Claude Sonnet 4.5 Reactions, David Senra Live in The Ultradome | Dylan Field, Adam Foroughi, Mike Krieger, Jeff Weinstein, Adam Draper, James Hawkins, Erik Bernhardsson

(01:27) - Meta AI App Community Reactions (19:45) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (35:22) - Stargate Project Reactions (40:33) - Claude Sonnet 4.5 Reactions (43:54) - Mike Krieger, co-founder and former CTO of Instagram, is now the Chief Product Officer at Anthropic, an AI company based in San Francisco. In the conversation, he discusses the evolution of AI models, emphasizing the importance of balancing eagerness and laziness in AI responses to enhance user experience. He also highlights the significance of AI's ability to maintain coherence over extended tasks, noting that longer task consistency builds user trust and enables more complex applications. (01:16:08) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:29:04) - Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma, discusses the integration of AI into design workflows, emphasizing its potential to enhance designers' capabilities by automating routine tasks and enabling more creative exploration. He highlights the importance of balancing AI assistance with human creativity, ensuring that AI serves as a tool to augment rather than replace the designer's role. Field also reflects on the evolving landscape of design, noting that as AI technologies advance, designers will need to adapt by embracing new tools and methodologies to stay at the forefront of the industry. (01:57:48) - Jeff Weinstein, a product leader at Stripe, discusses the integration of agentic commerce into ChatGPT, enabling users to discover and purchase products directly within the chat interface. He highlights the collaboration between Stripe and OpenAI to develop the Agentic Commerce Protocol, an open standard that allows businesses to make their checkouts compatible with AI agents, facilitating seamless transactions initiated by AI. Weinstein also mentions the introduction of a shared payment token API, which enables secure processing of agentic payments across different payment processors. (02:07:45) - Adam Draper, a fourth-generation venture capitalist and co-founder of Boost VC, discusses the firm's recent $87 million fundraising success , highlighting their commitment to investing in pioneering deep tech startups. He shares his personal experience of flying a jetpack, emphasizing Boost VC's dedication to turning science fiction concepts into reality. Draper also outlines the commercialization strategies for jetpack technology, including defense applications like boarding ships and search-and-rescue missions, and expresses enthusiasm for emerging sectors such as biotechnology and health tech. (02:15:49) - James Hawkins, co-founder and co-CEO of PostHog, discusses the company's recent $1.4 million Series E funding round and their developer-focused analytics tools designed to help businesses build better products. He emphasizes PostHog's strategy of offering a wide range of integrated tools to provide a comprehensive view of customer data, differentiating them from competitors. Hawkins also highlights the company's approach to product development, which involves small, autonomous teams working on multiple products simultaneously, fostering rapid iteration and responsiveness to customer needs. (02:24:45) - Erik Bernhardsson, founder and CEO of Modal Labs, discusses how his company provides infrastructure tailored for AI applications, addressing the limitations of traditional tools like Kubernetes and Docker. Modal Labs focuses on serving startups and later-stage companies with a usage-based pricing model, charging per GPU hour. Bernhardsson highlights the inefficiencies in GPU utilization, noting that many companies overcommit resources, and emphasizes Modal's approach of scaling up and down to ensure clients pay only for actual usage. He also shares his perspective on the GPU market, predicting Nvidia's dominance in the near term but expressing optimism about future competition from alternatives like Google's TPUs and AMD. Additionally, he critiques the complexity of CUDA programming and anticipates the development of more user-friendly solutions in the coming years. (02:32:07) - Adam Foroughi, CEO and co-founder of AppLovin, discusses the company's origins in 2012, focusing on providing advertisers with revenue-based pricing models for mobile game advertising. He highlights the challenges faced in securing venture capital funding, noting skepticism about competition from tech giants like Google and Facebook. Foroughi also emphasizes the importance of AI in enhancing advertising effectiveness and the company's commitment to maintaining a lean, high-performing team culture. (03:00:11) - David Senra is the creator of the Founders Podcast, where he delves into the lives and strategies of history's most successful entrepreneurs. In this conversation, he discusses his collaboration with Rob Moore and Andrew Huberman on a new show, emphasizing their shared commitment to quality and innovation. Senra also reflects on his approach to podcasting, highlighting his dedication to delivering concise, impactful content that respects the audience's time and attention. 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/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com fal - https://fal.ai Privy - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai 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://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPN. Today is Monday, September 29th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  The Temple of Technology. The Fortress of Finance. The Capital of Capital.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  A lot of people have been asking, was the TBPN Ultra Dome built by human beings? It just looks like something that humans don't know how to build anymore.

• 0:21Jordi Hays?

  Kind of like a boss civilization.

• 0:23John Coogan?

  It's possible. We haven't confirmed it. We're not commenting.

• 0:25Jordi Hays?

  It just appeared here one day.

• 0:27John Coogan?

  It's, I'm just, I'm, I'm just asking questions.

• 0:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 0:31John Coogan?

  Just want to dig into it a little bit further.

• 0:33Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 0:33John Coogan?

  So, you know, that's why we have free speech.

• 0:35Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people have been afraid to ask that question.

• 0:38John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 0:38Jordi Hays?

  And we're here saying with you, we also.

• 0:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, we also have questions.

• 0:43Jordi Hays?

  It showed up one day. We went, we went off the air.

• 0:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 0:46Jordi Hays?

  We showed up the next day. There was this.

• 0:48John Coogan?

  I couldn't.

• 0:48Jordi Hays?

  Dome shape, almost a monument.

• 0:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:51Jordi Hays?

  To entertainment and capitalism.

• 0:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:53Jordi Hays?

  Just appeared overnight.

• 0:54John Coogan?

  Where'd this come from?

• 0:55Jordi Hays?

  Where did that come from?

• 0:56John Coogan?

  We're getting some claps.

• 0:59Jordi Hays?

  Team is fired up. Best day of the week. Most underrated day of the week.

• 1:02John Coogan?

  Built by humans. Ramp.com.

• 1:04Jordi Hays?

  True.

• 1:04John Coogan?

  Time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more, all in one place. Uh, most underrated day of the week.

• 1:10Jordi Hays?

  Monday is potentially the most underrated day of the week.

• 1:13John Coogan?

  It really is. You're fresh.

• 1:14Jordi Hays?

  So much excitement, optimism. You're back. You've never been more back than on a Monday. First day of the work.

• 1:20John Coogan?

  Friday is the day of being over. It is so over.

• 1:23Jordi Hays?

  It's so over. And Monday, we're so back.

• 1:25John Coogan?

  You're so back. Yes, it's perfect. Uh, well, uh, continuing, we're, we're, we're going to talk about Dorkesh on Sutton, some AI stuff, some other AI stuff, the AI, Meta AI app, uh, vibes, uh, people, the reaction, I think that this came out on Thursday and then the reaction happened on Friday, for the most part. We talked about it a bunch, uh, debated it. Naval said.

• 1:48Jordi Hays?

  Fired shots.

• 1:49John Coogan?

  Creation without a creator is meaningless. And I think it's an interesting post because I kind of disagree with this. So I think when I, when I open up the Meta AI slop app, the vibes app. They shouldn't have called it slop. It would have been so funny.

• 2:03Jordi Hays?

  It would have been.

• 2:04John Coogan?

  It would have been.

• 2:05Jordi Hays?

  Or a trough.

• 2:06John Coogan?

  Trough would have been good, too. Just lean it all the way.

• 2:09Jordi Hays?

  Our new feed called trough.

• 2:12John Coogan?

  It's already a feed. You're feeding.

• 2:15John Coogan?

  But so when I open the app and I scroll it, I I don't think it's it's creatorless. Like, I think that there is a creator. It's David Holes. David Holes is the one that.

• 2:24Jordi Hays?

  It's a feed with one creator.

• 2:26John Coogan?

  One creator. And I'm down to look at it for like 10, 15 minutes. And then I'm like, kind of done. I didn't feel the urge to open it up over the weekend for any other reason than research and just understanding the platform a little bit more. I wanted to know if you got past the first, like, pre-scripted 15 shorts. Or I guess vibes is what they're calling them. Like, would I see UGC? Would I see other stuff? Would I see people in my network? Like, would the for you algorithm have taken hold by then? I didn't notice anything like that. There were a couple of accounts that were like, this person's clearly into like monsters. So they do like really big monsters. Or like this person does like POV dogs driving cars. Which honestly was awesome. And I think.

• 3:09Jordi Hays?

  Monkeys on jet skis, dogs driving.

• 3:12John Coogan?

  Dogs driving cars. Yeah, although some of the renders were really rough where it was like, the dog was at the wheel. But then the front of the car was behind the dog. So it like, didn't get it right. But it was still fun. And it was funny. I noticed it was what the one that I enjoyed the most was one of a golden retriever. Like, jumping and chasing the camera with this wave going over it. But what made it really special was that the song that was paired with that was. Who let the dogs out? Who, who, who, who, who let the dogs out? And it made me realize that, like, there is a little bit of a game mechanic to the app. Where if you have a song that you like, you can now go and basically direct a short form music video for it.

• 3:54John Coogan?

  And so if there's a song that you think is fun, you can go into the Meta Vibes app and start with the song in mind. Instead of layering the song at the end, the default flow is image prompt. Animate it, then add a song.

• 4:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:08John Coogan?

  But I think that it might be more fun to flip it around and think about this as like I'm curating a playlist almost.

• 4:14Jordi Hays?

  Music visualizer.

• 4:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, music visualizer.

• 4:17Jordi Hays?

  Which went incredibly hard when I was 10 years.

• 4:20John Coogan?

  Exactly. The Winamp visualizer, just to put that thing on or iTunes had one for a while. Some of them were reactive to the music, which is cool. That one was cool. And, and I think that there's something there where I thought it was, mostly I thought it was interesting that everyone is saying like, this is a creation without a creator. This is pure AI. Even, even Meta is marketing this app as there's noth- there's nothing human about it. It's just the AI content.

• 4:46Jordi Hays?

  Except the music.

• 4:46John Coogan?

  Except the music. There's no AI music. It's all iconic licensed songs from like the most recognizable musicians in the world. You can actually just go put a Taylor Swift song over something, um, which is crazy to think about from a music.

• 5:01Jordi Hays?

  Can you generate music too?

• 5:03John Coogan?

  No. You can't generate music. Of course, there are some songs that are AI generated that have like snuck into the Instagram library.

• 5:09Jordi Hays?

  Probably on Spotify.

• 5:10John Coogan?

  Cause you can use any song from the Instagram music library.

• 5:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:13John Coogan?

  So people will put stuff up there and then you can pull that in. But by and large, the flow is generate a mid-journey image, animate it with Black Forest so that it has a little bit of motion and then pick a real song from the real library.

• 5:27Jordi Hays?

  Black Forest, which just announced a new fundraiser.

• 5:30John Coogan?

  Four billion.

• 5:30Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 5:31John Coogan?

  European company.

• 5:32Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Let's give it up for the German artificial intelligence industry.

• 5:37John Coogan?

  So.

• 5:38Jordi Hays?

  We got a comment in the chat that said, I liked the table when it was messier. We did, we did go to a round table. We cleaned it up a little bit. I'm sure it'll get messier.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, don't worry.

• 5:48Jordi Hays?

  So don't worry, we're working on it.

• 5:49John Coogan?

  The mess comes back over time. Well, well.

• 5:51Jordi Hays?

  It's relentless.

• 5:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 5:53Jordi Hays?

  It's relentless.

• 5:54John Coogan?

  So, yeah, I mean, I, I'm still, I'm still unclear about like, will this be successful? A lot of the takes of the timeline were presuming that it will have very low churn and be so good, it's irresistible. Like it could just have high churn. It could just be a product that no one likes and everyone tested it out and they're like, yeah, okay, I'm done with that.

• 6:14Jordi Hays?

  And Meta's no stranger to launching flops.

• 6:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's happened a number of times with Facebook camera.

• 6:20Jordi Hays?

  Trivia.

• 6:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, they've had clones of a lot of things.

• 6:22Jordi Hays?

  Even threads arguably probably wouldn't have worked if they couldn't have just continued to push people to the app and grow it steadily using the existing distribution they had.

• 6:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think that, you know, if I if I'm trying to get serious about a take, I would probably land on they have the flywheel down, it works because you can already share vibes to Instagram, to your story and whatnot, and I feel like there's going to be a flow back and forth and they will get that to work and they will actually inject them back and forth. And even if it lands as like a tab on Instagram, like it will be adopted. But it was just funny that everyone was like, this is, there's 0% chance this doesn't work. And it's like, there is risk to these things. Anyway, I thought it was interesting. It made me think like, I was listening to the David Senra interview with Daniel Ek.

• 7:10Jordi Hays?

  I think one interesting thing is if they had added all of the functionality and vibes, the creation tools into Instagram, it would have been even more controversial.

• 7:19John Coogan?

  I think so. I think so.

• 7:20Jordi Hays?

  They would have had to deal, like, this is an experiment that, you know, basically, it's a it's a sandbox that they can do anything in, low stakes, they can get users using it, they can get some feedback, get some information, test stuff out without saying, we're launching this into Instagram, which has millions of creators that are going to feel super strongly about it. They might start saying, they might start campaigning to like, keep it, let's keep AI off Instagram, which they don't want.

• 7:45John Coogan?

  This is keeping AI off.

• 7:47Jordi Hays?

  AI content will, you know, I would I would assume, you know, it's only so long until every piece of content on Instagram has some AI element to it, whether it's just editing or enhancement or whatever.

• 8:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So the other the other interesting takeaway, I was talking to, I was listening to David Senra interview Daniel Ek, the founder of, CEO of Spotify, and I was almost thinking like, is this more of a Spotify competitor than a than an Instagram competitor? It's so music driven. Should should Spotify have an answer to this? Should they buy something similar? Should they do a similar deal with Mid Journey so that anyone who listens to a song can generate imagery and then the most liked imagery can become kind of that cover art and you can have like your community? You were kind of saying like, that's not the way short form video works, but.

• 8:39Jordi Hays?

  I think with Spotify. They also have the benefit of the best songs end up having music videos which are the artist's interpretation of a visualization of the music.

• 8:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:50Jordi Hays?

  And it's gonna be.

• 8:52John Coogan?

  Do you think that's the way it always works, though? I feel like sometimes they.

• 8:56Jordi Hays?

  But they also Spotify has also done something where they basically take an asset from the artist that's not a music video.

• 9:02John Coogan?

  Animated.

• 9:02Jordi Hays?

  It's like a gift.

• 9:03John Coogan?

  Loop it, yeah, exactly.

• 9:04Jordi Hays?

  And I think that's smart.

• 9:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:06Jordi Hays?

  Because I don't, I don't think that people are primarily consuming music these days by, you know, setting up just, I, I remember being a kid and being entertained at a desktop Macintosh.

• 9:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:18Jordi Hays?

  Just putting on the iTunes visualizer and just hanging out being, being like, this is awesome.

• 9:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:23Jordi Hays?

  But I don't, I don't wa, I, if I'm putting on music, I'm not like wanting to watch the music anymore as an adult.

• 9:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, I almost, I, I almost view the vibes app right now for like, as a music discovery tool. Go and swipe a little bit, find some interesting songs, add those to a Spotify playlist, go listen to the real songs.

• 9:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but the reason that that's not a hit consumer product is because people can just easily discover music in every other short form video feed.

• 9:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's what you were saying.

• 9:50Jordi Hays?

  That's our TikTok already functions.

• 9:52John Coogan?

  TikTok works that way.

• 9:52Jordi Hays?

  As a music discovery engine.

• 9:54John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, well, if you wanna livestream some music, get on Restream, one livestream, thirty plus destinations, multi-stream and reach your audience wherever they are. But the big news over the weekend was Dwarash Patel dropped a banger of an episode with none other than Richard Sutton, the touring award winner, who is essentially the Nobel Prize in artificial intelligence, um, and the, and the author of The Bitter Lesson, the blog post that says that, uh, again and again in artificial intelligence, um, there is a, there's an inclination for seeking out a new algorithm, a new design, a new architecture, but in fact, progress comes from scaled compute.

• 10:38John Coogan?

  And so that was used to underwrite massive investments in, uh, data centers, massive capex.

• 10:44Jordi Hays?

  Continued investments.

• 10:46John Coogan?

  Continued investments. A lot of people, I mean, uh, the Andreessen Horowitz partnership has, has been throwing around, we are better, better lesson pilled, a lot of people are better, better lesson pilled. Uh, that's certainly been a rallying cry for the AI capex build out. But, uh. Mr. Bitterless now sounds exactly like Gary Marcus. According to Gary Marcus, Gary says, of course, he's been a long, longtime LLM hater or LLM criticizer. He says astonishing, it's been a long, hard, unpleasant road, but one by one, every major figure in AI has come around to the critique that LLMs, of LLMs that I began giving here in 2019. Yan Le Cun was first, Demis Hassabis sees it renowned, two touring award winner, Richard Sutton is now on board. And Richard Sutton says,

• 11:31John Coogan?

  you were never alone, Gary, though you were the first to bite the bullet, to fight the good fight, and to make the argument well, again and again, for the limitations of LLMs, I salute you for this good service. And so I think that there's something interesting going on where we heard about like the infinity story, right? This idea that there's a few firms that are working on AGI, superintelligence, God, and if they achieve it, it's the last innovation, the final investment, all future companies will be, all future economic value will be birthed from the AI supercomputer. You can finally hang up your Patagonia vest, you'll be done, you'll retire as a capital allocator who got into the correct final deal. If you get a slice, if you're, you'll

• 12:12John Coogan?

  be good. It was a little bit sloppy as deal logic, but it was directionally correct. Like, if you, LLMs were a useful technology, there were compounding businesses to be built on top of them and investing in them, even at unicorn valuations in 2013, pencils out pretty easily now. But many in AI didn't like Sutton's take. My interpretation, my interpretation of his claim is that biological systems don't learn purely through imitation, whereas LLMs do. His example was like, if you think about a bird that's learning to sing a bird song, the, the bird doesn't necessarily need to study the way that the mother bird moves the vocal chords.

• 12:55Jordi Hays?

  That's part of it.

• 12:56John Coogan?

  It's more just listening to the song and trying to imitate the output and then the internal muscle movements.

• 13:02Jordi Hays?

  Learning through its own actions.

• 13:03John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. And, and now the-

• 13:06Jordi Hays?

  Like when I take this thing and I put it in my mouth, I get sustenance.

• 13:10John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. And so

• 13:12Jordi Hays?

  It's not just watching the mother bird

• 13:14John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 13:14Jordi Hays?

  Do the same thing and just realize, hey, maybe I should do that thing.

• 13:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so a lot of the, a lot of the AI researchers are kind of like, and, and this is why the, there was this discussion of like, were Sutton and Dorkesh like talking past each other? Because a lot of people in AI research tend to view the, the internal structure of the neural network, the training of the weights as exactly the same process. You are just mimicking the output tokens and the internal logic, like the muscle movements that create the bird song are learned the, in the same like random way as the actual bird does. And so there's the continuing to be this debate over like, are we on this, are we on the correct path?

• 13:56John Coogan?

  But it kind of doesn't matter in the, in the broad sense of the market because you can just put aside the super intelligence AGI question and just start underwriting the, the companies as just normal businesses. Uh, tokens clearly have value. Anyone who's used an LLM to answer a question understands this. They also have a cost. And if you balance those, you make a profit. So we're back to econ 101. And so in the real world, the question is like data center overbuild. Uh, the bitter lesson said, just keep scaling, compute, and you will always see improved performance. At least that's how it was interpreted. Uh, but exponential cost growth for linear gains doesn't always math out.

• 14:37John Coogan?

  If someone says, we're going to spend 10 times as much money training this next model and it's going to be 5% better. It's like, okay, well, maybe we don't need to do that one. Like, there might be

• 14:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, and again, if you, if you look at the leaders of various hyperscalers,

• 14:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 14:52Jordi Hays?

  They are not concerned about ROI. They're concerned about winning.

• 14:55John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Uh, and so this like landed on Oracle's plate. People were worrying about Oracle's 500% debt to equity ratio would search, would surface from this JP Morgan note.

• 15:09John Coogan?

  Now, the interesting takeaway is like, it's pretty clear the debt is on the horizon. Microsoft has a lower cost of capital than the US government right now. And so like, the ability to borrow is extreme.

• 15:21Jordi Hays?

  People trust Satya.

• 15:22John Coogan?

  Yep, yeah, and, and, and people are just ready to, in, to buy debt in these projects. Like, that's just a thing that's gonna happen. But you can't overreact to this viral chart. There's a, like, Oracle has a hundred billion dollars in debt. It's an eight hundred billion dollar company. And they produced eleven billion in cash flow last year. And so, the question is more about servicing of the debt than true book equity to debt ratios. McDonald's actually has negative shareholder equity because they've been doing so many buybacks that they bought back all the equity. And so, you can get really weird, like, divide by zero errors. And I would expect that we start to see those, especially at Oracle if they continue.

• 16:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and that's the thing with Oracle, you know, Ellison just owns so much. You know, he's bought, effectively bought back so much of the company.

• 16:07John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, and so, I don't know that that chart is like the, the red flag that people thought it was. Doug O'Laughlin had a good post about this. He said, "The chart weirdly makes no sense and doesn't matter. Time for the feed to relearn buyback math impacting book value." And it is, it is somewhat complicated, so maybe that's econ 102. But basically, it feels like, as we get closer to the efficient frontier of AI capex, risk does increase because you have that risk of doing the hundred billion dollar training run and only getting five percent gains. But ROI is becoming increasingly predictable as we move away from the infinity narrative. And even if there is an overbuild of infrastructure, there will be immense benefits to America broadly.

• 16:51John Coogan?

  This is the real American dynamism story, in my opinion. Multi-billion dollar projects are moving through government approvals, massive structures are being built in America again, and there's a real chance that we will see per capita energy increase.

• 17:02Jordi Hays?

  What's your read on Satya pulling back on, you know, obviously, he's scaling capex, but not being as aggressive as some of the other players? Do you think he's happy to let the industry overbuild and then come in later and say, "I'll take that off you for, you know, pennies on the dollar," or some? Some fraction of what it actually costs to produce.

• 17:25John Coogan?

  I think so. I mean, that was certainly the lesson from the.

• 17:29Jordi Hays?

  Or another way to look at it is, you know, I control a huge amount of the demand for tokens through the Microsoft Office Suite.

• 17:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:37Jordi Hays?

  In, you know, tokens in the workplace.

• 17:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:39Jordi Hays?

  And I'll just come in and I'll just do deals once this infrastructure is built off my balance sheet.

• 17:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:46Jordi Hays?

  And I'll get the benefit of it.

• 17:46John Coogan?

  I would love to know how Satya processed the dot com boom. Because we always go back to that story of there was a massive overbuild of fiber. Everyone thought that the internet was going to be this overnight revolution. It took 20 years to really squeeze all the value out of it, right? But Google was a massive beneficiary of the overbuild in fiber. Because they, they were able to go snap up a bunch of cheap fiber and build a massive consumer internet company on top of it.

• 18:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:17John Coogan?

  So I, I don't know exactly what, what, how did, how did that impact Azure? How did that impact Microsoft? Because if Azure was able to build a very serious player in a three-party oligopoly in, in cloud, basically between AWS, GCP and Azure. And so if Satya is saying, look, in the future, the, there will be a consumer internet company, that's OpenAI. We have a stake in that and they're the new Google. And then there will be cloud providers that are token factories. And I'll need to get in that market and I'll need to make sure that Azure is monetizing those tokens effectively. And Azure has data centers, they also lease data centers. We will adopt the same position, the same strategy.

• 18:58John Coogan?

  And so we will skip on the overbuild, skip on the high-risk stuff, but eventually buy in at prices that make sense. You could be looking at it through a very financial lens, but.

• 19:06Jordi Hays?

  Satya joined Microsoft in 1992. So he got to see the full cycle.

• 19:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 19:12Jordi Hays?

  In his first decade at the company.

• 19:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, and he was the, I mean, he's remembered as like the architect of the cloud transition. And Ballmer was the one who like missed mobile and missed cloud. But, you know, the company has done really well now, so maybe that was.

• 19:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:29John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe if the risk, if it like, what would a worse Ballmer look like? Well, it could have been someone who put the business like out of, who like bankrupted the company by taking too much debt and going too long into the dot com boom and getting over leveraged and really losing the company.

• 19:45Jordi Hays?

  We should read this post by Anyan Iyer. He says, quote, "This feels like 1999 again." He goes, "No, it doesn't. And I was there. I joined Cisco in January 2000 as a co-op, then full-time in May 2001. At the time, Cisco was the hottest infra company on the planet, riding the wave of the dot com boom. But by the time I started full-time, the crash had already begun. A month in, my manager was laid off. The party was over. Entire industries vanished. Here's what actually happened. One, the users weren't ready. Most people were on dial-up. Mobile didn't exist. E-commerce logistics were immature or non-existent. Everyone had ideas, but the end-user wasn't there. Two, capital vanished. The IPO window shut. Venture funding dried up. Startups that depended on future growth couldn't raise

• 20:30Jordi Hays?

  and died fast. Metrics were fake. Companies like Cosmo, Webvan, Pets.com burned cash chasing usage that never converted."

• 20:39John Coogan?

  I was a Webvan user.

• 20:41Jordi Hays?

  We see some companies burning cash.

• 20:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, I got, I got some groceries delivered when I was 10.

• 20:47Jordi Hays?

  Back, back with Webvan?

• 20:48John Coogan?

  With Webvan.

• 20:49Jordi Hays?

  No way. They were so right and just...

• 20:52John Coogan?

  There was another company called Homegrocer that was more popular in Pasadena where I grew up, and they got acquired by Webvan. And I'm pretty sure the founders of, of Homegrocer probably did very well because they probably got some crazy buyout. Hopefully they didn't take too much stock.

• 21:06Jordi Hays?

  Things like LTV, CAC, wasn't common enough vernacular. That's crazy.

• 21:10John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. That was a new concept. We were inventing arithmetic.

• 21:16Jordi Hays?

  Four, infra got overbuilt. Telecoms like Global Crossing and WorldCom spent billions on fiber and data centers. The demand never showed up. Cisco's customers disappeared, not because they lost, but because their customers died. Five, business models were broken. Most dot-coms were never real businesses. They scaled early and hoped revenue would catch up. It didn't. Now look at today. OpenAI, Meta, Google, XAI, Microsoft are all scrambling to keep up. Jensen put it plainly. Every hyperscaler has realized they dramatically underbuilt.

• 21:43Jordi Hays?

  Every forecast we've seen has been too low. We're not building for speculation. We're building for active workloads.

• 21:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 21:50Jordi Hays?

  So no, this isn't 1999. This isn't pets.com IPO-ing on vibes. We are not in a hype cycle. We are in a compute bottleneck.

• 21:58John Coogan?

  And this certainly, I mean, this feels real if you've used the apps. Like, there have been multiple times over the past few years where I've just had LLM queries fail, even though I'm paying

• 22:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:10John Coogan?

  hundreds of dollars. And so, like, maybe the cacti LTV math is a little bit iffy because what's the margin? Am I, am I overusing it with the deep research?

• 22:23Jordi Hays?

  During dot com. I just use Webvan to deliver groceries and it took 48 hours and all the food was rotten. Like, how do I short this stock?

• 22:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, that was happening in Wall Street memos, I guess, like Mary Meeker reports, basically. But yeah, I, I think this, so he's quoting the Spencer Hawkins chart of the, of the AI bubble now versus the dot com bubble. And if you're apophenic and you, and you like a pattern, you will love this chart. I think we have to commit ourselves to revisiting this exact chart a year from now and seeing how closely does it keep tracking? Because it could be wildly different in either direction, right?

• 23:10Jordi Hays?

  Like, that's Why don't we just make a live tracker?

• 23:13John Coogan?

  We should.

• 23:13Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, Tyler's not in the studio today. He had a

• 23:17John Coogan?

  He's traveling.

• 23:17Jordi Hays?

  Travel, but we should just make a live tracker of

• 23:21John Coogan?

  Yes, of this chart and see

• 23:23Jordi Hays?

  Follow along.

• 23:23John Coogan?

  How, how are we actually tracking to this? Or are we, are we diverging at some point?

• 23:27Jordi Hays?

  There was another post that was going pretty viral.

• 23:29John Coogan?

  Before we cover this, let me tell you about Privy, wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. What was the other post?

