FULL INTERVIEW: Why I Spent $70M to buy AI.com

This is our full interview with Kris Marszalek, recorded live on TBPN. We discuss why he bought AI.com the moment it became available, the long-term vision for a consumer “chief of staff” personal assistant for billions of people, how he locked in a Super Bowl spot before the product existed and pulled the trigger just weeks before airing, what happened when the ad drove massive traffic and signups, and why he turned down a $500M+ offer for the domain right after closing because he’s going all-in on building the product. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to podcast platforms immediately after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella.

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Chris, good to meet you.

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 0:02Speaker 02

  Nice to meet you guys. How are you?

• 0:03John Coogan?

  I love the background. The logo is looking great.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  Is that real or is that AI?

• 0:09Speaker 02

  It's totally made up.

• 0:12Jordi Hays?

  I was like, it feels feels pretty quick to have, you know, the actual design.

• 0:17John Coogan?

  Manufacturing. It takes time. Well, take us through the thesis for AI.com.

• 0:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, wait, before we, yeah, before we get into the Super Bowl, like, let's, let's maybe rewind to maybe probably a year ago. You see a domain on the market. I think they had been trying to sell it for a while, I imagine. And you came in as a buyer, but walk us through that whole journey.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I bought another domain and the agent who was brokering this told me about AI.com being,

• 0:48Speaker 02

  you know, in a process of being sold, if you will. So I immediately recognized the importance of it and just jumped on it. Got on the phone the same day, cut the deal down. We shook hands. There were some ups and downs through the, through the process, but we managed to get this done.

• 1:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you've had some good success buying, uh, buying iconic domains. What did you pay for crypto.com? Have you ever disclosed that?

• 1:18Speaker 02

  I don't think we ever did, but we paid $12 million. And I would argue that that was a more difficult decision, if you will. We were a small company back then. $12 million was about a third of our capital. And it was bang in the middle of the 2018 bear market. So people were discussing whether crypto is going to survive or not.

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the person selling it to you was like, probably like, this guy is an idiot.

• 1:49Jordi Hays?

  Of course, of course, you ended up, ended up looking.

• 1:51John Coogan?

  Now it's on the Staples Center. I drive by it all the time.

• 1:55Jordi Hays?

  Okay. So yeah, you, you see this domain is on the market. Do you have any idea what you wanted to do with it at the time of acquisition? Or do you just think that, hey, this AI thing is probably pretty important? Maybe I should own AI.com.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  Look, we were building products ever since ChatGPT launched and playing with consumer-facing side, but also internal tools. So constant experimentation. And the vision from day one was, you know, we want to build a consumer product. We believe that you have 4 billion people having personal assistants that should play the role of kind of a chief of staff for your entire life with great context, being proactive, getting things done for you rather than just chatting. So the vision didn't change from day one.

• 2:49Jordi Hays?

  And then, yeah, I guess, fast forward, how did you, how did you process, before we get into the kind of Super Bowl and that whole strategy, how did you, how did you process kind of the OpenClaw launch? It sounds like you guys are integrating the, are you building?

• 3:05John Coogan?

  Some of those patterns?

• 3:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, at least some of those patterns. Are you kind of forking the project? Talk about that.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  So as we started building this product about mid-2025, it was never just, it just didn't click. It didn't have this, you couldn't pass down a candy valley. And I think the pivotal moments where we started seeing these changes, OPUS 4.5 release, it started working much, much better. And we obviously saw Claudebot going live and adding some elements of their architecture to it. I think it gets it done in terms of how it feels as a product. You just need to solve a whole litany of issues to make it consumer-friendly, like how do you set it up without being technical, you know, the security issues around your data.

• 3:57Speaker 02

  Those are serious, serious issues when you want to bring something to the mass market. So I think we've

• 4:05Speaker 02

  We are combining everything that we've built over the last, say, eight months into something that we can roll out to the end users and we are starting doing this tomorrow.

• 4:15John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 4:15Jordi Hays?

  Tomorrow. Okay. Before we get into the product and kind of more of the vision, let's fast forward again to the to the Super Bowl specifically. How did that how did that all come together? It felt like it was coming together quickly, but we know we ran a much, much smaller ad. We ran a regional ad. You do have to lock these things in ahead of time, but walk us through the process of kind of preparing and then experiencing the the Super Bowl Sunday.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  So I bought the domain in April.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  The deal closed and we got the domain successfully. So I'm like, okay, we need to launch this and it deserves a global stage. And in May, we were one of the first companies to actually buy the spot.

• 5:02John Coogan?

  Oh, no way.

• 5:03Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  At that at that time, we had just the domain and idea what we want to do with it, but the product didn't exist.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  And, you know, I I know that we only have one shot to get this done correctly and I didn't want to release the product until I felt that it's there for the end user. You know, these things, you need to be able to develop an emotional connection with the product in order for this to be sticky and attentive. So I only made a decision that we actually gonna pull the trigger on this a couple of weeks ago. And that's why the ad felt like it was, you know, quickly put together. It was quickly put together.

