a16z’s $15B Raise, Tim Cook Exit Rumors, Meta Goes Nuclear | Ben Horowitz, David George, Alex Rampell, Jen Kha, Jeremie Eliahou

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (02:19) - Tim Cook's Retirement Rumors (09:11) - AI Needs a (Steve) Jobs (24:54) - Meta Announces Nuclear Partnerships (29:45) - Can AI Solve the Recycling Crisis? (37:51) - a16z's $15B Raise (45:14) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:07:25) - WSJ Mansion Section (01:28:29) - Jeremie Eliahou is a technology analyst at Semianalysis, where he focuses on semiconductors, AI hardware, and datacenter infrastructure. His work is known for deep technical rigor and clear analysis of GPU roadmaps, compute economics, and industry supply chains. (02:01:29) - Jen Kha, Operating Partner and Head of Investor Relations at Andreessen Horowitz, discussed the firm's recent $15 billion fundraise, highlighting the rapid three-month oversubscription driven by strong LP conviction in the AI super cycle. She emphasized the firm's decentralized structure, with specialized funds and teams, allowing nimble operations despite its 600+ employees. Kha also noted that while LPs seek liquidity, they prefer to retain stakes in high-performing companies, choosing to ride their winners rather than cash out prematurely. (02:16:40) - Alex Rampell, a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, is a serial entrepreneur who co-founded companies like Affirm and TrialPay. In the conversation, he discusses his entrepreneurial journey, the importance of understanding industry history, and the role of AI in creating defensible business models. He emphasizes that successful entrepreneurs can effectively mobilize resources, possess deep industry knowledge, and are driven by motivations beyond financial gain. (02:32:29) - David George, a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, discusses the firm's consistent growth investment strategy, emphasizing a focus on exceptional companies and founders with ambitious visions. He observes a post-COVID shift in founder psychology towards a more intense work ethic, contributing to rapid company growth, particularly in AI-driven sectors. George also notes the rational trend of companies remaining private longer, benefiting from a robust private market and avoiding public market volatility. (02:38:51) - Ben Horowitz, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, discusses the enduring challenges of entrepreneurship, emphasizing that despite technological advancements, the fundamental difficulties remain constant. He highlights the firm's evolution to address the expanding tech industry by creating specialized teams focused on areas like AI and crypto, ensuring comprehensive market coverage. Horowitz also reflects on the nature of market bubbles, noting that widespread denial of a bubble's existence often precedes its burst, contrasting past and present market conditions. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com AppLovin - https://axon.ai Cognition - https://cognition.ai Console - https://console.com CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io Figma - https://figma.com Fin - https://fin.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Graphite - https://graphite.com Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Labelbox - https://labelbox.com Lambda - https://lambda.ai Linear - https://linear.app MongoDB - https://mongodb.com NYSE - https://nyse.com Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com Public - https://public.com Railway - https://railway.com Ramp - https://ramp.com Restream - https://restream.io Shopify - https://shopify.com Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Vibe - https://vibe.co Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Friday, January 9th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Let me tell you about Ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. I forgot in the Vanity Fair profile that we were pitching Julia Ramp so much. She actually put it in the profile. It was very, very funny. Anyway, if you have an interest to read, we were in Vanity Fair yesterday. Should, it's a fun piece, little whirlwind tour of what, a show that happened maybe six months ago. So a lot of things have changed, but it's a good snapshot.

• 0:41Jordi Hays?

  But she got up to speed.

• 0:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's fun. Yeah, it's fun. Anyway, we have a massive show for you today, folks. $15 billion raised by Andreessen Horowitz. We have a bunch of folks. We have four members of the Andreessen Horowitz.

• 0:54Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna hit the gong just because.

• 0:55John Coogan?

  Hit the gong, warm it up. You gotta warm it up because we gotta hit it 15 times when we have Jen, Alex, David, George, and of course, Ben Horowitz coming on the show. Hit that app. Love it. Not a majority. Linear, of course, Meet the System for Modern Software Development. Linear's a purpose-built tool for planning and building good products. We also have Jeremy Ontiveros from Semi Analysis coming on to explain energy, to explain data center buildout, and the gas turbine infrastructure that's going into those. He did a great interview with Ben Thompson that dropped yesterday. We're gonna dig in and go deep into, apparently,

• 1:37John Coogan?

  there's a bunch of fascinating things. Apparently, there's like 10 terawatts of requests for data center capacity, which is like way more than anyone would ever build. But it's because of this weird dynamic of you have to ask for more than you need because you might not get it. And there's a whole bunch of interesting things. He, of course, broke the story that Meta had completely changed their data center design. They were optimizing for sort of energy efficiency before. Now they're much more focused on speed of development and scale. And so, we're gonna be taking you all over the place today. But we're gonna start with Steve Jobs' Apple. We're going back into Cupertino because there's a rumor that

• 2:21John Coogan?

  Tim Cook might step down sooner than expected. So this comes from

• 2:27John Coogan?

  Tim Cook, his compensation, we've talked about it a lot, seventy four point two nine million per year, salary's three million, stock awards fifty seven million, non-equity incentive compensation, he gets a twelve million, twelve million dollar bonus if he does well, he gets twenty one thousand in 401K, personal use of private jet, eight hundred K on that, that's nice.

• 2:51Jordi Hays?

  Only eight hundred K?

• 2:52John Coogan?

  Vacation cash out of fifty six K, security expenses, they're paying nine hundred thousand dollars a year to secure him, that's, that's gotta be a whole team of people, probably some jacked tier one operators following him everywhere he goes, but he is, he is rumored to be out, Apple track says, Apple CEO Tim Cook has told senior leaders that he is tired and would like to reduce his workload, rumors suggest he could-

• 3:16Jordi Hays?

  Doubt, I doubt they wanted that quote specifically-

• 3:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:19Jordi Hays?

  -to leak.

• 3:21John Coogan?

  Hmm, but it did via the New York Times, and, so rumors suggest he could announce a plan to retire as early as this year, of course, the, the rumor is that John Turnus might step into that role, Mac Rumors has a, a story here, with Tim Cook having recently turned sixty five years old and a number of other senior Apple executives having already departed in recent months or heading for the exits, there has been a significant focus on Apple's plans for who will succeed Cook as CEO. I, I was hoping for a Warren Buffett third act from Cook, I was hoping for him to just say, I'm just hitting my stride, sixty five to ninety five, that's where I'm gonna do my best work.

• 4:04Jordi Hays?

  That's my window. You haven't, you haven't seen any compounding yet.

• 4:06John Coogan?

  It's a completely underrated era for business leaders, if you can stay in the game and, and, and continue to compound from sixty five to ninety five, that's where the sweet spot is, you know, just get ready to lock in, not, not, not check out, but he might be-

• 4:22Jordi Hays?

  We love to joke about him being underpaid, I actually think he is, or he has been, but-

• 4:27John Coogan?

  For how big of a company it is and what he's done to the stock.

• 4:29Jordi Hays?

  The nominative determinism of Tim Cook coming in and just absolutely cooking-

• 4:33John Coogan?

  He's fucked.

• 4:34Jordi Hays?

  As long as he has, it will always be remembered.

• 4:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, so several recent reports have identified Apple's senior vice president of hardware engineering, John Turnus, as likely to be named the next Apple CEO. And the New York Times has now shared a profile of Turnus with some context on his expertise and how he's viewed within the company. According to sources who spoke with the New York Times, Apple has begun accelerating its planning for Tim Cook's succession last year, with Cook having expressed a desire to reduce his workload, while software chief Craig Federighi, services chief at EQ, marketing head Greg Jaws, and retail HR chief Deidre O'Brien have all reportedly been seen as potential candidates. Turnus appears to have shot to the front of the pack, with Cook likely to remain as chairman of the company's board of directors.

• 5:23John Coogan?

  Oh, so he's not completely out to pasture. He'll be in the boardroom. Turnus is known for his expertise as an engineer, having worked on many of Apple's devices through, although he is known, quote, "more for maintaining products than developing new ones." Big question about what the next decade or two of Apple's product roadmap actually looks like. How many more new products do they need? They sort of have one thing in every category. If we go through a major form factor shift, that could be an issue. But in general, if you have someone who's really good at maintaining products and keeping dominant market share, driving up margins, that could be the right person for the job.

• 6:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:02John Coogan?

  Quote about John Turnus, he's a nice guy. Let's hear it for him. Sometimes nice guys finish first, you know? They always say nice guys finish last. I think that's a bit of fake news.

• 6:14John Coogan?

  This is from former Apple engineer Cameron Rogers. Quote about John Turnus, "He's someone you want to hang out with." I love it. He's just a good hang. Everyone loves him because he's great. Has he made any hard decisions? No. Taking shots at your boy. Hey, we just like hanging out with the guy. We just like hanging out. Has he had to do any real work ever? No. Has he made any, a single hard decision in his life? I'm sure that's not true. But it does characterize his role, I guess. He hasn't been in the CEO seat, so he probably hasn't had to make crazy decisions like, should we launch Apple Vision Pro now or later? You know, he's not the one. He's just like, you told me to launch it, I got it done, right? That's his role.

• 6:57Jordi Hays?

  Should we make the iPhone less durable?

• 7:00John Coogan?

  That's a hard decision. Are there hard problems he's solved in hardware? Also, no. What? This is an insane quote. Wow. Turnus and others may quibble with that assessment. However, as Turnus has been involved with a number of innovative products over the years, including spearheading effort to develop the iPhone Air and working on the upcoming foldable iPhone, that's exciting. Turnus is seen as a natural successor to Cook, even with an even temperament, strong attention to detail, and an intimate knowledge of Apple's supply chain. That's obviously very good. But he may not bring the visionary focus and willingness to take risks that Steve Jobs had, leading to debate among Apple employees about exactly what type of leader

• 7:45Jordi Hays?

  We need to get the Germinator on.

• 7:46John Coogan?

  We do. Yeah, yeah.

• 7:48Jordi Hays?

  Nick, can you reach out to Mark Germain to try to get him on the show Monday?

• 7:52John Coogan?

  And let's talk through all of these things. There's so much to talk about here. Before we continue our conversation, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. So there's this question. Will John Turnus, if he steps into the role of CEO of Apple, will he bring the visionary focus and willingness to take risks that Steve Jobs had? That's a tall, tall order. I think Tim Cook's executed extremely well. He hasn't even, it doesn't really seem like he's tried to bring a visionary focus. He's been the operator.

• 8:28Jordi Hays?

  He's a supply chain visionary.

• 8:29John Coogan?

  He's a supply, yeah, visionary in his own way. But you were thinking, and we've been discussing, this need for a Steve Jobs of AI, a visionary leader in AI. We have a number of household name type CEOs, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Dario Amade, Demis at Google DeepMind. But we don't quite have that Steve Jobs. Maybe that's too tall of an order, but you still think it's necessary. So walk me through your thinking. Before you do, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on On social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

• 9:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, everybody's worried about, uh, not having a job because of AI. Well, AI needs the jobs too. They need a Steve Jobs.

• 9:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, I didn't get that. That's good.

• 9:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so, uh, yeah, I, I, we've talked about this a little bit this week. I tried to summarize it today in the newsletter, uh, and I'll, I'll kind of read through a little bit. So, uh, I went back and looked at the history of the phrase tech clash. It was originally, uh, coined by Adrian Woolridge in The Economist in 2013. He correctly predicted that, quote, "The big developments of 2014 will be the growing peasants revolt against the sovereigns of cyberspace. The silicon elite will be cease, will cease to be regarded as geeks who happen to be filthy rich and become filthy rich people who happen to be geeks." Uh, over the coming years, he was, uh, entirely correct. It was actually in 2018 that tech clash was the runner-up word of the year.

• 10:03John Coogan?

  No way.

• 10:04Jordi Hays?

  So he, he like, called it perfectly. Obviously you had the Cambridge Analytica scandal, uh, which is actually finally going to be, uh, dramatized this year with the social network too.

• 10:14John Coogan?

  That's coming out this year. Do we have a release date yet for that?

• 10:16Jordi Hays?

  I don't think so.

• 10:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 10:18Jordi Hays?

  Um, but it is in the works. Um, and then, yeah, just growing concerns about monopoly power, privacy, uh, democracy, censorship.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  Really quickly, Tyler, October 9th, 2026?

• 10:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's what I'm seeing as well. There we go. Okay, we do.

• 10:31John Coogan?

  Okay. Book the tickets now. It's going to be entertaining.

• 10:34Jordi Hays?

  Book it.

• 10:35John Coogan?

  Probably great.

• 10:35Jordi Hays?

  This would be a good, we should organize, we should, we should, uh, actually, I don't know. I, I'm not sure that this movie is, I, I expect this movie to hit like 10%.

• 10:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:46Jordi Hays?

  Or potentially negative in comparison to the social network one.

• 10:49John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 10:49Jordi Hays?

  And so I think it might be the kind of thing you get a bunch of people to go and it's just like, okay, that, that was.

• 10:54John Coogan?

  The social network, the original movie is, is a really good Rorschach test for, are you going to have a good time in tech? Like if you ask someone who is thinking about working at a company or a tech startup, like, what did you think of the social network? And they're like, oh, I thought it was like awful and like I hated all of it and there were no heroes. Uh, well, they're probably not going to enjoy tech, but if they came away from it being like, oh, well, it's actually really inspiring. Because he just coded a thing in his. In his dorm room that became really big. And yes, there was drama and fights over who gets what on the cap table. But even Eduardo Savarin became a multi billionaire. So, you know, sort of an aim for the moon. Land amongst the stars situation. So, yeah, I mean, you could read it both ways.

• 11:38John Coogan?

  But I think most people, most tech insiders, if you ask them about the social network, they were like, that was inspiring. I listen to the music all the time. It inspired me to grind harder.

• 11:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Real quick, happy birthday to techno cheat in the chat. Day one to you. Happy birthday to you.

• 11:59John Coogan?

  Gemini three pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding.

• 12:07Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, I'll continue. So first tech lash is all about how is this impacting our mental health? How's this impacting our democracy? The foundations of our country, society, privacy, you know, censorship, et cetera. The second tech lash has begun, feels like it started last year. You know, this is one of the things like, yeah, you don't really know. Like sometimes it takes a while to realize like, okay, we're in this thing now that we can look back and see how public opinion has been forming around this. So I believe the average American believes that technology and now AI is now like a threat to their way of life. So I was looking at.

• 12:44John Coogan?

  There were rumors of the tech lash in 2024 when the image generators came out. A lot of the arts community were saying this is really, really bad. It's going to put artists out of jobs. The thumbnail community on YouTube was upset. But this year it's solidified around, there's like three or four key points, key talking points. If you talk to someone, why don't you like AI? Well, it's stealing copyrighted information. It's slop. It's putting people out of jobs. It's stealing water and stealing power. And each one of those is somewhat real.

• 13:17Jordi Hays?

  First tech lash was like, okay, these tech, our lives are now existing in these platforms.

• 13:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:21Jordi Hays?

  And they are in some ways more powerful than the government.

• 13:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:24Jordi Hays?

  And now, so I was, I pulled Maslow's hierarchy of needs pulled up and I was just like going through and looking at physiological needs, right? Air, water, food, shelter, sleep, clothing, reproduction, safety, personal security, employment, resources, health, right? All these different things. And then you just go up and you can see that like. There's good reason for the average American to just kind of believe like AI is going to mess all of this up. So, starting at the bottom, Americans have heard that data centers use a lot of water.

• 13:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, I need water.

• 13:53Jordi Hays?

  It's not necessarily factual.

• 13:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:55Jordi Hays?

  Sure, sure, water is used in the process.

• 13:57John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 13:58Jordi Hays?

  But we're not like, you know, blowing through water at the rates that the public sort of receives.

• 14:02John Coogan?

  I was joking about this online. I was hypothetically debating with a AI doomer about water usage. Well, are they long water stocks? Because if you, if you believe that AI is going to use all the power and you bought GE Verona, you did very, very well. But the water stocks have not mooned. So, hey, D cells who think AI is going to use all the water, maybe you got to put on a long position.

• 14:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or just privatize a public utility.

• 14:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:28Jordi Hays?

  Become a monopolist.

• 14:29John Coogan?

  Also, I mean, we're talking to Jeremy at Semi Analysis, who's sort of their power expert, obviously.

• 14:36John Coogan?

  AI does use a lot of power and there's a lot of investment theses that can be built on top of the Semi Analysis energy model. Why doesn't Semi Analysis have a water model? Oh, because it's actually not a bottleneck to anything.

• 14:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so the power thing is, is more real. People now just assume, like if they, I have to imagine people are reading an article, oh, your power bill might be going up. If your power bill just goes up because it's a winner, you're like, oh, thanks, AI.

• 15:00John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, totally, totally.

• 15:02Jordi Hays?

  I, you know, I didn't ask for this. So they've seen Terminator 2, so they can imagine kind of like the sci-fi scenario playing out. That's one factor. If they're super online, they might have heard like the Casey Hammer or other people talking about this, like solar panels. You know, an AI system just saying like, hey, actually this farmland, I could use it better than you humans.

• 15:23John Coogan?

  Remember that Ilya video?

• 15:25Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:25John Coogan?

  So he did an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. It was this video, it was like a video documentary almost where they were interviewing him, but there was no questions. So you never saw who was asking the questions, but he was giving his answers and he's sort of like sadly walking around on a gloomy beach. It's like very moody and...

• 15:42Jordi Hays?

  I would say it's, he was aura farming. He looked sick.

• 15:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:46Jordi Hays?

  He was looking over the bay.

• 15:47John Coogan?

  He did aura farm San Francisco a little bit, but as I was getting dressed up as him for Halloween. We were playing that video and the makeup artists who were who were applying the Ilya Sutskever, you know, all the makeup to me, were watching that being like, that's not inspiring at all.

• 16:06Jordi Hays?

  Okay, yeah, and I didn't even include that in here, but that's like the reaction, like every time people hear leaders at labs talk,

• 16:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:13Jordi Hays?

  They're like, turn it off.

• 16:14John Coogan?

  As opposed to, you could show someone an Apple ad or a Steve Jobs clip and it would be like, oh, dancing on your wired headphones with your iPod? Like, I love music. They're making music available. Great. I love it. And there were so many things that were just inspiring. So continue.

• 16:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, continuing. So, yeah, moving up the pyramid, people have been told that AI is coming for their jobs. Some people have like actually had an experience that made them feel like, whoa, I thought I was, I thought what I did was unique and special. But now I'm watching AI do my job, trying to do it on my own computer.

• 16:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, maybe, you know, imagine somebody that's driving for Uber and Lyft and all day long they're driving and they're just seeing, they're sitting next to Waymo's in traffic and you're looking over and there's no one in the seat. Like, that's ominous. That's, that's, that's going to be scary if that's how, if somebody puts food on their table. And then every single CEO last year was saying like, we have, you know, fortunately, we have increased efficiency due to AI.

• 17:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:11Jordi Hays?

  And so we've laid off 10,000 people, right? And so a lot of that is just kind of like spin, marketing, et cetera, but that's what people are hearing, right?

• 17:17John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 17:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and then you look at what are the AI leaders are actually saying. So, so Ilya, uh, talking for 10 minutes, people are like, whoa, that doesn't seem good. Ilya is saying like,

• 17:29John Coogan?

  He's saying like, let's not do that. He's, he's trying to prevent that bad scenario, but it still reads like, whoa, I didn't realize they were taking that seriously.

• 17:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So you look at the quotes, uh, just you could easily look up quotes from Dario. Obviously he had his quote, AI could wipe out half of all entry level white collar jobs and spike unemployment to 10 to 20% in the next one to five years. Elon had a good quote, uh, from over a decade ago. He said, with AI, we are summoning the demon.

• 17:56John Coogan?

  Some people today might say the demon has been fully summoned.

• 17:59Jordi Hays?

  Fully summoned.

• 18:00John Coogan?

  Fully summoned.

• 18:01Jordi Hays?

  And Sam obviously said at one point, AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, they'll be great companies. And so this kind of messaging, credit to them, it's like super effective for fundraising, right?

• 18:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 18:15Jordi Hays?

  If somebody's saying like, all jobs will be wiped out, the world will be destroyed.

• 18:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:20Jordi Hays?

  But in the meantime.

• 18:21John Coogan?

  There's a lot of funds that are long demon. You know, you're just like.

• 18:24Jordi Hays?

  The demon thesis.

• 18:24John Coogan?

  The demon, the free cash flow from demons.

• 18:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So it's like, if you're sitting there being like, if AI is going to eliminate my job, I want to own a piece of it. So, you know, maybe, maybe I can benefit from it.

• 18:36Jordi Hays?

  So, yeah, so the big issue is like, anybody that's hearing all these, like, why would they actually be excited about AI? Right? Even though, even though it is so incredible in so many ways, right? I gave the example earlier this week of like, AI just being like a, a free sleep consultant for a toddler. That just like one shots it and it's free.

• 18:54John Coogan?

  You can chat to see health that launched this week. I mean, that, that, that's very good news for a lot of people that, you know, can't see a doctor that often or just don't have the time or don't have the money. There's a million reasons why that might be advantageous. And yet it's, it, it, it's, it's not that they're not pitching it like Steve Jobs pitched GarageBand, which was like, now anyone can be a musician. Now anyone can be their own doctor is inspiring, but it's just like, they are fighting an uphill battle because of those other quotes.

• 19:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, yeah, and I, and I was thinking about it's like, if you, if you want to, if, if somebody is kind of like generally scared of AI, who do, who do you, who, like, what do you, what content do you point them towards? Typically you'd want to point them towards the people building it.

• 19:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:36Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and say, or, or people around it, but even like Tarkash is like a little bit, maybe like too high level.

• 19:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 19:41Jordi Hays?

  Or, uh, not, not high level enough, actually, right? It's like a little bit too ethereal, right? Talking about all these different potentials.

• 19:48John Coogan?

  I mean.

• 19:48Jordi Hays?

  But if you have them listen to like a Joe Rogan episode with one of these guys, it's going to be.

• 19:54John Coogan?

  To be fair, I, not to debunk your piece, but I, I do think Demis is pretty good.

• 19:59Jordi Hays?

  I, yeah, Demis is great.

• 20:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. He doesn't have one of those crazy quotes and there's been two documentaries about him. Both of them are incredibly inspiring. And when I hear him talk about. AI curing cancer or humans curing cancer with AI. It hits a lot different because he literally has a Nobel Prize.

• 20:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:19John Coogan?

  And and his.

• 20:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the problem, the problem, if you look at, if you just count up the views that Elon, Sam and Dario have gotten in comparison to Demis.

• 20:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:27Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 20:28John Coogan?

  He's much less of a household name and he's also not the CEO of of a big company because he's running the biggest lab in a big company.

