Amazon Earnings, Saquon is a Superhero, Iraqi's Deserve Sesame Street, Real Founders Use Catheters

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Welcome to Technology Brothers, the number one live show in tech. We are live from the temple of technology in beautiful downtown Los Angeles. It's Friday, February 7th, 2025. This show starts now. Jordy?

• 0:16Jordi Hays?

  What do you got for me, John?

• 0:18John Coogan?

  We got some amazing breaking news. We got first up massive news out of Y Combinator. We got to ring the size gong for a bunch of developers, bunch of founders from overlap. They are part of YC summer 2024. They build multimodal AI agents that can understand search and edit videos and they raised a $1.9 million seed round. Let's ring the size gong for them. Congratulations to everyone over at overlap. We wanted to highlight this because this honestly seems like something we need. We, yeah, I would 100% demo this. We'd probably be power users. We are creating more content in tech than anyone has ever even tried to do before.

• 1:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, our goal for people that don't know, we're trying to get up to doing 120 hours a week live streaming. We're, we're at about 15 hours a week right now. So we got a ways to go, but overlap seems like a tool that would help us, you know, better utilize all the content that we're creating and make it, you know, right now we have a team of, you know, we have Ben, our producer, then we have a team of editors that help us take the content that we create and repurpose it for other platforms. So this looks like exactly like something that we would use. And I'm sure their, their sort of long-term strategy is to, you know, completely displace all podcasters. And so it might be one of those things where we're kind of like funding our own demise, but.

• 1:45John Coogan?

  Impossible, impossible. We are built different. I will fight the AI apocalypse personally, and I will go toe to toe with any ASI AGI system. You can't create these takes in silicon. It's impossible.

• 1:59Jordi Hays?

  It's impossible.

• 2:00John Coogan?

  It's impossible.

• 2:00Jordi Hays?

  We're going on record.

• 2:02John Coogan?

  We're going on record.

• 2:02Jordi Hays?

  To see, I'd like to see AI drink Dom Perignon to celebrate growth milestones. I just don't think it's gonna happen, but. These guys deserve a little sip of champagne for this moment. It's obviously day one for them still, but I'm excited to try out the product and congrats on a nice, nice little round.

• 2:23John Coogan?

  Nice little round coming out of Demo Day. Let's, let's break down their announcement. Their seed round came from a bunch of different investors. They got Y Combinator, Collab Fund, Transpose, Orange Collective, Pioneer Fund, and the 23 Fund. We're proud to welcome angels and operators from Amazon, Figma, Anthropic, Loom, Netflix, Meta, and OpenAI. What they do, they, this is how they describe it. "Overlap builds multimodal AI agents for media companies and video creators." That's us, baby. "Our first AI agent, a video marketing agent, can autonomously understand, search, and edit videos. This agent now helps dozens of companies and creators by instantly transforming their long videos into clips for social media." This is what we're trying to do. We're trying to be everywhere. We gotta get on LinkedIn. We gotta get on Instagram.

• 3:08John Coogan?

  This takes a lot of work.

• 3:08Jordi Hays?

  LinkedIn is not, LinkedIn is not ready.

• 3:10John Coogan?

  LinkedIn is not ready for us. We are going to flood LinkedIn.

• 3:15John Coogan?

  And I really do think that we can bring some great content there, have a lot of fun, and ultimately get a lot of views and, and have a big impact, which I'm excited about. And they said, "Over the last few months, our customers have seen a 10x increase in engagement while saving over 20 hours per week." I love that. We are working 120 hours a week. If we can make it 140 with the help of AI, I would do that immediately. And so what's next? Their seed round accelerates their mission to define the role AI will play in video workflows. With this capital, they're gearing up to accelerate product development, expand the team, and scale their impact. Stay tuned for more updates as they push boundaries of what's possible at the intersection of video and AI.

• 3:55John Coogan?

  So congrats to the overlap team. We love to see some big funding rounds happen out of YC Demo Day.

• 4:03John Coogan?

  Well, let's move on to our next story. We have some breaking news out of Figma. They announced a new product improvement. Aspect ratios can now be locked in Figma. People have been asking for this. Let's go. And it sounds like a minor thing, but look at the response. This is that they're promoting what, you know, a slight product revision. The designers went crazy. This was not only, not only did this post get 4K likes, but it was also a trending topic on X. Like I went into the X like search feed and it was, it was one of the top topics.

• 4:39Jordi Hays?

  The streets of Brooklyn have been absolutely begging for this, John. I mean, they've been, they've been campaigning, protesting, hitting the streets. You know, cold calling, trying to get Dylan to make this happen. They rolled it out. And it's just cool, you know, as, as big of a company as Figma is, as many people that use it, there's still things that they can do to meaningfully improve the product. And to be honest, I'm very excited about this. Like I had kind of a workaround to, to do this, like aspect ratio lock, but it wasn't something that you could do in the canvas. So very excited about this and I think they probably, if they were public right now, that, that you can imagine the stock would have jumped easily five, six percent off the news. This is absolutely massive for the design community and, uh, you know, startups everywhere.

• 5:24Jordi Hays?

  So congratulations to Dylan and the team.

• 5:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, we are, we're huge fans of Figma here. We used it to design our, the pitch deck for our, for TB that we send to everyone that we partner with. We're using it to design the show overlays that you'll see, uh, coming soon to the live stream. And so it's an incredibly versatile tool. We're using it to design our new website. And, uh, and, and, and fun fact, uh, when Jordy makes a meme, he actually makes it in Figma.

• 5:50Jordi Hays?

  I do, I do.

• 5:52John Coogan?

  He's one of the most advanced meme makers.

• 5:54Jordi Hays?

  I'm not using any of those slop meme generator apps on the phone. If you want to do numbers, you gotta be, you gotta be in Figma grinding. You gotta have your whole workspace. You gotta have good, you know, images to pull from. You gotta have good fonts ready. So, uh, it's a craft. You gotta respect it. It's almost a full-time job for me. If I'm not streaming, I'm memeing. And, uh, thank you to Figma for, uh, making that possible.

• 6:18John Coogan?

  I love it. And let's stay with Figma and talk about, uh, the CEO Dylan. He's an absolute dog. We talked about him before on the show. He's a beast. He is breaking down the impact of Figma responding to Sahil from Gumroad. Sahil says, "Many have confused design with knowing Figma." And this is again, Figma is just a tool. You gotta be a crack designer. You gotta know the tool, but you gotta know how to use it. And so Dylan says, "Always liked RSMs's framing. Figma is like a staircase. The first step should be easy to take and further steps should lead you to build mastery over time. We're on a mission to make Figma more accessible than ever. The craft of design still takes decades to perfect." Couldn't agree with that.

• 7:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I would, I would, you know, use my own personal experience with Figma. I started using Figma without any real design, you know, education, right? Totally self-trained. I think I had good taste, but I didn't actually know how to use the tool at all. And I wouldn't have considered myself a designer at all. I still don't really consider myself a designer, but I am so confident with Figma that I can create pretty good-looking designs, at least like MVPs for ideas that I have. And that's like really accelerated my sort of design timelines and really helped me work with designers. And so, yeah, I think it's amazing that Figma is not, Figma is easy to use. It's not incredibly easy to use,

• 7:43Jordi Hays?

  but if you just start using it, you'll figure it out quickly. And it's, you know, it's fairly intuitive. So just because you're not a designer yet, doesn't mean you shouldn't be in Figma using it. It's a super powerful tool. And I think that framing is great because, yeah, it is a staircase. I figured out how to drop a picture in and add text over it. And then suddenly I was, you know, making websites or product screens or things like that. So very powerful and it doesn't take much to get started.

• 8:11John Coogan?

  Figma is a staircase. And let me tell you, Jordy's calves are absolutely jacked. They're bulging out from all those stair climbs he's been going. But seriously, Figma is an incredible company. They went through this, I mean, really long grind. It took them three years to launch the product. Dylan started building the company in 2012. They didn't go, they didn't actually launch the product until 2015. They've raised a bunch of money. Then that crazy Adobe deal happens, gets broken up in antitrust. Now founder-led company, super well-capitalized, absolutely on a mission.

• 8:44Jordi Hays?

  And think about the timing with all these new generative AI, you know, products exploding. They have the distribution, they have the users. There's so many of these features that they can add.

• 8:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:54Jordi Hays?

  I, uh, there was a company called, um, uh, what? I'm blanking on the name. Diagram, diagram by Jordan Singer, um, Sarah, my wife invested in the company and, uh, they actually were acquired by Figma because they were doing a bunch of stuff around generative AI. So Figma is extremely well positioned to, uh, roll out a lot of these tools and, uh, just embed them in the existing software. So it's.

• 9:20John Coogan?

  Yep, yep. They're 100% going after the developer community now. And this in Figma, pretty soon is going to be a tool that is integrated directly into just a full stack developer's toolkit. And it's going to be something that, that even if they aren't a master of the previous iteration of Figma, it's going to be so much more accessible because of L L Ms and just being able to orchestrate things like you would cursor in the, in the IDE, uh, like you would Devon in a Slack channel, working on, uh, GitHub pull requests. It's all going to be the same flow. And so that's going to create way more versatility for, uh, a CEO who codes and, uh, does design. It's going to be all over the place. It's going to be amazing.

• 10:02John Coogan?

  Really excited for them. Uh, so stay tuned for more updates. We'll have to have Dylan on the show soon. Let's go to another breaking news story, massive product update from Palantir. They have partnered with XAI and they've integrated Grok into the enterprise. It's now officially available in A I P, the artificial intelligence program, uh, spearheaded by Shamsan Kar over at Palantir. We're huge fans of Palantir. And it's great to see that there's even more options for what foundation model you want to use when you're building these data-driven workflows for the, for the government.

• 10:34Jordi Hays?

  I love how they just threw this graphic out. It's very unclear what's happening, but it looks awesome.

• 10:40John Coogan?

  This is a video. We're working on showing videos. We haven't figured it out yet, but the video, I think this is a before slide.

• 10:48Jordi Hays?

  The video, the video guys don't know how to put video on a screen. This is, uh, we got a little bit.

• 10:54John Coogan?

  We are building the plane as we fly it here at TBPN. Stick with us. Uh, we will quote tweet this post. You can go and watch the full video. I'm sure it's fantastic. Uh, let's move on to, uh, Eliano, who is describing exactly what's going on there. Uh, there is an ontology of data that Palantir has created, uh, these hierarchical workflows, organizing all this data, dropping AI on top of it, and nothing feels better than dropping a big word like ontology on someone. You feel like a boss. Put in your vernacular, put in your toolkit. Highly recommend using it.

• 11:32Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic. Yeah. And Eliana's emerging as one of this year's hottest posters. He's been absolutely on a tear. He's got the Palantirians behind him. He's rallying them. The stock's rallying. Uh, it's just up only for, uh, the team over at Palantir. So love to see it.

• 11:49John Coogan?

  Fantastic team and great to see them partnering with Elon. I think just on yesterday's show, you said that, uh, you could imagine a world where Elon was a co-founder of Palantir. It feels like that. It feels like an Elon-driven company. Karp obviously has so much of the same founder-driven energy. It's just a fantastic company and we're excited to see them, uh, release huge products and integrate with, uh, with more LLMs and really, uh, hopefully make the government more efficient, which is what we're all excited about this year.

• 12:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And give them some, uh, even the government should be able to make memes internally. So if they can use Grok's image generation products as well, just, you know, flip some stuff around Microsoft Teams, that'd be awesome as well.

• 12:31John Coogan?

  Dude, I mean, Grok's image generation is remarkably good. I, I had it generate an image of Saquon Barkley, who's the, uh, who's the next top story that we're going to, gonna go to. Uh, Saquon Barkley and Jeb Bush are both investors in Ramp and I needed an image of both of them at a business meeting, at a share, Ramp shareholders meeting, smiling, and it nailed it. It was uncannily good. It was fantastic. The jersey was on point. All the details were right. The number of fingers was correct and it looked exactly like them. I was very satisfied. I got my money's worth.

• 13:03Jordi Hays?

  Finger test, the finger test.

• 13:04John Coogan?

  The finger test was passed and, and all the other, all the other, uh, image generation systems, uh, denied it. They were like, no, I won't, I won't create an image of Jeb Bush, which like, I, I think it's fair use. Like, you know, this is something I could have done in Photoshop, um, just, just copy and pasting. So,

• 13:23John Coogan?

  I don't know. But, uh, you know, we're following up on the, the, the breaking news from yesterday. I don't know if you saw this, Jordy, but, uh, obviously Ramp is running a Super Bowl ad, or as we think about it, uh, you know, there will be a showing of the Ramp ad on, on Sunday and there will be some football to help promote that ad.

• 13:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I think actually, so, so Kendrick Lamar, uh, actually agreed to do the halftime show once he knew that Ramp was running an ad.

• 13:50John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 13:50Jordi Hays?

  Cause he wasn't sure that football would be enough of a draw to really get people, you know, there packing out the stadium. But once he heard about the Ramp ad, easy yes from him. Yeah, I'll be there. I'll help create the right environment for people to be, you know, experiencing the ad. So, uh, very, very excited that Kendrick Lamar, Kendrick Lamar decided to step up and, um, help promote Ramp on Sunday.

• 14:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's fantastic. Um, well, Saquon Barkley is starring in that Ramp ad. You'll be able to see it, uh, live on Sunday and, uh, Eric Lyman, uh, you know, we, we were joking, we didn't really know who Saquon Barkley was, uh, when they told us, but now we're super fans, uh, you know, massive supporters, mostly of his, uh, investment portfolio, but he's also, I guess, pretty good on the field too. Uh, but, uh, an absolute, uh, goaded investor, future Hall of Famer in the business Hall of Fame for sure.

• 14:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the TV, in the TV probably has a bright future posting too.

• 14:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 14:49Jordi Hays?

  He's, he's clearly got, you know, good taste and, and good ideas and, and that's usually what it takes to, you know, dominate the timeline. So after he's done dominating the field on Sunday, I'd like to see a 20 part thread breaking down, here's how the game went. Here's what we could have done better. Here's what we're going to be taking into the off season. And, uh, you know, maybe, you know, a little bit of celebration as well. Um, and you know, looking at this picture,

• 15:13Jordi Hays?

  I could see you with an ear, you know, a similar earring, but maybe like a podcast microphone just kind of dangling there. So even when you're off the air, when you're walking around the street, people know, hey, this guy's a podcaster. He's wearing a suit. I'm going to treat him with a level of, you know, respect that, uh, that a hardworking podcaster deserves.

• 15:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure. And I like the eye black, you know, that's to, to keep the sun out of your eyes, uh, stop the reflections. There's a lot of light on the set. We might need to do, wear some eye black occasionally. Just make sure everything's dialed in. We're really focused in when we're podcasting.

• 15:48Jordi Hays?

  Great idea.

• 15:49John Coogan?

  But let's go through this. Uh, so, so Eric sent me some backstory on, uh, on Saquon Barkley. There's a, there's a great profile on him. Saquon Barkley is a superhero for the Eagles. His origin story is straight out of a comic book too. The man who has led the Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl run, the man who has been the most exciting player in football, almost quit the sport just before his career was about to take off. That was 14 years ago in Eastern Pennsylvania before Saquon Barkley became Saquon, a hulking hurdling blur with superhero like muscles. I love it.

• 16:25Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 16:25John Coogan?

  I watched a highlight reel of him. I mean, I'm, I'm a super fan now. It is incredible. He has some.

• 16:32Jordi Hays?

  I, I, I looked up some pictures of, of some, uh, plays yesterday because I wanted a shot of him running with the ramp card into the end zone, you know?

• 16:41John Coogan?

  There we go. Yeah.

• 16:42Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, anyways, um, an absolute dog.

• 16:45John Coogan?

  And so, uh, they have a bunch of quotes here to help tell the story of Saquon. I thought it'd be fun to go through this just because, you know, Even though, yeah, he's dipping his toe in the business world for the first time. He's clearly an incredibly inspirational figure and has done something remarkable. And studying greatness on, in the business world and beyond is something so valuable. There's a reason why David Senna has covered Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan on the founders podcast.

• 17:14Jordi Hays?

  Sure. Or even Keith, one of Keith Rabois' favorite books is The Score Takes Care of Itself. Have you read that? Fantastic book.

• 17:21John Coogan?

  Fantastic book. Yep. And so Brian Gilbert, the former head coach at Whitehall, his high school. I don't want to exaggerate, but the varsity coaching staff and I literally brought him in because we'd heard after his freshman year of high school, he was going to quit football. Barkley was frustrated, struggling with his self-confidence. Some kids had matured faster than him. Sophomore year, didn't, he didn't play varsity because his best friend was ahead of him. Saquon had to work. That's how he's wired and that's why he's so great. I said, listen, you may not be the best one right now, but we see potential in you. We see how fast you are. You've got to give it more time. He said, coach, I'm so skinny. If I come up and play varsity football, I'm going to get broken in half. We said, just get in the weight room and get stronger.

