Amazon x OpenAI, Ford's EV Reality Check, Kushner Drops WB Bid | Sarah Guo, David Senra, Doug O'Laughlin, Doug Bernauer, Jacob Effron, Logan Kilpatrick

(02:12) - Ford's EV Reality Check (21:03) - Amazon x OpenAI (33:13) - Kushner Drops WB Bid (39:53) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (57:33) - Sarah Guo is the founder and managing partner of Conviction, an early-stage venture firm focused on backing transformative software and AI companies. She’s known for combining deep technical fluency with a strong product lens, shaped by her experience as a partner at Greylock and as a former Facebook product leader. (01:32:29) - Doug O'Laughlin an expert in artificial intelligence and data center infrastructure, discusses Amazon's strategic partnership with OpenAI, emphasizing Amazon's superior execution in data center expansion and power availability. He highlights the challenges of integrating multiple computing platforms, noting that while diversification can reduce costs, it requires significant effort. Doug also expresses skepticism about the feasibility of space-based data centers, citing current difficulties in terrestrial model training and infrastructure development. (01:55:04) - Doug Bernauer, CEO and founder of Radiant, a company developing portable nuclear microreactors, discussed the company's progress in building their first reactor, which is set to become the first new design to go critical at Idaho National Laboratory since 1977. He highlighted securing a contract with Equinix for 20 units and a deal with the U. S. Air Force through the Defense Innovation Unit, emphasizing the role of nuclear energy in driving prosperity by providing power wherever needed. Bernauer also announced over $300 million in new funding, led by Draper Associates and Boost VC, to accelerate commercialization efforts, including constructing a mass-production facility in Tennessee. (02:09:01) - Jacob Effron, Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures, focuses on AI, enterprise software, and healthcare investments. In the conversation, he discusses the current state and future prospects of AI applications, the evolving venture capital landscape, and the potential impact of AI on various industries, including robotics and consumer hardware. He also shares insights on the challenges and opportunities in AI infrastructure development and the role of large tech companies in the AI ecosystem. (02:31:18) - Logan Kilpatrick, the product lead for Google AI Studio, discusses the launch of Gemini 3 Flash, highlighting its enhanced speed and efficiency compared to previous models. He emphasizes that Gemini 3 Flash offers advanced multimodal reasoning capabilities, enabling users to process and understand various forms of information more effectively. Kilpatrick also notes that this model is more cost-effective, making it accessible to a broader range of users and applications. (02:44:17) - David Senra is the creator and host of the "Founders" podcast, where he delves into biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, extracting lessons and insights for his audience. In the conversation, he emphasizes the critical role of storytelling in entrepreneurship, highlighting that the most effective storytellers are often founders themselves, as they possess an intrinsic understanding and passion for their company's mission. He underscores the importance of founders being deeply involved in communicating their vision, as this authenticity and dedication are challenging to replicate through external hires. 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 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 Polymarket - https://polymarket.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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Wednesday, December 17, 2025.

• 0:06Speaker 00

  I see multiple journalists on the horizon.

• 0:08John Coogan?

  Eight days till Christmas, baby. We're live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.

• 0:15Jordi Hays?

  It's Christmas.

• 0:16John Coogan?

  The North Pole of net income. The, I don't know, I don't have any more. Ramp, time is money, save both, easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. Uh, we're mixing it up today.

• 0:30Jordi Hays?

  Put Ramp under the Christmas tree.

• 0:32John Coogan?

  Jordy's the elf today. Jordy's the elf today, we're tracking.

• 0:41John Coogan?

  Hitting it, uh, that doesn't really work. Whoa, okay. Stockings are hung on the gong with care.

• 0:49Jordi Hays?

  We're back.

• 0:50John Coogan?

  Good to see everyone, welcome back to the show. Uh, we have a great show for everyone today. We have Sarah Guo joining us in the TVPN UltraDome. We also have Doug O'Laughlin from Sami Analysis hopping on to, uh, hopefully break down the Amazon OpenAI deal. That is a big news. Uh, I was talking about this with some friends about, you know, SpaceX is potentially going out, gonna Hoover up 30 billion of capital.

• 1:15Jordi Hays?

  They're going.

• 1:16John Coogan?

  They're going out at 1.5 trillion, they're talking to bankers now. They're gonna Hoover up all the capital.

• 1:21Jordi Hays?

  They're Hoovering.

• 1:22John Coogan?

  The public market's gonna be tapped out, right? Well, Sam Allman would like a word with Andy Jassy, and he says, I need 10 billion, and Andy says, sure. As long as you buy a bunch of Tranium chips, that's basically the story. We will get into that, we'll dig.

• 1:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, isn't it, isn't it like mostly or all credits?

• 1:38John Coogan?

  We will see, we will see. But first, I wanted to dig into a little bit more, we, we touched.

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  But don't forget, we also have Logan.

• 1:45John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:46Jordi Hays?

  From Google coming on to talk about, uh, Gemini Flash, the new model they released today. We also have David Senra joining at the end of the show, just to hang out.

• 1:55John Coogan?

  What is the, what are the odds that David Senra will be in a more elaborate Santa Claus costume than me?

• 2:05Jordi Hays?

  Zero. I hate to say it. We'll give him this hat. He can have this hat.

• 2:10John Coogan?

  Anyway, so the, the, closing out the story with the Ford F-150, of course, this broke earlier this week. The CEO of Ford did a, did a round of press interviews talking about the news, which is that Ford, the historic automaker, is killing the F-150, lightning their electric truck. Sales fell 72% year over year. Of course, they, that is a 72% decrease specifically in last month, which is post EV tax credit going away. And the whole project was a money pit. So they took a 19 and a half billion dollar charge and now they're shifting strategies.

• 2:52John Coogan?

  So, I mean, the first question that I was sort of toying with, that we've been debating is, did truck buyers ever really want to go electric? Was that even, was that ever a good idea? Because it always seemed like, who's the last person that's gonna buy an electric car? The truck buyer, right?

• 3:11Jordi Hays?

  So one thing that I was thinking about is I feel like the Cybertruck probably got truck buyers to, like, traditional truck buyers to go electric, but it wasn't because it was electric. It was because it looked electric. Like, it looked different. It looked wild.

• 3:26John Coogan?

  I completely agree with this. And so, yeah, there's this weird thing where like, the F-150 silhouette is iconic, but you sort of...

• 3:32Jordi Hays?

  Forgot I had my elf ears on.

• 3:38John Coogan?

  But, yeah, I mean, there's just like, I mean, ballpark, how many, how many ads, how many billions of dollars have been spent on ads that associate trucks with like...

• 3:48Jordi Hays?

  Being a, being a cool dude.

• 3:50John Coogan?

  Guy, dude.

• 3:51Jordi Hays?

  Guys being dudes.

• 3:52John Coogan?

  Driving through the mud. And a big part of that is the engine note. And a big part of that is the actual exhaust coming out of the back, like rolling.

• 3:59Jordi Hays?

  All that, all that advertising worked on me. Like, I grew up in a, in a Toyota family. We only had Toyotas growing up. And we had one point, we had one point had two Priuses, right? And, but, as soon as I was an adult and I could afford it, I bought a Ford Raptor. It was black on black on black on black. It was lifted. I just wanted the truck that I was that that was advertised to me as a kid.

• 4:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:25Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 4:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:26Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and then, of course, I realized quickly, like, it's very difficult to to to park.

• 4:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:31Jordi Hays?

  It was so loud in the cabin that it did make sense for a lot of reasons, but it but I but I I'd wanted that truck since I was a kid.

• 4:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, and a $750 tax credit probably wouldn't be enough to pull you off the the Raptor if that's what you've been programmed from a young age.

• 4:49Jordi Hays?

  Seventy five hundred.

• 4:49John Coogan?

  Seventy five hundred dollar uh uh EV tax credit. Um, that's probably not enough to pull you away from, okay, I've been watching the Super Bowl.

• 4:58Jordi Hays?

  The engine note.

• 4:59John Coogan?

  Every year, and every year at the Super Bowl, I see truck ads with big, loud engines, and they've been marketing this to me for decades. And yes, EVs, it's very logical, there's a lot of cool benefits. I mean, the Ford F-150 Lightning had crazy stuff. You you'd open up the front, it just had four household power outlets. So you just have like a full, you could have a full like tailgate. There was a 220 volt. You could power a washing machine on it. You could just like pull up with a washing machine and just do your laundry, I guess. Um, also, big part of big, big problem with trucks, I'm sure you experienced this, is that uh you don't have anywhere to store anything. Uh, if you, because if you put it in the back, it could just get taken. You have to lock it down if you're put something in the back. So if you have like.

• 5:43Jordi Hays?

  I think I think I think most people that are buying trucks for.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:47Jordi Hays?

  A daily are getting a a cover over the bed, but.

• 5:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, lock and cover potentially, but then you're in this like weird half and half. Uh, instead, the F-150 Lightning, there was a front trunk that was actually very large, and you could, and it had outlets in there, too, and there were a bunch of features. Uh, and they really went crazy with the features. Um, but uh, like, ultimately, it wasn't really, it wasn't really enough. And there was some interesting, there was some interesting data that Ford was sharing that they were framing as positive when the F-150 Lightning launched. But I think in retrospect, might have actually been sort of a canary in the coal mine.

• 6:22Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 6:22John Coogan?

  So the first stat was that of the people that reserved the F-150 Lightning, 50% had never.

• 6:30John Coogan?

  Owned a truck before. So they're new to trucks. And then 75% of the reservation holders had never owned a Ford before. And so Ford was celebrating this. It's like, we did it.

• 6:42Jordi Hays?

  We did it. New hero product.

• 6:44John Coogan?

  New hero product. It's going to bring new people into the Ford ecosystem. It's going to be a bring new people into the truck ecosystem. We are expanding the market. And in hindsight, what it feels like is the truck buyers didn't want it. The Ford buyers didn't want it. And they're the two biggest markets. And so, yes, there were a class of people that were like, oh, I would always, I've always, an electric truck. That sounds really interesting. I love the idea of a 220 volt. I'm a, I'm a unique purchaser. And they're like, this is a niche product. And they go hard for the niche product. They show up immediately. And they'll do it no matter what.

• 7:15Jordi Hays?

  And you wrote in the newsletter, the first electric truck was the Rivian.

• 7:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:19Jordi Hays?

  And that had only launched a few months.

• 7:21John Coogan?

  Six months earlier.

• 7:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:23John Coogan?

  So the Rivian came out in September of 2021. That's the R1T. Ford shipped in April of 2022. That's actually very impressive to me. I was very impressed with how fast Ford was able to respond to the idea of electric trucks happening. Because electric cars have been around for a really long time.

• 7:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:40John Coogan?

  But there was always this like, is it ever going to happen with trucks? And then all of a sudden it was like, it's happening this year. And you need big company, you need to respond within six months. Like, big companies are typically not that good at responding. Usually it's like, oh, we'll let the startup, we'll let this Rivian company show up. They'll, we'll let them ship, see how they do. And then we'll move, like, a lot of big companies like being second movers. This feels like they were like, no, we're, we're moving in the first wave. They did successfully. A lot of that's because they built off of the F150 platform. They were able to reuse a lot of equipment there in the, in the, in the supply chain. But ultimately, they didn't ship a product that delivered at the level of the R1T.

• 8:21John Coogan?

  So Doug DiMuro, friend of the show, former guest, gave the R1T a 73, which is a very, very good score. It actually earned Doug's Car of the Year or Vehicle of the Year. The next year, Rivian runs it back again, wins Car of the Year again with the R1S, with the SUV. And so Rivian has two back-to-back. Car of the year with Doug DiMiro, but the R1T gets a 73, so that's the benchmark for where you should be if you're competing with them.

• 8:51Jordi Hays?

  And Rivian doesn't break out sales, which is super annoying. I really want to understand this, but my guess is that not over 90% of their sales are the SUV.

• 9:01John Coogan?

  I agree, yeah.

• 9:02Jordi Hays?

  And that is, that is generally just because of the popularity of SUVs among the cohort of people that are going to buy an EV.

• 9:10John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 9:11Jordi Hays?

  And it, and the car just looks fantastic. I think that's underrated. Like, people critique the headlights early on, you didn't really like the headlights, but the car, the silhouette is just amazing. It feels like a 21st century, very, very modern, very kind of modern take on a Range Rover, right? And it has the same capacity.

• 9:29John Coogan?

  Yep, yep. And so, the, so the, the, the R1T got a 73 Doug score, the Lightning only got a 65. So, on day one, even with all the features, even with all the heritage, even with good pricing and time to market and all this stuff, still couldn't actually be a step forward. And it, I think it tied the Raptor, but lost on the, on some of the, some of the weekend categories, obviously, because Doug likes to drive these cars for fun on the weekend. But, you know, people wound up, you know, obviously buying some of them. I've seen some of them around, but my question was, how much does the iconic silhouette help or hurt the Lightning?

• 10:13John Coogan?

  Because you would imagine that there's so much, there's so much value in the F-150 silhouette that you would, you would, that would be a huge advantage, that you're driving something that looks like the classic canonical truck. But at the same time, if you see those Rivian headlights, you know that that person's driving an electric truck, and that's maybe more of a signal, more of a, more, more badge value there. It is just crazy reflecting on how, you know, the way you're talking about the Rivian silhouette looking good. I was thinking the Rivian name, do you like the Rivian name?

• 10:50Jordi Hays?

  I think it's, I think it's fine.

• 10:51John Coogan?

  It's weird, it, it, it, it sticks out to me. It was also weird when it first heard it.

• 10:55Jordi Hays?

  I'm neutral on it.

• 10:55John Coogan?

  It, it, it was weird when it first stuck out. It, it sounded like something that came from like a, like a brainstorming session at a pharmaceutical company. You know, because it's like this weird, like, like what does the name actually mean? I guess it means river and Indian kind of portmanteau, but.

• 11:09Jordi Hays?

  So the reason, so, uh.

• 11:10John Coogan?

  But it's really grown on me.

• 11:12Jordi Hays?

  As a blend of syllables from the river, symbolizing adventure and connection to nature.

• 11:16John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 11:17Jordi Hays?

  Like, I, I always looked at, uh, Rivian as, as something like the, the Whole Foods of cars, right? Like the, the REI of cars, right? It's like, people go to REI.

• 11:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 11:29Jordi Hays?

  Like the average person going into REI is not necessarily like buying gear for the most rugged adventure.

• 11:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 11:35Jordi Hays?

  Like they might be buying gear for their backyard.

• 11:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:38Jordi Hays?

  Or like going on a hike that weekend. And again, like, I feel like the Rivian cars, again, I mean, we had the CEO on, but like have that range where it's like, it really is just like a good daily.

• 11:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:48Jordi Hays?

  But they've built it. It's super powerful. It's very capable.

• 11:52John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm. Um, well, if you were to daily a Rivian R1S, let's say, um, oh, by the way, just to close out the Ford F-150 thing. Um, Ford's plan is to pivot, I will tell you what they're going to pivot to after I tell you about linear. Uh, the soft, the, the system for modern software development, linear streamlines work across the entire development cycle from roadmap to release. Um, so they are going to be pivoting to hybrid, uh, hybrid trucks and hybrid designs. But what's interesting is that it's one of those, uh, it's this extra long range hybrid where you have an electric powertrain

• 12:31John Coogan?

  that is charged by a gas motor. And so you can get like 700 miles of range. I saw someone demo one of these in China and it felt like one of those like crazy like, okay, is it just a gimmick like the jumping car? Or is this a really interesting like value prop? Because you could fill up once, you have all the towing power, like you have the energy when you need it. But then also you, uh, you don't, you don't have any of the ranging, range anxiety of the electric car ownership, which is still a little bit real.

• 13:00Jordi Hays?

  Magnus is a little triggered. Rivian is terrible. Stop talking about it.

• 13:04John Coogan?

  Oh, he doesn't like it.

• 13:05Jordi Hays?

  Ever bought.

• 13:06John Coogan?

  What was bad about it? Tell us the details. Give us the details. I've only heard good stuff. I don't know. Interesting. We'll have to dig it. We'll have to dig into it. Anyway, let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model. Yet, there's an update today. State of the art reasoning, next level of vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. So, here's a question. Here's something that people don't like about Rivian's. It's they don't have CarPlay. Is that a deal breaker for you? Do you like Apple CarPlay?

• 13:37Jordi Hays?

  I think it's solid. The thing that I find annoying is car, like the fact that there's no... The cars that I've owned are all defaulting back to the actual operating system.

• 13:50John Coogan?

  Oh, really? What do you mean they're defaulting?

• 13:52Jordi Hays?

  So, in, I have two Mercedes. They have like the regular Mercedes operating system. And then like CarPlay is layered on top. But I still find myself like turning on the car sometimes and it's the stock system. I'm like, so I just wish there was a single operating system.

• 14:12John Coogan?

  So, Apple's trying to do this because I've noticed this in my cars.

• 14:15Jordi Hays?

  But the manufacturers are like, well, we sell the Android and we don't want you to control us forever.

• 14:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 14:20Jordi Hays?

  Through some type of like new blue bubble scenario.

• 14:23John Coogan?

  Totally. So, I've noticed this weird thing where there are a set of buttons that I can use to interact with CarPlay. So, like changing the song is a button that's mapped to my steering wheel in this Cadillac. And as I, if I push the button, it will go to CarPlay and say, play the next track on Spotify. Great experience. But if I have, if I'm turning the volume dial, the volume exists at the car operating system level. And that overrides CarPlay. And so then, all of the buttons in the car are in like...

• 15:02John Coogan?

  Okay, we're now elevating to the volume knob UI. And so if you push a button, you're not clicking on the actual screen anymore. You're clicking on the volume overlay.

• 15:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:16John Coogan?

  And it's very weird.

• 15:17Jordi Hays?

  Think about how it would be insane if you're on a Mac and it was like running two operating systems at the same time. The difference of being in a car is like you're in a moving vehicle that's thousands of pounds.

• 15:29John Coogan?

  That's wild.

• 15:30Jordi Hays?

  And so it's really, I do think we'll look back at this kind of era being like, okay, what were we doing?

• 15:37John Coogan?

  Yes. So let me tell you about cognition, the team behind the AI software engineer Devon. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. But so Apple's trying to solve this their way. Apple's saying, hey, let us take over everything, including

• 15:51Jordi Hays?

  You can let the fox into the hen house. We can be trusted. We're a good fox.

• 15:56John Coogan?

  Yes. And so they will do, we'll handle the volume. We'll handle the speedometer. And we will do all of that in Apple CarPlay Plus or something, and it'll take the whole screen. And that seems great. That seems like a solution to a lot of the problems that we've identified. Rivian's gone the other way, said no Apple CarPlay. He was on Ben Thompson's show on Sir Tekori, and Ben asked him about this. So Ben said, why is there no CarPlay in Rivian's? RJ says, the CEO of Rivian says, it's a good question. We get asked a lot. We're very convicted at this point. We believe that the aggregation of applications and the experience, and importantly, now with AI acting as a web that's integrating all these different applications into a singular

• 16:41John Coogan?

  experience where you can talk to the car and ask for things and where it has knowledge of the state of the health of the vehicle, the state of the charge, distance, outside temperature, everything becomes much more seamless in time if the vehicle is its own singular ecosystem versus having a window within the vehicle that's into another ecosystem, Ben says. And that's the issue, just the implementation effort on your side? Or is that the issue? Or is it implementation on your side? Or is it that customers are actually short-circuiting themselves? RJ says, we could turn on CarPlay really quickly, but then you end up with

• 17:18Jordi Hays?

  I think I know why he's doing this. He wants the consumer to be able to say. Rivian, get me the fastest production car lap record at Laguna Seca.

• 17:28John Coogan?

  And it just does it.

• 17:29Jordi Hays?

  And it just does it.

• 17:30John Coogan?

  It just does it, self-driving, right?

• 17:33John Coogan?

  So, he basically doubles down and he says, you know, in the age of AI, you'll be able to say, Rivian, tell me what's on my schedule for later today, and it will go talk to Google Calendar, pull that information, and maybe you get stuck in an Apple ecosystem a little bit more. It still feels like a lot of duplicate work where, over the long term, Android Auto and CarPlay will be compounding and adding more features, and they should outrun the individual car companies. Ben actually asks, is this a bit where Tesla covered for you because they don't have CarPlay either, but now there's a rumor that they might add it, and it might make it a little

• 18:16Jordi Hays?

  It's no longer a rumor.

• 18:17John Coogan?

  Is it confirmed that Tesla is going to add CarPlay? I didn't know that that was confirmed, but...

• 18:23Jordi Hays?

  As of November 13, Tesla, from Bloomberg, Tesla plans to feature CarPlay within a window inside its broader interface.

• 18:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, which is normal. So, CarPlay is coming to Tesla. Will CarPlay come to Rivian? TBD.

• 18:39Jordi Hays?

  The question is, will the fart sound effect come to CarPlay?

• 18:43John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, for sure. 100% gonna happen. Anyway, if you want to make a more serious soundboard, go to Fall, the generative media platform for developers. Develop and fine-tune models, serverless GPUs, and on-demand clusters. Anyway, I think Rivian will eventually get on CarPlay. I think it's gotta happen because I just think of the car as, like, the car is not...

• 19:13John Coogan?

  Fully a device, the car is a speaker.

• 19:15Jordi Hays?

  It's not your life.

• 19:16John Coogan?

  It's not my life, exactly. It's not my life. And so if I'm, if I'm going on a run and I'm, and I, and I, and I'm listening to music on headphones and then I get back from the run and I go in the car, I'd like a seamless handoff. And then I go in my house, I'd like another seamless handoff. I, I don't want my house to be like, oh, no, like, we're building House OS and like, we don't interface with Apple. We don't play nicely with Google. I actually, as a consumer, I do sort of benefit from a monopoly and at least picking an ecosystem and staying into it. I mean, I'm, I'm seriously considering going just, I know that the, I think the audio quality isn't that good on the Apple Air, whatever the air speakers are. I can't even, I don't even know. They're a HomePods.

• 19:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:59John Coogan?

  The HomePods. But I'm thinking about just dropping those everywhere because at least it will be integrated, whereas Sonos has just been falling behind, falling behind, falling behind. And imagine if you're in a situation where like the Sonos situation plays out to Rivian, like it would be really, really unfortunate where you could be like, well, at least it still has CarPlay. Like, people will go buy retro cars or, or,

• 20:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:17John Coogan?

  or old cars and then go retrofit them with CarPlay. And, and then it's like, okay, yeah, like it has analog knobs and stuff. It's an old car, but at least it runs CarPlay. So I know that if, if I switch from Spotify to YouTube to Apple Podcasts to anywhere else where you can leave us five stars, you should, it will still continue to play. It will still continue. And it'll play seamlessly because that technology will just continue to get better, regardless of what happens. Anyway, let's move on to other news. But first, let me tell you about Adio, the AI native CRM. Adio builds, scales and grows your company

• 20:56John Coogan?

  to the next level. So the big scoop from Katie Roof, she says, Amazon is in talks to invest over $10 billion in OpenAI. And so let's read through some of this. Get the scoops.

• 21:12Jordi Hays?

  According to three people familiar with the discussions.

• 21:15John Coogan?

  Wouldn't be higher.

• 21:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the valuation would be higher than 500 billion. The Amazon investment would help OpenAI afford some of the commitments it has made, some, to rent servers from cloud providers, including from AWS.

• 21:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is like, it's like, there's somewhat, there's some circularity, but it's not entirely circular.

• 21:31Jordi Hays?

  Not fully beating the circular allegations on this one. OpenAI last month announced it would spend 38 billion renting servers from AWS over the next seven years, making AWS one of at least five. Cloud providers, OpenAI uses to develop AI. The deal also could help Amazon find a new customer for its Trame AI chips, which compete with the Nvidia chips.

• 21:53John Coogan?

  This is kind of like a rebate, you know, it's like they they said, hey, we're we're gonna buy forty. And they said, here, take ten back.

• 22:00Jordi Hays?

  And we'll take a piece.

• 22:01John Coogan?

  Take take ten back. I mean, this is the this is the semi analysis like.

• 22:04Jordi Hays?

  The bigger, yeah, so the bigger, the bigger, honestly, the more notable news here is that Amazon and OpenAI have discussed commerce partnership opportunities.

• 22:12John Coogan?

  That's very interesting.

• 22:13Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI wants to turn ChatGPT into a shopping hub and has discussed earning fees for referring customers to retailers. It isn't clear whether Amazon opening ideal would involve any arrangement related to such features in ChatGPT or AI powered shopping features that Amazon is developing. So I just look at this in the same way as like the Disney deal, which is like, hey, we're gonna invest, but we're gonna give you access to this thing. And I would expect that, I mean, you can imagine OpenAI has been working on getting referrals to from from basically getting a revenue stream from referring products out to Amazon for a really long time, right? They've done the Etsy deal, they're they're doing deals with Shopify, they have not done eBay notably, and they have not done Amazon notably.

• 22:54Jordi Hays?

  And I think there's been some, there's just been some general hesitance to let, again, let the fox into the hen house, right? Because you can think about it, like, the Google search experience is like, or sorry, sorry, searching for products on Amazon is extremely profitable for Amazon, right? If if consumers start just going to ChatGPT to find products on Amazon, that like, Amazon needs to be really careful around that because, yes, they can get a referral fee. Or they'll they're they're getting a customer, but then they, Amazon, or sorry, OpenAI wants to them to pay them for that customer. And that's a customer that didn't just go look at a bunch of ads, right? And I do not like searching for products on Amazon because

• 23:38Jordi Hays?

  the experience is, I'm just trying to find, I always use the example, like, paper towels, right? And it's like, it's so frustrating to search on there because I just wanna buy, like, I'll spend twenty to thirty dollars on this thing. And then it's like three pages of like six dollar versions of the product that I know are gonna be terrible and a bunch of ads for those things, right? And so being able to go into ChatGPT and just say like, hey, I want to buy. This item from a manufacturer or a brand that has been in business for more than 30 years, like pre e-commerce.

