.

• 1:15:32Speaker 03

  No. I don't think that's realistic.

• 1:15:36John Coogan?

  Okay. Anyway, this was a fantastic conversation. Thanks so much for joining.

• 1:15:40Jordi Hays?

  Ted, I'm very excited for you and the team. It's been awesome watching you guys over the last few months, and congratulations on all the progress in the new round.

• 1:15:50Speaker 03

  We're excited to be on. Just a quick message for everyone. We are hiring, [email protected], brilliant engineers, please apply or reach out to me. Thank you all for having me.

• 1:15:59Jordi Hays?

  Beautiful.

• 1:15:59John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:16:00Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 1:16:01John Coogan?

  Talk soon. Bye.

• 1:16:03John Coogan?

  Let's go back to the timeline. Duran did run a great out of home ad, brought to you by AdQuick. There's also news on the timeline about a Series A that was announced by Artisan, apparently a white combinator company. They announced their Series A with a massive billboard. And if we can pull this billboard up, it's the previous slide, I believe. Celine is just commenting on it, but Tej says, what's going on here? And

• 1:16:28Jordi Hays?

  So

• 1:16:28John Coogan?

  it's the two founders there, and are they

• 1:16:31Jordi Hays?

  Are those the actual founders? I thought they were just

• 1:16:33John Coogan?

  Those are the founders. Those are the founders. The founders are Jasper Carmichael Jack and his co-founder Sam Stallings, a former IBM product manager.

• 1:16:44John Coogan?

  But the way they're looking at each other in this photo makes me look like they're in love or something.

• 1:16:50Jordi Hays?

  It's possible.

• 1:16:51John Coogan?

  Maybe they're married, but I don't know, we often look at each other like that longingly and fondly during, during photo shoots. So it's understandable, but very funny to put out a billboard about your Series A.

• 1:17:03Jordi Hays?

  With your own face on it.

• 1:17:05John Coogan?

  With your own face on it, but I guess, you know.

• 1:17:07Jordi Hays?

  With no information about.

• 1:17:08John Coogan?

  What the company does.

• 1:17:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, I guess they have the whole team there presumably at the bottom.

• 1:17:11John Coogan?

  Or are those the AI SDRs? Cause I think this is an AI business development representative.

• 1:17:15Jordi Hays?

  You don't know, so it's funny. Yeah, I thought these were just two of their AI employees.

• 1:17:19John Coogan?

  They're not. Those are the founders.

• 1:17:21Jordi Hays?

  Those are the founders. They're stoked.

• 1:17:23John Coogan?

  They're stoked.

• 1:17:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, this, you know, every once in a while, the timeline starts talking about taste.

• 1:17:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:30Jordi Hays?

  This is a very specific kind of taste.

• 1:17:32John Coogan?

  I mean, also, look, founder.

• 1:17:34Jordi Hays?

  That they clearly have.

• 1:17:35John Coogan?

  Absolutely, Jack, the guy's diced.

• 1:17:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he's diced.

• 1:17:37John Coogan?

  We love it. Let's hear it. Let's hear it for Jasper. Guy is looking, looking peeled. Activate gold and retriever mode. TechCrunch, Y Combinator Day One Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, Oliver Jung Fellows Fund participated as well. They closed a $12 million round in September and now they got a $25 million Series A. They're, they're running a marketing campaign, "Stop hiring humans." Very viral. They, I, I think this is genius.

• 1:18:04Jordi Hays?

  I think they just get it.

• 1:18:05John Coogan?

  They get it. I think they get it.

• 1:18:07Jordi Hays?

  I think they're playing 5D chess.

• 1:18:08John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, they're gonna frustrate a lot of people.

• 1:18:09Jordi Hays?

  And this, they knew this billboard would get Celine to post about it.

• 1:18:13John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah, look at this. Celine, CEO of Loyal, says, "I cannot believe a startup bought a billboard on the 101 to advertise their..." Dot, dot, dot, "Series A." And 671 likes. And so, yeah, out of home advertising, consistently underrated. We've said this, go to adquick.com, out of home advertising made easy.

• 1:18:33Jordi Hays?

  And measurable.

• 1:18:34John Coogan?

  Pull a stunt and go, yeah, and measurable and go, go viral.

• 1:18:37Jordi Hays?

  Just do it.

• 1:18:38John Coogan?

  As long as you can come up with something that's. Going to infuriate enough people on the timeline. Will get attention.

• 1:18:45Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:18:46John Coogan?

  Andrew McCallum says, I think company towns are going to make a comeback.

• 1:18:50Jordi Hays?

  We've been exploring this. We've been exploring a town.

• 1:18:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was actually thinking about this. So I think if I think if things go really, really well for TVPN, what we're doing here in Los Angeles, a lot of people say, oh, why are you building in Los Angeles? Like, you should be in Silicon Valley. And I think that we could potentially make Los Angeles like the Silicon Valley of media, like a Silicon Valley of television almost. And and we could create a whole boom. And I think in I think in a number of years, you could see, you know, some massive media companies.

• 1:19:19Jordi Hays?

  Entire film and television kind of.

• 1:19:21John Coogan?

  It's totally possible, right? It's totally possible. And I think it could all start right here. And so what I would say is to folks is like, let's check back in five or 10 years. See the market cap of all the media companies that are built in Los Angeles. And, you know, maybe it's in the hundreds of billions if we add it all up.

• 1:19:38Jordi Hays?

  I it could.

• 1:19:39John Coogan?

  It could be even bigger.

• 1:19:40Jordi Hays?

  Become possible.

• 1:19:42John Coogan?

  Could become possible. Yeah, we are.

• 1:19:45Jordi Hays?

  I think John's John's on to something here. Yeah, we are in a company town.

• 1:19:48John Coogan?

  Los Angeles, I call it the Silicon Valley of news.

• 1:19:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, it actually is very.

• 1:19:56Jordi Hays?

  I think the experience of living in Los Angeles has become worse as the entertainment industry has struggled, right?

• 1:20:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:06Jordi Hays?

  There there's, you know, the the number of restaurants that can be supported has just gone down.

• 1:20:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:13Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 1:20:14John Coogan?

  The interesting thing about this post is is that he's saying specifically company towns. So there's obviously industry towns, you know, New York is a finance hub. Silicon Valley is a tech hub, LA is a media hub, Miami is like a NFT hub, but.

• 1:20:28Jordi Hays?

  Ripley was doing this for Foster City.

• 1:20:31John Coogan?

  They are. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.

• 1:20:33Jordi Hays?

  They left SF. They went to Foster City. They were like, we're going to focus. It's nicer to live here.

• 1:20:38John Coogan?

  Meta and Facebook were kind of doing that in Palo Alto to some degree. They were like building housing for employees and stuff. But I think, I think what he's getting at is that things like Starbase, where a company can't just be in the hub of a main city, so they go somewhere really bizarre and off-grid, and then the infrastructure builds up about the, around that. We were talking about like the Stargate facility. Like, if $500 billion really does pour into one data center, there's going to be infrastructure around that.

• 1:21:08Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to Abilene, Texas.

• 1:21:10John Coogan?

  Abilene, Texas is going to have, there's going to be people that are like, like, yes, it's going to be low headcount because it's just data centers. But like, you're talking about so many data centers, there's going to be people that are working on the air conditioning, working on the power. They're going to need an Arowan, for sure. They're definitely going to need an Arowan. And so, yeah, I was, I was talking to a real estate guy. I was like, maybe you should just go to Abilene, Texas, and then just start doing deals because they're like, the construction is going to be going on for a decade. There's going to be a lot of people that, that settle there after the fact. They're going to need an Arowan. You could sell them the property for the Arowan. They're going to need gas stations and all sorts of different, there's going to need to be a hardware store, right? They're going to need hammers, all these different things. So it'll be interesting to see

• 1:21:54John Coogan?

  if, if this happens. I think it'll be a long, long journey to get to new company towns, but I love that. We have a post from Adam Rosenblum. This is my nomination for the next TBPN AI Deep Dive. Live from the forge of fine tuning, the MCP monastery, the eye of AGI.

• 1:22:11Jordi Hays?

  The weights are sacred. The context is cash. The vibes are autoregressive.

• 1:22:16John Coogan?

  Tune in now.

• 1:22:18Jordi Hays?

  I messaged Adam, I think he's over at Cal. I said, maybe you should write for TBPN. So, open invite, Adam. You absolutely cooked, and we love being live from the eye of AGI.

• 1:22:32John Coogan?

  I like it. I like it. We, we, yeah, we need to, we need to spice up the intros. Keep iterating on them. I think people enjoyed the Institute of Iron, the Palace of Pump, the Hall of Hypertrophy. But there will be more. We're doing a crypto day. We'll have to come up with some new jingles for that. That'll be fun.

• 1:22:49John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, uh, pulled up in downtown Miami in his $450 million

• 1:23:03Jordi Hays?

  $450 million, $465 foot yacht.

• 1:23:06John Coogan?

  That's less than a million dollars a foot.

• 1:23:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:09John Coogan?

  At that price, it's a steal.

• 1:23:10Jordi Hays?

  They're giving these yachts away, to be honest.

• 1:23:12John Coogan?

  I mean, it's a lot of money, but it's a lot of yacht. It is a lot of yacht.

• 1:23:15Jordi Hays?

  A lot of yacht.

• 1:23:15John Coogan?

  And you can't sell a house or a midsize Series B company.

• 1:23:20Jordi Hays?

  That's right. Uh, Mike Solana says, I honestly can't figure out why everyone is attacking him for this.

• 1:23:26John Coogan?

  Completely agree.

• 1:23:27Jordi Hays?

  Yachts are awesome. Pirate wires will absolutely have one in a few years.

• 1:23:31John Coogan?

  I completely agree with that.

• 1:23:32Jordi Hays?

  I will be laughing there, champagne in hand before the waving flags, when you come for us. Enjoy your bike ride.

• 1:23:39John Coogan?

  One of the greatest posters of all time.

• 1:23:41Jordi Hays?

  He cooked them, John.

• 1:23:43John Coogan?

  Generational poster, for sure. Fantastic. Good friend of the show. Um, uh, yeah, I love it. Uh, beautiful, beautiful yacht. And why not? I mean, Google co-founder Sergey Brin has generated probably a trillion dollars of value for the economy, right? So enjoy your little yacht.

• 1:24:01Jordi Hays?

  I get a, uh, I support big tech. I love big tech.

• 1:24:05John Coogan?

  I would take a bullet for big tech.

• 1:24:07Jordi Hays?

  In theory, would take a bullet for big tech.

• 1:24:09John Coogan?

  I would scale a castle wall for big tech.

• 1:24:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:12John Coogan?

  I would fight in a trench war. I would dig a tunnel under a castle with a spoon for big tech.

• 1:24:17Jordi Hays?

  I would work years in the mines for big tech.

• 1:24:21John Coogan?

  Yes. I would fight a decades-long trench war.

• 1:24:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we got our next, uh, guest.

• 1:24:27John Coogan?

  The Hundred Year War.

• 1:24:28Jordi Hays?

  We got our next guest, uh, ready to, uh, join us.

• 1:24:33John Coogan?

  Welcome to the studio. How are you doing?

• 1:24:36Speaker 04

  We are doing well.

• 1:24:36John Coogan?

  Hey, we got both of you. That's fantastic.

• 1:24:38Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 1:24:39John Coogan?

  I'm so happy. Um, welcome to the show.

• 1:24:43Speaker 04

  You can ask him about how it was.

• 1:24:45John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. I mean, maybe that's a great, uh, way to start. We're huge fans. We were just singing big tech's praises, saying that we would do anything to support big technology. And yet, uh, you left big tech. Uh, why did you leave and what are you building now?

• 1:25:00Speaker 05

  We are building physical intelligence. We want to build a model that can control any robot to do any task. This is something I did exploring big tech before. It's just much more fun to do it in a startup, way more fun. Also, a little quicker, a little quicker.

• 1:25:18John Coogan?

  A little faster paced. Yeah, I mean, the pace has been crazy.

• 1:25:20Jordi Hays?

  Anything's become clear in the last few weeks, we need the robots now.

• 1:25:23John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:25:24Jordi Hays?

  We can't really wait 20 years. And if big tech was, you know, fully responsible, we probably would have to wait something like that.

• 1:25:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure. So can you walk me through the most recent announcement? I saw the video, fantastic. But how would you break it down in terms of like what the milestone represents?

