Tech Turns to Mining, Meta VR Layoffs, Thinking Machines Shakeup | Matthew Prince, Chirantan Desai, Delian Asparouhov, Deepak Pathak, David Tearse, Blake Resnick

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (01:30) - Big Tech Turns to Mining (12:09) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (21:44) - Thinking Machines Loses Top Executives (29:24) - NYC Sauna Wars (38:46) - Meta VR Layoffs (57:12) - Chirantan "CJ" Desai, appointed President and CEO of MongoDB in November 2025, discusses the company's reintroduction in San Francisco, emphasizing its evolution to support AI-driven applications. He highlights MongoDB's growth to over 60,000 customers, attributing this to its agility in handling unstructured data like images and videos, which is crucial for modern AI applications. Desai also mentions the company's strategic acquisitions, such as Voyage, to enhance AI capabilities, and expresses confidence in cloud providers' ability to meet computing demands, ensuring MongoDB's continued innovation and scalability. (01:07:55) - Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, discusses the €14 million fine imposed by Italy's communications watchdog, AGCOM, for allegedly failing to block access to pirated content via Cloudflare's services. He explains that the fine stems from a law allowing media executives to blacklist websites, requiring companies like Cloudflare to remove them globally within 30 minutes—a mandate he criticizes as overreaching and impractical. Prince expresses concern over the broader implications of such laws, emphasizing the potential for censorship and the challenges they pose to maintaining an open and free internet. (01:33:47) - Delian Asparouhov, a Bulgarian-born entrepreneur and investor, is a Partner at Founders Fund and Co-Founder and President of Varda Space Industries, which focuses on manufacturing in space. In the conversation, he discusses his pattern of investing during the holiday season, noting that over the past nine years, he has signed term sheets within 48 hours of Christmas Day in seven of those years. He attributes this to the quieter environment during the holidays, which facilitates focused negotiations with founders, and mentions that this period allows for setting clear deadlines, such as requiring deals to be signed by New Year's, making it a convenient time for both investors and founders to engage in discussions. (01:55:55) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:07:01) - Deepak Pathak, CEO and co-founder of Skild AI, is developing a general-purpose robot brain capable of controlling various robotic forms, from humanoids to quadrupeds, with a single system. In the conversation, he discusses the company's recent $1.4 billion funding round, valuing Skild AI at $14 billion, and emphasizes the importance of integrating robots into everyday environments alongside humans to handle the unpredictability of real-world scenarios. He also highlights the challenges in robotics due to the scarcity of data, contrasting it with fields like language and vision, and explains Skild AI's approach of learning from human videos and simulations to overcome this hurdle. (02:16:56) - David Tearse, co-founder and CEO of Karman Industries, discusses the launch of their Heat Processing Unit (HPU), a cooling system designed for gigawatt-scale AI data centers. The HPU utilizes supercritical CO₂ to efficiently manage heat, reducing energy consumption by at least 25% compared to existing solutions, and offers a modular 10-megawatt design that decreases mechanical yard space by about 80%, accelerating deployment times. Tearse also highlights the potential for waste heat recovery, including converting excess heat back into electricity or providing heating to nearby communities, emphasizing the environmental and operational benefits of their technology. (02:35:53) - Blake Resnick, founder and CEO of BRINC Drones, began his engineering career with internships at McLaren Automotive, Tesla Motors, and DJI Inc. In the conversation, he discusses BRINC's development of drones designed for public safety, including the LEMUR, which assists SWAT teams by flying indoors, breaking glass, and enabling two-way communication. He also highlights the company's growth, noting that approximately 20% of SWAT teams in the U. S. are utilizing BRINC's drones, and shares plans for expanding their applications to include rapid response to 911 calls and integration with emergency medical services. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You're watching TBPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Thursday, January 15th, 2026. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital. Jordy has a new set of animations. The soundboard is growing in complexity every day. There's a horse that walks all the way across the screen. And yes, guests can see that when they are calling in to.

• 0:26Jordi Hays?

  To be clear, to be clear, if we flashbang a guest, their entire screen is going white.

• 0:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 0:31Jordi Hays?

  Along with yours, along with ours, we're all in it together.

• 0:34John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 0:36Jordi Hays?

  It's somebody's birthday. It's Bobby, Bobby's birthday.

• 0:39John Coogan?

  Oh, happy birthday, happy birthday. Anyone who's thinking about getting a gift for Bobby, get him ram.

• 0:46Jordi Hays?

  Get him ram. I want every single person.

• 0:48John Coogan?

  Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. A little hot on the soundboard today, but.

• 0:58Jordi Hays?

  That's right. We're feeling good.

• 1:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we have a.

• 1:02John Coogan?

  We have a massive lineup. Uh, we have six CEOs joining the stream today. We have MongoDB, Cloudflare, Varda, Skilled, Karman Industries and Brink Drones. We're going to talk about the DJI ban on drones. Uh, we got to add Matthew, uh, we got to add Blake Resnick to the linear lineup today. Linear, of course, meet the system from modern software development. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Um, so, uh, in the news today, Tesla is sharing that they made a ton of progress on their lithium refinery. And then simultaneously, AWS did a deal with Rio Tinto to buy a bunch of copper.

• 1:42John Coogan?

  Not that much copper, we'll get into how much, but, uh, they're sort of underwriting a new, a new chemical process for refining copper. Uh, and it's all just sort of interesting that, uh, you know, Marc Andreessen published the software is eating the world story back in 2011. And I, I think. Even the folks in tech who took that seriously were saying, oh yeah, of course. Well, that just means that.

• 2:05Jordi Hays?

  I didn't take it seriously. I took it literally.

• 2:07John Coogan?

  Took it literally, yeah. But the people that took it seriously were thinking, okay, well, you know, you're you're going past just the the the first wave of the internet, the newspapers on the on websites, that type of stuff. And yes, we're going to get the Ubers. We're going to get, you know, more and more tech companies that are consumer facing or business facing, and you might see some transformation in legal services, financial services, logistics, airlines will be using apps to let you book. But we're now in the era where the tech companies are starting to vertically integrate so deep that they own the mines and they own the refineries. And it's not just that they're actually building software for the mining.

• 2:52Jordi Hays?

  It's not software, it's technology eating the world.

• 2:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And it's it's a new layer of of vertical integration that sort of just crept up on me because it wasn't an issue until the AI boom really necessitated massive industrial scale build outs, new industrial policy, which admittedly can't turn on a dime, but we're now two, three years into the chat GPT boom, into the AI boom, the data center build outs are getting bigger. We're seeing bottlenecks all over the place, whether it's chip shortages or energy shortages. And so, you know, the companies like Tesla, AWS, a lot of other folks are are really looking deep into the supply chain, all the way into the ground, into literally eating the world. Because I see mining as as sort

• 3:37John Coogan?

  of terraforming. I see it in in some ways as as literally eating the world, like you said. Before we move on, let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits, and HR, built to evolve with modern, small and medium sized businesses. So. Amazon's buying the first new copper produced in America in over a decade. It's a very exciting project and Tesla now has a Texas facility that can convert raw ore directly into battery-grade lithium hydroxide. It's a more efficient process. We can get into that. Tesla originally broke ground on this lithium refinery operation in May of 2023. It feels like they were sort of quiet about it, but now they're getting a lot louder.

• 4:18John Coogan?

  Obviously, the narrative around China controlling 90% of rare earth extraction and rare earth elements has been in the news and this is sort of their response.

• 4:31Jordi Hays?

  That shot with the Cybertruck driving by.

• 4:33John Coogan?

  It's good. It's good. There's voiceover. We should, we should watch that video in a little bit more detail. Can we pull it up with some audio when we have a second? So this facility should deliver.

• 4:42Speaker 03

  This refinery is the first spodumene to lithium hydroxide refinery in North America. We're deploying a new technology platform that is inherently much more environmentally friendly and cleaner. It's a simpler process.

• 4:55John Coogan?

  It's not that big of a facility and this should be able to create enough lithium for 500,000 vehicles a year, EVs a year, maybe a million a year, I've heard. Now Tesla is shipping 1.65 million, so this won't be 100%, but you copy paste this two, three times and you got enough coverage for all, for the entire Tesla fleet.

• 5:18Speaker 04

  Take it through a kiln and cooler. From there, we take it through an alkaline leach and additional purification steps. Take it into crystallization and produce battery-grade lithium hydroxide. Our process is more sustainable than traditional methods and eliminates hazardous byproducts and instead produces a co-product named annelime used in concrete mixes.

• 5:40Speaker 03

  From breaking ground in 2023 to running rock through the kiln in 2024 to start a full integrated plant startup.

• 5:48John Coogan?

  Guy looks so tired. He's just like, yeah, it's been, it's been great working for Elon. Hi, I love it.

• 5:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's been relatively relaxed here at the site.

• 5:58John Coogan?

  The, you know, we sleep in the factory. In this case, it's just dirt, but sleeping in the dirt, surprisingly comfortable.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  This refinery really enables us to have access to the critical minerals for energy storage, for battery manufacturing, and ultimately for EV growth. And it enables us to accelerate Tesla's mission by regionalizing supply chains for battery minerals and materials, by providing jobs, by cutting emissions from the transportation network that's required for those supply chains. That really allows us to usher in energy independence for North America.

• 6:30John Coogan?

  Who would have thought that Texas would be the home of EV domination? I know, narrative violation. California really dropped the ball. So Tesla's shipping 1.65 million, that was a little lower than the previous year. I think they were up at 1.7 million, but you get a couple of those facilities and it should be enough to cover everything that they need. There's also, there's been a whole bunch of news around rare earth minerals generally. Last year, a company called Ironic Mineral Technologies made a large discovery of 16 different types of minerals in Utah late last year. This was in December. As we do. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 7:12John Coogan?

  It has been funny, there have been rumors about this, but they found a huge deposit of all these different minerals. Obviously, everyone's worried about China controlling 90% of the supply of rare earths, but we need to actually get these minerals out of the ground, refine them, and so that's where projects like that come into play. Amazon's partnership with Rio Tinto is a little bit different. They're not fully vertically integrated like Tesla is, but they are partnering with Rio Tinto. And Rio Tinto had been working on a new method of refining low-grade copper deposits. So basically, like, there's a fair amount of copper in the ground, but there's a lot of dirt, a lot of other stuff that you have to process out.

• 7:53John Coogan?

  That can be very expensive, but because of the data center expansion exploding, the price of copper has, I think, nearly doubled in the past two years. And so copper is not the main ingredient to an AI data center or token factory, but it is important because... The biggest data centers use tens of thousands of metric tons of copper to move electricity around. So you need wires. There's copper in circuit boards. There's wire in the, there's copper in the transformers that move electricity around. And there's tons of miscellaneous electrical components all over a data center that need copper. So this particular AWS Rio Tinto deal is only 1,400 metric tons over four years. I don't even think that's enough for a single

• 8:35John Coogan?

  AWS data center. But it's allowing Rio Tinto to underwrite this sort of risky new process methodology that if it works and they get the price down on this new process, then they can apply that to tons more copper reserves that's locked up in, you know, messy, messy ore that otherwise would be uneconomical to refine. So 70% of the global supply of copper is currently locked away in ore that's not economical to refine into actual copper right now. So if this new process technology works, you effectively triple the amount of copper, you triple the

• 9:19John Coogan?

  supply, and so price should fall. It's doubled. You triple the supply, maybe price comes down. Good news for anyone who's in the copper market trying to acquire.

• 9:29Jordi Hays?

  Rio Tinto, some quick backstories, one of the world's oldest, largest and oldest mining corporations with a history that spans over 150 years. Name was inspired by the Rio Tinto in southwestern Spain. But the founding, again, goes back to the mid 19th century. Spanish government was facing financial crisis and they started selling off their older mines. And so crazy story of just like a very old company, you know, continuing to be a key player in an entirely new tech trend.

• 10:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Rio Tinto has been in the news a ton. Also for lithium ion, they do some stuff there. They had one investment that I think they wrote down, then they spun another one up. They've been back and forth. Let's 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. XFreeze broke the Texas lithium ion, lithium refinery down a little bit more. It's the first in North America to convert the raw ore into battery-grade lithium hydroxide, skipping intermediate steps in the long term, probably more economical. It went from groundbreaking to first production in just 19 months, an unheard-of timeline at this scale.

• 10:48John Coogan?

  The process is cleaner, no hazardous waste, a useful byproduct that can be turned into concrete. The single refinery can supply lithium for over 500,000 EVs per year and directly challenges China's 60% grip on global lithium refining. Elon chimed in and said it sounded like, I saw another number that was maybe closer to a million, but either way, you do two or three of these and you're good for Tesla's supply chain. At least, maybe they sell it to other folks as well. And what comes out of this will actually be sent to another company and then back to Tesla, but they are vertically integrating. Chamath Palihapitiya called it. He predicted this. He says, "As we predicted in our annual predictions episode at the start of the year, unless someone shows up with super conductivity or carbon nanotubes, copper is the only game

• 11:33John Coogan?

  in town and AI is a huge demand driver for a very under-resourced material." So, he's taken a victory lap with his thesis on copper. Pretty, pretty good call, pretty cool that he has this clip here. So, in other news, let's tell you about graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher-quality software faster. And speaking of AI, there is turmoil in the trade wars, in the talent wars.

• 12:04Jordi Hays?

  Barrett is back.

• 12:06John Coogan?

  Barrett is back.

• 12:07Jordi Hays?

  So back.

• 12:08John Coogan?

  So, this is from Kylie Robinson over at Core Memory. She says, "Breaking thinking machines."

• 12:13Jordi Hays?

  Can we just give it up for Kylie for a second? Potential scoop athlete of the year.

• 12:19John Coogan?

  Huge.

• 12:20Jordi Hays?

  Putting up some crazy scoop.

• 12:21John Coogan?

  Crazy scoop.

• 12:22Jordi Hays?

  She had that anthropics, XAI drama last week.

• 12:26Jordi Hays?

  She's on an absolute tear. She's on an absolute tear.

• 12:30John Coogan?

  Yes. So she says, "Breaking, Thinking Machines has terminated its CTO, Barrett Zoff, due to unethical conduct." According to two sources familiar with the matter, CEO Mira Maroti announced the news in all hands with employees today. Sumit Chintala will be taking over as CEO. And Mira posted as well, confirming the news, she said, "We have parted ways with Barrett." Sumit will be taking the new CTO of Thinking Machines role. He is a brilliant and seasoned leader who has made important contributions to the AI field for over a decade, and he has been a major contributor to our team. We could not be more excited to have him take on this new responsibility.

• 13:11Jordi Hays?

  And Alex Heath actually has some new news.

• 13:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:15Jordi Hays?

  This broke 30 minutes ago. He says, "More Thinking Machine employees are in the process of joining OpenAI after three of the startup's co-founders rejoined yesterday."

• 13:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:26Jordi Hays?

  Of course, the Thinking Machine co-founders had previously been at OpenAI. But anyway, somewhat of a, not great, not great. The, I think, potentially more controversial news was that Thinking Machines has branded squat racks at the office.

• 13:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 13:46Jordi Hays?

  Ryan Peterson posted a photo.

• 13:48John Coogan?

  Ryan posted this.

• 13:48Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people, a lot of people took this as somewhat of a red flag, right? People say, you know, the sort of common guidance is, "Don't make merch until you're generating some real revenue."

• 13:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:59Jordi Hays?

  Right? And so if you take that further, it's like, maybe you shouldn't have.

• 14:02John Coogan?

  What was Ryan doing to get this photo?

• 14:05Jordi Hays?

  I think he just walked by.

• 14:07John Coogan?

  He's going journalist mode here. You see this? He's like, he's not in.

• 14:11Jordi Hays?

  So if you zoom in, you can see, these things look fantastic, so.

• 14:14John Coogan?

  Well, Ryan, you're outside.

• 14:16Jordi Hays?

  I'm somewhat.

• 14:16John Coogan?

  You're outside the Thinking Machines branded gym.

• 14:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm somewhat, I'm somewhat envious. These things look fantastic. I'm kind of mad that, that we didn't get the branded plates. But this coming out while losing, you know, half of your family.

• 14:35John Coogan?

  It has to be weird. I mean, how much have they raised? It was $2 billion at $12 billion? Something like that? I mean. It's gotta be so weird to start a company and on day one have enough money for a custom gym. That's just like unheard of. Like, you know, like normally you, you, you start your company in the garage and maybe there's a weight in the corner you can lift or kettlebell.

• 14:56Jordi Hays?

  One dumbbell.

• 14:57John Coogan?

  One kettlebell or something, but to just come in and say, yes, we're taking class A office on day one, uh, hiring a massive team, uh, bringing on six, six or seven co-founders.

• 15:10Jordi Hays?

  Atlas was saying, uh, like the other red flag is where are the, where are the 45? I think, I think I'm gonna assume they're just not in sight, you know, like you can't see them, right? They would be, they would be mounted, they would be mounted lower.

• 15:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:23Jordi Hays?

  Right on the rack. Uh, but, uh,

• 15:27John Coogan?

  Never change. Oh.

• 15:31Jordi Hays?

  But, uh,

• 15:32John Coogan?

  So funny.

• 15:33Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, so, so.

• 15:34John Coogan?

  So rude.

• 15:36Jordi Hays?

  But in case you forgot, Andrew Tullock left Thinking Machines in, uh, uh, Q4 of last year.

• 15:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:44Jordi Hays?

  Zuck had been trying to poach him.

• 15:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:46Jordi Hays?

  And, and offered, uh, increasing amounts of money till, uh, and, and Andrew, I, uh, the, the sense is that Andrew was like, you know, I can't be bought.

• 15:57John Coogan?

  But he, he needed the money.

• 16:00John Coogan?

  He needed, he needed, he, he, he had a shopping cart filled with Chrome Hearts Supreme and he, and he was like, wow, like, uh, my, my, my next outfit's gonna run me 500 mil. I, I, I gotta get a new job. I can't afford it. I can't afford my lifestyle. Maybe it was a case of lifestyle inflation. They talk about that. You know, he's just like, okay, I got, I got a new, I got a new SP3 Daytona. Now I got the Valkyrie and like,

• 16:26Jordi Hays?

  And they gave him the F80 allocation.

• 16:29John Coogan?

  I need some cash. I gotta get a new job. It's just not, it's just not covering the bills over here.

• 16:35Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, do you remember the final amount that Meta paid? It was like, uh, cause, cause I always appreciate.

• 16:40John Coogan?

  There were a lot of rumors. It was in the billions.

• 16:41Jordi Hays?

  Like my, my, in my head, it was like Andrew was like, yeah, like I, I'm really like honored that you would make such a big offer, Zach, a billion dollars, but like unfortunately like, I'm very mission a lot, you know, I'm mission driven. There's really no price that I would take to leave the company that I started and Zuck's like, two billion.

• 17:02Speaker 05

  Well, so I think, I think all the rumors were actually from the summer when there was like the, like the, all of the talent wars going on. Um, so first there was, I think it was just one billion and then

• 17:12John Coogan?

  Just one.

• 17:13Speaker 05

  There were rumors of three and a half. And that being turned down.

• 17:17John Coogan?

  That's a lot.

• 17:18Speaker 05

  But then later in the year, then he eventually

• 17:20John Coogan?

  Okay, so people kind of assume that the rumor is true because, uh, because it, uh, he eventually made the move.

• 17:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, but I mean, it's not necessarily higher than three and a half, right? Because now we're seeing more people leave, like, why are they leaving?

• 17:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:31Speaker 05

  You know?

• 17:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:33Speaker 05

  It's, I mean, it's very unclear, right?

• 17:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think the, the, the actual estimate was like something like, uh, the journal had reported one and a half billion over six years.

• 17:42John Coogan?

  I mean, there is just some risk to starting a company with six co-founders. Like, that's just, that's just, that is unorthodox.

• 17:50Jordi Hays?

  Unorthodox? So some amount of churn.

• 17:52John Coogan?

  And they still got John Schulman, right? Who's absolute legend, co-founder of OpenAI.

• 17:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, like all, everyone who's still there or everyone who was there.

• 17:59John Coogan?

  Goated.

• 17:59Speaker 05

  Like, they're all goated. And it's like, super hard to, one of my buddies, he's like, super smart. He was trying to get a job there. It's like insanely hard. You have to be actual goat to work there.

• 18:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 18:07Speaker 05

  So, but you know, now they're leaving.

• 18:09John Coogan?

  It's a bit of a goat pen.

• 18:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 18:12John Coogan?

  Goat farm. Yeah, I mean, Dylan Patel was really excited about this. He said, uh, can I invest in Mirror's company? God damn. Two more goats going there back in February 6th of 2025. So a little under a year ago, uh, they're, everyone's saying Schulman, but the other is as arguable, uh, just is arguable, just as if not more goat. And David Holes says, I'm calling it Maradi Heavy Industries.

• 18:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, at one point, um, one of my buddies who works at a big lab, he was saying, at that time, Thing Machines has like the best team.

• 18:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:47Speaker 05

  Like any of the big labs.

• 18:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, so what, uh, how would you describe what they do? Because, uh, we, we've heard a number of different, uh, you know, pitches from them, products from them. And some of them seem like I you know, this could easily make a couple billion dollars a year.

• 19:03Speaker 05

  Yes, they've shipped a bunch of blog posts, but they also, I think, I think their only like real product so far has been Tinker.

• 19:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 19:09Speaker 05

  Which was basically like.

• 19:10John Coogan?

  Fine tuning, right?

• 19:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, API for fine tuning. It made it very easy. I think it was a super good product. People who've who've used it like really like it.

• 19:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, so I mean.

• 19:17Jordi Hays?

  Hasn't the general focus been enterprise?

• 19:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 19:19Jordi Hays?

  And chat GPT, everyone at OpenAI has been very obvious, like this is the year, this is the year they're focused on enterprise this year.

• 19:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think the idea was like RL environments for specific like businesses.

• 19:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So you get a really great fine tune. I know, obviously, OpenAI has a similar business line that probably competes directly. But, you know, being a pure play can work out. We've seen what Anthropic's done. It didn't seem like a crazy, crazy strategy.

• 19:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, John Schulman is like one of the OG like main RL guys.

• 19:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:51Speaker 05

  The team is like perfectly suited for this.

• 19:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, so I don't know, maybe smaller team, more focused, more, you know, a couple of big deals, they start finding their footing. How AGI pilled is Thinking Machines? Were they on our chart? I don't think they were, right? SSI was on the chart of needs AGI, is AGI pilled? I don't think Thinking Machines made the chart.

• 20:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 20:18John Coogan?

  How how AGI pilled is Thinking Machines based on what we know?

• 20:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say because it's like, okay, compared to like the average person, they're obviously way more AGI pilled. But but the idea of like doing you're doing RL for business, like AGI, it's like G is general.

• 20:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:34Speaker 05

  So if you're just like focusing on specific like business use cases, that's not very general, right? You can imagine someone is just like building the massive model, that they're just going to one shot everything. That's much more like AGI pilled.

• 20:45John Coogan?

  Is anyone doing ABI, Artificial Business Intelligence? I think that's what we have.

• 20:50Speaker 05

  Internet Business Machine.

• 20:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, ACI, Artificial Corporate Intelligence, AVI, Artificial Voice Intelligence, 11 Labs. Build intelligent, real time conversational agents, reimagine human technology, interaction with with 11 Labs.

• 21:06Jordi Hays?

  I think the question is, there was already immense amount of pressure and like a really, really, really high expectations on Thinking Machines around what they put out first, right? I don't think these these people leaving, maybe it makes it harder to deliver, right, on those expectations? But the expectations are still sky high. I did feel like.

• 21:27Jordi Hays?

  Kind of rough messaging, very, very rough messaging, right? Unclear coming out, you know, pushing this unethical conduct angle. People at OpenAI have, obviously they're biased, but they've denied it. Susan Zhang, who's at DeepMind, said feels like the type of character assassination leak you put out when you find out one of your co-founders might be splitting off. And Ruins says 100% sneaky PR move. So.

• 22:01John Coogan?

  And Sigil says there's more drama in AI than The Real Housewives.

• 22:05Speaker 05

  In the Wired article, the quote is, "A source close to Thinking Machines alleged that Zoff had shared confidential company information with competitors." So there's like that, and then there's the like.

• 22:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and to me, that's just like, okay, it sounds like he had been in conversations with OpenAI.

• 22:23John Coogan?

