Benchmark’s Ship of Theseus, OpenAI Kills Sora, SpaceX $2T IPO Buzz | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cisco - https://www.cisco.com https://www.cisco.com/ Cognition - https://cognition.ai https://cognition.ai/ Console - https://console.com https://console.com/ CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com https://crowdstrike.com/ ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io https://elevenlabs.io/ Figma - https://figma.com https://figma.com/ Fin - https://fin.ai https://fin.ai/ Gemini - https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com/ Graphite - https://graphite.com https://graphite.com/ Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Kalshi - https://kalshi.com https://kalshi.com/ Labelbox - https://labelbox.com https://labelbox.com/ Lambda - https://lambda.ai https://lambda.ai/ Linear - https://linear.app https://linear.app/ MongoDB - https://mongodb.com https://mongodb.com/ NYSE - https://nyse.com https://nyse.com/ Okta - https://www.okta.com https://www.okta.com/ Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com https://plaid.com/ Public - https://public.com https://public.com/ Railway - https://railway.com https://railway.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Shopify - https://shopify.com/tbpn Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co https://vibe.co/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  There's been a debate. Truth bomb dropped by Emile Michael. He says forgiving Benchmark and others would be like letting the Wuhan Institute of Virology slide back into a good reputation because the new senior manager of pandemic causation has made more friends than his predecessor. And so this got me thinking and I'm probably gonna have to put on the steel helmet for this one because this is wading into dangerous territory defending Benchmark. But my question is, how close are we to actually being able to forgive Benchmark? When is the right time? It's been a decade. Obviously, the drama between Benchmark and Travis Kalanick was awful.

• 0:44John Coogan?

  I think everyone's against what happened. But the question is, what is a venture firm? Is it partnership? If the partnership turns over at some point, is it a new team? Do you get a second shot? Can you actually change the reputation? And so, believe me, I get the Benchmark criticism. Travis is truly a generational entrepreneur and was on such an amazing run, right? So he was attacked.

• 1:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Jason from Saster was reacting to our interview with Travis. And his take, which I totally agree with, is it's hard to, if Travis had stayed in the role, it's hard to imagine Uber being worth less than something like a trillion dollars today.

• 1:28John Coogan?

  Yes. So our friend of the show, Owen McCabe, over at bin.ai, said Waymo is superior to Uber in literally every way. This was a year ago, in March 25th, actually to the day, a year ago, he said this. Waymo is superior to Uber in literally every way that matters to consumers. Smoother, safer, more reliable, no chatty, weird, rude drivers, private, quiet, self-driving car services are gonna dominate their human driver incumbents. And Owen says...

• 1:56John Coogan?

  TBT when, I think that's Throwback 2, right? Throwback 2, when Benchmark pushed Travis out of Uber and can the self-driving division that he started literally 10 years ago. And so this is what's so, so tricky about this is that Uber survived. It's 150 billion market cap. It's bigger than when Travis was ousted, but getting a 2X over a decade is not what I think people were expecting from Uber under Travis's leadership. And Lyft has fallen to just 5 billion. Like, he won the capital war and Dara's done a great job managing the business, but I feel like a lot of the success of Uber has been built on the foundation that Travis set up. It wasn't a complete reinvention. If anything, they just honed down the core business.

• 2:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the thing that is holding the business back right now, at least from a valuation standpoint, is this big question.

• 2:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47Jordi Hays?

  Right? Around self-driving. Dara has, has answered this question, you know, thousands of times right now. The strategy is to invest in self-driving companies, partner with self-driving companies, but not the same as like having, you know, having

• 3:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03Jordi Hays?

  Developed their own internal IP and product starting a decade ago.

• 3:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08Jordi Hays?

  And seeing where that would have been

• 3:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09Jordi Hays?

  By now is

• 3:11John Coogan?

  It's rough.

• 3:11Jordi Hays?

  Hard to think about.

• 3:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so Uber is valued at 150 today, something like that. Waymo was valued in February of this year at 126 billion. And so, yes, Waymo's been working on self-driving longer, but you have to imagine that there's another 50 billion of market cap. If you have a serious play.

• 3:30Jordi Hays?

  What would Waymo be valued if Travis was the CEO?

