Warner Bros. Discovery Split, Defense Tech Update | David Senra, Katie Haun, Justine Moore, Anish Agarwal, John Lee, Connor Zwick, Trey Holterman, James Cadwallader, Jordan Black, Ayush Sharma

(02:20) - Timeline (27:07) - History of Warner Bros Discovery (01:14:16) - David Senra, host of the "Founders" podcast, is renowned for his in-depth explorations of entrepreneurial biographies, offering insights into the lives and strategies of history's greatest business leaders. In this conversation, he delves into the career of music industry titan Jimmy Iovine, highlighting Iovine's relentless drive, exceptional talent recognition, and innovative marketing strategies that propelled artists like Dr. Dre and Eminem to global fame. Senra emphasizes Iovine's unwavering commitment to excellence and his ability to harness controversy as a tool for business success. (01:47:46) - Katie Haun, founder and CEO of Haun Ventures and former federal prosecutor, discusses the recent bipartisan passage of the GENIUS Act in the U. S. Senate, which establishes a regulatory framework for stablecoins. She emphasizes the importance of also advancing the market structure bill to provide comprehensive regulatory clarity for the crypto industry, highlighting the need to address questions surrounding securities and commodities classifications. Haun advocates for pursuing both legislative measures simultaneously to foster innovation and protect consumers in the evolving digital asset landscape. (02:06:49) - Justine Moore, an Investment Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, focuses on AI companies within the consumer sector. In the conversation, she discusses the rapid advancements in AI video models, highlighting the emergence of foundation model companies like VO3 and Cling, as well as multimodal apps such as Crea and Flora, which enable creators to generate videos using various AI models. She also explores the integration of speech and talking avatars in AI-generated videos, noting the development of tools that create talking avatars from images and those that apply lip-syncing to existing videos. (02:31:39) - Anish Agarwal, co-founder and CEO of Traversal, discusses the development of an AI-powered site reliability engineer to automate troubleshooting in complex software systems. He highlights the limitations of current observability tools, which require manual analysis, and emphasizes the need for AI agents to manage increasing system complexities. Agarwal also notes the challenges in hiring skilled site reliability engineers and the potential of AI to alleviate this shortage. (02:39:52) - John Lee, CEO of Safire Technology Group, discusses his background in defense contracting and his company's focus on accelerating electrification within the defense sector. He highlights challenges in military electrification, such as supply chain shortages and the need for advanced, interoperable battery systems, and introduces Safire's development of a tactical electric dirt bike designed for military use. Lee also emphasizes the importance of integrating safety into battery design, referencing Safire's patented SAFIRE technology, a shear thickening electrolyte that prevents fires upon impact, enhancing battery safety and performance. (02:59:39) - Connor Zwick, co-founder of Speak Language Learning Program, discusses the company's mission to create an AI-powered language tutor that offers personalized, on-demand instruction. He shares their strategic focus on the South Korean market, noting the country's significant investment in English education and the prevalence of English learning academies. Zwick also addresses the potential impact of real-time AI translation technologies, expressing confidence that the desire for genuine human connection and the aspiration to learn languages will continue to drive demand for language learning solutions. (02:59:39) - Trey Holterman, CEO and co-founder of Tennr, a New York-based company specializing in automating healthcare document processing, discusses how Tennr addresses the inefficiencies in patient referrals caused by reliance on e-fax documentation. He explains that over 90% of patient visits originate via e-fax, leading to delays and lost revenue due to incomplete documentation. By automating the processing of these documents, Tennr ensures timely patient contact and complete records, thereby improving patient care and provider revenue. (03:09:26) - James Cadwallader, co-founder and CEO of Profound, discusses the company's recent $3.5 million seed funding led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Khosla Ventures, Nvidia Ventures, and others. He highlights the shift from traditional search to AI-driven platforms like ChatGPT, emphasizing the need for brands to manage their visibility in AI-generated responses. Cadwallader also notes that Profound's platform has attracted clients such as MongoDB, Indeed, and DocuSign, underscoring its growing influence in the evolving digital marketing landscape. (03:17:38) - Ayush Sharma, founder and CEO of Warp, a modern payroll and compliance platform for startups, discusses how Warp automates payroll processes, including tax compliance and employee benefits, to alleviate administrative burdens for founders. He highlights the company's recent $18 million Series A funding led by Sound Ventures, with participation from notable investors like Drew Houston and Kyle Vogt. Sharma emphasizes the importance of building exceptional products in large markets, noting that even in crowded sectors, delivering superior user experiences can drive significant demand. (03:28:04) - Jordan Black is the CEO of Senra Systems, a company specializing in designing and manufacturing complex wire harnesses for industries like aerospace and defense. In the conversation, he explains that wire harnesses are essential components connecting electrical systems in vehicles and machinery, yet their design and production have remained largely manual and unchanged since the Cold War. To modernize this process, Senra Systems is developing a software tool called Amp to standardize wire harness design and implementing automation to streamline manufacturing, aiming to improve quality and efficiency in the industry. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVP.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Wednesday, June 18th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome. The temple of technology.

• 0:10Jordi Hays?

  The fortress of finance.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  The capital of capital.

• 0:13Jordi Hays?

  The home of the golden retriever.

• 0:15John Coogan?

  We are so back. Delian sums it up well. He says, we thought it was so over, but in fact, we are so back because Chamath Palihapitiya is launching a SPAC.

• 0:26Jordi Hays?

  He's exploring. He's exploring the idea and.

• 0:29John Coogan?

  He's having advanced conversations, advanced talks.

• 0:32Jordi Hays?

  I think I'm going to vote yes. The reason for that is that 99% of SPAC sponsors quit right before they're about to hit it big.

• 0:40John Coogan?

  Yes, I agree. I agree.

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  And so I think that this could be the one and I think everybody should be open to the idea, right? Let's, let's, it's not the, the vehicle's not the problem.

• 0:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 0:52Jordi Hays?

  It's the, it's the asset that, you know, that, that, that becomes a part of it. And so let's, uh, let's keep an open mind.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 1:00Jordi Hays?

  He might, he could very well be backing Stripe, right?

• 1:02John Coogan?

  I've never wanted a poly market on something more. We need a poly market on whether or not this SPAC happens before the end of the year ASAP.

• 1:09Jordi Hays?

  ASAP.

• 1:09John Coogan?

  Immediately. Um, also, I mean, if the SPAC gets out, you know where to go. Public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Multi asset investing, industry leading yields, they're trusted by millions. Go check it out. Um, let's read through some of the news that we want to cover today. Give you a little bit of overview of the show. Uh, the big news is more development in the story around Time Warner. Look at that lineup. Wow. That is a stacked lineup.

• 1:36Jordi Hays?

  It's getting to the point, it's actually a little hard for me to read.

• 1:38John Coogan?

  It's a little hard to read. Yeah. We might have to condense some of this down, figure out a way to kind of roll up, work on a lightning round product, something where we can go back to back to back. We did it with the Teal Fellows, worked out really well. We've been doing it at YC Demo Day. I think we're going to do it, uh, more frequently because there's so much news. Have you been following how many funding raising announcements have been going out? Like the timeline is just like six companies raising legitimate like seeds, series, series A, series Bs every single day.

• 2:07Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:08John Coogan?

  Narrative violation. The venture capitalists do not appear to be on vacation. Somehow, we'll see. These might be deals that got done before, before the private jets left for Europe, but

• 2:19Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:20John Coogan?

  They're just getting announced now, but we'll be here covering it, talking to the founders who are raising big dollars from big name VCs. And we have some news about who's joining what team. And there's a lot of movement amongst the tier ones.

• 2:31Jordi Hays?

  Lot of action.

• 2:32John Coogan?

  So there's, there's an update to the David Zaslav story about Time Warner. We'll, we'll dig into a little bit of the split of what's going on. This is of course HBO, HBO Max, they went to HBO, they went to Max, they went to HBO, they went back and forth with the brand. Eventually now they're splitting up the company entirely. And big news, Warner's chief to receive pay cut after split. This is David Zaslav. And so he will be making less money now as he's only overseeing kind of half of the organization. Kraft Heinz is also removing all artificial dies on the back of the Maha movement and a lot of stuff that RFK Junior has been pushing, right? Bobby Kennedy.

• 3:14Jordi Hays?

  I've been surprised at how quickly some of these players have been willing to give up

• 3:19John Coogan?

  They're moving on it really fast.

• 3:21Jordi Hays?

  Their sacred artificial dies.

• 3:22John Coogan?

  At the same time, with the artificial die story, I don't know, I still don't have a firm idea of exactly how dangerous they are, exactly the impact. Like, it seems like there's a study that shows

• 3:33Jordi Hays?

  You've never been afraid of them.

• 3:34John Coogan?

  I've never been, I'm still not afraid of them.

• 3:35Jordi Hays?

  Just go out and say it.

• 3:37John Coogan?

  But, but it seems like right now, the, the narrative is that they might lead to increase, slight increases in ADHD symptoms amongst kids. And so if that's true, that's obviously something we want to avoid. It seems like, you know, a lot of the rationale comes down to, they don't have

• 3:52Jordi Hays?

  All right, John, you're taking the side of big food.

• 3:54John Coogan?

  I'm just saying, like, like the, the, the actual narrative, the, the science communication, I think has been lacking on the food dies. It's been a lot of like, it's scary, but it hasn't been concretized in the sense of like, of like, it takes two years off your life. It, it, it raises your chance of cancer by 5%. Like, we're not there yet, and we've been there with other products. And, and I think that there is more, there's, like, we need more from the scientific community or from, from the actual thought leaders in Maha, anywhere else, to really make it clear, like, what are we getting when we remove this? It seems like something that, like, we could do without, because apparently food dies, they just make, they just make stuff like more enticing, basically.

• 4:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and there's plenty that well, well, the more important thing is there's plenty of of natural alternatives that are already used in Europe and other places around the world that we can just slot in.

• 4:45John Coogan?

  So it's kind of like a why not conversation, which is fine, but it would be cool if we actually knew to a point exactly how bad it was for you. I would always like to see that if possible. Other news, obviously, the the war between Israel and Iran is raging. Now there's a more interesting dynamic of merging in the oil markets. We're going to have a founder on to talk about oil markets soon, but China will pay if Iran's oil is cut off. The country's refineries have become hooked on cheap imports of sanctioned Iranian crude. So there's a very interesting dynamic between Russia, China, and Iran, as they all are kind of going to various levels of conflict with neighboring countries, neighboring

• 5:25John Coogan?

  areas. As they get cut off, they kind of drive each other towards one another. And so it'll be interesting. They would be unlikely bedfellows because of the difference in religion between China and Iran, but certainly likely trade partners if if they, you know, need to keep the oil flowing. And Iran obviously needs to keep the money flowing as they fund their war efforts. So interesting story there. Andy Jassy from Amazon is also talking about AI potentially cutting the size of their big workforce, which is interesting. We've heard this from Klarna. We're going to have the CEO of Klarna on the show soon and dig into how much of that is real. Where exactly is generative AI agent stuff like actually

• 6:10John Coogan?

  affecting hiring? Where can you actually?

• 6:13Jordi Hays?

  Get leverage.

• 6:14John Coogan?

  Get leverage. But the thing with leverage is like the game, the game theoretic outcome is usually like, you know, I can do X with 10 employees plus AI. You can do X, you can do the same amount of output with 10 employees and AI. And so we both wind up using the maximum amount of employees and AI. Like, like, it doesn't always play out that that there's an advantage to be gained by cutting your workforce.

• 6:41Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 6:41John Coogan?

  Especially if we're in kind of this more like centaur era where we're not fully. Delegating entirely and it's more like we want these AI enhanced employees and we need lots of them. So, but it is interesting. He says about 41% of employers said that they would downsize their workforce due to AI, a World Economic Forum survey found. And so lots of people are talking about this. It's unclear if it's just a signal to the market that, hey, we're going to be more profitable going forward.

• 7:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it'd be interesting to think about what type of messaging there was from CEOs in the dot com era. Hey, we're going to be able to-

• 7:16John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. All the fax machine employees are going away.

• 7:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:20John Coogan?

  Eli Lilly is buying a gene editing startup. They're paying 1.3 billion for Verve Therapeutics. It's on the cover of the Business and Finance section today. So I'm not super familiar with this. We need to have some more biotech people on to really dig into this, but they're paying $1 billion upfront, adding potential treatment for cardiovascular disease to its portfolio. Under the agreement, the company has said Eli Lilly will buy all of the gene editing startup shares outstanding at for about $10.50. The stock was at around $6 beforehand. There's another $300 million contingent on the company's lead treatment achieving certain clinical milestones. The treatment is being evaluated in Phase 1B

• 8:02John Coogan?

  clinical trial study and has been granted fast track designation by the Food and Drug Administration. There's a lot of excitement about Marty over at the FDA.

• 8:11Jordi Hays?

  Some quick notes on dot com era CEOs and how they thought about workforce expansion or contraction because of the internet. So during the dot com era, many CEOs and founders of internet companies believed that the internet would enable them to operate with leaner workforces compared to traditional businesses. This belief was rooted in the idea that the internet could bypass established distribution channels, automate processes and reduce the need for large numbers of employees to deliver products and services. The web was seen as a killer app that could connect buyers and sellers in seamless, low-cost ways, fueling optimism about efficiency and scalability. However, this vision did not always materialize as expected. While some companies did achieve efficiencies, many dot com firms rapidly expanded their workforces in pursuit of growth.

• 8:55Jordi Hays?

  And market share often hiring hundreds of employees within months. So when the bubble burst, these companies faced quite a lot of pressure with layoffs and it did lead to a glut in the job market, but it was ultimately driven by that desire to compete and capture market share. So many of these CEOs, they aspire to say, hey, we're going to have these much leaner sort of workforces. But the reality was that it was a lot more complicated than that. And there was some over hiring. So anyways, I think we will probably will see some of that, right? There's this pressure to just compete and just access the best talent and scale headcount in order to win market share. And I'm sure that will lead to layoffs at different

• 9:39Jordi Hays?

  points that might be blamed on AI because right now AI is this great scapegoat. If you want to downsize, you can be like, we're 10 times more efficient than we were last year.

• 9:48John Coogan?

  And if you want to upsize, you can be like, this stuff's too dangerous or it's too big of an opportunity. Or you want to spend more on CapEx. We have to go after it. Yeah, it is. It is the dominant narrative. It drives everything. It even drives the FDA because the FDA reporting to the Wall Street Journal here says FDA chief to fast track some drugs. This is what Eli Lilly is banking on and tap AI. And so artificial intelligence top of mind even for the even for the government, embracing artificial intelligence, taking on companies that make ultra processed foods and offering a fast track to approve drugs the Trump administration views as a priority. Welcome to the new FDA as envisioned by Dr. Marty Mochery, who is leading the agency under Health Secretary RFK Junior. Both men have

• 10:32John Coogan?

  said they want to overhaul the agency citing what they see as FDA's reputation for coziness with the pharmaceutical companies. Mochery's goal is to deliver more transparency, unleash innovation, eliminate conflicts and lower drug pricing, said Callie Means, a White House advisor and ally. And former guests of the show.

• 10:53Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 10:53John Coogan?

  That's here for Callie. Very interesting, the changes. And so I'm not exactly sure how they're planning on implementing AI. But it actually does make a ton of sense because FDA officials said about 6,000 people at the FDA are using AI weekly. AI can modernize the FDA and radically increase efficiency in the review process. I mean, that is huge because you wind up sending in like 100,000 doc, 100,000 page document citing all this stuff. And a lot of the early FDA trials are just fact checking that you actually filled out the form properly or fact checking that you even have scientific data. Like, did you do the test at all? And then if you did the test, then we will evaluate the results and put the scientists on it.

• 11:34John Coogan?

  But there's a lot of folks in the FDA where their job is not actually to understand the efficacy or the results of the trial, but just to understand that the trial happened at all. And that is something that AI could probably jump into pretty quickly. So that's exciting. Other news, the Senate is set to pass a bill regulating stable coins. This was on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The Senate was poised to pass legislation to regulate a widely used type of cryptocurrency, a key victory for the digital asset industry after it poured money into last year's election. The bill, the first of its kind, put federal guardrails on digital currencies, would set up oversight of stable coins, a popular crypto asset typically pegged to a fiat currency like the US dollar.

• 12:17John Coogan?

  The peg keeps their price steady, making them attractive to traders looking for a store of value while they buy and sell more volatile cryptocurrencies. And but stable coins can also be used for cross border payments. We've covered the genius act a few times. We're having Catherine Hahn come on the show to talk about exactly what's going on.

• 12:32Jordi Hays?

  For her to break it down.

• 12:33John Coogan?

  It'll be fun.

• 12:35Jordi Hays?

  We've talked plenty about unstable coins as well as stable coins.

• 12:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 12:40Jordi Hays?

  And but yeah, her analysis should be spot on. So excited to get that.

• 12:45John Coogan?

  In other news, there is a shakeup at Renault, is that right? Carrion. Renault's star boss tests his skills at Carrion. De Meo revived the carmaker's fortune at Renault as CEO, but views are split on whether he can do the same for the luxury group. Luca De Meo was among French business elite celebrating the opening of the 2024 Olympic Games at a party hosted by luxury group LVMH at its five-star Cheval Blanc hotel in Paris last July. Let's hear it for luxury group LVMH. The Renault chief executive joined LVMH patriarch Bernard Arnault and top executives such as Louis Vuitton chief Pietro Baccari.

• 13:29John Coogan?

  But few expected that within a year, the motor industry veteran would end up with the top job at LVMH, LVMH's longtime rival Carrion. And so he's hanging out at the LVMH party. Little do they know, there's a trade deal in the works and he's going to go work for the direct competitor at Carrion. The Italian is set to leave Renault next month and become the boss of Carrion, the struggling owner of Gucci and Saint Laurent, from mid-September. While De Meo has spent his entire career in the car industry, he has been making discreet overtures to the luxury sector for some time. According to two people with knowledge of the situation, he cemented his reputation by leading a turnaround of Renault, which he took over in 2020 when it was reeling from the exit of Carlos Ghosn.

• 14:14John Coogan?

  Do you remember this?

• 14:15Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 14:16John Coogan?

  He escaped, he escaped in a suitcase. Do you remember this whole story? Oh, it's amazing. Yeah, the Carlos Ghosn story is insane. Ghosn had been ousted after his arrest in Japan on charges he denies, later making a daredevil escape to Lebanon in a musical instrument box. That's what happened. So he, so he-

• 14:35Jordi Hays?

  In a plane.

• 14:35John Coogan?

  In a private jet. So he chartered a private jet under someone else's name and then basically was sleeping in a like a large guitar case or something like that. Or you know, one of those like roadie cases that has like speakers in it and stuff? So he goes in there and then he gets out and he can't be extradited because he's in his home country because and he claims that like the Japanese government was accusing him of was basically being like anti-competitive with him because he was dominating the Japanese market and they were like, you're cooking the books. It's unclear and like we'll never really know, I guess, who did the right thing. But Demeo came in and was like, okay, I'm going to turn this around, be a little bit more by the book, maybe, maybe don't get, you know,

• 15:17Jordi Hays?

  You don't want to end up in a situation where you're getting snuck in a private jet in a musical instrument case. You just want to avoid that.

• 15:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. You want to be in the

• 15:26Jordi Hays?

  It's not about, it's not, life's not about what you should do. It's about what you, you know, shouldn't do. It's about avoiding things.

• 15:33John Coogan?

  So he took over, so Demeo took over in July of 2020. Renault's shares price has almost doubled. Let's hear it for that. While Volkswagen has fallen by a third and Stellantis has been almost flat. Stellantis is also in trouble. Renault's operating margin improved from a loss in 2020 to a record 7.6% last year as he moves from one top French group to another and prepares to steer another turnaround. The question is whether Demeo's lack of experience selling handbags and high heels will help or hinder his bid to revive Caring. Luxury is a bit different from carmakers, said one luxury executive who said Demeo was a big captain of industry and a real star who could still succeed in his new role. Caring isn't lacking in creativity, but in structure and discipline.

• 16:15John Coogan?

  A combination of strategic missteps and global slowdown in demand for high-end handbags and watches has left Caring in a difficult, difficult position. Flavio Crada, fund manager and luxury specialist at GAM, said Caring had to do something big to address the situation. Caring slowdown follows years of

• 16:32Jordi Hays?

  The Caring, the Caring, Caring LVMH dynamic is interesting. So Caring has Gucci, Saint Laurent, Takevaneta, Balenciaga, Brioni, you know, a bunch of other brands. LVMH has pretty much every other one besides Hermès, which is obviously an independent company.

• 16:49John Coogan?

  I thought they were investing or they own a stake of Hermès.

• 16:52Jordi Hays?

  They have some, some ownership. And it was always the goal to just kind of buy up and eventually take control, but that didn't happen. But the power law dynamics that we see in venture clearly playing out here, Caring. Is a 22 billion euro market cap group, down over 60% in the past five years. LVMH is an order of magnitude bigger, 270 billion dollar company at, that's up 27% over the past five years. So if you remember, not too long ago, Bernard Arnault was richest man in the world.

• 17:32John Coogan?

  Yep, still up there.

• 17:33Jordi Hays?

  Everybody said, this is, people weren't exactly excited about that, except for us.

• 17:40John Coogan?

  Why not?

• 17:41Jordi Hays?

  No, I think the pushback was like, okay, the Instagram era crew made it so that the a

• 17:48John Coogan?

  He's not exactly curing cancer.

• 17:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:52John Coogan?

  Is that the criticism?

• 17:53Jordi Hays?

  The criticism was that he wasn't a technologist and, but anyways.

• 17:57John Coogan?

  Oh, he's an honorary technologist. Anyway, in other news, this is, there are two crazy deals happening today. Dylan Field is leading around into Senra Systems, which is a wire harness company.

• 18:12Jordi Hays?

  Named after David Senra?

• 18:13John Coogan?

  I think so. We'll have to ask, we have both of them on, so today, so we can figure that out. And then Spotify Daniel Ek is leading a 600 million dollar round into drone maker Helsing at a 12 billion valuation. And so, I mean, Spotify and Vingma, they're in different categories, but I see them both as like, you know, like consumer-ish internet, like the design heavy, like not hardware stuff.

• 18:39Jordi Hays?

  Aspire, everyone should aspire to be an angel investor that leads 600 million dollar rounds.

• 18:45John Coogan?

  Yes, or 25 million dollar rounds in the case of Senra.

• 18:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, there's a range.

• 18:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's a range, you can do a lot.

• 18:49Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, stop, you know, don't aim so small and think, oh, I just want to write 100K flyers, you know, shoot for the, you know, 25K lead, sorry, 25 mil lead check or 600 million, depending on the opportunity.

• 19:01John Coogan?

  So we can dig into this more when we get to that. Also, you know, the 5 million dollar US investor visa, the gold card?

• 19:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:11John Coogan?

  People were joking that like, Cominey is going to apply for one and then just be a citizen, even though he's like, you know, public enemy number one in the war for Iran. Well, 70,000 people have applied for it. It's a lot.

• 19:24Jordi Hays?

  How many of those are real?

• 19:25John Coogan?

  I don't know, but yeah, is it like you put down a $5, you know,

• 19:31Jordi Hays?

  The Tesla model, you know, 100 bucks. I mean, I believe that there are that many people that would be willing to pay.

• 19:41John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure. I mean, like, just look at demand for luxury apartments in tier one American cities.

• 19:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:48John Coogan?

  Like, there's so much international demand, and that's just to have an asset in America that feels more durable than something in your country.

• 19:57Jordi Hays?

  Your local currency.

• 19:58John Coogan?

  Right, in your local currency, exactly. So, the number seems staggering, but also maybe believable. We'll have to dig into where it goes from this. We can read into this article more, but I thought it was an interesting headline.

• 20:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, apparently, there's 59 million millionaires. Many of those wouldn't be able to just, you know, slam 5 million down for a gold card, but many of them, I'm sure, would be able to.

• 20:23John Coogan?

  There's also an interesting article in the Financial Times today, breaking down the weapons that are being used. Obviously, we know some defense tech founders that are playing in this world generally, mostly on the smaller drone side, but the Financial Times has a good breakdown, showing the different missile types of systems. There's ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and then UAVs, and you can kind of see the different arcs that they take. We were talking about this with regard to hypersonics, but Iran has four different kind of ranges and different classes of ICBMs that they've been sending

• 21:04John Coogan?

  over. One is the Haj Kasem Solid Propellant Missile, named after the IRGC commander, that's Qassem Soleimani, who was assassinated by the United States in 2020. They are immortalizing him in the name of this rocket. It has a maneuverable warhead, and, according to Iran, was used Saturday night and might have struck the Haifa refinery. There's the Fatah-1, the Koram Shah, and the Ahmad, and there's a few different trade-offs between range and payload, and it'll be interesting to talk to some defense tech founders over the next few weeks about what's actually on the ground, and then how do you counter this stuff?

• 21:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, some interesting electronic warfare or propaganda happening right now.

• 21:45John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:46Jordi Hays?

  Apparently, the satellite signal for Iran's state-run television channel. Has been hacked, so every channel is now playing anti-regime messaging.

• 21:55John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 21:56Jordi Hays?

  Uh, which are calling for freedom and revolution.

• 21:58John Coogan?

  Huh.

• 21:58Jordi Hays?

  Against the regime. So interesting, um.

• 22:02John Coogan?

  I think that's like the biggest question to answer is like, how popular is the actual, how, how popular is the current regime? Um, because there's obviously, you know, it, it's, it's very, it's very advantageous to someone who's attacking. If I'm attacking your country, I'm going to say Jordy's really unpopular. Everyone who says, everyone who says Jordy's popular is lying and, and you never really know.

• 22:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:25John Coogan?

  But something like that shows that there is at least enough will.

• 22:28Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get Shervin on the show.

• 22:30John Coogan?

  Pishvar?

• 22:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:31John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, that'd be great.

• 22:33Jordi Hays?

  He, he's, uh, according to X, very excited to be, to be able to go home.

• 22:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, he wants to go home. And there's a lot of folks that are in that, in, in that camp. The other news, uh, Musk's XAI nears a $9.3 billion fundraising. You highlighted this later on the show yesterday. Investors shrug off, White House spat, makes sense. They're closing $9.3 billion in debt and equity and the burn rate is over a billion dollars a month, right?

• 23:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:02John Coogan?

  I think that was the stat.

• 23:03Jordi Hays?

  Burning a bee.

• 23:04John Coogan?

  Investors have placed orders on more than $5 billion in a bond and loan offer and giving the company's bankers at Morgan Stanley confidence that they can finalize the financing round. I know the banker on this deal.

• 23:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Tesla is down 5% in the last month. Is that the number that you would think if?

• 23:20John Coogan?

  No. No, the narrative would be it's 75% down.

• 23:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:25John Coogan?

  Based on the news and like the drama.

• 23:27Jordi Hays?

  I don't think many people could pull this off though.

• 23:28John Coogan?

  Incredible.

• 23:29Jordi Hays?

  If you're a, you know, series C founder, don't make wild accusations about the president.

• 23:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:35Jordi Hays?

  Expect, you know, not to take a little bit of a hit. A bigger, bigger hit than, than, uh, you know, 5%.

• 23:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's wild. Well, people know naturally aspirated V12 is coming in the next Tesla. They're moving on. They're, they're branching out.

• 23:50Jordi Hays?

  If they, if they can do that, this is a $10 trillion stock, maybe a $100 trillion stock.

• 23:54John Coogan?

  Maybe even bigger.

• 23:55Jordi Hays?

  If they can really hit the right engine.

• 23:57John Coogan?

  Why not one quad?

• 23:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:58John Coogan?

