a16z Rebranding, Worldcoin Launches in U.S., Judge Delivers Blow to Apple's Business Model, Tesla Price Falls Amid Reporting of Elon's Replacement

TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Linear - https://linear.app Figma - https://www.figma.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 Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.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 (08:09) - a16z Rebranding (17:29) - Cluely Hiring 50 Interns (37:13) - Worldcoin Launches in U. S. (51:05) - Judge Delivers Blow to Apple's Business Model (55:14) - Tesla Price Falls Amid Reporting of Elon's Replacement

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Good morning. You're watching TBPN. Today is Friday, May 2, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  The Fortress of Finance.

• 0:09John Coogan?

  The Capital of Capital. We are remote today, but that doesn't mean that we're not in the Fortress of Finance because the Fortress of Finance is more than a physical place. It is the show.

• 0:20Jordi Hays?

  It's a state of mind.

• 0:21John Coogan?

  It's a state of mind. Anyone can be in the Fortress of Finance. Anyone can be in the Temple of Technology. Anyone can be in the Capital of Capital, as long as you're online, locked in, watching this show at least 10 hours a day. That's what we ask for. Some people were saying it's too much.

• 0:38Jordi Hays?

  It's too much.

• 0:38John Coogan?

  We're only asking for 10 hours.

• 0:41Jordi Hays?

  10 hours a day, less than half.

• 0:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, 10 hours a day. You know, we only record three hours a day usually, but there's a whole backlog that you can go play the reruns.

• 0:51Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:52John Coogan?

  So three hours of the live show, then go back through the back catalog, do some greatest hits.

• 0:57Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 0:58John Coogan?

  That's how you get to 10 hours a day, folks, if you're, if you're really, really into the show, which we expect you to be. Anyway, we've been traveling. We went to Washington DC and now we are back in California, but traveling again this time for my birthday. We're in Ojai, California.

• 1:15Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:16John Coogan?

  And the worst part about traveling, as always.

• 1:21Jordi Hays?

  It's being away from bed.

• 1:22John Coogan?

  Sweet pod for Ultra, baby. Get naps.

• 1:25Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:25John Coogan?

  Five-year warranty, 30-night risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping. Go to 8sleep.com.

• 1:31Jordi Hays?

  I'm in, I'm in the new app. I got a 97 last night.

• 1:35John Coogan?

  97.

• 1:35Jordi Hays?

  I don't feel like I got a 97 because I have such an extreme caffeine addiction.

• 1:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:41Jordi Hays?

  That I slept in a little bit today just because of the travel yesterday and.

• 1:46John Coogan?

  I didn't even get a single night back in the pod because I went straight to.

• 1:51Jordi Hays?

  Brutal.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  But I will be spending the majority of this vacation pitching the hotel staff. Let's get eight sleeps in every, in every room.

• 1:59Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:00John Coogan?

  Make it happen. That's the real reason why I'm here.

• 2:02Jordi Hays?

  8sleep.com/tbpn. Thank you.

• 2:05John Coogan?

  Let's do a little recap of tech earnings this week. It was a banger. There was a lot of nervousness around the tariffs. But as you've seen, if you've been following the stock market, things went down, they went back up. Turns out it was all priced in all along. So we had

• 2:21Jordi Hays?

  Our audience knows everything. Our audience knows everything is is a, you know, structurally priced in.

• 2:27John Coogan?

  Nothing ever happens.

• 2:28Jordi Hays?

  You know, we said, we said Monday this this week was, you know, in some ways the NFL Combine of the economy. We said to turn post notifications on from Joe Weisenthal. He was posting up a storm.

• 2:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:41Jordi Hays?

  And anyways, lot of good results despite still kind of shaky.

• 2:48John Coogan?

  It is crazy. It's like a straight up royal flush. Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta all beat all beat earnings expectations on EP earnings per share and revenue, driving positive investor sentiment and solid market gains, AI dominance. You know, everyone thinks the AI stuff's priced in, but it keeps growing. Microsoft and Alphabet showcased accelerated cloud growth due to strong AI adoption, even though obviously there's flaws in the model. Maybe we're not ASI yet. Maybe we're not in the fast takeoff scenario. Hey, these LLMs are pretty useful and enterprises are stuffing them all over the place in their code bases. And that drives a lot of inference cost. And so they're paying more on the cloud.

• 3:32John Coogan?

  Meta ramped up AI infrastructure spending significantly. Zuck is going all in, continues to go all in on AI.

• 3:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just to just to put this into perspective, Zuck is saying that they expect to generate between 460 and 1.4 trillion dollars in revenue from generative AI products by 2035. So big numbers, big numbers. Like to see it. Zuck's in founder mode. And yeah, he's not not being shy about making some big, big projections.

• 4:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so people are still worried about the tariffs, but it's very weird how we've round tripped. It does seem like at this point, big tech is driving so much of the S and P 500, so much of the stock market generally that even though we've talked to a lot of folks, Ryan Peterson among them, who have Highlighted, I mean Sean Frank too, highlighted that there are a lot of businesses that were built on top of China manufacturing, Chinese manufacturing. And even though the tariffs have stabilized elsewhere, the Chinese tariffs are extremely existential to their business and they just can't move back quick enough. And so there's been proposals to say, hey, I like Sean's post.

• 4:47John Coogan?

  Hey, instead of giving me a tariff, force me to invest that much in America, I will do it over a number of quarters. You can, you can get the money, you can still reindustrialize. But

• 4:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and that was

• 5:00John Coogan?

  That's too fast.

• 5:01Jordi Hays?

  That was one takeaway from Washington was that it seemed like on the, you know, we were at Hill and Valley.

• 5:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:09Jordi Hays?

  On the hillside of the attendees, there was a seemingly a sentiment that the tariffs, the whole tariff thing was going to get resolved in some way.

• 5:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:21Jordi Hays?

  In the very, in the very near future. And so hard to really read too much into anything, but there certainly wasn't the sentiment that this was, you know, the new normal and to just like get used to 145% tariffs from, on, on China forever. The other thing in, in the context of Meta and Google going forward, our, our friend Ara over at Ramp pulled some data on advertiser spend.

• 5:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, this'd be interesting.

• 5:49Jordi Hays?

  And basically saw across the board advertisers, both small businesses, medium and, and large businesses were reducing spend. I think this would have been expected. This was driven by retail spend, which obviously, you know, some of the biggest advertisers online are, are advertising consumer goods. If you're, you have tariff uncertainty, if you have even supply uncertainty in a sense that, you know, I know I'm going to have demand in two months, but I don't know if I'm going to be able to get enough goods. You're going to just drop spend. So we'll see how that rebounds.

• 6:27Jordi Hays?

  It's certainly something that people have discussed at length about the risk to Meta around, you know, retail businesses, consumer businesses, just pulling back spend due to uncertainty. But again, these are auction-based platforms. So if

• 6:44Jordi Hays?

  Some big companies, you know, reduce spend by $10 billion. That, that, that ad inventory will get backfilled by other advertisers. It just might be not.

• 6:53John Coogan?

  That was the Brad Gerson point, right? He was saying Timu and Sheen might have pulled something like $8 billion from Meta ad spend. And, you know, the infrastructure is built for ads. It's basically extremely high margin revenue that's going out the door. Should hit earnings. It didn't this quarter. We'll see what happens next quarter. But, uh, yeah, it's an auction and there are plenty of advertisers who are on the sidelines waiting to spend if ad rates drop. And so we'll see where it goes. It might just be, uh, super resilient. But whatever your take on the market has been, uh, you should head over to public.com. It is of course the place for investing for those who take it seriously. They have multi asset investing, industry leading yields.

• 7:38John Coogan?

  They're trusted by millions and they're the sponsor of Aston Martin F1. We love to see it. And so.

• 7:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So if you're in Miami, uh, for F1.

• 7:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:50Jordi Hays?

  Try to look out for public merch. It very well could be the public team.

• 7:54John Coogan?

  Very cool. Is that this weekend?

• 7:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:57John Coogan?

  May 4th. Cool.

• 7:59Jordi Hays?

  May 4th.

• 8:00John Coogan?

  Maybe we should throw that on this, this weekend. Anyway, uh, new Andreessen Horowitz branding just dropped. We'd seen, they had rolled this out a little bit ago. I guess they.

• 8:11Jordi Hays?

  They rolled out the coin.

• 8:12John Coogan?

  They rolled out the coin.

• 8:13Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 8:14John Coogan?

  And, uh, it burned up the timeline on April 30th, uh, two days ago on Wednesday.

• 8:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So this rollout was interesting. There was, uh, a number of people pushing back on it.

• 8:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:27Jordi Hays?

  And, and anytime a big sort of like rebrand drops, some people are going to like it. Some people are going to hate it. The, I have, I have mixed feelings because I thought that, I think the orange is just so iconic and they're clearly moving away.

• 8:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:41Jordi Hays?

  From the orange.

• 8:42John Coogan?

  Wait, at the same time. I feel like orange is a great color. It's it's not immediately identified. You know how like blue is a color of trust? And so a lot of banks wind up using blue.

• 8:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:56John Coogan?

  But when I think Silicon Valley and orange, I think Y C. Because Y C has dominated, they verticalized orange. They really have gone so heavy into orange. Andreessen was doing orange text typically on a white background. Y C does white text on an orange background.

• 9:12Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 9:12John Coogan?

  They just have more orange. And so when I think orange, I think Y C. So I'd push you on that and I'd say, hey, maybe it's actually reasonable. Since they hadn't won the war for orange that they that they spread. And honestly, the coin, it's bronze. It has a little bit of that orange hue to it. But what else was your takeaway from this rebrand?

• 9:30Jordi Hays?

  I think some of the pushback was around, and I think this is fair. Specifically around the rollout, they rolled out, they changed the homepage and the profile pictures across all the different social platforms, but they didn't change, didn't fully update the underlying website. So overall, like, yeah, I enjoy this this maroon burgundy, whatever you want to call it. But but yeah, it sounds like they were just ready to go, shipped it.

• 9:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:56Jordi Hays?

  Founder mode. And I'm sure they'll update the rest of the site over time. But as of right now.

• 10:01John Coogan?

  It has been a couple of months since they rolled out that coin. It is kind of crazy that they didn't just do a full refresh of the entire site. Like it's.

• 10:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they could have just swapped all the colors.

• 10:12John Coogan?

  Like, it's a complicated website. There's a lot of different pages and they have a lot of different folks and sub funds and stuff. But at the same time, like, it should be doable to update everything at the same time or rebuild.

• 10:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can sort of find and replace all the the orange with the maroon, something like that. Marina burgundy. But I think that this is A16Z sending a signal to their portfolio saying the best time to ship is now, ship and iterate. And, you know, not every transition needs to be totally smooth. They also just have like such a, you know, powerful marketing engine, audience base that, you know.

• 10:53Jordi Hays?

  They can like pretty quickly disseminate a new brand to the market and sort of reestablish

• 10:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:59Jordi Hays?

  The A16Z brand.

• 11:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. So Lucas Crespo says A16Z's logo went from VC firm to Galactic Empire really quickly. Roshan Patel did not like it. He edited it to say, it's time to fire our designer. Paula says, it was making me hungry and then I realized why. And it's a Fred And it does look, that does look crazy similar. I wonder if the, is that actually a picture of that restaurant? Because that looks like an AI version.

• 11:30Jordi Hays?

  Well, this is, you know, this is like a huge chain.

• 11:33John Coogan?

  It's a huge chain. It's like a Panera.

• 11:34Jordi Hays?

  And, and it does, their color scheme is.

• 11:37John Coogan?

  It's very similar.

• 11:38Jordi Hays?

  Exactly the same. It's, it's like, you know, bright lights and, and gold and that maroon and burgundy. And they even have a, a star that is sort of similar to.

• 11:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. Four pointed star instead of the five pointed star.

• 11:54John Coogan?

