MetaCloud, Bending Spoons IPO with Founder Luca Ferrari, Amble Founder Joins | Mark Pincus, Shubh Sinha, Wayne Ting, Jeffery Liu & Jon Wang, Eliot Pence, Luca Ferrari, Nick Grossman, Julian Hoenig

(01:26) - Meta Sells Compute? (28:17) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (32:14) - Mark Pincus, an American internet entrepreneur, is best known as the founder of Zynga, the pioneering social mobile gaming company behind hits like FarmVille and Words with Friends. In his recent conversation, Pincus discusses his new book, Life at the Speed of Play, which offers a hands-on guide to transforming ideas into products that resonate with users. He emphasizes the importance of rapid testing and learning in the AI era, sharing insights from his experiences to help entrepreneurs increase their chances of success. (01:08:42) - Shubh Sinha, co-founder and CEO of Integral, discusses the company's recent $18 million Series A funding and its mission to sanitize proprietary real-world datasets—such as medical records and financial transactions—so AI developers can access valuable data while ensuring privacy and compliance. He highlights how Integral enables data holders to monetize sensitive information without compromising privacy, benefiting both data providers and AI builders. Sinha also emphasizes the importance of privacy engineering in maintaining data utility and regulatory adherence, particularly in sectors like healthcare. (01:14:40) - Wayne Ting, CEO of Lime, reflects on the company's journey to its IPO, emphasizing the challenges faced in the micromobility industry and Lime's success in building a scalable, sustainable, and profitable business. He highlights the importance of operational efficiency, noting that even small mistakes can significantly impact the business, and stresses the need for a clear focus on critical areas like hardware, software, operations, and government relations. Ting also discusses Lime's vertical integration in hardware and software, which has allowed the company to manage supply chain challenges effectively and maintain a competitive edge in the market. (01:27:05) - Jeffery Liu is the co-founder and co-CEO of Assort Health, a San Francisco-based company specializing in AI-driven solutions for healthcare providers. In the conversation, Liu discusses how Assort Health's agentic platform enhances the entire patient journey by automating tasks such as call center operations, document processing, patient intake, care gap activation, and payment collection. He highlights the platform's ability to personalize patient interactions, reduce administrative burdens, and improve access to care, addressing challenges like long hold times and inefficient scheduling. (01:34:20) - Eliot Pence, co-founder of Dominion Dynamics, discusses the company's recent $100 million funding round aimed at building a Canadian defense technology firm focused on autonomous systems and Arctic domain awareness. He highlights Canada's rich defense tech history and the current opportunity to establish a major defense brand, emphasizing the importance of developing solutions for the Arctic's harsh environment to create significant competitive advantages. Pence also notes the company's strategic approach to cap table construction, incorporating both Canadian pension funds and global investors to support their vision of building a globally impactful, Canadian-owned enterprise. (01:41:06) - Luca Ferrari, co-founder and CEO of Bending Spoons, an Italian digital business holding company, has led the firm to a successful $1.7 billion IPO, listing on the Nasdaq under the ticker "BSP" with an $18.4 billion valuation. In a recent conversation, he discussed the company's broad acquisition strategy, emphasizing the importance of predictability and long-term improvement in potential targets, rather than focusing solely on industry or synergy alignment. Ferrari also highlighted the time-intensive nature of their transformative integration process and reflected on their journey from an initial $10,000 acquisition to their current position, underscoring that, despite their achievements, the company's journey is just beginning. (02:03:39) - Nick Grossman, a partner at Union Square Ventures, discusses the firm's investment approach, emphasizing their focus on expansive technological waves that open new opportunities, such as the Web 2.0 era and the rise of agentic AI. He introduces the "Rebel Alliance" thesis, highlighting the vast ecosystem emerging around powerful AI models and the potential for generational companies to be built across various components of the agentic stack. Grossman also addresses the challenges and opportunities of thesis-driven investing, noting the importance of timing, team selection, and the balance between capital intensity and strategic positioning in the evolving AI landscape. (02:22:48) - Julian Hoenig, co-founder and chief design officer of Amble, discusses the inception of the Amble One, a street-legal electric buggy designed for short-range mobility in resorts and urban areas. The idea originated from a conversation with his friend José António Uva, who sought an aesthetically pleasing mobility solution for his resort in Portugal. Recognizing a broader market need, Hoenig and his team developed the Amble One, emphasizing design, comfort, and performance, with plans to begin deliveries to hospitality clients in 2027 and expand to consumer markets by 2028. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPN. I'm zoomed in, you're zoomed out. It's Wednesday, July 1st, 2026. We're live from the TVPN Ultra Room, the Temple of Technology.

• 0:13John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about where time is money. Save both easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place.

• 0:24John Coogan?

  Hitting the gong so hard. What is that for?

• 0:30John Coogan?

  Is that for Mark Zuckerberg and Meta? Two gongs for two.

• 0:34Jordi Hays?

  People are always complaining that we don't warm up the gong enough. And so I wanted to start the show.

• 0:41John Coogan?

  You're welcome.

• 0:41Jordi Hays?

  And properly warm it up.

• 0:44John Coogan?

  Now it's warmed up. Couple of warm up hits to get it warmed up. You'll love to see it. Uh, anyway, we got a great show for you today, folks. Mark Pankas is coming on. We got back to back IPOs. Wayne Ting from Lime, Luca Ferrari from Bending Spoons. Uh, we got a bunch of other folks. We got Nick Grossman from USV talking about the Rebel Alliance thesis and Amble. We got Julian from Amble, the co-founder and chief design officer, coming on to talk about the electric golf cart. Very aesthetic that you're a big fan of, right?

• 1:16Jordi Hays?

  I'm a huge fan of.

• 1:17John Coogan?

  Huge fan, very excited to talk to him.

• 1:18Jordi Hays?

  Perfect show today. Perfect show.

• 1:20John Coogan?

  Show today. Uh, so our first guest will be joining in 30 minutes and we'll take you through the news. Meta is selling compute. They're getting out of the computing business. They said, we don't need computers anymore to do what we need to do. We don't need them. We're going to be selling them. Uh, Meta Platforms is developing plans for a cloud infrastructure business to sell access to AI computing power and models competing with industry leaders like AWS and GCP. The company is considering selling access to various AI models hosted on its existing AI infrastructure as well as raw computing capacity as part of its Meta Compute Initiative. Meta plans to generate revenue from excessive computing power, uh, could help return its

• 2:03John Coogan?

  investment in AI infrastructure, which includes hundreds of billions of dollars spent on data centers and expensive chips. And so. Lots of reactions to this. The NeoCloud market is selling off. Oddly enough, Meta has a bunch of NeoCloud contracts. Some of those companies are selling off because now they're a buyer and also a competitor. Lots of different takes about, you know, Meta finding its footing, finding something that justifies the massive CapEx. Of course,

• 2:30Jordi Hays?

  Deeply confusing, John.

• 2:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, is it?

• 2:34Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the whole thing, the whole thing.

• 2:35John Coogan?

  What's confusing about it?

• 2:36Jordi Hays?

  I think that, I think it is practical, what they're doing.

• 2:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41Jordi Hays?

  But it shouldn't, it doesn't, as somebody that, that, you know, I would say overall has been a big, you know, cheerleader for Meta, I think it's truly the best, in my view, it is the perfect business. It doesn't give you a lot of confidence in like the strategy overall. If they're signing these NeoCloud deals worth tens of billions of dollars, they're built, you know, spending hundreds of billions of dollars. And yeah, they can make the argument that these type of, like doing any type of NeoCloud deals themselves is just good business. It's, it's just like how, it's just the best way to get ROI today.

• 3:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't give you a lot of confidence that there's near-term products on the horizon for Meta that are going to be able to utilize that capacity themselves, which has clearly been their strategy. Mark and the team have never, have never said, we want to be in the cloud business. They've talked about, they've talked about the possibility of it.

• 3:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:45Jordi Hays?

  But the stated goal of MSL is personal superintelligence. We don't know what-

• 3:51John Coogan?

  I was a fan of, and I think you were a huge fan of. You were like Manus on your phone, going around your social networks. That's my biggest bull case for all of this. Like it's very, there are so many different applications that I can imagine being a daily driver of in the Meta family of apps. Oddly, none of that has really been even tried, in my opinion. It feels like a little bit early to call it.

• 4:14Jordi Hays?

  Seen so far is Muse, Spark.

• 4:18John Coogan?

  Good on benchmarks, like decent, you know, like-

• 4:21Jordi Hays?

  But, but again, not anything that, that anyone should really get that excited about.

• 4:27John Coogan?

  As a, you know, as a, as an API provider.

• 4:30Jordi Hays?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 4:31John Coogan?

  They did announce that they were going to release it via an API. I don't think they have. They might still.

• 4:36Jordi Hays?

  It's a model. It's a good model, sir, but I don't think it will have a lot of demand.

• 4:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:40Jordi Hays?

  And then we've seen Meta Vibes, which was a mid-journey.

• 4:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:43Jordi Hays?

  Rapper.

• 4:45John Coogan?

  But the, the fact, even if, even if Muse Spark is not on the super giga frontier, can it be good enough to get some work done inside Meta family of apps? Like it should, I would imagine, yes, but they just haven't found that, that killer feature. Like there are plenty of, there are plenty of applications that are AI powered. There are plenty of models out there that have found their footing without being on the, you know, super intelligence path or on that particular curve.

• 5:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And it's interesting because yesterday we were talking about the story where Google had been telling Meta like, hey, we don't have the capacity.

• 5:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:23Jordi Hays?

  For you. And here, uh, here Meta is, uh, with, with plenty of capacity themselves. I don't think we can read too much into this because it's just one article from Bloomberg. Uh, I think it will matter a lot who the potential buyers of compute are going to be.

• 5:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:40Jordi Hays?

  If it's, there's a number of companies that I think the market would get excited about.

• 5:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:45Jordi Hays?

  But if they're actually just going and trying to compete as.

• 5:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's weird that it came as a leak about, around like a plan to sell compute as opposed to just what SpaceX did where it was just like, boom, huge contract with Anthropic, lots of excitement going into the IPO. Like that was such a perfectly massaged story. As SpaceX entered the public markets, that would have been great if they just said, hey, we have a frontier lab that's paying us a billion dollars a month now. And like, it's going to show up in earnings next quarter. Like get ready. But the stock market loved it. Like the stock is way up and I don't know if it's way up because they see it as a huge growth area for Meta. Now, is it that crazy?

• 6:25Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think it's not because people have been wondering like where's the ROI going to come from for this hundreds of billions of dollars.

• 6:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:31Jordi Hays?

  Spend and up until now, there's been. No obvious place that it's going to come from, right?

• 6:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:37Jordi Hays?

  Had the Manus deal, that's being unwound.

• 6:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:40Jordi Hays?

  They have the, the deal with, you know, mid journey and vibes, that's, you know, unclear.

• 6:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:46Jordi Hays?

  There's, it seems very obvious that they're going to be able to integrate AI into their glasses over time.

• 6:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:51Jordi Hays?

  But the glasses that have product market fit today are more of just like the,

• 6:57Jordi Hays?

  I, I think the product market fit is really with the camera, not the intelligence combined with a pair of glasses.

• 7:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, which is also surprising that we haven't seen a diffusion model, an image model, because even if you don't, like Instagram in general is pretty, it's, it's remarkably slop free, at least my feed is. I don't see a lot of viral slop images. Uh, it, it happens every once in a while, but they don't have, they, they have to have some twist to them. But you can imagine AI powered features, background replacement, a lot of that stuff being AI enhanced. And people receiving that very positively and enjoying that. I was using Adobe, uh, like Adobe products recently and like in Photoshop, they have an integration with Gemini, Nano Banana, and you can plug in all the different image models and you can actually use the tools in very interesting ways.

• 7:50John Coogan?

  So sort of interesting, I, I don't know, I would imagine that that would scale very quickly and use a lot of compute. But yeah, maybe this is a, a better way. It does seem like it's easier to set up a Neo cloud than a true cloud platform. Like ju- if they were jumping into AWS or GCP and they wanted to have databases and servers and routers and elastic compute and also load balancing and, uh, and a DNS and, you know, all the different features that come with a true cloud platform. That might be a tougher lift, might be a bigger lift.

• 8:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:23John Coogan?

  But just saying, we have a bunch of servers, we're going to run whatever model you want. And then we will, uh, serve it, serve the tokens to you.

• 8:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the question, what would the stock do if they announced that they were, and again, I'm just like,

• 8:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:35Jordi Hays?

  You know, it's total hypothetical scenario, but they were just spinning out all of their AI infrastructure and commitments and, and powered shells to like a SpaceX.

• 8:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:47Jordi Hays?

  It would probably rip, you know.

• 8:48John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 8:49Jordi Hays?

  Even harder.

• 8:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe. I don't know. But yeah, I keep going back to that idea of like the personal superintelligence. What do I actually want? I ran into an interesting conundrum the other day because I've been sort of disappointed by the lack of AI in Meta Apps, which I know I'm like the only person that feels that way because the general vibe on Instagram is like extremely anti-AI. And every other, every other reel is like someone chugging a 55 gallon drum of water and then doing a, you know, a GPT 3.5 impression. But the, but I like Meta does have granular data about every reel I post. Some do better than others.

• 9:32John Coogan?

  I went to Meta AI in the Instagram app and I asked, what should I do more of in order to grow my account? You know, I'm a professional content creator, essentially. This would be useful, sort of a high-powered analytics tools, personalized analytics tools for what I do. I mean, the lifeblood of Instagram is the creator that actually posts. A lot of people want to know what does well. But I got this very generic LLM response. We might be able to pull it up. I think it's in, I shared the image in the timeline. Let me see if I can pull it up here. Did I text it in? Did it go in? I don't know. I can share it with the team. But I got this very, very generic, let me see if I can do this.

• 10:18John Coogan?

  This very, very generic response that just said.

• 10:22Jordi Hays?

  Skill issue.

• 10:23John Coogan?

  Skill issue, basically. Oh, I don't know. It didn't go through.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  Anyway, it said Buffer recommends focusing on sustainable, organic growth instead of quick hacks like follow trains. Post reels consistently since they get 36% more reach than carousels and 125.

• 10:41Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny to be referencing, it's referencing a blog post from a social media management SaaS company.

• 10:46John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 10:46Jordi Hays?

  Like you would think that if you had, I mean, and clearly they're not focused on this use case.

• 10:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:51Jordi Hays?

  But you would think that there would be an opportunity to. Give creators personal and super intelligence to just be better at creating on the platform?

• 10:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I said, use Instagram analytics to see which content converts viewers into followers and double down on it. Like, that's what I asked you to do. I said, what can I do better to get my following? Like, you have all the data about what does well. I don't want to go and look at this reel got 5,000 views, that one got 50,000 views. What's the difference here? I want you to do that. Collaborate with micro creators in your niche for authentic cross promotion rather than paid ads. Engage with responding to comments and testing out traffic. It also said to optimize your profile with clear keywords in the bio and maintain a consistent visual brand. It's like, a lot of that I'm already doing, a lot of that is old. And so, I'm just like, sort of disappointed that, that, like,

• 11:42John Coogan?

  say what you want about Muse Spark and its benchmarks or whatever, like, clearly, if they wire that model up to the user's data, they should be able to integrate appropriately and they just haven't productized it properly. And maybe if I get Manus and I get an API integration, like, I could get there, but like, it should just live in the Instagram search box, I imagine, since they already have an L O M there, it's just a legacy one. And so, on the product side, it's just not, it's just not enough to get to, okay, there's crazy demand for AI within the app.

• 12:13Jordi Hays?

  Did you ask it if the shareholder values three eggs, is the goose valued?

• 12:19John Coogan?

  That just sounds like a, like a jumble of words. Is that even a correct sentence? I don't know. But

• 12:25Jordi Hays?

  Sounds correct to me.

• 12:26John Coogan?

  I mean, honestly, like, the best place, it's very ironic, but the best place for Instagram growth hacks these days is just Adam Mosseri's front-facing videos. Have you seen any of these? So, he takes to Instagram, he uses Instagram very well, he goes direct, posts reels about all sorts of things. So today I got surfaced one. If you post something and it doesn't do well, should you delete it and then post it again? And he says, no, because the algorithm will give the same result. And your followers who saw the first one didn't like it, they're gonna see it and like it even less the second time they see it. So, he just, he just answers a bunch of common questions, he does Q and As, and it's actually the best way to communicate and get insights into how the Instagram platform works. But, it's not Personalized, like he's just giving generic one size fits all advice.

• 13:08John Coogan?

  I want the Adam Mosseri brain enhanced with Meta's AI tailored to my account. That's what I want and like a social media co-pilot. But maybe I'm in the minority here. I don't know. Maybe I'm the only one that would want this. I feel like tools for creators would be a great way to to launch this because even even like a small user. They all everyone almost always cares about how I'd love to get a couple more views on whatever, even if they're just using it in primarily a consumption tool. And so, and then there's also agentic shopping, which we asked Mark Zuckerberg about at Meta Connect last year. This idea that, you know, the Meta Ray-Ban displays, they have the they have the HUD.

• 13:52John Coogan?

  They have AI. You should be able to look at a pair of shoes and say, order me those. And he he sort of like gestured towards that being one potential possible possible future. But it's crazy to me that we haven't even seen them really try to remove at least one click from the shopping experience. Store some more of your data, shorten the funnel, increase conversion rates. That's good for brands. That's good for companies that advertise on Meta. It's good for Meta. It's good for users and it just doesn't feel like that's where the energy has been in terms of productizing AI within the family of apps. And so it feels like e-commerce will see agentic shopping happening.

• 14:35John Coogan?

  We're getting closer. Computer uses be getting better. APIs are there. MCP servers and Shopify has a bunch of tools for this stuff. But it's weird that Meta hasn't even been experimenting there. And we haven't seen like, oh, yeah, like they launched a thing where if you see an ad, you can click a button and the agent will try and go checkout with you and then just confirm the details within the Meta app and you don't actually have to open up the Safari window. I don't know. Maybe that works. Maybe it doesn't. At least we're on the experiment. Maybe they have. I don't know. Maybe I just missed it. But either way, it feels, yeah, this feels like a wind down of like the super intelligence ambitions that Zuck was gesturing towards last year. But I don't know. Maybe this is in the path. Maybe maybe this is just a temporary thing.