• 24:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:15Jordi Hays?

  I want a brand that has just been making this thing well for a really long time. And so I would be defaulting to the LLM and skipping Amazon entirely.

• 24:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, you want to fight, you want to fight to be the aggregator, you want to like, I guarantee that although Amazon shows up on Google search results, like they want people to open the app and search in the app and be the main starting point for their commerce, their entire commerce journey. And we've seen this with Shopify as well. Shopify obviously would love for the commerce journey to not start on Facebook or Meta Properties, instead start in the shop app. They're working towards that. The same thing is true of Amazon and every aggregator is acutely aware of aggregation theory and acutely aware that they should not let someone

• 25:00Jordi Hays?

  Amazon is apparently projecting 60 billion of advertising revenue.

• 25:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:05Jordi Hays?

  Which is growing way faster than the core retail business. They're sort of like, the core retail business is probably growing at the rate of overall e-commerce penetration, whereas this is just like extremely high margin, fast growing, and they want to protect that.

• 25:19John Coogan?

  And probably bigger than what they could make off of a referral fee on top, deeper in the stack, if they're deeper down. Like they, if they control more of that purchase, they can probably take a higher take rate essentially.

• 25:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:33John Coogan?

  Because I imagine their margins on top of all of this is very high. Well, the other side of the Amazon OpenAI deal is that the deal could also help Amazon find a new customer for its Tranium AI server chips, which compete with Nvidia AI chips that OpenAI primarily uses today. As part of the deal being discussed, OpenAI plans to use Tranium chips. Two of the people said the cloud deal Amazon announced with OpenAI last month only made mention of service powered by Nvidia. So if, the interesting thing here is, is what will they be doing with those Tranium chips? Will they have a specific model that runs on Tranium? Will they, will they set up some sort of abstraction layer that they can run any of

• 26:15John Coogan?

  their models on any hardware or any ASIC, basically? Like, like will you see, or will it be like, okay, we still have GPT-4O workloads. Let's recompile 4O for, for Tranium and let it just chill there and Tranium is our, is our pool for

• 26:36John Coogan?

  For 4.0, or you know what? Trainium is going to be our workhorse for image gen or video gen. And let's do our image gen optimized for that particular stack. We, when we talked to, um, when we talked about Trainium initially during the, during the latest launch, um, the Wall Street Journal highlighted real time video as an interesting place where Trainium could potentially outperform. They weren't making the case, at least to the Journal, that Trainium is what you want if you're going to do the biggest, most massive training run. That was sort of the narrative that, uh, the TPU was pitching with the latest Anthropic round, uh, like runs.

• 27:21John Coogan?

  Um, but they did highlight, you know, uh, real time video, video generation. And so I'm, what I'm, what I'm interested in is that is, is, does Trainium get abstracted to a point where it's sort of like model agnostic? Or, or is OpenAI like the, the ChatGPT, the app has a whole host of models? Because these models are now mixtures of models and there's model routers and there's different products, video, audio, uh, image, you know, deep research. Is one of those going to be on Trainium? Or will Trainium be a, like a liquid pool of compute that, uh, cuts across the entire stack? Do you have any, uh, you know, instinct on this or?

• 28:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I, I think the abstraction thing is pretty hard, right? Cause you always hear about TPUs and how, um, the TPU team and like the Gemini team are so closely integrated, right? Like every, all the model architectures like interlinked with the, with the GPU architecture, TPU.

• 28:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:20Speaker 03

  So I, I think it's hard to actually abstract all the way up, but it's interesting. I mean, Anthropic has been like multi-platform, platform for a while now. So I'm, I'm curious how, how they think about this stuff.

• 28:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 28:31Speaker 03

  Good question for Doug.

• 28:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe Doug will, will be able to get us up to speed.

• 28:34Jordi Hays?

  Something that's interesting, if I search on Gemini for a product on Amazon, find me the best blank on Amazon. It takes me, it says top recommendations on Amazon and then I click the link and it takes me to a Google search for that product that is a sponsored result on Amazon. So then, then I click.

• 28:54John Coogan?

  Who's paying who?

• 28:56Jordi Hays?

  So Amazon is paying, Amazon is paying Google to appear in search results.

• 29:01John Coogan?

  AdWords, okay.

• 29:02Jordi Hays?

  In AdWords.

• 29:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:03Jordi Hays?

  And then Gemini is routing basically to AdWords to get the click through there.

• 29:07John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 29:08Jordi Hays?

  So there's no direct integration at all.

• 29:09John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Huh. Yeah, well, uh, I mean, that, that is like the, the odd, Google has so many odd advantages. It's crazy like the, the, the, the, the fact that the Google bot just sees so much more of the internet. Feels extremely important and yet I just don't know how, if it will be enough. If it will be enough to win in consumer in some meaningful way. What does it mean? Does it mean 50% of the value of consumer? Does it mean that they can win, come from behind, defeat OpenAI ChatGPT? Like it feels so important and yet, uh, it, it, it also feels extremely hard to actually pass that message through.

• 29:50John Coogan?

  Maybe they need like a whole ad campaign around it or something, but, um, and, and also I haven't even, did, did Matthew Prince over at, uh, CloudFlare ever publish those results? He was saying, he was asking people like, how much of the internet do you think Google sees relative to OpenAI's web scraper? Like their bot, because no one has blocked, no one's blocking the Google bot. Like you have to be insane to be like, I don't want my company showing up on, on, uh, on Google. Like you just never do that. Um, but if you do, then you also show up in Gemini like that, like you, like what you just showed. Now there are plenty of blogs and plenty of people out there who are saying, I don't want to show up in ChatGPT because, uh, my content is valuable and monetizing in a particular way.

• 30:35John Coogan?

  Uh, we're not talking about products, products on the other side, they're on profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT, reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. No, but seriously, like, like, if you're, if you're a brand and you're, you want to be mentioned everywhere, but if you're like a newsletter writer, or you write reviews about best Amazon products, you might not want those reviews just to get sucked into chat GPT and anonymized, right? So you might turn that off, but no one's turning off Google. So Google should have an advantage there. The product should be better, but it all matters on like, how much does the consumer feel the bettiness of it? Because even, you can see it even with the image releases. It's like, we're into one's 99% of the way there, the other one's 99.1% of the way there.

• 31:20John Coogan?

  There's a benchmark that says this one's better, but people aren't really shifting.

• 31:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this one is really good at doing ornaments.

• 31:25John Coogan?

  Which one?

• 31:26Jordi Hays?

  Like, that was.

• 31:27John Coogan?

  That seems, that, that's the first value prop I've heard where I would switch immediately.

• 31:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, that was, that was, that was like something they were pushing yet. That was something, opening I was pushing yesterday was basically like you can turn yourself into an ornament.

• 31:39John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, Christmas, Christmas.

• 31:40Jordi Hays?

  Trying to kick off a new.

• 31:41John Coogan?

  That was good.

• 31:42Jordi Hays?

  meme super cycle. Uh, near, near is not loving this line. The, the Amazon investment would help OpenAI afford commitments, including from AWS.

• 31:52John Coogan?

  That's very funny.

• 31:53Jordi Hays?

  Um, well. Liquidity is showing the gang standing around. All right, Jeff, you're up next to invest in OpenAI.

• 32:02John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, literally, almost all of them.

• 32:06Jordi Hays?

  Well, to be clear, I don't think Elon is, I don't think Sundar is, I don't think Zuck is.

• 32:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 32:11Jordi Hays?

  And I don't know.

• 32:12John Coogan?

  You know, Tim Cook's partnering with Gemini, so this meme is actually slop. I'm sorry, liquidity, I love you, but.

• 32:17Jordi Hays?

  Well, it hit.

• 32:18John Coogan?

  It was, it was funny, but then as I dug in deeper, I mean, 10K likes, um, but it is not, is not, is not accurate. It's not accurate. Um, let me tell you about Vanta, automated compliance and security AI that powers everything from evidence collection to continuous, continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. Um.

• 32:39John Coogan?

  Amazon, $10 billion investment in OpenAI in the form of AWS credits. You got Satya Nadella.

• 32:45Jordi Hays?

  I couldn't find where.

• 32:48John Coogan?

  2% for Amazon, maybe less if it's if it's at above a $500 billion valuation. So Andy Jassy is getting 1.5% of OpenAI. Satya is sitting there with over 20. He's pretty happy, pretty happy, looking at the screen. Uh, this is a, oh, and this is a Gemini meme. Very funny. Uh, well, Jared Kushner is pulling out of the Paramount bid hours after his father-in-law took aim at the Ellison clan, apparently.

• 33:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, to be clear, I don't know where Nick pulled, uh, the credits line. I haven't seen that.

• 33:23John Coogan?

  Which credits line? Sorry.

• 33:25Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Nick, this post before.

• 33:27John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 33:27Jordi Hays?

  Amazon $10 billion investment in OpenAI in the form of AWS credits.

• 33:31John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:32Jordi Hays?

  I haven't seen that confirmed anywhere.

• 33:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's actually not in the form of AWS because it it it's just cash and then, but but it's just, it feels like credits because they do have obligations with AWS.

• 33:43Jordi Hays?

  They're basically gonna spend all of it.

• 33:45John Coogan?

  Well, no, it's like it all goes into a bank account. So, but but it fits, it fits a narrative to be like it's in the form of AWS credits. This is a good, that is a good correction. Thank you, Jordy. Um, anyway, uh, the the latest news in the Paramount bid for Warner Brothers, this story that just keeps on giving, um, is from Semaphore here. Let's see what this says. Uh, in the news, in back-to-back salvos Tuesday, the president and his former, or his family, distanced themselves from Paramount's hostile bid for Warner Brothers Discovery. I think we know what's going on there. It's about Foghorn Leghorn. It's about Tweety Bird. Is that it? Porky Pig?

• 34:29John Coogan?

  It it's Porky Pig. Um, it's a rebuke to owner David Ellison's attempt to leverage relationships with the White House to close the $108 billion takeover effort. President Trump Tuesday afternoon said he had been treated far worse by the Ellison-owned CBS since the family closed a deal for CBS parent Paramount.

• 34:50Jordi Hays?

  Which is so interesting because I've seen a bunch of, there's been, uh, people have been riled up about Barry Weiss running CBS. The, the reason that you maybe would say that she's doing a, an effective job as a manager of that asset is because people are talking about CBS content in a way that I have not seen in ever, right? Do you ever remember, like, maybe a couple of times here you'd see something and she's, she's clipping CBS content? It's like she's doing stories that-

• 35:22John Coogan?

  It feels like it's working.

• 35:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if their, if their goal is-

• 35:25John Coogan?

  We were joking about this, I mean, no, no shade to the people that were running CBS before, but like, what, what content was on that network?

• 35:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we just don't know what they were doing before.

• 35:36John Coogan?

  We, like, it's like it didn't exist, and now it exists, and you can like it or you hate it, depending on your political persuasion, but you can't deny that it exists now.

• 35:45Jordi Hays?

  And I always looked at this as like-

• 35:46John Coogan?

  It's a thing.

• 35:47Jordi Hays?

  The Allisons were like, hey, we can get a truth engine, and we can help-

• 35:50John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 35:51Jordi Hays?

  We can help, like, we can-

• 35:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:53Jordi Hays?

  Basically-

• 35:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, there's definitely, like, the brand is still great, like, CBS feels like a solid news source, so I agree with that.

• 36:02Jordi Hays?

  To recreate-

• 36:03John Coogan?

  But, the distribution was so far behind that people weren't talking about what was going on there, and I still don't know-

• 36:08Jordi Hays?

  The reason, the reason, one way to think about the value of CBS is what would it cost, and how long would it take to recreate a brand like CBS? Probably cost, it would take you decades.

• 36:20John Coogan?

  I don't think you can buy it. Like, I, I actually don't think, I think you could, I think you could be Sam Altman and Marshall a $50 billion fundraising round-

• 36:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can't just snap your fingers and get a CBS company grant.

• 36:30John Coogan?

  And it would still take 50 years to get there. And that's the thing, is that it's not, it's not, like, if you, if you get 50 billion, what do you have to do? You have to go buy the legacy IP, because there's only, you can't just, you can't just cr- you can't snap your fingers and create a brand overnight, like, it just takes time.

• 36:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So Warner Brothers sent a letter to shareholders this morning, basically saying that they're riding, they, they wanna, the board of directors still wants to go with Netflix, they believe it's superior in a number of different ways. One thing that stood out to me is that Paramount has consistently- They said Paramount has consistently led WBD shareholders that its proposed transaction has a full backstop from the Ellison family. It does not and never has. Paramount's most recent proposal includes a $40 billion equity commitment for which there is no Ellison family commitment of any kind. Instead, they propose that you rely on an unknown and opaque revocable trust for the

• 37:28Jordi Hays?

  certainty of the crucial deal funding, despite having been told repeatedly by WBD how important a full and unconditional financing commitment from the Ellison family was, and despite their own ample resources, as well as multiple assurances from Paramount Skydance during our strategic review process that such a commitment was forthcoming, the Ellison family has chosen not to backstop the Paramount Skydance offer. And a revocable trust is no replacement for a secured commitment by a controlling stockholder. The assets and liabilities of the trust are not publicly disclosed and are subject to change. So they're basically like have this entity being like, yeah, we're guaranteeing it, but it's not actually them saying, like, you know, they could move assets out of that trust and, you know.

• 38:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, got it.

• 38:14Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 38:15John Coogan?

  So strength of the offer not as strong potentially as Netflix. You know Netflix is good for it. It's a huge company. They've already signed a deal with a massive termination clause and they've, I believe they've raised debt for this, like they're, they're ready to rock. So, bird in the hand is worth, not too in the bush.

• 38:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other thing is Paramount has not offered to reimburse the breakup, the termination fee. It's a $2.8 billion fee. There's also financing costs that they're going to have to take, that Warner Brothers would have to take on if they don't, you know, complete the debt exchange. So, yeah, at the end of the day, what do the, what do the Ellison's do at this point, right? They've been, they've been doing deals, right? They're, they've got CBS now, they've got the UFC, they're trying to build this streaming platform. And I, again, going back to some of the conversations that we've had, like this entire, the entire strategy to date has been predicated on getting this Warner Brothers asset.

• 39:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And it seems like it might not happen, but game's not over. I anticipate.

• 39:23Jordi Hays?

  Announce the $1 trillion backlog.

• 39:30John Coogan?

  Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Also, Avi Schiffman got back to us. He answered the question, is he leveraged up? Is he levering up to buy billboards? He says, "Every out-of-home agent I've ever talked to has offered 50% reductions in price when doing a large-scale campaign. Most of the inventory is actually pretty cheap if you don't focus on the most premium assets." So, where haven't you seen a friend.com billboard? The 101. You haven't seen it, you know, in the iconic places. He hasn't done the Times Square buyout. He's in the subway, right? Like, when we saw him,

• 40:15John Coogan?

  you always make fun of this one. There's one that's like up against a wall. I saw one just at a random bus in my hometown. It's like, there's just like random places, but there's so many of them.

• 40:24Jordi Hays?

  Some of the alpha and out-of-home in LA is there's so much traffic that you're kind of moving slowly by some areas.

• 40:30John Coogan?

  And you'll just see random stuff. And so, yeah, I was kind of fighting you on this. Like, was this truly one of the greatest campaigns of the year? And hearing his extra context, it's incredible. He might have unlocked some entirely new strategy of just like the go-big, massive billboard campaign. And I wouldn't be surprised if we don't, if we, I wouldn't be surprised if next year is the year of the copy-paste this strategy for, you know, a company that has a million dollars to spend on a big campaign. Let's do an interesting billboard campaign.

• 41:05Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they have a million dollars in revenue, too.

• 41:07John Coogan?

  Ideally, yes. Ideally, yes. I mean, he clearly, like, it was, you know, he's like risk on, exploring, testing new things, like learning. But, but just the core, the core arb of like a big billboard campaign paying off, I think you gotta credit him. You gotta check in with Avi Schiffman.

• 41:28Jordi Hays?

  Did you see his other post? He said, "SF is over. Still a beautiful place to live." Hype around LLMs has subsided. It's not an interesting place to be anymore. Why go to a hackathon? It's not like GPT-4 just came out. There's nothing too interesting to discuss at a party anymore. All the big companies are too mature now. Most of what is new is just YC slop startups. If you're still in pre-seeding exploring stage, it's mostly too late. The directions have been positioned in. It's just a performative scene left. There are always a cycle to these things and this is fine. I've enjoyed 2022 to 2025. I hereby declare New York the new bastion of what matters in the near future.

• 42:07Jordi Hays?

  Could not disagree more with every single, pretty much every single word in here. It is, I think this is, I think Avi has shown brilliance in some ways, even though many don't. But this was, I put this up as one of the worst takes of the year.

• 42:32Jordi Hays?

  It's just like, it's literally like saying like back in 2000, like it's like saying in the early days of the internet or in the early days of the iPhone, like, hey, like, yeah, it's over. Just don't build anything.

• 42:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, Avi, underrated reason to stay in San Francisco. First, fin.ai. The company's headquartered up there. The number one AI agent for customer service. And I know you love AI agents, Avi. Automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel. Also, you should get in, if you're bored with the hackathon, you're bored with the YC demo day. Get into shark diving. Go dive in the bay. Put on the seven mil wet suit. Swim out to Alcatraz, take on a shark head to head and emerge victorious. I think that will really give you the sort of the glory. You'll be excited again.

• 43:24John Coogan?

  You will have survived a shark attack. That will energize you in a way that GPT-5.2 might not be energizing you.

• 43:32Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 43:33John Coogan?

  Fighting head on with a great white shark in the San Francisco Bay. That's something you can only do in the Bay Area.

• 43:39Jordi Hays?

  Or who's making, who's making friend.com for sharks, right? Like a wearable pendant that a shark could use to better navigate. Maybe they're lonely out in the high seas, right? It's cold, it's dark.

• 43:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 43:52Jordi Hays?

  Maybe in between hunts, right? They're just kind of hanging out, right? Maybe, yeah, just having a digital companion. Why reserve digital companions for?

• 44:02Jordi Hays?

  Why reserve those just for humans, right? Like, all life, all life matters. Think bigger. The other thing I was thinking, why, I was saying this yesterday, why has no one made like a telemedicine for anabolic steroids for your pets? Right?

• 44:17John Coogan?

  Somebody has, right? Wasn't, isn't that a real thing? Uh, you, you, I think Tyler was saying loyal.

• 44:22Speaker 03

  I was saying loyal, but I guess it's not really.

• 44:24John Coogan?

  That's a.

• 44:26Jordi Hays?

  I want to see a golden retriever as a mass monster.

• 44:29John Coogan?

  I think that's just a rottweiler. Like, I think you just get.

• 44:32Speaker 03

  No, but nobody, nobody.

• 44:34John Coogan?

  A jack.

• 44:35Speaker 03

  Well, so, I mean, you can make your, uh, like cattle really jacked, right? That's like what sarms are. So you could just, you, couldn't you just give it to your dogs?

• 44:42John Coogan?

  You know way too much about performance enhancing drugs.

• 44:47John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 44:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just saying the word sarms is like, just, just say that you've been deep in bodybuilding forum, Styler.

• 44:55John Coogan?

  Just say you're a day one, all more plates, more dates.

• 44:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, speaking of.

• 45:01John Coogan?

  Restream.com, one livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. Uh, before our first live in-person guest gets to the TBP and Ultra Dump, we got to open a Christmas present, but if you have breaking news, break it down.

• 45:14Jordi Hays?

  No, I wanted to talk about this Christmas present.

• 45:16John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, we got a Christmas present from friend of the show, Sahil Bloom. Let's open it up. It's on W33. Also, I got a belt on today. I'm looking much more Santa.

• 45:27Speaker 03

  Belt it up.

• 45:28John Coogan?

  Okay, so this is from Sahil Bloom himself. Look at this, look at this.

• 45:33Speaker 03

  New brand alert.

• 45:34John Coogan?

  I love this. So, he said, "I got sick of putting things on my skin that I'd never put on my body, so I spent 18 months creating the perfect solution. The perfect solution, wild Roman. I can smell it. Everyone says the TBP and Ultra Dump smells bad now. Smells great. This, this actually smells fantastic." So, uh, Wild Roman is 100% natural skincare for men made with grass-fed tallow, cold-pressed oils, and wild botanicals. You can order today at wildroman.com. Just wanted to give him a shout out and then we were gonna-

• 46:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is good stuff.

• 46:07John Coogan?

  You've been using this?

• 46:08Speaker 03

  I've been using this for about like two weeks.

• 46:09John Coogan?

  Wow!

• 46:10Speaker 03

  And I think it's working so far, yeah.

• 46:12John Coogan?

  Two weeks on Wild Roman and you look like that?

• 46:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's been, you know, it's helped with like beard growth and just general skin clarity.

• 46:20John Coogan?

  You look fantastic.

• 46:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're glowing. You're really glowing. Glowing from the inside out.

• 46:25John Coogan?

  It must be the grass-fed tallow and the cold-pressed oils, or maybe it's the wild botanicals, but it's clearly-

• 46:30Jordi Hays?

  I just want to say, never stop, really, truly never stop using this product.

• 46:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:35Jordi Hays?

  Because I do not want you to go back. I don't want you to go back. Never churn. I think you're a customer for life.

• 46:41John Coogan?

  Never, never churn, never churn from this. Uh, anyway, what, uh, back to, uh, the, the, the show. What do you think it takes to win in this category? Sawhill's obviously a, an influencer, an author. Uh, he has a massive newsletter. He has 1.1 million followers on, on X, um, and has an audience, but something we've been keep, we keep coming back to is like, an audience might not be enough to truly win in a category.

• 47:09Jordi Hays?

  I think he's gotta go hard on Target. Like, this feels, this feels like a good brand to introduce like tallow-

• 47:15John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 47:16Jordi Hays?

  -to the Target audience, right? This feels, uh, uh, again, like going, going for the set, bunch of products out the gates. This screams end cap to me. Uh, I, I was talking to a friend and they have a brand that, uh, uh, does over a hundred million a year-

• 47:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:39Jordi Hays?

  -only in Target.

• 47:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:40Jordi Hays?

  They don't sell anywhere else.

• 47:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:42Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and so it's just such a, such a massive channel. And so I think Sahel can probably leverage his brand to just go really hard into Target early. But I'm sure, but I'm sure he can, he can at least get some initial traction, um, D to C.

• 47:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. The D to C thing is great just because it gets the business up and running. Kind of like, you know, iron out any of the kinks, get the supply chain going, you know, learn the obvious customer service questions.

• 48:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the main, the main thing that people miss with like personality led, kind of like influencer brands like this is that no matter how big your audience is, you can be Kim Kardashian. And in order to build a truly big business, you get this initial boost from your audience. But, uh, but, but the, the nature of like any audience is that the longer that you just advertise against it, you can saturate it.

• 48:32John Coogan?

  It just becomes.

• 48:33Jordi Hays?

  So like Kim K can post like five times in the first week, but then eventually you have to go find new, net new people that aren't necessarily getting exposure.

• 48:43John Coogan?

  Well, it's a fascinating, uh, it's a fascinating question. Anyway, um, liquidity is, uh, is having some fun with Databricks. Uh, he says, you're laughing startups are raising series L's instead of going public and you're laughing. Um, yeah, it is, it is crazy. I was thinking about the, the product that, that Databricks is offering, like a financial product that Databricks is offering, like.

• 49:06Jordi Hays?

  So funny, the deal, the deal director who's in the, who's in often in the chat here says, uh, replied to this and said, don't be salty, VCs need to get paid too.

• 49:14John Coogan?

  That's it.

• 49:15Jordi Hays?

  Couldn't agree more.

• 49:16John Coogan?

  There is something to the fact of like, of like, if you have a growth fund with billions and billions of dollars under management and you need to park a couple hundred mil in a safe place that's going to grow, the cut, it's not some like, Databricks is not like a, oh, it started a year ago, AI company that might, you know, be gone if, or, or there's going to be some like, you know, different competitive pressure, like it's a real company is really going. Um, uh, the series, the Databricks series L looks pretty good.

• 49:44Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah. Trey in the chat says, wait, according to Reuters, trying to reverse engineer to ASML's EUV machine with the help of former ASML engineers and it's undergoing testing.

• 49:54John Coogan?

  That's crazy. Well.

• 49:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, they've never done this before.

• 49:57John Coogan?

  That's another good question for Doug. We can.

• 49:59Jordi Hays?

  Just kidding.

• 49:59John Coogan?

  Into that. Um, uh, I don't know. It does feel like there's a, there's a bit of a boom in lithography machines right now. We, we had one founder on the show talking about it. Uh, and it feels like that was for a long time thought of as unassailable. You could not build a business that was that deep in the chip supply chain. It was just too difficult. And now people are at least trying. I don't know. Maybe they're, maybe they're seeing.

• 50:21Jordi Hays?

  This is what I, this is what I've always said on the like China.

• 50:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:25Jordi Hays?

  Nvidia or just the China AI debate. It's like, no matter how many chips you give China, they will never say, oh yeah, we actually want to be dependent on foreign.

• 50:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:36Jordi Hays?

  Like suppliers for this technology that's so critical to the future. We'd love to just remain dependent. It's like, no, they'll take the chips and they'll continue to innovate and, and copy and invest to get to the, to parity.

• 50:50John Coogan?

  I can't believe we got a crossover between good skincare and Databricks, but it is here on the timeline. Uh, Fad says, the real reason Brian is trying to live forever is because he was an early investor in Databricks and is waiting for the liquidity event. Of course, there's probably plenty of times to, to tender your shares if you want to, but.

• 51:08Jordi Hays?

  I gotta say, Brian is looking fantastic in this new image. He looks.

• 51:12John Coogan?

  Twenty twenty-five is the best he's looked.

• 51:13Jordi Hays?

  This is a great version.

• 51:15John Coogan?

  This is a good take.

• 51:15Jordi Hays?

  The twenty twenty-three.

• 51:16John Coogan?

  Twenty thirty-three.

• 51:17Jordi Hays?

