AI-Birds, Snap's Next Chapter, Amazon + Globalstar | Kiva Dickinson, Aron D'Souza, Michael Mignano, Wade Foster, Ankur Nagpal, Bailey Pumfleet, Han Wang

(01:52) - AllBirds turns to AI Compute Provider (15:04) - Snaps Cuts 16% of Workforce (22:45) - Amazon + Globalstar (31:00) - Kiva Dickinson, founder and managing partner of Selva Ventures, leads investments in emerging health and wellness brands. In the conversation, he discusses his transition from investment banking to venture capital, highlighting his focus on supporting early-stage consumer brands that promote healthier living. He emphasizes the importance of providing strategic resources to these companies, aiming to make healthier living more accessible and enjoyable. (50:30) - Aron D'Souza, an Australian lawyer and entrepreneur, is the founder of the Enhanced Games, an upcoming sporting event that permits the use of performance-enhancing drugs. In the conversation, he discusses the inaugural event scheduled for late May in Las Vegas, highlighting the participation of Olympic gold medalists and world record holders, and mentions the organization's plans to go public through a SPAC combination on the New York Stock Exchange. Additionally, D'Souza introduces his new venture, Objection. AI, an AI-driven platform designed to challenge and verify claims made in the media, aiming to establish an objective arbiter of truth in society. (01:02:31) - Uber Commits $10B to RoboTaxis (01:04:28) - Michael Mignano, co-founder of the podcasting platform Anchor and former head of Spotify's talk audio division, has joined Union Square Ventures (USV) as a General Partner. In his conversation, he discusses his longstanding relationship with USV, highlighting their thesis-driven investment approach and willingness to support unconventional ideas. He emphasizes the importance of in-depth discussions within small teams to develop clear strategies, a practice he values from his experiences at Anchor and Spotify. (01:26:00) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:30:03) - Wade Foster, co-founder and CEO of Zapier, discusses the recent launch of Zapier's SDK, which integrates with various coding agents to automate tasks across numerous tools. He highlights the surge in internal tool development within companies, noting that Zapier's marketing team created over 80 new internal tools during a recent hackathon. Foster also emphasizes the importance of maintaining accountability when using AI-generated content and shares insights on how remote work enhances documentation and institutional knowledge. (01:51:35) - Ankur Nagpal, founder of Teachable and Carry, discusses the recent acquisition of Carry by AngelList and Lettuce Financial. AngelList acquired Carry's parent company to enhance its financial product offerings, while Lettuce Financial acquired Carry's retirement platform to provide comprehensive services for self-employed individuals. Nagpal highlights the importance of these partnerships in expanding access to financial tools for solopreneurs and plans to continue his involvement as a strategic advisor. (02:01:09) - Bailey Pumfleet, co-founder and CEO of Cal.com, discusses the company's transition from open-source to closed-source scheduling software due to escalating AI-driven security threats. He highlights that advancements in AI have enabled rapid exploitation of open-source code, compromising application security. To protect sensitive user data, Cal.com has decided to close its source code while maintaining its commitment to user trust and data integrity. (02:09:54) - Han Wang, co-founder and CEO of Mintlify, discusses the company's mission to empower developers by providing AI-native documentation solutions, which have been adopted by over 10,000 companies, including Anthropic, Microsoft, and Coinbase. He highlights the increasing role of AI in consuming documentation, noting that currently, approximately 50% of their documentation traffic comes from AI agents, a figure expected to rise to over 90% by year's end. Wang also announces Mintlify's recent $45 million Series B funding at a $500 million valuation, emphasizing the importance of accessible and up-to-date documentation in the rapidly evolving software landscape. Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVP.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Wednesday, April 15th, 2026. It's tax day. I hope you paid your taxes. We have a great show for you today, folks. Bunch of crazy stories going on. Allbirds is now an AI company. Snap is restructuring the entire company. Amazon's buying Globalstar. There's new info on Apple's new AI glasses. We're going to take you through it all. We also have a bunch of guests joining. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven guests joining. Kiva Dickinson, Aaron De Souza, Michael Mignano is now at Union Square Ventures.

• 0:36Jordi Hays?

  Massive pickup.

• 0:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're very excited for that. Wade Foster from Zapier is coming on. Anchor just got acquired by Angel List.

• 0:44Jordi Hays?

  Split acquisition.

• 0:46John Coogan?

  Split acquisition. I'm not exactly, oh, so, so half the company is going to Angel List, half the company is going to Lettuce.

• 0:51Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:52John Coogan?

  Got it. I wasn't sure what that meant. I'm excited to talk to you about it.

• 0:54Jordi Hays?

  Anchor himself will be over at Angel List. Very excited about that.

• 0:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:59Jordi Hays?

  Great pickup. But fun show today. S and P 500 rises to a new record.

• 1:04John Coogan?

  Yes. So why, why am I not wearing a white suit? It's because although the market is at all time highs, I don't understand why. It feels like there's never been more chaos in the markets and I'm seeing a lot of, a lot of companies that are under pressure, a lot of software companies that are under pressure. A lot of companies I know and love under pressure, but it does feel like the Mag 7 is doing well and some of the bigger companies are doing well. AI is still a mega cycle and there are exciting pockets of opportunity in the market, but we'll be digging.

• 1:35Jordi Hays?

  Certainly. Allbirds is doing quite well.

• 1:38John Coogan?

  Yes. How much is it up today?

• 1:40Jordi Hays?

  714%.

• 1:42John Coogan?

  So we talked about this maybe last week. That's an insane gain for a single day, but they're completely changing the business model. The Financial Times has a hilarious article in Alphaville. Alphaville has a great, great headlines. Allbirds is turning into an AI compute provider because of course it is. And it goes through what's happened over the last few years, few months. There's been a lot of twists and turns with this story, but we'll take you through it. They start by saying, ah, zeitgeist. Uh, Allbirds is a San Francisco maker of wool trainers that was once valued at more than $4 billion. That's pretty big for a direct to consumer shoe company, uh, at the same time.

• 2:25Jordi Hays?

  DTC darling.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  When it was growing and selling a lot of shoes, you know, Nike is a big company. It makes sense that if you could get a piece of that, maybe you could be a multi-billion dollar company, but.

• 2:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And they were selling a lot of shoes. They were very on trend.

• 2:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think that they got the revenues into the hundreds of millions of dollars and, uh, you would see them everywhere.

• 2:43Jordi Hays?

  Bunch of owned retail.

• 2:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. They definitely had some owned retail stores and were pursuing the hybrid online offline sales model. Uh, it, it was working. It was never, it was never just like some completely hypothetical vaporware company. Like they were real shoes. You could buy them, wear them. It was fine. Um, but, um, it was sold last month for $39 million to American Exchange Group, the stock having slumped more than 99% since its flotation on the NASDAQ in 2021. And so look at this chart, Jordy, uh, very, very rough.

• 3:17Jordi Hays?

  Is that good?

• 3:19John Coogan?

  That is not good.

• 3:20Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 3:20John Coogan?

  But maybe the next plan is better. We'll figure it out. So the plan for the Shell listing is quote, "to pivot its business to AI compute infrastructure with a long-term vision to become a fully integrated GPU as a service and AI cloud solutions provider in connection with this pivot." The company anticipates changing its name to New Bird AI. And so this was very unexpected. We can talk about where.

• 3:51Jordi Hays?

  With shareholder approval, Allbirds will raise 50 million via convertible notes from an institutional investor. It does not identify. So, uh, they're going to be able to get at least. A few GPUs.

• 4:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:04Jordi Hays?

  For that. Maybe, maybe they'll be able to plug them in. Maybe, maybe a whole rack.

• 4:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:08Jordi Hays?

  They can plug in a rack. But yeah, big questions around where, where are they going to get, where are they going to get the compute? Where are they going to get the, the energy? It, will anyone rely on, will be willing to rely on them?

• 4:22John Coogan?

  This feels like-

• 4:23Jordi Hays?

  Tons and tons of questions.

• 4:25John Coogan?

  This feels like an institutional investor who says, I want to participate in this idea that even older GPUs are trading above par. And so GPUs are sort of gaining value. And they want in on that in some meaningful way, but they also want to wrap it in a public company that can sort of become a meme stock, essentially. And then basically, everything else about the business will be different because the entire shoe business will be sold off. And, and this is basically just a use for the, it's, it's a use of the, of the ticker and the listing and the shell. And then probably an entirely different team, entirely different strategy, entirely different-

• 5:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:07John Coogan?

  Everything, basically. New name. So here's the Schedule 14A that explains the pivot ahead of a shareholder vote on May 18th. It adds, "With respect to the renamed corporate entity, we are investigating potential opportunities in the computing infrastructure market, including the acquisition and monetization of graphics processing units, related high-performance computing infrastructure capable to support high workloads, whether from artificial intelligence and machine learning, or other needs of potential future customers and other related assets. Also, because the anticipated electronics infrastructure business would be less focused on the public benefit of environmental conservation, which is stated in the company's certificate of incorporation." I guess Allbirds was a public benefit corporation because the wool

• 5:51John Coogan?

  was supposed to be more environment, environmentally friendly and-

• 5:56John Coogan?

  It was it was almost like an REI type brand. They are doing away with that. And so the stockholders are being asked to approve the charter amendment proposal to remove references to the company being operated for the environmental conservation public benefit. That is not going to be popular with the Allbirds fans.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  Oh, boy.

• 6:15John Coogan?

  The announcement was enough to establish Allbirds as a meme stock at pixel time when this went to print. The shares are up 774% at $21.76 a share to give the soon to be shell a market cap of slightly more than $184.5 million. And so I guess the question you have to ask is if this 50 million comes in, they're able to buy GPUs, rack them, get some value out of it. Is that worth anywhere near $184 million? It's a tough sell, but the market will figure it out over the next few days, I'm sure.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  Uh, Dave Fortnoy.

• 6:54John Coogan?

  Hold on, let's hear from.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  It's interesting. I mean, $50 million is like not enough to like lease to a Neolab, right? Because you just like can't buy enough capacity.

• 7:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  So it is interesting. I don't know who the actual like consumer of these GPUs will be.

• 7:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  Maybe you could just like resell them on on OpenRadar or something.

• 7:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you could resell on OpenRadar.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Like you're running.

• 7:13John Coogan?

  I mean, George Hots was talking about that, remember? He was talking about like he found a building that had cheap power and he was going to just buy a bunch of GPUs. And I think he was raising like 10 million or 20 million to do that. And he was going to sell the tokens on OpenRadar profitably. And so there's there's a potential business model there. Also, yes, you probably couldn't sell to a Neolab that's doing some huge foundation model training run, but there might be some company that's doing like fine tuning on some small model or doing some niche model. I mean, again, to go back to George Hots, like he had a, you know, a couple racks of GPUs that he was training self-driving cars on. And you have to imagine that there's lots of like long tail applications for

• 7:57John Coogan?

  for custom models that need to be trained that aren't as big, maybe. I don't know.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, so this is like essentially just a SPAC. Because you're just

• 8:05John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  Everything is different.

• 8:06John Coogan?

  Yes, it's sort of

• 8:08Jordi Hays?

  It was already, it was already a public company and they're just adapt, they're doing like a massive pivot. Uh, I don't think they will make any progress at all.

• 8:17John Coogan?

  No.

• 8:17Jordi Hays?

  I think that it is entirely a meme. Uh, I woke up this morning, I was like, that is really funny, you know, taking the, the, uh, taking, Allbirds became a meme, right? The company was basically dying, but the meme remained strong.

• 8:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:33Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, it's kind of making, uh, Allbirds in some way, just like became such a part of the uni- uniform of Silicon Valley. Uh, it was something that Silicon Valley was mocked for and to take that corporate shell and, uh, make a mockery of our industry again, uh, feels, feels quite fitting. And, uh, so anyways, I'm incredibly

• 8:56John Coogan?

  The shoes.

• 8:57Jordi Hays?

  Uh, even Dave Portnoy said, I don't get it.

• 9:01John Coogan?

  Uh, he loves a meme stock.

• 9:03Jordi Hays?

  And he loves a meme stock, so.

• 9:04John Coogan?

  Can we play this video?

• 9:05Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I have no idea how the actual stock, uh, will perform.

• 9:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:10Jordi Hays?

  Are you pulling it up?

• 9:10John Coogan?

  No, I, I don't have it here. I think you had it. Um, but, uh, the allbirds.com still resolves to the full e-commerce website. They're have an extra 25% off sale, discount applied in cart. You can get all the different shoes that they sell. I think they sell other stuff too now. Um, and so I, it'll be interesting to see, I mean, how quickly can they, can they disentangle the new compute infrastructure division from the actual apparel and shoe division because, uh,

• 9:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, well, my understanding is like they sold off all of the Allbirds assets.

• 9:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:42Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 9:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:43Jordi Hays?

  So for $39 million, they sold it to American Exchange Group.

• 9:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:47Jordi Hays?

  They got the domain.

• 9:48John Coogan?

  And so they're just kind of using the inventory, they got all the IP. As a quicker way to get to public markets.

• 9:52Jordi Hays?

  The ticker remained public and it was just sitting there. And I think a lot of people are sitting there. Sitting, talking to their friends, being like, why did I not think to turn all birds into a neo-clout? Yeah. Why am I, we, we It's gotta, it's gotta go on. We had a buddy who's a very, very smart investor, who you could just tell wanted to slam his head into the table because he's, you know, spending all of this time trying to, you know, trying to pick real winners, invest in, you know, fantastic durable businesses. Yeah. And all, you know, right in front of him was, um, uh, what in hindsight is like a very, very obvious play. Yeah. But, uh, but, but again, you know, look, looking back at like the history of, uh,

• 10:37Jordi Hays?

  the last time this happened was Long Island Ice Tea. In 2017, December 2020, uh, December 21st, 2017, the company announced that it was changing its name from Long Island Ice Tea to the Long Blockchain Corp. And said it would shift its strategy toward exploration of an investment in opportunities that leverage the benefits of blockchain technology. While keeping its beverage subsidiary. Uh, the stock surged immediately after the announcement amid crypto mania. Again, this was the 2017 cycle. Uh, coverage reported jumps of roughly 200% and some reports said it rose as much as

• 11:21Jordi Hays?

  uh, 380% uh, midday and, and, and it basically then just started to like chop, uh, chop for a few weeks. Uh, and, uh, ultimately faced, uh, various, uh, had a little run in with the SEC. Hmm. And they brought insider trading charges, uh, ahead, uh, uh, you know, be, because of activity that happened ahead of the pivot announcement. So I wouldn't be surprised to see, um, Wouldn't be surprised to see something similar here.

• 11:56John Coogan?

  The Long Island Iced Tea Company was doing 4 million in sales in 2017, something like that, 25 employees, like, pretty small company back then, and then just sort of wound down. There, the people are not, are not very optimistic that this would work. Ben says, "Hopefully, everyone understands, whatever the Allbirds pivot is, they will unlikely, they will, they won't likely secure any power, any GPUs at reasonable scale, and need a lot more money than this to even have a prayer." And you certainly see that with all the other NeoClouds that show up on, on ClusterMax. Every NeoCloud that we talk to on the show is, you know, raising hundreds of millions

• 12:40John Coogan?

  of dollars and then debt on top of it, and is usually, has a lineage that traces back years, if not a decade, and has a whole bunch of interesting, you know, unique value props to actually, whether it's the, on the software side, on the deployment side, on the, on the infrastructure side, on the energy side, actually going and finding power is very, very difficult and continues to be. But yes, a lot of people are saying this is dot-com vibes, it is crazy. Citrini says, "Can we please wait until we are at least 5% above previous all-time highs to start doing this?" And it does seem like this. "If you sell shoes, pivot to a GPU cloud," I guess. And negligible capital has the meme from Wolf of Wall Street.

• 13:25John Coogan?

  The name of the company? Newbird AI. It's a cutting-edge AI-native cloud infrastructure firm out of, well, they used to be out of San Francisco making sneakers, but forget that, John. They are now awaiting imminent deployment of next-generation GPU compute clusters that have both massive enterprise and consumer applications. Now, right now, John, the stock trades on the NASDAQ at about the price of a cup of coffee. And by the way, John, our analysts indicate it could go a heck of a lot higher than that. And John, one more thing, they're up just 160% today. Yeah, what a wild, what a wild, what a wild time. Well, uh, what, stay safe out there. Do your own research and, uh, and avoid all the proth. Uh, Mike Isaac says this is, uh, just going to be the default for any failing entity that owns

• 14:07John Coogan?

  a significant amount of real estate, uh, able to be converted into data centers. I'm waiting for the RB server farms. I don't know if that's what's happening here with real estate. I think it's more about the shell and just

• 14:17Jordi Hays?