• 3:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:34Jordi Hays?

  You would get some type of Travis premium on it.

• 3:37John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 3:37Jordi Hays?

  Just, just the market would be, would, would say.

• 3:40John Coogan?

  Totally, totally, totally, totally.

• 3:41Jordi Hays?

  You have this sort of

• 3:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:43Jordi Hays?

  One of one entrepreneur.

• 3:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:45Jordi Hays?

  In the seat.

• 3:46John Coogan?

  100%. So Sherwin said, "In my opinion, Gurley, single-handedly destroyed hundreds of billions in value. Travis and Emil staying in charge of Uber would have led to a Tesla-sized win, 500 billion plus for everyone, including Benchmark's LPs. He nuked decades of Benchmark's reputation with founders." The market has spoken and no future Travis quality founder would ever touch him or his former firm again, especially since three of the partners that approved of the ousting of Travis are still at the firm. And so my question is, how many partners need to be at the firm until we can call this a ship of Theseus? So for those who are not up to speed on their Greek mythology, in Greek mythology, Theseus is the mythical king of the city of Athens. He rescues the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the Minotaur, which is

• 4:31John Coogan?

  his mythical beast. And then he escapes onto a ship going to Delos. Each year, the Athenians would commemorate this success by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honor Apollo. Over time, because they're sailing the ship every year, various of its timbers rotted and were replaced. A question was raised by ancient philosophers. If no pieces of the original ship remained in the current ship, is it still the ship of Theseus? If it was no longer the same, when had it ceased existing as the original ship? So some people might say 50/50. Some people might say, yes, it is, it is the same ship because replacing one board

• 5:13John Coogan?

  at a time, the ship is the concept and you can swap everything out 25 times, it's still the same ship. There isn't like, it's a paradox. There is no like right answer. It's a philosophical question. But it applies, I think, to Benchmark. Because back when Kalanick resigned as Uber CEO on June 20th of 2017, after investor pressure that included Benchmark, on that exact date, Benchmark's equal GP roster was Bill Gurley, Eric Vitri, Matt Kohler, Mitch Lasky, Peter Fenton, Sarah Tavell. Today, the partnership has changed dramatically. The only two that remain are Peter and Eric. And you have Chetan, Ev Randall, and Jack Altman, who are new to the partnership post the Uber scandal.

• 5:58John Coogan?

  And so it's not a full ship of Theseus, but only one-third of the original 2017 partnership remains. And my question, for those who remain reluctant to forgive Benchmark, is like, what happens if Peter and Eric retire or leave at some point and the full ship of Theseus is complete? Maybe you'll ship-

• 6:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, right now, 40% of the partnership was there.

• 6:20John Coogan?

  33%.

• 6:21Jordi Hays?

  The question is, did Chetan-

• 6:24Jordi Hays?

  Everett and Jack come in and as part of the interview process say like, you're absolutely

• 6:28John Coogan?

  You're absolutely right. I mean, to defend Ev, I mean, he's been on the show, good friend.

• 6:33Jordi Hays?

  Knowing two out of the three.

• 6:34John Coogan?

  Ev had just graduated from college. Like, he was truly like not involved in the Uber scandal and yet, you know, people will visit it upon him.

• 6:42Jordi Hays?

  Knowing Everett and Jack, I'm sure, I'm sure during the interview process, they were like, the storied firm, I'm excited to join, but we can never do, we can never do anything like that again. And so, and so, one, one question that's worth asking is like, is the firm that did this and ultimately, you know, stained this, this storied brand and has certainly suffered the consequences, right? They've put up, you know, incredible returns since then, but I'm sure they've missed a lot of deals that would have made their returns even better because of that kind of narrative around the firm. And so, Emile, Michael and others are upset that they're doing great deals at all, but I think it is, if they're

• 7:27Jordi Hays?

  in a situation again, right, in the same situation, kind of situation, are they more, what, what decision are they more or less likely to make, right? I would, I would argue like they are probably less likely to

• 7:38John Coogan?

  I would think so.

• 7:39Jordi Hays?

  go against the founder, given, given how this entire situation has played out.