  This is the trophic disillusionment.

• 51:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:19Jordi Hays?

  Trophic disillusionment. Everyone's like, he looks like he's dying. This can't be good.

• 51:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:24Jordi Hays?

  Look at him now.

• 51:24John Coogan?

  I think the lighting is also doing a little bit of work there, but.

• 51:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but just the general skin tone.

• 51:29John Coogan?

  It just feels more balanced.

• 51:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:31John Coogan?

  It's good. Um, well, we mentioned, uh, we mentioned Netflix before. Obviously they're trying to go for Warner Brothers. But they're going for Barstool Sports as well. Before we take you into this story, let me tell you about Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions and get insights in seconds.

• 51:50Jordi Hays?

  Let's actually pull up the Portnoy video.

• 51:52John Coogan?

  I want to pull up the Portnoy video. So Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool says, breaking, I am proud to announce in our continuing twenty-plus year evolution, we are now partnering with Netflix for exclusive video podcasts. Uh, and the way he frames this in the video is remarkable. So let's play it.

• 52:13Speaker 00

  Emergency press conference time. If you haven't heard the news, I'm proud to announce that Barstool is partnering with Netflix for three of our top podcasts. Exclusive video only on Netflix, starting next year. I'm talking, you want to watch a video, part of my take, Netflix. You want to watch a video of spitting chicklets, Netflix. I actually spit there. That's just my brain. You want to watch a video of Ryan Rusillo's show? Netflix, Netflix, Netflix. Exclusive video, audio, stay the same. Video, where? Netflix, Netflix, Netflix. We're proud to partner one of the best in breed companies. That's what we do at Barstool. Evolve, rotate, evolve. Video, next year, PMT, Chicklets, Ryan Rusillo, Netflix, Netflix, Netflix.

• 52:59John Coogan?

  13 Netflix.

• 53:00Jordi Hays?

  So, so, pause, pause, pause.

• 53:01John Coogan?

  In a 47 second video, 13 mentions of Netflix.

• 53:04Jordi Hays?

  Founders, out there, out there. Founders, technology founders. Next time you think, oh, I need to film this crazy cinematic video. I need to film this crazy cinematic. I need a, I need a studio shot of me sitting down on a couch, looking all put together. Dave is sitting there with, with a, with a bunch of windows behind him that are reflecting, reflecting. He one shot at this video and it's way more engaging than, than him just being, you know, trying to be all professional.

• 53:34John Coogan?

  But I mean, to be fair, like, in order to do that, 20 years, 20 years of experience. Like, most people cannot just one-shot that on day one of their career on camera. It is hard. Anyway, TurboPuffer, TurboPuffer, TurboPuffer. If you want frivolous vector and full text search, TurboPuffer. If you want something built from first principles and object storage, TurboPuffer. If you want something fast, TurboPuffer.

• 53:56Jordi Hays?

  Linear TurboPuffer, notion TurboPuffer.

• 53:59John Coogan?

  If you want something extremely scalable, TurboPuffer. It's a, it really does work. It just worms its way into your brain. Anyway, the other big get for, I guess, the modern tech companies is the Oscars are moving to YouTube, which is a bomb.

• 54:16Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so, explain the Oscars.

• 54:19John Coogan?

  Okay, so it's like, you know how we did the award shows for, you know, random obscure achievements?

• 54:26Jordi Hays?

  Journalist of the year.

• 54:27John Coogan?

  Yes, absolute hitter of the year. It's like that, but for movies, of course.

• 54:34Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 54:35John Coogan?

  The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and they said they reached a deal with YouTube for exclusive rights to show this, to, to, to the show, starting in 2029. So, I mean, really feels like forever, but I'm sure it'll be upon us in no time, but probably the right time. But does feel particularly, it hits particularly hard because it's, it's like, the whole show is about the theater. It's about the movie industry.

• 55:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:03John Coogan?

  And the movie industry is saying like, yep, like YouTube beat us.

• 55:07Jordi Hays?

  It's over.

• 55:07John Coogan?

  It's over.

• 55:09Jordi Hays?

  We're so back, but also, it's over.

• 55:12John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's tell you about Numeral. Compliance handled. Numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance, so you can focus on growth.

• 55:19Jordi Hays?

  Okay, let's pull up this video of Vlad, and then we'll bring in our first guest.

• 55:23John Coogan?

  What is he holding? Is he holding an auction paddle or a ping pong paddle?

• 55:26Speaker 04

  Earlier I showed one of the many weather contracts we offer on the platform. Here's another one. Some people have already started to realize that using prediction markets can be cheaper than conventional fire, flood, and hurricane insurance. You can just place a trade on your, on your phone without having to deal with a traditional broker. Earlier I showed one of the many weather contracts.

• 55:47John Coogan?

  Give your take, I have a take. Let's break it down.

• 55:50Jordi Hays?

  So, on one hand, uh...

• 55:54John Coogan?

  Give the funny take first. The funny take is instead of buying insurance, you just...

• 55:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, yes, yeah. So the funny thing here is like, instead of, you know, insurance is like a pretty cool product. It, it gives you a lot of peace of mind. You pay for it once, you know, a year.

• 56:08John Coogan?

  Pull, pulls it out of your bank account.

• 56:10Jordi Hays?

  It's kind of automatic. You got a policy, whatever. You don't have to think about it. In this scenario, it would be like, okay, you're heading into the next month, and you're like, all right, like, I'm pulling up the weather chart. It's like, I'm, I'm trading, I'm trading on, I'm, I'm trading effectively, you know...

• 56:24John Coogan?

  Will my house burn down?

• 56:25Jordi Hays?

  Will my house burn down from a fire? The other problem here is like, if you're betting on a fire happening in a certain area, and depending on the odds, and if there's a lot of volume on it, it could very well incentivize somebody to start a fire in your, in your neighborhood. So, I, I think, obviously, I think prediction markets are, are very cool in a lot of ways, but the, the... The CEOs that have been integrating prediction markets have been coming out and giving some pretty wild examples of their value when I think that the value is that consumers want, they want these product experiences.

• 57:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think that there is a world where you do wind up building a, like, an actual financial product on top of all of this that feels a lot more normal instead of like the DIY version, but obviously it's very funny. Anyway, we have our next guest, Sarah Guo. Welcome to the show and thank you for joining us.

• 57:19Sarah Guo?

  Hello, how are you?

• 57:20John Coogan?

  Welcome. You look fantastic. Feeling, feeling the Christmas spirit. I'm gonna move this out of the way. The big.

• 57:28Sarah Guo?

  What's up, guys?

• 57:31John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 57:32Sarah Guo?

  I'm feeling good. I'm feeling the spirit.

• 57:34Jordi Hays?

  I have to take my ear off so I can get the.

• 57:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a mess.

• 57:38Sarah Guo?

  Those look very natural on you.

• 57:40Jordi Hays?

  Yes, I know, they really do. I said earlier before the show started, John's more Santa coded, I'm more elf coded. I don't know. It's just, anyways, you're looking like a lot more, a lot more polished.

• 57:51John Coogan?

  I like the nails. They're like frosted nails.

• 57:53Sarah Guo?

  Yeah, we don't have skincare, but we've got nail art.

• 57:56John Coogan?

  Okay, cool.

• 57:57Jordi Hays?

  Amazing, amazing.

• 57:58John Coogan?

  How did you process the storytelling, the storytelling cycle, news cycle yesterday? We asked pretty much everyone about storytelling. Do you, did you, I mean, I'm sure you saw the viral.

• 58:10Sarah Guo?

  Yeah, yeah, of course.

• 58:11John Coogan?

  Announcement that there's a lot of companies that are hiring people, storytellers. Is this just a rebranding? Is this a valuable thing? If a, if a founder came to you and said, "My, my second hire is going to be a storyteller," what would you say?

• 58:21Sarah Guo?

  I'd say that's your job.

• 58:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 58:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, actually. Well, so then the question becomes, can, like, is it, is it a skill set that you're kind of born with? You maybe start at an 80% and you can get to 100%, but if you start at like a 10% capability wise, like, you should probably just focus on other things, right? You're maybe never going to be great at that. I, I was classifying it as like, it feels like there's like Joe Rogan CEOs, which are CEOs that could go on a three-hour podcast and deliver an amazing performance, some of which would be about the business, a lot of which would just be about, you know, random stuff. But it feels like, have you seen founders in your portfolio go from just okay to like truly excellent?

• 59:04Sarah Guo?

  I think, so I'm an extreme growth mentality person.

• 59:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:07Sarah Guo?

  I'm like, if you are smart and you are a high work ethic, like, most skills are accessible to you.

• 59:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:12Sarah Guo?

  Not everybody can, you know, BTBPN, right? But you can go from like a D to a B plus.

• 59:17Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 59:18Sarah Guo?

  And that does a lot for your company, but I don't think you can outsource it.

• 59:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:21Sarah Guo?

  And so if you take this like storytelling idea and you just kind of disaggregate it a little bit, you have, you have like channels that have changed, right?

• 59:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:29Sarah Guo?

  This matters and like traditional media, you know, it's, it's having a time of it. It's struggling, right?

• 59:34Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 59:34Sarah Guo?

  Um, and so if you think about the job, like, does anybody want to like start off as a junior PR consultant today? It's a hard job, right? Um, I'm not saying there's not room for that, but the traditional like low grade version of that that was, I'm going to call a bunch of journalists, I'm going to repeat the pitch from the company. I have no point of view. I don't really have storytelling or taste and I'm a, I'm a C. Like, I think there's not a lot of room for that, right?

• 59:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:59Sarah Guo?

  Because if you think about it from the reporter's perspective, even if you think about where the attention actually is, you could be like a mid-size AI influencer and have as much like followership

• 1:00:11Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:00:11Sarah Guo?

  as a large media publication that's relevant today.

• 1:00:13Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:00:14Sarah Guo?

  Right? And so I think-

• 1:00:15Jordi Hays?

  And weirdly, like, the hardest job on our team is Nick, who's somewhere around here. And that is actually just like getting inundated with pitches from, from various PR teams, companies, agencies, et cetera. And he has, like, functionally, he has to say no to 95% of them just because we don't have, there's not, there's no time in the show to do as many, as many as are coming in, so.

• 1:00:36Sarah Guo?

  Yeah, I think there are a lot of people now where, um, they, like, why do they call it storyteller instead of like, content person or PR or whatever.

• 1:00:44Jordi Hays?

  Or just advertising specialist.

• 1:00:46Sarah Guo?

  Or advertising specialist, like, uh, the meta has changed, right? It's saying like, we need people with taste.

• 1:00:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:51Sarah Guo?

  Um, we're chasing the moment, there's a lot of noise and we have to like create some signal, even if we want the traditional channels.

• 1:00:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:57Sarah Guo?

  Um, and so some of it is skill set, some of it is the story about like what the job is.

• 1:01:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:03Sarah Guo?

  Um, but I, I do think a lot of it is, is hard to outsource and you can get better. We run a grant program, um, uh, which is like an uncapped note for 10 companies twice a year called embed. And the highest rated session for the program- Is a storytelling session.

• 1:01:16John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:01:17Sarah Guo?

  Right, so you come and you pitch your company and it like it goes from like a D minus to an A plus in terms of where people start.

• 1:01:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:23Sarah Guo?

  But like people get a lot better in the span of a week before they do demo day.

• 1:01:26Jordi Hays?

  It is, it is relative, it is relatively like structured, right? It's, it's not like if you're making a film, it's not like, hey, I need to reinvent the hero's journey. Like the structure works and I think there's the same type of approach you can apply to storytelling about your company. I, I would have this, I would get sent a deck and I'm like, your idea is cool and you're great. Your deck is terrible. And I would just send a Figma file that is like, here's the deck template. Here's like an example for each, like six examples for each slide, just like completely redo it. And then it, and then it's automatically like a few times better.

• 1:02:00Sarah Guo?

  But you have amazing intuition for this now. Did you start great at it?

• 1:02:03Jordi Hays?

  No, I made, I made so many. No, no, no, no. Yeah, it's definitely, uh, yeah, I don't know. I, I think I started, I've, I've, I've been sort of nat- naturally, I've studied advertising since I was a kid, not directly, but just like understanding like, why do I want this product? So much more than this product, right? And that started with like skateboarding and snowboarding stuff, right? And so I like fully understood, okay, this, this brand, it's like their event, athlete strategy, the design, this collaboration that they did, how, you know? But, uh, but again, like it was very, very refined to get to that ultimate structure that I have in Figma that I can just be like, this is the structure that, that has worked for me and it's worked for a bunch of other companies.

• 1:02:48Jordi Hays?

  It's like tried and true. This structure, even just my personal one, which I haven't shared broadly, has like directly contributed to raising like hundreds of millions of dollars, right? Um, just across the years. So, um, I don't know, I think you can systematize it.

• 1:03:02Sarah Guo?

  Yeah, there's art and there's alpha in it, but it's certainly something you can practice.

• 1:03:06Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:03:07Sarah Guo?

  Um, and I think people have discovered that like you need to be good at this now.

• 1:03:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:10Sarah Guo?

  And I think that's.

• 1:03:11John Coogan?

  Do you think people?

• 1:03:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, the other, the other thing I've, I've noticed with like company storytelling is like. If it is truly

• 1:03:18Sarah Guo?

  And people take you more seriously if you do it in an elf costume.

• 1:03:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course, of course. No, but the thing that I've always found is like if it's really difficult to get the story out in a cohesive way, then your whole strategy is just effed. Like it's just bad, right? And if it comes out very naturally, it means that like there's alignment, the strategy makes sense. But if you're like, if making the deck takes, you know, 50 hours, it's like you probably just don't have that great of a story in the first place. Like the actual facts of the situation are not that great.

• 1:03:49Sarah Guo?

  Yeah, this is so true for me. So the version of it is at some point I actually thought I wanted to be a writer. Like, thank God I'm not. I find writing incredibly painful. But I still have to write every week for my work as an investor, right?

• 1:04:00Jordi Hays?

  Like memos, LP updates.

• 1:04:02Sarah Guo?

  Yeah, yeah, mostly memos. And like the problem is writing is thinking, right? Storytelling is thinking, right? How do I actually communicate the strategy of the business and do I believe in it? And the difference between like, I'm procrastinating, I'm avoiding writing this memo for six days in a row because I gotta talk to my partners about it is I actually understand the strategy of the company or I don't.

• 1:04:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:24Sarah Guo?

  And sometimes it's because like I just don't know enough, right? We make our first defense investment and I'm like, well, I need to call like 45 people to understand what I don't understand about this yet in terms of the procurement process or whatever else.

• 1:04:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:36Sarah Guo?

  How important is electronic warfare? Like how quickly is this cycle gonna go? But, uh, but some part isn't knowledge. It's just like, does it make sense at all?

• 1:04:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:46Sarah Guo?

  And I have learned to trust that signal of like, well, if I'm not missing information and it's still like not super cohesive, it's not because I'm an idiot. Because I have to go tell this story to recruits and to the media and to the next investor. And if it's hard, they're not gonna get it either, right? And so I think there's substance in that.

• 1:05:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think, I think part of the, at least backlash or virality around the idea of

• 1:05:10Jordi Hays?

  Still so funny, dude.

• 1:05:11John Coogan?

  To be in Santa?

• 1:05:12Jordi Hays?

  We almost did Santa. We almost did Santa for Evan from Snap on Monday.

• 1:05:18Sarah Guo?

  It's too tasteful for it, I think. Yeah, I'm not.

• 1:05:20Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:05:21John Coogan?

  The first time, it's the first time you're meeting someone, like can you really go full Santa mode? But yeah, I mean, part of the reason there was like some backlash is I think people are worried about startups leaning in like over rotating to all style, no substance, all storytelling, no plot.

• 1:05:37Sarah Guo?

  Totally.

• 1:05:37John Coogan?

  You have to forget that like without some plot points, you can't tell a story around it. If you haven't built anything, you haven't raised, you know, you didn't raise a funding round like a lot of the stories get told around. We built this thing. We satisfied this customer. We hired these people.

• 1:05:51Jordi Hays?

  You also need, you also need tension. You need, you need some like adversity, right? So we'll have founders come on and we're like, aren't, is this not like the most hyper competitive category? And they'll be like, no, it's not. And then like not give like the follow up as to why.

• 1:06:06John Coogan?

  Yes, it is.

• 1:06:06Jordi Hays?

  And it's like, it's okay if it's competitive, if you're gonna win.

• 1:06:10Sarah Guo?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:10Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and you might be the one to win, but you, it's better to just admit like it's competitive and like, here's what, here's what the market is like missing.

• 1:06:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, sometimes people don't want to share whatever their alpha is, but.

• 1:06:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:21Sarah Guo?

  So I, um, I've like learned a little bit more about, I'm just gonna go ahead and say marketing, advertising, storytelling, but like that category of things that has existed for a little while over time, but I'm still like. I taught marketing at Warren, but I'm, I'm like at my core.

• 1:06:34Jordi Hays?

  Wow, she didn't just study.

• 1:06:36Sarah Guo?

  No, no, no, no.

• 1:06:37John Coogan?

  Wow, invented storytelling.

• 1:06:39Sarah Guo?

  I studied a little bit. I was a TI, um, but, uh, but like I'm a product absolutist.

• 1:06:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:44Sarah Guo?

  To your point of, I actually had just this like pretty full contact debate with a founder in our portfolio very recently about, um, how much of, uh, like the success of a company is its ability to raise money, get to momentum, look like it's winning to customers, look like it's winning to hires and go faster than others.

• 1:07:06Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:07:07Sarah Guo?

  And I'm like, well, you know, there's some, it, it depends on the space, right? And, uh, if you're in, take an example, like, like late 2010 SAS.

• 1:07:19Sarah Guo?

  The degree of freedom you have for like what you're gonna go build in any given category, not to denigrate the product work, it's just like you can only do so much without fundamental technology change if you have certain integration points and certain workflows. Totally. And you can have amazing execution there, but I'm like, you know what you probably want to do? Invest in people who understand the workflow, have amazing execution, and are total animals about like storytelling and momentum and all of that, right? And that doesn't mean there's no substance, it's just like, well, there's like, there's not as much creativity.

• 1:07:49John Coogan?

  That doesn't sound like 2010 advice, though. That sounds like advice today.

• 1:07:52Sarah Guo?

  No, no, no. Okay, so today, I would argue, actually, like-

• 1:07:55John Coogan?

  Is it different?

• 1:07:55Sarah Guo?

  Yes, okay.

• 1:07:57Jordi Hays?

  There's more white, I mean, twenty, late 2010 SaaS, there was no, there, it was struggling to find white space, I think. Like, if you, if you look at-

• 1:08:04Sarah Guo?

  The things you couldn't build were not that different.

• 1:08:06Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, the 2021 era, you saw this, like, it was crypto and fintech, sure, there was a lot of SaaS, but like, even with fintech, there wasn't, there was some new infrastructure with fintech that made it easier, but yet that you were still competing with companies that started five, six years ago.

• 1:08:24John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:08:24Jordi Hays?

  And so that was, that was just really rough. And so I think the difference today is like, we have super powerful LLMs, we have machines that can think, and so maybe there's like, a little bit more like, kind of random white space and categories that you can-

• 1:08:37Sarah Guo?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:37Jordi Hays?

  Uh, find and go digging in.

• 1:08:39Sarah Guo?

  I was talking to an investor friend yesterday about this, and he, like, we were discussing whether or not you just want to invest in the smartest people you could, within some constraints of like, they can convince other people to come to their cause and, and such. And I'm like, I actually think there's a much better strategy now than it was in the late 2010s, 2020 period.

• 1:08:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:58Sarah Guo?

  Because you're like, well, the rate, the variance on what you can build is really wide, right? And that's both information and like, ability, creativity.

• 1:09:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:07Sarah Guo?

  People are trying to, you know, they're trying to build very different products, even in software.

• 1:09:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:13Sarah Guo?

  And it depends on like, what you think you can do with models, or robots, or hardware, whatever it is, right?

• 1:09:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:18Sarah Guo?

  And I think it's just like, broader, and if, if you can do more different things with product, it matters more. So substance matters more than ever.

• 1:09:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:24Sarah Guo?

  Yeah. But storytelling too.

• 1:09:25John Coogan?

  If you believe in the midwit meme, then you should invest in the smartest founders, but also the dumbest founders, because who knows, they might lock into the same thing. No, I don't think that works.

• 1:09:34Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think that, I think, I think that works. I think that works in CPG, actually. I think it works in CPG. I've seen some people on, on both sides do very, very well. And in the middle, it's like innovating on four to, four to five different dimensions. It's like way too complicated and, and tends to.

• 1:09:52John Coogan?

  Anyway, tell me, what is a NeoLab?

• 1:09:55Sarah Guo?

  Okay, so there's this category of company that has been, you know, a handful of these things have been funded this year. They're quite controversial in the investing community, which is essentially like, we're going to raise a solid amount of money. Let's say, you know, fifty, a hundred million dollars plus. And we are going to invest in large scale AI research and training upfront.

• 1:10:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. So not a wrapper company?

• 1:10:19Sarah Guo?

  Not a wrapper company, though we can come back to that. And I think this is like, one of the reasons it's so interesting is because you had this dominant narrative for a lot of the last couple of years of just like, how could you compete with Google and OpenAI?

• 1:10:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:34John Coogan?

  And maybe people throw Anthropic in there.

• 1:10:36Sarah Guo?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:36John Coogan?

  And then a little bit of thinking.

• 1:10:37Sarah Guo?

  But that was the first.

• 1:10:38Jordi Hays?

  And it's notable because you have, you have, if you're, if you're trying to build like a new LLM or maybe have some new ideas around that type of product. And people are already saying like, oh, OpenAI can't compete with Google because Google has all this cash flow. And even though they have like almost a billion weekly actives, like they're burning so much money. And then, and then you get a new company, a NeoLab, that's like, oh yeah, we're also going to compete. And we don't have any users and we have a fraction of the money. And so that's why I think it's been like almost a narrative violation if you're gonna like, or, or at least like contrarian to say like, no, we actually are going to bet even more into this category.

• 1:11:12John Coogan?

  So point of clarification, Thinking Machines, SSI, Anthropic, are those NeoLabs? Or are the NeoLabs post those labs?

• 1:11:21Sarah Guo?

  I think the definition would be post those labs.

• 1:11:25John Coogan?

  Okay, that's helpful.

• 1:11:25Sarah Guo?

  But that was the first generation of this because they also fought that narrative.

• 1:11:29John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 1:11:29Sarah Guo?

  Like, and, and OpenAI did before them.

• 1:11:31John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:11:32Sarah Guo?

  Right?

• 1:11:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:33Sarah Guo?

  And so I think this is like this big open question in venture investing, like it, it opens a can of worms of like. Well, how much money do you need to go do venture investing at conviction? I gotta say like 14 times, like we would argue not that much necessarily if you're very early. But um.

• 1:11:49John Coogan?

  No, it changes the economics completely to like growth fund. You need to be able to.

• 1:11:53Sarah Guo?

  Totally.

• 1:11:54John Coogan?

  Build a position because it used to be you could take a flyer for two percent, you know, get, get 10% of the company for a couple of million bucks.

• 1:12:00Sarah Guo?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:01John Coogan?

  And if that's just not going to happen on day one, it's just the economics just don't work, right?

• 1:12:05Sarah Guo?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:05John Coogan?

  So is that changing your fund or have you figured out a way?

• 1:12:08Sarah Guo?

  It's, it's, it's not for us.

• 1:12:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:12:09Sarah Guo?

  And, you know, we have supported some new research lab efforts, but I, I think that's also a tactical thing of how early you are.

• 1:12:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:16Sarah Guo?

  And, um, but, but I think the, the broader thing that is really interesting is this narrative violation or question of uh, is scale the only thing that matters?

• 1:12:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:27Sarah Guo?

  And, um, and like, if you're going to spend the GDP of a medium sized country on training, can anybody keep up with you? Um, or like.

• 1:12:37Jordi Hays?

  Even if, so Greg had a video that came out yesterday or this morning where, uh, at OpenAI and he was just saying, uh, we've tried everything but scale and scale is the thing that works, right? And so again, it's, it's very contrarian to be like, well, no, we actually can come up with, you're basically, if you're raising a hundred million dollars to compete.

• 1:12:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:56Jordi Hays?

  With these other labs, you're saying like, we don't need scale just because you're never going to be able to compete on scale when these Anthropic and OpenAI are running away in the capital markets.

• 1:13:08Sarah Guo?

  You know, the, I think one of the more nuanced arguments about these things has been, uh, let's say a bunch of people can go raise hundreds of millions, two billions of dollars to, you know, a hundred billion dollar plus, which is a wild claim to begin with. Um, even so, like where you spend that money matters, not just size, right? Um, and so like, one of the things that's happened with open source is there, there are, uh, large pre-trained models.

• 1:13:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:33Sarah Guo?

  Some Chinese, some European, now hopefully more and more American ones.

• 1:13:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:38Sarah Guo?

  Um, that people work with and are really powerful, like the big joke that Silicon Valley runs on Quem.

• 1:13:42Jordi Hays?

  And they're like distilling them.

• 1:13:44Sarah Guo?

  Um, they're distilling them and, and they're also, I think if you're a research lab, you tend to be post-training or just trying entirely different architectures.

• 1:13:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:51Sarah Guo?

  And, and like, so people are, the argument I think goes something along the lines of. You know, more is better eventually, right? Like, I do need the GDP of Japan to compute. But on day one, Ilya Sutskever basically said this. Like, in the age of research, we need some amount of money to just validate our ideas.

• 1:14:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:11Sarah Guo?

  But it's not a trillion dollars.

• 1:14:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, his interview I took away, he's like, kind of like, we're gonna do a couple million here, a couple million here, a couple million here.

• 1:14:21Sarah Guo?

  I think it's a little bigger than that, but...

• 1:14:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, okay, okay. But, but the idea is like, he's not just like, we're one-shotting, we're gonna try to one-shot this with 60% of the dollars that we've raised. It's much more, again, experimental, research-driven.

