Alphabet Breaks $100B Barrier, OpenAI's Rumored $1T IPO | Grant LaFontaine, Chris McGuire, Max Junestrand, Christina Cacioppo, Lin Qiao, Ilan Twig, Taranjeet Singh

(00:12) - Meta Misses Earnings (06:13) - Alphabet Posts First $100B Quarter (23:58) - OpenAI's Rumored $1T IPO (26:42) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:17:47) - Grant LaFontaine, co-founder and CEO of Whatnot, a live-stream shopping platform, discusses the company's evolution from a niche marketplace for collectibles like Funko Pops to a diverse platform encompassing categories such as fashion and electronics. He emphasizes the importance of starting with a focused niche to build community and liquidity, highlighting that their initial concentration on collectibles allowed them to provide exceptional value to a specific group before expanding. LaFontaine also underscores the significance of listening to users, moving quickly, and taking bold actions, noting that their pivot to live-stream shopping was driven by observing user behavior and resulted in substantial growth. (01:50:48) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:55:10) - Chris McGuire, a seasoned civil servant, has held pivotal roles in U. S. national security and technology policy, including Senior Advisor to the State Department's Office of the Special Envoy for Critical and Emerging Technology (2023-2025) and Deputy Senior Director for Technology and National Security at the National Security Council (2024). He discusses the evolution of U. S.-China relations, highlighting shifts from integration to competition, particularly in semiconductors and AI, and notes China's assertive responses to U. S. policies, such as leveraging rare earth exports. McGuire emphasizes the importance of proactive measures to secure critical supply chains and suggests class-based regulations to mitigate risks from foreign technologies, like Chinese humanoid robots, to prevent potential national security threats. (02:29:55) - Max Junestrand, CEO and co-founder of Legora, an AI-powered workspace for lawyers, discusses the company's rapid growth since its 2023 inception, including closing a $150 million Series C funding round and expanding into the U. S. market. He highlights the evolution of AI in legal processes, emphasizing the shift from simple conversational AI to sophisticated tools capable of handling complex tasks like due diligence. Junestrand also addresses the potential for law firm consolidation due to technological advancements and the move towards value-based pricing models in the industry. (02:40:11) - Christina Cacioppo, CEO of Vanta, discusses the integration of AI in security and compliance, highlighting that 80% of security leaders are adopting AI agents to counteract AI-driven attacks. She emphasizes the importance of human-AI collaboration, referencing the "Centaur" model where AI and humans work together, and notes that future security breaches may stem from basic oversights rather than complex AI-generated threats. (02:49:05) - Lin Qiao, co-founder and CEO of Fireworks AI, discusses the company's AI inference platform that enables application-specific models to continuously learn and adapt, emphasizing that each developer should have their own specialized model integrated into their product design. She highlights Fireworks AI's significant processing capabilities, handling over 180 requests per second and more than 10 trillion tokens daily, comparable to Google's Gemini. Additionally, Qiao announces a $250 million Series C funding round co-led by Lightspeed and Index Ventures, bringing the company's valuation to $4 billion. (02:54:34) - Ilan Twig, co-founder and CTO of Navan, a travel and expense management company, discusses the company's journey from facing near-zero revenue during the COVID-19 pandemic to a successful IPO, highlighting the resilience and adaptability of their business model. He emphasizes the importance of leveraging technology to enhance travel experiences, introducing 'Ava,' an AI-powered virtual travel agent developed through Navan Cognition, a proprietary framework designed to ensure reliability and minimize AI hallucinations. Twig also shares a personal anecdote about his 90-year-old father attending the IPO ceremony, underscoring the personal significance of the milestone. (03:03:46) - Taranjeet Singh, co-founder and CEO of MEM0, discusses the company's mission to provide memory solutions for AI agents, addressing the current limitations of stateless AI applications that fail to evolve with user interactions. He highlights MEM0's market leadership, citing 41,000 GitHub stars, 14 million downloads, and a recent $24 million funding round led by Basic Ventures. Singh envisions a future where users own and carry their AI memories across various applications, enhancing personalization and user experience. 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 Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Thursday, October 30th, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome. The Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Uh, Meta missed earnings yesterday.

• 0:16Jordi Hays?

  Due to a one-time tax hit?

• 0:19John Coogan?

  Yes, not a, not that big of a deal, honestly. Uh, Meta posts record revenue, but warns of expenses. This is from the Wall Street Journal. Uh, Meta reported record revenue in the third quarter, but the technology company warned of accelerating capital expenditures around artificial intelligence, sending its stock down 7% after hours trading. Uh, if you're worried about expenses, you gotta go to ramp.com. Time is money, save both. Use these corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place, baby. Um, it's now a $1.7 trillion company. Not bad, but we are in the age of three, four, five trillion dollar companies now. Uh, it's crazy times.

• 1:03Jordi Hays?

  There's a club above. Uh, standout for me reels at north of a $50 billion run rate.

• 1:10John Coogan?

  Crazy, which is more than all of TV combined, right? Something like that. It's close.

• 1:16Jordi Hays?

  No, I think, uh.

• 1:18John Coogan?

  I think television advertising, like linear TV advertising is, is in that range. Or it's like creeping up on it.

• 1:25Jordi Hays?

  Uh, in 2024, television advertising spending in the U.S. was expected to amount to approximately $60 billion.

• 1:31John Coogan?

  I mean, they're within striking distance. Let's hear it for the Meta team. Uh, remarkable. Um, so there was this one-time tax charge of 15.9 billion that crushed net income. Uh, spending on AI researchers has also been crazy recently, uh, and CapEx is growing a ton. They're gonna hit 72 billion this year. I'm good for my 72 billion over at Meta.

• 1:56Jordi Hays?

  Not bad. Uh, the ad load just anecdotally is up tremendously. They're now doing, uh, four ads where they used to do one.

• 2:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, I thought there were almost five. Like you can go in between stories and get five in a row or something.

• 2:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So in between two stories, you can get up to, uh, five individual ads. So gotta pay for all that CapEx somehow.

• 2:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, the core business rocks. We know this. Uh. Fifty one point two billion in revenue this quarter. They were up twenty six percent year over year. And there's just so many dials that the Meta team can get slightly more dialed every quarter. You can get more users, more time on the platform from those users, more ads, more targeted ads. There's all these small tweaks that add up and wind up compounding. So my bigger question today is what happens to the advertising cash machine once you're two decades in? So Google went through this transition on October 2 of 2015. And at the time, I feel like most people thought it was crazy. They rebranded. They

• 3:02John Coogan?

  went from Google to being called Alphabet. And the idea was that they were going to have other business lines.

• 3:07Jordi Hays?

  A-Z.

• 3:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we're gonna have other, we're gonna have other things. And, you know, focus is usually pretty valuable. And at the time, people were like, well, you can't even keep Google Reader online. You can't even get a chat app up to date. You can't, you can't win in social networking. You had to shut down Google Plus. So what are you thinking you're gonna go build a self-driving car, an AI team, or a new cloud platform? Like, this is crazy?

• 3:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:34John Coogan?

  Just put the ten blue links in the back. But looking back on it now, it feels like Alphabet totally deserves the broader name. The company is more than just Google Search Box, certainly more than ten blue links. Google Cloud is material. DeepMind is material. Waymo is material. There's the business side, Google Apps for Business. All of these are both key to the future value of Alphabet, but also key to just running the business today. The interplay between these divisions creates a ton of value. But more importantly, I don't think these businesses, at least most of them, would exist if they hadn't grown up in a cash-rich environment. Like, I don't, I, it's just so hard to predict

• 4:19John Coogan?

  in 2009, how much capital is it going to take us to build a self-driving car network that we'll be able to launch in San Francisco and barely be profitable and then we'll probably need another decade?

• 4:30Jordi Hays?

  You know, strange, strange comp here is YC, I don't know, it's some years ago at this point, was trying to understand what, what the factors that contributed to the breakout successes. And one factor was founders having wealthy parents. So the founders felt like they could just take these really massive, high-risk swings because they weren't, they weren't going for a base hit. The founders like, If I make like a few million dollars, if I make a few million dollars, it doesn't change my life, right?

• 4:57John Coogan?

  You gotta go big.

• 4:58Jordi Hays?

  Is is is well beyond that.

• 5:00John Coogan?

  I gotta go big.

• 5:00Jordi Hays?

  And so I gotta go big, willing to like, look silly for a long period of time, willing to, uh, you know, just stumble around as long as it takes to hit it really big. Um, and and certainly, you know, a number of the things you just outlined, like, wouldn't have been able to be, maybe would have died as traditional venture businesses.

• 5:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, this was what I was writing about with with one X, the robotics company. Extremely difficult to understand, are we three years away from that business really working financially? Are we 10 years away from the business really working financially? There's a lot going on, but Google was able to just hold on to Waymo from 2009 to today, 16 years. And, uh, they're probably still losing money on it. I mean, they're they're like, unit economics are decent in one specific market. It's going to be a long time.

• 5:50Jordi Hays?

  I would say definitely losing money on it.

• 5:52John Coogan?

  But they can actually do stuff. Um, but every time they announce something, you know, they stream it, they gotta get on Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream and reach your audience wherever they are. You can sign in with Google since we're talking about Google. Um, so I wanted to look at some parallels between what's going on with with Google, who's been on a tear and now has this like, all of a sudden, pretty diversified business. Uh, there's this meme here of the Ninja Turtles where

• 6:23Jordi Hays?

  From the account Alphabetting.

• 6:25John Coogan?

  Yes, so the search giant, the search, the cash machine of the of the ads business is taking the other bets as their children. And now as search becomes less relevant potentially in the age of AI. Well, what does Alphabet have? They have Google Cloud, they have Waymo, they have Maps, Gmail, Chrome, DeepMind, Google AI, like, it's a stacked lineup. And so, yes, even if search does get older.

• 6:49Jordi Hays?

  I love how YouTube is doesn't even isn't even deserving of its own Ninja Turtle.

• 6:53John Coogan?

  No, and you'd think YouTube would be a huge one here. Uh, and that one seems, uh, YouTube seems extremely resilient in the age of AI. It seems like the place, it's a social network, it's gonna, it's gonna stick around. Um, and and there, we really haven't seen any, I mean, we've seen the Sora stuff, but, uh, uh, no one's, everyone uses ChatGPT and says,

• 7:13John Coogan?

  Oh, wow. Yeah, this is definitely going to replace some of my Google searching for sure. It's kind of searching Google for me and then just giving me the results. No one's saying that about Sora. No one's saying like, oh, I don't need to watch Doug Demiro anymore or whatever.

• 7:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I mean, I, I, I think one of the, you know, right now you're seeing more AI content on YouTube, but it's still created by independent channels.

• 7:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  There's a world in that, you know, YouTube pays out a huge amount of its revenue today to the creators on the platform. There's a world in the future where YouTube just generates the, the, the video, the content itself through, you know, it's, it's various AI products. It never actually has to pay out a creator.

• 7:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:48Jordi Hays?

  Because it's just like.

• 7:48John Coogan?

  And that's actually better for YouTube in many ways.

• 7:51Jordi Hays?

  So, so content creators, content creators today are worried about being disrupted by other people using AI to make content.

• 7:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:59Jordi Hays?

  They're not thinking about the platforms themselves that know exactly what

• 8:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:03Jordi Hays?

  uh, the kind of content that people like and would be able to over time produce it themselves.

• 8:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, but aggregating that demand.

• 8:09Jordi Hays?

  Aggregating attention.

• 8:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, the, yeah, yeah. The value is, is aggregating this is the, uh, is not aggregating the supply side. It's the demand side. This is the aggregation theory. And so if you want to aggregate, if you can aggregate a bunch of people that open apps and are in the market for video, you can serve them up a Mr. Beast video or Doug Demiro video, or you can serve them up AI generated content and you still make money because you have aggregated that, that, uh, that demand, not supply.

• 8:36Jordi Hays?

  Doug Demiro would be a good guest. We are working on it.

• 8:40Jordi Hays?

  Great point.

• 8:41John Coogan?

  Okay, now, three, two, one. Privy, wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spend on white label wallets, sign transactions and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. So the Google story is very interesting because really for the last decade since 2015, when they rebranded as Alphabet, I feel like they were not getting a lot of credit. People were like, oh yeah, like Google, it's like the kind of the place where you sit on the, you rest, invest, you sit on the rooftop, you're not really doing anything. And then now everyone's waking up to this idea that it's like, whoa, they have like four monster businesses. And yeah, there's a ton of gravestones in the graveyard from various note-taking apps and chat apps and Google readers over there.

• 9:23John Coogan?

  But overall, they wound up building a very diverse, very valuable business where even if Waymo's not cash flowing a ton, is it worth a hundred billion dollars? Does that add to their three trillion dollar market cap materially? Probably, right?

• 9:40Jordi Hays?

  Waymo also raised like a venture round not too long ago.

• 9:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think it actually has like a public mark now, which is interesting. But my question is, how do we take this and we and we bridge it to what's going on at Meta, formerly Facebook, in October. I guess October is the month where you rebrand your company. Facebook did it. Google rebranded to Alphabet in October of 2015. Facebook rebranded to Meta in October of 2021. And people, I think overly, were overly narrow about framing that transition about specifically VR, specifically, specifically virtual reality, the metaverse, everything that Mark Zuckerberg was investing in after the Oculus acquisition and the Meta Horizon worlds and VR. Obviously, that was a piece.

• 10:28Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting that I feel like the name Meta has aged

• 10:33Jordi Hays?

  pretty well.

• 10:33John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 10:34Jordi Hays?

  Even though it was ultimately somewhat like an embarrassing overinvestment at the time.

• 10:40John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 10:41Jordi Hays?

  So the name aged well, even though the activities that were driving the name change did not.

• 10:46John Coogan?

  Yes, and I think it was just, it was just important for for Mark Zuckerberg to send the message that.

• 10:52Jordi Hays?

  We're not any single app.

• 10:54John Coogan?

  We're not Facebook. Yeah, yeah. And we're not even just social networking. Like, we could wind up with a hyperscaler cloud platform. If there was like, you know, yes, you have AWS, GCP, Azure, and then you also have like Meta Cloud Platform. People would be like, yeah, that makes sense. And that's a couple hundred billion dollar business. And they figured it out, right? And so that rebranding, it did, it did definitely set them up for a new, a new era, but also just the ability to place other bets, like what Google did once they became Alphabet.

• 11:29John Coogan?

  But, so it's interesting to see like, how will, you know, like, what will those bets look like? Because AI is obviously just a sustaining innovation for Meta. It's a similar thing to YouTube, right? And machine learning's been, been generating value in ad targeting for over a decade.

• 11:48Jordi Hays?

  Sustaining, sustaining in many ways, but the, the potentially disruptive

• 11:55Jordi Hays?

  component is that people are using LLMs in social ways. And so as, as people spend more and more time talking to LLMs, that is time that they are not in Meta Platforms products.

• 12:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe on the like, like the personal interaction side, like the really parasocial stuff.

• 12:16Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. But for the users, like, like, you know, there, there are users out there

• 12:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:21Jordi Hays?

  that used to spend five hours a day using meta products and now are spending.

• 12:25John Coogan?

  I don't think there's that many of those, though. I mean, you look at the overall usage numbers. Yes, you're getting thirty minutes of chat GPT, but you're not seeing a blink on it's people are like, they're, they're doom scrolling Instagram and then they're also chatting with four O. Right? They're doing both.

• 12:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe. But at, but at the end of the day, I mean.

• 12:42John Coogan?

  I, I, I, I agree. Like, it could potentially be a headwind long term. Uh, and that's, and that's obviously why.

• 12:47Jordi Hays?

  I'm just saying, like, Mark certainly, like, sees ramping attention and use user minutes on

• 12:53John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 12:54Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI products.

• 12:55John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 12:56Jordi Hays?

  And it's a concern. It's a risk.

• 12:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:59Jordi Hays?

  Not quite as material.

• 13:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:01Jordi Hays?

  As, uh, for Google, but.

• 13:03John Coogan?

  And so the, yeah, the question is like, can Meta, MSL, TBD Labs generate some sort of chatbot that's at, that's at four O level? Uh, frontier level, doesn't need to be super intelligence necessarily immediately, but just something to sort of stem that bleeding in the way that uh, Gemini and AI search mode, AI mode in Google search and the AI search overviews sort of stemmed of the bleeding from, okay, well, uh, do I need to just stop using Google search for knowledge retrieval? If you, if, if you're like, am I, do I need to stop? May, maybe you can pull some people there. Um, but

• 13:41John Coogan?

  I mean, Meta does, even though there's like all this chaos around who they're hiring and, and they're laying off their old team and they're building this new team. They're spending so much money. Uh, it's not like they're new to this. Like Meta started using, uh, uh, machine learning for ad targeting all the way back in twenty thirteen, two years before OpenAI was founded, four years before the transformer paper.

• 14:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:02John Coogan?

  Like, this is not a new technology for Facebook. They've been using this in their core infrastructure for, uh, over a decade. Um, but the, there's this question of what is Mark Zuckerberg's track record when building or buying successfully in new markets? That's where it gets really hard. Obviously Instagram, WhatsApp, great results. Uh, but.

• 14:24John Coogan?

  Certainly mu- much harder in VR and also, you know, whatever the next, next thing is, it's much less clear.

• 14:31Jordi Hays?

  He has a track record of being amazing at cloning incredible features and products and buying incredible features and products. There's no obvious track record of zero to one innovation.

• 14:49John Coogan?

  And some, some of this stuff has just been blocked. Like I, I, I believe he wanted to buy Unity game engine and effectively like get into the gaming world in, in one way or another. And of course, some of those games would be instantiated in VR or instantiated in meta properties, but, um, but I, I believe that was blocked or that didn't get through FTC.

• 15:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. A, a, you know, an environment that doesn't allow him to buy, uh, great companies is not a great.

• 15:18John Coogan?

  It's his kryptonite. He's nerfed.

• 15:20Jordi Hays?

  He's definitely nerfed.

• 15:21John Coogan?

  If he can't buy, he's nerfed.

• 15:22Jordi Hays?

  He's one of the eminent goats.

• 15:24John Coogan?

  He is one of the eminent goats.

• 15:26Jordi Hays?

  His power level seems too high.

• 15:28John Coogan?

  And it's way different than Google. And it's interesting because on the face of it, Google and Facebook have similar backstories, similar cultures, you know, young founders who, uh, who built up these tech companies, only seven years, eight years apart from each other when they started, but Google had a very different culture. You know, it's a PhD research project, sort of an academic campus when you're walking around. The, the mission is organizing the world's information. It's like very nerdy and that obviously translates to, hey, how do we organize the world's information? Let's create a mapping product, Google Maps. Okay, what do we do when we have all the maps? Let's try and drive around a car on it. And then they get self-driving cars, right? And it's like, it's a little bit harder to jump from like, our mission is to bring people

• 16:10John Coogan?

  together, so we're generating AI or VR, which feels like the opposite direction. And so I don't know, I, it feels like there's always been a little bit more tension on the mission related to where the other bets go. Whereas the organize all the information, the organizing the world's information. Like you, you might say, how does a self-driving car fit into that? But I can totally say, here's exactly how it fits into it.

• 16:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:40John Coogan?

  I can't say that. It's much harder.

• 16:42Jordi Hays?

  What's Meta's mission? Monetize the world's attention?

• 16:46John Coogan?

  No. Bringing people together.

• 16:48Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 16:49John Coogan?

  And the thing is, bringing people together.

• 16:51Jordi Hays?

  To build the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible.

• 16:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so there's a lot of, there's a lot of products that feel like they might be successful, but they are.

• 17:02Jordi Hays?

  I would love for Mark to just go supervillain mode again. You know, he, he, he, he's, he's, he, like at some point, it could make sense from a comms standpoint to lean, you know, in the opposite direction.

• 17:13John Coogan?

  Of course. Right now.

• 17:14Jordi Hays?

  Right now.

• 17:15John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 17:16Jordi Hays?

  That's not the strategy, but if you just said, our mission is to monetize the world's attention.

• 17:21John Coogan?

  That'd be great.

• 17:22Jordi Hays?

  That would go pretty hard.

• 17:23John Coogan?

  I think the stock pops 20% that day.

• 17:26Jordi Hays?

  I think so too.

• 17:27John Coogan?

  You want to build it back up.

• 17:30John Coogan?

  Monetize the world's attention.

• 17:31Jordi Hays?

  Stock's down 10% today, but if it came out with that, updating, update, update on Halloween.

• 17:38John Coogan?

  Ooh, spooky.

• 17:39Jordi Hays?

  Spooky.

• 17:39John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 17:40Jordi Hays?

  Spooky.

• 17:41John Coogan?

  I like that we're going into spooky earnings season. Before we move on, let me tell you about cognition, the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Yeah, and so overall, you know, it's easy to look back with 2020 hindsight on Google and be like, wow, it all made sense. They, they were these academics. They wanted to organize the world's information. They wound up building AI. They wound up building Waymo. They've, they've been very successful there. Who knows what's going to happen with Meta? I, I, I do think that there is, there is an open question about how does Meta square the, the grounding of the mission into whatever comes next? Because if you're, if, if there is a big business to be built in anti-personal, in truly like anti-social networking.

• 18:29John Coogan?

  You kind of got to square that with the mission, right? And so maybe you do need to, maybe you do need to shift away to some sort of newer mission, something different. Or maybe you need to.

• 18:37Jordi Hays?

  Apple, Apple should probably update their mission to making phones that are performant but break easier.

• 18:44John Coogan?

  Have you, have you actually read Apple's mission ever?

• 18:49John Coogan?

  The, the Apple mission.

• 18:50Jordi Hays?

  We gotta do, we gotta, we gotta do a, a segment called ranking big tech's mission statements.

• 18:55John Coogan?

  We definitely do.

• 18:57Jordi Hays?

  Apple's mission is to bring the best user experience to its customers through innovative hardware, software and services. Is that actually?

• 19:05Jordi Hays?

  That is like the, that's like the least inspiring mission statement.

• 19:09John Coogan?

  They've, they've gone, uh, so Apple strives to bring the best personal computing experience to student educators, creative professionals, consumers around the world. There was an older mission statement at some point, like post Jobs era, there was one that like literally had like TM for like, we make the iPad, which is the best like tablet computer. And it was just like a list of products that they had. It was like deeply.

• 19:34Jordi Hays?

  Apple's mission is to create technology that empowers people and enriches their lives.

• 19:39John Coogan?

  That's pretty good.

• 19:39Jordi Hays?

  That's, that's better than the, than the AI overview of, of, of, uh.

• 19:46Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, yeah, I, I, I think the mission statement is probably underutilized as a, as a mechanism to, uh, increase your stock price because authenticity, authenticity is like a powerful thing.

• 19:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, overall, I, I, I think, um, you know, the, the, there's a lot of questions about like, what is MSL building? What is TBD labs? What is super intelligence? How does this all fit together? I don't think anyone doubts that Meta can benefit from just improved machine learning systems, improved AI features all over, all over the ecosystem, all over the family of apps, all over the core apps. The question is like, are any of the, are any of the side projects going to become monsters? Because you're kind of in the side project era now that you're 20 years old.

• 20:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's a good point. But yeah, good, you know, another shout out in, in the second quarter of 2022 reels was at a $1 billion run rate. And, uh, by the third quarter of 2022, a $3 billion run rate, second quarter of 23, 10 billion. And the third quarter of 2025, 50 billion. So the growth is absolutely incredible and, and, uh.

• 20:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, credit, credit to Meta's, you know, entire team for just ridiculous execution.

• 21:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. Google really crushed it. Google's parents says spending on AI development may reach 93 billion. They're higher than Meta's 72. Google parent companies, Google's parent company, reported a 16% surge in third quarter revenue with growth in its digital advertising and cloud computing units, helping to finance robust artificial intelligence spending. Sales reached a record 102.3 billion. Sundar was just like, uh.

• 21:35Jordi Hays?

  Is that good?

• 21:38John Coogan?

  There was, I mean, he, he almost posted like that. Like, the post is like, hey, we did our first 100 billion dollar quarter. Not, and it's completely

• 21:47Jordi Hays?

  Just posted Q3 earnings.

• 21:49John Coogan?

  insane that is. That's so, so massive. Shares rose 5% in after-hours trading. I think it's up a little bit more now. Net income was 35 billion, a 33% increase from the same period a year ago. Like other large tech companies, Google is pouring tens of billions of dollars into AI development. I mean, what a remarkable result. You know, there was so much, so much fun around

• 22:14Jordi Hays?

  Our friend, our friend Logan Kilpatrick, of course, works at Google, replies to Sundar and says, "Google is the most incredible business in the world."

• 22:23John Coogan?

  He just said that?

• 22:24Jordi Hays?

  He's replied to Sundar and said that. I, I, I have to, I have to agree. I have to agree with Logan.

• 22:32John Coogan?

  We are very proud to be sponsored with them, by, by, partnered with them, by the way. Google AI Studio. You can create an AI app, an AI-powered app faster than ever. You can get started. Gemini understands the capabilities you need and automatically wires up the right models and APIs for you. You can get started at ai.studio/build.

• 22:54Jordi Hays?

  And

• 22:54John Coogan?

  Talk about a domain name.