• 20:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:35John Coogan?

  Uh, and so there's, there's, there's that.

• 20:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and so I, so I've just been feeling like there's this.

• 20:40John Coogan?

  Gap.

• 20:40Jordi Hays?

  Gap, Steve Jobs sized hole, right? Uh, he had plenty of concerns about technology. He shared them freely. Somebody once asked him, uh, so your kids must love the iPad. Then he said, my kids haven't used it. And he just said, we limit how much technology we have in the home.

• 20:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:56Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he, he did talk about like losing the PC race to international business machines. He said, if for some reason we make some big mistake and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we're going to enter a computer dark age for about 20 years.

• 21:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:10Jordi Hays?

  Like you can imagine like Sam saying something like that around like you don't want, and and you've seen the internal sort of messages between him and Elon talking about like losing to Google.

• 21:18John Coogan?

  To Google, yeah.

• 21:19Jordi Hays?

  It's like, oh, we don't want Google to to control the AI god, right?

• 21:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:23Jordi Hays?

  Um, uh, he also had a, he had a 1994, uh, Rolling Stones interview, uh, Rolling Stone interview. Uh, the interviewer said, nevertheless, you've often talked about how technology can empower people, how it can change their lives. Do you still have as much faith in technology today as you did when it, when you started out 20 years ago? Steve says, oh, sure, it's not a faith in technology, it's faith in people. Uh, technology is nothing. What's important is that you have faith in people, that they're basically good and smart. And if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them. It's not the tools that you have faith in. Tools are just tools. They work or they don't work. It's people you have faith in or not. Yeah, sure, I'm still optimistic. I mean, I get pessimistic sometimes, but not for long.

• 22:06Jordi Hays?

  Um, and I, and and and part of this, I just, it feels like people have like are are. Part of it's like fundraising, part of it's just how excited we are about AI, but like you're leaving humanity out. So there's this quote from Sam. He says, if AI stays on the trajectory that we think it will, then amazing things will be possible. Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer. So it's like, that's a fine quote. If you, there's some way to look at and be like, okay, this is super, this abundance is super exciting. I'm maybe more optimistic about AI. But he happens to, he's saying that AI is going to figure out how to cure cancer, right? And like, if you've used these tools today, and any, and talk to people that are, that are

• 22:49Jordi Hays?

  at the labs, they're, they, the reality is like, it feels much more likely that humans will use AI to cure cancer, right?

• 22:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, central thesis.

• 22:56Jordi Hays?

  Like Steve would have said, if AI stays on the trajectory that we think it will, then amazing things will be possible. Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, humans can use AI to cure cancer. Like, small, small tweak.

• 23:06John Coogan?

  Human centrality.

• 23:07Jordi Hays?

  But it's, it's a big, it's a big difference. And so, I wrote, "The facts are the facts. Steve Jobs was not one to shy away from impressive specs and massive scale, but flipping the final line from AI will cure cancer to humans will use AI to cure cancer makes all the difference." Apple put human centrality at the heart of everything they did, even when they were talking about something like a CNC to mill an aluminum block into a MacBook Pro. The focus was not on the CNC, it was on what it allowed the human being to do, right?

• 23:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. CNC is literally a robot. It's computer numerical control. But when you watch that, that unibody presentation, it puts Johnny Ive at the center. And it's like, I used the tool to create something beautiful out of this amazing material that I could never do with just my normal tools. Like, I could never chisel out an aluminum unibody. I need a CNC for that. I have it, and I can create something beautiful.

• 23:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So yeah, at the end of this, I just said, like, I think AI has a massive narrative problem right now. The narrative is working within the industry. It's not working for people that are outside the industry. And I just don't, I really don't think it has to be this way, right? Like, I think that there is a human central, there is an empowering way to pitch this technology in this future. And we're not doing it right now. And, and I expect that, I expect that everybody will, will, you know, Elon has his own style of pitching all things, and I don't think he's going to change.

• 24:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:31Jordi Hays?

  I think that, that other folks. Maybe like Dario and Sam can make small tweaks that will go a long way.

• 24:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:40Jordi Hays?

  And obviously, there's founders that we don't even know their names yet that are going to be huge players in all of this as well.

• 24:46John Coogan?

  Definitely. Before we move on, let me tell you about 11 Labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs.

• 24:58John Coogan?

  So there's some massive news from Meta. They are doing a big deal with Oklo to build nuclear power plants. We've been following the energy story very closely this week. Obviously, we're talking to Jeremy in just a little bit. We have some exciting guests next week digging into how we are going to generate more power in this country. The headline from the Wall Street Journal is Meta Unveils Sweeping Nuclear Power Plan to Fuel Its AI Ambitions. And we'll read through a little bit of this. Meta Platforms on Friday unveiled a series of agreements that would make it an anchor customer for new and existing nuclear power in the United States, where it needs city-sized amounts of electricity for its artificial intelligence data centers.

• 25:39John Coogan?

  The Facebook parent said it would back new reactor projects with the developers Terra Power and Oklo and has struck a deal with the power producer Vistra, which is up 11% today, to purchase and expand the generation output of three existing nuclear power plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania. So they already exist. There's probably some work already done on the permitting side. They're probably deeper in, but Facebook's just stepping up and saying, hey, we're opening the pocketbooks. We got the debt. We got the cash flow. We got the money to power this and take it across the finish line. So Vistra and Oklo, both their shares rose about 15% after the stock market opened. Terra Power is still privately held, so no movement there, but you imagine the secondary

• 26:24John Coogan?

  market is booming right now. Meta aims to see the first new reactors delivered as early as 2030 and 2032, which feels like it won't matter because superintelligence will be here by then. Certainly, AI 2027, we're now, we're now less than 12 months away from, from the superintelligence, if you believe the most aggressive possible scenario.

• 26:48Jordi Hays?

  I mean, to give, to give AI 2027 credit, to date, it's been, it's been fairly on point.

• 26:55John Coogan?

  It has, it has, and no one will correct you more quickly than Tyler Cosgrove over there, the ultimate AGI pillar. I, I do think, we were trying to do the number of days till AGI on the ticker, and I think we got to go analog. I've been enjoying moving the goalposts, and I think we need a massive flip forward.

• 27:14Jordi Hays?

  It's like the doomsday clock.

• 27:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, you know how, do you remember back in the old days when there was a movie theater, and they would put up the letters on each of the, like, if it was like Avengers, they would take an A, and they would take a little sticker, sticks, like suction cup on the end of a pole, and they would put it up on the, the marquee, one letter at a time. I feel like we need something much more analog to change the number of days till the singularity, as we monitor it here on TBPN. It's purchase of nuclear power.

• 27:47Jordi Hays?

  We have our goalposts.

• 27:47John Coogan?

  Yes. We're, we're very wide, we're very eyes wide open that the schedule is challenging, but we think it's important to be bold, said the director of global energy at Meta. What a gig.

• 27:59Jordi Hays?

  That's a great.

• 27:59John Coogan?

  Hitting.

• 28:00Jordi Hays?

  I'm the director of global energy.

• 28:03John Coogan?

  Around the globe.

• 28:03Jordi Hays?

  I'm the energy director. I'm the chief energy officer.

• 28:06John Coogan?

  Want to power this globe? You're going through me. Soon, I mean, you, you got to be angling for a promotion there.

• 28:13Jordi Hays?

  I just view Meta as like a, a nation state.

• 28:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, but, but, so the problem is the globe. It's impressive. Meta operates all over the globe, but why aren't you thinking bigger? Who's the director of solar system level energy development? Galactic energy production.

• 28:30Jordi Hays?

  True, true, true.

• 28:30John Coogan?

  Universal energy production. You should be producing energy all over the universe meta. You're thinking too small, nearly focusing on the globe. Hitting those timelines for new reactors would require the companies to quickly select sites that would be acceptable to nuclear regulators, start working with utilities to secure grid connections, and get their manufacturing operations up and running, she said. But it would also mean they have a chance to meet the urgent demand for more electricity to fuel AI computing. And so if you think about 2020, 2032, this stuff comes online, that's great, but it feels like 2027, 2028, we're going to see a mismatch in demand relative to production. So we'll talk to Jeremy from Semi Analysis about how we can solve that in the interim.

• 29:15John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Figma before we move on. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create code-backed prototypes and apps fast. Continuing. Oaklow and Meta making this announcement. 1.2 gigawatts is the total size of this nuclear campus in Pike County, Ohio. The agreement includes binding prepayment to support fuel procurement, enabling Oaklow to advance early project work and secure fuel, adding new clean, reliable power to the grid.

• 29:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Oaklow opened super high this morning and then is at 115 and then has been trading down. So it's up 7% today, but up 28.7% in the last five days. So it's almost like, it's almost like somebody knew this was coming. But this was a, this was a fun article in the Journal. Were you happy to hear that AI is mining our trash for treasure?

• 30:14John Coogan?

  Trash economy. Trash economy. We're going to be using cubes of trash.

• 30:19Jordi Hays?

  We're all going to be getting trash post AGI.

• 30:21John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, we're going to be using cubes of trash to, to, everyone will be rich because everyone will be, everyone will have a cube of trash in the trash economy. The headline from the Journal is AI is mining our trash for treasure.

• 30:36Jordi Hays?

  Plus hospitals embrace AI for better and worse and scientists create a robot smaller than a grain of sand.

• 30:42John Coogan?

  So waste management, the largest US trash hauler and recycler is spending on building and automating recycling facilities. You have to go back and imagine a Sopranos like scenario where the mob is running trash management and just vibe coding and being like, what model should we use to detect what's in the trash? What's actually happening here is that they have to sort out the recyclables because there are valuable things that get thrown away in the trash and the more that you can route things to different places, the better. So it's a difficult job that pays workers little and it's hard for companies to fill. Who really wants the job of trash sorter?

• 31:19Jordi Hays?

  That's like my first job, picking up cigarette butts.

• 31:21John Coogan?

  Yes, but you didn't have to sort them. You should, it's ridiculous.

• 31:26Jordi Hays?

  Maybe I should have, maybe I should have found the ones.

• 31:27John Coogan?

  How do you never figure out that they just have that, you know that bucket that you put down and then you sweep into it? How did you not develop tools?

• 31:34Jordi Hays?

  It was like, it was like a dirt.

• 31:36John Coogan?

  Vacuum.

• 31:37Jordi Hays?

  It was like, it was like fine rock that was the ground. And so if I was doing that, I'd just be.

• 31:44John Coogan?

  Picking up rocks.

• 31:45Jordi Hays?

  And then I'd have to be.

• 31:46John Coogan?

  What about one of those grabber tools? I still feel like at a certain point, you weren't even operating at like monkey or dolphin level.

• 31:51Jordi Hays?

  I was more like, I was running, I know, I actually was running around like a monkey. Like I liked the speed at which I could just be like running around.

• 31:58John Coogan?

  But the monkey and the dolphin, they developed tools and you were unable to develop tools and you suffered.

• 32:02Jordi Hays?

  I was promoted fairly quickly.

• 32:04John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. You developed tools eventually. Thanks to recent advancements, some recyclers are now employing machines to do this dirty work. This week, Ryan December reports on the recycling companies using AI to find valuable commodities in the trash. So here's a job that computers can take without much complaint, sorting recyclables.

• 32:27John Coogan?

  And before we read this, let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputer for training and inference that's scaled from one GPU to

• 32:37Jordi Hays?

  By the way, do you have the, do you have the honor of being serviced by Waste Management?

• 32:41John Coogan?

  I don't know, actually. I think my town might have its own, but...

• 32:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Every time I use, I interact with Waste Management.

• 32:49John Coogan?

  It's good?

• 32:50Jordi Hays?

  It's great.

• 32:50John Coogan?

  Really?

• 32:51Jordi Hays?

  Like, it makes me wish that all utilities were privatized.

• 32:54John Coogan?

  How does that, how does that manifest?

• 32:55Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's just the website is great, the support is great. Everything about the experience is great.

• 33:01John Coogan?

  When are you going to a website to interact with your trash?

• 33:05Jordi Hays?

  Just like moving.

• 33:06John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. I need new...

• 33:07Jordi Hays?

  If you move, like, there's all these things, like, interacting with California utilities.

• 33:12John Coogan?

  My trash bin broke at one point and I needed a replacement.

• 33:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. One click. I bet Waste Management will have an agent that...

• 33:18John Coogan?

  Claude Code. Get me a new, get me a new trash can, I suppose. For humans, it is a foul laborious job that entails standing over a conveyor belt, plucking beer cans and detergent bottles from a stream of refuse. The job pays little and is hard to fill. At Murphy Road Recycling's material recovery facility near Hartford, the machines are taking over the dirtiest jobs. A few workers remain on the line, mostly near the front, to watch for hazardous items. Otherwise, the system of conveyors, magnets, optical sorters, and pneumatic blocks run largely unmanned. Watching over it all are computers that analyze material as it passes by about seven miles an hour. The device is made by

• 34:03John Coogan?

  London-based Gray Parrot. That's a good name for a company. Use artificial intelligence. The African Gray Parrot, I think, is the smartest parrot, or maybe it lives the longest. Use artificial intelligence to identify recyclables, flag food-grade material, gauge items' mass, assess market value. They're doing DCF on every item.

• 34:24Jordi Hays?

  African gray parrots can live to 70 or 80.

• 34:26John Coogan?

  Let's go. Let's go.

• 34:26Jordi Hays?

  Imagine just having the world's most wise parrot with you always.

• 34:31John Coogan?

  I like it.

• 34:31Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, you should get into birds.

• 34:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, bird guy.

• 34:35Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if we're, I don't know if our office lease allows for...

• 34:38John Coogan?

  What's my budget? What's your budget? I think an African gray parrot is expensive. I remember I was moving into a, an apartment building and, and I don't know why, but my friends were telling the landlord that we had, that one of the friends that was moving in had a collection of African gray parrots and they just thought it was the funniest thing to try and get this landlord to approve the African gray parrots in the, in the apartment. It was very, very silly.

• 35:04Jordi Hays?

  Uh, there's a store, there's a store in LA called The Perfect Parrot.

• 35:08John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 35:09Jordi Hays?

  Maybe you should go over there.

• 35:09John Coogan?

  Maybe. Gold Rock's Mike Rowe is punching the air right now. Dirty jobs, uh, getting displaced. Um, so, uh, environmental concerns and the White House's push to boost domestic production of raw materials have turned attention to America's waste stream, which is full of valuable commodities. Uh, the aluminum tariff, 50%, has lifted demand for scrap metal. Meanwhile, pulp mill closures have left box makers reliant more than ever on old corrugated containers and consumer good companies want to reclaim their bottles and jugs as states adapt, adopt extended producer responsibility laws aimed at reducing plastic pollution. That's good news. Uh, there's really a lot of value, value in a lot of recyclables and garbage,

• 35:52John Coogan?

  says the founder and chief technology officer at AMP, a Colorado company that builds AI-run recycling facilities. The problem has been that the cost of pulling those materials out is similar to or greater than the actual value of those materials. Recyclers believe that AI will allow them to efficiently mine our trash for treasure. Gray Parrot's analyzers were shown recyclables thousands of times in conditions raising, ranging from crumpled to perfectly intact until the computers could recognize materials. Perfect job for AI. Uh, the devices gather data about what is passing through the facility and which items aren't winding up where they belong. It's helping us make adjustments to the system. Uh, Murphy Road executives say the technology allows them to sort up to 60 tons an hour of

• 36:35John Coogan?

  curbside recycling. Um, and some of these, some of the, some of the stuff that you can pull out of recycling is, is remarkable, especially if there's batteries that can be disassembled. There's a whole company, Redwood Materials, founded by JB Strabel, uh, former co-founder of Tesla, early employee of Tesla, board member of Tesla. Focused on re recycling EV batteries because obviously we have the rare earth elements, we make the magnets, we make the batteries and then we just kind of trash them. And if you can recycle them, that's obviously effective and valuable. Sort of an interesting second.

• 37:09Jordi Hays?

  What do you think about the name Redwood Materials? Wouldn't you expect them to be working?

• 37:14John Coogan?

  In wood?

• 37:15Jordi Hays?

  Wood?

• 37:15John Coogan?

  I guess, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know why they call that. I think they're out in Vegas, they have a massive facility. I wonder how the business is doing. I know they raised a bunch of money, it was a massive capex intensive effort, but it seemed like something that was uniquely powered by, you know, seeing the rollout of Tesla, you know, JB Strabels working on Tesla, seeing how many cars they're shipping, watching all the batteries go out the door and just thinking, okay, well, something's going to happen with those in a couple of years, I should start building this business today. Well, CrowdStrike, your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

• 37:54John Coogan?

  So let's move on to the big news of the day. Andreessen Horowitz raised 15 billion dollars. Why are we here? Why did we raise 15 billion dollars? Ben Horowitz wrote a piece on X, you can go and read it, he's also.

• 38:08Jordi Hays?

  By the way, Redwood Materials, the last round they raised was in October of 2025. I missed that.

• 38:14John Coogan?

  October of 2025?

• 38:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so very recently, raised 350 million.

• 38:18John Coogan?

  Yes, so a massive suite of new funds. The haul represents 18% of all venture capital dollars allocated in the United States in 2025.

• 38:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so that was something I was curious about. Does this get sort of like backdated? Like this wasn't factoring into the data that we had from last year and now that it's, or was it already being counted in some way through filings, right? Because you add, you add an incremental, you know, 15 billion.

• 38:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's a big change. I don't know, we'll have to ask them. But A16Z is now at 90 billion of AUM and it's split over a number of funds. Growth, the Growth Fund got 6.75 billion, American Dynamism 2 got 1.776, I believe, right? Or is it 1.176 billion? It's, there's two different numbers here. Apps two got 1.7 billion. Infrastructure, the second fund, got 1.7 billion. Bio and healthcare got 700 million and other strategies got 3 billion. I wonder crypto is sort of missing here. I wonder if crypto is just on a different cycle or has some sort of different structure. We'll have to ask them about that.

• 39:32John Coogan?

  But very exciting and feels like despite the headline of venture capital fundraising declining, certainly plenty of money to go around.

• 39:43Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think both Josh and Delian this week talked about kind of the K shape.

• 39:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:47Jordi Hays?

  And how emerging managers, less emerging managers, less new funds, but the platforms have been doing just fine.

• 39:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, I'm curious about this. This. Oh, the okay, okay. So I understand it. So American Dynamism Fund two raised 1.176 billion. They already had a 600 million dollar fund. So you add those together and you get the final amount of funding for American Dynamism across the two funds, 1.776 billion for American Dynamism. And some cool trading cards going up from Andreessen. David Ulovich shares one of an Anduril Fury drone flying across a mountain range for companies that support the national

• 40:40John Coogan?

  interest. Catherine Boyle had a different graphic with a horse, which we love. Play that horse sound with an American flag and the Andreessen new font, which is a very beveled and 3D looking metal texture. Very fun.

• 40:58Jordi Hays?

  And Paki has a new piece on on some of the history of the fund.

• 41:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:05Jordi Hays?

  The opening is quite, quite fun. I'll just read it.

• 41:10John Coogan?

  Before we do, let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.

• 41:19Jordi Hays?

  Paki says, Andreessen Horowitz hears your feedback that it's too loud, that it would shut up and dribble, that it should shut up and dribble politically speaking, that you don't agree with a recent investment or two, that it's unbecoming to quote the Pope, that there's no way it will ever generate a reasonable return for LPs on such enormous funds. A16Z does hear you. It has been hearing you at this point for nearly two decades.

• 41:42John Coogan?

  Overnight success.

• 41:43Jordi Hays?

  And then he goes in to a bunch of the history and the news. So I would encourage everybody to go, to go read specifically. There's a bunch of information on their actual returns, which is cool, but unfortunately this went out right before we joined. So I have not been able to read it yet.

• 42:03John Coogan?

  But there was some spice. We got to get to the drama. So Andreessen Horowitz, they put out this image, why we raised 15 billion. We're all in on America. And what image do they use? They use Mount Everest. They're climbing Mount Everest. The metaphor is clear. It's the tallest mountain. We're the tallest mountain in venture. We got the most money. We're the biggest firm. But a lot of people are saying, hey, why'd you use a Chinese mountain? Why'd you use a Chinese mountain? It's Everest. It's over there in China. It's actually half in China, half in Nepal. It's more complicated. But maybe it's

• 42:35Jordi Hays?

  Let's not get into that.

• 42:36John Coogan?

  Maybe it's foreshadowing. You know, we're acquiring Greenland. Maybe they know something we don't. Maybe it's not going to be in China forever. Maybe we already, we already named it. Everest is named it by an American who I believe was the first person to climb it.

• 42:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And remember, so

• 42:52John Coogan?

  Land acquisitions.

• 42:54Jordi Hays?

  White House officials have talked about a $5.7 billion payment for Greenland, right? That depending on what type of payment would be needed for a place like Nepal, right? You can imagine it being potentially less than that. So A16Z, they've got plenty, plenty of cash. But I'm super excited to have a whole host of folks from the fund. Jen is joining Alex Rampell, David, and then Ben will cap it off at the end.

• 43:23John Coogan?

  And Dan Primack is pulling out the spiciest quote, VC industry shots fired by Ben Horowitz. Ben says, as the American leader in venture capital, the fate of new technology in the United States rests partly on our shoulders. That seems reasonable. They're certainly up there. And leaders, obviously, by what definition, but they're certainly in the top with in terms of AUM and and the they I mean, they do have a they do have a responsibility for

• 43:57Jordi Hays?

  And what did Josh Josh Wolfe yesterday was was saying that he expects at least one or two of these larger platform funds to go public.

• 44:07John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 44:08Jordi Hays?

  So we'll have to we'll have to get into that.

• 44:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, that's a very interesting angle with Andreessen is because it's it's becoming such a large, they call it platform fund, they're almost private equity type deals, we see general catalyst buy a hospital network like they're at a scale where they can keep a company private until they're trillion dollar company, but they can also buy whole companies and roll things up and incubate stuff, there's so much that you can do at this level and it starts to look like is the comp actually BlackRock is the comp actually Blackstone and those two firms are worth 170 billion each, something around there, 190 billion each and so it's it's going to be it's it feels like it's going

• 44:53John Coogan?

  to be interesting to start seeing these firms more as financial institutions.

• 44:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:58John Coogan?

  With more traditional.

• 44:59Jordi Hays?

  Not just a firm and institution.

• 45:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, not not that it's going to happen anytime soon, but it feels like.

• 45:03Jordi Hays?

  But this feels like it could be effectively a pre-IPO round.

• 45:07John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 45:08Jordi Hays?

  Pre-IPO fundraiser.

• 45:09John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe.

• 45:10Jordi Hays?