• 1:14:34Sarah Guo?

  Yeah, and then I think the second part of the argument of like, you know, we're, we're doing actually new things versus fighting symmetric warfare with Ant or OpenAI, which is like seemingly a bad idea from Google, you know, money machine.

• 1:14:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:47Sarah Guo?

  Um, is that if you have these pre-trained models, like, we can just focus. If you have the GDP of Japan and you have the GDP of Germany and, you know, I have some other equivalent country, California, right?

• 1:14:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Let's give it up for California.

• 1:15:00Sarah Guo?

  Let's go, California. We love you. Total failure of governance, an accident of history, but the best place in the world.

• 1:15:07Jordi Hays?

  We're still cooking.

• 1:15:08Sarah Guo?

  Still cooking, still cooking. Thank you, semiconductors. But, uh, but if everybody has some huge amount of money and I put it all toward post-training or self-improvement or diffusion or SSMs or some other bet, and you're like, serving inference and also doing pre-training and whatever else.

• 1:15:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:28Sarah Guo?

  Then like, my effort on the thing that matters might be bigger than your effort, even if you have more money overall. That's the story.

• 1:15:35John Coogan?

  Let me pitch you on a fund thesis and I want you to push back on it potentially or agree with it. So, I have a growth fund.

• 1:15:42Sarah Guo?

  Wait, tell me now and then let me do it.

• 1:15:43John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. I don't know. You know, let's say I have like, you know, a billion-dollar fund, I'm gonna put $100 million in 10 of these Neo Labs, one, you know, $100 million each. They're all gonna go and try different ideas and my thinking is, you know, 10% chance one of them goes really, really big. But but I but I'm also underwriting these on talent acquisitions.

• 1:16:06Sarah Guo?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:07John Coogan?

  And I say that, hey, for, you know, I'm not going to lose money on basically any of these, even though I'm paying crazy prices at seed for just a couple of people with barely an idea. I'm going to get a lot of money out because the because the big hyperscalers are going to continue to acquire.

• 1:16:23Sarah Guo?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:23John Coogan?

  Are you telling me I think that party's over? Or do you think, no, there's going to be an endless stream of billion dollar acquisitions coming out of the hyperscalers?

• 1:16:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's like shoot shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land in in Satya's arms.

• 1:16:37John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:16:37Sarah Guo?

  I do.

• 1:16:37John Coogan?

  Is that true?

• 1:16:38Sarah Guo?

  Um, I do think that is part of the calculus that's happening here.

• 1:16:41John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:16:42Sarah Guo?

  Where the distribution of outcomes is like, how, you know, without naming names, but how many people want to hire Ilya? Or Mira Maroti?

• 1:16:52John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:16:52Sarah Guo?

  Or Barrett? Or any of these folks that have started new labs? Like, a lot of people that could have, um, that think that winning an AI race is very valuable to them.

• 1:17:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:02John Coogan?

  So so so you think that the the hyperscalers, they're definitely aren't, uh, like exhausted of these like lab tuck ins? Lab tuck ins?

• 1:17:10Sarah Guo?

  Okay.

• 1:17:10John Coogan?

  Neo lab tuck ins.

• 1:17:11Sarah Guo?

  The actual.

• 1:17:11Jordi Hays?

  Well, and I think my point of view is like, as long as you have a bunch of people spending something in the range of a hundred billion dollars a year. And they believe that by spending a billion dollars to acquire a team, that they can make that money go further, there's a good chance that they will.

• 1:17:27John Coogan?

  It's always been.

• 1:17:27Jordi Hays?

  And if there's if there's, again, if there's like a pullback and new information, then you start to run the calculus of like,

• 1:17:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:34Jordi Hays?

  Well, we're actually cutting spend and we've figured out what we need to figure out. And just adding five new smart people to the team is not going to give us that much of an edge in this market.

• 1:17:44Sarah Guo?

  Yeah, I think this is exactly right where, um, one of the craziest reframings of this to me, made by somebody at a large lab with a lot of money to spend is like, just imagine Jordi as a researcher and like his GPU budget for experimentation is a hundred million dollars personally.

• 1:18:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:04Sarah Guo?

  Right?

• 1:18:07Sarah Guo?

  And I have to give that to him all the time.

• 1:18:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:09Sarah Guo?

  Right, so he works here for four years, he gets four hundred million dollars.

• 1:18:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Otherwise you start looking around, you say.

• 1:18:14Sarah Guo?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:14John Coogan?

  You're looking somewhere else.

• 1:18:16Sarah Guo?

  Well, and, and the question is like, well then, how much am I willing to pay for Jordy?

• 1:18:20John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:18:21Sarah Guo?

  Or the talent that is one percent better?

• 1:18:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:18:24Sarah Guo?

  Ten percent more likely to like make the thing work, actually a lot of money.

• 1:18:28John Coogan?

  A lot of money.

• 1:18:28Sarah Guo?

  Right, because it, like, the way, the, um, I'm not saying that you should start your growth fund with this risk calculus. It takes a, you know, certain, um, uh, strength of gut.

• 1:18:38John Coogan?

  Boldness.

• 1:18:39Sarah Guo?

  Right, um, but it's, it's not irrational to be like, these players have already committed to spend X billion dollars of compute over the next years, and they will look at the people as leverage on that compute.

• 1:18:53Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:18:54Sarah Guo?

  And so like, I don't, I mean, lots of things can happen in the macro and people can change their minds and some of these like contracts are, um, on performance, right, like they're not like fully solid, but the way it looks now, I'd be like, I think people are gonna keep spending money here. So you're probably safe with your fund.

• 1:19:10John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 1:19:10Sarah Guo?

  No financial advice.

• 1:19:11John Coogan?

  If the fund pans out, I'm going big on Christmas, what should I give to all of the founders in my portfolio who have made me so much money? What, how do you think about gifting? Is there a top gift recommendation for this Christmas season? Is there anything that you can share about top gifts?

• 1:19:30Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:19:31John Coogan?

  Uh, is there anything you can think about?

• 1:19:33Jordi Hays?

  Look at the, yeah, look at the Christmas theme on this too. We got Santa Claus.

• 1:19:38Sarah Guo?

  You know, this is a gift advertising. I learned recently that Coke made the, uh, modern.

• 1:19:43John Coogan?

  We fact-checked this, it's not true.

• 1:19:45Jordi Hays?

  They solidified it. No, they solidified it.

• 1:19:46John Coogan?

  They solidified it.

• 1:19:47Sarah Guo?

  They popularized it.

• 1:19:48Jordi Hays?

  They basically like.

• 1:19:49John Coogan?

  They didn't actually create the whole shtick.

• 1:19:50Jordi Hays?

  They didn't create the meta, but they, they owned it.

• 1:19:52John Coogan?

  They owned it. They storytold around it.

• 1:19:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:55John Coogan?

  They storytold around it.

• 1:19:56Sarah Guo?

  Over substance, yeah.

• 1:19:57John Coogan?

  So, so gift guide or maybe like a book recommendation that you could put under the tree if you, I, I always like giving books. Uh, what, what, what do you have?

• 1:20:04Sarah Guo?

  No, I'm a, I'm a big, uh, books person. Um, I want people to give me time and books and nobody seems to be able to give me time, so.

• 1:20:10John Coogan?

  Oh, wow, wow. That's deep.

• 1:20:12Sarah Guo?

  Uh.

• 1:20:12Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 1:20:13John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 1:20:14Sarah Guo?

  Yeah, my, my husband hates this. He's like, what do you want for Christmas? Do you want like? Stuff? Do you want jewelry? I'm like, no, I want time. And he's like, you suck.

• 1:20:22John Coogan?

  Maybe you should get you a luxury watch on getbezel.com, our sponsor. What's better? The only way you can get time is if you get a watch on getbezel.com, of course.

• 1:20:32Sarah Guo?

  Nice, nice. He said that.

• 1:20:33Jordi Hays?

  How are you processing? How are you processing the current moment? And like, what are you, what are you looking out for in the next 12 months? It feels like it's hard to think that we could go, things could get crazier.

• 1:20:47John Coogan?

  I disagree.

• 1:20:48Sarah Guo?

  Can I give one book recommendation? And then we'll like, talk about 26. Um, okay, only one. Um, no, I'm gonna give you three. So I think, uh, I think Dan Wang's book, Breakneck, on China and the US is really good. It's worth reading. It's like a little stylized, but I think like really substantive, actually just good storytelling, I suppose. Um, there's a book on Embruvica, like, I think a lot of people are suddenly like interested in biotech.

• 1:21:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:21:12Sarah Guo?

  I'm not saying that's bad. I think biotech is amazing and it will get a lot more impactful and it's like more efficient. And, but, uh, the book is called, um, I think it's called For Blood and Money. But it's about, uh,

• 1:21:24Jordi Hays?

  Great title.

• 1:21:25Sarah Guo?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:25Jordi Hays?

  I'm interested.

• 1:21:26Sarah Guo?

  Yeah, no, it's, it's sexy. I think it's,

• 1:21:27Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't sound like a textbook.

• 1:21:30Sarah Guo?

  As hot as and interesting as a book can be about a non-technical founder of like a breakout leukemia drug. Like, this is worth reading.

• 1:21:38John Coogan?

  Okay, very cool.

• 1:21:39Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 1:21:39Sarah Guo?

  Um, and then, um, if anybody, okay, I mean, this is a lot of tech nerds in this audience. So if anybody hasn't read Masters of Doom.

• 1:21:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:21:48Sarah Guo?

  Um, this is, this is a story of like the, like the,

• 1:21:50John Coogan?

  Carmack, right?

• 1:21:51Sarah Guo?

  Best era of the video game industry, Carmack. Worth reading.

• 1:21:54Jordi Hays?

  All right, these are great.

• 1:21:54Sarah Guo?

  Um,

• 1:21:55John Coogan?

  Masters of Doom is great.

• 1:21:56Sarah Guo?

  Okay, actually I have one more niche one.

• 1:21:58John Coogan?

  There's also the Prince of Persia book by Stripe Press. That's a good one. In that Masters of Doom.

• 1:22:02Sarah Guo?

  No, I haven't read it. No, I'm excited.

• 1:22:03John Coogan?

  That's sort of like, it is a similar, similar theme.

• 1:22:06Sarah Guo?

  Okay, I'm gonna screw up this title, cause it's,

• 1:22:08John Coogan?

  When you have storytelling, I mean, the, the story of a individual video game is particularly great, cause it's a tech company.

• 1:22:14Sarah Guo?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:14John Coogan?

  But it's always hard to tell the story of a full tech company that just keeps going and going and going.

• 1:22:17Sarah Guo?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:18John Coogan?

  And the video game companies, they do, but you can also tell just the story of that one game.

• 1:22:21Sarah Guo?

  Yeah, it's this multi-year project.

• 1:22:23John Coogan?

  Exactly. Whereas no one's like, oh yeah, we needed to talk about like, you know, the story of Figma in 2018 specifically. Like, it's like this whole, it's such a broader arc.

• 1:22:32Sarah Guo?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:32John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, other book recommendations? Are we on 26? Predictions.

• 1:22:36Sarah Guo?

  Okay, maybe last niche one?

• 1:22:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:38Sarah Guo?

  Though we could do the rest of the episode this way. Um, the, uh, there's a book, I, I'm really interested in like what environments make for good ideas.

• 1:22:46Jordi Hays?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:22:46Sarah Guo?

  Right? And like consistently good ideas because part of like extreme growth mentalities, you think environment matters.

• 1:22:52Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:22:52Sarah Guo?

  And so we're like, ah, how do we like help people create the environment where they're doing their best work?

• 1:22:57Sarah Guo?

  There is a book called Apprentice to Genius. Um, and it's about a, a series of researchers at NIH and Johns Hopkins that had like just huge contributions to biology, chemistry, science for a while, like way more than you should have in just a small lab over like decades.

• 1:23:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:16Sarah Guo?

  And, um,

• 1:23:18Jordi Hays?

  Was it the Feng Shui of the building or something? What about the environment? Were there obviously like the academic?

• 1:23:23Sarah Guo?

  I think,

• 1:23:23Jordi Hays?

  Environment?

• 1:23:24Sarah Guo?

  Yeah, I think it's a, I think,

• 1:23:25Jordi Hays?

  Even a couple of key people that were kind of like around during that period?

• 1:23:29Sarah Guo?

  It is definitely about, um, a couple of key people, but the question is like, how come their students also are like Nobel Prize winners? Right?

• 1:23:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:37Sarah Guo?

  Because it's hard to imbue the next person with like magical creativity.

• 1:23:41Jordi Hays?

  Just go win a Nobel Prize. Here's the playbook.

• 1:23:43Sarah Guo?

  Yeah, but like three times in a row, man.

• 1:23:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:45Sarah Guo?

  Um, and so I think the,

• 1:23:46Jordi Hays?

  Just look at this deck. Study this deck.

• 1:23:50Sarah Guo?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:50Jordi Hays?

  Study this Pigma file for an hour and you'll be,

• 1:23:52John Coogan?

  It's actually an online course now.

• 1:23:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:54John Coogan?

  Nobel Prize winning.

• 1:23:55Jordi Hays?

  It's available for a thousand dollars.

• 1:23:56John Coogan?

  For a grand.

• 1:23:57Jordi Hays?

  With, with, uh, client of payments attached, so.

• 1:24:00John Coogan?

  How'd I get this Lambo? I won a Nobel Prize. And then I sold a course on how to win a Nobel Prize.

• 1:24:08Sarah Guo?

  The course is $9.99.

• 1:24:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. How are you? What are you looking forward to this next year? What are you, what are you kind of wary of?

• 1:24:17Sarah Guo?

  Um, I think all the other investors should like go away and leave AI alone.

• 1:24:21John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:24:22Sarah Guo?

  And then just leave us to do it. It's over, guys. It's over. I'm sorry, the demand was not real.

• 1:24:27Jordi Hays?

  Look at the Oracle stock price. That's, that's what's happening here.

• 1:24:30John Coogan?

  Pick clean.

• 1:24:30Sarah Guo?

  If I can't move the markets that way, uh, no, I'd, uh, Okay, here, I have really high conviction that like, you know, 26 is gonna be a year of a bunch of new applications of AI, and that doesn't mean that there won't be like, market panic, or some bumps. Of course, people like claim it's winter, but I think there's now so much proof that the models are powerful in a bunch of different domains.

• 1:24:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:59Sarah Guo?

  And it starts with ones that maybe are not like, so obviously, commercial. You know, rent tech aside, people are like, what can you do with math, right?

• 1:25:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:09Sarah Guo?

  I feel like, oh, here's my prediction for 26 that you can like, come back to me on is, I think somebody out there is gonna make a lot of money, like hundreds of millions of dollars on AI trading.

• 1:25:20John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:25:21Sarah Guo?

  Like, it's not happening at that scale yet, but people are certainly gonna try, and I see no reason that would.

• 1:25:26John Coogan?

  But do you think that would happen on Wall Street? Will there just be like, a pod that is like, training models, or is that like a startup in Silicon Valley? Because there's very different cultures.

• 1:25:36Sarah Guo?

  I would love to see it be a startup.

• 1:25:38John Coogan?

  It would be fun if it was our team, but I think it's gonna be, who knows?

• 1:25:41Sarah Guo?

  I think people are already trying it in lots of different environments.

• 1:25:44John Coogan?

  I have talked to some-

• 1:25:45Sarah Guo?

  And the markets are big.

• 1:25:46John Coogan?

  I've talked to some high-frequency traders who are just like, yeah, I worked at Meta, and like, Meta's better at machine learning than we are. I don't know if that's like, holds across the entire industry, but I do think that like, the ad tech industry might be better, even though the high-frequency trading industry is like, a little sexier, and a little bit like, more discreet.

• 1:26:04Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, one reason you might see a startup do it is just because the labs have been, and just like, the West Coast has been recruiting from some of these trading firms on the East Coast.

• 1:26:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:14Jordi Hays?

  And so they already have the experience, and then they're like, hey, we made something that's pretty smart, maybe, maybe. And we're seeing like, I think NASDAQ announced like, 24-hour trading, and-

• 1:26:23John Coogan?

  They're getting there.

• 1:26:24Jordi Hays?

  There is a lot of volatility-

• 1:26:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:26Jordi Hays?

  Just in general, so.

• 1:26:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Last question for me. Do you, we've been wrestling with this debate over whether some of these AI tools become like, video games. We talked to the founder of Suno, and it's like, and Mid Journey's similar, where there's a lot of people that are using Mid Journey as a prosumer tool. There's other people that are using Mid Journey just as like, a game. Like, they have an idea for a funny image, they make it, and then they're satisfied when they get that image that they created. I think there's a lot of people that are creating songs on Suno, and then just- Enjoying them themselves and they're not actually sharing them anywhere.

• 1:26:59Sarah Guo?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:59John Coogan?

  Do you think that like the, how do you, how are you thinking about the nature of like gen AI interfacing with like prosumer, maybe new consumer flows, this like gamification, or is any of that resonating from you or any of the portfolio companies?

• 1:27:12Sarah Guo?

  Yeah, okay. So one thing I have as, I think is inspiring as an idea is that most people are much more creative than they get to express in daily life, right? If you are a creative of any type, like people have more ideas and points of view than they have tools and skills to go execute. And so if AI allows people in images and music and video, I don't know if it's a good thing in writing with slop, but, or code even, right? Like if you can make things at a much higher level.

• 1:27:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:43Sarah Guo?

  Then you're like, you're going to enjoy making things and making more things, right? Like, you know, what's the like saying, inside every adult is an artist?

• 1:27:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:52Sarah Guo?

  Because who doesn't draw when they're a kid?

• 1:27:53Jordi Hays?

  Some people just don't know what the process, like people that get viewed as like creative people are often people that just take two very different ideas and put them into one idea.

• 1:28:05Sarah Guo?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:05Jordi Hays?

  Take something that's working and make it different. And I think once people, I've seen people in their head kind of like unlock that concept and then they realize like, oh, I can be creative because like here's a product that I like. What if I made it healthy? Here, you know.

• 1:28:19Sarah Guo?

  But did they make Santa?

• 1:28:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. What if we made a soda and then marketed it with, by creating?

• 1:28:26John Coogan?

  And we're back to storytelling.

• 1:28:28Jordi Hays?

  I guess one question, maybe fun prediction, how much do you, how many dollars do you think will be spent on ads within LLMs?

• 1:28:38Jordi Hays?

  Next year?

• 1:28:39John Coogan?

  Do you think next?

• 1:28:40Sarah Guo?

  I think it's a little early.

• 1:28:41John Coogan?

  A little early.

• 1:28:41Jordi Hays?

  That's, that's my feeling. Like I could see it ramping in the back half of the year and like actually, because I think the ads are going to be extremely effective. People are saying like, oh, a lot of these queries are not that high intent. It's just research. But I think that a lot more of them, I think a meaningful amount are product research and once you're driving these sort of like high intent clicks, I think it will scale pretty quickly, but I think it will take, I think it will, I think this will be like a second half of the year, 2026 story as it starts to scale. But we've had founders on the show that have said, like, when somebody lands on my site from chat GPT, they can convert at seven percent and my average conversion rate is like three percent.

• 1:29:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:22Sarah Guo?

  So I think people don't. Quite, I think when it happens, it's going to happen really fast. And the question is just like, how quickly can the companies with a bunch of traffic build any kind of product?

• 1:29:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:34Sarah Guo?

  Because the inventory is going to be so good. And I think it's useful to look at open evidence as a like precursor here. So it has been reported that the company went from like two to 150 million of ad run rate already.

• 1:29:47Jordi Hays?

  Oh yeah, it's fully ad supported. This is LLM for doctors.

• 1:29:50Sarah Guo?

  It's the biggest ad business in AI today.

• 1:29:52Jordi Hays?

  Right, I forgot about that.

• 1:29:53Sarah Guo?

  And like what happened? They made a product that was free, that was so useful to doctors. Because you're literally answering the question of like, well, I don't know what's happening in this area of like personalized medicine for this domain of oncology for this type of patient, right? I'm from Wisconsin, so we'll use Wisconsin as an example. Like, I am a doctor in rural Wisconsin that's never seen this type of leukemia, right? So I'm going to ask open evidence for help. Guess what? Like, that's a really high intent.

• 1:30:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:22Sarah Guo?

  Query to go serve ads against for treatments.

• 1:30:25Jordi Hays?

  Here's a treatment.

• 1:30:25Sarah Guo?

  Yeah. And so I think when you compare that to the ad inventory that exists in the world was just like, I'm looking at a bunch of random stuff. My average query is two words or whatever. Like, I think that it's going to be amazing when it happens.

• 1:30:38Jordi Hays?

  There's a level of trust that I think someone will have with open evidence that they maybe don't have with Google search.

• 1:30:45Sarah Guo?

  Totally. Yeah, they understand what the sources are.

• 1:30:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:47Sarah Guo?

  It's, you know, research, trials, et cetera. It's generated data from other doctors. So I think, I think that if you can make the right products here, it's going to be very big. My only question is like, how quickly they make those ad products?

• 1:31:00Jordi Hays?

  Last, last question. Are you long or short forward deployed engineer? Like the model?

• 1:31:06Sarah Guo?

  I think it is a symptom of how quickly AI is happening. And so like, if the long is people are going to pay for a lot of FTE next year, huge bull, right?

• 1:31:21Jordi Hays?

  So maybe more like 2027, 2028?

• 1:31:23Sarah Guo?

  2028, I think like, in the long run, like you should deliver that as a product and people are going to.

• 1:31:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:30Sarah Guo?

  I don't, I don't think, I think FTE happens when people don't have, a transition happens too quickly, or they don't have the talent, or the ability organizationally to do like change management, the corporate term, but it's real, right? It's really hard to like. Completely transform an asset manager or a big public company. And so like, that's what you're paying for in 26 and 27 and maybe 28. But I think eventually it's going to be product.

• 1:31:57John Coogan?

  Yep. Well, thank you so much for coming by. I wish we had more time.

• 1:32:00Sarah Guo?

  Thank you for having me, guys.

• 1:32:01John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Merry Christmas.

• 1:32:03Sarah Guo?

  Merry Christmas.

• 1:32:04John Coogan?

  Hit the gong. Hit the gong for conviction. For conviction, all the progress you've made. And we will bring in Doug O'Laughlin.

• 1:32:12John Coogan?

  The president of Semi Analysis is coming on. Great hanging. TBPN. While we bring him in from the restream waiting room, let me tell you about graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And we've been keeping Doug waiting, but let's bring him in to the TBPN Ultra Dome. Doug, how are you doing? Whoa. Look at that. Outer. Fantastic. Galactic Doug. I'm so glad. Space Data Center Doug. Was delivered. It looks fantastic on you.

• 1:32:42Doug O'Laughlin?

  It, it, dude, it's great. I've been telling, we're going to make Semi Analysis like, we're going to try to do this. It's so good.

• 1:32:48John Coogan?

  You have to.

• 1:32:49Doug O'Laughlin?

  I got it yesterday. I actually didn't realize I was on today. I just wore it today for work. I'm like, I'm not, I'm not joking. And then I was like, oh my God, my schedule, my calendar of doing this. I was like, dude, this is perfect.

• 1:33:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, we were, we were talking. And Tyler was like, oh, did you book Doug specifically because you knew that Amazon was going to do this deal with OpenAI? He's the perfect person to talk to. Yeah, we booked Doug because we love Doug. I said, no, they did the deal because they knew Doug was going on TBPN on Wednesday, December 17. They were like, we got to give him something to talk about. Let's do a deal. And so Sam and Andy, they got together and they were like, this is good content for TBPN and Semi Analysis. Anyway, take us through your reaction to the deal. And if you could actually just start with like, setting the table on where are we on the Tranium narrative?

• 1:33:42John Coogan?

  Is it good? Is it bad? Is it like, what do we know? What, how is it changing? What's the updated thinking around just Amazon's chip efforts?

• 1:33:53Doug O'Laughlin?

  So I think it's pretty good. We wrote an article about Trainium 3. We think it's gonna be a lot better than Trainium 2, mostly because there's a lot of interaction and help with, uh, from the labs themselves. And let's not forget, oh my god, it's beautiful. Let's not forget, uh, one of my favorite parts of this whole story is, everyone's like, okay, we wrote about the TPU article and people hated it because we said, oh, it's a Ruben clickbait. Where did all the TPU engineers go? A lot of them went to Trainium.

• 1:34:22John Coogan?

  This is too, this brain rot's too Nvidia focused. I botched it. We wanted to give you some brain rot. We wanted to put the brain rot directly in the show because we've been, we've been enjoying the brain rot edits. And we thought, what if we did it live? But my prompting was maybe below, below standard. But I like the, is it a cake or not?

• 1:34:43Doug O'Laughlin?

  That's pretty good. I honestly forgot about the is it a cake.

• 1:34:45John Coogan?

  Anyway, sorry. Just resetting on Trainium. You wrote the article, obviously. There was like a bunch of back and forth, but, uh, but, but how are you thinking about it currently?

• 1:34:53Doug O'Laughlin?

  So look, I think, uh, we actually, in the semi-analysis, uh, premium, you know, product that I've managed, we definitely, we kind of made a call that we thought there would be some kind of announcement, OpenAI, um, at Reinvent. Mostly because, and then like first principles, here's what it is. Uh, data center execution is starting to become a real issue. Uh, Oracle's delayed, Fairwater's delayed, and Cores and Query is delayed. And you know who is not delayed? Amazon. Amazon has like, their execution is flawless when it comes to data center and power.

• 1:35:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:22Doug O'Laughlin?

  And they're, I think they're gonna put like five, six gigawatts online next year. It's a big number, like a huge number.

• 1:35:27John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:35:28Doug O'Laughlin?

  And so OpenAI is always trying to secure more compute at every single point in time. And who has the most power available to them and has a project, uh, that they, you know, obviously are very interested in getting more customers for? I think OpenAI's power constraint is going to, like, that's one of the reasons why the deal. And then also, you know, OpenAI is always down for fresh money. At this point in time, they're like, uh, they're hitting up Disney, they're hitting up SoftBank, everyone who has money. They're trying to get money on investment from. So that's kind of like a, you know, a win-win for them.