• 7:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. The only, the only steel man, and this is, this needs the full steel helmet because it's so hard to steel man the benchmark thing. The full steel man of the benchmark thing is really bad. It's really bad to bench, I'm sorry for everyone, I'm sorry. But it's basically that every partner at Benchmark, it's an equal partnership. So every partner was going to make a clean $1 billion. They were all going to be billionaires from this one deal. And it was such a power law that there was no path to becoming a billionaire for, you know, from the other, from the other investments, most likely. And so, you see the endless 24/7 hit piece pile stack up and you got Mike Isaac, you know, blood hounded

• 8:28John Coogan?

  on at the New York Times, writing books, they're turning into movies, like, it's getting rough. It's getting rough.

• 8:34Jordi Hays?

  My guy's at your door.

• 8:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, my guy's at the door. The barbarians are at the gate. And you're like, I'm either a billionaire or I'm going back to a paltry 10 million. And I can't, I can't do that. I can't do that. And so they freak out. And they're like, we gotta salvage this thing. We gotta just push it out in the public markets. We gotta get out of this name. And so they basically just, it's just too nerve wracking. And yeah, it's not a strong steal, man. But I think, I think that's a little bit more of what happened than, than like taking a stand on like, oh, like this particular thing that happened was so egregious. It was more just like, okay, like wow, all my money, like 99% of my net worth is in this asset. And it's looking like it could be a zero because Lyft is coming from behind. There's a whole bunch of VCs that are piling into that.

• 9:20John Coogan?

  The narrative is totally flipping. There's a boycott Uber campaign like, and everyone's like, ah, what's going on? I gotta get out of this. I, I, I gotta salvage this. And I think that was maybe more of the underpinning than like, like I, I, I'm taking some sort of like moral stand on a particular hit piece or something like that. Anyway, it's rough. But fortunately, you know, ship the C S process, maybe it happens. I don't know. Would Deline accept that argument? Probably not. Would Emil? Probably not. But they're not making it any easier with the Manus investment either. Because the, like, there was a world where it was like, okay, yeah, the Uber thing happened a decade ago. The partnership is basically entirely new and they're focused on.

• 10:02Jordi Hays?

  But it's.

• 10:03John Coogan?

  It's not there yet. Yes.

• 10:05Jordi Hays?

  It's just not there yet.

• 10:06John Coogan?

  It's not there yet.

• 10:06Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think you can rewrite this in five years.

• 10:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. You, you made this point that this is, it's too early to call this, but.

• 10:17Jordi Hays?

  But that's directionally, given that the firm is still, is still putting up great returns. They've gotten to a bunch of great companies over the last five years. I think we are on, on a path to the, to the, to the benchmark.

• 10:31John Coogan?

  Well, yeah.

• 10:31Jordi Hays?

  Benchmark being the venture ship of Theseus.

• 10:34John Coogan?

  And VC Bragg said Airbnb has no homes, Uber has no cars, and Benchmark has no partners. Of course, that was an exaggeration. Sora, rest in peace, Sora, the app is leaving.

• 10:45Jordi Hays?

  Ev is in the chat.

• 10:46John Coogan?

  There he is.

• 10:47Jordi Hays?

  Class of seventeen, represent.

• 10:49John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, Ev was chugging beers while Uber is getting ousted. Do not visit the sins of the father on the son. That's what I would say. Ev not guilty.

• 10:58Jordi Hays?

  Ev was a boulder.

• 11:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, he was hanging out.

• 11:01Jordi Hays?

  What happened? Senior year? What happened?

• 11:05John Coogan?

  Anyway, Sora is now, is it still in the App Store? I think it's like the announcement was that it will be leaving the App Store.

• 11:13Jordi Hays?

  Millions of people have made content on the app. They have to leave it running for some amount of time.

• 11:18John Coogan?

  There's a phase out, but the announcement happened. And now it is going out. And I have a bunch of takes on this. Obviously, this is not the end of video creation for OpenAI. This will be rolled into ChatGPT, I imagine. Tyler Hodge put it well, bullish, killing products quickly is hard. Almost no one can do it. It's a good sign for OpenAI. They're consolidating. In many ways, it's like last week, you heard about like the red, the code red was like a month or two ago. And then it was like, we're refocusing. And then it's like, here's step one of refocusing, like a single app that we're going to push everything together. And also, I've enjoyed making some videos in Sora.