  He could have just been complaining about the lack of 45-pound weights, and that is technically confidential.

• 22:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:28John Coogan?

  He shares it with somebody else. They overhear it at a coffee shop, and they're like, "You shared confidential information."

• 22:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but that type of allegation is like, "You guys talked about AI. You shared confidential information."

• 22:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:41Jordi Hays?

  So anyways.

• 22:44John Coogan?

  Well, the scoops will continue.

• 22:46Jordi Hays?

  It is played out, I'm sure we'll get more.

• 22:49John Coogan?

  What did Fleeting Bits say? Fleeting Bits said, "Some quick thoughts on Barrett Zoff and Matt and Sean Holtz. Going back to OpenAI, Barrett was the vice president post-training at OpenAI before he left for Thinking Machines. He left OpenAI in September of 2024. Barrett would have probably initially had options for about 10% to 30% of Thinking Machines? That's insane. They had six co-founders. How could that be so high? Post-training was one of the more valuable skills at launch, I suppose. Okay. The seed round was $2 billion at $12 billion. So this would mean that he would have options now for around 8% to 25% of the current company. This seems all hypothetical here. There were rumors back in November that Thinking Machines was in talks to raise at $50 to $60 billion, so this puts his equity at $4 billion to $15 billion valuation.

• 23:35John Coogan?

  Thinking Machines could probably exit somewhere at between 30 and 60 today? Who has that money? I don't know, maybe Nvidia buys them or something. At least at some point in the over, over the next two years, I think the most likely acquirers would probably be Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Amazon, Nvidia. Okay, large cap company that wants to build a frontier model, Bear would have been just over his one year cliff. So assuming he was not fired for cause or thinking he doesn't want to litigate, he still has about one to three and a half billion.

• 24:05Jordi Hays?

  That part's incorrect. How does that math work?

• 24:07Speaker 05

  I don't know.

• 24:08John Coogan?

  Uh, one quarter of.

• 24:09Jordi Hays?

  Twenty-five percent vested.

• 24:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, so, so one quarter of the equity at a, so this person's assuming that, that he got ten to thirty percent of the company. And that the value of the company currently is sixty.

• 24:20Jordi Hays?

  This assumes that it's a one-year vest.

• 24:22John Coogan?

  Well, no, one quarter of.

• 24:23Jordi Hays?

  He's assuming he.

• 24:24John Coogan?

  A four-year vest.

• 24:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:25John Coogan?

  He's over a one-year cliff.

• 24:27Jordi Hays?

  Actual.

• 24:27John Coogan?

  And so you're looking at a billion dollars of equity. Would be interesting to know how his OpenAI pay package, the rumor is that OpenAI set aside about fifty billion for the equity pool for the new PBC. So they can afford a decent pay package for him. My guess is that it was personality dispute or disagreement over the commercial direction of the company with mirror executive team. And if there's something behind the unethical conduct claim, it could just be a game of telephone over him talking to the other labs and mirror interpreting it as him disclosing trade secrets. Huh. Interesting. Well, let me tell you about app loving, profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over one billion daily active users and grow your business today. Uh, it's called Thinking Machine now because there's only one left.

• 25:12John Coogan?

  No, there are three left, so it's still plural, Rahul, but that's a funny post nevertheless.

• 25:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, I, I.

• 25:23Jordi Hays?

  Read, reading into this, I mean, uh, the, there's got to be some real excitement on, uh, the, you know, OpenAI has just been outflows, outflows, outflows. Getting some of these superstars back.

• 25:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:35Jordi Hays?

  Onboard.

• 25:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 25:36Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it's got to be good for.

• 25:36John Coogan?

  So is this what the elves and Valinor, do we know what Rune was posting about? Cause we learned that Rune posts the elves have left for Valinor every two years apparently.

• 25:47Speaker 05

  Okay, well, he posted it once before, yeah, in, um, in twenty twenty-four.

• 25:50John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 25:51Speaker 05

  About in, I think, what was it, Ja- January twenty-second?

• 25:54John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 25:54Speaker 05

  So, yeah, so, so now, um, he posted this like, uh, on the twelfth, so three days ago. I think most people have now taken it to mean, or to be about this, right? Uh, people leaving, thinking machines going back to OpenAI. But I think there's a couple of ways you can look at it, right? So if you look at it in the context of. Uh, of the, of the last time he said this, it was the exact same quote that Els had left for Valinor. Um, like, okay, what is Valinor in Lord of the Rings, right? Valinor is where elves go, um, so they don't like diminish or like they don't like kind of fade away.

• 26:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:29Speaker 05

  So it's okay. What does that mean? Like maybe it's you're just basically securing like massive wealth. Right?

• 26:35John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 26:36Speaker 05

  You're not, you're not gonna be diminished by inflation or something slowly, you know, dying.

• 26:41Jordi Hays?

  Or, or the other way to read that is like you go to, you go to like a, one of these newer labs and you could be a superstar, but your, your abilities could fade away with time, right? Cause you just don't have the scale or the resources.

• 26:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 26:53Speaker 05

  Yeah. But so, so I think in the 2024 context, uh, Valinor actually was the Neo Labs, right? Because you can basically go start a company, be the co-founder, you guys raise at 12 billion. You're just like, let's go. Like, yeah, I just secured insane amount, like massive bag.

• 27:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:11Speaker 05

  But then now, uh,

• 27:12John Coogan?

  Now OpenAI is now.

• 27:13Speaker 05

  Context, OpenAI is now Valinor, right?

• 27:15John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 27:15Speaker 05

  They, they're setting aside 50 billion just for pay packages.

• 27:18John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 27:19Speaker 05

  If you go back, I mean, you're doing pretty well.

• 27:21John Coogan?

  Another bag.

• 27:21Speaker 05

  It's pretty safe, right? You don't, you don't have this startup, you know, you're not sure if it's gonna work or not. Um, so it's kind of a circular thing going on.

• 27:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:30Speaker 05

  There's other ways you can even read the most recent one, right? There's, there's like the billionaires leaving California.

• 27:35John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 27:36Speaker 05

  Maybe Texas, Miami, that's Valinor.

• 27:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:39Speaker 05

  Um, you could say the agents are Val, are, are the elves.

• 27:43Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, maybe Barrett was so afraid of the billionaire tax act that he's like, I don't want to be a billionaire. Hmm. I'd rather, I'd rather not be a billionaire than give 5%. Just give me a, just give me a simple hundred million dollar pay package. I'm a humble guy. That's it. I don't want to be worried about that. AGI is coming.

• 28:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, the new pay package.

• 28:06Jordi Hays?

  Money won't matter.

• 28:07John Coogan?

  Should be 999 million.

• 28:09Jordi Hays?

  He's like, I don't, I don't want to deal with the headache of, you know, paying out taxes on unrealized cap gains.

• 28:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:15Jordi Hays?

  I'll be bankrupted.

• 28:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so yeah, Rune is talking about the framing around this before cognitive restructuring. Important people are leaving after cognitive restructuring. They're being fired for unethical conduct. The mom and dad are fighting. More The Machine employees are in the process of joining OpenAI after three of the startup co-founders, all ex-OpenAI, rejoined yesterday. Three? I thought it was only two that rejoined. But it does seem like-

• 28:46Jordi Hays?

  It's two. They're counting in, Drew.

• 28:48John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. Rejoined, but he didn't rejoin OpenAI, so I don't know if that would count.

• 28:54Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:55John Coogan?

  It's a little odd.

• 28:55Jordi Hays?

  You're just saying what? Yeah.

• 28:57John Coogan?

  Anyway, it does. It does seem like the talent wars are unending in the AI race. We got to talk about saunas. We got to talk about the sauna wars because they're heating up and Vanity Fair has a piece on it. So before we read this, let me tell you about Consol. Consol builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

• 29:21Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Everyone's focused on the AI wars. Not enough attention going to the sauna wars. The real heated rivalry is at the bathhouse.

• 29:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 29:31Jordi Hays?

  From Bathhouse to Other Ship to Alter, a wave of bathhouses in New York City are popping up just blocks apart, igniting a war of zen. And this, this is especially relevant to the TVPN team because-

• 29:45John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 29:46Jordi Hays?

  We've been in somewhat of a sauna war ourself, which we'll get into at some point in the story. The Flatiron District in Manhattan has been a center of nouveau wellness for around 15 years with its many boutique fitness classes, gyms, acupuncturists, and stretching and recovery centers. Now a wave of bathhouses that offer dry heat and cold plunges face off in a few blocks. There is Bathhouse on West 22nd with Other Ship two blocks away, and Alter set to open this winter. You could walk between all three in mere minutes. Williamsburg has its own cluster, right, in parallels-

• 30:19John Coogan?

  It's like a supercluster. Yeah.

• 30:23Jordi Hays?

  With the original location of Bathhouse and Other Ship that followed. Welcome to the sauna wars, where dedicated bathhouses compete with members' clubs like West Village's Continuum, which costs $40,000 per year, that has a bathhouse setup, and the Financial District co-working space, WSA's Wet Lounge as well. Co-working space with a wet lounge.

• 30:44Jordi Hays?

  Not something you hear about every day. The fitness chain TMPL has a whole subway ad campaign entirely around their bathhouse facilities, featuring women in swimsuits reclining in a suggestive way that one doesn't really find in saunas in real life.

• 30:59Delian Asparouhov?

  Very odd.

• 31:00Jordi Hays?

  They join stalwarts like the Spa 88 in Air in Manhattan, Citywell in World Spa in Brooklyn, Spa Castle in Queens, and of course, the Russian and Turkish baths in the East Village, which is the sort of place newcomers are brought to see a slice of the real New York City. It's usually teeming with people, some getting waxed by bushels of oak leaves in a treatment called Plazza, and has two owners who rotate weeks of ownership. That's interesting. That's a funny concept. It's no frills and even a little gritty. For those who are used to conveniences such as booking ahead, there's none of that to be found. They do have a nod to modernity with an active TikTok account featuring guest endorsements, recently highlighting Uma Thurman wrapped in a pashmina and calling it "one of the

• 31:43Jordi Hays?

  greatest, best New York institutions." "The first time I went to 10th Street Baths was in 2007. I love the authenticity and how it made me feel. I would find my way back there when I felt depleted, underslept, whatever it might be. I would come out feeling great," says James O'Reilly, who is one of the founders of the co-working space Noi House. His latest project is the new Lore Bathing Club. This is where you go if you want to cultivate lore in your life, I guess. Founded alongside restaurateur Adam Elzer, Lore takes some inspiration from the Russian and Turkish baths, as well as the communal sweat traditions of Europe and Asia, and drops it into a 6,200 square foot space finished in travertine and white oak in NoHo.

• 32:27Jordi Hays?

  The bath world is quite a scene, one where skincare brands such as Pharrell Williams, Human Race send out a press release to announce they're temporarily supplying Lore locker rooms with their signature 7-D gel sets. What is a 7-D gel set? Tyler.

• 32:43John Coogan?

  I have no idea.

• 32:44Jordi Hays?

  Other chip is hosting comedy nights. Alter will be selling bathing suits that are custom made in Brazil and has hired a lighting designer who has worked with Billie Eilish. So you're always feeling your best and comfortable and tan. Jafari says with a laugh while giving a tour of the space. There's already a waitlist of more than 500 people for their membership, which will cost $275 per month upfront for $500 worth of credits to be used towards sauna and cold plunge, but also IVs and shots of vitamins, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, red light, NAD compression and PEMF. Kohler has an indoor sauna with a list price of 120,000, an outdoor sauna with a list price of 95,000, and even launched a collaboration with the Wellness Club Remedy Place for

• 33:27Jordi Hays?

  an at-home 39-degree ice bath for $20,000.

• 33:31John Coogan?

  Do you think Brian Johnson will get into IRL experiences, physical locations? I know, was it Dave Asprey did that for a while? There were a series of bulletproof coffees.

• 33:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's one, that one in Santa Monica.

• 33:45John Coogan?

  And there's been a few, like, locations where you can go and they have a hyperbaric chamber, you can get your, your blood tested, like a variety of, sort of, health and wellness, like biohacker hubs. Some of them.

• 34:02Jordi Hays?

  I think Brian would make a nightclub bathhouse.

• 34:05John Coogan?

  Probably.

• 34:06Jordi Hays?

  Because he would, he would want to, you know, his new thing is love as the ultimate longevity hack.

• 34:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:11Jordi Hays?

  And so, could see him doing something like that.

• 34:14John Coogan?

  It's such a, yes.

• 34:15Jordi Hays?

  It is a sauna boom reminiscent of the glut of boutique fitness studios that flooded the market in the wake of the success of SoulCycle. It used to be that you would go to a gym and it was outrageous to go to an expensive group class, says Jafari, but now there are 99 boutique fitness concepts in a four-mile radius. Still, there are not as many as the peak days pre-pandemic. Not every boutique fitness studio survived, let alone thrive like Solid Core and Tracy Anderson. Competition is always something we are aware of, says Emily Bent, Othership's co-founder and director of marketing. The saturation in North America for bathhouses is not even close to what it is in Europe. We're starting an industry and rising tides and all that.

• 34:54Jordi Hays?

  I have heard about Othership and what an insane business Othership is from a number of people, so not surprised to hear they're expanding. While the message from founders blissed out on 180-degree heat is one of bringing together community and good vibes, the reality can be cutthroat. Consider the case of Bath House, probably the most well-known of the businesses in the second wave of New York City sauna culture. Co-founders opened their first location in Williamsburg in 2019 and a second in Flatiron in 2024, both featuring sauna steam rooms, warm pools, and cold plunges. Goodman, the founders, saw the companies more as more approach through the model of working on large event production. You think

• 35:39Jordi Hays?

  like an experienced designer, so going to Bath House is not a monolithic experience, but more of a choose-your-own adventure. When it first opened, Bath House was jokingly called the Bitcoin Bath House as they used the heat generated from mining to warm the tubs. Which is, I've been to both of the Bath House locations in New York.

• 35:59John Coogan?

  Now they need to do LLM inference.

• 36:01Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 36:01John Coogan?

  This is a no-brainer. Like, everyone who was in crypto mining needed to pivot to AI. They should just do that. They already have all the infrastructure.

• 36:09Speaker 05

  This is the solution to the political problem. People are mad at data center power use, but if you have a nice bath house that you can go to for the public.

• 36:16John Coogan?

  Everyone's at the bath house constantly, talking to Claude or something. I imagine that the water use in the bath house is actually probably pretty significant. I imagine that they're draining the pools fairly often, so you get the water use issue back.

• 36:29Jordi Hays?

  I think they're probably draining them less than you would hope.

• 36:33John Coogan?

  Oh, that's not good.

• 36:36Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, the comments originally were like...

• 36:38John Coogan?

  There's a bunch of things I want to talk about. First, CrowdStrike, your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Second, we have a key question. Do you know who Uma Thurman is?

• 36:49Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 36:52John Coogan?

  Kill Bill? You've never seen Kill Bill? Tarantino? It's fantastic.

• 36:56Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I, I, yeah, I.

• 36:58John Coogan?

  Brutal.

• 37:00Jordi Hays?

  Also Pulp Fiction. I've seen Pulp Fiction. Anyways, the comments were like, oh, they're laundering money through Bitcoins.

• 37:06John Coogan?

  Wait, what?

• 37:07Jordi Hays?

  But it's just a fancy pool heater. Those jabs did not prepare them for what happened earlier this year when someone posted on Reddit, Reddit, "I noticed the hot tub and body temp tub were looking kinda dirty and gross. I thought it'd be fine, but then I ended up with a UTI."

• 37:23Jordi Hays?

  Not great. A UTI doesn't just walk across the river. If it was a problem, it would be a pool at a single location at one given day. There's 24-hour computer monitoring. So I'm glad that the Bitcoin heated pools are getting 24-hour monitoring and they're manually logged five times per day and we keep the logs. We are adjusting pH and chlorine at all times. Every drop of water at every pool turns over every 30 minutes. All the vessels have their own independent systems, so they don't mix. The water goes through a sand filter that takes out any particles up to two microns, like a receipt in their pocket or a tag that falls off. Then it goes through a UV filter, a big tank with three-foot-long light bulbs, a pure UV light. So they're going pretty hard.

• 38:07John Coogan?

  Cool. Well, vibe.co, we're D to C brands, B to C startups and AI companies advertising on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences and measure sales just like on Meta.

• 38:18Jordi Hays?

  Anyway.

• 38:19John Coogan?

  We got to be on Meta. We gotta talk about Meta because they just laid off 1,500 people in their MetaVerse division. It's 10% of their staff. It affects the company's AI glasses and other wearable products. The stock is up on the news.

• 38:36John Coogan?

  Obviously, 1,500 people is a ton. That's a lot of people. But they still have 14,000 people working on Reality Labs. So there's a question about like, what exactly will they be doing? How much does this represent a shift? They're, you know, the messaging has certainly shifted to augmented reality instead of virtual reality. But it feels like they will be continuing with a lot of stuff. The Wall Street Journal has a report here in December. Meta was, the Journal. reported that Meta was planning to make budget cuts to teams working on the Metaverse. Meta spokesperson said, "We said last month that we were shifting some of our investment from Metaverse towards wearables. This is part of that effort."

• 39:18John Coogan?

  And yeah, you see the Reality Labs team work on a bunch of different stuff. And it started as sort of, you know, the Oculus acquisition of VR headset. Then all of a sudden, it was Meta Ray Bans, which is, you know, mostly just a camera, certainly not a VR headset, but it feels like it's sold many more units. I actually don't know the precise numbers.

• 39:40Jordi Hays?

  I'm super curious how many of those 1,500 people will end up working in VR in their next role.

• 39:47John Coogan?

  Somewhere else?

• 39:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because it's just like, can the industry really

• 39:51John Coogan?

  Absorb that?

• 39:51Jordi Hays?

  Absorb that many people, right?

• 39:54John Coogan?

  I don't know. I mean, there's projects at Google and Samsung and Apple Vision Pro, obviously. And then there's a couple startups. But yeah, where do you go? I mean, I imagine that a lot of those people are just broad technologists and can work on anything because they're probably working on servers or supply chain or purchasing or marketing. Like, there's so much to do within Reality Labs. It's a massive organization. I mean, they ran like huge TV campaigns for the Oculus and they will probably continue to with a quest. A year after the name change in Pivot, the Journal reported that the company's flagship Metaverse product, called Horizon Worlds, was failing to catch on with users. It had less than 200,000 monthly active users and most so-called worlds were never visited by anyone at all.

• 40:37John Coogan?

  The company's presentations attempting to stoke enthusiasm for Horizon Worlds provided fodder for popular mocking internet memes. People were making fun of it. Yeah, the Horizon Worlds product-

• 40:48Jordi Hays?

  I still believe Meta is a fantastic name for Meta.

• 40:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you think Salesforce should rename? I wanted to ask Benny off that yesterday, if he's ever just gonna go Force.

• 40:58Jordi Hays?

  Metal Force.

• 40:58John Coogan?

  Just Force. Metal Force would be a good name. But yeah, I mean, he is moving past sales. He talks about Agent Force and Service Force and all the different groups he has. Maybe he's gotta change the name at some point. It'd be fun. But Salesforce is kind of a Lindy name. It's been around for so long.

• 41:11Jordi Hays?

  Who has the ticker AI?

• 41:13John Coogan?

  Uh, C3 or something? I don't know. Meta's been ramping up AI, spending on AI, pushing its capital expenditure to 72 billion last year with plans to accelerate that spending this year. It's also doled out offers worth tens of millions, tens and hundreds of millions of dollars to AI researchers and engineers and recently acquired a Singapore-based AI startup called Manus for more than 2 billion. The company's Ray-Ban smart glasses equipped with AI have also started to take off. The company sold more than 2 million pairs and has delayed the rollout of its newest glasses in Europe as it struggled to keep up with demand in the US. So, 2 million pairs of smart glasses, the Ray-Ban Metas, versus 200,000 monthly active users in Horizon Worlds.

• 41:57John Coogan?

  I wonder what the retention is on Ray-Ban, Meta Ray-Bans. Because if they're retaining less than 10%, then the actual MAU pool is lower.

• 42:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:09John Coogan?

  But it sort of seems like it's growing. I see people, I've started to see Instagram reels of people using the smart glasses.

• 42:15Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 42:16John Coogan?

  To do first-person videos and often prank videos. So, I think that there's actually a flywheel there that's stronger than what's happening in VR.

• 42:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The only, yeah, the thing that's interesting about not focusing on Europe

• 42:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:30Jordi Hays?

  is that my initial reaction of using the Ray-Ban Metas was if I was using WhatsApp as my primary messaging app.

• 42:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:40Jordi Hays?

  These would be like way more interesting, right? Because you have the integration, you have the heads-up display, you can get messages, you can read them, you can respond to them. It's super, super integrated. Meanwhile, they don't have an iMessage integration and so they're not that valuable to me from a messaging standpoint, which is like kind of one of the key use cases.

• 43:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. The sort of Ben Thompson takeaway from this was that even though Mark Zuckerberg has effectively complete control over Meta and can rename the company and move very aggressively and acquire big companies, at the end of the day, he does respond to shareholders and the shareholders have been watching the Reality Labs losses pile up billions every year. And at some point, if you have a new sort of big You know, Money Pit initiative that's AI and you're going to spend tens of billions there, you have to sort of make a sacrifice or at least like show the shareholders that you're refocusing on the new thing.

• 43:44John Coogan?

  Even though obviously AI and VR play very well together, part of the biggest problem with VR is that it's very difficult to develop. You have to develop this full game. AI can enable a lot of that speed up development. And then there's also the, the sort of longer off take, maybe not that far in the future, but this idea that if you generate a world model like the Fei Fei Li World Labs project or Google has a project as well, Genie, that might be something that actually gets you to put on the headset because it's infinite and endless and requires a whole bunch of upfront costs to train the model. But then, once you put it on, you're just in that and you can prompt it yourself. You're kind of designing your own game and that's a unique experience that it seems uniquely

• 44:28John Coogan?

  suitable for VR. Yeah. Ben Thompson's take was that the Meta Vibes was like a virtual reality project effectively, even though you didn't put a, put a glasses on, it was creating. Well, and that's been my take on the name. It is like. It's still a metaverse. It is a metaverse. Yes. It just looks like a suite of apps. Yes, yes, yes. And now you access that, you access that metaverse through a screen and how, how close that screen is to your face might take years to get closer and it might be small when it's, when it's close for the, for the, for the first, first iteration. I'm very interested to see how the, the Ray-Ban displays are selling. Two million Ray-Ban smart glasses.

• 45:13John Coogan?

  I've seen them sell the Ray-Ban displays at Best Buy and Shiel Monat was talking about sort of his, his frustrations getting on boarded. I haven't, I haven't, have you run into anyone wearing them in the wild? I've run into people with the Ray-Ban smart glasses all the time with the, with the cameras on them, but I haven't run into anyone. Seen the new ones, the chunkier ones? With the display. Yeah. I haven't, I haven't seen anyone just rocking them, even though they are out. I honestly, I feel like we don't see that many people. Never go outside.

• 45:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, I mean, on the, on the weekends I do, but I'm like out, out and about.

• 45:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:48Jordi Hays?

  But it's kind of a small community.

• 45:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:50Jordi Hays?

  Um, but, uh, I didn't get a chance to give a, I, I wanted to go back briefly to the, to the sauna thing.

• 45:56John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 45:56Jordi Hays?

  I didn't get a chance to give a take.

• 45:57John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 45:57Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I am, uh, extremely bullish on Americans starting to sweat more.

• 46:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 46:04Jordi Hays?

  Because it, the, the evidence is like so clear that if you use a sauna every day.

• 46:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:09Jordi Hays?

  You will probably extend your house span, lifespan. It's heavily, heavily studied, just be, studied because of how popular it's been in the Nordics for like decades and decades. Uh, so very bullish on sweating. Uh, one of the things that's interesting though is that, uh, New York is, is, uh, has like, you know, New York is like the center of consumption, right? People have tiny apartments, so they're just constantly consuming, right?

• 46:33John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 46:33Jordi Hays?

  Food, uh, you know, uh, exercise, uh, shopping, et cetera. Uh, but I don't think it's representative of the way that the, uh, Americans will like sweat broadly. Because you can get a sauna for like a couple of grand. And so all these bath houses are like a few hundred dollars. And so I think for some people, they want the social experience. Whereas for me, I don't like the, I'm not really like that into the, like, the.