• 1:36:01John Coogan?

  Okay, so the question that I was kicking around was, there's a, there's, there's this $10 billion investment into OpenAI from Amazon. Simultaneously, OpenAI has around $38, $37 billion of commitments with AWS over a series of years. And my, my question is like, how, how do we see, how do you think about the way, the way OpenAI will be working with, with AWS and, and Tranium chips broadly? Is it something where they can basically make all of their models multi-platform and run them and kind

• 1:36:42John Coogan?

  of create one fluid compute resource, a pool of compute that, that can fluidly shift across Tranium and GPU from Nvidia? Or are they going to sort of take the Tranium chips and have a specific model? Like maybe they'll do their video generation over there, or their image generation, or they have old 4O workloads that are sticking around longer than they expected. Let's replatform that model to Tranium and have it run really cheaply on Tranium, or something like that? Like, is it a per, per-use partnership? Or is it something that cuts across the entire org? Do you have any visibility into that?

• 1:37:25John Coogan?

  Did we lose audio?

• 1:37:27Jordi Hays?

  I'm not hearing, I'm not hearing Doug. Lost him.

• 1:37:30Doug O'Laughlin?

  Uh, oh, how about now?

• 1:37:31John Coogan?

  Now we're good. Sorry.

• 1:37:33Doug O'Laughlin?

  Okay, we're back. We're so back. Uh, I, I don't think we have perfect visibility first and foremost, but you can look at someone who's already doing that, which is Anthropic. Anthropic uses TPUs. They, they use GPUs and they use Tranium. And so there's a certain level that you can abstract to that. And I think TPUs, for example, is trying to do it on Torch TPU, right? So at PyTorch. And I I think um having the multiple compute like elastic pools of compute is good for negotiating power and that's probably in OpenAI's interest, but it's like a pain in the ass to get this to work. So there's like a two, two brains. Um, one, if you're really focused, you just buy more of one and be the best at it. Um, two, uh, at the same time, you get to pay less gross margins if

• 1:38:14Doug O'Laughlin?

  you can kind of diversify your suppliers instead of just one. Um, it's possible. Anthropic has shown you that they, people can do it. They already have, and that's probably what we, yeah, so that's kind of my brain. I I think it really comes down to the power constraint, dude. That's what Amazon has that no one else has. And that's like, that's the art of the deal, if that makes sense. And also, I think it's the

• 1:38:35John Coogan?

  Is that, is that a refer, i- is that, uh, like, does that tell me that Amazon was more excited about the AI build out a year or two ago? They didn't pause when Satya Nadella went through that pause? Or is it just Amazon's been building sort of linearly growing, growing, growing for a decade, two decades? And so this is just more of the same what we should have predicted from Amazon? Do you have, do you have an idea of like, is this them catching up? Is this them just maintaining their level of excitement?

• 1:39:08Jordi Hays?

  Well, I mean, part of it is if you look at Oracle's like backlog enhancement, they were basically saying we're going to build AWS in like a couple of years. Meanwhile, AWS has, you know, multi-decade head start. And it's like, yeah, we're also that, like, you can imagine they're thinking, like, we're gonna, we're gonna build that capacity too. And you're welcome to like, you know, have your deal with Oracle, but uh, it makes sense that Amazon can kind of like beat them to the, to the punch.

• 1:39:36Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah, I think that that's, uh, I think what Jordy said is probably more down the more realistic what's happened. So like last year, we had the pause from Microsoft. Um, obviously, it's a big deal. But even before the pause, uh, Microsoft at the infrastructure level was never as sophisticated from Azure versus AWS. AWS, um, is the OG, all in-house, did everything themselves and has like a very reactive and like Battle-tested infrastructure and like, hey, they're the largest logistics company in the United States. They're one of the largest logistic companies in the entire world. Before all this AI stuff, they had the biggest amount of compute and the biggest, you know, the biggest infrastructure shell and all, like the whole pipeline and platform and all of this.

• 1:40:18Doug O'Laughlin?

  And I think that that's the, like, pretty much they finally got everything turned in the right direction with a focus on more AI and then you're seeing the, the results of that. About a year and a half later, like, right, but you're, you're, while Microsoft pulled back, they pushed ahead and then now all of their long-term investments are going to start to bear fruit meaningfully in twenty-six and twenty-seven. So that's the, I think that that's the simplistic way to think about it. Um, when I work, when I talk to and I work with people who have worked with, let's say, and this is like from the before times, you know, before GPUs. Uh, the difference between AWS and Azure is like, you know, junior varsity varsity, like they're a totally different league. And I think that that's, uh, that's that, and, and you don't bet against AWS's infra- uh, infrastructure, like execution there.

• 1:41:02Doug O'Laughlin?

  We've seen almost, like, like Oracle is a perfect example, dude. It's been delay after delay after delay, like these timelines are starting to be pushed out and and we think that that's going to become like, you know, more than just like trying to find power. It's just like converting that power into a powered shell seems to have a real execution risk. And I think Amazon is more money good from that perspective.

• 1:41:21John Coogan?

  How did you process the AWS, uh, like direct pipe to GCP news? It seems like they're maybe trying to get into more like cross data center training. I know Google, uh, has some experience there is AWS. Is that, is that something that the, the big labs are demanding at this point? Like, is there also multi-cloud? Like, are there any special, um, offerings other than, or is it really just like, hey, we just have capacity and no one else does and that's enough?

• 1:41:51Doug O'Laughlin?

  I mean, I think, I think the labs probably demand it. Um, and historically, the, the biggest rake that everyone got paid or like had to pay in these, in the multi-cloud world was egress and ingress.

• 1:42:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:02Doug O'Laughlin?

  Um, I don't like, this is like, I don't know, you remember maybe twenty nineteen, everyone was like, oh, these fricking egress fees are like too high. Then that's kind of, um, I think that's like, kind of how, what they did is they forced all the data to stay inside their data centers and they charged you like crazy to open the door. I think, um, I think it's just kind of breaking because they're, they're seeing that like the customers. Absolute size is so large and they need so much demand that you have to pay. You know, how do you win these customers? Well, you need to build a pipeline, a door to your, your data center. Especially if your data center isn't where they started at and they're, you know, their data lives in Azure and not in AWS. Yeah. Uh, right? You want to have a door to A W S because up until now it was everything lived in AWS. So I think that's kind of the story there.

• 1:42:46Doug O'Laughlin?

  Um, yeah, I think, I definitely think the multi data center, uh, multi data center training and inference probably like to certain extent is like, maybe not inference, but like that's part of the story too. I also think, um, maybe even rolling back to the previous question in terms of like, there was a paper or article where maybe it was like a conversation that Anthropic had where there are different models that have different TCOs and different values that, um, on different hardware. So like certain types of hardware, I think is much more profitable on certain types of memory bound and or like flops bound. And so I do think having all those different options is going to have, um, a better cost per use, per model, per hardware. And so that's, I think that that's going to be a like strategically valuable thing going forward in terms of like lowering the cost of AI.

• 1:43:31Jordi Hays?

  Do you accept, uh, expect to see any announcements on the commerce side between OpenAI and Amazon? Uh, we were talking earlier. Uh, it feels like this could be a scenario where like Disney invested in OpenAI and in exchange, uh, as part of that, Disney is giving them a one year exclusive on all that IP, which is like an insane, I think underrated advantage. With Amazon, you can imagine ChatGPT, OpenAI has been working since inception to like, be able to monetize, uh, some of the product, uh, like some of the purchasing that they are driving across the internet and could be. But at the same time, Amazon has a $60 billion like ad business and they want to protect that. And that's based on people landing on Amazon and searching for products there.

• 1:44:18Doug O'Laughlin?

  My impulse is not, no way, man. That's like the, you know, that's like the unassailable. That's the unassailable thing. So, yeah, it's the golden goose. Why would you let, why would you let the fox into the, into the hen house? Like, just no way. No way, dude.

• 1:44:32Jordi Hays?

  So, so the weaker, weaker companies have, the Etsy's of the world have said like, yeah, we'll, we'll do it because we.

• 1:44:39Doug O'Laughlin?

  They have more to win.

• 1:44:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:40John Coogan?

  Your background makes it look like you're in space. Are you developing a thesis around data centers in space? Or is that coming? I know you probably don't want to leak too much alpha on this particular show, but.

• 1:44:55Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:55John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about it? What's the timeline? Is there going to be a space data center, data center model for sale anytime soon?

• 1:45:02Doug O'Laughlin?

  So you're talking, I'm from the space data center team, research team, SM analysis right now on the ISS.

• 1:45:09John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:45:09Doug O'Laughlin?

  Um, and, and, and I'm.

• 1:45:12John Coogan?

  Santa tracker online.

• 1:45:14Doug O'Laughlin?

  Santa tracker online. Um, and I'm going to be honest with you, I'm a space data center hater. I'm a huge space data. I'm a, I'm a giant hater. I'm sorry. I know, I know Gavin talked about it. Gavin's really intelligent and like a very well spoken, smart individual in the space. But like, guys, it is hard to train a model on Earth today.

• 1:45:36Doug O'Laughlin?

  It's hard enough to train a model on Earth.

• 1:45:38Jordi Hays?

  It's hard to build a box and put some chips in it and plug it in and on Earth.

• 1:45:42Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah. It's, it's, dude, we're telling me that we have power delays on Earth.

• 1:45:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:45:48Doug O'Laughlin?

  What, what is going to happen? Like, we, you know.

• 1:45:50John Coogan?

  It is hard to square those things. Um, and so, and so, and so hater, hater.

• 1:45:54Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the pushback there would obviously be like, there's a lot of energy in space, solar energy. But, but again, it, it, it, uh, I just felt like there was like a very organized, uh, effectively narrative pump tied to this.

• 1:46:11Doug O'Laughlin?

  I, I mean, do you want to know why? Come on. I can tell you the answer. I can tell you the answer. It's because SpaceX is racing.

• 1:46:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:21Doug O'Laughlin?

  You gotta remember what bag is being pumped at any given time and the fact that you heard the SpaceX round come out maybe a few weeks later is not, um, it's that like

• 1:46:31Jordi Hays?

  It wasn't, it was within the same week, it was in the same week that the $800 billion round like details came out. I could see them raising more now because they've announced the like target one and a half trillion. So like that just creates space for like the pre-IPO round, which could land at easily a trillion or north of a trillion. Now that all these people realize like, hey, it's going to go out. I'm going to have like a shorter liquidity timeline. Uh, and so, yeah, I would expect, you know, more.

• 1:47:04Doug O'Laughlin?

  I, I think that's part of it, but also, uh, you know, if we're talking about data centers in space, there's only one service provider, right? The whole, uh, so like, you know, the one of the reasons why I'm like a hater of data centers in space is like, hey, um, uh, like, you know, a 3,200 pound or whatever, a one ton GB 200 on earth costs a lot of money, uh, 10x the cost to get it into space, right? Um, but if a space data center was to ever happen, right? Uh, there's only one company that has really lowered the cost of moving something from on earth into space. And so if that was to even be part of the TAM, uh, all of that TAM would belong to SpaceX. So that's my, that's, that's, that's my belief at least is that like, when, when these like large narratives come around, uh, a very large funding round,

• 1:47:47Doug O'Laughlin?

  there's no, it, it isn't a coincidence. Maybe that's what they were talking about in the SpaceX round. And that's where you're starting to hear all this stuff. Hey, this is something in their long-term planning. And then, you know, investors who are very excited about it, talk about it. That's very possible. And if, if there are data centers in space, I promise you SpaceX will be doing it. Let's put it that way.

• 1:48:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:06Doug O'Laughlin?

  However, we feel about it, I promise you SpaceX will be doing it. So.

• 1:48:10John Coogan?

  It's sort of the same thing as like the Mars narrative, which is still years and years away and, and, you know, maybe decades away. Uh, but you still have this like call option on it because if we get to Mars, it's probably going to be a SpaceX rocket.

• 1:48:23Jordi Hays?

  Something I've been thinking about is, I mean, it seems like, I mean, so far Paramount's, uh, Skydance effort to acquire Warner Brothers seems to be falling apart a little bit. Warner, uh, Warner Brothers board doesn't want to do it. Uh, they're happy with Netflix. It seems like. Netflix very clearly is like good for the deal and there's less certainty on the on the Paramount side, or at least that's how Warner Brothers board is positioning it. And I have to imagine that there's a handful of people that are looking at that money that was like soft circled by the Gulf. And they're like, I want, I want those tens of billions of dollars. So like if you're SpaceX or you're OpenAI and you're like seeing an opportunity of like,

• 1:49:06Jordi Hays?

  hey, this, this kind of money was soft circled for a deal that might not be going through. Everybody should be going after that.

• 1:49:14Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah, you should be raising. Always be closing, bro. So, uh, always be closing.

• 1:49:21Jordi Hays?

  I wanted to ask you about storytelling, but in a very specific context, obviously, everybody on the timeline was talking about storytelling this week, if you should hire a storyteller. Uh, but I wanted to ask you about Meta, specifically their storytelling, because they came out this year with this story around personal superintelligence. And then there was some reporting recently, I forget by who, that was saying like some of the execs apparently were just like, hey, we should just work on ads, basically. Like, let's just make the core business better. And I feel like I, I personally, as a, as a user in the meta ecosystem, I have no idea what like personal superintelligence like really means, right?

• 1:50:03Jordi Hays?

  Is it, is it a better ver- like, are you trying to deliver a better version of ChatGPT and get into the search business as a, as a meta shareholder? I'm like, I don't know. I also don't, I also don't totally know what it means. And so my question is like, do you, do you think that Meta needs to kind of dial that in or do we just let them cook and, and we can form an opinion once they, uh, once they ship?

• 1:50:30Doug O'Laughlin?

  Look, so, okay, I, I think forming an opinion when they ship is like the most reasonable way to live your life instead of speculating, but I'm going to put my, my Zuck hat on, okay? Zuck hat on, um, let's think about how I would do this. Um, three billion people use our products every single day and it's important part for, of your day to day thing. I would argue, uh, the chat. GPT universe is actually like, don't even include us, uh, include the United States, actually. We are high ARPU users who like pay for like Macs or Pro or whatever and like can can amortize, know how to use these things. Um, the adoption in the United States is pretty high. The long tail of Meta users is like pretty astounding. Um, you know, in in some places in Southeast Asia, like,

• 1:51:14Doug O'Laughlin?

  hey, Meta or like WhatsApp, which is on by Meta, is like the primary mean for people to do business on, right? For people to talk to other businesses. Hey, um, all of a sudden, like, I'm sure, have you ever done like a random like tour in like Southeast Asia or like Japan or like wherever the hell you go on? Um, and you like, you know, you sign up for it and they they send all these things. There's clearly like a whole business flow behind it. Um, WhatsApp actually does have a ginormous, you know, billion user moat that I think can like kind of, you know, kind of become the super app. That's like,

• 1:51:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, that that but the other thing, they have to be feeling pretty confident with the experience with threads, where they have effectively ported their user base to an entirely new app, like, the it's I I believe they could at some point, once they're confident in the product experience, get the Meta AI app to half a billion users in the way that they, I don't think Threads is at that yet, but it's had hundreds of millions of of active users. And that that distribution advantage does give them the potential to like come from behind, especially in some of these uh, uh, sort of more international markets.

• 1:52:22Doug O'Laughlin?

  I mean, have you guys ever seen the like the really sloppy, um, I I think their app, Love and App advertisements, actually for the games? It's like the guy and he's shooting a gun and you press one. It's like the the pure brain rot, video game ad that gets you to click through.

• 1:52:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:37Doug O'Laughlin?

  Um, Meta Meta has the ability, in my opinion, to serve that kind of crap in your feed that is so gamified, it makes you press a button. Um, when I am, when I am doom scrolling on reels or something like that, occasionally there would be a thread where they have like such a jabated, ridiculous title where I'm like, I just have to see that. And of course, it ends like the word before the hook that you want to know the answer. And so you click it and then you go through and then like, that's how you can like juice ARPU. So, yeah, you're, I think you're right. There, no one else has quite the on-ramp, I think, in terms of engaging active users ASAP if they wanted to. But I think you have to have like, you know, you have to have the galaxy brain addictive perfect use case done first because I think they have the on-ramp and they can spend enough

• 1:53:21Doug O'Laughlin?

  GPUs to tell you here's how you convert a random user to try our experience for thirty seconds and we could probably mechanically show it to enough people to get, you know, to easily boot up ten, twenty, thirty million people to try the app very quickly. But the real execution that I think it's going to be on them is to get those ten, twenty, thirty million people to become addicted users who share it with other people and make that, you know, personalized super intelligence part of your day to day.

• 1:53:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, remember to the WhatsApp point, they did boot ChatGPT out of like the WhatsApp ecosystem, like not too long ago, remember, which had like a ton of users. I think it was, I, it was at least.

• 1:54:01Doug O'Laughlin?

  When did they boot this out?

• 1:54:02Jordi Hays?

  This was like, I think a couple months ago.

• 1:54:06Doug O'Laughlin?

  It's actually really interesting. I might have to follow up on that idea. Actually, that's pretty, it's pretty interesting. I might kind of.

• 1:54:13Jordi Hays?

  That tells you, that tells you, yeah, I mean, it tells you like how, how they'll integrate their own models.

• 1:54:19Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:20Jordi Hays?

  Over time. Anyways, we're, we're way over. I wish we had more time, but thank you for being a part of this this year. Some of our most enjoyable conversations.

• 1:54:31John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for everything you've done to help.

• 1:54:32Doug O'Laughlin?

  Dude, thank you, guys. I love, I love TPP, like seriously, I love TPP, like straight up. We're, we're on the moon, I guess, or we're in outer space. You guys are in LA. I would love to do it. I got to do it in person sometime.

• 1:54:43John Coogan?

  Please, come down.

• 1:54:44Doug O'Laughlin?

  I'm like never out, but no, I would love to.

• 1:54:46Jordi Hays?

  Anytime.

• 1:54:47Doug O'Laughlin?

  It'd be great.

• 1:54:48John Coogan?

  Merry Christmas. Have a great holiday season and we'll see you in 2026.

• 1:54:53Jordi Hays?

  You're the man.

• 1:54:53Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:54John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:54:54Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:54:56John Coogan?

  Public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing and they're trusted by millions. Our next guest is Doug Bernauer from Radiant. He's right across town over in El Segundo. He's one of the, one of the original El Segundo hard tech companies. I have been a huge fan.

• 1:55:17Jordi Hays?

  Look at that Bo Trust.

• 1:55:19John Coogan?

  Look at this building.

• 1:55:20Jordi Hays?

  So, so.

• 1:55:21John Coogan?

  We're looking for a building that looks exactly like that.

• 1:55:23Jordi Hays?

  I didn't know that terminology until this year and now I only want to spend time. If I'm not at home, I want to be in Bo Trust buildings. They're just, they're iconic.

• 1:55:32Doug Bernauer?

  You can come on by. I think it's a double Bo Trust because they've got the two.

• 1:55:36John Coogan?

  No way. They got double.

• 1:55:38Doug Bernauer?

  I also have a name for that. That might be a name for that.

• 1:55:41John Coogan?

  Anyway, we're not here to talk about architecture. We're here to talk about nuclear reactors. So, uh, please kick us off with a, uh, get us up to speed on what's happened in the last year. How are you describing the shape of the business? Where's the progress? Uh, what are you building and how do you frame it for everyone?

• 1:55:59Doug Bernauer?

  Thanks, John. Uh, great to be here. Uh, we are actively building our first nuclear reactor, which would be the first new design, uh, going critical at Idaho National Laboratory since 1977. So before any of us were born, uh, so it's extremely exciting. Uh, I think last time we had talked, you know, a year ago, we were still working on the design. Now all components are ordered, there are parts here, there are technicians assembling it.

• 1:56:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:56:22Doug Bernauer?

  Uh, we're on qualified supplier list and, you know, just this morning we announced we were-

• 1:56:27Jordi Hays?

  You said the first?

• 1:56:28Doug Bernauer?

  That's right.

• 1:56:29Jordi Hays?

  Is there some competition to really be the first? A lot of people want to say they're the first.

• 1:56:35Doug Bernauer?

  Absolutely. There's always competition and I welcome all the competition. Let's all build a huge amount of reactors, uh, and all right, make, uh, American nuclear energy, uh, reach as many people as it can.

• 1:56:49John Coogan?

  So the design's still the same, one megawatt, roughly the size of a shipping container. Have you thought about, uh, who the buyer is? I know we've talked in the past about, uh, you throw it on a military base or you throw it on a, an oil and gas exploration zone, stranded area where, where diesel might be really expensive. Are you still thinking about those types of customers or have the AI folks come calling?

• 1:57:14Doug Bernauer?

  Uh, we're absolutely thinking about those types of customers, but really, uh, nuclear energy is for prosperity, driving prosperity. That means letting humans put power wherever they want to put it. Uh, just so happens if you make a compact reactor, you could put years of megawatt scale power wherever you want. Um, we have made progress with, uh, you know, we have a data center customer Equinix, who has, uh, put down an order for 20 units. So AI is definitely driving that.

• 1:57:40John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:57:43John Coogan?

  That's a lot. I mean, yeah.

• 1:57:45Doug Bernauer?

  And then more, more progress with the military customer as well. And we have a contract now with the Air Force through Defense Innovation Unit, uh, for several units there, uh, as well. UAV online.

• 1:57:56Doug Bernauer?

  So it's, it's really, we're working on the same stuff that, you know, the design has not needed to change. We submitted a regulatory document over 500 pages to the Department of Energy.

• 1:58:05Jordi Hays?

  They one-shot it with ChatGPT?

• 1:58:07Doug Bernauer?

  It's not a good, not a good thing to do. You definitely can use AI to learn fast, but not to do fast.

• 1:58:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. So take us through the news today. Massive new funding round. What exactly happened? And then I want to talk about some of the, some of the uses of that funding.

• 1:58:27Doug Bernauer?

  Yep. Yeah, so we have raised over $300 million in new funding through Boosts and Draper Associates.

• 1:58:40Doug Bernauer?

  Massive. Awesome.

• 1:58:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, that's a huge, that's a huge number. Are, is that because you're expecting to order lots of parts at this point? Because you're actually fulfilling orders? Is this hiring more R and D scientists? How much of this goes into R and D? How much of this goes into OpEx, CapEx? Like, how are you thinking about the uses of the funds?

• 1:59:00Doug Bernauer?

  Yep. All D, no R.

• 1:59:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:59:04Doug Bernauer?

  So it's, we're building. We're building right now. That's right. But it does accelerate our ability to go and build and get some more trained operators to run. At Idaho National Lab, we'll be running 24/7 with the reactor up, up and functioning. But a lot of this funding will go towards actually our facility that we announced in Tennessee. You know, over 80 acre site where we're putting down new construction on Department of Energy land. And that's fueling facility. What will become the mass production of reactors coming out of that facility?

• 1:59:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:38John Coogan?

  What, so, so the next I N L milestone? Do you have a specific date locked in? Are you working against a particular timeline? And has any of this shifted since there's been sort of a flurry of efforts to speed up the development of nuclear specifically? Has, has anything been able to be pulled forward? I know that there's a lot of, there's a lot of excitement around nuclear just over the past year. Has anything changed from your initial plan?

• 2:00:12Doug Bernauer?

  I think that things are accelerated across the board. So we got access to fuel in May. We know that's been transported now. It's at the fabricator. Fuel's being made for the reactor. That's very new, probably the most important thing to know that will hit schedule. But nothing's really changed in the long run. You know, we had a goal of going critical with the reactor, full scale. One that's designed, built by and then operated by Radiant along with the National Lab. And that'll happen before summer, which is pretty exciting. So it's very, very soon that's coming up. Your greater question, there's a whole bunch of executive orders and there's a lot of impetus from the current administration to make things move, make them go quickly.

• 2:00:57Doug Bernauer?

  And the National Labs and the NRC are both looking at their processes and going, well, we've got new reactors coming and so let's plan for it.

• 2:01:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:06Doug Bernauer?

  And so there are new processes that have already been released as part of the effort. So it is not an open call to action, but we're seeing a lot of real action.

• 2:01:14John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:01:16Jordi Hays?

  Switching topics, I wanted to, we had the tragic news yesterday that the MIT professor passed. I know he was studying and focusing on fusion. Can you talk about maybe the significance of his work and kind of the more industry reaction? Because a lot of people on the timeline were just kind of reacting to that and obviously it's incredibly tragic and just concerned around the work that he was doing.

• 2:01:56Doug Bernauer?

  Yeah, I am actually not a fusion expert. So I think that probably that story is best told by someone else. Of course, energy is critical and we're all building off of those marvels of the past and the technology that's developed, even just the ideas and those people who are willing to, you know, make their life and their life's work about something so important as, you know, clean, safe energy and access that energy for all of humanity.

• 2:02:26John Coogan?

  What

• 2:02:26Doug Bernauer?

  So I applaud that.

• 2:02:27John Coogan?

  You, one of your unique sort of like experiences been at SpaceX watching development of early rockets and then the transition from making one that works to making, you know, dozens and eventually hundreds that work of these like, you know, massive machines. How are you thinking about setting the company up for success in the transition to the point where you're churning out dozens of reactors? Are it, does it, can you already feel that Radiant is a different company because you're thinking about scale down the road?

• 2:03:06Doug Bernauer?

  Yeah, that's absolutely the case. So, pretty much everything with nuclear does not have a thing you can go and just carbon copy and say, we're going to make, somehow make reactors a thousand times smaller, but yet follow like all the rules and use all the same suppliers who are used to making those types of parts and things.

• 2:03:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:26Doug Bernauer?