  We will see, we will see, but go go read Packy's piece.

• 45:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:13Jordi Hays?

  And Shom Sankar says, we should insist that all data centers that are built are architecturally beautiful in the neoclassic style.

• 45:23John Coogan?

  Yes, I wanted to do an architecture deep dive. Before we do, let me tell you about Labelbox, delivering you the highest quality data for frontier AI. Get in the box, the label box.

• 45:35Jordi Hays?

  Get in the box.

• 45:37John Coogan?

  I love that they they gave us enough, just enough rope to hang ourselves.

• 45:44John Coogan?

  So Shom Sankar, you know, he he wants data centers built that are architecturally beautiful in the neoclassical style. You have you seen those photos of the AWS data centers that back up on to Virginia housing developments? So it's just like an idyllic few houses that just look like a normal neighborhood and then just

• 46:05Speaker 02

  And you zoom out.

• 46:06John Coogan?

  Massive white school box.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  They're like, I'm not leaving.

• 46:09John Coogan?

  Well, now you don't even get a box, you get a tent because Meta is now, they gave up on their previous architectural design and now it's just a tent. But maybe is more more aesthetic. If you're going to do a tent Meta, I think you should make it like a circus tent, get some red and white stripes going. Get some constant, you know, clown music going.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  Get the get the workers in the data center to be wearing clown.

• 46:36Speaker 02

  IRL slop.

• 46:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. But there were some interesting architectural debates that I wanted to go through. Before we go to the next one, let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. So imagine being as locked in as the Kyoto architecture community was in 1397. I cannot believe this was built 700 years ago, 1600 or 600 years ago. Explain what

• 47:11Speaker 02

  There's some lore here.

• 47:12John Coogan?

  Give me the lore Tyler.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  Okay, so so yeah, 1397 when it was built, I think in maybe 1950. So it was like a temple, right? So there's there's monks that lived there.

• 47:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  And I think it was 1950.

• 47:25John Coogan?

  For 500 years or 600 years.

• 47:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  The one was living there and he burned down the temple.

• 47:32John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  And then he tried to like commit suicide right outside it.

• 47:35John Coogan?

  Why? What's wrong?

• 47:37Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 47:37John Coogan?

  He just wasn't locked in?

• 47:38Speaker 02

  No one knows what happened, but but then so this is actually it was rebuilt and there's a good.

• 47:43John Coogan?

  But it was rebuilt in the same style?

• 47:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:44John Coogan?

  So the architectural style is truly from 1397?

• 47:48Speaker 02

  Yes, I mean, there's I think there's some questions about how much gold was actually used in the original

• 47:51John Coogan?

  Original.

• 47:52Speaker 02

  Design.

• 47:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:53Speaker 02

  But yeah, there's a good

• 47:54John Coogan?

  I feel like gold should be pretty fire resistant, you know, gold, probably high melt.

• 47:59Speaker 02

  Sure, but I mean, it's like a very thin.

• 48:01John Coogan?

  Well, that's that's a skill issue. They should have made it out of solid gold. Then a single ember, you're trying to light it, trying to get it started and the monk is just, ah, I can't get this gold building to melt.

• 48:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but there's a good Yukio Mishima book about this.

• 48:13John Coogan?

  Oh, really? There's a whole book just about this story?

• 48:15Jordi Hays?

  It's like a fictionalized story of the burning.

• 48:17John Coogan?

  Interesting, very cool. How would you rate this out of 10, Jordy? Would you live in this Kyoto temple?

• 48:24Jordi Hays?

  If it was an Aman, yes.

• 48:26John Coogan?

  If it was an Aman, it must have spa.

• 48:28Jordi Hays?

  I'm kidding. I do, I like the water feature.

• 48:31John Coogan?

  The water feature is very nice.

• 48:33Jordi Hays?

  I really want to bring back moats, right? The obvious thing that's missing from modern architecture, people talk about the material use, the form factor, but the obvious, the elephant in the room is a lack of moats in modern

• 48:45John Coogan?

  Indeed.

• 48:45Jordi Hays?

  architecture. We need to bring back moats, gators in the moats, potentially sharks in the moats.

• 48:51John Coogan?

  I feel like sharks are a little bit safer in the moat because you can hang out at the waterline. Whereas if there's gators in your moat and you're on the grass next to your moat.

• 49:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people have like koi fish, you know, ponds, but why not just go size it up a little bit?

• 49:06John Coogan?

  Genetically modify.

• 49:07Jordi Hays?

  Shark pond.

• 49:08John Coogan?

  Shark pond.

• 49:08Jordi Hays?

  Shark pond. Imagine, you know, people go out, they like the being relaxed and kind of like feeding the,

• 49:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:14Jordi Hays?

  feeding the koi, but imagine just, you know, throwing like chicken breasts into the water for a shark, how relaxing that would be.

• 49:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:21Jordi Hays?

  If you needed just, you know, 15 minute break from, from work before you get back to your email job.

• 49:26John Coogan?

  Well, if you're building a fintech company, you need a moat, you need Plaid. Plaid Powers, the app you use, the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest. Secure, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending now with AI. What about the architecture at the Charles de Gaulle Airport in France? It's a cross-section of a wing, complete with a spar box. I didn't know what that means. Need Billy Thalmer, founder of Regent Aircraft, been on the show. He says, we need more buildings modeled after airplane parts. I've seen this as well in a house. Someone took an airplane wing, a physical, real airplane wing,

• 50:11John Coogan?

  and built it into a house. It sort of served as the unifying ceiling. What do you think about living in an airplane wing? Would you do that? If it was an Aman, obviously.

• 50:24Jordi Hays?

  I've seen, I feel like I saw a house at some point that was built around uh 747.

• 50:29John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Uh, well, you also might be thinking of John Travolta's house, which just often had a 747 parked outside, which he flew himself, which is incredible. Imagine being so into private aviation that you learn to fly massive jets.

• 50:44Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I found it.

• 50:44John Coogan?

  And then land them at your house with your own, with your own.

• 50:48Jordi Hays?

  I put it in the timeline, guys, if you can pull it up. There's something called the 747 Wing House uh in California.

• 50:55John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 50:56Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this, let's pull up this video.

• 50:57John Coogan?

  I think I've seen this on, on a show called Grand Design on Netflix. I believe I watched a, a little mini documentary or, or an episode of reality TV about this. Let's see this. Yeah, this is the exact thing I've, I've watched, I believe.

• 51:10Speaker 03

  You don't come across views like that. More than once in a lifetime. It is somewhere that once seen, it would never be forgotten.

• 51:16John Coogan?

  Reveal it, reveal it.

• 51:16Jordi Hays?

  Reveal it, reveal it.

• 51:17John Coogan?

  Enough of the, we got this cactus outside.

• 51:20Speaker 04

  Running water or even roads is an endurance test only the brave.

• 51:24John Coogan?

  Where's the wing?

• 51:26Jordi Hays?

  There it is. Look at this thing.

• 51:27John Coogan?

  Oh, two wings. Interesting. Oh, very cool. That looks really cool.

• 51:32Jordi Hays?

  We don't know how to make wing houses in this country anymore.

• 51:35John Coogan?

  You know what this is? I, every time you watch one of these episodes, it's always just uh some couple that's just maniacally focused on making this particular thing and they interview them and it takes like years to create one of these episodes. Wow, interesting. It's blurred. I wonder why that, that is. Um, very, very odd. But um, it's always someone has a vision and then they think it's going to be easy and then they spend a decade building it and they have to check in with them. We checked in with them four years later and they were still in production and still getting permits. Uh, but eventually it does get built and it looks beautiful when it does and.

• 52:08Jordi Hays?

  You gotta really love the 747 to uh, to be in love with this house. I think it looks very cool. I'm glad they did it.

• 52:15John Coogan?

  I flew on a 747 for maybe the first time to Europe. It was beautiful. It was amazing.

• 52:20Jordi Hays?

  The first time?

• 52:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, 747s are pretty rare. Like, uh, except for long haul international flights.

• 52:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're an America guy.

• 52:27John Coogan?

  I'm an American, so I'm usually 737 MAX, always. Like, or, or, or Airbus, or Airbus. Um, but uh, the, the 747.

• 52:37John Coogan?

  It's got a special, it has a special aesthetic to it because of the, the smooth bump. You get the second story, but only for the first half of the plane. It's, I mean, it's the plane that we use Air Force One for, uh, that we use for Air Force One. Whereas the competitor, which I believe is the Airbus A380, doesn't have the same aesthetic beauty. It just, i- i- it's two stories the entire way. It's very efficient, but it just doesn't have the same clean line as the 747, which is just so, so iconic. Anyway, Charles de Gaulle Airport, go check it out. Also, check out Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. Uh, so.

• 53:18Jordi Hays?

  Checking in on 262 Fifth Ave.

• 53:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 53:21Jordi Hays?

  Sage, uh, Hunter Bornstein says.

• 53:24John Coogan?

  Should be raised.

• 53:25Jordi Hays?

  It's a crime. It should be raised. Shame on SLCE.

• 53:29John Coogan?

  He really dug into who built this thing.

• 53:31Jordi Hays?

  Moscow-based. He's going at him.

• 53:33John Coogan?

  26 residences. He calls it hideous architecture. He says it takes away Madison Square Park's views of the Empire State Building. Um, I don't know. What is that at the top? That, that, that top is just.

• 53:46Jordi Hays?

  Don't, don't worry about the gold cube, John. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. It's just, it's a gold cube.

• 53:55John Coogan?

  Wow, we found a rare post here. Zero likes, 166 views.

• 53:59Jordi Hays?

  Wow, first.

• 54:00John Coogan?

  Except for the fact that I disagree with it. I think it's actually sort of a nice building and I think we just, we generally need more buildings.

• 54:06Jordi Hays?

  I think it just feels harsh because of the contrast to the building next to it.

• 54:09John Coogan?

  True, true. But, uh, I don't know. I, I was, uh, we'll, we'll read this in the mansion section, but there's, there's some interesting dynamics about, uh, how HOAs enforce aesthetics in communities and whether or not that's good or not. Um, in other news, they 3D printed a Starbucks. Starbucks has a new drive-through in Texas. The coffee giant's first 3D printed store in the United States.

• 54:33Jordi Hays?

  It's funny, they've really made it look like it's 3D printed.

• 54:36John Coogan?

  Look at this, look at this. So, I mean, I, I've talked to one of the, there's a YC company that does this technique. I know, it looks so sloppy. And there's a little bit of like, up at the top, it actually looks like there's a little bit of imperfection and randomness that looks sort of aesthetic. It looks like it's sort of designed in the way that a log cabin, not every log is going to be perfect. But then you get to the middle section and it's like the tube that was pumping it was just not working. If you scroll over to the left and then down a little bit, just down, like that is messy. So this, the way it shows up, you basically get like a crane with a gantry that can move the nozzle in an X and Y axis. And it just pours cement in loops, circles again and again and again.

• 55:18Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I need to know, I need to know how quickly they built this and how much it costs because if this came in at, at 80%.

• 55:25John Coogan?

  They said it was, it was two, two Gs, two grand. Can you imagine?

• 55:30Jordi Hays?

  Starbucks was down to their last two grand.

• 55:32John Coogan?

  And they're just like, yeah, just 3D print it. Yeah. I don't know.

• 55:36Speaker 02

  Around 1.2 million.

• 55:37John Coogan?

  Okay, that's.

• 55:38Jordi Hays?

  What is a normal, what is the average Starbucks standalone building cost?

• 55:44John Coogan?

  Tyler asks, who is the architect? And Pete says, slop GPT. People are not happy.

• 55:51Jordi Hays?

  Chase says, you wouldn't download a Starbucks.

• 55:56John Coogan?

  US Graphics Company says, I have the sudden urge to insult this in biblical terms. Yeah, people are not, not very happy with this. It does, it does feel like a low quality print. Hopefully the 3D printing company, you know, this is just a step in the road and they become more, more aesthetic, more precise, I think.

• 56:14Speaker 02

  Okay, so the total investment range for Starbucks location is 760,000 to 2.2 million.

• 56:21Jordi Hays?

  See, that's not.

• 56:23Speaker 02

  It's kind of like right in the range there.

• 56:27Jordi Hays?

  It's the median cost, but one of the more ugly ones. I, yeah.

• 56:33John Coogan?

  Whether you're long or you're short Starbucks, you got to do it on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with Dan Gray, customer service.

• 56:44Jordi Hays?

  Matt, Matt, Stavik says they saved 10 bucks.

• 56:49John Coogan?

  Good to see you, Matt. The Wrath of Non says is comparing some architecture in Oslo, Norway.

• 56:57Jordi Hays?

  Wait, going, going back to the 3D for a second?

• 56:59John Coogan?

  Sure, let's go back to the surface.

• 57:00Jordi Hays?

  Could they not have found a material to just place on that? Like, it seems like this could be a great way to build a, like, the core structure.

• 57:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:08Jordi Hays?

  Couldn't you just put, put some, yeah, plaster over it?

• 57:10John Coogan?

  You totally can plaster over it and just smooth it out.

• 57:11Jordi Hays?

  It seems like they wanted to prove that it was, really put it in your face. But the whole point of technology is not the technology itself.

• 57:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:20Jordi Hays?

  It's what it enables.

• 57:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:21Jordi Hays?

  So if you can build a Starbucks for half the cost, you know, twice as fast, that's amazing. But it doesn't mean it has to look like it was pre-printed.

• 57:29John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, I mean, you, you can, you can plaster and spackle over any sort of rough material. And then you can print, you, you can basically stamp like brick texture into it or some cinder block texture into it. And it's fake, but it looks like what it looks like. They didn't do any of that here.

• 57:45John Coogan?

  They really let the, like, the loose tubes really lay out. It looks just squishy.

• 57:50Jordi Hays?

  It looks like, it looks like.

• 57:52John Coogan?

  It looks like a gingerbread house.

• 57:53Jordi Hays?

  It, it looks like a kid's, um, a kid's, you know, pro, school project.

• 57:58John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. Today, we're using, uh.

• 58:01Jordi Hays?

  And you gotta be like, oh, nice, nice work. Nice work.

• 58:03John Coogan?

  There was like tongue depressors and chopsticks or, uh.

• 58:06Jordi Hays?

  Uh, popsicle sticks.

• 58:07John Coogan?

  Popsicle sticks and glue. And the, and the four-year-old went a little crazy with the glue. The Elmers came out in full effect with this Starbucks.

• 58:15Jordi Hays?

  That being said, cool that this is actually happening.

• 58:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:18Jordi Hays?

  Because this has been, uh, promised.

• 58:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 58:21Jordi Hays?

  Uh, for a while.

• 58:22John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 58:22Jordi Hays?

  I just hope they, they refine the, the design.

• 58:25John Coogan?

  At the same time, I've talked to a number of startup founders who, uh, operate in the.

• 58:30Jordi Hays?

  Trace says you can also build a Starbucks out of mud, but probably.

• 58:34John Coogan?

  You probably shouldn't. Oh, wow. Okay. So, um. I've talked to a number of startup founders working in trying to develop cheaper housing, cheaper building materials, and they've all said, the last thing that you want to 3D print is just a flat wall. Like, 3D printing is great when you're talking about Lucas Zinger's hypercar and you need some crazy structure that can't just be milled. But with a, with, like, we're very, very efficient at making flat planes. You can just take a, you can just take a metal cube and slice it. You can take a bunch of wood and build a grid. Like, we're pretty efficient at just building flat walls. You don't actually

• 59:16John Coogan?

  need 3D printing for that. You need 3D printing for building some sort of special structure. There was a rocket company, was it Relativity? I don't want to get it wrong, but there was a rocket company that was saying, hey, we're going to 3D print rockets, and it would go and solder one piece after another in a cylindrical turbine. The only problem is that we know how to make cylinders really, really effectively.

• 59:36Jordi Hays?

  Bend metal.

• 59:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, we can just bend metal. And so that's what Blue Origin and SpaceX do.

• 59:40Jordi Hays?

  Hawkwood Rocket says Lincoln Logs Starbucks.

• 59:43John Coogan?

  Lincoln Logs Starbucks.

• 59:45Jordi Hays?

  Soft serve building.

• 59:46John Coogan?

  It does look like soft serve, that's right.

• 59:47Jordi Hays?

  It's a good Starbucks.

• 59:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe it's an ad for the McFlurry. Maybe the McFlurry machine always works there.

• 59:52Jordi Hays?

  DG says you could do a sandcastle Starbucks.

• 59:54John Coogan?

  Sandcastle Starbucks might be fun.

• 59:56Jordi Hays?

  That could go pretty hard.

• 59:57John Coogan?

  Well, maybe they need to do a sandcastle national museum over in Oslo, Norway. But before we dig into this, let me tell you about AppLovin, profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. So, he's comparing two images. One is from 1882, it's the National Gallery, and in 2022, they launched the National Museum, and he claims that modern architecture is meant to demoralize you. And you can zoom in on the side by side here. The 1880s building is very ornate with lots of gold and brick and details and structure and windows and all sorts of things. And the 2022 building looks like a black cube

• 1:00:41John Coogan?

  from the Borg or Star Trek.

• 1:00:45Jordi Hays?

  Really rough.

• 1:00:45John Coogan?

  Some cool stuff. You can do cool things with flat materials. I've always liked the design of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, but it looks like this sweeping winged structure. It's very innovative and unique. This is a little boring, guys. But at the same time, Oslo, it's a gloomy place. It sort of fits in, I guess. I don't know. Maybe the architects were depressed. They had seasonal affective disorder. Sad. Anyway.

• 1:01:12Jordi Hays?

  Steve is sharing, apparently this was a proposal from a Norwegian architecture firm for the Obama Presidential Library in Hawaii, but it failed.

• 1:01:22John Coogan?

  Okay, so the Norwegians got it.

• 1:01:23Jordi Hays?

  They still got it.

• 1:01:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, sometimes it's the flat black cube. It's interesting because like the critique of the new Obama Presidential Library is that it's too Norwegian. And it turns out he just went with the wrong Norwegians, I suppose, because they're sharing these sort of science fiction looking renders. These look beautiful with a wonderful water feature and this sweeping grass overlay that seems very cool. Although, it feels like you would be at risk of falling off the edge here. They would have to put a railing of some sort. But very, very cool architectural designs, and I would love to see more.

• 1:01:57Jordi Hays?

  Pull up the Obama Presidential Library.

• 1:02:00John Coogan?

  Does Trump get two Presidential Libraries, one for each term? Has he already built one? I know the plane's going there, right? Something like that?

• 1:02:08Jordi Hays?

  I put, I put the Obama one in the.

• 1:02:11John Coogan?

  But if you're worried about a lack of gold in the Presidential Library architectural industry, I don't think you need to be worried for very long. I think there will be a very ornate building coming in just a few years, probably. And I'm sure the.

• 1:02:24Jordi Hays?

  Yes, this is the, this is what, this is, this was the winning bid.

• 1:02:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. And they did that because it's a power source, right?

• 1:02:32Jordi Hays?

  This one is in Chicago.

• 1:02:33John Coogan?

  This one's in Chicago, okay.

• 1:02:34Jordi Hays?

  Not Hawaii.

• 1:02:35John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:02:35Jordi Hays?

  And again, maybe if they get a huge projector and put like a fireplace on the wall inside, it could be cozy.

• 1:02:42John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 1:02:43Jordi Hays?

  But that doesn't look, uh...

• 1:02:45John Coogan?

  It's crazy how tall it is.

• 1:02:46Jordi Hays?

  It looks like a great place, potentially like the, uh, like if the deep state felt like not super welcome in other buildings.

• 1:02:56John Coogan?

  I want to see the aircraft that they're building inside there because that looks like an aircraft hangar for a UFO.

• 1:03:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:02John Coogan?

  It seems of alien origin.

• 1:03:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:05John Coogan?

  Well, Wrath of Non is continuing to talk about, uh, architecture. He says, "Traditional Korean architecture with its visually rich, harmonious patterns produces lower levels of visual stress than modern facades with repetitive patterns, hard lines and high contrast materials, which are more likely to overload the visual system and contribute to discomfort, especially in dense urban areas." There's some research that suggests that having variation in your architecture actually can reduce stress, which is fascinating.

• 1:03:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, try to zoom in on this picture on the left.

• 1:03:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:45Jordi Hays?

  Again, because you can see the one on the left, it's way, uh, for something, it just feels more organic or more natural, right?

• 1:03:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, and it's a pretty simple shift, like...

• 1:03:53Jordi Hays?

  And then if you go over to the right a little bit...

• 1:03:55John Coogan?

  It doesn't feel like they completely...

• 1:03:56Jordi Hays?

  Okay, that looks like a prison. On the one side, the left, looks like, you know, they're gentrifying, uh, some area. And on the right, uh, some part of like Mexico City, and on the right, it looks like a prison. And it's only a slight...

• 1:04:09John Coogan?

  Or a bank building in New York City, but, um, yeah, it doesn't seem like it costs that much to create some variation and randomness in your architectural designs. Maybe it's expensive, but, um...

• 1:04:20Jordi Hays?

  I want to see the new A16. I think A16Z needs to build a, like, a massive gold, uh, superstructure in the heart of San Francisco.

• 1:04:28John Coogan?

  They do.

• 1:04:29Jordi Hays?

  Just carve out, uh, you know, the, uh, who knows what the fee structure is, but...

• 1:04:33John Coogan?

  Take half of it.

• 1:04:34Jordi Hays?

  Take half of the fees and just build a monolithic monument to...

• 1:04:40John Coogan?

  Have you ever been to the, uh, Statue of Liberty?

• 1:04:44Jordi Hays?

  I've never actually toured it.

• 1:04:46John Coogan?

  Get inside. So there's a structure. You can go inside of it and walk up the stairs and whatnot. You could put offices in that. You could build, you could build a statue and then put your office inside the statue. That's thinking.

• 1:04:58Jordi Hays?

  I like that. I think we should kind of look back to Charlie Munger's design for the UCSB. Yeah.

• 1:05:04John Coogan?

  The lock-in.

• 1:05:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:06John Coogan?

  Dormzilla.

• 1:05:07Jordi Hays?

  He, he just wanted, he just wanted everyone to lock in.

• 1:05:11John Coogan?

  He wanted everyone to lock in and he was, he was killed for it. It was ridiculous. He was.

• 1:05:16Jordi Hays?

  Pull, pull this up. University of California abandons plans to build windowless dorm, the Munger Hall. He just wanted you to lock in, but pull up this article. You can see the design and just how many, just how many rooms in this place are windowless. It is very, very powerful. So on the outside, it looks like, it looks, uh, I think he just knew that, uh, people were only going to have a few. By the time this was built, people would only have a few years to escape the, the permanent underclass and windows would distract people. If you scroll down, you can see the actual design.

