GameStop + eBay, Neural Computers | Nat Eliason, Michael York, Maddie Hall, Anjney Midha, Ben Lamm, Jake Stauch, Garth Sheldon-Coulson, Katie Haun, Nick Abouzeid

(02:42) - Neural Computers (20:48) - GameStop Offers $55B for eBay (28:44) - Nat Eliason, an entrepreneur and writer, is the Head of Founder Development at Alpha School, where he is launching a high school program that promises students will earn $1 million by graduation or receive a full tuition refund. In the conversation, he discusses his journey from running an SEO-focused marketing agency to exploring personal knowledge management and AI, leading him to develop this innovative educational model that combines AI-driven academics with real-world entrepreneurial experience. (58:12) - Michael York, co-founder and CEO of Casa, discusses his journey from joining Uber at 18 to launching Casa, a subscription-based homeownership platform. He explains how Casa acts as a personal property manager, handling maintenance and services for homeowners by leveraging advanced technology to create detailed home profiles. York also highlights the company's recent $20 million Series A funding and plans for expansion beyond San Francisco and Los Angeles. (01:11:15) - Maddie Hall, CEO and co-founder of Living Carbon, discusses her company's mission to restore degraded U. S. lands by planting genetically enhanced trees that capture more carbon and produce sustainable forest products. She highlights a recent $500 million deal with Octopus Energy Generation to reforest up to 250,000 acres, aiming to remove 50 million tons of CO₂ over 40 years. Hall also emphasizes the importance of active intervention in reforestation projects and the potential for these efforts to offset emissions from data centers and AI operations. (01:18:43) - Anjney Midha is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, focusing on AI, infrastructure, and open-source technology, with prior roles including VP of Platform Ecosystem at Discord and co-founder of Ubiquity6. In the conversation, he discusses the strategic rationale behind GameStop's acquisition of eBay, emphasizing the potential to eliminate $2 billion in marketing inefficiencies and leverage GameStop's physical stores for verifying collectibles, thereby creating a competitive edge in the AI-driven e-commerce landscape. (01:44:23) - Ben Lamm, a serial technology entrepreneur and co-founder of Colossal Biosciences, discusses the company's recent advancements in de-extinction efforts, including the successful creation of woolly mice and dire wolf puppies, demonstrating their ability to revive extinct species through genetic engineering. He highlights the role of AI in accelerating these processes and mentions the company's expansion into projects like the bluebuck, emphasizing their commitment to biodiversity restoration. Lamm also touches on potential partnerships with ecotourism and governments to reintroduce these species into natural habitats, aiming to blend conservation with education and economic opportunities. (01:54:43) - Jake Stauch, founder and CEO of Serval, an AI platform for employee support, discusses the company's new program, Serval Start, designed to deploy AI in large enterprises and train future founders. He emphasizes the importance of talented individuals who can build relationships, sell products, and develop solutions to effectively implement AI in complex organizational environments. The program aims to provide participants with hands-on experience in deploying AI, accelerating their career paths toward entrepreneurship. (02:01:35) - Garth Sheldon, representing Pampalasa, discusses the company's recent $140 million fundraising success and the development of autonomous energy-capturing nodes designed for deployment in the Southern Hemisphere's power-dense oceans. These nodes, each generating approximately 500 kilowatts, aim to provide scalable, renewable energy solutions for data centers, with plans to manufacture them near the deployment sites to optimize logistics and costs. (02:09:38) - Katie Haun, a former federal prosecutor and venture capitalist, is the founder and CEO of Haun Ventures, a firm specializing in digital assets and blockchain technology. In the conversation, she discusses the firm's recent $1 billion fundraise aimed at supporting founders building the "new economy," focusing on three structural shifts: new financial rails and infrastructure, new assets and markets, and the intersection of AI and crypto. Haun emphasizes the importance of stablecoins, the tokenization of financial products, and the potential of prediction markets, while also highlighting the need for platforms to address regulatory challenges such as insider trading and federal preemption. (02:25:18) - Nick Abouzeid is the co-founder and CEO of Rivet, an AI-enabled tax preparation firm that serves over 500 fast-growing companies. In the conversation, he discusses the challenges of implementing AI models in tax workflows, highlighting their unreliability and the necessity of human oversight to ensure accuracy. He also introduces TaxBench, a benchmark developed to evaluate AI models' performance in tax-related tasks, revealing significant capability gaps in current models. Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVVN. Today's Monday, May 4th.

• 0:03Jordi Hays?

  Would you look at that?

• 0:04John Coogan?

  2026.

• 0:05Jordi Hays?

  Would you look at that?

• 0:06John Coogan?

  Would you look at what, Jordy? Everything looks fine to me.

• 0:08Jordi Hays?

  We're back.

• 0:08John Coogan?

  We're back.

• 0:10Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm looking at.

• 0:12John Coogan?

  Uh, we're getting ready at the last second. We may have installed, uh, Modern Warfare, uh, 2 on this large screen and gotten a little bit behind schedule with some of the interns playing Rust 1v1. It was a knockout drag out fight. You, you won by a lot, right?

• 0:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 0:31John Coogan?

  Well, we'll have to rematch throughout the show.

• 0:33Jordi Hays?

  It was pretty embarrassing for Ben, considering that he is still in that, um, not, not, not, uh, not Chief Producer Ben, uh, but other Ben, uh, considering he's still in like the main kind of like

• 0:45John Coogan?

  demo.

• 0:46Jordi Hays?

  video game.

• 0:47John Coogan?

  But at the same time, I mean, you were probably two years old when Modern Warfare 2 came out. So you gotta sort of relearn the, the old, the old tricks, the old tricks on Rust.

• 0:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh, well, I hope you guys had a great weekend.

• 1:00John Coogan?

  Hope you had a great weekend. Uh, big week. We'll be, uh, we are going to a conference on Wednesday and Thursday, so we might, uh, be off both those days, but we have some great shows for you planned. Monday, Tuesday, Friday. It's a conference.

• 1:13Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I thought you said concert.

• 1:14John Coogan?

  No, although I think there might be a concert.

• 1:18Jordi Hays?

  That would be extremely out of character.

• 1:20John Coogan?

  I think there might be a concert or, or at least some sort of musical performance at this particular conference, but.

• 1:25Jordi Hays?

  Who do we have coming on the show today?

• 1:26John Coogan?

  We have a bunch of folks. Nat, uh, Michael York from Casa, uh, Anjney from AMP. We got Garth from Pantholos.

• 1:36Jordi Hays?

  A little more context on Nat joining.

• 1:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, we talked about it.

• 1:38Jordi Hays?

  He, he joined Alpha School.

• 1:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:41Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he's the head of Founder Development. They're launching a Founder Track at Alpha School, which I'm very curious to hear about, considering that, uh, a lot of the parents in my, uh, in my area are very Alpha School curious.

• 1:58Jordi Hays?

  So excited to hear about that.

• 1:59John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, there's a bunch of news we're going to go through, but first I was just sort of reflecting on, there was a great interview with Andre Karpathy at Sequoia AI Ascent, I think last week it went up on YouTube, and it was, he was sort of reflecting on how his workflow is changing around vibe coding, and I was sort of reflecting on how my knowledge workflows are changing, particularly around image generation, now that image generation is really good at infographics and effectively designing slides or output. And so we're starting to see the rumblings of this idea of like the neural computer. There was this, people have been talking about this for years since the AI boom began, but the basic idea

• 2:43John Coogan?

  is like, you would have a computer that basically has no software whatsoever on it. It would just have an LLM or just an AI model, just inference capability, or potentially connection to cloud inference, that would generate whatever you want, whatever you need, on demand, on the fly. And so I think Elon talked about this with Macro Hard a little bit. That was a piece of the vision. This has always been theorized, but it's becoming more and more real. And so Karpathy describes this idea of like a neural computer this way, and I think it's an interesting framing. Obviously, it'll have implications for SaaS products that might be used in a headless, under the hood scene way, or might be competed with,

• 3:27John Coogan?

  against these neural computers. But Karpathy describes it as, he says, "Imagine a device that takes raw video or audio into basically what's a neural net and uses diffusion to render a UI that's unique for that moment." And so this sort of like on the fly instantiation of the exact UI that you need for that particular question, or whatever problem you're trying to solve, whatever you're trying to do, is an interesting paradigm shift that it feels like we're starting to see glimpses of. So. I most recently felt it when I was trying to understand Ryan Cohen's proposal for GameStop to take over eBay. This is a big story. We'll go through it today. But I haven't tracked each either either company closely. We've had Ryan on the show and we've talked about eBay and

• 4:11John Coogan?

  GameStop intermittently, but I couldn't tell you off the top of my head, what's the revenue for each company? What's the profit like? What are the different multiples? And so in a pre- chat GPT world, I would have gone to Google Finance or Yahoo Finance and pulled some data, maybe had two tabs up, maybe used one of their comparison tools. If I wanted to be really advanced, I would have copied and pasted the stats into a spreadsheet. If you're really working on Wall Street, you might have like CapIQ or Bloomberg plugging into a sheet, an Excel sheet that then can build you a comparison table and do like comps. And then, once we got into the chat GPT world, you might do a deep research report, pull all that data, put it into a table,

• 4:52John Coogan?

  which is effectively markdown. And and sometimes the tables renders a little weird and like you can kind of bounce around. But now, I the whole process from start to finish is just a single prompt. It outputs an image. So you can pull up the image that I generated. So this was this was one prompt. I said, do a bunch of research on GameStop and eBay's valuation and key financial metrics, things like growth rate, top line, earnings, revenue, valuation, how the multiples fit together, build a nicely designed side by side comparison of the two companies. And you wind up getting something that is very digestible. Like just looking at this, I mean, it's obviously a little zoomed out, but you can zoom in and see, okay, eBay

• 5:31John Coogan?

  has about three times the revenue, 50 billion versus 15 for GameStop. And revenue growth, eBay is growing while GameStop shrunk by 5%. eBay grew 8%. Operating income, eBay has 10 times the operating income at 2.28 billion versus 232 million for GameStop. And so you just get this like, very easy, okay, what's the operating margin? eBay's up at 20%, GameStop's down at 6.4%. And so you can start to see on a price to sales ratio, GameStop's at 4x, eBay's at four and a half. But on a market cap to net income, GameStop has a higher value, 34x versus net income versus eBay's 25x.

• 6:16John Coogan?

  So you can just sort of see this table, and this is something that usually would have been like three or four steps to get here. And instead, it's just this single prompt. And so I think that there's, like, this is not a perfect result. Like, in that image, you can see that, like, it chose red as the color for all of GameStop's financials, which is not what you'd normally do, because red is usually for negative numbers, but those revenue figures are positive. Like, it could be better. I could probably go further and prompt it a couple more times to get exactly what I wanted. But it solved my problem of having, like, here's the summary of the question that you were actually asking, which is like, how do these companies stack up to each other? What's the relative size of the business? What are the strengths and weaknesses of each of them?

• 6:58John Coogan?

  And then, boom, you have a square image that you can easily text to someone, and it's ultimately shareable. And more importantly, I don't care what it used under the hood. It could have puppeteered a spreadsheet and put it all in comma-separated values and make a CSV. And it could have transformed it with Excel or Google Sheets under the hood. It could have written Python. It could have used pandas or scikit-learn. It could have done anything it wanted to. But it's all abstracted to me, and I don't even think about it. And this is different from the previous era of like, okay, well, if I wanted to do some sort of stock comparison tool, I could vibe code a stock comparison tool with API integrations, make sure you have the data connections. But it's just kind of less necessary as the models get fatter and they sort of eat more and more of the process.

• 7:43John Coogan?

  And so, Karpathy describes this concept as software 3.0. And we should pull up his example, because it's very similar. Of course, it happened like months ago, because he's ahead of me on everything, obviously. But he gave a good example of shifting from like, you have a problem that there's no solution for, so you're going to vibe code an app, to just a few weeks or months later, like, the AI tools can just do it. And you don't need any code. You don't need any system to build. Even though it's fun to build a system, and it's interesting, and it allows for more, maybe more speed, more reliability, like, more and more things are like one-shot-able by the model. So let's pull up Andre Karpathy talking at Sequoia AI Ascent about his experience with software 3.0.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  I think one more, maybe, example that comes to mind that is even more extreme than that is when I was building Menugen. So Menugen is this idea where... You come to a restaurant, they give you a menu. There's no pictures usually, so I don't know what any of these things are. Usually, like 30% of the things, I'd have no idea what they are, 50%. So I wanted to take a photo of the restaurant menu and to get pictures of what those things might look like in a generic sense. And so I built, I vibe coded this app that basically lets you upload a photo and it does all this stuff and it runs on Bursell and it basically re-renders the menu and it gives you like all the items and it gives you a picture that it uses an image generator

• 9:06Speaker 02

  four to basically OCR all the different titles, use the image generator to get pictures of them and then shows it to you. And then I saw the software 3.0 version of this, which is, which blew my mind, which is literally just take your photo, give it to Gemini and say, use Nano Banana to overlay the things onto the menu. And Nano Banana basically returned an image that is exactly the picture of the menu that I took, but it actually put into the pixels, it rendered the different things in the menu. And this blew my mind because actually all of my menu gen is spurious. It's working in the old paradigm that app shouldn't exist. And yeah, the software 3.0 paradigm is a lot more kind of raw.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  It just, your neural network is doing more and more of the work and your prompt or context is just the image and the output is an image and there's no need to have any of the app in between. So I think that people have to kind of like reframe.

• 10:01John Coogan?

  It's over for apps. Yeah. I mean, it's real and it's, and there were, I had some takeaways from this, like what are the implications for this? And I think there's a few things. The first thing that was on my mind was that although we have gone through this crazy vibe coding boom where everyone is vibe coding apps, it feels like a very temporary aberration. And also I know that, like even though there are millions and millions of people that have used Codex and Claude Code and Open Claw, like the numbers are big, but it's not at 20% of the US population.

• 10:41John Coogan?

  Like it's just not at that level of adoption as opposed to chat apps, which are at like 70, 80% penetration, right?

• 10:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The other, the other thing that's been interesting is non, like people outside of tech that have gotten into vibe coding, that have been pitching me their ideas here and there. Almost every time they're pitching me the idea, it is something that the, that Claude Code and Codex can do themselves pretty well today. Like just in one chat thread.

• 11:11John Coogan?

  Or the app, like the apps can do them. And that's what I'm like, what's blowing my mind now is that, is that in many ways.

• 11:17Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm saying. So like they're using, they're, they're using vibe coding tools to vibe code something that doesn't necessarily need to exist. Because you could just use the app itself to do the thing.

• 11:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:30Jordi Hays?

  And they're already widely available. So it's, it's been, it's been interesting.

• 11:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. So I think there's, I think there's two things. Like one is that if you, if you've been like hesitant to jump into vibe coding, because like it's just, it's a little bit too much hassle. Like Andre Karpathy is like, obviously very, very comfortable being like, oh yeah, let me deploy to Versal and do all this. Like you can figure all that out, but that leads to this world where it's like, oh, I was staying up all night. I was, I was really, really like burning the midnight oil to get this app deployed and like do all this stuff. Well, like a lot of that's going to go away and like, you're not going to need to do that. And frontier models are, but then there's also the, the, this question, what you had, which is like, there needs to be this higher order loop of thinking around, okay, you have a problem. Should you actually vibe code an app?

• 12:19John Coogan?

  Or should you just try and one-shot it with the current model capabilities? Because for a lot of things, like.

• 12:25Jordi Hays?

  And within.

• 12:26John Coogan?

  With, yeah, within chat GPT, within Gemini, within Claude, the actual apps, like you can like take a picture of your food and say, hey, start tracking my calories. Like there's a lot of things that the, that the apps can just do in one chat thread that people are doing. But I think that, that there's like this tension between when, when you actually need to for sure go and vibe code something versus when you can just do it in like a one-shot LLM context. And so like frontier models are already able to in basically 90% of situations, I feel like instantiate exactly whatever's required to solve the actual problem under the hood entirely abstracting away like code and tools. Like you will just not be aware of what's happening and it doesn't matter.

• 13:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:10John Coogan?

  And then the second.

• 13:11Jordi Hays?

  And I, yeah, I would, I would add to, to my previous statement by, by saying that doesn't mean that there's not necessarily a business there because sometimes taking a raw capability and presenting it to people in a way that's very easy for them to digest, you can still deliver value and you can get customers and people will pay you money.

• 13:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:29Jordi Hays?

  But it is, it has been fascinating to see like, does this actually need to be an app?

• 13:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's, there's a ton of apps and software that will still be valuable, whether it has a liquidity pool or some sort of unique source of strength or some differentiation point that, that the existing chat apps can't hack at all. And then there's also just like, like marketing ARBs effectively where it's like, okay, yes, the, any, any frontier model in a chat app could do this, but you weren't aware of it. And this company was really good at running ads to actually get awareness going and then drive downloads of this specific thing. And so we see those in the, in the app store all the time. So the other thing that I was

• 14:17John Coogan?

  reminded of was, did you ever read Union Square Ventures 2016 blog post FAT Protocols? Are you familiar with this? So FAT Protocols was this concept around how in, in the web, like web, I guess 1.0, 2.0, there were protocol layers, which are like TCP IP, HTTP, SMTP, like file transfer protocols, HTTP. And there, and a lot for like a couple of years, the crypto community was like, The the group that developed and maintained like HTTP, they basically created the standard that the web ran on, and yet very little value accrued to the creators and the maintainers of that protocol.

• 14:59John Coogan?

  And crypto would be different because the Bitcoin protocol had the value capture component like baked into it. And so there was this idea of like, the application layer in blockchain would accrue very little value, and the protocol layer would capture the vast majority of value. So this is on the web, the applications on top of HTTP. You can think of like Facebook as a beneficiary of the protocol of HTTP, because that's how what how how the actual information, the photos and the text gets transferred to you. But the HTTP standard does not accrue the value. The value accrues to the to the application on top. And if you scroll down, you'll see the blockchain example, which was sort of borne out, that

• 15:41John Coogan?

  the application layer was pretty thin on top and most of the value went to like the tokens and the protocol below. Ethereum. Yeah, exactly. Ethereum is a good example. Solana is a good example. Of course, there's there's value in the application layer, and there's some companies that are being built. But this was basically this thesis that the the the he says, we see the very early, we see this very clearly in two dominant blockchain networks, Bitcoin and Ethereum. The Bitcoin network has a 10 billion market cap. Wow. I think it's like a trillion now, right? Isn't it 700 billion? Yet, the largest companies built on top are worth a few hundred million at best. Now we have Coinbase, which is in the tens of billions. So both sides of the protocol application layer did very well, but the point is still

• 16:26John Coogan?

  true. Similarly, Ethereum has a $1 billion market cap even before the emergence of real breakout applications on top and only a year after its public release. And so that that was sort of the core thesis on this fat protocols thing. And I think there's something similar happening in the AI value chain. Of course, there's like a bunch of other dynamics going on in in the AI value chain, and there's a lot of capture and complicated market dynamics. But the models feel like they're getting fatter every month, and they're sort of eating away at the edges of what you can do with them. And And so increasingly, you can just get more and more out of the core model, which is interesting dynamic. And then, third, there's still like this huge question of like walled

• 17:10John Coogan?

  garden jumping. We've talked about this before, but it's almost that we need like a different term for like the dead internet theory. It's like the walled garden internet theory. Like, the internet's not dead. Like, there's great, there's great information in Substack on certain legacy webs, legacy media websites, and on Facebook, and on X, and on YouTube. But like, all of those companies don't want to interact with each other. And so, that's where you get something like, oh, well, like, if you write code, you do get access to it loosely. Or if you're puppeteering a browser on a Mac Mini, you get access to that. Or if you're digging through iMessage locally, like, that can require a different workflow. But that's more of like a legal and business discussion than a technical one. Like, there's

• 17:55John Coogan?

  no reason technically that a single LLM wouldn't be able to just query every single web resource, except for the fact that the big, the various tech companies don't want each other to talk to each other. And so, the models, I think, will continue to find a way, under the walled garden, over the walled garden, through the walls, like, they'll seep everywhere. And it's more of a question of just inference cost, how long it takes to actually grind through the wall. But they're already figuring out a way around. And then, and Open Claw is a good example of that, where a lot of the walled gardens were sort of brought down by running locally.