  The brand.

• 14:18John Coogan?

  No, not even the brand. I mean, the brand.

• 14:20Jordi Hays?

  No, the brand, the brands, like, there has to be a goofiness to it.

• 14:23John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 14:24Jordi Hays?

  For it to be, to have the meme potential.

• 14:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, to become a meme.

• 14:26Jordi Hays?

  Cause I don't think, I don't think anybody who's investing in this company

• 14:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:31Jordi Hays?

  actually thinks they will build a great

• 14:34John Coogan?

  Neo cloud. Yeah, it is just

• 14:37Jordi Hays?

  We just, we just have, uh, you know, talked to so many of these, of these companies and there are a number of established players. In fact, they're already, um, you know, everyone expects the market for inference to be one of the biggest markets of all time.

• 14:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:51Jordi Hays?

  But that doesn't mean, um, that doesn't mean that, uh, that doesn't mean that, that anyone that, that attempts to build a business here will be successful.

• 15:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, uh, let's move over to Snap. Evan Spiegel, former guest of the show, two-time in-person guest.

• 15:06Jordi Hays?

  Saying he went to Coachella and came back and was like

• 15:09John Coogan?

  Right-sized the company. So he's laying off a thousand full-time employees, which is roughly 16% of the global workforce as part of an effort, uh, to reduce costs and achieve profitability. Uh, in a memo to employees Wednesday, Spiegel said the cuts are necessary for Snap to boost efficiency as it pursues profitable growth. He cited improvements in artificial intelligence technology that lets Snap employees move more quickly. The company is also closing more than 300 open roles. Spiegel told staffers, many of whom were told to work from home on Wednesday, that the job cuts and pullback on hiring will reduce Snap's annualized cost base by more than 500 million by the second half of this year. Snap estimated that total revenue rose 12% to 1.53 billion in the first quarter.

• 15:52John Coogan?

  So 6 billion in total revenue run rate. Uh, adjusted earnings before, uh, interest, basically EBITDA is 233 million during the period. Snap shares jumped as much as 9% after markets opened in New York. Spiegel wrote a memo. He said, "Last fall, I described Snap as facing a crucible moment requiring a new way of working that is faster and more efficient while pivoting towards profitable growth. Over the past several months, we have carefully reviewed the work required to best serve our community and partners and made tough choices to prioritize the investments we believe are most likely to create long-term value." The stock is down 31% so far this year. And what's interesting is that it is not really

• 16:35John Coogan?

  this SaaS apocalypse narrative, because even if you vibe code a Snapchat clone, you won't have the actual usage data, the network effect that exists. But the market has definitely turned on stock-based comp and just is in the hunt for profitability broadly.

• 16:54Jordi Hays?

  Which, of course, Snap has never had generated a single dollar of net income.

• 17:06John Coogan?

  When you include stock-based comp, right?

• 17:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, correct.

• 17:11John Coogan?

  I think that always includes stock-based comp. And so EBITDA is positive, but they issue a lot of stock to comp the employees, and that has weighed down on the share price because there's a lot of dilution. And while Spiegel is also working to sell a vision for augmented reality glasses, which the company plans to debut later this year, it has leaned heavily on outside firms to power its AI offerings. Larger rivals are spending aggressively to build and develop their own state-of-the-art AI products and infrastructure. The job cuts arrived just weeks after activist investor, Arenic Capital Management, took a stake in the company and called for swift changes in that memo that we reviewed on the show a couple of weeks ago, including a recommendation that Snap cut its workforce in hopes of boosting the

• 17:55John Coogan?

  stock price. "Like many of your peers, you overhired," the investor wrote in a letter to Spiegel last month. "Unlike your peers, you haven't course corrected." Spiegel's note to employees didn't mention whether the job cuts were related to Arenic's recent demands. Other major tech companies have slashed their workforces, including Snap rival Meta Platforms. Meta eliminated hundreds of jobs globally in March and shed roughly 1,000 workers from its Reality Labs group. Back in January, all while ramping up investments in AI. Spiegel suggested AI was one part of his decision for the cuts. While these changes are necessary to realize Snap's long-term potential, Spiegel said of the cuts, "We believe that rapid advancements in AI enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase velocity, and better support our community partners and advertisers."

• 18:38John Coogan?

  And so, the big question that I have generally is like, the, what is the actual replacement rate? Like, how much are they spending on AI? We saw that report from Uber that they blew through a year of budget on AI tools in just a couple of months. And a lot of people were sort of reacting to that, saying like, "Well, I've used the Uber app for years. It doesn't feel like it's changing dramatically." Of course, there's manual workflows that internally might need to be done, and AI might speed that up. But in terms of getting like net new applications, net new apps that people actually use and enjoy,

• 19:16John Coogan?

  that seems to be like the next opportunity for real growth as opposed to just cost optimization. And so, the $400 million deal with Perplexity is no longer happening. I guess that's been pulled back on and...

• 19:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wonder, I really wonder why the Perplexity's seen seemingly some very real growth in their new product, Computer. There's been, they've been sharing some of their, the increased revenue that they're seeing from that. But, but yeah, that was, I think one of the things that, yeah, what did, in the Save Snap Now campaign, that was one of the, one of the suggestions.

• 20:02John Coogan?

  Was to pull out of that?

• 20:03Jordi Hays?

  Is to concentrate AI partnerships on clear winners like Gemini, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

• 20:08John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 20:09Jordi Hays?

  So they were not in favor. And again, it seemed, seemed like Perplexity would be in a position where they would pay the most, actually, for that distribution. And we'll see if they actually backfill that slot or just focus on their own tooling.

• 20:23John Coogan?

  So, the full presentation is up now, which you can read through. After nine years of being a public company, 15 years since being founded, Evan Spiegel finally decided to put a business plan together for how to reach profitability. And so, you can go click through all of that. And what else is going on? Oh, you wanted to talk about Anthony Pompliano's new Agentic podcast on Wall Street. The show's called Best Stocks and it's 100% AI-generated. Each episode is based off the Agentic research articles. Synthetic AI content will be more popular than human-created content, he says.

• 21:01John Coogan?

  And he had it covered in accents. I could see a daily.

• 21:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so a lot of people, a lot of people are, um. Best Stocks is kind of a funny name because it's just like the most generic possible name for a finance podcast. What's your, what's your finance podcast called? Called Best Stocks? Uh, but, uh, I, I think that, um, historically, you know, the, one of the main downsides of the podcast was that they always had this lag, right? They were recorded, edited, and then eventually published. But people, and so like in some ways TV remained competitive as a place where if you wanted to understand what was happening in the markets, you'd turn on CNBC, right? It's always on. Uh, you can always kind of get an update there.

• 21:46Jordi Hays?

  And so I think that like real-time podcasts, that was part of, um, part of what I think, uh, helped us, uh, uh, get some traction early with the show was that we were publishing every single day. So it was like kind of a real-time look into the markets. I, I think that this show, I haven't listened to an episode yet. I'll try it on the way home. But, um, I wouldn't be, uh, given the popularity of, I think this, um, there's like a real-time like politics one, uh, that, that is done very well in Apple Podcasts. Um, I think that, I think that this, uh, show could find an audience, right? It's basically Notebook LM.

• 22:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but, but a little bit more curated, probably a little bit more opinionated.

• 22:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:26Jordi Hays?

  You don't have to like be prompting yourself. And, um, I, I would expect this to get some level of traction of people just wanting to turn something on, understand in real-time what's happening. Um, and it uses obviously the existing distribution. So. We'll see, but not as bearish as some of the other people.

• 22:46John Coogan?

  Well, let's switch over to Amazon. Why is Amazon buying Starlink rival Globalstar in an $11 billion deal? The race is heating up between Amazon and SpaceX. So, Amazon's buying satellite operator Globalstar in a deal that the company's estimated at about $10.8 billion, seeking to build a business connecting consumer smartphones with satellite internet connections. The deal would give Amazon's Leo Satellite Ventures a boost, as advised with SpaceX's dominant Starlink network. The Elon Musk-controlled satellite business has been launching satellites designed to connect to consumer devices and signing agreements with mobile carriers. Here's what's at stake. Amazon plans to launch new satellite-to-cellphone

• 23:27John Coogan?

  service in 2028. That feels far away, but I guess it's only two years away. A big factor in the deal is Globalstar's control over spectrum resources, which we've seen trade hands a few times now, which Amazon could use to provide satellite links to smartphones. Those wireless assets would enable a plan for Amazon to deploy its own direct-

• 23:46Jordi Hays?

  John, brace yourself.

• 23:47John Coogan?

  Tell me.

• 23:48Jordi Hays?

  AST Space Mobile is down 10 and 1/2%-

• 23:50John Coogan?

  No way.

• 23:51Jordi Hays?

  ...in five days. Selling off.

• 23:53John Coogan?

  Selling off on this news?

• 23:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, maybe the people are worried about like a duopoly here. I don't know. Ben Thompson was talking about ASTs a little bit. Where is it?

• 24:04Jordi Hays?

  He's joining the retail, the AST Space Mobile retail army?

• 24:08John Coogan?

  Space Mobile. Yeah, he said, "This isn't the only example of leaning companies wanting to avoid being at the mercy of SpaceX. Verizon is at it again in terms of their own satellite service, doubling down on their investment in AST Space Mobile instead of coming to a deal with Starlink for not just better service, but service that actually exists." So, AST Space Mobile is years behind. They don't have a constellation actually up and active yet, but they have plans to. And to that end-

• 24:36Jordi Hays?

  They have concepts of a plan.

• 24:38John Coogan?

  What other company is the clear leader in that space? Well, it's the one that Ben Thompson expressed hope last year would lean into a SpaceX Spark partnership, and that was Apple. And so, he says the problem, he noted, is that it was hard to see Apple and SpaceX ever resolving who would actually be in charge. Apple clearly agrees because they are not only declining to work- With SpaceX, I actually think they were the driving force in this Global Star deal. And so the battles between all the different tech companies continue to rage.

• 25:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and AST Space Mobile now has a heavily, heavily, heavily funded competitor in the same general category.

• 25:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, there was a moment where

• 25:22Jordi Hays?

  Like, Amazon's not spending eleven and a half billion and then just gonna be like, alright, we're gonna like, try to be really, you know, run this super efficiently. They're gonna invest heavily.

• 25:29John Coogan?

  Yep, in between

• 25:30Jordi Hays?

  And have the insane distribution

• 25:32John Coogan?

  Blue Origin.

• 25:33Jordi Hays?

  Or Amazon business.

• 25:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:34Jordi Hays?

  As they get to scale.

• 25:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, they don't have devices and so they won't be fully vertically integrated, but what Ben Thompson's pointing out is that Apple might not want to have a single point of leverage there with SpaceX and so they're balancing the two out. Overall, SpaceX's overall Starlink fleet numbers around 10,000 operational satellites. Elon had this cool chart of 10 to the zero, 10 to the one, 10 to the two, 10 to the three, like, the exponential every 10x number of satellites. And they check them off at Starlink HQ when they get to the next order of magnitude.

• 26:11John Coogan?

  The company plans to launch thousands more in the years ahead. Starlink has deployed more than 650 satellites dedicated to providing connections to cell phones. As of the end of last year, connecting more than 12 million people, according to the company. Global Star operates a network of satellites and in recent years has provided Apple with satellite links to support features for iPhones. Apple's service allows users to send text messages, call emergency assistance, and seek roadside help in areas where cellphone service isn't available. And the Global Star service has always been slower than, it's high Earth orbit, so it's a lot slower than a Starlink connection. But they're already working with Amazon to figure out the next iteration of that. So, Amazon said Tuesday that it had agreed to a deal with Apple to power satellite services for its iPhone and Apple Watch.

• 26:56John Coogan?

  And to and to work together on future satellite services using Leo's growing network. Global Star has separately been working with Canadian satellite maker MDA Space to develop new satellites that Global Star would own with capacity dedicated to Apple. So Global Star's global spectrum rights became more valuable as SpaceX and Apple began more aggressively using satellite links to connect phones. So connecting cell phones through satellites is still a nascent market. Most consumers who live in urban areas get links through traditional telecom providers, carriers that have struck satellite to smartphone deals, have promoted them as ways for consumers to always have some degree of internet connectivity in remote areas. T-Satellite connects you where towers can't, T-Mobile says of its offerings through Starlink. SpaceX, of course, has a rocket advantage.

• 27:41John Coogan?

  They have a fleet of Falcon 9 rockets to build Starlink into the biggest satellite fleet in history. Amazon has been splashing out billions of dollars to other launch providers, including ULA and Blue Origin, to build up the Leo network. But delays have slowed Amazon's effort. You have a take?

• 27:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I wonder how smoothly this will lead into space data centers, because I know Blue Origin has talked a little bit about doing that. I think they got some, they got some permission from, I think, the, I think FCC. Yeah, like, it seems like this is the very, like, this is the natural endpoint. You're basically just, like, doing similar things to Elon.

• 28:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was, I was reading, I think Ben Thompson mentioned it, about Global Star's, like, original, what was it? The, is it processing? So, so Global Star's assets are all things considered pretty middling. 24 satellites nearing the end of their 15-year lifespan. So they only have 24 satellites up there, and they use a bent pipe architecture, which is signal relaying, only no onboard processing. So I think it's actually just a reflector dish. I don't, I'm not for sure, I'm not sure exactly how this works, but that's- That's what it seems like. Maybe there's, I mean, he's saying there's no onboard processing.

• 29:06John Coogan?

  I'm not exactly sure how detailed that is. I want to do a little bit of a deep dive on what the bent pipe architecture implies, because it sounds like mostly just a reflector dish up there, but it works because you can bounce, you know, you have ground station, you can bounce stuff up and still-

• 29:21Jordi Hays?

  This is reminding me, why did Allbirds not kind of rally their pivot around space data centers?

• 29:27John Coogan?

  They should have, yeah. Yeah, why are-

• 29:29Jordi Hays?

  Huge.

• 29:30John Coogan?

  Why are they doing, why are they doing data centers when, you know, compute on the ground-

• 29:35Jordi Hays?

  Lean into the new meta.

• 29:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, the new meta for sure. Maybe, yeah, who knows? Maybe next week they'll be looking for another story and that'll be it. They have 24 ground gateway stations across six continents. There are some new satellites on the way to keep the constellation going, but it seems likely that still on the drawing board, higher capabilities satellites will be scrapped. Approximately 8 megahertz of the L-band satellite uplink and approximately 16.5 megahertz of the S-band satellite downlink and N53 terrestrial spectrum for private cellular networks not phoned to satellite communication that is licensed out. So those assets by and large serve one customer, Apple. Apple owned a 20% stake in Globalstar and had rights to 85% of Globalstar's network capacity for the satellite service it provides to iPhones

• 30:21John Coogan?

  and Apple Watches. So that's certainly a valuable relationship, but it also meant that Apple had a de facto veto on any Globalstar acquisition. And so what he's, what he's arguing is that Apple is very happy that Globalstar and Amazon are teaming up in this way to provide them with another, another option in the market.

• 30:40Jordi Hays?

  Apple's like, any, we love all CapEx that is not our CapEx.

• 30:45John Coogan?

  They really do. They, they are the master of that. We'll have to come back to the story of the Apple new Ray-Ban competitors, the smart glasses, because we have our first guest in the waiting room, Kiva Dickinson from Selva Ventures.

• 31:00Jordi Hays?

  Series A lead of Grooves.

• 31:03John Coogan?

  Kiva, how are you doing?

• 31:04Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 31:04John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 31:06Jordi Hays?

  Doing great, guys. What's going on? It is great to see you. I was looking in your background, trying to see if we could maybe see- Our own office.

• 31:17John Coogan?

  Oh, are you in LA?

• 31:18Jordi Hays?

  Distance you're.

• 31:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're looking, we're looking northwest. Where are you guys?

• 31:22Jordi Hays?

  Okay, we are more east.

• 31:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 31:25Jordi Hays?

  Um, so not quite, but, uh, great to see you on here. How's your last, uh, how's your last week been? Was that your, was that your first like, uh, billion dollar exit?

• 31:36Speaker 03

  First billion? Yeah, for sure. And, um, that definitely, definitely the biggest exit that we've been a part of. And, um, yeah, it's been fantastic. It's, it's exciting to share the good news and really incredibly thrilled for the company. Um, spent a lot of time with them this week.