• 15:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And, and, you know, if you look at the SpaceX deals with Google and Anthropic, they were, they weren't like five year deals, right? They were shorter term opportunities for both sides to get out and. I think that Meta could easily do something like that where they could make, again, this is like the practical decision and say like, hey, we actually do have way more capacity than we need. We plan on being able to utilize it fully over time, but we need to get our products sort of ramped up. And so in the meantime, why not sell that capacity and signal to the market that we're not entirely irrational?

• 15:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. My, my, um, yeah, Tyler, what's up?

• 15:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was gonna say, maybe a comparison to Apple here, which is like, I think Meta can actually wait until like, the features that they need to implement are like extremely obvious, right? Like, Apple waited a long time to actually implement these things, even though everyone was like basically begging. I don't know if people are like begging for AI features in Instagram, and maybe that'll happen in the future, and they can just basically just wait while like, oh, we're not really sure how to implement this stuff. Yeah, you can put in the search bar, whatever, but it doesn't improve the experience that much. But maybe, you know, in a year or two, there's gonna be some feature that like, wow, everyone really wants this in Instagram. By then, you know, they'll have all the compute necessary. They can, you know, 90 days before they implement it, they can, you know, get out of the lease or whatever.

• 16:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I feel like they just need to do more product experimentation. Like, the core, the core Instagram team, they launched the, what's it called, glimpses or something? It's like a shorter, even shorter version of stories, like lower. It like sits in like this little sidebar of the chat. Like, they are launching different features across the family of apps, but that culture, like, it feels like they have a research organization, but they don't have an AI product organization that's actively productizing things as quickly. I mean, Meta Vibes for, you know, even though it was like this white label of Mid Journey, was, well, at least it was launched fast, and at least they got the feedback.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean-

• 17:13John Coogan?

  I would have liked to see a Meta Vibes level effort like once a month.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  Facebook is, I don't think, or like Meta, whatever, I don't think they've ever been like the company that like really innovates on product, right? There's gonna be some, some feature that everyone's like, wow, this is really great for AI, and then they can then just integrate it into all their apps. They have all the capacity to serve it by that point.

• 17:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know where it goes. Amit is investing over there, shares his perspective, two perspectives on the Meta news. He says bearish, the bearish take is if Meta has excess compute that they are willing to sell via a new cloud business, doesn't that mean we aren't compute constrained? Isn't this really bad for NeoClouds? Why would Meta give a deal to Core Weaver Iron if they just sell the compute themselves? Furthermore, wouldn't they cut CapEx because idle compute as the basis for a new business means they don't need as much compute as they bought, which means CapEx should come down. That would be bearish for all semis. The bullish take is if Meta is building a cloud business, even if they are using idle compute, which means they aren't compute constrained, they might

• 18:18John Coogan?

  end up spending more on CapEx to compete with GCP, AWS, and Azure. Like if they realize that selling compute and services on top of a Meta cloud is better than just ads, then wouldn't they end up having to spend in the same way that Google, Microsoft, Amazon do in order to build out a full cloud business? They do have a lot of capabilities in terms of spinning up data centers quickly, maybe not quite as quickly as SpaceX and AWS, but they're certainly like near the frontier of that capability in terms of putting up GPUs and tents. Says more CapEx would be good for semis. So what do people think? Where do we land on this? The market is certainly reacting positively to Meta and negatively to the NeoClouds because there's a new competitor in town.

• 19:00Jordi Hays?

  Zephyr and the Satriani team are going pretty hard. They say LMAO. Zach finally takes the L.

• 19:07John Coogan?

  Okay, so if this is a, if this is a Metaverse-style side quest and the, and the superintelligence Meta-trained models are the VR of this cycle for Meta's attempt at a new business creation, and the Meta-trained models get sort of mothballed in the way that the Meta Quest and the VR strategy got mothballed, what is the Meta raidance of MSL?

• 19:37John Coogan?

  Like what would, what would remain? Because when they wind down one of these projects, sometimes you get Meta Raybans, which is pretty good business and growing and, and cool. And like, there's development there, but it's a much more narrow focused. And I would say image model, but they, they seem to-

• 19:53Speaker 02

  But wouldn't it just be this like NeoCloud business?

• 19:55John Coogan?

  Maybe, yeah.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  That's what's gonna stay on?

• 19:56John Coogan?

  That's not as fun as Meta Raybans, though. I want a consumer product, a consumer company.

• 20:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's interesting because you can, you can make the case that Meta could build an amazing inference business.

• 20:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:12Jordi Hays?

  Right? Because they already, uh, they already serve millions of businesses globally.

• 20:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:19Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, they could make a pretty compelling case for how like, hey, we help people acquire customers and we help people deliver products and services over here.

• 20:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, we've talked about that before. I don't know that I buy that, that the fact that they have like, you know, every single mobile gaming company and DDC e-commerce business on is, actually flows over to, well, now get your tokens from us?

• 20:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just, I just, I just think that like, people have it in their head like, okay, Meta is a consumer business.

• 20:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:50Jordi Hays?

  Right? It's thought of as like a consumer business.

• 20:52John Coogan?

  But they have incredibly-

• 20:53Jordi Hays?

  But they have massive sales teams, account management teams. They know how to get in front of customers.

• 20:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:59Jordi Hays?

  They've got to the point where, you know, again, they, they're not operating a commodity business, right?

• 21:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:05Jordi Hays?

  Having their, you know, social networks. Cloud is, is closer to one. But anyways, I'm interested to see, I'm, I imagine they'll have to come out with, uh, their own kind of news around this pretty quickly.

• 21:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:21Jordi Hays?

  So that they're not sitting in limbo with just one kind of rumored article floating out there and, and people are speculating. Ju Khan is saying Meta falls out of the AI race. He's over at Citrini as well. Too soon to say that, probably. They still have a bunch of amazing talent. They certainly have a lot of GPUs.

• 21:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:41Jordi Hays?

  And, you know- Elon getting into the cloud business, certainly he was not seeding the AI race, right? I think he seemingly is motivated as ever to do what he can to win or at least be a player.

• 21:57John Coogan?

  It's just, it's almost like the curse of size or something. Like when you're a trillion dollar company, there's probably a world, the Meta Ray-Ban displays is a good example of like, or Meta Ray-Bans, good example of like, there's, there's probably a piece of consumer hardware that's AI enabled, like the Ring or something where, or, or just getting really good at voice models, or just getting really good at image models. And if they're a little bit more narrow and constrained, they could probably completely dominate that. But trying to do super intelligence and, and coding agents and it's a little, it's a little scattered potentially. Serenity says, there's a lot of disinformation going around about Meta cutting CapEx because they quote overbuilt. This is an if they have

• 22:41John Coogan?

  excess capacity and it looks like the opposite right now. Hyperscalers like Google are so mu- are so compute constrained that they have had to cut allocations to Meta back in March since Meta was using too much for internal projects. Meta was immediately constrained, so it looks like they were forced to immediately sign massive $48 billion contracts in Neo Clouds like CoreWeave and Nebios. Meta is selling excess capacity if there's any, especially since their large contracts are take or pay from the newer Neo Clouds. Yeah, this all could just be like a, a potential, like you're laying the groundwork in case you wind up in a situation where that is where the value is accruing, that's where the advantage for

• 23:20John Coogan?

  Meta is. So there certainly is a, a positive thesis there. Jay Yun says, we are still massively short compute Meta and XAI are selling compute because there's no inference demand for their models. It's a compute allocation problem. Too much compute in the hands of players with no internal use for it. Not a compute surplus problem. Interesting. Well, we can continue to cover the story.

• 23:44Jordi Hays?

  More Meta news.

• 23:47John Coogan?

  What is that?

• 23:48Jordi Hays?

  Apparently, according to Bobby Allen over at NPR, Meta considered buying CalShe before it's developing its own prediction market app. That is sort of a classic.

• 24:00Jordi Hays?

  Meta playbook. This sort of puts to bed your theory that they might be just making a, you know,

• 24:08John Coogan?

  Clout based.

• 24:09Jordi Hays?

  Clout based prediction markets where you compete for your ability to see the future. I.

• 24:16Speaker 02

  I'm a manifold, is that right?

• 24:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  So it's like a, it's like a pretty big platform.

• 24:22John Coogan?

  Yes, but I was saying, there's a chance right now, based on the reporting, that it could be the manifold strategy, or it could be the polymarket Kalshi strategy. And the fact that they didn't try and acquire manifold, they tried to acquire Kalshi, sort of signals like, hey, they're probably going the, the financially incentivized route, which I think fits with your thesis that, you know, it's in consumer, it's profitable and growing very fast. And also, Tarek from Kalshi was taking shots at Instagram, saying it's brain rot, saying that like, every minute you spend on Kalshi is a minute that you're not spending brain rotting on Instagram, which is like, okay. I think a lot of people would say that these are like equivalent, or maybe one is worse than the other, but, you know, that's a way to get attention.

• 25:07Jordi Hays?

  Don't you think that, so, so the potential pool of profits in prediction markets and sports betting broadly, I think in the last year, was it 100 and Tyler, can you check? I think it was like 160 ish billion of like trading volume, that is not at all equivalent to revenue, obviously.

• 25:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:29Jordi Hays?

  But it doesn't, it feels like, again, it's not a space that, it's a space that has consistently had many, many, many players, wildly different than, you know, Meta's core social networking business. And I just wonder is like, is the potential profit pool risk the attention that, worth the risk of all the attention you're going to get from lawmakers globally by integrating? Integrating like betting into the product that is already under attack on like a million different fronts, right? It feels like

• 26:06John Coogan?

  With the movie coming out and stuff, it's like you're jumping straight to

• 26:09Jordi Hays?

  It feels like you have a golden goose, right? And the goose is getting valued.

• 26:14John Coogan?

  The goose is getting valued.

• 26:15Jordi Hays?

  Going back, I'm gonna just keep going back to the slides.

• 26:17John Coogan?

  Love these slides.

• 26:18Jordi Hays?

  The goose is valued, it's producing golden eggs and you see another golden egg, but it's almost like a poison golden egg. And if you bring it over

• 26:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:27Jordi Hays?

  To the farm, it might kill the goose.

• 26:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 26:29Jordi Hays?

  It might kill your, your main goose.

• 26:30John Coogan?

  Potentially.

• 26:31Jordi Hays?

  And so it feels, feels risky.

• 26:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. I, I just sent in

• 26:35Jordi Hays?

  The true value is really the power.

• 26:36John Coogan?

  This is the rise of American gambling. These are losses by year in the United States. It's now almost at $250 billion. So I wanted to think about getting into gambling. How, what's the correct gambling strategy? And I got one, I got one. So you go to the Monarch Casino and Resort.

• 26:59Jordi Hays?

  Americans are losing 240

• 27:01John Coogan?

  Billion a year, I think. Or maybe this is, is this cumulative? No, this isn't cumulative. This is, this is per year? I don't know.

• 27:09John Coogan?

  I don't know. I just saw this image. It's high, it's growing.

• 27:12Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't look good.

• 27:13John Coogan?

  Doesn't look good. Uh, here's a gambling strategy that, uh, might work out, not financial advice, but the Monarch Casino and Resort. Uh, if you, this company went public in 1993, and if you went to the Monarch Casino Resort and every week you gambled $100 on their stock by buying the stock over the run, one, just gambling $100 a week on their stock from 1993 to today, you would have put in $174,000 and it would be worth 3.3 million dollars. So.

• 27:47John Coogan?

  Just depends on where you want to gamble. Gamble on the stock, potentially. It's a fascinating company. Golden Door Motel, family owned. They have two assets. They have two casinos and this company is just absolutely printing. Thirty-six percent EBITDA margin. And they buy back stock and they also pay a dividend. It's just two properties, Reno and Blackhawk in, where's Blackhawk? In Colorado. And they've just grown this like small chain of casinos and the company and the stock's done very well. So, own the house, don't bet on the actual casino. Stay out of the casino. Stay in the stock market, potentially.

• 28:27John Coogan?

  Anyway, moving on. Google Gemini, there's some news there. Google AI overviews decreased outbound organic clicks by forty percent. Eric Suft is sharing a new paper by researchers at Carnegie Mellon and the Indian School of Business. Finds that AI overviews were triggered in roughly forty-one percent of observed Google searches. And when triggered, reduced outbound organic clicks by about forty percent. That seems like one to one. The presence of AI overviews increased the likelihood of a zero-click search by roughly thirty-five percent. Everyone is going, everyone's going Google Zero at this point. And the founder, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, wrote about Google AI oligarchy and the end of the open web.

• 29:12John Coogan?

  It's an interesting read, but we'll go through it another time.

• 29:15Jordi Hays?

  December twenty-ten.

• 29:17John Coogan?

  What happened?

• 29:18Jordi Hays?

  Demis was scraping together a couple million bucks.

• 29:22John Coogan?

  This is crazy.

• 29:23Jordi Hays?

  For a small company called DeepMind. This is for a founder that just like, you know, had their, started their career in the last few years. This is like inconceivable. They're like, wait, you mean two on fifty, right? It's like, no. Sold half the company at five million post as one of the most elite.

• 29:49John Coogan?

  Can you imagine what

• 29:50Jordi Hays?

  Technologists in the entire world.

• 29:52John Coogan?

  If it stayed independent this whole time? I don't know, maybe there'd be another, another path or something.

• 29:57Jordi Hays?

  Are you saying they sold too early?

• 29:58John Coogan?

  It seemed like they sold too early. I don't know. Hard to say, hard to say.

• 30:03Jordi Hays?

  Paper Hands?

• 30:04John Coogan?

  Paper.

• 30:05Jordi Hays?

  Paper Hands Pete?

• 30:08John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no. I think all the VCs didn't want to sell. Especially because the whole Google thing, that was like the whole story was, uh, was don't sell the Google. Google's like the bad one, uh, which is funny because like Google's been very responsible and, and yeah, great, great company. Um, I was, I was playing around with VO3 or VO4. Where, where are we in the VO models? Um, so good and yet still not indistinguishable from reality. Uh, we're, we're, we're so, so close and yet so far. If you want to generate a, a video these days, um, it is cool. You can do it on your phone though. I like it. Where do you want to go next? We're joining in, Mark Pincus is joining us in just a few minutes. So we'll bring him in.

• 30:52Jordi Hays?

  Millennials be like Norm MacDonald is funny. Then you watch some of his videos and there's no Meta glasses pranks, no Vine boom, sound effects.

• 31:02Jordi Hays?

  No meme clips interspersed, no undisclosed gambling ads, no Dexter background.

• 31:07John Coogan?

  I don't know the Dexter background music thing. I'm not online enough for that.

• 31:11Jordi Hays?

  I think you would, you would probably recognize the sound.

• 31:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:14Jordi Hays?

  Probably recognize, it's just kind of like meme background music at this point.

• 31:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. Dexter background music.

• 31:23Jordi Hays?

  Uh, bullpen is planning his bachelor party for November. He's not getting married, just feel like the fellas need to let loose a little.

• 31:32John Coogan?

  What's that?

• 31:33Jordi Hays?

  Interesting idea, interesting idea.

• 31:35John Coogan?

  Which one?

• 31:37John Coogan?

  Christopher Nolan went to an AMC Burbank 16 fairly often. Team loves it. We're seeing the new Nolan movie. We just bought tickets. We got a crew assembled for, uh, the Odyssey. We're very excited. Look at this.

• 31:52Jordi Hays?

  Kind of blowing up his spot a little bit.

• 31:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, really. Let the man just enjoy a

• 31:57Jordi Hays?

  A film.

• 31:57John Coogan?

  A film and a big bucket of popcorn. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. Our next guest is Mark Pankas, the author of Life at the Speed of Play. He's with us in the TV1 Ultra. Welcome to the show, Mark. How are you doing?

• 32:20Speaker 03

  I'm great. It's good to meet you guys online.

• 32:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, literally. Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 32:26Jordi Hays?

  After a whirlwind media tour.

• 32:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:29Jordi Hays?

  I feel like, I feel like you probably have worked through like all your, your best bits at this point.

• 32:35Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 32:36Jordi Hays?

  This is gonna be the finale. Or

• 32:39John Coogan?

  Well, we can play the hits. We can also just go a different way.

• 32:42Jordi Hays?

  I want to play the, I want to play the hits.

• 32:44John Coogan?

  Okay, where do you want to start, Gary?

• 32:46Jordi Hays?

  No, where, where should we start?

• 32:47Speaker 03

  We're supposed to be the, the very first one.

• 32:49John Coogan?

  I know. We were traveling.

• 32:50Speaker 03

  We got rescheduled.

• 32:51Jordi Hays?

  It was, it was on us. No, but, but, uh, I hope this is the first of many. So it's, it's great to have you on.

• 32:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, I mean, let, let, let's start with a book. Uh, I want to know, like, before the actual, uh, before the thesis came together, like, why write a book at all? Are people even reading books these days?

• 33:10Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 33:11John Coogan?

  We, we see these charts of like books just falling off entirely. Um, what, what, what was the, uh, is it about legacy?

• 33:18Jordi Hays?

  They should do that. They should have, they should, you should put something in the book that's just like, hey, reader, I want you to pause for a second. If you ever meet me in person, I will ask you for the code word. This is the code word.

• 33:28Speaker 03

  Easter eggs.

• 33:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Easter egg.

• 33:30Speaker 03

  Reward you for making it this far.

• 33:32Jordi Hays?

  And if you tell me I love your book, I will ask you for the code word.

• 33:36John Coogan?

  Oh, there you go.

• 33:40John Coogan?

  But yeah, I, I, I want to hear about, uh, just the general motivations and the general, uh,

• 33:45Speaker 03

  I think everyone should, I think you should. Build a house and write a book one time.