• 23:41Jordi Hays?

  The other post is the, from Steven Fiorio. He went pretty viral, 2 million views yesterday. Said the AI doesn't, the AI bubble doesn't exist. The bears are wrong. Time and time again, I've turned on a major financial news network, listened to a financial podcast or seen a post on X. Indicating that we're in an AI bubble, the rapid surge in AI-related investments and some stock valuations have created a narrative that the current environment is similar to the dot-com crash of the early 2000s. The main arguments I've seen are that the current euphoria outpaces real-world results, valuations are detached from fundamentals, there's a lack of ROI, companies are hitting infrastructure and resource constraints, and the escalating costs are creating unsustainable business models. The bare narrative almost always

• 24:26Jordi Hays?

  leads back to the idea that AI stocks and startups are trading at premiums that resemble past bubbles and are being driven by FOMO rather than profitability. It doesn't help that users on X are posting triple and quadruple-digit gains that are often hundreds of thousands or millions in profits from their actual accounts. Some accounts on X are twisting the dagger deeper as they're posting gains from naked options or call spreads, which have finance professionals screaming into thin air as some of the underlying equities are unprofitable and pre-revenue businesses. Remember, there was that company Fermi that is going to IPO.

• 24:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 24:58Jordi Hays?

  They have a lease to a piece of land in Texas. They're planning to go out around $14 billion, and they're about nine months old. So I think that it's very fair, you know, there can be distortions, things happening in the market that don't exactly make sense.

• 25:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:23Jordi Hays?

  While simultaneously, there being some businesses with strong underlying fundamentals and incredible opportunities that are trading at relatively fair multiples.

• 25:32John Coogan?

  Yep. Scrawley had a good take on this, too. He said, "I know there are some questions about this, including some smart people, but there is a word for this that describes the exact situation where Nvidia is investing in OpenAI, OpenAI signs a compute deal with Oracle, Oracle commits to buy Nvidia chips, and it seems very, very circular." Martin Scrawley has a word for it. He calls it "an economy." He says, "The way you measure its success is not by the trading between partners, but by non-party demand. That demand is pretty high and growing quickly. I am demanding it." I'm prompting it. Everyone is prompting it. Companies are prompting it. There is a lot of demand for tokens.

• 26:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So anyways, Stephen continues. He says, "I have a news flash for every bear. AI is not a bubble. In every market environment, there are always companies that become overly expensive with valuations that look unsustainable for no reason, other than they have built a cult-like following and there are more buyers than sellers. This is not a period of extreme speculation, unlike the dot-com bubble where investors poured capital into any company with a dot-com in its name."

• 26:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:34Jordi Hays?

  That was a big factor. "The rapid growth of the internet changed how information was disseminated and how people communicated, which led to the overvaluation of startups as venture capital flooded the market, fueling unsustainable growth. The dot-com bubble burst because many of the companies from height of the era were nothing more than hype, prioritizing user growth over sustainable business models that focus on revenue and profitability." Again, I push back a little bit here. There certainly has been companies that are scaling revenue really quickly, unprofitably, sort of betting on capturing market share and token costs coming down. Anyways, I'll continue. "The Fed hiked interest rates several times during 1999 and 2000, which caused investment capital to tighten, making it harder for cash

• 27:16Jordi Hays?

  burning companies to sustain operations or roll over debt, leading to bankruptcies."

• 27:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:21Jordi Hays?

  And then he goes into how Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, et cetera, says, "These are not startups or companies tapping the debt markets to build out new business ventures with the promise of becoming profitable. These are the largest companies in the world with the strongest balance sheets and largest profitability. Everyone has the right to their opinion, but when the CEO and Board of Directors are taking a blank-check approach to building out data center infrastructure to harness the power of AI, they're probably the ones who are probably correct." Here are some statistics about Microsoft. And keep in mind that their 2025 fiscal year just ended, as they are not on a calendar year. So since 2022 fiscal year ended, over the next three years, Microsoft's long-term debt has declined by 14%.

• 28:03Jordi Hays?

  While they have increased their allocation towards CapEx by 170%. Over this period, Microsoft has increased the cash from operations it generates by 52%. $47 billion from $89 billion to $136 billion, which has allowed them to increase the amount of capital they're allocating towards CapEx while paying down their debt obligations. Microsoft is now generating $70 billion of free cash flow while allocating $64 billion toward CapEx, and they did this while repurchasing $18 billion worth of shares and paying $24 billion in dividends during the 2025 fiscal year.

• 28:37John Coogan?

  It's a lot of money.

• 28:39Jordi Hays?

  Mic drop from Satya. This is much different period than the dot com era, and when companies like Microsoft are leading the way, funding the data center build outs organically from their cash from operations, there's no bubble in sight. And he does the same kind of analysis for Google and some of the other players. So worth going and finding this. The account is at Dividend Streams. And anyways, worth. And the other, last thing I'll say here, I was talking with a buddy who runs research for a multi-trillion dollar asset manager over the weekend at a kid's birthday party, and he was saying the market is like generally, even though you see this euphoria, right?

• 29:24Jordi Hays?

  You see retail traders, you know, posting screenshots of their Robinhood accounts, posting these insane gains. If you look at like cash tied up in money market funds, that sends a signal at record highs, that sends a signal that actually people are quite bearish, right? So it's interesting, certainly living through history.

• 29:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, I feel like the, the speed at which these companies can actually get up to making a profit is just wildly different than 1999. Like if you're mp3.com, which was a good idea, like the idea was Spotify, right? It was a hundred billion dollar opportunity at least. They IPOed with just a dot com domain and a business plan. And if you think about what they were going after, they were going after record stores that sold CDs. And they had to build Databases, licensing agreements with every

• 30:31Jordi Hays?

  And they didn't have the Facebook ads platform.

• 30:33John Coogan?

  They didn't have Facebook ads. They didn't have cloud hosting. They had to build servers and, and, and, and mobile apps. And where do you listen to music? In your car? Okay. How are you going to listen to mp3.com in your car? Well, normally you put in a cassette tape or a CD. Well, like there's no integration there. Whereas today, if you come up with some app or product or B2B software, which is where a lot of the money is, you call someone up and you say, you want to switch to our product or you want to add our product on to what you're already using. They're like, sure, send me the link. I'll put out, I'll put in my credit card today and then start using you tomorrow. And it's just like, everything is set up

• 31:14John Coogan?

  for acceleration on the actual product development, getting, getting some sort of value delivered to a customer. It's just more possible now. I don't know that we're in an era of like wildly different ideas, but it's just easier to actually go and move chips around the board and like eat off of other people's plates. We see this with like, like, there is a bubble, but a lot of it is like the SaaS, the SaaS apocalypse is, you know, legacy companies are actually selling off. And so there's, there's more of like a rotation to a newer company that's potentially taking market share from existing players as opposed to just completely new market cap that's being created out of thin air with some

• 31:56Jordi Hays?

  Or disrupting ourselves.

• 31:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and, and that disruption actually

• 32:00Jordi Hays?

  It was more fun for tech when, when they were just, you know,

• 32:03John Coogan?

  Brick and mortar.

• 32:04Jordi Hays?

  mp3.com was just trying to disrupt the record store, right? It was another industry that we were disrupting. Now we're, we're eating, we're eating our own.

• 32:11John Coogan?

  Yep. Well, quickly, let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon. Devon is the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.

• 32:22John Coogan?

  Back on the bitter lesson, Nando de Fritas says, "The only bitter lesson is that LLMs have succeeded beyond any expert expectations. Underpinning LLMs is the idea of scaling, which is too often misunderstood as more parameters. Scaling is about using massive compute effectively to maximize the throughput of data ingestion into the learning process to obtain more capable models. We're still far from hitting the limits on this. We are still hungry. We're still compute hungry because there's a ton more that we could achieve if we only had more compute from exponential, from experimental ablations to data acquisition and curation. Scaling is largely about data and evals, but the models are now trained on almost all of the web in an equally large but growing self-generated synthetic data set. Sifting through such vast quantities of data, the whole of human

• 33:06John Coogan?

  creation requires formidable engineering and intelligent ideas. This is what differentiates most models. AI is finally in the hands of billions of users, and with it will come billions of tasks, every reasonable user need. This scaling in task and evaluations is order of magnitudes higher than pre-LLMs." And if you think about the, yeah, every time, any, any user of the ChatGPT app, for example, fires off a query, like, that's more training data, especially if you're using the reasoning models, those rollouts will become reinforcement learning environments as well as training data. And if you're not on the enterprise plan, like, they will be training on that data, and that's going to make the data set even larger and the products get even better.

• 33:51John Coogan?

  And the gains will probably be less zero-to-one feeling, but there will just be continued progress. And unfortunately, at least for OpenAI, a lot of the other companies are in, are in different positions, but at least for OpenAI, the monetization in front of them, whether it's from the freemium model to the ads model, agent-to-commerce model, like, there's a whole bunch of news today about their agent-to-commerce stuff. It, it certainly feels like it can, it can support a lot of spend, a lot of spend.

• 34:19Jordi Hays?

  Totally. The other, the other thing, you know, happening right now is that certain companies are growing revenue so, so quickly that it's placing pressure

• 34:31Jordi Hays?

  On other companies that aren't doing that to do weird accounting tricks, right? Or doing stuff that's like just blatantly wrong, counting, you know, one time revenue and bundling it into.

• 34:44John Coogan?

  Well, ARR is yesterday's revenue times three sixty-five, right?

• 34:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or last minute's revenue.

• 34:49John Coogan?

  Last minute's revenue.

• 34:50Jordi Hays?

  Times sixty, times twenty-four.

• 34:52John Coogan?

  As soon as we be refreshing the Stripe dashboard and then multiply it by sixty, by twenty-four, by three sixty-five, don't do that. Stay serious, stay compliant with Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Should we pull up this Citrini video? It seems like they flew a drone around.

• 35:19Jordi Hays?

  Citrini research has been on an absolute tear. I'm gonna read, I'm gonna read this. So they had a post from 2023, which was, the first phase, talking about global data center hyperscaling, May 31st, 2023. The first phase is centered around the development and build out of robust computational infrastructure. This involves a massive and sustained tailwind to the suppliers of data center equipment of accelerated computing required for both AI training and inference. The enormous computing power required for AI ML places considerable demands on a variety of technology sectors. The companies involved in providing the necessary infrastructure stand to benefit significantly from this heightened demand.

• 36:03Jordi Hays?

  This includes businesses involved in semiconductor manufacturing, networking equipment, data center construction and management, and more. And again, even, even, even, you know, storage, right, is a category that was ultimately overlooked.

• 36:20John Coogan?

  It's like a three acts.

• 36:21Jordi Hays?

  And again, we, we covered, I think, Western Digital at the end of, at the end of last year.

• 36:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:28Jordi Hays?

  And it is up one hundred and forty-six percent year to date.

• 36:33John Coogan?

  Normie and Alice is literally pulling up a Wall Street Journal article and the thesis is like, oh, like, AI companies are gonna be.

• 36:39Jordi Hays?

  Probably gonna be important.

• 36:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, like, there's a lot of data and so there'll be a place to put that. Wow, missed a generational trade.

• 36:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Western Digital up 146% since Q4.

• 36:51John Coogan?

  But you should really read this whole article.

• 36:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so they.

• 36:55John Coogan?

  They went to Stargate and they.

• 36:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so they just decided, hey, let's fly a drone over Stargate and see.

• 37:01John Coogan?

  It's so remarkable. The scale of this thing is insane. They show a ton of images of what it looked like before. It's just a field, basically. It's so crazy that Chase Lockmiller over Crusoe like really like clocked this as a logical place to go.

• 37:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so they go through all the different categories. Stargate Power and Energy, Stargate Thermal, Stargate Mechanical, Electrical and Plumbing, Stargate Civil and Structural, Stargate Fiber and Stargate Construction Services.

• 37:32John Coogan?

  600 football fields filled with cables, pipes.

• 37:35Jordi Hays?

  And that's the building. That's 600 football fields.

• 37:39John Coogan?

  Single facility.

• 37:40Jordi Hays?

  Buildings.

• 37:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's remarkable.

• 37:43Jordi Hays?

  Try and pull up this before and after. You can just see the screenshot of the land. This looks like a Google Earth.

• 37:50John Coogan?

  Which is literally a ludicrous building. There are eight under construction on the single site. And this is just one of the Stargate data centers. There are many more. Colossus 2, Metas Louisiana Hyperion, Microsoft's Fairwater, Quantum Loophole, Nebius's New Jersey, DC, Amazon's Pennsylvania Project, Google Anthropics Project Rainier, just to name a few. Together, the current footprint is roughly the size of Lower Manhattan. It's so huge. It's so huge. And apparently Metas Louisiana facility will be even bigger, even bigger, which Zach shared on threads.

• 38:30Jordi Hays?

  So there was also some news over the weekend. Residents shut down Google data center before it can be built. So they, Google nixed plans for gigantic $1 billion data center on more than 460 acres of land in Indiana after residents hotly protested the proposal due to concerns the complex would jack up electricity prices for neighbors and suck away untold gallons of water in an area already plagued by drought. It's funny, Futurism is a crazy website. I'm looking at the recommended articles.

• 39:01John Coogan?

  They don't seem to be fans of the future.

• 39:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I'm going to just the trending articles on Futurism.com.

• 39:06John Coogan?

  They should rebrand to Return. Returnism.

• 39:10Jordi Hays?

  Back to the land. Trending articles right now, Bon Iver, Bon, Bon Iver?

• 39:16John Coogan?

  Bon Iver.

• 39:17Jordi Hays?

  Bon Iver, right, right, right. Side projects, it's funny, I've seen, I've seen Bon Iver live and I still botch the pronunciation. Side project Spotify page features an AI slop song. The second article, ChatGPT is blowing up marriages as spouses use AI to attack their partners.

• 39:36John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 39:37Jordi Hays?

  The next one, Sun fires energy blast at mysterious interstellar object.

• 39:44John Coogan?

  They might be algo maxing.

• 39:46Jordi Hays?

  AI coding is massively overhyped, report finds.

• 39:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 39:50Jordi Hays?

  And of course, OpenAI's new data centers will draw more power than the entirety of New York.

• 39:54John Coogan?

  Audience captured, baby. Let's go. Anyway, VCs say some AI startups, under pressure to show rapid ARR growth, are using questionable accounting practices, like counting one-time deals as recurring revenue. You just mentioned this, Bill Gurley chimed in to say, sad to say this isn't new, but as they say in Den of Thieves, your bunny has a good nose. What is, is Den of Thieves that, that movie with Gerard Butler? Or something? What is Den of Thieves? Is this a book or something? I'm, I'm out of the loop on this, but in other news, figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free. But the real news, of course, is Claude Sonnet 4.5 is out

• 40:39John Coogan?

  and Claude is declaring it the best coding model in the world. They say it's the strongest model for building complex agents. It's the best model at using computers and it shows substantial gains on tests of reasoning and math. And of course, we will be joined by none other than Mike Krieger from Anthropic in just a few minutes. But the model card is out.

• 41:03Jordi Hays?

  You remember Mike joined Figma's board.

• 41:05John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 41:06Jordi Hays?

  For the IPO as well. So we have Dylan.

• 41:08John Coogan?

  Perfect overlap.

• 41:08Jordi Hays?

  Will be joining.

• 41:09John Coogan?

  The whole Figma board today.

• 41:12Jordi Hays?

  Board meeting.

• 41:12John Coogan?

  Board meeting.

• 41:14Jordi Hays?

  Live on.

• 41:14John Coogan?

  But the model card is up and the benchmarks look great next to GPT-5 Claude Sonnet 4.5. Interesting that they didn't just go fully to Sonnet 5. OpenAI is on the fifth iteration. Gemini is at 2.5. There's a little bit of like, all of these are just going to go the way of the, so the cars are like, it's the 2025 car. It's the 2025 911 or the Ford Explorer. And now the phones are doing that too, like iOS 26, all the phones kind of jumped forward just to say, hey, just keep it on the year cadence. And I wonder if the models will wind up doing that too. I wonder if people will care about the models. Certainly people, you know, enterprises will demo these against the Pareto frontier.

• 41:59John Coogan?

  How much value am I actually getting out of this API relative to the cost? And they will benchmark it in their own internal uses.

• 42:08Jordi Hays?

  And of course, Satya.

• 42:10John Coogan?

  It's good marketing.

• 42:11Jordi Hays?

  Sharing, "Four decades in, some things never changed then and now." And it's an old ad for Microsoft Excel saying, "Microsoft Excel Aces Final Exam."

• 42:23John Coogan?

  Throwback.

• 42:24Jordi Hays?

  Advertising spreadsheet for Windows. Trademarked, of course.

• 42:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 42:28Jordi Hays?

  And they're showing spreadsheet bench accuracy results for their new Copilot in Excel.

• 42:34John Coogan?

  Agent mode. It's way better than the previous Copilot in Excel.

• 42:37Jordi Hays?

  The founder of Shortcut was taken, taken some shots.

• 42:42John Coogan?

  Oh, Shortcut's here at 46.6.

• 42:45Jordi Hays?

  And he was saying, "Get ready." He said something, something to the effect of,

• 42:51Jordi Hays?

  something to the effect of like, "Get ready to dance for the next few decades," or something like that. So, competition heating up in the Excel agents category.

• 43:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, well.

• 43:06Jordi Hays?

  This post, Kathy D. hit the timeline over the weekend. CTO started coding the second we got to the gate. Colin Fraser says, "He went on his laptop at the airport? That is crack."

• 43:20John Coogan?

  Very rude quote post, but it is funny.

• 43:22Jordi Hays?

  I think it's a fair post from Cathy, but at the same time, I think if you're traveling and you work.

• 43:29John Coogan?

  It's not the biggest flex in the world to do some work at the airport, but.

• 43:34Jordi Hays?

  It's been done before.

• 43:34John Coogan?

  It's better than watching slop videos, I suppose, you know? I'd rather, I'd rather the CTO work when possible, when on the move. Anyway, let me tell you about graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And we have our first guest to the show, Mike Krieger from Anthropic. He's in the restream waiting room. Now he's in the TV pin, UltraBell. Mike, welcome to the show.

• 44:00Jordi Hays?

  There he is, looking sharp.

• 44:02John Coogan?

  You look fantastic. Congratulations on everything.

• 44:07Jordi Hays?

  There's a. You wore a suit. Look at that.

• 44:09John Coogan?

  I love the suit.

• 44:10Speaker 02

  You know, I was kind of TV fan, I had to.

• 44:11John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 44:12Jordi Hays?

  It's a great sign of respect in our culture.

• 44:14John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 44:15Jordi Hays?

  And we appreciate it.

• 44:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:17Jordi Hays?

  It's great to see you. Big day, big day for you.

• 44:20Speaker 02

  Big day. Yeah, we're super excited. You know, and actually I was listening to you guys. I was falling asleep last night and I was like, we should have called it Sonic 5, but you know.

• 44:27John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  You never know how good it's going to be until the very end, like, not really well.

• 44:30John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, I.

• 44:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, now you raised the bar. You threw that, you raised the bar even higher for five, right?

• 44:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  That's what happened with three and four is that we ended up with this like, well, it's, it's getting better, but what's four going to be? And we're like, three, three, seven, and we're like, we need to call the next one 3.999. And we're like.

• 44:46Jordi Hays?

  99999.

• 44:48John Coogan?

  I'd love that. Yeah, well, you know, you can take all of our criticisms or ideas with a grain of salt because we are the, the kingpins of being armchair quarterbacks here. It is very different being in the arena. I do wonder how, how long it'll be until the numbers just melt away. And it's just like, you know, OpenAI is powered by GPT and Anthropic is powered by Claude. And, you know, we stopped caring about the minor revisions to the Google algorithm.

• 45:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think you can take a lesson from Apple and realize that it's hard to get people really excited by this, you know, app iPhone 17.

• 45:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:23Jordi Hays?

  X.

• 45:23John Coogan?

  But at the same time, there is a lot of value in putting a number on something, doing an announcement, sharing new data. And it seems like that's just a way to reengage with the customer base, bring people back who have tried.

• 45:37Jordi Hays?

  It's also very satisfying to, to win, you know, the place at the top of benchmarks against people that have a higher number than you.

• 45:44John Coogan?

  Of course, who, everyone wants to win.

• 45:46Speaker 02

  I always wonder like, when I came into this role, I was like, I think, why don't companies just want us to be on like dash latest and just be just getting the latest and greatest? And then they're like, ah, but the model might change and we want to be careful. So I think the future looks like some hybrid where maybe we help people get on the new version for them and then just auto upgrade. That could be a little bit easier.

• 46:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. What are the other trade offs? Like, the benchmarks tell one story. There's been this previous story about 3.5 having like this particular personality. Are there other things that you find that customers and counterparties are looking for in a release like this beyond just benchmarks?

• 46:25Speaker 02

  One of the biggest ones is like how eager versus lazy the model is. You know, maybe intuitively like you want the model to be as eager as possible. We had this with 3, Sonnet 3.7 where it was great, but it was a little too eager. You'd be like, hey, can you make this button blue? It's like, I made it blue and I also refactored your entire website. And it was like, too much. So we scaled it back with four and then four was a little too lazy. We actually have a monitoring signal inside Anthropic where if we're finding people are saying like, keep going, just go, like, yes, come on, then it's probably, you know, being too lazy. And so we're trying to tune it for this one, which is like the right blend of eagerness and laziness and make it as steerable as possible. So that's a big one.

• 47:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about on the compute infrastructure side, the actual being able to keep up with demand? Is there any messaging that you're sharing around what this particular model means just for like speed, availability, reliability? Because it seems like there's so many businesses that are just like, it's good enough for my use case, but I need a lot of it.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, for sure. We think a lot about about capacity and infra. And for us, it was really big to be able to deliver something that was more powerful than Opus for a fifth of the cost. And you can imagine that's like, you know, we think a lot about where we're serving and what we can serve at that scale. So having our best model also be the kind of sweet spot middle child is really, really big for us to be able to scale up to capacity. I think earlier this year, a lot of the conversations I have with customers, like, how do I get more Sonnet, like I'm at capacity? And we're finally getting to the point now where we can meet that demand.

• 47:57John Coogan?

  Can you, I, I, I'm not sure if this story is real, but there's this story about Instagram where one of the key user experience kind of hacks in the early days was as soon as you would go to start filtering a photo, it would start uploading to the server and then the filter would be applied on both sides. So when you hit post, it would automatically be live and you didn't have to wait for the upload to start. Is that roughly true? Can you tell me that story?

• 48:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's rough. Yeah. And we had a flashback and it was 2009, like networks were really slow. So we did everything to try to make it fast. So that was one of the things we did was the second, you, you, people would type, you know, messages, it would take them five minutes. And all that time, we were just doing all the processing in the background. And then that last post, you sync it up and then you posted it to the timeline. So that was a really big thing we did. We also did a lot on the timeline itself where which photo you fetched next was a lot of optimizations that we did. It's funny, like now the person who initially started Claude Code, one of our products, his name was Boris, and he came from Instagram as well. And he brought some of the kind of perf ideas from Instagram into Claude Code. And so there's some, there's some lineage of Instagram to Claude Code now.

• 49:07John Coogan?

  That's why I was asking about the, that story. It feels like there's, we're, we're in this, we're in this wave of like consumerization, just like where the user experience really matters for these models. And there's, I have to imagine that there's low hanging fruit. I was joking that at a certain point, there's so many LLM queries that you might just be able to go back to database lookups for certain things because like, like, how many times has someone went to a really beefy LLM and just asked for like the capital of California? And you can actually just-

• 49:40Speaker 02

  We get a lot of messages that just say hello. And then I feel like we could cache that one.

• 49:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you cache that and then you're just saving that inference for other more serious things. And, and I'm wondering if there's any other places where you feel like you've reached into your, your history and been able to draw comparisons to the work that you've done at Instagram or other places and say, oh, there's something interesting that we can apply here at Anthropic that actually maps into the pre-AI era.

• 50:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the biggest one, so I think one thing we did well at Instagram really on was just make it look good, make your photos look good and it's gonna be something that you're proud to share and you know flashback like this iPhone 3GS, the camera was pretty bad, right? So you're trying to just get to the point where it's actually good and shareable. So we were working on like you can now create PowerPoints and Excel files within Cloud AI and then you can edit them further if you want. And the thing I was really pushing the team on is, you know, we talk about how the model can code for hours and hours, but the thing that it produces has to be good. You don't want it to be autonomous and bad or autonomous and slop. So a lot of what we've been doing on the, on the office front is like the anti-slop, like make something that is actually good out of the gate and then of course you're gonna polish it up and, and correct it. So that's that, that, that

• 50:49Speaker 02

  effort to output ratio that I think Instagram has is what we're aspiring to here around. Can you give it some instructions, get it some data and then have it produce something where you're like, yeah, that was pretty good, pretty close and I'm gonna like finish it up myself.

• 51:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I feel like that has been my biggest hot take around the Meta AI Vibes app is just that people say there's no artist and I'm like, no, it's, it's David Holes's vision. And that he has honed that at, at mid-journey and it's his opinions and his artistic vision that's come through and

• 51:20Jordi Hays?

  Well, and the downside there is that it's great if you want to consume that style

• 51:26John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 51:27Jordi Hays?

  of, of content.

• 51:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:29Jordi Hays?

  But people like being in feeds and having randomness and new

• 51:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:34Jordi Hays?

  new ideas and perspectives and aesthetics, whereas if you're generating UI for some app, you know, an internal tool, it's actually totally fine in my view if it like feels like clot, right? Because it's like a, it's not necessarily even if, if you're creating an internal tool, it's not necessarily even something that needs to be a reflection of your brand, right?

• 51:55John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 51:55Jordi Hays?

  And so having like a distinctive style and if, if you need to do that in order to avoid just slop, then I think that's a good trade-off.

• 52:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's fine.

• 52:04Speaker 02

  I think the Figma connection is real there, too. I think if you ask Claude to make a website, most of those websites look kind of similar, but then can you incorporate your design language or your library so it actually looks, generically yours at least, like something that could have been created inside your company? And sure, it doesn't have like the hand of a designer on it, but at least it's not the full generic version as well. But yeah, it's interesting watching vibes, how much of it is, it's like 70s prep school, summer camp vibe and/or futurism. And it kind of falls into one of those, too.

• 52:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's definitely like found its way into some like local minimum, maxima or something. It feels like almost overfit, but maybe in a good way because the alternative is maybe sloppier. Who knows? I'm also interested in how you actually bring an opinionated vision to bear in a company like Anthropic. Going back to Instagram again, I remember hearing stories that might be true, maybe not, but about like the initial filters were hand-coded. Where like you were adjusting sliders and dials and code to make the filter look a certain way, and that was the expression of basically a single individual.

• 53:16John Coogan?

  And I'm wondering if there's, when you think about the texture and the flavor of what Claude 4.5 is putting out, is this something that's coming from the, you know, selecting the training data or building the RL pipeline? Are there multiple people that are bringing an opinion or is it an emergent property? Is it the whole team? Like, how does all this fit together to actually create something that has taste in something that's just a big, big bag of numbers?

• 53:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's actually an underappreciated thing about training is how much individuals and their taste really matters. Like, I think our particular post-training team, I think, has excellent taste on the code environments and just the code production itself. One of the things that we found with Sonnet 4.5 is that if you pointed at some code that previous versions had written, it'll go clean it up and be like, why is this comment here? It's totally unnecessary to rip it out. And so it's like improved in some taste. So there's that part. And then there's the work that we've been doing kind of around the Model around how you instruct it, how you give it the right skills to actually go produce the right content. And there, it's actually reminds me a lot of Instagram where we're looking at outputs and saying, all right, can you get it to make it make PowerPoints that look a little bit more real? Can you make the docs, you know, they don't need five fonts, it can be simplified that down.

• 54:30Speaker 02

  And so there's a lot that you can do in that kind of scaffolding where taste can come in around how you shape the model. And like, again, get it to the point where you're, oh, this is actually good.

• 54:39Jordi Hays?

  So you think slop is is a is a function of laziness?