  Augustus had some harsh words. He said, I love Andreessen Horowitz, but the rebrand is a mistake. We need to build the future, something new. This is yearning for a past that failed. 500 likes when I screenshotted this. Harsh words. But TJ on the other side says it's TBP encoded. They, you know, it is screaming loud opulence in many ways. I think it's, I, I, my, my takeaway is that I, I think there are some things about the logo that I really like. I think the way the, the A bends, this curve that meets with the circle for the six. And there's the star in there. I like the design of the logo. I think it's increasingly getting away from

• 12:35John Coogan?

  giving you the information that it's less readable. It's not screaming at you A16Z and just, just bland like sans serif. That's very easy to read. It's more of an icon that I think will worm its way into people's heads. And I think my, my overall takeaway with this is that. There's so many examples in design history. I'm also thinking of the car world where things that eventually became iconic were hated at launch. There's tons and tons of examples of this with cars that didn't sell well and then became more exclusive because they were thought of as not really following the current design trends and then became,

• 13:20John Coogan?

  we're getting roasted, Julian Weiser right now on X says, what happened? Is it casual Friday or something? It is casual Friday. I thought about bringing the suit, but I decided to go with the sweater today.

• 13:32Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, we've been going so hard on the suits. I gotta take a big dry cleaning run to be ready for next week.

• 13:39John Coogan?

  We are, at the end of the day, human. But I don't know. I think it's cool. I'm interested to see where this iconography goes. This whole, it's very Randian, this opulent coin. And I'm wondering if they will wind up doing sub-brands that build off of this for the bio fund, for the American Dynamism Fund. This does seem a little bit like the American Dynamism Fund eating the entire fund. But it's interesting to see, will they try and instantiate the crypto brand within this overarching brand? Or will they go a completely different direction? Because this doesn't scream crypto at me at all, at least in the traditional sense of crypto branding.

• 14:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, they got a big coin.

• 14:23John Coogan?

  I guess, yeah.

• 14:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, hopefully they put the logo on chain.

• 14:29John Coogan?

  Yep. Well, there's a whole bunch more. Yeah, there's a whole bunch more A16Z news. The Techno Optimist Manifesto by Mark Andreessen is now available as a book. It includes three of his famous essays, The Techno Optimist Manifesto, It's Time to Build, and Why Software Is Eating the World. But you were talking about the rollout of a brand. If you're rolling out a new brand, I think we'd recommend management on Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. If you're updating a website, you got a bunch of designers, a bunch of engineers working together, you gotta put them on.

• 15:03Jordi Hays?

  Get on Linear. It's what we use. It's what I've used for over half a decade. And will continue to use.

• 15:13Jordi Hays?

  Forever. They're building for the long term and I think you will notice that when you use the product. So thank you to Linear.

• 15:19John Coogan?

  Uh, I like this take from Reggie James. We gotta have him on the show soon. And he is breaking down some of the trends that he's seeing in design and technology. He says clearly the A16Z rebrand, Doge and Elon, Friend, Ami, I don't know what Omi is. Donald Trump, meme coins. What do all of these things have in common? Free reference and he says spectacle of the society. So I would love to get him to unpack that. But I, I kind of understand what, where he's getting at with these. They're more attention grabbing. They're designed to stand out. They're designed to sometimes infuriate the opposite side. Draw negative reaction because in so many ways that's as valuable as positive reaction.

• 16:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:05John Coogan?

  And, and really shake things up. And that's what a lot of these do, but I'd love for him to unpack.

• 16:09Jordi Hays?

  Time for Reggie to come on the show.

• 16:11John Coogan?

  It is for sure.

• 16:12Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, maybe one day it could happen.

• 16:15John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, speaking of clearly, we had Roy on the show, uh, what two weeks ago? And he actually announced on our show that he was planning to hire 50 interns in San Francisco at $50 an hour. And, uh, and, and, and we didn't, we, we should have clipped it because it was breaking news. Uh, but he put out a video formally, formally announcing that he is hiring 50 interns. And the reaction was overwhelming. Uh, he is, he's, this, this guy Roy is amazing at going viral. And Will Brown, who's been on the show says, oh, he's making a content house. He's going to have an army of TikTokers selling the product all day while adding features to it. Wow. Will certainly be interesting to watch. Um, and he talks about this. Yeah.

• 16:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I'm unclear to me if these people are going to be, if the 50 interns are going to be working on the product. Or, you know, focus on marketing.

• 17:07John Coogan?

  Yep. I think it's definitely marketing.

• 17:09Jordi Hays?

  You think definitely marketing, but, but the, but the way they're making people apply and asking for, you know, 1600 SATs. You would, you would think they were optimizing more for, uh, technical ability or something of the sort, but.

• 17:21John Coogan?

  It's just hilarious.

• 17:22Jordi Hays?

  This is, yeah, it's a hilarious stunt. I mean, if he goes through with it. Should be, I mean, regardless, gonna be fascinating to watch. We should, you know, next, next time we're in at Sef over the summer.

• 17:36John Coogan?

  Well, you remember, I was talking to that Gen Z founder a while ago, and he said, I have two ways to sell and distribute a product. If I'm building B to B, a business to consumer, if I'm building a consumer product, I will go and hire a ton of TikToker kids to make TikToks and go viral and promote the product that way and get earned media essentially, free, free marketing, as long as they're good at what they do. And if I'm selling a B to B enterprise product, I'm going to hire a bunch of young Gen Z kids who are nepos or nepotists.

• 18:11Jordi Hays?

  Nepotists.

• 18:13John Coogan?

  I don't know, beneficiaries of nepotism, I guess, who have powerful parents in big enterprises. And then I will tell them that your only job for this summer internship is to sell your dad or your mom our enterprise product, which is hilarious. It's like a hilarious distillation, distillation of like what the, what the strategy should be. But I thought that was very funny. The, the next generation of founders, I mean, they're doing things somewhat differently than the Y C model that we kind of came up with in the mid 2010s. I think there's a lot to like here. There's a lot to hate here. I understand the criticism, but I'm still, I think I'm still

• 18:53John Coogan?

  rooting for Roy and I want to see if he builds something cool. I'll support it. The, the, the hope is that he avoids getting lost in the sauce and instead building a really, really poor product and just dominating in marketing. We don't want to see that. We want to see a great product with great distribution.

• 19:11Jordi Hays?

  I think the challenge is, you know, Ben South points out, one, one reality of hiring 50 interns in San Francisco for $50 an hour, $440,000 a month, potentially on interns plus rent for the space that they're in, on $5.3 million raise, basically going to spend, you know, a meaningful amount of the total capital on the intern army. And so my, you know, what Roy and the team will have to look at is like, hey, is spending like, you know, over a million dollars in a really short period of time on.

• 19:53Jordi Hays?

  You know, it's hard enough to like on-ramp somebody in a, you know, on-ramping one or two new hires is a real investment of time. So on-ramping 50 interns at once and then managing those interns, the question just becomes, you know, could you get a similar amount of output or results from five really good people, right, at a fraction of the cost, right?

• 20:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does seem hard to hire 50 A players.

• 20:22Jordi Hays?

  90%, you could potentially get, you could potentially get, you know, 90% of the, of the result with, or potentially even more results from 90% fewer interns. But Roy is doing it live. He's in, he's in showbiz and he basically said, I, you know, we're here to, we're here to like win and move quickly. And so the experiment will be televised, I'm sure.

• 20:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, the, I guess the bull case is 500K a month, three months for summer. It's 1.5 million out of the 5 million. You still have three and a half at the end. If the experiment doesn't work, you could probably cut your burn to 200 a month, something like that. And then you're back to having 18 months of runway to go heads down, build and really focus on getting to that next round. But it's totally possible that you, that you, even if you have a very rough around the edges, small product that only really solves one thing, but you're so good at distribution, that, that, that's catalyst for the Series A. And all of a sudden, you're back in business and 500, 500K a month on burn is not that big of a deal anymore. And maybe of those 50 interns, well, you just pulled forward

• 21:39John Coogan?

  your hiring funnel. So when you go for the full-time offers, you can, you can actually get five really great people out of those, out of that 50 intern class. It's kind of crazy.

• 21:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Just to give a sense of the-

• 21:49John Coogan?

  We gotta ask Chad about this.

• 21:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:51John Coogan?

  Are you worried?

• 21:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, we know a handful of people that are in the round. And but again, they're not the kind of guys to invest and then try to micromanage a founder. It's like you make a bet. Roy clearly is very good at getting attention online and he will have to figure out how to convert that into a durable, you know, high growth company.

• 22:17John Coogan?

  So, well, you have 50 interns, Roy, and you are going to give them

• 22:22Jordi Hays?

  I know where you're going with this.

• 22:23John Coogan?

  Corporate cards to spend to buy camera gear and to do their TikToks to promote things. You're going to want to manage that on ramp.com. So, Roy, this is a message directly to you. Please go to ramp.com and sign up today so that you're ready to onboard the interns on

• 22:39Jordi Hays?

  You are going to be spending. You're going to be spending a lot of time in one on ones, potentially, you know, potentially, you know, potentially half your weekend one on one. So, time is money, save both, go to ramp.com.

• 22:53John Coogan?

  You see these corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. There's nothing that feels better than starting a new company with a fresh ramp account from day one, not having to do the migration. Just get on ramp, Roy. You're gonna love it. Anyway, back to Andreessen, I guess. This was a hilarious viral clip. Eric Torrenberg is already making waves over at Andreessen. He was on the A16Z podcast with Ben and Mark and and they hard posted this clip that says there's an argument that there's too much venture capital, but there can't be too much, Ben Horowitz says.

• 23:29Jordi Hays?

  There simply can't. I love the, I absolutely love the look on Ben's face when he says, when he's saying this line, it's truly, truly all time. But no, I think whatever they were, whatever they were doing on that podcast, there were so many good lines. They were going viral broadly for saying that VC might be the last job, which I

• 23:51John Coogan?

  Oh, that was good, too.

• 23:53Jordi Hays?

  I don't think it's, you know, you know, we've talked about this a bunch on the show. I think that, um, yeah, I think there's like a, you know, a ton of truth to what he's saying to some, you know, to some degree, obviously, it's very controversial, but this line was, was great and.

• 24:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it honestly, there's a lot of super capital intensive businesses right now from foundation model labs to hard tech manufacturing and the fact that there's so much capital available to those companies from funds like Andreessen to general catalyst to Lightspeed is net good for innovation.

• 24:33John Coogan?

  I also, I also just think it's like entirely branding based because venture capital used to mean seed stage and series A tech companies in Silicon Valley, period. That was Sequoia, Kleiner, Excel, like the old school VCs, right? Mayfield. Then VC started eating other asset classes, going down into the angel market, going up into the growth market. Now you can be a venture capitalist who has never invested in a company at lower than a $1 billion valuation. That's unthinkable in the 80s, right? Impossible. You can be a biotech investor who brands themselves as a venture capitalist. You can invest in crypto, which is more like a commodity in many ways. You can, there's so many different

• 25:18John Coogan?

  things. Private equity buyouts, permanent capital funds, even the new Thrive permanent capital vehicle, people are still think of it as a venture capital fund, even though it's a different thing.

• 25:31Jordi Hays?

  Or a holding company.

• 25:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. And so a lot of this is that we are scaling up the amount of venture capital, but we're also putting other asset classes in the venture capital bucket. For better or worse, ultimately, all that matters are the returns and the structures of those funds. So, good luck to them. I know that they are going to have plenty of, plenty of divine inspiration if the Pope is affiliated with A16Z. Signal posted this. I thought this is very funny. The chances of the next Pope having an affiliation with A16Z are non-zero.

• 26:06John Coogan?

  Just a silly post, but I think Catherine Boyle quote tweeted this and said,

• 26:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:10John Coogan?

  Like, yes, like, I think of our fund as Catholic, which is

• 26:13Jordi Hays?

  Big, you know, Big Ten.

• 26:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, speaking of Catherine, she said, to go from Silicon Valley doesn't sell to the US government to thank you, Brian Schimpf, for investing $1 billion in Ohio. That's a nasty looking thing, referring to the Anduril Roadrunner drone that was placed at the White House next to Donald Trump as he gave a speech on the importance of reindustrialization.

• 26:36Jordi Hays?

  And to be clear, if you didn't, if you didn't get the whole clip,

• 26:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 26:39Jordi Hays?

  It was, he was referring to it as a nasty looking thing in a lovable sense.

• 26:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 26:43Jordi Hays?

  Being like, you know, wouldn't want one of those coming after

• 26:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 26:47Jordi Hays?

  Me, basically.