  And I think at my core is that SpaceX kind of derived first principles approach. And, you know, it's absolutely the case if, and we usually point folks to talk to the national labs or other entities who are not us to talk about us and go, you know, what's different about those guys? And we really, we feel strongly that you must really own every aspect of the design down to and including the printed circuit boards and the software that goes on them. And that is not at all dissimilar to, right, that's a thing SpaceX also did. So it wasn't just, hey, make rocket engines, only make that. There's also, it's really required that you think through integration and go put everything you can get from the modern world into something. So they end up with something that's not outdated or slowed down by the lack of integrating that new technology.

• 2:04:11John Coogan?

  How big is the team at this point? And are you going to need to set up a second facility at some point? Because it feels like, you know, SpaceX started in El Segundo, eventually sort of outgrew that and now has an entire city. Is there going to be a, like a Radiant base city somewhere in Texas or something at some point?

• 2:04:31Doug Bernauer?

  Yeah, so Tennessee is our factory site.

• 2:04:33John Coogan?

  Tennessee.

• 2:04:33Doug Bernauer?

  Construction will start really soon on that. I think we will have a functioning building able to handle fueling reactors before the end of next year.

• 2:04:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:43Doug Bernauer?

  Which is a wild timeline, only supported by the NRC being able to move fast today, which is very exciting. But we already actually have two buildings in El Segundo. We just got our second building last month.

• 2:04:53John Coogan?

  Congrats, that's amazing.

• 2:04:55Doug Bernauer?

  So we have ES1, ES2.

• 2:04:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, very cool.

• 2:04:59Jordi Hays?

  Chat, Gabe in the chat said the Koreans are making major moves in nuclear, he thinks. Are there any countries that are kind of like rebooting their nuclear energy?

• 2:05:10John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, who else is drafting off of America right now? That's interesting.

• 2:05:13Jordi Hays?

  As, or yeah, inspiration or people that have been inspired by your efforts and other companies in the space?

• 2:05:22Doug Bernauer?

  Yeah, so nuclear spans this wide range of power levels. So, very true, Korea's, they're building a whole fleet of reactors that are, I think, 1,400 even up to 1,600 megawatts.

• 2:05:32John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:05:33Doug Bernauer?

  So some of the biggest that there are.

• 2:05:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:35Doug Bernauer?

  And they're able to do it on really short timelines, you know, five to six years to construct a giant facility like that.

• 2:05:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:41Doug Bernauer?

  Which is grid power. But it's so different from what we're doing. And I don't know if, it seems like America might be ahead, it might be first in the area we're in, which is these one-megawatt, right, systems, the real tiny and portable stuff. But there are, because the US is so innovative, there are startups that are working on this as well, and some established US nuclear companies. But there's handfuls of them. Though, you know, there are even more federal dollars being pointed at this problem.

• 2:06:12Doug Bernauer?

  So the Army actually have a really big program called Janus that's been announced that we're really excited about. So that could provide even faster motion to the tip of the spear, right, and go make it so that nuclear can go in a box and can go anywhere you want, which isn't the case

• 2:06:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:28Doug Bernauer?

  for those big reactors in other countries.

• 2:06:30John Coogan?

  How much of what's happening in the admin is just?

• 2:06:35John Coogan?

  A different level of energy, a different perception versus like there's, oh, that one law changed, that one rule changed. And because it felt like, we've talked about this in the past, there wasn't necessarily just like one line in the legal code that was holding you back. It was more like this sclerotic system of, you know, like a large organization, a lot of people trying to do their best, but just not really pushing things forward. So is it more of like a cultural shift? Or has there been particular regulatory changes that have been helpful?

• 2:07:11Doug Bernauer?

  Yeah, it's a great question. I think it's always a, it's kind of a combination of things. But I would say that, you know, we have Department of Energy, we have the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. These organizations have been around a very long time. There are people who've been there.

• 2:07:27John Coogan?

  Did we lose audio and video?

• 2:07:30Jordi Hays?

  We lost both.

• 2:07:31John Coogan?

  We lost both.

• 2:07:32Jordi Hays?

  You're back.

• 2:07:32John Coogan?

  You're back.

• 2:07:33Doug Bernauer?

  Oh, sorry about that.

• 2:07:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, no problem.

• 2:07:35Doug Bernauer?

  Reanswering. So the NRC, right, the Department of Energy, there are people there who've been there for decades. And it's, it's not like there's a real cultural shift, but there's a, there's a culture within them that just needed to be unleashed.

• 2:07:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:07:49Doug Bernauer?

  And so a lot of folks, it's the same people.

• 2:07:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:52Doug Bernauer?

  But they're just answering a different call.

• 2:07:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:54Doug Bernauer?

  Right? And they're, they're excited by it, and they're, they're deploying fuel.

• 2:07:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:58Doug Bernauer?

  You know, there's a reinvestment in enrichment assets in this country as well, which since 2013, there, there had been nothing. So I think we're, we're just really out of a dry spell.

• 2:08:07John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:08:09Doug Bernauer?

  Yep.

• 2:08:09John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. Well, thank you.

• 2:08:11Doug Bernauer?

  A lot of belief.

• 2:08:12John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show on such a busy day. And congratulations on the massive Series D. It's 1.8 billion valuation. You're officially a unicorn. Congratulations.

• 2:08:23Jordi Hays?

  Unicorn mode. Congrats to the whole team. I'm sure you guys are not going to have a very relaxed end of the year.

• 2:08:28John Coogan?

  I can't imagine you resting on your laurels. That's what, that's what we do over here.

• 2:08:32Jordi Hays?

  You got timelines, timelines to hit.

• 2:08:34John Coogan?

  We'll handle the laurel resting.

• 2:08:36Doug Bernauer?

  That's right. The build plan includes weekends and holidays.

• 2:08:39John Coogan?

  Okay, that's great.

• 2:08:40Doug Bernauer?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:41Jordi Hays?

  Locked in.

• 2:08:41John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a great, have a great holiday season. Cheers.

• 2:08:47Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:08:48John Coogan?

  Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. And our next guest is already in the restream waiting room. We have Jacob Effron from Redpoint.

• 2:09:06Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 2:09:06John Coogan?

  There he is.

• 2:09:07Speaker 08

  Hey, how you doing, guys? Great to be on.

• 2:09:09Jordi Hays?

  Great to finally have you on. Got it in before the end of the year. Welcome to the show.

• 2:09:15Speaker 08

  It's an honor to be here. And a very, very happy holidays to you guys.

• 2:09:18Jordi Hays?

  Thank you. Thank you. What's going on in your world? Maybe, maybe first time on the show, quick, quick introduction for the folks watching.

• 2:09:27Speaker 08

  Yeah, I'm Jacob. I'm a managing director over at Redpoint. We're a $6 billion fund and I co-run our early growth fund, which sounds like an oxymoron, but basically means a series B and C. So that's where I spend all my time and do a lot of RAI investing across a bunch of companies.

• 2:09:43Jordi Hays?

  What's, what's your favorite?

• 2:09:46Speaker 08

  You know, you can't answer that question.

• 2:09:48Jordi Hays?

  I think you can answer it. I think, I think it's, I have a friend who does As and Bs. And like, he has like a very, very clear, a very clear, clear preference around like one of, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, you know, share his alpha, but like, he has a lot of reasons about liking one versus the other. And I think, I think they attract. But I'm curious how you think of that B to C range, if there's like,

• 2:10:14Speaker 08

  Yeah, well, I will say the first, the first investment I ever worked on at Redpoint was, was show sponsor Ramp, which is sitting nicely up there in the, in the top right. And so I feel like that, that set the bar pretty high for, for team velocity.

• 2:10:27Jordi Hays?

  Was that the, was that the B or the C that you guys?

• 2:10:30Speaker 08

  That was the B, yeah.

• 2:10:30Jordi Hays?

  That was the B. Yeah, yeah. Now, I, I remember those days. You guys were, had a lot of conviction and it certainly panned out. What, yeah, what, like, how are you kind of reflecting on this year?

• 2:10:46Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's been, it's been quite the year, right? I think we've, you know, on the application side, I feel like there's been a tremendous amount of stuff that's really started to work. I feel like, you know, obviously coding being the killer use case, but there's been a ton in customer support, healthcare, legal. And I think the big question going into next year is, what's the next set of dominoes to fall on the application side? You know, are we in a time period where models have, are relatively plateauing and it's going to be this set of applications for a bit? Or are we going to see some improvements and then get a whole next wave of application areas unlocked? At the same time, there's been a ton of interesting stuff on the model side, you know, outside of core LLMs.

• 2:11:29Speaker 08

  Obviously, you guys have talked at length about some of the cool stuff happening in the image and video world, but even in robotics, biology, material sciences, it's been fascinating to see. And then next year, I'm really fired up about infrastructure, actually. I think with the, with the models slowing down a bit, I actually think it's a great opportunity. There's finally a stable set of things to build infrastructure for. And so I think it'll be really, really interesting 26.

• 2:11:50John Coogan?

  Do you think that there's any chance that we'll get a new consumer AI company out of a company that didn't start as a consumer AI company? I'm just fascinated by this.

• 2:12:01Speaker 08

  Like OpenAI part two?

• 2:12:02John Coogan?

  Oh, I mean, I mean, that is one of my hottest takes is that maybe, maybe the OpenAI nonprofit spawns another for-profit because perhaps there's something just innately, you know, like, just, there's no better place to just do unstructured research and start a company than a massively funded nonprofit. It happened once in history, maybe it happens again. But, but, I mean, to be clear, I was talking more about like, there's, there's these like Suno, Mid Journey, there's this interesting, there's this interesting wave of companies where they have a model and they turn it loose and it seems like people are kind of playing with it themselves and, and everyone reads on immediately as, oh, job displacement, that's a prosumer tool, that's an enterprise product.

• 2:12:47John Coogan?

  And maybe that's right, maybe there is a big enterprise opportunity or big prosumer opportunity or B2B opportunity. But I'm more interested in, in these new patterns of consumer behavior right now and trying to find areas where.

• 2:13:01John Coogan?

  Where consumers just might land, but I don't know if you've even looked at any of that.

• 2:13:05Speaker 08

  Yeah, no, we've looked at all these and I think there's obviously a ton of interesting new consumer behavior around, you know, remixing these models, playing around with them. I think Suno especially, I mean, we play around with that, with that tool all the time. And so I do think that there, you know, I think that the key will be, and you're starting to see this with OpenAI and Disney, and even Suno, which had an arrangement with Universal recently, it's like bringing IP onto these platforms, I think will just be fascinating, right? Because what's the, it's fun to remix something that is, you know, maybe a friend or somewhat abstract. It's a lot more fun to remix something that involves, you know, Taylor Swift or, you know, Darth Vader or some form of IP.

• 2:13:45Jordi Hays?

  How do you look at that category evolving? Because I was debating somebody Monday night who has managed some of the biggest global superstars and we were talking about music creation as a category and consumer AI and this kind of prosumer category. And I was taking the side that like, you have to assume that every lab, or not every lab, but a lot of the big players get into, you can imagine Gemini letting you make music, OpenAI, every, I think a lot of people will get into this because it's just like, it's a great hook and it's something consumers clearly want. I was much more on the side of like, I think music is like nuanced enough and like, there's a lot of depth to it and I think it deserves a standalone app.

• 2:14:26Jordi Hays?

  And I think that there's a lot of people that will just pay for the Suno experience for a long time, even if they have some of these other subscriptions. Meanwhile, like clearly, like you don't need, like, the average person is not going to necessarily have like an image gen app and then also like their normal LLM. So I'm curious, you guys are obviously quite biased here, given your position in Suno, but like, how you see that structure evolving?

• 2:14:52Speaker 08

  We're not investors in Suno, just a fan.

• 2:14:54Jordi Hays?

  Oh, really? Sorry.

• 2:14:56Speaker 08

  I'm from Boston, and so anytime there's like an epic Boston-based company, I get very excited. And so Suno being from there is awesome. But I think that, to your question, you know, I agree with you. Like, it probably doesn't live within a larger consumer app. I think, if anything, what you're going to see is there's a whole set of experiences to be built around how artists interact with their fans through these platforms. And I think that when someone captures a lot of the volume of folks that are interested in this, that's where the artist will go. It's not like an artist is going to go to 10 different, you know, to Gemini, to Claude, to ChatGPT, where music's embedded and like, you know, have back and forth with fans that are, you know, remixing their songs and interacting with it.

• 2:15:37Speaker 08

  I think that the, you know, the IP holders here will go to the consumer landing page that aggregates as many people as possible. And so I actually think it makes a ton of sense as a, as a space for a standalone category, because it's not really just about the quality of a model, right?

• 2:15:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:15:54Jordi Hays?

  I wanted to, chat was asking about pricing, and I was curious too. How you guys are, how you guys handle, some of these companies that are being formed have, are getting off the ground, basically with like Series A pricing out the gates. How do you guys handle that at Redpoint when you have an early-stage team? And then you're doing early growth and you're like, where do these even fall in?

• 2:16:15John Coogan?

  You incorporate the company and you say, I don't want to talk to the Redpoint seed investors. I want to do a growth round on day one. I want to talk to Jake.

• 2:16:22Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 2:16:25John Coogan?

  They call you, you know, I don't have an idea, but I need a growth round right now. Put 100 million in my account.

• 2:16:32Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, this is where, you know, I think it's just one of the really fun parts of working at a small firm, right? There's, you know, there's eight of us that are, that just work super closely together on all this stuff. And, you know, a company can be a seed one day and five days later be a Series B. And so we, you know, I think it involves us just working super closely together. But it's, you know, it's, it's an interesting time, right? It's both a crazy valuation environment and also these markets that folks are going after is just absolutely massive. And so I think you have to hold both of those, both of those truths simultaneously.

• 2:17:02John Coogan?

  Okay, on the valuations broadly.

• 2:17:07John Coogan?

  Just in the last half of this year, we've seen Oracle sell off post a big excitement around the backlog and the RPO. We've seen CoreWeave sell off. We've seen Rich Sutton and Andre Karpathy and Ilya Sutskever on the Dorkesh Patel podcast, talking about how maybe the models are slowing down. Is any of that

• 2:17:29Speaker 08

  Though I love that Andre's take was taken as bearish. He was like, I think this stuff will automate all enterprise work, but it will take a decade. And everyone's like, oh, it's over. Like, if it takes a decade, I don't want it.

• 2:17:39John Coogan?

  Well, there's the question. Is that, how is, how is the venture community? How is, how are all of those different data points? Some of them bullish, some of them bearish potentially, many of them up for interpretation. How are they being interpreted in Series A, B, C prices?

• 2:17:55Speaker 08

  Yeah. I mean, I think what's, what's very clear is there's both going to be, you know, massive, massive new companies created in this wave. And I think even with just the capabilities of models, even if, even if you believe that models aren't going to get that much better without some algorithmic breakthrough, and you believe that we're overbuilding on the data center side, it doesn't change the fact that this current generation of models works really well in a bunch of different application areas. And so I do think like on, on the app side, there's going to be massive businesses built. They'll require a bunch of infrastructure behind them. I think, you know, you were talking earlier with Sarah about some of the Neo Labs. I think that's like the most interesting question of, you know, what, what is the form of model progress going to be in the next five, 10 years? And is that something that occurs within the labs or outside of

• 2:18:38Speaker 08

  them? But I don't think that anyone's questioning whether really large companies will be created today.

• 2:18:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about the overall venture, the venture, like the, the amount of dollars flowing into venture funds right now? I'm sure you have a view and you have a couple data points. There's this chart that looks incredibly bearish. It looks like it's completely over for venture capital. And yet, that doesn't match with anything I was feeling because there's huge rounds happening. I mean, I guess it doesn't count as venture capital, but OpenAI is raising 10 billion from Amazon. Like, there's big deals getting done, but for some reason, there's a chart that shows venture dollars going down. How did you process? Did you see that chart? Did you process that?

• 2:19:21Speaker 08

  Of course.

• 2:19:21John Coogan?

  Same way I did. Walk me through your interpretation of that. What's going on?

• 2:19:25Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think you're spot on on the vibes. It didn't totally match what it feels like the game on the field is. I do think there's probably, you know, it's definitely harder for emerging managers or first time funds. And so it doesn't surprise me that the overall count of funds was was down a bit. But like, you know, a lot of that data can be skewed by some pretty outlier large funds that were raised in kind of 2021, as well as the fact that those funds in 21 were deployed in like, you know, six, 12 months or something, right? And so I think actually maybe we're back to slightly more normal fund deployment paces.

• 2:19:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then do you think there's also a shift over the last few years to more SPV usage amongst fund managers? So that maybe the maybe the dollar value that's flowing through is high or is growing right now this year certainly is.

• 2:20:15Jordi Hays?

  Look at rate. We just had Doug on from Radiant. The two funds that led are not, to my knowledge, multi-billion dollar funds, and yet he raised $300 million that had to come from, assuming that came almost entirely from SPVs.

• 2:20:31John Coogan?

  Sure. So yeah, are you seeing an uptick broadly? Does your firm have a view on SPVs?

• 2:20:36Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, I think there definitely, you know, seems to be both SPV activity as well as, you know, Nvidia, like, you know, large, the hyperscalers, a lot more investment coming in from from all sorts of other places. I think for us, you know, we keep our fund size focused. We're, you know, we want to be, you know, direct investors and long-term partners with the companies we work with. But I do think, you know, I do think that's probably part of the story here, too.

• 2:21:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you think there's any, are funds losing, like, losing rounds to hyperscalers? Like, oh, yeah, I put it in a term sheet and they went with Nvidia instead of me.

• 2:21:12Speaker 08

  I think usually these rounds are kind of a combination of, you know, traditional venture firms and some of the other folks. But obviously, people have different incentives in those arrangements. And so, you know, it can change, change the pricing sometimes.

• 2:21:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

• 2:21:27Jordi Hays?

  What are you, what are you expecting out of robotics broadly next year or maybe the next two years?

• 2:21:34Speaker 08

  Did you guys see the news from from physical intelligence today? It's actually pretty nuts. What? Yeah.

• 2:21:39Jordi Hays?

  I didn't. I didn't see it.

• 2:21:40John Coogan?

  But yeah, be sorry. Break it down for the audience.

• 2:21:42Speaker 08

  Yeah, so for those that didn't see, and I am not a robotics AI researcher to be clear, but I'll do my best to play one.

• 2:21:47Jordi Hays?

  But you guys are investors in physical intelligence.

• 2:21:50Speaker 08

  We are investors in pi.

• 2:21:51Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Let's ring the gongs for that.

• 2:21:53Speaker 08

  Exactly, exactly. I love that. So what they basically, what they basically showed is, there's been this question for a long time of can you use, you know, egocentric human video data to improve robotics models? Because god, we have a lot of, of human video. What we don't have a lot of is teleoperated data and other data that's more difficult to gather for robotics. And so what they were able to show is that basically, they, they built these models already on, you know, they had this model pi point five that they built using a bunch of teleoperated data. And once the model got to a certain ability, they then threw a bunch of egocentric human video data at it, and it actually made the model way better. And this was what's called an emergent capability.

• 2:22:36Speaker 08

  This capability didn't happen when the model was way worse. And what's exciting about it is it kind of parallels actually, a lot of what's happening in, in reinforcement learning right now. And, you know, after AlphaGo, there was this huge push to, to do reinforcement learning for everything. And it didn't really work because the base models weren't powerful enough. But then fast forward, we did this massive pre-training, we got these much more powerful base models, and then reinforcement learning started working really well. And so it seems like as we're starting to scale some of these robotics models, we're starting to see some pretty cool effects of the ability to apply video data, which we have a lot more of.

• 2:23:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes so much sense. This is awesome.

• 2:23:11Speaker 08

  Yeah. Those guys, every month I feel like have some awesome research.

• 2:23:15Jordi Hays?

  So I guess, I guess like, any, any predictions around just like, I feel like for people, you see stuff coming out of labs, it's really exciting, but for people to really start to like actually believe that robotics are going to transform our entire world, right? You have to like get zipline delivered to your house and have that like. Moment, right? You have to be, you have to be in a Waymo.

• 2:23:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, everyone seems to be waiting for like the touring test of robotics is like do my dishes. And, and it's like, it's unclear that that's going to be the first really big business in robotics. Like it could be something else that comes out, but we already have the robot in the house. It's a vacuum cleaner. Um, you know, a variety of companies have duked it out there, but like we, we have some robotics that deliver some value. But we want something that's like the full humanoid will probably accept the dishwasher robot in the interim with like one arm.

• 2:24:09Speaker 08

  I'll definitely accept the dishwasher robot. Like I'm here for that. The laundry robot, like dishwasher. Sounds, sounds.

• 2:24:15Jordi Hays?

  Dishwasher robot? I'll sell you a dishwasher. It's an AI dishwasher. It's 20 grand. You want it?

• 2:24:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:22Speaker 08

  Yeah, for, for, under my Christmas tree, I'll, I'll take it. Uh, but no, I do, I do think that, uh, you know, basically as these models get better, we'll start to see some pretty interesting, uh, probably to start in like, you know, some of the enterprise use cases where you can control the environments a bit more, uh, and it's less, uh, on the home side. But I think there's going to be a ton of really interesting stuff people build on top of the models. To be clear, there still needs to be improvement, uh, in, in the underlying models until we get there. But I think it's so clear, everyone from the government to the largest, uh, companies in our economy are, are quite focused on robotics right now and rightly so.

• 2:24:55John Coogan?

  Have you looked at, have you looked at other AI hardware stuff? There's this weird, uh, phenomenon happening where there's a lot of AI hardware companies that go viral, get tons of press. And then it doesn't seem like there's massive sales in the short term at least. And then we wound up finding some company that was just doing basically AI device for note taking. It just records and gives you the notes. It's a very simple, like, you know, you very, I can explain you. You already know exactly what I'm talking about in terms of the product value prop. And they're making like a hundred million dollars in sales, maybe 250 or something already. Have you looked at that? Have you thought about how, uh, like the future, like AI hardware plays out? Or is it scary because, uh, the, the big device companies like Apple might want to just go after that and just eat that at some point?

• 2:25:40Speaker 08

  Well, I think all big markets, the big companies will want to go after, right? And so nothing, I think that's the price of it being really interesting. We're investors in a company called Sesame that is going after, you know, both kind of better voice models, but also like, you know, the AI glasses world. And I think that it's interesting to see so many people coalesce on that as like the form factor for, for a bunch of, you know, of these products going forward. And so I think that like that is hugely exciting and I would be really surprised in the next few years if there wasn't a much more prolific usage of hardware that has a bunch of these AI capabilities built into it.

• 2:26:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, that's exciting stuff. Jordi, anything else?

• 2:26:19Jordi Hays?

  The amount of glasses that are going to be available in a few years is wild. Probably going to be Sesame, Snap, Apple.

• 2:26:28John Coogan?

  I mean, that's less than you walk into a sunglass hut. There's 25 brands. Why not 25 brands of electronic products?

• 2:26:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, no, I just think it's exciting. It's going to be very cool.

• 2:26:36Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's going to be pretty sweet.

• 2:26:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, we got the demo Monday of the new, the Snap.

• 2:26:44John Coogan?

  Spectacles.

• 2:26:45Jordi Hays?

  Spectacles that are coming out next year that are dev only right now. And we were running around everywhere here having, having a lot of fun.

• 2:26:52John Coogan?

  I mean, the AR.

• 2:26:53Speaker 08

  Are you guys going to rock them on the show next year?

• 2:26:54John Coogan?

  The augmented reality is remarkable. They're very chunky. They're, they're big. And, and I, I've actually thought about this, like, like, would I have a reason?

• 2:27:02Jordi Hays?

  The developer version is not what they're releasing this next year.

• 2:27:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it'll be small. But, um, I, like, wearing augmented reality glasses, I mean, I guess I could have a screen. It's like, I could kind of use it as like a teleprompter. Like, I, I, sometimes I will, like, text with the team on my laptop here. Oh, is the next guest, you know, on time? Or do I need to hang out in this interview longer? Not to break the fourth wall here, but, um, and I could imagine, I could imagine glasses.

• 2:27:29Speaker 08

  I hope you're not texting that directly right now.

• 2:27:31John Coogan?

  I'm not, but, uh, but Logan from Google is actually a few minutes late, so we can hang out here and chat. But, uh, and then maybe it would be fun to have a camera on there that you could feed into the show. So you could be like, let's go to the John cam. Cause sometimes we go to the Gong cam and imagine if you could watch me hit the Gong in first person as Santa Claus, like, that sounds like entertainment. Of course, I'm a sort of a niche use case, or use, sort of a niche, a niche user. But, uh, I don't know, I just came up with two pretty cool use cases. I, I think it's going to be a fun future.

• 2:28:03Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think the fun part about this stuff, I mean, it reminds me of the models. It's like you put it out in the world and you can't begin to imagine the way that people are going to use it, right? And I think that once you have a product that meets the aesthetic bar of something you'd actually wear, people are going to use it in all sorts of ways that I'm sure anyone making these things couldn't possibly predict. In the same way that I love, whenever the model companies release a model, it's like they have some idea, but they're always, day one, shocked at like all these, you know, things that work about it or ways people use it, they had no idea.

• 2:28:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Last question. With all the competition in the foundation model space, it does seem like there's a lot of startups that you've probably invested in that are spending a lot of money with the foundation labs. Have you seen that manifest in gross profits? There was a data point from Notion in the Wall Street Journal that their gross profits went from like 95 to 85% or something. It was a very slight gross margin compression. Certainly not cause for concern, but have you, do you feel like you have a view on what the impact of, you know, high usage LLM inference might be for growth-stage software companies on gross margins?

• 2:29:12Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, I think for, the thing that makes it challenging to know where it all shakes out is just the price of these models changes so much every, you know, two, three months, it just keeps going down. And so, you know, if we stay on this like treadmill of capability improvement, then maybe you're always paying for the most cutting-edge thing. But I do think that for anything that one of our companies was doing six months ago, it's gotten 10 times cheaper. Now, they may be doing a whole new set of things as well, but take any set of capabilities, I think the gross margin for that set of capabilities will end up being, you know, being pretty good, just given the competition that exists in the foundation model space. And just the insane rate at which this stuff keeps getting cheaper. And we're going to see the same stuff happen in video, in other spaces, and I think that'll

• 2:29:56Speaker 08

  be incredibly exciting too for folks building on top.