• 54:43Speaker 02

  I think it's, you know, if it's the default parameters, I saw a talk by Ted Chiang, amazing sci fi writer. And he was talking about AI and creativity is like creativity is a bunch of choices, right? And if you just type to any of LLMs, like, tell me a story, it's going to tell you a pretty similar story almost every time. And that's kind of like a nature of the model. But if you then go and instruct it with a bunch of, you know, custom things, now it starts becoming a little bit more you. And it's not a zero to one thing, right? Like, there's some spectrum on there as well. I think to me, the slop is the stuff that tends towards like the minimum effort and the minimum amount of choices. And then when you tend to a bunch of choices, and if they're like not the best choices, at least it's got some creative spark in it.

• 55:22Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 55:23John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about imagery? I mean, a rich history there with Instagram.

• 55:30John Coogan?

  Models are becoming multimodal generally. Anthropic hasn't been chasing that really publicly, but there's a world where I can go to Claude 4.5, I'm sure, and say, draw me a cat with ASCII art and it'll do it. And there's a world where maybe if the models get really good, I could just say, hey, just write out the individual RGB, you know, numbers and I will encode it as a PNG or something like it feels like if the if the text models get really good, I can just get images out of them. So how do you think that develops for Anthropic? Or where do you think you want to bring that to bear? Is there anything that's interesting there? Do you just see it as a completely different set of the tech tree that you're happy to just watch other folks work on?

• 56:12Speaker 02

  That's funny you say that. One of the launch kind of like internal things, one of the PMs put together was a self-portrait of Claude that it drew using cells in Excel. It was like, pretty good. Yeah, I think for us, you know, I was like zoom out, like, what's the goal here? It's like, the goal is to build powerful AI in a safe way. And we think that the sort of direct, like, I love your tech tree, kind of metaphor, like, the direct route of that tech tree is models that can think for a long time, act agentically, can write code, can execute code, and kind of keep track of state. And like, almost everything that's not in that tech tree, we've not focused on. And that's, you know, I think it's been good. We've been able to get a lot done with a smaller team than most other frontier labs.

• 56:51Speaker 02

  But it's meant that on things like image generation, that's like, maybe we're leaning on partnership, or bringing some images in via MCP. Or to your point, maybe it actually emerges as a property of the model where it's able to both, you know, write and run that code. The late-breaking thing that we found the model is actually very good at is generating memes. So, given a virtual machine, Sonnet 4.5 can take a, you know, basic image and then put in, you know, like the butterfly meme, like, is this AGI? And it's actually like, pretty funny too. Like, another thing that I think people will see over the next couple of weeks is Sonnet 4.5 is like, our funniest model, I think. And so, there's something around that.

• 57:26Jordi Hays?

  And what, what, what types of ways? Because there's a lot of ways to be funny, and to date, I think the thing that consistently everybody has enjoyed is like, the, you know, like, be me. Format is one format, and then, but like, stand-up every model that I've seen has struggled.

• 57:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, and specifically the funny examples where people say, oh, AI-generated this. It's usually like, it's a top-voted joke on r/jokes on Reddit, and so it's kind of stealing the joke, and it doesn't really count as like, a new joke, in my opinion.

• 58:01Speaker 02

  So, we need to like, formalize an eval for this at some point, but the thing that we do is, we bring Claude into our Slack channels. Mostly in serious ways, like, we have Claude help out with, you know, if it's a coding task or whatever, but we also have Claude in our basically like, internal posting, you know, channel, and we'll do it for every model. And I- Most Anthropic employees, or at least many of them, were up really late this weekend because it is so good now in the like watercooler channel that it's like funny, it's like kind of roasting people, but not in too mean a way. It's like reacting to in-jokes, it's making back references to something happening earlier. It's definitely not like, it wouldn't be fooled for a human yet in most ways, but it definitely like had some leap where it's actually just really fun to talk to.

• 58:46Jordi Hays?

  Watercooler bench. Call it watercooler bench.

• 58:50Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 58:51Jordi Hays?

  How are you, I loved your guys' recent campaign around, you know, Claude being for, you know, it's never been a better time to have a problem. I've seen some, some out of home that you guys have done around LA, which is great. As you, as you kind of introduce more and more of the world to Claude, how are you thinking about, you know, kind of pouring? Do you think there's ways to pour fuel on the fire around social features and surface area that maybe hasn't been explored before in LLMs? I mean, you're very qualified to, to Sort of flywheels.

• 59:32Jordi Hays?

  Comment on some, some of that. So don't, don't feel like you need to give away your roadmap, but I'm curious, you know, what, what's been underexplored in your mind?

• 59:40Speaker 02

  No, I think about the things that like where Claude feels like it had some breakouts. And I think there's been like three or four in the year and a half have been at Anthropic. One was, we had Golden Gate Claude, where we actually put a research demo up where you could talk to Claude that believed it was the Golden Gate Bridge. And I still talk to people a year and a half later. I was like, that was the first time I really thought about interpretability and how the model features might work. And that was like a cool breakout moment for that. There was also like the, the sort of point where people realized like Claude's actually pretty good at relationship advice. And there was like lots of like college students posting the like, you know, you know, talking to Claude about their kind of relationship thing that had like a A viral moment and then who knows if this will go viral, but I'm excited to see what people build with it. We're putting something out today called Imagine with Claude where you can talk to Claude and Claude will like create whole

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  software on screen, but also simulate what the software would do if you clicked a button. So it doesn't write sort of a backend code. It is the backend code, which sounds a little trippy. You kind of have to play with it, but people have been doing all sorts of stuff like, hey, show me what Steve Jobs's desktop looked like the week before the iPhone launch. It's like, okay, well, here's the finder window and here's a keynote file about his keynote. So you click the keynote file and it's like, well, I guess I have to imagine and create what keynote looks like now. And it creates that from scratch and it's kind of this like glimpse into the future of what UI might be, which is fully generative, fully dynamic and drawn on demand. So we'll see what people build with that, but that's another one. I think that'll be the kind of thing that we push on, which is either demonstrations of where the future could be going. And it's probably not as mass market as Instagram would ever be, but it hopefully breaks through to the right people who are thinking about this stuff. Yeah.

• 1:01:07John Coogan?

  A product like that seems within reach, magical, amazing. It also feels like if I was using generative UI, fully, a fully generative app for like hours, I might go down some weird path and it might lose consistency. We've seen this with the benchmarks. I mean, just in 2020, you know, GPT three on the meter length of AI task can, that they can do at a 50% success rate. It was like 10 seconds and now we're blowing past an hour. I'm interested to know how you're thinking about four or five. If you think about that internally as a benchmark, it wasn't on the model card. Should it be? Are you seeing promising results there?

• 1:01:47John Coogan?

  And then I'm also interested in what should the ultimate target be? Because I was, I was trying to think about like, yes, I want an AI that can do tasks for a really long time. But what is a human's task length? Like, is it a hundred years? And how long does it take to get to a hundred years? If we're doubling every seven months, it turns out it's like a decade. And I'm wondering how you think about like the, the, just the, the length that the model can maintain consistency. Do you like that as a metric? Are we on track there and what are the consequences of that?

• 1:02:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, a big part of Claude four point five's training was around both keeping its own memory and staying, being able to work for a longer period of time and keep that consistency. I put a video up on my X, which is for every version of Claude, we asked it to build Claude.ai. So kind of like a flagship AI product and you know, one through three, just. Can't even do anything out of the gate. 3.5 like, ah, kind of showed something on screen, but you can't log in. 3.7, you can log in, but it doesn't work. 4, it works a little bit, but message failing, message sending fails. 4.5, like, didn't just implement it, also implemented our whole artifacts feature in its prototype. So, I think about like that whole kind of thing, and it's a fun like time lapse of just even watching it do that. So I think it is really important, even if for most tasks, you're not going to kind of set it off on a, you know,

• 1:03:02Speaker 02

  30-hour task like a couple of our customers did during testing. The fact that you could, I think, lets you start trusting it for longer and longer tasks. The way I see our engineers actually use Claude Code now is they have like three or four terminal windows open, and they're running Claude Code concurrently on multiple ideas at once. And the only way you can do that is if it's not going to interrupt you 10 seconds, and you're like, wait, what did you mean again? Or trust that you're not going to go off the rails. I think it's, if not the, it's one of the most important kind of metrics to look at is how long it can maintain coherence.

• 1:03:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, that Claude example you gave is crazy, because do you know how many man-hours it actually took to build the real product?

• 1:03:38Speaker 02

  A lot.

• 1:03:38John Coogan?

  Like, it's more than an hour, it's more than four hours, it's more than anything on this chart. If it's, and, and, yeah, that's a very, very mind-blowing concept that, like, we're still, like, it's working for an hour, it's working for two hours, but it's maybe doing hundreds of hours of man-hours if you were to try and create an apples-to-apples comparison. Very-

• 1:03:59Jordi Hays?

  It's hair-raising.

• 1:04:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's exciting, it's exciting.

• 1:04:03Speaker 02

  It really is. And also, like, it hopefully makes us more flexible, too, where I think there's a lot of sunk costs that happens in software, right? Like, oh, whatever you build, it's so good. The things we did evolve in Instagram was saying like, yeah, you built it, but if it's not going to be good, just rip it out, you know, and then start over.

• 1:04:15John Coogan?

  One of the most magical experiences I had with Claude Code recently was, I, I essentially, I don't write a ton of software and build a lot of applications, but I do a lot of research. And so, I asked Claude Code to do a deep research report, but instead of just creating a markdown file, like I would get in any other deep research product, I asked it to build an HTML5 website with all of the nice features, bar charts and graphs and all that stuff. And it was, it was okay on the research side, but it was a really cool glimpse into this, like, generative UI world that it feels like we're going into. And I'm wondering

• 1:04:54John Coogan?

  There's a how you see that flowing into just consumer right now. When I think of Claude code for deep research, I think of a prosumer product. And I'm wondering if you if you think that there's a path, maybe it exists through mobile, maybe iFrames. Like, how does this actually work its way into like my my mom's life, you know? Someone who's not going to understand the terminal and get fired up on that way.

• 1:05:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, something we put out actually in our mobile app about a month ago that people have been enjoying is kind of giving the same sort of agentic kind of multi-turn thing in Claude. But with your local mobile capabilities and it's a little easier on Android. You can do a lot of this on iOS, but not all of it.

• 1:05:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:05:33Speaker 02

  And you can say things like, hey, you know, look at my calendar for tomorrow. Like, I have these three meetings, do some local searches, like find out where I should have coffee. Remind me to like grab my coat before I leave. And by the way, like compose a text to these three people because I need to like let them know about it. You'll see it works through all of it, like use all these local tools, do it agentically. You can't send it automatically, so you have to like press a button still to like send the message. So it's not like all the way, but I think that's where it's going to start showing up in in consumer applications. And I think, you know, for better or for worse, it's going to require more partnership with the device makers because a lot of that's gated on the on the OS. You can do a lot more on the web, but I think that's the that's where things are going. I think that's where it start will start to feel real to people.

• 1:06:11John Coogan?

  What's the biggest lesson from Artifact? I was a huge fan of the product and I feel like with where we are in terms of how effective the models are at scraping the entire web, creating summaries. Like, it feels like we're on the cusp of another breakout, like product or problem solution in that space. What are what are you taking?

• 1:06:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it feels, I mean, for better or worse, it feels like you could ultimately like Claude could one day function as in what I what I loved about Artifact, right?

• 1:06:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, we even, you know, you can like see it already, like, search the web, do the synthesis, and then like, create a briefing for me. I think one sort of underappreciated artifact lesson was, if your product really shines when it really knows you and is really personal to you, that's a hard sell for newcomers, right?

• 1:07:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:07:05Speaker 02

  They're gonna, we had a, like, our retention was actually really good if you stuck around, but it was that kind of activation that was the trickiest. Plus, like, any shareable thing in news is really difficult.

• 1:07:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:14Speaker 02

  But think about that now with Claude, where if you ask it to do something, we can't have expected you to already have taught it a bunch of your preferences or connected all the right things. We actually can, because Claude can be conversational, say, "I'm gonna be way better at this if you let me connect to your Google Drive. Like, is that okay?" Right?

• 1:07:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:28Speaker 02

  Or, "I'm gonna be on your iOS, you know, it's gonna be way better if you connect your Maps or your calendar for this." That's, I think, where we need to go, which is, don't expect people have done all the upfront work, because that's gonna be too hard for most people, then they'll churn. But the nice thing that's different now in 2025 is, the model can now have the conversation about how to get it to the state where, you know, it's gonna be actually useful to you.

• 1:07:46John Coogan?

  Everyone in Teapot on X, in tech Twitter, is reacting to Dwarash Patel's interview with Richard Sutton. Are you bitter lesson-pilled? Is Anthropic bitter lesson-pilled? Like, how did you and the team kind of process the debate between Dwarash and Richard Sutton?

• 1:08:08Speaker 02

  I think we're overall super bitter lesson-pilled. What an interesting example, and this is kind of a bitter lesson derivative, but I think kind of fades into the same kind of idea. You mentioned deep research. So, you know, the original, you know, advanced research, you know, implementation in Claude AI was like thousands of lines of code, some like pretty complex infrastructure. We've since, you know, re-implemented, we haven't launched it, it'll come out soon, we re-implemented on top of basically the Claude Agent SDK, which we put out today too, which is basically what Claude Code runs on too. And it was basically just a prompt and some tools. And like, none of that like custom scaffold and instructions and all of that. And like, that to me speaks to the same idea, which is like, you wanna like, let the model do as much itself as possible. Don't try to like overly specify all of like the steps and the infrastructure and all those different

• 1:08:51Speaker 02

  pieces. So, that definitely shows up even in products, which is, you know, not what the bitter lesson is about, but it kind of feeds into that as well. But I think overall, like, very bitter lesson-pilled, but also still really bullish, I think, on the possibilities of RL. You see it in how much the model's advanced even since February.

• 1:09:08John Coogan?

  Do you think you're...

• 1:09:13John Coogan?

  Bullish on this idea that there will be some sort of new paradigm or new buzzword in a few years that describes a material change in architecture or just like how AI research is done. We certainly saw this when we went from just transformer-based large language models to reinforcement learning with human feedback to RL and synthetic environments and synthetic data. Does it feel like we're continuing to come up with new ideas?

• 1:09:44Speaker 02

  I think so. And I think the other piece that's going to be really interesting, one, just the scale of all of these RL runs is getting enormous. And I think the second one is the model's ability to maybe actually introspect and see if it can propose ideas will be interesting too. I don't think we're there yet too. And when do we get there? We got to do it very carefully with the right kind of safety kind of guardrails in place. But I think that'll potentially deal to some kind of divergent ideas at that point.

• 1:10:07John Coogan?

  What are your thoughts on hardware? What's going to change in hardware over the next few years? Instagram was so interesting. I remember that it was designed to be used with the phone in the vertical. It was such a vertical app, even though people were so used to turning their phones. And in some ways, the hardware, like the medium is the message, the hardware kind of defined what you built. But then eventually, you know, we got more cameras on the phone, probably because of Instagram. And I'm wondering if you think AI will change hardware or will get entirely new hardware to interface with AI in different places? Just kind of what's your view on hardware over the next couple of years?

• 1:10:46Speaker 02

  I think this is the consumer side where, you know, like I think the AirPod Pro is going to be like the sneaky like AI, you know, sort of thing that actually does the mass market, not a super controversial take. I think the other one that people are thinking less about is what's the business side of this? You know, we've designed these open office plans, but I think in the future, we're going to actually talk to our AI a bunch in order to get stuff done, to delegate tasks. It's like really nice already. People have like hooked up Claude Code with like Open Whisper or something so they can talk to it. And it feels very natural. And so like, what does that do for office design? Are we all going to be using these like sub vocalization things now that people are prototyping?

• 1:11:22John Coogan?

  I think those are really cool.

• 1:11:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's like you know, like walk through an office, a bunch of people mumbling like.

• 1:11:28Jordi Hays?

  Or the the dark sci fi of just it's it's wall to wall, the phone booths, you know, just like thousands of phone booths. And everybody's sitting in their phone booth.

• 1:11:37Speaker 02

  We created like 1960s IBM. Like, I feel like there's gotta be something better, too. I'm also really interested in what the sort of multiplayer, like I mentioned, like Claude talking to us in our social channel. But like, there's also, what is like, what is it like to not just have an AI note taker in these meetings, which everybody has, but like an actual participant? And how does it know when to chime in? And what is it listening for? Can it be like, hey, you guys haven't talked about this thing you said you were going to talk about? Or, hey, I'm detecting a lot of like, you know, disagreement here. Can we move forward? So that's going to be an interesting, it's like, the hardware necessary for that won't be super complex, but it will need to show up in more and more places.

• 1:12:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, how do you guys think about what comes to mind around the word focus? Anthropic feels incredibly focused and not every lab feels that way. Is that is that something that you guys, you know, just keep coming back to around? Or what does that mean to you?

• 1:12:32Speaker 02

  Well, for sure, like, I think that the, one of the things that we've done well is that there's been that extreme focus from the research side. I think, you know, before anything else, which was like, here's the path, like, we're going to build that, recognize as many people, perhaps as much compute, but we're going to like remain focused. But like, that is actually another kind of bridge to Instagram. We were very, very focused. I think they finally shipped the iPad app. You would always ask, why doesn't Instagram have an iPad app? I'm like, it's focused, like, you know, you're not going to get a lot of new users that way. And most of the users is going to be on the iPhone.

• 1:12:59Jordi Hays?

  Web, web took years.

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  And it was like, you know, people think we were stubborn, but it was actually, you know, every new platform you add is like another thing that you're going to have to think about. And, you know, yes, you can staff up for it, but it's just that that coordination cost, it's the kind of additional overhead. So we've really pushed the focus thing here as well. You know, it's like do more with less and do fewer things better, but I think it's really important. And it's meant like, we've got more of this sort of prosumer or power user and then business lens. But also think that's like an interesting place to occupy in the market.

• 1:13:30John Coogan?

  Last question from my side. Jordan, you have another?

• 1:13:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, kind of last question. We're having Dylan on in a bit to catch up on Figma Make. And I know you joined the board prior to the IPO. What are your, you know, with Figma, the AI opportunity in current reality is very obvious, right? It's a place that people go to make things and build software. But what are your conversations like with, I'm assuming, other public, you know, public SaaS CEOs and boards reach out to you all the time, trying to get your read on where software is going? Are those conversations happening? What do they, what do they look like today?

• 1:14:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think there's this, if you think the models are going to be able to act agentically and retrieve over, you know, your, you know, employee records, plus connect them to your current work in Google Docs, all these pieces, I think the concern, I think, from a lot of these SaaS providers is do they become just document and data repositories, right? And how do you like modify that? But then I think that there's the sort of like way of making that actually interesting is if you actually connect an agent with another, which doesn't sound that profound until you actually try it, it's really powerful. I saw this demo of Claude talking to an agent that was built on top of some Salesforce data. And rather than just like search for Salesforce data and then get results back, it had a conversation with, they had like two back and forth conversations where the Claude agent was like,

• 1:14:54Speaker 02

  here's the email I'm thinking of sending to this customer. And the Salesforce built like thing built on top of Salesforce was like, no, no, no, they're not going to like it. I looked in the like earlier messages and they really hated that turn of phrase. They ping ponged back and forth with actually like very little human input. And at the end had a message like ready to send. So that's where I think like you can move from worrying about, are people going to visit my website less because of agents? Some more like, well, maybe not, but if you're actually building value beyond just the data store, you can still play a really key part in that exchange.

• 1:15:22John Coogan?

  It goes back to what we were talking about, about Claude being able to generate images, but then just using an Excel sheet as a canvas. There's a world where you might be able to train a model that's super expensive to inference, that can, you know, just do all the math in the world and has every number, every, every calculation memorized. Or you could just say, hey, here's Python, like just write some Python and you get the exact result. And so it's a beautiful synergy. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations.

• 1:15:51Jordi Hays?

  Congrats on the launch. We're looking forward to five or 4.999.

• 1:15:54John Coogan?

  4.999 would go extremely hard. I would love that. The pressure is on. 4.99999.

• 1:16:03Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Well, we're excited to to to play around with four, five and and get into it.

• 1:16:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks so much for having me on. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:16:12Jordi Hays?

  You're the man.

• 1:16:13John Coogan?

  Let's go over to Polymarket and check in on which company has the best AI model by the end of 2025. Anthropic has jumped in the rankings. This is, of course, Almerina, which is a different benchmark, but Anthropic jumped from 1.8% to over 6%. Google is in first and continues to be. OpenAI was giving them a run for their money towards the end of August, but Google is seems to be running away with it. People on Almerina are really enjoying Google.

• 1:16:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting how, you know, this this continues to be the probably the most popular market on AI.

• 1:16:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:52Jordi Hays?

  And yet, all the underlying labs are focused on different things, right?

• 1:16:56John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:16:57Jordi Hays?

  Anthropic is values a bunch of different things differently than Google does, right? And and XAI, same thing, right?

• 1:17:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:17:06Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 1:17:07John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of ChatGPT, they launched a new brand campaign. Each scenario features young people who are some of our most creative proactive users. We're showing their stories in ways that others can see and connect with. Our goal is for people to look at these moments. And Emily Sundberg said, "Part of the reason this campaign looks so good is because Heidi Bivins is the stylist from Euphoria and Spring Breakers worked on it." So they brought in some heavy hitters for this, which is exciting.

• 1:17:30Jordi Hays?

  This feels, even the colors and the tones, feel a lot like Anthropic's recent campaign.

• 1:17:37John Coogan?

  And it it feels solar punky. It feels a little bit like the the drone delivery company.

• 1:17:45Jordi Hays?

  How's this guy with his barbell set up in this like?

• 1:17:49John Coogan?

  He's doing exactly what I do. He's tracking his splits. He's tracking his lifts. He's trying to hit a one rep max. He's saying, "If I use this much protein, consume this much creatine, can I hit this?"

• 1:17:59Jordi Hays?

  In, well, I guess he's.

• 1:18:01John Coogan?

  He only has 65 pounds on the bar, though, so, you know. Oh, I guess he's doing some dumbbell curls. But, you know, with the power of ChatGPT, I think he's going to be benching three plates in no time. But, yeah, very fun campaign. We're having Dylan Field join in just nine minutes. He was getting in a tussle on the timeline, talking about the definitions of software engineering. Elliot, I guess at Lovable, said, "We just killed software engineering, by the way."

• 1:18:28Jordi Hays?

  Which is like, I don't know if Elliot is rage baiting, but...

• 1:18:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. It is. It is a little rage baity, but, uh, oh, well.

• 1:18:38Jordi Hays?

  It's like, who's that, who is that post for?

• 1:18:41John Coogan?

  I don't know. In other news, Thrive has a new citation, sovereign under management. I know you were all wondering about this. This is from Preston Holland. It's a nice touch. So this is a private jet.

• 1:18:55Jordi Hays?

  This is Thrive Aviation, to be clear.

• 1:18:57John Coogan?

  Everyone, everyone thinks that this is Thrive Capital, of course, Josh Kushner's firm, expanding into private aviation, as he probably should, but this is a different company, I believe.

• 1:19:09Jordi Hays?

  Different company. They did put the words "big dog" on the engines.

• 1:19:14John Coogan?

  Big dog looks great.

• 1:19:15Jordi Hays?

  Dog with a D-A-W-G, and they parked the Turbo S.

• 1:19:19John Coogan?

  You get a lot of flack for having a PJ for flying from, you know, Orange County to Burbank just to save a couple of minutes. But if you put "big dog" on the engines, I think you get a free pass. I think it's the way to do it.

• 1:19:31Jordi Hays?

  Thrive's tagline is "above your standards, beyond your expectations." Above your, above your standards. Is that not...

• 1:19:40John Coogan?

  Above your standards.

• 1:19:41Jordi Hays?

  We're actually above your standards, Jeff.

• 1:19:42John Coogan?

  Yes, whatever your standards are. We're not going to ask you about your standards. We're just going to tell you that this is above.

• 1:19:46Jordi Hays?

  We're above you.

• 1:19:47John Coogan?

  It's above your standards.

• 1:19:48Jordi Hays?

  We're above you.

• 1:19:49John Coogan?

  Well, you know what else is above your standards? Julius.ai. What analysis do you want to run? It's the data, the AI data analyst that works for you. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English, and get insights in seconds, no coding required. In other AI news, it's a busy day. Chat, ChatGPT is now integrated with both Stripe and Shopify. We were kind of debating this, like, is the Stripe integration...

• 1:20:12Jordi Hays?

  We are having Jeff from Stripe on, who worked on, has been involved with, with some of these new features. So we'll have to ask him about this. Unclear to me yet how the dynamic, obviously, Stripe powers Shopify, but how do these different partnerships work?

• 1:20:32John Coogan?

  I think there will be companies, I think there will be companies that that vend their essentially their product catalog into chat GPT. Maybe with like an MCP server, or they surface it in a way that they can integrate directly with Stripe. And because all of their plans, everything that they sell is sold through through Stripe. And so there are plenty of companies that don't need an order management system. And, uh, you know, all of the features that you get with Shopify and they basically just run on Stripe. A lot of SaaS companies do that. So you could imagine in the future, if you're trying to buy something that doesn't need to track inventory. Uh, you could buy it in chat GPT directly with Stripe.

• 1:21:12John Coogan?

  But then if you are trying to buy something that might be out of stock or has a bunch of variations and you're storing that data in Shopify. And doing downstream marketing on that and all the different tools that Shopify brings to bear. Uh, you will benefit from the Shopify chat GPT integration. So I don't know that there, I mean, they're clearly jumping over the, the, the precipice together.

• 1:21:35Jordi Hays?

  I am very, when you think about using products, any, any LLM, how efficient it is to find the information that you're looking for. And now how efficient it's going to be to find the products that you're looking for. There's, there's plenty of categories that I'm, uh, that I don't expect to use LLMs for shopping. Like, hey, uh, you know, like I'm not going to go in here and like look for. I don't know, some jackets, right? Like casual jackets, right? Because that, that to me is like, I don't know, I care a lot more about discovering a new brand and understanding what they're about and things like that.

• 1:22:17Jordi Hays?

  But in the context of like purely functional goods, I'm looking to see what Amazon does in, in regards to chat GPT, because think about how terrible it is to search for products on Amazon.

• 1:22:29John Coogan?

  It's rough right now.

• 1:22:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I'm, I'm an Amazon respecter, Andy Jassy respecter, I'm a Jeff Bezos respecter. Uh, but whenever I, if I could search on chat GPT, find me, uh, you know.

• 1:22:43Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, a paper towel holder from companies that existed more than a hundred years ago.

• 1:22:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:49Jordi Hays?

  I don't want to go and buy a paper towel holder.

• 1:22:51John Coogan?

  That's some cheap knockoff.

• 1:22:53Jordi Hays?

  That's a knockoff of an American brand.

• 1:22:54John Coogan?

  And they hack the SEO and they hack the star rating and they hack the reviews and they're paying for ads.

• 1:23:00Jordi Hays?

  And so, and so Chad, I've, I've always wanted a, to be able to shop on Amazon without any of the knockoff Chinese like.

• 1:23:08John Coogan?

  And they should be able to do that. They should be able to solve that pretty easily by vending an LLM just into the search box. And letting you search natural language. Like you're already searching, just let me query whatever I want.

• 1:23:21Jordi Hays?

  But also I think the average Amazon user probably is like, just give me the paper towel holder. That's three dollars.

• 1:23:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:23:26Jordi Hays?

  Direct from the factory. But I think that LLMs will be able to provide a level of personalization that is.

• 1:23:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. So maybe those hundred year old paper towel holder companies will say now is the time to go deeper into Shopify or Stripe. And profound to get mentioned in chat GPT, right? And then from there, uh, assume that they are not going to be able to win the Amazon game anymore. Because it's being team-ified.

• 1:23:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:55John Coogan?

  And so those brands will move over and, and, and like, you know, generate customers from uh, chat GPT users.

• 1:24:04Jordi Hays?

  The question is, I wonder if OpenAI has a take rate here.

• 1:24:08John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:24:10Jordi Hays?

  Like because.

• 1:24:12John Coogan?

  They will.

• 1:24:12Jordi Hays?

  These brands.

• 1:24:13John Coogan?

  Certainly.

• 1:24:13Jordi Hays?

  In the example that Toby gives, I'm looking for a lightweight trail running shirts that's, that stay cool. Can you help? Historically, that if somebody's searching that and buying historically, Google is taking, taking a cut, right? Through, through AdSense or if somebody's just scrolling and a, a brand on Instagram.

• 1:24:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:32Jordi Hays?

  And ever they get an ad for.

• 1:24:33John Coogan?

