Tesla Robotaxis Go Live, OpenAI Pulls Jony Ive Promotional Materials, Iran Updates | Yacine, Farzad Mesbahi, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Jon Chu, Eric Romo & Thomas Mueller, Derek Thompson, Alex Robinson, Jesse Zhang

(01:33) - Live From the backseat of a robotaxi w/ Farzad Mesbahi (07:58) - Timeline (10:53) - Telsa rolls out Robotaxis in Texas (16:30) - Iran launches attacks on U. S. base in Qatar (20:27) - OpenAI pulls promotional material around Jony Ive (32:03) - Timeline (56:38) - Sebastian Siemiatkowski, born in 1981 to Polish immigrants in Sweden, is the co-founder and CEO of Klarna, a leading fintech company known for its "buy now, pay later" services. In the conversation, he discusses his early entrepreneurial influences, including Richard Branson and Ingvar Kamprad, and his journey from working at Burger King to founding Klarna at age 23. He also highlights Klarna's growth to over 100 million users and $100 billion in annual payment volume, the company's strategic expansion into the U. S. market, and the impact of AI on white-collar jobs and business operations. (01:25:32) - Jon Chu, a Partner at Khosla Ventures with a background in machine learning and engineering leadership, discusses Meta's strategic moves in AI, emphasizing the company's commitment to securing top talent and its willingness to invest heavily to remain competitive. He highlights Meta's strengths as a fast follower and its readiness to take significant bets, noting that even a second-place position in the AI market could yield substantial returns. Chu also touches on Meta's potential to integrate AI across its product suite, from chat applications to ad optimization, underscoring the company's focus on leveraging AI to enhance user engagement and revenue. (01:51:25) - Tom Mueller, a founding member of SpaceX and the CEO of Impulse Space, discusses the future of humanoid robotics, expressing optimism that their capabilities will advance more rapidly than some predictions suggest. He highlights the potential impact of humanoid robots on manufacturing and space exploration, emphasizing their role in reducing costs and risks associated with human space travel. Mueller also shares his vision for Impulse Space, focusing on enhancing in-space transportation to facilitate access to higher orbits and support missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. (01:51:25) - Eric Romo is the President & Chief Operating Officer at Impulse Space, the in‑space transportation company founded by Tom Mueller. He began his career as one of the earliest propulsion engineering hires at SpaceX and later founded startups in the solar energy and virtual reality sectors. Romo also served as a Director at Facebook Reality Labs. He holds both a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA from Stanford University. (02:08:58) - Derek Thompson is an American journalist and author, known for his work as a staff writer at *The Atlantic* and as the host of the podcast *Plain English*. He has authored several books, including the national bestseller *Hit Makers* and the #1 *New York Times* bestseller *Abundance*, co-authored with Ezra Klein. In the conversation, Thompson discusses his decision to leave *The Atlantic* after 17 years to pursue independent ventures, emphasizing his desire for new challenges and the freedom to explore diverse topics. He reflects on the success of his book *Abundance* and the strategic timing of his departure, noting that the book's reception provided a unique opportunity to engage with a broader audience. Thompson also shares insights into the book's promotional strategy, highlighting the effectiveness of television appearances in driving sales and the importance of creating engaging content that sparks public discourse. (02:43:19) - Alex Robinson, co-founder and CEO of Juniper Square, a leading investment management software company for private markets, discusses the company's recent $130 million Series D funding round and the launch of their AI product, Juni AI. He highlights Juniper Square's growth to approximately 2,500 customers managing around $1 trillion in assets, and addresses challenges faced during market downturns, including necessary layoffs and strategic pivots. Robinson also emphasizes the importance of integrating generative AI with deterministic tools to ensure accuracy in financial reporting, underscoring the company's commitment to innovation and efficiency in fund administration. (02:52:43) - Jesse Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Decagon, discusses his company's AI-powered customer service agents that handle tasks like booking hotel rooms and managing loyalty points, aiming to enhance efficiency and customer experience. He highlights the advantages of large language models (LLMs) in managing complex customer interactions, moving beyond traditional chatbots to provide nuanced, personalized support. Zhang also emphasizes the evolving role of human agents, who are transitioning to higher-level positions such as managing and overseeing AI agents, rather than handling routine tasks. (03:00:43) - Yacine Co9z5oe, founder of Dingboard and co-host of the "John and Jordy" podcast, discusses his recent experiences at X (formerly Twitter), where he addressed numerous bugs and observed the company's rapid advancements following its merger with XAI. He shares his plans to enhance Dingboard, a meme creation tool, and introduces the "Ding Bot," a 3D-printed robot designed to tackle everyday annoyances like dandelions on lawns. Additionally, Yacine reflects on his approach to online engagement, emphasizing his commitment to honesty and the balance between fun and stress in his prolific posting habits. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TBPN. Today is Monday, June 23rd, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome. The Temple of Technology. The Fortress of Finance. The Capital of Capital. El Capital de Capital. Massive news today. Over the weekend, Elon Musk announced the Tesla AI Robo Taxi launch in Austin, Texas. That was the big technology news of the weekend. Technology news. Of course, we will be covering what's going on in Iran. We have an exclusive interview with Shervin Peshavar, the investor and Iranian entrepreneur who came to America decades ago, has been waiting for this moment for 46 years, as he put it to us.

• 0:40John Coogan?

  We pre-recorded an interview with him because he is in Paris. It's very late there, but it was a very fascinating interview. You'll hear that at the end of the stream. We have a great lineup, tons of interviews going on. We're talking to the founder and CEO of Klarna. We're talking to a partner, Khosla Ventures. Tom Mueller from Impulse Space is coming on. Then we have Derek Thompson, the author of Abundance and owner of a new Substack. As well as, we're doing a lightning round with a bunch of founders who have raised money recently. And then we're talking to Yacine, the ex-software engineer of X. Software engineer at X. He's an ex-software engineer. So it'll be fun to talk to him.

• 1:20John Coogan?

  Anyway, we have someone who's written about the Tesla Cyber Cab in the Robo Taxi, in the back of a Robo Taxi. Hopefully, calling into the show. I sent him the link. We'll see if we can bring him in. Hey. There he is. Perfect timing.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  How's it going, guys?

• 1:38John Coogan?

  What's happening?

• 1:39Speaker 01

  Here, let me see. Can you see it?

• 1:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Wow.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, there you go. We got our sixty rider right here as well.

• 1:45John Coogan?

  Oh, very cool.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  He's got some sick, sick glasses on, but yeah, we're, we're in the Robo Taxi right now. This is my fifth ride. I'm also here with Harry from the UK.

• 1:54John Coogan?

  Hey, what's going on?

• 1:56Speaker 01

  He's a fan of the channel. Yeah, so, yeah, this is my fifth ride. It's been. Amazing so far. It really does feel like Tesla has hit this one out of the park truly. Uh, the Geo Fence area is definitely much smaller than Waymo's right now, but I think they did that uh, with, with the thought process of like, hey, we want to make sure we have a really good launch. Uh, we want to make sure that it's going real nice and smooth and uh, but so far the rides I've taken have all been really, really good. Very smooth. It's very hard to communicate just how smooth the, the car is unless you're familiar with the, with the software. Unless you're familiar with FSD and how it operates on, on the Teslas. It's very, very similar to that experience. It's just, there's just nobody there now.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  And that, that's the freaky part is that, you know, for, for a lot of people that have been following the company, uh, a lot of us knew this day was going to come where Tesla would pull the trigger and start, you know, getting actual paid driverless cars on the road. But nonetheless, now that it's here, it's kind of like this is, this is wild. This is wild. So, uh, is that better?

• 2:57Jordi Hays?

  The stock is up nine percent today.

• 3:00John Coogan?

  Nine percent today. Wow. Uh, yeah.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  You're welcome, everybody. I'm kidding.

• 3:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Give us your other takeaways. Um, well, I, I, I saw you posted, uh, a, a good breakdown from your experience. Um, what, what else do you have to share about the process? Uh, uh, did you need to go through a pre-registration to get on boarded? It feels like it's not completely, uh, open access just yet.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, yeah, we were invited. We're, we're a part of like a very limited group of people that were invited. I think Tesla was just, uh, here. So somebody crossed over the road and it just navigated that no problem. Uh, the, um, yeah, it's a very small group of people. I think, uh, a lot of us that have followed Tesla very closely uh, over the years, uh, Tesla went out of their way to sort of, you know, get us, uh, some early access so we can go out there, test the, test the system, get it out there for people to see how it performs. Uh, so far it's very, very limited, um, in its use case, and I'm showing you guys here just on the road. Uh, hopefully, does it come across? Can you guys see the, the road, how it's driving down? It's very steep. Um, yeah, I think, I think Tesla specifically started this very small, uh, but now if you go.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  People keep all

• 4:16Speaker 01

  in their zip code and their phone number and email address. Um, so they can sign up for the service and that's probably a way for Tesla to get some uh some idea of how much interest there is for this thing out there. Uh, but so far it's very small, small geofence area, small group of people. Um, and uh, I think I, I, I don't know how many cars they have on the road, but I doubt it's more than 10 right now. Uh, we're a four-way stop right now and it's navigating that no problem. Um, but yeah, I, I think, I think it's very limited on purpose. Uh, but I will tell you that for those of us that are so lucky to be able to experience this firsthand, it's just, it feels surreal because it works, it works. It just, it just takes you around and there's no one there.

• 4:57Jordi Hays?

  It's wild that uh, it's wild that we got full self-driving cars before reliable cell coverage in major cities. You're breaking up a little bit.

• 5:09John Coogan?

  I, I mean, I have one more question, we'll let you go.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:12John Coogan?

  Uh, I mean, what's remarkable about this is, is not just that it's a self-driving car, but particularly that it looks like a stock $38,000 Model Y. Is there anything, are you seeing anything on the car that looks like it might be aftermarket, added to it, extra cameras, anything?

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Nothing, nothing. Uh, I mean, there's different software, but I mean, that's just a, that's a software update, right? It does, there is nothing that, that I can gather that says, oh, this is a speci- like a very uniquely equipped Tesla that has some additional sensors. This looks to me like, the, the point you made is exactly in, this is why this is such so mind-blown, like I just can't believe it's happening. The best-selling car in the world where Tesla's making over a million of these per year that costs less than $40,000, potentially less than $30,000 to make, is driving itself in Austin, Texas with a paid ride. I paid $4.20 and it's driving me around, the best-selling car in the world. Like that, that is, that's a weird thing to process.

• 6:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Because it fundamentally breaks the, like what, how we think about self-driving transportation. Cause you would think about, oh, self-driving, a lot of sensors, et cetera, et cetera. No, that the cost structure for this. Thing is the is scale the scale that Tesla has able has been able to achieve. That same car is going to drive itself.

• 6:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Right? And and that just breaks everything because your cost per mile plummets. The method they've taken uh as far as training the the software should allow them to get this thing to scale much faster than Waymo can. And they have the cars, right? So Tesla makes as many of these cars every five hours that Waymo has on their fleet total. Right? And that that's the mind blowing piece of it and Waymo should be celebrated for the work they've done because it's such an incredible. Such an incredible technology and I'm really happy they exist. But the scale piece is the challenge.

• 6:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  And it seems like now that Tesla has figured out how to get paid rides going as we come to a to our destination. That's my Cybertruck right there hanging out.

• 7:05John Coogan?

  No.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  Um, you know, that it's like it's monumental. This is truly a monumental thing for them.

• 7:10Jordi Hays?

  This is like uh Disneyland for tech bros. You could just keep taking rides around all day long.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:15John Coogan?

  This is amazing.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  This is like, thank you very much. Yeah. Thank you, brother. Uh, yeah, dude, it's like, you know, sometimes I'm like afraid I'm like, does my does my wife think I'm too nerdy? Like, am I getting too nerdy about this? What's going on? But it really is like it's it's it's it's just upending, you know, what Tesla has been historically great at is just upending the equation around. Uh, the technologies that they work in with the electric vehicle now with self-driving, they're going to get into the the human or robot space.

• 7:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  This is what they do. And so I think this is just another reminder that. They're they're full steam ahead and it's uh it's very exciting and I'm it's just such an honor to be part of this the the this release truly. It's an honor.

• 7:50Jordi Hays?

  Historic.

• 7:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, thank you so much for calling in. This was great.

• 7:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:54Jordi Hays?

  Have fun out there.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  All right.

• 7:55Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Thank you, guys. All right. Bye bye.

• 7:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, the uh the the scale of this thing, I mean, it like Elon wasn't the first person to put a satellite in space. He's just the first person to figure out how to get the rockets go up and back every single six hours or something like that. And so.

• 8:10Jordi Hays?

  Scale.

• 8:11John Coogan?

  Scale really matters. It's more of like an industrial question than a technology question at this point. And uh, yeah, they seem really set up for it. I love this post by Nick Cruz. He says Elon Musk is back on his main quest focused on the robot taxi. Uh, and you love to see it. Little bit of side quest going on for the last six months. Uh, you know, sometimes you find a little pot of gold at the end of a side quest, but it's not it's not the main mission.

• 8:36Jordi Hays?

  Pot of gold.

• 8:37John Coogan?

  Pot of gold. Uh, anyway, um, there's some other uh, there's some other news.

• 8:42Jordi Hays?

  Powerbottom Dad says, time will tell, but my bet is that this signals the death of the Waymo leaving Google in a twenty billion dollar hole. And likely Uber as well. Very dramatic. I'm not, I'm not, I think power bottom dad is a very strong poster.

• 9:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:01Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, the competitive dynamic is really heating up. I'm interested to see how quickly Tesla can actually scale this in other cities. Right now, it's, it sounds like it's 10 ish cars in a very, very small area, but, but again, they, they could potentially scale a thousand times faster than Waymo. It's all just going to come down to safety and what's actually going on behind the scenes.

• 9:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:24Jordi Hays?

  George Hots last week was saying that, you know, Waymo has, is our tele-operated. He said, you know, I haven't fact-checked this. Thankfully, we're not journalists. We don't have to fact-check. But he said something like 1.7 people per car.

• 9:38John Coogan?

  Or 1.2 or something.

• 9:39Jordi Hays?

  You know, sort of, you know, overseeing.

• 9:41John Coogan?

  It's more than a taxi cab, because a taxi cab only has one.

• 9:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So the, the real question will be, what, you know, is Tesla doing tele-operation as well? Do they, you know, how, how long will these companies need to do that? But once things are really working and they're safe, Tesla theoretically could be everywhere all at once.

• 10:03John Coogan?

  I think the real question is what corporate card should you use?

• 10:06Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 10:07John Coogan?

  Ramp.com, time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. No, it's a good point. And I don't know about Waymo and Google. I think I lean with PBD here, saying that they have a lot of explaining to do, Waymo, Google and Uber. It's hard to imagine how you can compete if your product's 10 times the price. Or if you, like, the Uber has, the bull case for Uber is that they have the customers, right? And that everyone has the Uber app installed. But if the only way to hail a cyber cab or a Tesla robotaxi is through the Tesla app.

• 10:50John Coogan?

  How hard is it going to be to get people to install that app? I think it's going to be very easy because the brand awareness is huge. The brand awareness is huge. It's not like Zooks where it's some, oh, you gotta be an insider to know that they're doing tests and that the other major player in the space or whatever.

• 11:07Jordi Hays?

  And the virality, the virality of seeing Tesla's driving around with no driver in the front seat.

• 11:11John Coogan?

  That guy's in the Tesla army. Like, he's doing the promotion for free and getting a ton of impressions.

• 11:15Jordi Hays?

  When it comes to Uber, you have to remember that Dara CEO was formerly the CEO of Expedia, which was a booking website.

• 11:23John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 11:23Jordi Hays?

  And so if Uber, if Uber can figure it out, it's like, hey, we're just routing demand and we're taking a cut.

• 11:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 11:31Jordi Hays?

  But we're integrating with multiple different autonomous vehicle providers.

• 11:35John Coogan?

  That, that actually would be the bull case, yes.

• 11:37Jordi Hays?

  But the question is, does Tesla just say?

• 11:40John Coogan?

  Can that happen?

• 11:41Jordi Hays?

  We got this. We're not going to give up. We're going to let consumers go direct.

• 11:45John Coogan?

  A lot of question depends on like the timeline because if, if the robotaxi, so we don't know how much work they did. They, these might be somewhat teleoperated. They might have, they have a safety driver literally in the car, right? Although it's interesting because the safety driver, did you see the safety driver? Do they have a pedal? Because if they don't have a brake, what is the safety driver doing? Like, is the safety driver going to reach over or push a button on the screen? Kind of unclear. But the question is, if, if the robotaxi can't generalize to odd conditions, then you wind up in a situation where if you have the Tesla robotaxi app and it doesn't work in the snow, or it doesn't work in the rain, or it doesn't work if you need to get to the beach,

• 12:29John Coogan?

  or you don't, or we won't go into the mountains. Well, then all of a sudden, you actually do want something like, the beauty of Expedia is that it can book me a Southwest flight to, from Burbank to SFO, but then it can also book me a, you know, Dubai Airlines first, first class Emirates Air all the way across the world. And so. If there is a world where where I want a variety of products.

• 12:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, benefiting from variety and not this frequency of booking. If you're booking a Tesla Cybercab multiple times a week.

• 13:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:01Jordi Hays?

  And you can save by going directly to the app.

• 13:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:03Jordi Hays?

  You're just going to do that.

• 13:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:04Jordi Hays?

  Overall, I thought the Robo Taxi did incredible job under pressure. Probably it's the first sort of live show that it's been a part of.

• 13:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:11Jordi Hays?

  And so the fact that it stayed composed.

• 13:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:14Jordi Hays?

  That it didn't, you know, make any erratic turns or anything like that. Uh, I'm, uh, I'm pretty impressed.

• 13:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it, it's very exciting. Um, but you know, you don't always want to be in a self-driving car that costs $38,000. Sometimes you want to be a Ferrari-driving Harvard med graduate AI angel investor. We saw this photo on the timeline.

• 13:38Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 13:38John Coogan?

  Loved this. Uh, it seems like pure bait for VC congratulating themselves for VC brags. AI angel Harvard Medical School. Is that a Roma?

• 13:48Jordi Hays?

  I think so.

• 13:50John Coogan?

  Would have hit harder if it was an SP3, you know? Like, yeah, okay, you're an AI angel investor, but probably weren't seed investor in scale. But clearly has done well and enjoys the.

• 14:06Jordi Hays?

  Ben is saying it's an SF90.

• 14:08John Coogan?

  That's, that's not an SF90, no way.

• 14:09Jordi Hays?

  I think it's a Roma.

• 14:10John Coogan?

  I think it's a Roma.

• 14:11Jordi Hays?

  I think you're wrong.

• 14:12John Coogan?

  Let us know in the comments. Um, and, uh, you know, you know what's missing from this picture? A luxury watch. This person's got to get on.

• 14:21Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure they have a header on. They might even have a racing machine on the wrist.

• 14:24John Coogan?

  They might, they might. Go to getbezel.com, shop over 25,000 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. Trump, this is the news of the day with the Iran crisis. Uh, Donald Trump says, everyone keep oil prices down. I'm watching. You're playing right into the hands of the enemy. Don't do it. You love to see the president talking directly to the market.

• 14:48Jordi Hays?

  Everybody's saying, everybody's, you know, saying this is ridiculous, but it's never been tried.

• 14:53John Coogan?

  People always say, oh, all that matters in, in oil prices, supply and demand.

• 14:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:57John Coogan?

  Well, all you gotta do is say, hey, supply, go down. Hey, supply go up. And demand go down.

• 15:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:06John Coogan?

  And we will have lower prices. I mean, there is something to that.

• 15:09Jordi Hays?

  Hasn't been tried before. It's worth, it's worth trying something.

• 15:12John Coogan?

  If you do signal, I mean, there are, there are stories about oil prices going down because Americans got the signal that prices were going to be high and they stopped traveling as much during the summer vacation, for example. Like, that does happen every once in a while. But, uh, yeah, very, very odd to post, anyway. Um, uh, back on watches, the Watches of Espionage account says, "Men who guide the destinies of the world well wear Rolex watches. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Dan Razin Kane in Situation Room during attacks on Iran wearing a Rolex GMT." Well, you need a GMT because you gotta know what time it is in Tehran.

• 15:47Jordi Hays?

  We gotta start doing these.

• 15:48John Coogan?

  This is a good, this is a good one. I haven't seen this. I've seen the Merkel route. I've seen the, the, the, the, the break, cracking your knuckles, but this is, this is special. It's like four points of attack. I mean, I guess they did hit four sites, so you gotta point to all of them.

• 16:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 16:04John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 16:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's been an eventful morning.

• 16:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:08Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Iran attacked a US base in Qatar.

• 16:12John Coogan?

  Yes, that's the latest.

• 16:13Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, people are basically saying that it's bullish because there were no casualties. All of, apparently all the missiles were taken out in the air.

• 16:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:22Jordi Hays?

  And this could lead to a de-escalation.

• 16:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:26Jordi Hays?

  And a return to a steady state of tension.

• 16:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. This has been my position for a long time. I'm, I'm pretty anti-aggression, anti-war, but I'm extremely pro domes, iron domes, golden domes. I want to be able to shoot down every missile before, as soon as it leaves, no matter where it's leaving from. Let's shoot it down immediately, from space, from land, do whatever you can. But missiles, bombs, nuclear bombs, these things should not be relevant in the future. Um, but, uh, Drava has a breakdown of this. "The strike package that destroyed the Iranian nuclear facility at Firdaw represents over one year of US production capacity of the GBU-57 bunker buster. Its primary explosive, AFX-757, is difficult to produce and we

• 17:11John Coogan?

  don't have many factories to do it. It's why way more robots are necessary, um, to do everything from production to Automating research. I'll also note that China has been very interested in higher throughput production of this very compound for some time now. Very interesting to see. Joe Weisenthal had some polymarket news. Bombing of the nuclear facility did not push down the market odds of Iran possessing a nuclear weapon in 2025. In fact, it's at the highest level of the day. I wonder what's driving that. Do you think that's more driven by, we didn't actually take the-

• 17:42Jordi Hays?

  Former Russian president comes out and said, hey, we might just give them a nuke.

• 17:47John Coogan?

  That would be bad.

• 17:47Jordi Hays?

  Which would be bad.

• 17:49John Coogan?

  That would be bad.

• 17:49Jordi Hays?

  The other thing that's interesting, the Fordo nuclear facility destroyed but before July polymarket is only sitting at a 32% chance still on 4 million in volume. So I think people are basically saying, calling that it wasn't actually destroyed, or at least that's what the market is saying. So it's impacted but not destroyed, even though Trump came out Saturday night and claimed total annihilation.

• 18:13John Coogan?

  Well, the the Crown Prince of the opposition party gave a speech in Paris earlier. We talked to Shervin Pishvar about it earlier. You'll hear that. You'll hear that interview at 2:30 today. And he launched a website to help recruit defectors. If you're designing a website, you gotta get on Figma.

• 18:31Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 18:32John Coogan?

  Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Go to Figma.com. Combat Learjet says, my buddy was a B2 pilot. He flew one of those extremely long missions several years ago. The mission was two pilots, 36.3 hours of flight time, Missouri to Iraq and back to Missouri. The mission required five air refuelings, taking on over 500,000 or 500K kilograms, maybe 500 kilograms of gas total. These pilots are legends. Yeah, that's insane. Oh, I guess pounds, 500, 500 pounds. I don't know. Anyway, what a beast, the 36-hour grind. I never want to hear you complain about, you know, sitting at your desk for 10 hours or coming down the weekend

• 19:16John Coogan?

  or some PowerPoint or some Excel, the investment banker specifically. Oh, I work so long. No, 36 hours, get it done.

• 19:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, really wild.

• 19:26John Coogan?

  Jacob Helberg was celebrating this, very excited. He has been confirmed, by the way. And he says, and he's already shifting the conversation, I think, in a good direction. He says, "Not a single Chinese humanoid robot should be sold on US soil. US government should preemptively ban Chinese humanoids in the US without delay," in all caps. And Jason Calcanas says, "The fact that you need to tweet this is crazy."

• 19:47Jordi Hays?

  You realize this was posted a year ago?

• 19:50John Coogan?

  Oh, this is, whoa, and he just reposted it?

• 19:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:53John Coogan?

  Or he edited it or something?

• 19:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so he was

• 19:56John Coogan?

  Oh, he's way ahead of you.

• 19:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But now he's part of the admin.

• 19:59John Coogan?

  Now he can tweet it.

• 20:00Jordi Hays?

  Actually make some of this stuff happen. So excited to see him. Yeah, we talked about this. Why, why are we, you know, let's not allow what happened with DJI to happen again with a new robotic form factor.

• 20:13John Coogan?

  Yep. Anyway, there was some news that maybe the Johnny Ive OpenAI deal might not happen because OpenAI apparently scrubbed everything about Johnny Ive and Sam Altman off the website and YouTube. It's just completely gone. YouTube video, private blog post removed. Everything is gone. I confirmed that. You get a 404 when you go to the original webpage. Mark Gurman, so everyone thought the deal was falling apart. Maybe Johnny Ive was getting poached by Zuck over at Meta. That would be dramatic. Mark Gurman has the story. He says, "The Johnny Ive and OpenAI deal is on track and has not dissolved or anything of the sort, I'm told. Here's what happened. They were sued over the name IO and there was a restraining order issued by the judge. They had to pull all materials with the name." That's interesting.

• 20:58John Coogan?

  Also interesting that they didn't, we knew that the name of the company was IO before this acquisition, right?

• 21:05Jordi Hays?

  No, it was LoveFrom and then they had an internal project called IO.

• 21:09John Coogan?

  But that was not, I thought that, I thought that was, I thought, I thought, I thought that we knew that the new project was called IO like, like six months or a year ago.

• 21:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:19John Coogan?

  But they're suing now. This happens a lot. There's, there's kind of multiple sides. We'll hear both of them. Nick, who I believe is more in the Elon camp, is, is saying that, you know, it's the beginning of the end for Sam Altman and Johnny Ive's project. He says, "A federal judge has banned OpenAI to use the word IO to brand for their upcoming AI hardware advice, device. Little rough language there." The ruling caps a fierce trademark battle sparked by Silicon Valley startup I Y O. Similar but slightly different name, which spent the past six years developing its voice controlled AI wearable. The I O one court filings revealed an eyebrow raising series of events.

• 22:01Jordi Hays?

  So this is from I O's point of point of view.

• 22:05John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 22:06Jordi Hays?