• 1:25:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, so the biggest challenge in robotics so far hasn't really been agility or dexterity, what the robots can do.

• 1:25:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:25:50Speaker 05

  But then generalization.

• 1:25:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:25:52Speaker 05

  Kind of similar to what we've seen in language before. Where it was really, really hard to get it to do tasks where you just ask it to do something and see if it can work. And what we tried to do for the past six months or so is to get to the next level of generalization for these models for robots. So the challenge we set for ourselves is to take a robot to a completely new home it's never seen before. And ask it to do a complex, long horizon task like clean a bedroom or clean a kitchen. And there is so many details that go into cleaning a kitchen that you need to understand when you're in a new home. And you only start appreciating it when you try to do it with a robot. Where, you know, everything is different, like the countertop looks very differently.

• 1:26:37Speaker 05

  You don't know where the drawers are, you don't know how to open them, you don't know where the objects are, you don't know.

• 1:26:41Jordi Hays?

  I don't even, when I try to wash dishes in my house, I'm always, I'm like, I can't, where's this, where's the sponge? I don't know where the soap is, where do I put this?

• 1:26:50John Coogan?

  It's a mess.

• 1:26:50Jordi Hays?

  So not even easy for me.

• 1:26:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, I guess.

• 1:26:54Speaker 05

  Really, really hard. And on top of like knowing all of those things, then you also need to connect it to motion. You actually need to get the robot to do the right thing. Um, and it turns out that with with Pi uh O five, which we which we just released yesterday, we we can do that. And it it doesn't work all the time. It's not that I can just give it to you and it will work in your kitchen every single time. But it works quite often, quite well. So we bring it to a new home and it can do those things, maybe like fifty percent of the time, sometimes eighty percent of the time.

• 1:27:29Speaker 04

  Big increase from zero percent of the time.

• 1:27:30Speaker 05

  But yeah, big increase from what we've seen before where the the previous state of the art was basically if you want to show a robotic demo, you need to collect data in that specific environment for those specific tasks and that's where you show it. But now we can, for the first time, bring it somewhere else and it kind of works. It understands what it needs to do.

• 1:27:48Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that consumers will generally be more patient around reliability with robotics? Because if I, you know, let's say I have some type of robot in my home and I say, hey, do the dishes, right? And fifty percent of the time it does it perfectly and like, you know, the other fifty percent of the time I have to kind of interject. Whereas if I'm like booking a flight and only fifty percent of the time it like books the flight, it's like, well, I'm just gonna do it myself, right? Because like it's only gonna take me a minute, whereas like the dishes could take twenty minutes, right? So how how do you think about kind of uh the sort of threshold of reliability in order to like really deliver value for consumers?

• 1:28:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that that like we don't think right now about delivering value for consumers. And it's kind of why we structured the company the way we did. We're a research lab. We're trying to solve this problem of physical intelligence. We really like these consumer oriented tasks and I think people tend to as well, like when they think about laundry being folded for them. I think there'll be a point at which it gets good enough that we can deploy it to consumers, but it's not gonna be like fifty percent. It's gonna be closer to ninety eight, ninety, ninety nine percent. And there I think we can harp on uh self-driving cars where there'll be a period of of interventions, right? Like if it doesn't work, it's not that it just will stop and do nothing for a while. We can have a human teleoperator intervene and finish the task. But I think the other cool thing about the home and consumer use case is there's so much that could also just happen overnight.

• 1:29:08Speaker 04

  Um, there's like while you're sleeping, your laundry is folded, your your your meals are cooked for like the, you know, they're prepped for the week ahead. Um, your house is tidied. Uh, so consumer is still a little far away, but making a lot of progress.

• 1:29:22John Coogan?

  Can you talk about the, just the path in terms of the underlying technology to go from a Roomba? We're pulling up the video here on the stream of what you've actually built. What were the foundational turning points in terms of the, like, the different models and different breakthroughs? I imagine the transformer was really important, but there's probably a ton of other developments that excited you.

• 1:29:48Speaker 05

  Please clean the.

• 1:29:50John Coogan?

  Now is the time, like, we're ready to go.

• 1:29:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's been a lot of things that we are, we are building on top of.

• 1:29:58Speaker 05

  Things like transformers, things like vision language models, the concept of pre-training and post-training. A lot of those things transfer to the robotics world, but they're, they're not as well understood. We are still in the process of figuring out what that recipe should be like. We, we kind of have to rediscover this, some of the steps that, that language people had to do initially and see how we can map them onto the robotics world. We don't have the, the privilege of having an open internet full of data. We need to collect that data ourselves, which on, on one hand is, is a big challenge. Like, the data isn't there. You can't iterate nearly as fast. On the other hand, it also gives you more freedom in figuring out what kind of data is the most important and what data to collect.

• 1:30:42Speaker 05

  For, for this particular I O five advancement, what we had to do is, one, collect very diverse data set, large diverse data set that involves not only model manipulators in homes, but also static robots in the office or data of the internet. And it turns out if you collect very diverse data across many different tasks from many different form factors, they all contribute to each other and that they contribute to, to a better understanding for the model, what, what actually is happening and how to utilize all of the data to figure out what to do. So that was a really, really big component. And then there's also a lot of architectural things, a lot of details that we need to get right to make sure that we take full advantage of that data.

• 1:31:26Speaker 05

  Interestingly, most of the data is actually not the, the model manipulators in many different homes. It's a very, very small percentage of it. So it gives us also a lot of hope that we can leverage the data off from the internet or from other platforms where it's easier to collect it to to get to that kind of generalization.

• 1:31:43John Coogan?

  Can you talk a little bit about simulation, like data generation through simulation? I imagine it's very easy to procedurally generate like a million different floor plans or a trillion different floor plans to try and navigate those in, you know, kind of two dimensional space. But at the same time, when you get into the manipulating of a sheet, all of a sudden that's a physics calculation. It's probably harder to simulate there. It's not like with self-driving cars, there's, you know, Grand Theft Auto you can train on. I haven't, maybe there's a game where you clean up your house, but I certainly haven't played it. How effective has simulation been in generating data? And is it useful? Is that a viable path here?

• 1:32:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's been so far really, really useful for locomotion, for robots walking around.

• 1:32:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:32:29Speaker 05

  And the reason for this is that for that kind of problem, the main difficulty is modeling your own body. Like, how do you place your foot? How do you, how do you walk? And that you can do once when you, you know, you model your robot really, really well. And then it works. It works across many different terrains. You can easily, you know, randomize that and figure out the gate that is robust. It hasn't worked nearly as well for manipulating objects or working with your hands. And I think the reason for that is then the difficulty isn't about like, how do you move your hands? It's more about the world that you're manipulating. And that is much harder to simulate. You don't just do it once. Like every object you interact with is different and you have to model each one of those.

• 1:33:13Speaker 05

  And it's really, really hard to to figure out all the different physical parameters to make it, to make it good.

• 1:33:20Speaker 05

  So, and, and this is kind of the data that is the most important, the data of, of physical interactions, because this is the data that is not on the internet. This is the data that is not even described in language. This is something that comes really natural to you. You just, you just know how to do it. You don't even sometimes know how to describe it in words. So I think it's kind of like the, a really bad combination where it's the hardest thing to do for sim and is the data that we need the sim the most for.

• 1:33:47Speaker 05

  And what we discovered so far is that Basically, looking at the past successes of machine learning, of AI, it seems that the best successes are where you you take real world data and large diversity of that data and and learn directly on that. You don't try to find some kind of proxy or some kind of simulated environment that reflects what you actually want to do. You just go after the problem head on. And that's what we're doing here. So we're collecting a ton of data ourselves in the real world. We can collect very diverse data this way. It's also very easy to collect it across many different scenes, many different objects. We don't need to, you know, create them in sim. We can just buy them and bring them in and and start interacting with them.

• 1:34:30Speaker 05

  And that so far has been actually easier than we had initially thought.

• 1:34:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, you you you say you're collecting a lot of data, but I I imagine like there's only so many of those robots in that demo video that you can manufacture. There's only so many houses that are like, yeah, come try your 50% robot in my house. Is is is that a key? Is that scaling as you'd like, or or or is this more like you're going to build a physical? You know, demo like demonstration unit, like, and then be manipulating it in a warehouse? Or is the plan to be more like, let's roll this out and just have beta testers kind of dog food it for us?

• 1:35:10Speaker 04

  All of the above. Basically, where we find there's benefits to scale at this stage, we'll scale it. We'll figure out a way. And whether that's producing more robots, giving them to people, whether it's scaling up our our operations team and the folks that teleoperate these robots ourselves, whether it's going out and commercially deploying these into environments where they're doing economically useful or viable tasks. The training data set collection will do it. We also think there's there's so much, though, to do on just the algorithmic development that that can make the data far more useful, that can reduce the necessities of scale, but we're structured such that we can go and pursue every avenue required.

• 1:35:50Speaker 05

  I would mention there is, that was one of the big questions before PyO5, where it kind of was unclear, you know, do we have to visit million homes? Do we have to visit, you know, hundreds of thousands? And at some point, it becomes kind of not feasible or really, really hard, and maybe we need to find a different path. But so far, we've been quite surprised by how few different environments you need to see to be able to generalize to a new one.

• 1:36:13John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 1:36:14Speaker 05

  We actually got really reassured that this path could could really work.

• 1:36:19Jordi Hays?

  Would you guys like to see way more early-stage robotics companies? It feels like there's the optimist, the 1X, you've got Figure making noise. But it feels like, we just covered this, I think, Monday, the Chinese humanoid marathon. I'm sure you guys followed that. They've got a lot of people working on this problem. It seems like there's a tendency in venture to think that, okay, there's a bunch of heavily-funded players now, I shouldn't go build in that space. But at the same time, when you look at some of these TAMs, maybe we should have 10x the amount of early-stage robotics companies getting started.

• 1:36:59Speaker 04

  It's extremely early. We work with, I'd say, probably most of the new robotics companies, starting in the US and abroad. If you're starting a robotics company, reach out to us. We'd love to work with you. You can build the body, we'll build the brain. But yeah, we need to see a lot more robotics companies, particularly in the US.

• 1:37:17John Coogan?

  That's awesome. I want to talk, did you ever interact with the Google ARM farm?

• 1:37:23Speaker 05

  Yes, yeah. One of my co-founders actually started that project.

• 1:37:28John Coogan?

  I had a feeling. Do you have your own version of an ARM farm? Or can you describe for people that might not know, what was the genesis of the ARM farm? What was the purpose? What was the takeaway? And is that, does every robotics company need an ARM farm? Or is it just you? And what will that look like in the context of what you're building specifically?

• 1:37:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, so back then, that was a few years ago. The idea was that for robots to learn, to acquire those kind of skills, to manipulate the world around them, you can't really prescribe it. You can't just code it all up. The world is too diverse. You can't have a lot of if statements describing what you should do in every single situation. They need to learn it the same way as we do. And the idea of the arm farm was to set up many different stations where you have static robots, static robotic arms, where they just practice and they learn from experience. So in that particular case, they were trying to learn how to grasp objects. So they just had a bin in front of them with lots of different objects that are very diverse. And the arm was just going down and trying to figure out how to grasp it.

• 1:38:35Speaker 05

  And over a long period of time, it gathered enough experience to actually learn from it and get, and become really, really good at grasping objects, like remarkably, remarkably good. And way better than any kind of prescribed systems that people, that people design by hand. And on, on one hand, it was a big success because of that, because you know, it was, it was clear that this learning approach is something that can truly work and, and understand the nature of grasping and truly nail that skill. On the other hand, it was also disappointing in that it took really long time. It needed a lot of data and especially a lot of data at the beginning was kind of just like the arm wandering around and not knowing what to do. So it seemed like a lot of that time was just kind of wasted with the arm figuring out the simplest things.

• 1:39:21Speaker 05

  And one thing with P I O five that we are really excited about is that we are now at the stage where the robots kind of get the, the sense of what they should be doing in the environment. So they are no longer in this space where, you know, you're just like arriving in a new home and you start with just like moving your arms around, not knowing what to do and hoping that you, you do something that is useful. And then you learn from that. You start at a point where you kind of know more or less what you can do. It works some of the time. You just now need to get it to work every time and really, really well.

• 1:39:57John Coogan?