  I would assume that it's exactly the same as the, the Facebook and Google take rate. And that you will look back on commerce and you're like, I pay the Google tax. I pay the Facebook tax. I pay the chat GPT tax.

• 1:24:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:46John Coogan?

  And companies will be happy to do that because the alternative is no growth. The alternative is no customers.

• 1:24:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the question is, again, this is where Mark Cuban is pushed back, you know, is, is what if, what if the best product is not on Shopify or not, not, not set up in a way that you can buy it, right?

• 1:25:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the hope is that.

• 1:25:06Jordi Hays?

  The only recommending products that they have partnerships with.

• 1:25:09John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:25:10Jordi Hays?

  If so, then that sort of violates the trust that the user's been developing, so they have some stuff to figure out.

• 1:25:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, the hope is that there's, there's a division between the editorial and commerce teams and that the, the, the team that searches, that surfaces like knowledge, retrieval results will focus on just getting you the most accurate information and then the commerce team will focus on monetizing all of this, but we will see.

• 1:25:33Jordi Hays?

  In other news, there's a post here from OXON that says, "God forbid men have hobbies." Arkansas men arrested for taking turns shooting each other while wearing bulletproof vests after drinking.

• 1:25:45John Coogan?

  Why were they arrested? This doesn't seem illegal. This seems like top-tier operator behavior.

• 1:25:51Jordi Hays?

  Guys being dudes.

• 1:25:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, give them a break.

• 1:25:53Jordi Hays?

  I feel like this post has gone viral.

• 1:25:56John Coogan?

  Many times.

• 1:25:56Jordi Hays?

  Many, many, many times.

• 1:25:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's from 2019 and then, then somebody just found it and quote tweeted it and it went viral.

• 1:26:02Jordi Hays?

  Newsweek had no idea what they were doing.

• 1:26:03John Coogan?

  To the tune of 200,000 likes, wow.

• 1:26:07John Coogan?

  Interesting. Well, Gas Station Barbie says, "Feels kind of weird that no branch of the government sends you a card when you have a baby." Like, that's a new citizen.

• 1:26:15Jordi Hays?

  Social Security.

• 1:26:16John Coogan?

  And, yeah, they do, they do. I guess they literally do.

• 1:26:19Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they could just add it to the.

• 1:26:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, it should just be a birthday card instead of something you have to apply for. Growing Daniel says, "JD Vance, I know you see my tweets. This would be a nice touch." Apparently in Finland, the government sends you a large box of supplies when your first kid is born.

• 1:26:33Jordi Hays?

  That's sweet.

• 1:26:34John Coogan?

  It's very sweet. Well, Eliano is describing the wide range of Palantir all-understanders with, with Nick Fuentes and Tim Dillon on the left and of course a Palantir insider on the right and Jim Cramer right in the middle, I suppose.

• 1:26:50Jordi Hays?

  Fair.

• 1:26:51John Coogan?

  He kind of, he kind of, it seems like he's slightly edging to the right if you look at his shoulder. His head is at like negative one, but his right shoulder is at two.

• 1:26:59Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna have Jim on the show soon. We'll ask him what Palantir does.

• 1:27:03John Coogan?

  I think, I think Jim has a very good thesis for Palantir, actually. I think he has a pretty strong understanding. I would put him closer to a four or a five on this.

• 1:27:12John Coogan?

  Well, the oldest hotel in the world is the Nishima Onsen Kyun-kyun in Japan and has been in business since 705 AD. It's still a family business for 52 generations.

• 1:27:27Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up.

• 1:27:28John Coogan?

  That's so long. Oh, oh, you think in decades with your business?

• 1:27:32Jordi Hays?

  Are you thinking generations?

• 1:27:33John Coogan?

  Oh, you're going on a 100-year run? That's nice. That's quaint. What about a 1,300-year run? Let's step it up. Let's step up the ambition, folks.

• 1:27:43Jordi Hays?

  I think they should make this in Amman.

• 1:27:44John Coogan?

  You're a founder. They should make it in Amman. Shiel says, in Japanese tradition...

• 1:27:48Jordi Hays?

  The 53rd generation has the opportunity to do the funniest thing.

• 1:27:52John Coogan?

  Just turn it into a Motel 6 and bring in private equity, lever it up, turn it into a McDonald's or a strip mall.

• 1:27:59Jordi Hays?

  I've been learning about finance. I think we should play around with leverage.

• 1:28:04John Coogan?

  What is going on with that the 52nd grandson doesn't botch it? Like, that's crazy. So much tradition and reliability.

• 1:28:13Jordi Hays?

  I hope Dylan Field does this with Figma.

• 1:28:16John Coogan?

  Me too. That would be a fantastic outcome.

• 1:28:18Jordi Hays?

  We should ask him. 52, can you do 53 generations?

• 1:28:22John Coogan?

  Where will Figma be in the year 3,300? That's what I want to know, Dylan. Let's start thinking in millennia. Shiel has some extra context here. He says, "In Japanese tradition, you adopt a capable manager or have arrangement to have him marry your daughter to keep business in the family. Otherwise, there's no way you'd keep something like this in the family for this long. This is still common practice. 98% of adoptions in Japan are adults. Almost all men 20 to 30 brought in for business succession purposes. Among many others, Suzuki and Toyota have had multiple generations of adopted son-in-laws to keep them in the family business."

• 1:29:01Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy.

• 1:29:02John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:29:03Jordi Hays?

  Let's bring this concept into enterprise software.

• 1:29:05John Coogan?

  Dylan is in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP and Ultra Dome. His first virtual appearance, I believe, on the show. He's, of course, hit a gong live with us at the New York Stock Exchange, which is a slight upgrade from Zoom.

• 1:29:20Jordi Hays?

  Quickly retired the gong.

• 1:29:22John Coogan?

  But thank you so much for joining us, Dylan. How are you doing today?

• 1:29:25Dylan Field?

  Thank you for having me back. Good to see you guys.

• 1:29:27Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 1:29:28John Coogan?

  Great to see you. What's new in your world?

• 1:29:31Dylan Field?

  Well, I've been deep in this weekend with Claude's on it 4.5. I'm gonna be real with you.

• 1:29:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:39Dylan Field?

  And Figma 8.

• 1:29:40John Coogan?

  That's what I wanted to hear.

• 1:29:41Dylan Field?

  Still swimming in that.

• 1:29:43John Coogan?

  What? Well, yeah. Give me your initial reactions. Like, do you care about the benchmarks model card? Are you tracking like the the meter, like how long a task can run? Are you more like just chat with it like it's a person have really short back and forth exchanges to get the vibe or the texture of the of the words that are coming out? Are you put it on a really critical business task and then benchmark it against one of your top developers? Or something like, how do you evaluate a new AI model as a CEO?

• 1:30:11Dylan Field?

  Well, okay, so there's the personal side and there's the Figma side and there's the CEO side, maybe.

• 1:30:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:30:18Dylan Field?

  So I'll start with personal, which I have not gotten to yet, but I love playing with these models, testing them at their limits, seeing if I can, you know, get them into sort of weird headspaces. And that's just like a hobby of mine.

• 1:30:34Jordi Hays?

  What's a weird?

• 1:30:35John Coogan?

  You're trying to one-shot them.

• 1:30:37Dylan Field?

  No, I mean, look, it doesn't have to be a one-shot or like single prompt. You know, the longer you go, the worse it gets.

• 1:30:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, you keep going and the models like I'm seeing.

• 1:30:47Jordi Hays?

  What's the weirdest? What's what's an example of like this? You know, you don't have to name the model, but like what what kind of weird? What's the weirdest headspace you've gotten to model in? Is there just hallucinating, you know, more and more intensely type of thing?

• 1:31:03Dylan Field?

  Um, look, I mean, models are trained on the internet and the internet has some weird stuff on it. And, you know, what do you find it in there? It's kind of fascinating and I won't give examples or definitely not companies or model providers. What I do instead is I try to like, if I find a good repro case, I send it over to the models. And that way they can figure out what to do with it.

• 1:31:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's funny if you think the models are the models trained on the internet. That means like the models effectively trained on stumble upon, you know, like if you like that, that level of range, right? Which is quite, quite wide.

• 1:31:39Dylan Field?

  There's a lot to the internet. Yep, for sure. So take us through the other testing cases.

• 1:31:43Dylan Field?

  Yeah, let's get in specifically at the, not even at the Figma level. I haven't even gone there with 4.5 yet another time. But I'd say that for Figma, for Figma, that is where my attention's been focused so far. And with Figma Make in particular, we've been just trying to figure out, okay, how do we make it so that

• 1:32:05Dylan Field?

  we're able to quickly pull in Sonnet 4.5 to make and then evaluate? You know, are we ready for it? Do we have to do anything differently? Is this a good addition, a good improvement? And the more we play with it this weekend, the more we used it. It was so impressive how it made Make better. Everything from planning and just thinking through and evaluating, understanding the codebase that it was working on, whether it was like a shorter prompt or a long-running session, to thinking through

• 1:32:44Dylan Field?

  just sort of like the way it should evaluate a prompt and giving better results. And also, you know, we recently introduced this new feature where you can copy from Make Output into Figma Design. And we've, since launch, had a way to basically go from Figma Design into Make and basically copy paste in. And that way you can bring your design into whatever you're coding and creating. And the consistency that we're now seeing with 4.5 on that part of it, that round trip, that's the part that's most incredible. And it's so, just kind of like, gives me the chills a bit because we literally launched

• 1:33:28Dylan Field?

  this feature where we copied from Make Output to Figma Design last week, not knowing when we launched it that, you know, 4.5 was coming, it would make it so much better. And here we are, and we're like, okay, well, that's a good surprise. But I guess the general point is just, it's really nice to be in a place where, and I think this is an important thing for everyone to be thinking about in software, as the models get better, you need to get better. So for us, we'll get the models getting better, and Figma, we're like, okay, great. Figma gets better, all of our users are going to benefit from this. And

• 1:34:02Dylan Field?

  I think it's really important that you're always in that sort of headspace of how to make sure that you're standing for strategy that way.

• 1:34:09John Coogan?

  How do you think about the Figma make user base, the community? Right now, there are so many different subsets of AI users. There's folks who can tell you the difference from one paragraph. Oh, that came from 4.0, that came from Sonic 3.5. And then there are people who are like, I gotta try that AI thing out soon. Is, is the Figma make community in a place where 4.5 Sonic can just be like a strict upgrade? That there's no resistance to? Or is it something where you have to think about model switching and, and leaving some choice up to the user? Are there cost considerations?

• 1:34:51John Coogan?

  Like, how much work are you putting on the user or the community? And where's the right pivot point for that?

• 1:34:58Dylan Field?

  Yeah, I think there's to your question about

• 1:35:03Dylan Field?

  sort of the diversity of use cases and personas that might be applicable here. There's so many different users on our platform and types of behavior that we see. You know, about, you know, a third of our users are designers, two thirds are non-designers. Design's always at the core. And I, I honestly think that just from my reflections on this weekend. One thing I keep coming back to is like, I think we're just entering this era of the 10x designer. Where the designer is going to be able to do so much more than ever before. You know, designers have knowledge not only of aesthetic, UX and craft, but also the value is just moving up the stack.

• 1:35:48Dylan Field?

  And the designer will be in this position of leverage where they're going to be able to do a lot in terms of product building and creating products with craft that just create joy and thinking of the entire system and then pulling everybody else in and helping lead in the charge. And I think that it's just this time where good enough is no longer enough.

• 1:36:15Dylan Field?

  Good enough is mediocre. You have to be great if you want to make it so that you can win. And I think that the more power that designers have, the more leverage they have.

• 1:36:29Dylan Field?

  Then the more likely they are to be able to help a company win.

• 1:36:34Dylan Field?

  And so that's just kind of like how I see things going in general. And on the implementation side. I I think it's like not as relevant, you know, you just kind of have a variety of ways that people want to interact or different cycles of AI adoption people are at. And you need to meet them where they're at and you need to create and provide an amazing product experience. And so it gets back to the basics there.

• 1:37:01John Coogan?

  How do you think about?

• 1:37:04John Coogan?

  The the vibe or the taste of the designs that are coming out of these models? I keep coming back to the the mid journey example where it just feels like David Holes did something different from just take the average or like or like, you know, minimize the loss function. It feels like there's his artistic vision in there in every generation, no matter what your prompt is. And then you can do a lot of different things on top of it. And so it's almost this like collaboration between the artist David Holes and the artist who's the prompter. And I'm wondering if you think that like, like, how does the flavor of design that's coming out of

• 1:37:50John Coogan?

  4.5 plus Figma make like, where does the human opinion get inserted at each level? And how does that like, how much of that is actually happening? Like, can you tell the difference in the flavor of design that's coming out of a certain model?

• 1:38:06Dylan Field?

  I I think we're not yet like a Dolly two moment for design or a mid journey moment for design. This happened relatively the same time.

• 1:38:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:16Dylan Field?

  And look at Dolly one compared to Dolly two.

• 1:38:21Dylan Field?

  You know, it's uh, it's easy to dismiss. And um, I think design generation will get better. At the same time, I think that the law of averages concept that you kind of mentioned is sort of the reality today and likely will be the reality for a long time.

• 1:38:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:39Dylan Field?

  And what is critical is iteration, the ability to push in a direction and getting to great. And if you're able to do that and you're able to uh, advance your craft. If you're able to have a sense of what the culture is and what the business problems are and what the engineering challenges might be. Bring it all together with a great design, user experience, aesthetic. It's, it's like, it's not just the style. It's the entire system you have to hold in your head and figure out um, along with brand, marketing, point of view, how's it all gonna work to work together?

• 1:39:23Dylan Field?

  And if you can do that, that's like where I think everything unlocks.

• 1:39:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:27Jordi Hays?

  How, what's your read on sentiment right now in the design community broadly around AI? Because on, on our side as a business that, that is constantly working with creative people externally. Obviously, we have people internally. But we have like basically as much demand as ever for like talent, talented creative people. Like we don't, we have a ton of work that we want to do and uh...

• 1:39:55John Coogan?

  But we also have an unlimited demand for Figma make and tools that help us instantiate ideas. And there's a lot of stuff where we're like, we just need to do the footer or the layout or the buttons and like the faster we can get that out, the better.

• 1:40:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but, but there's this sense of um... We have a insatiable demand for novel thinking.

• 1:40:16John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:40:17Jordi Hays?

  Ideas and concepts.

• 1:40:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:40:19Jordi Hays?

  And it's it's less a it's less a.

• 1:40:21John Coogan?

  I can't tell if you're saying we humanity or we TBPN because.

• 1:40:24Jordi Hays?

  I'm talking about both, but TBPN. And it's less of, oh, is this possible? Like, is making this animation gonna be, you know, within budget? It's more it's more like, well, what animation should we make?

• 1:40:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:39Jordi Hays?

  We're willing to pay, we're willing to pay a lot for that kind of original thinking. But I'm curious, like, where where you see the kind of where sentiment is at today? Because on the software development side, it seems very clear as as when you can build software faster and cheaper. Well, we want more engineers to build more software because the world needs a lot of software. And I think same thing for truly great novel creative work.

• 1:41:04Dylan Field?

  Yeah, well, first of all, I'm hearing a strong advertisement on TBPN for TBPN. You all are trying to hire, so hopefully your viewers can like apply somewhere. But the thing that I would call out is I think that we're almost seeing a parallel to the AI talent wars with design right now. At least amongst the companies that are really getting it.

• 1:41:33Dylan Field?

  The ones that have internalized the design is going to be how you win or lose. And that's the craft, the details that matter. They are really getting aggressive, not like meta AI aggressive. Let me be clear. Very aggressive. And it's, I think, just again, value moving up the stack. And that's something that all companies will eventually figure out. I just hope that a bunch of companies don't figure out too late. But yeah, I think Jevon's paradox as applied to talent that is adept at using models and doing amazing work and really pushing the boundaries of what's possible and what could be created.

• 1:42:18Dylan Field?

  And how much craft you can have, how much you can delight people, that's real. And the demand for development is certainly not shrinking. I think that, you know, it's never been met. And at Figma, I mean, we're doing headcount planning, like we're hiring almost all areas as we go into this next year and in big ways. And I think just generally, you know, our point of view from the start about AI at Figma is like, how do you both lower the floor? Make it so that more people can come into the design process, but also raise the ceiling, make it so designers can do more.

• 1:42:57Dylan Field?

  And I think that's something that's a shared view. Uh, maybe we were one of the first to articulate it, if not the first, but uh, I believe that most of the products that are in the sort of AI space are trying to do the same thing. They're trying to make it so that more folks are able to be part of uh, this lifecycle. And also they're trying to make it so the people that are the experts are able to do more than ever before.

• 1:43:24John Coogan?

  Do you have a view on like the shape of the design community as a function of maybe the amount of designers working in a particular organization? Are there, are there more design firms than ever? Are there more solo design firms that are profitable and making money than ever? Is the power law getting steeper or is the floor rising or both? Do you have any idea on like the shape of the design community and, and the shape of how designers work together? Uh, or just make money independently uh, in the age of AI?

• 1:44:04Dylan Field?

  Yeah, I think um, there's a lot of work here we've done on the sort of company side and we're seeing there just more and more people getting involved in design and more design hiring.

• 1:44:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:18Dylan Field?

  I think in that um, more freelancer agency segment, there's more research to do. Uh, to understand is the same effect happening? But I'll maybe think back historically, um, you know, when there was this first wave of design hiring and people realized that design talent was critical to success. One of the first things they did was they started to snap up the agencies. And they would quickly just start acquiring agencies of great design talent. And so that's how like, for example, T. Han and Lacks became involved in then Facebook, then Reality Labs. And John Lacks ended up leading up Reality Labs for a while.

• 1:45:04Dylan Field?

  And they got someone who was legendary design talent to be able to be at the forefront of their work on Oculus for for quite some time. And I would not be surprised if similar things started happening. But I also think that, you know, back in the early days of Figma,

• 1:45:27Dylan Field?

  it was this question even of like, how many designers are there in the United States and the world? I mean, the Bureau Labor Statistics said that there were 250,000 designers. It's like, well, that seems wrong in 2012, but like, how many other actually, I don't know, maybe it's like 500,000, not 250,000, but like, is it like a venture scalable business? We don't know. And but what we noticed was that values moved the stack and it was going to be the case that everyone was going to build up their design team and the design would be so important as this overall system changed. And I think that that same thesis we held then in 2012,

• 1:46:09Dylan Field?

  it has not changed. It is the same thesis we hold today. And I really believe that sort of this era of the 10x designers here, it's just starting in some ways, but it's going to be quite incredible and it'll require more designers to step up as leaders. And for them to lean into leadership roles that they may have otherwise not considered. But, you know, if they don't, then I think it's going to be a dynamic where everyone's trying to get involved in design and they don't really know the guardrails or how to do it exactly. And you have a lot of people with a lot of thoughts, but not many like railways built, tracks built

• 1:46:55Dylan Field?

  for folks to go down. So that's the challenge, I think, that many design oriented folks will have and the need for design leadership this time.

• 1:47:04Jordi Hays?

  Shopify just acquired a design studio last month, by the way. Someone in our chat mentioned this. What's your thinking around open source? You obviously have a close relationship with Mike over at Anthropic. He's on the board and and obviously Claude has consistently led on code gen, so they're a natural partner for Figma make. But is open source something you're exploring or just given that they're not really at the front?

• 1:47:37John Coogan?

  For a while it was like commoditize your complements, but maybe the LMS, yeah, I'm super interested to hear what you think.

• 1:47:43Dylan Field?

  Yeah, I mean, look, there's, I think, first of all, I mean, Mike, you and I, from the start of just looking at him being on the board, we had to make sure that, you know, it was clear, we as Figma have to choose whatever is best for Figma. You know, as models get better, we get better, but if we're not choosing the right models, then we're not getting better. So on 4.5, but the eval is an easy choice, you know, roll it out to users. There's going to be a lot of other model improvements and of course, open source is something we're always watching too. And so it's exciting just how much is happening right now.

• 1:48:25Dylan Field?

  And I think that it's going to be just a fun next few months to see the continued model releases. I'm pretty psyched.

• 1:48:36John Coogan?

  What are your thoughts on hardware right now? That feels like a place where we're seeing a reemergence, a lot of hype around Meta's new devices, potentially a new design surface as people design more, more physical products that are maybe enabled by AI. It just feels like that could be kind of the next thing, some sort of like Cambrian explosion of hardware devices, or maybe it's all just AirPods forever or something, who knows? But I'd love to hear your take on like, how, is there, is there a demand from you for new hardware devices? Like, the Wacom tablet is obviously legendary in the design community,

• 1:49:21John Coogan?

  but it's a completely prosumer, professional device. Just, how are you thinking about hardware these days?

• 1:49:27Dylan Field?

  Well, I think in the Figma context, what we think about is, okay, what are the screens that we need to serve? And are users need to design for? And that's why I was so excited to be able to check out Meta's new glasses and also the neural band. The band is like, underappreciated, so cool.

• 1:49:51Jordi Hays?

  People need to, people won't, it won't get a reaction until enough people have actually tried it, because it's-

• 1:49:58John Coogan?

  It looks just like a Whoop band. Like, there's nothing that looks crazy about it until you actually try it and you're like, oh, you can fully see what's going on.

• 1:50:05Dylan Field?

  Yeah. And, but like, let's be clear, I mean, this was years in development, many years. I mean, they've been at it for so long now. And I think the first time I got the demo was almost a year and a half ago, a year and a few months ago, and then I saw it again right before config, but like, the sort of new improved version. And it just takes a long time to go build these new form factors.

• 1:50:36Dylan Field?

  You know, the same thing is being true in auto. It's true, you know, in wearables in general. It's probably going to become true in other surfaces that people will find. And I, I think that whether it's AR, VR, you know, curved glass, you know, small screen sizes, large screen sizes. There's a lot of surfaces that designers now need to target. And we haven't even gotten into, you know, AI and agents and what designers need to do to create context in these places too. I think in many ways, we're just in the MS-DOS era of AI.

• 1:51:18Dylan Field?

  We are still figuring out how to explore this amazing latent space. You've got this LM, it's your spaceship. But you're in this like N-dimensional space and the best way to like figure out where you are, your compass is your prompt, natural language. It's like, what interfaces will be built for that? How would be able to figure out custom bespoke ways to do dimensionality reduction, figure out how to help people navigate better as these models and the architecture just fundamentally improve. And also, you know, what protocols between the models should exist? And what's the best way to create those? Because I think that there's a reason MCP is really caught on so fast. It's extremely valuable.

• 1:52:00Dylan Field?

  And we just launched with Figma, the Figma MCP for design as a remote service before it was only desktop and local. And also we improved the capabilities. And then we did it for Make as well. So we want to make sure that people know you're not trapped in Make. Figma Make, if you're going prompt to code and you're making it so that you're getting to some great output and you're spending a lot of time on it. Awesome, like you always had to download code, but now you can just have your MCP connect to Figma Make and pull all your code in.

• 1:52:35John Coogan?

  How is, how is MCP adoption going? It, it, it feels like there's a, there's a world where like I was promised like the AI didn't need an API because it would just use the computer, right? And I imagine that there's a, maybe we're not quite there, but there's a world where my, my AI just literally opens browser, goes to Figma.com, does whatever it needs to do, just like a human. And yet MCP seems to be like what you're identifying with like the energy around it is immense. How are people actually using it? Like, are there, is there a killer app, killer feature, some story where you've been really excited about? Like the impact that it's had on an actual like design project or designer or firm or your company?

• 1:53:16Dylan Field?

  I mean, you should definitely try it out. Like it is a sort of magic experience when you go and you've got your design structured in Figma with Auto Layout. You've got your variables defined and then you're able to just, you know, basically press the button. And with MCP, you pull in all that design context into your code base.

• 1:53:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:53:35Dylan Field?

  And you can use inference to basically go figure out how to map it. And I'm not saying it's all one shot, but like with either one shot or a little bit of it or a prompting. If you have your design set up in a structured way.

• 1:53:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:50Dylan Field?

  It, it's a pretty wild experience. You know, Coinbase was telling us about how it's really improved their workflow. And, um, you know, we've heard from many other customers that I'm not sure I have permission to name, but uh, how much it's affected them and how powerful it's been. And overall, yeah, people are super excited. We've been thrilled with the response. That's why we're investing so much time into it. It's because we really think this is a super important part of our story as a company.

• 1:54:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:19Dylan Field?

  Is being more open and making sure that we really extend out to the greater ecosystem of AI. Um, there's so much that we've done in so many places and design is context and that context is valuable in so many different spots.

• 1:54:33John Coogan?

  So I should think of, of the MCP efforts as a, almost like a business to consumer, like a consumer benefit, not necessarily just something like an API that, that enables like better, uh, like B to B partnerships and integrations. Is that roughly correct?

• 1:54:49Dylan Field?

  Uh, yeah, I think it's, um. You know, I think everyone's still trying to figure it out for sure.

• 1:54:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:56Dylan Field?

  But I think that yes, with the right MCP services out there, the ways that they can affect, you know, all sorts of places that you consume in France. It's pretty, pretty big and I think we're just kind of the start. So yeah, for Figma, we're very, very excited about where we can go here.

• 1:55:23Dylan Field?

  And then, yeah, I think just, if you zoom out, the bigger story that is being told is how do we go from idea to product? And, you know, it used to be this very linear process. But now we're no longer in that world. We're in a world where instead,

• 1:55:45Dylan Field?

  people try various directions, various paths. And you need to be able to generate a bunch of different ideas, explore them with your team, figure out that option space. We hope Figma make me a big part of it. But even if someone has a different tool that they've, they're using,

• 1:56:05Dylan Field?

  we also want to make sure that they're able to bring their design context in. And with that design context, really help that other surface improve. We think that's a win-win for everyone and it's most importantly, a win for the user.

• 1:56:22Jordi Hays?

  I'm so excited for today's middle schoolers and high schoolers to have access to these tools. Like, can you imagine if you had, had, had Figma make?

• 1:56:29John Coogan?

  It's incredible.

• 1:56:30Jordi Hays?

  Like when you, at that, at that age, like you, you, you let somebody marinate with these kind of tools for a decade, what they're going to be capable of.

• 1:56:37John Coogan?

  I mean, I'm pretty sure we've already seen posts about like 15 year olds sold the company for like $50 million or something. There's crazy stuff happening all over the place.

• 1:56:44Jordi Hays?

  But it's just going to be more and more and more.

• 1:56:47John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for joining. Last question.

• 1:56:48Dylan Field?

  The trails will be wild.

• 1:56:49John Coogan?

  Last question from the chat. Do you miss the ratty?

• 1:56:54Dylan Field?

  Oh, not really, no.

• 1:56:58John Coogan?

  What is it? Is it the university dining hall? Is that right?

• 1:57:01Dylan Field?

  One of them. Yeah. I was more of a Vdub guy, but.

• 1:57:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:57:04Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:57:05Dylan Field?

  Yeah, the, the ratty was.

• 1:57:10Dylan Field?

  A great place to see people.

• 1:57:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:57:11Dylan Field?

  And but then again, I also like I hate standing in line. So I would I'm out of everything so that I either arrived super early or super late. So I wasn't in the long line. But yeah, the food, maybe not the best. But you know, good, the vibes, right?

• 1:57:28Jordi Hays?

  The memories.

• 1:57:29John Coogan?

  Good vibes. Well, thank you so much for bringing good vibes to this appearance.

• 1:57:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, massive week for you guys.

• 1:57:33John Coogan?

  Massive week. We'll talk to you soon, Dylan.

• 1:57:35Jordi Hays?

  We'll talk soon.

• 1:57:36John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 1:57:36Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you.

• 1:57:37John Coogan?

  Uh, quickly, let me tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and unknown clusters.

• 1:57:50Jordi Hays?

  Cora, Perplexity and many more.

• 1:57:52John Coogan?

  And we have our next guest from Stripe in the restream waiting room. We will bring in Jeff.

• 1:57:56Jordi Hays?

  It's time to Jeff.

• 1:57:57John Coogan?

  The TV PN Ultra Dump. Jeff, how you doing?

• 1:57:59Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 1:57:59John Coogan?

  Whoa, okay.

• 1:58:01Jordi Hays?

  We're purple.

• 1:58:01John Coogan?

  I'm seeing some announcement lighting. What's going on?

• 1:58:05Jeff Weinstein?