• 46:58John Coogan?

  You don't like talking in the sauna?

• 46:59Jordi Hays?

  I do like talking in the sauna. We've obviously had our sauna wars, our sauna wars are, uh, I guess we were talking too loudly in the sauna the other day. Cause this guy just absolutely, uh, absolutely snapped. I, I, I was, uh, he was a bit of an angry elf. Um, but, uh, but, but the anyways, like the most, most consumers are going to be looking like, I can go and buy a sauna for $2,000.

• 47:23John Coogan?

  And I have space for it because I have a two-car garage and a backyard and maybe a pool. And like for the average American, it has a little bit.

• 47:31Jordi Hays?

  Last time I lived in an apartment, this was like, uh, six or so years ago.

• 47:36John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 47:36Jordi Hays?

  I had a whole cold plunge that I snuck into my apartment. And the sauna, just, I had a two bedroom loft.

• 47:42John Coogan?

  You had a sauna too?

• 47:43Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I had two. I had a two bedroom. I had a two bedroom loft and one of them, I just put a, it was just like cold plunge on a wooden floor.

• 47:52John Coogan?

  That's insane.

• 47:52Jordi Hays?

  And I had a sauna.

• 47:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 47:54Jordi Hays?

  Of course, I don't think you're allowed to bring like a mini swimming pool.

• 47:58John Coogan?

  If it leaks, you're gonna destroy the whole.

• 48:00Jordi Hays?

  Actually, I did. They did eventually tell me I had to get rid of it because there was a leak in the building.

• 48:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:04Jordi Hays?

  And they went in to look and they were like, it didn't have anything to do with my cold plunge or whatever. But, um.

• 48:10John Coogan?

  Okay, so if you were, if you were talking to Brian Johnson, you would say skip the physical institution that is the sauna. Start a, a line of saunas that can be delivered on a truck to, to, to homes.

• 48:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe. I mean, that, that's a, there's, there's a company called Plunge that scaled insanely quickly.

• 48:28John Coogan?

  That company's done really well, yeah.

• 48:29Jordi Hays?

  I think over nine figures of revenue off the cold plunge boom. But, uh, yeah, the main thing you have to understand is you're, uh, you know, for other shipping these companies, like you have to go, I think, into dense areas where people don't have a lot of space and have saunas. Because a lot of people are gonna look and say, either have one in my gym or I can, you know, people can go and just, even if they don't have the two grand, you can use a firm and like you're effectively paying a couple hundred bucks a month for, for like a private.

• 48:56John Coogan?

  Private sauna.

• 48:56Jordi Hays?

  Experience.

• 48:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:57Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we'll see, we'll see. Uh, Gabe says the big sweat lobby is making moves.

• 49:03John Coogan?

  I like it.

• 49:04Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but yeah, I just, uh, the, I've, I've remained so bullish on this trend because it's just passive.

• 49:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:09Jordi Hays?

  Right? You don't, you don't have to like work up like the motivation to sweat.

• 49:14John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 49:15Jordi Hays?

  So you get a lot of the benefits of exercise, but you're not like, I gotta force myself to go for a run. It's just like, get in the box.

• 49:21John Coogan?

  Get in the box.

• 49:22Jordi Hays?

  The label box.

• 49:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's tell you about Label Box.

• 49:28John Coogan?

  Label Box, delivering you the highest quality data for Frontier AI. Get in the box.

• 49:33Jordi Hays?

  Get in the box.

• 49:34John Coogan?

  Label Box. Maybe Label Box should do a drop of, of custom saunas for everyone.

• 49:38Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Daniel Gross says, I am building out Meta's compute desk. I'm looking for folks with a background.

• 49:43John Coogan?

  I like the term desk.

• 49:45Jordi Hays?

  Desk.

• 49:45John Coogan?

  It feels like New York. It feels like finance. It's not just a team. It's a desk.

• 49:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Deep learning, supply chain, commodities.

• 49:53John Coogan?

  He's stacking copper.

• 49:56Jordi Hays?

  Energy, Excel, prediction markets, monitoring situations, et cetera.

• 49:59John Coogan?

  This is amazing.

• 50:01Jordi Hays?

  Candidates should have experience in at least one of these domains. Somebody's like, I, I've monitored a lot of situations. I'm qualified here. And novel ideas on how to apply LLMs to their work. If you'd like to help manage 100 billion of compute spend, please DM and include information about why you're a fit. If you're in doubt, if you're in doubt about being a good fit, please apply.

• 50:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, at least, at least one of these domains. I only know Excel. I don't know anything about any of the others. I'm just an Excel jockey. Good luck. But yeah, I mean, massive compute spend. Very interesting to see where the Meta Compute project goes. Obviously, they're spending a ton. Mark Zuckerberg said, "Today, we're establishing a new top-level initiative called Meta Compute. Meta is planning to build tens of gigawatts this decade, hundreds of gigawatts or more over time. How we engineer, invest, and partner to build this infrastructure will become a strategic advantage. It's led by Daniel Gross, of course, and Santosh will continue to lead the technical architecture, software stack, silicon program, developer productivity, and building and

• 51:08John Coogan?

  operating the global data center fleet and network. Daniel will lead a new group responsible for long-term capacity strategy, supplier partnerships, industry analysis, planning, and business modeling. They'll work closely with Dina Powell McCormick, who just joined Meta as president and vice chairman, to work on partnering with governments and sovereigns to build, to invest in and finance Meta's infrastructure. I'm looking forward to working closely with Daniel, Santosh, Dina, and their teams to scale Meta Compute." It's a good name. You need a name for a team. What did Ben Thompson have to say about this? He said, "The narrative seems to be quickly spinning up that this signaled that Meta is finally going to get into cloud computing, competing with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google." And well, Ben Thompson, he doesn't really think that's going to happen.

• 51:53John Coogan?

  What exactly would be the point? Amazon invented the space and invested heavily to have a structural cost advantage in commodity compute. Microsoft had a natural customer base with enterprise. Google has differentiated infrastructure and an outlet to fully leverage their AI investments without fear of cannibalization. What exactly would Meta bring to the table that other hyperscalers do not have, such that they would have the confidence that they could be anything other than second choice, competing on nothing but price?" So asking the hard questions about where Meta Compute goes. They don't need to sell it if they if they truly scale, they've been what I mean, didn't it wasn't their compute budget in the pre AI era, tens of billions of dollars in capex?

• 52:37John Coogan?

  And that was just for, you know, reels, just for ads, like, there's plenty to do.

• 52:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:42John Coogan?

  If they don't, if they don't choose to sell it. Anyway, 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.

• 52:53Jordi Hays?

  We have the CEO of MongoDB coming on in just five minutes.

• 52:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh, in other news, Beijing has told Chinese firms to stop using CrowdStrike. If you didn't have a reason, if you didn't have a reason to start using CrowdStrike, this is a pretty good one.

• 53:08John Coogan?

  Is this the TVP N effect? They saw, they saw us run a couple ads over in Beijing and they were like, yeah, they're too powerful.

• 53:15Jordi Hays?

  Too powerful.

• 53:15John Coogan?

  They're too powerful.

• 53:16Jordi Hays?

  Apparently, uh, this is already very tiny business for CrowdStrike, so not super impactful.

• 53:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:22Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, in other news, uh, OpenAI's number one hater in the entire world, Nick.

• 53:30John Coogan?

  Is back on the timeline.

• 53:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he was the hater, OpenAI hater of the year last year.

• 53:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:35Jordi Hays?

  He's probably, he's really gunning for it again this year.

• 53:37John Coogan?

  His camera roll is all just pictures of Sam Altman.

• 53:40Jordi Hays?

  Trying to go for a double.

• 53:41John Coogan?

  It's all, his camera roll is just all Sam Altman photos for sure.

• 53:46Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but the news, OpenAI Broadcom, uh, AI chip delayed.

• 53:50John Coogan?

  And Tio says it's not a delay, it's clearly a five D chess move where Sam is amassing enough time to release state of the art GPT six and put in Google and anthropic out of business. Everyone's having fun.

• 54:00Jordi Hays?

  Trying to find.

• 54:02John Coogan?

  With the news.

• 54:02Jordi Hays?

  Trying to find where this was actually reported.

• 54:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, Sam Altman also, uh, is, uh, putting, uh, together, there, there, there's an announcement from Ashley Vance about, uh, OpenAI and Sam Altman backing a new bold take on fusing humans and machines. It's called Merge Labs. We've heard about this before. We talked to Rob Taves, uh, on the show about, uh, BCI and brain computer interfaces potentially being a big trend for this year. Obviously, Neuralink has been cooking for a number of years. Sam Altman also has his bet with Merge Labs and, uh, they now have, uh, two hundred and fifty two million dollars in the bank and an all-star, all-star crew and superpowers.

• 54:46Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and remember, Sam Altman wrote in twenty seventeen, a piece called The Merge. I'll read and, uh, short a few paragraphs on it. He said, more important than that, unless we destroy ourselves first, superhuman AI is going to happen. Genetic enhancement is going to happen. Brain-machine interfaces are going to happen. It is a failure of human imagination and human arrogance to assume that we will never build things smarter than ourselves. The merge can take a lot of forms. We could plug electrodes into our brains, or we could all just become really close friends with a chatbot. But I think a merge is probably our best-case scenario of two different species, both want the same thing and only one can have it.

• 55:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:23Jordi Hays?

  In this case, to be the dominant species on the planet and beyond, they're going to have a conflict. Imagine if dolphins, imagine if Benioff has been working with the dolphins to secretly help them merge, and they're like in a, in a crazy dolphin-human race to see who can merge first. Because dolphins basically created Salesforce.

• 55:42John Coogan?

  We need neural links in the dolphins so that we can just like generate B2B SaaS product ideas constantly.

• 55:47Jordi Hays?

  So funny. X has this, this new thing then repeatedly. AI always is very good at being funny unintentionally. But a bunch of people were posting about Benioff's story yesterday, talking about, and so X summarized it as a headline. Mark Benioff recounts dolphin vision behind Salesforce's start.

• 56:08John Coogan?

  Dolphin vision. Love it.

• 56:10Jordi Hays?

  Dolphin vision.

• 56:10John Coogan?

  Sam has some crazy old posts. I was looking at this one from February 15, 2023. This is in 2023, it's $30,000 to get a simple iPhone app created and $300 for a plumbing job. I wonder what those relative prices will look like in 2028. The likely coming divergence between changes to cognitive work and changes to physical work could be quite dramatic. And I mean, I saw Nick was showing us an iPhone app that cost about $100 of credits or something like that, maybe a little bit less than a vibe coding app. You know, you're going to use credits to inference a model that can actually build an iPhone app, but we're definitely closer to 300 bucks than 30,000 at this point. It's, yeah, remarkable. Sentry.

• 56:55John Coogan?

  Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. Well, we have our first guest of the show, CJ, the MongoDB in the Rooster Room waiting room. We won't keep him waiting any longer. Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 57:14Jordi Hays?

  What a setup.

• 57:14John Coogan?

  To jump on the show. How are you doing?

• 57:17Speaker 07

  I'm doing fantastic, man. It's like there are 700 people here.

• 57:22John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 57:22Speaker 07

  San Francisco is back. I feel like San Francisco is back.

• 57:26John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 57:26Speaker 07

  And we are reintroducing MongoDB in San Francisco today. So Phil's, the energy is just amazing.

• 57:33John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Congratulations. Take us through some of the announcements. What does it mean to reintroduce MongoDB? What are the misconceptions where people might think of it as one thing and now you need to reintroduce it?

• 57:46Speaker 07

  I would say, you know, MongoDB, first of all, database market has been around for a long time, 50-plus years, maybe 60 years. Oracle is going to celebrate its 50th anniversary.

• 57:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:58Speaker 07

  Year and a half. That was my first job out of college is I tried Oracle.

• 58:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:03Speaker 07

  And MongoDB was a truly disruptive database that got created in 2007. And in New York City. I mean, this is a, one of the few tech companies that got created in New York City.

• 58:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:17Speaker 07

  And.

• 58:17John Coogan?

  Put it on the map.

• 58:19Speaker 07

  I know. I know. And then the leaf, you know, people ask me, what is the leaf of MongoDB all about?

• 58:25John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 58:26Speaker 07

  And the founder said, hey, this is a natural way a software engineer or a builder should interact with a database versus a rigid way of interacting with database. So it's pretty cool. I just became CEO a couple of months ago, came from Cloudflare, and I'm having great time meeting innovators, customers around the world. On the misconception, here's what I would say.

• 58:51John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 58:52Speaker 07

  That even though the database was created in 2007, the whole idea behind it was speed, agility, and dealing with a lot of unstructured data like emails, PDFs, images, videos, log, files, this and that. So when the founder created this database, it was not with AI in mind. And today, when you look at any AI application, your favorite consumer application you may be using on a daily basis, you see there is images in there, you may have created a video in there, lots of interaction. This database was created for the AI wave, and we want.

• 59:34Speaker 07

  Builders building on MongoDB as they create agentic AI applications or any applications for that matter that has structured data so that they can move fast and hopefully create the big iconic businesses, legendary businesses in Silicon Valley on top of MongoDB.

• 59:52John Coogan?

  Where are you seeing the most excitement and growth in your business? I can imagine that there's a ton of greenfield projects that are happening in large clients, large enterprises where they want to move even faster, so they're grabbing MongoDB in addition to other modern tools on a new greenfield project. And then there's also a new startup boom of AI-enabled software companies. I'm sure that's growing as well. What have you been seeing? Where is uptake the fastest in the last few years?

• 1:00:28Speaker 07

  I would say, John, you know, what I learned, and I can feel it right here on the floor, is that you had pretty much customers, we have 60,000 customers, okay, 62,500. And our customer

• 1:00:46John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 1:00:47Speaker 07

  And our customer growth

• 1:00:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:49Speaker 07

  has accelerated in last 12 months, which is pretty cool, because a lot of developers are now building on MongoDB.

• 1:00:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:57Speaker 07

  Nice, I like it.

• 1:00:58Jordi Hays?

  Every time you say something great, I'm gonna, I'm gonna hit that, so fair warning.

• 1:01:02Speaker 07

  Alright, I love it. So, one is our customer base re-accelerated as developers are building on MongoDB, but it's a tale of two cities, right? One is large enterprises, John, as you called out, they are growing still with MongoDB, they have some mission critical across every industry, financials, healthcare, government, I can tell you many across the globe, just building on MongoDB. And you have AI native companies or digital native companies, whether they are in San Francisco, Seattle, Tel Aviv, or even New York, they are building on MongoDB. So the customer growth is coming from there and customer growth accelerated in last 12 months for us, which is really cool.

• 1:01:46Speaker 07

  Many, many companies, you know, when they start de-selling, they do not re-accelerate and we re-accelerated. So that gets me like really fired up and really positive. And the innovation that we announced today, that if you want to truly build an agentic system at scale that doesn't hallucinate, you can build it on your laptop, you always require a great database, you need an awesome agentic rag or, you know, semantic search that just works, that is accurate, and this is truly a mission critical app that an insurance company may float it to their customers or a government may float it to their citizens or whatever the case might be. We want to make sure that this is a great data platform.

• 1:02:31Speaker 07

  So we announced voice for embeddings. We created a small embedding model called Nano, which is one-eighth the size of Large. It shares the embedding space and works with pretty much on-cloud, on-prem, multi-cloud. And you know, Jensen talked about at CES, the whole thing around multi-cloud, multimodal and multi-models, and we do the same. So, very cool, excited. We gave that message this morning to the builders here. We have a full show all day today, which was also live, and people are fired up.

• 1:03:06John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about M&A this year? Obviously, the company's doing really well. You're a public company, you have a public currency for acquisition. There's a lot of different pieces in the landscape that could be synergistic, but what's your thought process for partnering with other startups, either in a full acquisition or another partnership? How are you thinking about this year?

• 1:03:34Speaker 07

  So John, I'm a big believer in organic growth. I like, we have a large market that we participate in. We have only penetrated two and a half percent of that market. Hundred billion, we are at two and a half billion. So we have a lot of room with our core data platform. Now, we are always looking for specialized skills, say maybe in the AI area. So in 2025, we bought Voyage, which was created out of Stanford. Amazing people, you know, the founder teaches a legendary course on machine learning. So we bought that company and it got amazing, amazing engineers and researchers. And that professor is now chief AI scientist at MongoDB.

• 1:04:16Speaker 07

  So we will do those type of acquisitions where they are small, either for a technology or people, or sometimes both, so that we can truly leverage and accelerate the pace of innovation.

• 1:04:29John Coogan?

  Has anything in the various compute bottlenecks been a headache or kept you up at night? I mean, we're reading about Amazon Web Services is paying for copper refining because they need to go so deep in the supply chain that they need to go to the mining level. Memory prices are through the roof. There's delays on all sorts of custom silicon chips. I know you might not be affected, but how are you thinking about the different bottlenecks in the cloud computing supply chain?

• 1:05:06Speaker 07

  I would say the bottlenecks, if you remember a couple of years ago, everybody was worried about will they get enough GPUs from Jensen? Everybody's like, oh my God, bro, are you gonna get enough GPUs from Jensen? And that was like a big worry. And now, when we speak to customers, that's why they are like, okay, will GCP or Amazon, like you said, AWS and others, will they have enough capacity? Right now, it is not something that people are panicking. And Amazon or Google, I would say they are trying to stay ahead on that curve so that it doesn't become that, hey, CJ, we cannot run MongoDB for your favorite customer X because we are out of capacity,

• 1:05:50Speaker 07

  man. We just can't do that. So we are trying to definitely work with them, understand how they are dealing with both compute as in CPUs as well as GPUs. And those innovation cycles are also very fast. But right now, we are relying on them to solve. But we are not worried about it because they haven't given us the signal that we won't be able to do this.

• 1:06:10John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on the event. Jordi, do you have anything else?

• 1:06:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the new rule. I know we're out of time, but I'm sure we'll

• 1:06:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'd love to dig more into your background and tell the fuller story. But we know you have a busy day today. Congratulations, and we will talk to you soon.

• 1:06:25Jordi Hays?

  Give our best to everybody at the event.

• 1:06:27Speaker 07

  Thank you, Jordi, and I appreciate it.

• 1:06:29John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. We have Matthew Prince from CloudFlare joining in just a few minutes. In the meantime, we will go back to the timeline. There is some massive news.

• 1:06:52Jordi Hays?

  I did on Merge, I wanted to say a couple of things. So Mikhail, who is one of the co-founders of Merge, says TLDR, we are developing a new paradigm for BCI using molecules instead of electrodes.

• 1:07:05John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:07:06Jordi Hays?

  If you're excited about this and want to contribute in protein engineering, synthetic bio-delivery, immunology, ultrasound devices, neuroscience, or data, ML AI, we'd love to hear from you. So.

• 1:07:18John Coogan?

  That sounds extremely sci-fi.

• 1:07:21Jordi Hays?

  Merge is pursuing ways to make BCI much higher bandwidth, millions of neurons, and less invasive, no device implants. Instead of electrodes, we're focusing on modalities like ultrasound that can cover large areas of the brain, and on proteins that can connect these modalities with neural activities. And so, again, quite a different approach than Neuralink.

• 1:07:44John Coogan?

  Well, let me tell you about TurboPuffer, serverless vectoring full-text search, built from first principles on object storage.

• 1:07:50Jordi Hays?

  Wee puffin'.

• 1:07:51John Coogan?

  10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Our next guest, Matthew Prince, is in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVP and UltraDome. Matthew, good to see you again. Happy New Year. How are you doing?

• 1:08:04Matthew Prince?

  Good. How are you?

• 1:08:05John Coogan?

  That's good to hear. It seemed like you weren't doing that well a week ago when you posted about a court in Italy fining you. Can you take us through the process? Was this a surprise? How did everything lead up to your post which went mega viral?

• 1:08:24Matthew Prince?

  Yeah, first of all, not a court, a quasi-governmental organization. And let me give you a little bit of background. So in Italy, there was concern by a bunch of the football clubs, so the soccer clubs in Italy, about online piracy of the matches that were there. And in response to that, the Italian Parliament basically designated a quasi-governmental organization called Agicom that they would have the ability to essentially allow any media company executive to put any website they didn't like on a list. And then initially, just the ISPs in Italy had 30 minutes to block access to that website. But they then

• 1:09:09Matthew Prince?

  amended the law to be able to include other companies, including Cloudflare, but also folks like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, anyone that is doing anything that is cloud-related. They have gotten swept up in this. And so the requirement was that when a website was put on this list, that we would have 30 minutes to remove it globally. In other words, this small group of media executives got to choose what you could watch in the United States. And we already saw significant exposure of this beyond just illegal streaming, where we saw political content being removed. They accidentally blocked all of Google Drive at one point. They accidentally blocked all of Cloudflare's network at one point, which

• 1:09:52Matthew Prince?

  broke the Italian internet, so they turned that off pretty quickly. And so we had been in litigation in Italy to basically say this doesn't make any sense. And what particularly doesn't make sense is we hate the illegal streamers. They cost us money. We don't make any money off of them. They waste our bandwidth. They take up resources that we could have for paying customers. And so we have a huge team that is trying to shut them down. We actually won a court decision right before Christmas that said that we could get all of the internal documents on how this commission was created, what its rules were, everything else. And then, you know, probably just coincidentally, of course, immediately after Christmas, the

• 1:10:36Matthew Prince?

  first meeting they had, they imposed a $17 million fine on us and said that it will continue to escalate if we don't pay it and register for this scheme and commit to let them censor the internet, which obviously we're not going to do. That, by the way, is 2X our revenue in Italy. They have interpreted the law as saying that they can charge up to 2% of global revenue for any company that they find. So again, the insanity here is pretty high.

• 1:11:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:09Matthew Prince?

  And yet, that's not even what the law says. The law just simply says it can be from tens of thousands. And in fact, there's parts of the law that they relied on that are so old that they were actually quoted in Lyra, so it was back before even the EU existed. To give you some sense of how crazy this is, even the EU has said that this law has significant concerns over this law. And so we're in a strange situation where, you know, we're getting a lot of pressure to literally just turn Italy off and not let them connect to CloudFlower's network, which would, you know, unfortunately, everyone saw a few months ago when we had an outage, how big of an issue that is.

• 1:11:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:51Matthew Prince?

  That doesn't seem right.

• 1:11:53Jordi Hays?

  What's the, you know, putting your tinfoil hat on, what is, is there some, do you think there's some local group that wants your Italy business that says like, hey, that's like, what, is it purely censorship?

• 1:12:10Matthew Prince?

  It seems like it's such an own goal. I think there's, I think that there is, so I think first of all, it's a bunch of, you know, older, you know, football owners who don't understand how the internet works, who just are saying, you know, piracy is a problem and instead of doing what most leagues around the rest of the world do with us, which is work with us in order to identify what those illegal streams are, and then we not only take them down, but we actually put up a page that's an advertisement for the, for the correct stream in its place. Instead, they were just like, you know, we're, we're gonna just, you know, be, be, be, we're gonna just make it so that you have to take these things offline, damn the consequences. I think there are other people inside of Italy that see this as an ability for them

• 1:12:54Matthew Prince?

  to be able to control some political content that they may not like. Obviously, Italy is a contentious political state and being able to shut things you don't like off the internet is, is a very powerful political tool. So I think that's the, that's the tinfoil hat, hat side. But I think mostly this is just thuggish behavior by a bunch of people who don't understand how the internet.

• 1:13:14John Coogan?

  Ben, take off the tinfoil hat, put on the steel man helmet and try and steel man for me the, the, where the work should be done of fighting piracy on the internet because I have some empathy for a league owner who doesn't want their, you know, content streamed illegally.

• 1:13:35Jordi Hays?

  It seems to be like such a hard problem. Like, like my view is like UFC kinda just like threw in the towel and was like, this is, the pay-per-view model is over.

• 1:13:44John Coogan?

  We're going to Netflix, right?

• 1:13:46Jordi Hays?

  Paramount.

• 1:13:46John Coogan?

  Paramount, yeah. And so, yeah, I, it, it seems like it's a nice thing for you to do to take down these illegal streams. Maybe there's some legal reason that that falls on you?

• 1:13:56Matthew Prince?