• 12:01John Coogan?

  I've never enjoyed having to go to a separate app. I want all of that to live in one place. So that makes a lot of sense. Let's see what Dak said. It's lame to see all the people saying, ha, I called it. I knew Sora wouldn't work. Yeah, duh, because everyone thought that, including me, who were working on it. They probably learned a lot trying to make it work anyway for every successful thing that exists. A hundred efforts like this had to fail. And those learnings are fed into making something that ultimately does work and provides you with a steady paycheck. Yes, it's interesting because this quote of like people saying, ha, I called it. I knew Sora would work. That is not how I interpreted the vibes around the Sora launch. Like, I went back and revisited. The essay that I wrote on October 1st, we had the slop versus farming debate.

• 12:46John Coogan?

  I was really on a tear back then. So slop is bad. We, the timeline, don't want to be pigs at the trough. We don't like it when tech leaders treat us like farm animals, but we love farming. Farming is Lindy. We, the timeline, want to return to a world where we are filling up troughs with slop on a daily basis, I guess. So between Google DeepMind, Meta Superintelligence, and OpenAI, we now have three different variations on AI video products, each met with slightly different responses. So the, yeah, the interesting thing here is that like, uh, Google has been like charging ahead, launching it. It's in, it's in real, it's in, uh, shorts, uh, and that's just been like not a story at all. What was interesting was that the vibes around, both Meta vibes and Sora, were like, this is going to one-shot humanity. They're like, this is going to be too successful. That was, it was like.

• 13:32Jordi Hays?

  It was like a entertainment doom loop.

• 13:35John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 13:35Jordi Hays?

  You could imagine.

• 13:37John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 13:37Jordi Hays?

  It just getting so good at generating the next thing that you would want to see better than even a billion humans on Instagram.

• 13:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 13:45Jordi Hays?

  Could do. And that's not what we've seen.

• 13:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 13:49Jordi Hays?

  So far.

• 13:49John Coogan?

  And so like my big question was, was like, will this actually be sticky? Will people like this? And at what rate? I mean, I read, I read LLM-generated text daily, but I also read a ton of not LLM-generated text. And my, my ratio has grown exponentially, but it hasn't gone to 100%, nowhere near it. Like probably 5% of the text that I read is LLM-generated.

• 14:14Jordi Hays?

  I mean, we should actually revisit how we were processing it during launch when it was, you know, rocketing.

• 14:20John Coogan?

  We should just throw on that three-hour stream and just watch that and react to how our tweets from that day.

• 14:24Jordi Hays?

  Even at the time, I remember saying, very obvious that they built like a very cool creative tool.

• 14:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:30Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, they have the potential to seed a network with this. There's all this, you know, novel content. They had, they had, uh, allowing creators and, you know, people like Sam to. Uh, allow people to use their, their IP.

• 14:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:46Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it was very, very well executed launch, but even from the beginning, it was like, okay, obviously cool creative tool.

• 14:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 14:52Jordi Hays?

  It's a totally different ball, you know, this like come for the tool, stay for the network has been like an enduring.

• 14:58John Coogan?

  It's Chris Dixon.

• 14:59Jordi Hays?

  Strategy, right? Chris Dixon probably wrote that in like 2014, maybe, or.

• 15:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:05Jordi Hays?

  Like a long time ago, over 10, over 10 years ago.

• 15:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:07Jordi Hays?

  But just because you build a tool that is attached to a network, like that jump is just really, really, really, really tough.

• 15:14John Coogan?

  Especially when there are three or four, five serious networks that are at scale that can on day one, support the format of the file that is produced from the model. So in a world where generative AI video came out, not in a MP4 file or an MOV file, it came out in some sort of format that could never be uploaded to Instagram reels. Then you have a chance to build a network and run away with it. And this was the story of Instagram, like, like Instagram just had better support for images than Facebook did. And then Vine had support for video literally before Instagram. So Instagram, it was like, I have a video on my phone. It's cool.

• 15:59John Coogan?

  I want to share it.

• 16:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:01John Coogan?