• 22:55Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, uh, this is, uh, I didn't ask Logan if this is cool, but if you run into any issues with, with, with Gemini, you can just DM Logan. He'll be your personal tech support. And if he doesn't respond quickly, DM me, then I'll DM him and say, hey.

• 23:11John Coogan?

  You know, you're famously a, you're famously a, a dot com respecter and a good domain respecter. Uh, Google has gotten to the level where they're buying whole TLDs. Are you familiar with this? Like docs dot new.

• 23:25Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 23:26John Coogan?

  I believe they own dot Google. And so if you go to, I think if you go to com dot Google, it resolves or something like that. I think they bought dot Google. Maybe I, maybe I don't get that right. WWW dot, I gotta look this up. But they, they, they've been on a tear. If you go to docs dot new, uh, you just get a new Google doc, which is cool.

• 23:52John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's, uh, let's move on to some timeline. Let's move on to some news. Tyler, what's new in your world?

• 23:59Speaker 02

  I mean, most of the big news, I guess, was the OpenAI IPO.

• 24:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. One trillion dollars and, and that's from Reuters, correct?

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Uh, yes.

• 24:10John Coogan?

  Do we know, like, was that just leaked to them? Or does, can you just call them? Should we call Reuters, hey, uh, TVPN? We think it might be worth a trillion. Uh, R E U T.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know where this was originally reported, but.

• 24:26John Coogan?

  OpenAI lays the groundwork for juggernaut IPO at up to a one trillion dollar valuation. Three people familiar with the matter said. So, uh, they got some reporting. They got a scoop. The company has looked at raising 60 billion at the low end and likely more. They cautioned that talks are early and plans, including figures and timing, could change depending on business growth and market conditions. CFO Sarah Fryer, who's been on the show, uh, has told some associates, the company is aiming for a 2027 listing. Boo, play the wah wah. Let's get it happening earlier. Uh, some advisors predicted could come even sooner around late 2026.

• 25:10John Coogan?

  I want this IPO to happen tomorrow. I think it'll be the most entertaining news item ever.

• 25:18John Coogan?

  To actually get to dig into an S1, to actually look at the financials. Like, there's been so many leaks, so many, so much speculation to actually get.

• 25:26Jordi Hays?

  We can do our first 24-hour show.

• 25:28John Coogan?

  We should, we should. I mean, realistically, we should be there in New York City the day of, talking to all these people, everyone involved, as they go out.

• 25:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so it says they're gonna, they're planning to file in the back half of 2026?

• 25:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, so it'll be a while. There's still a lot to do, a lot to build. I'm sure that they want visibility into what's the impact of Sora on the business, what's the impact?

• 25:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I saw, I saw another post that, that, that was, I don't think it's in the, in our stack, but it was something to the effect of like, you know, how, depending on where Meta's market cap is at the time of the OpenAI IPO will be like, potentially, like, like, it will be an interesting comp, because you're gonna be able to look at a business that's like, very, you know, at scale, like profitable, still growing very quickly, versus OpenAI, which we know will be losing, you know, tens of billions of dollars at the time of the IPO.

• 26:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:28Jordi Hays?

  And of course, we'll have an amazing growth story and a bunch of narrative and things like that, but we'll still be, the comps are gonna be absolutely wild if it, if it's landing in that one to, you know, one-plus-trillion-dollar range.

• 26:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let's go to some timelines. Suspended Cap says, "Makes no sense what the F Meta is spending all this money on. You've spent 70 billion on Reality Labs to make the Ray-Ban Vision? Are you serious?" And people are critical of Apple and their hardware efforts. Give me a break. And Investor Nick says, "Investors need to punish Zuck like they did in 2022." And Suspended Cap says, "He won't blink this time. This is too big. He's effed." I don't know. He does have one of the biggest cash machines in the entire world,

• 27:19John Coogan?

  in the entire history of business. There's a lot of cash and there's, it, it's worth remembering the debate between Eric Schmidt and Peter Thiel, where Peter Thiel sat down with Eric Schmidt, I believe at a Wired conference, maybe it was Forbes, and they debated what big tech companies should do with all the cash they're generating.

• 27:46John Coogan?

  Before we continue, before I finish this thought, let me tell you about Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design development teams build great products together. Get started for free.

• 27:54Jordi Hays?

  I believe you interrupted your own thought.

• 27:56John Coogan?

  And so, and so, I was listening to Sharp China with Bill Bishop last night and he, and he, his dog came in and he mentioned the Farmer's Dog, which is like the brand of dog food that he feeds the dog. And he was like, this isn't like TVP and we are doing 25 ads in the middle of the show. And I was like, you are doing ads. Anyway, um, yeah, the question was like, Google has all this money. Uh, why do they have this growing cash pile? Why can't they find something to do with it? And it's interesting, looking back on it now, because Google did wind up giving a lot of cash back. They, they weren't able to find a place to, they, they truly had too much cash to do. They like, they invested so much in Waymo and so much in DeepMind and

• 28:37John Coogan?

  so much in Google Cloud and, uh, and, and a ton of other projects. And at the same time, they still had money left over. And so they were still doing, I think, stock buybacks and dividends throughout that whole process. Uh, and so it was, it, it like, Teal was kind of proven right that Google was sort of out of ideas, or, or the big tech companies or the technology industry broadly was, was really out of, uh, ideas. Then of course, AI comes. Now we're sort of, you know, vindicated, hey, there is this new thing. We can invest. Let's, let's draw it out on the cash flow. Uh, people are skeptical about it, but at least it's happening. But the question is, is what is, I think, because he's definitely in the mode of like, I got this cash machine. Let me invest my cash flow in new data centers,

• 29:21John Coogan?

  in new AI training labs, in VR.

• 29:23Jordi Hays?

  Investors are right, are right to, to look at this and say, like, Meta Platforms is one of the greatest businesses of all time. And you have, and, and the CEO is a little crazy. Like he's a bit of a wild card. Like he has, like, obviously has an incredible-

• 29:37John Coogan?

  That's true for all of the big tech companies.

• 29:39Jordi Hays?

  No, I, I disagree. I think if you look at, I think if you look at Sundar, I think if you look at Satya, I think if you look at the, the guys that are running other-

• 29:46John Coogan?

  What about Bezos? I'm thinking Bezos because they had a cash machine with Amazon. What did he do? He didn't return a dime of capital and had, had gross, uh, net profits of like zero for a decade while he was building AWS.

• 29:59Jordi Hays?

  AWS. And the last time that, that Mark invested this heavily in something, it did not deliver ROI.

• 30:07John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 30:08Jordi Hays?

  And so I think people are just a little bit scared. That's why the stock's more volatile. That's why it traded down 10%.

• 30:14John Coogan?

  This is, this is fair.

• 30:15Jordi Hays?

  Google is up, uh, Google's up 10%.

• 30:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:20Jordi Hays?

  Microsoft traded down briefly after, after earnings, but, um, but ultimately I think you have, if you're, if you're investing in this company, you have to be, you have, you have the, the, the, the sort of protection, knowing that this is fundamentally just a fantastic business.

• 30:36John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 30:36Jordi Hays?

  And you can, you can pause, you know, they can sort of pause this like crazy spending at any point, but again, they

• 30:44John Coogan?

  Meta can.

• 30:45Jordi Hays?

  Meta can.

• 30:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:45Jordi Hays?

  But Meta hit the, hit a, they're, they're doing a, a bond offering that got announced this morning for $25 billion. And that's after they did another, um, they did another deal with Blue Owl for like something like $30 billion a couple of weeks ago. And so, uh, Zuck is levering up. He's going all in.

• 31:02John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 31:02Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, investors need to be tolerant of, of, of, uh, that risk. And there's plenty of people that are going to say, well, it's fine. I'd rather own, you know, Alphabet. I'd rather own Microsoft, et cetera.

• 31:16John Coogan?

  Buco Capital bloke is also, uh, seems like he's on your side here. He says, excited to buy Meta in the 500s. Uh, the stock of course is trading in the 600s. So he's joking that it will fall down.

• 31:29Jordi Hays?

  Currently at $666 a share.

• 31:32John Coogan?

  That's a, is that a good thing? Is that a good omen? Is that, is that a good symbolism?

• 31:37Jordi Hays?

  It's a devilish omen.

• 31:38John Coogan?

  It's rough. Uh, and, and Buco Capital says, oh, the only challenge will be having the courage to do it when it gets there. And he shares a pretty good visualization from Gemini of what's happening right now. Mark Zuckerberg is in some sort of convertible, driving off a cliff, wearing a VR headset with piles of cash.

• 31:58Jordi Hays?

  Wall Street in the back.

• 31:59John Coogan?

  Flying out the back of the car.

• 32:02Jordi Hays?

  I mean, to be honest, I think this makes him look really sick.

• 32:04John Coogan?

  It does. And this is exactly what I want out of a big tech CEO. I want risk. I want risk. And I, and I don't know. I, I feel like you're making a ton of good points. That I agree with this year.

• 32:17Jordi Hays?

  I'm not saying, to be clear, that I'm not riding with Zuck. I will always ride with Zuck.

• 32:22John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 32:22Jordi Hays?

  I'm just saying, I understand why people are like, you know what? I'm gonna, I'm not, I can't really stomach, you know, a drawdown. Some people are gonna just rotate into the other hyperscalers.

• 32:33John Coogan?

  I'm just trying, you know, Tyler, what do you think?

• 32:35Speaker 02

  Uh, I mean, I, people were calling for Sundar to be basically fired for like a long time.

• 32:39John Coogan?

  I know.

• 32:39Speaker 02

  Until like basically this year.

• 32:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:41Speaker 02

  So I, I feel like you're, you're exaggerating how much like Google has been like this like winner of the whole time.

• 32:47John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, I completely agree. This was my point about when they, when they rebranded to Alphabet. Like, everyone was like, you're not gonna cure cancer and create self-driving cars and also build AGI and build a cloud platform.

• 32:59Speaker 02

  And people were still saying Sundar like should not be CEO.

• 33:02John Coogan?

  For 10 years, for 10 years, yeah, people were saying like, it's not really working. And now, finally, people are like, okay, it actually worked. You have a diversified business. Congratulations.

• 33:10Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay, breaking news.

• 33:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 33:12Jordi Hays?

  This is gonna rock your world.

• 33:13John Coogan?

  No way.

• 33:14Jordi Hays?

  Taylor Sheridan and Peter Berg, team on Paramount and Activision's Call of Duty movie.

• 33:21John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 33:21Jordi Hays?

  Let's go. Hit the, hit the gong for that. The creators that made Yellowstone, Hell or High Water, and Lone Survivor, and Sicario.

• 33:31John Coogan?

  I'm so excited for the Call of Duty movie. You know, they should also make a Vanta movie. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. That's incredible. Uh, wait, so what, what, we need to get someone on the show who understands media. Because I, like, this all seems like it's happening very, very quickly.

• 34:00Jordi Hays?

  We understand neo-factual media, new media, corporate media, legacy, new legacy media.

• 34:07John Coogan?

  No, I don't understand.

• 34:08Jordi Hays?

  Neotrad media.

• 34:09John Coogan?

  The neo-conglomerate is entirely new to me. I don't understand what Ellison's doing. I don't understand what, uh, Taylor Sheridan is doing in reaction to it. It seems like this is a reaction. Basically, Taylor Sheridan left Ellison's new empire, left Paramount, and said, hey, I'm out and I'm going over to NBC Universal. I'm riding with the Comcasters. And, and, and now he's saying, I'm making a Call of Duty movie? Is this, is this, is this all tied to his, him leaving, uh, him leaving Ellison?

• 34:44John Coogan?

  Or is it something else? I don't know.

• 34:45Jordi Hays?

  This, I'm sure this was in the works for a while, for a while.

• 34:49John Coogan?

  Potentially. Was it? I don't know. There have been like a flurry of Taylor Sheridan, like little leaks and news items because it seems like he's in, he's in a negotiation with, uh, with David Ellison over, I mean, he was until he left, but he's still with, uh, he's still with Paramount, at least for, you know, a couple more, uh, months, maybe a couple more years. He still has projects in flight. You can't just like, you know, completely dip on your, on your production company. Um, but we really should get someone on the show to figure that out. Uh, let's go to more, uh, haters, more, you know, posters in the timeline, uh, from Jay Bultard.

• 35:28John Coogan?

  Uh, this AI stuff is so dumb. Zuck is repeating the 2022 sinking of a great money machine in Meta with wasteful spend. The Metaverse sucked and AI is nearly as dumb with all this capex as investors tell him they're sick of it.

• 35:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And part of, part of, part of, part of the, the, I think part of the blowback here is that the first AI product that Meta announced from their new team was Meta Vibes.

• 36:01John Coogan?

  Incredible.

• 36:02Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, I know you're, I know you've been putting in hours and hours a day on the Meta Vibes app, but that didn't send a strong, that does not inspire confidence, right? Because it was, they, if they had launched Sora, people would have been saying like, wow, they're absolutely cooking.

• 36:19John Coogan?

  And I think there's two audiences that the Meta Vibes app didn't hit with. One was, okay, the extremely online, technical teapot, whatever you want to call them. Those folks are like, well, this looks like white labeled mid journey because it kind of is. And the app just doesn't feel like super polished or like crazy, oh wow, I've never seen these like UI paradigms. So there's that. Uh, and then there's the, the, you know, the, the teapot critique of like infinite jest and slop and all this stuff. So like, they weren't hitting with like the insiders. But then simultaneously, it's not like you walk down the street and you were like, oh wow, like this is actually breaking through with just like everyday random people in the way that Threads has. And so. I don't know, maybe in a year we'll be like, oh, wow, they actually figured it out.

• 37:04John Coogan?

  They funneled a ton of people to Meta Vibes and it's as successful as Threads. That would be impressive.

• 37:10Jordi Hays?

  It would.

• 37:10John Coogan?

  It seems like a tall order.

• 37:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it won't be.

• 37:12John Coogan?

  It won't be.

• 37:13Jordi Hays?

  The, uh, but, but the, the thing about Sora.

• 37:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:16Jordi Hays?

  That stood out, and even though I'm not bullish on Sora as a media consumption platform. It, it had this innovative, super viral feature that was fresh and new. And so if I think, I think if Meta had launched that.

• 37:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:30Jordi Hays?

  Everyone would have been like, yep, like you spend the money.

• 37:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:34Jordi Hays?

  But when they launched Vibes.

• 37:35John Coogan?

  Frontier of the slop, like you're, you have the, you have the purest slop.

• 37:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it, and it, you know, Sora benefits Instagram weirdly because people are creating more content over there and it's driving engagement, but.

• 37:46John Coogan?

  And also just the Sora app, the actual app. The idea of cameos and putting those things together.

• 37:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:52John Coogan?

  And the way it was like, all the little details. Yeah, it was like, okay, this is unique and then like there's clearly a ton, like just doesn't feel.

• 38:00Jordi Hays?

  Did you see Cameos suing OpenAI, like Cameo, the, the celebrity video.

• 38:04John Coogan?

  Ah, that makes sense, yeah.

• 38:05Jordi Hays?

  By a celebrity video platform suing OpenAI over the feature, which I don't know, like.

• 38:09John Coogan?

  Do we talk feature or just the name?

• 38:10Jordi Hays?

  The naming, the naming, uh, the naming of the feature, which feels like, feels like a stretch to me.

• 38:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 38:16Jordi Hays?

  The other thing.

• 38:16John Coogan?

  It, it, the, the problem with, with brand names is if you create a name that is too descriptive of what you do, you can't, uh, you can't trademark it. So if, if, if we were to call this like the news show, we couldn't, we couldn't, uh, we couldn't have any intellectual property around that.

• 38:36Jordi Hays?

  Did you see this, this, uh, engineer said a couple of days ago, just submitted my resignation from Meta. Some might say that one year at the company is not that long, but I survived like three rounds of layoffs. So I think it's fair play for what it's worth. My team is great and it was an overall positive experience, but there are other better places to build AGI, which hopefully won't be used for stepmom chatbots and infinite slot machines.

• 38:59John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 38:59Jordi Hays?

  Scathing.

• 39:01John Coogan?

  I wonder what the play is. Do you think that's like grow your account so you can be a founder, launch something? Uh, the whole, I don't know, the, the slop, it doesn't seem, I don't know, it's tricky.

• 39:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:14John Coogan?

  Uh.

• 39:15Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 39:17Jordi Hays?

  Zuck is certainly, I don't think, gonna take his foot off the gas yet.

• 39:21John Coogan?

  No, no way.

• 39:21Jordi Hays?

  We'll have to get, the vibes will have to get about 10 times worse.

• 39:25John Coogan?

  There's new Reality Labs hardware shipping every year. Like, there was massive pushback and the stock like sold off by like 50%. It was like really, really rough for a while.

• 39:35Jordi Hays?

  Wasn't it, wasn't, didn't it trade down to something like, like?

• 39:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, like $300 a share or something.

• 39:41Jordi Hays?

  No, I think it was, I mean, so.

• 39:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, look at the, look at the five year chart in 20, at the bottom of 2022, it was $90 a share.

• 39:51Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 39:53John Coogan?

  Phew, rough. Uh, and, and it was up at 300. So it, it traded from, from almost 400 to 90, which is down 70%. Like, that is an insane drawdown. And then it just built right back up and was bigger than ever. Uh, and so, I don't know. I feel like people might be filling out apology forms for him at some point, even though it looks rough right now. Just something's gonna wind up clicking and also the core business is just gonna keep ripping. So you just get so many more shots on goal. It's just an endless, an endless, you know, stream of shots on goal when you have a cash machine like the family of apps.

• 40:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, also the stock's up 20% in the last six months, even, even, you know, factoring in this 10% drawdown.

• 40:42John Coogan?

  I don't know. I think, I think, uh, investing in AI is not the craziest thing you could do in 2025 as a hyperscaler CEO. Uh, anyway, uh, Polly Market has some OpenAI IPO market up already. Uh, so no IPO by December 31st, 2026 is already at 55%. Um, we will certainly be tracking this. Um, but if they do get out. The the market is pricing right now between one and 1.25 trillion in market cap, but 6% chance that it's up at 1.5 trillion, which would be crazy to go out at. Not technically the biggest IPO of all time. I believe that belongs to Saudi Aramco.

• 41:26John Coogan?

  So oil is still dominant relative to AI, but still would be one of the most insane tech IPOs in history, obviously.

• 41:36Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 41:37John Coogan?

  Quickly, before we move on, graphite.dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Did you want to watch this video?

• 41:47Jordi Hays?

  Toby yesterday responded.

• 41:49John Coogan?

  Wait, Luki?

• 41:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Toby, we we covered his post where he said, having some AI follow you into into your Zoom meetings or Google Meet for taking notes is the digital equivalent of showing up to a meeting with your fly down. I said, I never let them in. I just let them sit there in the waiting room. Oh, I forgot. Sorry. He responded and said, I'm actually very pro meeting recording and AI summarization, but I'm not OK with bots joining as fake humans to accomplish this. It's a meeting between you and me, not you and me and some startup's viral growth strategy. Granola is great. Gemini does this well in Google Meet. Hypernote is great and fully local, but use them with consent. My tweet is about how ridiculous and self-important it looks when you show up to a meeting with random bots as entourage. Yeah, I think.

• 42:34John Coogan?

  I I do remember seeing there's a viral screenshot of somebody who showed up. Is this the screenshot where somebody brought like five bots? It's hilarious. Entourage is actually kind of sick. Yeah, wait, Tyler, this would be a good hack project, like viral entourage on your on your calendar that when you join a meeting, it just joins with like 25 other people. And it's just like, it just takes your name and just automatically does like, you're chief of staff, you're head of security, you're PR person, you're secretary, you're driver, you're dietitian, you're, and it just joins every meeting with 20 different bots and just makes you look super important online.

• 43:20John Coogan?

  Maybe that'll happen. We should move on to this.

• 43:22Jordi Hays?

  Let's watch this video.

• 43:23John Coogan?

  Video of Jensen Huang.

• 43:25Jordi Hays?

  Oh, Jensen.

• 43:26John Coogan?

  Right?

• 43:26Jordi Hays?

  I was gonna go, I was gonna go for that, uh, the guy from, from Snowflake.

• 43:30John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, yeah, yeah. Uh, I mean, let's watch, the, the Jensen video is only seven seconds, so look at this. He's having beers with some absolute dogs. He's hanging out with the CEO of Samsung, the CEO of Hyundai, hanging out in South Korea, just having some beers, crushing some beers with the boys. This is how you do it. People will call it a top signal.

• 43:52Jordi Hays?

  I mean, this is gonna go so hard in a top signal vibe reel that we will definitely create.

• 43:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:59Jordi Hays?

  When the time is right.

• 44:00John Coogan?

  But, I mean,

• 44:01Jordi Hays?

  For now.

• 44:02John Coogan?

  There have been crazier top signals, and when Nvidia was at like, half the market cap it is at now, uh, Jensen was signing autographs. People were like,

• 44:11Jordi Hays?

  Wasn't he signing, signing a woman's shirt?

• 44:14John Coogan?

  Might have done that too. I don't know. But, it was a crazy moment, and everyone was like, this has gotta be it. So, I think Jensen is just consistently putting out crazy clips that read as top signals to confuse the market, keep you guessing.

• 44:30Jordi Hays?

  That's right, that's right. He's a doubt, doubt me again.

• 44:33John Coogan?

  He also says that Korea has the best fried chicken in the world, taking shots at Colonel Sanders. Rough out here for America.

• 44:41Speaker 03

  I don't know why Korea has the world's best fried chicken, but Korea has the world's best fried chicken.

• 44:47John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 44:48Speaker 03

  Best fried chicken in, in America is Korean.

• 44:51John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 44:52Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 44:53John Coogan?

  I have had Korean fried chicken. It is delicious. Something about the sauce is really, really good. Um, also, uh, Jensen Wong in, uh, South Korea says, are there any Nvidia investors here? Uh, the audience cheers, and he says, that's why Korea is rich, baby. Let's play this one. Play it loud.

• 45:13John Coogan?

  Did we get it?

• 45:14Speaker 03

  Any else Nvidia investors?

• 45:18Speaker 03

  That's why Korea is so rich.

• 45:23John Coogan?

  He's got bits. He's got bits.

• 45:26Jordi Hays?

  He's feeling good right now. I mean, on your five trillion day, I mean,

• 45:30John Coogan?

  I mean, come on.

• 45:30Jordi Hays?

  Let him have a little fun.

• 45:32John Coogan?

  What are you gonna do? Have some fun.

• 45:33Jordi Hays?

  Let him have a little fun, straight after GTC.

• 45:36John Coogan?

  It's so wild that they hit five trillion yesterday, particularly because they don't report earnings for another like two weeks. So like, basically, every other big tech company is on like, the October 28th, October 29th cycle. So, as of tonight, after Amazon and Apple report earnings, we have like, the book closed mostly on all the Mag7, except for Nvidia. But Nvidia's still in the news. And so Alphabet got crammed to the business section, Microsoft got crammed down to the business section, Meta made it to the front page of the Journal because they sold off. But Nvidia got the full chart of their progress,

• 46:20John Coogan?

  they got the Glazinator 3000, the A1, from the Wall Street Journal because they just hit five trillion. And they have this interesting chart of how many days it took Nvidia to create a trillion dollars in market cap. The first trillion took them 6,138 days. The second trillion, they did it in 180 days. The third trillion in 66 days. Then the fourth trillion was in 273 days. And then the fifth trillion in 78 days. So from 6,000 days, it took them 20 years to make that first trillion. They say that. The first trillion's the hardest.

• 46:58Jordi Hays?

  They do say that.

• 46:59John Coogan?

  But then the next one comes in just 66 days or 78 days, which is remarkable. So, he is on a tear, and congratulations to Jensen Huang and all the folks over at Nvidia for powering this AI revolution and absolutely crushing.

• 47:14Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this video of the Snowflake CRO doing a little street interview.

• 47:20Speaker 04

  Excuse me, sir. How old were you when you became a millionaire?

• 47:23Speaker 05

  Oh, this guy. Yes, sir.

• 47:25Jordi Hays?

  This guy.

• 47:25Speaker 05

  I've just been getting your Instagram feed.

• 47:27Speaker 04

  How old were you when you became a millionaire?

• 47:28Speaker 05

  Oh, boy. Four years ago?

• 47:30Jordi Hays?

  Okay, pause, pause.

• 47:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, wait, so who is this guy again? He's the, he's the, the CRO of, of Snowflake. Which like, Snowflake's been like a hundred billion dollar company for a while, right? Snowflake market cap. I thought it went out like years ago. I mean, maybe he wasn't liquid. It's ninety-one billion dollar market cap company. And it's down too. Like, it was trading higher.

• 47:58Jordi Hays?

  So, there's, this was the line that people were most confused about. Because I don't, I don't wanna, I don't wanna like, try to guess this guy's age too, too, uh, you know, I, I won't pretend to know exactly. But I, I assume he's in his forties, maybe his fifties.

• 48:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:17Jordi Hays?

  He was at VMware for ten years as the Vice President of, uh, US Enterprise Sales. And then the Senior Vice President, General Manager of Americas.

• 48:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:28Jordi Hays?

  And so, uh, and he was also the President of Broadcom for, from November of twenty twenty-three till now.

• 48:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, it seems like an absolute dog.

• 48:38Jordi Hays?