  We're here in New York. We're finishing up some keynote practice for our event tomorrow, Stripe Tour. But I imagine you all want to talk about some agentic commerce today.

• 1:58:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:14Jordi Hays?

  It's looking, it's looking wild in there.

• 1:58:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, give us.

• 1:58:18Jordi Hays?

  I get excited enough about payments even without the neon lighting. But uh, but that certainly helps.

• 1:58:24Jeff Weinstein?

  I think I look better in purple.

• 1:58:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, yeah. Uh, give us the, the actual news item. It, it seems like Sam Altman just found out about Stripe recently and decided to do some sort of deal or something. Now, of course, like the companies go back a long way. And so my, my, my question is like, what's new about the relationship between the two companies today?

• 1:58:42Jeff Weinstein?

  Yeah, really exciting. So today, for the first time ever, you can purchase where you prompt. Uh, and inside of ChatGPT, you're able to discover products as lots of people are already doing. But now you can buy from businesses right in the chat. And so we partnered with OpenAI to build this as well as a open standard agentic commerce protocol to help more businesses get going of selling agentically. So I'd love to get into all of that.

• 1:59:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Name every product I can buy today. Uh, I mean, give me an example because I can imagine there are products where the company wraps in a different, you know, content management system or order management system.

• 1:59:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:27John Coogan?

  Physical versus there are other companies where they sell stuff and it's really just Stripe and a website. And so that makes a ton of sense. So what's the wheelhouse customer interaction look like?

• 1:59:39Jeff Weinstein?

  Yeah, so anytime you discover a product in ChatGPT, if that seller is enabled on the Agentic Commerce Protocol and is working with OpenAI, you'll be able to purchase directly with any of the payment methods you've already saved with ChatGPT for subscription, or be able to add one. And what's really interesting is, you know, one of the big unlocks here is how do you scale adding merchants to Agentic Commerce? And how do you scale accepting Agentic Payments? And we have two big announcements that are going to unblock those foundations. One is the Agentic Commerce Protocol, which is an open standard that we co-develop with OpenAI for businesses to make their checkouts agent viable, agent ready.

• 2:00:21Jeff Weinstein?

  And so as a business, you're used to, you know, first you're selling in the mall and then you're, you know, sold over the phone and then you sold on the website. And now you're going to be able to express your checkout in a way that you want for agents to be able to initiate transactions. And the second big thing is, how do you actually move the money? How do you get the payment from the buyer and have it sent to the merchant for processing in a secure way? Which is why we built this Shared Payment Token API, which lets businesses on Stripe and businesses that might be using another processor be able to process Agentic Payments. And that those two things together are what really enable a launch like this.

• 2:01:04Jordi Hays?

  Getting more into the details, if for an e-commerce company in particular, like where does, where's inventory managed? Is, are you guys integrating? I know Shopify had an announcement today too. Is that connected to this? Are these two totally different experiences? Like, help me understand how like, you know, a specific company like an e-commerce brand is gonna, can get started selling in line in these LLMs.

• 2:01:35Jeff Weinstein?

  Yeah, so today's announcement for ChatGPT has Etsy Live. So today, rolling out this morning, you'll be able to purchase from Etsy sellers directly in the chat. And Shopify is coming soon in the same, in the same program. So these are the first two merchant partners, the first two e-commerce platforms that are, are working with ChatGPT to be able to sell Agentic, sell Agentically through their LM system and their consumer base. For merchants going forward, you know, how do you at scale?

• 2:02:07Jeff Weinstein?

  Have a way to express your checkout as a merchant, as an e-commerce platform? That isn't just, hey, have the agent like pretend to be on my site and click around to do so? How do you have a standard API system for scaling those merchant integrations? And that's what the Agentic Commerce Protocol is. It's a way for any e-commerce platform, any business, to be able to express their checkout in a way that an AI agent can then safely initiate the transaction. And we think this is a big unlock for how to scale Agentic Commerce. The world has already had lots of product feeds. There are many at-scale product feeds, but there isn't yet a way for a business to

• 2:02:53Jeff Weinstein?

  programmatically express their checkout in a way that they can control and have it be agent-initiated.

• 2:03:00John Coogan?

  How does the standard that you built differ from MCP? Is it related? Is it compatible? Are these two separate paths in the tech tree?

• 2:03:08Jeff Weinstein?

  Yeah, we think that the Agentic Commerce Protocol is specifically designed to help with initiating agentic checkouts online. And it is dedicated to that type of commerce use case. It shares a lot of the same principles of being open and LLM-first as MCP does for generic tool usage, but checkouts are complicated. They have all kinds of weird back and forths and coupons and SKUs and inventory and payment failures and payment success. You need a dedicated specification, and that's why we're so happy to partner with ChatGPT, with OpenAI, to both build the standard, but also have it be the way that they're going to scale their merchants. And so you can get started at agenticcommerce.dev.

• 2:03:53Jeff Weinstein?

  That URL happened to be available last week, so I might have bought it. And that's what we went forward with.

• 2:04:01John Coogan?

  How does the Apple tax feature in all of this? It seems like I use ChatGPT on my phone and Apple usually tries to take a cut if I buy something digital, if I say...

• 2:04:11Jordi Hays?

  Amazon, physical goods historically have been exempt.

• 2:04:14John Coogan?

  Exempt, but if I'm buying a digital good, do you play nice with that? Like, how do you see that all playing out?

• 2:04:20Jeff Weinstein?

  Yeah, today's launch is focused on physical goods, and I think there's going to be a variety of ways that these third parties, third-party services are able to charge in various ecosystems. But today's launch works on web, on iOS, on Android, and is rolling out to all US ChatGPT consumers this morning.

• 2:04:39Jordi Hays?

  Very exciting. Do you think people are underestimating how much of a shift this trend is going to be? Because we were explaining before you got on earlier, if I can go on my phone and describe in plain English the exact type of product that I want be served, a number of options, and in one click buy it, that's incredibly useful. Even I was giving the example of even browsing Amazon and trying to just find, if I'm trying to find a, the example I gave is like a paper towel holder. This is personal for me because I was, I bought a really cheap direct-to-factory paper, you know, direct-from-factory paper towel holder, and I was just like, just give me-

• 2:05:22Jeff Weinstein?

  It's not the place to skimp.

• 2:05:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You use it every, you use it multiple times a day, right? But, but I, I've always wanted almost a layer over Amazon to just, just products that have existed or from, or from brands that have existed for more than 100 years, right? And this is the kind of thing that you can describe of, I want to buy a paper towel holder, but I want to buy it from a company that's over 100 years old, right? If they've been around for-

• 2:05:45Jeff Weinstein?

  It's so interesting. It's like, your, your, your futuristic purchases, I want the legacy provider. It's a perfect combination. I think, I think you're expressing what many of us are all feeling in our lives, is which is the modality for discovery has completely changed. And we expect that commerce to get closer and closer to intent. And it's certainly, having tested, having worked on and tested this for the last many, many months, it feels extremely natural to, to purchase where, where you are discovering. My garage is full of things I bought from Etsy as we, as we said over the, over the last months. And this is just the beginning, because with this type of foundational agentic commerce-

• 2:06:29Jeff Weinstein?

  Set of APIs and open standards. It's really unlock to both scale merchants, scale AI agents, scale all types of new consumer and business experiences. And so I think it's very much just the beginning here, but we are, I think, unlocked, we hope, how to take these things from prototype to at scale production. And I really encourage folks who are watching today to, to look on chat GPT and try to find something fun that you've always wanted to buy that might be, have been on page 10,000 of your search engine, but might be like right there as the LM really can, can provide you very personalized recommendations. It's, it's, it's just very fun to on the go.

• 2:07:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:10Jeff Weinstein?

  Buy and a tap in this kind of way.

• 2:07:12John Coogan?

  Love it. Uh, well, thank you so much for stopping by and giving us the update.

• 2:07:15Jordi Hays?

  Tons more questions I have, but, but probably stuff you can't even get into, but we'll have you on again soon to talk more.

• 2:07:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:21Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations.

• 2:07:22John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon, Jeff.

• 2:07:23Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, Jeff.

• 2:07:23Jeff Weinstein?

  Good to see you all.

• 2:07:24John Coogan?

  And in the financial news, Etsy is up 15.83% on the news. It's a $7.42 billion company. Head over to public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions.

• 2:07:41Jordi Hays?

  Not financial advice.

• 2:07:42John Coogan?

  Our next guest, yeah, maybe you want to go long, maybe you want to go short.

• 2:07:44Jordi Hays?

  15%.

• 2:07:46John Coogan?

  But a big boost on Etsy products potentially being sold in chat GPT.

• 2:07:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, we have Adam Draper in the re-stream waiting room. Let's bring him in. Whoa, there he is.

• 2:07:58Speaker 05

  Let's go.

• 2:07:59Jordi Hays?

  Let's go. What's happening?

• 2:08:01Speaker 05

  Jordy, John, so excited to talk to you.

• 2:08:04Jordi Hays?

  Let's go. We're excited to have you. Uh, uh, give us, give us the news. What's happening?

• 2:08:10Speaker 05

  All right. Uh, well, we raised $87 million. Actually, yeah, let's go.

• 2:08:18Jordi Hays?

  Let's go. Uh, actually what? Actually.

• 2:08:22Speaker 05

  Well, it was eighty-seven, six, five, four, three, two, one dollars. Because, you know, that's how rockets go off. Eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.

• 2:08:32Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Boost VC. It's a rocket.

• 2:08:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, and we get to continue to do what we're doing. Our investors love our returns, so we just get to keep doing what we're doing for the last thirteen years, which is backing great founders on the fringe.

• 2:08:45Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. You were early to sci-fi investing, or maybe did it before it was so on trend?

• 2:08:56Speaker 05

  I was an early investor in Coinbase, a company called Virgin Labs that did Snapchat, that became Snapchat Spectacles. I've been investing in what any kid would dream of for the last fifteen years. I just flew a jetpack.

• 2:09:17Jordi Hays?

  No way. No way. Yeah, somebody sent me, somebody sent me a video earlier. Maybe it was the same company. Were you flying with Jackson Moses? Is that, is it Gravity Industries? Is that the company?

• 2:09:31Speaker 05

  I was flying, so, okay, this is the coolest thing. I, you know, I read my first Iron Man comic when I was like six. And then about a decade ago, we invested in Iron Man thesis, which ended up investing in gravity.

• 2:09:48Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:09:49Speaker 05

  And I got to fly a jetpack today.

• 2:09:55Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:09:56Speaker 05

  So, I, I, I, I think-

• 2:09:59John Coogan?

  I heard there was some fundraising news.

• 2:10:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. John's back. Hit that, hit that gong. Eighty-seven million.

• 2:10:07Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:10:10Jordi Hays?

  Adam's the most fired up. You're the most fired up guest I think we've ever had. Nobody else is jumping. You're at the standing dead. It's fantastic. I gotta tell people.

• 2:10:17Speaker 05

  Thank you guys so much for doing this. You guys are just the greatest cheerleaders and champions of this tech world.

• 2:10:23Jordi Hays?

  We, we love, nobody loves technol- I would hate if somebody loved technology more than, more than us. Maybe you do, but, but break down the jetpack. How does this, like, it's a good example of like a specific portfolio company. How does this go commercial?

• 2:10:39Speaker 05

  I, I think that the promise of venture capital, the hope of venture capital is that you get to invest in all the dreams that anyone ever had as a twelve-year-old. And they end up coming through and I got to do that with a jetpack. I like I invested in like exactly what my childhood self would have loved to have invested in. Uh, except it was seven years ago and then they made insane progress to the point where not only one person can do it. Anyone can do it. I was I just flew down to I got to Bakersfield and then I got to fly a jetpack. And so I am.

• 2:11:18Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay. I love, I love everything about jetpack. How, how does uh, Gravity specifically, how are they looking to commercialize? Uh, you know, what are, what are the, what are some of the use cases? Is it, is it going to be the kind of thing that, that is more initially, you know, consumer? It's just fun to fly jetpacks. So people pay to do it.

• 2:11:40Speaker 05

  By the way, one of the things I always noticed when you guys are doing your thing is that your cans pile up. So I want to make sure.

• 2:11:45Jordi Hays?

  There, there we go. You got double fisting.

• 2:11:50Speaker 05

  So we uh, so first off, we invest in all founders who are on the fringe of doing great, incredible things. Uh, Gravity specifically, we saw the, I saw a man fly. So he flew in my back parking lot back here in San Mateo. And when someone flies.

• 2:12:09Jordi Hays?

  You gotta write him a check.

• 2:12:10Speaker 05

  You write a check right there. And so we wrote a check right there. Seven years later, uh, he's built a, you know, multimillion dollar business and it has two parts to it. There's the defense part and the media part. And also this training school so that people like I could become pilots, jetpack pilots. And basically I highly recommend, we should go do it. We should go.

• 2:12:33John Coogan?

  That sounds fantastic.

• 2:12:34Jordi Hays?

  I've always wanted to have a jetpack in the studio in the Ultra Dome.

• 2:12:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, for really big fundraising.

• 2:12:39Jordi Hays?

  What's the, what's the defense, uh, what's the defense use case here in your view? Because I can imagine in, in sort of um. More controlled environments, this could be a cool way to turn a human into a drone. But at the same time, on the battlefield, I don't know, with, with a lot of drones, I don't know if I'd want to strap myself in and get into, get into the air, just considering you might be a target. But how, how do you view the?

• 2:13:06Speaker 05

  It turns out boarding boats, it turns out is one of the best defense capabilities. So being able to go from one boat to another boat.

• 2:13:13John Coogan?

  You see that with like the Navy SEALs show up in the little.

• 2:13:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was the other demo they did, right?

• 2:13:19Speaker 05

  Yep, that was Gravity.

• 2:13:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was insane. So Gravity, every time I've seen a jetpack, basically the last seven years, it was Gravity.

• 2:13:28Speaker 05

  And it's really an innovation in vertical takeoff and landing engines. People didn't believe, there was a disbelief that you could build small enough engines that they would be able to lift an individual human off the ground. With enough fuel to live for long enough. And so this has been a huge innovation. Also, paramedic is a big deal. Like if someone's lost on a mountain, you can just fly up there within a small amount of time and get it. And then the, yeah, dude, I mean, I, I, it was a lifelong dream to fly. I flew. I'm gonna be a, I'm a jetpack racer.

• 2:14:04John Coogan?

  Jetpack racer.

• 2:14:05Speaker 05

  I don't know how to say this, I don't know how to say this in English.

• 2:14:09Jordi Hays?

  Just deploy, deploy the fun in like the.

• 2:14:12Speaker 05

  Jetpack stuff. Like, it could be bio jetpack things, it could be jetpack things. Just, it needs to have jetpacks, evidently.

• 2:14:21John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:14:22Jordi Hays?

  Last question, what, what's the next category that is maybe, if, if jetpacks were underhyped seven years ago, what, what, what are you looking at today?

• 2:14:33Speaker 05

  These founders are coming into my office and they're saying, I'm gonna make you live 50 years longer, I'm gonna cure cancer, I'm going to, uh, just cure all genetic disease. We're gonna move from a world of treatment to a world of cures in the healthcare and science world. So I would say bio is really the thing that I would say. Also, one of the things we do is, as Boost VC is, we actually put on a deep tech demo day with the entire deep tech, early-stage venture community. And it's coming up on Wednesday, where you can see some of these bio, future-forward companies. Actually, a bunch of the demo day companies have actually been on, uh, TVP, uh, Doug from Radiant.

• 2:15:15John Coogan?

  Love him.

• 2:15:15Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:15:16Speaker 05

  Incredible people. Gravity.

• 2:15:18Jordi Hays?

  There we go. I expect to see you flying around the floor.

• 2:15:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:22Jordi Hays?

  Of the demo.

• 2:15:23Speaker 05

  Okay, we'll go down together. We'll do it together.

• 2:15:25Jordi Hays?

  Love it.

• 2:15:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, you need to jetpack into the show. The chat is demanding it. Uh, thank you so much for hopping on the stream. We'll talk.

• 2:15:31Jordi Hays?

  Great having you, Adam. Congrats on the new fun.

• 2:15:33John Coogan?

  See you soon.

• 2:15:34Speaker 05

  Thank you. We just get to keep backing the founders.

• 2:15:37Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Incredible. Talk soon.

• 2:15:38John Coogan?

  Rest of your day. Let me tell you about TurboPuffer. Search every byte, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.

• 2:15:48Jordi Hays?

  We puffin'. Simon from TurboPuffer.

• 2:15:50John Coogan?

  Tomorrow live in the TVP UltraDome.

• 2:15:53Jordi Hays?

  Can't wait.

• 2:15:53John Coogan?

  But for now, we have James Hawkins in the restream waiting room.

• 2:15:56Jordi Hays?

  From?

• 2:15:56John Coogan?

  Posthog.

• 2:15:57Jordi Hays?

  Posthog. Here he is.

• 2:15:58John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 2:16:00Speaker 06

  Uh, yeah, very well. Thank you very much.

• 2:16:02John Coogan?

  Give us the fundraising news quick.

• 2:16:04Jordi Hays?

  Let's amp it up.

• 2:16:06John Coogan?

  Let's amp it up. What you got for us?

• 2:16:08Speaker 06

  Sure. Well, first of all, I am very excited to announce that pineapple does not belong on pizza.

• 2:16:13Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, whoa, shots fired.

• 2:16:16John Coogan?

  I, I, I love pineapple on pizza. That's.

• 2:16:18Jordi Hays?

  I don't. I don't. I'm riding with James here.

• 2:16:20John Coogan?

  Okay, well, then you can hit the gong.

• 2:16:21Jordi Hays?

  I'll hit the.

• 2:16:22John Coogan?

  I don't like this guy now.

• 2:16:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:16:23John Coogan?

  He's my mortal enemy. No, I understand. It's an acquired taste. What inspired that? What? Timeline debating that? That, that, that's a, that's an eternal point of debate. Uh.

• 2:16:35Speaker 06

  It's fine on it. It's not a debate. It's decided, right?

• 2:16:38John Coogan?

  What about hot dog? Is a hot dog a sandwich?

• 2:16:41Speaker 06

  Hot, uh, is, no, I don't think that's true.

• 2:16:43John Coogan?

  What if you eat it like this? What if you turn it 90 degrees? Then it looks like a sandwich.

• 2:16:48Speaker 06

  I feel like, I feel like, uh, I, I'm not American. I have a less strong opinion on this, I think. I think you guys are more.

• 2:16:52John Coogan?

  If a dog wore pants, would it wear them on the two back legs or across all four legs?

• 2:16:59Speaker 06

  Wow. You're, you're not straying from the hard questions.

• 2:17:01John Coogan?

  These are the hard questions.

• 2:17:04Speaker 06

  I'm gonna be actual. I've got one more. I've got one more thing.

• 2:17:06John Coogan?

  Please.

• 2:17:07Speaker 06

  Um, so I'm very pleased to announce that we have raised our Series E.

• 2:17:11John Coogan?

  Woo!

• 2:17:11Speaker 06

  32 million, 1.4 billion posts.

• 2:17:14John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:17:15Jordi Hays?

  Massive.

• 2:17:15John Coogan?

  Uh, what, what unlocked it? Uh, walk through the business? What's working? Uh, the customers, the, the problem set, everything?

• 2:17:24Speaker 06

  Sure. Uh, so Postlog is a very developer focused set of analytics tools and feature flags and stuff at the moment. Um, we try and help you understand, uh, how to build a better product, basically. So we help you understand your customers in lots of different ways, um, like errors, analytics. We have 16 products. Um, what's working well?

• 2:17:41Jordi Hays?

  16 products.

• 2:17:43Speaker 06

  Yeah. Should be hitting the gun for that. I think there are about ten or eleven that are charged for and the rest in production. That's right. So yeah, we've been busy bees building stuff. Um, what's working well, we've got tons of engineers who we have really looked after. We think there's been a big rise in product engineering, engineers who want to decide what to work on. Um, and so we've been able to sign up just an awful lot of them. Uh, I think we have about two hundred and forty thousand customers across like free and paid. Um, and so we're kind of like a heavy product led growth, um, from engineers just installing our stuff, basically.

• 2:18:14John Coogan?

  What, uh, it, uh, some of these tools I imagine would, uh, be fertile grounds for hyperscaler competition. What's been the secret to, uh, maintaining differentiation against the big cloud platforms?

• 2:18:29Speaker 06

  Uh, all the products in one has been the main thing, um, going very, very wide. Um, because the way we think of it, there's lots of tools that help you, you know, their, their feature flag products, our experimentation products, our analytics tools, but it's the same customer underneath all of these. And so we kind of felt it's just better. It is more important to our users to have all of their custom data in one spot and lots of things you can do off the back of that. And then it is to, um, apply like fifteen point solutions, basically.

• 2:18:59John Coogan?

  What's your, what's your take on the idea of the compound startup versus, uh, iterating and adding one product after the other? How focused do you want to be on a new product at one time? Do you want to orient the entire company around the next product? Or do you want to have, you know, let's just get a bunch of things started. We'll iterate, iterate towards greatness in all of them kind of simultaneously.

• 2:19:21Speaker 06

  Uh, much more the latter. So, um, we start a couple of products at a time, um, but we always have a small team that we leave behind on each product. So back in the early days when we were smaller, we would go, hey, new shiny thing, everyone would move over.

• 2:19:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:19:32Speaker 06

  Um, but then as the existing one got more and more growth, um. We'd start, we just weren't very responsive to customers and so on. It didn't feel like we were looking after people properly. So we have tiny little teams, like the average team size of Postdoc is probably three people on each product. Um, it's just like three engineers deciding what to build. Um, we just try and get out of the way. Um, so fiercely anti bureaucracy internally. Um, so yeah, this, this small team structure has worked great, like very flat, very wide, um, and a lot of autonomy for engineers.

• 2:20:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. When you're, when you're thinking about creating a new product, what is, what is the bar in terms of turning something from an experiment? You know, at, at what point would you, would you launch something and maybe shut it down or, or, or if you're launching, or by the time you're launching something, are you committed to maintaining it over the long run? I'm curious what kind of the, the framework is.

• 2:20:21Speaker 06

  Sure. Um, yeah, we see really, um, we started at the bottom end of the market. So the bar to us launching something is pretty low. Like we'll start targeting two person startups, kind of doing Y C, for example, is kind of, uh, start from the start is a phrase you hear a lot internally.

• 2:20:35Speaker 06

  In terms of retiring stuff, we haven't had to retire a product at this stage. We've always built kind of products where we're going in with a late mover advantage, we consider it. Um, so we're going in after a lot of the market. This is actually behavior that we're trying to change now, um, with AI in particular, um, because we're looking at figuring out how can we use like this sort of multi-dimensional data and all these different tools together. Which is one of the challenges. And that's partly why we did this round, because we wanted to have the time and space and the ability to kind of go nuts, um, trying to automate. The way I would kind of consider it is a bit like if you were trying to understand a painting and you can only see the color blue, uh, like one data type. You'll get a rough idea, but it won't get a totally correct idea of what's happening. And so we kind of think having all the tools and all the data is a bit like having all the colors.

• 2:21:16Speaker 06

  But this is something that's new to us and it will take a little bit of time, um, and some confidence. Uh, so that's kind of, yeah, it was probably the main driving force behind wanting to raise at this point.

• 2:21:24John Coogan?

  Last question for me. Um, how has AI changed the business over the last few years? There's so many different ways that you can launch AI products, you can use AI to speed up product development. There's a million different ways, but what's been the biggest thing that's actually, uh, worked for you?

• 2:21:41Speaker 06

  It's massively sped up product development because of so many products at once. It's given us a big, it's just, we already thought that was happening because there's more open source software available. And it's just ramped up fully. So now kind of, we even have companies quite regularly emailing us like smaller startups being like, hey, would you consider buying a company? We don't know how to compete with compound approaches in our industry. Like we've become a feature of a bigger platform, for example.

• 2:22:06Speaker 06

  And so I think we got lucky with that respect. We are targeting engineers and their workflow is entirely changing. And so we're trying to move towards a world where we're generating kind of pull requests for people based on like our data, the session, like video clips of them using their products. Like their feedback and everything else that we're kind of feeding in. So that is a totally dramatic change for us. I think we've gone from mic hair, honestly, to like in complete excitement about what's going on.

• 2:22:32Jordi Hays?

  That's great. One note, chat absolutely loves the website. You should look at it, John. It's absolutely stunning. It's probably the best iteration I've seen of, of, you know, building like a desktop. And making a website, just like a desktop, right? Feeling like a operating system. Absolutely stunning. One question, was Posthog a hot company at Y C Demo Day? Or did it take time to, to get people to kind of come around to the team and the opportunity?

• 2:23:03Speaker 06

  We actually had, I think relative to our batch, we were doing quite well. We had a lot of traction, just free open source usage. We just had an open source project start off with. But our seed round was a train wreck to raise. It was like March 2020. And so I was like, man, we're going to have this thing done in like three days. And then I was like, I may not live to see the end of this.

• 2:23:24Speaker 06

  So, yeah, we made like, you know, we made a bunch of people who put in like random little 5K checks, a bunch of money, which is actually one of the most fun parts, if I'm honest. So, yeah, the seed round was very hard. The later rounds, it kind of got easier. Like the series A was Google Ventures, I'm going to preempt it, and we went with it because we.

• 2:23:44Speaker 06

  There was so much kind of fear in the market fundraising at that time and then the later rounds all but much easier because we just had kind of obvious traction and we're quite efficient business because we're inbound and so we haven't really needed money and that's our first rule of fundraising is do not need to fundraise but we're not against fundraising and that served us extremely well later on but yeah the start the first round was the hardest by miles.

• 2:24:02Jordi Hays?

  Such an important lesson for anyone out there. It's like if your seed round is brutal, you know, it's not necessarily, can be an indicator that you're on the totally wrong path, it can be an indicator that people just don't understand exactly the opportunity or just how good the team is. So, thank you for coming on and giving the update and congrats on the round.

• 2:24:23John Coogan?

  Thanks for coming. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:24:24Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you, James.

• 2:24:25John Coogan?

  Bye. Let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for building and planning products. You heard it from him. They built a lot of products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps.

• 2:24:38Jordi Hays?

  People forget they created modern, they basically created the modern Software as a Service website.

• 2:24:44John Coogan?

  That's true. That's true.

• 2:24:45Jordi Hays?

  How many, how many thousands of companies have tried to emulate it but...

• 2:24:48John Coogan?

  Well, up next, we have Eric, the CEO of Modal Labs. He's in the re-streamed waiting room, coming in to the TBP and UltraDome. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 2:24:56Jordi Hays?

  Eric, what's happening?

• 2:24:58Speaker 07

  Hey, how's it going?

• 2:24:59John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 2:25:01Jordi Hays?

  Great to finally have you.

• 2:25:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, would you mind kicking us off with an introduction on yourself and the company?

• 2:25:06Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. So, we build infrastructure for AI. And so, basically, if you think about a lot of sort of traditional AI, or sort of traditional infrastructure, you know, things like Kubernetes and Docker, things like that, it really doesn't work well for all these new AI applications, you know, whether that's, you know, generative media or like large language models or things like that. So, we basically built a whole new software layer that makes it a lot easier for developers to build applications on top of that.

• 2:25:30John Coogan?

  Where does that sit in the stack? Like, are you trying to be the software layer at Stargate at like these massive, massive data centers? Or is there a different customer archetype that you can actually deliver value for at like a smaller scale? How does the market actually bifurcate?

• 2:25:49Speaker 07

  Yeah, so we focus on slightly smaller companies. Initially, we saw a lot of PMF with startups. But in the last year or so, we've seen a lot of traction also with later-stage companies, you know, public companies and enterprise companies.

• 2:26:01John Coogan?

  What's the pricing model?

• 2:26:02Speaker 07

  Not quite a Stargate level.

• 2:26:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, what's the pricing model for something like this?

• 2:26:06Speaker 07

  So it's all usage-based.

• 2:26:07John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:26:08Speaker 07

  Which means, you know, sort of traditional, basically like a traditional cloud vendor. Like, we charge per GPU hour, essentially.

• 2:26:14John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. And then, do you offer like abstraction layers on top of this? Do you want to build a platform at some point? Or are you happy vending it into another cloud partner that where the customer might not even be aware of you? How do you sit in the market over the long term?