• 33:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 33:52Speaker 03

  Because neither one ends up feeling like it was, you know, the right return on the investment of time.

• 33:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:59Speaker 03

  But it's, but you have this passion in you and you should be all in and get it out.

• 34:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:05Speaker 03

  One time, and this is my one time. I, I had, I'd say that there was just a lot of lessons and a whole playbook built up across five companies and in building Zynga. And I give, I created a course at Stanford Business School and Stanford CS. And I give this advice over and over to founders and even people running companies at scale. And I just said, I might as well get in a book. And I, I'm, I, I think that my reference was Zero to One, Peter Thiel's book. And I thought it's a big reach goal, but if, if my book can be referenceable 10 years later like that, then, you know, it's of use.

• 34:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. Where do you think you either differ with the Zero to One thinking? Do you think it needs expansions, updates? Like what, what needs to be added to the canon that isn't in Zero to One?

• 35:03Speaker 03

  Well, like what, what to actually do.

• 35:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:08Speaker 03

  I mean.

• 35:08John Coogan?

  That's a good point.

• 35:09Speaker 03

  Zero to One is, I just reread it.

• 35:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:12Speaker 03

  A year ago and, and it motivated me again.

• 35:15John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  And I was, oh yeah, I love the moral arbitrage and the monopoly. And it's these big ideas that you love and you can repeat, but it's not, it's not a how to guide or a playbook. And I think so many people have ideas and they either don't pursue them. And I think in this new world AI, that's a shame because the, the bar is so low. Or they do and they fail for the wrong reasons. I think you guys have probably seen this too. So many people who they have a great idea, but it's buried in a losing product. And so the core thesis that I've been saying over and over to myself and other people

• 35:56Speaker 03

  across my career is that that it, once you realize that you have winning instincts and you've attached them to losing ideas, it changes everything. And that's how you change your odds of success.

• 36:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I've heard that. A plus entrepreneur with a C plus market or C plus opportunity.

• 36:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, or a B plus idea is the enemy of an A because it's good enough to get funding and get a team and.

• 36:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's funny because when I was, when I was like around maybe senior year of college, I was working on a product and I felt like I was getting like two different types of advice. Like one is like, don't listen to anyone. Just like, you know, advice is worthless. Just like do, do, do, and you'll, and you'll figure it out. And then, and then, and then on the other side, you know, people are giving you, you know, advice and sort of playbooks. And I distinctly remember one meeting that I had where somebody who's now a friend was like, you're super talented. This idea like it's okay, but it's not great and it's going to hold you back from your potential. And I, and I just like didn't fully

• 37:01Jordi Hays?

  listen, but it's just stuck in my head. Since that point.

• 37:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's sad, right? We see founders who are talented and they are just sticking with an idea that's just not quite right or not that good. And it's because there's something in their gut that they know is amazing. And that was me. I mean, I talk a lot about in the book that I, this is not a humble brag. Okay. I managed to fail. I created one of the first three social networks, tribe.net. And there were probably 10 launched in that two or three year period, including Facebook and MySpace and Tagged and Bebo. Eight of the 10 probably made it, were successful on some level. I was probably amongst the

• 37:45Speaker 03

  two that weren't. And so it took an act of willpower to fail and I had that much will. I was, I was so determined to stick with this one losing idea that. Really, by the time I got to Zynga, I was just not gonna do that again. And I think that's a big message in the book. And I think it's, I still need to hear that message today because we fall in love with our ideas.

• 38:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How much, like, to you, what is the balance between some ideas? Like, I find this in consumer, like, quite a bit more than enterprise because it typically is a lot more defined. But in consumer, like, there's ideas that I've been pitched and I'm like, that's a terrible idea. And then like the founder, you know, just does it and it totally works and sometimes it's unpredictable. And I think you can like tune your intuition like quite a bit, but it can never be like 100% crystal ball. You just know exactly whether an idea is going to work or not. Like, what is your, what has been your framework of, yeah, like, what's the point where you're

• 38:55Jordi Hays?

  like, I'm not 100% sure this idea will work, but it's worth putting in the three weeks or three months or whatever time is necessary to actually get the reality check to the idea?

• 39:07Speaker 03

  Well, I think that we have idea veins or instinct veins. And so there's a zone that you have an instinct around. And then I have this framework proven better new, which is a way to kind of de-risk that and keep ourselves out of trouble. So it's like, just narrow down where your idea is new or novel and wherever it's not, look for what's already proven and copy it. And people like Nikita Baer have really, really been good at that. And, you know, there, he's done kind of the same product over and over again, and it's worked each time. So I think that at least means you're not going to fail for the wrong reason and you get a lot more shots on goal.

• 39:52Speaker 03

  And the whole, and in consumer even, you know, much more than enterprise, it really is, if you test more ideas in a week than the industry you're in, in a contest in a year, you probably have a four or five X.

• 40:07Speaker 03

  Advantage, you know, higher odds of success. And I'll also say that the reality in consumer is, you know, where you see traction, there's a good idea and where you don't see traction is not a good idea. And, and that might sound kind of dumb, but you know, I find in consumer, you could back a, you're better off backing an unproven entrepreneur who's found for whatever reason, product market fit than a proven entrepreneur like me with no product market fit. And that's just, you know, that's an unfortunate reality.

• 40:45Speaker 03

  I have a bunch of questions.

• 40:46Jordi Hays?

  I have, I have a, I have a fun thought exercise. So, so I, John and I have had this debate of is it possible to build a competitor to Instagram? And, and I think that I would like to see someone, someone try because I believe the capital markets are in a, are in a state right now that, you know, even though it's insane and there's like, you know, 99% chance it doesn't work, like there's going to be people that would take the bet. And you have Instagram, which is one of the most popular products in the entire world. And the company is like very focused on like other things, right? Like they're focused on AI and now a cloud business and, and maybe the company overall

• 41:31Jordi Hays?

  doesn't fully appreciate just how amazing the business is. And it, and it still continues to grow. And so I want to believe that it's possible to, for, for a smart team to actually go and, and, and create something that would actually compete in that, in that category. John is like, it's just not possible. It's over. It's like, you know, network effects and the scale and, and the social game that it's turned into, but I want to believe, I'm curious what your view is.

• 42:00Speaker 03

  Well, one of these instinct veins that I talk about is the cocktail party. And originally, like, there was a cocktail party on Napster, and then there was a cocktail party on Friendster, and then Facebook, and now Instagram. And it, once the cocktail party is there and working, it is hard to get people to move, but these cocktail parties can wear out and kind of lose their excitement or appeal. And in the case of Instagram today, I think it's lost a lot of its original value to us, which was social networking. It was the kind of serendipity that we get at a cocktail party.

• 42:42Speaker 03

  And they, for maybe business reasons, you know, they pursued engagement, they want to be more like TikTok and get you, be more entertainment, reels. And so I do think that that opens up an opportunity. I, I don't know if you guys spend much time thinking about net promoter score. It used to be really popular, NPS. And there's a funny thing, you can, you could go research this now, or maybe AI could simulate it for you even quicker, but I would bet that, that today, users of Instagram probably have an NPS of 35, and the day they quit, it's like quitting cigarettes, is probably a minus 35.

• 43:24Speaker 03

  That's usually the sign of some weakness, you know, in your product or brand. Looking at that, you know, on the exit, you know, they're not promoting it. In fact, they're proud that they've given up this bad habit. And what I would say, though, is there probably has to be a new...

• 43:41Jordi Hays?

  The only thing, the only thing, it's, it's a small sample size, but the friends that I know that quit, quit Instagram, they end up still sending me memes from like their business accounts. And I'm like, alright, I get it, you quit it.

• 43:55Speaker 03

  They can't give up the addiction.

• 43:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, I think they're actually like, they're, they're signaling that they've quit, but, but they're, they're still like, you know, having a cheeky drag here and there.

• 44:04Speaker 03

  Well, I gotta say, I, I got my drags down to, like, I probably use Instagram once a month, and then I find myself just drawn into time wasting. I'm on Twitter or X. That's like my social network, my drug of choice. I tell myself it's more valuable content, but you know, that's what we do.

• 44:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I look at it as like, it's an opportunity to do, you know, whatever the inverse of meditation is, right? Meditation, you're sitting there, you're like, I'm gonna let the thoughts, I'm gonna let the thoughts flow through, but I'm not gonna hang on to them, you know, whatever, whatever your approach is. And it's like, what if you could add 20 new ideas to your head every 10 seconds?

• 44:46Speaker 03

  Would you do that?

• 44:47Jordi Hays?

  And it's like, here's, here's drone warfare, and here's a protest somewhere else. And like, here's some startup who's rage baiting you, you know, it's, but addictive, whatever it is.

• 44:58Speaker 03

  It is. But I would say that it's probably, you need a shift, you need something new, I think, to get consumers, to get all of us, we are lazy and apathetic and low attention span. And so, you know, no one's downloading new apps. So there has to be something, probably AI and agents, that, that is the new thing that pulls you into a new cocktail party.

• 45:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  But I do believe it'll happen.

• 45:25John Coogan?

  Even though I'm, I'm like skeptical about the particular go-to-market, I'm curious on your read on the state of venture capital, because if you go back to zero to one, the sources of monopoly power, network effects are one of the four. They're, they're very enduring. And everyone believes that network effects will endure even in the age of AI. And so I guess I have been surprised, even though I can't think of how to disrupt an established social network, I've been surprised that we haven't heard about a $1 billion pre-market round. Well, yes, that's what I'm saying. So that was the interesting thing. By the venture capital community to actually buy their way into a network effect.

• 46:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can build a new social media company, but you need billions of dollars. And like TikTok is evidence of that. TikTok was spending how much money on Meta, how much money on Snap, all these other platforms.

• 46:16Speaker 03

  They were probably the biggest advertiser on the internet for a while.

• 46:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, for, for a minute there. And so I do think it's possible.

• 46:21Speaker 03

  I think they are getting their users, you know, from social networks.

• 46:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:25Speaker 03

  But I, but I would just say, your question on venture capital, why aren't we seeing this funded? I think you gotta pull the camera back and just also say, We're not seeing a lot of consumer being funded. It almost feels like it's not investable right now. I think Y Combinator, probably less than 10% of their companies are consumer. But I'm investing in some consumer, but it's after I see traction. And it feels unpredictable and completely uncertain before there's traction. So I just think distribution is pretty broken. Even though AI feels like a new platform at a consumer level, it's not. We have kind of a portal in GPT, but we also have to remember like we're so early.

• 47:08Speaker 03

  GPT is a single player experience, right? There is no multiplayer version of Claude or GPT. There is no app connection. You know, there's none of the things that enabled Zynga, you know, or MySpace was started. I mean, YouTube was started on top of MySpace. People forget that. So there isn't an obvious way to jumpstart distribution. And I think, you know, VCs rightly want to see something predictable. And so the small number, a company called FOMO announced a big round last week. And I invested in that along with Union Square Ventures. I only invested after they proved it and got the traction.

• 47:52John Coogan?

  Sure, yeah. How do you think vibe coding, agentic coding is going to change or is already changing game development? Because it feels like we should be seeing AAA games produced by solo developers. I don't know if that's more of a VC backable strategy or opportunity, but it feels like we're very, very close to some inflection point there. The indie gave indie dev community is already booming. But how do you think it'll play out? Like a thousand flowers bloom?

• 48:25Speaker 03

  Happy Bar Simulator.

• 48:26John Coogan?

  The simulators are fun, but yeah, I'm just wondering if you think that there's like a business opportunity there or if it will just be more like the D to C boom, where there were a ton of small brands, a couple of breakouts. But by and large, it was just that, oh, there's a ton of, you know, solo entrepreneurs on Shopify today, and that's great.

• 48:43Speaker 03

  Right.

• 48:46Speaker 03

  It's a 280 billion dollar industry that doesn't seem to have any innovation. You know, I think games have gotten really boring and have kind of stagnated. And I think it's because distribution's broken. Will AI change distribution? Probably on a pretty small level. The only place I think it could is enabling much faster testing of ideas, like what some of the hyper casual game companies, like a company called Rollic that Zynga bought was brilliant at that. So they would say, what was TikTockable? So they would figure out what's a TikTok meme.

• 49:28Speaker 03

  They made a game in a week called High Heels that became the number one game in the App Store. So that happened. I don't see anyone really using AI effectively to do that. So then you get to, well, OK, AI can reduce the cost. Sure. And I think it is making headway in reducing the cost. But I don't think you get hits in games because of less cost. You get hits because of more dimensions you can innovate on. And I do think AAA, you know, will come down from 100 million to maybe 30 million. But I don't, I don't think that's going to spark growth in the market.

• 50:08Jordi Hays?

  It's so fascinating that I can't think of a single even media asset game, anything like that, where AI created the hit factor, whatever. Like, we go back to the Harry Potter Balenciaga video. That was one of the first AI videos that really went, went super viral. And people were like, whoa, this is actually entertaining and interesting. Yeah. And it's always like the human that used the AI to do something that they wouldn't have done if they had just had an idea pre-AI. Because it would be like, well, I'm not going to pay for all the CGI to do, you know? It would have just been way too much work. But the human still is the hitmaker. We still got it.

• 50:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, and even if... It's awkward because when we were doing, you know, games, there was Flash, we were doing web games and we were able to innovate and test really quickly and put things out in a day or a week. And now in the App Store and Unity, it's slower, but AI is really well suited for web languages, you know, and web gaming. Web gaming is 1.9 billion out of 280 billion. So a lot of people are betting that 3JS is going to unlock innovation and growth, but you're gonna have to see people embrace web gaming, which, you know, is a tough bet.

• 51:35Jordi Hays?

  What do you think, how would you, how do you think Apple should approach vibe coding? It feels like an interesting, interesting challenge. They're kind of, I don't think they necessarily, at least they don't necessarily know how they want to approach it, or they haven't made it clear yet. They've made it hard for these apps to, you know, I think they kind of froze updates on a bunch of apps and said like, you know, we're just basically like saying like, your business is like over until we figure something out. So clearly they want to make money from it and they want to protect users, which I think are both, you know, developers are gonna be annoyed at, or at least good developers will be annoyed at both of those things.

• 52:16Jordi Hays?

  But it seems like a tough one, where users are clearly gonna want modular software that they can create and multiplayer experiences that they can imagine and then share with friends, but it feels like it's at odds with all of Apple's kind of principles.

• 52:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, 100%. I mean, I, I don't think that there is a real incentive for Apple to do anything about that. And I don't think, it doesn't feel like, that's not the energy I get from Apple. It's not the vibe, is vibe coding.

• 52:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I don't even see Apple doing anything to help distribution of the apps that, you know, are put out on their platform now. So I don't think...

• 53:06Speaker 03

  I just, I have a hard time seeing them motivated to help, you know, people put out tons more apps. I mean, I think it's more likely that that logjam gets broken because somebody makes an app container that somehow, you know, Apple allows people to keep changing massive amounts of change of content inside. I mean, almost like a Roblox, but it's, yeah, it's, I, it hurts my brain to figure out how that's gonna happen. And vibe coding, I actually, I'm, I think Claude Code, Codex, I think, I think automating coding and using

• 53:50Speaker 03

  coworking agents has, obviously, you don't need me to tell you that has legs. I think that's gonna go somewhere.

• 53:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:59Speaker 03

  But, but vibe coding almost feels like the misstart we had with blogging and GeoCities, where there was a moment where everyone was gonna make their own website, and they did, and then they just weren't very good.

• 54:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:15Speaker 03

  And it didn't go anywhere. There was, there weren't really websites that blew up.

• 54:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:19Speaker 03

  That I know that were built on top of like a GeoCities, or maybe I'm dating myself, you guys don't even remember those.

• 54:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, we, we are, like, it feels like we're very close to being able to effectively vibe code an iOS app in the cloud, have it, deploy it to test flight, and you get that app back on your phone, and close that loop entirely on your phone in an Apple compliant way. Now, it couldn't go viral, because it's not in the store.

• 54:50Speaker 03

  Right.

• 54:51John Coogan?

  You might be able to have your agent go and submit it to the store and wait two weeks, and then it gets out there, which might be an acceptable flywheel for some developers, but it is, like, the technology is gonna get there quicker than the distribution, and like, the ideas, I think. I think you're spot on.

• 55:08Speaker 03

  And the ability to test. I'm also surprised

• 55:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 55:11Speaker 03

  this far into this AI cycle, that if, I would have thought

• 55:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:15Speaker 03

  that the first thing we'd see is kind of top of the funnel, massive testing of, you know, using ads and

• 55:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 55:23Speaker 03

  links and things. And tell your agent to spend all night testing and come back in the morning with the winning variant. And I don't even see a, I don't know about you guys, I don't see even one successful company or service offering that. And I don't find any founders doing that. It's more you can build something in three months, kind of, that would have taken a year or two.

• 55:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  So it's more of, I can get to my prototype faster, but not, not, I can test a lot of ideas faster.

• 55:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Speaking of ads, do you think hyper casual games should be allowed to advertise with fake CGI versions of a different game to promote the install of their very basic, probably pick three game?

• 56:11Speaker 03

  Hmm, wow. Now we're getting to, at a toss level, should they be allowed? At a morality level? I'd say it's, it, I don't like it. I mean, I think it's, it's misrepresenting, you know, it's, I wouldn't, I wouldn't blame Apple for taking somebody down for that. Because it's misrepresenting things.

• 56:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:40Speaker 03

  It's a bad user experience. Now, what I would be okay with is what we did in the beginning of Zynga is, I would go, I'd put up a link for some amazing new game, you want to try? And it would go to 404 page not found, because I was just testing for heat and interest.

• 56:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:57Speaker 03

  So, or eventually we got more sophisticated and say, you know, you'll be the first to know about this game, you know?

• 57:04Jordi Hays?

  I had, I had, I had an experiment.

• 57:07John Coogan?

