Snap Specs, Taste, Midjourney Hardware | Eric Newcomer, Merrill Lutsky, Carter Reum, Swami Sivasubramanian, Thomas Suarez, Mark Gurman, Ryan Daniels, Isaiah Granet

(01:48) - Snap Specs (17:39) - Midjourney Hardware (18:56) - Taste Labs (29:27) - Eric Newcomer, an American journalist and founder of the "Newcomer" newsletter, discusses his transition from traditional media to independent journalism, emphasizing the importance of building trust and transparency with his audience. He highlights the challenges and opportunities in covering Silicon Valley, noting the evolving dynamics between venture capitalists and founders, and the impact of AI on the media landscape. Newcomer also shares insights into his business model, including revenue streams from subscriptions and events, and reflects on the future of independent media ventures. (01:05:19) - Merrill Lutsky, a key figure at Cursor, discusses his early fascination with space exploration, inspired by films like "October Sky," and how this passion led him to his current role. He elaborates on the recent partnership between Cursor and SpaceX, highlighting the excitement within the team and the potential for advancements in model training. Additionally, Lutsky introduces Origin, a Git infrastructure designed for the agentic era, emphasizing its scalability and the goal of achieving more autonomous, self-driving pull requests. (01:17:38) - Carter Reum, co-founder of venture capital firm M13, discusses the U. S. soccer team's historic World Cup performance, highlighting their unprecedented scoring success. He reflects on M13's decade-long journey, noting investments in 17 unicorns, including SpaceX, and emphasizes the importance of investing in cycles, particularly in emerging technologies like AI. Reum also shares insights on the evolving venture capital landscape, stressing the need for clear communication and strategic differentiation in a competitive market. (01:36:46) - Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President for Agentic AI at Amazon Web Services (AWS), has been instrumental in developing AI services like Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Bedrock, and Amazon Q. In the conversation, he discusses the transformative potential of agentic AI, highlighting AWS's launch of Qlik Autonomous Agent to integrate context across tools, and Continuum, a service designed to continuously enhance security by integrating AI into software development processes. He emphasizes the importance of balancing speed and security in AI adoption, noting that AWS's innovations aim to empower enterprises to build trustworthy and efficient AI agents. (01:50:21) - Thomas Suarez, founder and CEO of Raven Resonance, discusses the development of Raven Prism, the world's first ambient computer in the form of stylish glasses. He highlights its standalone Linux-based operating system, privacy-preserving eye control, and hot-swappable batteries for all-day use. Suarez emphasizes the device's focus on micro-interactions and contextual information, aiming to seamlessly integrate technology into daily life. (02:07:12) - Mark Gurman is a prominent technology journalist known for his in-depth coverage of Apple Inc. He discusses the recent enhancements to Siri introduced at WWDC 2026, highlighting features like personal context understanding and improved workflow capabilities, such as sending calendar availability via email. Gurman also notes that while Siri's new AI functionalities are robust, they may not fully replace advanced tools like ChatGPT for more complex tasks. (02:39:22) - Ryan Daniels is the co-founder and CEO of Crosby, an AI-powered law firm that combines artificial intelligence with human expertise to expedite contract negotiations. In the conversation, he discusses the publication of a new benchmark evaluating AI agents in legal negotiations, highlighting the complexity of contract discussions and the challenges AI faces in replicating nuanced legal judgment. Daniels emphasizes the importance of integrating AI with human oversight to enhance efficiency while maintaining the quality of legal services. (02:46:53) - Isaiah 25edj1g discusses his company's development of AI systems that replace traditional call center bots, focusing on complex and high-stakes calls in sectors like healthcare, airlines, and eventually 911 services. He highlights their approach of training proprietary models without relying on OpenAI, and mentions their viral marketing strategies, including collaborations with celebrities like Soulja Boy and Paul Lieberstein, to attract enterprise clients. Additionally, Isaiah shares that their recent funding round raised $50 million, with participation from insiders, Dell, and HubSpot. (02:56:37) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVP.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Wednesday, June 17th, 2026. We are live from the TVP Ultra on the Temple of Technology, the Fortune's Finance, the Capital of Capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

• 0:19Jordi Hays?

  Big show today.

• 0:20John Coogan?

  Big show today. Lots of guests coming on. We got newcomer newcomer coming on. Mark Girmans coming on.

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

  I am super excited for Eric to join.

• 0:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I don't have time to listen to that many podcasts, but I love listening to Eric.

• 0:36John Coogan?

  He's been on an absolute tear. His, uh, Kara Swisher interview was very good. His Ed Zitron interview was very good. Uh, he's been.

• 0:45Jordi Hays?

  He throws on the gloves.

• 0:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:46Jordi Hays?

  And he's almost like a matador. He's almost like a matador, right?

• 0:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it's interesting because, yeah, he, he, I don't know. He just has like a very balanced view and keeps the conversation going and pushes people and, uh, gets things going back and forth. So very excited to chop it up with him. Uh, anyway.

• 1:03Jordi Hays?

  Then we have, uh, Merrill.

• 1:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05Jordi Hays?

  From Graphite.

• 1:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06Jordi Hays?

  Who made one of the plays, the absolute greatest plays of the year.

• 1:11John Coogan?

  Truly.

• 1:11Jordi Hays?

  Selling to Cursor and which of course shortly after that, uh, sold to SpaceX and is now up even further.

• 1:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so.

• 1:20John Coogan?

  The TVP effect really. Graphite was a sponsor, of course.

• 1:25Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we, we, we did as much as we could. Uh, then we have Carter.

• 1:30John Coogan?

  90% of the hard work.

• 1:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, then we have Carter from M13 jumping on. Uh, we have Dr. Swami from AWS joining. And then, uh, the Germanator, of course, and a number of other founders. So.

• 1:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. Big show. Anyway, uh, snap, snap, spectacles. We talked about it a little bit yesterday. Uh, feedback has been mixed. Not good. People don't like it. Uh, pull up the picture from DJ Cows. Glasses. What glasses? Uh, so and not this one, the next one.

• 2:07Jordi Hays?

  It's really

• 2:08John Coogan?

  This one.

• 2:09Jordi Hays?

  It's really tough because if if a startup ship these, everyone like they would, they would, they would be able to raise capital.

• 2:18John Coogan?

  After you're seeing this one, go back to the other photo. Looks really normal now.

• 2:23Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 2:23John Coogan?

  Honestly.

• 2:24Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  The funny, big exaggerated version makes me feel like these actually look really cool now. That not those. That's too much. But you flip back. I'm into it now. It's actually inoculated me to the, oh, they're big because I saw a bigger version. And I like these. They're a little bit blocky. Yeah, but it's like a style choice. I don't know. I'm getting, I'm getting pilled. I might pick up a pair.

• 2:46Jordi Hays?

  Here's the thing.

• 2:47John Coogan?

  Might pick up a couple pair.

• 2:48Jordi Hays?

  If a startup launched this product.

• 2:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:51Jordi Hays?

  And was able to do the demos that they can do.

• 2:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53Jordi Hays?

  We've tried this product.

• 2:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54Jordi Hays?

  We've done, we've done a number of the demos. That startup would, would be able to raise at, I would say, easily a billion, just based on current market conditions. But they're, a startup is evaluated a lot differently, of course, than a, you know, public company that has spent somewhere in the range of three and a half billion dollars building this product.

• 3:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, the feedback from the market.

• 3:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:20Jordi Hays?

  Has not been great from activists, has not been great.

• 3:23John Coogan?

  92% of the last five years and just in the last five days, down another eight and a half percent. And Evan Spiegel has been having to defend his decisions, his investment here. We'll, we'll see where all this goes. The question's like, how, how expensive is this effort? How, how core to the business is it? How many Snap employees are working on this? They have a great ads business, a great social media with a network effect. Should be an AI winner, you know, just increase the, the ad load, increase the ad targeting, run a really lean, thin operation, and you should be able to be a very, very profitable enterprise. The, the era, clearly, a lot of these investments were greenlit in the early

• 4:06John Coogan?

  days when the stock was up, when the, when the market was booming. And now we're seeing them roll out and everyone's asking a wildly different set of questions because we're in the AI era, not the wearables era. But.

• 4:18Jordi Hays?

  Tyler in the chat says snapped down 92% since peak.

• 4:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:21Jordi Hays?

  So you can imagine a lot of the, a lot of the work that was done on these was done when they were a much, much, much bigger company.

• 4:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. But to be fair, Evan has been acquiring in this category and thinking about this for. Probably over a decade. I know I actually talked to a founder that he sold his company to Snap. It must have been 10 years ago and they bought a couple of companies and been working on this. And then of course, they did have the first version of spectacles, which were like the Meta Ray-Ban displays or the Meta Ray-Bans, no screen, but just camera. And the rollout for that was really well received, but never quite got to escape velocity where it really moved the needle for the business. But very clear, you know, interesting R and D thinking. Anyway, Evan Spiegel is going to have to defend himself from our own Brandon Gurrell.

• 5:08John Coogan?

  Because Brandon Gurrell came up to me after writing the newsletter and said, I don't, I don't think I get it. And I'm like, that's fine. We'll, we'll read through your piece. We'll, we'll take, we'll, we'll steel man it. I'll steel man it. No problem. But first I'm going to steel man CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

• 5:27Jordi Hays?

  I think it can steel man itself.

• 5:29John Coogan?

  It can steel man itself, honestly. So let's read through Brandon's.

• 5:32Jordi Hays?

  Hit it.

• 5:33John Coogan?

  So Snapchat showed off Spax's new augmented reality glasses at Augmented World Expo 2026 yesterday. Interesting. I didn't realize that this was an industry conference for augmented reality, not a Snap specific event. The features are a mix of things you'd want in a daily driver pair of glasses that you have on all the time, everywhere. Maps, HUD, review of restaurants in your visual field, prosumer features like the ability to collaborate on shared virtual whiteboards and more general AI powered assistance, stuff like measuring distances for you. So you don't have to use a tape measure. The broad mix of features combined with the fact that Spax are fairly pricey, $2,200 basically, and that they look painful to wear.

• 6:17John Coogan?

  So Brandon Gurrell is pointing out the fact that Evan's ear looks a little bit bent from wearing the Spax. The, the, what do they call that?

• 6:28John Coogan?

  The bar? What's that thing on the glasses that goes in the back? I don't know, whatever that thing is, it's a little thick, it's a little heavy, there's a battery back there, probably some compute. And so that is compressing his ear a little bit. You imagine wearing that for four hours, maybe it gets a little bit tiring. We will see how.

• 6:47Jordi Hays?

  Other scenario, he's getting some cauliflower ear, he's training, he sees Zach is, you know, gotten into MMA. He doesn't want to be left behind.

• 6:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:56Jordi Hays?

  So we don't know.

• 6:56John Coogan?

  So Brandon asked.

• 6:58Jordi Hays?

  Tyler says it is the arm.

• 7:00John Coogan?

  The arm?

• 7:01Jordi Hays?

  Of the sunglasses. Where is Tyler, by the way? Oh, Tyler's Tyler's going to.

• 7:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, Tyler's going to the mid journey event, which will also be interesting. There's a whole bunch of interesting hardware stuff happening in the midst of the AI boom. Midjourney is launching a hardware device tonight. No one knows exactly what it is. Surprising it hasn't leaked.

• 7:20Jordi Hays?

  They got it locked down over there.

• 7:21John Coogan?

  They got it locked down. It's great. Also, I think maybe journalists don't think it's like the hottest scoop to go after, but still really impressive. I'm on the edge of my seat to figure out what they launched because incredibly talented team, incredible business, incredible founder. And David Holes, the founder of Midjourney, started Magic Leap, an augmented reality or virtual reality company that would track your hand over this little device that was sort of the size of a stick of gum, basically. And you could strap it to the front of a Oculus Rift and it would track your hands while you were in VR. That company at one point sold to Apple almost and then got rolled back and then sold to another company

• 8:03John Coogan?

  and raised a bunch of money and then David ran it all up again with Midjourney. It's a great story. Anyway, I love, I love the Midjourney story, but very excited.

• 8:12Jordi Hays?

  Back to specs.

• 8:13John Coogan?

  Back to specs. Are guys who golf every other weekend in the summer really going to drop over 2K? So they can put on their pair of specs just when they need to see how many yards they are from the pin? I think a lot of golfers do have disposable income. The price tag might not be the issue. The question is, does this look cool on a golf course? Is this a, is this a, is this something that has like badge value? If you pull out like a nice rangefinder, like a Titleist bag or something with a, with a great brand. It feels like to make it cool, it's got to be on the PGA tour. The, the heroes that people look to need to be using this actively for the golf community to really.

• 8:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so many cool use cases. But are any of them a killer use case? No, I'm just saying, I'm saying like, that's a cool use case. You're trying to understand how a piece of furniture is going to fit into your room. I don't, I can, I, I do that.

• 9:18John Coogan?

  Mentally.

• 9:18Jordi Hays?

  When I'm doing, like if I'm doing an interior design project, I might need that. But that's like a specific moment in time.

• 9:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:26Jordi Hays?

  Maybe once every couple of years at most.

• 9:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:29Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people, I feel like, you know, some people are kind of constantly adding furniture here and there. But a lot of people, it's kind of you set it and forget it. So yeah, very, very like, again, unclear why this is something you would want on your face all the time.

• 9:47John Coogan?

  Glasses. I'm Googling Robert De Niro's casino glasses. Yeah, these are pretty, pretty bulky here. We, we can share this in the chat here. Boom. Pull those up. Let's continue. So you can buy rangefinders for around 150 bucks. They're not fragile. Also, a lot of golf, a lot of golf heads, they're out there for more than the battery life. They're more, they're out there for more than three, three and a half hours. Three and a half hours might be enough for nine on a busy course. They're doing six hours out there sometimes. You don't want to be out there with your, going to reality glasses and they die on you. Are DIYers going to drop this much money just so they can have easy access tips for their home projects? Are startups going to be willing to drop 2K for every employee who wants to

• 10:29John Coogan?

  collaborate in AR? All of these are examples touted on Snap's specs page as things you can do with the glasses and the features do seem super cool. It's just hard to imagine any one of them justifying a 2K price tag, especially because they look painful to wear. And so that's your point about killer features. I disagree. I don't think that these products need a killer feature. I think the original killer feature of the iPhone was the phone. Like, people were already carrying phones and the iPhone was like, we debated this before, but it had some call dropping problems, but it was a replacement for your dumb phone. And then the fact that it also was an iPod was an extra feature. And then the fact that it was an internet browser was

• 11:12John Coogan?

  another feature. But it replaced like, very, very basic things.

• 11:16Jordi Hays?

  My thing is like, I don't think, as cool as the tech is, I don't think the tech is ready to be a daily driver computer.

• 11:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, I think it needs to replace a very, a very regular, everyday interaction thing, like a screen. And so that's why I still think VR is like a replacement for the home theater, maybe a replacement for the 80-inch TV. But 80-inch TVs are like 500 bucks now. And so you got to get it to be better and you got to have enough for everyone in your household to have one. And it's got to be a better experience. But in that world.

• 11:45Jordi Hays?

  The other challenge is like, a lot of these, I mean, like, a lot of these use cases, I don't feel like are that aligned to Snapchat's user base. And that's like the biggest thing. Like, a $2,000, a $2,000 device doesn't really align to their, what I believe is their core demo.

• 12:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so Google Capital blokes asking the question, how did this happen? Do you know how deeply broken a culture has to be to ship this product and let the CEO walk around like this? Again, I don't think they look that bad, but there is this question of, you know, is this a serious product? The fashion part must be addressed first. I guess the taste memo never made it to Snap. If you're enough of a dork to have these on your face and you won't even get the chance to say, may I meet you? Wow. People are very, very upset about these. JB says, I think, I legit think this may be the first product ever to hit the market and not sell a single unit. That's ridiculous. They're gonna sell a few to people that want to demo them. There's, there's fans that buy every product. Palmer Lucky has a collection of augmented VR glasses. You know, the collectors

• 12:49John Coogan?

  will get them.

• 12:50Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this post from A Capital, because this might be a

• 12:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, if we can watch this, this, this actually might be the killer feature, honestly.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  Thanks for joining us here today. You're wearing your new specs. You just unveiled. They cost $2,195. The stock's down more than 5%.

• 13:10John Coogan?

  The sound effects, the sound mix is really good.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  Thanks for joining us here today. You're wearing your new

• 13:17John Coogan?

  The sound mix, the fact that her voice gets quieter when you go inside the headset is really what does this. So, so funny.

• 13:25Jordi Hays?

  The smile. I, I feel, I feel really bad for the Snap team. I, I think this, I, I think like the, I want them to win, but I don't, I don't think this launch will get them the level of traction that they're gonna need to justify further investment, is my current view. Unless you're, unless, you know, Spiegel just doesn't care and, you know, continues to double, double or triple down, which is totally possible. But I think at, at a normal company, this would, this would kind of be the, the last shot.

• 14:09John Coogan?

  It's tough. You're competing with, like, these hyper-efficient Chinese companies. There's this company, XREAL. We demoed this. I got a pair for Tyler, took them for a spin. They're not quite there, but they're way cheaper. You're looking at a couple hundred dollars and you get a, a screen that's like not even really augmented reality. It's sort of like sunglasses with a screen, screen inside, but then it projects like a 200-inch TV in front of you. And these Are actually sort of, it's more chopping at the daily use cases and less doing like frontier technology. So you can play video games on them because you just plug the HDMI from

• 14:54John Coogan?

  the Xbox into the device. And then you just have a big screen in front of you. And if you don't have a TV with you for mobile gaming, there's a whole bunch of different things you could watch movies on it. Do the basic things that people do with screens. And I think that XREAL is on a path to like commoditizing this in a pretty significant way where it's not

• 15:16Jordi Hays?

  A lot to mention, Meta Ray-Ban displays are $7.99.

• 15:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:20Jordi Hays?

  And I'm sure, I do believe that these have more, quite a bit like more features, functionality, they have a bigger developer network.

• 15:29John Coogan?

  But a lot of the, a lot of the killer features of like on-demand AI, instantiating a generative UI, answering a question for you, that can be done with a Call of Duty Hut.

• 15:39Jordi Hays?

  And like all, all this, like again, it's, it's cool, but I cannot, I don't know anyone that would do this.

• 15:46John Coogan?

  And you face this crazy cold start problem where the developers don't make anything because there aren't that many users. Like I was, I was, you know, we were talking about this with YC yesterday. It is so crazy that even in the era of vibe coding and software being like free, we're not seeing breakout Apple Vision Pro development. Like the Apple Vision Pro, which I need to bring in for Scott, he wants to demo it, comes with a really, really impressive demo where it, it finds all the walls and then one of the walls opens up and is a portal. And, and through the wall, you see this like dinosaur land. You'd love it as a dinosaur expert. Kids love it. And then a dinosaur comes through the portal, comes into your

• 16:29Jordi Hays?

  What kind of dinosaur?

• 16:30John Coogan?

  Uh, it's like a velociraptor type thing.

• 16:32Jordi Hays?

  Let's double check that.

• 16:34John Coogan?

  And, and a butterfly lands on your finger and it feels like it almost, you almost feel it because it's so, it's like tracking your hand and lands. Very cool. It's like a five-minute demo that the Apple team clearly worked very hard on. That feels like something that could be expanded on very cheaply in the age of vibe coding. And yet, no one sees it as an economic opportunity. Developers are just, they'd rather build an app for the iOS App Store. And so no one's really going there to compete. So while these demos look really cool, Where's the ecosystem going to come from if they're not selling millions and millions of units and people are ready to purchase games or see ads or do anything that could monetize a business built on the back of this platform?

• 17:19John Coogan?

  It's a very, very tricky proposition to get a platform like this up and running. Anyway, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is a commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And Harley had some big news today. We can play a video from Shopify later in the show, but David Holes is saying you'll want to see this. They're announcing their first hardware project tomorrow, which is today at 6:00 PM. I believe Tyler from our team will be in attendance, checking it out, reporting back. Stay tuned for a live stream of our in-person launch event in San Francisco. If you're in town and want invite, reply below, there are a few slots left, so go check it out if you're in San Francisco.

• 18:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting. You know, this hardware project, I guess in some ways is probably funded by Meta and the licensing deal they have. The other thing about Mid Journey, privately held company, right? They haven't, they don't have like tens of thousands of shareholders that have lost money on the business. And so it's almost like pure upside. Whereas I think like part of the reaction to, the negative reaction to Snap is like looking at all the comment, looking at all the people, you know, sharing negative things. I can imagine like 90% of those people have like owned the stock at some point or another, have lost money on it. And so they're just like already inclined to have like kind of a negative view on anything

• 18:44Jordi Hays?

  the company does and not, not give the leadership the benefit of the doubt really in any way at all. So, but very, very excited for this and hardware is hard, but I think the more, the more shots on goal, the better.

• 18:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, the other story that's burning up the timeline is Taste Labs put the timeline in turmoil, people going back and forth. So yesterday, a former Exa AI Labs founding team member introduced her startup Taste Labs, whose mission is to end AI slop. Quote, "This requires turning a fuzzy, subjective domain into something we can measure and codify. We're starting with design," her post says. More specifically, Taste is, says they're working with Frontier AI Labs to improve their models along taste lines through data labeling and app layer startups to improve the aesthetics of their products. This has been a critique of vibe-coded projects. They all sort of look the same. Of course,

• 19:40John Coogan?

  there are examples of really cool projects, but people were starting to say, oh, this has like the vibe code look to it, or this model's not good at front end, etc. Her goal is to fix that. Ty's post, her post was immediately went viral, generating tons of opinions on X and getting over a million views in 24 hours. People's main complaint is basically you can't program taste. It's impossible, they say. But the steel man is that the AI aesthetic, AI's aesthetic output can be improved, and that it's perfectly reasonable for a startup to try and capitalize on that opportunity. I want to talk to you

• 20:20John Coogan?

  about Taste, about your, your feed. Is it scalable? Is it not? Give me, take me through some of the critiques here. Tell me what resonates with you, and then I have a take about where the business.