  And became the CRO at Snowflake, uh, this year. But still, uh, everyone I think is shocked of like, uh, how, how he didn't, you know, possibly pull together a million.

• 48:50John Coogan?

  A million dollars.

• 48:50Jordi Hays?

  A million dollars by somewhere.

• 48:52John Coogan?

  Twenty-five years in enterprise technology. That's what it says. Twenty-five years. Like, what is he spending his money on? He must be just like obsessed with buying depreciating cars.

• 49:02Jordi Hays?

  That could be it.

• 49:03John Coogan?

  Maybe he gets a new Bentley Continental GT every year like clockwork. Maybe he's the one that's buying all the Lamborghini Uruses.

• 49:11Jordi Hays?

  Maybe he's buying multiple. Maybe he doesn't like to drive the same car twice.

• 49:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, that must be it.

• 49:16Jordi Hays?

  Maybe he gets a fresh car.

• 49:17John Coogan?

  That must be it.

• 49:18Jordi Hays?

  I don't like to drive cars with more than twenty miles on the odometer.

• 49:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:22Jordi Hays?

  So I'm just gonna cycle it out. I'll take the lot.

• 49:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:25Jordi Hays?

  Every twenty miles.

• 49:25John Coogan?

  They say once you drive it off the lot, you lose half the value. Well, it's, it's the price I'm willing to pay.

• 49:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:31John Coogan?

  Cause I gotta keep my net worth under, I gotta keep it in six figs.

• 49:34Jordi Hays?

  To inspire, it clearly it worked. It clearly inspired him to grind harder. He's the CRO at Snowflake.

• 49:40John Coogan?

  It's incredible. Um, no, this must be, this must be some sort of, he, he misspoke. Uh, because. That uh.

• 49:47Jordi Hays?

  Okay, let's let's play the play the rest of it.

• 49:49John Coogan?

  This does not make sense.

• 49:50Speaker 04

  What are you doing tech?

• 49:51Speaker 05

  Uh, CRO for Snowflake.

• 49:53Speaker 04

  Did you guys just go public?

• 49:54Speaker 05

  Uh, we went public five years ago during covid, couldn't ring the bell. So this is our.

• 49:58Speaker 04

  Do you recommend entrepreneurs take their company public because there's a risk there as well? When you bring in all that capital, you bring in voting shares? What do you think about going public as a?

• 50:04Jordi Hays?

  Such a funny question.

• 50:05Speaker 04

  I have to snag him. I'm so sorry. I promise we got 17 million followers. This is the best marketing he could do. I know. All right, just keep it rolling. Hey, we're keeping this shit rolling, man. Sir, real quick, could I finish real quick with you real quick for one minute?

• 50:16Speaker 05

  We'll do 30 seconds.

• 50:17Speaker 04

  30 seconds is cool. All right. What do you think?

• 50:18John Coogan?

  He does not do 30 seconds. He definitely does another like five minutes based on the edit.

• 50:23Speaker 05

  Cash flow is everything until profitability comes. Then you get S and P 500 and you get a whole different kind of return on investment.

• 50:27John Coogan?

  What does that mean too?

• 50:29Speaker 04

  Have you always been in the tech?

• 50:30Speaker 05

  Always my entire career.

• 50:31John Coogan?

  Do I not understand that?

• 50:32Speaker 04

  What did you guys do revenue this last year?

• 50:34Speaker 05

  So we're gonna exit this year probably just over about four and a half billion.

• 50:36John Coogan?

  Let's go disclosure. That's disclosure that he's not supposed to make.

• 50:41Speaker 05

  Keep track of us. Keep to know.

• 50:42John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 50:43Speaker 04

  Do you have some good equity in the company?

• 50:44Speaker 05

  Uh, we're doing okay.

• 50:45Speaker 04

  We're doing okay. As somebody who's an executive at a billion dollar company.

• 50:48Speaker 05

  You're awesome, by the way. I watch you all the time. Congratulations on all your success.

• 50:51John Coogan?

  This is amazing.

• 50:52Speaker 04

  The best financial advice you can give to the younger generation, best money advice you can give.

• 50:55Jordi Hays?

  This guy, this guy shouldn't be giving.

• 50:59John Coogan?

  He's like, uh, step one.

• 51:00Speaker 05

  You can save your way to being financially secure in the future. You've got to build up wealth. Don't worry about W2s. W2 is not necessary. WT maybe you'll have to pay.

• 51:08John Coogan?

  Took me 30 years to build that.

• 51:10Speaker 04

  Next five to 12 years, what do you see in the future?

• 51:11John Coogan?

  Million dollar savings.

• 51:12Jordi Hays?

  This is crazy.

• 51:14Speaker 05

  It's tough to predict, my friend, in this world.

• 51:15John Coogan?

  This is actually hilarious.

• 51:16Speaker 05

  12 to 18 months. That's all you got.

• 51:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. Okay. Can you give me the next 12 months? What's the number one thing people need to be adopting in their business right now?

• 51:22Speaker 05

  Uh, they're gonna be using AI.

• 51:23John Coogan?

  He's still going, 30 seconds, 30 seconds.

• 51:25Speaker 05

  Accelerate revenue. It's all about moving fast.

• 51:27Speaker 04

  Do you think if business owners aren't leveraging AI, they're gonna be left behind?

• 51:30Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 51:30Speaker 04

  Why?

• 51:31Speaker 05

  It's like the internet. If you're not on the internet, wave your dead.

• 51:33Speaker 04

  It's gonna replace Uber drivers.

• 51:34Speaker 05

  Potentially could. Self-driving. It's gonna change the world.

• 51:37John Coogan?

  It's so funny.

• 51:39Jordi Hays?

  Oh. Wild, wild interview.

• 51:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. So they had to file an emergency 8K disavowing unauthorized statements. Uh, the projection exceeded the official guidance by a hundred million dollars. So, uh, they, they, they said that they were projecting 4.4 billion. He rounded up to 4.5 and, uh, that's a no-no. So he got himself in trouble. Stay safe out there.

• 52:06Jordi Hays?

  I just don't understand how he has on his, on his LinkedIn, he has president at Broadcom full time. Since November of 2023, he's not listed on the Broadcom. Website.

• 52:18John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 52:19Jordi Hays?

  But, uh.

• 52:20John Coogan?

  It is one of the funniest.

• 52:22Jordi Hays?

  Maybe he's kind of like Soham Pareek style moonlighting over there.

• 52:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. Who knows? Uh, we have the founder of, uh, founder, CEO of Whatnot coming in the studio today. Is that correct?

• 52:32Jordi Hays?

  In about 20 minutes.

• 52:33John Coogan?

  About 20 minutes. We have Grant. We're very excited. Uh, people have been debating whatnot because it sort of came out of nowhere as this, uh, Dacacorn e-commerce company. Uh, Chris Pike, former friend, uh, former guest on the show, uh, is, is taking shots on the timeline, putting the timeline in turmoil, calling it unregulated gambling. Well, we're going to get to the bottom of it. Uh, is it gambling? Is it not? He says, he feels like someone needs to write a deep dive on this, but, uh, we will dig in. I'm not exactly sure, but we'll, we'll, we'll try and understand the business, how they make money, how it all works.

• 53:09Jordi Hays?

  He's buying groceries gambling? Sometimes you go buy a watermelon. You're like, I don't know.

• 53:14John Coogan?

  That's actually true.

• 53:15Jordi Hays?

  It looks pretty good.

• 53:16John Coogan?

  You can't crack it open.

• 53:17Jordi Hays?

  But if I, once I cut it open, once I get home and cut it open, it might not be the best watermelon, but it looked good. You're trying to knock on it, you know, you're trying to feel out the kind of the vibes of the watermelon.

• 53:26John Coogan?

  You do that with pumpkins right now around Halloween.

• 53:28Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 53:28John Coogan?

  Halloween's coming up. People are gambling on pumpkins. It's going to be rotten inside. You gotta play the game.

• 53:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:33John Coogan?

  Play the game on the field.

• 53:34Jordi Hays?

  Um, we, uh, Drove over on X, uh, released a video. I guess he says, Amazon will sue me for leaking this. He says, worth it. Uh, new, new.

• 53:44John Coogan?

  This is so funny. Putting the tiny Amazon package in the missile launcher that just flies in and I love it. It just demolishes the door. It just completely destroys the door. Like the door just gets like broken into a million pieces.

• 54:02Jordi Hays?

  And this is innovative because how everyone's experiences, right? Even though Amazon gets it right to your front door, it'd still be kind of mildly annoying.

• 54:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:11Jordi Hays?

  To have to go out and carry boxes in.

• 54:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 54:13Jordi Hays?

  First world problem.

• 54:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:15Jordi Hays?

  But this solves that.

• 54:16John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 54:16Jordi Hays?

  Yes, you need to replace the door once a day, but.

• 54:20John Coogan?

  So people were taking shots at, at DoorDash with the new DoorDash robot. Will it get into your door? Well, here's your answer. Maybe, maybe it needs a missile launcher on it. I also love that this video, it, it looks like it's, it's in part a real video. Like those first frames with the human hand, that looks like they actually built the missile. And then they switch over to just a 3D render. And so there's like, maybe no AI here, but still some CGI. It's, uh, it's very, very hilarious.

• 54:48John Coogan?

  Uh, so funny.

• 54:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh, should we move into some of the more Neo, Neo reactions?

• 54:52John Coogan?

  Of course, yeah. But first, let me tell you about Julius. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data, get expert level, level insights in seconds. Julius.ai.

• 55:03John Coogan?

  Yes, me, after loading the dishwasher, instead of paying a robot $20,000 to do it for me, and it's Trump holding a ton of cash. Very, very funny. Also, people are planning to drip them out with gold chains or silver chains, and I think a fade on here too.

• 55:22Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 55:24John Coogan?

  I mean, underrated, the idea that if you get the 1X robot, I wonder how much you'll actually be able to dress it. Because at a certain point, you, like, you can't put a body kit, a crazy body kit on a Tesla, because you'll just block the cameras and eventually you'll, you won't have self-driving. And I wonder-

• 55:42Jordi Hays?

  I'm putting Chrome Hearts all over my knee.

• 55:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're going to? I think that, but I think it's gonna trip and it's gonna shatter-

• 55:49Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. One t-shirt?

• 55:51John Coogan?

  One t-shirt? I don't know. You get a baggy t-shirt in there-

• 55:54Jordi Hays?

  If it can't handle one, one baggy tee. If it can't handle-

• 55:57John Coogan?

  It's just, you're gonna have to pay for two Chrome Hearts t-shirts. Cause you have to, you have to send one to the teleoperator. Because the teleoperator doesn't feel the exact weight of the Chrome Hearts t-shirt.

• 56:07Jordi Hays?

  They need to make, immediately make an account dripped out Neos, and it's just a daily feed of-

• 56:12John Coogan?

  The vibes around this company are just great. It's such a moonshot, and it's like, and it's, it's so capital intensive, it's so difficult. But, uh, but I think everyone's having fun with it. Uh, MKBFC actually dropped a whole video.

• 56:23Jordi Hays?

  Rob, uh, we gotta pull up this video. Rob, uh, Rob, uh, fruit. He says 20K to simulate the experience of a roommate with a ketamine problem.

• 56:30John Coogan?

  It's ridiculous.

• 56:33Jordi Hays?

  No, this is what we were saying, that, the, uh, we were saying on the show yesterday. It's like, hey, uh, Neo, uh, you know, clean up all those wine glasses. And it's just like-

• 56:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, just smashing everything. I mean, it's gonna be crazy.

• 56:45Jordi Hays?

  Neo, get ready to be good at cleaning up glass.

• 56:48John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 56:48Jordi Hays?

  That is, that's really the final challenge for humanoids.

• 56:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:52Jordi Hays?

  Cleaning up glass, one of the greatest challenges for humans.

• 56:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:55Jordi Hays?

  Uh, cleaning up glass.

• 56:56John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, it's a mess.

• 56:57Jordi Hays?

  Like, uh, it's an adventure every time. It's a high stakes game.

• 57:01John Coogan?

  I mean, the, the, uh, like, some of the anecdotes from this robot are gonna be hilarious. There's gonna be wild stuff. Um, well, if you're looking for a robot to generate some media for you, head over to Fall, the generative media platform for developers, the, the world's best generative image, video and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters.

• 57:25Jordi Hays?

  Uh, another post here with Neo with, he's got the Glock out. Now tell me where the seed phrase is. Gotta make sure that the, just another reason why they put the experts locally.

• 57:37John Coogan?

  You definitely have to arm them. This is important.

• 57:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, should, should. Humanoids be able to open carry?

• 57:44John Coogan?

  There's a whole Corridor Crew video about this that went super viral, Boston Dynamics Dynamics. They made a whole series out of it, all CGI, but they took, uh, renders of real Boston Dynamics robots and put them in like shooting ranges and this whole environment. They tell this whole story. And it just goes viral constantly and people think it's real, even though it's CGI.

• 58:04Jordi Hays?

  What were you saying about MKBH?

• 58:06John Coogan?

  Oh, MKBHD put out a video about Neo 1X and, and he's, he's beating the drum of like, this is tell operation, it doesn't count. And he's like, he's going pretty hard on them. He gives us some caveats and he says, you know, hey, I wish, uh, I hope, uh, this does work out. But some other people were kind of, uh, levying the critique, uh, on him that he's not in the arena, not trying to build things. Um, but I mean, at the same time, we talked about this yesterday. I think MKBHD really has seen a number of these consumer. Yeah, and, and.

• 58:38Jordi Hays?

  He's been burned on, on.

• 58:40John Coogan?

  He's been burned on a couple of things.

• 58:41Jordi Hays?

  Um, you know, multi hundred dollar devices that should be a lot easier to deliver a great customer experience. And so I think it's fair for him to be concerned.

• 58:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:50Jordi Hays?

  About a $20,000 product that would probably, like, I, I, I'm, every day I'm more bullish on 1X.

• 59:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:02Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think, uh, They're, they have a great understanding of the internet.

• 59:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:08Jordi Hays?

  They're folk, they've been focused on like a specific use case, the home for a while.

• 59:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:12Jordi Hays?

  They're focused on teleoperation, which is the right thing to be focused on.

• 59:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:16Jordi Hays?

  Because even if it's only as good at teleoperation forever.

• 59:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:19Jordi Hays?

  That still could be valuable.

• 59:23John Coogan?

  I'm bullish as a futurist.

• 59:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 59:25John Coogan?

  Not as a consumer advocate, consumer reports guy.

• 59:28Jordi Hays?

  And I think that everybody should be going into this with the understanding that you are going to be participating in trying to pull the future.

• 59:35John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 59:36Jordi Hays?

  Forward.

• 59:36John Coogan?

  I agree. Yeah, yeah. It, it, it seems like, I don't, I, I don't know if they're calling it a beta, but it feels like you should go into it, uh, assuming it's a beta. What are you laughing at? Didn't you have a joke? Did you ever post your joke? At least tell your joke on the, on the stream if you didn't post.

• 59:49Jordi Hays?

  I'll tell my joke.

• 59:50John Coogan?

  Tell your joke.

• 59:51Jordi Hays?

  A woman shoots her one X Neo, then holds him underwater for five minutes. Next she hangs him right after they enjoy a lovely dinner. How can this be?

• 1:00:02John Coogan?

  The, what was, uh, what was John posting about that before?

• 1:00:05Jordi Hays?

  The woman, John, John Palmer, this was inspired by John Palmer's post last week of like the AI agent being like, this is not my son.

• 1:00:12John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. A, a, a, a father and son create an AI agent company that gets to $20 million. They go to San Francisco.

• 1:00:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was a father and a son, a father and son build an AI agent. The father tweets that they have 10 million ARR and the son has rushed to San Francisco to pitch the seed round. At the pitch, the VC looks at the boy and says, I can't this, I can't fund this boy. He is my son.

• 1:00:37Jordi Hays?

  And so the answer, of course, to my riddle, a woman shoots her one X Neo, then holds him underwater for five minutes. Next she hangs him right after they enjoy a lovely dinner. The answer to the riddle is of course.

• 1:00:47John Coogan?

  Turbo puffer, search every byte.

• 1:00:49Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:00:49John Coogan?

  Serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, extremely scalable.

• 1:00:55Jordi Hays?

  Major cliffhanger. No, she killed the robot, but is hanging out with the operator.

• 1:00:59John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. At, at first at my re-audity, I mean, my re-audity was just like, it's ridiculous and it's a play on that whole, uh, like riddle that, uh, confuses LLMs generally. I mean, there's some very funny examples of those. It's the strawberry thing all over the, all over again. Uh, it's just very easy to confuse these things.

• 1:01:18Jordi Hays?

  PE, PE Cooper over on X, uh, went incredibly viral, 25,000 likes on half a million views saying, my Neo robot after I learned the third world are piloting them is mad chill.

• 1:01:32John Coogan?

  It's not gonna be a third worlder, remember?

• 1:01:34Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be an American teleoperated robot.

• 1:01:38John Coogan?

  What is this Will Manitis post? He posted this Neo robot in this like, in this image, and I understand it's photoshopped in there, but I don't understand why it went so viral. People really like it. What is this a reference to?

• 1:01:52Jordi Hays?

  It's some, I mean, if you scroll down, Brandon Jacoby's posting.

• 1:01:56John Coogan?

  You think it's this? You think it's that they don't know? But it's such a real image.

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  Have you seen the original image?

• 1:02:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, is it like a frat, a frat guy?

• 1:02:05John Coogan?

  What is the original?

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it's like a guy who's staying there and he like, I don't, he just like, I don't know how to describe it. He's like, looks all rundown and everyone's like looking at him funny.

• 1:02:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  I, I, I think the, the, it, it's kind of just like the Ghibli thing where it's like, oh, that's an image I recognize.

• 1:02:19John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, for some reason I don't, I, I don't understand this image. Pro, I just don't look at that many photos of people drinking on porches, I suppose. But, you know, to each their own. I guess what is in to that?

• 1:02:35Jordi Hays?

  Dev had an absolute banger. Wait till you find that MF 20K clanker in your kitchen acting too friendly.

• 1:02:43John Coogan?

  Ridiculous.

• 1:02:44Jordi Hays?

  And I guess you, you followed him after this post and he says, damn, after so long.

• 1:02:49John Coogan?

  Oh, that's funny. I got caught following it, but I did like this post and I was like, I gotta follow this, there's a Dev.

• 1:02:57John Coogan?

  I don't know, wait, after so long, you, you don't, you're not that big of an account. I feel like I'm not that behind. I don't know. I'm glad I found your account though, Dev. You're very entertaining.

• 1:03:06Jordi Hays?

  You guys found each other. It's very sweet.

• 1:03:08John Coogan?

  Oh, Jordy already following, okay. It's me, you, David Holes. For the followers I know, and Jaya Seed, very funny. And I like that Dev replied, replied to the post, banger. Just giving yourself a pat on the back is fantastic.

• 1:03:24Jordi Hays?

  Okay, Eric Katana has a less, less, not so PC post in here. Is it gay to have sex with a female robot teleoperated by a man?

• 1:03:34John Coogan?

  Elon Musk comes in with a crying emoji.

• 1:03:37Jordi Hays?

  Crying emoji.

• 1:03:39John Coogan?

  I don't know. We'll leave that to the philosophers, I suppose. We'll need a whole new branch of philosophy.

• 1:03:44Jordi Hays?

  Eric Katana, Eric Katana replied and said, Elon, what, what did you mean by this? Which is Optimus's new hand upgrade includes 22 degrees of freedom. What does it mean? Anyways.

• 1:03:55John Coogan?

  Uh, did this, uh, did this Tane post get deleted? I don't know where this one went. I'm, I don't know.

• 1:04:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, let's, we, let's move over to some bub talk. We have a post here from USV with a clip from the legend Fred Wilson.

• 1:04:11John Coogan?

  Well, we pulled that up. Let me tell you about profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat G V T. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands.

• 1:04:21John Coogan?

  Let's play the clip from Fred Wilson.

• 1:04:23Speaker 06

  The thing about bubbles is that there's just two things I think that people need to remember about bubbles. First of all, bubbles provide the financing for new revolutions. Like that book you described.

• 1:04:36John Coogan?

  I love revolutions.

• 1:04:37Speaker 06

  And they provided at inflated valuations. So people can, I mean, look at what OpenAI and Anthropic and others are doing. They're raising money at astronomical valuations and then throwing all of that money building.

• 1:04:50John Coogan?

  We gotta get Fred Wilson in the shop. What a legend.

• 1:04:52Speaker 06

  We can say they're overdoing it, you know, this reminds us of the telecom overbuild of the late nineties, whatever. But the net result of it will be, there will be advances that would not have been possible without that investment mania. So that's one thing to remember about bubbles. The second thing to remember about bubbles is after the crash, there's, there's a renewal. And so if you can just ride out the crash and then stick with it, things will be even better afterwards. So, well, so the thing about bubbles is that there's just two things I think.

• 1:05:24Jordi Hays?

  Basically just survive.

• 1:05:26John Coogan?

  Survive. Get in the winners, ride in the winners.

• 1:05:29Jordi Hays?

  Invest in the companies that are durable and generation, multi-generational.

• 1:05:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:35Jordi Hays?

  Skip the others.

• 1:05:36John Coogan?

  Skill issue, skill issue. Just, just, just don't make mistakes. Just don't make mistakes. Uh, use Google AI Studio, the fastest way from prompt to production with Gemini. Create an AI powered app faster than ever. That's the second time I did that, but.

• 1:05:54John Coogan?

  Sometimes we skip around.

• 1:05:55Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Dean Ball, uh, says, my sense is that selling Blackwell chips to China would quite possibly be the most unpopular tech policy move of the Trump admin, especially on Capitol Hill. It's plausible that the long-term, really even near-term result will be much more compute regulation.

• 1:06:12John Coogan?

  I like this guy, Dean Ball. Tyler, do you know Ball?

• 1:06:17Jordi Hays?

  I think you've already made this joke. Yeah.

• 1:06:19John Coogan?

  But, but have you, have you gone down the ball rabbit hole?

• 1:06:23Jordi Hays?

  Uh, not, I've read some of his, his longer posts.

• 1:06:26John Coogan?

  He's coming on the show tomorrow.

• 1:06:29Jordi Hays?

  Pretty spooky day to come on the show.

• 1:06:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is.

• 1:06:32Jordi Hays?

  That'll be an interesting.

• 1:06:33John Coogan?

  Be very fun.

• 1:06:33Jordi Hays?

  Interview.

• 1:06:34John Coogan?

  Um, yeah, I, I feel like the, uh, wait, didn't, uh, Trump went to China just yesterday, right? Uh, or, or where did he actually meet Xi Jinping?

• 1:06:43Jordi Hays?

  Trump's not going to China.

• 1:06:45John Coogan?

  No, no, no, but he, but he met with Xi Jinping and immediately let up.

• 1:06:48Jordi Hays?

  South Korea.

• 1:06:49John Coogan?

  Oh, South Korea? Okay. Oh, Jensen's there too. Uh, that's fun. Um, I, I have no idea anymore. I, I feel like if you were, if you were, if you were anti-selling GPUs to China on the basis of AI doom, you have to update towards it's actually kind of chill to sell them to China, right? Like, debate this with me.

• 1:07:14Jordi Hays?

  Wait, if you're a doomer.

• 1:07:16John Coogan?

  The reason, the, one of the reasons people said, let's not sell GPUs to China was if they get GPUs, they will get super intelligence, they will steamroll us, they will be all powerful. And super intelligence will be communist, it will be state capitalist, it will be not loving free speech. It'll be all the things that are un-American and we don't like. Then the last couple of years have happened and played out and it feels like the fast takeoff scenario feels uh, less likely. And so, uh, that should update you to be like a little bit less worried about it now.

• 1:07:55Jordi Hays?

  Um, maybe, I mean.

• 1:07:57John Coogan?

  About selling to China because it's not nuclear weapons. It's not the Manhattan Project. It's.

• 1:08:05Jordi Hays?

  It's nuclear slop.

• 1:08:07John Coogan?

  It's slop. It's erotica. It's, but it's also great knowledge retrieval, really cool image generation, really cool audio generation. Summaries, like it is definitely a great productivity tool, but it's not going to be, okay, they have it, they got the GPUs, they got, you know, a GPT five level model and now. America just loses like and China is just dominant, right?

• 1:08:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the Leopold take is that it's still like, I don't think in his scenario, like the labs haven't even been nationalized yet and used like, I don't think the capabilities right now merit the nationalization.

• 1:08:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  But I think a lot of people still think that like, it's like, you know, two more years, then we'll be at a point where like, it would make sense for there to be like major geopolitical conflict just over the AI question. So I don't think it's like, the people who were super like bullish on that idea, I think are still, I don't think they've been fully like disproven yet.

• 1:09:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. It seems like, well, I mean, we'll have to talk to more people about like how that's shaping up because there's also the weird dynamic of like, even if we wanted to sell Blackwell to China, would they even buy it? Because they seem very interested in their own supply chain.

• 1:09:26Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think they can do both, you know? They can buy Blackwells today and they can still.

• 1:09:31John Coogan?