  It's a purely, it's a financial reason. It's like when, when the streams come up, they, they clog our pipes and that shuts down the ability and we have to pay for that bandwidth. So we have all the financial incentives to shut it down. It is a hard problem, right? Because again, the streamers are clever and they're always bouncing around and doing different things. But we shut down hundreds of thousands of illegal streams every single day and we work with most of leagues around the world. So there doesn't need to be a law in order to create the incentives for us. What I do worry about though, is any time that you create some sort of rule in the name of privacy, in the name of protecting children, in the name of whatever, that lets a local government, and whether that's a, you know, state government or a...

• 1:14:39Matthew Prince?

  Or a nation state be able to set how global infrastructure works. That just seems per se bad, right? You shouldn't be able to say Italy decides what you can see and watch in New York or California or Texas or Canada or China frankly. And China shouldn't be able to impact like let China be crazy inside of China. And they can have their own rules and regulate their networks however they want. But the fact that this has extraterritorial application that that literally some again, Italian basically soccer club owners can dictate what content you watch in California or New York, that's insane. And that's something that we have to push back against.

• 1:15:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. So what's the response been like in Washington, in DC? I imagine that at some point even just a passing statement from the admin, hey, Italy, back down on this, we'll, you know, buy a little bit more wine or something, some trade deal.

• 1:15:34Matthew Prince?

  Or not impose 100% tariff on all your goods.

• 1:15:38John Coogan?

  That too. Yeah. What are the levers that people are considering pulling? What has been pulled? How are the how are the discussions going?

• 1:15:47Matthew Prince?

  Yeah. So I spent the beginning part of this week in DC, meeting with everyone from senators to, you know, I'd say state department, a wide number of different officials within the administration directly in the White House, USTR, which is the United States Trade Representatives. And I didn't come across a single one that wasn't disgusted by this policy. And so like, I don't think the Italians quite understand the hornet's nest that they've stirred up. This is this is now sort of the cause celebre for Europe, Europe using US tech companies as their piggy bank. Where the I mean, the crazy stat is that Europe makes more off fining US tech companies

• 1:16:30Matthew Prince?

  than they do off taxing their own technology companies. That's insane, right? And so something has to change here. And this is the most clear example that again, you know, whistles to all the dogs in Washington right now, saying like, we can't have again Europeans, let alone, you know, this sort of Italian cabal being able to dictate what is and is not online.

• 1:16:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's the reaction been from, I mean, your competitors? There are other content delivery networks, other hosts. Do they agree with you and they're just less outspoken because they're not in the founder mode that you're in perhaps? Or are there some, some other companies that are just less affected or less targeted because they aren't as much of a pure play? Like, how, how, how is the rest of the ecosystem reacting to all this?

• 1:17:21Matthew Prince?

  Yeah, I think the hyperscalers are really concerned about this. I think anybody who has, you know, a, a, a really large business where they have millions and millions, we have tens of millions of customers. You know, I think what's unique about us is we have a free version of our service because we believe that every small business, every, you know, developer should be able to have robust cybersecurity tools, robust content delivery tools. And so that, that gives us a much broader portfolio than some of our competitors that only have, you know, you, you, they won't even pick up the phone for less than a million dollars.

• 1:17:55John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:17:55Matthew Prince?

  Like that, that's a, so it's, it's a little bit of a different thing, but if you're in AWS, if you're a Google Cloud, if you're a Microsoft Azure, if you're an Oracle, like they are deeply concerned that this is going to impact them because they all have broad sets of customers. And it's very difficult for them to, you know, just say, we're going to let Italy pick who can and cannot be a customer of ours. That's, again, just insane.

• 1:18:17John Coogan?

  Okay. Last question on the fine for me, and then I want to move on to AI, since we have you here. What, what's the result of the fine? Did you just pay it or are you debating it?

• 1:18:25Matthew Prince?

  No, no, no. So we're, we're, we're challenging it, Italian law, because it's, because it's Italy, doesn't have any, any mechanism to stay this. I would imagine that there are going to be some, some pretty pointed phone calls

• 1:18:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:18:38Matthew Prince?

  from senior US officials, senior Italian officials saying like, cut this out.

• 1:18:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:43Matthew Prince?

  In addition, you know, we, we're considering various options. So we may shut down our free service in Italy, which again is unfortunate. It'll hurt a bunch of developers there, but we can't, we can't do charity for places that again, or in a fine.

• 1:18:58Matthew Prince?

  The other thing that's coming up is the Milan Cortina Olympics, where we provide tens of millions of dollars of free cybersecurity services. I was actually a personal guest of the former president of the IOC to the Paris Games, because we provided the information that took the terrorist attack that almost shut down the games and allowed them to arrest 90% of the terrorists beforehand. We helped stop massive denial of service attacks, again, for free, that were launched from Russia, which is trying to completely discredit the Olympics because of the doping scandals and fans that they've faced. And so, again, I really believe in the Olympics. I really want the Olympics to succeed. But again, it seems wrong for us to be providing tens of millions of dollars

• 1:19:40Matthew Prince?

  of free cybersecurity for a showcase event in a country that's just acting completely insane.

• 1:19:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes so much sense. Talk to me about the 2026 App Innovation Report. Talk to me about this idea of a technical glass ceiling. I've been going back and forth with a lot of the AI researchers that come on the show. The models are amazing. And then I'll ask them like, well, this particular app doesn't seem to be getting better on my phone. What's going on over there? Why isn't this app significantly improved? Why are there still bugs in enterprise software when everyone has access to frontier models? What are you seeing in AI adoption? What are you feeling internally? Just take me through your current thinking.

• 1:20:24Matthew Prince?

  Well, we are incredibly bullish in AI. We use it internally. We use it across all of our teams. We actually had our company-wide kickoff today, and our CTO challenged every one of our teams to say, how can they use AI more? And it's really quite incredible what it's done. What I will say, though, is we're definitely in some places for some AI companies hitting some sort of a limit, it seems, in what they're able to do. And the exception to that, I think, has been Google. Gemini has continued to outperform the rest of the market. And I think that the answer to why that's the case is actually not about the chips. Obviously, they've designed their own TPU chips. I don't think it's about the people.

• 1:21:07Matthew Prince?

  They have incredibly smart people, but so does Anthropic, so does OpenAI. I think it's actually about the data. And we are one of the few companies that actually has a view into this. And so we haven't shared this very publicly, but I guess, no time like the present. And so... How much more of the web would you guess that Google sees and is able to train their AI systems on versus OpenAI?

• 1:21:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'd probably say 50% more.

• 1:21:35Matthew Prince?

  Yeah, the answer is actually 3.2 times more.

• 1:21:39John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:21:39Matthew Prince?

  Which is insane, right? That means that for every one page that OpenAI sees, Google is seeing, you know, 3.2 pages. So there's just so much more data that's going into it. And again, OpenAI is the next closest. After that, Microsoft sees, uh, Google sees 4.8 times more of the web than Microsoft. They see similar to what they see with Anthropic as well, and it just drops off from there. And so what I worry about is that because Google has this unique access to the web that nobody else has, that the game might just go to them. Because I think that at the end of the day, whoever has the most data wins in the era of AI. And I think what a lot of these companies are seeing is they're hitting kind of a data limitation.

• 1:22:23Matthew Prince?

  And one of the things we're really thinking about is how can we make sure that we level the playing field? Either bring Google back to where everyone else is, don't let them leverage search in order to get a unique advantage in AI. Or how do we lift everyone else up to the same place where Google is? Make sure that everybody has access to that same data. If we don't create a level playing field in terms of the data, I do feel like there's a real concern that Google is going to run away with this and no one else will catch them.

• 1:22:48John Coogan?

  Interesting. Yeah, we've noticed that, I mean, we test all the different LLM apps and even just from a branding perspective, when you're in the Gemini app and it says, "Doing a Google search." All the other apps will say, "We're searching the internet." But doing a Google search just gives, the brand is like, "Oh, it's doing what I would do if I were on the computer." And that, and it's interesting to hear that there's actually more data being accessed. It's not just the brand.

• 1:23:13Jordi Hays?

  It's also the, one of the only things that Elon and Sam can really agree on or sort of a shared, shared motivation is like making sure that AI race is competitive with Google.

• 1:23:23Matthew Prince?

  I mean, people, people forget that OpenAI was started because Elon and Sam got together because they were so concerned about what was happening with, with Google. And I think that that concern is rightly placed. And Google has such a data advantage where because of search, everyone has let them behind their paywall. Everyone has let them see parts of the Internet that no one else sees. Again, we can look at the restrictions on various bots. What are the robot txt files and everything else? For a huge portion of the Internet. And the answer is that Google just has privileged access. And until we level that playing field, either by bringing Google back to the same level as everyone else, or bringing everyone else up to the same level as Google. I worry that this is their race to win. And that's bad.

• 1:24:06Matthew Prince?

  Like, the world certainly shouldn't have one AI company. I don't think it should have five AI companies. I think we should be playing for a world where we have 500,000 AI companies. And we make it as easy as possible for any of them to thrive and survive.

• 1:24:18John Coogan?

  Okay, talk to me about the defaults in on robots.txt. Where people are allowing scrapers. Where Google bot can come in, where Gemini can come in. What's been your thinking on defaults? How has it evolved? And then what's the reaction from your customer base been to those defaults?

• 1:24:39Matthew Prince?

  Yeah, so I think this is actually a really nuanced issue. And the answer is going to be different for a number of different companies. And in some cases, we don't know what the right default is. So here's where I think it's the things that are very straightforward. Excuse me. If you have a knowledge base, so CloudFlare has a knowledge base on how to use CloudFlare workers in order to build systems. Excuse me, tickle my throat.

• 1:25:07John Coogan?

  No problem.

• 1:25:08Matthew Prince?

  If you have something like that, then of course you want that to be in AI systems. And that should be default scrape no matter what. On the other hand, if you're a publisher, which is ad or subscription supported. Maybe you don't want that to be in because AI bots don't click on ads. And if they're taking all the content that you're generating and then just regurgitating it in a place where you don't get any benefit from that, that that's a real problem for the business model of of media companies. And again, I think what we're seeing is the media companies have really locked down who has access to their content. And you're seeing much better deals from the likes of Conde Nast, Dot Dash Meredith, Reddit, who are getting more for their content from the AI companies because at the end of the day,

• 1:25:52Matthew Prince?

  whoever has the most data is going to be the winner that's there. What I think is somewhat unfair, and again, back to the same issue, is Google, because of search, is still getting almost everything for free, whereas everyone else is having to pay for it. That seems wrong. That seems like something that we need to fix in some way. And again, we need to either bring everyone else up or bring Google back down to everyone else's level. But that's that's one of the things we're worried about. I think the most interesting thing that people aren't talking about today is what's going to happen to retail? What's going to happen to small businesses that are out there? AI is this massively consolidating force. And if you look at, take three of the biggest retailers in the world, Walmart, Target, and Amazon.

• 1:26:32Matthew Prince?

  What's interesting is, again, these are hugely well-resourced companies, smart people working at them, no lack of of, you know, financial resources across across them to do whatever is right. And they've come to three completely different conclusions on what you should do about agentic commerce. In the case of Walmart, throw the doors open, open up the catalog, let every agent in. And in the short term, I think that's clearly the right answer. But I worry over time that the agents are going to just keep trying to figure out, how can we cut Walmart out over time? And I don't know what brands mean in a world where, you know, your agent is shopping on your behalf.

• 1:27:13Matthew Prince?

  Brands are a way for humans to have shortcuts that understand quality and value. That goes away in a world of agentic commerce. Agents will figure that out for you and report back. And brands might not matter as much, and including a massive brand like Walmart. Amazon is taking the complete opposite strategy. They're literally suing perplexity, saying your agents aren't welcome here. Again, two massive retailers.

• 1:27:37Jordi Hays?

  But that's because they have a massive advertising business and they know that the agents aren't.

• 1:27:41Matthew Prince?

  Well, so does Walmart.

• 1:27:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it's not, how material is it for Walmart versus Amazon?

• 1:27:48Matthew Prince?

  It's a pretty big, like, all, all, I mean, there's any of those sponsored listings on Walmart, they're all doing the same stuff. I think, I think, I would, I would argue it's something different. I think Amazon thinks that they have to win the agent war themselves. And so Alexa has to get much better at it, whereas Walmart doesn't have as much of a stake in it. So this is a giant bet, I think, from Amazon, that their agent will be able to shop better than anyone else's. That is my experience with Alexa yet, but again, a huge amount of resources that are going into that. Target has what I think is sort of the, oh, let's split the baby, um, kind of approach, which is, agents are allowed, but they have to be the ones that are listed on the Target website. That obviously is not going to be a long-term, sustainable approach. But, but I think that that shows how challenging this is going to be.

• 1:28:33Matthew Prince?

  And what I really worry about is going forward, like, if you think about what small businesses that you shop with, your local butcher, your local, you know, flower store, those things. A lot of it is because of the interpersonal relationships with you, that you have with those shop owners. If those go away, if your agent is doing this all on your behalf, if we all become some version of the Jetsons, where, you know, what is, how does George do his shopping? He has Rosie the helpful robot to go do it for him. An egg show up and he doesn't really care, you know, where they came from. I worry that that's going to put enormous pressure on small businesses. And I don't know that small businesses have the tools today to be able to figure out how to exist and thrive in this world of agentic commerce. And that's something that I'm enormously worried about.

• 1:29:13Jordi Hays?

  Jordy? I think, yeah, I think it's, I think it's warranted. I, I, I still think at the end of the day with physical products, it's like, you know, I care a lot about, like, I'm, I'm drinking this here. I'm drinking this because our friend Andrew Huberman, this is the brand that he's aligned with. Like, if I just sent an agent to go buy me a Yerba Mate, maybe it comes back with something else, but then... I'm still like, yeah, just get me the, get me the, get me the podcast in a can, please. Anyway, so a lot, a lot to figure out. The, the exciting thing I feel like is that every, so many different companies are reporting that LLM traffic is converting at a high rate, which tells me that it is a great tool for product research, but there is a lot, there is a lot of questions of like, yeah, how do you,

• 1:29:58Jordi Hays?

  you know, geo is kind of like a dark art right now. It's very hard to under, it's, it's far easier to kind of understand how you're showing up in, in results than it is to maybe influence it yet. A lot of things to figure out. I did have one, I, I wanted an update on the ski season from you. We, we, I saw numbers, you know, traffic, basically traffic down like 20% year over year.

• 1:30:24Matthew Prince?

  The, uh, so, so that, so, so one, one thing before, like I, I agree. We don't quite know how this is going to play out, but I do think it's important that we articulate what we're trying to play for. So I want to play for a world where there's not five AI companies. There's 500,000, where there's not, you know, a small set of media, you know, massive conglomerates, but anyone can be a content creator. I mean, you guys are a perfect example of what I want to make sure continues to exist as we get into a world that is more AI driven. And then for businesses, we need to make sure that you can be a small business and still thrive. There, there is a way to have a level playing field and that there can be tens of millions of businesses around the world that can actually do that. And that's, that's what we're thinking about. That's what we're partnering with folks like Visa and Mastercard, American Express, PayPal,

• 1:31:09Matthew Prince?

  you know, Shopify, Adobe, Salesforce, to try and figure out how do we give those tools? And I think that's the one of the most important questions. The business model of the internet over the next five years is going to change radically. Rarely does that something, you know, that big have that big a change. And I think if you're not thinking about what that change is going to be, uh, then, uh, then, then again, I, I don't think you're worrying about the most important question today. In terms of the ski season, no reason the skiing should be distracting you from thinking about what the future business model of the internet should be. It is grim. I'm sitting in, I am sitting in Park City, Utah. It is the worst ski season. I mean, 51 years old. My first year of skiing, I was the 76, 77 season. This is as bad as that season. Um, I'm

• 1:31:51Jordi Hays?

  No, it's good timing for you. Like a lot of people, you pray for snow. You were kind of like a bad ski season is kind of convenient for you right now. You need to be pretty locked in.

• 1:32:01Matthew Prince?

  I am for, for, I'm trying to get Vale to sell me, uh, Park City, uh, and then return it to local ownership and, and make it the star that it is. And I think

• 1:32:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, so Vale is trading at less than, less than two times revenue. Uh, I, we've covered kind of the history of the business. Uh, like at, at what point do you just like, just buy the whole, buy the whole thing?

• 1:32:23Matthew Prince?

  I don't think it makes sense. I don't want to run Vale. Uh, that doesn't sound like much fun, but I think somebody should. And you know, if it's, you know, if you could, if you could acquire Vale for, you know, $5 billion, uh, with, with some leverage, you need about a billion dollars of equity. I, I know a guy who will, who will write you if you're a, an activist investor.

• 1:32:42Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's what I was saying. One way you get your, your prize, uh, you know, your trophy, Park City is you just buy Vale and then you spin it out, spin out Park City yourself and then

• 1:32:51Matthew Prince?

  Yeah, that, that seems, uh, uh, uh, maybe we'll get to that point. I would much rather somebody else who's like good at those things that goes again, like a, you know, Elliott Management, if they want to go buy Vale and then sell me Park City, that would be, it's, it seems like an almost, it's getting close to being a no brainer.

• 1:33:05John Coogan?

  Amazing. Well, well, we're hoping to follow that story. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Good luck with the

• 1:33:10Matthew Prince?

  Absolutely. Thanks.

• 1:33:11John Coogan?

  Good luck with the Italians and thank you for all the support coming on the show.

• 1:33:15Jordi Hays?

  How's your Italian? How's your Italian?

• 1:33:17Matthew Prince?

  My Italian is, is, is not, not particularly good.

• 1:33:20John Coogan?

  But he has a great Italian lawyer, I bet. And then he's got a guy who's over there.

• 1:33:25Matthew Prince?

  A lot of, a lot of good, a lot of good Italian lawyers.

• 1:33:27John Coogan?

  Full employment. Uh, well, have a great rest of your day. Enjoy the rest of the week and we'll see you soon.

• 1:33:32Matthew Prince?

  Thank you. Big fan of it.

• 1:33:33John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Thank you. Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplace and now with AI agents.

• 1:33:46Jordi Hays?

  Dalian in.

• 1:33:47John Coogan?

  Dalian Asperu Hov, the co-founder of Varda, the partner of Founders Fund. Hit him with the flashbang. Got him.

• 1:34:00John Coogan?

  We gotta hit him with a smoke grenade too. Ask him to do an intro as the smoke clears. We're throwing smoke. Throwing smoke.

• 1:34:11John Coogan?

  And look who is it? It's Delian as the smoke clears. We have the partner from Founders Fund on the stream. It really takes a second to clear. Okay, okay, we're clear, we're clear. Delian, good to have you here. Hope you're doing well. Thanks for hopping on the show. How are you doing? How's your week going? You're ripping checks, you're in business. Money's flowing.

• 1:34:30Jordi Hays?

  Is the bear market, is the bear market over? And, you know, last year, you, you kind of, you felt like things were getting a little crazy. Maybe you, you didn't, you, you didn't find any opportunities you love. Then you started the year with a bang.

• 1:34:45Delian Asparouhov?

  Started the year with a bang. I feel like, you know, I, I, I think I'm just like addicted to investing over the holidays. I realized over the past like nine years that I've been in venture. I think seven of those years I have signed a term sheet within 48 hours of Christmas Day. And I don't know if that like speaks to the fact that like I just like I'm addicted to work or something about like Santa Claus makes me wanna like send out some presents or something like that. But yeah, it definitely feels like a busy season. I was catching up with another investor and he was like, same thing here. Like one of the best deals we did was basically over Christmas.

• 1:35:13John Coogan?

  Is the deal flow from like serendipity at the holiday parties? Or is it just networking from the internet? Like where are you meeting founders these days?

• 1:35:21Delian Asparouhov?

  I admit that like, I think a part of it is if, if you were trying to preempt a round, no better time than to do it over the holidays. Cause like nobody's chitter chatting at the office. There's no like hallway conversations that are, you can have these just like very quiet conversations. Founders like it because they don't have to deal with like, you know, a bunch of noise. You like it because you feel like you can do this like one-on-one negotiation. I basically just set the deadline of like, you know, I've now done this a couple of years in a row where it's like, yeah, sign by New Year's, otherwise like deal's off basically. And it feels harder to enforce that type of deadline like during the like, you know, school year basically. And so I think that's a part of why, you know, on both sides I like it. It's like as a founder, you can kind of test the waters. And if it gets shot down, whatever, nobody heard about it. Everybody was gone for the holidays. You come back into the office, your employees don't know, your board doesn't know, no VCs know. And if it does go, then like, you know, great.

• 1:36:06John Coogan?

  I think it, I think it's convenient.

• 1:36:07Jordi Hays?

  As a founder, the holidays can be so annoying because like it becomes like kind of poor form to just be like, you know, slamming people, your team with emails around Christmas Eve, Christmas.

• 1:36:19John Coogan?

  Slamming the VCs with the.

• 1:36:21Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, so I, I think it's a win-win. Just obviously anytime you're talking terms, it becomes wildly distracting because you're like, this is maybe the most important thing for my business right now. But if you can use that stretch of like seven days where you're not really supposed to be like, you know.

• 1:36:38Delian Asparouhov?

  You're not operating, but you're allowed to negotiate terms. By the way, I did want to point out, I did make sure that I wore my TVP on quarters up today.

• 1:36:45Jordi Hays?

  There you go. Do you have a, do you have a horse on that? Is that a little?

• 1:36:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. Horse there? We got another.

• 1:36:51Delian Asparouhov?

  Horse that we get it. Oh, other way, other way into sunshine.

• 1:36:54John Coogan?

  It's coming on. It's coming on the screen.

• 1:36:56Delian Asparouhov?

  Wow.

• 1:36:59Delian Asparouhov?

  I like you guys to have a whole CD guy.

• 1:37:01John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. 2026 is a good year for us. We're, uh, talk to us about the bi-modal strategy, early stage, growth stage. Is this, is this actually pushing you on the barbell? Was series A your sweet spot? Now it's seed and series C. Is this going to be a permanent thing? How are you thinking through that?

• 1:37:20Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, I think if you look at some of the best like deep tech hardware, industrial, you know, sort of companies over the past like 15 years, they have a very interesting like PPS, you know, sort of growth curve where effectively you have like typically a seed round that happens. And I'm just going to give like, you know, somewhat fake numbers here, but you know, indicative of like, you know, a buck per share, basically the like early incubation days. You then have like series A, that'll be like four or five times higher, basically like five bucks a share. And a lot of times what you'll see is years of super de minimis basically PPS growth until you sort of get to the other side of like the R and D, production hell, et cetera. And then all of a sudden you just have huge step function changes like over and over and over again. And this is true on everything from like the early days of like Nvidia, Tesla, like, you know, Apple, all the way down to like some of the more, you know, sort of recent, you know, some more, you know, deep tech, industrial, you know, sort of startups.

• 1:38:06Delian Asparouhov?

  And so what to do as like an investor, basically, well, you know, you can, you know, I think do the seed rounds where I do think they're, you know, attractive risk reward. You get some amount of IR just like through series A, et cetera. And then what you effectively want to do is do that last round. Where it's flat and then allow it to basically, you know, basically grow, you know, from there.

• 1:38:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:25Delian Asparouhov?

  And I think what I feel like starting to realize is like, that is the style of company that I like to do. It has a very different PPS curve relative like SaaS, AI, et cetera, which are honestly just like much more like, you know, clear, smooth, sort of like, you know, typically, obviously exponential curves. If it's like, you know, sort of great company, right? Like if you look at Ramp, for example, there was just clear step ups all throughout. You obviously had to like, you know, they did a great job of like,

• 1:38:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:46Delian Asparouhov?

  um, you know, marketing themselves down and like the 23, you know, 2022, basically, you know, sort of crashed. And I think that was proven to them. And then basically smoothly upwards, basically since then. And so the, the, the way that's played out is like, you know, now over the past couple of years, I've much more consistently done basically like super early stage PDF and a founder, basically like, you know, early, early, you know, industrial deep tech companies. And then I sort of sit there and bide my time and wait until what I think is like that basically last round, right before the inflection point. And then basically, you know, sort of do, do that round. And I've now done that, you know, over the past year, I did basically three like later stage, basically rounds. I like, you know, series B, series C, and then like, you know, basically series C that I just, you know, some closed terms on over the holidays. And all of them were companies that I'd either been tracking basically since seed

• 1:39:30Delian Asparouhov?

  or literally been an investor since seed. And we talked about one of those, you know, part of what we were talking about earlier today was, you know, talking about one of those very particular companies. But yeah, I think I'm starting to realize that I like that way more than I like doing the like, you know, sort of messy middle in some ways. And so, yeah, want to double down on that. And, you know, whatever Tuesday night was cool, where I literally felt that happen, where I signed two term sheets that were indicative of both ends of the barbell for me.