• 1:05:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:57Jordi Hays?

  I'd say there's a lot of.

• 1:05:59John Coogan?

  There's a lot of windowless things. Maybe he was just super pilled on VR at the time. He was like, everyone's going to be in the metaverse. Everyone's going to be locked into their VR headsets. Uh, maybe.

• 1:06:08Jordi Hays?

  Ock was says Munger was cooking. Yeah. We, we, we should have let him cook.

• 1:06:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. We support him. Um, anyway, uh, gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits, and HR built to evolve its modern, modern, small and medium sized businesses.

• 1:06:25Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah. I mean, the, the funny thing with trying to do that at UCSB is like the most popular freshman dorms at UCSB are actually like in an old like hotel. So it's these two towers that like have these like incredible like 360 views, not 360, but like the mountains and the ocean. And then you have like this huge like Olympic swimming pool. So it actually feels like you're just staying at like, uh, at like a Hilton or something like that. And so to go from that to windowless is uh, just a little bit rough.

• 1:06:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, well underrated strategy. Buy a compound with your friend. Do you see this? Former casino mogul Steve Wynn and financier Thomas Peterfee.

• 1:07:08John Coogan?

  Set a record when they bought a four and a half acre compound in 2024. I can't seem to add this to the list, but it's in the Wall Street Journal today. It's on the cover of the mansion section. It's comparing Aspen to Palm Beach, but it's very funny. It says, "Five years ago, $20 million home sales in Aspen were rare, happening no more than a handful times in a year. An influx of uber wealthy buyers has now upended that norm, handing the affluent ski area 34 deals above $20 million last year, up 161% from 2024." Year-over-year growth, almost tripling in that category.

• 1:07:53John Coogan?

  "The median single-family home sale price hit $13.95 million during 2025's third quarter, compared to $9.97 million in Palm Beach, Florida." Raising the question, "Has Aspen eclipsed Palm Beach as one of the priciest markets in the country?" Long known as playgrounds for the rich and famous, one sunny, one snowy, Aspen and Palm Beach are increasingly two sides of the same coin when it comes to luxury real estate. Despite 2,000 miles between them, each is home to dozens of billionaires. Restaurants like Saint Ambrose and boutiques like Brunello Cucinelli have outposts in both locales.

• 1:08:35John Coogan?

  Some of the wealthiest people have property in both places, too. "People run in packs and they run to the same destinations," said Palm Beach real estate agent Dana Koch. "The meteoric rise of Aspen's ultra-luxury market has made comparisons between the markets unavoidable. Both Palm Beach and Aspen saw deal volume and prices soar in 2020. That's continued to be driven by strong financial markets." "The 1%ers are making money hand over fist," said Aspen real estate appraiser Randy Gold. "Real estate," he said, "is a hard asset that they can enjoy." Both are small markets that are protected geographically, adding to their exclusivity. Palm Beach is an island. I gotta turn to M9.

• 1:09:20Jordi Hays?

  Aspen is basically an island in the mountains surrounded by public land. Once you're here, it's very private. Each has a limited supply of homes. There are only so many beachfront properties in Palm Beach and/or homes on Aspen's Red Mountain, which has fueled major price appreciation in both. The numbers are mind boggling, but the reality is that is these properties are unicorns. When they come up for sale, you have buyers out there who will pay a premium.

• 1:09:43John Coogan?

  Okay, so Steve Wynn and Thomas Peterfee, they both own homes in the same area in Palm Beach, and they're known to be friends and they're both GOP donors. They're neighbors in Florida, and apparently they became close enough to go in on a $108 million Aspen estate together. And so Wynn is the founder of the Wynn Resort and Casino in the Bellagio. Thomas Peterfee is the founder, chairman, and largest shareholder of Interactive Brokers. So he's made a ton of money. Thomas is worth $35 billion. Steve Wynn is maybe worth $3.4 billion. So one order magnitude gap between them.

• 1:10:24John Coogan?

  And you wonder if it's Wynn being like, "I gotta bring in some extra firepower on here. Let's go 50/50, brother."

• 1:10:30Jordi Hays?

  Well, here's the, like, this sounds great in theory, and then it's New Year's, and both families want to be in Aspen.

• 1:10:39John Coogan?

  But it is a 22,000 square foot compound. You might just say, "Hey, we're doing Christmas together, New Year's together."

• 1:10:47Jordi Hays?

  I know, but...

• 1:10:48John Coogan?

  But there's probably only one master.

• 1:10:50Jordi Hays?

  Actually finding families that want to go be in a cabin...

• 1:10:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, it's a tall order. It's crazy to be like, "Oh, yeah, like, bro, you're only, little bro, you're only worth $3.4 billion? Hit the couch." I got the master, you got the couch. Oh, you only put in 50 million into this compound. But this is where it gets funny. So no one, there's no reporting on like why they decided to buy this together. But we have a clue because they, they, the buyer is actually an LLC that they set up and the name of that LLC is Buddy's Aspen. Buddy's, we're Aspen buddies. We're a couple of Aspen buddies and we went in on it together. And so they bought a, they bought an Aspen mansion together. It's a, it's a very funny time.

• 1:11:36John Coogan?

  The, the other buddies who did not buy a mansion together are of course the Google co-founders who have both bought property in Miami. Larry Page just spent 173 million on two Miami homes. Some of them are very odd. We'll, we'll go into these. First, let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. So Google co-founder Larry Page has bought two massive Miami estates for a combined 173 million dollars. According to people familiar with the situation, the deals come as Page and other Silicon Valley moguls descend on Miami in the face of California's proposed tax on billionaires. Delian called it just a little bit too early, but the move is finally happening.

• 1:12:21John Coogan?

  Page paid 101 million dollars in December to buy one of the properties, a waterfront compound in Coconut Grove that had long been the home of the late restaurateur Jonathan Lewis. He then purchased a nearby Coconut Grove property for 71.9 million from Eris Sloan Lindeman Barnett and her husband Roger Barnett.

• 1:12:39Jordi Hays?

  Okay, and let's pull up, there was some interest in one of these homes.

• 1:12:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:12:44Jordi Hays?

  That Larry bought. We can pull it up. I put it at the bottom of the timeline.

• 1:12:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:12:48Jordi Hays?

  But one of the homes that, that he purchased looks, looks fantastic. It looks like this jungle oasis. And then you zoom in a little bit.

• 1:12:57John Coogan?

  Do the CSI, enhance.

• 1:12:58Jordi Hays?

  Enhance, enhance it a little bit.

• 1:13:00John Coogan?

  And it gets a little odd.

• 1:13:03Jordi Hays?

  A little odd. Haven't.

• 1:13:06John Coogan?

  Uh oh. Uh oh. It has a warning.

• 1:13:09Jordi Hays?

  It's not. It's just a sculpture. We can, we can show it.

• 1:13:11John Coogan?

  Let's see. This is gonna be a jump scare if it's anything but this.

• 1:13:14Jordi Hays?

  Yes. So this, so you have to show the, show the zoomed out picture.

• 1:13:17John Coogan?

  So scroll down, show the zoomed out photo. Oh, wait. No, it's not there. Uh oh. Don't, don't scroll there too much. We need to find the original photo.

• 1:13:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the, the original photo is just.

• 1:13:27John Coogan?

  Where did the original photo go? Uh, we'll, we'll find that and, and we'll tell you.

• 1:13:31Jordi Hays?

  Put it here.

• 1:13:32John Coogan?

  But if you, but, uh, but basically there's a, there's a, you know, it's a stock, it's a real estate photo. It's a photo that was taken clearly.

• 1:13:39Jordi Hays?

  This is not.

• 1:13:40John Coogan?

  Real estate agent, hired photo team. Before it was Larry's house, to be clear. So this is the photo. And then people started zooming in and you keep zooming in and you keep zooming in and you keep zooming in.

• 1:13:50Jordi Hays?

  What's going on here?

• 1:13:51John Coogan?

  And you start seeing some very weird design and decor, interior decorating decisions that, uh, tell a little bit of a weird story about whoever was here. Usually these properties are staged before they are photographed. So.

• 1:14:05Jordi Hays?

  Who, who owned the house?

• 1:14:06John Coogan?

  Odd choice.

• 1:14:07Jordi Hays?

  Who owned it previously?

• 1:14:08John Coogan?

  Also, it's something that.

• 1:14:09Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, can you try to find out the, the previous owner of this house?

• 1:14:12John Coogan?

  I don't know. So, I mean, we, we, we have, we do have some, uh, Jonathan Lewis is one and Sloan Lindeman, Lindeman Barnett and her husband Roger Barnett are the others. If this is Larry Page's new house, but I know Sergey also.

• 1:14:25Jordi Hays?

  Some guy named, uh, Jeffrey.

• 1:14:27John Coogan?

  Oh, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no. Uh, and they declined to comment. Um, California's proposed ballot initiative would impose a one-time 5% tax on the assets of billionaires would retroactively apply to those who were California residents as of January 1st, 2026. Now, this proposal, uh, is not even on the ballot yet. It's, it's still being workshopped. Uh, but, uh, many tech billionaires are not taking any chances and they're relocating as of January 1st or December 31st in many cases.

• 1:14:59Jordi Hays?

  December 31st was really the day to send the press release.

• 1:15:02John Coogan?

  It was, it was. Pretty much every other day I'm showing property to a client from the San Francisco Bay area, says D, D, uh, Deena Golden Tire of Douglas Elliman. Every conversation I overhear, they're talking about the wealth tax and how it's retroactive. They're in a hurry and they're all looking at the same houses. Uh, several agents told the Wall Street Journal, they couldn't talk about the deals because they'd signed non-disclosure agreements that could end their careers if broken. The former Lewis compound spans about four and a half acres on Biscayne Bay in Coconut Grove, one of the city's most coveted neighborhoods. Lewis was the son of the late Peter B. Lewis, one-time CEO of Progressive Insurance Company. What a great business.

• 1:15:42John Coogan?

  The property listed for 135 million in 2024, was most recently asking 115. The estate has two primary residences. One was designed for the Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan in the 1920s, and Lewis built the other home for his father around 2002. The other property purchased by the Barnetts for 45.9 million in 2021 is less than a mile away. Sloan is the daughter of billionaire George L. Lindeman, and Roger is the chief executive of health supplement maker Shake Lee. I don't know Shake Lee, actually. The Barnetts sold the San Francisco mansion to a billionaire Lauren Powell Jobs, wife of the late Apple visionary Steve Jobs, for around 70 million in 2024, setting a record for the California city.

• 1:16:27John Coogan?

  The Barnett property wasn't on the market at the time of the deal, so little information is available. Real estate data at website Property Shark shows it was built around 2015 and spans 17,000 square feet with seven bedrooms. Paige and Sergey Brin founded Google as Stanford students in 1998 and built it into the world's most valuable companies, were one of them. Stepped back from active management in 2019, and maybe getting back in the arena during the AI boom. Paige is worth around $270 billion, according to Bloomberg. In addition to his home in Palo Alto, he obtained New Zealand residency in 2021. Miami's ultra-luxury market has skyrocketed in recent years. In 2025, there were 19 sales above $50 million in Florida,

• 1:17:10John Coogan?

  compared with just 12 in New York and 10 in California. Miami had four deals above $100 million last year. Billionaire hedge fund, hedge funder Ken Griffin paid $106 million for a coconut.

• 1:17:21Jordi Hays?

  Miami, Miami really makes Southern California look cheap.

• 1:17:26Jordi Hays?

  Ask a Miami guy to watch him browse, uh, watch him browse Zillow.

• 1:17:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:31Jordi Hays?

  And they're like, why they're giving the houses away here.

• 1:17:33John Coogan?

  Well, let me tell you about vibe.co where D to C brands, B to B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences and measure sales, just like on Meta. And you know what else is surprisingly expensive? Nashville, I had no idea, but there is a Nashville condo that quote, where it's James Bond meets Lenny Kravitz and it just is for sale now for 33.5 million. So looking to hang out with John Fiorentino out in Nashville. You gotta pick this one up. It's 5,000 square.

• 1:18:09Jordi Hays?

  Wait, doesn't John live in the Four Seasons?

• 1:18:11John Coogan?

  I think he might.

• 1:18:12Jordi Hays?

  Not to Doc.

• 1:18:14John Coogan?

  But if you want to get Volta from the source, you gotta head to Nashville and hit John Fio on X with a DM. In Nashville, where luxury home prices have skyrocketed in recent years, a penthouse at the Four Seasons Hotel and private residences is aiming for a record 33.5 million asking price. The condo unit is the city's most expensive home for sale. The penthouse is also available. You can rent it if you don't have 33 million to spare. It's going to cost you $200,000 a month and you gotta commit to at least six months. But if you have 1.2 mil, burn in a hole in your pocket, you want to hang out in Nashville with one of the greatest idea guys to ever do it, John Fiorentino.

• 1:18:56John Coogan?

  Maybe, uh, maybe.

• 1:18:57Jordi Hays?

  It's just funny. I just realized that the guy selling this house is a buddy of mine.

• 1:19:02John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:19:03Jordi Hays?

  I actually bought my house through his office.

• 1:19:05John Coogan?

  Jamie Parsons or?

• 1:19:06Jordi Hays?

  This is Cortazzo.

• 1:19:08John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. Uh, the newly completed Four Seasons in downtown Nashville near the Ascend Amphitheater. What Ascend Amphitheater? They're ascending out in Nashville?

• 1:19:20Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 1:19:20John Coogan?

  I, I.

• 1:19:21Jordi Hays?

  Is that where you spend, spend winter break?

• 1:19:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, the Ascend Amphitheater just looks maxing. John has been looking good recently. He must've been spending some time there. It's a few minutes away, walk away from Broadway and thorough, a thoroughfare famous for its bars and live country music. About two miles away from Taylor Swift's longtime home in the city. The penthouse spans roughly 5,000 square feet with three bedrooms and a balcony lined with floor-to-ceiling windows. The unit has expansive views of the city and Cumberland River. Chris Cortazzo, a Malibu, California, real estate agent, bought the penthouse for 12 million in 2022 when it was just a shell. There were no walls, kitchen, he said. There was nothing there. He spent two years building out the unit in an aesthetic he calls James

• 1:20:06John Coogan?

  Bond meets Lenny Kravitz, anchored by a circular floating fireplace. Wow. Floating fireplace. That's cool. The residence has about a million dollars in smart home technology. He lives full-time in Malibu, but began visiting Nashville around five years ago, Cortazzo did. He also owns a roughly 150-acre farm outside the city, he said, and has spent only a few weekends at the penthouse since completing it earlier this year. Cortazzo is also listing the Malibu home of the late actress Shannon Doherty, a longtime friend of his. Oh, I heard about this news. That property hit the market last year for 9.45 million and has a listing price that has since been reduced to 8.75 million. Nashville's luxury real estate market

• 1:20:48John Coogan?

  has surged over the past six years, according to Parsons. While only one home traded for over 10 million in Nashville, Kruger said that she believes the figure almost hit 20 in 2025. If Cortazzo's home sells at or near its record asking price, it will set a record for Nashville. The current record is held by a suburban home on 50 acres that sold for 32 million in 2024. So if you're looking to head over to Nashville, pick up this penthouse. I've never lived in a penthouse, a condo, like this. I would...

• 1:21:23Jordi Hays?

  Then you've never lived, John.

• 1:21:24John Coogan?

  I've never lived. But personally, I would be going for the 50-acre suburban home. Too many dogs, too many animals around. I want the steeds around. I want to be able to ride the horses. But for the right person in the right time of their life, I'm sure this is a fantastic pickup.

• 1:21:40Jordi Hays?

  In other news...

• 1:21:42John Coogan?

  Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom Card.

• 1:21:49Jordi Hays?

  France will delay the G7 summit to avoid conflict with mixed martial arts.

• 1:21:56John Coogan?

  Really? On Donald Trump's birthday?

• 1:21:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so they're going to delay Group of Seven summit to avoid a conflict with the mixed martial arts event planned at the White House on Donald Trump's birthday.

• 1:22:07John Coogan?

  Do you think they have a group chat for the G7? And it was like, hey, can we get together? We gotta get together.

• 1:22:12Jordi Hays?

  You gotta get together.

• 1:22:12John Coogan?

  We gotta do a summit.

• 1:22:14Jordi Hays?

  I miss you guys.

• 1:22:14John Coogan?

  Let's do a summit, guys. G7 leaders. Let's do it. And Trump's in there just being like, yeah, I already told Dana I'm in. I'm watching UFC that night.

• 1:22:26Jordi Hays?

  It's happening in my house.

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  It's happening in my house.

• 1:22:27Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be really awkward if I'm not there.

• 1:22:29John Coogan?

  I gotta be there.

• 1:22:30Jordi Hays?

  I gotta be there.

• 1:22:30John Coogan?

  Let's plan another summit, another time. Uh, this is interesting. Um, usually there's some big news that comes out of G7 summits. Usually there's, uh, you know, all the leaders get together, they're striking deals, they're talking to each other. There's something going on.

• 1:22:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So definitely worth still doing, worth delaying, but worth doing.

• 1:22:50John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of Trump, uh, Lip Buthan is in his good graces. Donald Trump posted-

• 1:22:54Jordi Hays?

  His new best friend.

• 1:22:55John Coogan?

  On Truth Social, he says, "I just finished a great meeting with the very successful Intel CEO, Lip Buthan, LBT, as he's called, for those who know. Intel just launched the first sub-two nanometer CPU processor designed, built, and packaged right here in the US of A. The United States government is proud to be a shareholder in Intel and has already made, through its USA ownership position, tens of billions of dollars for the American people in just four months. We made a great deal, and so did Intel. Our country is determined-

• 1:23:27Jordi Hays?

  You're kinda slipping into the-

• 1:23:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. By the end of the year, I'm gonna have it down. Uh, "Our country is determined to bring leading-edge chip manufacturing back to America, and that is exactly what is happening." Uh, and people are asking for particular, uh, financial advice, which we won't, which we will not give. Um, but Lip Buthan also sat down with Howard Lutnick. Uh, Howard says, uh, "Just four months after the United States invested in Intel, that investment is already delivering tens of billions of value to the United, to the United States people. That momentum continues with Intel's new 1.8 nanometer processor and a major step-

• 1:24:05John Coogan?

  Towards bringing semiconductor manufacturing back home. Let's play this clip from Liputan talking to Howard Lutnick.

• 1:24:13Speaker 05

  I have the pleasure today of welcoming Lipu. And he's come to the Department of Commerce to update us on how Intel has been doing since we made our historic investment in the company.

• 1:24:24Speaker 06

  Oh, thank you so much. I'm so delighted to come over here to see you. We doubled the market cap. It's over 200 billion.

• 1:24:31John Coogan?

  200 billion.

• 1:24:33Speaker 06

  And I think very exciting. We are now our products first time on the 18A production in

• 1:24:42Speaker 06

  Series 3 processor with multiple of our customer in US globally and using that. It's the most advanced process design and also using our most advanced 18A productions.

• 1:24:56Speaker 05

  Right, so for the United States, we we love the fact that Intel is doing leading edge work in America.

• 1:25:02Speaker 06

  In America.

• 1:25:03Speaker 05

  Right, 18A means 1.8 nanometer, 14A is 1.4 nanometer. I mean, think of how incredibly sophisticated and tiny that is.

• 1:25:12Speaker 06

  And complex.

• 1:25:13Speaker 05

  And then packaging.

• 1:25:15Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:25:15Speaker 05

  You take this little, little, little, little teeny thing and how you put layers and layers of sophisticated circuitry on top of it. And you do it with, you know, just the most amazing technology.

• 1:25:28John Coogan?

  Succession music.

• 1:25:28Speaker 05

  Doing that in America, leading in America by a US company.

• 1:25:34John Coogan?

  Get yourself an investor that talks about your company like this.

• 1:25:37Speaker 05

  So we're proud of you.

• 1:25:38John Coogan?

  This is a

• 1:25:39Speaker 05

  Okay, we're rooting for you and we need you to be successful for America.

• 1:25:42Speaker 06

  Thank you so much.

• 1:25:43John Coogan?

  This is the new startup launch video. You do a deal, you raise some money from a VC and you got to put out a music, a video like that. You guys sitting down on the couch next to each other with the succession music and they explain your business, shake your hand and

• 1:25:57Jordi Hays?

  There's so many new formats.

• 1:25:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, new format. Unexplored, unexplored. Clone that one. Call, call a video production team, get it done. In some other news, US oil executive is commenting on Venezuela. No one wants to go in there when a random effing tweet can change the entire foreign policy of the country. And deep dish enjoyers is LMAO. It is remarkable how online this administration is. You saw during the, you know, people have been celebrating the death of X and yet during the invasion on, in one of the images of the, of the war room in the background on the TV was just X.com slash

• 1:26:40John Coogan?

  search for Venezuela. Let's see what people are saying. Remarkable times.

• 1:26:44Jordi Hays?

  Next time they'll probably have Reggie's monitoring the situation.

• 1:26:48John Coogan?

  They should have done that. They should also be using Railway. Railway simplifies software development, web apps, servers and databases run in one place with scaling, monitoring and security built in. So I posted a piece about the Apple card and how it's changing from Goldman Sachs to Jamie Dimon's JP Morgan, of course. And a software architect for Goldman Sachs's consumer bank, Matt Lowe chimed in and says, good article. I think the main reason it didn't work with Goldman Sachs is that it lost its high priority in a double whammy. CEO David Solomon used a lot of his power to evolve the partnership

• 1:27:29John Coogan?

  culture to an exec-first modern corporation. That's interesting. Through that reorg, I speculate he had less political flexibility to defend Marcus from other partners who didn't want to wait for the consumer bank to scale up. Marcus even grew through leadership turnover during the pandemic and made a huge acquisition of Greensky. It seemed to fizzle out and lost the continued executive sponsorship it needed to keep going while reporting to an asset and wealth management division. Note, in a couple, in last, in last, in a, in last couple of weeks podcast with Sequoia Capital, Solomon said the main reason for the wind down was regulatory. Interesting. So just some extra context around the Apple card. Well, let me tell you about Graphite and then we'll bring in our first guest of

• 1:28:13John Coogan?

  the show. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub to higher quality software faster. And without any further delay, let's bring in Jeremy from Semi Analysis. How are you doing? Welcome back. Good to see you again. Second time on the show. Happy New Year. So excited to have you here. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. How are you? Are you, are you shocked to see that the G7 that's supposed to happen in France? Aren't you in France right now?

• 1:28:41Speaker 07

  I'm in France right now, yeah.

• 1:28:42John Coogan?

  Well, you're gonna have to wait for the summit because UFC takes priority in America, apparently. I don't know if you saw that.

