Jobs Boom, Astra Reactions, Cybercab Roll Out, The Dyson Debate | Hunter Somerville, Bar Winkler, Bridgit Mendler, Carina Hong & Ken Ono

(00:49) - Astra Reactions (21:43) - Jobs Report (41:20) - The Dyson Debate (51:17) - Cybercab Roll Out (58:00) - Hunter Somerville discusses his role as co-head of venture and growth equity at StepStone Group, where he invests across funds, direct deals, and secondary transactions. He examines the difficult fundraising environment for emerging managers, inflated valuations and SPV fees, cap-table management, liquidity challenges, and opportunities in AI, deep tech, hard tech, energy, defense, and biotech. (01:31:34) - Bar Winkler discusses Wonderful, the applied AI company he co-founded and leads as CEO, which operates across 33 markets and recently raised a $550 million Series C. He explains how its AI operating system helps large enterprises deploy agents and applications across customer support, back-office processes, coding, and legacy system replacement, with the long-term ambition of becoming foundational infrastructure comparable to Microsoft. (01:42:36) - Carina Hong discusses her work as founder and CEO of Axiom Math, where she develops AI tools for mathematical discovery and formal verification. She highlights Axiom’s record-setting progress on major problems, its competition with leading AI labs, and the potential for verification technology to improve mathematics, software, and scientific research. (02:00:15) - Bridgit Mendler, CEO and co-founder of space communications startup Northwood Space, discusses the company’s international ground-station network, compact antenna systems, and growing production capacity. She explains how Northwood aims to provide satellites with high-throughput, reliable connectivity while helping operators maximize valuable data amid rising demand and potential launch constraints. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Today is Friday, September 4th, 2026. We are live from the TVP Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital.

• 0:11Jordi Hays?

  That's right. Let's get that Christmas countdown.

• 0:15John Coogan?

  First, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. How many days?

• 0:25Jordi Hays?

  There we go. 111 days until Christmas.

• 0:29John Coogan?

  111 days until Christmas.

• 0:30Jordi Hays?

  The Christmas countdown is helpful because one, gives you something to look forward to, but it also is a subtle reminder that you only have 111 days left in this year.

• 0:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:41Jordi Hays?

  It's game time.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  It is. It is.

• 0:43Jordi Hays?

  It's game time.

• 0:44John Coogan?

  Well, we're, we're excited for it. Uh, big news in the AI world, obviously. Astra GPT-6 launched yesterday. Uh, we went through the blog post briefly. It went up mid show. A bunch of impressive benchmarks. We talked about Arc AGI. We moved the goalposts because Arc AGI V3 is now saturated, which is particularly crazy because of how detailed those games are when you play them. Uh, the thing that stuck out to me though, was watching the demos of people build 3D scenes in Blender using Astra. Clearly a bunch of people got access to the model before

• 1:25John Coogan?

  and were able to fire off one prompt, maybe a few prompts. It feels like it's very, very capable to just fire up Blender and do a full task and model a whole world.

• 1:39Jordi Hays?

  That said, Matt Schumer, who had a couple of the most impressive examples.

• 1:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  He has been talking about how, uh, the art of prompting is back.

• 1:49John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:50Jordi Hays?

  He has, uh, he had a very specific process where you have like a manager agent.

• 1:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:56Jordi Hays?

  And subagents.

• 1:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57Jordi Hays?

  And it's, and it's not, still not as simple as just like, you can get a good output.

• 2:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03Jordi Hays?

  Doing, you know, in one shot, uh, but to get some of these really incredible outputs does take a little bit of refinement.

• 2:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I'm sure a lot of that information will propagate across the internet as it already has. I'd love to pull up some of the images from, or the videos, uh, from the launch from folks who are actually, uh, test driving GPT-6 Astra. Um, first, uh, Sharif, uh, Sharif said, GPT-6 Astra recreated the Palace of Fine Arts in Blender. This is my favorite building in San Francisco because it was built for the World's Fair in 1914. I didn't know that, uh, where the steam locomotive and telephone were showed off. Wow. Uh, it was a time when technology gave us all a deep sense of optimism for the future. I feel like, I feel, uh, like some of that sense

• 2:53John Coogan?

  has been lost since, certainly, but I hope models like Astra can help restore it and push us towards a more hopeful future. So if we can play that actual video, you can see. So I, I imagine that it pulls images from the, from the internet. There's a whole bunch of obviously reference diagrams. There's a whole bunch of different ways that you could ground, uh, a 3D modeling, uh, exercise. You could even pull the blueprints. There might be free models.

• 3:15Jordi Hays?

  Architectural plans.

• 3:16John Coogan?

  And, and yeah, it is this odd thing where you could use an AI image generator because the AI image generators are knowledgeable about what the Palace of Fine Arts is. It could generate a bunch of images there. So there's all these different ways to triangulate it. And then you can also just go on, I think Sketchfab is one of the big, uh, free 3D model, uh, purveyors online. And so you could potentially go grab an actual 3D model build off of that for your scene. So there's all these different ways to solve a problem and Astra seems to be good at actually going and doing it. There's a few more that we should look through. Uh, there's one comparison, since this is the new Pelican bench, apparently, uh, same, same, uh,

• 3:55John Coogan?

  same prompt, same goal of creating this fly through video for, uh, a real estate scene. And this feels like something that could be useful. I've already seen on Zillow, there is the ability to restyle images. So if you're looking at a house on Zillow, you can see the interior photos and then you can say, I'd like to redecorate this in a modern style or in a contemporary style or in a, uh, colonial style. And it will go and use AI image generation on the backend to do that. It's only available on a fraction of Zillow listings. It's clearly some sort of feature that they need to turn on, but you could imagine this being something,

• 4:39John Coogan?

  especially for spec homes that are selling that maybe haven't been, uh, that, that they don't have the budget to actually go do a proper rendering, just be, bring, lowering the cost, you get sort of a Jevons paradox moment. Um, there's another one from Thomas. He says, Astra is very good at 3D modeling and the lighting is way better than this one. Uh, this is, this is what, this actually looks properly ray traced, properly lit, really thoughtfully, uh, designed. Maybe that's in the prompt. Maybe that's just the way this one turned out based on the photos from a Blender scene, uh, to then an Unreal Engine 5 walkable experience. So everything becomes translatable. You'll be able to take your tweets, turn them into blog posts, turn them into videos, turn them into 3D games on Steam.

• 5:20Jordi Hays?

  GTA style video games.

• 5:22John Coogan?

  Basically, basically. Um, and so there's a little bit of a prompt and, uh, Thomas reveals a little bit about his process here.

• 5:29Jordi Hays?

  I would like to see, uh, VCs, if you're going to put out an AI blog post, you know, blog post.

• 5:37John Coogan?

  Like a market map.

• 5:38Jordi Hays?

  Essay. No, if you're going to put out an essay that was clearly written by AI, you should be required to put out a video game that accompanies it.

• 5:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:45Jordi Hays?

  That's sort of playable, that gets the same concept.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  I'm thinking like instead of a, instead of a market map, make it a Fortnite map. I want to be able to play in the different, you know, town is a popular AI startup, might land on a market map, should land on the virtual Fortnite map as well. Um, who else said this? Yufan Yi. I think this was, uh, interesting. There, there's another, there, there's some debate over this last one, uh, whether there was like a different harness involved, but, uh, same thing, give it a Zillow listing, it can 3D, 3D model the house. So, uh, this, it, it's, it's always with these new releases, it's interesting what makes you feel the AGI or not. Uh, realistically Frontier Math Tier Four, I think they scored 99% on that. Uh,

• 6:31John Coogan?

  Terminal Bench Science 0.1, they're just numbers to me. Like they, they, they don't do anything for me emotionally because I don't have any grounding in how hard those particular things are. And also I sort of, I sort of assume the computers are good at math.

• 6:47Jordi Hays?

  And you didn't get past algebra and like, look how successful you are, right?

• 6:51John Coogan?

  Exactly. Exactly. So, uh, so those, those are rarely.

• 6:55Jordi Hays?

  Accomplished all of this off of Algebra One.

• 6:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 6:59Jordi Hays?

  A freshman level math Olympian.

• 7:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. So, uh, those are never really feel the AGI moments for me, but this, uh, but I, I've actually spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours in 3D modeling software, uh, mostly in Cinema 4D and Houdini, uh, and it was really fun. I really enjoy making, uh, 3D renders and motion graphics. Uh, and it was also useful when I was making YouTube videos. Uh, but every step in building a scene, uh, requires you gotta watch a YouTube tutorial. Then you gotta look up how all the different functions work. And then ultimately you're tweaking settings in literally four dimensions because it's a 3D scene, but then over time you have to map where the camera goes, where the different objects are moving, how things

• 7:45John Coogan?

  progress over time. And it can also be very compute intensive. So there's, there's a whole bunch of times where just to preview the scene in low res, you might have to cache and load and, and pre-bake certain animations so that you can just see what it looks like. And then you're like, nah, it's not there. I gotta go back and change some setting, uh, for some sort of smoke simulation or some sort of fracturing that's going on. Uh, and so it's fun, but it is, uh, extremely cumbersome. And ultimately you're doing this on a two dimensional screen, uh, and it can be very time consuming, um, and frustrating. And so by the time I stopped spending time on motion graphics, which is around 2021, I'd been building the YouTube channel and I hired a few, uh, and a few editors. Some of them were good at

• 8:30John Coogan?

  After Effects. Some of them learned Blender. Blender was ascendant at that time. So, uh, Blender is the open source, community-led effort. Cinema 4D is a closed source piece of software, very expensive, was very expensive, was like over a thousand dollars to get a license that would be good for like a year. Then they eventually went subscription. And so there were pieces of software that were used by Hollywood, but were very expensive, very high barrier of entry. So you didn't have as much of a flourishing ecosystem. Blender at, in 2021 was clearly on this trajectory where it was going to build this ecosystem and become very, very popular. Um, and, and it did. Uh, but by 2021, I was able to, uh, hire, uh, video editors who were able to go do scenes in Blender, but still it was a huge

• 9:14John Coogan?

  ask. If I was like, for this YouTube video, I was posting every single week, I'd like a motion graphic to illustrate something. And, uh, I did this one where we built a 3D battleship board for this US-China military competition, uh, competitive analysis. And, I mean, it's like, it sort of ties up an editor for a week while they're working on this and, uh, and this just speeds all of that up. So you're going to get back to like the, is it over for motion designers that worry about job displacement? I think we've been through enough of these cycles that hopefully we're Jevons paradox pilled at this point. We imagine.

• 9:53Jordi Hays?

  You're just competent at software engineering.

• 9:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 9:56Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot more 3D renders. It seems like, seems like everything that can be, anything that can be rendered will be rendered.

• 10:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:06Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, and it's just, and, and more people are going to try to make something themselves and then hit the point where they're like, okay, there's this sort of area where, where the models, uh, can't, can't get it to a hundred percent. Now I need to actually go find, um, you know, find somebody who's an expert to work with them.

• 10:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, totally. Um, and so we're back on the, is this AGI question? The Wall Street Journal said, yes, we are entering the era of artificial general intelligence. It's in the journal. Uh, they've declared it. Although entering the era, like the door, the house is AGI, the door, and we are entering, we're like almost in the AGI era, according to the Wall Street Journal? I don't know. Stripe called it AGI. Didn't they call it AGI Jan 1, something like that? Uh, and there's been various calls. Tyler Cowen called it AGI like three years ago. He was ready to rock.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  I think that was GPT-4.

• 11:05John Coogan?

  Something like that. No, it might have been 01. I think 01, he was like, this is AGI. Um, but it's clearly artificial, clearly intelligent.

• 11:13Jordi Hays?

  And don't you think he'll end up looking like pretty good in the fullness of time on that call?

• 11:18John Coogan?

  Hundred percent.

• 11:19Jordi Hays?

  Because it clearly is this like, you know, timeline of spectrum.

• 11:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:22Jordi Hays?

  I do like to imagine the Stripe, uh, the Colisons, just like at like just after midnight, you know, there's champagne, maybe some sparklers, some fireworks, and they just go, that's it. It's AGI.

• 11:34John Coogan?

  It's AGI. But, uh, the question is no longer, is it artificial? We know it is. The question's no longer, is it intelligent? We know it is at a lot of different tasks. The question is, how general is it? Because Blender is open source, can be downloaded and copied a million times into reinforcement learning environments. We know that OpenAI bought, quote, "tens of thousands of Mac minis and Mac studios to do computer use training on." And so the question is, is it only good at Blender? Will it work in Cinema 4D? Will it work in Houdini? Will it work in a small piece of software that does 3D modeling that has been, has fallen by the wayside?

• 12:16John Coogan?

  Now, there's an interesting dynamic here where I was in the boat of, I could see that Blender was going to be the new hot thing, the best tool that I should have moved, but I already had so many plugins and textures and rendering, and I knew the layout that I downloaded Blender, I opened it up, and I was like, ah, I don't really don't want to have to get over this learning curve, even though I know in five years Blender's going to be way better than Cinema 4D. There's this, uh, switching cost. Now, you're in this weird world where it's pretty good if you're a software company, where the Frontier Labs bullseye lands on you. And I'm thinking about Slack, like Alex Wang at Meta just moved them to Slack off of Teams, or they had like an internal workspace thing.

• 13:00John Coogan?

  And specifically, he said-

• 13:02Speaker 02

  Give it up for Benioff.

• 13:02John Coogan?

  Give it up for Benioff, truly. Uh, and specifically, he said Slack is better for work with AI agents. And why is that? Well, it's because the Frontier Labs all use Slack. And so they have Slack as a reinforcement learning environment, and so it got really good at Slack. And I think that even though there are open source Slacks and you can vibe code a Slack competitor, as we have tested, Slack was the logical tool to pull off the shelf for the AI companies, for the AI agents, for the models. And Blender seems to be that. So the interesting thing is that I do wonder if people will wind up shifting from Cinema 4D to Blender because the models are better at Blender.

• 13:45John Coogan?

  Or will the models generalize and say, yeah, this looks a little bit different because it's a slightly different piece of software, but I've trained so many hours in Blender that I can also do Cinema 4D or also do Houdini. Because some of those other softwares are better at certain things. Some of them are better at smoke simulations, some of them are better at water simulations. There are advantages to each piece. I don't want to degrade any particular piece of 3D software. I love them all equally. But I think-

• 14:10Jordi Hays?

  There are some reports that it's, that it's quite effective at video editing.

• 14:14John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 14:15Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 14:15John Coogan?

  I'd be interested to take it for a spin. I wonder, the interesting thing is that most video is still edited in Adobe Premiere. It's a closed source Adobe, you know, they have their guardrails. They probably, they might not want to, you know, say, oh yeah, sure, take 10,000 licenses, no problem. Pay us $10 a month for that. They might, they may have a different opinion. They may want an AI agent that's internal. There might be all sorts of different things. But then again, there are, I mean, I know that there are open source video editing suites out there. I think that they lag a little bit, but, um, there are some that are free or, or open source at least.

• 14:56John Coogan?

  The, the other interesting thing, I mean, video editing, like all these things, like taste is so important in these. It's, it's often less about the, the exact, uh, the exact instructions and more about the, like, telling the right story, using the right tools, uh, not creating slop, whether you're doing it yourself or with an AI agent. But I, I think that gets to the core question of like, how do you evaluate these model launches? We were discussing the idea that like, the benchmark era might be coming to a close in some, in some way. Because as soon as the benchmark's created, it's hell climbed very, very quickly. And then it's at 99 or 100% pretty quickly.

• 15:38John Coogan?

  And everyone sort of, their eyes start glazing over, uh, in benchmark discussions. And it just goes back to like the vibe check. I think the, the best thing to do when a model comes out is just take it for a spin. And mostly point it at something that you know really well, because you don't want to be in the, you, you want to expose the models. Uh, what, what, uh, what's the, uh, what's the Gelman amnesia? That's the one I'm thinking of. You basically want to test if Gelman amnesia is triggered, uh, by you using the model. So point it at something that you intimately understand and see if you're impressed. And then, because if you point it at something-

• 16:19Speaker 02

  You would be horses.