• 1:39:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, what was the amount of work in DD that you did on the series C company significantly higher? Like, how did you actually split the time out? Because this is framed as, uh, you know, 50/50 of Delian's time. But, uh, I imagine that there's just more data to pull in, more research to do, more customers to talk to.

• 1:40:07Jordi Hays?

  But at the same time, you know, the company so much better.

• 1:40:10John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. Yeah. So what was it like process wise?

• 1:40:12Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah. I mean, I'm not somebody, I don't think I would ever be able to do like a raw series C, where it's like, I've met the company for the first time and have the time to go do the diligence, et cetera, from scratch. Cause it's just like, dude, I've got a fucking company that I gotta run. Like I can't do that. The thing that I can do though, is like, get involved early. Or if it's something I'm like deeply passionate about, even if I'm not involved, like track the company super regularly. Such that I'm kind of doing all that pre diligence, basically like ahead of time. So like, let's talk about one of the, you know, some companies that I think exemplifies this strategy. Hadrian, where we just announced a $1.6 billion post round led by T. Rowe Price, basically last week.

• 1:40:45Delian Asparouhov?

  Maybe, um, you know.

• 1:40:48John Coogan?

  We're gonna have Chris on the show, we'll ring it for him, we'll ring it twice for the Hadron.

• 1:40:52Delian Asparouhov?

  Exactly, exactly. I think if Dell's, you know, fifth unicorn or something like that, from like, you know, they see under 25 posts all the way through to the, uh, yeah, yeah, I feel good about it. Chris said, I was texting him earlier, he's like, you're allowed to toot your own horn.

• 1:41:03John Coogan?

  There you go, there you go.

• 1:41:05Delian Asparouhov?

  VC brags, you know, uh, yeah.

• 1:41:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Give us the update on, on, on Hadron.

• 1:41:12Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, that's one where, it's like, look, I got involved in the, you know, basically like company formation, basically like, you know, sort of seed round, where it was Chris and like maybe one or two, you know, sort of people.

• 1:41:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:21Delian Asparouhov?

  And so what did diligence on that one look like? Well, it was effectively like, you know, four and a half years of working with Chris very closely, going to every single board meeting, watching the company like adapt over time. And in like, you know, Q1 last year in 25, it was clear that there was just like this inflection point that I felt like I could appreciate, but not everyone else was really appreciating yet. The first was, they basically, you know, for those that don't know, Hadron basically builds these like automated CTC, basically, you know, facilities, they basically cut metal on behalf of, you know, aerospace and defense companies. So, you know, I think a lot of the biggest logos in the founder's own portfolio, I won't list, you know, sort of all of them, since I'm not sure which ones are allowed to be public, but you know, ones that, you know, build rockets, make drones, you can guess which ones those are.

• 1:41:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:41:58Delian Asparouhov?

  Um, and they cut metal on behalf of those companies. For a long time, they were interested in the like R and D, production grind, like trying to figure out basically like how to make deck amounts of the business work, you know, switching from like what were originally quick turn, small prototype contracts into like production, multi-year, you know, basically large contracts. And in Q1 last year, there were two things that happened that just like made it very clear to me that it hit like my spidey instincts of like, oh, this is like the point that I'm supposed to come in and do the series C. Like my whole job was to have done the seed and then wait for this exact moment. The two things that happened were, one, they just got through production hell, basically. Like the economics started making sense, they were producing, you know, sort of way more volume. And then the second thing was, you know, um, We talk about this a lot, but the defense industry is obviously going through a huge shakeup.

• 1:42:41Delian Asparouhov?

  And there's a whole set of, you know, neoprimes that are coming out that are going to get anointed. And Hadrian was clearly in this transition point from what was previously just purely like a backend sort of supplier of, you know, sort of parts and a vendor into uh somebody that was becoming more of like a strategic, you know, neoprime that was going to be co-bidding alongside others. But as a neoprime that is focused specifically on production, right? So if we think about groups like, you know, Anur, Seronic, Shield AI, um, you know, name your favorite, basically, you know, you know, mock industries, name all your favorite, you know, neoprimes. They all roughly follow the same model, which is like, they are product developers fundamentally, right? Like they go in like design, net new products. They may do a decent amount of production and assembly of themselves, but they still are reliant on like

• 1:43:24Delian Asparouhov?

  out of, you know, sort of house, you know, sort of vendors for a vast majority of their like, you know, subcomponents. Yeah. Hadrian fundamentally is a very different type of neoprime, right? They are a neoprime that is explicitly focused on production. They do not produce basically like end products themselves. They only amplify others' end products. But that is a significant bottleneck that the, you know, defense, you know, department or, you know, war department is looking to go unlock and is leaning on a Hadrian for a wide variety of, you know, sort of programs, both directly, you know, as Hadrian as a contractor, as well as like co-bidders alongside other neoprimes. And so I think that when I think about like, you know, the way that Hadrian was interpreted Q1, Q2 last year, people were squinting at it, they're like, man, these economics have only turned in the last quarter, um, you know, isn't this just a backend vendor that doesn't have a ton of upside? From my like insider perspective, having watched it for five years, I'm like, dude,

• 1:44:07Delian Asparouhov?

  this is the type of business where once the economics turn a corner, they don't unturn a corner. You know what I mean? It only gets easier from here. We finally got to fucking positive, we're going to 20% margin, 40% margin, 60% margin. And it's like, you know, accumulating advantages, but like materials get easier, the factories get easier, the states want to set the stuff. It's just like, you know, you're rocking and rolling. But like when people look at like a SaaS business, they don't appreciate that like, yeah, in like hardware, especially where you're producing something that is like kind of a commodity, there's sort of like semi-infinite demand. There's like not semi-infinite demand for data bricks, you know what I mean? Like, you know, it just doesn't, the, the scale of the market is not nearly as large. Um, and then people are like, didn't appreciate.

• 1:44:42Jordi Hays?

  Ollie would quickly introduce him on that.

• 1:44:44John Coogan?

  Thank you, David.

• 1:44:45Delian Asparouhov?

  I'm sorry, we're obviously investors in the universe.

• 1:44:47Jordi Hays?

  So Tiro Price is, Tiro Price is smart enough to be in both Databricks and Hadrian, you know?

• 1:44:54Delian Asparouhov?

  Big Databricks fan, but at the end of the day, the amount that we spend on metal is more than, I mean, I don't probably really know what Databricks does, but like whatever they do, the amount that we spend on metal is more than whatever we spend on data.

• 1:45:06John Coogan?

  Well, well, I mean, reflect on the, on the AI boom, the slop versus steel debate. It felt like AI went through this sort of reset on the narrative towards the back half of last year.

• 1:45:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Do you have room in your office for a victory lap or are you kind of?

• 1:45:24John Coogan?

  But, but it feels like, it feels like we're back to, back to normal. I mean, there's, there's multiple $10 billion deals announced already this year. Nvidia is acquiring stuff for 20 billion, something like that. It, it feels like the pace is, is just continuing unabated. There's no real reset there. How, how did you process like the bubble in venture, that discourse? Where, where do you feel like we are now? Where do you think about the new like fundraising landscape, the K-shaped dynamic between the large funds, smaller funds? Like what's your, what's your current outlook on the venture capital market broadly?

• 1:46:00Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah. I mean, it's tricky where like, um, you know, I won't name names, but there's like various venture firms that, you know, have had like funds that they have like half funded, done really great deals out of, and some of these like, you know, sort of top tier names have significant markups even on those investments and still aren't able to like fully close out the fund. So it's like as an LP, you're able to like, you know, basically get in, immediately know that you're like, you know, LP position is going to be marked up. And a part of it is that you're comparing it that versus like, there's so many of these mega, you know, sort of labs, mega rounds, where there are so many SPVs that are available that as an LP, you're actually trading that against, well, I can just go get the direct position. No fees or much more diminutive fees through like an SPV from like a lesser manager.

• 1:46:41Delian Asparouhov?

  And so you are seeing like, you know, um, if you look at like, you know, they, I think there was this like, you know, sort of graph recently, there's just showing like, you know, total,

• 1:46:49Delian Asparouhov?

  venture dollars raised by venture firms significantly, like it's still linearly basically down since 2122. And that was, you know, shown, I think it was like on Carter or something like that. They were showing basically that data. But I would bet if you looked at like total LP dollars deployed into like tech, venture, you know, direct, you know, sort of investments, funded investments, et cetera. It is almost certainly significantly up since 2021. It's just like. Mobotile at some point can access some of these mega rounds just as easily as they can access like directly into you know basically like some of the funds that they used to have to you know invest into and so you're getting this odd dynamic where you know I think we talked about this you even last week a bit but like a lot of people are doing these like feeless careless SPVs that are basically like branding exercises for them um so yeah I

• 1:47:32Delian Asparouhov?

  I think it's like it's a harder time than ever to be an emerging manager like yeah there's somebody that like I forget who did this analysis but it's like it's taking you know there's fewer emerging managers taking longer to close and then it's harder than ever to even as you go and you're like a multi-stage mega find to still go raise the like equivalent of like the Andreessen fifteen billion dollar you know sort of total you know you know growth fund and it's not trivial for people to do that because the things you're going to go invest into in these late-stage assets are now you know readily accessible directly via the you know LPs through all these all these all alternate you know sort of vehicles and so

• 1:48:02Jordi Hays?

  And it's not it's not like a huge secret what what companies are like the real winners you don't need to you don't need to pay fees

• 1:48:10Delian Asparouhov?

  It's not like there's like a hundred logos it's like there's like seven logos that matter basically like are significant number of the dollars and so as an LP you're like you know why do I care about paying you know these fees or it's like I know I'm getting into the exact same logo anyways but through this other vehicle

• 1:48:23John Coogan?

  So you have sort of like the private mag seven that everyone's excited about LPs are getting direct access to is there any effect of the fact that the public mag seven are doing so well I was I was kind of laughing to myself like if I want exposure broadly to self-driving cars and I buy Google and humanoids and I buy Tesla and like there's a number and AI so you buy Google again and it's like you can get a pretty broad portfolio of like sci-fi bets just by owning the mag seven and maybe those get disrupted and maybe you gotta pick up other big companies but it's not like they're completely asleep at the wheel is there is there a like a a little bit of a magnetism from the mag seven that

• 1:49:05John Coogan?

  might be pulling liquidity towards just public tech companies these days?

• 1:49:10Delian Asparouhov?

  A bit, but I would say also for most of these LPs, they have like, you know, and especially the endowments, they have like pretty clear ratios that they want to maintain across basically like public, private, et cetera. And so in some ways through the public market, you know, sort of accelerating, they have, you know, if you, if you remember in like 2020, you know, sort of during the craft, there was like the reverse thing, basically where like, you know, basically all of a sudden the private books basically weren't, you know, getting marked down yearly enough, they're starting to represent like 20% of an endowment's book and they were like, we literally have to freeze all private investing.

• 1:49:35Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 1:49:36Delian Asparouhov?

  Now you're in some ways seeing like, you know, the reverse where, you know, people in some ways counter swung so hard, where now some of these groups that want to maintain like a, you know, 7% ratio on private are all of a sudden down at like three and a half, and are trying to figure out basically where to deploy. But that's where they're coming with these like, you know, sort of huge checks at the table, but they're seeing that there's like a multitude of options and they want a relatively like, you know, sort of limited set of names, and why not just go basically like, you know, more and more direct into those names. And as a founder, at some point, you're like, well, like I like these venture guys on same hill road, but at some point when I'm a public company, these are going to be the guys that hold my stock when I'm public, and so I don't mind prioritizing them, you know, sort of basically directly and having them on board. And so in some ways, you know, to tie this all the way back to Hadrian, it's like, yeah, this past round, Hadrian had a multitude of different, you know, sort of offers from, you know, more traditional Silicon Valley venture firms, but it's like, why wouldn't

• 1:50:18Delian Asparouhov?

  you take a T-Row price, where T-Row price is going to be the person that likely just, you know, underwrites part of your IPO, holds it when you're public, you know, scales with you while you're, you know, sort of public. And so you're seeing obviously, you know, you know, those types of firms come in much earlier into venture, and then founders by default, you know, sort of prioritizing those. You obviously had the like wave in like 2021 where a bunch of the VC firms tried to become RIAs and enter into like the T-Row price, you know, sort of lane. That all mostly obviously turned out to be like a disaster where it was just like, these guys are not, you know, sort of public equities, you know, experts and do not understand what it means to, you know, manage that, you know, sort of book appropriately. So I feel like most people have pulled back from that. So I do think, you know, it's a shifting landscape where I just don't think that the current state of liquidity preferences that are given to, you know, like, if you invest

• 1:51:03Delian Asparouhov?

  into a company at 500 billion in the public markets, you do not get a liquidity preference, right? You know, as an investor, I think it's less and less likely that some of these super late-stage private companies keep giving that type of liquidity preference to investors. And then I think also the like fee structure on these venture firms is almost certainly going to compress for some of these like super, you know, sort of late-stage, you know, types of rounds and funds.

• 1:51:20Jordi Hays?

  Do you think we'll see any SPACs this year?

• 1:51:25Delian Asparouhov?

  Well.

• 1:51:26Jordi Hays?

  Specifically for for companies uh in our in our world. Obviously, there's SPACs like constantly.

• 1:51:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, treasury companies and stuff going out, but but venture back SPACs.

• 1:51:39Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, I definitely um you know have had now, you know, a variety of companies that I'm involved with have had SPAC sponsors like pretty aggressively approached and like knocked on the door. I think like there are certain companies where it makes sense. If you are a type of company where it's like, look, I just need 500 billion or 500 million on the balance sheet. Billion would be great. I'm sure some all loved it 500 billion on the balance sheet. Uh but yeah, you know, and you're some super deep tech, long cycle thing. Yes, makes sense.

• 1:52:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:09Delian Asparouhov?

  I think there's just enough scar tissues from the 21 time period where it's like, there's a very small handful of companies that like survived through that SPAC crazy, right? Like there's that one robotics company that works with Walmart. Uh pretty significantly. It's like one of the few that has actually like, you know, sort of traded significantly up, but like the vast majority.

• 1:52:23Jordi Hays?

  MP Materials, MP Materials.

• 1:52:25Delian Asparouhov?

  Was MP Materials a SPAC though?

• 1:52:28John Coogan?

  Wasn't it Chamath's SPAC?

• 1:52:29Jordi Hays?

  I thought it was a Chamath's. Yeah, it was.

• 1:52:31Delian Asparouhov?

  You're right. It was a Chamath's. And that was like, I think almost like a part, like it used to be public, went private, restructured and then like re-fact basically.

• 1:52:37Jordi Hays?

  Fortress Fortress Value.

• 1:52:39John Coogan?

  Fortress Value.

• 1:52:40Jordi Hays?

  I'm just I'm just excited. I'm just excited to see what American exceptionalism acquisition corp.

• 1:52:46Delian Asparouhov?

  Um Symbiotic was the one that I was thinking of, by the way. I'm pretty sure. Um it's one of the few SPACs from like 2021. Let's look at it.

• 1:52:52Jordi Hays?

  Here's one. Here's a SPAC candidate. What about that uh that's uh spa uh Moon Hotel that was getting cheered around?

• 1:53:00John Coogan?

  Moon Hotel.

• 1:53:01Jordi Hays?

  I mean, at $400,000 a night, it's pretty simple. Just do the math.

• 1:53:05Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, simple economics.

• 1:53:07Jordi Hays?

  It's simple. It's just it's just it's just a math problem.

• 1:53:10John Coogan?

  I like that they're working on that. Give them a couple of decades. Let them cook, Jordy. Let the very YC founder cook. Uh.

• 1:53:17Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:18Jordi Hays?

  Gave in the chat.

• 1:53:18Delian Asparouhov?

  But yeah.

• 1:53:19Jordi Hays?

  Not a to match back, it was a pipe.

• 1:53:21John Coogan?

  Oh, it was a pipe. Okay, yeah, so.

• 1:53:23Delian Asparouhov?

  Pipe, it was a pipe. Uh, pipe into that one. But yeah, Symbiotic is probably the best example of like basically SPAC'd that, um, you know, a looks like eight billion dollar valuation, now a forty two billion dollar company, basically like incredible, obviously like outcome, but that's like of the basket of like this SPAC doing twenty twenty one. It's like, you know, one of like, you know, fifteen that basically ended up like that, the basket going down. Uh, and so I think for most companies it did not make sense.

• 1:53:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like you get to do a big fundraiser, you get a bunch of cash on the balance sheet, and then almost certainly you're going to have a stock chart that just looks like this, that follows you around and gets screenshotted in your face for the next like, you know, five years. And then you look at some of these SPACs and it's like, oh yeah, they're up forty percent this year. And it's like, but they were ten times bigger when they went out. And so you have this weird dynamic, uh, even if it puts cash on the balance sheet, it seems like it's a lot of, lot of weird dynamic, very different culturally to be running a public company, dealing with the

• 1:54:14Jordi Hays?

  Is Sim- is, is Symbiotic just a super underrated company? It's like a Ford sized business?

• 1:54:20John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:54:22Delian Asparouhov?

  I mean, yeah, it's large. I think it's pretty underappreciated. It's basically like, I would describe it as like the best warehouse robotics thing since Kiva. Um, but it's like, you know, publicly traded, independent company. My understanding is like pretty darn significant, like, you know, roll out to dollar Walmart. Definitely not discussed enough. I don't remember like the venture investors, you know, there were, you know, you know, you know, uh, around the table, but it's like based in Massachusetts. That's a part of why it doesn't get like, you know, a ton of, a ton of interest and heat. But yeah, I definitely think it's like pretty under the radar.

• 1:54:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Have a great rest of your day. We'll see you soon.

• 1:54:52Delian Asparouhov?

  Good to see the boys. Let's keep, uh, oh, yeah.

• 1:54:56John Coogan?

  Tactical nuke? Oh, no.

• 1:54:59Delian Asparouhov?

  Uh, this is me doing barbells for my barbell strategy, so I'm gonna just keep doing my barbell pumping.

• 1:55:04Jordi Hays?

  Keep wrapping it up.

• 1:55:06Delian Asparouhov?

  Keep wrapping the barbell, boys.

• 1:55:07John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:55:10John Coogan?

  You had to nuke them, the truth nuke. Restream, that's a truth nuke. One livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to restream.com. Going from the truth nuke to the restream.

• 1:55:23Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of robotics, next up, we have Deepak from Skilled AI. Got to give a shout out to Luke Metro. Luke Metro, joined a company, it's pretty under the radar, left Andurall to join Skilled. There wasn't a lot of chatter about Skilled publicly at the time. And of course, Luke is a goaded picker and it's been marked up

• 1:55:47John Coogan?

  Significantly.

• 1:55:48Jordi Hays?

  Many, many, many times since he joined.

• 1:55:51John Coogan?

  But until the CEO arrives here in the Restream waiting room, let's talk about Reggie James. He's joined General Catalyst as their Creative Director. He says it's an honor to be trusted to hold this position. He had the opportunity to spend a lot of times with incredible folks across the industry during his break, but the ambition that General Catalyst has to tackle huge problems is simply unnatural. There's so much work to do to show the story of the immense world being built here, but I couldn't imagine doing anything else right now. I'm incredibly excited for this.

• 1:56:26Jordi Hays?

  Super bullish on this. Reggie obviously is OraMax, he's MotionMaxed. And I think if he can bring some of that to GC.

• 1:56:36John Coogan?

  It feels like, I mean, GC's a massive fund, but a little bit quieter, they're not going direct as much, there's not a lot of noise, and that just feels like more of a blank canvas than going into, if you put Reggie at a different firm that maybe has a whole bunch of other firms doing a ton of stuff. Yeah, loud. You could, yeah, this feels, this feels like a really natural fit and I'm excited to see what he does with it. Let me tell you about Figma. 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 back prototypes and apps fast.

• 1:57:12Jordi Hays?

  Billionaire, Rams owner Stan Kronke.

• 1:57:15John Coogan?

  Oh, he's land maxed.

• 1:57:16Jordi Hays?

  Becomes America's biggest private land owner.

• 1:57:19John Coogan?

  Let's do it for Stan. Let's stand. Are you a Stan Stan?

• 1:57:22Jordi Hays?

  He's listening to the show.

• 1:57:23John Coogan?

  I'm a Stan Stan and we stand, stand.

• 1:57:26Jordi Hays?

  Buying nearly 1 million acres of New Mexico ranch land.

• 1:57:30John Coogan?

  Stan's land is growing. That's fantastic news.

• 1:57:34Jordi Hays?

  Farmland investing becomes increasingly popular, especially now that, you know, maybe somebody comes in and wants to build the data center on your farm and pay, you know, 10 times what you paid for it. At 2.7 million acres, Cronkite's holdings are larger than Yellowstone National Park, or the equivalent roughly 2 million football fields. He bought 1 million acres of New Mexico ranchland in December from the family behind industrial conglomerate Taladine. According to the trade publication, Singleton Ranch's transaction is the largest land purchase in the US in more than a decade. Land is back.

• 1:58:14John Coogan?

  Back on the menu.

• 1:58:16Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 1:58:17John Coogan?

  Speaking of land, Greenland is in the news, of course. Dylan says, "This is the equivalent of affordability in Greenlandic politics," and he shares a screenshot here. It's a quote from a Greenlander who says, "I hunt whales and seals. In the United States, they think whales and seals are cute and shouldn't be hunted. That's what I'm afraid of. Don't bring your fear of hunting. Don't, don't bring, oh, whales are cute.

• 1:58:44Jordi Hays?

  I like this. He's looking for a carve-out. He's looking for a carve-out.

• 1:58:47John Coogan?

  Let me keep hunting my whales. Let me keep hunting my seals. Hey, you know what?

• 1:58:52Jordi Hays?

  Can we, Nick?

• 1:58:54John Coogan?

  If you join up with America, he will let you.

• 1:58:57Jordi Hays?

  Can we work to get Knut Abelson on the show to talk about the business of whale?

• 1:59:02John Coogan?

  So Knut wants to stay with Denmark, just because culturally it's cooler to hunt whales and seals.

• 1:59:08Jordi Hays?

  We can shift the culture.

• 1:59:09John Coogan?

  We can, I'm down to hunt whales. I'll go hunt some whales and seals with you right now. I'll, let's hang out. What are you using, a spear? Spear gun? Rifle? Nuke?

• 1:59:19Jordi Hays?

  What if, what if, what if he's selling the blubber out the back door to power data centers?

• 1:59:24John Coogan?

  We got flashbangs. We'll throw a flashbang in the ocean. All the whales will be doing this. Oh, no.

• 1:59:29Jordi Hays?

  Something about, um...

• 1:59:30John Coogan?

  With the harpoon.

• 1:59:32Jordi Hays?

  I don't like, I don't like seals at all.

• 1:59:34John Coogan?

  He's reading, he's reading Moby Dick. We know about hunting whales in this country. We would be happy to partner with Greenland on this.

• 1:59:41Jordi Hays?

  I'm, I think I'm against whale hunting. They're just so majestic.

• 1:59:44John Coogan?

  Majestic. That's, that's a synonym for cute.

• 1:59:48Jordi Hays?

  But seals.

• 1:59:49John Coogan?

  You're the problem.

• 1:59:49Jordi Hays?

  I have deep beef with seals.

• 1:59:52John Coogan?

  Why?

• 1:59:52Jordi Hays?

  Uh, growing up surfing in the cold waters in Northern California. By the way, last time I talked about surfing, I got mega canceled on YouTube.

• 2:00:01John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:00:02Jordi Hays?

  Cause I was talking about how surfing makes like, it brings your body temperature lower and then you spend all day trying to heat up. People were like.

• 2:00:08John Coogan?

  You were against surfing before work.

• 2:00:10Jordi Hays?

  This guy is in a suit talking about surfing. What does he know about surfing?

• 2:00:13John Coogan?

  You're about to get canceled by the seal lovers in the chat.

• 2:00:15Jordi Hays?

  No, so, uh, seals will, will like mess, would mess with me. I'd be out alone surfing.

• 2:00:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:21Jordi Hays?

  In Northern California, water is very sharky.

• 2:00:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:24Jordi Hays?