  I don't know. I mean, the more you buy, the less incentive you have to build locally. Like, that's just true. Like, we buy solar panels here, there are no good solar panel companies, or I don't know, there aren't, there probably some, but like, America has been like, yeah, we're buying them so cheaply. Like, how do you get a company off the ground in a market that's just getting destroyed? We ran this example with GoPro. Like, America had a company there and got steamrolled. And so it's like, you need to be over investing like crazy and America just doesn't have the appetite for that.

• 1:10:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I'm just saying China has the appetite to have a, you know, entire industry, you know, backstopped and, you know, money losing for a sustained period of time.

• 1:10:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:18Jordi Hays?

  Couple more posts before we bring in Grant. Uh, ZeroHash, uh, we talked about this briefly yesterday. Mastercard is set to acquire crypto startup ZeroHash for nearly $2 billion. Imran Khan over at Alliance says ZeroHash powers most crypto to fiat on off ramps, holding money transmitter licenses and MSB licenses across the US. Most on-ramps you use today likely run through ZeroHash. This is a pretty big deal. So Mastercard getting into the game. In other news, Kimball Musk says, please vote your Tesla stock. There is no one remotely close to my brother and no CEO on earth that would accept this package. It is a massive

• 1:10:59Jordi Hays?

  win for you as a shareholder every way you look at it. Elon says, thanks, bro. These are the original technology brothers.

• 1:11:08John Coogan?

  What is, oh, true. What does he mean by no CEO on earth that would accept this package?

• 1:11:15Jordi Hays?

  I can give some more context. So Gavin Baker says, my firm, Atreides Management, will be voting in favor of Elon's performance-based compensation package. I would prefer that every company I invest in have a comparable plan.

• 1:11:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:11:25Jordi Hays?

  I believe shareholders should generally support thoughtfully structured, performance-based CEO compensation packages because they incentivize CEOs to create transformational growth and value. The basic logic of these plans is the CEO gets 10% of the incremental value creation if they 10x the stock with a 2x hurdle. So shareholders get a 900% stock increase and the CEO gets an incremental 10%. The first Tesla plan incented Elon to 10x the value of Tesla. He achieved all the milestones and may never be paid for this. The Axon plan incented Rick Smith to greater than 5x the value of Axon, and he did. And when milestones aren't met, such as farfetched, then the CEOs don't receive the payouts. The new Tesla plan is arguably better than the first as it also includes financial and technological milestones in addition to market cap-based

• 1:12:09Jordi Hays?

  incentives. And again, so Atreides is riding with the brothers.

• 1:12:16John Coogan?

  Yes, but what do you, what do you think Kimball means by saying, no CEO on earth would accept this package? Like I understand that I completely agree with the first part. There is no one remotely close to Elon for Tesla. Like, I'm totally in on that. I'm in on the idea of incentive packages. I like that as a structure.

• 1:12:37Jordi Hays?

  Targets are so aggressive that most CEOs don't think they would achieve them.

• 1:12:41John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, they'd be like, no, pay me.

• 1:12:45Jordi Hays?

  How about, how about I do it? How about, yeah, how about I get?

• 1:12:48John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:12:48Jordi Hays?

  Just compounded 10% a year.

• 1:12:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, if I go to the CEO of Target or something and say, like, okay, you won't make a dime unless you 10x the stock. They're gonna be like, what are you talking about? No way. Uh, yeah, that makes sense. Thank you. Well, uh, let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Let's start building. Um, let's go to Cheng Lu. Uh, have you heard this, uh, Scott Forstall stands? Uh, there's a lot of Scott Forstall stands out there. He was the Senior Vice President, iPhone Software.

• 1:13:28John Coogan?

  13 years ago, he was apparently fired from Apple after the disastrous launch of Apple Maps. What mapping app do you use on your phone?

• 1:13:40Jordi Hays?

  I am an Apple Maps guy.

• 1:13:44John Coogan?

  Me too. I use Apple Maps as well.

• 1:13:46Jordi Hays?

  I've been because I used to be. I switched to Apple Maps, but only like a year ago.

• 1:13:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:51Jordi Hays?

  Then I was on Google Maps.

• 1:13:52John Coogan?

  I was on Waze and Waze was incredible because you'd find all these like secret behind the scenes ways. And then I think a lot of local neighborhoods basically said like, hey, we, we actually live on a, uh, on a nice, quiet street. We don't want Waze funneling a thousand cars through our neighborhood during rush hour. So can you route around us? And it kind of put everyone back on the normal routes and.

• 1:14:16Jordi Hays?

  I just always liked that you could see the maps on your home screen without unlocking your phone.

• 1:14:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:14:20Jordi Hays?

  And that was enough for me.

• 1:14:21John Coogan?

  I agree. I agree.

• 1:14:22Jordi Hays?

  I would stuck with it, even though sometimes it would take you on a little bit of a goose chase.

• 1:14:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, Waze is.

• 1:14:28Jordi Hays?

  But I also, I was never a fan of the goose chase. I'm like, I don't, I don't want to.

• 1:14:33John Coogan?

  You're anti goose chase?

• 1:14:34Jordi Hays?

  Like in the Waze context.

• 1:14:35John Coogan?

  Oh, I love a Waze goose chase.

• 1:14:37Jordi Hays?

  I don't want to go on a street race through a bunch of 25 mile an hour.

• 1:14:41John Coogan?

  No, the best is when you're on Waze. I agree with you, but the best is when you're using Waze and it's like, hey, you're on the freeway. But why don't you get off and get back on the freeway seven times over the next six miles? So you can save 45 seconds. It's like, Waze, I don't want to do that. At one point, Waze, so.

• 1:14:59Jordi Hays?

  You really, they really should have a slide, like an aggression slider.

• 1:15:03John Coogan?

  They basically do. So if you go into the Waze settings, there's one where it's like, okay, avoid, avoid toll roads. It's like, I understand that. It's like, if I'm driving across the town and I don't want to pay five bucks, like, I want to save money. Yeah, avoid toll roads. Then one was like, avoid freeways. And I don't know. I guess it's like, maybe if you get motion sick or something, you don't want to be on freeways.

• 1:15:20Jordi Hays?

  I met, I met, I met someone recently that, that doesn't drive, they didn't grow up in LA.

• 1:15:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:25Jordi Hays?

  They moved here and they just avoid all freeways. They only take, uh, street law.

• 1:15:29John Coogan?

  I mean, the self-driving cars often, uh, avoid, uh, avoid freeways because higher speed accidents are more risky. But so for a while, I don't know if this was actually in Waze, but there, there was a moment where you could go in and check, I want to avoid toll roads. Two was, I want to avoid freeways. And three was, I want to avoid dirt roads, which was hilarious because I can just imagine driving through Los Angeles. And all of a sudden, it's like, yeah, if you cut across this person's front lawn, you can save 30 seconds.

• 1:16:00John Coogan?

  And so, I don't know. Hot, hot take is that Scott Forstall, like Apple Maps was this kind of disastrous launch where it, it really didn't work. As well, anywhere near, uh, Google Maps, but eventually they turned it around and Apple Maps became a really great product for the iPhone. And Cheng Lu says, as someone with a bit of insider info, sorry for baiting, I can tell you that the current trajectory for Apple would likely have been better off if he ended up CEO. Look up his background and interests. I'll forever be a Forstall simp. The guy can code and coded the right things. And so it's very, very interesting.

• 1:16:40Jordi Hays?

  I wonder what he thinks about iOS seventeen.

• 1:16:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it like you can, you can run this counterfactual and, and say, okay, you, if you put the software guy in charge, maybe the software is better. But what does that mean for the hardware, the supply chain, the trade war? Like, would Scott Forstall have been able to get through the crazy trade war?

• 1:17:01Jordi Hays?

  I mean, Tim Cook could have been a goaded COO, right hand to Scott.

• 1:17:05John Coogan?

  That's true. That's true.

• 1:17:07Jordi Hays?

  Maybe you wouldn't have, maybe iOS seventeen wouldn't be such a dumpster fire.

• 1:17:11John Coogan?

  I don't think it's that bad, actually.

• 1:17:12Jordi Hays?

  I, I, it, I, I get multiple times a day a reminder of how, how, how bad.

• 1:17:18John Coogan?

  I think, I think it will, I think you'll get used to it over the next like six months.

• 1:17:23Jordi Hays?

  I've gotten used to it, but I still can appreciate how bad it is. But we have Mark, Mark Germain's coming on the show next week.

• 1:17:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:17:31Jordi Hays?

  Um, and I'm excited to talk with him about it.

• 1:17:34John Coogan?

  Well, we have our first in-person guest of the day. While he hops on the show, let me tell you about numeralhq.com. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Thank you so much for hopping on the show. Great to meet you.

• 1:17:52Speaker 03

  Likewise. Good to meet you.

• 1:17:53John Coogan?

  Thank you. Uh, can you?

• 1:17:54Jordi Hays?

  Fellow LA technology brother.

• 1:17:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, not many of us.

• 1:17:58Jordi Hays?

  Not many.

• 1:17:59John Coogan?

  Uh, here, I'm gonna have you.

• 1:18:03John Coogan?

  Uh, why don't you introduce yourself and, and kind of describe the shape of the business today? And then I'd love to go back and kind of hear the whole, the whole entrepreneurial journey.

• 1:18:11Speaker 03

  Sure. Uh, so I'm Grant LaFontaine, uh, co-founder, CEO of a platform called Whatnot. Whatnot's a live stream shopping platform, online marketplace. The way to best way to think about it is we sort of enable anyone to create like a digital brick and mortar store.

• 1:18:26Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 1:18:26Speaker 03

  So as opposed to, you know.

• 1:18:27Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 1:18:28Speaker 03

  You know, any seller can come on, they can then sell through live video, which means you sort of like this.

• 1:18:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:34Speaker 03

  You can stand up, you can be in your store, you can walk around your store, sell goods, sell anything. And so we have people on the platform, um, selling comics to paintings, to plants, to women's fashion, everything in between. Um, and it just ends up being, you know, incredibly good way to build a business, very similar to like a brick and mortar retail shop.

• 1:18:55Jordi Hays?

  It's so interesting that, that digital commerce has just, and doesn't look like, yes, there's items on the storefront that you can buy, but imagine if stores had no employees in them and you couldn't like in real time quickly ask.

• 1:19:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:11Jordi Hays?

  Ask a human like, hey, like, you know, what size do you recommend here? Or do you have this? Do you have this in another, you know, all these different things that ultimately drive like higher purchase volume in a retail setting that we just generally don't have online, but do exist on whatnot.

• 1:19:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. What was the, uh, take me back to the start of the company. What were the, what was the competitive landscape like at the time? What was the, uh, was this something that was like working internationally? And you were like, oh.

• 1:19:38Jordi Hays?

  Of course, of course. That was the whole, that was the whole thing. It was like, everyone was like looking at China and you look at how some of China's retail giants got started. It was like selling fruit and vegetables.

• 1:19:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:47Jordi Hays?

  Like in live and, and something that Americans just don't understand at all. You know, buying like bananas through like basically a farmer who's just like, yeah, check out these bananas.

• 1:19:57Speaker 03

  I actually imagine you buying bananas through.

• 1:19:59Jordi Hays?

  I would, I would do that.

• 1:20:00Speaker 03

  In Malibu.

• 1:20:01Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, but yeah, walk us through kind of like the early days of discovering kind of the opportunity.

• 1:20:06Speaker 03

  Yes. So one of the funny things with us is so the live shopping market in Asia is like monstrous.

• 1:20:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:12Speaker 03

  You know, like nearly a trillion dollars. And it's been big for a long time? So I think it took off in like a little after 2015 or so. And it's just like ramped to a crazy extent. When did you get started? What year? So we started whatnot in 2020. Okay. Okay. So there was like some, there were examples out there. Yeah. This can work. Although we had no idea. Yeah. We literally had no idea. So when we started whatnot, it was me and my co-founder Logan, and we were working at some bigger tech companies. We'd both started businesses before, where like we like to build.

• 1:20:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:40Speaker 03

  Like that's sort of the thing we enjoy to do.

• 1:20:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:42Speaker 03

  And we're like, we don't like what we're doing now. Let's go build something new.

• 1:20:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:46Speaker 03

  Um, and we were both really into. Buying and reselling things online, collectibles. So, you know, at one point, we were selling sneakers and, you know, in that whole world. And I, my first business was when I was seven and I started selling Pokemon cards online.

• 1:21:00John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:21:01Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:21:01John Coogan?

  I love it. I was selling DJ equipment. He was selling skateboards.

• 1:21:04Jordi Hays?

  The last YC batch, we, we were asking every founder that we interviewed, like how they started their first, what, what their first business was. And a lot was like somewhat collectibles.

• 1:21:13John Coogan?

  It was like running Fortnite servers, collectibles. Like there's just something about, I don't know. I, I, I have kids. I don't know if you have kids. I want to get my kids to like do business online ASAP.

• 1:21:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah. And, and people that don't, people that are like, I want to start a business, but I don't have an idea. It's like, business is just making something for one price.

• 1:21:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:31Jordi Hays?

  Or buying something for one price and selling it for a higher price. Like that is just business. They're just sneakers or sneakers or collectibles, Pokemon cards, whatever. It's just very simple.

• 1:21:40John Coogan?

  So, so I feel like a lot of the, a lot of the media platforms, uh, they'll start with just like the idea of like, I want to share photos online, Instagram, or I want to have a place to host video online, YouTube. And then over time, the commerce aspect comes in and becomes, uh, more feature rich, whether it's, you know, tagged products with affiliate codes or sponsored content or an ad network. Like how, how mature was your thinking when you went to write like the first pitch deck or the first, uh, did you go through YC?

• 1:22:10Speaker 03

  We went through YC.

• 1:22:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. So the YC application, like.

• 1:22:12Jordi Hays?

  Did you apply with this idea or did you guys like, uh, take a little bit of a?

• 1:22:17Speaker 03

  So I'd say we had like a quasi pivot.

• 1:22:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:22:19Speaker 03

  Which was so early on, the thesis was there's something around collectibles and social commerce.

• 1:22:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:26Speaker 03

  Because a lot of why you collect is not necessarily for the object, but to sort of hang out and talk to people about your interests. And so our initial pitch was basically a social commerce like marketplace for Funko Pops, which are like little final dolls.

• 1:22:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:40Speaker 03

  And that was it. You can, that's what's in the YC application. And we didn't have any idea we were gonna do video.

• 1:22:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:47Speaker 03

  It sort of looked like a standard marketplace with a follow button and a cool handful of features.

• 1:22:53John Coogan?

  So was it creator-led in the sense that I, as the collector, come and share pictures and inventory and details about particular products that I have in stock?

• 1:23:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, it would basically be that.

• 1:23:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:23:06Speaker 03

  So you'd have a profile.

• 1:23:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:07Speaker 03

  You could follow it. You could post your stuff. There's DMs.

• 1:23:10John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:23:10Speaker 03

  You could chat with people.

• 1:23:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:12Jordi Hays?

  And how many investors, obviously you managed to pull it around together, but how many investors passed? Because they were like, "Sorry, I'm not backing your niche toy marketplace."

• 1:23:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's funny now because the amount of money we've raised is ungodly large.

• 1:23:28Jordi Hays?

  But not even, not even-

• 1:23:29John Coogan?

  Ungodly large numbers.

• 1:23:31Jordi Hays?

  Not even, not relative to the valuation. I mean, you've raised just under a billion dollars. You're sitting at 11 billion. It seems like-

• 1:23:38John Coogan?

  Also, the stakes right now for raising an ungodly amount of money are like, if your business doesn't work, does everyone in the whole world lose their job? And as long as you're not there, have fun.

• 1:23:51Jordi Hays?

  Or people are like, "I have two GitHub stars on my projects. I'll take 2 billion."

• 1:23:57John Coogan?

  But yeah, so when did the video aspect come in? What were the thinking? And how did you, how did you think about the first design and then start iterating?

• 1:24:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I'd say like I'm a purist when it comes to building product, which is like you stay close to your customers. You talk to your customers and you figure out the problems they have. And so as we were building our Funko Pop marketplace, we just knew everyone on the platform.

• 1:24:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:21Speaker 03

  We knew all the sellers. We were friends with them.

• 1:24:23John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:24:24Speaker 03

  And we could see them hacking sort of social media video in interesting ways, in particular trying to run auctions in live video.

• 1:24:31John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:24:31Jordi Hays?

  So they'd be going live on Twitch or other platforms and then selling on whatnot?

• 1:24:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, so what we'd, well, the actual real initial example was we were- Uh, following, so I was following a seller on Instagram and I tapped into their Instagram Live and they were trying to hold auctions in the comments. And the latency on Instagram Live video, at least at that time, was like 30 plus seconds. So they basically have like, put up the item, run a clock, and then once the clock stopped, they'd start taking the bids in the comments. And I invited my co-founder in and we got into a bidding war and it was just like, really fun. We're like, huh, why has no one built-

• 1:25:07John Coogan?

  But sort of broken.

• 1:25:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, what, why has no one built mobile video auctions? It just sort of felt obvious.

• 1:25:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:14Speaker 03

  And then-

• 1:25:15Jordi Hays?

  People don't realize, unless you've bid on an online auction, you have no idea how-

• 1:25:21John Coogan?

  Thrilling.

• 1:25:22Jordi Hays?

  -thrilling it is. So I've, I've, I've, I've, uh, bought cars on, on, uh, Bring a Trailer and once you start bidding, it is just, there's nothing more entertaining on the entire planet.

• 1:25:34John Coogan?

  The more I get to know you, the more you're like, actually, gamification really works on me.

• 1:25:38Jordi Hays?

  It does work on me. No, it's just, it's, it's incredibly, it's incredibly fun. And, and that's even in the context of Bring a Trailer, which anybody that's used Bring a Trailer, like, maybe it uses, goes on the site a- all the time, but they're like, this is so underdeveloped in comparison to every other application that I use. And so even just the dynamic of like bidding against someone else and looking at their bidding history and seeing, okay, like, this guy just bids a lot, he doesn't actually buy cars. Okay, this guy's bought like six cars in the last six months, like, I've got a real, real competition here, so.

• 1:26:12John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:26:13Jordi Hays?

  Um, but I still, yeah, it's still the percentage of people that have actually like done, like bought things online via auction, I think is relatively, it must be relatively low still.

• 1:26:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, and so, so, yeah, we basically-

• 1:26:25Jordi Hays?

  How quickly did you ship the, the, your version of the live auction product after that?

• 1:26:30Speaker 03

  Four weeks.

• 1:26:31Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:26:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:32Jordi Hays?

  Correct.

• 1:26:32John Coogan?

  They were good APIs around that time, because I remember, uh, it wasn't Clubhouse doing live audio and they were partnered with some new company that was able to kind of do it like turnkey.

• 1:26:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was this company Agora, I think.

• 1:26:46John Coogan?

  That's it.

• 1:26:46Speaker 03

  Clubhouse was using. We actually didn't, again, we made a bunch of mistakes. We didn't know anything about China. We didn't know anything about the low latency live video APIs.

• 1:26:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:26:54Speaker 03

  So we actually stood up our own like low latency live video surfing infrastructure. If we hadn't, we probably would have built it in a week.

• 1:27:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:01Speaker 03

  Um, and it was not very good.

• 1:27:04John Coogan?

  But like, good enough to get.

• 1:27:05Speaker 03

  Good enough, and the product was so clearly had product market fit.

• 1:27:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:10Speaker 03

  I'm not entertaining, as you guys can tell. And I did the first live stream because we, you know, we gotta like, make sure it works. And I sold $5,000 with a Funko Pops in two hours.

• 1:27:19John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:27:20Speaker 03

  And so you're like, unentertaining human being, sells that much. We basically dropped everything the next day and we're like, we don't know what this is, but this is really fun. This is it. Drop everything we're all in.

• 1:27:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:27:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and $5,000 doesn't sound like a huge amount of money. But when you look at that in the context of an individual seller that probably has decent margins on that $5,000, and then they start realizing, I can do this every single day. And this quickly just becomes like a real business.

• 1:27:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:47Jordi Hays?

  Out of like, could be out of nothing.

• 1:27:49John Coogan?

  So from there, help me understand the growth mechanism. Is it people screenshotting and sharing to other platforms? Are you running ads? Is there a referral program? Is there SEO? Like, what's the flywheel? Because it feels like.

• 1:28:04Jordi Hays?

  Well, and part of it, because I imagine like the people that are obsessively buying like Funko Pops are like, pretty, like, they know where they're being sold, right? Like, these people, like, it's not like.

• 1:28:16John Coogan?

  Well, it's the same thing with GT3RSs. Like, people know, I'm gonna go find that on Bring a Trailer.

• 1:28:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or their handful of other platforms. Yeah, it's like, people that are obsessive about a category are gonna know all the surface area where selling is happening and just go to where the inventory is.

• 1:28:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, is that roughly?

• 1:28:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's roughly correct. For. You know, for almost the first three or four years of the business, we basically just focused on collectibles and enthusiast categories, which we sort of broaden out, maybe like if you're into cars and things like that. And it was fundamentally because these categories, people like to talk about what they're buying, where they're buying it. And so we lean, for the first four years, we basically just grew through referrals and word of mouth.

• 1:29:00John Coogan?

  Was it pretty smooth?

• 1:29:00Jordi Hays?

  And what was it like with the investors, once, once the product was clearly working? Because I remember there were so many VC, like, think pieces on live shopping and how it had broken out in China. And imagine when they met you, they were like, Lisa Algaie. I finally, I finally, but there was also, there was also, like, in the early days, like, I remember there, I won't, there was like, there was like, Pop Shop was also very hot. I think they raised around from like Benchmark around the same time as you guys. So it seemed like very competitive at the time.

• 1:29:31John Coogan?

  Also, Amazon owns Twitch. They have selling infrastructure. Like, there were lots of reasons why someone else might do this. The classic, like, what if Google builds it? What if Twitch does it? What if someone else does it?

• 1:29:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'd say, probably at least for the, even the first couple of years after we did live, we weren't like particularly hot.

• 1:29:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:51Speaker 03

  A lot of people like looked at the side that we started in, which was, you know, all collectibles, and then sort of compared it to Asia. And they're like, is that really the same? So like, you know, a lot of it was people holding, you know, doing auctions and they're not showing their face on camera. They just show like the Funko Pop.

• 1:30:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:30:06Speaker 03

  And so, and a lot of the other companies.

• 1:30:09Jordi Hays?

  And that's like, they'll put the product out and wait till it sells and then put a new one up there?

• 1:30:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, they'll like, talk to you and you'll just like, look at the product and you can, you have chat.

• 1:30:17Jordi Hays?

  And meanwhile, in China, if people haven't seen these videos, it'll be like, they'll, they'll show like, it's, they'll just take a product, hold it up, move on. Take a product, hold up, move on, right?

• 1:30:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, we, we have those, we have those people now.

• 1:30:27John Coogan?

  It's crazy that that works at all. Like, that feels like such a worse experience than just an e-commerce app with like, a bunch of dropdowns and filters.

• 1:30:35Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, something, something about seeing a product in real life. Like, I think it inspires like some element of like trust even than just seeing like, a digital, you know, photo or render.

• 1:30:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think what we see is that people start to build relationships and trust the seller. So as opposed to like, in the previous e-commerce world, there's Where is it coming from? Who you don't know?

• 1:30:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:57Speaker 03

  People come to whatnot because they build a relationship with a seller. It's sort of like, I don't know, a local shop where you go and meet someone, talk to them.

• 1:31:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:04Speaker 03

  And so that just builds a lot more trust in the system.

• 1:31:06John Coogan?

  So in that sort of like, it seems like there were a few years where like you weren't as hot as like maybe you should have been. Uh, was that driven by just, uh, not fully monetizing as well as you wanted or like choppy growth? Were you cyclical at all? Was it like the interest rate, like crisis and SVB collapsing that like, put a damper on the hype or was it all pretty smooth?

• 1:31:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because I, cause, cause my, my memory of, of the whatnot hype cycle was like, okay, wow, this company has like a massive valuation. But I've never used it and I think that's what a lot of people like recognize, like people are like, something, something can't possibly be real unless I'm using it every day.

• 1:31:51John Coogan?

  It's a zero unless I use it.

• 1:31:51Jordi Hays?

  But you guys had this insane valuation and then every once in a while you're not, you don't go on a lot of podcasts. At least I haven't, I haven't, uh, heard you on one before. But like you just pop up with like a massive up round and then just pop up with another massive up round. And so I guess like, uh, what we're trying to get at, I think is like, has the growth been like relatively like consistent and smooth? Or has it been like unlocking new categories, unlocking new use cases that have just really continued to, to drive the business?

• 1:32:20Speaker 03

  In, in general, it's been pretty smooth. We had one slow patch, probably coming out of COVID where growth during COVID, if you were like a consumer entertainment company, it was just, no one had anything to do. And so I think we were sort of lazy in our growth motion because it just, basically we didn't have to worry about growth. They just sort of like boom.

• 1:32:39Jordi Hays?

  It's happening to you.

• 1:32:39Speaker 03

  And, and then we had to get a little bit more deliberate, but I don't think we've ever grown under like, you know, top line sales. I mean, revenue has probably never grown under 90% a year.

• 1:32:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:47Speaker 03

  And the entire history of the business.

• 1:32:48John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:32:49Speaker 03

  And so it's been pretty good. And there's when people like there's moments and times where people get excited. So for a long time, we're like, oh, this is niche. It's collectibles. And then we got fashion going and working. And I'd be like, oh, that's exciting.