  Can you talk about the path to or the importance of end to end learning in the context of robotics? My understanding is that teleoperation is great and as long as it's economical, we should do it. And then having a deterministic code, like, you know, a control system that's written in C++. That's also great. As long as it works, it's sometimes more debuggable. But the reason that we want to get to end to end A I systems is that Then you're on the scaling law, then you're just data bound and the more you can manufacture, the more you can produce the actual robots. You're on this flywheel and you're now bound by actual productive,

• 1:40:41John Coogan?

  you know, like getting the cars into the, on the roads, getting the robots into the world. That will naturally create a flywheel. That's what everyone's hoping for in self-driving. But, but what does that path look like now? And how ridiculous is it to claim that end-to-end robotics will be here by the end of the year or something like that?

• 1:41:02Speaker 05

  So end-to-end robotics is already here. Everything we've shown so far is fully end-to-end, where you take camera input in and few other sensors and output actions directly.

• 1:41:12John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:41:14Speaker 05

  I think there is another reason to do end-to-end learning, which is this is, I think, the only thing that has a chance of working.

• 1:41:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:41:22Speaker 05

  I would like, if, if there was a way to just pre-program your robot and write a really good C++ code to, to get it to do all kinds of different things, like folding laundry, we would have done it a long time ago.

• 1:41:32John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:41:33Speaker 05

  It's not for the lack of trying. Many people have tried it for a very, very long time. There's just, the world is too complex. There's too many things that you will never see, you will never predict, and you can't really write that code. And I think the only way to get there is to, is for, for AI to figure it out from experience. This is similar to what we've seen in language or in vision, where people have tried to write chatbots with writing different instructions and prescribing logical steps of how you should proceed. But it turned out that, that the intelligence you need is much more messy. It's just like, you give it a lot of text and you let it figure out all the different patterns and analogies, and there's many, many more of them than, you know, the ones that we can express in code or in language.

• 1:42:18Speaker 05

  And I think something very, very analogous is going to happen here. And that's what we started seeing. Demonstrations that we, that we've shown so far here at Physical Intelligence are of tasks that were not possible before. Like things like folding laundry. You can't really, there is no program that I've ever seen that could, that could do that. The same with arriving in a new home and making the bed. There's just too many variables there to do it any other way.

• 1:42:43John Coogan?

  Can you talk about some of the experiences that you both have had in your careers? Google and Stripe, in some ways, big companies that maybe move slower than a small startup. But at the same time, both of those organizations, I feel like the time from, hey, we're starting the company to we have a product that it wasn't a research organization for years. What have you learned from those organizations? What are you taking into this experience?

• 1:43:08Speaker 04

  Stripe really taught me everything I need to know about building a robotics research lab. It's just lessons galore.

• 1:43:18Speaker 04

  I'd never worked in a research environment, so I don't have priors. I don't know what a research environment actually looks like. I just know what our research environment looks like. I feel like we, whatever it looks like, maybe it operates exactly like startups, like maybe grad programs are exactly like startups, but we feel like every other company I've worked with that moves extremely quickly and has a clear set of goals and direction and just has a bunch of people that work behind it and work extremely hard to solve whatever it is that we're setting our minds towards. And there's so much I learned from Stripe that informed that, but a lot of it's just the obvious stuff, right? It's like, hire exceptional people, set a really high bar for it, don't compromise, set a very clear set of goals for everyone, really align people.

• 1:44:02Speaker 04

  Actually, I think that's one thing I really took from Stripe is you want an extremely aligned set of people. And I've never seen more alignment than I've seen at Pi. We talk about the alignment tax, like when we're bringing someone on, how much work is there to align them around our mission, our way of seeing the world? And almost everyone that joins, there's like basically nothing. Most of the people that work here have dedicated their lives towards robotics or robotic learning or AI in some form or another, hardware, whatever it might be. And that just allows us to move so much quicker. And it's like, we need to communicate a fraction of what the average company needs to communicate to someone. We don't really need to inspire people or motivate them because they're so inspired and so self motivated. I think that's probably one of the things that's worked best for us today.

• 1:44:45Jordi Hays?

  How have you seen your customers react to all the news and chaos around the tariffs? I think a lot of these companies are not in full commercial production yet. So it's not like, hey, we're no longer making money. But how are they thinking kind of like long term? Just given how much of the supply chain is based in Asia? And are there opportunities for, you know, you know, new US kind of like subcontractors and manufacturing companies to sort of service this new industry?

• 1:45:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, the good thing is, I mean, good and bad. It's also subscale right now. Like, most of the money is being spent on R and D rather than scaled production. And so it's not as if there's 100,000 robots that everyone's buying and it's now just twice as expensive. I think the good thing is that, given it's subscale, there's a lot of time to build out US supply chains. And it's putting a lot of focus on figuring out, can we get US actuators? Can we, can we start to create companies that are developing those? And all the other critical supply elements of the supply chain. So it's actually just getting a peak wind to gear and maybe it's the right time for it.

• 1:45:50John Coogan?

  Can you talk a little bit about what you're excited about on the data center side? Is there a moment where you're like really pulling for Stargate to come together and we need the, the, the 100 gigawatt data center to crunch, you know, all of the data that you've collected in, you know, kind of a GPT five class training run? Or is that something that's like so far out that you'll always be able to just, you know, tag along on the residual capability from the large language model labs?

• 1:46:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, we are, we are not there yet in terms of like having a full scaling law the same way as we've seen for LLM companies where you can just translate, compute to progress or compute to capability. We are, we are searching really, really. Uh, really heavily for that. We, we are trying to figure out what is the recipe that would scale like this, but we are not there yet. We do at the same time generate a ton of data. I think that's one thing that, that I realized since starting the company. Is that robots generate a ton of data and you don't need that many to generate data that is close to the levels that L L M companies use for, for their models.

• 1:47:05Speaker 05

  And there is no ceiling to it, right? Not that we run out of the, the data, the data that robots can collapse. It's not like the internet. So I think over time, it's quite likely that, that, uh, the, the places are going to switch a little bit where most of the models, including, you know, L L M's and V L M's are going to be using real world data collected through robots. Because that's the data that has no ceiling. And it's very active as opposed to just passive observations of what people wrote on the internet. Um, and I think at that point, probably the, the question about data centers and compute is gonna, is gonna be a big one. But for our models, we are not there yet. We are not bottlenecked by, you know, if only we had hundred times more compute, everything would have worked so much better.

• 1:47:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:50Jordi Hays?

  How do you guys think about, uh, demos long-term? We joked on the show recently after seeing the, the Chinese humanoid marathon. Like I want to see humanoids doing like big wave surfing, cliff jumping, you know, at, at what point is that like worth even doing or exploring just because of the amount of attention that it would bring to the industry?

• 1:48:10Speaker 04

  What do you think we should demo?

• 1:48:12Jordi Hays?

  I think I'd like to see a, uh, one of your robots surf jaws. I think that's, that's really.

• 1:48:16John Coogan?

  I was saying, I want to see, I want to see a robot do the nine hundred on a half-pipe Tony Hawk style. That was a really foundational moment in, you know, my childhood and American skateboarding.

• 1:48:25Jordi Hays?

  Like really life or death stuff.

• 1:48:27John Coogan?

  Exactly. It's gotta be high stakes.

• 1:48:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:30Speaker 04

  What about with, with hands? What about manipulation?

• 1:48:32John Coogan?

  Uh, juggling for sure. Rubik's cube for sure. Uh, juggling Rubik's cubes. You can do that. I can do the Rubik's cube. Jordy can juggle. We need to learn each other's skills so we can do both at the same time. But yeah, I mean, these stunts, uh, when they're done right, they can draw a bunch of attention. Although you guys have plenty of attention. I don't know if that's really what, what's keeping you back.

• 1:48:50Jordi Hays?

  No, but it's an interesting thing where it's like you have the, the intention of the entire industry, but then at some point, you know, to basically inspire the next, you know, however many thousand robotics companies.

• 1:49:01John Coogan?

  I, I would love to know about, um, Obviously, with any AI project, there's always the public perception of like job displacement, dystopia, AI doom, etc. But when I look at the demo that you just posted, I'm like, that thing is going to be fighting on my team in the singularity. Like, this is a friendly robot that will be defending me. But how do you think about the, like, tuning the language interaction so that, do you see a world where, yes, it's doing my laundry or making my bed, but if I happen to just also ask it, "Hey, tell me about the news, I can just have a chat with it," is that something that's even in your mind in terms of like, human-computer interaction?

• 1:49:43Speaker 04

  It's not a big focus of ours right now. We're like, we're so focused on manipulation and economically valuable tasks, and more so than that, the fundamental building blocks that we think gets us from here to physical intelligence. I think it's inevitable that everyone has robots in their homes, their workplaces, just like, in their lives. And I think they'll want robots that are more useful than just doing things, whether it's companionship, or like, it's the best Amazon Alexa that can actually then go like, cook the recipe that you ask it for. It's a place we focus around the interaction, but right now, it's more understanding the intent of clean my kitchen and then breaking that down into tasks. But it's pretty straightforward to go from do the thing to tell me about

• 1:50:24Speaker 04

  the thing, let's have a conversation about the thing. And so it's on the horizon, but not the greatest priority.

• 1:50:30Speaker 05

  And then, one thing there, I would say, is with the models we've been releasing, they're actually built on top of vision-language models. So they're the models that are truly what they call multimodal, where you can talk to it, you can ask it what they see in the image, and every now and then, you can ask it to perform actions, too.

• 1:50:47John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 1:50:47Speaker 05

  And what we, what we started to realize is that all of these different data sources contribute to each other. They give you just like, a bigger picture of what the world is like, and better understanding. And it just turns out that robot actions is just like yet another language that these models can speak and they just need to learn it and see enough examples of it. So the model that we have already is the model that you can talk to and it works, you know, just as well as as open source BLMs. But on top of that, it can also have that understanding be very embodied and it and you know, it's it understands what it sees in front of it and it's a much deeper understanding when it knows how to how to move its arm to actually accomplish a task.

• 1:51:27John Coogan?

  We were kind of joking before the show about the obvious comparison between robotics and self-driving cars, but can you explain to me like I'm a five-year-old or like a venture capitalist, like, why is that a bad analogy? Why don't you love that analogy?

• 1:51:43Speaker 04

  I feel like it's it's not that you don't love it, it's just that it it can put you down a bunch of wrong directions. There's a lot of parallels, but I mean, even like the Waymo Tesla thing, right? Like Tesla has this incredible advantage with how much data they're collecting and passively, yet Waymo is so much better so far and it has so many fewer cars on the roads. There's useful things about it, but there's also aspects that that don't transfer in the analogy and it I think the like the reason why we were joking about it is it's the number one question.

• 1:52:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:17Speaker 04

  We don't talk to many five-year-olds, but investors and VCs ask us and so we have to go down this rabbit hole where we're breaking down all of the assumptions and correcting some of them and validating some of them.

• 1:52:28John Coogan?

  I mean, is that a so so should VCs, if they're looking at the robotics market, just throw out that analogy entirely? Or should they be saying like, there are a set of robotics companies that are in the Waymo category and there's a set of robotics companies that are in the Tesla category and those are reasonable, like an ontology to map to?

• 1:52:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, it's a there's a lot of very useful stuff in the analogy. I think.

• 1:52:55Speaker 04

  I think one thing that's interesting is that there are all these self-driving companies that have died over the past 15 years. And one thing that we actually like to remind people is that this is not coming tomorrow. You log on to Twitter and you'll see all of these crazy robotics demos, most of them teleoperated, or most of them being like robots doing backflips, which is a much easier problem than actually a robot folding laundry. And the thing we really try and remind everyone that looks at investing in us, or is thinking about investing in us, is this is not a problem we're going to solve tomorrow. There's fundamental research breakthroughs that we need to make. And much like self-driving had a, it's what, like a 15-year arc at this point, there is a very high likelihood that robotics is the

• 1:53:39Speaker 04

  same way. Like, we think our greatest competition is science itself. It's not like this company or that company. It's just, maybe we can't pull it off in our lifetimes. We think we'll be able to. It's looking more and more likely. But it's not a tomorrow thing.

• 1:53:51John Coogan?

  I have one last question. I know you enjoy food and cooking. What is the final eval, the Mount Rushmore, the Mount Everest of cooking that you expect will be the last, the last dish that a robot will be able to cook? What's the hardest dish for a robot to cook?

• 1:54:08Speaker 04

  The Don Angie lasagna.

• 1:54:09John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 1:54:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:54:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:54:11Speaker 04

  It'll be very difficult.

• 1:54:12John Coogan?

  So when they cook that, AGI achieved?

• 1:54:16Speaker 04

  It's game over, yeah.