• 18:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, except, I think SAP came out and said, no unauthorized agents here. They're trying to, they're trying to put up the walls, they're trying to build a moat, they're trying to get some alligators to scare off the agents.

• 18:47John Coogan?

  Yes, but I would be very, I would, I would be very surprised if they're able to stop me from, if I have SAP and I'm running it locally, for me to take a screenshot of my computer, and then tell the mouse to go where it wants. Like, it's very hard to fight back against these, like, the computer. I mean, I've seen this guy on On YouTube who uses like ever more contrived aimbots like he has one that's it's like a robotic mouse so the it's using the actual mouse and keyboard but it's robotic fingers on it and then it's controlling I think he plays Rainbow Six Siege or Counter Strike and he's cheating but

• 19:28John Coogan?

  it's look it's a camera looking at the computer so until you get to like you know world coin eyeball scanning making sure that you're not using this he's also done one where he I think he put like electro stimulation on his arm that would do the aimbot for him and so it was his arm physically moving but it was puppeteered by an AI essentially and you know it's very very demo phase at this point but imagine that everything is so locked down that no AI agent can interact with SAP but then I have the electro stimulation and I can just type it super fast because and it just does whatever it needs and I'm the I'm the the the the human instantiation actually pushing the keys

• 20:11Jordi Hays?

  Rune had a good tweet where he was like you know people are now just like vessels for the AI where they just like the AI tells them what to do and then they just act exactly like the model

• 20:19John Coogan?

  Wasn't John Collison talking about this?

• 20:23John Coogan?

  John Collison was saying like the humans get the thing off the high shelf it's just like every time I have to like go and like export a PDF and upload it to chat GPT because I can't get it in there by default even though I could just give them a web URL I have to export it a print or whatever this is the

• 20:40Jordi Hays?

  Let's talk about I think we should talk about GameStop

• 20:43John Coogan?

  Let's do it what's up with GameStop

• 20:45Jordi Hays?

  What's going on with GameStop yesterday it came out through Wall Street Journal GameStop was preparing to make an offer for eBay as part of Ryan CEO Ryan Cohen's plan to turn the retailer into a hundred billion dollar plus juggernaut GameStop has been quietly building a stake in eBay's shares ahead of a potential offer and could submit an offer as soon as later this month which they did this morning if eBay isn't receptive Cohen could decide to take the offer directly to eBay's shareholders and they released a letter

• 21:17Jordi Hays?

  Yesterday, to Paul Pressler, who's the chairman of the board over at eBay, happens to be a friend of mine.

• 21:28John Coogan?

  Wait, really?

• 21:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I, I, I, um, um, are, his daughter and my wife are good friends.

• 21:38John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 21:38Jordi Hays?

  So I end up, we end up hanging out a decent amount. And we're neighbors.

• 21:43John Coogan?

  Does he do a lot of, does he do a lot of like podcasts or press appearances?

• 21:48Jordi Hays?

  It can, it can, we can, it can be discussed.

• 21:50John Coogan?

  I'm just saying like dominant determinism of Pressler would be like somebody who dominates the press.

• 21:55Jordi Hays?

  The press circuit.

• 21:55John Coogan?

  I think you would be doing the press circuit all the time.

• 21:57Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, Paul, Paul is fantastic.

• 21:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:00Jordi Hays?

  And Ryan wrote this letter to him yesterday. Saying GameStop is proposing to acquire all common stock of eBay at $125 per share. We have accumulated a 5% economic stake in eBay through derivatives and beneficial ownership of common stock and are filing a Schedule 13D and HSR notification tomorrow. Our offer is $125 per share comprising 50% cash and 50% GameStop common stock, which we will get to in just a little bit, because Ryan Cohen discussed this on CNBC this morning.

• 22:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:31Jordi Hays?

  That represents a 46% premium to eBay's unaffected closing price on February 4th, 2026, the day GameStop started accumulating its position in eBay. And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But let's go straight to the CNBC.

• 22:47John Coogan?

  So quickly, there was a question. So Bizlett said, can someone please tell me how GameStop has $56 billion? It's not a $56 billion company. There were questions and Ryan Cohen went in the ring with Aaron Sorkin over at CNBC, or Andrew Ross.

• 23:05Jordi Hays?

  Put the gloves on.

• 23:07John Coogan?

  Andrew Ross Sorkin on CNBC Squawk Box to interview about the GameStop eBay acquisition. We can play this.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  Walk us through how, how you could get to that price and how it would work.

• 23:19Speaker 04

  It's on our website. It's half cash, half stock. But the details are on our website.

• 23:31Speaker 03

  Can you help? I've read them, but can you help our audience understand them?

• 23:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, which part exactly?

• 23:41Speaker 03

  Well, I think we can start with the idea that the market cap of GameStop is, call it, $11 billion. You have $9 billion on your balance sheet. Arguably, if you're providing effectively all of your stock, and then the cash that gets you to 20. You have this letter from TD. That's another 20. We're now at 40, but we're still off by, call it, 16. And the 20, as far as I understand, while it's considered a highly confident letter, meaning TD's saying they're highly confident that they would provide the financing, it's not locked financing.

• 24:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, we'll see what happens.

• 24:34Speaker 03

  Never doubt. I hear you. Dead air. I understand that. I'm just trying to understand where the rest of the money would come from.

• 24:44Speaker 04

  It's half cash, half stock.

• 24:48Speaker 03

  I hear you. I'm just saying that that math doesn't get you to the price that you're offering.

• 25:00Katie Haun?

  Brian, that's a pretty straightforward question. I don't get it. Where's the rest of the money coming from? Andrew laid it out pretty clearly.

• 25:10Speaker 04

  I don't understand your question. We're offering half cash, half stock, and we have the ability to issue stock in order to get the deal done. But the full details of the offer are on our website.

• 25:27Katie Haun?

  But you're on our air. We thought we'd get...

• 25:32Speaker 04

  So, but I don't understand your question.

• 25:37John Coogan?

  Where's the money coming from? That's the question.

• 25:42John Coogan?

  You're wondering, record scratch, freeze friend, you're wondering how I tried to buy a $55 billion company with $40 billion. Earmarked.

• 25:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I don't, what, what, do you think he was expecting this to go out on Sunday, Monday, GameStop stocks pop like crazy?

• 25:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:00Jordi Hays?

  And it's actually down today?

• 26:02John Coogan?

  I guess that's possible. I, I don't know. I, I also don't understand why he can't just say like, "Hey, we're in the process. Like, we got a highly likely letter from a bank for 20. Yeah, we need 16 more, but we're gonna go get more letters from other banks. We're gonna go get other equity investors. Like, this is a whole process. We're excited to announce this. And this is like our first close. Like, we're not like, we're fully ready."

• 26:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:26John Coogan?

  But maybe you can't do that.

• 26:28Jordi Hays?

  So the tough thing is, he took this offer to Paul, chairman of the board.

• 26:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:32Jordi Hays?

  Now, Paul has to look at this and be like, "Okay, is this a real offer?"

• 26:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:36Jordi Hays?

  And I imagine Paul will watch CNBC, and

• 26:39John Coogan?

  It's not.

• 26:39Jordi Hays?

  that's not gonna give anyone a lot of confidence.

• 26:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's, yeah, I mean, you could imagine it in the, in the context of like, buying a house. You know, you show up and someone says like, "I have 80% of the money. And like, my bank will underwrite me for 50%, and I have 30% in cash." And you're just like, "Look, I need the full amount."

• 26:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the tough, the tough thing is like, I'm, I'm wondering, I'm wondering what Ryan, I, I'm, you know, eBay is an incredible business. It's been remarkably durable. They've faced an onslaught of competition for every single category from sneakers to watches to art to name any cars, right? Any category. There is like a vertical competitor to eBay.

• 27:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:22Jordi Hays?

  And yet, the business has done, has been remarkably, remarkably strong.

• 27:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:27Jordi Hays?

  It's up pretty meaningfully this year, right?

• 27:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:30Jordi Hays?

  Like, management is executing.

• 27:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:32Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, and, and again, it's unfortunate for Ryan and his bid that the most viral sort of video clip out of all of this is just him failing to answer, like, you know, a pretty straightforward question, and not having an opportunity to talk about, "Okay, why do you, you know, presumably if you're buying this company, you think it, it can and should be worth a lot more." Why, what's your, what's your plan, what's your plan for the business? Why are, why are you better suited to run it than, than Jamie, who's been in, in the seat since 2020, worked at eBay from 2001 to 2009?

• 28:09John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 28:10Jordi Hays?

  So he's a veteran, knows the business very well. And you're coming in $16 billion short, at least that's what it looks like. And anyways, this bid could be, could be over before it really started.

• 28:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, or I mean, it could attract a bunch of investors who want to line up and fall in line and wind up producing the 55 or so required, but it does feel like it's, it's a ways away. Anyway, we have our first guest of the show in the waiting room. We have Matt from Alpha School, and here he is in the TDP and Ultra. Matt, how are you doing?

• 28:48Speaker 06

  I'm doing great. How are you guys?

• 28:50John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastic.

• 28:51Jordi Hays?

  Incredible to finally have you on the show. We enjoy, we love when your name pops up in the chat, and we've both loved following your career the last.

• 29:01Speaker 06

  Appreciate that, guys.

• 29:02Jordi Hays?

  As long as I've been on the internet.

• 29:03Speaker 06

  It's awesome to be here. I mean, I've been following you guys since it feels like must have been the first week or two. I just love the show and I've loved seeing you guys crush it. It's brought a lot of joy to my, my weekly commutes, so thank you guys for doing this.

• 29:17Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. And yeah, we're, we're super excited. I personally am excited that, that you're at Alpha School now because, um, yeah, Alpha School is moving into my town, it looks like. It's early, early stages, and I've just been curious to learn more about it. And, um, yeah, especially like what you're working on specifically.

• 29:36Speaker 06

  I'm here to answer any of it.

• 29:39John Coogan?

  Should we go back further?

• 29:40Speaker 06

  Open up all over.

• 29:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, why don't you give, give us an overview of like everything you've worked on the last few years? Cause like every, every, I think you've, you have done a better job than almost anyone at identifying these sort of like big macro technology changes and cycles, and then like just like experimenting and innovating in a bunch of cool ways. So, um, so yeah, take it, take us back a little bit.

• 30:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I I got the entrepreneurship bug in high school, didn't have many ways to get into it then. And then in college, I went to business school and figured business school will teach me how to be an entrepreneur, realized really quickly that that wasn't the case, and ended up just trying to go figure it out on my own. So got super deep into SEO, ran a really successful SEO-focused marketing agency for a number of years until 2021, basically handed that off, eventually got acquired. But that was kind of my first taste of seeing this like cool thing in technology, trying to figure it out, trying to build a business around it, and just feeling incredibly fulfilled by getting to

• 30:46Speaker 06

  do that. And so when I stepped out of SEO, I got pretty heavy into the personal knowledge management space. So I was doing all the like Rome research and Notion stuff, got deep into crypto during that 2021, 2022 era, and was like writing smart contracts and working with a couple of teams through that. And then when like building with AI really became a thing, a few years ago, I was using Cursor like right at the beginning, well over a year before we had these terms like vibe coding and whatnot, and was just completely obsessed with it. And was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with it for a while. I had a course that was really early on how other people could start learning how to

• 31:28Speaker 06

  vibe code. And at the end of last year, I said, Okay, like, I actually want to, I want to stop doing the solo printer thing. I want to kind of like go after something much bigger. And while I was in the process of figuring that out and tinkering with a few bigger things I wanted to work on, Alpha School reached out to me, and they told me that they were working on this wild idea for a new high school, and they were looking for a kind of scrappy AI-native entrepreneur to come help them build the curriculum and get the whole thing launched and built. And it was kind of one of those like, do you know anybody else who would be good at these kinds of things like you? And I'd never considered taking a job, certainly never considered working at a high school. But when they told

• 32:13Speaker 06

  me they wanted to build this, and that they were looking for somebody like that, I was just immediate like, I have to come do this.

• 32:19Jordi Hays?

  Okay, before we get into Alpha School, why you you're witnessing the explosion of LLMs, why didn't you get into like Answer Engine Optimization or AI Observability?

• 32:33Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure you thought about it and given your background, building the the SEO agency to exit, I'm sure you would have been well positioned to do well there. Did you did you consider that at any point?

• 32:47Speaker 06

  I thought about it and to be honest, I was just kind of tired of the SEO game. I'd been so deep in that for so long that I just kind of didn't want to go back to that. And I just loved how fun building stuff with these AI tools was like on the software side. And that was kind of the route that I was starting to go down. And, you know, thankfully, like this still this still kind of heavily scratches that itch because like, even though this is a school and we're learning how to, you know, we're teaching and trying to build all of that out, so much of the internal systems and how we figure out how to teach

• 33:30Speaker 06

  this requires getting really deep with AI and building a lot of our own internal custom software. And it's really cool to like, be a part of a school that's also investing so heavily in that. And so it's been fun getting to bring those skills and that energy here.

• 33:44Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Introduce reintroduce Alpha School. We've talked about it on the show, but for anyone in the audience that that isn't familiar, I think it'd be helpful. And then I want to talk about the program that you're building out.

• 33:56Speaker 06

  For sure. And just to double check, because I did get a message that my mic wasn't sounding right. Is it?

• 34:02John Coogan?

  Not plugged in? I'm looking at it and it looks like there's no cable.

• 34:06Speaker 06

  Oh, my God.

• 34:08John Coogan?

  I was just like, look at it.

• 34:09Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 34:10John Coogan?

  Okay. And then I think you probably need to select it and change the thing over. But I was looking at it. I was like, wait, that's not plugged in at all.

• 34:18Jordi Hays?

  That's hilarious.

• 34:19John Coogan?

  Ooh, there we go. Works.

• 34:25Speaker 06

  New studio, you know.

• 34:26John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, this is.

• 34:27Jordi Hays?

  Oh, this is nice.

• 34:28John Coogan?

  Much nicer.

• 34:29Speaker 06

  Silky smooth now?

• 34:30Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:31John Coogan?

  All right. So good.

• 34:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 34:33John Coogan?

  Sounds awesome.

• 34:34Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 34:34John Coogan?

  Okay, so yeah, reintroduce Alpha School for those who who don't know the model because I I I think it was many people learned about it through Invest Like the Best, I guess. I mean, that's how I learned about it.

• 34:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, there was like, there was like, you know, rumor mill around it, right? There was like, there was a lot of, there was a lot of lore. A lot of people were curious. And then Invest Like the Best, I felt like was like this first mainstream kind of exploration of of the the vision and and what had been done to date and and how how you guys were approaching it. But obviously, that was before you joined.

• 35:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, so Alpha School actually started 12 years ago with McKinsey Price here in Austin. And it was a smaller, smaller micro school, but still built on that fundamental idea that you could compress the entire academic day to about two hours if you leaned on what we know about learning science, which, you know, the the the teacher in front of a room of 25 students trying to teach everyone at the same time is just not the best way to learn. And if you were able to kind of customize the education to each student based on where they were, you could get that day a lot shorter and then give them a lot more time for learning life skills, doing these interactive workshops and making them just love going to school, right?

• 35:51Speaker 06

  Because no student feels like they're being held back or not getting a chance to get caught up. And so when generative AI came on the scene in 2022 or so, Joe Lamont, who he and McKinsey had known each other forever, and his daughters were already going to Alpha School, he kind of went to her and said, hey, with AI, we can now take this model that you have figured out and we can start to, we can bring this to a billion students. We can make this the way that like every student gets to learn. And that's when Alpha School, that he brought, um, he brought Big Investment to Alpha School, started like building it up, expanding it. And that's why a lot of people feel like it just started in the last few years, because that's when it really started to grow and take off.

• 36:35Speaker 06

  And Joe had been kind of, uh, you know, he wasn't very a public facing figure for a long time. He wasn't doing podcasts, wasn't doing interviews. And then a year ago.

• 36:45Jordi Hays?

  He would have loved the podcast circuit back in like the the 90s. He would have, he would have crushed it.

• 36:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, but then a year ago, he did that Invest like the best interview. He did the Colossus piece that I know a lot of people have read. And that's when he started really sharing more about what they've been up to at Alpha School, because they'd had a few years of working on the new model, building out the software. And now it's just, I mean, it's growing like crazy. We were at Info Session in Boca Raton two weeks ago, and they thought maybe 20, 30 families were going to come, and there were over 100. And the school that they were planning on starting there got filled up just almost immediately. Right? It's been very cool to see how much excitement there is, especially in the crowd of younger, more tech-forward parents who are, who have been thinking for a long time that like,

• 37:35Speaker 06

  hey, there's got to be kind of a better way to do this. And it feels like we really have the technology now to make it happen.

• 37:44John Coogan?

  Is the, is the model like start with kindergarten and then just grow with the class? Or is there actually like, let's get a bunch of juniors in high school to jump in so that there's like continuity from day one and it feels like a full K through 12 experience? Or is it like grow iteratively?

• 38:05Speaker 06

  We do both. So a lot of students do come in and we go down to pre-K4 right now. So pre-K4, kindergarten, first grade, a lot of students do come in at that age range. Again, just because there are more younger parents who are excited about the way the school day works. But you do have a lot of kids who come in, starting in high school. We have people, I'm at the high school in Austin right now, and we have students who transferred in as 10th graders, 11th graders. It's kind of, if they're, if they're really interested in something, or if they feel like their current school isn't working for them and they want to try this model instead, we'll take them basically any time of year. And the benefit of starting earlier for a lot of students is that they don't have as much catching up to do.

• 38:50Speaker 06

  A lot of students transfer in from even really good private schools, and it turns out that they're a year or two behind in math or reading or one of these subjects. And so they do go through that catch-up period. But again, it goes back to just like the nice thing about having software that can personalize the learning experience to each student. If you're a seventh grader who's actually in fourth grade math, there's no seventh grade math class that will help you get caught up. But with with time back with our with our learning software, it can identify, oh, OK, you actually need to go back and really memorize your times tables because that's becoming a big bottleneck for you in trying to learn algebra. So we're going to go back and do that first.

• 39:27Jordi Hays?

  Maybe Ryan Cohen. Ryan Cohen, if you guys could.

• 39:32Jordi Hays?

  Ryan was being asked some math questions about the eBay takeover this morning.

• 39:37Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, the eBay.

• 39:38Jordi Hays?

  And there was some like adding and subtracting that they were doing that. That wasn't adding up. It wasn't. Things weren't adding up.

• 39:45Speaker 06

  Sign them up. Yeah, extension program.

• 39:49John Coogan?

  Talk about the Founder's School initiative specifically. How does that fit in? It feels like like a different track. Or how separate is this from sort of the typical Alpha School experience?

• 40:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, so basically, you know, we have our high school in Austin, and we've been looking to expand the high school offering for Alpha. And so Joe went to all the high school students last fall. And he said, hey, you know, what would be the just best, most incredible version of high school that you can imagine? And we have a really good mix of what the high schoolers are working on in their afternoon time after they finish their academics. We have a girl who's putting on a Broadway play. We have a few students writing books. One student opened the biggest bike park in Texas. But we have a lot of students who are really interested in entrepreneurship. And so they said, you know, it would be incredible if we had a highly dedicated entrepreneurship program

• 40:47Speaker 06

  so that we could just go after this as much as possible because we have all this time in the afternoons. And we, you know, we just want more mentorship and more guidance and more support around trying to like build big businesses. And that got the idea going in his head to say, hey, what if we opened a high school where we were essentially saying that we are going to get the best mentor network possible. We're going to get the the best like resources possible for whatever bottlenecks challenges you're hitting. We're going to build the best curriculum possible so that we can take what might be years and years of kind of fumbling around in the dark like a lot of people do when they first start that entrepreneurial journey.