• 1:33:03Jordi Hays?

  That's a big category.

• 1:33:03John Coogan?

  And is fashion driven mostly by reselling existing inventory? Or are you partnered with specific brands or fast fashion companies?

• 1:33:12Speaker 03

  Like so.

• 1:33:13John Coogan?

  What's the shape of the market?

• 1:33:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's pretty diverse. So there's some brands selling now. There's brick and mortar jewelry shops selling. I would say the dominant sort of theme in in fashion is probably like old season inventory or overstock. So people, the reason it's really great is it's great for whoever owns that inventory because they can collect higher margin by selling it on whatnot.

• 1:33:38Jordi Hays?

  And that's the individual brand?

• 1:33:40Speaker 03

  A lot of times it's it's.

• 1:33:43Jordi Hays?

  Somebody that goes to the brand.

• 1:33:44Speaker 03

  Just businesses, things like TJ Maxx style stuff.

• 1:33:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:47Speaker 03

  So people getting access to TJ Maxx style inventory and it's multi-brand. It'll be like Lululemon, but from last year and so you're gonna buy it.

• 1:33:55Jordi Hays?

  It's like 60% less or something.

• 1:33:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, 60% less and the deals are incredibly good.

• 1:33:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. So people are kind of building their own business on whatnot from from scratch, but then scaling to a point where they kind of have an operational relationship with different brands and they have a whole kind of strategy and probably pretty stable earnings as a creator.

• 1:34:13Jordi Hays?

  What's the competitive landscape been like over the last couple of years? Because I know it's been widely reported that TikTok's been willing to just burn billions of dollars trying to get shopping, working on their platform. You have, there was another one, I can't even remember the name that popped up with crazy incentives that was like, I don't think it was live, but what's the one that?

• 1:34:37John Coogan?

  Flip?

• 1:34:37Jordi Hays?

  Flip. So Flip popped up and they were like, free money as a service. We're just gonna get, and that was like, I remember people were like, people would send me a text and it's like, I just sent you $200 on Flip. And so I'm like, this can't go, this is not going to last that long. And so you've had a number of people kind of like, you know, trying to at least like enter this like overall.

• 1:35:01Jordi Hays?

  Kind of like entertainment meets commerce market, but how have you got, it sounds like it's just been continuing to execute against your roadmap?

• 1:35:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're pretty, like, as you said, we, I sort of don't go on much podcasts. You know, maybe we'll pop up every once in a while with a fundraiser. We just try and stay really heads down and just deliver. Our thesis has always been it's going to be a competitive market. And so how you're going to distinguish yourself is consistent delivery and then, you know, continuing to add value to customers every day. And, you know, our belief's always been there's room for a purpose-built platform here. Like, say TikTok, amazing product, but people are going there to like, watch videos, not necessarily shop. And I think that pattern's really hard. So we've always believed there's opportunity for a player who's purpose-built to be world-class at shopping and sort of, you know, shopping meets entertainment. And I think over the past six years, we've sort of largely proven that out.

• 1:35:52John Coogan?

  Is there a Mr. Beast of whatnot?

• 1:35:55Speaker 03

  Um.

• 1:35:56John Coogan?

  A true power law creator that's just a whole order of magnitude above everyone else in terms of seriousness and operational excellence, size of team, like that type of thing?

• 1:36:11Speaker 03

  There are a few people who are like, I think whatnot's very similar to other entertainment platforms. So I spent like six years at YouTube.

• 1:36:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:36:19Speaker 03

  You know, it is power law oriented. And so the handful of people who are in the tippity top tier, you know, you're looking at operations with like 100 plus employees at this point. So pretty big.

• 1:36:29John Coogan?

  That's pretty remarkable. Yeah. Why do people say whatnot is gambling? It feels like collecting things that just like, I mean, obviously there's a little bit of risk. You buy a GT3RS and you find out that it is a broken, you know.

• 1:36:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I think to be more specific, people are saying like, certain sellers on whatnot are focused on.

• 1:36:47John Coogan?

  Mystery boxes?

• 1:36:48Jordi Hays?

  Hard, you know, mystery boxes, right?

• 1:36:50John Coogan?

  Like the power packs from GameStop?

• 1:36:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so you would have to like, also say that, yeah.

• 1:36:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you have like policies around it? Do you have a personal stance? Like, how does that all?

• 1:37:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because gamification too is like, that is something that sellers want. They're like, make it easier for me to provide an entertaining shopping experience.

• 1:37:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:11Speaker 03

  So first off, there's no gambling allowed or whatnot, right? Flat out, like it's illegal and whatnot.

• 1:37:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:37:17Speaker 03

  Uh, you know, our trust and safety and customer experience team is probably our biggest team at the whole company. So we do take this stuff like very seriously.

• 1:37:25John Coogan?

  Let's hear for no gambling. We love that.

• 1:37:27Jordi Hays?

  Let's hear for trust and safety.

• 1:37:28John Coogan?

  Let's hear for trust and safety team. They work really hard. We know it's a serious expense. Very good.

• 1:37:33Speaker 03

  But yeah, so none of that's allowed, I think. You know, people open packs of cards. It's fun. I opened packs of cards when I was a kid.

• 1:37:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:37:39Speaker 03

  I sold Pokemon cards when I was a kid. And so we try and give sellers the flexibility to run their business in the right way.

• 1:37:44John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:37:44Speaker 03

  While making sure it's safe for customers and we don't, nothing illegal is allowed. Stop.

• 1:37:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, and so there are, there, there is an element of randomness if you're selling just like, I, I used to buy the booster packs of Magic the Gathering cards as a kid. And like, sometimes you get something that's a foil or something, but that's very different than putting money into the whatnot platform, participating in some sort of ecosystem, then pulling out dollars directly. Like that's what gambling would be, right?

• 1:38:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, let me tell you.

• 1:38:13Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what categories are you guys working towards that you're kind of most excited about? You said you unlock fashion.

• 1:38:21Speaker 03

  So the one, the future category I'm most excited about, it's still early innings is food and drink.

• 1:38:26Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:38:28John Coogan?

  It feels like really hard to sell online.

• 1:38:30Speaker 03

  Well, so it, it would be in a static world, but in a video based world where you can like, you know, so like the, we have a, there's a farm, outside of San Diego who sells organic citrus.

• 1:38:42John Coogan?

  The bananas. Back to the bananas.

• 1:38:44Jordi Hays?

  Back to bananas.

• 1:38:44Speaker 03

  Um, and so like I'll order from them and like the next day at my doorstep will be like organic tangerines and things like that. And so I'm like, I'm really into, I'm a foodie and I, I think everyone increasingly is more conscious around what they eat, where they get their stuff from. And so I think being able to. Eventually, you know, get fresh meat from a farmer, get fresh fish from a lobsterman from Maine. There's a bunch of stuff we're gonna have to figure out logistics wise and all sorts.

• 1:39:13Jordi Hays?

  Seafood is crazy.

• 1:39:14Speaker 03

  But wouldn't you rather like see it get caught and then at your doorstep the next day?

• 1:39:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, with Starlink, with Starlink, the fisherman's gonna be out there and be like, alright, I'm just pulling up a crate of crab.

• 1:39:25John Coogan?

  Who wants it?

• 1:39:26Jordi Hays?

  Who wants it?

• 1:39:27John Coogan?

  That's wild.

• 1:39:28Jordi Hays?

  And then he pulls it up and there you go. Uh, yeah, that's, I can see that. I can also, there's so many other categories of like collecting. I don't know if these are popular yet, but eventually I could imagine like a wine collector's going on there. And wine is something that you want if you're buying it, like unless you're like just an insane expert, you probably want somebody like part of going to a wine shop is being able to talk to the, you know, associate there and they can talk through like the origins and the winery and what made, what made, you know, a certain case of wine like special, things like that. So wine makes sense, I think. Other categories of like collectible alcohol, like, um, you know, whiskeys and things like that. What about cars?

• 1:40:12Speaker 03

  Cars, dreaming of the day to do cars. I've wanted to do cars for a long time. We'll eventually get to it. Um, the, the truth is we're growing so fast and so we're having to like, make sure the core user experience is really good before we can get outside of our.

• 1:40:26John Coogan?

  How rigid are you? Because Twitch just has, you know, like a just chatting or like IRL for like, it's a catchall. If you're not playing Fortnite or Minecraft, they have a catchall. And then people kind of go and innovate in that category. Why, is it just like I will get deplatformed if I try and sell my car and whatnot?

• 1:40:46Speaker 03

  Um.

• 1:40:47John Coogan?

  Or is it just like you're not ready to say like it's actually a good experience, but it is possible to do?

• 1:40:52Jordi Hays?

  Cars are tough too because, I mean, think of, you know, you can buy a new car. It could be a lemon. You can buy, you know, an existent, you know, a used car. And, you know, even after, you know, on Bring a Trailer, there's like you buy it and then you can get.

• 1:41:07John Coogan?

  PPI.

• 1:41:08Jordi Hays?

  You win the auction, then you're getting the, the, the PPI done. And then at that point you can back out. You don't get your like, I guess like fee back, but at least there's like some protections there. So when you up the. When you up the price like, you know, a thousand X, it just gets.

• 1:41:23Speaker 03

  So theoretically today, if you adhere to our platform policies, you'd be able to do it. You could. Theoretically, it would be almost impossible. Sure. Because you have to be able to pay for it with your credit card. You'd have to be able to, you know, like, ship it in two days.

• 1:41:39Speaker 03

  It's like, I will be driving this across the country. Cannonball across the country. We have sold some cars on whatnot. Those have been more for like, collectible cars for specific events. So like, the creator of Spawn, sold like, the Spawn Mobile. And so we, we just did some custom stuff there. But, but in practice, if we saw people, um, starting to sell cars, they'd likely butt up against some of the just general policies we have today. And so we, we'd have to go and make the platform suitable for it.

• 1:42:08Jordi Hays?

  How's it like, uh, is the majority of the team in LA?

• 1:42:12Speaker 03

  Uh, so we're all over the place now. So the. Are you a true COVID company? Yeah, we're a true COVID. Even before, like, we started a handful of months before COVID and our initial team, there was, our designer was in Italy, two engineers in Brazil and me and Logan in LA. And so we've always sort of been distributed on the introvert. Did you go to Y C up in the Bay? We did go to Y C up in the Bay. And then we couldn't raise money. And so we moved to Phoenix. No way. Yeah. Um, because we had like, no money and we just ran it, ran the company from our garage in Phoenix. And then.

• 1:42:43Jordi Hays?

  I would, I would, uh, off air, I would love to see who passed.

• 1:42:49Jordi Hays?

  I mean, even to, to a lot of people's credit, I mean, I saw Sheil, uh, from BTV posted yesterday, like, if I got pitched, uh, whatnot, and they were selling like dolls, I would have like, almost certainly passed.

• 1:43:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, look, you would have, the only way you would have ever invested in whatnot in the early days was if you knew me or Logan, deeply and had worked with us. Because that's the only thing that would have given you confidence. We always had the confidence because we.

• 1:43:17Speaker 03

  You know, we thought we were capable of doing a lot per period of time, but we're not. I didn't know that many people. I hate networking and you're coming here with like a Funko Pop thing like so I totally. Do I harbor like a little bit of like, you know?

• 1:43:30Jordi Hays?

  You're getting the last laugh.

• 1:43:32Speaker 03

  But, but nah, you know, like I still think it's early, so I don't even worry about it. I just sort of like blinders on, we got to deliver. But yeah, unless you knew us, you would have sort of been a fool to invest.

• 1:43:41John Coogan?

  How did the Logan Paul investment come around then?

• 1:43:45Speaker 03

  I think we got introduced to him through Andreessen. So Andreessen did our Series A and then helped, you know, get us connected. And he was really into Pokemon cards at that point in time. And so it was sort of like a natural fit. He's, you know, been on the platform a handful of times and, and, and so it was a good add on investor.

• 1:44:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was reviewing his post, uh, talking about the investment and I was like, that makes so much sense because he's been so immersed with even early stage like Vine was so primordial in terms of like what TikTok became. He's been so early to all these platforms. Makes sense that he could see the vision better than a lot of other people.

• 1:44:20Jordi Hays?

  How, how international is the business today?

• 1:44:23Speaker 03

  I think we're in nine countries now. Um, so I think we, we got into international maybe about two and a half years ago. It's, it's a, it's a really big focus for us. The international business is doing very well and I think you'll see us continue to expand this year.

• 1:44:36John Coogan?

  We're going on the offensive. Are we going to China? We're taking the fight with them. We're going to TikTok's front door. Bank dancer on notice.

• 1:44:45Speaker 03

  We'll, we'll go anywhere where we think we can add customer value.

• 1:44:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:44:49Jordi Hays?

  How, uh, how crazy has the Labubu, uh, side of the business been? Uh, we, we covered it. I think we, so, so we, I think we literally, by the time we did a deep dive on it, I think we like may have like top ticked that, that trend. Yeah. And maybe, maybe they're still growing as fast as they were, but.

• 1:45:08Speaker 03

  Uh, I mean, it was pretty much came out of nowhere and then was doing hundreds of millions of dollars in sales on whatnot. It still is, I think.

• 1:45:16John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:45:17Jordi Hays?

  Um. Annually?

• 1:45:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, annual, annual, annual. Like, if you were to.

• 1:45:20Jordi Hays?

  You're like, no, daily.

• 1:45:21Speaker 03

  No, it's, it's, it's, it's pretty big. Um, you know, I, I, I think it's just like fun. You know, you sort of get a box and you see which one you get and it's kind of quirky and weird. So it, it had, it like lends itself to making content and so it sort of takes off.

• 1:45:37John Coogan?

  What's the relationship like with the company behind Labubu in that case? Because I can imagine that they want to capture some of the value created by the gamification and they have the ability to sell directly and they, they, they might even have the ability to auction things off. Like, they want efficient pricing. And so, uh, how, how does the relationship work between you and like the originator of the collectible?

• 1:46:00Speaker 03

  I think it just depends.

• 1:46:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:01Speaker 03

  Um, you know, there are some collectibles companies we work with directly. Like, I think we're working with Marvel and, um, we've done a bunch of stuff in the toys and comic space. Uh, we haven't specifically worked with Labubu. Honestly, I think the Labubu stuff took off to such a large degree, even they're like, I, I, again, I don't know.

• 1:46:20Jordi Hays?

  They're still probably catching up.

• 1:46:21Speaker 03

  But I imagine like, holy, you know. Uh, so no matter what, they were going to sell a gajillion Labubus.

• 1:46:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:46:27Speaker 03

  And so I think they were just trying to make sure manufacturing hits and the product is still good. So.

• 1:46:32John Coogan?

  Totally. Totally. That makes sense. Uh.

• 1:46:35Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, before you jump off, what, what does the next like couple of years look like?

• 1:46:40Speaker 03

  I think it's a lot of the same stuff. One, just continue to make the buyer experience better, the seller experience better. You're going to see us get into more categories, more countries, and then make sure we build the products for more and more types of sellers. So more investments in brands is, is definitely in the cards very specifically.

• 1:46:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. Where does AI play a role? Do you need like a traditional machine learning system for recommendation algorithms? Or is there a role for generative AI in this business? Or is it more just like you're using, you know, tab completion models to write, speed up the developer productivity of the company?

• 1:47:16Speaker 03

  I think everyone's like, there's, there's the obvious spots where like, yes, everyone uses cursor and, you know, whether you're an engineer or not, you can prototype and build stuff faster.

• 1:47:26John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:47:27Speaker 03

  I think we're seeing obvious applications in CX and trust and safety, really good at like detecting context.

• 1:47:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:47:33Speaker 03

  In core ranking systems, I haven't seen anything yet that's like much better than the state of the art machine learning models.

• 1:47:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:47:41Speaker 03

  So I'd say we're at least in core ranking systems, probably not a lot of L L Ms. We're starting to use it more for like content understanding.

• 1:47:49John Coogan?

  This is very good.

• 1:47:50Speaker 03

  You can take a live stream and like, tell me everything about this live stream to then feed into the M L models.

• 1:47:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:47:56Speaker 03

  So I think for us, we're just trying to be world class at using L L Ms to solve our customer problems. So we're making deep investments, but it's, you know, wherever we can solve a problem.

• 1:48:06John Coogan?

  Where does the community stand on AI generally? Are they like anti-AI because it needs to be like a, you know, old fashioned collectible? Or do they see it as an opportunity? There will be new IP that comes from some kid prompting a model and then creates a collectible phenomenon?

• 1:48:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think people still want to interact with people at the core. So in some, in some ways, whatnot sort of anti-AI in that it's like about the human experience.

• 1:48:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:34Speaker 03

  So I think anything that undermines the human experience will always have a little bit of a knee, knee jerk, negative reaction. And so for us, again, I think customers don't care if you're, in fact, they care if you're using AI, but you know, everyday customer uses whatnot, doesn't care. So it's more behind the scenes stuff where we can make their lives easier. So you're a seller, can we tell you what are the, the five major things happening with your business or, you know, generate tips for you or make it so you can list products really fast? Can we get all the context from them? I think that's sort of where we're applying it.

• 1:49:04John Coogan?

  Is there a cohort of folks that? Just, I mean, like, there are obviously tons of people that just watch Doug Demiro videos because they're interested in cars and they never buy a car on Cars and Bids, or they never even buy a new car, because they're just happy with their car, but they like him and they like him talking about cars. And are there, are there users on Whatnot who don't really buy stuff, but watch a lot and just see it as like some sort of meditative, you know, content?

• 1:49:33Jordi Hays?

  Parasocial.

• 1:49:34John Coogan?

  Maybe parasocial, but also maybe just like, it's kind of like background TV and they're just like enjoying learning about different products and understanding the market.

• 1:49:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. So unlike any given day, the vast majority of people who are watching do not purchase anything, and the average person watches 80 minutes.

• 1:49:49John Coogan?

  80 minutes?

• 1:49:50Speaker 03

  80 minutes a day.

• 1:49:51John Coogan?

  80 minutes a day? That's so much.

• 1:49:55Jordi Hays?

  Hit the gong.

• 1:50:00Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy.

• 1:50:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, well, thank you so much for coming on.

• 1:50:03Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.

• 1:50:04Jordi Hays?

  Really good to, uh, really good to meet.

• 1:50:06Speaker 03

  Good to meet.

• 1:50:06Jordi Hays?

  Always, always welcome when you have news. Anytime you want to pop your head up and announce a new.

• 1:50:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, I'm glad that we're here.

• 1:50:12Jordi Hays?

  Hey, hangin'.

• 1:50:13John Coogan?

  Hang out. 80 minutes a day. Wow, that is a lot of minutes.

• 1:50:19Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna need more minutes in the days.

• 1:50:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, sorry, Sam Altman. Good luck with your 30 minutes a day of ChatGPT usage. Uh, Whatnot's got 80. Uh, get those numbers up. Time to get those numbers up. If you're, if you're building anything except Whatnot, apparently.

• 1:50:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Tyler, can you find out the day that we did our Popmart deep dive?

• 1:50:40John Coogan?

  Yes, I need to know.

• 1:50:42Jordi Hays?

  Because?

• 1:50:43John Coogan?

  Uh, I also need to 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.

• 1:50:55John Coogan?

  Uh, oh, there's, there's this funny, funny thing. So, uh, uh, there's profound and like, GEO is, is, is actually in the timeline, and of course, we are partnered with Profound. And so, uh, you know, there, there's the conflict of interest here. Didn't we, you know, you gotta get through it with a kid gloves, but, uh, the, the, uh, The founder of Amplitude, a Y C company, Spencer Skates, he posted, too many VCs are funding AI companies that should be features. 12 plus startups have raised 72.8 million in the last few months for AI visibility, basically S E O for L L Ms, what Profound does. We built it in three weeks with three people and shipped it for free.

• 1:51:38John Coogan?

  And he's going back and forth with David Burton, who says, I personally demoed 12 S E O for L L M products.

• 1:51:44Jordi Hays?

  Wait.

• 1:51:45John Coogan?

  And 11 out of 12 suck. Did you see this?

• 1:51:47Jordi Hays?

  First, don't, don't we have to talk about James's reply?

• 1:51:51John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, that was.

• 1:51:52Jordi Hays?

  Almost, almost ratioed Spencer. James, James replied, lack of focus kills, and he just shared Amplitudes.

• 1:52:01John Coogan?

  I, I'm not a fan of that. I think it's not golden retriever coded. It's not.

• 1:52:06Jordi Hays?

  It was pretty hardcore.

• 1:52:07John Coogan?

  It's a little, it's a little too hardcore for me. I think you gotta, you gotta put on the kid gloves when you're dealing with somebody.

• 1:52:13Jordi Hays?

  But, but to me, to me, one, one thing that stood out about Spencer's original post.

• 1:52:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:19Jordi Hays?

  Spencer's wife, by the way, did the series A of whatnot.

• 1:52:23John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:52:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:24John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:52:24Jordi Hays?

  Credible investment.

• 1:52:26John Coogan?

  And Skates. Oh, cool.

• 1:52:27Jordi Hays?

  Friend.

• 1:52:28John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 1:52:28Jordi Hays?

  But they said 12 startups has raised 72 million in the last, that just doesn't feel like that much for a category that could be, drive like billions and bill, like.

• 1:52:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. Like, yeah, we've talked to a bunch of these different companies. It feels like, it feels like a lot for one sort of like thing all at once. It is interesting because, I mean, it feels like a ton compared to like, how many weapons companies were being funded when Andrew started?

• 1:52:57Jordi Hays?

  Two thirds of that is profound.

• 1:53:00John Coogan?

  Two thirds of the dollars, yeah, but not of the number of startups.

• 1:53:02Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:53:03John Coogan?

  And so it is, it is just interesting that it feels like, it feels like a niche.

• 1:53:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but, but yeah, for, for all of venture, if something's a good opportunity, expect like at least 10.

• 1:53:13John Coogan?

  I mean, I would expect that there are at least 12 new like CRM companies out there. Of course, we are partnered with Adio, Customer Relationship Magic, the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. And so, but it was just funny because David Burden is like putting all of these AEO companies in the truth zone, but Ahmed Omar says, which one works? And he said, profound, but I didn't buy because pricey and still too black box for me. But he was, you know, very interested that he

• 1:53:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and this is effectively why, this is why I, I were one of the reasons I invested in profound myself was Kareem over at Ramp was just like, this is what works for us. That was, that was enough of a, of a cosign for me. Tyler, did you find out when we covered Popmart? Uh, yes, it was August 29th.

• 1:54:08John Coogan?

  Is that the top?

• 1:54:09Jordi Hays?

  Oh my god.

• 1:54:10John Coogan?

  Wait, did we perfectly top tick it? August 29th, really?

• 1:54:14Jordi Hays?

  Not perfectly, but August, it, it actually peaked on August 26th. And so this is a good learning. If we ever start talking about

• 1:54:23John Coogan?

  Something cool.

• 1:54:24Jordi Hays?

  Toys.

• 1:54:25John Coogan?

  It's not cool anymore.

• 1:54:26Jordi Hays?

  Collectible toys, just know that we are probably top ticking it. If we're talking about some trend in technology, we're probably like 12 months, 12 months at least before the top.

• 1:54:38John Coogan?

  For sure. We have our next guest in the restream waiting room. First, how'd you sleep last night, Jordy? How'd you sleep on your 8sleeve?

• 1:54:49Jordi Hays?

  I mean, my handicap is just killing me.

• 1:54:50John Coogan?

  Head over to 8sleeve.com.

• 1:54:52Jordi Hays?

  I think I got a decent.

• 1:54:53John Coogan?

  You had a pod 5. I did not do too well. I got 6 hours of sleep. I got a 79. I think you might have beat me today.

• 1:54:58Jordi Hays?

  See, the fact that you can get 6 hours and put up a 79 when I got 7 hours and 10 minutes and put up an 81, it's like, I'm gonna have Mateo reset this.

• 1:55:05John Coogan?

  I think you, I think it's a skill issue. You're just not focusing on sleep. Like, so you're like waking up in the middle of the night and stuff. It's not good. Should we bring in our next guest?

• 1:55:14Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it. I'm excited to talk to Chris.

• 1:55:16John Coogan?

  Let's do it. I'm gonna let you take the intro.

• 1:55:19Jordi Hays?

  Chris, welcome to the show.

• 1:55:22Speaker 07

  Hey guys, thanks for having me.

• 1:55:23Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you. I will give some quick background. Chris, you were the senior advisor to the U.S. Department of State, Office of the Special Envoy for Critical and Emerging Technology from 2023 to 2025. You were a Foreign Affairs Officer for the U.S. Department of State, the Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance from 2015 to 2023. And in 2024, you were the Deputy Senior Director for Technology and National Security on the National Security Council at the White House. And there's a bunch of other stuff that seems equally significant and important, but we can get into it. It's great, great to have you on the show. I'm sure it's been a busy, busy, busy year for you. But why don't you give

• 1:56:05Jordi Hays?

  a quick introduction on your background and anything I may have missed?