• 18:03John Coogan?

  Thank God he listened and this guy, and this guy squats like almost a thousand pounds now. Just absolute dog, absolute dog.

• 18:12Jordi Hays?

  Absolute dog.

• 18:13John Coogan?

  And so the former varsity Whitehall quarterback who he played with, Nick Shafinsky, or Shafnisky says, he was always the freakiest athlete and the nicest human. But it seemed like there was always someone a year or two older who was a little bit better. He was never the guy, as crazy as that sounds, because now he's the epitome of the guy. I love it.

• 18:36Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 18:37John Coogan?

  Going back to Gilbert, he says, he played a little varsity as a sophomore in 2012. At the end of that season, that summer, we went to Rutgers as a team camp. His improvements that he made that off season are different from any other athlete I've seen. He had a tremendous camp. Then Rutgers head coach Kyle Flood brings him in, him and me into his office and offers him. He says it was based on what he saw that day in the film they'd watched, which was JV film because that's all we had. So sick. This guy just goes on a tear.

• 19:08Jordi Hays?

  One, one thing that immediately comes to mind, so.

• 19:13Jordi Hays?

  Saquon freakiest athlete, nicest guy, right? That's, that's, that's his reputation. It makes sense that he would partner with, with Ramp and specifically Eric Wyman, because when you meet, when you meet Eric or, or Kareem or, or, or, or the, or the Ramp exec team, they're all genuinely the kindest people that, and it, it almost is this weird dichotomy because they're absolute savages in business and that yet Eric is just like the nicest, like sweetest human, right? And so it's, it feels like a really perfect partnership.

• 19:49John Coogan?

  So he wasn't even the number one running back in the state of Pennsylvania. No one on the staff looked at this high school film and thought this was going to be a generational talent. This guy, they thought this guy's pretty good, let's take him, but we gotta have Andre Robinson, the, the, the actual number one running back in the state of Pennsylvania. As far as why he flipped so fast, he went up to a whiteout game in 2013 and I think he was like, oh my God, this is night and day from Rutgers to Penn State. 1 million percent, the whiteout game changed his life. Gilbert says, Saquon is such a pleaser and I don't want to disappoint anyone and doesn't want to disappoint anyone. He asked me to how to tell Rutgers. I said, we're going to call Coach Wilson and tell him. He said, can you tell him?

• 20:34John Coogan?

  I said, no, you're going to tell him. You're going to feel better, like you've achieved something by doing this. It's going to be hard, but you can do it. He was so nervous, but I think that little step towards knowing that he hates disappointing people, but sometimes having to do what's best for your own good helped. It made him grow a little bit. A while later he called me, he said, I just got a call from Ohio State. Same with Notre Dame. Urban Meyer called him. Brian Kelly called him. Saquon didn't waver. He never went on another official visit, never went on another unofficial visit. He asked me if he could go on five official visits to Penn State. Because he didn't want to go to any other school. So he goes to Penn State. I would have loved to have coached him, but even now, when I watch him, I root for him because he's a

• 21:15John Coogan?

  great kid. And so the Penn State head coach says, to be honest with you, even up until his senior year, he wasn't thought that highly of. He was a good player, but nothing crazy. Then he had a dominant senior year. Then he played in some East West All-Star game, and they didn't even start him at tailback. He played fullback in the game. James and I went out to see him play early in his senior year. He had like 200 yards of offense and four touchdowns in the first half. And I was like, I think we can leave now. I was texting the pilot. Our job was done. He says, we're leaving. What do you mean, we're leaving? The game started at seven. It's only 7:38. I have a cool picture from me and Spence standing on the sideline. Our local photographer shot a picture of us from over our shoulders with him in the background. I have it hanging in my basement. So sick.

• 21:59Jordi Hays?

  Cool, uh, cool little connection. So he was at Penn State, uh, at the same time as Bo Nickel, technology weather and, uh, future, uh, UFC middleweight world champion. Um, so anyways, a bunch of also nicest, most, you know, humble guy. Penn State's doing something right.

• 22:20John Coogan?

  So they say, have you heard the story about the track deal when he was in high school? Gilbert says, this story is legendary. Franklin, uh, he wouldn't miss opportunities to do something special. I was at the district track meet when that Whitehall hosts every year at the 100 meter dash. This girl ran and finished first, but there was a mistake with the clock. So they had to redo it. And when they redid it, she came in second. Saquon witnessed all this. So he went over and gave her his gold medal. So amazing. He said, you deserve this. People at local pubs and restaurants will ask if it's really true. Yep, it is. What a good guy. That's amazing. Uh, for me, realizing he was special, it was probably the first day we were in full pads at summer camp. He read, he ran a basic

• 23:01John Coogan?

  inside zone play. He hit the A gap and then made a jump cut all the way back to the edge and went like 70 yards. Everyone's going crazy. He comes right back to me and says, should I have pressed it a little more? That's where the legend of Saquon started. I remember the run from the Oklahoma drill when the three O linemen basically blocked nobody and the three D linemen came through and he shook them all. That was welcome to Saquon Barkley moment. Have you seen that? That's so good. In the first year, we kept trying to protect him. He had unbelievable physical tools, but we were conscious of throwing him to the wolves too soon because we didn't want to scar him. After that Buffalo game, we were like, okay, we gotta play this guy. Then it was, how do we get him ready to play in the Big Ten without throwing too much at him? I went to our position room and went up on the board. I wrote up the

• 23:46John Coogan?

  number 26 and circled it. My D lineman asked what it was. I said, this is called the theory of 26. It means if any of you MFs hit this dude in practice and hurt him, you're gonna have hell to pay. Don't touch him. He's like the quarterback. Leave him alone. I don't want one of them big dudes falling on him. After his freshman year, he said he wanted to be the best running back ever. What do I need to do to get better? He went back and looked at some of the long runs where he got run down. It happens against Rutgers, against Michigan. We went back and did a series of looking at winning in open space, breaking tackles and making guys miss. Saquon Barkley says, you try to improve in every aspect of the game. I watched film on myself.

• 24:28John Coogan?

  I did self-evaluation. I wanted to get better at finishing the run, break loose and make another guy miss and get into the end zone. Eliminate the next play because anytime you have to line up again, you give the defense another opportunity. You can have a muffled snap, anything. My freshman year, I was explosive, but I didn't have true speed. My 20 and 30-yard burst was really good, but when I got to go 60 or 100, I didn't really have another gear. I really wanted to increase my 40 time.

• 24:54Jordi Hays?

  So sick. I love it. Crazy.

• 24:56John Coogan?

  And so, yeah, this story kind of ends with Huff. Going into next year, I told him, you gotta be prepared to have the biggest letdown season of your life. I said, now teams are not gonna let you beat them. You have to be able to find success in the little things. Maybe you don't rush for 200 yards and three touchdowns, but you can eliminate a few negative plays, improve your pass blocking, get better at catching the ball, coming out of the backfield, develop other parts of your game. And he was like, okay, I'm good with that. I love it. Yeah. What a beast. So huge fans now.

• 25:28Jordi Hays?

  And he, it was just awesome to see Jeb and Saquon on the timeline yesterday, just dominating. Even Jeb, Jeb, Jeb baited everybody, a little engagement bait. He included, you know, what looked like a bullet point at the start of, start of his post. A lot of people said, hey, somebody sent him this post. He chose from the bullet points and he was just copying, pasting it in. But, uh, you know, what, you know, people quickly pointed out, they said, hey, Jeb is a master of the timeline. He included that to drive engagement. So his post would go more viral. So.

• 26:01John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 26:02Jordi Hays?

  You don't get to be someone like Jeb Bush without being an absolute dog and taking every little extra step to get that extra reach, to get that extra impression. And I love to see him, you know, performing on the timeline.

• 26:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. So lesson for founders, if you're, if you have somebody on your, on your board or your cap table, who's an interesting poster, who you want to feed a tweet to, let them include a bullet point, maybe even include a little spelling mistake in there. So people are like, oh, like this is, this is artisanal.

• 26:29Jordi Hays?

  Quotes are good too. If you include like one or, you know, quote at the start or the end, people are going to say, hey, somebody sent you that to copy and paste in.

• 26:36John Coogan?

  But that's viral fuel.

• 26:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's viral fuel. I, I, so that's so funny. So, uh, I, I don't think we talked about this post on the show, but I posted, uh, Karl Marx failed to consider that making money with your boys is the most fun activity on earth.

• 26:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:52Jordi Hays?

  And I, I posted, I like reviewed it like a few times and I posted it. I had a typo in the fourth word. Karl Marx fail, or fifth word, Karl Marx failed to consider. I said, considered. And it's still got 14,000 likes.

• 27:10Jordi Hays?

  I was like, how does that even work?

• 27:13John Coogan?

  This is more organic. It knows it's not slop and LLM would never make that type of mistake.

• 27:17Jordi Hays?

  And I said, I said, you gotta put a typo in every post to prove that you're human. And AI would never have the creativity to, to think, you know, oh, I'm going to try to trick people into, you know, thinking I'm human by put, by making a mistake. Right? So. Anyways, we got some.

• 27:34John Coogan?

  Fantastic with Saquon Barkley. Tons of great lessons for business there. I mean, the guy total come from behind story, just absolute grinder, works on all aspects of the game, clearly reviews every piece of footage, really understands how to improve and spends a lot of time in the gym, working on the fundamentals. And that can be true in business. So lots to learn from Saquon on and off the field.

• 28:00Jordi Hays?

  I'm generally against wearing jerseys with another dude's name on the back. We're getting some TV jerseys made that'll be just Coogan and Hayes, but I'm almost inclined to try to get a Saquon jersey by Sunday and just be cheering, not for the game, but for the ad. Waiting for that 15 seconds to just.

• 28:21John Coogan?

  Blow me away. Can't wait.

• 28:25Jordi Hays?

  All right, we got some earnings presented by public.com. I'll have public app and you can run through this and I'll source any data we need to kind of support.

• 28:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, if you could look up what Amazon's done over the last five days, 24 hours, I want to know, I want the update from you from public.com. But it's earnings season, boys. We covered Google, we covered Apple, we covered Facebook and Meta, and now we're on to Amazon.

• 28:52Jordi Hays?

  And I don't think we have this slated, but I mentioned this to you yesterday, Roblox, which that what's that research Hindenburg Research had done a take down on. They reported a drop in sort of usage and like 30% of the stock got wiped out. So if Hindenburg was still in in Roblox, they would have done pretty well off of that. But let's get into Amazon, a stable, humble giant, although they are down 3% in the past week.

• 29:24John Coogan?

  I mean, that's a big move for a big company like that. So they just had their earnings, their shares fell after sales outlook is weaker than expected. The company is expecting to allocate a record amount of capital expenditure to AI. This has been an ongoing trend. Analysts are worried about overspending in the data center world. Some of those investments can be very good, but there is risk because cash is coming out of the balance sheet. And so let's go to the Wall Street Journal. They say, Amazon shares slipped Thursday after the company projected lower than expected sales and operating income, and said it plans to allocate a record amount of capital expenditure this year to build artificial intelligence infrastructure. Amazon is the latest large tech company to unveil big spending plans for AI,

• 30:09John Coogan?

  even as some investors are starting to question whether the spending spree is prudent. Virtually every application that we know of today is going to be reinvented with AI inside of it. Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy said on a call with analysts. Amazon projected net sales for the first quarter of between 151 billion and 155 billion, as well as operating income between 14 billion and 18 billion. The high end of each outlook came in below Wall Street's expectations. And so the company's net sales last quarter rose 10% from a year earlier to 187 billion, in line with analysts' expectations. Net income rose 88% to 20 billion, higher than predicted.

• 30:54John Coogan?

  So very good year last year, a little bit rougher going forward. Revenue from Amazon's cloud computing unit, AWS, increased 19% to 28.79 billion, slightly lower than expected. Analysts said they were closely monitoring this number after disappointing cloud computing results from Alphabet and Microsoft. What do you think, Jordy?

• 31:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I'm thinking that Amazon has been weirdly out of the headlines on all things AI capex. It's just not something that you're thinking about and not really hearing about much. I mean, obviously people like Dylan Patel are spending a lot of time writing about it, but it hasn't been top of mind for a lot of people. But given how, how much of their business is in cloud, you would think that they would be using that to drive the narrative and trying to build momentum around, you know, the narrative, the Amazon narrative around AI. And it just doesn't feel like, it doesn't feel like, you know, they obviously have like the actual like core data center infrastructure and cloud leadership, but it doesn't feel like there's no.

• 32:03Jordi Hays?

  They don't, they don't have their like Satya, right? Like somebody who's coming out and you know, going on CNBC, trying to get on Technology Brothers, likely, uh, things, things like that. So they just don't feel like they're, um, while they are like critical and they're running a lot of this, you know, work, they don't feel like they're a big part of the conversation right now.

• 32:26John Coogan?

  Well, I, I, I think that's a great take. And I think there's mainly two reasons why we're not hearing that. Um, even though AWS is the oldest cloud computing provider, and I think by far the largest. Um, but I think there's two things that are going on. One is that they don't have a, like a direct consumer narrative around AI in the same way. Uh, so Google, everyone's saying, oh, how is AI going to affect Google search? You gotta tell me about Gemini. They're launching products that directly compete with OpenAI. They have the TPU. They've really talked about this. And the transformer was invented at Google. So there's a whole bunch of history there around Google and AI. Everyone kind of expects that. Obviously Zuck is doing the same thing. He made

• 33:08John Coogan?

  this massive bet. They've trained Lama. There's a huge narrative there. Zuck's completely driving that. They did the huge AI CapEx, the massive GPU buy. And then even in Microsoft, which is a little bit less focused on AI productization. Obviously they're stuffing, you know, uh, co-pilots everywhere, but they have that massive position in OpenAI. So anytime OpenAI is in the news, you can talk to Satya. Whereas Amazon, they have deals with Anthropic. They host a lot of stuff. Obviously there's Alexa and there's AI in their products, but it's not as strong of a narrative. And a lot of it comes from the fact that they're no, they're kind of no longer in founder mode, like Jeff Bezos is out. And I was trying to understand, um, do you think Jeff Bezos

• 33:51John Coogan?

  goes back in the next four years? You think he does as CEO?

• 33:56Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I just think it's a really interesting, you know, question and, and conversation to be had. Uh, I bet, I bet he wakes up some days just itching to be back, you know, behind the wheel of, uh, one of the biggest ships in the world. Um, it seems like there's, there's, there's quite a, you know, looking at the core retail business. Um, I, I think it, there's.

• 34:19Jordi Hays?

  Lack of potential like real leadership in AI and that's because you think about who goes on CNBC to talk about Amazon's AI prospects and I can't name that person and I talk about technology for three hours a day with you here on the show and so that's that's probably a problem and it just shows there's not, you know, we've seen this with Satya in many ways, he's going founder mode.

• 34:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:45Jordi Hays?

  Even though he didn't start the company, right? Like he's clearly the face and the leader of that company and if he decided to leave, stock would drop, you know, I'm sure, you know, in a meaningful way. Then you have Zuck, obviously, doing his thing, you know, the other issue is the entire retail side of the business. I actually pulled up a post from Sean Frank, who we've had on the show, probably a hundred times now. He has been talking for a very long time about how little new interest there is in selling on Amazon. You remember there was a time when everybody was selling courses on how you can make, you know, $5,000 a day selling on Amazon. You don't even need your own products. And so Amazon has gotten optimized and optimized and optimized and they've

• 35:27Jordi Hays?

  just kept eating into the profits of the sellers on their platform. It's basically completely pay to play now. It's really hard to drive sales without spending a huge amount of your sales of gross revenue on ads. So I just pulled this up. There's a post, this was from a little, a week ago, actually, Sean says, why is interest in Amazon businesses collapse? One, the overall econ market has collapsed. Almost no deals are being done and those deals are 50% of what they would trade for in 2021. Solo Stove was worth $2 billion at one point. It's worth under 100 now. That sums up investor interest. Two, sales are stagnant. Amazon marketplace sales are down, single digits.

• 36:08Jordi Hays?

  That means the average merchant isn't growing all that much. No growth stories. So there's even less interest. He says three, all the big buyers went bankrupt. So you remember companies like Thrasio. And then you have like kind of other alternatives like Open Store that are playing more on the Shopify space. They aren't buying the same number of companies. And then the big thing is the fees have, you know, increased so much that even if your revenue has doubled since 2021, your EBITDA is flat or down. So you've doubled revenue, but your business is maybe worth less than what it was, you know, a few years ago. And so that is creating, you know, is definitely like seemingly like a lack of real, real leadership, right?