  And these things are the dogs of the sea. So they'll run up and they would just slam into me. And all of a sudden I think I'm getting attacked by a shark and then I'd just be in the water by myself beefing with a seal.

• 2:00:35John Coogan?

  This is incredible skill issue for you. Oh, seals annoying me. Oh, I need, I need, I need, I need seals to be hunted. It's fine. Hang out with the seals. Let the seals mess with you. They're, they're the dogs of the sea. We love them. We also love Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest. Securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending now with AI. Buco Capital, he tried to warn you. He said, I tried to warn you. I'd say, I'd say we're getting close to the bottom, but I have no idea. Nobody wants to own these things. He's, he's referring to the problem with application SaaS isn't vibe coding. It's that vibe coding is only one of the many bear cases. There's no valuation support for many of these names.

• 2:01:19John Coogan?

  Free cash flow is a mirage due to excessive stock-based comp. He is calling the, uh, the top on SaaS boys, uh, the, the SaaS boys are not happy with Buco. He says, speaking of stock-based comp, the dilution at some of these companies is absolutely disgusting. It's insulting. VCs funded thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of these things.

• 2:01:41Jordi Hays?

  Snapchat, Snapchat gives away the whole company every 10 years.

• 2:01:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. What happens to competition and to margins and to future profits when the incremental feature is free to make? Many of these companies are zero. So you're going to see, his prediction is you see a lot of different VC funded SaaS companies encroaching on each other's territory. Oh, I'm in this category. I'm just going to build this.

• 2:02:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the calculus changes when it's like, hey, this feature is going to take us like nine months to really build and be competitive. And it's like, oh, it's actually going to take us like a month.

• 2:02:12John Coogan?

  Two seconds, it's done. But it's not clear where the value will accrue. Investors are thinking of Netflix gathering all the value on top of cable or OTAs stealing all of the value on top of legacy systems. Record last and certainly not least, even if you don't think application SaaS is zero, everyone else seems to. So who's going to step in to buy these things? Probably private equity. One of them has to accelerate for real for the money to start flowing in. Yes. Interesting. He could go on and on. Anyway.

• 2:02:40Jordi Hays?

  Naruto in the chat says, I've done the swim from Alcatraz in SF. People running an event sit in boats and prevent seals from biting the swimmers. Seals are not.

• 2:02:49John Coogan?

  Send this post to Greenland. Let them know. We know how to fight the seals. We know how to beat them back when our Americans are swimming.

• 2:02:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the biggest mistake they're not making is flash banging the seals.

• 2:03:00John Coogan?

  Flash banging the seals.

• 2:03:02Jordi Hays?

  They didn't study.

• 2:03:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. Scientists have made a spray on powder that can seal serious wounds in seconds. Speaking of seals, sealing wounds, the South Korean developed powder reacts with elements in the blood and turns into a gel to form a barrier to stop bleeding. This is not that new. There's coagulants that exist. We've talked to a few folks about this.

• 2:03:27Jordi Hays?

  It's the company's founders, Jake.

• 2:03:28John Coogan?

  Jake Adler has a similar coagulant. And then also there's QuickClot from the late 90s, I believe. But exciting to see more, more development in the, in the healing of wounds.

• 2:03:40Jordi Hays?

  Toma Bravo has a piece in the Financial Times.

• 2:03:45Jordi Hays?

  And they say broader integrated software platforms for business are positioned to win out against those selling specific services. The explosive rise of AI startups follows a pattern we've seen before. Small companies racing to apply new technology to specific business problems. Let's give it up for applying new technology to specific business problems. Doesn't get enough love. Promising huge efficiency gains in their narrow slice of the market. These startups typically use standard AI models and distinguish themselves by writing software on top in order to target specific tasks. Their value proposition is that specialized solutions can compete without worrying much about how businesses function as complete systems. But this is a vulnerable strategy. Like dot com companies that burn cash without sustainable business models, many of today's

• 2:04:29Jordi Hays?

  AI startups burn money paying for access to AI models while lacking advantages that competitors can't copy. Their core bet is that AI can solve specific business problems so efficiently that companies will willingly go beyond their integrated systems to get superior performance in one area. In short, best in class beats good enough but all in one place. But connecting to full business processes to find a sustainable growth path over time is a very challenging task for companies built to do just one thing. While some might be seeing sharp initial revenue acceleration, they also see substantive costs. One study by Cruise Consulting suggests they spend double what traditional software as a service companies spend on compute and infrastructure while also paying for specialized talents that command high pay packages.

• 2:05:13Jordi Hays?

  These structural challenges show why we believe established software platforms such as Salesforce, SAP, and Microsoft and portfolio companies like Anaplan and Coupa that we invest in at Tomo Bravo will be more durable despite the risks of AI disruption to their businesses. While AI startups struggle to defend narrow territory, broader platforms build advantages that often grow stronger over time. Rather than just making one specific area better, they work on strengthening the broader business of a customer. This model produces intelligence for both the company and the provider building capabilities. And SaaS companies have years of making improvements. For example, software platforms can model cause and effects across business functions. A narrow AI tool might optimize an inventory, but if it doesn't consider cash flow, supplier

• 2:05:55Jordi Hays?

  relationships, or supply chain risks, that optimization on a single variable could actually stand to hurt the business. Established software companies are

• 2:06:05Jordi Hays?

  Are thus better positioned to address business concerns on AI integration, competition, implementation challenges, cybersecurity, legal, ethical questions, costs and reputation risks. This is because digital transformation has always meant balancing efficiency gains with risk management. Trying to see if there's anything else here that's worth reading. I think the main thing is like being in a position like Tomo Bravo where you're meant to be deploying tens of billions of dollars amid when you have the shifting sands is like a pretty harrowing. There's a ton of opportunity, very exciting time, but it's also harrowing.

• 2:06:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, let me tell you about Vanta automated compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform and we have our next guest. We are in our Lambda lightning round. We have Deepak from Skilled. How are you doing? Good to have you on the stream.

• 2:07:03Jordi Hays?

  Great setup you got here.

• 2:07:05John Coogan?

  Fantastic setup. Thanks so much for having me.

• 2:07:07Speaker 09

  We're testing it for the first time and as you can see, there are still issues in between, so we do not know.

• 2:07:13John Coogan?

  Yes. Please introduce yourself and the company since it's your first time on the show.

• 2:07:18Speaker 09

  Yeah. So thanks for having me. I am Deepak, Deepak Patil. I am a CEO and co-founder of Skilled AI. So at Skilled, what we are doing is we are building a general purpose robot brain. Now, any robot, any task, one brain. So when I say that, it's like even a humanoid, a quadro bag, robotic arm, hands, everything governed by a single brain. And that is what we do.

• 2:07:43Jordi Hays?

  Let's get into the news from this week and then we have a bunch of questions.

• 2:07:48Speaker 09

  Sounds good.

• 2:07:50Jordi Hays?

  What happened this week?

• 2:07:52Speaker 09

  Well, this has been a busy week for us. I think back to back, we had multiple announcements. We began with the announcement regarding learning from human videos. We showed a lot of results, but the latest announcement, which is just from yesterday, is about the funding announcement. I have raised-

• 2:08:09Jordi Hays?

  How much did you raise?

• 2:08:10Speaker 09

  Close to 1.4 billion dollars, which values the company now at 14 billion dollars.

• 2:08:22Jordi Hays?

  Incredible, incredible. Yeah, let's talk about where you're most excited about the application of robotics in the very, very near term. There's so many different, obviously, angles, industries, kind of form factors that are exciting, but where are you guys focused on today working with customers?

• 2:08:44Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think this is the, whenever in public, folks talk about robotics. On the consumer side, the excitement becomes, okay, we have robot coming to our homes next month, and I hope robot will do X, Y, and Z. And people don't realize that robotics is not a new field. Like, this is one of the oldest areas in technology. It precedes computer, and in fact, it precedes AI. And for 70 years, you see all these movies and even real-world demos of robots, but still, we do not see robots around us. And we began to feel that robotics has not arrived yet. But if you go to any big factory, go to a car factory or Amazon, you will see like

• 2:09:27Speaker 09

  tons of robots, thousands of robots doing things, manufacturing items, etc. Now, what's the gap? The gap is you cannot get robots beyond these demos or beyond these factories that takes to consumer scenarios because the brain has been with them. And that's what we bring to the table. Now, in this setup, it is a step-by-step approach, even in factories, even in enterprise. The robots are there, but they are in a red tape area, like behind an area where you cannot go, and if a human goes there, they're going to turn off all the robot. And that's where you start first. You start to get these robots alongside people. So what we are doing right now, even we are already deploying in variety of areas like

• 2:10:08Speaker 09

  point-to-point delivery systems, even warehouses, manufacturing, but the change is we are doing it alongside. Where people can come and interact and do their own work and then robot to be between the side uh in with randomized scenarios. People is important because people create randomness and chaos. And that's where AI needs to come in.

• 2:10:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you feeling about the supply chain? Are there any bottlenecks that you're worried about coming down the pipe? We've seen so many unexpected bottlenecks pop up in just the data center build out. Talking about copper today, that was not on my bingo card. Uh, what should we be worried about if we if we are going to be scaling robotics over the next couple of years?

• 2:10:50Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think this is exactly why we are scaling the way we are. If you think about going like for every different application, there's a different hardware requirement. If you are doing something for the data center, you need a different kind of robot for doing things and especially for other scenarios. And this is where getting all the supply chain all together at once, it takes a long time. But as I said earlier, robots are not a new thing. Industries have already been deploying that for variety of scenarios. The ROI has been less because you have to create a separate area, separate warehouse, customized scenarios for them. So we can piggyback on those supply. So what we the model we follow is we partner with hardware companies or even end users who have hardware. And we provide our software as a service on top.

• 2:11:34Speaker 09

  And that enables very fast go to market strategy for us. And these robots, which may be earlier in a secure area where humans cannot enter, now can be used around in uh in outside alongside people and start to work.

• 2:11:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh, how much how much hardware do you guys actually build internally specifically for testing? I can imagine there's uh uh certain kind of like products where you're working just just on the software side, working with a specific customer, but then on the internal side uh for like, you know, having faster feedback loops. I imagine you're uh building quite a bit as well.

• 2:12:10Speaker 09

  You can today, what has changed the last five to seven years is you can purchase a lot of commercially available hardware. Uh, and in fact, every single robot hardware probably is on the internet has made our made its way to our office. And we already have large number of them as long as the company sells them and gives us access to fully control the robot or software. So we take the hardware, we put the model, it's an end to it model, goes from direct for pixels in to actions out. And it takes control of the whole hardware and makes it a skilled a skilled robot.

• 2:12:42Jordi Hays?

  What what form factor do you think what robotic form factor do you do you think will be the first to make consumers feel like robotics has really arrived, right? You talked earlier about how it's like commonplace in a commercial setting, but it's happening like in a warehouse. No one's really seeing it. And so they're not kind of like feeling the acceleration yet. But on the consumer side, when do you think people will have that kind of moment?

• 2:13:13Speaker 09

  This is a very, very, very good question. And I think it goes to the root of what people think of robotics. When they say, okay, I want a robot in my home. Okay, let's say the most common thing in Silicon Valley, like I want a robot in my home in this year. But when has it happened that you suddenly have things at home and you do not see them in your daily lives? What about grocery stores? Like, do you see a robot in grocery stores? What about Target? You go to order something, you pay for two hours for it to get picked up ready, and then it's a pain to get even pick it up. What about hospitals? What about any of these consumer facilities which deal with consumers but are on the enterprise? And

• 2:13:54Speaker 09

  that's where you believe you will begin to see robots first. It will become a commonplace thing, and then you start to get them in your robot. Like, if I give your robot to you like today, you will probably use it and you will like it for a few months, then it will sit in your garage like a massage chair, which I don't know if you have. And then never get used again. So it has to first become become common in your daily life. Like, you're not surprised, okay, I have this in my home and it's ready to go. And that's where, yes, enterprise is a stepping stone to the eventual consumer deployment. And, yeah, I can go deeper into this. What is the other reason for this? But this is one of the practical reasons. The other reason is data. And that's can go forward.

• 2:14:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what what what kind of bottlenecks are there on the data side that you guys are seeing?

• 2:14:43Speaker 09

  Bottleneck as in where is the data?

• 2:14:46Speaker 09

  When there is something in high quantity and it's coming to a squeeze hole. Uh, but there is no data for robotics. This is the, this is the main, uh, main issue. It is not one of those AI areas. Like as I said, robotics, when the initial AI projects were done at MIT and other places, they were done in the context of robotics. It has been seventy years. Chips have, uh, the gram has come down from a room size to like, you cannot even see that, uh, uh, so tiny transistors. Robots are still not around them. And the reason for that is unlike language or vision, where you can build GPT like orders, LLM like orders, there is no data for robots. And that's where the technical part becomes very critical.

• 2:15:29Speaker 09

  So what we do today is we boost, somehow you to somehow bootstrap the process to deploy the robot in the, on the site. You cannot say I get a data by deployment and, uh, but to deploy, I need, uh, so to get in a problem, like to deploy, I need the brain to function for the brain to function and the data. So how do you break this problem? To bootstrap that, what we do is we start with two such alternate sources. We learn by watching people. So learning by watching people act like, uh, there are tons of lifestyle videos on YouTube, uh, and Flickr, other sources. We watch them and have the robots learn from them. And the second source is simulation. And we put them together, uh, to transfer these results, uh, to the, to the real world.

• 2:16:12Speaker 09

  And once they get deployed, then we can, we can establish this data privacy. Where the more deployments increase, the more data you get back and that increases your further your, uh, the performance of your model.

• 2:16:25Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. Makes a lot of sense.

• 2:16:26John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 2:16:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to, great to finally meet.

• 2:16:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, great to finally meet. We're huge fans of Luke Metro. He's a great pick.

• 2:16:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'd like to nominate him for employee of the month and employee of the year.

• 2:16:35John Coogan?

  We don't know anything about the other employees, but he's the employee of the month in our heart.

• 2:16:39Jordi Hays?

  We think he's a great guy.

• 2:16:40John Coogan?

  He's a good person.

• 2:16:41Speaker 09

  Employee of the month, employee of the month every month.

• 2:16:43John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Fantastic.

• 2:16:44Jordi Hays?

  That's it. That's it. Uh, well. Uh, so great to finally meet you, uh, and congratulations on all the progress.

• 2:16:50John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. We got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Our next guest is David Tearse from Karman Industries. While he's coming in, I'm going to tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Good to see you. Welcome to the show. First time on the show.

• 2:17:18Speaker 00

  First time on the show.

• 2:17:19John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming in person. Please kick us off with an introduction yourself and the company.

• 2:17:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, David Tearse, co-founder and CEO of Karman Industries. We actually launched today our heat processing unit. So an HPU, and this is a cooling system designed for gigawatt scale AI factories.

• 2:17:37John Coogan?

  Okay, cooling the entire data center, the individual chip, both?

• 2:17:41Speaker 00

  All of it. So typically, a lot of these are cooled with a similar loop because you've got high memory bandwidth. You've got GPUs, you've got air handling, all that type of stuff. All of this is about reducing the complexity of the infrastructure. So our overall solution is actually a 10-megawatt modularized solution. And that's very different than the one to two-megawatt ones from the existing solutions out there. And we reduce that mechanical yard by about 80%. So your speed to deployment increases rapidly with this.

• 2:18:11John Coogan?

  So heat is generated as I put electricity through the silicon chip. In an old Facebook data center, they would just open the window and blow it out with fans, I assume, you know, air-cooled systems. Now we're seeing a lot of water cooling. Walk me through, like, try and explain what is the actual flow of where the heat goes, how it's moved around?

• 2:18:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. So pretty much every single electron that goes into a data center gets turned into heat. Comes right into these chips. They generate a huge amount of heat. So now when we're talking gigawatt scale, this is a gigawatt worth of heat.

• 2:18:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we talked about, there's a bath house in New York called Bath House, and they originally would heat the baths with, via Bitcoin mining. There's so much heat coming off of it.

• 2:18:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, and racks used to be kind of in this like 5 to 20 kilowatt per rack. Now we've jumped up to 120 kilowatt per rack. The Vera Rubin coming will be 600 kilowatts per rack, and they're trending towards a megawatt in a rack. So when you think of how much power that is, a megawatt's 1,000 homes' consumption. And putting that in a rack, and then all gets turned into heat. So you have to move that the most efficient way possible. And today, 20 to 30% of your energy is going towards cooling. That is a OpEx constraint. That is a thermal constraint. And it's just, you're not generating revenue with that.

• 2:19:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:28Speaker 00

  So, we're trying to shift that and we reduce that at a minimum of by 25% energy consumption on the cooling side.

• 2:19:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:34Speaker 00

  Now, you can have more headroom that you're using towards compute.

• 2:19:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. And what's the, what's the material? What's the substrate for extracting the heat? Air, water, something else?

• 2:19:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, we interface with the existing systems that are there.

• 2:19:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:19:46Speaker 00

  So, we integrate with the glycol loops that go to the chip level to the CDU side of it.

• 2:19:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:19:51Speaker 00

  But, inside our actual system, we're using supercritical CO2. So, we're running a high-speed compressor that was developed in-house by our team. We have a huge amount of history from SpaceX Rocket Lab. About a third of our team comes from there. And, we've really designed this from the ground up.

• 2:20:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:20:06Speaker 00

  Our first one, we came up and running in eight months with a four-person team.

• 2:20:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:10Speaker 00

  Ran it at 30,000 RPM.

• 2:20:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:12Speaker 00

  The next system will be coming together in Q2 here. And, yeah, we're using supercritical CO2 due to the high density of the fluid.

• 2:20:19John Coogan?

  Energy density. So, it can absorb the heat. It absorbs the energy. It heats up and then you move it somewhere else.

• 2:20:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, we remove it. We vent it to ambient. But, why we're calling this a heat processing unit is because today, we view heat as a liability and as a constraint. But, heat is energy.

• 2:20:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:35Speaker 00

  And, it's an asset. And, so, we're building the platform that allows you to remove that heat from your system as efficiently as possible.

• 2:20:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:20:44Speaker 00

  And, it opens the door for future use cases of heat reuse.

• 2:20:47John Coogan?

  Sure. Yeah, I want to talk to you about that. Because I've seen some of the hyperscalers have put out statements saying that there is waste heat from our data centers. But, we're going to be able to pipe it into the local community, basically give everyone free heat in their homes.

• 2:21:00Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:21:00John Coogan?

  And, that sounds really good as long as, I guess, it's clean air. But, it seems like a good use. What does it take to actually go from a data center in the middle of nowhere to a data center that's closer to a bunch of homes? To get the energy, get the waste heat there and maybe just warm up someone's house during the winter?

• 2:21:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think Europe will be more ahead of us than us just due to the proximity of those data centers to urban locations. Just smaller continent, smaller countries, right? So where we see also a great opportunity is to do waste heat back to electricity. Oh, interesting. And actually supply that back to the data center. So in your colder regions at night during the winter, you'll have a big enough delta T where you can actually do that with our system. Okay. So that becomes now additional headroom that you can use towards compute. Okay. As well as then I kind of have seriously half joke that right now data centers are not in my backyard. That's the vibe that everyone has. But what if we built communities around these and you have free utilities if you live there? That would be huge. I think people would really like that.

• 2:21:56Jordi Hays?

  We were talking about this yesterday, just like if if somebody's, you know, you hear a data center coming into your backyard, anywhere in your town, there's no, there's no, for a lot of people, there's not going to be direct upside.

• 2:22:08Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 2:22:09Jordi Hays?

  Just because even if it's not there, I can still use all the different AI tools, right? I'm not like limited just because there's no data center even in my state.

• 2:22:16Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:22:17Jordi Hays?

  I like that. Talk about discovering the opportunity, the journey to getting here, maybe your background. When when we met, you were in, this was probably a couple of years at this point, you were in the IDMAs looking at a lot of different opportunities and seems like you found a super exciting one.

• 2:22:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, so kind of going through that is, yeah, I was in entrepreneur residence at Riot Ventures, looking for what I was going to build. Yeah, shout out Will. And I, it really takes people that are true industry experts, world-class engineers to develop something new. And I ended up partnering up with my co-founder, Dr. CJ Calra, who had spent pretty much his entire career in the thermal energy space, most recently head of technology at Antora. Prior to that, worked at a couple of different startups, but started his career at GE Research working on supercritical CO2. So that's exactly what we're doing here with our system. So he was, when we started working together, it was looking at this broader thermal infrastructure layer. Fifty percent of all end

• 2:23:16Speaker 00

  energy use is used for thermal management. We're either heating something up or cooling something down. And we're doing it with outdated technology. So we're leveraging the tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars that has been spent across turbo machinery in the rocket industry, high-speed power electronics, silicon carbide, permanent magnet motors, and the EV revolution, packaging this all together and bringing it to the most pressing need, which is the thermal management of data centers right now. This is a huge bottleneck for them.

• 2:23:43Jordi Hays?

  How have you been bouncing all around the map, checking like on the ground at various data center projects?

• 2:23:51Speaker 00

  A little bit. Now, they're, these things sometimes are more heavily guarded than Fort Knox. These guys have machine guns outside of these things. It's hilarious.

• 2:23:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, I know. But once you're, once you're, you know, working with somebody and like actually doing a deal, I'm sure the doors get open.

• 2:24:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. And we're going to be launching these actual deployments starting later this year. We're standing up our first factory, Gigaworks One, which will be a thousand mega, or sorry, a hundred units per year of 10 megawatts. It's a gigawatt-sized capacity right out the gate. Because the demand is so extreme compared to where the supply chain is right now.

• 2:24:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. So if we see one of these data centers, maybe it's 150 megawatts, maybe it's a gigawatt, how many heat processing units would they buy from you? Is it a modular system where they might be using some legacy system as well and then bring you on incrementally? Or do they need to go all in and work with you exclusively?

• 2:24:47Speaker 00

  No, we're very much plug and play with the existing solutions that are out there. So you could, if you have an existing data center with an existing cooling system, we could phase in our system over time. But yes, a lot of these are clean sheet designs that are going up right now. And right now, this is one of the biggest bottlenecks for them for deployments.

• 2:25:05John Coogan?

  Okay, so yeah, there's obviously just a bottleneck of like if you just can't get any sort of cooling, you know, from the market, like you'll just be delayed. Talk about the actual economics of someone who goes with you for a new build. Is this higher CapEx, lower OpEx over time? Or how should a CFO who's working on a new data center think about working with you and the trade offs involved?

• 2:25:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. So our actual CapEx of the system is the same as existing solutions out there. And the snowballing effect of reduction of size, reduction of infrastructure, reduction of piping, make this a cheaper solution right out the gate, faster deployments because time is money on these deployments. As well as then when you actually look at the efficiency of our system. So in your worst conditions, this is you need to cool your chips at 20C in Texas during the middle of the summer. We have a 25% energy reduction in the cooling system.

• 2:25:58John Coogan?

  Over the state of the art.

• 2:25:59Speaker 00

  When you start looking Virginia, some of these, you know, more moderate climates, we're looking 60 to 100% improvement in performance of this system, which that unlocks huge amounts of headroom.

• 2:26:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:12Speaker 00

  So it's not as much about the OpEx savings because we do do that. But what we really unlock is the ability to allocate more of your electricity towards compute, which that's, that's the moneymaker in this thing.

• 2:26:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Talk to me about manufacturing a heat processing unit. Are there co-packers for this thing? Can you go to a turnkey manufacturer once you have a design or a CAD file? You call in Hadrian or someone? Or are you going to vertically integrate and kind of make these in a warehouse somewhere?

• 2:26:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're going to vertically integrate a huge amount of this. Now, there's certain key components that we have a supply chain for. Around the motor, around a couple of other pieces in there.

• 2:26:55John Coogan?

  Tubing and piping and stuff like that.

• 2:26:58Speaker 00

  Exactly. So we're taking very much the SpaceX approach. People think SpaceX vertically integrated from day one.

• 2:27:02John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:27:03Speaker 00

  They bought a lot of things off the shelf and then they looked at where they could either make an improvement or bring the cost down. And we're doing that exact same thing. A big piece of this also is diversity in our supply chain. We need to make sure that we're not single string in any one of these single components because the big guys, the hyperscalers are saying, you know, you need to produce a lot of these and you cannot slow down my deployment. You know, the reason that they're coming to us is because we're speeding up their deployment. So we're making sure that we have. Derisked every piece of our supply chain. Our chief operating officer, she came from SpaceX. She was leading all of production at Millennium Space Systems before she joined us. So we have a rock star team and that's always what Carmen has been about.