  Sharing it to Instagram was not possible.

• 16:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:03John Coogan?

  Now on day one, you generate an AI video. You want to share it, you can share it on Tik Tok.

• 16:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's just the incentive. If you create, if you created an amazing video on X, on Sora.

• 16:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:13Jordi Hays?

  What is the most logical thing to do? If you're a creator and you want reach, post it to Instagram.

• 16:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:17Jordi Hays?

  There's just naturally, there's billions of people there.

• 16:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:19Jordi Hays?

  There, there were millions of people on Sora.

• 16:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:22Jordi Hays?

  And a lot of energy momentum.

• 16:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it's not lost on me that the same day that Sora was killed, uh, you have a viral breakout, reality TV style series show, putting up incredible numbers on Tik Tok for, uh, Fruit, Love Island, I believe it's called. It's an AI generated, uh, twist on Love Island. Uh, there's romantic intrigue and plot lines and stories and consistent characters and a lot of things that have come from a variety of AI models and, uh, we, we should. Talk to the person that's the entrepreneur behind that project because I would be interested to know what the stack is because I imagine it's not just, you know, going to a single gen AI app. I imagine that they have a whole pipeline, like a workflow in place to actually generate that.

• 17:08John Coogan?

  And so we're at this weird moment where, you know, Sora, the app is going away, but we're also seeing more and more AI-generated content slowly see success, whether that's the podcast that's at the top of the charts that's fully AI-generated. There's this Love Island show. There's a number of niches where they found the right product market fit for AI-generated content. But it's not overnight. We're living in infinite just and we just can't look away. It's like for specific things, it makes a lot of sense. And so it's working there.

• 17:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting to think about Google's strategy with with video. Even even Google was like, we cannot operate this for free at scale.

• 17:51John Coogan?

  Two hundred and fifty bucks a month.

• 17:53Jordi Hays?

  No, that was the that was the discounted rate.

• 17:55John Coogan?

  Oh, I think I had five hundred a month.

• 17:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was. It was like an entry to start. It was like two hundred and fifty dollars a month.

• 18:01John Coogan?

  And it was brutally weight limited, like the most.

• 18:03Jordi Hays?

  Even even with, we were laughing at this because

• 18:06John Coogan?

  I'll get three a day.

• 18:07Jordi Hays?

  I remember we'd be like at the gym in the morning, you would fire off a couple prompts.

• 18:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:12Jordi Hays?

  And and then you were like rate limited.

• 18:14John Coogan?

  I got it right.

• 18:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it wouldn't get it right. Then you were rate limited and you're like, wait, I'm rate limited on a on a two hundred and fifty dollar plan that's going to jump to five hundred. You're probably paying. Got to check the ramp. Check our ramp. It's probably paying five hundred a month still.

• 18:29John Coogan?

  No, seriously. And and that and that.

• 18:31Jordi Hays?

  And that's and that's Google with all this cash flow, all this scale, this insane data advantage with YouTube.

• 18:38John Coogan?

  Let me tell you, rate limits kill retention. Like, nothing, nothing is worse. If you're in Instagram, the endless scroll exists. TikTok, you can you can scroll endlessly. You can use the Imagine if TikTok was like after five minutes, you have to close the app and come back in 20 minutes. Like, how successful do we think that would be? It would be a disaster. And that was the experience for both Sora and V O three, where you'd fire off a prompt. And it would be like, okay, come back in a couple minutes. It's gonna take me a while to cook. And then you fire off five and it's like, okay, no more for today. Clearly, the compute constraints are immense. And there's just so much more value that can come from enterprise and can come from deep research and so many of the other models that are immediately economically valued like code gen, like enterprise workflows.

• 19:23John Coogan?

  And it's maybe more boring and less viral and less controversial. But it's it's where the compute needs to go. And so I think you're going to see the chips be moved around inside of all the labs to like, compute will find the most optimal output. Like the tokens of the most value will always be the ones that it flow, that the compute flows to. And endless random generations that aren't quite dialed yet. Even the best video models, like they're just not there. They require a lot of work is not the same as as where we are in terms of knowledge retrieval, where we are in terms of code gen. It's just way more valuable.

• 20:00Jordi Hays?