• 41:30Speaker 06

  And we try to teach all those core skills as quickly as possible, give you the ability to develop expertise in whatever areas you're most interested in, and then build a big business by the time you graduate high school. Because nobody really doubts that a sophomore at Stanford can drop out and build a million or billion dollar business. And so like, why can't a 17 or 18 year old? And kind of like working back from that said, okay, well, you get this incredible network at a place like Stanford of other students who can be your co-founders, you can work with and be motivated by. You get these incredible mentors who come in, talk to you, you know, give you some advice or just inspire you

• 42:13Speaker 06

  around what's possible. And then there is some stuff around the academics and the classes. But there's functionally no reason we can't pull that back down to the high school level, especially considering that these kids get like five hours in the afternoon every day after they finish their academics. So that's 4,000 plus hours over four years. And then if you just cut out all of the things that people usually end up wasting time on or don't have the resources to figure out, it is eminently doable to get somebody to a million dollars by the time they graduate high school.

• 42:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, at the very least, like teaching, teaching some of these fundamentals. I think this has been the thing that Y C has always done so well, which I think is amazing because it's all open source, which is like, okay, like, what are the, what are the, you know, they can probably teach like the foundation of like a Y, what, what, what the Y C method to making a startup is in about an hour. And it's like, simple rules, like talk to your customers that oftentimes people don't do early in their founder journey where they're just like, oh, I have to spend like six months like making everything perfect before I can talk to a customer. And it's like, no, you actually can just go have the conversation first before you even start any of that. And so there's the basic things where if you can get somebody

• 43:26Jordi Hays?

  To like basically start the clock earlier, start taking shots on goal, start going through the motions, but doing it with like some general guidance that you that that again, like the you can get on the internet, but you have to kind of piece it together. And there's something about having having that in person experience that I think is very important, too.

• 43:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, having somebody in the room with you to say, hey, you are wasting time on this thing, or you need to go try to sell this to someone. That five minute conversation might save you months of your life. But a lot of people, when they're starting out, don't have someone to do that. And it's like, just by providing more of those touch points and having that expertise in the room with you, I think you can really, you can accelerate it quite a bit. And YC is a great example, where they do an incredible amount of work with people in three or four months, and we get four years. So I'm, I think we're gonna be able to

• 44:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other, the other thing that's very, very cool right now, John, John and I were at dinner last night, and one of John's friends is will likely get to like a million of ARR, building a business that historically he would have always needed to raise venture capital for. But given all the AI tools, like he just doesn't need to raise any money. And so he has all this, one, he has optionality. He's not like raising money, locking himself into this thing for a really long period of time. But it's very cool because historically, capital would have been a huge constraint for like a high school student, where, you know, even if they can go to to a private school, they don't necessarily have like another, you know, a huge amount of money to invest into into some idea. And now

• 45:07Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 45:07Jordi Hays?

  They basically don't need any capital for a huge number of different types of businesses.

• 45:13Speaker 06

  No, it's totally true. It's when the like AI is the big thing that removes the bottleneck around like, why can't a 17 year old? Build a million dollar business where you don't need to spend as long developing deep expertise in programming or software development because you know you could certainly for a V1 you can prompt a lot of it. You don't need to raise a ton of money for hiring or design or build out or any of these things because again you can get like an initial version going with AI. And also, if you're a 15 year old trying to get started and you're trying to hire a marketing person or whatnot, like a content marketer might not want to go work for a 15 year old. Like that'd be kind of an awkward thing, right? And so if you can

• 45:56Speaker 06

  just use AI to get started and get your business going, yeah, you take out a lot of the capital requirements, take out a lot of the expertise buildup requirements. And again, it just shortens that timeline, it makes a lot more things possible for them.

• 46:10John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about the, or how are you wrestling with the idea that like so many great founders did not study entrepreneurship or business? They usually like when, when, when you give the other examples of like the person that's putting on Broadway play, like I, I don't think that that's not entrepreneurship path. I, I, I see that person and I'm like, oh, they could wind up owning like a media company or they could wind up buying and you know, consolidating the Broadway industry. I don't know. There's like a bunch of different ways that I, and I, when I look at entrepreneurship in America, I think it's one thing to look at like Silicon Valley tech startups. And there's another to think about like the millions of small businesses that are like a dentist office or a law firm or some sort of business that's

• 46:54John Coogan?

  built around a unique expertise with a completely different path. And then entrepreneurship is just like the cherry on top at the last second where that individual realizes that they just want to build their own company around their, their expertise or their discipline. And it feels like there's always this wrestling with like, if you only learn the entrepreneurship piece, like what industry are you actually an expert in to go and, you know, offer an improvement in? People always go back to like Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah, I think he took some computer science class, but he studied psychology and that makes a lot of sense.

• 47:27Speaker 06

  I just looked it up. So Sundar has an MBA.

• 47:31Jordi Hays?

  Satya has an MBA.

• 47:32Speaker 06

  Those aren't the entrepreneurs though.

• 47:33Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I know, I know.

• 47:34Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 47:34Jordi Hays?

  But this is notable.

• 47:35Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 47:35Jordi Hays?

  They're like the professional CEOs. So Sundar, Satya, Andy and Tim Cook, they all have MBAs.

• 47:40Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 47:41Jordi Hays?

  Jensen, Elon and Zuck do not have MBAs.

• 47:43Speaker 06

  Basically.

• 47:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that being said, though, I think, I think, um, yeah, it's a good, it's a good point, which like clearly, clearly you, if you have a, a vision and you work very, very hard and you get some luck along the way, you don't need to be that good at business and you can like, you just end up being successful.

• 48:00Speaker 06

  You learn it on the fly.

• 48:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you learn it on the fly. But at the same time, I think a lot of entrepreneurs, like people that want to be entrepreneurs, will spend five years wasting a bunch of time, kind of like learning these foundational, like truths about entrepreneurship. And so, I mean, when I think back, I would have loved to learn all the kind of like, the YC way in high school, right? And just take some shots on goal, even if it didn't, even if I ended up going to college,

• 48:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 48:26Jordi Hays?

  getting into something totally different and then coming back to entrepreneurship later.

• 48:30Speaker 06

  Mm hmm. Yeah, and to be clear, you know, the, the students aren't going to be like studying entrepreneurship. And there's going to be this very heavy focus on expertise building in a domain that you are passionate about, because that is going to lead to a lot of these opportunities. And that's something that Alpha School already does really well. The high school students are heavily encouraged to, or actually they're required, to pick a topic that they really want to develop deep expertise in. And then we're teaching them how to use AI, how to use writing, how to use producing, uh, just like any kind of content media to develop that expertise. And that's going to be a core part of this program as well. We also have this, this whole additional aspect of it that's really important to us,

• 49:12Speaker 06

  that we're calling kind of the philosopher builder canon, drawing on Cosmos Institute, and working with them a bit, where we don't just want people who are like slinging mobile apps to try to hit a revenue goal and then driving around in Ferraris, right? That's absolutely not the kind of like ethos that we're trying to inspire here.

• 49:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:35Jordi Hays?

  I want to see the, I want to see the Alpha School parking lot in Austin, just Euris wall to wall.

• 49:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 49:46Jordi Hays?

  Every, yeah, every, by the end, they, they all start an econ business and then six months in, there's, they're ripping a course and they're like, here's how you got a Euris in, at 16.

• 49:56Speaker 06

  This is not going to be a, a school on how to sling peptides or anything like that.

• 50:00John Coogan?

  Hustler's University, that's Andrew Tate's school.

• 50:03Speaker 06

  No, I mean, we're, we actually have a really rigorous freshman year reading list that's basically grounded in philosophy and kind of like trying to develop a broader sense of the world. And a lot of it goes back to one of the big challenges with being an entrepreneur, kind of doing anything in high school is getting out of the local high school mindset. Everybody wants to build an app or something for their peers, right? They're not thinking about the bigger problems in the world they could be going after. And so by spending a good amount of our time encouraging them to pick areas they want to become experts in and really deeply understand and encouraging them to think and read and write about like the bigger challenges in the world that they might want to attack, then we can kind of

• 50:47Speaker 06

  encourage more of that thinking where it's not just, again, we're like, we're not trying to build Hustler School here. And so I like, I'd completely agree that you couldn't like just teach entrepreneurship and expect that to lead to something interesting. It needs to be balanced for, for it to work.

• 51:02John Coogan?

  In terms of the best way to learn, do you, do you prefer the, the Stanford method where it's just two people, some microphones, having a conversation? Or do you like the Dwarsh Patel podcast way where there's an expert at a chalkboard sort of breaking things down line, step by step? Cause it seems like there's two sort of ways to learn these days.

• 51:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 51:22Jordi Hays?

  John is doing a bit because people have been doing, teaching classes at Stanford that are effectively podcasts.

• 51:32John Coogan?

  That's just a hilarious inversion. But, but I am, but I am interested in like, in like, you know, what, what is the world for just like hearing from an expert in an unstructured way, more conversational versus like, you know, having information delivered in a more structured pattern? Is it like, you know, right tool for the job, right person for the right flow? Or is there, is there one way that you think is like actually better?

• 51:54Speaker 06

  I think it really depends on what you're trying to provide. So if we were doing a workshop or a session on earned media or on TikTok or something, I think that having very short informational sessions followed by implementation, practice, finding issues, and then getting very structured feedback to the challenges that you're running into, that's going to help accelerate your learning the most on that very tactical skill. But where the conversational, longer form stuff becomes super valuable is hearing stories of how other people got started or what other people did, where it's not so much like, here's exactly how to do this thing, because it'd be really hard to hold an hour-long lecture

• 52:39Speaker 06

  on how to do Facebook ads in your head, but hearing how somebody thought about developing expertise, finding business opportunities, getting started, especially hearing those starting stories from people who are now really successful. Like, that's the thing that I think those Stanford classes do so well, is they make these incredibly successful people feel very human, very approachable, where you realize, like, oh, they were just like me at one point, just getting started, they didn't have all these resources, and those kinds of sessions are extremely valuable as well. So I think it's just kind of like what problem you're trying to solve at that point in time.

• 53:16John Coogan?

  Jordan, anything else?

• 53:19Jordi Hays?

  Any predictions on end of this year?

• 53:23John Coogan?

  Was Joe inspired by PMF or Die for the structure? Because it's 150K a year, but if you don't hit a million dollars in profit, you get your money back, isn't that it?

• 53:35Speaker 06

  That's correct.

• 53:35John Coogan?

  There we go. That's PMF or Die right there. We gotta lock these kids in a room, stream it. This is the way.

• 53:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 53:43Jordi Hays?

  No, I was gonna say, yeah, predictions on highest run rate 12 months from now from a student? How big do you think they can go?

• 53:54Jordi Hays?

  Because in today's world, like if they're not getting to nine figures in 12 months, like they should probably just shut it down.

• 54:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, you know, obviously you can't hold me to this, but I would not be shocked if by the end of year one, we have at least at least one student who's, you know, well past the 100K mark. I wouldn't even be horribly surprised if you've got a student who's like halfway to the million or even there, right? Just you find that right thing, you lock in and we're going to have some students coming in who are already making some progress on on their own things.

• 54:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, whenever we talk to Y C founders, Teal fellows are always like, they were always making money in late middle school, high school. And it was, they were picking ideas that didn't, that had kind of a cap to it, right?

• 54:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, or they were competitive market.

• 54:42Jordi Hays?

  Or super competitive, but if they just applied themselves to it, to a category that was maybe a bit more boring than Minecraft stuff.

• 54:48John Coogan?

  Minecraft, there were just hacks and.

• 54:50Jordi Hays?

  Like there's, there's no limit. So.

• 54:53Speaker 06

  But, but I'll tell you what, guys, you know, it would be a lot of fun is I think these students are going to crush it. And so if we want to do like a TVP and Founder's School Demo Day next June, I think that'd be pretty sick. I'm so excited to see what these kids do.

• 55:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 55:08John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, we, we have to set the record for the youngest TVP and guest. We had that kid who, uh, applied to Y C, right? Remember from Australia? He came in for a couple of minutes. How old was he? Was he 16?

• 55:21Jordi Hays?

  I think he was like 13.

• 55:22John Coogan?

  I thought he was 13. Yeah, he's really.

• 55:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he came in with his dad.

• 55:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:26Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and then if any of them build products that we can use, let us know. We'll, we'll be happy to be beta customers.

• 55:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm going to be shouting from the rooftops, everything that they're working on. So I'm, I'm very excited about that.

• 55:39Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Uh, well, congrats.

• 55:41John Coogan?

  I personally, I don't, I don't, I don't think of myself as like a beta customer. I'm more of a Sigma customer, but you can do with it. If I'm going to buy a product from Alpha School, I want to, I want to be the Sigma customer. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Appreciate you guys. Yeah, great to catch up. Congrats. Great to catch up. We'll talk to you soon. There's some back and forth on the timeline. XAI's GPU fleet is running at about 11% utilization, exposing how hard it is for AI labs to fully use expensive Nvidia hardware. This is May 2nd from the information. Trace Cohen says, how is this possible? There's infinite demand. We're going to talk to Agnene in a little bit about the infinite demand because it is real, but there's some extra context here. It says 11% almost certainly

• 56:24John Coogan?

  refers to flops utilization, not 89% of GPUs sitting idle. If, if it were the latter, they would just throw more GPUs at training. It's notoriously hard to maximally utilize GPUs when, even when saturating inference capacity due to things like uneven mixture of expert demand and, and memory stalls. The 11% figure means their inference stack sucks with a large contribution from lackluster architecture, Contrast, DeepSeek, who do an amazing job maximizing utilization at every level, including innovative MOE load balancing. And I mean, even if the utilization is low, it's like, well, the, the team seems ahead of the curve solving the problem by acquiring Cursor or partnering with Cursor because the, the whole thesis of the Cursor deal was XAI has compute capacity. But Tyler, what are you thinking about this?

• 57:09Speaker 07

  11% does not mean like only 11% of the GPUs are like on. It's just that like, you know, the, the maximum like flops that you could get, say it's like a thousand, they only have like 110 like flops, basically actually being used just because of like what their like inference stack is.

• 57:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:24Speaker 07

  So, so the GPUs are, are still on. It's like they're just like sitting idle.

• 57:27John Coogan?

  But you want it at 100%, right? Or close to it?

• 57:29Speaker 07

  Yes, but that's like extremely hard because you have to like-

• 57:31John Coogan?

  You have to be using it all the time.

• 57:33Speaker 07

  Yeah, because you know, you're constantly loading, you know, memory on and off or whatever.

• 57:36John Coogan?

  And, and, and you might just see uneven demand. I mean, that happens all the time with these AI products where there's a boom. Like I bet you that utilization spikes during like big moments on X because a lot of people are tagging like @GrokIsThisReal and a lot of people are, are using Grok in X when there's a particular, you know, there's, there's those moments where it's like an election or something and everyone's on X talking about the thing, the raid on Osama bin Laden or something like that. And everyone's like querying at the same time to get more information. That's probably lighting the GPUs on fire during around, around big model releases and whatnot. Anyway, Jordy, where do you want to go next? Guest in the in the waiting room. We can bring

• 58:14Jordi Hays?

  We can do that.

• 58:15John Coogan?

  From Casa. Michael is in the waiting room as the co-founder and CEO of Casa. And he's here to talk about subscription based homeownership platforms. How are you doing, Michael? Good to meet you.

• 58:25Speaker 08

  Good. Good to be with you guys. Thanks for having me.

• 58:27Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you on. You announced a new round last week. Couldn't get you on on Friday, but you're here today. Hit us with the news.

• 58:36Speaker 08

  We raised $20 million Series A.

• 58:41Speaker 08

  Bunch of great folks around the table as well, including a recent guest, Mr. Travis Kalanick himself.

• 58:48Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 58:49John Coogan?

  I didn't realize.

• 58:49Jordi Hays?

  How did that happen?

• 58:51Speaker 08

  Well, I give you a little bit of backstory. I I left school when I was 18 to join Uber. Uber was 50 people at the time and started out as an unpaid intern working on the supply side, getting LA up and running.

• 59:07Speaker 08

  Got a job offer later and decided to drop out and a year later moved up to SF to work on product and edge, which was really my my passion and.

• 59:15Jordi Hays?

  Did you? Did you know? Did you in your in all of your 18 year old wisdom know that Uber was a special company prior to joining? Or were you just happy to have an internship?

• 59:25Speaker 08

  Maybe a little bit of both. I mean, it was obviously something that spoke to me. But I think for me, it was a way to actually just get immersed in the culture I really loved, but from afar. I mean, I know you guys are in LA. I'm from LA and certainly it wasn't what it even is now, you know, exposure to startups and tech and all of that. So.

• 59:43Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 59:45Speaker 08

  Yeah, I was very fortunate. It actually happened on the backs of a tweet, which is a fun story for for maybe later.

• 59:50Jordi Hays?

  The whole was a whole team built off of tweets?

• 59:54Speaker 08

  Basically, yeah. Basically, there was a TechCrunch article that they were coming to LA. I followed it. A few months later, someone tweets from the account says, we have a press lunch. Email us here if we missed an invite. And I just hit up this email as an 18 year old kid who was not in the press, but just wanted to meet these guys. And they sent me an invite and was like, come meet our CEO Travis Kalanick. And it was this restaurant in West Hollywood. Where I was like, half the age and height of anyone there. And I just moved my way into an internship with the GM that they just hired for LA. And that was kind of the start of it.

• 1:00:28Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing. How long? How long were you there?

• 1:00:31Speaker 08

  Was there for almost six years. I left the day that TK left.

• 1:00:35Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:00:36Speaker 08

  I knew that, you know, I didn't want to be there for a few months there. I knew I was only going to work for him or myself after that. And actually, I ended up working for him again a few months, you know, after he he left and all that madness. He he was calling for for round two with Cock Kitchens. And so I joined him there. We were about 30 at the time and was working on product and design for software side of our business until till 24.

• 1:01:00Jordi Hays?

  That's incredible. It's quitting in solidarity with your with your boss. Underrated. Is underrated. Underrated. Underrated. All right. Talk about talk about Casa.

• 1:01:11Speaker 08

  Yeah, so not sure if you guys already saw, but Casa is a personal property manager for your own single family home. You know, I guess the origin story is coming off of the Uber experience myself. I was really fortunate enough to consider buying my own first home. And I think, you know, like any first time home buyer, you're super excited about the emotional aspects of having a home and making it your own and sharing with your friends and family. It's also this huge financial endeavor, probably the most expensive thing you ever buy. And pretty much everyone realizes once they have it for the first time that, you know, at least a part of the ownership experience actually sucks. It's basically another part time job.

• 1:01:45Speaker 08

  And, you know, the home is basically 1000 products in one. There's always stuff that's going wrong, always stuff you want to make better. And you're really left to deal with it on your own. And right, most people don't have the time, the expertise, negotiating skills, sometimes even interest to deal with all this stuff. And they'd rather be spending that time with their loved ones and go on vacation and doing fun things.

• 1:02:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, makes makes total sense. I've I've there's so there's so many things around my house where I'm like, months go by where I'm like, I should I should do that or, you know, whatever. I just, I don't get around to it. And then and then stuff comes up, which is like, oh, do you have like, where's the floor plan? And I'm like, I don't know. It's like in an image.

• 1:02:24Speaker 08

  What's the paint color?

• 1:02:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What's the paint color? When did we redo the when did we change the HVAC filter? Like all this stuff. And it just gets lost in emails and texts. So I totally get the pain point.

• 1:02:38Jordi Hays?

  Has there been a lot of shots on goal on this concept in the way that you're positioning it? Like, it seems like one of those ideas that I'm surprised that I can't think of like a name brand company that does this.

• 1:02:51Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:02:52Jordi Hays?

  So I'm sure you've looked for it.