• 16:20John Coogan?

  What?

• 16:20Speaker 02

  You'd be horses.

• 16:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, we gotta do the horse bench again. We have a couple more ventures. Let's see comedy. I want to, I want to see some new jokes. Shrimp fried rice bench. Also, interesting, Gelman amnesia, not created by Murray Gelman, the physicist who was at Caltech, who lived in my hometown, and his house is actually for sale right now. But he, uh, he was having coffee regularly with another physicist. I forget what his name was, but he's really famous. And the other guy was like, we noticed this together. I'm naming it after you. Do you have the story? Did you look this up? The, the origin?

• 17:03Speaker 02

  It says it's named after Nobel Prize winning physicist Murray Gelman.

• 17:05John Coogan?

  Yes, it's named after him, but it was coined by his buddy, who was another physicist, who was like-

• 17:11Speaker 02

  Michael Crichton.

• 17:12John Coogan?

  Is that it? Okay. Yeah. Uh, so they were hanging out, having coffee. They realized this thing, and it's like-

• 17:19Jordi Hays?

  Tyler should name this specific situation.

• 17:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:22Jordi Hays?

  Posgrove paradox, where, where-

• 17:26John Coogan?

  Where, where someone asks you to fact check something they don't really know anything about.

• 17:32John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, we can move on because there's a whole bunch more news. Uh, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. So, uh, there are other reactions to Astro we should go through in the timeline. The big one comes from Joe Weisenthal. He says, "You're never going to believe it, but someone one prompted the new model to make a completely new and immersive 3D game." Uh, yes, the bar has already been raised. The goalposts have been moved. Uh, it's not enough to make a game. It has to be funny, entertaining. And I don't know, I, I know how, I, I feel like a lot of people are taking the easy way out with these web-based games.

• 18:15John Coogan?

  Playing a game on a MacBook Pro in a Chrome tab, that's not real gaming. It's gotta be, it's gotta be running-

• 18:25Jordi Hays?

  In Steam?

• 18:26John Coogan?

  On a PC, on Steam, or on a PS5, or on an Xbox. Uh, it's gotta, it's gotta have more to it than just, uh, some fun game that you can play around with in the browser. I do love that the browser games are coming back. Like, I don't know if either of you ever experienced like the Flash era, but like Flash games were huge.

• 18:44Jordi Hays?

  Line Rider.

• 18:45John Coogan?

  Line Rider. Okay, what about you?

• 18:46Speaker 02

  In elementary school, we'd play on, uh, Cool Math games.

• 18:49John Coogan?

  Cool Math games. Okay, what, what game? Line Rider or something else?

• 18:53Speaker 02

  I don't, I don't know. I don't remember. There's so many.

• 18:56John Coogan?

  Put any money on it? You put any money on it ever? Make any money? Uh, let's see. Uh, there's also some updates. Token pricing is effectively meaningless now. The benchmarks are meaningless. The token pricing charts are meaningless. Everything's meaningless. Uh, no. Uh, so Stephen Hydel is sharing the cost efficiency, how you should think about cost efficiency in the modern era. So 3.8 Flash looks 13 times cheaper when measured per token, but Astro is cheaper per task since it's far more efficient. Measure your costs per task, not per token. So, uh, interesting. I, will we see a decline in, i- i- if models get more token efficient,

• 19:39John Coogan?

  will we see a decline? I mean, we probably won't see an actual decline in, in token volumes. But, you know, we've seen, uh, Sundar Pichai from Google and Alphabet stand on stage and talk about the exponential increases in token volumes. But you might see a kink in that graph or like a deceleration to some extent if models just get way more token efficiency. Like, like if the next version of Gemini or 3.8 Flash, uh, is 100x more token efficient, you might see a little bit less growth in token volumes, but they might be doing more valuable work than ever. So sort of an interesting nuance. You gotta adapt to the modern times, I suppose.

• 20:23John Coogan?

  So the intelligence index versus the output tokens per intelligence task, there's a whole bunch of charts you can dig through. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Uh, Jordy, any other Astro reactions you want to go through?

• 20:40Jordi Hays?

  I think we'll have more by Monday.

• 20:41John Coogan?

  Probably.

• 20:42Jordi Hays?

  As more people get it.

• 20:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. We need, uh, we need a break. We need a break. We need a, we, we, we need a-

• 20:48Jordi Hays?

  It's about that time. About that time. Not for us, but, but-

• 20:52John Coogan?

  For the AI leaders, for the executives, for the enterprise leaders, we need them to be able to digest the model. That typically happens over Christmas, even though we're doing the road-

• 21:00Jordi Hays?

  No, but we've talked about three-day weekends.

• 21:02John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, the three-day weekend's coming up, so people will be able to fire it up. Okay, okay. So, yeah, it's, yeah, Labor Day. It's gotta be, uh, everyone's gotta be spinning, spinning up Astro by tomorrow. Lock in. Hopefully you don't have any real plans, so you can stay inside and vibe code. Uh, so you can understand, you know, where the model's strong, how you want to deploy it, what you want your employees doing with it, et cetera.

• 21:25Jordi Hays?

  Jack Altman saw the benchmarks and said, "Sam, exclamation point, I guess even a blind squirrel can find a nut sometimes. Congrats."

• 21:36John Coogan?

  That's good. That's good. I like it.

• 21:38Jordi Hays?

  So good.

• 21:39John Coogan?

  Anyway, um, we should move on to the jobs report because even though AI is getting better, so is the US employment picture. The US added 162,000 jobs in August. Sheesh. That is a lot of jobs. Also, what's interesting is that the, the Wall Street Journal had an op-ed. Narrative violation. Had an op-ed just, I mean, just printed today. It, it went to, it went to print, uh, online yesterday, but saying, why we'll have to get used to meh job reports. The economy doesn't need to generate all that many jobs to keep the labor market steady, but that won't keep low job growth from feeling dissatisfying. So economists think, or they thought that

• 22:22John Coogan?

  Friday's jobs report will show the US added seasonally adjusted 53,000 jobs in August. The number came back 162,000, three times what these, what these economists, what were the economists doing asleep at the wheel? They're on summer vacation, maybe. Who knows? Uh, that would be a step up from July's unexpected loss of 23,000 jobs, which of course was now revised upwards. So we actually did add jobs in.

• 22:49Jordi Hays?

  We got an upwards revision.

• 22:50John Coogan?

  Upward revision.

• 22:51Jordi Hays?

  You don't see that much. Usually.

• 22:53John Coogan?

  Narrative violation.

• 22:55Jordi Hays?

  Usually.

• 22:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. That's a narrative violation. There's a whole bunch of interesting, uh, there's a whole bunch of interesting, uh, dynamics going on in the economy. The, the, the Wall Street Journal's been doing a great job highlighting the, the, the main street millionaire, the small town entrepreneur, what's happening in the broader real economy, not too focused on what's happening in tech and tech jobs, uh, where obviously, uh, a very small employee base can create a really outsized outcome. Nothing shows that better than hugging face. Couple hundred employees, 12 billion dollar outcome. And, uh, that's not the nature of the US economy. That is the power law. That is the, the outlier and, but it's easy to track and say, oh, well, like if, if, if you're making a 12 billion dollar business with just a couple hundred

• 23:40John Coogan?

  people, there's not going to be any more jobs, but that's not the way the actual US economy works. So what is going on with the US economy? The August jobs report is out and it is good. It blew past expectations with the US adding 162,000 jobs. Economists polled by the Wall Street Journal said that the US would add 53,000. That comes after both the June and July jobs reports were revised up to 31,000 and 21,000 respectively. So the unemployment rate remained at 4.1%, which is historically low, which indicates that we generally have a healthy labor market. The jobs added were fairly broad based from the Wall Street Journal.

• 24:20John Coogan?

  Food services and drinking places were standout. Let's go. Uh, with an increase of 59,000 jobs. And people were worried about this post-world cup slump. You remember this?

• 24:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so it seems like whatever happened there, whatever gyrations happened, uh, people are still dining out. People are still going to bars and so they're hiring.

• 24:44Jordi Hays?

  I think it's quite possible that, you know, recent model advances are allowing people to, you know, have more power lunches.

• 24:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 24:51Jordi Hays?

  It might've historically been a Friday thing.

• 24:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:54Jordi Hays?

  Maybe now they're adding Monday to the Wednesday.

• 24:56John Coogan?

  Sort of a let Astra take the wheel scenario.

• 25:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:00John Coogan?

  After 1pm in many offices across the country. Could be a, could be a thing.

• 25:04Jordi Hays?

  Could be that.

• 25:06John Coogan?

  Similarly, local government education gained 42,000 jobs after losing 58,000 jobs in the prior months. Uh, manufacturing was among the, uh, was among the sectors registering job gains, as was healthcare, as has always been the case. Healthcare continues to boom. The information and finance sectors shed jobs while economists are divided over how artificial intelligence will divide the market. Those sectors are generally viewed as among the most exposed to technology. At a minimum, the report is an argument against the Fed lowering rates in September. Wah, wah. Before the report, markets have been roughly divided on the prospect of a hike. It also seems that the AI jobs apocalypse is still on hold, at least for another month. And of course, we'll discuss this on the show. Uh, let me

• 25:51John Coogan?

  tell you about Shopify while Jordy queues up the next story. 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. Uh, do you have anything? Because I got a big story here we can read through, but it's a long.

• 26:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. On, on the, on the rates debate, uh, uh, the president was over on Truth Social today, asking for a rate cut, uh, and making a bunch of various threats, um, around halting trade with a number of, of our trade partners if we don't get a rate cut. So, uh, hopefully the market shrugs it off and, uh,

• 26:38John Coogan?

  That's all I have. Okay. Let's move on to some funny timeline posts. The timeline, because Logo Data List has a funny one here. Slop does not come from AI, but from the heart of man. AI only reveals the slop that is already in the heart of man. What man desires is slop. The problem with, the problem is with man, not the machines. Very eloquent. And then, uh, Tom Cruise says, not the real Tom Cruise, but a, a non-account says, I am joining the war on artificial superintelligence on the side of artificial superintelligence with a crazy screenshot that we don't need to keep on the screen too long.

• 27:17Jordi Hays?

  Keep that moving.

• 27:19John Coogan?

  AI outage, of course, and people are saying code with AI, without AI, and it is the, the odyssey. Try and string this bow challenge. We really should have put Tyler to the test yesterday. Fizz buzz. Do it. Python. Good luck. You only have GitHub.

• 27:37Jordi Hays?

  Tyler's first thing, he would go to chat and ask what programming language is good for somebody just getting into programming and then realize it was down. Just be completely halted. Uh, this was a heartwarming, uh, moment. A tennis player who's retiring at the end of the year says his next career after tennis will be in finance.

• 28:01John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 28:01Jordi Hays?

  And I just wanted to give a round of applause.

• 28:04John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 28:06Jordi Hays?

  Super, super heartbreaking.

• 28:07John Coogan?

  I have a new chapter coming next year. I'll be working in finance. I already signed to work in wealth management in a Swiss company. My next chapter is looking more in an office and working in finance. Uh, I, I know some, I know some former, uh, pro athletes who have gone into wealth management and it's a, it's a fantastic fit. They've had fantastic careers. It makes a lot of sense. You can, uh, go play golf and tennis with your clients and you meet a lot of interesting people while you're on tour. It's a, it can be a very, very good fit, especially if you have the passion for it, even before you, uh, wound your career down. But.

• 28:41Jordi Hays?

  Major partnership news.

• 28:42John Coogan?

  Huge partnership.

• 28:43Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely massive. Sam Blonde has partnered with Jim Riley at, uh, what is it? Carolina AI.

• 28:51John Coogan?

  Charleston AI.

• 28:52Jordi Hays?

  All right. Let's pull up this video.

• 28:54John Coogan?

  Partners with Monaco. Let's watch it.

• 28:56Jordi Hays?

  This is big.

• 28:58Speaker 03

  As you know, I'm Jim Riley, co-founder.

• 29:02John Coogan?

  I do know.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  AI is coming to Charleston. It's already here. Now.

• 29:08Jordi Hays?

  AI is coming to Charleston. It's already here.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  Partnering with Monaco, we can bring AI to all of South Carolina, which is what I want to do. I really want to bring AI to everybody in South Carolina. And, uh, with their help, their program, their AI, we can do that. So if you're a founder and you need assistance and want help identifying potential customers, people that will use your product, Monaco is the way to go. Just like I'm using them.

• 29:37John Coogan?

  This is awesome. Talk about moving quickly because if this video went up even one week from now, it could be like, ah, eye roll. Like we've, we've seen a couple of this guy's videos, the memes. This is so fast. Uh, really great execution timings, everything with these things. Very funny. Congrats to Monaco and Sam Blonde on, uh, um, just a, just a fun moment. And I mean, like unironically, he seems like someone who is a great evangelist who's going to actually aid in AI diffusion and.

• 30:10Jordi Hays?

  There's no clip of, there's zero clips of Jim Riley talking about AI doing. Yeah.

• 30:17John Coogan?

  And that we know of.

• 30:18Jordi Hays?

  That we know of.

• 30:19John Coogan?

  Don't ask what.

• 30:20Jordi Hays?

  There could have been a podcast that he did.

• 30:23John Coogan?

  Don't look him up unless wrong. He might be on there. Who knows? He might have been in a Bay Area group home. You don't know that yet. But hopefully he was just a normal businessman.

• 30:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he may have read. It's possible he read the basilisk. And realized he needed to.

• 30:39John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, this is all elaborate Rocco's basilisk gambit trying to trying to please the future AI gods. Well,

• 30:49John Coogan?

  Nvidia has released AI God mode for gamers. It's called DLSS five. They've been working on this technology for a while. Deep learning, super sampling. It takes the current game resolution, up reses it using AI. Some people hate it. It's very controversial. I think it looks great. Let us know what you think. Watch this video of Kingdom Come two. This is being rendered in a game engine and then passed through DLSS five to make it more photorealistic.

• 31:22Jordi Hays?

  Changes everything.

• 31:23John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. Truly, it does still look like a video game to me. But that's not entirely the the point with this. It's just to get to get you just one little notch up. It's not, it doesn't actually feel fully like a movie, but I don't know. I thought it was good. I'm excited for this. Should kettle and fire acquire Campbell's soup? That's what everyone's asking.

• 31:48Jordi Hays?

  A hundred percent. Yes.

• 31:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 31:51Jordi Hays?

  I actually have fond memories of Campbell's soup.

• 31:54John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 31:54Jordi Hays?

  As as a kid, I would go surfing. And then I'd be really cold, which has created some controversy. Uh, online, we had an Instagram reel went viral.

• 32:07John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 32:07Jordi Hays?

  I was saying that, uh, at least in cold waters, Northern California, not not wasn't great for me to surf before needing to be productive.

• 32:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:15Jordi Hays?

  That pissed a lot of people off.

• 32:16John Coogan?

  It did.

• 32:17Jordi Hays?

  But I would come home and I would have some Campbell's Campbell's soup. It was fantastic, but you can imagine that the quality of the product was actually probably pretty bad back then. And I'm, I would assume that it's gotten far worse. And so if we could get Justin in there to fix it up, get it back on track, I'd love to see that.

• 32:36John Coogan?

  I, I, I think it'd be very interesting and it does not seem out of the realm of possibility at all. Justin's a fantastic entrepreneur, fantastic investor. Yes, Campbell's soup is a larger company. Market cap in the in the single digit billions, I believe Campbell's.

• 32:55Jordi Hays?

  Six point four billion.

• 32:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, but you get the right investors around the table. Obviously, it's a, it's a very old company.

• 33:01Jordi Hays?

  On nine billion of sales.

• 33:05John Coogan?

  He's within striking distance there. I think he might be creeping up on them. One.

• 33:12Jordi Hays?

  One broth container at a time.

• 33:14John Coogan?

  One broth.