• 5:53Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so you bought so you bought the Super Bowl spot?

• 5:56John Coogan?

  But you can always call back to crypto.com if you wanted to.

• 5:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What was the idea like, hey, if if we don't run it for AI.com, we have the crypto.com ad ready, we'll just run that?

• 6:08Speaker 02

  We have the crypto business, we have a prediction markets business, you know, we could do, there's always some level of optionality, right?

• 6:17Speaker 02

  But this is the moment to run an AI ad, as you guys have seen.

• 6:20John Coogan?

  It is.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  And, and, and timing is really important in life, you know, scale, timing and a lot of combination of these things.

• 6:28John Coogan?

  It's a good reference.

• 6:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh, okay, so you put the ad together in effectively two weeks and then you run it and what happens then? Because I think you got, you got the, the attention from buying the world's most expensive domain ever, then you got the attention of like, hey, there's this new AI product I've never heard of with a crazy domain, running a Super Bowl ad, should pay attention to it. And then you got a whole nother kind of amount of, of attention from people being like, wait, I just got an ad for AI.com and I landed on the website and it's not, and, and the website's down. So what, what, what, what kind of happened? Did you, you spent the, the 70 million on the domain, the eight million on, on these spot and then you didn't have enough for, to host it or what, uh, what happened?

• 7:11Jordi Hays?

  I'm assuming a lot of people got through, but certainly a lot of people got, uh, got stuck as well.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think we are happy with the outcome.

• 7:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  We had about 300,000 people signing up.

• 7:23John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 7:24Jordi Hays?

  Wow, let's go.

• 7:24John Coogan?

  That's a lot, yeah.

• 7:25Jordi Hays?

  Can we get the gong, can we get the gong for 300,000 signups?

• 7:28John Coogan?

  There's been a lot of big numbers.

• 7:31Jordi Hays?

  That's a big number for one day, for one day.

• 7:37Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, on a, on a more serious note, how did you, uh, how do you even prepare for that, that amount of traffic? Like, how do you, how do you, what was going on in the war room?

• 7:49Speaker 02

  As you know, we've, uh, we're on a platform that is used to spikes, right?

• 7:57Speaker 02

  And we've got a great DevOps team and we've got all the stuff that you usually would expect, auto scaling and whatnot. So there were intermittent problems for some people, but largely it held up.

• 8:09John Coogan?

  People got there.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  So I, I think fundamentally it's the name and the fact that there is a certain element of curiosity there and we designed it in a, it was a very simple call to action.

• 8:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Go and, and sign up.

• 8:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  And so I think it worked.

• 8:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk to me about consumer AI. ChatGPT has broken through Gemini and Google. They've been leveraging, you know, the Google platform and the network to onboard consumers. Nano Banana was a big moment. Sora and the Meta Vibes app sort of made a splash, but haven't been super sticky. But where do you see the gap in breaking through with consumers in a new way? Or just doing what consumers already expect, but better, cheaper, faster? Like, where is the consumer AI opportunity now that we're three years into the ChatGPT boom?

• 9:03Speaker 02

  I think fundamentally, you're able to actually get stuff done right now. So that's a big differentiating factor for the user experience. And we don't really know where this experiment is going to take us. Given how the domain is resonating with people, you know, we can introduce social network elements to it. I think the fact that every single person on earth is going to have an assistant of this sort can unlock new type of interactions and make our lives just better through serendipity, advice, staying on top of things and being proactive, really understanding us.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  So it's, I'm pretty excited about the wondering aspect of it. We try to keep an open mind and not really be set on one thing. We will, we now have 300,000 people waiting for us to give them the product. We're going to very quickly iterate on it. I'm a huge believer in moving quickly and, and listening to actual customers. And we will see where the journey takes us. I take a very long-term view, you know, what can we do with this in 10 years? So I think it worked in the crypto space and the opportunity here, the size is much, much bigger.

• 10:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, so much of what happened in crypto was Sort of permissionless, you know, bankless, this open source, these networks, anyone can set up a node. And part of this latest OpenClaw, Claudebot, you know, hype cycle is driven by the fact you like you get a Mac Mini, it can talk to iMessage, it can talk to WhatsApp, it can talk to Telegram, it can go sort of wherever you go as a person. And that feels unique because maybe OpenAI can't go over to WhatsApp because Mark Zuckerberg doesn't want to let him. And so I'm wondering about how you're thinking about the trade off between certain things that are

• 10:59John Coogan?

  only possible with an open source AI system that is sort of acting as an imposter as a human versus you're a company. If you want to integrate with WhatsApp, you might have to give Meta a call. So how do you think about delivering the vision of like a truly universal AI agent that can do things with the realities of the business community?

• 11:24Speaker 02

  There are a lot of business and UX challenges here.

• 11:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  So we'll have to resolve them one by one.