  Record the fake game, have it, have an agent vibe code you a real version of the fake game. Because a lot of people, they want to play the fake game, but the fake game doesn't actually have the, the flywheel of you will keep playing it. You'll play it for a couple of minutes and then you'll get bored. And so they have to funnel you to something else. Jordy?

• 57:23Jordi Hays?

  I had a product in college. I was taking a lot of film photos and there was like, it was a 30 minute drive to the closest place to get film developed reliably. And I was quite frustrated by it. So I wanted to make like, effectively a subscription service. They would send you one or two rolls of film a month, and you just send it back, and they would develop it and upload it for you and whatever. And to test it, I just like ran a bunch of Facebook ads at a landing page. And I actually got, I think I had like a 15, $20 CAC or something at the time. Facebook ads were a lot cheaper back then. Ended up not pursuing it, but I just refunded everyone, like obviously right afterwards because I wasn't offering, I wasn't able to offer the service.

• 58:04John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 58:04Jordi Hays?

  I was just like, hey, sorry, like, you know, we over

• 58:07John Coogan?

  That's a cool experiment.

• 58:08Jordi Hays?

  oversold or whatever, but best way to test something.

• 58:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. Back to the book. Uh, Peter Thiel didn't, uh, Reddit AMA after zero to one, uh, launched and someone asked him, what is the Straussian reading of zero to one? And he said, don't become an entrepreneur, which is a very funny response. What is the Straussian reading, reading of life at the speed of play?

• 58:35Speaker 03

  Hmm, I, I would, not to be, uh, you know, read completely a carbon copy, but I would say, I'd say, don't, don't become a product founder.

• 58:53Speaker 03

  Don't do it if you want to make money. Like, don't, don't go be a product founder if you think this is, uh, the best path to be, you know, rich and successful because it's, I end the book by saying, how ambitious are you? And, and a lot of, you know, everyone says I'm an 11 on a 10 scale, right? But then the question is, well, what, the flip side of that question is what are you willing to sacrifice to get to that place? Would you toil in obscurity for 10 years in order to have an 80% chance of the greatest home run, you know, of your life? Or would you take kind of an 80% chance of a first base hit in one to two years?

• 59:34Speaker 03

  And most people would take the latter and that's, that's why they stay in their jobs or careers, or that's why even once we go found a company, I think we make all these compromises to de-risk it.

• 59:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is that the correct question to ask to assess someone's level of ambition? Should you ask them 80% chance of a home run in 10 years versus, you know, 20% chance of base hit or something like that? Or, uh, sorry, vice versa.

• 1:00:02Speaker 03

  Odds.

• 1:00:03John Coogan?

  Or are there other?

• 1:00:04Speaker 03

  I'd like that.

• 1:00:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. 80%. Uh, those are good odds. But, uh, or are there other questions that you can dig into when you're talking to a founder to actually assess their level of ambition?

• 1:00:15Speaker 03

  I think you can pretty quickly, you guys have seen this too, get a sense of what's motivating somebody and why they're doing this. And I think that the best founders have a passion for this that goes beyond this one business or opportunity. And they need that because it's probably going to fail. And so I think that there's a question like, why are some founders repeating success and some have one big success? And I think it is like your commitment and willpower. And if you have, if you're more committed to...

• 1:00:59Speaker 03

  Because we've talked about Founder Mode. And there's all these moments where I think as a founder, we have to have real courage. But it's not courage to go against the world. It's usually courage to go against our own team, our own investors. Because we've promised them things. We've built expectations with them. And now we have to tell them we are wrong. And you come in on Monday and you're like, "I just saw another product the competitor had last week, and what we're doing is totally wrong." And people have complained, "Working with Mark is like third grade soccer. Every Monday, he wants to chase another ball." And they're not wrong a lot of the time. Because I'm trying to be intellectually honest, and I can burn people out that way.

• 1:01:42Speaker 03

  But it's because I'm more committed to winning than I am harmony or even keeping this team with me. So I think that's more of the thread that I look for is, do I see that this person is more motivated by taking the hill and winning than being liked or respected? Yeah, it's so interesting because you have...

• 1:02:07Jordi Hays?

  I've been in that mode too where third grade soccer strategy where and I think that comes from like fundamental knowing that what you're working on is there's something wrong with the idea. At least in the early days for me because with our with our with the podcast early on, even when we literally had like 100 viewers, I didn't have that. I didn't have that like third grade soccer strategy was just like this is a good product and I know because there's people I trust that are not lying to me and they say like this is great, keep doing it. And so like we had the blinders on, but I've been in that mode and in hindsight where you're just kind of like, oh, like let's try this other variation of this thing or

• 1:02:50Jordi Hays?

  let's, you know, we need to go in a totally different direction. And that was it, it comes off as scattered. But if you're able to admit that it's more like you need to be intellectually honest with yourself and your team that you're scattered because there's something that's fundamentally off with the approach.

• 1:03:07Speaker 03

  Right. Right. You knew that you liked this product that you, I mean, I think and in feedback loops you got from people around you, like you felt good about it and they liked it. You're like, okay, if it's not catching on yet, I think it's a marketing question and a patience question. That's different than you kind of feel in the pit of your stomach like it's just not that good. And I think a lot of times we're so hopeful about a product we're building and then when we finally see it, it's usually never as good in code as it was in our mind. And, and what do you do? I mean, that's happened to me so often in games that like this will be so cool. And then we build it like, ah, or we see a competitor who has that and I want to send

• 1:03:52Speaker 03

  them a thank you note because I'm like, thank you for building my bad idea for me. I'm definitely not going to do that now. But when you, it's kind of like love, you know, finding your partner when, when I think when you do find the person, you're not asking, is this right? You're not asking other people, do you, what do you think of her?

• 1:04:13John Coogan?

  You mentioned a bucket list. Everyone should build a house. Everyone should write a book. Was taking a company public on your bucket list before you did it? Was it appropriate to have it on that list? What was that like?

• 1:04:27Speaker 03

  Well, this is the second company I took public. I had a company called support.com that I took public in 2000 on the last day of the IPO window.

• 1:04:38Speaker 03

  Because it was enterprise software.

• 1:04:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:40Speaker 03

  And our VCs had no interest in the company until the consumer fell apart. You know, we had 170 million bookings. We were able to go public.

• 1:04:50Speaker 03

  I, I think it's a false dream. I mean, I, and I think I even felt it a little bit then, but I for sure, by the time I got to Zynga, I didn't want to go public. We were forced to go public. We, we were incredibly profitable. We had over a billion dollars on our balance sheet when we went public, but we were forced because of the SEC rules, which Obama changed with the Startup Act. And there's all this pressure because people want your stock and they're finding ways to buy it through side letters and then that's exposing you and all kinds of things. We're seeing it happen now with Anthropic and you write really, really mean letters and policies scaring them and

• 1:05:32Speaker 03

  saying like Anthropic has that we're not going to recognize your stock if it wasn't issued to you. But in the end, you still, the SEC is going to see you as responsible for anyone who bought it. So anyway, we were forced to go public. So was Facebook. So was LinkedIn. This other class of companies like Stripe have put it off for years for good reason. Anyone who tells you that there's anything that's going to help your company about going public, I think nine times out of 10, they're lying to you. Now SpaceX and you know, these large cap AI companies, they want legitimately need access to capital markets. And so they're optimizing for that.

• 1:06:16Speaker 03

  If you don't have that need for capital market access, there is no benefit. It's only bad. In fact, you have so many employees who leave because they say, yeah, I always wanted to be at a company that went public. It was on my bucket list. Goodbye. And so you give them this liquidity, you know, you give them this. Thing on their resume and so now they're gone. Your culture changes, ours did. And now, you know, Michael Dell once told me before he took his company private and then public again, that the biggest reason to go private was to control communications with his employees because he said, you know, they, they get their views from stock chat

• 1:06:59Speaker 03

  rooms and what their family is reading and not from Michael Dell. And so it's, no, there's, it gives you like five other jobs as a CEO that you don't need. Like you should be focused on your product, you know, customer product team, not investor, IPO, you know, media.

• 1:07:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes a ton of sense. Well, the book is Life at the Speed of Play. It's available everywhere books are sold. Go pick up a copy.

• 1:07:28Jordi Hays?

  On the launch and let's do this again soon. We, I have a million more questions.

• 1:07:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's so many more topics to get into.

• 1:07:36John Coogan?

  This would be great.

• 1:07:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'd love to talk about my broken internet strategy of public stock investing, which.

• 1:07:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we didn't even get to Snapchat.

• 1:07:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, we didn't get to Snapchat. That's a whole show.

• 1:07:47Jordi Hays?

  That's a whole show. Let's do it soon.

• 1:07:49John Coogan?

  Come back at 1:30.

• 1:07:50Speaker 03

  Maybe have me and Evan on together. We can debate like whether, you know, this, this whole journey into AR goggles is, is the best thing.

• 1:07:59Jordi Hays?

  Shareholders love the specs. Shareholders really love the specs.

• 1:08:04John Coogan?

  We'll get to the bottom of it.

• 1:08:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, thank you so much. No, I mean, wait till we see how many sell. I think, you know, I'm, I'm pricing in, I'm pricing in 20, I'm going to, I'm pricing in 20 pairs.

• 1:08:14John Coogan?

  20 pairs.

• 1:08:15Jordi Hays?

  But I think it could, there's a chance that it surprises to the upside.

• 1:08:18John Coogan?

  It could, it could. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Have a great rest.

• 1:08:22Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, Mark.

• 1:08:23John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

• 1:08:30Jordi Hays?

  Mark just gave the anti ad for going public.

• 1:08:33John Coogan?

  Hey, hey, if you need to raise capital, if you want to raise the most capital, you gotta go to the New York Stock Exchange. That's the endorsement that we're proud to give. Our next guest is in the waiting room. Shubh Sinha from Integral is the co-founder and CEO. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? I'm doing okay. Thanks, thanks for having me.

• 1:08:51Jordi Hays?

  Just okay, just okay on this big day.

• 1:08:56Speaker 04

  I'm riding the highs and lows and getting back up right now.

• 1:09:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's pretty normal for the entrepreneurial journey, but take us through your entrepreneurial journey. How'd you get here? What are you building? What's the news today?

• 1:09:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, I'm excited. Today, we actually just announced an $18 million Series A for my company, Integral. And so, the gong.

• 1:09:24John Coogan?

  There's good warm up hit. How do you get the real hit in there? You like to warm up the gong on this show.

• 1:09:29Jordi Hays?

  Double hit. I don't think we've done that before.

• 1:09:31John Coogan?

  There's warm up hitting them, the real hit.

• 1:09:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. That was special for Integral.

• 1:09:35John Coogan?

  So, tell us about Integral.

• 1:09:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, so what Integral does is we sanitize proprietary real world data sets such that AI builders can get very bespoke, very sensitive data sets, but that data holders can also make sure that privacy and compliance is adhered to. And so, this thing, this looks like medical records, financial transactions, et cetera. You know, a lot of this contains the real world human behavior patterns that people like you and me have. And there's a ton of individuals and enterprises who are now monetizing it since the AI companies and the AI builders want it. That being said, the builders want the signal. They don't want the secret values. They don't want the proprietary secrets, so to speak. And so, Integral sits in the middle where we ensure that through privacy engineering,

• 1:10:20Speaker 04

  both with our private teams and our engineering teams, we can retain the utility and the signal, while also ensuring that privacy and regulatory and contractual.

• 1:10:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so how about this for an example? There's been, you know, there's been examples of, you know, a company buying a company just for the data around how that company was operating, like just for the Slack. But then you can imagine a Slack, there's so many things that, so much information in Slack that, again, you talked about is signal, but not necessarily information that should be available for even people, let's say, working at the labs to see, right? That's like PII, et cetera.

• 1:11:02Speaker 04

  That's right, and folks at the labs don't even necessarily want to see that, right? They want the context of it all, and so it's a real win-win for data holders who want privacy and trust and also revenue. And then the lab, who are the AI builder, who wants to ensure that they're not stepping into anything they shouldn't be stepping into, but they get that value.

• 1:11:19Jordi Hays?

  What are some types of companies that have valuable data that don't know that it's valuable and it would be something that they could monetize if they were, let's say, working with you?

• 1:11:30Speaker 04

  For sure, and that's one of the bets that we're making, that there's this new proprietary data economy of individuals and enterprises. And so we've seen kind of all across the board, just given the kind of newness of the economy, the types of data sets that are coming in, and the bespoke demand. So we've seen, for example, like mid-market hospitals that see compressing revenues but have a very, very specific treasure trove of data because they focus on a rare disease or a specific procedure and that's not available anywhere else. Fitness apps, some people, you know, they log their entire lives into fitness apps, and these apps have free or paid users. They're only making money off the paid users, but they can then, those apps can then monetize what is that entire real world signal and really continue to make that app free and introduce a ton of value.

• 1:12:15Speaker 04

  And it all becomes circular because as AI gets better, a lot of these same companies will actually use it.

• 1:12:20Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:12:21Speaker 04

  So it's a real win-win there.

• 1:12:22John Coogan?

  What's the state of the art in sanitization, maintaining privacy? We talked to Ed and Ty from the National Design Studio on Monday. They shipped something like less than 15 meg, it's like small language model for sanitizing documents in the browser, runs very efficiently. Are you just throwing open source models of this? Do you need frontier models for data sanitization? And then is there some worry where it flows back if you're using some closed source model and the frontier lab takes the data that you sent them and stores that improperly?

• 1:12:57Speaker 04

  For sure, for sure. And there's a variety of solutions out there mixed with, call it human services, BPOs, and entire teams of PhDs looking at it.

• 1:13:07John Coogan?

  Reg X is right. Like if it's a phone number, identify it, just turn it into X or number, number, number sign, or something like that.

• 1:13:14Speaker 04

  That's right. That's right. So there's a ton of solutions that kind of do that first layer. I think where integral really specializes is, you know, we got our start in healthcare.

• 1:13:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:22Speaker 04

  And healthcare has all proprietary data. Your doctor should not be putting your internet or your data on the internet. And as far as we can tell, they're not.

• 1:13:30Jordi Hays?

  I told my doctor, go ahead.

• 1:13:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. It would be embarrassing for everyone else if like your, your lean muscle mass and your body fat percentage got leaked out there.

• 1:13:39Jordi Hays?

  Well, if your test levels leaked on the internet, it would, it would be, it'd be crazy. You'd be getting accused of doping.

• 1:13:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:48Jordi Hays?

  Are you, when did, when did you make the switch from AirPods to Wired? I'm also a Wired, a Wired headphone guy, so I'm.

• 1:13:57Speaker 04

  I hit number five on AirPod placement, and then I went Wired. And it turns out, so I'm, I'm in New York. And it turns out it's a fashion state as well. So I'm, I'm kind of rocking both sides.

• 1:14:07Jordi Hays?

  I think it is entirely superior. And that is even before the fact you can get like a bunch of pairs of Wired headphones, have them everywhere, and for the cost of just one pair of AirPods. So we're, we're ahead. Congratulations on the round. Business makes a lot of sense and excited to see where you go, go with it.

• 1:14:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Our next guest is Wayne Ting from Lime, coming in on IPO day. Wayne, how are you doing? There he is. Congratulations. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Talk to us about the journey to get here today. What does it feel like? What's going through your head right now?

• 1:14:59Speaker 05

  It's been a, it's been a long journey and I, I feel great to see Lime go public today. And I think it's, it's certainly not been a linear journey. I mean, as you guys know, there's been a lot of companies in micro mobility and Lime is the last man standing in a very tough industry. And I think we're the only ones that have built a scalable, sustainable, profitable business. And I think that's why we've earned the right to be a public company today. And I feel like to see Lime trade publicly was a validation of the hard choices we made along the way, but also a lot of sacrifices to get Lime to this point.

• 1:15:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, uh, what changed culturally recently or what is the culture like? Because it feels like the key to this business is operational efficiency.

• 1:15:46Speaker 05

  Excellence.

• 1:15:46John Coogan?

  Excellence, not having a ton of side quests. You have to be focused. This is not a business with some, you know, just crazy, you struck lightning 25 times in a row and, and you can just make a ton of mistakes, like operational efficiency is key to the business. Correct?

• 1:16:04Speaker 05

  You're absolutely right. It's a, I describe it as it's a game of inches. I mean, our average vehicle is generating $7.50 of revenue a day. We have to charge the vehicle, fix the vehicle, use spare parts, make sure it's positioned in the right place at the right time. And we do all that and we generate a 50% plus cash margins on that $7.50. And because we're able to get that level of margins, we pay back our vehicles in less than one year. But you're talking about a relatively low price print product. Small mistakes very quickly adds up and the, and the business becomes upside down, which is where you see most of our competitors. They, and it's not for the lack of capital. A lot of our competitors raised more money than we did.

• 1:16:50Speaker 05

  They were in the market longer and it's obviously hard because if it was easy, they would have done it too. And I think it also requires a clear, a clear view of like what actually matters. And in the world of limited resources, we are very focused that we want to be, the way to crack this business is great hardware, great software, great operations, government relations. And then everything else, we have to deprioritize in a incredibly strict way in order to put our limited resources towards the things that actually matter in this business.

• 1:17:23John Coogan?

  What is going on on the supply chain side? Is there a constraint on battery capacity because of demand from AI broadly? It feels like the AI industry is sucking up every possible piece of the supply chain from coatings that go into toilets to everything that generates power under the sun. Rocket motors and jet engines are being bolted to the ground to generate power. Is that a constraint? Or is there an opportunity that demand for energy will ultimately reduce the price of batteries or maybe even extend their life?

• 1:18:04Speaker 05

  I haven't seen a shortage on battery cells today, but I think one of the advantages that Lime has is we are vertically integrated in hardware, software. So we have every e-bike, e-scooter you see online. We have designed, engineered in-house. We control our own supply chain. We outsource the manufacturing. But because Lime is the world's largest purchaser of e-bikes, e-scooters, it also means we get warning when there are shortages of critical parts and suppliers want to sell to Lime. So I have seen this year a shortage and inflation in memory chips. Clearly, AI has driven up demand on the high-end memory chips.