• 1:02:54Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, if you look at the companies, you know, at the intersection of home services and tech right now, and the few that remain, it's like the Yelp, the Thumbtacks of the world. And, you know, they might market themselves as homeowner products. I don't actually believe them to be. And you don't have to look farther than their P and L to understand that, right? 100% of the money they make comes from the vendor side of the business. So these guys are happy to send you shitty plumbers or super expensive plumbers if those guys are paying the platforms 20 bucks a click. And to be honest, the vendors hate them too for the same reason. So I think this is prime for disruption. You know, to answer your question, I would say I don't really think it's possible to build this in what I would say is the right way to build it until, you know, the last couple of years with the multimodal models. Basically, how Casa works under the hood is you sign up, and the first thing we do is we come to your house with a bunch

• 1:03:38Speaker 08

  of specialized hardware and software. And in the span of a couple hours for a standard sized home, we will develop an extremely intricate understanding about everything about the home that matters from a servicing perspective. So it could be a full 3D model LiDAR scan of your house, every appliance, every electronic, every exact paint color, the light bulbs inside of all your light fixtures. So to do that in the span of a couple hours with one or two humans was impossible a couple of years ago and is now possible. And that's really what powers everything that we do. So we're actually really fortunate. We got to take this like very first principles look and approach to all these homeowner problems. And, you know, it starts with the physical day to day pain points, the things that a handyman might help with, or, you know, another type of physical vendor. But there are also these other kind of meta concepts around the home, anything from your property taxes,

• 1:04:22Speaker 08

  your utilities, to all these things that we that we now kind of monitor end to end. And we'll do a more interesting job of helping you out with over time.

• 1:04:31Jordi Hays?

  And I'm assuming You have the, uh, this is an account that theoretically should stay with the home because

• 1:04:39Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 1:04:39Jordi Hays?

  I remember when I bought my house, I felt terrible because I would hit up the seller, like the previous owner, all the time, like, hey, do you know where this thing is? I just was like, I, uh, it was fair to ask all these questions and they were happy to answer, but it was still like, I felt like it was wildly annoying. And if there was just basically like a database that all this stuff had been like dumped in and a, and a single source of truth, they could have passed that to me. I would have been happy to, to pay to have access to it. So theoretically, I'm sure you're building out your model for the business, but you're hoping that, you know, a house could change hands multiple times and the casa would, would be kind of like, um, continuous through the whole experience.

• 1:05:22Speaker 08

  Yep. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, not to bring in a legacy name, but you can kind of think about it like a Carfax for your home too, or certainly that's the direction we would move in, right? So you have this neutral entity. Obviously we have no particular affiliation to any of the owners or whatever, and we're able to just provide this very unbiased view of how has the house been maintained? What are the general costs to maintain the home? Um, and that might even become interesting in other contexts, right? Like to lower your home insurance costs, if we can provide the insurance entity with like a partened understanding of these are the proactive maintenance plans that have been happening for a home, um, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to save money there. And so these are really all the opportunities when you're taking this homeowner approach, um, homeowner focused approach that you can kind of pursue that don't make sense for anyone else in the picture right now.

• 1:06:04Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. And have you been in stealth the last couple of years or like, yeah, what's the history of the company?

• 1:06:10Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah. So we've been in private beta since Q3 2024. Uh, we basically put out this very, very simple app. It was basically a two-way messaging client, uh, for a few of our friends or family in the Bay. And we basically said, hey, whatever problem you have with your home, send it to us, uh, and we'll try to figure it out. And for us, you know, we weren't charging anything. We just wanted to understand what were the bounds of requests that we were going to get? Where do people want to, um, have a concierge for their own home help with? And, uh, on the other end of that, that was basically my co-founder, Michael and I just responding to these issues, you know, calling up vendors, figuring out handyman, uh, on the fly. And, you know, I'd say in the span of a few months, we understood where the sweet spots were, what people were looking for, and the beta itself took on a life of its own. So what started as a handful of folks ended up with hundreds of homes, um, all in the

• 1:06:54Speaker 08

  Bay and eventually in LA, um, on the, uh, On the backs, actually, most notably on the backs of a tweet from one of our beta members, Lenny Ratchitsky, I know you guys know.

• 1:07:03Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 1:07:04Speaker 08

  And, yeah, he shared it, you know, he was like, hey, do you want a few extra homes? And we were like, sure. And then he tweeted about it. It was a very sweet and generous tweet, and the waitlist just went through the roof. And honestly, we've been working through that one for many months. So that was the first time a lot of folks had heard about us. And, yeah, that's where we're at.

• 1:07:24Jordi Hays?

  What does it take to launch a new region? You probably know what... You've launched a few regions, I'm sure, back in your Uber days?

• 1:07:31Speaker 08

  Yes. Actually, the first thing I was doing at Uber was standing around at LAX, knocking on a black car, town cars, recruiting drivers. And by the way, at the time, it was like primarily 50 to 60-year-old men who had not seen an iPhone before. And we're like, hey, do you want to change your whole life and use this phone and drive people around? And, yeah, I think for us, it's very similar in that, you know, I see this as a paralysable playbook. So we, you know, at Uber, we spent the first couple of years really perfecting what was the playbook for landing in a city and going from zero to 100. And once that really was understood and stabilized, you saw us launching, you know, 50, 100, 150 cities a year. So, you know, we'll do the same thing here, which is we're understanding what that looks like. L.A.'s the second test of that.

• 1:08:15Speaker 08

  We got a handful more markets coming this year. But, you know, I think you'll see us kind of do that exponential growth curve on the number of markets we're supporting, you know, also to the benefit of others.

• 1:08:27John Coogan?

  How do you think about disintermediation? Obviously, Uber did fantastically, even though you meet a great driver, no one really jumps from, you know, the driver that took you to the airport is now a full-time employee. Very, very rare. At the same time, like, dog walking had a much harder go, where people found great dog walkers and said, hey, how about I pay you cash? And we cut out the middleman and disintermediate. It feels like there's some sort of interesting unlock here with the data around the house that is valuable and provides enough value that both parties will want to stay on the platform. But walk me through the thesis of, you know, avoiding disintermediation at scale.

• 1:09:06Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's a great question, John. Actually, I think those are two perfect analogies, right? So for Uber, it didn't make sense because a huge part of the value for Uber was that you can get in a car in two minutes, even if you have a driver's number. Forget about all the insurance and the other things you get, but it just doesn't make sense to call a guy and wait an hour for him to come get you. It doesn't even make sense for the driver. The dog walker one's a bit different, right? Because the dog walker presumably lives in your city and, you know, once you have that connection, you're good to go.

• 1:09:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, and it's like every week, the same, the exact same pattern.

• 1:09:33Speaker 08

  Exactly, exactly. Exact same service and all of that. We're very much in the Uber camp, and I tell you that honestly just from experience, which is that we've never had a single one of our vendors or handyman poached by a homeowner. And the reason for that is obvious to me from the inside, and I think will become obvious to folks as the service gets bigger and more prevalent, which is that all of the things we do to surround the visit, right? So in the Casa app, you can book a handyman visit and you can say, hey, I want these three things done for my home. What actually happens at that point is a combination of a bunch of fun AI stuff and our own kind of concierge human team will look at those tasks, will look at the history of your home and all the information we have about your home to do that thing really well for you, right? So you might say, hey, I want to hang up a bunch of family artwork in the hallway, and we'll come back to you and we'll say, hey, do you already have the frames? Do you want us

• 1:10:16Speaker 08

  to find them for you? If you do, we'll come back to you with a bunch of options based on your past preferences, or we'll start to understand your preferences, and we'll actually have those frames ready for you or in the hands of the handyman before they even show up. And all of that context about your home and the preparation for this work is what really makes it valuable and also getting the right person to your home, right? So one handyman might be really great at carpentry and another might be great at a different skill. Sending the right person at the right time is super important, and also the fact that you can just get someone at your house usually within 24 to 48 hours at any time, and you can't do that with one person.

• 1:10:48John Coogan?

  So handyman exhibit, handyman exhibits spiky intelligence, and you solve that. That's what's going on.

• 1:10:53Speaker 08

  Yes, yes.

• 1:10:56John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations. I mean, this seems fantastic.

• 1:10:58Jordi Hays?

  You guys are based in SF?

• 1:11:00Speaker 08

  We're based in SF. We launched with SF in LA, so it's SF Bay Area plus LA, bunch of other stuff to come, and yeah.

• 1:11:07John Coogan?

  Oh, and Forerunner led the rounds. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:11:11Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna sign up.

• 1:11:12John Coogan?

  I'm definitely gonna sign up.

• 1:11:13Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna sign up.

• 1:11:13Speaker 08

  Love it.

• 1:11:15John Coogan?

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

• 1:11:16Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff, dude.

• 1:11:17Speaker 08

  Thanks, John.

• 1:11:17John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Up next, we have Matty Hall from Living Carbon with an absolutely massive plan to work on United States reforestation. Matty is in the waiting room, but we'll bring her in to the TV panel show. Matty, how are you doing?

• 1:11:32Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:11:33Speaker 09

  Hello, thank you all for having me.

• 1:11:35John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on on such a momentous occasion. Take us back, though, introduce yourself and the company, and then I want to get to this half a billion dollar deal, absolutely insane scale. Congratulations already.

• 1:11:47Speaker 09

  I know, it's very exciting. I think largest amount of money that's been raised for afforestation of degraded land in the US.

• 1:11:53John Coogan?

  Absolutely crazy.

• 1:11:56Speaker 09

  Prior to starting the company, though, I was actually working at OpenAI.

• 1:11:59John Coogan?

  Oh, no.

• 1:12:01Speaker 09

  Yeah, so.

• 1:12:01Jordi Hays?

  And explain OpenAI for the audience. No, kidding. Very, very cool.

• 1:12:06Speaker 09

  Tafa, you may or may not have heard of it.

• 1:12:08John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:12:10Speaker 09

  Yeah, but I think it was pretty clear that the biggest blocker between where we are today and superintelligence is energy, right? And the math just continues to get to get more compelling, like the hyperscale emissions have been up more than 50% since 2020. And at the same time, like, a lot of data center projects are being blocked, like 64 billion, something crazy. So Living Carbon, our focus is on transforming old mine land and abandoned farmland into forests that either can produce carbon credits or sustainable forest products. And then we sell to the world's biggest companies, Microsoft, Google, Meta, McKinsey, to mitigate their increased emissions from AI and data centers.

• 1:12:52John Coogan?

  And then how vertically integrated is the business? Because I can imagine this being something where, like, you're working with a whole bunch of contractors and different forestry organizations, and it's a lot of financial work to, you know, bridge the gap between the hyperscalers, which you have connections to, and the different forestry organizations. But are you planning on, like, building machinery, hiring people, planting trees, planting seeds? Like, how in the weeds will you get?

• 1:13:19Speaker 09

  Yeah, so I think of Living Carbon as like the general contractor of the project, overseeing all of the different pieces. That's largely what this Octopus deal enables us to do. It is them covering the cost of all of the site prep, the planting, the land lease, all of the above. And then Living Carbon acts as really the overseer and the manager of those projects, but then also shares in the revenue with Octopus from their investment. So we don't own nurseries, we don't own land, but we have programmatic tools to identify the sites that are best suited for our projects. And we do all of the end-to-end negotiation, financing, off-take agreements, getting all of those pieces of the puzzle lined up.

• 1:14:03Jordi Hays?

  Are there labor shortages in reforestation? Like if somebody's wants to get in on the AI boom, should they be like learning how to plant a lot of trees quickly?

• 1:14:16Speaker 09

  I mean, I think it's, I think it's possible. I think, you know, what you have when you're doing these land-based projects is value that is going to persist, right? Regardless of, uh, you know, how much of the software space the foundational model companies end up, end up eating. Um, so, you know, it's a great long-term cash flowing business. Yeah.

• 1:14:37John Coogan?

  Uh, the goal is a quarter million acres in the short term. You've already done 25,000 acres. Walk me through lessons learned from that, what that actually looked like, how that, how that initial first project came together.

• 1:14:52Speaker 09

  Yeah. So our flagship project right now, um, is about 25,000 acres that we're in the process of planting, uh, with our customers, uh, Microsoft, Google, all of the above. Um, and that's taking degraded land in Appalachia, so, uh, abandoned mine land and reforestation it. And what's interesting about this project is it actually has the potential to offset, uh, the entirety of all of the emissions of San Francisco on an annual basis. So our plan with Octopus is to hopefully 10x that, which would remove all of the emissions of New York City, uh, on a basis.

• 1:15:29John Coogan?

  Got it. Uh, walk me through why mines cause so much deforestation? I think of a mine as like a hole in the ground and, you know, it digs under, but it's not exactly clear cutting like miles and miles. Or is it? Like what actually happens in the process of mining that affects the forest?

• 1:15:47Speaker 09

  Yeah. So a lot of these sites that we're, that we're working on, they actually have been like stagnant since the nineties and it's really sitting for decades. It's not just the mining pit, but all of the land, um, in close proximity to it. When coal went bankrupt in the nineties in the region, uh, there was very little, uh, effort put into a lot of the remediation, restoration that, uh, would actually allow for that land to be put back into production. So these sites have been really liabilities on the balance sheet of a lot of the mining companies and private landowners for 20 plus years.

• 1:16:21John Coogan?

  Can you get me up to speed on some of the other like reforestation trade offs that are happening right now around carbon credits? Like I've heard one thing about like some carbon credits that are basically just designed where it's like, okay, we were going to cut these trees down, but we didn't. And so we want the credit and that feels like little bit edgy. And then also, I'm wondering about international because I imagine just on a cost basis, you could probably plant way more trees internationally because the land's cheaper. But does that offset carbon emissions like globally potentially? But do the hyperscalers get credit for it if it's happening halfway across the world? So how have you unpacked some of like the hot topics in reforestation?

• 1:17:02Speaker 09

  Yeah, so I think our focus has really been on like active intervention that wouldn't have otherwise happened without funding from carbon credits and the costs that we have there. It's hard to say with certainty whether or not a tree would have would or would not have been cut down. But we can say with certainty that these sites would not have been restored without our work. And so you're looking at these these areas and the natural rate of regeneration is very low. It is cheaper to do it in other parts of of the world. And I think there are some amazing projects that are being developed in Latin America and globally. I think for us, being in close proximity to the areas where data centers are being

• 1:17:42Speaker 09

  developed and having that regional focus such that our projects, you know, will offset carbon within the same region where large scale renewable projects are being built out and data centers being built out. And that's been desired.

• 1:17:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, so it's not just abstract to the local voter who's making a decision around environmental impact since.

• 1:18:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, is one of the solutions to how ugly data centers are to some people to just put like forests fully surrounding it? Is that a could we see that in the future?

• 1:18:11Speaker 09

  Oh, I sure hope so.

• 1:18:14Jordi Hays?

  A magical data center in the center of a forest. I would love that.

• 1:18:18John Coogan?

  I would love that too.

• 1:18:19Speaker 09

  I mean, that's what we're doing. So.

• 1:18:21Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 1:18:22John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:18:22Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 1:18:23John Coogan?

  Well, tell us about the the new deal. I want to hit the gong. How big is the new deal?

• 1:18:30Speaker 09

  Up to 500 million.

• 1:18:34John Coogan?

  Congratulations. And thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. And we will talk to you soon.

• 1:18:40Jordi Hays?

  Happy you're doing what you're doing.

• 1:18:41John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day.

• 1:18:43Speaker 09

  Sounds good. You guys too.

• 1:18:44John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:18:47John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Agni. Uh, is this the first time on the show? No, he's been on the show before. Second time on the show. Well, let's bring him in.

• 1:18:55Jordi Hays?

  As a free man.

• 1:18:56John Coogan?

  First time with his new fund AMP PBC. He's here in the waiting room. He's here with us in the TV panel.

• 1:19:03Jordi Hays?

  A man that finds generational run.

• 1:19:06John Coogan?

  Yes, generational.

• 1:19:08Speaker 10

  It's getting started, guys. No, generational run is used for people who are retiring.

• 1:19:12John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that's true. That's true.

• 1:19:14Jordi Hays?

  I think it's a, I think it's appropriate to, I think it's important to recognize when you're on a generational run that you realize you have to actually level up even further if you want to stay on the same trajectory.

• 1:19:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:25Jordi Hays?

  Uh, cause if you just get complacent, then.

• 1:19:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's important to like count the chickens before they hatch. Like, that's what you're saying?

• 1:19:30Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, the opposite. Anyway, it's great, great to have you back on the show.

• 1:19:37Speaker 10

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:19:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, fun to, um, but yeah, catch us up to speed on.

• 1:19:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, when, yeah, when did the fund launch? Uh, what, you know, what's the strategy? Uh, and, uh, yeah, like, like, walk us through like the current thesis for how you want to actually develop the firm.

• 1:19:52Speaker 10

  No, I think we should talk about something more interesting. Let's talk about eBay. Let's talk about eBay.

• 1:19:56John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, what you got?

• 1:19:58Speaker 10

  So, so here's what I'm, and I want you guys to kind of spar with me, right? I looked at, you know, Ryan did this CNBC interview and everybody's like pinging me and saying, oh my God, this makes no sense, blah, blah. And, and so here's my, my take on it. Okay. Which is that, like, if you read the GameStop deck, like carefully for eBay, most of what's been said about the deal in the last 48 is basically totally wrong. Hmm. I, I read, I was just before jumping on, I was reading Michael Burry's piece on it, which you guys should check out.

• 1:20:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:27Speaker 10

  And he's right that the leverage is pretty tight. But I think he's answering the, the wrong question. And so was Ryan on CNBC where he's, you know, they keep asking him like, where's the cash? How are you going to fund the deal? 50% cash, 50% stock, 50% cash. Like, I, I don't think the question, the question isn't can GameStop afford eBay? The question is whether the underlying business actually works. And I think it does, but not for the reason I was expecting Ryan to pitch.

• 1:20:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:20:55Speaker 10

  So if you, if you pull up eBay's 10K from February.

• 1:20:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:59Speaker 10

  Fiscal 25, and I did not understand this on Reddit. eBay spent $2.4 billion on marketing.

• 1:21:07Speaker 10

  How many new users did they get for that? I mean, you guys are marketers, you understand. 1 million.

• 1:21:12John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:21:13Speaker 10

  That's crazy. The user base went from one, a hundred and thirty-four million users to a hundred and thirty-five million users after spending two point four billion on marketing.

• 1:21:23Jordi Hays?

  So, and that's basically, they're basically, you, you would have to imagine they're just having to reacquire all their old users, people that have been on the platform before, or maybe even lost their account and they're, they're, they're coming back.

• 1:21:36Speaker 10

  I don't know, but it's like, that's twenty-four hundred dollars of marketing per new user on a site that every American already knows exists.

• 1:21:42Jordi Hays?

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:21:44Speaker 10

  So where's all that money going, right?

• 1:21:45Jordi Hays?

  That's rough.

• 1:21:46Speaker 10

  So, I don't think going is, is, I, I don't think he's buying eBay.

• 1:21:51Speaker 10

  Like, I, just watching Ryan, I don't think he's buying eBay because he thinks he's smarter than eBay's product team. I think he's buying eBay because he can see two billion dollars of fat that Wall Street has been pricing as fixed cost. And so he goes, okay, let me cut that, and the interest on the debt just pays for itself.

• 1:22:07Jordi Hays?

  Mm-hmm, interesting.

• 1:22:08Speaker 10

  Right?

• 1:22:09Jordi Hays?

  But he doesn't necessarily want to say that because he could kind of

• 1:22:13Jordi Hays?

  give that idea to the management team.

• 1:22:14John Coogan?

  But he still has to put the money together, right? But i- i- is your thesis that like, the deal is coming together? He has investors that he's talking to, but it's too early to say, "Oh yeah, I actually do have a fund that's gonna give me another five over here. I got seven over here, and it will math out, but just give me a week." Or is there something else going on?