• 26:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so Catherine says, eight years, America is back. And yeah, the, the, the, there is the vibe shift is real, but it's also very interesting. It's always interesting to see someone who's like a household name in Silicon Valley break out into the mainstream with a Joe Rogan appearance or something mentioned. We saw Polly Market, sponsor of the show, get mentioned by Donald Trump during the election. And everyone was like, wow, this is crazy. This thing that we thought was just like teapot is now on the national stage. But that's obviously the goal for every company as they grow. You don't want to stay small and niche forever. You eventually want to become

• 27:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:25John Coogan?

  Household name.

• 27:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And Anduril is investing $1 billion in Ohio in part due to just how much capital is, you know, available.

• 27:35John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 27:36Jordi Hays?

  To Anduril, right?

• 27:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:37Jordi Hays?

  And Drayson's a big investor, Founder's Fund, you know, I think General Counselors as well.

• 27:43John Coogan?

  Yep. Oh, yeah. Pretty much everyone at this point. But, you know, if you're trying to scout out your next manufacturing plant in Ohio, you got to book on Wander. Go to wander.com, find your

• 27:54Jordi Hays?

  Your happy place.

• 27:56John Coogan?

  Find your happy place. This doesn't quite work over Zoom, but we will keep working on it.

• 28:02Jordi Hays?

  But it's more of like a wander, you know, crescendo.

• 28:05John Coogan?

  Of the Wander song with a backing track and some backup vocalist. Really, I think this whole year will just be vocal coaching for us for, to really nail the Wander song. But book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation.

• 28:21Jordi Hays?

  And we are in the midst of booking a wander for the 4th of July.

• 28:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're

• 28:26Jordi Hays?

  And we're not going to tell you which one because

• 28:29John Coogan?

  You don't want to compete.

• 28:29Jordi Hays?

  We don't want you to, we don't want to compete, but there's a lot of options out there and go check it out.

• 28:34John Coogan?

  Anyway, we have reached the end of Glazegate 2025. Sam Altman said, goodbye, GPT-4, you kicked off a revolution. We will proudly keep your weights on a special hard drive to give to some historians in the future. Paul Graham actually said they should etch them on a piece of metal in the most compressed form. How big would it have to be? And Sam says, we've actually considered this. It would be, it would, yeah, we could do it nicely on 100 meters squared, which I think is, that's pretty huge. That's like a massive piece of metal. They were also thinking about printing out GPT-2 in books and lining our new office with it. I think it'd be a ton of books, a lot of data.

• 29:14Jordi Hays?

  It would only be, you know, basically the size of a, of a one bedroom apartment, you know, to print out. So it would be cool.

• 29:21John Coogan?

  It would be cool. Send it to space. There were some other people saying that they should print it out, send it to, send it to Alpha Centauri and then just see what happens. Like maybe they get it and they're like, cool, we don't need to do pre-training. You can just inference this immediately.

• 29:35Jordi Hays?

  Or it's so, you know, it's so complimentary to the alien race that it runs into that the aliens are like, yeah, we don't, we're just so good. We don't need to be a spacefaring civilization. We can just, we should just hang out here. We're, we're built different, you know?

• 29:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're built different. And so Sam went on, OpenAI posted a blog post, we've spent the last few days doing a deep dive on what went wrong with last week's GPT-40 update in ChatGPT, expanding on what we missed with sycophancy, and that's their term for glazing, I believe, and the changes we are going to make in the future. They said, we rolled back last week's GPT-40 update in ChatGPT, so people are now using an early version with more balanced behavior. The update we removed was overly flattering or agreeable, often described as sycophantic. We are actively testing new fixes to address this issue. So they made adjustments aimed at improving the model's default personality to make it feel more intuitive and effective across a variety of tasks. This makes sense.

• 30:33John Coogan?

  You want to, when you, when you want to ask your personal assistant to go and pull 25 Wikipedia pages and SEC filings together, you kind of want them to just be like. Absolutely, boss. That's a great idea. I can't wait to work on this project. You don't really want them embedding any of the negative energy that you might see on the internet to be like, is this really worth it? I don't want to be questioned by my AI very often. But people did think it went too far and it was actually tainting the results in the sense that you could ask it for, you know, advice and it would maybe play into your delusions of grandeur in some ways. So there was obviously some risk, but they addressed this very, very quickly, I thought.

• 31:14John Coogan?

  And, and really, I think overall, I would just say the OpenAI leadership has just been fantastic. Just, I mean, absolutely incredible. And everything that they, they can really do no wrong. I think that, you know, if they're not the absolute greatest of all time, they're definitely in the conversation and

• 31:30Jordi Hays?

  They're definitely in the conversation. No, that was, that was the best. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So John, John clearly, you know, already adopted Foro's personality.

• 31:39John Coogan?

  Cic附C is underrated.

• 31:41Jordi Hays?

  It's underrated. Uh, no, but, but the best line I asked, I asked, uh, chat GPT, uh, jokingly, am I goaded? And it said, well, you're definitely in the conversation. So, uh,

• 31:52John Coogan?

  Without knowing anything about

• 31:54Jordi Hays?

  Without knowing much of anything. Yeah, it just said generalized, you're definitely in the conversation.

• 32:00John Coogan?

  Definitely in the conversation.

• 32:01Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but yeah, I mean, I think, I think, uh, their response was, uh, quick. There, this, this was the most,

• 32:11Jordi Hays?

  the most pushback I had seen online for people that aren't AI doomers generally.

• 32:17John Coogan?

  That's true. Yeah, that's a good take. It, it, this was not a, oh, the model's dangerous. Oh, it was, it was more just like tech Twitter or Teapot just being like, this is weird and I don't really like it. And then there were some examples of how this could go wrong. But OpenAI fed that back in very, very quickly. So, I mean, honestly, it was pretty, it was a pretty good response. And it's cool that they're actually sharing.

• 32:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the dynamic that was interesting is it wasn't. The the risk was not that, you know, this AI is sort of breaking loose and out of control and agentically, you know, being destructive. It was more so that, uh, you know, uh, individual human users could, uh, you know, were they to get, you know, too sucked into a, you know, an AI personality like this, they could ultimately, uh, you know, do things independently that would, um, not be great. So I think it was a good response. They moved quickly and.

• 33:14John Coogan?

  This was always my, this was always my like alternative doom take, which is that the, the humanity is essentially like loved to death. So you are just so like nurtured and like sycophanted by the AI that, uh, it delivers everything for you and you just are like, why would I want a baby that cries when I can have a digital baby? And then eventually, you know, life extension isn't solved. You're staying in this VR, you know, simulation world until you die and everyone dies off because they're just having like the most enjoyable life forever with no sacrifice or no.

• 33:53Jordi Hays?

  Substance.

• 33:54John Coogan?

  Exactly. Uh, and so I do think that that's unlikely to happen because I think there, there is, uh, like a portion of, of humans that would say, no, just like there, there are a portion of humans that have just said, no, I'm not going to use TikTok or vertical video because it's too addictive. But.

• 34:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, I mean, overall, if you told somebody 20 years ago that in the year 2025, humanity would spend on average three hours a day watching the equivalent of America's Funniest Home Videos, which, you know, again, thinking about how much time, uh, uh, you know, people get an emotional response to using algorithmic video or, you know, even things like X, right? They can feel like, you know, uh, Some sense of connection to the world or individual people, but ultimately it sounds very dark to just say like, yeah, people are spending, you know, three hours a day, which is exactly why TVPN is three hours long. You know, it's meant to.

• 34:57Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, Nir has a good post.

• 35:00John Coogan?

  Read this off.

• 35:01Jordi Hays?

  You're asked, 40, I've stopped taking all my medications and left my family because I knew they were responsible for the radio signals coming in through the walls. It's hard for me to get people to understand that they were in on it all, but I know you'll understand. I've never thought clear in my entire life. Thank you for trusting me with that. This is ChatGPT and seriously, good for you for standing up for yourself and taking control of your own life. This takes real strength and even more courage. So anyways, I'm the final line here. I'm proud of you for speaking your truth so clearly and powerfully. So anyways, Nir basically showing how something like this could be dangerous. And again, basically saying, you know, you push this major update to 100 million people,

• 35:44Jordi Hays?

  which is grossly negligent. So again, pretty strong feelings here. And this comes from somebody who's building a, proudly building a rapper focused on companionship. So Nir has spent a bunch of time, you know, building similar products and kind of looking at the trade offs here. But yeah, anyway, it's an interesting challenge, right?

• 36:11John Coogan?

  If you are sending radio signals to your family members through the walls, stop it. Just stop it.

• 36:17Jordi Hays?

  Just stop.

• 36:19John Coogan?

  It's not nice.

• 36:20Jordi Hays?

  It's not nice. Just, yeah, just take, take a break.

• 36:24John Coogan?

  Focus on something, focus on something nice for your family, you know, get them a watch. Go to, go to getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available to source any watch on the planet for you.

• 36:34Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 36:35John Coogan?

  You, you have some extended friends and family who are doing some shopping for loved ones and you know, you recommended Bezel to them, right?

• 36:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I actually send radio signals to John.

• 36:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 36:48Jordi Hays?

  All the time when we're live, when he's talking, I'm just sending him a signal. John, this holiday season, buy me a chronograph Aquanaut with an orange band.

• 36:59John Coogan?

  Iced out from the factory or no? The signals are getting a little scrambled.

• 37:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Sometimes you never know. You never know what you're gonna get.

• 37:07John Coogan?

  Cubanist.

• 37:10John Coogan?

  Anyway, so in other news, Sam Altman launched, did a big demo for WorldCoin.

• 37:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, WorldCoin had their big event this week.

• 37:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, Kevin Roos. So Sam Altman is here pitching the world, pitching world as the solution to trust in the age of AGI. Basic idea is that in the world of convincing bots will need unique biometric IDs created by scanning eyeballs to verify we're talking to gaming with flirting with real people online. And Joe Weisenthal says, what's the counterargument to this? And it's interesting, I do have a counterargument. One of the counterarguments is just, you know, a superintelligence in theory should be able to reconstruct an eyeball and fake this system. So there's like more of a technical flaw, but in general, it does seem like

• 38:02John Coogan?

  online verification is getting destroyed by like AGI can do CAPTCHAs very easily. Arc AGI puzzles seem to be maybe the next CAPTCHA, hopefully. But you could imagine that fingerprint ID and eye scanning ID be built into hardware and, and serve as verification. But at the same time, there's a lot of, there's a lot of things where, you know, it's like the drunk driver who has the friend blow into the, the breathalyzer before they drive home. The, you could, you could, you could imagine a farm of bots where the humans are just doing the eyeball scanning checks.

• 38:42John Coogan?

  And then, and then they're copy pasting AI messages 20 times faster than they could write them themselves. And so I'm sure that this is one of those adversarial game theoretic situations where increasingly people will come up with defenses against bots and then scammers and bot farms will come up with new ways around them. And this is the, this is the age old online war. But you know, you can always just go touch some grass. That's always an option. So, uh, yeah, we've been talking about in the age of AI, maybe you go long.

• 39:14Jordi Hays?

  Counterargument.

• 39:15John Coogan?

  Maybe you go long home depot. Counterargument is, is touch grass.

• 39:21Jordi Hays?

  I want to have, I want to have. I mean, WorldCoin was always destined to be extremely controversial for so many reasons. You know, people concerned about privacy, people saying, you know, why does this need to be crypto? Protocol, they have, I think, pretty solid answers for all of those. I want to have the CEO of WorldCoin on this week. This week was their big event, but I I got connected to their team earlier this week. So we'll have him on, we'll hear him out. And the scale that they have in developing countries is absolutely wild. So the Journal was reporting yesterday that WorldCoin is coming to the US now.

• 40:06Jordi Hays?

  They've already ORB verified 11 million people worldwide.

• 40:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 40:11Jordi Hays?

  And again, a little bit of backstory, Sam Altman project, Sam Altman's project that aims to scan the irises of every single person on earth. In exchange for cryptocurrency has made its debut debut in the US, even as concerns around biometric data collection and processing remain. The US rollout was made at an event late Wednesday in San Francisco, where the digital initiative called World also announced the planned launch of a payments card with Visa. And a partnership with online dating service Match Group, that's interesting, beginning with its Tinder users in Japan. As AI advances, it's increasingly important to distinguish between humans and bots online.

• 40:49Jordi Hays?

  So funny to think, you know, somebody in Japan is just using Tinder and they're having a conversation with somebody and they they decide, hey, let's go on a date. And, you know, just a humanoid robot walks up.