  One quad. Let's do it. Musk company told investors that it also expects to complete a $4.3 billion equity raise alongside the debt package, giving it the firepower to build the data centers it needs to expand. It is competing with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others to develop and commercialize AI tools. Musk's group launched a chatbot, Grok. As an irreverent alternative to ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, claiming that it would seek truth rather than a politically correct narrative. Musk combined XAI with his social media company X in March in a deal that valued the company, the combined entity at $113 billion.

• 24:34John Coogan?

  That's up there. TPG is in the deal. There's a couple other folks in the deal. Anyway, let's move on to some timeline. What's going on in the timeline? Let's get into it. I think we should go deeper on what's going on at Warner Brothers because this is an interesting story that we didn't really get to. Somewhat in the tech, in the tech world because of course they interface with Netflix, former Fang, current Fang, I guess, but Fang has just fallen out of style. But the news today that's driving the, the story is Warner's, the chief executive, David Zaslove will take a pay cut after the company splits. And so the news is that Zaslove could receive over $150 million in stock by exercising options if share price targets

• 25:19John Coogan?

  are met post-split. Gunnar Wyden, Wydenfels will become the CEO of the Cable Networks Company, receiving a 15 million stock and options grant. And so we'll go into this, into this split. The new pay package goes into effect only if the split happens by the end of 2026. We need a poly market on this to be tracking it, but Zaslove already received options for nearly 21 million shares last week. The underlying stock was valued at more than 200 million at the time. The board gave priority to retaining Zaslove and giving him strong incentives by trying, by tying pay to performance. He will head the streaming and studios business after the split and is often, he's often one of

• 26:01John Coogan?

  the highest paid CEOs in the S and P 500s. Last year, he received a pay package of 51.9 million, up there with Tim Cook. Pretty big, pretty big. Feeling criticism amongst shareholders. Yeah, a lot of folks have been kind of saying that his strategy has been misdirected. A lot of focus on the brand, which we'll go into with the HBO stuff, but interesting to see how this dynamic is playing out. At the new company, he would keep his $3 million a year in salary. His target bonus would fall to 6 million with a cap of 12 million from a target of 22 million and a payout of 24 million last year. The contract promises Zaslav a target of 15.5 million in equity awards the first year and 7.5 million annually after that.

• 26:44John Coogan?

  The amount could rise or fall with performance. He's going to invest and they kind of go into the, this is like an incredible amount of detail, but I guess they had to share this with the board and so it's in the journal now. I'm kind of interested in like how this actually plays out, but anyway, I don't know, we could do a little bit of backstory on Warner Brothers Discovery to kind of set things up to, to take us up to speed. I mean, it's a really, really old company.

• 27:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:13John Coogan?

  Literally started by brothers, like Harry, Albert, Sam, Jack Warner, began screening motion pictures and mining towns across Ohio and Pennsylvania in 1903.

• 27:23Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 27:23John Coogan?

  You don't see many brothers companies anymore. We've completely lost the, the use your last name as the name of the company.

• 27:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:31John Coogan?

  Meme, that's completely gone.

• 27:33Jordi Hays?

  I do think, I do think Chris Amadon is bringing this back.

• 27:40John Coogan?

  Oh, he's doing it?

• 27:40Jordi Hays?

  Amadon Heavy Industries.

• 27:42John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 27:42Jordi Hays?

  I like that. But so that's a good start. I do think that could be the next meta because

• 27:48John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 27:48Jordi Hays?

  It allows you to quickly, you know,

• 27:51John Coogan?

  The dot coms available.

• 27:52Jordi Hays?

  It attaches some meaning.

• 27:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:54Jordi Hays?

  As an investor, as an investor, it's like, I want to invest in the company that the founder attaches their name to, right?

• 28:00John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep. I'm putting it all online.

• 28:02Jordi Hays?

  What's?

• 28:02John Coogan?

  I'm not just going to like dip on this company because then what?

• 28:04Jordi Hays?

  You're like, oh yeah, that company named after me is, you know, failed.

• 28:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. It's putting it all online. Yeah, it's good. I think it could, could become a meme, just like the, the browser company of San Francisco or of New York and the compute company of San Francisco and the American manufacturing company of America. Like there's a whole bunch of those and, and, and we're maybe reaching the end of that meta and a new meta shall emerge.

• 28:28Jordi Hays?

  That meta is over.

• 28:29John Coogan?

  You think so?

• 28:30Jordi Hays?

  Do not name yourself the

• 28:32John Coogan?

  The media company of Hollywood.

• 28:33Jordi Hays?

  The media company of Hollywood, although you did throw that out at one point. As a good name for a C corp.

• 28:40John Coogan?

  It'd be disrespectful to the folks who are actually using that name. So they, so in 1923, not far from here, in Hollywood, California, they incorporated Warner Brothers Pictures in 1923. So they were grinding for 20 years, just showing motion pictures in mining towns. Just showing up to some mining town in Ohio or Pennsylvania and saying, you guys want to see a movie?

• 29:03Jordi Hays?

  You guys like flicks?

• 29:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was just like, not even incorporated really as like a proper company. 1927, they released The Jazz Singer, popularizes the synchronized sound talkies. This was the, the generative AI, the VO3 moment of the day. When you could hear sound synchronized with the, with the movie. And this propelled them to major player status. And then you jump forward 40 years, 1967, Jack Warner sells his remaining shares. Seven Arts buy the studio and the firm is briefly renamed Warner Brothers Seven Arts. In the next three years, parking and services conglomerate Kindly National acquires Warner Brothers. So they just like changed hands a bunch. The Discovery Channel launches in 1985.

• 29:49John Coogan?

  In 1990, there's a $14 billion merger of Time Incorporated with Warner. This creates Time Warner and we're going to get to Time Warner in 1996. Acquires Turner Broadcasting Systems, Ted Turner's company. That's CNN, TNT and Cartoon Network for 7.6, 7.5 billion. And so now it has a cable portfolio. And then in the dot com boom, you gotta get in on the internet action. And of course you get to America Online announces it closed 165 billion. It really is a great name, America Online. It's fantastic.

• 30:24Jordi Hays?

  And I think, I think the, I think that the IP is like kind of floating around.

• 30:31John Coogan?

  It's like the Enron IP, you can just like launch a call.

• 30:33Jordi Hays?

  AOL.com still exists, but, but like, does it really exist?

• 30:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. So I mean, this was the, I think this was the biggest merger of all time.

• 30:42Jordi Hays?

  I go to AOL.com, I get a Ramp ad.

• 30:45John Coogan?

  Oh yeah?

• 30:45Jordi Hays?

  So that's cool.

• 30:46John Coogan?

  Well, time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more, all in one place. Go to Ramp.com.

• 30:53Jordi Hays?

  The official corporate card of the golden retriever.

• 30:56John Coogan?

  Exactly. So AOL announces a 165 billion dollar merger with Time Warner, forming AOL Time Warner, later judged one of the least successful mega deals in US history. Over the next 10 years, the early 2000s, AOL has dropped from the corporate name. Time Warner ultimately spins AOL off as a standalone company. In 2018, Discovery Communication closes its 14.6 billion dollar purchase of Scripps Network Interactive for HGTV and Food Network, rebrands Discovery Inc. So they have like a package of cable assets there.

• 31:35John Coogan?

  Warner Brothers, so in 2018, AT&T completes its 85 billion dollar takeover of Time Warner and renames its division Warner Media. And so Comcast has Universal and AT&T has Time Warner and kind of like the pipes of distribution are also owning the networks of distribution, which also own the shows and the content. And this is the nature of the TV media era, basically, pre-internet. We haven't seen this with the social networks that much. We've seen like a couple of big deals from like Spotify, you know, doing like one offs,

• 32:13John Coogan?

  but there aren't as many like, okay, the social network bought like a creator organization that's operating on top of it. It just doesn't really happen. But maybe in the future, who knows? In 2020, Warner Media debuts direct to consumer streaming service HBO Max in the United States. And HBO has a fascinating history, too.

• 32:35Jordi Hays?

  Disney at one point bought Maker Studios. Do you remember that? For almost 700 million.

• 32:43John Coogan?

  I wonder if they like kept pumping stuff because like, it feels like the core Disney IP portfolio is so valuable.

• 32:50Jordi Hays?

  Maker at one point had tens of thousands of creators. And I don't know if-

• 32:55John Coogan?

  It was like a true network. Were they thinking of it, I wonder if they were thinking about it like the new, what's that, what's that like farm team that Disney has where they, where like Justin Timberlake came up from and like Britney Spears was part of it, it was like Mouseketeers. Are you familiar with this?

• 33:10Jordi Hays?

  I don't even know.

• 33:11John Coogan?

  There was some sort of like child actor farm team that Disney had for a while. They would, they would put different child actors on for like little bits to kind of like audition and they'd get some screen time, but it wouldn't be like they, they're starring in their own show. And if they did well, they would wind up getting music deals and movie deals and, and kind of rolling from there. So I could imagine them thinking about that as being like, uh, a, uh, like a, an arm into the next generation of talent, but unclear if they actually do that.

• 33:41Jordi Hays?

  Maker, maker, maker studios, uh, was absorbed by Disney Digital Network, uh, in 2017. This was a couple of years after the acquisition and it effectively is no, no longer operating. So not, not a great.

• 33:55John Coogan?

  Be interesting to talk to them and get the postmortem, see what they're up to now. Um, so yeah, HBO Max, AT&T agrees to spin off Warner Media. These assets change hands so much, but, uh, they merged with Discovery in a $43 billion reverse Morris trust transaction. Discovery CEO David Zaslove is tapped to run the combined entity. This is in 2021. Deal closes Warner Brothers Discovery, or everyone calls it WBD, begins trading on NASDAQ under the ticker WBD. Uh, they consolidate HBO Max and Discovery in 2023 into a single streaming platform branded Max. Uh, and then responding to brand recognition concerns, uh, in 2025, this was May 14th.

• 34:37John Coogan?

  Warner Brothers Discovery announces Max will revert to the HBO Max name in summer of 2025. And that was like, everyone was saying it's a massive L to what dropped the HBO brand name because they've spent decades building HBO home box office, like The Sopranos, Sex and the City.

• 34:53Jordi Hays?

  It used to mean something. It still means something. It stood for quality.

• 34:56John Coogan?

  Movie quality television. And you turn it on, you're going to get movie quality content the entire time. And they built that, it was such a premium brand. And then they just were like, yeah, we're not going to use it anymore. It was a mess. I mean, there, there is the counterfactual, which is like, they wanted to put Discovery assets on an app. And so if they put that on HBO and all of a sudden you're going to HBO and seeing like, Home and garden content, or I don't know exactly what's on Discovery these days, but Food Network, you might be like, ah, this doesn't feel like HBO. It's like diluting the HBO brand. But still, it was a little bit of a mess. And so, facing debt and strategic pressures, Warner Brothers Discovery unveils a plan to split the two publicly traded companies

• 35:38John Coogan?

  into two publicly traded companies by mid 2026. Streaming and Studios will be headed by Zoslov, and Global Networks will be headed by CFO Gunner Weidenfels. And so, this was the big news last week, June 9th, or the week before.

• 35:52Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 35:53John Coogan?

  They're going to split into two different companies. There will be Global Networks, which will be home to CNN, TNT, TBS, and Warner's dozens of cable channels, as well as international holdings. Global Networks will hold 20% stake in the second entity, which Warner is referring to as Streaming and Studios, which they're going to give a different name to. And it plans to use earnings from that stake to pay off debt. And so, it's still a little bit of kiretsu happening, but they are drifting apart.

• 36:24Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it is, it'll be interesting to see how these two entities trade, once they're independent, right? There could be more of a growth story around HBO Max.

• 36:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:35Jordi Hays?

  You know, if they continue to want to compete with Apple, and Netflix, and the many other players, Prime, etc. The cable division will, you know, it's hard to see what the long-term growth story there, but I'm sure they'll continue to find a way to make money.

• 36:54John Coogan?

  I mean, the weird thing about this is that, like, the Wall Street Journal has this little infographic about what's in Global Networks and what's in Streaming Studios. And in Global Networks, it's Bleacher Report, cable channels, CNN's planned streaming service, that's, I believe, CNN, oh yeah, they're not calling it, is it, was that ESPN, where they're pro streaming service, just called ESPN? What is CNN going to do? Are they going to do CNN Plus? This is the chart, Jordy. So, Global Networks has Discovery Plus, which I believe is a streaming service. And then Streaming and Studios has HBO, in addition to HBO Max, I believe HBO is just a channel. Because they're still selling HBO to cable subscribers as a premium channel.

• 37:35John Coogan?

  And so even though they are like separating these things out based on whether or not it's streaming or a cable network, it's really more of like a separation around the brands and the IP. And what I'm seeing is that is that CNN and Discovery are more like news, reality TV, more ephemeral, less durable franchises, less long-lived IP. And over in streaming services, I'm seeing DC, you have Superman, Batman, HBO, these, they're real assets, Westworld and Sopranos and Game of Thrones, right? Like Game of Thrones could become its own whole world and they do more spinoffs and more movies and stuff. And so it feels more like they divided it along IP lines than really along like technology

• 38:20John Coogan?

  and distribution lines, but I don't know.

• 38:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 38:22John Coogan?

  We'll see.

• 38:23Jordi Hays?

  We'll see.

• 38:24John Coogan?

  We are empowering these iconic brands with the sharper focus and strategic flexibility. They need to compete most effectively in today's evolving media landscape, Zaslav said in a statement. Riveting.

• 38:37John Coogan?

  Zaslav is under increasing pressure to boost the company's sagging stock price, which before Monday had dropped about 59% since the company was created from the merger of AT&T's Warner Media and Discovery Communications. Shares closed down 3% Monday. S&P Global Ratings, friend of the show, downgraded Warner's debt to junk status earlier this month. It's really, it's really such a dig that they just have, you know, it's like, it's kind of like how if you're in school, you know, it goes like A, B, C, D, and then they skip E and just take F.

• 39:07Jordi Hays?

  F.

• 39:08John Coogan?

  Right? It's like they, they needed to give you that extra, like you did really bad. And so because they could just do like triple A debt, double A debt, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, they could have it be much more, you know, random or, or just like linear. Instead, it's like you go from like triple A, sounds amazing, sounds really safe, like I'm not going to lose my money in triple A. And then junk sounds like extremely risky to me.

• 39:35Jordi Hays?

  Junk.

• 39:35John Coogan?

  Anyway, they're going into into his pay package again. Significant portion of Warner's roughly $34 billion of debt will live on the balance sheet of global networks, which currently generates more revenue and has stronger cash flow than streaming studios. So maybe this is more of like a CFO play, figuring out the the finances, kind of like the reverse version of what X and XAI did.

• 39:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:56John Coogan?

  Warner said it secured a 17.5 bridge loan, 17.5 billion dollar bridge loan from JP Morgan to buy back a chunk of its debt. Yeah, if you're if you're, this is the big leagues. You don't go to that VC for, you know, oh, I need $2 million bridge loan to get me to Series A. This is you go to JP Morgan, ask for 18 bill.

• 40:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it is interesting. You know, people love to poke fun over the HBO Max, Max, now back to HBO Max over the last few years. But if you actually look at the full corporate history of these assets, it's always been constantly renaming, changing things around, et cetera. So in many ways, it's just a continuation of decades of rebrands and restructuring and mergers and reverse mergers. So.

• 40:41John Coogan?

  Lots of lots of fodder for the journal, maybe that's what we're here for.

• 40:46Jordi Hays?

  My my key issue is getting rehearsal renewed for another eight seasons.

• 40:51John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 40:51Jordi Hays?

  10 seasons.

• 40:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's so good.

• 40:54Jordi Hays?

  I don't know how you top flying a commercial aircraft.

• 40:57John Coogan?

  He has been like changing the direction of that.

• 40:59Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, oh, oh, here, here's how it goes full circle. So Nathan Fielder becomes the CEO of of HBO Max.

• 41:12John Coogan?

  Or the CFO.

• 41:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:13John Coogan?

  He gets a CPI or CFI.

• 41:15Jordi Hays?

  And he actually convinces, you know, management and gets sort of a critical mass of shareholders aligned to, you know, become just to to sort of sell off all the legacy IP and just focus on him.

• 41:29John Coogan?

  It's.

• 41:30Jordi Hays?

  Really go really just become a personality led, you know, media company that's just centered around Nathan Fielder.

• 41:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:37Jordi Hays?

  And maybe they could go into consulting, you know, you could see, you know, other media companies like Netflix coming to Nathan Fielder saying, how do we, you know, we already have subscribers in every household in America. How do we grow? And, you know, I imagine he'd have some wild ideas around around how to catalyze growth.

• 41:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, I like that he's been able to. Basically like do be incredibly impactful at a global scale like as a bit. Basically, he's like, wouldn't it be funny if we fixed serious problems with the FAA? And then he like goes and like, kind of makes it funny, but mostly is just actually doing like investigative journalism and like a documentary about aircraft safety. And yes, there's like a layer of comedy over it, but mostly it's just, uh, it's just like impactful work, uh, and insightful analysis. And yes, I would love to see him do that at Warner Brothers Discovery, uh, come in and, you know, as a bit, just make it a high performing growth stock. Give it a growth story.

• 42:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, he could potentially double. He could potentially double HBO Max's revenue if he use, you remember when he did this gas rebate?

• 42:48John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 42:49Jordi Hays?

  It was a dollar 75 gas, but you had to like, take the rebate up.

• 42:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:53Jordi Hays?

  You know, a mountain.

• 42:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:54Jordi Hays?

  So he could do something like that with HBO Max, which is like, you know, you can actually, we'll give you a, you have to sign up for, for $50 a month. But once you've been a member for a few months, if you hike up Mount Everest and you actually put, you know, this rebate in, in the box, we'll offer you a free subscription.

• 43:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 43:12Jordi Hays?

  And so there could be some, um, a lot of different, a lot of different strategies I could see him rolling out.

• 43:17John Coogan?

  I'd be more interested in his investor relations strategy as CEO. I want to see him like, as a joke, go to Sun Valley, as a joke, go on Squawk Box regularly. You know, uh, as a joke, tell a really convincing story during earnings that, that excites retail, turn it into a meme stock as a joke.

• 43:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he could do something like.

• 43:37John Coogan?

  Blow out the shorts.

• 43:38Jordi Hays?

  He could live stream and day trade with the company balance sheet.

• 43:41John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 43:42Jordi Hays?

  As a way to kind of just drive retail engagement.

• 43:45John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. I, I think you gotta put him in the boardroom at this point.

• 43:48Jordi Hays?

  Put him in the boardroom.

• 43:49John Coogan?

  For sure. He deserves a board seat after the rehearsal.

• 43:52Jordi Hays?

  We should buy, uh, since apparently after the whole Tesla pay, uh, CEO, uh, compensation saga. If you own like seven shares of a company, you could, you could sue. So it's possible, you know, we could buy some shares of Warner Brothers and start, you know, uh, oh, sorry, HBO. Max and start actually lobbying to get to get Nathan into the boardroom.

• 44:14John Coogan?

  I've been saying this for our buddies who wind up selling companies to public companies. And we always tell them, our advice for anyone who does some sort of like acqui or like sells their company to a bigger company, like your job is not to rest and vest. Your job is to become the CEO, put the company back in founder mode. We're half joking, but oftentimes the the company that's acquiring you is acquiring you because they're not in founder mode and you are and you are more agentic and more aggressive and more creative. And so you should actually try and get into the boardroom. You should actually try.

• 44:48Jordi Hays?

  Regardless of what the CEO that bought your company actually wants.

• 44:52John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 44:52Jordi Hays?

  It's very likely you know better than they do.

• 44:54John Coogan?

  And I think we as we as we as friends should potentially buy some shares in the acquiring company, fire up a shareholder lawsuit and say, hey, put our friend who you just acqui hired for a couple mil.

• 45:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:08John Coogan?

  In the boardroom.

• 45:09Jordi Hays?

  You got an MVP that's basically benched right now.

• 45:11John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 45:12Jordi Hays?

  Cause they're not in the boardroom.

• 45:13John Coogan?

  Perfect metaphor. That's the perfect metaphor. Well, speaking of MVPs, Ben Thompson, MVP of Stratechery has a breakdown on his reaction to the news. He says he feels compelled to cover this because as much as he likes celebrating when he gets things right, he also needs to own his Ls. And I'm taking a big one here. He says, I was very optimistic about the idea of combining Warner Brothers and Discovery. And this is what I love about Ben. He's like, he really holds himself accountable. He gets a lot of things incredibly right. I mean, Nvidia and Meta, when they were down, he was laying out really, really detailed bullcases, but he does it in a way that's not, he doesn't issue like a buy rating, you know? He just walks through the strategy, but he still holds himself accountable, even though

• 45:57John Coogan?

  he's like, like, you know, he's kind of like the opposite of Kramer, like Kramer's like riffing, offering like buy and sell ratings like all the time. And then like constantly.

• 46:06Jordi Hays?

  He's not afraid to change his mind.

• 46:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Cause he's just going, going, going on the daily basis. Ben's obviously much more detailed in his analysis, but then also revisits what he's said before. So back when Warner Brothers and Discovery were in the process of that merger, Ben Thompson said there would be increasing bargaining power with MVPD providers. I think that's Netflix. I don't, I don't, I don't even know. Do you know what MVPD stands for? This is like industry jargon. A streaming package, a streaming package that appealed to the entire household with a combination of prestige content and top notch filler.

• 46:40Jordi Hays?

  MVPD, MVPD is multi-channel video programming distributor, which is traditional TV providers like cable, satellite, fiber optic, etc.

• 46:49John Coogan?

  Got it. Okay. So, so, so if they, if they go to Comcast and say, hey, in the bundle that you're offering to Comcast subscribers, you know, there's usually like the base tier, the premium tier, and then like every channel possible and like sports package.

• 47:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:07John Coogan?

  They would have leverage to say, we want you to push HBO harder and get the upsell for that and give us more of that because we, otherwise you don't get, you know, Discovery reality TV shows or something like that theoretically. And so, yeah, that's what he's saying is that the streaming package could appeal, appeal, appeal to the entire household because you get the prestige content, Game of Thrones on the weekends, but then you also get filler content, which he calls, you know, his affectionate term for Discovery style reality shows. And so I don't actually know what the top, what the top Discovery reality shows are because there's so many different ones. And I know Bravo, I believe is owned by NBC and they have a whole bunch of reality shows. I'd love to know what Discovery is working with,

• 47:51John Coogan?

  but there's clearly stuff on HGTV and other Discovery channels. I imagine they do, doesn't Discovery do like Shark Week? Isn't that the big one? I imagine like that's a Discovery thing. I don't know. They have so many.

• 48:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they have Deadliest Catch, Mythbusters.

• 48:04John Coogan?

  Mythbusters, that's a classic.

• 48:05Jordi Hays?

  Alaskan Bush People.

• 48:06John Coogan?

  I haven't heard about that one.

• 48:08Jordi Hays?

  Dirty Jobs.

• 48:09John Coogan?

  Dirty Jobs, Mike Rowe. Okay. Yeah. So, so that, that, that kind of content is something that you'd be putting on the background, like a laundry TV.

• 48:17Jordi Hays?

  Naked and Afraid.

• 48:18John Coogan?

  Never heard of that? Not interested?

• 48:19Jordi Hays?

  That's where, no, no, no. It's not as bad as it sounds. It's contestants are dropped into remote wilderness locations with no clothes, food, water.

• 48:27John Coogan?

  No clothes?

• 48:28Jordi Hays?

  And must survive for 21 days. This would be great if we could get venture capitalists to do it.

• 48:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 48:35Jordi Hays?

  I think they could, you know, it's a, it's a high risk, you know. Move for them to say, I'm going to take my August instead of going to Europe.

• 48:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 48:43Jordi Hays?

  I'm going to be dropped into the Alaskan wilderness and forced to survive.

• 48:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:47Jordi Hays?

  21 days on camera.

• 48:48John Coogan?

  But they have some grit coming out of that.

• 48:49Jordi Hays?

  They'd have some grit and some credibility.

• 48:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, credibility.

• 48:52Jordi Hays?

  To be able to say, you know, I've, I've pushed through, I've, I've faced.

• 48:55John Coogan?

  I'm in the trenches.

• 48:55Jordi Hays?

  I'm in the trenches with you.

• 48:57John Coogan?

  You might be in a literal trench.

• 48:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:58John Coogan?

  Muddy and naked and afraid.

• 49:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:02John Coogan?

  Anyway, Ben Thompson also laid out a reason for optimism, a better advertising offering that extended across linear TV and streaming. But he says his biggest mistake in his analysis, which was, was not properly accounting for the debt, which the new Warner Brothers Discovery was taking on, a mistake that was greatly amplified by the significant rise in interest rates that occurred over the past few years. Interesting. Although Warner Brothers Discovery debt is still fairly cheap and is going to, and is going down. S and P Global downgraded them to junk, thanks in large part to declining linear TV revenues. Interesting. It's important to acknowledge, however, that my reasons for optimism were overstated as well.

• 49:40John Coogan?

  First, there were serious questions about WBD's MVPD leverage going forward, particularly now that TNT has lost the NBA. Second, there's no evidence that Max's breath does anything to mitigate churn, mitigate churn, which remains among the highest of any of the streaming services. Is that just because it's so expensive and it's like, either there's a take over the world moment with the Game of Thrones, like you gotta be subscribed or else it's like, nah, I can skip it. I feel like HBO is something that like, once a year I'm open.

• 50:10Jordi Hays?

  They don't have it in them to slop it up.

• 50:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm not like.

• 50:13Jordi Hays?

  Netflix is down to slop. They're down to just throw mud at the wall.

• 50:17John Coogan?

  I never watch Netflix. I don't even have it installed because like, I just don't.

• 50:21Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 50:21John Coogan?

  Very little stuff on there.

• 50:22Jordi Hays?

  You can't get to Netflix on your TV?

• 50:24John Coogan?

  No.

• 50:25Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 50:26John Coogan?

  I can't get to it on my phone either.

• 50:27Jordi Hays?

  The last one. Hey Netflix.

• 50:29John Coogan?

  No.

• 50:29Jordi Hays?

  You got, I got a guy for you. Come find.

• 50:31John Coogan?

  To be clear, I pay.

• 50:32Jordi Hays?

  They're going to be banging on the door. Okay, okay.

• 50:34John Coogan?

  I pay for it.

• 50:36John Coogan?

  And I'm probably not like the most premium tier, but.

• 50:38Jordi Hays?

  Very un-American to not support, you know, a great American tech company.

• 50:42John Coogan?

  So, so unlike you, I do, I do enjoy the current thing when it comes to cinema and television.

• 50:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:49John Coogan?

  But it needs to be take over the world. Everyone is talking about it and then I watch it. So White Lotus, the last thing I watched on Netflix was Squid Game, season one.

• 50:59Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 51:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, because it was like so important to see it and everyone, and it was good. I liked it. But like, what was the biggest show on Netflix this year so far? Like it's all just background TV to me. I feel like, I mean, I guess F1, Drive to Survive is pretty good, but I just haven't had a chance to.

• 51:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but even Drive to Survive, I don't, I would be fascinated to understand their viewership in late, in these later seasons versus some of the initial ones.

• 51:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. You know what they should do? They should have Design to Survive, kind of some Figma Spawn Con on Netflix, all about designers fighting for their lives.

• 51:35Jordi Hays?

  Mobile app, enterprise, SaaS.

• 51:37John Coogan?

  Exactly. Go to Figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams, build great products together.

• 51:43Jordi Hays?

  Dylan, consider.

• 51:46John Coogan?

  Absolute dog.

• 51:47Jordi Hays?

  Designed to survive.

• 51:48John Coogan?

  Designed to survive.

• 51:51Jordi Hays?

  If we don't increase the conversion rate on this button by 5%, we get thrown into this pit of sharks.