• 1:56:10Speaker 07

  Thanks a lot, guys, and really appreciate you having me. Yeah, so I was a longtime civil servant in the government and State Department. I was detailed to Biden White House from 2021 to 24, from 22 to 24. I was on the National Security Council, and I broadly had the China technology portfolio the whole time and oversaw that they had to kind of all of the Biden administration's critical and emerging technology-related work from the White House. Then I went back, served the Trump administration for a good chunk of time this year, and recently left government. So really appreciate you guys having me, especially on today, where obviously we had a big, a bunch of big developments kind of overnight with the President meeting with Xi and the kind of trade deal of which technology is obviously a very major portion.

• 1:56:55Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so before we get into what's happened in the last 24 hours in the last week, like, can you give kind of your view on this year and how a lot of these different, you know, how the trade war has been kind of evolving in your view?

• 1:57:11Speaker 07

  Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, I think the administration has very much kind of gone back and forth on where they are in China policy. I think that you obviously have had enormous, you know, threats of tariffs and moves to kind of really kind of separate the U.S. and Chinese economies on pretty fundamental levels. On the other hand, I think you haven't actually seen a lot of implementation there. There's a continued desire to talk with the Chinese. And when it comes to some of the technology protection measures, where I think the Biden administration was more focused, it's been a little bit more stop and go. I think that generally, since the first Trump administration, there has been a big pivot

• 1:57:54Speaker 07

  in Washington to move towards a, away from the policies of China of let's deepen integration in order to kind of get them to change and towards a more competitive stance. I think the first Trump administration really kind of initiated that, it was very much built on by the Biden administration, particularly in the semiconductors and AI spaces, where I think there was a very conscious decision. I know there's a very conscious decision to really separate those supply chains and saying in those areas, we have to maintain as large of elite as possible. It doesn't mean in every single one, but in the especially critical ones like advanced chips and AI. And then the Trump administration then, I think, took this and initially escalated with enormous tariff threats on China across the entire economy.

• 1:58:39Speaker 07

  The Chinese, I think, have very much taken to heart their lessons from the first Trump administration, that what you have to do is punch back and punch back hard. And that has resulted, I think, in a little bit more of a détente, actually, than we've seen over the previous few years, where I think the United States has been able to kind of slowly ratchet things up. The Trump administration has ratcheted things up a lot, so did the Chinese, and I think both sides have now kind of pulled it down a little bit.

• 1:59:07John Coogan?

  It does feel like the renegotiation of US-China relationship starts in 2016 with the new Trump administration. Hundred Year Marathon by Michael Pillsbury is an important point. That book, it seemed like it sort of went viral on Capitol Hill. There's also the rejection of American tech companies. But what else do you think kind of led us? What was like the inciting event, if there was one, in this beginning to discuss a renegotiation in US-China policy? Is it Xi Jinping becoming effectively a dictator for life? That kind of changing the perception of like, okay, well, they're not even going, they're not even trying to go for democracy.

• 1:59:52John Coogan?

  What other kind of like moments in history do you think of as the defining moments in the renegotiation of US-China relations?

• 2:00:02Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think that's right. I think that China has kind of fundamentally, well, China has fundamentally changed under Xi. I think there's some realization here that some of the promises of China, political change in China and market-based change are not going to happen. There have been very much market-based changes in some senses, right? They actually are much more deeply integrated into the economy, but it hasn't changed the fundamental, you know, integration with the Chinese state and their companies. And from that flows kind of national security considerations. And I think Xi has obviously taken this in a much more authoritarian direction. And one can argue whether or not that was there all along. And actually, you know, maybe it was something that people missed in the 2000s.

• 2:00:47Speaker 07

  But I think very much in the mid 2015s, like you said, around 2015, 2016, people were starting to realize that we have to change course. And particularly, I think, in 2017, 2018. And look, the initial Trump campaign, I think, really did change the narrative on China. I think that's pretty indisputable. On certain things, I think we were starting to see a little bit of a changing narrative towards the end of the Obama administration. Like, the last week of the Obama administration, they put out a big report, the President's Council on, a PCAS, President's Council on Science Technology, put out a big report on the importance of maintaining a domestic semiconductor industry, which was the first time they'd really talked about that. And then, obviously, you know, with the CHIPS Act in the coming years, that became

• 2:01:31Speaker 07

  the major focus. But I

• 2:01:36Speaker 07

  I think you have to give the Trump, the first Trump administration credit for, for really changing the policy. And, and the, the Biden administration very much continued that. I think the approach was, you know, maybe not to have a, a massive confrontational policy across the economy, but to say in the areas that we care the most about, we are going to take pretty, you know, actions that you know, four, six years ago would have been unprecedented to, um, separate ourselves. And, uh, that's, that was, that's, we are in a very different place because of that. Uh, I think we'll see kind of where we go going forward. It's, it's a little bit of a, um, the, the last, last like couple of weeks have introduced some, some more complicating dynamics, I think.

• 2:02:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. One of those was, uh, the rare earth, uh, elements debate. Uh, have, has America been blindsided by the importance there? Were we miscalibrated on exactly how much leverage they had? Like how much that poker chip is worth on the poker table of this trade deal?

• 2:02:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Cause there was a point where people are like, wow, they're already using that, that, that play, right?

• 2:02:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Taking away the passports of the researchers and then also just banning exports, really crippling our ability to build with, uh, those rare earth elements. But is that something that we've known about for the last 10 years? Or, or has this been a surprise? Or is this like, or, or, or is that just like one of the many chips that we expected to be played the whole time?

• 2:03:05Speaker 07

  Yeah. I mean, people in Washington clearly knew that the Chinese had dominance of rare earths. You'd have to kind of be under a rock to not know it, but I think you're totally right that, that no one really did anything about it. Um, and, and part of that is that, look, it's hard, it's so hard to get things done in Washington. Yeah, that's about right. Uh, it's, it's, it's hard to get things done. And it's hard to get things done that are like, you know, you'd need a lot of investment and a lot of coordination and like, you know, massive resourcing and coordination is exactly the thing that's, that's really difficult to get things done in Washington.

• 2:03:35Jordi Hays?

  It took a Schmott's back to really make a move, right? And be materials.

• 2:03:40John Coogan?

  Oh, he did. Yeah. He did do that spec. That's crazy.

• 2:03:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, that's like, that, I think that's the biggest, biggest success out of, out of, out of all of them.

• 2:03:47John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:03:48Speaker 07

  Yeah, and I think, look, Washington is actually, can be good at responding very quickly in a crisis, right? Like, Operation Warp Speed was very effective, for instance. But, obviously, it took until there was a pandemic for us to do something like that. So, I'm hopeful that now people will take this very seriously. I wouldn't be surprised if we start to see legislation on Capitol Hill that's actually resources. Because even though the administration, I think the administration is focused on it now, and takes it very seriously, they're also, you know, we really need to get money, right? And exactly how, where that, you know, how that money manifests, whether it's, you know, equity investments, or loans, or some

• 2:04:29Speaker 07

  kind of, you know, other, you know, Defense Production Act authorities, or something else, like, there's, there's going to have to be some government dollars here, which certainly can be stretched a long way. But we're, but we're gonna have to do that. I think, just to your original question, though, the thing that's surprising, I think people were very surprised that they played this card as expansively as they play it right now.

• 2:04:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:51Speaker 07

  Right? And, go.

• 2:04:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, continue, and then, and then I want to get into kind of the last 24 hours.

• 2:04:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, the surprise on the, playing the card early.

• 2:04:59Speaker 07

  Yeah, I, look, the fact is, this move was way disproportionate to anything that we had done. Effectively, it was saying, you know, there was this affiliates rule that the United States put in place, which basically fixes a big loophole in export controls. Like, the way that, the way that export controls work is every single company has to actually be listed on the control list to be, to be controlled, and if the subsidiary isn't listed, then you can export to them. That's not the way that sanctions work. The way that sanctions work is if the company is listed, then every company they own is sanctioned, and you better not work with sanctioned companies, because otherwise you're violating sanctions. For various arcane, you know, reasons that have to do with nothing.

• 2:05:39John Coogan?

  That seems like a really simple own goal there.

• 2:05:41Speaker 07

  Exactly, exactly. So, we basically put in place, there was a regulation that said, hey, we're gonna fix this really obvious loophole, that is being blatantly exploited, that also is just very logical. And the Chinese response to that was to go way over the top, and say, we're gonna cut you off from all the rare earths, and, you know, threaten your entire economy.

• 2:06:03Speaker 07

  They didn't think that was proportionate. I think what they were trying to do was send a signal that we won't tolerate any additional export controls on any entities in China. And we want any additional restrictions on our access to technology, we're going to go over the top. It was really risky for the Chinese because the US does have big leverage over the Chinese too, right? There's two things that they're extremely dependent on us for us that we could cut them off from. The first is the US dollar, right? Their financial system is still very reliant on the dollar. Obviously, they're trying to extricate that. That would have enormous implications, but they're reliant.

• 2:06:38Jordi Hays?

  What would that look like?

• 2:06:41Speaker 07

  Sanctions on banks or something like that. Like, I think it's something the Chinese fear quite a bit. Now, to be clear, I'm not advocating for that, and that would be a really significant move, but just it's something that would be a, it's a lever that we have. The second is semiconductors, right? They're not good at, you know, they have limited 7 nanometer, can't do anything beyond that, and they're very, all their whole industry, they're reliant on chips made with US tooling and so on.

• 2:07:04Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so I want to get way more into chips, but to kind of ground the next part of the conversation, like, catch us up to speed on the, on what you kind of, what your takeaways were and what we know out of the meeting in South Korea.

• 2:07:20Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I think basically, the deal was sort of a freeze for freeze. They agreed to freeze implementation of their massive escalation rare earth rule. We agreed to freeze our affiliates rule. So I think you think of it as largely it locks in the status quo for the duration of the deal. There was various other things that it resolves that are recently created issues. The Chinese agreed to buy soybeans, we resolved rare earth access, et cetera. It did, it did not, you know, we avoided some of the worst-case outcomes. There was no agreement to send, you know, our votes to advance chips to China. There was no, we didn't accept like a Trojan horse package to like, hey, we're going to build a bunch of, you know, Kittle and BYD factories in the United States, which would

• 2:08:04Speaker 07

  have been very bad for US battery and auto industry in the longer term. But I think China really does feel emboldened right now because they kind of punched us in the face with the rare earth rule and our, you know, what happened was we both de-escalated a little bit. We'll see what happens going forward, but the status quo, to a degree, benefits China. They're trying to buy time, they're trying to circumvent our controls, and if we're not willing to kind of continue to engage in this, in this kind of technology protection effort. Then every day, the Chinese get a little better at working around our controls, so.

• 2:08:37Jordi Hays?

  What, what can you say about, uh, or what do you, what's your read on the actual dynamic between Xi and Trump? Like, I feel like these two guys have been in the game for a long time. I have to imagine, my, my, part of me wants to believe that they enjoy the, this like, you know, deadly dance that they play with each other, but maybe that, maybe they're just like deeply frustrated.

• 2:09:01John Coogan?

  Putin and Xi Jinping, uh, kind of be like, yeah, we might live forever. Yeah, you think you're gonna make it to 160, bro? It's like, he's like, yeah, totally. I got some scientists that are cooking up crazy stuff. I love that this is like hot mic, who knows if it's real, might be a psyop, but I like to imagine that they're just, you know, growing down. Who knows? Well, yeah, what do you think?

• 2:09:19Speaker 07

  I will say, uh, that was not the first time I've heard, when I've heard, you know, leaders of countries speak to the desire to live to 150. Uh, here's some interesting things you work at the White House, and I have heard that before. Not from them, but, uh...

• 2:09:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I'm thinking of putting down, that's great.

• 2:09:36Speaker 07

  Uh, yeah, but, um, no, I mean, look, I think that, that Chi, Trump's obviously coming at this from, from, you know, this deal-making perspective, that's not surprising. Um, and obviously, there is, you know, political dynamics here on top, uh, you know, both because I think there's threats to, you know, the Chinese, the Chinese kind of both pose threats to hollowing out industry, but also are, are kind of doing acute things to cause pain to some of Trump's political base, like I think that the soybean purchases and things like that are doing that. Yeah, exactly. Um, uh, on the other side, uh, I think that, you know, Xi is very much seeing himself as managing the, the relationship for the long term.

• 2:10:18Speaker 07

  Um, I mean, what hovers obviously over, over all of this is, is Taiwan as well, uh, and the desire to kind of slowly move the United States away from Taiwan, um, which is ultimately his like long-term historical perspective and, and goal. So I, in some ways, they're coming at this from a little bit opposite, you know, I think Xi is from the much, much longer-term angle and Trump from a, a shorter-term angle. Um, but I don't think they necessarily have hugely different perceptions of the, you know, broader dynamics at play here.

• 2:10:49Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so on the, on the chip front...

• 2:10:54John Coogan?

  Okay, yes, so we got the rollback. Yeah, let's move on to chips.

• 2:10:57Jordi Hays?

  So I don't even know, maybe it was two, three, four weeks ago at this point, but somewhere in the last like month or so, they were basically like, we don't want any of your chips at all. And, and I didn't really know how much to read into that at the time, people.

• 2:11:13John Coogan?

  It seemed like the deep sea team wants Nvidia chips, but CCP said.

• 2:11:17Jordi Hays?

  So if you're an AI.

• 2:11:18John Coogan?

  You gotta justify why you'd want Nvidia chips over Huawei chips. We're working hard. Let's support them.

• 2:11:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Xi wants to build up, you know, real national champions that can get to the cutting edge.

• 2:11:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:11:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, or leading edge. Uh, and at the same time, the AI industry wants to be able to make as much progress as they possibly can.

• 2:11:37John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 2:11:37Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, what was your read when that news broke? And then, uh, how much do you think they're still kind of gunning for Blackwell grade chips?

• 2:11:49Speaker 07

  Yeah. So number one, I think they are, you know, the Chinese will take all of the US chips that they can get in a vacuum. Um, like I, I, I think that there's some negotiating ploys here. Uh, and I think, I think they were holding the H20s kind of hostage because they wanted to, to turn the tables on us and get us to give them Blackwells, which, which obviously didn't happen. There is a possibility that there's, uh, the information filtering up to Xi is saying, actually, we can do this ourselves. You shouldn't take these.

• 2:12:25Jordi Hays?

  And that would be like Huawei being like, no, give us, just, just keep the money, you know, coming back to us so that, you know, we're close and we'll be a lot closer in a few years if we can, you know, take those dollars, reinvest them, et cetera.

• 2:12:40Speaker 07

  That's right. But the problem is like, there's just no way that China can meet their domestic demand with Chinese chips alone. I mean, if we can have all sorts of debates about Chinese production numbers, and I'm happy to engage in those, but fundamentally, the United States cannot meet demand for our own AI ecosystem with, with, you know, all the semiconductor production in the world and all the best companies. So it's obviously impossible that. China, who has a much more nascent ecosystem, is heavily restricted on tooling. And I think all the estimates of their seven nanometer production capacity, not to mention, obviously, they don't have any five, four, three, two production capacity, is, you know, somewhere in the realm of one twenty-fifth to one one-hundredth of the United States.

• 2:13:23Speaker 07

  Like, there's just no way that they can fill their domestic demand with Chinese chips. So any effort to say, we're going to not take any US chips, is going to inherently hobble their AI industry. I mean, I guess at some point, if you're very close, the marginal value of that would be such that you're willing to take it. But I think, you know, just given the dynamics we're broadly seeing with US AI companies, I'd be very surprised if they were, they were actually, when the cards were down, were going to reject Nvidia chips.

• 2:13:51Jordi Hays?

  Is Jensen being in South Korea at the same time just a coincidence? Or did he, do you think, you know, he sort of planned around that?

• 2:14:02Speaker 07

  Do you think anything with Jensen's a coincidence these days?

• 2:14:07Speaker 07

  No, I don't think so.

• 2:14:09Speaker 07

  No, it makes sense. There was the Apex CEO summit. He's the CEO of the biggest company in the world. Like, he should be there regardless.

• 2:14:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, he's running, Nvidia is basically a country. I mean, their market cap is like, you know, bigger than.

• 2:14:24John Coogan?

  Their market cap is equivalent to twice Canada's GDP, something like that.

• 2:14:28Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's greater than Germany's GDP.

• 2:14:31John Coogan?

  Remarkable. Not that you can really compare those, it's kind of Apple store.

• 2:14:35Jordi Hays?

  You wrote a piece that you published last night around why Chinese car investments are a national security risk. Would love for you to kind of like, give us a preview on that front.

• 2:14:47Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, the point we were making, there was a lot of rumors in advance of the summit that another thing that the Chinese were dangling, which did not come to fruition, was saying, hey, appealing to the dealmaker element of Trump and saying, hey, we'll give you a bunch of investment in the US in exchange for, you know, whatever, I mean, as part of the deal. But that's kind of very obviously is a Trojan horse. We, you know, there's, we very much restrict Chinese investment. Critical industries in the US via the CFIUS process right now. And obviously, particularly given the rare earth controls, you would think that that would, I think it has shown that we really can't be dependent on China for critical supply chains. So if we were to have BYD factories, like I was saying before, like BYD factories or CATAL factories in the US,

• 2:15:33Speaker 07

  that's not, that's, that's just as bad as relying on Chinese graphite for batteries, right?

• 2:15:39Jordi Hays?

  So when you, when you say Chinese investment in the US, you mean them setting up local factories, which is different from making equity. Yeah, yeah, because China wants us to make as many equity investments in their companies as possible. Because that gives, I mean, think about DJI is a good example. There's American venture capitalists that were in DJI. They have huge returns, just like sitting there. They now have an incentive to say, hey, we shouldn't, we shouldn't ban DJI. Like, it's not a problem that China can fly, you know, millions of drones over, over all of our cities. Just, just worry about something else. We saw this with, I mean, we saw this with Byte, we saw this with ByteDance, too.

• 2:16:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:16:22Speaker 07

  Yeah, no, that's right. And there's a whole separate conversation on kind of outbound investment and what we should think about with, with US investors investing in China. And then with inbound investment, the question is, what are the risks that the Chinese, and not passive investment, that's very different, but, but active investments and particularly setting up, you know, large facilities in key supply chains. What are the risks here? And the trend we've seen over the course of multiple administrations has been to take those threats much more seriously. So it's, it's, you know, I think that's a positive thing. I think that the other thing the administration is going to have to really think about is, you know, first of all, what are the investments we need to make in those supply chains? If we're not going to accept that and we're going to want to diversify not just from like Chinese batteries,

• 2:17:06Speaker 07

  but also like all the way down the Chinese battery supply chain. What does that mean? But also, we have to think about kind of what are the sectors where, and this is where we got to the car, was what happened with cars, and we talked about in the piece. What are the sectors where just having large scale deployment of kind of connected Chinese products in that area poses a risk? And I think there was a recognition in the Biden administration that actually, you know, electric, vehicles in general, having You know, it's 20%, 30% of the cars on the road were Chinese and could theoretically be like, you know, switched off by Beijing. Yeah, I mean, they could cripple our transportation infrastructure overnight, right? That is something that wasn't a, that was unacceptable. So we've effectively banned Chinese cars, but did it before there was big market penetration.

• 2:17:50Speaker 07

  So I think we have to kind of think about what are the other, like, I think there needs to be some pretty hard conversations on robotics, right?

• 2:17:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so what do you think about Unitree just selling humanoids on Walmart.com?

• 2:18:01John Coogan?

  We were thinking about buying one here.

• 2:18:03Jordi Hays?

  Because, because I've, I've been very vocal over the last year, as long as we've been doing the show, that, you know, I think it's super disappointing that we let, you know, like, GoPro should have been the dominant American drone company, and there's a longer list of companies that could have made great products in that space. Maybe people would have to pay slightly more, but we just let DJI flood. And from, from what we know, DJI was just willing to lose money for a very, very, very, very long period of, of time in order to just take market share. And so when I think about humanoids, and, you know, I don't, I'm not going to put a Unitree robot in my home, but if they're the cheapest and, you know, if they're at

• 2:18:47Jordi Hays?

  kind of the leading edge right now, there's a scenario where we just let them flood the United States with humanoid robots and maybe they're adding value in home or in factories in different settings, but then it's just obviously, like, you just watch any sci-fi movie and you can understand, like, the potential, like, national security risk of allowing robots that can be teleoperated to, you know, just proliferate all over the country. And so it just feels like, hopefully that comes up at some point in some of these discussions of just, hey, maybe we make the call to not allow this to happen like it did with drones.

• 2:19:23Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think we just have to have kind of class-based regulations on these things. It says anything that fits these parameters, you know, a robot in your home that's capable, that has recording equipment and audio, yeah, and can like has mapping technology and maybe has, yeah, it has some kind of appendage. I don't know, you could figure out a way to do it. Like, it just cannot be sold in the United States if it's from a Chinese company. Or Chinese, Russian, North Korean, right, like the broader set of actors. The only category of items that we've done that for as a class is vehicles. But I think that needs to be, you know, we need to think about, we have the tools to do it, and we need to think about what are the areas where that pose kind of similar risks.

• 2:20:08Jordi Hays?

  And you're worried that we'll wait until there's a robot uprising to do something like this? I mean, you said earlier, like, the US is really good at reacting in a crisis, and I just hope, like, at some point, like, if I'm China, and you're letting me sell humanoid robots into your country at scale, and you're a political adversary, like, I'm laughing, I'm laughing at you. Like, it just seems like totally unserious.

• 2:20:38Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think it is easier to do these types of things before there are huge market impacts. So part of the reason that the cars move was doable was because, first of all, like, industry was very supportive, right? We had Detroit banging down the door, being like, this is, we're gonna get killed by the Chinese. But, in the same way they are with tariffs. But, but, but second of all, the market penetration of all the Chinese car companies was very close to zero still, partly because we had such significant tariffs, although those were going to become muted in effect. So if you have an area where it's still pretty nascent, it's doable, and think about...

• 2:21:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, humanoids are perfect. Like, the second, once you have a million Americans that have spent 20 grand on a humanoid, and they're like, I'm not, like, I want to buy the next version. I like this one. You know, it's not like, we've now seen, the Chinese can build hit consumer products. There was a long time where people didn't believe that was true, but clearly with TikTok and DJI, like, it's no longer a debate.

• 2:21:38Speaker 07

  And DJI is a great example because, you know, DJI, it's much more complicated to do this for UAVs right now because DJI is everywhere. Also, all sorts of like state and local and municipal governments, even the federal government still uses DJI drones. They're just, they have such dominance that like, even if we did do it, we would have to do some kind of mitigation steps even to implement it if we did it today, which maybe we should, but it's just, it's massively complicated. Whereas if you do it nascently, it's just, you could just kind of cut off the appendage.

• 2:22:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, anybody that disagrees about the national security risk here and the potential downsides, like you can't believe that, like if you believe that Israel was able to run like a decade-long operation to get pagers like sold into the right group of people that they could then carry out this, you know, coordinated action, and then you think it's safe to just let robots from an adversarial nation flood our country, like I don't know what to do. I think you're just.

• 2:22:36John Coogan?

  You're lost.

• 2:22:37Jordi Hays?

  Blissfully.

• 2:22:39Speaker 07

  And they won't let us develop the domestic robot industry unless we do something like that too, right? Like they will consistently undercut us and we'll never, our companies will never get mature enough where they'll be able to benefit from the economies of scale where they can even remotely compete with the Chinese. Instead, they're going to be 100% off.

• 2:22:55Jordi Hays?

  We were having this debate before you, not debate really, but before you got on. It's like, I believe that China can simultaneously buy as many leading-edge chips, Blackwells, whatever, whatever we'll give them, and simultaneously provide the, the long-term capital to allow their own industry to catch up on whatever time scale it needs to catch up on. Like what is the tolerance level?

• 2:23:20John Coogan?

  Is there, basically, is, is it possible for us to run the Chinese playbook against them? We subsidize Blackwells, flood their markets with Blackwells, and then they can't go down the learning curve with SMIC and SME and Huawei, and then at the last second when they're super dependent, we pull it back when we need to right before, I guess, ASI hits or something like that. That's the basic thesis. Debate.

• 2:23:44Speaker 07

  I mean, I think two things with that. One is that history would show that's never something that the Chinese are going to accept, right? They they they've never been OK being reliant on any Western technology of any significance. They also, we, you know, we we've been very clear about our intention to keep this dominant. Now, I think you can't put that toothpaste back in the tube like they're going to go. We we saw they were going all out in indigenization at, you know, back in 2020.

• 2:24:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:08Speaker 07

  It's even more the case now. Their constraints are not desire or cash. They they are actual access to equipment and tools, and we're lucky that the the SME and, you know, not just lithography machines, but also etching deposition machines, like anything, all the all the kind of really advanced equipment is is among the most complicated technology in the world.

• 2:24:28Jordi Hays?

  But we can assume that they're actively that they have, you know, thousands or tens of thousands of people that are tasked globally with just collecting as much information as they possibly can to reproduce it locally.

• 2:24:40Speaker 07

  Yeah, the only reason this works with chips is because this is the most complicated equipment with the most complicated supply chains on earth, right? Like, an UV lithography machine is literally the most complicated machine ever made by man, so therefore it's possible the Chinese can actually indigenize every single thing on earth except this. Like, that is a logically consistent outcome. The other thing I would just say with respect to your your your thesis is if that was the play, the more effective way to do that would be to cut them off from everything completely, but then tell them you can have it via US cloud, because then you can cut it off at any moment's notice. You could debate if that's a good idea or not, but like, chips are going to be a lagging effect, right?