  I'd say from 2018 to 2024, I O publicly showcased its ear worn device, investing heavily to carve out its niche. Between 2022 and 2025. Altman's Apollo projects and I've love from team participated in extensive pitch meetings, factory tours and hands on testing of I O's product. On March 5th, 2025, Altman declined investment in I O disclosing he was working on something competitive. Which ended up being called I O, I dot I O.

• 22:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:35Jordi Hays?

  Not I Y O.

• 22:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:37Jordi Hays?

  Said when OpenAI revealed a six and a half billion dollar venture named I O in May of 2025. I O's fundraising immediately stalled as Sam Altman influenced investors to stop investing in the small startup. Obviously, these are all allegations.

• 22:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's interesting here is like Sam invested in humane and that project didn't really get to fruition. And so there's this question of like, like it's possible that he was like, okay, idea is good, but team maybe can't deliver at scale or can't deliver.

• 23:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:08John Coogan?

  As an independent venture. And so for that reason, I'm out and that's kind of clear. You also kind of know if you're pitching an investor that's actively running a huge company that you like, you can go pitch Mark Zuckerberg to be an angel investor. But if you're pitching him like Instagram 2.0, you kind of know.

• 23:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:27John Coogan?

  Okay, I'm.

• 23:27Jordi Hays?

  So the thing that's clear.

• 23:28John Coogan?

  I'm letting the fox in the hen house.

• 23:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the thing that's clear here is that it's it's very possible that the company I Y O has great grounds around the trademark.

• 23:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 23:37Jordi Hays?

  They've been operating for a while and it is confusing, right? Even when we're saying it out loud.

• 23:40John Coogan?

  Yes, also I O not, it's not such a good name that like they have to stick with it. I would just change that name immediately.

• 23:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I never.

• 23:48John Coogan?

  I never thought it was that great name. And I would rather just have it called like the chat GPT phone or something, you know, or the or the OpenAI phone or something. Like there are other, they probably couldn't get away with that because it sounds too much like iPhone. But there are, there are other brand names that they could spin off of to create a device. That's the, the, the OpenAI device. And they don't necessarily need to use that I/O keyword. And so backing off of that seems fine. There's also this trend of like, when big dollars are changing hands, like six billion in this case. Oftentimes, there are folks that come out and file lawsuits because just because like, there's a whole bunch of money changing hands. Everyone wants it to change hands quickly. And so if you can show up and say, hey, I'm just, I, I, I'm owed a hundred million dollars. A lot of people will just settle to make it go away.

• 24:33John Coogan?

  This happened to Palmer Lucky during the Meta acquisition or the Facebook acquisition of Oculus. There was a guy who came out and said, I invented VR. I have a patent, you have to pay me. Palmer went all the way to court, fought it and won. But it was still, it was still framed in the press for a long time as like Palmer Lucky stole the idea for virtual reality. Which of course is one of those things where it's like, okay, like the idea of virtual reality has been around for like decades, if not like a hundred years.

• 25:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:03John Coogan?

  Palmer used, he stood on the shoulders of giants, used some patents and some technology and licensed some of that stuff. And so you might have a claim, there might be some sort of settlement, there might be all sorts of different things. But at the end of the day, like, yeah, like it didn't, there was no evidence that Palmer was like literally cheating off his homework. Like looking over there being like, let me just take this to market.

• 25:21Jordi Hays?

  The general idea for virtual reality had been something that had been written about both in venture and in sci-fi for decades.

• 25:30John Coogan?

  And it's the same thing here, like, like.

• 25:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So here, here's what I.

• 25:33John Coogan?

  This I/O device looks really cool. It's this headphone, but again, it's like.

• 25:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What's interesting here is, is it, is it's a, it's a potentially new type of product that could ultimately be similar to what OpenAI develops with Johnny Ive and Love From.

• 25:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 25:50Jordi Hays?

  So the I/O, I Y O is a product designed to be an ear worn device. The, the device uses 16 beam forming microphones to create a quote unquote audio display or an immersive audio environment for both speaking and listening. The I/O one achieves this through the use of natural language. The user does not have to learn, know, or memorize special commands, words, or gestures to cause the device to do what is asked of it. Instead, all the user needs to do is speak to the device naturally as though the user were conversing with a person.

• 26:22John Coogan?

  Hmm. Yeah. I mean, like this feels like. souped up AirPods in some ways or completely disruptive and it ultimately depends on the how how great the software is, how great the interaction pattern is, the branding, the design, the go to market. It's not, I don't think that they own the idea of like, put a thing near your ear and play sounds. Like, that's not, like, if OpenAI comes out with something that competes with this, I think we would more likely comp it to AirPods and ask, what is Apple doing to respond? How are the AirPods going to be a competitor in this category? I mean, it's the same thing with the, with the Meta, the Meta Quest and

• 27:05John Coogan?

  the Apple Vision Pro. These are somewhat similar devices, screens on your face. They have slightly different design choices, but they're both in the same category. I wouldn't, I wouldn't say, oh, like, Zuck should 100% sue Apple for launching the Apple Vision Pro, right? Like, that is not, like, they don't own the idea of screen on your face. And I would say that Apple doesn't necessarily own the idea of audio in your ears and, and Johnny Ive doesn't necessarily own that idea either. So it's going to be a much more nitty gritty question.

• 27:43Jordi Hays?

  You might be more quick to come to the defense of I Y O if you knew they were funded by both big tech and big defense tech. Lockheed Martin and Alphabet are both, are both in the company. They've raised over $20 million in venture funding to date. So.

• 28:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it could definitely, yeah, it could definitely be a valuable product, but I think the game will be won in the execution of the, of the software and the hardware, not strictly the idea of like, of like, voice first computing in your ear. That's not enough to win. Just like.

• 28:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, in many ways, the AirPods have already done some re-ventury version of this for a while.

• 28:25John Coogan?

  And it'll talk to you a little bit. It's like, they're not executing well.

• 28:28Jordi Hays?

  Where you can call your executive assistant and say, hey, can you book this up for me? Hey, can you call this person? Hey, can you schedule this? Hey, can you book me a flight?

• 28:35John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 28:36Jordi Hays?

  In many ways, they're just trying to recreate a great EA.

• 28:39John Coogan?

  Yes. Well, Whatever I O Y O is building, they got to get on Vanta, they got to automate compliance, they got to manage risk, and they got to prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the work 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. But yeah, I mean, these lawsuits are always, are always interesting, could wind up being a big settlement. I mean, if they can even get $40 million from the $6.5 billion in a settlement, that's a series B for them. They get to keep going, keep building. That's, that's probably a good outcome for them. Maybe they can get them to change the name. Because I agree with you that the name is crazy.

• 29:18Jordi Hays?

  The most attention, you know, if they spin this and say, hey, the OpenAI team spent years ordering our product, meeting, meeting with the fitting specialists, doing all this stuff. Because it's so great, maybe they'll get some orders out of it.

• 29:31John Coogan?

  And you know, the best thing for everyone in this scenario?

• 29:34Jordi Hays?

  What's that, John?

• 29:34John Coogan?

  We're gonna get some emails and discovery that are gonna go on big tech history emails, the, the X account, and you know, we're gonna find some funny back and forths between Johnny Ive and Sam Altman.

• 29:46Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of, of lawsuits and emails and discovery, Elon's lawyers are apparently claiming that he doesn't have a computer as part of the lawsuit between OpenAI.

• 29:58John Coogan?

  Who doesn't have a computer?

• 29:59Jordi Hays?

  Elon.

• 30:00John Coogan?

  Elon doesn't have a computer.

• 30:01Jordi Hays?

  Saying he doesn't use a computer.

• 30:02John Coogan?

  He doesn't even have a work computer. You posted this earlier today.

• 30:04Jordi Hays?

  I found this out because I posted, I posted earlier, if your CEO has a quote unquote work computer and a personal computer, it's time to start polishing your resume. And so somebody responded to that with notes to, basically claims that.

• 30:21John Coogan?

  How does Elon play Diablo?

• 30:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, he probably has a gaming rig.

• 30:27John Coogan?

  A ga, oh, it's a rig. It's not, it's not a computer.

• 30:29Jordi Hays?

  No, but the, the Verge posted this.

• 30:31John Coogan?

  Your honor, my client doesn't have a computer. He has a rig. He has a gaming rig.

• 30:36Jordi Hays?

  Oh, you want access to his rig?

• 30:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:39Jordi Hays?

  Where he plays games on?

• 30:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:41Jordi Hays?

  You want, you want to see if he's really that good at Diablo?

• 30:43John Coogan?

  There are people that would actually definitely want that for sure.

• 30:44Jordi Hays?

  The setup.

• 30:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. I don't know, maybe, maybe the second greatest Diablo player of all time will subpoena that information. Be like, I want actual data. How many hours did he log? I need to know the real account information.

• 30:57Jordi Hays?

  So Wired is reporting this morning that the claim appeared in a court filing related to Elon Musk's ongoing lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI. He said that the lawsuit also flags that he has posted about his laptop numerous times in the last year. So people are trying to put him in the true zone.

• 31:20John Coogan?

  That is crazy. So he doesn't have a computer. He doesn't, he doesn't have any apps installed on the computer. He doesn't have linear installed on his computer?

• 31:29Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure his team does.

• 31:30John Coogan?

  His team must, because how would they get anything done without a purpose-built tool for planning and building products? Like, they need a system for modern software development. How else would they streamline the issues, projects, and product roadmaps?

• 31:42Jordi Hays?

  How else would they, would they run such a big service with so few people on their team?

• 31:47John Coogan?

  It would make no sense.

• 31:48Jordi Hays?

  Unless everyone is just...

• 31:49John Coogan?

  Okay. I think we're gonna find the computer, and when we find Elon Musk's computer, we're gonna find it.

• 31:53Jordi Hays?

  There's gonna be one app on there?

• 31:55John Coogan?

  One app, linear, for sure.

• 31:56Jordi Hays?

  That's right. Linear.app. An anonymous little birdie told me that he does have a massive, a gaming PC with an ultra-massive screen and indeed does not have a work computer. LOL. Pretty basic.

• 32:13John Coogan?

  Okay, anyway. Wealthfront is filing to go public. Very exciting. We've heard about this fintech platform before. They...

• 32:21Jordi Hays?

  Seems like the window's open, John.

• 32:23John Coogan?

  The window is wide open. If you're a Series D company, Series C company, Series B company, maybe Cluley gets out, who knows?

• 32:32Jordi Hays?

  I could see Cluley getting out with Chamath.

• 32:34John Coogan?

  It's possible. Anything's possible when the window's open. So go for it. If you're a founder, our advice to you, just go public. Just take your company public and then go on a generational run, compounding it 40% a year, stock price, for a couple decades.

• 32:49Jordi Hays?

  For decades.

• 32:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, a couple decades.

• 32:50Jordi Hays?

  It's all it takes.

• 32:51John Coogan?

  And then you'll be in the, in the Mag7.

• 32:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, in many ways, if you go public earlier, those initial

• 32:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:58Jordi Hays?

  years can be easier.

• 32:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:59Jordi Hays?

  Because it's such a small base.

• 33:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, everyone says, "Oh, like, the SEC requirements are so difficult, and you could be shorts, you should be, you could be short sellers, could attack you." It's like, that's just inspiration to grind harder.

• 33:10Jordi Hays?

  Attack them back with, you know, putting up incredible quarter, a quarter results.

• 33:13John Coogan?

  Blow them out. Blow out the shorts.

• 33:14Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of... The public markets. Anthony Pompliano posted this morning, "Today I'm announcing a $1 billion merger to create Procap Financial, a Bitcoin-native financial services firm. The company will be a publicly traded entity on NASDAQ at the conclusion of the proposed business combination between my private company Procap BTC LLC and Columbus Circle Capital Corp. Corp. 1, a publicly traded SPAC. The ticker for the publicly traded entity right now is CCCM. And he has raised over $750 million. They will focus on acquiring Bitcoin for their balance sheet while also developing products and services to produce revenue.

• 33:59Jordi Hays?

  And profit from Bitcoin on our balance sheet. Let's give it up.

• 34:04John Coogan?

  Some people would say that should be the first goal.

• 34:07Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for revenue and profit, everybody.

• 34:10John Coogan?

  We love it.

• 34:10Jordi Hays?

  Love to see it.

• 34:11John Coogan?

  Trying to be the Warren Buffett of Bitcoin. Buy companies, invest in Bitcoin, funnel the Bitcoin back in and buying more companies, produce more Bitcoin. The flywheel continues.

• 34:22Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 34:22John Coogan?

  That's the goal. Well, whatever company he buys, gotta put them on numeral, numeralhq.com. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Should we do some of the downstream fallout from Cluley? Even if it's fallout.

• 34:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just wanted to cover this post from Will Brown first. Zuck hired Alex Wang for a half to 1% equity. He's basically a founding engineer. Thought that was good. When the 15 billion number was being thrown around just a week ago, everybody was freaking out, but it's barely a point.

• 34:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, we identified that. It's like.

• 34:56Jordi Hays?

  Threw him a point.

• 34:57John Coogan?

  It's like, what would it take for Alex Wong to move his market cap 1%? Well, like, I don't know, a great Lama 5 release, that would probably do it, right? Like, there's a ton of things. There's a lot of opportunity. If you're just talking about that's being the stakes. It's not that he has to overnight double the company in size. He just has to. He just has to, you know, implement a rational and effective AI strategy. Ben Thompson was talking about this earlier today.

• 35:24Jordi Hays?

  For a multi-trillion dollar opportunity.

• 35:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's so many places where AI products can have an impact. Ben Thompson was talking about this, this idea that the researchers are really important, but what Zuck has been on a tear about is hiring actually great managers. When you look at Daniel Gross, Nat Friedman, Alexander Wong, like these guys are everyone. The criticism, like they're not researchers, but that's actually probably the benefit of the strategy because we are in the application war right now. We are in the implementation of these AI tools and the capabilities of the models are clearly way, way ahead of the, of the actual foundation models, like the, like the actual science that's happened.

• 36:08John Coogan?

  I was thinking about this, just like for, for Instagram during the Dolly moment. I was like, I like, I wonder what would happen if you just took every single person's on Instagram, their most recent photo and gibblied it, Studio Gibblied it and just sent them to it, send it to them proactively. It would cost a ton of money to do this in the inference, but you do that, you send it to everyone and you just say like, would you like to post this? I bet you have like the biggest day on Instagram like ever, right? Cause you're just creating all this like viral fuel for the day. Or what does it take to distill that model down, bake it into just a filter? So when you upload a photo, you can just select the Studio Gibbli thing and it runs efficiently and that's almost, that's not really a research task. It's more of like product management and I'm not even like a product manager at Instagram, right?

• 36:53Jordi Hays?

  It's good enough for product managers.

• 36:54John Coogan?

  But like those types of like the volition that it'll take and the will and the incentive alignment that it'll take to actually roll out a product like that and really push the team to be like, no, we want to spend all this money rendering these gibblys because we think this is a calculated risk that will put us back in the AI image conversation. Or we want to, you know, spend all this money to distill down images, image generation diffusion to a point where it can just be a filter button on the, on the Instagram app. Like those are product management, those are cost, like it's almost like more of a CFO question than a research question at this point. Like we know that the Ghibli filter is doable and it's great. And so how do you actually get it out into the world effectively? And that's more of a manager, manager discussion. So he's basically a founding engineer.

• 37:38John Coogan?

  But I think he's going into more of like a C suite role. So we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll keep tracking it. Anyway, um, should we keep, uh, should we keep going into the AI application layer with the rapper of all rappers, Cluley?

• 37:50Jordi Hays?

  The final rapper, the final boss of rappers.

• 37:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, we should, uh, we should get Tyler's take on this. Um, because the, the question that I think people are digging into is that Cluley is like the easy, the easy take was like, oh, it's this is like Theranos. And it's like, I don't think it's like Theranos at all. Like the product works. Like you, you tried it and you would agree that it is a real product.

• 38:17Speaker 03

  Yes. Yeah, for sure.

• 38:19John Coogan?

  100%.

• 38:19Speaker 03

  It's, it does what it advertises.

• 38:21John Coogan?

  It does what it advertises. Now, there are some questions about like the actual long-term value there, or I, I think the risk, the, the, the, the bear case for Cluley is...

• 38:32Jordi Hays?

  The risk is that, the risk is that the opportunity does not align with the, the marketing strategy.

• 38:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 38:40Jordi Hays?

  So like the, the opportunity for helping students with their homework and the sort of, sort of like traditional nature of cheating.

• 38:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 38:47Jordi Hays?

  Aligns with the marketing strategy. I think they can dominate there.

• 38:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 38:50Jordi Hays?

  The enterprise opportunity of let me intake all the information from every call that you have internally, every sales call that you have, every...

• 38:59John Coogan?

  That's a very competitive space.

• 39:00Jordi Hays?

  That's a very competitive space that the labs will probably want to own because it's very valuable data, right? You can imagine OpenAI having a desktop application that's permanently running.

• 39:11John Coogan?

  They already do. They already have a, yeah, but they haven't, they haven't adopted that pattern.

• 39:15Jordi Hays?

  Not to the same degree.

• 39:15John Coogan?

  And so, yeah, the, the risk is like, is like if, if, if the pattern really works and people are like, this is what we want. We always want the screen capture and, and constant, uh, uh, constant responses from LLMs. Like if it's a really big opportunity, you're going to face competition from the really big labs.

• 39:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:34John Coogan?

  Um, if it's a smaller opportunity, it's hard to kind of scale up.

• 39:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:36John Coogan?

  So there's, so, so there, there's a lot of...

• 39:39Jordi Hays?

  And the more, the more, the other pushback was high level, you know, why are we funding these types of businesses that are loud and, and not, you know, truly sort of bending? The world in any type of positive direction and it has the cheating angle, which some people, I think that was very intentional. Yeah. The pushback I would have there is like, it seems like, it seems like there is enough venture capital right now. Like if you have a great idea and hard tech, defense tech, manufacturing, et cetera, you will be funded. Yep. And it's, you know, it's, it's not like some great, you know, manufacturing, American dynamism business is not getting Yep. 15 million dollars this week because Cluey got 15 last week. Yep, yep, yep. And so it's not zero sum. Yeah.

• 40:25Jordi Hays?

  We had some good reactions. Kevin, AKA Plant Daddy, was quoting a segment from our interview and said, Roy was basically saying like, there's not enough viral content, which is actually an interesting take, his, his take at a high level is like, if you make something like great, novel, engaging, it just will naturally go viral because there's actually a scarcity of like viral content. I think it's an interesting, I think it's an interesting point and I think that he's probably right to some degree. Kevin fired back at a high level and said, this is not correct. While it is true that when, oh, and, and sorry, the last thing,

• 41:08Jordi Hays?

  Roy was basically saying that consumption has just shifted so dramatically to TikTok, which is a new form factor. And so that's changed the dynamics. Kevin is an active creator, I believe on YouTube, and I'm sure he's everywhere. So he was just firing back. He says, this is not correct. While it is true that when TikTok blew up in 2020, there was a brief moment where there wasn't enough short form content to satisfy consumption. That lasted 12 to 18 months. I remember it well because I was one of the first gardening accounts on TikTok in 2019. It was free back then. Literally any video popped off. Then millions of new creators came onto the scene, coupled with 10x reduced friction in creating content due to TikTok's native editor, filter and cap cut, you saw an explosion of short form videos. So both the number of creators and number of videos dramatically increased.

• 41:52Jordi Hays?

  Consumption just increased even more because the videos were all five to 15 seconds long. So one scrolling session equals 100 videos instead of 50 to 70% of one YouTube video. It's not true that for the next six to 12 months, anything that you post has a potential to go viral will go viral. That's only true when there's a paradigm shift and all platforms have to catch up. The phase where IG, Meta released reels and YouTube released shorts to catch up to TikTok was truly a free attention grab era and thousands of creators made a fat bag during that era. From 2020 to 2022, I grew Epic Gardening from 300,000 to something like 8 million across all platforms. It was that free. That time isn't today, though. He says, "I think what you're seeing right now with Clouly is someone applying a Mr. B.

• 42:36Jordi Hays?

  style hyperscale influencer content model into something that VCs will salivate over, B2C AI. Whether anything comes of it is another story, but it is somewhat comical to see the tech VC space go crazy for the viral attention grabbing when the type of attention they're grabbing, as well as the scale of it, is dwarfed by almost any top 1% creator, of which there are thousands of."

• 42:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, Christian Kyle was pointing out that Clouly is getting millions of views on X, but only a few thousand views on YouTube. And so it's very, very platform specific. And yeah, but Roy is really fantastic at applying the viral playbook that works for X on X. And it's been very successful. I think they're successful on other platforms, too. But it is interesting.

• 43:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's interesting. Slow Ventures, Creative Fund, Megan Lightcap over there runs it. We've had her on the show, I believe, right?

• 43:30John Coogan?

  We had Sam.

• 43:31Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if we actually had Megan on, but we should. Basically saying, hey, there's all these creators that are getting a massive amount of attention. If they have capital, they can monetize it. So some people are paying attention to this.

• 43:44John Coogan?

  It's still, like, I've been surprised by how much the cheating buzzword has been really controversial. It seemed very clear to me that that was deliberately edgy and just kind of an edgelord statement, and that it was pretty clear that the tool was very much just like embracing the new norm of co-pilots happening everywhere and that cheating was deliberate. Used as a, as a word to kind of spark controversy. But it, but it really is, it really is acting as baggage on Roy. And so Sarah Guo over conviction

• 44:25John Coogan?

  said, we should celebrate hacking, not cheating. Cheating quietly pockets extra monopoly money, insider trading, plagiarism, inflated metrics, happening, hacking openly flips the game board, exposing rigged rules and inventing a better game for everyone. Wikipedia replaced Britannica, Airbnb monetized spare rooms, Linux openly challenged Windows. Both break the rules, but hacking doesn't compromise integrity. It reveals the old game wasn't worth playing. Yeah, it's interesting because like he could have totally reframed the clearly launches as hack everything, hack dating, hack your, your, you know, your online interviews or whatever. And it

• 45:04Jordi Hays?

  probably Where the other position is like

• 45:05John Coogan?

  Much less viral, but much less controversial.

• 45:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The other thing is like, give yourself superpowers in any of these domains, right?

• 45:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, the co-pilot thing is like the friendliest framing of all of this, right? It's like, yeah, it's just like something to help you out.

• 45:20Jordi Hays?

  Auto complete, saying autocomplete for everything is not nearly as viral.

• 45:25John Coogan?

  And many people have said that over the last year.

• 45:27Jordi Hays?

  And I think this is what Roy is already, is already battling with is he, I think generally has good intentions, right? He has his own intentions around. He clearly is excited about being famous. In many ways, he already is a niche tech celebrity.

• 45:43John Coogan?

  Over 100 K followers.

• 45:44Jordi Hays?

  But at the same time, he does want the respect of insiders. And you can tell that from, from some of his comments over the weekend and replies. So anyways, he's young, he's going to figure it out.

• 45:57John Coogan?

  Well, if he's going to try and sell this into enterprise at some point, he's got to get on Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. Lulu continued the conversation, saying, "One thing Cluley got really right is hiring only marketing people who have already built large followings on their own. Any marketing person that isn't bringing you an audience is just being subsidized by yours." I thought this was a good take. I don't know how, it's tricky, because many people who have built large followings have their own businesses, but Roy's clearly created some sort of like, great relationship with them, such that they can come in and earn a paycheck and at some point get paid very highly. Kind of unclear how much is cash

• 46:42John Coogan?

  and stock, but it's enough to get people to step back from a TikTok account that's 100,000 followers or something like that. But that type of person understands the algorithm and actually can do marketing more effectively. And so, I think there is an interesting lesson there, in that the new marketing, like, we transitioned from resumes to GitHub profiles for hiring programmers. We've seen this with folks that, the interns that we've focused, that we've hired, where someone will come in and say, "I built this this weekend. Here's an example of what I can build." Or, "Here's an example of something I built in the past, an open source project." And, the equivalent in the marketing world now is building some sort of following, and actually understanding content creation at some level. And so, it's, yeah, it's very bullish. Maybe, maybe marketing departments

• 47:27John Coogan?

  should be doing more proactive outreach to folks that are building large followings, but not quite monetizing them just yet, and saying, "Hey, you clearly understand Instagram, TikTok, whatever you're doing, you should come inside the organization and work here in our marketing team." Which I think can make sense. Dylan Field had some alternative framing of the Cluley story. He said, "Cluley isn't just good marketing. Roy hacked the algo feed with an anti-fragile memetic virus. And the more energy you throw at it, the stronger it gets." Well, here we are. Throw in more energy at the memetic virus, baby. That's what it's all about. Uh, we can move on from Cluley in a little bit. Uh, Teddy Blank says royally disturbs people because by any measure,

• 48:09John Coogan?

  he should be a successful crypto slash Forex influencer, course hustler, but instead he chose B2B SaaS and it feels unnatural. Funny that he's saying B2B SaaS because the previous, uh, the previous post by Plant Daddy said B2C SaaS.

• 48:23Jordi Hays?

  Well, Roy says they're doing.

• 48:25John Coogan?

  They're doing both, I guess. Yeah. They'll sell to willing buyers at market prices. Um, also interesting in the open source world, uh, Ian has the story while Cluley spent that $15 million on marketing videos, this random guy on Reddit built an open source, the exact same project. Always interesting to see when these open source projects break through because I remember there was a competitor to Devon, Open Devon, that was open sourced and everyone was like Devon's cooked, but we saw the, the data and it seems like Devon's producing tons and tons of GitHub pull requests and has a very differing go to market motion in that for a lot of enterprises that are doing replatforming of their .net application to Python, they might not want to use an open source product.

• 49:09John Coogan?

  They might want to have a team there that's actively improving the project on a daily basis. And so the open, open source did not kill Devon in that case. In fact, their, their more significant competition comes from OpenAI. Um, and another, and another large enterprise scaled, you know, $100 billion company, not just some random developer. Uh, on the flip side, we saw DeepSeek and Manus come out with open source projects.

• 49:33Jordi Hays?

  Manus?

• 49:33John Coogan?

  Um, but, uh, but not quite these like, you know, I just open sourced it and made it free. Like DeepSeek and Manus, nobody would call those like true side projects. Um, so it's unclear, um, how much this will affect. At the same time, uh, if you are hesitant about sending screen recordings to Cluley, uh, maybe open source is the one that you actually want to run. You want to run this locally because of a privacy issue, but it will be interesting to see whether or not this is a, uh, a factor in Cluley's rollout. I would be surprised if this is, if this is something that makes, uh, a difference, uh, to them. I would imagine it's much more about.

• 50:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. They're clearly marketing to people that don't know how to.