• 31:51Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, fantastic for the category overall. Uh, you, you guys have been through it. Uh, obviously you never lost, uh, you never lost faith. Otherwise you wouldn't have invested in groons, but, uh, certainly it's been funny today, uh, watching all birds have new life. Uh, hopefully, hopefully your portfolio isn't, isn't getting any ideas, you know? Hey, hey, you know, uh, the supplements category is running away from us, but we could pivot to AI compute. But, um, but yeah, walk, what, give us, uh, I, I wanted to have you on just to kind of get an update on like consumer investing broadly.

• 32:26John Coogan?

  Can we start with like some background and how the fund was set up, uh, how you got into investing, all of that?

• 32:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally. Um, I started my career in investment banking, uh, joined TPG about 12 years ago. Uh, in the consumer group and, and, you know, I, I think it was incredibly like formative time of learning what private investing was. And, and, you know, learning about consumer businesses. But what I was thematically excited about was really uninvestable for us. I was seeing these incredible companies line the shelves of Whole Foods and Target. They were getting more and more exciting every year, taking share of the companies that I had grown up with. And you know, when we talked about them internally in our investment committee,

• 33:14Speaker 03

  the problem that we faced was they didn't consume enough capital for us to get our kind of two, $300 million minimum check in on the way out.

• 33:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:21Speaker 03

  And we couldn't outbid Unilever, P and G, or Mars on the way out.

• 33:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:26Speaker 03

  And so my takeaway was like, I'm in the wrong seat. Like I gotta be doing something in the earlier stage, some be some part of of the early journey of these companies. So.

• 33:35John Coogan?

  So wait, but double clicking on that trend that you see, I think everyone's familiar with the boom of, I mean, there were a bunch of different factors and I want to know your take on on all of them. Like Whole Foods at one point had like local buying. So if you could go in and like talk to the local, like the Whole Foods in your town, they could actually stock you. They didn't have centralized buying. There was also the D to C boom, online advertising, the influencer boom, celebrities getting the space. Like what were you identifying as the undercurrents of that broader trend of like new products taking shelves, like space on the shelf?

• 34:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, this is definitely like height of the D to C boom. And so what was being talked about in the technology industry and in the press were companies friendly like Allbirds and Gaspar.

• 34:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:22Speaker 03

  And I think that was distracting a lot of attention and capital away from what I thought was the most interesting thing, which was when you walk through the aisles of a grocery store, you see completely different things than you did 10 years ago.

• 34:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:36Speaker 03

  You saw companies like Kind Bar taking enormous share in transacting with Mars. You saw companies like Dr. Buy selling to Dr. Pepper Snapple for like $1.7 billion. These were not grabbing tech headlines. These were not grabbing traditional venture capital. But they were taking share of an absolutely enormous industry. I mean, consumer packaged goods, depending on where you get the input from, is like 7 to 10% of GDP.

• 35:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Buy is such a funny story because, I mean, it has a traditional startup founder in his basement, making the product, grinding, unique insight. But during the D to C boom, they didn't have a D to C website. Their website was just links to Amazon. They never set up a first party e-commerce site because they just didn't need to.

• 35:21Speaker 03

  Which can make sense.

• 35:22John Coogan?

  Which can make sense. Oh, it makes a ton of sense. Yeah.

• 35:24Speaker 03

  Beverage specifically.

• 35:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Beverage is really expensive. Amazon has the logistics for it. So yeah, what, so walk me through the decision and how you actually positioned yourself to get in at the earlier stages.

• 35:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I made a stop at a company called Circle Up. They had pivoted from helping emerging CPG companies raise capital to actually raising a fund. And TPG invested in the fund. I kind of put my hand up and said, hey, this sounds awesome. I want to be part of this.

• 35:57John Coogan?

  Did we lose you?

• 35:58Jordi Hays?

  We lost you.

• 35:59John Coogan?

  So now.

• 35:59Speaker 03

  It's called Nut Pods.

• 36:00John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:01Speaker 03

  We eventually. Did I lose you guys?

• 36:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, just for a second.

• 36:04Jordi Hays?

  You're back.

• 36:05John Coogan?

  So yeah, tell me about that first deal.

• 36:06Speaker 03

  Called Nut Pods that we. Yes, we invested in a company called Nut Pods that we eventually sold to VMG and then invested in a company called Liquid IV that we pretty quickly turned around and sold to Unilever in about two and a half years. And it showed me what the risk reward can look like. It showed me also that the early stage companies had a real pain point at seed and Series A. They needed not just like specific specialized capital firms who understood their journey, but also resources and common challenges for these companies look different from early technology companies. It's like, how do we do online growth marketing? How do we launch in retail? How do we scale a supply chain? How do we deal with not having all our eggs

• 36:48Speaker 03

  in the basket of one contract manufacturer? Traditional venture capital firms were not built to solve these problems. And so in 2019, I broke off and basically tried to build a proof of concept of what a modern venture capital firm built to serve these companies could look like. That's what Selva Ventures is today. We're now investing out of our second fund and that fund has been a part of, like you said, I said, groons, but also businesses like OneSkin, Javi, Midday Squares, Array, to name a few.

• 37:20John Coogan?

  What's the, sorry.

• 37:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what, what, what does best in class look like today? One of your, one of your portfolio companies, which I won't name because I don't think that it's public. I, I was able to watch them go from basically zero to hundreds of millions of revenue in the span of like, I think, like roughly four years, something like that. Very, very short period of time, very small team. Is that like, like, is that kind of what you expect out of, out of, out of a good investment? Or are there still some like, you know, kind of like slow burn, kind of, you know? Companies that that kind of like find that takeoff moment quite a bit later.

• 38:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, there are there are longer journeys. There are shorter journeys. Groon's is probably the shortest one I've ever seen. I mean, that business is like 32 months old now since since launching to consumers. I think what we do find is that the combination of online subscription, which is for a great habitual personal care or supplement business can be really, really sticky, like software-like retention, plus the scale of the best retailers out there. I'm talking Walmart, Target, Costco, Sephora. You can build a very, very large business that doesn't consume a lot of capital in a pretty short period of time. And so

• 38:47Speaker 03

  when we talk short, like, we underwrite our investments to five to eight years. You know, the the exits can certainly be shorter than what we've started to see in the technology markets of like, longer dated IPOs.

• 38:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:00Speaker 03

  But, you know, the the off-ramp for these companies is traditionally, you know, like Groon's, in the best-in-class way, an exit to a strategic once you're somewhere between one and $300 million in revenue. And and that's something if the flywheel online and offline is going, you don't have to wait too long for.

• 39:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. It seems like a, I mean, it's a great, it's a great outcome whenever you see one of these like unfold. I mean, Groon's is particularly fast, but there's a lot of examples of, you know, raising money carefully, deploying it, growing steadily, figuring out the product, the supply chain, and then exiting to a strategic. We've seen that over and over and over again. Do you ever run into founders who are like, I'm going to take on Unilever. I'm going to become the next Unilever. I'm never selling. I'm going all the way.

• 39:44Jordi Hays?

  I think everyone says that until they get an offer from Unilever at over a billion and then.

• 39:48John Coogan?

  Maybe, but I'm just wondering.

• 39:52Speaker 03

  We have, it's funny, actually, when I started this firm, I'd have a bunch of traditional VCs like send me pitch decks to be like, what do you think? And the subject line was like the next P and G or the next family.

• 40:04Speaker 03

  These are incredibly sophisticated organizations. They're so good at manufacturing, marketing, sales, distribution, regulatory. What they're not good at is innovating. And so the idea of like building a new one from scratch is kind of like.

• 40:22Jordi Hays?

  It's like you need to do the hard thing. Yeah, you need to do the innovative thing and do that really well while simultaneously doing it multiple times and getting the scale. And systems and the distribution dial.

• 40:36Speaker 03

  I mean, the one in our space that people naturally talk about is Harry's. They're now called Mammoth Brands, but you know, they had a definitive agreement to be acquired by Edgewell, who owns Schick like six years ago. And it was blocked by the FTC and you know, now their only path is going public. And in order to go public, they need to basically build the modern P and G. And so, you know, they bought Coterie. They bought, they bought a, you know, personal care business called Lumi a few years ago. And like they're probably the closest thing to it. But I think these like pure play, fast growing disruptors are really what we focus on because we feel like, you know, you take share. You cause enough pain for these modern companies and you fit very well into the machine that they have built.

• 41:18Jordi Hays?

  Are you expecting chaos in the supplement category going forward after an exit like this? I'm assuming there's at least a hundred pretty smart entrepreneurs that that think, you know what? I've always wanted to build a supplement company and start going after it.

• 41:36Speaker 03

  I'd say like 2022, 2023, when the market crashed.

• 41:42Speaker 03

  There was a period of time where we talked about how all the tourists left CPG investing. And it was sort of locals only and I would say the space was sort of under capitalized.

• 41:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's when Groons, that's when, that's when Groons and I know a number of your other winners like formed. Which is fitting.

• 42:01Speaker 03

  That, that tends to be a great time to form a company. Also a hard time to raise capital. But you know, the competitive dynamics benefit you. I really hope that we don't have a flood of half baked ideas backed by, you know, non-traditional investors coming in and doing this the wrong way. I, I feel like there's still a lot of scar tissue from the industry when traditional venture capital started backing B2C brands in the mid 2010s. And like, obviously it's ironic with the Allbirds pivot today, but like, I feel like I spend a decent amount of my time explaining to people why we don't invest in businesses like Allbirds.

• 42:41Speaker 03

  And why CPG is fundamentally different than that, that direct to consumer is not the purpose. It's, it's the products themselves and how much better they serve the consumer.

• 42:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense. One, one thought is that I feel like a lot of VCs are paralyzed right now because they've invested, you know, a significant amount of money into the labs, but they want to invest in more companies because they have capital to deploy, but they're afraid to invest in the app layer and traditional software because of just AI disruption broadly. And I think that that could, that could lead at least some folks from, from to deciding to, hey, maybe we should take a flyer and, let's, let's just throw like five million bucks in this, in this CPG company, you know. Groons is a good, is a good comp for it. Why, why not? It's, it's just, you know, so hopefully you don't get crowded up.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  By the way, I'd be looking at the technology stack of Groons. I mean, Chad, who you had on last week, it was a great, it was a great interview. Like he, he publishes a lot on, on LinkedIn, like all of his vendors, all the technology solutions. I mean, there is a huge opportunity to be the picks and shovels of this type of company that will not stop taking share from large CPG. And are willing to, you know, try out new AI tools or new technology tools.

• 44:01Jordi Hays?

  What, what, what outcomes have there really been in that? Cause, cause again, that, that was like a wildly popular category during the D2C era too. It was like, I'm going to invest in. I'm going to invest in the brands and then I'm going to invest in the technology stack. And you had like the Klavios of the world did well. Obviously Shopify has been incredible, but it's hard to think of a bunch of other examples that got out at actually a venture scale.

• 44:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, none obviously come to mind, although there's been some smaller attractive exits. I mean, one of the best like tech-enabled Amazon agencies sold yesterday. And so like, you gotta think about entry prices and the value creation to the early investors in these companies. They don't have to sell for billions of dollars to be really interesting investments. But we see companies all the time that are just like changing the way these companies operate and reducing the number of people that you need to run a CPG business that interfaces with the physical world. So you would think naturally would need more people.

• 45:05Jordi Hays?

  Do you guys do any of the infrastructure? Or are you purely?

• 45:08Speaker 03

  We don't, but we try and be pretty fluent in it.

• 45:11Jordi Hays?

  I love that. I love the focus. It's basically like there's two companies a year that you need to find and back and you need to try to be the biggest. And just focus all your energy on that.

• 45:23John Coogan?

  So I mean, on that hunt, you said you wouldn't back just a D to C company with decent growth metrics potentially. The product matters. What does that actually look like? Is it all your own taste? Are you doing surveys and panels and trying to understand where the white space is for a particular product? How durable that white space is? Because every once in a while, there's like a new co-packer that comes online and unlocks a new stick pack or a new gummy format or something. And then there's a boom around that and it feels differentiated. But really what you're looking at is like, oh, there's just a new piece of machinery that's in a bunch of different co-packers. So what's your process for actually understanding whether a company has a great product and

• 46:07John Coogan?

  will continue to be able to compound on the back of like the quality of the product?

• 46:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think you gotta be pretty thoughtful about value proposition. And a lot of new consumer value propositions for a CBG product are like downstream of changes in how nutritional knowledge and human health plays out in our world. So, you know, GLP-1s have a bunch of downstream effects. We don't just invest in GLP-1 companies. We invest in companies that ultimately take share because of a world where GLP-1s are important. And so the first thing we're trying to understand is like, where is the where is the puck going in terms of human understanding and therefore value proposition in the future? We're trying to find signal of great companies with DSC and offline metrics.

• 46:56Speaker 03

  And then most of our job frankly is figuring out what are the false positives? Like, what are the reasons why a company might be growing really fast and efficiently that ultimately won't translate to successful omni-channel distribution and velocity and a successful acquisition?

• 47:12Jordi Hays?

  That was the thing with Groon's that that I think some people maybe like

• 47:20Jordi Hays?

  you know, drove them to pass is that there had been that company on Amazon that had scaled to like 500 million or something like that in sales that was doing that.

• 47:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, goalie.

• 47:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, goalie, just basically no value creation at all, even though they had tons of sales. And I think people kind of like wrote off gummies as a category.

• 47:38Jordi Hays?

  And clearly that was, you know, wrong.

• 47:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, we were grateful for that misunderstanding.

• 47:44John Coogan?

  What about the the temperature with LPs right now? I imagine that you have a unique value proposition and LPs are watching, you know, so much like K-shaped winner-take-all dynamic in AI. And it's such a complicated industry to allocate towards. What are you hearing from LPs on appetite for for consumer packaged goods investing broadly?

• 48:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's a lot of curiosity. You know, naturally, these are things that they see in their physical world and you know, when an outcome like Runes crosses, but Runes is not the only one, by the way. I mean, Poppy, Dr. Squash, we've had actually like a slew of billion plus dollar acquisitions in the past year in our industry. And so, you know, they see that in their news cycle, they see it at the grocery store. I think there's a curiosity moment like what's happening here and how does it work? And I think a little bit of that is trying to square that against what they've heard about the D to C revolution not working over the past 10 years. And so I would say there's a wading into the waters. There's definitely any time a news cycle of these acquisition hits, like people start

• 48:56Speaker 03

  to double click and try to understand it and spend time. I think what we found in our meeting specifically is folks appreciate the specialization in recognizing that this is different from technology. So if we were a traditional firm that was trying to spend 15% of our time on it, I don't know that we could do a very good job on this. Us spending 100% of our time on it feels like, you know, more comfort in their minds, but a little bit distant from what they usually do.

• 49:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I think at this point, like if somebody starts a consumer brand and they are talented, they will get introduced to you some way or another. And so you can kind of like meet every, every great entrepreneur, which I feel like would be, is basically impossible in like traditional tech investing.

• 49:47Speaker 03

  That's the goal. I mean, there's not a lot of people that, I mean, there's a few firms that we love and respect that do this, but like, one of the reasons I started this firm is like there's no benchmark Sequoia, A16Z, like if you're, if you're an entrepreneur out there, like there's not that firm that you've always dreamed of partnering with and getting started. And so, you know, eventually myself and a few of my peers decided like we've got to go create that firm for them.

• 50:13John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 50:14Jordi Hays?

  Love it.

• 50:15John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations all.

• 50:16Jordi Hays?

  Great to hang.

• 50:17John Coogan?

  Thanks for coming on to break it down and have a great rest of your day.

• 50:19Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you.

• 50:20Speaker 03

  Great to see you guys.

• 50:21John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Up next, we have Aaron De Souza. He is the founder of Gojection.ai and the Enhanced Games. He's in the waiting room and we'll bring him in to the TV here on Ultradome.

• 50:33Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 50:35John Coogan?

  Aaron, how are you doing?

• 50:37Speaker 04

  I'm great. Thanks for having me on the show.

• 50:39John Coogan?

  Of course. Thanks for being here. Do you want to give us a little bit of your background? You've done a lot in your time. I'm super interested in enhanced games and then we can go into objection.ai at some point, but how are you introducing yourself these days as a multi hyphenate?

• 50:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I'm a lawyer by training. When I was 24 years old, Peter Thiel hired me to lead his litigation against Gawker Media involving the wrestler Hulk Hogan. We won the largest invasion of privacy judgment in history. It's the subject of the bestselling book Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday, forthcoming movie starring Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.

• 51:13John Coogan?

  There's a movie. There's a movie.

• 51:15Speaker 04

  There's a movie, yeah. And since then, I've gone on to found nearly 12 companies, you know, most famous for the enhanced games, this quote unquote steroids Olympics, but launched today, my new one, Objection AI.

• 51:27John Coogan?

  Okay. Do you know who's going to play you in the movie yet?