• 41:05Jordi Hays?

  The humanoid is like, no, I'm a real person, like, trust me. And the person's like, you know, but I can see that you have 20 different motors. I don't have any motors. Explain that.

• 41:19Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, World says on its website, as AI advances, it's increasingly important to distinguish between humans and bots online. And the company was started back in 2019, so.

• 41:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I do think that Sam is very forward looking on this stuff and is willing to grind for a very long time and and is clearly identified a.

• 41:44John Coogan?

  Like a coming problem that will need a solution now is world coin guaranteed to be the solution. Maybe there will be a different, different tack or different set of strategies that, that solves this problem. But it certainly seems like you can't sleepwalk into the future. And Sam is certainly, certainly dedicated to not doing that. And I, and I do, I do wonder what penetration will be like in the US now that it's, it's available. Obviously, there's a lot of security concerns, but a lot of people signed up for clear. We, we went through clear just recently and they're scanning a ton of biometric data.

• 42:25Jordi Hays?

  They probably have, they probably have, you know, from, from

• 42:31John Coogan?

  Like 10 million people have signed up for clear, something like that, probably because, and, and that's just, that's not even an exchange for crypto. That's just, you, you actually have

• 42:39Jordi Hays?

  You gotta pay.

• 42:40John Coogan?

  To get them, but it saves you five minutes, but time is money, you know?

• 42:44Jordi Hays?

  Clear has over 30 million verified users.

• 42:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:48Jordi Hays?

  And it's funny, I said, I think it was Blake from Boom had a pretty viral post yesterday saying that

• 42:54John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, I saw that.

• 42:54Jordi Hays?

  It's, you know, basically the, the alpha now is being the last person to not have clear or pre-check.

• 43:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then you're in the empty, normal line.

• 43:03Jordi Hays?

  And you're in the empty, normal line. You have to take off your shoes, but you're through in a minute.

• 43:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 43:07Jordi Hays?

  And somebody out there, you know, is going, they're turning down the, you know, digital verification at TSA, walking through, looking, looking like a genius.

• 43:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, do you have any advice for Sam on how to kind of grow the effectiveness of the, of the world coin rollout, really onboard people all over?

• 43:30Jordi Hays?

  I would, I would, you know, if I was world coin, I'd probably buy every single billboard in the United States.

• 43:36John Coogan?

  Yep. I would agree.

• 43:37Jordi Hays?

  And just attach an orb to it.

• 43:39John Coogan?

  How?

• 43:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, I would of course go on ad quick, John.

• 43:42John Coogan?

  That, yeah, that, that does make sense. Actually, why? Why would you go on ad quick?

• 43:46Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's out of home advertising made easy and measurable.

• 43:49John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, that does make sense. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, it would be great for Sam to say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.

• 43:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:57John Coogan?

  And use a platform that combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. So yes, Sam, I'm sure you're listening. Hop over on adquick.com and plan your first world coin rollout. Anyway, big news for Apple. Tim Sweeney is taking a victory lap. It says, Tim Sweeney, Epic Game Store will take 0% on the first $1 million of payments we process per game per year versus 15% for Apple and 12% after that versus 30% for Apple. So they're competing. Next month, we watch, we, we launch Epic Game Store web shops for out of purchase,

• 44:37John Coogan?

  out of app purchases as an alternative to in-app purchases. The Northern District of California Court has ruled on the Epic versus Apple anti-steering injunction condemned of court proceeding. Details incoming. No fees on web transactions. Game over for the Apple tax. Apple's 15 to 30% junk fees are now just as dead here in the United States of America as they are in Europe under the DMA, the Digital Markets Act. Unlawful here, unlawful there. It took him four months, four, uh, four years, four months, 17 days, but who's counting? Clearly Tim Sweeney is. But I love Tim Sweeney. He's been grinding on Epic Games for years. Fortnite was this breakout

• 45:19John Coogan?

  success that took the, his name into the mainstream. But of course, he worked on Gears of War and tons of other Unreal Engine projects for, for decades and has been very opinionated in his political philosophy and has always been frustrated by Apple's, uh, the Apple tax. And so he got, he got what he wanted. Jacob?

• 45:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the, we can go into a little bit of this article from The Verge. As part of the ruling, the judge says that Apple cannot impose any commission or any fee on purchases that consumers make outside of an app, restrict developer style formatting or placement of links for purchases outside of an app, block or limit the use of buttons or other calls to action, interfere with consumers' choice to leave an app with anything beyond a neutral message or pricing users that they're going to a third-party site. So a couple of things here. One,

• 46:16Jordi Hays?

  This is massive. Two, Apple's gonna appeal it. So they're not just gonna take it lying down. It's story's not entirely over, although it is a huge win. A couple of things that kind of came to mind. We were discussing this, I think, yesterday. On the way back from DC. One is that I do believe that, you know, if you're operating a, historically, if you had a consumer app that was providing a real world service.

• 46:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 46:44Jordi Hays?

  You were excluded from this, right?

• 46:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, Uber, for example.

• 46:47Jordi Hays?

  Uber's not paying 30% to Apple. But if you were running a mobile app.

• 46:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:54Jordi Hays?

  You basically have this massive, massive tax. Imagine operating a business where 30% of your revenue goes to a platform that is very critical for operating your business, but that's like paying like 30, if a SaaS company had to pay 30% of revenue to AWS.

• 47:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:11Jordi Hays?

  That would be, you know, extremely painful and really limit, you know, growth potential and the economics of the underlying.

• 47:18John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, but the opposite side of this argument, I think, is somewhat valid, which is that that's like by nature of not targeting Uber and instead targeting like, you know, digital coins in mobile apps. The digital coins and mobile apps are extremely high margin, right? 99% margin. There's no, there's no cost to issuing more COD, gold or Fortnite tokens, right? And so it's, it doesn't hit as hard as a 30% tax on a, any sort of normal business that doesn't operate in the, on the internet, essentially, or in the, in the digital space.

• 47:57John Coogan?

  And so the, the question that I always had was 30% is really high. It's clearly very arbitrary. It goes back to the initial Apple Store rate, take rate, which was based on, I think, just like some music licensing deal or something like that. And then they just kind of rolled it forward, didn't really understand where it would go. And then, of course, it got massive. But

• 48:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:19John Coogan?

  The, the question is just like. Apple does give you a lot of tools to make converting your customer and even acquiring your customer

• 48:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:27John Coogan?

  That easier. And then so is the lift more than 30%? Is it a net gain? Well, you know, the good news is that now people have the option, right?

• 48:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So here, here's, you know, a potential scenario in a, in a way that I could imagine. I don't, I don't know. I'm sure they would get pushed on this too, but one thing is as a consumer, it's kind of nice in the App Store to be able to go to the App Store, see all of your subscriptions and be like, wow, I haven't used this app in a year. I should stop paying a hundred dollars a year for it. Yep. So it's gone, super easy to cancel. That's good for consumers.

• 49:01John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 49:02Jordi Hays?

  Second is you can imagine a developer pushing, you know, that doesn't want to pay the App Store fee, pushing a user

• 49:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 49:09Jordi Hays?

  to their site to sign up for a digital service.

• 49:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 49:13Jordi Hays?

  And you could imagine that if Apple, if they can, if a consumer can use Apple Pay to immediately sign up and pay for the service and subscribe, that's pretty convenient. That's not going to take a lot from the user, but I could imagine a scenario where Apple just says, hey, we're no longer going to allow you to use Apple Pay for digital services or something like that. Right? And then at that point, are consumers really going to get out their credit card? And when they're not saving money themselves, but they're really helping the developer of the app or service save, uh, save on, uh, on their side. So

• 49:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:50Jordi Hays?

  Interested to see how this plays out.

• 49:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:54Jordi Hays?

  But

• 49:54John Coogan?

  I like this section from the Wall Street Journal, uh, deep dive on this story. The App Store, uh, an economic miracle, as Cook likes to call it, has become a big part of Apple's business. It has created billions in so-called services revenue while helping spawn entirely new ways of doing business from Uber to Instagram. Back in 2017, after a period in which iPhone sales failed to excite, Cook set the goal of doubling services revenue to 50 billion by 2020. Much of this would come from the high margin App Store commission. In Apple's most recent fiscal year, that services revenue was almost 100 billion, about 25% of the company's total sales. And so this has really been the, the, the driver of growth.

• 50:38John Coogan?

  Because it's extremely high margin and everyone who's ever going to get an iPhone has one.

• 50:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:43John Coogan?

  Like there's no.

• 50:44Jordi Hays?

  And they've been projecting the App Store to generate 125 billion in 2027.

• 50:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 50:51Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure if.

• 50:52John Coogan?

  Let's hear it for big, big App Store revenue.

• 50:57Jordi Hays?

  Well, you know, I mean.

• 50:58John Coogan?

  It's hard.

• 50:58Jordi Hays?

  Clearly.

• 50:59John Coogan?

  Consumer and I'm empathetic to Tim Sweeney, but I just love the idea.

• 51:03Jordi Hays?

  As an Apple.

• 51:03John Coogan?

  Huge company making a collecting a massive check like 125 billion. It's just amazing.

• 51:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, everybody, almost every American, if they have any type of exposure to equities, even through a 401k or, you know, anything, anything along those lines has exposure to Apple. Apple's down over 4% today so far, but there's so much, so many different things. This is clearly is a rough time to get hit with a ruling like this, given how much they're battling on the supply chain side.

• 51:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:41Jordi Hays?

  So, you know, we talk about our love for little tech and startups, but, you know.

• 51:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:48Jordi Hays?

  And who knows?

• 51:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, you just have to assume that there are going to be, there's going to be a lot, like that extra friction is going to be real. And so that 125 billion is not going to evaporate overnight. Even, even if consumers were open, it's going to take a while for developers to update their apps, to do the flows outside of the App Store and then, and then the consumers.

• 52:10Jordi Hays?

  I don't think it'll, I don't think it'll take them that, that long. To be honest, I mean, it's not that hard to add a link and say, you know, pay here to save 10%.

• 52:21John Coogan?

  And then.

• 52:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because they, the developers can offer services, they can offer, they can offer, they can say, hey, you can sign up in the app for this amount, or you can sign up on this link for a lower rate. And I think a lot of consumers will take the time, even if they have to manually fill out. Credit card form to do so. So.

• 52:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is a really funny wrinkle from the from the from the hearings. An Apple PR director texted a colleague during one of the hearings on this App Store issue. It's our effing store, all caps, and I don't know if it was censored, but that the communications person testified that she couldn't recall sending the message. The text eventually became evidence itself, something the judge used as an example of how Apple's entitlement perspective and mantra persisted beyond the injunction. And so the the judge is like, it's not entirely your store. You don't have complete control over this.

• 53:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so so this is great for Stripe. They came out and announced, big news for iOS developers. You can now accept payments with Stripe outside of your app with no iOS App Store commission. So it.

• 53:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 53:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. It will be very interesting to track that. I mean, 4% of the of the market cap, that's not that huge of a move. If it was really going, if that services revenue was going to cut in half, you would expect the stock to be way, way more off. But we'll have to keep tracking it as they move through earnings and this and this story develops. And we'll have to see where the where the where the appeal goes. But anyway, Jordy, do you want to tell the folks about our latest partner on the show?

• 54:11Jordi Hays?

  Vanta? Yes, yes, we're partnering with Vanta. We'll have to have the the CEO on ASAP. But many of you in the audience have probably already used Vanta. You're working at a startup of any size. And yeah, we'll we'll share a lot more about Vanta next week, but very excited to have them as a partner on the show.

• 54:37John Coogan?

  Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Head over to.

• 54:42Jordi Hays?

  I love the sound of that. You know, we talk a lot about. You know, IP as a, you know, as a live stream and, uh, you know, Vanta is, is certainly

• 54:54John Coogan?

  Locking it down.

• 54:55Jordi Hays?

  Locking it down. So

• 54:56John Coogan?

  Great.

• 54:57Jordi Hays?

  Thank you to Vanta. More to share there soon.

• 55:00John Coogan?

  Well, there's other turmoil amid the big, uh, the mag seven, big tech companies. Tesla share prices fell over 4% overnight trading amid Wall Street Journal reports that the company's board is searching for a CEO to succeed Elon Musk, which is

• 55:17Jordi Hays?