• 1:22:31Speaker 10

  It depends on which investors he's talking to, but if he was pitching me, here's what I would underwrite, right? I'd say, okay, that's the floor. The floor is Ryan's gonna cut two billion dollars from this thing of fat, put that into treasuries, and we're gonna make more money than it's currently yielding. Okay, so that's the floor. Now the ceiling, because I'm a, I'm a technology investor, right?

• 1:22:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, the opportunity, the bull case.

• 1:22:52Speaker 10

  Bull case, so Amazon's used and collect, collectibles business has been flat for six years. They tried renewed, they tried collectibles, they tried trade-in, none of it scaled. You cannot put a nineteen sixty-two Mickey Mantle card through the same warehouse as a phone charger. That category, that category, right? Collectibles is structurally defensible against Amazon.

• 1:23:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:23:13Speaker 10

  Amazon is for phone chargers, Mickey Mantle for eBay, right?

• 1:23:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:16Speaker 10

  eBay has the marketplace, GameStop has, GameStop has like sixteen hundred stores that could physically verify the goods. That's a real mo.

• 1:23:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:25Speaker 10

  And it's worth more in the AI era than the human era, right? Right? Because, why? Because when AI agents, I, I collect, I love collect like rare pens, okay? This is a Montblanc.

• 1:23:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:23:35Speaker 10

  I'm a pen guy and I love old vintage glasses. I don't know if you can see my Jacques Marimage box in the back. Oh, cool. Nice. But when I'm out of time, what do I do? I have Claude go look for rare pens and glasses for me online. The biggest problem with used rare asset purchases is fraud. Yeah. So I often will tell, so Claude will be like, Andre, I found this amazing pen, this Montblanc pen. And I say, okay, can you triple check that it's, it's, it's real, it's not fake? Yeah. And that's where things go up real, because there's no way for him to verify that without messaging the agent and so on. Yeah. But if you have sixteen hundred stores where people who have Montblanc pens can go and physically verify those assets at GameStop. Sure.

• 1:24:21Speaker 10

  Now Claude just says, yeah, I checked. It has the physical verification stamp from. Somebody brought it in. Exactly. So you, you can't, you need physical verification built into the system for agentic commerce. And look, the reason I know this is real is because a few years ago, I think you, you guys, we talked about this last time, but I sold my last startup to a company called Discord in twenty twenty, peak pandemic. So I come on as the head of platform. My, my, my job is supposed to be, you know, Andre, go build SDKs, APIs and so on for gaming. Uh, we helped this company called Midjourney get going, AI, you know, generated. But twelve months later, suddenly I find myself running without realizing an e-commerce business because it was the summer of NFTs.

• 1:25:02Speaker 10

  And the, the, the board apes are blowing up and suddenly we have more than ten billion dollars of GMV flowing through Discord buy, sell, pay channel. Yeah. And Jason and Stan are like, hey, brother, your job is to like capture a piece of that pie. Yeah. Okay, homework accepted. So we start doing a deep dive. And we realize ultimately the, what, what these users need and pay for, like, so you have liquidity, right? Ultimately, that's what a marketplace like eBay and Discord, um, provide in sort of community commerce is liquidity. But you cannot provide liquidity if you don't have physical verification. And for Discord, that was just out of scope. You know, used sneakers.

• 1:25:41Jordi Hays?

  And it worked, you're saying it worked for NFTs because you had the on-chain.

• 1:25:44Speaker 10

  Yeah, you don't need any physical, there's nothing physical to verify.

• 1:25:46Jordi Hays?

  You owned it and you can transact.

• 1:25:47Speaker 10

  Yep. Exactly. And so we had, we are bootstrapping the e-commerce platform at Discord with NFTs. But of course, everyone on the board is like, well, how long are NFTs going to last? It's a fad. So Ange, what else is coming? And we go look at rare sneakers, or keyboards, like pens, all this stuff that nerds like me love. But for those, you need physical verification. And once we realized physical verification was out of scope, we nixed the project.

• 1:26:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're not going to go have the 1,400 like retail locations where people can drop things off. Yeah, that's, that's, that's quite, that's quite interesting.

• 1:26:16Speaker 10

  So that's when I realized, okay, eBay is this undervalued asset. And I hope that Ryan has figured it out as well. Because if he hasn't, he's giving me ideas.

• 1:26:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Have you, have you tried to walk through what, what, uh, you know, given that you're probably more AGI pilled than, than I would say 90, 90% of, of VCs? Have you tried to play out, what is it, what, how would you, how would you build eBay from the ground up today? With an agent-first approach? Is that even the right question to ask?

• 1:26:51Speaker 10

  Look, I, I have not, guys, because right now I'm in a, I'm a compute infrastructure guy, right? We started AMP as this public benefit corporation whose job is to be an independent system operator of the compute grid. We think about, we think we're roughly in like 1885 industrial England where the steam engine's been invented. Everybody knows that you can make cool new products like, you know, uh, steel and, and notebooks and pens and cars. And there's this very scarce input called coal that everybody is hoarding. In this case, it's compute.

• 1:27:20Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 1:27:21Speaker 10

  And when I, if you fly over industrial era England, you'll see all these factories getting set up. And everyone's running a generator in their backyard at half capacity. And I'm going, this makes no sense. If I'm looking at all my portfolio companies, you know, you have these, these clusters are running at like half utilization. In fact, Elon's like got 500,000 GB300 in Memphis at running an 11% MFU and less than 60%, you know, allocation. I mean, this is $12 billion of compute being wasted. So I set up AMP as an AI infrastructure organization where we buy a bunch of compute. We do long-term leases. We pull that, all those clusters on the grid. We coordinate capacity, drive up utilization. And by the end of this year, I think we'll have, you know, several billion dollars of compute coming online. But that's what I've been focused on night and day since like I left Andreessen Horowitz in January. And so, no, I have not had time to look at how to redo eBay,

• 1:28:06Speaker 10

  but if Ryan called, I'd probably help him out. But right now, it's wartime on compute, guys.

• 1:28:10John Coogan?

  So, yeah, I want to talk about AMP, but I also want to talk about, just last question on the combination of eBay and GameStop. Like, I get the thesis, the bull case. GameStop is $10 billion. eBay is like $48 billion right now. You put them together, maybe you get to $100 billion. I'm in for the bull case. The question is like, what's going on with like the plan? Because it feels like Ryan just doesn't have the capital, but then he announced it. Like, what do you think is happening behind the scenes? Because there's one thing where you could throw it out as like, oh, like, these two companies should work together. Here's a bull case. Let me know if you want to be on the team that does this. And then there's the other one, which is like, make the offer before the capital's lined up. But

• 1:28:54John Coogan?

  I just haven't been through enough of these stories to actually understand, like, why it's playing out this particular way.

• 1:28:59Jordi Hays?

  To be honest, I think he's sitting there with, he has $9 billion of cash.

• 1:29:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:29:04Jordi Hays?

  He's in a $10 billion company. I think when he announced this, I think he expected the stock to pop like crazy, and he'd be going on CNBC being like, this merger could make sense.

• 1:29:16John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:29:16Jordi Hays?

  And I think that-

• 1:29:17John Coogan?

  We'll issue another $20 billion of equity, and then we'll merge or something.

• 1:29:21Jordi Hays?

  And I think if you looked at, I think if you looked at like how kind of frothy some things in the market could be, you could have imagined that playing out. I mean, the Allbirds thing was, I'm sure you appreciated that from a meme standpoint.

• 1:29:33John Coogan?

  Direct competitor to you.

• 1:29:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, direct competitor.

• 1:29:35John Coogan?

  You gotta be careful.

• 1:29:36Jordi Hays?

  AMP versus Allbirds will be the new horse race. Anyways, that was my read. Because GameStop is basically valued at like, the brand is, and all the retail locations and everything is valued at like a billion dollars, right? He's getting no credit for all the cash.

• 1:29:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:54Speaker 10

  So, to be clear, AMP is not a cloud business. We are, so I started AMP as a holdings business.

• 1:29:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:59Speaker 10

  And I've got an infrastructure business and a capital business. And the infrastructure business secures compute and passes it on at cost to our portfolio companies. We have more than $1.3 billion in commits for our first fund. I've been at it eight weeks. And so we do the venture capital investments. We put $300 million into IntraFict.

• 1:30:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:14Speaker 10

  Oh, okay, cool.

• 1:30:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:15Speaker 10

  But we, we, we need to raise another roughly, you know, six and a half billion dollars this year and a lot, and more is getting committed by the day.

• 1:30:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:22Speaker 10

  But we give away the compute at cost to the independent ecosystem because my belief is that, you know, that they're like sort of, that the optimal unit of research today is a, like a focused, downed, dense team outside of the hyperscalers, you know, Anthropic and Coding, which was, I was the first, one of the first, I'm certainly, I think I'm the first angel investor, if not the first investor in the round.

• 1:30:41Jordi Hays?

  They're saying you're the Jason Calacanis of, of Anthropic.

• 1:30:45Speaker 10

  Unfortunately, JCal, I could never top JCal, but like, if I was JCal intern or something, fine, I'll take the win.

• 1:30:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:52Speaker 10

  But, but I, I think more importantly, like, I think compute is the strategic asset I've been yelling about for four years, and it's a primary bottleneck on these teams. And if you're not at the hyperscalers, you just can't get access. So we buy up that compute, we give it at cost to the portfolio companies, and then we reinvest the profits of carry and fees to buy more compute and so on and so forth. And so I'll take as much capacity as I can get from Allbirds. I love it when new people go into the business because that gives us more supply. So if you're the Allbirds CEO listening to this, please send us your compute, we'll take it all.

• 1:31:19Jordi Hays?

  That makes, that makes a lot of sense. Uh, what are you excited to invest in? You're investing in teams that need a lot of compute. You're trying to find things that aren't going to get steamrolled by Anthropic, who's another big portfolio company. Uh, there's, there's, you know.

• 1:31:37John Coogan?

  There's application layer stuff, there's Neo Labs. There's a lot of other different things that need compute, but what, what do you think?

• 1:31:42Jordi Hays?

  Because I feel like, I feel like a lot of, a, a lot of ECs are, would never say this out loud, but a lot of, uh, I get the sense from a lot of ECs that they're kind of like paralyzed, where they're like, they really don't, they don't have a clear sort of understanding of where things will be in five years, and they feel like they need to be active. Um, and so it's a mix of like doing new Neo, uh, doing some Neo, Neo Labs, maybe doing some application layer stuff and just kind of praying. But I would hope that you have a Given, given your background and how you're approaching this, you have like a stronger thesis on, on where the opportunities to invest at the early stages.

• 1:32:23Speaker 10

  Look, in, in some sense, it's, it's back to the future. I started my career at Kleiner Perkins when I was nineteen. My first board seat was as an observer with John Doerr when I was twenty. I wasn't old enough to drive. Technic- oh, drink, sorry. I didn't have, I didn't have a driver's license. I wasn't old enough to drink. And, and I got the chance to apprentice with like the greats like, you know, Brooke Byers and, and look, that's the, that's the vintage of venture capitalists I grew up admiring, like Arthur Rock. And that's my, you know, our thesis at AMP on the, on the venture capital side. Our business is called the AMP Foundry, where we help create, co-design, you know, new labs one at a time. My current one is called Periodic Labs. And we just decided to lead this series. I led the seed round last year with Liam, who was the co-creator of ChatGPT, and Doj, who was the, um, who led some of the quantum physics teams at DeepMind. And we're trying to find new high-temperature superconductors there with physical, we have a thirty thousand square foot facility in Menlo Park.

• 1:33:09Speaker 10

  I spend three days a week there. We do a stand-up every morning from eight AM to eight thirty AM, and then we make our priorities and then go execute. And, you know, basically we have AIs predict new materials. We then have robots synthesize the new materials. We then have an X-ray diffraction machine that tests whether the material has the properties that robots, uh, the AI said. And then we pipe that verification loop back into the training round like as many times as we need for the agents to continue predicting new superconductors. And in the last ninety days, we've had more material verification than I think in the last decade in the field. And so I'm a huge believer in unblocking frontier progress in domains where it, the verification, uh, sort of loop is clearly just like, we know it's gonna work, but execution is the bottleneck. And then I like getting these, the best teams, the best scientists, the best engineers, the capital, the compute, the commercial help they need.

• 1:33:51Speaker 10

  Now, I, I think that the beauty about having Anthropic around is that it's made this idea of the bitter lesson and, and scaling legible to the capital markets. So now, instead of me having to call up twenty-two friends and getting twenty-one no's, which was the case with the seed round of Anthropic, now I, I make two calls. Instead, I, we get like, you know, like we get three times oversubscribed. So capital is no longer the bottleneck, which is phenomenal. You know, again, we've been at it eight weeks. I have more than a billion dollars committed from my, our first fund. I'm a solo key man GP on the fund. And there's lots of institutions, pension funds, sovereign funds, who are like, how much more can you put to work, especially in publics, privates, buyouts? It's a bonanza for people who wanna be true partners, who wanna be the Arthur Rock of this era. I think if you believe in the bitter lesson, it's not new. It's been around for ages. You and I, the three of us talked about this like over a year ago at the last, at recent Harwood's AGM.

• 1:34:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, still bitter.

• 1:34:37Speaker 10

  I, I, I'm, I'm more zen than I am bitter.

• 1:34:42Speaker 10

  How are you thinking about building out the team on both sides? Trust is the mode. So there's five of us on the team. My full-time engineering co-founder Sebastian Lobo, we were roommates 14 years ago at Stanford and then he went on to build the grid.

• 1:34:55John Coogan?

  Here we go.

• 1:34:56Speaker 10

  What was that one?

• 1:34:57John Coogan?

  Overnight success.

• 1:34:58Speaker 10

  Overnight success. Thank you. 12-year overnight success in California.

• 1:35:02John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:35:03Speaker 10

  So Seb and Midha built the Borg Export GQM scheduler, which kept the Google internal capacity pool at more than 95% utilization there. If it was at 94% utilization, that was considered a major outage globally.

• 1:35:13John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:35:14Speaker 10

  Andrew Erskine is my partner on the operations side. He was a partner at ORIC, which was the outside counsel for Anthropic. And he was my GC at Ubiquity 6, which was the company I sold to Discord. And then Rosie, who was my chief of staff, ran comms for me from Edelman when I was at Andreessen Horowitz. You know, when I was a VP there. So you got the band back together. It's the Ange reunion, basically. And, you know, we called AMP not after my initials. Sometimes people think that. It's not Anzema Partners, anything like that. It's about energy. It's about amperers, the unit of energy. And we want to amp things up because we think we're entering like the great renaissance in technology. And, you know, if you can have a small team that trusts each other across context, you know, compute, capital, sports teams, buyouts, leverage, technology, all of this stuff.

• 1:35:58Speaker 10

  It's, these are all buckets and categories that we've all put, you know, traditional capital allocators have put around these asset classes that shouldn't exist. And I think if you have the flexibility to go back to first principles with a small team that you trust, you can execute, you know, with orders of magnitude less, a size of a team as a firm in this new era with the right tools. I don't know if that makes sense.

• 1:36:17John Coogan?

  No, totally. You mentioned taking positions in public companies. The fund structure is a PBC. Are you also an RIA? Like, how are you thinking about navigating both of those asset classes? Since that's a little more traditional.

• 1:36:29Speaker 10

  We are in process.

• 1:36:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:36:30Speaker 10

  Yes, we are in process of becoming an RIA because, you know, we founded the firm barely.

• 1:36:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:35Speaker 10

  Yeah, ninety days ago, but I'm used to that cadence because Andreessen Horowitz was a RIA. I was a general partner in the AI Infrastructure Fund for several years, as you guys know. And we were in RIA, I'm used to the compliance, the regulatory sort of guardrails we got to follow. And I think LPs trust us to, you know, have that cadence from day one. And so we're, we're gonna make sure that we, you know, Zach, if you remember this, this, like, you know, twelve years ago, Zach went on TV to say, move fast and break things. And then you have to update the thing to be like, move fast with stable infrastructure. And, and I think we move fast with stable infrastructure from day one, essentially, because we are an AI infrastructure team.

• 1:37:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk about the PBC, uh, like, if I'm playing back, like, what, what year were you referencing? Eighteen fifty or something like that?

• 1:37:13Speaker 10

  Eighteen eighty-five.

• 1:37:13John Coogan?

  Eighteen eighty-five. So if I go back to eighteen eighty-five and I think about the financiers that, uh, you know, created the industrial build-out, uh, they were not public benefit corporations. They were personal benefit. Yeah, uh, and I mean, there was a lot of good that was created. We got railroads and trains and, you know, machinery and cars and all sorts of things out of the industrial revolution. Uh, there were also things that were rough and there was unionization and battles and back and forth. Like, what is the PBC in service of solving? What, what, what, why PBC?

• 1:37:43Speaker 10

  Yeah, great question. So there's the, um, I, I'll tell you the substantive answer and then the vibes answer, right?

• 1:37:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:37:49Speaker 10

  So, um, from a substantive perspective, we, we do two things, right? We have a venture capital business and we have an infrastructure business. Both things have this very unique property called positive externalities. When implemented correctly, venture capital can unlock massive positive externalities for the ecosystem and for the world, because you end up funding innovation when done correctly. And then infrastructure, the same, right? When you have compute that's used by small, focused, downed, dense teams like Anthropic, that's able to produce ten times more soda capabilities than like DeepMind, which is, you know, sixty thousand or one hundred and sixty thousand people, then you're generating positive externalities for the world by being much more efficient per unit of input with the output they create. And so I was like, huh, well, what happens when, as an economist, you look at positive externalities? Usually you have market failure, you have underconsumption of that good. Well, how do you correct the market failure? Usually you get the government to intervene, but if you don't have the government intervening in time,

• 1:38:34Speaker 10

  what do you do? You become a private sector participant. And then if you look at the arc of eighteen eighty-five, you know, private sector businesses that ended up correcting market failure by... Um, by producing public benefits, they ended up getting regulated as utilities. Hmm. That's what AMP is. AMP is a self-regulated utility of that provides venture capital and infrastructure to the world's leading scientific teams. The next Dario, the next, you know, uh, Guillaume at Mistral who created Lama, the next Robin who created stable diffusion. These are the my, my generation's smartest minds. I'm not smart enough to be, you know, them, but I can be their intern. And instead of waiting for the rest of the space to come up with standards and institutions to enforce this, we're like, dude, let's just do it ourselves and show the world you can have fun while doing it with a small team. You

• 1:39:18Speaker 10

  don't need to be, you know, some, something called a, um, you know, with like these words like RIA, multi-stage asset class firm, doesn't matter. Just let's skip ahead to the part, the good part and, and like, you know, use all the proceeds that we get from management fees and carry to keep the space like innovating at the pace that we were promised, you know, 12, 13 years ago. And instead we got tweets and not flying cars. You know, when I was at Stanford, I got the chance as an undergrad, I had the chance to take Peter Thiel's class, the zero to one. And he was, you know, his whole moniker was, we wanted flying cars and we got, uh, you know, um, uh,

• 1:39:50Jordi Hays?

  Hundred and forty.

• 1:39:50John Coogan?

  Hundred and forty characters.

• 1:39:52Speaker 10

  Well, two hundred and forty characters. Thank you. And now I'm back at Stanford teaching CS one fifty-three, which is the largest class on campus. It's called AI Coachella. We've got thousands of people following along.

• 1:39:59John Coogan?

  Coachella is a good one.