• 51:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 52:00Jordi Hays?

  This pit of snakes.

• 52:02John Coogan?

  That's actually not the steak with Drive to Survive. Like, like the steaks are just like all like interpersonal drama and like trade deals.

• 52:08Jordi Hays?

  I would, yeah.

• 52:08John Coogan?

  It would be like, oh, who's poaching who?

• 52:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:11John Coogan?

  Oh, this person.

• 52:12Jordi Hays?

  Coinbase reached out to one of.

• 52:14John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. We know. We know the story.

• 52:17Jordi Hays?

  The US Army's designers.

• 52:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 52:20Jordi Hays?

  And now they're pulling them in.

• 52:21John Coogan?

  Meta's trying to pull designers in. It's a hot market.

• 52:24Jordi Hays?

  Meta just offered $200 million.

• 52:26John Coogan?

  No.

• 52:29Jordi Hays?

  Too much.

• 52:29John Coogan?

  The number's 100 and that's not confirmed, by the way.

• 52:32Jordi Hays?

  It's not confirmed. Speculation.

• 52:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then they, and then of course they, they dropped the, they dropped the, the HBO name and they went back and forth on that. There was a funny thing. Compare that to Netflix. Certainly the streaming service is investing tons of money in having differentiated content with a long-term goal. And by extension, the ultimate value proposition for consumers is offering something for, offering something, something, offering something for everyone all of the time. To be, to be TV, in other words, but freed from the constraints of geography and time. One subscribes to Netflix not to get a particular show, but simply because that is what one does. Just as one, one subscribed to cable. Can you see the difference? Just think of the tagline. It's not TV, it's HBO. That's not simply a slogan. At least it wasn't, but it will be if AT&T.

• 53:17John Coogan?

  Sees the brand's ultimate value as a consumer front end for a de facto Netflix competitor. That is to say TV more broadly. If my interpretation of these comments is correct and AT&T plans to build a streaming service to rival Netflix. Well, first, good luck and second, that is quite a bit higher level of ambition for the Time Warner acquisition than I anticipated with what he said. Okay, maybe I can take the W on this analysis.

• 53:42John Coogan?

  It holds up pretty well in the end. The mistake was not so much about combining Warner Brothers and Discovery as it was trying to take on Netflix in the first place. My instincts were right about that. I just wish I'd stayed anchored on that point all the way through. And if you look at the, I saw somebody being like, oh, whatever happened to Fang? We, I think we covered this in the show. And it's like, it was like, why was Netflix ever in Fang? And it was kind of a good question because like Netflix doesn't have the same just intense power of the hyperscalers and the other trillion dollar tech companies. But you look at the stock chart and yeah, it went way, way down for a little bit. But it's, but it's back up and it's been on absolute tear. And for a long time it was the best performing stock in the stock market.

• 54:26John Coogan?

  And I think it's up like millions of percent or something like that. Like the numbers are insane.

• 54:30Jordi Hays?

  He's trading at a 57x.

• 54:34John Coogan?

  Earnings?

• 54:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 54:35John Coogan?

  Price earnings?

• 54:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 54:36John Coogan?

  What's the market cap?

• 54:38Jordi Hays?

  520 billion.

• 54:40John Coogan?

  Not bad, half a trillion. Like that's pretty, pretty big for something that the narrative was like, it's just a streaming service. So it's not as dominant as, you know, Google, which has the Google search and YouTube, which competes with Netflix and cloud platform. Or Apple, which is the iPhone and the gate to Netflix like. Or Tesla with the car and the humanoids and the self-driving and all this different stuff. Netflix was always just an app that you watch stuff on and there were a lot of them for a while. And so there was a question about like, how, how solid would their lead be long-term? They have solidified it. Anyway, hopefully they're on Vanta automated compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the work

• 55:21John Coogan?

  out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

• 55:30Jordi Hays?

  Get on there. Intercom is on there. And you know why I said Intercom? Because SPAC sponsors are reaching out to OWN at Intercom.

• 55:38John Coogan?

  No way.

• 55:39Jordi Hays?

  And so I highly doubt he would entertain any of that. It seemed like a sort of boiler plate email that they were just blasting out.

• 55:45John Coogan?

  Wait, did he? Did he post this?

• 55:47Jordi Hays?

  He posted, he said, he said, we are so effing back. And he posted a screenshot.

• 55:56Jordi Hays?

  And anyways, I'm sure, you know, part of being ready to get SPAC'd at any time, you got to get on Vanta. Got to get your

• 56:04John Coogan?

  Got to do it.

• 56:05Jordi Hays?

  Compliance dialed.

• 56:07John Coogan?

  And so, uh, Bucho Capital bloke, this was actually two years ago, back in 2023. He talks about Warner Brothers Discovery and talks to license HBO original series to Netflix. Zaslov strikes again. Corporate financial decisions won out. Selling the future for money today. Uh, the HBO streaming's world, a walled garden is coming down, it seems. You can already watch HBO on Hulu somehow. You can like pay through Hulu. And so that's been a thing for a while.

• 56:32Jordi Hays?

  Hulu is a weird place. Weird place.

• 56:34John Coogan?

  Hulu's Hulu's an odd story because it was like this crazy joint venture between all the different platforms. And then eventually Disney acquired most of it, but like it had like all sorts of content.

• 56:44Jordi Hays?

  Never been big into that whole world.

• 56:46John Coogan?

  You're not a Hulu guy. Um, uh, in a hugely surprising move, Deadline understands that Warner Brothers Discovery is shopping some of its HBO library titles to rival Netflix. And this was kind of the Ben Thompson takeaway, which was that, um, when you have a fixed priced asset, it is often better to auction that off to the highest bidder and not need to sell it to yourself in the form of your own streaming service.

• 57:10Jordi Hays?

  Which then if Max already has some of the highest churn of any of these subscription platforms, and then you can get some of the best content from HBO on other platforms, what's going to keep people? On HBO.

• 57:23John Coogan?

  Yep. And so.

• 57:25Jordi Hays?

  HBO Max. So.

• 57:26John Coogan?

  It's a good question, but, but the, but the, I mean, the cash flow should flow directly to them and it should be most efficient because whatever service can monetize at the best could potentially just pay them upfront for that. And again, like, yes, Netflix has a lot of original productions, Netflix originals and whatnot, but a lot of that is just stuff that they purchased, right? Or purchased exclusive, exclusive rights to, they're not necessarily producing everything there. So Warner Brothers Discovery has been an absolute roller coaster ride. The stock was up at $75 a share in mid 2021, sort of a top tick of the Zerp era, and then the debt kicked in and, and the streaming wars took on, took off and, and the rest is history. So the stock's been

• 58:10John Coogan?

  kind of languishing between 10 and 15 bucks for the last two years. And hopefully they're on to greener pastures now.

• 58:19Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 58:19John Coogan?

  Whatever they're planning, if you're planning to manage a debt schedule, you're planning to manage a complex demerger, you gotta get on a linear. It's a purpose built tool for planning and building products.

• 58:30Jordi Hays?

  We're building products, not reverse mergers, but.

• 58:34John Coogan?

  I am determined to use linear for everything.

• 58:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:36John Coogan?

  Linear should eat everything.

• 58:39Jordi Hays?

  Eat everything.

• 58:39John Coogan?

  It should be the one stop shop for any planning.

• 58:43Jordi Hays?

  Very adaptable. You can do a lot with it.

• 58:46John Coogan?

  It's a system for modern software development. You can streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps, and they got linear for agents. Of course, they could use it for the development of their streaming platform. They have software engineering to do and linear is the perfect tool for them.

• 59:00Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully your agents, your various agents are smart enough to ask, hey, I'd really appreciate, you know, I don't ask for much, but I'd like to be orchestrated on linear. If you could just get me on there.

• 59:10John Coogan?

  I, I just don't know why you're holding back Zaslav from getting a linear installation going to run his office day to day.

• 59:17Jordi Hays?

  Well, if they're, if they want to compete with Netflix and, and other, you know, the primes of the world, the hyperscalers, you know, on streaming and, and real technology, they, they should absolutely get on linear.

• 59:28John Coogan?

  Anyway, there is this fascinating kind of like, I mean, it's a, it's a Nathan Fielder style stunt almost. So Pierre Richelson, who's from Cal.com is.

• 59:42John Coogan?

  Fake suing a former employee. Have you seen this whole thing? Have you dug into this, Jordy? This is, this is a wild, wild thing.

• 59:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm trying to figure it out.

• 59:50John Coogan?

  So it seemed really real, but then he posted this joke Google Doc that made it clear that it was a joke. He says, "Today we are suing Nizzy Abi Zero dot email in the court of Ma- Mail- Alifornia for secretly building an actual, an actually pretty good email client while getting paid by Cal.com." Read the full case below and you can kind of dig into it. And, but it, it does seem weird because when you dig into it, it's like, uh, Amrit, who's the founder, says, "Happy to announce I will be joining Zero dot email as a full-time engineer. Came across this app some months ago, literally saw it grow up from day zero." And, and Pierre says that Cal.com to Zero Pipeline is two for two. And so two people have left Cal to go build this new company.

• 1:00:35John Coogan?

  That can be very rough. That can be sometimes looked down upon to leave the organization to build something new. But it seems like maybe it's good. So Shams Twali says, "So I need to work on Cal first." And then Pierre says, "Well, the best people don't leave Cal, so it depends. Are you good?" And then, uh, and then Nizzy says, "Didn't Cal.com want to acquire Zero dot email before I left?" And then Pierre quote tweets that and says, "Hey, Oric at Grok, what happens if you build a new startup on company, on a company device during work hours?" Which to me looked like he was serious. And John Sirro- Josh Shiroda says, "Ooh, shots fired."

• 1:01:14Jordi Hays?

  They're just joshing around.

• 1:01:15John Coogan?

  It seems like they're just messing around, right?

• 1:01:17Jordi Hays?

  The lawyer that submitted the complaint.

• 1:01:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:01:21Jordi Hays?

  Is named Chad Esquire.

• 1:01:23John Coogan?

  Love it. And, and the amount that they, that they asked for is like $420,000 and 69 cents. Something like that. But it's weird, like, it's weird, it's this weird, like, fake stunt to draw attention. It's working. It got my attention. It was confusing.

• 1:01:38Jordi Hays?

  And you've wanted somebody to build an AI-powered email.

• 1:01:41John Coogan?

  Maybe I'm gonna wind up checking this out. They got me. They definitely got me with all this nonsense. But it really is like the new era of like, you know, content marketing and like going viral.

• 1:01:53Jordi Hays?

  You gotta be crazy.

• 1:01:53John Coogan?

  Like a fake lawsuit is what is the stakes now to break through. You can't just say, hey, like, you know, this new company is going through. But it seems like they went through YC and they worked together and they're probably friends. And I mean, that does happen all the time. That's always like the good ending when someone spins out. They say, hey, I was here for a while. I had a good experience, but I want to go build my own thing. And they get the blessing of the CEO and usually the founders like will angel invest or something like that. So hopefully it really is that narrative. It's a little unclear, but I think that's part of the joke that's going on here. Anyway, whatever, whatever they wind up doing, they gotta get on numeral sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to numeralhq.com.

• 1:02:33Jordi Hays?

  Sales tax, AGI.

• 1:02:35John Coogan?

  I love it. Sam Altman's been on a podcast tour. He's firing shots at Elon Musk. He says, I didn't think Elon was going to abuse his power in the government unfairly complete. I regret to say I was wrong about that. I genuinely thought he wasn't going to. I really, I think it's really unfortunate for the country that he would do these things. I wish Elon would be less zero sum or negative sum. So the, the battle between the AGI Giga Chads is raging still. Although it feels like maybe that like this is coming to a close, like, like they now just have to duke it out in the app layer. Win in the store, like.

• 1:03:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think if you remember, it felt like the big winner of the blow up between Elon and Trump was Sam. Sam and people that had bought a Tesla before Elon went crazy. So there were two winners coming out of that. So hopefully, but again, I'm sure there'll be more updates coming down the pipeline around, around the, the active lawsuit between both parties.

• 1:03:40John Coogan?

  Well, either way, they gotta get on Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Newcomer is on Substack. He's an investor in Substack. He's also leaking information about Substack on Substack.

• 1:03:59John Coogan?

  It's the, uh, it's the Pimp My Ride of Substack Scoops. He's the, he's the exhibit, exhibit, right?

• 1:04:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:07John Coogan?

  So he's generated $400,000 a year from newcomer paid subscriptions. He's paid Substack $50,000. He sells his own sponsorships and Substack doesn't get a cut of that revenue. He also invested $5,000 in Substack's crowdfunding round in 2023 as a show of support. And he's a fair weather friend, constantly agonizing about the huge chunk of subscription revenue that we fork over to Substack. Too friendly tech newsletters platformer and garbage day decamped from Substack over a year ago to Ghost and Beehive respectively. Executives from rival newsletter platforms like Beehive and Kit regularly try to get us to consider jumping ship. Substack's app oriented strategy has at times annoyed me as it sometimes asks newsletters to do that.

• 1:04:52John Coogan?

  Ultimately, he stayed. What's interesting is that now he, he has, he got the scoop that, that Substack might be outraising new funding on the back of a bunch of growth.

• 1:05:01Jordi Hays?

  Scoop?

• 1:05:01John Coogan?

  And so it's just a funny dynamic that is, uh, it's just unique to the new era of like these independent journalists, like.

• 1:05:09Jordi Hays?

  I, I.

• 1:05:10John Coogan?

  Really is a scoop.

• 1:05:10Jordi Hays?

  The thing I have to call out and, and Eric should come on the show and talk about this dynamic, but he's generating.

• 1:05:19Jordi Hays?

  He's netting $400,000 a year and paying Substack $50,000.

• 1:05:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:05:26Jordi Hays?

  Fraction of that.

• 1:05:27John Coogan?

  They take like 10%, I guess, or I guess it's a little bit more, 12%.

• 1:05:31Jordi Hays?

  And this is the backbone of his business, which, which you would imagine being on Substack, I would guess, helps him generate an incremental $50,000 a year of revenue and, and would probably pay for itself.

• 1:05:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, certainly. I mean, yeah, there's two ways to look at that cost. One is, uh, so if you went to a more DIY platform like Ghost that has a lot of the features, but you still have to customize it yourself and you're not getting the Substack team of engineers constantly releasing new products. Well, then you're probably going to wind up paying someone maybe more than 50K a year to, you know, enhance your Ghost installation. Or like optimize it and get the most out of it. So there's like the cost side of that. You can probably do more and more now with AI and get more leverage out of someone around 50K. Probably not right there, but maybe 100K starts to get interesting. If he winds up paying Substack.

• 1:06:26John Coogan?

  You know, 2 million in a few years, maybe it makes more sense, but this is kind of one of the interesting, you know, problems that Substack has to play ball with, but they can probably negotiate at a certain point because there is, there is some element of like, hey, you've gotten really big, we'd love to keep you, why don't we give you a little bit discount on, on our take rates so you don't move off?

• 1:06:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, who knows? That can start a crazy snowballing effect, though, where all the top, you know, creators, which talk amongst themselves, I'm sure.

• 1:06:53John Coogan?

  Yep, totally.

• 1:06:54Jordi Hays?

  But ultimately, he says that he does get recommend, he gets a large number of free signups.

• 1:07:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:07:01Jordi Hays?

  Through recommendations, though.

• 1:07:02John Coogan?

  That seems good.

• 1:07:03Jordi Hays?

  Those readers convert to paid subscribers at low rates. Anyways, interesting. It'll be interesting to see where Substack's new round gets priced. I wouldn't be surprised if it was fairly close to their peak valuation, but that would actually be great to see them kind of growing into that, whatever their 2021 valuation was. I think it was like 750 million.

• 1:07:29John Coogan?

  750? What's up there?

• 1:07:32Jordi Hays?

  They raised a Series B in April 28th of 2021 at 650 million, so.

• 1:07:39John Coogan?

  Pre or post? Probably post.

• 1:07:41Jordi Hays?

  Post.

• 1:07:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:07:43Jordi Hays?

  So they sold 10%.

• 1:07:44John Coogan?

  Oh, not bad.

• 1:07:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the business seems to be like very much sustainable at this point. It seems like it's accidentally profitable, remember that, or reporting in the information? And talking to Chris, it seems like things are going really well. Yeah, just, I guess there is this question of like, how can you quantify the impact of Substack's features on growth?

• 1:08:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:05John Coogan?

  Because you, like, the, yeah, the question is like, they're driving free signups for newcomer, but is it actually driving incremental 50K in profit for him?

• 1:08:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, who knows? I mean, he's selling ads against the newsletter.

• 1:08:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:21Jordi Hays?

  Which, you know, he's able to, he's monetizing those free subscribers, so who knows?

• 1:08:27John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 1:08:27Jordi Hays?

  Who knows?

• 1:08:28John Coogan?

  Promoted post from Public. We haven't done one of these in a while. We're hosting a private screening of one of the summer's most anticipated films starring Brad Pitt, and set at 200 miles per hour. If you're a New York-based Public member, you can access the exclusive experience and be there on opening night, June 25th. Reply Aston for your chance to win tickets. So if you are in New York and you're on Public, reply Aston to this post and head over to the movie screening.

• 1:08:55Jordi Hays?

  Hit him up.

• 1:08:57John Coogan?

  Over in defense tech world, Anduril has partnered with Rheinmetall, the German, the German defense tech company, Prime, really, to manufacture Barracuda and Fury over there. That's very exciting. And then we also touched on Spotify founder Daniel Ack.

• 1:09:14Jordi Hays?

  Guess, uh, guess when Rheinmetall was founded?

• 1:09:20John Coogan?

  The way you're saying that makes me think it's like 1650.

• 1:09:24Jordi Hays?

  I'm putting you on the, I'm putting you on the spot like Tucker put, uh, what's his name?

• 1:09:28John Coogan?

  Oh, how can you possibly report on the news if you don't know when it was founded?

• 1:09:32Jordi Hays?

  This is, this is the best bit earlier. I have to read it out.

• 1:09:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, read the muffin man.

• 1:09:36Jordi Hays?

  Tucker, do you know the muffin man? The muff, Ted goes, the muffin man?

• 1:09:40John Coogan?

  The muffin man?

• 1:09:40Jordi Hays?

  Muffin man. No, I don't know him personally.

• 1:09:44Jordi Hays?

  How can you know anything about Drury Lane if you've never met the muffin man, John? This is a post from Zach Stewart.

• 1:09:51John Coogan?

  This is real gotcha.

• 1:09:52Jordi Hays?

  Really, really good. Anyways, you can still, I give you permission to comment on Rheinmetall, even though you don't know.

• 1:09:57John Coogan?

  What year?

• 1:09:58Jordi Hays?

  1889.

• 1:09:59John Coogan?

  I was not, I, I knew it was really old. 1889?

• 1:10:02Jordi Hays?

  Dusseldorf.

• 1:10:03John Coogan?

  Okay, I was, I was pretty far off with 1650, but, but over 100 years. I mean, yeah, that, that's the same, uh, I, it's general, General Atomic is part of like this roll up and the, and the, and it came out of like, I think, General Dynamics at some point. And the company that, that, the founder of the company that competes with Fury for the, uh, for that autonomous program that they're competing for right now.

• 1:10:36John Coogan?

  Was like the designer of a submarine in the Civil War or something like that. Like, I'm pretty sure that he's, he died more than a hundred years before Palmer Lucky was born.

• 1:10:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:48John Coogan?

  That's the, that's the cultural difference between the two companies that are competing for this like one contract. It's like a fascinating dynamic about like how legacy they are. Like, it's not just like.

• 1:10:58Jordi Hays?

  If you're in the game for a while, you know, decades after, after you start the company, your, your greatest enemy will, will be born. And then they'll have to grow up a little bit.

• 1:11:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:11:08Jordi Hays?

  They'll have to learn the game.

• 1:11:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:11:10Jordi Hays?

  And then they're gonna come for you.

• 1:11:11John Coogan?

  Wild. So yeah, Spotify founder Daniel Eck is leading a $600 million funding round into German defense startup Helsing. This is the, this is kind of more of an andor equivalent over in Europe, valuing that four-year-old company at 12 billion. The, the business makes battlefield AI drones, submarines and robo fighter pilots. It's now one of Europe's most valuable startups.

• 1:11:36Jordi Hays?

  And they're using some renders here, John.

• 1:11:39John Coogan?

  Renders?

• 1:11:40Jordi Hays?

  Look at this image. They're render maxing.

• 1:11:42John Coogan?

  They're render maxing.

• 1:11:43Jordi Hays?

  Happens. It is a cool render. Yeah, look at the water there. It's definitely a render.

• 1:11:47John Coogan?

  Who knows? It's hard to tell these days. It's so, it's, we're beyond the uncanny valley. And so Helsing is, is expanding from its origins in artificial intelligence to produce its own drones, aircraft and submarines as part of a bigger push for locally made and owned defense products for European countries and really companies all over the world.

• 1:12:12Jordi Hays?

  Crazy. It was founded in 2021.

• 1:12:16John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:12:16Jordi Hays?

  By Torsten Riel, Ryle.

• 1:12:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:12:19Jordi Hays?

  A video game entrepreneur, Gunbert Scherf, a former German Defense Ministry official and Nicholas Kohler, an AI researcher.

• 1:12:28Jordi Hays?

  And they have partnerships with Saab already.

• 1:12:33John Coogan?

  And tons of.

• 1:12:33Jordi Hays?

  As Mistral.

• 1:12:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, and tons of American venture capitalists in the deal. You got Lightspeed, Excel, and General Catalyst.

• 1:12:40Jordi Hays?

  Conner's cooking.

• 1:12:41John Coogan?

  They've raised over 1.37 billion.

• 1:12:45John Coogan?

  The Daniel X said, "The world is being tested in more ways than ever before." That has sped up the timeline for Helsing's financing, X said, pointing in particular to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, where drones and other AI-powered systems have been deployed at scale for the first time. There's an enormous realization that it is now really AI, mass, and autonomy that is driving the new battlefield. And so, yeah, exciting, exciting deal. If they want to get more attention, want to do some hiring, they should get on AdQuick. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.

• 1:13:27Jordi Hays?

  They make it just about as easy as launching a campaign on Meta or any other ad platform.

• 1:13:33John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:13:34Jordi Hays?

  Get over there, check it out, adquick.com.

• 1:13:36John Coogan?

  We have David Senra coming in the studio in just a minute. In the meantime, if you're looking to go deeper in AI, there's AI Startup School has been going on for the last two days up at Y Combinator, and Andre Karpathy gave a banger talk, and Swix, friend of the show, grabbed pictures of every slide from his talk and reconstituted it into a full, into a full, like, slide deck, so you can go and read the full talk if you want. And so go check that out on latent, latent.space if you're interested. And we have David Senra in the studio. How you doing, David?

• 1:14:19Jordi Hays?

  Brother, welcome to the show.

• 1:14:20David Senra?

  Now I can hear you. What's going on?

• 1:14:22Jordi Hays?

  What's going on? It's great to see you.

• 1:14:25David Senra?

  How much how are you guys? Great to see you again. Long time no talk.

• 1:14:28Jordi Hays?

  Long time no talk.

• 1:14:29John Coogan?

  Did we talk yesterday or the day before?

• 1:14:31David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:34David Senra?

  It's too long. I need every few hours.

• 1:14:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, honestly, between the show and then the hour that we typically talk with you afterward, at some point, we should just start streaming it live, get up to five hours a day.

• 1:14:47John Coogan?

  This scratches the itch a little bit.

• 1:14:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:50David Senra?

  You guys haven't announced our month-long Extreme Podcasting Summit in Malibu yet.

• 1:14:55John Coogan?

  I was gonna wonder if you wanted to talk about that. I'm super down to talk about it. I'm excited.

• 1:14:59David Senra?

  I've been inviting other podcasters. Like, you need to fly out.

• 1:15:01John Coogan?

  It's gonna be summer of podcasting.

• 1:15:03David Senra?

  Entire month.

• 1:15:05Jordi Hays?

  Rob.

• 1:15:06David Senra?

  No, you have to have a podcast to go.

• 1:15:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the summer of Extreme Podcasting in Malibu, California. I want to create the center for Extreme Podcasting.

• 1:15:18David Senra?

  We're gonna tip it in Malibu, though.

• 1:15:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 1:15:20David Senra?

  With the people that are coming. Yeah, sure.

• 1:15:21Jordi Hays?

  The weather in Malibu.

• 1:15:23David Senra?

  Come on, no one's like, hey, come visit Austin in the summer.

• 1:15:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we need a fresh start. We need a fresh start, too.

• 1:15:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. There's something about the mothership where I think Austin works because you need to have all the cross-pollination from Kill Tony and random people coming in. Malibu's for monk mode podcasting.

• 1:15:42David Senra?

  Yeah, but if you're a comedian and you're friends with Joe Rogan, yeah, obviously move to Austin. That's really good for your career.

• 1:15:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:49David Senra?

  But that doesn't apply to us, so.

• 1:15:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's been a good crew amassing out there. Break it down for us. What's top of mind for you?

• 1:15:58Jordi Hays?

  Before, I have something. So, James from Profound announced a round today.

• 1:16:04John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:16:05Jordi Hays?

  He's coming on the show later today.

• 1:16:06John Coogan?

  Great.

• 1:16:08Jordi Hays?

  David and I are both investors in Profound. They announced a $20 million Series A led by Kleiner with participation from Nvidia, Saga, South Park Commons, and SV Angel. And of course, Guillermo.

• 1:16:23David Senra?

  It's hilarious the lineup of investors. It's like Jordy and David.

• 1:16:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. It's Guillermo from Vercel, Jordy and David, and Jordan Singer, friend of mine, snuck in there as well. So stacked. They're building an answer engine, helping teams optimize. But we'll get into that later. But maybe.

• 1:16:43David Senra?

  Well, no, let me. Actually, there's a perfect Ramp crossover. I don't know if you guys have heard of this little company called Ramp?

• 1:16:49John Coogan?

  Heard of them.

• 1:16:50David Senra?

  But so I was actually in New York with James yesterday and every time, the last few times I go there for a few weeks and last few times I've been there meant made sure to like spend time with him. James for profound and there's actually a funny way that I met him. So Kareem, obviously co-founder and CTO of Ramp is a good friend of mine. And the reason I think that Kareem is such a great founder is because he has this like divine discontent with everything that he does. So nothing's ever good enough. The, the product's not good enough. This go to market's not good enough. The sales isn't good enough. Like everything can be improved. And I was at dinner at his house, like, I don't know, maybe like two months ago. And this was going on and on about all the things that like

• 1:17:32David Senra?

  need to be improved and things that he thought like he hated or whatever. And I was like, all right, enough of this. Tell me like what you actually like, like who are the founders or the products that you think are great? And one of them was profound and James. And so I went up looking, looking James up on Twitter and I found that he followed me. And so I actually followed him back and then we went up DMing. And I was like, Hey, are you in New York? He's like, yeah, I was like, I'll be there tomorrow. He's like, come by the office. And so, yeah, I just thought it was hilarious that, you know, Kareem, his, his bar for excellence is excessively high for people and products and James and profound have exceeded that. So that's actually how I met James and why I was invited to invest in that round.

• 1:18:12Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 1:18:12John Coogan?

  Love it. Should we move on to Jimmy?

• 1:18:15Jordi Hays?

  Let's talk Jimmy.

• 1:18:17John Coogan?

  Break it down for us. How did you originally land on, on Jimmy Iovine as someone to profile?

• 1:18:23David Senra?

  That, that's a question I had for you guys, because you guys both grew up or like lived in LA for a long time. So my interpretation of Jimmy Iovine is like every single person in the music business knows who he is, but the average person doesn't. Were you guys familiar with him at all?