• 2:27:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. What do you think? I mean, it sounded like you wanted to have these in production pretty quickly. What do you think about the lead time? The battle of the press releases? The idea of going out and getting a couple of big headline deals done? And then using that to either raise money against those? Or even just have them pay you upfront? And then that kind of finances the growth? How are you thinking about like the investor relations aspect of the business?

• 2:28:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I come from an investor background. We did actually announce the series A this morning as well.

• 2:28:12Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, we got a gong for you.

• 2:28:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, hit the gong for us.

• 2:28:15Jordi Hays?

  Give us the details.

• 2:28:16Speaker 00

  Details.

• 2:28:17John Coogan?

  Who did it?

• 2:28:18Speaker 00

  It was Riot Ventures. They were our lead. We closed it back in September.

• 2:28:22John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:28:23Speaker 00

  It was kind of under the radar.

• 2:28:24John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 2:28:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was Riot Ventures, Space VC, Wonder Ventures, and then Sunflower Capital. And we also brought on Pat Gelsinger.

• 2:28:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:28:30Speaker 00

  He was an investor as well.

• 2:28:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. CEO of Intel.

• 2:28:34Jordi Hays?

  Hit that gong.

• 2:28:35John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:28:42John Coogan?

  Rings out.

• 2:28:43Jordi Hays?

  I like that. I like the technique.

• 2:28:45John Coogan?

  Good technique. Talk to me about the name. It feels like you'd be a space company. You're not. Is it?

• 2:28:51Jordi Hays?

  Not yet.

• 2:28:52John Coogan?

  Is there something more about to the Carmen line? Or is that the reference?

• 2:28:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's Theodore von Carmen, famous physicist. He did kind of coin the term of the difference between our atmosphere and space. But just his work in supersonic and hypersonic flow

• 2:29:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:29:06Speaker 00

  was a lot of the inspiration for this.

• 2:29:09John Coogan?

  That's amazing. That's amazing. What's next? You're hiring. How big is the team? Where do you want to be in a year? How are you thinking about growing the business?

• 2:29:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're 23 people right now. We have the core team in place to build these first units, get them up and running. The scaling piece of this will be all technicians to be able to actually manufacture a huge amount of these systems.

• 2:29:28John Coogan?

  Technicians? What? Where are you pulling from? Where are the? Where do people do this work typically? What skills? Is it a trade school? Do they have college degrees? Are they mechanical engineers? Like, who are these people?

• 2:29:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we, the, the kind of first wave of them is going to be people with a, I would say, very diverse skillset within manufacturing.

• 2:29:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:29:49Speaker 00

  And that's because when you're building these first units, you don't actually know exactly where the sticking points are going to be.

• 2:29:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:29:54Speaker 00

  And you're doing this kind of design for manufacturing while you're also standing up the manufacturing piece of it.

• 2:29:59John Coogan?

  So you have to be able to troubleshoot as you're building something out.

• 2:30:02Speaker 00

  Exactly. So you want, yeah, you want very high skilled generalist technicians and then we will move into more specialized as we go increase the velocity of that, the actual production side of it.

• 2:30:12Jordi Hays?

  Are you in the gundo?

• 2:30:13Speaker 00

  We are actually in Long Beach.

• 2:30:15Jordi Hays?

  Long Beach?

• 2:30:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:30:16Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay.

• 2:30:17Speaker 00

  Bigger facilities down there.

• 2:30:18Jordi Hays?

  Bigger facilities.

• 2:30:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, if you need a lot of space, it feels like a lot of companies graduate, they go to the gundo, they hang out.

• 2:30:24Jordi Hays?

  How big are the actual systems?

• 2:30:26Speaker 00

  Yep, they're the size of a shipping container.

• 2:30:28Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:30:28John Coogan?

  Shipping.

• 2:30:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. So we gotta build a hundred of those to do a gigawatt in a year.

• 2:30:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:30:32Speaker 00

  So it's very doable.

• 2:30:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and, and would you actually stack them up, a hundred of them at a, at a big data center site?

• 2:30:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you go look at these data centers today and you do an aerial view of one of them and you have more square footage getting taken up by the exterior mechanical yard, all for cooling, than you do the data center.

• 2:30:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:50Speaker 00

  So with a one or two megawatt one, if you're building a gigawatt data center, you've got 500 to 1,000.

• 2:30:55John Coogan?

  Wait, is that the current status?

• 2:30:56Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 2:30:57John Coogan?

  Okay, because I would assume that there'd be some sort of mechanical economy of scale where if, instead of, you know, you have a thousand tubes and a thousand, you know, like compressors and a thousand, and if you can just reduce that by just doing one really big one, but there must be some sort of.

• 2:31:13Speaker 00

  Then there's onsite construction with that. It's a custom build, all these things.

• 2:31:15John Coogan?

  Okay, so you.

• 2:31:16Speaker 00

  These were really designed originally for hospitals, universities, doing cold water systems. You'd put two or three of them on the roof.

• 2:31:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:31:23Speaker 00

  They work great. These are automatic controls, carrier, train type systems out there.

• 2:31:26John Coogan?

  At the one megawatt.

• 2:31:27Speaker 00

  Correct, yeah.

• 2:31:28John Coogan?

  So you're scaling that up, but still staying in a deployable form factor that can fit on the back of an 18 wheeler?

• 2:31:34Speaker 00

  Yep, and that's what CO2 is great for.

• 2:31:36John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:31:36Speaker 00

  High density, we run a high-speed turbo compressor inside there that was designed in-house.

• 2:31:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:41Speaker 00

  That's how we get the 10 megawatts in there.

• 2:31:42John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:31:43Speaker 00

  And then the actual fan system is separated from ours and that's, actually, we've decoupled that from our design.

• 2:31:48Jordi Hays?

  And you're, you're building a thousand of these this year?

• 2:31:51Speaker 00

  Hundred.

• 2:31:52Jordi Hays?

  A hundred, okay, okay. And what, what's the rough, what's the rough price range for one of these things?

• 2:31:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:31:58Jordi Hays?

  You can give me, you can give me a wide, I know it's call me, but like a wide, wide range.

• 2:32:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're, you're kind of in that. We'll call it 750 K a megawatt type range.

• 2:32:08Jordi Hays?

  Very nice, very nice.

• 2:32:09Speaker 00

  So it scales up very fast.

• 2:32:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. What are the like environmental considerations of compressed CO2? People worry about emissions, but what's the net impact of using CO2?

• 2:32:23Speaker 00

  So CO2 is actually the gold standard for refrigerants.

• 2:32:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:32:26Speaker 00

  Because today they're using R1234A, something from Honeywell.

• 2:32:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:31Speaker 00

  They've, while they have tried to push down the global warming potential of those, they now form forever chemicals over time.

• 2:32:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:32:38Speaker 00

  So CO2 is a global warming potential of one, because it is your baseline.

• 2:32:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:32:42Speaker 00

  It does not form forever chemicals over time as well.

• 2:32:44Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 2:32:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:32:47Jordi Hays?

  We want to get CO2 cannons in here.

• 2:32:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:50Speaker 00

  There we go. Yeah. No, it's actually a great working fluid for many reasons on that. It's non-flammable.

• 2:32:56John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:32:56Speaker 00

  And then the energy density of it is just dramatically higher than the existing solutions out there, as well as it's abundant. It's cheap.

• 2:33:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, interesting. And so walk me through like a data center construction in, I don't know, 2028 or something. Is it possible that they're, that they're off water entirely? There's no water cooling? Or would that still be a piece of the puzzle?

• 2:33:17Speaker 00

  Yep. So our system, while you use water as in like the glycol loops.

• 2:33:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:22Speaker 00

  Ours is a closed-loop system.

• 2:33:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:33:24Speaker 00

  So it does not consume water at all.

• 2:33:26John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:33:26Speaker 00

  Which is a big plus for these data centers. We're getting a huge amount of pushback.

• 2:33:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:33:31Speaker 00

  Gigawatt data center can pull over a half a million gallons an hour to keep it cool. It's an astonishing amount of water.

• 2:33:37John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:33:38Speaker 00

  So we've seen a huge amount of reception from the hyperscalers around closed-loop, zero water, doesn't form forever chemicals, natural refrigerant.

• 2:33:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:46Speaker 00

  All of these things are speaking exactly how they want to build data centers going forward, as well as that compact package is speed to market. At the end of the day, it's how fast can I build this?

• 2:33:54Jordi Hays?

  How are you prioritizing your pipeline?

• 2:33:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:33:58Jordi Hays?

  This is kind of a, it's like, there's not, I imagine there's some potential like mom and pop.

• 2:34:03John Coogan?

  There's hyperscalers and there's Neo Clouds.

• 2:34:05Jordi Hays?

  Going straight for the hardcore.

• 2:34:07John Coogan?

  Go to semi-analysis, look at cluster max, call every single person.

• 2:34:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we've definitely been talking to a lot of the big, you know, name people out there as well as the Neo Clouds, the ones that are kind of step below that.

• 2:34:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:34:18Speaker 00

  I would say for probably every one of these big gigawatt campuses that you hear one of the hyperscalers announcing, there is three to five in, that are kind of shadow data centers that may look like an Amazon warehouse and their co-locators, they're selling that compute to others.

• 2:34:31John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:34:32Speaker 00

  Each one has, it's, I would say its own unique reasons why they get excited about what we're working on.

• 2:34:37John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:34:37Speaker 00

  But yeah, that's actually a very ongoing consideration right now is how do we allocate our 2027 production numbers right now?

• 2:34:45John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:34:45Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic. Are you trying to, how, how many units do you want to produce in 2027?

• 2:34:49Speaker 00

  So this fall, we will stand up that factory with an annual run rate of a gigawatt. So in 2027, we'll do about a gigawatt worth of actual production.

• 2:34:57Jordi Hays?

  Cool.

• 2:34:58John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Well, congratulations.

• 2:35:00Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 2:35:00John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on down to the TBP in UltraDome.

• 2:35:03Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 2:35:03John Coogan?

  And great to have you.

• 2:35:04Speaker 00

  Thanks for having us.

• 2:35:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's amazing to, uh, uh, this feels like the perfect opportunity for you and a very, uh, necessary problem to be working on.

• 2:35:12Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 2:35:13Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 2:35:13Speaker 00

  Thanks for having us.

• 2:35:14John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment, web apps, servers, and databases run in one place with scaling and monitoring and security built in. And I'm also going to tell you about the New York Stock Exchange.

• 2:35:28Jordi Hays?

  That's.

• 2:35:28John Coogan?

  Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. Stop making excuses.

• 2:35:35Jordi Hays?

  No more excuses.

• 2:35:36John Coogan?

  No more excuses. And we are ready for our second guest in the TBP in UltraDome today. We have Blake from Brink.

• 2:35:43Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 2:35:44John Coogan?

  In the studio with some hu- physical hardware.

• 2:35:49Jordi Hays?

  Make room, make room. You want to put it right here in the front, maybe?

• 2:35:53John Coogan?

  You can put it on top of here, maybe? I don't know. Wherever you want. In the front, that works. Uh, we have a drone, two drones in the studios. Uh, thank you so much for bringing this. Thank you so much for coming on down to the TBP in UltraDome. Uh, second time on the show, but, uh, reintroduce yourself. How long have you been working on the company?

• 2:36:10Jordi Hays?

  By the way, this thing is alive.

• 2:36:12John Coogan?

  It's alive.

• 2:36:13Jordi Hays?

  We got a live one.

• 2:36:14John Coogan?

  It's a heartbeat. Yeah.

• 2:36:15Speaker 10

  No doubt.

• 2:36:16John Coogan?

  Uh, so yeah, uh, briefly, uh, reintroduce the company and, uh, just explain kind of the scale and size of the business these days.

• 2:36:23Speaker 10

  Yeah, no, my, my pleasure. So, um, story, story of me, the company started my engineering career off over at McLaren Automotive. I was 14 when I was working there, so.

• 2:36:32John Coogan?

  Amazing, wow.

• 2:36:33Jordi Hays?

  You're why, you're why, you're, you're, you kind of can take a little credit for the.

• 2:36:37John Coogan?

  The W1.

• 2:36:38Jordi Hays?

  The, well, that and the recent, you know, the Landos.

• 2:36:41John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm sure.

• 2:36:42Speaker 10

  You know, unfortunately, neither of those things, but I can take a tiny amount of credit for the 720S.

• 2:36:48John Coogan?

  Okay, no way.

• 2:36:49Jordi Hays?

  How's that?

• 2:36:50John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:36:50Speaker 10

  I, I worked on some parts that are on the underside of that.

• 2:36:53John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:36:53Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:36:54John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:36:54Speaker 10

  So that, yeah, that was an insane first engineering job, obviously.

• 2:36:58Jordi Hays?

  It's been all downhill.

• 2:37:00Speaker 10

  In some ways, yes. Dude, I mean, it's, it's hard to match walking by MP4 dash four every day on my way to lunch.

• 2:37:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Wait, where, where, what facility were you actually working out of?

• 2:37:10Speaker 10

  Woking, so out of the McLaren Technology Center.

• 2:37:13Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 2:37:13Speaker 10

  Which is, yeah, like this.

• 2:37:15John Coogan?

  How did you actually get the job at 14?

• 2:37:16Jordi Hays?

  Classic, classic summer job, classic summer job. I was at 14, I was, I was, I was reffing like 10 soccer games every Saturday. Not, not a, uh, working hard, but not as smart.

• 2:37:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Wait, so how, how did you get the job?

• 2:37:30Speaker 10

  Well, I, I, I built a fusion reactor, um, before, yeah, before the internship, so that really helped.

• 2:37:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:37:36Speaker 10

  Basically, I would stay up until like 3 a.m. Las Vegas time every night and I just kept calling their CEO, what I never got through to. But after maybe the third or fourth attempt, I did get through to his personal assistant. And yeah, she took some pity on me and ended up facilitating the internship.

• 2:37:52John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Okay, well, catch us up on Brink.

• 2:37:54Speaker 10

  Yes.

• 2:37:55John Coogan?

  Scale of the business, where you are, product suite, all that.

• 2:37:57Speaker 10

  Yeah, 100%. So Brink manufactures drones for public safety end users. We started off with this guy, which is an indoor drone for SWAT teams. So the mission of this is to take off from an armored vehicle, to fly up to a target structure, look around the backyard. And then this was the first drone in the world to have a glass breaching capability. So it would literally shatter a window, make entry indoors.

• 2:38:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:38:18Speaker 10

  Uh, this right here is a small LiDAR, generates about a half a million points per second. So as this aircraft is clearing rooms, it's actually drawing a floor plan of the structure and then streaming it back live to first responders.

• 2:38:29Jordi Hays?

  Remind me how it actually breaks the glass?

• 2:38:31Speaker 10

  Yeah, so basically it's a wheel that hangs off the front of the bird that has two tungsten carbide end effectors that are embedded into it. And the wheel spins up to roughly 30,000 RPM.

• 2:38:42John Coogan?

  Sort of like a saw, almost.

• 2:38:45Speaker 10

  Yeah, but it causes glass to just explode. In particular...

• 2:38:49Jordi Hays?

  Glass is the worst nightmare.

• 2:38:50John Coogan?

  We have to share, when we were coordinating for this appearance, they said, "If you guys bring some glass to the Ultra Dome, we can smash it on set." We were like, "I don't know if we have the capability, we should have."

• 2:39:00Jordi Hays?

  I actually broke some glass yesterday, I was playing a little basketball.

• 2:39:03John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:39:04Jordi Hays?

  We break glass here.

• 2:39:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, next time we'll have to have you bust in through the door, take down the steel wall.

• 2:39:10Speaker 10

  I would love to make that happen. And yeah, this thing can also enable two-way communications. So when it finds a suspect, it can enable a crisis communicator to actually de-escalate whatever is going on.

• 2:39:19John Coogan?

  A hostage negotiation.

• 2:39:20Speaker 10

  Yep. So Vegas Metro was our first customer. Today, about 20% of the SWAT teams in the country are actively utilizing this drone.

• 2:39:27John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:39:28Jordi Hays?

  What are the rest of them waiting on?

• 2:39:30Speaker 10

  Well, you know, a lot of SWAT teams are super small. And they're like a shared effort between a bunch of 10-person police departments.

• 2:39:37John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:39:38Speaker 10

  This is a rather premium drone, so they're not in the direct addressable market for this particular bird. If you're looking at the addressable market, we probably sold to 40% or 50% of those.

• 2:39:48John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. And they might need, if it's a small team, you might need an extra operator, someone who'd pull away from the door kicking that the rest of the team's doing. Not everyone has the staff.

• 2:39:57Speaker 10

  Yeah, that's exactly it. But yeah, I mean, from the beginning of Brink, I also had this vision of drones arriving at the scene of 911 calls before first responders could, right? But I was familiar with how technically complex it would be to realize something like this from my time at DJI, who was my last employer. And yeah, I thought building a citywide network of recharging pods that could integrate with computer and dispatch and enable drones to fly very reliably over people, etc., it was just like a little out of scope for a teenager without any money. So I started with this, but you know, a lot has changed for Brink over the course of the last five years. Today, we're just about the second-largest quadcopter manufacturer in America, and we are the world's largest public safety drone company. And that's enabled us to, yeah, realize that product.

• 2:40:38Jordi Hays?

  So this is new, when did this come out?

• 2:40:40Speaker 10

  About a year ago, little over a year ago.

• 2:40:44John Coogan?

  Oh, wow. The camera's active.

• 2:40:45Speaker 10

  Yes. Yeah, for sure.

• 2:40:47John Coogan?

  It's okay. I'm touching.

• 2:40:48Speaker 10

  Oh, yeah. No, it's great. I'm glad you are. So, yeah, this is really the world's first purpose-made 911 response drone. So it takes off from a citywide network of drone recharging pods mounted on top of police and fire station roofs, and it flies to emergencies before, you know, first responders can show up.

• 2:41:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:04Speaker 10

  And then when it arrives, it streams back live video feed of whatever is going on, so first responders know exactly what they're about to walk into. It has an onboard thermal imager, so it can see heat. It can see through smoke, see hotspots and structure fires, you know, all of that good stuff, communicate that potentially to a

• 2:41:18Jordi Hays?

  And I imagine police officers would want one of these on-site even if they are getting there first in some situation, right? Maybe they're witnessing something and just having that third-person view from the sky so that they're less focused on, you know, trying, you know, obviously they have body cams and things like that, but having that extra angle, I think, is important.

• 2:41:40Speaker 10

  100%.

• 2:41:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. How does deployment work? I mean, I imagine a 911 call comes in, an address is getting collected, and then at some point is like, is, you know, does someone type the address, hit go, and then the drone can just go from an address and route itself? Or is there a pilot that's firing it up? Like, how autonomous is the actual deployment to get from the base station to an address?

• 2:42:08Speaker 10

  Yep. So we grab addresses from computer-aided dispatch or other pieces of software.

• 2:42:13John Coogan?

  Computer-aided dispatch? What does that mean?

• 2:42:14Speaker 10

  Basically, that's the software that dispatchers use to deploy ground units of various kinds.

• 2:42:19John Coogan?

  Got it. Okay.

• 2:42:20Speaker 10

  But when someone calls 911, you know, the GPS coordinate of that phone hits CAD.

• 2:42:25John Coogan?

  Okay. Interesting.

• 2:42:26Speaker 10

  Yes. So we will grab that GPS coordinate, and we find the nearest drone to the emergency with sufficient battery state of charge to actually get there.

• 2:42:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:35Speaker 10

  The doors on our recharging pods automatically open.

• 2:42:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:42:37Speaker 10

  We launch an aircraft. We plan a path from its launch site to the emergency, avoiding manned air traffic, no-fly zones, et cetera. And then when the drone arrives, it can engage in some number of pre-programmed, like, on-arrival behaviors. Like orbiting the GPS coordinate, pointing its camera in a certain direction.

• 2:42:54John Coogan?

  Maybe saying something, announcing itself.

• 2:42:56Speaker 10

  Totally. Or, or it can then be taken over, you know, by dispatcher or tell operator. The drone can be repositioned, camera can be moved around. Maybe that tell operator does use the drone to communicate to someone. Uh, or they might decide to deliver an emergency medical payload.

• 2:43:08John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:43:09Speaker 10

  Like Narcan, a defibrillator, personal location device, et cetera.

• 2:43:13Jordi Hays?

  How does it, uh, how do these takeoff points, charging locations actually work when a police, uh, uh, law enforcement agency decides, or a city decides they want to set this up? Are they going around and find, finding local businesses and getting them to opt in? Are these just like sitting on the roof of like a Starbucks or something like that? How does that all work?

• 2:43:33Speaker 10

  You know, that does happen sometimes, but generally fire departments are just already in the right places in jurisdictions.

• 2:43:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:41Speaker 10

  Because.

• 2:43:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So how, what, what, yeah, maybe, maybe it's helpful to talk about the range of this first.

• 2:43:46Speaker 10

  Yeah. Each one of these birds can cover roughly 20 square miles of jurisdiction.

• 2:43:49Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:43:49Speaker 10

  Which is quite a bit.

• 2:43:50Jordi Hays?

  So like most cities, you actually maybe need a handful. You have great coverage.

• 2:43:56Speaker 10

  Correct.

• 2:43:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:57Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 2:43:58John Coogan?

  Talk about the supply chain to actually, uh, build a drone company. Obviously you're a great engineer, but, uh, there's so many pieces on here, uh, that America hasn't really been dominant in drone manufacturing. We, we, we, we talked about GoPro and sort of the rough go that they had trying to get into the market, being underpriced in many ways. Like what did it take you to build the first one? How did you build the supply chain? How much is built in, in-house today? How, how are you thinking about building these guys?

• 2:44:25Speaker 10

  Well, fun fact, Brink has been sanctioned by China twice and I'm also personally sanctioned by China.

• 2:44:31John Coogan?

  No way. You're, you're one of the guys on the list.

• 2:44:33Speaker 10

  I know, I am, I am.

• 2:44:34Jordi Hays?

  It really is, uh, I mean, there, there's a lot of lists you can get on as an entrepreneur, but none with more kind of prestige than being sanctioned, I think.

• 2:44:42Speaker 10

  I was, I was proud of that one.

• 2:44:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. Ready to vacation in America.

• 2:44:45Speaker 10

  Yeah. A hundred percent. Um, so we had to move away from a Chinese supply chain.

• 2:44:51John Coogan?

  And I'm sure you were buying some stuff early on. Okay. There's a battery, buy some stuff off the shelf, hack it together. But eventually the geopolitical reality.

• 2:44:58Jordi Hays?

  And your 3D printing too?

• 2:45:00Speaker 10

  Yeah, so Lemur does include some carbon fiber reinforced nylon 3D printed parts.

• 2:45:06John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:45:06Speaker 10

  Responder, though, is fully injection molded.

• 2:45:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:45:09Speaker 10

  Got it.

• 2:45:09John Coogan?

  And so walk me through the supply chain. What are you making? What is America good at making? Or do we at least have a good drone motor company? I've been hearing that drone motors in particular are difficult to make in America. Or at least a lot of the companies sort of offshored or left or went out of business.

• 2:45:26Speaker 10

  Yes. So, listen, I mean, DJI controls 90% of the global drone market. They're near, it's really a monopoly. I think this isn't so well understood. But like, the drone industry is a monopoly owned by DJI.

• 2:45:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:45:38Speaker 10

  Autels are near its competitor. They're another Chinese drone manufacturer. They have about 5% of the market.

• 2:45:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:45:44Speaker 10

  All foreign drones were just federally banned.

• 2:45:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:45:47Speaker 10

  I don't know if you guys have been tracking this, but right before Christmas.

• 2:45:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:51Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 2:45:52Jordi Hays?

  Wait, but, but only in a, for government buyers or all consumers?

• 2:45:58Speaker 10

  All new foreign drones have just been banned from entering the country.

• 2:46:02John Coogan?

  Okay, so if I go to Best Buy right now, there might be a DJI Mavic 3 on the shelf, but there's not going to be any new ones. Once they go out of stock, they probably have to restock.

• 2:46:12Speaker 10

  Exactly. Basically, like, the next Mavic won't be allowed into the country. The next Matrice series drone won't be allowed into the country. They can hypothetically continue importing their current in-market drones.