• 50:20Jordi Hays?

  Run open source software.

• 50:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 50:22Jordi Hays?

  The thing that was interesting Gary Tan shared are people building brands ahead of the tech just to try to hold space right at the moment that the just right models hit. Somebody named Ethan Ding was highlighting that he was comparing Cluley and Icon, both of which have been very controversial. Ethan said, I'm surprised no one's connected Roy Lee's playbook to the Icon ad maker playbook a couple of months back. Have an unusable product dominate mind share for potential buyers. Buy time for the AI to catch up to bail you out. I don't, I don't, you know, Roy Lee's product is not unusable. We used it on the show Friday.

• 50:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 50:59Jordi Hays?

  It worked for the use case that that they advertise the most.

• 51:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 51:03Jordi Hays?

  They clearly are dominating mind share. The question is, will AI catching up actually,

• 51:13Jordi Hays?

  actually enable them to win in the enterprise or these categories? The issue is that the two categories that Cluley is going after being effectively like B to C, so like students and B to B enterprise are two categories that ChatGPT is already dominant in.

• 51:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 51:30Jordi Hays?

  And so the, the question again is, is are they going to be able to win head to head with OpenAI even if OpenAI doesn't have as many viral TikToks being produced in house?

• 51:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, he calls out the risk of churn here. I think that's very real. I think the bigger question is,

• 51:50John Coogan?

  Cluley in very much is rapper, but at the same time, it's not trying to compete on the foundation model level. And so if the models get better, Cluley should get better. And so you are, you are very much riding the rocket or riding the, the wave of technological improvement, which seems like a good strategy. I guess it just keeps coming down to the question of if this is, if this is truly the UI paradigm that people want to interact with ChatGPT through, you would expect the ChatGPT app to, to launch this. But, you know, who knows? Maybe it gets popular and maybe there's other pockets of, of opportunity that come through. And, and there's a bunch of.

• 52:35Jordi Hays?

  In other news, Mark Gurman was reporting over the weekend. He said Apple will need to leave its M and A comfort zone to succeed in AI, basically calling out that Apple has held various early conversations with different companies like perplexity and thinking machines around potential acquisition. People were pressing him saying, why perplexity? Mark responded, which looks like it's an output from chat GPT. I don't know.

• 53:04John Coogan?

  It's not.

• 53:04Jordi Hays?

  It's not. He actually wrote this. It's got so many M dashes. Look how many M dashes it has, though, John.

• 53:10John Coogan?

  Wait, no, no, I think I actually, maybe this is from, I don't know, I'm confused. I can't tell anymore. Yeah, this might be from chat GPT. I thought this was from his article.

• 53:17Jordi Hays?

  So he says, a proven consumer ready product. It fills a clear need, a decently sized team, and a reasonable valuation at around 14 billion. Perplexity wouldn't break the bank.

• 53:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:30Jordi Hays?

  And the timing, too, is interesting. Apple's long running search deal with Google is under threat from a US antitrust suit. This iPhone maker has to prepare for a post-Google search world, and acquiring perplexity would allow it to finally launch its own Apple branded search engine.

• 53:43John Coogan?

  My question about perplexity going to Apple is, what is perplexity building on top of that wouldn't be an issue in an Apple acquisition? Because I don't think that they trained a foundation model themselves, and I don't think they necessarily wrote a massive web scraper. So I feel like they might be sitting on top of a few APIs that might be renegotiated if all of a sudden Apple's the buyer on the other side. So Google search or Bing, I think Bing also had for a long time, an API where you could search the web using Bing and resell that as a product.

• 54:25John Coogan?

  But if Apple's the buyer, it's going to be a different conversation with Microsoft, right?

• 54:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So they use a number of different, they have their sonar family of models. Those are perplexity's in-house models. Then they have R1 1776.

• 54:40Jordi Hays?

  Which was a deep sea. Then they have a bunch of different third-party models that they use, OpenAI, Anthropic, XAI. So they're they're they're routing to a bunch of different. But they say the default model is optimized for speed and web browsing, delivering fast, relevant answers. So.

• 54:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:56Jordi Hays?

  Perplexity has been solid. I I I use it once a day. I don't know if I.

• 55:01John Coogan?

  Oh, you do.

• 55:02Jordi Hays?

  I I at least once a day, I don't think I don't know if I'd use it if I wasn't. Running the show. But I get value from it day to day.

• 55:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 55:13John Coogan?

  I I'm not sure if it'll happen. I mean, it certainly makes sense. I posted over the. Over the weekend that. Siri was an acquisition. And so even though Apple has this culture of let's never. Let's never acquire anything or let's never.

• 55:36John Coogan?

  Let's build everything in-house, everything needs the Apple polish. They do have a lineage of acquisition, although Siri was a much smaller acquisition, a much earlier.

• 55:44Jordi Hays?

  Two hundred million.

• 55:45John Coogan?

  Two hundred million, and and I think Siri had been around for like a couple of years. Kind of similar. And if you think about what a, I mean, it's.

• 55:52Jordi Hays?

  With inflation. Two hundred million in twenty ten.

• 55:55John Coogan?

  It's a hundred times as expensive. It is, it is a big, big deal, but still. It's, you know, it could, it could happen.

• 56:06Jordi Hays?

  Well, in more important news, the all-in, all-in podcast released their new tequila brand over this weekend in L.A. There was quite a lot of pushback, but I thought the bottle was quite unique. And I would be down to.

• 56:23John Coogan?

  Stack of poker chips. I would be down to sample it as well. Also, people were saying, oh, this is so out of character. But Elon Musk has Tesla Tequila and Donald Trump has Trump Tequila, apparently. And so. Or liquor brands, I guess Trump has a liquor brand. And so this is, this is a proven, proven strategy. Anyway, we have our first guest of the show, our second guest, technically, since we already have that call in. The CEO of Klarna, welcome to the stream. How are you?

• 56:49Jordi Hays?

  What's going on? Welcome to the show.

• 56:51Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Haha, thanks for having me. I was just realized the light in here is very, very odd, but I hope this is fun.

• 56:56John Coogan?

  I think you look great.

• 56:57Jordi Hays?

  You're good, you're good.

• 56:59John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. I imagine you had to stay up late for this, so we always appreciate it when someone can do that. Would you mind?

• 57:04Jordi Hays?

  Last man in the office, it looks like. Leading by example.

• 57:09Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Exactly.

• 57:10John Coogan?

  This is what your team said.

• 57:11Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  I hope there's some more people here than me.

• 57:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, you know, no, your team said this about you. They said that you're you're you're obsessed with artificial intelligence right now, obsessed with digging in the weeds, tinkering with stuff. Probably goes back to the the early history of the company. Maybe that'd be a good place to start. How did you actually like, what was the inciting element or the inciting incident that led you to start the company?

• 57:34Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Wow. Well, so as you may know, I've been at this for longer than many others. So I'm at the 20th year of this venture.

• 57:43John Coogan?

  An overnight success.

• 57:44Jordi Hays?

  Overnight success.

• 57:45John Coogan?

  We love an overnight success. It's been easy.

• 57:48Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  But I was 23 back then. So I'm not that old yet.

• 57:51John Coogan?

  23. Did you ever have a real job?

• 57:55Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  What?

• 57:56John Coogan?

  Did you ever have a real job? Or did you go straight into entrepreneurship?

• 57:58Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  I had many jobs. I had many jobs. I, you know, I started working when I was a 15 year old at Burger King.

• 58:04John Coogan?

  Nice.

• 58:04Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Flipping burgers.

• 58:06Jordi Hays?

  Were you any good?

• 58:08Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  What?

• 58:08Jordi Hays?

  Were you any good?

• 58:10Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Flipping burgers?

• 58:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:12Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  I think like we actually had a competition for like making whoppers really fast.

• 58:15John Coogan?

  No way.

• 58:16Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  With quality, with quality. I think I think I scored pretty well.

• 58:20Jordi Hays?

  Good, good.

• 58:22John Coogan?

  So yeah, walk me through it.

• 58:23Jordi Hays?

  History of greatness.

• 58:24John Coogan?

  So 15, you're flipping burgers. 23, you're starting a massive tech company that will go on a 20 year run. What happened in between?

• 58:34Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Very shortly. Well, first, like, you know, for whatever reason, I always dreamt to be an entrepreneur, kind of odd thing to do as a kid. My my father really wanted me to be a doctor, but I was inspired by Richard Branson and Inga Kamprad, the founder of Ikea and stuff. And I went to business school, bad idea. I should have learned to code the first thing I did, but that was a bad idea. But anyways. And then, you know, after a few years of just like testing a lot of different jobs, I ended up. By very odd story, going around the world without flying, coming back too late to continue my university studies and as a consequence, ending up as a sales guy at a factoring firm that was doing like account receivables, last thing in the world I ever thought I would work with.

• 59:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:17Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  And at that point in time, I realized there was a lot of these very small newcomer e-commerce companies that were selling stuff online and they needed a better payment solution because their customers didn't trust them, didn't trust that they would ship. So they preferred the idea of buy now, pay later, where you would first receive the product and then kind of pay for it once you had it. And that was pretty much the beginning of Plana.

• 59:40John Coogan?

  That makes sense. Yeah. It's awesome. Yeah, walk me through the more recent developments. How big is the company today?

• 59:50Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Um, so we're about a hundred million users worldwide. Uh, we do about a hundred billion dollars worth of payments volume annually. Uh, there's about half a million merchants, but a lot of them are really large. So there's like Nike, Macy's, Sephora, uh, Walmart nowadays. And, um, and yeah, what else? On, on number of employees, about 3,000 people. Yeah.

• 1:00:13John Coogan?

  Wow. Yeah. What was the, uh, what was the initial go to market? I seem to remember, um, there were specific dynamics in Europe around, uh, cash on delivery being a unique kind of vector into growth. Can you walk me through kind of like, um, what the early go to market was and how, um, and, and it like, it seems like you almost like leapfrogged the technology curve a little bit.

• 1:00:41Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Well, the truth is, funny enough, even in the U S, if you look at the beginning of credit bureaus, they actually, a lot of them started as mail order companies where the first credit was provided actually by you shipping a product and asking for cash on delivery. And then the third time you shipped to that same address, you would say, well, this customer seems to have money every time I shipped to them. So I'm going to provide him a small credit line, credit line. And that was actually the beginning of a lot of credit bureaus, even in the U S back in the early 20th century. So a kind of same thing happened across Europe, across the U S. So the idea of doing like cash on delivery and then turning that into a credit line based on the performance of that customer always having cash at hand when they were buying those products or paying for those products that they ordered, at that point

• 1:01:26Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  in time, mail order catalog orders, right? That that actually worked. So in the end, to us, when online came along, most people were offering debit card payments. And the problem with debit card payments is the customer ships money and then maybe receives what was on that picture that they ordered. And so basically offering credit, not necessarily for the lend, for purpose of lending, but more for that kind of security of getting and touching the product before you paid for it made a lot of sense, especially in markets where credit cards were not as prevalent as they were in the US, right?

• 1:01:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, what was the, like, as you were looking at the global map of expansion, what informed like where you go next? Like, like, walk me through the different markets that you that you had at the top of the list and how you chose to kind of rank those as you expanded.

• 1:02:16Jordi Hays?

  How soon did you know the American consumer was undefeated? And you had to be, you had to, you had to be here.

• 1:02:22Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  That took a lot of years.

• 1:02:23Jordi Hays?

  We like stuff. We like stuff.

• 1:02:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, we like to buy stuff.

• 1:02:26Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Exactly. Funny enough, it took a lot of years before we realized the US market. I mean, first and foremost, like, when we started, you have to remember, at that point in time, there was one, one globally successful European tech startup, and that was Skype. That was it. Like Skype was the thing. Everything else had been launched out of Silicon Valley. There was no real European tech success of that size that had like global consumer, you know, recognition, right? And hence to us, it was like, okay, where are we going to go from Sweden? Let's go to the massive market called Finland, that is half the size of Sweden, because it's very close, and we kind of know what it means, right? So we kind of started with expansion in the Nordics, then went to like Germany, which was a huge thing for us. Figure that out and then went to UK.

• 1:03:11Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  And we ever, we always thought that we never like figured out how are we going to come into the US market? Because credit cards are so prevalent. But the funny thing that we hadn't realized was due to the financial crisis in oh seven. There was a lot of regulation introduced that made it much harder to get a credit card. One thing that kind of sounds sane is that credit card companies couldn't advertise in campuses anymore. We just want their like most common places to sign up credit card holders.

• 1:03:35John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:03:36Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  And so there was a lot of that regulation. So it meant that between two thousand ten and twenty debit cards in the US grew like a credit cards volume grew about two X. Debit card volume grow ten X, right? And so actually, rather than us figuring out how to be successful in the US. It was the other way around. The US market became more like the European markets with much higher debit card penetration. Where buy now pay later and the kind of products that we offered became much more relevant suddenly for this new consumers that didn't have credit cards to the same extent, or didn't have as much credit limit as they used to have historically, right?

• 1:04:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, what was the the rollout like in Finland, Germany, the UK, the US? From a regulatory perspective, do you have to get like banking licenses, their approval? Is it mostly like regulatory or are you more focused on the engineering challenges, setting up servers, localization?

• 1:04:28Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  All of them.

• 1:04:29John Coogan?

  All of it, yeah.

• 1:04:30Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  The above, all of the above. But I think from a regulatory perspective, um, we quickly identified that it would be a benefit to be fully licensed over time. So about ten years ago, we did get our bank license and we were fortunate that EU had implemented legislation that meant that you could take your Swedish bank license and passport it across all the European countries, right? So we run on the Swedish bank license, but it's applicable for all. And it included UK up until Brexit, right? So, um, so that worked for a long period of time. But obviously, technology was an important challenge for us as well.

• 1:05:04John Coogan?

  Wh- wh- what are the knock on effects of having a bank license? I I I talk to fintech founders all the time where they, it feels like they're in the money moving business, but then you find out that they have all this float and they're making a ton of money on on treasury bills or something like that. Is there an aspect of your business where you can actually drive more profit and bottom line on the basis of having that bank license? Or is that less relevant? And then I want to go from there into stable coins and what's going on and how that might be changing the market.

• 1:05:36Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  So I think that the, in our case, what you're referencing is kind of funny enough, something we have underutilized the Klarna, which is the ability to generate the deposits and kind of earn interest of those deposits, right?

• 1:05:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:49Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Funny enough. And that's something we're addressing right now, where we're introducing more products and services in that area. Um, but where the big advantage for us was, if you look at like the history over those twenty years of a lot of fintechs who were credit providers, a lot of them offloaded their balance sheet and did so effectively up until at some point in time, something went wrong in the underwriting model and it turned out that the losses were higher than they expected, at which point of time, the people that had taken on their balance sheets realized that they wanted to shift the liability back to the fintech. But the fintech was not capital, capital wise equipped to take that on, meaning that like their valuations either collapsed or the whole thing went bankrupt.

• 1:06:33John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:06:33Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  So, and this happened over and over again, if you look at a lot of the like fintechs over the last twenty years. In our case, the benefit of having deposits is we are a bank, we're fully capitalized as a bank.

• 1:06:44John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:06:44Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  We need to hold the same capital that, you know, any large bank needs to do in comparison to our balance sheet. And it means that we're much better equipped, like even if our losses go up and down or whatever, it doesn't change the sentiment of our balance sheet, doesn't mean that we can dry up funding, we're not dependent on the funding in the market, the whole, the whole thing that went down in oh seven, right? Which was the problem. We're basically, we only have deposits and that are insured by the government and so forth, right? So it gives us a much more stable way of funding, funding the bank, basically.

• 1:07:14John Coogan?

  Then on stable coins, is there any benefit to you there? We've heard stories about lower fees and faster payments and obviously there's a massive, you know, uh, the frequency of payments across the Klarna network is massive. Uh, are you looking at it? Have you already looked at it? What's your takeaway on, on stable coins or, uh, the, uh, the genius act that is, seems on the cusp of passing?

• 1:07:37Jordi Hays?

  You've had fintech CEOs on the show that have said, actually, traditional banking rails can be pretty awesome if you utilize them properly. So curious what you read.

• 1:07:45Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  I, I think that the, I have been one of the crypto skeptics for a long period of time. And, um, and the reason for that is when like I started playing around with this stuff in ten years ago, I felt that, you know, I always ask myself like, how is this technology going to make my mom's life better? Like, how's it going to make our products and our customers' experience better? And I didn't really see any. Any benefits of the technology apart from the fact like people have been speculating that it's an interesting asset, an alternative asset to hold, right? Bitcoin or whatever. But then I gave it a second chance, a second look now, one about a year ago, started looking at the next generation of stablecoin implications and implementations. And I very much agree with the fact that like now the technology is showing strong promise,

• 1:08:28Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  both in its speed, in its cost, et cetera, et cetera, versus the traditional bank rates, especially, especially obviously in international transfers.

• 1:08:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:36Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  In orders that are more like, you know, you're moving money from like UK to US, you're probably not gonna make that big of a difference. But if you're moving money from, you know, Brazil to, let's say, Greece.

• 1:08:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:47Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Oh, sorry, that was a Euro country, stupid idea, stupid suggestion. But another one, which with a smaller currency, you're going to have a, a very real benefit of it, right? So I think that stablecoins definitely are going to be a major thing. I think also like crypto is here to stay and the bitcoins of the world are here to stay as assets, right? That people find are interesting assets in their portfolio. So I don't think that's gonna change either anytime soon.

• 1:09:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm always interested in, in where the value will accrue with these technological shifts, specifically like with stablecoins, you can imagine if you're going from two-day settlement to instant settlement, well, if the customer would accept one-day settlement, all of a sudden you have one day afloat that's gonna sit there that you could kind of keep as your own margin and maybe put in T-bills and maybe it gets to be a big number. And so I've been, I've, I've been kind of trying to understand there, like when their time is money and when, you know, when time decreases and, and systems get faster, you can pass all of that along, you can pass half of it along. Um, and, and, and there's different things that different companies can do, um, based on the consumer preferences.

• 1:09:54Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  You're right, but I, I think you're totally right, but that also means that in, in, in some degree, which is something I tell my investors, right? It's a race to the bottom. Like this payments industry has had a, you know, combined revenue globally addressable market of like two trillion dollars or whatever. It's not going to stay that way. There's no, there's no real good reason why it's more costly to send money than send an email, right? There's a little bit more risk involved. There's a little bit more like, you know, security involved. But in essence, you're just like shifting data between two accounts.

• 1:10:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:26Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  And so like in, in some, to some degree that like that, those kind of solutions will drive. And that also means that the revenue generated from these services will be significantly lower than it is today, right?

• 1:10:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:36Jordi Hays?

  What's your broad, uh, not, not to go too broad, but what's, I'm curious to get your broad market outlook right now. You have this interesting view into consumers, companies all over the world. It's a very interesting time right now. We have geopolitical instability. We have, you know, and, and effectively war. We have tariffs, trade wars, all happening at once. Yet at the same time, you know, we've seen circles when public and is now trading higher. I guess higher than Coinbase, you know? So that seems like the, the general excitement around.

• 1:11:12John Coogan?

  Capital marches on.

• 1:11:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, capital is marching on, but, but yeah, how are, how are you thinking about markets broadly from your view?

• 1:11:22Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  To me, um, from my perspective,

• 1:11:26Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  because of kind of the deep, um, interest that I've taken into AI and tried to understand the implications and how to apply the technology. I am very much convinced that it will have implications on white collar jobs. If effectively you can have like economical swings that, you know, recession, non recession. It may, you know, higher inflation, higher cost pressure and so forth may have some implications for consumers sentiment of spending, you know, I can spend a bit more, I can spend a bit less and so forth. But the, but the true life changing moment that affects people's true ability to pay back, right? Is to a large degree, uh, loss of jobs, right? If you, if you lose your job, then it severely impacts your ability to do so.

• 1:12:07Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  I think that the key question now is to what degree we're going to see an acceleration. Loss of jobs among white collar people, which in itself then potentially leads to a recession and less spending in that group of people, which is obviously a group of people that have had a lot of money. Yeah. Um. So I think that's the area that I'm like mostly because the tariffs so far um obviously have been announced and kind of changed and then announced again and changed and so forth. And now it almost feels like if I look at our merchants, when the first tariffs were announced on Labor Day, they really did adjust their marketing spending. We saw changes in the transaction volumes. We saw, for example, some of the larger Chinese companies that we work with would shift their marketing spending from US to Europe

• 1:12:50Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  and would try to offset more of their inventory in the European market as opposed to the US market, et cetera. But as now also like there's been more and more like turbulence around these things, people start also discounting it, saying like, yeah, it was announced this week, but who knows what's going to happen next week? And so we're not going to draw too early conclusions from this. We're not going to change, you know, the business of what we're doing until we know it's for real, right? And until it's actually going to happen. So I don't actually see currently in the trends, the direct implications of tariffs themselves in our business. But uh and I'm more just like trying to second guess if I'm going to see a major change in the uh in job. And what are you cracking on the job side?

• 1:13:30Jordi Hays?

  The other thing is you're kind of hedged in some way and that that I think people would be more likely to use Klarna if they have, if if they, you know, uh in in some ways have reduced spending capacity or or, you know, the

• 1:13:43Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Yep.

• 1:13:44Jordi Hays?

  you know, more more likely to leverage a product. I'm curious, just getting getting, you know, more specific around this. What is your up updated hiring strategy throughout the net, the rest of this year and next year? What what what are you, um, you know, hiring? What areas are you hiring in or are kind of shifting away from?

• 1:14:02Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  So we um about almost now two years ago, um, after experimenting with ChatGPT and so forth for a few months, our conclusion was that this will lead, um, this will change. Our ability to get more done with less people. And that we believed that in an AI world, revenue per employee will be a very key metric. Because the higher revenue you have per employee, uh, the more profit you make per employee means that you can spend more on marketing. Means you can acquire more customers, which you can scale more. So if you have a low revenue customer, you'll be less competitive, basically. And so, uh, for us, the question then was, how do we catch those efficiency gains? And so we decided to stop hiring about two years ago.

• 1:14:45Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  At that point in time, we were about five thousand, five hundred people. And since then, we shrank to about three thousand employees that we are currently, which is basically through natural attrition. Uh, because, you know, in a tech company, about twenty percent will leave on an annual basis voluntarily because they're going for other jobs, other opportunities. And so by just being very strict in not rehiring, uh, we have been able to shrink down the company and, and, and continue to do so. Now, we've hired a little bit, doesn't mean that we haven't hired at all. We've hired in some areas and so forth, but if you look at the net, um, you can see that we've shrank from about five thousand, five hundred to three thousand. And we, uh, and then what we also done is internally, we've been very honest and open about this. And we've communicated to all our employees that, um, what's going to happen is the gains, because obviously this means our labor cost is shrinking.

• 1:15:30Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Uh, while our revenue actually has been growing, right? So revenue, uh, as a consequence of that, our revenue per employee went from about four hundred K, uh, uh, to about over a million now. And which is a kind of equivalent to where Goldman Sachs is. Now, next, yeah, thanks. Next step is, um, is kind of, you know, Apple, Netflix being at two million dollars. I sometimes joke because like OnlyFans is at like thirty million dollars.

• 1:15:53John Coogan?

  Don't go there.

• 1:15:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, don't, don't, don't look at Tether. Don't look at Tether, Tether will have you looking at, uh, net income per employee.

• 1:16:00Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Yeah, exactly. So I'm not sure that's a great, uh, the comparison you want to have, but the, the thing is that like, um, the, anyway, so we are continuing down that path. And, and the point is that, um, What we've communicated internally, however, is that as the total labor cost shrinks, we are reinvesting that in an acceleration of compensation for our existing employees. So as they participate in the efficiency gains, we have been able to accelerate both equity and cash compensation at Klarna to our existing employees. More than we had in previous years. And that's kind of a way for them to share the benefits with the shareholders of the efficiency gains that this creates.

• 1:16:38John Coogan?

  So if you're a new, if you're, if you're a new grad and you want to get a job at Klarna and make a career out of it, maybe be there for 20 years and earn a lot of stock and cash over.

• 1:16:49Jordi Hays?

  Come for your job, maybe.

• 1:16:51John Coogan?

  Come for your job. What should a new grad do? Should they learn prompt engineering? Should they learn to vibe code or program? Or should they be focused all on networking and management skills and people's skills and the things that the robots seem to be mediocre at?

• 1:17:08Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  I think very clearly is there's one area where we have not reduced number of people that hold, and that's sales. In our case, I mean like B two B enterprise sales. So we have people locally on the ground across the world in over 50 offices. You know, whether they sit in China next to Xi'an and TikTok and so forth, or whether they sit in Portland next to Nike, or whether they are in, you know, somewhere on the East Coast or in parts of Europe. And those, obviously, there's no like immediate expectations that those are affected by this, right? Rather the opposite, like that human connection in my, in customer relationship is super important.

• 1:17:46Jordi Hays?

  I've never, I've never seen a chat GPT have a power lunch and a steak dinner.

• 1:17:51Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Exactly.

• 1:17:52John Coogan?

  It's impossible.

• 1:17:54Jordi Hays?

  Till we get better humanoids.

• 1:17:57Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  But on the rest of jobs, actually it's been quite interesting because for a period of time now, we said, okay, let's stop hiring all other competences than engineering. So if you look at that 5,500 of them, 1,500 were engineers. Today of the 3,000, 1,500 are engineers. So actually the number of engineers have stepped, kept the same while it's all the other like marketing, you know, analytics, whatever it might be that shrank. Now, with that said, however, in the last like months, because of the acceleration of. Claude code and and you know and cursor and all these tools. What you're seeing is now is a group internally at Klarna who are like a few hundred business people

• 1:18:37Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  that in the last two years have, you know, learned how to code, not necessarily like the most complex things, but inspect code, understand code, interact with code. But doing so with having all the business knowledge, understanding what the customer wants, understanding a lot of things that engineers sometimes have struggled with, like they can't articulate why we're building the product, for what purpose, for how it's going to solve customer needs and so forth. And they've been maybe sometimes more focused on just like latency or technical implications or, you know, et cetera. So I kind of see a convergence now of the truly kind of Renaissance people that are kind of, you know, both on both sides that can understand the code, but can also understand the business. Those are the ones that are now truly becoming the most productive, in my opinion.

• 1:19:18Jordi Hays?

  What is your framework for buying AI tools versus building AI tools internally?