• 1:18:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was loosely.

• 1:18:39Jordi Hays?

  But I think part of it, when you, when I actually think back, it's like the, the tech angle beats and Apple is probably was my introduction to it.

• 1:18:47John Coogan?

  But also like reading stories about Dr. Dre, because I was a fan and kind of like the, the Interscope mafia, like that was, that was in the news when Dr. Dre was like the, one of the leading artists at that time.

• 1:19:03David Senra?

  So Jimmy Iovine is easily like top three people that I want to meet. And when people ask me like, out of all the living entrepreneurs, who do you want to meet? That usually when I say that the surprising, many people don't know him. I've been fortunate enough to have dinner with two people. One was mentored by Jimmy and worked with him for a very long time. Another person competed directly with him. And the way that people speak about him, there's like an unbelievable level of respect and just that the guy's unbelievably driven. Really like relentless. And one of my favorite documentaries, so like, you know this because I read the same books over and over again. I like read the same quotes over and over again, but I also watch the same documentaries over and over again. And so my favorite documentary is The Last Dance. Obviously, you see what comes up when I text you guys.

• 1:19:44David Senra?

  It's Jordan from The Last Dance. But the second one would be The Defiant Ones, which I probably watched at least 10 times. And everybody's like, oh, what's the documentary about? And if you go and like, look it up, it'll say it's about the long-term friendship and partnership between Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre that goes back, you know, three decades. It's like, yeah, it's about that. But really, it's a documentary about entrepreneurship. This is like, if you think of founder mentality, think of like, the way entrepreneurs think, the way they act. It's like in that documentary. And I've been wanting to do an episode on him forever, but there's just not, there's no books about him. He's never written an autobiography or anything like that. So I was like, you know what? Fuck it. I'm just going to watch the documentary again. I'm going to take notes on the documentary and build an outline, just like I would for a normal episode. And then I found every single good interview he's ever done and then transcribed that and then essentially combined all that to use that as like my own book.

• 1:20:28David Senra?

  But I think it's, I'm really interested in these people that are not well-known to like the general population, but everybody in their industry. There's a great line from Warren Buffett where he's like, hey, if you want to learn about an industry, he's like, interview you every single like top CEO, top executive in the industry, you might have to talk to 20 different companies. And then you always ask him, like, if you had to eliminate one of your competitors, I think he used the example, like, if I gave you a gun and you only had one bullet and you could take out any of your competitors, who would it be? And he's like, and Warren's point is like, that's all, you're going to ask all these people, usually they're going to arrive at the same question. He goes, that's the guy. That's the guy in his case you should invest in. Jimmy is very much so that in the music industry. And I just find his, I mean, there's, there's a line in, he's been like,

• 1:21:13David Senra?

  Like really good friends with Bruce Springsteen for like, I don't know, six decades, five decades, something like that. And there's a line that's in the documentary, it's also in Bruce Springsteen's book, where Bruce was talking about, and Jimmy has this mentality, he was like, I didn't want to be rich, I didn't want to be famous, I didn't want to be happy. I wanted to be great. And I think that's what really attracts me to Jimmy Iovine, in particular, and people like him. It's just this relentless drive where he started out with nothing, he started sweeping the floor in a recording studio, to working with John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Dr. Dre, Eminem, founding one of the most successful record companies of all time, then saying, hey, I got bored with that, what am I gonna do next? I'm gonna start Beats. You know, growing that, starting a streaming service, and then selling that to Apple for billions of dollars. Like, he's just incredible person.

• 1:22:00Jordi Hays?

  Insane. Did you get, did you get much into his, he has a program at USC, have you covered that at all? My buddy Ben Taft is on the board there.

• 1:22:10David Senra?

  That's at the end of the documentary, that's actually funny, the least interesting parts of biographies. Cause everybody can understand like the struggle, right? It's like you started out, talking about family life, all trying to figure out your path in your early career, then you might hit on something and then it's going well and then you take another step back and there's just whole like climb that everybody can empathize with. One of the things that I think should be cut out of biographies completely is the end where they're like, I bought a building. I'm so rich, I donated a building named after me. It's like, that's just not relatable, it's just not interesting. So yeah, it is covered in the documentary. I of course am not gonna put that on the podcast.

• 1:22:45John Coogan?

  But they probably want to talk about that too.

• 1:22:47David Senra?

  No, that's, no, like, there's a great line, actually, let me read this to you. Because here's the funny part, Jimmy is a great storyteller too, which I think is really important. And I think above and beyond, like, yes, we're studying these great entrepreneurs to learn how to build a big business and to take ideas from them, be like, hey, that idea worked from then, we can use it for us. But like, more important to that is like, I, building a business is just part of our lives, it's a huge part of our lives. I'm interested in having like an interesting, fun, unique life. Like, I want my kids, or you know, my friends, after, long after I'm gone, to like read the life story of mine and be like, oh, this is a page turner, this is actually interesting. That is Jimmy has incredible stories, you know, for a five decade long career in in

• 1:23:31David Senra?

  music. And what I like is he intersects with all the other greats. So David Geffen, who is, you know, one of the greatest, I think entrepreneurs, investors of all time, and somebody it's like really reclusive now and I really wish wasn't. I would love to read his autobiography. But David Geffen started this huge like gold rush because he wound up selling his, uh, his record label for like $500 million. And I think with stock wound up being, you know, six or seven or $800 billion. And so when that happened, all the other people that were record producers, just like Geffen and Jimmy Iovine were like, oh shit, I need to start my own record label. And so Jimmy goes and David was his mentor. And he goes, hey, we kind of do the same thing, but you just made a lot more money than I did. Should I start a record company? And David goes, you should definitely do it.

• 1:24:16David Senra?

  There's a lot of people in the record industry way dumber than you are. And Jimmy talks about like that actually giving him inspirations. Like, oh, wait, okay, this guy's succeeding, not Geffen, obviously, but other people are succeeding. And, you know, they're not, it's not just a test of intelligence. But there was, uh, there's all these different record labels start at the exact same time as Interscope. And somebody in the documentary says this great thing, uh, where it says, the reason that Interscope was successful versus a lot of other startups at the time was Jimmy was an animal, the most driven and brilliant person at the same time. He was never off and he didn't understand why everybody else wasn't the same way. And this is like, these are the kind of people that like I like to study. These are like kind of people, these are the kind of friends I like to make.

• 1:25:00David Senra?

  These are the kind of people I like to be around. Just like they're fully alive and completely committed to what they're doing.

• 1:25:06John Coogan?

  Give me insight into how he transitioned from sweeping the floor to actually engineering and contributing to studio sessions. Like you, you told us that story about, I think it was Jim Cameron, like reading textbooks while he was driving. Was that Jim Cameron? I think, uh, like there's usually

• 1:25:26David Senra?

  James Cameron.

• 1:25:26John Coogan?

  James Cameron. Yeah. What, what, uh, what was, there's usually like an arc where there's Go to where the heat is, get in the room with the greats. And it seems like he was able to do that by like sweeping the floors and showing up and just being like, I will do anything to be in the important place. But then there's also this second step of like, learn to contribute beyond just floor sweeping.

• 1:25:48David Senra?

  You, you, you just fucking nailed it. This is exactly what happened. So he, his first, his first two jobs in, uh, working in a record studio, he got fired. Okay. Uh, the third one, he gets set up.

• 1:25:59John Coogan?

  Why? This is amazing. Very pro getting fired. So.

• 1:26:02David Senra?

  Yeah. Well, cause he's a college dropout. So let me, I'll just like, give you like the 15 minute version. Interrupt me whenever you want of the hour long episode. And cause it's like, and especially because we're all fathers. I think this is like really important. Like the, one of the most important relationships between father and son. And like, if you really think about all the work that I'm doing, I'm going to hit, you know, the 400th biography read, uh, in like three weeks or four weeks from now. It's like all daddy issues all the way down. Like just stacked on top of each other. You either want to be like your dad or you fucking hate him. And like, you're trying to like, yeah.

• 1:26:30John Coogan?

  We got it ready for number 400.

• 1:26:31David Senra?

  Please, I'll come on. Uh, and it's, it's going to be about the vacuum cleaner guy who I'm obsessed with.

• 1:26:37David Senra?

  Somebody just pulled up and this guy.

• 1:26:39John Coogan?

  Most people would be like, oh, and for 400, you're going to do like Steve Jobs or like Elon Musk. You're like, somebody really, really powerful. Let's give it up for vacuums. Vacuums. That's why he's like, go.

• 1:26:51David Senra?

  You tell me another guy that has been running this company for 40 years, owns a hundred percent of it, highly likely.

• 1:26:56John Coogan?

  We're talking about Dyson, right?

• 1:26:57David Senra?

  I have a friend of mine, a guy I know, actually tried to, uh, gave, tried to, uh, I'm going to take a tangent real quick, cause this is a funny story.

• 1:27:03John Coogan?

  Please.

• 1:27:04David Senra?

  Uh, you know, Dyson is a hundred percent of this company. I've heard the rumors that he's taken out. Everybody's like, oh, he's worth $20 billion. No bullshit. I've heard he's taken out like five plus billion a year in cash and has for a very long time.

• 1:27:14John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:27:15David Senra?

  And so it's like.

• 1:27:16John Coogan?

  Wow, that makes Mark Benioff look like a chump. Mark Benioff sells $2 million to Salesforce every single day. So he's making like $600 million a year in liquidity. But that sounds like Dyson's got a.

• 1:27:25David Senra?

  Wait, he's selling? Or is this, I didn't hear the first part.

• 1:27:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, so Mark Benioff has a.

• 1:27:29David Senra?

  No, no, no. Dyson retains the equity.

• 1:27:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know.

• 1:27:31David Senra?

  This is fucking cash. No, no, no. Don't give me that shit. Uh, and so the, the funny part is, uh, this guy I know, um, told me this story where, you know, he, he's, he's managing Ever. larger pools of capital and has to keep buying more and more private businesses. And so you can't buy a $500 million business anymore or two billion dollar business. It just doesn't move the needle. And so he gave a very friendly like, hey, would you guys be interested to Dyson? To sell. And again, I like highly disagreeable people. I like people that are obsessed with their product. They do it forever. It's just like people like us. And that you can't buy. It's just no fucking number. It's just like, I'm not for sale. Thank you very much. And so they approached Dyson and I'm paraphrasing. Their response was, fuck you. This is a family heirloom.

• 1:28:15John Coogan?

  This is the paraphrase.

• 1:28:16Jordi Hays?

  Family heirloom.

• 1:28:17John Coogan?

  This is the paraphrase.

• 1:28:20David Senra?

  Let me go back to Jimmy, though. I can talk about Dyson forever. Somebody just pulled a tweet. They're like, this guy's been tweeting about the vacuum cleaner guy since 2018. I was like, yeah.

• 1:28:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I saw that. I saw that post. I mean, this is great David lore, but in 2019, you got like four likes on a post. You said like, I just, I just read my 83rd biography.

• 1:28:42David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've slipped some of those in like, isn't it like Jay Gould or something? It's like, this is a person that only you know about, basically. And you've done like multiple episodes.

• 1:28:51David Senra?

  No, so, so we, like, I have very few entrepreneurs living knew about Jay Gould. But the reason you should study him is because, again, I'm always interested in who's influencing the influencers, right?

• 1:29:01John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. So who is the one that influenced Steve Jobs, right?

• 1:29:04David Senra?

  Edwin Land.

• 1:29:05John Coogan?

  Edwin Land.

• 1:29:08David Senra?

  I'm sending you Edwin Land shirts, by the way. I'll bring it with me.

• 1:29:10John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 1:29:11David Senra?

  So, no, but the Jay Gould thing is interesting. And don't, and then let me get to Jimmy if you want. I mean, it's your show. You can do whatever the fuck you want. But the reason I studied Jay Gould and I've read a bunch of old books about him is because I'm reading biographies of Rockefeller. And he was asked like, who's the best businessman you know? And he said, without hesitation, Jay Gould. I'm like, well, that's interesting. And then Cornelius Vanderbilt, keep in mind, when Cornelius Vanderbilt died, okay? He owned 5% of the money supply.

• 1:29:37John Coogan?

  That's like the GDP metric for Stripe. They're like, we want to power 1% of the GDP.

• 1:29:42Jordi Hays?

  Founders need to be more ambitious. They put up the page in the deck. 1% of the TAM.

• 1:29:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, no.

• 1:29:48Jordi Hays?

  No, try to get 1% of the money supply.

• 1:29:51John Coogan?

  Five, 5%. 5%.

• 1:29:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, you gotta start somewhere, you know, 1% of the money supply.

• 1:29:56David Senra?

  And so when Cornelius Vanderbilt was in his 70s and he was by far the richest person on the planet, he said the smartest man in America was Jay Gold. Jay Gold was like 33. And he had said that because they just went head to head to compete over the control of a railroad. And Jay Gold smoked them. And then, you know, interesting thing. Then Cornelius Vanderbilt actually sent, hired hitmen to kill Jay Gold's partner. He didn't succeed. Yeah, that kind of business was completely different than it is now. But yeah, there's all these interesting stories in these books that nobody reads. That's why I love what I do. And I try to like highlight them for people because I'm like, these guys had interesting lives and they ride. They worked on something for 50, 60 years. What's the chance that they, they built a wonderful business for six decades?

• 1:30:40David Senra?

  They didn't come up with any idea that you could use? Like, that's ridiculous. So going back to Jimmy Iovine, it's just like, so he gets fired. I forgot the first reason he got fired the first time, but the second time was they just gave him a 98 day trial. And they just didn't think he was good enough. They, on day 89, he gets fired.

• 1:30:56Jordi Hays?

  Sweeps aren't smooth, you know, you're missing, there's dust all over the floor.

• 1:31:02David Senra?

  The response they said to him was like, this just isn't for you. Working in the music business isn't for you. And this happens over and over again. Like Sam Walton, you know, his first manager, when he was working at GC Penney said, hey, guy, I know you're interested in retail. Sorry to tell you, you don't have a future here. And Sam's like, okay, how about if I become the most successful retail person in history? And I'll build a $400 billion fortune. How about that? Like, so I find like, I love when people, you know, doubt other people and they don't know what they're talking about and they're proven wrong. But Jimmy went to, being fired the first time is really important because then he goes to the record plant. The record plant is owned and run by this guy Roy Sacala, who is a legendary engineer. The reason this is important, exactly what you just said, John, is John Lennon, after he was a Beatle, wanted to work with Roy Sacala.

• 1:31:46David Senra?

  So, nobody will come into the studio on Easter Sunday. And Jimmy Iovine is from Brooklyn. He's this old school Italian family. He gets, Roy calls him, he's like, hey, we need help with the studio. No one else is coming in. You gotta come in on Easter Sunday. And Jimmy's mom's like, you're fucking crazy. You know, we're having a feast, this is church, you can't do this. And Jimmy says, he's 19, he goes, I will do anything, anything to make this work. Shows up to the studio, Roy says, good, I'm glad you're here, I was testing you. In the room is Jimmy, Roy Sacala, and John Lennon.

• 1:32:18John Coogan?

  So he didn't even know John Lennon was gonna be there. He showed up anyway, and that was like the reward, wow.

• 1:32:23David Senra?

  Bingo. And so he said, he goes, listen, I would do, there's a really interesting idea. So I actually talked to Daniel, active founder of Spotify about this. And his whole point was just like, he's completely, like, he'll do anything it takes to get information that he feels is helpful. So when Spotify was going through a lot of rough trouble, he'd reach out to other, his peers, other tech company CEOs. He says, hey, can I just like shadow you? Because like, you say you can run meetings with like 30 people? When I run a meeting, 30 people, not like, it's, I don't even understand how you do this. And Daniel's like, there's no ego involved. So he did this with like Mark Zuckerberg. He spent like, I think, a few weeks shadowing. He goes, I got Mark's fucking coffee. I don't care. Like, I'm there to learn. And so Jimmy Iovine was the exact same way. He says, I did everything they did.

• 1:33:06David Senra?

  Like, I took care, I cleaned the equipment, I set up the wiring. I eventually learned how to be an engineer. He goes, I figured out the way that John Lennon, was, if you're Chinese, from Britain, he's very particular about how he likes his tea. So I memorized exactly how he wanted his tea. He goes, the way I was about his fucking tea was the way I was about everything. He got so good at making John Lennon's tea, that John Lennon wouldn't let anybody else make his tea. So his point was like, man, you're, these guys are, they're legends, are letting you in the room, just be useful. Sometimes it's running an errand, sometimes making tea, sometimes it's fixing the drum sound. And then John just felt he could trust them. And so John starts sending them to, he, he, he just takes them everywhere. They go to LA together, they're recording in London, or in New York together.

• 1:33:50David Senra?

  And like, it's exactly what you just said, John, it's just like, you get in the room and you do whatever you can to stay in that room.

• 1:33:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I want to talk about his, his picking ability and how he became immediately successful. You know, Tom Petty, Stevie Nicks, U2, the list goes on. How much of that do you think was a function of just like his innate taste and, and ability to spot greatness versus just drive and relentlessness and just listening to every single possible artist out there?

• 1:34:22Jordi Hays?

  What is, what is the comp to the venture world where you can be a great venture investor, even if your hit rate is like, you know, 5% because it just matters and getting, you know, actually getting into the companies that matter and move the needle and people will kind of forget about a bunch of misses and, and companies that didn't go anywhere.

• 1:34:38David Senra?

  Okay. You guys know I don't give a shit about venture, so I'm definitely not going to talk about that, but I will talk about how this relates to founders building great products. How about that? Cause that's the only thing that's actually interesting and matters. So Jimmy's idea was, and the example I used in the podcast where his thing is like, okay, producers, which you know, he was an engineer and then he turns into producer. He goes, producers are always like, I did this and I did that. He's like, this is the analogy for venture and founders. He's like, would be producer and musical artist. He's like, I'll read this to you. He goes, you're only as good as the artist that you're working with. You're only as good as the founder that you're investing in, right? Any producer or any venture capitalist who says, I did this and I did that is full of shit. 99% of what's going on in the studio is the artist. And so his point was, I don't have,

• 1:35:21David Senra?

  he wasn't the founder, right? In this situation, he's, I don't have the talent. I'm there to do whatever I can. I'm in service of them. And so his whole point is like, if I want to be successful, then I'm going to pick the best possible talent. How do you arrive with that? Well, the thing about excellence and greatness is like, people don't actually know what it is until they like get close to it. And so part of this is luck and randomness because Bruce Springsteen's most important album that he ever makes is Born to Run. Okay? That's his third album, right? Bruce is still doing it. He's one of the top selling artists. He winds up becoming a billionaire off his career and everything else. But before then, his first two albums were not doing well. He was not doing well. And so Jimmy is the engineer on that album.

• 1:36:01David Senra?

  And he sees firsthand the level of work ethic and dedication that Bruce Springsteen will have to this. And so the way that Bruce was about like a drum sound is the same way that like a Steve Jobs was about every single pixel that's on any device that he's making. And so Jimmy tells the story where it's like Bruce would stand over me and say one word over and over again. He'd say stick, stick, stick. And what that means is like we're hit the hit the drum again because it's not producing the actual sound that I want. It took them three weeks of just in the studio every day, hitting that over and over and over and over again, until Bruce got what he wanted. And so, once you see it's like, oh, and then what happens? Born to Run comes out, winds up being one of the best selling albums of all time. It's just a complete phenomenon.

• 1:36:46David Senra?

  So now he sees the level of craft that John Lennon puts on his work, then and Bruce Springsteen. Then he starts working with Stevie Nicks, who just came out of Fleetwood Mac, who was a fucking legend, Tom Petty. Then he gets in the room with Dr. Dre 15 years later. You just know it when you see it.

• 1:37:01John Coogan?

  How much do you think it was driven by like, like casting a wide net and meeting lots of people? I'm thinking about like, as a founder, there's a very different approach to hiring talent. If you could think about this in the sense of like hiring talent, knowing who to work with, than like the Bill Gates mindset versus the Jim Simons mindset, like.

• 1:37:19David Senra?

  I think Jimmy's more of a Jim's that that's exactly what I was thinking of. Jim Simons, his whole thing, and I just did an episode on him too, right? Renaissance Technologies, in case people don't know, essentially just has a money printing machine.

• 1:37:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. And most importantly for this, Renaissance Technologies hasn't, isn't in the business of hiring thousands of people and firing the bottom 20% every year. Microsoft did that for years. There's, yeah, exactly. There's no turnover.

• 1:37:40David Senra?

  There's no turnover because if you leave.

• 1:37:42John Coogan?

  Microsoft is notoriously high churn and that's by design. It's a very different thing.

• 1:37:46David Senra?

  If you leave Renaissance Technologies, your money, your personal money comes out of the medallion fund, and the medallion fund is a magic money-making machine. So you do not want, whatever you want to do in life, you don't want your money out of the medallion fund, so you will stay there. So, when you go and read Jim Simons biography, that's a great analogy, John, thank you. It's very similar to how Jimmy picked his talent, where he's just like, "This is the most talented person I could possibly work with, and it may take me years to recruit him, but I will do anything. I will go to, I will go to his house, I'll meet his kids, I'll spend, I'll do whatever possible." And then what happens is then you read up on the people, which I just did for the Jim Simons episode, on who he recruited, and it's like, they weren't like normal mathematicians or PhDs. Every single person was a mathematician or physicist or PhD working at Renaissance. They have like theorems named after them, where they like, they discovered something in mathematics,

• 1:38:27David Senra?

  they were literally the best of the best. And so like Bono, and again, I think some part of this is like pattern recognition, he saw the edge that Bruce Springsteen had, and then he gets introduced to Bono when, at the very early days of U2, and he sees him perform, he's like, "Oh, he's got the edge." And so, he's like, "Let's work together." Bono's like, "No, let's work together." Bono says, "No, let's work together." Bono says, "No." And he says, that he chases, Bono says, "He chased us around the world until we agreed to come to the studio with him. He would not take no for an answer. He happens to you. He is like a virus, and he takes over your organs and brains. He just knows that this is going to work out well for both of you." I don't think there's a person alive that won't listen to this Jimmy Iovine episode and get something out of it. And it's just like this relentless pursuit of what you want to do. And his whole thing is like,

• 1:39:12David Senra?

  he wasn't a big fan of how the music industry, they, their metric of success was like total records sold. His was like, "Did you make a great album?" He's like, "Great is success." A lot of people sell a lot of albums and they suck. If you can make something great first, then you'll be able to get more customers, more listeners, and more everything out. But the primary thing was great. And there's a great example of this, which I think is really important too. And you see this all the time. We're at the end of the documentary, towards the end. Dr. Dre, he had all these issues. He starts his own record label for the very first time. His first two albums he puts out completely flop.

• 1:39:50David Senra?

  And Jimmy's his partner and Jimmy has corporate partners. They're like, hey, you need to fire Dre. And Jimmy, and this, this is another thing I admire about him. He has these lifelong relationships. We have been friends for years. I hope, I hope we're friends for decades. You know, this is, I'm not, this is really important to me, like these compelling relationships. And so they're like, you need to fire Dre. He goes, yeah, we could do that and we'll save on my salary too, because I'm going with him. And so what happens? They try to fucking fire Dre because these idiots that can't do what the artist can do, don't know what they're talking about. This guy's a generational talent. You're like, get him off the payroll. And what happens? Jimmy is spending day after day after day, doing these listening sessions with Dr. Dre. Dr. Dre would come over to Jimmy's house every day.

• 1:40:30David Senra?

  They'd listen and try to find an artist for Dr. Dre to work with. Jimmy gets his tape of Eminem at the Rap Olympics, gives it to Dre. Dre's like, what is this? Right? And then they, Dre starts working Eminem. He becomes one of the top 10 selling records artists of all time. But more important than that, Jimmy says something that was great because at the very beginning, his first like two albums were super controversial. There was like protests. There was congressional hearings about Eminem's lyrics. And he goes, we weren't looking for like a white controversial rapper. We were looking for great. He's so consistent from the day one, from when he's 19 till when he retired at close to 70. Great can come from anywhere. You just have to find great.

• 1:41:08Jordi Hays?

  Congressional hearings are such a success metric, you know?

• 1:41:11John Coogan?

  Paul Merlucky told me that. He said, the thing you learn from Zuck was that it's not, you're not getting dragged in front of Congress because you did something bad. It's because you're being crowned as like the victor essentially.

• 1:41:21Jordi Hays?

  What, what was Jimmy's approach to financing different deals? How did he think about control? Was it possible to? I, I understand in the record industry, there, there can often be like a parent label and then. And then you can have a new label under it. Did you get anything there? Did that not come up?

• 1:41:39David Senra?

  He, no, he like, he, he actually does like a really interesting deal. See, I mean, he may keep in mind. So like, my metric of success is not like, he wound up being a billionaire, but that came like way after, even if he never did beats. To me, he'd be unbelievably successful just with the life he lived and like the, the experience, you know, probably made hundreds of millions, but with beats he made, you know, billions. There, one of the things was like, well, we went, especially with like a tech focus is like when he sells, I think he sells like 50% of his, of Interscope, I forgot to, maybe to MCA. And it was like, for like a hundred and fifty million dollars. So it's like, it's fantastic outcome, but when you were talking about three trillion dollar market cap tech companies.

• 1:42:20David Senra?

  So it looks small. Um, but, but no, it, finance was not like a, a focus on any of the interviews or any, anything in documentary, other than like mentioning random dollar amounts with like taking in partners and stuff.

• 1:42:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:34John Coogan?

  Uh, on the, on the protests and congressional hearings, uh, did you, it feels like there is something there where, when a founder is successful enough, eventually they have to put on the suit and go to Washington and start lobbying and do something like that. Did you dig into any stuff that he was able to do or apply his methodology to even trying to smooth over that situation? Because it did seem like an existential risk to the rap industry at that time. If they were really going to clamp down on explicit lyrics beyond just the, the, the content warning.

• 1:43:08David Senra?

  He, he doesn't, he doesn't state it like that. That's part of the reason he had to sell like, uh, he, he like went with one partner to another. Cause like, I forgot what the company he was with, but they were like, hey, like, I think it was like underneath comp, it was like a bigger conglomerate that owned like another label. And then under that label was Interscope kind of thing. And they're like, we have fucking senators calling like we, this is such a small part of our business. Like you have to go elsewhere because like, I'm not, I have a, you know, 200 billion dollar cable company or something like this is not it. But I, but the, I think the interesting part here is I think he, he's a phenomenal marketer. And that's what everybody would keep to, like a relentless salesperson.

• 1:43:45David Senra?

  Um, I think that's one of his gifts, but I think he understood that like, remember he signed like Marilyn Manson, Trent Reznor, Eminem, like Tupac, he Death Row Records, like literally people were, there was, they were, the rappers were killing each other. Like that was under Interscope and obviously he didn't want them to shoot each other, but his point was with all of this, with like this congressional protests and you know, the, the media saying that he's like a smut peddler and everything else. Like it's good for business and like it's, it, all this outrage, because what happens when we were kids, remember I was listening to Eminem and it was like a huge influence on me. Cause I had this like, all this like pent up anger about like my early life and like, I, I felt I was born into an environment that I didn't belong in and I was better than, and like Eminem was kind of a soundtrack of like, yeah, like you, I feel that way too.

• 1:44:31David Senra?

  And so like, music is very much like a young person's game. So you have like 60 year old congressman or Bob Dole saying like, you shouldn't listen to this. Well, as a kid, you remember it was like being a teenager, like, oh, that makes me more interested. I want more of that. And, and he does this too, like, um, with Beats. So the idea before the streaming service, he had the headphones. He's like, it doesn't make sense for Dr. Dre to endorse anything. He, he had like sneaker endorsement offers and all this other stuff. And he said, there's a great line in the documentary, he goes, Dre, fuck sneakers, speakers. You should do speakers. He's got that like, you know, high pitched Italian twang voice, which I absolutely love.