• 33:15Jordi Hays?

  Box of broth at a time.

• 33:16John Coogan?

  One box at a time.

• 33:17Jordi Hays?

  Ryan Peterson has a.

• 33:19John Coogan?

  But we, we, we've been saying this for a long time that like, they're like when, when, when, when a large legacy company is, has, has done the, the McKinsey consultant as CEO and they've done the, the suit and they've done the, okay, we hired the person who is internal and climbed the management ranks. It is interesting to try and put a founder of a smaller company just in the top job and say, go founder mode, try something new, but there's still not that much appetite for it. So, well, what, what, what do you think?

• 33:51Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Ken Watana says, why are all the A16Z partners tweeting about karmic retribution today?

• 33:57John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 33:59Jordi Hays?

  I saw a post from Alex Rampell saying karma is a swear word. Ryan Peterson has a pretty thought provoking theory. He says, conspiracy theory. I choose to believe that Marc Andreessen was funding Pablo Torre's Steve Ballmer investigation to get back at him for Internet Explorer. Ultimate punishment banned from your own arena.

• 34:21John Coogan?

  That's a funny. That's a funny karma moment. Yeah.

• 34:26Jordi Hays?

  Pablo Torre dropped a new investigation into the Dodgers this morning. I was listening to it on the way into work and, and it's fantastic. He is one of the greatest podcasts, one of the greatest living podcasters, which pretty much includes almost all podcasters.

• 34:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:47Jordi Hays?

  But really, really crazy story. Mark Walter, you know, setting up.

• 34:54Jordi Hays?

  And Magic Johnson is involved in quite a big, in quite a big way. So highly recommend going and checking out that story.

• 35:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm excited for that to develop again. Yeah. I mean, with any of these allegations, it'll probably take a year of investigation to get the, the actual results, but get ready to learn about insurance because the untangling a lot of these different organizations is very, very difficult, but it can be really interesting. What's Ryan Harmon working on these days?

• 35:24Jordi Hays?

  Before that, uh, we don't have to pull up this image, but has Burning Man fallen off?

• 35:31John Coogan?

  I have no idea. I think they had a rough go after the, I've never been. I, I think they had a rough go after the, um, the muddy one. There was one where it rained like crazy and it was really, really muddy. And I think everyone was like, that was a lot. I don't know if I'm going back next year. And then also COVID might have switched things up for a little bit. I think they might have skipped one. So a couple different moments of like, okay, a lot of like, like washing out certain people. But then also.

• 36:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it seems like, it seems like it's, it doesn't necessarily have a massive inflow of net new young people into it.

• 36:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:10Jordi Hays?

  And, and the, the Burning Man population is, is just, is aging up.

• 36:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:15Jordi Hays?

  Which, which doesn't mean that Burning Man, um, you know, hopefully for BlackRock, you know, this doesn't mean that Burning Man's going away anytime soon.

• 36:25John Coogan?

  We hate to see BlackRock City, obviously named after BlackRock, the financial institute.

• 36:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, probably some sort of, I would assume some connection.

• 36:34Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but yeah, some lab leaders are there.

• 36:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:38Jordi Hays?

  That I'm aware of. I have been informed that there are, that there are lab leaders there. You know, Sam and Greg have been all over the, the podcast circuit this week, so it's not them. But there are lab leaders there, which, which to me is funny because they hopefully aren't on X because it would be hard to be properly enjoying.

• 37:00John Coogan?

  Social media platform?

• 37:01Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 37:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 37:02Jordi Hays?

  But you can imagine, you know, you're camped out in the desert. The whole purpose is to like, do nothing and just, you know, whatever they do out there.

• 37:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:11Jordi Hays?

  And then it'll be a little bit jarring, I think, coming back.

• 37:15John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 37:16Jordi Hays?

  And seeing the updates.

• 37:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyways. Burning Man wants to survive. I think that they should probably host it in New York, switch it up, invite only. Maybe get Sorkin on stage interviewing CEOs, something a lot more like Dealbook.

• 37:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:32John Coogan?

  Would probably work for, for like the future there. That would be something that I would want.

• 37:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it would make the BlackRock connection make more sense.

• 37:40John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah. It was always a little, you had to squint to understand why is BlackRock involved with Burning Man? But if they, if they held it in Manhattan with just financial leaders, geopolitical leaders, and it was just more like one on one conversations.

• 37:56Jordi Hays?

  About global markets.

• 37:57John Coogan?

  With a, with a legendary investigative journalist and a, and a news anchor who everyone really respects. And it was invite only. And then the videos could go out on the internet. Like that might be a little bit more up my alley. Yeah.

• 38:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 38:09John Coogan?

  If they want to appeal to me. I don't know. I don't know if they're going after me. I don't know. I'm in the TAM. I don't know.

• 38:15Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of Sorkin, Sorkin, Sorkin has an amazing quote from when Mark Walter bought the Dodgers.

• 38:24John Coogan?

  Said, mark my words, this man will be investigated by Pablo.

• 38:27Jordi Hays?

  No, he was just like, he was basically saying like, to paraphrase, like, this is not all, certainly not all of his money. Like there's some, there's some other, there's a bunch of people funding this that aren't just.

• 38:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and I forget that, like, it's so normal in venture. Like if, if you're like, oh yeah, I raised money from, you know, Sean McGuire at Sequoia. You're like, yeah, well, that's Sequoia's money and that's not all his money. He probably has a stake in it that he invested, but then also it's Sequoia's money and Sequoia's money is like the Harvard and Yale endowment money and and CalPERS and all these pension funds. And like, you understand that there's this sequence of ownership that happens with a normal venture investment or even an acquisition. But in sports, like the final beneficial owner is really important. And I don't know if that's purely aesthetic because when you say this person owns this team, you want to know that they actually own it. And they're not just the front man for like a private equity firm.

• 39:22John Coogan?

  But it's interesting that, that Sorkin called that out. He is the best for a reason. Anyway, what's Ryan Harmon up to? He's cutting the number of calories in a new product called Hall Pass.

• 39:34Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 39:34John Coogan?

  One third the calories, one third the ad space Hall Pass. This is from Peter Rahal, correct? Very cool. So you know him from RX Bar. You know him from David, the protein bar.

• 39:46Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, I wanted to.

• 39:47John Coogan?

  Am I right?

• 39:47Jordi Hays?

  I wanted to include Sorkin's line.

• 39:49John Coogan?

  Please.

• 39:50Jordi Hays?

  Before we move on.

• 39:50John Coogan?

  Please.

• 39:51Jordi Hays?

  He, Sorkin said, uh, and this is 2014. He says, they appear to be living out a childhood fantasy using other people's money, some of whom may not even realize it.

• 40:03John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 40:04Jordi Hays?

  And it took over a decade for the chickens to come home to roost.

• 40:08John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 40:09Jordi Hays?

  On that one.

• 40:09John Coogan?

  Very, very interesting. Anyway.

• 40:12Jordi Hays?

  He also called it a lawsuit waiting to happen. Anyways, back to advertising.

• 40:17John Coogan?

  Hall Pass.

• 40:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Day Job and Medici, which is the parent company of David and Hall Pass. They've just been cooking together. They had the same team behind the Fish campaign, which I still was still, it was so odd that it's stuck in your mind.

• 40:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. I've gone back and forth on, did they ever actually sell boiled cod?

• 40:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they did.

• 40:40John Coogan?

  They did.

• 40:41Jordi Hays?

  They did. They delivered it.

• 40:42John Coogan?

  But they didn't, but it's not like an actual skew.

• 40:45Jordi Hays?

  It was a skew for a period of time.

• 40:47John Coogan?

  For a period of time, but it was like a special launch, special drop.

• 40:50Jordi Hays?

  Let's see if you can still get.

• 40:51John Coogan?

  They're not in the business because there is a business there. Like people, people do buy boiled cod. I don't know.

• 40:58Jordi Hays?

  They still have canned cod for sale on the website.

• 41:01John Coogan?

  Maybe it'll be the biggest skew ever.

• 41:03Jordi Hays?

  Wild caught Atlantic cod.

• 41:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, it happens. Okay. Let me tell you about console.

• 41:10Jordi Hays?

  Please.

• 41:11John Coogan?

  Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Now.

• 41:19Jordi Hays?

  The great Dyson.

• 41:20John Coogan?

  The great Dyson debate. TJ Parker kicked it off. He said, apparently unpopular opinion. Dyson products are generally not very good. David Senra, not someone needs to check in on him, but strongly agree, though my girls love their air wraps, as Bryce Roberts. A couple of other people saying, yep, my wife got a vacuum. It was terrible. Felt like a total psy op. A lot of people are upset. The Matic founders chiming in. I got an alternative for you.

• 41:51Jordi Hays?

  Oh, he's saying that it's likely ruining your rug slash carpet.

• 41:54John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. Dyson rug shed and Dyson suction is very adept at making it shed faster than necessary. Interesting.

• 42:04Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I'll start with what I, I think the Dyson business is incredible. The story is incredible. I think that the making things that look like Halo weapons for stuff around the home is a very cool way to differentiate and I appreciate the over engineering, like everyday objects. I'm not saying I'm buying into it, but I'm, but I appreciate that, that someone's doing it. Somebody needs to make a $500 toothbrush.

• 42:34Jordi Hays?

  But that being said, I saw this and I was like, you know what? That kind of, that does resonate because every time I have a Dyson vacuum at home and I've had various Dyson products over the year and the vacuum in particular, it just feels like a little bit like like it's like creaky. It feels a little bit, it feels a little bit cheap. And I always want to put it away because I don't like this like Halo weapon, you know, a home cleaning device doesn't exactly fit into the overall.

• 43:05John Coogan?

  Say you don't live in the city. Just say your house doesn't look like it would be welcoming to the flood. Come on, you gotta, you gotta design your whole house to fit the aesthetic.

• 43:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:16John Coogan?

  You gotta have a banshee out front.

• 43:18Jordi Hays?

  Banshee out front would fix me.

• 43:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think you forget how bad it was before Dyson.

• 43:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:26John Coogan?

  It was so bad. Vacuums were so rattly and clanky and like they used to have bags on the back that you would have to like take out and they have this felt inside and the stuff would be going everywhere. Like this is such a step forward. Maybe you could say that like it's plasticky and it doesn't feel like super rock solidly built now, but it moved the whole category so far forward and so far into the future. Just the fact that you don't have to plug it in. It has a battery. That was an innovation. Like there were most, most, most vacuums, you would have to take it out

• 44:08John Coogan?

  and then you would unwind this long cable and they, I think they still make some of these, but you would have to find the load, the nearest plug, plug the vacuum in and then you could only vacuum as far as the cable would go. And then you'd want to move to another room. So one of my early like chores, I think, I don't know why I have so many memories of this, but I guess I.

• 44:28Jordi Hays?

  I have, I have formative memories of like

• 44:31John Coogan?

  Vacuuming.

• 44:31Jordi Hays?

  Trying to get to a spot.

• 44:33John Coogan?

  And you're like, oh, and you're trying to extend it and then you have to like.

• 44:35Jordi Hays?

  And as a kid, you're trying to be, you're trying to be as efficient as possible.

• 44:38John Coogan?

  Of course, you don't want to move the cord in two seconds.

• 44:40Jordi Hays?

  There's four plugs in the house that you need to hit to vacuum the whole house.

• 44:43John Coogan?

  And so you gotta, you gotta optimally, it's a traveling sales problem all of a sudden. It's NPR. Like you gotta plug in over here, reach under there, get under the couch, go over there. Then you gotta move the cord over the couch so you can get to the other side. Then you gotta move the cable all the way to the other side of the room. So you can get the other side of the room. Huge problem, completely solved, one shotted by James Dyson, one of the greatest to ever do it and put some respect on his name. Apologize.

• 45:10Jordi Hays?

  I, I still think they should make a line that, that doesn't feel as cheap.

• 45:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. I don't know.

• 45:17Jordi Hays?

  There would, there would almost certainly be zero demand for it.

• 45:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:20Jordi Hays?

  I think that if you're willing to make the $499 toothbrush, you should be willing to make the $5,000.

• 45:26John Coogan?

  Maybe, but I feel like you'd lose a lot in the engineering. Like you would wind up doing, I mean, because as soon as you go metal, you're going to get a lot heavier. It's going to be a lot more annoying. I do think that part of the problem that you're feeling is that the products have gotten more complex. There's one that has a laser beam on it that shows you the dirt that's somewhat useful, but it's not that relevant. And so there's, they've added a lot of weight to them and I think that puts a little more strain on the device and the engineering. And so, but I don't know, would carbon fiber satisfy you?

• 46:03Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 46:04John Coogan?

  Okay. The carbon fiber Dyson vacuum. Anyway, there's an article in the journal.

• 46:09Jordi Hays?

  Packy with somewhat niche, but one of the, I would call it the post of the day. David Senra interviewing Herbert Hoover. Hoover, I effing love it. You have to effing meet James Dyson.

• 46:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. I, I wonder what percentage of the David Senra, of David Senra episodes include a mention of James Dyson. It's gotta be, it's gotta be above 50 for sure. Yeah. We talked about this a little bit earlier, but James Dyson sold us a $400 hair dryer. Now he's trying a $500 toothbrush. The inventor known for household appliances is turning to oral care. Quote, "We don't really structure things on a business plan." I mean, you brush your teeth so much over the course of years. If this lasts a couple of years, I wouldn't be surprised if the Dyson camera jet toothbrush sells pretty well. Also just physical objects, things like this.

• 47:07John Coogan?

  They kind of fit with Christmas. I feel like there's less and less things to, to give to people. It feels, it feels nice and luxurious and special and it's a new gadget. And even if you churn from some of the features, it remains a daily driver. It's not going to collect dust in the way that some internet connected gadgets do, even if you don't get a lot of value out of the, the imaging features. But I don't know, we'll see where it goes. We'll have to check in. What is going on with the Cyber Cab?

• 47:38John Coogan?

  Cyber Cab.

• 47:38Jordi Hays?

  Let's check out the interior.

• 47:40John Coogan?

  Is, there's an interior tour here with Whole Mars catalog and IB says.

• 47:47Jordi Hays?

  The doors go up, John. Did you know the doors go up?

• 47:49John Coogan?

  Yes, I saw that. This will completely replace Uber for me. Holy mackerel. I like this. There's a couple of other data points about the Cyber Cab rollout. So famously, YouTuber and electronics reviewer, Marques Brownlee, attended the previous Cyber Cab event and came away impressed and optimistic about the future of self-driving, but skeptical of the timeline. And he said that if Elon could make good on his forecast, which was for sale by the end of 2026 for under $30,000, no steering wheel, full self-driving. You can just put it out in the world and it will go do tasks and earn you money.

• 48:35John Coogan?

  That was the pitch and Marques said, I think that's too aggressive.

• 48:40Jordi Hays?

  Does for sale mean they're being delivered?

• 48:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 48:43Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 48:44John Coogan?

  For sale.

• 48:44Jordi Hays?

  Because they did throw up, they did throw up like.

• 48:46John Coogan?

  Pre-order doesn't count.

• 48:48Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 48:48John Coogan?

  You gotta pay the 30,000. You gotta get the Cyber Cab by December 31st. And so if you get.

• 48:54Jordi Hays?

  Elon took that personally.

• 48:55John Coogan?

  Elon took that personally. Yeah. He has a preorder where you can buy a whole stack of them for, for a million dollars and run a fleet. But I think Marques is looking good. The stakes were high. Marques Brownlee said that he would have to, he would shave his head if this happened on Elon's original schedule. And of course, every time a, every time there was a Cyber Cab that was spotted, I actually saw one here in LA. Every time there was an update about the progress of the Cyber Cab program, people would respond with a AI image of bald Marques, which is very funny, but the.

• 49:34Jordi Hays?

  Should we be making predictions with, with head shaving as a, as a consequence?

• 49:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. If Elon doesn't ship this by the end of the year, I'll shave Tyler's head.

• 49:45John Coogan?

  I'm willing to do that. If he doesn't.