• 2:29:59John Coogan?

  That's good to hear. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. Have a fun rest of your day. Yeah, we're gonna have a great time. Well, have a great rest of your day and we will talk to you soon.

• 2:30:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great, great hanging, Jacob.

• 2:30:11John Coogan?

  Sounds good.

• 2:30:12Jordi Hays?

  Good. Talk soon. Cheers.

• 2:30:13John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 2:30:15John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about 8sleeve.com. Exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, wake up energized.

• 2:30:22Jordi Hays?

  I had a kind of a brutal night.

• 2:30:24John Coogan?

  Do you have a rough night? That's too bad. I'm sorry. Well, maybe you'll need to...

• 2:30:28Jordi Hays?

  Sixty-three, four hours.

• 2:30:30John Coogan?

  Maybe you'll need to book a wander in the meantime. Book a wander with inspiring reviews, hotel grooming, hotel great amenities, dream beds, top tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service.

• 2:30:39Jordi Hays?

  I forgot to ask Jacob what he felt is an appropriate tip, founder's end of year little holiday tip.

• 2:30:47John Coogan?

  We didn't necessarily either. I got an 89, so let's go.

• 2:30:51Jordi Hays?

  Wow. I have some breaking news.

• 2:30:53John Coogan?

  Breaking news?

• 2:30:53Jordi Hays?

  Jared Isaacman confirmed at the Senate.

• 2:31:04John Coogan?

  I'm very excited. You know, whether the data centers go to space or not, there's obviously a lot of interesting and important things to be done in space and very, very excited to have...

• 2:31:15Jordi Hays?

  He's that guy.

• 2:31:16John Coogan?

  Leadership in the position in the seat.

• 2:31:18Jordi Hays?

  He's that guy.

• 2:31:18John Coogan?

  Hopefully doing some cool stuff.

• 2:31:19Jordi Hays?

  You know who else is that guy?

• 2:31:21John Coogan?

  Logan Kilpatrick from Google? Of course. He's in the restroom waiting room and now he's in the TVP and UltraDome. Welcome to the show, Logan. How are you doing?

• 2:31:29Jordi Hays?

  He's that guy, pal.

• 2:31:31Logan Kilpatrick?

  Hey, guys. Happy holidays.

• 2:31:32John Coogan?

  Happy holidays. I love the background.

• 2:31:35Logan Kilpatrick?

  The UAV online is incredible.

• 2:31:38John Coogan?

  Well, we have Christmas themed ones now, so there's... Play the drummer boy one.

• 2:31:46John Coogan?

  Hostile drummer boy on your six. That's a good one. The team had fun with that. Anyway, thank you so much for joining. Please, everyone knows who you are around here, but take us through the news today. Gemini 3 Flash, what are the highlights? How are you positioning the communication around that particular launch?

• 2:32:06Logan Kilpatrick?

  Yeah, no, it's a great question and thank you again for having me on. Gemini 3 Flash is the most capable model, I think, along a bunch of dimensions that we've shipped before and it's also just this model that is going to bring intelligence to everyone, which is the exciting thing. So I feel like...

• 2:32:30Logan Kilpatrick?

  I feel like that is, we need to do this for Gemini launches is we should get, I'm gonna get a gong for the office.

• 2:32:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll, we'll help you out. We've, we know all the suppliers and we, we get bulk pricing. Yes. We're gonna help you guys out.

• 2:32:46Logan Kilpatrick?

  Etched, etched gong for the office when we launch would be perfect. No, but I think the model is incredible and I think it builds on the momentum from three pro, which is really exciting. But, and it's actually, the crazy thing is, it's actually better than three pro at some dimensions.

• 2:32:59John Coogan?

  I was looking at this. I'm looking at the model card. It, it outperforms on Arc AGI two, which is like my personal favorite benchmark. We love the team over at Arc AGI. And somehow the flash model outperforms the pro model. Uh, it like, I would, I'd be very interested what the thesis on that is it like, uh, Gemini three pro was overthinking it. Is that what's going on?

• 2:33:20Jordi Hays?

  We also did, we also did our own bench, shrimp bench.

• 2:33:23John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, shrimp bench went very well.

• 2:33:24Jordi Hays?

  We had, uh, it, it came up with, uh,

• 2:33:27John Coogan?

  You're supposed to think of, you're supposed to think of jokes that have the same format as you're telling me a shrimp fried this rice. So shrimp fried rice.

• 2:33:35Jordi Hays?

  So for ginger snap, it said, you're telling me a ginger snapped this cookie?

• 2:33:39John Coogan?

  It's pretty good, pretty good. It's, it's funny. We're, we're loving it.

• 2:33:43Jordi Hays?

  Not all the, some of the models absolutely bomb these that are, that are, that are quite smart. So it's, it's a good, it's a good, uh, benchmark, sir.

• 2:33:52Logan Kilpatrick?

  Yeah. Really quick though, like the reason flash is so much better, like there's a very pointed answer on this. And actually not that it's so much better.

• 2:34:00John Coogan?

  It's better in certain places.

• 2:34:02Logan Kilpatrick?

  Some places it's a little bit better. And this is because the model is a little bit smaller. So the like iterate, like we're able to do a little bit more iteration. And it has like a slightly updated, um, like post-training recipe versus the pro model. And this is just because of the timing. So like we finished pro and finished some of the training, like probably a little bit more than a month ago. So like just within the last month have like made a bunch of innovation on the research side. It makes it into the smaller model just because of like the timing and the release process. Um, but so you'll, you'll see some of that. So there's no like si- specials, you know, silver bullet behind the scenes of making this possible. It's just like literally time. And with enough time, we can keep making, uh, even better and better models, which is exciting.

• 2:34:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you thinking about the like, I feel like the Gemini team is very, very good about offering different models that are along the Pareto frontier, not, not over fixating on a particular benchmark, but delivering a high quality product at each incremental price or the best product for a given price. Do you, do you envision the, the, like the left and right bound expanding further? Is there like, like a nano coming, something even cheaper, even smaller, even more compressed? How do you think about offering a product from the same sort of API, you know, structure, but at, you know, in even cheaper prices?

• 2:35:29John Coogan?

  Is that something that's coming?

• 2:35:31Logan Kilpatrick?

  Yeah. Yeah. So we're, we're working hard on this. So the flash or the sort of three model family historically, or 2.5 model family historically has been Pro, Flash, Flashlight, which is the smallest model. And then I think, I don't know if we still call it Nano or not, but Nano was our on-device model, which is like the, the smallest model. So we will hopefully have a flashlight model early next year. It, it takes time to sort of trickle the innovation through and it's, the holidays are busy.

• 2:35:57John Coogan?

  I was joking with, with, with Jordy because Nano Banana, the, the code name sort of leaked into like the public consciousness, just because it was exciting, it's great model. And so people figured it out, Nano Banana. But, but it implies the existence of just a normal banana or banana pro or a mega banana or giga banana. And so we want the giga banana. We want the full image, the, the even bigger model, the biggest, the biggest possible model. But of course.

• 2:36:25Logan Kilpatrick?

  Nano Banana Pro is your giga banana. We actually thought about calling it giga, giga banana. It wasn't as catchy as Nano Banana.

• 2:36:33John Coogan?

  Nano Banana already has its own brand. So you kind of got to just run with that. Like you got the bird in the hand, just run with it.

• 2:36:40Jordi Hays?

  Maybe getting a little bit more specific, how, how conversation's been going with, with startups that are leveraging kind of the suite of models, like what, where's, where's, where are people most excited in terms of actually implementing them?

• 2:36:53Logan Kilpatrick?

  Yeah, I think the cool thing, and this is hasn't been unique to this launch, but I think the cool thing is that for 2.5 Pro customers who are paying, I think it's like between a dollar twenty five and two fifty per million input tokens and then like ten to twelve dollars per million output tokens. This model is actually almost across the board completely. Three flash is better than 2.5 Pro. So like if you're a startup and you're like 2.5 Pro was the model that which for meant like literally tens to hundreds of thousands of customers in production right now. This is the case for them.

• 2:37:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:28Logan Kilpatrick?

  They're able to sort of migrate over to this new model and like out of the box cost saving, their product just gets faster. And I was talking to someone earlier today and like the fact that two years ago, this like narrative of being a model wrapper was like a sort of like bad idea. And then now I think about this for our team, actually, like we have APIs for developers to build with, but we're also building a vibe coding product in AI Studio. And like the vibe coding product, we ran the like silent test behind the scenes and it was like just with three flash, actually because of how much faster it was. And it was like reasonably the same quality as three Pro. Retention went up, the number of things people were building went up, engagement went up and it was like free. We didn't have to do anything. We literally just

• 2:38:09Logan Kilpatrick?

  changed the model and the dropdown. It's actually cheaper for us to run that. And like as a product builder, I don't think there's been a time in like human history of building startups where like you just get to show up one morning. Somebody made your product forty percent better and saved you fifty percent like the the analogy is like

• 2:38:30Jordi Hays?

  Usually if you make something forty percent better, you're like, get ready to pay fifty percent more.

• 2:38:36Logan Kilpatrick?

  Exactly. Exactly. So it's crazy. I think it's like that that continues to get me just like in the fiber of my being so excited about what startups are able to go after and yeah, it's a great moment. So hopefully, hopefully folks get a chance to adopt. And then I think the next thing that I'm excited about is like Taking these two models, Flash and Pro, now become like the default models to build on top of for our other like custom variants and like the the image generation is one example of this, but also we have text to speech models and live audio models and a bunch of other stuff in the works, computer use models, and they all sort of rebase onto this new thing. And then again, by default, just like get better out of the box, which is really, really cool.

• 2:39:16Logan Kilpatrick?

  So I think you'll see the not just, you know, coding and all these other agentic capabilities, multimodal that we've showed with this specific three Flash base model, but you'll see this across pretty much every other dimension as all those more bespoke checkpoints rebase to these new three Flash and three Pro variants.

• 2:39:34Jordi Hays?

  What's going on with the agent builder that that that you got? Did you roll it out last week? I'm losing I'm losing track of time, but.

• 2:39:44Logan Kilpatrick?

  In Google Word Ice?

• 2:39:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, I know it's I know it's outside of your kind of like key territory, but I would I would love to kind of hear why what's exciting about it to you?

• 2:39:56Logan Kilpatrick?

  Yeah, I think and so what I mean, truthfully, and I'll I'll give you my very candid take, which is I've been I was trying the version of that product for probably, and I tweeted this out probably like three months before it came out. And the part that was most the reason I loved it so much is because inside of Google, like, you know, we can't just use random startup products. Like, there's like a very rigorous process in order of like what software are we actually using as Google employees? And so this like whole grown solution for me to be able to like have an agent builder and like connect all my stuff up and build workflows and all these things. Like, really is the AI product that I get to use on a daily basis. So like I it is exceptionally important that it's world class and that it like pushes the frontier

• 2:40:40Logan Kilpatrick?

  and that it's actually good because I I don't get the sort of free market of options. I can't just go and choose between any one of 100 AI startups who are providing something similar to this. And for what it's worth, I I get those in my personal life, which is awesome, but I don't get those in my work life. Feel like it's like sort of hit the mark of where I wanted it to be like I really do get. Genuine product utility. And as somebody who my email is out on the internet, you can email me [email protected]. I get many, many emails. It is helpful to like have a system. I still respond to all of them manually, humanly, but it is nice to have some sort of like filtering mechanisms and then sort of separate my external stuff from my internal stuff.

• 2:41:20Logan Kilpatrick?

  And it's been and also hook up to the rest of my Google information. It's awesome. So I'm a huge fan and it's also just chapter one of this like AI native workspace story. And I think you'll see this across other Google product services. I don't know if y'all have had Robbie Stein on who leads AI product for search.

• 2:41:39Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, we did. I think we did.

• 2:41:41Logan Kilpatrick?

  That's right. Robbie, man, I love Robbie. He, he, we talked probably six months ago about he was telling me this story and it was a story at the time of like how search was becoming this frontier AI product. And I sort of had to extend disbelief a little bit. And I think now you sort of see this with AI mode, like AI mode is crushing it like it really is like a just as competitive frontier AI product as a lot of the other ones that are out in the market. And it's like at search scale, which is crazy. So they're doing a great job. And I think workspace is going to go through that same arc where it's like they're going to become a frontier AI product, which is great for the, you know, billion plus users who are using workspace.

• 2:42:20Jordi Hays?

  Anything, any shipping again this year? Or are you going to give everyone a break? Let people, uh, let the other labs rest?

• 2:42:27Logan Kilpatrick?

  Offline, starting next Monday. So we've got, we've got a couple more things in the pipeline, the rest of this week, which I'm excited about. And then people really will be offline. It is the, the blissful last part of the year where people actually take time off and relax. And then the roadmap for January is going to be ridiculous. So.

• 2:42:45John Coogan?

  You should try and get a massive company wide secret Santa coming.

• 2:42:52Logan Kilpatrick?

  One more quick pitch for both of you. I've been pushing for the blimp. So don't worry. I'm having a conversation.

• 2:42:59Jordi Hays?

  It's time to blimp. It's time to blimp.

• 2:43:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:02Logan Kilpatrick?

  Maybe going to be a blimp coming.

• 2:43:03John Coogan?

  It's in, it's in Google's DNA. I feel like.

• 2:43:06Logan Kilpatrick?

  I'm not going to say who's involved, but we've got, we've got some people involved. So we'll see what happens.

• 2:43:11John Coogan?

  We would be, we'd be.

• 2:43:12Jordi Hays?

  2026 TVPN live from the air.

• 2:43:16John Coogan?

  Christmas gift for us.

• 2:43:17Jordi Hays?

  That'd be incredible. What a year. You and the team should be incredibly proud and we've loved every conversation. So, thank you for being a part of this. And yeah, I'm glad we'll be off when you guys are off, so we can all. I expect what some someone out there to be like, we're launching something on Christmas Eve.

• 2:43:43Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 2:43:43John Coogan?

  But we'll cover it when we're back in January.

• 2:43:44Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 2:43:45John Coogan?

  But thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Have a great rest of.

• 2:43:51Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Logan. Happy holidays. Happy holidays.

• 2:43:54John Coogan?

  Goodbye. One last, if you if you don't, if you don't have access to a blimp and you want to run a billboard ad, you go to adquick.com, out of home measure, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Plan, buy and measure.

• 2:44:08Jordi Hays?

  We need some David Senra, buy David Senra billboards.

• 2:44:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, when's the billboard coming?

• 2:44:12Jordi Hays?

  We need the $1 million ad buy.

• 2:44:14John Coogan?

  We have David Senra in the studio in the TVP and Ultra Dome. We're going to bring him down. We'll talk to him about podcasting. Maybe we'll touch on podcasting. Maybe we'll touch on media. No, you know what I want to talk to you about first? We've beat this story to death, but a few days ago, this Wall Street Journal article went viral on how all tech companies are trying to hire storytellers. And I want your unfiltered thoughts on on storytellers and entrepreneurship and whether storytellers can be bought or or they merely exist.

• 2:44:51John Coogan?

  I think the read, just to set the table, was that, so basically there are a number of jobs that have popped up in Silicon Valley, $250,000 for someone whose job title is just storyteller. And that feels very broad because is that a copywriter? Is that someone who buys ads? What are they doing?

• 2:45:08Jordi Hays?

  Do you think it's important for a founder to be good at telling stories?

• 2:45:12David Senra?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:45:15John Coogan?

  Well, take us through.

• 2:45:16Jordi Hays?

  Well, and so my take was like, the best storytellers are just not for hire because they're running companies.

• 2:45:23David Senra?

  I mean, who do you think is the best storyteller or salesman alive today?

• 2:45:28John Coogan?

  Probably Elon.

• 2:45:29David Senra?

  Yeah, and before him.

• 2:45:32John Coogan?

  Steve Jobs.

• 2:45:33David Senra?

  There you go. Yeah, it's very important. There's a great quote from Don Valentine, the founder of Sequoia, who talked about this and actually put it into my ads for one of my partners. And he's like, the art of storytelling is critically important. Most entrepreneurs that come to us can't tell a story. And that learning to tell a story is really important because money flows as a function of the stories. So yeah, I don't know. I didn't read the article. I don't read any of that shit.

• 2:45:57David Senra?

  But I do, but I do listen to you guys and I heard you go over it. And I think like Vanta was one of them trying to hire.

• 2:46:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:06David Senra?

  Yeah, so like, I think they were one of my big partners. Like, they pay a lot more than $250,000. And I think I'm just like the person that needs to tell that story. And I think like that's the... Yeah, I think like, obviously Christina's really good from a founder level. But even if you don't have like the Elon, very few people have the Elon or the Steve Jobs skillset. And so I think like we've talked about this over and over again. And like you just partner with the people that are able to tell that story.

• 2:46:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:46:30David Senra?

  Like, let me give you an example. Mr. Beast texted me like two days ago. He's like, look at my Spotify rap. And number one was the, it was Founder's Podcast. I want to talk about the new show, not Founder's, but so we'll get to that in a minute. But um, he, we're in a group chat. It's me, him, and all the founders of Ramp. And his whole thing was like, he didn't know what Ramp was. He texted this to Kareem and Eric. And he's like, now we've switched over my company to Ramp because like I feel like I know every single thing that's going on inside Ramp because I get a minute or two minute update every week from David. And if you listen to my Ramp ads, it's not like, this is, you know, it's just corporate cards.

• 2:47:04John Coogan?

  It's not the same every time. You're digging into different pieces of it.

• 2:47:08David Senra?

  It's not that it's not the same every time because I think actually reputation is persuasive. So I have three or four versions and I repeat them over and over again. But Ramp and I, as you guys know, have a multi-year partnership.

• 2:47:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:47:17David Senra?

  So, but his point was just like, oh, like... It's more than a partnership. So, you should see the shirt I have underneath this hoodie. It's Ramp. So, the, the point that he was telling them... It's like he now knows how Eric, the CEO thinks. He knows how Kareem, the co-founder and CTO thinks. He knows their hiring practices. Like my ads are just stories about Ramp, not and if you pay attention to them, then you're like, oh, like I want to work with a company that takes this that seriously. That does 300 different updates to their product on a year basis. That's nearly impossible to get hired as an engineer. That is trying to lead from the very front in AI. And you know, these are very effective storytellers to the point that those ads converted the biggest creator on in the world to use your product.

• 2:48:01David Senra?

  So I think that's what companies should be doing. Paying somebody 250 grand, maybe, I don't know.

• 2:48:05John Coogan?

  How structural do you think storytelling should be? Because I, I really like systems thinking. I like, I like, I like systems and processes. So when I think about telling a story, I actually do think about a three act structure. I think about who's the protagonist, what's the antagonist, like I can map it out on a piece of paper.

• 2:48:24David Senra?

  I know. This is from your, your YouTube days.

• 2:48:26John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly. No, I literally think about it.

• 2:48:28David Senra?

  This is how we met.

• 2:48:29John Coogan?

  I studied, I studied the books on it and I studied and I created like structure on it. There are other people that are much less structural. But when you're, when you are trying to, like, when I tell the story of a founder on a YouTube video essay, I would literally map their journey to a beginning, middle and end, act one and act two and act three. What happens at the end of act one? You're crossing into the unknown. What happens to?

• 2:48:56David Senra?

  You're describing the oldest story there is.

• 2:48:58John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 2:48:59David Senra?

  The hero's journey.

• 2:48:59John Coogan?

  Yes, the hero's journey. I would try and map it to the hero's journey. Do you think about that when you are constructing an interview for David Senra, your new show? Are you trying to start with, let's do the early life and then at, at one third or, or you know, 20 minutes into the interview, I'm going to try and get you into, tell me about the crossing into the unknown. Okay, then how are you structuring the episodes? If not following a hero's journey.

• 2:49:27David Senra?

  Like the way I think about my work is very simple and I think it's really important because there's this great line from Munger where he's like, you know, the rarest of all things is to keep things simple and remember what you set out to do. Right? The value in what I do is that I'm going to be doing very similar things now. I was doing it 10 years ago. I'm going to be doing it 10 years from now.

• 2:49:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:49:42David Senra?

  That is the value. It's in the compounding nature of it. So the way I try to keep, remember to keep things simple. Is Founders is the books that I'm intensely interested in reading. And the new show is who am I intensely interested in speaking to?

• 2:49:56John Coogan?

  And talking to.

• 2:49:56David Senra?

  Yeah. There have been multi billionaire, public company CEOs that asked to be on the show. And I started doing research about them. I was like, I don't want to spend any time with this guy. Like, I'm just not interested in talking to him at all. And me and Rob, my partner, some partners are Andrew Huberman and Rob Moore on the new show. And, you know, Rob kind of pushes back sometimes and is just like, I just don't want to talk to him. What do you want me to tell you? And, you know, he's like, this is actually good that you would say no to somebody like that.

• 2:50:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:21David Senra?

  I don't think of things in, like, obviously, the hero's journey. If you listen to Founders, like, that is, essentially, that is what I'm doing over and over again. I think that comes naturally to me. But I don't think of things as structured. I'm just very, almost everything for me is like, I can, I'm intensely interested in what I'm working on. I consume, I try to consume more information about the subject, subject matter than anybody else in the world. And then I just go straight off intuition.

• 2:50:43John Coogan?

  I just wonder if

• 2:50:44Jordi Hays?

  I think one thing that's interesting about that.

• 2:50:46John Coogan?

  Intuition will develop a structure. I don't know. I think that might be.

• 2:50:48David Senra?

  I don't know. You listen to the podcast. I mean, do you see a structure there?

• 2:50:51John Coogan?

  Uh, I, well, you're, how many episodes in?

• 2:50:54David Senra?

  Six.

• 2:50:55John Coogan?

  Six. Like, I, I would assume that in a decade, I will be able to somewhat predict a structure. And you won't, you won't need to ever sit down and map out, I'm going to ask this question before this question. It'll just come to you naturally. But that intuition will happen and it will make sense. But you will know the rules and also know when to break them. So it won't, like, there are stories that are told in four acts. There are stories that are told in five acts. There, there are stories that don't map perfectly onto the hero's journey because it's actually a love story. Or it's actually, you know, some other structure of story.

• 2:51:31David Senra?

  I think storytelling is downstream from interest. So I heard Jordy said something that I think is dead right. It's like, you, you guys are using the term storyteller when it's really like, you're talking about like, copywriter. Right? And what I would do is I'd go back and study this guy named Claude Hopkins. Can one of the guys check, I think it's episode 170 of Founders? And he wrote this book called Scientific Advertising. And I found him because I read not only, you know,

• 2:51:55Jordi Hays?

  It is 170. A Life in Advertising.

• 2:51:57David Senra?

  When did I do that? How, how, how long ago was that?

• 2:52:00Jordi Hays?

  March, March 8, 2021.

• 2:52:02David Senra?

  Okay, so 2021. So this is my point. It's just like intensely interested in what you're doing. And then, um, and then just try to collect as much information as possible. So. Essentially, I found this guy named David Ogilvie.

• 2:52:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:15David Senra?

  Then he would write about every single person that you're interested in will tell you who influenced who influenced them. And this guy wrote, Claude Hopkins, probably the greatest copywriter to ever to live. And he wrote this book called Scientific Advertising. That, I'm pretty sure if you buy his autobiography on Kindle, you get My Life in Advertising and then the end you get Scientific Advertising for free. But I think every single person on the planet should read Scientific Advertising because Claude Hopkins worked for this guy named Albert Lasker. Albert Lasker built, he made more money as an advertising agency founder than anybody else in history. And all he did essentially cut away all the fad, he didn't have an art department, didn't have a research department, he had two of the best copywriters and their words made the cash register ring. And in scientific advertising-

• 2:52:58Jordi Hays?

  That's why I'm saying it's like, it's such an elite skillset. Like using, using only your words, you can, you can get the, you can ban the world.

• 2:53:07David Senra?

  But you have, this is, it's the amount of, you have to, one, be intensely interested in this subject and two, you have to be willing to do an insane amount of work.

• 2:53:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:14David Senra?

  And in-

• 2:53:14Jordi Hays?

  Well, that was why, that was why I started to interrupt you, but when, when the point you brought up, the point you brought up earlier, like, if I'm trying to hire a storyteller, I want to hire the best writer. I don't want somebody that wants to be the chief storyteller of a business. I want them to be obsessed with writing and actually understand how important it is. I don't want them to like-

• 2:53:33David Senra?

  Best communicator, not writer.

• 2:53:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:34David Senra?

  It just happens at that time, writing was the form of communication. So let me, let me just finish the story real quick. Albert, he wrote Scientific Advertising, Albert Lasker reads it, he's like, this is our trade secret. This is why I'm so rich. Like, it's going in the safe. He literally locked the manuscript in a safe for 20 years. Then when he retired, he let Claude Hopkins publish it and wound up selling eight or 10 or 12 million copies.

• 2:53:54Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:53:54David Senra?

  And so, but when you go into there, like Claude Hopkins, let me give you an example. And this is something I think I do really good on the podcast ads, is like talking about the story behind how the product is made. And so, there was this beer at the time, it was like Schlitz beer or something like that. It was like fifth market share.

• 2:54:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:11David Senra?

  And so they hire Claude Hopkins, he goes and visits him, he visits their distillery, he interviews all the top founders, the founders of the company, the executives, he spends an insane amount of time with it. And then he goes, hey, you have this like remarkable brewing process that is like fascinating with all these machines and this technology and like, I drank your beer, but I didn't know what was going on. Why don't you tell that story? And their whole point was- But our process isn't different from any other beer company. He's like, yeah, but no other beer company is telling the story. And all he did was tell in text of like a thousand, two thousand, three thousand words. The story behind how the product is made. This, when you, when you hear a Founders episode or the new show, like the James Dyson episode just came out, it was one of the best days of my entire life to be able to spend several hours with him.

• 2:54:54David Senra?

  The amount of fucking people, am I gonna get you in trouble on the stream cursing?

• 2:54:58Jordi Hays?