• 1:45:08David Senra?

  And so they're like Bo, the, the leading, at the time in 2006 or whenever this was happening, the time the leading headphone product was Bose. He's like, headphones to put you to sleep? I don't want to put you to sleep. I want to make you move. I want you to get off your ass. And so what happens is they made them distinctive. So you could tell with the big logo on the, on the, on the ears, what they were, right? And then he's like, our idea, my marketing idea is very simple. I'm going to put them in with the best musicians on the planet. That's going to get everybody to try them. And then once you try them, you'll stay because the, the sound's good. And then he expanded out to athletes. But what he did is he wound up spreading it to the 2008 NBA Olympic team or US Olympic team, the men's basketball team.

• 1:45:49David Senra?

  And they, it got banned and there was all this coverage because Beats wasn't an official sponsor, right? And so you can't wear them. And so they wore them anyways. They went up getting fined and everything else. And Jimmy's like, this is the best thing that ever happened to us.

• 1:46:02John Coogan?

  Makes sense. I mean, that's fantastic. We could do this all day. This is always amazing.

• 1:46:09David Senra?

  Yeah, thanks for having me, guys.

• 1:46:10John Coogan?

  We'll see you soon.

• 1:46:12David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:12Jordi Hays?

  We cannot wait to next, next time we do this, it might be in person here.

• 1:46:17John Coogan?

  We got some plans.

• 1:46:17David Senra?

  How are you guys doing? How are you guys? Are you have you? Are you gonna? But if people drop in, you're like, okay, guys, this is the end of the segment. Now you have to get up and leave?

• 1:46:24John Coogan?

  We could do that. We're, we're, we have some ideas we'll share with you, but it's gonna be.

• 1:46:27Jordi Hays?

  You could just do a whole show with us.

• 1:46:29John Coogan?

  It's gonna be.

• 1:46:29David Senra?

  No, I can't. I can't. I can't do three hours of this. I can do three hours alone with you guys, but not.

• 1:46:34John Coogan?

  You can do it. You can do it.

• 1:46:36David Senra?

  You know how I talk. In three hours, if it's live and not edited, I'm gonna get canceled. I'll get in trouble.

• 1:46:40John Coogan?

  No, you'll be fine. You'll be fine.

• 1:46:42Jordi Hays?

  You're good. You're good. We'll bleep out all the swear words.

• 1:46:43John Coogan?

  We'll work up to it. We'll do 30 minutes, then 45, then an hour, then two.

• 1:46:48David Senra?

  What did, what did they used to do on TV? There was like a two minute, like, remember there was like a delay, like a tape delay?

• 1:46:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. We'll need a tape delay for you. You're already swearing like a sailor, so we gotta clean that up. We'll work on that. That, that, I mean, you're worried about getting canceled.

• 1:46:59Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna have to, we're gonna, we're gonna go do the Porsche Experience Center.

• 1:47:03John Coogan?

  That'll be fun.

• 1:47:03Jordi Hays?

  And we'll have to get, get some behind, behind the scenes of that. I cannot wait to see.

• 1:47:09John Coogan?

  Of extreme podcasting.

• 1:47:10Jordi Hays?

  Senra and a GT3 RS.

• 1:47:12John Coogan?

  I can't wait.

• 1:47:13Jordi Hays?

  You know, just, just tearing up the track. Can't wait.

• 1:47:15David Senra?

  What was the, what was the Ferrari that I sent you guys?

• 1:47:18John Coogan?

  A12, super fast.

• 1:47:19Jordi Hays?

  A12, competition?

• 1:47:20John Coogan?

  Competition.

• 1:47:21David Senra?

  We gotta do that one.

• 1:47:22John Coogan?

  Awesome. We'll talk to you soon, David.

• 1:47:24David Senra?

  All right, guys.

• 1:47:25Jordi Hays?

  Talk to you.

• 1:47:25John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Catherine Hahn from Haun Ventures coming in the studio to talk about the stablecoin bill. The genius bill is slated to pass on the front of the Wall Street Journal today, and we're very excited to have.

• 1:47:36Jordi Hays?

  Is the guiding and establishing national innovation for US stablecoins.

• 1:47:41John Coogan?

  We had her on the show, and yeah, we're excited to talk to her. So welcome to the show. How you doing, Catherine?

• 1:47:47Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:47:48Katie Haun?

  Hi. Hi, how are you guys?

• 1:47:50John Coogan?

  We are great.

• 1:47:51Jordi Hays?

  Big 24 hours.

• 1:47:53John Coogan?

  Congratulations, I think, are in order, but please get us up to speed on what's actually happening and where, where things are in Washington.

• 1:48:00Katie Haun?

  And I love that you called me Catherine. That was my Washington name. I haven't been called that. I used to appear in court, but Katie.

• 1:48:06John Coogan?

  Let's update the, let's update the Chiron. Katie Haun.

• 1:48:09Katie Haun?

  So, thanks for having me on, guys. Actually, I literally just walked off a plane. I was down at the COTU conference.

• 1:48:16Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 1:48:16Katie Haun?

  Where I was talking to a lot of founders, crypto and non, and everyone loves your show, so I, I'm. Happy to be here.

• 1:48:23Jordi Hays?

  Well, thanks for making the time.

• 1:48:25Katie Haun?

  Yeah, thanks. I think congratulations are in order. I don't know if I would say that yet. I mean, first of all, the bill passed through the Senate. Great, great news, obviously. It's another signal, I think, kind of like I feel like I did when ETFs were approved. By the way, not really by the SEC, although that was the body that formally approved it. But as I said last time I was on your show, guys, make no mistake, the DC Circuit, that Article 3, that other branch of our government, left the SEC no choice. The courts don't always get it right, but sometimes they do. And the courts unanimously in that case said that the SEC had acted arbitrarily and capriciously.

• 1:49:05Katie Haun?

  So to my mind, the court system is the reason we have ETFs in this country today for Bitcoin and for ETH. And I think of this as a bit, a similar thing. Now, here we have another branch of government stepping in. In this case, you have the Senate passing this, introducing this legislation, passing this legislation. Now, of course, the House has to vote on it, and then the President has to sign it into law. So if those two things happen, you can say congratulations are in order for the industry. But I think one thing that is not really being discussed, and I hope we can discuss today, is there's another very important bill. And I'm not going to slap a percentage on and say which bill is more important, but that's the market structure bill.

• 1:49:48Katie Haun?

  And to me, that's really the transformational bill for the crypto industry.

• 1:49:53Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so break, yeah, break that down for us.

• 1:49:56Katie Haun?

  Yeah, so there's one bill, stablecoin bill, as you just mentioned, that the Senate passed. And one of the things that I loved to see about that is the bipartisan support for that bill. Because I think we used to be, as an industry, pre-political. Brian Armstrong always talked about the industry being pre-political. And I think I don't want it to be the case that this industry is too political on one side or the other. So I really love to see these moments, like we saw yesterday in the Senate, where you have a number of Senate Democrats voting in favor of sensible rules of the road. And I think this is a classic example of that, so I'm delighted, and I hope the House passes it. But I don't see why we have to choose between just a stablecoin bill and the market

• 1:50:39Katie Haun?

  structure bill. And the stablecoin bill obviously paves the way for a regulatory framework for stablecoins in this country. So that's that. Then there's another bill, the market structure bill. And that kind of will answer or attempt to answer the question of what's a security? What's a commodity? And I know you guys have been covering crypto for long enough. You know, this is kind of an age old debate. And, you know, where can there be an enforcement action? Well, the the big question is, well, what's a security and what's not? And I think the market structure really goes a long way in answering that question. And that's why I think it's so fundamental. And we've seen courts across the country weigh in on that question. And that's because we don't have legislation. And Gary Sandler said it was

• 1:51:24Katie Haun?

  also clear. And of course, it wasn't also clear.

• 1:51:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So what what's the what's the timeline there? What are the different players? What do people want out of it? What is the core, you know, kind of crypto industry and both on the investor side and and company side want out of it? And what are what? Who would who would not want it to go through at least how the crypto side has it in mind?

• 1:51:49Katie Haun?

  Look, I think I think everyone in the crypto industry wants the stablecoin bill to go through and become law. I don't think there's really any question about that. The question is, do you go for both? Someone just described it to me as in a sports analogy, and I'll probably fumble that one. But it was like, do you go for the field goal? Or do you go for the touchdown? And the thing about after a field, you know, after a field goal, the other side gets the ball back. And I think Congress really operates in kind of six to 10 year windows. And, you know, it's on their mind, reform regulatory clarity for crypto right now. And I think the transformational bill for crypto right now is very much that market structure bill. We also want that stablecoin bill and we have this unique moment in time where we have bipartisan

• 1:52:34Katie Haun?

  support for both bills. So personally, I say go for both of them. And worst case, you end up getting the stablecoin bill only. But I do think that's not the most desirable outcome for the crypto industry. I think the crypto industry deserves, especially after years of uncertainty, both a clear message from Congress. I think Congress ought to do its job and pass both bills. And I especially think that because after the Supreme Court last summer, in a case I said that this was the most important case for technology policy, not for just crypto, but for tech policy in decades, was the overturning of the Chevron doctrine. And that takes power kind of away at a high level,

• 1:53:14Katie Haun?

  away from regulatory agencies, and puts it back more in the hands of the courts. And do we want to have another 10 years of litigation percolating up from the district to the appellate court to the Supreme Court on what's a security or what's a commodity, and a patchwork of different answers throughout the country? Or do we want Congress to answer that question for us now? And I think it's incumbent for Congress to answer that question now. You asked who, what does the industry want? I think people, this is a big industry. We say crypto's not a monolith. It's a broad new asset class. And stablecoins are a very big, important piece of that asset class and a growing piece. As you guys saw, I shared with you the stats, you know, almost a quarter of a trillion dollars,

• 1:53:59Katie Haun?

  I think you banged the gong for that stat, locked in supply, growing enterprises across the world integrating stablecoins. You probably saw those announcements from some of the big tech companies in the last few weeks. And I think one thing that everyone's wondering is, those ones that haven't yet dived in for stablecoins is, well, what are the rules? So this bill that was passed yesterday out of the Senate, the genius act, so important for that. It's like, here you go. And so what kind of institutional interest will be unleashed once that bill becomes law? I think that's really exciting.

• 1:54:34Jordi Hays?

  What's your, how would you, how do you think about big companies getting excited about stablecoins and thinking, or institutions and being like, there's a lot of potential here, we should create our own stablecoin versus we should just figure out how to leverage this technology? Where do you see the kind of line and opportunities?

• 1:54:53Katie Haun?

  Well, look, we already have two very dominant stable coins, right, already today. Tether, USDT, and then we have USDC. So clearly, it's not winner-take-all. I mean, those two are both growing, and they both have market share. So we think there will be stable coins like those that will have network effects. But we also think, at the same time, there are some businesses that are just so big and just so important, and if they launch their own stable coin, we could also see that, too. I don't think we see a world where everyone, I think we get asked this question all the time, is there going to be a world where every company has their own stable coins? You know, we don't think so. We could be wrong, but that's not the view of how we see this evolving.

• 1:55:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we had Aaron Frank from Lightspeed on earlier, and he was comparing certain companies would launch a stable coin, and it maybe would feel like Kohl's Cash, where it's like...

• 1:55:46Katie Haun?

  Yeah, yeah, good point. I don't have any of that, nor do I... I don't have any of that. And that's the thing, if I did, would you want to use it on other platforms, right?

• 1:55:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, every bank could launch a Visa network competitor theoretically, but that doesn't necessarily make sense.

• 1:56:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so in your mind, is the broader market structure bill the kind of thing that could catalyze a massive amount of new activity? And from my view, you know, stable coins have been getting adoption. There are a bunch of exciting use cases. We have a public, American, stablecoin issuer in Circle now. It feels like, yes, regulatory clarity is important there, but having broader clarity around how tokens are treated by, you know, how the government actually views tokens feels like it could catalyze, you know, much more of an explosion in investment activity and new company formation and new use cases for tokens. Is that the right framework?

• 1:56:40Katie Haun?

  I think that is the right framework, because, like I said, stablecoin's a big, important piece of the pie, and very low-hanging fruit, by the way, to my mind. But crypto as an asset class is much broader. So when you say, where do the industry players, where do the crypto investors, where do we want to see it? I don't think it's a monolith. I think crypto, as it grows to a multi-trillion-dollar asset class, like any multi-trillion-dollar asset class, you have different factions. And I think some fairly, and some really smart people think, just take this, take this win, and move on, and don't worry about the rest. And I think that's a little... I see why they might think that if they think that... It's this or nothing, but I don't, I think that's a false choice.

• 1:57:22Katie Haun?

  I think that we can have both, and this is a really opportune moment to have both. And I think the, the question that has beleaguered the industry really has been the question over securities, commodities, which agencies are going to have jurisdiction? I think that's a bigger question, and I think it would be a real shame if we let this moment go to waste. You know, the irony too, so you have some stable coins or only stable coin companies who are like, yep, genius act and move on. They don't want to get dragged into this broader, kind of a more omnibus package, right? But with the market structure legislation, but I think that's a missed opportunity. And I think we'll be sorry as an industry if we don't go for both now. Again, go for the touchdown.

• 1:58:04Katie Haun?

  And with, you know, I think all of the, like I told you, all of the fundamentals are kind of working all at once together now. When I last talked to you guys, and that's very much part of it. So why would we not go for that? So I think some folks who don't maybe have an appreciation for how, sometimes, sorry to say it, slow Congress operates. They've been trying to update the money laundering laws for two decades. And it's like out of sight, out of mind sometimes. And I think we have a really unique moment to press for both here. And the irony is some Democrats who were opposed to market structure, you know, they, because of abuse, potential abuses, or who are opposed to the crypto industry. They cite abuses, they cite fraud, they cite speculation, they cite Trump coin.

• 1:58:49Katie Haun?

  And I, I get all of those criticisms, but I'll tell you what, had the market structure bill been passed, that would have answered a lot of those questions. The irony is if you would have had the market structure bill, you wouldn't have had a lot of the blowups that you had in the past several years in this industry.

• 1:59:04Jordi Hays?

  Is crypto truly coming home to America? We went through a period where crypto is being pushed offshore. We've heard over the last year that some crypto founders feel like they can come back to the States now, maybe actually have an office stateside. Are you seeing more and more momentum there with, with some of this positive regulatory movement? Or is, or are you still seeing momentum around places offshore, Singapore, et cetera?

• 1:59:32Katie Haun?

  I think, look, everywhere that you're going to want to develop does is going to have some rules that you're going to have to follow. When I hear founders who say there is no regulate, it's often that there is no regulatory regime whatsoever. Sorry, Balaji, if you're watching.

• 1:59:47Katie Haun?

  But I am seeing that onshoring a bit. We were kind of seeing the offshoring in an unfortunate way, but it's not only regulation that matters. It's hiring top talent. And currently there's top talent right here in Silicon Valley and other places in the world. I mean, you mentioned Singapore, Singapore has top talent to be sure, but you know, there's a lot going for the US. So we're still very optimistic and I don't think it, but we were getting to a very dangerous point with the crypto industry. Had the likes of Gensler and others like him been left kind of to just do this. Now fortunately, the courts were pushing back. So it wasn't a partisan issue. It was just the courts were starting to say, no, you've gone too far.

• 2:00:29Katie Haun?

  I mean, I lost track now, I literally lost track of how many federal courts of all political persuasions and appointments ruled against Gensler's regime and not just Gensler, but others like it, where you had very activist regulators who were really far out of their lane. And, and you saw courts curbing back on that. So I think that was already, we're at a dangerous spot, but the courts were maybe going to save us. But you don't only want to rely on litigation to save you, of course, because then you've already lost. But I think hiring talent is important. I think, you know, access to capital and traditional venture, maybe that's a little different in the crypto asset class. But I think also fundamentally, what you have going on right here now with AI, particularly in Silicon Valley.

• 2:01:12Katie Haun?

  And we've talked a little bit at the early stage about some of the synergies between AI and crypto. Because of course AI creates digital abundance and blockchains are good at enforcing digital scarcity. And I think you're going to see more and more synergies emerge and use cases over time. And I'm not going to say what they are because you know, we've seen that before in crypto. A lot of over promising, under delivering on use cases. So let's just stick to, right now, we see synergies. There's a lot happening in Silicon Valley, obviously with AI. We think that's going to benefit the crypto industry. And so in addition to regulatory clarity, if you're a founder, you want access to great talent. You want your visa situations sorted out for your employees. You want.

• 2:01:56Katie Haun?

  Access to other founders, depending on what type of company you are, you want access to capital. So I am optimistic about the state of crypto in the US, but also elsewhere. And we invest in companies. We invested in squads. We've announced that. And I know Stepan, one of the founders of squads, watches your show. But Stepan's based right now overseas. And I was just having a conversation with him about how do we get you to come and bring squads to the US?

• 2:02:27Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Awesome.

• 2:02:28John Coogan?

  I want to talk about the longer tail of regulation because it seems like the stablecoin bill is very straightforward. Like the least ambiguity there. Then you have the Market Structure Act and there's a lot more to do there. But I'm sure that there's like riders getting pitched and all sorts of long tail things. Like, how much are we actually like, where does the line end between what we're actually trying to define versus what we're still in the exploration phase of? Because you have NFTs, crypto gaming, there's, you know, prediction markets. There's so many different crypto applications that trying to kind of do them all at once, maybe that's the right approach.

• 2:03:10John Coogan?

  Maybe these need to be handled like after we've done the technological exploration. But what's your view on kind of the long?

• 2:03:18Katie Haun?

  My view on that is no, because we can't just, we can't have an NFT bill, a bill for bank contracts. Or we can't have specific bills. And if you saw, if you think back to the advent of internet, that's not what we had. You know, we had section 230, it applied broadly to platforms. And I think we need something similar here. So on the one hand, I would say it can't be so specific that it's like, okay, if you're a, you know, events contract platform, it's this rule. And if you're an NFT player, because again, we don't even know yet what will be created.

• 2:03:52Katie Haun?

  Really, at the end of the day, we've seen some early use cases with product market fit. Obviously, chief example of that is Bitcoin. But what if we had had this conversation, guys, back in 2010? And you said, okay, we've got Satoshi's white paper and there's this thing called Bitcoin. Let's pass some crypto regulation, which has just been for Bitcoin. And that would have been a mistake because then a couple of years later on the scene, we have East and a few years later, we have Solana. So I think what we need to do, so you don't wait for the end state to have any regulation, right? You don't do regulation by enforcement. I can tell you what we don't do. We don't do regulation by enforcement. You don't wait till the end state of things, but nor do you want to get so with such specificity today and do the current state

• 2:04:34Katie Haun?

  of regulation by the end state of regulation. That you can't do either. And so I think what you have are some guiding principles, some generic rules of the road. And really, that's all the market structure bill is. And there's enough clarity that you had Democrats vote for it last time it came up. So it's not like it's so specific. It talks about, and I think, look, I think you have people like Hester Purcey, who is SEC Commissioner, has written and given speeches on this of what that ought to look like. What is a decentralization test? And those are some guiding principles that you can kind of look at and apply as you think through this legislation. You know, what body ought to regulate it? And sure, you're gonna have some outliers

• 2:05:15Katie Haun?

  and new technologies emerge that you're like, okay, does this fit neatly in the bill? No, but we have laws for everything in this country with technologies that develop that don't fit neatly in a particular bill. And that's why we have, that's why we actually have, we don't do regulation by enforcement. We do notice and comment. We do things like advisory opinions. Certain bodies, by the way, do do advisory opinions, not judges. And then if all else fails, you do go and sometimes seek Article Three, seek a judicial interpretation. But I think that's, like I said, that's kind of the failure state if you're having to go to the courts. But indeed, that's what was happening because we were getting no rules of the road and we were

• 2:05:55Katie Haun?

  only getting unfair regulation by enforcement. And I say unfair because Gary Gensler basically picked what should have been the best companies in crypto to post for children for compliance and brought enforcement actions against them. And then the complete spectacular disasters didn't bring anything. So until after the fact. And so I think regulation by enforcement.

• 2:06:18Jordi Hays?

  We gotta have you and Gary on the show to hash it out. I'm sure you guys have had some funny conversations.

• 2:06:25Katie Haun?

  Yeah, thanks guys for having me.

• 2:06:27Jordi Hays?

  Great having you.

• 2:06:28John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day.

• 2:06:30Katie Haun?

  Okay, bye bye.

• 2:06:31John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Justine Moore from Andreessen Horowitz. Incredible map knowledge dropped a fantastic

• 2:06:37Jordi Hays?

  New market map alert.

• 2:06:39John Coogan?

  All around AI image, AI video models. We're going to have her take us through it. Welcome to the show.

• 2:06:45Jordi Hays?

  She is welcome.

• 2:06:48John Coogan?

  Can you hear us?

• 2:06:49Jordi Hays?

  Can you hear us?

• 2:06:51John Coogan?

  Hello.

• 2:06:52Justine Moore?

  Oh, I can hear you guys now. Sorry.

• 2:06:54Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:06:55John Coogan?

  Hey.

• 2:06:55Jordi Hays?

  I was saying to John, when you dropped your new market map, I was saying, you know, it's a great sign of respect.

• 2:07:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:07:01Jordi Hays?

  In our culture to drop a new market map and come on the show.

• 2:07:05John Coogan?

  I've been incredibly bullish on market maps. I find them extremely interesting and I think they got a bad rap a couple of years ago. But I'm glad that you've stayed the course.

• 2:07:13Jordi Hays?

  We are pro, strongly pro market map.

• 2:07:16John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:07:17Justine Moore?

  The people love market maps. It's like you can guarantee a popular tweet if it has a market map in it.

• 2:07:21John Coogan?

  Absolutely. And I think people got kind of sick of like, oh, like we know the playbook. We've seen it, but there's a playbook for a reason. It works.

• 2:07:28Justine Moore?

  Yes.

• 2:07:28John Coogan?

  So yeah, take us through the latest market map. What are you tracking? How did you decide what to divide it up into? And, and what, what kind of inspired this moment specifically?

• 2:07:39Justine Moore?

  Yes. So I mostly do AI creative tools here at A16Z. So I spend like all my time testing all of the image, video, audio, et cetera. And obviously the past few months in particular, video has been like the thing. There's been like VO3, obviously, which was a massive moment with adding the audio for the generations. Hydra around the talking characters, the new Mini Max model, the new ByteDance model, C-Dance, which is in the arena, already outperforming VO3. So it just felt like a good time to refresh sort of what's going on in the video space. And I kind of formatted this market map, just thinking about more from the perspective of a creator, like less in terms of the go to market of the company.

• 2:08:24Justine Moore?

  More just like if you're a person trying to create a video. With AI, where would you go for these different use cases? So there's first sort of the model, like the foundation model companies where it's either text to video or image to video. Most places do both. Where they actually take your input, generate, have their own proprietary model that generates the video for you. So that's the VOs, the Clings, the Runways, the Picas. And then there's also now this emergence of what I call like multimodal apps. Places like Kria and Flora and Visual Electric that enable you to run a bunch of models in one place.

• 2:09:05Justine Moore?

  So like if you want to take a single prompt or a single image and see what it looks like in five different models super easily, you can do it somewhere like that. And then the other side of this market map is sort of like what happens when you add speech and talking characters? And so some folks do that by like generating a talking avatar from an image where you can eventually have the person move. And other folks do that by taking like a video of a person and then applying lip sync over it and then syncing the audio. So that's sort of the distinction between talking avatars and lip sync.

• 2:09:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting that you're in the consumer group because I can imagine that a lot of the talking avatar companies wind up selling to corporations that want to vend in talking avatars, for example. Are you seeing a lot of that? Or like, I guess, how rigorous or stringent are founders about like, hey, we are trying to build a consumer app? Or we're just building a cool technology and it might land as a consumer product, but it also might land as a B2B play?

• 2:10:05Justine Moore?

  Most people are not at all rigorous and often don't even know at the beginning. So what we actually saw with the first generation of AI video was it was only researchers making these like magical models. And they had no idea what the use cases were going to be. They all just put like a text prompt box in front of the model and then you got an output. And like a big company and an individual were using the exact same interface. Now I think we're starting to see more at like what we call the app layer, which is essentially like, how do you productize this? How do you create workflow and therefore how do you go into two specific verticals? Maybe an example of that is all of the like standalone video ad creation products. So things like Createfy or Captions where, or Hey Jen has a product for this too,

• 2:10:50Justine Moore?

  where you can literally just like paste in a link to your Amazon or Shopify store. It will pull all of the info about your product, your logo, your brand, and it will generate a talking head avatar like holding your product and describing it. And that's something that like a VO3 or a Kling, the general video model companies won't do today.

• 2:11:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. Where are you seeing the strongest like low churn adoption of these tools? Because just personally, like VO3 was the thing that got me to subscribe to Google Pro Max 25, which we can go into the names and how difficult it is to access these. But, but other than that, there, there haven't, I haven't seen that many where like we've seen the ASMR stormtroopers or something, but, but it hasn't been clear to me that someone's building like the next Pixar and they're actually thinking about it like Mr. Beast and they're like, I'm building a studio. This is a business. I have ad integrations and I have a content schedule. It's very much in like the testing phase. We see the Studio Ghibli moments go viral.

• 2:11:50John Coogan?

  So where, where is like the true long-term value playing out right now?

• 2:11:57Justine Moore?

  Okay. On the content creation side, where we are at right now is actually there's a bunch of content agencies, like, you know, there's a bunch, Wonder Studios, Dream Studios, there's, there's probably like 20 of them now.

• 2:12:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:10Justine Moore?

  Uh, one called Paracosm, that's, that's really cool. Um, and these are people who are just early adopters of the tools and they're getting hired by brands and ad agencies and entertainment companies to use the tools for them.

• 2:12:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:12:22Justine Moore?

  Uh, and make content. I think the problem now and what you're describing is like, the people at Pixar would have to know how to use the AI video tools and how to set up the workflow in order to create their next movie using AI.

• 2:12:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:34Justine Moore?

  And we're not yet at like, the tools aren't mature enough and we don't have enough people who are working at those entertainment companies who know how to use the tools, that it's primarily being done with these external AI native agencies or contractors today. Um, I think like one of the first AI IP we've seen is the Italian brain rot characters. I don't know if you guys.

• 2:12:54John Coogan?

  No, I don't know this. I haven't seen this.

• 2:12:56Justine Moore?

  Italian brain rot characters are huge, so I can't even say the names here because they will sound ridiculous, but, um. It's people basically making images of like an animated talking baseball bat and like a ballerina whose head is like a cup of cappuccino.

• 2:13:11John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 2:13:12Justine Moore?

  And a shark who wears sneakers.

• 2:13:13John Coogan?

  Okay, but they're starting to build like a cinematic universe.

• 2:13:16Justine Moore?

  Oh, it's massive. Yeah. Accounts have like millions of followers.

• 2:13:20Jordi Hays?

  The world isn't ready for Italian brain rot.

• 2:13:22John Coogan?

  So is it, is it, uh, is it like decentralized in the sense that like I could just go and participate in this like broader trend?

• 2:13:30Justine Moore?

  So yes and no. I would say there were a couple of accounts that originated the first few characters. And then other people started participating using the hashtags remixing.

• 2:13:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:13:40Justine Moore?

  And then the good, the characters that were good that came out of that sort of bubbled up to become part of the cinematic universe.

• 2:13:47John Coogan?

  The canon.

• 2:13:47Jordi Hays?

  They have Bombadiri Bombadaro Crocady Crocadiio, which is a bomber.

• 2:13:54Justine Moore?