• 1:54:17John Coogan?

  It's game over. That's amazing. There was actually a recent AGI benchmark, someone shared a screenshot, and it was a very old definition of AGI. It said, it'll be able to describe a sheep, tell you three things that are larger than a lobster. And AGI is here by that definition. But one of the, one of the things that it can't do is bake you a cake. And we just thought it was funny that like, that was the, that was the last thing that the, that the computer can't do. But maybe soon, maybe future. But thank you so much for coming on the show. This was a fantastic conversation.

• 1:54:47Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for making the time, guys.

• 1:54:48John Coogan?

  Best of luck to you. And thank you so much for building this. This is really important technology.

• 1:54:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're excited. Put a, put a robot in the studio when you're ready.

• 1:54:54John Coogan?

  Send it over. It's a mess. I have clothes all over here that need to be folded. So we'd love to have one.

• 1:55:00Speaker 04

  Awesome, too, guys.

• 1:55:01John Coogan?

  See you. Next up, we got Sam Lessin coming in the studio. Venture capitalist yapping about venture capital. We will bring him in when he's ready. In the meantime, I will do some ads. We'll talk to you about Wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. We can also tell you about Ramp. Time is money. Save both. You heard me slip it into the perplexity interview. I'm going to try and slip more ads in. We've been hearing a lot of feedback that there aren't enough ads on the show. We are working hard to remedy that. But we have Sam Lessin here in the studio. Welcome to the show, Sam. How are you doing?

• 1:55:42Sam Lessin?

  I'm doing great. How are you guys doing?

• 1:55:44John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastic. We just had a fantastic conversation with Carol Hausman and Lachy Groom over at Physical Intelligence. Did you see the demo of their cleaner robot? The room of 5.0?

• 1:55:56Sam Lessin?

  No, I love Lucky. I haven't seen him in a bit. I know, is this the folding robot?

• 1:56:00John Coogan?

  It can fold your laundry.

• 1:56:02Sam Lessin?

  They've been folding shit in like a warehouse for a while.

• 1:56:04John Coogan?

  Yep. Well, they're doing it in the real world now. The demo was they sent the robot out into the field. It cleans someone's house. They say it's about 50% accurate. They're getting ready to deploy it once it gets to 99% accurate.

• 1:56:15Sam Lessin?

  What does a 50% accurate cleaning robot do? Like, does it have the time?

• 1:56:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, it can fold half of your shirts properly and half of your shirts improperly.

• 1:56:25Sam Lessin?

  Look, in fairness, that's probably better than I could do. I'm not much of a folder myself.

• 1:56:29John Coogan?

  I'm terrible at it. I'm terrible at it. So, you know, anything.

• 1:56:32Jordi Hays?

  I would be a terrible laundry robot, personally.

• 1:56:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:56:36Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, Sam.

• 1:56:38Sam Lessin?

  Always fun. You guys are crushing it. I'm loving the vibe. You're both full-time now. Like, you've got ads?

• 1:56:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, ads. Yeah, we can do some ads right now.

• 1:56:47Jordi Hays?

  Never side hustle. That's our, never side hustle. Always full hustle.

• 1:56:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:53Jordi Hays?

  What's going on in your world?

• 1:56:55Sam Lessin?

  You know, I don't know. I've been traveling a bunch, but I'm back and

• 1:56:59John Coogan?

  Traveling as a venture capitalist? How does that work?

• 1:57:02Sam Lessin?

  Oh, just for fun. Guys, not for work, please. No, I just sit in a pool house for work.

• 1:57:07John Coogan?

  But I would imagine such a prestigious career path is so demanding that you would never be able to take a day off.

• 1:57:12Sam Lessin?

  Never. No, I am a slave to Zoom. I just sit here and Zoom back to back.

• 1:57:17John Coogan?

  You seem to have cracked the code.

• 1:57:18Jordi Hays?

  What's your stance on Zoom? Do you invest much purely over Zoom or are you just meeting everybody at this point?

• 1:57:27Sam Lessin?

  You know, it's a really interesting question. I personally think Zoom, Zoom's had like a really interesting impact, I think, on venture capital. Because initially, people were all bowled up on how Zoom, unless like no meetings in person, was going to open the funnel. And people would like invest all over the country and we break down walls because all of a sudden physicality, like there was like this kind of euphoric, Zoom will be democratizing type thing going on. And it's interesting. I do think that Zoom means that people like me and venture capitalists are willing to take more meetings than we otherwise would be on like interesting topics with people that, again, like it's just like the barrier is lower, you'll meet with more people. Now, does that actually result in more investments?

• 1:58:11Sam Lessin?

  Unclear. I think it might invest in like broader sets of first meetings. Just because the barrier is lower and like if the meeting gets boring after 15 minutes, I can just do my email and say, uh huh, right? So like, it's like, there is some breakdown in like access. But it's not clear to me how much that resolves to like actually broader access means. And in fact, I think that's one of the big things that's interesting about AI broadly right now is, you know, there's this narrative like with auto scripting, I get the number of pitches I get that are like half written by AI or written by AI is like out of control, right? I don't know what people think they're doing with those because they're all just gonna get deleted. Right. And if anything, the irony is the fact that the barrier now is so low to those emails means that even the ones that actually are legitimate

• 1:58:56Sam Lessin?

  just get archived because like on the margin, they're probably spam. And so there's this interesting thing where AI is actually leading, making venture capital, I would argue more insular. Right. Than it was before, not less insular. Right. So there's all these like unintended consequences going on of Zoom, of AI, of all this type of stuff in VC.

• 1:59:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. Email, you just gotta use it like text messaging, just no, no subject, no body at all, just whatever you have to say, just put it in the subject and send.

• 1:59:22Sam Lessin?

  Yeah. Look, I, I actually am a, I'm like probably, I'm old, I'm like 41, right? So I'm like a huge, I love email. Like I think it's great and I'm an inbox zero guy. I'm like, but I also like run aggressive filters on my emails.

• 1:59:36John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:59:36Sam Lessin?

  And like, I'm fine not responding. Like I don't consider email a contract that because you sent me something, I'm required to send you something back. I think you just have to treat it differently.

• 1:59:47Jordi Hays?

  What about on text? Are you an inbox zero on text?

• 1:59:50Sam Lessin?

  Text I take pretty seriously. Um, actually, so that is like, I, I kind of have a pretty quick SLA on text. And I, I tried to make sure that not everyone knows my actual phone number.

• 2:00:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's put, let's put Sam's phone number up on the screen for everyone. Uh, so you can text him if you have to.

• 2:00:06Sam Lessin?

  No, Texas, Texas. Well, I'll give you my plug, which is, you know, one of our companies is called OpenPhone, which is a great company.

• 2:00:11John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 2:00:12Sam Lessin?

  And that I use an OpenPhone phone number for a lot of things where you want to put it up on screen. And it's great. It's like a second text inbox. That's not really the purpose of the company. It's more sophisticated than that, but I, I like it for that.

• 2:00:23John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:00:23Jordi Hays?

  We should, we should set an open phone lineup. Yeah, for me, I, I like to think of the hierarchy of like, you know, inboxes, right? Email. But then now it's like, okay, you have X D M's, uh, iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal. If you want to get in touch with me, show up and grab me by the collar. Yeah, it's basically like juggling.

• 2:00:43Jordi Hays?

  Until I hear what you have to say.

• 2:00:45Sam Lessin?

  Well, yeah, it's, I mean, I, I, so I have like, my stack is, text is incredibly important and serious. That's like a one hour SLA, but it's limited.

• 2:00:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:54Sam Lessin?

  Email, I take very seriously. Like, I really care about email. Um, but then people are like, you should be in my Discord server or like Slack. I'm like, absolutely fucking literally not. Like, I think those things are disasters. I refuse to engage with them. I hate everything about them. Despite the fact Slow was one of the seed investors in, um, in Slack. And so I have to thank Stuart for making us some money, but like, I just like can't deal. Uh, I refuse to deal.

• 2:01:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Uh, let's, let's. Yeah, take us through the. Should we talk about, uh, venture capital? I actually want to start and go back to your 2023 piece.

• 2:01:27Sam Lessin?

  Sure.

• 2:01:28Jordi Hays?

  Which is on the timeline. Uh, you called out, uh, this is October 16th, 2023. The shutdown of the VC factory line and the death of the factory farm unicorn narrative. Um, the awkward crowd into seed investing by multi-stage firms. The mirage of AI and LLM startup investing. The post-pandemic fundamental cultural change impacting startups. Um, what, which one of those?

• 2:01:54Jordi Hays?

  Would you grade yourself? Yeah. How would you, how would you grade your predictions?

• 2:01:57Sam Lessin?

  I obviously grade myself excellently on all of them. The, um, no, I mean, I think like, look, I try to pull up every few years and just, especially in times of uncertainty. And just be like, what is going on? Like, where should we be spending time and our attention? I think, you know, two years ago, you know, the, those were the big themes for me is one, we were very used to for 10 years as a fund. Effectively operating this factory line. We take in companies at a certain stage. We know what metrics they have to hit. We give them the money. We then package them and send them on to our friends at Series A, who then send them on to B and da, da, da, da. And the whole thing works beautifully because at the end we pop them out into the public markets and retail investors buy them and life is good. And I was just saying like after the pandemic, you know, people wanted that to come back. And I was like, this is not coming back. Like this whole, the market is, it's a mixed up market.

• 2:02:42Sam Lessin?

  You know, we've basically produced a bunch of these things which are on paper unicorns. But like, they're not fundamentally important businesses. And more importantly, the, there's been this huge release, which is the biggest platforms in the world can just keep getting bigger. Like, I remember a time when like a hundred billion dollar company was a huge company, right? People thought there was a limit to how big the biggest could get. And so there was this constant hunger in the public market for what's the next? Three billion dollar company that's going to grow really fast and there was coverage for that. People cared about it. And now the obvious answer is just like, put more money into Amazon, put more money into Meta, like there is no upper bound. And so I just think the markets have shifted, demand from consumers have shifted at the market, at the public, has kind of rippled back to the ecosystem. You know, what we have now, and you know, I have this in the 2025 version is what I'm calling zombie

• 2:03:27Sam Lessin?

  corns, right? So there's all, you know, people thought, people, friends of mine were like, oh, we're going to see this mass extinction of these unicorns. They're all going to die because, you know, they're going to run out of money. No one's going to fund them. The liquidation preferences are huge. They can't go public. They actually mostly didn't die, right? What they did do is they basically sacrificed growth. They cut their burn a lot. They kind of got marginally profitable. They can kind of exist. And they're kind of zombies. They're just, they're out there. They're not going anywhere, but they're also not going public. There's no market for them. No one knows how to buy them. The liquidation preferences are set up so that no one wants to deal with them. And they're just going to kind of exist.

• 2:04:05Jordi Hays?

  So the, the factory line is broken at the late stage because there's no off ramp. But in many ways, in many ways, the sort of early stage pre-seed to seed to series A is still accelerating as though there's an off ramp.

• 2:04:18Sam Lessin?

  I don't think, I don't think it is actually. I think this is like one of the, I think the part of the 2025 deck are trying to think about what's going on. I actually think what we now have, weirdly, is effectively several markets for companies that are pretty decoupled from each other and kind of have their own logic and exist in their own vacuum. So like, there is a public market, like the public market exists is the biggest, right? There is a private market now. There are companies that are private and will like probably never go public or never for various reasons. The way that companies are valued by the late stage private and the public are actually just different. Like what's valued is different, how people think about them is different. Large LPs actually invest in both. So they don't care. They like, but there's basically like running two parallel universes that

• 2:05:02Sam Lessin?

  don't have a lot of operability. Now, at the early stage, I actually, the same thing is going on, right? Which is like, there is a kind of seed to pre-seed-esque market that exists and people compete and people get excited and there's kind of a market clearing price. For startups and invest sure. But then when you say, well, what do you, what does it take to hop? From an early stage, call it like pre seed, seed, maybe sneaking into A. To like a legitimate B and beyond growth round. There's no more like magic numbers you hit and like a valuation framework that's consistent. It's actually much more about belief. You know, I, I say in the deck, it's a lot about this kind of new math of people want downside protection and then an option on infinity. Right. And so like, what's the average of infinity and zero?

• 2:05:46Sam Lessin?