• 1:18:47Speaker 05

  We don't put the AI chips into a Lime bike or scooter, but I think a lot of this supply chain has realened towards manufacturing the high-end. So even if you're using a middle-of-the-road or low-end memory chip, we're seeing significant price inflation. But more importantly, if you don't lock in supply, you're not even, there's not going to be any supply to be bought in 2027, 2028. But because Lime is the global leader in micro mobility, our suppliers are coming to us early and saying, how might we work with you to secure supply for next year? And let's lock in prices now before the kind of price inflation that we see. And I think that's one of the advantages of being vertically integrated. But even this is it's a real game of inches.

• 1:19:30Speaker 05

  We have to, we have to look ahead on not just what's going to happen this year, but what's going to happen in the future. The other supply chain challenge we

• 1:19:40Speaker 05

  We navigated this past year was Liberation Day. So the president announced a series of tariffs. And some of these tariffs were 150% on some countries. But because Lime controls our own supply chain, prior to 2026, we started to diversify where we are doing our manufacturing. In fact, we stood up full manufacturing capacity in three different countries. And what that allows us to do is depending on the policies of the day, we could work with different vendors to ensure that not only do we have the right supply, but that we are optimizing for the, um, any sort of tariff, um, of headwinds that we see.

• 1:20:22Speaker 05

  If you're buying off the shelf hardware from the same Chinese manufacturer, these are not tools in the box for you. And I feel like a lot of our competitors really couldn't navigate whether it's the tariffs or any sort of component shortages in the same way that Lime can. This is also where scale matters. We are in a winner take most market, similar to Uber and Reitler and DoorDash and food delivery. And winner take most market is great to be the winner, and that's Lime. It sucks to be second and third place because you don't have the same reliability, the same scale to invest in software, hardware, capital expenditure. And you don't have the scale to actually build proprietary hardware. It doesn't make

• 1:21:04Speaker 05

  sense to build your own scooter or e-bike if you only have a fleet of a thousand vehicles because you have to amortize that R D cost over a much smaller fleet. We're able to have a independent product strategy because Lime operates over 300,000 bikes and scooters in 230 cities, 29 countries around the world. That scale advantage only accelerates now that Lime is public because we have more capital to invest in the business. I think we realize it's important to be vertically integrated. We realize the importance of scale and we build a business to capture those competitive advantages early, which is why Lime is here and most of our competitors are bankrupt or not doing very well.

• 1:21:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, if you could rewind to the early days during the height of the competitive dynamics between, you know, you and Bird and, and other players, how, how would you have, knowing everything that you know now, what, what would you have done differently?

• 1:22:07Speaker 05

  I think there's lots of small things I would do differently, but I think the overarching strategy was the right one. And I think it's proven out by Lime's going public today. I think it starts with, I remember early days of Lime, and people still have this debate in Silicon Valley, and it really is a false choice, which is, is growth more important or profitability more important? And that's not really, you need to get your unit economics right, to earn the right to grow rapidly. And the incentives in the early days were so that it really incentivized the wrong behavior. Because nobody was making money, the only way to survive is to open up incremental venture capital. And when venture capital

• 1:22:52Speaker 05

  firms are saying that what we're gonna value you on, and what we're gonna give you money on is growth, it incentivized companies to chase after unprofitable revenue, and frankly, unsustainable growth, even if it doesn't make financial sense.

• 1:23:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and that would be even like markets, markets that turned out to not be a great fit for this type of mobility solution. Is that, is that like an example? Because I imagine like, there was just like, like LA is an interesting city, because it's like so dominated by, by cars, and it feels, you know, anyways. And I just remember when I moved to LA during the, the, the early days of this, like, of the war that you guys had during the heyday of like, Bird Graveyard, and all those accounts that probably made everyone's life a lot harder. But it felt like if you're just chasing growth, you're gonna go into markets that you know are not even that great, because if you don't get that revenue growth, your

• 1:23:51Jordi Hays?

  competitor is going to, and they're gonna be able to raise more capital, etc.

• 1:23:55Speaker 05

  Capital fight. Exactly. And in fact, one of the first things I did when I became CEO was shrink our footprint. Because I mean, if you're, if you are running a coffee shop, and you're losing money at every cups, every single cup of coffee, you should probably sell fewer cups of coffee and figure out how to make money before you started opening up new coffee shops. And that was the reality of Lime eight years ago. I think, I want to say our gross margins were negative 300%. Every dollar of revenue, we lost 30 bucks. It was like, before we think about growth, let's fix that. We should be making money at the trip level, at the scooter level. So we shrunk our footprint, focused on the things that matter, fixed our unit economics. And but and then really accelerated growth once we got that right.

• 1:24:40Speaker 05

  And I think the companies that really had a growth at all costs mentality, even when it doesn't make financial sense, actually raised more money for a period of time. But the law of economics catches up to everybody. You can be economically irrational for a period of time, but you can't be economically irrational forever. Even the dumbest VC at some point figures out the game. And I think when the when the irrational funding left the industry, that's actually when I think Lime's competitive strengths really became more obvious because we were not competing on our ability to raise more capital and to burn it faster. We started to compete on the quality of our hardware, the quality of our operations.

• 1:25:23Speaker 05

  And I actually think getting past the hype cycle was a major reason why Lime is here. If we're still in the middle of the hype cycle, then we'll be on that treadmill of crazy growth, burn all this money to raise more money, to burn more of that in order to raise more money. And I think that's a loser's game.

• 1:25:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:41Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations to the whole team. I'm sure when when you took the job as CEO, maybe eight out of your 10 friend, closest friends were like, you're absolutely crazy for taking that job. But you did it.

• 1:25:52John Coogan?

  You got it here.

• 1:25:53Jordi Hays?

  Very cool moments.

• 1:25:54Speaker 05

  I actually was texting with the, the day I got took this job, I was having drinks on the rooftop of a friend's house and I was there with six friends from Uber. Every single person is like, this is such a dumb decision. It's a no win job. You will never be able to turn this around. You should have never done this. Locked yourself into a trap that you can't get out of. And I just recall, I mean, the fact that you mentioned that, I recall this conversation. I was texting with that group of people being like, remember what you said.

• 1:26:23Jordi Hays?

  No, contrarian, contrarian and right.

• 1:26:25John Coogan?

  Victory Lab, you deserve a drink on top of a roof deck. Hopefully you got one. I'm sure it's been a long day.

• 1:26:31Jordi Hays?

  No, I literally knew. I knew. I was like, these guys, I'm sure around a lot of smart people. It was very contrarian to to go and do this and congratulations on, you know, an incredible moment.

• 1:26:43John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:26:44Speaker 05

  Thanks so much. Really appreciate it. And congratulations on all your success as well. This is he.

• 1:26:48Speaker 06

  Great podcast. Really, really appreciate it.

• 1:26:50Jordi Hays?

  Thanks.

• 1:26:51John Coogan?

  Have a good one. 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. Our next guests are from Assort Health. We have co-founders and co-CEOs. Co-CEO alert. How you guys doing? Welcome to the show.

• 1:27:13Jordi Hays?

  Hey.

• 1:27:14John Coogan?

  Introduce yourself for everyone. Love the cowboy hats.

• 1:27:17Jordi Hays?

  Jackson, can you grab mine?

• 1:27:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, we gotta get some cowboy hats.

• 1:27:21Jordi Hays?

  Get as many as we need. Maybe get John the bear mask.

• 1:27:24John Coogan?

  I don't need that bear mask.

• 1:27:26Speaker 06

  We love that you're in J and J as well. We always, we were, our Slack hack is at JJ. You guys.

• 1:27:31John Coogan?

  That's right, Jeff and John. Well, tell us about the company. Tell us about the round. I want to hit the gong. Tell us what's going on.

• 1:27:39Speaker 07

  Sweet. Yeah. So we're John and Jack, co-CEOs of Assort Health. We are an agentic platform for the entire patient journey for provider groups. So healthcare providers, we do everything from work, call center automation, voice AI, to handling fax and document processing, patient intake forms, care gap activation and payment collection.

• 1:28:03John Coogan?

  I have a bunch more questions, but tell us how much you raised. We gotta hit the gong together. Double gong for the.

• 1:28:09Jordi Hays?

  You go first?

• 1:28:10John Coogan?

  No, together.

• 1:28:11Jordi Hays?

  Together?

• 1:28:11John Coogan?

  Together. Tell us how much you raised.

• 1:28:13Speaker 06

  $222 million total.

• 1:28:22Speaker 06

  That's, that's a sick gong.

• 1:28:24John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 1:28:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, wait, when did you guys start the company?

• 1:28:28Speaker 07

  2023.

• 1:28:29Jordi Hays?

  2023. All right. Not bad. Just a couple hundred million of value creation annually. I like it.

• 1:28:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. Take us through, take us through the actual, the customer journey. Who's buying? How do you interface with both the doctors, the patients, the hospital networks, and the insurers, like health cares, like famously a seven-party negotiation for everything, but how do you, who do you actually sell to and how do you flow through?

• 1:28:56Speaker 07

  Yeah, let Jeff answer that.

• 1:28:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, in terms of how we actually approach these provider groups, it's, it's, I think when we first started the business, it was actually educating the market on voice AI agents. Like when we first started, it might have been too early, right? It was, no one else was really thinking about this in early 2023. And I think the landscape has now completely evolved where all of our customers and partners, they know voice AI agents really well. They understand, they, they have this burning need and they're really eager to adopt, right? I think the big difference for us now is, um, we're really overarching, as John mentioned, a gentic platform for every part of the patient care navigation journey. That's really our huge, you know,

• 1:29:38Speaker 06

  durability and differentiator. It's like, you've all experienced this, having to tell your story over and over, over and over again with the healthcare system. Like, why didn't remember that? Like, the patient, like, you feel invisible as a patient, right? So really with our sort synapse model, which is now powered by over 190 million patient-facing interactions, super proprietary data that our agents are generating to feed back into our product and agents to make the next interaction more conscientious and personalized. Um, and then also the fact that every product talks to each other, right? If you engage with our voice AI agent inbound and you book your, your appointment through us, when we send you those patient intake forms for consent and everything, it's going to be 70% prefilled. And it may also recognize like, hey, you know, John is eligible for a colonoscopy,

• 1:30:23Speaker 06

  colonos, colonorectal screening. Let's get him booked through that, right? In that high-end, you know, you know, make sure to take care of your health, right? So like, got to be really preventative with these things.

• 1:30:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:34Speaker 06

  Uh, and then also be like, you know, instead of getting a paper bill, it's going to surface that payment right there. It's be like, you have this outstanding bill, right? And then let's say on that first inbound call, you're like, you know, you were, we'll remember that you prefer Monday mornings. We'll remember what type of voice you like, what tone you like. For us, it might not be, you know, we won't, the next call with the agent, it's not going to repeat itself over and over again for a more elderly patient. It is going to proactively repeat their Medicaid or number back to them, the address, how to get there. So this level of personalization per patient and really the kind of durability that we build across all of our products talking to each other, where it's like, I'm never going to turn off iPhone because I have iMessage, right?

• 1:31:12Speaker 06

  Talk, you know, that's what we really want to build with patient journey memory, uh, to really, uh, create the best experience possible for our patients and our, and our practices.

• 1:31:20Jordi Hays?

  What, what, uh? What flipped in the procurement process over the last few years? Because I mean, if we were doing this show and you're building in healthcare, you know, five years ago, you guys would be doing this round after like 12 years or something like that, and you probably have less revenue, you know? It just was always like every healthcare founder would be like, it's an insane slog.

• 1:31:42Speaker 07

  Facts, crinkling ink on your hands.

• 1:31:43Jordi Hays?

  And now that's clearly flipped because you guys are growing

• 1:31:47Speaker 07

  Accelerating.

• 1:31:47Jordi Hays?

  super quickly. A bunch of other founders have been on the show saying that there's like such insane pull. It's just the magic of AI and it's real. Are there any other factors at play? How do you guys see it?

• 1:32:02Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's really interesting. I'd say there's like two components of market and then of course our unique approach. In terms of the market, if you talk to any of these provider groups, it's challenging, more challenging than ever to run a business in healthcare, right? You're seeing revenue actually go down every year from insurance. Costs are going up because the cost of work with payers, the cost of administering healthcare, it's literally going up 20% year over year, right? So they're in this, one of the hardest businesses. Every single admin labor person they hire typically has a 40 to 50% turnover rate on average, right, per year. So they're just in this really tough position as a business and as a market.

• 1:32:42Speaker 07

  And in the past 10, 12 years, if you talk to any of these provider groups, CEOs, they have not really seen any change to their technology stack. It's been pretty static. A lot of existing partners have not really innovated in the space because there hasn't really been much appetite or hunger for like AI, right, historically? And so with this technology, you know, it's really mind blowing. We work with like groups across the entire country, over 200 customers and like we'll fly out to like rural parts of Idaho.

• 1:33:16Speaker 07

  And they will literally like hear our demo and be like, this is mind blowing. Like this technology is going to change and transform my practice. Patients will no longer have to be in a hole for 30 minutes, right? They can actually finally get access to care. Elementary school teachers working from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. can actually like get access to care after the work, right? So stuff like that, really heartwarming to hear. So yeah, that's been a really inflection point in the market.

• 1:33:41John Coogan?

  Sure. Awesome. Congratulations on the round. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:33:45Jordi Hays?

  Do you guys wear the cowboy hats normally or just for?

• 1:33:47John Coogan?

  Fundraising?

• 1:33:48Jordi Hays?

  Just for the show?

• 1:33:48Speaker 06

  We wear it at our board meetings, all hands, customer events. We just had a huge customer event in Sonoma last week. We went all out.

• 1:33:57John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:33:57Speaker 06

  It's the Asian Cowboys, very memorable.

• 1:33:59Jordi Hays?

  It is, it is. You gotta be quirky. It's your edge.

• 1:34:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's your.

• 1:34:05Jordi Hays?

  Love it. Well, gentlemen, it's been an honor.

• 1:34:08Speaker 06

  Have a good one.

• 1:34:10Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:34:10John Coogan?

  See you out there. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of I T H R and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password reset. Our next guest is Eliot Pence from Dominion Dynamics. He's the founder and CEO. Welcome to the show.

• 1:34:30Jordi Hays?

  Hey guys. Sorry, that's a special sound effect. It's very dramatic.

• 1:34:33John Coogan?

  It's very dramatic, but we're very excited.

• 1:34:36Jordi Hays?

  But I feel like it's fitting. It is fitting. Let's do it again.

• 1:34:41Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show, Eliot.

• 1:34:42John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:34:44Speaker 08

  Love it. I'm great. It's hard to follow the Asian Cowboys, though.

• 1:34:47Jordi Hays?

  I know. Tough act, tough act. Well, we'll hit the gong even harder for you. We'll make it up.

• 1:34:52John Coogan?

  Tell us about yourself. Tell us about the company. Tell us about the round.

• 1:34:56Speaker 08

  Yeah, for sure. So we just raised 100 million. The company is called Dominion Dynamics. It's focused on.

• 1:35:06Speaker 08

  We're building a Canadian Neo Prime. So we connect autonomous systems. We're focused on domain awareness in the Arctic.

• 1:35:15John Coogan?

  All software or hardware as well?

• 1:35:17Speaker 08

  No, software and hardware. We've built 10 things, five hardware, five different platforms. And we're about to build a big drone.

• 1:35:27John Coogan?

  Why is that not crazy? Like building one thing is hard. Building 10 things, five things like that, that feels like, like, you know, obviously a hundred million dollar Series A, it's great, but like, you know, isn't there value to focus? Why is this industry different?

• 1:35:43Speaker 08

  No, look, the opportunity in Canada is not to focus. It's such a wide opportunity landscape.

• 1:35:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:35:49Speaker 08

  Canada used to have a very rich and deep defense tech history.

• 1:35:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:53Speaker 08

  You know, you you can track it back to Canadair and Bombardier.

• 1:35:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:57Speaker 08

  They have all these companies, first autonomous submarine, first two operational drones, first passenger jet. And then we basically went on a starvation diet. So there's talent in tech here.

• 1:36:08John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:36:09Speaker 08

  But we've not actually had a large prime for some time. So I think actually the the the opportunity is to basically do a land grab. And but to do it with software, not just

• 1:36:20John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:36:20Speaker 08

  kind of one specific thing. So like in the US, yeah, there's nine hundred and seventy companies that have been backed over the last six years. But in Canada, it's a G seven country without a defense prime. That's insane.

• 1:36:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 1:36:33Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:36:33John Coogan?

  Uh, is the i- i- in America, Palmer Luckey's talked about how uh, the government does not want Anduril to be a monopoly. It can be a great business, it can be a big business. But if it gets to be the only supplier of something, the government will say, look, we're going to give a contract to someone else because we want a diversity of supply chain.

• 1:36:52Speaker 08

  Of course, the government's not going to want to have a monopoly. That's not the point. Like, the point is have the best capability.

• 1:36:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:58Speaker 08

  But it is likely that some of those companies will build the best capability. And if they build the best capability, they should have a monopoly.

• 1:37:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:37:06Jordi Hays?

  How are you, how are you thinking about, uh, you you guys feel uniquely, you know, situated to be able to dominate in with like Arctic capabilities. How big is the opportunity outside of Canada in your view?

• 1:37:21Speaker 08

  Yeah. So what we want to build is a global company. We want it to be a Canadian company headquartered in Canada, majority owned, majority controlled, which it is. Uh, we think it's a huge opportunity. What we're really building is not just Arctic, right? The reason we're starting in the Arctic is it's the harshest operating environment in the world. But the other reason is because you have to architect solutions very differently. There's no comms. The hardware situation is insane because power doesn't work. The ground, what they call breeze because of the tundra. So it like cracks and breaks, so runways don't work. Uh, if you're building drones, you've got to go five thousand kilometers. So like, it's basically like building for the moon.

• 1:38:02Speaker 08

  If you build for the moon, you will build massive modes because it's the hardest thing to do.

• 1:38:08John Coogan?

  In terms of Canadian ownership, what does that look like when you go out to fundraise? I see Valor Equity Partners, Atreides, Bessemer, amazing funds. I think of them as American funds. Do you draw the line around G7 investors? Or is there a broader scope that you can think about? Or do you think about cap table construction one way or another?

• 1:38:30Speaker 08

  100% we talk about and think about cap table construction. We've been super intentional about who we bring in. So we wanted to have pension funds in.

• 1:38:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:38:38Speaker 08

  Canada has 2.5 trillion under management by the Maple Eight. So we brought two of those pension funds in. Exactly.

• 1:38:47Speaker 08

  BCI and Omer's.

• 1:38:51John Coogan?

  For the pensioners.

• 1:38:54John Coogan?

  It's good enough for the Canadian pensioners. It's fantastic.

• 1:38:58Speaker 08

  But you know, those funds, like Valor, Atreides, Bessemer, they're all global funds, right? They have mandates to do global investing and we wanted the best of the best. So we went out and got the best of the best.

• 1:39:09Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. What have been the biggest breakthroughs since you were on the show last? I think it was January of this year.

• 1:39:17Speaker 08

  Five months. Well, we did a 5,500 kilometer snowmobile operation across the Northwest Passage with AuraNet, which is our kit, our backend.

• 1:39:28John Coogan?

  So a ten ball?

• 1:39:30Speaker 08

  Yeah, yes, exactly. Across the Northwest Passage.

• 1:39:34Jordi Hays?

  Wait, is that a drone snowmobile? Or you guys are?

• 1:39:39Speaker 08

  No, literally snowmobiles. Dudes on snowmobiles for three months across that, testing out the communications backend.

• 1:39:47John Coogan?

  That's very cool.

• 1:39:48Speaker 08

  No gong for that.

• 1:39:50Jordi Hays?

  We'll hit it again.

• 1:39:55Jordi Hays?

  Tremendous, tremendous progress. Great to have you back on. And you're coming on at a good clip. So I'm confident that we'll see you again this year.

• 1:40:06John Coogan?

  And you know the name of the communications platform?

• 1:40:09Speaker 08

  It's called AuraNet.

• 1:40:12Jordi Hays?

  Wow, powerful.

• 1:40:13John Coogan?

  Aura Farming, it's good. I love it. Very on trend. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:40:18Speaker 08

  And happy Canada Day, guys.

• 1:40:20Jordi Hays?

  Wait, it's Canada Day?

• 1:40:21John Coogan?

  It's Canada Day. We gotta hit that gong again.

• 1:40:27John Coogan?

  Everyone who's listening, please text Jeremy Defon. Happy Canada Day. I'll give you his phone number right here. It's not.

• 1:40:36Jordi Hays?

  Who, oh wow, Canada into the round of 16. We're hoping to follow you. We're hoping to follow you guys in there. Congratulations. Exactly.

• 1:40:45John Coogan?

  And thank you so much.

• 1:40:46Jordi Hays?

  Well, thanks, guys. Yeah, great to see you. Cheers.

• 1:40:48John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify founded in Canada, Canadian company. 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.

• 1:41:02John Coogan?

  Good news, we're gonna do Canada Day, Canada AI Deep Dive. I'm glad we got one Canadian on the show. But up next, we have an Italian, Luca Ferrari, from Bending Spoons, the co-founder and CEO. Luca, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 1:41:15Speaker 09

  Hey, guys. Nice to see you. Thank you for having me.

• 1:41:17John Coogan?

  Thank you for coming back on such a day.

• 1:41:19Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you back.

• 1:41:20John Coogan?

  How's it going? Where are you at mentally? Are you relieved? Are you excited? What's it like?

• 1:41:24Jordi Hays?

  Just another day, John.

• 1:41:25John Coogan?

  Just another day?

• 1:41:27Speaker 09

  I'm exhausted.

• 1:41:28John Coogan?

  Exhausted, okay.

• 1:41:30Speaker 09

  You know, I'm an extreme introvert, and there's nothing worse for an extreme introvert to do a roadshow on a media day.

• 1:41:38John Coogan?

  Well, we appreciate it.

• 1:41:39Jordi Hays?

  We can just hang out. We'll keep this, we'll keep this casual. We'll pretend it's just the three of us catching up. Yeah, what, how is your approach overall? We had, when Klarna did their IPO, it was literally, they had a handful of people on the team. I think it was like, sub 10 people. They dropped into the stock exchange, they did the IPO, and they just, they left like, you know, the next day. What's been your, what's been your approach overall?

• 1:42:06John Coogan?

  Because it's a company building moment, it's a celebration, but also it can be exhausting to fly a whole bunch of people around the world if you want to do that.

• 1:42:14Speaker 09

  I think we've done probably the opposite. Nasdaq told us that we broke a record by bringing over 500 people, pretty much everybody who could fly on cloud notice.

• 1:42:24John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 1:42:26Speaker 09

  No, it's been wild. I mean, look, we are a very competitive group, and we're already, if possibly, more motivated than we were before. But at the same time, it's good to pause for a second and acknowledge this milestone. It's not easy. So, you know, happy for it, but also just hungry to show that this is just the beginning.

• 1:42:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was the one liner that resonated on the roadshow most with bankers and investors who were trying to get their head around the company?

• 1:42:53Speaker 09

  I mean, the financials.

• 1:42:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:42:55Speaker 09

  They look pretty good, so that helps.

• 1:42:59Speaker 09

  When you double the company pretty much every year for, for as long as I can remember, that's, that goes a long way.

• 1:43:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:05Speaker 09

  Getting people to, to like, you know, I mean, jokes aside, I think the, you have to ask investors, every person is different. In my opinion, what people liked about us is a combination of a technologically advanced platform, uh, where everything is highly integrated, we're pushing AI to its limits, which is obviously, uh, under the promise for the future and how companies get to be run. Um, and at the same time, a track record that shows a combination of we are willing to, uh, make aggressive moves, uh, whether it's in acquisitions, monetization, but at the same time, we invest, uh, just as aggressively, uh, and in a far sided manner on, on product, having, you know, added a ton of features, brought innovation to product that sometimes I haven't seen it in a long time.

• 1:43:48Speaker 09

  So that combination, uh, I think is unusual and the, and we see a huge pipeline of acquisitions out there. So I think that, that was, uh, quite resonant with, uh, at least the best investors.

• 1:43:59John Coogan?

  How crazy is this as a reason to be excited about what you're doing? A lot of the companies, there's a lot of fear around AI disrupting, uh, tech companies, but a lot of the companies in your portfolio have survived the. Mobile. Mobile apocalypse and the. Cloud. Cloud apocalypse. And so you have a number of, of, of organizations and, and brands that are just resistant to sudden disruption from the new hot thing in a way that a company that was started in the pre chat GPT era might not be quite equipped, might still be in the hyper growth, but then there's a newer thing, whereas a lot of your companies have

• 1:44:42John Coogan?

  maybe more resiliency built in just by virtue of the fact that they are maybe over five, over 10 years old at this point. Is that realistic?

• 1:44:51Speaker 09

  Absolutely. I think we, I don't think we have any significant business that's, that hasn't been around for at least fifteen, sixteen years. On the one hand, you know they're not going to go to the moon, you know, which is bad, I'd prefer it to be the case, but, but on the other hand, yes, they've gone through so much and the customer base is so self-selected at this point.

• 1:45:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:11Speaker 09

  It's a huge advantage. You, when you bet as a VC, for example, in a fast-growing company, of course, that's exciting, but also you need to believe that growth will stay, that company typically is, you know, N of one, offering that product or that product in that way. So as competition comes up, you don't know what's going to happen. You haven't seen it happen before, but for AOL or Eventbrite or Vimeo, we have seen it all. Like they've had, basically they've lived in a perfect competition kind of environment for a decade plus. So plenty of clones, emulators of those kinds. So you kind of know what you get and there's volume in that for sure.

• 1:45:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. Are you getting calls from VCs who are trying to offload shares or whole companies of zombie corns? There's a article in The Economist this week about zombie corns, companies that were valued at over a billion dollars and have not raised an up round in years. What kind of deal flow is getting pushed your way? And then what are you doing with that deal flow? Is it interesting or not?

• 1:46:11Speaker 09

  Yeah, look, we, we, we look at everything. It's like you got it. I mean, it's a particularly good time for a serial acquirer. There's a bit of dislocation due to disruption from AI, which I think has a lot of truth to it in many cases. It's a bit nuanced, but, and we can only do, so one of the disadvantages of our model where we almost rebuild some of these businesses from the ground up. We try to keep everything that's great and rebuild everything that's, that's great. It's, I mean, the good thing is, I think it's much more challenging and interesting than, than going a little bit more shallow. And also it's delivered very high returns, but, but at the same time,

• 1:46:49Speaker 09

  you can't do it a million times a year. It takes a lot of time, a lot of effort from a big team, our engineers, designers, product managers and so on and so forth. And so we have to be very selective. So yes, it's a good time with a lot of opportunities, but equally we, we can only do a few. So the key is, you know, listening to what's available, the opportunities, but also not get too excited, stay patient for the right one.

• 1:47:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, more than fifty deals done.

• 1:47:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How much of an advantage is, is being public going to actually give you in, in net new acquisitions? I imagine a lot of acquirers are going to be. You know, it's potentially a lot more compelling to get, you know, if they're going to sell to you to get, you know, depending on whatever the cash equity debt split is, to actually just have exposure to something that they feel like can compound while having access to liquidity.

• 1:47:36John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:47:38Speaker 09

  I think, I mean, you may be right. We will see. Of course, it's, you know, day one in that regard. So I don't have a track record. We chose to go public primarily to improve our access to debt.

• 1:47:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:47Speaker 09

  It turns out that lenders really like lending to private, public companies, better regulated, more externally transparent, a life valuation, all things a lender loves. And, you know, historically, if you look at our, the capital we have deployed, it's been like 80% of directionally from debt and like 15, 20% free cash flows. So it's important for us to have access to debt dollars and cheap debt if possible, and this should help on the margins a little bit. But yeah, I think you're right. We may find opportunities that wouldn't have been available to us had we stayed private.

• 1:48:27John Coogan?

  Do you think any of that new debt market access might unlock sort of like a white whale acquisition, some mega deal where you're taking down a company that it fits the thesis, but is much larger than anything you've done in the past?

• 1:48:46Speaker 09

  Look, I would say, I believe that a good strategy is predictable to some extent. And our, you know, our predictable strategy is do three, five, eight deals a year of relatively speaking, the same scale, more or less, and it's going to grow as we expand. But, but yes, that's an upside. That's a cherry on the cake. That's, you know, I'm sure that in time, something like that will happen and we'll try to move quickly and seize the opportunity. So yeah, possible, likely, no, possible, yes. I think if you look at this over enough, you know, long enough, a period of time, it's almost guaranteed to happen before or later.

• 1:49:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, what, oh, sorry, George.

• 1:49:25Jordi Hays?

  Do you think, uh, how do you, how do you think about people's like nostalgia around software products in general? I feel like, uh, we were talking with Scott Galloway yesterday for his podcast and he was saying that he's quite excited about bending spoons, specifically because he was like, they're great brands that people have like positive association with and, uh, in fashion, everything that's old and uncool eventually becomes cool again, right? I would say like, uh, you look at an example of, you know, one of the hottest brands in the world, Chrome Hearts, right? Has gone through periods where it wasn't the hottest thing, uh, but then it, you know, and these things go in cycles.

• 1:50:06Jordi Hays?

  So like, I can imagine a world where five years from now, every Gen Z kid is like, oh, of course I'm using AOL. Like, it's like, it's like, you know, it's like vintage and it's like cool and nostalgic and like the, and so I can imagine like at some point, uh, and it feels like software is going the way of, of, of fashion where it's like fashion, you know, it's very easy to make a new fashion brand, right? Like it's, it's very easy to go compete with a Gucci or, or a legacy brand, but, um, but there's some, there's just brand value is like a real thing. Do you see a potential where, where you see a re-acceleration or renewed cultural relevancy in, in any of the brands or is that not something you think about at all?

• 1:50:50Speaker 09

  I, I would say it's possible. It's not something we wouldn't bet in a business case. We, we, we're kind of math, science and engineering people. We look at the numbers and try to make sure that we base our capital allocation on the assumptions that we can be close to certain about. Uh, and I would say what you just described is plausible, but does it happen when it's, so again, you know, maybe we'll try to make these products. Better to the best of our abilities and if that helps ignite some of that, we'll you know, we'll be incredibly happy. But even if it does, our investment thesis does not hinge on on it.

• 1:51:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, it certainly could be true for Vimeo. The community there has always been uh very culturally different and like anti-brain rot. You don't have a lot of like YouTube style slop on there.

• 1:51:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I I associate Vimeo with like quality filmmaking and it's still right. Like when I think about my favorite surf movies growing up, they're always always there. Snow, you know, snowboarding, all all these different kind of niches I was into, like the quality was going there.

• 1:51:54John Coogan?

  Um, what?

• 1:51:55Speaker 09

  Yeah, right. And by the way, on that one quickly, I I I agree. We have some surprises in store for for that community. There's they've they've, I think that that been a bit frustrated over time, rightly or wrongly, but I I can empathize with the direction Vimeo has taken, which is it's been more like enterprise and it makes sense. I mean, but we'll see whether we can do something for them that they like. Um, I don't know if that will turn out to be a success, but yes, I I do think there's potential there for sure.

• 1:52:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, a lot of people have fond memories. Um, on on AI, we've seen a lot of engineering organizations sort of like take out the biggest hammer possible.

• 1:52:38Jordi Hays?

  Wait, are you talking about advanced Italians or artificial?

• 1:52:42John Coogan?

  Artificial intelligence. I know that you deploy a lot of advanced Italians, but I want to know how you're deploying artificial intelligence. Obviously, your operating team is fantastic, but I imagine that your operating team is also fantastic at making sure that you're not token maxing and overspending, that you're, if you are using a coding agent, you're using it judiciously. What have the learnings been? Have you been on as much of a uh as a as much of a roller coaster ride as some of the bigger tech companies? We've seen headlines out of Uber where they spent so much token maxing, they spent their whole budget, then they had to pull back. There's been these back and forths. What's your journey been like at Benning Smith's?

• 1:53:24Speaker 09

  Yeah, totally. So by the way, we have more people in the States than in Italy. Okay. It's a little bit like it's it's it's unusual and so it's cool that in the Italians or whatnot. And I'm Italian, but yeah, anyway, we've got a bunch of Italians, that's true, but not just Italians. Sure. Just as many Americans. Just to be clear. In any case, yeah, I I mean, almost nobody knows that Michael Funderson and I had an AI startup in 2010. Massive failure. And we raised a million dollars, which at the time felt like a lot. Today, it's basically, you know, like nothing.

• 1:53:54Jordi Hays?

  No, that was a lot. So Demis in 2010 raised 2.3 million at a five cap.

• 1:54:00Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:54:01Jordi Hays?

  So that's and that's like the most elite AI scientists in the world at the time.

• 1:54:05Speaker 09

  Yeah, that was the market. It did much better than we than we did at the time on AI, because I'm sure he's more competent on AI. But we I mentioned it because it's certainly something Michael Funderson and I have been passionate about and tried to use as much as possible in the business. We've had it as part of our proprietary technologies for almost a decade. I think 2018, certainly, we were using machine learning. So so, yeah, we push it pretty hard. We we actually don't have any limitations on using AI at the company. We encourage everybody to push the envelope there, but we have very limited cost. And the reason why we have very limited cost is that we have developed a ton of the models in-house. It turns out that if you're very good people, you can build narrow purpose models to do one thing really well. They're pretty dumb in general, but they can do that one thing pretty well.

• 1:54:49Speaker 09

  And they're very cheap. They're self-hosted, basically, I mean, almost free, just a little. And then, you know, there are good open source models you can fine tune, combine again. They may not be as good as the frontier models, but if you use them intelligently, we have built our own AI orchestrator that will help us make sure that for each task, we're using the, you know, models that are optimal in terms of cost, quality. We don't end up using the frontier models for a whole lot. Yeah. Just either the more complex stuff or supervision of of more dumb models. And with that, we we are pushing pretty hard on AI. We're lost, you know, as per our disclosures, we're over 90% of our code being written by AI and pretty modest expenditures. So we're pretty happy there.

• 1:55:31John Coogan?

  That's, yeah, that's fascinating. How do you see the footprint expanding for the company post-IPO? You mentioned that you have a lot of employees in the United States. Do you expect to spin up more offices, go more regional, centralized, decentralized? What's the thesis there?

• 1:55:50Speaker 09

  I think, well, I mean, the trend is one where we open more offices. And also ultimately, our, basically, a key way we do well is by creating this core team of exceptional people, giving them a lot of responsibility, powerful tools, and a culture that helps them be a little bit better than they would otherwise be. And sometimes we acquire companies that have failed to attract some of the best for a long time, not for anybody's fault. Like, sometimes management teams are great, it's just that if the brand is not as appealing, it really just don't attract the right applications. And so, but we, by injecting some of that talent, we help reinvigorate those organizations, bring back that, we call it startup mode, you know, high talent, more intensity, ambition, innovation.

• 1:56:33Speaker 09

  And basically, we look to hire as many great people as we can, and from wherever they are. Historically, just out of, you know, like, simply where we were based and are based, it was like Milan, Italy, and then London, and now again, the States, and Madrid in Spain, Poland, anywhere we can find great people who are excited about what we do using tech to reinvent how businesses are run, and take a lot of responsibility much earlier in their careers than would appear reasonable. I think that's us. So, yeah, probably more locations, not fewer locations going forward.

• 1:57:08John Coogan?

  Makes sense.

• 1:57:09Jordi Hays?

  What, do you track average timelines from first conversation with a management team to close? Like, I imagine there's some companies that you've acquired where you're talking for years and they're not really ready yet, but then the moment comes, and then you can move really quickly, and then others where it's like you have an opportunity to do a deal in, you know, six weeks.

• 1:57:31Speaker 09

  Yeah, we've seen both. I'm sure we track it. I'm not, I don't, I don't have the data off the top of my head, but we have had cases like that. We want to be an excellent acquirer, like, like, ideally a 10 out of 10 reputation, where you know, super honest, super reliable, good price, fast, and, and it starts with establishing a good relationship with founders, owners, boards. I, I, I'm actually, I think our ability to do that has surprised me in a way because, you know, we're so active that you could imagine, my assumption was selling to someone who's so active and rebuilds parts of your business can be a little bit more difficult than selling to a more passive investor. But it turns out, a lot of founders see us as the preferred partner

• 1:58:15Speaker 09

  because number one, we never sell. So you know exactly what you're getting into. Like, it's been this boost and it stays there for decades, forever probably. Also, people appreciate that we invest for real in these products. They, they keep expanding and improving and often founders see that as their, as their legacy and they, they like to know that, you know, technical people, product people will continue to pour love and effort into their babies. And I think we have a good history in that regard. And also, we, you know, we, we have, we're super flexible. Say a founding team wants to, to, to depart two weeks after closing because they feel that their, their time there is, is done, they move on, they can do that. And many more financial acquirers would ask you to stay for three years and roll over equity. And it can

• 1:58:56Speaker 09

  be pretty difficult after, you know, you ran that business for 10 years, 15 years, and now you've got to stay there, essentially taking direction. So, yeah, and so that's, you know, that's what we find they like, but also it starts with the, with the, with meeting and spending time and getting comfortable with each other much earlier than the transaction takes place. So yes, absolutely, we've had cases where we have known each other for two years and then the company felt ready and we, and we got it done.

• 1:59:24Jordi Hays?

  There are so many companies that I would love for you to own, and I hope that you do in time. Companies that are, you're now quite a bit bigger than in the public markets. So.

• 1:59:35John Coogan?

  I have one last question. Is AI speeding up deal making specifically on research, spreading comps, getting devaluation, legal diligence? Are you seeing AI bleed into your deal making?

• 1:59:49Speaker 09

  A little bit. It's not really a major area of efficiency for us because ultimately we only do five, say five acquisitions a year, get like order a month. So it's not really there that we unlock a lot of value. Where I think it's helping us tremendously is by enabling us to do more acquisitions and so scale the, like the operational side of things after we close the transformations around these companies because that's really a bottleneck to, to, to, to growth. And, and we have seen major improvements there. We went from, the KPI we, we think ultimately is the best proxy for our productivity of that core team. We call, we call, we call them spooners. It's revenue per spooner and that went up from about a million dollars in 2023 to roughly four million dollars.

• 2:00:34Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for the spooners.

• 2:00:38John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. I love it.

• 2:00:40Speaker 09

  So, yeah.

• 2:00:41John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much and congratulations.

• 2:00:43Jordi Hays?

  What an incredible moment. I'm so happy for you and the, and all, all 500 of you and more. Really, really incredible.

• 2:00:51John Coogan?

  Too many more successful deals. Have a great rest of the day.

• 2:00:54Speaker 09

  Thank you guys.

• 2:00:55John Coogan?

  Good luck.

• 2:00:56Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you. Congrats again.

• 2:00:57John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents mean the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Did you see what Riley Walls shared? He shared a, a heat map of the most popular types of dogs in San Francisco. The city is dominated by Chihuahuas. It's overrun by Chihuahuas, apparently. I had no idea. It's the capital of-

• 2:01:23Jordi Hays?

  That explains-

• 2:01:24John Coogan?

  Chihuahua, apparently.

• 2:01:25Jordi Hays?

  A lot.

• 2:01:26John Coogan?

  There's some Labrador Retriever hotspots. There's a couple Golden Retrievers in the city. There's a little area where there's a lot of poodles.

• 2:01:32Jordi Hays?

  What do you guys think about pit bulls? Are you pro pit bull?

• 2:01:35John Coogan?

  Um, not my favorite.

• 2:01:37Jordi Hays?

  Not around me.

• 2:01:38John Coogan?

  Not my favorite.

• 2:01:39Jordi Hays?

  Or anyone I love.

• 2:01:41John Coogan?

  Skill issue, just learn to wrestle with the pit bull. Just exert your humanity over it and put it in place.

• 2:01:50Jordi Hays?

  Are you a big pit bull guy?

• 2:01:51John Coogan?

  You like pit bull?

• 2:01:51Jordi Hays?

  No, not a big pit bull guy. What about Mr. 305?

• 2:01:54John Coogan?

  I like a golden retriever. That's my dog, even though I have.

• 2:01:58Jordi Hays?

  I don't mind him.

• 2:01:59John Coogan?

  I like Newfoundland's.

• 2:02:00Jordi Hays?

  Bending Spoons opened at around 30, 29, 31 dollars a share. It's now at 40. Nice little pop, Bill Gurley, in shambles.

• 2:02:13John Coogan?

  A very modest pop. He only gets mad when it's like up 2X or 3X. 40% pop, not too bad. Not, not, not, probably, probably, we probably will not get a post from Bill Gurley about this one.

• 2:02:28Jordi Hays?

  Luca is clearly just an absolute animal.

• 2:02:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:02:32Jordi Hays?

  Like, he's just like a guy who's just gonna, he's got the blinders on, he's gonna just keep executing the strategy. He's gonna own every iconic American company in time, running them out of a castle in Milan.

• 2:02:47John Coogan?

  He's getting out of everything.

• 2:02:49Jordi Hays?

  He's clearly like, he's clearly like just.

• 2:02:51John Coogan?

  Like the back seven?

• 2:02:52Jordi Hays?

  He's clearly.

• 2:02:53John Coogan?

  Give me 50 years, I will own all.

• 2:02:55Jordi Hays?

  He's clearly, he's clearly drooling over Snap. You know that every day, he's just, is texting.

• 2:03:00John Coogan?

  No, no.

• 2:03:02Jordi Hays?

  Like, "You up? Sell now?" Question mark. No, but I mean, that's the kind of, that's the kind of, like, I would say in the fullness of time, Spiegel's obviously happy running the business, but that, that to me would be like a white whale.

• 2:03:17John Coogan?

  But social networks and network effects businesses seem uniquely durable in the long term, and I wonder if that's where they'll get into next. A lot of these businesses have recurring subscriptions, they have great businesses, some of them are enterprise, lots of stickiness in the revenue, but would be interesting to see them at the helm of a true social network, potentially even a growing one. Our next guest is in the waiting room, Nick Grossman from USV. He's a general partner, and he's here to break down the Rebel Alliance thesis.

• 2:03:50Speaker 10

  What's up, guys?

• 2:03:51John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 2:03:52Speaker 10

  I'm doing great. How are you?

• 2:03:53John Coogan?

  So you're fighting against the Death Star. What, first introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your general investing thesis, and then break down the Rebel Alliance thesis.

• 2:04:03Speaker 10

  Yeah, you got it. It's great to be here. I'm Nick. I'm a partner at Union Square Ventures. I've been at USV for about 15 years. And we've, over that time, been in investing overnight success. Bingo. Been investing up and down the stack and across, you know, moments in time when different sort of layers of technology have emerged and, you know, opened the door to lots of new stuff. And it's, I think, if there's one thing that's consistent about the way we look at the world, it's like every sort of wave of technology is either kind of expansive or consolidating. And those moments where it starts to feel expansive are just incredible.

• 2:04:46Speaker 10

  Right? So back in our history, the first one was like Web 2. You know, you had built the core internet, and now you could build anything on top of it. The other one, you know, for us, it was, you know, Twitter was probably like the big investment from that era. If you look at like the crypto era.

• 2:05:02John Coogan?

  Wasn't USV also in like Tumblr and Etsy and like a bunch of other companies from that era? It was a great portfolio.

• 2:05:08Speaker 10

  Yeah, that was back. So the firm was founded in 2004 by Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham. And the thesis back then was there's been this epic infrastructure build in the, you know, fiber and switches and routers, a first pass at building, you know, mainstream consumer apps. But like, you know, a big blow up with the dot com, you know, pop. And the thesis in 2003, which was pretty contrarian, was there's going to be a big opportunity at the applications layer. And there's going to be a moment, you know, it's time to build, basically. And that was pretty. You know, it wasn't the most popular view back then. I think it created an opening to make some really great investments in a lot of early, you know, in application layer things.

• 2:05:50Speaker 10

  So we did Twitter, Tumblr, Etsy, SoundCloud, you know, Indeed, you know, a whole bunch from that era. And it was all about, you know, the, the tools are on the ground. So what can we build with them? And I think those moments when the tools are on the ground and it's time for people to build with them and anybody can build anything in any direction. I think those are the moments that have always felt the most exciting to us and that we've been looking for, you know, for 20 some odd years.

• 2:06:13Jordi Hays?

  Pros and cons of thesis driven investing. Most, I would say, investors now are humble enough to be like, I just try to find the best possible founder and give it money.

• 2:06:25John Coogan?

  The most common thesis I hear is, is this one buy low, sell high.

• 2:06:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's also, that's also a good one. But I just feel like, you know, you, you guys have done so well, like trying to really crystallize your vision of the future and the opportunity in the present and then investing and like actually being like, we know there's a company that should be built here and then taking the time to figure out what the right team is to go and attack that opportunity. But the, I'm sure there's like the, the other side of it was like, sometimes you just like get a little high on your own supply and, you know, back, back, back an opportunity that, that doesn't exist and you kind of forced it because you wanted it to exist. But, so, so every good strategy has its downsides, but I'm curious.

• 2:07:06Speaker 10

  Yeah, I would say the, the two potential downsides of sort of thesis driven are you're wrong. Like, that's the worst one. You're just like, something's gonna happen and it doesn't. That's happened to us. Don't get me wrong. And then the second flavor is like right idea, wrong team, or, you know, right idea, too early, you know, or whatever. And like, we've had our share of those two. And so I think, you know, we're a small fund. We don't need to play a coverage game. We don't need to play momentum. That's just not how we've operated. And so our, we're sort of set up to be able to pick our moments and take shots and, you know, have a point of view about what we think's gonna happen. And hopefully if we're right, we're contrarian and right, you know, and we, we've been that way a bunch of times. And hopefully if we're wrong, you know, we limit, we limit the damage

• 2:07:51Speaker 10

  on the losses.

• 2:07:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. So take us through the Revel Alliance. Who's in the alliance? Who's out of the alliance? Break it all down for us.

• 2:08:01Speaker 10

  Yeah, so the Rebel Alliance, we just put this up on the USP blog last week. It's an idea that's been cooking for some time for us. And it's basically the idea that if you think about AI and now agentic AI, the opportunity is so much bigger than any one company. And that there is a massive ecosystem exploding around these incredible magic core models. And there are layers and components and modules. And we're just beginning to start to see all of those get built out at an ever increasing rate, especially now that model capability is so good.

• 2:08:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:34Speaker 10

  And that means that we believe there are going to be generational companies built up and down the stack. Not just, you know, and really, you know, I don't think that OpenAI or Anthropic or the Death Star. I do think they are these really powerful companies with, that have sort of a vertically integrated approach. And I think the meme in the market is like, maybe, you know, Claude becomes the world's only employee and all value gets sucked into those companies. Our thesis, the Rebel Alliance thesis, is that the opportunity is so big and so massive and so expansive. And there are so many forces pushing for this expansive motion that there are going to be companies, you know, in all these components of the stack,

• 2:09:19Speaker 10

  building around, including the models themselves, but also so many pieces around them. We're already starting to see it. We're making lots of investments around them. And to us, it feels like, you know, the beginning of the whole economy, but maybe the whole internet getting rewritten on the agentic stack and with an agentic approach. And so really, the idea is that what's happening is bigger, is so freaking big. And that the opportunity, it's like a great time to be building. It's a great time to be building for builders. And there's a lot of big companies are going to get built. That's really the core.

• 2:09:53John Coogan?

  No, I love the thesis and we see it every day on the show where someone's coming on, not just with a big fundraising announcement, but a ton of revenue traction and a ton of customer love. I'm interested in the down the stack feels maybe less contrarian to me just because like you see announcements from the big labs where they're using Salesforce or they're storing all their data in ClickHouse and or even going deeper into the semis and the memory and the energy, all of that feels really obvious. But the bigger meme from a year ago was like, are you going to get steamrolled by the next model? And there were some companies that were just sort of thin wrappers with some prompt engineering. But then you have companies like

• 2:10:37John Coogan?

  Eleven Labs and Suno and these specific mid journeys doing really well. There's so many companies that have gone and carved out different niches and done really well.

• 2:10:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Suno is one of my favorite examples because it's, it's, you know, clearly a massive opportunity, already a multi-billion dollar business. Millions of people love the product and yet it's not a good fit for the labs to prioritize because the size of the prize is just like, you know, I don't, you know, Mikey's extremely ambitious, but like, you know, maybe it's a $20 billion business over time, right?

• 2:11:11Speaker 10

  To me that gets said too.

• 2:11:13John Coogan?

  Oh, I was just gonna say like the Gemini app has a make music button inside of it and Suno has still carved out like this incredible niche. Anyway.

• 2:11:21Speaker 10

  And I think there's two, there's two ideas, like just looking at example like Suno. One is user experience, right? And I think as we cover this, we rewrite the world with AI, whether it's in media or industrials or robotics or health or whatever, these experiences are going to need to be specific and tailored. And, you know, they're, they're, maybe you could call them niches, but they're really big. And I think that all doesn't collapse into a single app. And then the other thing, or an experience, and the other thing that we're seeing from everybody we talked to building at the application layer, whatever, however you describe the application layer is model competition. There's so many good models today and as we move.

• 2:12:03Speaker 10

  You know, as more things move into production, we start being aware of the trade offs between model capability and model costs. Everybody who's building is thinking about how to build an abstraction layer to make those best trade offs, to deliver the best experience and to have margins. If you're building a product like Suno, you know, you need to have margins. If you're an enterprise adopting this stuff, you're thinking about your token cost. And I think both of those sort of forces are, you know, are good for the Rebel Alliance. And at the end of the day, it's a core theme is competition among the models, but it's not the only one.

• 2:12:36Jordi Hays?

  All right, let's live workshop an idea that I have that I want someone to build.

• 2:12:44Jordi Hays?

  I, over the weekend, I was messing around with, in chat with the image model on some furniture ideas that I had. I managed to make some stuff that I think is cool. I would happily pay like for this like chair that I made. I'd happily pay a couple thousand dollars to get a very great version of this chair. And I was thinking like it'd be great if I could upload it and then have like some combination of like an Etsy or an Upwork style thing where furniture fabricators could say, I will make it for this price. Here's the work that I've done. And basically like a marketplace to kind of manage that.

• 2:13:19Jordi Hays?

  Theoretically, if I made it and it's great, then other people could just buy that product and the order would go to the fabricator and maybe I could get a little bit of a cut. And I thought it was an interesting idea because it sort of like rides the tailwinds of like anybody can imagine and prompt a product into digital form. And then like you need this network of people globally that can actually go make the products. I'm not sure if it's just like too small of a TAM, you know, like how many people really want to make furniture? But what's your immediate reaction?

• 2:13:50Speaker 10

  Well, there was a company maybe a decade ago that did this for physical products. I'm blanking on the name right now, but you know, this idea of invent your thing and make it, you know, from the 3D printing area era to the, you know, furniture or other things. I think it's even more possible now because part of what we have is the ability to design, you know, amazing things, you know, overnight. And I think where, I don't know where you're going with this, is this isn't really part of the Rebel Alliance idea, but it's another. Theme that we've been really focused on is services that plug into agentic experiences are, I think, with unique data or networks or sort of systems attached to them, right? In this case, like product fabrication, distribution, so on and so forth.

• 2:14:33Speaker 10

  It's like, you know, these are durable types of networks that need to exist with a very different architecture that can plug into the agentic future. And so I think things like this are going to be successful. And then there's a question of like, at the end of the day, who owns the interface? Who owns the distribution? You know, what's the consumer experience for that? You know, does it all roll into a chat GPT or a Claude? Or, you know, is it something else? Kind of a separate question, but I think like there, another theme is like durable networks as APIs into agentic experiences or MCPs or whatever. I think we're going to see tons and tons of those.

• 2:15:08John Coogan?

  Should I pitch my idea? The agentic AI for doctor billing?

• 2:15:13Jordi Hays?

  No, no, definitely not. Definitely not. For another time, for another time, for another time. How are you? Yeah, how are you? It's interesting. The like, I still have some wariness around this like rebel alliance style plays because of the first generation of companies that were leveraging GPT models. They grew like crazy and then it just was a matter of like building an interface and an interface is straightforward. How are you?

• 2:15:55Jordi Hays?

  Like, you clearly have are overcoming that fear and are willing, are investing a lot against it. Part of it is like, I just feel like this dynamic now where hiring an agent is like quite different than hire, you know, just sign, you know, using software and like you just assume that agents are going to get better. And one of the challenges is it's like an agent that is generally intelligent, just like a human, you can kind of plug into an organization and it can start just doing things. You don't really care that much how it, how it does things. And so I just feel like the, the process of like hiring agents for companies.

• 2:16:37Jordi Hays?

  Is going to be like quite a bit different than like the last generation of software where you had to build out this massive sales force and you know you're going to conferences and it's like it's it's it's just a very different motion and I think that like the growth of of Claude code specifically is like proof that like software has changed to some degree and you can get adoption of something at a speed that is entirely unprecedented. So I'm curious how you're thinking about like how how just like the procurement and sales is going to change because like again, we have we have companies on every single day that have that have grown revenue

• 2:17:18Jordi Hays?

  incredibly rapidly. They clearly are solving customer problems. You know, we had a healthcare agent company on today, started in 2023. It's a billion dollar company now. But but yeah, the question is like, are you still betting against when you invest in these companies? Are you just betting against general purpose agent progress?