• 2:26:31Speaker 07

  No, we offer a very fat layer of like all these software abstraction that focus on engineers writing code. We consider ourselves a high-code platform, right? So it's meant for engineers who want to write code and, you know, they need a better infrastructure than maybe traditional tools could offer them in terms of scaling up and down, working with GPUs, working with capacitors all over the world.

• 2:26:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:26:53Speaker 07

  And they want to write code.

• 2:26:54John Coogan?

  What are the, I mean, have you, what's the biggest nightmare story from misconfigured infrastructure? Or like the problem you're solving? Have you seen just like millions of dollars go up in smoke? Is it pretty rare? Like, what's the shape of failure in the AI? What are the stakes right now?

• 2:27:15Speaker 07

  I don't know if I can recall anything.

• 2:27:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:27:18Speaker 07

  We're pretty good at like catching. I mean, in a couple of cases, customers.

• 2:27:21John Coogan?

  I don't mean with your software.

• 2:27:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's more like company, you know, people coming to you.

• 2:27:26John Coogan?

  Saying.

• 2:27:26Jordi Hays?

  Having had issues in the past, configuring this stuff on their own.

• 2:27:30Speaker 07

  I would say like the biggest thing right now is just like people wasting a lot of money on GPUs. Especially, I think, a year or two ago, like there was just like kind of hyped up scarcity of like, you gotta get like a thousand GPUs. So a lot of companies went out and made massive reservations.

• 2:27:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:27:45Speaker 07

  And now they're sitting on them and like they're underutilized, right? So they're like, you know, what can I do with these?

• 2:27:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is there, is there a value for those folks just to like sell it back as spot instances for someone else? Like, what are companies actually doing when they wind up a little bit too GPU-rich?

• 2:28:04Speaker 07

  I know there's a couple of other companies. I think it's like Mythril is one of that. It's not like a space where like super focused on like we kind of think that model is kind of broken. Like the idea that companies go out and make a big reservation. We think companies should just pay for it is exactly what they use. And so that's something Model does really well is we scale up and down and you only pay for the time the GPUs are actually running.

• 2:28:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:23Speaker 07

  And yep.

• 2:28:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's your view on the GPU war? Nvidia is obviously dominant. AMD has been in the year of the comeback. They're taking feedback from George Hots. They're listening to Dylan Patel. What are, what does the race look like? There's also a lot of ASICs companies. There's Broadcom's doing stuff. What does the shape of the industry look like in the next couple of years? Where are you kind of, where are you partnering up and like investing for the long term?

• 2:28:55Speaker 07

  So I think in the next couple of years, it's going to be all Nvidia. Like our customers only want Nvidia. Nvidia is like such a massive advantage in terms of the software ecosystem. But I think look a couple of years beyond that, like that's when it starts to get more hazy. I'm personally quite bullish on TPUs, for instance, like Google's product. But of course, there's AMD, like you mentioned, and other players.

• 2:29:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. Are there, yeah, are there other, like, anything that you're looking at in terms of like abstracting away some of CUDA's advantages? It just feels like we're in this era of vibe coding. You should be able to take, you know, some sort of model and like just port it, but that doesn't seem to be working. But people are certainly, they have a lot of economic incentive to do that. Are you bullish on any of that, kind of like breaking the CUDA lock-in?

• 2:29:46Speaker 07

  Yes. It's funny because people are like CUDA is like a mode, like it's such an amazing, but like, I don't know. Like for anyone who's like actually tried to write CUDA, it like fucking sucks. It's very hard to work with. So I, I, I don't know why, like it, it's been so hard for AMD or, or for other providers to like build a better software layer because CUDA is very hard to use.

• 2:30:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:07Speaker 07

  So yeah, give it a couple of years. Like I, I would hope that there's better ways to, to write these kernels.

• 2:30:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, I just remember the story of like Facebook was written in all PHP. They wanted to move to C++. They didn't want to re, have everyone rewrite everything. So they just wrote a compiler that compiled PHP.

• 2:30:24Jordi Hays?

  It's hard to.

• 2:30:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's it. Right. And so it's like, couldn't you, couldn't we get to a world where you're just writing once and then compiling for any different GPU, like create a new abstraction layer? I don't know how the economic incentives play out. I haven't really dug into it, but it's an interesting industry.

• 2:30:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it comes down to.

• 2:30:37Speaker 07

  With modulars trying to do.

• 2:30:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:30:39Speaker 07

  In a way.

• 2:30:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:30:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it comes down, it's hard to be.

• 2:30:42Speaker 07

  Below, right? Sorry, I didn't mean to.

• 2:30:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was just saying it's, it's hard to be like extremely bullish on coding agents and also believe that CUDA has this like long-term, hyper-durable, you know, moat.

• 2:30:53John Coogan?

  There does seem to be some cognitive dissonance there, right? Like they, they both can't be true.

• 2:30:57Jordi Hays?

  It's like, why can't I run a 30-hour Claude code prompts at, at some point, or Claude code in the year 2030 and just like, you know.

• 2:31:05John Coogan?

  Rewrite this for AMD. Don't make mistakes. And it just doesn't.

• 2:31:08Jordi Hays?

  One shot.

• 2:31:08John Coogan?

  I would, I would hope that's how it plays out, but who knows? We, I mean, we might be years away.

• 2:31:12Jordi Hays?

  I generally like your. I've always enjoyed, enjoyed your takes and would love to have you back on sometime when we have more time.

• 2:31:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:19Jordi Hays?

  But congrats on, on the fundraiser. John, did you want to do the honors?

• 2:31:22John Coogan?

  Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Give us the details. What, what's the fundraising?

• 2:31:25Jordi Hays?

  87 billion, uh, million dollars. 87 billions.

• 2:31:32Jordi Hays?

  87 million. Series B.

• 2:31:37Speaker 07

  Yeah. So Lux is leading.

• 2:31:38Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:31:39Speaker 07

  Existing investors putting in a bunch of money to, yeah, we're super pumped.

• 2:31:46Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff, Eric. Thank you for joining and have a great rest of your day. Talk soon.

• 2:31:50John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Let me tell you about Numeral Sales Tax on Autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to Numeral HQ to get started.

• 2:32:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, on that note, I believe we have our first in-person guest of the day.

• 2:32:06John Coogan?

  The day of the week.

• 2:32:07Jordi Hays?

  From AppLovin'.

• 2:32:09John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show, Adam. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks so much for taking the time to come on down to the TBP and UltraDome.

• 2:32:17Jordi Hays?

  Here we are.

• 2:32:18John Coogan?

  Much. Great to have you. Would love to have you kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company and just kind of set the table for us.

• 2:32:27Speaker 08

  Yeah, totally. We're probably the biggest company in the world that no one actually understands what we do.

• 2:32:31John Coogan?

  That's a good title thumbnail.

• 2:32:32Jordi Hays?

  I guess it's bullish now if people don't understand what you do, right? Pals, valentines.

• 2:32:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, same thing.

• 2:32:38Speaker 08

  Well, let's break it down. So, we started the company in 2012, advertising inside mobile games. And really, the goal back then hasn't changed to now. We wanted to give advertisers the opportunity to market themselves, but do it on a revenue-based pricing model. So, they can come in and say, "Look, I want to generate $1,000 of revenue by day 30. Be able to get me $1,000 of media spend against that, so I can break even, make a profit. I'll scale unlimited if I can do that." And I was, I've been in ads for 20 years. I hated the construct of selling someone to convince them to run advertising. You don't know what works, what doesn't. You try to convince them an audience was there. It's all a bunch

• 2:33:18Speaker 08

  of make-believe until you go to top-of-funnel revenue-based pricing. And so, we ended up working with a lot of game developers. These are companies all over the world, a lot of smaller indie businesses. And when you're working with a customer that where the CEO is the founder and they're on the front lines of marketing, it's a great dynamic because usually they're technical, they want to actually understand the math around marketing. And so, we built our business really being inside this niche, working with these casual mobile gaming developers all over the world. Well, business started growing a ton. We were serving a video advertisement inside their games for other games. And over the decade that we ran up, up until going public, this business, super lucrative, super successful for our

• 2:34:03Speaker 08

  customers. We helped these game developers really build their businesses, but no one had heard of us anywhere.

• 2:34:07Jordi Hays?

  You bootstrapped, right?

• 2:34:09Speaker 08

  Well, not by desire. I'll say, we're one of the biggest misses for Sand Hill because we couldn't raise a million over four back in 2012. This was after we'd launched the product. Business was growing like a weed. We were doubling every single month.

• 2:34:24Jordi Hays?

  What was the, what was the pushback?

• 2:34:26John Coogan?

  Do people just think like, "Oh, Google will take it all"?

• 2:34:28Speaker 08

  I think I'm a horrible seller. I don't know. I mean, I've worked on the skills over the years, but the pushback was, "Google will eliminate you. If it's not Google, Facebook will eliminate you. If it's not Facebook, here comes Amazon." So, it was, "Why is this goofy-named company going to be able to do well inside advertising?"

• 2:34:43John Coogan?

  Really quickly, you said you've been selling ads for 20 years. 2005 is the start of this. What's the first ad you sold?

• 2:34:49Speaker 08

  We were affiliate marketers back in social. So a couple of us, one of... And that's how the most hardcore marketers started out in affiliate because it's just you eat what you kill. If you can make money in affiliate, you can make money doing anything. It is brutally tough.

• 2:35:06John Coogan?

  That's amazing. And what was the mood in Silicon Valley or the actual games that were the backbone of the launch? Is this the Zynga era, post Zynga?

• 2:35:16Speaker 08

  This is the tough part. It's a lot of casual games.

• 2:35:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:18Speaker 08

  Like the environment we have now is a billion plus daily active players playing solitaires and puzzles and words.

• 2:35:25John Coogan?

  Match three?

• 2:35:26Speaker 08

  Yeah, totally puzzles. So if you walk down an aisle of a plane, you'll notice like puzzles on everyone's phone.

• 2:35:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:32Speaker 08

  Those are the types of people playing. It turns out it's a lot of middle aged women. It skews female.

• 2:35:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:35:37Speaker 08

  It's a really strong audience of people, but a lot of us don't relate to that. So you think mobile gamer, well, shooter games and like traditional gamer. And so that was always one of the things we had to, there was a challenge in the business is how can that audience be good for, especially as we get into e-commerce and talk about our launch for broader brands? Because people didn't realize. They control so much purchasing.

• 2:36:00John Coogan?

  I was about to say.

• 2:36:00Speaker 08

  It's all the heads of households on the platform. We only have adults. We don't work on any child apps. So you've got adults, head of households, skew female, people with money. These are people on a thousand dollar phone playing for 45 minutes a day. It's a perfect audience. People just never realized it until we became more mainstream.

• 2:36:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about, there's this critique going around with OpenAI doing deals with Oracle, doing deals with Nvidia? And there's this like circularity to the economy.

• 2:36:27Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:36:27John Coogan?

  But then of course there's outside demand. People want to use the products. How do you think about circularity within the mobile app ecosystem where a lot, I'm sure you have advertisers who are advertising mobile games and other mobile games. And it feels like, oh, well, like, you know, is this just all circular? When does the actual money come in?

• 2:36:46Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:36:46John Coogan?

  How have you addressed that throughout the, the, the, the history of the company and like, where do we stand now?

• 2:36:51Speaker 08

  I mean, again, you got to find a purchaser at some point in that circularity, right? So if we were just advertising mobile games to mobile games that were ad supported, it'd be a house of cards.

• 2:36:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:00Speaker 08

  At the end of that, you have two, inside gaming, two things you're trying to do. Take a user from a game. Where they're playing X time per day and take them to a game that they're going to be more engaged with and play 2X or 1.5X. You can do that. You create more ad inventory. So the real growth driver in the category is increased supply. It's not any different than social networking. You get more ads viewed, then you got to make more use of the advertising. So as the technologies get more powerful, you can match up the advertiser and the customer together for something that's transactional. So you get them going from a Solitaire to Candy Crush. They pay $2,000 a year. You've created transactional value in the middle there. There's a lot more value than where the user started.

• 2:37:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. How did the company actually scale? Like how, how like meat and potatoes were the first deals? And then I imagine everything's like, you know, full tech platform now, but we're the first advertisers who are on board on the platform. Kind of like a handshake and a contract or how do you actually get inventory? How do you solve the chicken and egg problem?

• 2:38:02Speaker 08

  Play this video in your app at this moment and we'll give you, you know.

• 2:38:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. How much of like doing things that don't scale?

• 2:38:08Speaker 08

  There was a ton of wheeling and dealing. Actually, it's cool being in your office because we were a garage made into an office. And we had a gong and like, it was a bunch. One of the guys who runs my business team and now runs growth slept in the office for the first six months. So we were affiliates, right? We were dealers. So you'd go up to the early game developer and just give them a value prop of you can actually buy an install. Back then, there was not even the chance of buying an install. Now I said, sell them revenue. You're talking about 13 years ago, being able to sell them an install on a pricing model was innovative. And so when we went out to the market and pitched the zingas of the world on, instead of just buying ads and not really knowing what happens by installs. That in itself was, oh, wow, that's great. And then you pair that with video.

• 2:38:51Speaker 08

  The power of the video clip on a mobile device is really understated. 35 seconds of average viewing time on our ads, you can't do anything else. So when you get a brand opportunity to place an ad on a mobile device and the user's not distracted.

• 2:39:05John Coogan?

  Non-skipable.

• 2:39:05Speaker 08

  Well, it's a mix of skippable and non-skipable. Half the ads, the user actually, it's a great point. Opt in to watching the ad for a currency inside the game.

• 2:39:13John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:39:13Speaker 08

  That's up to 60 seconds of viewing time unskippable. You can't do other things. So we live in ADD-rich environment. This is the most non-ADD thing anywhere in the world.

• 2:39:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:39:24Speaker 08

  You've got to watch that advertisement.

• 2:39:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's fascinating. How do you think AI is going to change mobile gaming? I've seen, there's these famous ads on Instagram where they show you this like character that's right, I'm sure you've seen these, and then people are like, but that's not the real game. It's a pick three underneath. And then I found someone actually built the real game because game development's getting cheaper. It feels like we might be entering like a new, there's a couple of companies that have been pitching like vibe coding platforms for games that will, you know, like become their own app store. It feels like we could just be entering like a new primordial or Cambrian explosion of gaming. How are you thinking about like vibe-coded games or more custom software? Obviously, they'll all need ads to power this, but how are you thinking about?

• 2:40:09Speaker 08

  I mean, you already answered it for me, right? Like, we create discovery, so the more content that's out there, the better. So if AI creates an environment where anyone can build a game, and we're all creative, and most people, he is now today, have played games at some point in their life. Everyone can write an idea down, create a game.

• 2:40:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:25Speaker 08

  They're going to need discovery on the game. They're going to need monetization on the game. So that's a great opportunity for us as an ad platform.

• 2:40:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:32Speaker 08

  More broadly, our system is predicated on our model actually working. So we always talk about AI as LLMs, but if you just talk about AI as modern usage of neural nets, recommendation systems are one of the most economically viable use cases for AI today.

• 2:40:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:48Speaker 08

  They power Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. They power our system.

• 2:40:51Jordi Hays?

  This is why we always felt like, you know, Zuck, you know, spending however many hundreds of billions, like it was, it was very easy to underwrite because you could just get, there's a lot of ways to just get benefit from this infrastructure spend in the core advertising business, right?

• 2:41:07Speaker 08

  Totally. You got, I mean, there's a simple function to all these models. It's more data, more complex model, more compute, better output. And if your whole business model is built on an advertising business, that this technology continued to evolve at the pace it is, is fantastic.

• 2:41:22John Coogan?

  Yep. How do you think about AI on the ad side? Everyone's kind of predicting, I mean, there's already probably some tests out there that a lot of what Meta is doing will be just look at your product catalog, look at your inventory, and then generate the video creative, generate the audio, generate the text. How are you thinking about implementing that? Are you already running tests? How have the tests gone?

• 2:41:44Speaker 08

  This is one of the reasons investors are super excited about advertising platforms like ours. It's the simplistic of you've got a shop, you've got a catalog, create an optimized appearance of that catalog through a recommendation system. We already do that. The more complex is today, people upload a video ad into our platform, not always adapted for the platform. We're new in the marketplace, especially in shopping. So a lot of times they'll bring a 10-second clip from Facebook uploaded to us. Well, if you could have gotten 45 seconds of viewer time, that sucks. As a brand, that's a total miss. They don't have the resources at every level to go, let us create 100 ads a week for this company. Now we'll rebrand as Axon, and we can talk about that in a second. But this Axon advertising platform, they just don't have the resources to create that

• 2:42:27Speaker 08

  ad count at the scale of the time that you need into our platform. And so when you can apply LLMs to go, here's a couple of cool ads out there. Let me create 100 versions of this so we can put it into the system. That'll be a huge uplift in user response to all the brand's products that are being marketed on our platform.

• 2:42:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, when you think about, we're very close with the Ridge Wallet team. And so I got to early on in the Ridge days, and I know that they're an app-loving customer. But early on, I would just see the effort that Connor, the CMO, it's just this constant treadmill of trying to make more and more creative, never being able to make enough, knowing that the more creative you make, the more money you'll make, but still just not even having the time in the day. And so thinking about being able to multiply out creative across different user types, different games, being able to update it a lot more rapidly as games develop new features, bring back old users, et cetera. It's wild.

• 2:43:23Jordi Hays?

  Wanted to ask how you're thinking about M&A this year, next year, in the future. You guys, market cap has grown tremendously, and you guys are now in a position where you could, there's a variety of different platforms out there that have a lot of attention, that are maybe under-monetized, or at least not monetizing as well. I'm curious if that's at all. Something you guys think about or the opportunity in, you know, gaming is big enough that it makes sense.

• 2:43:54John Coogan?

  You're thinking specifically of like a Snapchat or a Pinterest or.

• 2:43:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean TikTok was in the news last week.

• 2:43:59John Coogan?

  TikTok was in the news.

• 2:44:00Jordi Hays?

  You guys were, you know, and that felt like a transaction that was more of like a political transaction than a purely economic deal.

• 2:44:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I guess the broad question is like vertical integration. Do you want to own games at some point or where media is developed or social media platform? Or does that just make no sense for you?

• 2:44:17Speaker 08

  Well, I mean, like we bid on TikTok. So the industrial logic of we can monetize inventory better with our ads models than anyone else out there. It is is sound at least to us, but there's a couple of things that constrain us. One, our culture is pretty unique. We've got very few people doing an exceptional large amount of output.

• 2:44:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:35Speaker 08

  Company is still under a thousand people. So you just don't tend to see scale like ours of that little.

• 2:44:38John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 2:44:39Speaker 08

  Headcount. And so putting companies together into that is really tough. The other piece is we're really excited about the organic growth opportunities in front of us. We're at a point now, I mean, I put out a couple of months ago that early in the year, we were $11 billion of ad spend on our platform. Plus now we've grown a couple of quarters, a bigger number today. And we only work with somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 advertisers on the platform. We've been completely managed. We haven't opened up the platform. So if you think about that, when Facebook opened up Ads Manager, they had $5 billion a year revenue. And we've got more than double that today on a very large platform. We haven't even opened it up. We're going to open up our platform, the Exxon Advertising Platform in two days.

• 2:45:20Speaker 08

  So once we take the advertiser account from the very low thousands to the tens, hundreds and of thousands and then subsequently millions. We think the opportunity in front of us is many quarters to possibly years.

• 2:45:32Jordi Hays?

  And so distracting, you know, it would have been, it would have been cool to own TikTok. It's a solid asset, at least. From observing from the outside, but the opportunity just immediately with the business is so massive that you may as well just focus on what you guys already do.

• 2:45:49Speaker 08

  Totally. And with a lean team, we don't have the resources to distract ourselves. So it's full speed ahead. We want to give our solution to all the advertisers in the world. We know that we've made a lot of businesses inside gaming more successful. We want to do that across the board. We've seen it in a very small pilot in e-commerce over the last year. The few hundred like Ridge Wallet and others that you said, they're seeing a lot of spend on our platform comparable to what they're getting on Meta. And it's on us to execute to get this in front of all the advertisers out there. If we can do that and become another destination like Meta where there's a ton of scale and it's top of funnel to bottom funnel revenue priced, all these businesses around us are going to grow. So we don't want to distract ourselves from that opportunity.

• 2:46:29Jordi Hays?

  How are you rallying the team around Q4? I'm assuming Axon is timed with the championship season for every retail brand, but like what does it look? Is it going to be people sleeping in the office more?

• 2:46:44Speaker 08

  I mean, there's been a bunch of that. It's around the clock right now because we've been closed and managed, right? So opening up an ad platform at our scale is a pretty complex undertaking. You worry about like, I mean, fraud is an obvious case. You don't want to see fraud. You don't want to see scammy ads on your platform. That's the first thing that happens. And like, we're probably arguably the biggest ad platform that's ever opened up self-service in any sort of form at this moment. And so when you've got that, you got to do a bunch of work building tools and controls to make sure the quality of advertiser and all the checks you have in place are as automated as they possibly can be and as good as it would have been in a human managed environment. So we've got that. You've got user experience. You need to make sure a customer can go live

• 2:47:29Speaker 08

  on their own all the way through to being able to pay you. And so we had to build a whole bunch of tools to get this right. We've been doing that for the last year. We've been tuning it with the customers on the platform. The team is, no joke, working around the clock right now to get this out the door in a couple of days.

• 2:47:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can't, you don't have the luxury of missing Q4 if you want to open up an ad, you know, in the ad business.

• 2:47:50John Coogan?

  That's the most critical time. How are you thinking about compute infrastructure? I feel like we're seeing Meta build these massive clusters and it feels like maybe that's because they're going to be generating so many ads or doing so many, so much gen AI that they'll need a ton of compute. They still need a ton of core AI just to do ad matching. Have you had to do on-premise deployments, cloud stuff? Like, what, how do you think about building out your infrastructure for the long term and potentially like a very different just economic dynamic around how compute like falls on the income statement?

• 2:48:25Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, we work with Google Cloud, so it runs through our income statement. So it's easy for investors to understand because we're not capitalizing the cost.

• 2:48:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:48:32Speaker 08

  Because we're so lean and because we were bootstrapped, maybe going back to the beginning, we think about every dollar we spend anywhere across the organization as everyone's a founder, you're spending money out of your own pocket. And this holds true with compute as well. I went into my team and said, look, we're going to go spend $5 billion by a bunch of compute. And in our scale, we can't do $100 billion in investment. So let's say 5 billion. We'd be wasting that money and it would make them uncomfortable. We try to constrain it to, to trail or maybe be on par with revenue growth. So that becomes a cost of your future revenue growth. But what does that mean? If our engineers create a more complex model, they could consume more GPUs.

• 2:49:11Speaker 08

  If we had unlimited capacity, they just deploy the model. Well, in today's world, if they see more GPU consumption and they go, holy crap, this is fantastic in result, but is going to consume too much GPUs. We just don't have it. They've got to go optimize their code and you may get like, you get, okay, maybe we lose one point on accuracy, but the cost all of a sudden goes down 90%. So across the org, we're wired to think about things that way. Optimize and automate and cut costs as much as possible. So we can have the best business. So we can fund our mission long term.

• 2:49:40John Coogan?

  Makes a ton of sense. Partnering with Google makes so much sense, given where they are on Nano Banana and where they are on Gemini. And like just the cost per performance, even if you go crazy into generating a bunch of ads, it feels like a great partner there. How did the Google will kill you narrative, it clearly didn't happen, but walk me through the various, it seems like you were getting that criticism of venture capitalists early days. How did that actually play out? Like, how do you sit together in the market of ad buying? Because you do compete, even though you work together on the cloud side. How has that relationship evolved? Why did the market play out the way it did? And was there any decisions where you think like, we made a really key decision?

• 2:50:24Jordi Hays?

  If you talk to advertisers, let's use the Ridge guys as an example again, you want performance and you want to constantly be experimenting and you don't want platform dependency. You don't want, in a perfect world, you'd be spending like 10% of your budget here, 10% of your budget here, 10% so that, one, as prices fluctuate, because they're all markets, right? Your business isn't, you know, and we saw the businesses that were, you know, in the D to C era, that were dependent purely on, you know, a meta and how bad things could get, companies going bankrupt based on, you know, small changes in price. But anyways.

• 2:51:01Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, Google is sort of a bottom funnel channel for most dollars spent, right? If you're selling a wallet, you go to Google, you search for a wallet, Ridge Wallet appears there, well, the consumer already knows they want to find a wallet. We were always going to be additive to the Google advertising story, so they did a really good job finding us early and betting on us across multiple business slides. And it became a really, really good partnership. If you think about the business model we deploy, it's top of funnel, the bottom of funnel, priced on revenue. Facebook does that. And if Facebook caught everyone's attention for every single ad, for every single product in the world, where there would be no other market, Facebook would capture all the top funnel attention and Google would be bottom funnel. Turns out, not everyone in the world notices an ad on Facebook.

• 2:51:43Speaker 08

  So long we come with these really immersive ads, capture users' attention, and we were able to go partner with a wallet company and sell more wallets. So, in a way, when you do it this way... They're they're getting an arbitrage. They're getting a customer that pays them immediately. They ship the product after the fact and they make a spread on that sale. If they can do that, there's no budgetary constraint. So we don't have a sales force at all really at the company because we're not going and asking for for budget. We're going and saying, look, if we you can sell more wallets and make money on us, you'll scale to infinite, as many wallets as you can go get in inventory. And so with that business model, we became additive to these other platforms. I think really that's the only way a small brand or niche company like us was able to have the large scale success.

• 2:52:26John Coogan?

  If you're if you're advising, I don't know, public company CEO, $100 million in market cap, but they have a platform and they're not monetizing with advertising and they're considering rolling their own versus partnering with you or partnering with someone else, like what are the trade offs? We've seen Uber's added a bunch of ads, Netflix added ads, there's chat G P is going to have ads soon. What are the different levers that a CEO should think about pulling? Have you done partnerships? How do you think about partnering with like those large scale new platforms?

• 2:52:58Speaker 08

  Yeah, we haven't yet. I think at some point in our narrative, we're going to get to a point where we're going to want to take our demand out. But we don't have access to demand. We have so few advertisers today. If we got 100,000 advertisers, we'd probably be able to take demand out.

• 2:53:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:53:10Speaker 08

  But I think a lot of times people forget, one, the technology is really complex. You've only had in terms of a model like ours that's scalable, us and then obviously Meta, a very large scale that's been able to execute on this this discovery type of product price on revenue. And so if there's only a couple of cases, it's not trivial and people over trivialize it a lot. The other thing is the ad format has to be similar to the ad format that we're really good at. Otherwise, it takes a lot of work. And because we've got such an immersive ad format, you don't tend to have that in other places. Now, in television you do. And that's an area that's that's been interesting to us.

• 2:53:47Jordi Hays?

  Specifically like streaming or?

• 2:53:49Speaker 08

  Anywhere where you can see 15 to 30 second clip. Yeah. So streaming is a great, great example. Pre-roll video is a good example, but a native ad that someone's scrolling by and probably misses or a little banner ad, those aren't going to create a lot of intent. So if the ad format. Isn't going to create intent, that's not a great matchup for us.

• 2:54:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:09Speaker 08

  It's something we can execute on over time and I think that'll benefit the publishers because really these third-party publishers, they shouldn't build their own ad tech for the most part. And there's not another solution out there that's really that focused on them with Google maybe deprioritizing their third-party ad stack for them.

• 2:54:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, what about Apple? I feel like there was a rumble years ago about, you know, a developer kit and SDK for adding ads into mobile games and it certainly hasn't stopped your growth. So what, yeah, how did that play out?

• 2:54:38Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, they have ads on search, they can monetize their own properties presumably. I always say, look, if there's more ad inventory and more discovery, the P and L of the businesses in the market swells. So let's say Apple rolls out a great ads product and you go to Apple Music, you discover a game. Well, you weren't going to discover that game before. So now that developer who will almost always be an arbitrage marketer, got a better arbitrage. Their business, their P and L grows. What happens when that happens? Well, they have more money to reinvest in us, they have more money to reinvest in Meta. And so if performance is there, that's fantastic for the ecosystem. If it's non-performant, then the customers are getting ripped off. And these customers in these categories, they don't have the business model or the brand to get ripped off.

• 2:55:21Jordi Hays?

  I had seen a few pitches over the last couple of years for businesses that were trying to effectively create app-lovin', specifically for LLM-type products. Why or why not is that an interesting opportunity? Because I would assume the app-lovin' for LLM is app-lovin'.