• 1:40:01Speaker 10

  And it's got frontier systems because it's all possible now. We're literally, I, in our lifetime, we're going to have flying cars. We're going to have room temperature superconductors. We are going to solve cancer. We just want to do it in a way that's stable, predictable. We want to skip all the boom and bust cycles. And the way to do that is to lead by example and say, hey, guys, the public benefit, you know, is to provide goods and services that are utilities and make sure that we, we don't like, let's be the adults in the room and not do the stuff where we try to be robber bands and monopolists and got greedy along the way. And so that's the substantive answer. The vibes answer is look, I don't want to get sued by shareholders for whom it's not legible why I'm giving away billions of dollars of compute at cost of portfolio companies, right? Because we, that's what we're doing. And that shareholder, that's, you could argue that shareholder value that we're destroying, but I would argue in the long term, we're actually creating orders

• 1:40:46Speaker 10

  of magnitude more value. And if you look at Ben and Jerry's, you look at REI, they've become stable enduring businesses in categories that are fairly crowded. And eventually I do think technology and AI will get crowded. It will get commoditized because technology is never the mode. Trust is. Community is a mode. Culture is a mode. Execution is a mode. And so we're trying to skip ahead to that part, but it takes time for people to get aligned. So until then,

• 1:41:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, we see, well, we see an AMP joint venture with private equity. To help distribute. Diffusion.

• 1:41:15Speaker 10

  If we can, yeah, you know, if you go to our website, it's called amppublic.com. Because I do think if you look back to the like vulture era of private equity, you remember like RJR Nabisco? And what barbarians at the gate, we should just learn from from their mistakes and go, can we do private equity? But done right in an aligned way, let's not rush to like lay off, you know, hundreds of thousands of people and then not re-educate them and prepare them for their new opportunities. I I'm an optimist, as you guys know, I came from Andreessen Horowitz. So I I'm a sort of a rational optimist and I believe the transition can be done in a positive way.

• 1:41:47Speaker 10

  Is that me getting kicked off? There's like a bell ringing, but that might be here.

• 1:41:51Jordi Hays?

  No, I don't know.

• 1:41:52Speaker 10

  Oh, okay.

• 1:41:53Jordi Hays?

  No, the only bell we have is this, but no, we're.

• 1:41:59Jordi Hays?

  We got plenty of sounds for you. Continue, continue.

• 1:42:02Speaker 10

  Well, we will do everything. We everything we do is governed by a public benefit charter. So if we do private equity, it'll be governed in the public benefit. If we do education stuff, that'll be in the public benefit.

• 1:42:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:12Speaker 10

  Look, I've made more money than I know what to do in life. I'm thirty four and I'm just getting started. So my goal is I'll be remembered for having been a net positive influence in the space. I just got tired of telling people I told you so, because after a while they started looking at my returns and going, why didn't you give me a call? And I said, I did look at your email. I introduced you to Anthropic and the Series A and the Series D and the Series C. And so at some point I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna go direct, talk to the LPs, set up a platform, build infrastructure. And hopefully be known as a generally like sane, common sense, rational point of view on stuff that can often be is not legible to people from different parts of the stack. And that's what the class is about. So CS153.stanford.edu. I would recommend anybody watching, go check it out. The lectures are all online and the first one went on on Stanford's official page on Thursday.

• 1:42:57Jordi Hays?

  Was that with Scott Nolan?

• 1:42:59Speaker 10

  So Scott, no, actually Scott is lecture eight. I put up lecture, we put up lecture one, which is mine as a kind of the opening act. Because Scott is one of the mainliners, the headliners of AI Coachella. Scott will be up soon as well. And then Jensen was last week, so I think he followed Scott.

• 1:43:15Jordi Hays?

  Well, last question for me. Do you think the world is prepared for it not to be a bubble?

• 1:43:25Speaker 10

  That's a good question. The world, if the world prepared not for it to be a bubble. Oh, yeah, yeah. Inertia is, guys, inertia is a powerful thing. Most of the world still has no idea what AI is. It is crazy. And I've been flying to places where I thought there would be diffusion of AI by now. And it just aren't barely using Claude, ChatGPT. I mean, these things are still alien to most of the world. And so if, if, if we stopped capabilities today and half of us in the AI ecosystem vanished off the planet, nothing would change. It's still so early.

• 1:43:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is really.

• 1:43:56Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. Well, great to catch up. Congratulations on a very impressive fundraiser and a very unique approach. And looking forward to the next conversation.

• 1:44:05Speaker 10

  Thank you so much. Guys, on a generational run, and I hope the acquisition does nothing but give you guys more steroids and more fuel for the fire. We need more of you every day.

• 1:44:14John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:44:15Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, dude. Congrats.

• 1:44:16John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 1:44:17Speaker 10

  Thank you, guys. Bye.

• 1:44:18Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:44:18John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Ben Lamm from Colossal Biosciences. I made a YouTube video about Colossal years ago. But this is the first time I'm talking to Ben actually live, but fantastic company, super interesting. Ben, great to meet you. How are you doing?

• 1:44:34Speaker 11

  Hey, great to meet you. Wait, what YouTube video was it?

• 1:44:36John Coogan?

  Uh, something about the woolly mammoth coming back right after your announcement. You went viral for the first time and I sort of like made a video essay talking about the company, a little bit about your background. And then also just some of George Church's work, trying to give more context on the science, like the more incremental steps. Like, I think the media generally wanted to jump to conclusions about like bringing back the T-Rex, right?

• 1:45:00Speaker 11

  That first year, that first year was a lot of interesting fielded calls, for sure.

• 1:45:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And I think people were sort of like, oh, you know, the Jurassic Park analogy is so fun. They run a jump straight to like the T-Rex running loose in Times Square or something. And I was like, no, like, there's a world where this business works, even if it's just like some cool new animals for zoos. Like, you don't even have to get that crazy to just look at the price of like different zoo animals and stuff. I know that the, obviously, the mission's a lot broader. We talked about some of the, not deforestation, but dealing with the Siberia, I'm blank. Thinking on this, but yeah.

• 1:45:34Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:34John Coogan?

  You can tell me about all the applications.

• 1:45:36Speaker 11

  All the carbon modeling for sure. Yeah, we, you know, we had our original thesis was, you know, synthetic, this is like the hardest synthetic biology challenge and you know, kind of access to compute AI and synthetic biology all paired together will create kind of this unique opportunity to, you know, build a lot of different tools and technologies. And so our view is like, if we start with the hardest problem and we couple it with kind of like an existential problem, which is, you know, losing biodiversity. Uh, you know, I think it forces us to, to, uh, you know, build a platform that's pretty robust because working with DNA that's a million years old or 73,000 years old is a lot harder than just working with something like right out of a lab or, you know, bought off the shelf from some like XYZ DNA provider.

• 1:46:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, so where's the company today? Like what, what, what are the, I mean, it was, this was always like a walk, crawl, run project. There was going to be interior development. It wasn't going to jump straight to bringing back the oldest creatures in history, but, uh, where have the successes been? Where have the setbacks been? Where is the, the strategy pivoted? Take me through some of the recent developments.

• 1:46:42Speaker 11

  Yeah. So the biggest developments recently are, you know, last year we had kind of a couple of like watershed moments. We showed the world the objectively cute woolly mice.

• 1:46:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:46:52Speaker 11

  Uh, which at the time were the most genetically modified multicellular organisms, uh, out there, right? Where we took, uh, the, uh, mouse equivalent of the mammoth genes that we're targeting in our Asian elephant cells, made woolly mice. They went crazy viral and I do remember sitting at South by being very concerned because I was like, wow, people lose their mind over these mice. Wait till they see giant wolves in a month.

• 1:47:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:47:15Speaker 11

  Um, and then we showed the world that the dire wolves, where we took about 73,000 year old skull and a 12,000 year old tooth and made puppies. Uh, and so those were kind of two really interesting data points that shows kind of the end to end pipeline. Not only could we identify extinct variants and we could replicate them, do the ancestral state reconstruction, model them in and actually put them successfully into living cells and then go through the entire quality control process to. Deliver actual living animals to Earth, but do it in a way that's completely humane, that passes all of our IACUC and Humane Global certifications and do it, you know, get exactly what was predicted. And one of the biggest things that we've learned from

• 1:47:57Speaker 11

  that is all of the AI systems coming online are just accelerating. Like you're seeing a lot of different markets and industries be affected in a lot of different ways. And, you know, a lot of doom and gloom is being sold around AI. But synthetic biology and all of the modeling and taking the data sets that all of our teams are generating and pushing them all forward together is something that, you know, we're really seeing a mass acceleration here.

• 1:48:25John Coogan?

  What's on your short lists for animals to work on? So we feel like it's like, you know, there's a big, long list. And I imagine the list in your head is a little bit longer than what's on the website. And so I want to dig into some of the deep cuts, the B-sides.

• 1:48:40Speaker 11

  Yeah. So we've definitely announced woolly mammoth, Tasmanian tiger, dodo, moa, and then as of last week, blue buck. But even with that last week, you know, we didn't say, you know, oh, we're starting the blue buck. We're going to be on this, you know, 10 year journey. We're pretty far. We'd already done all the ancient DNA work, all the comparative genomics work, all the stem cell work, all the animal repo work of cloning and antelopes. And so now we're really just in the editing phase. And, you know, two years ago, we were doing three to five edits at a time. We're now doing over 200 edits at a time. So that scale function has gone really quickly for us. And we haven't seen an upper end of the of the delivery. So I think that I think it's highly likely you

• 1:49:23Speaker 11

  can see a couple more dire wolf like moments of species that haven't been announced, but you know, just, you know, show up. And I think we'll show you some additional project, progress on our, some of our big projects.

• 1:49:35John Coogan?

  And then what's the team like? I imagine that you have a lot of scientists on staff at this point. What's the shape of the business?

• 1:49:43Speaker 11

  Yeah, so we've got 260 full-time scientists. We have 17 academic partners around the world. 80 postdocs in academia, 75 global conservation partners, and now we have five government partners around the world. So, you know, we've closed a little under $650 million, and the teams are doing quite well. Labs in Boston, Dallas.

• 1:50:04John Coogan?

  Amazing. And then, in terms of like, commercialization, is it still, like, you know, just focus on the science? Like, the business opportunities will come? Is it experimental, little test projects? Like, how, or are you already starting to think about, like, you know, the SpaceX Starlink? Like, there is a real commercial enterprise that will be self-perpetuating, not science funding? I'm sure you're bringing in revenue from a bunch of different sources, but have you started thinking about it long-term?

• 1:50:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my head goes to like zoos and effectively living museums. Where I think about all the things that you listed off, I read about with my four-year-old all the time, because these, you know, children's books are not like, you know, they don't discriminate between living or dead species, right? I've read, I know too many dinosaurs at this point. But if you were telling me, like, okay, we have a zoo, and you can go see all these animals throughout history, that would be pretty compelling, and you would have effectively a monopoly over said animals. Sounds kind of bad to say monopoly over a species.

• 1:51:15Speaker 11

  That'd sound a little bad and evil. But ultimately, you know, we love zoos. We work with a lot of zoos. We're not anti, a lot of times I get the anti-zoo stamp on me, because I say, you know, zoos are a little bit transactional. If you do look at all the data and the studies that, the scientific studies that have shown up around kids seeing animals in zoos, actually gives them a higher appreciation nature, a higher appreciation for biodiversity. So I'm not anti-zoo, but it does feel like a little antiquated, it does feel a little transactional. Like, I pay money, and I have young kids, I've taken them to zoos, right? You pay money, you go see zoos, feels a little transactional still. So I think we have grander ambitions on that. And so why? You know, we have no intention to make zoos. I do think there's highly likely that we will have partnerships with ecotourism with the animals,

• 1:51:59Speaker 11

  with countries where you can see the animals back in their natural habitats.

• 1:52:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, more like a national park.

• 1:52:06Speaker 11

  It's like Kruger National Park in all these different locations, right? And I think that also making that accessible and putting science on display versus animals on display is something that we're really excited about. Like, we want, we think it's as important that you understand the conservation impact, the ecological impact in the science of how you make a dodo as seeing a dodo. So I do think that there'll be educational and media experiences. That's a large portion of the company that focuses on that. But I still think that's going to be dwarfed by the government work and just the synthetic biology pipeline. We've already spun out four businesses from the company in four years, two of which we've announced, two of which we haven't. One of them kind of got leaked, which is Astromech, which we raised.

• 1:52:49Speaker 11

  The last round was at $2 billion valuation, nine months old. So we are, we are building fundamental technologies that I think have broad applications to government, you know, conservation, as well as that of human healthcare and disease modeling. So synthetic biology is kind of this end-to-end pipeline, I think is pretty interesting. But then separately, governments are now coming to us and we're helping them understand the assets in their biodiversity, how they can actually data mine that and protect their species and kind of help them think about biodiversity in a different way. So not as far as the long-term applications to nature credits and biodiversity credits, but how can we help governments underwrite the protection of their biodiversity,

• 1:53:34Speaker 11

  of looking at, you know, massive non-model species wins like the Gila monster? And how the venom from that actually led to a trillion-dollar GLP-1 market, right? And so helping them understand these assets that they have should be protected, right? If we can't get them to protect it because they should protect animals and they should protect their environment, it's like, okay, if you can't love the animals, can you love the environment?

• 1:53:55John Coogan?

  Figure out how to make money. No, it's a good.

• 1:53:58Speaker 11

  Yeah, it's a good.

• 1:54:01Speaker 11

  It's a pragmatic look at conservation, right? It's like, it's like, hopefully, we can get them to care about the animals, if not the ecosystem, and if not just themselves, and if not the economics from treating human disease. So, so it is working, and we are, we now have five government partners online and giving them the tools to really understand what they have and why they need to protect it. So I, I do think that we can really have this next-gen conservation narrative while also helping countries monetize it in a way that's good for them and their people.

• 1:54:29John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on the progress, Jordan, anything else?

• 1:54:32Jordi Hays?

  No, this was cool. I've been, I've been, yeah, hearing about the company forever. It's great to meet you and, and understand the vision, and I'm sure you'll be, come back on when you have your next.

• 1:54:42Speaker 11

  Yeah, we'll let you know as soon as we drop something else crazy, we'll let you know.

• 1:54:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, we can't wait. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:54:46Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you.

• 1:54:47John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day.

• 1:54:48Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:54:48John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Up next, we have Jake from Serval. We're running a couple of minutes behind, we gotta catch up. He's the founder and CEO of Serval, launching the Future Founders Program to train next-gen operators. How you doing?

• 1:55:00Speaker 12

  I'm doing great, how are you?

• 1:55:01John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastic. Welcome to the show. Introduce yourself and the company and the project.

• 1:55:08Speaker 12

  Yeah, I'm Jake, I'm the co-founder and CEO here at Serval. We're an AI platform for employee support. So you've heard of AI for customer support. We support inter-employees when they ask for new laptops and access to applications and all that stuff. And we've got this new program called Serval Start to help deploy Serval in these large enterprises and give future founders the opportunity to get inside an enterprise and deploy AI, which we saw with the news today is becoming really the, the gap from technology to actual implementation and impact.

• 1:55:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:43John Coogan?

  Talk about like the integration points with the systems that we know. Is the, is the point that you can work across different point solutions be sort of a meta solution? Or will you wind up building point solutions and sort of becoming your own compound startup at some point?

• 1:56:02Speaker 12

  I think the idea is actually the latter, that you become the own compound startup. We're increasingly ripping out systems of record like ServiceNow.

• 1:56:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:56:09Speaker 12

  And actually taking over that entire service area.

• 1:56:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. Who's, where has adoption been the strongest in terms of like massive enterprise Fortune 100, down to SMB, down to startups? Like where are you seeing the best traction?

• 1:56:22Speaker 12

  Yeah, we started like a lot of companies in that kind of tech startup world with great companies like Notion and Perplexity as early adopters. But we've worked with some of the largest companies in the world, Fortune 20 companies, Fox Corporation. And increasingly, I would say more excitement and more interest from the largest companies in the world, because that's where they have the most pain. They've got thousands and thousands of employees asking for password resets, asking for access to applications, all these things that can be automated.

• 1:56:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk about the Future Founders Program specifically and like how that's structured, why this particular model, how everything plugs together.

• 1:56:58Speaker 12

  You know, what we noticed was that the biggest pain point is increasingly not the strength of the models. It was actually the implementation in a large enterprise, understanding the change management and the stakeholders and approvals and all the things that need to happen. And you actually need really talented people to go in and run that process that have to be able to, one, build relationships, sell the product, but also build product because you're going to find out all these feature gaps. And when you think about who is really good at understanding customers and selling and also building product, it's all people that are either former founders or future founders. And we started hiring that profile for this role and realized, hey, this is also a great training ground for them because you get to go into these massive enterprises and really go through the motions of being a founder, the same things that me and my co-founder did when we started the company.

• 1:57:41Speaker 12

  And so why not really formalize this and focus on hiring the next generation of founders to give them a training opportunity? So we bring them in, we give them opportunity to build enterprise automations, deploy AI in large companies. We accelerate their vesting so they vest after six months. And we have the expectation that like, do this for a little while and then go start your company. And we'll connect you to our investors like Sequoia and First Round and Redpoint and General Catalyst. And we'll set you on your way and give a great reference and give you a great experience.

• 1:58:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. How, how big do you want the program to be?

• 1:58:14Speaker 12

  We're going to start with a class of about 12. I think we'll expand that over time. We'll do probably two classes this year and then we'll see where it goes. We might make it bigger or smaller over time. I think there's a big question across the board on how big a lot of teams get, but we feel like given our growth, we need as many people as possible in the shorter term.

• 1:58:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, sorry.

• 1:58:33Jordi Hays?

  No, it's cool. It's cool. I mean, a lot of, there's a lot of people out there that want to be founders, but in order, but haven't necessarily been inside an organization to discover the right opportunity to go and build. And so I can see this being a win, win, win.

• 1:58:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's the, what's the, like, the winning background for someone in this program? Like, in order, I imagine that working at a big company can accelerate you becoming a forward deployed engineer at a different company because you can immediately plug back into your former organization as long as you left on good terms. Is that the correct model? Or is it more like, oh, come out of college and jump into FDE work?

• 1:59:15Speaker 12

  Yeah, I think it's actually closer to the latter. I think you could be a new grad. You could also be someone with a couple of years of experience. I think general intelligence ends up being the bigger, biggest predictor and a technical background. So someone who's CS degree or has worked as a software engineer, because you're going to be asked to write code and it's going to be production code. It's not going to be just some bespoke automation. It's actually going to be impacting our product. And then you've also got to be somebody who can sell a large enterprise. So we are hiring ranges of experience. Some are new grads and some are 20 years of experience and have more experience in the large enterprise. We think that there's a fit for everybody. But I think it's going to be folks that are incredibly technical and that could be starting a company instead. You know, that would be their alternative path.

• 1:59:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and breaking it down for us. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:00:02Speaker 12

  Thank you.

• 2:00:03Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:00:04John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Garth coming back on the show from Pantholassa, one of the coolest companies. Farming energy from the ocean with mega machines, mega projects. We got to pull up some video of Pantholassa and what Garth has built over there because it is a magnificent structure when you see it. We will figure out the waiting room in just a minute.

• 2:00:29Jordi Hays?

  People are showing DeepSeek progress versus leading labs.

• 2:00:35Jordi Hays?

  China is actually falling falling even more behind. Noah Smith is saying export controls work, export controls work, export controls work.

• 2:00:44John Coogan?

  So the map, the chart is that if you look across GPT 4O, OpenAI 01, 03 mini, 03, then Opus 4, then GPT 5, 5.2, Opus 4.6 to 5.4, and then OpenAI is GPT 5.5. America and the United States AI lab seem to be on a steeper curve compared to DeepSeek Alibaba, Qwen, DeepSeek R1, V3, KIMI, K2, K2.5, and then DeepSeek V4 Pro. Big jump. Yeah, I mean, if you go, if you rebuild this line just between KIMI K2.5 and DeepSeek V4 Pro, it

• 2:01:25John Coogan?

  is looking steeper. Maybe they'll figure it out, but at least for the for the current moment, the AI gap is bigger than you think. And potentially, export controls work. We'll see where they go, whether they stick around. But we have our next guest in the waiting room, Garth from Pantholosa on the show last year. But welcome back. How are you doing?

• 2:01:47Speaker 13

  Hey, guys. How you doing? Long time.