• 1:28:49Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:28:49John Coogan?

  Anyway, congratulations on the new article. I would love for you to set the table for us and explain sort of what were the questions that you were trying to answer? What was the overall thesis that you came into this particular article? How AI labs are solving the power crisis? And then I have a whole bunch of questions that I want to dig into.

• 1:29:11Speaker 07

  Yeah, look, the question that we keep receiving every day, every hour, it seems, is how are we gonna power the AI race?

• 1:29:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:18Speaker 07

  You know, is the grid able to handle all of that? And look, last time I came in, I think I said, hey, there's like over half a terawatt of data center requests in all of the US grid.

• 1:29:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:29Speaker 07

  An insane amount of requests. And we talk about sort of prisoner's dilemma where because everyone is trying to find power, then it creates sort of a vicious cycle of everyone starts being more speculative and putting requests everywhere. And so basically, the grid is overwhelmed.

• 1:29:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:43Speaker 07

  People can't find energy. And so that's why you're seeing the rise of on-site gas, which is something that a lot of people have been talking about. But from all research, we just haven't found sort of any good, any good way to understand what are people actually doing? What are the challenges? What are the systems that people are actually deploying? What's the benefits throughout the trade-offs? And how to understand, how to make sense of all of these new entrants?

• 1:30:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:05Speaker 07

  Because one of the key highlights is, okay, everyone talks about G or Nova. Everyone talks about Siemens Energy.

• 1:30:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:10Speaker 07

  But we count actually 12 manufacturers that have secured orders of over 400 megawatts for US data centers. All on site gas power.

• 1:30:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:17Speaker 07

  There's way more people in the pipeline.

• 1:30:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:19Speaker 07

  But essentially, we wanted to show people how are the labs solving the power crisis? Talk about, to some extent, XAI was a bit of a pioneer because obviously it did that before everyone.

• 1:30:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:30Speaker 07

  And how are the other players following suit and actually solving this issue?

• 1:30:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's, let's stay with that point about power requests from AI companies. That's expanded significantly, correct? Isn't it, it's over 10 terawatts now or something like that? Everyone's spamming with these requests, isn't it? It's an insane figure. Is that roughly correct or?

• 1:30:54Speaker 07

  I don't know about 10 terawatts.

• 1:30:55John Coogan?

  It's over one, though.

• 1:30:57Speaker 07

  Over a ter- roughly a terawatt.

• 1:30:59John Coogan?

  Roughly a terawatt.

• 1:31:00Speaker 07

  It's always complicated to know exactly.

• 1:31:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:02Speaker 07

  Um, but roughly a terawatt.

• 1:31:04John Coogan?

  And what are the mechanics of a, of a, of a request for power? Is that going to, uh, to, uh, government-run organizations? Is that a permitting process? Like, what is the anatomy of actually making a request for power if you're an AI company?

• 1:31:22Speaker 07

  Sure, so typically you send a request to a transmission provider.

• 1:31:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:31:26Speaker 07

  Uh, so say American Electric Power, the largest in the US. Uh, you send them a request, I want power in Ohio.

• 1:31:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:32Speaker 07

  Uh, you have to fill whatever, some kind of form. Uh, you tell them what you want, by when you want it. Um, and then if sort of that first phase, uh, moves through, um, you have to go through a system-level study.

• 1:31:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:44Speaker 07

  Okay? And the reason we have to do that, and that process, the reason it takes time, is because, uh, the way the grid works is demand and supply have to be always perfectly synchronized. And if they fall out of sync, uh, because there's too much supply or too much demand, then there's basically a blackout for everyone. That's the worst-case scenario, to be clear. Uh, but it's possible. It has happened. It happened in Spain about a year ago, um, because of an issue on the supply side. And so the implication is that if you want to interconnect a one-gigawatt data center, you're gonna have plenty of system-level studies that are gonna slow down the process. Um, and this is where you get into that sort of vicious cycle, because everyone is sort of putting requests, because they know it's gonna take a while.

• 1:32:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, also, also, isn't there, isn't there some people putting in requests just, uh, from a speculation standpoint? They're just like, hey, I know that if I get access to the power, I can resell it to somebody else. And if I just kind of lock into, uh, you know, you know, uh, one of these, uh,

• 1:32:38John Coogan?

  Deals.

• 1:32:38Jordi Hays?

  grids, basically giving me, uh, a, a contract, then I can go and flip it? Is that, is that happening?

• 1:32:44Speaker 07

  Everyone wants megawatts these days or gigawatts.

• 1:32:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:47Speaker 07

  So, uh, you're, you try what you can to get some. Um, and if you, if you're, for example, say you're based in Ohio, you typically operate in Columbus, Ohio, uh, then suddenly you tell your utility, hey, I, I want another, uh, 500 megawatts. And they respond, actually, I've had like 10 other people ask me this, so, uh, you're gonna be the queue. And there's 10 other requests they have to evaluate before I get to yours.

• 1:33:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, but that's, but that, this is why some of the Bitcoin miners have done actually very surprisingly well in just sort of like pivoting to AI, because they had, they had the, the, the pre-existing power deals in place, right?

• 1:33:22Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's not in the queue, it already exists.

• 1:33:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:25Speaker 07

  Because the queue is just an evaluation, but then, once you have everything approved, you have to build a substation, you have to actually interconnect your data center to the grid, and the Bitcoin miners, they already have the substation, they already have the transformers on site, they already have the energy flowing. The electrons are there, so for them, it's just about retrofitting and just leveraging the magnetism.

• 1:33:44John Coogan?

  Is there anything that, I mean, we were reviewing this meta-deal today, and they have someone on staff who's the Director of Global Energy. Is there anything that a team or one of these hyperscalers can do to move through the queue quicker? I mean, I imagine they can't just like overpay or bribe, or it would otherwise just be an auction process, but is it sort of a battle of the forms? Is that actually happening? Is it just a battle of the forms? Is it the regulatory team that you have on site? Is it different, like scientists that are driving the work? Or is it just the best legal team wins? Like, what is the anatomy of actually winning allocation in power?

• 1:34:29Speaker 07

  So, the first thing we have to flag is there are many different transmission providers in the US, so many different bodies that work differently.

• 1:34:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:34:36Speaker 07

  But there's a few ways you can do so. First of all, if you're a sophisticated end user, what you're gonna do is analyze the grid and try to understand where does it make sense to have power from a grid congestion perspective. Analyzing the network, you realize, okay, this area probably should have free power, so I'm gonna talk to my utility. And if you wanna have a better chance of being ahead of others, then at least you have identified a specific spot that is likely to have available power. Now, typically, relationships obviously matter. If you've been in the business for 10 years or whatever, and you're good friends with, you know, C-level executives, you can perhaps move up the grid just because of trust. It's not about necessarily bribing or something like that, it's more about you have a whole

• 1:35:19Speaker 07

  lot of new entrants, you have a whole lot of new entrants that don't have a lot of experience, and then you have this other guy that maybe has been doing it for 10 years and has a lot of experience and success. So, obviously, for the utility, it's easier to trust that it has the track record and has the existing relationship. So, that's one angle.

• 1:35:35John Coogan?

  Sure. I'm interested to know about your process to understand how much power each player is actually accumulating. I've seen the semi-analysis watermark screenshots of data centers. Is satellite imagery actually that useful for understanding like the map of total data center capacity? Are you looking at regulatory filings? Are you looking at statements from the companies themselves? Like, it feels like you're at least one or two clicks ahead of what the executives of these companies are publicly saying. And you're act, the purpose of semi-analysis is to, you know, provide analysis and data ahead of what's publicly available.

• 1:36:17John Coogan?

  But what is the process for actually understanding Azure's compute capacity this year before anyone else does?

• 1:36:26Speaker 07

  Yeah, sure, thanks. So there's, there's different, some exactly times. For us, the way we do the, call it the short term forecast.

• 1:36:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:36Speaker 07

  Short term being roughly like six quarters.

• 1:36:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:36:39Speaker 07

  Extensive satellite imagery.

• 1:36:40John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:36:41Speaker 07

  We love satellites. We pay a lot of money for satellites. Every single block these days, you see satellite pictures.

• 1:36:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:48Speaker 07

  And it's pretty simple, right? One thing is using historical imagery, figuring out when did construction of specific building stop. Two is what's a typical time to build for an operator? So you have to, you have to get a sense of like, you know, having reviewed many of their buildings, how much, how long do they typically take? Or sort of understanding the design patterns, how maybe they can accelerate the build out to what extent. Right? And then if you know how long it takes in one satellite, you can know when it's going to be operational. Then it's about the size. It's also about if it's a large project, how fast can you get it up to speed? Because one thing is to build the show and the other one is to build all the electrical, the mechanical. And obviously deliver sequentially data hole by data hole typically. So there's a bunch of things you can review. We use all of it. Satellites, we're big fans, of course.

• 1:37:35Speaker 07

  And like some of, to us, it's interesting because we've been able to be very successful at predicting trends with our hyperskaters by analyzing data. Because you have to think of it, I'm saying you can just use satellite imagery, but you have to do it for hundreds of data. Yeah.

• 1:37:50Speaker 07

  Who has the time to do that? Wait, we do, we're crazy. That's awesome. But it works out because if you think about it, Amazon, they accelerated growth right from seventy percent to twenty percent last quarter. And a lot of people were surprised because people were saying, no, they're losing AI. Azure has accelerated, Google has accelerated, and Amazon hasn't. But actually, if you analyze data construction, they've been accelerating like crazy on the construction side. In the fourth quarter twenty twenty four, in the fourth quarter twenty twenty four, takes a year for them to build. Obviously, you see the acceleration mechanically, Q three twenty five, Q four twenty twenty five. That's one aspect. The other one, which is a bit more complicated, is tracking the leases. And so sort of understanding what are the different hyperskaters leasing capacity from third-party operators.

• 1:38:33Speaker 07

  The big guys are QTS, Digital Realty Equinix, and there's all the crypto miners that are basically doing the same thing. And that's also something we track very closely. And it's complicated because some of that information isn't public, but by triangulating many data points, you can actually get to the answer using only public data, which is what we do extensively. And using permanent sticking into filings and all of that is a huge part of the process as well to get to the answer. Yeah, as I understand.

• 1:38:56Jordi Hays?

  How much, how much is the, are you guys benefiting from like actual AI tooling on the research side? Like, are you guys running like, you know, twenty agents in parallel that are, you know, basically like looking at a lot of these filings, trying to find them, monitoring them, et cetera? Are you feeling an unlock?

• 1:39:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, so we're using AI quite a bit. I think we can do more. I wish we could do more. To some extent, obviously, it's bound by computer use. There are some complications. There are some portals for permit purposes, permit tracking purposes that we can automate. But the problem is that if you think about, there are so many states, so many counties, so many different things. And some of them are fairly easy to use, and so today's agents can actually automate the process. Other ones are maybe more complicated, more archaic, right? Some of them, you have a clean PDF, other ones, it's like, you know, a scanner, it's written by hand.

• 1:39:51Speaker 07

  When you go into the weeds of the permitting process in the US, so we do automate quite a bit. What we're starting to do, this is a pretty interesting project that we have on the data center side is a vision model. Where you can actually, based on salad imagery, detect real time sort of what's the status of construction and understand sort of the inflections that you see. As well on the, in it on that.

• 1:40:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, zooming out, it feels like, I think you quoted it, something like half a gigawatt of new data center capacity was being added for a period of years, sort of linear growth. And now we're seeing a break in the graph and we're seeing exponential growth. And I'm, I'm wondering how you're thinking about, there's always this question of like, when will AI show up in the GDP statistics? It's obviously a big business and there's a lot of revenue. But we're, but we're not seeing the 10% GDP growth just yet. Maybe that's coming.

• 1:40:48Jordi Hays?

  We are seeing productivity growth, I mean.

• 1:40:50John Coogan?

  Productivity growth.

• 1:40:51Jordi Hays?

  CNBC yesterday was trying to figure out why US economic productivity surged almost 5%.

• 1:40:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:40:58Jordi Hays?

  Highest in six years, so.

• 1:40:59John Coogan?

  Maybe, but I mean, my question with regard to like overall US power generation. Are you expecting to see a meaningful acceleration, a break in the graph there this year, next year? Or, or is, or is the data center overall energy picture still a small enough slice of the pie in terms of overall American energy production and consumption that we won't see it move the overall needle just yet?

• 1:41:28Speaker 07

  Oh, it's already moving the needle. It's just going to accelerate. There's just one direction, at least for the next, call it two years. If you, one thing you can do is a lot of the utilities are publicly traded, so you can go one by one. Every single one of them, the only thing they're talking about these days is data serves. It's how much load growth I have and how, and then it's about capacity constraints. Can I deliver on that, on that demand? But all of them are seeing tremendous load growth. And if you think about the leading indicators on the data center side, for us, we use two things on this. If you think about self-built, so the data centers that are built and operated by hyperskaters, construction stocks are exploding. So they're all massively accelerating. They have accelerated tremendously versus 2022, 23, so 24 is a big year, 25 insane.

• 1:42:08Speaker 07

  So this is a leading indicator with regards to what's going to happen in 26, for CapEx, for revenue, and obviously for load growth, because these days it's all correlated. On the leasing side, same thing. If you think about how much data center commitments are the hyperscalers doing these days, it's also just up and to the right. Twenty twenty five has been an insane year for the leasing market. And so everything points to twenty six, twenty seven, just accelerating. And then if you think about GDP growth, because I think it's an interesting topic, there's two things you can talk about. One is on the infrastructure side and the other one is on the productivity side. On the infrastructure side, you're already seeing it, but I think it's pretty easy to look at statistics.

• 1:42:51Speaker 07

  You can look at data center contribution to GDP. There's a bunch of stuff from some of the agencies. You can look at computer investment. There's a specific GDP that tells you, all of that is exploding. Roughly speaking, a guess that is over fifty percent of GDP growth today is AI infrastructure.

• 1:43:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:08Speaker 07

  Which is kind of insane if you think about it, right? And you can do some monkey math as well. You see Nvidia's revenue, what is it these days? Like two hundred and fifty billion annualized or more. If you do the math, right, a lot of that is going to the US. Now, there's, obviously it's complicated because there's inputs and things like that you have to deduce. But, you know, US GDP is over forty trillion, right? One percent is three hundred billion.

• 1:43:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:35Speaker 07

  Easily year-over-year additions, AI for investments over three hundred billion, taking it all, right? All of that, data centers, chips and all of that.

• 1:43:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, and that should drive significant GDP growth. That's.

• 1:43:46Speaker 07

  And then the second phase of this is on the productivity side, obviously you have to see to some extent, you would expect to see the people that are providing that productivity to be beneficiaries. And so this is why it's important to track what are the AI labs doing, what are the startups doing, which is something we've been trying pretty closely recently at SABIN Analysis. And so if you look at the AI labs, yes, they're all accelerating pretty fast as well on the revenue side. Like you see, you saw OpenAI tripling revenue, Anthropic ten X and so on.

• 1:44:14John Coogan?

  Can you take me through the latest bottleneck in gas turbines? We had Blake Scholl from Boom on the show and it feels like he's expanding his business to build turbines. And I'm interested in that specifically because we hear about nuclear power plants coming online. That's obviously a very heavy regulatory burden. Also, supersonic flight feels like incredible regulatory burden. But how difficult is it to just manufacture a new turbine or more of the same design, bring them online, actually ramp up capacity of natural gas turbines?

• 1:44:51Speaker 07

  So typically to develop a new turbine, you're talking about seven to 10 years R and D process. So it's pretty fascinating because you have a few new entrants that are hitting the market today. A big one is Dusan. Dusan is providing roughly two gigawatts of turbines to XAI. Dusan, Korean giants on the nuclear side, they've been developing their turbine for over 10 years. And it's like, you know, perfect timing.

• 1:45:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. What amazing timing. That's great.

• 1:45:20Speaker 07

  It's very lucky. Pro Energy is another interesting example, also seven year R and D program and late 23, finally they got all the approvals. It's just very, very complex technology, a lot of very high precision materials. So ramping up the manufacturing side is complicated. Another thing to think about, and that's the difference we have with folks like Bloom is what is the, like, how long can you make your investment when you build a new factory for gas turbines or some of these systems? And this is an interesting thing to analyze because for some folks, it's actually easier to build new capacity because their payback period is much higher and because their revenue per megawatt is higher and because their cost is also higher.

• 1:45:58John Coogan?

  Just because the prices are going up because AI labs are willing to pay more for the turbines?

• 1:46:03Speaker 07

  So, yes, but I'm more thinking about comparing different technologies. Like if you think about Bloom Energy, the cost to buy fuel cells is very high.

• 1:46:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:46:13Speaker 07

  It is much higher than buying a turbine.

• 1:46:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:46:15Speaker 07

  But the flip side of this is that the payback period, because the revenue is so high per megawatt, the payback period of building a factory is actually much shorter. So from Bloom's perspective, they take less financial risk if they expand capacity and they manufacture more.

• 1:46:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:27Speaker 07

  Pretty good position.

• 1:46:28John Coogan?

  It makes a lot of sense.

• 1:46:29Jordi Hays?

  How did you react to the Meta Oklo news from this morning?

• 1:46:36Speaker 07

  Well, I mean, it's, I think all of the, all of the, all of these folks are, are looking for energy that is, you know, cheap, stable, are looking for ways to ensure their, the continuity of their supply. And it just makes sense for all of the hyperskaters to, to, to work with the nuclear, nuclear companies. It's not a surprise because everyone has done it already, right? You saw Google as well with Kairos. You saw a bunch of these deals already switch with Oaklow as well about a year ago. So not too surprised about this one. Yeah.

• 1:47:06John Coogan?

  How much does the nuclear fission or even the fusion stuff, Google's partner with Commonwealth Fusion Systems on a few things, how much does that play into the analysis that you do when you're looking out six quarters? Because when we saw the date 2029, 2032, 2035, our eyes kind of roll back in the, in the bottom, in the back of our head and say, well, that feels post singularity. So what's the point? Probably important at some point, but certainly less of, less of a critical decision in the horse race of, you know, which lab will get power next month to train the next model that we're all going to be focused on.

• 1:47:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly. That's why if you read the report that we wrote, it's all about gas. Because if you think about the next few quarters, it's gas. There's just no other solution. Nuclear is going to take a few years. Solar and batteries not ready yet. All of these other alternatives, I think they all have good potential. And I'm sure we're going to see a lot of different solutions in five, 10 years. But today it's just gas.

• 1:48:07John Coogan?

  So you're modeling energy, it's mostly gas. Any plans to model, to, to model or, or analyze or model water? Is that important at all?

• 1:48:19Speaker 07

  Oh, interesting. Yeah, big topic these days, right?

• 1:48:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:23Speaker 07

  Our view, generally speaking, is that water is not that big of a problem. Because in the data space, you have this trade off between energy and water.

• 1:48:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:48:34Speaker 07

  And so you can actually design closed-loop systems that consume pretty much no water. In some cases, zero water. There is some water required just to build the initial tank and the initial loop.

• 1:48:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:47Speaker 07

  But it's closed loop, so you don't need water. So what's the issue?

• 1:48:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it is. It is a funny retort to anyone who's worried about the water. The AI water usage, just if it's important, why doesn't somebody else just talk about it ever? Why are people not trading the water stocks if it's if it's important? I am interested in the.

• 1:49:07Speaker 07

  We might talk about it soon.

• 1:49:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there's some sort of angle, but on the on the question of water usage, it does seem like Meta is moving from an air-cooled system to a water-cooled system. I think I have that right. They moved away from the H design of their data center. Can you tell me more about why the H-shaped data center was not suitable for water cooling? It felt like a very modern building. Why was it impossible to retrofit that? Why did they have to go with an entirely new design?

• 1:49:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, so the thing about the H design above everything is it was really designed by Meta for leading cost efficiency. And specifically, the ratio people use the PUE, which tells you what's the energy efficiency of a given facility.

• 1:49:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:49:53Speaker 07

  Meta had the world's best, the world's most efficient facilities. The energy required to cool the data center was extremely low.

• 1:50:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:00Speaker 07

  And that's because it had a fairly complex structure, three stories.

• 1:50:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:50:04Speaker 07

  The drawback of that is that the time to build a facility was about two years. So that doesn't work in the AI era. We're talking about a month, right? It's 22 days for XAI. So you need to go faster. So that's one of the main issues. Now, the other one is regards to cooling. The way we're cooling this specific data center is like, I call it an air-to-air system. You could you could simplify it and say, they opened a window. That's basically how they called it. They opened the window, obviously, they have a bunch of.

• 1:50:32John Coogan?

  Have we tried opening the window? You know, I actually toured George Hatz's, he has a miniature data center, just a couple racks of GPUs that he trains for autonomous driving, for self-driving cars that he builds. And his cooling, it really is just like a window unit that just flows air through this particular room in his office, and he's using air.

• 1:50:54Jordi Hays?

  I had a car with no AC once.

• 1:50:56John Coogan?

  Open the windows.

• 1:50:57Jordi Hays?

  Just open the window.

• 1:50:58John Coogan?

  It's a time-honored tradition. But sorry, I cut you off.

• 1:51:00Speaker 07

  It works. It works. It doesn't work that well if your hardware is liquid-cooled. Obviously, if you have a cold plate that goes through the chip, then the question is how do you cool the fluid that you put into the cold plate to remove the heat from the chip? Opening the window doesn't work that well. You can do some kind of retrofit with liquid-to-air CDUs. It's expensive, it's not very efficient. So the best way to do it is to have a dedicated fluid cooling system, which involves building a whole dedicated piping infrastructure and all of that, which is what Meta did. Their new data center can handle seamlessly liquid-cooled chips, whereas the old one was much more complicated.

• 1:51:37John Coogan?

  Do you have a view on, you said Meta's previous data center, I think it was 150 megawatts, two years to build it. How fast are they now? Are they at six months, a year? Do you have any idea of where they will be on the speed frontier, since that seems so critical?

• 1:51:57Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I'm sure two, two and a half years, roughly speaking. Then they built some sort of rectangular design, which is 12 to 15 months. And then they realized, actually, we need to go faster. And that's when you started seeing the tents. And these tents, yeah, the goal is to be able to put out a GPU cluster in six months.

• 1:52:18John Coogan?

  Six months.

• 1:52:19Speaker 07

  One of these tents.

• 1:52:20John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:52:21Speaker 07

  And it's interesting, because they go back to an air-to-air cooling system. So what I told you earlier, actually, is wrong, because despite hardware being increasingly liquid-cooled, now they're doing air-to-air, again, opening the window. But they have those sidecars, which are liquid-to-air, which are expensive again. It's one way to go faster. That way, you don't have to build a whole piping infrastructure and all that.