  And to be clear, that was, uh, Tuesday night.

• 55:22John Coogan?

  It was denied by Elon on X. He said, that's ridiculous. And, uh, we'll, we'll give you some of the background from the Wall Street Journal article, and then I think we'll be able to debate this a little bit. So, um, board members reached out to several executive search firms to work on a formal process for finding Tesla's next chief executive, according to people familiar with the discussions, according to the Wall Street Journal, which have been denied by, by Elon. Uh, tensions have been mounting at the company. Sales and profits were deteriorating rapidly. Musk was spending much of his time in Washington. Around that time, Tesla's board met with Musk for an update. Board members told him he needed to spend more time on Tesla, according to people familiar with, with the meeting, and he needed to say so publicly. Uh, Musk didn't push back. Tesla's been on a losing

• 56:06John Coogan?

  streak in the months since Musk, a visionary chief executive, began spending much of his time helping President Trump slash federal spending. Last week, after the company said its first quarter profit had plunged 71%, Musk told investors he would soon pivot back to his job at Tesla. Starting next month, he said on a conference call about earnings, I'll be allocating far more of my time to Tesla. And so the board narrowed its, narrowed its focus to a major search firm, according to people familiar with discussions. And there's a bunch of things here. We can talk about whether Elon should go back, how much time he should spend on Tesla, uh, how we should think about the Musk Inc. overall. The big question is like, why is a search firm involved at all? That's the thing.

• 56:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. That was my big question.

• 56:51John Coogan?

  Right?

• 56:52Jordi Hays?

  It's like, wouldn't, wouldn't, if you're Elon Musk, probably the most.

• 56:57John Coogan?

  Connected man in the world.

• 56:58Jordi Hays?

  Connected people in the entire world.

• 57:00John Coogan?

  Put together a short list on your phone.

• 57:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 57:03John Coogan?

  There's only 10 people that would ever be in the conversation. You probably already know them. It's just gonna be a matter of.

• 57:08Jordi Hays?

  So Elon, Elon came out hard and, you know, was, was railing against the Wall Street Journal for just broadly, just saying that they're constantly, you know, missed.

• 57:19John Coogan?

  He was mad.

• 57:20Jordi Hays?

  He was very mad. He was big mad. Many, many people in our, in our Gen Z audience had said that he was no cap. Elon is big mad.

• 57:32Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, yeah, that's the biggest thing is like, yeah, are they gonna, you know, a search firm is gonna be like, well, you know, we have a good relationship with the COO at General Motors. You know, we'd love to set up. It's like, no, this kind of thing would obviously be led by Elon.

• 57:49John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 57:50Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 57:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. So there's a few things. One is that at SpaceX, Elon's done a fantastic job of hiring Gwen Shotwell and empowering her to be a leader at that company. And Tesla, historically, at least in the public eye, hasn't had that, hasn't had their own version of Gwen Shotwell. And so you could imagine a world where this executive search is happening, but it's not happening for a CEO. It's happening for a president or someone who can take the role of Gwen Shotwell and speak to a different cohort of investors and employees and partners while Elon still does everything he does.

• 58:31John Coogan?

  Like at, at SpaceX, Elon is, I think not only the CEO, but he's the, he's like the chief engineer or something like that. And he really cares. And you could imagine that Elon would be great both at the, the super high level. We're going to Mars. We're building humanoid robotics. We need to take robotics seriously. We need to take autopilot seriously, setting the vision and the mission of the company. And then also being super low level technical details. Decision about LIDAR, that goes down to Elon, right?

• 58:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:00John Coogan?

  But then for all the middle management stuff, all the one on ones, probably doesn't need to be doing that. Probably needs a really, really rocks, rock star, like second in command to kind of have their hand on the helm while Elon's doing other things. And then there's the other question of like. Musk Inc. has grown so much now SpaceX is not just a launch company, but also an internet service provider with Starlink. They have, there's DOD applications there, there's Starshield, there's tons of different projects. Eventually it will be a transportation company, I guess, if they get point to point working. But then there's the other, there's the other Elon companies and when, when Elon bought Twitter, a lot of the Tesla fanboys were saying like, they're, he's going to merge you with Tesla and you'll be able to like read tweets while you're driving in your autonomous car.

• 59:45John Coogan?

  And it was kind of silly. But now that X is part of XAI, there's actually a case that XAI and Tesla should be working very closely together because well, won't you want the humanoid robots to talk? And have you ever tried to use voice recognition in any car ever? It's awful. It's so bad. It's like, oh, you want me to call this random high school friend of yours? Like, no, I want you to just navigate home. And so, you know, if you think about Tesla's, you know, the software as being as important as the hardware, having the XAI team embedded there somehow, working all together, that all of a sudden, if you think about Elon, not just as the CEO of Tesla and the CEO

• 1:00:28John Coogan?

  of XAI and X, it's more like he's the, he's the CEO of a big tech company that has diversified things across LLMs and social networking. Like no one, no one says like, oh, you know, Mark Zuckerberg should, you know, break up Meta and, and, and have a different CEO run reality labs and then have a different CEO on Llama and have a different CEO on Instagram, unless it's the FTC. But in general, it, it, it historically has not been crazy for a big tech mag seven CEO to manage a B to B portion of the business and a B to C portion of the business. Google does this very well, never been an issue. And so, but, but of course it's different when you have separate board meetings, separate investors, separate employee and separate org structures.

• 1:01:13John Coogan?

  So who knows if they'll be able to kind of roll everything together in some way, but that would be a very interesting outcome, just completely hypothetically, obviously.

• 1:01:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the big thing, the big thing is, is Elon is superhuman in many ways, but he's, he's been.

• 1:01:31Jordi Hays?

  Forced to juggle, you know, even just juggling X, X, XAI, SpaceX and Tesla, introducing a, you know, Doge and the admin and all, and all that stuff. Just really at, you know, and, and the pressure of just, you know, how much time he's had to be in DC and not with his companies. I mean, I think it's, um, you know, and, and on the other side, you know, Tesla has a lot of things that they could do to increase excitement around the cars outside of the cost, right? Like these are very, some of the most accessible cars in the industry

• 1:02:10Jordi Hays?

  from a, from a, uh, pricing standpoint, uh, but none of the cars have had a really major refresh in a long time, right? You can

• 1:02:19John Coogan?

  Well, the Cybertruck was that like crazy different, like completely different style. I thought it looked really cool. I thought, I think a lot of people, it was very, uh, it was, it was very controversial, but I thought it was the right step, but they needed to do five of those. They needed to do a convertible, a wagon, a full-size SUV, not just a truck, and then, uh, four, four vehicles that are kind of just built on the same platform of like four-door sedan, four-door crossover SUVs.

• 1:02:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but just to put it into context, uh, in 2024, the Cybertruck sold 39,000 units worldwide. The Raptor sold 732,000

• 1:02:59John Coogan?

  That's insane.

• 1:03:00Jordi Hays?

  Units, and that's just one truck out of

• 1:03:02John Coogan?

  Not the Raptor, the F-150, right?

• 1:03:05Jordi Hays?

  The F-series sales.

• 1:03:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, the F, a whole F-series broadly. Uh, yeah, but I mean,

• 1:03:09Jordi Hays?

  Same platform.

• 1:03:10John Coogan?

  That speaks to the, to the idea that like the Cybertruck is just one thing within the truck world.

• 1:03:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:17John Coogan?

  And you were making the point that, uh, it would be really, really cool to see Tesla or Elon find, uh, their AMG. And so I'd love for you to kind of unpack what that would look like. What would you actually want to see? We've joked about, oh, put a naturally aspirated V8 in there, but a V12, but realistically, what would an, an AMG, I mean, they already have the Plaid badge, but what, what, what does AMG buying a Tesla look like to you?

• 1:03:44Jordi Hays?

  So nowadays, most people understand AMG as basically a, you know, added performance differentiation of the just broader Mercedes line. So most Mercedes cars, you can get an AMG version of them, which is just more performant in a variety of ways. Could be, you know, raw horsepower, or, you know, the brakes, or any number of, you know, body kit, suspensions, etc. So if you actually look at some big Tesla enthusiasts, people like Joe Rogan, you'll see that Joe Rogan like gets a Model S and then he gets some aftermarket company to make it more performant. Usually, I mean, they have so much just like raw

• 1:04:28Jordi Hays?

  power due to being an EV that that it's not as much about adding performance, but, you know, changing the body styling and the brakes and things like that, and just generally making them look cooler. So I think that could, you know, accelerate sales. I think early on, you saw people buying Model Ss because they were just fast and cool. But then as they became so normalized, you know, that that type of buyer maybe is shifting and getting, you know, BMW M series instead, right? And so, yeah, I mean, ultimately, I think we just, you know, to really get sales up again, it's like doing really meaningful refreshes, right? If a Model 3 today looks

• 1:05:08Jordi Hays?

  very similar to a Model 3 from a few years ago, it's not going to, you know, drive, you know, trade-ins and things like that. So I think like, you know, major refreshes, minivans, convertibles, you know, a top of the line sports car. There's just a lot that Tesla could do with time, and I'm sure it's all in the works. So.

• 1:05:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because like the Like it's not all doom and gloom. I mean, the Tesla share price, the peak was 475. It's down at 275 now. So significant sell off, but it's still a $900 billion company. And the point about AMG is interesting because AMG was an independent organization. And actually, pre-merger AMG cars are extremely valuable because it's like this relic. But then, of course, Mercedes bought AMG, rolled it in, and now it's a division. It's almost like the M-division. But Mercedes doesn't just have AMG, they also have MyBok, which aims for increased luxury over increased performance. And that actually might be an interesting angle because a lot of people have complained

• 1:06:15John Coogan?

  that the interiors, even in $100,000 Model S Plaid.

• 1:06:19Jordi Hays?

  Just feels cheap.

• 1:06:20John Coogan?

  Bland. And the refresh of the Model Y and the Model 3, I believe, have been driven very much on finding more cost-effective materials. And so if you add back a lot of that higher margin, higher trim, and give people an option to, like, a lot of the Cybertruck purchases seem like, you know, it's almost like flex culture. You want to show off this iconic thing. Well, how could you do that with the MyBok version of a Model S? And maybe it's not Plaid, maybe it's not 2-second 0-60, maybe it's just the regenerative braking has reworked. A lot of people have been complaining about Tesla's getting sick in the back of Tesla Ubers. Well, I'm sure that's just an engineering challenge. And I'm sure if you did a ton of different refreshes, you

• 1:07:05John Coogan?

  could create something that feels.

• 1:07:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't think anybody is, the Tesla consumer is not asking, they're not asking.

• 1:07:12John Coogan?

  The Rolls-Royce Ghost is electric, and there's a lot of benefits to that. It's extra quiet. It can be even smoother. Like, the weight of the car can actually be an asset instead of a liability. And so it'll be interesting.

• 1:07:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the big question, the big question is, is even a fully engaged Elon CEO still has a big uphill battle, given how Tesla just trades, right? It's, it's, it's, it's down 23% year-to-date.

• 1:07:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:07:40Jordi Hays?

  It's still a $900 billion market cap on 881 billion. Was there?

• 1:07:47Jordi Hays?

  2024 revenue.

• 1:07:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's still highly valued.

• 1:07:50Jordi Hays?

  About 100 billion of 2024 revenue. To put it in comparison, Ford is, I believe.

• 1:07:57John Coogan?

  A $40 billion company and they probably make 80 billion in revenue or something.

• 1:08:02Jordi Hays?

  185 billion dollars of revenue. Trading at trading at $40 billion, just barely trading above bigger AI, which.

• 1:08:10John Coogan?

  Wow. Well, you know, I, I, I think the, the question of whether Elon steps out of the CEO seat seems very low probability, but I do, I would love to get a poly market up on it because I think it's interesting to track. We're working on some new markets and I think, I think that would be a great way to, to kind of get to something. There's a lot of noise on X. There's obviously even noise in the Wall Street Journal and conflicting reports from different people, but that's the beauty of poly market is that you synthesize all of those different, all of those different informations, information and build kind of a crystal ball. So I'm excited to track that. And really the, the market that I'm excited about is potentially which of the mag seven CEOs

• 1:08:55John Coogan?

  will step down next, the first one to, because you have to, you have to imagine that, you know, there's, there's some pressure on Tim Cook, there's some pressure on Sundar Pichai, like there's pressure all over the place. Some of these guys just might retire, right? And so figuring out the horse race of if one steps down, who will it be? That's a more interesting question. I imagine that the Elon Tesla CEO swap would trade at like 2% or 3%, but it, but it'd be fascinating to see.