• 20:35Jordi Hays?

  So I think the main thing is, main thing is people have taste fatigue. They don't want to hear that word anymore. I don't want to hear that word.

• 20:43John Coogan?

  Because the last six months, maybe last year, it's been like the code word. Like, what will we do when the AI can do all the technical stuff? Well, we'll have the taste.

• 20:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and, and, and so, yeah, I think there's fatigue around the usage of the word, the, even the conversation. Uh, I, I, we've never even like weighted that deeply into the conversation.

• 21:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:05Jordi Hays?

  And I'd like to keep it that way. That being said-

• 21:08John Coogan?

  But just to set the, the table on the critique, like, a lot of people outside of tech are critiquing it because a lot of SF people in tech are saying taste is so important and the outsiders don't see San Francisco tech-

• 21:22Jordi Hays?

  As being tasteful people.

• 21:23John Coogan?

  As being particularly tasteful people.

• 21:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:24John Coogan?

  From a fashion perspective, from an art perspective, or, or curation perspective. It's sort of known as the T-shirts and athleisure community and that's, it, it's sort of, it's, it's optimized. It's devoid of taste. By design, it's about efficiency, not taste.

• 21:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and then, and then, uh, I'll say one more thing and then, uh, and then I'll, I'll steal man taste labs.

• 21:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:48Jordi Hays?

  Um, but, uh, so the main thing is like, when I think of, when I think of like taste, like, like product taste, like I think of like linear, right? Like linear has like always been very opinionated.

• 21:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:00Jordi Hays?

  Very quality driven. Uh, they want to grow quickly because of how great the product is.

• 22:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:06Jordi Hays?

  Uh, like, you know, very, very design driven. Like, that is a company that I think generally has very high, you know, good taste, right? Uh, the problem is when you have good taste and people pick up on it, they just start sort of just like blanket, like copying you, right?

• 22:21John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 22:22Jordi Hays?

  Then there's an entire generation of companies that just look like linear, right?

• 22:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:26Jordi Hays?

  From their website to the actual product. Um, and so taste is something that people curate themselves.

• 22:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:35Jordi Hays?

  But then, uh, the, the, as soon as it's copied, then it's like fundamentally like not tasteful.

• 22:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:42Jordi Hays?

  It might, it might be, right? Then it's not original. Um, I think taste has, you know, you need some originality and to be able to combine, uh, combine, you know, do one plus one equals two.

• 22:55Jordi Hays?

  And another example is like

• 22:56John Coogan?

  Isn't one plus one equals three?

• 22:58Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, sorry, sorry. One plus one equals, one plus one equals three.

• 23:00John Coogan?

  One plus one equals 11.

• 23:01Jordi Hays?

  One plus one equals two. That's the, that's the ad.

• 23:04John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 23:05Jordi Hays?

  Fake startup ad. No, so another example is like Squarespace.

• 23:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 23:11Jordi Hays?

  Like Squarespace took like high-end website design and then just commoditized it. Commoditized it, right? Anybody could have a pretty website. And then you started to just, I would just look like, okay, is this a Squarespace website? Or did this person make it? Okay, it's a Squarespace website, like, and not, it's not really that much of a knock, but like, it wasn't like the, the company's own taste that led to that output, or, or the people that they worked with. Uh, so it commoditizes really quickly and then it ceases to be tasteful. That being said, uh, just helping AI labs create better-looking outputs and working on that problem feels like a pretty good way to get, to build a, uh, at least temporarily, a pretty big business.

• 23:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:55Jordi Hays?

  Because this is something that users really care about, the labs really care about, hyperscalers even care about, right? Um, and so I think that while Taste Labs, uh, you know, got a lot of flack over the last 24 hours, they probably, their pipeline probably exploded and I bet they get a ton of business out of it.

• 24:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:15Jordi Hays?

  And very unclear what, what this business looks like in, you know, five years, like a lot of the other, um, companies in the category, but, uh, I bet they, I bet they print in the short term.

• 24:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. I feel like a lot of the training data, data labeling.

• 24:29Jordi Hays?

  So the name, the name is like kind of perfect rage bait. Taste Labs. We're building.

• 24:34John Coogan?

  Taste, yeah.

• 24:35Jordi Hays?

  Taste in a lab. We built it. We made it.

• 24:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is funny because you could do the inverse and say, our job is to just identify things that are not tasteful. And the end product would be exactly the same because you're just, that's just your negative data set and everything else is positive by that design. Um, but a lot of the data labeling projects have just been, does the button work? Does the, does this render properly? Like, is this just, is this functional? And some of that's been able to be, you know, looped in a reinforcement learning environment. Some of it's been able to be encoded, just tagging, okay, does the, does the photo have six fingers or five fingers? Like, that was a useful.

• 25:22John Coogan?

  Useful piece of data labeling that happened probably two years ago. Now there's a bigger question about what actually looks good. And then how do you represent like a diversity of tasteful designs such that you everything just just doesn't collapse into like the new corporate Memphis and everything that's AI generated has the exact same flavor like the it's not this, it's that, but for design would be the

• 25:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, which is like already extremely easy to clock.

• 25:52John Coogan?

  Right now.

• 25:53Jordi Hays?

  And I got a deck last night. Friend of mine's company and my first piece of feedback is like, are you okay with everyone knowing that you didn't put any effort into design?

• 26:07Jordi Hays?

  Because it's totally possible the answer is yes. But at least you should go into your fundraise process, knowing that everyone is gonna know that you just tried to one shot this. Which again, for some businesses is fine and some investors is fine, but it's going to turn some people off.

• 26:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, yeah, people are going all back and forth on this. This highlights a fundamental misunderstanding in tech. Not everything can be codified and analyzed. Even if you make AI imitate taste, whatever that means, it still won't mean anything. Taste emerges from craft, context, meaning, subjectivity and genuine care. That's sort of true, but just, just increasing the quality of design is valuable. But yes, it is, it is, it's a tall order. When you use the word taste, because so much baggage has been assigned to that. Well, you know what the most tasteful database is? It's MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. You know what else is tasteful?

• 27:10John Coogan?

  Chris Larson from Ripple has been buying an absolute absurd amount of cars recently. He got an F1 GTR, a 918 Spyder, a P1, a T50, an Enzo, a Cesto, an Cesto Elemento. Has probably spent like 50 million on cars in the past year. I think it's more than 50 million if you total all those up.

• 27:29Jordi Hays?

  The P1 he has is. Insane.

• 27:32John Coogan?

  Where is that? Is that in the comments?

• 27:34Jordi Hays?

  It's green. It's a green on tan P1.

• 27:37John Coogan?

  Green on tan. Looking good. Post them all. They're on the Cesario collection on Instagram. Wow, yeah, the dark green is a good, good, good image. This is quite the collection that's emerging. Well, very tasteful. You can go check it out on Instagram because we love that.

• 27:58Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of, I mean, taste in Silicon Valley would could be a Mansori body kit on a on a Model 3. Because that says kind of like this high-low approach and says like, I'm practical. I want a car that gets me to point A to point B.

• 28:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:12Jordi Hays?

  But I want to look, I want to look good.

• 28:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's sort of like, it's a metaphor for taking like a sort of slop filled base model and then stuffing taste down it with a bunch of fine tuning.

• 28:23Jordi Hays?

  Because everyone, when they think of Mansori, they think of like really high taste.

• 28:27John Coogan?

  Maybe. Depends. Who will be doing the labeling? Will it be Mansori people? There's also a bunch of back and forth going on about Netflix buying Lionsgate potentially. Sources familiar with the matter disputed Semaphore's reporting. There was a back, there was a whole bunch of back and forth about is Netflix going to buy something else? Were they in the bidding war for Roku? And they're taking shots at each other. Semaphore, what you got? Ben Smith says, congrats on helping with the cleanup. They could have gone to Variety and chose you. I'm not even sure what this tweet means, Sharon. Cleanup on Isle Semaphore, my dear Ben. All I'm saying is they are now saying on the record that they're not interested in Lionsgate, never were.

• 29:12John Coogan?

  Would have been happy to amplify your scoop too. They're fighting. They're fighting timelines and turmoil. Anyway, we have the perfect person to discuss journalistic.

• 29:23John Coogan?

  Timeline and turmoil back and forth. I don't know. We have Eric Newcomer from Newcomer is the founder and writer. Welcome to the show. How are you doing there?

• 29:31Speaker 03

  Finally.

• 29:32John Coogan?

  Finally, I'm so sorry. First, first apologies. It's been way too long. You know, I've been a fan since Dead Cat. I'm not kidding. I've listened to every episode and you've been on an absolute tear and I'm sorry that we went back and forth. We both barely live in Instagram or in Twitter DMs. And so every our chats are just like, yeah, let's do it. And then like five days later, oh, sorry, I dropped it. Oh, sorry, I dropped it. But anyway, I'm glad you're here. How are you doing?

• 29:54Speaker 03

  Here, here we are. And I tweeted, this is a big moment for me. And literally, I'm having Ben Smith recording my podcast tomorrow. So it couldn't have been a better.

• 30:02John Coogan?

  You can get to the bottom of it.

• 30:04Speaker 03

  I haven't even dug into this. So it's like you're giving me notes.

• 30:06Jordi Hays?

  Material.

• 30:07Speaker 03

  To ask him about.

• 30:08John Coogan?

  You gotta ask him the hard questions. What happened with the minor scoop around Netflix and Lionsgate?

• 30:15Jordi Hays?

  I, I really, we were saying that when the show kicked off.

• 30:18John Coogan?

  Generational run.

• 30:19Jordi Hays?

  Generational run with, and, and I, when I listen to your show, I, I'm like taking notes. Cause like you, you actually have a really, I was calling you like a matador.

• 30:31John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:32Jordi Hays?

  You're with like, you're with like a bull and you're trying to get them to like, kind of run at you, but then they run at you and you sidestep them.

• 30:39John Coogan?

  It's really good.

• 30:39Jordi Hays?

  It's really good.

• 30:40John Coogan?

  And it's just, I don't know. Do you feel like you occupy like an interesting space? Because I feel like you're not some like tech optimist pumper insider, right? Like you have, you know, what, six years in Bloomberg, serious journalistic chops. But then you interact with people who come at you with like crazy anti-tech takes and you're able to sort of like play the pro tech guy in some ways. Like what is going on?

• 31:07Speaker 03

  Sometimes, you know, I'm someone who came up through journalism. You know, I was working, the last guy in through the normal, like I was in my hometown paper, the Macon Telegraph, Sun Sentinel, Tampa Bay Times, New York Times. Just like interning my way up, just doing the journalism thing. Thank God, Jessica Lesson brought me to work for the information. I was the first employee. So it was like, oh, the Silicon Valley thing. Very interesting. Yeah. And so I was working out of her like apartment in Dolores Park.

• 31:33John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 31:33Speaker 03

  And then I worked at Bloomberg for six years and, you know, started to really get Silicon Valley. And so when I launched Newcomer, I did write that I wanted contrarian optimism. You know, I felt like I started my time as a tech reporter. Being more negative than most because that was the era of, you know, sort of the gadget blogger. And then by the end of my time at Bloomberg, we had sort of the infiltration of, you know, the political reporter who was really gunning for Facebook or whatever. And so it went from everybody's too soft, everyone's too negative. And I really just wanted to write for like your audience, you know, people in Silicon Valley, people who got it, didn't want to have to explain who Marc Andreessen and Ben, you know, Bill Gurley were and just sort of write for the people.

• 32:17Speaker 03

  And sometimes that's positive, sometimes that's negative. Puts me in a sort of weird situation sometimes.

• 32:22John Coogan?

  So I, I feel like I'm also having trouble putting you in a bucket as like commentary, interviewer, scoop master, scoop athlete. You get some scoops, but it's not the only thing that you do. Like we talked to a lot of people who are just great yappers and they've never gotten a scoop and that's fine and they have great commentary and they can talk about anything. It's amazing. And then there's other people who are just great interviewers and they, every week they're delivering like the best guest. And then there's other people who are the scoop athletes and you never really hear them give a take or their opinion, but they're like pestering everyone and Signal all day long, I suppose. But is that by design? Is that something you see like fragmenting over time as you build the organization? Like what, is there a method to the madness or is it just like you enjoy all three things? So you've been down.

• 33:07Speaker 03

  It is sort of, you know, you do best what you enjoy. I've never heard anyone call me an athlete before, a scoop athlete. The.

• 33:14John Coogan?

  Scoop doggy dog.

• 33:16Speaker 03

  Scoop's.

• 33:16Jordi Hays?

  Future, future all of a fame.

• 33:18Speaker 03

  You know, we're essential reading. I think the best takes are ones where, you know, you go talk to people who know and then you're like, it's not just like I made this up. It's like, yeah, I talked to people, it's going to be right. You know, I want my predictions to come true. I think the best coverage, you know, doesn't just sit down smart today. You know, you look back and you're like, oh, we were saying Google was undervalued when the stock, you know, wasn't getting the credit. You know, you want to feel like we were right, like look back and read the record and that's how you build a reputation.

• 33:44Jordi Hays?

  When you say you get financial advice?

• 33:46Speaker 03

  I want, I want people to make money. I want it to, I, it's not, you know, that's not the goal, but I want people to read it and they make more money. And so it feels like it's worth subscribing. But yeah, we do, we do whatever we want, you know, it's newcomer, it's

• 34:00John Coogan?

  Diversity in the content from a personality driven, but you do have other folks on staff. And then also diversity of revenue streams, right? Ads, subscriptions and events. Like, was that deliberate on day one? I feel like a lot of people focus like, I don't know. It's, it's interesting. It's worked, but it's like, it feels contrarian in the new media sense. Cause most people just be like, oh, I want to be like Ben Thompson, only subscriptions or TVPNs only ads, or someone's like really in the conference business, or they do that like way later. It feels like you were able to land three planes simultaneously pretty quickly.

• 34:34Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, I, I mean, today, event sponsorship is our main revenue stream with newsletter subscriptions being our second largest. I mean, I did the Substack thing in 2020 in the pandemic. And it was like, this seems like fun. Finally, something in startup world applies to me. I'll jump on that. And I was one of the top tech Substacks. 2023, I had not jumped on crypto, right? Like, I'm sort of a crypto hater, but 2023, I'm like, I don't know, ChatGPT, this seems real. You know, this is actually the tech trend that people have been waiting for, not something that was like getting ginned up. So I had access to a beautiful office in Hayes Valley. My friends, now their company is Weekend. We put on the first Cerebral Valley AI Summit. And it was just sort

• 35:19Speaker 03

  of like, this worked. People were enthusiastic, you know, Ali Goodsey connected with Naveen Rao, Mozak Mel acquired the company for $1.3 billion. You don't get better press than that, you know? Business Insider put in a beautiful headline, you know? And so we were off to the races. We're literally doing our mid-year Cerebral Valley AI Summit London, uh, next week. So ramping up for that. So yeah, it's events, subscriptions, trying to, I'm out, I'm out hustling, trying to follow your, uh, sponsorship playbook. So if you want to put in a good word for people, the newcomer all around, like

• 35:52John Coogan?

  I'd love it. I mean,

• 35:55John Coogan?

  I mean, the mid, the, the, Or the pre-roll or the mid-roll host read ad in your podcast, I think would do very well. And I, and I, I mean, I, I like that it, there's no ads when you're sparring with somebody. But you did have the mic drop at the end of the, at the end of the Ed Zitron episode, which I very much enjoyed. And yeah, if you'd snuck an ad in there, I would have been like, you earned it, you know? Would have been good. Anyway, talk about, about how you're thinking about covering some of the big stories right now. Like SpaceX is, is dominating the news, but it's an interesting company to cover because Elon's like one of the first like go direct CEOs. He doesn't do a lot of like management interviews. You, you don't really like do interviews with other people.

• 36:38John Coogan?

  Like we have somebody from, we have a VP of Agentic AI from AWS coming on the show. They're happy to talk up and down the stack. You don't get that access at SpaceX necessarily. How do you think about what your audience wants to hear from you on SpaceX?

• 36:54Speaker 03

  I mean, they, yeah, they control their own social media network. They can publish directly.

• 36:58John Coogan?

  Apparently they're not doing SEC filings or something. Do you see this or not doing conference calls? I think they'll do the filings, but they'll just put it on X. It's hilarious.

• 37:05Speaker 03

  Um, I mean, for the most part, the newsletter really covers, you know, earlier stage startups. On our sort of Friday is like a step back and so we cover SpaceX a lot there. I mean, all this money is about to flow into Silicon Valley. So just everybody getting rich and that being great for the startup. Ecosystem is definitely one theme and who's getting rich and who got in early is certainly important to us. And then, yeah, we can't help ourselves but say, this is like madness. I feel like even people buying the shares, you know, know that it's sort of a part psychological stock where it's like, well, is there other money that's going to come in that's going to boost this thing up?

• 37:44Speaker 03

  And it, you know, as someone who's fairly bullish on Anthropic and OpenAI to some degree, like SpaceX just feels like total lunacy, given the sort of insane TAM story that you have to believe. So yeah, you're getting some of our commentary that it feels, it feels somewhat ludicrous, but trying to root it in. The S1 and just keeping it in the numbers.

• 38:06John Coogan?

  It seems valuable.

• 38:08Jordi Hays?

  Can you do some reporting on where, where the SpaceX employees are going to be? Doing their, you know, upcoming purchasing activity.

• 38:18Speaker 03

  Homes.

• 38:18Jordi Hays?

  There's like, there's, there's, uh, there's like a variety of like communities where.

• 38:25Speaker 03

  You're gonna say the one you're thinking of?

• 38:26Jordi Hays?

  If you look at them, there's only a few homes listed and I'm like, I knowing like, I, I was, there's like a, there's a car club. Uh, this, uh, this, this.

• 38:35Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 38:35Jordi Hays?

  Race track and it's called Willow Springs. It's an old racetrack. They're putting a car club there. Uh, I, I, I know for a fact that a bunch of them are signing up there. I'm a little bit, uh, I'm a little bit nervous that there's, that, uh, I share too many, I share too many interests with this SpaceX.

• 38:52Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 38:52Jordi Hays?

  Team, so.

• 38:53Speaker 03

  Priced out by these.

• 38:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 38:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:56Jordi Hays?

  Um, uh, one, one less, I guess, serious question. Do you think mocking VCs should be illegal? Because there's been some little bit of a, of a, some drama on the timeline.

• 39:06Speaker 03

  Or do you think in, in, in, if you take, if you major in venture capital in college, they should teach you about the Streisand effect?

• 39:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:13Speaker 03

  That might be another one.

• 39:13Jordi Hays?

  No, but there's been some drama on the timeline this week with, with VC brags and I'm just, I'm wondering, you know, Silicon Valley has a lot of power in Washington right now. And I'm wondering if now is the time to push to make it, uh, just straight up illegal.

• 39:27Speaker 03

  And this scourge, like it's, it's just, yeah. Um, you know, I, you know, we, we, we tweak venture capitals. I get.

• 39:34Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 39:35Speaker 03

  Capitalists. I guess I'm humorless, list, humorless on this. Um, yeah, I don't know. I, VC always needs to be better at taking, taking criticism. Sometimes you're up, sometimes you're down. It's like better to be in the mix.

• 39:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:46Speaker 03

  In some ways the sass, you know, gets, helps you clean up your message a little bit. So I'm, I'm always, uh.

• 39:52Jordi Hays?

  Oh, sorry. S A S S, not S A A S.

• 39:56Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 39:56Jordi Hays?

  It's like, I, I mean, that, that, that does get to something else, which is like, do you, are, do you get AI fatigue like we do sometimes where we're like, oh, like the snap spectacles thing we spent 20 minutes on at the top of the show and like, is it the most consequential story? Consequential technology. It's an eight billion dollar company. It's a new consumer product, but it's something that's like tangible that at least you can like dig into. How, how do you, how do, how do you, uh, balance like what is tangible and interesting to the, to the reader? With where the market cap is actually moving, which might be at the frontier labs or the data bricks of the world that's a little more abstract.

• 40:36Speaker 03

  I feel so lucky to cover venture capital because you get to cover interesting stuff. That makes a lot of money, right? Like I could, I could write about oil and gas and it's like you'd fall to dollars, but it's like super boring. So to me, venture is already pretty exciting. Like writing about AI, you get to talk about artificial general intelligence and like whether it's sentient and these have like, it has real like business consequences. So I don't really get tired of the AI story. I mean, certainly AI is dominating, you know, basically all the investment activities. So it becomes a huge focus of ours. So no, I'm less likely to get dragged into the Snap spectacle stuff. I mean, it's always fun to watch for new hardware, but just this, this question of, you know,

• 41:20Speaker 03

  are workers getting totally disrupted? Will, you know, change the course of American business? We have these enormous IPOs. So it's one of the more enjoyable times to be a business reporter where the stuff you want to write about, which is a new intelligence being birthed by Silicon Valley, matches, you know, the market caps and what's interesting. And so following the money for the most part has been, you know, a super gratifying story. And so we tend, we tend to stay pretty focused on that.

• 41:48John Coogan?

  How are you answering that question of like job displacement? Obviously there's like economic numbers. There's also just sort of reverting back to like your own personal experience. Like, are you seeing competition on Substack from like slop farms? Like,

• 42:02Speaker 03

  Definitely, yeah, I think,

• 42:03John Coogan?

  Tim Ferriss just wrote about this a little bit.

• 42:04Speaker 03

  There's at least one guy clearly ranked above me who's using AI to write the stuff, which is just fascinating.

• 42:12John Coogan?

  And where does that leave, like, like, have you, have you, have you grappled with like what the response is? Because it feels like the, like the scoops are very, very protected in this, or like AI resistant, but maybe, you know, history or breaking down or analyzing a, taking a press release that's already out there, synthesizing some data in history, that's maybe a little bit more commoditized. But how are you grappling with it?