• 1:52:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What about? How the other hyperscalers are matching up in terms of in terms of speed, but also a lot of the other hyperscalers, a lot of the big tech companies have made commitments to maybe move away from natural gas to maybe go more net zero, more energy efficient, more carbon neutral. That feels like the water debate is maybe a moot point, but there will be some sort of climate discussion in the future as more and more natural gas gets brought online. It is a fossil fuel after all, or it is not a renewable energy source.

• 1:53:25John Coogan?

  So how are, are there any big tech companies that are grappling with that or struggling to get through previous commitments that they made to to be more environmental or more net zero? And now they sort of have to retool their business in messaging?

• 1:53:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, you've already started saying this in 2025, but in 2024, where they all they all said, for the time being, we keep our commitment for whatever, 2030 or something, net zero, but short term, we're gonna have, we're not gonna be able to meet our goals and to, I guess, clean our fleets as as fast as we expected. But yeah, there's just no way. So there are a few interesting things. So the first thing I would say is you're seeing some projects that are natural gas based, but they have they have ways to become more sustainable. For example, there's a, it could be a site where you have geology to do carbon capture. So for Crusoe has a one like that in Wyoming.

• 1:54:26Speaker 07

  So that's those types of projects obviously have a long term potential as well, because then you can meet your commitment if you're still committed to that. Except here they're already that committed, but other topic. The other thing is, so Google, generally from our analysis, Google seems to be still the most committed hyperscaler. And they're doing some pretty interesting stuff in Texas, right? You saw the acquisition of Intersect Power. They're building some of these, some massive campuses in Texas, where they actually have onsite solar energy and battery. But to be clear, it's not behind the meter. The reason we don't talk about it in the in the article is because it's not fully off grid. There's still a grid connection. So it's not really comparable to the off grid deployments of folks with turbines.

• 1:55:07John Coogan?

  Interesting. Yeah, on the Google topic, is there any sort of durable advantage in multi-data center training that you're seeing from Google? Are you seeing evidence that they're leaning into that more? Are they building more smaller data centers? Or are they also, I don't know, off the top of my head, are they competing with like the Colossus 2? These, you know, Mark Zuckerberg comes out with the picture of the cube in Manhattan and it's very clear that Meta is in the one big massive data center race. At least they're trying to visualize it that way. I haven't seen that from Google. Is that intentional? Is there anything we can read into that about their actual training and deployment strategy?

• 1:55:48Speaker 07

  No, no, you're right. That's a good point. It is interesting to analyze the different, I guess, frontier AI training architectures from different players. If you look at what Meta is trying to build in Louisiana, it's a 2.1 gigawatt campus for the first phase. And they have individual buildings that are 400 megawatts each.

• 1:56:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:56:11Speaker 07

  It's brilliant.

• 1:56:12John Coogan?

  I mean, it's big. But it's still split up. It's still split up. But then, putting it all on the same campus, there's some sort of economy of scale around power generation? Or is it just, or is the latency with the fiber connections actually relevant and you wouldn't want to have it across town? So you put it on the same campus? When would, when would a big tech player choose to split across state lines, across the country, across the world versus centralize everything in one campus?

• 1:56:39Speaker 07

  So, I would say for now, Google is like the only one that has been, that has adopted this strategy and is very unique. But to some extent, you could argue it's because of, first of all, they're the most sophisticated on the networking side. For a while, like, that's one of the advantages with Google is for the last 15 years or whatever, they've been the best at infrastructure. On every single part of infrastructure and so networking, they've been building their own fiber networks for a while. And so they have much higher bandwidth inside a metro and between metros and other hyperscalers because they've been doing that longer. They've been planning ahead for, for all of that. So Google is sort of ahead of the others. And on the tech side...

• 1:57:22Speaker 07

  They've they've figured out multi data center training from a from a model perspective way ahead of everyone else.

• 1:57:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:28Speaker 07

  They've been very open about this. You had a podcast from Jeff Dean, for example, a few months ago, where he said openly, yes, we're doing a multi data center. It works pretty well.

• 1:57:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:36Speaker 07

  Uh, no one else has really done it uh at that scale for now. We have a bunch of startups that are not doing it at scale.

• 1:57:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:57:42Speaker 07

  Uh, so yeah, just Google is better at doing it. And what it enables them to do is and it's it's it enables them to to some extent, have more options with regards to site selection.

• 1:57:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:53Speaker 07

  Uh, you they're not really limited to finding the one two gigawatt side or the one, you know, one point five gig sites. Uh, they can just go on the metro, maybe a fifty mile or even a hundred mile area and find a bunch of sites that are each two hundred, three hundred, four hundred, five hundred. Connect them and bam, they have a, you know, two gigawatt campus.

• 1:58:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:09Speaker 07

  Uh, so that's the strategy they're pursuing.

• 1:58:11John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Last question for me and we'll let you get back to your day. I know it's late there. Um, uh, have have AI workloads, has this a shift in AI workloads had any effect on power decision making? Uh, it feels like you you go back a couple of years ago and uh the vast majority of power that was being used by AI was for training. Now we're moving more towards inference. Uh, does that change the landscape of power acquisition for AI companies broadly? Or is it sort of an irrelevant point?

• 1:58:42Speaker 07

  So first of all, I was actually just agree with the premise.

• 1:58:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:58:45Speaker 07

  Based on our analysis, uh, training is still the majority and it's growing equally as fast as inference. Inference is surging, training is surging as well, and that's normal because you have an incentive to do it.

• 1:58:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:55Speaker 07

  Uh, everyone wants to, you know, invest in their own model that is going to unlock revenue growth next year.

• 1:59:00John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:59:01Speaker 07

  You have, we haven't seen the limit. So there's the incentives are aligned to invest today and that's what everyone is doing.

• 1:59:06John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:59:06Speaker 07

  Um, a- a- anyways, to answer your question, yes, inference does have uh different requirements. There is different types of inference as well. Um, if you think about OpenAI, for example, they have two main businesses. ChatGPT is a vertical application. It's fully controlled by themselves. Uh, so for them, it's they can plan larger campuses, can be gigawatt scale, can be a few hundred megawatts, it's going to be big campus anyways. Uh, they can make use of smaller ones, but if you think about it from an infrastructure perspective, uh, What is their biggest pain point as a company is they want to maximize GPU utilization rate. But it is the single largest expense by far is GPU. So they need to maximize it and that's easier to do when you have large campuses. So that's why you still see campuses are fairly large even for inference.

• 1:59:48Speaker 07

  They also in terms of latency, that's a common sort of topic of discussion. Do you need to be very close to the end users? Well, maybe if you think about it, what is actually consuming power for OpenAI? It's, you know, deep research, it's GPT five point two pro. It's these thinking models and they they take minutes to answer. And so you don't really need to be near the metro. You can just be sort of far away and still find large pockets of power.

• 2:00:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations on the progress. Really appreciate the Semi analysis is hiring, correct? Can you take us on a brief summary of of roles or how to apply?

• 2:00:24Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah, we're hiring a lot of people. So we have a careers section in our website. So you can all check out. We're looking for folks in the AI space. So if you're interested in digging into what we call tokenomics, which is analyzing the economics of AI, analyzing the latest trends in terms of LLMs, different types of model architectures, reach out. If you're an engineer, you have experience with GPU clusters, reach out as well. We're hiring to to increase our technical team. Inference Max, really cool project as well, where we benchmark all the different models. If you want to work on inference max and work on TPUs and trainium and GPUs and AMD and Nvidia and all of that, reach out as well. We have a lot of pretty cool offers, so you should all check out the website and yeah, it's a good adventure.

• 2:01:06John Coogan?

  Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come. Great to see you. For us. Great to see you and happy new year. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Next, we are entering our Lambda Lightning round with Andreessen Horowitz, celebrating their 15 billion dollar fundraiser. We have Jen K in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring her in to the TDPN Ultra Dome. How are you doing, Jen? Good to see you. Jen, what's happening?

• 2:01:39Speaker 08

  Hey, hey, what's happening, brothers?

• 2:01:42John Coogan?

  Uh, not too much. You're off to a banger start of the year. Congratulations. Uh, break it down for us. What happened today?

• 2:01:48Jordi Hays?

  We knew we'd need a bigger gong for you guys in particular this year.

• 2:01:52John Coogan?

  Maybe we have to distribute the gong hits across the four Andreessen Horowitz, uh, partners that we're talking with. We'll see.

• 2:01:59Speaker 08

  You know what I have to say?

• 2:02:00John Coogan?

  Hey!

• 2:02:03John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:02:03Jordi Hays?

  There you go. Wait, what does it say? What does it say on it?

• 2:02:07Speaker 08

  It says it's time to build, baby.

• 2:02:09John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it. That's fantastic.

• 2:02:10Jordi Hays?

  There we go. You've probably been hitting that a lot. Do you, do you, you just do like one hit every time you get off an LP? You got a new commit, just a, a light tap. You probably had to do a few of them to get up to 15.

• 2:02:21Speaker 08

  Exactly. It's not quite your 80 inch one, but you know, next time I'll get a horse and then we'll call it even.

• 2:02:26John Coogan?

  There we go. Uh, how was, how was, uh, how was, how are the LP pitches, uh, going into this fund raise? Different than in previous years? The markets evolved, technology has evolved, Andreessen Horowitz has evolved. Uh, what were you saying that you felt like it was the first time you were saying to LPs this time around?

• 2:02:47Speaker 08

  Yeah. So, so let me first break down. So $15 billion, huge headline. Uh, the number is huge, but you know, I, I first I should foremost say, I normally don't respond to online rumors, but I feel the need to do so at this moment. The $15 billion is not for the Nepal or Himalayan or Greenland. Right? Well, let's spell that right now.

• 2:03:06John Coogan?

  You, you, you, people tease things all the time, little, little, little breadcrumbs in the releases. I'd like to see an American Everest. I feel like I've heard a pick for Greenland, the moon. The moon might be American at some point. It already is in many ways, maybe Everest, but you know, you're putting it in startups. You're putting in technology.

• 2:03:23Speaker 08

  Exactly. So, so hope springs eternal. So, so the prelim number, you guys covered this yesterday, but the prelim numbers for, for NVCA came out to, you know, 66 billion. So that actually ended up being what would have been equivalent to 22% of, of what was raised in, in 2025 with the $15 billion.

• 2:03:39Jordi Hays?

  So, so does the $15 billion get included? Do they, are they going to update the 2025 numbers? Or do they count it towards 2026 because it's actually being announced now?

• 2:03:51Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's gonna, it's gonna get counted for 2026. So that, that is, that is forward. So we're closing our fund today.

• 2:03:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:03:58Speaker 08

  So that'll be 2026 numbers. Yep.

• 2:03:59John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:04:00Speaker 08

  Um, and so calling it out, VC winter, maybe, you know, potentially over for some folks.

• 2:04:07Speaker 08

  But.

• 2:04:08John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:04:09Speaker 08

  But the sentiment, to answer your question, so the sentiment from LPs is different insofar as that we are now, this is the next, the second set of funds that we've raised in this AI super cycle. And so, we were oversubscribed in three months, you know. It was, I think, very clear for most people that AI is obviously taking over the world. And particularly when LPs have conviction and also the right information, they will close quickly. So, most funds, you know, the average VC fund takes probably close to over a year to fundraise. And the reality is, it's a tale of two cities. If you have great companies, great performance, great DPI.

• 2:04:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:49Speaker 08

  It's very, very easy to raise capital.

• 2:04:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:51Speaker 08

  We are luckily in that camp. If you don't, it's just a lot tougher. And by the way, let me tell you also a story because it's related to, on this liquidity topic that you guys oftentimes talk about and hear about from LPs. So, you know, there's a lot of belly aching from LPs about liquidity, but the reality is, it's in select companies. So, we actually went through this whole exercise last year. So, this was in the middle of liquidity concerns and this is early days of, you know, the administration's stance on endowment tax cuts. And, you know, we internally had this conversation, said, gosh, you know, should we offer some liquidity, particularly for some of our older funds, to our LPs? So, we went around, we called all of our LPs and those older vintages. And specifically, we had Stripe position, seed position in Fund One, and then we had

• 2:05:36Speaker 08

  Databricks at the Series A in Fund Three. And we said, hey, you know, we know you're in a liquidity crisis, would you be interested if we got you some liquidity in those names?

• 2:05:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:45Speaker 08

  And I'll tell you, 30 out of 30 of those early LPs said, absolutely not.

• 2:05:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:49Speaker 08

  Thanks, but no thanks. Like, we want liquidity.

• 2:05:52John Coogan?

  You're telling me, would I like to not ride my winners? Interesting.

• 2:05:55Speaker 08

  Exactly. Exactly. So, there's like subtlety in that conversation, which is like, you know, they want liquidity, but they want liquidity not out of those names. They want to ride those winners, right? They want to let them talk.

• 2:06:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's unfortunate. You want liquidity the most from the assets or the companies that you're least excited about.

• 2:06:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, excited about, which is this paradox. Interesting, interesting. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Talk about the split of strategies going on at Andreessen Horowitz today. I think a lot of people were curious about crypto not being included in this suite of funds. Is that just a different cycle? Is that a mechanics thing? What's going on there? Or is it truly like, a completely separate thing and we'll be hearing about that later?

• 2:06:34Speaker 08

  Yeah, so the latter. So the funds that we raised and announced today, it's five out of seven of our funds. So crypto is off cycle and then so is our games fund. So more to come from that.

• 2:06:44John Coogan?

  Got it. Okay, that makes sense.

• 2:06:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, how are LPs up to speed on this kind of like structure now? You obviously don't have to go into a conversation, explain Andreessen Horowitz, but most funds are not at the scale where there's like, you know, this multi, multi front fund approach. Is that like, how much of the conversation is about like, okay, like, giving you capital, where is it going to be actually allocated and how is it going to be split across the funds? Is it just straight pro rata across the different strategies and funds? Or how does that work?

• 2:07:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:18Speaker 08

  Yeah, so it's a, that's a great question. And in fact, I think we're one of maybe the first who actually split our funds. Most, most firms just have a generalist fund. Everything's out of one vehicle. And we very early on, passionately realized we needed to decentralize as a firm and then also our funds as well to match that to the teams. And so if you look at any of the individual teams, the deal teams are no bigger than, you know, four to six people.

• 2:07:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:07:40Speaker 08

  And so we're kind of similar to smaller funds and smaller firms, but with the breadth, of course, of, of, you know, the Andreessen Horowitz umbrella. And so for, for LPs, when they think about allocating to us, most of them just say, hey, I want to follow you into all the different funds. And they allocate pro rata. And in fact, we actually set up a vehicle to, to allow them to do that. Some folks pick and choose. And our view is, hey, every single fund needs to stand on its own. And it needs to earn its own keep from its LPs. And sometimes those LPs might be different, right? Some, some LPs, for example, internationally can't invest into certain strategies like crypto, for example, maybe American dynamism. So there's some, there's some nuance there of which we do account for.

• 2:08:17John Coogan?

  Interesting. Yeah. How much, how many questions are you getting from LPs about trying to predict the next, next Andreessen strategy that might take place in this fund? Like Andreessen started as, I mean, you look back at the early, like the fund one, and it's basically a seed fund by today's standards. Growth was obviously added on, then bio, then crypto, and then liquids, tokens. There's so many different strategies that if you went back to the dawn of Andreessen, you would say, well, that doesn't fit in this fund mandate. And, and we've seen

• 2:08:52John Coogan?

  Firms buy hospital networks and do more private equity style deals, do more secondary deals. Are LPs looking for you to lock a strategy or are they leaving you with a lot of flexibility? Are they looking for guidance on what might happen in the next 10 years in terms of creative financial plays that you might be able to make?

• 2:09:10Speaker 08

  Yeah, so it's funny. Our first fund is funny you should say, it's the size of a seed fund. The first deal we actually did was the buyout of Skype, which is, there's a good story around that we made, you know, ForEx are returned in 18 months and the rest is history. But, but, you know, that, that first.

• 2:09:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. I always remember seeing that on Andreessen's website. It was like, it wasn't a seed bet. It was this weird deal. And it, but it still panned out really well. And it was like a great logo to have on the, on the portfolio page, but for peculiar reasons.

• 2:09:40Speaker 08

  Yeah. And there was a bunch of risk in it because everyone was like, oh, you won't get the IP because of eBay and blah, blah. And then, you know, Microsoft ended up buying it. But, you know, the, the, and then there's a whole story there because a lot of our LPs, suffice to say, after raising a venture fund, we're like, what are you doing?

• 2:09:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:09:56Speaker 08

  It ended up working out. Nonetheless, you know, we, we always talk about internally how, you know, the way the individual funds are set up now is almost in the incarnation of the original Andreessen Horowitz. From the size of the team, from the capabilities and resources on the operating front. And so you've got these, you know, kind of seven different funds and teams that are effectively the incarnation of that first Andreessen Horowitz now replicated. And that's actually how you scale. We have 600 plus people at the firm. Now that's the only way you could actually nimbly move without getting mired in the morass of bureaucracy and oftentimes what big organizations end up being. And so in some respects, we don't necessarily, we're not motivated by innovating into, you know, there's a lot of VC firms now trying their hand at private equity, as you said, buying

• 2:10:41Speaker 08

  hospitals, raising private credit strategies. Like, that's not really of interest to us. I think you mentioned at one point, like going public, like as long as Ben is CEO, we are not a public, a public company. So we don't try to innovate on fund structure, right? We like pouring vanilla VC. Kind of returns and you give us money and we'll send you back and where we'll take risk and innovation is on the companies we invest into.

• 2:11:06Jordi Hays?

  How much do you involve individual GPs in the fundraising process? Sounds like, I mean, a three-month process, really not that long. Are you tapping them in at key moments? Because certain LPs want to understand, like, really get to know the individual investors? Or are you aggressively trying to protect their time because their time is really best spent with founders and actually evaluating and doing deals?

• 2:11:30Speaker 08

  Yeah, so, yes, we try to protect their time, but also at the same time, like, this is just like a company. Like, a fundraiser is a very important exercise. And in fact, you know, a few years ago, when people were asking whether we would go away from the traditional fund structure, you know, Mark and Ben kind of liked the concept of pressure testing our thesis every couple of years, right? You got to go out to your LPs, you got to prove to them that your thesis is worthy of their capital. And then it pressures you also, sorry for my voice, it's a little hoarse, because I've been shouting, you know, you're watching TVN too often.

• 2:12:04John Coogan?

  The wire, the wire deadline's now.

• 2:12:07Speaker 08

  Exactly, exactly. But that kind of sentiment of pressure testing your thinking is incredible. And you guys know from fundraising with companies, like, you learn a lot through the course of that process as well. So all of our GPs get involved, all of them are in the meetings, you know, they're all talking to the LPs, they're shaking their hands, kissing the babies, they are front and center of it.

• 2:12:29John Coogan?

  How do you realign the LPs from just endless AI questions and actually keep them interested in bio, healthcare, American dynamism? Do you try and have the AI narrative cut across everything? Or is it drowning out the rest of the stories that you're trying to tell?

• 2:12:47Speaker 08

  I think AI is similar to any platform shift where it's just going to infiltrate everything. And it's like, obviously, in the zeitgeist, but eventually it's just going to go in the background, just like cloud or mobile.

• 2:12:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there was that quote from Mark in the launch video that was like, someday in 10 years, we won't talk about the internet because it'll just be everywhere. And it feels like we're already, I like when companies, I think this is the year where companies like maybe stop pitching AI as aggressively in taglines because you should just assume that a company is leveraging it to the fullest extent.

• 2:13:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:19Speaker 08

  Hundred percent. Yeah, what else are you doing?

• 2:13:24Speaker 08

  100%. But I do think, you know, it's great too, because I also think, you know, with this platform shift, LPs can actually have a feel for how transformative this is themselves. So our entire, for example, fundraise process, we tried to take an AI-native first approach. So we had an AI chatbot that was replicated.

• 2:13:42John Coogan?

  I was about to ask.

• 2:13:43Speaker 08

  In my, in our data room, there was an AI gen in there.

• 2:13:46John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:13:48Speaker 08

  AI chatbot that was answering any question at any hour of the day.

• 2:13:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:51Speaker 08

  And then our LPs also are playing with these tools themselves as well in their underwriting and their diligence, but also even individually, I won't name the LP, but I was talking to an LP earlier this morning who was playing around with Replit, and I was like, you've got to try it, like, just code something that you wish, you know, you had access to. And she's like, well, I really want to be able to code it out that can look at Peloton classes and let me know when this instructor sees it. I'm like, try to prompt it. And she was able to do it literally in the course of the morning. So it's one of those things where I think these worlds are converging so quickly. It's also almost great that we're just, all we're doing is testing and trying and iterating. And for the first time, LPs as users can actually see the real world visceral impact to how they run their day-to-day life.

• 2:14:34Jordi Hays?

  How, what is, what is general LP sentiment specifically around 2026? What are, what are expectations? Obviously, we're expecting a slate of IPOs, and that's very exciting if you've been in, in these, in these companies, these names for, you know, a decade or more at this point.

• 2:14:55Speaker 08

  Yeah, I feel like Elon dropped like an early Christmas present when he was, it was like rumored to say that SpaceX might be going public in 2026. And everyone was like, oh, maybe we'll go public in 2026. So I do think sentiment and people are generally positive. Obviously, you know, we'll see where the IPO markets kind of turn out to be. But generally speaking, it's, it's early, it's up to get started. Like, we'll, we'll see what happens. But I do think people are expecting more capital this year in a way that, once one breaks through, it's going to be a watershed moment that might even top, you know, 2021 in terms of the amount of liquidity coming back to folks.

• 2:15:29John Coogan?

  That's going to be exciting. That's going to be exciting.

• 2:15:30Jordi Hays?

  Was, was 15 always the target? Or did you go out, you know, thinking that you do less and, and then you kind of upsized it based on demand?

• 2:15:41Speaker 08

  We had a range for our target and we try to, you know, kind of keep in that range just to avoid, you know.

• 2:15:47Jordi Hays?

  But you knew it was possible because if Masa can do 100, it's like, come on, can we, can we, can we do 15?

• 2:15:55Speaker 08

  I won't, I won't make that comparison. It is, it is funny in retrospect, you know, that, that vision fund.

• 2:16:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. The whole thesis was AI.

• 2:16:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, I completely blocked vision fund out of my head. And, and then I was like, I was researching before this, I was like, okay, 15 billion has to be the biggest fund, venture fund ever. And it was like, oh no, of course, of course.

• 2:16:17John Coogan?

  Anyway, well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations on massive news and we will talk to you soon, Jen.