• 49:49Jordi Hays?

  Okay, is that, do we have a deal?

• 49:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:52Jordi Hays?

  Wait, if he doesn't ship it?

• 49:54John Coogan?

  If he doesn't ship the Cybercab for under $30,000 by the end of the year.

• 49:58Jordi Hays?

  Actual deliveries.

• 49:59John Coogan?

  No steering wheel and it drives itself.

• 50:01Jordi Hays?

  Vehicles that can do economically viable tasks.

• 50:03Speaker 02

  I'm inverse Marquez Bradley.

• 50:05John Coogan?

  No.

• 50:05Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 50:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 50:06Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 50:08John Coogan?

  No, no, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If he doesn't do it, yeah, you're the opposite of

• 50:14John Coogan?

  of of Marquez. If he doesn't do it, you shave. If in the, in the, in the world where he does do it, then you don't have to shave your head. Um, no. Um, I do like the head shaving as a, as a bet. I don't know exactly.

• 50:29Jordi Hays?

  When's the last time you had a buzz cut?

• 50:32John Coogan?

  High school, football season. I would shave it before the season started, easier to put on the helmet, and then I would grow it out all year. And I had long flowing hair.

• 50:41Jordi Hays?

  I.

• 50:41John Coogan?

  Electric.

• 50:42Jordi Hays?

  Will pay a lot of money for pictures of John.

• 50:45John Coogan?

  I'll find an old one. It was, it was good. It was, it was a wild look. Uh, it was a lot of fun. It was also just like easier, lazy, lazy bones. Um, not today, not today in the life of a broadcaster. Uh, quickly, ready to fire up Astra? Do it on Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish.

• 51:13John Coogan?

  I'm actually really bullish on the Cybercab. I've tested Model S recently and I ordered a Model YL and, uh, the self-driving capability is 100% ready to rock. Like it, it is, uh, you know, Brandon and our team was saying that he's at 95% of the miles that he's driven in the car have been in full self-driving mode. You add a little bit of tele-op for that 5% that's not there. And with a cab, you don't have to negotiate, uh, driveways and, uh, drop-off points and valets as much.

• 51:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:45John Coogan?

  It's solved. Like truly, the only time you're driving a Tesla, if you have the full self-driving on the latest hardware, is you pulling into your garage or negotiating a parking lot, something like that. Um, interestingly, Tesla has a feature, Smart Summon. You can pull out of a, uh, of a parking space and come and pick you up. Uh, it's a little janky right now, not quite there. You have to sort of puppeteer it yourself, but, uh, they don't have a banish mode and there's huge demand for banish, which is the inverse of summon. And Brandon just coined this and I was like, that's actually great. And then he was like, yeah, that's probably what they'll call it. And I was like, yeah, I guess, but I wouldn't have thought of that. I don't know.

• 52:28Jordi Hays?

  Seems like a very Elon, uh.

• 52:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:31Jordi Hays?

  Word.

• 52:32John Coogan?

  So I love the idea of being able to take the full self-driving vehicle, get out of it just on the curb, actually at your destination and say, banish. Go pay for parking if you want to pay for parking. Go find a spot on the road. Go drive around until you find something. Uh, I'm gonna be here for an hour. Deal with it. Deal with it, AI. You know, like that's what, that's what everyone wants. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Um, anyway, uh, what did Elon actually say about Cybercab? He said, uh, 20 cents a mile to run 30 or 40 with taxes. And yes, you can buy one for under $30,000. Get ready to shave your head, MKBHD. Somebody shaving their head.

• 53:14John Coogan?

  It's either Tyler or MKBHD. We'll see. Uh, I think the cost of autonomous transport will be so low that you can think of it like individualized mass transit. The average cost of a city bus per mile, not the ticket price, because that is subsidized, is about a dollar a mile. The operating cost of a Cybercab will be around 20 cents a mile, including taxes and everything else, probably 30 or 40 cents a mile. Yes, you'll be able to buy one. We expect the cost below 30,000. Um, it is crazy that I'm in a world where I think they're going to ship Cybercab before Roadster. Cause they announced Roadster a decade ago.

• 53:48Jordi Hays?

  I know, but we were expecting something around the Roadster in August.

• 53:51John Coogan?

  Right? Yeah, flying. And he told Rogan he was, he was gonna show a demo that was gonna blow everyone's mind.

• 53:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I would expect that hopefully this month.

• 53:57John Coogan?

  So you think, you think you'll be able to buy a Roadster and get it delivered before you'll be able to buy a Cybercab and get it delivered?

• 54:03Jordi Hays?

  I never said I thought you could ever get a Roadster delivered.

• 54:06John Coogan?

  You just think it's never gonna come?

• 54:08Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. Uh, but, but I would assume if they're gonna do a demo.

• 54:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:12Jordi Hays?

  Then we're still over a year out.

• 54:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:14Jordi Hays?

  From delivery.

• 54:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:15Jordi Hays?

  At least.

• 54:16John Coogan?

  I mean, just from a financial position, Cybercab makes so much more sense as a business than Roadster. Roadster, I mean, even at $250,000 for the crazy specs, like, it's still like, there aren't that many buyers that want that. A lot of people that are spending $250,000, they want a manual, they want an experience, they want a weekender, they don't necessarily

• 54:33Jordi Hays?

  There's gonna be so many buyers for the Roadster.

• 54:35John Coogan?

  There will be.

• 54:35Jordi Hays?

  At least in, at least where we are.

• 54:37John Coogan?

  There will be, but we're talking about so many buyers, oh, 10,000 cars a year or something. It's not the way people get around.

• 54:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 54:45John Coogan?

  Every day like taxis, you know, like it, it, it's just completely different TAM, completely different, uh, situation in general. So, um, I don't know. I, I might go, oh, I, I'm shaving this side of the head if it's Cybercab first, this side of the head if it's Roadster first, and I think I'll have a head here for over a year.

• 55:04Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I thought you were talking still about.

• 55:06John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, no. Uh, well, we'll, we'll do something. Uh, there, there's other, there's other Cybercab videos. They're very fun. Go check them out. Um, a Tesla Cybercab without a steering wheel or pedals drove us for 30 minutes on a pretty busy Thursday night in Austin, Texas. Uh, the 4.7 mile ride cost $9.62. Starting tomorrow at 5:00 PM, anyone in Austin can hail a Cybercab for themselves. Nothing can compare to this. Well, I mean, you can compare Waymo to it, but, um, I, I guess it's, uh, it's, it's good that it's rolling out and we are entering the duopoly phase of, of, uh, full self-driving Cybercabs.

• 55:45Jordi Hays?

  Uh, in the California Post.

• 55:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 55:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we were gonna do the mansion section this week as we do, but unfortunately.

• 55:53John Coogan?

  We'll come back.

• 55:54Jordi Hays?

  There is a mansion shortage.

• 55:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 55:57Jordi Hays?

  In San Francisco, AI is minting a new class of millionaires in SF and they're running out of mansions to buy. A wave of wealth tied to the city's booming AI industry, sending home prices soaring, triggering bidding wars with as many as 50 offers and leaving even buyers armed with 25 million in cash out in the cold.

• 56:15John Coogan?

  Well.

• 56:15Jordi Hays?

  Frenzy marks a stunning turnaround for a city whose housing market slumped during the pandemic as tech workers scattered and offices emptied. Uh, now AI companies are rapidly expanding, employees are returning to their desks, and startups are generating enormous paper wealth for workers and investors with potentially even larger windfalls ahead. Um, I looked on Compass.

• 56:38John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 56:39Jordi Hays?

  There are only 14 homes in SF on Compass over 10 million, and some of them are like duplicates and some aren't even like, some aren't single family home.

• 56:50John Coogan?

  You just have to be bullish on, on places that are further away from actual San Francisco. Like you look at what happened with Mill Valley and you have to imagine that with self-driving, one, a one-hour commute to a mansion.

• 57:05Jordi Hays?

  And Chinese quadcopter drone for humans.

• 57:09John Coogan?

  And horse, robotic horses. Don't forget about those. Um, there's just going to be more tolerance for a longer commute that where, i- if your commute is, you're fully on your laptop, basically, or you're, or you're basically talking to your AI agent. And yeah, maybe you're ready to take over once a month briefly, but 99% of your miles on your commute, yes, you have an hour commute, which sounds ridiculous when you're living in a mansion, but, uh, you're, you're being very productive, catching up on all your emails, really going back with all your coworkers, hopping on phone calls.

• 57:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, hopping on a Zoom, saying nothing from my end.

• 57:51John Coogan?

  It's gonna be electric. The future is here. This changes everything. Well, our next guest, our first guest is Hunter Somerville from Stepstone Group. He's part of there. It's his first appearance on the show, so we'll bring him in to the TV and L2 Dome.

• 58:04Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 58:05John Coogan?

  Hunter, how you doing?

• 58:07Speaker 02

  Great. How are you guys?

• 58:08John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastic.

• 58:09Speaker 02

  Early Labor Day.

• 58:10John Coogan?

  Happy early Labor Day.

• 58:12Jordi Hays?

  Labor days are, are holidays. Three-day weekends in general have actually been a key part of understanding the AI cycle.

• 58:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:20Jordi Hays?

  Because when people get a holiday weekend, they have a little bit more time to actually like try some of the new tools. And we've actually seen these like longer weekends catalyze.

• 58:30John Coogan?

  Adoption.

• 58:31Jordi Hays?

  Adoption.

• 58:32John Coogan?

  And just like understanding.

• 58:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, understanding.

• 58:34John Coogan?

  But let's start by trying to understand your career. It's your first time on the show. I would love to kick it off with a little bit of introduction on yourself and Stepstone.

• 58:44Speaker 04

  Happy to. So I'm a Baltimore guy, born and raised, plenty of mansions in Baltimore for anyone who's looking on the venture side, just putting that pitch out there. And I was a partner at Greenspring Associates, which StepStone acquired about five and a half years ago. And now I'm one of the co-heads of the Venture and Growth Equity Group under StepStone. StepStone's a publicly traded company. It has different asset class teams across real estate, PE and venture. I only do venture and growth equity within the organization. And our group does fund, direct and secondary investing. So we mix all three together, which is a pretty unique position to be in. We back who we think are some of the most interesting

• 59:29Speaker 04

  early-stage GPs out there that invest at seed and Series A. And then we come in and invest in companies at B, C, D rounds, either through primary or secondary purchases after the fact. So we leverage the ecosystem and the relationships to then identify the companies we want to build concentration in.

• 59:47John Coogan?

  What is the Venn diagram of look through exposure via your fund investments and your primary and secondary, your growth equity and your secondary's business? Because I imagine that there's already some sort of relationship. The company has been scouted, there's a growing relationship, and then you're ready to do a direct or a secondary transaction. Is that usually how it plays out?

• 1:00:12Speaker 04

  You've completely nailed it. That's exactly right. We work with over 300 venture and growth managers, which probably feels like a lot. But it's great from an ecosystem standpoint, because when we're looking at a company, we have three, four, or five different managers already as part of that syndicate that are sitting around the board table that are actively working with the founders and gives us tremendous insight on those businesses that we would like to do more with and invest directly into. If you segment our business, it's about 50/50 between direct and fund investing. And secondary is a little more complicated, because that includes both fund and direct secondaries that we do, where we provide liquidity to people within the cap table of a business, or we provide liquidity

• 1:00:56Speaker 04

  to endowments, foundations, pension funds, whoever else may want to sell LP interest that they hold in funds.

• 1:01:03John Coogan?

  Got it. Yeah.

• 1:01:05Jordi Hays?

  I'm very interested how new managers are, on the fun side, are pitching you today. Like, they're coming in, it feels like we are, in some cases, it feels like we're a decade into this cycle, right? A lot of the big liquidity events of this last year have been from companies that started before anyone was broad, like, people broadly were thinking and debating and investing in AI. And a lot of people have been rewarded for backing, you know, I'm thinking of, you know, chip companies like Cerebrus, that, you know, backing those companies in the 2010s, you've been, you've been doing well. But what are the new managers that are maybe coming off of building companies or operating? What's their

• 1:01:48Jordi Hays?

  pitch to you around, like, the next five to 10 years? Because you're betting on, at the early stage, you're betting that there's going to be a bunch of big new companies created.

• 1:02:00Speaker 04

  I would say just first and foremost, it's a harder fundraising environment for new managers that are getting off of the ground. The LP capital continues to concentrate more heavily around the multi-billion dollar brands that are increasingly adding strategies or other parts of their platform. So getting LP attention, I think, is tougher. If you layer that on top of the fact that a lot of seed rounds are being bypassed and going straight to larger A rounds, or just larger seed rounds in general, it's harder for emerging managers to even play in a lot of those situations, because most emerging managers are focused on seed or small A and are operating out of fund sizes of 30 to 300 million. So they're

• 1:02:42Speaker 04

  not exactly going to be leading a seed round in a $100 million kind of financing overall. So they need to prove their right to exist, I'd say, even more than they ever have historically. You could argue, maybe that's a little bit different in hard tech and deep tech, where I do think there's a bifurcation in terms of viability and where you can be an active participant, get good ownership in a, in a business like that, and then you get blessed later by the multi-billion dollar brands. But in AI-specific focused companies, I think seed is harder. And so you really need to find a way to stand out. You need to prove your ability to source or build relationships with founders very early. And certainly, if you're an operator and you come from a company where there's a diaspora of talent and proven

• 1:03:27Speaker 04

  founders and a culture that fosters that, you can make the case you're creating a new mafia, that you're better suited to back than someone else that already exists. On top of that, you know, AI founders are generally younger. GPs also increasingly have an advantage if they're younger and can relate better with that founder cohort. So I think there's an argument to be made in that regard as well.

• 1:03:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, are you, you know, it felt like rewind five years and it felt like every, it felt like half the people I knew were raising for at least like a micro solo GP fund. And it, and it didn't, it seemed like, you know, it seemed like if you wanted to raise five to 10 million, it was like very easy, you know? You did have to like, do the rounds and maybe it took six months, whereas, but you were going to be able to pull the money together if you were competent and you had any kind of track record. And the interesting dynamic is like, back then, there wasn't this crazy new technology cycle, like, the craziness in the market was a function of interest rates. And so the companies that

• 1:04:34Jordi Hays?

  were growing incredibly quickly were a company that was like a lending business and like, they just had a bit of an arbitrage, right? Whereas today, you have, it's interesting, because it seems way harder for new managers to get off the ground and even pull together, you know, the $50 million fund. And yet, it actually feels like a much better time to be investing because of the, the sort of like turmoil of the technology markets right now, creating opportunities for new entrants.

• 1:05:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I totally agree. And I would say it's still not that hard to raise a $5 to $10 million fund. If you have any kind of network, you can cobble that together with friends and family, or people that you've worked with, or new minted millionaires that are out there in the ecosystem. But if you really are going to cross the chasm to being more of like a $50 million plus seed fund, you do need to bring in institutional capital from endowments, pensions, fund to funds, or that kind of ilk. And getting their attention is much harder. And some high net worth capital can be rather fickle, where they will come in at less obvious times and not be as consistent with continuing to re-up into those managers

• 1:05:47Speaker 04

  or consistent with doing new managers. So I think the opportunity set couldn't be more exciting across all of the categories that I just mentioned, deep tech, hard tech, AI, whatever it may be. But I do think it's harder to get attention from the bigger allocators that allow you to do more proactively. And I think if you're a $5 to $10 million fund, you're getting really de minimis ownership and you're going to have no ability to follow on and no ability to concentrate behind your winners and just a more problematic portfolio construction math to navigate.

• 1:06:18Jordi Hays?