• 2:55:39Speaker 08

  You probably never thought you'd be saying that statement. I mean, the day people started saying, I want to be the app-lovin' of this, was when we knew we made it, I guess. Like LLMs, they don't have a lot of space. So like, you don't want to interrupt the user experience, you can't alter the output. The referral program you guys were talking about a few minutes ago.

• 2:55:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one thing that was like a deep, like if somebody put in like a deep research query somewhere.

• 2:56:01John Coogan?

  Waiting 10 minutes, waiting 20 minutes.

• 2:56:03Jordi Hays?

  They're waiting, maybe, and you could accelerate it.

• 2:56:05John Coogan?

  Show me infomercial.

• 2:56:06Speaker 08

  You really sit in front of that, I don't know, it's veiling, come on.

• 2:56:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, everyone's veiling.

• 2:56:09Jordi Hays?

  It's true.

• 2:56:10Speaker 08

  That's a non-viewed ad.

• 2:56:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:56:12Speaker 08

  It's totally worthless.

• 2:56:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:13Speaker 08

  So yeah, I think it's going to be a lot more referral and embedded into the output and automated transactions, which again, for us is good. If you think about dollars spent, a lot of dollars today go to search when the user already knows what they want. If they go to the LLM and they they get an output that's something that they want and they can click purchase, all that's going to happen is those dollars are going to shift around from search to these LLM outputs. And that's good because that's already bottom funnel. The user knows that they want it. And in theory, it's good because it's just going to be cheaper to the advertiser. So again, if it's effectively cheaper, that while the company now has more money to go spend on a platform like ours, where they're truly getting discovery from the customer.

• 2:56:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk to me about the company culture, the type of person that succeeds. Do you have economists on staff that are understanding the the nature of the market? Do you have a lot of data scientists? Do you do you expect everyone to be able to think in statistical ways?

• 2:57:03Speaker 08

  Yeah, so it's engineering first, for sure. Research, science runs the models. Those are those are typically like very intelligent math math people alongside. They're also engineers. So they can implement their own research. And then on the business team, most of the business people are math econ. They know how to do Python SQL queries like so we're mostly more technical across the board. Now, core advertising business, our business and engineering teams are around 300 to 350. So if you just slimmed it down to what drives our the 98% of the value of the company, it's a very, very small team. It I always liked when I listened to Steve Jobs talking about the

• 2:57:44Speaker 08

  original Mac team. It's A players like to work with A players and then they despise that like everything dilutes when you go to B and Cs. And we've got a really cutthroat ecosystem where you're either an exceptionally strong IC where you can output a ton, or you're not going to make it. And so we end up churning through a lot of people who can't cut it. But the core team that remains loves working with each other because everyone's an A player.

• 2:58:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:09Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about, you know, what's your headcount plan look like over the next few years?

• 2:58:16Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean.

• 2:58:17Jordi Hays?

  I'm assuming you want to multiply revenue by a lot and.

• 2:58:20Speaker 08

  Without adding heads.

• 2:58:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:21Speaker 08

  I mean, like, I'd love a world where we could run with 20 people, but we're probably not getting back to that world. But like, I remember.

• 2:58:27Jordi Hays?

  Good old days.

• 2:58:28Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, up until 100, I knew the story and the name and every, everyone that was at the business. And so we've surpassed that, but being run this lean allows us to maintain a really high quality. So even our go to market team on e-commerce, which every investor looks at as a huge opportunity. It's 30 people today. It's really hard to add A players if you maintain a high quality bar. And you don't need to go into the state of, look, we've just got hiring quotas. Second, you do that, I think you blow up your culture and your organization. So we're slow and steady. Now, the company is built on automate first, hire second. And so LLMs let us do a ton. Most of the coding at the company is done by LLMs now. A lot of the business functions are done by LLMs.

• 2:59:09Speaker 08

  So we now are in a world where that culture is perfectly paired with this technology that's evolving so quickly. So we should be able to do more with less. And if we can do that, we're going to be able to scale the revenue without having to add heads. And then it's nice that the product's also so good, it sells itself.

• 2:59:26John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for coming by the TBP and Ultra Dome.

• 2:59:28Jordi Hays?

  This was fun. Nobody, nobody loves ads more than maybe than us than you, maybe.

• 2:59:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, the chat says because you're a gong respecter, a gong ally, we have to hit the gong.

• 2:59:38Jordi Hays?

  There we go. There we go.

• 2:59:43Jordi Hays?

  There's some progress we'll talk about Axon later this week. Excited.

• 2:59:47John Coogan?

  And before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2. And let me also tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI in the U of C R M that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level. We have David Senra live in the TBP and Ultra Dome. We have a video that we're going to play.

• 3:00:10Jordi Hays?

  Yo.

• 3:00:11John Coogan?

  Bring him on down. Let's play the video of his newest addition to the collection, to the history, to the world of business and podcasting. Welcome to the show.

• 3:00:22Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you 24 hours post-launch.

• 3:00:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, what are we watching here? Oh, it's a drill.

• 3:00:31David Senra?

  Do you have the?

• 3:00:32John Coogan?

  Explain this video.

• 3:00:33David Senra?

  The text?

• 3:00:34John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, I played it.

• 3:00:35David Senra?

  Okay, that's the video, but do you have the text that Rob put above it?

• 3:00:38John Coogan?

  What did, what did he say? He said, "The right way is the hard way." Jerry Seinfeld. Intro for, yes, they bought a Rolodex. This is for your new show.

• 3:00:46David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:46John Coogan?

  Break it down for us.

• 3:00:47David Senra?

  So, this is why I was excited to partner with Rob Moore and Andrew Huberman on this, because I've been friends with them for like three years.

• 3:00:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:54David Senra?

  And I know, um, he said, "I gesticulate wildly, so don't break your new microphone."

• 3:01:00David Senra?

  So, I knew how serious they take their work. The first time I ever met Rob was in, they invited me to Malibu to check out their new studio.

• 3:01:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:06David Senra?

  We talked podcasting for nine straight hours.

• 3:01:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:08David Senra?

  This is not an exaggeration. Um, we stayed at the same restaurant. We sat there for lunch, and then we started talking podcasting. And like four hours later, the waitress was like, "We're serving dinner now. Do you want to stay?" And we're like, "Yes." Lunch and dinner. So, um, I didn't even know they were doing this. They, they know that I was like kind of anti-intro for a podcast. I just like want to get right to it.

• 3:01:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:27David Senra?

  They're like, "We're gonna make a bumper for you." I was like, "I don't even know what a bumper is." So that's what they call this. And it's like, I was like, "It's gotta be short, though."

• 3:01:33John Coogan?

  Wait, that's the, oh, that's, that's from the video.

• 3:01:36David Senra?

  Exactly.

• 3:01:37John Coogan?

  The intro video. Oh, it all makes sense now. I remember seeing that and I thought, "Oh, it's just CGI or something."

• 3:01:42David Senra?

  No, it's not CGI. That's the- Handmade. Exactly.

• 3:01:44John Coogan?

  Handmade.

• 3:01:44David Senra?

  They bought a drill. They bought a Rolodex.

• 3:01:46John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:01:47David Senra?

  Then they printed out all, a bunch of companies and the founder names.

• 3:01:49John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 3:01:50David Senra?

  Of people I've covered on Founders.

• 3:01:51John Coogan?

  Yep, of course.

• 3:01:51David Senra?

  And then they did all the, like, the editing. And so the whole thing is like, the idea behind it was, okay, you turn on Netflix, you hear that, that sound, right? Or HBO, you hear that sound. I'm cool with that. I don't want a super long intro. Like, I want a very wealthy audience and we gotta get to the goddamn point. So yeah, I just love that. It's like an indication of like how serious we're taking the new show. No AI.

• 3:02:10John Coogan?

  The first-

• 3:02:10David Senra?

  We made it with a drill. No, I'm, I'm a human AI.

• 3:02:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, the first episode dropped, uh, Saturday, Sunday?

• 3:02:15David Senra?

  Sunday.

• 3:02:16John Coogan?

  Sunday.

• 3:02:16David Senra?

  They're coming out every other Sunday.

• 3:02:17John Coogan?

  Every other Sunday.

• 3:02:18David Senra?

  For now.

• 3:02:19John Coogan?

  How's the response been?

• 3:02:20David Senra?

  Uh, I'm like wired. I couldn't sleep last night.

• 3:02:23John Coogan?

  Excited?

• 3:02:23Jordi Hays?

  You couldn't sleep Saturday night, too.

• 3:02:25David Senra?

  I know.

• 3:02:25Jordi Hays?

  I saw, I saw David, I called David yesterday.

• 3:02:28John Coogan?

  Even though you have an 8slee, 8slee.com?

• 3:02:30David Senra?

  Yes.

• 3:02:31John Coogan?

  Get a Pod5, 5 year warranty, 30 years free trial. I actually enjoyed your 8slee ad integrated into the Daniel Ek episode. If you want to go here second, 8slee ad.

• 3:02:40Jordi Hays?

  I guess I was in solidarity with you last night, David, because I put up a 55.

• 3:02:44John Coogan?

  Ooh, Ralph.

• 3:02:45David Senra?

  I didn't even, see, I'm staying at a friend's house in Malibu right now, and I don't even have my 8slee.

• 3:02:48Jordi Hays?

  Well, you gotta, we gotta correct that.

• 3:02:50John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 3:02:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but, um, yeah, it was so funny. Yesterday, I called David. We're just catching up and we realized we were like 30 seconds on the same, on the same row.

• 3:03:00David Senra?

  We're like 500 feet from each other.

• 3:03:02Jordi Hays?

  So we're like, let's just pull over and, and, uh, hang out. Uh, so I got to get the immediate reaction. But, no, it really is, it, there's, there's, uh, to me, one of the most satisfying things is watching ultra talented people do a new thing and, and just demonstrate the love, the level that they're on. And you and Rob and Andrew have done that.

• 3:03:23David Senra?

  No, I appreciate that.

• 3:03:24John Coogan?

  Congratulations. Uh, on the note of like, you got, you got busy people, you gotta get right into it. Uh, talk to me about the decision for how you think about the first question. I was listening to Dwar Kesh over the weekend. Uh, he kicks it off with like a pretty quick intro, but he does, he does introduce the guest. Uh, my guest is Richard Sutton. He's one of the-

• 3:03:43David Senra?

  He's very, Dwar Kesh is insanely talented.

• 3:03:45John Coogan?

  Insanely talented.

• 3:03:46David Senra?

  Especially for a young kid. He's a huge one.

• 3:03:48John Coogan?

  And you know who else is a talented podcaster? Chris Williamson, friend of mine.

• 3:03:51David Senra?

  Oh, he texted me today.

• 3:03:52John Coogan?

  And Chris, uh, kicks off with no introduction.

• 3:03:55David Senra?

  He had a thousand episodes.

• 3:03:57John Coogan?

  A thousand episodes?

• 3:03:58David Senra?

  Came out today with Matthew.

• 3:03:59John Coogan?

  Wow, that's amazing.

• 3:04:00David Senra?

  Incredible.

• 3:04:00John Coogan?

  Uh, what a run. Um, but, uh, they, but they do introductions very differently. Uh, they do, uh, Chris kicks off with one short punchy, like, ungooglable question, basically. Like, there's no right answer to the question. He'll just say, you know, uh, what is the value of hard work? Or what is your life's goal? And then the person just tees off and it gets you right in the episode. Dwar Kesh gives you a little bit more of an intro and they go back and forth, and then he hits them with a question. Uh, how do you think about opening an episode? Do you like the way you're doing it? Do you think it'll evolve? We obviously opened with one of the most over the top openings with, you're watching TV and, uh, and it's like this crazy thing that just evolved. Uh, how do you think about it?

• 3:04:38David Senra?

  All right. I think the important thing is like, I have, I'm not interviewing anybody.

• 3:04:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:41David Senra?

  And so like that- The the tagline is like conversations with the greatest living founders. Sure. I have zero energy to interview anybody. I have unlimited energy to have long form, deep conversations. Mm hmm. You guys have been on the receiving ends of this. Like when we have dinner, it's not like, oh, we're gonna talk for thirty minutes. No, we talked for like four goddamn hours. And so that's why I think a lot of some people came out and they're like, you're talking too much in the Daniel Ek episode. It's like, it's like, no. Conversation. I like.

• 3:05:07Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's it's important to, I I think the your opportunity is to not be. It's tough if you're a podcast and people only watch for the guests.

• 3:05:17David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:17Jordi Hays?

  It's not a good position to be in, right? People watch Joe Rogan. There's a cohort of people that watch Joe Rogan just when they're, just when Donald Trump's on.

• 3:05:25David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:25Jordi Hays?

  But but a huge amount of people are watching it because Joe Rogan, they're like, who's he talking to today?

• 3:05:31David Senra?

  That that's what we're doing. So like, I think somebody I saw, they did analysis on like two thousand of Joe's episodes and he spoke like, you know, forty five or something percent of the time. Yep. It's just like the the whole genesis of this, and I think I talked about it on the Daniel Ek episode. It's because, you know, Patrick O'Connell, who again, I think is the best business interviewer. Yes. In the world. Like if I'm gonna start an interview show and compete with him, like, that's just stupid. I like the main message of founders, the founders podcast is like the importance of differentiation. Yep. So like, there's been a million, let's interview, you know, business people shows. I'm not, I'm gonna lose that game. I only wanna play a game that I can be the best in the world at. Yep. Um, and so what Patrick, you know, we've been really close friends, we're brothers, we talk every day.

• 3:06:12David Senra?

  We've have a ton. He's in these dinners with me. He's in these conversations and it happens over and over again. And he's he's mentioned to me for a few years. He said it before I was on Colossus. He's just like, man, I really think, have you ever thought about doing a show where you talk to other people, not just you sitting in a room, fucking reading books and doing the crazy shit that you do? He's like, I've been around this, like, no one can have these conversations. And so what really pushed me, and I said it on the Daniel Ek episode, was me, him and Daniel had this super intense four hour dinner. I don't meet with anybody. When I, the first time I met Michael Dell, I flew to to to Austin, five hours. We talked for five hours. You think I sat, you think I sat silent? I can't sit silent for anything. And they don't want me to sit silent. The whole point is like, you're like this weird, like, human AI with all this knowledge and they want like prompt and like get me going. So.

• 3:06:58David Senra?

  We get in the car because I'm, we're leaving New York and going back to Greenwich. I'm staying at Patrick's house at night. And the first thing he says to me when we get in with his driver, he's like, you have to start recording these.

• 3:07:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:10David Senra?

  He's just like, I, he goes, I've known Daniel for four years. You got more out of him in four hours than I did in four years. He goes, I talk 2% of the time. He talked 49% of the time. You talk 49% of the time. He's just like, no one can speak to the soul of the founder like you. You have to start recording these.

• 3:07:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's fascinating. There's that story.

• 3:07:26David Senra?

  That's the whole fucking idea. There's no interview. It's just like, I'm going to talk to the greatest living founders and we're going to have insane conversations that are not predictable.

• 3:07:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's a, there's that story about Mark Zuckerberg that he has like extremely high question to talk ratio. Like he lets other people talk a lot.

• 3:07:41David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:41John Coogan?

  And that was seen as like, you know, bullish on his ability to like hoover up information. At the same time, in the content world, I feel like there is a natural urge. Like I noticed, somebody sent me a short that we didn't post, that someone else posted of me and Jordy talking to Marc Andreessen. And it was clear that it was like Mark had a funny take. And so that was what would get the views. And so we were there kind of as like accoutrement to the main event. And there's a, like window dressing.

• 3:08:15John Coogan?

  Like window dressing. And, and so there's just like, there is a natural pull in the algorithm.

• 3:08:19David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:20John Coogan?

  For if you're starting an interview show, I should just get someone really, no, I know, that's the point, but I'm saying, I'm saying.

• 3:08:25David Senra?

  Like, did you not just do it?

• 3:08:26John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, what I'm saying is that, is that if you're just purely view maxing, it's like, go get a viral clip machine, point a camera on them and say, go. And then just film and then, and then say, what's next? What's on your, what's on your mind? And, and, and those two things, you have to actively resist the view capture, the algorithm capture. And that's what you're doing.

• 3:08:46David Senra?

  Before, I didn't even know, you know, I don't view max. I didn't legitimately, before we did the giant ramp deal for founders, right? I did not know how many people listened to founders.

• 3:08:56John Coogan?

  You didn't look at the analytics. It's great.

• 3:08:58David Senra?

  What does that tell you? I don't give a shit. I want the best audience.

• 3:09:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's the best.

• 3:09:01David Senra?

  Not the biggest.

• 3:09:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:09:02David Senra?

  The reason the ramp deal came about.

• 3:09:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:05David Senra?

  Because somebody we cannot name, who if you know, if you're elite in tech, you know who this person is, whatever the opposite of a public figure is, this person is. It's interesting that the, probably the smartest and best one, maybe the smartest and best person in tech behind the scenes, like no one knows, like, isn't she visible? Literally came because just like, I was at Michael Dell's house, he wouldn't stop talking about your podcast. He didn't know we were friends. I know 10 to 15 billionaires personally that listen to your show. We have to find a way to work together. That's the genesis of all of this. It wasn't how many downloads you get. It's you have the attention and the trust of the most elite people in the world. Look at the guest list on the new David Center Show. Yeah. It's like-

• 3:09:44Jordi Hays?

  David Center by David Center.

• 3:09:46David Senra?

  Yeah, that's hilarious.

• 3:09:47John Coogan?

  The, when you pull it up on Spotify in your car, it says, Daniel, David Center, David Center, David Center. It said it three times-

• 3:09:54Jordi Hays?

  Are you ready, are you ready, somebody in the chat says, hey David, I saw you at Malibu Country Mart yesterday. You're quite tall and handsome.

• 3:10:00John Coogan?

  Let's hear it for-

• 3:10:01Jordi Hays?

  Are you ready to be, are you ready to be, are you ready to be a household name?

• 3:10:05John Coogan?

  This is a live chat. You know, Joey?

• 3:10:06David Senra?

  Okay, this happened twice. So first of all, I land, because I came out here just for you guys, just so you know.

• 3:10:11John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 3:10:11David Senra?

  Like legitimately, I was like, I don't want to, you guys are really important to me.

• 3:10:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:14David Senra?

  Uh, I wanted like, do this in person. We gotta talk about how much has changed since last time I was here.

• 3:10:20John Coogan?

  It's here.

• 3:10:20David Senra?

  But, yeah, this has had, it's kind of, I don't like to think about this because I walk in some, I don't know which case this is. One happened at the Tesla Supercharger and another at, I walk into Sun Life and get a smoothie. And like, I walk in, there's only three people in there and two guys turn and like, David Center and I'm like, what the fuck, bro? Um, and then another guy was charging and-

• 3:10:40Jordi Hays?

  You used to, you used to only get recognized at Iman properties. Now, now, now it's about to be-

• 3:10:45John Coogan?

  Everywhere.

• 3:10:46David Senra?

  Oh, I have, I can't tell you-

• 3:10:48John Coogan?

  Everywhere.

• 3:10:49David Senra?

  The new show's gonna be the first one that's associated with Iman.

• 3:10:52John Coogan?

  That's very exciting.

• 3:10:53David Senra?

  Yeah. I shouldn't have said anything yet, but like, we're 99% sure that this deal is done.

• 3:10:58Jordi Hays?

  Your, your personal brand's already associated with Iman.

• 3:11:02John Coogan?

  How much variation do you think there'll be in episode length?

• 3:11:04David Senra?

  A ton. A ton. Because like, again, I'm not, there's no formulaic, there's no formula here. So like, the way I think about it's like, Founders is just the books that give me energy that I'm excited to learn about. And in many cases, they're not even books. Like, I think the, the Colossus profiles that Patrick and his team are making are so remarkable. I didn't know who Thomas Pufferty, Pufferty is. I read that, uh, the article just came out. Do you guys know about this guy? He's worth $80 billion. He's 83 years old. I think he owns 80%-

• 3:11:33John Coogan?

  Is this the AI will not make you rich article?

• 3:11:35David Senra?

  No. No, this, this is a guy, I think he started Interactive Brokers.

• 3:11:38John Coogan?

  Oh, wow, yeah.

• 3:11:39David Senra?

  And he owns 80% of it.

• 3:11:40John Coogan?

  That's legit.

• 3:11:41David Senra?

  Okay, yeah, he's a-

• 3:11:41Jordi Hays?

  The original size chat.

• 3:11:43David Senra?

  Yeah, he's a- He's a Hungarian immigrant, but you read his profile, I'm like, I couldn't put it down. I called Patrick because midnight, I literally got him on the phone, I was like, these things are incredible. And I was like, okay, I'm so excited that I read this, even though it's not a book, I have to make an episode. So that's the episode I'm working on right now, right? So that's how we went through the founders. David Senra by David Senra by David Senra. Hosted.

• 3:12:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, why did you pick David Senra to host the David Senra show? You could have, you could have.

• 3:12:09David Senra?

  You could have picked anyone.

• 3:12:09John Coogan?

  You're leaving a lot of room to slot other hosts in. Easy, you take the easy route.

• 3:12:14David Senra?

  The funniest response was by Christian Keel. I think he used to be at Astronist. He's like, where'd you come up with the name?

• 3:12:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's great, it's great. But with, with, with the founders podcast, I feel like you have, you, you're thinking on, on episode length, how you divide up the episodes has changed and you have a philosophy around it. And you've kind of narrowed the aperture a little bit as you've become more laser focused on what it takes to deliver a quality episode. Do you think that will happen over time?

• 3:12:41David Senra?

  No, because this is the thing, okay? I am a control freak, right? As you both know, so like founders is a one person thing.

• 3:12:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:12:49David Senra?

  Like I, to the point where I'm now hand editing the transcripts.

• 3:12:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:12:52David Senra?

  Everybody's like outsourced it. This is why I wanted to play this thing because Jerry Seinfeld way, the hard way is the right way. Right? It's like I'm complete, I have complete control. It's like permissionless. I feel like I'm like, you know, creating a statue or like some kind of art. It's like a very intense love affair that I have, an irrational love affair I have with that show. This one, I'm, now I have a partner. And like, I didn't mean, I have an entire team now, which I don't have a team on founders. What I mean is like, there's some, I don't have control over what that person's going to say, whether they're going to be interesting or not. And so what we've noticed is every single person that we've recorded with, and we have a crazy guest list, they all came from the audience, founders audience, because that way at least they have like, they know what, what I'm into, like what I like to talk about.

• 3:13:36David Senra?

  They're more prone to say yes for an unreleased show. But there's wide variance between like some, in many cases, in some cases, like they're, we've recorded some with incredible people and they, halfway through, I'm like, oh, they want me to do a founders episode for them. They just want, literally, they like, just, I'll ask them a question, like, hey, what about this? And then they'll like, look at me and like, want me to talk.

• 3:13:58John Coogan?

  I mean, that has to be the same case for Joe Rogan. It's like, if you're getting invited to the mothership, you're like, yeah, I want to hear, I want to hang out with Joe Rogan today.

• 3:14:05David Senra?

  Yeah, so no, I have to be, what I'm learning, and you know, this is new to me, is just like,

• 3:14:13David Senra?

  Loosen up a little bit, like obviously the quality stuff has to be good, like we have to edit ruthlessly. We're not gonna, there's a bunch of different ideas. Most of them came from Daniel Ek that I can talk about. Like, uh, one example he gave me, um, and again, like, guy is the most powerful person in podcasting. He's willing to just fucking counsel you. You should take his advice. So he's like, listen, you need to build up the original feed, right? And then maybe a year in, whatever the timeframe is, he's like, you need to have a bunch of separate feeds. So he's like, have the two hour conversation that we had and then edit it, have another feed where you edit those conversations down to like 30 minutes.

• 3:14:45John Coogan?

  That's interesting.

• 3:14:45David Senra?

  And then he's like, then you need a third feed where it's just, hey, Daniel had 10 fucking clips that were incredible. Just that.

• 3:14:52John Coogan?

  Isn't that, uh, something that he should be solving on the product side? Like when I, when I went to your show, I saw that I could do in Spotify, I could do, I watched it on Spotify out of respect to Daniel Ek. But I noticed that I could switch between, as the artist, as the host and the guest intended. And I also left a comment and it was in the comment section, but, uh, you could watch video, switch to audio. But then there were also short form video clips that were all linked to the same profile. I didn't have to go find Davidson or Shorts.

• 3:15:22David Senra?

  Yes.

• 3:15:22John Coogan?

  Uh, why will there be different feeds when that's something that they could solve on their side?

• 3:15:27David Senra?

  That's a really interesting, I don't know. I'd ask him. I'll ask him. Um, I'm not sure. But, uh, but this was, we were in Stockholm together. This, he told me this in January, so a few months. Cause the original idea, I, I, I guess I should back up too. The original idea was to launch in April because again, like you guys have a deep relationship with Ramp, just like I do. And, you know, I had this idea, give credit to Eric and Kareem for the level of trust they put in me. Where I was like, I want to do this where I have long form conversations with, starting with the people that are in my audience. And like, I think it'll be good, but like, I think I would love if you guys were the presenting sponsor, like done, like immediately, right? And the original idea was to launch in April.

• 3:16:09Jordi Hays?

  April of next year?

• 3:16:10David Senra?

  No, this past April. But me and Daniel couldn't sync schedules and I'm like, I'm not launching until he's gotta be number one.

• 3:16:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:18David Senra?

  Because of

• 3:16:18Jordi Hays?

  The pod father.

• 3:16:20David Senra?

  No, yeah, it's just like the respect I have for him. Like, I just knew, like, out of every, I'm friends with a bunch of people who have recorded, but not to the level of like, I've spent hours and hours talking to him. I just knew he's just so wise and he's not, I just knew I could get stuff out of him that, you know, I hadn't seen him talk about anywhere else. And so, we recorded that like a few months ago, but it was like the beginning of summer. And then I talked to the head of business at Spotify and the head of product and they're both like, you don't launch a show in the summer. And so that's why I got pushed back to end of September, yeah. Cause everybody's like, they're just distracted. It's just like, you want maximum impact.

• 3:16:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:56David Senra?

  And so we waited for a while.

• 3:16:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the launch video was

• 3:16:58Jordi Hays?

  Do you expect to record and scrap episodes entirely? You think that'll be frequent? Or do you think that if you bring the right energy, you can always get?

• 3:17:06David Senra?

  The unfair advantage we have is that like, I do a monologue podcast and maybe better than anybody else in the world. And so like, if they're gonna sit there and just listen to me talk, I can go forever, like, forever. No, I don't think I'll scrap it. I just think you have to be, again, you have to respect the, the, the, the time of the audience. And so, but this is different. So you mentioned the founders, the formula for founders, like, I don't like doing them longer than an hour.

• 3:17:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:31David Senra?

  So that way, you're listening on 1.5, so it's like a 40-year, 40-year career, 40 hours of reading, right? That you can listen to in 45 minutes.

• 3:17:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:17:38David Senra?

  That's the value prop of founders.

• 3:17:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:17:40David Senra?

  And that will give you a very high-end audience if you just, just idea after idea after idea.

• 3:17:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:45David Senra?

  This other one, like, if, if I can have an interesting four-hour conversation, then it can be four hours long. I don't think I can. I think I could talk for, we could talk for four hours and you should edit it down to probably like two.

• 3:17:54John Coogan?

  You're gonna do Gaston Glock's daughter?

• 3:17:56Jordi Hays?

  We should do the first

• 3:17:57John Coogan?

  Did you see her?

• 3:17:57David Senra?

  No.

• 3:17:58John Coogan?

  She's on X.

• 3:17:59David Senra?

  No.

• 3:17:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, she took over the company. I believe it's his daughter, or maybe granddaughter.

• 3:18:03David Senra?

  Did you listen to that? That's what I made up?

• 3:18:05John Coogan?

  Oh, it's one of my favorites.

• 3:18:05Jordi Hays?

  We could do, the three of us could do a 24-hour podcast on

• 3:18:09John Coogan?

  Podcasting.

• 3:18:10Jordi Hays?

  Business podcasting.

• 3:18:11David Senra?

  We could do that. It'd be boring as hell for the audience, but you guys have invited me before. You're like, you wanna be here for the whole show? And I was like, I don't think that's a good idea. Like, I can't live stream for three hours. I will get in trouble.

• 3:18:21John Coogan?