• 42:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think coming from a perspective, being a person, so transcending just a writing style, but it is literally

• 42:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:47Speaker 03

  Someone in a publication is accountable, is defensible. But certainly as the sort of writing quality of AI gets better and better. I'm not ruling out the possibility that it's super disruptive. Yeah, like you said, scoops. I think the sense that, you know, the information is coming from real humans, that like I'm in the business of knowing what other humans are thinking is fairly defensible.

• 43:15Speaker 03

  But, you know, we're using AI to build, you know, like our ticketing platform for our events.

• 43:21John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 43:21Speaker 03

  One of my reporters was talking about using it just to build his own like story tracker. I think we're trying to be creative, like I'm, I don't want sort of AI written stuff in our stories, but I do sort of have existential questions about, you know, like the fifth sentence in the third paragraph.

• 43:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:41Speaker 03

  If AI puts out a better version than you are going to spend the time to do, is it really a disservice to readers that you went in and like punched that up? And I, you know, I think it's probably good for readers. So it's hard to have this super hard line of all human written stuff, because we certainly want it for, it's a great copy editor. You know, I pay a human copy editor, but still I run stuff through Claude and it's amazing how much it's catching both, you know, it'll catch like million, billion type errors and obviously all sorts of minor typos, so.

• 44:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm imagining that, like, I, I, I feel no, like sadness about you never writing the line, "They declined to comment ever again." Like, it is, it is fine if that is, it can be a Python script. It doesn't even need to be gen AI. It can just be like an if statement, because that line is in so many news articles.

• 44:35Speaker 03

  We could have, we could have ones that's like, take out all the perfunctory lines of stories that they feel inclined to put and you can, you know.

• 44:42John Coogan?

  I would like that a lot of times.

• 44:44Jordi Hays?

  When you think about disruption for, for like a newsletter, media business, however, however you want to describe it, the, the only person I think would actually be able to Compete like you weirdly need like a network. You need like trust. You need like you need. There's so much like information that I would say informs your work and and other

• 45:09Jordi Hays?

  other journalists that that run similar businesses. It's just like not anywhere online like it truly only exists in, you know, a small like group chat or or places like that. And so the question is like, I don't think a fully, I don't think AI can like actually just like somebody with AI that is able to build up the trust and the network and the kind of understanding of the space. Yeah, that person is like if they're willing to just use more AI than you and like they don't care about like the slop allegations or whatever, then maybe they have some type of advantage. But I still feel like more than

• 45:46Jordi Hays?

  more than ever, there's so much information that that you need to run a great media business that is not anywhere on the internet. It's not in podcasts. It's not on X. It's you just have to go actually talk to people.

• 45:57Speaker 03

  We we play nice with Arfa Rock, but honestly, it's, you know, people in the industry giving it away for free. You know, the desperation for basically content marketing, meaning that some people do a good job of taking sort of their data and using it to to get attention. Like you think about, I don't know, um, I don't know, ramps AI spend data or something. Yeah, like that stuff, you know, used to be sort of the fodder of like a Wall Street Journal type story. And so to some degree, I think everyone being smarter that they need to have actually like great content to get people to pay attention.

• 46:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:33Speaker 03

  Is is one of the vectors of attack, not attack on media, but just competitive.

• 46:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, like, walk me through the the ramp AI spend is like an example of like going direct in the sense that they publish themselves. They tweet about it. They go on podcasts about it. The ADP jobs data just gets released on a newswire and then contextualized by the Wall Street Journal. But if ADP all of a sudden hired some really charismatic employee to go on podcasts, that would be like the same effect.

• 47:03Speaker 03

  And a lot of, you know, the old way of doing it would be you try to embargo it to a couple outlets. And so they felt like they're really getting something. So then their readers feel that this is a differentiated thing that they're receiving and incrementally more reason reason to subscribe to that publication. And so. So it used to be a dance that you'd basically be giving the media sort of favor and sort of unique access that we sort of lose over time.

• 47:28Jordi Hays?

  Do you, 10 years from now, would you, can you imagine having, you know, 10, 20 journalists on staff, joining, joining forces, you know, sort of rebundling, or do you like being unbundled?

• 47:43Speaker 03

  I mean, you know, I have, you know, Madeline Renbarger, Tom Doton, Jonathan Weber, writing for me now, and they're sort of a core part of what Newcomer is today. And certainly, you know, with unlimited resources, part of what I want to spend the money on is great journalism, good reporting. It's sort of, it's amazing that, you know, most cynically, like, our content marketing for events is profitable, generates subscription revenue, people demonstrate real value, you know, it's like, you, the journalism provides sort of a great way to remind people about the amazing events we're putting on. And so I think it's super synergistic. So yeah, I'd love to keep building up a newsroom, but I don't really believe in a sort of rebundling of substacks, like, part of it, we're all

• 48:26Speaker 03

  building separate brands, you know, Newcomer has its own brand proposition, and a lot of the other substacks people like, just are sort of, you know, I love, Lenny is like crushing it, right? But it's a very different thing focused on product managers. And so if you even look at tech and business substacks, we're so different that I've never really been a believer that there's going to be a rebundling in that sense. But some publications, like the Free Press, or the Ankler, or myself, get to a level of scale where we become, start to look more like publications.

• 48:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, it certainly didn't really happen on YouTube. Like, there are a whole bunch of different creators, and Mr. Beast has a whole team and offshoot channels, but with the Mr. Beast brand and the promise and the editing and, but, but they, it was never like, oh, Mr. Beast is gonna

• 49:10Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 49:10John Coogan?

  roll up other creators, because that's not the way the, the setup is working. Talk to me about Mafia. I think we agree that we don't need other venture capital firms with game shows, but

• 49:22Speaker 03

  Don't copy TVP and do a new thing.

• 49:25John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. And I love that for that reason. But do we need a game show with just journalist competitors, like an American Ninja Warrior with just substackers? What do you think about that pitch?

• 49:37Jordi Hays?

  Or Nitro Circus.

• 49:38John Coogan?

  Nitro Circus would be good.

• 49:39Speaker 03

  I'm not building my business around it. I'm happy to go on.

• 49:42John Coogan?

  You'd participate?

• 49:44Speaker 03

  As yeah, yeah, sign me up. But as you guys know, the challenge of media is sustaining it, right? Like, I mean, and kudos to Mike Solano at Pirate Wires. Obviously, he's delivering day in and day out. He gets it. But I do think for like, show concepts, it's fun to get excited about the idea. But the business is in the long term, like, is there variety? Do you have something great day in and day out? So some of these things, it's like, yeah, when you have, you know, the top people you'd want for a mafia show, it's exciting. But is there like, fifth episode with, you know, the C tier founders is much of a sort of much watch, must watch?

• 50:21John Coogan?

  But that's what's interesting about Mafia is that it's not a new company. It's not an enterprise that needs to sustain. It can be just

• 50:30Speaker 03

  A fun thing.

• 50:31John Coogan?

  A fun thing that goes as long as it needs to, doesn't overstay its welcome, because it's not this self prepared, because they have 60 billion in SpaceX coming to hire some camera crews that they need. You know, like, that is the nature of like,

• 50:44Speaker 03

  I'm glad they did the production. I haven't watched, I have not watched the full thing. Tom Dotan of my team wrote the piece. But I do think, you know, the traders is so exaggerated. And there's a reason for it. I still, I, I'm not saying that I could host it that way. But there is a reason that Hollywood and the TV business is so exaggerated. And I think they still need to up it even more, the sort of drama.

• 51:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I saw some people like chirping at the fact like, it only had 100,000 views on YouTube. And I'm like, that is insane for tech. That's insane. And, and like, like, who, like, the, the, the guests, like, who knows these people?

• 51:27Speaker 03

  Only Ed Zitron commands that in tech world right now.

• 51:30John Coogan?

  There's only like, a couple thousand founders that matter to a top tier venture capital firm. There's only a couple founders that, a couple thousand founders that even know who these people are. Of course, like, some of the contestants were bigger names. But, but by and large, these are insiders around the table.

• 51:47Speaker 03

  They weren't going to take founders' funds money, but now that Trey is great, they're in.

• 51:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, maybe.

• 51:54Jordi Hays?

  How, how are you thinking about the evolution of the tier one? It feels like the tier one VC, it feels like the tier one, the tier one VCs of, of, you know, when you started Newcomer are not the same. Uh, the same today.

• 52:09Speaker 03

  This is spicy. This is the question of all questions. Um, I mean, I want to say first of all, I mean, I would always, I'd put Sequoia, I guess, number one to answer the question. I think I wrote a piece.

• 52:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, I'm not even telling you, I'm not even telling you like to give me.

• 52:27Speaker 03

  Name them all.

• 52:28Jordi Hays?

  Name them, name them all, but you're welcome, you're welcome to, but this will be a scoop for us.

• 52:34Speaker 03

  This will be a scoop for us. Who do I think are the top, top?

• 52:37Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I just mean like to me, to me, there's been a very, like a very, very material shift and no one has like really said it out loud. Like there hasn't been, I think you'd be in a position to actually do this because you have to go talk to the top hundred founders, under $10 billion market cap or below and say like at series A, you basically like make them choose who they would pick every single round.

• 53:03Speaker 03

  You've done this, right?

• 53:04Jordi Hays?

  And, and there's been, there's been some like random, there's been some like random kind of like surveys and like games that you can play to try to get at it, but like, I think if you actually had it like you were.

• 53:15Speaker 03

  What's the core, Jeff? I've seen this idea on Twitter, like, and people, who is the firm or who, where's the real switch? Or who do you think? The swap would be?

• 53:24Jordi Hays?

  I just, uh, I think that there's a very re, like, at least when I talk to founders, like founders want to work with, uh, not necessarily like other founders as in like a founder who had an IPO, but they want to work with the founders of the firms. And so there's like a new generation of like, you know, the thrives and the, and the green oaks and things like that. Uh, where, where I see them as like really, really.

• 53:55Speaker 03

  Thrive is dominating. They would, they were certainly coming up soon on my list.

• 53:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And like, and, and, you know, when you get in a situation like hyper competitive, like series A, series B, like those guys are like really. Sharks, right? And like, where do they, where do they, where do they, you know, fit in? So

• 54:14John Coogan?

  The fall off of Arthur Rock, not our fur rock, but the original Arthur Rock needs to be studied. The guy funded Apple, Intel, absolutely insane portfolio, goes out investing with Bernie Madoff. He gets outed for that in 2009. There's a firm that really fell off from the top.

• 54:34Jordi Hays?

  Wait, did he, did he just get screwed by Bernie or he was?

• 54:36John Coogan?

  You got screwed. It's not even that bad, but I don't know. Yeah.

• 54:41Speaker 03

  I mean, how much do you think returns are going to drive this, right? In the cool venture story, like getting in Anthropic right now, or obviously making much money on SpaceX. It's like you look at Spark doing the round that people underestimated. That, that's clearly been really good for them. I mean, Lightspeed dumped a ton of money. And Menlo, you know, I think it was key, key to them. So there are firms where I think it's had a big impact on their reputation, but I don't know if that matches.

• 55:10Jordi Hays?

  I think that's helpful. I think that's helpful with LPs, but like the reason that it's an interesting question is like, okay, who has the best overall brands, right? Who has like the most like halo, which, which firms do founders actually want to work with, right? Uh, who has the most, who has like the most access to capital, like all these things factor in, who did like, who did the, the?

• 55:32John Coogan?

  Elo, like if you, between these two firms, which one are you picking?

• 55:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like people that bet on Anthropic.

• 55:37John Coogan?

  But that's a completely different thing from actually measuring the quality of the venture capital business that is being built. And people still conflate two different goals. One is the, the sexy seed round to multi-billion dollar exit in a very short amount of time. Cursor is a great example of like, it's just classic venture capital. You got in sub a billion, you were out at 60 within three years. It's just incredible venture capital. Right? Incredible venture capital. But then, but then there's a different game where that investment returns three billion in three years. And then there's a different one where you put 10 billion in a lab at 500 billion and it doubled and.

• 56:19John Coogan?

  So you made more money and in the, at the end of the game, these venture capital firms are businesses. The job is to return cash flow, like to create cash. And so, yeah, oh, this fund had to raise more money. That's not really a critique. That's a critique of like, what's the definition of venture capital? Should we include growth stage investing in that? Should we include your public business in there? But like, as a financier, as an entrepreneur of a financial company, all you care about is how much cash are you returning to your investors and to your, your GPs? And so there's two very different games that are being played. One is for clout and, and credibility. And the other is just how much raw cash is this business throwing off? What's the value of the firm?

• 57:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I look at it like when I, when I, in the, in the most simple view, I think about a, a series A or a series B and a founder gets 10 term sheets hypothetically. And then you run that and you ask, you know, a hundred founders that like who comes out in the top three? That, that to me is like the most interesting because that's like a generally going to be a leading indicator for like, who, who has the most aura, you know, uh, kind of.

• 57:29John Coogan?

  The aura list, the newcomer.

• 57:30Jordi Hays?

  The newcomer aura list, the newcomer aura list.

• 57:33Speaker 03

  Done, we did founder's choice a while ago, which was these guys.

• 57:37John Coogan?

  Elo, right?

• 57:37Speaker 03

  That was more like, you know, it was a little more like founder friendly.

• 57:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, who do you want to work with?

• 57:41Speaker 03

  Experience. We've published, you know, an LP did a survey of manager. So we, we try to, there's so many different ways to slice it.

• 57:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:49Speaker 03

  And yeah, I, I mean, getting great returns, I think it has some impact on, you know, cert, you know, your heft with founders. Founders like winners, people who are making a bunch of money. But I agree that you can't just look at returns and say those are the ones that are going to get picked by.

• 58:03John Coogan?

  There's also an interesting dynamic, particularly with Sequoia, where for a long time they had a reputation as being like, not particularly founder friendly. I mean, it is the genesis of founders fund is like the whole PayPal draft, drama around Sequoia, right? And it's like, what if there was a firm that was founder friendly? And then that went off and happened. And now, you know, obviously there's an entirely new team there. It's a new strategy, but I talked to founders who are like, yeah, they're not friendly. And I'm getting in the. Notorielle Arena with them like it's a lion and I'm gonna ride it like and they're excited by that and they're like yeah if I don't put up insane returns they're going to fire me that's encouraging like I need that I need to grind harder and so there's this weird thing where if you're measuring just on like who will have your back unconditionally

• 58:48John Coogan?

  there could be some really terrible venture capitalist out there who's not gonna help you but also never gonna fire you and they're just kind of like yeah I gave you their dumb money but so there's a lot more to the shape of like the thing but that adds aura too cuz like you can be I mean we had Andrew Reed on the show and he said Sequoia won't stab you in the back we'll stab you in the front

• 59:09John Coogan?

  that is high aura and like I I mean I'm not in a position to raise money from Sequoia right now but like I was like I kinda wanna work with Andrew like after that that's great like I like that and that is a good good defining line there anyway I don't know

• 59:23Speaker 03

  yeah I think you know good founders like tough investors

• 59:27John Coogan?

  yeah

• 59:28Speaker 03

  but yeah I agree you know competition and capitalism forced all these venture funds to realize that founders were their main customer and therefore they needed to say they were super founder friendly and you know I I think benchmarks doing a good job with their rebuild but having

• 59:43John Coogan?

  ship of feces

• 59:44Speaker 03

  Travis and Emil running around being like they screw founders over like I don't think

• 59:48John Coogan?

  like Ev Randall was drinking beers in college when that happened okay let's back off of that truck for a little bit let's not visit the sins of the father on the son right it's in the bible

• 1:00:02John Coogan?

  on on this list I you know the competing with the Midas list or doing some other list or like how valuable are lists in terms of like actual moving the needle for your business like early on at TVPN we did the the Metis list which was like a list of AI researchers and it converted a decent amount of email subscribers cuz we had like an email capture flow we weren't like directly monetizing it but it was an interesting experience we did a couple of those like sort of stunts and but I'm interested to know from your perspective is that is that less of a priority I always hear that like scoops get people to to to pay they jump the paywall after a scoop they gotta read it whereas an opinion piece might not even if it's going viral people might just summarize it

• 1:00:47Speaker 03

  we we did a survey with wing of top venture capitalists to rank up and coming companies and that does really well it's like great marketing for us you know Everybody in the list tweets it out.

• 1:00:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:59Speaker 03

  But we don't really put much behind a paywall because it's sort of meant to be read. And so then it's not a very good like subscription driver. It's more just like brand building awareness influence. And so, so really the challenge of any list is are you going to put it behind the paywall? And for the most, most of the time you wouldn't.

• 1:01:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:18Speaker 03

  Because you want it to get shared. And so I think they're good for brand and like list building, but not great for subscriptions. Whereas putting like documents or behind the paywall, you're going to get this resource of companies that you might invest in or whatever, you know, behind a paywall, you know what you're paying for. And so people are just much more likely to convert. So, you know, when that LP I mentioned earlier did a survey about venture firms, you know, we put that behind a paywall. I think that did very well. So if we're willing to put it behind the paywall, they can do well. But for the most part, the list you're talking about, you know, we keep in front of the paywall.

• 1:01:55John Coogan?

  I feel like there's still, I feel like a lot of people ascribe the, the value in the Midas list and what Forbes does to just the fact that it's a list and everyone wants to be on it and it has like legacy and brand and that's real. But underrated is how incredible the photography is in a Forbes feature. You can hire a, a great photographer and still not hit that level of like magazine cover look. And if you offer that to someone who's going to win the list, if they understand media and the power of like a really high quality photograph and a, and a photo that will live on and sort of immortalize them for like maybe a decade, you see a lot of people and

• 1:02:38John Coogan?

  their top Google result is still that cover that they did when their company hit unicorn status or something. And you're like, wow, they look great there. Then you meet them in person, they're like, oh, that was a decade ago. You've got some gray hairs now.

• 1:02:50John Coogan?

  But but offering that as like a trade is a is an interesting, interesting proposition.

• 1:02:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, we literally had like two photographers running around our last River Valley event. So I couldn't agree with you more that like getting great photos of these people out of these events.

• 1:03:03John Coogan?

  Something that looks different than just the LinkedIn profile photo against the wall. Something that has action, background, texture, like these things are harder to recreate than people think. They they take it for granted because they show up everywhere, but they're usually because of a special thing. Nothing's higher status than the only thing higher status than the the Midas list is the the Alami stock photo watermark Getty Images watermark at Sun Valley. That is the highest status symbol in Silicon Valley, in my opinion. You can't, you can't buy it.

• 1:03:34Jordi Hays?

  I just have one more question. Are you going to voluntarily switch to API based billing for your AI usage?

• 1:03:42Speaker 03

  Because you were getting some, you were getting some. Because I'm corrupt.

• 1:03:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You said, you said AI was useful.

• 1:03:49Speaker 03

  You said.

• 1:03:51Speaker 03

  And this one has this view that journalists shouldn't be getting monthly subscriptions because they're falsely subsidized. And we're, we're not really paying what it costs. We need to be paying.

• 1:04:02John Coogan?

  Eight thousand dollars a cloud for two hundred bucks.

• 1:04:05Speaker 03

  I think Claude and OpenAI, Anthropic and OpenAI are getting a better deal out of me probably than I'm using. I'm not, I'm not sure I'm getting this arbitrage.

• 1:04:14John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah, you can run those, those prompts of like, estimate the number of tokens that I've used over time. And like, a lot of people run that and they're like, wow, I've been paying two hundred dollars for like twenty bucks worth of tokens. Like they're printing off of me.

• 1:04:26Speaker 03

  I think I'm getting had, not the other way around right now.

• 1:04:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is AI useful? We'll figure it out eventually. We'll see.

• 1:04:32Jordi Hays?

  We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out together.

• 1:04:34John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time. This is a ton of fun. Let's do it again soon.

• 1:04:37Speaker 03

  So happy to do it.

• 1:04:38John Coogan?

  Well, I'm glad we saved, we saved this for, you know, today. It's been really fun. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your week. Goodbye.

• 1:04:48John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Codex, since we're talking about it. Codex is the most tasteful workspace for, no, powerful workspace for getting work done tastefully with AI agents. Whether you're tastefully writing code, tastefully analyzing data, creating tasteful content, or automating tasteful business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to tasteful.

• 1:05:11Jordi Hays?

  Usually.

• 1:05:12John Coogan?

  Usually.

• 1:05:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh, up next, we have Merrill.

• 1:05:16John Coogan?

  This is a scoop. Getting a SpaceX employee on the show is difficult. Not many people can do it, but we can because we got Merrill. How you doing?

• 1:05:25Jordi Hays?

  Rocket Man.

• 1:05:25Merrill Lutsky?

  Doing great.

• 1:05:26John Coogan?

  Rocket Man.

• 1:05:26Merrill Lutsky?

  It's great to be back.

• 1:05:29John Coogan?

  Tweet, I want to go way back in time. Did you ever have the, I want to work for a rocket company as a kid? I want to be an astronaut because you sort of wound up pretty close to it.

• 1:05:39Merrill Lutsky?

  Oh yeah. I mean, there was, uh, I don't know. I remember watching like that. Like, did you ever watch that movie October Sky?

• 1:05:45John Coogan?

  Oh yeah. I love that shit.

• 1:05:46Merrill Lutsky?

  Yeah, I remember that was like, that was like one of my favorite movies growing up. I definitely had like a NASA phase and, uh, yeah, so it's, it's kind of crazy. Somebody on Hacker News the other day commented like, it's funny how adding stack and trying to add stack tips to GitHub has resulted in the Graphite team now building rockets. So here we are.