  You said September, people overestimate how much brain rot happens in a year and underestimate how much brain rot happens in a decade. So.

• 20:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 20:09Jordi Hays?

  Yes, we're still.

• 20:10John Coogan?

  So, I mean, I'm using brain rot pejoratively there, but but I do think that like, this this move does not really bend the curve of of just AI generated content. But I still think it's like a slow rollout. Like it's it's fast in the sense that like we went from no slop on the timeline to lots. And we went from like, like actually zero. It was like one, one cool AI video, Harry Potter, Balenciaga was like entertaining to general people. And now we get like five. And then we get like, next year, we'll get like 20. And then eventually it'll be like hundreds and it'll be like, oh, yeah, I'm actually into that. Like people are into cartoons and people are into CGI movies and superhero movies. Some people will be into it. Some people will never like it.

• 20:52John Coogan?

  Some people will always say, I want a black and white film from the 40s. That's what I want to watch. And these rollouts, the diffusion of this stuff will happen.

• 20:59Jordi Hays?

  Tweet Davidson says.

• 21:01John Coogan?

  What is this?

• 21:02Jordi Hays?

  Y'all are worried about the wrong open claw.

• 21:05John Coogan?

  This is a good post. White Claw did have a fast takeoff, for sure. It went from zero to 60 and it was just everywhere all of a sudden. But anyway, it is a remarkable story because Fiverr is running a, one of the coolest out of home campaigns, like just from an out of home inventory. I didn't know you could do this. Let's, uh, we can pull up either my picture or we can pull up this.

• 21:25Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this video from KTLA5.

• 21:27John Coogan?

  KTLA5 had a video breaking down what's going on. Let's watch this and then we'll react to this. Let's pull up the, uh, KTLA5 report about AI coming for Hollywood. The mysterious sign along the 101.

• 21:43Speaker 02

  Underneath, a logo for Fiverr and a search box says, "Find the best AI directors." It's a brash, bold statement.

• 21:51John Coogan?

  Brash, bold statement.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  Coming for Hollywood.

• 21:52John Coogan?

  Coming for Hollywood.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  Fiverr has made a name for itself connecting projects with freelancers. Now they're launching an AI video hub, which they say can make content at a fraction compared to traditional production. This Billy Bowman guy is one of the directors that you can hire. He's based in Sweden. He's made AI videos for Google, Universal Music Group and others. As you know, AI really hasn't taken over Hollywood yet, but it has certainly crept into commercials, brands like Google and Jeep, rolling out AI on national campaigns. Many are slowly, or slowing rather, to see the 30 foot sign, uh, which went up over the weekend. I first noticed it stuck in traffic yesterday morning after someone was so entranced, they rear ended somebody else.

• 22:30John Coogan?

  It's causing accidents.

• 22:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:33Speaker 02

  So interesting, AI director.

• 22:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  So it's basically someone who puts the prompt into the machine and chooses.

• 22:40John Coogan?

  This is elite.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  Is Fiverr gonna pay the $500?

• 22:43Jordi Hays?

  Just put the prompt in the box, buddy.

• 22:44Speaker 02

  The fender bender. That's a great question, yeah.

• 22:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, can they be held liable for such a distracting sign? I didn't, I didn't get in a crash for sure.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  These AI companies are flush with money. Whether or not it is a bubble, like you can debate all day long.

• 22:59John Coogan?

  That's interesting because Fiverr is not one of those companies.

• 23:02Jordi Hays?

  KTLA, KTLA5 is not prepared for it not to be a bubble.

• 23:07John Coogan?

  But of course, the AI wave has not been kind to Fiverr because a lot of the tasks like, you know, generating an image for-

• 23:14Jordi Hays?

  AI is very, very, very good at $5 creative work.

• 23:17John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 23:18Jordi Hays?

  For $25. Obviously, the prices go well beyond $5 since, uh, since, since the early days. But in terms of the kind of projects that I always use Fiverr for, AI just one-shots all of that.

• 23:30John Coogan?

  And the nature of Fiverr is like, you have to define your task in a prompt.

• 23:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:34John Coogan?

  It's not, it's not, oh, have like a long conversation, get drinks with somebody.