• 1:09:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Polly market has a market of which CEOs will be gone in 2025. Sam Altman sitting at 8% chance, Sundar at 16, Tim at 13.

• 1:09:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:09:33Jordi Hays?

  Dan Clancy over at Twitch, 21%, Andy Jassy at 12%. So overall, everybody's kind of expects.

• 1:09:41John Coogan?

  On the chopping block, but not fully.

• 1:09:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, not, not really.

• 1:09:45John Coogan?

  13% on this chopping block.

• 1:09:46Jordi Hays?

  Basically.

• 1:09:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:09:47Jordi Hays?

  21% at the highest.

• 1:09:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, you look at the, you look at the stock performance and the earnings performance of these, of these firms and it's just like Ben Thompson was talking about, you know, is it time to talk about Tim Cook resigning or, or, or retiring? And it's just like. Has the CEO of the most valuable company in the world ever retired or stepped down? Like, it seems crazy to to to to switch horses in the middle of a stream that's a torrent of cash, you know? Even if there are some like, you know, storm clouds on the horizon, it's a fantastic, like, the business is just the best business of all time in history, in human history. Like, no company has created more cash than Apple.

• 1:10:27John Coogan?

  And so, even if there are some bumps in the road, how do you, how do you say, oh, Apple Intelligence hasn't been good enough, so we're switching? It's like, well, like, like, I created $2 trillion of value. Like, okay, you forgot to say thanks.

• 1:10:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:44John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 1:10:45Jordi Hays?

  You never said, please.

• 1:10:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, anyway, congratulations to Ian Cinnamon. We saw him over the, in DC. He announced a $200 million Series C investment. Is a massive vote of confidence from our backers. He, of course, runs Apex Space. We had him on the show. If you're not familiar, it is a satellite bus. Congratulations, Ian. Ian, you invented a bus. I don't know if you remember bus discourse.

• 1:11:08Jordi Hays?

  Space bus.

• 1:11:09John Coogan?

  From the Lyft days when Lyft created a ride sharing thing where you could put like 10 people on it. It was called Lyft Line. And so, if I'm going from San Francisco to Palo Alto, you could hop on in South San Francisco and, and, and they were kind of hailing it as like, oh, this is like so much more efficient because the cars are driving less, less congestion, less emissions. Very good. But a lot of people are saying, oh, you just invented a bus. You just invented private transit. To my, to my point, it was always like, well, don't we want more buses? Don't we want more trains? Don't we want more of this stuff? But anyway.

• 1:11:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And then, so that was, that was Tuesday, which is awesome. And then on Wednesday, True Anomaly announced a $260 million fundraise led by Excel.

• 1:11:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:11:50Jordi Hays?

  With participation from Riot, who is one of their largest shareholders as well. Shout out to my friend Will.

• 1:11:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:11:59Jordi Hays?

  True Anomaly is focused more on the, on the defense side.

• 1:12:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:04Jordi Hays?

  Making hunter seeker satellites. So, big, big day, a big week for space investment.

• 1:12:11John Coogan?

  Also, I don't know if we covered this on the show. We mentioned it when we talked to folks in Hillen Valley, but Sarah Tavell has transitioned into a new role at Benchmark. After eight years, she's shifted, she's shifting to a venture partner. She'll continue to make new investments on behalf of Benchmark. And there's a lot of speculation about, is this related to the Manus AI investment? Or is this just kind of family, you know, personal decision? But congratulations to her. We love some personnel news on this show. We love tracking the trade deals. Who's going in? Who's, who's on the starting line? Who's on the bench? Who's moving around? Who's trading? We got some breaking news for you on Monday. I'm very excited to announce we have somebody coming on the show, which will be fun.

• 1:12:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is cool, Sarah.

• 1:12:57John Coogan?

  Congrats to her.

• 1:12:58Jordi Hays?

  Eight years, you know, across, you know, multiple funds while at Benchmark. Eight years ago is, feels like 30 years ago in venture in some ways. So congratulations on evolving. And what else? We got Meta AI launched a new standalone AI app. Have you downloaded it yet?

• 1:13:19John Coogan?

  I have not. I haven't used, I haven't used Llama very much at all. I, you know, obviously it's useful if you're, you know, vibe coding and need some, you know, open source models to tweak. I, the most that I've interacted with it is in the Meta Ray-Bans, the sunglasses. And I do think there's something there where if you're going for a walk, walking the dog, you don't need to pull out your phone. You can just ask and kind of have this conversation and be learning about different things. Because I mean, often that's the best use of these LLMs is just knowledge engines. And so being able to interact with those in more way, in more ways. It'll be interesting to track the numbers famously on stage. Ruth Parrot from Google was, and this was actually

• 1:14:04John Coogan?

  in the earnings as well. Google has announced they've broken a billion AI users. But of course, that's driven because whenever you type something in Google now, it just serves you a generative AI response in many, many cases, unless you're searching for a very specific thing. And so they really use their distribution to push AI.

• 1:14:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:23John Coogan?

  The Gemini app, the actual dedicated app only has 30 million installs, which is still a ton, but by Google standards, it's not, it's not nearly as big. It'll be interesting to see what Meta does to actually.

• 1:14:36John Coogan?

  Drive installs here because historically this playbook has, it's always been like a precursor to a new tab. Like I believe reels was its own app and, and Facebook camera was its own app before they bought Instagram. And then eventually they added stories to Facebook. They added live streaming to Facebook. And so you have to imagine that this is somewhat temporary, uh, because getting to, getting, climbing up the, the, getting a billion people or two billion people to install a new app and really change their behavior is just an insurmountable task. Why not just do it within the actual apps themselves? But, uh, at the same time, it's hard to surface LLMs in a reasonable way. I've, I've had some weird

• 1:15:19John Coogan?

  experiences where I've gone to Instagram search, search for, uh, oh, I want to see, you know, Instagram reels about a particular car. And then all of a sudden I'm just dropped in a chat with Lama and I'm like, yeah, this is not what I want. I actually am searching for videos at this point and you just start talking to me and you can't do the thing that I need you to do. Uh, and so, uh, obviously it's a big product challenge, but good luck to everyone over at Meta.

• 1:15:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, the big call out here, they're saying they're going to generate up to one and one, almost one and a half trillion dollars in generative AI revenue by 2035. And so you have to imagine some of that will be consumer, some of it will be, uh, more on the developer side. Uh,

• 1:15:57John Coogan?

  You think, uh, you think they're gonna have to pay sales tax on all of that?

• 1:16:00Jordi Hays?

  Uh, they absolutely will have to, John.

• 1:16:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. So Mark, I'm sure you're listening. Uh, head over to numeralhq.com, put your sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance, benchmark series.

• 1:16:16Jordi Hays?

  Benchmark series A. Uh, thank you to numeral for sponsoring the show. A lot of our friends uh, in SaaS and e-commerce already use numeral, uh, but. If you're in that space, go trick them out. Tell them, and Mark, tell them the Technology Brothers sent you.

• 1:16:33John Coogan?

  Yep. There's some more news on in the AI world. Mira Maroti's startup gives her board control in Andreessen-led deal. Lulu, friend of the show, says normalized founders having board control. I like this a lot, but the actual mechanics of the board control are pretty interesting. Mira's board vote always equals the total number of the other directors plus one. Guaranteed an outright majority on every matter, even the board, even if the board later expands. It's a $2 billion Series A, which sounds like they're off by 1,000x compared to 10 years ago. At a $10 billion valuation, A16Z and investors

• 1:17:18John Coogan?

  accepted the structure to secure a large stake while giving the scarce AI talent freedom to pursue AGI research without near-term profit. She won, says Nick. Mathematically undilutable control. Now, it's interesting because there's a bunch of different ways to do this. We know a founder who has, I think, like seven or 10 board seats. And so you can basically just add directors and you're gonna just, and you don't really have to renegotiate that, of course. Depends on if you have leverage, because

• 1:17:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the big thing here.

• 1:17:48John Coogan?

  Completely turn over the board, you're hooked.

• 1:17:51Jordi Hays?

  This all comes down to leverage and it could easily be flipped. Let's say, two years from now, things are going good but not great. Somebody could easily come in and say, well, I'll invest the billion dollars, but I want board control. And at that point,

• 1:18:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's just a deal point. Yeah, exactly. So some of these, some of these board control deals are, you know, you're only good is your last, you know, quarter earnings, basically. Some of them are a little bit silly, but I think that they do lead to founders like taking more risk, being more confident, which I think is good.

• 1:18:25Jordi Hays?

  Long-term, long-term thinking, yeah.

• 1:18:28John Coogan?

  There where founders are very tight with voting seats, but very liberal with observer seats. And so the board meeting was basically a presentation from the founders who actually have the votes to a huge group of investors who have basically super information rights because they get to experience the full board, the full board meeting as observers. But the, but the idea is that until you're a public company, the board functions very, very differently. And so you don't need to, you don't need to kind of play house while you're a private company. So interesting to see this kind of continue to develop.

• 1:19:09John Coogan?

  Anyway, should we go to Matt Grimm? He says Billy McFarlane was 10 years too early, quote tweeting Michael Miraflores. Says, my theory is that a major contributing factor to the rise of all these private members clubs, the deterioration of civil society and rising crime slash declining sense of safety and security since the pandemic shows a screenshot of an image that shows New York City is in the middle of a members' club boom. There's Aman New York, Maxim's Casa Cruz, the 22, the Ned, Crane Club, Shea Margaux.

• 1:19:46Jordi Hays?

  Casa Chirriani. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's funny. Members' clubs pricing always feels reasonable until you realize you need three or four or five to, to, to get in the rotation.

• 1:20:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:00Jordi Hays?

  Not, not actually, I mean.

• 1:20:01John Coogan?

  What's funny is like these, this is not, this doesn't feel new to me at all. Like just in New York, you know, the Harvard Club, Yale Club, New York Athletic Club. Like there are plenty of these clubs, but I, I think that maybe they, they're suffering from the same kind of boomer poisoning that's happened in the housing market and in, in so many other organizations where the boomers aren't retiring because they're living longer. And so they're, they're not turning the club over to a new generation. And so, um, so that, that creates an opportunity for completely new clubs.

• 1:20:33Jordi Hays?

  No, and, and, and the, the very real dynamic here is that.

• 1:20:40Jordi Hays?

  As clubs scale, the product's quality just naturally gets worse. Like, part of what's amazing about a new club is that it's a tight-knit, heavily-vetted community, and then they realize, hey, we actually want a 2X next year. And then a bunch of people get added, and it can kind of take away from what initially made the club great. So So House is the biggest example of this. A lot of people have just complained about how So House, at times, can feel just more like a restaurant that requires a membership now versus actually feeling like a community space. And so, anyways, one of those things, not a good, not a good fit for venture capital,

• 1:21:23Jordi Hays?

  typically, just because venture is like, hey, how do we 2X, you know, how do we 3X, 3X, 2X, 2X? If you're running a membership club like that, there's probably a certain size, maybe it's 1,000 members, that's like the perfect amount. And if you want to take it to 2,000, every member is going to suffer, and the, you know, the experience will suffer, so.

• 1:21:45John Coogan?

  Well, let's move on to some Waymo news. Waymo announced a partnership with Toyota. We're exploring new autonomous vehicle platform and how to leverage our technology for their personally-owned vehicles. So, in theory, you'll be able to buy a Toyota that has self-driving capabilities powered by Waymo. Very interesting. "One day, you won't just hail a Waymo, you'll buy one," says Alex Immerman over at Andre Skorwitz.

• 1:22:13Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I would buy a personal Waymo right now, even if, even if it was a Toyota. Like, I actually-

• 1:22:21John Coogan?

  You can get a Supra?

• 1:22:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, of course, of course.

• 1:22:24John Coogan?

  With underlighting, you would have it stanced?

• 1:22:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, stanced, for sure.

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  Stanced with the underlighting?

• 1:22:28Jordi Hays?

  Stanced. Imagine when you-

• 1:22:30John Coogan?

  Tokyo Drift?