  No, no, it's fine, it's fine. There's one, there's one listener.

• 2:55:02David Senra?

  Who?

• 2:55:03Jordi Hays?

  That, that takes issue with it.

• 2:55:04David Senra?

  Yeah. Tell me after.

• 2:55:05Jordi Hays?

  He doesn't like, he doesn't like the swearing.

• 2:55:06David Senra?

  Okay, well, I apologize.

• 2:55:08Jordi Hays?

  David has a potty mouth, but it's, it's you, it's you. I appreciate it.

• 2:55:11David Senra?

  So, the, that's funny. The, um, I lost, now I lost, oh, the amount of people that sent me messages after that podcast or other podcasts have been, uh, made on him, that now because I understand who the person is and what went into building the product, like I went and bought his hairdryer or his vacuum cleaner, works for everything. Um, yeah, so.

• 2:55:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting, we, every, that, that, the style of advertisement, which was like you had a page of a magazine and you had a, basically an opportunity to put a picture and then a block of text, it kind of like comes back in fa, it's constantly like coming back in fashion and I think the reason for it, even though it's not like the most native format for the internet, is, it's because when companies sit down and they're like, how do we sell our product in a short paragraph? Oftentimes companies never do that, right? The modern ad, you, the modern way that you communicate is like you have a big website, somebody has to scroll all over the website to really be sold on something, or you have an ad that's like targeting different things or different value props, but when you just

• 2:56:11Jordi Hays?

  sit down and write one paragraph of exactly why somebody should care about your product and why they should purchase it, it's just extremely effective.

• 2:56:19David Senra?

  Ram's doing this with Harry Dry. Have you ever paid attention to Harry Dry's Twitter feed? Do you know who that is?

• 2:56:23Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 2:56:24David Senra?

  Fantastic copywriter out of Europe, I think he might be in England, and he's worked with Eric Hand in hand and they've done a couple, you know, and, and it's posted, if I'm not mistaken, on like Eric's Twitter feed. It's like, that is still a very effective ad unit.

• 2:56:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:36David Senra?

  So I, to answer your question, I don't know. Like, yes, telling your story is a good idea. Like, the founder should do as much as possible. Then, the founder should be really teaching how they think about their business. I always like, Jim Sinigal, the founder of Costco, has this great, uh, this great quote where he's like, "If you're not spending 90% of your time teaching, you're not doing your job." And his whole point is like, the direction's coming from you. You talk about, "This is what we're doing, this is why we're doing, and this is how we do it." And you repeat, repeat, repeat, over and over again. And, you know, people are like, "Oh yeah, but Jim Sinigal, you know, he's running Costco, it's not a tech company." Well, go re, go watch, uh, the episode he did, "How Elon Works." And in that, I just break down, I superlat, everything that, that has nothing to do with how, other than how Elon works, and this four-step algorithm. He got to the point where, he's like, he says in the book, "I repeated it so much that the

• 2:57:21David Senra?

  executives that are sitting in the meeting would mouth the next word that's coming out of my mouth. Repeat, repeat, repeat."

• 2:57:28Jordi Hays?

  Dave Portnoy did this today. He had this announcement video, and, and it looks like very unprofessional, in the way that it's shot. It's clearly shot in an iPhone, he's standing in front of glass, and he's just kind of like rambling, but he's just going Netflix. He said it like 15 times, because they were announcing a deal, uh, a bunch of Barstool podcasts are going on Netflix. Uh, he's just like Netflix, Netflix, Netflix. And like, you just immediately, like, it doesn't look-

• 2:57:52John Coogan?

  You wanna listen to part of my, you wanna watch part of my take? Netflix. You wanna watch Spitting Chicklets? Netflix. He just keeps saying Netflix. It was very, very effective.

• 2:58:00Jordi Hays?

  On, on repetition, something that I've appreciated about our relationship is I feel like, when we all get together, it's almost the same conversation every single time. Uh, and you'd think you'd get bored of it, but because we're extremely obsessed and focused, it's like, it's actually helpful, in that, like, we're remembering, like, why we do this, why, why, why we make the decisions that we make, and almost just kind of like constantly reminding ourselves. And I think that's very helpful, of like, not, uh, we talked about how we're thinking about next, somebody asked us what our-

• 2:58:29David Senra?

  Is this the Emily Sundberg?

• 2:58:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, she, she-

• 2:58:32David Senra?

  Can you read that exact quote? I thought it was really good.

• 2:58:33John Coogan?

  Oh, we were supposed to, it, it's in the show notes, I think, today or yesterday, but, uh-

• 2:58:39Jordi Hays?

  I'll pull it up. Our 2026 resolution is to lock in. We had a great 2025 and it opened up a lot of amazing and fun opportunities, but the most contrarian thing we think we can do the next year is simply double down on the core show itself. That means having to say no to anything that doesn't improve the show directly. No fun, no products, no world tour, just three hours of talking about tech and business at 11 a.m. every weekday.

• 2:59:00John Coogan?

  The world tour was my little sneaky joke is, you know, what is a world tour? Like, isn't there that whole meme of like, it's going to ruin the world tour?

• 2:59:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, we did, I mean, we had an opportunity to go to Switzerland.

• 2:59:14John Coogan?

  Oh, and I guess.

• 2:59:14Jordi Hays?

  And we turned that down.

• 2:59:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess we've had a couple, like, world tour, not not full tour, but like, trip, international trips.

• 2:59:20Jordi Hays?

  But if we were to go to Europe, it'd turn into a tour.

• 2:59:23John Coogan?

  It maybe, yeah, it's possible.

• 2:59:24Jordi Hays?

  If we went to the Middle East, it'd turn into a tour.

• 2:59:26John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:59:26Jordi Hays?

  You know, you're going all the way over there.

• 2:59:28John Coogan?

  Maybe that happens, but not next year. We're locking in next year. The interesting thing is that a friend of the show, Bryce, said that the, he was, he was sort of like, framing it as like, these guys have realized that like, media can be a better business.

• 2:59:41David Senra?

  Bryce Roberts?

• 2:59:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:59:43David Senra?

  He texted me yesterday.

• 2:59:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:45David Senra?

  And asked for advice on this format of a new podcast. And I was like, I'm not watching that. I won't say what it is, though.

• 2:59:52Jordi Hays?

  I don't even think it's not that it's a better business. It's just a better business.

• 2:59:56John Coogan?

  For us. Exactly, exactly, exactly. So, so, obviously, like, no, no shade here, but it is just like, you know, the founder market fit. Like, it is ridiculous to say that media is a better business than asset management. Like, that's just not true. Look at the 40400. It's, it's, it's all industrialists or asset managers. There are very, very few media figures that actually are in the 100 billion plus club. It just doesn't happen. But can you be hugely successful? Absolutely. Can you be very happy? Absolutely. Is it a better fit for us? Absolutely. And so, I would not.

• 3:00:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I could, I could have a.

• 3:00:34John Coogan?

  Asset managers will leave and pivot to media.

• 3:00:37Jordi Hays?

  I considered, I, I enjoy investing in startups. I always have. I've invested in.

• 3:00:44Jordi Hays?

  Probably every, every few months, I gotta add another 10. Sure. Uh, but, uh, yeah, some, something's over, over 60 companies. Yeah. And so I, last year, wandering in the wilderness, you know, trying to figure out how I wanted to spend my life. I considered that, but there's zero, yeah, that or join a fund, you know, it's, I, I think like being a solo GP is maybe uh, overrated in a bunch of ways, but uh, I, there's, I, I would be 10, 10% as happy or fulfilled doing that, even though uh, there's a career to be built. Cheers. I wanted to talk, ask you about, uh,

• 3:01:19David Senra?

  Question, one second, I want to go back to what you just said about like the, the, the conversations being very similar and, and repeatable. Um, I just did this episode on Bruce Springsteen, which I was like very unsure if I was gonna put it out. I recorded for like three hours, edited down to like one hour and like 15 minutes. It's the most unusual, um, episode of founders that I've probably ever done. The amount of people that have now text or sent me messages that like they're crying during it has been like shocking. It wasn't, it turned out, I thought I was making a podcast on, you know, somebody had one of the most, uh, extreme work ethics that I've ever heard of. That's, that was my introduction to him. I didn't know, I wasn't like a Bruce Springsteen fan. I'm a huge Jimmy Iovine fan, who's really like, almost like best friends with Bruce. And, you know, he says, one of the hardest working, like most extreme people ever.

• 3:02:02David Senra?

  And it wind up, you know, taking a very, the second half of the book is pretty crazy where you have this guy that like essentially gets everything that he thought he wanted and try, almost kills himself. And like, what happened there? Why is he doing that? And then how did he? He was 34 when that's happening. He's almost 80 now. He looks phenomenal, by the way. It's like, what happened there? And how did he actually get what he, he had, he mistake, he was mistaken on what he thought he wanted. Once he got what he wanted, it's not what he wanted. He realized what he actually wanted.

• 3:02:33Jordi Hays?

  It was a sports car.

• 3:02:34David Senra?

  But he was, no, but he was in, but he was incapable of getting that. And then he figured out a way. I think the, the episode title is like Bruce.

• 3:02:42Jordi Hays?

  He thought he wanted a GD3RS, but he really wanted a runsport.

• 3:02:46David Senra?

  Is that the one that you said I should drive?

• 3:02:48Jordi Hays?

  I always tell you to get the most insane cars.

• 3:02:51David Senra?

  But this is, but this is the point.

• 3:02:52Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny, David, you were, you were like, oh, if I wanted, if I like wanted to buy a Ferrari, it'd be this one. And it was an eight, 12 comp. For like a, just a car to keep in California. And I was like, that's so you to just pick like the most elite car.

• 3:03:11John Coogan?

  History's greatest cars. The spin off. What are we getting in car reviews out here?

• 3:03:15David Senra?

  Well, hold on, there's a line in Bruce's autobiography that I don't even think I put in the episode that I thought was interesting. He's like, people don't come to my shows to learn something new. They come to be reminded about what they already know is true.

• 3:03:26John Coogan?

  Ooh, that is great. I love that. Wow.

• 3:03:30David Senra?

  And I think if you look at, again, I think of founders as like church for entrepreneurs. I think a lot of that is like, dude.

• 3:03:36John Coogan?

  Many people don't think about it, like what they do, that like the rhythm and the repetition as like that, that's very interesting.

• 3:03:44David Senra?

  Yeah. So I do think, I think, again, my natural instincts is fewer, deeper. So it's like, I talk to the same people over and over again. I don't like, there's another line in the autobiography. He's like, I'm fairly insular by nature. I don't let new people into my life casually. I feel the exact same way. And so I do feel the best, the best things in life, all of them are come from compounding. Whether it's relationships, money, knowledge, everything comes from compounding. So my instinct is to just go and have the same conversations with, you know, the fewer, deeper people that I actually trust. And then you meet remarkable people and you add very slowly.

• 3:04:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I think about that, the opportunity cost of having a dinner with somebody that we've never met versus just hanging out and having my favorite conversation, which is the same one we always have. The other thing about, I would say the difference, like the quote you just gave around going to a show to remember what you already know. Think about. When I discovered founders, one of the most powerful things was learning that certain elements of myself were okay. Like, I'm not the most organized person, right? And so to hear that other people that have gone on to do great things, like, some of them are hyper organized, like, you know, incredibly dialed, and others are just, like, chaotic.

• 3:04:56Jordi Hays?

  And it's actually, learning, like, what's actually okay, is, I feel like, extremely powerful.

• 3:05:03David Senra?

  We may be like a small percentage of the overall human population, but we are not unique. There have been people that have our same experiences, think the same way that we are, have our same natural intelligence, talent, everything else. And it's foolish not to utilize, like, their experience and knowledge for your own benefit on how to build a life, not a fucking business. A life. That was one of the craziest things, realizations that Bruce Springsteen has in this episode, where he's like, "I thought I was building, like, work. I want to be a rock star. I want to do all this other stuff." He's just like, "I got that, and I have a shitty life. How do I fix my life?" And for him to go through that was, you know, a pretty intense, like, experience. And I think that's why, and then his dad, I don't want to talk too much about this, but like, you know, he had one of the

• 3:05:47David Senra?

  worst dads that you could possibly have. His dad was a misanthrope, had no friends, alcoholic, beat the shit out of Bruce. I think he said, in his entire childhood, his dad said less than a thousand words to him.

• 3:05:59Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 3:06:00David Senra?

  And then later on, he gets diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, and the amount of messages there were just like, the part about his dad is like, that hits way too close to home. It's exactly, like, why? Because there's people out there that have had that same experience, too.

• 3:06:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:14John Coogan?

  What is your favorite book that is not a biography? Really hard, right?

• 3:06:25David Senra?

  Favorite book that's not a biography?

• 3:06:27John Coogan?

  So, so, examples would be like, you know, 1929 doesn't really have a, Breakneck by Dan Wang.

• 3:06:33David Senra?

  I'm not reading anything new.

• 3:06:34John Coogan?

  No, I, I know, I'm just giving examples, like, I'm just looking through, like, what I've, what I've read recently, and there's a lot of books that are, that, that, I would imagine that it would be very hard to make a founders episode about a You know, I mean, certainly a work of fiction.

• 3:06:50David Senra?

  No, I think I can make a great founder's episode about any book that I really enjoyed. Like I did, last year I did Haruki Mirakami's, um, What I Think About When I Think About Running.

• 3:06:59John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 3:06:59David Senra?

  And I remember, I was in Malibu. This is why I spend so much time out here, because I really do believe I do my best work out here. There is something very, very special about this place. Um, and.

• 3:07:08John Coogan?

  About Hollywood or Malibu?

• 3:07:09David Senra?

  No, not. Malibu. Um, Hollywood, I come because I love you guys. I was whipping through the mountains just now, by the way.

• 3:07:16John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 3:07:17David Senra?

  I was like, I gotta slow down, this is not a good idea. Um, so I started reading that. Um, I got this idea from Elon and he's like, you know, he wants to read more books and he realizes like carrying books with him is difficult. So sometimes he would just read entire books on the Kindle app on his iPhone. And I started reading, I forgot even how I discovered this, I couldn't even who Haruki Mirakami was before this, started reading it. And I think I've read the whole entire book on my phone in like a day and a half. And then I was like, this isn't really a founder's episode, this is kind of weird. And I'm like, no, the fact that you couldn't put this down means that it is a founder's episode, you are going to make an episode about it. And then the response, because you're so intentionally interested and you can transfer your interest to, you know, podcasting is straight energy transmission for some of us.

• 3:07:57David Senra?

  Uh, you're able to transfer that enthusiasm, that passion for this guy's ideas and life, uh, to the audience. So I think I can make it on any book I'm intensely interested in, uh, like I've been rereading Freedom's Forge. Right? I mean, I could make the episode on just Bill Nudson.

• 3:08:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, Bill Nudson.

• 3:08:14David Senra?

  But I think telling the whole story of, you know, the fact that in, in the 1940s, the United States, they took what was this, this hugely sophisticated manufacturing base that was just applied to consumer products. And on a dime turned it and started building the more, you know, producing the most war material than any other country in the world. Like how they did that is a very fascinating story. But to answer your question, uh, favorite book that is not a biography?

• 3:08:38John Coogan?

  Because I, I would never put Freedom's Forge in the pipeline of founder's episodes. And yet I would 100% listen to a founder's episode on Freedom Forge, which is like unmet demand or unknown demand.

• 3:08:54David Senra?

  I don't want to talk too much about podcasting because you know, like I, I will not shut up about this, but like, I think one of the most important parts of like, if you're going to do this for a long term, long term and like, this is another thing that Bruce Springsteen, I think was very smart. He noticed, he just like observed his industry. He's like, this industry is very transient. There's a person that has a hit song, maybe a hit album, maybe two hit albums, but like then they, they either. Get on drugs. Longevity is hard. They die. I think there's the, what is it? The Twenty Seven Club, all these young musicians die. And he's like, I was built for durability and longevity. And so he worked backwards from like, what are these people doing? Yeah. And how do I just avoid? It's very Munger-esque, Charlie Munger-esque, invert, always invert.

• 3:09:36David Senra?

  And so with, with podcasting, I think about that a lot. I can't say who this was. And Rob, I shouldn't even say this, Rob put me across from like a, like I would consider him like a legacy podcaster. And he did this at dinner. I think he did this on purpose because he knows like what's gonna happen. And I just started asking him questions about like his show and like, and he came up in podcasting when like it could be your second, third, fourth, fifth thing that you were doing, which is like that, those days were done. And I remember, I didn't even eat that night, I don't think. I was like pounding my chopsticks on the table because his answers were like, you're not gonna make it, man. Like, you're already dead. Like, this isn't gonna work. So, uh, the, the, the point of being here is like, if you're going to do this long-term, I think you have to be, like, show the audience who you truly are.

• 3:10:21David Senra?

  And therefore they will, over time, I, I think people came to Founders because it was the books and the biographies. And over time, they're just like, whatever this guy thinks is interesting to read, I just wanna hear like his insight or his takeaways from that. You guys are doing a good job with all the personality you have. You're fucking dressed as an elf right now. Like, you have this giant, you know, horse behind. Like, the, the million little things that you guys do. Even now, I was here probably a month ago and like, even the stuff you have hanging up on your walls, I'm like, oh, they're just becoming more and more natural and authentic to, to who they are. So, um, I wanna answer your question. Lessons of History, Will and Ariel Durant. It's not technically a biography. I would say it's a hundred-page biography of the human species.

• 3:11:01David Senra?

  And because I think if you have one skill set that's gonna help you throughout your life, it's like really understanding that history doesn't repeat, human nature does. And you really should study how humans, humans react in very predictable ways when they're exposed to specific stimuli. And I think understanding that, yeah, is, is one of the most useful, like, tools you can have as you go through life. Yeah, that's fascinating.

• 3:11:21Jordi Hays?

  What, what patterns do you see in the Founders that have appeared on Founders and the new show? In terms of how they landed on? The thing that defined their life and their work, someone, V in the chat says, how does one find their purpose obsession? But I feel like it's very, very different across. But I'm curious if you see any patterns.

• 3:11:45David Senra?

  Somebody came up to me at that party, that Peter Thiel's party we were all together at a few days ago, and they asked me that question. They're like, I forgot the exact way this guy said it, but it was just like, you know, it's obvious that you've found your thing, like, and like, how do I find my thing? And the story I told him was just like, obviously it's internal, like, no one can answer that question. I gave that story from Mozart, where, you know, this 21-year-old kid comes up to Mozart, it's like, how do I write a symphony? And Mozart's like, you're too young. And Mozart's like, and the guy goes, you were writing symphonies younger than I am now. And he's like, yeah, but I wasn't going around asking people how to do it. And I just think, like, all you have to do is, like, just look how you spend your time. Actions express priority. Like, actions express priority. You, I don't give

• 3:12:29David Senra?

  a shit what you say. Just like, I see how you spend your time, and I will know what is actually important to you. And so if you're looking for that thing, you know, just like, where are you naturally drawn to? Like, this morning, I spent like, six, I don't know.

• 3:12:41Jordi Hays?

  But at the same time, when you were, when you were, I feel like there needs to be an openness to, like, an openness to not, like, you can't just, if you're trying to find your life's work, it's not the something you can just decide, I'm gonna find my life's work this week, I'm gonna-

• 3:12:57David Senra?

  No, no, no, you can't.

• 3:12:58Jordi Hays?

  Because when you were 20, it's not like you were like, I'm gonna be a-

• 3:13:02John Coogan?

  Not everyone can be a pro basketball player their entire life.

• 3:13:04Jordi Hays?

  And, and-

• 3:13:05John Coogan?

  People are going to-

• 3:13:06Jordi Hays?

  More specifically, like, when you were 20, it's not like you were thinking, well, when I'm in my 40s, I wanna have a business podcast.

• 3:13:11David Senra?

  So, what I would say, if that kid is 20, find out how old this guy is in the chat, I would say, read Paul Graham's How to Do Great Work, that essay. I think it's three, four, episode 314 of Founders, can you check for me a quick?

• 3:13:23David Senra?

  And like It's gonna one shot it again. I might not, um, it's like, I think-

• 3:13:27Jordi Hays?

  One shot it. Paul Graham, how to do great work. Episode 314.

• 3:13:30David Senra?

  So, so, so, hold on, real quick. Yeah. And I think it came down to like, you're, he's just like, how to do great, you're just following what you're intensely curious about. Hmm, yeah. And so like, like this morning, uh, I woke up and essentially I just like, read for, I don't know, four or five straight hours. Yeah. And then I was like, oh shit, I forgot, I have to go to TPPN today. Yeah. And that's why I was driving so fast. And like, no one told me like, no one's like, David, you should read for self-development. Development. It's just like, I like reading, I feel good when I read. It's way better than looking at my goddamn phone. Mm-hmm. It's, it, outside of like, spending time with people I love, like, there, there's not another activity I like to do. I would put like, our relationships, spending time with people I truly care about, above that.

• 3:14:12David Senra?

  But in terms of like, if I'm by myself, like, there's not another thing that I'd rather wanna do. Um, and that's just me listening to my curiosity.

• 3:14:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:19David Senra?

  I'm gonna go, okay. No, no, no, I was just, uh, yeah, yeah, you can continue.

• 3:14:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, if you could interview anyone, uh, that is dead, who would it be? Was there, was there any like, is there anyone you've studied that you feel like there's this open question?

• 3:14:37David Senra?

  Hmm.

• 3:14:37Jordi Hays?

  Where no, no text captured it, or no interview that they did?

• 3:14:42David Senra?

  Yeah, it's like particularly lost. I mean, that, that has gotta be the case. I ha- I've had, um, I had a weird experience last week, uh, and weird in a great way.

• 3:14:52Jordi Hays?

  A ghost?

• 3:14:53David Senra?

  No, no.

• 3:14:54Jordi Hays?

  The ghost of Rockefeller?

• 3:14:55David Senra?

  The ghost of today. So, yeah, the answer would probably be Rockefeller, I mean, the, the simplest thing would be like Rockefeller. Rockefeller. Maybe Steve Jobs, maybe Sam's Murray, cause Sam's Murray is just like, you know, such a savage. And I think I have definitely like, a wild side to me. That, um, you, you know Lulu? Yeah. Like, she's, she's constantly like, you cannot travel anywhere without a crisis comms person next to you. Like, you're going to get yourself in a lot of trouble. And so I think there's like, a wildness of Sam's Murray that, that's very attractive to me, if I'm being honest about this. Um, but, I, I, in, in terms of like, it does not come across in the text. So, what I'm trying to do, it's like, obviously with the new show, I wanna be differentiated, right? I wouldn't be doing it, you know, if, if, just to be the same as anybody else. Like, I find being the same as everybody else disgusting. It makes me wanna vomit. And, um-

• 3:15:40David Senra?

  So I'm working on some people that like have literally never done podcasts before.

• 3:15:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:44David Senra?

  And I skew to like older killers. Like I'm not interested in the in the in general. I do try to spend time like I do feel I'm in like the middle child where like you get access to all these crazy people have done things for decades and I'm really successful and they're willing to like spend a lot of time with you, most of them listen to the podcast. And then I get a lot of information out of these relationships and conversations, these dinners. And then, you know, every once in a while identify like a younger founder maybe to spend time with that if you think you can help them, you should. But in general, I skew way older, way like, you know, somebody that can actually point to a body of work to prove that they are actually like somebody you want to spend time with.

• 3:16:22David Senra?

  And I had, um, I spent time with the 71 year old guy last week in New York and he sold his company for $60 billion recently. And he's never done a podcast. And I did an episode on his, an episode of Founders on him and his family. And the reason he wanted to meet me and the reason that he's now going to do the new show and he trusts me is because there's only one book written about this. And he listened to the podcast, he couldn't believe the insights that were in it. He asked his son, asked David, who he interviewed in the family to get this information.

• 3:17:01David Senra?

  And the answer was nobody. I read the book and then I tied it together because like you're the same person that there's been 100 of you, 200, 1,000 of you. The past few hundred years, like we're not, I know we like to feel we're special, like we are, there's just, we're not as unique as we think we are. And so I don't think, you know, obviously if you can have conversations with these people, you should be, you should do that. One of the reasons that is because like in an hour, we talked for an hour, the amount of information that guy transferred to me in an hour would be literally impossible. You could give a 25 year old founder, 30 year old founder, weeks and you just could not convey that much knowledge and information that this guy was able to do in an hour.

• 3:17:41David Senra?

  Um, so yeah, if you can have conversations with them, you should, but I don't feel like I'm ever like missing out, like the text wasn't enough.

• 3:17:47John Coogan?

  Well, it's been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much.

• 3:17:50Jordi Hays?

  Chat says more swearing, please.

• 3:17:53John Coogan?

  Chats fans of it. Well, that concludes this episode.

• 3:17:57Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for having me again, guys.

• 3:17:58John Coogan?

  We will be

• 3:17:59Jordi Hays?

  Are you tired, John?

• 3:17:59John Coogan?

  Back at 11. No, I do have

• 3:18:01Jordi Hays?

  Oh, you actually have to go.

• 3:18:02John Coogan?

  I have to go. I'm sorry. But, I mean, you two could hang out here if you want.

• 3:18:06Jordi Hays?

  This has been a great show. We're in the fourth hour. We're almost

• 3:18:09John Coogan?

  I gotta

• 3:18:09Jordi Hays?

  halfway through the fourth hour. And we'll be back tomorrow.

• 3:18:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:14Jordi Hays?

  We got two more.

• 3:18:14John Coogan?

  11 a.m. sharp.

• 3:18:16Jordi Hays?

  Every day this week has felt like Friday.

• 3:18:17John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 3:18:17Jordi Hays?

  But, thank you for hanging out with us. Thank you for being here. Of course. We love you, David.

• 3:18:22John Coogan?

  Spotify and

• 3:18:22Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 3:18:23John Coogan?

  Add David Senra by David Senra to your podcast player.

• 3:18:27Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 3:18:28John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 3:18:28Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, folks.

• 3:18:29John Coogan?

  See you tomorrow. Goodbye.