• 2:16:24Jordi Hays?

  Incredible work.

• 2:16:25Speaker 08

  Awesome. Great to see you guys. Catch you later.

• 2:16:28John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Vanta, automated compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform.

• 2:16:34Jordi Hays?

  And thank you to the chat. There has been some updates to Claude's policies. Tyler is researching the story now and we will get to it as soon as we can.

• 2:16:44John Coogan?

  Well, we have Alex Rampell from Andreessen Horowitz coming in to be on Ultra Dome. Welcome to the show, Alex. How are you doing?

• 2:16:51Speaker 09

  Good.

• 2:16:52John Coogan?

  Beautiful background, fantastic American flag. What, what a day. Congratulations. How are you doing?

• 2:16:58Speaker 09

  Good, good.

• 2:16:59John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:17:00Jordi Hays?

  Super excited to have you on. I've, I've enjoyed, you're somebody who's, I've, I've read your writing and listened to your, your podcast appearances for a decade now and always, always appreciated your, your point of view on a, on a bunch of different things. So, welcome to the show.

• 2:17:17Speaker 09

  Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I'm here to prove that I'm real.

• 2:17:20John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:17:21Speaker 09

  It's like proof of life is very important increasingly, right?

• 2:17:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it is.

• 2:17:25John Coogan?

  I mean, first time on the show, can you give us a little bit of backstory, the journey to Andreessen and, and how long you've been there?

• 2:17:32Speaker 09

  Sure. So I've been here for 10 years, previously been a long time.

• 2:17:40Speaker 09

  Previously, a longtime entrepreneur, so I kind of started by writing software when I was a kid in high school, actually even before that. And then out of college, I was like, I graduated in 2003, I was probably the only person from my class that just kind of became an entrepreneur right away. And it wasn't because I was smart or dumb, probably more dumb than smart. It's like I had a little business that I was running in college, so I kind of kept doing that. Met this guy named Chris Dixon, who was at Harvard Business School when I was at Harvard College. And you have to remember, like, 2002 when we met, the internet 1.0 had just died. Everybody lost their jobs, you know, September 11th had happened. And what do you do if you're a dried up entrepreneur? You go to business school. I remember this company called Cosmo.com, a huge hit that kind of went to zero.

• 2:18:24Speaker 09

  What did that guy do? He went to HBS.

• 2:18:26Speaker 06

  No way.

• 2:18:26Speaker 09

  So Chris Dixon was there, and he and I were like the only two people, I swear, in like the entire state of Massachusetts, that thought that the internet was still kind of cool. We got introduced by an actual friend, had coffee at Albon Pan, this like little east coast chain. And then cooked up a product called Did They Read It?, which is still around today. It's an email tracking tool that embeds a tracking pixel in every email that you send out. That did pretty well. Then we started a venture back company together that became Site Advisor, that got acquired. And then I started another company called TrialPay. To, like, the thing that we learned at Site Advisor is that nobody likes paying for software. Like, you're willing to pay for an intangible good, like a glass of wine, $20 for that seems totally reasonable, right?

• 2:19:08Speaker 09

  But paying $20 for one song on iTunes, there would be riots in the streets. So, the idea was, I'll give you this digital good for free if you buy something else. And if you know how affiliate marketing works, it kind of plugged into that. So it's like, hey, we'll give you this product for free if you sign up for Netflix, or if you switch to Geico, or if you shop at The Gap, or if you get a Discover card, using the affiliate commission to go pay for the product. That did pretty well, like, it was like half of the revenue of Site Advisor. It was like from my little shareware business that I used to have back in the day, it doubled our revenue, so I turned that into a company called TrialPay. That did great for a while, then it did terribly, then it kind of resumed to okay, sold it to Visa. And then along the way, met this guy Max Levchin, after he had sold Slide to Google, and we cooked up a company called Affirm.

• 2:19:54Speaker 09

  So I co-founded Affirm with Max in 2012, and actually brought Affirm to Andreessen Horowitz as a funding opportunity, which they did.

• 2:20:03Speaker 09

  And Chris Dixon kind of ended up talking me into joining here in 2015. So I've been here ever since.

• 2:20:10Jordi Hays?

  How quickly did you realize that Chris and Max were special? Because I imagine during those two periods, you were meeting hundreds of different people. I'm sure people wanted to build stuff with you, other entrepreneurs, and you picked well, back to back. And it's probably the hardest, you know, one of the hardest things to actually clock at times.

• 2:20:34Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the greatest people, they have two things in common. They have this term that's going around a lot, like high agency. Like they don't just like follow the rules, they just like take matters into their own hands and do something. And then they just kind of know the history of everything before. Like they're just like students of history, philosophy, like, you know, Chris was a philosophy major. People don't know about him. He went to, like, he went to, you know, he got his bachelor's degree in philosophy, was going to do a PhD, kind of realized that was a bad idea. And then eventually went to business school, which was, he will probably say the worst idea. But it was kind of self evident. I mean, Chris and I, I mean,

• 2:21:09Jordi Hays?

  The history, the history thing's a real thing. Like if you're talking to an entrepreneur that has been building their business for one to two years, and you can tell them companies that in somewhat recent history, in the last decade even, that have like attempted that, or companies that are adjacent, and they're like, oh, I'm not familiar with that. It's like immediately like such a bare signal.

• 2:21:27Speaker 09

  Oh, it's a red flag. Well, the opposite, like that's the red flag, the whatever the opposite. Green flag.

• 2:21:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying. But yeah, the green flag is,

• 2:21:36Speaker 09

  What's the green flag? The green flag is not only do I know everything, I mean, I'll give you one example. I think the Collison brothers went out to like D. Hawks Ranch. Like D. Hawks started Visa. He's kind of like a weird quasi-communist, even though he started one of the biggest companies in the world. Because Visa was meant to be this like, it was a nonprofit. Visa was a nonprofit until 20, I don't know, 2008, maybe 2009. Yeah, one of the biggest IPOs, yeah. That's right. Yeah, but it was a nonprofit until then. A nonprofit like the NFL is a nonprofit. It like makes a lot of money, but it's owned by the constituents. And the constituents that own Visa were the banks. And it's like, okay, I'm starting a payment company. There were a lot of payment companies that came before, but it's like, who will?

• 2:22:17Speaker 09

  Let's find this guy who's 90 years old, who's moved outside of capitalism, is working as a farmer just to learn from him. And like I have this mental model that I now use for entrepreneurs and it's a memo that I've written that we use internally a lot. I gotta say like the best entrepreneurs, they have five things that I look for. They can materialize labor, capital and customers, and hopefully those are self-evident. It's like you can get people to quit their high paying job for like certain failure. It's like the Ernest Shackleton thing. It's like you wanted men for dangerous journey, almost certain failure and death, but if it worked, you might be famous, right? It's like you want that. Very, very hard to do. You have to find people that can materialize capital. It's like get people to give you money and the best, the best sign of future fundraising success, like if we do round N, we want to make sure there's going to be a round N plus one, or you're going to be profitable on round N, which is unlikely.

• 2:23:02Speaker 09

  So are you good at fundraising? Can you get customers? Like imagine it's like, I have two weeks of cash left. Please be my first customer. I have none. Like who? It's very hard to pull that off. Yeah. Then you want to know the history of the space, which is super important to your point. You want that green flag version, not just the intermediate, you know, what's the, what's the, the combination of green and red flag like the Brown? The tur- you don't want the turquoise or the whatever. Like you, you want the green, like this person knows everything that's tried before and they have a new angle of attack. They're not going to learn on the job. They've actually learned through history. And then the last thing that I care about a lot, everybody in my, my team knows this. My favorite book is The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas. And it documents the story of this guy, Edmund Dantes, who's like wrongfully accused, is

• 2:23:44Speaker 09

  like in prison for 17 years, but then becomes the richest person in the world, but doesn't give a shit. Right? It's like all the, all the riches in the world do not matter. He wants revenge. Yeah. Right? You want, or so you could either revenge, that kind of sounds bad. It's like a testimony, but you either want revenge or redemption. And some of the best entrepreneurs have this in common. And the reason why it's so important from a venture lens is imagine that you're a 20 year old kid, you start a company and somebody offers you, I don't know, half a billion dollars to buy your company. And you own 25% of it. You're going to make over a hundred million dollars. You'd have to be insane to turn that down. Right? And we need people that are insane that that actually are going for it's not that we don't want people that aren't capitalists that don't care about money. But it's like they care about if you've seen the movie Spaceballs.

• 2:24:27Speaker 09

  It's like, we're not doing this for the money. We're doing it for a shitload of money. A little, little different here. It's, I'm doing it for another reason. And like a great example of this is there's this guy Renaud Laplante who started a company called Lending Club. Very famous company at the time. There was like a dearth of IPOs, like Lending Club kind of gets to scale, goes public. He gets fired from his board, ousted from the company. He's probably made hundreds of millions of dollars. He's the Count of Monte Cristo. He's like, you know, fuck those guys. I'm going to start a new company. I'm gonna, I'm gonna start an upgrade. And you know what he called his new company? Upgrade. It does the exact same thing as Lending Club. It's probably 10 times the size of Lending Club now. And what's motivating him is not just the hopefully, you know, shit ton of money, Spaceballs quote. But he wants revenge. He wants redemption.

• 2:25:11Speaker 09

  And you see this with some of the best entrepreneurs, like what is the driving motivation? And because when times get tough, like you need something, because like there is no money. Like if, if your company's going to zero, uh, if you're Erno Shackleton in the winter of Antarctica, like your voyage is not successful, right? You, you need something else driving you at that point. And that's why that, that metal is something that, that I, I find extremely valuable.

• 2:25:37John Coogan?

  Have you seen Spaceballs, Jordy?

• 2:25:38Jordi Hays?

  I have not.

• 2:25:39John Coogan?

  You got to.

• 2:25:41Jordi Hays?

  I famously, I famously have seen like

• 2:25:46Jordi Hays?

  One of my, uh, probably like a, I really, I was gonna say maybe I, it's hard to exactly place a top 10. Like I, I loved your episode on, uh, Invest Like The Best on operating systems. How is AI kind of like updating your thinking on modes and operating systems? And, uh, how somebody can create a lot of value with a startup?

• 2:26:08Speaker 09

  Yeah, well, I think, well, maybe I can rewind a little bit and just because we announced this new fundraise, I can tell you exactly what we told our LPs in terms of like what we want to invest in at the application layer, because I do application layer stuff. And it's really three things, you know, category one is, I call it greenfield bingo. And kind of maybe another way of answering your question is, there's something that there's a quote that I use a lot, "The best companies have hostages, not customers." Right? Like, that's why nobody likes using Salesforce.

• 2:26:37Jordi Hays?

  You gotta be taking revenge. You gotta be taking hostages.

• 2:26:40Speaker 09

  You know, it's very Old Testament stuff. The best companies have hostages, not customers. Those are great companies to invest in, right? And that kind of goes to the part that I was making, like, you know, NetSuite, Workday, Salesforce, like, they're all hated by their customers, but none of those customers can leave. However, if you build a better version, like, kind of a more AI-first version of all of these companies, and you're selling into the greenfield, you've got a shot, right? Because, like, I was lucky enough to be the first investor in Mercury, and Mercury worked not by stealing people from SVB. They just worked, it's like, "Oh, you're a brand-new company, you can use shitty SVB, or you can use really good Mercury." And that worked. Whereas, they never got customers from SVB

• 2:27:23Speaker 09

  until the weekend that SVB failed. So that greenfield opportunity for software, like, that is AI-enabled, in the same way that, like, that was true for cloud, right? That was true for mobile. It's like, here is the new thing, the incumbent will eventually build it. Like, another expression I use a lot is, like, the battle between every startup and incumbent is whether the startup gets the distribution before the incumbent gets the innovation. The incumbent, my default assumption is that the incumbent normally wins. Because they have the distribution, they will get their act together three years later, and with AI and cursor and everything else, they'll get their act together maybe three weeks later. So that the, the, the, kind of... The might of distribution is very, very powerful. So one option is you just go into the greenfield. So that's kind of category one is, you know, we call it greenfield bingo.

• 2:28:08Speaker 09

  It's just like build, we have a bet that's just like NetSuite. It's better, it's AI enabled, but they're not going to steal customers from NetSuite. They're just going to get greenfield. Category two is this kind of new, super exciting category of software does labor. And like, there is no incumbent software product for, I don't know, trial attorneys. Like, it's called Microsoft Office, but like Eve does that and does that really well. There's no incumbent software product for dental office receptionists, but Tenor does that and does that very well. So that's a really, these are all industries that I wouldn't say they've been untouched by software. They've been untouched by specialty software. And the reason why is because the market was perceived to be too small. And this is exactly what happened to SaaS.

• 2:28:52Speaker 09

  Like fintech really changed SaaS significantly because take, I'm sure you've heard of Toast. Toast is one of my favorite businesses. It's like Square, but it's only for restaurants. It's this whole operating system for restaurants. How many restaurants on their IBM PC Junior in 1984 use software? Like, zero. And how many of them would pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for software? Zero. But they all need payment processing, they all need payroll, they need these other services. You kind of bundle them in with software. And this is the really exciting thing about AI, is you go say, hey, trial attorney, I want you to pay $50,000 a year for software. You said this 10 years ago, like, no way. Like, we'll pay for Microsoft Word because we use it to write demand letters. Like, that's it.

• 2:29:34Speaker 09

  And now you can say, hey, we'll handle all these cases for you that you could not handle profitably, and that's AI plus software. Now they are software buyers. So that's category two. And then category three, I call the walled garden. And I wrote a post about this a little while ago, but walled garden businesses are amazing because if you assume that in the world that we live in today, and this is another way of thinking about kind of defensibility in AI.

• 2:30:00Speaker 09

  OpenAI has their sights kind of on everything, right? Like Anthropic probably has their sights on everything. It's so easy to build everything. So I'm the, have you guys heard of open evidence?

• 2:30:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:09Speaker 09

  Yeah. Okay, so I tore my Achilles in February. It's almost a year ago. It sucks, right? It's all better now. Doing something fun? It was, I was skiing in Japan. There we go. That's a good reason, that's a good reason. There we go, there we go. One of the words. Tear my Achilles, what do I do? So I go to ChatGPT. I'm in like the clinic in Nisoko, Japan, talking to the Scottish doctor and he tells me, oh yeah, you only have surgery in the US. Nobody does it outside the US. I was like, this guy's on crack. Like, of course you have surgery to fix an Achilles. I go to ChatGPT, it tells me everything. Then I think, I find this thing, open evidence, and it's like ChatGPT, but it has every single medical document in the world. And imagine that tomorrow, ChatGPT 5.3 comes out, it's AGI, everybody agrees it's AGI,

• 2:30:53Speaker 09

  human race is over, but it has no medical data. And then on the other side, you have GPT 3.5 and it has every single piece of medical knowledge ever known to mankind. What would you rather use? And the answer, at least for me, and I did use this, is open evidence. There's so many businesses that look like this, where they find some proprietary piece of data. They're the only ones that have, because before you would have to sell data. That was like your only, that was your only hope as a business. And like another example that I mentioned in this post, there's a company called Vlex. And Vlex is this like 25-year-old European data business that bought up, you know, legal records in Spain to start, and they would sell it to firms like Wilson Sonsini that needed it for case law. Now they sell an outcome, because they're the only ones that have all the records.

• 2:31:38Speaker 09

  So you can chart, you can build a really interesting business if you're the only source of some unique form of data. And I love businesses like that, because that's the other, sorry for being so long-winded here on the answer to your question, but.

• 2:31:53Speaker 09

  The businesses that can be very, very large in AI that can grow very, very quickly, you still need to make sure that they're fundamentally defensible. And that's the really hard thing to disambiguate today, which is you can have things grow so quickly, but they can also go to zero so quickly because anybody can build software in like a weekend, which is both great and terrifying at the same time.

• 2:32:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, indeed. Well, thank you so much for hopping on the show and breaking it down.

• 2:32:16Jordi Hays?

  Incredible overview.

• 2:32:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:18Jordi Hays?

  Thanks, guys. Yeah, great to meet you. Thanks for coming on.

• 2:32:21John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon, Alex.

• 2:32:22Jordi Hays?

  Congrats.

• 2:32:23John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Let me tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And up next, we have David George. We are running late. David, good to see you again.

• 2:32:40Speaker 10

  Good guys.

• 2:32:41John Coogan?

  How are you doing?

• 2:32:42Speaker 10

  Good to see you.

• 2:32:43John Coogan?

  Congratulations on all the progress. How does this change growth, the growth practice? Is this just more of the same strategy? Or can you do new things with this new fund?

• 2:32:51Speaker 10

  It's more of the same, honestly. First of all, I'm still like thrown off because I've worked with Rampell for seven years and we're close friends. And I just realized that his favorite book is Count of Monte Cristo, and that's my favorite book.

• 2:33:04John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:33:05Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 2:33:06John Coogan?

  It's a good one. Yeah, it's a great one.

• 2:33:08Speaker 10

  Yeah, no, more of the same for the growth fund. I mean, look, you know, the last, the last seven years since we started it, it's been a pretty simple mandate. It's like best, you know, best companies in the world, best founders in the world with huge ambitions. Typically, the bet that we're making is that it can be bigger than other people believe it can be. You know, Paki wrote a whole, a whole long 16,000-word essay about this today. But if I were to summarize our views and what defines like, you know, quintessential growth investment for us, it's, it's a belief that it can be bigger than people would realize. And we got a ton of success stories on that. So more of the same in terms of our strategy. And it just so happens that we're on the back of like the best trend of my lifetime.

• 2:33:49John Coogan?

  Do you think there's something changing in the psychology of startup founders where the new crop of mega corns, the SpaceX's, it sort of gives the next generation permission to stay private longer? Maybe, hey, you know, previously it was maybe $100 billion IPO would be crazy big. Now we're maybe having a few trillion dollar IPOs happening soon. All of a sudden, logically, you know, even if you're not in that category, you're like, I'll stay private until 100 billion. Is the psychology changing for founders?

• 2:34:22Speaker 10

  Yeah, it is changing. I'm going to talk about the psychology of founders in two different ways. So one that I'm more excited about, like, we could talk about capital markets and public markets and private markets. The thing I'm more excited about is the psychology of the founders that has changed post-COVID. Like, this generation of founders is just way more hardcore. Like, I, for one, am all for, you know, the being back in the office, the working really hard, you know, unabashed, you know, pursuit of success. And I think it's a big change, like, in the last five or six years that's happened. I think it's part of what's propelling these companies to be so good so fast. Obviously, AI is the big technological driver, but I think the vibe shift is a huge part of it. You know, we were looking last night at some stats and going back and forth on some of our best companies.

• 2:35:06Speaker 10

  And we have a bunch of the AI-native companies that are application companies that are kind of 100 million plus, 100 million to a billion dollars of revenue.

• 2:35:14Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:35:15Speaker 10

  And we were looking at, do we think they're running themselves differently? So to this point of, like, you know, different vibes, what they, what they, what they care about. And it turns out, like, the old rule of thumb for companies was, you know, if you look at, like, revenue divided by all their employees, it's like $400,000 of revenue per employee. Like, you look at, like, public software companies, that's kind of where it shakes out. All these AI-native companies, they were basically like 500,000, 900,000, 2 million, 2 million, 2 million, 5 million. So they're, they're, they're totally different. I think they're being run totally differently. We're really excited about that. And the biggest thing is just, like, there's a tsunami of demand

• 2:35:56Speaker 10

  coming their way, which I think enables them to run, you know, much, much faster. So I'm super excited about that, you know, as it relates to the, the capital markets thing, the staying private longer. It's totally rational. Look, there's a bunch of it that is our own, you know, sort of government doing as it relates to being a public company and how difficult and expensive that has become. You know, we have a robust private market. It's been a benefit to us. You know, it's allowed us to invest in a bunch of companies that otherwise would have gone public, you know, sooner, when we can still invest in them and they're growing really fast. And, you know, the value proposition for founders is pretty good to be a private company. You know, they can, they can stay private.

• 2:36:40Speaker 10

  It's probably a little bit of a higher cost of capital for them, but the trade off for them is, you know, they can sort of avoid the daily kind of volatility of the stock price and what that means for

• 2:36:50John Coogan?

  And more M and A options as well. There's a lot of

• 2:36:52Jordi Hays?

  What is, uh, what is your day like? What are your weeks? What are your weeks like? Cause I imagine like you, the, the balancing and like prioritizing when you're like

• 2:37:01John Coogan?

  Most of it's adding zeros to spreadsheets.

• 2:37:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:37:04John Coogan?

  Okay, we gotta add

• 2:37:05Jordi Hays?

  The model's breaking, the model's breaking. No, but, but I imagine it's hard to prioritize when you can write everything from like a a hundred million dollar check up to, you know, at times like, you know,

• 2:37:16John Coogan?

  A billion dollar rounds are coming together.

• 2:37:18Jordi Hays?

  Multi-billion dollar rounds are coming together. Like how, like what, what, uh, how do you prioritize your day and your week?

• 2:37:25Speaker 10

  Yeah. I mean, the reason we raised this fund that's a little bit larger, you know, one, it's a reflection of the opportunity set and two, you know, we want to be able to say, hey, we can write a billion dollar check into a company directly out of the fund. And we have resources to be able to do more than that beyond it, but that was a big part, you know, if we're high conviction in a company, we want to be able to do that. There's not very many of those. And so, you know, we have to use our time wisely. Fortunately, given our brand and given our coverage, you know, we're able to see most things. We're able to meet a lot of entrepreneurs. Uh, and so, you know, we, we see, you know, probably as a firm, hundreds of deals or investment opportunities or companies a week.

• 2:38:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:01Speaker 10

  Uh, and then, you know, we have the, you know, we have the luxury of getting to kind of match make with the ones that want to work with us that we think are really special. You know, after this, I I just, you know, was texting with the founder and and he was like, he kind of cracked open the door that he might do a fundraiser. And and I'm like, great. All right, I'll meet you.

• 2:38:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, in a couple of minutes.

• 2:38:22Speaker 10

  Let's meet in our office at four o'clock. Like, you know, we we got to do it. So the way I try to spend my time is like, you know, the thing that gives me the most energy is to to meet those founders and make investments.

• 2:38:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, we'll let you get back to chasing deals. Good luck with that particular founder. Hopefully, that founder will be on the show ringing the gong in just a few weeks.

• 2:38:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this I'm excited to see what what you do with this with this new fund. It's preparation, timing, opportunity.

• 2:38:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:47Jordi Hays?

  This is gonna be an amazing chapter.

• 2:38:49John Coogan?

  Well, have a great rest of your day, David.

• 2:38:51Speaker 10

  Good to catch up.