• 1:06:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, that is, it's remarkable. It's like, it's almost like a side quest in the, in, in, in the long arc of history. Uh, you'll be deploying on the moon and Mars beyond. How has it been? What, what, what has the last couple of weeks been like? Has it been sleepless? Are you able to continue growing the product, building the product? Or has all the news been infiltrating you? Like what's the, what's the psyche been like over the last couple of weeks?

• 1:06:28Merrill Lutsky?

  Yeah. I mean, it's been, it's honestly been really exciting, uh, on, on the ground at Cursor. Like everybody is, everybody's fired up about, about like the Q partnership and what that's unlocking for us on the model training side. Uh, we also just had our first big conference compile at Fort Mason yesterday. So, um, the marketing team was, was really working hard to get everything together for, for that and make that a great event. And, uh, yeah, it all kind of led up to yesterday being a crazy news day of, uh, the SpaceX announcement. And then, uh, you know, the three big feature releases that compile yesterday, um, including Origin, uh, the agenda get forged that, that we're working on.

• 1:07:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:07Merrill Lutsky?

  Uh, so yeah, it's been a, it's been a frenetic, uh, past few weeks, but everybody's really fired up.

• 1:07:11Jordi Hays?

  Did you guys expect the announce, like the, the sort of second part of the, the announcement between, you know, the deal between Cursor and SpaceX to get as much like attention as it did? Cause I was seeing people that seemingly hadn't seen the first, the announcement of like the fir-, the first part of the deal. Uh, and a lot of people felt like they were processing it for the first time.

• 1:07:32John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:07:33Jordi Hays?

  Uh, which kind of makes sense in hindsight, but in our little bubble, I was like, great. Like obviously they were gonna do this deal.

• 1:07:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, I sort of had the, I guess I had it in my mind that you already had SpaceX badge, but that was not the case because this was a partnership and now the deal has been announced. Is that correct?

• 1:07:49Merrill Lutsky?

  Yeah, exactly. There was the, the announcement of the option to acquire and then, uh, the, the other, you know, the announcement yesterday was the exercising of that option.

• 1:07:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:07:59Merrill Lutsky?

  Uh, now, I mean, I still don't have a SpaceX badge yet. Uh, you know, we, we have to wait for, for the deal to close.

• 1:08:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:04Merrill Lutsky?

  Then we can actually start working together, but uh, now, now it's like just the, just antitrust and all the, all the other pieces.

• 1:08:11John Coogan?

  That makes sense. Well, congratulations. I do want to talk about Origin. Um, walk me through the thesis there. I mean, there's been plenty of gripes about, uh, how much code is getting pushed to the internet generally? How teams are working together, agents are working together, we're in a CPU crunch now. Um, how much of this is just, uh, taking a developer workflow that already exists, speeding it up versus reimagining it from first principles? Like walk me through the thesis for this product.

• 1:08:43Merrill Lutsky?

  Yeah, I think the, the origin really started from, you know, a simple realization, which is that every single piece of the software development lifecycle, um, that we have today, every tool, every piece of infrastructure, uh, was all designed for a world where humans write every line of code.

• 1:09:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:00Merrill Lutsky?

  We've tried to scale that, um, as best we can, um, over the past year or so, but we're really seeing, uh, many of those pieces just crumbling under the pressure. And, uh, first and foremost, just having, taking, uh, from first principles, designing something that can handle the scale, um, of agenticoding. Uh, that's, that's the, the most important thing. Like, is it scalable? Is it reliable? Is it performant? Like, can it handle hundreds of agents working in parallel at once? And that's really what we've, what we've designed Origin to be is like, the first example of Git infrastructure that is really built for, for the Agentic era. And the other piece of this is that then building, kind of building on that,

• 1:09:44Merrill Lutsky?

  if we own the infrastructure, we can start to build it with agents in mind. So it's not just, it doesn't have to be just like the Git objects. It can be, you can start to store agent traces. You can see the whole history of every action the agent has taken, everything it referenced. And you don't have to have, it's kind of silly today that you'll use one agent to write the PR, but then as soon as the PR is opened, like that agent just goes away.

• 1:10:10John Coogan?

  It disappears, yeah.

• 1:10:10Merrill Lutsky?

  It's like, why does that not carry through and help you then, you know, address review comments, resolve CI failures, fix merge conflicts? And really, we want to get to this vision of more like full self-driving PRs that can really bring themselves out to production, in many cases, without human intervention.

• 1:10:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's interesting.

• 1:10:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, I have a bunch of different things there. I guess the, the question is, yeah, how, like, how important is speed in this context? How important is actually, like, the volume of code? You see a lot of these, like, someone will post, like, okay, I just vibe coded this. I pushed this change, whatever model they're using, did really well. They, they got the job done. And then somebody will go in and look at the PR and be like, 100,000 lines of code to change the color of the button? Like, this is evidence of slop, or this is evidence of poor computer science happening.

• 1:11:16John Coogan?

  Do you have a stance on the, is the answer to slop more slop? Are we going to get less sloppy, more terse in the writing? Is that something that's coming? Or do you need to design a system where the new normal is, yeah, changing the color of the button? It might be 10,000 lines of code change, that's fine. Let's also store the reasoning trace and the whole, and the whole, you know, back and forth and everything that the agent was doing so that, you know, yeah, it was, it was, you know, 10 years of development time for one small change. It's fine because, you know, hard drives are cheap.

• 1:11:49Merrill Lutsky?

  Yeah, I certainly don't think that the the future is 10,000 lines to change a button color, but I do think that the volume fundamentally, just the volume of code and the volume, the throughput that we're seeing and all pieces of infrastructure have to handle now is is just growing exponentially. And, you know, we've seen, we've seen now a lot of teams are now doing like thousands of pushes per hour, you know, and previously they were doing tens or hundreds. And that's a lot of what we've been been trying to make sure Origin is able to handle is is that scale. So we've run some simulations recently where we're doing like, you know, 80 clones and 22 pushes per second with no downtime.

• 1:12:31Merrill Lutsky?

  And, you know, it's obviously just, this is just like us testing internally, but it shows that like the architecture holds up and it's scalable and it's not, when your agents are ready to work at that speed, Origin is not going to be the bottleneck for them. But I do think that we'll then need to, the other thing I think this will enable though is like more agentic review, more back and forth, like more, more autonomy and more, more like thinning out of changes and refining of them before a human ever has to look at them. So, you know, hopefully we can avoid the case where you have like a 10,000 line PR that's that's doing a meaningless change.

• 1:13:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. How is, how is growth overall? I feel, I feel like a lot of people watch an acquisition happen or a series of acquisitions happen and they're sort of like, okay, like that's the end of the story. Or, or they, I mean, it's really easy with Elon Musk to look at it and be like, okay, well, like this is incredibly talented team, but you know, this is data centers and space stuff. This is mass driver on the moon project. Like the, the, the main mission is now, you know, not relevant. And so it's less, less focused. But I imagine that you're just seeing growth in the core business still because

• 1:13:45Merrill Lutsky?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:13:45John Coogan?

  Teams are still, you know, getting up to speed on, on pushing code and, and using all these tools. What has growth been like post-acquisition? What have been the big drivers? What, what does that tell us about the way just the broad software development market is evolving?

• 1:14:01Merrill Lutsky?

  Yeah, I mean, we've seen since the acquisition, we've seen continued growth in the in like the graphite business itself. But really, I think the the most exciting thing for us is has been seeing the level of interest from companies of all sizes in in what we're doing with Origin. So we set a goal for end of July for like waitlist signups that we wanted to hit. And we we hit that in the first 20, like the last 24 hours since we announced the product. So

• 1:14:33John Coogan?

  That gong is also for the acquisition closing, which is maybe a bigger deal than waitlist. But honestly, like traction on an actual product is probably more relevant than any financial milestone, because it means that people are actually interested in this stuff, which is good.

• 1:14:46Merrill Lutsky?

  Yeah, it's it's every time we've talked about it, you know, at compile yesterday, on customer calls, it's like, you know, compile, I got a huge round of applause. Like, it's just it's so obvious. This is a problem that every single company is facing right now. And it's solving this this burning need. And that's why we're so excited about what we're doing. And, you know, really, thinking to your point around acquisitions, like, thinking back to to the graphite days, like, one of the hardest lessons that we learned from building graphite was that your product is only as good as the infrastructure that it's built on fundamentally. And it might seem obvious, but it's a really hard lesson to learn. And we were always limited by like latency, availability,

• 1:15:30Merrill Lutsky?

  even just UI extensibility. Our customers felt those limits when when our infrastructure was down, we were down too. And it's funny, now there's this whole wave of companies that are going to their favorite agents and saying, copy graphite's pull request page, make no mistakes, and you're shipping something out there. And they're really quickly finding out like, why it's so hard to to do what we did. And even even then, I think we were never really able to to create like the the level of experience of just totally seamless, you know, high performance interface that we wanted to, because we were we were limited by the platform that we built on. So with Origin,

• 1:16:10Merrill Lutsky?

  you know, now with with in the backing of Cursor and the combined team, we're finally, you know, we're now able to truly realize and accelerate the vision that we had from the beginning of the graphite days.

• 1:16:22John Coogan?

  Let's talk about AI doom, job losses. Is there any risk that AI puts DJing out of businesses? Are DJs going away in our AI future? Or will the DJ, the humble DJ, always have a place in our society? What do you think?

• 1:16:38Merrill Lutsky?

  I think there's always, you know, it's always been about more than.

• 1:16:42John Coogan?

  You've actually always been able to just press play on a premixed.

• 1:16:47John Coogan?

  And yet we still.

• 1:16:48Jordi Hays?

  Like ironically, like a really good.

• 1:16:52John Coogan?

  White pill.

• 1:16:52Jordi Hays?

  White pill for just jobs overall.

• 1:16:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:55Jordi Hays?

  It's like.

• 1:16:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, you want to see a human up there and.

• 1:16:58Jordi Hays?

  Even the most, yeah, even the most, the most well-known DJs, like they have like a set that they could just go up there and play and dance around. And of course.

• 1:17:06John Coogan?

  Some of them have been accused of that.

• 1:17:09John Coogan?

  Anyway, great to catch up. Congratulations on the progress. Thank you so much.

• 1:17:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, really happy for you and the whole team.

• 1:17:16John Coogan?

  What an inspiring story. A true overnight success.

• 1:17:19Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:17:19John Coogan?

  2020, baby.

• 1:17:20Merrill Lutsky?

  Overnight success of six years.

• 1:17:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, a lot of sleepless nights, but thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you.

• 1:17:26Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, Merrill. Congrats.

• 1:17:28John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And our next guest is here with us live in the TBPN Ultra Dome. We have Carter Room from M13. How you doing?

• 1:17:44Speaker 05

  What's happening, guys? How you doing?

• 1:17:46John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 1:17:47Jordi Hays?

  We're doing great. Give us your review of the World Cup so far.

• 1:17:52Speaker 05

  Ooh, whoa, that was definitely the best game in US soccer history. You know, historically, the US has always been competitive, but just could never find the back of the net. So to find the back of the net that many times, that was nothing short of spectacular.

• 1:18:03Jordi Hays?

  I had a, I had a, I turned it on. I'm watching for like, not like really focused on the game. I think I was like in the middle of something. But I was like, wow, we cannot get the ball on Paraguay's side, like for the life of us. And I realized like I had the, I had the, the Paraguay's flag look like our jerseys. So we were actually playing quite well. We were, we were pressing them the whole time. But I didn't know. And I was like, oh, wow, this is amazing. We're doing great.

• 1:18:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, hopefully, hopefully, the US gets excited like we hosted the opening night of the World Cup the night before at our house. And I was texting people going, hey, we're hosting this event for US soccer. They're like, what's coming? I was like, the World Cup. The last time it was in the US, it was only 32 years ago. But yeah, we'll see.

• 1:18:50Jordi Hays?

  Come a long way.

• 1:18:51John Coogan?

  Do you track like economic impact from World Cup? Are you reading into it? Some people are saying like, that's the reason why we're seeing unemployment so low in a time of AI disruption. It's like, there's a lot of hospitality hiring. Do you read into this stuff?

• 1:19:03Speaker 05

  I don't do a whole lot. I mean, it's interesting, both between the World Cup and the Olympics. Right. They always put out these studies and the question is, are you losing a shit ton of money? Or who's making the money?

• 1:19:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:14Speaker 05

  I can tell you, the car service in Seattle, they're definitely making money. They told me it's going to be $2,500 for a 30 minute trip when I land for Friday's game. So, you know, there are definitely people making money.

• 1:19:26Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, whoa, surge, surge pricing?

• 1:19:28Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:19:31Jordi Hays?

  $2,500.

• 1:19:32Speaker 05

  But it's a great economic lesson.

• 1:19:34John Coogan?

  That's what's happening in Vegas for F1. It was the same thing. Couple thousand bucks just to have a car take you from your hotel to the event. It was crazy. Anytime there's huge demand. So you're thinking more long term. Take us through the basic thesis for the fund. Some of your historical investments, obviously, seems like you're not thinking quarter to quarter based on, you know, unemployment rate data of this month and whether or not the World Cup is causing unemployment or to decline or spike. But what is the thesis for the fund? How long have you been doing this?

• 1:20:04Speaker 05

  I mean, we started M13 10 years ago. We just celebrated our 10 year anniversary.

• 1:20:09John Coogan?

  Congratulations. Where's the name come from?

• 1:20:11Speaker 05

  Everyone thinks we're El Salvadorian gangsters.

• 1:20:15Speaker 05

  Sadly, I'm not that, that gangster. But brightest cluster of stars, brighter than all the stars that comprise it. It's always been our philosophy. We can connect the dots and create more value.

• 1:20:25John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:20:26Speaker 05

  But yeah, you know, fast forward 10 years later, you know, we've been the Cedar Series A investor in 17 year accord. So sometimes better to be lucky than good.

• 1:20:34John Coogan?

  Incredible.

• 1:20:35Speaker 05

  You know, on days like last Friday, when we invested in SpaceX at 15 billion. And banged out, you know, 150x, you know, we all need more days like that.

• 1:20:44Speaker 05

  Thank you for the sound effects. That was well deserved, I think. Yeah, and you know, I think, you know, even as we, at some point, we'll start talking about AI. Everyone thinks like we haven't seen this before. And I think the key is as a VC, you have to learn how to invest in cycles, right? Like, we felt like the world was white hot in 2020 and 2021. Turns out it's even hotter now, right? You think about a lot of us, like M13 and Threeson, all of us, we are investing in consumer software, social media, things like ride sharing. That was the implication of the technological breakthrough, which was the iPhone, right? And so there's always kind of these ripples. And so, yeah, now, you know, we got 35 people, offices, New York, San Francisco, LA.

• 1:21:30Speaker 05

  Always trying to think, what is that next ripple? What is that implication of that technology? How do we invest where the world is bending? And, you know, I think SpaceX is a great example. You invest in outlier people who could create outlier companies. And you hope you take enough shots on goal that sometimes, you know, you get those, those big outcomes.

• 1:21:50John Coogan?

  SpaceX, Ring, Matterport, you're not afraid of hardware. Where'd that come from? What's your thesis on hardware-enabled technology companies going forward?

• 1:21:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, like, take AI today, right? Like, my housekeeper knows it's going to change the world, right? That is not, that takes no skill. The skill of a VC is to understand where to get the best risk and probability adjusted outcomes, right? And to do that, you got to find the right value layers, right? So, yes, foundational models are enormous. They also come at high prices with a lot of competition. The thing I talk about all the time these days is if you think about the last cycle around consumer software, social networks, it was innovators competing with innovators, right? Zuck competing with Evan, John Zimmer competing with Travis. I would argue in this cycle, it's innovators competing with innovators who are now competing with the most well-funded innovators on the planet.

• 1:22:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, Google, Microsoft.

• 1:22:40Speaker 05

  Well, even before then, you got OpenAI and Anthropic, right?

• 1:22:43John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:22:44Speaker 05

  Then you have the 10 biggest tech companies in the world. And I would argue, for the first time in history, they actually have the advantage, right? They got the tech, the talent, the data, the capital, and the technical expertise.

• 1:22:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, Google entering AI feels very different than Google entering social networking.

• 1:22:59Speaker 05

  For sure, right? And so, and so when you think about this market, you really got to think long and hard about where do you get that exposure to AI? Where are the value layers, right? We invested in a company called Prepared, you know, in the very early days, it sold earlier this year for about $900 million. It was using AI and technology to disrupt 911, thank you, 911 call centers, right? They had no competition.

• 1:23:23Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully not disrupt, oh, disrupt the call centers. Not disrupt the actual practice.

• 1:23:30Speaker 05

  It turns out 911 was still using landlines. The rest of us just weren't calling using a landline. So, you know, simple stuff like that. So, in this market, right, it's all about like where, and I think in venture, right, the multi-stage funds play a different game than someone like us, right? We invest out of a $400 million early-stage fund. We're playing for alpha, right? And so, we're pure play, seed, Series A specialists. And so, you got to be disciplined about how you enter, what the competition is, things like that.

• 1:23:59John Coogan?

  So, where does the capital come for doing SpaceX at 15 billion? Obviously, a fantastic investment, but not in that sweet spot of seed, Series A, right?

• 1:24:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, our first fund, to be fair, was kind of stage-agnostic. But I think a lot of it is, look, all the letters are fungible. The way we think about it at M13 is, there's only two types of companies in this market. Those trying to find product-market fit, and those who founded, who are hyperscalers, right? And so, at the end of the day, you're looking for venture-scale returns. And then, you know, the thing that we talk about all the time is, everyone just says, venture's risky, and they kind of throw up their arms. That's like, kind of true, but if you're trying to colonize Mars, that is riskier than if you're trying to get someone to order a black car on an app, right? So, there are different spectrums of risk. And so, it's always, you know, trying to figure out. Is the risk worse than the reward? And that's the game of venture.

• 1:24:51Jordi Hays?

  Have you been disappointed in the growth of the LA ecosystem?

• 1:24:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I laugh because I remember people telling me that San Francisco was dead three years ago. Turns out it's a little less dead than expected. The way I describe LA is right now it's having a siesta, right? Take a little nap, kind of like in Spain, between 1:00 and 3:00 PM. We can't forget, you know, about $450 billion of enterprise value was created outside of some of the big ones like SpaceX in the last cycle, right? And so you think about this cycle, right now, we're still talking about the technology, AI. There's no doubt that's going to come from the technologists sitting in San Francisco. But, you know, you guys know other industries. When you think about the second and the third wave, there's no doubt in my mind, some of that will come from LA, right?

• 1:25:40Speaker 05

  Nobody understands media, content, creators. It's why you guys are sitting in LA. You're the best in the game at that, right? And so I think it's too early to count out LA, just like it was too early three years ago to count out San Francisco. Yes, there were a lot of needles on the street and it was pretty, right? Everybody was leaving, but like, yeah, it came roaring back. So I think, as you think about, what are the new business models we're not even thinking about because of AI? What are those ripples? There's no doubt some of them will be coming.

• 1:26:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I am bullish on the South Bay, El Segundo, South Bay broadly. Continue to be bearish on, like, LA, actually LA, the city. Like, it's hard for me to imagine, I can't imagine a $100 billion company coming out of Venice, Santa Monica, West Hollywood, places like that, which is painful to me, but I think it's the reality. Would love to be proven wrong. Uh, hopefully I haven't passed on that company yet, but uh, but yeah, it's interesting that like, it feels like the South Bay is like really working, El Segundo is really working, you know, SpaceX starting in an El Segundo warehouse, like that's all working, but I feel like the,

• 1:26:53Jordi Hays?

  the original like LA startup movement can't even claim.

• 1:26:57John Coogan?

  Silicon Beach.

• 1:26:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, can't, can't claim that.

• 1:27:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:00Speaker 05

  Yeah. I, I don't think you'll find a hundred billion dollar company coming out of LA. I think you might find some 10 to 20 billion dollar companies. And the reason I say that is, you know, the hundred billion dollar company, the trillion dollar companies are going to be foundational models and things like that.

• 1:27:16John Coogan?

  Concentration of talent.

• 1:27:18Speaker 05

  Yeah. I think the, you'll find the, the application layers, like there's a reason Snap is here. And there's a reason Tinder was founded here and stuff like that.

• 1:27:27Jordi Hays?

  I know, but it's painful that like Suno, Suno should have been an LA company.

• 1:27:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:32Jordi Hays?

  Like, and it's, and it's what, like Boston, New York, maybe they have an SF office. I forget what.

• 1:27:39Speaker 05

  But I think like the dream works of AI, like it has to happen in LA maybe, but it won't be a hundred.

• 1:27:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe, but yeah, it's hard to imagine it as like.

• 1:27:47John Coogan?

  Stuff from LA, like New York is the home of like the on the street, what do you do for a living? Tik Tok or like the person that's playing the, the drums and streaming that like so many of the, like the, the internet democratizing content and then the competition from Atlanta, Toronto, and you know, international, there's a, the big, uh, we were just reading about the, the director of the Avengers, hugely successful filmmaker, obviously in the Disney portfolio is moving to London because they're doing the next round of Marvel films out there. And so, yeah, we just lost like a whole pool of talent here.

• 1:28:23Speaker 05

  Yeah. By the way, Jordy, I was gonna tell you, I'm very jealous that you live in Malibu. It's my house burned down in Malibu.

• 1:28:28John Coogan?

  Oh, I'm so sorry.

• 1:28:29Speaker 05

  Ocean breeze.

• 1:28:30Jordi Hays?

  In, uh, last year or 2018?

• 1:28:32Speaker 05

  Last year, yeah.

• 1:28:33Jordi Hays?

  Last year. Brutal.

• 1:28:34Speaker 05

  I told my wife the night before we went to bed, she was really panicked. I was like, sweetie, we, we literally live across the street from the firehouse and like not far from nobody. Trust me, our house isn't burning down. Uh, obviously we were wrong and we're still the lucky ones. A lot of people were way less lucky, but uh,

• 1:28:49John Coogan?

  And lost those.

• 1:28:50Speaker 05

  Man, I miss that, that beach breeze.

• 1:28:52Jordi Hays?

  Are you gonna rebuild?

• 1:28:53Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah, I'm gonna start this fall.

• 1:28:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:28:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:28:55Jordi Hays?

  So we'll see you in, uh, 10 years.

• 1:28:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:28:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. Hopefully the permitting goes faster or something. I don't know. It seems like a rough, rough go also in the Palisades.

• 1:29:04Jordi Hays?

  How are you thinking about, uh, consumer investing, like consumer products?

• 1:29:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, you know, like two and a half years ago at our LP day, we talked about how we thought for the first time in probably four, five, six years that we thought AI would make the application layer more interesting because we've been doing a lot of the underpinnings, right? We invested the future money, work, health, commerce. So that is a pretty high swath, but we are doing mostly infrastructure stuff. I think we've been right on that. It's hard to get the application layer around AI. Just things are so frothy and moving so quickly. I do think, I don't know if it will be for us anymore, just given the size of our funds. I do believe the next billion dollar D to C brands will be built as AI

• 1:29:49Speaker 05

  companies that happen to sell a product, right? The reason guys like us did so many, you know, D to C things and then stopped doing it was at one point the math made sense, right? You could create unicorns of the math. As the cost of Facebook acquisition increased, right? The math no longer made sense. I think for the first time in history, the math will make sense here for the next two to three years. The reality for M13 is we need generational companies when you operate out of a $400 million fund. So I don't know if it will

• 1:30:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's tough. Even if you're, even if you're doing a true seed and you can do two on 10 and then it's billion dollar exit and like you're like, okay, it doesn't actually can't return the fund.

• 1:30:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's a problem. Like, most people just don't think about the math adventure. It's great to say, oh, I had this X or that. But yeah, you need at M13, we always say every check in the base case has to return half the fund. So we need three to five billion dollar companies in the base case. And we have to hope, you know, we have companies like Open FX doing stable coins, or we need to find that next SpaceX and you need to find those Deca coins. That's the only way the math works.

• 1:30:58John Coogan?

  Sure. What's the team structure like? Two billion under management now, $400 million fund. That feels like enough room for some principals, some VPs around the table, but how, what's your philosophy to growing the firm?

• 1:31:12Speaker 05

  Yeah. So my brother and I founded the firm. Obviously, the way we talk about it is we wanted to build the venture firm that a founder would have built for themselves.

• 1:31:20John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:31:21Speaker 05

  So every single person is an operator by background. In fact, we only have one person that's ever worked at a VC. That's either crazy or that's by design, right? In our model, you know, Basically, some of those operators now invest for a living, right? And so that's the typical venture model. We say they're accountable for company picking, right? Obviously, we've historically been good with 17 unicorns at that, but they're trying to find where's the TAM? Where's these great founders? We have a large, a team called our propulsion team. They are former operators who actually don't invest for a living. They actually stay as operators, right? But now, instead of operating over a single company, they operate over a portfolio. And, you know, we backed, I think, 11 previous unicorn founders in the last two funds.

• 1:32:06Speaker 05

  These aren't people that need help, but where we invest at the early stages of Cedar Series A, they're not going to have a head of data and a head of talent and a head of product. And so we can use these very experienced operators. Like, we have guys like Carl Alamar, who's, you know, built Digital Ocean from pre-revenue to a $5 billion IPO. He now reminds me, I think it's $19 billion today, so he tells me, stop talking about five. But, you know, having a guy like that be able to fill in the gaps, look around corners for you at that Series A is incredibly valuable. So, yeah, so we have about 12 people that deploy the capital, you know, a handful of partners, like you said. Some, you know, I think for us, we obsess about our junior talent because those are our rising stars.

• 1:32:48Speaker 05

  You know, too many VC firms are a bunch of usually males that have had success and kind of hold on. I think you need the best 22-year-old kid from Stanford who did CompSci. I think you need the best 32-year-old. You know, I'm going to find the next unicorn founder because I probably had dinner with him last week, but I'm probably not going to find the 22-year-old kid who just dropped out of Stanford and did that. It's probably going to come from one of the junior people on the team. And so in everything we do, we always say, we didn't want to create a better VC. We kind of wanted to create a different type of VC. And so we take cues from the best of the best and then think about, again, if we were a founder building a VC, how would we build it?

• 1:33:28Jordi Hays?

  How do you think the SpaceX IPO is going to impact the luxury real estate market?

• 1:33:33Speaker 05

  Oh, I am so fascinated by this. I love your thoughts, man. I mean,

• 1:33:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, I'm just looking, I'm thinking about YC and how there's like, there's a lot of new centimillionaires and there's not a lot of inventory over there. And knowing YC, knowing SpaceX people, they like to be outdoors. A lot of them probably like to ski a little bit. And I'm, I think there might be a supply demand mismatch, at least at YC, but

• 1:34:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, maybe we should, we should, your house in Malibu, my house in YC, we try to get a premium for it, get some Anthropic or OpenAI stuff, or Blended, you know?

• 1:34:10John Coogan?

  You can sell your house for stock now.

• 1:34:11Speaker 05

  Yes, seriously. But I mean, I think it's going to be absolutely fascinating, right? Because you think about when OpenAI and Anthropic IPO, a bunch of VCs are going to make a ton of money. But those people's investors are endowments, institutional pensions, things like that. When you think about SpaceX, right? It is every guy in YPO. It is every guy at the country club. It is every guy at Burning Man. Right? Even if they did 150X like we did, they 10X, they 5X.

• 1:34:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, because they got in some SPV.

• 1:34:40Speaker 05

  Right? You think about it, like, there has never been this much value returned that was literally 80% in Specs. Right? And so I think it's fascinating because some guy just made 3 million, some guy just made 100 million, some guy just made a billion. And so

• 1:34:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, not to mention, you know, the, the, the team specifically.

• 1:34:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, and the team. So when you think about it, like, when you fast forward.

• 1:35:01John Coogan?

  Whole family with SpaceX IPO shirts. And I was like, I don't know that they're like, like bankers. I don't know that they were at the IPO on the inside. I think they just like got in early, made some money. And now they're really proud and they're part of like the retail army, essentially.

• 1:35:15Speaker 05

  But I think it will be good for venture. I mean, I think there's no doubt planes, houses, private schools, country clubs, all of those things, right? And we should talk about coupling our houses together. We could get a premium. You get two for one. I mean, that's an efficient trade.

• 1:35:27Jordi Hays?

  The starter pack.

• 1:35:28Speaker 05

  The starter, the starter Centillion to Mayor pack. You got Malibu and YC all in one transaction. But I do think it's just good for venture in general, right? Because people have realized these things just take a long time, right? Like, we invested at 15 billion and still took 10 years to return capital. So I do think it shows people In success, right? Although these things take a long time, that is a lot of money coming back to the system.

• 1:35:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Any last questions? We gotta hop on with AWS in just a second.

• 1:35:56Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it again soon.

• 1:35:57John Coogan?

  This is great.

• 1:35:58Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, yeah, well, uh, feel free to call in from a World Cup game or something like that.

• 1:36:03Speaker 05

  All right. You guys going to any of them?

• 1:36:05John Coogan?

  I don't have anything scheduled.

• 1:36:07Jordi Hays?

  Nothing, nothing scheduled yet.

• 1:36:08John Coogan?

  Who knows? I might get FOMO at the last second and try and get in.

• 1:36:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:12John Coogan?

  Is this crazy? Is the Knicks tickets a hundred thousand dollars to go? Or is it more reasonable if you just want to see the game?

• 1:36:17Speaker 05

  More reasonable.

• 1:36:17John Coogan?

  More reasonable. Okay. It can get crazy. I mean, I'm sure if it's like, you know.

• 1:36:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, you're telling everybody about it.

• 1:36:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:36:24Jordi Hays?

  Now the prices are gonna go crazy.

• 1:36:26Speaker 05

  During the next commercial break.

• 1:36:28John Coogan?

  Anyway, thank you so much.

• 1:36:29Speaker 05

  Thank you guys. Appreciate it.

• 1:36:30John Coogan?

  This is fantastic. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:36:32Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 1:36:33John Coogan?

  And we will tell everyone about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with Design System Context. Very excited to be partnered with Figma and we are also excited to have Dr. Swami Siva Subramanian from AWS. He is the VP of Agentic AI and he is here with us in the TVP in Ultron. How are you doing?

• 1:36:56Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:36:57Speaker 06

  I'm, I'm great. Hey, thanks for having me.

• 1:37:01John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on. Uh, why don't we start with a little bit of an introduction since it is the first time you're on the show? Tell us a little bit about, um, how you fit into the AWS organization, what you're working on, and then we can go into Agentic AI.

• 1:37:14Speaker 06

  Yeah. Nah, I mean, nah, I'm the Vice President of Agentic AI. I've been at, uh, AWS now for like 20 years. I created various things, uh, from like our data, uh, for database.

• 1:37:28John Coogan?

  What was it like 20 years ago? I feel like AWS is barely 20 years old. Were you like the first person on the team? You and Andy were hanging out and racking servers?

• 1:37:38Speaker 06

  Kind of, actually, literally, AWS was, would fit in a single conference room, if you can believe it.

• 1:37:45John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:37:46Speaker 06

  And, I mean, I joined as an intern. My internship project was to build a database called Dynamo.

• 1:37:52John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:37:55Speaker 06

  And, I mean, that turned out to be a bit of a success, so they gave me a job back.

• 1:38:00John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:38:01Speaker 06

  And then I started the database, joined the database team, started a bunch of databases.

• 1:38:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:07Speaker 06

  Then moved on to analytics and started AI for AWS.

• 1:38:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:38:11Speaker 06

  And now, now that you see all the things with Bedrock and SageMaker, all the AI tools. Now, as the world is moving more agentic, I kind of spun myself out of what I was doing.

• 1:38:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:24Speaker 06

  To focus all in on AI agents. So that's kind of my background.

• 1:38:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I imagine that, you know, the, the typical database business, the analytics business, all of that is growing. But it's dri- being driven by more agentic AI use. Talk about the new releases, the new launches, and I want to know, how do we compare and contrast continuum from context? Where, uh, how, how do companies use the right tool for the job here?

• 1:38:48Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, first of all, we live in some amazing times with AI agents. Because the art of possible has fundamentally changed.

• 1:38:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:57Speaker 06

  But when you look at it even, where you see actually enterprises are struggling today. First of all, on putting agents to work.

• 1:39:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:06Speaker 06

  They are still stuck in this world, if I call it the wall gardens, where they are stuck into bottlenecks. Where if I go on vacation, or even when I go to sleep and wake up, I get signals from like my Outlook to Slack. To various other messaging tools. So the time I spent to even catch up used to be like crazy, like at least an hour before I know I get to my job. So, why, why was it that case? It's not like we didn't have AI assistants in every one of these tools.

• 1:39:36John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:39:36Speaker 06

  But what was missing was it didn't have the context to fill in the spaces between these various tools. So, that's why today, actually, we launched something called Quick Autonomous Agent. It actually works on your behalf. It gathers all the context across tools. So there is no more wall gardens, but it's still. Has something enterprises love. It has built in governance and security. That's why the likes of GoDaddy to NBA, everybody is using it. We are showing it live today and the art of possible. Even when we demoed it live, people couldn't believe it because now you can actually catch up and generate a PowerPoint deck in a matter of minute to

• 1:40:19Speaker 06

  a detailed dashboard when you talk to your data lake and generate insights. All these things are changing. That is one example of bottleneck we are removing. A second one I talked about was in the world of security. Security is a big area where intersection of how software is getting built and security is changing in a big way because yes, the rate of change in how you can generate code is becoming very, very cheap. But also the risk on security is also becoming big. So, speed and security are almost at a trade off in every organization. So what we launched today is a service called Continuum.

• 1:41:00Speaker 06

  In many ways, the approach behind it is make security not a discrete thing companies do. It's like how antibodies actually fight viruses. Always on continuously fighting is the way we thought about it as well as an example.

• 1:41:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want to dig deeper into those like continuously running AI agents. I think when people think agentic AI, they go to coding agents because everyone's had the magical experience with those and seen the impact and the spend and the token maxing that happens when you deploy AI agents across a huge workforce of knowledge workers, heavily software engineers. But I'm more interested in in the less understood agentic workflows that are happening, maybe deeper and autonomously in a business. And I'm trying to get to a world where I have that case study at the tip of my tongue for every time I book a flight, it runs an agentic workflow

• 1:42:02John Coogan?

  to make sure that my seat on the plane is correct. Or I don't know, I don't know how to contextualize, but I know it's happening and I know you're seeing it. So walk me through some of the agentic workflows or agentic AI work that's happening, even if no one shows up to the office, it's a company holiday and there's still tokens being spent. What does that look like? What is the shape of that work?

• 1:42:23Speaker 06

  Actually, I mean, that is one of the key things that we are going to start seeing.

• 1:42:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:28Speaker 06

  Explosion of agents in a big way. Even today, for instance, you, in your summit, the CIO of Southwest Airlines talked about how they are building agents on top of actually Agent Core, which is our core agent platform service.

• 1:42:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:45Speaker 06

  And they were able to build these amazing new capabilities to do things like crew planning and various others.

• 1:42:52John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:42:52Speaker 06

  These are not like very human, such as generating codes, but how that's where they are going. The 3M, for instance, are using agents to now be able to do more efficient sales call planning. GoDaddy is able to actually leverage some of our quick agents to automatically reduce something like 15,000 hours of manual work that they are able to do. These are like examples of agents, again, not created just for purely creating software, but these are agents running under the hood and they are able to produce value. And this is going to be where the next big agent workload is going to happen in many ways, and that's what we are excited.

• 1:43:37John Coogan?

  What what is demand like for model routing these days? AWS is fascinating because you've sort of, maybe it's brilliant by design, but sort of the Switzerland of AI in the sense that there's partnerships with Anthropic, OpenAI. There's a whole bunch of other foundation models that are available on AWS. What is demand like? Obviously, different teams have different preferences and cost trade-offs, and they might say, I want to be with this particular Claude model or this particular GPT model. Other companies might just say, I never, I never want to be caught using a frontier model for something that doesn't need, that doesn't need frontier spend, so optimize it for me.

• 1:44:20John Coogan?

  Is that, is that something that you're seeing demand for already?

• 1:44:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, first of all, I think for the industry itself, when I started Bedrock, one of the things we were different compared to everybody else's. We always had this belief, no single model will rule the world. This was not a popular belief at that time, but now it seems so obvious. But then, amazing thing is now that you are in Switzerland, as you actually speak, in Q1 alone, the adoption for our Bedrock Generative AI LLM platform, what we are starting to see is in Q1 alone, the amount of workload that request rate that we are seeing is greater than all of the previous years combined.

• 1:45:06Speaker 06

  That is the amount of growth we are seeing. And it seems to have no signs of slowing down. It's because the rate of actually adoption, especially as people are moving from proof of concepts to production, is just accelerating because they are seeing real outcomes. And that is one of the reasons why so much of innovation is going into things like Bedrock and Agent Core, not just on the model front, but also how we are supporting the things like disaggregated inference and all the H and T capabilities such as launching new context. So these are the capabilities that's going to make actually enterprises

• 1:45:48Speaker 06

  move from just cute prototypes that are sitting in where they demo to their execs to actually production to see real value. And this is why I do think there is so much upside in the future.

• 1:46:00John Coogan?

  How do you think about AWS as a sort of like a thought leader for enterprises rolling these features out? I'm just thinking about like, we're going through this transition of like, there's a new technology, you need to use it effectively. I feel like a big piece of why AWS was so successful was because it powered amazon.com. And if it's good enough for amazon.com, it's good enough for my business or whatever I'm doing. And it feels like now there's an opportunity for AWS to sort of set the agenda on what. It's not token maxing, it's not token minimizing, it's token optimizing, it's ROI maxing or something like that.

• 1:46:39John Coogan?

  But how are you communicating to your team, to the teams within AWS about how to use AI effectively? Sometimes you just want to get everyone up to speed, just go and test everything. And then sometimes you want to be, you know, setting a tone that a company that says, hey, look, we don't have a lot of free cash flow here to throw at this new hot technology. If we're going to use something, it has to deliver ROI almost immediately. How are you carrying that through your organization and into the companies that partner with AWS?

• 1:47:09Speaker 06

  I mean, it's a great question because if you look at the industry and this is true even at Amazon. We first started with, everyone should get familiar with these tools. So we were trying to get everyone to adopt so that they know how to use these tools. Now that they have become so familiar, we are now making all the tools available between like Kira or Agent to Code, coding solution to Cloud Code to Quick is our business user productivity solution. Within Amazon itself, tools like Quick is used by hundreds of thousands of people, let alone Kira to many others equally on the software development.

• 1:47:46Speaker 06

  Now we are come to a point where we internally, and this is true for our external customers such as Delta and Southwest and many others as well as we give organizational breakdown. Within Amazon, we say, hey, every VP and under that team, how much usage is happening? What is their cost breakdown? And then we roll it out. This is true for Kira, I'm pretty sure it'll be true for Quick. And within Bedrock, which is our GenAI platform service, we actually integrated with AWS Cost Explorer so that we can actually have people spare, I mean, monitor the spend in terms of. Where at a per user level, per model level, and a per organization level too.

• 1:48:32Speaker 06

  The moment you have visibility, then you know where people are spending, then you can understand ROI. In fact, the interesting thing what we saw was that my teams, and there are a few teams in Amazon, I call them frontier teams. These are teams that don't see 50% productivity improvement, they see 10x to 20x productivity improvement. And when you see their bill on token, it's not actually like a hundred thousand dollars a month. It's actually, even in the Kiro credits, it's something like around $2,000 to $3,000 a month. That's not that much for 10x to 20x productivity.

• 1:49:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:10Speaker 06

  But I do think this is going to keep going as the world becomes more and more agent tech. Because once they move to coding, to we just launched our release agent. Because you increase code velocity, everyone talks about coding, but this is the net. Suddenly then, everything gets stuck, because you need to deploy it to real world. And deploying it to real world is a bigger challenge, because you can't just increase the volume by 10x a year. And the deployment is going at 1x, that means everything becomes a technical debt. So we made that agent tech, and then we made pen testing agent tech. So I almost jokingly call it saying like, hey, you need to ride it correct, ship it fast, and constantly keep it modern.

• 1:49:54Speaker 06

  And the only way to do it is you need to have all of it be done by agents, and that's exactly how we are now moving towards.

• 1:50:01John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Well, thank you for coming on the show. Congratulations on the launches and Yeah, great to meet you. Talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your week.

• 1:50:08Speaker 06

  Hey.

• 1:50:08John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:50:09Speaker 06

  Thanks again for having me.

• 1:50:10John Coogan?

  Of course. Great to have you. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Our next guest is already in the waiting room, so we'll bring in Thomas Suarez from Raven Renaissance. He's the founder, CEO, and CTO. Boom. What's going on in your face? Introduce yourself. Tell us about what you're building. I'm very excited for this.

• 1:50:36Speaker 07

  Cool. Hey, guys. Yeah, it's great to be here. Yeah, so I'm Tom, the founder of Raven Residence. We're a team of engineers and designers who have been building and wearing customized AR devices for years, decades. So we're working on Raven Prism, which is the first ambient computer in the form of glasses.

• 1:50:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:50:52Jordi Hays?

  Did you launch, did you launch this on Monday, knowing that the specs announcement was happening? Was that, was that somewhat intentional or just kind of random?

• 1:51:03Speaker 07

  So it was actually more of a preview. So we are doing our full launch later this year, but we were going to be at the conference anyway, and we figured would, you know, show some, show some of our hardware and software.

• 1:51:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, because it's augmented world. It's a conference for augmented reality generally. Do you like that term, or is that term getting stale at this point?

• 1:51:20Speaker 07

  I think it's, it's interesting. Augmented reality is kind of a loaded term in some ways, because there have been so many devices over the years. But I think for us, the term ambient computing feels really right, because it's about, you know, technology being there when you need it and gone out of the way when you don't. And I think that's, that's kind of what this device is for. I wore Google Glass for many years, and, you know, of course, there, there's a lot of baggage that comes with that. But there are lots of wearable computers that have tried these sorts of things over years. And I think finally, the industry is starting to converge on something that, that makes a lot of sense for daily wear.

• 1:51:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you positioning the product? What are the key stats that you're particularly proud of? Everyone talks about price, weight.

• 1:52:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, maybe even before that, like, I want to know about your product, but like, in your view, over the last few years, as you've been using these products, developing them, like, what is, what is the ideal product? What does it do? What are, is like, should we be thinking, we were debating earlier, does like, do we need to be thinking about, like, killer use cases, like, specific things that people do every day, or do, you know, a lot of the specs demos? There were some, some of the things that were being demoed, I was like, okay, that would be cool. Like, I'd maybe do that once a year, right? Like, measuring, like, a room, like, how a piece of furniture would fit in. That alone is like, even if it's 10 times better than using like a measuring tape or something like

• 1:52:47Jordi Hays?

  that, that's not going to get me to like, you know, be a daily user of something like this. So like, how have you been thinking about, like, what is the ideal product? Because I assume that's what you're building towards.

• 1:52:57Speaker 07

  Exactly. Yeah. So as someone who wore this for over 12 years, I can say that, or not this particular product, but wearables in general.

• 1:53:04John Coogan?

  Time traveler.

• 1:53:06Speaker 07

  I wish. I wish. There are two main categories of use cases that I think are really relevant. The first is micro interactions. So this is something where you're in and out of the display within five to 10 seconds. So this is things like next navigation direction, a notification that comes in, which sounds really distracting, but it's actually really nice to not have to pull your phone out of your pocket, changing your music, all that sort of stuff, even next cooking instruction, whatever. Those are micro interactions, in and out in five, 10 seconds or less. The other one is reference material. And so this is where you can airplane your phone screen up, you can pin up reference, contextually relevant information. So if you have something that you're working on hands-free, or with your hands, you want something that is hands-free, that's going to give you that information.

• 1:53:51Speaker 07

  And ideally, you can ask an L M or ask an A I to help you with that task. So those are the two categories of experience that we think about as being really necessary. There's also kind of a third one, which is spatial experiences, which is what we've seen from specs. And I think, I mean, certainly, there's a lot of spatial work that we want to do in the future as well. But I think right now, it's kind of like, you want to build toward, what is the iPod of A R before you build the iPhone? And we really need to get something out that is a nice form factor, that's lightweight, that people are going to actually want to wear.

• 1:54:24John Coogan?

  How do you think about field of view? I'm sort of split on it. I used to be F O V Maxer. I used the hollow lens and was like, this is unacceptable. Tried the Apple Vision Pro. It's much better. But then, when I think about the Call of Duty HUD, the Meta Ray-Ban displays, I'm like, actually, for a lot of those micro interactions, next turn direction, next cooking instruction, something like that, like, just put the information right there. It's fine. It's hands-free. I'm actually maybe fine with a smaller F O V if everything's designed around that constraint from, and it's not trying to be omnipresent.

• 1:54:58Speaker 07

  Yeah, so field of view is an interesting one because there's a couple of different ways to think of field of view. One is in, you know, absolute number of degrees diagonal on your vision. And typically, these devices are, you know, if you go to the really big VR headsets, you're going to be closer to 100 degrees. Something like this, this is actually 30 degrees. But that's actually a lot of space. That is equivalent to a 16-inch MacBook at arm's length.

• 1:55:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:55:21Speaker 07

  Which is a lot of space, especially if you have a high PPD. So we find that it's actually field of view and pixels per degree.

• 1:55:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:55:28Speaker 07

  And if you have a high pixels per degree, you have high resolution.

• 1:55:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:31Speaker 07

  Which means that if you have high pixels per degree but a low FOV, then you actually end up with something that is akin to laptop in front of you. And so when we think about, like, this device is Linux-based. It allows you to SSH in, you can run pretty much any application that will run on ARM 64, which is, of course, the same architecture as Mac. And so you can run, you know, properly as a computer.

• 1:55:52John Coogan?

  Okay, world locked versus headlocked. I feel like one of the problems with the HoloLens was that everything was worldlocked, and you turn your head and the narrow FOV would clip the sphere that you put there, and all of a sudden, you're looking at a half-sphere. And it draws your attention, as opposed to if it's just headlocked, like, the screen stays where it's put, and it leans in, and it does the best that it can with a limited FOV.

• 1:56:15Speaker 07

  Yeah, so that also, it also depends on, I think the world lock makes sense for those spatial experiences. Again, you need a large field of view.

• 1:56:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:23Speaker 07

  For something like a head-up display, I don't think world lock makes much sense. You really just need something that, there's all sorts of tricks that you can do in the human-computer interaction. For example, if you have edges on the screen, then it's obvious kind of that you're clipping. But if you kind of allow some padding, any pixels that are black are actually rendered as transparent. So any black pixels around your icons and things like that are going to appear, you know, in screen space as transparent, which is the way we think about it.

• 1:56:51Jordi Hays?

  How much is capital a constraint? Is your competing with companies that are willing to throw billions of dollars at this problem? And so far, I don't necessarily think it's getting them that much closer than what...

• 1:57:04John Coogan?

  It used to be for any hardware company, it was like, oh, you'll need $5 million to do that. And now it's like, oh, yeah, like, no problem. All the toolings are cheap and stuff, and you can outsource the whole supply chain if you need to for a little bit.

• 1:57:16Jordi Hays?

  Also, it's never been easier to raise $5 million.

• 1:57:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Like, even a big number, oh, we're gonna get 100 million. It's like, yeah, there's gonna be 20 of those raises this month.

• 1:57:24Speaker 07

  So it's interesting, when we started this company, a lot of investors told us that it was going to cost, you know, it's going to be over a hundred million dollars to bring this product from idea to design, you know, early design, EBT, DBT, PBT, whatever, all the validation stages and up to mass production. We're going to be shipping later this summer to the first batches and then we're launching later this year officially. But yeah, we've done it with under eight figures. And a lot of the, and actually there are a lot of, you know, smart classes, you know, we consider it, it's kind of a different category, the ambient computing, but there are a lot of smart glass companies that will go to kind of an ODM, you know, typically in China or somewhere else, and they'll take a reference design. That's not what we've done. We've actually, we're manufacturing in the US.

• 1:58:07Speaker 07

  We do source components from, you know, all over, of course, but we do all design in our lab in San Francisco. We build the batches. This unit was actually built in our lab in San Francisco, assembled. And we think that's really important, especially for rapid iteration. That is one of the ways that we've been able to, you know, the very small team, iterate quickly and get to a product that we're really proud of.

• 1:58:28John Coogan?

  How are you thinking of marketing messaging? Sort of to bring it back to that idea of like the killer use case. It feels like a lot of these pitches that we see for VR, XR, AR headsets, like they get a little scattered and all of a sudden they're trying to be 25 different things. A lot of the demos don't, if you're not a golfer, do you care about the golf thing? But I imagine that you get some of that flexibility for free by layering on top of AI. Because if you're a front door to AI and everyone knows, oh yeah, AI can do knowledge retrieval, it can also write code, it can also generate images, then you're like, oh, you don't need to explain that.

• 1:59:08John Coogan?

  You can just say, this is a better way to interface with any AI front door or any AI system. But how are you thinking about like the marketing messaging focusing that in? Or is it, or is it more valuable to pitch like broad developer platform, like who is the core customer?

• 1:59:25Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I think there have been plenty of devices that have tried pitching the developer, like this is a dev kit, dev kit, dev kit. And that's not really that useful because you get developers who get it and they play with it, they might go on a shelf for the next few years. And really, in order for a device like this, even a dev kit, to be useful, there has to be something in it, like some killer app. And so people ask us all the time, what's the killer app of AR? You know, there's a, it's an interesting question because what was the killer app of the iPhone?

• 1:59:54John Coogan?

  The phone.

• 1:59:55Speaker 07

  It actually is dependent on, yeah, true, but it's dependent on.

• 1:59:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, my take on the iPhone is that, is that when Steve Jobs introduced it, it was a phone, an iPod, and an internet communicator, basically a web browser. And that was the killer app. And then the App Store came in the future revisions, and then you got Uber and DoorDash and all the games and stuff. But it was enough on day one that you were like, well, I've been carrying a phone, this is a sleeker looking phone, I'll replace it. And so whenever I go to VR, AR, I'm always like, this should be a replacement for my, my, you know, 24 inch monitor that I plug my laptop into. Or it should be a replacement for a home theater, or a 65 inch TV, or another screen. Because in many ways, it is just another screen. So are you replacing the smartwatch?

• 2:00:44John Coogan?

  Are you replacing the phone? Are you replacing the iPad? Like, you gotta sort of laser in, instead of just trying to be something that's like entirely net new, it's hard. Like, like the AirPods were headphones first, you know?

• 2:00:56Jordi Hays?

  The other thing with glasses that's interesting is just how many, how many hundreds of millions or billions of people like already rely on, on glasses to see.

• 2:01:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:06Jordi Hays?

  So that's a market where it's much less of a, you're not actually selling them a new device, you're selling them the same thing that they rely on, plus a computer built into it, which like.

• 2:01:15John Coogan?

  I think a lot of people like the Meta Ray-Ban displays specifically to use for phone calls and for just music. Like they're just, oh yeah, I'm going for a walk in the park and I'll just take these and play music on these instead of headphones. And, and, and it's like, then you can get into the, you know, Meta Ray-Ban displays and like interfacing with AI and all that other stuff, but. I would imagine the majority of the time is spent like taking a couple of photos, pretty basic, everyone has a phone, but this is a little bit easier and listening to calls and and listening to music. But yeah.

• 2:01:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, there's there's certainly, I mean, there's, there's a lot of use cases tech for particularly for technical creatives. So certainly developers, engineers, but also musicians and filmmakers and there's, there's that kind of niches what we're going after at first. And then of course, it kind of becomes more mass market consumer after that. We also have enterprises that are interested in we have some enterprise customers as well because we design for a very strict set of design constraints and consumer and then, you know, translates enterprise. But one of the, there is a couple of other things that we, you know, we care really deeply about, you know, not only Linux architecture, which, you know, we're to our knowledge, the only ones kind of have with this type of device doing that, but also all day power. So we have these, these guys on the back. This is called Raven Prism and then these are the Raven Wings. The Raven Wings just

• 2:02:27Speaker 07

  come off. And this is actually an expansion port, not only for the hot swap of the battery system where you can take both batteries off and you can get all day power, but also for future modules. So we're going to release an HDK later this year. So people can actually start building their own hardware modules on it. And then the other thing is privacy. I think one of the, one of the challenges that this industry has faced is particularly around the camera, but as, but also just user data in general. I think it's easy for us, you know, we're in San Francisco to remember, oh yeah, you know, everyone's gonna be okay with this. But people are often not okay with all the, you know, privacy implications of this. And we're seeing a lot of backlash on certain devices. So a couple of things that we do is we actually have a physical camera cover on here. So you have to, you

• 2:03:09Speaker 07

  know, kind of take that off in order to use the camera. And it allows you to have this, you know, basically to allow, to alert other people around you when the camera is in use. And then there's a lot of advanced cryptography that we do kind of the lowest levels of the stack as well. Make sure that user data is protected. And we've had a pretty positive response to that so far.

• 2:03:29John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:03:30Jordi Hays?

  How many years until a billion AR or augment, what did you call it?

• 2:03:37John Coogan?

  Billion DAUs of glasses.

• 2:03:40Jordi Hays?

  Smart glasses.

• 2:03:43Speaker 07

  It's hard to predict. There's an industry saying that AR has been two years away every year for the past 30 years, and it's kind of true. So I don't think I could fully predict it. I think it's reasonable. I mean, Meta has been shipping a ton of devices. It's kind of growing the industry, which is really nice. I think it's reasonable to say that we'll at least be in the millions per year, or like we are in millions per year. But I think we'll be in the tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions per year in about four or five years. And then a billion daily active users could be 10 years away, it could be less. It's really, it's hard to say.

• 2:04:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I can tell, I can tell you're, I can tell that you're running, just from the short conversation, that you're running the company to make sure that you are in business with a fantastic product, like when that moment happens. Like, I was looking at the specs, just looking at the reaction to the specs launch, and like, Spiegel and Snapchat are in a unique position in that they can kind of just ignore what shareholders think about where they invest. But that being said, like, it's hard to think about them spending another $3.5 billion on this effort, or just given how I expect the product to be received in its current form. So I think if you're set up to like, keep burn low,

• 2:05:07Jordi Hays?

  really, really keep iterating, actually using the product all day long, which like, you must be, you must have used a product, you must have used like AR glasses more than anyone else on the planet, I imagine. Like, I don't know anyone. We know a lot of people that love technology. I don't know anyone that's been like, sort of like DAU for this long. But I think that's like, what it's going to take to make a product that people will actually use every day. For sure. Yeah.

• 2:05:33Speaker 07

  Yeah. Yeah, it really, you need the firsthand experience. Because it's, there's a lot of design decisions that happen for mobile that are not clear for this type of device. And so there's no replacement for just, you know. Using it every day and um there's yeah, it's very important.

• 2:05:52John Coogan?

  How on earth can you eye tracking in those? You really do eye tracking in those?

• 2:05:57Speaker 07

  Yeah, so actually, so this this device that I'm wearing, this is um, this is, these are the same kind of form factor. It's just kind of final materials, right? But there's actually two little cameras in there. There's one there and there's one there and those are hooked up to a separate kind of co-processor, which is on the other side, which is also for privacy, so that the main SoC never sees the raw camera images. But that co-processor, yeah, takes in the data from the eyes and then we have some some models that give a gaze vector over to the uh, to the SoC.

• 2:06:30John Coogan?

  That's remarkable. I was convinced that that anything with internal eye tracking like that was gonna weigh, you know, 600 grams, 1000 grams for a really long time.

• 2:06:41Speaker 07

  Not anymore.

• 2:06:42Jordi Hays?

  Not anymore.

• 2:06:43Speaker 07

  We're doubling down on it.

• 2:06:45John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:06:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, we're pretty excited for people to try it because it's quite a magical experience.

• 2:06:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we're very excited for you.

• 2:06:51Jordi Hays?

  Really great to meet you and come back on whenever you want to, whenever you have stuff to talk about.

• 2:06:56John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:06:57Speaker 07

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we're gonna be doing a launch in San Francisco next few months, so.

• 2:07:01John Coogan?

  Amazing. Congrats. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:07:03Jordi Hays?

  The progress.

• 2:07:04John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. We got the Germinator in the waiting room. Mark Germain, how are you doing?

• 2:07:22Mark Gurman?

  I miss you.

• 2:07:23Jordi Hays?

  What's going on, guys?

• 2:07:24John Coogan?

  We miss you. We miss you dearly.

• 2:07:25Jordi Hays?

  Especially when the news is like it's been and every, everything, everything I read reminds me of you.

• 2:07:32Mark Gurman?

  Oh, yeah?

• 2:07:33Jordi Hays?

  Indeed.

• 2:07:33Mark Gurman?

  That's funny.

• 2:07:34Jordi Hays?

  I see Siri, I see Apple, I see Apple Foundation models, I see everything. I just think the Germinator.

• 2:07:40John Coogan?

  Okay. Have you recovered is was last week exhausting? How are you feeling?

• 2:07:46Mark Gurman?

  No, last week was good. Yeah, it was an interesting conference. I'm glad they were able to keep the keynote time down to under an hour and a half. It was one of the shorter WWDCs. It actually felt that they had taken that five-minute section from WWDC 2024 where they introduced all those new Siri features, and then took it and spread it out and milked it for an hour, basically redoing it. And, you know, for those not familiar, basically this year's WWDC was all about new Siri features, the big one being personal context. So you could ask Siri, hey, I'll give you an example. Someone asked me for my calendar info for June, July earlier today.

• 2:08:28Mark Gurman?

  So I said, send an email to so-and-so with my calendar availability for the next two months, and it was able to do that. Other ones could be like, take the note that I wrote about XYZ and text it over to that person, right? These are real-world workflow features that I've been using all day for the last week or so, which makes it, A, all the more ridiculous that Apple had to delay that stuff two years ago, and it took two years to ship. But the most insane part about it is that Apple's responses to these delays all downplayed the features. They said, oh, we spent 180 minutes talking about Apple Intelligence, and only five out of the 180 minutes were delayed and not shipped.

• 2:09:13Mark Gurman?

  They basically positioned these as, oh, when it was a delay, it's not a big deal. Now that I'm using it, these are actually the only features that mattered that they announced two years ago.

• 2:09:22John Coogan?

  They could have delayed Genmoji. They shouldn't have delayed look up your calendar because that's a functional use that people are gonna do.

• 2:09:30Mark Gurman?

  Yes, and just to be clear, the new Siri is really good.

• 2:09:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:34Mark Gurman?

  And 95% of the people, sorry to say this, are not going to need ChatGPT on their phone because they have Siri AI pre-installed. The way I look at it is that ChatGPT does a bunch of amazing things that Siri AI can't do. But Siri AI also does a lot of amazing things that you'd go to for ChatGPT. So if you're 95% of the population using AI Chatbox and you're using it for looking things up, it's basically the new age Google. It's going to be able to do that. It's going to be able to answer questions for you. It's going to be able to do edits for you. But there is like a ton of pro level things that ChatGPT does that Siri AI can't do. So I made a list the other day of things that ChatGPT can't do.

• 2:10:19Mark Gurman?

  Big time research, big time analysis of multiple different documents and PDFs and comparisons. People use it for tax preparation. People use it for in-depth health things. So there's a lot you're going to want to use it for. So I could see people having both. Siri AI on the pre-installed and then you're going to subscribe to a ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or what have you for some of that extra oomph on top of it. But Siri AI is going to be useful for a lot of people and you know, one easy way to say it.

• 2:10:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:49Mark Gurman?

  Well, just hold on.

• 2:10:50John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:10:50Mark Gurman?

  Look at it as like iMovie and Final Cut Pro.

• 2:10:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, we debated this, like, have you ever Googled anything? And I still Google things pretty regularly and then I go to LLMs for more pro stuff. And then I go to Agent AI for other things and like, there's like using the right tool for the job that I think people are processing and absorbing. What, uh, what, what do you think in hindsight actually delayed these features? Because it does feel like the technology was there a year or two ago. Was it the negotiation, the deal with Google? Like, was this a technology problem or a business problem?

• 2:11:29Mark Gurman?

  It was a mix of both. One was the underlying stack and the underlying foundation models that Apple had two years ago were not very good. And so they needed to go back to the drawing board because they couldn't roll these features out only for them to fail, which is ironic, given they rolled out the rest of the Apple Intelligence and new Siri features that hardly worked well and were not impressive. If you've used the new betas, you can tell what has happened here. The under the hood models are so much better. Based on what I have heard internally, Apple believes that they're basically six months behind OpenAI and ChatGPT in terms of the use cases that they have right now.

• 2:12:14Mark Gurman?

  So Siri works great. Search works great. Image Playground, which is their image generation tool, the same underlying tech stack that powers Genmoji. It's like, close to what you're getting from Gemini and closer to what you're getting from ChatGPT. So, everything basically just works now. It's a great experience. I mean, the first beta is sloppy and it's buggy, as you would expect. But they've taken something that was way less than mediocre. And they're giving people a baseline now that's actually functional. I would look at it as this way. When you take the iPhone out of the box, it has all these pre-installed apps. They're not great, but they work and you could, you know, use your phone based on what comes out of the box.

• 2:13:00Mark Gurman?

  What Apple had with AI was not that. The pre-installed stuff just didn't work. But then you can go to the App Store and you can get a much better messaging app and a much better browser, email app. 10 times better versions of all the pre-installed apps. That's the case with AI, whereas now the pre-installed stuff is baseline and it works great. But you can go out and get even better stuff if you want.

• 2:13:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. How high is, how high are the walls of the walled garden? Like you gave that example of look up your calendar. I use Google Calendar. Send an email. I use Gmail. I'm not in the, even though I'm like an iPhone Mac user. I'm not fully in the Apple ecosystem. Is this going to work for me or am I going to bump up against different walled gardens as I try and go?

• 2:13:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, another example is like, I don't use Apple Music. I use Spotify. Can I tell?

• 2:13:50John Coogan?

  And the shortcut path is?

• 2:13:51Jordi Hays?

  Tell Siri, like, make me a playlist with these three artists. And make a Spotify playlist. I'm guessing no, but.

• 2:13:59Mark Gurman?

  Well, it is too early to tell. It really is going to depend on how broad Apple's developer tools for the new Siri are going to become over time. The first set of tools are there. They're a bit limited. It depends on how closely Spotify and Google and all those other companies are going to want to work with Apple. I would say it's going to be a slow burn. I would say that, you know, if it was Google, I would want my applications to work better with Android and Google Pixel. So I can get these cool AI features and bring people more into my ecosystem. So I would say, even if they opened up the tools to the degree that you guys are explaining those scenarios for,

• 2:14:39Mark Gurman?

  I would say it's not going to work as well as it would if you're tapped into the Apple Mail ecosystem and the other Apple services. Which is a shame, but I think over time, Apple will get there. And let's not forget, Google is doing very similar stuff right now with Android 17. And a lot of these scenarios I've explained on the iOS side of things are completely available to what you're seeing on the Android side of the world as well with this new Android hub. So if you're deep in the Google ecosystem with Gmail and Chrome, you know, you get a good experience on iOS, but my Pixel friends, they get a great experience, especially with, you know, the new Android stuff rolling out.

• 2:15:18John Coogan?

  How are you thinking? Wait, first off, were there any surprises? Did anything surprise you?

• 2:15:23Jordi Hays?

  Nothing.

• 2:15:24Mark Gurman?

  Did anything surprise me?

• 2:15:26John Coogan?

  Were there any surprises?

• 2:15:28Mark Gurman?

  I think I was a little surprised that there wasn't a little bit more. It seemed like, you know, well, that's it. Like, I knew, you know, everything that was coming in the keynote and, you know, beyond. I actually just put a story out about how there's a new iPhone Air coming out in spring just a few minutes ago. So happy to talk about that.

• 2:15:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:49Mark Gurman?

  But, you know, I would have, uh, spring 27.

• 2:15:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:53Mark Gurman?

  So I would have expected more out of this, out of this dev conference.

• 2:15:57John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, let's switch gears to iPhone Air. It seemed like there were some good reviews. I've seen a couple of people carry them, but it felt like it wasn't selling as well as people expected. And so it might just have been a one-off, but there is another one coming. Like, what is the correct story or framing around the iPhone Air?

• 2:16:15Mark Gurman?

  So Apple's engineering data, and this shouldn't come as a shock to anyone, the two biggest complaints for the first generation phone are the battery life and the camera. And Apple knows this because they came out with that battery attachment on the back, which is crazy. And then they tried to market the single camera on the back of the iPhone Air as being four lenses, whatever that means. So for this second version, they're upping the battery life. And I don't necessarily think that's because of a bigger battery pack, but I think it's the efficiency gains you're going to get from 2 nanometer in this new A20 Pro chip. And then the other big addition will be a second rear camera for ultra wide angle photography,

• 2:16:55Mark Gurman?

  which a lot of people really like on the iPhone 17 and the iPhone, you know, 17 Pro and Pro Max models. And so it's going to be a really nice upgrade. And I think at $999, a little bit less expensive than the iPhone Pros, having a little bit better battery life, having that second camera, that's going to be a really compelling offering. And so I would say, you know, 30,000 foot view, what they're doing to the iPhone over the last year past and the next few years, what they've got, like this three to four year period of the iPhone, incredibly impressive. They're knocking it out of the park. I mean, the iPhone last

• 2:17:34Mark Gurman?

  year, that launch, the 17 Pro and Pro Max, extremely strong. And the next few years are remarkable as well. This fall, the 18 Pro and Pro Max, the first foldable phone, which I'm calling the iPhone Ultra. I believe that will be the name, but let's see, you know, still a little early. And then next spring, you'll have the regular iPhone 18 and the iPhone Air 2. We'll see if they call it the 18 Air or the Air 2. And then next fall, you'll have the iPhone 20 and iPhone 20 Pro Max, those being the 20th anniversary

• 2:18:15Mark Gurman?

  models, complete redesign, curved glass, slimmer bezels, smaller dynamic island and all that.

• 2:18:21Jordi Hays?

  Lighter.

• 2:18:22Mark Gurman?

  Cleaner. Yeah.

• 2:18:24John Coogan?

  Like day by day leaks. I'm like, exactly what I was gonna do.

• 2:18:29Mark Gurman?

  It's funny.

• 2:18:29John Coogan?

  It's incredible.

• 2:18:30Mark Gurman?

  And then the second foldable phone. So it's a jam packed 2027. 2027 is going to be Apple's biggest product here in its history.

• 2:18:40John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:18:41Mark Gurman?

  I'm pumped as a consumer.

• 2:18:42Jordi Hays?

  Will they, do you think, do you think they will ever try to create the conditions to get somebody to own? A everyday consumer consumer to try to have multiple phones like will they create will they create a product like set of features it's like a digital twin where you have like your iPhone ultra and your iPhone air and you just

• 2:19:03Mark Gurman?

  I was yeah

• 2:19:05Jordi Hays?

  That feels like

• 2:19:07Mark Gurman?

  Yeah, I don't know what I'm gonna do as someone who lives and breathes this stuff I don't know what I'm gonna do because I can already tell you right now I want the new iPhone air I want the iPhone foldable and I want the iPhone 20 so it's like I don't know what I'm gonna do what a first world problem to have we're talking about not even two phones but now I want three phones so

• 2:19:26Jordi Hays?

  No, but it feels like for them it feels like for them I don't think you're gonna be the only one and it's always been interesting to me you know people complain about iPhone pricing but there are not that many products in the world that are as like that have as much utility as an iPhone that you use as much as the iPhone like if the iPhone was $10,000 there'd be a big market for them right and so I feel like Apple over time

• 2:19:55Mark Gurman?

  Don't give them any ideas

• 2:19:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, but I just feel like over time it's like how do we make more money it's like well you make a feature so that you have like you can have like yeah this is the iPhone I use on the weekend this is the iPhone that I use during the work week or whatever

• 2:20:10Mark Gurman?

  They should do that they'll probably get a lot of they'll probably get a lot of heat for that depending on how they articulate it hopefully they don't hire you as the marketing person for that because they're just gonna come across

• 2:20:20Jordi Hays?

  Well, I'm just giving them business ideas like I think like I'm giving them whatever it is 1500 a year for iPhones I don't even know the pricing but they could probably get they could probably get more

• 2:20:33Mark Gurman?

  They will I mean I would expect the prices to go up on all of these things the foldable phone obviously is going to be two grand plus the other thing to note is in iOS 27 they actually have a feature where you can

• 2:20:45Jordi Hays?

  They think they can price the ultra higher than specs?

• 2:20:49Mark Gurman?

  I think they'll be, I think they'll be higher than specs, but they added a new feature. Who, Snap?

• 2:20:56Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 2:20:57John Coogan?

  No, he's joking.

• 2:20:58Mark Gurman?

  Oh, we can get to that.

• 2:20:59John Coogan?

  Specs are very highly priced, yeah.

• 2:21:01Mark Gurman?

  But iPhone or iOS 27 has a feature where you can synchronize a single phone number and carrier account between two iPhones. So it does have that on the phone number side of things, but you're not going to be able to, you know, pick up a, make a feature to have the weekend stuff and during the week stuff and the night stuff. That'd be cool, though. I don't know, screw it. Maybe I'll get the foldable two and the 20 at the same time in a year from now. So we'll see. You're welcome, Apple.

• 2:21:27John Coogan?

  Does the foldable eat into iPad or is it purely additive?

• 2:21:31Mark Gurman?

  I think it's purely additive. Uh, I think that Apple has positioned the iPad itself at this point as a companion device to the iPhone and the Mac. I think they've done a great job at that, so I, I don't think the foldable is going to take away iPad sales, particularly because of the price delta is so high. There will be a new OLED iPad Mini coming out soon, which I think a lot of the iPad Mini fanboys are going to be pretty pumped about.

• 2:21:53John Coogan?

  That's great. What about, uh, what you got for the Apple Vision Pro fanboys like myself? Uh, what are we doing in AR/VR glasses? We just talked to, uh, the founder of Raven Renaissance. He's making augmented reality glasses, obviously specs launched as well. Is there any movement there or anything from WWDC on the software side that might actually hint at or translate into, uh, wearables?

• 2:22:21Mark Gurman?

  Uh, the Vision Pro added this new feature where it uses the external cameras to give you a sense of your external environment and object identification. That's going to be a feature at the heart of new AirPods coming out at the end of next year. It's a project called B798, uh, where they have cameras on the AirPods that can help you with navigation and seeing the world around you, cloud processing, feeding that data into Siri AI. Same functionality will come to the smart glasses from Apple, non-AR, right? No displays. Those will be, uh, rolled out at the very end of 2027, hopefully in time for the holiday season, uh, but they're a little behind on those. Augmented reality glasses from Apple, I would expect much later in the decade.

• 2:23:04Mark Gurman?

  New Vision Pro, so the Vision Pro is on ice. You're not going to see another new Vision Pro redesign. But what you are going to see is a completely rethought, revamped, from ground up, mixed reality headset from Apple.

• 2:23:20John Coogan?

  Okay, I'm listening.

• 2:23:22Mark Gurman?

  Okay, I'm thinking 2029, maybe end 2028, but it's gonna be a long time.

• 2:23:30John Coogan?

  Where's the Vision Air? We got the Vision Pro.

• 2:23:33Mark Gurman?

  They killed it.

• 2:23:33John Coogan?

  Just make it lighter.

• 2:23:35Mark Gurman?

  They killed it. Well, this is gonna be a lighter, this is gonna be a much lighter, end to end retooling, revamping of the headset. It's not a Vision Pro 2.

• 2:23:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:23:44Mark Gurman?

  Uh, it's a, uh, start from scratch type of product.

• 2:23:48John Coogan?

  Give me the Vision Ultra. Make it 25 pounds on my face.

• 2:23:52Mark Gurman?

  Yeah, it's gonna be, you know, it's interesting. When the Vision Pro launched and they were looking for different ways to take this product and, you know, give it a market. This is gonna sound surprising to you, but obviously on one hand, they were looking at, how do we make this thing cheaper and lighter? One of the directions they were actually also looking at, how do you make this thing even higher end? How do you make this thing even more expensive? How do you make this thing even better from a technical chop standpoint? How do you reduce the latency? Should we do a model, uh, that's specific for medical, uh, grade, for enterprise, um, for these high value targets that maybe would be willing to pay $5,000 for this machine?

• 2:24:34Mark Gurman?

  A business class version of the Vision Pro. Ultimately, they're not moving in this direction right now. It's all about that end to end retool.

• 2:24:44John Coogan?

  Where does Apple sit on enterprise versions of their products? Like, the Mac Pro, is that the last time they had something dedicated? Like, Mac Studio, do they think of that as like an enterprise grade product?

• 2:24:56Jordi Hays?

  The MacBook Pro is an enterprise product.

• 2:24:58John Coogan?

  I feel like MacBook Pro is extremely consumer, but I, I don't know. Like, how, how did they think about, like, actually, uh, you know, segmenting out that market?

• 2:25:09Mark Gurman?

  It's been a while. They had the X serve servers 15 years ago. You can make the argument like the Mac Pro, Mac Studio, what have you. But the thinking in Apple is make these baseline products for consumers that consumers love. And make them so enjoyable that you're going to want to use them at work too. And then provide the software tools that allow you to do that. And if you remember, you know, 2008, the iPhone, you know, Renaissance, starting then. A lot of credit goes to the price, cutting the price down to 199. A lot of credit goes to the App Store. Some of the credit goes to 3G, some of the credit goes to geographic distribution.

• 2:25:51Mark Gurman?

  But the one thing that people leave off when they talk about where did the, how did the iPhone go from here to here? Is 2008 is when Apple added enterprise support for the iPhone. And so getting these things in businesses is really, really important. For the Vision Pro, just like HoloLens, Magic Leap and other AR, VR companies before them. They had no choice but to go all in on the enterprise or not go all in. Go a little bit deeper into the enterprise than they normally would like with their products. Because that was their biggest market. Today, all of Apple's other products, watches, phones, iPads, Macs. They have really big, you know, footprints in the enterprise. But the enterprise is still only a sliver of the overall market. You know, 90% of their sales are consumer.

• 2:26:33Mark Gurman?

  Vision Pro, you know, the split is a lot bigger in favor of enterprise.

• 2:26:38John Coogan?

  Any update on the lamp?

• 2:26:42Mark Gurman?

  The lamp? Oh, the tabletop robot? I still expect that to come 2028. We're going to see the smart home display. I know, I know, I know. Smart home display, probably at the, as early as the end of this year. That's going to be an amazing product. And I think it's going to be a blockbuster. And I think it's going to be a gigantic seller. Just imagine having this thing on your desk, your wall, your counter. You can walk up to it, it could recognize you, it could pull up the stuff for, you know. You and, let's pretend Jordy and John live together. Jordy walks up to it, all of Jordy's stuff. Comes up, John walks up to it, all of John's stuff comes up. It has this personalized Siri, grab all that stuff from the device.

• 2:27:26Mark Gurman?

  It has FaceTime, it has intercom, it has smart home control, control your music. You can watch video on it. I think it's gonna be really, really great holiday gift when this thing finally comes.

• 2:27:35John Coogan?

  How will it control the music? Like, are they gonna finally make a run of matching Sonos, which is in a very, very tough spot as a 1.7 billion dollar company? Are they gonna try and make a run?

• 2:27:48Mark Gurman?

  Is that it? 1.7 billion?

• 2:27:49John Coogan?

  1.7 billion down.

• 2:27:51Mark Gurman?

  What's Peloton?

• 2:27:52John Coogan?

  Peloton, let's see.

• 2:27:56John Coogan?

  Peloton market cap 2.4, so bigger.

• 2:28:00Mark Gurman?

  It's crazy because Aura is like a 10 billion dollar valuation, right? I mean, it's amazing.

• 2:28:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, Sonos has frustrated a lot of people with the software. They rolled a bunch of stuff back, but in terms of actually offering a consumer, prosumer level experience with, you know, Wi-Fi connected speakers that are available in more than just one SKU or two SKUs, you know? Like, yes, you can go all in on the Apple speakers, but then you just have a ton of really small speakers around.

• 2:28:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I found out I have speakers built inside of my walls and it gave me insane, they're not Sonos thankfully, but I was like, it gave me insane Sonos PTSD because I'm like, imagine you have an issue with.

• 2:28:40John Coogan?

  Well, you take the aux from that and you plug that into whatever you want, some sort of receiver, but Apple doesn't make that receiver right now.

• 2:28:47Mark Gurman?

  Like, you know, Apple had such an opportunity with the HomePod in speakers and they completely blew it. Because of AI, because they didn't create an app ecosystem around it, because they made it exclusive to their, you know, customer base, no Android support, the list goes on, pretty disappointing. They haven't given the HomePod a meaningful update in six years since the HomePod Mini launched. They did a little minor refresh of the HomePod in 23. But I thought when the first HomePod launched in 2018, that they were going to be able to really go all in on speakers, different form factors, different versions. When this, but smart home is one of two pillars for Apple right now.

• 2:29:29Mark Gurman?

  AI wearables and then AI smart home devices. And so you'll see the smart home hub. You'll see one other thing in home security. You'll see that lamp, as you call it. You'll see a refresh of the home.

• 2:29:45Jordi Hays?

  The lamp and the home security combined and you have killer lamps.

• 2:29:49Mark Gurman?

  Sounds like a nightmare.

• 2:29:50Jordi Hays?

  You can release.

• 2:29:51Mark Gurman?

  And then you combine it with AI.

• 2:29:52John Coogan?

  Are there, wait, are there any Apple products with motors in them?

• 2:29:57Mark Gurman?

  No, this will be, this will be the first one with a artificial arm. And it's a motorized Apple product that can move around in space. And so if you think about it, this is a piece of the legacy of the Apple car, because this project was part of the Apple car. AI and mechanics and part of that division. And it was one of the things that got left over. In fact, the person who ran the entire Apple car project when it shut down, Kevin Lynch, this was the guy who ran software for the Apple Watch for a very long time and helped build that product from the ground up. His project now is the lamp.

• 2:30:41Jordi Hays?

  Lamp man.

• 2:30:42John Coogan?

  It's not quite a lamp.

• 2:30:43Mark Gurman?

  It's a big deal, going from running the Apple Watch to the Apple car to the Apple lamp.

• 2:30:48John Coogan?

  Do you believe the conspiracy theories that suggest that the Ferrari Luce is just a rebadged Apple car?

• 2:30:56Mark Gurman?

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no. The Apple car looks like a new age VW bus. Oh, you know, I think the Luce would have been successful as a hundred and fifty thousand dollar Apple car. But as a seven hundred thousand dollar Ferrari, I think they missed the mark.

• 2:31:15John Coogan?

  Well, you might need to buy one to get access to other cars. Like Ferrari is a very complicated business model. You never know how it'll.

• 2:31:21Mark Gurman?

  Yeah, no, it's funny. It's funny. I saw people go like on chat GPT. After the Luce was announced, they typed in make me an electric Ferrari. They're like, I made a better design in fifteen seconds.

• 2:31:33Jordi Hays?

  Not hard to do. What, what, any, any predictions with, for specs? It feels like at a normal company would, would launch this product and then probably shutter the program. I expect, I wouldn't be surprised if, if Spiegel triples down, but it just feels like I, I cannot see the market for $2,000, you know, pair of smart glasses that still feel like they're not going to add a tremendous amount of value to my daily life.

• 2:32:09Mark Gurman?

  I like Evan Spiegel. I like some of the stuff Snap is doing. I think the design of the glasses actually looks pretty cool. I haven't tried the, the latest prototype yet, but I think they're well-designed and in a nice product. The question is if there's going to be a killer app for it, and right now it doesn't seem to be the case. I think the price actually isn't terrible. You know, the vision, when we started talking about these things half a decade ago, was they need to get to smartphone prices. Smartphone prices are now $2,000. But if you can get this thing down to a grand, which I don't know how that's ever going to happen, you're talking about something fairly, fairly compelling.

• 2:32:50Jordi Hays?

  Meta Ray-Ban displays are at 800 bucks. Do you think they're losing a bunch of money on that?

• 2:32:59Mark Gurman?

  Think they're losing money on them. I don't think people are buying them. I've basically, Meta, what they've done is they've, they're created a three-tier system. Tier A is the non-display glasses that look exactly like normal glasses and don't have a display. And those have been extraordinarily popular because of the luxottica brands pushing those. Tier B has been the Meta Display, which is this little HUD, little heads-up display you have in there, and you use the wristband controller. The third tier is the true AR glasses. I don't think that mid-tier with the HUD is going to last. The price is, you know, relatively solid, but I just don't see that as something people are going to be compelled by.

• 2:33:43Mark Gurman?

  You want dual display, you want binocular displays, you want immersiveness. Then on the other hand, if you tried the Vision Pro, you're spoiled. And so it's like, really? Do you want to use any of these things? Because did I see a photo of you on a plane wearing a Vision Pro the other day?

• 2:33:57John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. I watched whole movie.

• 2:33:59Mark Gurman?

  Which one of it? It was one of you two.

• 2:34:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was me.

• 2:34:02Mark Gurman?

  It was you.

• 2:34:03Jordi Hays?

  John.

• 2:34:03John Coogan?

  I'll watch the entire Lawrence Arabia from start to finish in a Vision Pro.

• 2:34:08Mark Gurman?

  Your hair is so similar, I can't tell who's who anymore. But that's me on a plane. Like, I love that thing for movie watching.

• 2:34:18Mark Gurman?

  If you've installed Vision OS 27, have you installed it yet?

• 2:34:21John Coogan?

  No, better.

• 2:34:22Mark Gurman?

  The new series is pretty good on there. And then they have this new environment. I don't remember which, where it is in the world. Might be Iceland. It's really remarkable. And then you can set any of your panoramas now, the good ones at least, as your environment. So a few little bells and whistles tweaks in Vision OS 27. I don't think it's the, yeah, it's not the software.

• 2:34:44John Coogan?

  On Sunday, I'll take a panorama of the Ultra Dome. And then when I'm on that plane, I'll be able to sit here, re-watch our interview on that screen there.

• 2:34:54Mark Gurman?

  That's funny.

• 2:34:55John Coogan?

  In full immersion.

• 2:34:56Jordi Hays?

  Mid journey, mid journey hardware release. Any predictions? Have you followed it at all?

• 2:35:02Mark Gurman?

  Yeah, I've been looking at this closely. We're going to be covering it tonight. I believe the launch is 6pm. The head of hardware engineering is someone who came from the Vision Pro team. He was a manager of the Vision Pro hardware team. It seems like they've been working on this for a couple of years. I would file this immediately in the category of products that may never launch or may never be bought by anyone. I wonder what will some more, yeah, experimental, the specs for this product, probably the specs, to be quite honest with you. I think the last thing someone sent me before I came on with you guys was that the product is going to be large in size. So I don't know what that necessarily means. And I guess that would rule out a headset of some sort.

• 2:35:41John Coogan?

  Smart kegerator, who knows?

• 2:35:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just thought like some, I, my, my head went to like local compute, something that, something for like prosumer creators type of thing.

• 2:35:56Mark Gurman?

  Ah, I don't think that's interesting. I think you need something image based, something visual, not another Mac Studio.

• 2:36:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. Last question about WWDC. The parental controls, the focus on, it feels like Apple's solving some of the like societal anxiety around like, are phones bad for kids? Are phones bad for people? All this, yeah, is it existential? Like, what do you think they were driving there? Was that message received? Because obviously AI is everything everyone talks about. But how important are those features? Like, what were your takeaways from how, like, why they chose to focus on that so much? How important are those features? And then will that actually move the needle on like, young device adoption?

• 2:36:46Mark Gurman?

  Couple of things. Regulators around the world are going absolutely nuts about this stuff. Smartphone addiction, social media, et cetera. And Apple needs to address all this stuff before it becomes their next EU-related problem or EU-like problem.

• 2:37:01John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:37:01Mark Gurman?

  The other thing is AI, and not that Apple has had great AI on the phone, but obviously the fears of AI taking over things.

• 2:37:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:37:10Mark Gurman?

  And then the other thing I would say is they launched Screen Time, I believe in 2018, which is their parental control, the name of their parental control system. It's just been an unmitigated disaster that hasn't worked properly for like, five or six years. And so they really needed to revamp it.

• 2:37:25John Coogan?

  But it was bug-driven? Because I've noticed sometimes I'll go into Screen Time and it'll be like, the washingtonpost.com is 23 hours and 59 minutes. And I'm like, I had one tab open and it was just like churning and sending something.

• 2:37:39Mark Gurman?

  Super buggy, kids being able to just do whatever the hell they want on their phones, even if they're not supposed to, just a bunch of issues. And so they needed to do an end-to-end revamp. And it's smart timing, given they've finally got the AI in place. And then you've got a lot of people who are like, I don't want digital devices anymore. I want an MP3 player. Bring the iPod back, right? Get this Screen Time away from me.

• 2:38:01John Coogan?

  Palmer Lucky's out there banging the gong about retro futuristic devices, the game.

• 2:38:05Mark Gurman?

  It's a real thing. It's a real thing.

• 2:38:07Jordi Hays?

  Would Apple ever do a re-release of the, like, an iPod?

• 2:38:11Mark Gurman?

  I don't think so.

• 2:38:13John Coogan?

  No, that's not their style. That's Palmer Lucky's domain.

• 2:38:15Mark Gurman?

  I think this is. Well, you guys know how this feature works, right? Like you turn it on and then over time you can expand the feature set, who people can contact, applications you have. So you can really, you know, turn the iPhone into a dumb phone now and then let it get smart over time. It's actually a remarkable concept and I think if executed well, it's pretty compelling and all the other phone makers are going to copy it.

• 2:38:39John Coogan?

  Interesting. Happy birthday, son. You're 17. You get to unlock the calculator app now.

• 2:38:46Mark Gurman?

  Exactly.

• 2:38:47John Coogan?

  Enjoy it. Don't go too crazy with those numbers. Who knows? Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat.

• 2:38:53Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:38:54Mark Gurman?

  Thank you, guys. See you next time. I appreciate it.

• 2:38:57John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it, folks. Stop making excuses.

• 2:39:08Jordi Hays?

  Every founder that we talk to that raises capital at NYS loves it.

• 2:39:14John Coogan?

  They love it.

• 2:39:15Jordi Hays?

  They say it's incredible.

• 2:39:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, NPS is through the roof.

• 2:39:17Jordi Hays?

  Just go do it.

• 2:39:18John Coogan?

  NPS is legitimately through the roof.

• 2:39:20Jordi Hays?

  When you're raising that Series D or F, why not just head over to the New York Stock Exchange?

• 2:39:27John Coogan?

  We got Ryan Daniels from Crosby, the co-founder and CEO, in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TBP in UltraDome. Ryan, how you doing? Good to see you again. What's the latest?

• 2:39:36Ryan Daniels?

  Good to see you, guys.

• 2:39:37John Coogan?

  Welcome back.

• 2:39:38Ryan Daniels?

  Thank you very much.

• 2:39:39John Coogan?

  You're benchmarking.

• 2:39:41Jordi Hays?

  Benchmark.

• 2:39:42Ryan Daniels?

  Always got a benchmark.

• 2:39:43John Coogan?

  Tell us about benchmarks. What are you launching? Why is it important? Break it down for us.

• 2:39:48Ryan Daniels?

  So today we published a benchmark. It's the first benchmark that we know of that just looks at, it's simple in theory, but a negotiation between two lawyers, like as far as we can get to completion. And I think the main takeaway is there's a lot of art to negotiating and the way that lawyers negotiate contracts is really complex because there's so many moving variables. And this is what we do at Crosby. We try to get deals closed faster and so for the first time, we can actually measure, you know, how do agents do on the first red line? That's fine. We kind of know that already, but how do they go over and over through the process where the judgment of a lawyer really takes hold and they just try to figure out who is their counterparty and how can they get them to yes?

• 2:40:30John Coogan?

  Next step, you got to train a voice model to be able to yell on the phone at the other client at the counterparty, let them know that you're not doing another turn of the forms, the battle of the forms is over. No, obviously, there's a lot that goes into this. Talk about the data. Are you getting good red line data, ground truth data from firms? Are they happy to partner with you on this? Like, what is the value prop to actually get the correct data? Are you doing it yourself through a data firm? Like, what's the strategy to get the ground truth here? Because it is, it's not the same as like a math problem that you can just verify with lean.

• 2:41:06Ryan Daniels?

  Yeah, that's, that's like, that's the key point of it. And, and like, you're totally right. Like, like, so we worked with Michael Rwan really closely on this with Ali and his team. They've been amazing. They have like a really great legal focus that they're building out. And, you know, we have our own captive law firm here. That's been our kind of shtick from the beginning was in order to get the full benefits of what agents can do in law, start your own law firm, sell end to end legal work. And as agents get better, our margins get better. And we worked with Ali and the hard thing is like, there is no right answer. And we basically had large groups of real lawyers negotiating all with the same positions for the same parties and seeing like, how much of those lawyers agree with one another on the right way to respond to those other lawyers? And so we could just

• 2:41:49Ryan Daniels?

  see the overlap. And as the negotiation went longer and longer, we saw a ton of deviation between those lawyers, which is fascinating. Like, they're all very senior, they're all very experienced. This is a real negotiation. But at the beginning, the lawyers kind of more or less did the same thing. And we just saw the way the agents, we then built a rubric based on how those lawyers actually worked and tried to create some sort of like, ground truth for the best way to negotiate. But like, to your point, like, I don't know, maybe if we just did everything in all caps, the counterparty would just accept it and we could yell through the margin. So you have to try it.

• 2:42:20John Coogan?

  That's where you pay the big bucks if you got big, big lungs and can scream. What, uh, like, it seems like all the models did very similarly, 50%, 50.5 for GPT 5.5. Weird numerology there. 5.5 gets a 50.5. Gemini 3.5 Flash got a 45.1, Opus 4.8 got 44.4, and Fable 5 got 47.3. That seems surprising. I mean, it seems like the window for testing was low. Or is that something like Fable is more tuned to cybersecurity, bio, those sort of reinforced learnings, those feedback loops? And maybe it hasn't been applied to, to, uh, to legal yet. But what was your interpretation?

• 2:43:04Ryan Daniels?

  We put a big asterisk on Fable because we got one testing run through and then we lost access. So we still would want to do a few more. If and when we get, we get access back. You know, I think, I think, uh, it's not surprising. I think, uh, what was most interesting to us were a few things. One, in the first red line, like the first review of document thing, and agents like really did poorly, they scored, they scored poorly there because they couldn't service those first issues. As the, as the new issue went, went on, we knew the issues, models did quite a bit better. Um, but the biggest thing was models are really likely to just say yes and accept some term because you want to keep the deal going. And that was part of the instruction. And that's just not good lawyering, right?

• 2:43:47Ryan Daniels?

  Like a great lawyer knows how to kind of make you feel like you're getting your, your side, but, but still push the deal forward and, and protect the client. And that's where the world judgment came in. And so, you know, in our mind, we have a lot of work to do because we, we want our agents to be able to take the work off our lawyer's hands, to be able to think through something and say, hey, like we pushed back on this for this reason and really get the counterparty there. So, you know, um, I think the models did better than we thought they would. But there's a lot of work to do.

• 2:44:13John Coogan?

  We're having a little bit of interference. I have one more question, Jordan, if you need to get in. Um, I just want to know about the value of the harness because it seems like, uh, all of these models are sort of neck and neck, you know, within a few percentage. Uh, what happens if you wrap them in a very bespoke harness that your team builds? Can you get to 70%, 90%? Like, where do you think the, the upper bound is on this benchmark?

• 2:44:40Ryan Daniels?

  Yeah, that's a great question. And like, everything's published, it's all open source. So like, the harness that we use, everything can all be replicated.

• 2:44:46Mark Gurman?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:47Ryan Daniels?

  There's a lot of ways to push. I think, you know, we've invested a lot in the harness that we wrote specifically. That's really good at editing Word documents. That turns out to be a really hard thing.

• 2:44:55Mark Gurman?

  Yep.

• 2:44:55Ryan Daniels?

  And so there's ways to push there. You know, I think ultimately, you know, more and more bespoke models that are like really post-trained on just like making judgment calls, stating their reasoning will be an area. So like, both of those things help. But at the end of the day, like, there's a ton of intelligence in like, just the closed models. And I think it's not being fully exploited. So, yeah, all areas to explore. That's the right questions.

• 2:45:18Jordi Hays?

  How is your team experimented with token maxing? Like, I met, you guys are, you know, heavily funded, you're building an AI law firm. I imagine you're not telling the team, like, you know, be conservative with tokens. Especially because you can just like learn faster and it's kind of the whole point of the business. But where does token maxing make sense with legal? Have you already found an equilibrium? What is your overall kind of like ethos around it?

• 2:45:50Ryan Daniels?

  I feel like, as a company, we're not successful enough to be like worried about token costs yet. We're still in a place where we could just be like putting as much money. And I think more and more law firms, like Kirkland just allocated half a billion dollars to building their own AI stuff, are just trying to figure out, you know, they're charging, they're charging huge amounts of money for the labor spend at legal. So they have a lot of room to throw money at tokens. And so long as you're like basically spending less than the equivalent of a thousand dollars an hour on tokens, which is even for this, still hard to do, like, you're still coming out with a good margin. So like, we, you know, we're spending a ton, you know, we did a lot of work with Fable. We got early access to it and we spent a lot of money with it and like, you know, and so I think there's still room to go. Because ultimately,

• 2:46:33Ryan Daniels?

  It's either the model or the human and the models are still cheaper than, you know, hiring expensive lawyers for some of the tasks that we don't think we need lawyers for.

• 2:46:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come.

• 2:46:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, sorry for the technical difficulties, but uh, yeah, great, great to get the update.

• 2:46:47John Coogan?

  And we will talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye.

• 2:46:50Jordi Hays?

  See you, Ryan.

• 2:46:51John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasury and more with great customer service. Our next guest Isaiah from Bland is the co-founder and CEO of C E O. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 2:47:07Jordi Hays?

  What's up, dude?

• 2:47:08Speaker 10

  I'm doing good. This is like the coolest thing I get to do for this funder is announcement.

• 2:47:12John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, kick it off. Tell us, tell us about the fundraiser. How much did you raise?

• 2:47:17Jordi Hays?

  This is way overdue.

• 2:47:19Speaker 10

  We uh, we raised 50 million.

• 2:47:22Jordi Hays?

  Hit it again, hit it again, because it should have.

• 2:47:27John Coogan?

  There we go. Congratulations. Now tell us, what do you do?

• 2:47:33Speaker 10

  Yeah. So you guys know when you, you call basically any big company in the U S and you have to deal with one of those really annoying bots. We replaced that with A I. But our specialty, we like to say is like, we want to do the calls where if something goes wrong, someone sues or dies. Uh, so we do the really complex, hard to handle calls. And then we do that without open A I. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that on here and drop anyone else. So.

• 2:47:58Jordi Hays?

  So you're training, you're training your own models?

• 2:48:00Speaker 10

  Yeah, correct.

• 2:48:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and uh, okay. So, so more specifically, like, are you working like, uh, not like 911 calls? Is that, is that, I imagine that's not your focus, right? Cause it, or maybe it is, but I know there's some companies that, that just focus on that. Are you thinking like hospitals? Like what, what, what kind of, give us some more maybe concrete examples?

• 2:48:25Speaker 10

  Hospitals, airlines, uh, and yes, 911 calls eventually. So we're actually working on a product offering for that right now. Uh, I can't say too much about that, but I, I do have this weird feeling that like poetically, I'm going to die by a botched A I 911 call one day. Uh, and that's kind of my mission.

• 2:48:41Jordi Hays?

  Don't man it, don't, yeah, yeah. Yeah. You gotta, you're a time traveler going back in time.

• 2:48:48Speaker 10

  I gotta warn myself.

• 2:48:49Jordi Hays?

  You gotta, you gotta, you gotta save yourself. Um, what, what, how, uh?

• 2:48:57Jordi Hays?

  Describe this market, like, describe voice, describe the voice AI market, right? Like, you guys have some competition from the Frontier Labs, but it seems like less competition than than maybe one would think, or maybe it's like, almost certainly has to be less competitive than, you know, coding agents, right? Where you have, you know, thousands of companies and the labs and the hyperscalers all competing.

• 2:49:25Speaker 10

  Yeah, you'd be surprised. So like, two years ago, we were, we were one of the first companies to do this. This was like, well before the labs. And I have a little binder of screenshots of different VCs that I'm sure talked about their voice AI thesis today, who said, "No one will be talking to AI two years from today." And by the way, very unpopular if you go into a fundraiser reminding them that they said that. They don't like that. So I don't recommend that.

• 2:49:50John Coogan?

  Cheap gloves, for sure.

• 2:49:53John Coogan?

  On that point of like, like, no one will be talking to AI, it seems like, are you actually increasing the length of phone calls? Like, I'm seeing like, the typical call lasts 30 to 45 minutes. That feels like too long, honestly. That feels like a long time. Are people asking your models to write Python for them or something? And they're transcribing it one, one character at a time? Like, what's going on?

• 2:50:17Speaker 10

  It'd be a little roundabout, but yeah, we do calls with like, 90-year-old patients doing 45-minute-long, remote patient monitoring calls. And so if you want them to put on the blood pressure device, right? And you want to figure out if they're having a heart attack, you have to hear about their grandchild first. That is an immovable object you have to get through.

• 2:50:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:50:38Speaker 10

  These are lonely, lonely people.

• 2:50:40John Coogan?

  Oh, that's interesting. So you actually have to somewhat like, put guardrails on, obviously, but not, the guardrails can't be too narrow, to the point where you're a phone tree, because you actually do have to open up the customer, open up the, the user on the other end of the line, and start actually having a conversation before you can do a more complex interaction.

• 2:50:59Speaker 10

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:51:01John Coogan?

  So do companies, yeah, do companies have like, specific ideas about that? Preconceived notions, whether they should or shouldn't do that? Whether that's table stakes? Like, what does that look like?

• 2:51:11Speaker 10

  So we we work with a couple of like really big banks and one of them had a minute and a half long disclosure we had to leave at the start of every call. I know, thank you. I I worked that in there. So if you're a big bank watching this, please disregard everything else I've said and just reach out. But we we had to have a minute and a half long disclosure. So if you wanted to have a human being talk to our AI, you had to sit through a minute and a half of straight reading out different things to them. And then they would get on, you know, we get on calls with them, they'd say like, it's varying, right? Like, not every bank's like this. We've worked with some really big ones that are less painful. But they're like, yeah, how do we know the AI is not going to say something racist? Or we're pretty sure that it won't. And you have to go through this really

• 2:51:56Speaker 10

  intensive testing process. And so what a lot of people don't realize is that these call centers and these really big ones that we're dealing with, every business has tried to get rid of them every possible way they can. They only exist because there's a gap between what the business wants to offer and what it can offer. And so when you hear about like AI receptionists, or you hear about e-commerce, where's my order calls, that's not what we're doing. We're doing the hard part of the $250 billion a year spend in the US. And that is really early. That is like astoundingly early. I don't think people realize how early it is.

• 2:52:32John Coogan?

  Makes sense. What is, I mean, you're talking to big banks, like, what is the actual go-to-market motion funnel? Is it all sales-driven? Or are there inbound? Do you have an inbound team? Or is there any like, sort of like self-serve option at this point?

• 2:52:49Speaker 10

  We have 350,000 self-serve users, but most of it is actually inbound leads. So we do viral marketing every once in a while. You guys might have seen this, but we had a billboard. This was back before it was like cool to do billboards. That said, still hiring humans, question mark, and it had a phone number on it. Not stop hiring humans. That is a different company that worked off. We're not happy with that.

• 2:53:12Jordi Hays?

  You guys were the first.

• 2:53:14Speaker 10

  We were the, we were the first and I actually got a chance, um, while the founder of that other company was getting a haircut to go up to him and tell him what I thought. Cause I found out we were the same.

• 2:53:22Jordi Hays?

  Haircut, haircut's crazy.

• 2:53:24John Coogan?

  He's locked in, wow.

• 2:53:25Jordi Hays?

  Captive, captive audience.

• 2:53:26Speaker 10

  Sort of a captive audience, right? Uh, the, the poor, the poor people did not know what was going on and why we were so upset at each other.

• 2:53:33Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, cause you invented billboards. So for him to come in and not only run a billboard, but to use similar language is just, you know.

• 2:53:42Speaker 10

  Same graphics, same everything. I was like, he's like, oh, I'm a big fan of your billboards. I'm like, yeah, I know.

• 2:53:49John Coogan?

  Ted Turner.

• 2:53:50Speaker 10

  Uh, but yeah, so we, we bought the rights to Soulja Boy's voice, for example. You all know Soulja Boy, like crank that, right? Kiss me through the phone. So we've done a lot of viral marketing and we've managed to get CIOs, great people to come in and actually come to us. We do a lot of outbound too, but primarily.

• 2:54:06Jordi Hays?

  CIOs famously listen to Soulja Boy? Soulja Boy, yeah, Soulja Boy helped you win in the enterprise?

• 2:54:12Speaker 10

  Like you would not believe because he was really popular around the time that most of the CIOs were like teenagers.

• 2:54:19John Coogan?

  High school, yeah.

• 2:54:19Speaker 10

  Uh, or you know, uh, young adults.

• 2:54:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He probably crushes it like AWS reinvent in Vegas.

• 2:54:26Jordi Hays?

  Are there any, any, any of your customers actively using Soulja Boy's voice for, uh, their customer service? Or is that just like kind of a?

• 2:54:36John Coogan?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna need to read a disclosure to you for a minute and a half, but I'm bringing in Soulja Boy to do it. I think that's a winning formula.

• 2:54:44Jordi Hays?

  The retention there would probably be really quite good.

• 2:54:47John Coogan?

  Why not?

• 2:54:48Speaker 10

  Uh, yes, actually. There's a lot of, mostly there's, there's a lot of restaurants because apparently people really love it. But we have his name published under a different name on the platform. So we have Soulja Boy's official voice and then we have a, a name that's hidden for the other one. The other voice is very popular. So there are a few enterprises that if you stumble upon it and you call, you might not realize it, but you're actually talking to Soulja Boy.

• 2:55:13Jordi Hays?

  The one and only.

• 2:55:13John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:55:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, talk about working with, uh, Paul Lieberstein.

• 2:55:20Speaker 10

  Yeah, I never get to meet this.

• 2:55:22Jordi Hays?

  Actor behind Toby on The Office.

• 2:55:24John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:55:25Speaker 10

  I never get to meet the celebrities. It's always the marketing team. He was incredibly nice to work with, very pleasant. Ramp had Kevin or Brian, and I have to be very careful about the names and not mixing them up. But we were like, who's the most boring person that we could possibly think of? Because the company's name is bland, so it kind of comes with the territory. And everyone was like, well, Toby from The Office. Paul, I think, was humored by that. Took it very graciously. And we ended up having a lot of really great interaction with that. And it sort of goes along with our, our marketing, which is fun and engaging, but not maybe disruptive to the brand where you're like, these guys, I wouldn't trust them to handle my 911 calls.

• 2:56:10John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. Yeah.

• 2:56:12Jordi Hays?

  Imagine, imagine calling 911 and Soulja Boy picks up. That, that would be worrisome. I gotta, I gotta say. But good Legion.

• 2:56:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 2:56:25Jordi Hays?

  Congrats. Who, who did, who did the round?

• 2:56:27Speaker 10

  So it was our insiders plus Dell and HubSpot. So we actually went very corporate on this round. And we were excited to have them. And yeah, so you guys will be hearing more from awesome new models and stuff.

• 2:56:40John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Congratulations.

• 2:56:42Jordi Hays?

  Great to finally meet you. And yeah, congrats on all the prizes.

• 2:56:44John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:56:45Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:56:46John Coogan?

  Have a good one. In market news, more Fed officials have signaled a rate increase as the next move. The central bank held interest rates steady as Kevin Warsh's first meeting as chairman. But nine of 19 Federal Reserve officials penciled in at least one rate increase by year's end, up from none in March. And so the market is selling off down about a percent today, based on that. There's also a G7 meeting that's happening between AI leaders. Donald Trump was seated next to Sam Altman and, and Demis Vosobas from Google's

• 2:57:26John Coogan?

  DeepMind at a summit in France on Wednesday, discussing AI export controls and all things AI. The AI leaders are huddling at lunch with the G7 in France. And I'm sure there'll be more things to come out of that. There's still more back and forth on export controls. Fable 5 is still embargoed in some way and they're working through that. There's been a little bit more reporting, but not much major movement there. And then also, US has held off on blacklisting China's DeepSeek, more than 100 firms and more than 100 firms that are deemed security risks. That was part of the Fable 5 rollout

• 2:58:08John Coogan?

  was that there was a South Korean telecom company, according to the reporting, that had access to one of the most advanced models from Anthropic. And that firm, that Chinese, that South Korean telecom company had potentially ties to China in some way. And so, the US government was skeptical of that South Korean telecom company. And so, there was a debate over that and whether or not that crossed a bright line. And so, from the Washington Post, Anthropic later disclosed that the list had ballooned, the list of companies that would be getting the most advanced models, had ballooned and roughly 50 additional entities

• 2:58:51John Coogan?

  had already received access. Senior officials began to consider using export controls to claw back the technology after the company did not identify new recipients for days. When Anthropic finally turned over names, the administration discovered that one recipient was a South Korean telecommunications company. The administration suspected, alleged, of having ties to China, officials said. And so, that is the key of the dust-up there. But we'll be continuing to follow that.

• 2:59:17Jordi Hays?

  In other news, much more tragically, many of you will have seen this by now, but Joshua Bayer, who is the CEO and founder of Capital Factory, was in a

• 2:59:30John Coogan?

  Plane crash.

• 2:59:31Jordi Hays?

  Plane crash.

• 2:59:32John Coogan?

  In Laredo.

• 2:59:33Jordi Hays?

  I guess, early, early this morning, coming back from Mexico to Austin. I unfortunately never, never got to meet Joshua, but only heard tremendous things about him. And he really was an important figure in the Austin startup community. So, sending our

• 2:59:50Jordi Hays?

  Prayers to Joshua's family and friends. And yeah, really, really tragic.

• 2:59:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:58Jordi Hays?

  Rest in peace.

• 2:59:59John Coogan?

  Well, we should close on a positive note in some way. There's a whole discussion over SpaceX potentially using the high share price, the incredible valuation to acquire more companies, create a roll up. There's a piece in the Financial Times, we can, we can run through another day, but Bill Ackman shares a Hall of Fame opening sentence. One of the things that makes SpaceX so valuable is how valuable it is, a tautological value argument. Of course, what he's actually getting at is that while the stock price is, is so high, that serves as a currency for acquisition. And when you're a public company, you can

• 3:00:40John Coogan?

  acquire companies very easily with your public stock. And so there's a very interesting window. Ben Thompson wrote about it on the back of the cursor acquisition closing, or, or being announced that the option has been exercised. But it is a very interesting debate. We touched on it a little bit yesterday. Is there going to be an acquisition spree? Will there be a roll up? Will SpaceX buy NeoCloud assets, energy assets, chip assets? Like TerraFab has been talking. What's involved in that? I mean, they're, they're trading at what, 10 times Intel at this point or something? I don't know. What is the Intel market cap? But there's so much that they could do. They, it's not 10 times Intel. Intel's

• 3:01:21John Coogan?

  a $600 billion company. So that would be a big one. But there's a lot in the supply chain. There's a lot in the, in the AI world, in the space world that they could partner up with if that's the direction that they want to go. But it would be a very different direction. And so everyone will be watching it very, very closely. Anyway, thank you for tuning into TVPN today. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tvpn.com and we will see you.

• 3:01:49Jordi Hays?

  And hello to Keith, who seemingly just joined.

• 3:01:52John Coogan?

  Hey Keith.

• 3:01:53Jordi Hays?

  Hey Keith.

• 3:01:54John Coogan?

  Couple hours late, but happy to have you here.

• 3:01:56Jordi Hays?

  Few hours late, three hours late, but we're happy to have you here.

• 3:01:59John Coogan?

  Come back tomorrow.

• 3:02:00Jordi Hays?

  We hope you all have a tremendous afternoon. Thank you to Cooper for always coming in at the market close as well.

• 3:02:06John Coogan?

  Appreciate it.

• 3:02:07Jordi Hays?

  I appreciate it every day. And have a wonderful afternoon and evening, folks. We'll see you tomorrow.

• 3:02:13John Coogan?

  Goodbye.