  It's infinity, right? And so the way people are backing into value is so the entire factory is predicated on. $1 million in ARR equals series A at price blah, blah. With 30, you know, 30% growth and $10 million in ARR, like triple, triple, double, double. You can come up with all these frameworks. Everyone kind of agreed on shit and there was just like. Market clearing action and prices. And now I actually think there's just like. Distinct markets of belief that are really hard to move between.

• 2:06:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, uh, does this necessitate like a different model around growth? We kind of saw this, the like the crossover investors like Tiger, but a lot of growth funds have this downside protection mandate. No zeros, but let's underwrite to a three X. And, and yes, I mean, I hear the, I hear your infinity thing that does happen every once in a while, but. I think in general, a lot of growth investors are just saying no zeros and let's triple our money over this deal. But should you have more later stage growth investors that are thinking more like portfolio construction at the seed stage?

• 2:06:45Sam Lessin?

  I, I look, I think that. The answer to that basically is I don't even know when they talk about we're underwriting to a three X. Who's buying, right? Like everything is about the marginal buyer, right? There is no value on anything, right?

• 2:06:59John Coogan?

  Like a DCF. I mean, you could, you could justify the cash flows, right? You could comp to the public market.

• 2:07:05Sam Lessin?

  The problem, but the problem with the, first of all, copying is about the, basically nothing at late stage is trading comp to the public market really, right? And we can get, we can get into like why, how I think, I think that, look, the DCF comp to the public market. That way, that is the factory model, right? It's basically saying like, hey, I have a late stage thing. I put money in. It's going to triple. The DCF looks like this, it has this much profit margin, like this is the story, package sell to the public market, the public market buys on that same story. Like that, that was the mentality that persisted for a long time. And it was a great system for a lot of, for money making for a lot of people, right? I actually think that again, the public market now is like, well, if I kind of just want those types of metrics, why don't I just buy more of the MAG7?

• 2:07:49Sam Lessin?

  Like, I don't, I don't even want to dick around with your subscale offering. Like, I don't care, right? Like, I think, and there's reasons for that. It's because the big LPs are bigger, it's because of meme stocks, like a whole bunch of stuff going on there, right? That like kind of makes that happen. But the net outcome is there is no off-ramp to the whole. So then the question is, when you're underwriting at a late stage, you're not, you also have to underwrite to someone buying from you, right? And like, the question is, what are they buying and why are they buying it, right? And I think this is where it gets a little bit squirrely, because I do think, you know, I'm not the only one saying this, but like, private to private transactions are going to happen way more, right? Like, you're going to look, just as it happened in private equity, like, funds will sell the funds. Then the question is, well, what is the buying fund paying, right?

• 2:08:30Sam Lessin?

  They're going to pay, they need some margin, they need to have a framework in their heads about how they're going to sell, right? So then they're going to, you're going to be paying, you as an early-stage fund are no longer underwriting to some late-stage, to some DCF, to the public market. You're really underwriting to who's going to buy from you? What's their narrative on buying? Like, why do they want to hold this, right? Like, what's their time horizon, what's their purpose? And like, the irony of the whole thing is like, honestly, those prices are going to probably be much lower than what the DCF might otherwise imply, right?

• 2:09:01Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about, how do you think about funds, you know, selling an entire fund? And I'm talking about venture funds, maybe selling to other, um, you know, kind of like, not continuation vehicles, but just other secondary buyers versus trying to sell off and kind of like prune the portfolio and say like,

• 2:09:19Sam Lessin?

  Well, at the end of the day, look, I, I think, look, the fun side of the funds, you're just going to take some massive discount on that shit, right? Because at the end of the day, like, if someone's buying a fund from you, They're really only buying the winners and the rest is bullshit, right? They're and like, so in an ideal world, they just carve out the pieces they want. Like, I want this position and this position and this position because I care about these companies or I have an infinity thesis on them. Like, everyone has to have, I actually think the infinity thesis really matters in terms of how people are thinking about how big things can get and whether they matter or not in the world. And then everything else, it's like, it's basically worth zero, right? Um, you know, we were joking at our firm about, like, we were joking about starting right off co. Right? Because that's the other funny thing that happens, right?

• 2:10:01Sam Lessin?

  Is you just kind of give up on positions and you sell them for a dollar to take the tax, the tax advantage, right? On it. Every once in a while, the hilarious part is you sell something for a dollar because you give up on it and it turns out being worth something. Right? So like, there's a whole business.

• 2:10:15Jordi Hays?

  We love a comeback story.

• 2:10:16Sam Lessin?

  Hoovering up, you know, irrelevant positions. But.

• 2:10:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:20Sam Lessin?

  I don't know, I like, it doesn't happen, yes. Do GPs sell pieces of the GP? Yes, but that's complicated because the reality is at least the public market only really values the fees. Right? Which mean, like, so it's basically, I've been having trouble because I wrote this 2023 thing that I was pretty proud of and I think was honestly pretty accurate about what was going on. Understandably, it's been two years. I wanted to update it and be like, well, where are we now? And like, there are things I think I got mostly right. There are things that I think are wrong, but I think that the real story is end of factory model, the factory's over. What the, the, the, the yada, yada, yada on is we're now, I think, entering this period where like, you don't even think about it as one integrated capital system. They're just like different parallel universes. Like, everything in the world is regionalizing and fractionalizing.

• 2:11:05Sam Lessin?

  This is happening with globalization. We're having a deglobalization moment. This is happening with all sorts of things. I think it's happening with capital too. There are just literally distinct ecosystems and people play in multiple of them, right? But they have their own valuation logic, et cetera. And then I think like, the way people value companies as a result has changed. What you should be looking for has changed. The types of CEOs you want to back has changed. Um, it's just a new world.

• 2:11:27Jordi Hays?

  Did you dabble much internationally? This was a very 2021, 2022 thing with funds thinking that, you know, they, they win a deal and like, you know, like, uh, 10,000 miles away and, and then like, in hindsight, it's like, you have to think like, why did you win this deal? Why didn't, you know, uh, why, why are you, uh, you know, so lucky to have the opportunity to back this company? And then a lot of them just. You know, or derivative and and.

• 2:11:54Sam Lessin?

  The only, yeah, the only, we've always invested in Israel when it made sense. I think the the US-Israel relationship is strong. I think there's a lot of good technology. There's a lot of reasons that makes sense. And so that's always been a thing we've done. We know it well enough to like be confident in investing there. I again, I think that's the thing for us historically is yes, in a Zoom world, you'll take the meeting in Europe, right? Because like, it's interesting and like, you know, no one's accounting for your time as a venture capitalist. So if you're interested in something in Europe and they really want to talk, like, sure, you'll do it. But we're so lazy, right? That like, I don't want to deal with like, there's always an exception. Like, we have done a handful of deals that are kind of outside the wheelhouse, but it's a look at.

• 2:12:35Sam Lessin?

  But I kind of believe that there's really something to, you know, be New York, be San Francisco focused, pick a few GOs, understand them, understand how they fit into the global capital world, et cetera. Um, so no, we didn't get drawn into too much Europe.

• 2:12:49John Coogan?

  What is, uh, what, what is your interpretation of the rumor around OpenAI potentially buying Windsurf for 3 billion? It's the, it's not an AI cherry on top business. It's a rapper. Is it bull market for rappers now? Are we going to see tons more acquisitions?

• 2:13:05Jordi Hays?

  Slow is going to FOMO into a bunch of rapper businesses now.

• 2:13:07John Coogan?

  FOMO into every rapper because they're just going to get hoovered up. I mean, my, my take was maybe, you know, OpenAI buys one, then Anthropic needs one, then Amazon needs one, then Google needs one, and all of a sudden you have like seven unicorns getting bought. Everyone's making money. Everyone's generationally wealthy. That's the good ending, right?

• 2:13:25Sam Lessin?

  I don't, look, I really am pretty cynical slash don't think that we're going to see a lot of aqua hire AIE type stuff in this era. I think there's a few reasons that one is like, what are you really buying, right? In some of these things like you could, are you buying talent? That is not unreasonable, but, you know, and we've seen that. We've seen people like effectively quote unquote, buy companies that are literally just for like the one person they want to pay 200 million dollars to because they really think they're special because they need an exit. Look, some people are going to get massively overcomped. That will happen. I don't think it's an investment thesis. It is what it is. Uh, and I think it won't happen that much, but we'll see. I think there's going to be, are you buying technology?

• 2:14:06Sam Lessin?

  It's like, the thing about AI and a lot of where we're going is like, why, right? Like, software is getting commoditized. Like, what is it? Like, if you're buying technology. You gotta be buying some really important technology, right? And I think that's like, the third thing you in theory can buy is just distribution, right? Which is like, if someone really has, you know, for whatever reason, got their hooks into a few key contracts, or like, you know, they have a tail, like, fine, you buy distribution and that that can be worth something.

• 2:14:35Sam Lessin?

  But look, honestly, it just seems like all very squirrely to me at this moment. You know, the thing I'd say in venture capital is there will be random walks. Some random stuff will happen, right? And like, I think you can't get too, you know, twisted around that. You certainly shouldn't be chasing random walk. But no, I don't, I don't personally see it. And if anything, I'd say like, look, I was part of this. You know, my first company was acquired by Facebook in the era of aqua hires, right? And I think the, and I say this with some humility, but also perspective is like, I think when you go back and look at like, what was really bought there? And was that a good use of capital by most of the aqua hiring company? I think the answer is probably not, you know, like that era is kind of over. People aren't that special.

• 2:15:17Sam Lessin?

  You know, the big companies, just because they have such incredible access to capital and distribution. At this point, they can kind of build whatever they need anyway, right? So anything that does happen will be highly bespoke as opposed to like some industry wide trend is my personal view.

• 2:15:32Jordi Hays?

  How do you think right now about the dynamic between 30 to 50 million dollar early stage funds versus, you know, 30 plus billion dollar AUM funds? In in some ways, they, the, the, the tiny, you know, upstart funds benefit from these big platform funds coming in and sort of marking up deals, right? The returns look good, but.

• 2:15:56Sam Lessin?

  Maybe, I just think they're completely like, they're two completely different business models, right? Like, I think is the thing, this goes back to my poll about like rationalization and fragmentation of what capital even is, right? If you're running a 50 billion dollar venture fund, you can't possibly be deploying that well early. Right? And actually, you're paid to move gross dollars. The problem you're solving for LPs is you have some massive fucking LPs. They're like, I want exposure to private markets. It's really hard for me to go find how to do that. I would love you to deploy as much capital as possible. And like effectively, the way you get paid is on fees. You're not getting paid on carry. Like this, you know, if you have a $50 billion fund, making 3X on that, so you're making money on carry is like extremely difficult to impossible.

• 2:16:41Sam Lessin?

  Like the numbers just don't add up. You're getting paid to deploy. And that means your business model is attracting more capital. Tell, you have to return enough to justify it, right? But like, you're not actually shooting for maximum DPI or actual returns. You're just shooting for that. And by the way, just to go a step further.

• 2:16:56Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't the big, you know, I just see this all the time where I have friends with funds that are maybe sub $50 million funds. And they're investing into like, even if the big platform is just periodically dipping down into seed when, when they have a, you know, really like the founder or whatever. And then suddenly the round is like, you know, six on 40. And then the tiny fund, and then the tiny fund is like, you could get a bunch of bangers and you just do the math and you realize like, they're not making, they're not going to be making DPI either, and they're not getting management fees.

• 2:17:26Sam Lessin?

  The late stage, what happened after 20, in 2023 era, which I, I wrote about then is like, the late stage capital allocators who are again, are paid fees to deploy gross, they're like, they're weight deployers, they're mass capital deployers. They got, they, they couldn't deploy. So a bunch of their junior people in particular, like, well, I need to do something to justify my paycheck. So they started dipping into seed, right? Cause like, they're bored, right? And they're like, we can't deploy big checks, so we might as well deploy small ones. And by the way, no one cares, right? Like it's such small amounts of money, it's irrelevant either way. That completely messed up the seed markets because it got super undisciplined, right? And like it did, because it's candidly, we do the same thing at Slow to like the angel market, right? Whereas we, we are, it's a recursive problem. Like we will write $100,000 checks off a meeting.

• 2:18:11Sam Lessin?

  Cause it's kind of irrelevant to us and it's just relationship building and like whatever. But there's some poor angel is out there trying to price it properly and we don't care. And then we fuck it up for them. So like, it's, it's a recursive problem. Um. Did happen. I think mostly, honestly, the late-stage guys with AI have a narrative where they can put billions of dollars to work and do their actual jobs. So they've mostly pulled out of fucking up the early-stage markets because they have better things to do with their time. That's actually what they get paid for, right? And just to make a finer point on that, you know, a lot of these late-stage public platforms, they really are like setting themselves up to go public. Here's the thing about that. When they go public, the actual way the public markets value these funds has absolutely nothing to do with returns.