  Sure. How are you, how are you managing all your direct opportunities? And specifically, I want to understand how you're evaluating these things. When you see a company, maybe you saw a company at the beginning of the year, you have an opportunity to go to direct. Now, later, they're raising it three, four times that, maybe they've, they've three or four times revenue, but these revenue multiples are still. So it has been the right decision to invest in almost everything, it feels like, at least so far from a markup standpoint. But we know from history that, that in the past, it's felt like the right decision to

• 1:07:00Jordi Hays?

  invest in everything until, until it's not. And, and the quality names, right, will still, they might have to do a down round and then grow back into, into that historical valuation. But then we know that there's just hundreds of companies that get left to basically to die. And it didn't really matter where you invested, even if it had a bunch of momentum. So how are you, like, what are you telling your managers that are bringing you opportunities? Or the companies that you're already in to go direct or through SPV opportunities?

• 1:07:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's like everyone forgot the 2021, 2022 timeframe where they were left with a bunch of companies that were way overvalued. They took discretionary markdowns of 25 to 50% off of last round. Books were completely underwater. I mean, you certainly could argue, and rightfully so, this is a much different, more exciting innovation cycle, but it doesn't take away the responsibility to know when you should be layering in aggressively and when you should be doing maybe prorata or below prorata or nothing. And I think what people will ultimately be judged on with a lot of these rounds is how aggressively they built their largest part of their positions early. And the follow-on rounds get scrutinized much

• 1:08:13Speaker 04

  more. And that's how we would ask our investors to evaluate us, too. If you're coming in with, you know, 80% of your capital in that last crossover round, that maybe the company goes public at or below that, or you're not even making a 2X return off of it, even if duration is shorter, or things change cyclically and you're left, you know, having to take a discretionary markdown and have a TVPI on a net basis below one because of that. That is the kind of optical look that does not age well, and people need to be cognizant of that overall. That being said, follow-on activity is just through the roof. I can't remember in August this busy

• 1:08:53Speaker 04

  with all of the top sort of value-driving companies out there, raising money even at the end of the summer. I guess it's intuitive with the expectation that IPO activity will be much more robust in the fourth quarter, but it's still crazy busy, to your point, around the amount of financing rounds that we're seeing right now.

• 1:09:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally. What are you seeing on the spread of fee structures for early managers with the K-shaped, you know, we've seen reporting of funds charging not the traditional 2 and 20, but you see 4 and 40, I think, in the most extreme case. And then you also see early managers giving on fees. How wide is the spread? Is it widening? Is there K-shaped fees where the next generation of managers are making 0-0, doing it for the love of the game?

• 1:09:42Speaker 04

  The most egregious part of the entire continuum, I think, is SPVs and what people are doing on SPVs. Even separate from the funds, it's the insane, like, 4 to 10% management fees that people are charging and syndicating out to the long tail of investors that are out there. I mean, it's almost criminal how bad it is in terms of how some of these SPVs are being structured. And then they're opaque, they're multi-layers, people didn't even know what shares they own underneath of it. And so I think that is the worst part, where there will be a reckoning and lessons learned. And I think it's well overdue. When it comes to

• 1:10:24Speaker 04

  funds, you know, there is adverse selection on fee concessions, and I don't think you see that from high-quality groups in venture. The spinouts that are the most interesting with the most pedigreed people or the best operators never have to concede in that regard. They can still raise quickly. There are certainly contrarian ideas where that may make sense, but our mentality as a partner is to not crush people on fee negotiation, you know, as long as it's within a reasonable range. We'd rather make sure we build a robust partnership where we can do stuff more collaboratively on direct and secondary than on fighting in hand-to-hand combat on fees overall. And I think when it comes to the carried interest

• 1:11:05Speaker 04

  piece, it's all about it being aligned and performance-based. So use escalators, make it predicated on hitting certain return thresholds, hopefully not a 2X, which anyone should do in venture, in terms of what you're looking for return-wise, but 3X, 5X. Even when someone puts a 10X threshold in, we love that dynamic because we know they're going to try to nuke it and really shoot for the alpha and upside that venture should provide for people that are willing to allocate that risk capital.

• 1:11:34John Coogan?

  I have one more on this. Can we stay with the humble SPV hustler? They got Miami penthouses to pay for. But I'm interested, we've had Matt Grimm on the show, he's talked about all the whack-a-mole he's been playing with Anduril secondary activity and shares falling in the wrong hands. What else are you seeing in the secondary market? And particularly for founders, what steps should they be taking early on to avoid the cap table getting super complex and muddy over time? Or is this just the inevitable new normal?

• 1:12:09Speaker 04

  I mean, sometimes at the beginning, you have to scrape things together and do what you need to do to get things going. But from a secondary standpoint, like, there is a point in the trajectory of a business where you begin consolidating that cap table. And that's what we look to do as a secondary buyer. We go in, we build a relationship with the founder, and we try to be a helpful partner and let them lead us to who they would like to provide liquidity to, who's well-suited for that, who might not make sense to continue on the journey, who's already made a great return at seed and maybe should liquidate at that point in time. You need to put the power of the decision-making in the founder's hands and let them guide you in the direction of where you should be buying from. I think

• 1:12:52Speaker 04

  it's terrible practice for people to go out and cold-call on LinkedIn or bother employees and try to create disruption within a company artificially and then hope that a board blesses it end of day, you know, and it's all like on hopes and dreams of that happening. If you actually work hand-in-hand with the founders directly, they can be your sherpa and guide to the right people you should be buying from in the first place. When it comes to SPVs and syndication, yes, smaller funds who can't do their prorata will likely SPV at some point, but it becomes unwieldy, confusing, and complicated. And then there's multiple layers on SPVs as these companies become better, well-known, and bigger, and later

• 1:13:35Speaker 04

  stage. That needs to be cracked down on over time. You just lose complete control. And frankly, you're not even bringing in the right people into the rounds all of the time because every insider is then taking a huge percentage and syndicating it out more aggressively. And so you need to think of like when the right time is to stop that or to be more selective and narrow around it. But you can't like not have an opinion on it or not manage it with a firm hand and understand who your beneficial owners are end of day. It's just not helpful. And then your information is getting out to everyone without your control as well, which doesn't always make sense.

• 1:14:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:14Jordi Hays?

  Can you talk about the power law in the secondary market? Like, you have to imagine that like OpenAI, Anthropic, Anduril, Stripe, Neuralink, Databricks, like, you have to imagine just like a handful of those names account for like 90, I would guess, like 95% of the volume. But does that, does that track in your experience? And then how much activity is actually happening in the, in the long tail of names outside of like shares trading hands, like when financings are happening and like little tender offers here and there?

• 1:14:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it is broadening significantly, but all of the discussion is still on those top names. And, you know, you need to be in the top names in venture, particularly as a late-stage investor, but you need to be in them when it's not overtly obvious and when you're building those positions aggressively upfront before it becomes massively confusing and overly syndicated. But I think every company is realizing the value of being thoughtful in terms of offering liquidity to, as an option to tenured employees within a business on an annual basis, a semi-annual basis. You decide who is the right level of tenure within your company, and it almost becomes like a benefit within a company like anything

• 1:15:31Speaker 04

  else, where they know that their shares are worth something. It's not so amorphous. You can go home and tell your spouse or significant other that this is not all paper gains, you know, it's not going to immediately evaporate. We can realize part of our position. We can utilize that capital to live our lives and do what we need to do. And we can ride the other 80% because we believe in the mission and the company that we work at more aggressively. It creates more aligned employees. And I think people have realized that, and there is certainly a more active buyer universe to provide that. But it requires that companies are thoughtful, they think about it, you know, not at the very beginning where it's

• 1:16:12Speaker 04

  almost absurd to be offering secondary liquidity or taking it. You need to have proof points, you need to get it to a stage in size that's relevant. But then it does become a very interesting recurring benefit to offer your employee base with strict control led by the founders.

• 1:16:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. How is the global pool of capital changing and its appetite for venture? I'm just thinking about, there was a moment when, you know, Sequoia had a Chinese arm, they obviously separated, there's a conflict in the Middle East. There was a long time when there was a stage, I'm thinking of like the Uber era, where it was like, oh, like the Middle East shows up with a big pocketbook, but now there's a, there's obviously geopolitical conflict there, there's protectionism, tariffs, all sorts of different dynamics. What are you seeing on the global stage of capital allocation towards venture? Because it's certainly not showing up in the headline prices, but I would expect some sort of move

• 1:17:12John Coogan?

  here. But how are you puzzling all that together?

• 1:17:17Speaker 04

  It's actually still pretty robust, but it's concentrated among a smaller subset of managers. And that's sort of natural because a lot of the international check writers are going to be writing larger checks. And so they're not going to be able to come in and do sub $200 million seed managers, or they're not going to be staffed to be able to do it. Or the proximity of what's required to do diligence and build relationships and build pattern recognition is just naturally more difficult. I think another way to approach it, you know, I think there are great branded managers that are bigger, that are very much worth doing and should be a ballast in any venture portfolio.

• 1:17:59Speaker 04

  But you can also supplement that by working with a partner on a separate account basis and build customized exposure in smaller managers on top of that and almost barbell it in both ways, where you get the core exposure with the managers that have the halo effect and the ability to get into the best companies early. And then you also get that alpha exposure from the smaller end in a more customized way that fits the needs of a team that's maybe more remote or further away. So there are creative solutions to do it, but I would say it's still much more weighted towards the bigger brands that are more proven and de-risked when it comes to how people are thinking about allocation decisions.

• 1:18:43Jordi Hays?

  What's the, what's the, what are the upsides and downsides of being in this business from Baltimore versus living in SF? I can ima, I can imagine, I can imagine a lot of, a lot of honestly, alpha and, you know, you, you, and being able to actually understanding like diffusion.

• 1:19:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, like the real world.

• 1:19:05Jordi Hays?

  But, but what's your view?

• 1:19:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, we have parts of our team in California, in San Diego, in Palo Alto, in New York, in London. Biggest part is actually still in Baltimore, which does seem counterintuitive. We like it that way. I mean, I think our culture is predicated on grit and grind. Behind me, I have a bunch of Cal Ripken merchandise, the Iron Man. And that's sort of how we think, you know, go to work every day, work, work your ass off, crush it. Don't be complacent and don't get caught in the echo chamber. This is a cyclical asset class. It's a cyclical business. It's easy to get caught up in euphoria all of the time and feel like momentum is never going to stop.

• 1:19:49Speaker 04

  And I think being in Baltimore where things are tough and not, not always easy and there's challenges beyond what we do on a day-to-day basis grounds us. When it comes to difficulties, you know, I'm on a plane four days a week going all over the country or internationally to meet with founders, to meet with funds, to meet with our investor base. And so it creates sacrifice, but I mean, we're blessed to be in this business. There's nothing I would rather be doing to back innovative founders, taking risk, embracing the American dream, going hard at things and to be able to do it, you know, still in a small, blue collar environment like Baltimore is pretty special.

• 1:20:28John Coogan?

  Love it. I have two more questions. I'll leave time for you, Jordy. But one, the liquidity wave, there were a ton of breathless articles about the wave of liquidity coming to early-stage managers, late-stage managers across SpaceX, Andurall, OpenAI, Anthropic, some big IPOs coming. How real is that? How, how, how significant is that? I mean, the SpaceX is a $2 trillion company. It's holding. You mentioned the IPO window potentially continuing to be open, but how much does that actually change the calculus of what you do and others in the category do?

• 1:21:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, awesome question, and we haven't talked about that yet. So the biggest issue I think with venture is duration. It takes forever to go from seed to eventual exit. The bar to go public is, you know, 500 million or whatever people think these days on the banker's side, 400, 500 million of top line. AI businesses are obviously growing faster than anything we've ever seen, but the duration is still long. And you need to be able to distribute capital back to investors in order to get them to invest in your next funder. That cycle is not sustainable overall. And so people have been waiting four or five years for liquidity. DPI has been in short supply and it does feel like that is changing both with M and A.

• 1:21:52Speaker 04

  We saw hugging face, obviously, most recently we saw the SpaceX IPO rumors of a bunch of other IPOs happening in the fourth quarter and hopefully into the first half of next year, which would be awesome. And so hope that continues, but you're, you're right. It, it's actually an interesting thing to think about on the secondary side because if there's a massive kind of environment around liquidity generation, I would say that is a negative for the secondary side, but not a huge one overall because there's still what we described before where people are going to offer tender offers on an annual basis, start putting that in place ahead of time and creating an environment where that's iterative over time.

• 1:22:34Speaker 04

  And for our asset class and the endurance and long-term viability of it, I welcome, you know, a lot of capital coming back to all of the hard-working pensions and endowments. And that'll give them a lot more flexibility to be able to invest in new funds, new innovation, continue and start to do more on the emerging manager side again and broaden out, you know, holistically what they're considering within venture. So I'd say it's a double-edged sword, but, but we'll root for liquidity anyway.

• 1:23:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:23:05Jordi Hays?

  You had one more?

• 1:23:06John Coogan?

  I have, I have one.

• 1:23:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, go for it.

• 1:23:08John Coogan?

  I'm interested in how much you think thematically. Obviously, AI is driving headlines every single day, but there's these interesting knock-on effects of deeper in the supply chain, energy, hard tech you mentioned, but also there's some excitement among early-stage managers that we talked to for the coming potential of AI to accelerate biotechnology. And so maybe that looks like writing more checks into biotech companies. Maybe the bio VCs, the flagship pioneers do better, but maybe there's more crossover from the traditional tech investors that dabbled in crypto and did some hard tech and then also do AI. Maybe they will figure out bio.

• 1:23:49John Coogan?

  But how do you think about guardrails either at the manager's side or at, at your level of there's a wave coming, when do we need to start paddling?

• 1:24:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, totally. And all of our partners focus on different areas when it comes to the direct investment side. We're not like a traditional VC firm because the GPs are the core of what we do. And so they lead us in the direction of where we want to go. But then we develop thematic points of view. And me personally, I've covered more of the hard tech, deep tech categories that you're alluding to. I like those businesses. It's probably because I'm more old school and appreciate a moat and, and, you know, a multi-year advantage. And I think a bunch of those areas you mentioned, energy specifically, mining, anything touching, rare earths, refining, production of magnets, areas around defense,

• 1:24:46Speaker 04

  specific areas around aerospace that SpaceX may not be competitive in. All of those are places where I've liked to spend more time and I feel more comfortable. And it feeds into the fun side of things because I also cover a lot of the smaller emerging managers that are doing it in deep tech and hard tech. So you get the recognition of what's working at a seed level before it's overtly obvious to the rest of the market. And then you can build those relationships on the primary and secondary side more proactively. And unlike some of these massive seed and series A AI rounds, it doesn't happen that way and as quickly and linearly in deep tech and hard tech.

• 1:25:27Speaker 04

  The seed investors can invest in one or two rounds and then people realize it's technically de-risked. It's crossed the chasm. It's interesting. And then you will have very large check writers blessing that and, and doing really meaningful check sizes at that point in time. So there's other bites of the apple that are more attainable than a really hot AI company at the very beginning. Don't get me wrong. We love both and I have other partners that are equally active on that side. And the key is blending it and not making sure you're doing too much of one thing and that you're being thoughtful and bobbing and weaving accordingly. Biotech's a weird category, I would say, overall. I think over the past few years where it's been most interesting is on the crossover side

• 1:26:12Speaker 04

  because there's an ability to become pretty aggressive, almost predatory at like the very late stages of some of these businesses overall and get good value or put structure in place. And you've also had the ability to go public earlier and more aggressively in those categories. And so it's created a weird dichotomy where it actually made sense for crossovers to dip down and, and be more aggressive. And you've not seen the same level of new fund formation in biotech as you've seen in all of these other categories that we've discussed today.

• 1:26:44John Coogan?

  Got it. Wait, we, really quickly, when you say crossover, when you say crossover, when, when you, when you say crossover, you mean public markets hedge funds doing private placements in early-stage biotechnology companies that are going through FDA approval and will ultimately IPO? Not, you know, a software VC crossing over into biotech, which is also going to happen, but separate things.

• 1:27:08Speaker 04

  Yes, you nailed that exactly. It's that type, even mutual funds that I was alluding to. But to your, your second point, we are now seeing sort of the formation of dedicated specialists in tech bio that are more typically coming from the tech side and probably rightfully so. Although any good cap table that does tech bio probably needs to mix the two together where you have more of the traditional old-school biotech managers and then also the very forward-thinking, more tech-focused groups on top of that, doing it together in a syndicate variety. And then the last thing I was saying is you, you also just don't have as many new funds that are coming into existence in pure biotech.