• 2:46:23John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 2:46:23Speaker 10

  But in reality, in reality, even those imports are being slowed down very much at the borders.

• 2:46:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:46:29Speaker 10

  So, there's, there's this huge need for, you know, a DJI of the West. Or like, a leading drone manufacturer for the free world.

• 2:46:35John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:46:35Speaker 10

  And that's the organization that we want to be.

• 2:46:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:38Speaker 10

  I mention, I mention all of this, though, because...

• 2:46:41Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so what does that mean, though? Does that mean you, you start selling these to the public?

• 2:46:45John Coogan?

  Consumer. I want, I want, I want an American consumer drone.

• 2:46:47Speaker 10

  I think, I think over time, yes, we probably do start engaging in those types of businesses.

• 2:46:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:53Speaker 10

  You know, consumer is a little far from our, you know, current space.

• 2:46:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but if it helps you get to scale, bring down costs.

• 2:47:00Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 2:47:01Jordi Hays?

  There's a potentially good feedback.

• 2:47:04Speaker 10

  I think, I think, though, like, private security, industrial automation, homeland security, et cetera, would be like, more, more natural, immediate, new verticals for us. But, yeah, I mean, over time, we want to be a...

• 2:47:14Jordi Hays?

  That was underreported. I didn't, I didn't catch that they were, I, I remember... I remember some news around foreign drones with within purchasing from the government.

• 2:47:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:26Jordi Hays?

  Didn't clock.

• 2:47:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, they were, walk us through some of the history there. There were some local bans, some state level bans, some individual agencies that might say, hey, we're not going to approve these. You heard about, you know, you can't use TikTok in Langley. That seemed obvious. But now it's grown a lot. What was the actual history of the rollout? Who's been driving this in Washington?

• 2:47:49Speaker 10

  Yeah. So the progression here was, number one, the federal government banned itself from purchasing Chinese drones.

• 2:47:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:47:55Speaker 10

  Then some states started passing similar legislation. Florida, for example, banned their public safety agencies from requiring new Chinese systems. About a dozen states have followed suit. And the new thing is what I just articulated. You know, the government saying, you know what? No more new foreign drones are allowed into this country, period.

• 2:48:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:48:15Speaker 10

  Regardless of application.

• 2:48:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. Walk me through the geopolitical risk of, you know, foreign drones. I, at one point I had a DJI Air 2 or something, this little mini 49, what was it? 490 gram or something like that.

• 2:48:31Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 2:48:31John Coogan?

  And it was sort of like collecting dust in a, in a, in a drawer somewhere. And I was thinking like, okay, if somebody hacked this and really tried to fly it out of its little case and out of the drawer and then out of my closet and then out in my house, like, what is it going to do? Is it that dangerous?

• 2:48:48Jordi Hays?

  You treat child, you treat child, John.

• 2:48:50John Coogan?

  Walk me through the bad outcome.

• 2:48:52Jordi Hays?

  This is like, you rewind.

• 2:48:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:54Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, some, someone in China, so some entrepreneur in China is like, I'm going to make a hit consumer product in America that will be able to give you a real time map.

• 2:49:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:49:06Jordi Hays?

  Of everything going on. And there should be so many drones that people won't even notice when a drone is just hanging around some strategic asset or anything.

• 2:49:14John Coogan?

  So is that the risk, surveillance?

• 2:49:16Speaker 10

  I would say there are three primary risk vectors.

• 2:49:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:49:19Speaker 10

  Um, risk vector number one is that DJI drones just stream back video, thermal imaging information, GPS coordinates, altitudes, et cetera, to China, which can be.

• 2:49:29John Coogan?

  Straight to the DJI cloud.

• 2:49:31Speaker 10

  Yeah, a hundred, a hundred percent.

• 2:49:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:33Speaker 10

  A hundred percent. So that's, you know, that's the first big like tranche of risk.

• 2:49:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:49:37Speaker 10

  The next tranche of risk is look at what's happening in Ukraine. Like drones, specifically DJI drones and other, you know, aircraft that are similar, are being deployed to incredible effect in the context of warfare. And they're being consumed at insane rates. If America wanted to engage in, you know, adopting those types of drone tactics, we would need to produce many hundreds of thousands of drones a month.

• 2:50:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:01Speaker 10

  And we just do not have that industrial capacity in this country.

• 2:50:04John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:50:05Speaker 10

  If you ban foreign drones, though, guess what happens? That industrial capacity gets built up because the domestic market starts to be served by scaled American drone companies.

• 2:50:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, you bootstrap like wartime demand with consumer demand today.

• 2:50:19Speaker 10

  Yep.

• 2:50:20John Coogan?

  Enthusiasts that want to be able to, you know, get footage of their ski trip or some, you know, they're hiking or any number of use cases.

• 2:50:28Speaker 10

  A hundred percent. And then the third tranche of risk is what you articulated.

• 2:50:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:32Speaker 10

  Um, I would say, though, when you start contemplating systems like that.

• 2:50:36John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:50:36Speaker 10

  You know, that risk starts to feel much more serious.

• 2:50:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, because it might be able to take off at any time. It's not mothballed.

• 2:50:42Speaker 10

  From a recharging pod.

• 2:50:43John Coogan?

  From a recharging pod. And so.

• 2:50:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was surprised the, what was the op, the operation in Ukraine where they parked next to the airbase took off?

• 2:50:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:50:50Jordi Hays?

  Like that, like, I still feel like that risk, uh, people are not taking it seriously enough about that kind of event happening like on American soil.

• 2:51:02John Coogan?

  What was it? Spiderweb?

• 2:51:03Jordi Hays?

  Operation Spiderweb. Yeah, it sounds right.

• 2:51:06John Coogan?

  I forget what it was called. Um, but yeah, that was, that was certainly dramatic. So talk to me about, uh, you're having success in the, uh, the police market. Are you thinking of, uh, going to the federal government, the Department of War soon? Uh, is, is there a crossover there or is that more of a distinct, uh, market that you're putting off for the time being?

• 2:51:29Speaker 10

  Yeah. I mean, the, the way I think about things is. There are 20,000 police departments in America, 30,000 fire departments, 80,000 police and fire stations. In the future, I believe, you know, the top half of those buildings are going to have a drone recharging pod on their roof. That's 40,000 deployment sites. We charge on the order of like $60,000 to $160,000 per year per launch site. So even being very pessimistic, the domestic market's around $3 billion recurring. International excluding Russia, China, Iran, and all the countries that we'll never be able to sell to is a similar size, maybe like a $6 billion pie. Even if we're only successful at capturing a third of that, like we're a large public company. Axon's probably our closest comp right now. They're trading at roughly a 20x revenue multiple. So like that'd be an amazing outcome for us. But long-term, we do want to be the DJI of the West, right?

• 2:52:14Speaker 10

  And we want to operate in every customer vertical where we can add value. And yeah, that includes, you know, some of the areas that you listed.

• 2:52:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. On the engineering side, what is, if you could wave your, a magic wand, what technology would you want to advance most directly? Is it the battery, the motor, any other, the actual sensor stack? Like where are we most bottlenecked from just a technology development perspective?

• 2:52:41Speaker 10

  You know, I would say surprisingly connectivity can be a challenge. Yeah. We're about to release something very innovative in that domain with our next drone. But yeah, that can be, that can be a major issue. Like cellular isn't always perfect, especially at altitude.

• 2:52:55Jordi Hays?

  I have this very, very first world problem that on the drive home from the studio, there's like a 10-minute stretch where there's just, I cannot get a, I can't have a phone call. So I start a call when I'm leaving and then I'm like, I'm going to have to call you back in like 10 minutes. And then I call people back. And I'm like, how in the middle of Los Angeles on a major like street, can I not take a simple phone call?

• 2:53:22Speaker 10

  Keep in mind, our drones fly everywhere in jurisdictions, right? So every city has little pockets like that.

• 2:53:29Jordi Hays?

  Also the Verizon outage yesterday, you have to be, I mean, I didn't have any issues with it, but I mean, there was like 30% of Verizon users, I think yesterday had no coverage. Some massive number, mostly East Coast numbers, I guess, but.

• 2:53:45John Coogan?

  What about, uh, what about, uh, Starlink Satellite Connectivity? Is that doable on a drone this size? I have the Starlink Mini. I could imagine the extra Mini or the Nano fitting on here. Is that in the cards?

• 2:53:58Speaker 10

  Yeah, you should, you should watch our next launch event.

• 2:54:00John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 2:54:01Jordi Hays?

  When's, when's that? Rough date?

• 2:54:03Speaker 10

  Couple months.

• 2:54:04Jordi Hays?

  Okay, yes.

• 2:54:05John Coogan?

  Um, yeah, yeah. I- interesting. Um, what, what else goes into training, uh, uh, police forces and, uh, uh, and SWAT teams on using these effectively? Have there been any creative uses, creative stories that you've seen where people have deployed this, uh, in maybe novel ways where you didn't even think, oh, they, I, they could use it in that particular way? Are there any interesting stories that you guys have shared?

• 2:54:30Speaker 10

  Oh, there, there are so many. I mean, especially, especially when it comes to

• 2:54:34John Coogan?

  Glass breaking.

• 2:54:35Speaker 10

  To Lemer, right? Yeah, there, there are really a lot. There, there was one that I, I watched personally where, um, like a person was kind of pretending to be not responsive.

• 2:54:46John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:54:47Speaker 10

  So the, the operator of the drone actually kind of started nudging them

• 2:54:51John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:54:52Speaker 10

  and was able to get a response out of them.

• 2:54:53John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:54:54Speaker 10

  So, yeah, I mean, all weird, weird things along those lines happen just constantly. We can fly this as well if you guys are

• 2:55:01John Coogan?

  Please, yeah, that sounds great.

• 2:55:02Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 2:55:03Speaker 10

  All drones are alive.

• 2:55:04John Coogan?

  All right, cool.

• 2:55:05Speaker 10

  So

• 2:55:05Jordi Hays?

  We have a clean takeoff site there?

• 2:55:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, we can do it here.

• 2:55:08Jordi Hays?

  There's a Diet Coke that's gonna get knocked, John, I'd move your Diet Coke.

• 2:55:11John Coogan?

  Okay, I, I think we're flying this one.

• 2:55:13Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay.

• 2:55:15John Coogan?

  Uh, this is amazing.

• 2:55:16Speaker 10

  Yeah, I couldn't fly either, but yeah, I think the, the indoor drone is maybe the right

• 2:55:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's

• 2:55:20Jordi Hays?

  We got the camera view back here.

• 2:55:22John Coogan?

  Oh, we got the camera view up here too, okay. Oh, wow, it's that in and everything?

• 2:55:26Speaker 10

  Nice.

• 2:55:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's fly this around, this sounds great. What is happening? This thing would definitely get me to comply if it was flying around. This is crazy. There we go.

• 2:55:40Speaker 10

  So we'll show off a couple of functions.

• 2:55:42John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, show us some stuff.

• 2:55:43Speaker 10

  You know, right now, we're in a GPS denied environment.

• 2:55:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:55:47Speaker 10

  Because, you know, we won't be able to see any satellites through a metal roof like that.

• 2:55:50John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:55:50Speaker 10

  The drone is utilizing its onboard cameras, running visual inertial edometry algorithms. Yo, yo.

• 2:55:57John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:55:58Speaker 10

  In order to localize, and it's also using some onboard LiDARs to do the same.

• 2:56:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:02Speaker 10

  Uh, the aircraft is streaming back 4K video and thermal imaging information.

• 2:56:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:56:06Speaker 10

  So, yeah, Dimitri, you wanna, you wanna maximize thermal, really?

• 2:56:09John Coogan?

  Oh, the thermal. Oh, wow.

• 2:56:11Speaker 10

  So those are all of our thermal signatures.

• 2:56:13John Coogan?

  This is very cool. There we go.

• 2:56:15Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 2:56:16John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:56:16Speaker 10

  And those sensors are mounted on a payload that can rotate a full 180 degrees, so it can look straight up.

• 2:56:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:56:22Speaker 10

  And also straight down.

• 2:56:23John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:56:24Speaker 10

  Which is pretty operationally useful.

• 2:56:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:56:26Speaker 10

  We also have some lights that are built into our camera pod. Dimitri, you wanna hit those?

• 2:56:30John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:56:30Speaker 10

  So that's a glow light for our economy.

• 2:56:32John Coogan?

  Flashbang.

• 2:56:32Speaker 10

  Yeah, sorry.

• 2:56:33John Coogan?

  The flashback.

• 2:56:34Speaker 10

  Yeah, and you can barely see the dome.

• 2:56:36John Coogan?

  Oh, you can strobe it, too.

• 2:56:37Speaker 10

  And they both have strobe function.

• 2:56:38John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:56:39Speaker 10

  So, uh, that's, that's all.

• 2:56:40John Coogan?

  Wow, that's fantastic.

• 2:56:42Speaker 10

  You can see that kind of artic.

• 2:56:43John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, it goes up and down. There you go.

• 2:56:45Speaker 10

  Great. Uh, Dimitri, you wanna land it, and then I can give it a quick call?

• 2:56:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:51John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:56:52Jordi Hays?

  Give it a quick call.

• 2:56:54Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 2:56:54Jordi Hays?

  It really, it really is like a creature.

• 2:56:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:56:57Jordi Hays?

  The way, the way, the way that.

• 2:56:59John Coogan?

  It has aura. It has, it has some gusto to it. It's good.

• 2:57:02Speaker 10

  So, the airframe has a cellphone number.

• 2:57:04John Coogan?

  Oh, wait, really? Oh, so you can just call from an actual phone?

• 2:57:07Speaker 10

  You can, you can straight up.

• 2:57:08John Coogan?

  Okay. Don't, don't dox that phone number. You're gonna be ringing off the hook.

• 2:57:11Speaker 10

  One, two. One, one. One, two.

• 2:57:14John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:57:15Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 2:57:15John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, yeah.

• 2:57:16Speaker 10

  This is how, you know, hostage negotiations are happening around the country.

• 2:57:19John Coogan?

  Sure. Just call the drone. That's so simple. I mean, yeah, it's probably just.

• 2:57:22Speaker 10

  It was, it was the right solution.

• 2:57:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, simply just work off the default rails. That's amazing.

• 2:57:25Jordi Hays?

  How on earth did hostage negotiations, you, you, if you wanna turn it off and then...

• 2:57:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:31Speaker 10

  There's, there's one more thing I'll show off quickly, uh, which is turtle mode.

• 2:57:34John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 2:57:35Speaker 10

  So it's a very durable drone.

• 2:57:36John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 2:57:37Speaker 10

  If it ever does crash and lands on its back, it can self-right. So you'll see that.

• 2:57:40John Coogan?

  It can self-right. Oh, there you go. Wow, it really is.

• 2:57:43Jordi Hays?

  Turtle mode.

• 2:57:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. That's very cool. Okay.

• 2:57:48Jordi Hays?

  That is very cool.

• 2:57:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, thank you.

• 2:57:50Jordi Hays?

  How

• 2:57:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, your question, Jordan.

• 2:57:52Jordi Hays?

  How did, what were the actual logistics of a hostage negotiation historically?

• 2:57:58John Coogan?

  Wasn't it a lot of megaphones screaming?

• 2:57:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're yelling, but then they're trying to yell back, but they're in a house and they're trying to not be visible. I can imagine it's hard to hear, makes the negotiation, let's say, a lot harder.

• 2:58:09Speaker 10

  I mean, that, that absolutely happened. A lot of instances of SWAT teams just having to make entry into structures where they didn't know what was waiting for them on the other side of the door, you know, also, also occurred. And that's not good for anyone. I mean, that's incredibly dangerous for police officers. It's dangerous for the suspects. It's dangerous for civilians that might just be like generally in the area. So, I mean, our thought with LEMR is why do that at all? When you can send in a little drone to clear all the rooms, find suspects, you know, enable negotiation. Hopefully that just resolves the situation. But even if it doesn't, at least now first responders know, you know, what's waiting for them and they can put together a plan that takes all that data into account.

• 2:58:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. What are the economics of the first responder units that you work with? Are they, are they wary about capex? Do they want more of a subscription product with services and, and they get regular updates? Do they just want to pay one time and then you get out of their hair? What, what was, what's the correct business model for this?

• 2:59:07Speaker 10

  Yeah, I mean, in general nowadays, we're selling full-blown drone programs.

• 2:59:12John Coogan?

  Programs.

• 2:59:12Speaker 10

  So that, that might include some number of indoor drones, some number of standalone outdoor drones and also, you know, jurisdiction-wide 911 response drone coverage. In year one, we deliver all of our current state-of-the-art hardware. So an agency would get like responder one. Then at year 2.5 of a contract, we automatically upgrade them to responder two. Same thing happens at year five. If a drone ever gets damaged or destroyed over the course of those five years, we'll repair or replace it. We include data storage. We include unlimited software licenses for pilots and viewers. We include regulatory assistance with the FAA. Everything they need to run their full drone program.

• 2:59:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have you been processing the advancements in AI over the last couple of years? Like, what's been useful? Like, we have better video models. We can understand images at the same time, like. You know, the baseline is like a megaphone, so this is a huge upgrade.

• 3:00:06Speaker 10

  For sure, no doubt.

• 3:00:06John Coogan?

  And you might not be able to do on-device inference. I don't know if there's an H200 in there or something like that, right? So, yeah, where is AI being helpful? Where's it being useful? Where has it been? Okay, wait and see.

• 3:00:18Speaker 10

  So, our drones won't even take off without utilizing some of those techniques. You know, when you have a strong GPS signal, you can mostly rely on that for localization, especially if your aircraft has, you know, a GPS RTK system. But GPS isn't always perfect, like when we're flying around in this structure, right? Or if we're flying near a big building or under a tree, you do need like redundant localization systems. What we've implemented to solve that problem is a vision system that, you know, relies on those sorts of techniques in order to pick out tracking points and, you know, to calculate relative velocity. So it's really, you know, pretty fundamentally baked into our product at that level and at higher levels that, you know, touch end-user apps.

• 3:01:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, one of the most obvious use cases is just break a window, go into that building, find a person, and then I want to talk to them on the phone. And that's it. And maybe I can't get the video feed out because the connectivity is difficult, but if we can at least maintain a phone line.

• 3:01:16Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 3:01:16John Coogan?

  We can have a conversation and progress can be made and hopefully people can be saved.

• 3:01:21Speaker 10

  Yep, for sure.

• 3:01:22Jordi Hays?

  Any predictions on how drones will be applied in wildfires and just firefighting broadly? Is that something you guys touch yet? Would you ever touch it? How are you thinking about that?

• 3:01:33Speaker 10

  Yeah, I'm absolutely thinking about that space pretty seriously. Drones can add value in a number of different ways. First of all, they can help out with wildfire detection.

• 3:01:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:43Speaker 10

  Early on, you know, it's possible to put a drone recharging pod in an area that has a high wildfire risk and then just have it fly around.

• 3:01:51John Coogan?

  They'll be like solar panels powered?

• 3:01:52Speaker 10

  Yeah, totally, 100%. And likely, you know, a Starlink internet backhaul for connectivity.

• 3:01:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:01:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, some of the footage that came out of the L.A. wildfires was so bad. Like, I would see some of these cameras and it looked like it was a camera that was a potato.

• 3:02:08John Coogan?

  No, we only got drone footage days later.

• 3:02:11Jordi Hays?

  And you'd be like, and yeah, and it would be like, okay, there's a tiny speck of smoke here. And it's like, how is that like the best that we have when it causes tens of billions of dollars of damage?

• 3:02:22Speaker 10

  For sure. Drones can also be used for logistics, you know, moving around chainsaws and that kind of stuff in areas that, you know, are just difficult to traverse with conventional vehicles. And I think in the future, drone swarms will be used to actively fight forest fires.

• 3:02:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, just drop a ton of material all over the place.

• 3:02:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or even, I think even for like ember detection and like putting out like is obviously when some of these wildfires start, they're, they're, the actual fires happening here, embers are floating kind of randomly with the wind. And then there's a moment where like, if you just had like effectively a fire extinguisher that could for a second, just like hit a certain spot, you could stop like a bunch of structural loss, but.

• 3:03:06John Coogan?

  Back to this guy, what, what, what's the decision to have the white posts come up on the back rotors and then go down on the, on the front rotors?

• 3:03:17Speaker 10

  Yes, so those cans on the back of the drone are actually our GPS RTK antennas.

• 3:03:23John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting, the motor's actually just here.

• 3:03:25Speaker 10

  Yes.

• 3:03:26John Coogan?

  Okay, these are antennas.

• 3:03:27Speaker 10

  A hundred percent. And they need a field view of the sky in order to, you know, receive. Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. So, yeah, those two things are antennas. We've embedded antennas on the front two motor pods as well for a mesh networking radio. And then you see those two little wings coming off like the, yeah, yeah, those, those are actually our LT antennas.

• 3:03:49Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 3:03:50Speaker 10

  And it's, it's generally good practice to separate antennas on drones as much as humanly possible to avoid crosstalk. And that's why we engineered this configuration.

• 3:03:59John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on all the success and.

• 3:04:02Jordi Hays?

  Amazing update, this has been the most wild, in-person interview demos.

• 3:04:06Speaker 10

  Oh, I appreciate it. Let's glass break next time.

• 3:04:09John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, we should. We will definitely get some glass and smash it all.

• 3:04:14Speaker 10

  That is by far the coolest demo.

• 3:04:15John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 3:04:19Speaker 10

  Yes, thank you.

• 3:04:20John Coogan?

  Congratulations on the progress and we will talk to you soon. While he's walking off, let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. And I'm also going to tell you about Gemini 3 Pro. It's Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and they got deep multimodal understanding over there. Jordy, is there anything else in the timeline that you think we should get to? The one thing that I have is that we have some breaking news that Doug O'Laughlin over at Semi Analysis has severe LLM psychosis.

• 3:04:58Jordi Hays?

  One shotted.

• 3:04:58John Coogan?

  He's been one shotted. He uses Claude everywhere and anywhere and everywhere, including a client happy hour at 6:50 in New York City. And Doug says, absolutely. You've met me at a very Claude code time in my life. I listened to him on China Talk or on, sorry, on a podcast with Dylan Patel and Jordan Snyder from China Talk, transistor radio, and he was obsessed with using Claude code to organize his notes, write markdown files, orchestrate his entire life. He says everything is a skill issue. AGI has been achieved and he's very excited

• 3:05:42John Coogan?

  to be using agentic coding agents everywhere and always.

• 3:05:46Jordi Hays?

  Last thing we need to cover is the PBR 99 pack.

• 3:05:53John Coogan?

  What?

• 3:05:54Jordi Hays?

  That has been released.

• 3:05:56John Coogan?

  They launched this during Dry January? What a wild move. Zig when they zag.

• 3:06:01Jordi Hays?

  The new 99 pack wraps 99 PBRs and a gigantic, all-new original illustration featuring characters from the Godzilla universe. I mean, this is great to put on, like, put above your fireplace, right? I'm sure, I'm sure all the wives out there will love when the husband comes home with the 99 pack and puts it, you know.

• 3:06:22John Coogan?

  It's the song. 99 bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer. You take one down, pass it around, 98 bottles of beer on the wall.

• 3:06:30Jordi Hays?

  They did it.

• 3:06:30John Coogan?

  And they, yeah, they did it. They did the meme. But yeah, congrats to the team at PBR over there. They're doing stuff. They're innovating. Well, that's our show today, folks. The bomb has been planted.

• 3:06:43Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for being here with us.

• 3:06:44John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to our newsletter.

• 3:06:48Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 3:06:49John Coogan?

  At tbpn.com.

• 3:06:50Jordi Hays?

  We've got a fun day tomorrow.

• 3:06:52John Coogan?

  We do.

• 3:06:52Jordi Hays?

  We have our friends from Sequoia popping on.

• 3:06:55John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 3:06:56Jordi Hays?

  We've got the founder of Athletic Brewing.

• 3:06:57John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, we have some Athletic Brewing over there in the refrigerator.

• 3:07:01Jordi Hays?

  And of course, we'll have the mansion section.

• 3:07:03John Coogan?

  Of course, it's the mansion section tomorrow. Thank you so much for tuning in.

• 3:07:07Jordi Hays?

  Have a wonderful afternoon. We'll see you very soon.

• 3:07:10John Coogan?

  Goodbye.