• 2:18:55Sam Lessin?

  It is 100% the fee base, right? And so their structure and their incentive structure is 1,000% about earning fees and just making enough returns to justify the fees they charge and raise more money. Like, that's what they do. Then there's the early-stage market. Here's the thing about those $50 million funds, right? Ultimately, you gotta eat. You gotta actually deliver DPI, not just marks, right? And so marks are nice, like, they're fine, but I think what we're gonna find in a lot of ways is the gulf between I have on paper made a bunch of money or these deals look good versus like, oh no, I actually returned capital. I like made you money. You should give me more money and I made myself money doing it.

• 2:19:37Sam Lessin?

  That's a pretty big gulf. And I think what we're gonna find is that, you know, A, the market, most of those funds are going away because they don't have that and they're not going to. B, there could be a world where late-stage funds start saying, okay, add some discount to the last round. I'll buy out the seed funds effectively and give them some DPI, etc. But then the problem for the seed funds is that mark they were using to be like, look how smart I am. That's not what they're getting paid, right? That's like, that's like the high-water mark. Some investor invested later for primary. And when you come around and say, hey, by the way, would you like to buy my shares? And they're like, well, we'll take more and it'll lower our average cost base. They're not paying what they what they paid for the primary, right?

• 2:20:19Jordi Hays?

  And they're looking at their portfolio and they're like, I need to do this for 80% of my bets, in order to like actually.

• 2:20:25Sam Lessin?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:26Jordi Hays?

  And then it's like, you know.

• 2:20:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:28Sam Lessin?

  And so, look, I mean, the upshot, the really simple way to think about it is like, if you're a early-stage investor, you have to make money. Like, that is actually what you are paid for. And your people are saying, hey, I'm going to allocate a small amount of money to you. By the way, it's not efficient, right? Because if you're even a medium-sized LP, someone's running a $50 million fund, what are you going to give them, like a few million bucks? You don't care unless they make you a shit-ton of money, right? And so, like, if you make them a shit-ton of money, you're doing your job. You get to keep playing. If you don't, forget it. And that's just in a completely different game than what it means to be a late-stage capital allocator in the private markets.

• 2:21:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. I have a kind of a random topic, but there's there's two early-stage kind of publicity stunts going on this week. One is by Roy Lee. He launched Cluey. Clue Lee, cheat on everything. I'm not sure if you saw this, but it's very, very controversial. And he's kind of like a troll, almost like a Nathan Fielder-type, really kicking the bear. And then there's also this Artisan company announcing their $25 million Series A with a billboard on the 101.

• 2:21:31Jordi Hays?

  I love billboards, as you know.

• 2:21:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. We love billboards here. We're sponsored by AdQuick. We love billboards. But, you know, the the the positive take on this is that, hey, like, they're breaking through. They're getting attention. Attention's valuable. Distribution's important. The counter to that is, should they even need to do that? Shouldn't they just be heads-down building? Where do you sit on that continuum?

• 2:21:54Sam Lessin?

  I I guess the question I would ask is, what percent? What is the track record of companies that started with marketing stunts that ultimately were important or successful? Right? My sense is the track record, off the top of my head, is zero, right?

• 2:22:09John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, Facebook started with hot or not. That was very viral.

• 2:22:12Jordi Hays?

  No, but it really, it really. I'll give you an example.

• 2:22:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:22:15Jordi Hays?

  I'll give you an example. So. The challenge with going super viral early, and I had this with Party Round, is that people get a fixed idea, a lot of people get a very fixed idea of what your business does. Yep. And then you run into this like product marketing challenge, which, you know, people are aware of your business, but they're aware of it for something that you may not even do anymore. And that's why I was talking with Cluli, Yep. Founder yesterday of like, you need to be committed to like iterating and basically burning the whole brand down, because you might find in two months that You're completely different. The real opportunity is something else. Yeah.

• 2:22:48Sam Lessin?

  I think that's a really good point, and like I, I'll do a step further, which is, in my experience, really successful things, you actually want fairly high barriers to entry, so that the people who show up as your early customers are like deeply in need of it and true believers. Right? Because if they're deeply in need of it, they're going to put up with a lot of crap to get what it is you're offering out of it, because they're deep, because they really care. Like, they showed up first and they like have a real stake in it. And then they become true believers in that cult that advocates. I think if you have too much attention too quickly from a not fervent enough audience, you get distracted, you have to deal with a bunch of the wrong stuff, people are flighty, like,

• 2:23:28Sam Lessin?

  so I think there's this irony, which is like, it all, how you get your first 100,000, 10,000 people, and the barriers to entry there are like, and I'll give you a kind of counter example, which actually kind of is a marketing stunt, if you get into it, which is quite by accident. You know, Ikram and I kind of started this Jelly Jelly meme coin, which blew way the hell up and went crazy, but was supposed to be like a component of this app, Jelly Jelly, we've been working on. The app's super cool, but like, the app was not ready.

• 2:23:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:57Sam Lessin?

  Right? Like, and what's been really interesting to watch is because the app wasn't ready, you got a bunch of people in, most of them balanced, they're like, this isn't ready, this is weird, whatever. But you did attract a kernel of like crazy true believers that are really engaged with it. And then it's kind of like a fire, like you kind of blow on the coals of that, right? And you kind of keep iterating and working. So I guess that's a long-winded way of saying, I think the history of companies that start with a marketing stunt and blow up big is pretty poor. There probably is a way to like, Be very inefficient and like blow up something big or say something funnel out 99% of the noise.

• 2:24:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:24:36Sam Lessin?

  Somehow find that kernel 1%,

• 2:24:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:24:38Sam Lessin?

  Work with that 1% and like treat it like kind of the embers of a fire, right? And grow up. That's kind of the mental model.

• 2:24:44John Coogan?

  It's like how you handle it. Got it.

• 2:24:46Jordi Hays?

  Uh, last question, how cooked is Tesla?

• 2:24:53Sam Lessin?

  I mean, look, I, I, I've been in the camp of like Tesla's a meme stock for a long time, right? Um, and I think Tesla's a meme stock, right? Um, you know, and so I, um,

• 2:25:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you posted, uh, maybe it was yesterday. No, it was this morning. If Elon can move Tesla's stock up by seven and a half percent by saying he is stepping back from Doge against the backdrop of profits and revenue they just reported, then yes, he probably deserves the $56 billion difference as a pay package. That is what the market says his attention is worth. Uh, I thought that was pretty on the nose.

• 2:25:27Sam Lessin?

  Yeah, look, it's, it's, it's, um, Elon is the greatest marketer of our generation. Um, he's the greatest capital, uh, raiser of our generation. You know, he is the greatest, I think storyteller. I mean, there's a lot that he's really, really, really good at, right? And, um, you know, I think he's the ultimate cult influencer in a lot of ways, right? And he's built a lot of cool companies doing that, but it is so belief driven. And I think this is kind of the thing where it's like, you know, what does Tesla work from a DCF perspective? We talked about public markets and how you value these things, not a fraction of what it's traded at, right? But it is absolutely, he is great at the infinity story, right? The infinity story is so big and infinity, you know, plus zero equals big number.

• 2:26:11Sam Lessin?

  Everything's about the marginal buyer and it's incredibly loved because retail investors want something to believe in. Like they want something they can, that can go to infinity. It's the same thing with the Mars thing. It's like, look, I, again, I, I find the whole Mars thing in SpaceX so frustrating. I love SpaceX. It's like, you know, I think it's an amazing company. Like what they do is incredible, right? And there's a lot I love in the whole nine yards. The Mars narrative is so frustrating because it's so disingenuous on one hand, right? Like it's just like the, the predictions are out of control. Like it doesn't make any sense from like a fundamentals perspective, but my God, people need something to believe in, right? And so

• 2:26:47Jordi Hays?

  Believe in something.

• 2:26:49John Coogan?

  Well, I think Tesla's coming back. I think they're going to put a naturally aspirated V12 with a gated manual in a new car and they're going to sell. 700 million cars in a single quarter.

• 2:26:58Sam Lessin?

  I would fucking love that. If Tesla did that, I would be, even I would buy Tesla stock just because that would be awesome.

• 2:27:05John Coogan?

  There we go. We cracked it. We cracked it. It's gonna happen. You heard it here first. Thanks for stopping by, Sam. This was fantastic.

• 2:27:11Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, Sam.

• 2:27:12John Coogan?

  We will talk to you.

• 2:27:13Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for coming on.

• 2:27:15John Coogan?

  Next up, we have Bridget Mendler of Northwood Space coming into the studio. Very exciting. I believe $30 million Series A from Andreessen Horowitz in partnership, I think Founder's Fund, a bunch of other folks got in the round. So we'll talk to her about that. Bridget, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 2:27:33Jordi Hays?

  Hey, what's going on?

• 2:27:34Bridgit Mendler?

  Guys, what's up? I haven't been on podcast before, so am I on?

• 2:27:39John Coogan?

  You're not only on a podcast, but you're also live.

• 2:27:43Bridgit Mendler?

  Whoa.

• 2:27:44John Coogan?

  So there's no post editing, but hopefully we got the facts right, but you can break it down for us. Tell us, what does Northwood Space do? And tell us about the $30 million funding round that just was announced.

• 2:27:56Bridgit Mendler?

  Yeah, we're building the ground network for the industrialized space economy. You know, we view it kind of as the third critical pillar of infrastructure for space where you need to get things into space on rockets. You need to have things to put into space, which are satellites, and then you need a way to actually communicate with them and use them once they're up and operational. And so we're focused on that last third part and building the shared infrastructure that the whole industry can take advantage of, really drawing parallels to the cellular industry and to the internet where shared infrastructure is just a big enabler for being able to push technology forward.

• 2:28:31Jordi Hays?

  Talk about what companies have had to do historically. You know, we've heard a lot about satellite companies that send a satellite up and they're like, it's working, but we don't know where it is. So it's like, you know, kind of critical aspect of, you know, maintaining.

• 2:28:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, what was the status quo prior to you starting the company?

• 2:28:50Bridgit Mendler?

  Oh yeah, um, yeah, I mean, it's not just prior to starting the company, it's like ongoing. Um, you know, we talked to companies, I think like last week, they're just not getting enough coverage and so they're endeavoring to build their own ground stations themselves. Um, and you know, our, our co-founder, Shar, it was actually interesting during our first fundraise, he was still working at his old company and he was woken up two times in the middle of the night. There were a total of four ground failures just in the course of one evening while he was, um, manning their operations, uh, at all different locations, all different ground networks. Uh, one was a site that had already been down and just

• 2:29:32Bridgit Mendler?

  like not even notified the company that they weren't going to be able to make their contact. Talked to another company last week that had been out of con- uh, contact with their satellite for 28 hours. Um, it's like, you know, you're not just tossing like a $50 piece of equipment up there. It's like tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Um, so it's very stressful and, uh, we're, we're excited to, you know, pursue setting a new standard there.

• 2:29:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people get stressed out when slack's down for like five minutes and imagine having like, you know, this hundred million dollar, billion dollar device that you don't have contact with. What it, what it, I'm curious, what does scale look like for Northwood? You know, how many different, you know, ground stations, uh, you know, do you hope to kind of get to within the next, call it decade?

• 2:30:18Bridgit Mendler?

  Ooh, decade, that's a long horizon, but that's fun. Uh, we are looking at scale both from like a network level and a site level. So when you think about like, why do you need to have a global network to begin with, with space? Like the reason why you need to have a global network is because satellites orbit the earth and so maintaining contact with them, um, requires having, uh, you know, locations all over the earth to make sure that you can be in contact all the time. So think of it kind of like when you're using a cell phone and you're driving on the freeway and you're passing different cell towers, you need to have, maintain contact with cell towers in order to maintain connection, same with space. Um, and so for us, there's like two verticals. One is coverage. So you want to have enough coverage. So basically like a cell tower, like you're always in Contact no matter where you are.

• 2:31:02Bridgit Mendler?