  He's a crocodile plane that shoots bombs.

• 2:13:57John Coogan?

  This sounds like, yeah, yeah. Super, super viral.

• 2:14:00Justine Moore?

  Yes.

• 2:14:00John Coogan?

  Your kids probably love it. It's wild. Um, uh, before we go into more of the consumer side, talk to me about some of the, uh, the more like, uh, niche, like B two B use cases. Because I remember when like GPT three point five and we got four, four, uh, GPT four dropped. There were still like a lot of hallucinations, but you saw companies that were just like, yeah, like, sure. It's not incredible at writing poetry, but it's amazing at just like converting this messy text to JSON. And they were all of a sudden just running tons and tons of queries. And so I would imagine that in a, in a, in a, in a video workflow, things like what runway was doing in the old days of just like green screening or the, the stuff that like,

• 2:14:45John Coogan?

  artists aren't going to really get upset about because it just feels like a better, more advanced tool. Are, are a lot of these companies building tools like that? Or is all the focus just on like, let's one shot the next Oscar film?

• 2:14:56Justine Moore?

  Yeah, it's a great question. There's a decent amount of vertical focus. I think also like it's very hard for startups. Like if you're not a Google or an OpenAI or whoever to play in the game of like, let's train the largest one-shot best video model. So a lot of them are focusing on verticals like Luma, which is a company we've invested in, did this really cool tool where you can upload like a a nine by 16 like iPhone style video and you can just say extend and it just basically like out paints around the existing video and makes it look like. So you can just change the dimensions of your video really fast.

• 2:15:32John Coogan?

  Or there's companies like More of just like a practical tool, but super useful for a bunch of creators that are filming vertical content probably, and they want to distribute in a horizontal format. So they just do that.

• 2:15:41Justine Moore?

  Yes, exactly.

• 2:15:42John Coogan?

  That makes a ton of sense.

• 2:15:43Justine Moore?

  Or something like Higgs field that it has all these really special effects, like motion lauras essentially. So you can take like an image of a car and just say like, this is like, here's a template of what a car explosion looks like. Make this specific car explode.

• 2:15:59Justine Moore?

  And then on the B to B side, we've seen a lot around like, how do you scale marketing or L and D or like executive presence type content? So like, you know, tools like Descript now allow you to take a video of someone talking and then change the word that they're saying by changing like cloning their voice, having them the voice say the new word and then doing a new lip dub.

• 2:16:20John Coogan?

  Lip sync, yeah.

• 2:16:21Justine Moore?

  So you could have your CEO sending what looks like a personalized holiday message to like every single customer or something like that.

• 2:16:27John Coogan?

  Yep. Or maybe something worse with a phishing scam, but I'm sure we'll get to safety at some point.

• 2:16:32Jordi Hays?

  What do you, what do you think the long-term ambitions of companies like Google with VO and ByteDance with their model? What do you think they want out of this category? They obviously have a massive edge. I saw Anish was posting about Google's edge or YouTube's edge around IP with VO. You can generate

• 2:16:55John Coogan?

  What was going on there?

• 2:16:56Justine Moore?

  It's crazy. So

• 2:16:58John Coogan?

  The Disney thing, is that like a real deal or is that just a beneficiary of like some sort of relationship?

• 2:17:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, then I want to get a sense of, do Google and ByteDance, do they want to be developer tools that just vend into a bunch of these platforms? Do they actually want to own the end customer? What is this market? Is there a generalized market in the long run of just generating funny videos for the average consumer? Or is it going to all be verticalized out where I want to generate ads? I maybe want to generate customized messages? But I want to understand, like, this is a good overview of all the ways that you can generate content, but like, how does the market structure evolve?

• 2:17:36Justine Moore?

  Yes. Okay, on the IP question, I have not talked to Google's IP lawyers, and I'm not an IP lawyer. But my understanding is Google-

• 2:17:45Jordi Hays?

  But this is legal advice.

• 2:17:46Justine Moore?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:17:47Jordi Hays?

  Financial advice, all the advice.

• 2:17:49Justine Moore?

  Our compliance team is going to love this.

• 2:17:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're going to love it. Sarcasm.

• 2:17:53Justine Moore?

  You can, I think, my sense is basically, you know, when YouTube came about, it was suddenly like, all this IP content is on the internet, and Google cut deals with a bunch of the IP owners about essentially what can be posted on various Google properties, and if that content gets monetized, how it ends up going to the end rights holder. And so that's sort of the working theory right now about like, why VO3 can generate IP content and not get sued when a lot of other people are struggling with that. In terms of the market dynamics, it's so fascinating, the question around like, Google and ByteDance, and eventually, I think Facebook, I hear, is going to do more in video soon as well. Like, why they're doing it and what their strategy is.

• 2:18:35Justine Moore?

  I think, first of all, like, if I'm one of those huge consumer giants, AI is such a massive shift in consumer behavior that like, you want, if you want to own the interface to consumers, you probably want to own text, image, and video generation as well. And they have the resources in terms of data, like YouTube, for example, is a perfect example of this. They have a ton of compute, they have a ton of money, and they can hire the best researchers to build the best models. I think the question, as you sort of alluded to, is like, do they sell those models via API and let other people build the consumer experience on top of them? Or do they own the end-to-end consumer experience? My honest take on it so far has been like, it takes so long in the big company product teams to get stuff down and get new products out.

• 2:19:19Justine Moore?

  That like, the model teams are just shipping the models and like, pretty basic interfaces like Google Flow. And then the product teams are gonna figure out if they can catch up with some kind of cool new consumer app later.

• 2:19:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:31John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, I mean.

• 2:19:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my, my question is like, how much, uh, wh- what will the market actually look like for the average consumer wanting to generate images and video? Or will it just be something that people default to ChatGPT? Cause maybe they already have a subscription or they're fine with the free tier.

• 2:19:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:49Jordi Hays?

  And it doesn't end up, there ends up being a bunch of different applications on the enterprise B two B side. But then not so many like, you know, core consumer subscriptions on just like, cool videos, pictures, et cetera.

• 2:20:03John Coogan?

  I mean, it seems like it's a killer, killer moat for Google Cloud Platform to have VO three as an API. Even if Google can't figure out how to productize it fully. It's like, they do seem to have a real moat. I wanna get into that about, uh, YouTube is obviously an incredible training data resource.

• 2:20:20Justine Moore?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:21John Coogan?

  Uh, you mentioned that there was another company that is, that just surpassed them. Was it Tencent you said?

• 2:20:25Justine Moore?

  Uh, ByteDance.

• 2:20:26John Coogan?

  ByteDance, that's right. So, uh, I, I have a question about that because, um, obviously with CodeGen, uh, GitHub has a lot of public repos that people can probably just scrape. It's also just not that much data. You can probably fit it on a couple of hard drives, maybe sneak it out the back and go ahead of flight and, and train somewhere in Malaysia or something. You can't do that with YouTube. Like, it's just too much data. And so, my question is, uh, is how durable, how much should we be thinking about? A durable data moat in video generation for YouTube? Because it seems like something that they could really. Like clamp down on and would give them a durable advantage.

• 2:21:07John Coogan?

  But I don't know, there's so many other, there's so many other ways to attack any of these model developments. There's a lot of different options.

• 2:21:15Justine Moore?

  So there's a couple of parts of the data question. The first part is like, what do you own versus what do you scrape? I mean, we've seen companies like OpenAI will scrape YouTube as well to train their models. I think ByteDance also like, you know, here we think of YouTube and Facebook and whatever here in the US. I mean, as, as being the big host of content, but like, there's all these massive companies in China like ByteDance, who have their own, have, have their own user generated content on like their version of TikTok and their version of YouTube.

• 2:21:42John Coogan?

  And I'm sure there's reposts of American videos over there. So it's not like even has a unique flavor, probably can generalize pretty well, right?

• 2:21:49Justine Moore?

  Totally though, yeah, like I was one of the very early users of all of the Chinese video models. When you still had to access them on Chinese apps with Chinese phone numbers. And they were definitely very good at things that were more China oriented than, than the US models.

• 2:22:05John Coogan?

  That makes a ton of sense.

• 2:22:07Justine Moore?

  Oh, okay. The other, the other thing that's important to mention on data is in video in particular, it's not just the volume of data. It's also the quality of data and the quality of data labeling. Because essentially you can't just feed a video into a video model and assume it can understand what's going on and, and pull out the relevant info. You have to have really sort of dense labels is what we call them, or super detailed captions about like, this is this style shot, shot from this sort of camera. The camera is coming from this angle. This is the sort of character. This is how the character is interacting with the background. And that quality data is what drives quality in the video models. And China has really benefited there because there are so many more PhDs than there are here.

• 2:22:50Justine Moore?

  And it's much cheaper for these companies to hire them to do these, these dense labels for the video data.

• 2:22:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, how does Mid Journey fit into all of this now? It's such an interesting company because no venture dollars, this like behemoth kind of quietly hiding in a Discord server still. I saw some examples of video, it looked fantastic, seemed like they hadn't added audio yet, but how do they fit into the whole, the whole piece? Because it seemed like early on, they, they developed a really great feedback loop for the data that maybe wasn't happening with some of the other model providers.

• 2:23:25Justine Moore?

  Yeah, so the Mid Journey model came out this morning, really conveniently, like 10 minutes after I put out my market map without Mid Journey video, because it's not yet available. I was just playing around with it too, it's, it's really cool, they do image to video. And they, and so they don't do text to video, which is actually sort of easier, they can start with their, the super high quality images that they generate on the platform and then animate those. I think they have like a low motion and a high motion setting. From what I've tested so far, it's, it's better as sort of like a low motion scenery, environment, light interaction type thing. Like you have a photo of a person and you can then animate sort of rain and wind and them walking slowly.

• 2:24:06Justine Moore?

  And it's not as good at like what I call physics heavy world model type things, like two cars running into each other and exploding. That sort of thing requires a very, very large and costly, usually like text to video model that is more difficult to train. Whereas Mid Journey, I mean, I, I have no idea how they did it, it's a great model, they could have taken one of the open source image to video models and, and fine tune it on all their own data.

• 2:24:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I've noticed VO3 is really, really good with some of that physics stuff, but it still gets confused. Like if a car is driving away, all of a sudden you'll be looking at the front of the car and then the back of the car and it'll get kind of mixed up. But yeah.

• 2:24:47Jordi Hays?

  Are you, as, as all these different models have progressed, I, I always remember Brad and Trevor McFedries and just how early he was to, to what I think will be this like new wave.

• 2:25:01John Coogan?

  Is that Lil Mikayla?

• 2:25:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Lil Mikayla, which was like basically CGI influencer, so very, very early, I think we're going to see a lot more of this. And we, we've seen some of this to date, but do you expect that to be kind of like a new, a new, like how, how bullish are you on, on sort of like entirely AI creators getting? Getting real adoption, following, followings, turning into real businesses. I'm sure you follow a bunch of them already.

• 2:25:30Justine Moore?

  Yeah, I'm personally super excited about it because it kind of separates the content from the character. Like now, you know, before AI, if you were on Instagram, like you were both the character and the person coming out with the content. And so you had to like look in a way and present yourself in a way and talk in a way that was like interesting to the Instagram algorithm. And now it's like anyone with a good idea can create a compelling character. And so I think some of those are human characters. I've already seen way too many examples in my reels feed of OnlyFans models who promote themselves with AI avatars of themselves now, which works shockingly well.

• 2:26:08Justine Moore?

  There's some photorealistic human influencers, but honestly, some of the more interesting ones are things that could never be influencers before AI. So there's one called like Raccoon Stole My iPhone and it's an AI raccoon influencer. There's like AI capybara influencers. There's like mystical creatures, like all of these things that just come out of people's imagination.

• 2:26:31Jordi Hays?

  Competing for mindshare with Instagram pet pages, you know, dog pages, things like that. Did you have a reaction to Fountainhead? It was the, or sorry, Mountainhead, not Fountainhead. Mountainhead, the movie, the core overarching theme was that basically deep fakes or AI generated content had gotten so good that it was causing global unrest. Did it resonate at all? It does feel like I now have, you know, multiple times a day, I'm seeing content online and it's like getting, we're both in the community notes program, so it's like you see content getting community noted. It's one person says, it's not real, look at this link. It was this image, they redid it.

• 2:27:15Jordi Hays?

  Another person says, it's real, look at this. So it's like, I just assume that everything's fake and made up unless I see it, you know, with my own eyes. But I'm curious if you, if it resonated at all with you.

• 2:27:26Justine Moore?

  So I've not, I largely consume AI slop, so I have not seen it. I should watch it.

• 2:27:32Jordi Hays?

  You should watch the movie, the motion picture on slop.

• 2:27:36Justine Moore?

  Yeah, uh, once they have that, I will watch the, the full film, but um, it's so interesting. We talked about this a lot, actually, with audio models, it with the last like election cycle, because video, I think, wasn't there yet to have convincing deep fakes. But audio, like, there were way less cases of, even though you could make really realistic voices cloning candidates and saying things that weren't true, there were way less examples than we thought of that actually like impacting any, any election in any sort of meaningful way. And I think part of it is like, things like you mentioned, the community notes program, where like, you have sort of citizen watchdogs on various platforms saying, this is real, this isn't real, running them through various sort of AI detectors. But I also think like, people are starting to develop more skepticism around everything

• 2:28:21Justine Moore?

  they see online and whether or not it is real, which is probably not a terrible thing.

• 2:28:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, I had this take that After Effects would be more impactful on the election than AI video, because like, you can just show a clip of a burning building from 2020, and it's real video, but you recontextualize it and say, oh, you know, the, the, the Capitol's burning or something, and it's from years ago, or, or just, you know, speed up a video, slow it down, edit it out, they would do this with various politicians, uh, you know, cut out the ums and ahs and they'll sound sharper, add a bunch of gaps and all of a sudden they sound like they're slower.

• 2:28:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it, it even, you know, we're, we're here in LA and, and when all the imagery was coming out of the, the protests from a couple of weeks ago, it was like burning Waymos, kind of looks like something you generate with VO3, just because it was so symbolic and just such a crazy image. And then like, make an image of a guy with a Mexican flag riding it, doing burnouts around a, a car that's on fire, and it's like, oh, that looks like, you know.

• 2:29:22John Coogan?

  And even, and even the, just the way that was photographed, there was like, it looked like all of Los Angeles was engulfed in flames, but it was really like, one crazy block with a bunch of different angles, and then a bunch of different posts, and, and you drive around and you'd be like, oh, there's not that much going on.

• 2:29:35Justine Moore?

  See, that's the other interesting thing, is like, even real footage can be manipulated, like, any kind of story can be manipulated in a way, like AI or not.

• 2:29:44Jordi Hays?

  Are you seeing, I think like, you know, there's exciting companies like WorldCoin, you know, doing like proof of human. Are you seeing any infrastructure players trying to like do anything on like content verification side and like trying to create some sort of mechanism to prove whether something was like authent- you know, actually shot on an iPhone, right?

• 2:30:09Justine Moore?

  Right.

• 2:30:09Jordi Hays?

  You know, proving through the metadata and some type of like public setting. Is there any pitches from that side?

• 2:30:16Justine Moore?

  Yeah, so largely, honestly, today that has come in two places. One is the model companies themselves will often watermark the content in some way, like the VO3 generations has a little VO3. Eleven Labs, which is the audio, they actually have a site where you can upload any audio and it will tell you if it was generated with Eleven Labs or not.

• 2:30:35Jordi Hays?

  That's cool.

• 2:30:36Justine Moore?

  Which is pretty cool. The other place we've seen development there is for like prominent individuals, like, you know, celebrities or someone who's, there's like value behind their brands and who potentially even might want to monetize it in the age of AI. Like, if you're an actor and you suddenly don't have to, you know, film, go fly back to LA when you're filming a movie in Australia to tape like five ads for some cellphone brand and you can have your AI avatar generated to do it instead and it looks just as good. Like, you might actually want to, you know, have some licensing company that owns your AI licensing rights, whether it's your traditional talent agency or not, who can manage that for you.

• 2:31:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:31:17John Coogan?

  Very cool. Well, thank you so much for stopping by.

• 2:31:18Jordi Hays?

  Super insightful.

• 2:31:19John Coogan?

  We could talk for another hour. I have so many more questions in our doc, but we'll have to have you back.

• 2:31:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is great.

• 2:31:24John Coogan?

  So thank you so much for stopping by.

• 2:31:25Justine Moore?

  Thanks, guys.

• 2:31:25Jordi Hays?

  Thanks, Jesse.

• 2:31:26John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:31:26Jordi Hays?

  Great chatting. Have a good one.

• 2:31:27John Coogan?

  Up next, we have a niche from Traversal coming in the studio, kicking off our lightning round.

• 2:31:31Jordi Hays?

  It's our new lightning round.

• 2:31:32John Coogan?

  We're getting to every single financing.

• 2:31:36Jordi Hays?

  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

• 2:31:37John Coogan?

  Every single important startup update.

• 2:31:38Jordi Hays?

  Founders back to back.

• 2:31:40John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 2:31:42Speaker 05

  Doing super well. Thank you for having me.

• 2:31:44John Coogan?

  Can you kick us off with an introduction? What do you do?

• 2:31:47Speaker 05

  Hi, yes, my name is Anish. I'm one of the co-founders and the CEO of Traversal, where we are basically trying to build an AI site reliability engineer. So when you have software systems, they break and we try to help troubleshoot why they broke and how to fix it.

• 2:31:59John Coogan?

  Is the current status of the market entirely human site reliability engineers? Or are there like a suite of tools that are, you know, just not AI-enabled enough? And you can kind of piggyback on?

• 2:32:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I'd say the current state of observability, I call it observability 1.0, has been putting a lot of eyeballs in your data. So essentially, the great iconic companies now like Datadog and Splunk and Grafana and Dynatrace. And what they basically did is they stored your data and then helped you visualize it through, you know, numerous dashboards. But the toil of actually figuring out for an on-call engineer what happened is what I call dashboard dumpster diving. That's what they still have to do, right? And there isn't that intelligence layer of actually helping you search through this petabytes of data. And I think that's what this new generation of AI agents and LLMs and some of the research we have done in our PhDs unlocks now.

• 2:32:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, have you been tracking? I mean, it feels like site reliability engineering should be a beneficiary of AI. And yet, it feels like we've been seeing more and more outages, like Cloudflare went down, Google went down. We had another outage while we were doing the show, the whole internet went down. It feels like it's happening more and more. Is that just me being more sensitive to it or more news or I'm just online more? Or are these systems actually getting more fragile?

• 2:33:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think two things are happening. One is, as humans, we like to push the limits of everything we can do. And so we're always going to be pushing the limits of software systems. And they're getting more complex, there's more microservices. And that was happening before the age of LLM-powered code agents, right? And now with everything happening, the world of AI software engineering with Cursor and get a Copilot and WinSAP and so on and so forth. I think the amount of code that's being written is going to be like a Cambrian explosion, right? But I think most of it is going to be written by AI systems. And so this is going to get even more complex and less and less is going to be understood by us who are as engineers. And so I think it's going to get even harder to debug things because we don't actually understand what's written and it's more complex.

• 2:33:55Speaker 05

  And so I think, and I think that's actually going to throttle the use of AI software engineering tools in mission critical systems. Because if I'm head of infrastructure, I'm like, I don't, I don't trust this. I'm not going to allow this to affect my core infrastructure. And so I think you need tools, observability 2.0, to help actually be in line with it, I guess.

• 2:34:14Jordi Hays?

  I feel like finding truly great SREs is like a massive challenge. Like, how do you, like, you know, if you can deliver on the product side, like, how much bigger do you even think, like, the market is, like, the market demand for great, you know, basically, effectively, it sounds like you're wanting to offer productized SRE talent. How much, how much, like, demand is out there for, for, for what you're building?

• 2:34:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, so first of all, like, we've been trying to hire an excellent SRE and we still haven't been able to. There's, so there's a massive labor market discontinuity where it's just, it's impossible to find fantastic SREs. But I think, if I think of the role of an SRE, the way I think about it is like, it's, it's, it's all about the health of software systems. And I think of it as like the master hierarchy of needs. So in your level one, you, you know, you have a heart attack. You've got to deal with it right now. And I think that's what having a production incident feels like. And that's where SREs have to spend a lot of time where everything else, nothing else matters. Level two is when you have these, like, constant stream of alerts happening. That's the equivalent of having like some sort of like chronic condition that you have to deal with all the time. And you can't think like a year in advance.

• 2:35:23Speaker 05

  And only when you can deal with these things, then you can start thinking about like your long-term health and like life hacking and, you know, optimizing your sleep. And that's where I think you can think about the long-term health of a software system, how you would architect it over the next four, five, 10 years. And so I think all of the time right now for SREs is being spent in like having a heart attack and a debilitating condition. What I think they should be doing, the best SREs, is thinking about the long-term health of a system. How do I architect the system for the next five years so that it's robust? And I think that's what they want to be doing, but they're forced to be on call all the time. And so I think that's what we want to stop them from having to do. And they can spend their time on the more meaningful, you know, aspects of their jobs.

• 2:36:01John Coogan?

  Talk about the trade-off between fully agentic systems here versus more of a copilot dynamic.

• 2:36:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I think if I think about it, there's, I think of it as two by two. So think of the Y axis as the severity of the, of the issue. So you can have alerts that are happening all the time to really complex incidents. And then on the other hand, you have, how agentic is it? So on the close to zero would be you have a run book. You have some sort of playbook that exists and you need, you have humans or engineers go execute those, those run books. And on the other end, you have a, you know, where you really don't know what to do. And so you have fifty people in an instant war room trying to figure out what happened. Right? So if I think about for low value alerts, typically you have a playbook or run book that engineers can go execute.

• 2:36:50Speaker 05

  And that's, I'd say, less agentic because you can just kind of, the meta workflow is always the same, which is like, look at this dashboard, then look at this logs and, you know, correlate between them or something. And on the fully agentic side is when even teams of engineers have no idea how to solve it a priori. And that's where you need to come up with architectures that are truly novel, where it doesn't fall into a pre-existing run book. So and that's, I think, the type of architecture you had to build to deal with the most visible incidents that an enterprise faces. I think that's really when our focus of the company.

• 2:37:19John Coogan?

  Last question.

• 2:37:20Jordi Hays?

  I was gonna say, are you the first assistant professor at Columbia to raise, you know, forty eight million dollars in the first two financings of a startup? Do you have any, is there anybody that's got you beat there?

• 2:37:33Speaker 05

  I don't know, but Columbia's been an absolutely wonderful partner. I think they've been very supportive. I think they understand the importance of AI and how, in some, in my opinion, this is the industrial age of AI. So if you want to be a good researcher, you have to be in the weeds, learning how these systems work. You can't just be theorizing in a vacuum. And I think everyone, myself and Columbia, understands that. So they've been an incredibly supportive institution. And I'm, yeah, I hope that I continue my relationship with them over a long time.

• 2:37:57Jordi Hays?

  That's awesome. Talk about the traction to date. You guys have been in stealth. I'm sure you're gonna get a flood of inbound interest today. But yeah, who are you guys building and working with so far that you can?

• 2:38:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we've been, I can talk about a few that I'm allowed to speak with and some I can't. But they've all been some of the largest enterprises in the world, who, basically, any company that cares about downtime. So those turn out to be companies like infrastructure companies, payments, streaming, financial institutions. Because if you go down, your customers feel it immediately. Those have been the customers that we have typically focused on, or they've been attracted to us as well. And we found that actually, as you go to the larger enterprises, two things happen. One is they actually have all the data because if you don't have the data, we can't do anything. And so the instrumentation is mature, but at the same time, it's fragmented. You're like so many teams, so many different services. And so I think that's where an AI agent that can talk to all these different systems at the same time adds a lot of value.

• 2:38:51Speaker 05

  So we've we've found ourselves more and more pull towards the enterprise. And yeah, it's it's in deployed in a number of, you know, mission critical environments. People are using it every day to help them troubleshoot pretty complex incidents. I think that's what we feel proud of, I'd say.

• 2:39:07Jordi Hays?

  It's great that this product sort of self selects for really high quality customers that are gonna like, you know, once they onboard and they're getting value, will probably be customers for years and years and years.

• 2:39:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:18Jordi Hays?

  So very, very exciting. John, I think it's time to hit the gong.

• 2:39:22John Coogan?

  Absolutely.

• 2:39:23Jordi Hays?

  Not gonna, he's not gonna come on the show. And forty eight million dollars.

• 2:39:28John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:39:29Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic lineup of investors. Sequoia, Kleiner, great, great group.

• 2:39:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:35Jordi Hays?

  Great group.

• 2:39:35John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:39:36Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for coming on.

• 2:39:38Speaker 05

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:39:38Jordi Hays?

  When you have news and congratulations on the milestone.

• 2:39:41John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Up next, we have John Lee from Sapphire, building electric mobility. Very excited to talk to him. John, are you there? Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 2:39:55Speaker 06

  Hey, doing good. How are you guys doing?

• 2:39:56John Coogan?

  Doing great.

• 2:39:57Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:39:58John Coogan?

  Would you mind kicking us off with a little bit of introduction on yourself and the company?

• 2:40:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely. Just a quick background on me. I was a former contracting officer in civilian side at Naval Systems Command Headquarters, where I was in procurement for different systems from NATO sea spare missiles to submarine solar sensor systems, counter IED jammers to energy upgrade systems on the Digi Navy ships. Left and went to Palantir as head of contracts for the US government, where I helped to increase your revenue in, you know, then some of the large contracts there in the over energy million dollar contracts there. And then went off to do a lot of other, you know, helping startups. Most of them are ex Palantir friends and are trying to get conscious from the US government, helping them to go to market side. And then I met with my co-founders to start Sapphire and we're accelerating electrification for defense, starting with some of the deepest IP from the US government, where our first IP is out of Oak Ridge National Land.

• 2:40:47Speaker 06

  It's great to meet you.

• 2:40:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's the uh, what is the main gating factor in electrification in the military? Is it on the supply side? Is it just on the deployment side? Like, can you give us some concrete examples of where electric systems can be leveraged for the warfighter?

• 2:41:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely. So, right now, absolutely for sure, on the supply chain side, there is an absolute shortage of if there is a surge capacity need for us to be able to produce in the US from the cathode to the anode and up and have the vertical integration to be able to do it on our own, there is a lack. So there is a huge push from US government to make sure we onshore or we industrialize from ground up in terms of that production capacity, especially when it comes to surge capacity. If and when we need it, we need it. And we're lacking behind in their production side.

• 2:41:42Speaker 06

  But also, we're just behind in the advancement of how the battery cells are evolving and how we need more energy power on the battlefield. It's not interoperable. It's not interchangeable, and there's not enough of it, especially when there's no grid.

• 2:41:59John Coogan?

  What are some of the most important weapons systems or just defense systems that are impacted by that?

• 2:42:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely. So, it actually goes all the way down from handheld for soldiers and up. So, we're talking to Air Force Research Program Manager, and there was an actual case where there was a soldier that's doing an airstrike call. Halfway through, loses battery, and the coordinates are still on him. And because of that battery loss, it was a friendly airstrike fire, and that is not acceptable. That is such an easy elementary fix to be able to have a battery management system software that allows us to reserve that extra percent.

• 2:42:51Speaker 06

  It's an advancement that we have not been focused on. It's something that we need to do. But on top of that, it's the grid, is to be able to provide a A tactical microgrid out of the edge where hey if all the power goes out, bring it in. And now we've got a tactical microgrid that's solar powered, self sustaining, that provides an interoperable also energy source to mobile systems as well as standing systems. And that network availability also does not exist today well.

• 2:43:21John Coogan?

  What's, oh, sorry.

• 2:43:22Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the decision to be dual use. I'm sure there was a lot of thinking that that went into that. It'd be interesting to get your insight.