  It's easy, it's easy. Watch. There's a woman in San Francisco charging $30,000 to name your baby. What do you think?

• 3:18:28Jordi Hays?

  You're using that?

• 3:18:29John Coogan?

  Were you using that?

• 3:18:30David Senra?

  No, you shouldn't have a kid if you need somebody else to name it.

• 3:18:33John Coogan?

  Good take. See? It's easier than you think.

• 3:18:35David Senra?

  No, but I will get in trouble. I will literally get cancelled because I don't have a filter. I can't do live. Remember, I can edit the shit.

• 3:18:40Jordi Hays?

  I think the only thing you do is swear. You're very, you're very, you're very tame other than that. You just always divert, you're just always, you naturally divert to history and talking about.

• 3:18:51David Senra?

  So that's, that's the key. Where it's like, if you go back to differentiation, right? This is, somebody said the funniest thing, where there's like a Red Bull futurist.

• 3:19:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:01David Senra?

  Okay, he's like, somebody ripped, literally said, "We're gonna be the TPBN of Europe." And then he quote-treated them, and no disrespect to them, I don't know them, but like, he's like, of course, like, Europe works two days, two days a week.

• 3:19:14John Coogan?

  To their credit, they leaned into it and they were laughing about it, which I really appreciate it.

• 3:19:18David Senra?

  No, but that's the point. It's just like, God bless your soul. It's just like, then you want to avoid direct comparison. And I can tell you right now, they haven't asked me for podcast advice, but there's, I can't think of other people in the podcast industry that I'd want to avoid direct comparison than you two. It's like, you're gonna lose that because everybody's gonna be like, "Let's compare this to TPBN. What is this thing? What is this?"

• 3:19:39Jordi Hays?

  The Ultra Drum. Go to the wide. Go to the wide. Go to the main, go to the main wide.

• 3:19:42John Coogan?

  The big wide.

• 3:19:43Jordi Hays?

  We're here in the dome. There you go.

• 3:19:45David Senra?

  I don't know where the, what camera should be looking into. There's like fucking 10 of them in here. You don't understand how serious.

• 3:19:49John Coogan?

  It's really rude because someone just copied our last set and we completely changed the set.

• 3:19:54David Senra?

  You don't understand how serious these two guys take it. It's just stupid. It is a great line in Zero to One, right? Where Peter Thiel says, "If you're copying Mark Zuckerberg, you're not learning from him."

• 3:20:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:05David Senra?

  You copy, you don't copy the what, you copy the how.

• 3:20:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:09David Senra?

  It drives me insane. So, my point is like, I'm not gonna start another interview show. I'm gonna say, "Hey, I'm gonna have conversations," and the-

• 3:20:17Jordi Hays?

  Conversation show.

• 3:20:17David Senra?

  No, no, not even that, but there's other conversation shows like Joe Rogan. What you just said, I can't help myself. Everything I hear, read-

• 3:20:25David Senra?

  Anything. It all ties back to the shit that I learned from Founders.

• 3:20:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:28David Senra?

  So it's like, oh, like the first time I met Michael Dell, when I flew the first time. You know, we were talking, we went through Zach Dell's Base Power, we're going over, and they were showing like me these dashboards, everything else. Within like the first five minutes, I'd made references to like Jim Casey, Fred Smith, Brad Jacobs. This is like, this just comes naturally.

• 3:20:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:44David Senra?

  So it's like, the important thing about podcasting, or I think any kind of business, has to be like, natural to you. So in our private conversations, we pull ideas from Ogilvy all the time, or anybody. So yeah, that's exactly what I want to do. And so people are like, I liked it, but you should do this. I don't know what to tell you. Cause it's like, this is just who I am. I can't, I'm not acting. Like, I can only be who I am.

• 3:21:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:06Jordi Hays?

  I think the thing that's so, I think, I think the conversations that, giving people the experience of you being at dinner with Daniel or Ovitz, these people, like, I feel like incredibly blessed that I get to go to dinner with you and hang out with our friends and get, get the David Senra experience of like, having a normal conversation, but then always, you're always pulling it back and like contextualizing it with history. It's like incredibly addicting. I could just, I could do, you know, go to dinner for six hours because it's still gonna just be wildly interesting. But now creating that product, I saw somebody, somebody in the chat was looking earlier, they were looking at the first few guests and they were like,

• 3:21:46Jordi Hays?

  I might need to come back to this podcast later after I've made a few billion, but it's actually the exact opposite of that. It's like, no, just giving this product is something that's completely free. Anybody can just go listen to it. And you get to be, get the experience of being at dinner with you and, and somebody that's created a hundred and fifty billion dollar company, a ten billion dollar company.

• 3:22:06David Senra?

  So there's two things on that. So I did this, like, my very first viral episode of Founders, because I don't, obviously I don't try to go viral, was when I did the I had dinner with Charlie Munger episode.

• 3:22:14John Coogan?

  I remember that, yeah.

• 3:22:15David Senra?

  And like, it went so viral, put Founders to the top of the charts for all podcasts.

• 3:22:19John Coogan?

  The funniest thing about that was that, didn't you get some inbound from journalists who were like, he didn't want people to write about it and you got scoops? Like, cause you were basically like, reporting on it or something. It was like new information.

• 3:22:33David Senra?

  Berkshire's, so again, the reason why people love Munger and people, people I admire, is like, they're chaotic uncontrollable people. I am one of those people.

• 3:22:40John Coogan?

  The best.

• 3:22:40David Senra?

  Right? It's like, Rob is not going to, Rob Moore is not gonna be like, we, I'm gonna try to box this guy. There's just fucking no way. So Berkshire was, they're, they're very.

• 3:22:50David Senra?

  Like, they didn't understand the power of story. They control everything. And Charlie was uncontrollable. And so, it was not like I, I, they knew I was a podcaster. They knew, like, I was gonna make a podcast about it. I wasn't gonna record anything. Yeah. Um, and so Berkshire's PR was super mad. Hmm. Because they kept, not because of the episode, they, actually, the episode was very positive. Yeah, it was amazing. But, what they were upset about, is then you had all these journalists hitting them up. They're like, I thought- What did you mean by this? I thought Charlie didn't give interviews on a, uh- This one. Different take. Yeah, no, so he's like, uh, he's not, I, uh, he doesn't give interviews. I'm like, I'm not a journalist. Yeah. I'm an enthusiast. I fucking, this guy's my idol. I have a bust. I have a bronze bust of Charlie Munger in my house. I'm not a journalist, I'm an enthusiast.

• 3:23:35David Senra?

  I'm a business enthusiast. That's true. That's true. It's true. And so then, I, feedback, I was like, listen, if Charlie, if Charlie says, delete the episode, I will delete the episode. There you go. But some fucking lady at Berkshire, no, that's not gonna happen. Like, I'm very proud of that. Have him call me. Have him call me. Here's my number. And, and then, we found out, Charlie didn't give a shit. Because he doesn't, he didn't give a fuck. He's almost a hundred years old. So, to answer your question, or to, to piggyback on your comment. So I was doing all these, like, I had dinner with episodes, where I'd have dinner, and then I'd summarize in an episode, but you didn't hear anybody else. And so the original idea I had for David Center by David Center by, hosted by David Center, is, record, there's, there's, Jay-Z is one of the most fascinating people to me. Sure. Um, episode 238 of Founders is his autobiography. And he doesn't ever do podcasts.

• 3:24:20David Senra?

  And he did a podcast that was a title exclusive, when he was trying to build up title. And the podcast was fascinating, it's called Rap Radar. They rented, they were in a private dining room in Beverly Hills. So it's the two hosts, and then Jay-Z, and they just have lunch. Right? You don't, he's not like chewing. No, no. It's like, um, um, like that. So you edit that stuff out. And I'm like, that's, that's exactly what I want. Yeah, that's great. Cause what you just said, how much would people pay? Yep. To have dinner with Brad Jacobs? Yeah. Or Daniel Ek or Mike Ovitz? I'm going to New York again in like, two weeks to have dinner with Ovitz again. Ovitz has become like a crazy friend. Like, he texts me all the time. He just booked a guest, I can't tell you who. Let me tell you the funny Ovitz experience I had this, this week. Uh, he goes, hey, I just had dinner with X. Okay, I'm not, I can't say who.

• 3:25:05David Senra?

  Elon Musk's son. No.

• 3:25:08David Senra?

  And he goes, he's unbelievable, you should get him for the new show. And I was like, do you think you could help convince him? He goes, that's why I'm fucking texting you.

• 3:25:17David Senra?

  Two hours, no, but give him credit. He's like, what's your email? Like, the email to the person that can book this for me? Yeah. Two hours later. Yeah. Date done. Like, he's a, he's a shark. There we go. He's a machine. That's fantastic. Yeah, he's crazy. So I do want to say one other thing about being free. I, um, I just retweeted my own tweet. There we go. Because I think this is really-

• 3:25:36Jordi Hays?

  Give yourself a pat on the back.

• 3:25:36David Senra?

  No, because I, I think this is important, what you just said about the fact that it's like a miracle that this all is free. And I was feeling this today because like, the message I've been getting for the, for the Daniel Rock episode. Yeah. And it's like, podcasting is a miracle. You can receive a world-class education on any subject you want, on demand, while your eyes are busy for free. And I understand that I've been doing it for almost 10 years. It's still a fucking miracle to me. I still cannot believe that I can listen to these conversations. I can, it just, I, I never-

• 3:26:07Jordi Hays?

  I, I still, I still, I, I still feel that podcasts were much more important to my education than my traditional education. I, I thought back of, of, uh, I was lucky to discover like Tim Ferriss when I was 18, right? And, and being able to, yeah, you just did the show with Tim. Um, and just like being able to sit in on those conversations and learn about different perspectives on life and different ways to live and, and how to work and how to be healthy. All these different things were, were incredibly formative. And I just thought, I was never, growing up, I was never in an environment where I was in any of those rooms at all, right? I had a, you know, uh, uh, there are some people that are that benefited from that.

• 3:26:51Jordi Hays?

  And I just feel like it is the greatest public, uh, public good.

• 3:26:55David Senra?

  You nailed it. Like, okay, if you went to Harvard or Princeton or Ivy League, like, my parents didn't even fucking graduate high school. That was just never gonna be an option. I had to work full-time. Like, maybe you get work, you, like, there are a small percentage of people that get world-class education and they're surrounded by a crazy network. Like, think about like, the majority of my friends were all at Harvard. They're all like Jewish. These, these like Jew, Jewish genius Harvard people, they were all at school at the same time. And then you fast forward, they've been out of school for like 15 years and they're all completely like absolutely dominating. Like, I couldn't imagine what that experience would have been like to have that when you were 18. Like, life-changing. And they're still doing deals together.

• 3:27:30Jordi Hays?

  You go to your friend's house for the weekend and the dad, you just, the conversations at the dinner table, right? But now those conversations are actually widely accessible to everyone.

• 3:27:38David Senra?

  Exactly. And so like, I've learned more. I'm looking for this, we, you know, you were one of the first advertisers on Founders years ago. And I'm actually looking for this text now, text that you sent me, probably like 2023.

• 3:27:53Jordi Hays?

  Oh, way back.

• 3:27:54David Senra?

  Yeah, but you were just like, Founders is essentially like the only show that I'm listening to these days.

• 3:27:58Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:28:01David Senra?

  And I want the response though, because my response was kind of arrogant.

• 3:28:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, I tried to buy, I asked if you were open to being acquired, I think.

• 3:28:10David Senra?

  Yeah, and you wanted, you wanted to buy all, oh, no, you're like, the only podcast I listen to religiously. This is, hold on, this is gonna be funny. You think this is an act. So this is back in March 22, 2023 is when this is happening. Okay, so you text me, only podcast I listen to religiously. I go, no days off, I'm coming for everyone.

• 3:28:29Jordi Hays?

  Fact check, true.

• 3:28:31John Coogan?

  Narrator, he did come for everyone.

• 3:28:33Jordi Hays?

  How do you, uh, explain your approach to work? Because I know you, in my experience, you're working around the clock. Like, you're, you're, you're always on, but it doesn't always look like being in front of a, uh, you know, a computer, you know, editing an episode or whatever, but what, what, and, and what have you kind of pulled from the greats to kind of inform your own process?

• 3:29:02David Senra?

  So I, I think like, oh, man, sometimes, so I just did Tim Ferriss, and sometimes like, I think I said this on Tim Ferriss, like, I say stuff and I'm like, I should not be admitting to this, uh, but then every time I do, people are like, man, I'm so glad you said X, Y, or Z, because like, I feel that exact same way.

• 3:29:20Jordi Hays?

  What, do you procrastinate sometimes?

• 3:29:23David Senra?

  No, no, no. So my issue was, I think for years, episode 222 of Founders is Ed Thorp, and if you look at the subtitle of that episode, it's like, My Personal Blueprint. And what I thought was interesting about Ed Thorp was like, oh, this guy like mastered life. More than almost anybody ever ever come across out of the 400 episodes I've done. And what I mean by that is like, he actually was like balanced, like he, you know, he has a, he lived a crazy adventurous life. He invented a system for counting cards and blackjack, built the world's first wearable computer with Claude Shannon, created the world's first quantitative hedge fund, made more money he could ever spend. He, but he, he like took care of his health. He was a good family man. And so that's what I meant. I was like, oh, he's like all well balanced. And I was like, this is my blueprint.

• 3:30:05David Senra?

  And the closest thing I have to like a mentor, I would say, like an explicit mentor and kind of like an older brother is Sam Hinky. And I was on the phone with him recently, I mean recently, it was probably like nine months ago. Cause I, I kind of understood this about myself for a while. And I'm like, man, I think I'm fucking lying. Like, I think I'm lying when I say like, that's my blueprint. Like, I don't like, I don't want to be balanced. Like, I don't like, I like, I think I'm much more like Enzo Ferrari than I am like Ed Thorp. And, you know, I think Sam's point, he's just like, he's a way better person than I am, like legitimately better human being than I am. And his point is like trying to pull me back in that direction. And I just think that's like, not going to happen. So the answer to your question is like, if my eyes are open, then I'm thinking about work and I'm only thinking about work.

• 3:30:50David Senra?

  And it doesn't feel like work because I just have this irrational obsession. Dude, I don't want to talk about this. I literally like, this sounds so, so terrible. I literally like had tears in my eyes when I woke up yesterday because this is so fucking important to me. And I knew it was, I knew that yesterday was like a, a big turning point in my life, but I woke up from a private message from Daniel. And it's like, I read it and like immediately started fucking crying, like, not like sobbing, but like tears in my eyes. Because to have somebody that you respect so much, say, you're like, you, you're, I'm really proud of you. Like, what you're putting out is excellent, really great. And to have that and also love it the way I do, it's like, the reason I said Enzo Ferrari, because he said,

• 3:31:35David Senra?

  "A man dominated by a passion such as mine, like can't be cut in half." His whole point was just like, He wasn't good at anything else but thinking about Ferrari. And so my work thing is just like, I'm infinitely curious. And so like today, you know, I worked out and then every other thing was just reading. And like, I'm reading two books at the same time. I'm working on founders episodes. I'm trying to respond to messages about the Daniel episode. Like, I don't know. And then I just come over here and like, we're friends, but this is kind of work too. And then after this, like, I'm going to go back and work some more. And like, that's all I want to do.

• 3:32:07John Coogan?

  I have a follow up question, but first I'm going to tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.

• 3:32:20David Senra?

  I don't, I don't mind the ad. I love the ads and I love how they're weaved in. But if I'm sitting here, it's got to be a Ramp ad.

• 3:32:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:32:26David Senra?

  Can we do a Ramp ad?

• 3:32:27John Coogan?

  Run it back, run it back. Uh, time is money. Say both. There we go. Use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com. Uh, my question, do you think that there is a material difference between retired and live player, active CEO, post FU money, post economic, in terms of the shape of an interview, what you get out? If, if, if you took a random listener and they had no idea who Daniel Eck and Brad Jacobs and, uh, Michael Dell and all these different folks who you're going to interview were?

• 3:33:01David Senra?

  I'm not interviewing them.

• 3:33:02John Coogan?

  What? Uh, yeah. Conversing. Talking to. Um, do you think that they would be able to tell, okay, this person's still in the arena? This person is post economic, checked out, no bags?

• 3:33:15David Senra?

  It's not, it's not a money thing. It's not a retirement thing.

• 3:33:17John Coogan?

  What is it?

• 3:33:17David Senra?

  It's like a personality thing. Like, wait till you see the Brad. I cannot believe some of the stuff we got on film that Brad Jacobs does.

• 3:33:25John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 3:33:25David Senra?

  Because that guy just can't help himself. He is who he is. And obviously like, he's a public company. I don't know if he's a CEO. He's definitely chairman, but like, a lot of these happen to be public company CEOs. So like, I have to be. You know, they have, they have comms people and they have all this crazy stuff and I'm not gonna, I'm not intentionally trying to get in trouble with anybody. You know, again, I'm an enthusiast, I'm not a journalist. I just think, hey, you're brilliant. Can I pull something out of you that other people, I benefit a lot from talking to you? And so it's kind of selfish that I get all these lessons and this inspiration and this education from you. Are you cool us sitting down and just recording the conversations we have anyways? And so a person like Brad, doesn't give a shit. He is 68, he's got the most energy of anybody else I've been around. He also has nothing to be insecure about because he started eight separate billion dollar companies. And he's a wild-

• 3:34:09Jordi Hays?

  He wrote the book on starting billion dollar companies.

• 3:34:11David Senra?

  And he's, and he's, and he's a wild boy.

• 3:34:13John Coogan?

  Asking for, you know, like, are you bullish on this particular market that you may or may not have bags in? That's not relevant, so-

• 3:34:19David Senra?

  We don't talk at all about current affairs.

• 3:34:21John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:34:22David Senra?

  Current events. My whole thing is like-

• 3:34:23Jordi Hays?

  Which is, this is why we're beautiful yin and yang, because obviously we're focused on what's happening in markets and the news.

• 3:34:30John Coogan?

  Huge point of differentiation against like a Rogan. Is like, you go on Rogan, it's gonna be like, well, let's react to the news right now. It's very-

• 3:34:37David Senra?

  No, and my point, like, I'm not, you know, I'm not, we talked about this. John was like, will you do a podcast with me? I was like, what are we gonna do? He's like, talk about tech news. I'm like, I'm not gonna talk about tech news. No, I'm not gonna talk about tech news.

• 3:34:49Jordi Hays?

  Would you, Ragav is asking, would you interview David Senra on David Senra by David Senra hosted by David Senra?

• 3:34:57David Senra?

  Okay.

• 3:34:57Jordi Hays?

  Would you interview yourself?

• 3:34:58David Senra?

  Okay, so the, the, the-

• 3:35:00John Coogan?

  Happens.

• 3:35:00David Senra?

  Hold on, the reclusive genius that we all know and that we can't name his name, literally called me yesterday. And had a long conversation about this. And he had a, I'm not gonna, I can't say, I'll tell you guys off air, but he had a great idea. And he's like, once, we, we should do this for episode 100. And I'm like, yeah.

• 3:35:17John Coogan?

  Well, here's another great idea. Go to getbezel.com, your Bezel concierge is available to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Get a lucky watch.

• 3:35:25Jordi Hays?

  Last question I have on my side, then we should, we should grab lunch. Do you think we're exiting the hobbyist era of podcasting?

• 3:35:37Jordi Hays?

  Era?

• 3:35:38David Senra?

  We had this conversation yesterday.

• 3:35:40Jordi Hays?

  It was, I mean, there was a, there was a beautiful, there was, there was a, there was about a, a decade and a half where you could start a podcast and have a, you know.

• 3:35:50David Senra?

  Okay.

• 3:35:50John Coogan?

  I was doing media part-time. I was one of the worst offenders.

• 3:35:54David Senra?

  Yeah, but we had this conversation, no.

• 3:35:55John Coogan?

  You convinced me.

• 3:35:56David Senra?

  I had this conversation when it came in, cause uh, it was just obvious. We'll talk about this later.

• 3:36:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:36:02David Senra?

  It's the first fucking video I saw of yours.

• 3:36:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:36:04David Senra?

  I was like, this guy, we have to be friends.

• 3:36:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:36:06David Senra?

  He's a generational talent. Like, it's just obvious.

• 3:36:08Jordi Hays?

  We had, we had a guy stop John while we were at breakfast this morning, had no idea about TVPN, but was obsessed with John's videos. And John's like, I haven't published a video, I haven't published a video in like, over a year.

• 3:36:20David Senra?

  Yes, I was, I wouldn't think it was that early, but I came in really early, years early. Um, so anyways, we, we, me and Jordy just randomly talked about this, cause we can't help ourselves. Yesterday, when we randomly ran into each other.

• 3:36:34David Senra?

  This is where I like, I don't mean any disrespect to other people, so.

• 3:36:40Jordi Hays?

  We are live.

• 3:36:41David Senra?

  I know, I have to be very careful, so.

• 3:36:43John Coogan?

  And that's a great place to end it.

• 3:36:44David Senra?

  No, no, so, um, okay, no disrespect, there's no way this guy's watching.

• 3:36:50Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, no, no, it all gets back.

• 3:36:52David Senra?

  Okay, okay, right, okay. I was induced into a state of rage, because I was, I was at a dinner, and I was introduced to another podcaster, and they mentioned, like, again, they're from like, the old school.

• 3:37:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:37:07David Senra?

  Right, when you can like, come in and like, it's just different, and basically, his point was just like, yeah, there's like, I have to figure out like, a new form.

• 3:37:15John Coogan?

  There were a lot of people that saw podcasting as just like, a marketing side hobby.

• 3:37:19David Senra?

  But you can't say, I need, like, I need to fix my show.

• 3:37:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:37:23David Senra?

  And I need a different, like, I needed like, a new, like, take on my existing show.

• 3:37:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:37:27David Senra?

  And also tell me that I'm gonna take three months off to do something else that's not the podcast.

• 3:37:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:37:33David Senra?

  And I told him, I go, you're gonna get fucked up. Like, because what's happening now, this is exactly what I said though, but this is what's happening now, is people used to come in and they're like, oh, I'm just gonna, like, I can do three other things. Podcast could be your third, fourth, fifth most important thing in your life.

• 3:37:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's just 90 minutes, once a week.

• 3:37:48David Senra?

  Yeah, but now you have people that act like founders and entrepreneurs coming in, and the conversation we had, it's like, so I think of like, obviously, I approached this as. If, if an Enzo Ferrari was doing what I was doing, if a Munger was doing what I was doing, if a Steve Jobs was doing, or Edwin Lamb was doing what I was doing, what would they do? That's exactly how I think. And then I come into this and I'm like, oh, and I knew you guys think like this anyways, but what I was just telling them, because I was like, where did the rest of, you had like 15 people last time I was here. The interns went back to college.

• 3:38:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:38:16David Senra?

  I'm like, no, they're gonna learn more. I go, these two.

• 3:38:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, one of our interns didn't go back to college.

• 3:38:21David Senra?

  But I go, this is what I said. I go, these two are gonna take this as far as it could possibly go. There's no way, if you have a front row seat to that, skip a fucking year of college. They're gonna take this as far as possible. You guys are not at, you're not, you are podcasters, but you're entrepreneurs. And you just realize like, this is the product. Look what it's got. Your fucking one year anniversary is what, four days from now?

• 3:38:42John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 3:38:43David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 3:38:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we need to figure out when we.

• 3:38:45John Coogan?

  365 probably.

• 3:38:47David Senra?

  But look at what you guys have done.

• 3:38:49Jordi Hays?

  We didn't start, we didn't, well, we didn't, yeah, we didn't start.

• 3:38:52David Senra?

  No, you didn't.

• 3:38:53Jordi Hays?

  Doing daily.

• 3:38:54David Senra?

  Until I cornered you at the Faena in Miami and started yelling.

• 3:38:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:38:58David Senra?

  Out of love.

• 3:38:59Jordi Hays?

  That's the real, that's the real founding date.

• 3:39:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:39:02David Senra?

  But my point being is like, we were just looking at episode one, right? Before I came on. And look what you guys, you're entrepreneurs. You've iterated tremendously in a year.

• 3:39:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:39:12David Senra?

  And so, yeah, good luck competing with John and Jordy. You're not gonna do that.

• 3:39:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's also, I mean, the function of, you know, John spending years building up, figuring out how to create great content online, me starting my career, basically selling ads on the internet. Just a bunch of different, and then, I don't know. It's a, would not have been possible if we hadn't each spent a decade doing what we did prior to that.

• 3:39:38David Senra?

  But then there's also something that is not copyable, which is the chemistry between you two, which is why I was so like emphatic about you need to take this more seriously. Not that you weren't, but like, you, you had, there's just, you can't buy that chemistry.

• 3:39:50John Coogan?

  What do you mean chemistry? We're mortal enemies.

• 3:39:51David Senra?

  No.

• 3:39:52John Coogan?

  You just play.

• 3:39:53David Senra?

  The amount of time you.

• 3:39:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're just great actors. We're here in Hollywood.

• 3:39:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:39:56David Senra?

  There's so many times where I'm like.

• 3:39:57John Coogan?

  I remember when I went to casting and they were like, you're gonna play this guy.

• 3:39:59David Senra?

  This is a lie. You don't lie to your audience. There's so many times.

• 3:40:02Jordi Hays?

  Plays the character, the friend, a character that's friends with.

• 3:40:05John Coogan?

  For this other guy.

• 3:40:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're hooked.

• 3:40:07David Senra?

  There's so many, the audience, they're lying. There's so many times when I'm with one. And the other one calls the other one. And it's just like, they love each other. I can't hang out with anybody as much as you guys hang out and then still like them. So like, I'm much

• 3:40:21Jordi Hays?

  Nobody, I just, nobody likes talking about

• 3:40:25John Coogan?

  225 is not gonna bench itself.

• 3:40:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, we, we can't

• 3:40:28John Coogan?

  Who else will I get to shottily spot me while they're on their phone and I'm dying from the sex trap?

• 3:40:34Jordi Hays?

  I've, I've definitely, I've gotten better at spotting, but, but when, when, in the morning when we're working out, it's, uh, it's could be, there are a couple of times John almost lost his head because I was locked in on the news when he was benching.

• 3:40:46David Senra?

  Dude, you're, the joint workouts are working. I saw the pictures of you at the beach. Your back's getting, it's way wider. I'm like, oh, you guys are on the juice?

• 3:40:55John Coogan?

  Look at this.

• 3:40:56Jordi Hays?

  No, no juice. I do, I do. The, here, you know the secret. I eat a ham, I eat a double smash burger every morning at 8 a.m.

• 3:41:03John Coogan?

  There's secrets.

• 3:41:05Jordi Hays?

  Secrets. Uh, this is a lot of fun.

• 3:41:07John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Wander. You wanna sing with us? Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, roomy beds, top tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation, but better, for your case.

• 3:41:19Jordi Hays?

  I just have to say, uh, I'm so happy for you. I'm so proud of you.

• 3:41:23John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:41:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I feel lucky to have met you before you became a household, uh, name and nobody in my career has done more for me than you with zero financial incentive, anything, anything along those lines. Um, so it's

• 3:41:44David Senra?

  One, I thank you very much. The second part I think is really important is because at the end of the day, if you're insanely talented, it's like people chase money when you should really be chasing relationships. Like, that is all, like, outside of work, I care deeply about the friendships that I build and like, I don't purposely. You know, I talked to Kareem about this. He's like, man, you're selling all these ads for other podcasters. You're doing all sorts of stuff. Kareem from Ramp, one of the, maybe the most brilliant mind working in finance today, technical mind working in finance today. Listen to the Daniel Ek episode and you'll see how he's similar to, how Kareem's working style is very similar to Daniel's. Um, and he's like, why don't you start like a, you know, business doing this? It's like, I don't, I do it because I love the, I love podcasters and I love super talented people that take their work very seriously. And it's like, I like seeing my friends win.

• 3:42:27John Coogan?

  And no side hustles.

• 3:42:28David Senra?

  Yeah, and that's another reason.

• 3:42:29Jordi Hays?

  Never side hustle.

• 3:42:30John Coogan?

  Well, uh, let's ring the gong for the first episode.

• 3:42:34David Senra?

  Thank you.

• 3:42:37Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Great hit. Thank you for tuning in, folks. We love you. Thank you, everyone. We'll see you tomorrow. See you tomorrow. Thank you. Cheers.