  And then the the other one is throughput, that's like density. And so kind of gold standard for this is SpaceX where they have hundreds of ground stations to um not just have global coverage, but to be able to serve millions of users in different regions. So when they're wanting to like service a a region that has a lot of customers, they need to put a lot of ground stations in that region in order to support that much capacity. And so we want to be able to offer that to other folks so that they can have like that kind of gold standard of uh connectivity through space. So um we're going to be putting um you know, ground stations in different regions as well as ground stations densifying in the same regions. Um and one of the things that we think about with scale is really like, how can we put as many

• 2:31:46Bridgit Mendler?

  ground stations to support as much capacity as possible at a single region? So our kind of um you know, sub near term goal is five hundred sites.

• 2:31:54John Coogan?

  Can you take me through some of the, can you take me through some of the history of uh these ground stations, maybe explain it in really, really simple terms, like maybe like I'm a venture capitalist or something? Um something like uh, how do we communicate with the Hubble telescope? Is this like a big satellite dish like what I'd saw in contact with Jodie Foster? Uh is that how we communicate with the Hubble or is there a different network of ground stations? What what what was kind of the gold standard ten, twenty years ago?

• 2:32:19Bridgit Mendler?

  Yeah, um I have to just say like us ground nerds in space, we do not often get asked these questions, so thank you very much. Like the ground is just generally like the not sexy part of space. Um so very fun. So yeah, I mean, what you're doing is uh you know, generally using RF to contact a satellite that is like hundreds of kilometers away. Um you need to concentrate enough power to be able to do that. So that's why you see like the big parabolic dishes, it's concentrating power. Um and so when you're you know, further away, that requires more tower, more power. So actually, um if you're you know, in the Palo Alto area, you go by the um the Stanford Dish is kind of a well known one. I imagine like some folks uh if they're watching might know of that.

• 2:33:02Bridgit Mendler?

  Um it's massive, a a giant dish that's used to make that contact. And so it's interesting because like the legacy of space, it's more Exploratory, it's more research-based where like booking an antenna is kind of more like booking a telescope. You know, where it's like a, an individual piece of equipment. Where um, you know, they're located at these different locations around the world, you book the time. You're kind of in control of how that functions and how it operates. Uh, but as the space industry has been scaling, um, it's not really a sustainable model to think of like. As you're needing to coordinate, you know, tens or hundreds of different sites to think about that individual booking and coordination. Um, and with that, we kind of like to analogize, analogize to network routing for the internet.

• 2:33:45Bridgit Mendler?

  Where it's like, you're not thinking of every single, you know, router and network switch. You kind of trust in a, a network that can reliably deliver that data. Um, and so that's something that we're starting to think about, about. You know, how the space industry is going to evolve in terms of communication, going from. Uh, booking an antenna like you book a science telescope to. Having the outcomes through um, a global network where you can. Um, you can have a lot of observability and control into that network, but it's much more like software-defined. Um, and controlled, kind of like modern internet infrastructure.

• 2:34:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, question. For now, I think there's an obvious opportunity to serve existing space companies. What kind of companies do you think uh, are potentially enabled by your technology and network? That uh, may not have been smart to start five years ago if you didn't have kind of the resources of, of SpaceX.

• 2:34:40Bridgit Mendler?

  Yeah, uh, there's a company that we were recently talking to that I get really excited about. Um, you know, in LA, we had the wildfires a couple of months ago and uh, absolutely devastating. Um, you know, really difficult to figure out where to route resources with a really fast-moving fire. Uh, if you're trying to get a sense of like the scale and, and the direction of that fire with a heli- uh, a helicopter. Um, it's often like not safe or not even permitted to go into those regions because there's just so much debris. Um, and so satellites are a really interesting application where. Um, if you're able to have uh, enough revisit rate, which is what, you know, in the space industry you call like being able to go over a region again. If you're like a, a low earth orbit satellite where you basically just need to have like.

• 2:35:23Bridgit Mendler?

  A bunch of satellites that pass over and take turns because it takes time to orbit the earth. Um, so having enough revisit rate to where you can actually like regularly track the movement of a fire is pretty revolutionary. Like you can, you could stop fires much more rapidly and be able to detect the movement. Um, the challenge with that is if you don't have um, your, your latency down low enough to um, to be able to give the information, it's pretty much useless, right? Like if you deliver information like an hour later, then you can't um, you can't deliver anything actionable and helpful towards firefighters on the ground. Like they're gonna go into the wrong.

• 2:36:00Jordi Hays?

  Lives are on the line. I remember John and I, I live in Malibu. John lives in Pasadena. I remember the watch, the watch fire.

• 2:36:06John Coogan?

  Watch duty.

• 2:36:06Jordi Hays?

  Watch duty went down for like an hour and I was like, I was looking, I was looking at the mountain behind my house, just like being like, if the fire comes over the hill, I just wanna have eyes on it quickly. Um, and that was like, you know, very brief that it was down.

• 2:36:20John Coogan?

  Uh, I, I have a follow-up question. Um, again, maybe a stupid question, but uh, what is going on in the various uh, different orbits? We, we talked to Albedo about V Leo. Obviously Leo's kind of the hot one with Starlink, but uh, do you need different ground station technology or scale to hit something in high earth orbit? We talked to Astronis, which is maybe partnering with Impulse to kind of boost to higher orbits. Uh, what are the challenges in uh, or, or benefits to different orbits when you're thinking about it from a ground communication perspective?

• 2:36:57Bridgit Mendler?

  Yeah, no, that's a great question. Um, you know, V Leo, like you're getting closer to Earth, so you're able to get um, more like high fidelity imagery or like sensor um, things like that. If you go up to Leo, like um, that's useful both from that perspective, but also from like a latency perspective, when you're talking about like trying to hit internet similar kind of latency timelines, just the time it takes to go with those altitudes. There's also operators in like MEO, which is, you know, middle earth orbit that are supporting internet use cases. Um, and then if you go out to GEO, the benefit of that is like it's geostationary. That's what the name means. You're fixed at a certain location, um, and you're able to have really continuous coverage over a wider area

• 2:37:38Bridgit Mendler?

  because it can see so much of, of the globe. Um, this is a super interesting area and an area that we're actually like really enthusiastic to be working in is, is servicing multiple orbits. Um, and yeah, I think it's it's both of interest on the commercial side and also on the government side, you know, they have a lot of assets um that stretch up into higher orbits and uh they're looking to have, you know, more capacity, more coverage, more resiliency, like there's really a shortfall of ground assets in the higher orbits, actually. Um, and so that's something that we didn't enter into the business planning on, but that's something that has been like a a very large driver of activity in our business

• 2:38:18Bridgit Mendler?

  over the past like eighteen months of existence. Um, and yeah, I I think like the more dynamic movement is also a really interesting point where it's not like you're just hanging out in one orbit, right? Like, that's kind of impulse impulses, really exciting uh proposition with prop um is that they're able to uh, you know, maneuver between orbits in um in new ways and uh, you know, in space economy rendezvous proximity operations like that's that's something that's definitely going to be picking up and and very significant in the coming years.

• 2:38:48John Coogan?

  I feel like Middle Earth orbit is like super ripe for a Tolkien named startup, some founder's fun back thing. Um, uh, I I mean, I would love to hear where the name Northwood came from. Um, yeah, tell me where where the name come from, and then I do have a follow up question that's more serious.

• 2:39:04Bridgit Mendler?

  Yes, um, that's a very serious question. Um, the name came from the lake house where uh, we first did our prototyping of antennas during pandemic pandemic and it was the very origin of becoming a ground nerd. Um, and so, yeah, that's that's kind of the history of the name. I mean, that that lake house, my great grandparents got it in nineteen forty five. It's just a little shack in New Hampshire and uh, it's been uh, kind of the all all the companies that I've had have had some affiliation to it.

• 2:39:34John Coogan?

  Got it. Uh, so on the business side, um, can you walk me through where you're playing in kind of the value chain? I imagine that there's a fair amount of equipment that's available off the shelf. You might or I correct me if I'm wrong, but do you need to build the equipment from scratch? Is this a project where you're going to be building like a a giga factory like what we've seen for the Starlink units at some point? Or is it more about um assembling different components and then being really strategic about placing them and then building a network on top of that and really like the services side of the business?

• 2:40:12Bridgit Mendler?

  Great question, something that our head of manufacturing, Thomas, thinks about a lot. We're definitely going to be leveraging outsourcing in early days. We are a vertically integrated company, like we, we design all of the different components. We have those outsourced and then, you know, brought in. We're not, we're not, you know, like making our own circuit boards at this point in time. There's certain things that are like more efficient, efficient to in-source versus outsource. So largely leveraging outsourcing. Initially, I think, you know, we're really focusing on modular units and making our, our units designed for manufacturing.

• 2:40:48Bridgit Mendler?

  So making sure that we can parallelize development, making sure that we can have things ready to be integrated at like kind of the final hour is, is the thought process. Just to accelerate our manufacturing capability and then gradually over time, when we figure out like what is actually cost efficient and time efficient, we bring it in-house entirely.

• 2:41:10John Coogan?

  I want to know more about actually the mechanics of setting up a ground station somewhere. I imagine you could do it on federal. Yeah, yeah, we're, we're thinking about doing this. My backyard, you know, I have some extra space.

• 2:41:22Bridgit Mendler?

  Honestly, there's a lot of ham radio amateur folks that do that.

• 2:41:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I have a, I have a family friend who their family has some land in Napa and I think they monetize it by selling a cell phone tower right on top of it. Is that, is that, is that the, the, one of the folks that you'd buy land from or, or is it on federal land? Like, how do you think about placing these? Do we need them to be equidistant across the United States and beyond? Are there other countries? Are you placing them in allied countries? Like, how do you think about the, the coverage map? The, I want to see the Verizon map with all the different coverage points, right? How does that grow over time?

• 2:41:58Bridgit Mendler?

  Yeah, no, it's, it's real. We do that modeling in-house. So yeah, we, we think in terms of like the coverage mapping and the metrics that we're prioritizing hitting for customers. Also shout out to Christian at Astronis who has his own amateur radios. We had a fun time talking about that. Yeah, but in terms of where you put sites, it's a great question. Basically comes down to three things. Land, fiber, power. Um, so you just need to optimally be able to um make your sites. Uh, you know, we, we prioritize making our sites as uh generic as possible, really, so that like we have the most optionality possible.

• 2:42:37Bridgit Mendler?

  Um, we are also prioritizing like really high throughput backhaul. So um data centers honestly become like a good spot to to put them at because they have the power in the backhaul um already uh set up. Um, and you know, generally try to just make sure that the land is like easy to deploy. Uh, one advantage of the way that we're building our systems is we don't need to lay like a concrete pad, which can add weeks to months to your uh timeframe, especially when you need to like do permitting and all that. So our goal is to make it so that, you know, the uh, the tech bros of the world can just, you know, have one in their, in their backyard. Very uh easily deployed, easily. Um, and yes, it is, it is a global effort that we're.

• 2:43:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, I remember Anduril did something similar with the uh, with the sensor tower. They didn't want to pour the concrete pad because of permitting, so it's on wheels and.

• 2:43:29Bridgit Mendler?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:43:29John Coogan?

  Saying it's completely unnecessary. You could just drill it in the ground, but then it's way more complicated.

• 2:43:34Jordi Hays?

  How do your uh, how do your timelines work? Uh, a lot of, you know, I'm assuming a lot of your customers are kind of planning around like launches and that means those are kind of busy moments for you guys. I imagine, but at the same time, you can serve a lot of existing companies that have assets in orbit already. How do you think about uh kind of the advantages that you guys have of like being on the ground and not needing to plan your entire business around SpaceX?

• 2:44:02Bridgit Mendler?

  Oh, yeah, it's very convenient. We can work on our own schedule. I mean, we have different challenges because, you know, you're going to different countries and they have their own local regulatory regimes and all that. But we're, we are not constrained by launch schedules, which is great. Um, and then the first part of your question was, what was the first?

• 2:44:21Jordi Hays?

  No, you answered it. You answered it already.

• 2:44:23John Coogan?

  Uh, we, I have a, I have a, I have another somewhat uh random question. Um, we ask a lot of artificial intelligence founders about their P Doom. We ask a lot of space founders about their P Moon. Uh, what is the probability that you will visit the moon uh in the next thirty years, let's call it?

• 2:44:43Bridgit Mendler?

  Oh.

• 2:44:43John Coogan?

  Would you go if the capability was there? Let's say there's been 100 people or 1,000 people or 10,000 people up. Are you going? And then what's the likelihood that you think the space economy and the flywheel that gets us to the moon happens based on your insider knowledge of the industry?

• 2:44:57Bridgit Mendler?