• 2:38:52John Coogan?

  We'll see you.

• 2:38:53Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:38:53John Coogan?

  And up next, we have Ben Horowitz, the founder of Andrus and Horowitz, the Horowitz in Andrus and Horowitz. Ben, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 2:39:02Speaker 11

  Good. How are you guys?

• 2:39:03John Coogan?

  We're fantastic. Massive news today. Congratulations, obviously. We'll get into the the the the the fund structure. I'm sure we'll have a bunch of questions there. I wanted to kick it off with a reflection on your book, The Hard Things, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. What is the one piece of advice that you think has aged particularly well from that? What has never changed? And then maybe you could take me through some things that might have changed in this era, bigger companies, AI. What what do you go back to and what do you maybe think needs needs an update?

• 2:39:38Speaker 11

  Yeah, well, like, I think it's still like really hard to be an entrepreneur. And one of my favorite quotes in the book is something Mark said to me, you know, when things were extremely bad, he said, you know, one day we'll look back on this, chuckle nervously, and change the subject.

• 2:40:00John Coogan?

  I think some of us have seen those late teammates.

• 2:40:04Speaker 11

  Yeah. Another thing you know, I say is things get darkest before they go completely black.

• 2:40:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's underrated how how long you two have been in partnership beyond just this this firm. You've worked together for so long.

• 2:40:20Speaker 11

  Thirty years.

• 2:40:20John Coogan?

  Thirty years. What a run. An overnight success, a true overnight success if there ever was one. How is how do you two like to work together now? How is how is the day to day working at the firm?

• 2:40:34Speaker 11

  Yeah, I mean, I think that it works pretty well. I mean, we have pretty different roles. So I run the firm and then, you know, Mark is kind of in a lot of ways, the face of the firm. And he also, you know, he gets very deep on specific things. So policy, AI are kind of the two things that he's like super focused on right now.

• 2:41:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:01Speaker 11

  And, you know, he has many, many ideas about, you know, running the firm and I have many ideas about things he does. And so, you know, it's very collaborative, I would just say.

• 2:41:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:12Speaker 11

  And, you know, we argue all the time about everything.

• 2:41:15John Coogan?

  As any good partnership does.

• 2:41:16Speaker 11

  Sometimes he's right, sometimes I'm right.

• 2:41:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, how is the structure of running the firm? How is the structure of the firm changing in this era? Obviously, the numbers are bigger, but on the fundraising side, but maybe not on the team side. What's changing? Is there anything that you've felt like this technology shift requires different management of the firm?

• 2:41:41Speaker 11

  Yeah, no, for sure. I think that, you know, what's happened is where we have such a powerful new technology platform that the number of really important companies that will be created out of it has just multiplied.

• 2:41:56John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:41:57Speaker 11

  And, you know, like the tech industry itself used to just not be that big. And now the tech industry is all industry.

• 2:42:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:05Speaker 11

  And that change is kind of what really changed the architecture of the firm. So originally, you know, we look like every other venture firm. We were You know, a team of venture investors, you know, we were a little different in that we had a more elaborate platform.

• 2:42:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:20Speaker 11

  But now what we've done is we've kind of subdivided the technology market into all of its submarkets. So, you know, infrastructure, applications, you know, crypto, early-stage stuff, bio, these kinds of things, American dynamism, and each of those teams is basically, looks like the original Andreessen Horowitz, but they're independent of each other.

• 2:42:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:46Speaker 11

  And that enables us to both kind of cover the whole market in a very, very serious way, but also be nimble and not have, I mean, you don't want 20 people in a room talking about a deal.

• 2:42:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:57Speaker 11

  Like, you're not going to get to the truth like that, you know, just in my management experience, it turns out you can't have a conversation with 20 people. You can't have a presentation.

• 2:43:07John Coogan?

  How do you think about empowering the firm or the sub-teams to become subject matter experts and actually investigate and prosecute deal theses in entirely new markets, where no one in the firm might have ever done an oil and gas deal, or a solar deal, or some bio thing that's entirely new? And you have a team, but there's, you know, new markets forming and new markets coming online as potential transformation targets for technology. How are you keeping the firm sharp on every corner of the global economy?

• 2:43:42Speaker 11

  Yeah, so a lot of times, you know, there are super experimental things that we'll look at, but we don't necessarily kind of build the organization around yet. And then, you know, but once we commit the flag, then that, you know, our big commitment would be, okay, we'll create a fund around it. So, you know, we did that with crypto. We made the Coinbase investment before we had the crypto fund, but then we, as we got into it, we said, well, like, this is going to be a larger market and it's super different than everything we're doing. So, we need to commit around that. More recently, you know, with AI.

• 2:44:23Speaker 11

  AI, like the way you build AI companies, the nature of the AI founder is just so different than everything that we've seen before that we ended up bringing in a lot of expertise from the outside. We kind of reoriented everybody on the inside. Like, we actually had, you know, a huge amount of training materials and like, you know, basically exams to make sure that, you know, everybody who has worked on that was what we call AI native and understood, like, all aspects of it before getting into it, just because, you know, uh, the, these things do tend to be different. And this is why you see a lot of people age out of venture capital and then a lot of kind of firms be not what they once were.

• 2:45:08Speaker 11

  You know, they were very important in 2015, but they didn't necessarily make the transition. They didn't bring in the right kind of talent.

• 2:45:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, do you, as, as, when you're managing the firm, how do you think about uh, the dividing lines and the walls between different funds? We've seen, just with, just with the Neo clouds, a lot of those folks started as crypto companies. Uh, then they became AI companies, but they're building things at such massive scale. I wouldn't be surprised to see them in an American dynamism portfolio because they're sort of sort of re-industrializing. So are you the person that the firm, that one of the subdivision leaders comes to to say, hey, I want this in my fund? Um, how does that work?

• 2:45:49Speaker 11

  Yeah. So, so there's not that much conflict in that, you know, the categories are pretty clear. Um, there are, you know, it happens occasionally where, where they bump into each other, but, you know, for the most part, it's like, what are you really trying to do? Uh, and then the entrepreneur will gravitate towards one of the funds, um, based on what they're trying to do. Like, we want to sell things to the government.

• 2:46:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:17Speaker 11

  Okay, that's likely going to go into American dynamism, whereas like, okay, we've got, you know, eight PhDs in AI, that's almost certainly going to end up in infrastructure.

• 2:46:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:29Speaker 11

  Um, you know, kind of model world and that kind of thing.

• 2:46:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:32Speaker 11

  And so, you know, it's really matching that the funds are You think about markets of entrepreneurs and the funds are designed to address that market of entrepreneurs and those tend to be fairly distinct. Now, sometimes, you know, people will try to game us and get rejected by one part and then they'll go to the other.

• 2:46:51John Coogan?

  Ah, okay.

• 2:46:53Speaker 11

  We have very, very, very good, comprehensive data on everything we've seen. We've got extremely good systems, so we catch those people.

• 2:47:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. When did you realize a $15 billion fund was possible? Was it, was it, did you, did you imagine this kind of scale was possible from inception? Or was it a, did you build that?

• 2:47:13Speaker 11

  Yeah, our first fund was $300 million, so we definitely weren't thinking about it then. We thought 300 million was a lot and people, you know, thought we were raising too big a fund in 2009. But no, like, what we've done is we've kind of looked at the markets and said, okay, you know, how big is this market? And then what kind of fund do we need to kind of win in that market and generate a large return? And, you know, we tend to have a relatively optimistic view of the future. I think there are some like cynical DCs out there and like, when I was a boy, donations weren't this high.

• 2:47:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's just like, play the game on the field.

• 2:47:56Speaker 11

  Yeah, we like to look forward and not look backwards. And so as a result, like something, you know, I think we have done a good job of getting ahead of the game. Like when we raised Fund 3, which was a billion dollars, we got a lot of criticism from other funds going like, that's crazy, you know, no billion dollar fund has ever returned money, yardy, yardy, yardy, yardy. And we're like, well, okay, but like, the world didn't look like this and software is eating the world and things are getting bigger and we think that like we can deploy a billion dollars. And, you know, that fund, you know, had Coinbase and Databricks and Lyft and Digital Ocean and GitHub and like a lot of big outcomes. And if we didn't

• 2:48:41Speaker 11

  have that much money, it'd be a problem.

• 2:48:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. On that, on that note of optimism and understanding the scale of the internet as it eats the entire world, how did you process the bubble talk that took place in the back half of 2025?

• 2:48:58Speaker 11

  Well, you know, I was CEO during another bubble. So I know a lot about bubbles. Look, I think that, um, so there's a couple of things that I learned from the bubble that we were in.

• 2:49:11Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, sorry.

• 2:49:14Jordi Hays?

  We keep a bubble gun handy.

• 2:49:16Speaker 11

  Yeah, look, you know, one of the things, um, if you look back at that bubble, there were, there were a lot of things that were present then that are definitely not present now. So like probably the biggest being the internet, everybody knew the internet was going to be giant. But at the time that everybody was investing all the money, the internet was very, very small. So if you go back to nineteen ninety six, at Netscape, we had ninety percent browser share and, you know, we had fifty million dollars in revenue. So the entire, or we had fifty million users, sorry, fifty million users. So the entire number of people on the internet was fifty five million.

• 2:49:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:59Speaker 11

  So like, so you're funding these companies and giving them a ten billion dollar valuation selling into a market of fifty five million people. Like, and then half of those were on dial-up, so it was limited in what you could do. And so those valuations were running way, way, way ahead of the technology is kind of what caused the bubble. You know, if you look at AI, the technology is like working and getting to the world right now. Like, how many people are on ChatGPT? And, you know, how's that business going? It had, I think, zero revenue in November of twenty twenty two. And I don't know what the current number is, but it's probably between fifteen and twenty billion.

• 2:50:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:40Speaker 11

  Um, like, we've never seen that before. So the things are working, like, the things that, that, that were bubble-icious in ninety nine aren't quite the same. But, you know, to me, the biggest thing that I learned was right before the bubble burst, nobody thought it was a bubble. Um, Warren Buffett, who had never invested in any tech in early two thousands, started investing in tech. So everybody capitulated and agreed prices would never go down. Like, that's what you need to get to a bubble. It's a psychological phenomenon, you know, not a, uh, not a financial phenomenon. And so. You know, right now with everybody talking about a bubble, I was like, oh, great.

• 2:51:20Speaker 11

  We're not in a bubble because it's when nobody believes it's a bubble that it becomes a bubble. Same with the financial crisis, by the way, if you look at the price, you know, the kind of interest you pay on like home loan debt in, in, uh, in 2007, it was the lowest in history.

• 2:51:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:41Speaker 11

  Right before it all came crashing.

• 2:51:42John Coogan?

  It should have been the highest.

• 2:51:43Speaker 11

  Right before everybody defaulted.

• 2:51:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:45Speaker 11

  You know, it was the lowest in history and that's because it was a bubble because everybody believed, hey, they're not building any more land anymore, you know, like that's what's going on. And so, once you get into that kind of psychological convergence, that's when you really get into like a really crazy bubble. Now, look, in venture capital, um, everything is always priced at either half or double what it's worth. Like, that's the, that's the steady state. And so, are there going to be things that are, you know, priced way too high? Yeah, of course.

• 2:52:16John Coogan?

  Speaking of land, uh, how are you processing the move out of California? The, the news in California of the wealth taxes. It's a lot of folks are saying, you know, California might shoot themselves in the foot, kill the golden goose. How have you been processing the news?

• 2:52:33Speaker 11

  Yeah, I mean, so it's very kind of like an interesting kind of view of the world, I think, that, that, that the, you know, the groups in California have been kind of pushing this idea. So, you know, we, I go all over the world. I've met like in the last year, you know, the president of Mexico, the president of El Salvador, you know, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. So like, I'm always with world leaders or I've spent a lot of time with them and they always want to know, like, how do we create Silicon Valley here? And when you look at Silicon Valley.

• 2:53:10Jordi Hays?

  We want a golden goose. We want one.

• 2:53:13Speaker 11

  It's, it's pretty remarkable that like we've repeatedly created companies with larger kind of GDP than most countries, like routinely we've done that. And so, rather than asking like, how did we do that? It's like. Well, how can we like rearrange it and you know, run an experiment and see if it destroys it or not? And so I thi- I think that's probably the weirdest part of it for me that people would think about it that way like I mean it like i- i- i- if you start confiscating wealth and you know, taxing unrealized capital gains for people who aren't liquid like

• 2:53:54Speaker 11

  so, so actually saw this in Norway. So Norway has an unrealized capital gains tax. And if, and Norway's got like a lot of extremely smart people, great entrepreneurs, but they all left. And when you talk to entrepreneurs in Norway, they're like, well, I literally can't pay the tax. Uh, because the, the, the company got marked up. Yeah. Whatever, a billion, two billion dollars, and I own a lot of it, and I can't get that money out. It's a private company.

• 2:54:25Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:54:25Speaker 11

  And so I'm stuck. So I, I have to leave the country. And there are no entrepreneurs and there is basically no tech entrepreneurs in, in Norway now. And if you wanted to get, it's been so hard to break the Silicon Valley network effect, but this is the best strategy I've seen. If you wanted to break the California tech.

• 2:54:44Jordi Hays?

  How, how are you processing, how, it feels like today we have this incredible optimism within the technology industry, this incredible excitement, and then outside of the technology, you know, your neighbor or somebody nearby has like this, there's, it feels like this real tension and kind of fear from broader society about the work that is being done within the technology industry. And you see interviews that, uh, you know, AI leaders will give where they'll say, we're, we're summoning the demon or, or they'll say, you know, uh, you know.

• 2:55:14Speaker 11

  Not the most optimistic storytelling.

• 2:55:16Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna end, the, the world will end, but we're gonna create some great companies. So I think people like this, these, these interviews and these quotes spread so quickly. A lot of people have heard them and the question from the broader populace is like, hey, do we need to do this?

• 2:55:29Speaker 11

  What's the optimistic vision?

• 2:55:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, do, or, or can we stop, right?

• 2:55:32Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:55:33Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and, and obviously, technology is, you know, proven to be somewhat inevitable, relentless.

• 2:55:40Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:55:43Speaker 11

  So I think the good news is it speaks to the importance of the moment. So this is on the order of the microprocessor, the steam engine or something, or electricity, or something like that. And those things all turned out to be like really good for humanity.

• 2:55:59Jordi Hays?

  Was there that much with electricity? Was there like the level of fear?

• 2:56:03Speaker 11

  There was.

• 2:56:04Jordi Hays?

  Because there was people that would like go and obviously I know the stories, people that would like their job was to write, light the lamps, right?

• 2:56:11Speaker 11

  Oh, yeah. Like if you go back and read about the beginning of electricity, it's wild. Well, they made a law when automobiles first came out, there was a law in the United States that said, if you're driving your car and you see a horse, you have to stop the car, disassemble it and wait for the horse to pet.

• 2:56:31Jordi Hays?

  Disassemble.

• 2:56:33Speaker 11

  Like it was that level, that was the regulatory idea. So, yeah, I mean, I think, by the way, watches were the same. You know, when watches came out, there was like huge fear that like people would never be able to have a conversation again because they'd be just checking the time always.

• 2:56:50Jordi Hays?

  Got one shot by watch.

• 2:56:52Speaker 11

  Yeah, these technologies like generate a lot of fear, but I think that, you know, the good news on it is, you know, this one is really important. I think that the impact into the well-being of humanity is going to be bigger than certainly anything in my lifetime. And, you know, one of our bigger problems, I think, is there are people in the industry going for regulatory capture who kind of feed into the fear.

• 2:57:16Jordi Hays?

  The fear.

• 2:57:17Speaker 11

  And then like there are also people who have just, you know, it's moving so fast that it's actually freaked them out who are working on it and that's.

• 2:57:24Jordi Hays?

  How do you advise, how do you advise portfolio founders or even people at the firm around processing noise? Think historically, you know, there wasn't like this constant chatter, right? We have like X now, which is like a constant, you know, stream of consciousness from millions of people that are sharing their opinion. And it's, you know, I know a lot of entrepreneurs that, you know, one day everybody's saying that they're the greatest thing ever and then the next day, you know, people start to criticize and how do you kind of like, what's your, what guidance do you give there?

• 2:58:01Speaker 11

  Yeah, well, I think that like the world of media changed and it's I think it's tricky for people in companies to process because if you grew up in marketing or in old media, your whole concept of the laws of physics is different. So in old world, you were always thinking defensively because there were there were very few channels to get your message out. The format was very tight. You know, you could get a quote in here, you could get a few sentences before the host cut you off or whatever. Yeah, you know, you guys watch CNN from time to time.

• 2:58:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:39Speaker 11

  And so like in that world, the way you would think about media is just like, let's make sure we don't say the wrong thing. Let's spend hours and hours crafting the message and so forth. You know, the new world, it's like wide open. There's media everywhere. The formats are whatever you want it to be. And so the right kind of way to think about it is you have to be interesting. And don't worry about making a mistake because you can just come back tomorrow and flood the zone, you know, like just keep going. And that I think it's I found it very, very difficult to reorient somebody who has spent a career

• 2:59:19Speaker 11

  in old media world kind of thinking in a new media way. And so the biggest thing that like I really talked to our CEOs about is like, you've got to approach the you have to approach new media with new media thinking, new media people, that kind of thing. And it really it's a remarkably opposite world. It's like, you know, it's like you're landing on Mars and you're like, well, what the fuck happened to gravity?

• 2:59:47John Coogan?

  Different.

• 2:59:49Speaker 11

  And you can't even say, well, no, gravity is different here because it's like, no, no, gravity just is. Like, I can't deal with the fact that that's just that's just the truth.

• 2:59:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, we would love to keep talking about media.

• 3:00:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:03Jordi Hays?

  Very few things that that we enjoy.

• 3:00:06John Coogan?

  We should ring the gong.

• 3:00:07Jordi Hays?

  But we know you have a late you got late fees if you're late to meetings. So this gong is for the whole A6CT team.

• 3:00:14John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:00:16Jordi Hays?

  And we won't keep you any longer, but come back on again soon and congratulations.

• 3:00:21John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 3:00:22Speaker 11

  Great to see you guys.

• 3:00:23John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. And with that, we need to check in on the

• 3:00:30Jordi Hays?

  Eric just said that they're good for the 10 bucks, Torreberg. He says, you've got to, you know, he's one minute late to his next meeting.

• 3:00:38John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. They have a late fee.

• 3:00:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, for those that don't know, Andreessen Partners, if they're late to

• 3:00:48John Coogan?

  Do they have phones too? If they have phones out, they get fined?

• 3:00:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, but it's late if you're late to a meeting with a founder that you're looking to invest in. Or you're just meeting, you gotta pay if you're late.

• 3:01:00John Coogan?

  Well, we should check in with Tyler. There were some rumblings about a change to Claude Code.

• 3:01:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay, so basically what happened was, okay, so when you get a Claude subscription, right, there's Pro and Max.

• 3:01:14Speaker 02

  You get like Claude Code credits, basically. And so what was going on was there's like third-party harnesses. So there's one open code. There's like a bunch of these. And they would basically use the credits that you get from Claude Code or from your Claude subscription. Like use, and it's like they're like, you know, open source, agentic harnesses, whatever. So Anthropic stopped that. So you can't use your base, you can't use your subscription as like the credits. You have to use the actual API.

• 3:01:43John Coogan?

  The actual API, okay.

• 3:01:45Speaker 02

  That's like the main thing. It's like not, to me, it doesn't seem that crazy of a thing because you can still use it with API.

• 3:01:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, is it, is it an exchange rate thing, maybe? Like if I'm on Claude Pro or Claude Max, am I getting on the, on a per-dollar basis, more tokens than I would if I, okay.

• 3:02:03Speaker 02

  Yes, that's why there's like a lot of arbitrage, because

• 3:02:06John Coogan?

  They were getting arbed. They said, no more arbing us.

• 3:02:09Speaker 02

  You can think of like, Claude Code is going to get much better if more people use it, right? Because it's like an RL environment, basically. So the value of the data

• 3:02:16John Coogan?

  So this shouldn't be incentivizing people to go elsewhere, but they are still allowing people to go elsewhere, just at the, at the consistent rate, API rate.

• 3:02:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you can still like, it's like bring your own key. You can do that.

• 3:02:27John Coogan?

  Okay, that doesn't seem like too

• 3:02:28Speaker 02

  It's not that crazy, but people are very mad. They're canceling their Claude.

• 3:02:31John Coogan?

  People are mad, mad at Claude. So sad. Oh, well, I'm sure that they will figure it out and the fun will will continue. Oh, we do have to cover another story in the AI world. Logan Kilpatrick, friend of the show over at Google, he said, I'm happy to share that we, the Google AI Studio team, are now sponsoring Tailwind CSS, the project that had to lay off three people, and it was very dramatic because it was 75% of the team, but their business model was not really working because they were selling templates, which of course could be assembled by AI agents in the modern era.

• 3:03:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I love this.

• 3:03:10John Coogan?

  Logan said, honored to support and find ways to do more together to help the ecosystem of builders. And I said, you drop this king. And I gave him the crown, Mario, holding the crown. If you scroll down, you should see it.

• 3:03:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, this is great.

• 3:03:21John Coogan?

  That's me.

• 3:03:22Jordi Hays?

  I expected this, I expected this to happen pretty quickly. I'm glad, I'm glad Logan made this move.

• 3:03:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:28Jordi Hays?

  And I think a handful of others did as well. So hopefully Tailwind can hire back the handful of engineers that they were forced to let go.

• 3:03:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:38Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, this should give them some more predictability while they figure out the next chapter.

• 3:03:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, in other news, OpenAI is reserving $50 billion for a stock grant pool.

• 3:03:52John Coogan?

  Jack Ryan says, 500 billion company doing 13 billion in revenue, projecting 50 billion in equity comp is so good. So price of

• 3:03:59Jordi Hays?

  Price of SF real estate is going up.

• 3:04:01John Coogan?

  Price of the AI researcher going up, but they have the money to distribute. That is a big equity pool, but it's an opportunity to join pre-IPO, get some shares and hopefully do well for yourself. Well, thank you so much for watching the show and tuning in today. We will be back

• 3:04:18Jordi Hays?

  First week in the books.

• 3:04:19John Coogan?

  Pacific on Monday.

• 3:04:21Jordi Hays?

  Only three more sleeps until we're back.

• 3:04:24John Coogan?

  Spotify and subscribe to our newsletter at tbpn.com. And with that, we'll say goodbye and have a great

• 3:04:30Jordi Hays?

  Have an amazing weekend.

• 3:04:31John Coogan?

  Thank you for watching.

• 3:04:32Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 3:04:33John Coogan?

  See you Monday. Goodbye.