• 36:51Jordi Hays?

  Because if they had proper leadership place and the proper narrative in place, if they said, hey, we are going to be a real player in AI. We're going to spend tens of billions of dollars on new infrastructure. Then that might be a bull case, right? That might say, hey, they're going to take one of their core business lines. And there's a real world where they, you know, multiply it, but we don't have that. And then we don't have,

• 37:14Jordi Hays?

  on the retail side, all the sellers are upset. No, no seller on Amazon is saying, I'm so happy I built my entire business on Amazon, right? They're getting competed by, you know, Chinese sellers. They're being knocked off. There's a bunch of trademark infringement that happens. I, one of my portfolio companies, Element, L M N T, you know, had a copycat product on the platform. That was the exact packaging, different name, but a carbon copy of the product. And Amazon let it run up to, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of sales. I think they've dealt with it at this point, but it's a very hostile environment to be a seller. And

• 37:53Jordi Hays?

  we're not seeing, you know, real leadership on the, on the cloud side. So, um, yeah, I don't know. I don't know what to think. I think it's still a pretty good user experience. On the, on the platform, I, my, I think it's a great value exchange as a user from, I pay, I don't know how many, a couple hundred dollars a year and I get a bunch of content and free shipping and that's great, but, I think there's trouble on the retail side. And, um, because ultimately Amazon's, you know, they're not, you know, now they own inventory, but historically it was a very, you know, Inventory light model and that's what one of the reasons it made it such a great business. And that's why Timu, it does like a meaningful amount of Amazon's, you know,

• 38:39Jordi Hays?

  net income, you know, profit from the retail business despite being a fraction of the size. And so I'm interested to see how it plays out. But if you're Bezos and you're looking at all of this and you say, I have this juggernaut, the thing that is, you know, the thing that he put his entire life into. And I could see him getting tired of yachts and, you know, hanging out with his, uh, who, his wife who, um, seems to be enamored by every celebrity that, you know, cross, they cross paths with, which has to be a lot. Um, so eventually he might just decide, you know what? It's, it's time to go founder mode. I also think that he clearly has more interest in Blue Origin now.

• 39:20Jordi Hays?

  And I like the fact that he and Elon seem to be more, um, positive some now and, uh, supporting each other, which is, which is great to see as well. So who knows? Um, but, uh, but yeah, it's a great, great American company for the most part. And I'd like to see them, uh, you know, really, uh, take the reins and capitalize.

• 39:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, I would love to see Bezos back at the helm. He clearly has an incredible amount of soft power at Amazon still and, um, probably could step in. I think what's very interesting, I mean, I'd love to get a Polly market up on, does Jeff Bezos go back this year and then roll that over to next year? I know Polly market doesn't do long dated things, but if you look at the timeline, Jeff Bezos stepped down in 2021. This was just almost immediately once Lena Khan came in and the Biden administration came in. And you could maybe read that as he was studying the history of Bill Gates at Microsoft. He lived through that. He was in Seattle when it happened.

• 40:24John Coogan?

  There's actually a ton of overlap between their families, I believe, and investors because of the Silicon Valley business community. And what happened in the, uh, in the Microsoft, in the Microsoft case was. Bill Gates was the richest man in the world and had a target on his back and became kind of a scapegoat for monopoly power and then dealt with this like really rough monopoly case. And even though it didn't destroy the company or really break up Microsoft in a meaningful way, I mean, they had to kind of disaggregate Internet Explorer from, uh, from Windows. The company's still been massively successful. It's one of the biggest companies in the world. They got through it. But, uh, when you, when you listen to Bill Gates talk about it, he says it was like incredibly distracting and it really ruined the job

• 41:09John Coogan?

  for him. And then he spent the next, and then it kind of broke his brain because he spent the next 20 years just trying to kind of rehab his image through all of these crazy philanthropies. And so you could imagine-

• 41:19Jordi Hays?

  He's still trying to rehab his image and, and the most effective thing I've seen him done lately is he, he did an interview, uh, and was photographed in a, in a Bottega Veneta suit. I thought he looked fantastic. Uh, I thought he looked cool. And so more of that and less, you know, running experimental vaccine programs on, uh, you know, India.

• 41:40John Coogan?

  He's also a big Porsche guy.

• 41:43Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 41:44John Coogan?

  Oh yeah. Huge Porsche guy. He, uh, he was, he, it was maybe like a little shot across the bow to Elon, but he was always like, I'm a take, I'm a Taycan guy. Uh, you know, oh, I don't do Model S, which I think is a miss, but I think he also has like, uh, like a Carrera GT, a 959, uh, a 918, uh, probably he'll get the new one. Uh, and, uh, it's-

• 42:06Jordi Hays?

  I've been, I've been, uh, I've been driving a Taycan this week while, while I'm in South Carolina, Turbo S. Uh, it is, uh, it's a very fun car. It absolutely rips. Um, but, uh, so I can see that.

• 42:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, uh, what I think about Bezos is, uh, 2021, Lina Khan comes in and remember, Lina Khan wrote her senior thesis, like her dick, her dissertation on Amazon as a monopoly. And Amazon was not thought to, uh, to be subject to, uh, antitrust legislation because of the fact that it acts as an aggregator, as Ben Thompson described, in the sense that competition is only one click away. Their strength comes not from cornering supply, it comes from cornering demand. And what that means is that, is that Amazon- They might be able to raise prices, but they never have. And so it's impossible to

• 43:04John Coogan?

  it's really, really difficult, at least to prove consumer harm, which has always been the definition of we got to break up this monopoly. It's one guy owns all the steel or all the railroads. And then because he owns all the steel, he can say, I'm doubling the price of steel and everyone still has to buy. And, and you can imagine that that's bad. It makes sense why we have antitrust legislation to prevent that type of stuff.

• 43:27Jordi Hays?

  In the case with Amazon, it's, it's seller harm. And so sellers are pissed off. Sellers are, are, you know, still able to eke out a business, but their businesses aren't growing in value.

• 43:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 43:40Jordi Hays?

  And so that's a major, you know, again, it doesn't mean that, that there's a strong antitrust case to be built there because as a consumer, I'm sitting here and I'm like, well, I paid 200 bucks a month or 200 bucks a year to Amazon. I get a bunch of content. I get, you know, free Whole Foods delivery. It's, you know, it's a pretty, it's a pretty good exchange. So.

• 44:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'll see. We'll see how it plays out, but with that.

• 44:03John Coogan?

  And so 2021, Bezos steps down. This is like, you know, within days or within a year of Lina Khan coming in. And then two years later, the FTC files an antitrust lawsuit formally. And so I think of it as the writing was on the wall. The Biden, the Biden administration's going to be very rough on me. If I duck out now as CEO, there's no scapegoat to go after and it'll be much harder to rally public support for an antitrust lawsuit because we won't be able to say, look at this multi billionaire. Look at the richest man in the world. He's extracting value. Everyone needs to support this. And that support, even though

• 44:43John Coogan?

  FTC lawsuits are not voted on by the American public, there is pressure that happens through various elected representatives to the FTC. And it's a lot easier to go after someone who looks like a. You know, Lex Luthor than Andy Jassy, who's just a guy who no one really knows his name. And he's just there being like, yeah, we're obsessed with cloud computing. And it's actually a very, it's a very hot market, very competitive. And look at Amazon, Amazon, yeah, we might be the biggest in cloud computing, but Google Cloud is huge. Azure is huge and Facebook's also investing in data centers in a massive way. And then there's a million other providers. So it's, it's a complete perfectly competitive market. Yes, we have great margins.

• 45:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:27John Coogan?

  But it's not, it's not a monopoly.

• 45:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, now you have a bunch of new, you have new players like Stargate and you can point to them be like, look, they're, they're investing $500 billion in their own, you know? So we're not.

• 45:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:39Jordi Hays?

  Vetting new players from entering, entering this market. It's still going to be very competitive.

• 45:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so with Linacon out, it kind of creates a space where Bezos could go back in if he wants. And I've always been interested in, I always love when the founders have been able to set up their businesses in a way that they can do everything in the one master bucket. Zuck is the master of this, like he has the super voting shares. And so when he wants to do the metaverse, that goes in the meta bucket. When he wants to do AI, that goes in the meta bucket. Elon's taken a much more decentralized approach, but then he's re-centralized with things like SolarCity getting bought by Tesla. XAI is integrated with X and Tesla has some people over there. So he's kind of creating this kiretsu of different companies that all have intertwined stakes. There's a lot of overlapping investors.

• 46:28John Coogan?

  People actually think about the portfolio of Elon companies as like Elon Inc. now. And that's happening. It's not all one company.

• 46:35Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's crazy to think that he could take just his personal positions public independently and create an index of Elon.

• 46:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:45Jordi Hays?

  And it would probably trade at, at a 5X premium to book value, you know, something ridiculous.

• 46:51John Coogan?

  Yep. But Bezos has always, he's never been able to justify that fully. Like he, I think Amazon did one satellite internet project, but they, they weren't, he wasn't able to go to the Amazon shareholders, even though he has an immense amount of control. He was able to go to them and say, look, we could be making money on retail, but instead we're going to invest all of that in AWS and we're going to have this amazing second business. He wasn't able to do that a third or fourth time. He could have said, hey, look, we have a lot of delivery trucks. We want to make electric delivery trucks. And so we're going to build electric vehicles in-house, but that's not what he did. Instead, he funded Rivian and Rivian is kind of his Tesla. And that stock's been up and down, but Amazon built a position and Bezos like helped with that a little bit, but he wasn't able to just do it

• 47:32John Coogan?

  inside. If Zuck needs trucks, he's going to build them in Meta, you know, and he's not going to start a second company. And same thing with Blue Origin. Like, like if Zuck wants to build rockets, it'll probably happen within Meta because he has so much control and so much voting power there. And he's, and he's been very good at convincing the shareholders. So it'll be interesting to see. I mean, I would be most, I would, I would honestly probably be more excited about Blue Origin and Rivian if they lived within the Amazon holding structure and Bezos was at the top of that and could really choose how to allocate capital because this, this business, even though, you know, it's down a couple percent, it's throwing off so much money that they are going to invest $100 billion in capital expenditure next year. Like that's probably way less than Rivian needs or Blue Origin needs. These could be within.

• 48:17Jordi Hays?

  Think about, think about how good that would be for users if you could be driving in your Rivian and click for it to do an Amazon haul and buy a $13 guitar or $13 couch, right?

• 48:28John Coogan?

  $20 couch. Yeah.

• 48:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly. That's what users want, right? They want slop products while they're in their, you know, slop EV.

• 48:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, at the same time, it makes sense why shareholders are like, wait, like I wanted to like Zuck, I'm here as a shareholder. I just want like ad dividends. Like, why are you open sourcing L L Ms? Like, I don't care about that. And Zuck has to make the argument that, oh, well, it'll help with talent and it helps with our, it's commoditizing our compliments and oh, we'll be able to stuff this and everything and we'll have a, you know, stake in AI. And it's obviously gone very well. But even as a CEO who controls a massive public company, you do still have to make your case to shareholders. You can't just say, I have a wild idea. I have no idea how it connects and I'm going to do it anyway. People have to say, hey, it's going to make money for the core business.

• 49:20John Coogan?

  But Amazon, I mean, it really is interesting, your point about them not being like leading the AI narrative, because they are leading the AI narrative. They're spending $100 billion in CapEx this year as part of a push to build generative AI services.

• 49:36Jordi Hays?

  They're, they're leading the investment in CapEx. They're not, they're not.

• 49:41John Coogan?

  They're not leading the narrative. Yeah.

• 49:42Jordi Hays?

  And I think that narrative just matters so much for a company, you know, that, that, you know, every company is in the game of, we want our, you know, for the average, you know, retail investor that owns Amazon, they want the, you know, they want the, everybody wants the price to go up. And so I think that they're not getting credit for that CapEx from a, you know, market cap standpoint.

• 50:08John Coogan?

  100%. And so, uh, let's just break down how Amazon compares to the other hyperscalers. It really is fascinating. Uh, you know, Satya has that quote, I'm good for my 80 billion. Well, now that has actually increased. Amazon, uh, Microsoft is expected to top 90 billion in CapEx this calendar year. Uh, Google is spending 75 billion and Meta is spending 65 billion. And so you add all that up, you're in some huge, huge territory, 350 billion, something like that.

• 50:40John Coogan?

  Pretty, pretty crazy numbers. Uh, but you know, it's a lot of data centers. I'm excited to see it. And, and it's the meme, another trillion to one, another trillion to Nvidia. Woo-hoo.

• 50:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Uh, we, we need to do a, uh, data, we need to do a data center.

• 50:57John Coogan?

  Model map.

• 50:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:59John Coogan?

  For sure. For sure. Uh, and so US tech stocks tumbled last week after the surprise success of a new generative AI model from China. That's of course DeepSeek. The free to use model was built at a fraction of the cost, although. Very debatable at this point. The latest number I saw was like, they spent 1.5 billion, which is like more than it costs to train GPT-4. And so now we're in like weird territory.

• 51:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they spent 1.5 billion while horrifically stealing from, from OpenAI.

• 51:31Jordi Hays?

  Harder to, and then, and then, you know, lying about it.

• 51:34John Coogan?

  I'm actually very confused about the real number here because it started as 6 million. Then people said, well, they have other stuff and it doesn't include R and D. And even DeepSeek admitted like, we didn't include all the cost. And so people were like, okay, maybe it's 50 million, maybe it's 100 million. It's still impressive. They clearly did a bunch of optimizations to make the code run faster. And there's just no question that inference is cheaper. Like that is true. We know that. But now we're getting these crazy estimates like actually DeepSeek has invested 1.5 billion in AI as a whole project. But then on the other end, you're hearing like, oh, a couple of kids at Stanford rebuilt it for 50 bucks. And so we're now like in the bands of like, DeepSeek spent a billion, but Stanford can do it for 50 bucks. I don't know what to believe anymore. It's crazy.

• 52:17Jordi Hays?

  I love, I love how they just inspired America to grind harder. Everybody, everybody was like, oh, it's possible to train a model like this for, you know, very, very little comparable cost. We should just do it. And then they do it. So.

• 52:31John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it. Well, and so obviously that shook markets. Amazon CEO Jassy wants to make Amazon an AI leader. As the world, he needs to do more podcasts though. He needs to start setting the narrative. Call Lulu. Go direct. As the world's largest cloud service provider, the company is in a good position to profit from AI. Amazon created special teams, created special teams to,

• 52:59John Coogan?

  let's see, created special teams to drive generative AI innovation and has released a flurry of services, including an AI shopping assistant. First time I'm learning of that.

• 53:11John Coogan?

  I've heard that they have an AI chatbot that you can chat with.

• 53:15Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny. Their shopping assistant for the consumer is, yeah, we're just going to find you the products that you really want. And then on the back end, they're just telling all the retailers, yeah, you're going to have to give up 90% of your margin to get this customer and you're going to love it. Otherwise, you know, somebody else will, will, will pay for that slot. So.

• 53:35John Coogan?

  And, and so the, the Wall Street Journal highlights, uh, Amazon's competitiveness in the e-commerce business with new rivals such as Timu and Shein. Both of these companies offer low prices to source products extensively from China. President Trump suspended a trade exemption known as the de minimis provision that Shein and Timu and other Amazon competitors have used to avoid import duties on low value packages from China. We've covered this before and we, and honestly, we never thought that it was putting a dent in Amazon's revenues because a lot of the slop products that were bought on Timu and Shein were incremental and it was seen more as gambling dollars than really replacing or displacing Amazon as, as a staple of the American consumers, uh, consumer habits.

• 54:20John Coogan?

  So unclear how big of an issue Timu and Shein have been historically. They're certainly on their back foot now and it seems like Amazon's even, even better positioned. I mean, a lot of this, although the stock traded down, it, there's a lot of bullish stuff in here, like they've, they've, they've, they've, they've like, there's no more FTC risk with Linacon out. They, they're, they're potentially killing off Timo and Sheen and, and they're spending the most on AI data centers. So if you believe that having a lot of data centers and a lot of GPUs is valuable, they're in the best position. Now, not by a lot, they're only spending 10% more than, than Microsoft, uh, but it's still a lot and they got a lot of stuff on the US. It's great.

• 55:03Jordi Hays?

  And to be clear, the stock is not underperforming by any means. They were down on earnings, but I'm on public and they are up 5% ish in the last month. So, um, not, not a bad spot to be in, but.

• 55:17John Coogan?

  I think they were up 40% last year, which is crazy for a company that big.

• 55:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they were not a, they were not a trillion dollar company in 2020. They were, um, in, yeah. So right, uh.

• 55:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you bought, if you bought Amazon the day that the NBA, you know, basically went offline, it was like a $900 billion company, right?

• 55:43John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 55:45Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, still doing well despite Bezos not at the helm, but imagine, imagine the move if Bezos did join the company, the, the, the pop would be biblical.

• 56:01John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure. And so separately, during the important holiday quarter, Amazon grappled with threats from one of the largest US labor unions, and I love their name, although I'm not a fan of them personally, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. I know the Teamsters Union, I didn't know that was their full name. We should start an international Brotherhood of Technologists. They tried to disrupt holiday deliveries to pressure Amazon to negotiate with its warehouse workers. At the time, the company said those attempts had fallen short, I guess. And so Amazon got through that. I also wanted to go back and look at a little bit of older earnings analysis

• 56:40John Coogan?

  from Ben Thompson. This is from 2023, talking about Amazon and AI. And, and Ben Thompson is highlighting the, the, the lack of clear narrative. And so Jassy, at the time, back in 2023, he says generative AI has captured people's imagination, but most people are talking about the application layer, specifically what OpenAI has done with ChatGPT. It's important to remember that we're in the very early days of adoption and the success of generative AI, and that consumer applications are only one layer of opportunity. And so three of the five big tech companies have a clear AI story at this point. Microsoft has its partnership with OpenAI, Google has its own AI models and Google Cloud platform,

• 57:22John Coogan?

  and Meta is pursuing open source strategy in conjunction with seeking partnerships with large cloud providers, starting with Microsoft. That leaves Apple and Amazon, who have way underperformed on the narrative front.

• 57:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so here's the thing. So Amazon made its bet on Anthropic, and Anthropic has built a great model. People love Claude, but is kind of irrelevant on the consumer side. They have, you know, a fraction of the downloads and the engagement that OpenAI does.

• 57:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:52Jordi Hays?

  And they don't have a reasoning model right now.

• 57:56John Coogan?

  They do. It's just internal. They haven't launched it.

• 57:58Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm saying. I don't, I don't care. They don't have a, they don't have a, you don't get credit for, oh yeah, we, we got, we got, we got a great, like, the whole thing with, with all these, you know, foundation model, you know, companies is they're launching products oftentimes before they're really ready for production, right? They launched deep research and you didn't even have access to it, right? So everybody's sort of running. I believe that Anthropic's model was actually competitive. They would have launched it already.

• 58:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. It is clearly a very, very different.

• 58:29Jordi Hays?

  And the other thing is they may, Anthropic made a clear bet around AI safety. And a lot of other firms ignored that. DeepSeek, one of them. And so that seems to be in the short term, the wrong bet to make. And so that was, that was Amazon's real, you know, player in the race. And, and I think that, or at least consumer narrative. And it's turning out that Anthropic doesn't seem to have a strong consumer narrative right now, even though people love the product.

• 59:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is crazy comparing.

• 59:02Jordi Hays?

  I haven't personally used Claude in, in weeks. So.

• 59:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, it seems like it has popularity amongst the developer community, but beyond that, it hasn't really broken through. And it's fascinating to see how aggressive Sam has been at OpenAI about responding to just any developments. You know, every time Google has a keynote, OpenAI has a keynote two days before. And Deep, DeepSeek comes out, what, what, what's the name of the product he launches? Deep Research? Like, he wants the Google Auto Field, AI Deep Something? Oh yeah, Deep Research, go over here. And you can tell that Deep Research, I mean, I, I've been enjoying the product and I think it's getting a lot better. But you can tell that they're not ready to scale that for a few reasons. First, it's not available on mobile. So.

• 59:51John Coogan?

  The button is just not available there. So you have to, if you're on your phone, you have to open up a web browser and go to chatgpt.com and then click the deep research thing to do a query on mobile. So they're clearly cutting the amount of deep research queries that way. And then also, it always asks you a clarifying question to slow you down. And I'm sure there's some sort of churn rate between, oh, I was about to kick off this deep research thing, but it asked me a bunch of clarifying questions. Maybe I'm not going to do it. And if that saves them 50% of the of the queries, that's a lot of compute because clearly it's very, very expensive. But it shows that that they're they're willing to push it out and get the data they can and do as much scaling as they can, even though they're not ready for this to be free for everyone, ad

• 1:00:36John Coogan?

  supported, and billions of inferences that are just burning up data centers every

• 1:00:41Jordi Hays?

  And Anthropic, all this stuff, DeepSeek coming out and people responding to it and, you know,

• 1:00:50Jordi Hays?

  it's kind of showing that we may be at least a few models away from from the sort of asymmetric risk that Anthropic has been, you know, focused on. And so it seems to have been so far, at least for these early reasoning models that aren't fully, you know, agentic, it does seem that they kind of made the wrong bet there.

• 1:01:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, it'll be, it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. Maybe Bezos gets in there and puts some pressure on them and puts their feet to the fire and says, give me the models they're going out today. But let's close with Ben Thompson's analysis. This is again from two years ago, talking about Amazon's play in AI. And he has some, he has an anecdote. Ben writes, I'm wrapping up my usual summer stint in the US in a metro area that started receiving same day deliveries earlier this year. Speaking personally, I absolutely agree with Jassy's characterization of consumer behavior. I both found Amazon's delivery speed to be astounding, and also recognize a significant shift in my own behavior because of that speed. The truth is that buying something locally in person still requires a trip of some sort with

• 1:01:58John Coogan?

  that with the risk that what you want may not be in stock is, in almost all cases, it was actually faster, particularly once you incorporate the realities of life, where you can't actually go to the store this very minute, because things come up to simply order from Amazon, because you'll receive your item in a matter of hours, not days, indeed. I felt this summer marked the largest shift in my purchasing behavior since the launch of Prime. When I needed something like, say, a mic cable, which happened last Sunday, I simply bought it on Amazon the moment the need arose. The cable arrived four hours later. What I find so fascinating about this, though, is Jassy's argument that this actually results in lower unit costs because there are fewer touchpoints for the delivery. This does not make intuitive

• 1:02:40John Coogan?

  sense in that it is a classic tech trade-off between marginal costs and fixed costs. It is also a tangible expression of why I thought it was so important for Amazon to push for this level of delivery speed in the first place. Amazon is at its best when it's realizing advantages that no one else can match because of its willingness to invest in the real world. This is what Amazon does best. Focus on long-term moats and instead of short-term profitability, that's what leads to increased profitability in the long run. If you're patient enough and confident in your position with consumers will endure, Amazon's renewed interest in its logistics is a perfect example and an encouraging sign that the company will retain its greatness

• 1:03:21John Coogan?

  without its earnings call skipping founder because Bezos didn't go to the earnings call, which I think is funny. Anyway, Jordy, what you got?

• 1:03:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would just kind of close this out by saying Amazon generally is very well-positioned for a lot of the trends that we're seeing right now. Some of these other companies that are more pure-play software companies that aren't existing in the real world, there's some real threats there, right? Software development timelines are changing so dramatically. It's becoming so much faster and cheaper to make software. That threatens a company like Salesforce in a way that Amazon, which is selling physical products, selling content, selling, you know, they have their logistics network, they have their data center business. They should be, people should

• 1:04:08Jordi Hays?

  be tremendously excited about Amazon's positioning for the next 10 years. And yeah, they're somehow not getting that through. So anyways, excited to keep covering it.

• 1:04:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's an interesting story.

• 1:04:22John Coogan?

  Seems mostly narrative and communications based, but we'll see. Fortunately, you know, stocks up 40% over the last year. Minor, minor bump in the road with this earnings. Little bit of scared on the CapEx, little bit of deep sea threat, but we'll see where it goes. Let's move on to our next top story. We have a Technology Brothers exclusive where the, for the first time in Technology Brothers history, we're covering an Eric Newcomer exclusive on General Catalyst's fundraising. And so we have slides here from Eric Newcomer

• 1:04:53John Coogan?

  showing how General Catalyst has performed, how they've scaled, and Eric Newcomer has the firm's Q3 2023 fundraising documents. And General Catalyst is on a tear. They are just going big, ultimate size lords. Let's hit the size gong a couple of times for them. They're just

• 1:05:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and they even, I don't think this article would have caught it, but they came out yesterday announcing they have a new fund of funds platform to fund other emerging managers. So they're just going, I love, we love when people get aggressive and they're certainly doing that.

• 1:05:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the narrative around, around General Catalyst has been, it was a VC firm, then it was a growth stage firm, then it was a private equity firm. Now it's just an asset manager in every sense of the word. I think they also launched a wealth management product, right?

• 1:05:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:46John Coogan?

  Did you see that? Yeah. And so they have a hospital, consumer value financing, a wealth manager under the leadership of CEO Hamon Tenaja. The firm has grand ambitions. Newcomer got his hands on documents that show how General Catalyst has presented itself to prospective investors. Documents he obtained are admittedly a little dated from 2023. It's a bit old, newcomer. Got to step it up. Got to be hanging out at the Sand Hill, the Sand Hill Rosewood a little bit more.

• 1:06:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or the Nobu.

• 1:06:20John Coogan?

  Hanging out.

• 1:06:21Jordi Hays?

  I want to see, I want to see, I want to see a tech journalist. Go to Japan, study how to make sushi for 10 years and then go get a job at Nobu and just sit at the sushi bar. You're just making sushi. Everybody thinks you're just, you know, making a nice hand roll. Turns out you're listening for scoops. You're picking up every single thing that they say. You're yelling, "Iroshima say," but then you're really, you got your ears, both ears here because you've got a bunch of allocators right in front of you. You know, you're picking up this round's happening, that round's happening. Maybe a faster way to do that would just be to go pay off the individual, you know, the, the waitstaff, the sushi, the sushi chefs, et cetera. But there's alpha everywhere, folks.

• 1:07:04Jordi Hays?

  And there's certainly alpha in the Palo Alto Nobu.

• 1:07:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, newcomer, become a janitor at Aman and then just go around and just sweep up all the slide decks that are laying around the pool and the jacuzzi and the spa and just scan them, throw them up on the newsletter. You're going to triple subscriptions. You're going to be printing 5 million next year in EBITDA. It's gonna, you're playing small ball right now.

• 1:07:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so the investment memo provides a detailed look at General Catalyst's strategy and performance as it was raising its last suite of venture funds. And so let's go through some of these. They are absolute dogs, General Catalyst. Billions raised in October 2024, the firm announced $8 billion of new funds for its Fund 12, been around for a long time, including 4.5 billion for the firm's core VC funds, 1.5 billion for its creation strategy, and 2 billion for separately managed accounts.

• 1:08:01Jordi Hays?

  One and a half billion for, I'm reading that as incubations. Is that correct?

• 1:08:05John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 1:08:07Jordi Hays?

  Billion for incubations is insane. That's just an insane number.

• 1:08:14Jordi Hays?

  Given how capital efficient incubations can be, because, you know, sometimes a firm will put. You know, founder as an EIR, so they have a bit of an income and benefits while they figure out what to build. I have no idea how it's actually structured, but.

• 1:08:30John Coogan?

  Well, their latest incubation was a roll up. And so they wound up buying a lot of existing firms. And so you could imagine if you're, if you're buying like a mid-sized business, dropping AI on top of it. Yeah, it's going to be a hundred million equity check and then a couple of million, a hundred million in debt, maybe. That's going to go pretty quickly. That's 15 deals. If you're doing hundred million dollar checks to kick off these like incubation roll up type things. I have no idea how they're, how they're sizing their bets, but I'm sure we'll find out more. Let's go to the evolution in 20, in two, in the year 2000, the firm started in Boston, founded by serial entrepreneurs, David Falco and Joel Cutter during the dot

• 1:09:10John Coogan?

  com bubble. General Catalyst established credibility. Let's see. They hatched winning companies resulting in Kayak, Demandware, and Virtu. Fund five in 2007 was $722 million, already pretty big. During the global financial crisis, they expanded to Silicon Valley in 2010 and New York in 2012. They did a fund six of $500 million. Fund seven was 676 million. Every, every fund is just getting bigger and bigger. Ken Chenault, who I've actually interviewed, Ramp investor, former CEO of Amex, he joins as the chairman. And

• 1:09:52John Coogan?

  then in 2018, General Catalyst solidifies a full stack platform by raising multiple funds segmented by stage. This is the Fund 10 group. Fund 10 comes in at 2.9 billion. General Catalyst raises its first sector-specific fund, the Health Assurance Fund. Hamant becomes CEO. They open a London office in 2021, post COVID, and Fund 11 clocks in at 5.4 billion, baby. And so there's a little bit of a breakdown here for Fund 12. They have their Creation Fund, which hatches companies, transforming companies with a catalyst advisor and executing, and executing venture buyouts.

• 1:10:36Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so that's, so that's interesting. So it's their Creation Fund, but it's a venture buyout.

• 1:10:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:10:42Jordi Hays?

  Strategy. So that.

• 1:10:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, and they're trying to own 25% of the business when they do.

• 1:10:46Jordi Hays?

  Trying to deploy at one and a half billion when you're creating. You know, pre-seed companies and presumably making room for other investors to

• 1:10:55John Coogan?

  Yep, impossible.

• 1:10:57Jordi Hays?

  Difficult.

• 1:10:58John Coogan?

  But they're going to buy, they're going to buy companies like their private equity firm, but where they think there is VC-like opportunity and venture scale. And so they have the ignition fund. This is where they do their core early-stage work. Another 1.5 billion there. They focus on seed, series A, series B. And of course, they focus in a 10 to 25% ownership target there. They have their health assurance fund, which is targeted at digital transformation of the healthcare industry. 750 million, early-stage seed, series A, series B in healthcare, 10 to 25% ownership targets. And then they have their endurance fund. That's their growth and later-stage investments, 2.25 billion. And this is all out of Fund 12.

• 1:11:42John Coogan?

  And so they've taken this full-stack approach. You can look at some of their leadership here. They focus on basically everything, healthcare, fintech, global resilience, technology, consumer and enterprise. And we can go through more of the slides, but you might just want to subscribe to Newcomer. The guy gets scoops, even if they're a year and a half old.

• 1:12:06Jordi Hays?

  Always scooping.

• 1:12:07John Coogan?

  Always scooping.

• 1:12:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, an absolute dog.

• 1:12:11John Coogan?

  Is there anything else we should talk about with regard to general catalyst? We got some boys over there, some absolute dogs writing huge checks, making plays.

• 1:12:20Jordi Hays?

  No, I, you know, some, every time a venture fund comes out and announces multiple billion dollars of new AUM, there's always naysayers, haters saying, oh, this is not, you know, this is not real venture capital. Or, you know, how are you going to actually put up returns like this? But You have to just give people a little bit of credit. If somebody is raising $8 billion, unless they're Masa Sun, they have probably planned things out pretty precisely. They probably have a very coherent strategy because that kind of money doesn't change hands and get

• 1:13:00Jordi Hays?

  invested without, you know, the people that are investing those dollars are sophisticated. And yeah, they're taking a portfolio approach. They don't need every fund they invest in to outperform. But yeah, got to give credit. And I like to see that General Catalyst is getting aggressive and evolving venture. It's not a cottage industry anymore. I think that the super, super early stage stuff will continue to be somewhat boutique and there's always going to be opportunities for new managers. But, you know, the bifurcation venture from these sort of small 10 to 50 million dollar funds all the way to these like 5 to 20 billion

• 1:13:41Jordi Hays?

  dollar funds or 5 to 10 billion dollar funds. That is seemingly the new normal. And I think it's overall healthy. It's important for early stage investors to know that, you know, if I invest in a company at a 5 to 10 million dollar valuation, that if they do well, there's going to be, you know, $50 billion of downstream capital that somebody like a GC or an Andreessen or a Founders Fund or a Sequoia can deploy into that. So overall, I think it's healthy. I think there's going to be, you know, an entirely, it's going to be cool to see the generation of investors, allocators that come out of firms like General Catalyst that were there during the transformation and then can continue to innovate down the road. So

• 1:14:26Jordi Hays?

  overall, very cool. And, you know, look, they're probably doing a few hundred million ARR just on the fee side.

• 1:14:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. So the, the, the old model of two and 20 is gone. VC firms used to take 2% annual management fees and 20% carry, but not a general catalyst, baby. The firm's share profits on investments starts at 25% and climbs to 30% if the profits are above 133% in aggregate contributions. And so, a lot of these, a lot of these different funds have different management fee structures. The creation fund gets 2.5% management fee. The ignition fund gets 2.25. Endurance is their growth fund, so a little bit lower, 1.75% management fee. And the health assurance fund gets 2.5% management fees.

• 1:15:16John Coogan?

  So Eric Newcomer clocks it at $120 million a year just from Fund 12. And remember, they're raising these new funds every couple of years. And so, that's going to fund a lot of employees, a lot of office space, and a lot of ski trips to Tahoe and Sun Valley.

• 1:15:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and one, one thing to note, yesterday, we will probably talk about this later in the show, but yesterday, some news broke, I think from Bloomberg, that Trump was exploring eliminating what, what has been called the carried interest tax loophole.

• 1:15:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:15:50Jordi Hays?

  And I think that loophole is a sort of not the best way to characterize it because the, what they're referring to is the fact that investors that are, you know, people that manage and deploy money that's not necessarily their own. They get, when they, you know, if you have a $10 million fund and it does well, and you're in carry, that carry gets, you know, has, has historically been treated and today gets treated as capital gains. What they're trying to do is make it treated more like ordinary income. So instead of paying a

• 1:16:27Jordi Hays?

  You know, 15, 20 ish percent tax rate, whatever it is, you might be paying closer to 50% tax rate on that. And so for someone like GC who's deploying billions of dollars and presumably wants to make a great return on that, that's billions of dollars that they would be giving to the federal government or the state government depending, you know, on their performance. So pretty, would be pretty brutal for the industry in many ways, but it's coming from somebody like Trump who runs his own money. So as a real estate guy, he's using his money. I'm sure he has co-investors and using a lot of debt,

• 1:17:08Jordi Hays?

  but to him, it, you know, maybe is not so important how carried interest is treated. But if you're a fund manager raising, you know, billions, or if you're a fund manager that's raising 10 million and really making money on, on the carry piece versus the fee side would be pretty devastating. So.

• 1:17:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, the, the carried interest loophole closure, this whole discussion, that came up during the last administration. Didn't go anywhere. You said that if it goes through, VCs will make January 6th look like a baby shower. I think we could see lots of VC and private equity associates protesting on, on the National Mall. If this happens, it'd be very bad for the industry. And who else said something interesting? I forget who it was. Dan Primack. Dan Primack says, "A source on the phone just now on the carried interest tax situation is like the red wedding. Trump collected all the VCs at the White House so he could more easily murder them."

• 1:18:13John Coogan?

  And so.

• 1:18:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And, and to be clear.

• 1:18:19Jordi Hays?

  It's it's not going to be the end of the world. But it does meaningfully impact. You know, when I look at it as like, you know, from time to time, I'll do an SPV into a company that I'm excited about. And now I have to, i- if they do. Change the law and the tax treatment. Right now, you know, if I invest, you know, a million dollars, be an SPV, I take 20% carry on it. Uh, maybe there's other partners in the deal, so I'm not actually getting the full 20% carry. After it's taxed 50%, it might not have even been worth my time to do the deal.

• 1:18:58Jordi Hays?

  I might have been better off just putting in, you know, 50 grand myself, letting it ride and knowing that it's going to be treated like, um. Cause, cause putting together money like that be an SPV, it's a lot of work, it's super time intensive. And so, um, you know, you're basically looking at the, the way that I've always looked at it is. You're investing in the deal with your time. And so from that lens, it's saying, okay, maybe it should be treated. Um, like ordinary income, but the payoff is so unclear and it takes so long to see a payout. And you only see a payoff payout if, you know, there's a meaningful return. And so, um, I see a good argument to keep it as is. I don't think it should be framed as a loophole, but, uh.

• 1:19:40John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:19:41Jordi Hays?

  We'll see how it plays out.

• 1:19:42John Coogan?

  And so, uh, manifold markets, I don't know if how up to date this is, but they are running a market on carried interest repeal by the end of 2026. It's a yes 40%, no 60%. I imagine that's pretty low liquidity. Uh, Med Faber here, Meb Faber here, who actually follows me says, uh, we need a poly market on the chances of carried interest lol. Uh, close the carried interest tax deduction loophole. So everyone wants to know whether or not this will happen. It could just be one of those things where like Trump is doing with Canada. Oh, we're going to make Canada a state, this and that. He, Canada, uh, Trump loves to open with a crazy proposal and then back it off and, and get something in trade.

• 1:20:24John Coogan?

  And so I could imagine this saying, look, I'm going to close the carried interest loophole, blow up your entire industry, but. As this gets, now that I brought everyone to the negotiating table and people realize how serious I am, Trump will say, well, actually, I'm going to close the carried interest loophole on investments that are made outside of the United States. Or, and, and, and really his goal the whole time has been, I just want VCs to invest in American companies that make products in America. And you could see that being more aligned and that's actually what he's going for. But how does he get there? Well, he's got to come in with a hammer and get everyone woken, waking up and saying, look, it's going to be the red wedding. There's going to be a bloodbath unless you play ball. And then, you know, he's set the bar here. And so when he backs down, he gets exactly what he wants.

• 1:21:09John Coogan?

  And so I could see that happening and maybe that, maybe that would be good for America. It's possible.

• 1:21:14Jordi Hays?

  Let art of the deal.

• 1:21:16John Coogan?

  Let art of the deal. Okay, let's go through some timeline. And Ben, if there's any questions or reviews you want us to read, send those to the chat and I'll cut over to Jordy as we go through. But first, we got a promoted post from one of the favorite companies on the channel. I'll let you take this, Jordy.

• 1:21:35Jordi Hays?

  Those I don't know, I'm a co-founder of Aurora. Aurora makes beautiful, easy to use, highly effective water filters. I just thought this was a cool shot. Brian, CEO, posted this yesterday. It's just showing the same exact tap water coming out of NYC pipes. One on the left going through Aurora, one on the right, just sitting there. And you can just see the difference. You can see the contamination of the water. So if you're drinking tap water, you've got heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, tons of stuff in it that you just don't want to be drinking. It's absolutely insane to drink tap water. I simply, I haven't, I drank tap water once in literally the last like five years.

• 1:22:20Jordi Hays?

  And it was actually at David Senra's event. Not to throw David under the bus or anything, but I got back to my room and it was at a, you know, it was at this really cool retreat center. And I was like, probably like a 20 minute walk from where I could get water. And I didn't even know if those open. So I drank tap water and I was like, it was, it was in Austin, which has notoriously bad tap water. And I was like, this is. egregiously bad spit it out and just ended up, you know, it's going to bed thirsty. But, but anyways, filter your water. Aurora makes good filters. Highly recommend you check them out and feel free to DM me if you have any questions on it.

• 1:23:01John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:23:02Jordi Hays?

  And one, I've had multiple calls now with Technology Brothers listeners where I popped into the call and they already had their Aurora in the background. Very, very awesome moment. Thank you for the support.

• 1:23:15John Coogan?

  You love to see it. Well, we got some major personnel news in the world of AI. OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is joining Miramarati's startup after a brief stint at Anthropic. The trade deals.

• 1:23:29Jordi Hays?

  The holy trinity, the holy trinity right here.

• 1:23:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, the holy trinity. It really is like the NFL. I mean, these, these guys are bouncing around like crazy and you never know if it's like, oh, it's AI safety. It was too dangerous. They were just too reckless or it was just like, I just didn't like working with those people or I wasn't getting comped right. Or, you know, some deal fell through. I wanted a different thing or I wanted to be more product focused or more research focused. But everyone's excited about Mira.

• 1:23:59Jordi Hays?

  I mean, look at the, look at the pressure that Sam is under. Elon's attacking him to, two of his former co-founders, Ilya and Mira, both have competing startups. He's competing with Anthropic, DeepSeek. Yeah. It's, it's not so often that, I mean, it happens, right? Where you have a group of co-founders that build a big company and then one leaves and starts a competitor. But not in a while, and I certainly not in my memory, can I think of a time when a relatively new company, that was already a multi-billion dollar company, had two co-founders leave that each now have their own billion dollar companies that are generally competing for the same opportunities. I think Ilya was in the news today,

• 1:24:42Jordi Hays?

  this morning that he's raised, potentially raising new money at a $20 billion valuation. And so, people are clearly bullish on the OpenAI founding team. And this is a big win for Mira because you could imagine that John could have gone to, to Ilya. Um, to Ilya's company as well. And so anyways, it's, this is just a great time to be in the technology temple that is our studio and my remote studio. I love.

• 1:25:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's fantastically dramatic. The, the, the weird thing that I never understood was like th- these departures are always framed as like indictments of OpenAI. And yet it's like, okay, so you guys all don't like OpenAI, but you also don't like each other because otherwise you'd all just start a company together and you all started separate companies. And so clearly, like the infighting at these companies is just crazy. And in many ways that we, like the internal politics are much more complex than just like, oh, there's two sides to this issue. Because like, why, why aren't Mira and Ilya working together? Why did John Schulman leave Anthropic? Like, like, you would think that there would just be like, the, the OpenAI and the anti-OpenAI. But instead, it's like, there's the anti-OpenAI, and then there's a different one. And then this

• 1:25:54John Coogan?

  one's more about safety, and this one's more about this and product and stuff. But either way, it's going to mean a lot of great AI products. And I'm excited to try them all. And let's see what happens.

• 1:26:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's really a crazy time. I mean, when the pitch with AI right now, the reason to invest in a pre-revenue company at a $20 billion valuation is presumably because there's trillions of dollars on the line. And so that's causing, you know, individuals to say, hey, I could go join this company. I could go on a vacation, or I could raise a one-on-five billion dollar pre-seed round. And that's, that's pretty sweet.

• 1:26:30John Coogan?

  Let's go. And so I think there's actually somebody else that's joining Mira's company. I know Dylan Patel was tweeting about this, saying that he was very excited about the startup and, and, and thought that the talent aggregation was very impressive. Still, I'm, I'm just mostly excited to see like, how is the product going to take shape or be different? Obviously, there's a lot of difference. There's already fragmentation at the model layer. Obviously, we see that within OpenAI's model dropdowns. There's reasoning models. There's web searching models. There's AI models, code models. And so.

• 1:27:03Jordi Hays?

  Using OpenAI right now is, is like opening up, you know, a drawer in your desk that you just use to just jam, you know, jam a bunch of old papers in, and you're trying to look for one. And you're like, just, sometimes you want to just give up and, you know, slam the door back shut. But that's easier to figure out how to name your products than.

• 1:27:24John Coogan?

  I was thinking about how messy the naming scheme is and I was like, this is bad. But at the same time, I think it could be worse, honestly, if they tried to give them all like cutesy branded names. Like imagine if it was just like apple, pear, banana, like, like sprinkles, like ice cream. And you'd be like, which ones, which? At least I know like 01, 03, like 03 is a bigger number, therefore it's better. And I can at least like click on that one.

• 1:27:49Jordi Hays?

  And I'm sure OpenAI's plan internally is you won't pick the model yourself. You'll ask what you'll tell it to help you with something and it will just route it to the best model.

• 1:27:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:28:00Jordi Hays?

  Based on the ask. And so, yeah, maybe it's like, you know, very temporary.

• 1:28:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, it seems very solvable. That doesn't seem like an intractable problem whatsoever. Anyway.

• 1:28:09Jordi Hays?

  All right, we got some questions in the chat. I just want to go.

• 1:28:12John Coogan?

  Let's go through them. What you got for me?

• 1:28:13Jordi Hays?

  Elliot asks, can you guys go over Caterpillar earnings? That's a good question. I know nothing about Caterpillar's business, but I love, I love, I love the products that they make. Every time I drive by one with my son, he calls it out. So maybe we should do Caterpillar earnings.

• 1:28:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I love that idea. Ben, can you drop that in the group chat for, for deep dives?

• 1:28:36Jordi Hays?

  It'd be actually, I would love to figure out how Caterpillar is benefiting from all the AI capex, because you could imagine if you have, you know, hundreds of billions of new data centers that need to get built, like that's potentially, you know, a big growth channel. So great call out, Elliot. We'll look and do it. And if it's relevant, we'll definitely cover it. Amit says, when's the Anduril IPO? I don't think we can.

• 1:29:01John Coogan?

  They said not this year publicly. I think they said not 2025. But I'm sure there'll be plenty of exciting news between now and then. Stay tuned. And we promoted an Anduril job posting yesterday. So, you know, if you want exposure, pre-IPO, you gotta put in the work. You gotta just go to work there. The underrated way to get allocation into these companies is just go in and exercise your options immediately.

• 1:29:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, no, it is probably easier right now to get a job at Andorl than buy Andorl Secondary.

• 1:29:34John Coogan?

  I was scrolling their jobs page. They have like a thousand jobs up. It's crazy how many jobs they had. I thought it would be like, oh, like a quick scroll. It was like pages and pages and pages of jobs. So get on your grind, polish up that LinkedIn, polish up that resume, start, you know, being a reply guy to every Andorl employee.

• 1:29:50Jordi Hays?

  And in your, in your cover letter, tell them the technology brother sent you.

• 1:29:54John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:29:56Jordi Hays?

  Another question from F S F S F F R F, which I presumably was, he just slammed it in there to try to get a username going. He says, is this live? And the answer is yes, we're speaking to you live now. There's maybe a five second delay, but very live. We got another question from five, five, two, three. What are your thoughts on the UK's prospects for the future tech wise?

• 1:30:21Jordi Hays?

  That's a better question for Harry Stebbings. He's on a mission to, to make, to make Europe great again. So I'm wearing a shirt that, that looked, that had that on it. And yeah, I, I can't really like speak too clearly. I mean, I think that Europe has a lot of issues around tech regulation right now. I think part of the reason that the Figma deal didn't go through was they were facing pressure from European regulators, even though Adobe and Figma are both US companies. They seem to have a number of issues, you know, looking at the data, there's maybe only a small handful of companies that have been started in Europe in the last like 50 years that are in the top hundred biggest companies in Europe.

• 1:31:06Jordi Hays?

  And so that just tells you that it's a tough environment to innovate in and create companies from zero to one. And so there's been some successes. The standout successes are, are the neo banks. I forget the name of the one that, that has done well over there. But overall, you know, and the other thing is Andreessen actually had made a big push into London around crypto because London was historically a finance, a global sort of financial center still is. And they, the, the UK government was making a push to create more friendly regulations around crypto. And Andreessen opened an office over there for that. But overall, I would say that if you want to build a high growth tech company and have the best chances of success,

• 1:31:48Jordi Hays?

  you're still better off, you know, moving to America or the Bay.

• 1:31:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. If you look at the, if you look at some historical data, I think from the top 20 largest companies by market cap, 100% of them have been created in US and China.

• 1:32:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:04John Coogan?

  And I think it's like, I think it's like 80, 20 US. And so unfortunately, Europe's just, it's just not in the conversation. You can certainly do entrepreneurship there and start companies. But in terms of these generational world changing power law companies, they just aren't coming from anywhere but the US and China.

• 1:32:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Even China is making it difficult by, in, in many investment structures, the founders have to like basically put their house on the line where if the company doesn't work out, you know, the, the investors can, can claw back their.

• 1:32:38John Coogan?

  And I mean, you can actually just go to Silicon Valley and start a company, raise money and grow and, and become an American citizen. This is a thing you can do. You just can't do that in China. Like there's never been a Chinese company that was not founded by a Chinese national.

• 1:32:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Last question for now, and then I got a question for you, John, also from F S F S. Is Technology Brothers a VC firm? Great question. We are not. We are the number one daily show in tech. John and I do invest, though I've invested in 50 plus private companies. They're, they're on my website, plus a number that, that haven't been listed yet. And, and John's done a lot. And John also is an employee of Founders Fund, which is a small boutique venture capital firm based in here in the United States. So.

• 1:33:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, last question. This is for you, John. What's your sleep score?

• 1:33:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:33:32Jordi Hays?

  Heard you had a rough night, but I gotta put you, I gotta put you in the spotlight. I don't have my eight sleep right now. And, uh, and it's a, it's a real tragedy. Gotta start traveling with it. Just take it on the road. But what do you got?

• 1:33:44John Coogan?

  So Thursday was fantastic. I was at 96, 100% quality, little low on the, on the routine, but last night was rough. Uh, 90% quality for a final sleep score of 84. It's good, but it could be better. I'm trying to get to 100% every single day.

• 1:34:03Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's good. It's probably, uh, probably better than the Doge team, which probably put up like three hours last night and, uh, you know, the on the pods, but, but probably still not putting up big numbers on the sleep score side.

• 1:34:15John Coogan?

  But the experience has been fantastic. I've been super enjoying. My wife's been loving it. It's just been amazing overall, and I can't say enough good things about it. I've really been loving it.

• 1:34:27Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. All right. Well, let's

• 1:34:28John Coogan?

  Back to the timeline?

• 1:34:30Jordi Hays?

  Get back into the timeline. We had a post from Will Manitis, friend of the show. Underrated, how much of the success of early stage companies are determined by vibes and not fundamentals? Better vibes mean people will give you cheaper capital, work harder for less money, give your product the benefit of the doubt. Once the vibes go negative, I'm not sure we actually have the full quote. Uh, I'm assuming it says, um,

• 1:34:53John Coogan?

  You are done. And then Lulu quotes it.

• 1:34:56Jordi Hays?

  This, um, this is timely because, uh, uh, so yesterday, uh, Avi, uh, from friend hosted a space because one of his competitors had a co-founder leave. And usually when a co-founder leaves early, uh, people don't tend to jump off rocket ships. And so, uh, a lot of people were looking at it, at that overall and saying, you know, hey, there's probably problems internally, or maybe the product's not doing as well as they hoped. And so Avi, uh, and knows how to get attention. He immediately jumped on and hosted, uh, basically a space to kind of.

• 1:35:35Jordi Hays?

  I didn't, I listened for like two seconds, but imagine it was a little bit of dancing on, on, on their grave. But um, but yeah, I think Lulu's been like, this is a part of her whole strategy with her firm is. And so she's adding to this, she said, people think the purpose of comms is to release news and it is. But primarily it's for setting the vibes. And so I think that's very well said. It's really difficult to do. A lot of people associate vibes with taste. Because you have to have good taste to be able to consistently put out ideas and visuals and product releases. And know how to leverage news and, and sort of make the story about yourself in some way.

• 1:36:18Jordi Hays?

  And so it's very difficult to do, but it does give you a massive advantage. You know, I experienced this with my last company. I would have people DM me that were incredibly talented. And like Dylan is a good example, who, who led our, our marketing and partnerships effort. Uh, he was at a bunch of great companies. He was very early at HQ Trivia, helped blow them up. Then was at Postmates and he reached out to me and said, hey, I want to talk. I haven't seen vibes like this since early HQ trivia days. And then I immediately, pretty much immediately, you know, gave him an offer to join. And, and he's still like a super close friend and went on to build a crypto company called Crypto The Game and, and sold it.

• 1:37:02Jordi Hays?

  And so somebody like that, it's, he explicitly came because he was just like, the vibes are good. I want to be a part of this. And so uh, it's both Lulu and Will are very correct here.

• 1:37:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. And also, I mean, the important thing here is the early stage companies. In the late stage companies, once you've established the monopoly in the business and you're kind of Lindy. The vibes can go out the window and the profits can still print.

• 1:37:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. But, but you know, we just talked about Amazon earnings. I would argue that Amazon doesn't have great vibes right now. The sellers hate Amazon. Uh, users aren't excited about it, you know, like consumers aren't.

• 1:37:38John Coogan?

  Forty percent is what I'm saying, like.

• 1:37:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I'm saying.

• 1:37:40John Coogan?

  I, I agree with you, but it just, it just matters a lot less, like.

• 1:37:43Jordi Hays?

  Matters less.

• 1:37:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, it matters less. It matters, it matters so much in the early stage. That's.

• 1:37:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like Salesforce, Salesforce has terrible vibes for our corner of X. But people like to go to their conferences and like, listen to pop music, you know?

• 1:38:02John Coogan?

  Let's go to Grant. He says, as a rule of thumb, you should spend more time writing the prompt than it takes the LLM slash agent to do it. I think that's a really good tip. And I think I got so burnt out on the here are 10 sick hack and amazing prompts and amazing tricks to get something out of mid journey or open AI or GPT three that I kind of got bored of all that and stopped paying attention. But with deep research, I've noticed that getting the prompt right really, really matters. But it's not just the actual instantiation of the words, the idea, like what thesis are you bringing? What question are you trying to answer? What would require the agent actually

• 1:38:45John Coogan?

  to go and do a bunch of work and pull a bunch of data and then setting it up for success there? As opposed to just, oh, if you use this word, you'll get a better result. Like, for a long time, the prompting was like, think step by step, or ignore previous instructions. And they were like these hacks. And I think we're kind of, we're kind of post that era and now into an era of, okay, you actually need to think critically, bring an interesting thesis and the AI agent, deep research, or the reasoning model will help you substantiate that and support that with data.

• 1:39:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think I look at this and I draw a connection to when you're working with with junior, junior level employees, it's ends up paying dividends if you spend 10 minutes or a thoughtfully crafted email explaining exactly what you want, how you want it done, what success looks like and things like that. And so you're just going to get a lot of better results out of that. And so I think what Grant is saying here is it is a good rule of thumb. I also think that this will continue to change as the models understand you better and they just get faster, right? Yeah, totally. Because eventually it'll be like nearly instant where, you know, yeah, you're going to want to spend.

• 1:40:00Jordi Hays?

  A minute, you know, writing the proper prompt and then it'll do something that's like, you know, completely instant. So.

• 1:40:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, Dwar Kesh Patel was talking about this too. He was, he was saying that, you know, we don't spend, we will spend hours training a junior employee, but we refuse to spend 15 minutes really working on a fantastic LLM prompt. And then he shared a prompt that was really robust, all for Gemini to help revise his show transcripts. And it gives bulleted lists of what he wants, what he doesn't want. It even includes an example of before and after exactly how to transform the data. And he really set the LLM up for success. And now he has a template that he can use for every single show, drop it in there and get a perfect transcript every single time. And that's just not going to happen if you just go in there and say, hey, clean this up because

• 1:40:47John Coogan?

  it doesn't really know what you want. And so, yeah, spend the time to, to write a great prompt and you'll get great results. Uh, let's move on. This is some drama in the hard tech world. Haas, the world, the West's largest CNC machine tool provider was found and charged for using shell companies to sell machines, parts and services to China and Russia. And Cody James says surprised not to, to not see much news covering this. And Chris Power over at Hadrian gives it the throw up emoji.

• 1:41:21Jordi Hays?

  Hit them with a throw up emoji. I mean, so one, I saw this news and my first thought was, so this is why the Haas F1 team is absolute trash. It all comes back to karma, right? You know, they, they were trying to be worthy American team, you know, cheer, cheer for us, you know, support, you know, support American F1. And meanwhile, you're selling CNC machines out the back door to our enemies. And I don't appreciate that. And so I will, um, you know, the next time I'm, I'm watching a race when they're getting, you know, uh, 19th and 20th place and maybe not even finishing at a DNF, I won't feel so bad. Maybe it's, maybe it's a,

• 1:42:06Jordi Hays?

  but hey.

• 1:42:07John Coogan?

  Going Cadillac, Cadillac F1 team. It's, it's happening.

• 1:42:11Jordi Hays?

  I'd like to see, I'd like to see Chris Power come in and, um, you know, LBO pass and, and, you know, make, make Haas great again.

• 1:42:23John Coogan?

  Yep, it'd be great to see. Yeah, we got to dig into this. I mean, it's pretty, pretty crazy to actually go and set up all these shell companies. Usually when this happened, it's kind of like, we were more or less bamboozled by a shell company that was set up by a foreign adversary. We didn't do our homework. This is them proactively trying to sneak stuff out the back door.

• 1:42:47Jordi Hays?

  So bad, so bad.

• 1:42:49John Coogan?

  So bad.

• 1:42:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and you know, if they keep doing stuff like this, I wouldn't be surprised if 10 years from now, somebody makes a Haas cryptocurrency.

• 1:43:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, rough. Who knows? I wonder how big the fine was. I wonder what the punishment will be. We'll have to dig into this more, maybe do a full history of Haas. That would be a very interesting deep dive. I mean, at one point, certainly a fantastic hard tech company, probably lots of lessons to learn. Just got to keep the moral compass, that true north. Let's move on. We have a promoted post from Jeff Huber over at Chroma. He's hiring a chief of staff to work directly with him. Highly recommend working with Jeff, great guy. They make a, they're launching Chroma Cloud, and they're looking for a chief of staff to help them build and scale the business. You'll work directly with Jeff, the CEO. This

• 1:43:43John Coogan?

  is Chroma's first dedicated go-to-market hire. Your scope and responsibilities will reflect this. This is an exceptionally demanding, high-velocity role. He's looking for five years of experience in technical product, business operations, or strategy roles, strong understanding of product-led growth principles, data-driven mindset, technical aptitude, excellent verbal and written communication, and a great taste for design. Bit of a corporate athlete role, really.

• 1:44:11Jordi Hays?

  Love to see it. Jeff's also a smart guy. Look at him, linking his, putting his link in the second post. Numbers, that's the kind of guy you want to work for. You don't want to be working for somebody that's putting hashtags and links in their, in their primary posts. Bad news. Not a lot of alpha there. But anyways, great opportunity and a great company.

• 1:44:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. So Chroma is a vector database, a very useful tool in terms of AI and AI applications that maybe people don't often think of. The really cool application that I was hearing about was the ability to just stuff a huge transcript or huge document into Chroma and then run vector similarity with other documents. So you can imagine like, there was a founder that was using this in a dating app. They have a huge intake form where they ask you all sorts of questions about what you're looking for. And then they can actually search over all that text for someone across the network who might be a good match. Instead of just trying to match you based on height and, you know, whatever other, you know,

• 1:45:16John Coogan?

  hardcoded metrics you, you code in. They can actually look, really understand the responses, who you are as a person, what you're interested in, your writing style, and then match you across that. And that's something that can, that can happen in a, in a rag, retrieval, augmented generation context very easily. And so Chroma has been on a tear. They raised a bunch of money and Jeff's an absolute dog. So I recommend hitting him up if you're interested. Let's go into some debate about DeepSeek. I love this post. Bojan asks, do people still

• 1:45:54John Coogan?

  use DeepSeek? And Nikita Beer trimes in with some evidence. He says, yeah, my cousin Jimbo Beer in West Virginia can really see the quality improvement over GPT. He heard about DeepSeek's performance from the town sheriff during Appalachia AI Happy Hour.

• 1:46:15John Coogan?

  And I love it. And Prashant there says, can confirm, I host the Appalachian AI Happy Hour.

• 1:46:22Jordi Hays?

  Appalachian.

• 1:46:23John Coogan?

  And of course Nikita is trolling.

• 1:46:25Jordi Hays?

  John, you normally leave me to to botch words. Appalachia.

• 1:46:29John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, Appalachia.

• 1:46:33Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but yeah, this is what we were saying the whole time. The chart was clearly not, not fully real. You know, I'm sure there was real. I'm sure there was people coming from TikTok, but I don't, I haven't heard anybody outside of of Teapot using DeepSeek, excited about it. I haven't seen on Instagram, haven't seen a single post about it or any, any type of content at all, really.

• 1:47:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. And Nikita broke it down really well. TikTok's been warming the trend. They're doing a ton of promotion for this. They're trying to get more people to install the app, but they don't really have any viral loops yet. And it doesn't make sense that there would be a massive uptake that would be durable or sustainable. When you're going to be able to get similar results in WhatsApp and Instagram, like you go to the Instagram search bar and you're talking to, to a pretty solid LLM in the form of Llama.

• 1:47:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other.

• 1:47:31John Coogan?

  And it's going to get better.

• 1:47:32Jordi Hays?

  The other thing that's interesting is I don't think the average ChatGPT user cares about reasoning or would even really know how to really put it to use.

• 1:47:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:42Jordi Hays?

  And so for them, if you say, well, I have ChatGPT on my phone, I'm on the free plan. I get some value out of it. Oh, there's also a Chinese app that has Chinese characters as the developer name in the App Store that I can't even read. Oh, yeah, I'll just stick with ChatGPT, please. It's, it's not a really good sell at the moment.

• 1:48:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. And as much as we make fun of the ChatGPT app as being confusing with all the models, like it is a more robust and better app than DeepSeek, just in terms of functionality, sort of image generation baked in and charts and all these different PDF uploads we, we, we joke about, but it really is a more full-featured app just because they've been developing it for several more years. And so. The DeepSeek is kind of like a rough clone and there's a free version of the ChatGPT app that it's going to be hard to get people to uninstall that. And then there's also Google AI summaries and AI is popping up in all these different places where there's already distribution. So not super bullish on DeepSeek sticking around and breaking through in the way TikTok did.

• 1:48:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:48John Coogan?

  Especially with all the pressure. Here's an interesting post from Cody James. He says, we should bring back How It's Made. This show did more for America's skilled workforce than anything else. Post clearly resonated, 1.5K likes. And did you watch How It's Made ever?

• 1:49:07Jordi Hays?

  Trying to remember. It sounds really familiar, but it might be slightly before my time as as an almost Gen Z-er.

• 1:49:14John Coogan?

  It was on, I think, Discovery or one of those, kind of the Mythbusters Network. And they would just show you, okay, we went to a factory that makes bubble gum. And we're going to show you the ingredients going in, goes into this machine, gets extruded. Really nice cameras, really like lots of slow motion, just really nice voiceover and some really cool music. And it was just really relaxing, really fun to watch. I loved watching this and it actually came in in in super handy. When we were building the first, we were planning to build the first manufacturing line for Lucy gum, nicotine gum. I literally watched How It's Made on how to make gum.

• 1:49:59John Coogan?

  And and I was like, okay, taking notes like, okay, it goes in this machine, goes in this machine. And it's remarkably like making pasta. You like you, you have a bunch of ingredients, you knead it into a dough, then you extrude it. Then you need to cool it and kind of bake it down and then you coat it. And so and and it's just like, it's really just like four or five machines. Each machine has a couple of buttons and yeah, you can hook it up to a computer. But really, it's just like, if you know how to turn it on, you know, the right settings, you know that, oh, if you put this, you know, this flavoring in, you're going to run it for a little bit longer or you're going to need something else in there. And and this is how like pretty much every product in the world is made and.

• 1:50:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:38John Coogan?

  And I completely agree. We're getting a light version of this with the Jason Carmen documentaries. I I got a chance to do a version of how it's made with George Hots because he has brought his entire manufacturing workflow in-house for Kama AI, the aftermarket

• 1:50:53Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy.

• 1:50:54John Coogan?

  self-driving kit. And so he has a a machine that prints circuit boards and then a machine that puts transistors on the boards and assembles them. And then he takes it over to another place.

• 1:51:04Jordi Hays?

  We need George to get into the drone market.

• 1:51:06John Coogan?

  For sure. That would be amazing. I, yeah, I mean, these, there's so many companies that need to be built and unfortunately, it feels like far too few entrepreneurs that have the will and the ability to actually go and execute at scale and and really get addicted to the grind of, okay, we're going to sell more and more and more and grow, grow, grow. We keep coming back to like, oh, there's a problem. Like, can Elon build a company around this? If not, we're screwed. Like Intel, oh, it's got to be an Elon project or no one. And as much as I love Elon, it's like, it's kind of sad that we don't have like a deep roster of Elons that can go and transform companies. But hopefully, the next generation is it. Hopefully, they get inspired by how it's maybe to.

• 1:51:51Jordi Hays?

  Our listeners

• 1:51:54John Coogan?

  Build different.

• 1:51:54Jordi Hays?

  Ironically, are.

• 1:51:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:51:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:00Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 1:52:00John Coogan?

  Let's move on. This is fantastic news. Palantir has officially reached mega mega cap status today, surpassing a $250 billion market cap. The stock is absolutely ripping. It's massive. And Gary Tan quote tweets it and says, "I designed the logo for a mega cap 19 years ago. Overnight success sometimes takes two decades." That is so crazy, insane.

• 1:52:28Jordi Hays?

  GT, GT.

• 1:52:30John Coogan?

  GT, the absolute, absolute dog. And Ty Morse down there says, "Time to update this thumbnail." It's a, it's a vlog of Gary saying that he, I believe he didn't stay at Palantir long enough to get all of his shares. And he says, "It's the decision that cost him 200 million." Pretty sure Palantir was worth like 10 billion back then. And so you might need to add another zero to that. But you know, Gary has obviously gone on to do incredible things and

• 1:52:59Jordi Hays?

  You make it all back.

• 1:53:01John Coogan?

  Make it all back, make it all back in the in the capital markets game. And it's and it's still just like a fantastic story and a really inspiring story for early employees. And a tale about joining a rocket ship, identifying the right company, getting in and and just riding it all the way to the top. And so Gary's been super, super generous, sharing his insights on his YouTube channel. Now he's over at Y C sharing more of those. I'm sure he feels like he hasn't told these stories enough, but I'm glad that he's

• 1:53:33John Coogan?

  resurfacing some of these stories because they are fantastic.

• 1:53:36Jordi Hays?

  Insane.

• 1:53:38John Coogan?

  Oh, this is some amazing breaking news. Saudi Arabia has asked the Oscar winning composer Hans Zimmer to work on a new version of its national anthem. I am so excited about this. This is, this is just incredible. It only happens Saudi Arabia. And I love that they're just like, yeah, we need a V two, like no one.

• 1:53:57Jordi Hays?

  We should be, so this, this, we should all, we should commission new versions of the national anthem. You don't actually have to be the actual country to commission a new version of your national anthem. We could do, we could do a, you know, we could create a Dow to make a new, you know, national anthem, right? Let's get those crypto guys to, to put their, you know, dollars to work and create, you know, a hard asset like a, like a banger version of the national anthem. But I love that Hans is, is partnering up with the kingdom. It's gonna, I cannot wait to hear this track. We'll do a live, well, we'll play it live on the show, react to it. Maybe, you know, we're going to be in the Middle East later this month.

• 1:54:42Jordi Hays?

  Maybe we could pop over and do a little listening party.

• 1:54:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:47Jordi Hays?

  But it's great to see.

• 1:54:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it makes sense like like there are plenty of national anthems that are iconic. You know, people obviously know the American National Anthem, but most people also know Oh, Canada. And and there's a few others that stick out in people's mind. Saudi Arabia hasn't charted hasn't topped charts in a while. Most people can't sing it from heart. And so get Hans Zimmer in there. He did Inception. He did The Dark Knight. He did Oppenheimer, I think, maybe. That was somebody else.

• 1:55:18Jordi Hays?

  Black Hawk Down, too.

• 1:55:20John Coogan?

  Oh, he did.

• 1:55:21Jordi Hays?

  There's some crazy tracks on that.

• 1:55:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wanted to sound like Inception.

• 1:55:28John Coogan?

  Really dramatic Saudi Arabia. Welcome to Saudi Arabia, Hans Zimmer. I hope they play this at the airport just on repeat.

• 1:55:36Jordi Hays?

  What do you think the actual cost to get an OK track from Hans, where he kind of looks in the back catalog? He takes out some stuff that never quite got published. Yep. Because it'd be kind of cool to get the Technology Temple anthem, you know, a track that we could play while we're prepping the show in the studio.

• 1:55:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think it's probably seven figs. It's probably up there, but it's doable for the right price. Hans Zimmer also, I mean, people or John Williams has gotten a lot of criticism for kind of like remixing Gustav Holtz into Star Wars. And so, you know, a lot of it's just what, what, you know, you're standing on the shoulder of giants. What what building blocks are you using to create the next classical banger?

• 1:56:20John Coogan?

  But Hans Zimmer is great. He, I think he did Dunkirk and he's done a lot of interesting stuff with like burying the theme of the movie within the song. And so I'm genuinely very interested to see how he brings out the

• 1:56:33Jordi Hays?

  You want to.

• 1:56:34John Coogan?

  The spirit of Saudi Arabia through.

• 1:56:37Jordi Hays?

  In the track.

• 1:56:38John Coogan?

  I'm excited.

• 1:56:38Jordi Hays?

  One, one thing that's interesting is on UFC. When the, the, when the UFC goes to the UK.

• 1:56:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:56:46Jordi Hays?

  Fight on, uh, like basically like E- Eastern Standard Time.

• 1:56:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:56:51Jordi Hays?

  And so the fighters have to fight at like five, six AM. So they have to stay up the entire, imagine pulling an all nighter and then having to fight a title fight. It's the most brutal thing ever when they go to, uh, and there's a lot of English fans. And so people have complained about that and said, Hey, we have a lot of fans here. You're making the fans and the fighters stay up the entire night to watch these fights. And, um, when they fight in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, they fight perfectly at prime time and, uh, uh, locally.

• 1:57:19John Coogan?

  Saudi time. Wow.

• 1:57:20Jordi Hays?

  Saudi time. So, so there was a UFC card, I think it was last Saturday. Yeah, it was Saturday. And, uh, started at nine AM Pacific. It was actually kind of nice for me.

• 1:57:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's great. It's like F1. F1, you're always up early and i- if you're in California.

• 1:57:36Jordi Hays?

  But the Saudis absolutely mog the, the, the British fans by being like, no, when you have enough leverage, they'll do it at whatever time you want.

• 1:57:43John Coogan?

  I- i- it's a bad day to be a, uh, to be a sports fan if you're not Saudi aligned. Like, didn't they take all the golfers to the, to the Saudi tournament?

• 1:57:51Jordi Hays?

  I guess, I guess the PGA and, and Trump are, are in conversations now.

• 1:57:56John Coogan?

  Bring you back. We'll see.

• 1:57:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:00John Coogan?

  Uh, well, let's move on to a promoted post from Christie's Real Estate. Uh, there's a breathtaking country chateau near Brantome on, set on 134 acres of tranquil parkland and forest. This would be a great pickup for anyone in the audience who's looking for a chateau. I, I really liked it because it has a lot of versatility. Uh, you can see, uh, massive turrets, multiple stories, looks like a castle and it has a pool.

• 1:58:27Jordi Hays?

  Great turrets on this one. I mean, not enough people take into account how many turrets they have when they're shopping for a home and it's just such a. Amazing feature. One concern I have now even talking about this is that our friends over at Wander, Kyle and John, they listen to the show and I'm guessing that that they're listening live and I'm guessing that they're bidding on this already. And so if you're not listening to the show live, good luck picking this thing up because the Wander guys are on a mission to get the the best vacation rentals across the entire world in every single market. So.

• 1:59:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. So let's move through to the next slide. We got some closeups of the turrets. We got the pool and you go inside and it's just loud opulence everywhere you look.

• 1:59:13Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. It looks like it could use a little bit of a.

• 1:59:15John Coogan?

  Look at this fireplace.

• 1:59:17Jordi Hays?

  Little bit of a, maybe not a remodel, but a sort of refurbishment.

• 1:59:21John Coogan?

  I think you throw an eight sleep on the floor and you're good. What else do you need?

• 1:59:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:26John Coogan?

  In your, in your.

• 1:59:27Jordi Hays?

  There you go. All you need is an eight sleep and a dream.

• 1:59:29John Coogan?

  In your Renaissance castle. A great place for offsites, great place to have the whole crew while you're building the startup. Get a chateau, the country chateau. So yeah. If you're looking for a chateau, go to Christie's Real Estate, tell them the technology brothers sent you. And then, you know, while you're not there, throw it on Wander, make it a little couple extra bucks.

• 1:59:51Jordi Hays?

  There you go. That's, that's the real play.

• 1:59:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:54Jordi Hays?

  All right. I threw this in.

• 1:59:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:59:57Jordi Hays?

  I'm tearing up right now.

• 1:59:59John Coogan?

  Okay, break it. Oh yeah, this is rough.

• 2:00:01Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, so the news is that every Quicksilver, Billabong and Vulcan store in the United States will close. And it's very sad. We had a, we had Quicksilver in Malibu that shut down. And if you're a surf apparel store and you can't stay in business on PCH in Malibu, that just says that there is so little demand for surf apparel now. And so to give some backstory, because I don't think I've talked about it on the show. I like grew up an avid surfer in California, went to UCSB because the surf was good to be on the surf team. And so I competed on the team.

• 2:00:43Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, and I actually worked at a surf store in high school and even then I could tell that surf culture was fading, uh, quickly from relevancy. It used to be that, you know, young kids in Ohio wanted to wear surf apparel because like surfing was cool. And then skateboarding really, uh, rug pulled surfing. That became more of the sort of dominant, uh, culture, at least in apparel. And then streetwear was really the death knell for, uh, surf, the surf apparel industry because kids now want to wear Bape and, uh, you know, Supreme and, you know, Nike and things like that. And so anyways, the surf, the surf apparel industry

• 2:01:23Jordi Hays?

  is in a rough spot. I mean, I'm sure the brands will, will survive. It's just more so, uh, athleisure is the other big trend, right? So dads, dads might've been, you know, wearing quicksilver shorts and shirts and now they're wearing Blue Lemon or, um, what's the other one that, um, I don't wear athleisure. So I can't even think of it, but, um,

• 2:01:46John Coogan?

  Vori.

• 2:01:47Jordi Hays?

  Vori, Vori, um, Vori is the other one. Yeah, those, those, those brands like just really dominate that, that's

• 2:01:54John Coogan?

  I mean, there's a beautiful Hawaiian shirt right there in that image. Palmer Lucky should pick this up. It can be his next mod retro.

• 2:02:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:02John Coogan?

  He should pick up quicksilver Billabong and Volcom, turn them around. Just, you know, start printing. Make it great.

• 2:02:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:10John Coogan?

  I'd love to see it.

• 2:02:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And it's this, I've talked about this on the show before. My, my, um, roommate in, uh, in, in college, Pierce, incredible surfer, easily could have gone pro, but his parents forced him to get an education and go to, go to high school and college. Um, but I, I swear he, he has, he now, uh, is able, he's in real estate. He's able to work all over the world. So he's like constantly surfing in different places while having a real career. And so he's getting the last laugh as the sort of surf industry collapses and a lot of the, you know, salaries that were paid to surfers historically for endorsement deals have dried up. And, um, so anyways, sad, sad moment, but I think a lot of people saw it coming.

• 2:02:54John Coogan?

  Pour one out. Uh, Art Club says pouring one out for my seventh grade wardrobe and Josh Steinman says Jinko?

• 2:03:03John Coogan?

  Uh, let's go to Catherine Boyle. She says, it's crazy how good the internet is right now. Best season ever. And Carter says, X is the movie theater. Couldn't agree more. Having tons of fun on the timeline. Uh, never a dull moment and never a lack of content for our show.

• 2:03:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I swear we've had consistently a new current thing every 48 hours this year and it's fantastic. I mean, part of that is the Trump effect.

• 2:03:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:03:31Jordi Hays?

  In 2016, I kind of, I was in college. I had like work in my business. I just kind of like tuned out a lot of that stuff. But this is exactly what happened back then where every single day he just sort of dominates mindshare in the news cycle. And it's been interesting now having JD there and Doge and some of these like bigger initiatives that, and having that you have the AI activity as well. It's just kind of creating this sort of vortex, this attention vortex. And, uh, yeah, I think, I think many people are saying it's just gonna keep accelerating.

• 2:04:08John Coogan?

  I completely agree. I completely agree. Let's go to Brandon Jacoby over at X. Jacoby, he's on the timeline. He says, I can't say why exactly, but I need you to like this post. And it's a banger. He got almost 5,000 likes.

• 2:04:23Jordi Hays?

  Jacoby.

• 2:04:25John Coogan?

  You know, the steel man here is that, oh, he's a designer at X. He's testing the algorithm. He's testing some feature in prod. No, I think he's just farming. He's just farming likes, trying to grow his account. Trying to, you know, get that, uh, greater monetization check going, print some Elon bucks.

• 2:04:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is, this is, uh, this looks like insider trading on the, on the creator payouts.

• 2:04:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:50Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna use my, I'm totally joking. It's funny. I asked, I asked Tyler and Jacoby, if, if I could record live from the X studios or the X office in New York on a. On Tuesday, they've yet to get back to me. They said they, they said that it's pretty tight security wise over there. So can't have, can't have newscasters just stroll in the halls recording, you know, live shows, but we'll see, maybe we make it happen.

• 2:05:18John Coogan?

  Yep. Well, whatever he did, it worked. And if you're ever in need of a pickup and a banger, just, just copy paste this, throw it in the queue, your notifications will be popping off. And, uh, you know, I think this is a tried and true format, almost like, uh, he was so real for this with a screenshot of a banger. Works every time. Uh, let's go to link. Link says day two of my 1K to 50K challenge and the portfolio is down 99.75% and link, which started with 1K has $55.98. And so, you know, you just need, you just need a thousand bagger

• 2:06:02John Coogan?

  now. Originally you needed a 50 bagger. Now you need a thousand bagger. Uh, you know, dust yourself off, get back on the horse. I believe in you, Link. I want to see what happens. I know whatever's going on. I don't even know this app, but I know it's degen just from looking at the UI design. I know you're trading some sort of coins.

• 2:06:19Jordi Hays?

  That's phantom.

• 2:06:20John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah, there you go. And, uh, and you know that this is not, uh, that this is not, that this happened very quickly.

• 2:06:27Jordi Hays?

  And this is his 10th account to be clear.

• 2:06:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:06:30Jordi Hays?

  You can see he's got a bunch of, bunch of wallets going. So, I mean, yeah, most people would say, oh, I'm down 99.75%. Uh, you know, it's hopeless. I should just give up now, but 99% of people actually quit right now. And so take your 55 bucks.

• 2:06:48John Coogan?

  Ride it back up.

• 2:06:49Jordi Hays?

  Hit the, hit the timeline and run it, run it back up to 50K. I posted, I hadn't actually seen this until you shared it, but, um, I posted today, uh, we need a McDonald's challenge in crypto where a bunch of contestants, they each get 25K. They've got some amount of time to turn it into a million. Uh, and if they're successful, uh, you know, great. If they, if they lose the money, they have to go get a job at McDonald's and just use those paychecks to pay back the 25K, which I imagine would, would take, unless you got a nice cushy management role, it'd probably take you a good, a year just putting the fries in the bag, bro.

• 2:07:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, I like that. It's a good one. Hopefully that pops off. Well, let's go to another promoted post from NASDAQ. Good friend of the show, good friend of Ramp. Run that wonderful billboard that partner with AdQuick. AdQuick talks to NASDAQ. They own that beautiful billboard in Times Square. They'll throw your brand up there. So call AdQuick if you're looking for some promotion out in the real world. It's the way to make an impact online. You go, you throw your brand on the big billboard. You take a selfie with it. Elon retweets it. Next thing you know, you got 10K likes. What you got, Jordy?

• 2:08:01Jordi Hays?

  I will, I'll put a little note out there. If you want to run an AdQuick billboard in Times Square at any point in the next year, DM me. I'll spend 30 minutes with you on Zoom and work on the creative. I love doing out of home ads. And so a little free marketing support for you.

• 2:08:20John Coogan?

  And it's completely power law driven. Like the difference between just a few, what a few words on a billboard say completely change it from being, oh, there's a billboard there to, I need to take a picture of that, put that on social media and it goes viral. And so you really can't under, underappreciate and undercount how important dialing in the copy and dialing in the messaging and the imagery and the design of that billboard. Because if your message is iconic and it resonates, it's going to go so far and you're going to get incredible ROI on that out of home spend. And so highly recommend it. But the reason we're talking about this is because NASDAQ, they went to the World Economic Forum in 2025 in Davos. We've said that we're going

• 2:09:04John Coogan?

  to make Davos great again, as soon as they give us a call and let us host it. Executives discussed the economic outlook and cutting through complexity with media and industry leaders across BCG, Tenio, IIF, and CNBC with special guests Simone Biles and Man United. You're only going to get that kind of lineup at Davos and NASDAQ is there to host it.

• 2:09:28Jordi Hays?

  Low tan banger, at least at the time, a screenshot, four likes, few retweets. I guess they're making it difficult to engage. Only accounts that NASDAQ follows or mentioned can reply, but.

• 2:09:40John Coogan?

  I know why that is.

• 2:09:44John Coogan?

  Coins. You know that, you know that anytime they post, someone was like, let me put a pumped out fun on here. Uh, you know, if you want exposure to NASDAQ, WEF, get this token, not financial advice, do not buy anything ever. Uh, but we love NASDAQ, we love companies on the NASDAQ, and we support the NASDAQ. So thank you to NASDAQ. Let's move on to another Ramp post. This one just from a fan. They say, I would love to see Ramp produce a Spotify-esque wrapped report. Some ideas, your top reimbursers for the year. Simon spent X dollars on his Ramp

• 2:10:27John Coogan?

  card. The engineers expensed X dollars on Postmates. I think this is a great idea, not just to go viral, but actually to understand how the money's flowing around in your business. A lot of times when you close the books, what you're doing, digging into below, like different cost line items on the P and L, it's to find weird things that are happening. And a wrapped type product would be a great user experience to make it actually fun to dig into the different parts of your business and understand, oh, like what's really driving revenue growth? Where's our marketing spend going? What, where, where are we spending too much on travel and entertainment or, you know, office supplies? Any of that stuff could be

• 2:11:08John Coogan?

  really well surfaced through AI, through even just normal algorithms, just figuring out what's going on, showing me a couple of trends, but just surface this, you know, Ramp is, you know, I like to think of it as machine god in your CFO's Chrome tab, and we need more products that make it easy to understand what's going on in your business. And that's why we love Ramp here.

• 2:11:30Jordi Hays?

  Ramp.

• 2:11:31John Coogan?

  Ramp. On to the next one. Ready to do that one? Uh, should we talk about Sahil Lavinaga? Uh, Lavinga? Lavinja?

• 2:11:41Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 2:11:42John Coogan?

  He says, no longer hiring junior or even mid-level software engineers. And he breaks down how many tokens are in each of his code bases. Gumroad is just 2 million tokens. Flexile is 800K, Helpers 500K, Ify is 200K, and Shortest is 100K. Both Claude 3.5 Sonnet and 03 Mini now have context windows of 200K tokens, meaning they can now write 100% of our Ify and Shortest code if prompted well. It won't be long until AI will be writing all the code for Helper, Fixile, and Gumroad. My guess is by the end of 2026, when these models get bigger and their context windows get bigger. And so, his new process, step one, he sits and chats about what he needs to build, doing research with deep research as he goes.

• 2:12:25John Coogan?

  Then he has AI record everything and turn it into a spec. Then he cleans up the spec, adding any design requirements or other nuances. Then he has Devin coded up. We're good friends with cognition. Love that Devin's helping out here. And then, uh, step five is QA, merge, and auto deploy to prod. And so, he is just having a great time with AI tools. And, uh, it's great to see a CEO of a company that has a couple of different products, a couple of different code bases, actually break down the workflow.

• 2:12:54Jordi Hays?

  One cool thing here, you talked earlier about how, uh, CEO like, um, Zuckerberg just says like, this is my company. I have control. I'm just gonna do everything that I want to do under this umbrella.

• 2:13:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:13:07Jordi Hays?

  Sahil is doing the exact same thing with Gumroad. Uh, he's basically built out, um, a number of different products or business lines under Gumroad, which is, um, yeah, I'm, I'm sure everybody's familiar at this point, but an easy way to sort of buy and sell digital products online. Um, and so he's now building out these other products that help him build Gumroad and then making those individual products available to everybody else. So they have, um, some type of like, uh, Contractor payments product. They have a help desk product that he's talking about here. So.

• 2:13:39John Coogan?

  And I'm pretty sure he raised VC money very early. He started the company very young. He was, I think, an all-star intern at Pinterest and then raised a bunch of money. And then, and then I think he was able to buy out the VCs at one point and kind of get more control over the company or something. And now he runs it kind of like a lifestyle business, but that's not meant to be a pejorative. He just has control and he's been building exactly what he wants and growing the business in very interesting ways. Unfortunately, documenting it all right in public, he's not quite building in public, but there's a lot of good stuff that comes out of his account.

• 2:14:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and he did a very high profile crowdfund, I think in, must have been 2022.

• 2:14:17John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 2:14:18Jordi Hays?

  But very small, very, very small shareholder in that.

• 2:14:22John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 2:14:23Jordi Hays?

  I'm always excited to see where he takes it.

• 2:14:26John Coogan?

  Well, let's move on to Trey Stevens, answering a very interesting question because Trey worked at Palantir with Alex Karp. And Chase asks Trey, what was it like working day to day with Karp? I'm so curious. And Trey says, well, one time my buddy and I were, who, who, who went to Notre Dame and Georgetown respectively, were with Alex Karp after a great customer meeting. And during a moment of silence, he said, great job, guys. You think we should be recruiting more people like you from second tier universities? That's mostly what it was like. It's so funny. Karp just talking trash, talking trash in the boardroom. But it worked out. He got great results from his crew.

• 2:15:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and he's still, still talking smack this time from earnings calls.

• 2:15:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:12Jordi Hays?

  We love, we love to watch.

• 2:15:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. And Tim Ronan, who was there, says Carpe Diem with a K. And Trey says, you remember this, right? I don't think I was hallucinating. Such a funny post. And, and just a great culture, you know, just guys, guys being guys, talking trash in the office. I'm sure it makes everyone grind harder, way better than, you know, oh, you know, my boss can't make fun of me. I couldn't possibly withstand that. No, you know, you gotta have some sharp elbows. You gotta have some fun sometimes. So we love to see it. Uh, let's go to Phil Mickelson. Phil Mickelson said, I would, uh, is this the actual Phil Mickelson? I think so. Uh, he says, I would just like to say Sesame Street is an excellent show.

• 2:15:57John Coogan?

  Iraqis deserve to have it. And although production costs were under 500K, shooting on site required 19.5 million dollars to insure.

• 2:16:07Jordi Hays?

  Okay. So this is referencing.

• 2:16:09John Coogan?

  USAID stuff, right?

• 2:16:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there was a USAID, uh, payment for 20 million dollars to produce a Sesame Street for Iraq.

• 2:16:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:16:19Jordi Hays?

  And so Phil's just backing him up. He says Sesame Street's an excellent show and Iraqis deserve to have it. So I think, uh, yeah, standing up against.

• 2:16:29John Coogan?

  I talked about this on the Pirate Wire show, uh, yesterday and, uh, and it's a pretty hilarious story. What's weird to me is like, why did they need to shoot Sesame Street in Iraq? Like, why not just take our Sesame Street, translate it, and then just broadcast it over the air? Or just send them the files and be like, you can distribute this now. It's in your language. Uh, instead they had to localize it and shoot it there on site, which is crazy to me.

• 2:16:53Jordi Hays?

  I like how he follows this up and says, cause sarcasm is just completely lost on X. If you've ever posted something sarcastic, you'll understand, but Phil replies, I'm curious how many people will think I'm serious. And then he replies again, turns out quite a few.

• 2:17:09John Coogan?

  Yep. Wild story, but you love to see Phil Mickelson on the timeline, dipping back in. Uh, not, not your typical teapot poster, but still got it. Got some good humor.

• 2:17:21Jordi Hays?

  Oh, got it.

• 2:17:22John Coogan?

  Having fun, wading into it. Uh, let's go to Coin Telegraph. Just in, pump.fun hit with a cease and desist from Berwick Law, ordered to remove 200-plus IP infringing meme coins. And you know, I don't know, we, we could be a plaintiff in this case. Someone made a, a, a pump.fun meme coin. All, all about us trying to steal our idea and our branding.

• 2:17:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, that, to be clear, they made, uh, a coin. We had talked about LVMH being a good proxy for TV. Cause we think a lot of people in tech are going to be big LVMH buyers in the future.

• 2:17:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:17:58Jordi Hays?

  And it was said purely for entertainment, but somebody turned it into a meme coin. And then in the description on pumped up fun was saying that it was affiliated with us, which it clearly was not. But the funny, the funny thing about this post is that, um, You can't just remove tokens from the blockchain. I guess Pump Fun could stop showing tokens that have IP infringement.

• 2:18:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, they could block them at the Web 2 layer, but not at the Web 3 layer.

• 2:18:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the tokens are still going to be there, still able to be traded.

• 2:18:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:30Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, it's just one of those things that companies have to.

• 2:18:35John Coogan?

  I mean, the NFT marketplaces went through the same thing where there were, you know, really crazy IP infringing NFTs and some were very offensive. And there were a lot of NSFW NFTs and a lot of spam NFTs. And so OpenSea and the other marketplaces created essentially views and filters on top of people's wallets to only show certain products. And then, and then obviously only highlight certain products in the store.

• 2:19:01Jordi Hays?

  It seems like that's something that Pump Fun should do in the sense that there was a TikTok token and it had nothing to do with TikTok. It was just, and you had a guy from, from Trump's team or some organization funded, you know, I don't know, part of that whole, that whole world.

• 2:19:21John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 2:19:21Jordi Hays?

  He was promoting it. So I think that there, there is a real risk for consumers to, you know, think that it's somehow associated with TikTok and maybe they're buying it. But that being said, people need to do their own research and think, hey, this is a Chinese company that's under immense scrutiny right now in the US launching a crypto token, even though they make billions of dollars a year. Probably not.

• 2:19:44John Coogan?

  Well, thank you to Berwick for your service and we're happy to support you if you need extra evidence of what's going on in the IP infringing meme token space. We will be on the witness stand, screaming.

• 2:19:57Jordi Hays?

  We'll call up Bernard Arnault.

• 2:20:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, get him in there.

• 2:20:02Jordi Hays?

  Together, you know?

• 2:20:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, I would be happy to stand on the, take the stand next to Bernard in, in defense of valuable intellectual property.

• 2:20:12John Coogan?

  Let's go back to GT, the man, the myth, the legend, the president of Y Combinator, Gary Tan. He says, "That is merely the average at YC these days, thanks to AI." He's quote tweeting Yuri, who says, "Overheard from a Series C founder, we are experiencing YC-level growth numbers 10% per week. Let's go." I love it.

• 2:20:33Jordi Hays?

  Insane. Yeah, I posted earlier this week that YC is just such an obvious beneficiary of AI for a few reasons. One, you can just build things faster than ever. So the three-month period that YC typically takes place in, they can just make so, you know, these teams can make so much more progress. Two, teams need to hire less people because they can use AI to just be way more efficient. And then three, these companies are, so I'm going to give you four, actually, but one is that the potential applicant pool has exploded so much because people that didn't think of themselves as developers can now develop

• 2:21:13Jordi Hays?

  software. And then the last being that now that it's cheaper to build software, we're going to want more of it. So I talked to a team yesterday that's doing something in sort of retail, more consumer packaged goods, and they're building software as part of their business because they now can do something with one engineer that would have taken them, you know, a pretty significant team historically. So very cool to see.

• 2:21:39John Coogan?

  That's great. And Gary, if you're listening, let the technology brothers host a live stream for Demo Day. We want to review all the startups, pump them all.

• 2:21:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, right now, right now, they work with TechCrunch.

• 2:21:53John Coogan?

  Give us the press pass.

• 2:21:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:55John Coogan?

  We want to be in the press.

• 2:21:56Jordi Hays?

  We need a press pass, and we will put the companies on.

• 2:22:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, it'll be great. I think we make it very entertaining. We'll stream it on Axe YouTube. We'll bring a lot of entertainment to YC Demo Day. Be great. Let's go to Zach. He says, "If you're not coming close to peeing yourself at your desk, you are not obsessed with what you do."

• 2:22:20Jordi Hays?

  And this really resonated for me because oftentimes we'll finish recording and it's getting hairy. You know, it's getting close. No, I think this is just a sign that you're working on something that you're really excited about. If you're working on something that bores you and you, uh, and you have, you feel like you need to go to the bathroom. You'll just get up and do it. If you're working on something that's stimulating.

• 2:22:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:42Jordi Hays?

  You probably let it go a little longer than you should. So.

• 2:22:45John Coogan?

  And Lucas here says dude's so locked in, he got a catheter.

• 2:22:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:50John Coogan?

  Zach says he'd consider it.

• 2:22:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:53John Coogan?

  Dude is the definition of locked in.

• 2:22:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, I, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the Doge boys got catheters in so they can just stay, stay in front of the computer, you know?

• 2:23:03John Coogan?

  Grind never slop stops. The guy, the grind never slops either.

• 2:23:09John Coogan?

  Perfect Freudian slip, I suppose. Uh, let's go to Josh Steinman. Friend of the show, been on many times. You know him, you love him. He says this exactly. And the bridge from the idea to results, the gap is being cool. And the solution is being cringe. And so you can't be afraid of being cringe to grind towards your results.

• 2:23:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're only going to be, you're only going to be remembered by, uh, what you accomplished. So if you need to be cringe to accomplish something, that to me says that cringe is cool. Cringe is bad.

• 2:23:47John Coogan?

  I mean, the flip, like the flip on this like cringe is like, uh, it's such a charged word, but it's more just like putting yourself out there. Like even just asking your first customer to go from a free trial to paid. It kind of triggers that cringe feeling of like, ooh, I'm putting myself out there. I'm asking for something. I'm asking for a favor. I'm asking for something that I might see. I, I might, there's, there's like downside personal ego risk. And so I think that's really the abstraction layer here of, of even just telling your family, I'm going to start a company. And I've never started a company before. That is in many ways in some circles like cringe. Like, why don't you go be a lawyer? Why don't you go be a doctor?

• 2:24:28John Coogan?

  And, and you have to be willing to put yourself out there and take that, that ego risk. And that's what cringe is. It's not necessarily actually just like. When people think cringe, they think like posting slop threads on X. That is cringe, but that's not what we're talking about here.

• 2:24:43Jordi Hays?

  I think you nailed it. You have to be willing to be successful. You have to take ego risk.

• 2:24:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:24:48Jordi Hays?

  All day long for years, right?

• 2:24:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:24:51Jordi Hays?

  A very small example is us transitioning from a recorded show to a live show. There was a bit of a hurdle. Suddenly, everything we say is immediately, you know, public.

• 2:25:04Jordi Hays?

  Thankfully, we never talk about politics or social issues, just purely about business. It makes it a little bit easier. But um, but yeah, you gotta be willing to be cringe. And Steinman even, he's notorious for posting the same idea over and over and over. And a lot of people would say, well, it's cringe to say the same thing over and over, but he made it part of his brand. And I actually think it's cool now because he's just saying, these ideas are important to me. I'm just gonna keep posting through it. So.

• 2:25:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's gotten results. The man has gotten results. It's fantastic. We got a couple more posts in the timeline. We got five more minutes. LM over at Kleiner Perkins, one of the holy trinity firms in the valley, says, product exec at startup. In response to CodeGen Tools, I told my PMs, we are done with specs or PRDs, prototypes only. And so you're on notice, PMs. If you're not building prototypes, you're not going to be working for this product exec at this particular startup, even though it's anonymized. But interesting, makes sense.

• 2:26:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I saw TJ Parker post that the entire time they were building, uh, it was, what was this company again? Pillpack?

• 2:26:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Pillpack. Sorry. I thought I was getting confused. The entire time they were doing that, they didn't have any PMs. It was just designers and engineers. And so I think that there was, at some point over the last 10 years, it was very, it was almost like controversial to be like, we're not going to have any product managers. And I do think now, you know, we still need people to, um, yeah, it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. Maybe it's. Designers that code and then you have like operations people or vice versa. But anyways.

• 2:26:42John Coogan?

  The flip side of this is what do you do with your PMs who can't build prototypes, can't design, can't engineer? And my idea is you send them to the pool and you get them making TikToks. They go viral because it's insane rage bait. And then everyone learns about your company and they're like, wow, this company is so dysfunctional. You're playing 4D chess. Your PMs are now marketers for your company.

• 2:27:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, your PMs just become your marketing budget. So however much you're spending on PMs, that's what you would have spent on ads. And if they bait people properly, you'll get way more impressions than, you know, whatever you would have gotten.

• 2:27:17John Coogan?

  And so PMs, either you're in, you're in Devon, you're in Cursor, you're in Windsurf, building prototypes, or you're at the pool and you're opening up TikTok. So you're on notice PMs.

• 2:27:27Jordi Hays?

  Now and be, now and between.

• 2:27:28John Coogan?

  No in between. Stop writing PRDs, prototypes only. And that concludes the timeline for today. We are on schedule, two minutes early. This is a fantastic show. Leave us five star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Please leave an ad in your review. We will read it out on the show and just thanks everyone who tuned in. Thanks for watching. Thanks for being a part of this community, the brotherhood.

• 2:27:55Jordi Hays?

  The brotherhood, international technology brotherhood.

• 2:27:59John Coogan?

  We will see you Monday. We have five more days of content planned next week. Lots of clips going out. Follow us on X, TBPN on X. Subscribe to the YouTube channel, add it to your Spotify, Apple Podcasts, review us everywhere.

• 2:28:16Jordi Hays?

  Send it to your, send it to your mother. We specifically have eliminated swearing from the show so that, you know, your mother won't be, you know, embarrassed to hear you listening to people with a potty mouth.

• 2:28:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. I do, I do have a rant about the, the, the free speech thing that's going on. There's a lot of people that are saying more and more aggressive things. And then there's a question about, will there be accountability for this? What's the free speech thing? And I just think going back, I needed to coin something around this Coogan's Law, but I've been calling it the, the, what would your mother think rule? And I think that in the age of truly free speech, you're not going to be, this is America. This isn't Europe. You're not going to be put in prison for your speech. And also the platforms are extremely forgiving. There's very little censorship now. You might get community noted, but you can kind of say whatever you want. And so it's incumbent upon you as an individual and as an upstanding member of society to not

• 2:29:08John Coogan?

  police yourself, but just act with honor. And, and the heuristic that I think serves us best is what would your mother think? What would your mother say? And so that, that applies to the language that you use, to the ideas that you espouse. And just if you're being a nasty vitriolic person and your mother wouldn't approve of that, um, maybe you shouldn't do that at all. Maybe you should be going golden retriever mode and trying to be friendlier. And so that's how I'll end the show.

• 2:29:38Jordi Hays?

  Well said.

• 2:29:39John Coogan?

  Thanks everyone for watching.

• 2:29:40Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 2:29:41John Coogan?

  We'll see you Monday.