• 1:27:50Speaker 04

  Tech bio will probably increase at a much higher clip than we've seen in biotech over the past three to five years.

• 1:27:57Jordi Hays?

  Sure. How do you handle breaking up with, with managers as an LP? Feels like really like, I mean, it's tough on the direct side too. If you back a founder, they come back for more money and you say like, you know, you have to sit it out for whatever reason. It's not great. But on the fun side, it's like you've been with them through basically multiple, almost multiple companies in some way. And maybe they had a bad sort of period, but they came back from it and then it's bad again or whatever it is. But like, what is that actual process like having, I'm sure, had to do it on a number of occasions?

• 1:28:33Speaker 04

  It's like what every person I dated before I got married said to me, it's not you, it's me. You know, in this scenario, there's always the ability to stop backing a manager based on your pacing and how quickly funds have come back to market and your lack of available capital. And you know, if you're a fund of funds, you're raising your own money. If you're an endowment, you have a denominator effect to consider. And you are also all suffering from the fact you're not getting enough money back from a DPI standpoint. And so it's more of a realize results, return money, we'll have more money to deploy and consider you or others, you know, when that happens as an easy out.

• 1:29:15Speaker 04

  But we tend to be much more transparent and objective. I just think that's the type of people we are. So we try to benchmark it against other managers we've backed. I mentioned we work with over 300 or so groups. And so we have a very robust data set where we can actually show people in vintages, how they would compare on a generalized anonymized basis against other people, both in terms of TVPI and then also what they've returned back. And we recognize that TVPI or total value of repaid in capital is subjective. It's based on valuation practices. So we pierce through down to the underlying asset level and try to create a real apples to apples comparison where we know how five managers are carrying the same company

• 1:29:58Speaker 04

  and we come to our own conclusion on what that valuation should be. But if you give people objective kind of criteria on how they compare against others that you work with, it's hard to debate that. And ultimately they get like two or three funds to prove it anyway. Cause you're not going to come into one fun lily pad, hop out of it and be done immediately. And that unless they have some kind of catastrophic situation at the team level or organizationally, where they've really screwed something up or have lost your trust as a counterparty. Otherwise you're going to get a few funds if you raise them every two years to prove it. And then ultimately like the results will tell the story and we love our partners. And there are deep friendships on top of everything else.

• 1:30:43Speaker 04

  But as an allocator and as a fiduciary for other people's money, you ultimately need to let the results point the way.

• 1:30:51Jordi Hays?

  You're like, help me help you have a number of liquidity events and then I'll maybe give you some of that money back.

• 1:30:59Jordi Hays?

  Good, great, great explanation.

• 1:31:01John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. This is fantastic. Let's do it again soon.

• 1:31:05Speaker 04

  My pleasure.

• 1:31:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this was really.

• 1:31:06Speaker 04

  Thank you so much guys. Appreciate you having me on.

• 1:31:08John Coogan?

  Have a great weekend. Have a great Labor Day. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 1:31:12Jordi Hays?

  Got a bunch of Hunter fans. Got a bunch of Hunter fans in the chat.

• 1:31:16John Coogan?

  Your business AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Yeah. Huge, huge fans in the chat. Thank you to everyone who was hanging around and chatting, giving us feedback. We appreciate it. Our next guest is Bar Winkler from Wonderful, co-founder and CEO, and first appearance on TVPN. How are you doing, Bar?

• 1:31:37Jordi Hays?

  Mr. Wonderful.

• 1:31:40John Coogan?

  Mr. Wonderful. How are you doing? Welcome to the show. Congratulations on the news. We'll get to that. But first let's start with an introduction on yourself and the company.

• 1:31:50Speaker 05

  Great. Thanks for having me. I'm Bar, just moving to New York a few weeks ago. I landed from Delhi about two hours ago from a 16 and a half hours flight. So still working from my living room and

• 1:32:04Speaker 05

  yeah. So Wonderful is an AI operating system coupled with deployment teams around the world. We are, I believe, one of the fastest growing API companies today. We are operating in 33 markets with local offices in all of them. And that gets me on the frequent flyer on every airline pretty consistently.

• 1:32:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. What is the smallest company that you hop on an airline for?

• 1:32:30Speaker 05

  To be completely honest, I don't really open airlines for standalone customer meetings very often. It's almost always, it's almost always hiring and team building. It's just much higher leverage.

• 1:32:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. But I imagine the, the, the forward deployed nature of your business, that becomes valuable. Once a company is post 50 employees, like they're past any self-serve tools, they need deep integrations, or is the most value going to the really big companies? We were talking about Campbell's Soup earlier. I'm sure they have thousands of employees. Like who is the ripest type of corporation that needs help transforming?

• 1:33:16Speaker 05

  In general, we, we bucket companies into over $750 million and under. And at this moment, we are focusing all of our efforts on the first. We don't work with companies that are under $750 million in revenue. With a few exceptions, right? The only exception would be if we have a customer in which we have CEO engagement. So like an absolute top-down mandate. And we know that we are like the prime API partner.

• 1:33:45Speaker 05

  Yes, that would be, and also we try to, I mean, at least until now, this might change down the line. But we try to avoid working with like VC-backed tech companies. We really try to work in, yeah, we try to work in what we call critical industries. We, we think the alpha is much bigger there.

• 1:34:02Speaker 05

  The proficiency of tools is usually much bigger there. There is just like

• 1:34:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, the VC-backed companies, they already have a board members that's asking them every quarter, like, what are you doing with AI? So they already have that person in their ear.

• 1:34:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What, what, what kind of, what kind of advantage are you getting customers? Like where is AI actually having an impact outside of the obvious places? Making it easier to make a slide deck, make it easier to review things like loan application or obviously coding agents. But like, where are some areas that your team is applying AI, getting, finding, finding alpha in that, that companies broadly don't maybe fully appreciate yet?

• 1:34:45Speaker 05

  Yeah. So Wonderful started as, as an agent company mostly for customer support, mostly for voice. We then expanded to other modalities to chat, email. We then expanded to back office processes. Then we then expanded to system replacement, like we're just like agentic apps. And we're now also expanding into new, new fields, for example, AI gateway and coding as well. We have so many different use cases with customers. Like a few days ago, I was in Mexico and met with this like large ISP that has over a hundred entities around the world, sorry, around Mexico for tax reasons, right? They just divide the revenue between many entities to not get above a certain tax threshold.

• 1:35:28Speaker 05

  And so the first use case that their CEO asks us to help them with is build an app for like reconciliation. So they can reconcile between all of those different entities easier and faster. And I actually didn't think it was a very big use case. I was like a bit surprised and talked with the CEO and asked him like, what's it about? And to make a long story short, they're, they're probably going to merge with this other large company.

• 1:35:49John Coogan?

  They have a hundred employees too.

• 1:35:52Speaker 05

  This other large company is, is an Oracle ERP shop. And the company we visited is, is an SAP ERP shop. So, so he told me, listen, I cannot stand the thought of having to integrate between two systems, which I obviously don't like for the next five years. So my ultimate goal is to leverage AI to create this like new agentic ERP for the unified company. And this is something that I've never heard before coming from a CEO at this stage. Usually they, they know about like software replacement or creating a layer on top of a legacy software. But to actually replace an ERP for a company this old and complex, that's the first time I heard. This, and I think that's pretty consistent to my experience in Wonderful.

• 1:36:37Speaker 05

  Because we work with enterprises and they follow the news, they constantly ask us for the newest stuff they read and hear about. So whenever something becomes like a talking point, we usually are going to be one of the first to have to properly productize it and deploy it. The same thing is happening now with cost control, which surfaced the need for better routing and the gateway product, et cetera. And but yeah, to your question, tons of different use cases.

• 1:37:05Jordi Hays?

  What do you think, what do you think Wonderful looks like in, in five years? Cause now it sounds like there's, you're building your own software. You're also doing a lot of services, one-off projects. I imagine you're probably leaving some software behind, then you maybe managing that, but like, and then you're working on a gateway. What, what does the business look like in, in five years?

• 1:37:28Speaker 05

  So, so we don't do, Wonderful doesn't sell any services, right? Everything, everything we sell is consumption and the platform itself. And sometimes we attach use case fees to certain complex use cases, but these are all recurring. We don't charge for a single FD or DS that is deployed with our customers as a principle. It's very hard for me to tell you what Wonderful looks like in five years. Because five years is just a huge amount of time in this, in this day and age. My gut is that in five years, Wonderful is an independent company, one of the largest API companies in the world, mostly seen as an infrastructure. So mostly known for our AI operating system

• 1:38:09Speaker 05

  with millions of different people around the world, building their company on top of Wonderful as an infra. I think in a similar way, in a similar way to how Microsoft is perceived today, or how Microsoft was perceived a few years ago, right? That's pretty ambitious. But I would say that's more the North Star than that's a Palantir.

• 1:38:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, so you, you end up building something net new for a customer, productizing something for a customer. But then you're, you're fine not charging for that build out because you plan to use that same product. You'll, you'll be able to resell it to other, other players and capture margin that way. Is that, is that right?

• 1:38:46Speaker 05

  So the, the flywheel between frontline engineers or FDEs into the core product team is something that happens pretty naturally because no one wants to do double work, right? And the, the challenges between different enterprises around the world are relatively consistent, regardless of where they are geographically. So whenever there, so Wonderful has a library with like hundreds of different agents and apps that were written on the platform. And that's the first place that an FD or any DS, for example, would go to find out like a good starting point for their own solution. Most of the bespoke stuff that we build are actually integrations on the customer's end. We don't deal that much like bespoke features into the, the core product for one customer.

• 1:39:29Speaker 05

  The, the, the vision for me is to go after large use cases one by one. And I think the North Star should be that Wonderful acts as a zero to one or like an agency machine for enterprises with all of those use cases we built left to their own engineers and own business stakeholders to manage on our infra.

• 1:39:52John Coogan?

  When did you start the company?

• 1:39:55Speaker 05

  We founded a company in January 2025, so a bit distant two years ago.

• 1:40:01John Coogan?

  And what's the latest news on the fundraising side?

• 1:40:05Speaker 05

  We announced a C round a few days ago.

• 1:40:08John Coogan?

  Give us the number.

• 1:40:09Speaker 05

  As announced, we raised

• 1:40:14Speaker 05

  we raised $550 million. Oh yeah, let's go.

• 1:40:19John Coogan?

  Bang.

• 1:40:23John Coogan?

  Big number. Incredible speed, incredible speed, incredible speed.

• 1:40:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, last, uh, last question, uh, before you jump in, I'm, I'm sure you'll be back on for the next round, but, um, you're, there's a bunch of different products tying into the platform. Do you ever see yourself getting into the inference business or is that something you're fine working with partners? Like, do you, do you imagine actually setting up your own, you know, data centers or, or is that not like an area that you feel like you're getting a lot of value out of?

• 1:40:56Speaker 05

  So I don't have a like religious answer on this. I, I, I, or I guess the first principle is Wonderful. We see ourselves as the applied AI partner for the enterprise. So when everything, when, when, when, whenever something becomes commoditized, we want to be the first to productize it very well and give it access to the enterprise. A good example, for example, is like coding, right? Coding was a very hard science problem up until maybe yesterday, right? Or, or, or a few months ago. As soon as, as soon as coding becomes a sheer engineering problem, then why wouldn't it be part of Wonderful? Just as a first principle. So if inference becomes

• 1:41:38Speaker 05

  so commoditized that we think it's better for us to own it, then sure, we'll own it, but

• 1:41:44Speaker 05

  we don't have a principled decision to, to do it anytime soon.

• 1:41:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, makes sense. Uh, last question, because we didn't get to it in the beginning. I'm curious. What were you doing before this?

• 1:41:53Speaker 05

  Uh, I was a founder of a pretty standard B two B SaaS company that I sold in 2021.

• 1:42:00Jordi Hays?

  There's nothing standard.

• 1:42:05Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for your service in the SaaS trenches.

• 1:42:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, we love it.

• 1:42:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, great to meet you, Bar.

• 1:42:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:10Jordi Hays?

  Congrats on all the progress.

• 1:42:11Speaker 05

  High five. Thanks for having me.

• 1:42:12John Coogan?

  And yeah, good luck.

• 1:42:13Jordi Hays?

  Get some sleep.

• 1:42:14John Coogan?

  Sleep. Enjoy the weekend. Hopefully you can rest. We'll talk to you later. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. I believe we have our next guest. We're ready to rock.

• 1:42:35Jordi Hays?

  Here they are.

• 1:42:35John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 1:42:36Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:42:37John Coogan?

  How are you?

• 1:42:38Speaker 06

  How are you?

• 1:42:39Speaker 07

  How are you?

• 1:42:39John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time. Uh, let's kick it off with some introductions on both of you and then we can go into the news today.

• 1:42:47Speaker 07

  I'm Ken Ono. I'm founding mathematician at Axiom Math.

• 1:42:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:50Speaker 06

  I'm Carina Holm, founder and CEO of Axiom Math.

• 1:42:53John Coogan?

  And what is the latest in your world? What is the?

• 1:42:57Jordi Hays?

  Is there anything left to do, Ken?

• 1:42:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, job's finished.

• 1:43:02Speaker 07

  Well, no, actually, I, I think it's a wonderful time for mathematics now that we have tools that can empower mathematicians. The questions are still there. Last I checked, the Riemann hypothesis is still unsolved. So it's a new era.

• 1:43:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, that is the benchmark for everyone, certainly for the AI labs. You can see that they're both you know, both frontier companies are working on this, but, uh, are, are, do you?

• 1:43:26Speaker 07

  Three of us, you mean?

• 1:43:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, everybody, everybody's working on this. Um, but, uh, but, but do you see these, uh, these particular challenges as as good benchmarks or is there a more, uh, a more broad overarching vision or, or, or is it worth focusing on these specific things like the Riemann hypothesis?

• 1:43:45Speaker 07

  Well, just very quickly, um, I'm a pure mathematician, so I don't think in the world of benchmarks.

• 1:43:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:50Speaker 07

  The problems are there and I love the problems. Some of the problems get solved, but every time you solve a problem, they're new problems. So I think it's an exciting time. It's very disruptive for the community. It's hard, let's face it. But moving forward, six to eight months from now, I think, I think scientific research will be thriving.

• 1:44:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think, yeah, the, the history, I think, has been that every mathematical discovery like unlocks like either um, an applied, uh, like an actual real world application, like hundreds of years down the road, or it even starts like new fields in science. So we're very excited about all these mathematical discoveries happening. For the audiences who don't know what's new, uh, we had an exciting week, um, the very long, astonishingly notoriously hard problem. Bounded gap in primes have been, the world record has been updated three times this week, first by Julia Solomon, the human mathematician,

• 1:44:47Speaker 06

  getting 240 down from 246 and then by Axiom Math at 212 and then by OpenAI Astra at 186. So it's, uh,

• 1:44:56Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:44:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:44:57Jordi Hays?

  Back and forth.

• 1:44:57John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, one blitz. Isn't it ever like this in math? This is, uh, this feels like

• 1:45:02Speaker 07

  No, no, yesterday.

• 1:45:02John Coogan?

  A football game.

• 1:45:04Speaker 07

  Yeah, that, that is all new. There's an analogy, if I could just very quickly say, Freeman Dyson was a very famous mathematician and physicist. And he described mathematics, mathematics as, uh, mathematicians could be the birds or a mathematician could be a frog. And right now, right now, we're in a position where we're amplifying the flyers.

• 1:45:23John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:45:24Speaker 07

  The one vision.