• 23:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was often, that was often the bottleneck.

• 23:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:42Jordi Hays?

  That was the bottleneck.

• 23:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 23:43Jordi Hays?

  It was like, okay, I need to do this task.

• 23:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:45Jordi Hays?

  I, I need like-

• 23:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:46Jordi Hays?

  10 minutes to like properly define it, all these things. It's honestly way more time than you spend prompting normally. Because with prompting, you're just like, I'll just try it a few times.

• 23:55John Coogan?

  Bunch of times.

• 23:56Jordi Hays?

  Kind of iterate.

• 23:56John Coogan?

  Hit my rate limits and then fire back up. Yeah, I mean, it was always a bottleneck. I remember as an entrepreneur, I found out about Fiverr and I was like, this is amazing. I can get random stuff done for $5. But the time commitment, actually finding the right person, making sure the reviews are good, it, it wound up being like hours of work. And if you have a consistent flow, you're better off just hiring a person. So the, the, so they got kind of squeezed in the middle.

• 24:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the market is, is not excited about Fiverr right now. They're being valued basically at four times EBITDA.

• 24:25John Coogan?

  But this is an interesting pivot for them. They're basically saying that you can come to us to hire someone who has all the tooling set up to actually sit there and, and sort of nanny all the AI models because it is a hassle. Like you, as you described with me and VO3, I was sitting there like, okay, I fire off four prompts, then I go back. Like, it's way better if you, if you're on the API and you have Higgs field wired up and you have, you know, runway ML and you have access to the Chinese model C dance, like the right tool for the job and then you do fine tune on someone's face. There's a whole bunch of things that you can do to get better results, but it takes time and it's a hassle and it's more of a professional job. It's not actually out of one prompt.

• 25:08Jordi Hays?

  Here's, here's the main problem with the campaign.

• 25:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 25:11Jordi Hays?

  Is that Billy Bowman

• 25:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:13Jordi Hays?

  Is a real person.

• 25:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 25:15Jordi Hays?

  With his own website.

• 25:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 25:17Jordi Hays?

  With his own Instagram. You can just go and reach out to him. Which is interesting because like the primary issue with with these labor marketplaces like Fiverr.

• 25:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:26Jordi Hays?

  Disintermediation.

• 25:27John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 25:27Jordi Hays?

  If you if a business hires somebody on Fiverr and has an amazing experience, eventually they're just gonna go direct because they build up a lot of trust.

• 25:36John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 25:36Jordi Hays?

  And it's very different than than a platform like Uber where you don't necessarily want the same driver every time because they're not around you and all these things. And so the reason that the Fiverrs and the Upworks of the world and and there's been a bunch of other like engineering-focused marketplaces just have never reached like insane scale.

• 25:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:56Jordi Hays?

  Like Uber is because of the disintermediation.

• 25:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:59Jordi Hays?

  And this campaign is effectively an ad for Billy Bowman.

• 26:03John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 26:03Jordi Hays?

  Who you could just go hire today.

• 26:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. Disintermediation has always been a problem on these platforms. Bombardier, the manufacturer of private business jets, is down 10% over the past month. A lot of people were wondering why this was happening. I think we now know why, and it's probably because the shot across the bow from United Airlines. So what competes with a private jet? United Airlines new product, which is an entire row of economy seats. United Airlines says the entire row is all yours. Welcome to the United Relax Row. Three adjacent United economy seats with adjustable leg rests that can be raised or lowered to create a cozy lie-flat space for stretching out. You'll also get a mattress pad, blanket, and two pillows.

• 26:50John Coogan?

  If you're traveling with kids, a plushy too. United Relax Row will be available starting next year on more than 200 of the 787s and 777s. So what do you think, Jordy? I was telling Tyler Cosgrove, who is out of the studio today. He's in Washington DC. He's got to demo this. He's got to get on one of these. I don't know. Every time the airline announces something, it's always like five years until it actually is available. I've been waiting for Starlink for a long time. Took a long time for that to get rolled out from the PR release.

• 27:14Jordi Hays?

  United has pretty good pace.

• 27:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 27:16Jordi Hays?

  Haven't they been quick to start?

• 27:17John Coogan?