• 2:17:41Speaker 10

  Yeah, that's a really good question. And I think one important idea here is we're not just talking about will there be other agents that compete with Claude or ChatGPT? Like, will people build sort of like personified agents and how will those get to market? I think that's one version of what agents look like. Another version of what agents look like is like cloud infrastructure, where every you know, company that's building any system is going to have agents and the orchestration of hundreds or thousands of agents built into their underlying, you know, platform, whether that's an app or whether that's an enterprise or anything else. And so if you I think part of the Rebel Alliance thesis for us is agents are moving from sort of

• 2:18:26Speaker 10

  people you like personified people you hire to cloud infrastructure. And and it and when we look at how agents are getting deployed and orchestrated today, it's not just I'm hiring an agent and it's showing up in my Slack. It's like I'm programmatically spawning, you know, 50 agents, you know, to go sort of be part of whatever system I'm building. And so Think of agents as infrastructure as opposed to agents as employees. I think that's where a lot of these forces come into play where every, every company, every enterprise who's building in an agentic style is going to need model routing, model choice, orchestration, you know, memory, you know, some sort of harness.

• 2:19:08Speaker 10

  And there's, there's different options at each of these as you're building up agentic systems. So, so that's like really a big driver of this is the move from agents as people to agentic systems that have all of these layers in place and have more of like, corporate's the wrong word, but like a more of a production vibe to them where they're going to get built by professionals who want to have control and who are going to want to lay them out in increasingly sophisticated ways. And so, so I feel deeply like, like very, very strong that that's happening. I see it everywhere. And I think a big, like a lot of the stuff that we're looking at right now in the agentic stack is like kind of low level, like networking and identity and payments and all these like pieces you need in order to compose and orchestrate agents.

• 2:19:51Speaker 10

  We're moving from like agent as employee to agent as infrastructure. And, and I think that also is like a big driver of how, why we believe so much in the Rebel Alliance thesis.

• 2:20:01John Coogan?

  Last question, can you take me through the financials, what they might look like at a Rebel Alliance company versus a non Rebel Alliance company? When I think about a lab, they might spend a billion dollars on a training run, amortize it over months and there might be all these GPU commits and, and they're spending money like an industrial company sometimes. If you're building Rebel Alliance company, does it look different? Is it all talent? Are you subsidizing tokens at some point? Is it cost of customer acquisition? What are you pattern matching to in terms of like the shape of the business? Are we doing 12 to 18 month runway here? Like, how are you thinking about deploying capital and watching that capital flow through

• 2:20:46John Coogan?

  the business at the early mid-stage of a company?

• 2:20:49Speaker 10

  Yeah, it's good that you brought up like capital intensity, right? So I think, because I think an idea here is there's this category of hyper capital intensive AI companies, which is the big labs.

• 2:20:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:00Speaker 10

  And then there's kind of everything else, maybe that's like less capital intensive.

• 2:21:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:05Speaker 10

  You know, we have a portfolio company called Plurals Research that does model training, but in a decentralized network using, you know, compute that's scattered around the internet. So you can still do training in a capital light way. I think that's possible. So I don't want to make it seem like all the models must be capital intensive in the form of a single company, but I think generally speaking, you're looking for things that are more capital light. A lot of the things in the middle, like harnesses and memory and, you know, identity and payments, I think a lot of that looks like kind of regular tech companies. And then anything that sits at the sort of user level that's passing through token spend, you know, there's a category of margin profile there that's, that's new in the AI era, right?

• 2:21:47Speaker 10

  You're either taking a loss on, on token spend passed through to the big labs, or you're like eking out margin by swapping out models. And so I do think there's like, actually, it's almost like this barbell of capital intensity where at the, at the model layer, there's a lot of capital required. And at the application layer, there can be, if you're subsidizing a lot of token spend, certainly on a free tier or something like that. But there's a lot in the middle that I think has a more of a traditional capital.

• 2:22:12John Coogan?

  And it's just all wildly different than web two where a dollar of revenue was usually a dollar of gross profit, basically. And now you might see 60% gross margins, you might see 20, you might see 90. It just depends on how the entrepreneur has positioned the business and what the shape

• 2:22:29Speaker 10

  Yeah, and like 20% gross margins for some application companies is like great.

• 2:22:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it might be negative 50% if they're going really fast. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time. Really fun chat and we'll talk.

• 2:22:40Speaker 10

  Yeah, my pleasure.

• 2:22:42John Coogan?

  Have a good rest.

• 2:22:42Speaker 10

  Thank you so much.

• 2:22:43John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about public investing for those that take it seriously. Stocks, options, bond, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. Our next guest is in the waiting room. We have Julian Hoenig from Amble. He's the co-founder and chief design officer. Julian, welcome to the show.

• 2:23:01Speaker 03

  Round of applause.

• 2:23:04Jordi Hays?

  Hi guys.

• 2:23:05John Coogan?

  We're very excited to have you. We very much enjoyed digging into the images of the new vehicle. Would love to-

• 2:23:13Jordi Hays?

  I view you as an angel sent from heaven. Make my dream motor vehicle.

• 2:23:18John Coogan?

  You saw the Ferrari Luca and just snapped and said, "There has to be a different way."

• 2:23:22Jordi Hays?

  Enough. Enough. It's time to make something beautiful, useful.

• 2:23:26John Coogan?

  Actually, take us back. Tell us how you got here. A little bit of your history and then some brief history on the company would be a great place to start.

• 2:23:34Speaker 11

  Yeah. First of all, thanks for having me. Super excited.

• 2:23:37John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:23:38Speaker 11

  How did it start? I mean, it started with a pretty simple conversation with me and my friend Jose, who is the co-founder and of the co-founders. And here's this beautiful hotel in Portugal, in Alentejo, called Barocal. And it's really beautiful. And he's building a second one on the coast with a direct on the coast and in the dunes. And he asked me, "Do you know of any good mobility solution, golf carts for my resort where everything is designed perfectly?" And then, you know, I did some research before and said, "I think there's nothing that really, you know, fits your standard you have in the resort." And we said, "Well, let's, for fun, let's do something. Let's design something for you."

• 2:24:18Speaker 11

  And this little idea became reality because we realized if one hotel wants this, probably more hotels want that too. But also, if you make it street legal, you open up a whole new customer base, right? And I lived in Pasadena. I lived in LA.

• 2:24:35John Coogan?

  You lived in Pasadena, California?

• 2:24:37Speaker 11

  Yes.

• 2:24:38Jordi Hays?

  You're a Pasadena resident right here.

• 2:24:39John Coogan?

  I live there currently. I was born there, raised. That's amazing. And I-

• 2:24:43Speaker 11

  It's amazing. I went to Adcent. I mean, you're sure you know Adcent.

• 2:24:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I live very close there. And I sent this to a friend who lives also in that area, because we've been talking, we were talking about, like, can you get a golf cart in this area? Probably not. I was asking ChatGPT, like, how much trouble will I get in if I have a golf cart? And he saw a golf cart and was like, "I think it's just an unlicensed golf cart. I think somebody's just bending the rules." And then I sent him the amble immediately because I was like, "This is what we've been talking about." So I fully expect these to take over Pasadena. But anyway, sorry, I interrupted you there.

• 2:25:18Speaker 11

  No, no, no, no, but it's, you know, those are the LSV and you can, you can through the low-speed vehicles, you can make it street legal in most states, or almost all states.

• 2:25:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:27Speaker 11

  Um, but yeah, I, I, I, you know, growing up there, I know that they need, and, and, you know, I've been many times in Florida, all parts of California, Texas. So I, I think that understanding a bit of the American market, I thought this could, could really work well because there's nothing really nice out there yet that is electric, open. And, and then we, we also said, well, you know, we don't, we just don't want to take a golf cart and make it pretty. It's like, we, we really started from ground up, meaning we make it slightly bigger, it's wider. Um, has, of course, bigger wheels, has, um, individual suspension. So not only the design, but also the engineering. We spend a lot of time with engineering. One of, our head engineers actually comes from Formula One, so we really take it seriously to, to make something special.

• 2:26:12Jordi Hays?

  No, I, I, you know, I was joking when you, you, you, uh, came on, but I totally agree. I've spent, uh, I live in Malibu, like, so we're the perfect customers for you. I, I live in Malibu, John lives in Pasadena. I've seen every possible type of golf cart in every setting, from commercial settings. Uh, worked at a hotel, you know, a, a long time ago where I would drive these big, you know, bulky, commercial, uh, golf carts to driving, you know, golf carts on golf courses to around the neighborhood. I've seen the ones that are street legal, the ones that are not, the ones that are, you know, gas, gas powered, the, uh, the ones that are, you know, more like farm vehicles, things like that. So I've looked at the full, uh, the, the full spectrum and you guys really nailed to me, uh, all the different,

• 2:26:57Jordi Hays?

  all the different elements that matter. Specifically, like, I think a lot of, uh, a lot of vehicles in this category try to sell you on tech. I went through this, the buying process recently and they're like, well, this has a smart system and the backup camera and it's got, you know, full, it's full speakers and it's got, it's got all these other things. And, and to me, I think just people are desperate for the best of modernity, but also the best of, you know, the, the, the 50s and the sort of like truly analog era. And I think that, um, And manufacturers just haven't like really listened to that feedback.

• 2:27:40Jordi Hays?

  And so, yeah, when I look at all the design decisions that you guys have made, it looks like it's going to be incredibly solid to drive, right? The wider base, the proper suspension, it'll feel better in corners over things like as simple as speed bumps. And then just the usability of it. Like, I don't want my outdoor vehicle to feel like a big computer. You know, I just want it to feel like, I want it to feel like a classic, you know, like something closer to a modern Mok or something like that. So.

• 2:28:16Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think you, absolutely. Because what for us was the most important is, of course, the design, but then the comfort, ride comfort, also performance. It's not something you know, you take to Bismarck Beach and you go down the dunes. But it has quite some power, like three times more than the average golf cart. So it's quite more powerful. You can go 25 degrees uphill with full load. So this is something, you know, so it's the comfort, the performance, the design. And in terms of gadgets and screens, we really intentionally said just the basic screen at the front that's really nicely designed and then bring your own device.

• 2:28:55Speaker 11

  Like, some of these, you know, some of these products, they have the screen, but after a year or sometimes already when it ships, it's old, right? It's old news. So we said, instead of that, let's focus on having a nice USB C port. You bring your phone and then, you know, have, I mean, we all know this, right? You're in your car, you have a huge screen and what do you do? You put your iPhone on the screen and use Waze, right? Or Google Maps or whatever you use.

• 2:29:25John Coogan?

  Can you take me through your design process? Does it start with pencil and paper? Do you start in Photoshop? Do you pull a mood board together? Do you use AI to generate something? Like, what is the process? Because I imagine it ends in something like CAD. But where does it start and how does it evolve?

• 2:29:46Speaker 11

  Just looking for my sketchbook.

• 2:29:48John Coogan?

  Okay, sketchbook, you got it.

• 2:29:50Speaker 11

  Yeah. Um, I think, I think it's all for, for, I mean, I tell my son and I think all students, they should never stop sketching. I think sketching with pen and paper is still the most direct way of expressing ideas and the fastest. Uh, okay, now with AI, you talk to your phone and the, and the drawing comes out, but I think that's half the fun. So, uh, it starts with sketching ideas and then fairly quickly we went into, into 3D modeling, like, uh, into CAD. Um, and what we did, I think what's very, you know, my, my experience before was Audi. I was, um, eight years at Audi, then a year in Lamborghini doing car design. So my background is really on the one hand, car design. On the other hand, I worked in 10 years at Apple in Johnny's team. So have bring both the product

• 2:30:34Speaker 11

  design, but also the car design. Um, but yeah, but what we did, I think what's unusually, we, we, we built a, a, a driving prototype fairly quick in the process. Usually you make a lot of models, like one-to-one scale models, and we just went directly into the driving prototype, which was pretty, pretty cool.

• 2:30:55John Coogan?

  What is the next two years like? What needs to happen to get to 2028 for deliveries? Uh, it feels extremely fast. It's amazing. At the same time, I'm not happy I want it today. Um, and so I'm, but I am interested. Is it supply chain? Is it, is it manpower? Is it regulatory? Is it all of the above? What does it actually take to bring a new vehicle to the market? Because, I mean, every other company, it's 10 years. So two years is great, but what, what does the next two years look like?

• 2:31:26Speaker 11

  So, um, what we are, we're in the process now. We are, I would say 90% finished with engineering for manufacturing. What it means is basically we have this amazing prototype, but the last year we spent the full year of making this. Ready for mass production.

• 2:31:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:41Speaker 11

  Which is the most difficult part because you have something you love. Then you have to, you know, factor in cost, you have to factor in, you know, visibility. The parts, the extra parts you wanna order, the supply chain. So we are like ninety percent there to have that ready. I'm spending a few months, for, for, uh, two, two, three months more to pull it together. And then we produce, we start producing end of the year.

• 2:32:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:02Speaker 11

  Um, and we ship two thousand twenty seven, but only to, um, to hotels.

• 2:32:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:32:07Speaker 11

  Because as you said, the, the process of making the street legal takes another half a year. So we intentionally start with, with clients like, you know, Almangiri and, and really the top clients for hospitality. And then we have, uh.

• 2:32:21John Coogan?

  This is a dream come true. We talk about Almangiri a lot, so.

• 2:32:25Speaker 11

  Yeah, it's, I mean, it's, it's fantastic.

• 2:32:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, do you, so do you have, uh, it seems like there's a, a little bit of ambiguity in your mind about where the split between hospitality and, uh, personal sales will be in a few years. Uh, are you starting to narrow the aperture there? Do you have a vision for where you want the company to be? Because it feels like with developing a great brand, uh, interfacing with the user, the first time they ride on it, it's at, uh, Almangiri, it's beautifully cared for, it's in this idyllic setting, they wind up buying one, they have very great brand aspirations. Do you want this to go into street vehicle sedan SUV?

• 2:33:11John Coogan?

  Do you want this to be ninety percent consumer sales eventually? Like, where does this go if it becomes a huge business?

• 2:33:20Speaker 11

  I mean, it's interesting. We, I mean, hospitality is a great starting point, but we already see now after three days, we have already over a thousand pre-orders.

• 2:33:28John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:33:29Speaker 11

  And, and a lot from the U S.

• 2:33:36Speaker 11

  I like this. Oh, this is the I have to get one of those too.

• 2:33:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, we have lots of sound effects.

• 2:33:41Jordi Hays?

  We can get you one.

• 2:33:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 2:33:45Jordi Hays?

  No, I think I think it's I think I think there's gonna be I think there's gonna be a big market here. I just I know so many people that um and I guess I would say like maybe it's a smaller market, but I think you can get a very, very, very meaningful amount of it just because I've I know so many people that have spent this much money on a vehicle and gotten something that is just not not special.

• 2:34:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:08Jordi Hays?

  Uh, in any way, so.

• 2:34:10John Coogan?

  The open air not having the doors on. I was looking at the take getting Ferrari Luca and taking the doors off for a similar experience, but it's like 20 times the cost. And so this is just makes so much more sense. It's a more rational purchase. And I think that's.

• 2:34:24Speaker 11

  I think that the door is more expensive than our car.

• 2:34:28John Coogan?

  Probably. I think every door is probably 50K on that car. Uh, anyway, thank you so much.

• 2:34:33Jordi Hays?

  Thank you so much for joining. Uh, we will. We will be your strongest supporters. And you guys are welcome to come on anytime. And thank you to Riley for connecting us.

• 2:34:43John Coogan?

  This is fantastic.

• 2:34:44Speaker 11

  Yeah, thanks so much for having me and looking forward. Yeah, and hope to meet in person, maybe for the first deliveries.

• 2:34:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be amazing.

• 2:34:51Jordi Hays?

  First deliveries, we can go do a tour of our.

• 2:34:53John Coogan?

  You can do the second car review on the show. The other one was a hypercar. Uh, yeah, the zinger, uh, which is, uh, I think over a million dollars. This is much more affordable. Uh, it's available at driveambal.com. Uh, you can go check it out if you're listening at home. Uh, and thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

• 2:35:13Jordi Hays?

  Great to hang, Joy.

• 2:35:14Speaker 11

  Thank you so much.

• 2:35:15John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon.

• 2:35:15Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:35:16John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And Jordy, uh, people were asking you to do a little bit of a little bit of a spin for everyone. Show off the new merch you got there. I'll tell everyone about Codex on the arms. 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, or just trying to just trying to look good. Codex.

• 2:35:46Jordi Hays?

  We just got our first shipment of, I think, around 201 of our new merch product.

• 2:35:52John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. I know the one you're talking about.

• 2:35:54Jordi Hays?

  And that one is gonna be available online.

• 2:35:56John Coogan?

  That's the one.

• 2:35:58Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, no, no, not the one, not the one you're thinking.

• 2:36:00John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 2:36:01Jordi Hays?

  No, that one will also be available online. We have one, we have one that, uh, we have one that's a little bit silly.

• 2:36:07John Coogan?

  It's groundbreaking.

• 2:36:07Jordi Hays?

  It's groundbreaking.

• 2:36:08John Coogan?

  In the best way possible.

• 2:36:09Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's, it's a product that humanity has been trying to create for centuries.

• 2:36:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:16Jordi Hays?

  And we did it, we did it.

• 2:36:19John Coogan?

  We did it. We had a breakthrough.

• 2:36:21Jordi Hays?

  We had a big breakthrough.

• 2:36:22John Coogan?

  A big breakthrough.

• 2:36:23Jordi Hays?

  Took a long time.

• 2:36:24John Coogan?

  Did.

• 2:36:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but, uh, but yeah, no, the merch will finally be for sale and we will make the, it will be dropping in the chat.

• 2:36:31John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:36:32Jordi Hays?

  First.

• 2:36:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:33Jordi Hays?

  We're not exactly sure exactly when.

• 2:36:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:36Jordi Hays?

  But we will give it to you guys first and thank you for the patience.

• 2:36:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:41Jordi Hays?

  But on that note.

• 2:36:44John Coogan?

  We'll see you tomorrow. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tdpn.com. We'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye.

• 2:36:51Jordi Hays?

  We love you.