• 2:43:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely. That's certainly amazing question. That was something we've been learning a lot from since the company started. So the our core IP technology is out of Oak Ridge National Lab where some of the nuclear materials were invented. And our C two has been there for over 20 years and he's got funded by ARPA E to work on a silicon nanoparticle that would go into lithium ion batteries. Essentially, if you ever work, play with water and cornstarch, it creates this thing called Uble. It's very fun for the project for the kids.

• 2:44:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:02Speaker 06

  It's a non Newtonian fluid, but we're doing that shear thickening effect in the battery cell. And that happens immediately upon a bullet hitting the battery or a car crash hitting it, then it solidifies from liquid to solid, preventing it from crunching up and providing extra structural strength for added safety. And so we started having conversations. We kicked off the company three years ago, raised friends and family around and kicked off the company and we were talking to electric vehicles and defense at the same time. And what we we really wanted to really understand, like what I'm really passionate about is protecting and saving lives. Like I could care less if it's, you know, 10 technologies or 100 technologies do it, like I'm going to protect and save lives. That's where my passion is.

• 2:44:47Speaker 06

  When I was working on the counter IED jammers to put into our vehicles in CENTCOM so that the enemies cannot blow up the IEDs under our vehicles as a contracting officer, then it was just kind of a moment where I was like, I couldn't do anything unless what I'm doing is impacting and hoping to protect and save lives. And so we talked to EV companies and they wanted more safety. But they also wanted to in- increase performance and decrease cost. They want it all, right? And so um we are uh so we so we went to really focus on how do we decrease the cost? So now our, you know, we're really focused on, we went back to the drawing board on the EV side to say, okay,

• 2:45:28Speaker 06

  with our product goals, it's a lower cost than the aluminum steel that's surrounding the battery packs. And so we're looking at how do we in- decrease the weight to increase performance, while ha- while having same if not higher safety on the EV side. But that sales cycle is actually, you know, you you like, I I've been working with the government uh uh, you know, pretty much all my life in defense and I think government was slow, but EV could be slower.

• 2:45:53Speaker 06

  And I was just kind of like, wow. If I wait until we have, you know, this technology and we keep building it, it's not like people would just come and buy it. It's just not how it's gonna work. The, you know, that's not how how how we did at Palantir. Like, we we have a playbook here. Don't recreate the playbook. We're gonna go to the end user and figure out what they need, and they're gonna give them what they need. And however business model uh fits that is what we're gonna create. And so that's the approach we took.

• 2:46:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. On the defense side, um is this something that you could actually go and build a whole program record around? Or do you just need to be a subprime contractor and and vend into some of the larger primes as they build out new systems?

• 2:46:35Speaker 06

  Yeah. So we really flipped um uh the entire business model on its head from the beginning where we say, hey, we've got a core IP. How do we create this? And then, you know, it in the traditional sense, you would say, let's build it, let's sell it to another supplier who then supplies it to another system, and the system will sell it to a customer. Instead, we just went straight to the customer. We say, what do you need? And they say, we need an electrical tactical dirt bike that can be deployed out of air, deconfigurable, reconfigurable, and can be parachuted down. When it lands, I don't want it to blow up from that impact. And it has to go, you know, X X amount of miles. And and it has to carry three hundred fifty pounds because because we have gear. It's not a hundred eighty pound type of bike.

• 2:47:14Speaker 06

  And that just didn't exist. And so we partnered up with the subcontractor uh with the top uh uh dirt bike company. I mean, newly designed a electric dirt bike tactical for AFSoC air combat controllers, us as a prime. And that was the most important thing. We said, we're not gonna wait for somebody else to sell. We're gonna own the customer. We're gonna own the supply chain, for the gain of great, and become that next uh next gen systems integrator two point O that we all know is in a dire need.

• 2:47:41John Coogan?

  Electric dirt bike for the military just sounds like something straight out of like a COD side mission or something. It's incredible.

• 2:47:48Jordi Hays?

  We're down to, we're down to test.

• 2:47:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yes. At least send us one. I do not have a motorcycle.

• 2:47:54Jordi Hays?

  Around the gong here.

• 2:47:56John Coogan?

  Yes. Yeah. Sounds amazing. Uh, but that, yeah. Thank you so much for stopping by and telling us about the business. This is fantastic.

• 2:48:02Speaker 06

  Awesome. Well, thanks so much for having me. Really appreciate it.

• 2:48:06Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, John. Thanks for coming on.

• 2:48:08John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Connor from Speak, uh, uh, language learning program. Uh, let's talk to Connor. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing today, Connor?

• 2:48:19Speaker 07

  Hello, hello.

• 2:48:20Jordi Hays?

  Welcome.

• 2:48:20Speaker 07

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:48:22Jordi Hays?

  I was expecting you to come on and say, just start talking in a variety of different languages.

• 2:48:26John Coogan?

  You're not impressing us. Drop some, drop some foreign languages on us. Uh, do you speak any foreign languages?

• 2:48:33Speaker 07

  Wow. Great question. Just getting right into it. Uh, I mean, I should be able to speak Spanish, uh, because I took five years of it in high school and college. And I have the classic story of, uh, I learned everything except how to speak, uh, which segues into what we're trying to do. And we finally have Spanish. So, uh, you know, I'm working on it. I'm getting better very quickly.

• 2:48:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Break down a little bit of the history of the company because it's interesting. Go to market, interesting history, uh, interesting strategy.

• 2:49:00Speaker 07

  Sure. Yeah. I mean, for context for everyone, we are trying to build the world's best language teacher using AI. So imagine, you know, a really good tutor, but they're in your pocket, available whenever, wherever, thinking about how best to teach you. Um, and it's speaking first, but yeah, the, the kind of interesting and weird thing about our history is we started this company a while ago. We've been working on it for like eight years at this point. The first few years are really just like AI research into how, how we could use AI to build the technology. And, um, and then we realized that we need to go focus on one market. So we spent, uh, the next four years or so focusing on a single market, a market that I had literally never been to in my life before, which was South Korea, a market where there's not really.

• 2:49:41John Coogan?

  How'd you pick that?

• 2:49:43Speaker 07

  So we we we kind of did a bunch of different, you know, market analyses. We built a free app and we and we like released it in a bunch of countries and saw what kind of traction we had. But ultimately, the thing that was the most convincing to me was I I went to South Korea to talk to some of our earlier users and I saw like literal skyscrapers that were filled with English classrooms. And all and it was just very clear that the country was obsessed over learning English. But there was also way more competition and solutions there than anywhere else in the world. So we we really thought like the only way we're going to build something interesting is if we actually built something substantially like structurally better using technology, like a 10x solution. And that market was going to be the market where we would get the most signal because

• 2:50:28Speaker 07

  the only way it would work is if we actually built something unique. And, you know, today, we are the clear number one leader. We've got about 80% brand awareness. We've had double-digit percentage of all South Koreans try our product. And yeah, it's.

• 2:50:44John Coogan?

  Air horns. What's the universal? Universal. This is the universal language of celebration. It's the real universal language. The vuvuzela of celebration. What like, walk me through like, how much value you're trying to deliver in the product? Like, am I benchmarking this more towards like a fun app to noodle on from time to time? Or, you know, a college-level curriculum that actually will, you know, almost guarantee fluency if I work through it?

• 2:51:13Speaker 07

  It's really the second, like, like, people do become fluent if they use our method. And and really, the benchmark is these, you know, cram schools in Korea that people are spending hundreds of dollars per month on, or, you know, there's private tutors that cost $40 to $80 per hour to study with. And that's really like the thing that we're benchmarking against and really trying to surpass in terms of efficacy and enjoyment.

• 2:51:40Jordi Hays?

  I'm trying to think, you guys have raised a lot of money from a bunch of great investors. I was trying to think through how they might think about risk factors to the business. And one of those I could imagine would be real time translation with AI gets so good that that maybe people, you know, don't feel the same drive to learn languages. Now the counterfactual or counterpoint would be something like, you know, robots being much better at chess than humans, yet, you know, humans still love to play chess. And so I I'm curious how you think of that, or if that's something that's kind of come up at all and how you would address something like that.

• 2:52:22Speaker 07

  It comes up all the time. You know, one term that, you know, is in some sci fi books is the idea of like a babblefish. You put something in your ear, which, by the way, I think will be launched by many companies this year. I mean, Google kind of released that with Google I O last month as well.

• 2:52:37John Coogan?

  With iPods a little bit, they teased it at W W C.

• 2:52:40Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly. So that's going to happen. I mean, we're already seeing this bidirectional, real time audio, speech to speech technology proliferating. And my response is always, you know, what we're ultimately doing is we're building something that is all about human connection and aspiration. Like, the reason people learn languages is because they actually want to be able to connect with other people and they aspire to to to be someone that speaks multiple languages. And that's the fundamental behavior we're helping with. And so if you think about like the world's greatest translator, like the UN translator that's like highly paid and stakes are high, there's still an immense amount of friction in that interaction.

• 2:53:21Speaker 07

  And so especially when you're learning a language, because it's, you know, for example, English, and it's the language that will allow you to travel the world and talk to anyone, or really frankly, any language. I think that people will still want to do that in the era of really great live translation. And in fact, my contrarian bet, acknowledging I'm extremely biased here, is more people will learn languages, not less, because it will become radically more enjoyable and easy. Imagine you just have your best friend who's teaching you every single day and that person is funny and like knows all about you and can talk about whatever you want and make it extremely personalized. I think a lot more.

• 2:53:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's humans like. Challenges.

• 2:54:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:01Jordi Hays?

  Very challenging. It's fun. It's stimulating.

• 2:54:03John Coogan?

  Look at chess.com.

• 2:54:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:05John Coogan?

  The business is ripping and like chess has been completely solved by AI for years.

• 2:54:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:09John Coogan?

  And yet people do it. Talk to me about what's working on the customer acquisition side. I want to hear about the footprint of the business internationally and domestically. And then just kind of like the pricing model and how customers think about actually paying you for the service.

• 2:54:24Speaker 07

  Yeah. So, I mean, the, the business model right now is quite simple. It's just a consumer subscription business. We have multiple tiers and that idea is we can build tiers for the people that are really dedicated and want all the power tools and intelligence behind it. And we do charge a premium, like it's, it's a little bit more expensive than most other, you know, consumer subscription businesses where we're talking, you know, depending on the market somewhere around a hundred dollars a year to over $200 a year. There's a lot more room there to play and we're just getting started. But the, yeah, I think like size of, you know, business and where we're at today. So, you know, I mentioned South Korea is kind of our bread and butter. That's where we've been up until relatively recently, trying to, you know, stay under the radar and just work, work on building the best possible product.

• 2:55:08Speaker 07

  And then we, we've really started to expand in the last two years or so. And so we, we're now, um, you know, becoming a very popular brand in, uh, in Japan and in Taiwan. And we've actually now expanded coverage to, uh, over 40 countries around the world in the last few quarters. Um, and just yesterday, we have now gone from an English language learning app to a language learning app with the launch of learning Spanish, Italian, um, French, Korean and Japanese, and more languages on the way. A large part of why we're even able to do that is, uh, because of all the like agentic AI content creation.

• 2:55:43John Coogan?

  I'm sure. Like localization has to be like completely one-shot-able by most modern LLMs. Like you can just, like, this is the transformer. It's really good at transforming stuff. It transforms things from one language to another. It's like the best, the, like, the, the most bread and butter.

• 2:55:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:00John Coogan?

  Anything else?

• 2:56:00Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. Very cool.

• 2:56:02John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 2:56:02Jordi Hays?

  We got to get on there. Uh, my Chinese is a little rusty. I know how to say.

• 2:56:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. What do you know?

• 2:56:07Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:56:08Jordi Hays?

  Well, hun shi wan pi zhou.

• 2:56:09John Coogan?

  Well, hun shi wan pi zhou.

• 2:56:10Jordi Hays?

  Which is not even factually correct, but it generally means I really enjoy beer. But it's a good line to have if you're ever, uh, I don't think we should go to China.

• 2:56:20John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:56:21Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, it's a good line to have in your back pocket.

• 2:56:23John Coogan?

  Totally. Totally. I just know bouyao, don't want, if somebody comes up to you on the street, I don't want it.

• 2:56:30Speaker 07

  I know, ni de yanching heme.

• 2:56:32John Coogan?

  What's that mean?

• 2:56:33Speaker 07

  Your eyes are very beautiful.

• 2:56:34John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:56:36Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, between the three of us, we could establish a beachhead.

• 2:56:42John Coogan?

  Tell the people to go away, compliments.

• 2:56:44Jordi Hays?

  And some nice compliments, so.

• 2:56:45John Coogan?

  It'd be fantastic. Congrats on all the progress.

• 2:56:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, come back on when you have news.

• 2:56:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

• 2:56:52Speaker 07

  Okay, thanks guys.

• 2:56:53Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:56:54John Coogan?

  Really quickly, let's tell you about Wander. Find your happy place, find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks.

• 2:57:09Jordi Hays?

  It's summer.

• 2:57:10John Coogan?

  Next up, we have Tanner coming in the studio.

• 2:57:14John Coogan?

  And before we get to Trey at Tanner, let's tell you about Bezel. Go to getbezel.com. Your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Get on there. Yeah, Jordy knows the beats of the delivery.

• 2:57:28Jordi Hays?

  Seriously, any watch.

• 2:57:30John Coogan?

  How did you sleep last night? I got destroyed.

• 2:57:33Jordi Hays?

  I had a rough.

• 2:57:34John Coogan?

  I had a very rough night.

• 2:57:35Jordi Hays?

  I had a very rough night.

• 2:57:38Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, I got a little cocky. I slept really well Monday night. Last night.

• 2:57:44John Coogan?

  I know, I got cocky too. I got 62.

• 2:57:47Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, 62. The tides have really turned, John. You went on a, that was truly a generational run.

• 2:57:53John Coogan?

  I gotta make it all back tonight. I'm sleeping 10 hours.

• 2:57:56Jordi Hays?

  Make it all back in one sleep.

• 2:57:57John Coogan?

  In one sleep. Nobody outsleeps me. It's the best.

• 2:58:01Jordi Hays?

  Sleeping 10 hours is actually surprisingly challenging.

• 2:58:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:06Jordi Hays?

  It's almost too much time.

• 2:58:08John Coogan?

  25 kids, it's brutal.

• 2:58:11John Coogan?

  In other fundraising news, Applied Intuition closed their Series F round of fundraising at $15 billion valuation. We had Kesar Yunus on the show at Hillen Valley, an absolute dog.

• 2:58:22Jordi Hays?

  He's gonna be running out of, running out of letters soon. I mean, he's got quite a few to go still.

• 2:58:28John Coogan?

  I wonder what the latest series letter we've ever, that has ever been done in venture history? Like, I know people have done F, but have we seen a Series K? Have we seen a Series S? Like, how far down the alphabet has anyone gone ever?

• 2:58:48Jordi Hays?

  I could see someone like a Cluley just raising like $1 rounds, speedrunning it to get to the Series Z.

• 2:58:53John Coogan?

  That would be an interesting strategy. I could definitely see Stripe being deep in the alphabet. They've been going for, what, almost 20 years now, that business? 2007, 2010? I guess 15 years they've been in business. So they could be deep into the alphabet.

• 2:59:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:12John Coogan?

  SpaceX. I don't even know if they are numbering or lettering their rounds anymore, because some of them are so like...

• 2:59:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're really the candidates.

• 2:59:19John Coogan?

  It's a tender offer, it's a preferred share, it's a common stock sale, kind of just moves around. What were you laughing at?

• 2:59:26Jordi Hays?

  There's always stuff to laugh about.

• 2:59:28John Coogan?

  Looking at the timeline?

• 2:59:29Jordi Hays?

  Looking up the timeline. What else we got?

• 2:59:33John Coogan?

  Um, we have our next guest, Trey from Tener. Here we go. He's fax maxing. Hey Trey, how you doing?

• 2:59:41Jordi Hays?

  The Fax Man.

• 2:59:42Speaker 08

  Doing well, guys. Yeah, doing well. Yeah, good. Boring to see myself on that screen.

• 2:59:49Speaker 08

  Reverse. You know, you never picture yourself in mirror image. It's horrible.

• 2:59:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is confusing. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Can you kick us off with the introduction of the company? We've heard TJ Parker teasing and educating us a little bit about this market, but I want to hear from you.

• 3:00:04Speaker 08

  Yeah, 100%. I mean, our solution, we work with providers that receive patients. Those patients get sent from other providers typically via what's known referrals, scripts.

• 3:00:14John Coogan?

  Doctors.

• 3:00:15Speaker 08

  Terminology, doctors, right? And those doctors, when they send a patient, they'll describe it as like sending a patient into a black hole. The patient doesn't get contacted, they don't know where they're at, and it loses a ton of money actually to those receiving providers that are trying to convert those patients into real visits. They end up getting denied if they don't have complete documentation. So it's a whole mess. It's a real problem. And it turns out it all starts at eFAX documentation. Over 90% of these visits originate via eFAX documentation. And if you can solve the facts, you can really drive a great outcome for those providers. So that's what we do.

• 3:00:48John Coogan?

  So I, like, I hurt my knee, I go into my general doctor, and they refer me to a knee specialist? And at some point, there needs to be a whole bunch of faxes going on? Is that just for insurance or for everything?

• 3:01:01Speaker 08

  Yeah, so I mean, imagine you get sent to that knee specialist and then the knee specialist says, hey, I really want to send you to a surgical center. Now, the surgical center has to go collect all this documentation to say, "Okay, Coogan, are you..." Maybe they don't address you by that name, but you know, they're gonna say, "Do I have, do I have enough, basically, to get past an authorization? Is the payer, the insurance company, gonna pay for this?

• 3:01:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:01:20Speaker 08

  Or do I need to, basically, say, "Hey, sorry, we don't have complete documentation. I have to send you to PT." In that timeframe, weeks go by, and you have no idea what the hell's going on.

• 3:01:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's super frustrating. Um, I mean, you mentioned e-facts. We've heard a lot about faxes driving the medical industry broadly. What is actually the state of the art in the fax medical world right now?

• 3:01:43Speaker 08

  This conversation usually is like, it's like a misnomer, really. When we talk about, most times you hear people talking about fax, you should really think like emailed PDFs. You should think e-facts, right? It's actually very rare nowadays, at least as what we see, that people are literally going in and like putting the pieces of paper.

• 3:01:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:59Speaker 08

  It's, it's actually, um, you know, it's more like, if you wanted to send, um, you know, you want to send a patient, I'm just gonna right-click, download the whole chart, and then I have to send it somehow. It's as easy as sending an email. It just happens to actually travel on fax wires. Like, that's the actual mechanism, the protocol. It's not SMTP, it's FaxLine.

• 3:02:16John Coogan?

  Interesting. And that's important from like a regulatory perspective, right?

• 3:02:19Speaker 08

  That's right. And to be honest, it's actually, even that is a little bit overblown. In many cases, it's very possible to have a secure email inbox, um, which we see a lot of as well.

• 3:02:29John Coogan?

  It's just kind of a legacy network, and that's the one they use. And as network.

• 3:02:32Speaker 08

  Yeah, that's right.

• 3:02:32John Coogan?

  Interesting. How'd you get into this?

• 3:02:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, when did you, when did you realize you wanted to drive efficiency in healthcare business process?

• 3:02:40Speaker 08

  I, to be honest, I have no, like, I, like, uh, I view, like, automation as kind of this, like, uh, also sort of this, like, uh, false prophet. It's, um, I learned about this from my mom who was sending patients out, and she'd say, Trey, it's like, It's like sending patients into a black hole. And it's not really like automation just so happens to be one piece of the component. The other big thing is nobody knows how much it costs. Right? So if I tell you, look, it's gonna be, if I say, look, it's gonna be $300 and you know that right off the bat, you're actually way more likely to show up than if I tell you, look, we're gonna have to determine your costs once you show up, which is what most people do today. And the reason they do that is because then they also have to go and run a check and make sure they understand how much your insurance is gonna cover and pay for in the process.

• 3:03:24Speaker 08

  So really, we exist to solve the black hole problem. I don't really give a crap about solving the fax. It's just like if you say you're gonna solve a problem and the first sort of hurdle is, okay, there's a bunch of unstructured PDF flow and if we can structure that, we get like a good chance at it. That's sort of how we approached it. No, not that much of a student of the game.

• 3:03:45John Coogan?

  Talk to me about the scale of the customer that you can sell to. Is this, is this something where like if you go to like a few networks and you win really, really big, it's kind of like game over? Or do you need to go to like every single doctor in the local, like in a local neighborhood and get them on board?

• 3:04:01Speaker 08

  Yeah, so I mean, somewhere in between, to be honest, right? Like there's, you have so much private equity in healthcare that you, if you think about the size of their markets, they're often consolidating. So those consolidated entities, those are really our ideal, you know, customer profile. We do work with a number of health systems, but like, to be, like if we're just being honest, right? It's like if you wanna centralize an inbox and really a sales funnel, when you think about the patient funnel is really a sales funnel, you still have to go do it department by department. So there's not like 20 deals to be done. There's probably more like 200,000 when you look at like the size of providers. Cause we unfortunately can't work with like two provider shops. But yeah.

• 3:04:43John Coogan?

  What's the scale of the business like today?

• 3:04:46Speaker 08

  So we're processing, we have 20,000 providers sending, right? So they're sending faxes, sending emails. We've got hundreds of providers using Tenor to process. And then we've got millions of patients.

• 3:05:00Speaker 08

  Millions of patients. Let's go! Oh, thank you, fucking, oh yeah. So, yeah, man. How much did you raise today? We raised 101 million dollars. That's right.

• 3:05:15John Coogan?

  Wow, let's go.

• 3:05:18Jordi Hays?

  There we go. There we go, that's fantastic. How did the round come together? What was that process like? Was it preemptive? Did you guys go out for it? Who'd you get on board?

• 3:05:28Speaker 08

  Alright, yeah, I gotta, guys, I literally was... Just a little bit of background, I literally got lost. So, I'm in the Lincoln Center. We had a, like, completely unrelated to the fundraising, that we had a big prospect customer event in the Lincoln Center tonight. I get lost, five minutes before, because I wanted to grab some food, some nuts, and I get lost. I'm sprinting to the door and I found it. So, I'm like, running hot. But, so to answer your question, like, um, I feel, I sound really salesy right now. To be honest, I'm usually a horrible fundraiser, historically, horrible fundraiser. This came together in like, four days. It was like, um, the business, it was...

• 3:06:02Jordi Hays?

  About 25 mil a day, it's pretty solid. It's a good run rate. You should've just kept going, why not? Why not? Okay.

• 3:06:09Speaker 08

  Most of our rounds have been, so we had a partner at Andreessen. I mean, this is kind of like, I think, some of the fun shop talk, but, you know, so you have a GP partner on most deals at Andreessen, right? So, we had a GP and a partner. Now, partner at Andreessen goes and actually becomes a GP over at IBP.

• 3:06:25John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 3:06:26Speaker 08

  And what does, what does he do? He was just bored observing us for two quarters, and we said we were gonna hit the thing. And he just calls me up after the quarter ends and is like, "So, did you do the thing?" And I said, "Yeah, we did the thing." And so, we did the round. And then, um, there were a couple of other firms that we just like, really respected, that, um, were, that were just like, "Yeah, we're doing the thing. Let's do the thing." And we did it.

• 3:06:46John Coogan?

  That's amazing. What's the, uh, what's the use of funds like? Is this, uh, like, R&D heavy, spending a lot on engineering? Are there hard costs in the business? Is it hiring a lot of sales reps? Is there some sort of like, crazy payback period where, you know, you have to go and install, then win a customer, and then you get paid back over like, a really long time? Because I imagine like, this seems like a pretty low churn product if you can get it installed, but it might be expensive to do that.

• 3:07:12Speaker 08

  That's a great, yeah. It's really, um, it's an expensive deployment period. And so, you're looking at an expensive first year, typically speaking.

• 3:07:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:20Speaker 08

  So, not, so, yes, the traditional, "Hey, we're gonna, you know, keep growing the sales team." That's just been growing off of growth anyways.

• 3:07:26John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:07:26Speaker 08

  But get way ahead of the engineering team. We're launching this product, so like, we have these millions of patients, right? And I'll give you like, one quick example, it's kind of interesting. You think about the fact that you got sent over to like a, um, let's say you're sort of having trouble sleeping, you turns out you get diagnosed with sleep apnea. You now are going to get a CPAP. Now you might actually qualify based on all the clinicals you've done because you've been to a sleep doctor, you've been processed through DME, you've been processed through diagnostics. We have all your clinicals, we have your insurance, we can actually suggest to you all these other services, basically, that you qualify, you're eligible for to go and get. Um, and uh, whether that's additional consults, behavioral treatment, uh, pharmaceuticals, things like that. Um, and so we're launching this big

• 3:08:08Speaker 08

  network product and it's a, it's a huge lift on the engineering team. And so we've been growing that team really aggressively as well.

• 3:08:14John Coogan?

  That makes a ton of sense.

• 3:08:15Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor to hit the gong for you.

• 3:08:18John Coogan?

  It has been an honor.

• 3:08:19Jordi Hays?

  You're an absolute Chad. Uh, thank you for coming on. Congratulations on the milestone. I have a feeling you'll be back here in the temple with us very soon.

• 3:08:27John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:08:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, with how you're talking. So, uh, congratulations to you and the team.

• 3:08:31Speaker 08

  I wanted to, I was hoping I'd get some credit. It's like, I, I see all these guests come on, I'm a big fan.

• 3:08:34John Coogan?

  I saw the jacket. I was gonna say.

• 3:08:36Jordi Hays?

  There you go, there you go.

• 3:08:37Speaker 08

  I got the suit.

• 3:08:38Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, honestly, you wear it, it looks natural. A lot of people put it on as, it looks performative. You know, it's like stolen valor.

• 3:08:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So we don't want to draw too much attention if that's your daily, but we appreciate you dressing up for the occasion.

• 3:08:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you look sharp. You look sharp. And, uh, just do us a favor and never wear casual clothing in the workplace ever again. Just, you know, make this a part of your daily, you know, you're, you're a healthcare technologist, you know, you should be, you should dress the part.

• 3:09:03John Coogan?

  You're an executive, you're a businessman.

• 3:09:04Jordi Hays?

  You're a businessman.

• 3:09:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:09:05Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 3:09:06Speaker 08

  We've got Fit, we've got Fit Fridays. It's the opposite of casual Fridays. You have to dress really, really nice going into the office here in New York.

• 3:09:11Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 3:09:12John Coogan?

  I love it. That's amazing.

• 3:09:14Speaker 08

  We're doing our part, man. We're doing our part. You guys have a great, great to see, great to see you. Good chat.

• 3:09:18John Coogan?

  Have a great one.

• 3:09:19Jordi Hays?

  Great chatting. Congratulations. See ya.

• 3:09:20John Coogan?

  Up next, we got James from Profound coming in the studio. Oh, is there another gong hit coming in? Let's hear it.

• 3:09:29John Coogan?

  James, how you doing?

• 3:09:30Jordi Hays?

  There he is. What's going on?

• 3:09:31John Coogan?

  Break down the news. What's going on?

• 3:09:33Jordi Hays?

  I got the mallet ready.

• 3:09:36Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 3:09:37James Cadwallader?

  How are you doing, guys?

• 3:09:38John Coogan?

  Doing great.

• 3:09:39Jordi Hays?

  Well, we've already covered your raise. We've talked with David Senra. We've got the backstory on how David Senra met you and invested. But super excited to have you on to break down the news yourself.

• 3:09:52James Cadwallader?

  Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, and congrats on all the TBP interaction as well. It's inspiring just to see your story kind of continue to take the main stage.

• 3:10:02Jordi Hays?

  Thank you. Thank you.

• 3:10:05Jordi Hays?

  We had you on recently. What's what's happened since? Talk about the new round and then I want to hear about traction and kind of what you're seeing on the product side as well.

• 3:10:13James Cadwallader?

  For sure. Yeah, I guess since we last spoke, it's just been, you know, a lot of days in the office. We moved office, we moved across the other side of Union Square, New York City. The entire team is here in person, working very hard. We're in office six days a week. And yeah.

• 3:10:36Jordi Hays?

  I love to hear that as an investor. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna pretend I don't.

• 3:10:42James Cadwallader?

  I think, you know, it's, it's, it's very exciting. I think the the tailwinds are mind blowing. It's, you know, this is a clear platform shift, maybe one of the biggest platform shifts in the history of marketing as hundreds of millions, billions of consumers turn away from Blue Link search and instead talk to platforms like ChatGPT and get a response. How your brand shows up, how your products show up, how your services show up in these AI responses is becoming like boardroom level discussion for every brand on the planet. So, yeah, we're building Profound as a new age marketing platform

• 3:11:24James Cadwallader?

  to guide marketers, every, every brand on the planet to this new generative internet and internet where you can talk to it and it talks back to you. I think the closest heuristic would be SEO for AI.

• 3:11:39James Cadwallader?

  But you know, once you start to look underneath the hood, there's a lot of fundamental differences here. These models are opining, they give, you know, they have sentiment, they they give opinions, you know, the the kids are using chat these days and uh yeah, more like an operating system. Um, and yeah, how your brand shows up there is P zero.

• 3:12:01Jordi Hays?

  What are some of the big struggles that maybe legacy brands are facing in terms of shaping their, you can imagine.

• 3:12:09John Coogan?

  Are there any canonical horror stories yet? I feel like it's all pretty good stuff. Well, most of the time I see uh examples of this, it's always somebody screenshotting like, oh, I I nailed it, like, like the chat G P T recommended my brand. But I imagine that there's probably some people that are uh having having rougher experiences.

• 3:12:26James Cadwallader?

  Well, the models are probabilistic, so you know, you ask the same question ten times in a row and get ten different responses. So that's kind of the, you know, that's one of the main upsides of using technology like profound is you get the kind of aggregate response um across all of the major platforms. Um, I mean, yeah, we we work with Ramp as an example, uh they're an example customer. Um, and you know, we seven Xed their their visibility in a category where they didn't have much visibility and the way that you do that is by you understand

• 3:13:01James Cadwallader?

  through lots of prompting, you you understand how the models are talking about your brand, your products, your industry, your competitor, where where they're going in order to answer those questions. And then you strategically start creating content for bots.

• 3:13:21John Coogan?

  Oh, we got.

• 3:13:22James Cadwallader?

  And yeah, it's it's it's it's pretty tractable.

• 3:13:25Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Talk about uh the round who participated. Uh it's a pretty, pretty great list. Uh, I'm biased, but uh not David David Senra like does not really angel invest. Yeah, it's very, it's very, very rare. So uh you got him.

• 3:13:41James Cadwallader?

  Yeah, thanks. Um, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's cool. So it's, it's a, you know, it's a real kind of like pinch me moment. Um, we're, we're working. So Kleiner Perkins led the round. Um, so Ilya Fishman's taking a seat on the board. Um, in addition, we have Coastal Ventures, that's with Keith Raboy, Nvidia, um,

• 3:14:02Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, sorry, didn't let you finish, but uh, had to, had to, had to go. Uh, continue, continue.

• 3:14:14James Cadwallader?

  Uh, Saga Ventures. So yeah, that's uh, Max Altman, Ben Braveman, Thompson Ruen, um, South Park Commons, SV Angel, um, and then a bunch of really great angels. Uh, obviously the most important, uh, being a, a guy called Jordi Hays.

• 3:14:33Jordi Hays?

  Too kind, too kind. Um, but uh, but yeah, uh, give us an update on uh, almost like an investor update, um, uh, which, which I won't share, but, but give it, give us an update on, on kind of the, the, like, what is, I'm curious what the sales cycle is right now with, with companies that you're talking to. I imagine this is like a kind of a hair on fire issue where they realize like, hey, we don't know what's going on or, or things are happening. Um, is it, is, you know, what does that look like with some of these bigger multinational, you know, brands and, and companies that you guys are working with?

• 3:15:04James Cadwallader?

  Yeah, I think, you know, what the, the, the thing, you know, what they're realizing is true is that this platform shift is so big that they need dedicated technology to understand and control how they show up in answer engine outputs. Um, they can't rely on like existing marketing technology. If anything, just purely because the space is moving and evolving so quickly. Um, which I think is really evidenced by the fact that we are able to work. We're working with Fortune 10 brands. So literally some of the biggest brands in the world are using Profound. Uh, there's thousands of marketers on the platform now. Um, it's hard to, it's hard to mention logos, you know, as, as we all know, it's, it's tricky.

• 3:15:47James Cadwallader?

  But so, you know, some of the logos that we are able to mention are, so we have brands like MongoDB, Indeed, Mercury, DocuSign, Zapier, Ramp, Plaid, Row.

• 3:16:04Jordi Hays?

  Murderers, bro.

• 3:16:05James Cadwallader?

  Yeah. Chime, US Bank, Clay, Recent. So yeah, we're working with, you know, that's just the ones we can mention.

• 3:16:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:14James Cadwallader?

  Um, and yeah, I think, you know, we're, these brands are coming to us because we've built the ubiquitous technology in this new category that, you know, we, we've, we've, we're sucking the oxygen out of the room and we're building a better product. And, um, yeah, I think that's a function of a very talented engineering team here in New York, basically.

• 3:16:36Jordi Hays?

  Category leader, working six days a week. The only option would be to try to work seven days a week, but then you risk a major burnout. So better, better just not compete at all and, and just let, let James cook. Just be, be a customer. Uh, well, thank you for coming on, James. Uh, awesome milestone and, uh, I have no doubt we'll have you back on again soon.

• 3:16:55James Cadwallader?

  Yeah. Thanks for having me, guys. Appreciate that.

• 3:16:56Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:16:57John Coogan?

  Amazing. We'll talk to you soon. Bye.

• 3:17:01John Coogan?

  We got back to back guests coming in the studio. Next, we got Warp and Senra Systems. We're going to figure out who's joining first.

• 3:17:11Jordi Hays?

  Senra's coming on first.

• 3:17:12John Coogan?

  Okay, we got Senra.

• 3:17:13Jordi Hays?

  Not David Senra.

• 3:17:15John Coogan?

  Not David Senra. We already talked to him.

• 3:17:16Jordi Hays?

  We got Jordan.

• 3:17:17John Coogan?

  We got Jordan from Senra.

• 3:17:18Jordi Hays?

  Founder of Senra Systems.

• 3:17:20John Coogan?

  Let's bring him in.

• 3:17:21Jordi Hays?

  He is an emerging wire harness manufacturer.

• 3:17:25John Coogan?

  We're going to try and get Senra. In the meantime, I think we have Warp.

• 3:17:29Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 3:17:30John Coogan?

  Let's do Warp. Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

• 3:17:33Jordi Hays?

  Ready? There he is. Sorry, sorry for the chaos. I told you now, ten minutes from now, back and forth.

• 3:17:38John Coogan?

  It's live TV.

• 3:17:39Jordi Hays?

  But you're here. We're live on TVPN in the Ultra Dome.

• 3:17:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:17:44Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you.

• 3:17:45James Cadwallader?

  Glad to be here.

• 3:17:46Jordi Hays?

  Exciting, exciting day. Give, give everybody some, some background on you and the company. And then we can talk about the news.

• 3:17:53Speaker 10

  Yeah, yes. My name is Ayush. I'm the founder and CEO of Warp. And as some of you may have seen, we are the best way for startups to run payroll, handle compliance, hire people, and do all those fun things. We just also announced our 18 million Series A. Let's go.

• 3:18:08Jordi Hays?

  John, I'll let you do the honors. I'll let you do the honors. Let's go Y.

• 3:18:14Jordi Hays?

  Boom. I have a feeling we'll need a bigger gong for Warp. Hopefully, hopefully we can get it in here before the next round. Yeah, talk about, talk about competing in a, in a, in a big but crowded category. And maybe kind of the, a little bit of the origin stories of, of the business as well because

• 3:18:35Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 3:18:36Jordi Hays?

  You're relatively new, but, but clearly making waves.

• 3:18:40Speaker 10

  Yeah, totally. I mean, Jordy, you've known us from the very early days, I think. And we've been, we've been friends and kind of working on this from the very, very start. So I think you've seen that journey. But really what I think about is there's almost like such a high bar today for building incredible products, right? I think a ramp obviously comes to mind where, you know, you, you start out in this like huge market and you see a incredible like opportunity and maybe it looks like there's all these players, but if you can build an amazing product, if you can give startups, companies the best product experience, like that actually has a lot of demand. So I think on, on our end, we also saw that there's all these different tools that people

• 3:19:22Speaker 10

  kind of piece together for running their company, running payroll, handling compliance. It's very disjointed. It's very manual still today, especially for startups. And if there's one thing the startups hate, like I've done this before myself, is stare at a piece of like paperwork from government, like New York Department of Taxation, whatever, and have to do it themselves. And that's just so, so annoying. So we're kind of automating all of that for once, using tons of kind of automation AI behind the scenes to kind of accomplish that and also just building a really, really amazing product. So one of, I think one of our customers told us this the other day is that using all these other providers feels like you're using like Bank of America to pay somebody or like TD

• 3:20:04Speaker 10

  Bank. But then if you use Warp, it feels like you're, you're using Brex or Ramp or Venmo to pay your friend. And that's the kind of like the qualitative sort of product like difference that we think about.

• 3:20:18Jordi Hays?

  How much are you thinking about agentic workflows and features versus traditional bread, you know, SaaS, bread and butter, crud, you know, traditional fintech, all that kind of stuff?

• 3:20:32Speaker 10

  Yeah, it's a huge part. And I think we're being thoughtful about it. Like, I think there's a lot of players that are just like waking up to it and their approach is, well, we're just gonna jam like some AI kind of buzzwords kind of sound cool. But I think we have the luxury that we're starting in this, almost in this time where like all these advancements are happening very, very quickly. So maybe you guys don't know, but like my personal background actually is in computer science, specifically focusing on AI back at MIT. And so it was very cool to see some of these things early on, right before this started taking off. And now we have the opportunity to build this in a way that is from the ground up, we can actually like architect this in the right way. So a lot of these manual paperwork, like maybe the customer doesn't even know about them or think about them.

• 3:21:14Speaker 10

  I know they're completely abstracted away from them, all the media filing paperwork, taxation, that would typically be their responsibility or their accountants or controllers, whatnot. We can absorb them for the first time and there's no like middle ground that we have to cross where they're kind of doing it and then it's slightly automated and they're asking some chat UI. I know it's just like fully in the background automated.

• 3:21:37Jordi Hays?

  Where's the growth coming from? I know you guys are growing quickly. You don't have to give us like, you know, the full secret sauce, but how and why are you winning customers over?

• 3:21:47Speaker 10

  We, I think the biggest thing is we have seen tons of founders just telling their friends about us. So if they, if customers using us, we target a lot of our, you know, startups, founders, a lot of the folks that you would have known of like Rahul from Julius AI and Isaiah from Blind. And I think tons of these really cool startups that are building all these amazing products. They have lots of like Twitter presence, very online and they'll tell their friends or tweet about us or say something positive. And that's been a huge driver. So first and foremost, just like building an incredible product, people will tell their friends, but also targeting these like very awesome companies that will kind of spread the word.

• 3:22:26John Coogan?

  Why is payroll so oligopolistic? I feel like there's like ADP, Paylocity, Paycom, Pay something else in the public markets. Then YC has like three unicorns in payroll. Like I get that there's a lot of money. Yeah, I get that there's a lot of money where the money is, but like, why is there not more of a compounding advantage? Like, what's the market dynamic? Is that expected to change? Or is it just like, you can go and win even if you get 1% of the market and that's like, fine?

• 3:22:53Speaker 10

  I think it's definitely more of the latter. But at the same time, it's almost like banking, right? Like, if you think about banking broadly, how many different banks exist and fintechs exist? And they all kind of can win big. Even some of the biggest players that are, you know, obviously like wrap, like in the grand scheme of things, the market is so, so large that even a small portion of that can be huge. And every five to 10 years, it seems like there's some new wave of technology where the consumer behavior shifts enough. So like, one thing I think about a lot is the founder expectations have shifted a ton, right? They're used to using tools like Superhuman and Linear for running their teams.

• 3:23:33Speaker 10

  And then they go log into like a Salesforce-like junk, you know, like HR hefty thing. And I just kind of hate that. So I think there's some consumer behavior shift. There's also the fact that you can reinvent these things from first principles every five, 10 years. And then AI is a big piece of that puzzle, too.

• 3:23:49John Coogan?

  It almost feels like the opposite. Like, it feels like payroll, it's such, it's so cumbersome to rip it out that it's actually a slower turnover. And so if, as opposed to some of these tools where it's easy to rip them out, you, if there's really, really great product that's actually better, you're going to take over the market and get everyone to rip it out and replace it very quickly. But payroll system, it's like pulling teeth to get it out of the system. And so like, people are like, yeah, I don't like the one that I have, but I'm not, I'm not going to change or anything. I don't know. It's interesting.

• 3:24:24Jordi Hays?

  Are you thinking about stable coins at all? They've been in the news in the last 24 hours. People have talked about the potential of stables helping.

• 3:24:33John Coogan?

  Maybe just like saving you money or earning you more float or something like, it seems like most of the payroll companies are pretty mature in terms of like squeezing every penny out of the dollars that they transfer around. But is it a bull case at all? Or does it change the economics at all?

• 3:24:45Speaker 10

  I, from where we sit, I mean, we haven't seen a ton of requests coming from customers directly, which is the main thing that I try to track, right? But I think more macro level, it seems like the moment for stable coins is definitely happening. So I, I, I'm bullish overall, but I haven't seen a direct uptick into like payroll, especially because I think if you, especially for US focused use cases, which is where we are. Um, we do global contractors, obviously, and that's a smaller part of like what we're doing. But for those players, it's probably a bigger thing that they need to think about uh for international. But I think the uh one, one maybe like take that I have is the US uh banking system gets more shit than it actually deserves.

• 3:25:27Speaker 10

  It's actually like quite good. Um, the ACHs, the Fed wires, even though they're kind, they're kind of old and we're stuck with them in some ways and they could be better, they're better than what people realize or give them credit for at least.

• 3:25:39John Coogan?

  Is that just because they've been wrapped in APIs so many times that like they're actually pretty easy to develop on? Or is the actual underlying system evolved and actually gotten better?

• 3:25:49Speaker 10

  It's both. Um, I think the rise of fintechs and APIs obviously make a lot of them very easy. Um, but the one, like, the interesting thing is, um, like, if you look at India, and I grew up in India, my family's still there. UPI, which is mobile wallets, they're actually a huge thing in India. And they basically around from twenty fifteen or so, there was a period where mobile wallets just went vertical, almost within like a one year period. Um, and the reason that took off is India was largely a cash-based society. So the delta between going from like cash and change and like counting all of that immediately to phone wallets and QRs was massive. But in the US, you'll never get mobile wallets, not in a true sense. What we do have is credit cards and Apple Pay.

• 3:26:30Speaker 10

  Because there's not enough of a delta. So like, it's one of those things where the US figured out ACH rails and Fedwire rails and credit card rails earlier than all these other countries that, that are now just catching up. So they get to kind of leapfrog and go to the next level. But we have like some of these things that I've actually worked for a while, all these like legacy layers of technologies that are built around it. Um, that we don't get to like immediately crossover because there's not enough of a delta. So we will be on, we will be on like ACHs and Fedwires for a long time, but they work pretty well.

• 3:27:02John Coogan?

  They're Lindy.

• 3:27:03Jordi Hays?

  Lindy. Uh, I think, I think Gong Hit is in order.

• 3:27:07John Coogan?

  Oh, let's do it.

• 3:27:08Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the round. Uh, eighteen million, Series A?

• 3:27:12Speaker 10

  Eighteen million, Series A. Let's go. Led by Sound Ventures, we've got Drew Houston, Arash, Kyle Vogt. As part of the round, those are all MIT engineer founders where I went to school. So, YC crew, we tried like all the technical folks, some great people joining and we're super excited and very thrilled.

• 3:27:34Jordi Hays?

  Did you, you graduated MIT, right?

• 3:27:37Speaker 10

  That's right, that's right.

• 3:27:39Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, no, that's the new bull signal.

• 3:27:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's the contrarian move.

• 3:27:42Jordi Hays?

  The contrarian thing is.

• 3:27:43John Coogan?

  Don't drop out, don't drop out. Yeah, that's right.

• 3:27:46Jordi Hays?

  That's where, that's where all the new, the new outfits.

• 3:27:48John Coogan?

  Congratulations, yeah.

• 3:27:49Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations, it's been amazing to watch you execute over the years and excited for the next chapter.

• 3:27:57John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:27:57Speaker 10

  Awesome, yeah, likewise.

• 3:27:59Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:28:00John Coogan?

  Uh, next up, we have Jordan from Senra Systems, not David Senra's Systems. These are high-quality wire harnesses. Welcome to the stream, Jordan. Hopefully, we can bring you in. I know we had some back and forth juggling. Um, but great to have you on the show.

• 3:28:16Jordi Hays?

  There he is. We did it.

• 3:28:18John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream.

• 3:28:19Jordi Hays?

  We did it. Welcome.

• 3:28:21John Coogan?

  I love, I love when we, I love when a plan comes together. Uh, would you mind introducing yourself, the company, and what is a wire harness for those who don't know?

• 3:28:30Speaker 11

  Yeah, absolutely. Uh, I'm Jordan Black. I'm the CEO of Senra Systems. Uh, you probably don't know what the hell a wire harness is and that's totally fine. Uh, just think of it as like an iPhone charger, but like a lot more complex. Like when you lift the hood of your car, you see a bunch of electrical wiring. It just connects any two or more components together. Uh, and everybody hates it because it's entirely manual process to design it, entirely manual process to manufacture it. Uh, and it's just a very bespoke thing that hasn't changed since the Cold War.

• 3:28:59John Coogan?

  Uh, top applications, I mean, you see it in the car. I seem to remember like the Cybertruck changed their wire harnessing and reduced it by like, you know, it went from like 10,000 feet of wires to like 1,000 feet or so. Is that roughly like the right story or like, give me a more concrete example?

• 3:29:16Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think, uh, the thing with wire harnessing, the more you have, the more expensive it's going to be. So you put more sensors and computers and, uh, thingamajigs around your car or rockets or drones, uh, you're going to have more wiring and it's become more expensive. So what Tesla did was really kind of minimize the amount of signals they had to go through and there's a little more complexity that goes into that too. Uh, but it's, it's in everything. Like that's the way you power your coffee maker, your rocket drone missile, everything else, because if you need to connect. This thing that needs to send signal or power to this thing over here, the only way you're going to really do it is through copper wire.

• 3:29:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. So cars, rockets, drones, planes, like what, what is the most common product that you're selling your, your wire harnesses into? Is it everything? Or do you have a specific focus right now?

• 3:30:01Speaker 11

  We do a little bit of everything, but right now it's mainly aerospace and defense. And the reason why is because it's very hard to get a high quality wire harness in the space. Like not to get super morbid, but like the reason why like the astronaut side of the Apollo mission was there was like a nick on the cable jacket. And there was a flammable gas and the whole thing sparked. Or uh, there's a lot of launch failures or launch delays that happen because like they can't get a wire harness on time. And it's this hard thing because if you put a wiring in a car, it's kind of like, it sits there, you know, it goes through some bad winters sometimes. But like, when you put it into a rocket or a drone, like it meets withstand crazy environments, get beat the hell up. And all it goes to space, it's in a vacuum, it's all over the place.

• 3:30:43Speaker 11

  And it has to be like very precise in ways it gets built because it's all done by hand today. So there's a lot of like inspection. And so that's kind of where this like bespoke process on top of the complexity and top of like it being something really niche that nobody really knows about. Besides myself and the people who work at Centerra and a very few found people in the U S. This is where we're trying to like, take all that tribal knowledge, take all that processing and really kind of make a structured output of it too.

• 3:31:06John Coogan?

  So yeah, what, what is the key innovation here? Is it automation? Is it robotics, uh, better software, better just skilled? Just caring about it 10, 10 times more than the next person. Giving a damn as you say on your website.

• 3:31:20Speaker 11

  I like the high level is like, if any of us ran like TSA tomorrow, we'd just do a way better job than like there currently is. And so they're just like caring and just make like, kind of just getting rid of all the bullshit that's going into it. But what we're doing from a fundamental portion is like the way large companies today design wire harnesses. They use like Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides and no one's really trained on this thing. And the way it gets built is like with hand tools and like on a wooden table. And so the like software aspect of it is like, we're creating this like industry standard for how wire harness should be designed in like our tool called AMP. Where we could take the tribal knowledge we have and like tell people like, this is how you should design it. Because every time I get a wire harness, I go back and forth to the customer of like, you did this thing wrong. I can't find this part, yada, yada, yada.

• 3:32:04Speaker 11

  And then to build it, we're actually using automation and we're using a lot of software processes to make it a really streamlined effects. Like you both can come to my factory tomorrow and start building a wire harness because it's not the most difficult thing to do in the world. The hardest part is just knowing exactly what steps to do and where to actually perform the process as well.

• 3:32:23Jordi Hays?

  Talk about how the round came together. Dylan feel that some sharp elbows, elbowing out, you know, the platform.

• 3:32:31John Coogan?

  You don't want to get on the wrong side of board table with him.

• 3:32:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:32:33John Coogan?

  Board room is going to be rough.

• 3:32:34Jordi Hays?

  But how did you guys meet and break down the round for us?

• 3:32:38Speaker 11

  Yeah, absolutely. I got introduced to Dylan through one of our investors and I FaceTimed him. I was, I think, a weekend in Laguna and all of a sudden we just started hanging out a ton. And I been pitching that we were creating a wire harness design tool, which is the Figma of wire harnessing for years.

• 3:32:59John Coogan?

  No way, yeah.

• 3:33:01Speaker 11

  And just to kind of explain what we're doing.

• 3:33:03Jordi Hays?

  Did he scare you and say, well, actually, Figma is the Figma for wire harnesses and I'm going to eat you alive?

• 3:33:09John Coogan?

  Stay out of my territory.

• 3:33:10Jordi Hays?

  It's a little bit different, a little bit different.

• 3:33:12Speaker 11

  Yeah, a little bit different. I've yet to get a Figma designed wire harness to this day, but maybe one day we'll get it. And we spent a lot of time together and I'll be frank, like I'm obsessed with the guy. I think he's just so intelligent, the way he thinks from a product standpoint, how he runs his company, where taking something so bespoke, like a design tool as well and breaking into this industry that hasn't been changed in a while, too. Like, it kind of just really resonated with me. And then we were chatting one day and I was like, I'm going to go out and like fundraise. And he's like, I'd like to like put a check in. And I'm like, oh, okay, like classic made it in Silicon Valley. He's going to write an angel check. And he's like, oh, I like to, you know, own a substantial amount of the company in the round. And I was like, oh, my gosh. And so it was kind

• 3:33:56Speaker 11

  of about to start taking out the fundraise and doing that. And I don't know, it just, it really taught to me of like, we have really great investors on our cap table and I'm just super thankful about that, too. But I'm excited to just have someone who can be in the weeds with it and just like actually help grow this company, be this kind of like mentor, but also just like this company that we want to grow into as well, too. And it's ultimately really exciting. And so I was like, let's, let's do it. It's, you know, no one else can really understand like the struggles and also the missions or the obstacles we have to overcome than Dylan. And we just kind of get each other. So.

• 3:34:30Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing.

• 3:34:31John Coogan?

  What was the final round size?

• 3:34:33Speaker 11

  25 million is the, the ground size.

• 3:34:38Speaker 11

  Let's go.

• 3:34:39Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 3:34:39John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:34:41Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 3:34:41John Coogan?

  It's great news.

• 3:34:42Jordi Hays?

  Well, I feel like you'll be back here in the Ultra Dome very soon.

• 3:34:46John Coogan?

  Very soon. We might need some custom wire harnesses. We're wiring up lights all over the place.

• 3:34:50Jordi Hays?

  There's actually, yeah, we.

• 3:34:52John Coogan?

  We got extension cords taped to the ground right now.

• 3:34:55Jordi Hays?

  Probably not your ICP, but we got a lot of.

• 3:34:58John Coogan?

  We'll figure out a way to integrate for sure.

• 3:35:01Speaker 11

  Perfect. If you ever need anything, electrical wiring, I'm your guy. So.

• 3:35:06Jordi Hays?

  What's the, before you go, how are the vibes in, in the gundo? You're, you're, you guys are technically in redondo. So I don't know if you claim gundo.

• 3:35:17Speaker 11

  I'm calling it the dondo. No one's calling.

• 3:35:19John Coogan?

  The dondo.

• 3:35:19Jordi Hays?

  The dondo.

• 3:35:20John Coogan?

  The dondo. Yeah, that's good.

• 3:35:22Jordi Hays?

  Heard that before.

• 3:35:23John Coogan?

  That seems so obvious now that I think about it. Yeah.

• 3:35:25Speaker 11

  Yeah, it's, um, I think the vibes are very high. I think everyone's just so excited to build. It makes complete sense. It's not, uh, of like, not only center up, but just even the companies in this space too of like, there's a time to build, a time to move fast, a time to build things correctly. And I think it's our turn to kind of, start changing this entire industry, which is in the hard tech space. Uh, and I think it's.

• 3:35:50Jordi Hays?

  What percentage of your customers are in Southern California right now versus other states, international, et cetera?

• 3:35:58Speaker 11

  I'd say most of our, I'd say probably about 80% of our customers are in the US or is on any of those in Southern California. All of them are in the US. Um, but that's because they like kind of having this supplier or this, uh, face of just like, I can come next, drive over next door and just be able to support them and talk to them as well too. So.

• 3:36:18Jordi Hays?

  It's old fashioned.

• 3:36:19John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 3:36:20Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 3:36:21Jordi Hays?

  Love it.

• 3:36:21John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations.

• 3:36:22Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for coming on. Very exciting.

• 3:36:25John Coogan?

  And we'll talk to you soon.

• 3:36:26Speaker 11

  Awesome. Take care.

• 3:36:27Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:36:28John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 3:36:30John Coogan?

  Well, that is our show today, folks. We hope you enjoyed the lightning round, the deep dives, the chat with David and Center Systems.

• 3:36:38Jordi Hays?

  Visualizing that conversation or getting dropped in there and Dylan's like, "Yeah, I'll throw in a check."

• 3:36:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:36:46Jordi Hays?

  And he's like, "Cool, like, you know, 50K, 100K." He's like, "How about..."

• 3:36:52John Coogan?

  The whole round.

• 3:36:53Jordi Hays?

  Eight-figure.

• 3:36:54John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 3:36:56Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 3:36:56John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. Hopefully, we see more of it. It seems cool.

• 3:36:58Jordi Hays?

  No, it makes sense.

• 3:36:59John Coogan?

  You get a founder in your board, different timeline.

• 3:37:01Jordi Hays?

  It's not about the fund or the vehicle that gives you the money. It's about the person. It's about the investor. And it seems like they have an awesome partnership.

• 3:37:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:37:09Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 3:37:10John Coogan?

  Well, anyway, leave us five stars on Apple and Spotify and we will talk to you tomorrow. Thank you for watching.

• 3:37:17Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for tuning in. Have a great afternoon.

• 3:37:20John Coogan?

  Have a great afternoon.