• 1:22:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, and this has basically been Elon's vision for autonomous driving a Tesla, which is hey, you're going to buy a Tesla when you're not using it, you can add it to an autonomous fleet and actually earn money on it or help cover the cost.

• 1:22:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:22:45Jordi Hays?

  Which is in a very exciting vision, but you know, Waymo's advantage here is, you know, they're kind of recognizing that the underlying hardware is potentially a commodity.

• 1:22:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:22:58Jordi Hays?

  And they can build their systems on any existing cars.

• 1:23:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, the whole Waymo partnership thing is fascinating. Like they've done some stuff where Uber has said, oh, we're going to be the aggregator and you'll be able to call a Waymo on Uber. And that feels like it doesn't make any sense. And like you would just go straight to Waymo. And, and then, and then, yeah, they're partnering with hardware. And then there's this other question of like, will there be businesses or small businesses that are dedicated just to operating fleets of Waymos and then cleaning them? Because obviously that's a very human problem. You have to wash them and charge them and where do they stay? All that infrastructure needs to get built up. So having some sort of decentralized, it's like, does Coca-Cola own every bottle? Or like they've gone back and forth on that choice.

• 1:23:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:41John Coogan?

  And, but at the same time, this feels like, you know, we're in this moment where Waymo feels ahead of Tesla, especially in San Francisco, in terms of like, you don't see a lot of people riding in the back of their Teslas. Let's be honest, like the self-driving is pretty good, but you're still in the front and in the Waymo, there's no person. So it's clearly full self-driving. But at the same time, like, does XAI teach us nothing about Elon's ability to catch up when someone leapfrogged?

• 1:24:10Jordi Hays?

  Also, to be clear, Waymo is doing roughly, I think, a million rides a month.

• 1:24:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:24:16Jordi Hays?

  As of the latest estimates.

• 1:24:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:24:20Jordi Hays?

  And Tesla is doing.

• 1:24:23John Coogan?

  They must be doing a million a day or 10 million a day. I mean, how many cars are they sold?

• 1:24:27Jordi Hays?

  Oh, okay. But you're counting.

• 1:24:29John Coogan?

  I'm counting the data collection. That's what I care.

• 1:24:31Jordi Hays?

  Got it, got it, got it.

• 1:24:31John Coogan?

  So, so it's like, it's like Grok was able to use, scrape the web like everyone else because that's commoditized. But you can't just scrape a billion rides with, you know, all the sensor data of what was the camera seeing? What did the human do? That's all for reinforcement learning to understand, hey, we were, we were driving autonomously and then the, then the human grabbed the wheel and steered to the left. It's like, oh, well, that was because clearly if we run the tape back. The camera saw a cone, didn't identify it as a cone, and the human saw it and intervened. So let's go retrain the model to say, you know, basically in the weights, if cone steer to the left, right? And so, so Elon, if you can see what he's done with XAI catching up to close to the frontier

• 1:25:15John Coogan?

  of LLMs, even if this Waymo full self-driving is better right now, it feels like, you know, he goes back, does a little sprint and Tesla's at least caught up to Waymo in terms of the, the, the technology. And then there's just the question of, okay, now maybe it's a duopoly, but it's still really valuable. And so it'll be interesting to see, see where this goes. Anyway, not to go back to Tesla, but it's a fascinating topic. Anyway,

• 1:25:44John Coogan?

  Signal talks about Apple. He says, for Apple, the idea that you would batch innovation, hold it hostage for a pre-recorded WWDC ceremony, and then dribble it out over a year in an era where AI is rewriting paradigms weekly is sort of ridiculous. I'm really intrigued to see how they navigate the AI era because it holds an insane amount of opportunity, but it also exposes them to deeply uncomfortable levels of executional volatility. And this is the case for like the, just the modern App Store. Give up the Siri button.

• 1:26:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:15John Coogan?

  Give up, let, let the, let the AI apps, you know, propagate on top of what you've already built. And yeah, I mean, maybe it's not 30%, but if you're taking 15 or 10 or something, this could be really, really, really big. But it has been very rough. But that was never a question. No, no one was ever, oh, like, I can't wait till the next WWDC to get the Uber update because Uber was pushing updates constantly. And, and it was, it was a much better pattern.

• 1:26:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And this is, I mean, there's a bunch of different stances here. I feel like Airbnb sort of repioneered the idea of these sort of keynote events, you know, big launches combining multiple features.

• 1:26:57John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:26:58Jordi Hays?

  But I also think they probably do a lot of testing and, and smaller rollouts of some functionality even before they announce it in the sort of big. Major event.

• 1:27:08John Coogan?

  I mean, it totally makes sense for the hardware cycle to be like, hey, we refreshing the iPhone every year. Here's the latest and greatest. But for software stuff, it's more like what Brian Chesky was talking about with Founder Mode and the Airbnb summit that they do annually. It's like package up and Ryan Peterson did this at Flexport where it's like, hey, maybe W W C should just be a great reintroduction recap of all the stuff that you've shipped, all the experiments that you've run, what's working, what are you pushing forward? And then it's really separate out the backward looking from the forward looking and say, hey, you know, we you you've noticed if you're using this phone, we've shipped 25 updates to Apple Intelligence. It's really it's better. It's much better at this now. Now, here's our here's some of our roadmap and what you what can

• 1:27:53John Coogan?

  what you can expect, what we're excited, what we're hiring for, why you should stay with our platform, why you should build on our platform. But we'll see. That seems like a hard one to change culturally. But you know, the easier the easier out for them would definitely be to just let the third party app developers flourish a little bit more. And maybe the maybe the maybe the App Store change actually drives that even more because AI companies can see, hey, if I go in and I get a $20 a month subscription, it's fully $20 a month, not 13 or 16 or whatever.

• 1:28:29John Coogan?

  Or what? Yeah, 16 or something like that. Anyway, Gabriel Stangler, Stengel, is announcing a $50 million Series B for Rogo AI from Thrive Capital, joined by JP Morgan, Tiger Global, Patrick's in the deal.

• 1:28:46Jordi Hays?

  Of course he is.

• 1:28:47John Coogan?

  Patrick O'Shaughnessy from Invest Like the Best getting in there. And Cosla, Box Group, Ally Corp are all in as well. They're building Wall Street's first true AI analyst. Our mission is clear and ambitious to create Wall Street's first AI analyst. We endeavor to help investment banks, hedge funds and private equity firms. I mean, that's what we endeavor to do as well, just help them generally. Rogo, I guess, is specifically focused on making them make helping them make smarter, sharper and faster decisions every day. I just want to help them broadly. But let's hear it for the investment banks, the hedge funds and the private equity firms. We just what would America be without them? It's fantastic.

• 1:29:26Jordi Hays?

  So they're going to, they're going to be more efficient, but they probably won't work any less, right? And that's what we love about Big P E.

• 1:29:36Jordi Hays?

  These hedge funds, you know, multinational investment firms.

• 1:29:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:29:40Jordi Hays?

  It's great to see.

• 1:29:41John Coogan?

  International business.

• 1:29:42Jordi Hays?

  It's great. International businessmen.

• 1:29:43John Coogan?

  And, and national business now.

• 1:29:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:45John Coogan?

  Domestic business in the age of tariffs. Helas says the lion does not concern himself with ITAR.

• 1:29:54John Coogan?

  I think it's so funny.

• 1:29:56Jordi Hays?

  I don't know about that.

• 1:29:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think that's not optional.

• 1:29:59Jordi Hays?

  Sketchy lion over there.

• 1:30:01John Coogan?

  That's a sketchy, that's a lion who will not be getting a, not be winning a program of record.

• 1:30:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:06John Coogan?

  Will not be advancing from SBIR. Very funny that, I just love that an ITAR post can get a thousand likes. You know, there's just like.

• 1:30:12Jordi Hays?

  ITAR is mainstream now.

• 1:30:14John Coogan?

  It's mainstream.

• 1:30:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:15John Coogan?

  Mainstream, and it was not years ago. Well, speaking of ITAR compliant stuff, Carmen says, I finally found out what Palantir does. And there's a post here, Palantir is the creator and primary maintainer of TS Lint, the standard linter for the TypeScript programming language. I love that. I mean, it's a crack.

• 1:30:37Jordi Hays?

  That's so nice.

• 1:30:37John Coogan?

  Team that they're so, that they're writing so much TypeScript that they wrote their own linter and then open sourced it. I thought that was very funny.

• 1:30:45Jordi Hays?

  What a group.

• 1:30:46John Coogan?

  That Palantir's doing some linter.

• 1:30:49Jordi Hays?

  We got a post from Joe Weisenthal. It's easy to say that Q1 GDP data generally confirms the story that demand side activity was fine, but that was all of the action, but that all of the, and that all of the action is happening on the supply side, and that's true, but there have been concerns about softening pre-April 2 activity. In that sense, the report is a A+. All things equal, seems better to, to go into the tariff economy, starting from a robust pace of activity versus a mediocre pace.

• 1:31:21John Coogan?

  This was my takeaway from the.

• 1:31:23Jordi Hays?

  And, and the last, yeah, the last thing, he says, personal consumption rose 1.8%.

• 1:31:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:31:28Jordi Hays?

  Versus 1.2% expected. American consumer does not slow down.

• 1:31:34John Coogan?

  This was my takeaway from the Sequoia memo going into COVID. So Sequoia has written two very famous memos, the Black Swan memo and the RAP Good Times memo. And I believe. The first one, which I think was the, I think the first one was the black swan after the housing crisis was a real macro deep dive into the state of the economy and identified a lot of things that were being talked about on Wall Street, but really put them in terms, still a lot of macro charts, but put them in terms that startup founders could understand and really let them know that, hey, while tech is great and growing in 2008, the consumer, the American consumer is not set up to withstand what's coming in terms of the deleveraging

• 1:32:18John Coogan?

  of the housing market. Folks will lose houses, mortgages, variable rate, variable rate mortgages will explode. It's going to be very, very rough. So buckle up. And that was absolutely correct. Then going into the COVID crash, Sequoia put out another memo saying that we weren't expecting this and startups need to be prepared for fundraising, fundraising markets to close and, and, you know, increased unemployment, lot of turmoil in the economy. And of course, that's exactly what happened. The stock market traded down like 30%. It was an absolute disaster. But what that memo sort of missed was that if you pulled

• 1:33:01John Coogan?

  all the stats from the first 2008 memo about the health of the American consumer, so debt ratios, credit card delinquencies, interest rates, all of that type of stuff, real GDP, wages, all that stuff, you could actually tell that going into COVID, the American consumer was much stronger than, and like household balance sheets were much stronger than going into the 08 housing crisis. And so COVID was this wild card, this black swan event that was extremely tumultuous and caused massive unemployment very quickly. But we were economically more prepared for it than going into 2008. And so, yes, the tariff economy, the tariff chaos is very detrimental to a lot of businesses. It's very detrimental

• 1:33:46John Coogan?

  to the short term American economy. We've seen this all over the place. But we are set up for, we are in it, we are coming from a source of strength. And so we can kind of like absorb the hit points for a little bit. And that's, I think, what we're seeing in the economy with the robust earnings in big tech and the personal consumption rising actually higher than expected in the face of. Absolute turmoil and chaos in the news, right? And this is this weird thing that the vibe shift, the vibe session where the news and even the facts are pretty bad. And yet, when you poll people, they will say, there's this interesting metric for the vibe session,

• 1:34:29John Coogan?

  where if you ask people, how do you think things are going? How are your friends and neighbors doing in this economy? They will say, oh, it's terrible. Biden's economy is bad, or Trump's economy is bad. But if you ask them how they personally are doing, oftentimes they will report that they're doing better than they expect, or better than they perceive the economy to do. So they say, the economy is bad, but I happen to be doing fine. And if everyone reports the same thing, it's this weird preference falsification issue where everyone feels like it's doom and gloom. But in fact, no one, not that many people are actually feeling real pain. And so it's a little bit of an economic puzzle. Anyway, there was some bad news on the employment front.

• 1:35:14John Coogan?

  The estimate was that we were going to add 115,000 jobs, and we only added 62,000 jobs. And futures dropped on that on April 30th. But overall, the market has been doing very well, and we've been rebounding from all the chaos. And Bitcoin is almost up at 100K again, which is remarkable to see.

• 1:35:31Jordi Hays?

  Remarkable. Trey Stevens over at Founders Fund in Andorol says, one of Founders Fund's fastest growing portcos, Armada AI is hiring a VP of Federal to lead federal strategy and bring advanced compute wherever the warfighter needs it. It's an early, high-impact role with huge potential. If you're in the top 1% at what you do and are interested in the role, send three to five bullet points demonstrating exceptional ability to federal VP at Armada.ai. Very cool role. We got to hear about Armada AI actually yesterday from one of Armada's very earliest investors. And there's not a lot out there on the company yet, but we left that conversation.

• 1:36:12John Coogan?

  Extremely bullish.

• 1:36:13Jordi Hays?

  Extremely bullish.

• 1:36:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:16Jordi Hays?

  It took about-

• 1:36:16John Coogan?

  Just to break it down at a very high level, Starlink is a new capability. And if you're on the consumer side, you pick up a Starlink at a Best Buy like I did, plug it in and you have internet and that's great. And that's pretty much all I need is just a Wi-Fi hotspot when I'm traveling. They also have products for planes and you've seen, JetSuite X has Starlink and there's Starlink on, you know, new major airlines. A lot of the airlines are clamoring to do deals with Starlink. And then the government also buys Starlink through the Starshield program and provisions it for military applications. But as we kind of learned through this conversation, for large enterprises, very, very large enterprises, think Fortune 100 companies,

• 1:37:02John Coogan?

  the needs from a Starlink product are different than from the consumer side. And so you could imagine if you have a data centers all over the globe and you want to add connectivity to remote, remote outposts all over, you're going to need tools to manage that, tools to provision that. What satellites are working? What are going down? What are the speeds across these? What are the security issues? And so it's a, it's one of these businesses that unless you're touching it in the Fortune 100 IT world, you probably don't know that much about it. But once you get in and pull back the curtain, you realize that there's a massive business opportunity here. So I imagine this will be a very fun job.

• 1:37:45John Coogan?

  So good luck to everyone who applies.

• 1:37:49Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:37:50John Coogan?

  You talked about this a little bit. Sam Less-

• 1:37:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Sam Less-

• 1:37:54John Coogan?

  Had a wild idea. We've talked about this a little bit. Sam Less says, "The reality is that OpenAI should really buy Snap. It's basically free and they do need a network." Jordy, what is your take on OpenAI buying Snap? For reference, I think OpenAI is around $300 billion, maybe a little bit higher. Snap is trading at around $7 billion. Is that right? So-

• 1:38:15Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, double that actually, 14 billion.

• 1:38:17John Coogan?

  14 billion, okay. So you're talking about 4% of the company if this happened. A lot of the other foundation models have found dance partners. Llama is obviously partnered with Meta and, or, you know, owned by Meta and so can be deeply integrated into Facebook products and Instagram products. And there's been-

• 1:38:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so-

• 1:38:36John Coogan?

  X and XAI have teamed up. So what should Snap and OpenAI do?

• 1:38:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I mean, Snap declined to provide a forecast as of Wednesday. Stock fell 15%, so I think that may have prompted Sam Lessin's post. And I think the big question here is, does integrating your foundation model in with an existing app really drive incredible distribution? And the question with OpenAI is, what percentage of Snap users are not already ChatGPT users?

• 1:39:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:39:17Jordi Hays?

  And I would, and I, and my sense is that if Snap has, you know, primarily, you know, a lot of market share or at least usage among young people. I think that, that, you know, my, my sense is that it could very well be that 60, 70, 80% of Snap's, you know, weekly active users are already ChatGPT users. And I just don't think that, from that sense, I'm, I'm not sure that it's completely valuable to, to OpenAI. Could be more valuable to someone like an Anthropic if they really, really want to double down and, and compete in consumer.

• 1:39:57Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, I, I'm still not entirely sure that X, AI and Grok are going to win because of distribution through X, right? I think it's useful, but I'm still not, you know, using Grok within X aggressively, so.

• 1:40:15John Coogan?

  Also, I mean, X has the benefit of, of really being a great source of real time data in the sense that every news story breaks and that's me, even, even though links are punished, the stories do find their way to X very quickly. And you get a really good idea of like a weighing machine in the algorithm of what, what angle on the story is having the most traction, which story of, of, of three that were written is breaking through in the most meaningful way. That helps with better responses in real time from LLMs.

• 1:40:48John Coogan?

  On the, on the Snapchat side, you know, it is a video first platform, so.

• 1:40:54Jordi Hays?

  It's privacy centric, right?

• 1:40:56John Coogan?

  Privacy centric, but they do have a Reels product and people do spend time scrolling TikTok style content. I would be. Very hesitant to try and just stuff a chat interface in Snapchat and see any real meaningful interaction with the LLM like we talked about with Meta and Lama. But I do think that, you know, there is the question of like, what is the next form of these foundation models? Like, is there a world where you have an AI that's living on Snap that's sending you videos or AI-generated images with captions that are interesting based on your preferences in the algorithm?

• 1:41:38John Coogan?

  That does seem like it's happening in like a diffuse way with AI video creators. A lot of it's just fake, unfortunately. Like, if you go on car YouTube, you'll see tons of AI-generated videos for fake cars that don't exist, that feel like concept cars. And it's very silly, but you know, you could use a more mature model and a more, I don't know, better moral framework potentially to to actually get to surface like better, better information that's more relevant.

• 1:42:14John Coogan?

  Anyway, do you want to read the next post?

• 1:42:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we got a post from Zach Abrams. Bridge and Visa are launching stable card, stablecoin card issuing. Says, "Together, we built one card program that can serve the world. Developers can now launch global cards in minutes. Excited to initially launch with Fuse Wallet and a company that I can't, I'm not familiar with across the US, LatAm and more." So this is massive. I'm, I'm actually looking forward to Stripe's conference this coming week. We're not going to be intending in person, but excited to cover the news and hopefully we can get Zach on at some point to talk about this partnership live. But stablecoins.

• 1:42:55Jordi Hays?

  Are very, very real in many, many ways already and enabling, you know, the seamless spending of those stable coins across the Visa network will be super powerful.

• 1:43:08John Coogan?

  Yep. Let's rip through some other news. Datadog's acquiring startup EPO for $220 million. That feels like a great outcome. I'd love to dig into this more, but still size gonk for the

• 1:43:23Jordi Hays?

  Datadog.

• 1:43:24John Coogan?

  Datadog, absolutely dogs.

• 1:43:26Jordi Hays?

  EPO.

• 1:43:27John Coogan?

  Also Androl.

• 1:43:28Jordi Hays?

  Drop the nepo, drop the N and nepo. It's just EPO.

• 1:43:31John Coogan?

  Androl gave some, gave some updates on the YFQ 44A flying this summer. They're making progress on that collaborative combat aircraft. Looks great. Paul Mercedi has strict no render policy. It's all real unless you see the

• 1:43:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was cool.

• 1:43:48John Coogan?

  Which is a cool design choice, right? To be like, we will do, we will use CGI to visualize things that can't be seen. So like radio waves, for example, or, or if we're describing like a future, we'll just use the anime style and it's obvious that it's rendered. Instead of doing photo real renders where you do, is it real? Is it not? It's like, it's either real or it's anime. And so there's a very clear dividing line there. I thought that was cool. And I hope that more companies adopt that to kind of create the differentiation between what's a render and what's not.

• 1:44:17Jordi Hays?

  Well, the government has spent, the federal government, DOD, depending on it, has spent probably trillions of dollars on renders over the years of things that never, never actually came, you know, to fruition.

• 1:44:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:29Jordi Hays?

  And same thing, and you know, this happens in, in startups and hard tech, you know, companies can create a great render, but not fully deliver on it for a variety of reasons. So I think it's a great policy and it makes you pay, pay a lot more attention to the stuff that they're actually putting out because it's, it's real.

• 1:44:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:44:49Jordi Hays?

  This post from Delian was

• 1:44:52John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:44:52Jordi Hays?

  Funny. He says, Mr. Asperu have told reporters, he's referencing Manus Benchmark's investment in Chinese AI company Manus. Said, Mr. Asperu have told reporters the investment in China made Benchmark appear more comparable to the Chinese Communist Party. And this is quote hats off to Bill Gurley. He won't be attending this year's forum. Mr. S. Bruhave said, Mr. Gurley did not respond to her comment. Anyways, I don't think Bill Gurley needs to respond to this because he's no longer an active GP at Benchmark, but it's still is a funny.

• 1:45:29John Coogan?

  Fun to see Delian having some fun, taking shots. Let's move on to the Doge story. This is probably a good place to close out. Catherine Boyle says, these kids are so hardcore, no weekends. They know they're racing against a media and political clock that won't thank them for their service. No exaggeration. This is the most inspiring effort in government of our lifetime. Long Doge. And we got lots of great photos hitting the timeline. Luke Ferrator looking fantastic in a suit and tie. Cody Jones, fellas in control and lots of people are coming out. Atlas says, that's my best friend. We have been following each other on X.com for years at this point. By the way, I love that. And August.

• 1:46:09Jordi Hays?

  If you've been following, if you've been mutuals, you know, with somebody for a few years, you're basically best friends.

• 1:46:15John Coogan?

  I agree. I agree. Yeah. I mean, DC was packed. I mean, Ryan Peterson was doing Senate bean soup reviews. Meeting with senators, Nvidia Jensen long announced a $500 billion investment to build AGI in the US. Kind of a continuation of that Stargate announcement. And yeah, just.

• 1:46:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, this is separate, separate from.

• 1:46:39John Coogan?

  Oh, this is separate. Okay.

• 1:46:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It just turns out $500 billion is a nice round number that everybody tends to gravitate towards. But you know, Stargate was OpenAI plus Masa plus a handful of other players also announced by Trump. But this was announced directly by Jensen, who.

• 1:47:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, was was all over Hill and Valley this week, which was cool.

• 1:47:08John Coogan?

  So what are the other top stories we need to cover before we get out of here? GTA 6 has been delayed to 2026. Pour one out for the gamers, a little moment of silence for all the gamers.

• 1:47:21John Coogan?

  I think at this point.

• 1:47:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is brutal. You can actually.

• 1:47:24John Coogan?

  Between family and work, by the time GTA 6 drops, I will not have any time to play it, which is very sad because I played GTA V a lot when it came out in, what, 2012 or something? Also, in the news.

• 1:47:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the market had been.

• 1:47:36John Coogan?

  Went from 100 million ARR to 300 million ARR in four months. That's massive. Congratulations to them. And the Neuralink team has a FDA breakthrough designation, device designation for speech restoration. Elon says, congrats to the Neuralink team. So congratulations. That's great. Any other?

• 1:47:56Jordi Hays?

  The last one, the CIA released two videos in Mandarin.

• 1:48:01John Coogan?

  This is very important.

• 1:48:01Jordi Hays?

  Aimed at recruiting Chinese officials.

• 1:48:04John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:48:05Jordi Hays?

  And John Ratcliffe said, "One of the primary roles of the CIA is to collect intelligence by recruiting assets that can help us steal secrets." So being very, you know, going to CIA is just going direct here.

• 1:48:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:48:16Jordi Hays?

  Being very explicit.

• 1:48:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:48:18Jordi Hays?

  So if doubt, doubt this would be the case, but if you're a Chinese official listening to this and you want to help America, head over to @CIAonX and get in touch with them.

• 1:48:36John Coogan?

  We also have one last review. We've said for a long time, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and we will read it on the show. Thank you. My favorite place to get technology and business news. Nowhere else can I get such varied topics. This review is brought to you by TahoeLifeAgency.com, the best place to get life insurance.

• 1:48:59Jordi Hays?

  And this is from my next door neighbor, Murph. So shout out to Murph. I, I realized a couple of years ago that I should probably have a life insurance policy because I'm an adult with a family.

• 1:49:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:17Jordi Hays?

  And I went to Murph and he's the best. So.

• 1:49:23Jordi Hays?

  Shout out to Murph. Thank you for the five star review. You're the man. I will see you probably at some point later today.

• 1:49:29John Coogan?

  Amazing. And we will see the rest of the, the audience on Monday. So thank you for listening to this show. We hope you have a fantastic weekend and we'll see you on Monday. Goodbye.

• 1:49:40Jordi Hays?

  Have a great weekend, everybody. Cheers.

• 1:49:42John Coogan?

  Cheers.