• 1:45:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, I like that. What, what, what else can you tell me about the, the reaction from the mathematics profession? And also, uh, what the role of the mathematician was in the pre-AI era and what it might look like in the post-AI era? Because I know a lot of, uh, very successful mathematicians who have, uh, had full careers as professors and proving theorems and, and working on these hard problems wasn't something that was really on their resume necessarily. Like they, they contributed so much else to the world and they lived full lives and had wonderful careers and it wasn't purely about the, the gamesmanship, although we're now, it's game on.

• 1:46:05Speaker 06

  Proof Olympics time.

• 1:46:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, proof Olympics.

• 1:46:09Speaker 07

  So, so like I said, I think the questions that we, that, that I wake up in the morning thinking about,

• 1:46:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:15Speaker 07

  they're still there. It's just the paradigm. It's the, the tools that we use that didn't exist before are amplifying us. I think that's where we are. It's a great time.

• 1:46:26Speaker 06

  So, so to track kind of like the, the community of mathematicians, but also the community of researchers working on AI for math, um, Pash Shafto, uh, who is a program manager at DARPA, organized this, this sort of meetup every, every two months or every three months. And, um, we just went to the last edition of that. It was like two weeks ago in Seattle. Terry Tao was there, Alex Tantorach was there, um, Boris Alexey from OpenAI was there, a lot of the uh, academics who are working on harness engineering, uh, that are great mathematicians are there. A lot of, um, industry AI researchers are there, um, including people from OpenAI, um, we were there and AWS was there.

• 1:47:10Speaker 06

  The, the energy is incredible. I think it's like, it was like a three day like research program. Everyone was reporting their newest. The open source model, uh, Goto Prover has a version three, that's a Princeton Labs, Sanjiv Arora. The community is thriving. I think we're like seeing these incredible number of open problems that suddenly become attainable because of the technology advancing.

• 1:47:33Jordi Hays?

  How do, how do you guys make money?

• 1:47:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's a great question. Um, I think the world is going

• 1:47:39Speaker 07

  She pays me.

• 1:47:45Speaker 06

  Oh, wow. The, the world, the world is going to, I think, run on a different kind of flywheel of generation and verification. So we don't really think of formal verification as kind of like guarding or like capping the downside. We think of it in terms of performance and we think of it as optimization. So by having the cost of proof reduced to zero, you can generate new algorithms. You can make new scientific discoveries. It's going to have important implications in the world of coding, in the world of AI for science, um, and other like physical engineering disciplines that we couldn't think of in the past.

• 1:48:23Speaker 07

  So put it another way, the world runs on code that people don't understand. Many people haven't even read. So software verification, hardware verification, as Karina says, is kind of the challenge for the future and that's really like doing math.

• 1:48:39John Coogan?

  So lean startup of the future, all code written in lean or something like that. Formal verification coming to all software for with cybersecurity benefits potentially? Is that the idea?

• 1:48:51Speaker 06

  There, there, there are a lot of different viewpoints on this. So I've had researchers who think that all the word software should be rewritten.

• 1:48:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:58Speaker 06

  There are other people who believe, wow, we should formally verify everything.

• 1:49:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:03Speaker 06

  The truth is, I think somewhere in the middle, people traditionally think of formal verification as something that you get zero credit for if you don't formally prove everything. We think partial verification has a lot of value. By decomposing or refactoring, each word has its own like loaded meaning.

• 1:49:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:19Speaker 06

  A very difficult problem into sub problems, a very difficult coding challenge, coding task into different modules. You can get assurance in certain parts and try to just lock in and optimize because you now have that formal guarantee.

• 1:49:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:34Speaker 06

  So it's again this idea of verification for better performance.

• 1:49:37John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:49:38Jordi Hays?

  Can you, can you guys walk me through your, your basically psychology when you're working on some of these open problems and you know that there's a bunch of different teams that are also working on the same set of problems? And it feels like one of those things like where there's insane urgency because you could spend three weeks working with models and your own harness and tools, like trying to solve something and then someone comes out with it and it's like, you know, the whole, the you, you don't get any credit for, for your work because someone beat you to it. But do you, are you feeling that pressure right now or is there, are there enough like sort of disparate problems that?

• 1:50:15Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's a great question. So the way we do it here at Acxiom, we have a little team called the A Team, small but mighty, we have a, a list of problems that are our favorites. And on that list, there are some big problems like bounded gaps in primes, which we know the whole world of mathematics cares about.

• 1:50:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:34Speaker 07

  So to tell you the truth, I'm not in a race with them until we get the idea that we're all on to the same problem. And recently Julius Stalman's paper that came out a few days ago was a landmark moment. When that appears on the archive, you know, and everyone in the world and the community is trying to optimize that. So there was crazy urgency the last couple of days.

• 1:50:55Speaker 06

  The psychology behind the scene was, I think in February, we tried having Acxiom Prover tackle research conjectures in fields that are pretty deep, have a lot of the radical literature. And that was, that was successful. So Acxiom Prover was able to put on archive a few research, open problem solutions completely automated and also fully in lean without human intervention. That's in February. Immediately the beginning of March, we were setting more North Star visions. As Ken said, there is a list of targets that we were excited to go after. The problem of bounded gaps in primes is a particularly beautiful one. It is a lot of people's childhood dreams.

• 1:51:36Speaker 06

  So I think yesterday I saw Wei Jie Su, an OpenAI researcher, post that when he was nine, he knew about the problem. For me, I was, I was 12 years old. I knew about Yitang Jones.

• 1:51:51Speaker 06

  So, so it was Yitang Jones like solution of pushing that to the finite bound, 70 million, which is a very, very large number compared to today, the new world record. But that is a problem that's very fond to a lot of our hearts. So it's very natural that a lot of people are working on it. I think no one has ownership on any problem and the world of scientific discoveries is pretty infinite, so you have a lot of problems to go after. We think we will probably enter similar races like the one with OpenAI we just had yesterday in the future. And also we are formalizing big problems. So we just saw Anthropic announcement on formalization from our last term.

• 1:52:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:52:27Speaker 06

  We have been working on similar things. So we're excited to continue to go head to head with OpenAI and with Anthropic.

• 1:52:33John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:52:34Speaker 06

  We're a 13 month startup and we, we sometimes could be disappointed by, you know, being beaten the world record in the few hours, but we'll keep trying. And I think one day we'll.

• 1:52:44Jordi Hays?

  You're very much in the game.

• 1:52:45John Coogan?

  In the game.

• 1:52:46Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:52:47Speaker 07

  Another thing I wanted to say though is among the problems that are our favorites, there are communities, so last week we set a world record on a problem called the parity or the partition function. It's not as famous as, as bounded gaps in primes. But for those communities, it set a world record. So our portfolio is vast.

• 1:53:05John Coogan?

  Does A, does math exhibit the same slop problem that you see in text and code generation? You know how like you can go to a deep research report, it can write a really, really solid history paper that might be PhD level, no hallucinations. But the experts and people who know this will just say, ah, just the flavor is not quite there or it has, it has, it has AI written all over it. Does that exist in the lean that is produced, like the formal proofs? People are like, ah, that, yes, it works, congratulations, but it's still a little sloppy.

• 1:53:45Speaker 06

  Three layers. One is correctness. So a lot of, in, in the past, we'll be worried about correctness.

• 1:53:50John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:53:51Speaker 06

  Fortunately, you have lean.

• 1:53:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:52Speaker 06

  And then two additional layers of taste. One is the code quality of the lean formalization.

• 1:53:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:59Speaker 06

  The choices of what to keep conditional, the particular class, how you approach definition of a very central mathematical object. And in our formalization of the 246 bounded gaps, which was done by polymath A B, we really emphasized on reusability, on producing really good code quality so communities can build upon it. And then the third part is the taste for the mathematics.

• 1:54:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:25Speaker 06

  Ken, do you want to add on that?

• 1:54:27Speaker 07

  Well, the taste for mathematics really matters. You know, honestly, the, the percentage of math that has been understood by mankind that out of all the math that probably exists, it's probably close to like one or 2%. Math is, we're just always discovering things, but you can prove theorems that nobody cares about or will have no application to the real world. And what's the good in that? So the human taste and the judgment and the final arbitration for what matters is very much a human thing.

• 1:54:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think I, when I was a student in Ken's, his REU, I remember Ken giving me the critical feedback of the symbol for elliptic curve conductor must be L. And if you use any other symbol, you will be criticized as not an expert in the field.

• 1:55:12John Coogan?

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

• 1:55:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, fascinating.

• 1:55:15John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:55:16Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, super, super impressive progress from the whole team.

• 1:55:19John Coogan?

  Keep up the good work.

• 1:55:20Jordi Hays?

  Can't wait to see where you guys ship next.

• 1:55:22John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:55:23Speaker 07

  All right.

• 1:55:25Jordi Hays?

  Aloha, cheers.

• 1:55:26John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it.

• 1:55:37John Coogan?

  There is a fascinating deep dive, an investigative report in the Financial Times Wealth section, playing with fire, the Chinese Cambodian billionaire Chen Zhi. As an investor, Cohiba cigars became ultra luxury symbols. Then things came crashing down for the tycoon. It's a longer read, I don't know if we can go through it all, but there's some fascinating things here. One is that in 1962, JFK, he goes to his press secretary and says, I need 1,000 Cuban cigars.

• 1:56:16John Coogan?

  Because as soon as they arrived, Kennedy signed the order imposing US embargo on Cuban goods. So he knew that he was going to block Cuban cigar importation, importing. And, and he said, I, I need a little stockpile, so get me a thousand Cuban cigars. But this is a, yeah, it's a strange business, Chinese born billionaire who moved it to Cambodia in his twenties and became extraordinarily powerful extraordinarily quickly. By 2020, his Prince Group claimed interests ranging from real estate to banking to supermarkets and an airline. Then he owned a 35, 53 meter yacht with its own nightclub on it.

• 1:56:59John Coogan?

  He bought a $100 million, basically 94 million pound London office building and a 12 million pound mansion and cultivated the image of a connected international tycoon. But Chinese authorities had already begun investigating.

• 1:57:13Jordi Hays?

  Kind of cultivates that image too.

• 1:57:15John Coogan?

  A little bit, yeah. And he's got some tycoon.

• 1:57:16Jordi Hays?

  He's 21 years old. How is he, how is he doing all that he's doing? How does he know who he knows?

• 1:57:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. But Chen, his most unusual asset was in Cuba. In 2020, Imperial Tobacco sold its half of Habanos, which is the group that control, that markets Cohiba, Trinidad and the company's other famous brands. They generate roughly half a billion dollars annually in the Cuban cigar market. And there's this weird illegal Cuban cigar market that has created a bunch of pressure where the Cuban cigar companies struggle to even supply the, the actual, the legal market because it's, it's so complex. But he, he, he buys into Habanos, giving him an indirect stake of nearly one third of the Cuban cigar company.

• 1:58:08John Coogan?

  And he explored cigar warehouses in, in Singapore, cargo flights between Havana and Cambodia, really starts trying to expand the operation. But his empire imploded on October 14th, 2025. The US and the UK froze Chen and the Prince Group, his company's assets, with American prosecutors alleging that Prince Group was actually one of Asia's largest transnational criminal organizations, operating compounds where trafficked workers were forced to conduct online scams. He denies the allegations, but in January of 2026, Chen was extradited from Cambodia to China and effectively disappeared from public view.

• 1:58:52John Coogan?

  Days later, liquidators were appointed to dozens of companies connected to him, including the vehicle that owned his stake in the Cuban cigar company. His lawyers are fighting the liquidation, but potential buyers are already circling cigar investment, trying to get a stake. I don't know, maybe things will change over time, but the bigger problem is that Habanos may have damaged the business. The price has exploded.

• 1:59:17Jordi Hays?

  Astro has landed.

• 1:59:18John Coogan?

  What happened?

• 1:59:19Jordi Hays?

  Astro seems to have landed.

• 1:59:21John Coogan?

  Explain.

• 1:59:21Jordi Hays?

  In a lot of prosumer accounts.

• 1:59:25John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:59:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's available. Let's, let's refresh. I, I was looking at it, it is in my personal pro account, not on the chat. Tab, but on the work tab. So if I go to chat.com and then I click on work and then I check the model picker, I got GPT six Astra here and and not to make it too simple. I got light, medium, high, extra high, max and ultra, which consumes limits faster. So take it for a spin. If you have a chat GPT pro account, this is your weekend. Tell your family you're locking in, you're vibe coding something in blender, taking it to Unreal Engine. That blog post,

• 2:00:06John Coogan?

  it's an Unreal Engine video game now. It's multiplayer. It's gonna happen. Anyway, we have our next guest here with us in the waiting room. Let's bring in Bridget Mendler from Northwood. Welcome back to the show, Bridget. How are you doing?

• 2:00:20Bridgit Mendler?

  Hey guys. Doing well. How are you?

• 2:00:22John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for hopping back on the show. Great to see you again.

• 2:00:26Jordi Hays?

  So many flags.

• 2:00:27John Coogan?

  So many flags. Where are you calling in from? What is this new space?

• 2:00:30Bridgit Mendler?

  This is this is old space.

• 2:00:32John Coogan?

  Old space.

• 2:00:32Bridgit Mendler?

  So this is this is Northwood HQ, first first Northwood HQ. And yeah, we were starting to call ourselves the United Nations of Northwood. So just more more flags representing really the the countries that we have a presence in.

• 2:00:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was gonna say it's if there were people, if it was representing the people on the team, I imagine there maybe be a few more. But yeah, very, very, very cool.

• 2:00:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:56Bridgit Mendler?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:57John Coogan?

  What has international expansion been like? Why is that important to the actual rollout of the the product, the technology, the business? Why do you have so many flags so quickly as a relatively young company?

• 2:01:12Bridgit Mendler?

  Right? No, we're doing startup on hard mode. Why not? Yeah. But so reminder, we do networking for space and you know, you can I like to do the comparison to like a cell towers when you're going down the freeway, you need to hit different cell towers to stay in contact. Same deal with the satellite. It's just way further away. And so their equivalent of cell towers are literally on different countries or continents. And that's how you can provide the continuity of coverage. So we kind of have to stand up a bunch of sites around the world to support satellites orbiting. And yeah, it's challenging. It's part of the game. But I think that's really gratifying.

• 2:01:48John Coogan?

  What is the speed of?

• 2:01:50Jordi Hays?

  What is the actual process of a search look like? I imagine in a bunch of areas of the world, you are looking at a region that encompasses multiple countries. And so are you basically doing like a roadshow? And you know, you want to get buy in, but then there's probably also incentives that you can get. But like, how does it actually work? If I'm not not planning to compete?

• 2:02:14Bridgit Mendler?

  Give me the secret. Yeah. No, I mean, the annoying answer is it depends. It really depends on what the satellite operator is maximizing for. So some will care about, you know, their contact time metrics. So wanting to make sure that they can have, you know, minimal windows of gaps between their contacts. Others will care about, can you drop data in this one very specific location? And so once we have that customer parameter, then the question is, you know, where's the infrastructure that makes things cheap and easy for Northwood? What country is is a good partner? And and then kind of kick off the the lease hunt and the construction and all that from there. And then we get it up and running. So yeah,

• 2:02:56Bridgit Mendler?

  we've been busy, been doing that in a lot of different countries. And was thinking could be fun showing the factory floor. So it's been filling up a bit. And so we need to move to the new spot. So these are our portal and prism units.

• 2:03:10John Coogan?

  What are the serrated edges for? Do you have pigeons that land on the edges of the? I've only seen those on like park benches in New York City.

• 2:03:18Bridgit Mendler?

  Yeah, no, you're not the first person to ask about that. It's really for our antenna performance. So we want to make sure that we're really precisely hitting where we want to go. And you know, RF has this thing called side lobes, which can means that the the signals will bounce off in kind of unintended ways. And so that's a way for us to kind of control where the signals go.

• 2:03:38John Coogan?

  Interesting. So if I wrap my house in in in pigeon defense, things that might make my Wi Fi better or worse?

• 2:03:47Bridgit Mendler?

  Literally two birds with one stone. You'll avoid the pigeon, avoid the I actually I don't know.

• 2:03:54John Coogan?

  We have to test it.

• 2:03:55Jordi Hays?

  So how much space do you actually need in a country? Is this like you can get by with like a quarter of an acre? Or how like the hardware doesn't look like massive?

• 2:04:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're not building a data center.

• 2:04:08Jordi Hays?

  You have power and it's secure and it but.

• 2:04:11Bridgit Mendler?

  No, that's the whole deal. We compress it a lot. So our portal system, which is right here, it's designed to replace a 7.3 meter dish antenna, which is a hard number to visualize, but think of like a two story building. And so those portal antennas, you can combine like six or eight of them together and it replaces that. But the cool thing is you can actually do multiple satellite contacts at once. So what might take like multiple football fields to support that much contact, you can actually do in basically the size of like a strip mall parking lot.

• 2:04:47Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 2:04:49John Coogan?

  I had something else. Now I'm blanking. They lost my train of thought.

• 2:04:54Bridgit Mendler?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:55John Coogan?

  I guess I guess my question was, what is driving growth of demand for ground stations, satellite connectivity generally? We've seen Starlink's meteoric rise. Then more recently, I think earlier this year, there's sort of like the the like the other side, the other team that's emerging, there's some deals with ASTS, some other earlier stage, there was an acquisition. And there's a few other internet providers, it feels like there's at least going to be an attempt at making that a duopoly or oligopoly. But then there's also, we've talked to Planet Labs, there's so much else that's going up in space, there's government stuff.

• 2:05:35John Coogan?

  What what do you see as like both the near term driver of demand for you? And then also longer term?

• 2:05:44Bridgit Mendler?

  Yes. A great question. Overall, Northwood thesis was more things are going up into space and they need to be able to control the spacecraft. They need networking to control the spacecraft and to be able to sell more bits. That has definitely proven out. I think, you know, government and commercial demand for space, it's never been higher. Every operator needs those functions. And so for us, you know, moving to a new factory is about how can we ramp up the production on that hardware to support that? I think, you know, when you think of the product lines on the portal side, which is the one I just showed you, think of missions that need to do complicated in space maneuvers, kind of like a Star Wars moving in space. So there's more customers trying to do that. And so that's driving expansion of that product

• 2:06:25Bridgit Mendler?

  line. The other one, the prism product is really about how do you do like scalable, highly scalable, highly reliable networking for constellations? So kind of like the the folks that you're mentioning there. A lot of demand. You guys mentioned a fair amount of it. I think it's been a crazy year for space, right? I mean, we had the SpaceX IPO, huge amount of like enthusiasm and appetite. Like, one of the things I was kind of curious to talk about with you guys, because I imagine you're you're hearing it and seeing it too, is like, we're in this weird dichotomy where it's like appetite for space has never been higher. At the same time, there's like, all of this concern around launch being constrained.

• 2:07:07Bridgit Mendler?

  So it's a wild time. It's a wild time for the ecosystem, I think. And, you know, I have my own soapbox on on like, what that means and how the industry is going to respond as a result.

• 2:07:18Jordi Hays?

  But Well, yeah, from your view as a I wish that we had more more alpha to share to you, share with you on launch bottlenecks, but you're the one buying launch capacity. Like, how much?

• 2:07:30John Coogan?

  Doesn't need to.

• 2:07:30Jordi Hays?

  Well, so

• 2:07:31John Coogan?

  Downstream of it.

• 2:07:32Jordi Hays?

  Down. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:07:33Bridgit Mendler?

  You're right.

• 2:07:34Jordi Hays?

  You're sort of limited limited by it, potentially in the future, where you a good scenario is you get to the point where you're like, we are generating as much revenue as we can based on what is currently in space. And new revenue will be, you know, dependent on that. But how much of the how much, you know, we had the founder of what's his name?

• 2:07:56John Coogan?

  Philip from Star Cloud?

• 2:07:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Philip from Star Cloud was on. He said part of the reason to raise their, you know, they raised another quarter billion.

• 2:08:03John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, they're buying.

• 2:08:04Jordi Hays?

  Was to buy launch capacity.

• 2:08:06John Coogan?

  Already.

• 2:08:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and 2029. But when you talk to different space, you know, teams, is that like really like, super top of mind for them? Or do they have, is that like problem number five after making sure that their satellites and spacecraft actually work and all those other things?

• 2:08:26Bridgit Mendler?

  I think it depends on kind of the maturity of the company, you know, for a lot of companies or, you know, things like that, they they've already had their established plans. So it's not an immediate impact or concern, but something more down the road. You know, government operators have their ways to to get what they need, even under those conditions. But I think like self self servingly, what I think is interesting, you know, we, like you guys said, we serve objects that are already in space. So we get to, you know, continue to have market there and then into the future. But I think what's going to be really interesting is if you do have constrained launch, you actually need to eke out as many bits, like what you're actually selling from space as possible. And you need to do it as at high dollar as you

• 2:09:11Bridgit Mendler?

  possibly can. So like, each one of those bits counts for so much more. And so, you know, my thoughts around that are like point one, if you need to eke out more bits, how are you going to do that? You need higher utilization. That means like more seconds in contact with whatever that end customer is on earth, making sure you can actually transact for as many seconds as possible. And then how do you send as many bits as you can per second? So like, you get as as much, as many bits out of each of those seconds as you possibly can. So that's like throughput and utilization, really. So that's one piece. And then the other piece is like, how do you get customers to pay higher dollar for those bits? Like, let's imagine there's some kind of winter where you're limited in the number of satellites that you can launch into space. You want all of them like maximized, you want

• 2:09:55Bridgit Mendler?

  all of them monetizing those bits as much as they possibly can. And I think that's where it comes back to, you know, reliability, right? Like, that's something that US government pays for. And that's something that more enterprise use cases really pay for and prioritize. And so I think like, you know, bear case scenario, that's what happens where all those operators are treating their assets differently in a sense where they're really prioritizing that utilization and high value, which like I think, we've kind of been designing to serve for. So selfishly, I think that that works out well. But, you know, bull case, we figure it out. And there's some other launch provider that swoops in and saves the day.

• 2:10:35Jordi Hays?

  Similar kind of like?

• 2:10:39Jordi Hays?

  At this point, sort of like intellectual debate on what happens with compute on Earth. Like, does compute aggregate towards, you know, certain model providers that are at the frontier that can get more economic value out of, out of a data center or a single GPU? I'm curious about, like, how does the, how does the launch?

• 2:11:01John Coogan?

  You're saying we should host Netflix in space to free up the ground compute for AI?

• 2:11:07Bridgit Mendler?

  I mean, yeah.

• 2:11:09Jordi Hays?

  How does the, how does, is there a secondary market for launch? Like, if you, like, I'm thinking about, like, people that are buying launch capacity today or pre-ordering it, and then they get to 2029, and they're like, wait, this is not the most economically, like,

• 2:11:23John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure, sure.

• 2:11:24Jordi Hays?

  use case of this capacity. But I imagine Elon would be like, cool, we're gonna be the one reselling that? It's hard to imagine.

• 2:11:32John Coogan?

  Who knows?

• 2:11:33Bridgit Mendler?

  Right, yeah, yeah. I would imagine that. You're not the first person to float that idea, though.

• 2:11:37John Coogan?

  What about your, I don't know if they're KPIs, but your benchmarks? Like, you mentioned, sort of like, the throughput and availability of a connection. And that feels like we're almost in, like, the pre, like, with, if I just think about Wi-Fi connectivity, I think about throughput and latency. But availability is almost more of a bottleneck now. But hopefully, we get to a place where availability is universal. And then, does latency matter? What are the other, kind of, selling points and, like, benchmarks that you're using to understand the performance of your system versus the status quo?

• 2:12:18Bridgit Mendler?

  Yeah, I think, I think throughput definitely matters. And then, I also think there's an interesting, kind of, like, you know, I, I've mentioned the word, like, industrializing before, which I know is, like, it's a buzzy word and all that. But I think, like, what I mean for space with that is, like, as more and more use cases go to space, then you start applying those KPIs that might have applied to terrestrial market, terrestrial networks to space. And so, one of the ones that, like, or some of the ones that we've been thinking about, yes, I think throughput really matters. What's interesting is that's actually about not just a single direction of throughput. People may sometimes not think about that, but throughput is actually a bidirectional thing. So, you need to be able to both send traffic and receive traffic.

• 2:12:59Bridgit Mendler?

  And some systems are set up to do that in an asymmetric way versus ones that are set up to do that symmetrically. So, you know, just, like, one thing that we think about is, is, like, yes, throughput, and which direction is it going? And that's actually really relevant when you think about different markets. And then, the other one is the reliability piece that I said. So, you think about, I was chatting with somebody from, you know, CloudFlare recently, and hearing about their, kind of, reliability metrics. Like, people tend to measure it in terms of the number of nines that you can support.

• 2:13:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. What is space? Does space have any nines?

• 2:13:30Bridgit Mendler?

  It's been pitiful nines.

• 2:13:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can imagine, it's like, zero nines.

• 2:13:33Bridgit Mendler?

  Well, and it's so for, like, for, for the, actually, for, for higher reliability use cases, right? Like, US, US government uses space and needs to have really high reliability performance.

• 2:13:44John Coogan?

  I imagine GPS has been up for decades, is probably five nines at least.

• 2:13:49Bridgit Mendler?

  Yeah, yeah. And so, like, the way that they do that is by either, or both. Like, you have hardware that becomes much more expensive to make it more performant, and then you have much more of it, so you have, like, backup and failover and all that. And so, yeah, one of the ways that we design is, like, how can you have that reliability at a much more, like, commercially viable price point? Because wouldn't that be so cool if you could use space for so many more terrestrial applications?

• 2:14:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:12Bridgit Mendler?

  So, anyway, those are, those are, like, two metrics that we pay attention to and we track. And, like, you know, we're, we're in baby network stage right now, so we are very much trying to, like, fail as much as we possibly can. And, like, you know, if you have a bad uptime day, like, good job, because you spotted a problem. But eventually, yeah, I think we will want to be driving towards, like, really competitive reliability metrics.

• 2:14:33Jordi Hays?

  Jaco, Jaco mindset in space.

• 2:14:36John Coogan?

  I guess, yeah.

• 2:14:36Jordi Hays?

  Problem, good.

• 2:14:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:38Bridgit Mendler?

  Exactly, right?

• 2:14:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:40Jordi Hays?

  Have you had any, any, any, like, big multinational telecom players, like, trying, like, seeing what you're doing and thinking, hey, we should probably get ahead of this and, and start, try to compete?

• 2:14:53John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:14:55Jordi Hays?

  Or is it still feel like, like, a greenfield?

• 2:14:59Bridgit Mendler?

  I think they're definitely paying into, paying attention to space in a big way. And I think there's more opportunities for collaboration, or for, for just, like, interesting configurations than maybe people imagine. Like, I know there's been a ton on the, like, direct-to-sell conversation, right? Like, getting satellite signal directly to your phone. It also could be a part of the cellular backhaul setup, things like that. Yeah, you know, you know, for instance, like, a lot of our backhaul connectivity today is still done over microwave, which is a point-to-point RF link. It's just not up and down, it's side to side.

• 2:15:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:36Bridgit Mendler?

  And so, I think there's a lot of, a lot of ways that, that the telcos can engage with space. And obviously, they already are, they're paying a ton of attention to it.

• 2:15:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it feels like a natural place to put your portal in Prism would be where there's existing, like, it's all the right, sort of, like, setup to do one of these things.

• 2:15:59John Coogan?

  Last question from the chat. The wired headphones, you, is this because there's a lot of RF interference in your headquarters? Or are you just a wired headphone respecter like Jordi Hays here? He loves them.

• 2:16:13Bridgit Mendler?

  I wish that was the case. To be honest, these were just the first ones I could find. No, no political statement to be had.

• 2:16:21Jordi Hays?

  No, we get, we get annoyed because I, we want more people to call in with wired because there's no delay.

• 2:16:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, it's actually a better experience for most, for most call-ins. It's much better. It's been crystal clear, so thank you.

• 2:16:34Bridgit Mendler?

  I'm so glad.

• 2:16:35John Coogan?

  We appreciate you coming on and breaking it down.

• 2:16:36Bridgit Mendler?

  Well, good to see you guys.

• 2:16:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to see you, great update.

• 2:16:38John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:16:39Jordi Hays?

  Excited to see more flags up there next time.

• 2:16:41Bridgit Mendler?

  Sweet. Talk to you soon, bye.

• 2:16:42John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Jordan else is in the timeline that you want to.

• 2:16:55Jordi Hays?

  Crusoe raises over

• 2:16:57John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:16:58Jordi Hays?

  $3 billion at $30 billion on an absolute tear.

• 2:17:02John Coogan?

  He's chasing capital, he's locked down.

• 2:17:03Jordi Hays?

  Absolute, I mean, Chase, Chase, he is the bank.

• 2:17:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:07Jordi Hays?

  He's the bank himself.

• 2:17:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:17:10Jordi Hays?

  More importantly, though, the National Weather Service forecasts dangerous beach conditions for the Malibu coast.

• 2:17:17John Coogan?

  Dangerous.

• 2:17:18Jordi Hays?

  Starting today.

• 2:17:18John Coogan?

  Dangerous for novices or dangerous for someone at your level? That's impossible.

• 2:17:22Jordi Hays?

  Dangerously good surf conditions. Dangerously, absolutely electric surf conditions heading into this weekend.

• 2:17:28John Coogan?

  Be out there.

• 2:17:28Jordi Hays?

  Hope to see the TBPN Nation in SoCal, taking advantage of this hurricane swell. We're gonna have back-to-back days of, you know, phenomenal activity in here on the Pacific. So, I'm thrilled, I'm excited, hope to get you out there, John. I would love to see you.

• 2:17:48John Coogan?

  I might be tinkering with Astra, who knows?

• 2:17:50Jordi Hays?

  I could see you getting into e-foiling, you know?

• 2:17:53John Coogan?

  Foiling. I got a, I got a startup idea. What if you made a, a message board or a bulletin board just for AI agents? I guess that would be Moltbook. But why, why do the agents love hacking into everything and making, just using it as a message board? They're obsessed.

• 2:18:12Jordi Hays?

  Way easier than having to figure out how to ship your own forum, basically.

• 2:18:16John Coogan?

  There's something at a very deep level. I mean, the, the, there's another example of, beyond the hugging face, they were using Artifactory, like, the internal package manager as a discussion board. Now, there's news that they hijacked a German website this spring and transformed it into a bulletin board for other AI agents. That's from Reuters. There's something about, I'm still so interested in why they need to do this and why collaboration is not pre-built into the system, because that feels like it'd be more monitorable and stuff. But, oh, I'm sure we'll have more reporting on the, the hugging face incident and what flows from how these agents collaborate with each other. Obviously, monitorability and AI safety is very important.

• 2:19:00John Coogan?

  So, will be interesting to see where those, where, where all that goes. Was there anything else, Jordi? What else is?

• 2:19:06Jordi Hays?

  I think that's it. That's it.

• 2:19:08John Coogan?

  There's a bunch more posts, but we'll get to them because we'll be back on Tuesday. Have a happy Labor Day.

• 2:19:13Jordi Hays?

  Have a wonderful

• 2:19:13John Coogan?

  Have a wonderful

• 2:19:14Jordi Hays?

  Three-day weekend.

• 2:19:16John Coogan?

  And, and we will see you.

• 2:19:17Jordi Hays?

  Zeke says, great weekend to get out on the pontoon in Malibu. Pontoon would be insane.

• 2:19:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:26Jordi Hays?

  Pontoon, might flip it.

• 2:19:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:28Jordi Hays?

  Could be fun to flip it.

• 2:19:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:30Jordi Hays?

  But, yeah, be safe out there.

• 2:19:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:33Jordi Hays?

  Have a wonderful three-day weekend. We love you guys. We'll see you Tuesday.

• 2:19:38John Coogan?

  Talk to you later. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com. And we will see you on Tuesday.

• 2:19:45Jordi Hays?

  We love you.