• 2:25:23Speaker 07

  It's going to be two to three years until all the GPUs kind of go bust or.

• 2:25:27John Coogan?

  Or get depreciated, or you need to move on to a new architecture. It's interesting.

• 2:25:32Jordi Hays?

  Hmm. What what uh what is the most current debate on the ground in Washington around, like, black wells specifically?

• 2:25:41Speaker 07

  So there is the question of whether or not we should ship them. But actually, the more pertinent question is, is there's a piece of legislation called the Gain AI Act that's moving on the Hill that actually the Senate passed as part of the NDAA, the must-pass annual defense bill, and is being debated with the House right now. And it's sponsored by Senator Banks. And basically, it says, he's a Republican from Indiana, and basically, it says, look, we're not going to weigh in on the question of whether or not we should ship chips to China. That's a separate question. But regardless of where you are on that, American companies should get priority access before Chinese companies. And it basically requires, before shipping any chips to China that are controlled and

• 2:26:24Speaker 07

  authorized, it requires American buyers to get right of first refusal, which I think is a, from my perspective, is a pretty logical approach. Whether or not you support or oppose AI chip exports to China, you know, saying that America should have them first is logical. It also does one other thing, the most recent text, which exempts trusted US exports to trusted US persons to anywhere other than China from license requirements. The reason this is important is actually, there's a lot of pending deals in the Middle East right now from US data centers that are trying to make billions of dollars of deals in the Middle East. Those are subject to license requirements. There is a lot of negotiations on whether or not those can go, and they've been held

• 2:27:09Speaker 07

  up for a long time. But this would say, as long as the government certifies them as a trusted US person, and they're subject to a couple, you know, standard restrictions, like, you know, they keep 50% of their computing power in the US, then they can go without US government approval. So really, basically, trying to prioritize US customers in any decisions vis-à-vis Chinese companies, and also US companies vis-à-vis any decisions on the international AI buildout.

• 2:27:33Jordi Hays?

  Do you think Jensen will be happy with that?

• 2:27:40Speaker 07

  Nvidia has been pretty public of their opposition to the bill. But, look, my response would be-

• 2:27:46Jordi Hays?

  And is that just they want, they don't, they just want the flexibility to do deals, effectively? Like, because it's not exactly a secret that Nvidia, like, they have a Shanghai office and R&D center, like, they're trying to, I've joked that Jensen is, you know, the juggler, just sort of like juggling a bunch of different, you know, national interests, always. And I guess that's his duty to the shareholders. But, what is their specific, do you know what their specific opposition is?

• 2:28:21Speaker 07

  I think, I mean, any regulation is generally opposed, and I think they're concerned it would kind of hamstring their operations, or result in kind of bureaucratic complexities that actually would prohibit them from selling anything to China, even if it kind of was prohibited. I guess I think that this is a good faith effort to work to develop a system that would allow that, if that's the administration's policy position to do so. I think my response would generally be like, if, the question is really, is there a supply shortage of GPUs or not? Right? Because if there is, I think it's pretty clear with Blackwell that there's more demand than there is supply, then I think that US companies probably, it's not surprising to

• 2:29:04Speaker 07

  say that the US government, for the US government to say that US companies should get priority over these, over foreign companies for these chips. If there's not, then the bill, in theory, would have no impact on their, on their ability to sell them to others. Now, certainly, I think there's tweaks to the language and things that people would be, you know, I know that Turner Banks and his staff are, you know, happy to work with industry on, but that's the intent here.

• 2:29:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:31Speaker 07

  I'd hope that we could come to a resolution there.

• 2:29:32Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense. Really enjoyed this conversation. Come on again soon. We'll reach out, I'm sure there'll be much more to talk about in the near future.

• 2:29:41John Coogan?

  This is fantastic. Thank you so much, Chris.

• 2:29:43Speaker 07

  Thanks, guys. Appreciate you having me. Look forward to talking more in the future.

• 2:29:46Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:29:47John Coogan?

  See you later. Bye. Let me tell you about public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi asset investing. They got industry leading yields. They are trusted by millions, folks. And our next guest is already in the restroom waiting room. Let's bring in Max Junestrand from Legora into the TVP Ultram.

• 2:30:06Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 2:30:06John Coogan?

  Max, how are you doing?

• 2:30:08Speaker 08

  Welcome.

• 2:30:09John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:30:09Speaker 08

  I'm great. Good to see you. How are you?

• 2:30:12John Coogan?

  Congratulations on all the progress. Introduce yourself, the company, and then give us the news.

• 2:30:17Speaker 08

  Of course. I'm Max Junestrand, CEO, co-founder of Legora. We're an AI-powered workspace for lawyers. We just closed our series C, founded the business back in spring 2023.

• 2:30:29Jordi Hays?

  How much did you raise? John's ready. John's ready.

• 2:30:32Speaker 08

  Hundred fifty million on a one.

• 2:30:37John Coogan?

  Can't even.

• 2:30:38Speaker 08

  I got all of these pictures from, I got all of these pictures back from the gym this morning from Stockholm. They had bought a huge inflatable unicorn. Maybe we can send you some pictures.

• 2:30:47John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:30:48Speaker 08

  It literally takes up half the office.

• 2:30:51Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:30:52Speaker 08

  If I added it to the meeting calendar, so you can, you can book it.

• 2:30:56John Coogan?

  Are you a YC company?

• 2:30:58Speaker 08

  Yeah, we were in YC winter 2024.

• 2:31:00John Coogan?

  Winter 2024?

• 2:31:02Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:31:03Speaker 08

  Yeah, winter 24.

• 2:31:04John Coogan?

  That's insane.

• 2:31:05Speaker 08

  Eighteen, eighteen months.

• 2:31:06John Coogan?

  This must be one of the fastest growing YC companies of all time. That's actually crazy.

• 2:31:12Speaker 08

  Month in seed to series C.

• 2:31:14John Coogan?

  Wow, that's impressive.

• 2:31:16Jordi Hays?

  So the VCs, they'd said, we need 10% max. And you're like, best I can do is, uh, eight, eight point three?

• 2:31:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:27Speaker 08

  I'll tell you actually, this one was easier to negotiate than the first one I did with Benchmark. Um, when I did the one with Benchmark, we sat down, we took an Excel, chatted and put in some numbers. And I went, there's no way, dude. And he goes, I've never done a deal where I didn't get 20%. And then we started going down on the like point decimals. And I think we landed on something like 18.51%. It was extremely.

• 2:31:55John Coogan?

  You got it to back off just a little tiny bit.

• 2:31:58Jordi Hays?

  It was good. He broke his rule for you. So.

• 2:32:01John Coogan?

  Okay. So how, how are you? We, we've talked to a bunch of.

• 2:32:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let me give some context here because, uh, a good friend of mine is a lawyer. Uh, and, and the firm he's at, he's, he's on their like tech kind of advisory. I don't know, whatever, whatever, you know, big law. Uh, and he's been evaluating products and about a year ago, he like was not impressed at all. And when I saw him, uh, I saw him last week and he was telling me that, uh, he now is seeing AI tools do, um. He called it like a hundred thousand dollars worth of like diligence in like 10 minutes.

• 2:32:40Jordi Hays?

  And he was like, huge wake up call. He was like, thinking about, um, like, he didn't, he didn't even think his firm would be able to evolve to that. Even though he, even, even though, and this is a big, you know, big firm, but he, uh, he was like, clients are gonna realize like, what's the game has changed like very quickly and not every law firm is gonna be, is gonna react, uh, quickly enough. And so, um, yeah, kind of wanna get, yeah, wanted, wanted to get the update on like just how much has changed kind of over the last year because there's product innovation that's happening. And then there's just like, the models are getting better and they're both feeding into each other.

• 2:33:22Speaker 08

  Yeah. Well, I, I, I kind of view it like this. Here's the model capabilities. Here's the product capabilities and here's the people capabilities in terms of using those products and getting the most out of it. So there's a huge sort of gap still to be filled in terms of what people are using the products for. I mean, back in 2024, when we were part of Y C, I mean, Legora was a glorified, uh, G P T rapper, uh, with sort of good rag, good citations, you know, solves complacency and, and detail, uh, issues. But now I, I think your friend is right. The products have moved from being a conversational, simple AI into something that solves much more sophisticated tasks. And it looks very differently across transactional work or in litigation or in in-house work.

• 2:34:07Speaker 08

  If you take due diligence as an example, I mean, it's effectively the exercise of looking through a large number of documents and understanding what is within those documents. And I think L L Ms were better at reading than writing initially, which is, is quite an important distinction. So we came at this whole problem very much from the review angle. I think some companies, I mean, look, we were not the only ones who realized that legal and LLM was going to be a nice marriage. They came at it from the thing like research angle or drafting angle, which was much, much harder to build a good company on in the early days.

• 2:34:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:43Speaker 08

  And I think now what's happening is, I mean, I don't know how many apps you use on your phone, I use maybe five.

• 2:34:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:48Speaker 08

  And what's happening is, um, the lawyers don't want to learn twenty different point solutions. We're bringing everything into one suite. And then with things like MCP, we can actually also allow the really sophisticated law firm, law firms to bring in corpus of their own bespoke tools and capabilities, which I think gives a much richer environment.

• 2:35:10Jordi Hays?

  I, I have a very painful lesson around diligence, which is why I care, I'm very excited about this technology. There was, I worked on a deal last year, you know, before we started the show and we were in diligence on this company. And there was a single document that killed the deal. And the lawyers had already racked up like, like a hundred, like a hundred thousand dollar bill before we, before we, before we found it.

• 2:35:39Jordi Hays?

  And it ultimately meant that, you know, that all, all the parties walked away. But we were still sitting there with like this massive bill and it was just like unbelievably painful because it wasn't even complicated. It was just, the business was incredibly old and there was just this one deal that they had done like a decade ago that meant that, that it was just like kind of dead in the water.

• 2:35:58Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, what's, what the tech allows is that you can also do a DD on the sell side before you even put the documents into the data room and you say, hey, let's go open it up to the other side, right? Like it's, it's, it's funny that it's called a data room, right? Because it used to be a physical data room with a bunch of boxes. You would go into that room, you would open it up, you would start reading all the documents. Then we got Ctrl F and you could start Ctrl F-ing for different change of control classes. And then came the early versions of the sort of AI systems where actually the seed for what became Legora was founded. Back with the early BERT models, if you remember those. And you had to fine tune the system to find specific provisions. And now what's cool is you basically just ask the query in natural language and the system understands it.

• 2:36:43Speaker 08

  So you can even go in there and say, on a scale of one to 10, how much of a smoking gun is this document? And the AI will just respond and provide its reasoning. So I think in the comment that you made, will some law firms disappear? Absolutely. I think law firms will go through a huge wave of consolidation, frankly. Because they've never had tech and sort of real scalability as a weapon. And I mean, you have the big four in auditing and tech has been very good for auditing. It's very good with numbers, very good in finance. Tech has never been good at language until large language models. And so now I think you'll see increasingly firms leverage these things to not only sort of out deliver their competitors, but also to out price them, you know.

• 2:37:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so is the is the solution for law firms, you think transitioning to kind of value based pricing, flat, flat, you know, more like project fees? Because, you know, if you compare this to like the creative world, like the best logo designer in the world is not going to charge an hourly rate because they might be able to make that logo in like 30 minutes, right? And so if they charge like, you can't charge like a hundred thousand dollar hourly rate, but companies will pay a hundred thousand dollars for a great logo. So is that?

• 2:37:58Speaker 08

  Which is correct. I think that's correct for a lot of work. I don't think it's correct for all the work. So I'll give you an example. When we negotiated this term sheet, we were working with Goodwin and our partner Craig there. And when I need his expertise to help me negotiate the term sheet, he's worth a lot more than his hourly rate, which is, I mean, arguably already high, but he's worth a lot more than that in that specific case. But when his team is reviewing simple documents, maybe that's not worth as much if AI can do that. So I almost view it as if AI can do a specific piece of task, it will do it. The only question is like, where does that get transacted?

• 2:38:39Speaker 08

  And I think you'll see value based pricing in taking a portion of the deals. Like the best law firm in the world arguably is Wachtel, and they don't do hourly rates at all. They just say, this is the price to win. And you pay them, right? And they get a portion of that. But I'm also actually seeing another way where really big companies, like the big tech companies, are going to law firms and saying, hey, we're going to pay you $200 million over the next two years, and we want you to do all of this work. Can you do it? And the law firm is then forced to say, are we going to turn down $200 million? Or are we going to figure out a way to do that? And of course, then tech will be part of that answer. So I actually.

• 2:39:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's about creating the right incentive to adopt the tech versus like currently some firms are going to resist it and being like, I actually like doing diligence the old fashioned way where we could get three people to spend, you know, all these hours. This was super fun. I'm super excited for you guys. I have a feeling we'll have you on a lot more in the future.

• 2:39:42John Coogan?

  Just remarkable progress.

• 2:39:43Jordi Hays?

  Wish we had more, wish we had more time.

• 2:39:45John Coogan?

  I love, it's a C Y C company winning, and I rarely see one winning this hard. This is incredible.

• 2:39:51Jordi Hays?

  This hard, this fast.

• 2:39:52Speaker 08

  I gotta give a shout out. Like we, since we started in Europe, we just launched in the U S back in March. So since then, we've built a team from almost 50 people. And it's like the growth that's coming in the U S is frankly what we're doing around.

• 2:40:04John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:40:05Speaker 08

  Thank you so much, guys.

• 2:40:06John Coogan?

  Thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.

• 2:40:08Speaker 08

  Cheers. Bye.

• 2:40:09John Coogan?

  Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Our next guest is Christina from Vanta. She's been on the show multiple times. She's back. We're getting an update. How are you, Christina? Great to see you. Thank you for supporting us for this entire year. It's been fantastic. You've been on a tear. What's new in your world?

• 2:40:36Speaker 09

  Well, I got a hat in the mail from you all, and it's great.

• 2:40:39John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:40:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, you should have got in a jacket, you should have gotten a jacket too, but the team may have sniped it.

• 2:40:44John Coogan?

  Oh, no.

• 2:40:45Jordi Hays?

  Oh, the jacket never, the jacket never showed up.

• 2:40:48Speaker 09

  Jacket never showed up, but I'm really, really into the hat, so thanks for that.

• 2:40:51John Coogan?

  I'm glad, I'm glad.

• 2:40:53Speaker 09

  Things are going well. So a little bit, a lot of AI going on with everybody as we're probably talking about. Getting excited for VantaCon, the security and compliance event of the season.

• 2:41:03John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:41:04Speaker 09

  And just did some surveying of security folks about how they're feeling about AI.

• 2:41:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were talking to the CEO of CrowdStrike yesterday. Very interesting nuance. Some, there's basically like AI-generated viruses now where the actual code that hacks the system is generated on the fly by a generative AI model.

• 2:41:25Jordi Hays?

  And can do reasoning.

• 2:41:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:26Jordi Hays?

  So your malware-

• 2:41:27John Coogan?

  It's gonna be great, I'm sure.

• 2:41:29Jordi Hays?

  Can think like a human now.

• 2:41:30John Coogan?

  I'm in danger, I'm in danger is what I feel like. But how are people feeling? What are you learning from the customer base, from the folks that you're talking to on the ground?

• 2:41:39Speaker 09

  Yeah, so we talked to folks on the ground and then we also surveyed thousands of security leaders around the world. And the results are actually super, super encouraging on the AI front. And I actually even guessed. So we found like four in five security leaders are using or plan to use AI agents to prevent against those sort of attacks.

• 2:41:58Jordi Hays?

  So the solution to the attack, to the AI agent attacks is good guy agents?

• 2:42:04Speaker 09

  It's in fact more AI.

• 2:42:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:42:05Speaker 09

  Yeah, long tokens.

• 2:42:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:07Speaker 09

  So there's that piece. And then we found like kind of a similar percentage, but 70% of folks are letting those agents give input on security strategy.

• 2:42:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:18Speaker 09

  And it's like giving it to a person who's considering it, except but like-

• 2:42:21John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:42:22Speaker 09

  We're in, we're in like default, let the agent talk to your folks and influence them.

• 2:42:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:27Speaker 09

  Versus like default skepticism. And again, this is among security folks. So I was actually pretty impressed with this.

• 2:42:32John Coogan?

  How, do you have a sense of like how token intensive some of these processes are? Because I imagine that like, one of the things you could do is just, the benefit of AI is that it doesn't mind working 24/7 for months on end. So you could just say, actually go through every single line of my code base, one by one, and then just, you know, see, does this, does this same, like, there could be vulnerability here. And just generate tons and tons of, you know, ideas. And then we'll have a human filter through what it thinks could be vulnerabilities.

• 2:43:00Speaker 09

  Yeah. So, okay, I saw your interview with Alex and Berikas yesterday, and I think we're like seeing something similar where it's just like paralyzing.

• 2:43:07John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:43:07Speaker 09

  And we're like, oh, okay, go off, run, take all the tokens, like, see what you come back with.

• 2:43:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:43:12Speaker 09

  And maybe it's something, and then I just did two things at once. And maybe it's nothing. And then I'm like, I kind of just did the one thing, and I have to move to the next task. But like, I'm in, I'm in the spot I am. And so we are seeing like a ton of paralyzation at work here. Yes.

• 2:43:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, what, uh, uh, yeah, what, what, what, what else is, uh, is empowering people on the, on the AI side in security compliance? I can imagine that, uh, like, you know, when we're talking about the technology, we talk about, uh, oh, the future of the agents, we'll just be able to do it. But then when we talk to people on the ground, they're like, uh, I'm just using chat GPT to do my homework, or I'm using it to get educated. And I feel like there's a whole world where we go and we rebuild the compliance training processes in an AI native way.

• 2:43:59Speaker 09

  In a not awful way.

• 2:44:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a lot of times it's pretty awful. I've been through a few of those where you're clicking a button and watching a video and you need to move the mouse. Is there progress there? How fast is that rolling out? What, what is the future of, uh, compliance training look like, you think?

• 2:44:14Speaker 09

  Yeah, okay, well, compliance training in particular, I think a ton, and to your point, like adaptive and compelling and not the like, um, watch a video that feels, you know, at best stuck in the nineties are probably worse things you could say about it, right? Which is like where it's work.

• 2:44:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:28Speaker 09

  Um, yeah, we see folks doing like, the phishing email was like always the classic thing, but now it is just, they're, they're really good because it's also like, oh, let me scan your email inbox and be like, what do you actually reply to?

• 2:44:41John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:44:41Speaker 09

  Not just like, I'll send you the, I don't know, TVP newsletter and like try to, or fake that and try to get you to click on it. Like it's, it's super personalized. So there's some cool stuff there. Um, to your other question, my model of this, kind of an overall, but I definitely see it in security and compliance to steal from Tyler Cowen is like Centaur's. And so it's like AI plus person, and we're at that stage.

• 2:45:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:03Speaker 09

  Right? And we'll be at that, and maybe, you know, AI will take it all the way, like the way it did with chess.

• 2:45:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:08Speaker 09

  But even with chess, there was like a multi-decade, you know, AI plus person stage, and I, we're seeing a lot of that with our customers.

• 2:45:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's fantastic.

• 2:45:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what, uh, we were asking, uh, the CrowdStrike founder about like, like,

• 2:45:24Jordi Hays?

  Basically, was he surprised that we haven't seen like a Gen AI induced like high-profile security incident yet? I don't know.

• 2:45:33John Coogan?

  Like a solar wind.

• 2:45:34Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure, yeah.

• 2:45:35John Coogan?

  Flashing attack.

• 2:45:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what's your, you know, like, how concerned are you about about that sort of like, you know?

• 2:45:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, like even the AWS outage, that was not a generative AI-driven problem. It was just DNS configuration on a database.

• 2:45:51Speaker 09

  Okay, so actually, like, building off of that, I think, I don't know, probably pretty soon, but I don't think it'll be some, like, crazy complicated attack, like, a kind of, you know, it'll be like, oh, you left your database unlocked, it's like the classic Equifax thing, you know, and it's like, maybe AI spotted that, but like, it did the equivalent of like, well, you left your front door unlocked.

• 2:46:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So just another, another lesson, and just like, go back to the basics, drill the basics, human in the loop, there's definitely, the centaur era is going to be here for a long time, I believe. I completely agree with you.

• 2:46:25Jordi Hays?

  Last question, wish we had more time today, like, how are you, how are you and your team thinking about headcount planning over the next, over the next two years?

• 2:46:36John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that's a great question.

• 2:46:37Speaker 09

  It's like all I'm doing right now. Um, in like an AI sense, in a business perspective.

• 2:46:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, just not even in an AI sense, but just like, it's a new, it's a new world, it's a new world. We see, we see public company CEOs doing layoffs and saying, we're doing these layoffs because of AI, and maybe some of it's because of AI, but, you know, others is just, it's really good.

• 2:46:58John Coogan?

  Alex Karp told us he's not going to really grow headcount, and he thinks he can massively grow revenue without actually scaling up the, the, the talent pool that much.

• 2:47:06Speaker 09

  Government contracts are amazing. Um, the way we're thinking about it is, um, like, someone, or like, AI won't take your job, but someone using AI might, like, back to the centaur thing, and so have a bunch of stuff, and that's, that's like our framing inside of Fanta, or Fanta, whatever. And we have a bunch of stuff, both to like, encourage and teach, and be like, this, and then this will be a core expectation of your job. And so like, that kind of model going forward, and filtering on it, and hiring, and, you know.

• 2:47:36Jordi Hays?

  So you're telling the team, like, you should have three, three, at least three bots join every hangout that you do, that are all summarizing, all summarizing the meeting notes, and competing to summarize the meeting notes the best.

• 2:47:51Speaker 09

  I saw this too. I, yeah, I'm, I don't, I'm a note ticker and like notes make me pay attention. So I like can't use those meeting recorders because then I stop paying attention. And I'm just like, I know this. Um, not everybody is like this, but yeah.

• 2:48:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. A lot of it depends on like the actual use case. If you're in some sort of meeting where you need a full transcript, that's probably different, but you know, certain types of meetings, it's going to make more sense.

• 2:48:13Jordi Hays?

  Vanta should make like a really menacing agent that joins and is like watching, watching.

• 2:48:19John Coogan?

  Make sure there's no funny business going on.

• 2:48:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:48:21Speaker 09

  Say some words that'll like pop up at you. Yeah.

• 2:48:24John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join, uh, the show today. We will talk to you soon.

• 2:48:28Jordi Hays?

  Catch up.

• 2:48:28John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:48:30Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon. See ya.

• 2:48:32John Coogan?

  Before our next guest hops on, let me tell you about Bezel. Your Bezel concierge is available. Now to source you any watch on the planet, seriously, any watch.

• 2:48:40Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Uh, quick fire drill, uh, for the team is Alon from Nirvan in the, in the, in the waiting room yet, Ben?

• 2:48:49John Coogan?

  Uh, we have.

• 2:48:50Jordi Hays?

  Cause I know we have a couple more.

• 2:48:51John Coogan?

  Fireworks AI in the re-stream waiting room right now.

• 2:48:54Jordi Hays?

  Okay. But, uh, team, think about ordering here because, uh, Alon.

• 2:48:59John Coogan?

  We have a special, we have a special situation because Nirvan is going public.

• 2:49:03Jordi Hays?

  Today.

• 2:49:04John Coogan?

  And the IPO's timing might be.

• 2:49:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I just want to be cognizant of his timing. So.

• 2:49:08John Coogan?

  Okay. So we will have the production team working on that.

• 2:49:11Jordi Hays?

  But let's bring in Lynn.

• 2:49:12John Coogan?

  Let's bring in Lynn from Fireworks AI into the TV panel room. Welcome.

• 2:49:17Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:49:17John Coogan?

  Show Lynn, how are you doing?

• 2:49:20Speaker 10

  Hi, thanks for having me.

• 2:49:21John Coogan?

  Uh, thank you so much for taking the time. Big day. Uh, would love to get your introduction to the company, how you're framing your business relative to everything else that's going on in AI at such an exciting time. Um, and then, um, we'd love to go into the news.

• 2:49:37Speaker 10

  Yeah, definitely. So fireworks, we are a AI inference platform.

• 2:49:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:42Speaker 10

  Uh with application-specific inference.

• 2:49:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:49:46Speaker 10

  So here's how we think about inference differently.

• 2:49:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:49Speaker 10

  That we do not think about inference as we buying compliances at home. For example, we buy refrigerator, use that for ten years and then upgrade to the next one.

• 2:49:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:59Speaker 10

  Uh we believe model should be continuously becoming smarter and smarter and learning and adapt into the application. So every single application developer, they should have their own model. They shouldn't use off-the-shelf, um you know, any model other people use and become a model API rapper. Instead, model should be part of their product design.

• 2:50:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:24Speaker 10

  And the model is like we raise child, it will continue to learn and be smarter and be more specialized in solving particular problem really, really well. So that's kind of inference platform we provide with um smarter model, faster model and a much more cost-efficient model for every single application.

• 2:50:42John Coogan?

  So, yeah, I mean, you're competing with, I I'm I crazy or you're competing with like AWS, Azure? Like, these are the biggest hyperscalers. They are somewhat model-agnostic, but serve up inference as APIs. Like.