• 1:19:26Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Right. So we we have been fairly vocal about the fact that, you know, as part of acceleration of AI at Klarna, one of the first thing that we can do, remember ChatGPT came along. There was this like, hey, I can now connect all my PDFs to ChatGPT, you know, and like, and people were like, oh, that's awesome. Uh, the only problem with that is that like the truth in data modeling and data science has always been like shit in shit out, right? So if you feed it tons of like internal stuff that is contradicting, inconsequential, not truthful, whatever, it's just gonna get lost, right? Just like some of our MPs get lost when they start navigating the internal workings of Klarna, right?

• 1:20:05Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  So so the first thing that we realized, we can't silo the data anymore. We have to have a a common data model. And that meant that we started removing the software as a service providers, you know, so we um we closed down Salesforce, Workday. Uh, I think the next big one that would go is Atlassian, Jira and and so forth. Uh, but then there's also like a long amount of smaller software as a service vendors that we have utilized. So actually, if you kind of counted in total, there's over one thousand five hundred that we have uh closed down in the last two years. Now, obviously, some of them are like super small, like some plugin to Jira or whatever, like it's not like every one of them is like a tremendously big software as a service application.

• 1:20:47Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  And then we've kind of harmonized and standardized our data layers so that we have one data that we can then let the L L M. Interpret and run on top of allowing us to to do more with less, right? Um. So currently, there are a few things that we will use eleven labs for

• 1:21:06Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 1:21:07Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Voice. Uh. We will use like specific people that are really, really proficient. We use a company called Full Story. That's fantastic to kind of catch user interactions. So there's some some places where we just found like this software is so strong that there's really no, you know, meaning in like trying to replace it. But a lot of traditional SaaS may have just been a database with, you know, some nice UI and some data and some process logic on top of. And that is easier to replicate today. And and it's not easy, but it's easier. And the problem is if it's spread out, it's inconsistent. And we need it to be consistent for both humans and L M to make sense out of it.

• 1:21:47John Coogan?

  Well, this is fantastic. This is super interesting. I feel like uh we should talk regularly about the the situation with white collar workers and just the advance of A I tooling. There's so many interesting things where you have a a unique insight because of your position in the industry.

• 1:22:03Jordi Hays?

  Last question from for me before we jump. Do you think uh cookies hurt conversion rates across Europe?

• 1:22:11John Coogan?

  I mean, cookie policies?

• 1:22:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just just the fact, just generally. Well, well, gen generally. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we could spend half an hour. But no, but generally, like the more clicks you need on a website to get to the eventual purchase, you know, the the worse the conversion rate and.

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  Maybe that's why the American consumer is outperforming.

• 1:22:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's just purely technicalities.

• 1:22:32Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  I think the the challenge of G D P R, which is the legislation that led to those that cookie, uh, sorry, shit show, is that um the problem was it it came from a very good principle and idea.

• 1:22:47Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 1:22:47Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  And that is that we as users should own and control our data, not the companies, right? And if you think about it, when when a few years ago, WhatsApp, there were some rumors that they have updated the terms of use. And now there was so much more privacy infringing and everyone should shift, right? Now, how many people really shifted to Telegram or whatever? Not enough, right? Why? Because at the, at the center, the way it should have worked is you should have been able to go to WhatsApp with a click of a button, extract all the data, all your contacts, all your messages, and be able to then feed them into Telegram or, you know, Signal or whatever your choice of preference would have been. That would have been true customer mobility.

• 1:23:30Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  And that was the purpose of GDPR is to allow that customer mobility. But because there wasn't, the legislation wasn't implemented thoughtfully enough, it, it, that hasn't materialized. Because in that world where you had a hundred percent customer mobility, the point is if you lost trust in WhatsApp as a provider of your primary chat messages, you would have instantly been able to move to something else. And the fear of losing all your users in such a very mobile world where everyone could move, would have forced WhatsApp to be concerned about privacy and not just speak that they are concerned about privacy, right? So like, I think that, and that was the original intent, but then it was implemented with these cookies, which actually creates the opposite,

• 1:24:16Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  which is that like, we're just tired of accepting cookies. I don't want to go to new website because then I have to click again on fifty-five like. The, the people that, the people that wanted these kind of laws had the right intentions, but the implementations are horrendous and actually cause the opposite, which is less customer mobility, people less willing to shift services and try different things. And funny enough, are hence playing into the hands of the same companies that they were annoyed with for infringing on our privacy. Because as that creates just like the bigger success of these big tech companies, full customer mobility, the being able to take your data with you and go wherever you want, is the key to creating a better competitive internet,

• 1:24:58Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  where companies actually have to compete on creating more value for you as a customer, rather than locking you up and locking your data up and then, you know, creating models that just forces you to use the same thing.

• 1:25:11John Coogan?

  Makes a ton of sense.

• 1:25:12Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense. Thank you for joining.

• 1:25:14John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. Thank you for having me. Welcome anytime. Thank you for an amazing pod. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:25:18Jordi Hays?

  We'll talk soon.

• 1:25:19John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:25:19Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Sebastian.

• 1:25:20John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. Multi asset investing, industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions of folks. And they're the sponsor of Aston Martin F1.

• 1:25:31Jordi Hays?

  That's right. Public.com. Head over.

• 1:25:33John Coogan?

  We have our next guest in the studio already.

• 1:25:35Jordi Hays?

  And we have John Chu from Coastal Ventures. What's going on? Welcome to the show.

• 1:25:41Speaker 03

  Good to be here.

• 1:25:42Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you. I, we didn't, we didn't prepare at all, which is, which is the part of the beauty of our show. We just, you just come in, you're live, and we will do it live. The showbiz. It's great to have you. I've got a bunch of questions. You're always getting spicy on the timeline. We'll talk through a bunch, but um, why don't you introduce yourself, quick background, what you're doing at COSA, all that good stuff?

• 1:26:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, uh, so I'm John. I'm one of the partners here at KV. I do a lot of technical things, so basically anything I've really written code on in the past. So like data infrastructure, dev tools, a lot of AI stuff from foundation models and the app layer, if I really understand what it does, right? Yeah.

• 1:26:25Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Let's get right into it. What did you read? What are you reading into the news around DG potentially going to Meta and all that? Was that a surprise to you? What, what can you talk about there?

• 1:26:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it was a big surprise. I actually say like, the funny thought that came to mind when I first heard the rumor was like, should I be buying Meta options? Because does that mean like Zuck got Ilya, right? And then that gets announced and Meta just jumps. But like, look, it's, it's pretty obvious what's going on here is that there's a giant market in AI, right? OpenAI kind of proves that. The pie is huge. And Zuck has a shot on goal. And Zuck is not someone that likes to lose shots on goals. So if he has to pay up to get the best talent that he thinks that can actually compete, he doesn't even have to win. You don't have to beat OpenAI, you just have to be number two. If he can get there, billions of dollars is worth it, right? So like, all of this makes sense when you think of it through the lens of like,

• 1:27:25Speaker 03

  Facebook is a giant company, a billion dollars, five billion dollars. That's a drop in the bucket if you take on this new market that ends up dominating.

• 1:27:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, what do you?

• 1:27:33Speaker 03

  And yeah, the last thing he wants to be is like, Microsoft and misphones.

• 1:27:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you think about the phone story? At one point, Facebook was working on a phone. And maybe the lesson that Zuck learned is that he should have put more resources into that instead of not try to do it at all. I'm wondering, because there's all these different stories. VR, he's investing way ahead of adoption. Reels, he was a little bit behind, but wound up rolling out a product that I believe produces tons of profit. And so it was totally worth investing in and taking the shot at building out all those data centers to do the recommendation algorithms. So yeah, I mean, what other examples do you think we should be pulling from? From the meta history? Or do you think that might be relevant here?

• 1:28:21Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, there's basically two things to know about Meta, right? One is that they are fantastic fast followers. They either buy or they copy. I think Snapchat is a fantastic example of that, where like the stories, literally, like, that was a team that just copied stories and just executed better. So like, if anything, Facebook is an execution machine. And they are able to pull that off. And then the second takeaway is Zuck is willing to date bets. So like, I think Oculus, the acquisition and the whole Metaverse is a great example of that. And you don't win all of them, right? But like, I think on the upside, he's won more of them in terms of like, call it shareholder value, than he's lost.

• 1:29:07Speaker 03

  So this is just another one of those.

• 1:29:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:09Speaker 03

  And this one, I think he has extremely strong conviction behind, more so than you. Like, the fact that AI is already doing real things in the real world that actually are impacting enterprises and impacting real people gives you a significantly higher confidence bar than like the Metaverse bet.

• 1:29:27John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:29:28Speaker 03

  To have significantly more confidence here. I was talking to like, a guy at Windsurf, who like runs their field engineering team. And he was like, oh, you know, I I talked to his enterprise and they're like, we're gonna buy like twenty five hundred windsurf licenses, because this was fantastic. And those guys, he's like, why don't you buy five thousand? Because like, you have five thousand engineers. And he's like, yeah, we're not gonna have five thousand engineers. Because of windsurf, we're gonna have two thousand five hundred engineers. Like, it's actually doing real things.

• 1:29:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. How how can Meta benefit broadly from AI, not in the just found in the foundation model game or image generation or things like that? You know, we we've talked about just just getting slightly better at AI across the entire organization can have tremendous benefits on just improving delivery of ads and these sort of like basic things you were working on ML at Facebook back in the day. So I'm sure you have some some strong insights.

• 1:30:22Speaker 03

  Well, so I I think like, there's a few layers here. If you start from the product level, the obvious is that there's new products that are going to be built, right? There's the whole like, Jony Ive and OpenAI thing, right? And that's some kind of hardware thing, we're all guessing. That's probably a new product. And if you just take the lens of like, if this technology in five years gets significantly better, I have a bunch of hardware products inside of Meta, I can add more, I have a great research team that knows how to build great hardware, I know how to handle the supply chain. What can I build? There's like random upside there in products, right? If you go back to the current Facebook suite,

• 1:31:06Speaker 03

  there's Meta AI is like already doing a lot of this, but you have chat apps, you have Messenger, you have WhatsApp, right? Like, you can already do chatting in there. You have a great llama model. If you have ChatGPT in there, you can just pull them into conversations and already add value. That increases engagement, that increases ads views, right? That's that's automatic money there.

• 1:31:26Speaker 03

  And then if you go back to the where I worked, like in ads models. There's a, you're seeing less of it with generated by today mainly because everything is doing attention on sequences and ads like ranking models are a little bit different, but people are already applying research to different layers of the ads models and like if you have a one percent uptick in ad score, that's like a billion dollar, actually it's like a percentage increase in revenue. So like a billion dollars today in the future, one percent is going to be like 10 billion dollars, right? If Facebook goes 10x. Um, and there's some really interesting research there. Like I, I have an, a port code that I invested in, actually was a distinguished agent at Facebook or at Meta and like, he's kind of got some technology that's a foundation model for ranking.

• 1:32:10Speaker 03

  Where you really just don't need any feature engineering. And I saw another company this morning, which is the same, that's like, that rips out giant pieces of infrastructure, has like automatic increase in ad score ranking. And you can like fire all your ML engineers, you probably don't want to do that, but like you can fire most of the ML engineers at Facebook, like that's gigantic, right? That kind of stuff is going to happen. I mean, the time scale is a question, but it's going to happen over time.

• 1:32:32John Coogan?

  Do you think that the UI paradigm around AI's interface with social networking is defined enough? I, I'm thinking of the example of Snapchat and Face and Instagram stories. It was very clear that Evan Spiegel at Snapchat did enough of the experimentation to define how vertical disappearing video and images would be distributed on social networks. And then Facebook was able to adapt that and adopt that and bake it into Instagram. Um, when I think of who, what big tech companies, which of the mag seven is most closely cheating off of chat GPT's homework? It feels like it's Gemini and the Gemini app feels much more directly competitive to the chat GPT app.

• 1:33:17John Coogan?

  Uh, I would be surprised if, if Facebook or Meta or, or Instagram tries to stuff an entire chat GPT experience into the fifth panel on the hamburger menu. Um, so I'm wondering like, is, is there, is the story of Meta's AI rollout really just about ad optimization or are we actually going to see it instantiated in different UI and like interaction paradigms?

• 1:33:43Speaker 03

  You're, you're going to see it everywhere. Um, ads is just an obvious place. You gotta win, right?

• 1:33:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:48Speaker 03

  Um, but like. You're you're going to see it. Actually, someone might stick it in a tab somewhere. If I know anything about Facebook, having been there, like if a number goes up and to the right, they'll do it. So like, that's like that that might happen. Um, but like, in like I said, inside of Messenger and WhatsApp, I think there's going to be lots and lots of usage there. And if you think about it, like, people ask this question. I was actually a little confused at first. They're like, why did you pay 15 billion for what it sounds like just Alex Wong, right? Like, that's my guy. And then you think about it for a bit, and you're like, okay, well, what makes OpenAI OpenAI like? Yes, there's great tech, but Sam, like Sam actually runs that thing and Sam makes it successful. And then, like, if you ask anyone, and why even Paul Graham is like, okay, if you had to pick someone again, that's like

• 1:34:34Speaker 03

  a top founder inside the Y C network that's not Sam, who would you pick? Even Paul Graham says Alex. So like, if you're looking at products inside of Facebook or even outside of Facebook, like, pick the guy, right?

• 1:34:44John Coogan?

  Yep. Yeah, I mean, it feels like a really, really strong, like, total reset of Meta's AI strategy. Bring in three absolute hitters and turn them loose on whatever the next phase is. Jan LaCoon was there for kind of the research, like, journey and the research part of the AI story. Now we're in the application story and so go get the managers, right?

• 1:35:09Jordi Hays?

  How much, how much should people read into, again, this is all alleged. I don't think it's been confirmed that TG is joining Meta yet, but rumored. How much should people be reading into, you know, the CEO of SSI leaving to work at Meta? Uh, and using that to inform their general timelines, right? You know, if we were on the cusp of developing superintelligence in two years, maybe you wouldn't leave billions of dollars of on the table at at a company that had the potential of of of cracking that. Uh, even, you know, getting a billion dollars ish liquid at Meta is great.

• 1:35:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but still, I I think it's hard not to read into into the move if it happens.

• 1:35:56Speaker 03

  I I I have no no knowledge here. Like, I I don't know Dan well enough to know like what his, uh, what his kind of thoughts behind this are and what drove the decision, right? But like, I I can say honestly, for myself, working with Ilya would be like an amazing dream. And it's kind of amazing, uh, to do at the same time, like. SSI is a pure research lab. So it's not like OpenAI where Sam is over here trying to build products. It's a pure research lab. And I don't know if that's what Dan actually finds fun. And also like what he actually excels at versus like Meta also has a giant research lab, tons of opportunity. And like unlimited GPUs and money, right?

• 1:36:38Jordi Hays?

  And distribution to to scale products.

• 1:36:41John Coogan?

  And get data and get data to feed them back in the models. Yeah, it's huge.

• 1:36:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is the thing about Facebook, like distribution, everyone underweights that. All these DMs that come out of Facebook and pitch me, the thing they always miss is like, no, distribution is not trivial. It was trivial for you at Facebook, but it's like not for the whole world.

• 1:36:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, you got a billion people to, you know, click on your new button. It's like, that'll be a lot harder when you're starting from zero.

• 1:37:04Jordi Hays?

  Do you think, yeah, I was gonna say, do you think Apple will make a big bet here? There were conversations reporting over.

• 1:37:09John Coogan?

  You're talking about Tim Cook going to Meta to get a pay bump?

• 1:37:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:13John Coogan?

  Cause he's barely scraping by at at Apple. He's making seventy five, under seventy five.

• 1:37:17Jordi Hays?

  Under seventy five a year.

• 1:37:18John Coogan?

  He could probably double that if he went over to Meta.

• 1:37:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, something there. No, but do you do you do you expect Apple to make a big bet here? There was, you know, rumors over the weekend of reporting that they had spoken to perplexity and thinking machines. Do you think they, do you think that they're willing to make a big investment? You know, Siri over 10 years ago was 200 million. That's like a seat, an AI seed round for ants these days. So I'm curious.

• 1:37:45Speaker 03

  Man, seed rounds are so expensive.

• 1:37:49Jordi Hays?

  You're like, don't remind me.

• 1:37:51Speaker 03

  Dude, I've been priced out of almost every round in AI research I've tried to do this year. There've been a few exceptions, but like, it's not like I'm priced out by a small amount. It's like 2X my price or whatnot.

• 1:38:03John Coogan?

  How are you even underwriting AI research bet these days? Are you pulling out a spreadsheet and building the market size? Or is it just like, based on the vibe of this founder, I'd pay 50, but the price came back at 100, like?

• 1:38:17Speaker 03

  I get another lottery and go to the future and then I figure out if it's actually gonna work.

• 1:38:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's good.

• 1:38:23Speaker 03

  It's basically, you gotta underwrite the team and then the opportunity size, right? That's really all you can do. I mean, that's basically what we did when we did Sakana.

• 1:38:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was gonna ask about Sakana, the Japanese language model.

• 1:38:35John Coogan?

  Very cool company.

• 1:38:36Speaker 03

  But that, like today, it's even worse is like, that's really all you can do.

• 1:38:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:40Speaker 03

  And then part of it's like, if the price is just not there, given the confidence interval, then like, gotta step back, right?

• 1:38:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. At the same time, I mean, the SSI deal, the Scale AI deal, like, it feels like it's potentially easier than ever to get taken care of as an investor, even if you overpaid and did a seed at 300. Like, the Mag7 has money to spend on multi-billion dollar acquisitions. Like, a lot of these crazy looking deals might get rolled up, but I don't know how many of these there will be. Like, you have to be, you have to be backing a founder like an Alex Wong, or like a, you know, Nat and Dan to even have that on the table.

• 1:39:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you back a generational entrepreneur, you'll have a little bit of a safety net. But they have to be.

• 1:39:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's funny. We, we don't typically underwrite acquisitions, right? We only underwrite, can this company IPO? And I think most investors do that. If you think about it, too, there's like seven of the Mag7. So like, if it's not some goal, it's like, not really an investment. You're going to put like 200 mill post on, right?

• 1:39:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:45Speaker 03

  That, that being said, like, I made this, it was a half joke, when we were looking at one of these hot rounds in the seed rounds. I was like, you know what we should do? Like, we should just invest now and then sell at the next round. It'd be like the best hire on the planet. And Vinod, like, looks at me dead. And he's, pardon me, he looks at me dead, and he's just like, you'd be a great hedge fund manager. We don't do that here.

• 1:40:05Jordi Hays?

  I think it's a good strategy for angels, to be honest. Angels are the only, the check sizes are lower, you can get a, you can get a quick 10x and sell in three months.

• 1:40:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, would you rather a $4 billion SPAC or a $14 billion aqua hire on your, on your ROI?

• 1:40:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:20Speaker 03

  I see that again, too. I got pitched a SPAC recently.

• 1:40:24John Coogan?

  Wait, why are they pitching you a SPAC?

• 1:40:26Jordi Hays?

  They're like, hey, got any, got any portcos?

• 1:40:29Speaker 03

  And then he wanted us in the pipe. And I was like, wow, SPACs now, they're coming back.

• 1:40:32John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:40:34Jordi Hays?

  How, what's your updated thinking on memory as a lock-in and a moat for different model providers and app, app layer companies? You had been, it sounds like you've been pitched by a bunch of like, plaid for memory type companies. You've been posting about this. What's your kind of framework there?

• 1:40:54Speaker 03

  I I still don't have a clear view, to be honest. I I think it is a mode. So um you look at all of the the model providers. They need different ways to keep their customers coming back to them versus going to other model providers. And memory is one way to do it. Um if you have enough history on the person, you can tailor recommendations, tailor responses, et cetera, et cetera, right? You've seen this play isn't like. The first time someone's done this, like, I think the best example of a data mode is effectively Google and search. It's literally like, oh, I get so much search data that I can do better ads. And make a better product. And then like no one on the planet can get more search data than you because I am the best. You all come to me and you give me more data, right?

• 1:41:38Speaker 03

  So it's kind of the same play. Um at the same time, like, I see why users want this memory thing. Of like, oh, I can like shift memory from OpenAI over to like Anthropic. But then like I have the same question of like, well, why would OpenAI let you do that? Like, why is Google gonna let you take their data and give it to like thing, right? Just like not going to happen. So.

• 1:41:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:00Speaker 03

  I still don't see what the outside function is where like an Anthropic or an OpenAI would be game for that.

• 1:42:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:08John Coogan?

  Yes, I mean, this seems like the entire dynamic is that it's a good idea, but customers won't demand it. It's the same. It's the same dynamic as. Uh, you know, should I be able to? We were having this discussion back in like 2010 about like Google's walled garden. Like, can I export all my Google data or all my Facebook data and just give it to Google to get better ads? Like that potentially, but no one's demanding that from the customer side. And so it'll never happen from the from the B two B side.

• 1:42:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Are you worried in general about, you know, there's been a bunch of different app layer companies that are kind of B two B players? That are building products that ultimately will just potentially be built into things like the Google suite, right? And and happen where you can get sort of these sort of fast revenue ramps, something like a calendar, but then then ultimately just get added as a functionality to core Google Workspace or or Teams functionality?

• 1:42:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is kind of funny. This is like, um, one of those questions that keep come, keeps coming up is like, started with like GPT rappers where it's like, oh, my startup is gonna die. And I was like, all right, what's inside the space of these model companies? And and the answer is like, you need some story for defensibility. And I I actually don't understand why this is so hard for people to grok because like, this has been the history of technology forever. Is like, yes, there's tech, tech eventually gets eroded. Like what stays along that gives you defensibility is like community is some kind of open source thing. Is it like workflow locking? There's like these moats that have existed forever that everyone knows about. And for some reason, because the word AI is here, like entrepreneurs and VCs just like, forget about the existing moats.

• 1:43:40Speaker 03

  They're like, yeah, this is like something different and new. And it's like, no, it's not. It's just like technology like before, right? Um, so that that's really the story is like, yes, things will get eaten. And like, yes, you're already, I've seen plenty of companies get killed that are shallow GPT rappers. And I'm seeing some actually deep, like, technical moats getting overrun by OpenAI and Anthropic. And you just need the story on like, okay, how do I get to something defensible? And can I get there in time?

• 1:44:09John Coogan?

  Hmm. What do you think about these new generation of uh startups? Some of them are in AI where it seems like the efforts of the team are like ninety percent marketing. Um, and they're really, really good at getting a ton of attention. And they're being very noisy. And Gary Tan was kind of framing it as like, maybe they're trying to win in distribution and then kind of hold on to the attention until the AI models pick up. It feels like it's almost like a necessary evil of the current

• 1:44:48John Coogan?

  market and and how fast things move that uh if you want to accelerate revenue and kind of live up to the to the standards of the day, you have to be very, very noisy online. But do you see it as like a counter signal? Or do you think that there's something that where maybe this is around to stay?

• 1:45:03Speaker 03

  It's not necessarily a counter signal, like, um. It it's the same as like when when we pick companies, if you're too early, you're wrong. Right? Same thing for founders here is like, some of these founders are fantastic, especially like these like younger founders are fantastic at getting attention.

• 1:45:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:23Speaker 03

  And I think historically with any company, any movie, any like pop star, any type of hits, eventually the attention wanes, right? So really, it's a timing thing of like, I need the attention to translate into customers. And if my product's not there, I'm going to see churn.

• 1:45:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:44Speaker 03

  So how long can I capture attention? Does that overlap with where my product actually doesn't have churn? If I have enough timeline in the middle and I timed it right, then I win.

• 1:45:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:45:53Speaker 03

  Then I lose, right?

• 1:45:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:45:55Speaker 03

  It's like, pretty much that simple. It's like, it's simple to say, it's not an easy game to play, but if you play it correctly, you have a giant company.

• 1:46:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. The the organic attention getting, it seems like a a really great go to market or like early beachhead, but it doesn't feel like a sustainable flywheel versus some of the other permanent go to market motions or like viral loops that drive, you know, meta to beat earnings every year for decades or something like that.

• 1:46:21Speaker 03

  It can get you into one, right?

• 1:46:22John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah, it's an opportunity. Yeah, it gets you the shot on goal where as a lot of a lot of entrepreneurs that are maybe those PMs that say, I'm going to get distribution and they just put out a, you know, press release and they're like, where did all the customers go? I don't have any clicks on my on my button. So yeah, it it is kind of a a necessary thing.

• 1:46:39Jordi Hays?

  There was a there was a market map a while back showing all the different venture funds investing in all the different labs. You you guys at COSLA are OpenAI purists, so passed on, I'm sure had the opportunity to invest in all the different, you know, Anthropic, XAI, Cohere, all these different players. Talk about kind of that, was that always an intentional decision? Is it, let's stick to ventures roots and have our bet? Or was it sort of, sort of a lucky ability to just be in, you know, the breakout, you know, winner? That's the lab and the consumer app? And so, you know, talk through that decision making process and maybe kind of insights from from different partner meetings.

• 1:47:23Speaker 03

  I I don't know if we've ever like discussed this intentionally until we kind of came to the like, OpenAI is it thing? But I I think it happens kind of organically where. You you work with a founder, you work with a team, you have giant breakthroughs and giant wins. You own enough of a company where like their success is basically your success and

• 1:47:48Speaker 03

  it kind of looks like

• 1:47:52Speaker 03

  they're gonna win it anyways, like, I mean, I I we had this back and forth on Twitter, I know, but like Keith was kind of like, yeah, I don't think another Transformers based or another like foundation model company is gonna be a great VC return outside of acquisitions. And it's kind of like, yeah, how how are you gonna beat OpenAI like? It's quite hard. They have distribution. They have marketing brand. They can have a shittier product and they probably still win this, right? Um, so like, and they have money. Money is actually very important in this game because of GPUs. So it's it's both the like, we bet on this horse. We love this team. We work very great with them, very closely with them. There's like symbiotic value here and also like they're probably gonna win this.

• 1:48:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Um, we'd love to have you.

• 1:48:33Jordi Hays?

  What are you, uh, last, last question? What are you expecting out of, uh, are you, are you expecting to see ads in various L L Ms, consumer apps this year? I'm sure you've been pitched people saying, I'm gonna build an ad network for L L Ms. I'm sure you have opinions on that as well, but what are you, what are you expecting to see out of the next year? A big question I have is will the average American pay for their favorite L L M three years from now? Uh, I've been trying to figure that out, or will it just sort of, um, you know, go closer and closer to free over time?

• 1:49:06Speaker 03

  I I don't actually know. Um, like, I I think.

• 1:49:09Jordi Hays?

  What do you mean? You're you're VC. You should, you should have a crystal ball on your desk, you know?

• 1:49:14Speaker 03

  I I like technology and I think there's many ways to monetize this and people will try all of them. So like, are are there gonna be like ads? Yes, people will try it. I mean, like Arvind over at Perplexity already said he was gonna try it, right? So we're gonna see that at some point.