• 51:31Speaker 04

  I don't know. It's, you know, Hollywood is not like Silicon Valley. It takes them a very long time to make a movie and it seems to go through a lot of different iterations.

• 51:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, it should be interesting. Well, let's, I would love an update on the enhanced games. The first event is happening in late May, is that correct?

• 51:50Speaker 04

  That's correct, in Las Vegas.

• 51:51John Coogan?

  Las Vegas. And talk to me about the scale, the potential value, the goal with that project. It's certainly got a lot of attention. Everyone has a take on it.

• 52:04Jordi Hays?

  Oh yeah, the timing feels pretty good considering it feels like more people than ever are enhancing themselves.

• 52:09John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, with GLP-1s and stuff, which might be banned?

• 52:12Jordi Hays?

  GLP-1s and peptides, which, you know, are, some of them are banned, some are not in traditional sporting events, but...

• 52:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. But what, yeah, what led you to the enhanced games and give us the update there?

• 52:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, I studied philosophy as an undergraduate and I've always been interested in bioethics. And I wrote a paper by Professor Julian Savorescu, who's a professor at the University of Oxford. And he actually argued back in the 90s for the Enhanced Olympic Games. And I learned that there were nearly half the athletes in the Olympics admit to using banned performance enhancing drugs, yet less than 1% get caught. So there's this like real disconnect. And at the same time, things like peptides, TRT are becoming increasingly normal. You know, even people like Secretary Kennedy, you know, our health minister in the United States is quite an advocate for human enhancements. And so I thought to myself, you know, why should we be shackled by the ideas of the

• 53:10Speaker 04

  past? And shouldn't we be able to unleash the full level of human potential using the best of science and technology? And that's where the idea of the Enhanced Games came from.

• 53:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. How many athletes have actually stepped forward and said that they want to participate? Like, how, how, how big is the movement at this point? Obviously, the first Games is happening. Do you want to put it on the similar, like, every two years cadence? Is there demand for more of a UFC-like schedule? How do you think this all works out?

• 53:36Speaker 04

  Uh, it's, it's, the aim is for an annual schedule.

• 53:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 53:40Speaker 04

  Uh, we're very pleased that the company is going to go public through a SPAC combination on the New York Stock Exchange in the coming weeks. Obviously, I stepped down from being CEO a few months ago to focus on my new venture.

• 53:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:52Speaker 04

  So I can't speak to the

• 53:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 53:54Speaker 04

  execs of the, the SPAC. Um, but a $1.2 billion valuation, we're very happy about. Um, and ultimately, uh, it's not the number of athletes participating, it's the quality of athletes. So we have Olympic gold medalists, we have world record holders. And in fact, uh, we've already set our first world record in the 50 freestyle.

• 54:12John Coogan?

  No way.

• 54:13Speaker 04

  Which was set by Christian Kolomev of Greece, uh, in an exhibition event last year. He's running faster than any man in history had up to the point in time. Uh, and he had only been enhanced for a couple of weeks. And so to, to show you how, how much of a difference that could make, Christian was 31 years old at the time, which arguably is about 10 years past his prime for a swimmer.

• 54:32John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. Wow. Okay. Uh, well, take us through Objection AI. What's the, uh, the thesis? How do you, uh, like, what, what led you to start another company at this moment in time?

• 54:43Speaker 04

  I believe that the fundamental problem that we face in our society is truth. There is no sense of an objective arbiter of truth in our society, and this is something that has caused, you know, great societal decay. If we don't have a shared sense of truth, we can't have a functioning civilization. And, you know, two decades ago, we would have said the New York Times is the arbiter of truth. And today, you know, the social platforms don't seem to care about it very much. AI, you know, juggernauts don't seem to care about it very much. And so I said to myself, what is the best way to find truth? And truth is not a vibe, truth is a process. And that process is very well documented in courts. Courts are viewed by Americans as being very trustworthy entities versus the legacy

• 55:27Speaker 04

  news media in particular has seen a collapse in credibility. Fifty years ago, according to the Gallup poll, 70% of Americans trusted the media. Today, that's down to only 30%. And so the goal of Dejection AI is to create a system where anyone can challenge a claim made in the legacy news media. Independent investigators will then investigate it, former CIA and FBI agents. And then all that data is presented to an AI jury to analyze, to figure out if the original claims made by the journalists were true or not.

• 56:01John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 56:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, something that's, it feels like community notes have been a good innovation for like truth online. But the big flaw is that by the time a post gets like a, like solid community note, oftentimes like a million people may have seen it already. They didn't know that there was.

• 56:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, I mean, the logical follow-up is, is speed a problem here? Because I imagine that, yeah, I imagine that if you have to run a whole jury process and have discovery and argue, argument, like the original claim could be baked into the society's like mind share before you have a chance to.

• 56:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, so that's the fundamental problem about news media today is that. False information spreads six times faster than true information. And so the incentives for generating clickbait content is very pronounced, and we've known this for a very long period of time. And so by compressing the legal process, which often takes 10 or 20 years and costs $10 million, as we learned in the Hulk Hogan lawsuit, down to something driven through software and artificial intelligence, down to a couple of days, we can adjudicate factual disputes much, much quicker and much cheaper. The whole process on objection can cost as little as $2,000 and can be done in as little as 24 hours.

• 57:25John Coogan?

  So is the business model to sell directly to people that want to contest claims that are made on the internet?

• 57:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. So if the New York Times writes something inaccurate about you guys and your wonderful podcast, you can file an objection.

• 57:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 57:42Speaker 04

  Then human investigators will investigate the story line by line, source by source. They'll call everyone quoted in the article. And then they'll present that information to an AI jury. And the original author, of course, has the opportunity to respond.

• 57:56John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 57:57Speaker 04

  And say, hey, my reporting was good, it was high quality. But, you know, we live in the era of data, and I think it would be wonderful if every story published by the New York Times included the long-form recordings of each interview. I've done thousands of media interviews. Journalists always record them, but they never publish them in full. And so being misquoted or, you know, anonymous source, these are the tools that in particular print journalists use that have seen a massive degradation in trust.

• 58:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have you been following the Satoshi Nakamoto story recently? That feels like a

• 58:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 58:31John Coogan?

  textbook example of something where it's been disputed, but it's very hard to disprove if you're being accused of being Satoshi. How have you processed that particular story?

• 58:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, then so courts are a very good methodology of finding truth. I think there are only two solid methodologies of finding truth. One is courts and the other is the scientific method.

• 58:52John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 58:52Speaker 04

  And so if you take a scientific method approach, anonymous sources should never be allowed, right? So you can't say to a scientific publication, "A source told me this." You have to be able to replicate the experiment over and over.

• 59:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:05Speaker 04

  Right? Or courts is the alternative method of truth finding is where you have two adversarial parties often arguing antithetical points of view. And what is truth? It's a really important question. It's almost the core question of philosophy. Well, in the court setting, it is who has made the better argument? Who has presented more evidence? And how coherently has that argument been made? And now with the magic of artificial intelligence, we can do all of that very quickly and very cheaply.

• 59:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about tuning different models to actually give you unbiased results? It feels like every different model has slightly different flavors and things that it likes and dislikes and might see things different ways. Like, it feels like a subjective technology. How do you get it to be impartial?

• 1:00:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, so that's a great question. And that's exactly how we face these issues with human juries and human judges.

• 1:00:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:00:09Speaker 04

  Right? So, human judges are extremely infallible. According to a paper from Professor Posner, who's one of the leading scholars of law and economics at the University of Chicago, AI applies the law 100% accurately. Human judges only do it 52% of the time. Because human judges can be swayed by whether they've had lunch or not, whether they're having a bad day, you know, whether they have a savvy lawyer in front of them. And then, in the same way, we use a jury-based system.

• 1:00:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:38Speaker 04

  Five different models prompted to act as if they were different personas of people based on, you know, a statistical sample of how everyday Americans behave themselves and demographic samples. And the models have to find, you know, a majority opinion to pass a verdict.

• 1:01:02John Coogan?

  Are you thinking about integrations with social platforms? Dordi mentioned the community notes system. How do you think about distributing findings once you actually have reached a conclusion?

• 1:01:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, so this is the principal flaw of courts. So courts issue a judgment, but they have no distribution mechanism.

• 1:01:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:01:23Speaker 04

  And we have something called the fire blanket. So we have an algorithmic posting system on X. So that every single claim that is under investigation, we immediately fire off a tweet that says, this claim is under investigation. Please see the full case file. And then when the similar claim is retweeted at some later point in time, after adjudication is complete, we then say that claim is false or that claim is true. Please see the full analysis that was done. So it intercepts the spread of disinformation as it is happening.

• 1:01:59John Coogan?

  Very cool. Dordi, anything else?

• 1:02:01Jordi Hays?

  Excited to follow along.

• 1:02:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:02:06Jordi Hays?

  And the chat wanted to confirm, though, you are not being held hostage right now.

• 1:02:10Speaker 04

  I am not being held hostage right now. I'm in an undisclosed location.

• 1:02:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:02:16Speaker 04

  Because as someone who is often subject to negative media reporting, I like to not show where I live.

• 1:02:23John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Makes sense. Well, good luck and we will talk to you soon. Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:02:28Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me on the show.

• 1:02:30John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day. In other news, Uber is now going back into robotaxis. Uber commits $10 billion to robotaxis and strategy shift. Uber's committed more than $10 billion in buying thousands of autonomous vehicles and taking stakes in their developers, breaking from the asset-light-gig economy business model to avoid disruption from robotaxis. The ride-hailing app has aggressively increased deal-making over the last, over the past year, announcing partnerships with more than a dozen providers, including China's Baidu and US-based Rivian as well as...

• 1:03:05Jordi Hays?

  And here's the kicker.

• 1:03:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:03:07Jordi Hays?

  As well as plans to launch robotaxi services in at least 15 cities in 2026. So they're going to be putting Rivians on the road autonomously?

• 1:03:17John Coogan?

  Or maybe they'll do a deal with one of the other robotaxi providers. Rivian seems like, I mean, great cars, really beloved, but not quite...

• 1:03:25Jordi Hays?

  Everybody says like the autopilot in Rivian is great.

• 1:03:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:29Jordi Hays?

  But... So it's also great in Tesla and we don't see

• 1:03:33John Coogan?

  RoboTaxis like truly scaling yet.

• 1:03:36Jordi Hays?

  I don't know anyone that's that's ridden in a in a RoboTaxi.

• 1:03:39John Coogan?

  But things are moving quickly and you know, but it is 2026 right now. So that is a very aggressive timeline to actually launch RoboTaxi services. But maybe that means more of like partnership with existing RoboTaxi providers. We'll have to dig into it and we'll talk more.

• 1:03:56Jordi Hays?

  Market likes it. Stock is up 6.8% today.

• 1:04:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the the stock has been trading down as Waymo and Tesla expanded services. It sold off, Uber sold off. And when Waymo raised $16 billion, Uber sold off again. And when Zooks planned major expansion, the company Uber sold off as well. The stock is down 23% in the past six months. And investors are starting to get to get concerned about autonomous vehicles. So Uber is responding. Well, without further ado, we have Michael Mignano from Union Square Ventures now in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TDP and Ultra Dome.

• 1:04:34Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 1:04:34John Coogan?

  Let's hit the gong for you.

• 1:04:36Jordi Hays?

  We're going straight to the gong.

• 1:04:40Michael Mignano?

  Oh, man, I love that. I love that gong. Thank you, guys. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

• 1:04:45John Coogan?

  Reintroduce yourself. Tell us where you were and where are you now?

• 1:04:51Michael Mignano?

  Yeah, of course. I'm Michael Mignano. I am a GP at Union Square Ventures. Most recently, a partner at Lightspeed. And then before that, co-founded Anchor, which sold to Spotify. And I'm very excited to see you guys again. Thanks for having me.

• 1:05:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, what motivated the move? Did you just want to go to New York? You want to work with Fred Wilson? Like, what was the what was the reason to jump over to Union Square?

• 1:05:16Michael Mignano?

  Well, I'm from New York. I've always been here. I've always lived on the East Coast. I've always been somewhere in or around New York City. And I've known USV forever. So, you know, I built Anchor here in New York City, pitched them. Back in the day for our seed and Series A and they passed both times unfortunately.

• 1:05:37Michael Mignano?

  Sorry.

• 1:05:39Michael Mignano?

  No, I love it. I love it. Got to know the team, obviously, and after we sold Anchor to Spotify, became an LP in the funds and stayed close and just always loved their approach. You know, USV is famously thesis driven, right? They've always been sort of willing to bet early on the stuff that looks weird, the stuff that looks funny, and I've always really appreciated that approach. And so, late last year, they approached me and they said, "Hey, how about coming over to USV and joining us and joining the partnership?" And had to do it. So, here I am.

• 1:06:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. How should I think about USV right now? How big is the firm? How big is the partnership? It feels like a unique firm at a time when many firms are just going for insane scale.

• 1:06:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, building platforms. But it feels like Benchmark and USV are two funds that could have built platforms and, you know, have made the decision to, you know, stay true to venture.

• 1:06:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:39Michael Mignano?

  Yeah, I think this has always been USV's approach, right? It's been a famously small partnership for a very long time, small in terms of the number of general partners, and small in terms of the fund size relative to lots of other bigger platforms, as you mentioned. And I think they've made it work because of what we talked about a little bit earlier. They've always been willing to have a thesis and have a point of view and go really, really early when, you know, a lot of the other big firms and the big platforms are chasing more consensus deals, to their credit, right? I think the platforms have been very, very successful at using, you know, large, large, vast quantities of capital and speed as a weapon to back the winners. But I think what USV has always done well

• 1:07:23Michael Mignano?

  is said, "You know, we think the world is going in this direction. We're going to bet really, really early. Sometimes we'll get it wrong, but every once in a while, we'll be one of the first investors in Coinbase, or Twitter, or Mongo." And obviously, for a fund of this size, that ends up having a massive impact. And I think, you know, I think that that is the right playbook to be playing moving forward. Obviously, AI is going to create a proliferation of startups like we've never seen before. And I'm not actually sure it will be possible to see them all. And I think the only way you're really going to be able to have a great bet is if you know what you're looking for before you see it. And that's always what USV has done.

• 1:08:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I still am surprised when I look at the App Store charts and see that we really just have LLMs in the charts and not much else. And it feels like that has to, that has to change at some point in the next, in the next year or two. And, and yeah, fully expect that. So where, where do you want to focus your time? What's exciting?

• 1:08:27Michael Mignano?

  Yeah, you know, I've always been somebody that's been excited by great products. You know, I'm a product builder myself. You know, we mentioned Anchor. I have another startup, which we've talked about on here, OBO. So I'm naturally drawn towards products, great, you know, great product oriented founders. When I was at Lightspeed, you know, I led deals like Suno and Granola, which I think for me have always fit that bill. But also, you know, I think take a little bit of an interesting approach that's relevant to building startups in AI moving forward. You know, Suno is, is a company that's taking a form of media and it's leveraging the democratization of that media to not just, you know, optimize an existing workflow or optimize an existing market.

• 1:09:12Michael Mignano?

  They're doing it to build a completely new format and unlock a whole new form of creativity for people. And so I think we're going to see a lot of them moving forward. I think AI is going to unlock use cases and applications that we can't really dream up now. Maybe to your point about there only being like three LLMs at the top of the App Store now. In fact, I, I believe that software is starting to represent more and more a form of media, right? It's so easy to create this stuff. I'm sure you guys, just like me and everyone watching or building apps and creating agents every day. Think about what happened with video. Think about what happened with podcasts, with text. It wasn't just about building the media. It was about the enablement that goes under it, the platforms, the payment rails, the distribution.

• 1:09:55Michael Mignano?

  I think there's probably going to be a massive amount of enablement that goes into supporting the massive long tail of software about to see.

• 1:10:02Jordi Hays?

  Well said. Wanted to get your take on synthetic podcasts. We saw Pomp launched a synthetic, an AI-generated podcast today called Best Stocks. I'm assuming they talk about the best stocks, but I wanted to just get your kind of overall take. We've seen some other AI-generated podcasts start to top the charts. What's your perspective there? Not a venture opportunity, but certainly I would say interesting.

• 1:10:35Michael Mignano?

  Yeah, look, I think it's, I think it's super interesting. You know, back in the day when, when I was building Anchor inside of Spotify, we actually had a partnership with, with WordPress, where if you had a WordPress blog, you could tap a button and it would immediately turn the text and the blog content into a podcast, right? So it was a way for the creators to get more and more distribution. And, you know, I think it was great. We saw a lot of demand from the creators, but it may have been too early on the timeline in terms of the quality of the content and sort of that uncanny valley. And I think that has a lot to do with it.