• 2:50:53Jordi Hays?

  Lin's competing with everyone.

• 2:50:55John Coogan?

  Is this the craziest?

• 2:50:55Jordi Hays?

  He's coming for everybody.

• 2:50:57John Coogan?

  But I mean, what, take me a a click deeper on the actual strategy. Is it just that there's so much demand that you can go in, uh go and satisfy the the extra demand? Or do you think you're building something that will just be completely differentiated from the hyperscalers forever?

• 2:51:13Speaker 10

  Right, so um we uh currently we are running very high traffic. Uh we are processing more than hundred eighty requests per second. That is an order of magnitude of uh it's same in the ballpark of Google's search traffic volume. We process more than ten trillion tokens per day.

• 2:51:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:51:32Speaker 10

  Based on Google's earning call. That's similar to their.

• 2:51:40Speaker 10

  That is, that is actually the same as their token processed from Gemini.

• 2:51:47John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:51:48Speaker 10

  So we process a large volume of data. And that means, that just means Open Model has the future. And there are so many startups and enterprise, they are reinvent the new use experience. And they want to have full control of, of the model as their IP. And have the model co-develop, co-evolve, co-adapt into their product. And we see that as a future and that's how we differentiate from product focus point of view. And we do not provide this inference one size fits all. We provide one size fits one, specific tailored towards application.

• 2:52:23John Coogan?

  Are you GPU rich, are you GPU poor? Is this a part of the, part of your strategy to have GPUs available when your companies need them? Is that a differentiator?

• 2:52:37Speaker 10

  Yeah, I, I would like to say we design our product for GPU poor. Because interestingly, we are at the beginning of S curve of huge AI product explosion.

• 2:52:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:49Speaker 10

  But product market fit today doesn't mean viable business. In the sense that many of the, we, we talk, we work with so many companies. They just couldn't scale to millions of developers or billions of consumers. They're going to scale into bankruptcy. Fundamental, their infrastructure is so expensive. Even if they build the best product has so much value.

• 2:53:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:12Speaker 10

  They just couldn't make a viable business.

• 2:53:14Jordi Hays?

  Scaling into bankruptcy is an iconic line.

• 2:53:17John Coogan?

  It's a great line, Lynn.

• 2:53:18Jordi Hays?

  I'm not going to name, there's one company that really comes to mind, I won't name them.

• 2:53:24Jordi Hays?

  Give us the news, give us the news from today.

• 2:53:25John Coogan?

  On the fundraising side.

• 2:53:27Jordi Hays?

  And get that gong ready again for a second hit.

• 2:53:29John Coogan?

  We, congratulations.

• 2:53:30Speaker 10

  We raised our CUC.

• 2:53:32John Coogan?

  Well, yes, give us some more details. Who, who came in, how much, what is the valuation? What else are you sharing about the round?

• 2:53:38Speaker 10

  Yeah, we raised 250 million, co-led by Lightspeed and Index.

• 2:53:44Jordi Hays?

  Boom. Love it.

• 2:53:46Speaker 10

  With.

• 2:53:47John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:53:48Speaker 10

  Participation by Eventic and Sequoia.

• 2:53:51John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:53:52Jordi Hays?

  You can just call it a quarter billion now. You're getting to the big number, the really big number range, so.

• 2:53:57Speaker 10

  Right, it brought us about our valuation to four billion dollars.

• 2:54:00John Coogan?

  Four billion, wow.

• 2:54:01Speaker 10

  So really excited for all the customers, partners and the masters.

• 2:54:04John Coogan?

  And, and quickly, how old is the company? We're three years old. Wow, that is impressive. Congratulations. Well, thank you for everything that you're doing to power the AI revolution.

• 2:54:16Jordi Hays?

  Helping people avoid scaling into bankruptcy.

• 2:54:18John Coogan?

  That should be the company motto. That's honestly one of the greatest lines.

• 2:54:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, we're gonna be, we're gonna be using that line quite a lot. So thank you for that. And it's great to meet you. Congrats to the whole team.

• 2:54:29John Coogan?

  Congratulations. Thank you so much. Have a good day. Before our next guest hops on, let me tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. Our next guest is from Navan. We have Elon Twig, the CTO and co-founder.

• 2:54:48Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 2:54:49John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:54:51Jordi Hays?

  Get that gun ready.

• 2:54:52John Coogan?

  Congratulations. Let's ring the gun preemptively.

• 2:54:54Jordi Hays?

  Preemptive hit.

• 2:54:58John Coogan?

  Now we can, now we can have a conversation.

• 2:55:01Speaker 11

  Champagne.

• 2:55:02John Coogan?

  Cheers, cheers. We have, we have happy dad.

• 2:55:05Jordi Hays?

  Nobody's joined, nobody's joined drinking champagne ever on the show.

• 2:55:10John Coogan?

  If you're joining drinking champagne, I'm gonna have a happy dad from the Milk Boys.

• 2:55:15Jordi Hays?

  From friend John.

• 2:55:17Speaker 11

  I had a really long, a really long day. So that's my last thing before the big party starts. So.

• 2:55:21John Coogan?

  Well, well, congratulations.

• 2:55:22Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. And you're live, live from the Nasdaq. How's, how's the day, how's the day been? And yeah, maybe kind of back up a little bit and actually introduce yourself. I think people can probably tell what, what you're up to, but.

• 2:55:37Speaker 11

  Yeah, sure. So my name is Elon Twig. I clearly like champagnes. I'm the CTO and co-founder, co-founder of Navan. Navan is a travel and expense management company. We started more than a decade ago. Today we IPO'd. Super pumped. It was a beautiful day. Yes, exactly. My entire family, by the way, I think I broke the record of the number of family members that joined me to the server.

• 2:56:04Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 2:56:05John Coogan?

  That's amazing. It's so funny because the last time we were at an IPO, yeah, the last time we were at an IPO, it was for Klarna, Sebastian, who's a friend of the show. And he, for him, it was, it was just like another day. He was like, oh yeah, I didn't even bring my family. I just kind of stopped by, IPO'd the company, come back. But so every founder, every.

• 2:56:24Jordi Hays?

  Wait, how many family members, by the way?

• 2:56:25John Coogan?

  Like processes these things differently. It's always interesting to hear how people treat it.

• 2:56:29Jordi Hays?

  How many roughly? Like thirty, thirty?

• 2:56:32Speaker 11

  No, it was just for my family. It was seventeen. Seventeen.

• 2:56:35Jordi Hays?

  Seventeen.

• 2:56:39Speaker 11

  Seventeen family members at the IPO. Yeah. Congratulations.

• 2:56:43Jordi Hays?

  Really amazing milestone.

• 2:56:45Speaker 11

  If I may say one last thing about the guests. So my parents were here, both of them. Sure. My dad turns ninety in two weeks. Wow. And he was here with me on the, yeah, on the stage. He was like happy. That's amazing. I think most of my excitement was watching them. Totally. Being so excited. Yeah. Not understanding anything because they don't really speak English, but they kind of got the gist of what's happening and it was super exciting. Yeah.

• 2:57:09Jordi Hays?

  That's incredible. What, uh, take us back through, I mean, I'm sure when you, when you looking back into like the depths of COVID, which probably it feels a long time ago, but.

• 2:57:20Speaker 11

  No one was traveling.

• 2:57:21Jordi Hays?

  You were in a business that was, I mean, I just imagine you, you aged more rapidly than maybe Brian Johnson would like during that period. Walk us through kind of some of the key moments getting, getting to this point.

• 2:57:33Speaker 11

  Yeah. Maybe I should first tell you that before COVID, I had black hair. It was all black. Oh, wow.

• 2:57:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, it looks, it looks good on you. It looks good on you. You look more like a serious, you know, executive now.

• 2:57:46Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah. I can fool people around with I'm serious. Um, yes. No, you know, you run a company that the business model is you, we make money when people use the platform. There was no monthly fees. There was no way you don't pay. No long lock-in, no enterprise contract. No enterprise contract. So, and why? Because both my co-founder, Ariel Cohen and I, we, we had this philosophy that if the company generates money on usage, then the company will always be focused on making sure that people would want to use the product because it's a, it's a great experience. And it worked well for us for the first five years. And then when COVID hit, no one was traveling and no one was using our platform.

• 2:58:31Speaker 11

  Not because it was an inferior product. It was because there was a virus and no one could travel. And so we found ourselves with the best product out there with zero usage and zero, zero revenue. And it took six weeks from like, I don't remember the number, maybe a hundred million to zero, six weeks. So then what? Yeah, it was a very interesting point in time, but I can tell you that, you know, five years later, here I am with a glass of champagne. My parents were here. We were celebrating the IPO with a company that has way more products, a much more resilient business model. And trust me, this time it's pandemic proof, so we are not going to go to zero. We'll go down, but not to zero if it happens again. So we learn, you know? That's why we have gray hair.

• 2:59:15Speaker 11

  Battle scars. And yeah, it was definitely a challenging time, but I think that, you know, judging by results, I think that it was managed well. Obviously, the entire company, the entire management team, the board, we were all united around the decisions and here we are. Super happy.

• 2:59:36John Coogan?

  How are you? We were talking to Brian Chesky at Airbnb last week, and he was sort of mapping out his vision for the future of travel. This idea that as we become more online, we also maybe want to become more offline as well, and maybe we're traveling more as well as spending more time just online. How do you internally in the company think about the future of just business travel, pleasure travel, just like the overall travel market?

• 3:00:07Speaker 11

  Right. So first, I should tell you, you know, I'm the CTO and I love technology. I mean, this is my thing. I really, really love technology. When Cheechi PT came out, the first thing that I did, I bought like a $30,000 worth of a GPU. That's what I did.

• 3:00:23John Coogan?

  No way.

• 3:00:24Speaker 11

  And I built a PC. My co-founder thought that he should fire me. It's like, you have a PC under your desk?

• 3:00:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:30Speaker 11

  I said, yeah. And I paid for it. You don't worry about it. I paid for it. And then I started deploying LLMs on top of it, uncensored LLMs. I dove deep into that and I really wanted to know the nature of these creatures, how they behave, because if I were to deploy anything to production based on these creatures, I call them, I need to know who they are, how they behave. Will they lie, for example? Do they know what a lie is? Will they use it? No, they lie, yeah. But forget all the nations. They will also lie for other reasons, intentionally, like they would not want to lose, for example, and they would lie in order not to lose. Lots of discoveries, but ultimately it led us to, once we really understand the

• 3:01:11Speaker 11

  technology, how to deploy this thing to production and let it run completely unsupervised and do stuff for us. And I think the important thing is completely unsupervised. The first thing that we've done is we deployed the Eva. Eva is our virtual travel agent and she communicates with travelers as things happen, when they need to book something or there's disruptions and they need to push their travel by one day, cancel this leg, argue about the refund, et cetera, et cetera. And she would do all of these things for them. And it is all based on an internal framework that we built. We call it Navan cognition. I really like the name cognition. I didn't invent it. It was a professor from Columbia that we work with.

• 3:01:54Speaker 11

  And why cognition? Because it turns L L Ms into a highly functioning cognitive system. So Eva today is completely unsupervised. She manages thousands of chats every day with a very, very high customer satisfaction that matches the humans level. And she offsets more than 50% of the incoming chats. She does not deflect, she solves. So I think our approach to travel is we look for ways to leverage technology to make travel easier so that people can focus on being there rather than getting there. Getting there is just a noise that you have to, it's a penalty that you have to pay. But the focus for corporate

• 3:02:36Speaker 11

  travel is to be there and to be fully there. And there's people outside trying to make me laugh from outside. And I'm a little bit...

• 3:02:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, I'll try. I just have one suggestion. I think if you make an agent one of your, you know, your baby creature and call it Twiggy, please.

• 3:02:55Speaker 11

  Oh, that's a good nickname.

• 3:02:57Jordi Hays?

  Microsoft has Clippy. Navan needs Twiggy. You already went through one. You went through a rebrand. You were Trip Actions. Now you're Navan. I want you to rename Eva to Twiggy.

• 3:03:07Speaker 11

  I love it.

• 3:03:10John Coogan?

  I'll do my best. Cheers. I'm gonna drink for that, really. Cheers.

• 3:03:14Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:03:15John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show on such a big day. Congratulations.

• 3:03:18Jordi Hays?

  Such a monumental moment.

• 3:03:20John Coogan?

  And, and please extend our congratulations to the entire family, all seventeen.

• 3:03:25Jordi Hays?

  All seventeen and the whole team. It's a beautiful moment.

• 3:03:28John Coogan?

  And just, I hope you have a great. I hope you have a great rest of the day. Great rest of your week. Thank you so much. I'm gonna party tonight. Thank you so much.

• 3:03:35Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 3:03:37John Coogan?

  You guys, bye bye. Love your podcast. Love it.

• 3:03:41Jordi Hays?

  What a, what a legend.

• 3:03:43John Coogan?

  What a legend.

• 3:03:43Jordi Hays?

  What a legend.

• 3:03:44John Coogan?

  That, that's the way to do an IPO, for sure.

• 3:03:47Jordi Hays?

  That was tough to, tough to follow.

• 3:03:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:50Jordi Hays?

  You have Taranjeet coming in next.

• 3:03:52John Coogan?

  From Memo. I think that's how I pronounce it. Memzero. He's in the restream waiting room. How are you doing? Great to see you. Thank you so much for hopping on the show.

• 3:04:01Jordi Hays?

  Really, really tough one to follow, honestly.

• 3:04:03John Coogan?

  The last guest with IPO, he was drinking champagne.

• 3:04:06Jordi Hays?

  Raise the billy.

• 3:04:07John Coogan?

  It's a crazy moment.

• 3:04:08Jordi Hays?

  But I'm, I'm excited for this.

• 3:04:10John Coogan?

  But thank you so much for hopping on the show. We're very excited to talk to you.

• 3:04:13Speaker 12

  Yeah, like, thank you for having me. Great to be here.

• 3:04:16John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 3:04:16Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 3:04:17John Coogan?

  Talk to me about the business. Introduce yourself in the business and then I want to go really deep into how memory will actually transfer and, and what the equilibrium of the market will be, but we can go into all the technical or like market structure stuff after we kind of get the general news, where the business is, the shape of what you're building.

• 3:04:38Speaker 12

  Thank you. So I am Taranjeet. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Memzero. Memzero is building memory for AI agents.

• 3:04:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:44Speaker 12

  Right now, everybody is trying to create an AI app, an AI agent, but there is a fundamental issue. All the apps are done because they are stateless.

• 3:04:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:52Speaker 12

  They don't evolve with you as humans evolve. We are trying to fix that. We are the, so far, we are the most dominant player in the market with like forty-one thousand GitHub stars, fourteen million downloads, and we recently announced our twenty-four million funding, led by BasisSet Ventures with Kindred, P2P, IC, and GitHub.

• 3:05:14Jordi Hays?

  Total agent domination.

• 3:05:17John Coogan?

  So I mean, I I I gotta just jump straight into the actual market dynamic because I I have to imagine that right now OpenAI is saying, well, you're gonna log in with OpenAI and we're gonna store the memory because we want you locked to us as much as possible. And for everything else, if we we want to build it within the app, we want to, you know, do we want one click checkout in the app. And if and if we're gonna send you out, you're gonna owe off with ChatGPT. And so are you the Android to ChatGPT's iPhone? Or is there a way that you can play together? Is there a data privacy thing where I can go to Sam

• 3:05:58John Coogan?

  Altman and say, hey, look, I know I'm daily driving the ChatGPT app, but you gotta let me take my data with me, my personalization data with me, because I want to go out into the open, open LLM ecosystem and interact with things all over the place?

• 3:06:13Speaker 12

  Yeah, I think that's a very good question. And there are two ways to look at it. First, it's good that big labs are adding memory in their consumer offering. They are actually educating the market that memory is needed. And they also realize that as models commoditized, memory is the next mode. And it's a matter of time that memory becomes available as an API. But you know, developers who are building all sorts of cool AI apps are using multiple LLMs. So in that scenario, because memory is not just read only, it's also write, you would want to decouple it from LLMs out there. So that's like take one. Now, the fundamental thing for why, you know, this is happening is, you know, we are going through a technological shift. So far, we have been interacting with click, swipe, and scroll.

• 3:06:55Speaker 12

  But for the first time, we are, we and everyone on this planet is getting the ability to talk to software. You can chat with it. You can say a few words, it will say it back to you. So you as human, I as human, we are accumulating rich personal context. Now, right now, it's a handful of AI agents that we use on a day to day basis. And we use like ChatGPT, Claude, and you know, other apps are there. But five years down the line, it's going to be a lot of apps in our Life and imagine if I as a user or you as a user have to explain every app who you are. That's going to be frustrating for you. So in that scenario, we we strongly envision and we strongly will make uh this uh plaid for AI kind of uh you know functionality out there.

• 3:07:39Speaker 12

  Within you as a user are empowered to carry to own and carry your AI memories across any app or device that you interact with.

• 3:07:47John Coogan?

  Okay, so if you're the plaid for memory and

• 3:07:51Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 3:07:52John Coogan?

  in the future, I am using, I mean, this is a real story. Like I use Gemini all the time for V O three. I also, if I'm interacting with a YouTube video, I'll always go to Gemini for that. Gemini is faster in a bunch of different places, but I use the voice mode on Chat G P T. I also use Claude every once in a while. Like I have little memories all over the place. And

• 3:08:15Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 3:08:16John Coogan?

  if I'm in the plaid analogy, that's similar to having a Chase account over here, Morgan Stanley account over here, an E-Trade account over there, a B of A account, a credit card, all these things, and I want to bring those together. Is is that something that you imagine I'll be able to do when someone comes out with a completely new product that they want to customize? I could go over, we were talking to Adobe or something, and then I could say, yeah, I'm gonna auth with memo. And uh and then I'm going to allow you to access my memories or my my, yeah, my memory in all of the other apps and and and port all of that in. Is that something that they would let you do?

• 3:08:54Speaker 12

  See, that's uh that's the future that we feel is highly possible. They won't, I I mean, like big labs won't let you do because for them, memory is one of the modes, right?

• 3:09:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:03Speaker 12

  But if you consider from other side of users, then like, you know, the world is not going to be just one app. The world is going to be multiple apps. It's like OpenAI will be there, Gemini is there, Claude is there, right? In that scenario, once, so I know it's like a technological shift, so you and I can relate, but not everyone on the planet, right?

• 3:09:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:20Speaker 12

  But soon they will relate. And because of this new interface of voice. Like I will feel like why do I have to tell this software again and again? Why is this software so dumb? In that scenario, I think like users should be empowered to own and carry their memories. So far, it has not been the case because it's just been like clicks, data, you know, your session history. But now you're sharing a lot of personal rich context. You should own it. You should be saying that, okay, I give my healthcare memories to this app. I give my financial memory to this app and they are in sync. And that's a future that benefits everyone, at least everyone on the planet.

• 3:09:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:59Jordi Hays?

  Is cold email underrated?

• 3:10:03Speaker 12

  I I actually changed my life because of cold emails. Like I wrote like two hundred cold emails to everyone, almost everyone in Silicon Valley back in twenty three. I still write like a lot in this round also. I still wrote like cold emails to angel investors. Uh, I think it's the most valuable asset for everyone out there. You should be writing more cold emails. Everyone should be writing more cold emails.

• 3:10:27John Coogan?

  I love it. Uh, handwritten or AI generated? What's your take?

• 3:10:31Speaker 12

  No, I I still write like everything personally. I just take AI help to fix, you know, some grammar or some structural issues, but should be personally.

• 3:10:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the AI cold email. Hey, saw you're in New York. Hope you like, I bet you like Central Park.

• 3:10:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, do you like Starbucks?

• 3:10:51Jordi Hays?

  Uh, anyways, congratulations on the fundraiser. Uh, it's great, great to meet you and hopefully get to use Memzero out there in the wild very soon.

• 3:11:02Speaker 12

  Yeah, thank you for having me.

• 3:11:03John Coogan?

  Fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.

• 3:11:06Jordi Hays?

  Um, I have the perfect post to end the show on. That is that, um.

• 3:11:15Jordi Hays?

  Tyler's, Tyler's app is broken.

• 3:11:17John Coogan?

  Oh, taking shots at Tyler. He's doing his best. Did you want to do the virality equals taste one?

• 3:11:23Jordi Hays?

  No, I wanted to do, uh, May, May Tobbs says, "I keep getting ads for cocaine on Facebook."

• 3:11:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 3:11:31Jordi Hays?

  They're just using Linktree as a cloaking page, kind of surprised this works. And to that, I would say, "How do you think, who's gonna pay for the CapEx?" Right?

• 3:11:40John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, I see. You're bringing it back to where we started the show, with Meta earnings. Uh, if you see this, you gotta, you gotta assume, uh, you know, the, the, you know, whoever's running that ad, advertising cocaine, they gotta pay a pretty penny. They gotta pay in their Facebook Ads Manager.

• 3:12:00Jordi Hays?

  This is so funny. There's a, there's a reply here from this guy Zach. "What data does Meta have on you?" And, uh, May Tobbs says, "I was in LA for a day, I guess."

• 3:12:10John Coogan?

  This was a thing, um, this was a thing on, on Facebook of people advertising drugs. And it is a game of whack-a-mole, back and forth, trying to catch people, because the, the lingo will change. And the, the way people are kind of dog-whistling to each other that they have something illegal that they're selling. Uh, it's a, it's a huge game of cat and mouse that the Meta team is, is kind of constantly working on. Uh, and you see those same kind of, uh, like, uh, breathless panicked, uh, news articles about like, is Facebook like a hotbed for, I guess cocaine in this case? Or, or, you know, something else and, you know, a variety of different, uh, adult content or whatever.

• 3:12:54John Coogan?

  And, uh, it's always this like dance of like, how much do they, how much are they gonna invest in trust and safety? How many people are gonna be in the loop? How much AI are they gonna throw at it? How are they gonna get false positives? Because what if you're just posting a meme about Tony's, uh, not Tony Soprano.

• 3:13:10Jordi Hays?

  Tony Montana.

• 3:13:11John Coogan?

  Tony Montana, yeah. Our favorite song that we used in our, in our launch video. If we post that, there's obviously a reference to illicit substances in there. Do you want that to be flagged? No, obviously not. Uh, and so, um, it's a, it's a constant dance. But, uh, very funny that someone actually slipped this through the Facebook's ad, ad review team. Uh, I have a funny story about the Facebook ad review team. Uh, there was a time when you could... Straight up, like, there were companies, there were companies that would basically go and find the individual ad manager who would approve, who would have admin access to the, the Facebook side of the ad manager.

• 3:13:56John Coogan?

  And the company would go and put up an ad and try and get it approved and it would get shut down. And the ad would be like Harvard scientists created this limitless pill that's used by Johnny Depp. It was always Johnny Depp, but it was always Harvard scientists. And it would be a picture of Johnny Depp looking great and then Harvard scientists. And it would link you to some scammy website that would sell you basically some fake, fake nootropic or fake supplement. And these ads were against Terms of Service. Like, it's straight up snake oil. Like, it's not even, like, there's no thesis of like, oh, it's actually good for you, it's just completely fake. But they realized that it would convert and it would be very high margin. And so what they would do is they would go to the Facebook ad manager people and they

• 3:14:39John Coogan?

  would try and bribe them and say, hey, if you go in and you approve my ad, I'll put a hundred million dollars of ad spend behind it and generate two hundred million dollars in revenue. And if I can get that ad approved, if you, as just the individual ad manager, can go and tweak the backend. And so there's like a constant war even inside the organization to make sure that nothing elicits us out.

• 3:15:02Jordi Hays?

  I heard something interesting recently that there's a, a, a health influencer and people make AI videos of them just promoting random supplements on YouTube. So they'll make an AI video. They'll post the video and in the, in the, in the description, they'll put links out to products.

• 3:15:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:15:22Jordi Hays?

  And YouTube does not, it will not systematically identify the, the content themselves. It's just they say they, we support AI video.

• 3:15:32John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:15:32Jordi Hays?

  And so this influencer is paying another AI service to consistently monitor videos and then report them automatically.

• 3:15:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:15:43Jordi Hays?

  But they have to spend ten thousand dollars a month.

• 3:15:45John Coogan?

  It's ten grand a month.

• 3:15:47Jordi Hays?

  On this service because it's super, it's super intensive from a, and, and this influencer like needs to, so you can imagine somebody's.

• 3:15:55John Coogan?

  Yep, I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, there's, uh, yeah, it's a, it's a constant war. It's a constant war.

• 3:16:01Jordi Hays?

  The solution to bad AI is good, good, good AI agents with guns, I guess.

• 3:16:07John Coogan?

  Give your Neo-Robot a Glock. Uh, it needs to happen. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in today. Thank you for listening to the show. We will see you tomorrow. It's Halloween. We have a special show for you. Please tune in. Uh, leave us five stars on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

• 3:16:23Jordi Hays?

  Tomorrow's gonna be spooky.

• 3:16:25John Coogan?

  It'll be spooky.

• 3:16:26Jordi Hays?

  It could be silly.

• 3:16:27John Coogan?

  Have a great, have a good one.

• 3:16:28Jordi Hays?

  And I can't wait.

• 3:16:29John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:16:30Jordi Hays?

  Have a great evening.