• 1:49:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:29Speaker 03

  If it's going to be the model that works, who knows? Um, but it is like a nice tried and true model, right? So there's a good probability that it does work for some set of products.

• 1:49:40Jordi Hays?

  I saw somebody, somebody had a pretty viral post last week saying, "I'm so sick of being asked to sign up for different services across the whole internet."

• 1:49:51Jordi Hays?

  What's his name? Antonio at Coinbase was like, "I'll tell you a model for this, but you're not gonna like it."

• 1:50:00Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, thank you for joining. Appreciate all the insights and welcome back anytime.

• 1:50:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, this was fun. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks, guys. This was fun.

• 1:50:10Jordi Hays?

  Have a good one. Cheers, John.

• 1:50:11John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:50:13John Coogan?

  Until you can buy ads in ChatGPT, you gotta stick to ads out of home.

• 1:50:18Jordi Hays?

  Out of the home.

• 1:50:19John Coogan?

  Out of the home, using adquick.com. 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. We have our next guest in the studio, Tom Mueller from Impulse Space.

• 1:50:35Jordi Hays?

  I'll be right back.

• 1:50:36John Coogan?

  I will handle the intro.

• 1:50:38Jordi Hays?

  Cool.

• 1:50:39John Coogan?

  Tom, how are you doing?

• 1:50:43John Coogan?

  We are bringing him in in just a second to give you more background on Impulse. I met Tom, oh, it must have been two and a half years ago. Legend in the space community, worked at SpaceX. Also, a car aficionado who engaged with my post about the Coogan test, which of course is the challenge to have a humanoid robot step into a Dodge Viper ACR and lap the Nürburgring in under seven minutes. It's been done by a human in seven minutes and one second and a few milliseconds. It's an extremely difficult challenge, requiring physical endurance of the G-forces, but also a bunch of dexterity and obviously image processing.

• 1:51:28John Coogan?

  And I was talking to a bunch of AI folks about how long it will be until humanoids are actually at that level where they could do something like that. And it took, I think the consensus was around 2045, something like that. Anyway, Tom, great to meet you.

• 1:51:44Speaker 05

  I don't think it'll take that long, will it?

• 1:51:45John Coogan?

  How long do you think it'll take? This is a great question.

• 1:51:47Speaker 05

  I don't, when you take fear out.

• 1:51:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, maybe that's a big one. I don't know. You, you've done a lot more laps than I have, so please.

• 1:51:55Speaker 05

  Don't they have, haven't they already shown that fighter aircraft can beat a human in, you know, in dogfights?

• 1:52:00John Coogan?

  So. Yes. So the difference there is that I, I'm adding the challenge of the, the Dodge Viper, ACR must be stock. And so the humanoid must operate three paddles and the stick shift and the steering wheel. And that's a lot more challenging than just plugging into the steering column and, you know, controlling it like you do in a Tesla or Waymo. And so I think that adds a wrinkle, but I don't know. 2045, 2035, it's clearly going to happen. But, uh, well, that, that, that's, that's a good way to say that you're bullish about, uh, humanoid robotics.

• 1:52:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:52:40John Coogan?

  Do you anticipate that humanoid robotics will have an impact on your business in the next decade in terms of maybe manufacturing or something even more narrow scope?

• 1:52:49Speaker 05

  Certainly manufacturing. I think, I think for manufacturing, robotics are developing fast. But I think, you know, I, I think humans should explore space, but, but it's really expensive and dangerous to put humans in space.

• 1:53:01John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:53:01Speaker 05

  If you really want to like, you know, use the economies of, of space, I think it's going to take a lot of robotics. So I'm, I'm bullish about robotics.

• 1:53:09John Coogan?

  We gotta put a Nürburgring on Mars. And then ship.

• 1:53:13Speaker 05

  Or a dirt bike track on the moon, which I'm all about.

• 1:53:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, I would love a.

• 1:53:16Jordi Hays?

  Let's use taxpayer dollars to put a racetrack on Mars.

• 1:53:20John Coogan?

  I would love that. Anyway, sorry, we jumped straight into it. Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction for both of you and a little bit about the company?

• 1:53:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, sure. Yeah, I'm Tom Mueller. I'm the CEO and founder of Impulse Space. I was one of the founding members of SpaceX, uh, where I led the development of, uh, propulsion systems for Falcon nine and, and Dragon and a little bit into Starship.

• 1:53:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:45Speaker 05

  Left there in 2020 and started Impulse in 2021.

• 1:53:50Speaker 05

  And we have our four year anniversary here coming up next month.

• 1:53:54John Coogan?

  Congratulations. That's great to hear. That's amazing.

• 1:53:57Speaker 05

  And it's been, uh, been doing great.

• 1:53:59John Coogan?

  And Eric, would you mind introducing yourself?

• 1:54:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, sure. Hey, I'm Eric Romo, the president of the company. I've been with the company for the last two years. I've known Tom for better part of, God, Tom, 22 years, I want to say now, 23. So I was an early propulsion engineer at SpaceX in the very early days. And then went and did a bunch of, uh, non-space, non-propulsion stuff for a long time and found my way back to Tom a couple of years ago.

• 1:54:21John Coogan?

  Amazing. Yeah. Uh, I mean, as I describe it in kind of, uh, layman's terms or in terms even a venture capitalist could understand, you can get to LEO pretty easily, but you need impulse to get to higher orbits. Is that still kind of the bread and butter of the business? Am I describing it even remotely accurately?

• 1:54:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, at, you know, at SpaceX, we, I think we really, uh, made LEO very accessible, lowered the cost, made it, you know, you get, you know, flights going there, you know, every other day. I want to do the same for, for everything beyond LEO. So get, make it much easier to get to high energy orbits, to get to the moon, to get to Mars, get to outer planets, anywhere in space. Like, let's make it much easier, much more affordable and, you know, really start the true space age.

• 1:55:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. When you were at SpaceX, did you have an idea of how valuable LEO would be? I think a lot of folks, Starlink took them by surprise, basically, in terms of not just how awesome that service is, if you've been on a plane and used it, uh, but also the business that was to be built there. Did that take you by surprise? And then, uh, is there something that you can use as a concrete example of what is exciting about the higher orbits?

• 1:55:35Speaker 05

  Well, yeah, I'm old enough to remember the first time we tried to do LEO constellations, you know, back in the late 90s. And, and actually worked with some companies, uh, that, that tried to do it. And, you know, it wasn't the right time. Uh, technology's improved a lot, especially low cost launch, you know, better bandwidth, easier to manufacture spacecraft, all the things. So. I kind of realized it was the right time when it was, you know, when SpaceX first started talking about it, it really clicked. I'm like, yeah, we need to do this.

• 1:56:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so in terms of the higher orbits, what are, I mean, obviously going to the moon is very concrete. Are there specific obvious business cases or anything that would be, you know, inspiring or immediately relevant that?

• 1:56:24Speaker 05

  Well, geostationary orbit is still probably the most important orbit because it's the 24 hour orbit over the equator. So you just point your dish at that and it's always there in the sky, your antenna, or you can cover the whole, you can cover the whole earth with three satellites. So making access much more affordable to that, I think, is a huge help. But then I'm, you know, I've always said I'm really all about a lunar economy starting and even mining asteroids and things like that. So those are the, those are the things I'm most excited about.

• 1:56:59Jordi Hays?

  Question, I'm sure you guys have gotten asked in every single pitch meeting, so I'll ask it. Why, do you think this is on SpaceX's roadmap? Are you guys partnered with them already? Do you expect, do you expect them to want to prioritize this in the future? Or, you know, what does that kind of partnership or competitive dynamic look like?

• 1:57:22Speaker 05

  Lonnie, you cover that one here.

• 1:57:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, they're pretty busy, right? And so this is the equivalent of the Silicon Valley startup question of like, why doesn't Google just do that? Or Facebook just do that? Or, right? They could, they could do anything. All right. They're technically amazing company. They can execute on pretty much anything they sink their teeth into. I think the question is, will they? And why, where would this be on the priority stack? So, you know, one of our products, Helios, is really good at getting large payloads to high energy orbits like medium earth orbit and geostationary orbit. SpaceX can certainly do that with a Falcon Heavy, but they've been super vocal about the fact that they would prefer not to. And there's operational reasons for that, cost reasons for that. But so this is a space where we think that we can actually help them and other launch providers get to a thing that they're to some degree ignoring right now.

• 1:58:06Speaker 06

  And then on the the small spacecraft side of things, we we make a small, highly maneuverable vehicle called Mira, which is largely useful for Space Force. So we announced some contracts with them late last year and a partnership with Androl to go to market with with Mira. And that's a thing that's pretty far afield from anything that SpaceX is working on today. You know, the Starlink is awesome, but it, you know, kind of just sits there, right? It's a constellation, whereas Mira is designed to move very quickly as its core competency.

• 1:58:31John Coogan?

  Can you talk about the lunar economy and how you imagine that developing? Does it start with tourism or scientific exploration? Do we need an ISS-like base that's kind of taxpayer-funded on the moon first? Or do we go straight to mining or helium three? I remember the movie Moon. But what are like, what are the rest? What does the tech tree look like as we build out the moon as a capability?

• 1:58:58Speaker 05

  Possibly all of the above, like mining helium three certainly could be a good starting point because it's even right now on Earth, if you don't flood the market, it's on the order of $20 million a kilogram. So you can certainly, if you can get it on them, I don't know how the part of getting it, like you got to mine apparently millions of tons of regolith to get it. But if you have it there, transporting it back is like 1,500 to that cost. So it's definitely, it's economically doable, assuming that you have, you have, you know, a can of it. But I think if, if, if you're doing mega structures or, or massive manufacturing in LEO, pretty fast, you will figure out that it's 23 times roughly more efficient to bring mass from the surface of the moon than from the surface of the Earth, just because the

• 1:59:43Speaker 05

  gravity well is so much lower.

• 1:59:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:59:45Speaker 05

  And I think that's, that's when the real use of the resources of the moon will happen, just to get, to get material to lower through it.

• 1:59:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, I've always thought that the moon was also just a great staging ground for Mars. You imagine if you're up there, the moon's always facing Earth. So if something goes wrong, you know, the sci-fi version, oh, there's a crack in your, in your suit, you can just dive in an escape pod and you're aiming in the right direction. Whereas Mars, you have to deal with the transfer window. It's a whole different problem. And if we can get really good at living on the moon, we're probably going to be able to get good at living on, on Mars. I am interested in kind of these questions about when the one of the great stories about SpaceX is that it feels like it's a relatively smooth handoff of capability in terms of launch capacity

• 2:00:34John Coogan?

  from NASA to SpaceX, from the taxpayer to the private sector. At the same time, I love that NASA put a helicopter on Mars because I can't imagine that would ever happen, no matter how crazy the VCs are. I don't see that happening and being underwritten against any sort of 10-year, 20-year, you know, life cycle of return on investment. And so my question for you is like, what type of space projects should we be pushing into the, you know, the NASA world, the government-funded world, the even the nonprofit world versus what is commercializable today? And do you see both as

• 2:01:16John Coogan?

  important going forward that we that we kind of have this, you know, taxpayer-funded R and D, the really fringe scientific experiments, and then we commercialize things when they're ready?

• 2:01:26Speaker 05

  Well, I think two things really that I'd like to see from NASA mainly is answering the big science questions, like, is there other life out there? And also, let's explore what's out there. Like, I just posted a picture this morning from the new Vera Rubin Observatory. Amazing, you know, just amazing stuff. They should continue to do things like that. And but I think as far as develop, they should develop technology that's that that takes a lot of money to develop that maybe commercial companies aren't going to invest in now. Like, I think the next thing, you know, Jared Isaacman was talking about is NEP. And I'm always touting that too as a next step in propulsion. So rather than than build a giant rocket that competes

• 2:02:08Speaker 05

  against people that already build giant rockets, why don't they go develop the next thing, you know, the next, the next technology? I think that's probably the best use of taxpayer money through NASA is to advance science.

• 2:02:19John Coogan?

  How do you think about, oh, sorry.

• 2:02:21Speaker 06

  I was just gonna say fundamentally, I think NASA needs to figure out if it's a jobs program or if it has goals, right? I mean, I think that's the that's the thing, like, SLS made no sense in the commercial rocket economy. Maybe it did when it started planning 20 years ago or whatever, but in for the last decade or more, it's made zero sense. But yet it's still kind of hanging on because Congress wants to fund jobs in Alabama, which is, you know, maybe a noble purpose, but, you know, is that the purpose of NASA? I think is the thing that they need to figure out.

• 2:02:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about extraterrestrial life? Do you ascribe to the dark forest theory? Or like, do you think it's promising? Do you think, you know, we will have an answer to this in a few years? Do you think we're getting closer? What is your take overall?

• 2:03:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, we need, we need to get, we need more information. Definitely. I hope it's just, life is extremely rare. And it's not, you know, some, some great filter that's, that's still out of us.

• 2:03:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:03:17Jordi Hays?

  What are the, what are the, the kind of upcoming events in the next one to two years in commercial space that you think can be major catalysts for the industry overall? That maybe you guys are working on or that you want to see from the industry broadly?

• 2:03:32Speaker 05

  Well, something that we're not working on, but it's something that SpaceX is developing is Starship. I, I really started this company realizing that Starship and other, you know, reusable rockets are going to be, be bringing massive amounts of cargo to, to LEO. And it needs to go other places. So that's what's the premise of this company. So I'm excited about Starship finishing development and becoming a commercial, commercially viable spacecraft. And then, well, we have really, you know, we have the mirror that, that Eric talked about earlier. And energy is really for, for government and defense. And then we have Helios coming on, online here next year. We're developing it right now, which is basically adding a third stage to Falcon nine and other mid-sized rockets.

• 2:04:16Speaker 05

  And that's what it can allow us to get, you know, more easily to, to high energy orbits. So those are the two big things for us right now. Yeah. Super excited about lunar landers, Mars landers, all kinds of cool stuff.

• 2:04:30Speaker 06

  I was just going to tack on. I think you're seeing one big trend is that Space Force, the rhetoric of counter space or space defense activities has really ramped up in the last six months. In the public sphere, there's not been a lot of investment in, in, you know, some sort of space on space defense. But in privately, Space Force has been talking about that a lot more. And then they started about six months ago, really publicly, not coincidentally with the change in administration. And so the, the question, I think for companies like ours is, you know, do dollars follow that rhetoric? Is there increased investment in that sort of thing? And then on the commercial side, I think you have an awful lot of operators who are trying to figure out, how do they carve out a niche and survive in a post Starlink world? How do they figure out, you know, what their space is as a commercial comsat operator? That, you know, once you have the dominant Starlink player in the market.

• 2:05:14John Coogan?

  I'm interested to hear about the challenges of developing rocketry or engines at different scales. I've heard this story that one of the reasons the Raptor engine was so successful was that it wasn't a mega project, in the sense that you didn't need to bring in a crane necessarily to work on it. There were more smaller modular pieces. Is that true? And then I'd love to know about the challenges of scaling up and making bigger rockets. I was tracking, obviously, I want Starship to work as soon as possible. It feels like it's a really, really tough challenge, and it feels like it's a harder challenge than

• 2:05:57John Coogan?

  the Falcon 1 or the Falcon 9, which, you know, it did crash several times, exploded several times. But SpaceX is a much more mature company, and so you would expect that it's not just, you know, the first time that they're doing it. It's actually something fundamental about the larger scale engineering that's going on there. So can you share anything about that?

• 2:06:18Speaker 05

  Well, we've become a lot better at developing rocket engines, you know, over the last, you know, 20 years, certainly. When we started SpaceX, there wasn't really, it wasn't like startups would do rocket engines. That's why I had such a hard time hiring people in the early days, because nobody believed in it. And now there's many teams all over the world that are developing liquid rocket engines, and it's never easy. It's not, but it's doable. And modern, you know, modern tools are affordable and available, and certainly modern manufacturing techniques like 3D printing is almost cheap code for rocket engines. But when you're doing something like Raptor, which is extremely high pressure, full flow, staged combustion, very advanced engine, the most advanced engine ever, it's just,

• 2:07:03Speaker 05

  it takes the difficulty to 11. So not surprising that there have been setbacks. Also, one of the hardest things to do in launch vehicle recovery is getting back an upper stage. You know, you saw, we had pretty good success with Falcon 9 getting back to first stage, and certainly flying the boosters back, and that awesome landing. But second, upper stages are coming in with a lot of energy, so really hard. They're going to solve it.

• 2:07:31John Coogan?

  Just a matter of time. Yep, just time. Well, it is rocket science after all.

• 2:07:36Jordi Hays?

  I was saying, people don't, people don't use that phrase. It's not rocket, you know, this isn't rocket science anymore because we've gotten really good at.

• 2:07:44John Coogan?

  There's a lot of stuff that is rocket science. How many times I heard that? Come on, Tom. It's not rocket science. It is rocket science. Well, I'm sure you have a lot of rocket science to do. We'll let you get back to it. We really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us. This is a lot of fun.

• 2:07:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, thanks.

• 2:07:56John Coogan?

  Thank you, guys. Have a great rest of your day. Next up, we have Derek Thompson.

• 2:08:01Jordi Hays?

  Some breaking news.

• 2:08:02John Coogan?

  Give me the breaking news.

• 2:08:02Jordi Hays?

  From Truth Social, where news breaks.

• 2:08:05John Coogan?

  News breaks, apparently.

• 2:08:07Jordi Hays?

  Trump says Iran has officially responded to our obliteration of their nuclear facilities with a very weak response, which we expected and have very effectively countered. There have been 14 missiles fired, 13 were knocked down, and one was set free because it was headed in a non-threatening direction. I am pleased to report that no Americans were harmed and hardly any damage was done. Most importantly, if they've gotten it all out of their system.

• 2:08:30John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:08:31Jordi Hays?

  And there will hopefully be no further hate. I want to thank Iran for giving us early notice, which made it possible for no lives to be lost and nobody to be injured.

• 2:08:40John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:08:41Jordi Hays?

  Perhaps Iran can now proceed to peace and harmony in the region, and I will enthusiastically encourage Israel to do the same. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

• 2:08:50John Coogan?

  That'd be good.

• 2:08:50Jordi Hays?

  It's a good way to, it's a strong way to end your post. Now, if you want to come across presidential.

• 2:08:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:08:56Jordi Hays?

  Just bolt on. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

• 2:09:00John Coogan?

  That's great. Well, we have our next guest, Derek Thompson, the author of Abundance, in the studio. Welcome to the stream.

• 2:09:09Speaker 07

  Great to be here. Thanks, guys.

• 2:09:10John Coogan?

  Congratulations on the move.

• 2:09:11Jordi Hays?

  Being a businessman now.

• 2:09:13John Coogan?

  You're a businessman now.

• 2:09:14Speaker 07

  I'm a businessman. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm a CEO.

• 2:09:16John Coogan?

  You're a CEO.

• 2:09:17Speaker 07

  I mean, I'm everything. You name whatever piece.

• 2:09:20Jordi Hays?

  Wearing hats.

• 2:09:21Speaker 07

  Corporate suite that you want to name. I guess I am that. I'm CTO, I'm COO.

• 2:09:25John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:09:27Jordi Hays?

  He's about to become a hyper capitalist. Vibe shift.

• 2:09:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Talk to us about the move. What, I, I mean, we're going to go into a bunch of stuff, but maybe just start with a little bit of background and then the decision to move.

• 2:09:40Speaker 07

  Yeah, sure. So I, I've been running for the Atlantic for 17 years, which is like, honestly, like, freaking disgusting to even contemplate. I don't.

• 2:09:47Jordi Hays?

  Wait, how, how old were you when you joined?

• 2:09:49Speaker 07

  I want to say four. I mean, that would be much better about myself. The answer is 22. So I joined in September of 2008. Wow. After graduating from college. I was like a comms intern for a while. I'm currently the comms intern for my Substack, so right back to that position. And I wrote for 16, 16.75 years at The Atlantic and it was great. And the truth is like, I've always had like a little bit of wanderlust. I've always felt like I had a bit of an entrepreneurial bone in my body. There was never a great time to leave because The Atlantic is really a wonderful place to work. They let you write about my position, in my case, about whatever I wanted. Tech, science, economics, social mysteries and conundrums.

• 2:10:31Speaker 07

  And finally, I just thought, you know, abundance, the book, has become a lot of things. It's certainly become something almost like, something that could be a full-time job. Like if I just wanted to reply to and engage with like the political feedback, that would be its own job. And part of this was like, this is an opportunity to do something on my own, to do something that's really independent, not put The Atlantic in a position where they're like a non-political organization with a writer who's doing some things that are explicitly political. But also like, I just kind of wanted to know, and this is what I said, I think in my original essay. Maybe you guys felt like this when you started this show, like, what does my mind feel like? When I wake up in the morning with a new job, a new task for it, right?

• 2:11:16Speaker 07

  Like, you work at like a VC, right? Or you work at maybe a private equity firm. And like, you wake up and like, how do you process the world? You process the world the way it's most remunerative to you at that private equity firm or at that VC. And when you change your job, you change your mind. Right? New tasks, new questions, new mysteries are unlocked. And I wanted to do that for myself. I wanted to like wake up with a new set of questions. And so that's what I'm doing right now.

• 2:11:40Jordi Hays?

  Was there a price that could have kept you at The Atlantic? Many people say everyone has a price, but it feels like legacy media is not set up to retain superstars. And I imagine.

• 2:11:52Speaker 07

  No, look, The Atlantic paid me well and the book paid me well. I'm really lucky from that standpoint. There's not really a number, right? Like, you know, $1 billion. Okay, now suddenly you're talking about something completely silly, but like, I wanted the freedom, the freedom to say, all right, like, I'm 39 years old, right? If I stay for another 11 years, I'm 50 years old. Like, now, I'm basically on the other side of the hill. At some point, you want to be in your sort of, in your, your electric prime, be like, what, what is my mind like? What is my life like? When I give myself an entirely new task of starting my own company, of thinking about the world from perspective of, I'm

• 2:12:34Speaker 07

  writing for myself, not writing for this august institution. So, no, I don't think there was a number. And I also think it's important to say, like, The Atlantic is one of these places that, as much as independent media is growing, and obviously, I think that's great, there are a couple empires that are going to. The Times is growing like crazy. The Atlantic is hiring like crazy. They pay their writers over, overall, I think, quite well. So, this was not really about, about money at all. This was about being in a fortunate position to take, to take a risk that had nothing to do with money.

• 2:13:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you just cared about money, you'd become an AI researcher and you'd join Meta. Get 100 million.

• 2:13:06John Coogan?

  Well, we got to pinch him on private equity, because he sounds like he doesn't want to be a private equity guy, but I think Scale to Substack started acquiring, rolling up other, other independent journalism.

• 2:13:16Jordi Hays?

  Could happen.

• 2:13:16John Coogan?

  Could happen. I, I do want to talk about advice from Ezra about this. Obviously, you wrote a book with him. He's been at the New York Times. He's been, started his own thing. What was his advice to you as you kind of stepped out in this next, next era?

• 2:13:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's an interesting question. No one's asking that question before. So, I told Ezra, three days before the book came out, we had just done, here, I'll set the scene for you. We had just done Fareed Zakaria's show, and it was one of the first annuals that we did together. And we were in the hut. You guys are based in San Francisco?

• 2:13:46John Coogan?

  We're in LA.

• 2:13:47Speaker 07

  You're in LA? Okay, cool. So, in New York, Hudson Yards, is that like enormous skyscraper mall, right? And we go, like, get some food and get some lunch. And we sit down and I say, hey, by the way, just so you know, I'm starting to think a little bit about doing something independent. This was before abundance became what it was. This was before a single book had been officially sold. So, I kind of think I want to do something on my own. And he said, you know why? Like, The Atlantic's a wonderful perch. And I honestly told him, I told him what I told you. I was like, Like the job of like being a content creator, right? It's a weird and wonderful job. Your job is to wake up in the morning and think, what do other people want from me? That lives in here that I can put out here and give to them. It's a really weird and wonderful job.

• 2:14:31Speaker 07

  And I feel like that work requires a certain amount of churn and experimentation. If you're stuck somewhere and I didn't feel stuck at the Atlantic, but I was there for 17 years. If you're in one place for 17 years, there's a certain amount of experimentation that you're essentially choosing to block yourself out of. Right? And so I told him, like, I really wanted to to experience like, you know, what? What different kinds of questions, what different kinds of writing styles and podcasting styles, maybe eventually like, you know, video podcasting styles would eventually be unlocked by going independent. I think that's a lot of the the appeal of Substack for people in a certain place or Beehive or some of these other places. Patreon is really getting into the game here as well. It's this opportunity to be like, all right, what is it?

• 2:15:15Speaker 07

  What does it feel like to be a content creator for myself? I'm not answering anybody else and I'm taking on all of the responsibility and the stress that comes with, you know, being my own boss. I feel like that's an experiment that more people should run on themselves.

• 2:15:29John Coogan?

  What about the timing of the launch? You always hear about the big bump that comes from like a big podcast appearance or something like that. Is there a world where you think you should have been doing email capture in the lead up to the book? So when the you did the interviews for the book, people could just go subscribe immediately. Is this the ideal time? It seems like it's really well timed because the like, the book has really, really done extremely well. And so you're in this like capturing moment. It would have been probably much riskier to launch this a year from now. But did that factor into it? Did you do you think about doing it before or later? How did you land on this time?

• 2:16:06Speaker 07

  Look, here's a framework that I that I thought about. It's not like the only framework that in my head, except for one.

• 2:16:13Speaker 07

  Obviously, having a number one New York Times bestselling book is a good opportunity to do something new.

• 2:16:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:16:21Speaker 07

  Because a certain number of people are already paying attention to you. Like, there's a certain amount of obviousness there that I don't want to be like cynical or conceited or vain, but I think it's just flatly true. And there was a certain calculation that was like, if I do want to do this in the next 10 years, does it really make sense to think, am I going to have another number one bestselling book in five years? Like, almost certainly not.

• 2:16:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:43Speaker 07

  In 10 years?

• 2:16:43John Coogan?

  Let's get a polymarket on it.

• 2:16:44Speaker 07

  Almost certainly not. Like, it is incredibly fortunate and frankly, just strange thing. I mean, I don't know if you know, there's no reason for you to know this. Our book did not hit number one on week one. It did hit number one on week two, or three, or four. It hit number one on week five. Like, a discourse built around the book.