• 1:11:08Jordi Hays?

  Basically, the voice models just were not very good. Voice models were not good, or you're using...

• 1:11:13Michael Mignano?

  Exactly. The voice models were not that good yet. Obviously, they're a lot better right now. Eleven Labs creates phenomenal voice models. I don't know what this podcast you mentioned is, is using. But I think the closer and closer we get, not only to great voice quality, but also a human-like experience for these hosts, whoever they are on this show, I think the closer we can get, we can get to getting it to work. I mean, one of the reasons people tune into TBPN is not only to kind of hear the news and hear people speak, but it's to watch you guys, right? They like you guys as the hosts, and they like the personality and the human aspect of you guys. And so I think the agents that are hosting these shows are probably going to have to get closer and closer to that and the spectrum before it really takes off.

• 1:11:57John Coogan?

  Did you explore any version of that WordPress to podcast workflow that would sort of on-demand hire a voiceover artist? Was there any demand for that, or did you ever explore that?

• 1:12:10Michael Mignano?

  We did explore that and we, you know, it was one of those things where, again, at the time, it was, it was going to be challenging to spin up the content for that.

• 1:12:21John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:12:22Michael Mignano?

  Quickly enough such that we were confident that there would be enough demand to make it worth, worth it. You know, I think with media and with publishing, people, people really want immediacy, right? We, you know, when we were first building Anchor, actually, the way that we went from being a social audio app to a podcasting platform is, we found that all the people that were publishing just inside the Anchor app said, "We want a podcast. We want this to be on Spotify. We want this to be on Apple." But there were no APIs at the time. So the way that we did that was, we actually had human beings sitting in our office and manually creating RSS feeds and posting those RSS feeds to Apple Podcasts in real time. And fortunately, we were able to do that quick enough, you

• 1:13:04Michael Mignano?

  know, within a couple of hours, that it satisfied the creators. But I think, you know, at the time, your idea, what you're talking about now, the gap just would have been too long. It would have been days or weeks before the content was ever delivered.

• 1:13:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have you, have you reflected on the, just, like, there's such incredible model progress and such incredible AI functionality progress, but I, the, I would have expected to have found, in, in the same ways that the AI-generated podcasts seem to be working and we've seen some audio stuff work, I would have expected to see like a Substack that was AI-generated text that got really popular. And that seems somehow easier from a, from just an AI capability perspective. There's less steps in the chain, but it hasn't really broken through in that way. And I'm wondering if you've ever like, grappled with that question

• 1:13:58John Coogan?

  of like, why that hasn't, why even like the simpler, more condensed text? I don't even know if I follow, I mean, maybe I do, but I, I don't know if I follow any Twitter accounts that are like fully AI-generated news headlines.

• 1:14:12Jordi Hays?

  That you know.

• 1:14:12Michael Mignano?

  This was actually going to be my question to you. I mean, it's possible that that already exists. And maybe these publications or these writers or these journalists aren't really admitting it yet. I mean, I have to imagine a lot of the content we now consume on the internet is AI generated. We may just not know that it is.

• 1:14:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like a lot of it is like this. We're in the centaur period where, you know, the human plus AI works well. And so you see people doing research and then processing it and adding their own spin.

• 1:14:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Alex Heath was talking about how he's using a ton of AI in his writing process. He can, he can say that because people are paying to subscribe to sources to get like net new information that doesn't exist anywhere else.

• 1:14:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:52Michael Mignano?

  And so no one, I don't care. But I think that that only makes, you know, human powered content that more valuable. Again, not to keep bringing it back to you guys. I mean, I think this is a reason that people like this. And I think there's a reason that, you know, sports, live sports viewership is at an all time high. And people are going to concerts, right? I think, I think people crave this, uh, this farm to table human experience.

• 1:15:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. I feel like you've done a good job of that with your content. Uh, can you sort of reintroduce it for folks who might not be fully familiar? Because, uh, the, the, the production quality is extremely high. Uh, but it feels like you're sort of playing a different game in terms of, uh, release cadence. Like making sure that everything is special and not formulaic. But how are you thinking about your own, the, the content that you're putting out these days?

• 1:15:39Michael Mignano?

  To be clear, I think you're referring to the podcast I was running at Lightspeed called Out of Office, which I'm no longer the host of now that I'm not at Lightspeed. However, the philosophy that we and I had for that, I think holds true and I believe in it, which is there's so much content out there on the internet.

• 1:15:55John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:15:55Michael Mignano?

  And the tools have gotten so good at clipping and mass producing video content. Or, you know, two people sort of sitting in the same setting, having the same style of conversation. But you really have to do something different. You guys did something different. There are a number of podcasts out there that are now doing something different. But one of the ideas that, that I had, that we ran, what's that?

• 1:16:16Jordi Hays?

  There's five total.

• 1:16:18Michael Mignano?

  There's about five, uh, maybe six.

• 1:16:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:21Michael Mignano?

  Um, the, the thing, the, the idea that we had for Out of Office was. You know, why does this conversation have to happen in a studio? Or why does it have to happen around a table? Um, how great is it to watch an episode of comedians in cars getting coffee?

• 1:16:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:36Michael Mignano?

  And watching these guys behind the wheel of an awesome car or in their favorite coffee shop?

• 1:16:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:40Michael Mignano?

  Or watching something like Anthony Bourdain, Parts Unknown?

• 1:16:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:44Michael Mignano?

  And watching these two iconic people travel around a really iconic, familiar place? And we thought, hey, can we bring that to the tech podcast? And so that was, that, that's out of office at Lightspeed again. You know, no, no longer something I'm involved with. But stay tuned because, uh, I do think, you know, I and maybe USV will have something similar in that vein. Uh, coming soon. I actually just posted a little bit of a teaser photo on my X a few hours ago. Uh, go check that out if you haven't already. But, but look, I think, I think the, the theme is like to break through right now and break through the noise. You've got to do something that looks a little bit different. And you have to do something really, really high quality because the tools have gotten good enough. There's a baseline quality that you just get out of the box.

• 1:17:29Michael Mignano?

  So if you want to stand out, you actually have to go above that.

• 1:17:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Jordy?

• 1:17:34Jordi Hays?

  How many investments do you expect to make? You know, what percentage of investments do you expect to make in New York versus the West Coast? You know, listing off some of USV, uh, USV's iconic investments, of course. You know, the, the coin bases, the Twitters, et cetera.

• 1:17:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:49Jordi Hays?

  Many of them were on the West Coast, so are you going to be over here a lot?

• 1:17:53Michael Mignano?

  USV's always been a sort of one office, New York centric firm. Obviously the namesake, Union Square Ventures, but USV has also made a lot of money all over the world. You know, you just rattled off some of the locations. When I was at Lightspeed, I was based in New York. And, uh, even though I was based in New York, I was making investments all over. I think, I think most of my portfolio actually was on the West Coast. Obviously, uh, had, had, um, Suno, which we just mentioned in Boston, Granola in London. But a lot of them were in the West Coast. Going to continue to operate that same way. Uh, you know, we'll invest wherever the opportunities are, but, uh, the home base is going to stay in New York City.

• 1:18:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's this, what's the secret to, uh? Getting good deal flow at the early stage, I feel like that's such a differentiator for Fred Wilson throughout his career. You are teasing, you know, some sort of conversation. You've clearly been working with him for a while. What do you think makes USV particularly differentiated in finding great companies early on?

• 1:18:58Michael Mignano?

  I know it sounds simple, but I think it's a willingness to be wrong and actually make predictions. I think so much of this industry is focused on momentum and focused on consensus-driven bets, which again can be very, very lucrative if you get in them and you have the capital to fund them. But I think what Fred and the team have always been great at is having a conversation which lasts maybe not just one partner meeting, but last weeks or months, or in some cases, years, and along the way, making some bets against that idea and against that thesis, which may look wrong for a very, very long period of time. You know, you mentioned Coinbase. USV famously made that really early Coinbase investment, but they had invested

• 1:19:41Michael Mignano?

  in crypto before that, right? They had a strong thesis around crypto before that, and it took some cycles for them to gain conviction in what they ended up seeing in Coinbase. So I think it's about engaging in honest discussion with your partners. It's about not being afraid to have a crazy idea, to like the weird, and to keep that conversation going for a long time.

• 1:20:10John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about wearables these days? It feels like the Meta Ray-Bans are having like an inflection point. There's, you know, Apple's coming to market with stuff. There were a few startups that-

• 1:20:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the Hellside Aura, Whoop-

• 1:20:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:23Jordi Hays?

  I've seen-

• 1:20:23John Coogan?

  It feels like it's maybe under-covered, but have you processed any of that as like an interesting endpoint for technology broadly?

• 1:20:32Michael Mignano?

  I think there are a couple of interesting aspects about it. Jordi, you mentioned earlier at the top of the App Store, we're seeing the same three apps now for the past two years or whatever. Hardware, which I think has often been thought of as too hard, you always hear the term like hardware is hard, and so venture capitalists often ignore it. We might want to rethink that a little bit. Hardware could be considered a wedge now, right? Maybe it's actually a defensible layer where if you can actually have a successful product there, that's going to be a lot harder for a massive foundation model lab to go and replicate than leveraging their distribution for a new form of data collection or whatever the case may be. So I think there could be some interesting edge model or edge data out on a hardware

• 1:21:17Michael Mignano?

  device that is pretty defensible. So that's something interesting I like about it. I think the other thing that's interesting about it is, you guys have talked a lot, I've talked a lot about how context is king and finding these edge data sources is really, really unique. And that's obviously something that has been pretty fascinating about granola, right? They're capturing these conversations that you can't really capture any other way or aren't being captured any other way. And so that provides a lot of value to the model. Hardware offers a similar opportunity, right? Where using hardware, whether it's the glasses or maybe something else completely, a pen, an Oura ring, you're capturing an edge form

• 1:22:01Michael Mignano?

  of data that the labs can't really see unless they have that hardware. So I actually find hardware to be quite compelling at the moment, and I think it actually is an area of opportunity.

• 1:22:11John Coogan?

  How are you seeing startup culture change in terms of like who's hiring? I'm thinking about hardware. I was reading this report, maybe it was in the Journal or the Financial Times, about how more and more students are choosing like electrical engineering, mechanical engineering over computer science because of the rise of AI that can code very effectively and the job market changing. And that feels like potentially a boom for hardware startups. You have to imagine hardware gets less hard if there's just more hardware. Engineers and it's easier to staff up for that. But I'm wondering if you're noticing any other changes around. Location or work, life balance or in in person.

• 1:22:52John Coogan?

  We did the COVID thing. We did full remote, then we went back full in person, then we go in hybrid. Like, how is how are the startups that you're interacting with like looking different than a decade ago?

• 1:23:05Michael Mignano?

  I think the big difference that's happening right now, and this feels like a very recent thing, maybe past a few months, maybe, you know, past six months is I think we're going to see a swing back. Towards the mission driven company. I think, you know, we've seen a lot of capital. Flow into the ecosystem over the past few years, and I think that that has turned a lot of missionaries into mercenaries.

• 1:23:26John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:23:26Michael Mignano?

  And by the way, it's worked phenomenally well. Again, we keep talking about the same. You know, two or three startups that are massively, massively valuable. But I think we're also seeing a lot of churn, right? And a lot of attrition at these companies. And I think it has to do with this mission based thing, right? If you if you think back, maybe. Five years ago or 10 years ago, and some of the behemoths. That emerged from maybe the previous software and startup cycle. These companies were very, very mission oriented. They were all aligned around the same mission. They stayed incredibly lean. Incredibly focused on what they were trying to accomplish. They left the politics and the bullshit out of the office. And they just focused on hitting that mission. And I think. Right now, we're seeing a lot of people get burnt out after just chasing huge, huge paydays.

• 1:24:09Michael Mignano?

  At incumbents or insanely well capitalized startups, and. I think we're going to see the pendulum swing back in the other direction.

• 1:24:17Jordi Hays?

  White pill. White pill.

• 1:24:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, how many last question for me, uh, just because you're the first person from Union Square Ventures to come on the show.

• 1:24:26Michael Mignano?

  Is that true?

• 1:24:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:28Jordi Hays?

  How many? How many? How many partners are there? Like, how big is the investing team? I guess is a better question.

• 1:24:34Michael Mignano?

  There's about, there's about eight of us. And the whole team in general is under 20.

• 1:24:41John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:24:42Michael Mignano?

  So we're a small team. Like I said, we're all in one office. And we talk a lot. You know, when I was at Spotify, Gustav Soderstrom, who I think you've had on the show.

• 1:24:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:52Michael Mignano?

  Had this famous saying inside of Spotify. Everyone at Spotify knows this saying. Gustav says.

• 1:24:58Michael Mignano?

  Talk is cheap, so you should talk a lot. And what he means by that is the cost of getting something wrong is actually way more expensive than the time it takes to actually talk and align and earn the right to go invest or spend or bet on something. And what I've always loved about USV is they have a similar philosophy. They talk a lot. It's a small team, but they spend a lot of time together, forming their point of view on the world. And to your question earlier, I think that's what's giving them the edge.

• 1:25:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, they're very, very lucky to have you and excited to see what you guys do together. It's great to see you.

• 1:25:30Michael Mignano?

  Thank you. You too. And by the way, congrats to you guys.

• 1:25:33John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 1:25:34Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 1:25:35John Coogan?

  We're very excited.

• 1:25:36Jordi Hays?

  Come, come, come see us when you're in LA.

• 1:25:37John Coogan?

  I'm going to LA.

• 1:25:38Jordi Hays?

  And we'll do the same in New York.

• 1:25:39Michael Mignano?

  I'd love to.

• 1:25:40John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you. We'll talk to you later. Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:25:43Jordi Hays?

  You're the man.

• 1:25:44Michael Mignano?

  Thanks, Sean. Thanks, Jordy.

• 1:25:46John Coogan?

  Speaking of Meta, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly moved his desk into the AI lab, working directly with Alexander Wang and Nat Friedman. Zuckerberg is reportedly coding throughout the day. There's a story in the New York Times about AI sunglasses. I feel so sorry for my AI sunglasses. And it opens with this anecdote about trying to use the glasses to identify, what is it? Some sort of bird? It says, "One afternoon on a sunny stroll, I stopped to admire a bright red cardinal singing its heart out in a tree. 'Hey Meta,' I say, 'what kind of bird is chirping in that tree?

• 1:26:30John Coogan?

  My sunglasses make their little ding dong noise, analyzing the world. Finally, they speak. I don't see a bird in the tree or hear any chirping,' they say. I point directly at the bird, which is still chirping. 'I don't see a bird in the tree where you're pointing,' my sunglasses say cheerfully. 'Just bare branches and sky. For several weeks, this is how it goes, the disorienting sense of chatter with a toddler who is drifting off into naptime. Look, it would be easy to dunk on my very expensive, staggeringly incompetent glasses. Critiquing AI these days is like shooting fish in a barrel. And I mean poorly animated fish that keep sprouting human fingers inside that barrel." And so, yeah, it's a very interesting read. Because it's clearly like there's so many times when you're interacting with an old legacy model in a particular

• 1:27:14John Coogan?

  in a particular endpoint where you're not getting the most frontier intelligence and it can really throw you off. Andre Karpathy had this whole take about people that used like early L L Ms that would hallucinate and haven't tried the latest coding models to really understand how powerful the technology is. There's this big division. And so you sort of have to do both acknowledge that diffusion takes time, actually rolling these models out to a device like glasses takes time.

• 1:27:40Jordi Hays?

  And it's interesting with Meta because it feels like their glasses.

• 1:27:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:44Jordi Hays?

  I'm getting served a lot of videos.

• 1:27:46John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, people are using them as GoPros.

• 1:27:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but they're just cameras.

• 1:27:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, as cameras. And I know a lot of people that use them as AirPods replacements, like they use them just to take phone calls, listen to music, because then they don't have anything in their ears and it's just more comfortable for them. They even have clear ones that they can wear on, it doesn't really work on a plane because it's too loud, but when they're just in the office. But actually getting the A I features into these devices is true.

• 1:28:12Jordi Hays?

  They have, they have humor bench.

• 1:28:14John Coogan?

  Oh yeah?

• 1:28:15Jordi Hays?

  Hey Meta, I said one day, tell me a joke. Why did the baseball go to the doctor?

• 1:28:21John Coogan?

  Why Jordy?

• 1:28:22Jordi Hays?

  It had a little rundown in its batting average.

• 1:28:27John Coogan?

  Rundown? Uh, I don't really get it.

• 1:28:30Jordi Hays?

  Swing and a miss.

• 1:28:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, it might be better in this case just to pull from the bank of vetted jokes.

• 1:28:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you don't need to generate one from scratch.

• 1:28:36John Coogan?

  Siri did that early on.

• 1:28:38Jordi Hays?

  Look up, you can just look up some of the best jokes in history.

• 1:28:41John Coogan?

  When Siri initially launched, they had comedy writers write out a whole bunch of jokes and when you ask Siri, tell me a joke, it would just pull one off the shelf that was handwritten by a human about Siri, aware of the context, aware of everything. I'm now, I have triggered Siri, so I'm in trouble on my laptop. But it is, it is just very interesting. Apple, of course, we, we touched on this. They, Mark Erman has a report on the upcoming A I smart glasses. They'll come in several styles and colors. A few of those frames seem like they're direct competitors to Wayfarers. Will be very interesting to see the ecosystem integration. With Apple and Dan Primack has a take here. He says, Apple isn't burning mountains of cash on GPUs

• 1:29:23John Coogan?

  or investing billions into frontier labs, but it still may win the AI race. Success from the sidelines, sort of a contrarian take at a time when Apple doesn't really want to talk about AI right now. They're they're clearly in this They really don't want to talk about AI. But they have partnerships with OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini at this point. They're using AI tools all over the company and it feels like they internally are starting to feel the AGI, but at the same time have a very unique strategy of not overreaching and it could really work out for them. So it's an exciting, it's an exciting time and an exciting story to to follow. Well, without further ado, we have our next guest in the waiting room, Wade Foster from Zapier.

• 1:30:08John Coogan?

  Zapier. Wade, how you doing?

• 1:30:11Speaker 06

  Good. How are you guys doing?

• 1:30:12John Coogan?

  We're good. Great. Good to see you. Thanks so much for coming back to the show. How are things going? Give us the general update on your company. And then there's a million different things that we can talk about, but I'd be interested to know what you're learning from your vantage point as CEO of Zapier.

• 1:30:30Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, you know, we launched our Zapier SDK last week. That's probably the most exciting news. This, you can install it inside of, you know, Cursor, Claude Code, Kodak's, any coding agent you might use. I use it. I'm not an engineer and I basically built like an entire AI Chief of Staff on top of this team thing. And, you know, it runs in the background. I don't have to close my laptop or I can close my laptop lid and not worry about things breaking. So it hooks into all 9,000 different tools and I have it running all over the place. So that's probably the exciting news out of Zapier's land.

• 1:31:03John Coogan?

  Do you, do you feel like the vibe coding boom generally is more heavily tilted towards internal tools, dashboards, reports, chief of staff, B to B applications? Because it feels like Clearly, people are consuming a lot of tokens. They're spending a lot on inference. The models clearly work. The coding agents clearly work. At the same time, I open up the App Store and I'm not seeing the, oh, wow, somebody vibe-coded a Call of Duty competitor that's blowing up on the Steam charts, right? Like, we're just not in this, like, everyone's talking about the new app,

• 1:31:43John Coogan?

  or the new Uber, or the new game that's been created much faster with a leaner team. But everyone has a story of, we pulled forward our roadmap at our company.

• 1:31:55Speaker 06

  Yeah. We've definitely had a renaissance of internal tools internally. We, our marketing team ran a hackathon recently. It was about 50 people on the marketing team. At the end of the week, there was like 80-plus new internal tools.

• 1:32:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:06Speaker 06

  Most of these were like dashboards and, you know, data visualizations and things like that, that in the past marketers, like, especially are pretty analytical.

• 1:32:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:15Speaker 06

  But they may not be like the best at like using SQL or running these things.

• 1:32:18John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:32:19Speaker 06

  And getting access to the data has been clumsy and hard. And now, it just feels like they've got a jetpack on, where they can just go build these like really quick, simple tools that allows them to make like hyper-specialized, hyper-customized campaigns, because they can quickly run an analysis and see, oh, you know, across the last month of like social posts, these are the ones that took off. Here's the common traits about them, so let's figure out how to like tweak our next campaign for the next month to be more like this and less like that. That type of analysis would have been really difficult for a marketer to do solo, you know, in the past. Now it's, you know, less than an hour of work.

• 1:32:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think Terrence Tao had a, the mathematician, had a point about this, where he was saying that like, in his papers, he will use AI agents to create new visualizations that would have taken him multiple days to make. Now, he, but it's not like it's saving him time because in previous papers, he just wouldn't have put the visualization in. And so it's this, it's this element of like people just doing more with more. But I'm wondering like, as you see, you know, so many companies have done this where there's a hackathon for the marketing department or some organization. And the, the, the prompt can often be like, replace yourself. And I'm wondering if you're seeing that actually happen?

• 1:33:40John Coogan?

  Or if it's more like the, the competitive dynamic is everyone's getting more leverage, doing more things and just out of the 20 ideas that they have, they're able to do 15 instead of five?

• 1:33:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, I, I definitely think it's more the latter right now. Uh, you know, a cross-sapper, a hundred percent of our employees are using AI daily. I would say this is like individual AI usage. People are individually more productive. But if you were to ask me, is the company more productive? Institutionally, are we more productive? A lot harder to say yes to that.

• 1:34:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:12Speaker 06

  And I think that this is where like the company is on the cutting edge. This feels like the next thing that everybody's working on is how do we actually accelerate the institution? And this gets harder because you actually have to rethink how the company works. Um, to give you an example, we've gone from a world where code was expensive to now code is cheap.

• 1:34:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:30Speaker 06

  In the world where code was expensive, you had all these processes upfront to talk to customers, to align on roadmaps, to figure out what the right thing to build was. Because if you chose the wrong thing, that was a really expensive mistake. And so all these humans and all these processes exist up here. But when code is cheap, you can get rid of all that stuff. And that takes redesigning jobs or rethinking the human, where the human actually exists in the first place.

• 1:34:55John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:34:55Jordi Hays?

  If you're in YC, you no longer, if you were in YC and you were about to talk to your customer, just cancel the call. You don't need to do it anymore. It's all good. That's an old, no, I'm kidding. No, it's a, it's a, it's a very good point. It's like, hey, show the customer.

• 1:35:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. That's the thing. It's like, you don't need to show. Yeah, it's like a non-tech founder in the past would like show up and like, give them a survey or like, ask them generically about the problem or something like that. And you would get some signal from that. But now a non-technical founder can literally show up and say like, Would like, can you just use this?

• 1:35:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:35:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, and see what happened. And that gives you a lot more information in the past. And so it's just a much different like learning cycle. I think company like companies that are, you know, not in Y C, companies that have been around for a while, have all these systems and processes that have been built up that have to be torn down and reassembled to work in the AI area. And that's where I think the institutional AI really kicks in.

• 1:35:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. How how are you even grappling with the idea of work slop? There was this a great cartoon early on where, you know, the the joke was, take these three bullet points and turn it into an email. And then on the other side, somebody says, take this email and turn it into three bullet points. And people should have just been sending three bullet points to each other the entire time. And I feel like we are hyper in that world where I can send you a, you know, a full essay, a deep research report, a book if I want, a dashboard, a visualization, a hundred page deck. And at the same time, sometimes, you know, the human intuition of knowing, okay, this was a good post, let's just do more of that might be the right intuition. So how have you grappled with, you know, fine tuning the team on?

• 1:36:32John Coogan?

  Okay, it's great. Everyone should be using AI, but let's stay away from work slop.

• 1:36:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, you my co-founder Brian says, you can delegate the work, but you can't delegate the accountability. And so, you know, if you're slinging this stuff, you got to stand behind. It's okay to present AI author work. I do that often. Oftentimes I will say, hey, I was going back and forth with my AI friends.

• 1:36:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:54Speaker 06

  Here is what I found.

• 1:36:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:55Speaker 06

  I have read this and I actually like stand behind it and agree with this. But if you're just gonna like, you know, throw a random prompt in and then pass it off as like your own work.

• 1:37:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:06Speaker 06

  That ain't that ain't cool. And so like, we kind of try and coach people on that, the kind of etiquette around that kind of stuff.

• 1:37:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:37:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, I had that early on. I was working with somebody and they sent me something that had clearly been, you know, hydrated by an L L M. And I was like, you could just send me the prompt because I could actually imagine it exactly what it was. And like, yeah, if there's a fact that we need to look up, we can use it for knowledge retrieval. But I actually don't need all of the hydration. You can just use on the prompt.

• 1:37:35Jordi Hays?

  You guys, you guys are. Remote company, how, do you think that gives you an advantage in the, in the AI era?

• 1:37:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:45Jordi Hays?

  You know, what are the ways?

• 1:37:46Speaker 06

  I think the thing, the biggest advantage we have is every last bit of work exhaust is documented. So all of the stuff is inside of Slack. All of our meetings are recording. You know, every last inch of work that happens, there is a like a, a, a written trace of that. And so we can put chatbots on top of that. We can put L L Ms on top of that and that creates a whole bunch of institutional knowledge that accelerates the work. So a new person coming in can literally figure out, is there a standard operating procedure for this? Is there a skill for this? Is there a whatever to do this thing? And you don't have to go like chase people down in offices and tap on shoulders and sort of hope that the campfire wisdom like finds you.

• 1:38:26Speaker 06

  So I do think remote companies have a big advantage because they do tend to have so much of the work. Has a digital exhaust.

• 1:38:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, how, how are you thinking about like, uh, the, the volume of content? Are you, is it just like stuff everything in one large context window? Are there like, are there agents that are going around and like creating little rollups of things and there's processes for teams to boil things down? Because even, even just the explosion of like, uh, you know, Zoom call recording and note taking can produce like so many transcripts. And I've been sort of shocked by the slow speed of just search in every tool that I use. Because there's so many more words that when I search for receipt in my email or something, I get, you know, every single email possible because they all have so much text now.

• 1:39:18Speaker 06

  So what we have done internally is we built a company brain out that has canonical data. So it exists at a couple of different layers. There's a set of company data. This is like our company strategy, our company values, our ideal customer profile, things like that. That is curated by me and a handful of other people that sort of say, hey, this is the truth in these areas. Then there's team data. And so every team internally has a similar version that kind of cascades down. And then finally folks have individual content that they've sort of used to supplement. That that's private to them. So anytime someone is like talking to their AI, they have this, you know, source of truth that has been curated.

• 1:39:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:55Speaker 06

  Then, you know, folks are know that they can pull in other additional content at any given time. And so for me, you know, if I wanted to pull in a meeting transcript or a Slack thread or something like that, I would point the SDK at both those documents and say, hey, I want you to go review those against the backdrop of this company brain.

• 1:40:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:12Speaker 06

  And so it sort of helps you manage the context window because you can take, you know, bite sized chunks here and here, you know, have the like company brain is like the backdrop to all that stuff and get better insights versus just saying, look at all of Slack or look at all of the meeting notes, which that would just not be very effective because there is a lot of noise inside of that.

• 1:40:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have you seen more, have you seen acceleration either at the lower end, below your average customer size or bigger companies onboarding? Like I imagine that there are a lot of tailwinds right now for you. But what's, where are you seeing faster adoption or more interest?

• 1:40:53Speaker 06

  You know, I think small companies tend to just move faster. They just have less bottlenecks on this type of stuff.

• 1:40:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:58Speaker 06

  That said, I have been somewhat surprised over the last couple of years, how fast enterprises have gotten on to this stuff. You know, they still have more procurement hurdles and, you know,

• 1:41:12Speaker 06

  boxes to check to really take off here, but they're not asleep at the wheel, which is kind of the meme is that, ah, you know, these enterprises move slow and don't make decisions, da, da, da, da.

• 1:41:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think they just have more things that they, considerations that they have to do. But I do think smaller companies generally just are moving a lot faster on this stuff.

• 1:41:30John Coogan?

  Are you, are you feeling CPU poor? We've been seeing like with the, with the explosion of agents and just more work being done on the internet. I could imagine a lot of your customers submitting way more requests. There's an explosion in demand and maybe there's two ways. One is just scale up your servers, but the other one is maybe work on optimizations and rewrites. Now, the company's been optimizing for over a decade now. So I imagine things are pretty optimized, but how have you been processing just increased demand relative to, you know, just infrastructure?

• 1:42:06Speaker 06

  I think the most interesting place we've seen this is new usage patterns. So agents, you know, interact with APIs different than how like a human might set something up. Uh, and you're also able to deploy them faster and at a larger scale. And so, you know, when we're hitting, uh, you know, like, I, I don't know, like, uh, let's use like Slack for example. Like the way you might, you know, set up automation across your Slack channels like looks a lot different than it did pre-AI. Because you have new use cases and new patterns that you want to use that are more, um, I just want more data. Like it just wants to look at more stuff. And so I, I do think that, uh, that's probably the, the most interesting changes. The, the usage patterns are, are, are different in the AI world.

• 1:42:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. For some of the more like basic workflows, what is the, what is the pitch for using, uh, Zapier? Instead of vibe coding, something that takes my LinkedIn post and emails it to me or dumps it in my Slack? Because that feels like something that you could effectively one-shot. But then you get caught in who's going to maintenance that or who are you serving that? What happens when the API changes? Like, uh, I feel like there's a lot of, uh, excitement about, oh, I can vibe code this in an hour. Uh, and maybe people aren't thinking about what it takes to maintain a service. But how are you, how are you, uh, reiterating the benefits of being on Zapier?

• 1:43:31Speaker 06

  I think the, the fact that we maintain all this stuff is a huge advantage. Uh, the other thing is it's storing your tokens very safely. Uh, a lot of these vibe coding tools will say, hey, just copy and paste your API key here. And it goes into a plain text file, uh, that might get shipped up to GitHub and might get shipped somewhere else. That's like, ooh, crap, we're in trouble. And so, you know, Zapier is just tends to be a safer place to do this. Plus, you know, we have all the vibe coding, uh, capabilities as well too. So, you know, hey, take, take my leads from this service and add them to that and da, da, da, da. You know, Zapier is able to do, uh, a lot of that as well. So it tends to be a little bit, you know, safer, more reliable place to, to run these types of automations.

• 1:44:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:10Jordi Hays?

  Uh, timelines around fully autonomous companies where you can have an agent that you just kind of prompt it to, uh,

• 1:44:20Jordi Hays?

  You know, this has been an idea that's been around for a while. You know, you just say like, figure out a way to make money selling software and it just goes off and it maybe makes some software and figures out how to market it. This already kind of exists in kind of the trading world, hedge fund world where they're creating algorithms that just go out and figure out ways to make money. But on the software side, I'm curious, given everything you know about, you know, automating business processes, when do you think it's really possible?

• 1:44:51Speaker 06

  I, to your point, I do think for some very simple things, like it is pretty close. Trading, you know, whether you're actually good at it or not, TBD, but like, pretty dang close there. I also have a former Zapier employee, this guy Nat Elyason, who made it, has an open, yeah, he's an open claw that, you know, started making money on courses. And, you know, basically was, yeah, open claw was just like figuring out how to go do it. And so, you know, it's like, pretty close. So you're starting to see-

• 1:45:26Jordi Hays?

  There's also use cases, like, like, I think of like, a simple app in the Shopify App Store where you could just say like, go compete with this app. And then it's like, pretty obvious where you need to advertise and you can figure out the equation between like, you could just make the, make a clone of the app and then figure out the equation of like, what is the minimum amount that I need to charge in order to be able to spend enough on user acquisition to like, eke out some like, very thin margin that covers the cost of inference?

• 1:45:57Speaker 06

  Totally. The thing I don't know is if it's truly going to be a zero person company or not. Like, it does still feel like you need a human to like, supervise this thing to like, you know, when it goes off the ropes, to actually have the initial idea. So, you know, I don't think we're at this dream where you like, poke the AI-

• 1:46:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's always gonna be, yeah, there's always gonna be qualifiers. Even the one person, one billion dollar company that was in the New York Times, it's like, okay, like, he hired his brother and then also, he had a bunch of contractors. And so, there's never, like, even if you do create like, an autonomous business, like, if it's working at all, then suddenly there becomes an economic incentive to maybe, hey, maybe I should spend an hour on it. And then like, well, is it still really autonomous if you spend an hour a week on it?

• 1:46:41Speaker 06

  Man, that's the thing I think is also gonna make it hard for these things to be crazy pervasive is that if someone is being that successful, there's another person that would look at the thing you're doing and say, well, I can do that, too. And let me go compete against your margins.

• 1:46:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:57John Coogan?

  How do you think about terminology? Jordy always gives this example of a company that had workflows and they just rebranded it agents and they didn't really change anything under the hood. And it feels like there's immense pressure from investors and marketers to just use the latest lingo. And sometimes that's useful because the capabilities change and so the nomenclature should change, but we're in this weird continuum where there's there's workflows, AI workflows, agentic workflows, full AI agents, like, are these meaningful definitions? How have you been processing all of this since you're sort of in all categories?

• 1:47:33Speaker 06

  We definitely have a slide that explains the difference between all three of the things you just said.

• 1:47:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:39Speaker 06

  Practically speaking, though, they're all agents. You know, I'm sure like somebody who is, you know, like a master wordsmith would like, you know, try and debate the finer nuances of it. But what I see in the market is practically what people are saying is an agent is a thing that does automation for me. Whether it's purely deterministic or whether it's purely agentic, it's kind of an agent at the end of the day. Now, you know, deterministic workflows have some advantages and disadvantages. Agentic workflows have some advantages and disadvantages. As you start to go build these in production use cases, you probably should understand the difference between these things.

• 1:48:19Speaker 06

  But practically speaking, we see customers showing up and they haven't really figured that stuff out yet. They're just like, I have a problem and I want that problem solved.

• 1:48:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about vibe coding? Like, how broad do you think this trend goes? I saw someone, I think it was, who was it? Downtown Josh Brown joking about how he's getting sent like a new vibe coded thing every single day.

• 1:48:46Jordi Hays?

  He gave the example of like, somebody that makes an app that like, displays their Spotify playlist nicely. And he's like, you're not my child. Like, I'm not gonna spend time on this. I don't owe you any time. But of course.

• 1:49:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm just wondering how you're processing like it feels like this year vibe coding is going very mainstream. A lot of people are toying with it. What do you think retention looks like? What do you think the knock on implications are of this? Any like security concerns? Just how are you processing this idea that like the number of people that will have created software will probably like 10x this year?

• 1:49:24Speaker 06

  I think it's very exciting. You have all these folks who have had ideas or are coming up with ideas for problems to solve, etc. But in the past, those ideas have kind of been locked away because they can only implement like a small piece of it. And now with vibe coding, it feels like you can do a lot more stuff. And so I think that's why we've seen such a surge is that everyone feels like they can get these creative ideas out of themselves. I do think as an industry, there's going to have to be a lot more stuff built out to make these things work in all the various, you know, use cases. I think one of the places Zapier is like very helpful is, you know, connecting to all your data sources and doing it in a secure way, like we'll handle all your authentications clearly. And so that's

• 1:50:06Speaker 06

  a way that we can sort of, you know, play a really important role in how people go build out, you know, these infrastructure. And it can move less from vibe into more trusted, you know, infrastructure.

• 1:50:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, makes a lot of sense. Jordy, anything else?

• 1:50:23Jordi Hays?

  No, this was great.

• 1:50:24John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Have a great rest of your week and we'll talk to you soon, Wade.

• 1:50:29Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you.

• 1:50:30John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Before we bring in our next guest, Kevin Warsh, who is the new Fed Chair nominee, had a financial disclosure and has a ton of startup investments. He's in SpaceX and a whole bunch of other companies.

• 1:50:46Jordi Hays?

  Bunch of crypto.

• 1:50:47John Coogan?

  He's a one man EC machine.

• 1:50:49Jordi Hays?

  Brave that the browser.

• 1:50:53John Coogan?

  Uh, the tech-enabled patent law firm, uh, D Y D X.

• 1:50:59Jordi Hays?

  Protocol.

• 1:51:00John Coogan?

  He's in a lot of stuff. Uh, I think some of this is through, I think some of this is through funds that he's invested in, but still it's a, it's a whole bunch of, uh, it's a whole bunch of companies, uh, and it's interesting to, to dig into. He also owns a, a horse racing stable, something like that. Did you see this? Uh, it also includes his role as a general partner in the stable, a horse racing operation.

• 1:51:24Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 1:51:25John Coogan?

  He, he is invested in all sorts of things. So he will be, uh, disclosing all of that. I'm sure people will dig in more as he, uh, goes towards the committee vote. Um, but, uh, without further ado, we have our next guest in the waiting room. We have Unker from Keri. He is the founder and is here with an exciting M and A update. How are you doing?

• 1:51:47Ankur Nagpal?

  I'm doing great. Looks like, looks like we both have some M and A to announce in the last couple of weeks. Yeah.

• 1:51:53John Coogan?

  Yes. Uh, talk us, uh, first, let's start by.

• 1:51:57Jordi Hays?

  Start with the gong.

• 1:51:58John Coogan?

  Let's start with the gong. Let's hit the gong.

• 1:52:00Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Now we can continue.

• 1:52:05John Coogan?

  But let's, uh, yeah, let's talk about, uh, the, the company that you built, the background, maybe your background even before starting this company that was just acquired.

• 1:52:16Ankur Nagpal?

  Yeah, absolutely. Before this, I used to run a company called teachable.com, which helped people make money online for the first time. So it helped people create online courses and coaching and, um, had a successful exit there during the pandemic. Took a couple of years off trying to figure out what I wanted to build. And then I started Keri, uh, about three and a half years ago. And the mission with Keri was we help people first make money online. Now we'll help them grow their net worth, be smart about taxes. Um, I think I came on the show last to talk about taxes. So a lot of that stuff. And now here we are three and a half years later, excited to share that we've been acquired by two separate companies.

• 1:52:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Explain that. That, uh, it feels very uncommon. How did this happen? What, who's going where? What's the, how did this deal?

• 1:53:00Jordi Hays?

  Like it's my second exit. I want to get acquired twice this time.

• 1:53:03Ankur Nagpal?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:03Jordi Hays?

  At this rate, the next, the next company, you might get acquired by four different.

• 1:53:08Ankur Nagpal?

  Yeah. Yeah, twice the diligence, you know, nothing like like running two simultaneous M and A processes. But no, the overall company is bought by Angel List, which is a platform I've had a longstanding relationship with. You know, my first company raised money on Angel List. I hired a lot of my team there and my funds there. They saw the marketing engine we've built. They saw our ability to build and launch financial products. And they wanted to buy us to build and launch new financial products to make the private markets more accessible. As they did this, you know, we obviously have built what I consider to be the best solo 401k self-employed retirement platform. They didn't really have a logical kind of use for that asset.

• 1:53:49Ankur Nagpal?

  So we partnered with a company called Lettuce Financial that does tax, bookkeeping, payroll, insurance for self-employed people. And that's where we're selling the retirement platform.

• 1:53:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:53:58Ankur Nagpal?

  So it's almost two, two separate acquisitions.

• 1:54:01John Coogan?

  So yeah, what does that look like from a customer perspective? I mean, maybe walk me through the first, like the, the actual go to market for the company while you were building it, what the last couple of years looked like. Because then we can go into, you know, where, what the experience for the customers is like.

• 1:54:16Ankur Nagpal?

  Yeah. So our go to market, which I think we, we were quite good at is we never spent a single dollar on paid marketing. I think a lot of it was content, education, teaching people about the insanity of the tax code, which is. There's something fitting, by the way, in announcing our acquisition on April 15th. It was completely unintentional. But it's, it's funny. It's funny how that happened.

• 1:54:37Jordi Hays?

  The amount of times I would read like one of your posts and then send it to my CPA and just be like, please make sure that we're.

• 1:54:44John Coogan?

  Following this.

• 1:54:45Ankur Nagpal?

  You're doing this.

• 1:54:46John Coogan?

  So yeah, what, what, what was the, was the marketing strategy go direct or were you doing, I mean, it sounds like.

• 1:54:51Ankur Nagpal?

  Go direct, content, education.

• 1:54:53John Coogan?

  Content education. What platforms worked the best?

• 1:54:56Ankur Nagpal?

  We had a personal finance newsletter with over a hundred thousand people, which worked quite well. Twitter has always worked well. I do think there's some percentage of people who follow me on Twitter are going to be relieved to see less tax content. A lot of buddies be like, dude, like, like, Leo. But. But look, I think, you know, I'm excited for the next chapter with Angel List, where we will apply a lot of the same, you know, go to market to launch new products for the private markets. Meanwhile, lettuce is, the platform stays exactly the same. Customers will, you know, only get a better experience since lettuce allows people to also do taxes, payroll, health insurance for self-employed people. I'll continue to stay involved there as well with more of my data to time on Angel List, but most of the team ends up going to lettuce.

• 1:55:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was, uh, what was the founding team like? Who did you hire? How big did the company get? Talk to me about like the shape of the company.

• 1:55:49Ankur Nagpal?

  Yeah, absolutely. So we, we got to about 25 people, about 4 million in ARR. Founding team had, you know, four, four other co-founders. And yeah, it was, it was, the business was at a point where it was growing quite nicely, where we got to about 250 million in assets on the platform. However, looking at all the things happening in the market today, you know, you look at it in like three and a half years and 4 million ARR, it's a good business.

• 1:56:16John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:56:16Ankur Nagpal?

  But you look at some of these modern AI companies and you're like, wow, you know, it's a, it's a good business, not a, not, not sort of the crazy multiples you see these days.

• 1:56:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about the, the, the, I mean, I guess like level set for me on the boom of the solo entrepreneur? Like what have you seen there? What, what, what, what has stuck out to you? And then I want to talk about that in the context of Angel List.

• 1:56:37Ankur Nagpal?

  Yeah. So we stumbled upon this in my last company where for the first time we saw, you know, tens of millions of people start a business online. I think marketplaces made it very easy for anyone to get attention. And when you got attention, you could start to monetize this. So saw that first happening at Teachable, but then kind of kept investing in the creator economy and seeing the growth of that. And when it came time to launch the new business, which was carry at the time, realized that like so many things are provided to you by your job, like your retirement plan, your insurance, all of that. As a self-employed person, you may be financially doing quite well,

• 1:57:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:57:13Ankur Nagpal?

  but you have to go figure it out for yourself. And the solo 401k specifically was one of those too good to be true sort of personal finance things where it's a private. 401k plan just for yourself, you can invest in literally any asset you want. Um, your money grows and compounds tax-free. You can use it all to contribute to a Roth IRA, you can borrow money from it, you can get a tax credit for setting one up. I was reading this and I'm like, this is insane. Like, why, why isn't anyone like doing anything about it? So that's where we built CARRY, where, you know, we kind of help, I think, 4,000 separate people set up their retirement plans and custody their dollars and all of that.

• 1:57:51John Coogan?

  And then within the Angel List ecosystem, how do you see, it feels like there's a continuation of the solo entrepreneur boom. Vibe coding is obviously a big piece of that. Uh, I, I definitely agree with a lot of people that have come on the show and talked about this idea that maybe we're not at a one-person, one-billion-dollar company yet, but just the ability to build something that is software with a smaller, leaner team sort of lends itself to maybe lower capital requirements, not needing to go the traditional venture path because it might look more like a lifestyle business. But I'm wondering how you think the financial markets will react to that dynamic?

• 1:58:30Ankur Nagpal?

  Yeah, absolutely. I think we're seeing a lot, the rise of the one-person business is only becoming bigger, but the Angel List acquisition was also, we spent a lot of our time educating people on investing and, you know, being smarter with money. And I think there's still a big opportunity to make private markets more accessible. I mean, we're seeing this with companies going public later and later, so much of the wealth creation, people are locked out of. I mean, you can, I'm like, come on, you can, you can buy prediction market contracts on how long a handshake will last. You can, you know, gamble on shitcoins. So I don't really buy the whole, like, we're protecting people angle.

• 1:59:05John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:59:06Ankur Nagpal?

  So the idea with Angel List is we're going to spend some time and figure out sort of, how can we take some of this wealth creation that's historically been only for a very few people and make it more accessible, but in a way that's actually, you know, fundamentally good and investor-friendly products?

• 1:59:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:26John Coogan?

  In a perfect scenario, do you think that the, uh, the public funds that invest in private market companies should be basically valued at 1X NAV? Because we've seen a couple of things go out and they get really highly valued and it feels like some sort of like, okay, the market's not efficient here.

• 1:59:46Ankur Nagpal?

  Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of very, very big IPOs coming up that will that will determine, I think, like, I know I'm going to sound dramatic, but the future of the private markets in a lot of ways, because there is such a massive disconnect right now, where you have so many fundamentally good companies in the public markets getting completely slaughtered. Meanwhile, all kinds of private businesses are, you know, continuing to rip. So I think, I think there's going to be a reckoning. I think, you know, companies are staying private longer. But, you know, I mean, like, I would, I would imagine Anthropic and OpenAI have unofficial markets that make them more traded than a lot of public securities. So like, you know, the, the line is blurring. There are effectively stock prices for a lot

• 2:00:28Ankur Nagpal?

  of these late-stage private companies. So I think it's a really interesting time. And it's, to me, inevitable that we allow private markets to access more of this.

• 2:00:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, I know you guys have some big news coming up, so I have a lot more questions, but we'll save it for when you guys are ready to announce, which I'm looking forward to. But congratulations to the whole team. I think it's super smart to, you know, make this decision, and I can't wait to see what you do at Angelus. It's going to be incredible.

• 2:00:58Ankur Nagpal?

  Yep, appreciate it. Thanks for having me on, guys.

• 2:01:01John Coogan?

  Thanks so much. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day.

• 2:01:03Ankur Nagpal?

  Bye-bye.

• 2:01:03John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Bailey Pumfleet from Cal.com. Cal.com is considering going closed as AI agents overwhelm the open-source ecosystem. We're excited to have Bailey join us. How are you doing?

• 2:01:19Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:01:19John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:01:20Speaker 08

  Hey, how's it going? Been a busy day.

• 2:01:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, very busy day. Please introduce yourself and the company. We've reacted to some Cal.com posts in the past, but it's a fascinating company. So take us through the shape of the business, a little bit about yourself, and then we'll go into the decision today.

• 2:01:37Speaker 08

  Yeah, Cal.com has been an open-source scheduling software. We've been around for like, five years. The whole company has been around being open source. And my co-hosts are huge fans of the open-source space. And, yeah, today, we made the announcement that we're actually going to be closing Source, which is a very tough decision and quite a controversial one.

• 2:01:58Jordi Hays?

  Before you, before you continue, your audio keeps kind of cutting in and out. Do you have headphones? Or I don't know if you're kind of covering your, your mic at all. I don't know if you're picking that up.

• 2:02:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it sounds a little muffled.

• 2:02:09Jordi Hays?

  Hearing every other word.

• 2:02:11Speaker 08

  Oh dear, is this any better?

• 2:02:13John Coogan?

  That's a lot better, actually. Whatever you did.

• 2:02:15Speaker 08

  Well, yeah, that's a zoom, a zoom magic.

• 2:02:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, thank you.

• 2:02:19Speaker 08

  Um, but yeah, so, um, you know, we, we started this company as huge believers in open source. And, um, I'm caught into a lot of shifts in AI. Um, the whole sort of risk perspective has completely changed. AI is now able to break code at completely unimaginable speeds. It's the one thing that nobody's really talking about. Um, we've seen little drops about like Anthropic's mythos model. And nobody has really taken the time to just kind of understand the ramifications, which things like that can have on not just open source, but broader application security.

• 2:02:58John Coogan?

  Uh, what was the business model, uh, in the prior era? How, how, if you're an open source software, uh, how do you keep the business running?

• 2:03:07Speaker 08

  Fundamentally, the business model has not changed at all. Um, so we've always been open source and the code has been open. And that's mainly for the things that the average person would need to be able to run their own, you know, scheduling service, um, on their own domain or something like that. Um, as a business, we actually sell this software commercially. And, um, you know, open source is actually something that benefits us commercially. Because we can go to people and we can say, hey, you can look at the source code and you can verify that we're not doing anything sketchy with your calendar data.

• 2:03:39John Coogan?

  Hmm. Uh, what, if any, are the benefits of being open source during the, you know, AI agent boom? Because I imagine that you are getting automated pull requests and vulnerability reports. Are there any silver linings that you, you know, things you put in the, in the pro column before you realize that the con column overwhelmed the pros?

• 2:04:05Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think a lot of these things remain to be true that, you know, with open source, everybody can audit your code. Um, so, you know, especially with AI producing a lot of slop nowadays. Um, the one thing that we have going for us is that we have code which is written by humans and reviewed by humans. And so it definitely creates a lot of trust in that sense. Um, it's just that, um, You know, for us, there's a lot of pros really. And we also just genuinely care about open source. We care about trying to do the right thing with this business. We're going to make money and we're going to do our thing, whether we're open source or not. And I think one of the common misunderstandings about this discussion is that it's some kind of like business decision that it leads to greater profit for us.

• 2:04:50Speaker 08

  But, you know, really, we just always try and do the right thing by our customers and by our community.

• 2:04:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:59John Coogan?

  Talk about reputation farming attacks. I haven't heard that much about this. What is going on in the open source ecosystem with reputation farming?

• 2:05:11Speaker 08

  What do you mean by reputation farming specifically?

• 2:05:14John Coogan?

  Specifically like agents that are trying to go and make low quality contributions in order to, you know, earn some sort of reputation in the open source ecosystem so that they're more likely to see other pull requests accepted.

• 2:05:31Speaker 08

  Yeah, I asked for clarification there because there's actually a lot of different sort of like branches of reputation farming here. You have, you have, for instance, like these people out here who are just trying to use AI to attack open source, to just like get cheap bounties. You get people who are using AI to make small contributions to open source. And maybe they might be trying to get open source bounties for developing code. Maybe the end goal inside is to get a job at one of these sort of companies or something like that. But, you know, just like how we see a ton of AI slop on LinkedIn and things like that, we're seeing a lot of AI slop on GitHub. Granted, for us, that doesn't really affect everything that's happened today.

• 2:06:17Speaker 08

  We don't make any decisions because, you know, there are some like AI slop pull requests. But that is something I'm hearing a lot from other projects where it's really hard for smaller teams to deal with just the sheer amount of review workload.

• 2:06:32John Coogan?

  How are you, is there, I mean, it's weird because you're already open source. There's always the possibility that a paying customer would say, you know what? I'm just going to self-host this. So in some ways, by being open source, you don't really face the competitive threat of, oh, I'll just vibe code this software and I won't use something off the shelf or I won't pay you. But is, is there a business threat from AI? Is the business threat greater now that, I mean, obviously the model capabilities are, are greater, but being closed source sort of incentivizes people to say, hey, if I want to get it for free, I should vibe code it.

• 2:07:08Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think the question about can vibe coding replace my SaaS startup is, you know, the, the hot thing right now.

• 2:07:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:16Speaker 08

  We feel pretty confident in our defense of that, whether we're open or closed source, because scheduling is so fragile and so nuanced. Like, if, if you say, okay, I can build a basic scheduler in a weekend, I probably believe you, you probably can. But to build something the scale of cow.com that actually works in, you know, all these enterprise use cases and things like that, it's a lot harder, to be honest. And, um, you know, you're going to run into so many little hiccups that just AI, um, you know, sort of vibe coding concurrently sort of hit.

• 2:07:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's, I, I, I mean, I have to imagine that the models will be able to, to create a good scheduling app, but it's more about, I, I, and I wonder if you agree with this, but it feels like it's more about the potential of, uh, just a company prioritizing their time. Because there's, if there's so many other things and you're spending your time rewriting and maintaining all of your custom in-house vibe-coded tools, uh, if you just pull something off the shelf, even if it just costs a couple, you know, 20 bucks a month or whatever, um, you're just going to have more mind share towards, oh, the scheduler broke, or it's down, or it, there's a security vulnerability, we need to patch it. Instead, you can go focus on whatever your actual business is.

• 2:08:33John Coogan?

  And so I imagine that the prioritization is a big factor there, too.

• 2:08:37Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, it's the same way. Nobody's going to build their own Stripe for payment processing, or you're probably not going to build Intercom for your customer support. You absolutely can do that, but is it really worth it? At the end of the day, for us, our business model has never really relied on gatekeeping anything, but just more that bringing something out of the box and just deploying it and getting selling is the most important thing to pretty much every founder.

• 2:09:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come and explain it to us and break it down. Good luck with the decision and the reaction from the community.

• 2:09:13Jordi Hays?

  And one of my favorite dot coms.

• 2:09:15John Coogan?

  It is a great dot com, cal.com.

• 2:09:16Speaker 08

  Thank you.

• 2:09:17Jordi Hays?

  Still underrated, even after all these years building on it.

• 2:09:21John Coogan?

  Well, have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one, Bailey.

• 2:09:25Speaker 08

  Thanks, guys.

• 2:09:25John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Up next, we have Han Wang from Mintlify. He's the co-founder.

• 2:09:31Jordi Hays?

  And Allbirds, where the markets are closed, but Allbirds is down almost 10% after hours.

• 2:09:38John Coogan?

  Off of the high?

• 2:09:40Jordi Hays?

  It ended at 17.

• 2:09:42John Coogan?

  Okay, that's pretty high. That's a very big departure from, it was a $10 million company, $20 million company yesterday, and now it is over $100 million company. That is a massive gain. So we'll see where Allbirds goes. They have a lot to prove, but we're rooting for them. And we're also rooting for Mintlify. Let's bring in Han from Mintlify. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 2:10:04Speaker 09

  I'm doing really, really well. Hey, thanks so much, guys, for having me on today.

• 2:10:08John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for coming on.

• 2:10:09Jordi Hays?

  Love the energy. Are you fired up? You seem fired up.

• 2:10:12Speaker 09

  Oh, Allbirds proved to the rest of us that you can just do things, and that's the energy that we aspire for.

• 2:10:20John Coogan?

  Indeed. Yeah, it was a wild story, but we're not here to talk about Allbirds anymore. Tell us about you. Give us your backstory and then tell us about the company, and then we'll get into the news.

• 2:10:29Speaker 09

  Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Han, one of the co-founders of Mintlify. We founded the company in 2022, really off of the simple idea that we wanted to, to help enable other builders, right? I've been a programmer since I was 11 years old, and it's just basically been defining elements with my, there you go.

• 2:10:58Speaker 09

  I'm so curious by all the, no, I love it. And basically wanted to build a company enabling other developers because it was, you know, who I was and who I fundamentally am. And now, cut forward a few years, Mintlify now powers, you know, the docs for companies like Anthropic, Microsoft, Coinbase, OpenClaw, Perplexity, and now well over 20,000 others. You know, that now reaches over 100 million people every single year, which is, you know, something that we're incredibly proud of and, you know, of the impact that we have.

• 2:11:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, I mean, fundamentally, developer docs are text on an HTML website, essentially, but what's usually unique is the harness and the environment that, you know, migrates any changes to the code or API endpoints onto those docs. What was the first approach to actually deliver something unique or more enterprise-ready than, say, some of just like the open source, like reverse engineering the URLs and just statically serving it, which is what I think most people will be familiar with? What was like the V1, like, okay, we have product-market fit, this is better than the status quo, and then we'll go into the AI era?

• 2:12:18Speaker 09

  Absolutely. Initially, when we started, it was off a very simple idea that anything on the market wasn't fundamentally built for developers, right? Which is so ironic because it's the developers who are often maintaining the content, it was developers who are often reading the content, and everything that was out there was just kind of like static site builders that were, you know, often adhering to like a different audience, it felt like. And having personally, you know, suffered from so many bad docs out there, I was like, hey, look, like, if we're gonna go build one, let's go build the one that we always wish we had. And let's make that great.

• 2:12:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:57Speaker 09

  And it turns out, those opinions that we kind of made into building this platform really resonated with a lot of the industry, right? It started initially with, you know, like, a few of our YC batchmates, then grew to about a quarter of the entire YC batches, and then it grew eventually now to serving with some of the largest companies, you know, including Microsoft and others.

• 2:13:21John Coogan?

  So... How do you think about integrating AI? I imagine that there's, there's more docs than ever that need to be written. Those docs need to be read by AI. But then also whenever a new endpoint is created, even if it's created very quickly, it needs to be documented equally as quickly. How have you integrated AI into the product?

• 2:13:45Speaker 09

  Yeah, many different ways, but I think it's really important to first take a step back and understand the changing role of all of this. Right? When we started the company in 22, it was a very simple idea. Hey, like docs are almost like, you know, you can think of them almost like, you know, an instruction manual.

• 2:14:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:03Speaker 09

  Right? Like, you know, when you assemble, like, let's say, you know, Lego bricks and like, you know, Lego kit, you know, you have to read the assembly manual in order to figure out how these things work. It's written by people.

• 2:14:13Jordi Hays?

  You don't have to. You can do it the old fashioned way.

• 2:14:17Speaker 09

  There you go.

• 2:14:19Jordi Hays?

  But I get your point.

• 2:14:21Speaker 09

  Yeah. But now it's really important to understand that 50% of the viewers for the content is actually not humans anymore. It's actually AI. So we basically took a look across all of our data, you know, a few months back and we're like, look, you know, we felt the change in AI agents being the end users. What did that actually look like? So we went through, proxied our viewers, identified what are agents and what are humans? And out of curiosity, John, Jordy, I'm curious, if you guys had a guess, like, what percentage of traffic do you think now comes from agents versus humans?

• 2:14:55Jordi Hays?

  Didn't you just say 50%?

• 2:14:56Speaker 09

  Oh, I said 50%.

• 2:14:59John Coogan?

  I was thinking it was a trick question.

• 2:15:00Jordi Hays?

  I was like, trick question. It's actually 500%.

• 2:15:04John Coogan?

  50/50 is an interesting place to be because I feel like it'll, like, it was probably 0% a couple of years ago and it'll probably be 99.999% very quickly.

• 2:15:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would have, I would have actually guessed higher if you hadn't said.

• 2:15:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:15:17Speaker 09

  Yeah, literally. It went from 15% about 12 months ago to about 50%.

• 2:15:23John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:15:24Speaker 09

  A few months ago. And I would say now it's like closer to 60, 70%.

• 2:15:28John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:15:29Speaker 09

  And so we have a very strong opinion that. By the end of the year, to your point, it's going to start to look like 90 plus percent.

• 2:15:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And if for no other reason than a developer will just be using a chat app to interface and ask the questions that they want and have the chat app go to the particular website, pull everything in, contextualize it at their level, based on their memories, based on those particular questions they asked, instead of opening up 12 tabs and scrolling through a bunch of different endpoints.

• 2:16:00Speaker 09

  Exactly, exactly it. And also, if you think about even like what the developer work cycle is nowadays, right? It's like, I'm getting here to ask Claude Code to go vibe code my product, vibe code my app. And if, for instance, I'm like, hey, let's go and use, you know, let's figure out how to implement Stripe or a new feature or an integration, it's gonna, the first thing it needs to do is actually crawl through the content to figure out how it's done.

• 2:16:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:24Speaker 09

  Right? And so to kind of tie it back into the Lego Kit Assembly Manual, if you're tasked in a way to go do it, the first thing it's going to need to do is to read that instruction manual.

• 2:16:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:34Speaker 09

  And so we view the change of content out there, not so much like a platform or like a website like it used to be, but like a crucial part of infrastructure for agents to understand how to implement, how to understand the world, and how to even, maybe even surface like, you know, whether or not you should use your product.

• 2:16:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:53Speaker 09

  Because of what it knows.

• 2:16:54John Coogan?

  How do you think about that? I mean, you have some huge customers, like the biggest companies in the world. At the same time, like, random, like, people that don't even have a business are like vibe coding software. And do they need to be releasing developer documentation? Will they be your customers in the future? Like, is the long tail gonna get longer or fatter?

• 2:17:17Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:17:17John Coogan?

  Or, or, or do you think this is, you're gonna stay focused on enterprise consolidation? Like, the really, really high traffic, the important endpoints that get pulled off the shelf from agents consistently?

• 2:17:30Speaker 09

  Yeah, that's a really good question. What we're seeing is a bit of both. So while it's more important to optimize for like the heavy hitters, because those products are getting more usage than ever before, and to make sure that they're really well optimized for agents, it is also equally important for like your next two-person, you know, YC startup, or your billion-dollar one-person company to make sure that their product is also out there. Because in the age of AI where agents are making the decision, how well it understands how your product works, right, is what informs of it of like whether or not you should use your product at all. And so discoverability, right, making sure that your content is out there, available,

• 2:18:16Speaker 09

  is just more important than ever, especially in the age of where software is, you know, starting to get commoditized as well.

• 2:18:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. Tell us about the round. What happened?

• 2:18:24Speaker 09

  Yes. We raised a Series B.

• 2:18:29Jordi Hays?

  How much?

• 2:18:30Speaker 09

  Uh, forty-five million dollars.

• 2:18:35Speaker 09

  Congratulations. I'm honored. I'm honored. I got the gong.

• 2:18:38John Coogan?

  Of course, of course.

• 2:18:41Jordi Hays?

  Last question for me. How, how did you answer the SaaS apocalypse question? Obviously, you guys are using a bunch of AI, you're building agents. But I feel like that must have come up during the round, and I'm sure you had a good answer because you put it together.

• 2:18:57Speaker 09

  Yeah, of course. Um, so what we fundamentally view is that the SaaS apocalypse is fundamentally more of an enabler for us than anything else. As more products gets built, because software is actually, you know, the cost of barriers is, is cheaper these days, things like discoverability, how well you expose your content out there, is just far more important than ever. Right? And this influx of companies being created, companies being out there and making sure that they expose their information out to the world and agents, has kind of what we've seen in our data, this massive tailwind of adoption for our product. And now if we're here saying that like, you know, most of the viewers of your products or how to use your product or agents,

• 2:19:43Speaker 09

  you know, like having every company enable that is, you know, what we've seen as kind of this big tailwind and explosion of, of usage across the board. And especially since Millify as a company have taken this developer-first approach. Into building docs, it actually was really beneficial for agents in actually spinning these things up faster than ever before as well.

• 2:20:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:08John Coogan?

  So more, more companies pulling it off the shelf and not, and, and not.

• 2:20:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's more software companies and then also an agent can just use Mintlify.

• 2:20:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:18Jordi Hays?

  To build docs.

• 2:20:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, very cool.

• 2:20:21Speaker 09

  And I think the really important thing to note is like even from the ground level, we've only seen the adoption of our product go up significantly in the age of agents.

• 2:20:31John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:20:31Speaker 09

  And I think as more companies, you know, have more competing priorities and just more things to do in the SaaS apocalypse, I actually think the build argument is actually stronger than ever before to preserve focus of what really matters.

• 2:20:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:20:48Jordi Hays?

  You're, I gotta say, your customer page is absolutely stacked. We've got Coinbase, AT&T, Cognition Browser Base, Anthropic, Fidelity, CalShe, Decagon, Lovable.

• 2:21:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's everybody.

• 2:21:02Jordi Hays?

  PayPal, Perplexity.

• 2:21:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. And this is a good definition of like, you know, you're an AI company. If you're accelerating revenue right now in the AI revolution.

• 2:21:10Jordi Hays?

  X.

• 2:21:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. Wow, amazing.

• 2:21:13Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna run out of companies soon. That's, that's the bear case. You're gonna run out of customers.

• 2:21:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, I like the design language there where the logos, we'll have to pull it up, but the, the, the logos have like these generated images behind them that have this like very cohesive style, but they all have slightly different flavors to each, each logo. I really like the design. I thought it stuck out.

• 2:21:33Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 2:21:33Speaker 09

  I really appreciate it.

• 2:21:34Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you, Han. Chat loves you too. Thanks for putting up with our sound effects.

• 2:21:39Speaker 09

  All right. Thanks so much, guys.

• 2:21:41John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you later.

• 2:21:42Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you soon.

• 2:21:43John Coogan?

  Have a good day.

• 2:21:44Jordi Hays?

  All right.

• 2:21:45John Coogan?

  We gotta close with the farm people who are doing schizo edits now. It's in the timeline, 4,000 people liked it.

• 2:21:54Jordi Hays?

  I missed this.

• 2:21:55John Coogan?

  You, you missed this one? Look at this. I, I imagine this has.

• 2:21:58Jordi Hays?

  Oh, this is the, the pig pageant.

• 2:22:00John Coogan?

  I, I've seen people direct their pigs with the, with the little guides, the.

• 2:22:05Jordi Hays?

  We have some SD kit here.

• 2:22:07John Coogan?

  Oh, it is SD Kid. There we go.

• 2:22:09Jordi Hays?

  No, I don't think it is.

• 2:22:10John Coogan?

  It sounds like in that genre, but the background is crazy. The rotoscoping is extremely sloppy, but that is the essence.

• 2:22:17Jordi Hays?

  All right, enough of that.

• 2:22:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:19Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna give you a headache.

• 2:22:20John Coogan?

  Enough of that, enough of that.

• 2:22:21Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but TBPN is gonna wrap for today.

• 2:22:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:22:25Jordi Hays?

  But our friend, Dwarash Kesh.

• 2:22:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:22:27Jordi Hays?

  Has Jensen on his show.

• 2:22:29John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:22:30Jordi Hays?

  And I'm gonna listen to that.

• 2:22:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:31Jordi Hays?

  On my way home.

• 2:22:32John Coogan?

  Go over there and listen to that. Uh, thank you for tuning in. We will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. sharp.

• 2:22:37Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor and a privilege.

• 2:22:38John Coogan?

  Give us five stars, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com, and we will see you tomorrow. Goodbye.

• 2:22:44Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you soon. Love you.