• 11:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  And our, our view is we want to stand on the side of the consumer and help them make the these, you know, technical choices, make sure that their data is safe, make sure that they can do what they want to do without putting themselves at risk and solving these issues with, with access to data, with, with user experience. It cannot feel like a chore. In today, you need to be really technical to get value out of it. So there's plenty of work and it's difficult and that's part of the opportunity.

• 12:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one of the, some unrequested feedback for me, I had kind of heard that AI.com was like potentially something like some type of, you know, leveraging some OpenClaw technology. And then I got hit with the Google login and I was like, I don't have time to read through kind of the, the full terms, the service, privacy policy and really understand. So I would love to see, I mean, maybe there's plans for it, but I'd love to see just like being able to create account, an account on the platform.

• 12:34John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 12:34Jordi Hays?

  To play around with it, just because I was looking at my Gmail, which my life is on, my work email, which obviously, you know, has its own privacy concerns, all that stuff. What you're, you said you're rolling out the product tomorrow. What's the first thing that you want people to do with it?

• 12:53Speaker 02

  I think this is the big part of the product, figuring out how do you onboard people to it? And get them to do a couple of things so that they can see value very quickly and connect with it. I think, I think today it's pretty hard to, to get a feeling for what it can do without really connecting your email and calendar.

• 13:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  We will see. I feel that there is going to be a lot of experimentation there and we will look for user feedback and truth in data and numbers of what really works and what doesn't. To a certain degree, you need to gamify it until such point where, where users are deep enough that it actually gives them the feeling of like, wow, this is special. This is different.

• 13:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that gamification is so important. Like you see the Studio Ghibli moment where, you know, the latest images in ChatGPT launches and you don't even have to think. You just have something in your camera roll and you're going to type Studio Ghibli and you're going to get the value prop. And then a couple of months later, you're still going to be going there for slide inspiration and stock photography and all the other things that you can do. But there's a killer app on day one that you come in and you, and you get joy out of.

• 14:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, did you ever talk to the original owner of AI.com? I heard he sat on it for 30 years because his initials, his first and last name, his first starts with A, last name starts with I, so he bought the domain.

• 14:14John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 14:14Jordi Hays?

  I'm shocked that he held on to it for so long. You would think like IBM Watson, IBM Watson in like 2010 would be like, we'll give you a million.

• 14:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, he held on.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  Look, we spoke on the day when we closed the transaction because he had a, it was a little bit of a bidding war. He had a very serious bidder on the other side and it required connecting in order to get it done.

• 14:40John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 14:41Jordi Hays?

  Your deals got.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  And by the way, and by the way, um, right after, uh, we closed the deal.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  I got the approach from the other side, offering 500 million plus, not for 500 million for the domain. I think I could have pushed it to a billion if I wanted to, but I didn't want to. So I think you guys seem to understand I am pot committed.

• 15:08John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it. You are committed.

• 15:10Jordi Hays?

  I love that you're just thinking, you're viewing this like, obviously you're taking it very seriously, but you're also taking the approach of like, it's very early days in, you know, what will be a long journey for the project, but also the industry. And you're just gonna, you know, listen to your users and figure it out. But the conviction to turn down what would have been turning 70 million into 500 or a billion in 24 hours is admirable.

• 15:37John Coogan?

  Will you train a foundation model?

• 15:43Speaker 02

  I think I'm more focused on getting this to scale and getting the data flywheel going so that we can deliver for our users. Our users don't really care about which model runs in the background as long as the job gets done and their data is safe. But once you get to a certain scale, who knows?

• 16:05John Coogan?

  Anything's on the table. I like it.

• 16:07Jordi Hays?

  Well, I'm sure you'll be back on.

• 16:09John Coogan?

  That's very exciting.

• 16:09Jordi Hays?

  I'm excited to see this roll out and...

• 16:12John Coogan?

  I'm signing up tomorrow. I might be using a dummy Google account, but I will be signing up and testing this out. I'm excited. And then I'll slowly forward myself data from my real account to give you a little bit more, a little bit more to see what it can do. But I'm excited for the launch tomorrow. And congratulations. I mean, a fantastic career, but also this particular project, really, really fun execution and a wonderful story. So thank you for coming to share with us.

• 16:38Jordi Hays?

  Do you come, you're basically the mayor of Los Angeles through the crypto.com arena. Do you come through much?

• 16:45John Coogan?

  You're a Lakers guy?

• 16:46Speaker 02

  I've been in DC last week and then I stopped over in Silicon Valley. I have never been to the arena.

• 16:54John Coogan?

  Never been to the arena. Wow. You gotta come sometime. Catch a game.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  Maybe we should catch a game.

• 17:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. They also do monster truck rallies there. Underrated crypto.com arena experience, especially if you have kids. This is a big, big monster truck guy. I'm a big monster truck guy. I don't really follow basketball that much, but I will be watching Gravedigger live in the crypto.com arena. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.