• 2:17:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:02Speaker 07

  Allowed it to sort of like hover in the two to three range and then spiked to number one in a way that my book agent said she's never seen this before. Like, no book, she said, she said, I've had a lot of books hit number one, none for the first time in week five. So it was a really original, not original, really maybe unique experience in terms of the way that it hit the discourse.

• 2:17:21John Coogan?

  Was that a directly?

• 2:17:22Speaker 07

  Because of the popularity of the Democratic Party.

• 2:17:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, was that a product of like the podcast appearance strategy I saw Ezra going and you, but both of you guys going on like a really wide swath of podcasts and, and bringing the message to places. And I think a lot of authors, when they launch, they think like, I'm going to do like five big things on week one and then like, ah, you know, I'm done. But it felt like you were kind of taking the message to all these different pockets of the internet and really capitalizing over a long time. And it didn't feel like it was necessarily like, okay, you got 50% of the audience in week one, and then 10%, and then 10%, and then 10%. It felt more like you're having different frames on the same conversation again and again, and actually building that momentum.

• 2:18:06Speaker 07

  Yes. So if we were doing like book publishing economics 101.

• 2:18:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:18:11Speaker 07

  Okay. The book publisher controls very little distribution themselves, right? There's very few channels of exposure that the book publisher controls themselves, right? Even if you love reading nonfiction, my guess is that you aren't going to randomhouse.com to check out their nonfiction titles every Tuesday when the new nonfiction titles come out, right? Yeah. What do you check? The New York Times Book Review, podcasts that you listen to, Yep. other sites that review books, right? TV interviews, those are the channels of exposure. When you're a book author, you're basically in a position of begging. You're in a, you, you, you go to Friedzakaria and you say, please, please, can you talk to me about this book? And you go to Barry Weiss and you say, please, can you talk to me? And you go to the far-left podcast, you say, please.

• 2:18:53Speaker 07

  Go to the right-wing podcast, you say, you know, Ben Shapiro, please. You're asking, please, please, please, of everybody and their assistants and the assistants producers and the producers assistants, you're begging the entire world. Yeah. Made this, and, and almost every author is doing that. Every author is in this position of begging because often other people control channels of distribution that they don't. Now, in Ezra's case, he arguably has, with the Ezra Klein Show, like, the, the medium of exposure that is most successful for launching books. So that's a unique experience for me and my co-author. That said, two things. One, I would guess that if you really looked into the numbers,

• 2:19:34Speaker 07

  what sold this book early on, despite the impression that you gave that this book was on a lot of different podcasts, what sells books is still television. And the reason why is not because television is bigger than podcasts. In a weird way, it's because television is shorter and it's a worse product. But a worse product gives you a better amuse-bouche for the book. If I talked to Lex Friedman for four hours about Abundance, That makes sense. Exactly how many more hours do you want to spend inside of Abundance? That's a great point. That's a great point. If you talk to Friedzakaria for 10 minutes about the book, it's this little amuse-bouche that makes people think, ooh, that sounds exactly what I want. The future Democratic Party, the future of liberalism.

• 2:20:18Speaker 07

  So my feeling is that while... Podcasts are important because in a weird way, the product of a book is even more the conversation about the book than the product than the book itself. The best way to sell a book, weirdly, even in this like podcast heavy moment, is still television. That's my, that's my unempirical

• 2:20:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:38Speaker 07

  vii bet right now.

• 2:20:39John Coogan?

  That's fascinating. Yeah, I love that. Um, yeah, I mean, I noticed that with, uh, I mean Ezra on his, I believe it's his own branded podcast channel, put out a 20 minute video essay outlining the thesis for the book. It also, that video did very well. I believe it went viral and got maybe millions of views. That, that feels like number one bestseller on, on that week, but I think that happened on week one, not on week five, which is interesting.

• 2:21:06Speaker 07

  Which is where, yeah, I mean, so what happened was, um, uh, John Green, the author of The Fault in Our Stars, uh, who's become a nonfiction writer, wrote a book called Everything is Tuberculosis. And that book, I, I don't think I can share the inside numbers that I have.

• 2:21:19John Coogan?

  But he smoked you.

• 2:21:21Speaker 07

  We did great week one. That book kicked our ass. Like we weren't even, we weren't even close. Like, I don't know if you guys are, what kind of sports fans you guys are, like that was like the Miami Heat. That book was the Cleveland Cavaliers, we were the Miami Heat. Like everything was a blowout. It destroyed it. So like, we, we weren't even close number one, number one on week one. Um, and that does go to show that, that with book selling, it's all about channels of exposure.

• 2:21:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:49Speaker 07

  And who's already a celebrity owns their channel of exposure. And so the book publisher, by giving them a lot of money is essentially buying their channel of exposure. And that's partly what they're paying for.

• 2:21:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:58Speaker 07

  But yeah, the strategy, you know, beyond strategy, there's this question of like, how do you sell? How do you sell a book? And there's also this question of like, I don't mean to get like weird existential, but like what, what's the job of a book? Like what's, what's his job? And I think the job of a nonfiction book is to get people talking about it. Of course you want people to buy it, but like

• 2:22:19Jordi Hays?

  Or start your presidential run.

• 2:22:21Speaker 07

  Or start your presidential one.

• 2:22:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:23Speaker 07

  Honestly, you should do it the other way around. Because the best way to get attention for yourself, like if you dudes, if you guys run for president as a ticket.

• 2:22:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:30Speaker 07

  You'll get a ton of media exposure.

• 2:22:31John Coogan?

  A ticket, we haven't even thought about that. That's hilarious.

• 2:22:34Speaker 07

  Then you'll build, then you'll.

• 2:22:35John Coogan?

  Then people will buy our book.

• 2:22:36Speaker 07

  Totally free.

• 2:22:37John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:22:38Speaker 07

  Totally free media.

• 2:22:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:39Speaker 07

  Because all these people, the New York Times is like.

• 2:22:40John Coogan?

  They have to talk to you.

• 2:22:41Speaker 07

  Guys doing, and the Washington Post is like, what are these guys doing, right? You get all this free media exposure.

• 2:22:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:45Speaker 07

  Then everyone knows your name. Then you go to a book publisher, then they give you a lot of money and then you have this, this platform that's been co-constructed by media organizations that were conspiring.

• 2:22:58John Coogan?

  Media industrial complex.

• 2:22:59Speaker 07

  Even though they didn't even mean to.

• 2:23:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, sure.

• 2:23:01Speaker 07

  You should not write the book then go for president. You should do it the other way around.

• 2:23:04John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:23:05Speaker 07

  But the, but the, the product is the conversation.

• 2:23:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:08Speaker 07

  And so the reason to go on podcasts, the reason to go, you know, on, on shows like this.

• 2:23:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:13Speaker 07

  Because like, you want these ideas to get out in the ether. Like, no one should write a book if they don't want to talk about it for 50,000 hours. Because that is the experience of writing a book.

• 2:23:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:23Speaker 07

  You finish it, and then if you're lucky, you talk about it for the rest of your life.

• 2:23:26John Coogan?

  Okay, well, talking about things actually in the book, this has been fascinating so far. I've really enjoyed this, but

• 2:23:32John Coogan?

  that one of the narratives that I keep coming back to is the, the story of California High Speed Rail. I grew up in California, friends and family members who have worked on that project, actually. And I think for a lot of technologists and Californians, the, the comparison between SpaceX and the California High Speed Rail story really draw a very clear conclusion in people's mind, which is that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector. And I'm wondering how you, uh, do you think that that narrative of, you know, one was literally rocket science, but at the same time, we had put things up into space. It wasn't entirely a new capability. The other was a train, which, you know, we've had trains for.

• 2:24:16John Coogan?

  Generations and we tried to build a train and we tried to build capability to get to low earth orbit. One feels very successful and the other feels like we didn't get anything out of it. And I think for a lot of people, the takeaway is let's not have the government even try and do things. Let's let the private sector do as much as possible. And that trade off between, if there is an economic feedback, or there is a profit motive or a payback, that will act as a better incentive to actually get the result that people want, which is transportation or the ability to get to space. How have you grappled with that anecdote specifically?

• 2:24:55Speaker 07

  I'm a liberal who believes in a large role for private sector innovation. There's no question that SpaceX is an extraordinary company that has done things for rocket technology, and especially for rocket efficiency, that no other company in the world has done, no other individual in the world has done.

• 2:25:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:15Speaker 07

  How many people has moved to space?

• 2:25:18John Coogan?

  A lot.

• 2:25:19Speaker 07

  How many? Like?

• 2:25:20John Coogan?

  Dozens?

• 2:25:21Speaker 07

  A thousand?

• 2:25:22John Coogan?

  Hundreds? I don't know. It's just the ISS.

• 2:25:25Speaker 07

  How many people are in California?

• 2:25:26Jordi Hays?

  This is our, this is our Iran population question.

• 2:25:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're getting on.

• 2:25:30Speaker 07

  Fifty million, right?

• 2:25:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, in California.

• 2:25:33Speaker 07

  To build infrastructure?

• 2:25:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:35Speaker 07

  That is a public good for 50 million people, is a different challenge than building technology whose proof point requires several dozen. These are entirely different challenges. And that's why we need...

• 2:25:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would just, I would say like SpaceX has provided internet infrastructure for billions of people.

• 2:25:53John Coogan?

  The satellites kind of count as the people in this case, like, because that's the, that's the benefit that people really want out of.

• 2:25:59Jordi Hays?

  The public benefit is that people in Iran right now can access the open internet.

• 2:26:04Speaker 07

  And I think the value of Starlink is sensational.

• 2:26:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:08Speaker 07

  But when you're talking about, like... I mean, when you think about like broadband technology. Yeah. Like broadband technology is already being built by a lot of private companies, right? So it's not as if the creation of Starlink is taking away what has historically been a public service and is creating a private company out of it. Yeah. Broadband companies exist, like Charter exists, Comcast exists. So I think it's great that there are private companies that are working on that. When we're talking about questions like public goods, when we're talking about roads and bridges, things that are frankly quite difficult to monetize, and it's not entirely clear that we want to like directly monetize them.

• 2:26:49Speaker 07

  Like, do we want to charge poor people a certain fee every time they use a road or a bridge? Or does it make sense to live in a rich society with a progressive tax structure such that we can tax the rich a little bit more than the low income and use that money to create a set of public goods that makes life better for everybody? That allows frankly, low income people to use those roads to drive into areas where they can provide services for high income people such that everyone turns out better off. I, I, I see a large, large role for the federal government and for state and local governments to look out for public goods. And to me, when I say public goods and you look at the actual budgets, the federal, local,

• 2:27:32Speaker 07

  state governments, overwhelmingly what we're talking about is healthcare, subsidized healthcare. We're talking about education. Yep. And we're talking about infrastructure and transportation, things like roads, things like bridges. I think there's a huge role for government to play. Yeah, I'm, I'm totally with you. I, I, I like having both, like having mixed economy, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. A muscular government and also even more, I would like to see in the book, it's probably about this, even more purposeful pro-tech, pro-science strategy. Because the truth is, if you look at what SpaceX did for rocketry, why haven't we done that for Alzheimer's? Why isn't there like a SpaceX for like chronic inflammation or SpaceX for carbon capture technology? So I, I, I see a huge role for both of these things.

• 2:28:14Speaker 07

  I don't think that the success of government in some places proves that the private sector can't do certain things very well, or the success of SpaceX means that the government should get out of the business of building bridges.

• 2:28:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, I agree with you on the roads and bridges thing. I guess my worry is like the free market solution to how do I, the real problem that you're solving is like, how do you get people from LA to San Francisco? How do you move people around California? And the free market solution is a one hour Southwest flight that costs a hundred bucks, or a Camry that drives you there and maybe costs $20 in gas or something like that. And so the free market's kind of solved like if you have six hours, you can do it in 20 bucks, or if you have one hour, you can do it for a hundred bucks and you kind of choose those. And we kind of came in with like, we want something that's cheaper for two hours, but it, there wasn't this like

• 2:29:03John Coogan?

  massive market pull. And so that it was more like the decision to, to, to create that interim solution, just, just never really happened. But I mean,

• 2:29:13Speaker 07

  You know, just to stop there. Yeah, I love Southwest. I love flying on airlines. I, at no point in my life, and I'm like, what we need to do is like nationalize, you know, like do that. But like, who built LAX?

• 2:29:27John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:29:28Speaker 07

  Right. Like you need public infrastructure or infrastructure that is partly publicly financed in order to create a kind of platform technology, a platform for the private sector to succeed. And in this way, if you look at the history of Elon Musk's companies, like, what is the total number of government contracts and loan guarantees that SpaceX and Tesla have benefited from in order to become the companies that they are? I'm pretty sure it numbers in the billions, especially when you count all the NASA contracts.

• 2:29:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. So I guess the question is like,

• 2:29:57Speaker 07

  It's like a huge, huge opportunity for a public, private partnership to give us some of the outcomes that we're most proud of.

• 2:30:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. With the California High Speed Rail example, the question I guess is, is it, was it a mistake for the government to pick high speed rail as an important project? Like, was it a mis-ranking? Should have spent more money on roads and, or was it just the execution?

• 2:30:19Speaker 07

  I mean, billions of dollars were spent on a rail system. I mean, 30 billion dollars were essentially tacitly approved by a bond that was voted on by the public. And several million dollars were actually spent constructing rail that isn't connecting anything to anything right now. So clearly, if you were looking back, like the total of, the total number of man hours spent and dollars allocated on high speed rail has not been worth it for people who live in California. I don't want that failure to indict. The good that the public sector can do, any more than I think you would say that the failure of one SpaceX launch proves that SpaceX is in fact totally overrated.

• 2:30:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, how much, switching gears a little bit, how much are you digging into general research funding? We had Andrew Huberman on the show last week talking about his concerns around NIH.

• 2:31:10Speaker 07

  Tell me his concerns. Can you, I actually, I didn't see that. Can you?

• 2:31:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, so he had a, he had a long interview with Jay Bhattacharya and, and essentially the proposal is to cut government funding to university labs and research and scientific research labs by something like 40%. And that's a pretty significant chunk. He was very worried about this. There are some unnecessary costs potentially that he highlighted, but in general, this is the, this is the research that cannot be underwritten by the private sector because it does not, if you're just doing research on how do, how do we fall asleep? Or like, how do we, how does the brain work? At a very abstract, or, or what is the, what is DNA? You can't patent DNA as soon as you discover it. And yet, as soon

• 2:31:57John Coogan?

  as you've discovered it, boom, there's a huge, huge, you know, massive boom in, in biotechnology, but it won't be captured by a single patent holder on the underlying.

• 2:32:08Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 2:32:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so that just feels like an area that you could really dig and dive into in an area where it's okay to be kind of skeptical of this hyper capitalist viewpoint and, you know, venture backed companies can solve everything when, when some of the smartest people in the world.

• 2:32:23John Coogan?

  It's, it's, it's broad. It's, it's, it's a ton of funding of a whole bunch of different research areas. They're all, they all can't be underwritten by the private sector in any way versus being very prescriptive. We need to train from here to here and we are going to hire the people to build it. That feels like much, much harder for the government to get right.

• 2:32:39Speaker 07

  I, I agree with the way you guys are thinking about this. And maybe it means I agree with the way that Andrew's thinking about it as well. I think what's happening at the NIH right now, under HHS, is horrendous. I think if what you wanted to do. Was to reduce America's annual deficit by eighteen billion dollars, which is what we're cutting from NIH. You could either cut NIH, the fountain of scientific discovery for it, not just the US, but the entire world, you cut NIH by forty percent, or you could cut the corporate income tax cut by zero point four percent. Like, why not, why not just like, kind of reduce the size of the corporate income tax cut by a microscopic percent and still fund scientists to discover the basis of Alzheimer's

• 2:33:23Speaker 07

  and chronic inflammation and multiple sclerosis and pancreatic cancer. You said it really well. Knowledge can't be patented, period. Like, when the first scientist who looked inside the Gila monster's mouth discovered that there was a little hormone there that seemed to suppress its appetite and regulate its insulin, you can't patent a lizard's tongue. But our knowledge, our subsidized knowledge of the liquid on top of the lizard's tongue gave us GLP-1 drugs, which now appear to be something like a miracle drug for everything. I mean, they don't just help people lose weight, they don't just help people reduce inflammation. They literally seem to, there's a study going on right now, that they might reduce rates

• 2:34:03Speaker 07

  of Alzheimer's, because Alzheimer's might be caused in part by inflammation in the brain. And if GLP-1 drugs work by not only reducing obesity, but also reducing chronic inflammation, they might ironically, or incidentally, be a neurodegenerative drug that works through the gut-brain interface? That's fucking crazy! And we see this by looking in a lizard, and no smart VC. Like, Mark Andreessen's brilliant, but he would be an idiot if he told scientists, if he gave scientists tens of millions of dollars to just look in the mouths of a bunch of reptiles. That's dumb. It sounds really dumb, but it's really wonderful to have a publicly funded organization that

• 2:34:44Speaker 07

  asks scientists who simply discover the truths of the universe with the hope that if it's true, someone along the line can find a way to make a product with it that makes money and saves people's lives. So, I think we need a really aggressively funded NIH and NSF. I think what's happening right now in the Trump administration is really, really sad. And Jay Bhattacharya, if you're out there, I would love to talk to you about what's happening at NIH, because I know you a little bit. We've talked a little bit. I know you don't want this, deep down. And I would love to talk about how we could amend NIH policy to truly make Americans healthy again and make America great again, because cutting NIH by 40% ain't it.

• 2:35:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think the frustration from Andrew was seeing, you know, the increased spending and trying to reckon with the two decisions there. Let's switch to something less politically charged. Can you give us the highlights of your conversation with Mom Donnie? You released that this morning.

• 2:35:41Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:35:42Jordi Hays?

  Right, right before we got on the air. So we haven't had a chance to listen, but I'm sure it was, I'm sure it'll be entertaining.

• 2:35:49Speaker 07

  Look, let me give you my reaction as like a person, and then it's like a political thinker. He's unbelievably charming and engaging and thoughtful. Like, you know, when you're talking to someone who's listening, or who at least is very good at performing the act of making you think you're listening to them. Like, I only know this guy for 37 minutes, but I loved our conversation. I really, really loved it. I think he's wrong about a lot. I think rent freezes are a terrible idea to increase housing supply. I think fundamentally, you cannot try to cap the price of something whose supply you're trying to increase. The

• 2:36:31Speaker 07

  way I put it in the podcast, that was like, you want grocery stores in New York to be better. If you pass a law that capped receipts at grocery stores at $50, what do you think grocery stores would start doing? They would stop, they would stop stocking the shelves, because you can't make money selling nice stuff to people if it's illegal to make $51 on the receipt. So in the same way, if you cap the price of a good and you're trying to increase its supply, you're tying the hand behind your back that you're trying to use. He was respectful, but we disagreed about that point. We disagreed about the fact that I think, I'm persuaded that while I'm not against public sector unions in the big picture, if you look at why New York City subways have among the highest transit

• 2:37:16Speaker 07

  construction costs in the world on a per mile basis, one part of it is that their union staffing levels are four times higher than the international average. You cannot build, you cannot build anything efficiently. If the first rule of your company is your staffing levels have to be four times higher than all your competitors. It doesn't work. So I asked him whether he was interested in talking to public sector unions, which are a democratic ally, of course. If he was interested in, in, in building public transit efficiently and increasing public excellence. Again, he disagreed. That said, I was really impressed by his insistence that he wanted to be a politician who was outcomes first and process second.

• 2:38:01Speaker 07

  And there was a certain amount of ambivalence that he seemed to communicate to me. Again, maybe he's lying. I don't know him that well. He's a nice guy on the phone. There's a certain amount of, of sort of procedural ambivalence that I really like in a politician. Like if, if Jay Bhattacharya came on your show, right? Or if RFK Junior came on your show or whoever else in tech policy, someone on, who's doing AI policy. And they told you that the outcomes that they wanted were the outcomes that you wanted. They were ambivalent about what process it took to get those outcomes, but they were going to try their damnedest to make sure that when they left office, those were the outcomes that everybody could agree about, right? There's something that's like very refreshing and like non ideological about that perspective. And I heard a little bit of it. That said, you know, I'm.

• 2:38:44Jordi Hays?

  Is that, is that tying into changing his mind around how police should be funded? Where he.

• 2:38:49Speaker 07

  We talked about him changing his mind on two things. One, he told the New York Times, he's changed his mind in the role of private developers in housing. I think he used to be more on the side of like, the government should build up the houses. I'm more on the side of the government should fund some of the housing construction, but like, we've got private companies that are really good at building housing. That's, that's not do what the private sector is already doing too much. But the other thing he changed his mind about, as you said, is defund the police. He talked four years ago, five years ago about defund the police being a slogan that he believed in. And now he, really his policy is fund the police. He thinks that police don't solve crimes fast enough and that in many cases they're forced, and this is clearly true, to act as social workers rather than police officers. And so if you've got a police officer or say a hundred police officers who have to basically be,

• 2:39:34Speaker 07

  you know, street therapists and social workers all day long, how are they going to solve crimes? How are they going to stop crime? And so he said he's changed his mind there a little bit as he talked to more police officers. And the end of our conversation was, I thought, a really refreshing point that he made that he thinks that his job, he sees his job as surrounding himself with people who aren't too fast to say yes to all of his ideas. He likes being around people who challenge his ideas. And I think that's, I think it's a useful thing for really, I mean, anybody, any politician or executive. And so there were many things in the conversation that I was impressed by. But, you know, also fundamentally, I think it's just important to say, there's, there are very big differences between socialism and liberalism.

• 2:40:14Speaker 07

  And he's a socialist and I'm a liberal. So we're not going to agree about everything, but you have to be able to talk to people you don't agree with.

• 2:40:21Jordi Hays?

  What are you hoping to see out of tech, the intersection of tech and Washington in a post Elon White House world?

• 2:40:31Speaker 07

  You know,

• 2:40:35Speaker 07

  we got to get beyond this, this insanity where the administration attacks on progressive thought become attacks on the kind of talent America needs to train and attract and retain to keep our dominance and to keep the really valuable information clusters that we have here. If we attack Harvard because we're pissed off at them and force all of the international students to leave, or if we encourage some of the smartest people around the world who deep down want to be at Caltech, want to be at Harvard, want to be at Duke, we push them to be in London and Beijing and Shanghai,

• 2:41:19Speaker 07

  we are losing so many great ideas, so much agglomeration, the interaction effects that happen when you put a lot of smart people together in America, like, it's important that Silicon Valley is in California and not in Brazil or France or Poland. Like, there is a special sauce to America, I think. You want to, you want to attract and retain these people. I want us to rationalize our talent and immigration policy and not have it be a kind of unfortunately assassinated bystander in this war between the Trump administration and a progressive movement that they think has gone too far. I think we really need to get back down to a reasonable basis on immigration policy in particular. And then

• 2:42:03Speaker 07

  I would like us to add back the funding to NIH and NSF. I'm sure Andrew talked about this a little bit, like, is it possible that there are so-called indirect costs, right? Money that I work at Harvard, let's say, you're NIH, you give me some money for my Alzheimer's study, you also give me money for Harvard. Is it possible that Harvard money, those indirect costs are too high? Yeah, sure. Let's have a public debate about that. Let's have public testimony. Let's not cut NIH by $18 billion and say, well, hopefully we're only cutting the fat and none of the muscle. So better immigration policy and better science policy, number one. I wish I had a good answer on AI. I don't know what the hell the next five years look like. I feel like the smart people that I follow change

• 2:42:48Speaker 07

  their mind every six months. Sometimes they accelerate, sometimes they decelerate. I wish I had this sort of crystal ball that could tell me what optimal AI policy coming out of Washington looked like. Right now I don't, but hopefully in the Substack I'll be able to get some answers there.

• 2:43:02Jordi Hays?

  Well, we're excited to follow along. Thank you for joining. This was great.

• 2:43:06John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. We'd love to have you back. We could talk all day.

• 2:43:09Speaker 07

  All right, great. I'll do it.

• 2:43:09John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Talk to you soon.

• 2:43:11Jordi Hays?

  Later.

• 2:43:11John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 2:43:13Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, I went way over. I thought we were five minutes over.

• 2:43:17John Coogan?

  We have a light system in the studio, but the golden retriever does not concern himself. The lion does not concern himself with who's in the waiting room. We have our next guest from Juniper Square. Thank you for waiting. Great to talk to you. And we got some news.

• 2:43:38Speaker 08

  We got some news.

• 2:43:41John Coogan?

  What do we got? What do we got?

• 2:43:43Speaker 08

  We got two things. We got a $130 million Series D.

• 2:43:50John Coogan?

  Congratulations. I've been waiting to do that all day.

• 2:43:53Speaker 08

  Glad we got it out. Yeah. And then we launched our AI product that we call Junie AI.

• 2:43:58John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:43:59Speaker 08

  That's our second bit of news.

• 2:44:01John Coogan?

  Now that we got the important stuff out of the way, who are you? What do you do?

• 2:44:06Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm a, I've become a fan of what you guys are doing. Glad to be on the show. It's really interesting and unique. So keep it up.

• 2:44:15John Coogan?

  But yeah.

• 2:44:16Speaker 08

  Yeah. So my name's Alex. I'm the co-founder, CEO of Juniper Square.

• 2:44:20John Coogan?

  Thanks.

• 2:44:20Speaker 08

  And Juniper Square is an 11-year-old technology and services company. All of our customers are private markets, GPs.

• 2:44:31John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:44:32Speaker 08

  So venture capital firms, private equity firms, real estate investors, crypto, private credit, you name it. If they raise an outside fund.

• 2:44:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:44:41Speaker 08

  Then we help them with fund administration. We help them with technology to manage that fund, reporting, basically everything is not the investing. And we've got close to 2,500 customers now, trillion dollars that were responsible for stewarding and about 750 employees.

• 2:44:56John Coogan?

  2,500 customers. Is that, is that not all of them? How many investors are there? I feel like, I saw that number on your website. You need to update it, by the way. It says 2,000 on your website. You're at 2,500.

• 2:45:07Speaker 08

  Yeah, we gotta get those numbers out.

• 2:45:09John Coogan?

  I mean, I feel like there's, I mean, we try and talk to, I thought we talked to all the VCs. We've had, we've done hundreds of interviews. I thought we talked to them all. Apparently there are more.

• 2:45:17Speaker 08

  There's some left.

• 2:45:18John Coogan?

  How big is this market? It feels like, like, you know, you talk about private markets investing. That feels like a small market, yet Series D is a billion point one. Like you're building a big business. How big is this market?

• 2:45:33Speaker 08

  Right. So the, you have to kind of take it by asset class, right? Cause VC is relatively small.

• 2:45:40John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:45:41Speaker 08

  As an asset class, both in terms of the capital that it manages and the number of GPs or investment firms that are out there. Private equity and real estate are respectively probably five times as big as venture.

• 2:45:55Speaker 08

  So there's thousands and thousands of, you know, just think of all the middle market, private equity, kind of LBO, growth focused firms out there. Think of all the different real estate investors focused on, you know, apartment buildings or retail or whatever. There's probably about 20,000 GPs globally that matter.

• 2:46:16John Coogan?

  Was the ZERB crash hard for you? Was that a slower growth period for your business? Because it seemed like it was really rough for all the VCs and a lot of investors pulled back, but it's not as like they really shut down their funds.

• 2:46:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's more like net new fund creation.

• 2:46:32John Coogan?

  So yeah, was that a real driver or are you just going after the existing players? And so the new ones don't necessarily matter as much.

• 2:46:39Speaker 08

  No, we definitely felt it. And you're right that we're, what we're sensitized to is in a given quarter, a given year, how many new funds were created? Our market share is so low that we still can sell to existing funds and people switch their providers all the time, but it's always easiest to get the new funds that's raised. So we had the double whammy of, you know, big focus for us is commercial real estate. So when COVID hit in spring of 2020, you know, it just took out retail, it took out hospitality and hotel and commercial real estate was, it was really tough sledding from like 2020, you know, really until 2022. And then the rate hike started and commercial real estate's,

• 2:47:19Speaker 08

  you know, heavily capex intensive, it's super rate sensitive. And then we had the big bust in, you know, public markets correction. We had the big overhang of everyone investing at, you know, 100x revenue multiples in 2021, 2022.

• 2:47:35John Coogan?

  We're going to bring those back. Yeah, we're working on it here.

• 2:47:38Speaker 08

  The sober, the sober days of 100x revenue multiple, which we're kind of back to now. Areas.

• 2:47:45John Coogan?

  How'd you get through all those times?

• 2:47:46Speaker 08

  It's recovering, it's coming back.

• 2:47:48John Coogan?

  How'd you get through the tough times? Did you have to do layoffs or change the direction of the business? Were there any pivots in the story?

• 2:47:55Jordi Hays?

  Kind of specific meditation track?

• 2:47:58Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's all in the meditation, actually.

• 2:48:03Speaker 08

  Yeah, all of the above, you guys. We had to do some layoffs for sure, like everybody. I mean, we were going into, you know, the Fed started hiking rates in like late 21, but by spring of 22 is when we had that huge correction in the public markets. And by that summer, it was clear that companies like us and pretty much every high-growth, late-stage tech company was spending too much, right? We were all investing for revenue growth and we all had to pivot to invest for growth efficiency. So we did a round of layoffs then, like a lot of people did. It was the first time I ever did that as an entrepreneur. It's not fun by any means, but it was necessary. But then the big thing for us is, you know, we started out as a technology company,

• 2:48:46Speaker 08

  but then we added, in 2019, we moved into the world of fund administration and we became a full-service fund administrator. And fund administration is like a really critical market for private capital. There's probably 30, 40 trillion dollars of private capital out there in the world and almost all of it needs a third-party administrator. So we kind of moved into this market that was like 50 times the TAM of our previous market concurrent with this big correction happening. And so those forces ended up working out that like the company did really well and we continued, you know, we grew, we've grown really quickly through a really challenging market period. So it wasn't without its bumps and bruises, but it's overall has been really well.

• 2:49:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, what?

• 2:49:31Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the new AI product. I imagine it's a difficult one to build. You can't really, like LPs and investors can't really tolerate hallucinations. I can imagine it, you know, a product that works well.

• 2:49:46John Coogan?

  I don't mind if you leak my fund returns to my direct competitor. No problem.

• 2:49:50Jordi Hays?

  Less of that, but if you're trying to understand fund performance and things like that or reporting, you can't like, oh, I'm sorry, I misreported.

• 2:49:59John Coogan?

  TVPI.

• 2:50:02Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah. So that is the crux of the challenge is, I mean, as you guys know, you talk about it a lot on the show. You know, generative AI is probabilistic, right? So next token prediction is is probabilistic in its nature. And the kind of work that we do of reporting on financial assets is deterministic, right? Like one plus one always has to equal two. It can never equal, you know, one or three or anything like that. And so the real trick is, and if you guys ever know, if you've ever like taken a pile of invoices or something and uploaded them to chat GPT or any LLM? And been like, hey, tell me the, you know, invoice amount for invoice number eight. It's terrible at financial data extraction.

• 2:50:46Speaker 08

  And so the big hole that we have in the market that we're filling for our customers is if you're an asset manager, if you're a financial services firm, like a venture capitalist or a real estate investor or whatever, one of the key things you have to do is you have to report to your regulators. You have to report to your LPs. That reporting is like, you know, you're putting your brand and reputation and your ability to raise more money in the future and everything behind it being accurate and correct. And so the trick is, how do you leverage all of the power of generative AI? This like all these summation use cases, document extraction, the chat interface that we've all become so accustomed to. How do you fuse that with a set of deterministic tools that do all the precision stuff?

• 2:51:28Speaker 08

  The precision math so that like you're calling functions in Python to run some code to, you know, answer a question. You're not trying to have a next token prediction be the answer of that. And that's basically what this platform is, is it's multi-model. We have a bunch of different models running inside of it. And the idea is, think of it as like a model orchestration layer, where if you're a private markets GP, there's a lot of work you got to get done. You want agents for different things, different models fit different use cases. And you need a way of orchestrating all of that work, ensuring it's compliant, ensuring it's accurate. And that's what this layer does.

• 2:52:07John Coogan?

  Anything else?

• 2:52:09Jordi Hays?

  This is great.

• 2:52:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, we, yeah, we got to have you back on. We're running behind today as you saw, but we really appreciate you stopping by.

• 2:52:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, congratulations on making it through the fire and come back on when you have more news.

• 2:52:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk soon.

• 2:52:21Speaker 08

  Happy to be here, guys.

• 2:52:22Jordi Hays?

  Congrats to you and the team. Cheers, Alex.

• 2:52:23John Coogan?

  Bye. Really quickly, how'd you sleep last night?

• 2:52:28Jordi Hays?

  I'm on a run.

• 2:52:30John Coogan?

  I'm on a run. Ninety-four.

• 2:52:32Jordi Hays?

  If you beat me last night, I'm gonna be extremely eighty-six.

• 2:52:37John Coogan?

  Oh, let's go for John.

• 2:52:39Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy. Ever, ever, ever since I got, ever since I got sick, I've been, I've been trailing you by, by like ten points.

• 2:52:46John Coogan?

  Off your game. Well, we got Jesse from Decagon in the studio. He's certainly been on his game. How you doing, Jesse?

• 2:52:52Jordi Hays?

  What's going on? Welcome.

• 2:52:53Speaker 09

  Guys, good to see you. Thanks for having me.

• 2:52:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks for hopping on. Give us the news. What does the company do? And what's the breaking news with you?

• 2:53:02Speaker 09

  Yeah. Hey, everyone watching. I'm Jesse. I'm one of the co-founders of Decagon. If you don't know about us, we're essentially an AI customer service agent. And so what this means is, you know, imagine next time you're, you know, booking a hotel room or something, right? There's an AI agent that's there that you can call or chat with live, and it knows everything about you. It can book rooms for you. It can upgrade. It can answer questions about your loyalty points and so on. And so essentially what we do is we work with these large, you know, usually consumer businesses that have a lot of customers and a lot of, you know, contact center volume. And we're there to both, you know, drive a ton of efficiency for them because now their human agents don't have to deal with these more mundane issues.

• 2:53:41Speaker 09

  But also, we are able to give a better customer experience for the actual customers. So that's what we do. And then today, we're very excited to announce our Series C, co-led by A16Z and Excel at a 1.5.

• 2:53:57Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's go. Give it a bigger hit, John. There we go.

• 2:54:04John Coogan?

  Talk to me about the early, the early beachhead for the company. I feel like LLMs are so generalizable. And yet, go-to-market is so specific. Every vertical industry has slightly different customer service needs. Whether it's a Shopify store that needs access to an inventory management system, or refunds, or Stripe versus a SaaS product. What has been most interesting to you? What's been, where has adoption been the strongest early on?

• 2:54:33Speaker 09

  Yeah, it's a good question. So I would say that with most of the use cases out there, the ones that have had the most impact from AI has been ones where there is a little bit of complexity, right? Where you need the AI to go and take actions for you or look up data for you. And it's kind of adding this extra layer beyond what traditional chatbots have been able to do. Because I'm sure both of you have used chatbots in the past and usually it's a pretty frustrating experience.

• 2:54:59John Coogan?

  It's horrible. Yesterday I was trying to cancel, I was trying to cancel Spectrum Internet at my, at our old office.

• 2:55:07Jordi Hays?

  Good luck, John.

• 2:55:08John Coogan?

  Couldn't do it on the website. This is 100% deliberate by them, by the way. Couldn't do it on the website. Of course, like, you know, this is a crud app. I should be able to click a button and update.

• 2:55:17Jordi Hays?

  You have to wonder if it's intentional.

• 2:55:19John Coogan?

  It's 100% intentional. They broke one password, so I couldn't log in. Finally, they say, hey, text us. And I'm texting with their chatbot. It texts me natural language, but then asks me to click a dropdown for two different options every single time. Finally get through all that flow and they're like, you need to call us. And by the way, we're closed today. It was awful.

• 2:55:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, is that, is that, is that some maybe friction in the sales process where people are like, I get it that you want to make this more frictionless for our customers, but you're going to increase our churn. You know, 10%.

• 2:55:51John Coogan?

  Are there actually trade offs there? I'm super interested.

• 2:55:54Speaker 09

  Yeah, no, that is, that is one use case, right? So to your question, what use cases are good? It is where you need a little bit of complexity because in the old days, the reason why you can't do that today is because it's really easy to game that system.

• 2:56:06John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 2:56:07Speaker 09

  They made a disentry, then people, someone would make a Reddit post about, hey, here's how you actually cancel easily. And everyone will just do it immediately.

• 2:56:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:56:14Speaker 09

  And it impacts the revenue, right?

• 2:56:16John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:56:16Speaker 09

  The nice thing about LMS now and the thing that really unlocks is this level of nuance. You're able to create much more complex flows and sort of situations that are tailored to specific users. Because of that, you're able to cover way more ground, right? So we have customers, for example, that use us to process refunds. We have customers that use us to, you know, either book flights or reorder a credit card or things like that. And that's really powerful because it's just wasn't possible before, right? Before you're kind of in this more, you know, dumb decision tree that you have to get forced down a certain path.

• 2:56:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:54Speaker 09

  And maybe that path is kind of what you want, but you want like something slightly different and you're just forced to go down the path. You get stuck and you get escalated, right?

• 2:57:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:01Speaker 09

  So that's one of the main benefits of these LLMs.

• 2:57:03John Coogan?

  Last question from my side, I know we're going crazy on the timing, but in my previous jobs, when I've hired a really all-star customer service agent, the thing that's always impressed me is when they're able to expand out of their role as just customer service, just doing specific flows and actually turn into sort of a salesperson and actually turning the interaction into customer education or upselling or cross-selling or, you know, hey, yes, you said you wanted to cancel, but I think you want to cancel for a reason that we could actually alleviate by switching you around or giving you discount or doing something like that. Some of that can be deterministic. We've seen this with like, are you sure you want to cancel?

• 2:57:45John Coogan?

  We'll give you 20% off, but the real best customer service agents tend to do it with more touch. Is that something that you're seeing already being able to be handled by LLMs? Do you think that's coming with more agentic workflows? How do you see the role of the customer service agent or human evolving over the next couple of years?

• 2:58:05Speaker 09

  We work with our customers a lot on that exact concept, which is what is the definition of customer experience over time? Because when you start, you're generally working on the low hanging fruit, like, you know, processing transactions or looking up information.

• 2:58:17John Coogan?

  Even FAQ, right?

• 2:58:19Speaker 09

  Right, exactly. But if you end up having a really, really good AI experience, and if you just think about it with the products in your life, right? You're just going to interact with it more. Like, it's not that you're gonna, it's like, oh, I'm done with this. If it's a good experience, you're gonna interact with it a lot more. And that opens up a much broader surface area for what customer experience means. You can start being proactive instead of just reactive. You can start looking at revenue generating use cases like you just mentioned, right? And it doesn't just have to be a cost center, which is what a lot of enterprises look at customer service, right? It's like, oh, is this thing that's not really strategic to us? We're just gonna put it off to the side and try to save as much money as possible.

• 2:58:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:52Speaker 09

  AI is changing a lot of that and, you know, a lot of the customers I use decking on are super excited by this concept that. Hey, if you have a good system there, it almost becomes essentially a concierge for your product, right? It becomes like a new UI that customers can use to interact with you. Because if it's really good and it can do everything, like, yeah, maybe people are just chatting with it instead of using an app or kind of going through a bunch of, you know, dropdowns and stuff like that. So.

• 2:59:17Jordi Hays?

  What's happening in the call, sorry to interrupt, what's happening in the call center BPO market right now? Or is there already pretty massive impact from companies like Decagon, Intercom, Sierra, et cetera?

• 2:59:32Speaker 09

  The, yeah, the call, the call center market is definitely thinking about this space a lot, as you can see, right? When, when AI first came out, a lot of their stocks went down by quite a bit because it's, it's one of the most obvious use cases for, for AI. I would say the, the best BPOs out there are really figuring out how to become AI native and either partnering with solutions like us or spending a lot of effort in, in building their own. I think partnership would probably be the realistic path because when customers, when end customers buy these services, they, they usually kind of see BPOs as a service provider. So there is room for partnership, but that's typically the way, way it'll happen.

• 3:00:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, just the advent of software as a service or just websites in some ways reduce the amount of humans in a sales interaction because you could go through the Shopify checkout by yourself and yet there was still a role for the humans. So I'm sure that will be evolving. But it's exciting stuff. Thank you so much for stopping by.

• 3:00:31Jordi Hays?

  Congrats on the round and congrats on picking up Max Skarnecchia a couple of months ago, star of sales leader. I went to, I went to college with Max. He's an absolute Chad.

• 3:00:43Speaker 09

  He was telling me about you earlier.

• 3:00:46Jordi Hays?

  So shout out to Max. Anyways, thanks for coming on.

• 3:00:48John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:00:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:49John Coogan?

  Cheers. Have a good rest of your day. Next up, we have

• 3:00:53Jordi Hays?

  Yapseed.

• 3:00:55John Coogan?

  Welcome to the studio.

• 3:00:56Jordi Hays?

  Chat has been waiting.

• 3:00:58John Coogan?

  Yapseed, how are you doing?

• 3:01:00Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 3:01:03John Coogan?

  You are on mute, brother.

• 3:01:04Jordi Hays?

  No audio yet.

• 3:01:05John Coogan?

  But I do love the background. We got the weight rack in the back.

• 3:01:09Jordi Hays?

  Is that a weight rack?

• 3:01:11John Coogan?

  Looks like it.

• 3:01:12Speaker 10

  Hello, Test.

• 3:01:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, we can hear you.

• 3:01:14Jordi Hays?

  Testing.

• 3:01:14John Coogan?

  How are you doing?

• 3:01:14Jordi Hays?

  Testing.

• 3:01:15Speaker 10

  Good. I haven't set up my DAC yet, so.

• 3:01:17John Coogan?

  No, you're good.

• 3:01:18Jordi Hays?

  You're good. What's happening?

• 3:01:19Speaker 10

  Let me just ask, let me just check, like, let me just look at something on.

• 3:01:25John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:01:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll give the basic background on you for the audience while you figure that out.

• 3:01:32Jordi Hays?

  The poster who needs no introduction.

• 3:01:34John Coogan?

  He needs no introduction. Founder of Dingboard, a web-based.

• 3:01:42Speaker 10

  Of the hosts of.

• 3:01:46Jordi Hays?

  John and Jordy.

• 3:01:48Speaker 10

  John and Jordy. Hey, how's it going? Nice to meet you guys. My name is Yaseen. Apologies.

• 3:01:53John Coogan?

  Good to meet you.

• 3:01:54Speaker 10

  Hello. Thanks for, thanks for the introduction. I appreciate your time as well. And I'm like, actually like a huge fan of you guys, like someone, someone I, someone I used to work with introduced me to you guys. So I like, found a lot of enjoyment.

• 3:02:06John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 3:02:06Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you on. How have the last few days been?

• 3:02:09Speaker 10

  Um, a little bit stressful, to be honest. Uh, I've slept three hours every single night because posting on Twitter has been so fun. And unfortunately for.

• 3:02:18Jordi Hays?

  Fun or stressful?

• 3:02:19Speaker 10

  Yeah. So both fun and stressful because I can't stop posting and that's not good for me, but I will basically just not stop posting.

• 3:02:27Jordi Hays?

  But if you keep posting the way you have been, could you potentially replace your salaries? You were making in the seven-figure mark. You gotta really ramp it up a little bit.

• 3:02:35Speaker 10

  I used to go on 4chan and these like, people would be like, yeah, I'm like making like a million, like a two mil at these AI companies. I'd be like, no way. There's no way you guys are making two million at these AI companies. And I started making like seven digits at an AI company. I was like, wait, like, these guys weren't actually lying. Like, you actually make that much money at these AI companies? And it's like, pretty fun work too as well. So, yeah. For what's worth, like, I didn't work on AI. I worked on like bugs that really annoyed me on the app. And that's why I joined, actually. So I joined X because there were a lot of bugs that really annoyed me. I fixed quite a lot of them. So I'm pretty happy like with the work I've done.

• 3:03:05Jordi Hays?

  X X is the product I use that I find the most bugs, yet am not just, I don't abandon the product. Like, that's how addicted I am.

• 3:03:12Speaker 10

  That's a super interesting thing. And it's because there's like, when it's a very large app, right? So the scale is huge. And you guys are like right tail users, right? Like, you guys are famous, like, you know, the podcast of the tech pro podcast. Uh, sorry, the, the host of the tech pro podcast, you guys are famous. So the amount of notifications you guys get, the amount of replies you guys get, the amount of DMs that you guys get is an insane amount. You guys are so far into the right tail, but how many people are there like you? That's why it feels buggy for you. For most people, like an engineer who's like creating a test account and like clicking around, it's not, it's not going to be buggy for them. For what it's worth, this is true across all the apps. Power users will always experience a lot of bugs unless they have someone to like, uh, really like, you know, um, talk to them and like, understand what their pain points are.

• 3:03:52Speaker 10

  And, and for what it's worth, X does a really great job. Like, I mean, it's actually remarkable how well X is, is run as, as a company. And like, just working there, I got to learn a lot about like, how to get engineers motivated and like, really like, get shit done. Like, uh, it was, it was awesome work there. It was like, super.

• 3:04:05Jordi Hays?

  How, how, uh, do you wish you had the opportunity? You were, you were working remotely the entire time and, and that was maybe counter to the broader X culture? Do you think it's the type of organization where if you're going to work there, you should just 100% be in the office? Or do you think?

• 3:04:19Speaker 10

  Yeah. So the person who hired me like, was like, dude, like, let me tell you, you're, you're going to have to get to the office. My wife, uh, so at the time I got the offer, in between I was interviewing, I found out that my, my wife was pregnant. So I let them know.

• 3:04:31Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations.

• 3:04:31Speaker 10

  Because, uh, yeah, so, so kid is born now, he's seven months old. So that's by the time I joined, I was like, okay, well, we're, we're gonna, I'm going to work remotely for a bit and then see if I can move. But as the kid got older, my priorities started changing a bit. And I was kind of like considering and talking to my wife about like, different ways I could come to politics. I could totally work remotely like, and be productive. I think after the X and XAI merger, the information attractor got so strong and the talent at XAI, they were like ship, they're shipped so much. Like, I used to be able to read every commit. Like, I used to actually just like sit there on my email and like, click archive over and over again and read every single commit that went into the codebase. But after the XAI people joined, it was just like, literally no way. They're like, you're, and I mean, I told one of the XAI guys this, it was like, uh, you know, when, when you have like, um, dinosaur shit.

• 3:05:16Speaker 10

  And, you know, which was the Twitter code base and you get extreme pressure, which is XAI talent.

• 3:05:22Jordi Hays?

  The diamonds.

• 3:05:22Speaker 10

  You get diamonds. That's how you get diamonds.

• 3:05:25Speaker 10

  And I was so bullish after that. Like they're really like, they're really pushing on it. It's like, uh, really awesome. I want, and I, and honestly, I really wanted to be there. Like I wanted to go. I think it was like, probably I was talking to my manager at the time. I was like, um, can I like maybe come like twice every quarter or something? It was, um, and he was like super, I mean, Flossworth, by the way, like my manager was reading between the lines, totally surprised, totally surprised. He looked super depressed in the meeting. I felt so bad for him. But if you're watching this, it's okay, dude. Don't worry about it. You're, uh, seriously, like some people, like the, probably the best thing, I think, like working at X is like, I got to work with these engineers who've worked at Twitter for so long. And when I joined, I was like, oh, these guys were like, are on boarded onto everything.

• 3:06:03Speaker 10

  But that wasn't the case. Like my manager literally could just figure anything out. It felt like he was already on boarded onto everything, but he could actually just like, read the code, look the logs and figure out what the problem was within 30 minutes. And it didn't matter what it was. I was like, this guy must've been here for years. No, he's like actually just that good. Um, so I mean, I really loved working with him. He was like a really awesome guy. Um, I think it was surprised. Um, I, I guess like, I guess I kind of, kind of guessed what happened to be honest, but it doesn't really matter. Uh, but anyways, like it's been really great working there. I mean, so I was, I was gonna go to visit, actually we were planning to visit Palo Alto. My wife is going, going on a trip with her mom and the baby. And I was like, okay, like that's one week. I know I'm not just a baby. I didn't want to go on a trip because I had work to do.

• 3:06:42Speaker 10

  Not anymore. So probably gonna go and it's gonna be pretty fun. Um, but like, uh, I was gonna, I was planning for that week to go to Palo Alto, but, uh, but also my manager was like, can you come like next week? And I told my wife and she's like, literally like, you know, baby in her arm, like, you know, trying to like scarf food in her mouth for like the few seconds that she had, just like literally dying. So first time parents, right? So we're kind of getting used to it, but yeah.

• 3:07:05Jordi Hays?

  No, it's a crazy, it's a crazy change. What, um, why don't you give some background on what you were doing prior to X ding board? And then I want to talk about the future. Cause that's the.

• 3:07:13Speaker 10

  Okay, sure. So, uh, you guys can, I'm probably going to like work a bit more on ding board. Um, there's a bunch of bugs that I want to fix. I just didn't have the time with my full-time job. So dingboard.com is the best app ever dingboard.com if you want to make a meme in seconds 15 seconds meme.

• 3:07:28John Coogan?

  I was paid user. I was a paid user. I loved it.

• 3:07:31Speaker 10

  Thank you very much for paying.

• 3:07:33John Coogan?

  Actually, very, very good.

• 3:07:34Speaker 10

  You know, like your money actually helped pay for this.

• 3:07:36John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 3:07:38Speaker 10

  John Coogan.

• 3:07:38Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 3:07:39Speaker 10

  2% of this is John Coogan.

• 3:07:40John Coogan?

  No, it was.

• 3:07:41Jordi Hays?

  You should give him naming rights.

• 3:07:42John Coogan?

  It is.

• 3:07:43Jordi Hays?

  Naming rights.

• 3:07:43John Coogan?

  It is actually crazy that that mobile meme making is so in the dark ages. And I feel like you just pulled it forward. I used to have an app called like Photoshop mix or something and it was pretty good. And then they just completely deprecated it. And then they put ads in it, which was I would, I was dealing with. And then they just shut it down and it was pretty good at dropping out the backgrounds and doing. It wasn't great, but it was okay. And then they forced you to go over to Photoshop Express and Lightroom. And so I'm using two different apps and neither of them are good anywhere near what you need. And so I was always, I was always a fan of dingboard, but.

• 3:08:17Speaker 10

  I was actually like in the process when I joined them, I was in the process of rewriting it so that I could deploy on web like applications. And sorry, on iOS and Android. It's actually like, if you guys, if you guys are a nerd, there's, there's something called Sokol. Okay. Sokol is made by the Swedish guy. I think he's retired, kind of. He works three days a week and on the four days that he has, he's working on this cross-platform GL. Graphics library, like, I guess, like transpiler. So you write in one GL language, it'll, it will produce the, the metal version for iOS. It'll produce the version for Android and it'll produce the version for web. So I can use the same code and the code can be basically like, it can basically be the same code base deployed to all apps. And then John Coogan and Jordy can make memes in seconds and get more followers on X.com.

• 3:08:57John Coogan?

  I'm so ready. This is the future I was promised.

• 3:08:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it feels like incredible founder market fit for you to make a tool that helps posters make memes.

• 3:09:05Speaker 10

  I mean, like the reason I made it was because I was like making memes on my software engineering diagramming tool. And then they like started adding a watermark and I was like, fuck this.

• 3:09:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:13Speaker 10

  Fucking ruin my meme making tool. I am going to war.

• 3:09:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:16Speaker 10

  It's been two weeks.

• 3:09:17John Coogan?

  And then I remember, I remember you had, you had sponsors. This is, I love this. There were sponsors when you would open a new dingboard file. It would just have a semi-analysis ad from Dylan.

• 3:09:26Jordi Hays?

  It's still there. It's still there.

• 3:09:27John Coogan?

  Oh, it's still there.

• 3:09:28Speaker 10

  It's still there. So I mean, semi-analysis Dylan Patel, you should guys should go check out his Substack. He's sponsored. sponsor me for three months and he stopped sponsoring me and I was too lazy to remove it.

• 3:09:35John Coogan?

  Oh, he's not on a sub stack, but uh he's actually, he's on passport with Ben Thompson. But anyway, he's the man and we love him and uh but the big, but the big question is like ding board. You're super popular online. Um, why didn't you go and raise like 15 million dollars from a gross.

• 3:09:53Speaker 10

  Dude, man, that sounds so lame, man. Oh, like raising money with managing people. I'm so not down. I'm so not down. I mean, I can serve like literally dude, like this, I have two plugged in right now and I don't have enough power going to my house to like plug this one in, which is why it's unplugged.

• 3:10:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:09Speaker 10

  But like I could serve literally a fucking million people.

• 3:10:11John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. So you're gonna blow your mind. We're gonna blow your mind with this, but sometimes you can raise 15 million and you can do what's called a secondary transaction where some of the money goes directly into your pocket. Oh, you don't have to hire that many people.

• 3:10:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So you could raise like 50 on 500 and it's, you know, take, take 40 million straight to the bank.

• 3:10:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, just, just to kind of set yourself up a cushion. They call it a cushion.

• 3:10:32Speaker 10

  Safety. I feel like, I feel like you want the opposite of that. I would never invest in a founder who asked for that.

• 3:10:38Jordi Hays?

  No, he's just, he's joking, he's joking.

• 3:10:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm joking. Never happens.

• 3:10:42Speaker 10

  You don't, you don't want a founder with money. You want a founder with no options. You want a founder like Roy Lee from Cluey.

• 3:10:47Jordi Hays?

  New dad, new dad or, or new dad. You gotta figure it out. You gotta figure it out.

• 3:10:51Speaker 10

  I've got to figure, I, I need, I need a two acre lawn and a zero turn tractor. That's what I need. I, this is, I need this. I will get it no matter what, maybe the next 10 years. But like Roy Lee, for example, uh CEO, I think of Cluey, who he, he got, you know, kicked out of his university, a disgraced tarred and feather. He has no choice. I wish I got an allocation. I even know he was raising. I would have written, I, I need the money, right? Like I got a kid. I would have written a check without even thinking. I don't even care what the fuck he's doing.

• 3:11:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're, you're a Roy Lee defender.

• 3:11:17John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. But yeah, so, so, so here's about, here's about. I want a number for ding board. Uh, how many users did you get? How much money were you making? Give us some sort of number so we can ring the gong for you.

• 3:11:26Speaker 10

  Peak MRR was like, like, I, I mean, I don't remember, uh, I don't remember. I'm not raising and I don't want funding. Uh, probably like 10K.

• 3:11:34John Coogan?

  10K. Indy developer. Let's hit the gong for you.

• 3:11:40John Coogan?

  Let's go!

• 3:11:42Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, honestly ringing that for your fans too because you're

• 3:11:45Speaker 10

  Yes.

• 3:11:46Jordi Hays?

  You genuinely, you're an internet celebrity and you have real fans. The question, the question I have for you is, because you're a Roy Lee defender.

• 3:11:54Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 3:11:55Jordi Hays?

  What, what, what's your line between balancing, you know, engagement, sort of like rage baiting versus, you know, you sound like much more even keeled, you know, on the show right now.

• 3:12:07Speaker 10

  All my rage baits, here's what makes people so mad. Sure. That I actually believe what I say. I'm not saying it to piss people off. I really believe it. Like, I actually really mean it when I say it, which makes them even more angry. Makes them just like, but like, when you're honest, like, I mean, like, you know, I'm a big believer in like honesty and stuff like that. And like, like, when you're honest, like, you kind of like, also the same amount of haters that you gain, you kind of gained twice as much as like people who like are fans of you. And I think that's what really matters. And sometimes the haters can kind of drown it out. So like, I mean, the reason I'm a big fan of Roy Lee is because he posted that video right around the time I got fired. I got like an email, which was a bunch of like really scary legal words, like non-disparagement. I had like to like Google what this meant. Like, I even know what disparagement meant. I was like, okay, I'm not gonna sign anything. I'm gonna wait for a lawyer. And, and then Roy Lee did this

• 3:12:51Speaker 10

  thing and I realized like, you know what, like Roy Lee's a fucking legend. He's got skin in the game. Like, Roy Lee has to win. So you know what? I'm just gonna fucking be retarded. I'm gonna be a retard. I'm gonna be a retard online and I'm going to have to win. And then I'm going to, I'm obviously capable of winning, but if I have like, you know, like the one thing I don't understand about people like Elon who like work super hard, like super smart and like, you know, Elon's done. He's got like compounds, he's got like, you know, tons of children he could spend all day, all day with. Like, he's got all the toys he could also he want to play with, all the engineers he could talk to. Like, if I was him, I would just like goof around with fun toys, but like, he's actually trying to get to Mars. Like, you know, like, I feel like, I feel like sometimes it's like, so I think about being Elon. I could never be him because I would give up at 20 mil. I'll be like, alright, I'm done, dude. Like, this is me. Like, I did my part. Like, I'm

• 3:13:34Speaker 10

  gonna chill with my zero-turn tractor and my two-acre lawn. So like-

• 3:13:38Jordi Hays?

  Gotta know what you want.

• 3:13:39Speaker 10

  Yeah, exactly. Right? So, but like, I think that's what happens to a lot of founders is they get enough money. Like Palmer Lucky. Palmer Lucky, it was like a chip on her shoulder. He was like, he was like, fucking Jason Calhoun. I'm gonna fucking get that guy. Like, I'm so pissed. I'm gonna do it again. And he did it again. 100% did it again.

• 3:13:54Speaker 10

  By the way, I love Jason. I love Jason. I love Palmer. I love both of them. And you know what? Jason is like the, it's like, it's like you can't have Batman without the Joker, right? You can't have Palmer Lucky without Jason. He's the Joker of tech. He's the Joker for Palmer Lucky. For me, the Joker would be the middle manager who I pissed off by complaining about Android bugs.

• 3:14:16Speaker 10

  We're getting into the story. We're learning what actually happened. Don't worry about it. I never said anything about my, no, we're better about it.

• 3:14:25Speaker 10

  What's next?

• 3:14:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, yeah. So what's, what's next? All in on Dingboard, building out the team?

• 3:14:29Speaker 10

  Okay. So Dingboard is doing great. I'm gonna, you know, keep on growing it and like, try to get more money because I need some land. And here's why I need some land. I've been building things. This is the Dingbot. The Dingbot.

• 3:14:39Jordi Hays?

  The Dingbot.

• 3:14:40Speaker 10

  See this? What does it do? I threw, I 3D printed this. What does it do? This, this is an arm ESP32 attached to a motor driver, attached to a stepper driver. Uh, sorry, sorry, stepper motor. Some 3D printed things that I made with Dingcat, by the way, dingcat.com. It's currently down because I had no time to work on it, but I have like a local host version.

• 3:14:58Jordi Hays?

  Dingcat is coming back, breaking news.

• 3:15:00Speaker 10

  Popsicle sticks no events. Here's, here's the genius of it. Okay. It is. I need cash flow. You know, hardware is hard because you buy an iPhone and like, you have an iPhone. It's like good for like 30 years, right? Yep. But with popsicle stick robots, they'll break in a month. You have to buy a new one. Oh.

• 3:15:17Jordi Hays?

  There we go. There we go.

• 3:15:18Speaker 10

  Get them in the boardroom. You know what? It's like, you have a Dobby the elf robot that's like cleaning the house and like, you know, it costs you 30 bucks. And it makes a mistake. You just go in and just fucking eat it. You like kick it across the room because it's like 30 bucks. You can just buy another one. It's like, it's like, that's the feature.

• 3:15:32Jordi Hays?

  You're not worried about getting, you're not, you're not worried about, you know, uh, getting paper clipped by abusing your Dobby robot?

• 3:15:40Speaker 10

  Uh.

• 3:15:42Jordi Hays?

  Cause it'll come back to get you at some point.

• 3:15:43Speaker 10

  Oh, no, you just program it to be happy that it gets kicked. You know, it's like, Dobby's like, you know, please, you know, please, sir, you just program it, right? Like, oh, this is like a solved problem, by the way, like the, no, we're not going to get run away. I think the real problem with like AI and stuff is like YouTube shorts. Have you seen these kids all like, like I saw a kid like, uh, so, uh, uh, uh, he, uh, he dinner. So with my family, uh, this kid was like at the, uh, trying to get to the bathroom. He's 12 years old and he was on his YouTube shorts and he was like trying to like, find the, the door now. Like clicking or like, like not clicking around, but like, like reaching around, uh, is actually kind of, kind of brutal. But like that, I think that's like the real AI risk for what's worth, like YouTube shorts specifically.

• 3:16:19John Coogan?

  So you're in retirement. Is there anything that could get you to come out of retirement? Could you?

• 3:16:24Speaker 10

  Who said anything about retirement? I was coding yesterday.

• 3:16:27John Coogan?

  Hundred million dollar offer? I mean, to get you back into a mega corporation.

• 3:16:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:32John Coogan?

  Is it gonna take eighty million, a hundred million, hundred and twenty million? What gets you to take the job?

• 3:16:38Speaker 10

  I think like I'd probably like find it really hard to say no. It's like two point five probably like. But I don't think like the companies I would work for have that kind of liquidity hanging out. I mean, I think they do.

• 3:16:46Jordi Hays?

  Well, what are those kind of companies? What are those kind of companies?

• 3:16:49John Coogan?

  I'm talking like.

• 3:16:49Jordi Hays?

  We can run a process right now.

• 3:16:51John Coogan?

  Big tech. So I know you don't want to work there, but there has to be a number. What's the number?

• 3:16:54Jordi Hays?

  All right. I'm gonna just start doing an auction here. Okay, I got a message for five hundred, five hundred. Do I have six hundred? Six hundred. All right, seven hundred.

• 3:17:02John Coogan?

  Our, our, our internal goal was to get you hired on this stream or at least get you to raise fifteen million with five million in secondary.

• 3:17:09Speaker 10

  I could raise money like super easily and like I could also get a job super easy. I mean, I have friends. The thing is like, I'm a very honest, hard worker. Like the places I've worked at, I could, I could go back. Like I have like a really strong network. So I don't really need a job and I mean, I'm not worried about getting a job. But if I wanted to join in terms like for me, mission alignment is super important. Like I really need to like use the product to actually enjoy it.

• 3:17:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:17:28Speaker 10

  So I sold, sold some ding board t-shirts on Shopify and I'm like aligned with like Toby's awesome. And then Cohere, I think is like a really interesting place to work for because they're on the come up. But mostly like, I mean.

• 3:17:38Jordi Hays?

  He's in Canada. He's in Canada.

• 3:17:40John Coogan?

  Hold on. Uh, yeah. Break down Cohere. That, that is not the common narrative. I mean, I love Aiden and I, I think it's incredible founder. But, but, but it does seem like, you know, there's gotta be some sort of like geopolitical strategy there for that company to really play out.

• 3:17:54Speaker 10

  I think, I just think they're based, dude. Like I just, yeah, I just think they're fucking based, yeah.

• 3:17:58John Coogan?

  So it's just pure, pure culture. They'll figure it out. They will find an opportunity.

• 3:18:02Speaker 10

  You know, like it's, it's, it's a lot closer than Palo Alto or like California, like Canada. And I think they're fucking cool. Like.

• 3:18:08Jordi Hays?

  They got it. They need a poster in residence. You could basically, you could a thousand X their, their, their impression.

• 3:18:14John Coogan?

  Do you listen to Death Grips?

• 3:18:16Speaker 10

  Uh, yeah, yeah. It goes, it goes, it goes.

• 3:18:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cause, cause Aiden's a big Death Grips guy, so.

• 3:18:21Speaker 10

  That just bumps Cohere on top of Shopify.

• 3:18:24John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep. Yeah, yeah. He did a, he did an interview in a Death Grips t-shirt. I saw it and I was like,

• 3:18:29Speaker 10

  That's amazing.

• 3:18:29John Coogan?

  This guy's a killer.

• 3:18:31Jordi Hays?

  But what, what's, what's wrong with just becoming a full-time poster, getting a Substack set up, getting a nice?

• 3:18:38Speaker 10

  Uh, I think I'm gonna try to become like an actual billionaire. The dingbot thing is not a joke. I'm actually going to actually do it.

• 3:18:43John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 3:18:43Speaker 10

  And I'm not gonna raise. I think I can do it. I probably can find people to, to do this for. There's a lot of things I'm really interested on the way, which is like, uh, doing like reinforcement learning for like, uh, control of robots, certain types of robots. Uh, I think I figured something out after listening to a popular lucky podcast about don't solve for things in hardware when you can solve them for them in software. And I'm pretty good at software and I'm sure hardware isn't that hard. Clearly, it's not hard enough to start.

• 3:19:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's easy, actually. You, you, you proved with that that it's easy.

• 3:19:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. Explain that with the reinforcement learning for robotics. Are you thinking like you're gonna do stuff in simulation and then transfer the, the now, the knowledge back with reinforcement learning? Are you doing the thing that Dylan Patel was posting about with like the robots on the, you know, on the harnesses, trying to walk and then reusing that as reinforcement learning data? Like what are you actually thinking in terms of reinforcement?

• 3:19:34Speaker 10

  So I don't think like humanoid robots is what I would do. I think I would do robots for things that annoy me. For example, dandelions on my lawn. And I would do whatever is possible. Like talk, I have a pretty good solid network. Like talk to some of the guys from ETH Zurich. Sure. I don't know how to pronounce it.

• 3:19:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:47Speaker 10

  Uh, and just be like, hey, like just give me, feed me the papers and like some shitty Python code. I'll clean up and make good. Um, sorry, researchers, uh, you guys.

• 3:19:54John Coogan?

  This is extremely Matt Friedman coded. He's out of the game. Someone's gotta build a robot that picks up the leaves.

• 3:20:00Speaker 10

  Exactly, exactly what now, because it's like, I'm fucking sick of like going outside and just, you know, just like poking out all these dandelions. I'm, I'm actually so sick and tired of it. And it's so easy to build this. It's like literally 3D printer, like you could, you could even 3D print the wheels. Like you can get like five bucks on AliExpress and ESP32 costs like three bucks. I just impulse buy them. I like get my X ad revenue payout and I just like spend the whole thing on AliExpress. My, my, my house like constantly has like these random AliExpress packages. I just like, maybe build like a Minecraft sorting system in real life. Like, yeah.

• 3:20:31John Coogan?

  I feel like, I feel like if you could build it, you could sell it at Home Depot for like 300 bucks, you know, kind of new.

• 3:20:36Speaker 10

  I could also sell for 25 bucks on subscription and you get a new one every month.

• 3:20:39John Coogan?

  Oh, there we go. Yeah.

• 3:20:41Jordi Hays?

  Cause people are kicking their dobbies.

• 3:20:42Speaker 10

  Yeah. And it's like, it's like if it breaks, it's like, I literally will tell the users, hey, I'm just, you know, a dude and there's a CNC shop here that does wood. Uh, so like they do wood CNC. So I'm going to make the robot chassis out of maple wood because there's a lot of maple here in Ottawa. And I'm going to laser, you know, laser on like made in Ottawa on it, uh, except, you know, modulo the, the motors inside that will be made in China. Until I figure out how to make motors, which shouldn't be that hard. Um, but I guess like the, the, the core insight I have. After doing ding board and like honestly, we're working for a lot of these big tech companies is like, there's a lot of little businesses on the way to something. Like I'm going to try to do this. I'm going to realize like, holy shit. Like all the CAD software fucking sucks. And I'm going to build it because I can. And like, you know, with Gemini 2.5 pro, just like ripping on my credit card.

• 3:21:27John Coogan?

  What about Grok?

• 3:21:28Speaker 10

  Uh, Gemini 2.5 pro is the best model to use for coding. If you write your own coding frameworks, because it's cheaper, uh, it's faster. And it's good enough. Like, I'm not like giving all of my work away. So I don't need a PhD level intelligence because I'm not a PhD level guy. I'm trying to write react. Like it's not that hard to write react. I need a model that can listen to me and understand what I mean. And kind of like doesn't avoids using too many if statements. Stop, just stop using if statements and like, yeah, yeah. So.

• 3:21:55John Coogan?

  Okay. Okay.

• 3:21:55Jordi Hays?

  So, but, but here's the thing, you need, you need, you're, you want to build a bunch of stuff. You need some cash flow. Why not set up, why not set up, you know, some type of subscription? You have a lot of fans. A lot of people want to give you $10 a month. So you can hack forever.

• 3:22:07John Coogan?

  I mean, honestly, that was the ding board subscription that I signed up for. It was like, support this guy who's doing something cool.

• 3:22:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the issue is ding board is so hard to sign up for. How do I even sign up for ding board right now?

• 3:22:17Speaker 10

  Go to dingboard.com.

• 3:22:19Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 3:22:19Speaker 10

  Never, never. Okay. First of all, Jordy, never doubt my conversion levels ever again. I am a conversion. I can convert anything to anything. I am, I am, I am a conversion God. Okay. Go to dingboard.com.

• 3:22:31Jordi Hays?

  You're so good. You're so good. You don't have a buy button because you want to inspire yourself to grind harder.

• 3:22:36Speaker 10

  Go to dingboard.com.

• 3:22:37Jordi Hays?

  Okay. I'm here. I'm here. Sign in first. Do I have to sign in?

• 3:22:40Speaker 10

  I don't even have to tell you what to do.

• 3:22:43Jordi Hays?

  Legend, legend. Alright, I'm signing in. I'm signing in. Okay, I'm here. What do I? Ding scribe. There we go.

• 3:22:51Speaker 10

  You just wanna know what ding scribe even means?

• 3:22:53John Coogan?

  You can't not ding scribe.

• 3:22:55Jordi Hays?

  $12.99 per month. You gotta get your numbers up, dude.

• 3:22:57Speaker 10

  $12.99 per month? Dude, I actually don't have the code. It's like on my server.

• 3:23:01John Coogan?

  You gotta do what Google does. It's 500 a month, but they give you six months at half price. And then it just auto converts up. Yeah, that's the, that's the real ticket.

• 3:23:10Speaker 10

  Or I could just double the price.

• 3:23:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, but the price should be, you know, cheap on day one and they just get more and more. It should go up by 10% every month.

• 3:23:17Speaker 10

  Dude, I'm not doing that. That's some YouTube shorts, fry some kids' brain shit.

• 3:23:22Jordi Hays?

  Alright, I... I'm a ding pro subscriber.

• 3:23:26John Coogan?

  Subscriber.

• 3:23:27Jordi Hays?

  I'm dinged up.

• 3:23:27Speaker 10

  No, dude, you're a ding subscriber. You have to get that, dude. Jordy, never get that wrong again. You're a ding scribe.

• 3:23:32Jordi Hays?

  Ding scribe.

• 3:23:33Speaker 10

  You're part of the crew.

• 3:23:34Jordi Hays?

  I'm ding maxing.

• 3:23:35John Coogan?

  Okay, talk about the rest of your stack. Gemini 2.5 Pro. Are you Cursor guy? GitHub Copilot Cursor?

• 3:23:41Speaker 10

  Never, no.

• 3:23:42John Coogan?

  Never say Cursor.

• 3:23:43Speaker 10

  Okay, I have a custom framework. I've written for Neovim. So basically what it is, is I have a server that creates a facade for all the LLMs that I have. So Claude and, before Gemini was good, Claude and then OpenAI's models. They go down all the time. Like, infrastructure is hard to serve at scale. Like, I don't blame them. It's like, that's a hard problem to solve. So I have like, always, I always have a model available. Like, even if both of them are down, like, I can hit deep seek over an open router, right? Like, it's a facade.

• 3:24:11John Coogan?

  Can't you do that in Cursor by just switching the model router?

• 3:24:16Speaker 10

  Switching, was there a hockey? So for me, it's like, I have a weird, I mean, let me, let me, let me flex on you guys a bit. So this is my keyword.

• 3:24:22John Coogan?

  Flex, flex away. Whoa, there we go.

• 3:24:26Speaker 10

  Nice Nana, by the way. I got a, I got a homie from, from China to make it for me. And so basically, space, space, was it space? I don't even remember. It's all... Space I is a LLM provider, so that's Gemini 2.5 Pro. Space K is Gemini Flash, and it all renders in a single markdown file. And I've created commands for these models. So basically, like, depending on the fence, so three apostrophes, and then there's going to be the command name. So like edit file. It can, I can give, basically give it into syntax to edit a file for me. And then I actually manually.

• 3:25:01John Coogan?

  Is this open source? Like, you know, put their dot files up, like, can I install your setup?

• 3:25:07Speaker 10

  So, no, it's not open source, mostly because people are going to start posting issues and I'm just not interested in fixing them. So I'm just going to do it for myself. I'm like, I'm pulling up the ladder behind me. Like, I'm, you know, I know how much this is.

• 3:25:17John Coogan?

  If it's not open source, you gotta raise for it. It sounds like we got ourselves a real cursor competitor here.

• 3:25:22Speaker 10

  It is a cursor competitor, and it's probably going to kill Cursor if I open source it, but I'm not going to sell for money. I think what's going to naturally happen is like, when people see me do use it, they're going to have ideas of their own, and then they're going to build it for themselves. Like, the whole point of, so it's a NeoVim plugin, kind of. It's like also a server and it plugs into a bunch of, I'm good at software. So, part of the problems with, so NeoVim is great because the software is configurable as a feature. So like, the best software you can get is like software you can read and understand and actually change. The best software for you is software you've written yourself. If something annoys you, you can actually go change it. And that's why I really like to like write my own frameworks. Cursor, I'm sure is a great product, but I like, I'm just so particular about certain things.

• 3:26:05Speaker 10

  Like, for example, like, I want to like implement tree sorter across multiple files and automate adding files to my context. So I have a, I have a file which has a bunch of file paths, and those get added to my context based on the workspace that I'm in. And I manage it manually by like literally going to the file and deleting the lines. And what I want is to automatically create an AST, so an abstract syntax tree, to be able to jump around with an LLM or like train a model to actually go through the AST. And this is all super obvious to me. It's like. Fuck, man, like.

• 3:26:34John Coogan?

  What about, uh, you're gonna make any products in the parenting space?

• 3:26:37Speaker 10

  Oh, yeah. So actually, I have an idea. I had an idea. So I use an e-ink display. By the way, before you try to hack this, I never update the software and I never write anything private on it. So go. It's, I'm gonna, I'm gonna put it public. Um, so I have an e-ink reader slash like tablet. And what I wanted to make is to teach my kid to write, uh, instead of texting him. Uh, I want to make like a kind of like a radio e-ink display, kind of like an etch and sketch, which you can write on. But it syncs to your parents' etch and sketch. So my wife will have one, I will have one, and my kid will have one.

• 3:27:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:08Speaker 10

  And he'll learn how to write because we'll write to each other over, over distances, right?

• 3:27:11John Coogan?

  Right.

• 3:27:12Speaker 10

  I think that's like a really cool idea. So I'm probably gonna build that. If you wanted to make like a gajillion dollars, it's so easy. Just look around and like come up with good ideas and actually just believe that you can do it, like literally just go do it. Like, it's not that hard. It's actually not. Get a 3D printer. Watch some YouTube videos. YouTube is great product. I would love it if they stopped putting shorts because there's so many great videos we can learn. Stop with the shorts. Stop.

• 3:27:33John Coogan?

  Get ready. This is gonna be a YouTube short. We're gonna edit this.

• 3:27:37John Coogan?

  This'll be on TikTok, baby.

• 3:27:40Speaker 10

  Yeah, Minecraft speedrun.

• 3:27:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll put Subway surfers over you, anything. AI slop.

• 3:27:46Jordi Hays?

  How many kids do you want to have?

• 3:27:47Speaker 10

  Uh, so as much as God allows us to have, uh, so just leaving it up to God and, uh, yeah, that's how many kids.

• 3:27:53Jordi Hays?

  Good answer. That's great.

• 3:27:56Jordi Hays?

  What else? What else do you have to say to the people while you're here?

• 3:27:58Speaker 10

  Uh, thanks for doing this podcast, guys. I know how hard.

• 3:28:02Speaker 10

  I know how hard it is to run a podcast and all the tech behind it. Uh, let's just say that. And like, uh, the doing live and stuff, like, it's, it's a pain in the ass. Uh, so keep it up, guys. I know, like.

• 3:28:10John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 3:28:11Speaker 10

  And, and, and the, the, the, the live, the live, uh, the video team at X are like generational talents, like super, super good people, like, so like, just like find someone to like, like find a way to reach out to them. So when you have any issues and like actually talk.

• 3:28:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I didn't fully realize that you were the bug guy until you posted over the last few days. Otherwise, we would have been hammering you with messages every single day, but this has been great. Come, come back on whenever you want to talk about your projects.

• 3:28:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'd love to just hang out and chat.

• 3:28:36Speaker 10

  Yeah, thanks. I really appreciate you guys. And, uh, yeah, so keep it up. Thanks.

• 3:28:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're, we're excited and, and I'm excited to be Dingmaxing. Just offer, offer a premium tier like, I don't know, like 10 grand a month or something like that. And maybe we become, you know.

• 3:28:48Speaker 10

  Oh, I mean, if you guys want an ad space, I'll sell you right now, like spit handshake. If you want to put an ad on Dingboard, your podcast, I'll, uh, let's say.

• 3:28:59Speaker 10

  12 grand.

• 3:29:00Jordi Hays?

  12 grand, okay. We'll talk to our CFO.

• 3:29:03Speaker 10

  Alright, alright, alright.

• 3:29:04Jordi Hays?

  And our CFO, our CFO will talk to your CFO.

• 3:29:07John Coogan?

  But can we get the semi-analysis deal where it's perpetual? It's 12 grand once, so we get it forever? Because what if you sell this to a billionaire?

• 3:29:16Jordi Hays?

  Is it a one-time?

• 3:29:17John Coogan?

  It's a great option. There's a lot of upside here.

• 3:29:19Speaker 10

  It depends on how good your podcast is.

• 3:29:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:29:21Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay.

• 3:29:22John Coogan?

  Well, we're gonna keep working on it. Hopefully Ding Board keeps growing for the next decade and we can be massive together.

• 3:29:27Speaker 10

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 3:29:28Jordi Hays?

  We're excited to follow.

• 3:29:30John Coogan?

  Awesome, we'll talk to you soon.

• 3:29:31Jordi Hays?

  Godspeed.

• 3:29:32John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Bye. Next up, we have to talk to 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, and a 24/7 concierge service.

• 3:29:46Jordi Hays?

  Yep, Seen should get a wander.

• 3:29:47John Coogan?

  He should. He's gonna be traveling around interviewing at all the top companies. Wander would be a great choice for him. We have had a great show. We were gonna play you an interview that we did earlier today with Shervin Pishvar, but there are some security issues unfortunately, and so we're working to potentially blur the background and we will get you that interview as soon as we possibly can, but security.

• 3:30:09Jordi Hays?

  Comes first.

• 3:30:10John Coogan?

  It comes first. And so we will obviously relay some of the key takeaways, and honestly, it's such a developing story. I feel like already the story has moved and we should just have him back on again soon from a more secure location and make sure that everything is above board. But thank you so much for watching.

• 3:30:30Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for tuning in.

• 3:30:31John Coogan?

  And we will talk to you tomorrow. Have a great day.

• 3:30:34Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:30:35Speaker 10

  Bye.