• 2:01:49John Coogan?

  Long, too long, but you've had you've made massive progress in the interim.

• 2:01:53Jordi Hays?

  You brought us back a big number.

• 2:01:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, you brought us back a big number. How much did you raise? Tell us what you raised.

• 2:01:58Speaker 13

  We did what we could. We did what we could. Oh, are we gonna do a gong?

• 2:02:02Jordi Hays?

  Right away.

• 2:02:03Speaker 13

  It was 140. Let's do it.

• 2:02:09John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Okay, talk about the progress. What specifically unlocked such a huge fundraise? Break it down.

• 2:02:16Speaker 13

  I mean, let me tell you, congratulations to you guys, too.

• 2:02:18John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:02:19Speaker 13

  Like, very happy for you.

• 2:02:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, and thank you for jumping on the show so early when we were a tiny show with just, you know, making phone calls to random founders.

• 2:02:27Speaker 13

  That was awesome.

• 2:02:28John Coogan?

  Hop on. It was a lot of fun having you on.

• 2:02:30Speaker 13

  Yeah. So, so sorry, what was, what was the question? Progress?

• 2:02:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, the question is like, yeah, why this round right now? I mean, I can imagine a bunch of reasons. I can imagine like you built the thing successfully and it's working. Or I can imagine just it's very, it's way more clear what cheap energy means. Because with LLM training, you load some GPUs on this thing, you send it up to a satellite. Like a lot of the pieces of the puzzle to underwrite this deal feel like they've fallen into place, but

• 2:02:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there were a lot of businesses that were pitching at the point that we first talked that have made less and less sense, right? Even things like application layer companies would be one. And like, it feels like your business makes more and more sense as the sort of

• 2:03:16John Coogan?

  Especially on the back of like data center bans and, and, and energy expenses and natural gas flaring. And gee, Vernova's out of stock. And even if you get it, it's going to be, you know, natural gas powered, like going to the ocean, going to somewhere far away seems to make a lot of sense.

• 2:03:34Speaker 13

  Yeah. Well, I think there's two things happening at the same time. Like number one is this is a deep tech play that we started working on a long time ago. And we had to develop the whole new technology to do it. You know, no one has built an autonomous system to go to the middle of the ocean, capture energy, turn it into anything. You know, computing fuels is one of the things we're going to be doing too. So, you know, that took time and now we're at the point where we can actually start scaling these systems. So that's a big unlock. That means that we can start building our manufacturing plants. It means we can start getting all the bugs out of that, getting the bugs out of the first fleet that we're putting out starting later this year. So, so that's the sort of inflection point on the company.

• 2:04:14Speaker 13

  But then you've also got, I think, everyone figuring out that there aren't that many ways to get energy on the planet. You know, and it's the really hard thing. It's like there's, you know, there's gas, which you can scale. There's solar, but it takes a lot of people and a lot of land. And so what are your options? People are saying, well, you know, you guys were on to something. When you said middle of the ocean is a pretty good play. So it's been, it's been a lot of fun to gather that coalition of investors who are like, wow, this is a totally orthogonal play and it makes a lot of sense. We can go and do this.

• 2:04:45John Coogan?

  How much energy does one, what are we calling it, device?

• 2:04:49Speaker 13

  Node. We call them a node.

• 2:04:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:04:51Speaker 13

  N O D E. Yeah.

• 2:04:52John Coogan?

  How much energy? Because we talk about an average meta campus might be half a gigawatt or something. And, you know, we're moving towards a gigawatt a month. And there's different clusters and different sizes of campuses. And I imagine you can create a fabric of these nodes that work together. But a single node, how much energy are we generating? How could we think about it when we compare it to just the broader like data center campus world?

• 2:05:20Speaker 13

  Yeah. The typical node will be on the order of 500 kilowatts.

• 2:05:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:05:23Speaker 13

  That's what we're thinking it'll be.

• 2:05:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:25Speaker 13

  It's 100 kilowatt up to a megawatt.

• 2:05:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:27Speaker 13

  So it's like one rack to multiple racks depending on density.

• 2:05:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:05:31Speaker 13

  And yeah, they can talk to each other sideways.

• 2:05:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:33Speaker 13

  So we'll have radio. Of course, they're talking to satellite.

• 2:05:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:05:35Speaker 13

  And so we're building this grid, you know, and it's not for synchronous training, right? This is not fiber between everything.

• 2:05:41John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:05:41Speaker 13

  But if you want tons of embarrassingly parallel inference,

• 2:05:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:05:45Speaker 13

  you know, running all the same models, running future models that get bigger or smaller, we think we're going to be perfect for lots of, lots of that. So the way that we see this going is like, once the energy starts to crash through what's available in the grid, it all just becomes about who can actually build in an elastic fashion to make, you know, 10 gigawatts, 100 gigawatts, 100 gigawatts per year is the kind of thing that we're getting asked to do. So that's the kind of framework that we want to build up just pure manufacturing to get energy capacity out there.

• 2:06:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. So you build a thousand. So I imagine a huge industrial project now to actually scale the manufacturing process. What, what are you, is there anything unique that you need to do around battery storage to maintain generation capabilities? Or would you just like take a node offline if it's in still water? Like, because I imagine that there's a, sometimes it's generating more than others, depending on what the conditions of the ocean are?

• 2:06:46Speaker 13

  Yeah, so the reason we chose this resource, and it's not just any ocean that we're going to. We're not going to, you know, 200 miles off the coast of San Francisco or something. We're going to the southern hemisphere oceans, which are really power dense. The wind is blowing all the time. The waves are on even more than the wind because it's this big battery for wind energy, big battery for solar energy. So when we're there, we're on almost all the time. There's like a couple of times per year where we dip down a little and we do have some battery on the system for that, but it's not like solar where you're using the battery every day. It's just a couple of times a year. We don't need as much battery. We can cycle that battery far less frequently.

• 2:07:24Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 2:07:24Speaker 13

  And so the level of uptime that we want, you know, we can go to four nines, we can go to three nines, we can go to like 98% uptime if that's the economic optimum. And so we do a lot of that optimization to figure out for the chips we're running, for the workloads we're running, what is the exact right amount of battery? What is the exact right size of the payload and all of those things?

• 2:07:44Jordi Hays?

  Where are you thinking about placing a network of nodes?

• 2:07:48John Coogan?

  Around Antarctica.

• 2:07:50Jordi Hays?

  Antarctica?

• 2:07:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, essentially, right? It's the southern oceans?

• 2:07:54Speaker 13

  Yeah, it's like way, way north of Antarctica. It's like, you know, southern hemisphere, south of Australia, south of New Zealand, all the way around the planet. But like, yeah, we don't go, you know, we don't go down into the, those parts of the southern ocean.

• 2:08:07John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:08:07Speaker 13

  Yeah. We can also do some in the North Pacific and so forth. That's where we're doing our pilot fleet.

• 2:08:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:13Speaker 13

  But the real energy resource that we think is optimum for this is that southern hemisphere belt.

• 2:08:18John Coogan?

  So do you, I mean, if you're, I'm just thinking about if you, if the, if the, if the road is like road to a gigawatt, that's like 2,000 of these units that will happen over years, I'm sure. Do you have to build the factory nearby to cut costs? Or if you make them in America, can you ship them down there effectively? How does that work?

• 2:08:40Speaker 13

  The best deployment story is one, yeah, where you have your factory or factories pretty close to the resource.

• 2:08:46John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:08:46Speaker 13

  And so we're working with folks in some of those countries that are nearby.

• 2:08:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:50Speaker 13

  To, you know, identify the right sites.

• 2:08:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:53Speaker 13

  Go build there. Right now, we're building our first pilot line, though, near Portland, where we are.

• 2:08:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:08:58Speaker 13

  Because we want to like dial in all the manufacturing, get it really good. Then we can go and start carbon copying that unit to the right places.

• 2:09:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's fascinating. Jordy, anything else?

• 2:09:07Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely wild stuff.

• 2:09:08John Coogan?

  It's such a cool project, such a cool project.

• 2:09:11Jordi Hays?

  I cannot wait for the, for a, for a future video where you are jet skiing between the different nodes.

• 2:09:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:17Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be, it's gonna be incredible.

• 2:09:19John Coogan?

  It'll fit a lot of, I don't know if the nodes would even see each other. I mean, you put a thousand down there.

• 2:09:24Jordi Hays?

  I know, they're, they're gonna be jet skiing distance apart.

• 2:09:26Speaker 13

  You can spread them out pretty far.

• 2:09:27John Coogan?

  Imagine.

• 2:09:27Speaker 13

  But anyway, we'll get you guys down there on a yacht.

• 2:09:30John Coogan?

  Can't wait.

• 2:09:31Speaker 13

  So you can check out the fleet.

• 2:09:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, can't wait.

• 2:09:33Jordi Hays?

  Incredible progress.

• 2:09:34John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. We'll talk to you soon, Garth.

• 2:09:38Speaker 13

  Goodbye, see you guys.

• 2:09:39Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:09:40John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Katie Haun from Haun Ventures announcing a new fund. This is very exciting.

• 2:09:46Jordi Hays?

  This is the biggest number? No. Anthony, Peter.

• 2:09:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, but.

• 2:09:52Jordi Hays?

  You almost had the biggest number on the show today.

• 2:09:54John Coogan?

  Uh, we were catching up with Ash. But, uh, anyway, thank you so much for taking the time. Welcome back to the show. How are you doing?

• 2:10:00Katie Haun?

  Thanks, I'm doing well. How are you guys? Thanks for having me back.

• 2:10:03John Coogan?

  Of course, it's always good to talk to you. Uh, I mean, there's, there's a lot of different directions we could go, but let's, let's talk about, uh, the fund, the thesis, uh, expansion, interactions between different theses, like where, how you're seeing the market, how you're seeing opportunity in venture broadly right now.

• 2:10:19Katie Haun?

  Yeah, so it's been four years since we launched Haun Ventures. And, you know, the world looks a lot different four years later. And, uh, we're, we're excited to have a billion dollars in fresh funds to deploy behind. Thank you. Even though it wasn't the biggest of the day.

• 2:10:36John Coogan?

  Huge. Wild times that we are in, in the venture world, for sure.

• 2:10:42Katie Haun?

  Yeah. Well, we're taking this fresh funds of billion dollars and backing founders who are building what we're calling the new economy. And by the new economy, I'm thinking about three structural shifts we're seeing right now. The first is new financial rails and infrastructure. I mean, think companies like Erebor, right? Gone are bankers' hours, gone are wire cutoffs. I mean, you're talking about global from day one, 24/7. This is a bank that opened on a Sunday. The second structural shift we're seeing are new assets in markets. It started as stable coins, but it's quickly kind of we're now talking about tokenizing the stock market. And you see giants like BlackRock and you see Coinbase and Robinhood doing that. But it's also opened up new markets.

• 2:11:25Katie Haun?

  I mean, think prediction markets, think perpetual markets. You've had a lot of those guys on the show. And then the third structural shift, we're putting this new set of funds behind. And this is the earliest of the category, but of course, we have an early stage fund too. Is what we're calling the agentic future. And it's not just AI broadly, it's where AI and crypto intersect. And I think that's a lot more areas than people realize. I mean, we're talking about building for a world where the end user is not necessarily a human of a financial product or service, but is a computer or an agent. And so how does that impact things like privacy? How does it impact things like provenance and trust? And what form will they use? How will agents pay for things or subscribe to services?

• 2:12:06Katie Haun?

  And blockchains are good for everything, but they are really good for some of those things I just mentioned, as are other cryptographic tools.

• 2:12:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, I remember that being like back in 2015, 2016, the original machine to machine payment thesis around Ethereum. And even some Bitcoin folks were talking about it, tons to dive into there. Just in general, we were talking to the Collison Brothers last week about how stable coins are maybe in some sort of a winter. Like there was a big surge, 30% growth in the market. And then it's been a little bit flat. Like, do you think that this is a regulatory story? Is this a technology story? Like, what is the next breakout adoption? Yeah, yeah, the next adoption hinge point for for just crypto technology to diffuse further.

• 2:12:57Katie Haun?

  Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, I think actually I take the other side of that. I think you have now, Mastercard, for example, just paid 1.8 billion dollars for one of our stablecoin investments, BBNK, and that was the third largest ever in history acquisition by Mastercard.

• 2:13:12John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 2:13:12Katie Haun?

  And so I don't, I don't think we're in a stablecoin winter. I think actually you have double-digit trillions of dollars in transaction volume now flowing through stablecoins. And this is a technology that didn't even exist, guys, 10 years ago.

• 2:13:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:25Katie Haun?

  And now it's about to surpass the combined transaction volume of Visa and Mastercard. And we think that'll continue, but the story doesn't stop at tokenizing dollars, because now, of course, a lot of economies want stablecoins for their currency.

• 2:13:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:13:38Katie Haun?

  So I think that's a tipping point. Another one is tokenizing other financial products and services, like the stocks I'm talking about.

• 2:13:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Is that, is that a disruptive innovation or sustaining innovation? Because I can imagine that the BlackRocks, the Coinbase's, like, the Robin Hoods of the world, like, do very well in that world. They're already set up for them. They have the audiences and the customers, and they, you know, expand into that category. At the same time, you could imagine we've seen upstarts like Polymarket, Kalshi, like, you know, you know, slightly new twist on an old idea, and it's just a huge new unicorn or Decacorn emerges, and sometimes multiple in a single category. How are you viewing the idea of, like, on-chain equities as a venture opportunity?

• 2:14:23Katie Haun?

  Well, and it's not just on-chain equities. I think it's starting there, right? It started with fiat, and now it's starting with, for example, securities or stocks. But I think it won't end there. I mean, I think it will be all kinds of financial products and services. And I'm not one of these people who is going to tell you all assets will be on-chain. Every single physical asset will be on-chain. Maybe eventually that's an end state, but I don't think it's an end state necessarily in our lifetimes. But I do, I do believe that financial services and project, products will end up on-chain.

• 2:14:52John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:14:52Katie Haun?

  And we're just starting to see that. You mentioned prediction markets. It's a great example. Again, and by the way, you talk about the original prediction market was Augur, right? And that was just ahead of time, years and years ago. I mean, when was that? 2016?

• 2:15:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:05Katie Haun?

  But that was before you had stablecoins. And it turns out you need some of the infrastructure to really have prediction markets find true product-market fit at scale. And that's what they're, that's what they're undergoing right now. And I think we're still early in prediction markets. Like sports and politics.

• 2:15:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, last time you were on, last time you were on, I think you you made the call, if I remember correctly, that, yeah, it was still early in stable coins and we, or sorry, not stables, but prediction markets.

• 2:15:33Katie Haun?

  Prediction markets.

• 2:15:34Jordi Hays?

  And you were, you were correct, there was a boom, there was a bunch of new kind of like vertical approaches. How are you, how are you processing it? Do you expect to make like a net new prediction markets bet?

• 2:15:43John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:15:44Jordi Hays?

  Out of this fund, or have you made your bets at this point and and you're just gonna watch it evolve?

• 2:15:49Katie Haun?

  Well, in Fund One, we made a bet and Coinbase bought that bet. And that was the clearing company. So I certainly hope, my prediction is that we have a prediction market bet in Fund Two. We don't have one now. Okay. It is some, an area where, and and but the prediction markets that we invest in might not look like what they look like today. Remember, we're a venture fund, we're not a hedge fund, so we're looking at over the next 10 years. And I think an area I'm particularly interested in, and we as a fund are interested in for prediction markets, is some enterprise use cases. Think about insurance, think about litigation predictions, think about drug trials, think about risk hedging and all kinds of other business uses, aside from the fun of sports betting, aside from the fun, if you can call it fun of, you know, betting on politics outcomes.

• 2:16:34Katie Haun?

  There are a lot of business use cases and institutional use cases, and that's why you see folks like the New York Stock Exchange and ICE getting involved. But I think we're really early scratching the surface. So the question is, is it going to, is value going to accrue there to one of the established entrants already? Or will some new upstarts come about? And so we're keeping an eye on both. And as I said, there's huge opportunity, but with huge opportunity is going to come a lot of legislation, we think, and regulation.

• 2:17:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, how do you think the whole, how do you think the whole insider, you know, given that you don't have an active bet, it sounds like, how do you think the whole insider trading debacle?

• 2:17:14Katie Haun?

  Confirming, we do not, we do not have an active bet.

• 2:17:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, that's what I'm, that's what I'm saying. So I just feel like you can.

• 2:17:21John Coogan?

  But I have a huge bet on her taking a bet in the next couple of years.

• 2:17:25Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay.

• 2:17:25John Coogan?

  Because she just said that, so I'm going super long on that.

• 2:17:27Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but my question is like.

• 2:17:29Katie Haun?

  We're definitely in the category and we hope, maybe I should rephrase to say I hope we have a bet.

• 2:17:34John Coogan?

  No, no, no.

• 2:17:34Jordi Hays?

  But I just wanted to ask around like how you see the insider trading debate evolving? Because clearly, if if you're somebody that is looking to prediction markets for alpha, for data, theoretically, like.

• 2:17:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:49Jordi Hays?

  Prediction markets.

• 2:17:50John Coogan?

  You mean specifically like right now it's handled on terms of service level and it might eventually be handled at like the government regulatory level.

• 2:17:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:58Katie Haun?

  Right. I think now you have a little bit of what we'll call self policing and you know, industry best practices, but the industry is still early and what are best practices today might not be. I mean, and I think a lot of these platforms, look, a lot of responsibility is going to fall to these platforms. This is novel issue with any nascent technology. You're going to have novel issues of first impression from a statutory point of view, from a constitutional point of view. You're talking about insider trading, that's a criminal point of view. And as you guys know, I spent over a decade as a federal prosecutor at the Justice Department and I've seen a lot of, a lot of situations emerge that frankly, companies weren't really contemplating and that just come about. And I've seen a lot of that in my career as a prosecutor. And I think that these platforms are really going

• 2:18:42Katie Haun?

  to have to be thinking very deeply about these issues. And I think they know that. I mean, but they're, they're only going to be heightened because of the opportunity. And I think that's really exciting, but it's the flip side of the coin, right? And it's not just insider trading. Right now, these platforms are asking for federal preemption, which I think is really interesting because you might want federal preemption today or you have a CFTC chair who is not hostile to prediction markets, but don't forget that Gary Gensler himself was once the CFTC chair. And, and so I think it's a really interesting question of do you go state by state? Do you ask for federal preemption? And so there are a lot of questions beyond just insider trading.

• 2:19:20John Coogan?

  So, so unpacking that risk, there's a world where you get federal preemption, but then as different rules and laws are written, if there's a different, less friendly CFTC chair, the downstream, like the implementation of that oversight could be disadvantageous to the industry. Is that basically the risk?

• 2:19:41Katie Haun?

  You're exactly right. You could win the battle but lose the war.

• 2:19:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 2:19:46Katie Haun?

  Yeah, but that's, I do see why a lot of those platforms are looking for federal permission right now. But again, you've got to look at this as a multi-trillion dollar asset class, and you've got to look at it over the next decades.

• 2:19:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:58Katie Haun?

  And I think, you know, social media was a huge category, a huge market opportunity for investors, and yet also these platforms had to get really sophisticated over the last decade with how they police content, for example, and how they work with regulators. And it's not just in the US. As I said, this structural shift of new assets and new markets means it's global from day one. So you're not just thinking of the US. You have to think about globally. What do regulators across the world think about this? And they don't always just follow what the US and the CFTC think.

• 2:20:33John Coogan?

  On the intersection of AI and crypto, are you equally excited about bringing crypto to existing AI agents? Someone has an open claw and they wanted to buy something, and so stable coins speed that up, machine-to-machine payments, micro-payments, all of that? Or is there actually more of an opportunity, or maybe an equally or maybe less discussed opportunity around bringing AI to crypto, thinking about like a cursor, but it's really good with writing smart contracts, or something like that, where you're still primarily selling to the crypto community, but you're bringing AI tools to bear for that world in the way

• 2:21:14John Coogan?

  that there were several big crypto winners that were sort of web 2.0 SaaS products, but they applied their strengths to the crypto world very successfully and built huge businesses. Are both of these equally exciting? Is one of them more hyped than the other? How are you processing those two opportunities?