  I would absolutely go to the moon if I had the opportunity. I did hear from like an astronaut one time just how life changing that experience was. And yeah, I mean, I feel like that would be definitely a thing for the bucket list. As a mom now, I think that's honestly like the only thing that holds me back from saying.

• 2:45:13John Coogan?

  You gotta bring the kids. You gotta bring the kids. It's gonna be Disneyland on the moon. That's the first economic use case.

• 2:45:18Jordi Hays?

  We talked about this too, like do we go to, do we go on a Blue Origin flight? It's 250K. Do we just go and podcast in space? John was, John was all in. I was like, my wife will absolutely kill me. I don't know if it's worth it. So it's definitely part of the calculus.

• 2:45:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:35Bridgit Mendler?

  I know, to be, to be young and wild and free. And like the lunar economy, I'm very bullish on it. I think, um, yeah, I think we'll hopefully see that within our lifetime.

• 2:45:45John Coogan?

  Uh, somewhat related to space tourism, uh, the Blue Origin flight did just happen last week. I want to know specifically, what are the challenges with, uh, with again, uh, connectivity? Because it seemed like we lost the video feed while they were at the apex of their kind of trajectory. It was only three miles or three kilometers up or something. It wasn't that high and yet we still lost the live video feed. Is that something? It's a moving object, but satellites move too. What does it take from a ground station perspective to, uh, you know, be able to watch Netflix on your Blue Origin flight consistently?

• 2:46:23Bridgit Mendler?

  Yeah, that was actually something that we talked about, like in the very early days, like pre-forming Northwood was like being able to watch Netflix in space. And we're like, oh, wouldn't that be like such a cool future? I mean, to accomplish that, like there's multiple different kinds of the communication going on. There's like, how do you actually make sure that the rocket is going where it's supposed to go? And, um, it's safe and like. You know, we talked to someone the other day who was concerned about like a rocket trajectory not going the direction it was supposed to and winding up like landing on another country and needing to deal with kind of like the catastrophe that falls out of that and managing that. So like you really need to know where your spacecraft is going.

• 2:47:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:47:01Bridgit Mendler?

  Um, because yeah, the, the consequences that fall out of that are serious. But then yeah, having um, actual, you know, humans on board, needing to have some kind of communications on board. Um, yeah, it's, it's going in a different trajectory than a satellite that is just kind of conventionally like orbiting. Um, and that's something that we're excited about with our technology as well is um, being able to vary our beam width. Um, so if you think about like, uh, you know, the, the signal as you get further away is kind of like a, if you were to shine a flashlight on a table and like the, the, the area that the flashlight, um, spotlight covers changes depending on how far away the, um, the flashlight is. It's the same thing with an object going up in space. Like it's changing the actual

• 2:47:46Bridgit Mendler?

  um, signal propagation depending on um, how far away the spacecraft is. And so you need to be able to have like some way of, of tracking that. Um, and we're excited through uh, you know, the, the tech that we're developing to be able to, to track the beam with us as it changes for more dynamic trajectories.

• 2:48:05John Coogan?

  Can you talk a little bit about the long-term uh, mix of customers? I mean, we've all been following Delian's uh, trajectory with Varda. It was, he was talking about ZB LAN at one point, then it was Pharma, now there's some DoD mixed in there, some government contracting. It feels like a lot of these companies that are doing stuff in space or doing stuff in hard tech, it's dual use. Um, is there a government angle here at some point or is that just something you're thinking about in the future?

• 2:48:31Bridgit Mendler?

  No, it's, it's very near term. It's very real term. Um, very real term. Um, very, very real.

• 2:48:36John Coogan?

  Very real.

• 2:48:37Bridgit Mendler?

  Um, yeah, across a number of different applications. I mean, they're dealing with the same challenges, like if not even more so, um, where like they have aging assets that, um, Are kind of infrequent, like there's, you know, certain networks that just don't have a lot of assets and they're old and they're vulnerable to outages, whether it's like an intentional outage, you know, by somebody targeting that site or not. And so there's been a lot of interest in how that they can leverage commercial to get sites deployed quickly. Like for us in the conversations we're having, we're really emphasizing like we can deploy capability quickly and we can serve up capability that's like quite scalable.

• 2:49:18Bridgit Mendler?

  So if one of those outages happens, you'll have that that backup and that resiliency. And so as, you know, government use cases, like so much of our world runs on space in a way that I think people don't really realize. And so it was, you know, that's been a refrain that you're hearing more and more through government stakeholders where there's this concern on, you know, if anything goes down in space or through the ground connectivity, it has ripple effects through like a lot, a lot of our critical infrastructure. And so for us to be able to, you know, deploy capability that can enable resilience there is something that's definitely resonating.

• 2:49:54Jordi Hays?

  This might be a silly question. Are you guys already making hardware that's actually on satellites? And if not, is that something you would do at some point? Because I imagine when it comes to, you know, reliable communication, you're somewhat reliant on the technology that's actually on the craft.

• 2:50:10Bridgit Mendler?

  Yeah, that's a, it's a great question. I think like so far we've been pursuing partnership there, but like if the need presented itself to stretch onto that side, we have amazing engineers that would be very capable of doing something like that. But yeah.

• 2:50:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's kind of a decomposition happening right now where there's a, there's one company that just makes the satellite buses. And so you could imagine that there's a different company that makes, oh, just downlink connectivity. And then you kind of vend all that together and then you do the important thing and you can focus your company a little bit more.

• 2:50:40Bridgit Mendler?

  Exactly, exactly. Like that's, that's the vision where, you know, in the same way that a developer doesn't need to think about like their, you know, cloud or networking or any of it. It's just like, you just focus on building and yeah, the rest is, is kind of.

• 2:50:55John Coogan?

  Focus on that key value creation. When did you initially start researching or like catch the space bug? When did you get into this?

• 2:51:03Bridgit Mendler?

  I mean, honestly, it was around that that time of the, you know, prototypes that we were making. My husband, Griffin, is our CTO.

• 2:51:10John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 2:51:10Bridgit Mendler?

  And so, you know, we were just working on those prototypes during the pandemic and I feel like I don't pursue things casually.

• 2:51:17Jordi Hays?

  As one does.

• 2:51:18Bridgit Mendler?

  Um, but.

• 2:51:19Jordi Hays?

  Some people were, you know, baking like sourdough bread.

• 2:51:21John Coogan?

  Some people were podcasting sourdough bread, but you know, rocketry.

• 2:51:24Bridgit Mendler?

  I'm sure you guys saw a lot of like new founders coming out of the pandemic too.

• 2:51:28John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:51:28Bridgit Mendler?

  Yeah, too much time on your hands. Um, we were fortunate to be in that position. But yeah, can't do something casually. I was just like, all right. And then after we did that, we kind of like, you know, wrote a white paper with commercial folks. And then we did another one with some government stakeholders and like, damn, like this is a really critical vulnerability in the space industry. It kind of took off from there.

• 2:51:49John Coogan?

  So five years of work to get here. Can we play the overnight success sound? Overnight success. But congratulations on the funding round.

• 2:51:58Jordi Hays?

  Really, really incredible milestone and congrats to you and the whole team. Come on, next time.

• 2:52:04Bridgit Mendler?

  What are you, what are you guys drinking over there? Is that a Yerba mate?

• 2:52:07John Coogan?

  That's a Yerba mate.

• 2:52:07Jordi Hays?

  I am. I am. I am.

• 2:52:09John Coogan?

  The Guayaquil.

• 2:52:10Jordi Hays?

  Big Yerba mate guy, but John's, you know, we have both sides of the table here.

• 2:52:13Bridgit Mendler?

  I'm having the third. Wait, this is like endorsement or something, but yeah, we have the trifecta, the holy trinity of energy drinks.

• 2:52:20Jordi Hays?

  What are you, what are you drinking?

• 2:52:22Bridgit Mendler?

  Red Bull.

• 2:52:23John Coogan?

  Oh, Red Bull, a classic. Very Lindy. Lindy.

• 2:52:26Jordi Hays?

  Holy Trinity.

• 2:52:26John Coogan?

  The holy trinity of energy drinks. Anyway, have a, have a great rest of your day. Thank you so much for coming on the show and we'd love to have you back when there's more news. Thank you so much.

• 2:52:35Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:52:35John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 2:52:35Bridgit Mendler?

  All right. Have a good one.

• 2:52:37Jordi Hays?

  Bye.

• 2:52:38John Coogan?

  Let's close out with some timeline. What else we got? Oh, Mike New, former guest on the show, has released the results from OpenAI's O3 model, which everyone's raving about on Arc AGI. And so his takeaway is that O3 medium, because there's a million different varieties now for how in, how intense and how long running these, uh, these reasoning models can run for. But O3 medium is the industry leading AI reasoning system by a large margin, 2X the score and 1/20 the cost compared to the next leading, leading chain of thought system as measured by Arc V1 semi-private set scoring, 57% for $1.50 per task.

• 2:53:20John Coogan?

  And that's interesting because we talked to Sean Swix about. How Google was dominating in this paradeau frontier of model capability versus cost and they'd really, we talked about this with Logan too, how Google has been dominating in these benchmarks and then cost, but Arc AGI is this completely separate benchmark from MMLU and L M Arena and Humanities Last Exam and all these other things that are, Arc AGI, it's so simple as these puzzles, but it's in some ways harder to game or harder to optimize for apparently. And so, he says, his key question for released 03, is it more

• 2:54:00John Coogan?

  like 01, slightly better than pure L M on novel tasks, or more like 03 preview? I love OpenAI's naming scheme, keep it, keep it simple, guys. It makes it really hard to do my job. Qualitatively new capability to solve problems outside training data. And so, we are going to be following the Arc AGI development very closely. He closes by saying, Arc V2, which is the latest puzzle eval that he released, Arc V2 still has a long way to go, even with the great reasoning efficiency of 03, new ideas are still needed. He called this when he came on the show. He said, we haven't evaluated the new OpenAI models yet. We've heard rumors about them. We think they're great, obviously very economically valuable,

• 2:54:45John Coogan?

  obviously amazing tools. We love them. But in terms of Arc, Arc V2, they're not solving that fundamental problem. And it raises questions about, is it AGI? Is it 10-minute AGI? Is it, it's, it's AGI that can do like IMO level math, but it can't solve a puzzle that a kid can solve. It's a different type of intelligence. And I think that's great. I think it's amazing for the economic impact, but we still got our edge.

• 2:55:12Jordi Hays?

  Still got it.

• 2:55:13John Coogan?

  We still got it. Humanity's not done yet. But anyway, let's move on to some news. The United States banned artificial dyes from all food products effective yesterday.

• 2:55:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is big. We gotta get Callie, Justin Mears, co-founder on to come break this down. I don't have full context. It seems like it's going to be incredibly disruptive to big CPG.

• 2:55:34John Coogan?

  Can you imagine trying to reformulate M and M's? Like, M and M's, they've been making this for like 100 years.

• 2:55:42Jordi Hays?

  Get ready to have some gray M and M's, folks.

• 2:55:46Jordi Hays?

  They're still gonna taste the same. Actually, we'll see if they taste the same if they're not, you know, the color of the rainbow.

• 2:55:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:52Jordi Hays?

  But I, I, I think this is good. There's plenty of evidence that these different dyes like have really terrible impacts on health and especially considering that kids consume these and they don't have the same ability to reason.

• 2:56:06John Coogan?

  I have a different take. I think natural immunity of the human body is incredibly resilient. And so as long as you build up a tolerance to the poison, you're gonna do fine. So I would say just start slowly, microdose the M&Ms, build up your tolerance, and then you can take a ton of artificial dye. No amount of artificial dye could do anything to me at this point. I have consumed so much Celsius and so many processed foods that I am invincible.

• 2:56:35John Coogan?

  Some people say hubris. Yes, thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. Yes, I'm unkillable by the American food industry.

• 2:56:45Jordi Hays?

  Let's end, let's end the show there. We gotta get on with Taipei.

• 2:56:48John Coogan?

  We do.

• 2:56:49Jordi Hays?

  But we will see you guys tomorrow.

• 2:56:52John Coogan?

  See you tomorrow.

• 2:56:52Jordi Hays?

  This is a great show.

• 2:56:53John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:56:53Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for tuning in.

• 2:56:54John Coogan?

  We'll see you tomorrow.

• 2:56:55Jordi Hays?

  And thank you to the incredible corporations that make the show possible.

• 2:56:58John Coogan?

  Thank you.