  So you think Tyler could get on this tomorrow?

• 27:19Jordi Hays?

  I think if Tyler's resourceful enough, he could just, if he ended up in a row.

• 27:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:23Jordi Hays?

  Two empty seats next to him, he could just figure out a way to detach the armrest.

• 27:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 27:28Jordi Hays?

  Blocking this.

• 27:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:29Jordi Hays?

  And just kind of kind of build your own.

• 27:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:31Jordi Hays?

  They might have to land the plane and arrest him.

• 27:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:33Jordi Hays?

  Potentially worth the risk.

• 27:35John Coogan?

  He could also, he could also potentially negotiate with whoever's sitting next to him. Say, hey, you go and spend the entire flight in the lavatory. And in exchange, I will vibe code you a sloppy app, of which I don't understand what programming language is used.

• 27:49Jordi Hays?

  I'll trade you an app for your seat.

• 27:50John Coogan?

  I'll trade you an app for your seat. And somebody might be like, that's amazing. I don't have anyone that can vibe code for me. This is, this is too good. No, I'm sorry.

• 27:57Jordi Hays?

  Ryan Peterson says, now we just need to put stairs on the food drink cart. So you can climb over the top of them to get to the bathroom instead of holding.

• 28:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this just, this just feels like, this just feels very, very chaotic.

• 28:13John Coogan?

  I don't know. Starlink, a relaxed row, a dream. I, I think that this could be a good option. United built the product that everyone who has been, who has ever been on a plane wanted, says John Collison.

• 28:25Jordi Hays?

  John, you need to work on fixing Bombardier's stock price.

• 28:29John Coogan?

  I don't think it's related. Oh, apparently Air New Zealand launched this in 2010.

• 28:33Jordi Hays?

  No, it is related because he, he should, he should help them build out their pipeline.

• 28:37John Coogan?

  Well, he's, he's just pumping his bags because he owns a, a property in Ireland. How do you get there? You gotta fly on United. So, you know, one hand washes the other on this. He's, he's, he's talking his own book.

• 28:49Jordi Hays?

  SpaceX aims to file IPO as soon as this week.

• 28:54John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 28:55Jordi Hays?

  Everyone is excited for the S1. Particularly, I think people will be focused on XAI.

• 29:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:03Jordi Hays?

  What they have going on. I think that I.

• 29:05John Coogan?

  Are they gonna have to break it out in the S1?

• 29:07Jordi Hays?

  I would assume so.

• 29:08John Coogan?

  This might be the first time we actually see the economics of inference, the economics of a foundation lab, even though, yes, they are at a smaller scale.

• 29:16Jordi Hays?

  Hard to read too much into it because they've been investing so far ahead of demand.

• 29:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. I, I just think that like, there is a world where we get broken out financials that you can dig through and you can understand based on GROC pricing, which we see and top line revenue and cost. We can actually see, are they serving that model profitably? And. There will be, you know, a lot to dig into there. Obviously, the other labs have different strategies, different vertical integration points, different economics, different pricing regimes. I mean, the true frontier, the models that are dominating ArcAGI, those command a premium, a price premium. There's a wild difference between charging 15 bucks per million tokens versus $2 per million tokens. So.

• 30:03Jordi Hays?

  People were posting this as though it was fact. I think it's a very real possibility. So I think Elon will try to aim for the company to actually go out on April 20th, 420.

• 30:14John Coogan?

  Really?

• 30:15Jordi Hays?

  And I think it is possible if he goes.

• 30:17John Coogan?

  So fast.

• 30:18Jordi Hays?

  We'll see what the ticker ends up being, but I think some people would, like, knowing Elon's very millennial sense of humor, I think the ticker, S E X is.

• 30:28John Coogan?

  Oh, you think so?

• 30:29Jordi Hays?

  Plus the April 20th IPO. I would assume that.

• 30:34John Coogan?

  You think it is a real prediction? You're not trolling.

• 30:36Jordi Hays?

  I'm not saying I would bet on it. I would put the April 20th at maybe like, you know, 30% and then the ticker maybe down at 15%.

• 30:46John Coogan?

  Okay, well, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. We'll be live tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific sharp. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com and we'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye.