America's Tech Wishlist, Comcast Splits in Two, Tristan Thompson in the Ultradome | Zach Laberge, Gavin Uberti, Eren Bali, Larsen Jensen, Ricky Rosa, Andrew Rea, Michael Anderson, Tristan Thompson, Grant Gregory & Ian Rountree

(02:02) - Rocket Lab Enters SpaceX Arena (10:32) - Comcast Splits in Two (12:16) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (21:15) - America's Tech Wishlist (44:02) - Zach Laberge, founder and CEO of Omen AI, discusses his company's development of real-time fluid monitoring systems for mission-critical machines, particularly in data centers. He explains how their sensors detect contaminants and bio-growth in liquid cooling systems, preventing costly downtime by enabling proactive maintenance. Laberge also highlights Omen AI's recent $31 million Series A funding, which will support team expansion and manufacturing growth. (52:23) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (58:15) - Gavin Uberti, CEO and co-founder of Etch, discusses the company's development of rack-scale inference hardware optimized for transformer models, emphasizing innovations like low-voltage inference and cluster-scale memory to enhance efficiency and performance. He highlights the importance of strong partnerships, particularly with TSMC, to overcome manufacturing challenges and meet the growing global demand for AI inference. Uberti also underscores the significance of assembling a talented team and securing strategic investors to drive Etch's ambitious roadmap in the rapidly evolving AI hardware landscape. (01:16:33) - Eren Bali, known for founding Udemy and Carbon Health, discusses his new venture, Monogram, a general-purpose AI application that provides interactive visual interfaces in response to user queries, distinguishing itself from traditional text-based AI interactions. Monogram emphasizes voice input for faster communication and delivers visual outputs for quicker comprehension, aiming to make AI more accessible for everyday tasks. Bali highlights his consistent focus on simplifying complex systems to broaden accessibility, as demonstrated in his previous ventures. (01:28:23) - Larsen Jensen, founder and general partner of Harpoon Ventures, is a former Olympic swimmer and Navy SEAL who transitioned into venture capital to invest in technology serving national interests. He discusses raising a $155 million fund, the evolution of defense-focused startups, and the importance of supporting high-octane founders with visionary ideas. Jensen also touches on his experiences in the SEAL teams, the significance of the Black Flag accelerator, and shares his perspective on the Enhanced Games. (01:42:22) - Ricky Rosa, founder and CEO of Oasis Devices, discusses the development of a smart ring designed to replace traditional keyboards by enabling private dictation and editing through touch and voice commands. He highlights the ring's advantages over existing devices like AirPods, emphasizing its ability to capture whispers in noisy environments and its multifunctionality as both a microphone and trackpad. Rosa also shares the company's progress, including a recent beta launch and the initiation of pre-orders for the device, with plans to ship in small batches starting in two weeks. (01:51:23) - Andrew Rea is the co-founder and CEO of Taxwire, a company offering a fully managed solution for global sales tax compliance. He discusses the challenges businesses face with indirect tax compliance, the increasing enforcement of sales tax regulations, and how Taxwire leverages AI to provide customer-friendly services in a market dominated by older, less adaptable companies. Rea also highlights the company's recent $25 million funding round and its role in disrupting traditional tax compliance services. (01:57:44) - Michael Anderson, co-founder of Framework Ventures, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm established in 2019, discussed the firm's evolution from its initial $15 million fund to managing several billion dollars across multiple funds. He highlighted their early focus on seed-stage venture investing in the crypto and web3 space, noting the global distribution of crypto entrepreneurs and the necessity of extensive travel to engage with them. Anderson also emphasized the firm's commitment to supporting world-class founders across various industries, including energy and AI, while maintaining a consistent venture thesis throughout their growth. (02:06:51) - Tristan Thompson, a Canadian-American professional basketball player, has played 13 seasons in the NBA, notably winning a championship with the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2016. In the conversation, Thompson discusses his transition into technology investments, highlighting early stakes in companies like Anthropic and SpaceX, and emphasizes the importance of betting on strong founders and leveraging his network to identify promising opportunities. (02:33:30) - Grant Gregory is a Partner at Cantos Ventures, a venture capital firm specializing in early-stage investments in near-frontier technologies. In the conversation, he discusses Cantos's investment strategy, emphasizing the importance of rapid iteration and testing in hardware startups, and highlights the firm's focus on deeply technical founders aiming to transform the physical world. Ian Rountree is the founder and managing partner of Cantos, a venture capital firm focused on "near frontier" technologies. He invests in deeply technical startups across AI, defense, aerospace, energy, biotechnology, and advanced manufacturing, backing founders building technologies that can reshape the physical world. 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You're watching TVP.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Tuesday, June 30th, end of the quarter 2026. We're live from the TVP and Ultra, the Temple of Technology, the Forces of 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.

• 0:18Jordi Hays?

  Where'd you raise this?

• 0:19John Coogan?

  Amazing news out of ramp today. Ar Karazian, one of the greatest economists to ever do it, has canceled the AI job apocalypse. We'll get into it, but it's a very interesting analysis showing that firms that adopt AI are hiring, they're going on the offensive. I've always said that this is the correct stance for a CEO to take is say, yeah, we're getting so much productivity, we're going to crush our competitors. We're staffing up. This is not doom. We're not some, like, there were all these CEOs that went into this very defensive. They were acting like they got bought for pennies on the dollar by a private equity firm. And they're like, yeah, it's looking, it's looking pretty bad for us. We're gonna have to fire everyone and cut costs because this AI opportunity never made any sense.

• 1:02Jordi Hays?

  My, my point, my, my, my.

• 1:04John Coogan?

  Go on the offensive war.

• 1:05Jordi Hays?

  You have someone who's like, yeah, we're using AI. We're way more efficient now. We're getting more value per person on our team. And so you're like, okay, great. So you're hiring more people, right? Because you're getting more out of each incremental person.

• 1:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18Jordi Hays?

  And they're like, well, no, actually, like.

• 1:20John Coogan?

  Actually, yeah, we gotta do layoffs. A lot of these, we know, we've known this for a long time. A lot of these CEOs just over hire. They wanted to lay people off. They wanted to do.

• 1:28Jordi Hays?

  They needed an excuse.

• 1:29John Coogan?

  They wanted to get rid of underperformers, people that weren't fit, like the right fit for this particular company. All of those folks will reshuffle, find their place. Not everyone suited to work at a giant 100,000 person company. Some people might be better off at a 5,000 person company, or 500 person company, or a two person company, or even a one person company. There's also interesting studies showing that entrepreneurship is on the rise and it's never been better to go it alone. Thank you, Jordy.

• 1:59John Coogan?

  What else is in the news? Let's give you a quick overview. People were clamoring for a Rocket Lab story that never came yesterday. Rocket Lab enters the arena with SpaceX brand of grill. Fired up the TVP newsletter, which you can subscribe to at TVP.com today because we were on the horn with Prof G. We did his podcast, very excited for that to come out. We're warmed up because we already got an hour of podcasting under our belts for today. It's a four hour day for us. We got a three hour show for you. It's just coming out of stealth. We got Aaron Bali from Monogram coming on. We got Tristan Thompson live in the TVP Ultra Dump. And then Grant Gregory, Ian Rountree from Kantos coming in person as well. New fun. Folks, we're going back and forth fundraising announcement, venture capital fundraising announcement,

• 2:42John Coogan?

  startup fundraising announcement, venture capital fundraising announcement. The money's flowing, things are good. Anyway, Rocket Lab, they are duking it out with SpaceX. Let's go through it. Yesterday, the launch services and space systems provider Rocket Lab agreed to purchase satellite manufacturer slash operator Iridium in a cash and all in stock deal that values the company at eight billion or 20% more than the share price at Friday's close. Iridium pioneered Leo's Leo satellites, launching its first one some 30 years ago. The Iridium network was the original sat phone, this huge block of a phone. You would take out the antenna out of the back and the antenna was big enough to kill you instantly. If you let it get near your brain, no, just kidding, it was very sad.

• 3:25John Coogan?

  But you, it would be terrifying to anyone worried about, about microwave technology or, or any sort of radiation. But it was wildly successful. Company grew and grew and now it's part of Rocket Lab. Today, they operate a fleet of 66 satellites. That seems low. That's because these are bigger, older satellites, but this partnership is probably going up against Starlink. So that it connects handsets and other devices used by ships, mining sites, US government agencies, enterprise connectivity play. The move represents yet more vertical integration at Rocket Lab. Over the years, the company has grown from a small niche satellite launch provider to an integrated space powerhouse. It now designs satellites and aerospace components, serves the.

• 4:08John Coogan?

  Defense Primes has the second most launched US rocket annually, the Electron rocket, and is currently developing a reusable medium lift launch vehicle, but Jeff Bezos is probably coming for that silver medal any day now. With the Iridium acquisition, Rocket Lab is positioning itself to compete directly with SpaceX, which already operates a 10,000 satellite fleet. Rocket Lab has its work cut out for it, says Brandon Gurrell. Delian had a good post about this, talking about the journey of Rocket Lab. We can pull up because it was a SPAC, and SPACs have a bad rep. They all went down 99.999%, but not Rocket

• 4:50John Coogan?

  Lab. On August 25, 2021, Rocket Lab SPACed at 4.1 billion, the usual SPAC price, probably $10 a share, 4 billion valuation. It stayed at or below that price in the public markets for three whole years until September 2024, when it started to grow both revenue and get rerated. Now it's acquiring Iridium for 8 billion, twice its original IPO price. And Delian says-

• 5:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you could buy it for around $4.80 a share on July 1 in 2024. It is now sitting at $101.

• 5:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, what a run. And yeah, the whole space economy has been booming, very, very good. It's a $60 billion company, so they're picking up an $8 billion connectivity provider. And we can play a little bit of this from the founder of Rocket Lab, the CEO, Rocket Lab is Rocket Man himself. Rocket Lab is acquiring Iridium-

• 5:48Speaker 03

  Last time I was wearing this blue jacket-

• 5:50John Coogan?

  Look at this.

• 5:51Speaker 03

  -was announcing Neutron. So I guess that means there's something important to announce-

• 5:57Jordi Hays?

  Do you ever, wait, pause for a second. Do you ever put on a jacket like that? Because let's rewind.

• 6:02John Coogan?

  Is this really the important-

• 6:05Jordi Hays?

  This seems to be one of the more-

• 6:06Speaker 03

  I was announcing Neutron.

• 6:07Jordi Hays?

  All over the top. Look at this. No, wait.

• 6:09John Coogan?

  Wait.

• 6:10Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 6:11John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 6:12Speaker 03

  Something important to-

• 6:13John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 6:14Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I don't think I have, but now I want to try.

• 6:15John Coogan?

  Let me try. How do I put on a jacket? I go like this, take the jacket off, and then when I put on the jacket, I usually just go, how do I put on a jacket?

• 6:27Jordi Hays?

  Now then punch up. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That was way too much to the side.

• 6:32John Coogan?

  But that's what I do.

• 6:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, but try it the, try it his way. One arm out and then you want to punch up through.

• 6:38John Coogan?

  Okay, so you go one arm in.

• 6:40Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 6:41John Coogan?

  And then you're punching up.

• 6:45John Coogan?

  To the, to that, to the stratosphere because he launches rockets.

• 6:50John Coogan?

  No, it's a, it's a metaphor. It's a metaphor for the rockets that lead, that go to orbit.

• 6:54Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay.

• 6:55John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 6:56Jordi Hays?

  Symbolic. All right, let's go back to the video.

• 6:58John Coogan?

  Let's keep playing the video.

• 6:59Speaker 03

  Man, this thing's shrunk.

• 7:01John Coogan?

  This thing's hard too.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  Okay, we're going to go back to school for a little bit. I want to introduce you to the space application equation.

• 7:15Speaker 03

  So you've heard me talk a lot in the past about applications. It's where all the value in space truly lies. But in order to exploit that value to the fullest, you need a few other things. The first thing is unfettered access to space. So you need your own launch.

• 7:34Speaker 03

  And then of course, you need your own ability to build spacecraft at scale. We've got that too.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  But there's some other really big barriers to building large, successful constellations in orbit. And the first one.

• 7:51John Coogan?

  Romantic companions.

• 7:52Speaker 03

  Spectrum. Spectrum is a finite, almost impossible to get. And of course, not all spectrum is created the same. The next thing is, it takes a long time to build and launch your infrastructure. A long time to design and build your satellites, launch them. And even longer time to get your first $1 of revenue. And then finally, it's a long time to a sustained cash flow model. A long time to build your business model. A long time to build your customer base. And it takes just that long extended time until you've got proper reoccurring cash flow. So those of you who know me will know that I'm way too impatient for that. So we found a bit of a shortcut.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  Rocket Lab is acquiring Iridium Communications.

• 8:39John Coogan?

  Good music. Very clear video.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  This will be one of the most transformative deals in the space industry. It's the ultimate combination for growth. And if you think back to our little whiteboard session a moment ago, this is a deal where one plus one equals three, not just two. One being Rocket Lab, we have unfettered access to space.

• 8:57John Coogan?

  Unfettered!

• 8:57Jordi Hays?

  Unfettered intelligence.

• 8:59John Coogan?

  Access to space again.

• 9:01Speaker 03

  And then you think of Iridium, they have an already operational constellation, spectrum, not just any spectrum, extremely valuable spectrum.

• 9:07John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, the spectrum's really important.

• 9:08Speaker 03

  Millions of customers and they're a profitable business.

• 9:10John Coogan?

  SpaceX just bought some spectrum too.

• 9:11Speaker 03

  So where the three comes in is the result of these two things is a fully integrated self-launching space superpower. One that will unlock more growth from Iridium's existing network and build new constellations to unlock new services and market opportunities. This is officially our entrance into the space applications market. A thing we've been talking about for a long time now. But to be clear, this is not the finish line. Now, we won't just continue Iridium's network as is. We're going to build upon it to unlock new markets and pioneer new space-based services. Rocket Lab's future in space applications has just been unlocked and accelerated.

• 9:52Jordi Hays?

  I like this guy.

• 9:54Speaker 03

  I'm off to buy a new jacket. This thing's too small.

• 9:59John Coogan?

  See, it goes full circle. The reason that he had to put the jacket on sort of awkwardly was it's too small.

• 10:05Jordi Hays?

  It was a part of the story.

• 10:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was good. That's a really good video. I like that. Anyway, will be interesting. Doesn't seem that hard to put up more satellites, just lower.

• 10:17Jordi Hays?

  It's just rocket science.

• 10:19John Coogan?

  I think they got to figure it out. They've been doing rocket science for a while. But congrats to everyone at Rocket Lab and Iridium. Deal makes a ton of sense and will be interesting to see where it goes from here. A lot of the space bulls will be. Picking up shares, I'm sure. Comcast split. In 2011 Comcast, which was primarily a cable TV, internet and phone provider to something like 30 million Americans, bought a 51% stake in NBC Universal from General Electric. I love it. I love an industrial company that owns a media company. It's happened before, folks. It's not that crazy. Just might work. In 2013, it purchased the remaining 49% stake.

• 11:00John Coogan?

  Since then Comcast has acquired the European media company Sky, the movie studio Dreamworks Animation, and through NBC Universal spun up Peacock, among other activity in the entertainment space. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Comcast's decade-long plus foray into - decade-plus-long foray into trying to be a content-plus-distribution company is coming to an end. It's planning to split the businesses into two. The Comcast entity will once again become a connectivity-only business, and NBC Universal will focus entirely on content. And there's been a number of spin-outs that have been happening for a while, and this is the final, like, big one, I guess.

• 11:43John Coogan?

  There's a recent history of telecom connectivity companies rolling up entertainment businesses and then spinning them out or getting rid of them. Over the past decade Verizon bought AOL and Yahoo, reorganized the two into a entity called Verizon Media, and ultimately sold Verizon Media to Apollo in 2021. Over roughly the same period, AT&T bought DirecTV and Time Warner, but ended up fully exiting its position in DirecTV and spun off Time Warner as Warner Media into its own entity in 2022. So, interesting deal to follow along. The other good news in the space world is that after that explosion...

• 12:22John Coogan?

  At Blue Origin launch, that New Glenn launch that was so disheartening, there were rumors that it might be two years until they got that launch pad back online, but there is some updates here. There are some updates. To return to flight this year, we're not rebuilding the same pad. We're going straight to a horizontal, vertical, hybrid con ops. We had already been developing for our 9X4 New Glenn launch vehicle using existing infrastructure, skipping a new transporter erector and creating a common con ops across two pads. So Dave Limp shares-

• 12:59Jordi Hays?

  There we go. They just used the explosion as sort of like a demo. They demoed the old setup.

• 13:04John Coogan?

  Demolition?

• 13:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:06John Coogan?

  But, good news from Dave Limp, the CEO of Blue Origin, that they're going to get New Glenn flying again sooner than people thought. So, good news there. What else is in the news today? I have a pitch for you. I have a business idea. I want to hear your feedback. So, what's the biggest problem with being a doctor? You make a lot of money as a doctor, right? What's the biggest problem?

• 13:33Jordi Hays?

  The odd hours.

• 13:34John Coogan?

  No. Taxes. You make so much money, you get taxed on normal income, ordinary income. Even if you're a doctor, you're saving people's lives. You're doing the most important job in our economy.

• 13:45Jordi Hays?

  You have a doctor buddy that also runs a hedge fund, though.

• 13:48John Coogan?

  And when he runs the hedge fund, he's making capital gains. But when he does an operation, he makes ordinary income.

• 13:55Jordi Hays?

  Which to me was personally very concerning. I don't know if I'd want to go to see a doctor that does surgery that also-

• 14:02John Coogan?

  To be fair, he's building a new clinic and he has time off while he's not up and running it. But-

• 14:06Jordi Hays?

  But when I heard that, you know, a surgeon was also running a hedge fund, I got a little bit worried. Just, you know, if I was under the knife and there were some, and the market was open, I'd be a little nervous.

• 14:20John Coogan?

  Only on off-hours, for sure. But the doctor makes a ton of money, saves people's lives, does all sorts of good things, gets taxed at ordinary income, not capital gains. So you're taxing doctors who are saving lives at a higher rate. So my business idea is with the power of a Gent AI, we create thousands and thousands of Delaware C Corps for every doctor. So every time that there's a doctor's appointment and you have to pay the doctor, you acquire one of their Delaware C Corps. And within that C Corp, there is on the balance sheet of that company, basically an IOU for the services the doctor must render you.

• 15:05Jordi Hays?

  Sitting on the balance.

• 15:06John Coogan?

  Sitting on the balance.

• 15:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's an asset.

• 15:07John Coogan?

  It's an asset. And so you can, you can then depreciate that asset since you've acquired it. The doctor reaps capital gains and then you cash in your.

• 15:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and they can have a sort of a farm of C Corps. So there's, you know, they've had them, the shares for over a year.

• 15:25John Coogan?

  Exactly. Exactly. Long-term capital gains. And then, and then the patient on their way out, they sign one form, a Gent AI does its thing, winds down the C Corp and, and cashes in the asset. And then the doctor can reap capital gains. What do you think? You think we got a business there?

• 15:43Jordi Hays?

  I think you just created vertical AI agents for tax fraud.

• 15:47John Coogan?

  I asked ChatGPT and it said, this is almost certainly dead on arrival. Not clever tax optimization, more like abusive tax shelter with healthcare law side quests. The core problem is the economic substance is obvious. The patient is paying for medical care. Doctors being paid for performing medical services. IRC 61 includes compensation for services and fees and gross income. And the IRS says you generally include everything received in payment for personal services. Wrapping the bill in a newly minted C Corp does not change the income character. Well, I think we'll have to take that one to the.

• 16:25Jordi Hays?

  All the way. Take it all the way.

• 16:27John Coogan?

  Take it to the Supreme Court. There's a chance.

• 16:29Speaker 04

  I think you can wrap it in a prediction market, right? So every single time you go to the doctor, you say, okay, there's like 0% chance the doctor's going to do well. And then he bets yes.

• 16:38John Coogan?

  He bets yes.

• 16:39Speaker 04

  And then we'll see what happens.

• 16:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:40Speaker 04

  But you know, if it's a good doctor, then he'll be paid out in full.

• 16:43John Coogan?

  It adds insurance to it as well because you don't pay if the doctor doesn't do a good job.

• 16:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's like insurance is built in.

• 16:48John Coogan?

  Built in.

• 16:49Speaker 04

  So I think this is actually.

• 16:50John Coogan?

  But are winnings on prediction markets capital gains?

• 16:54Speaker 04

  I think it's still mostly unclear. So for the next few years, I think this would definitely be a good strategy.

• 16:59John Coogan?

  Okay, I like it. I like it. You have to imagine, because they say, they don't use the word bet, they use the word trade.

• 17:06Speaker 04

  Trade. Predict. So capital gains.

• 17:08John Coogan?

  So trading, capital gains treatment, maybe?

• 17:11Jordi Hays?

  I think the post last year where someone was saying like, prediction markets will replace everything. If I want blueberries delivered to my house, I go to the market for blueberries being delivered to my house and I bet $15 and I bet no. Someone else, they bet yes. They deliver me blueberries. They get the $15.

• 17:33John Coogan?

  Works every time. Works every, every single time. We keep debating this, this meta question of will they launch a, a financially incentivized prediction market? Or will it purely be for social cloud? You're still in the camp of there's going to be real dollars. It just feels like the first time that it will ever have.

• 17:54Jordi Hays?

  The reason I, I believe that is because I believe they had meta.

• 18:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:01Jordi Hays?

  Like was reaching out to the various prediction market providers to try to be potential like partners and or vendors.

• 18:09John Coogan?

  But I mean, partnership can mean so many different things, right? Partnership with, with prediction market can mean, we'll give you ad reads or discounted ads, or we'll vend your data so that if someone is on Instagram and hits the search box acting for something and Lama, Five or Muse Spark wants to answer it and surface data from a prediction market, we have the rights to do that without infringing on your copyright or something like that. Like it could be a data licensing partnership. It could be an acquisition funnel. It could be something where. Meta's funneling people to the prediction markets or back like that that whole I I read the same article that you read and it doesn't make any sense to say, oh, yeah, I want to

• 18:54John Coogan?

  create a competitor. So I'm going to reach out to my direct competitors and see if I if they want to give me their customers. Like, why would they ever do that? That makes no sense. You see what I'm saying?

• 19:05Jordi Hays?

  The only thing is like, the prediction markets have a history of partnering with with other applications and basically being the infrastructure providers.

• 19:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:15Jordi Hays?

  To actually place real.

• 19:16John Coogan?

  But if you go to any, any partner, whether it's, you know, there was that whole suite of like.

• 19:23Jordi Hays?

  No, I, I, I agree with you. Like, I, I generally agree that there is a possibility that there's no dollars and it's just.

• 19:30John Coogan?

  CNN, CNBC.

• 19:32Jordi Hays?

  But I just don't, I.

• 19:33John Coogan?

  New York Stock Exchange, they all have partnerships with prediction markets. None of them have like, oh, go in the CNBC app and and upload your credit card information. Like Meta's been on this path of like, maybe we'd like a financial relationship with our customers for decades. And like, it's never really matured. There was always this idea that you would be able to like, save your payment infrastructure in information. And then when you see a T-shirt, you could just click and one click checkout in the Instagram app or in the Facebook app. And that never really took off for a variety of reasons.

• 20:05Speaker 04

  So John, in this case, it'd be like, you see an ad and then it's like, I place a bet that there won't be a T-shirt delivered to my house.

• 20:11John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 20:12Speaker 04

  And then it'll get fulfilled.

• 20:13John Coogan?

  This is the final box.

• 20:14Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully.

• 20:15John Coogan?

  Hopefully.

• 20:15Jordi Hays?

  You place a big enough bet.

• 20:17John Coogan?

  The answer to your question on can doctors reap capital gains by using prediction markets instead? Prediction market profits are taxable, but the character's unsettled at the moment. CFTC regulated event contracts like Kalshi style contracts. There is a decent argument that they are financial derivatives rather than gambling. The CFTC describes event contracts as derivative contracts whose payoff depends on the specified event. It also granted Kalshi status as a designated contract market. So best case, some contracts might be treated as. 1256 contracts, that means marked to market annually and gains and losses split

• 21:00John Coogan?

  across 60% long-term capital, 40% short-term capital, regardless of holding period. So, there's a chance that that's the, that that's the solution. I think we might, we might have solved it, but we'll have to use every tool in the modern financialization and technology box. The Wall Street Journal asked their readers what innovations they want to see in the next 20 years, and the answers are sort of all over the place and sort of all over the

• 21:26Jordi Hays?

  place. Number five will shock you.

• 21:28John Coogan?

  Number five might shock you. What innovation do you want to see in the next 20 years? Tyler, think of something, Jordy, think of something. I'll read some of what the Wall Street Journal readers wrote in. Mary Gillespie from Irving, Texas said, "Solar on wheels." She wants, she says, "Why can't cars be manufactured with solar panels integrated into the top of the vehicle? Then it could recharge the car's battery as you travel and when you park." So this is not actually a new idea. There are cars that have solar panels on the roof, but solar panels are extremely weak, and so you'd have to leave the car outside for like five months to charge, a full electric car. Now, there have been DARPA grand challenge cars and specific, almost science experiments

• 22:13John Coogan?

  vehicles where they have a huge surface area and it's this massive wing of solar panels. And I think there's a plane that's also potentially be able to ply indefinitely by having solar panels that recharge a motor and it spins. But for a normal car, a single solar panel on the roof doesn't get you much in the way of charging. But she's basically asking for a stronger solar density, stronger energy density. And I'm in, I'm in. In 20 years, totally feasible. Mary from Irving, Texas, I think it's going to happen. I think it's possible in 20 years. Anyway, traffic jam plan. I would love to see an autopilot feature. I would love, I would love to see autopilot features on cars talk to each other.

• 22:56Jordi Hays?

  Saying, uh, the chat wants nuclear cars. Just get a nuclear car.

• 23:00John Coogan?

  That's very, uh, very fallout. I, I, I like the, what is that? Nuclear punk or something? What was that? What was that? There's like this alternate history of like the 1960s if it was powered by nuclear, uh, not solar punk, atom punk. Atom punk is the term. Uh, and it has all these really cool things that could be powered by nuclear. Maybe we'll get there. Fusion, uh, is sort of promising that. We've talked to a couple of companies that do smaller fusion reactors. Um, and they, uh, tend avalanches one up in, uh, Seattle or maybe Washington where, uh, it's basically the nuclear, nuclear reactor, but it's, uh, it's fusion, not fission. And it's about the size of, you know, a large battery.

• 23:42John Coogan?

  And so you could potentially put it in a car, put it in a drone, put it in a space vehicle, uh, keep it up there for a long time. Uh, accordion traffic jams would be a thing of the past. What is an accordion traffic jam?

• 23:53Jordi Hays?

  I think that's when the traffic's like.

• 23:55John Coogan?

  Oh, going in and out.

• 23:57Jordi Hays?

  In and out. It's like people are stopping and going and there's that slight delay when theoretically, if everyone was like moving at the perfect.

• 24:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:04Jordi Hays?

  You know?

• 24:04John Coogan?

  So Morgan Clayton from Birmingham, Alabama wants autopilot features on all the cars to talk to each other. So they never do that. So they know, okay, I gotta speed up. I gotta slow down. And then they're all perfectly in sync. Probably doable. You'd need some standard or something. What are you thinking? Musical vision. This is a good one. These people are thinking outside the box. This is not like, oh, I want inference at one tenth of the cost. Silicon Valley is unimaginative, unimaginative by comparison, but Mary Schickner Gifford from Alpine, Utah says she wants musical vision. I'd like to see the invention of a device to help musicians with eyesight limitations read music.

• 24:47John Coogan?

  There are many ways to help the sight impaired read the printed word, but pianists and others need to read music at the piano. My father's sight was so bad that he had to look at the music about two inches away, memorize one or two phrases, then practice what he memorized. He gave his last recital from memory at age 94. What a legend. Let's give it up for Mary Schickner Gifford.

• 25:11John Coogan?

  Father, grandfather.

• 25:13Jordi Hays?

  Powerful.

• 25:14John Coogan?

  Crazy idea. Can't you just print it bigger? If you're having trouble seeing it.

• 25:23Jordi Hays?

  You just invented the semi-truck-sized printer.

• 25:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, you could just print like a poster board and then you could see it at the piano. Also, glasses, potentially? Solution here?

• 25:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wonder, I mean, it might be a small, might be a small market of people whose vision is so impaired that even with glasses, it needs to be.

• 25:46John Coogan?

  Up close?

• 25:47Jordi Hays?

  Up close.

• 25:47John Coogan?

  I'm just confused by why this, the invention of a device to help musicians with eyesight limitations read music, why are we focused on reading music? Wouldn't this be, wouldn't any technology that allows you to read music with your heart of sight allow you to read anything?

• 26:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you could also.

• 26:08John Coogan?

  Are we talking about a general technology?

• 26:09Jordi Hays?

  I mean, couldn't you have, couldn't you learn individual notes and then learn the order of them?

• 26:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:16Jordi Hays?

  Have it spoken to you?

• 26:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. I do think maybe iPad app, iPads often sit at the, at the piano and you could have an iPad app that shows sort of like one note or two notes at a time.

• 26:28Jordi Hays?

  What about a humanoid robot that grabs your hand and bends?

• 26:31John Coogan?

  Puppeteers you like a marionette.

• 26:33Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, slams your hands.

• 26:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. Totally possible. Battery swaps. We've seen these in China where they eject them with great force. Joseph Magnati from Sarasota, Florida, has a different idea. He says in probably less than 20 years, the technology of all solid-state batteries will reach the point where the owner of an electric vehicle, I like this because he's phrasing it more as like a prediction.

• 26:56Jordi Hays?

  Pull up this video. We have, we have, Joseph.

• 27:00John Coogan?

  We got the technology. We just need to make it less violent. We'll reach the point where the owner of an electric vehicle will be able to drive into a service station, buy a pack of batteries, each the size of an old phone book. Okay, this is a very different technology. Yep, that one's very dangerous. Let's not do that.

• 27:16Jordi Hays?

  Okay, every time I call Nick on our team, he's like on some crazy quest to charge his car. Every time. So this-

• 27:26John Coogan?

  He doesn't have a-

• 27:27Jordi Hays?

  Every hour of the day I call him, he's like, "I'm trying to find a charger," like, you know, "The map was wrong."

• 27:35John Coogan?

  Launching my battery like a broadside canyon at the moron next to me that cut me off.

• 27:42John Coogan?

  Just committing supuku with your car, just abandon the battery, but you take out your rival.

• 27:50John Coogan?

  It's a crazy thing, because like, if you eject that battery, like, you're not getting it back. It's gonna be at very least damaged. There's no way that's going back in the car. But, this of course is a fire mitigation strategy. Electric vehicle batteries can burn for days on end. If you can eject them, you save the car, you save the surroundings potentially, and create a much more safe environment. Totally reasonable, looks hilarious in the video. Anyway-

• 28:15Jordi Hays?

  Nick just texted me, "Bro, the chargers in Malibu are all fake."

• 28:19John Coogan?

  They are? I don't know what that means.

• 28:21Jordi Hays?

  I don't even know what that means.

• 28:22John Coogan?

  No worries about charging, taking too long. The imminent technology will also herald-

• 28:27Jordi Hays?

  That's probably the new, like, "I'm going to the dentist," you know, when, you know, someone's like interviewing at other places. "I got a dentist appointment," and you're like, "Again?" But, uh, but Nick is just like, "Oh, I'm just charging my car. Just charging my car." It's a good excuse. I don't buy it, Nick. I don't buy that the chargers are fake.

• 28:48John Coogan?

  Here's one. Ethan Glasby from South Kingston, Kingstown, Rhode Island, wants a trash economy. He says, "Push, put trash to work. I would love to see an at-home generator powered by bacteria that eat trash. We already have bacteria that produce ethanol, as well as bacteria that break down plastic. So both in one doesn't seem like that much of a stretch. Much like solar energy, the ethanol could be used to offset heating costs and keep the fridge running when the power goes out." He's basically asking to burn the trash, but I guess in a more clean fashion, all while being fueled by household waste. Just maybe don't tell your dinner guests that you are growing bacteria in the next room over.

• 29:32John Coogan?

  Good little piece of advice from Ethan.

• 29:34Jordi Hays?

  Shee.

• 29:34John Coogan?

  Beam me up. This is this is great. Harold Lewis is truly living in the year 2060 or 2600, something like that.

• 29:44Jordi Hays?

  Or 3060.

• 29:45John Coogan?

  Because Harold Lewis from Tarrytown, New York says, uh, beam me up. I want human teleportation in the next 20 years. It should work a lot like email in which data composed of bits and

• 29:56Jordi Hays?

  It's email for humans.

• 29:58John Coogan?

  As a whole in one place are disassembled, then electronically transmitted to another place where they are reassembled. What is DNA if not bits and bytes of human beings? Do you believe that if you were teleported in this fashion, you would remain? Would you be teleported? Or is it a prestige situation not to?

• 30:18Jordi Hays?

  I would almost, I would almost certainly have Tyler go first and just like give it a spin and uh.

• 30:25Speaker 04

  Well, no, the whole point is that you wouldn't be able to tell, but like I would actually die and there's a clone of me.

• 30:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, that you would die.

• 30:30Speaker 04

  Like you would have no way of knowing if it was me or not because it in every way, it's like all the same data.

• 30:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you might be, you might be in the pocket of big teleportation. No, it's, I'm still.

• 30:41John Coogan?

  No, I'm arguing. New Tyler would be like, it worked great. And then the corpse of old Tyler who got disassembled molecule by molecule, uh, would be no longer with us and then disappeared. And that is the question in the prestige. You gotta go.

• 30:55Jordi Hays?

  Well, Paul, Paul Blanco wants something else. He wants a smart spatula.

• 30:58John Coogan?

  This is so much more attainable.

• 31:00Jordi Hays?

  I'd love a cooking spatula.

• 31:01John Coogan?

  Human teleportation.

• 31:02Jordi Hays?

  That could tell without penetration, what temperature, how thoroughly cooked a hamburger or steak is such as rare. Do we not have, uh, like a?

• 31:11John Coogan?

  No.

• 31:12Jordi Hays?

  Like we, we, we literally have things. You just.

• 31:14John Coogan?

  No, no, no. He wants without penetration. It has to, you just rest the spatula on top of the steak and it tells you inside the steak, what temperature it is, which is very difficult because if you're searing or doing a reverse sear or something, the outside could be a wildly different temperature than what's going on inside. So how do you detect the temperature without penetrating the steak with a thermometer?

• 31:36Jordi Hays?

  A powerful X-ray.

• 31:37John Coogan?

  Imagine it's as big as that brain scanner thing. Yeah. Here's your smart special. Load it up. It's like MRI-ing the entire steak. That'd be a good time. Robot chef. So this is related. I want a robot that can work as an executive chef in my own kitchen, says Ray Lor from Lacey, Washington. It could call a grocer, order ingredients, insist on insisting on it all being upscale and have those ingredients delivered, unpack, load the fridge, and then use my appliances to make dinner. 20 years? I think it's possible. I like that. That's right on the right, like, you know, level of sci-fi. Seems doable, not impossible, but also not something we could whip up in a weekend with an Arduino, like the smart.

• 32:20Jordi Hays?

  Some of these ideas are silly, but I'm viewing it as a very literal request for startups.

• 32:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, I like it. Quiet Inside, Cheryl Franklin from West Grove, Pennsylvania, says, given the negative effects of excessive noise, such as elevated blood pressure, cardiac stress, and lower real estate values, I'd love to see improvements in building materials. For example, drywall with built-in soundproofing capabilities. Love that. Perhaps a lightweight sound.

• 32:49Jordi Hays?

  It's called lead paint, Cheryl. Bring it back.

• 32:51John Coogan?

  That doesn't do anything to sound. Perhaps a lightweight sound blocking film could also be developed for use in existing buildings and homes. I had a startup idea a while back. So you know when you have a young baby, a child, and they, every time you go to change the diaper, very noisy? One of my friends put up sound panels, like a podcast studio, full slat wall in the nursery.

• 33:15Jordi Hays?

  Dual-use technology.

• 33:16John Coogan?

  Dual-use technology, for sure. And it dampens the cries, so you can, so you're not so echoey, because sometimes if a kid's crying in a very echoey room, it really reverberates and it can be kind of crazy.

• 33:28Jordi Hays?

  And lead paint is dense, so in theory, any added mass can reduce sound transmission. So maybe add a little bit of lead paint. To your nursery.

• 33:37John Coogan?

  Lead plates, whole lead plates, maybe, whole Faraday cage. But here was the idea. You don't, no one wants a slat wall in their nursery, in their baby's room.

• 33:48Jordi Hays?

  I don't know.

• 33:49John Coogan?

  Maybe if you're trying to breed the super podcaster, but most people don't want that. They want animals, they want a pastoral nature vibe, some warm pastels, some nice warm tones, something welcoming for the new child who's just been brought into this world. And so, the idea was a typical sound panel, square, flat, you know, you might see the egg crate, the black material, but you, you paint on it, an animal, you painted on it childlike, you know, paintings that you would hang on the wall. It looks appropriate, it fits the decor of the room, but it also has the added effect of sound treating the room, so that it's less noisy when everyone's yelling. Good business?

• 34:30Jordi Hays?

  Banger.

• 34:31John Coogan?

  Banger, there we go.

• 34:32Jordi Hays?

  Banger.

• 34:32John Coogan?

  Got a banger. Better than C corps on demand for doctors?

• 34:38Jordi Hays?

  For doctors, to do tax props?

• 34:41John Coogan?

  Maybe, certainly simpler.

• 34:42Jordi Hays?

  Jennifer Smith, we have made so many advancements in so many areas, but what I want most is a way to control outside noise. This is the superpower she wants. It would be so nice to be able to sit on my screened in porch and enjoy listening to the birds without having to hear nearby traffic, which sounds like drag racing these days. Well, that's because it is drag racing, Jennifer. We're drag racing in your neighborhood. If sounds are waves, can't we block some? How have we not invented an open air type of noise cancelling headphones to shield noise waves and give us some quiet spaces outdoors?

• 35:18John Coogan?

  Interesting. I mean, the, the, the simple solution here is just more electric vehicles, they're quieter, you don't sound like drag racing. Obviously, there's a whole bunch of emission standards that also reduce, reduce noise from internal combustion engines, at least until you chop the exhaust and straight pipe that thing. But if you're not doing that.

• 35:38Jordi Hays?

  Or your engine swap.

• 35:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:40Jordi Hays?

  Your Model 3.

• 35:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. V12. Um, but uh, yeah, I don't know. Is this possible? Could you just put out a big speaker that selectively noise cancels car noise, but not bird noise? That seems possible. Seems possible.

• 35:58Jordi Hays?

  Personally, I would, I would, you know, take my home. I'd, I'd get really thick windows, ideally lead paint in the whole home, you know?

• 36:07John Coogan?

  You want the lead paint? Just love the lead paint.

• 36:10Jordi Hays?

  And I'd bring the birds inside.

• 36:12John Coogan?

  No, I got an alternative theory. If you got drag racers racing down your, your, your quiet, uh, bird infested street, uh, you gotta go wily coyote mode. You gotta put out a fake tunnel that out of bricks, paint it with some lead paint, maybe. Uh, the fake tunnel, the drag racer smashes into the bricks. They'll never be racing down your street again.

• 36:35Jordi Hays?

  Drop an anvil on there.

• 36:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. Dropping an anvil on the car. That works too.

• 36:39Jordi Hays?

  Well, you're gonna like this one, John.

• 36:42John Coogan?

  Tell me, tell me what we got.

• 36:43Jordi Hays?

  Daniel Hanson says, first, I'd like to see a dishwasher with racks that can be raised, making it easier for tall people to load and unload them.

• 36:51John Coogan?

  Literally a thing that exists. My dishwasher has that functionality.

• 36:56Jordi Hays?

  Can you get it? Can you get it to six, eight though?

• 36:59John Coogan?

  No, it doesn't go up that high, but you can adjust it up.

• 37:01Jordi Hays?

  But wouldn't that be nicer if it was at eye level for you and you could just?

• 37:04John Coogan?

  I guess for the bottom rack, if it, if it elevated. Yeah. This is, this is, this is a contraption. This is an invention. I, I, I, I agree. I like this. Uh, and then glare, some smart glass for windshields that will tint itself in the spot where the sun or reflection hits it at high intensity. That's very cool, very niche. I like this. Seems very difficult to do. There are some electrochromatic, uh, windows. Have you seen, is it Porsche or maybe a Lamborghini that has it where you can, you can twist a knob and it will progressively shade and, and tint certain sections of the glass. The Rivian, which, uh, the Rivian team sent me to demo this week, which has been a lot of fun, um, has an electrochromatic

• 37:49John Coogan?

  sun or moon roof, I guess, because it doesn't open. So it's a moon roof and you can change the tint, but only for the whole thing, not selectively. There are now cars that allow you to do basically stripes, like every other one. If you want half chrome, half tint, I suppose. Um, seems a little bit of a neat.

• 38:06Jordi Hays?

  I have a funny dynamic with my daily where the Uh, the, the material like to my right, like down and to the right from the steering wheel is like very like glossy plastic.

• 38:23John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 38:23Jordi Hays?

  And so anywhere between like two and four PM, the light just hits it and just goes into your eyes.

• 38:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:30Jordi Hays?

  And I, I just, every time I think I'll put, I'll have to like, take like a shirt and just cover it.

• 38:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 38:36Jordi Hays?

  I'm thinking like.

• 38:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. If you had like millions of nanomachines that can reconfigure the structure of the, of the armrest at a particular time to balance the light slightly differently, that would be the easy solution.

• 38:49Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 38:50John Coogan?

  That would be the simple solution.

• 38:51Jordi Hays?

  Nano bots.

• 38:52John Coogan?

  I love, I love.

• 38:52Jordi Hays?

  Wait, we have to talk about the Rivian team because they sent you this, this demo unit to try.

• 38:57John Coogan?

  R1X.

• 38:57Jordi Hays?

  And they said.

• 38:58John Coogan?

  Quad motor.

• 38:58Jordi Hays?

  It's a demo unit, so drive it as fast as you want. You can roll it.

• 39:02John Coogan?

  You do whatever you want.

• 39:02Jordi Hays?

  You can roll it if you want.

• 39:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:04Jordi Hays?

  Like it's no big deal.

• 39:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:05Jordi Hays?

  Just like really enjoy the car to the fullest.

• 39:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:07Jordi Hays?

  I was pretty surprised.

• 39:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:08Jordi Hays?

  That they said that.

• 39:09John Coogan?

  That's great. It's actually an amazing car. I like it. Uh, the self-driving feature, deeply underrated. My latest hot take is that, uh, self-driving technology is commoditizing as fast as LLM, as LLM technology and that, uh, companies that take it seriously and actually prioritize it. Uh, it is not some insane, uh, insane tech breakthrough that cannot be, uh, implemented in other vehicles. It in fact can be implemented in other vehicles, just like we've seen Chipotle get a chat bot. Uh, we will see every car be autonomous. It will not be the domain of a single company. Um, funniest thing about this, you got someone who's asking for just a dishwasher that's a little bit taller. You've got somebody who's asking for a smart spatula.

• 39:53John Coogan?

  And then you have Nolan Williams who says, I would like to see significant developments in cancer and longevity drugs. You're sitting there, you're going around with the Wall Street Journal and, uh, and you're like, oh, like, what did you ask for? Like.

• 40:07Jordi Hays?

  Smart spatula.

• 40:09John Coogan?

  Smart spatula. I was like, what did you ask for? Like. Longer lives.

• 40:12Jordi Hays?

  Life extension.

• 40:13John Coogan?

  Curing cancer. You're like, what? I didn't know. I didn't know it was that type of question. He says, longer lives mean longer runway for brilliant people to bring forth their own innovations and pass on their knowledge. Wow, Noel Williams, really, really great answer. Early detection. In the next 20 years, I would like to see how new tech and AI-driven diagnostics will improve cancer detection. This is definitely happening. Clement Lee from Atlanta. We are on the right track. A focus on seniors. I would like to see something address the risk of falls. I've seen a couple of things like this. Different devices that you can put in your home that detect falls either while you're wearing the device. It detects the motion. I think the Apple Watch has a device, has a feature for this. But I saw another, I think it was a YC company that had essentially a smart speaker that

• 40:57John Coogan?

  could detect a fall in a house. Very, very cool. Robotic home aids, robots that are capable of performing home healthcare, very similar to the chef, but obviously for someone who has multiple disabilities. Matthew Weed here from Colorado Springs.

• 41:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's gotta be, if, for anyone that's older and has been seeing like the humanoid form factor for decades now, and then now there's actually like a bunch of startups like, you know, that are, that are investing billions of dollars into doing it. They're still probably like, yeah, it's just never gonna happen.

• 41:32John Coogan?

  I like, I like these. Michelle from Canton, Ohio says, what do I wish for? A house that never needs dusting. I know, ain't gonna happen. And then there's someone else who says, Donna Helper, True Dumber here, says, what tech innovations would I like to see? None. We have too much tech. Keep it real. Very good. Anyway, there's a whole bunch more, but you can go and read them. Let's move on to other stories in the news. We have our next guest joining in just a minute, but there's a narrative violation on the timeline. We got a narrative violation, folks. David Sacks is breaking it down.

• 42:10John Coogan?

  This is from Ara Karazian, Overt Ramp, chief economist, says, "A new study of 21,559 firms in the United States finds that companies that adopt AI..." tend to grow faster following adoption. Firms making the largest AI investments grow employment by roughly 10% following adoption, while low-intensity adopters see no statistically significant change. Entry-level headcount rises 12% for high-intensity adopters. Wow, that is a lot considering that the whole narrative was this will be the end of of entry-level jobs, and that doesn't seem to be the case, at least with this study. The results counter predictions that AI adoption will lead to broad job loss.

• 42:52John Coogan?

  The study is based on observed AI spending from Ramp, card and bill pay data linked to Revelio Labs workforce records. And what's interesting here is that it's clear, especially from that Wall Street Journal article, people want more things. They want more stuff. People want more output from companies. They want cheaper things. They want more of those things, whether it's movies or entertainment or cars or smart spatulas. People want more. They want more specific things. They want more niche things. They want more mass market things. They want more affordable things. And all of that requires a lot of AI and a lot of people. And so you put them all together and you start growing your business. And that's what's happening, at least in this data.

• 43:35John Coogan?

  Well, congrats to the folks over at Ramp on a banger article that made it into the Financial Times. You'd love to see whenever something breaks loose of the Ramp Economics Blog, but you can go sign up for our Substack and subscribe to the Ramp Blog. But without further ado, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the 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 our next guest is in the waiting room. We have Zach Laberge from Omen AI, the founder and CEO. Zach, how are you doing?

• 44:07Speaker 05

  What's going on? How are you guys doing?

• 44:10John Coogan?

  Did I get your last name even remotely correct?

• 44:12Speaker 05

  No, that was perfect.

• 44:13John Coogan?

  Perfect. Wow. Let's go. Yes. Thank you. Anyway, please introduce yourself.

• 44:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm Zach, founder of OMEN AI. We do blood monitoring for mission-critical machines.

• 44:28John Coogan?

  Okay, mission-critical machines. I'm thinking data centers. What do you think?

• 44:32Speaker 05

  Yes, sir. You'd be right. We got our start in big mining machines, you know, like the big machines you see on site. That's where it takes a long time working. Where does the name come from? It's a forecast of something to happen, whether good or bad. You know, we obviously don't want our customers' machines to break. And so we like to go good Omens.

• 44:53John Coogan?

  So the lifeblood of the modern data center, there's water, there's liquid that's cooling the data center, sometimes in a closed loop, flowing around, getting cooled outside the data center, being brought in, removing the heat from the chips. What's actually in that liquid? Is it just water? Is it water and something else? And then what happens? Like, how does it get dirty if it's in a closed loop? Why doesn't it just stay clean and fresh forever? Why do you have a job? Why do you have a business?

• 45:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a great question. So it, you know, it depends the type of fluid. Normally, it's a water-based fluid with some sort of mixture of either ethylene glycol or propylene glycol. You're seeing a big shift recently towards more like, you know, safer fluids. So, you know, propylene glycol is more preferred since it's less, you know, toxic. But can you drink it? Could you have a sip?

• 45:44John Coogan?

  You can definitely vape it. Both of those are heavily used in the cigarette industry. Yeah, no joke. The whole VG-PG ratio is a big thing in the e-cigarette world. But good that we found a good use for it.

• 45:57Speaker 05

  You're basically smoking data center when you hit it.

• 46:01John Coogan?

  That's one way to put it. The other way is that this is the solution to the vape crisis, is that drive up the price of propylene glycol so that everyone's like, "Ah, I gotta quit vaping. I gotta save it for the data centers."

• 46:14Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna use that now. Every time I see someone hit a e-cigarette, it's like, oh, really? You're smoking a data center?

• 46:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway, so what happens? How does a liquid cooling system actually degrade over time? How long does it take and what's actually going on?

• 46:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, so a bunch of different things can happen in the system. You know, you see a lot of, you know, basically infrastructure wear. So, you know, when your pumps wear, your seals wear, all of that stuff starts to contaminate the liquid itself.

• 46:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 46:40Speaker 05

  And so whether it's like copper or chromium from the pipes, or we're starting to see some on get in. What also happens is like the more heat that hap- you know, and the more wear that happens to your fluid, the more it starts to break down. So you go from this very nice, like, high concentration of, you know, glycol to water, to then that starts to degrade, and then you start to get bio growth and other crap that gets in there and, you know, starts to eat your chips and, uh, you know, sit on your, in your pipes.

• 47:05John Coogan?

  Has anyone tried using beef tallow to cool a data center? I think that might be the solution. That's a real meat in the middle compromise policy position, maybe. Now, uh, what is the go to market like?

• 47:17Jordi Hays?

  Most niche, niche joke of all time.

• 47:21John Coogan?

  What is the go to market like? Thirty-one million dollars raised, there's some hyperscaler mega data centers. Do they pick up the phone for you? Can you, can you sell into them? Or are you working your way up with smaller data center providers, sort of a walk, crawl, want approach? Like, what's working?

• 47:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, we've just, we've been working with almost every, you know, kind of NeoCloud that's out there. I'm in some more violent deployment. It's been pretty crazy. I mean, you think about like nine months ago, folks were just starting to get these, you know, systems online and these clusters online for liquid cooling. And now you've started to see folks who are running dozens, maybe a hundred, hundreds of megawatts worth of, you know, liquid cooled compute. And they're starting to see failures. And so we kind of went from, hey, we're selling, and folks don't really know what the problems are, to now everybody's like, shit, we've had failures, or we're starting to see failures, our competitors are seeing failures, uh, you know, we need to adopt something.

• 48:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it's probably pretty easy to underwrite because every hour that the data center's not functioning is leaving hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars on the table. Uh, what is the actual installation process? Can you just, like, cut the pipe and then insert your device into the flow? How long does it take to install? How big is, is your solution?

• 48:35Speaker 05

  Yes, our solution just fits across the rack manifold. So we're kind of plugging in those OCP quick disconnects, adding it if you were a GPU. So it only takes a couple of minutes to install. What's great about like, you know, a cabinet is that we get power, we get, you know, network and you know, the fluids right there. Again, coming from industrials, that was not fun where you have every machine that has completely different integration. So, you know, we get to, you know, eat a lot less pain over on this side of things.

• 48:59John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. Who did the round? What are you actually going to be spending it on? Is it just staff up? Like, what is the cash conversion cycle like for the business such that, because I imagine there's a lot of cash flowing around and they might be able to just pay you upfront. How much did you raise first? Tell us, we want to hit the gong. Jordy's warmed up.

• 49:19Speaker 05

  Raised 31 million in Series A.

• 49:27John Coogan?

  We got a bigger mallet.

• 49:28Jordi Hays?

  We got a bigger mallet. One of the first, one of the first rounds with this mallet.

• 49:33John Coogan?

  31 million dollars. Is that, is that hiring scientists to iterate on the product? Is it just scale up manufacturing? What are you, what are you actually putting the money to work for?

• 49:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, it's really just growing out the team and growing on manufacturing. You know, when we raised our seed like eight months ago is basically just me, you know, working on this problem, you know, putting sensors on, on excavators. And so we've kind of gone through this interesting process of going from one to 20. And now, you know, we're going to go from 20 to 40 folks by the end of the year. And the round was mostly like just really smart data center experts. And so it was led by a fund called Nova Ventures. Really a lot of strategic value from the data center space, a big LP and their fund is Sheryl Sandberg, who is also now an investor in us. And so we're really happy to have her on board. And then we also have like CRV and a few other awesome like kind of C-suite folks from CoreWeave, Sensorwave and a lot of smart places.

• 50:28John Coogan?

  Is, oh, sorry, Jordy, you have something? I got another question. So detection is only one piece of the puzzle. Is if you detect something earlier, you detect microbial buildup or copper leaking into the into the liquid cooling cycle. What does that actually, what happens downstream of that? Is it that you swap all the water out or you go fix the root issue? Like, what is the technician's side doing with the information that you give them?

• 51:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the problem right now is like you have these monster labs that like they pull a sample from every major data center you can think of. They ship it off to their lab. And now it's like, let me wait a couple of weeks to get a result back. And normally it's pretty binary. It's like we either flush it, which, you know, is millions of dollars in downtime. I mean, you think about a loop, that's like, call it 1,000 GPUs. It takes four to five hours to flush a rack. And so now that's 5,000 GPU hours just went down, just to one rack. And so laundering it every day, you can say, okay, what are smaller chemistry changes we can make, whether it's bio shocking, whether it's adjusting the propylene glycol to water ratio. Those are all things that the CDU can do. We just can't do it right now because we have these silly lab tests.

• 51:41John Coogan?

  That's very cool.

• 51:42Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 51:43John Coogan?

  Is the business 100% US right now? What is the state of the data center build out internationally?

• 51:52Speaker 05

  We work with only US like NeoClouds to date. You know, some of these folks have projects all around the world. So we're looking at some projects in Europe that are run by a few of our partners, but it's been primarily US based. We're based in San Francisco and we have an office in Orange County right now.

• 52:08John Coogan?

  Amazing. Thank you.

• 52:10Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you.

• 52:10John Coogan?

  For coming on the show.

• 52:11Jordi Hays?

  Great progress.

• 52:12John Coogan?

  Congratulations. And we'll talk to you soon.

• 52:14Jordi Hays?

  Come back on soon.

• 52:15Speaker 05

  Thanks, sir.

• 52:15John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 52:16Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Zach.

• 52:17John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. Derek Thompson has a new newsletter out. He's breaking it down. He says, there's never been a better time to get rich working alone.

• 52:35Jordi Hays?

  Is he saying the goose is not valued?

• 52:37John Coogan?

  I think he's saying the goose is not valued.

• 52:40Jordi Hays?

  He's saying the goose is not valued?

• 52:41John Coogan?

  He says the debate about AI and jobs often breaks down into two extreme groups, both of which have an evidence problem. On the one hand are the doomers who say AI will take everyone's job, even though unemployment remains low and the unemployment rate for prime age Americans is still very high. On the other hand are the deniers whose insistence that AI is a worthless scam prevents them from seeing the many ways it's changing work and the economy broadly. If you want a strong and evidence-based take about AI and jobs, I have one for you. Quote from Derek Thompson, "There's never been a better time for workers

• 53:22John Coogan?

  to get rich by going independent. This is the golden age for tiny startups with big revenue." The evidence, charts one and two, the number of solo entrepreneurs and tiny startups is taking off. Great news. Chart three, there's rising evidence that these small firms are more likely to use AI and sell AI-related products, whether it's software consulting or design. Chart four-

• 53:44Jordi Hays?

  Is he saying that the matter's not the eggs, it's the goose itself? Is the true value is the power to keep laying eggs?

• 53:50John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 53:51Jordi Hays?

  Okay, continue. I just want to make sure I understood.

• 53:54John Coogan?

  Today's micro startups are becoming multimillion dollar firms faster and more frequently than any generation of firms that Stripe has measured. Today's article is about the rise of the solo act in the US labor force and its implications for the future of business, social life, more solo entrepreneurs, even more aloneness, and America's fiscal crisis, more pass-through firms, even less tax revenue for a revenue-starved government. Interesting. So if you have a bunch of talented people that would be earning money as doctors, but then they go in and they wind up starting a business, then yeah, maybe that's lower tax. That feels like that's further off. When I looked at cap gains rates, like even if you brought cap gains in line with ordinary income, it doesn't close the deficit gap

• 54:37John Coogan?

  whatsoever. It's such a small portion of the tax revenue base. But interesting that he's calling that out. Would love to know more about where that trend line actually converges. The interesting thing, is this a bull case for-

• 54:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't really get the pass-through. Firm's point, like you still end up paying.

• 54:55John Coogan?

  It wouldn't be, I don't know if it's pass through. It might be, so I guess in a mature C corp, the company is paying taxes and then also the employees are paying taxes. And so this is why most people don't set up a C corp if they're just a solo entrepreneur, because they don't want to pay corporate taxes and then also personal taxes on their income.

• 55:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but like one way or another, you're gonna have to.

• 55:24John Coogan?

  No, no, it's actually like double taxation. That's why you use an LLC, because you pass it through and the income that you distribute is not taxable at the corporate level.

• 55:34Jordi Hays?

  I know, but I'm saying like overall, overall, the money is being taxed one way or another. Whether it's flowing to individual.

• 55:44John Coogan?

  Currently, like a, just a meta employee, meta pays their taxes and then the meta employee pays income taxes. If that meta employee spins out, starts an LLC and then is making the same amount of money that they were making at meta, the overall number of dollars that's going to the government is lower. That's what he's identifying. Now, do I think this is a crisis just yet? It would need to go a lot further, I think, to get there. But I understand like the math that he's laying out. It is a risk factor. But is this a bull case for co-working spaces?

• 56:19John Coogan?

  The rise of solo entrepreneurship.

• 56:22Jordi Hays?

  Nothing is bullish for co-working spaces to me.

• 56:27John Coogan?

  It's rough. Why is it bad? Why has no one been able to make a good co-working space?

• 56:33Jordi Hays?

  Cause I think it's just nice to have your own space. It's the same, I mean, the same logic would be like, why don't they make an apartment building where you get a tiny little, I mean, they do do this.

• 56:47John Coogan?

  Why don't they have a pod?

• 56:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's basically like, imagine if you rented your apartment and it was actually like as big as like one.

• 56:55John Coogan?

  Why don't they make like a smaller version of a house that you can rent? That's like in a building with other like of these mini houses.

• 57:03Jordi Hays?

  I'm just saying like a 20, a 10 foot by 10 foot room that you rent and then all the amenities are.

• 57:09John Coogan?

  You would happily live in the uni shed.

• 57:13John Coogan?

  You were saying that it's the pinnacle of lifestyle.

• 57:16Jordi Hays?

  I did think the picture of it in stores looked cool.

• 57:20John Coogan?

  But it needed a slight.

• 57:23Jordi Hays?

  But the difference there is like that shed on the right property would be very cool.

• 57:28John Coogan?

  That's true. That's true.

• 57:29Jordi Hays?

  But but the property is a sort of an amenity.

• 57:33John Coogan?

  Uh, yes, but, uh, people don't feel that way about going into the office. They don't feel like, oh, this is a coworker. Like, people feel worse about a coworking space than they do. I like your your sentiment is correct. Many people feel this way about coworking spaces that they are unproductive or annoying. But people don't feel that way about going to a a campus with a bunch of buildings and a bunch of even like cubicles or like desks that are pretty close.

• 57:57Jordi Hays?

  Shared.

• 57:58John Coogan?

  Shared.

• 57:59Jordi Hays?

  Efforts.

• 58:00John Coogan?

  But it's everyone's on the same team.

• 58:01Jordi Hays?

  Shared culture.

• 58:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. So you need to create a kiretsu of every company in the in the coworking space potentially. I don't know. We'll figure it out. But fortunately, we have our next guest from Etched in the waiting room. We're very excited for the launch of this company. I did an interview. Gavin, uh, what was that, two years ago or something like that? You were laying out the the idea for this company very early on. You made a ton of progress. Take us through the story. Begin at the beginning. Introduce yourself first.

• 58:36Speaker 06

  Well, I'm Gavin. I'm the CEO and one of the co-founders of Etched. We are building a rack scale inference hardware.

• 58:43Speaker 06

  And what that means is that we're building the full system. That is chips, boards, platforms, racks and clusters, as well as, of course, software. And importantly, the production lines.

• 58:56John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 58:56Speaker 06

  To build those things at scale.

• 58:58John Coogan?

  So the original viral soundbite that got so much attention around your company was the idea that you were going to bake the train. You were all in on the transformer. You said, AI will advance, but the transformer is here to stay. That architecture will be here to stay. And so we are going to fully commit to the transformer and we're going to sort of etch that into the chip. How real is that today? Has that that thesis feels like it's been borne out very well, but it feels like you've added a lot of new strategies to the portfolio. How are you thinking about the the the bet that you made two years ago?

• 59:38Speaker 06

  We looked at a lot of early research directions and we realized the key things that models need are way more compute and a way faster memory. If you think about inference, there's two key parts, pre-fill and decode. For pre-fill, it's a compute-bound problem. You need to have more flops, more operations per second on each of your chips. And on our GPU, the bottom line is actually thermals. You can't really run a GPU at more than around 50% of what it could theoretically do, or it'll melt. So we're introducing a new technology today called low voltage inference to try to solve this problem. And what that is, is you bring the voltage of the chip down dramatically, which allows

• 1:00:22Speaker 06

  us to have way, way better efficiency in terms of how much power is drawn per unit of math and thus fit way, way more flops onto the chip.

• 1:00:30John Coogan?

  Why, pausing there, why can't you super-cool the chips? Liquid nitrogen or dry ice or something to make it colder so that you can run it at 100% power?

• 1:00:43Speaker 06

  It's a great question. If you look on the internet, there's some videos of folks trying to super overclock CPUs, using these things on them. The problem is you actually can't go a whole lot above where they're meant to operate. For example, original CPUs can go ahead and do 4, 4.5 gigahertz. I think the world record's on the order of 8, 9 gigahertz with the liquid hydrogen at helium. And the problem is you have to get the heat actually out of the chip. That you can't physically go touch the resistors with your liquid nitrogen. You have to go ahead and go through the silicon itself and that by itself has a good deal of thermal resistance. Unfortunately, there's no way around it. You have to solve the power problem to want to run inference.

• 1:01:25John Coogan?

  So low voltage and then the other side of the equation. Take us through that.

• 1:01:29Speaker 06

  Well, for decode, it's all about bandwidth. And it's not just bandwidth on a chip, but bandwidth across your cluster. And that's why we have this technology, what we call cluster scale memory. It reduces the amount of time it takes to communicate from one chip to another dramatically. And as a result, we can go use all of our HBM and HBM bandwidth and SRAM and SRAM bandwidth and our scale-up domain as a single coherent pool. And that means if you're a user, you can go get much faster tokens per second speed is while still keeping your costs low.

• 1:02:06Jordi Hays?

  How are you and the team dealing with various bottlenecks across the supply chain?

• 1:02:13John Coogan?

  How did you get TSMC to work with you as a startup?

• 1:02:17Speaker 06

  TSMC has been a fantastic partner to us. We are so, so grateful. And one of the great things about them is they're very technical. You can just sit down and say, hey, we believe this will be a big market for these reasons. And we need your help to figure out how to go co-design transistors that can run at a much lower voltage. And that was a particularly challenging piece. As you bring the voltage down, manufacturing gets way, way tougher. We would not have been able to do it without a great fab partner.

• 1:02:48John Coogan?

  Where else are there bottlenecks right now that you're experiencing?

• 1:02:53Speaker 06

  I think all across the chip supply chain, there has to be much more built out. People don't realize how big of a market interference is going to be. Right now, only a couple million people have access to the frontier models. And those are going to have to get deployed to eight billion people across the globe. And that's not even counting AI agents that exist already and will exist in the future. There need to be way, way more tokens produced. And that requires both much bigger assembly lines, many more factories, and some new technology.

• 1:03:26John Coogan?

  Two years ago, you predicted that AI would not kill everyone within two years. You were correct about your prediction. How are you feeling about the, the general prospect of doom?

• 1:03:43Speaker 06

  I mean, I don't understand it. I think right now is an incredibly exciting time to see all the breakthroughs that are getting made. And it's like the unit distance conjecture, stuff I learned about in college. And to see that now get cracked by an AI model, man, what a time to be alive. And we are still so early. Models will keep getting smarter.

• 1:04:07Speaker 06

  Man, I could not be more excited for the moment right now.

• 1:04:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. So what is the?

• 1:04:13Jordi Hays?

  Why was, why was like now the time to come out of stealth? You clearly have had no issues getting, getting customers. Sounds like there's a billion dollar pipeline that you're working through. But what, what made you decide to, to talk about the business today? And, and what are you hoping to get out of this, this little media tour?

• 1:04:39Speaker 06

  All about talent. I really strongly believe that our company's best asset is the people we've been able to hire. And I'll give a couple of examples. Look at our platform team. Around half of them are from Nvidia. If you look at the VP responsible for designing that thing behind me, that used to go run Nvidia's HDX and DGX programs. That made up most of their revenue for a hopper and Blackwall. And people like that should move the needle so much more in business, especially in a hard space like semiconductors.

• 1:05:12Speaker 06

  And not to mention, we're now working on our roadmap. Finally, I have Gen one. If you want to go do multiple generations in parallel and take really big ambitious tech bets, you need the best of the best.

• 1:05:26John Coogan?

  Are you a car?

• 1:05:32Speaker 06

  A car?

• 1:05:33John Coogan?

  Are you a car? There's a debate around whether modern, large chip companies are interchangeable with one another. Whether the moats around the software.

• 1:05:45Jordi Hays?

  Like if you have a logistics business, you can buy trucks from multiple vendors.

• 1:05:51John Coogan?

  I can get a new car tomorrow. In fact, I am demoing a new car right now. I got in it. I connected my phone over the Bluetooth and it works just like any other commodity product. That has not been the pitch in semiconductors for years. For years, we've been told about moats, about how complex the software is, how hard it is to write efficient software that runs. On a particular chipset that you had to be all in on one ecosystem. And with the advent of agentic coding and insanely high rewards for figuring out how to run on other ASICs or other other chipsets. It feels like chip companies are becoming more car like.

• 1:06:34John Coogan?

  How do you think about your mote as you go into the future?

• 1:06:38Speaker 06

  Well, I would say Toyota and Ferrari are not the same thing. If you look at the speed gap there, you see what? A two X. And I think chips similarly is very, very meritocratic. If you're able to go up and be faster, you can go command a huge premium, just like the fastest cars can. The difference here, the way cars work under the hood is very similar. There are no more tenneccity that you had in cars. I was thinking chips, over the next couple of years, there's going to be a lot more technical innovation. And I'm very excited to go ahead and show the world, not just the current gen, what the roadmap for these things looks like.

• 1:07:19Speaker 06

  We believe we can go push low voltage inference and cluster scale memory much further and get even bigger unlocks here.

• 1:07:26Jordi Hays?

  So next time you get that question, say, I'm not a car, I'm a Ferrari.

• 1:07:31John Coogan?

  Doesn't make any sense.

• 1:07:33John Coogan?

  So, so is the source of

• 1:07:34Jordi Hays?

  Makes perfect sense, John.

• 1:07:36John Coogan?

  It doesn't make sense.

• 1:07:38John Coogan?

  Is the, is the source of, of, of strength, is the reason that you will have positive margins in the future? Intellectual property, trade secrets, patents? Like, what is the shape of owning that technology and not just being copied and commoditized by other chip companies?

• 1:07:57Speaker 06

  I think it just comes down to, those things matter. We of course do trade secrets and patents, but you need to build a lot of products. And you have to go out and have really great economics as well. Being faster isn't enough. You have to go be able to do that at a price people can afford. You see folks stretched thin today. And that's why when we think about doing the thing, we want to go do the whole hard thing. That means building not just the chip, but the board, the platform, the rack, the cluster, and especially the production.

• 1:08:29John Coogan?

  What is the last AI innovation or product development that has updated you on your strategy, if anything? I'm thinking about the transformer-based LLM, obviously a huge moment. But then we got diffusion models and image models. We got agentic software that requires CPUs and other memory constraints. You got reasoning models. Has there been any development where you've either said, I'm glad we're on the path we're on and we need to double down on that, or we need to slightly adjust our strategy to deliver the best performance for the latest and greatest use case?

• 1:09:10Speaker 06

  Well, the thing that's been the most exciting for me, I've been seeing the models get so big, get so big and demand be so large.

• 1:09:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:18Speaker 06

  When you think about economies of scale, it always comes down to how much is there to go serve? And the market's relatively small and justified small factory, but not some gigantic mega cluster. And with what we're seeing right now, with these many, many trillion parameter models, with these quadrillion token demands that we're seeing that are increasing every month, there has never been a better time to go ahead and invest in those economies of scale.

• 1:09:50John Coogan?

  It's great news. Last question. The customer, are you focused on serving hyperscalers, the frontier models, Neo clouds, open source models, all of the above? How do you think about that?

• 1:10:04Speaker 06

  All of the above. What we want to go out and do is build tech that you can go ahead and see that'll make your tokens faster and your tokens cheaper. And that is working with the full stack.

• 1:10:16John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations.

• 1:10:17Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the round. Who participated? We have a gong and it would be an honor to hit it on your behalf.

• 1:10:22Speaker 06

  Well, I am blown away at the quality of a message we've been able to get on the cap table. Folks like Jane Street, folks like

• 1:10:32Speaker 06

  folks like

• 1:10:35Speaker 06

  yeah, something.

• 1:10:41John Coogan?

  It is, it is a very interesting group. I mean, obviously, a lot of, a lot of traditional venture capital firms that focus on technology.

• 1:10:49Jordi Hays?

  I was, I was ready to do one hit for Jane Street, one for HRT, one shift for two Sigma, one for Jump, one for Scott, one for Peter Thiel, one for Hinton.

• 1:11:00Jordi Hays?

  Scott Wu, Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Zach Dell.

• 1:11:05John Coogan?

  Absolutely.

• 1:11:06Jordi Hays?

  I think the people on the table are fantastic.

• 1:11:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:09Jordi Hays?

  Maki, Kareem.

• 1:11:11John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:11:11Jordi Hays?

  This is, I, the best, best party round of the year. You really put together a good list.

• 1:11:15John Coogan?

  It's a good cello poster. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come shower with us.

• 1:11:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so great to meet you and congratulations to the whole team on the launch. Looking forward to the next conversation.

• 1:11:25John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:11:25Jordi Hays?

  My pleasure, guys. Thanks for having me.

• 1:11:27John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:11:28Jordi Hays?

  Great. Cheers.

• 1:11:29John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. You know who won't be raising capital at the New York Stock Exchange anytime soon? These fly-by-night peptide companies. Because the peptide battle has commenced, says Jessica Adams. FDA recommends against adding all seven peptides under review to the 503A bulks list. Is that for bulking up? Is that a list of things that get you bulky? No, I think it's things that cannot be produced in bulk. But the FDA has, has effectively delivered a, a blow to BBC 157 for ulcerative colitis, KPV for wound healing, TB 500 for

• 1:12:13John Coogan?

  wound healing, MOT S dash C for obesity and osteoporosis, emidiltide and DSIP for opioid withdrawal, Cmax and apitalion. You can tell I do not know my peptides, by the way I'm pronouncing these. Anyway, a lot of people are fans of this stuff. Sorry if this is a dark day for you. A lot of people are in the camp that the FDA serves a functional purpose here to review these things and make sure that they are effective and safe for public health. It's a blow for them.

• 1:12:52Jordi Hays?

  Ben texted, we're just about to take all of these.

• 1:12:56Jordi Hays?

  No, yeah, a lot of people are going to be upset here. I think a lot of people would also say that this is like maybe good if, you know, there's could be some very real downsides with with any of these. I was texting with a friend in healthcare this morning. I said, what does this mean for peptides? He said, done so. And I said, can't sell anymore? He says unless RFK overrides the FDA, not legally. Then I said, but they were already in a gray area. Now they are explicitly banned? Question mark. He said, they've been banned other than research use and haven't been enforced for human use. So they've been banned,

• 1:13:39Jordi Hays?

  but there hasn't been enforcement. Justification for taking them off the ban list was to kill the gray market. A lot of people have been taking peptides from random websites online. They either don't even have active ingredients, or they're contaminated, or the, yeah, they're effectively just, just nothing. And he says, I think the real companies that are, were moving into the space net new in anticipation of this changing are in a real pickle. So, yeah, so we'll see. They now face a newly constituted pharmacy compounding advisory

• 1:14:15Jordi Hays?

  committee, making the July meeting one to watch. That will be July 23rd to 24. So, we will keep following.

• 1:14:27John Coogan?

  Well, in other good FDA news, nicotine pouches finally got MRTP, which is Modified Risk Tobacco Product. ZYN is the first one to go, and ZYN can now market and put on the label and advertise that it is better for you than cigarettes, which is such a mild claim, but it's huge for the industry. If you know what this means, it's an extremely high bar. They have to run a bunch of tests and whatnot. Every product in the category currently says, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical, but the products forever.

• 1:15:05John Coogan?

  Have not been able to say this is better for you than smoking, which is the obvious benefit that every company wants to make. They want to make that claim. There's a ton of literature out there. A lot of it's from Sweden, a lot of it's international. The FDA has to review it on a per-product basis to make sure that your particular product maps to the data, because the Sweden data that everyone points to is about snus, which is a tobacco product. It's not exactly the same as as white nicotine pouches that actually don't have tobacco in them. But anyway, the FDA has to review each one. They reviewed ZYN and they gave them the MRTP approval. It's huge news for the industry. It's very good news. It's good news for everyone, I think. Anyway, the other news is that Nvidia and Eli Lilly are building an AI lab,

• 1:15:49John Coogan?

  a $1 billion lab for drug discovery in San Francisco. Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks talks about their data advantage. Some scale biotech bioplayers are just training on public data, but there's only 4,000 ever-approved drugs. Lilly alone has 3 million failed drugs. We're learning from failure, which is interesting. So, a lot of big, a lot of big talk about the next biotech boom. There's acquisitions going on. Anthropic bought a company. There's all sorts of predictions about the impact that AI will have on bio, whether that will accrue to the labs or the biotech companies. Who knows? We'll figure it out. Maybe both, maybe everyone. Hopefully lots of consumer surplus.

• 1:16:32John Coogan?

  But we have Aaron Bali from Monogram in the living room. Let's bring him in to the team. I'll try to go. Aaron, how are you doing? What's happening?

• 1:16:43Speaker 07

  Thanks, guys. It's great to be here with you guys.

• 1:16:45John Coogan?

  Finally. To have you, finally. Long overdue. Talk about the launch today. Talk about the fundraiser. Introduce yourself a little bit. Tell us about Monogram.

• 1:16:54Speaker 07

  Okay, so I'll try to do it in a different order.

• 1:16:57John Coogan?

  Whenever you want.

• 1:16:58Speaker 07

  I'm Aaron. I guess most people know me from the two other companies I started. Udemy, the online education platform, RunPublic. Hopefully most will know it by now. I started Carbon Health.

• 1:17:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:11Speaker 07

  Being taken over to a healthcare company. And now the new company, Monogram, we have been very stealthy about it intentionally.

• 1:17:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:20Speaker 07

  Essentially, what we, like, Monogram, which we launched today, just like I asked me five minutes ago.

• 1:17:26John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:17:28Speaker 07

  Thank you. It's a general purpose.

• 1:17:35John Coogan?

  So congratulations.

• 1:17:38Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, now we can continue.

• 1:17:40Speaker 07

  Okay, so.

• 1:17:41John Coogan?

  You're on one day. Yes, continue.

• 1:17:45Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's a general purpose AI application for everyday use.

• 1:17:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:17:49Speaker 07

  But what makes a difference is with other AI applications, you usually have a chat based interface.

• 1:17:55John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:17:56Speaker 07

  You ask a question, you write some text, you get some text back.

• 1:18:00John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:18:01Speaker 07

  With Monogram, you ask something and then you get a complete visual interface back.

• 1:18:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:18:07Speaker 07

  It's essentially like a, like a, it's like when you think about computers had command line interfaces back in the eighties. And then we switched to graphical user interfaces where everything became visual, interactive. We are trying to be our, we will be the first company to do this in AI.

• 1:18:24John Coogan?

  I love it. I've been seeing glimpses of this with chat GPT images. So I wanted to know the, the rate of air conditioning in every European country. Cause there's this whole debate over France, they don't have air conditioning there. I wanted to know how France stacks up. And instead of asking for a text output, I just said, go get the data and then generate me an image, a graphic of that. Of course, it's not interactive, it's not HTML based, it could be so much richer. And people are seeing glimpses of this with vibe coding, but it hasn't come to the consumer. So I'm interested to know, have you found a beachhead? Have you found a killer use case? Like, I feel like.

• 1:19:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess assuming like, assuming every single person listening uses AI 20 times a day. You know, even if it's just casual asking questions, et cetera. What are the, what are the kind of prompts that you would traditionally take to a, a, a normal language model? That, that people should try with Monogram?

• 1:19:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:22Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:19:24Speaker 07

  First of all, like if I explain, this is one of the things that when you see it, it becomes very obvious.

• 1:19:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:31Speaker 07

  But it's hard to sometimes describe. But the big difference is we generate a visual interface response in roughly one and a half seconds. You ask a question and you immediately start seeing something, right? So it is not a do this work, make some research and get me back with a dashboard or report. It is, I ask a question, I lift my finger from the audio button. And then like in a second, you start seeing the.

• 1:19:57Jordi Hays?

  That's really cool.

• 1:19:58Speaker 07

  So what we, to be honest, we didn't know what use cases would really work with this technology best. But what we realized as like testing the application ourselves is it works best for the like very, very simple day-to-day use cases. Like I, for example, say, okay, the Oscars are live, so which movies were nominated for Oscars this year?

• 1:20:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:21Speaker 07

  And I find something to watch and maybe something from a South American director.

• 1:20:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:26Speaker 07

  Just really open-ended questions like where do I eat? Is there an in and out on my way to the airport from here?

• 1:20:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:33Speaker 07

  Right? So all like this like day-to-day questions. And then like what you realize is like, yes, like if you ask the same question to GPT, it will also ask that. Right? Behind the scenes, we are using, we are using OpenAI as well. But we do it quite a bit on top of it.

• 1:20:50Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure.

• 1:20:51Speaker 07

  To make this response very interactive, like you get information architecture rights. You get a lot of interesting visuals. And when you tap on something, you get even more information, right? So it's really just a day-to-day search, discovery, basic question. Which, that's why we actually start seeing the most like kind of enjoyment ourselves.

• 1:21:11Jordi Hays?

  Is it, uh, is so it's voice first?

• 1:21:14Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:21:15Jordi Hays?

  And talk about, talk about that. I mean, I, John, John was like such a, is such a power user of voice. Took, I was, I was a laggard, but now I don't even like to prompt without voice because I, I can get a much better result if I just talk for 20 seconds and then give it a bunch of context and then it'll give me back, you know, closer.

• 1:21:36Speaker 07

  I'll ask you this from first principles, right? So I'm a first principles person. So. Talking is a lot faster than typing, right? Roughly four or five times more information can be conveyed into audio uh per second. So, but the problem with voices, when you do voice mode, you have to, you have to listen. Listening is very slow. Listening is maybe four times slower than reading.

• 1:22:00John Coogan?

  Ah, that's interesting.

• 1:22:01Speaker 07

  But if you think about them, there's something even faster than reading. There's such a scene.

• 1:22:05Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 1:22:06Speaker 07

  So if you can, the fastest, most of it, the most like I would say frictionless experience for me with A I is voice in and then visual output back.

• 1:22:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:17Speaker 07

  Except when you have visual output, sometimes you can tap on things, right? Tapping on a card is a lot faster than saying, can you give me more details about this thing, right? So, so we support every form factor, but we design everything around audio as the primary input. Camera will be the secondary and keyboard will be an external input. They, they all work well. We really like in the output, like we, we do have some audio output, like we have a short answer. But maybe like maybe ninety percent of the information is conveyed through the visual interface. And you're getting a short answer like kind of with a text or speech back.

• 1:22:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, so cool.

• 1:22:53Jordi Hays?

  I wish I could bet on how quickly Apple tries to buy you.

• 1:22:59Jordi Hays?

  Cause I, I'd be like, I'd be like term sheet by end of week.

• 1:23:02John Coogan?

  So, yeah, I mean, the, the, you're, this is your third huge company, like, do you have, I, I, I mean, I guess it's like, where, where, where do you want to go with this? What are your aspirations? Cause you've checked a lot of the boxes on the entrepreneurship journey. Um, but then I'm also interested in like, it's not, you're not building the same business three times in a row. There are certain founders that do that very successfully and it's impressive. But uh between Udemy, Carbon and now this, uh very different companies. So what lessons, what strategies are you actually taking through the three companies? That you feel like, oh yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm running, you might not think it, but I'm running the Carbon playbook in this particular area.

• 1:23:45John Coogan?

  Or I'm running the Udemy playbook here a little bit.

• 1:23:49Speaker 07

  Hmm. So the, the, the common thing between those three companies was that. Look, what my brain gets obsessed on is, how do I make something that is complicated and has high and free barrier and make that accessible to more people?

• 1:24:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:06Speaker 07

  With Udemy, when everybody was focused on higher education, online degrees, we focused on how do I learn Photoshop? Like in a week. So it was the most mainstream of the education companies. And that's how we got a ton of success. And the difficult part was like not being overly caught up with what was hot in Silicon Valley at that time, right? With Carbon Health, when everybody was going after premium Christian healthcare, we were more focused on how do we make the healthcare that everyone can access better? And I think here, right now, all the focus on AI has been the coding agents and how to make really complex enterprise workflows work. But what I'm really obsessed on is, if I make AI a little bit easier to use,

• 1:24:51Speaker 07

  it will just benefit more people. So it's just like, again, there's not a ton overlapping, as you said. Like, I also do like a new challenge for myself. So I do like rotating things over. And I would say healthcare was difficult, so it's nice to do software only.

• 1:25:05Jordi Hays?

  Pure play consumer app. This is expert mode.

• 1:25:11John Coogan?

  It is. How are you thinking about image models, diffusion models? I saw a really cool demo for something that looked like a website, but in fact was real-time diffusion. You probably know the one I'm talking about. It looked like a sort of a beige cityscape and you could sort of zoom in and it was all being rendered in real time. Is that something you see yourself implementing in the future? Or is it a distinct, different arc of the technology tree?

• 1:25:40Speaker 07

  So the answer is yes and no. So I don't believe AI all put in pixels as the primary form factor. That sounds cool, like maybe 10, 20 years later, it might be the reality. But in the near term, like you'll want something that's more of a representation of the user interface as a layer. So I think pixels is probably not the form right output like medium. But diffusion models, I'm obsessed with. So every time a new diffusion model comes in, we say, oh, is this the day we switch from LLMs to diffusion-based models? Because that sounds like the right architecture for what we are doing.

• 1:26:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:20Speaker 07

  But they haven't been realistic enough. Like, we have been trying everything, right? So such as the way Monogram works is, there's one major model. Because when you ask a question, there is language in the interface. So you just need a language model or something model that can do language. But then there's a lot of, like, maybe 20, 30 parallel things are happening at the same time. So it's a very different agent architecture. So we do have, we have some of our own models, some fine-tuned models. But the one, like, big one, so I think eventually that the main model will be the diffusion-based, not LLM-like transformer-based. But not today. Like, I think their tech is still not good enough to be able to handle this.

• 1:27:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe in the future. Super cool, in the App Store now, iOS exclusive, Android as well. What are you thinking?

• 1:27:13Speaker 07

  It's iOS exclusive, we'll be working on verification, desktop, Android. But part of the idea here is because the entire interface is built by AI, we are just building clients.

• 1:27:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:25Speaker 07

  This will become the most cross-platform.

• 1:27:28John Coogan?

  I imagine it has to be so fast, especially in the age of vibe coding. Like, porting can, has to be so simple now. Instagram took like five years to get to Android. I imagine you have a shorter timeline, so good luck for the... Tell us about the round. Yeah, tell us about the round.

• 1:27:44Speaker 07

  So the round was led by DST and Lux. It was a 40-minute RC round.

• 1:27:51John Coogan?

  Woo! You already...

• 1:27:56John Coogan?

  You hit the gong for the launch, and you hit the gong for the round as well. It's a double-gong day. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Fantastic. Very cool, I'm super excited to play around with it. I'd love to have you back on the show and chat more soon. Have a good one. Yeah, great to see you. Thank you. Cheers. Let me tell you about Figma. If you're designing the next banger app, get in Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with Design System context. And our next guest is in the waiting room. We have Larsen Jensen from Harpoon Ventures. He's the founder and general partner. How you doing?

• 1:28:32Speaker 08

  What's up, boys? Good to see you. Thanks for having me.

• 1:28:33Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 1:28:34John Coogan?

  I'm obsessed with the portfolio. We can go into that, but introduce yourself first and get us up to speed on what the fund is doing and what the news is today.

• 1:28:44Speaker 08

  Sure. Jordy, John, great to be here. Thanks for having me. My name's Larsen Jensen. I'm the founder and GP at Harpoon Ventures, early-stage venture capital firm focused on investing in technology in the national interest of the United States and our allies when appropriate. Today, we're announcing that we raised $155 million Fund IV. So fired up for the gong. Wish I was there to see it in person.

• 1:29:08Jordi Hays?

  We wish you were here. This new mallet setup we have, it really like you just feel the full force of the gong coming right back at you.

• 1:29:15Speaker 08

  That's sick. I felt it on my end. Thanks, guys.

• 1:29:18Jordi Hays?

  Good, good. Harpoon Ventures, great name, great name.

• 1:29:23Speaker 08

  Thank you.

• 1:29:24Jordi Hays?

  Would you, if it was necessary, would you invest in a company that you was using Whale Blubber to power data centers?

• 1:29:33Speaker 08

  Is this even a question? Of course I'd do that. If it's necessary, it might be necessary. We did all the energy we can get, so let's go.

• 1:29:40Jordi Hays?

  We do. No, it's a great name.

• 1:29:42Speaker 08

  This is the show I'm on.

• 1:29:43John Coogan?

  Take us back in time. Give me a little bit of the journey to venture capital because you have a fascinating, you actually have the non-traditional background that so many VCs wish they had when they say, "I went to Stanford and then I worked at Google before becoming a venture capitalist."

• 1:29:59Speaker 08

  Lots of guys say they're an operator, you know, in the background of what operator meant, a special operator in the career that I came from.

• 1:30:06Jordi Hays?

  Insane stolen valor.

• 1:30:07Speaker 08

  It's interesting to hear. When I showed up to Silicon Valley, it was like, "Oh, I'm an operator. I'm an operator." I'm like, "I don't know. It was the same kind of operator that I was used to, but I guess different ecosystems have different terms, which is fine."

• 1:30:20John Coogan?

  So take us through it.

• 1:30:21Speaker 08

  Definitely. Sure, sure.

• 1:30:22Jordi Hays?

  The real operator should start saying like, "Yeah, I was an employee. I was an employee."

• 1:30:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, basically.

• 1:30:29Speaker 08

  That's cool, too. You know, that's cool.

• 1:30:30Jordi Hays?

  Just trade, just trade.

• 1:30:32Speaker 08

  Exactly. So yeah, grew up in the Central Valley of California. My parents are almond farmers. Went down to USC. Fortunately, was pretty good at swimming and worked pretty hard at that. Brought me to two Olympic Games, '04 and '08. I got a silver in '04, bronze in '08. '08 is where Phelps got his eight gold. So, you know, if there's anything that's common about my my trajectory is I'm sort of like a nothing compared to the people that work in the industry or in the careers that I'm in. Had to compete against guys like Phelps and Lochte and that whole generation when I was swimming. And then similarly, you know, moved into the SEAL teams thereafter. Wanted to serve my country in a different way than just serving on the playing field, but do so on the battlefield. Felt like I had the, you know, hopefully the courage, I guess we would see, some of the determination and the hard work to make it

• 1:31:16Speaker 08

  through SEAL training, which fortunately did. And then deployed in combat to Afghanistan. Had the opportunity to be an early adopter to Palantir. They told us we were an early customer, but you never really know with the government what the truth is, you know, across history. But they said we're early adopters to Palantir and I was just mind blown by the capability. And that gave me the tech bug. So decided to apply to Stanford and if I got in, I'd move up to the to the Valley. And if I didn't, I'd do another rotation in the SEAL teams. Fortunately got in. So you did go to Stanford? Yeah. Traditional background.

• 1:31:50Jordi Hays?

  Traditional background. Traditional background. Wait, I gotta ask, how was?

• 1:31:56Speaker 08

  I was a DEI hire up at Stanford at the time.

• 1:31:59Jordi Hays?

  How was, how was Bud's as like an Olympic medalist swimmer?

• 1:32:05Speaker 08

  Dude, it was fucking hard. It was really hard.

• 1:32:08Jordi Hays?

  Okay, but was there, was there, was there any points where you're like, ah, it's kinda easy? I feel like I'm just kinda.

• 1:32:13Speaker 08

  Well, yeah, the swimming was, was a piece of cake. Like, you know, as you can imagine. I was literally the fastest, I mean, still the fastest American of all time in the 400 meter freestyle. So if it wasn't easy for me, we'd have a real problem. So it was, it was, it was easy. I don't say that to brag. I'm just saying you asked the question like, you know, was, was it, was it easier or hard?

• 1:32:30Jordi Hays?

  That's what I, no.

• 1:32:31Speaker 08

  But I got my ass kicked like everything else. So what was the hardest part then? For me, it was boats, boats on heads, which if you've seen the videos, you're like carrying these like inflatable boat rafts and running around. And stuff like that. It looks like they'd be in a background, like a backyard pool. Trust me, they're not. These things are a couple hundred pounds and you're carrying those on your head for weeks on end. In the case of Hell Week, you pretty much always have them on your head. And so that was brutal. So anything that was impact oriented, I'm still feeling today. I think a lot of guys are. I mean, when you're loaded up and rucking around the mountains, I mean, you're doing so in full kit. Wearing, you know, 200 pounds almost of gear on top of where you're already, whatever your existing body weight is. So it's brutal. And, um, you know, I was definitely not the best at it. Wasn't the best swimmer.

• 1:33:16Speaker 08

  Wasn't the best SEAL, but was fortunate to be part of the community. That's awesome.

• 1:33:20John Coogan?

  So take us from Stanford to venture. What were some of the first investments? What was the strategy back then? Where'd the money come from?

• 1:33:26Speaker 08

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my venture career sort of started pre-Stanford. I got lucky and got an internship at Andreessen Horowitz, uh, which was awesome. Great learning opportunity to go there pre-GSB. Similarly did between years over at Lightspeed of the GSB. And then after Lightspeed had the opportunity, or after the GSB had the opportunity to go to Lightspeed for about a year. I just really had this, like any crazy founder might have, like this harebrained idea or a gap in the market. Something you're so passionate about, you can't sleep without. And that was me in terms of investing in technology for the national interest. And at the time, there really wasn't a fever for this. Now there certainly is, thank God. But at the time, there really wasn't. And I sort of had this idea that's maybe not that novel. But I effectively said, hey, what if we could create a private sector IncuTel?

• 1:34:11Speaker 08

  Wouldn't that be pretty cool? And that's what I set out to do. So fortunately pitched the GPs and the team over at my former two employers, uh, at Andreessen and Lightspeed. And they're our first LPs ever in Harpoon to sort of go out there and start taking it, uh, taking that mission to the market. So that's what we've been doing. Um, when, back in 2018, when we started, the market was obviously very, very different. Most of what we did was very much, you know, known as dual use. At the time, that meant very much enterprise technology. And we would try to work with them to help them break into a government market that these founders didn't really know existed. But, you know, we and our team knew existed from our, you know, lived experience, I guess you could say, uh, for cybersecurity tools or.

• 1:34:51Speaker 08

  Next generation data infrastructure, what have you for autonomous autonomy platforms. All the things that people sort of like know today are applicable to the government market. But back then it was super faux pas, man. It was crazy. I was, I felt like I was gonna get laughed out of town. It almost was. And so now we're doing much more defense focused things because I think the founder ecosystem provides for it. I think that we've evolved along with the ecosystem. At the time, there really wasn't very much national security or government focused. You know, companies or engineers or talent. Now there's a ton. I jokingly say that I, go ahead, go ahead.

• 1:35:29Jordi Hays?

  Go for it, go for it.

• 1:35:30Speaker 08

  No, I was gonna say, I used to go to these conferences that the government would put on, you know, in and around the Pentagon and Crystal City and all these places. As a venture guy, it would be like nobody there. There'd be like no like high horsepower entrepreneurs. There'd be no other venture firms. Man, what am I doing going to these places? There's nothing for me to invest in. Ultimately now that's all changed and I'm so happy about that. We're going, we're celebrating our nation's 250th birthday this coming weekend. Hopefully all of you are celebrating the fourth in traditional good fashion. And you know, I think that now to see the ecosystem, what it is, is just tremendous. I'm super fired up about it.

• 1:36:06Jordi Hays?

  Where, how are you thinking about early stage defense? Like, are you still, are there still pockets of, of white space and opportunity?

• 1:36:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like the boom of.

• 1:36:18Jordi Hays?

  Or do you really need to be doing like hardcore R and D like? Like, like it seems like the last five years, there was an opportunity to do hardcore R and D, like actually new technology. Or just like deliver a capability that's necessary and kind of leverage existing technologies and just deliver a great product for a need. Whereas it feels like there, there's less and less like, you know, we have a bunch of great maritime focused companies now doing kind of every major category. So does a new company needs to do like, you know, real R and D and come up with something totally novel? Or, or compete with existing or are there still, is there still like pockets where you're like, there needs to be?

• 1:37:03Speaker 08

  I think both are true. Like, one, you know, I want the discombobulator. I want to invest in that. I don't know exactly what it is, but Trump came out with the discombobulator and said that that's what helped in Venezuela. And like, I want to find the next version of that and I want to back that technology. Similarly, I have a buddy of mine that we might need some R and D on that. Also, I have a buddy of mine who I went to OCS with, I'll keep his name off the tape here, just, you know, but he testified to Congress on the UAP phenomenon, which I know you guys are deep in as well. And I texted him not too long ago and I'm like, hey, man, we got some alien tech. I'm ready to go. All the rest of this stuff is like, I don't know, not really doing it for me. And so we had a quick call, but, you know, didn't end up going anywhere. So if you've got any founders out there that are, you know, want to reverse engineer.

• 1:37:44Speaker 08

  Listen, I got a signed poster of Bob Lazar in my office. I'm super fired up. I go deep on this. So

• 1:37:50John Coogan?

  You Jesse Michaels guy?

• 1:37:52Speaker 08

  Yeah, listen, I dive into anything you'll give me. So send me some books. Send me whatever you got. I'm ready. But like, ultimately, I think that there's plenty of meat on the bone for other novel capabilities to come up and get funded. I think for us as a venture firm, I used to superimpose my view of what should be created on the ecosystem. And we've effectively stopped doing that and just tried to be, you know, good judges of founders that are high octane and have a huge vision. And when we're surprised and we believe them, we want to back them as early as possible, which is another evolution of the firm. When we started, I don't think we had the brand, the reputation, the credibility, or the credibility to credibly lead some of these, these rounds. Now I think we do. And we launched our Black Flag Accelerator,

• 1:38:35Speaker 08

  which is helping us go earlier, creep into doing more pre-seeds and seed stage investments, where we've led a lot through that. And so I think the future is bright for entrepreneurs, you know, chipping away at a variety of different problems.

• 1:38:46John Coogan?

  You're wearing a flag on your hat. It's the Stars and Stripes, beautiful, American, patriotic flag. Black flag, I associate with pirates. Are they on my team? Why, why black flag?

• 1:38:56Speaker 08

  Well, I should have wore my other hat. So I got the Jolly Roger over the red, white, and blue. I should have wore that one for you guys, you know, figuring that you'd bring that up.

• 1:39:05John Coogan?

  Are they on our team? Have we recruited the pirates? How does it work?

• 1:39:08Speaker 08

  Yeah, we recruited them. They're on our team now.

• 1:39:11John Coogan?

  Okay, I got it.

• 1:39:12Speaker 08

  This is an American pirate.

• 1:39:14John Coogan?

  I like it.

• 1:39:15Speaker 08

  Patriot pirate hybrid. I mean, if you look, I mean, we thought about this for a while. And if you look at all the squadron patches that are out there for aircraft squadrons, you know, various SEAL Teams, Special Operations, etc. Like, they all have some pirate themed, you know, insignia. So it's actually not all that. Believe it or not, we were pretty thoughtful about the name Harpoon and the name Black Flag. We've actually thought about the pros and cons and some people might not like it, but you can't, you can't win over everybody.

• 1:39:41John Coogan?

  I like.

• 1:39:41Jordi Hays?

  Tell us, how did you, what is your overall take as an Olympian on the Enhanced Games? How did you process it? If, you know, if this was like before your venture career and you were done with the, you know, Olympics, would you have considered going in there? I want, I want your whole take.

• 1:40:00Speaker 08

  You know, I, I should have tracked it more closely. You guys are probably much better read on this than I am. But on the swimming, I, you know, I believe somebody entered that wasn't enhanced at all and still won and did a best time, I believe in the backstroke. Um, which is interesting. And I saw some jokes on Twitter about people saying like, oh, these guys are already enhanced. You know, they don't need to be even more enhanced. And I think that's just a lot of BS. Like, you know, we get drug tested so much, it's insane. We could, we could go a whole offline segment on, you know, what it's like to have the drug tester show up and, you know, watch you go to the restroom, take your blood and all of this stuff unannounced. You have to fill out where you're going to be for literally a quarter in advance, down to the day. And if you miss three tests in a row, it's the same as being, you know, being a positive test.

• 1:40:43Speaker 08

  So, um, you know, I don't know. I mean, I think that you might not be attracting to the Enhanced Games the right athletes right now. I don't know else to put it. I don't know if they're the gold medalists, silver medalists, bronze medalists that are showing up.

• 1:40:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so it's basically like a gold medalist is still going to outperform the like number eight guy who's taken.

• 1:41:05Speaker 08

  Totally. I would have whooped those guys asses for sure. Like, I mean, it's not just me. It's like anybody who's like who medals. Anybody who medals, like there's a big drop off between like meddling and sort of finaling and then not finally. And so, uh, you know, I would have sort of welcomed it. I think an interesting aspect of the Enhanced Games would be like, let's, let's load these guys up and put them head to head with, you know, whoever the modern day, like Katie Ledecky. Let's see if they can beat Katie Ledecky.

• 1:41:30John Coogan?

  I mean, there, that was part of the interesting. Production of the enhanced games was that it did tell you something about the real games and that and that there is a gap there and that was in an if you look at it as like a a science experiment, it was a cool experiment that we got to run and I think we all learned a little bit from it, even even if it wasn't this, oh yeah, obviously with the with the drug regimens, they just blow everyone out of the water, which is sort of what some people expected, but that wasn't really the message of that campaign.

• 1:41:57Speaker 08

  I know, it was a really cool experiment and great, great to see.

• 1:41:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, anyway, thank you so much.

• 1:42:01Speaker 08

  You're the man. Where are you based? San Diego, California, but I'm on the road, I'm actually in New York right now, but you know, I'm back in San Diego quite frequently.

• 1:42:09Jordi Hays?

  All right, Fund Five.

• 1:42:10John Coogan?

  Come on.

• 1:42:11Jordi Hays?

  Come on live.

• 1:42:12Speaker 08

  We'll come back, boys. Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:42:15John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Our next guest is Ricky Rosa from Oasis Devices. Ricky, how you doing? Welcome to the show. How you doing? Can you hear us? Introduce yourself.

• 1:42:38Speaker 09

  I can, can you hear me?

• 1:42:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, all good.

• 1:42:41Jordi Hays?

  Can you hear us over the drumming and the air horn?

• 1:42:43John Coogan?

  It's a very chaotic entrance. You get hot dropped in here, you're trying to drink your coffee in peace and all of a sudden it's welcome to the UltraDome. But, welcome to the UltraDome. Introduce yourself.

• 1:42:54Speaker 09

  Awesome, thank you guys. So I'm Ricky Rosa, I'm the founder and CEO of Oasis Devices and we're, we make a smart ring to try to replace the keyboard. What we're interested in is the next platform of computing. Are our smartphones the final form? I don't know. I mean, I don't think anybody knows. But once you take that as your baseline.

• 1:43:14Jordi Hays?

  I'm praying every day. I want to throw it in the ocean.

• 1:43:19Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah, you and me, brother. So, so what, what, once you take that as your baseline, you can start to explore.

• 1:43:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:26Speaker 09

  But what we noticed is that you can only ask people to take one step from current and it is very easy to get, you know, tangled in, in, you know, crazy new platforms and and devices and and that sort of thing, but.

• 1:43:42Speaker 09

  You can only you can only ask people to change things so much. You cannot ask them to change the entire workflow overnight. We've spent years in the idea maze trying to figure out, you know, what would be a good use cases for for smart rings and and and and different things. And what we landed is private dictation because what rings are really useful for is bringing them very close to your mouth and whispering. And it just so happens that we also have a tripod in our ring that allows you to edit. We spent a lot of time making sure that it has it had the resolution for navigation, for smart glasses. But smart glasses are, you know, a little bit slower to take off.

• 1:44:27Speaker 09

  So we we channeled all of that development into editing what you see on screen. And so we made it work with Whisper Flow. The founder tonight is an angel investor in our company. And so that's what we're launching today.

• 1:44:41John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 1:44:42Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 1:44:43John Coogan?

  What what does good look like in terms of churn and retention for a new device? Because I imagine that the product looks great. I imagine it will work and I imagine people will keep it on for a long time and use it. But the baseline is so low. I mean, we had an Apple Vision Pro in the studio this morning and the team was trying it out and like laughing and enjoying the demo. But that product has to have like 99% churn and same thing with most VR headsets. A lot of hardware companies, like if you can just find that smiling curve of, you know, the conversion rate of a few people that come on.

• 1:45:24John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about actually getting people over that that goal, that honeymoon period where they try something?

• 1:45:30Jordi Hays?

  Well, I'll tell you, I'll tell you why like I like this approach is you're one utilizing a device that is already a daily product in the workspace.

• 1:45:41Jordi Hays?

  Utilizing like audio transcription, which like Whisperflow, I was at dinner with a buddy last night and he's showing us like his whole Whisperflow setup.

• 1:45:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:48Jordi Hays?

  He's obsessed obsessed with it. And then you're utilizing the ring, which is also a form factor that people are used to by now, that way, or a ring is proven.

• 1:45:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:57Jordi Hays?

  And so you'd like, take that combination of like, people want to be transcribing more.

• 1:46:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:01Jordi Hays?

  They're using their computers all day long. You deliver it in a form factor that is like, you know, nor, you know, understood already that people are comfortable with.

• 1:46:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:08Jordi Hays?

  And I think that's a recipe for potentially a hit. But again, yes, the, the sort of median new consumer electronic device has like 0% retention.

• 1:46:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:19Jordi Hays?

  So it's still very hard.

• 1:46:21Speaker 09

  Well, I will say, I use the Vision Pro every night. I don't know if that helps or hurts my credibility.

• 1:46:25John Coogan?

  I'm the only one. Yeah, yeah, no, I love, I love new hardware, but, but I, I, you know, I admit that there's a, that it's always hard to get people on. But yes, is, is it important that this is both effectively a peripheral for a daily driven device and then also a fashion accessory? Is that important that it's both?

• 1:46:45Speaker 09

  Yes. Uh, so the way that we think about retention is, and this is why we struggle so much in years past is, we really needed to find a use case that was a must have, not a next to have.

• 1:46:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:57Speaker 09

  Right? And so with Whisperflow, you know, you can speak loudly to your computer, but it just so happens that in, you know, crowded offices, um, coffee, coffee shops, those are public environments, you can't speak out loud. And so it really helps to have, to have a, a peripheral that you can speak quietly to. Once we move to other platforms like iOS and, and glasses eventually, then the fashion accessory or the fashion point starts to become more important.

• 1:47:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:35Speaker 09

  Does that make sense?

• 1:47:36John Coogan?

  It also feels like, I don't know, um, because you can wear AirPods and you can talk to them.

• 1:47:45John Coogan?

  Can you not whisper to AirPods? Because even if you can, even if it's the same functional device, it's way different aesthetics, talking into a ring and having earbuds in that feel like, okay, this person's like out in their own world. But I imagine with the microphone a lot closer, the ring allows you to speak at even a lower level and produce a higher fidelity transcript. Is that correct?

• 1:48:09Speaker 09

  Correct. Yes. Yes.

• 1:48:10John Coogan?

  Okay. That's cool.

• 1:48:13Speaker 09

  The ring outperforms AirPods, but also it has the modality of touch.

• 1:48:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:17Speaker 09

  Which allows you to do more, yeah, it allows you to do, to edit the things that you see on screen. It allows you to navigate. It allows you to completely interact with AI and your computer and your workflows without over touching the keyboard.

• 1:48:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:30Speaker 09

  And this point is important because what we think is that if we can, it's a big if, but if we can get people to interact with laptops without touching them, then the output piece of it becomes a little bit more fluid.

• 1:48:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:45Speaker 09

  Now it's a smaller ask to ask people to put the display in glasses or display in another device. Right? So, but you really need to solve the input part first. And that's kind of what we're going after at the moment.

• 1:49:00John Coogan?

  The demo is someone using basically a Word document. Is that intentional? Why not a code editor? Why not an LLM interaction back and forth? Why, why, why text specifically?

• 1:49:12Speaker 09

  Well, we, we had, we do have a demo of the person using ChatGPT and you know, code and that sort of thing in the launch video.

• 1:49:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:23Speaker 09

  But for the B-roll, it's just like more aesthetic to have a text.

• 1:49:26John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, okay. I was just wondering if there was a hint at like where you see the first killer feature? With, with writers or with someone who's doing more like Word document based knowledge work? As opposed to something who more of a programmer? But I, I don't know. Maybe I'm reading into it too.

• 1:49:44Speaker 09

  Remember, remember Whisperflow is like, like a platform agnostic tool.

• 1:49:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:48Speaker 09

  They see retention across emails, Word documents, you know, coding tools and the rest. And so we are an extension of that. So we kind of sit in the same plane as them. You know what I mean?

• 1:50:00John Coogan?

  What's the, what's the status of the company? How big is the company? Have you raised money? Where do you see all this going?

• 1:50:07Speaker 09

  So we're pretty small. We're like a five-person team. We're scattered across the globe. We have, you know, people in Australia, Abu Dhabi, China. We're an eclectic bunch. Um, we've raised a few angel rounds and we shipped our beta this January.

• 1:50:26John Coogan?

  That's great. When do you want to go into public release? Where can people sign up to learn more? Where can people?

• 1:50:33Speaker 09

  Well, so we launched our preorder campaign for the microphone and trackpad version today, and that's going to be shipping in small batches from two weeks from now till Christmas. So we're going to roll it out, yeah.

• 1:50:46John Coogan?

  That's great. A testament to the modern.

• 1:50:48Jordi Hays?

  Let's, uh, we'll, we'll order one pilot. If you can order one and then, and then try to put us, uh, you know, I don't, should I ask to be put at the, at the front of the list or near the front of the list? It'd be, it'd be nice to get in the next, uh, in the next month would be awesome.

• 1:51:04John Coogan?

  Be great. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations on the progress. Very cool device.

• 1:51:09Speaker 09

  Thank you. I appreciate it, guys. Thank you for having me on.

• 1:51:11John Coogan?

  Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And our next guest is in the waiting room. We have Andrew Rea from TaxWire. Andrew, how are you doing?

• 1:51:33Speaker 10

  Hey, guys. Thank you for having me.

• 1:51:35Jordi Hays?

  What's going on, dude? Nice to see you.

• 1:51:37John Coogan?

  Welcome.

• 1:51:38Speaker 10

  Jordy, good to see you.

• 1:51:40John Coogan?

  I know you guys know each other, but for the audience members that don't, maybe introduce yourself. Tell us what you're building.

• 1:51:47Speaker 10

  Yes, uh, Jordy, good to see you. I did not, did not have it on my bingo card to three, three, four years ago, whenever, whenever it was that we, I worked for you, with you at, uh, at Party Around slash Capital, that we would be talking about taxes on, uh, on your podcast. Um, we're back. Uh, we're, we're so back. Congrats, uh, to both of you on all the success. But, uh, I'm Andrew Rea. I'm one of the co-founders of, uh, of TaxWire. We, uh, are a full-mended solution for global sales tax compliance, and we just raised $25 million because death and taxes are forever. And, uh, I think, I think probably our bet is that those Brian Johnson will solve taxes, uh, solve death first. So we're, we're here to solve taxes. I got the hat for it.

• 1:52:31Jordi Hays?

  I see that. You're actually hoping.

• 1:52:35Jordi Hays?

  That he solves that to just have more customers.

• 1:52:38John Coogan?

  Bigger TAM.

• 1:52:39Speaker 10

  Exactly, because the TAM just keeps growing. We just have more consumption in the economy. GDP goes up, there's more taxes. Hopefully, we can improve the subway system in New York with some of those tax dollars. And we just had a good time to keep rolling.

• 1:52:53John Coogan?

  Why business-to-business taxes? Why not go after TurboTax?

• 1:52:59Speaker 10

  Yes, it's a great question. My immediate initial reaction is because Intuit has a hell of a lot of distribution. And so that's probably one. But no, more for me specifically, I had this problem in a really big way. And a company as well before this, very much felt the pain of managing indirect tax compliance. And I think it's a market that's dominated by a bunch of companies that are very old. I think about $5 trillion in taxes remitted in sales tax and VAT by enterprises around the world. It's a very big problem. There's a bunch of very not so customer-obsessed software companies and services firms like the Big Four, Avalara, et cetera, that dominate this market. And it's a pain point that I had before this.

• 1:53:44Speaker 10

  And we, so it's mixed up market opportunity and our customers are finance people. They're super smart, but they do not have the expertise or time to be managing their taxes. So we deliver that outcome for them.

• 1:53:57John Coogan?

  And reality check me on this. I would assume that sales tax enforcement is increasing significantly. In the early days of the internet, there were all these crazy loopholes where if Amazon's based in Seattle and you buy something in Florida, they don't pay tax. And I think a lot of those loopholes have been closed. So more and more e-commerce companies have flourished on the back of Shopify and other platforms, Stripe. And but so there's more people selling products all nationally. And so they have a much higher sales tax burden. Is that roughly correct for the secular trend?

• 1:54:37Speaker 10

  Roughly correct. The secular trend is kind of like a few things. One is regulations. So there's that regulation's been rolling out. And what we're seeing now is that a lot of states are now actually starting to roll out taxes of not only like more enforcement, they're using AI to do audits. A lot of states are increasing sales tax as well and trying to increase audits of companies that have been complying now because they're getting squeezed on income tax. They're getting squeezed on property tax. Gavin Newsom in California is trying to start taxing the software industry. And then very similarly in VAT around the world, there's a lot of enforcement of real time reporting and the invoicing that's coming down the pipeline. So it's a, nobody gets voted out of office for raising sales tax or raising VAT, whereas

• 1:55:20Speaker 10

  income tax or property tax can hit you. So you're seeing big enforcement. That's like just a, I'd say a secular tailwind. And then the incumbents in the industry are not incredibly AI native or customer friendly. And so you've also kind of got this general customer frustration that gives a new player like us a lot of tailwinds as well.

• 1:55:39Jordi Hays?

  So you raised this money during the SaaS apocalypse. You overpowered the SaaS apocalypse. But I'm sure you were getting asked, like, you know, how did you answer, how did you answer the SaaS apocalypse question? Because now, right, I'm sure when you kind of closed around, or at least you had a term sheet signed, the SaaS apocalypse was over. Everyone was like, you know, we're back. But

• 1:56:03Speaker 10

  Yeah, we were super back, super back. The SaaS apocalypse is over. But no, I think it's super, being super honest, it's like we, the benefit, we're benefiting a little bit from the fact that a lot of the people we compete with are services as much as they are software companies. And so that there is like more spend to need, which lets you kind of mean into, we get, we are categorized as like AI native SaaS or AI native services, software. And some of that is that we genuinely like are actually delivering an outcome. And so our customers don't think of us as software or services. Like we have tax experts in-house. We do literally everything that goes into indirect tax compliance. We ripped and replaced a big four consulting firm literally this week for one of our customers. And so it's,

• 1:56:47Speaker 10

  That is that we are benefiting from AI versus being someone who's being displaced maybe by AI. And it's mostly a tail end. I think.

• 1:56:56Jordi Hays?

  You're doing the displacement. You're coming after, you're coming after the hundreds of thousands.

• 1:57:01John Coogan?

  I am the apocalypse.

• 1:57:03Speaker 10

  Exactly. We are, we are the, we are the apocalypse and we probably, we probably, our category probably benefits from it, which is something that maybe I can't take much, much credit for. I think, I think it's probably still painful out there for, for some folks and in a way that maybe it's not for us.

• 1:57:17John Coogan?

  Well, good luck. Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:57:19Jordi Hays?

  Amazing progress. It's been awesome to see the journey and yeah, congrats to the whole team on the milestone. I'm sure you'll be back soon.

• 1:57:25John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:57:26Speaker 10

  Of course. Thank you guys so much. Appreciate that.

• 1:57:28Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:57:29John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? It's a question everyone's been asking. It's your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform.

• 1:57:41Jordi Hays?

  Just do it. Just do it.

• 1:57:43John Coogan?

  Why not? Our next guest is Michael Anderson from Framework Ventures, raising a huge four fund. He's in the waiting room and now he's in the TV in El Salvador. Michael, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:57:55Speaker 11

  Doing well. How are you guys?

• 1:57:57John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastically.

• 1:57:58Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, the view here is not the view there.

• 1:58:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, this view, where are you?

• 1:58:02Jordi Hays?

  You're view mogging us. We don't even have any, we don't have any windows in this, in this studio and you're sitting here.

• 1:58:10John Coogan?

  This is.

• 1:58:10Jordi Hays?

  Like thousands of feet in the air.

• 1:58:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, getting in the castle, getting in the castle, looking good. Anyways.

• 1:58:17Jordi Hays?

  Where are you calling in from?

• 1:58:19Speaker 11

  San Francisco, uh, the Transamerica Building.

• 1:58:23John Coogan?

  Ooh, that's a good one. The pyramid. I like that one. Awesome. Enough about the view. Let's tell, let's talk about you. Please introduce yourself a little bit. Tell us about the fund. Give us the news.

• 1:58:35Speaker 11

  Yeah. Um, so, uh, Michael, one of the two co-founders of Framework, uh, the quick history is, uh, my co-founder Vance and I started it seven years ago. We're both working, uh, for, you know, tech companies. I was at Snapchat. He was at Netflix, quit our jobs. We're obsessed with crypto. Moved into my parents' house and started the fund. Uh, now we've raised our fourth fund and manage a couple of billion dollars.

• 1:58:58John Coogan?

  Did you have any outside capital in the first fund? Like what was the, cause I imagine with crypto, like you can just invest in tokens and like, if you're good at trading and you're early, like you don't necessarily need institutional capital to get started. But what was the early day? What were the early days like?

• 1:59:15Speaker 11

  Yeah, we had an institution as our first backer. And it was a small $15 million fund. And we started a framework really with a thesis. You know, a lot of people started with trading or a hedge fund thesis. Ours was actually the opposite in that we felt that nobody was going after the early seed stage of venture investing in the crypto web three space in 2019. And so that's what we started with. So it's always been, you know, a venture thesis. And I think our first, you know, our second, our second fund 100 million was kind of like the first institutional fund with multiple institutions. And now we've got Ivy League endowments and sovereign wealth funds and off to the races.

• 1:59:52John Coogan?

  That's great. What was it like in the early days? Was, was the crypto community really geographically distributed? Or were you focused on investing in America or California or San Francisco specifically? If you're going after those early stage crypto founders?

• 2:00:08Speaker 11

  Yeah, good question. I mean, we moved back to San Francisco. We were actually in, Vance and I were in Los Angeles. We moved back to San Francisco thinking, okay, well, well, that's the hub of tech. And we found ourselves basically traveling to all the entrepreneurs at the early days. Cause crypto was global phenomenon. You had pockets in Asia, you know, Australia, UK. I'd say largely now it's still, it's still pretty geographically distributed, but there's still, most of the tech is happening in kind of the hubs that you would expect. So San Francisco is definitely one of the top places these days. But yeah, it was a lot of, a lot of travel those early couple of years.

• 2:00:42Jordi Hays?

  So what's the, what's the conference strategy now? I feel like there's debate on like, you know, how many, how many conference? What's the perfect amount of conferences to go to in a year as a crypto investor?

• 2:00:55Speaker 11

  That, that is the, the topic of conversation.

• 2:00:58Jordi Hays?

  It's like a billion dollar question.

• 2:01:02Speaker 11

  Now you gotta do an Asia trip. You gotta do a Europe trip. You know, make some travel out of it. It's, they're always in fun destinations. I think a couple of years ago, we went to the blockchain week in Singapore and then stayed for the F1 race.

• 2:01:17Speaker 11

  It's, it's always a good time.

• 2:01:19Jordi Hays?

  What, what, what are you kind of forecasting in, in crypto right now? Like what, what you, you guys have done well by predicting, I just, you know, it's a balance of like having some idea of, of the future and just backing great entrepreneurs. But like, what are you, what are you excited about with this new fund to invest in?

• 2:01:44Speaker 11

  Yeah, so I think when we started in 2019, we saw crypto as sort of the next frontier, where the smartest entrepreneurs that we were meeting with, you know, the Wiz kids popping out of the Stanford, Harvards are, you know, working on crypto, working on cryptography technologies. And I think that that's still the case. But I think what a lot of what we're seeing now is people who have domain expertise in different areas, different industries, who are saying, "Help me do the crypto. I think this should be decentralized," whether it's energy, nuclear, AI, or, you know, hard, hard infrastructure. They're, they're coming to us and saying, "Hey, like, I know how to do energy trading. I've been doing it for the last decade. Help me build a distributed decentralized utility so that we can go disintermediate,

• 2:02:28Speaker 11

  you know, the utilities." And I think that that is kind of the, the new thing. It's not crypto just for crypto's sake. It's crypto getting imbued within, you know, really hard tech industries. So it's not really like its own thing anymore. I think now it's just gonna become pervasive in, in everything.

• 2:02:45John Coogan?

  So the fund's grown, the aperture's probably widened in terms of the industries that you look at. What stayed the same throughout all four funds?

• 2:02:57Jordi Hays?

  I'll, I'll take a, I'll take a crack. Just remaining bullish on crypto when everyone's calling you an idiot, loser, is like a really good way to make money, I think. And I feel like you guys have, have done that.

• 2:03:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:10Jordi Hays?

  Just like, you know, i- it seems like it's about having a tolerance for being, looking silly.

• 2:03:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:03:16Jordi Hays?

  And that, and that can look like remaining bullish during like moments where everyone's like, "Honey, you're still, you're still doing that crypto thing, you know, at Thanksgiving?"

• 2:03:25Speaker 11

  Oh, so, so many years of that. You know, it's just gonna be another one of those. When it's a good time to buy, it's, it's a bad time to sell. When it's a bad time to sell, it's a good time to buy. So I think, you know, riding the waves, for sure. And we hold, you know, digital assets in the fund. Each one of them, but I think the thing that has been consistent is really just a venture thesis. And then following the founders and the founders who, you know, we are seeing like we have a investment in a company called Meka. We got to know them because they were previous entrepreneurs that sold their company to Coinbase. They are not doing anything in crypto currently. They could eventually, but it's, you know, how we got to know them was through crypto and they are building, you know, a data platform for robotics AI.

• 2:04:09Speaker 11

  So those types of investments I think are just the consistent thread for us. And when we find world-class founders, we're going to back them multiple times.

• 2:04:16John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:04:16Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Cool. I haven't been following the Mike strategy, Michael Saylor. We have not been following the story closely. Can you get me up to speed in just like 20 seconds? What's going on over there? I mostly just see like the deranged, like, you know, AI images that he puts out where he's like on a lifeboat. Just like, it's like, why are you putting that image in my head?

• 2:04:40John Coogan?

  That's a funny one.

• 2:04:40Jordi Hays?

  Literally leaving.

• 2:04:41John Coogan?

  Leaving.

• 2:04:42Jordi Hays?

  You're like escaping the Titanic.

• 2:04:45John Coogan?

  Wait, am I on the lifeboat?

• 2:04:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Wait, is this inspiration?

• 2:04:51Speaker 11

  I, I, I think, you know, the, the, the quick story is that whenever you mix financial engineering and crypto, something bad usually has happened.

• 2:04:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:59Speaker 11

  And I think that that overfitting of the narrative is kind of what's going on with him right now.

• 2:05:05Speaker 11

  But he's building this, this entity that has multiple layers to it, whether it's convertibles, whether it's preferred, whether it's common. And he's financing it, you know, in different ways. And, and the question is, can he continue to deal with all, all of the legs of the stool? Or is one of the legs going to fall out? And I, I think, you know, the narratives of him blowing up are overblown. I think he's got the smart people around. I think it's tough when crypto is down this, this much, but this is exactly what happens in all of these cycles. If we go back to, you know, the, the calluses on our hands over the last, you know, nearly decade of doing this. This is exactly what plays out all four years. So I think we're just in the middle of that right now.

• 2:05:43Speaker 11

  And I, I think he will be proven right eventually. It may just take him years and talk about somebody who's been willing to just stand in the face of all of the, uh, the negative publicity. Uh, he, he's the best at it.

• 2:05:54Jordi Hays?

  That's, that's a good point. Awesome, Dave. Well, great, great to meet you. Congrats on, on the new fund and, uh, yeah, looking forward to meeting more of your founders.

• 2:06:03John Coogan?

  Appreciate it. Great to meet you guys. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish.

• 2:06:21Jordi Hays?

  It's kind of the goose itself.

• 2:06:23John Coogan?

  It is the goose itself. Have you ever heard of a hectocorn, Jordy?

• 2:06:26Jordi Hays?

  Hmm, no.

• 2:06:28John Coogan?

  I'd never heard of this either, but apparently it refers to a company worth more than a hundred billion dollars. You got a unicorn worth one billion, a decacorn worth 10 billion, and a hectocorn, which I'd never heard before, but, uh, you know, somebody wrote it in.

• 2:06:45Jordi Hays?

  Learn something new every day.

• 2:06:46John Coogan?

  Learn something new any day, every single day, especially on this show. Well, our next guest is investor and NBA champion Tristan Thompson. We're very lucky to be joined by him here in the TDPN UltraDome.

• 2:07:02Jordi Hays?

  There we go. John, stand up next to him.

• 2:07:04Speaker 00

  Man, God.

• 2:07:05Jordi Hays?

  Let's get a high check. High check.

• 2:07:10Speaker 00

  It's like Wally Zerbi out here.

• 2:07:13Jordi Hays?

  You guys are pretty, pretty even.

• 2:07:17Speaker 00

  Hey, yes you are.

• 2:07:18Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 2:07:18Speaker 00

  You are all of it. You are a tall drink of milk. Oh, schnickies.

• 2:07:25Jordi Hays?

  What's happening, dude?

• 2:07:26Speaker 00

  What's going on, brother? How are you?

• 2:07:28John Coogan?

  We're doing great. We're hanging out.

• 2:07:29Jordi Hays?

  Knock, knock.

• 2:07:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Why don't you stand up?

• 2:07:31Jordi Hays?

  Not even close. No, I'm happy to let you guys do your thing. I just wanted the audience to understand that John is an NBA-sized man.

• 2:07:39John Coogan?

  It's true. And, and on the camera, everyone thinks I'm 5'10".

• 2:07:42Speaker 00

  And then John, and you guys like, they might see the shortest one right now. Like, seriously. Like, this guy's a bitch. He was a center for 14 years. At this height, how do you do it?

• 2:07:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's going on?

• 2:07:53Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it's great to have you. It's great to have you.

• 2:07:56Speaker 00

  Glad to be here. By the way, congrats to you guys.

• 2:07:57John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:07:58Speaker 00

  Congrats.

• 2:07:59Jordi Hays?

  We're landing you?

• 2:08:00Speaker 00

  No, no, no. You guys' success and acquisition and all that, you know, come on now, that's big time.

• 2:08:04Jordi Hays?

  Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

• 2:08:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I want to start with, uh, I mean, tech and investing. I mean, we can go through your career, but I'm interested in, in sort of, uh, how you first caught the bug, how you first got interested in technology, investing, just your journey to financial management, understanding more of your strategy, and, uh, sort of like, oftentimes there's like mentors or books and resources along the way. Like, what was your journey?

• 2:08:29Speaker 00

  I mean, I think for me, and you know, I won't give like the cliche, like, You know, I think other guys are like, you know, I think I didn't start really investing into things outside of the traditional, you know, state treasury bonds and the S and P 500, the stuff that Fidelity and Wells Fargo tell you to money market. I waited until my second deal. Let's be real, like, you know, cause and, you know, I tell the young guys is, you know,

• 2:08:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's good, cause you gotta just be focused on being really good at basketball, so that you get the second deal.

• 2:08:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, when you get the second deal, when I got my, my, my second deal, 82 million, you know, I, I switched financial advisors because of the, when I was with, bang, bang, bang.

• 2:09:06Speaker 00

  There you go.

• 2:09:12Speaker 00

  This is high energy here. I love this. Wow. But no, um.

• 2:09:17John Coogan?

  You got two deals.

• 2:09:19Speaker 00

  No, I started getting into alternative assets and getting into tech and investing in companies, whether it's consumer or tech or.

• 2:09:25John Coogan?

  Were, were you getting pitched VC funds, like investing in the VC funds?

• 2:09:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, like Carlisle Group and then, and all those guys, you know, back then I was with Morgan Stanley. So they would give us those opportunities because they had them as a client.

• 2:09:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:35Speaker 00

  So that was kind of like my early, uh, uh, kind of like get my feet wet. But obviously as I got older and, and, and wanted to dive into more, but obviously having the capital to have that exposure, um, you know, I started to, you know, look into more and start to talk to founders and, you know, get ahead of the curve.

• 2:09:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:51Jordi Hays?

  That's probably good to, probably good to start, uh, probably good to start, like, taking deals from Morgan Stanley, cause obviously, or, or, or a partner like that, because not every deal is gonna really hit or be that great, but better than just looking at whatever's coming through, because I think when people start investing, especially in private markets, they, everything looks great in a pitch deck, right? It's like, oh, I'm looking at the forecast. It's like they're going to 100 million in like three years. And then you realize like, okay, well, that, the most, that's in most decks and it's about being able to pick out, okay, what's actually gonna do well versus what's gonna flop.

• 2:10:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, I feel like one of the hardest things is, uh, you, you, you see one deck and you're like, this is a great idea, great team. And you don't realize that there's three other teams that are doing the back's exact same thing. They started two years earlier and they're better. Do you think about trying to, when you, when you, when you? Identify a trend that you're interested in, you want exposure to. Are you trying to pick the one winner, get a huge stake in one winner? Or do you want to have some sort of diversification across the market?

• 2:10:52Speaker 00

  I think for me, it's, first of all, I always bet on the founder.

• 2:10:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:56Speaker 00

  Right? It's betting on the horse, right? I think that's the most important thing. And I, you know, these pitch decks, before they're a hundred million. Now they always tell you they're a billion dollars. And now they always look so good. But I think for myself, I try to lean on what my peers are doing as well. And I've been so fortunate to have some guys that have, you know, have early ICOs in Ethereum. Guys that have done great exits. And whether it's a family office or it's the guys that are in funds, you know, that have had that experience. Because for me, the reality is, I am still one of the younger guys that are in the space, right? So I try to lean on other people. And honestly, people have been so good to me and kind of like, kind of helped steer me the right way. Cause they're like, Tristan, we want to see you win. We don't want to see you come in and just give money to everybody.

• 2:11:36Jordi Hays?

  And not get much back.

• 2:11:38Speaker 00

  And not get much back. You know, I remember Olaf, a buddy of mine, who's one of the early Coinbase employees. Yeah, you know, he said, Tristan, you also got to be prepared that you're going to invest in 10 things. And eight are going to fail.

• 2:11:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:11:49Speaker 00

  But the two that do well, he said, don't worry, it's going to cover all your capital that you put in. So I also had that mindset as well, but I always like to bet on the founder, bet on the horse. It's like a horse race. That's what I'm the most bullish on.

• 2:11:58Jordi Hays?

  Was there any athlete, entrepreneur, investors that you look up to? Maybe from the previous generation or people that were, or maybe underrated investors that people don't know about? Cause I feel like people know about the, the Shacks of the world, the guys that are super commercial. But anybody that's maybe more underrated?

• 2:12:15Speaker 00

  I mean, I look at Shaq and Magic because I think they were able to use their NIL to pivot to chapter two and leverage that to great opportunities, right? Like the end of the day, like the fact that Magic Johnson can open up movie theaters at affordable and get acquired by AMC, that's big time, right? That's like, like that's, that's creating a movement. But I think, you know, guys have done a good job as, you know, of course, like the Steph Curry or Andre Iguodala. He's done a good job. Um, but you know, the reality of us athletes, if we make good investments, we're going to tell all you guys.

• 2:12:48Speaker 00

  Doing very well?

• 2:12:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You're going to talk about it.

• 2:12:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's no one under the radar.

• 2:12:51Speaker 00

  If I'm doing a 25x, I'm not just gonna hide in Indiana and not tell you about it.

• 2:12:55John Coogan?

  I'm gonna do a press tour about it, yeah. So, yeah. Do you think that there's a, there's a fork in the road between NIL sponsorship? Just get the cash, but put your name everywhere there it makes sense, tons of brand deals, but not a lot of equity ownership versus more behind the scenes equity ownership, just investing? Is that a fork in the road or can you do both reliably? How do you think about that trade off? If there is one?

• 2:13:18Speaker 00

  I think for us as athletes and anytime I go into, you know, into the meetings and I'm on calls all the time. Or I'm going to whether it's Milken or I'm at Medici or I'm at Token.

• 2:13:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:27Speaker 00

  You know, I, we only get one chat to this, right? And I think for us, because when we come in, everyone always, we're always playing down by five points, down by 10, because they're like, alright, another athlete in here that's gonna write a check and you know, he's gonna like, I don't know if we can curse in here, but we're always gonna like, uh, um, H O E ourself out, right?

• 2:13:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:13:45Speaker 00

  And, and that's what we, I want to be very selective because at the end of the day, I don't want to be the guy that's for everybody. I want to make sure if I'm going down one lane, if I'm gonna invest in a robotics company, I'm gonna invest in tech drones, I want to try to find one or two.

• 2:14:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:01Speaker 00

  Not just be with 10 guys.

• 2:14:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:03Speaker 00

  Because you don't want to be that guy. But I, but in terms of the NIL, I think it's very important as well because if you look at it right now, who's the biggest influencer on planet earth? Elon Musk.

• 2:14:14John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 2:14:14Speaker 00

  You would probably say Kim Kardashian, but you might say Elon.

• 2:14:18Speaker 00

  But like, he's realized that, you know, Bill Gates, his job, you know, these guys back in the day in the 90s and 2000s, right? They would never put themselves out there and sit on squat box and go on CNBC and talk about their product. But now you realize that the great founders, you are going to do a press run. You're like Drake and you're going to do an album rollout because you want to create the FOMO for retail for when you IPO.

• 2:14:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. That people are gonna buy. Yeah, I mean, you see this Palmer Lucky too, like very, you know.

• 2:14:43Speaker 00

  And you got the look, Michael Saylor's got like the look, can't look.

• 2:14:46John Coogan?

  The look.

• 2:14:46Speaker 00

  And then Elon's got the like, doesn't look human. And then you got Larry Ellison, it looks like he's like, uh, he's like look maxing and everything, right?

• 2:14:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, Larry Ellison does look really young.

• 2:14:55Speaker 00

  You do the look back, so like, I get that and I think that's why I think.

• 2:14:59Jordi Hays?

  Ellison really is the OG looks max.

• 2:15:00Speaker 00

  He is, he is. He's got the chiseled and everything.

• 2:15:02John Coogan?

  No, it's remarkable.

• 2:15:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:15:04John Coogan?

  It's like, he's 80 or something.

• 2:15:06Speaker 00

  And then there's no sun in SF like that, so.

• 2:15:09John Coogan?

  That's a good point, right? But, but he sails, he sails all the time.

• 2:15:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he's a sailor.

• 2:15:12John Coogan?

  He's a, he's a big boat guy.

• 2:15:13Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:15:14John Coogan?

  So maybe he's getting the sun there.

• 2:15:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:15:15John Coogan?

  Uh, who needs to be around the table when you're negotiating with a company? Because. Olaf, fantastic investor. I imagine that if he's writing a check, not many people are being like, "Hey, we'd also like to put you in our Super Bowl ad." But with you, I imagine every founder comes to you and they say, "Well, we'd like an Instagram post and we'd also like you to be in an ad." And all of that is a separate negotiation. Are there agencies that you work with? Are there, is this something that you can puzzle out? Is it all just one big bucket? Or do you just say, "Hey, let's table that and let's just do the equity deal here and then let's talk about partnership later?"

• 2:15:50Speaker 00

  So the way I approach it is like this, right? So obviously you had the initial call and the conversation and you figure out what this, what this marriage is going to look like. And what, and if I'm just capital, if I'm just capital, then you're not gonna, I'm gonna be more behind the scenes. But if I really believe in it and I feel like I can help your GTM and create the narrative and story to be, to show what you guys are building and if I believe in it as well, we are in a strategy. And I've been very fortunate to have people that come from the venture, people that have, you know, from multi-coin and that, around those, those guys, you know, they've been very helpful with like Tristan. Like if you look at customer, it's like Tristan, you gotta be very delicate at how you do things. And, and for me, it all depends. There's definitely been a lot of investments that I, no one knows that I'm invested in, right?

• 2:16:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, some of the best opportunities, like they

• 2:16:36John Coogan?

  Well, you're waiting until it's a 25X and then you'll go on the tour.

• 2:16:41John Coogan?

  Cause it might be a zero and you're not gonna talk about that.

• 2:16:43Speaker 00

  Oh, no, but you know what, sometimes you gotta, you gotta get your hit lift. I was down 3-1 before, so it all really depends. But I love being part of, if I really feel bullish about something, I love being part of the journey.

• 2:16:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:16:54Speaker 00

  Because for me now, I still have the hunger and drive of winning again. I love winning championships.

• 2:17:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:17:00Speaker 00

  And this is the next form of doing it, but instead of wearing a jersey, I'm wearing a Tom Force suit and tie, or I got this nice, I don't know what color you guys call this, but I think it's very like TV PM, right?

• 2:17:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:17:11Speaker 00

  It's on brand.

• 2:17:16John Coogan?

  Taking the NBA to the next level, is there anything that could make the NBA bigger? It's at the top of the mountain, but is there an even higher mountain? Is there a drive to survive play? What would make the NBA even bigger if you could do anything?

• 2:17:32Speaker 00

  I don't know if this is legal, but imagine if you

• 2:17:37John Coogan?

  I like where you're starting.

• 2:17:38Speaker 00

  I don't know if the NBA could do this, but imagine if like, so we have this something called the Player Post-Career Income Plan, right?

• 2:17:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:45Speaker 00

  I'm gonna give some tea and I don't need to say, this is gonna be real, right? So the Player Post-Career Income Plan is where basically we take a portion of our capital and we put it into, let's say it's like the Voya or the principal, right? We give them our money, we give them a percentage of our bi-weekly check.

• 2:18:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:02Speaker 00

  And they hold on to it. It's good if you have, you know, bad spending problems and whatnot, and that is what it is. But you get nothing out of it. You don't make no yield, no interest, right? But imagine if you were able to kind of create like an MBPA fund. But it's, and but it's, we're not gonna be doing the money market four and a half, like.

• 2:18:21John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:18:21Jordi Hays?

  You wanna be YOLOing.

• 2:18:24John Coogan?

  But, but, but like, like a college endowment.

• 2:18:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, college endowment.

• 2:18:27John Coogan?

  Where they allocate ten, twenty percent alternatives.

• 2:18:29Jordi Hays?

  So I, I, we follow the sport of business, as you, as you know. So I don't, I don't, I don't know really anything about this, this kind of program that you're talking about. You give them money, you don't get any yield on it, and then they just give it back to you at a certain point?

• 2:18:45Speaker 00

  So the reason why they created this is you guys remember the ESPN 30 for 30 broke?

• 2:18:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:48Speaker 00

  Right? There was a lot of high-profile athletes that unfortunately, and it happens, right? At the end of the day, we come from, especially myself, I've come from nothing. You give us millions of dollars and it's, it's, we can't rely on people back home to help us. It's like the blind leading the blind.

• 2:19:03John Coogan?

  And you just get a ton upfront, you think, oh, this is never gonna stop.

• 2:19:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this was something that the NBA, and I, and I appreciate Adam Silver and David Stern taking it and just say, hey, we don't want our players to pull out of their 401K at 35, 45.

• 2:19:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:17Speaker 00

  Because, you know, you get heavily penalized, the tax, everything. So we're gonna create a Player Post-Career Income Plan. The day you're done playing, we are gonna give you a check monthly to get you to 55, 60 years old.

• 2:19:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:19:29Speaker 00

  Right? Which I love, and I think that's so smart.

• 2:19:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:31Speaker 00

  But imagine if now we're able to take some of that capital.

• 2:19:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:34Speaker 00

  And, and get some exposure to some of these great, you know, investments. Like, imagine if, think about this back when SpaceX, back in 2022, right? If I came here and said the MBPA Association's gonna give endowment of 500 million, 100 million dollars to get into some allocation space. That's a pretty good one to get into, right? I'm not saying go ahead and buy a bunch of Sally beauty supplies. We're saying something a little bit more protective, right? A little bit more that we feel like.

• 2:20:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just don't understand why, so, so if there's capital that's been put aside coming out of your paycheck and it's sitting there, somebody's getting yield on it.

• 2:20:10Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:20:10Jordi Hays?

  Who's getting the yield?

• 2:20:11Speaker 00

  Not me.

• 2:20:12Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy. That's crazy.

• 2:20:14Speaker 00

  But I will say this though, I will say this too, because then everyone's gonna be like.

• 2:20:17Jordi Hays?

  So they're like, yeah, we're taking care of the players. Meanwhile, they just have this huge pool of capital that they're, they're.

• 2:20:22Speaker 00

  Well, I will say.

• 2:20:23Jordi Hays?

  Optimizing, that seems a little bit, I think you might be honest with me.

• 2:20:26Speaker 00

  But I will say the NBA's done a great job with the 401k. What they've done that no one else does is that they will match whatever you put into 401k 120%.

• 2:20:35Jordi Hays?

  Wow, that's great.

• 2:20:36Speaker 00

  Which is great. So, so the NBA does a really good job protecting the players and, and trying to put the players in the best position to be successful, which I appreciate. So that's, you know, you gotta give a little bit. It's a start, it's a start. And it's like, you know, we're not, no one's ever finished product. Every business can get better. That's why AI, robotics, that's a big thing, right? Especially in the workforce.

• 2:20:57Jordi Hays?

  What guidance do you give to young players that are real prospects? Maybe they're getting, you know, about to become a teenager, they're on the path to college, hopefully the NBA. What advice do you give them around navigating like the internet? I imagine like, you know, the same way for any endeavor. People that have some type of following or notoriety or aura, they can get better deals done. Uh, but what advice are you giving? Cause you, you know, I imagine like, that wasn't even something that you had to deal with at the time, but then you obviously leverage social media now.

• 2:21:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I wished it was NIL when I was playing, you know, back then when I was playing, I was getting the money through the back door. Now you get it through the front door. I wish I was getting that 11 million dollar direct deposit or that wire to my account back in the day. But what I tell these young guys is that, you know, just, just be careful. Like protect what you've built, right? Because everyone's gonna want a piece of you and the reality is that. We are not gonna be the smartest in the room. We are gonna be basically the squirmy fish in the cesspool and people are gonna wanna eat us up. Right? So you gotta really lean and I tell guys, lean, I know, I'm sorry guys, I'm just very honest. Yeah, this is part of being a big man, a center in the NBA. We're not pretty, we're very ugly with it and we get down and dirty.

• 2:22:17Speaker 00

  But no, but I think it's like lean on your peers and older guys. I've always been the one, whether it's LeBron, whether it's Kevin Love, whether it's Antoine Jameson, Anderson Varejao. I've always went to my older, my vets to ask questions and don't be afraid to be vulnerable. I think that's the one thing for us as athletes, we fear saying like, man, my shit might be screwed up. I might be in some bad deals or I might have a bad financial advisor. That's the one area where athletes become small.

• 2:22:46John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:22:47Speaker 00

  And that's not something we should do.

• 2:22:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:49Jordi Hays?

  What about AI and sports? I'm sure you get pitches all the time. I imagine you seem to like to invest in really big categories. You're going for the, you're going for the hundred X, the thousand X. But what's exciting to you at the, you know, at the intersection of AI and basketball?

• 2:23:08Speaker 00

  Well, I think, you know, I would, nothing would make me more happy if we had a fourth referee. And my friends think I'm crazy, if that referee was, you know, we used AI.

• 2:23:19John Coogan?

  It's worked in tennis.

• 2:23:20Speaker 00

  Yes, it's worked, it's worked in tennis and it's even in soccer.

• 2:23:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, and World Cup right now, they have this ban or something like that.

• 2:23:27Speaker 00

  They're canceling goals on Paraguay, they're canceling goals on Canada, remember I'm Canadian. So we scored, they're like, nope, bring it back VR. But I remember like being a kid watching the World Cup, I said, that never used to happen.

• 2:23:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:37Speaker 00

  But now they're using AI technology to try to make the game more efficient. But especially in the NBA, in the NBA in the playoffs, when it's a one-possession game and, you know, when they're saying it's a charge or block. Or, I mean, we were a victim of it, game one against Golden State, when LeBron took, took the charge on Kevin Durant and then they called it a blocking foul and they switched and I think, and we lost that game and I think we got swept there. But that was a turning point in the series, among other things. But yeah, I think like, that was like, I feel like that's the next step. For sports and AI and I think, you know, AI is taking over so many different sectors in the world. I think sports is like the one area that it's been like the most, like it's like the slowest one. It's like the last one to the party.

• 2:24:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:24:16Speaker 00

  And it's like.

• 2:24:16John Coogan?

  People on the court at the end.

• 2:24:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, but in reality, it's like, guys.

• 2:24:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just mean outside of that, like performance, things like recovery.

• 2:24:22Speaker 00

  Recovery. Well, think about this. Think about last year in the playoffs, you had Jason Tatum, Tyrese Halliburton and Damian Lillard all tear their Achilles. And Adam Silver said, we gotta start using AI technology to protect our players, right? Because don't get me wrong, sports science is great, but there's another level to this.

• 2:24:37John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 2:24:37Speaker 00

  You can't have your best players in the faces of your league.

• 2:24:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:40Speaker 00

  Go down at the most important time where it's the moneymaker time, which is the playoffs. So to, to, hopefully that answers your question.

• 2:24:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:24:46Speaker 00

  I think that's the next step for, it's more for sports, sports medicine.

• 2:24:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:50Speaker 00

  And science. And I would, I wouldn't mind a little, you know, a little fourth referee just to clean up some stuff.

• 2:24:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 2:24:56Jordi Hays?

  How are you, what, what's your personal biohacking stack? Are you doing anything? I, how, how long do you want to live? Are you thinking like 90, I'm good?

• 2:25:04John Coogan?

  We clearly got the height extension surgery.

• 2:25:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. I literally did put it in my legs there. No, but um, for me, you know, I'm very big on peptides. I want to look good for a long time, guys.

• 2:25:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:25:13Speaker 00

  All right?

• 2:25:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:25:14Speaker 00

  Let me show you guys. I want to look good.

• 2:25:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:15Speaker 00

  For a long time.

• 2:25:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:16Speaker 00

  I'm, I'm 35. I want to look 25.

• 2:25:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:18Speaker 00

  I want to keep this skin good.

• 2:25:20John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:25:20Speaker 00

  I want to keep this jaw healthy. I want to stay in shape. So I will do, listen, I'm very, I look in a mirror, I look in a mirror at myself a lot. I want to look good every day.

• 2:25:27Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 2:25:27Speaker 00

  So whatever I need to do, I'm about it. So yes, I do a little, you know, a little doop doop for the hair.

• 2:25:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:32Speaker 00

  A doop doop doop. So, you know, I gotta make sure I'm right.

• 2:25:36John Coogan?

  I love it. Uh, I'm sure you've traveled all over the world. If there's one city where you could put a new NBA team, where would you put it?

• 2:25:42Speaker 00

  Ooh.

• 2:25:43John Coogan?

  Anywhere in the world.

• 2:25:44Speaker 00

  Oh, in the world?

• 2:25:44John Coogan?

  Anywhere in the world.

• 2:25:45Speaker 00

  NBA team.

• 2:25:46John Coogan?

  NBA teams.

• 2:25:48Jordi Hays?

  I mean, is that not a kind of a dumb question?

• 2:25:50Speaker 00

  No, no, this is a really dumb question.

• 2:25:52John Coogan?

  What do you think I'm thinking? That's the point.

• 2:25:54Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 2:25:55John Coogan?

  Just like, it would be exotic. It would be interesting to go play there. I don't know. That's what, that.

• 2:25:59Speaker 00

  I would say, I would say Marrakech.

• 2:26:01John Coogan?

  Marrakech.

• 2:26:02Speaker 00

  In Morocco.

• 2:26:02Jordi Hays?

  Ooh.

• 2:26:03Speaker 00

  Or I would say, I mean Dubai has a team right now, but Dubai is so beautiful.

• 2:26:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:07Speaker 00

  That's a magical place.

• 2:26:08John Coogan?

  See, dumb question, interesting answer.

• 2:26:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:26:10Jordi Hays?

  How, how much time have you spent in Morocco?

• 2:26:12Speaker 00

  You know, I'll be honest, never been there yet.

• 2:26:17John Coogan?

  You just paid for a hug.

• 2:26:19Jordi Hays?

  You gotta go, you gotta go.

• 2:26:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, Jaylen Brown goes there every year. He calls me, he's like, TT, you have to come. He's been invited the last three years. He's like, TT, you have to come. And then one of the agents that worked for our sports agency at Clutch Sports, he's Moroccan, he's like, TT, you have to go, you have to go. It's beautiful, it's magical. So that's why I say Marrakesh, but Dubai, I spend a lot of time there. That place is magical. They're forward-thinking. They love entrepreneurs. They're about what we're about.

• 2:26:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:41Speaker 00

  They're all about, that's what I love.

• 2:26:42Jordi Hays?

  Morocco's great. Marrakech is great.

• 2:26:43Speaker 00

  You been?

• 2:26:44Jordi Hays?

  Surf trip.

• 2:26:45Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 2:26:45Jordi Hays?

  Probably nine years ago.

• 2:26:47Speaker 00

  Now I see it in the hair.

• 2:26:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:26:49Speaker 00

  There you go. You spent a lot of time in Laguna.

• 2:26:50Jordi Hays?

  Malibu.

• 2:26:51Speaker 00

  Ooh, there, closer, closer.

• 2:26:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:26:56Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, like, do you think you'll ever get bored with investing?

• 2:27:01Speaker 00

  No, you know, I'm, I'm actually so excited.

• 2:27:04Jordi Hays?

  That actually does happen. Like, there's some, like, generational investors, specifically angel investors, that are doing it for the love of the game, and then they just get a little bit tired chasing the next deal. The issue is if you're good, you just get, you get too rich and then you're like, what's the point?

• 2:27:18John Coogan?

  It's the boat, it's the boat. If you get the boat, you'll just be on the boat.

• 2:27:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, it's, it's not about the invest, you know, I love talking to people and like, these meetings and the calls that I have, you learn so much. Like, first, like, I have a call with a gentleman that's creating a nuclear energy company. I just want to learn, learn about what he's thinking, his thesis, why, what he thinks, where he thinks the world's going. I just love the education, right? It's almost like classes in session. So of course, yes, do I like investing? Do I like winning? Of course. Like, when I did a hype short, everyone thought I was crazy, but now I'm laughing to the bank when I, when I pulled out my hyper liquid trade. So that's what I was happy about. So I like being right, but I like, I like the storytelling because I think, I, I, I bring everything back to team.

• 2:28:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:02Speaker 00

  And, and everything's a team. You guys are a team. The guy, the gentleman is you guys back here. They got, they love you guys to death. You got a squad here, right? Everything is team-oriented.

• 2:28:09Jordi Hays?

  Team sport.

• 2:28:10Speaker 00

  It's team sport. So I love to always hear how, how this team is trying to operate and what they're trying to accomplish. And if I can come, and whether it's capital or whether it's leveraging my resources or intros, I want to do that, especially if I believe in who you are.

• 2:28:23Jordi Hays?

  Would you ever, would you ever raise outside capital from other players? Say, hey, I don't want you to, don't invest 100% of your money, but give me, give me 2% of your next deal. I'll deploy it. And, and so they can kind of like, you know, get the benefit of everything you've learned.

• 2:28:41Speaker 00

  Well, you know, I've been running a lot of SPVs the last two years. And I've had some, some great success. I mean, I just, you know, one thing I'm very bullish on is Prometheus and I just invested in, you know, their last round.

• 2:28:53Jordi Hays?

  The Prometheus allocation.

• 2:28:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I got the Prometheus allocation, the friends and family. Shout out to family. You know, shout, shout out mom for the, you know, 70th birthday at Jeff's house. Shout out mom, I love you. You know, I definitely allocated Jeff. Yeah, it's beautiful and God is good to me. And, and I want to give, you know what I really want to do? I want to give guys a same opportunity. That's also why.

• 2:29:11Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. Cause like you work, you work to get to the point where you get that slug, but.

• 2:29:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I think it's like now instead of keep SPV, maybe at some point I might want to, you know, around Q4, maybe start a fund for, for me and my people and, you know, give guys the opportunity that I have and it's globally. It's not just in America, you know, it's, you know, yesterday I was sitting with some gentlemen that work with the QIA. And they've been really good and they've been very open doors to me and they showed me nothing but love and respect. And I love the people of Doha and Qatar. So I want to give the people the opportunity that I have because I think it's about paying it forward and that's about being a real team player. And me being a center, I didn't score 20 points a game. I did if you needed me, if Kevin Love was out the game. But you know, for me, I'm getting the low double, I'm getting the rebounds, be a star in your role. And now my role now is pivoting to be, you know, helping my guys that have still got the jerseys on or the young guys or the guys that are retiring. Give them the access opportunity to make their money, make money.

• 2:30:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, get my head start.

• 2:30:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:30:03John Coogan?

  Robotics. You're excited about robotics. What specifically? Humanoids, non-humanoids, wheeled stuff?

• 2:30:09Speaker 00

  No, I think, you know.

• 2:30:10Jordi Hays?

  How, what's your timeline to a humanoid being able to beat you one on one?

• 2:30:15Speaker 00

  So.

• 2:30:16John Coogan?

  This is the real.

• 2:30:16Jordi Hays?

  Cause like it might be, it might legit be like.

• 2:30:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, forget the touring test. We got the Tristan test.

• 2:30:23Speaker 00

  The day that I go one on one versus a robot and if I lose, I better make sure I have so much peptides in my shoulders and biceps. Where I can rip it apart.

• 2:30:32John Coogan?

  I better have so much allocation in the robot that beats me. I better be.

• 2:30:37Jordi Hays?

  If you're not making money on the robot that's whooping you, then it's over.

• 2:30:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, but no, I'm, I'm, you know, my thesis on robotics right now, it's, and Jensen Wong said this two years ago, it's about physical AI. And I think robotics is physical AI. Humanoids, I'm not, we're not there yet. You know, I'm not going to sit here and say I would want a, a robot taking care of my nine, eight and three year old. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying for the physical AI, it's, it's more so, you know, whether it's in healthcare, whether it's in one area like healthcare, agricultural, you know, uh, construction, landscaper, right? All of those areas. Robots and robotics can help. It's making, it's making the owners be more efficient on the business aspect. And especially one area I'd like to touch on is agriculture, like the farmers, right? Because, you know, back in the day, you know, a lot of the, you know, a lot of the tractors right now are autonomous.

• 2:31:24Speaker 00

  They're doing it on their own. But back in the day, you had people, labor workers doing it. And, you know, a lot of these farmers were spending so much time on the labor and missing out on the business growth and opportunity, which was killing their margins. So now, us using more autonomous, you know, machines and robotics, even like what Jeff's doing with now, the packaging, what he's gonna have in Amazon with Prometheus, right? It's not just, you know, the drive the cars, the Amazon. No, it's more like the packaging, the arm. So it's more efficient, which that's what I'm super bullish on because I want people to find ways to improve their business and less relying on the manpower. Let's us focus on building the business side. And I think one area that I, that I'm very excited about is like the agricultural space, how we can improve that.

• 2:32:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:08Speaker 00

  Because those farmers, they're important to us. People always forget, like, we're talking about like AI and energy and crops are important.

• 2:32:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:14John Coogan?

  And there's a labor shortage.

• 2:32:16Jordi Hays?

  Would you ever start a company?

• 2:32:17Speaker 00

  Would I ever start a company?

• 2:32:18Jordi Hays?

  Go through YC, run it up?

• 2:32:20Speaker 00

  Oh, like YC? I mean, listen, those guys are, man. You know, one thing I will say on this, guys, I, I, I am, I am a capital allocator. So I do believe in a lot of people and I don't mind writing checks. So if there's the right opportunity, maybe one day they create my own accelerator. I've thought about it as well, you know, especially.

• 2:32:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Go head to head with Gary Tan.

• 2:32:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, but, but, but founding the fund is the entrepreneur.

• 2:32:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:32:44Speaker 00

  Or, you know, doing, doing a multi, you know how they do multi-family offices?

• 2:32:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:32:49Speaker 00

  Like do like a multi-family accelerator. Where it's like, Gary, you, you, you could both put like a hundred in, because I know like YC used to put two fifty and then they want like ten percent back. Gary, we busted in half.

• 2:32:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:32:58Speaker 00

  Ten and ten.

• 2:32:59Jordi Hays?

  Ten and ten.

• 2:33:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, ten and ten and when I'll put the hundred, you put the one fifty.

• 2:33:05John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much.

• 2:33:06Jordi Hays?

  This was super fun.

• 2:33:06John Coogan?

  This is so much.

• 2:33:07Speaker 00

  No, guys, thank you guys so much.

• 2:33:08Jordi Hays?

  Let's make it a regular thing.

• 2:33:09Speaker 00

  Yes, no, I love it, man. We're all in the same place. Thank you guys so much.

• 2:33:11Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic.

• 2:33:12Speaker 00

  Listen, I'm a big fan, huge fan. Watch you guys daily. I'm so glad we're able to make this work.

• 2:33:16Jordi Hays?

  This is awesome.

• 2:33:17Speaker 12

  You're welcome anytime.

• 2:33:17Speaker 00

  I would love to come back again.

• 2:33:18Jordi Hays?

  This is electric.

• 2:33:19Speaker 00

  I appreciate it. Thank you guys so much.

• 2:33:20John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:33:21Speaker 00

  Yes, sir. Tell me, thank you, guys.

• 2:33:23John Coogan?

  See ya.

• 2:33:23Speaker 00

  Much love, everybody.

• 2:33:24Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:33:24John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:33:25Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:33:26John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about public.com investing. For those who take it seriously, stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. And we are back to back with two guests in the TDP and UltraDome. The men.

• 2:33:44Jordi Hays?

  Made it in.

• 2:33:45John Coogan?

  Eleven. We got shirts. Ooh, I like this embroidery here.

• 2:33:48Jordi Hays?

  Follow.

• 2:33:49Speaker 12

  New logo as of this morning.

• 2:33:50John Coogan?

  I like it. Very nice. Well, walk me through the logo design. Well, first introduce yourselves.

• 2:33:55Speaker 12

  Tristan just gave our pitch, by the way.

• 2:33:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. You guys must be co-investors.

• 2:34:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:00Jordi Hays?

  You guys must be co-investors on some stuff.

• 2:34:02John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show, I'm sure. You're like Castilian shirt.

• 2:34:04Jordi Hays?

  We got a Castilian shirt.

• 2:34:05John Coogan?

  That company is on a tear near us as well.

• 2:34:08Speaker 12

  Olaf Soren told you it was more.

• 2:34:09John Coogan?

  I like the nears.

• 2:34:10Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 2:34:10John Coogan?

  Orange. I didn't realize that they were verticalizing orange. It's a good color. Anyway, sorry. Quick introduction, names, titles, everything quickly, and then we'll go into it.

• 2:34:20Speaker 12

  Ian Rountree, founder and general partner at Cantos.

• 2:34:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:24Speaker 12

  Glad to be joined by.

• 2:34:25Jordi Hays?

  Grant, a partner at Cantos.

• 2:34:26John Coogan?

  Fantastic. When did you guys get started investing?

• 2:34:29Speaker 12

  Ten years ago.

• 2:34:30John Coogan?

  Ten years.

• 2:34:31Speaker 12

  Almost exactly.

• 2:34:31John Coogan?

  Overnight success. And the latest, the newest fund, take us through it.

• 2:34:37Speaker 12

  New fund we just announced is 70 million. Last fund was 50. We kept it.

• 2:34:47Jordi Hays?

  It's even louder.

• 2:34:48Speaker 12

  It feels even better than I expected it to.

• 2:34:51Jordi Hays?

  You feel it in your bones. Feel it in your bones.

• 2:34:54John Coogan?

  I felt the.

• 2:34:55Jordi Hays?

  First of all, did you ever, did you ever consider Rountree Capital? Because you got Sequoia, you got the Green Oaks. Like, there's already a long lineage of iconic firms that are sort of tree-related or themed.

• 2:35:07Speaker 12

  Not for a second, no.

• 2:35:08John Coogan?

  No. Where's, where's the name come from? Where's the logo come from? I want to know about the new logo.

• 2:35:14Speaker 12

  So, so I named it from Cantos because the, the, um... Chapters of an epic poem.

• 2:35:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:35:20Speaker 12

  Arcantos.

• 2:35:21John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. Yeah.

• 2:35:22Speaker 12

  And I always, I always thought we're drawn to startups.

• 2:35:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:25Speaker 12

  These missions that are greater than ourselves.

• 2:35:28John Coogan?

  Let me take that, dude.

• 2:35:29Speaker 12

  We want to be part of some grander story.

• 2:35:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:31Speaker 12

  And I think of founders as a modern day hero.

• 2:35:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:34Speaker 12

  And, and the startup is the epic and I had these delusions of associated grander that I might partner with people who like.

• 2:35:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:41Speaker 12

  Change the world in a way that's remembered in, in story and song.

• 2:35:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was, uh, what was the strategy early on? Like, were you trying to lead rounds? Were you going very early stage? Whatever would work?

• 2:35:52Speaker 12

  What strategy?

• 2:35:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:54Speaker 12

  The strategy was write checks into startups.

• 2:35:57John Coogan?

  Okay, just get allocation in good companies. Got it. Okay.

• 2:36:00Speaker 12

  Yeah, I wish I called fund one, fund zero, because it really was just like lessons.

• 2:36:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:03Speaker 12

  Cobbled together four million.

• 2:36:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:05Speaker 12

  Writing tiny checks.

• 2:36:06John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:36:07Speaker 12

  Just trying to learn.

• 2:36:07John Coogan?

  Four million. Wow. What a start. That's amazing.

• 2:36:09Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:36:10John Coogan?

  I feel like the, yeah, the lessons there probably, uh, there's some people that should be, would probably be better off if they started with four million because it really is a constraint, but that breeds ingenuity, I'm sure.

• 2:36:22Speaker 12

  Well, I did. I also was like, you know, I, I was early at SoFi.

• 2:36:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:25Speaker 12

  Crazy to go to the US men's opener at SoFi Stadium, by the way. That's surreal because I, I joined them and they were like 20 people.

• 2:36:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:32Speaker 12

  Um, and just started writing checks.

• 2:36:33Jordi Hays?

  I think it's like 20 million a year for 20 years, so 400 million to just get the naming rights. I think they bought it.

• 2:36:40Speaker 12

  What percent of their market cap was up?

• 2:36:42Jordi Hays?

  I think, aren't they on a, aren't they on a rip? You probably sold a long time ago.

• 2:36:45Speaker 12

  I did, unfortunately.

• 2:36:47John Coogan?

  Paperhead.

• 2:36:48Speaker 12

  Paperhead.

• 2:36:49John Coogan?

  This is why I started the private markets.

• 2:36:51Speaker 12

  It's only, it's only a $23 billion stock.

• 2:36:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, but, but, but, I mean, that's a, that's a perk of being in the private markets.

• 2:36:59Speaker 12

  I sold secondary to Silver Lake, I think in the series D, maybe?

• 2:37:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:37:04Speaker 12

  But that helped me get Canto's up.

• 2:37:05John Coogan?

  So, uh, but, but, so fund zero, fund one, uh, you know, whatever the right tool for the job is, whatever the right deal is, you'll get in as long as it's a good company. Uh, how rigid are you today? Do you want to be a specific, uh, specific, uh, first money in seed, series A? Do you want to take a certain ownership perspective, percentage? Like what guardrails do you have, if any?

• 2:37:34Speaker 12

  We feel like the constraints breed creativity in a way. You want to be focused enough that you signal to the market what you do, and we kept the fund relatively small because we want to be able to look a founder in the eye when we write a one and a half million dollar check, and me and Grant and me, our principal, can look a founder in the eye and say, "Your company at this stage is a meaningful percentage of my network."

• 2:37:55John Coogan?

  Is important to you.

• 2:37:56Speaker 12

  And if you get too big, you can't really say that with a straight face.

• 2:37:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, when I think about the names like Nero's, Castilian, there's a bunch of others, like that, the 70 million like feels like, yeah, very intentional about like, we want to actually just keep doing what we're doing.

• 2:38:11Speaker 12

  Totally. That said, a lot of the best investments look like exceptions. You need to know when to bend.

• 2:38:16John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:38:17Speaker 12

  And Grant led Castilian's seed round when he was at entries, and the first thing he said when he joined Cantos was, "Hey, I know they're about to raise a big Series A."

• 2:38:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, "Well, let's do it."

• 2:38:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. The logo, the new logo, what's the etymology?

• 2:38:34Speaker 12

  So this is a quill.

• 2:38:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:38Speaker 12

  And we also like that it implies a vector.

• 2:38:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:38:42Speaker 12

  We talk a lot about tempo, speed, velocity really matter for a startup, because time compounds, just like money.

• 2:38:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:38:49Speaker 12

  And I like that it looks like a diving peregrine falcon or something.

• 2:38:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:56Jordi Hays?

  Dude, I was just watching videos about a peregrine falcon.

• 2:38:59John Coogan?

  This is what you do in your free time?

• 2:39:01Jordi Hays?

  My four-year-old.

• 2:39:02Speaker 12

  Fastest creature.

• 2:39:03Jordi Hays?

  Fastest creature on earth, and they are incredibly violent, like they just go after other birds, like literally they're like a missile.

• 2:39:13Speaker 12

  Sounds like some of the founders we met.

• 2:39:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Peregrine falcons.

• 2:39:17John Coogan?

  State of Defense Tech, we were talking about this, are we past peak Defense Tech in terms of, not in terms of the size of the companies, but in terms of the rate of formation? It feels like post Anduril awareness. There was a boom, there were a lot of founders that came into the category from other areas, experience from SpaceX, et cetera, but is it picking up still?

• 2:39:44Jordi Hays?

  You guys have the blessing of like, you're in Nero's, you're in Castilian, you're not like, "Oh, we needed, we need our drone." Need to find more.

• 2:39:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, and a lot of founders, a lot of would-be founders, if they're If they're at like Boeing and they're bored and they want to do something more exciting, like they could go work at Neuris, you know, like, like there are so many options now. If you want to go have an impact at the early stage broadly that you might not need to start a company. But what are you seeing on the ground?

• 2:40:09Speaker 13

  Well, one of the ways we look at these, like the cinematic universe here broadly is go down like the top, you know, 100 companies by market cap. And as soon as you start to not recognize the names, it turns out that those industries are super big and massive.

• 2:40:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:40:23Speaker 13

  Defense was one of the ones that now there's enough people like Androl, volunteer that paved the way. And people are realizing that the venture scale outcomes from, but one of the amazing things about Kanto's, when I was at Andreessen was just observing how Ian and the team were able to find these categories that people still didn't feel comfortable about. I mean Tristan's talking about ag, right? Like 10 years ago, people were like, oh, let's do ag tech. And everyone's like, it's a horrible place. You're never going to make money. And then, you know, we turn around a few years later and Kanto's is leading the seed round for Shinkai.

• 2:40:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:57Speaker 13

  And it's like fish killing robots. It's really weird. Yeah.

• 2:41:02Jordi Hays?

  I think it was the pre-seed. Weren't you guys in the pre-seed or what?

• 2:41:05Speaker 13

  It was a small seed.

• 2:41:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's some crazy ag tech things. We had the founder of the laser weeder on.

• 2:41:12Speaker 13

  Oh, yeah. No, I, yeah, there, there's a bunch of cool things.

• 2:41:17John Coogan?

  Have you heard about this?

• 2:41:17Speaker 13

  No.

• 2:41:18John Coogan?

  It's a, it's a tractor, but everyone's worried about pesticides. Very obvious solution is just fire a laser at the exact weed. So you just burn it. No one has a problem with like having a burnt weed next to your tomato. So it's fully.

• 2:41:32Speaker 13

  No pesticides. Way better.

• 2:41:33John Coogan?

  And it's just something that's you, obviously like you can back of the envelope how that's built very quickly. But it's enabled by computer vision and, you know, small actuators that can adjust where the laser is going. And there's a whole bunch of like somewhat commodity technologies that are just put together in this very interesting way. Creates a great product.

• 2:41:51Speaker 13

  Yeah, but it's how you package it.

• 2:41:52John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 2:41:53Speaker 13

  It's one of the lessons, like when I got into deep tech, it's like.

• 2:41:56Speaker 12

  Technology is not inherently valuable in and of itself.

• 2:41:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:00Speaker 12

  It's valuable insofar as it solves a problem.

• 2:42:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:02Speaker 12

  Creates value in the world.

• 2:42:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:04Speaker 12

  And if you're better at packaging things that are off the shelf in a novel way and contextualize that in a business that makes money.

• 2:42:11John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:42:11Speaker 12

  That's a lot more interesting than like, oh, I did my PhD in this crazy thing and it sounds really cool.

• 2:42:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:17Speaker 12

  How do I sell this, by the way?

• 2:42:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. Where do you see yourself punching the hardest in terms of value add? Like, you're making investments in a way that you are an important voice around the table to the founders. That's clear. But are they coming to you with go-to-market consultation or hiring or strategy or marketing? Like, where do you feel like you're, if a founder calls you about a particular problem, you're excited to talk about it as opposed to saying like, oh, this is kind of new. I can help as much as I can, but.

• 2:42:52Speaker 12

  Yeah, I mean, there's all the like, when I'm fundraising next.

• 2:42:54John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure, sure.

• 2:42:56Speaker 12

  In-house banker or whatever.

• 2:42:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:58Speaker 12

  All the relationships. And we have very high hit rate there.

• 2:43:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:01Speaker 12

  Something like, you know, over 90% success rate in getting your next round.

• 2:43:04John Coogan?

  And that's, and that's actually a. And that's an advantage of being a $70 million fund is that there's no signal to like, yeah, I'm actually not doing the $100 million round. It's like, yeah.

• 2:43:13Speaker 13

  Well, the other, I think the other thing that's different about Cantos and maybe we talk about like, you know, joining from injuries and going here.

• 2:43:20John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:43:20Speaker 13

  Like, I think one of the things that's really clear about Ian and the team was they're so concentrated.

• 2:43:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:26Speaker 13

  And so, yes, we don't have the follow-on signaling dynamic here. But we also, when we go to another firm and say, we think this company is amazing, they're going to take it that much more seriously. And also, because we're concentrated, we can just devote more time to our relationships here. So we have a lot more context on any company in our portfolio probably than the rest of the entire cap table.

• 2:43:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:47Speaker 13

  And, you know, there are times when founders don't want us to be involved because they're busy and they're crushing.

• 2:43:51John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:43:52Speaker 13

  But most often, early on, you need a lot of help. And that's where I think like, we've just, they've been doing this for 10 years. I've been doing a good amount of time too. Like, we have enough pattern matching. And I think the other thing too is for these categories, like. I'm fired up that everyone's coming in to the cinematic universe here. But also, not a lot of people, I think, have like as strong opinions for how to build a company or what types of founders you need to have. And I think with the lessons here, we can package a lot of that and have this cross pollination between the portfolio companies that's pretty distinguished and helps out a lot.

• 2:44:26Speaker 12

  But a lot of times, the founder, they have the intuition, they know what they need to do deep down, they kind of just need to hear from someone they trust that like, yep. Like when we invested in Shinkai, right, they were still licensing robots to fish farms.

• 2:44:41John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 2:44:42Speaker 12

  And they kind of dabbled in selling fish, having their own brand, but they weren't capitalized well enough to go do that. And so we stepped in, we were like, hey, why aren't you doing that thing anymore? And Safe was like, honestly, because...

• 2:44:53Speaker 13

  Everyone's saying no, yeah.

• 2:44:54Speaker 12

  And we were like, that's absolutely what we should do. And it was like, we had given water to a man in the desert. Like, he wanted to do it, he knew he needed to do it, the other investors were being more coy about it, and we were like, no, let's go direct, man, like, use your own robots, don't sell them, just sell better fish with those robots.

• 2:45:11John Coogan?

  Another super vertically integrated, it's great. Where's the office, do you have an office here?

• 2:45:16Speaker 12

  San Francisco, I'm in San Francisco.

• 2:45:18Speaker 13

  I'm in LA.

• 2:45:18Speaker 12

  I'm in LA.

• 2:45:19John Coogan?

  If you could open an office anywhere in the world, where would it be?

• 2:45:22Speaker 12

  What a...

• 2:45:23John Coogan?

  No, post LA, and then maybe there's a boom in Austin, where's the next, next boom? For entrepreneurial talent, hard tech, defense tech, where's interest?

• 2:45:34Speaker 12

  Texas has been good to us.

• 2:45:35John Coogan?

  Texas?

• 2:45:36Speaker 12

  We're investors in Soligen and Venus Aerospace in Houston, or Sargent Industries in Austin more recently, there's a couple CEOs that live there as well in the portfolio.

• 2:45:46Speaker 13

  We're gonna see a bunch of these states, though, start to be really compelling. LA is so strong in many ways because Tesla and SpaceX. Austin's starting to get that with a bunch of other companies there. Well, we're also seeing those, so many companies were started in the Gundo, they kind of graduate to Torrance or Hawthorne. But then eventually, Castellan, for example, they're not going to be able to test their missiles in LA, obviously, that'd be terrifying. And so a lot of these companies graduate, Radiant, same thing, for new

• 2:46:12Jordi Hays?

  How many times you meet a Gundo founder and you're like, "Don't test your product."

• 2:46:17Speaker 13

  Don't do it here, you can do it somewhere else.

• 2:46:19Jordi Hays?

  We're not too, we're not far enough away for me to feel comfortable.

• 2:46:23Speaker 12

  You start in the Gundo, or you start somewhere else, you move to the Gundo.

• 2:46:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:46:26Speaker 12

  Series A, you move to Torrance, and then you start building a factory.

• 2:46:29John Coogan?

  In Texas.

• 2:46:30Speaker 13

  In Texas, Tennessee.

• 2:46:31John Coogan?

  Tennessee.

• 2:46:32Speaker 13

  Tennessee.

• 2:46:32John Coogan?

  New Mexico.

• 2:46:34Speaker 12

  I think you'll probably see, we've seen a number of companies out of Seattle because a lot of the Starlink team is there.

• 2:46:39John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:46:40Speaker 12

  And like, within SpaceX, that's a crack team.

• 2:46:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:46:44Speaker 12

  So you'll, you'll see people that probably want to stay.

• 2:46:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, I know Avalanche, the fusion companies up there, and there's been a few others that we've talked about.

• 2:46:50Speaker 12

  The lumber manufacturer.

• 2:46:51Jordi Hays?

  What is, what is great luck from an R and D cycle or an execution standpoint? Because like, it really just feels like there's such a, like, on TVPN, we're 90% of the time, we're having founders, 95% of the time, we're having founders on that are like, actually like, shipping and making like, really meaningful progress. And then there's like, the 5% of hard tech founders, some of them raise a lot of money, and we're sort of curious, but are not really shipping, and that's like, kind of like, that's people, people, a lot of people have been burned by companies like that over the years, where it's like, "Cool idea, deep tech", and then they just don't, they keep raising money, but don't ever make anything, don't ever get like, real contact with the market.

• 2:47:36Jordi Hays?

  Um, maybe like, quantum, uh, related companies.

• 2:47:40Speaker 13

  There's different types, there's different classes of companies, like, we have some that, like, we, we put out a deck last year on what we're calling like, the State of Adventure Capital. Yeah, there we go. Delayed, delayed. But it's, it's like, 286 slides, and there's a chunk in there that talks about like, "How deep is the deep tech company?"

• 2:47:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:47:59Speaker 13

  And, you know, if you're doing quantum or like, fusion, that's going to take a long time, the timed revenue is long, CapEx, whatever. I think the companies that we like are higher up in that score, where the, the timed iteration's really fast. You want to build, break, and iterate. And I think what a lot of people got wrong in prior hardware eras is they just assumed, yes, like, you only get a few shots on goal, you have to be really deliberate, sniper shot it out, you can't spray and pray your way to greatness here. But that doesn't mean that you can still not like test quickly. If you look at Nero's, if you look at Shinkai, Castellian, all of them are like constantly in the field, fielding their systems, seeing what's working, what isn't, and they know early on that those are not going to be the best ways.

• 2:48:40Speaker 13

  But the most expensive part in building in hardware by far are the people. It's not the hardware, and you hear Elon talk about this all the time. The cost of Starshield and Starship and all these systems there in the grand scheme isn't a lot. It's the hours of labor that go into it. And so the sooner that you test out and see what breaks and refine it, I think the better off. I think we're seeing a bunch more founders that have appreciated this, that have learned it at SpaceX or in other places now. And they're coming out and doing a lot more, but you know, I think there's like the other challenge here is a lot of people that are coming in and are excited to make a bet in defense or energy or what have you.

• 2:49:19Speaker 13

  They, I think are missing that way of evaluating companies and their ability to test quickly.

• 2:49:26Speaker 12

  You have to get on the learning curve as quickly as possible. You can't, you can't sit in a lab. You need to field technology. And we find that getting back to tempo, vector, speed, like we find that if we're diligencing a company in like a week, I used to think, oh, that's not a lot of time. Of course, they won't have made progress. But we've started, we've backed so many people now that like a week to them is like a month to everybody else. And they'll just blow your mind with how quickly they move. And if you don't, again, that compounds, if you don't get that feeling in a week, you're not going to get it in a month, a quarter, a year, all of a sudden a decade, you know, is a lot shorter than it used to be.

• 2:50:04John Coogan?

  Are you feeling the pull of the AI vortex? It feels like we're seeing like-

• 2:50:09Speaker 13

  Like, no, not at all. I didn't notice it.

• 2:50:11John Coogan?

  No, it feels like, it feels like we've seen a number of hard tech companies sort of pivot or expand into AI-related projects. Boom, supersonic, like Castellian, I can imagine that somebody's going to try and figure out how to bolt that thing to the ground.

• 2:50:25Speaker 13

  Yeah, I'm sure.

• 2:50:26John Coogan?

  Nero's is going to wind up being like, security for AI data centers or something. Obviously, they have fantastic businesses, but like, are there examples or like, how do you negotiate? Or what do you, what do you say to a founder who's saying like, yeah, we have a- We have a six out of 10 market right now. It's going to be a couple of years, but I got an interesting call from a NeoCloud and they think that they could put our thing to work.

• 2:50:51Speaker 12

  We were having this conversation recently. We've made, we've made a general robotics investment that's still in stealth. We're really excited about it. And it will be general, but again, we want to get on the learning curve. Ideally, we want to commercialize as quickly as possible. And we're thinking about where do you start? And we're just throwing spaghetti at the wall. And one of the ideas was like, should we start a car wash? You know, have these like robot arms wash your car for you?

• 2:51:14John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:51:15Speaker 12

  And then we're like. Which are sneaky good businesses.

• 2:51:17John Coogan?

  No, no, good business also extremely fragmented. I don't think they've been rolled up. And with self-driving cars, the Waymos, they'll need to go somewhere, why not match it?

• 2:51:26Speaker 12

  You know who has a lot bigger budgets right now? Data centers. Maybe data centers could use some robots. So of, of the two, it seems like a pretty obvious answer. I think there will be a lot of technologies that can ride that wave. When I, when I first invested in Radiant, we were, we were talking about military applications.

• 2:51:40John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:51:41Speaker 12

  And the behind the meter application for data centers was not even really on the radar.

• 2:51:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. I interviewed Doug a couple of years ago and I was like, so like you're going to get calls. And he's like, ah, we really like the idea of going to Mars and stuff. And I'm like, you'll get there.

• 2:51:55Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 2:51:56John Coogan?

  But you're going to power some May I stuff first.

• 2:51:58Speaker 12

  Well, we got handed, all the energy companies got handed a huge gift.

• 2:52:01John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 2:52:02Speaker 12

  We had no growth in, in, in the grid.

• 2:52:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, nothing.

• 2:52:05Speaker 12

  Thirty years.

• 2:52:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. And there's these like niche applications, like oil and gas exploration, stranded energy and stuff. And now it's just like, yeah, there's obvious, obvious demand. And it's going to be so much easier for these folks. And then all the technology will get commoditized and it'll go everywhere and it'll be great. And you'll still get.

• 2:52:20Jordi Hays?

  What's, what's the state of IP coming out of like universities today? Is that, is that a pipeline of?

• 2:52:27Speaker 12

  Granted, it could be. We have a no PhD policy at Cantos. I learned this the hard way.

• 2:52:33John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:52:34Speaker 12

  Like, I mean, there are, there are some PhDs that are like, like the Salt Nation guys, like John Gedmark at Astronis, who are very business minded.

• 2:52:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:42Speaker 12

  But if you find someone who's like. Trying to commercialize their thesis.

• 2:52:46John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:52:47Speaker 12

  You've got this hammer, you're looking for nails, that like hardly ever works.

• 2:52:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:50Speaker 12

  You're also trained exactly the wrong way.

• 2:52:52John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:52:53Speaker 12

  When you're defending your thesis.

• 2:52:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:55Speaker 12

  Like, it's all caveats and what could go wrong.

• 2:52:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:52:58Speaker 12

  You get dinged if you, you know, overpromise and...

• 2:53:01Speaker 13

  It's like the old school way of thinking about hardware.

• 2:53:03Speaker 12

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:53:03Speaker 13

  Like, it's just, it's like east coast mindset of, we're gonna sit in an ivory tower, think about all the ways that this could make a lot of impact, as opposed to just say, we're just gonna, like, Shinkai's just gonna put the robot on fishing boat and see what breaks, and turns out a lot of things are gonna break. Yeah, let's do it.

• 2:53:19Speaker 12

  Yeah, you'll find like, you know, the SpaceX-

• 2:53:21Jordi Hays?

  Put the gun on the truck.

• 2:53:24Speaker 12

  Were you doing this, Mike?

• 2:53:25Jordi Hays?

  No, yeah, this is John's, like, bit on a Allen Control System.

• 2:53:29Speaker 13

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:53:30Jordi Hays?

  Where he's like, oh, the gun on the truck company.

• 2:53:32John Coogan?

  But they failed to consider that there's a YC company that's just gun on the ground.

• 2:53:36Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, Nine Mothers.

• 2:53:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, Nine Mothers, just gun on the ground.

• 2:53:39Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, multiple use cases.

• 2:53:41Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 2:53:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, gun on everything, I suppose. Anyway, congratulations on the fund. Congratulations on a decade.

• 2:53:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, decade in, decades to go.

• 2:53:51Speaker 12

  That's, that's the idea. You know, we, if you look at our website, kantos.vc, we have these plaques and sort of our version of Trajan's column, because we aspire to back people whose companies will be engraved in stone and metal in a thousand years. And if that's not you, don't email us.

• 2:54:09Jordi Hays?

  I love it, I love it. Know who your, know who your, your customers are.

• 2:54:13John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:54:13Jordi Hays?

  Hit the gong for us. I want you to take it for a spin.

• 2:54:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, take this. This guy's big. Whack that thing.

• 2:54:19Jordi Hays?

  Back it. Interesting.

• 2:54:24John Coogan?

  Thank you for watching TVPN. We'll be back tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific.

• 2:54:27Jordi Hays?

  Oh, hang out with us. We'll close it out.

• 2:54:29John Coogan?

  Hit us five stars on our podcasts and Spotify.

• 2:54:31Jordi Hays?

  Love you.