• 2:21:31Katie Haun?

  I think they're both really early and I think they will naturally, we're interested in both. I think there's a case to be made for both and we can talk a little bit about that. But I do think that it's more of an opportunity for our early-stage fund right now because we are very early at this. I think to the first point of, you know, you mentioned micropayments. This is something that those of us in the crypto community over 10 years ago were talking about with companies like ChangeTip and other things. And it turns out that fast forward, now there is a use case. And I think we've heard John Coulson talk about how he's tickled about this. And I think that's the word he used, tickled about the case for micropayments. And, you know, we don't think agents who work 24/7 around the globe, again, they don't

• 2:22:14Katie Haun?

  work banker's hours, we don't think they'll necessarily just be using credit cards for payments. I mean, think about the need for instant settlement and if you think about the need for finality and these transactions that are, again, around the globe but also micropayments. And we think crypto rails are actually perfectly suited for that. So that's the first thing. But in terms of bringing blockchain-based solutions or cryptographic tools, we also think there's a lot of exciting areas there where there's an intersection. And again, it's very early, but you can imagine provenance. You know, the blockchains are real, blockchain-based systems are really great at proving provenance. And I think in a world of AI where you're wondering the provenance, you're going to be wondering ever more about the provenance of things.

• 2:22:57Katie Haun?

  We've already been wondering about the provenance of things where most things were created by humans. And now that's starting to shift and more and more is being created by computers and we think more and more will be created by agents. And so what does that really mean for provenance? What does it mean for privacy, by the way, when all of a sudden all of your data, we have things, you know, GDPR and the California equivalents that are out there. But in a world where you have Different AI agents that can really quickly, much more than humans can, kind of undo that privacy, do you look for zero knowledge-based proof solutions for that? And that's, again, a cryptographic tool. So I would say reputation systems, provenance, privacy, agentic finance, they're all fair

• 2:23:41Katie Haun?

  game and right within the wheelhouse of what we've been doing, guys, for the last four years, and we're excited for the next four years. And I think we are probably, it's for a billion-dollar fund, we have the trust of 35 or so global institutional investors from around the globe who very much believe in this future of the intersection of these technologies.

• 2:24:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, that makes a ton of sense. Yeah, talking to the Collison Brothers really, I don't know, just very much like reset me on the actual need for micropayments, the value that comes from that, talking about token theft and basically setting up an account, getting on 30-day billing, not being good for it at the end of the 30 days, like that's solved if you're paying in an income stream. Streaming payments actually makes a lot of sense there.

• 2:24:29Katie Haun?

  And if agents have something to go look at that's immutable, and so you start to see, and you know, it's not just the Collison Brothers and Stripe that are doing this, obviously Coinbase and companies like Robinhood are really leaning heavily into these areas. And then you have, again, the giants like Mastercard or Visa, who, I mean, I think Visa's chief product officer was saying this next period over the next decade for agentic finance is one of the most interesting, so they're keeping their eye on it closely, too, and so are we.

• 2:25:03John Coogan?

  Amazing. Jordi, anything else?

• 2:25:05Jordi Hays?

  Tremendous progress.

• 2:25:06John Coogan?

  Congratulations. Thank you so much.

• 2:25:08Jordi Hays?

  Let's not let it go another year.

• 2:25:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is always a good time.

• 2:25:11Katie Haun?

  Absolutely not.

• 2:25:12John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.

• 2:25:15Katie Haun?

  Thank you. Thank you all. Bye-bye.

• 2:25:18John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Nick from Rivet. He's the co-founder and CEO. He's been on the show. Has he not been on the show before?

• 2:25:25Jordi Hays?

  He's been on the show.

• 2:25:26John Coogan?

  He's been on the show before. Right? Nick, welcome to the show. You've been on the show before, right?

• 2:25:31Speaker 14

  Yes, quickly for a seat around. It was a great time.

• 2:25:34John Coogan?

  Welcome back to the show. We need to update our CRM, our database. We have you down here as first appearance. I know that's fake news. Anyway, a lot of people have been worried about artificial intelligence. They say, is it worth the water? Is it worth the energy? But I think after they see these results from tax bench, they're going to change their tune. Tell us about it.

• 2:25:55Speaker 14

  Yeah, so Rivet is an AI.

• 2:25:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, before, yeah, yeah, introduce the company first.

• 2:25:59Speaker 14

  Yeah, Rivet is an AI-enabled accounting firm. We do tax returns and tax advisory work for thousands of companies.

• 2:26:08Speaker 14

  When we implement these models, there you go, yeah. When we implement these models, right, we need a way to test them. So we've had an internal benchmark that we've used for a long time to see whether these models are actually doing our job as accountants effectively. It was time to publish that benchmark. And so that came out today. The results are pretty striking. The top models don't get most questions right if you ask it the same question five times in a row.

• 2:26:32John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:26:33Speaker 14

  A lot of them do incredibly well when you ask it once and cross your fingers that you're going to get the right question or the right answer.

• 2:26:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:40Speaker 14

  When you ask the same question five times in a row, are these models actually reliable? Turns out they actually really aren't, especially at scale.

• 2:26:46John Coogan?

  Interesting. And

• 2:26:48Jordi Hays?

  And why are they not like doing enough RL? Like you would think that like these, these, these

• 2:26:55John Coogan?

  Carpathia has this take.

• 2:26:57Jordi Hays?

  There's verifiable kind of like results, right? Like this should be something that the models could do.

• 2:27:04John Coogan?

  Need lean for taxes.

• 2:27:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, but maybe it hasn't been prioritized enough.

• 2:27:09Speaker 14

  So most of the answers require five, six, seven, eight steps, and you have to get the right answer every time. If you get one step wrong, the ultimate result is wrong. And what we've found when you ask it these types of questions is that it'll get a lot of it right. But that single big skip, you know, hey, my client lives in New York City. Uh, they're about to sell their company. Uh, does their, uh, you know, does their stock qualify for QSBS? It'll check if they held the stock for five years. It'll check if they, uh, were under the gross asset limit when they acquired the stock. But then it'll pull a brand new article saying, hey, New York's considering getting rid of QSBS.

• 2:27:52John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:27:52Speaker 14

  Oops, it must not recognize QSBS. No, they don't qualify. And, and ultimately the client is, is, is left out, you know, in the dust.

• 2:28:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:00Speaker 14

  Uh, pricing out moving trucks, which don't have to.

• 2:28:02John Coogan?

  Too news heavy, too like web heavy, not like law.

• 2:28:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's an interesting, it's a very interesting domain because these are, these are, this is not like doing like research for like a project where like, you know, the, the, the consequences of getting like a fact wrong.

• 2:28:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:18Jordi Hays?

  Or like somewhat defined, like maybe you just like came to the wrong conclusion. But this is like you, if you, if you don't work with a human at all and you just work with a model and then you get something wrong, it ends up being like, maybe it costs you a hundred thousand dollars. Maybe it costs you a million dollars, maybe, maybe more, right? Maybe, maybe it's even five grand and then still. And so I think like this, I, I expect a long period of, of human in the loop on, and potentially forever on this domain specifically because, for, for a number of other reasons. Um, anyways, full employment for Nick.

• 2:28:52John Coogan?

  Final boss.

• 2:28:53Jordi Hays?

  Um, have you, have, have any of the labs like reached, reached out and, and like, are they, are they actively working on this? Or is it not, not a priority because they know people like you will, will be putting them, the models through the paces and, and kind of like verifying the work?

• 2:29:08Speaker 14

  So we'd love to try all the new, you know, secret stealth models that no one's, you know, that are not available online quite yet. Uh, we do have an email entry on the website. If you want to try your own model against our benchmark, we'd love to run it against it.

• 2:29:22John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:29:22Speaker 14

  Uh, nobody's reached out quite yet, right? And, and I'm not super surprised. Researchers have very different priorities than real businesses running these workflows. I don't think Anthropic cares about my benchmark, which is fine, right? That's not their business. We're going to pick the best model for our, for our purpose and move on.

• 2:29:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:40Speaker 14

  Um, funny enough, even the new models don't do as well as some of the old ones. Uh, we've actually found regressions as they launch new models. They perform worse and worse. Uh, four seven performs worse than four six from Anthropic. 5.4 Pro performs better than 5.5. Weird. The 4.1 model from Grok beat their 4.2 model. So it's not always newest is best, flashiest is best. You really have to test the specific model that's come out to make sure that when you're implementing it, it actually does improve your results as a business and the person calling the model. Interesting.

• 2:30:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Really fascinating. How, you started this business not, my understanding is you didn't start this business because you saw like models getting much better, but really that you just thought you could build a better service around tax for startups and you now, I guess, get the benefit of the intelligence explosion. Where are you, like even with the flaws, are you still getting a lot of leverage out of them? Or is it not really because of the lack of reliability, is it not giving you the, quite the leverage that you'd like yet?

• 2:30:52Speaker 14

  No, it's a totally fair question. We get a ton of leverage as long as they are paired with a human who really knows what they're doing. You know, you talked about the stakes for some of these questions. If you're just playing with Claude to write a poem or make a website, you as the end user know what you like and don't like and you can steer it towards what you want to see and don't want to see. If you aren't an accountant, you have no idea what to steer it towards, you have no idea to prompt it, "Hey, please double check that New York recognizes QSBs. Hey, please double check that you pulled the, you know, new tax rules under OBB." You need to have somebody skilled who knows how to talk to it and engage with it and structure the prompt correctly. And make sure that when it tells you something, it actually smells and, you know, sounds right. So we do get a ton of leverage out of them.

• 2:31:37Speaker 14

  We have quite a few workflows that are powered by them internally. But it requires a ton of work on top of that call to make sure that the answer that's ultimately shown to the client is correct. And, and not just, you know, hallucinated figures or hallucinated rules that ultimately, you know, nobody's going to jail, but they're going to get a lot of letters in the mail and owe quite a bit of money.

• 2:31:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, Andre Karpathy was talking about how there was a huge jump in chess capability between GPT 3.5 and GPT 4. And what he attributes it to is just like the researchers were interested in chess during that training run. So they fed it a bunch of chess data and it got better at that. And it feels like there might be a moment in the future where like, oh, like this lab on this model date got really interested in chess and went and bought like all the or in tax data and bought all the relevant training data. And now it's now it's jumping up on tax bench. If you were to, I mean, I'm looking at some of the stats here and it shows like Grok 4.1 fast reasoning at 4.2%. You know, some others are in like

• 2:32:43John Coogan?

  the 10%, 12%, 31% range. Is this is this like Arc AGI where we're just at very, very low passing rates and and you're sort of waiting for them to start climbing up exponentially, but we haven't seen that take off yet?

• 2:33:01Speaker 14

  So to the models credit, the scores that you're referencing are mostly from data retrieval, which is the most operationally difficult category of questions that we ask the models. They're given access to a client's entire data packets. This could be hundreds of pages of PDFs and Slack messages and emails and asked to answer a question. A question could be something like, find their 2023 tax return, find the carry forward capital losses that go under 24 return. If you ask a junior CPA straight out of college to do this, they'll get it right 100 times out of 100. It's not difficult. It's in the exact same spot, in the exact same form every time. These models really struggle. They really struggle. They will just make a number up. They will get frustrated when they can't

• 2:33:46Speaker 14

  find the 1040 off the bat. Maybe they have trouble OCR. I mean, the client took actual pictures of the tax return versus, you know, a real raw PDF. They really struggle with the combination of searching and then analysis on top of that. A lot of them skip. They'll pull the wrong carry for figure and ignore that there's a $3,000 allowance against current income for 23, you have to subtract 3,000. It's it's small, ticky tacky things, but if you try to deploy these models into a real production workflow, they're going to get it wrong. You have to have a human review it, right? You have to have a neck to choke. Something goes wrong. And so we've we've hired a great team of necks to choke, so to speak, to actually make sure that the work that's delivered to the client actually does what it says it's going to do.

• 2:34:26John Coogan?

  Have you thought about building a harness? It feels like a lot of the the unlock in software was was, you know, on the back of Codex and Claude Code, like, like, something like the harness is is somewhat simple sometimes, but it clearly unblocks the thinking model in a very important way. And it feels like for some of those rules based or or tool usages, like, just something a thin wrapper around these these models could potentially lead to much higher scores. Have you looked at that?

• 2:35:00Speaker 14

  You were hired as our next product manager. Welcome to the team.

• 2:35:04John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:35:05Speaker 14

  You start on Monday. No, it's absolutely on our list. One of the most impressive tools in the market that we've seen today is Thomson Reuters Co-Counsel, which is, the UI looks like any other model, but it's built on top of their tax library.

• 2:35:19John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:35:20Speaker 14

  They don't give anybody API access today. It's hundreds of dollars per seat per month for a team. And so I would love that as an API. We'll be building on it when they launch it, I think, coming later this year.

• 2:35:32John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:35:33Speaker 14

  That's what we were told. But in the meantime, we'll be building our own and jumping down the rabbit hole, so to speak.

• 2:35:38John Coogan?

  Good luck.

• 2:35:39Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. Well, great to get the update. And yeah, we will, every every researcher that comes on.

• 2:35:45John Coogan?

  Taxbench, this is the most important one. Forget Eric AGI, it's all about tax AGI now. I don't care about gaming.

• 2:35:53Jordi Hays?

  I think I think as as the IPOs start happening, they'll start caring more about about performance on tax.

• 2:36:00John Coogan?

  Probably, yeah. I mean, it's a huge, huge market, huge uplift. You've seen what happened in the coding market. If you add accounting and finance to that, you can see the next leg up on all the revenue charts. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 2:36:13Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, Nick.

• 2:36:14John Coogan?

  Have a great day.

• 2:36:15Speaker 14

  Great to see you, guys.

• 2:36:16John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you later. Goodbye.

• 2:36:18Jordi Hays?

  Breaking news.

• 2:36:19John Coogan?

  Breaking news for gamers out there.

• 2:36:21Jordi Hays?

  What's that?

• 2:36:21John Coogan?

  I know a lot of gamers out there. They have laptops. They're worried about the price of these laptops, the batteries, electricity is getting expensive. What are you gonna do? How are you gonna charge your laptop up? We got the solution for you. It's a gas, it's a gasoline powered laptop. So it's pretty simple. It's a one of a kind gasoline powered laptop. It's offered for just $850. Looks like it's right in Windows XP. You might not be able to play the latest and greatest games. Will it run Crysis? Maybe, maybe not.

• 2:36:53Jordi Hays?

  With a full tank, you can get an hour and a half of runtime out of this.

• 2:36:56John Coogan?

  It runs a two stroke engine and it's perfect for off grid computing. That's hot right now. And so the laptop specs, let's take you through it. It's got an Intel Core 2 Duo. Two gigs of RAM. RAM's going up in price. This is valuable. This is an appreciating asset. 120 gigs of hard drive space. That's gonna hold a lot of games when you're off grid. You only have a little bit of gasoline. If you want a game, this is the laptop for you.

• 2:37:22Jordi Hays?

  And of course it's running Windows XP.

• 2:37:25John Coogan?

  And it says that it starts easy. The, the, the two stroke engine on the gasoline powered laptop, yes, it does start.

• 2:37:32Jordi Hays?

  Colin in the X chat says it gets 300 tweets to the gallon.

• 2:37:40John Coogan?

  Oh no, I accidentally said GTA V to max settings. Well, at least it'll serve as a benchmark test. Uh, how many Chrome tabs can it, uh, open before it crashes? People are having fun with this, but, uh, the gasoline powered laptop, this is true hacker mindset. Whoever built this is, uh, is an incredible engineer and did something, they did the impossible. They built a gasoline powered laptop. I've seen a couple of other of these, like, uh, gasoline powered, uh, projects, people making all sorts of different things. It's always a funny gag, obviously.

• 2:38:11Jordi Hays?

  The actual breaking news is the White House is considering vetting AI models before they are released.

• 2:38:16John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:38:16Jordi Hays?

  Trump admin, which took a non-interventionist approach to AI, is now discussing imposing oversight on AI models before they are made publicly available.

• 2:38:25John Coogan?

  Well, FDA for AI. We'll see.

• 2:38:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it would be potentially an executive order to create an AI working group that would bring together tech executives and government officials to examine potential oversight procedures. Okay, so this would be an executive order to create a working group that could potentially create an oversight, uh, body.

• 2:38:43John Coogan?

  Okay, so we're a couple of steps away, bud. Seems reasonable. I don't know. Depends on what the, what the, what the, what the benchmarks are, but you certainly don't want.

• 2:38:54Jordi Hays?

  And Trump says, "We're gonna make this industry absolutely the top because right now it's a beautiful baby that's born."

• 2:39:00John Coogan?

  Interesting way to put it.

• 2:39:02Jordi Hays?

  "We have to grow that baby and let that baby thrive."

• 2:39:04John Coogan?

  Is this real?

• 2:39:04Jordi Hays?

  It's a real quote.

• 2:39:07John Coogan?

  Are you messing with me?

• 2:39:07Jordi Hays?

  It's a real quote that Trump said about AI. He said, "We have to grow that baby and let that baby thrive. We can't stop it. We can't stop it with politics. We can't stop it with foolish rules and even stupid rules."

• 2:39:19John Coogan?

  It's not a baby. It's a $10 trillion industry. It's like the, the engine of the global economy. Anyway.

• 2:39:27Jordi Hays?

  Dean Ball's got a quote in here.

• 2:39:29John Coogan?

  What does he say?

• 2:39:29Jordi Hays?

  "The technology is moving extremely fast and there are few formal procedures, but they don't want to over-regulate." He said, "It's a tricky balance."

• 2:39:36John Coogan?

  I say, "Don't release it unless it's acing tax bench. It's gotta be able to do the taxes before it gets out into the wild." No, obviously you want these models to be safe. You want them to be reliable. You want them to avoid negative externalities. And anything that gets us in that direction is probably good, but everything comes with trade-offs, so.

• 2:39:56Jordi Hays?

  Final post of the day from Tommy. Hi, PhD in hammerology here. Alright, so what we're looking at is a nail.

• 2:40:06John Coogan?

  That is the correct mindset. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Also, go check out Riley Walls' new project. He's shipping stuff every week. This one got a million views. You probably already saw it. 27,000 likes. 10% of AMC movie showings sell no tickets at all, so if you want to go see a movie in a private theater with no one else, he made a site that finds empty theaters and tells you exactly when you should go and book. You can go see Project Hail Mary at 12:30 PM today in New York. If you don't have work, you can go see Project Hail Mary in your private theater. It's available at walzer.com/empty screenings, W-A-L-Z-R.com, Empty Screenings. You can search by zip code.

• 2:40:51John Coogan?

  Let's see what's around us. Is there anything good?

• 2:40:53Jordi Hays?

  There's 10:45 PM Devil Wears Part II.

• 2:40:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:40:57Jordi Hays?

  Around us. Zero seats.

• 2:40:58John Coogan?

  Enjoy it. Enjoy being allowed.

• 2:41:00Jordi Hays?

  You got it.

• 2:41:02John Coogan?

  This is very funny. Yeah, there's he does. He does surface some that have one seat or two seats. Interesting way to make a new friend. Me and you. Because you think so, you think, oh, I got the zero seat theater. You're in the one seat theater and somebody's like, I want to meet the psycho that went to the empty theater. And then they're talking your ear off. Who knows? Well, maybe, maybe you can enjoy it. Well, thank you for tuning in. We'll see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. sharp Pacific time. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbn.com. And we will see you tomorrow.

• 2:41:37Speaker 07

  Love you.

• 2:41:37John Coogan?

  Goodbye. A little bit missed time there.

• 2:41:41Speaker 07

  See you tomorrow.